On my right, I had a clarinetist who was more moved than ever at a concert when she saw and heard two historic clarinets (basset horns) for which Mozart composed. On my left, the Franconian wine queen and her sister who treated us with a kindness that matched their elegance (all three in the photo).

The Mozart gala dinner concert was held in the Kaiser Hall of the Residenz in Würzburg, a beautiful city twinned with Salamanca, where it is said that you don’t have to look for beautiful places because every corner is beautiful. But it’s not just the buildings and gardens that they care for; they appreciate and cultivate music with numerous and very diverse concerts and even with their church bell ringing. And everything is adorned with an unusual frequency of groups enjoying their friendship and couples of all ages walking in love.

The aria from «The Marriage of Figaro» sung by Susana decorated the place with feelings of a beauty even more profound than that of the paintings on the walls.

Come, my beloved, among these hidden plants. I want to crown your forehead with roses.

Music and lyrics rise above the specific moment of the plot in a hymn to freedom, to the revolution of love against the droit du seigneur that Count Almaviva wanted to continue exercising.

It was not Mozart who made the transformation in music that put it at the service of feeling, we owe that to the great revolutionary Beethoven, who first became enthusiastic about the democracy supposedly championed by Bonaparte and then became so deeply disappointed with his authoritarianism that he erased his name from what he eventually called «Eroica». It is precisely with this third symphony that Beethoven took up Mozart’s great contribution by laying the foundations of the sonata form and at the same time transformed it by enriching it with great creativity in its development.

I think it is easy to imagine how this night was filled with brightness with every chord of the music, with every gaze, with every idea, with every feeling. Each moment that every human being should have the option to enjoy, if he or she wants to, was filled with beauty. A growing number of education professionals are achieving this right to beauty for their students and even for their families, who ignore the «theories» that deny this possibility, those who propose and practice ugliness. They are professionals who enjoy and make people enjoy the beauty that humankind has created, the most profound revolution in history.

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Por Ramón Flecha

Catedrático Emérito de la Universidad de Barcelona. Investigador número 1 del ranking científico internacional Google Scholar en las categorías de "gender violence" y "social impact" (violencia de género e impacto social, respectivamente). Director de REVERS-ED.