Mozart's Birthday 2018

For a lot of us post post modernists there's really nothing in the world that we recognize as divine but the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; so we celebrate Mozart's birthday as our only possibly genuinely religious holiday.  It's fine if you don't understand this--being Mozart-worshippers, we're used to people who, for whatever reason, don't venerate Mozart as we do, and are incapable of comprehending that music is an art (something noble and sacred), and that Mozart is, in a special sense, the greatest artist that ever lived, and that--to name only two things--the clarinet concerto and the clarinet quintet--are both, every single note of them, from end to end, absolutely sublime. You either "get" it or you don't.

Still, it occurs to me that there are other composers that the many-headed have no understanding or appreciation of; some with, some without, the imputation of sub-humanity that failure to realize the divinity of Mozart naturally brings with it.  A composer whom an insensitivity-to makes one, alas, more beast than man would be Henry Purcell. While a composer to whom one might be indifferent--or, let us say, defensively insensible--without dropping further in the scale of humanity than Rude Peasant (that is, not quite so low as the Ox he drives) would be Tomaso Albinoni.  There is, bluntly and frankly, no hope for the clod of less than human clay who does not feel the sublime pathos of Dido's lament.  But it's possible (I think, in all charity) just to be so bewildered  and overwhelmed by the high-stepping, fugacious regality of Albinoni's Concerti a Cinque that one might fail to recognize their perfect (albeit rebarbatively princely) beauty.