r/Mozart

Do you think, as I do, that Mozart's seven great string quartets - the six Haydn Quartets plus the D major Quartet, K. 499 - represent the finest music ever composed?

Of course, Western music still had a long way to develop. But considering the harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and structural language available at the time, as well as the expressive possibilities of the string quartet itself, these works seem to me to represent the pinnacle of human compositional achievement.

They have everything: bliss, darkness, peace, sorrow, nobility, fear; intellectual curiosity and profound emotional expression; sonatas, fugues, variations and more; gorgeous counterpoints and beautiful melodies.

They expand the expressive range of Classical music itself to an extraordinary degree. At the time, nothing else - not symphonies, cantatas, operas, or any other form of chamber music - seems to me to have reached the same level.

With a concert tonight I am trying to set my mind at rest by reminding myself that in high summer in 18th century Austria the bassoons would have been even more out of tune due to being less precisely and technically built.

And also that likely being servants the musicians would have been sleeping in garrets and have had an even poorer night's sleep.

And finally that their clothes and wigs and the heat of the opera house or ballroom (Candles! Crowds! Sweaty people who had their last bath at Easter!) the players' fingers would be even more sweaty.

At least, that's my excuse for missing a few notes in Marriage of Figaro.