For Mozart read Britten and you have a link with the 20th

For Mozart read Britten and you have a link with the 20th century, making Haydn modern too. But the essential contrast is between the forces of nurture and nature, the matrix of creativity that in the different lives of Haydn and Mozart is seen in emblematic form. In choosing vocal works to spar against Haydn symphonies, conductor Roger Norrington certainly whetted the audience’s appetite. And therein lies the historical dialectic that has made these programmes so intriguing. Late-starting and flowering Haydn, master of comedy, is compared with Britten, the gifted prodigy, whose story approached the furrowed, comet- like path of another genius, Mozart. The strength of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s recent South Bank Haydn series, which has also featured Britten’s work, must therefore lie in contrast.

Though Britten admired the music of Haydn, there’s not much of a tangible link between these rather different composers. In his best work he can give a drawing lesson to any artist, beau or hack.’The Berlin of George Grosz’: at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, London W1 to 8 June (0171-439 7438). Of course the theft goes both ways, but sometimes the other way deserves high credit too, as Grosz’s example shows. He falls from his tense wire into various sorts of soup, and I’m afraid that here all the pejorative senses of the word “illustration” apply.But Grosz was always a commercial artist, and he does honour to a profession which is often unregarded – except when fine artists decide to “break down the barriers” by thieving from it, a theft that is then invariably turned to fine art’s credit. But what happens is that the geometry is down-played in favour of a general roundedness, and the fracturing gets much looser and so really does become sketchiness; also Grosz turns more to colour and water-colour, which he uses in a very facile wet-in-wet dissolving way, and the line goes entirely.The result can be either much cuter than before, a cuddly sort of caricature, or much more disgusting. Perhaps Grosz felt the style was limiting his human range, and perhaps that’s true. But what needs to be said is why Grosz is good for the few years that he is, and why he then loses it, and this comes down to his lines From the early Twenties they begin to change They begin to flow.

They make the lines like charged wires.It feels strange to talk about Grosz in this formal way, when one should be talking about his searing vision and his world and times, the revolution, the counter-revolution, the inflation, the sex-capital of Europe – I mean, Berlin In the Twenties And that’s certainly what this show wants to emphasise. This isn’t a sketchiness, the sort of suggestive vagueness that leaves it to the viewer to make the best of it: the main line is absolutely there and determined But the fractures do their subliminal work. If you follow them, you see that all these apparently individual lines are in fact multiply fractured – made up of many small overlapping strokes, each of them slightly out of true with the main line into which they coalesce. He doesn’t cut his figures out with single, decisive strokes. How’s this done? How does he get an energy into even a simple straight line so that it animates the white paper around it? One is tempted, cued by his subject- matter, to describe Grosz’s penning in bold and savage terms – to say: he draws with a scalpel, a razor etc But it isn’t so. So, to Grosz’s animus, it gives a detachment that is alarming.And there’s something else – a quality in the line by itself.