From: inr@zardoz.caltech.edu (I. Neill Reid)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: re: Haydn recommendations
Date: 1 Oct 1992 20:25 PST
Organization: California Institute of Technology
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From: asbed@sol.usc.edu (Asbed Bedrossian)

>There's no doubt that Haydn covered a lot more ground than Mozart, and
>this message is not to debate the issue.

>But all this discussion we ended up with, comparing Haydn and Mozart, I
>haven't seen a sungle person take into account that Mozart lived 35 years,
>and assuming that his first composition was at 8 years old, that gives a
>musically creative life of 27 years, lumped at the start of the life.

>Haydn lived to be 77, with a creative life of some 60 years. We surely can't
>dismiss the amount of growth and change that a person undergoes through so
>many years. Interests change; boredom, repetition, comfort all change one's
>perspective. If Haydn experimented more, it was probably because he had the
>time and the luxury to do so. The surprise (again, my example) could ONLY
>have been written by a man who has written a million symphonies before, and
>absolutely absorbed the routine of the audience. To me, Haydn's excellence
>and genius is not different or above or below that of Mozart's; it just was
>channeled differently through influence of his time-space environment. What
>would a 60 year old Mozart have written?
> 
 I don't really think that age is an important difference when you're comparing
the mature works of either composer. After all, Mozart was not working in
a vacuum - in fact both had plentiful exposure to, and both profited from,
the other's music. In any event, Haydn had written a fair amount by
the time he was 35. My recollections (and someone will no doubt correct
those) are that Haydn was employed at Esterhazy at about age 28-30, and there
are certainly numerous symphonies dating from before 1765. In fact, the 
morning-noon-evening series are a pretty remarkable set - and they were
the first that he wrote for Esterhazy. (Of course, giving solos to
all the main instrumentalists was a pretty shrewd move for a new
composer-in-residence.)
 I think what's much more important than who died when is, first, who had
freedom to experiment and who didn't (as Roger Lustig pointed out, Haydn
had one of the most enlightened aristocratic patrons and was positively
encouraged to experiment; Mozart had to cater to a much more varied,
and sporadic, clientele); and, second, the individual characteristics
of the composers. Haydn appears to have been much more given to 
experimentation even before he was employed at Esterhazy; Mozart seems
more to have seized on new forms and developed them in his particular way
without pushing the overall shape of the form. Haydn also seems to have been
a generally less complicated character - the darker overtones in his music
are less pronounced, less personal - perhaps because he found stability
early on (but there's a chicken-egg argument here). Probably Haydn's most
personal music is to be found in the final series of masses (which are
stunningly underperformed), and the later quartets.
 Of course, it's a fascinating (and futile) game to hypothesise on what
Mozart would have done had he lived to age 70; it's even more fascinating
to speculate on what would have happened if a 50-year old Schubert had 
met Brahms and a 70-year old Schubert met Wagner.

 Neill Reid - inr@eccles.caltech.edu