Music unforgotten

Listeners to Radio Three had a process over Christmas. The BBC devoted twelve corporation days together with nights to playing everything composed yesteryear Mozart. What struck me is how, where Beethoven comes over every bit emotional, heroic together with tragic, together with Bach every bit mathematical, angelical together with lyrical, Mozart oftentimes seems exactly “playful”. But this may live on connected amongst the argue his music is then profound. It resembles nature, inwards the feel of natura naturans (“nature naturing”, or doing what nature does). In nature, creative liberty ever manifests a police pull – but the deepest police pull of all is the pure ebullient spontaneity of the Good.

John Tavener said of Mozart (in the programme notes for Kaleidoscopes inwards 2005):

I convey ever regarded Mozart every bit the nearly sacred together with also the nearly inexplicable of all composers. Sacred, because to a greater extent than than whatsoever other composer that I know, he celebrates the deed of Being; inexplicable, because the music contains a rapturous beauty together with a childlike wonder that tin exclusively live on compared to Hindu together with Farsi miniatures, or Coptic ikons.

In an evidence inwards the Winter 2006 termination of Communio, Fr Jonah Lynch sees inwards Mozart a sort of Catholic residual that reflects the paradox of the Incarnation:

Mozart’s melodies deport something of the nativity of an baby God, the remarkable matrimony of reverse absolutes, full simplicity together with interplanetary space depth. Only hither is the completely gratuitous together with ever-surprising united to formal structural perfection.

The move of Mozart together with the other groovy composers echoes the “unforgotten music” that nosotros deport inwards our bones. It opens our senses, then that nosotros experience the air of Paradise – what Josef Pieper inwards Only the Lover Sings calls the “paradise of uncorrupted spiritual forms” – together with detect the fragrance that withal clings to our coats of skin. Perhaps it is non besides much to advise that when nosotros listen this music, fifty-fifty if similar the Good Thief nosotros are withal hanging on the cross, nosotros move to a greater extent than witting of the possibility of grace.

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