CLASSICAL

A term which, along with its related forms, ‘classic’, ‘classicism’,

‘classicistic’ etc., has been applied to a wide variety of music from different
cultures. It evolved from the Latin classicus (a taxpayer, later also a writer,
of the highest class) through the French classique into English ‘classical’
and German Klassik. In one of the earliest definitions (R. Cotgrave:
Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, 1611), classique is
translated as ‘classical, formall, orderlie, in due or fit ranke; also, approved,
authenticall, chiefe, principall’. The two parts of this definition will be
retained here and glossed as (i) formal discipline, (ii) model of excellence,
supplemented by (iii) that which has to do with Greek or Latin antiquity
(Dictionnaire de l’Académie, 1694), and (iv) that which is opposed to
‘romantic’, the latter understood as morbid and unruly (Goethe, 1829). Of
the various meanings, (ii) has had the widest currency over the longest
time. In this general sense, for example, Forkel recommended J.S. Bach’s
main keyboard works as ‘klassisch’ (1802, rendered in the English
translation of 1820 as ‘classical’). Generic excellence accounts for the
similar labelling of Josquin’s motets, Palestrina’s masses, Couperin’s suites,
Corelli’s concertos, Handel’s oratorios and Schubert’s lieder – though as
Finscher has observed (1966), the term is properly reserved for works in
genres ample enough in scope and developmental possibilities to be
susceptible of ‘classical’ fulfilment.

In the early modern era, it was more often in the first two senses
enumerated above that the terms ‘classic’ and ‘classical’ were applied with
regard to literature and art, with analogies to Greek and Roman culture
only gradually coming to the fore. This was especially true as regards music
(e.g. Scacchi, 1643; Schütz, 1648), for which no antique heritage was known
to survive (see Nägeli, 1826). As Weber has shown (1992), it was in 18th-
century England that ‘classical’ first came to stand for a particular canon of
works in performance, distinct from other music in terms primarily of
quality, but also to some extent age (the Concert of Ancient Music generally
restricted offerings to pieces written more than two decades earlier). Civic
ritual, religion and moral activism figured significantly in this novel
construction of musical taste, converging notably in the cult of Handel. On
the Continent, where canonic concert repertories were slower to develop (or
were not entirely public, as with the Viennese concert series organized by
Gottfried van Swieten during the 1780s and Raphael Georg Kiesewetter
during the 1810s), ‘classical’ music continued up to the end of the 18th
century to be understood mainly in its traditional senses – as when
Constanze Mozart deemed the value of her late husband’s compositional
fragments equal to that of ‘fragments of classical authors’ (letter of 1 March
1800). The composer’s biographer Niemetschek, in positing the ‘classical
worth’ of Mozart’s music, had earlier written (1797, rev. 1808) that ‘The
masterpieces of the Romans and Greeks please more and more through
repeated reading, and as one’s taste is refined – the same is true for both
expert and amateur with respect to the hearing of Mozart’s music’. For
Spazier (1800), too, a classical work of music was one that ‘must gain from
each [new] analysis’.

