A Musical Jesus

Tchaikovsky called Mozart the musical Jesus. In his sublime expression in a musical idiom, of man’s aspirations for becoming as ‘unto gods’, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has the unfinished c minor mass as his calling card.
Mozart was not by any definition of the term a saint, let alone to be compared with Jesus. Other than observing the requirements of the Church outwardly as any other Viennese of his time he spent his life making music,- and writing compositions as never before heard, thereby fulfilling the promise of his genius and that of his father’s expectations in particular. In his spare time he drank, played billiards, made love and attended parties and cultivated the rich and influential. Repressed at youth by a somewhat tyrannical father, he had a partiality for coarse humor and horseplay. His failings were all too human while his genius was of the highest, transcendent kind. When I think of Godhead it is Mozart who comes to my mind.
No day I have passed unless I am on the road, or otherwise busy elsewhere, without listening to him. Day before yesterday I listened to the Mass in its entirety. (It is unfinished like Requiem by the way.)
Lifting oneself by bootstraps as it were, out of chaos of social upheavels, petty squabbles of politics and despite the drag of enervating habits and financial disarray to make music or art of high order is heroic. But in the way Mozart lifts us higher with his music, to be in a transcendental world from which we may gather enough strength to carry on with our unfinished business on earth is nothing short of salvation dispensed freely to all. Who but God can confer such a grace?
benny