Donald Satz wrote: >A few list members have seemed frustrated and bewildered as to Mozart's >high level of popularity in the classical music community. Being a Mozart >fan, I've been giving this some thought over the past two days. Why is he >so popular? And I've thought in terms of linking strong Mozart musical >traits to what most folks seem to want in their music. > >My conclusions are: > >1. Most listeners look for and want melodies in the music they listen >to. As postings on another thread have shown, there are many other musical >features besides melody, but they pale in importance with the majority of >listeners. > >2. I know of no composer who could churn out as many great melodies within >a small musical time frame as Mozart (the melody man). > >3. Most listeners also want "upbeat" music; they want to be entertained, >and who better to do this than Mozart whose music has a very high >entertainment quotient. > >4. One additional trait which I think puts Mozart at the top of the >"upbeat melody" category is how expertly he develops melodies and links >them to one another in a work. The flow is astounding. It's all true but, meaning no offense, it seems to hit the nail right on the thumb. It should hardly be necessary on this list to point out that there's more to Mozart than catchy tunes. It's how they're presented. It's the instrumentation. (Hear, e.g., the wind and the string quintet versions of his Serenade in c minor. Opinions may vary, of course but Mozart's Clarinet Quintet and Oboe Quartet sound to me as though the ensembles for which they were written were naturally dedicated to each other while their lovely successors by Brahms and Nielsen and the concertos by Strauss and Vaughn Williams sound like pieces written for the wind instrument suitably complemented.) It's (forgive this musical illiterate's possibly incorrect choice of terms) his harmonies, his modulations, his syncopations. (Just listen, for example, to the slow movement to his Jupiter Symphony, where he changes to a minor key and presents us with a paroxysmic series of syncopations which comes as close as anything that I can think of to a brave child's holding back its tears.) Every Mozart lover comes back to his g minor Quintet K. 516. If after hearing that, a listener still fails to appreciate Moazrt as a composer whose genius transcends a facility to write catchy tunes, I can only repeat the comment of a famous jazz musician asked by a lady to explain it to her: "Lady, if I gotta explain it, you ain't never gonna understand." All this having been said, Mozart's melodies are more than catchy tunes. *Amadeus*, often condemned as presenting a totally misleading story of Mozart, has an episode which, even if fictitious, illustrates something about Mozart's tune crafting. He acknowledges a pretty, if somewhat banal, tune written in his honor by (boo! hiss!) Salieri, damns it w/ faint praise, and proceeds by a nip and a tuck here and a rearrangement there, to come up w/ the totally delightful and original and anything but banal "Non piu andrai" from *Figaro*. Somebody once described genius as the ability to make the unexpected appear inevitable in retrospect. Remembering now how "inevitable" some of Mozart's melodies sound, and forgetting that we've been hearing them for all our musical lives, it's hard to realize how "unexpected" they were when first heard. I realize that preaching Mozart on this list is almost like preaching Christianity to a combined session of cardinals and Marxists. Either because they need not be, or will not be convinced, nobody is. And friends of mine, on this list and off, have indicated that for this reason they're no longer wasting their energies on his defense. 'Tis a shame, because they could do it so much better than I. But lest their silence be interpreted as an absence of disagreement, I thought these comments of mine to be not altogether inappropriate. Finally, to thwart if I can reply volleys where no shot was fired, I yield to no person in my admiration for Haydn and his compositions. Walter Meyer