You loved the clavier, though
The opening of the Kochel 545
Would sound banal under any other’s
fingers:
Merely the major triad just extended
across
Three bars in blatant, downmarket
C-major
(None of that Fred Chopin’s posh six
flats).
Then a run of quavers
Obvious as Zerlina.
But eat your heart out Czerny for
These are not scales and our
Wolfgang could so bend ternary form
To make us a musical rainbow,
The arch of heaven.
Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364 (violin
and viola)
The E-flat comfy drawing room but
with
The fiddle screwed up half a tone
Like Donna Elvira
The perfectly sedate hysteria in Don
Giovanni’s second sextet
And then the wretched apocalypse of
The finale K.551.
Ave Verum in one July afternoon at
Baden, 1791
A bare three months before your
personal Dies Irae 626
And the common grave
Lachrymosa
Exsultate

Peter Mullen,
Northern Echo columnist