Thanks for the pleasant diversion.  This led me to wonder: will we ever have another Haydn, Beethoven, or Mozart?

Hayden: a genius neglected too long. Readers should try the Military Symphony for wit, sparkle, and a touch of elegy.

Paul, we had one in Messiaen.  Start out with his earlier organ music.  And for wit, John Adams comes close. Try his “Fearful Symmetries” for a long journey from cool jazz to a whole new world—and thus the transcendence of our current cultural scene.  Then try his early and maybe best achievement, the ne plus ultra of Minimalism and perhaps the supreme artistic achievement in the religion of Californianity: his “Common Tones in Simple Time”. When the deep base petal point enters the affect is sublime; the climax is mystical transport, the conclusion the best ritardando since Mahler’s 9th, 4 mvt.

Yes, yes, we have been replacing one Lycurgus for another..where is our Solon?

I have enormous respect for Haydn.  But his music somehow lacks, for me, the magical spark of Mozart and the genius ferocity of Beethoven.  Just a little too contained.

Well, Fletcher, you find Haydn wanting. If memory serves right, Toscanini said that all of Mozart sounded the same to him, and his recording of Haydn’s “Surprise” is a joke, trying to turn the andante movement into a late Beethovenian/Brucknerian adagio. Beecham isn’t any better. The divine Furtwängler couldn’t conduct anything before Beethoven. Walter’s Mozart is equally too Romantic. It took Karl Richter to get people to start playing Bach un-Romantically, Karl Böhm Mozart, and Eugen Jochum Haydn.

Yet fair is fair: I never thought Rachmaninoff more than just elevated cocktail music.

To each his own.