Summary: <br> <a href="https://d3fr1q02b1tb0i.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/29080435/Roessler_Joseph_Haydn.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>A rather flattering portrait Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) by Johann Carl Rößler, 1799<br> <br> <br> <br> On April 29, 1798 – 221 years ago today – Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation was first performed before a star-studded, invitation-only audience at the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna. <br> <br> <br> <br> Getting older, or “when I’m 65.”<br> <br> <br> <br> An ugly confession. Eleven days ago, on April 18, 2019, I turned 65 years old. Don’t get me wrong; I am aware that growing older is generally preferable – generally – to the alternative. But it is, nevertheless, an ongoing shock to the system. Like many of us, I fully intended to be Peter Pan (Bob Panberg?): the eternal boy. And while one may not inaccurately assert that that is a fair appraisal of my emotional age, it cannot be said of my physical age. My eyes continue to weaken. My joints – crapped up by years in the gym – remind me of their ever-greater unhappiness by making ever more noise. My ability to dredge up names has become increasingly more difficult (although, curiously, dates and numbers come to me instantly). As my hairline beats an increasingly hasty retreat, thick, disgusting fly hairs on my shoulders and back continue to grow in ever greater profusion (this is so gross I don’t know where to start). <br> <br> <br> <br> My father, who lived to 92, liked to say that age was “only a numbah”, even as – like Jeff Goldblum in the movie The Fly – he’d put one piece after another of his body into his medicine cabinet for safekeeping. <br> <br> <br> <br> My “baby” brother the radiologist, who is only 63, has observed that “you’re only as old as you smell,” a claim that has given me cause for hope as I haven’t taken on that sickly-dry smell of desiccation, at least not yet.<br> <br> <br> <br> Oprah Gail Winfrey (born 1954)<br> <br> <br> <br> Having said all of this, there is someone who has given me true hope, solace, and perspective in this whole aging thing, and that person is none-other-than the awesome/magnificent Oprah Winfrey. Oprah and I were born in the same year: 1954 (although she is some 10 weeks older than I am, har-har!). When Oprah has a landmark birthday she tends to make some wonderful, optimistic statement that, 10 weeks later, applies to me as well. Accordingly, in 2004 Ms. Winfrey announced that “50 is the new 30”; in 2014 she told us that “60 is the new 40.” And while she hasn’t commented yet on 65, I’m hoping for something on the lines of “65 is the new 14” which will, at least, square me with my emotional age.<br> <br> <br> <br> If Oprah Winfrey is correct – and given the state of modern medicine, nutrition, hygiene, relatively clean water and air, etc. “60 might very well be the new 40” – then for Joseph Haydn, living in 1798, his 66 years would be the equivalent, today, of – what? – perhaps 96 years (give or take). <br> <br> <br> <br> In 1798, 66 years of age was old: a foot in the grave old; farting dust old; walking as if treading on glass and sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons old. <br> <br> <br> <br> So what was “old” Joe Haydn doing in 1798? Having recently returned from his second triumphant residence in London, the Vienna-based Haydn was overseeing the first performance of his single greatest masterwork, the oratorio The Creation, even as he was thinking about the composition of his next masterwork, the oratorio The Seasons, which would receive its premiere in 1801, when he was 69-years-old.<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://d3fr1q02b1tb0i.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/26082723/Joseph-Haydns-Death-Mask.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>Joseph Haydn’s Death Mask; nothing flattering here<br>
