Mozart composing Mozart

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer – say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is in such occasions that my musical ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory, and I am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself…

All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised and defined, and the whole – though it be long – stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so I can survey it – like a fine picture or a beautiful statue – at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them as it were all at once.

What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing lively dream. Still the actual hearing of the ‘tout ensemble’ is after all the best. What has been produced I do not easily forget, and this is perhaps the best gift I have my Divine Maker to thank for.

When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out of the bag of my memory – if I may use that phrase – what has been previously collected into it in the way I have mentioned… But why my productions take from my hand that particular form and style that makes them ‘Mozartish’, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which render my nose so large or so aquiline, or, in short, makes it MozartÕs and different from those of other people. For I really do not study or aim at any originality.”
~ Mozart in: A Letter to Emperor Joseph II (1780)

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4 Comments

  1. says: nando

    Gênio. Gênio. Gênio. E sábio – e humilde – o suficiente para reconhecer a fonte no Absoluto. É impressionante como os maiores gênios sempre têm uma consciência do que lhes acontece, uma visão objetiva mais ampla e profunda da realidade. A cultura ocidental gosta de alimentar a visão de “gênios loucos”, usando alguns casos para formar uma visão generalizada do todo, o que é um erro grave – porque deforma a visão sobre a genialidade. Por causa de alguns Van Goghs (que acabou no hospício, embora isso jamais tivesse se misturado com a visão geniosa e iluminada que Van Gogh teve sobre a vida, o universo e os girassóis), engavetam toda a realidade dos gênios. Mozart não era apenas um gênio, era um sábio.

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