WHO IS THE GREATEST COMPOSER?

I‘ve been asked this, most recently by a Canadian border guard

I have two answers.

Answer 1: A silly question. Does Mozart in the backstretch overtake Bach, winning by a nose? With gold and silver taken does Beethoven get only the bronze.

Add the superlative to the word great and art ends, sporting events begin. For shame.

Answer 2: Haydn

I can’t help it.

Let me explain…

By using someone else

Here is Beethoven the big idea man: with odes to joy, mankind’s injustices, the wonders and terrors of nature, personal loss, unrequited love. 

Beethoven did not play well with others. “Fidelio” is hell to sing.. Your problem, Mr. Tenor The  “Hammerklavier” Sonata is ridiculously difficult to play) and the “Grosse Fuge" equally hard to listen to. Beethoven legitimized the smell of sweat.He is is reaching, always reaching. He is us multiplied many times

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But could it be that what Beethoven searched for Haydn had already found? 

Beethoven rent his garments with biblical fervor.Haydn wore his best clothes while composing. Beethoven bravely, brilliantly forced music into new directions. Haydn calmly quietly invented the string quartet perhaps instrumental music’s purest form of expression.

Beethoven’s A minor Quartet asks the great questions. Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet answers them, sovereign and serene.

Haydn’ s music is civil to everyone  and yet _ sly, half-amused, always humane _it contradicts civility at every turn. To the casual ear every note sounds plausible. Yet without fanfare, perfectly reasonable musical lines stretch or contract  Sudden silences sit us up straight. Haydn jumps into foolhardy harmonic progressions, smiles at our alarm and then restores order with god-like assurance. The arithmetic may not add up but Haydn has an arithmetic  of his own.

Beethoven is too great a man to accuse of self-pity, but his acolytes then and now have embraced cosmic howls of pain as a lingua franca. Haydn, as one wise soul said, had the courage to be happy. 

Yet no music exists that meditates on human distress more touchingly, and with such dignity than Haydn’s  “Seven Last  Words of Christ.”  (I like the string quartet version.)

Haydn fares less well next to the big bangs of space travel aesthetics. He inhabited a quieter world . He survived a harrowing early life, suffered a bad marriage  then spent decades in near isolation serving as court composer in a grand castle surrounded by Austrian swamp land.

Listeners in pursuit of life’s great tragedies tend to smile benignly at Haydn and pass on. But are we to punish him for his happiness?

BERNARD HOLLAND