len: >Robert W. Shaw writes, re Mozart vs. Haydn: > >>Listen to Syms 40 & 41 and what was to come would have been spectacular. >>Frankly, Haydn never wrote music that sublime. Cute, funny, and well >>orchestrated and written, but not that sublime... > >Why is it that Haydn gets "dissed" this way so regularly? The Paris and >London Symphonies? The string quartets? Good question. I don't really know why, but it seems that Haydn presents a rather massive barrier to those "unfamiliar" with his music: three distinct "epochs" in his output with qualitatively different musical character, large numbers of works in a variety of forms in each epoch, and the "diffculty" (for lack of a better word) of his music in that it needs attention and concentration from the listener to parse its deeper content apart from its surface features of "cuteness" and "fun." Combined with competition from Mozart with his overwhelming initial "brightness" and melodic appeal (not the mention the popular myth of his sublime genius), all these make it easy for the uninitiated to pooh pooh Haydn. FWIW, my opinion still is that overall Haydn is a greater composer than Mozart, even though Mozart's "peaks" often exceed those of Haydn. Ulvi [log in to unmask]