Fortunately, around my 50th birthday, I began to LISTEN for myself. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, ar undeniably great, but in the realm of piano I prefer Haydn’s piano sonatas to the keyboard works of any of them, or of the great Romantics and Moderns that followed.

I won’t say Haydn was the “Greatest”. But he is far and away my FAVOURITE (and I have heard many times everything that Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, CHopin, Liszt and many others have written for the piano and its predecessors.

Most of Mozart’s music, on the other hand, is a cliche-filled snoozefest (for me, at least). That said, he did write a couple of my all-time favorite pieces — the 40th Symphony and the (lesser known) Adagio & Fuge in C min. (K. 546). When Amadeus was inspired, he was incredible.

The Heiligmesse is a brilliant piece from beginning to end, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it. But think of what Mozart might have done with a mass-setting in his maturity.

It’s hardly an original thought, but if there’s one thing that puts Mozart in a class by himself, and especially compared to Haydn, it’s the emotional ambiguity of his music. This has been noted by many people, and I maintain Haydn was simply incapable of that kind of thing. The very thing that places Mozart’s music out of reach of anyone else, before or since. If Brahms were a little more approachable in general, I’d say Brahms had this aspect of the art nailed perfectly, but Mozart manages this deep emotional ambiguity even in pieces that are full of a Haydn-like wittiness. And manages it with ease, unlike Brahms, who seems to labor terribly to achieve something like the same effect–Brahms’ basic melancholy as an artist gets in his way.

Mozart 19th piano concerto comes to mind as a good example of this (or all of Cosi fan Tutte, for instance). The Concerto comes across as one long witticism, but if you spend a little time with it, you realize that the play of light and shadow in the piece is very subtle and sophisticated, and the more I listen to it–now over many years, a lifetime, really–the more I’m convinced Mozart did this kind of thing very deliberately, that it is not some kind of unconscious expression, but the product of careful calculation–and Mozart’s natural bent as a person, probably.

You get this emotional ambiguity very early on in Mozart’s work too.

Haydn was just not that kind of artist, and I would argue that the delicate play of light and dark in Mozart is the one thing every musician after him despaired of achieving. Many tried. Beethoven. Brahms. Tchaikovsky. Mahler. None able to quite achieve this quality the way Mozart did.

Oddly, I’d almost give Shostakovich credit for nearly pulling off this kind of thing, although I suspect his essentially sardonic character gets in his way.

I’ll put K. 464 up again as the ideal of this kind of mixed affect. The g-minor string quintet an even more distilled essence of the same thing, and then, of course, there are the Vienna operas, soaked in emotional ambiguity.

Haydn just did not have this stuff in him. Neither did anyone else.

Thank you for your comment. Welcome!

I’ll stick to my statement- that Haydn was more inventive, more skilled, more creative a composer, and that Mozart’s gifts, which were unparalleled before or since, were in sensitivity, inspiration, depth of expression and melody. If I had to pick one composer’s output to live with, I’d pick Haydn’s which is more varied, more imaginative, more intellectually stimulating. On the other hand, if I had to pick one piece, it would probably be Mozart’s G minor Symphony, or the Requiem or the Jupiter. Mozart didn’t have Haydn’t facility or his structural genius, but boy could he shake the soul.

And remember, Mozart found the composition of the “Haydn” quartets to be the most daunting challenge of his career. I’ve played them all and I love them all. Could Haydn match them? Mozart thought so- that’s why he struggled so hard with them.

KW

The fact that you think the Andante of the Sinfonia Concertante K. 365 stands “far” above the rest of the piece, simply suggests you don’t really get what Mozart’s all about.

Three examples of how Mozart composed rings around Haydn:

1) His piano concertos. Haydn was simply incapable of writing this kind of thing, and he knew it. There is plausible speculation that Haydn quit writing piano concertos (except perhaps for a couple on commission) because he heard Mozart’s later Viennese concertos and realized he was left in the dust along with everyone else.

2) Mozart’s operas. Haydn largely quit writing operas about the time Mozart’s great Viennese operas became better-known. There is better than plausible evidence to suggest Haydn quit writing operas because he knew he simply didn’t have it in him to write a Figaro or a Don Giovanni

3) Mozart’s string quartets. The Quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn are simply full of things Haydn not only never thought of, but would never *have* thought of. Seriously, can you imagine Haydn writing anything that sounds like K. 464? And it’s no coincidence that this was one of Beethoven’s favorite pieces of any kind. You could even make a pretty convincing case that Beethoven spent the rest of his life trying to write something he thought was as good at K. 464, culminating in Op. 132, with which Beethoven came as close as he could to eclipsing his model.

Which brings me to the point: Haydn and Mozart were fundamentally different people, different artists, and to make some faux-objective claim that Haydn was somehow more talented than Mozart is just misguided.

I love Haydn, and I’m not about to claim Mozart was “better” than Haydn. He was just different. I happen to like the difference enough that I probably value Mozart’s art more than Haydn’s, but at least I’m willing to admit that’s a totally subjective statement.

This is like the endless argument over whether Bach dusts Telemann. It’s just stupid. Telemann was a completely different kind of person from Bach. Neither man was ever going to write what the other one did, but it’s worth noting both admired the other, and collected and performed their music with pleasure. And whether you value the one over the other–just as with Mozart and Haydn–says a lot more about you than about the art itself.