Classical Music : What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for piano?

What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for piano?

-----

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

Haydn is certainly one of the very greatest symphonists and not to be as lightly passed over as he sometimes is.

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

Be careful with those Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes. As gr8 as Haydn was at writing symphonies (not just quantity but also quality), I think there's little doubt that what Beethoven achieved surpasses Haydn. Most if not all of the 19th century luminaries thought so, such as Schumann, Brahms and Wagner.

It does leave one wondering what Haydn might have achieved had ill health not curtailed his composing activities long before he died. If he had had the chance to compose after being exposed to Beethoven's middle symphonies, who knows?

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

Well Schumann (love him like a sister but) and Wagner just plain didn't understand Haydn. Brahms very much DID understand Haydn, but did he ever say Beethoven was better? I haven't heard that he did.

"not just quantity but also quality" But see there you go that's the thing. Haydn gives you quality AND quantity of symphonies - Beethoven gives you quality, obviously, but only 9 times! Ok they're longer than Haydn's but not THAT much longer - we're talking, like, 25-30 minutes versus 45 minutes. That's why Haydn's better. With piano sonatas otoh Beethoven gives you a whole bunch, so he can be best piano composer.


-----

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

Brahms did take a couple of decades to write his first symphony because he was intimidated by the legacy of Beethoven's compositions, especially the 9th symphony. I don't think Haydn had a similar effect on Brahms.

If greatness can be measured as a product of quality and quantity, does that mean if we accumulated enough Vivaldi concertos we could equal a symphony by a Haydn or Beethoven? How many would it take? Several hundred? Several thousand?

I'm not completely discounting the "product" idea - clearly we would think less of Beethoven as a composer of piano sonatas if we only had his, say, even numbered sonatas.

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi


If greatness can be measured as a product of quality and quantity, does that mean if we accumulated enough Vivaldi concertos we could equal a symphony by a Haydn or Beethoven? How many would it take? Several hundred? Several thousand?

Half-serious answer: More, because there's only about 30 seconds' worth of great material in any movement by Vivaldi.

Totally serious answer: Never, because even the best Vivaldi concertos aren't in the same class as a first rate Haydn or Beethoven symphony. You might reply "Well even the best Haydn symphony isn't in the same class as a first rate Beethoven symphony" - but I don't think that's clearly the case.)


-----

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

Ah, poor Vivaldi, who's reputation takes another beating in our IMDb polemic!

And I agree, Haydn's symphonies contain many moments - and more - of magic that hold up quite well alongside Beethoven.

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

Don't get me wrong, Vivaldi is clearly a great composer - yeah, lots of formula wasting your time between the great ideas, but the great ideas are really great - there's just somewhat... less to him, at his best, than to... well, a few other composers. I'd say the same about, I dunno, like, Mendelssohn, or Ravel, probably.


-----

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

Also: true that Brahms had anxiety of influence about Beethoven & no apparent anxiety of influence about Haydn. But BEETHOVEN had anxiety of influence about Haydn. http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=219


-----

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

Well, I bet Hadyn felt some pressure from C.P.E Bach, who felt pressure from J.S., who felt pressure from Vivaldi...

😊

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

ok maybe, but then you could say the same about the generation after Brahms. Like, Debussy's plenty anxious about Wagner, but not so much about Beethoven.


-----

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

I can't get past hearing Haydn as 2nd rate Mozart. I really can't be arsed with him, which is a shame given his output. I have a few of the late symphonies & a couple of quartets, but they don't hold the attention too much; it just seems as if he were just too nice a guy to write anything brilliant, though admittedly I haven't an enormous amount.

Many of Beethoven sonatas, such as I've heard them, do little for me...I think people give some of them more notice than they deserve simply because Beethoven wrote them. Debussy's my man, with regard to piano. Much as I like some of the B sonatas I wouldn't be too upset if I could never hear any of them again, whereas it would be terrible if I couldn't listen to the Debussy Etudes, Images, Preludes etc.

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

I think Haydn appreciation might generally benefit if everybody made a point of screaming, at every possible opportunity, that he's a very different kind of composer than Mozart. Debussy and Ravel is maybe a good comparison - superficial similarities, but fundamentally different. Mozart is basically a melody composer - his long movements are built around self-sufficient, symetrically balanced opera aria melodies; Haydn is basically a motif composer - putting little blocks of material through surprising transformations - even his lyrical melodies tend to break down pretty obviously into smaller blocks.

Have you heard any of the recent recordings of Haydn symphonies by Thomas Fey and the Heidelberger Symphony Orchestra?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLCqY2ljrGI

Haydn is one composer who I think may be better served by the current "Historically Informed Performance" style than by earlier styles in the audio recording era. Not that the current HIP style necessarily has much to do with the performance conventions of Haydn's own time: I suspect it's closer to the style of the fairly recent European avant-garde (French spectral composers like Gérard Grisey and German extended techniques composers like Helmut Lachenmann, and behind them Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ligeti, et al.), just as the older HIP style of John Eliot Gardiner, and before that the "1960s Baroque" style of Neville Marriner, have clear affinities with the first recorded performances of Neoclassical Stravinsky compositions, from Mavra through The Rake's Progress, and are almost certainly closer to those than they are to how music was actually performed in Bach's time. Doesn't matter: their style of Bach, Handel, & Vivaldi performance may not necessarily be any more historically accurate than the style of Klemperer or whoever, but it struck a chord with the public in a way that Klemperer didn't, and so Marriner's and Gardiner's generations succeeded in making High Baroque concertante and (to a lesser extent) religious works more popular, where Klemperer's generation failed. I think the same might be happening with Haydn now.

