Haven’t been able to achieve much this last couple of days – no time for Yun, and I feel terribly frustrated about it -, but I had been wanting to re-post my review of Henry Brant’s Kingdom Come and Machinations, and I have.
Listened to three symphonies of Michael Haydn by Harold Farberman on Vox. They’re great! I’m not all that familiar with those of Joseph, but I hear nothing in those of his kid brother that I can recognize as inferior to his, or to Mozart’s. In fact, I hear many traits of great originality. Posterity is a bitch (and that’s going to be the title of my review). Why did Franz make it to fame, during his lifetime and after, and not Michael? I don’t know, it’s a true question that would deserve an in-depth sociological study: the mechanisms of fame. And it’s not that one would have been working in a remote cultural backwater and the other one in a dominant cultural centre, because it’s the opposite: Joseph was famously at the service of the Esterházys in the middle of nowhere, and Michael was in a prominent position in Salzburg which was a prominent musical city then.