Charles
Rosen, in theThe Classical
Style (ISBN 0-393-31712-9 PBK), stated that by the 1790s Haydn
had developed and refined a style that was both deliberately popular and steeped in the intellectual and practical riches of learned technique.
Only for one brief
historical period in the operas of Mozart, the late symphonies of Haydn, and
some of the Schubert songs, has the utmost sophistication and complexity of
musical technique existed alongside—or better, fused with—the virtues of the
street song. (page 329)
I'm aware that there are cases made that the "canon" of dead white guys is racist, however, I am not quoting Rosen's work as a boilerplate defense of dead white guys in music. I happen to love Haydn's music and think Mozart is over-rated and over-played. My primary point in quoting Rosen is to point out something he said about Haydn's work, even if (and perhaps especially if) we're confining discussion of music written by the "canon" of dead white guys, that there was a brief historical period in the operas of Mozart and the late symphonies of Haydn as well as in Schubert songs where there was no opposition between the popular and the learned.
Contemporary academic discussions of populism since 2016 have a strong current of defining "populist" and "populism" in authoritarian terms. I've discussed Jacques Ellul's "populist agitator" propagandist in the past yet in the arts one of my concerns in the last four years has been that populist ideas have been defined in such strictly pejorative terms the very idea that there can be any positive populist impulse has been moved off the proverbial table. Thus ... I'm half skeptical of Ian Pace's skepticism about authoritarian populism not because there's nothing to the concern as stated but because I'm wondering if there's any other kind of populism these days in the minds of academics than authoritarian populism. I'll proceed to quotes from Pace on that topic.
https://ianpace.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/my-contribution-to-the-debate-on-authoritarian-populism-and-impure-futures-the-legacy-of-stuart-hall/
