Of the many responses elicited some of the most consistently enjoyable and
eloquent defences of Mozart's alledged supremacy as composer have come from
Peter Goldstein.  There are points raised with which I must take issue:

>I disagree with the poster who argued that Mozart is always Mozart.  His
>early works show some extraordinary anticipations of his mature style ...
>
>William Hong wrote that Mozart was an opera composer who just happened to
>write other music.  I think this observation is spot on.  I very much like
>Donald Satz' comment that Haydn is "direct, lean, efficient, stern." You
>feel it especially in his contrapuntal development sections--Mozart's
>developments are more often like broad melodic and tonal curves.

Were I as keen a Mozartian I would surely have equally delighted in
discovering flashes of genius in his earlier works, but unfortunately
I cannot and are frequently put off by what is too often less than
extraordinary in his earlier works.  This does not of course say that I
agree with Bob Draper in dismissing ALL of Mozart's music as 'bland'.

But I am MOST surprised by the defense of Mozart on the grounds that his
music is vocal or operatic in character.  It was Stravinsky who pointed
this out when he gave a typically barbed description of Mozart's sacred
works as 'roccoco-operatic sweet-of-sin'.  Indeed for all their doubtless
virtues it is, when judged by the highest standards, precisely in their
lack of symphonic structural cohesion that I find Mozart's instrumental
works less than overwhelming.  One turns to Haydn with relief.  Here is
a composer capable of presenting a terse, tightly argued, to-the-point,
musical delopment-argument which is not padded out with beautiful but
ultimately only semi-relevant grandiloquent flourishes.  I risk being
thought of as being myself 'stern', ' lean' and even ruthless, but it is
for the joyful effortlessness with which Haydn handles musical complexity
that I value him above Mozart.  They are the same reasons for which I value
Webern over Berg (or even Mozart).

Do not get me wrong, I do value emotional depth in music.  It is just that
'emotional depth' (Peter Goldstein's expression) is for me too sentimental
a ground to justify the over-inflation of Mozart's reputation, even where
he is lacking in genuine PROFUNDITY of utterance in comparison to others.

Satoshi Akima
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