String Quartets Nos. 4-6, String Quintet No. Here’s the Dittersdorf I have in my collection: Imagine Dittersdorf, Haydn, Mozart and Vanhal playing string quartets together – they did, in the mid 1770s! Now of course Dittersdorf is among the vast throng who have been dwarfed in the eyes of posterity in the shadow of the holy trinity Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven. But like so many, his music is often enjoyable, if you are into the pleasures of the Classical style, from galant to pre-Romanic “Sturm und Drang”. As with so many (now considered) “minor” composers from the era, I started listening to Dittersdorf to better understand the environment from which grew Haydn and Mozart, with the pleasures afforded by the music a by-product, so to speak, of that musicological investigation, but I end up, as always, just enjoying the genuine pleasures afforded by the music, with the musicology becoming a mere by-product of the listening. Born in Vienna, he was one of those numerous and talented composers who vied for success in the second half of the 18th Century in the capital of the Austrian empire, although, like his good friend Haydn (not born in Vienna but trained there), his engagements at the service of various princes and nobility soon led him away to more remote parts of the empire. Dittersdorf was in fact born Ditters, and it is only late in his life that he acquired the title of nobility “von Dittersdorf”.
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