Haydn

Maclean’s is apparently making a major push on behalf of Joseph Haydn, the 200th anniversary of whose death is being marked this year. Jaime Weinman complains about how underrated he is; Paul Wells adds his two cents in a blog entry.

Haydn is another gap in my musical knowledge (I’ve been spending too much time obsessing over Beethoven and, to a lesser extent, Chopin) that I’m going to have to address at some point. Lord knows when — my father just gave me a CD collection of Brahms’s piano works, and I’ve been studying up on him. But I’m sure I’ll get to Haydn eventually, since my tastes run more to the Classical/early Romantic period than earlier or later. Oddly enough, the three symphonies of his I have so far have left me kind of meh, so maybe I need to broaden my sample, give him another chance.