# Getting Mozart



## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

It's one of them conundrums: how to get beneath the surface and not drown in saccharine, treacle and smooth slippy jelly. It's all confection, a delightful dessert, to be washed down before you wash the dishes, but the _Meathoven _of the meal is Luigi, or Schumann, or Wagner, scientists in a lab, see, fellers using weighing scales to measure a beat, demented dark-minded Giants in long white coats creating music so monstrous and new that it earned the right to be considered Momentous and Proper just by being associated with their august names.

Somebody better than me once said, if you want to get into Classical Music, begin with Mozart: he's accessible, and he dazzles with his surface sheen. Then move onto the Romantics: for all their troubled being, they generously bequeathed music that captures the true terror and tragedy of being human. THEN! When you've mastered all this, you're ready to go back to Mozart again, and you'll listen and be brought below the glitter and shine into the discreet and fraught depths below.

With Mozart, he possibly gets more praise than any other composer. He also gets dissed for being a wimp. There's rarely common ground between the two. He's a genius with angels fluttering around his ears, or he's a mud-mouthed hooligan with a sentimental core. Eine Klein Nacht Musik is wheeled out as an example of his inability to be anything other than pleasing. And light. I listen to Lyric FM, and dread the minute they play Mozart, because they usually wheel out the dreaded EKNM. Even speaking the initials placed together like this and you sound like somebody vomiting.

_EkkkkKKKNNNMMmmmMM!!_

But of course, the second movement is gorgeous, as they usually are. So how to get into Mozart? The second movement! Usually the slow set is the seduction song of the dance. Get a good recording of the piano concertos, put on the adagio, the andante, the romanza: listen to the larghetto in his last piano concerto. Two-fingered playing, halting and concealing the sobs until an ejaculation of strings blows the gaff and we're staring eyeball to eyeball at terror, and grief, and a depth of loneliness we couldn't have known was there, if we had only read the blurb about the man. Listen to the twelfth. Listen to the Ninth - _more Ninth than Beethoven_, as they used to say. The adagio in the clarinet concerto.

Then move outwards, to the outer movements. Everything sounds differently once we move beyond the shine…


----------

