Not sure if there's a Julian/Gregorian calendar consideration to be made here (not in Austria in 1756, I think- will have to check), but I was just reminded that it's Mozart's birthday today. Well, it's not today but yesterday that I finished listening to that wonderful opera Idomeneo for the first time in full, but I'll still endeavor to celebrate - he's still one of my very favorite composers (after Beethoven and Bach- yes, JS..., who sometimes tie, but that's probably it).
Favorite instrumental Mozart works, by the way (without voices) - the piano concertos (wonderful string quartets and late symphonies but the piano concertos, especially 1784's works on - nos. 14 in E-flat to no. 25 in C especially, but nos. 9 and 27 are fantastic in more than one sense, and if I could bring one only to a desert island, would it be no. 24 in C minor that grand but also truly tragic piece, or no. 17 in G both bittersweet and truly sneaky and jaunty too? (I had a tape coupling those two precisely, a joy and other emotions too, to play...) - or no. 23... - hrm... though no. 14 is its own miracle, so many of them are in their own ways; it's not a question I want to have to answer...)
Favorite work with voices- don't know the operas well yet, but the unfinished mass in C minor he wrote as a promise (may I have Constanze's hand in marriage...) (something like that...) - is one of a very few works. I think I first heard it before reading Alfred Einstein's truly glowing praise but I'm not sure... (he describes it, unfinished though it is, as maybe the only mass really standing between Bach's in B minor, and Beethoven's Solemnis in D. This despite Haydn's wonderful twelve, and they are wonderful, especially those I've heard of the last six, a sort of continuation of the late Haydn symphonies just with voices and set to liturgical texts, not that that makes very much sense... ah well.)
-Eric who now must rush to work, trying to be on time today.
