Art & Creativity Quote by Lukas Foss

Calling Mozart "our Shakespeare" is a provocation disguised as praise: a way of yanking him out of the museum and back into the messy business of character, plot, and contradiction. Foss isn’t admiring Mozart for elegance or “genius” in the postcard sense. He’s staking a claim about drama as a compositional technology. Shakespeare isn’t revered because he wrote pretty lines; he’s revered because he built people who don’t resolve cleanly. Foss argues Mozart does the same in sound: music that behaves like a mind under pressure, turning on a dime, refusing to settle into one emotion long enough to be comforting.

The phrase “psychologically most baffling” is the key tell. Foss is pointing to Mozart’s capacity for tonal whiplash and moral ambiguity: the way a phrase can smile while its harmony quietly undermines it, how delight can carry a shadow, how suffering can arrive with perfect poise. That bafflement isn’t a flaw; it’s the point. It makes Mozart feel modern, even postmodern, because the music won’t reduce human experience to a single mood.

“Combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together” is also a sly defense of eclecticism from a 20th-century composer who lived through stylistic dogfights. Foss, writing in an era obsessed with systems and schools, elevates Mozart as the patron saint of audacious synthesis: comic and tragic, public spectacle and private confession, formal balance and emotional sabotage. The subtext: the bravest originality isn’t purity, it’s collision.