Today I leave for a much-needed vacation. I intend to continue this blog while away because it is a big source of joy in my life. But there’s also a chance that I’ll have no internet access … and if that’s the case, there will be one of these:

There’s a great classical music story about the need for vacation. Back in the 18th century, Art Musicians were essentially servants to the aristocracy. You found yourself a royal patron, and you did whatever he said. When the king says, “write me music for a fireworks party I’m throwing,” you wrote music for the royal fireworks. When the king asks you to improvise a fugue on his own five-note theme, you write the most complicated, amazing music ever composed (accompanied by copious amounts of royal-ass-kissing.)

And when the prince demands you stay at his summer-house much longer than expected, even though you’re exhausted and dying to travel back home and see your family whom you haven’t seen in weeks … well, you have to stay and continue to play for the prince. Franz Joseph Haydn‘s “Farewell” Symphony was written under these circumstances – and only someone as awesome as Haydn could get away with this level of cheekiness. His musicians appealed to him for help – “maestro, please, we need a vacation!” Haydn wrote a symphony in which the musicians leave the stage, one by one, until at last, only two players remain. The message was clear, and the very next day, the prince let the musicians go home.

If you haven’t seen the movie Amadeus, stop putting it off and go see it!

The movie stretched the facts a bit in order to craft a good drama; you can read about that by googling it. However, there were two things in the movie that were spot-on: first, Mozart was a dirty man who was obsessed with poop; second, his insane genius for composition. Even his farts sound as good, if not better, than the average classical symphony.

One of his most famous operas, Don Giovanni, opens with an equally famous overture. The music is out-of-this-world (standard for Mozart), but even more impressive is the fact that he wrote it 24 hours before the opera’s first performance. Legend says that he woke up drunk on the day of the premiere, rolled out of bed and wrote the piece. It’s more likely that he wrote it the day before. Still, that’s not exactly timely, especially in light of the fact that, in 1787, after writing a piece, the score was sent to a copyist who would have to hand-write the individual parts for the musicians to play – and even then there’s the not-so-small matter of the musicians rehearsing …

So the next time someone tells you not to procrastinate, remind them that one of the greatest pieces of music ever was a drunken last-minute quickie written by a potty-mouth.

The classicists (composers from 1750-1810) were all about form. Symphonies, sonatas, concertos, operas – there were specific forms associated with all of them, which audiences expected to hear. A typical symphony would start with a sonata-form movement, then a slow rondo or theme & variations, then a 3/4 dance in trio form, then a quick rondo.

But these 18th-century wig-wearing aristocrats weren’t so stuffy that they couldn’t occasionally break away from convention. When they did, the pieces were called Divertimenti – “amusements”. These were like a hybrid between a baroque dance suite and a classical symphony: a flexible, multi-movement suite of short pieces (like the baroque suite, often more than four movements – more than a symphony), using traditional classical forms (sonata, rondo, trio – not the binary forms of the baroque).

Confused? Put more simply, this is late 18th century party music – short, flexible pieces that could be cut short if dinner was about to be served, or repeated if the cooks failed to cook the main course on time. Often they were written for smaller ensembles which could fit into smaller spaces, and often used wind instruments, which were a little louder and could be heard indoors and outdoors. Today’s piece is just this – a divertimento for wind sextet (two oboes, two horns, two bassoons). Go ahead and play it while your food is cooking; Mozart wouldn’t mind.