Sometimes, we hear things so often that they fade into our aural background, and we simply assume they have been there forever. But once upon a time, before 1756, there was no Mozart.  No Magic Flute, no Marriage of Figaro, no “Prague” Symphony.  None of it.

And maybe because there was a Mozart, we don’t necessarily appreciate how much changed because he was on this planet for 35 years.  Because Mozart didn’t stride into the world and bend it to his will.  He took the existing forms of music–the sonata, the symphony, the concerto–and saw far more deeply into them than any composer before him ever had.  And he taught us that music could be fun, beautiful, and joyful.  Up until Mozart, operas were based on Greek myths and tragedies.  Mozart set his operas in magical forests, in brothels (gasp!), and in opera houses.  He mixed up the order of the movements in a traditional symphony in order to make them more accessible, and more emotionally resonant.  He wrote a piece based on the song of is pet starling, so that he and his bird could perform a duet together.

Perhaps one way to understand Mozart’s influence, we can compare him to another genius…he was the Albert Einstein of music.  Einstein believed that physics, its principles and its laws, simply existed, and it merely required a human to condense them into words–and he believed that Mozart’s music “was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.”

The piece below is Mozart’s Requiem, a piece he left partially unfinished on his death (he left detailed notes for his apprentice, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who physically completed the score 100 days after Mozart’s death).  He wrote it while he was suffering from a debilitating, if unnamed condition (to date, some 118 conditions have been suggested, but the official description was “severe military rash”).  He was poor, cold, and dying, yet this piece is one of the most hopeful pieces he ever composed….But look at the score.  There are no cross-outs.  There are no edits.  Because Mozart heard the entire piece in his head before writing it down.

So rather than listening to me anymore, I’ll let Mozart speak for himself.  Here is the Boston Baroque’s performance of his Requiem, to make your day a little more hopeful.