Deryk Barker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Roger Hecht wrote:
>
>>You can confort yourself with the hypothesis that perhaps Mozart died
>>young precisely because he gave us everything he had.
>>
>>That's what I do, anyway.
>
>And Glenn Gould claimed that Mozart had died too late, not too early.

With all due respect to Deryk (but not to GG), I cannot disagree
strongly enough.  Even with the low life expectancy of the 1790s, Mozart
died a young man and it can be argued that his art was reaching the depth
that such masterworks as Don Giovanni, the Requiem, the Clarinet Concerto,
the last three symphonies, etc., show him to have had aplenty.  For me,
it is opinions such as this that reinforce the notion of Mozart as a
much misunderstood composer, one that was supremely talented, but was
not capable of reaching the heart with his music.

To say that he died too late implies that he was past his prime or that,
at the very least, his late works do not measure up to his earlier ones.
Nothing could be further from the truth.  To those who hold GG's view,
I propose a simple test: listen to Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus (K.  618),
a technically simple piece of music with an inwardness of expression
that reflects the proverbial state of grace that any human being,
regardless of religious beliefs, would like to reach before joining the
departed.  The ability to combine such simplicity with such a depth of
feeling is granted to very few.  Beethoven took this much further in his
late string quartets, but it's very difficult to assert without any doubt
that Mozart could not have taken his art further.

Ramon Khalona