1. The Viennese ‘Classical’ idiom.

2. Earlier ‘classicisms’.
3. Neo-classicism, Romantic classicism.
 DANIEL HEARTZ/BRUCE ALAN BROWN

Classical

1. The Viennese ‘Classical’ idiom.

Well into the 19th century, many partisans of ‘classical’ music,

continental as well as British, defined their preferred repertory negatively,
in opposition to mere virtuoso display, Romantic music, Rossini and other
‘trumpery’. But by the 1830s ‘classical’ music was coming increasingly to be
identified specifically with the ‘Viennese classics’ composed by Haydn,
Mozart and Beethoven, and it is to these that the term-complex usually
refers when encountered without further qualification in more recent
writings on music. The notion that these works constituted a ‘classical
period’ or ‘school’ arose among German writers in the 19th century, in part
by analogy with the Weimarer Klassik created by Goethe and, to a lesser
extent, Schiller. Kiesewetter (1834) referred to ‘the German or (perhaps
more rightly) … the Viennese school’, and other writers followed his lead.
(His limitation of this school to Mozart and Haydn was endorsed by
Finscher (MGG2), who cited Beethoven’s slowness in approaching the
genres in which they excelled, among other factors.) The explicit linkage of
‘Viennese’ with ‘classical’ was codified in the early 20th-century writings of
Sandberger, Adler and Wilhelm Fischer, along with explanatory schemes
regarding its evolution. Blume extended the boundaries of this putative
period back to the middle of the 18th century and forward to include all
Schubert’s works, weakening any conception of a closely knit or precisely
defined movement: he specifically denied the possibility of stylistic unity
within the period between the deaths of Bach and Beethoven. Rosen
restricted what he called the ‘classical style’ mainly to the instrumental
works of the mature Haydn and Mozart, and of Beethoven. In this view, for
which Finscher found early 19th-century documentation (e.g. Wendt, 1831,
1836), there was a stylistic period that stretched from Haydn’s obbligato
homophony, achieved in the 1770s and capped by the op.33 quartets, to the
threshold of Beethoven’s last period, when the ‘classical’ forms are
supposed to be overstepped or disintegrating.

That there was a ‘classical idiom’ shared by Haydn, Mozart and, to an

extent, Beethoven is more generally agreed than is the existence of a
‘classical period’ (IMSCR VIII: New York 1961). If applied to the music
exclusively of these three composers, or to the historical phenomenon of
their posthumous reputations, the appellation ‘classical idiom’ is justified;
in describing music generally during these composers’ lifetimes, it is
perhaps better to speak of a ‘Viennese’ or ‘Austro-Bohemian’ school (with
analogous terms for other local traditions), rather than of a diluted
‘classical period’. Some writers of the time, such as John Marsh,
distinguished only between the ‘modern’ style and all that came before it.
Haydn’s central role in the refinement and propagation of this new style is
manifest (see Koch, 1793, and Marsh, 1796), despite his early geographic
isolation, and differences of opinion concerning the date by which his
works display full mastery. Haydn’s abandonment during the 1770s of
certain more local or personal features of his style – possibly connected
with the wider circulation of his music in print – was followed by his
achievement of an individual synthesis of pleasing tunefulness (the
galantstyle) with the learned devices of counterpoint he had previously
used somewhat forcedly and selfconsciously (the op.20 quartets) – though
Webster (1991) has pointed to fundamental continuities of technique
between the composer’s music in this and later periods. By about 1775
Haydn had put behind him, for the most part, the mannerisms of
‘Empfindsamkeit’ – though this idiom still retained some utility for certain
types of keyboard and chamber music – and the obsessive pathos of Sturm
und Drang, and assimilated in his own language the fantasy qualities,
‘redende [speaking] Thematik’ and developmental skills of C.P.E. Bach.
Mozart followed Haydn closely in the 1770s in his quartets and symphonies,
and the dedication of the six quartets to Haydn speaks eloquently enough of
their close relationship. Other elements in the synthesis achieved by both
are use of dynamics and orchestral colour in a thematic way (perhaps a
legacy of the Mannheim School); use of rhythm, particularly harmonic
rhythm, to articulate large-scale forms; use of modulation to build longer
arches of tension and release; and the witty and typically Austrian mixture
of comic and serious traits (pilloried by north German critics, who held firm
against any alloying of the opera seria style by that of opera buffa). During
the 1780s Haydn’s instrumental works were very widely printed and
diffused. His language had become understood (as he told Mozart when he
set out for England) by all the world. This universality, which Mozart also
achieved, especially with his concertos and operas, deserves to be called
‘classical’ even under the most precise definition (ii above).

