Gábor Takács-Nagy

“I go every Sunday at 12 to Baron von Swieten’s,” Mozart wrote to his father in April 1782. In Vienna, Gottfried van Swieten maintained an extensive music library with works by Handel and Bach. Mozart would borrow prints and manuscripts, study compositional techniques, and in 1783 applied them with virtuosity in a fugue. Five years later, he combined these “finger exercises” with a new Adagio introduction. From 1777 to 1790, Haydn’s works reigned supreme at the Parisian Concerts Spirituels with 256 performances. In 1785, he delivered six “Paris” symphonies to the orchestra of the Concert de la Loge Olympique. Symphony No. 92 also made its way to the French capital in 1789 before being performed in 1791 at Oxford, when Haydn was awarded an honorary doctorate. “It is all playfulness, teasing, and coquetry,” wrote the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung about the second movement of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, composed in 1812 and, according to pianist Carl Czerny, “far better” than the more famous Seventh. Was the composer indulging in “innocent joys,” or perhaps in love? While polishing the symphony, he sent love letters to an anonymous recipient: “Already in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my eternal beloved, at first joyful, then again sad, waiting for fate to listen to us. I can live only with you, or not at all.”