'The Classical Style' reading group, week eight

 

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.