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Mozart remains the music lover’s favourite composer of all time. As well, musicians, whether composers or performers, have always looked to him as a model. How was it possible for this small-town musician from Salzbourg, mischievous and clever, to succeed in so short a life, during which his pen could hardly keep up with the inspiration of his mind, in permeating our civilisation with his genius?

This is a great mystery, for if we tally up all his works, it seems nearly impossible for him to have written them all in such a short time. It is said that he wrote the overture to Don Giovanni in one evening, starting at the top. First the flute, followed by the oboe, then the clarinet, etc., as if he had composed the full score in his mind already and was now simply dictating it. When you think of Beethoven’s drafts or Stravinsky’s many sketches, there seems to be a whiff of the supernatural or the divine here…

With Berlioz, what is striking is the precociousness of his ideas and musical language. He is in a sense the French Mahler. But he wrote his Fantastique nearly sixty years before Mahler’s first symphony. Here, too, is a prodigy to be marvelled at.