Art Is: Mozart’s Dream
“Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them all at once. What a delight this is! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.”
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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The dream of creative expression is an experience of the whole — the blooming, buzzing chaos yielding its inner harmony, and thus its meaning, miraculously. It is non-verbal, felt, and mysteriously embracing. It is being fully human.
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Mozart’s birthday was yesterday. His work came, as he describes, fully formed, leaping from him as a unity. The other paradigm of creation, that of Beethoven, has it that the work aggregates from smaller insights; Beethoven’s work habits are as cogent a model as that of Mozart. There are no rules in creating.
