
Mozart’s Infinite Riches - tintinnabula
https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/may-june-2020/mozarts-infinite-riches/
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TheOtherHobbes
Not quite infinite, but consider that the K numbers go up to 626. If you
disallow the misattributed pieces that's still around six hundred complete
pieces of music, all written in long-hand, many fully orchestrated, some
lasting hours, all written in the thirty years or so that Mozart was active,
with many considered classics of their type.

Take off time for travel and other disruptions - of which there were many -
and that's an insanely productive schedule.

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crispyporkbites
How do you get into classical music? I enjoy listening but I can’t keep track
of all the different pieces and the performers as they are often bizarrely
named or have no consistency between composers.

~~~
hellofunk
Don't try too hard. Classical music is more varied in history and style than
any other genre, so it cannot be considered a single kind of music. Just keep
listening to different composers, different eras, to see what resonates with
you. Even among professional classical musicians, there is strong preference
for one period over another.

There is so much to explore between 1650 - present day, all "classical" and
all entirely different.

If you want a geeky but artful introduction to Bach (the composer I dare say
that really "started it all"), you could do far worse than this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-
On_Bach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-On_Bach)

If you find anything you like there, go find it in its more authentic form and
just keep peeling back the layers. :)

~~~
petewailes
Not to be that guy, but Monteverdi, Schutz and Gabrieli, along with their ilk
predate Bach by a century and kick off the Baroque period, and you've got the
entire two centuries of the Renaissance period before that.

Bach is awesome, and the man had an awful lot to draw on for the emotion in
his music, but he was a long way from kicking off the evolution from
plainchant to Messiaen.

~~~
hellofunk
Well, I guess you are being that guy :) but Bach certainly went much further
than nearly any composer in advancing the state of music harmony that allowed
the explosion of the classical and romantic areas. Composers from Chopin to
Mahler cited Bach as their main influence.

I was just offering an arbitrary line to represent “classical“. Of course
there’s a lot of great music written in ancient Greece as well.

~~~
madhadron
> Bach certainly went much further than nearly any composer in advancing the
> state of music harmony

It's easy to have that impression because JS Bach (justifiably!) looms so
enormously over music since then. But it wasn't so much that he advanced the
state of harmony as that he was so encyclopedic and powerful in his ability to
use the material of his age that he somewhat obscured his source material,
rather the way Newton did in classical mechanics.

Then his sons basically created the classical style just to get out of his
shadow. And for many years JS Bach was far less famous than his sons JC Bach
and CPE Bach.

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smitty1e
This is a righteous aside in TFA =>

One is reminded of the story which Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy told
about his brilliant protegé Srinivasa Ramanujan: “I remember once going to see
him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and
remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it
was not an unfavourable omen. “No,” he replied, “it is a very interesting
number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two
different ways.”

~~~
dang
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=ramanujan%201729&sort=byDate&type=comment)

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8bitsrule
Such an austere game! Noone should be allowed to play it until they've had
time to be sure what they'd be giving up.

I could easily do without vocal music, anything baroque, and if I absolutely
had to, anything with an orchestra in it ... if in return I had access to all
the chamber music. (So many hidden treasures there!)

For someone else that might be the worst choice. But really they ought to know
before playing any such game. ;-)

~~~
telesilla
The game doesn't work much past the early 20th century, perhaps the last
choice of a body of genre-specific works would be Shostavich and Bartok (I
couldn't choose between their string quartets but would take Bartok's
concertos over Shostavich any day). How would you genre-ize Cage or Xenakis or
Reich (ok, maybe Reich) or Radigue? We'd get lost in their glorious obscure
forms.

On Mozart, I agree with the article about the piano concertos. Having played
K488 (#23) as teenager it never ceases to gives me goosebumps when I hear the
second movement.

[https://youtu.be/9LqdfjZYEVE](https://youtu.be/9LqdfjZYEVE)

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mykowebhn
I enjoy Mozart's piano concerti, but I actually don't consider them to be
"serious" music. IMHO, they're great music for background listening, but on
repeated listening I find they are not as layered or deep as, say, Beethoven's
late piano sonatas or Strauss' Vier Letzte Lieder

What I would be reluctant to give up are Mozart's operas, or his sacred music.
I couldn't imagine never being able to listen to Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd
schön from Die Zauberflöte, or Ave Verum Corpus.

Very difficult game indeed!

