Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Joseph Haydn / Symphony No. 101 in D major "The Clock" (Mackerras)
Haydn the man of the rule
From opening tenebrae to joyful carnaval celebration in some palace.It turns cynical as if it did not want to end, it wanted to be eternal. Let's come to an end, a real end not a false ending that is a new beginning. The andante is a super famous theme like a pas de deux to celebrate some ansolute calm situation that cannot be disturbed by anything. Eternal peace and quiet, though here and there there is a pang of some kind in that enjoying heart, if it is a heart. It might only be a peaceful spleen and a quiet liver soused in some opiate. A rebellion at the eleven minute as if it were the eleventh hour. The andante is getting crazy but all ends nearly well after all and peace and quiet comes back without any spleen and gall in the mood of this mindless enjoyment. And once again the repetitiveness of that music is sickening. Mannheim is good but not too much and with more than just enough notes. The variations show that under that quietness there is danger, brutality, power and even absolute control. Please all of you get back to the step, tempo, rhythm and keep it without any qualms of conscience or any other romantic useless entity. The Menuet is there to give tio this celebration the grandeur and nobility it requires. Each repetition is teh echo of itself in the previous and the next sentence. The minuet turns on itself luke a top that cannot stop because it cannot start and it better not stop otherwise it would be dead forever. No turning bourree in that minuet. Just jumping from one foot to the next from one hand to the next from one partner to the next. Genteel and gentle. Just aristocratic.But the 18th century was also a century of enlighrtenment and change, of rebellion and even revolution. So even the nicest minuet gets disturbed by some variations in the shape of a tentative escape from the high security prision of this aristocratic dance. Maybe even here and there Haydn may have thought of Mozart and some whirling, turning, spinning little moments come up to be criushed at once by the dominant orchestra that cannot stand any evasion. And it all ends with a vivace that is a real piece of glorious illusion. More than lively it is a perennial neverending kind of a lament crushed down by the orchestra that want order in the ranks and files of this unruly society. You can complain as much as you want but we are the masters of this world and thinhs will go the way we say.For you the lament, for us the piower, profit, control, dominance, governing force and even violence. And stop forgetting we are in a state of the law that is to say under the sole authority of the law. Grumble grumble lament lament we will get the whip and if necessary the guillotine.
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 8:23 AM 
