Maybe composers are like electrons, whirring around a concentrated nucleus of matter to generate the numerous spheres of Pythagorean sound that support our universe of emotion. In the first ring there are only two or three individuals, perhaps. In the next ring, farther removed from the center, there may be eight. And in the third ring there may be sixty-four composers who delight us on occasion, though they never sustain us for long.

Who are the truly great composers? I was discussing the issue with a friend the other day in a coffee shop—though I came up with the molecular analogy only after the fact. We immediately agreed that Bach and Mozart stand in a class by themselves. We also agreed that Verdi was hovering in the same vicinity. I felt I had to draw the line at the suggestion that Wagner might be included in this august inner group, and offered Ravel as an alternative. Not a single meretricious work in the oeuvre, and the Trio in A Minor is truly sublime. Out of the question, my friend replied. He advanced Beethoven. I countered with Schubert? Faure? We knew we were drifting away from the heart of the issue.

This parlor game is amusing, but it also brings to light the fact that music is not an easy thing to talk about. Our enthusiasms are rooted in differing temperaments and also in differing paths of exploration, which are driven by hunches and recommendations—and by listening to the radio.

We can learn something from music historians, though they often confuse chains of stylistic innovation with intrinsic merit. For example:

We have already noted that one of the most potent influences on Schumann's style was the music of Bach. From that he derived a new and vital type of free polyphony, represented since Bach's time only in the later work of Beethoven. This free intermingling of melodic lines—clearly seen even in so simple a piece as “Warum?” or the wonderful “Kind im Einschulummern”...is productive of so much novelty of harmonic effect as to constitute a most important addition to the resources of musical expression... [Ferguson, A History of Musical Thought (1935), p 336]

For myself, I have always hated the incoherent and seemingly random wanderings that Schumann drags the listener through, and I have succeeded in avoiding his work for many years. As I read on in the work cited above that Schumann's stylistic novelties serve as “almost the guiding principle of structure in all the music to follow during the nineteenth century,” I find it necessary to ask myself what kind of structural guidance a “free intermingling of melodic lines” could possibly provide?

On the other hand, performers who write about the works they perform are likely to give us a blow-by-blow that may not be very revealing, unless we're listening to the piece AT THAT VERY MOMENT:

The part-writing is perfect throughout, and leads us to a moment of darkness in bars 13-14. It is quickly dispelled with an ascending sequence before the final descent. Now come a pair of Passepieds, a dance full of charm and executed with nimble movements. We must feel light on our feet in these! The first is written as a Rondeau with a returning refrain—a common occurrence in the music of Couperin, but not so frequent in Bach, although we immediately think of the Rondeau of the Partita No 2 in C minor.

That's certainly what I was thinking about.

Music By the Mood

Though I lack the background to pursue such a project, it strikes me that it would be worthwhile to develop a “Music by the Mood” approach to the classical repertoire. The music industry has long since cashed in on such anthologies as “The Calmest Albinoni Adagios Ever” and “Puccini for Lovers.” We less often come across collections on the order of Penderecki for Income Tax Preparation or Barbequing with C.P.E. Bach.

If I were to develop such a scheme, here are a few of the guideposts I would establish:

•  For a strange and haunting experience, full of challenging harmonies and also striking consonances, the music of Guillaume Machaut (ca 1330), especially as it is presented by the Gothic Voices on The Mirror to Narcissus [Hyperion CDA 66087]. It's like eating mint ice cream with slices of mango on top.

•  For those quietly gloomy and meditative but not abjectly despondent moments, when the skies are gray but life continues to plod forward, how about the keyboard works of William Byrd (1543 - 1623)? The harmonies are less buoyant and surprising than Machaut's. All the same, they tend to move from one point to the next in subtle and interesting ways that avoid the tonic / dominant / subdominant routine which became popular long before the Ramones arrived on the scene.

•  During those bright weekend mornings when you're cleaning the house, why not listen to some of the brilliant and flowing Italian arias of G. F. Handel ? There are plenty of versions and voices to choose from, from Kiri Te Kanawa and Kathleen Battle to Lisa Saffer and the late Lorraine Hunt-Liberson.

•  Angela Hewitt has done the world a service by recording Francois Couperin's keyboard works on a piano. Even-tempered and lyrical, brief yet varied, they explore veins of bourgeois delight that are well-suited to that late-afternoon home-from-work hour with a martini or a glass of cheap pinot grigio and the latest copy of the New Yorker . If you begin to feel guilt about listening to Couperin on a piano, then as a penance let me suggest a dose of Glenn Gould playing Handel on the harpsicord!

•  Franz Joseph Haydn offer us a body of generally good-natured and inventive works unsullied by Mozart's Italianate magnificence and agitation. And Haydn is at his agreeable best in his piano trios. These compositions are not often performed or recorded because the string parts are considered boring by the ensembles who would be performing them. Haydn himself published many of the trios as " Sonates pour le piano forte avec accompagnement de violon & violoncello," in other words, piano sonatas with simple violin and cello accompaniment. But to the listener, the grace and simplicity of the accompaniment is a virtue rather than a defect.

•  For those strange and moody evenings when you're sitting by the fire reading Levinas or W. S. Sebald, nothing could be better than Beethoven 's late string quartets. These rambling, almost dotardly creations, with their unconnected snatches of melody and brusque changes in mood and tempo, give us the musical equivalent of thought itself—not musical thought, but the halting thought patterns that run through our heads throughout the day. Such musings may occasionally be brilliant, but more often they lead to rather dour dead ends. Hence the grumbling and irascible musical subtext of these august works. Facing that void in the company of the Master, we also gather heady intimations of the sublime.

