K. 20, God is Our Refuge

K. 20, God is Our Refuge

Was this Mozart’s first spiritual work?  In a protestant land, in a language other than Latin?   When I started this venture, I wondered if I was going to run into a work written in English.  Lucky me, I did.  The lyrics are simple: ‘God is our refuge.  A very present help in trouble.’  The work is a one musical step above a Gregorian chant. 

Mozart had absorbed a mass of information.  And for someone age nine?  But, was such level of knowledge rare for the educated of the day?  Or, does it seem rare when I present-mindedly compare him with today's educated youth?   I’ve been doing research into the classical method of education.  I believe more youth are capable of more knowledge absorption.  (We just need to get rid of many of the distractions—I don’t know how to make that happen.) True, Mozart had a father who worked tirelessly at educating his son free from digital gizmos, boy/girl crush distractions, and fear-mongering bullies.  

The classical philosophy stresses three learning stages: grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric.  Mozart would have been in the grammar stage, the stage in life where a child is an information-sponge and needs to be fed.  (The other two stages teach a youth what to do with the information they know.)  For him to have had knowledge of so many languages is evidence that grammatically he had been well nourished.  (I’ve heard this is why children learn languages easier.) Some would claim, that because he was such a genius, he had an ability to have a varied knowledge.  True, Mozart was undeniably a music prodigy, but I don’t believe he was superior in any other realm.  As reflect on his history, I wonder if his education lacked the dialectic and rhetoric stages.  Once he reached adulthood, his lack of—as a troglodyte might say—‘real-world’ skills left him scraping by as he sought to profit from his God given genius and learned grammar.