Music Quote by Colin R. Davis

Mozart is one of the few artists whose work routinely triggers a kind of embarrassed overpraise: the feeling that ordinary adjectives are too small. Colin R. Davis leans into that impulse with "more than human", a phrase that sounds mystical but functions as a precise cultural move. It elevates Mozart beyond biography, beyond the messy particulars of patronage, illness, deadlines, and ego, and places the music in a realm of near-divine transmission. The intent is reverential, but also protective: if Mozart is "more than human", then criticism starts to feel like a category error.

The subtext is as interesting as the compliment. Calling something "more than human" quietly implies that the human register is limited: too tied to language, plot, and personality to account for what happens when a melody seems to anticipate your feelings before you can name them. It also sidesteps the modern suspicion that genius is mostly branding. Davis isn't arguing that Mozart was morally superior or emotionally uncomplicated; he's arguing that the music produces an effect that exceeds its maker's life.

Context matters because this kind of phrasing is typical of conductors, critics, and devotees trying to describe a specific phenomenon: Mozart's uncanny balance of clarity and depth, pleasure and dread, comedy and metaphysics, often inside the same bar. The line flatters Mozart, sure, but it also flatters the listener: if you can hear "more than human", you are tuned to something rarer than taste - a glimpse of the sublime without the usual religious packaging.