![]() ![]() I hope that by now you realise by now that this programme, with its theme of humour, is just a construct to play some music by Haydn, a composer sometimes thought of as a poor man’s Mozart. The energetic opening grinds to a sudden halt followed by a spectacularly discordant orchestral flourish as the violins discover that they seemingly need to retune their strings – which they noisily do for 10 10 15 seconds before the resume playing. The finale features one of Haydn’s best-known musical jokes. ![]() 60 is nicknamed ‘ Il Distratto’, The Distracted Gentleman. Someone once told me that she liked the sound of an orchestra tuning their instruments before a concert. Have some fun with the YouTube recording. This one is called The Palindrome because, with typical Haydn humour, the second part of the minuet is exactly the same as the first but backwords. Many of Haydn’s symphonies had nicknames: The Philosopher, The Bear, The Schoolmaster, The London, and so on. We’ll now hear part of a Haydn symphony – No. He chickened out.Īnyway, here is Haydn’s _Capriccio in G Majo_r.Īs I said earlier, don’t expect a bundle of laughs today. It was only when his horrified father discovered that his son was about to go under the surgeon’s knife that Haydn was told what the operation actually involved. So when his choirmaster suggested that if he had a small operation he would be able to keep his unbroken voice for the rest of his life, he liked to sound of the idea. As I said earlier, before his voice broke, Haydn was a great singer. “It takes eight of you to castrate a boar - two in front, two behind, two to cut, two to bind.” Haydn translates this into musical terms in this ‘theme-and-variations’ piece by wandering wildly from one key to the next.īy the way, I have something more to tell you about castration. It takes as its theme an old Austrian folk song, Acht Sauschneider Müssen Sein, which describes castrating a boar, an operation for which eight expert butchers were apparently needed. You are going to hear an early Haydn work, his Capriccio in G Major, written in 1765. I was born at the wrong time, and with the wrong kind of brain, to find anything worth a laugh in Charlie Chaplain films, and the same goes for the music by Haydn that he thought humorous. I find the humour in Haydn’s music a bit obscure. That said, I’m not sure if anyone here will necessarily be amused, although I and sure you will at least smile at least once. Mozart said that Haydn could “amuse and shock, arouse laughter and deep emotion as no-one else”, but we’ll concentrate on the “amuse” bit this morning. I bet nobody here laughs at this.īy the way, when this piece does finally end it seems to do so by no musical logic other than that it has stopped. ![]() Clara Schumann wrote of how she laughed aloud after hearing a performance. And so the finale can be strangely disorientating and confusing with a whole series of false endings, weird pauses and wrong places to clap. The story goes that Haydn wrote the ending to win a bet that “the ladies will always begin talking” before the music stops. 2 – otherwise known as ‘The Joke’, written in 1781. ![]() We’ll start in a obvious place – with the fourth movement of Haydn’s String Quartet No.30 in E-Flat Major, Opus 33 No. And it’s Haydn’s humour that’s the subject of today’s programme. This pigtail-cutting reflected one of Haydn’s great traits – a mischievous sense of humour. He was subsequently dismissed from the choir, most probably because of his voice but possibly also because he cut off the pigtail of a fellow chorister – a prank for which he was caned. Michael sang beautifully but as for Joseph, well, after his voice broke Queen Maria Theresa – more of whom later – complained that he “sang like a crow”. When he was a boy Joseph Haydn and his brother Michael were choirboys at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. When I read recently that Franz Joseph Haydn was a composer you learn to appreciate more with age, I decided he’d be an ideal subject for one of these get-togethers.īut given that he wrote 108 symphonies (some say 104), more than 80 string quartets, over 50 piano sonatas, at least 24 concerti, 20 operas and goodness knows how many chamber and choral works, I decided I would have to come up with a theme. ![]()
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