'All the world understands my language'

Defining music has long been a vexed question. The composer Edward Elgar put it very simply: 'There is music in the air', while Frederick Delius thought that 'It is only that which cannot be expressed otherwise that is worth expressing in music'. The American jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker said 'Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn'.

The emperor Joseph II is reputed to have said of The Abduction from the Seraglio: 'Too beautiful for our ears, and much too many notes, dear Mozart' but the pianist Artur Schnabel put it differently, 'The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides!

The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham said 'Good music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and quits the memory with difficulty', but the search for this has taken composers in many different directions. Ralph Vaughan Williams said of his fourth symphony 'I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant'. Gustav Mahler saw Niagara Falls with pleasure: 'Fortissimo at last!' Arnold Schoenberg regarded his Violin Concerto as a challenge: 'I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire. I want the Concerto to be difficult and I want the little finger to become longer. I can wait.'

The American composer Leonard Bernstein said that 'Music...can name the unnameable, and communicate the unknowable'. But perhaps Franz Joseph Haydn summed it up most effectively. When Mozart advised him not to visit England because he knew too little of the world and too few languages, he replied, 'But all the world understands my language'.

To find out more about Haydn, one of the founding fathers of classical music, go to the new Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn, edited by David Wyn Jones, publishing in June. Click here for more details.

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