Just as one had begun to despair over the devaluation of the notion of the "miracle" (Scott Morrison even thought his 2019 election victory was one) and of "genius" (everywhere on the internet now one finds the word used to describe everything that's even a little bit smarty pants clever) a grand new book comes galloping to the rescue.
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In the online music-loving places where I trespass, reviewers are gasping at true stories told in a new, big, scholarly, revelatory biography of Mozart.
John Check gasps in New Criterion: "The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart begins with the 'miracle of January 24, 1761'. This is Jan Swafford's apt phrase, found in his new biography, Mozart: The Reign of Love, for what happened one night in Salzburg when a four-year-old boy sat down at the harpsichord in his parents' house and began to play.
"His sister Nannerl, age nine, had been practicing a scherzo, and he was taken with its lively rhythms. When she finished, he wanted to give it a try. The boy immediately caught the gist of the piece. Within half an hour, despite being unable to read music and having had no previous harpsichord instruction, he had learned it by heart."
Another reviewer of the book, gasping in The Economist, marvels at Jan Swafford's reporting of how "The moment he saw an organ, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart knew what to do with it."
"Aged six, already a prodigy on the clavier, he encountered pedals and stops for the first time in an Austrian church. Within moments he was accompanying mass and improvising freely. His father wrote that 'every day God performs fresh miracles through this child'."
Sorry Mr Morrison but the 'miracle' of your election victory, easily explained in non-supernatural ways (by the Australian people's innate everyday dullness, amorality and credulity) is not in the same class as the Mozartian ones.
Back to Mozart, circuitously, in a moment.
First, though, to how one is used to 'horrifying statistics' (usually statistics of catastrophes) popping up everywhere in the news. But I have just come across some horrifying statistics, horrifying for fretful me, in a new discussion of UFOs and aliens.
Elizabeth Kolbert's fine New Yorker piece Have We Already Been Visited By Aliens? is a discussion based on a dashing new book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign Of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb.
Let Wikipedia remind you of the book's big subject, the famous October 2017 astronomical sighting of Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System. For now I am only twitching about the horror given me by some of the statistics in Kolbert's piece. In my shameful ignorance of astronomy I had never until reading Kolbert, any notion of the terrifying immensity of space. Her shocking throwaway facts include how "Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to Earth ... is about twenty-five trillion miles away."
What? Twenty-five trillion miles? And that's the closest star system?
With horrifying statistics like these, fretful earthlings are shirtfronted by the terrible loneliness on our lonely, blue planet in the vast unneighbourly void.
"Where are they?" physicist Enrico Fermi famously despaired of a Universe in which the Milky Way alone, if we are not alone, should be teeming with beings on its tens of millions of potentially habitable planets.
So in our wistful loneliness our species in 1977 sent Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 bustling out into the Universe each bearing a Sounds Of The Earth Golden Record of earthling information. We hope extraterrestrials may find it and, fascinated, then take an interest in us.
Among the sounds of music on the Golden Record is the Queen of the Night's aria from Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. It is the witch-majesty's terrible declaration of incandescent rage and revenge-lust. It is a once-heard-never-to-be-forgotten testament to Mozart's genius and shows off just what an earthling's voice (when she is an elite soprano) is capable of.
Thanks to the miracle of YouTube we can all see and hear the recording sent out there, Edda Moser's miraculous rendition of this musical miracle, wondering as we listen what on earth extraterrestrials will make of it.
What if they think it is earthlings' belligerent declaration of war?
What if (someone on one YouTube link to the aria marvels "Man, this is gonna scare the shit out of the aliens!") it so terrifies them that the very extraterrestrials we so long to meet timidly shrink even further away from contact with lonely, lonely us?
