2023 Posts with the most comments: August

The winner for this month was the Friday Miscellanea for August 18. The comments discussed the recorder, György Kurtág, Taylor Swift, happy/sad music, and how the last movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 is actually pretty bad, partly because Beethoven wrote badly for the voice. Samples:

I'd never heard any Kurtag before and came aware quite impressed by his spare, intense style and clever textures -- I want to explore his other works -- but as an opera it was painfully slow. Only four characters, two of which disappear into their dustbins early on (I mean this literally; they were an elderly couple who each lived in their own dustbin), and much of the libretto was just monologue. Perhaps some of the problem lies with Beckett (the opera is based on his play Endgame), whose bleak imagination doesn't interest me. My fault, probably. Lots of people walked out over the course of the performance, which was a shame. Others were talking very enthusiastically about it afterward. For me it was a fascinating and special performance, even though it was also trying..! Actually, it was one of the few interesting premieres at this year's Proms (so far).

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Although it can be risky to equate major keys with “happy” and minor keys with “sad”, there’s often a crude correspondence. I think Mozart wrote significantly more major key music than minor key music. And yet it’s the minor key music we often feel is the deepest: the Lacrimosa from the Requiem, the 40th Symphony, the slow movement of the A major Piano Concerto. I particularly love the A minor rondo for piano, which seems to anticipate Chopin.

I know this preference for gloom colours my own reaction to music. It’s not rational, but art appreciation never is. I’m one of a small group of curmudgeonly grumps who can’t really enjoy Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. It’s too irritatingly positive, dammit. I think Stanley Kubrick was right to see something sinister in it!

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I think the worst music William Byrd wrote on his worst day is better than anything and everything choral Beethoven wrote. His choral music is just kinda dreadful. By contrast I genuinely like Haydn's oratorios and masses but as my old choir director in college put it, Haydn actually sang in church choirs and for those who can't stand choral music from the Classical period Haydn and Mozart are the best, or the best of the worst for people more steeped in English, French and Russian choral music and for Lutherans who prefer Schutz and Bach to Beethoven.

Great bunch of commentators we have here...