The Plain Dealer

Mozart is always with us.

And thank goodness. So much hype is surrounding the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth Friday that we’re likely to be distracted from the true reason to celebrate. Forget the purported Mozart skulls, marzipan goodies, wall-to-wall performances meant for the record books and debates about Wolfie’s lively personality, a la “Amadeus.”

Music, music, music. Nothing else really matters where Mozart is concerned. It is instructive and fun to delve into biographical details to discover where one artistic experience led to the next. But only when we open our ears to the transporting qualities in Mozart’s music can we begin to understand why his birthday should be noted at all.

Anniversaries, in the end, are important not as milestones, but as reminders of a person’s existence. Mozart cemented a place in perpetuity through the hundreds of works he gave to the world, many of them among the most sublime artistic creations known to Western civilization.

Why do we love Mozart? There are too many answers to delineate the beauty, mystery, drama and complex simplicity (both oxymoron and paradox) that make his music so rich, endearing and life-affirming. Still, however futile, an attempt at defining that transcendence is worth the effort.

First, let’s dispatch that pesky oxymoron. Mozart’s music is so perfect in design that it somehow sounds inevitable. The miracle is that it also comes across as endlessly surprising.

What might sound organizationally easy is the result of intricate, and ideal, solutions that separate Mozart from everyone but a handful of colleagues. Whether Mozart wrote his music down complete without changes isn’t particularly relevant. Even he – a mortal, after all – had to mull compositional matters over in his head.

At the point he set quill pen to staff paper, the music emerged fully formed. Genius will always be inexplicable.

And technical rightness only can go so far in explaining the music’s boundless allure. Beyond the notes – never too many, contrary to what Emperor Joseph II stated – are Mozart’s humanity, melancholy and humor. The ideas he sets forth in his symphonies, operas, chamber music, sacred works and pieces in numerous other genres reflect an unsurpassed command of expressive possibilities.

Mozart goes to our emotional core. He has the ability to communicate exuberance and tragedy within the shortest time span, often by dissolving from major to minor keys. His music is elegant, fiery, radiant and conflicted. Through unexpected turns of harmony, melody and instrumentation, he implies feelings to which we instantly relate.

In his operas, Mozart’s peerless response to words and dramatic events bring the characters to pulsating life. Myriad moments in “Cosi fan tutte,” “Don Giovanni,” “The Marriage of Figaro” and “The Magic Flute” exemplify his gift for psychological perception. We identify with these people, even the outlandishly rakish Don Giovanni, through the varying passions the music portrays.

Yet Mozart doesn’t need theatrical situations to propel arresting musical arguments. Most of his vast output is abstract, articulating distinctive discussions through an inspired unfolding of motives, structures and instrumental texture and interaction.

We can do without explicit narratives in Mozart and still be immersed in spirited or philosophical conversation. The second movement of the Clarinet Concerto, one of Mozart’s most popular and luminous works, moves slowly and inexorably on a poetic path that depicts nothing more specific than itself. In the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, the solo instruments weave daring and wistful musings as if engaged in a series of pithy chats.

Mozart’s virtuosity astounds both on visceral and cerebral levels. The finale of the “Jupiter” Symphony is an Energizer Bunny of fugal elements that arrive, overlap and depart in wizardly flourishes of counterpoint.

Along with the consummate craftsmanship of his music is the joy, and challenge, of interpreting Mozart. Musicians adore playing his music, though they’re quick to admit that Mozart is just about the hardest to perform. Every gesture is so exposed, precise and vulnerable that special control and clarity are necessary when transmitting his sonic messages.

Those messages tell us much, if never enough, about a composer whose prodigious skills from childhood catapulted him to the peak of artistic accomplishment. Who knows how much more Mozart would have contributed had an ailment (he wasn’t poisoned) not killed him at 35?

Haydn, his colleague and one of his greatest champions, lived to the age of 77. If Mozart had been given several more decades, he would have joined Beethoven and Schubert in the transition from the Classical to the Romantic eras. Think of these composers all toiling in Vienna during the same time. The mind boggles. As fate would have it, Schubert had an even shorter life than Mozart, dying at 31.

But it’s pointless to bewail these realities. Is there any way we can complain when Mozart and Schubert – and certainly Beethoven, who lived to be an old man of 56 – left us so much music that continues to haunt, excite and enchant us?

Which of those figures stands at the top is for each music lover to decide.

Even on his 500th birthday in 2256, those who savor glorious music are likely to acknowledge that Mozart may be unrivaled among the select composers who have touched the ineffable.