Who was Joseph Haydn?
Even though the Austrian composer gave Germans their national anthem, to this day he remains a stranger to the German-speaking world. That could be set to change 2009 is the Year of Haydn and one focus is on the composers sense of humor. The baritone Thomas Quasthoff is sitting on his sofa at home in the Berlin district of Dahlem, cursing. He is cursing politics, the colorlessness of politicians and a world that believes rational solutions can be found for every problem. We live in a world in which people have forgotten that politics is for people for emotional, visionary, yearning, sad, disappointed and crazy characters, he said. I do not understand why we, in Germany in particular, are so content to accept what we call logic. Why we do not see that our world, our co-existence, in fact operates according to quite different mechanisms. I wish politicians could be forced to listen to more Haydn, he added. Then they would learn a lot about the human creature, about what people long for,
