Why I love Mozart....

Mozart comforts me when I'm feeling blue. Listening to his music seems to bring order to chaos and helps me to feel calm when I am surrounded by the disorder and sometimes panic that is our modern life. There's a quality to his music that is distinctly pure, clean, and beautiful, so that when I listen, I become more calm and hopeful and then eventually smile with joy.

Loving Mozart puts me in good company. As Albert Einstein said:
 "We cannot despair about mankind knowing that Mozart was a man."
              -and also-
"Mozart is the greatest composer of all. Beethoven created his music, but the music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it — that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart

Another interesting phenomenon about Mozart is that trying to play his piano pieces well is an endless quest for perfection, rarely attained by mere mortals. His music seems so simple at times, that it seems it should be easier to play than say a pyrotechnic showpiece by Liszt. However, the clarity of the music means that as a pianist, every little extra "thumb accent", pedalling inaccuracy, tempo falter, lack of tasteful dynamics, etc. is very exposed. In other piano works, slight imperfections in technique might not be noticed due to the sweep and dramatic nature of music. This is not true in Mozart. As Artur Schnabel put it: "The sonatas of Mozart are unique: too easy for children, too difficult for adults. Children are given Mozart to play because of the quantity of notes; grown-ups avoid him because of the quality of notes."
http://mozartsmusic.blogspot.com/2011/08/some-quotes-about-mozart.html

As a Mozart lover, I knew I wanted to play his sonatas and I eventually learned the first movement of Mozart's K333 piano sonata for one of my music exams. I struggled mightily to learn this movement. I practiced for hours and hours to try to try to improve my technique to achieve lightness and beauty. The movement stayed with me day and night playing over and over in my head. However, technique is not enough with Mozart, he was also a fantastic Opera composer. Mozart's music must "sing". So, my other big struggle was trying to make Mozart have a "singing line". In piano teacher parlance, I needed to have impeccable phrasing and articulation. So, not only are you working on your technique during your practice, sometimes you also need to sing the melody in your head while you're practicing and/or have a vision of your own musical interpretation, a musical story.

In the end, I didn't feel that I managed to project my true vision of the glory of this work during my exam performance. However, the effort I put into learning this work certainly made me a much better pianist. My struggles for perfection meant that my technique and phrasing all improved tremendously. So, even though professional pianists appear to avoid Mozart as concert pieces or during piano competitions. I don't think piano teachers or non-professional pianists should avoid Mozart. Instead, we should love Mozart even more. We should teach and learn his sonatas with care and joy and all the while becoming better pianists.