Mozart and pauses.

Mozart was supposedly asked what was the most important part of his music, he just said the pauses. In Symphony Nº 25 there's a marked pause, it's as though you're waiting for something and then that something comes. It's the sort of rising up of a particular theme which seems to express Mozart's joyous experience of his own powers as a musician, or even his own youth you could say because he was only 18 when he wrote it. This is his first real great symphony, the first real Mozart symphony in which he puts, or he pours, in his own deeper feelings, his own deeper emotions. This represents a breakthrough, the real Mozart breaks through. I get the impression as though it's the young Mozart who realises, perhaps for the first time, that he's a genius and he's better than anybody else and there's that sort of triumph and exaltation in the music. It comes up after this pause, as though he wasn't quite sure of it before, then there's just an instance of hesitation, but only an instance, and then ... he soars straight up into the sky. Whereas those other musicians were just sort of painfully flapping around, he knows he's much better than anybody else, he knows his genius, and he really delights in that. But not in an egoistic way, he delights in the exercise of his genius, the experience of his physical genius. So it's very interesting to see an example of some spiritual breakthrough in purely musical terms. So it's all going on within Mozart and the breakthrough is manifested, is expressed in that particular symphony, and what is all the more remarkable is that Mozart's personal breakthrough came when he was only 18 and that was his 25th Symphony. He must have written 24 symphonies therefore already by the time he was 18.

You can read Sangharakshita’s thoughts and reflections on:
Nietzsche, Milton, Handel and artistic inspiration.
Nietzsche, Goethe and the enemy.
Nietzsche, Zen and Sudden Enlightenment.
Kant, the Buddha and the limits of reason.
The limits of space and time.
Baudelaire and awareness of others.
Spiritual friends.
Giving style to one’s character.
Anarchism.
Schopenhauer and the will to live.
Schopenhauer and aesthetic appreciation.
Mozart and pauses.
Mozart and the unpredictable.
Mozart and the concentrated mind.

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Dernière mise à jour:
21 juillet, 2008.