Saturday, January 08, 2005
Papa gets some pub
Apparently it is not quite fashionable in high musical circles to admit a love for the music of Josef Haydn. Since I don't run in those circles, I will risk making my admission. I call his symphonies "happy music."
The oft-heard criticisms include the observation that his music is too decorous, not given enough to emotional effulgence, even unimaginative. Yet there is wide acknowledgement, even among those who hold these opinions, of the important place Haydn holds in the evolution and development of classical (small 'c') music.
A fine new essay by Terry Teachout, music critic for Commentary Magazine, asks us to reconsider the many brilliances of Haydn's music. We also learn that it is possible to be in good company in expressing one's esteem for the composer. It turns out that Alec Guiness was an admirer:
"For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised—listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne’s essays."
In Teachout's contrast between Haydn and Beethoven we can see the larger dichotomy between Classical (capital "C") and (albeit early) Romantic temperaments. And these in turn are the archetypes of today's more familiar conservatives and liberals. Haydn's "conservatism", as distinct from a more romantic inclination to the view that human nature is malleable and can yet be perfected:
"Instead of Haydn, a man of modest piety who embraced the world as it was and is, they preferred Beethoven, a woolly-minded, proto-romantic pantheist who wanted everyone else to embrace the world as he longed for it to be."
The oft-heard criticisms include the observation that his music is too decorous, not given enough to emotional effulgence, even unimaginative. Yet there is wide acknowledgement, even among those who hold these opinions, of the important place Haydn holds in the evolution and development of classical (small 'c') music.
A fine new essay by Terry Teachout, music critic for Commentary Magazine, asks us to reconsider the many brilliances of Haydn's music. We also learn that it is possible to be in good company in expressing one's esteem for the composer. It turns out that Alec Guiness was an admirer:
"For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised—listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne’s essays."
In Teachout's contrast between Haydn and Beethoven we can see the larger dichotomy between Classical (capital "C") and (albeit early) Romantic temperaments. And these in turn are the archetypes of today's more familiar conservatives and liberals. Haydn's "conservatism", as distinct from a more romantic inclination to the view that human nature is malleable and can yet be perfected:
"Instead of Haydn, a man of modest piety who embraced the world as it was and is, they preferred Beethoven, a woolly-minded, proto-romantic pantheist who wanted everyone else to embrace the world as he longed for it to be."
# posted by mds : 8:43 PM
