ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music, in staging these intimations, reflects a fundamentally ironic and melancholic condition of modern, post-Enlightenment self-consciousness. That Mozart composed the most beautiful music we can know is an article of faith among listeners and critics of Mozart's music. In Mozart's instrumentation, every part has a satisfying role to play; every part sounds. Mozartean dissonance sometimes creates unheard-of sounds, plaintive and yet pleasantly thrilling, strange and yet exquisite. Mozart's beautiful dissonance is a special inversion of Santayana's beauty—one that seems to answer to the ironic pain of consciousness. For E.T.A. Hoffmann, Mozart announces the first glimmers of this kind of consciousness by composing music that makes this newly conceived interior space resonate—and this is what makes Mozart a Romantic artist. For Mozart's music is music to be reheard: the listening experience lives and lives again to anticipate and then savor such moments.
