Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

HAYDN - ESTERHAZY DOING?

H

aydn isn't having too bad a time of it, either. In fact, to be fair, he had it cush! None of the starving artist, garret flat and pauper's grave for him, thank you very much. Oh no. He ran his composing less as an artist's life and more as… wefl, an insurance firm, or something. He got himself a nice litde deal as composer-in-residence for Prince Esterhazy at his residence in Eisenstadt not far from the Austrian capital, and then, well… simply kept it. All his life. True, he did work hard and he had to churn out music at a rate of knots. But as far as living on the edge was concerned, well… lion-taming wasn't for him.

He did, though, once write a symphony where he instructed all the orchestra members to walk off the stage at the end, one by one, after their bit had ended. So you had the effect of, one by one, a gradually emptying stage, with the music being played by just the last person remaining - he wrote diem a special 'staggered' ending to do it. Eventually, the last person left the stage and stopped playing, too. It was meant to be a bit of a gende dig at his boss, who hadn't let the composer or the musicians have a holiday in ages. He labelled it his Farewell Symphony - farewell in the sense of the orchestra buggering off, not in the sense that it was the final time he was going to play Wembley. Mmm. Interesting stuff, eh? I don't know, these musicians. Have you in stitches, wouldn't they? It's his 45th symphony. 45! Can you believe that? And before he's finished he will have more than doubled that count. Of course, he is, by then, forty-one years of age. W(»lfgang Amadeus Theophilus P. Wildebeest Mozart©-", his partner in crime in the Classical-R-Us® chain, was only coming up to seventeen at this point.

Still, youth never held Mozart back, and in 1773 he came up with the simply exquisite three-movement slice of heaven, Exsultate, jubilate. It's for soprano and orchestra - well, that's not strictly true: it was originally for castrato and orchestra. Mozart had, not long ago, made the acquaintance of one Venanzio Rauzzini, a noted chanteur sans balswho had taken a starring role in one of his early operas, Lucio Silla. Mozart was clearly impressed and set to work on a new piece using Latin text. It includes one of the most gorgeous bits of composer showing off since Hildegard of Bingen learnt to play mouth organ while riding a bike. It's the last movement. Mozart decides that he can set the entire last movement to just the one single word -Alleluia. Clever clogs, he is. In fact, this gives us a perfect chance to take stock and survey how far we've come musically.

Because if you think about this one-word setting in the last movement, and you think of someone like, say, Johann Sebastian Bach when he wanted to do some showing off, then you realize just how poles apart they are. If Bach had done some showing off on this scale - and he frequently did: setting his name as the theme of a piece of music; working out double and quadruple fugues which then went back on themselves^ fi - well, it would have come out as a largely academic exercise. Superbly executed, correct down to the 78th decimal point and yet somehow… not particularly… emotional, as it were. I know I'm on dodgy ground here, for some, because Bachophiles''^ love their favourite composer with a passion - no pun intended. And I, too, love the man to bits. But with Mozart, working only some twenty-odd years fi amp;This is only partly a joke. Mozart's full name - the one that would have appeared on his birth certificate - was Johannes Chrysostomus "Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart (the 'Amadeus' was a later substitution, a Latin finessing of the Greek word Theophilus). So I wasn't simply making a gratuitous benny Henry reference. fi fi Which, I believe is called a 'crab' formation. fi fi fi Bachophiles are not to be confused with the wrappings for cooking turkeys, which go by a similar name. after the death of the great man, you get a joyous, uplifting movement that sounds like… well, that sounds like freedom, in a way. It sounds as if Mozart is just improvising on paper - 'Ooh, I could go here, now. I know what, I'll go there after that', a bit like you imagine the mind of a jazz player to work - whereas, only twenty or so years earlier, you could almost smell the working out. Am I making sense? I hope I am. And if I am, then it just proves there's a first time for everything.

So, it's official, then. Into the warm, cheek-shaped indentations left on the twin thrones of music by Bach and Handel move the young and younger new frames of Haydn and Mozart. Baroque is now long dead and classical music is the new classical music.