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Classical Period - Music ■
The dates of the Classical period
in Western music are
generally accepted as being between about 1730 and 1820. However, the term classical music is
used colloquially to describe a variety of Western musical styles from the ninth
century to the present, and especially from the sixteenth or seventeenth to the
nineteenth. This article is about the specific period from 1750 to 1820.[1]
The Classical period falls between the
Baroque and the Romantic periods. The
best known composers from this period are
Joseph
Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, and Ludwig van
Beethoven; other notable names include Luigi Boccherini, Muzio
Clementi, Antonio Soler, Antonio Salieri, François Joseph
Gossec, Johann Stamitz, Carl Friedrich Abel,
Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach, and Christoph
Willibald Gluck. Ludwig van Beethoven is also sometimes regarded either as a
Romantic composer or a composer who was part of the transition to the
Romantic.
Franz Schubert is also
something of a transitional figure, as are Johann Nepomuk
Hummel, Mauro Giuliani, Friedrich Kuhlau, Fernando
Sor, Luigi Cherubini, Jan Ladislav Dussek,
and Carl Maria von
Weber. The period is sometimes referred to as the era of Viennese
Classic or Classicism (German: Wiener Klassik), since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
Joseph Haydn, Antonio Salieri, and Ludwig van Beethoven all worked at some time
in Vienna, and
Franz Schubert was born there.
● Classicism
In the middle of the 18th century, Europe began to move
toward a new style in architecture, literature,
and the arts, generally known as Classicism, which sought to
emulate the ideals of Classical antiquity
and especially those of Classical Greece.[2]
While still tightly linked to the court culture and absolutism, with its
formality and emphasis on order and hierarchy, the new style was also a cleaner
style—one that favored clearer divisions between parts, brighter contrasts and
colors, and simplicity rather than complexity, and the typical orchestra size
increased.[2]
The remarkable development of ideas in
"natural philosophy" had established itself in the public consciousness with Newton's physics taken as a
paradigm: structures should be well-founded in axioms and be both
well-articulated and orderly. This taste for structural clarity worked its way
into the world of music, moving away from the layered polyphony of the Baroque
period, towards a style where a melody over a subordinate harmony—a
combination called homophony—was preferred.[2]
This meant that the playing of chords, even if they
interrupted the melodic smoothness of a single part, became a much more
prevalent feature of music. This, in turn, made the tonal structure of works more
audible.
The new style was also pushed forward by
changes in the economic order and in social structure. As the 18th century
progressed, the nobility became the primary patrons of instrumental music, and
there was a rise in the public taste for comic opera. This led to changes in the
way music was performed, the most crucial of which was the move to standard
instrumental groups and the reduction in the importance of the continuo—the harmonic
fill beneath the music, often played by several instruments. one way to trace
this decline of the continuo and its figured chords is to
examine the decline of the term obbligato, meaning a
mandatory instrumental part in a work of chamber music. In the
Baroque world, additional instruments could be optionally added to the continuo;
in the Classical world, all parts were noted specifically, though not always
notated, as a matter of course, so the word "obbligato" became redundant.
By 1800, the term was practically extinct.
The changes in economic situation also
had the effect of altering the balance of availability and quality of musicians.
While in the late Baroque a major composer would have the entire musical
resources of a town to draw on, the forces available at a hunting lodge were
smaller and more fixed in their level of ability. This was a spur to having
primarily simple parts to play, and in the case of a resident virtuoso group, a
spur to writing spectacular, idiomatic parts for certain instruments, as in the
case of the Mannheim orchestra.
In addition, the appetite for a continual supply of new music, carried over from
the Baroque, meant that works had to be performable with, at best, one
rehearsal. Indeed, even after 1790 Mozart writes about "the rehearsal," with the
implication that his concerts would have only one.
Since polyphonic texture was no longer
the main focus of music (excluding the development section) but rather a single
melodic line with accompaniment, there was greater emphasis on notating that
line for dynamics and phrasing.
