Penny Anderson

Ah memories, good and bad.

I think Haydn might have made a good comic novelist if he hadn't dedicated himself to music. Here he amusingly portrays his dismay at returning to his workaday life after a pleasant stay in Vienna. (It reminds me of me after a week at Augusta.)

Another gem in a different vein from the letters of the great composers: Haydn on the subject of Mozart. It's striking that to Haydn's generous mind (so evident in his music) there is not just the genius Mozart, but "so many promising geniuses" to recommend to good fortune.

 

Via Futility Closet, a choice bit of old-fogeyism from 1651; the image is from openlibrary.org:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wonder if he was referring to that degenerate Buxtehude?

 

 

 

It's good to be back in the real world after six weeks of the most intense teaching ever!

I think I'll celebrate by at last putting together something about George Sand's charmingly sentimental novel of French peasant life, La Mare au diable (The Devil's Pool). The story culminates with the description of a wedding ritual where the bride's party barricade themselves in a house and the groom's friends pretend to attack it. As part of the mock conflict there is a song contest (the idea of musical warfare…

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