A strong case may also be made for both composers on grounds of

formal discipline (i). Their high technical skill is patent. Sovereign ease of
writing, learning lightly worn, happiness in remaining within certain
conventions or at least not straying too far from them – conventions that
were bound to please and aid the public – these mark what Henri Peyre
called the ‘classical’ attitude. Peyre posited further that the ‘classical’ artist,
regardless of the field or period, worked in complicity with his public,
attempting to fulfil its expectations, and was not afraid to be pleasing or to
submit to society’s conditions. Haydn had more success, initially, in
pleasing a very wide public, than did Mozart, but from the latter’s own
words it is known that he wrote for ‘all kinds of ears – tin ears excepted’. In
this easy relationship with the expectations of the consumer lies one
explanation for the fecundity of Mozart and Haydn, for the hundreds of
works with which they enriched all genres (absolute mastery of every genre
makes Mozart in this sense the last of the universal composers). Colossal
productivity such as theirs presupposes a down-to-earth, workmanlike
approach to the craft. Mozart once described, in typically earthy language,
how he wrote music (‘as sows piddle’). A similar fecundity was enjoyed by
Boccherini, Clementi, Gossec and many other masters of the time. Haydn’s
acceptance of certain conventions did not prevent his symphonies from
being received by his contemporaries as highly original, and so dramatic in
nature that they seemed literally to speak. Grétry (Mémoires, 1789) urged
them as models for opera composers, and marvelled at Haydn’s unique
ability to get so much out of a single motif. In 1806 specific and detailed
programmes were published for both Haydn’s Drumroll Symphony
(Momigny) and Mozart’s Symphony k543 (August Apel, in poetic form),
dramatizing these works even further.

Gerber summed up Haydn’s symphonic style in his Lexicon(1790):

Everything speaks when his orchestra begins to play. Each

subordinate voice, which in the works of other composers
would be merely insignificant, often becomes with him a
 decisive principal part. He commands every refinement, even
if it comes from the Gothic period of the grey contrapuntists.
But as soon as Haydn prepares it for our ear it assumes a
pleasing character in place of its former stiffness. He possesses
the great art of making his music oftentimes seem familiar;
thus, despite all the contrapuntal refinements therein, he
becomes popular and pleasing to every musician.

Haydn’s reliance on actual folk melodies has been shown in relatively

few cases, but touches of local colour enliven the fabric of his music from
the earliest divertimento-style works to The Seasons. His art was popular
by intention, and was so received. Mozart too was aware of seeking a
middle ground between what was too difficult for the public and what was
easy and threadbare (letter of 28 December 1782). Beethoven stood close to
both at first, compositionally and in his aim of pleasing a wide public
(especially in his works involving the piano); in orchestral style he took up
where Haydn left off. The wave of music from Revolutionary France also
had a powerful impact upon him and helps account for the exalted moral
tone, the extra-musical messages that play an increasing role in his art from
the ‘Eroica’ Symphony onwards. Whether the mature master tended more
towards the ‘classical’ or ‘romantic’ has been, and will be, long debated. The
circumspection or self-possession (Besonnenheit) that Hoffmann found in
his mature works, and the degree to which his last compositions in
particular are preoccupied with the premises of musical language itself,
betray the deep roots of his manner in the music of Haydn and Mozart. His
style of life marked him as a romantic in the eyes of his contemporaries,
who also noted quite early his ‘tendency towards the mysterious and
gloomy’ in music (Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried, 1799). By turning increasingly
inward, away from the public, in his last years Beethoven strayed from one
of the ideals of ‘classical’ art: ease of communication. In the Jean Paul sense
he appeared to be a ‘romantic’ artist, wild, extravagant, boundless, isolated
and possessing the other traits then coming into fashion with the young
German littérateurs. But this means little because anything they perceived
as imaginative, deeply moving and colourful, including the music of Haydn
and Mozart, automatically became ‘romantic’ (e.g. E.T.A. Hoffmann). One
measure of the distance in attitude travelled beyond Mozart and Haydn is
Beethoven’s decreasing productivity, matching his increasing
selfconsciousness about being original – the necessity for every work to be a
universe unto itself, born of struggle and speaking an individual expressive
language. Perhaps this striving for the ultra-expressive can usefully be
contrasted with a ‘classical’ attitude of genuine modesty and willing
restraint, personal and artistic. One suspects that Mozart would have
reacted to Beethoven at his most ‘pathetic’ the way he did to the Klopstock
style, which he found ‘sublime, beautiful, anything you like, but too
exaggerated and pompous for my delicate ears’, or to the music of
Schweitzer’s Rosamunde, in which he found ‘nothing natural, everything
exaggerated, and badly written for the voices’. Mozart recurrently stressed
the virtues of moderation, the unforced, the thread (‘il filo’) that allowed
one musical thought to follow naturally upon another.