The simplification of texture made such instrumental detail more important, and
also made the use of characteristic rhythms, such as attention-getting opening
fanfares, the funeral march rhythm, or the minuet genre, more important in
establishing and unifying the tone of a single movement.
Forms such as the concerto and sonata
were more heavily defined and given more specific rules, whereas the symphony
was created in this period (this is popularly attributed to Joseph Haydn). The
concerto grosso (a concerto for more than one musician) began to be
replaced by the solo concerto (a concerto featuring only one soloist),
and therefore began to place more importance on the particular soloist's ability
to show off. There were, of course, some concerti grossi that remained,
the most famous of which being Mozart's Sinfonia
Concertante for Violin and Viola in E flat Major.
A string quartet. From left to right: violin 1,
violin 2, cello, viola
● Main characteristics
Classical music has a lighter, clearer
texture than Baroque music and is less
complex. It is mainly homophonic [3]
— melody above chordal accompaniment (but counterpoint is by no means
forgotten, especially later in the period).
Variety and contrast within a piece
became more pronounced than before. Variety of keys, melodies, rhythms and
dynamics (using crescendo, diminuendo and sforzando), along with
frequent changes of mood and timbre were more commonplace in the Classical
period than they had been in the Baroque. Melodies tended to be shorter than
those of Baroque music, with clear-cut phrases and clearly marked cadences. The Orchestra
increased in size and range; the harpsichord continuo fell
out of use, and the woodwind became a
self-contained section. As a solo instrument, the harpsichord was replaced by
the piano (or fortepiano).
Early piano music was light in texture, often with Alberti bass accompaniment,
but it later became richer, more sonorous and more powerful.
Importance was given to instrumental
music—the main kinds were sonata, trio, string
quartet, symphony, concerto, serenade and divertimento. Sonata
form developed and became the most important form. It was used to build up
the first movement of most large-scale works, but also other movements and
single pieces (such as overtures).
● History
● The Baroque/Classical transition
c. 1730–1760
At first the new style took over Baroque
forms—the ternary da capo aria and the
sinfonia and concerto—but
composed with simpler parts, more notated ornamentation and more emphatic
division into sections. However, over time, the new aesthetic caused radical
changes in how pieces were put together, and the basic layouts changed.
Composers from this period sought dramatic effects, striking melodies, and
clearer textures. The Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti
was an important figure in the transition from Baroque to Classical. His unique
compositional style is strongly related to that of the early Classical period.
He is best known for composing more than five hundred one-movement keyboard
sonatas. In Spain,
Antonio Soler also
produced valuable keyboard sonatas, more varied in form than those of Scarlatti,
with some pieces in three or four movements.
Another important break with the past
was the radical overhaul of opera by Christoph
Willibald Gluck, who cut away a great deal of the layering and
improvisational ornament and focused on the points of modulation and
transition. By making these moments where the harmony changes more focal, he
enabled powerful dramatic shifts in the emotional color of the music. To
highlight these episodes he used changes in instrumentation, melody, and mode. Among the most
successful composers of his time, Gluck spawned many emulators, one of whom was
Antonio Salieri. Their
emphasis on accessibility brought huge successes in opera, and in vocal music
more widely: songs, oratorios, and choruses. These were considered the most
important kinds of music for performance and hence enjoyed greatest success in
the public estimation.
The phase between the Baroque and the
rise of the Classical, with its broad mixture of competing ideas and attempts to
unify the different demands of taste, economics and "worldview", goes by many
names. It is sometimes called Galant, Rococo, or
pre-Classical, or at other times early Classical[citation
needed]. It is a period where some composers still working
in the Baroque style flourish, though sometimes thought of as being more of the
past than the present—Bach, Handel, and Telemann all composed well beyond the
point at which the homophonic style is clearly in the ascendant. Musical culture
was caught at a crossroads: the masters of the older style had the technique,
but the public hungered for the new. This is one of the reasons C.P.E. Bach
was held in such high regard: he understood the older forms quite well and knew
how to present them in new garb, with an enhanced variety of form.
