Gran Partita

There is a kind of beauty so precious, so perfect, that even to try to put it in words leaves us in tears. The best we can do in its presence is sit very still, holding our breaths. Trying to do no damage. To it. Or to ourselves.

***

Returning to this music after a long time I am struck by how listening to Mozart is like falling in love. A sensation at once laughingly simple and unspeakably complex; a heady mix of profound emotion and delightful mischief; an excitement deeper than language, purer than breathing.

A feeling I opened myself to keenly, whole-heartedly. Naively. When I was young. Because that is all youth is, a capacity for concentration that is also a capacity for surrender. Not narcissism, exactly, nor arrogance, but a belief in the self sufficient to make giving oneself to the great things of the world seem an equal trade.

Young men serenade. Old men sit in their chairs listening to this music, dreaming of the balconies they could never reach.