The interpenetration of French, Italian and German music during the

last part of the 18th century – long disregarded by scholars more intent on
studying the quirks of ‘sonata form’ or defining the ‘classical style’ – is
indisputable, and argues in favour of a ‘classical’ moment, if not period.
Similarities in musical discourse at Naples, Paris and Berlin outweighed the
dissimilarities, a situation that did not obtain 50 years earlier, when critics
could perceive only national differences. A cosmopolitan style, cultivated in
all the great capitals, was carried, through massive diffusion by prints and
copies, to every corner of Western civilization. The coining of this lingua
franca does not necessarily depend on knowledge of the Viennese ‘classical
idiom’; rather, its common denominator – the irreducible core of stylistic
unity – would seem to rest upon the uncontested dominion of Italian opera.
Dent went so far as to state ‘the classical tradition is nothing more or less
than the Italian tradition’.

Classical

2. Earlier ‘classicisms’.

Humanist leanings tended to promote the subsuming of definitions (i)

and (ii) above under (iii), especially in France. But even in France,
antiquity’s models of excellence were deemed to have been equalled or
surpassed about 1670–85 by modern writers like La Fontaine, Molière and
Racine (‘nos auteurs classiques’, as Voltaire later called them). They, and
Voltaire himself, became literary models for all Europe during the 18th
century, and were accordingly given status as ‘classical’. By analogy with
literature, some scholars have attached the same sobriquet to French 17th-
and 18th-century music, although it had not nearly so wide a sway.
According to Dufourcq, ‘la musique française classique’ stretches from the
founding of Baïf’s Académie in 1571, the most important musical
consequence of French humanism, until the Revolution. Setting in
opposition ‘l’opéra française classique’ (from Lully to Gluck) and
‘romantique’ (the 19th century) betrays the literary distinctions that were
imported into France pursuant to Goethe’s vexing dichotomy (iv above).

The Arcadian Academy founded at Rome in 1690 became the focal

point of Italian literary ‘classicism’. It promoted a more sober approach to
form and language, avoidance of ‘Baroque’ hyperbole (so-called
‘Marinismo’) and explicit submission to antique models (but implicit
recognition of French models as well). Reform of the opera libretto by Zeno
and Metastasio was a direct consequence of Arcadian ‘classicism’. While
refining diction and polishing language for specifically musical purposes,
Metastasio separated the comic and serious genres and raised the latter to
an elevation of style it had not known. In his aria texts, in particular –
which he considered to be comparable in function to the choruses in
ancient tragedy – he reduced vocabulary to a small number of quite simple,
universal images (see Opera seria). By the time he left for Vienna in 1730 he
was already regarded as the most influential model in the field, the final
codifier of aria opera. His debts to the French tragedians were, somewhat to
his embarrassment, recognized as such at the time (as were the debts, more
freely admitted, owed by Goldoni to Molière). There is nothing
extraordinary in that one literary ‘classicism’ should stand on the shoulders
of another, imitation belonging to the phenomenon by nature.

