I find the contrast and coherence between Mozart and Haydn really wonderful.
Those days I hear more Haydn than Mozart. Mozart's pieces are amazing, but they're so powerful and distinctive I don't find drawn to them over and over. Haydn's pieces are often just as prodigious, but more modest; he calmly draws you in and paints the main themes. I find hearing Haydn a journey. Mozart is more catchy, viral, virtuosic. To me Mozart is miraculous in his operas of course, but also when he set sights on "modest" forms of the string and piano quartet (learning from Haydn no doubt).
I encourage everyone to discover Haydn as well! He had much more time to develop the techniques and depths of composition, and it shows in his later works. Mozart is good, but mature Haydn pieces... I can hardly believe it's music I'm hearing and not a beautiful story.
There's a standard joke among quartet players that Haydn builds string quartets and Mozart destroys them.
New quartets begin playing Haydn because it all fits together so solidly that it guides the quartet into gelling. Mozart quartets regularly just don't have that scaffolding and the quartet had better have their quasi-telepathic communication down first.
For anyone in the Bay Area: if we ever get out of pandemic, the St. Lawrence String Quartet are artists-in-residence at Stanford who specialize in Haydn. They have regular Sunday afternoon performances, as well as three free noon concerts during the summer. Their energy and enthusiasm for Haydn is thrilling, and they're big supporters of living composers as well.
Mozart interpretation is weirdly constrained-- most performers certainly know that a lot of Beethoven's weirdo techniques came from him-- like the sudden dynamic contrasts, or the many formal innovations of mashing things up. But they refuse to experiment with emphasizing those aspects, at least to the same degree they do in their performances of Beethoven.
Take the last movement of Mozart's String Quartet in E-flat Major, K 428. Mozart begins it without a lyrical melody (one which only appears in the final statement of the rondo theme)-- all four instruments are just playing an accompaniment to nothing. Then a contrasting phrase with an overactive melody in the first violin speeds its way into a half-cadence, after which the initial accompaniment material is developed in more substantial imitative polyphony.
On paper this looks completely reasonable-- starting with a little mystery, gaining some momentum, then developing what it started with. The problem is there is a repeat sign after the speedy melody-- that means the players are forced by the tradition of the form to go back to the banal accompanimental pattern right when the music should be moving toward development[1]. It's a clear a musical joke-- these forms force the listener to hear everything twice, and the composer is using that fact to ruin what would otherwise be a sensible flow. It's equivalent to getting up from one's chair and running vigorously back to one's chair to sit and do nothing.
In every performance I've heard, the performers underplay the weirdness of the first phrase and smooth over those hard edges at the repeat sign, thus hiding the joke. It's a shame because if they made it sound as weird and jarring as it's written, even people who don't listen to classical music would get the joke.
[1] And the performer can't simply leave out the repeats as performers do with sonata repeats-- in a rondo this would disrupt the proportions of the phrases.
I'm currently reading the book - Jan Swafford is masterful. See https://g.co/kgs/2Jv69s for the book itself.
I was waiting for this to come out since his book on Beethoven was, and I mean this, a riveting page-turner, I devoured it: https://g.co/kgs/KfQ34W. If you are a pianist you'll love it. So far, the Mozart is equally good. Can't wait to finish it. Must put down phone and return..
Those days I hear more Haydn than Mozart. Mozart's pieces are amazing, but they're so powerful and distinctive I don't find drawn to them over and over. Haydn's pieces are often just as prodigious, but more modest; he calmly draws you in and paints the main themes. I find hearing Haydn a journey. Mozart is more catchy, viral, virtuosic. To me Mozart is miraculous in his operas of course, but also when he set sights on "modest" forms of the string and piano quartet (learning from Haydn no doubt).
K 458 is a good example to me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYTuXWxNhxo
I encourage everyone to discover Haydn as well! He had much more time to develop the techniques and depths of composition, and it shows in his later works. Mozart is good, but mature Haydn pieces... I can hardly believe it's music I'm hearing and not a beautiful story.