THURSDAY, September 30, 2021 – 12:49 AM
How do you start?
First of all, listening has to fun, so if it’s not fun, you won’t want to do it. The questions is: where do you start? What do you listen to first? How should you listen? Is there a good way to start experiencing the music of any composer?
Find find just one thing you like…
It doesn’t matter what it is, and it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it. If you like it, keep it. Listen to it again. You can try other things by the same composer, and maybe you will like many others. Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll hate everything else. It doesn’t matter. Just keep what you like, and listen again.
Keep an open mind…
If you hate everything you’ve heard, don’t close your mind to the next thing. You just might be surprised and like something by a composer you think you don’t like at all.
Haydn was short, homely and pock-marked…
In his day almost everyone got smallpox and remained scarred for the rest of their lives. You don’t know that from paintings because painters left out the ugly truth. And he was probably unusually short from malnutrition. He was not a good-looking man, yet from all I’ve read he was much loved by everyone.
He suffered from hunger…
As a child he was always hungry. He had to leave home early in his life, and where he went next he was not given enough food. Scholars think he remained so small because of malnutrition.
He was seen as a servant, not a great artist for much of his life…
It was not until the Beethoven that young composers began composing only for themselves, inspired more by personal creativity than the whims of a rich aristocratic employer. Haydn for most of his life was just an employee. He was treated well. He certainly got a good degree of respect. But he was always bound by the wishes of the royalty he worked for.
That’s probably why he wrote 104 symphonies…
Composing was a job, and if his employer wanted another symphony, Haydn wrote one. If he had written one symphony every month, it would have taken him almost nine years to write those 104 symphonies, and we now know he probably wrote more that we don’t know about. Common sense says that no human being can write more than 100 symphonies and put all is individuality and creativity into all of them, so we can expect some duds. In Haydn’s case a “dud” was better than the best of what almost everyone else could write, but it was still far inferior to those he wrote when he was truly inspired.
How do we find the really good symphonies?
Frankly, I asked myself the same question. My experience told me that great composers wrote their masterpieces later in life, so I started with his last symphony and worked back. The only thing that drops the quality of a great composer’s work poor health and a mental decline. Otherwise they tend to use all their life experience and years of listening to write even better music.
What’s at the end?
The London Symphonies came last, and that’s when he had the greatest freedom, the most financial security and liberation from being nothing but a pawn of the aristocracy. He had bigger orchestras to work with, better musicians and more instruments. That’s where you see him writing for clarinet, trumpet, timpani and even trombone. There were more string players. Everything was more modern, richer and more varied.
He was pushed by the best…
First young Mozart started doing amazing things, and Haydn went from encouraging mentor to colleague and close friend. Haydn learned from everyone. He never stopped growing, and he outlived Mozart by many years. So he learned from Mozart and incorporated his ideas, as Mozart did his. It is not out of the question that he picked up some ideas from Beethoven late his life So in late Hadyn you hear a greatly expanded musical language and a still evolving style.
So it’s best to start at the end, then move backwards…
There are 12 “London Symphonies”, and not one of them is any less than very good. Then before that are the six “Paris Symphonies”, which are almost as impressive although with fewer instruments. With that you have 18 symphonies, and I truly think that in those 18 you get everything you really need to know.
Each symphony is easy to listen to…
His longest symphony is not longer than 30 minutes, and most are under a half hour. One half hour was usually not long enough for me to quickly copy down the instruments used, the movements and the time stamps for those movements and then to write down just a little bit about the music.
Start with 104…
Find the best recording you can, and try to find a group you can watch, to see the instruments. The videos are inconsistent, so you will never know which symphonies will have great videos. Just pick one, on a day you are relaxed and listen either while watching or while doing something else. Just let the music run and absorb it. Then if you are comfortable with that, start working your way back.
Decide what kind of sound you like…
Some recordings use only modern instruments. Others are very locked into period instruments, which have a very different sound. Finally, some conductors mix the old with the new, and that’s the approach I enjoy the most.