Quite extraordinary, on the other hand, is the effect that Metastasian

elegance had on the tonal art. The poet’s mellifluous language and clarity of
expression taught musicians similar virtues, or so they believed. Eximeno
(y Pujades) (1774) specified that it was Metastasio’s ‘dolcezza’ that
prompted Italian composers and singers to raise music to its 18th-century
peak of perfection. Arteaga (1783) equated the reform of the libretto with
the beginnings of ‘modern’ music. By their own admission, ‘modernists’ as
diverse as Hasse, Jommelli, Rousseau, Grétry and Paisiello claimed
Metastasio’s verses as their main source of inspiration. Mozart, typically,
cut his compositional teeth by setting Metastasian arias, and was involved
with the poet’s works right up to the end, in La clemenza di Tito (the very
drama that Voltaire proclaimed ‘equal, if not superior to the most beautiful
productions of the Greeks’). Haydn rated his setting of Metastasio’s L’isola
disabitata among his best works. Cimarosa was still setting Metastasio,
albeit with many modifications, to the end of his life. The Berlin critic
Krause, in what might be called a poetics of Metastasian opera, Von der
musikalischen Poesie (1752), wrote that ‘good taste consists in flattering the
ear and touching the heart; it has reached perfection in the Italian operas of
Hasse and Graun’. C.P.E. Bach still subscribed to this view when he wrote
in his autobiography of 1773 that ‘Berlin [Graun] and Dresden [Hasse]
represented a new era in music as a whole and in its most accurate and fine
performance in particular’, a highpoint which he feared had since passed,
owing to inroads made by the comic style. Hasse was widely considered the
leading figure of the style the 18th century called ‘galant’ and as such was
one of the main predecessors of the ‘classical’ synthesis. This style prevailed
up to and beyond the middle of the century (well beyond in Berlin) and
constituted one of the most admired translations of Arcadian classicism
into music (Metastasio preferred Hasse above all other composers). At the
same time two other Arcadians, Goldoni and Galuppi, raised opera buffa to
a peak of literary-musical excellence, the one inspiring the other to new
heights of parody, irony and wit (providing worthy forerunners on the path
leading to the collaborations between Da Ponte and Mozart). Galuppi’s
definition of good music, told to Burney, was ‘vaghezza’, ‘chiarezza’ and
‘buona modulazione’; his own music shows that even the last applies mainly
to melody. What sounded ‘modern’ to the generation that matured around
the mid-century was elegant, affecting melody, of a periodic nature,
tastefully ‘graced’ with many fine nuances, and simply accompanied. Even
C.P.E. Bach was so caught up by this aesthetic that he deprecated the
operatic arias (but not the oratorios) of Handel, saying of him ‘he could
never have become a Hasse or a Graun even if he had had the opportunity’.
Instrumental music found no rationale with Quantz and Bach except as an
imitation of fine singing: Italian singing, to be sure, and above all that
paragon of the age, the castrato.

Classical

3. Neo-classicism, Romantic classicism.

Forces were abroad in the mid-18th century that would eventually

overthrow the notion that music existed to ‘flatter the ear’ (but not its
corollary about ‘touching the heart’). At first less literary than artistic and
archaeological, they proceeded from the emotional rediscovery (once again)
of the force and sublimity of antique monuments, whether intact or, more
characteristically, in ruins. The movement began in the 1740s with the
coming together of Piranesi and members of the French academy in Rome.
Hugh Honour described their artistic breakthrough as follows: ‘Encouraged
to look at Antiquity with fresh eyes, they sought its essence in the primitive
– painters in the spare drawings of Greek vases and architects in the
robustly masculine, austerely undecorated Doric temple at Paestum’. An
important turning-point was the expedition led by the Marquis de Marigny
(brother of Mme de Pompadour) to Paestum in 1750, the occasion which
produced Jacques Soufflot’s famous sketch of the ruined temple of Neptune
from location (see illustration), a sketch that was later engraved, used for
an actual stage-setting (1755), and influenced subsequent ruins shown on
the operatic stage. Out of a collective vision of an antiquity to be revived in
all its sombre, even primitive qualities emerged what art historians now call
‘Neo-classicism’ or ‘Romantic classicism’. Theorists and critics were quick
to seize upon the trend, among them Caylus, who started bringing out his
illustrated Recueil d’antiquitésin 1752; Laugier, who in 1753 attacked both
the Italian Baroque and the French Rococo for having strayed from the
simple truths of nature; Lodoli, whose rigorist ideas on architecture were
codified by Algarotti the same year; and Winckelmann, whose better-
known work appeared in 1755, mixing sentimentalism with an idealistic
nostalgia for everything Greek, in which he saw ‘noble simplicity’. These
and similar works represent a reaction against the earlier 18th century’s
playful treatment of the antique heritage – against ‘la mythologie galante’,
as it has been termed. Longing for the grandeurs of a greater past (whether
that of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or Louis XIV) back
beyond the immediate past accounts for the beginnings of both ‘romantic’
and ‘neo-classic’ art; the latter has been called a dialect within the language
of the former.