● Circa 1750–1775
By the late 1750s there were flourishing
centers of the new style in Italy, Vienna, Mannheim, and Paris; dozens of
symphonies were composed and there were "bands" of players associated with
theatres. Opera or other vocal music was the feature of most musical events,
with concertos and "symphonies" (arising from the overture) serving as
instrumental interludes and introductions for operas and church services. Over
the course of the Classical period, "symphonies" and concertos developed and
were presented independently of vocal music.
The "normal" ensemble—a body of strings
supplemented by winds—and movements of particular rhythmic character were
established by the late 1750s in Vienna. However, the length and weight of
pieces was still set with some Baroque characteristics: individual movements
still focused on one affect or had only one sharply contrasting middle
section, and their length was not significantly greater than Baroque movements.
There was not yet a clearly enunciated theory of how to compose in the new
style. It was a moment ripe for a breakthrough.
Many consider this breakthrough to have
been made by C.P.E. Bach, Gluck, and several others. Indeed, C.P.E. Bach and
Gluck are often considered to be founders of the Classical style.
The first great master of the style was
the composer Joseph Haydn. In the late
1750s he began composing symphonies, and by 1761 he had composed a triptych
(Morning, Noon, and Evening) solidly in the "contemporary"
mode. As a vice-Kapellmeister and later
Kapellmeister, his output expanded: he composed over forty symphonies in the
1760s alone. And while his fame grew, as his orchestra was expanded and his
compositions were copied and disseminated, his voice was only one among
many.
While some suggest that he was
overshadowed by Mozart and Beethoven, it would be difficult to overstate Haydn's
centrality to the new style, and therefore to the future of Western art music as
a whole. At the time, before the pre-eminence of Mozart or Beethoven, and with
Johann Sebastian Bach known primarily to connoisseurs of keyboard music, Haydn
reached a place in music that set him above all other composers except perhaps
George Frideric Handel. He took existing ideas, and radically altered how they
functioned—earning him the titles "father of the symphony," and "father of the
string quartet."
One of the forces that worked as an
impetus for his pressing forward was the first stirring of what would later be
called Romanticism—the Sturm und Drang, or
"storm and stress" phase in the arts, a short period where obvious emotionalism
was a stylistic preference. Haydn accordingly wanted more dramatic contrast and
more emotionally appealing melodies, with sharpened character and individuality.
This period faded away in music and literature: however, it influenced what came
afterward and would eventually be a component of aesthetic taste in later
decades.
The Farewell
Symphony, No. 45 in F♯ Minor,
exemplifies Haydn's integration of the differing demands of the new style, with
surprising sharp turns and a long adagio to end the work. In 1772, Haydn
completed his Opus 20 set of six string quartets, in which he deployed the
polyphonic techniques he had gathered from the previous era to provide
structural coherence capable of holding together his melodic ideas. For some
this marks the beginning of the "mature" Classical style, where the period of
reaction against the complexity of the late Baroque began to be replaced with a
period of integration of elements of both Baroque and Classical styles.
● Circa 1775–1790
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, posthumous painting by
Barbara Krafft in 1819
Haydn, having worked for over a decade
as the music director for a prince, had far more resources and scope for
composing than most and also the ability to shape the forces that would play his
music. This opportunity was not wasted, as Haydn, beginning quite early on his
career, sought to press forward the technique of building ideas in music. His
next important breakthrough was in the Opus 33
string quartets (1781), where the melodic and the harmonic roles segue among
the instruments: it is often momentarily unclear what is melody and what is
harmony. This changes the way the ensemble works its way between dramatic
moments of transition and climactic sections: the music flows smoothly and
without obvious interruption. He then took this integrated style and began
applying it to orchestral and vocal music.
