Tony Duggan wrote:

>The best advice is to take a look in the List Archive under "Eroica
>Repeats" from a couple of years ago and you will find enough mails on the
>subject to keep you going from Pancake Tuesday to Sheffield Wednesday!
>Many who lived through that discussion (and I was one of them) came to
>refer to it off-list as "The Thread From Hell".  On reflection, as much
>light as well as heat WAS thrown on the subject though, at the time, it
>seemed that the opposite was the case.  I, and I would not be surprised
>if there are others who agree with me, said all that I ever wanted to say
>on the subject then.  It's a fascinating topic but it is surprising just
>how passionate people can get about it.

Yet again, it's one of those which was a subject of so much passion in the
Letters column of Gramophone!  At least there nobody complained when the
Editor parenthetically declared the correspondence closed (usually after
a letter from some major figure)--until it started up again a few years
later.

Two personal remarks--taking ALL the repeats [including the Minuet/Scherzo
repeats in the Da Capo] in the late Mozart-Haydn symphonies and the
first two Beethoven gives the work as a whole an entirely different
psychological/dramatic balance than otherwise.  This is particularly true
with the Minuet/Scherzo Da Capo- it makes that movement a much better
counterweight to the slow movement.  In Beethoven, where the middle period
quartets are so striking in their arrangement of double scherzo/trio
structure [likewise Symphony 5 (originally), 6 and 7] we can now see that
this is a sort of variation on the earlier pattern.

I conducted Haydn 101 on 15 January with every possible repeat.  The
wife of one of my colleagues was in the audience in the row behind the
proverbial "woman of a certain age", who, after the Minuetto ended remarked
to her neighbor, "He [JL] didn't seem at all to notice that they kept
playing the same thing over and over again!"

Further comment not required.

Joel Lazar
Bethesda Maryland