Mozart 250 — Another Last Word

Writers celebrating the Mozart tercentenary in 2056 will no doubt find late-twentieth-century views of Mozart as expressed in performance and criticism as blinkered as those of our predecessors seem to us. Surely, in the realm of performance we shall be charged with want of humor and -- who knows? -- of innocence: we know the humor is there but are inhibited about bringing it out. We do have some feeling for his emotional range, for the thin line between laughter and tears,for his dissonances and this rhythmic oddities (those five-bar phrases I never heard about at school), for the color of his sound. We have heard a wider range of his music than any generation since his own, we have some sense of historical context for him. We know that he too worked too hard and sometimes had trouble making pieces come out right.

I want to see him without even a trace of halo, to love him, but not to adopt him or idolize him, to come to him -- as to all great music -- with the ears, the goodwill, the attentiveness, the heart, and, I hope, with the human experience to awaken him.

Michael Steinberg, from "Tchaikovsky's Mozart (and Others'), in For the Love of Music