Kierkegaard on Mozart

"One can indeed imagine many more musical classics, yet there still remains just one work of which it can be said that it's idea is absolutely musical, so that the music does not enter as an accompaniment but, in bringing the idea to light, reveals its own innermost being. Therefore Mozart with his Don Giovanni stands the highest among the Immortals." 

There's a lot I want to unpack here, will think and update.

Edit: Still thinking but it's so tough to get to the central thought here. How do you reveal your being? Is he implying that it's an end unto itself?

And then he says:

What someone has loved with the

infatuation and admired with the enthusiasm of youth, what someone has kept up

a clandestine and enigmatic commerce with in his innermost soul, what someone

has hidden away in his heart, that is something the like of which one always

approaches with a certain shyness, with mixed feelings, when one knows that the

intention is to try to understand it. What you have learned to know bit by bit, like

a bird gathering every little straw, happier over each small piece than over all the

rest of the world; what the loving ear has absorbed, solitary in the great

multitude, unremarked in its secret place of hiding; what the greedy ear has

snatched up, never gratified, the miserly ear hidden, never secure, that whose

softest echo has never deceived the searching ear’s sleepless vigil; what you

have lived by day, relived by night, what has banished sleep and made it

troubled; what you have dreamt of in sleep, what you have woken up to dream of

again when awake, what caused you to leap up in the middle of the night for fear

of forgetting it; what has come to you in your moments of greatest rapture; what

like a woman’s embroidery you keep constantly beside you; what has followed

you on the clear moonlit nights, in lonely forests by the shores, in the gloomy

streets, in the dead of night, at break of day, what has ridden with you on

horseback, accompanied you in the carriage, what permeates your home, what

your chamber has been witness to, what has echoed in your ear, resounded

through your soul, what your soul has spun into its finest web – that now reveals

itself to thought.

Well, excuse me Mr. Kierkegaard! So much finery banishes my soul. You have got to be joking cuz I refuse to indulge this.