PhilPaine.com

Haydn is the foun­tain­head from which both Mozart and Beethoven sprung forth. Writ­ten in 1799 and 1800, Bethoven’s Sym­phony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 could be described as “sar­cas­tic Haydn”. It sounds some­thing like a mature Haydn sym­phony, but it has a weird open­ing meant to con­fuse you about the key. It has a min­uetto move­ment that sounds like it’s being danced by metham­phet­a­mine addicts. It has a kind of fake “start” in the last move­ment. All quite weird. We tend to think of Beethoven as humour­less, but he did occa­sion­al­ly show a sense of humour — sort of a Scot­tish put-piss-in-your-beer-glass kind of fun. Some of the stan­dard Beethoven fea­tures are already there, like the strong role for wood­winds and the addic­tion to sforza­to, which seem to have dis­tin­guished him from Haydn right from the begin­ning. But the debt is real­ly obvi­ous in this first sym­phony. It’s only in the third sym­phony that Beethoven real­ly broke loose from the fold. I haven’t actu­ally lis­tened to this one close­ly for years (it’s prob­a­bly Beethoven’s least pop­u­lar sym­phony), so it came at me like a fresh piece.