The concert hall’s Mozart wasn’t the same Mozart

If I may confess the musician’s mortal sin, I am a certified Mozart hater. I don’t deny the quality, the skill, the genius of his music. I just find it incredibly boring.

On Friday I had the opportunity to see a very lovely concert put on by a historical music group, BACH COLLEGIUM SAN DIEGO. The thing that makes BCSD special (yes, this is a plug to anyone local) is that they do everything they can to play the music as it would have been played when it was written, on the instruments it would have been played on.

Friday was set up in a little bookshop, no more than 50 people, and the first row was close enough they could have touched them. The back row could have whispered and still been heard by the musicians. I’ve listened to thousands of hours of Mozart’s music, but always in the stuffy concert halls, made to seat thousands, on instruments engineered to project unamplified to the most distant audience member.

This was different. More alive. More intimate. More subtle and nuanced. A line played to project not to thousands, but dozens, played at times so quietly that I had literally to lean in. This was not the concert hall’s Mozart. This, I liked.

It’s easy to hear an idea once and dismiss it. It’s easy to try something once and fail, and never look back. In the startup world, we’re taught to iterate rapidly, pivot at failures and always move forward. But this was a good reminder that ideas that were not right at the time aren’t always not right forever. Sometimes, the "hall" is too stuffy, or the instruments are wrong.

Time, and place, and voice matter. In the new year, I encourage you not to just look forward, but to reexplore the past. What ideas have you left in the dust because the world wasn’t ready for them yet? Because you weren’t ready for them yet?