Our homeschooling group has chosen Mozart as Composer of the Month, so I’ve been doing some sleuthing.
Interesting tidbit: Bruno Nettl (professor of music and anthropology emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a founder and past president of the Society for Ethnomusicology) muses about Mozart being the “sweet” composer. He talks about how there are sweets (Mozartkugeln, Mozartkrapfen) and sweetshops named after Mozart, but not other composers, except for Schubert who has his own Krapfen.
Mozart is the sweet composer, there are sweets, sweet liqueurs, sweet wines, at least four sweetshops in North America, desserts in Viennese cookbooks, all named for him. None for Beethoven; all I could find was a meat-and-potatoes restaurant on the coast, and a piano moving company in New York. (snip) The idea of the composer who writes easily, doesn’t have to try, for whom problems are solved, as it were, by divine inspiration, in whose music each phrase seems the only logical successor to the one you’ve just heard, all this correlates with the idea of sweets, which go down easily and represent for us a certain seamlessness. For Mozart we are sometimes inclined to think, composing was easy as pie, or a piece of cake. - from Aesthetics: The Big Questions
Why is Mozart a composer of “sweet” music? It is sweets, and particularly chocolate, that “go down easily”, provide no obstacles. Perhaps most among the music of the great masters, Mozart’s gives the impression of ease, flowing naturally, moving without obstacle. - from Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons
Here’s a company that sells Mozart chocolates:
Reber Chocolates at mostlychocolate.com
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