If I'm right, then maybe this should have been predictable: in the high summer of Modernism, in the 1960s, performers figured out how to make the Bach, Handel, & Vivaldi popular. So if you tried to guess who performers today, in the high summer of Postmodernism, could successfully popularize, then of course it was going to be Haydn, the great composer distinguished by his apparent accessibility, his combining of elements of high culture and popular culture, and his jokes.


-----

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

One more thing. Here's Kenneth Rexroth on Julius Caesar's prose. His observations seem to me astonishingly applicable to Haydn's music: "His prose is eminently simple and clear -- to those who read Latin fluently. Yet his use of the language is not just eccentric; it is entirely peculiar to him. Caesar was one of the most completely competent writers in all literature. It is impossible to doubt his meaning, if we have an ordinary grasp of the Latin language; but his style is nervous, full of surprises, and deliberately odd. [...] Reading Julius Caesar, if you read Latin and have never read him as a child (a most unlikely contingency), is like riding a high-spirited horse who for all his nerves is always completely under control. [...] The masterful concealment, of course, is an essential part of the maturity. Caesar's style has been called unsophisticated. It is exactly the opposite. In fact, his books could be called manifestoes against the florid writing of Cicero or Livy."


-----

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi


Mozart is basically a melody composer - his long movements are built around self-sufficient, symetrically balanced opera aria melodies; Haydn is basically a motif composer - putting little blocks of material through surprising transformations - even his lyrical melodies tend to break down pretty obviously into smaller blocks.


I like the use of melodic vs. motivic as a way to classify composers, and it's true that Mozart and Haydn are good examples of these two, respectively. Beethoven was primarily a motivic composer as well, and his first symphony in particular sounds in places like it was written by Haydn.

The trouble for me has always been that Haydn wasn't nearly as inventive or interesting in his use and transformation of motifs as Beethoven. For instance, let's take the transition between the 3d and 4th movements of Beethoven's 5th symphony, where the 4 note motif of the scherzo is transformed into the triumphant theme of the finale. I admit to have only listened to a handful of Haydn's 100+ symphonies (mostly the later ones), but I doubt there's anything quite as creative in any of his compositions.

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

The transformation of scherzo theme to finale theme in Beethoven 5 is all well & good, but it's just ONE transformation. Where Beethoven is supreme is in taking a motif that by itself sounds like the simplest thing in the world and then building it up into a massive complex architecture, like in the first part of the exposition of the FIRST movement of his 5. Where Haydn is supreme is in the VARIETY of uses he finds for a tiny amount of material. e.g. in the first movement of the Reine symphony, notice how much of that movement consists of transformations of just two little motivic scraps - the quickly ascending scale after the first two bars of the adagio introduction, and the long note and four descending shorter notes that follow at the very beginning of the vivace. And even the quote from the Farewell symphony that interrupts the movement, in the middle of the exposition and at the beginning of the development, is closely related to the second motif.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr2kEfBW71A


-----

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi

Though I have stated elsewhere in this thread that I consider Beethoven's accomplishments with symphonies to exceed Haydn's, I will say that Haydn often explored (or discovered or invented) realms that you simply don't find at all with Mozart or Beethoven or anyone else. In my opinion not including Haydn's symphonies in a classical collection is an irreplaceable loss. You don't have to go to the later ones to find genius.

The second movements of the following symphonies have a unique transcendence (I don't know how else to put it).

#44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXctarOxRz8

#48
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES01U3rNGzk

#98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcLSavoCSe4

Re: What if Haydn = gr8est symphony composer & Beethoven = gr8est for pi


I like the use of melodic vs. motivic as a way to classify composers, and it's true that Mozart and Haydn are good examples of these two, respectively. Beethoven was primarily a motivic composer as well, and his first symphony in particular sounds in places like it was written by Haydn.

In SO many ways Beethoven is more Haydn's son than Mozart's - the mutual fascination with kettledrums, for example. And no wonder - Haydn was already the certified Greatest Living & Working German Composer when Beethoven was a preadolescent in the early 1780s, and Haydn CONTINUED to occupy that position, uncontested (because Mozart was dead), as Beethoven was in his early to mid-20s and finding his own style in the early to mid-1790s.

Not to mention that "classical music" as we know it, the art we now regard as being epitomized by Beethoven - in its most unattenuated form: "absolute music," meant to be listened to, not for religious purposes or the theater or dancing or background music or teaching purposes, no improvisation - was INVENTED by Haydn more than anybody else.

There's maybe something to the old cliché that Mozart wasn't all that influential. He seems more like a supplemental influence in Rossini as well, behind Cimarosa or whoever. Maybe Weber's Freischütz owes more to Don Giovanni than to any other opera, but even there I wonder if that impression would survive a better knowledge of early 19th century French opera (the overture's similarity to Cherubini's Anacreon has already been noted).


-----
Top