Haydn's gift to music was a way of
composing, a way of structuring works, which was at the same time in accord with
the governing aesthetic of the new style. However, a younger contemporary, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, brought his genius to Haydn's ideas and applied them to two of the
major genres of the day: opera, and the virtuoso concerto. Whereas Haydn spent
much of his working life as a court composer, Mozart wanted public success in
the concert life of cities. This meant opera, and it meant performing as a
virtuoso. Haydn was not a virtuoso at the international touring level; nor was
he seeking to create operatic works that could play for many nights in front of
a large audience. Mozart wanted both. Moreover, Mozart also had a taste for more
chromatic chords (and greater contrasts in harmonic language generally), a
greater love for creating a welter of melodies in a single work, and a more
Italianate sensibility in music as a whole. He found, in Haydn's music and later
in his study of the polyphony of Bach, the means to discipline and enrich his
gifts.
The Mozart family circa 1780. The portrait on the
wall is of Mozart's mother.
Mozart rapidly came to the attention of
Haydn, who hailed the new composer, studied his works, and considered the
younger man his only true peer in music. In Mozart, Haydn found a greater range
of instrumentation, dramatic effect and melodic resource; the learning
relationship moved in two directions.
Mozart's arrival in Vienna in 1780
brought an acceleration in the development of the Classical style. There Mozart
absorbed the fusion of Italianate brilliance and Germanic cohesiveness which had
been brewing for the previous 20 years. His own taste for brilliances,
rhythmically complex melodies and figures, long cantilena melodies, and virtuoso
flourishes was merged with an appreciation for formal coherence and internal
connectedness. It is at this point that war and inflation halted a trend to
larger orchestras and forced the disbanding or reduction of many theatre
orchestras. This pressed the Classical style inwards: towards seeking greater
ensemble and technical challenge—for example, scattering the melody across
woodwinds, or using thirds to highlight the melody taken by them. This process
placed a premium on chamber music for more public performance, giving a further
boost to the string quartet and other small ensemble groupings.
It was during this decade that public
taste began, increasingly, to recognize that Haydn and Mozart had reached a
higher standard of composition. By the time Mozart arrived at age 25, in 1781,
the dominant styles of Vienna were recognizably connected to the emergence in
the 1750s of the early Classical style. By the end of the 1780s, changes in
performance practice, the relative standing of instrumental and vocal music,
technical demands on musicians, and stylistic unity had become established in
the composers who imitated Mozart and Haydn. During this decade Mozart composed
his most famous operas, his six late symphonies which helped to redefine the
genre, and a string of piano concerti which still stand at the pinnacle of these
forms.
One composer who was influential in
spreading the more serious style that Mozart and Haydn had formed is Muzio
Clementi, a gifted virtuoso pianist who tied with Mozart in a musical "duel"
before the emperor in which they each improvised and performed their
compositions. Clementi's sonatas for the piano circulated widely, and he became
the most successful composer in London during the 1780s. Also in
London at this time was Jan Ladislav Dussek,
who, like Clementi, encouraged piano makers to extend the range and other
features of their instruments, and then fully exploited the newly opened
possibilities. The importance of London in the Classical period is often
overlooked, but it served as the home to the Broadwood's factory
for piano manufacturing and as the base for composers who, while less notable
than the "Vienna School", had a decisive influence on what came later. They were
composers of many fine works, notable in their own right. London's taste for
virtuosity may well have encouraged the complex passage work and extended
statements on tonic and dominant.
● Circa 1790–1820
When Haydn and Mozart began composing,
symphonies were played as single movements—before, between, or as interludes
within other works—and many of them lasted only ten or twelve minutes;
instrumental groups had varying standards of playing, and the continuo was a
central part of music-making. In the intervening years, the social world of
music had seen dramatic changes: international publication and touring had grown
explosively, concert societies were beginning to be formed, notation had been
made more specific, more descriptive, and schematics for works had been
simplified (yet became more varied in their exact working out). In 1790, just
before Mozart's death, with his reputation spreading rapidly, Haydn was poised
for a series of successes, notably his late oratorios and "London" symphonies.
