Joseph Sowa wrote:

>BTW, at my Uncle's house I heard a pretty interesting work of Haydn's
>of which I never knew.  It was an oratorio called, IIRC, The Seven Last
>Words of Christ.  In the last movement, Haydn depicts the earthquake after
>Christ's death in musical terms--very accurate musical terms, which I've
>never heard in Mozart.

You may be right.  Actually, I'm more familiar w/ the string quartet
version of the Seven last Words, which also end w/ a musical depiction
of the earthquake following Jesus' death.  It's grand Haydn, of course,
but I prefer the slow movements that precede it.

If Haydn's earthquake trumps Mozart's failure ever to have written
a musical description of one, they're both trumped by Honegger and
Villa-Lobos, each of whom described very convincingly in musical form
the sound of a steam locomotive.

Walter Meyer