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Siete qui: Home Festival Festival 2009 Una medaglia con due facce, ugualmente preziose
Una medaglia con due facce, ugualmente preziose PDF Print E-mail

di Carla Moreni

During the year of Haydn, died in Vienna on May 31, 1809; the comparison with Mozart becomes extremely interesting. It is common to consider the second composer the most popular and valuable; Mozart became immediately famous because of some of his compositions for theatre, because of his Requiem, and because of his biography, marked by legendary happenings. Still, when the two composers are put one beside the other in an orchestral dimension, as happens in tonight’s concert, it is extremely difficult to assign absolute preferences: Mozart e Haydn are very different from each other still in the mean time extremely similar. Mozart considered Haydn as a fundamental teacher and Haydn described Mozart as a genius without rivals. In their differences – of personality, of style, of time and of biography – the two men remain anyhow examples of an extraordinary medal with two sides, each one precious exactly like the other.

The two Symphonies by Haydn, written with about ten years of difference one from the other, (the no. 45 in 1772 and the no. 80 in 1783-84) present a common stürmisch trait, passionate, pre-romantic. But passion in Haydn is always crafty, veiled by irony and plays on surprising effects. It seems as if the musician would have wanted us to be emotionally awakened, while remaining uninvolved. We can feel this in his Symphony in D minor, which begins the first theme of its Allegro spirituoso with the solemn and impressive gait of cellos, but continues the development of the sonata – form in a gallant and almost mundane spirit. Extremely rich is the melodic texture of the Adagio, at the point of conditioning also the following Minuetto: indeed in the Trio, in particular, resounds the Gregorian theme of the Lament of Jeremiah. And it is the same that we shall find in Trio of the Symphony no. 45, one of the most popular for the drama present in its last movement: in the extra Adagio, at the end of the composition, one by one the instruments quit playing, leaving just two violins. Goodbye! This is the symbolic message given by the musicians of the Orchestra of Esterhazy – guided by Haydn – obliged by the prince to live in his beautiful countryside palace, isolated from their family and from the rest of the world. Each musician was supposed to blow off the candle of the lecterns, ending the Symphony almost in complete darkness.

Written during the last months of his life, in 1791, the Concert for clarinet by Mozart was an hommage for his friend Anton Stadler, as written in its original version for basset clarinet. Never there had been such a total cohesion between a wind soloist and the orchestra; made up of timbers, of thematic remands and of a breathing this time truly common, the concert finds its climax in the emotional Adagio, one of the most soave pages by Mozart, that flows with uninterrupted continuity from the first to the last note.