Composers in Paris,
Rome, and all over
Germany turned to Haydn and Mozart for their ideas on form.
The moment was again ripe for a dramatic
shift. During the 1790s, there emerged of a new generation of composers, born
around 1770, who, while they had grown up with the earlier styles, found in the
recent works of Haydn and Mozart a vehicle for greater ｅxpression. In 1788 Luigi Cherubini settled
in Paris and in 1791 composed Lodoiska, an opera that raised him to fame.
Its style is clearly reflective of the mature Haydn and Mozart, and its
instrumentation gave it a weight that had not yet been felt in the grand
opera. His contemporary Étienne Méhul
extended instrumental effects with his 1790 opera Euphrosine et Coradin,
from which followed a series of successes.
The most fateful of the new generation
was Ludwig van
Beethoven, who launched his numbered works in 1794 with a set of three piano
trios, which remain in the repertoire. Somewhat younger than the others, though
equally accomplished because of his youthful study under Mozart and his native
virtuosity, was Johann Nepomuk
Hummel. Hummel studied under Haydn as well; he was a friend to Beethoven and
Schubert. He concentrated
more on the piano than any other instrument, and his time in London in 1791 and
1792 generated the composition and publication in 1793 of three piano sonatas,
opus 2, which idiomatically used Mozart's techniques of avoiding the expected
cadence, and Clementi's sometimes modally uncertain virtuoso figuration. Taken
together, these composers can be seen as the vanguard of a broad change in style
and the center of music. They studied one another's works, copied one another's
gestures in music, and on occasion behaved like quarrelsome rivals.
The crucial differences with the
previous wave can be seen in the downward shift in melodies, increasing
durations of movements, the acceptance of Mozart and Haydn as paradigmatic, the
greater use of keyboard resources, the shift from "vocal" writing to "pianistic"
writing, the growing pull of the minor and of modal ambiguity, and the
increasing importance of varying accompanying figures to bring "texture" forward
as an element in music. In short, the late Classical was seeking a music that
was internally more complex. The growth of concert societies and amateur
orchestras, marking the importance of music as part of middle-class life,
contributed to a booming market for pianos, piano music, and virtuosi to serve
as examplars. Hummel, Beethoven, and Clementi were all renowned for their
improvising.
Direct influence of the Baroque
continued to fade: the figured bass grew less
prominent as a means of holding performance together, the performance practices
of the mid-18th century continued to die out. However, at the same time,
complete editions of Baroque masters began to become available, and the
influence of Baroque style continued to grow, particularly in the ever more
expansive use of brass. Another feature of the period is the growing number of
performances where the composer was not present. This led to increased detail
and specificity in notation; for example, there were fewer "optional" parts that
stood separately from the main score.
The force of these shifts became
apparent with Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, given the name Eroica, which is
Italian for "heroic", by the composer. As with Stravinsky's The Rite of
Spring, it may not have been the first in all of its innovations, but
its aggressive use of every part of the Classical style set it apart from its
contemporary works: in length, ambition, and harmonic resources as well.
● First Viennese School
The First Viennese School is a name
mostly used to refer to three composers of the Classical period in
late-18th-century Vienna: W. A. Mozart, Haydn, and
Beethoven. Franz Schubert is
occasionally added to the list.
In German speaking countries, the term
Wiener Klassik (lit. Viennese classical era/art) is used. That
term is often more broadly applied to the Classical era in music as a whole, as
a means to distinguish it from other periods that are colloquially referred to
as classical, namely Baroque and Romantic music.
The term "Viennese School" was first
used by Austrian musicologist Raphael Georg Kiesewetter in 1834, although he
only counted Haydn and Mozart as members of the school. Other writers followed
suit, and eventually Beethoven was added to the list.[4]
The designation "first" is added today to avoid confusion with the Second Viennese
School.
