Classical Music

. Gioachino Rossini, Mozart’s great successor in the world of Italian opera, couldn’t get enough of him: “I take Beethoven twice a week, Haydn four times, but Mozart every day... Mozart is always adorable!”

The succeeding generation of Romantic composers looked up to Mozart as the ultimate in musical purity. The rabble-rousing Berlioz studied his exquisitely balanced art with a sense of disbelief: “The wonderful beauty of Mozart’s quartets and quintets and of some of his sonatas first converted me to the worship of this angelic genius.” Chopin’s very last words were reported to have been “play Mozart in memory of me”, and even as the last embers of Romanticism died down, Richard Strauss referred to Mozart as “the most sublime of tonal masters”. Indeed, no composer in history has been so universally and consistently admired by subsequent generations.

“Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows,” the composer Aaron Copland proclaimed, “expressing himself with a spontaneity, refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.” Few would seriously disagree

Richard Strauss deeply admired Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his “infinitely fine and richly structured spiritual landscape”. Mozart’s “melodies,” Strauss wrote, were “poised between heaven and earth, between the mortal and the immortal, the deepest penetration of artistic imagination into the final mysteries.” He had loved Mozart’s bright transparency and consummate melodic structure since his youth.

Strauss made his debut as a pianist in Meiningen with Mozart’s C minor Concerto, as a conductor he particularly admired Così fan tutte, and he tackled Idomeneo as an arranger. Of course, Strauss did not base Mozart’s “divinity” solely on the well-balanced equilibrium of his melodies but on his emotional richness as well – particularly in the late works, such as the “Haffner” Symphony. As a 17-year-old, he composed a serenade for winds that emulated Mozart’s “Gran Partita”. And, at almost 80, he drew on Mozart again with wind sonatinas and concert works.

Indeed, during the chaos of the war and post-war years, in his old age Strauss’s notes often revolved around the “miracle of Mozart”, the “incredible fascination of Mozart’s melodies”, with their “revelations of the innermost soul of the world”.