(Born at Salzburg, January 27, 1756; died at Vienna, December 5, 1791)

In this life that is “so daily,” as Jules Laforgue complained, a life of tomorrow rather than of today, we are inclined to patronize the ancient worthies who in their own period were very modern, or to speak jauntily of them as bores, with their works of “only historical interest.” Mozart has not escaped. Many concertgoers yawn at his name and wonder why such men as Richard Strauss or Vincent d’Indy could praise him with glowing cheeks. They suspect this attribute of worship to be a pose. Remind them of the fact that to such widely different characters as Rossini, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, the musician of musicians was Mozart, and they say lightly, “There’s no accounting for tastes; surely you do not pretend to maintain that Mozart is a man of this generation.”

No, Mozart was neither a symbolist nor a pessimist. He was not a translator of literature, sculpture, or painting into music His imagination was not fired by a metaphysical treatise. He simply wrote music that came into his head and disquieted him until it was jotted down on paper. He did not go about nervously seeking for ideas. His music is never the passionate cry, never the wild shriek of a racked soul. His music is never hysterical, it is never morbid. It is seldom emotional as we necessarily and unhappily understand that word today. Perhaps for these reasons it is still modern, immortal, and not merely on account of the long and exquisite melodic line, fitting, inevitable background, delicate coloring. Music that is only the true voice of a particular generation is moribund as soon as it is born.

His music, whether it vitalizes stage characters or is absolute, as in the three famous symphonies, and in the chamber works, is as the music on Prospero’s isle: “Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.” The analyst may find pleasure in praising the unsurpassable workmanship, which is akin to the spontaneity of natural phenomena; he may marvel at the simplicity of plan and expression; the simplicity that is the despair of interpreters, for it is the touchstone of their own art or artificiality—and Mozart himself, when he told his emperor that his opera had just the right number of notes, anticipated the judgment of time—but he is still far from explaining the peculiar and ineffable tenderness of this music that soothes and caresses and comforts.

The serenity, the classic suggestion of emotion without the distortion that accompanies passion, would grace a tragedy of Sophocles or a comedy by Congreve. Mozart’s music is essentially Grecian, yet now and then it reminds one of Watteau.

Hazlitt said of art that it should seem to come from the air and return to it. But he characterized it with finer appreciation when he said, without mention of Mozart’s name, “Music is color without form; a soul without a body; a mistress whose face is veiled; an invisible goddess.” And for this reason Debussy is the spiritual brother of Mozart, moderns both, yet classics.