Whilst, Schubert apart, these composers
certainly knew each other (with Haydn and Mozart even being occasional
chamber-music partners), there is no sense in which they were engaged in a
collaborative effort in the sense that one would associate with 20th-century
schools such as the Second Viennese School, or Les Six. Nor is there any
significant sense in which one composer was "schooled" by another (in the way
that Berg and Webern were taught by Schoenberg), though it is true that
Beethoven for a time received lessons from Haydn.
Attempts to extend the First Viennese
School to include such later figures as Anton Bruckner, Johannes Brahms, and Gustav
Mahler are merely journalistic, and never encountered in academic
musicology.
● Classical influence on later composers
Musical eras seldom disappear at once;
instead, features are replaced over time, until the old is simply felt as
"old-fashioned". The Classical style did not "die" so much as transform under
the weight of changes.
Portrait of Mendelssohn by the English
miniaturist James Warren
Childe (1778–1862), 1839
One crucial change was the shift towards
harmonies centering around "flatward" keys: shifts in the subdominant direction. In
the Classical style, major key was far more common than minor, chromaticism
being moderated through the use of "sharpward" modulation, and sections in the
minor mode were often merely for contrast. Beginning with Mozart and Clementi,
there began a creeping colonization of the subdominant region. With Schubert,
subdominant moves flourished after being introduced in contexts in which earlier
composers would have confined themselves to dominant shifts. This introduced
darker colors to music, strengthened the minor mode, and made structure harder
to maintain. Beethoven contributed to this by his increasing use of the fourth as a consonance,
and modal ambiguity—for example, the opening of the D Minor
Symphony.
Franz Schubert, Carl Maria von
Weber, and John Field are
among the most prominent in this generation of "Classical Romantics", along with
the young Felix Mendelssohn.
Their sense of form was strongly influenced by the Classical style, and they
were not yet "learned" (imitating rules which were codified by others), but they
directly responded to works by Beethoven, Mozart, Clementi, and others, as they
encountered them. The instrumental forces at their disposal were also quite
"Classical" in number and variety, permitting similarity with Classical
works.
However, the forces destined to end the
hold of the Classical style gathered strength in the works of each of the above
composers. The most commonly cited one is harmonic innovation. Also important is
the increasing focus on having a continuous and rhythmically uniform
accompanying figuration: Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata was the model for hundreds of later pieces—where the
shifting movement of a rhythmic figure provides much of the drama and interest
of the work, while a melody drifts above it. Greater knowledge of works, greater
instrumental expertise, increasing variety of instruments, the growth of concert
societies, and the unstoppable domination of the piano—which created a huge
audience for sophisticated music—all contributed to the shift to the "Romantic"
style.
Drawing the line between these two
styles is impossible: there are sections of Mozart's works which, taken alone,
are indistinguishable in harmony and orchestration from music written 80 years
later, and composers continue to write in normative Classical styles into the
20th century. Even before Beethoven's death, composers such as Louis
Spohr were self-described Romantics, incorporating, for example, more
extravagant chromaticism in their
works. However, generally the fall of Vienna as the most important musical
center for orchestral composition is felt to be the occasion of the Classical
style's final eclipse, along with its continuous organic development of one
composer learning in close proximity to others. Franz Liszt and Frédéric
Chopin visited Vienna when young, but they then moved on to other vistas.
Composers such as Carl Czerny, while deeply
influenced by Beethoven, also searched for new ideas and new forms to contain
the larger world of musical ｅxpression and performance in which they lived.
Renewed interest in the formal balance
and restraint of 18th century classical music led in the early 20th century to
the development of so-called Neoclassical
style, which numbered Stravinsky and Prokofiev among its
proponents, at least at certain times in their careers.
● Classical period
instruments
Fortepiano by Paul McNulty after Walter & Sohn,
ca. 1805
● Strings
● Woodwinds
Keyboards
Brasses
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