Haydn redirects here. For other uses, see Haydn (disambiguation). Portrait of Joseph Haydn by Thomas Hardy (1792) (Franz) Joseph Haydn[n 1] (/ˈdʒoʊzəf ˈhaɪdən/; German: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈhaɪdən] ( listen); 31 March[n 2] 1732 – 31 May 1809), known as Joseph Haydn,[n 1] was a prominent and prolific of the Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the piano trio[1] and his contributions to musical form have earned him the epithets Father of the Symphony and Father of the String Quartet.[2] A lifelong resident of Austria,[3] Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Esterházy family at their remote estate. Until the later part of his life, this isolated him from other composers and trends in music so that he was, as he put it, forced to become original.[n 3] At the time of his death, aged 77, he was one of the most celebrated composers in Europe. Joseph Haydn was the brother of Michael Haydn – himself a highly regarded composer – and Johann Evangelist Haydn, atenor. He was also a friend of Mozart and a teacher of Beethoven. Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Austria, a village that at that time stood on the border with Hungary. His father wasMathias Haydn, a wheelwright who also served as Marktrichter, an office akin to village mayor. Haydns mother Maria, née Koller, had previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the presiding aristocrat of Rohrau. Neither parent could read music;[n 4] however, Mathias was an enthusiastic folk musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had taught himself to play the harp. According to Haydns later reminiscences, his childhood family was extremely musical, and frequently sang together and with their neighbors.[4] Haydns parents had noticed that their son was musically gifted and knew that in Rohrau he would have no chance to obtain serious musical training. It was for this reason that they accepted a proposal from their relative Johann Matthias Frankh, the schoolmaster and choirmaster in Hainburg, that Haydn be apprenticed to Frankh in his home to train as a musician. Haydn therefore went off with Frankh to Hainburg 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) away and never again lived with his parents. He was about six years old. Michelangelo was the first artist in history for whom self-expression was the absolute priority of everything he did. To think like that in the 1500s was a departure from precedent as extreme as, say, Marcel Duchamps invention of the readymade in the early 20th century. Without Michelangelo, we wouldnt see artists as geniuses. We would just see them as useful decorators. So long as art is taken seriously at all as imaginative and intellectual expression - or, for that matter, so long as artists are glamorous culture heroes - Michelangelo will remain the true source of ideas we think of as ultra-contemporary. He paved the way for art as we know it through physical suffering. As a boy he was determined to be an artist, enduring the blows when his father tried to beat it out of him. His most heroic labour began exactly 500 years ago this autumn. The one story everyone knows about Michelangelo - that he painted the Sistine Ceiling in an epic, solitary back-breaking struggle - is absolutely true. The only serious inaccuracy in the way we tend to picture it is that Michelangelo did not, in fact, lie on his back to paint; his platform was suspended between the chapel windows and he stood stretching upward, with painful results he described in a poem. He says his chest has become like that of a harpy, hes got a goitre from bending his neck, and the paint dripping constantly on his upturned face makes it look like a rich pavement. There is a richly inlaid medieval pavement in the Sistine Chapel - its easy to imagine him writing this poem way up there on his scaffolding, looking down, seeing the pavement and coining that image. Telling stories about himself is part of what Michelangelo does. The Sistine Ceiling contains within it the epic story of its making: there are four successive images of the act of creation as God divides the air and waters, clothes the earth with vegetation and makes the sun, sparks life into Adam and raises Eve from Adams rib. These scenes that mirror Michelangelos own colossal act of creation are the last narrative panels he painted: restorers in the 1980s found no evidence on these later scenes of the involvment of any other person. In other words, the old story of truly individual creativity told by his 16th-century biographers is true. You are singularly intimate with him when you stand in the Sistine Chapel for a very simple reason - you too must stand and bend your head back to see the paintings, adopting a milder form of the torturous pose in which he painted them. It is a raw, real physical place, this chapel - its not like Old Master art at all but something immediate, spontaneous and living. This is true of all Michelangelos paintings and sculptures, throughout his long life. His works dont close themselves off in a safe realm of art. Each of his sculptures is carved with such flow and feeling that as you walk around them, trying to assimilate something ultimately unassimilable, its as if he is still there, tapping away with a chisel - because they dont feel finished, dead, terminal. Kinds of wounds Leonardo D a Vinci The personal life of Leonardo da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) has been a subject that has excited interest, enquiry and speculation since within a few years of his death. Leonardo has long been regarded as the archetypal Renaissance Man, described by the Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari as having qualities that transcended nature and being marvellously endowed with beauty, grace and talent in abundance.[1] Interest in and curiosity about Leonardo has continued unabated for five hundred years.[2] Modern descriptions and analysis of Leonardos character, personal desires and intimate behavior have been based upon various sources: records concerning him, his biographies, his own written journals, his paintings, his drawings, his associates and commentaries that were made concerning him by contemporaries.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 07:28:48 +0000
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