Posted: Jan 12 2006 at 5:22am | IP Logged

Mozart is the sweet composer, there are sweets, sweet liqueurs, sweet wines, at least four sweetshops in North America, desserts in Viennese cookbooks, all named for him. None for Beethoven; all I could find was a meat-and-potatoes restaurant on the coast, and a piano moving company in New York. (snip)
The idea of the composer who writes easily, doesn't have to try, for whom problems are solved, as it were, by divine inspiration, in whose music each phrase seems the only logical successor to the one you've just heard, all this correlates with the idea of sweets, which go down easily and represent for us a certain seamlessness. For Mozart we are sometimes inclined to think, composing was easy as pie, or a piece of cake. - from Aesthetics: The Big Questions

Why is Mozart a composer of "sweet" music? It is sweets, and particularly chocolate, that "go down easily", provide no obstacles. Perhaps most among the music of the great masters, Mozart's gives the impression of ease, flowing naturally, moving without obstacle. - from Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons