{"id":10095,"date":"2010-04-06T00:00:54","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T04:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=10095"},"modified":"2010-04-06T00:00:54","modified_gmt":"2010-04-06T04:00:54","slug":"frye-on-haydn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/04\/06\/frye-on-haydn\/","title":{"rendered":"Frye on Haydn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/04\/HAYDN41.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10096\" src=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/04\/HAYDN41.jpg\" alt=\"HAYDN4\" width=\"281\" height=\"382\" srcset=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/04\/HAYDN41.jpg 351w, https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/04\/HAYDN41-220x300.jpg 220w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 281px) 100vw, 281px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Further to Michael&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/2010\/03\/31\/joseph-haydn\/\" target=\"_blank\">post<\/a>, Frye on Haydn in Notebook 5<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If I had such a thing as a favorite composer, it would be Haydn.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s Haydn anyway.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to write something on him someday.\u00a0 More and more I find myself turning to Bach &amp; Haydn, which means more &amp; more away from Mozart.\u00a0 Mozart\u2019s a skeptic &amp; Haydn\u2019s a Christian.\u00a0 Haydn has everything.\u00a0 He has all of Schubert\u2019s ease of melody sags or goes soupy the way Schubert does.\u00a0 He\u2019s as witty as either Mozart or Scarlatti: I\u2019ve just read through 37 minuets &amp; 24 German dances, a grueling test for any composer &amp; he says something pointed &amp; epigrammatic practically every time.\u00a0 But he has more than wit: he has an amazing eloquence &amp; range in his melodic line: he can be marvellously \u201csingable\u201d &amp; yet swoop over everything form a soprano to a bass range: D major sonata in Book I with the lovely long Adagio.\u00a0 He may not be as profound a thinker generally as Mozart, but I think he\u2019s a greater thinker <em>in musical form <\/em>than Mozart: he has a sense of organic unity about him &amp; an originality of creative thought, still in musical form, Mozart hasn\u2019t.\u00a0 Haydn develops a plot; Mozart works out a situation.\u00a0 But the plot really develops, that\u2019s the point.\u00a0 He had much more influence over Beethoven than Mozart, I think, particularly in things like the Path\u00e9tique: only Beethoven is analytic &amp; disruptive where Haydn is synthetic.\u00a0 He\u2019s really almost more radiant than Beethoven for that reason.\u00a0 His trios are more fun to read on a piano than Mozart\u2019s because they\u2019re all piano &amp; Mozart\u2019s are balanced: Mozart\u2019s are more expertly written, but it\u2019s plot &amp; situation again, &amp; Haydn\u2019s more fun.\u00a0 In things like the G major sonata, Book II, slow movement, his impersonality, gone serious, just drops you out of sight: he\u2019s too wrapped up in pure music ever to be sad or cynical, like Mozart.\u00a0 He hits cold depths of ice Mozart doesn\u2019t get down to because he doesn\u2019t believe enough.\u00a0 Sometimes the coldness of pure Rococo, the winter-chill of our autumnal culture: slow movement of C major quartet, op. 59 No. 2 or something in the fifties: 55, I guess.\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s an abstract music writer.\u00a0 Sometimes Bach is unplayable, either because, as in the Art of Fugue, he\u2019s just writing absolute music, or because he\u2019s gone beyond all reading or reproduction into pure thought, as in the C# minor of the WTC I [<em>The Well-Tempered Clavier<\/em>, book 1].\u00a0 Sometimes Beethoven\u2019s unplayable when he\u2019s appealing to a wrench in the guts too physical for a performance to reach, as in the Coriolan or the 106.\u00a0 (That doesn\u2019t <em>necessarily<\/em> mean greatness, any more than an unactable play is necessarily great because <em>King Lear<\/em> is unactable).\u00a0 But Haydn always has a powerful ease of reproduction: his music exists only for performance.\u00a0 His piano sonatas are in one idiom, his string quartets in another, etc.\u00a0 That\u2019s why he\u2019s the easiest of all composers to play: he thinks so purely in terms of the genius of reproducing instruments.\u00a0 Hence he\u2019s an amateur-family musician, and could do what the Bible could almost have done (not quite: its achievement is overrated) for amateur-family English prose style.\u00a0 He\u2019s probably the only great composer who could have written a national anthem.\u00a0 But he\u2019s got something ultimate in his time &amp; Mozart &amp; Beethoven &amp; Goethe haven\u2019t: there\u2019s too much Goethe in Mozart and too much Beethoven in Goethe.\u00a0 Something of the rebirth of imagination: the thing Blake had.\u00a0 Haydn was no Bach and couldn\u2019t do the Mass or Passion job to save his soul, if it had ever been in any danger, but the <em>Creation <\/em>does give the perfect Paradise-existence of the imaginative mind: the super-pastoral note.\u00a0 I daresay the Seasons is the same thing: I haven\u2019t heard or read it, but winter is as pastoral an idea as summer.\u00a0 He\u2019s been so grossly underrated for the same reason that Mozart used to be: a supreme genius of comedy, patted on the back for being amusing, like Dan Chaucer and gentle Shakespeare\u2014the Papa Haydn approach.\u00a0 Chaucer, being ironical, is Mozartian; Haydn\u2019s closer to the 13<sup>th<\/sup> c.\u00a0 (Notebook 5, CW 25, 163\u20135)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Further to Michael&#8217;s post, Frye on Haydn in Notebook 5 If I had such a thing as a favorite composer, it would be Haydn.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s Haydn anyway.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to write something on him someday.\u00a0 More and more I find myself turning to Bach &amp; Haydn, which means more &amp; more away from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-denham","category-music"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Frye on Haydn - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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