It
was in the Mirabell-Garten that I seemed nearest to Mozart.
The music of Mozart, as one hears it in "Die Zauberfloete," is music
without desire, music content with beauty, and to be itself. It has the
firm outlines of Duerer or of Botticelli, with the same constraint within
a fixed form, if one compares it with the Titian-like freedom and
splendour of Wagner. In hearing Mozart I saw Botticelli's "Spring"; in
hearing Wagner I had seen the Titian "Scourging of Christ." Mozart has
what Coventry Patmore called "a glittering peace": to Patmore that
quality distinguished supreme art, and, indeed, the art of Mozart is, in
its kind, supreme. It has an adorable purity of form, and it has no need
to look outside those limits which it has found or fixed for itself.
Mozart cares little, as a rule, for what he has to express; but he
cares infinitely for the way in which he expresses everything, and,
through the mere emotional power of the notes themselves, he conveys to
us all that he cares to convey: awe, for instance, in those solemn
scenes of the priests of Isis. He is a magician, who plays with his
magic, and can be gay, out of mere pleasant idleness, fooling with
Papagenus as Shakespeare fools in "Twelfth-Night.
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