[nilesfunnies] Fw: Haydn

Frans Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809) was a renowned and prolific
composer, famous for his many symphonies. He was born in Austria. He
is credited with establishing the string quartet and perfecting the
classical symphony.

His worldly experience and his esoteric and eclectic tastes are
not common knowledge today; in fact, he was an experimenter with music
much in the way Edgard Varese, Steve Reich, Paul Simon and Gabriel
Byrne are regarded in the modern era: "pushing the envelope" and
blending some "world music" into the mainstream.

Haydn's success at merging the musical moods and motifs of the
different continents prompted Mozart to say of him, "There is no one
who can do it all - to joke and to terrify, to evoke laughter and
profound sentiment - and all equally well, except Joseph Haydn."

Haydn's interests took him to other parts of the world,
considered quite risky during that period. He traveled to the New World
and to the Asian Sub-Continent, always taking time to listen to the music
characteristic of those regions.

His students learned a great deal from him, but as is often the
case in such learning experiences, some of his pupils went off in their
own new directions rather than following on in their teacher's
footsteps.

Two such pupils were the young fellow Austrian, Frederic der
Wiesel, and the Frenchman Papgeau. These two troublemakers were to cause
Franz such consternation that he was to shred his ground-breaking new
symphony to bits moments after its first performance and forever
abandon the thought of composing anything other than "conventional"
classical music again.

Musicologists continue to search for remains of the manuscript,
but only a few scribblings in his journal regarding the melodies he
notated during an expedition to India are all that remain of the
composition.

The Haydn Sikh Symphony was only performed once, at the same
venue as the premiere of the new composition of his pupils (and the
source of Haydn's outrage), the comic Papgeau- der Wiesel Suite.