Joseph Haydn around 1770 (source).
Part III
HAYDN FROM 1770 TO THE DEATH OF MOZART
1 String Quartet
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
Mozart died December 5, 1791, age 35.
On pg. 118, Rosen says of Haydn’s Op. 33 string quartets, “Transitional figures and phrases are almost completely eliminated.” I find this interesting because when Ezra Pound edited T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, he mostly eliminated transitional material, seeing it as unnecessary. Before Pound and Eliot, the notion of the three unities of time, place, and action played a big role in Western literature even though writers like Shakespeare rarely followed the unities. Shakespeare’s The Tempest provides a rare exception: the play takes place in one location on one afternoon. Robert Anton Wilson noticed that films prepared audiences for radical jumps in space and time. D. W. Griffith influenced both Pound and Joyce. Later films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fifth Element would jump thousands of years from one scene to the next. James Bond films would jump all over the world from scene to scene.
Literature before Pound and Eliot tended to have transitional material. Pound used radical jump cuts across space and time in The Cantos, and he encouraged Eliot to abandon transitional material in The Waste Land. Rosen illustrates a similar process in Haydn.
I love Rosen’s writing, but one sentence on page 140 bothers me: “Op. 64 no. 3 in B flat major is one of the great comic masterpieces: the listener who can hear the last movement without laughing aloud knows nothing of Haydn.” I don’t like how he puts the reader on the spot here. The first time I listened to this movement in response to this passage, I did laugh aloud, but I wondered if I found myself nervously laughing because of my fear Rosen would think I knew “nothing of Haydn.” I just listened to it again, and I had a similar experience, laughing insecurely but enjoying the music nonetheless. Cannabis users might experiment with this movement and the quartet as a whole.
4 comments:
Much of this chapter is incomprehensible to me.
At least I can use it to look for listening recommendations, as I am not as well versed in Haydn as I am with Mozart and Beethoven.
Rosen writes, "The mature power and variety of the six quartets op. 64, which followed a year later, were never surpassed by Haydn."
This seemed like a pretty strong recommendation to me, so I bookmarked some albums on Hoopla Digital of recordings of the opus 64 quartets, and I have started listening to them.
The write-up of this post seems brilliant. Pynchon sometimes has tricky jump cuts in his writing.
I think I have a mental block with reading this book; only able to get through 10 pages of this week's chapter so far. I did watch and listen to the video posted and enjoyed it. I tried and failed to see where they placed the mics – maybe just a pair up high out of frame? The notion of a music competition seems odd to me; probably common with this kind of music. Contemporary music has it too, sometimes, with the Battle of the Bands. My favorite of those happens in the film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Primus kills it in that one.
I can't remember if I have mentioned this to Eric, but when I was a college senior, one of my few classical LPs had Stravinsky piano music on one side and Schoernberg on the other. I couldn't get into the Schoernberg stuff but I loved the Stravinsky. The name of the piano player meant nothing to me at the time, but from seeing the album cover, I realize it was Charles Rosen.
Thank you for your comments and for your efforts to read this book. I appreciate your taking this journey with me. I hope you find it worthwhile. Tom, I hope when we reach music you have more familiarity with by Mozart and Beethoven you enjoy revisiting that music after having made it through the earlier portion of the book. It also occured to me that you might enjoy relistening to Prokofiev's Classical Symphony either now or in a few weeks since you have spent the last seven or so weeks contemplating the classical style. Oz, you might enjoy that symphony as well, written in the twentieth century as an homage to Haydn and Mozart.
Oz, the film "The Competition" provides an interesting view of a piano competition. Prokofiev's Piano Concerto #3 features prominently.
Tom, I love that Rosen CD of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
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