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.