•  Giuseppi Verdi's Requiem is just about the most powerful tidal wave of rousing musical emotion you will ever hear. He infuses the movements of the Requiem Mass with operatic energy, but the chorus is more prominent than in an opera, the solos more concentrated and moving. This is joy and dejection of the first order—the flamenco of classical expression.

•  On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum we have Eric Satie, who cultivated an oneiric simplicity all his own. His short, eccentric piano works are justly famous, but his symphonic drama Socrate maintains a serene and melancholic atmosphere through the course of three dialogues. The text is based on Plato's works, and the music is modal, if I'm not mistaken, which, to a layman like me, means that it runs up and down a strange scale without resorting much to dissonance to hold our interest. Yet it does hold our interest. It haunts. It enchants. It is sui generis in the world of musical expression.

•  I have long felt that beauty of the most rarified sort is to be found in the music of Maurice Ravel . As a youth Bolero and Pavane for a Dead Princess got me going. I moved on to the String Quartet and the two piano concertos. Eventually I absorbed the solo piano music, the songs. And at the top of the heap lies the chamber music. Arch and romantic. Utterly slippery and elusive. The soundtrack album to the film En Coeur en Hiver gives us a splendid selection—the Trio in A Minor, Violin Sonata, and Cello Duo . A splendid expansion of the same vein can be found on the Trio Fontenoy's recording of trios by Debussy, Ravel, and Faure.

•  Igor Stravinsky is famous for large-scale works like Petruskha and Le Sacre du Printemps , but he is at his acerbic best in small-scale works like the Octet , the piano Sonata (1924), and the Duo Concertante . Dry, edgy, colorful, brilliant, and annoying, this is propulsive circus music of the very highest order. Of course, if you want to listen to the pieces I've mentioned back-to-back you're going to have to do as little hunting on-line and then burn your own CD.

Mozart's Legacy

The peculiar position occupied by Mozart in the musical pantheon—at the top—is attributable to the fact that he did so many things so well. To the ear unfamiliar with his idiom, his concertos, symphonies, and sonatas may well sound much the same. Greater familiarity exposes remarkable subtlety and depth within these apparently cliché-ridden forms--forms that in point of fact he and Haydn largely developed.

Though Mozart has long-since achieved iconic status as a miraculous genius who could do anything he wanted to without really trying, in fact the rigors of his childhood education in the musical courts of Europe from Naples and Bologna to Mannheim, Paris, and London, were instrumental to the development of that genius. Mozart-scholar Alfred Einstein put the matter as follows:

Mozart's training was a spiritual process such as only a miraculous artistic organism could venture upon and overcome. The acquaintances with new forms of art and new individualities were the true experiences in Mozart's development, which in his boyhood still resulted in frequent acceptance of influences of all sorts, good and bad, so much so that the youthful composer's style was subject to iridescent changes from work to work; indeed, as a ripe master he continued to take delight in assuming a stylistic mask foreign to him. Before long, however, a complete sublimation and new formation of alien artistic peculiarities occurred, a continual absorption of sympathetic elements. The result was an incomparable melodic richness and taste, a musical and spiritual flexibility, a formal assurance and clarity that has not its equal....Never has the natural strife between homophony and polyphony, between melody and counterpoint, been more completely settled.

To my mind, what distinguishes Mozart's music and keeps it interesting, in a word, is development. Though there is a great deal of regularity to his music, Mozart is always changing things in subtle ways that surprise and move us. By the time a phrase repeats the context has changed to such a degree that it sounds rather different to our ears. It might even be suggested that the best of his works give us a familiar context of regular rhythms and harmonic schemes without actually repeating much at all. They flow, they develop, incorporating new experiences and feelings into an ever-expanding body of coherent song.

A few of the most famous of Mozart's compositions, such as “Eine Kleine Nachtmusic” and the rondo from the Sonata in A minor KV 331, exhibit very little of this developmental quality. Even the theme of first movement of the G-Minor Symphony can become tiresome, which may explain why it was once popular as a cell-phone ring. But works of every description abound of which we're unlikely to grow weary. The remarkable “flow” is ever-present in such works as The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni , as everyone knows. And the Haydn Quartets, the String Quintets K 515 and K 516, the last six symphonies are merely the most obvious of the instrumental masterpieces crying out for our attention. As we explore further among the chamber works for piano and woodwinds, it becomes ever-clearer that Mozart's inventiveness was tireless. It is our ear that eventually tires of his idiom, and we begin to look elsewhere for sonorities that attack or caress other zones of experience.

In an often-quoted passage from his poem “Little Gidding” T.S. Eliot writes,

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive at where we started And know the place for the first time.

I don't think it will do much harm to Eliot's reputation if I suggest that perhaps no poetic sentiment could be further from the truth. We may hope , perhaps, never to cease from exploration. But an end will come. And however long our exploration continues, there is absolutely no chance that we'll arrive back where we started. Those days are gone, like car keys dropped into a lava flow. And in any case, we never really know that much about where we are anyway.

What does happen from time top time is that we detect some mysterious connection between our current surroundings and former times and experiences. This can be a pleasing sensation, and it sometimes acts as a subconscious element in our gathering with friends and family. At other times—the sudden appearance of an old friend perhaps, or the sound of a long-forgotten pop tune on the radio—we're palpably struck by a pleasant congruence between past and present that validates and solidified some aspect of our being.

In the great works of art—and Mozart has produced far more than his share—this effect of returning to the familiar within the unfamiliar strikes us again and again in the course of a single composition, now with grace, now with wit, pathos, or sheer exuberant joy. Two hundred and fifty years after his birth,(with a little help from modern technology) we are still being carried along by that buoyant spirit who possessed the preternatural ability to bring a sense of rhythm and playfulness into even the darkest corners of our emotional life.