Mozart is the greatest, they say

In my last Mozart installment, I wrote:

Not everything great composers have said is worth taking at face value. But when patterns emerge, it’s worth paying attention. It would be bizarre for many great minds to be completely wrong about the same thing. Not impossible, but unlikely. Likewise, aesthetic testimony is not always reliable. Indeed, much of it is probably not worth much. Experience art for yourself, don’t just trust the experts! But under the right circumstances, we learn something from aesthetic testimony. And I think that nearly two centuries’ worth of great minds saying great things about Mozart tells us something about Mozart.

Some of the greatest composers of the two previous centuries were admirers of Mozart. And while a great composer does not a great critic make (nor vice versa), most of them quite obviously had great taste. They may not be ‘ideal critics’ (in Hume’s sense) but composers have often had better judgment than actual critics of the time. Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler got a lot of bad reviews; contemporaneous composers understood better what they were up to. The most influential music critic of the 19th century was not too shabby a composer himself—Robert Schuman—and was early recognizing Brahms’s genius in his famous 1853 “Neue Bahnen” (New Paths) article in Neue Zeitschrift. Brahms was only 20.

If many of the greats are closer to ideal critics than many actual critics, and their judgments have converged and remained stable over time, they may be onto something. And that something, I claim, is Mozart’s supreme, enduring greatness. (Of course, the fact that classical musicians continue to perform, conduct, and record Mozart so much is also some defeasible evidence—it is, however. confounded by Mozart’s popularity, which itself may not be sufficient evidence of greatness.)

Haydn was the focus of the previous post. Today, I will highlight some of Mozart’s greatest admirers in the Romantic and post-Romantic periods. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive collection or representative of what the Greats thought of Mozart—you will find many more apocryphal and some presumably authentic quotes online. It’s an unabashedly biased sample. Some of the following quotes and anecdotes are sometimes difficult to trace to their primary source. I don’t think any of them are myths, but some may be apocryphal, and I didn’t always do my due diligence and retrieve the primary source unless it was easy. ...