What I find fascinating about this piece – the overture to an opera that Mozart wrote when he was 14 – is that it sounds like the kind of thing you might get if you programmed a computer to generate “something that sounds like Mozart.” It’s the distinctively Mozartian sound, but by contrast with his later work he’s just not doing anything very interesting with it.
My point here isn’t to slam the piece – hell, it’s damn good for 14, and anyway in its day the Mozartian sound was already an innovation (I wouldn’t mistake this piece for, say, Haydn). But it’s just interesting to realise that there is such a thing as the pure Mozartian sound, apart from the cool things he would later learn to do with it. It’s a bit like encountering a genus not yet contracted to any particular species – or perhaps a kind of Mozartian prime matter.
Two great quotations in Ken MacLeod’s