part of the enlightenment was openly mocking aristocracy and making the commoners just as smart. look at figaro and suzanna. they are getting the upper hand sometimes of the count and his wife. even the wife gangs up on the count. and the plots are so thick. there was a lot of intriegue to all this. lorenzo da ponce was quite a writer and a sort of 'renaissance man.' he ended up in new york with a corner store as an old man. would have been interesting to talk to him about mozart.
for some reason, this stuck in my head (don't know where it was from) 'immanuel kant, like mozart, had a curiously ambivalent attitude toward the intellectual atmosphere of his time (he didn't revolt as much as beethoven - is what i think they are trying to say) embodying it's principles. kant even wrote an essay 'what is enlightenment?' yet mozart set the stage for those who would go beyond those principles.
voltaire came up with the saying 'those who are noble in birth are not always noble in character.' i tend to not just enjoy and appreciate the history, but also the classical nature of mozart. you kind of already know a little of what to expect. the characters are 'stock' characters - but he puts different twists and turns on them. take a look, too, at some classical paintings. jacques-louis david (the oath, the subine women) and francesco de goya (may 3, 1808). the first always uses classical themes - light and dark - balance into three sections - pillars (equally dividing). you have some of what makes up the 'golden mean.'
the golden mean was thought to be used in mozart in his music as well. dividing things up so that the aesthetic pleasure of the whole is in the classical form of it's parts. as i read in one article by fx shea - 'the romantic movement relocated reality. before romanticism, men lived in a tradition of rationalism. they believed that in the achievement of clarity, definition, and abstraction they attained the truth of things.'
'the chief articulator of this centuries-long tradition was, of course, plato; but the tradition itself precedes and continues after his seminal work. probably its emergence is properly dated with the beginnings of writing and with complex urban civilizations.'
as mcluhan and walter ong point out - 'the rational tradition is fundamentally spatial and visual. to identify reality with the contents of acts of understanding is to emphaisize definitions. behind definition lies a metaphor of visual diagram. the modern evaluation of full reality and the significance of feeling is a heritage from the romantic rejection of the rationalist's belief in the supremacy of sight.'
anyhew - what i get from all this is that visually and aesthetically - the classical era is about 'beauty.' now, bach had a certain element of this 'golden mean' as well - but it is covered with ornamentation. by mozart's time and beyond a bit - there was a simplification of a melody. becoming singable. simple. easy to understand for the common musician or common person. you didn't have to be a nobleman or woman to understand the music or appreciate it. and, i think there is an element to bach and mozart's music that is worshipful to God as well. you have composers that wrote religious as well as secular music. when you get into the romantic era - there were less composers (i think) that wrote religious music for the sake of the church - and more for just random ideas 'oh, i'd like to write a requiem.' they weren't commissioned - i guess is what i mean - so they did things with composition that the church didn't earlier allow in some instances.
Topic: I don't get Opera.. will you explain ?