"Mozart is expressing something that is more than human"
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When Sir Colin Davis says Mozart is expressing something more than human, he gestures toward the curious way Mozart’s music seems to exceed personality, fashion, and even the ordinary mechanics of expression. The phrases arrive with an inevitability that feels discovered rather than invented, as if the music reveals an order we sense in ourselves but cannot quite articulate. Clarity and spontaneity coexist: the architecture is lucid, yet the emotional current flows with natural ease, so that grief, joy, and irony can live side by side without strain.
For a conductor steeped in Mozart’s operas and sacred works, the experience is not merely aesthetic but existential. In the operas, every character—saintly or foolish—receives music of dignity and compassion. Moral judgment does not harden into caricature; instead, the score enlarges human failings until they read as glimpses of a broader truth. In the instrumental works, especially the slow movements, time can feel suspended. The Adagio of the Clarinet Concerto, for instance, draws breath so calmly that it seems to listen back to the listener. Such passages suggest a realm where emotion is intensely present yet purified of self-absorption.
The phrase more than human also fits Mozart’s Enlightenment context. His balance of reason and feeling, proportion and freedom, echoes the era’s trust that nature’s hidden laws might be intelligible and beautiful. Listeners often describe this balance as luminous: a rightness of line and harmony that implies a cosmic grammar, the old idea of the music of the spheres made audible in human terms.
Davis’s remark is not hagiography but a recognition of limits. Words, performance, even individual psychology feel too small for the total effect. Mozart’s music does not escape the human; it completes it, pointing beyond our partial perspectives to a wholeness that we can only momentarily inhabit, yet never forget once heard.
For a conductor steeped in Mozart’s operas and sacred works, the experience is not merely aesthetic but existential. In the operas, every character—saintly or foolish—receives music of dignity and compassion. Moral judgment does not harden into caricature; instead, the score enlarges human failings until they read as glimpses of a broader truth. In the instrumental works, especially the slow movements, time can feel suspended. The Adagio of the Clarinet Concerto, for instance, draws breath so calmly that it seems to listen back to the listener. Such passages suggest a realm where emotion is intensely present yet purified of self-absorption.
The phrase more than human also fits Mozart’s Enlightenment context. His balance of reason and feeling, proportion and freedom, echoes the era’s trust that nature’s hidden laws might be intelligible and beautiful. Listeners often describe this balance as luminous: a rightness of line and harmony that implies a cosmic grammar, the old idea of the music of the spheres made audible in human terms.
Davis’s remark is not hagiography but a recognition of limits. Words, performance, even individual psychology feel too small for the total effect. Mozart’s music does not escape the human; it completes it, pointing beyond our partial perspectives to a wholeness that we can only momentarily inhabit, yet never forget once heard.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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