Haydn is a slow infiltration (and how to tell him apart from Mozart)
Some pieces are puppies, after a glance they are hugging the legs of my listening habits and chewing away at my head when it’s supposed to be sleeping. Other pieces hover around at the periphery, waiting for their chance to unexpectedly leap in: a warm bath that you unexpectedly find has crinkled your fingers. Hmmm. The metaphors aren’t exactly on par tonight, are they? Puppies… bathwater… Perhaps if I deliberately try to find horrible illustrations, fantastic ones will magically manifest themselves all over the screen. But don’t count on it.
So why the bathwater allusion? Well, Haydn has been doing that recently. Franz Joseph is such a cheeky, sneaky fellow. It’s mostly the fault of the “Military” symphony, which keeps getting played because of its prime placement at the start of a CD that has lodged itself in the stereo. As mp3s dominate the sonic surroundings in my milieu, the poor old compact disc player doesn’t get much love, and thus doesn’t get its innards swapped out very frequently. This means the Military is getting a lot of playtime, a large amount of background exposure, when play gets pushed to fill in the silence. Recently, however, it’s far exceeding its role as background and leaping right into the foreground.
I’m liking Haydn more and more. As I mentioned previously one of my all-time ultimate tip-top life goals is to be able to reliably distinguish Mozart from Haydn. That last time Miss M. gave me a few hints for separating them (can you imagine it being in an opera? Probably Mozart) and I just explored a link my Dad emailed me to a Slate article centering on the differences in style between the two. It’s got audio comparisons of each of the points they illustrate and everything. Briefly their ideas are 1) Haydn is more rustic than Mozart 2) where Haydn is heartily funny, Mozart is craftily witty 3) Mozart is generally more ambiguous.
Maybe in a month or so I’ll be a bit more qualified to cast my own differentiation opinions.
November 22nd, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I’ve always had trouble telling them apart, but that may be because I’m rather apathetic about that period in European music anyway. A horrible thing to confess, but my taste tends to jump from Bach to Beethoven and settle down pretty much from then on. Perhaps it’s the aristocratic tinge that 18th century music tends to have–a lot of it was subsidized by the nobility, and it sounds like it.
However, both Haydn and Mozart were somewhat unsympathetic to the nobility also, so there is something of the common man and woman in their music. I tend to prefer Haydn because of his “rusticity.”
November 28th, 2007 at 6:24 am
Technically, a giveaway is that in his mature music, Mozart writes much more chromatically than Haydn. The introduction to the Dissonant Quartet is a notorious example, but again and again there are prominent lines that include all the semitones, such as the music for the commendatore’s death in “Don Giovanni,” the finales of the quintet K.593 and quartet K.464, and too many others to mention. Plus any number of thematic and transitional phrases, dissonant harmonies, etc.
For me anyway, this quality gives Mozart’s music a quite different emotional color from Haydn’s, more complex, varied, and ambiguous. It’s one reason why Mozart was by far the greater opera composer, but it’s everywhere in the music of his last 10 years and more.
November 30th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Jon:
I know what you mean. This is the first time so far that any of the classical stuff has really struck me, or at least started to strike me perhaps. It doesn’t have much of an emotional impact.
JF:
I should expand my Mozartian collection – I’m certainly intrigued by the dissonant quartet, I think i’ve heard it mentioned as one of the somewhat surprising examples of early dissonance (along with Beethoven’s “Grosse Fugue”)