I notice that I often hold back from Mozart's music. When I listen to the opening of Haydn's Creation - the 'Representation of Chaos' - I do not inhibit my feelings. Yet the opening of Mozart's Dissonance String Quartet (K.465, in C), which, as Maynard Solomon intimates, may partly have inspired Haydn's vision of loss, leaves me comparatively unmoved. And it is the same with the String Quintet in G minor (K.516) and the Fantasy in C minor (K.475) and the B minor Adagio (K.540). In the face of these pieces I am like Coleridge gazing at the stars and the crescent moon in the western sky: 'I see them all so excellently fairy/ I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!'

LRB 14 December 1995 | PDF Download