Haydn

My patron musical saint of quarantine is Joseph Haydn. I’ve been playing his sonatas every morning. This is music in which everything makes sense. Haydn is famous for his cleverness, his jokes and formal trickery. But his cleverness never has anything to do with proving himself. This is music from before the invention of genius, as we now have the concept. So there is this lightness. Look away from the supposedly “important” elements of the form, toward the brightness and jocularity of the transitions and the closing themes: there is this a lack of self-consciousness. Even Mozart at times seems to know that he is a genius. Haydn has never even heard the word. Here is a guy just having fun with music, and it sparkles.