Symphonies And Pyramids

Symphonies and Pyramids

He was a superstar long before the age of superstars. At age five, he wrote a concerto for the harpsichord. Before he was ten, he was composing and publishing violin sonatas. At twelve, he produced his first opera. When he was thirteen, he was the concertmaster of Europe’s greatest symphony orchestra. By the time he died of exhaustion, this manic overachiever wrote numerous operettas, cantatas, hymns, oratorios, and arias. He composed forty-eight symphonies and a dozen operas. In his brief life, he gave birth to six hundred compositions!

His music was sheer perfection. His genius has never been matched. This whiz kid with the moniker Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart certainly had a lot of name to live up to.

But there was a dark side to the boy genius. In the 1700s he was living the destructive lifestyle of a modern rock superstar. He was only thirty-five when he collapsed from pneumonia. His drug-addicted wife was in such a stupor that she barely knew her husband had died. A handful of people went to his funeral, but a snowstorm prevented them from going to the grave site. By the time the weather cleared, the grave diggers could not remember where they had buried him. The grave of history’s greatest musical genius has never been found.

Compare Mozart’s unmarked grave to the most spectacular shrine ever built for a single person. Towering above desert sands outside Cairo, Egypt, it is the most visited grave site in the world. Over one hundred thousand slaves labored and died building the Great Pyramid. Its construction almost bankrupted a nation. After more than four thousand years this grave still stands in crumbling grandeur, although robbers long ago stole the body and plundered the buried wealth. Only a few history buffs remember the name of its original occupant: Pharaoh Khufu. Other than a grave that has become a popular tourist destination, Khufu has left no lasting legacy.

On the other hand, Mozart doesn’t even have a weathered stone to mark the fact that he was here. Yet turn the lights in your den down low, slip a CD into the slot, close your eyes, and listen to the exquisite beauty of a Mozart sonata. Race along the highway with the convertible top down, and let the wind rush through your hair as a Mozart symphony blasts gloriously from the speakers. Attend his greatest opera and allow The Marriage of Figaro to inflame your senses with soaring passion. Although his body has long ago decomposed in that unmarked grave, his genius lives on forever. One thing is sure: if you look through your CD collection, you won’t find anything by an Egyptian pharaoh named Khufu.

It matters little where any of us are buried. It does matter what we compose while still alive on this earth. Every time we love, touch, rescue, or encourage others, they become the living notes of a beautiful symphony that we are composing for the ages. It may not have the perfection of Mozart’s musical genius, but our life symphonies will bring joy and beauty long after we are gone. So live today with this in mind:

Everything will perish, and this world will pass, but the symphony you compose will last forever.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:13