In an attempt to make sense of the hysteria, I took up the cudgels for the Pierre Boulez slogan that Mozart was a regressive force who added nothing to the development of music. The inventors and energisers in music history were Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler and Schoenberg; all else was entertainment. Boulez, as music director of the New York Philharmonic in the 1970s, replaced Mozart with Haydn on its programmes.

His case still holds, up to a point. Al- though some find prescience in a Schoenbergian 12-note row at the cold heart of Don Giovanni, Mozart pushed no musical form forward beyond existing borders. He was conformist to a fault, a conservative com- poser. On the plus side, he contributed two dozen works to what one might term general human civilisation, the common stock of culture—from “A Little Night Music” to the last notes of a Requiem he never lived to finish. That’s two dozen out of 630 works, but it’s a dozen more than Haydn and it is a rush of works that arouse instant warmth and acceptance from an audience.

Andrew Ford, the Australian composer and broadcaster, reinforces this point in a new collection of essays, Try Whistling This (Black Inc., £21.95). Mozart, he writes, “knows how to keep us close to the edge of our seats”, something few composers ever achieve. Ford goes on to acknowledge, how- ever, that once we start to believe that his music is “a sonic panacea from God, we might well lose our ability to listen at all”.