Algarotti was in the vanguard of operatic as well as architectural

reform. In Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (1755) he advocated a return to
first principles, suggesting a closer look at ancient drama and even at
ancient amphitheatres. Larger and better opera houses in Italy had
provided the models for the rest of Europe since well before Algarotti’s
time, but no one spelt out as he did the needs with regard to both sight and
sound. Larger orchestras were the consequence of increasingly large
theatres, and ultimately a style of music to fill them, truly symphonic and
grandiose, instead of chamber-like (as in the early symphonies of
Sammartini). Concomitant with this passion for grandeur along antique
lines, which increased towards the end of the century, was the revival of
interest in the operatic chorus. Before Algarotti even Krause had awarded
the palm to French opera in this respect, and for integrated ballets, saying
that Italian opera could only be improved by adding these resources to its
basic strengths. That is what happened at Parma a few years later when
Frugoni adapted some of Rameau’s librettos for setting by Traetta; in the
preface to Ippolito ed Aricia (1759) Frugoni defended the introduction of
choruses by referring specifically to Greek practices. Earlier, at Rome,
Jommelli had taken the bold step of ending his Attilio Regolo (1753) with
an impassioned obbligato recitative and a chorus. It is no coincidence that
Rome and Parma, two of the main centres of ‘neo-classical’ art in the 1750s,
were the main meeting-grounds of French and Italian ideas, nor that
Jommelli and Traetta worked for patrons who played such a role in the
archaeological excavations.

Jommelli’s appointment at Stuttgart in 1754 had an electrifying effect

on German music similar to Hasse’s at Dresden 20 years earlier. Traetta
reached tragic heights in his works for Vienna (1761, 1763) and Mannheim
(1762) for which Heinse could find no better praise than to call them
‘classical’ and ‘worthy of the ancient tragedies’. A certain mutual
strengthening between artists, such as Haydn and Mozart later
experienced, is evident in the relations between the Neapolitan Traetta and
the Bohemian Gluck around 1760; as a result, Vienna’s future eminence
was already well launched. Gluck, like Traetta, had been much involved
with French dramatic music in the 1750s. In setting opéra comique he
acquired the popular tunefulness that this genre promoted, corresponding
with its seeming naturalness. His involvement with ballet, too, together
with his experience as a composer of opera seria, endowed him with a fund
of resources with which to create a new supra-national kind of musical
tragedy. The vision he achieved in Orfeo ed Euridice (1762, Vienna), with
the important collaboration of his poet, Calzabigi (as well as the
choreographer, Angiolini, and scenographer, Quaglio), represented a
triumphant expression in opera, the total art form, of the new wave of
radical severity in expression. His contemporaries viewed Gluck’s control of
vast time spans as epochal: the working against each other of the Infernal
and Elysian scenes in Orfeo, for example. They also singled out his painting
of gesture in music (which influenced subsequent composers of
melodramas, dramatic ballets and symphonies; see Sturm und Drang).

