Untitled Fourteen

In a recently discovered chamber work of Mozart,
he has added a viola to the quartet.
 
It is an ambivalent voice,
dark, hazardous,
 
and dissident,
evading the continuities of the other instruments,
the sonorous lines of the andante, the lento,
the classical agilities of the allegro, the presto,
 
withholding itself,
intruding,
fitfully, willfully,
 
its silences shrewd, ruthless, entreating,
 
antithetic,
 
its symmetries groping
for a music that cannot be played.

Oliver Rice | Mudlark No. 41 (2010)
Contents | The Albatross