Re: WAYLTL 2025!

On 1/14/2025 8:59 PM, cheregi wrote:

I think it's an insult to CPE to list him as a Romantic ahead of his
time. He is so much more interesting than that. He is the polar opposite
of cloying, insipid and sentimental.

Amen to that, although your characterization of (early) Romanticism sounds more dismissive than warranted.
And it's

certainly something I find even less of in the type of Romantic music
seemingly concerned primarily with expressing a series of emotional
states for the listener to bask in, which I find almost unbearable.

As above.
CPE

is obviously working with affective signifiers in his music but they are
treated with a sense of distance and irony rather like the handling of
emotions in a jazz ballad.

Which makes CPE sound like a precursor of Thelonious Monk. And more recently, the link (or spiritual affinity) between CPE's empfindsamer Stil and the jazz solo piano tradition was not lost to Keith Jarrett who gave a brilliant reading of the Württemberg sonatas in 1994.

 I think much of what's difficult for me to express about my appreciation
for his style has to do with his position at a very particular moment in
the transition to capitalist economic systems. I think from the Austrian
perspective it was important that CPE lived and worked in a relatively
more marginal and backwards area.

Well, Berlin and Hamburg in the mid XVIII century were not London or Paris or Vienna but still not exactly peripheric from a cultural and professional vantage point. And CPE seemed perfectly happy with his Kappelmeister role and his strong links to the aristocracy and patronage thereof, definitely different from Mozart a few years down the road.
I mean, whatever had been

truly connoisseur-oriented about south German musical life had already
been destroyed by the incentives towards populism, so Haydn and Mozart
looked north. CPE/empfindamer Stil was eaten and what came out the other
end was Schumann or whatever.

Maybe with Weber as the missing link.