Sandstone Press

Sonnets to Mozart (6)

Posted by RLD on 31st August 2010

This group of poems is dedicated in gratitude and appreciation to the composer William Gilmour. Searching around for a theme I once noticed the scores of a number of Mozart’s piano sonatas resting in the back of his car. It happens that I like this music too, although the notion of me playing it is just an impossible dream. What better linkage to Willie though, who can and does? This led to a consideration not only of Mozart’s music but also his titles and K numbers. What might rise from a concentrated, meditative focus? It turned out to be an appreciation of the shared Dunbeath Water creation process, Paul Gallico’s story,The Snow Goose, whose themes of suffering and sacrifice strike me as pagan and Celtic rather than Christian, new beginnings, memories of my own boyhood in Glasgow, a quote from C.S. Lewis that has never left me, that grief feels like “waiting; just hanging about for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling.” Love, sex and death all take their bows, as would be expected. That damned ferryman appears again. My mother used to say, “There’s no show without Punch”, and that takes us back to Rhayader and his spirit bird.’ Now also remembering Edwin Morgan.

What Happened to Mr Mozart

Ideas drawn from deep within the well
Let down again, or maybe laid aside.
Structures, assemblies, orderings that fell
Were gone for good. The new form tested died.
Think of Mozart as he threw down his pen,
Head shaking over worlds that might have been.
His fickle audience had put an end
To this journey - too difficult it seemed.
How he leapt and hurled his wig at the wall,
Drank himself daft and kicked out the window.
He swore he would quit and he damned them all.
No, only kidding!  He started again.
He began Le Nozze di Figaro.
Our world spins about worlds that might have been.

Piano Quartet #3 in an Unknown Key, K624