Back to Bed, More Sweet/Sad Dreams...And Now: Born too Late

Listening, through my "Tunes Application" (whatever the bloody hell that is) to a flute concerto that seemed at first agreeably classical (in the late 18th century sense) and effortlessly, charmingly melodious.  And then...One began to notice that the charming tunes had no "suite."  They came one after another, sure enough, but none grew out of itself into something else.  And the orchestra, one noted first with anxiety, and finally with exasperation, had nothing to say for itself--was just sort of there, holding things up, like male dancers in ballet.  What fatal lack of intelligent regard for melodic development, proportion and balance, had turned this work, so pretty in its tunes and solo part, into a dreary, one-dimensional hurdy-gurdy?   The answer, my dears, is  The Climate of The Times, Romanticism, in which only stupendously gifted Titans like Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and then but seldom and rarely, could conceive of the balance of melody, development and proportion which is essential to the composition of a successful concerto for soloist and orchestra, and which, certainly, was beyond the grasp of minor talents like Chopin--or, in this case, Franz Danzi (1763-1826), who, had he but been born twenty years sooner, would have been a very good composer, possibly (such were his melodic gifts) even great.  Not to fault the great Romantic concertos that did get written; but they are few. 

Just listened on WGUG to that famous Miserere of Allegri's which the 12-year-old Mozart famously copied out from memory after hearing it once or twice (twelve parts?): very pretty, not at all what I'd expected from its patronizing description by musicologists and Mozart biographers of the first half of the 20th Century--so blinded and deafened as these were by their own notions of "greatness" and "genius," that they could scarcely actually see or hear anything which they (or some "received authority") had not pre-determined to possess those (very Romantic) qualities.