Jacek Niecko writes: >With Mozart, one often suspects that the cascade-like, explosive nature >of his gift prevented him from stepping back and seeing what it was that >he had been doing. This is certainly not my take on Mozart. He seems to have been a very self-conscious composer. He has a lot of comments about his compositions that seem to indicate that he knew just what he was doing. Was it of Osmin's arias that he described how he would produce the effects of losing control while not violating basic rules of harmony? Or when he spoke of one of his piano concertos (15?) as having passages that only the cognoscenti could understand, although they were written in such a way that the less educated would be pleased without knowing why. He wrote that no one had studied Italian opera librettos as he had, and I've never heard anyone challenge his claim. The reworkings on some of the Haydn quartets and (I believe) the contrapuntal effects of the "Prague" Symphony show a composer who was "cascade"-like only in the popular imagination. When Beethoven, on hearing strains of the c-minor piano concerto, said to a friend, "Such things are forever denied to the likes of us," he was more than generous; he was speaking the plain truth. But not because the earlier composer was a direct conduit for the divine (though, of course, in a way he was that, too); Mozart, as far as I can tell, went beyond the status of child-prodigy through sheer hard musical thought, and if he was a bit to early to create an image of himself as a Romantic genius, he was, alas, just in time to have the Romantics produce an image of him as a natural phenomenon with no reflection or self-awareness at all. Pity. (The comments here are from memory; the details may be in error, but I think the gist is accurate.) Nick [log in to unmask]