Jocelyn Wang <[log in to unmask]> repeats again:

>They can like the repeat or not like it, but none of these or any musicians
>have any business in tinkering with Haydn's compositional process, which is
>what that crime-against-art practice of disregarding repeat instructions
>amounts to.

Too often the repeatsphalanx on the list or elleswhere, just forward the
opinion that the repeats should be taken, but argue for it with nothing,
or with a straw man as best.  I wanted to know what the real and original
reason for taking the repeats really are.

Repeats can be found in 18th century menuetts, and in other places even
earlier, before they appeared in Haydns symphonies, or in compositions
of equal ambition.  Those repeats must not be hold for the same thing as
repeats in symphonies.  These menuetts were the popular music of their
time, and are repeteous in the same way as modern rock or pop music is
repeteous.  Trios and Scherzos and Menuetts used in symphonies are at best
a supercondition of form - symmetry.  The cheaper sort of menuetts were
actually, and not to forget, music people danced to, what you shouldn't
do to the menuett of Haydns _pick your favourite_ symphony.

In a time that started before Classicism, and streched long into
Romanticism - sometimes called "GoetheZeit" after it great formulator J.W.
von Goethe, a reaction against the mechanic "Weltanschauung" of the 18th
century occurred.  A movement, to say it short now, among much else talked
about the importance of the individual, and stressed the human emotions to
the point that not logics, but emotions should steer your acting.  Another
stream in this maelstrom was the idea of unity of affined peoples, the
nationalistic movements, that occured in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.
A problem for its times philosophers, a debate that many artists and
composers (especially Franz Schubert) also engaged in, was how these ideas
could melted together into a unity.  Nobody found a good answer to this,
but the artist (read:  composers) of this time attempted to paint the
problem in tones, illustrate the problem, and to find an artistic solvation
on the problem - meanwhile being very aware that an artistic solvation
would just be an image and wouldn't contribute to solve the problem in
reality.  The sonata form that took its classic shape under Haydns pen,
illustrates this problem.  A powerful, bouncing, masculine first theme,
contrasts against a weaker, more lyric, feminine, side theme, and these
two marking the conflicting ideas, making a unity in the full form.  The
repeats? They are probably repeated to tell about the impossibility with
which these ideas let combine with each other.  The qustion pocking and
pocking, toruring the human being with its demand for an answer that wasn't
there to find.  So, omitting the repeats is to disrespect the people of
this time, erasing what they actually wrote on the postcard they sent us
from their time.  I hope people of future generations will treat us with
more respect.

Mats Norrman
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