K595 (Mozart)

Sometimes there breaks in on us a new dance,

darkness touched alight, something going straight

to the bone of our being. For instance,

circumventing thought, total and complete,

Piano Concerto Twenty Seven

unselves our worldliness, undoes our sleep,

a song brought back from the edge of Heaven,

a simple shape of notes that makes us weep.

SEÁN STREET

Kosovo Surprised by Mozart

(Bernard Roberts playing K533, 11 April 1999)

Lovely chromatic Mozart, talk to me

in your language of intimate, arithmetical

progression. Perform with this performer.

Hold that diminished seventh's cutting edge

close against the dominant until it

skylarks away from the tonic's expectant

cages to a charmed high of almost

imperceptible rallentando, only to

circle back lightly into the right key.

Why does what is known of happiness,

like sadness, find insignia in harmony?

Your genes were a template of musical

grammar from the hour of your birth.

You must have translated straight from

sensation into sound, ignoring the tongue’s

barbed wire at disputed borders. How young

you were, how unfinished your work of

spinning tempi into timelessness.

Easy it may be to bless and be blessed

in the terra cognita of Pythagoras, but

who lives there long? Young hungry hours can’t

help but devour us, hacking from east to west

through this eleventh day, fourth month, last year

of the twentieth century. An uninhabited body is

slashed and displayed on a pole. It's not unusual

for flesh to be pummelled, pistol-whipped,

groin-kicked, machine-gunned under arrest.

For news is the news, and our cameras favour

burying sufferers alive in rewindable footage.

And your spirit? Escaped long ago in a passion

of inky dots. It's for ten live fingers to decode you –

leapfrogging over the rubble, the incurable hospital,

the wreck of the temple, the cries and imploring hands.

We accuse you, Herr Mozart, of not representing our age.

Simplified, rarefied, perfectionist as ever,

punish us in the key of F major.

ANNE STEVENSON

Mozart's Horn Concertos

Not for war or hunting cry

Is this; it gentles down the heart,

So there's no question asking ‘Why

Does man exist?’