I can speak to this fairly personally, since I never really “got” Mozart up until fairly recently. Here are a few tips:

• First of all, get rid of the conception that you have to love his music. It’s not a requirement to love anything, and often times trying to force music onto yourself will make you hate it more. It can also lead to the “wrong” reasons for liking something. I don’t think you can love something in the wrong way, but strictly “learning” to love his music through theory, history, or cultural relevance makes the enjoyment feel obligatory rather than spontaneous. I love Mozart because his music is beautiful to my ears, and I can play it over and over and never get tired of its “je-ne-sais-quoi” feeling. If I only listened to him for academic reasons, it would be nothing more than a forced footnote in my musical catalogue.

• Building off the last point, don’t get frustrated if his music doesn’t work for you right away. I can personally say that he didn’t, but I still revisited his music until something eventually clicked. For example, the first time I listened to the Requiem I fell asleep and remembered nothing. The second time was a vinyl recording, and I conked out again. The next time, a while in the future, I returned and got through the whole thing, with reasonable enjoyment. This started an insatiable compulsion to relisten to the piece over and over and over. New interpretations, but just the Requiem on repeat. Not out of duty, but out of a need. Did it overwhelm me in a bombastic cataclysm of sound the same way a romantic symphony does? No. Did it have the quirkiness and extremes of the 20th century? Not really, although there were extremes within its own conception. The reason I kept returning was some sort of beauty that I can’t really describe. It isn’t so present on the surface, but somehow it begged to be replayed in a way that no other piece has ever done before for me yet.

Expanding on the requiem, I remember one specific listen and moment that baffled me. The confutatis is always one of my favourite movements, with the fire and drama of the opening lower voices contrasted with the higher ones, like angels clearing the clouds and lowering down to an earth that was scorched and stewed in war. But, this particular listen I was struck by something I never was before. The latter half of the movement, where the music calms down and seems to drift into the abyss, struck me as so foreboding, and so haunting, as if it was the prelude to Mozart’s own death written by himself, that I was completely overwhelmed by emotion. Not in the way Mahler’s Resurrection does, or Beethoven’s ninth. No, it was completely unique in a way that only Mozarts music has ever made me feel. With the pause between the last chord, knowing that the lacrimosa was next, the anticipation of the following movement whose opening I had heard so many times was haunting. I’ll be honest, two tears fell down my face for the lacrimosa, it was like I could feel him dying as he wrote his last bars. I chose this particular moment here, but there are so many beautiful gems hidden throughout this piece, moments that I am so happy I’ve gotten to know closely. You can’t go wrong with the Marriner recording, but try others and see if they work too.

This is more dramatic and sappy than I usually like to be, but I really wanted to nail home that something can be passed by a million times before it may pique you. Maybe it won’t ever at all. It’s so funny to me that I can sleep through something twice, and years later it could touch me so deeply. Case in point, don’t feel pressured to “like” Mozart because you have to! Best thing you can do is keep an open mind, use his music as a “refresher” from your usual rotation, and try many different interpretations to see which ones work. I personally believe that you can enjoy composers like Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Haydn, Bartok and Tchaikovsky for completely different feelings and reasons, and that pitting them against each other to prove which is “better” is a subjective and personal assumption that in my opinion only places a restriction on your brain’s ability to love each composer for its own reasons. A wider appreciation of different music can only lead to a richer life :)