The publication of Orfeo ed Euridice at Paris in 1764 caused little stir.

A decade earlier the style that subsequently came to be known as ‘Rococo’
had been superseded, almost overnight. Much notice had been taken of a
turn towards ‘Greek simplicity’ in spoken drama with Guimond de La
Touche’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1757), which Grimm and Diderot praised
because ‘it suppressed all galant intrigues such as had heretofore disfigured
the genre’. But Grimm could not bring himself to credit Calzabigi for doing
the same in opera, and his prejudices against non-Italian musicians
prevented him from recognizing in Gluck’s score a similar turn towards
simplicity and stark, unadorned pathos, nourished by dreams of ancient
glories. Only later, after Gluck’s personal triumph in Paris, did Grimm
admit that his music represented a transgression of earlier boundaries,
going beyond Metastasio’s vision of Arcadia, to achieve that same sobriety
and gravity that he applauded elsewhere in the arts.

The tragic tone of Gluck’s Orfeo and Alceste (1767) helped feed the
subsequent wave of ‘Sturm und Drang’ pathos in the Viennese symphonists,
and even contributed to the deepening of Haydn’s symphonic style
(according to Feder). These operas, together with Gluck’s masterpieces for
Paris in the 1770s (pronounced ‘classiques’ by Grétry), established the bases
upon which musical tragedy could continue to evolve. Piccinni’s, Salieri’s
and Sacchini’s French operas, as well as those of Méhul and Le Sueur,
extended the lineage, which came to a magnificent climax of tension in
Cherubini’s Médée (1797), a work which subsumes Haydn’s symphonic
development as well as various French and Italian operatic styles, and
which, moreover, had a powerful impact on Beethoven. In explaining his
Mort d’Adam (1809), Le Sueur made a statement that characterizes the
attitude of this whole school; he had ‘avoided all semblance of the musical
Gothic and followed only the grand taste of the antique, so that the work
was not directed to one country, or one people, but rather to the
brotherhood of the human race’. Similarly, Rousseau believed that his
invention of mélodrame revived the mélopéeof the Greeks. Previous claims
to the contrary notwithstanding, it is clearly necessary to consider antiquity
(definition iii) in relation to what was ‘classical’ in music, because that is
how musicians themselves then thought.

The various ‘classicisms’ in the arts of Europe are not contradictory,

but rather like a series of waves piling towards the same shore: the one
phase builds upon the other, just as a single art is nourished often, and
reciprocally, by a sister art. What the Viennese ‘classics’ attained could not
have come about without passing through the purifying fires of that mid-
18th-century upheaval which generated ‘Sturm und Drang’ and ‘Romantic
classicism’. It was fortunate that the most revolutionary creative spirits,
those seeking raw antiquity and primitive passions, had the strengths of
Arcadian ‘classicism’ to fall back upon, as necessary, and even beyond
these, the achievements of French ‘classicism’. In a work like Mozart’s
Idomeneo, of crucial significance to his subsequent artistic development,
the contribution from each of these phases can be identified, which does
not deprive the opera of its purity, consistency or tragic dignity. Mozart’s
motivic and tonal control extended over the span of an entire opera for the
first time in Idomeneo. Such careful relating of every detail to the whole can
be regarded as fully ‘classical’, in contrast with the more random stringing
together of tonalities characteristic of Hasse and the galant phase. Haydn
achieved the same organic unity in his last period, most superbly in The
Creation and The Seasons, two monuments that serenely summarize his
life’s work, while mirroring his lifelong and deep-seated feelings for nature.

See also Baroque; Empfindsamkeit; Enlightenment; Galant; Opera,

§IV; Rococo; Romanticism; Sturm und Drang.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (‘Klassik’, L. Finscher)

H.C. Koch: Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Rudolstadt
and Leipzig, 1782–93/R; partial Eng. trans., 1983)
 J. Marsh: ‘A Comparison between the Ancient and Modern Styles of
Music’, Monthly Magazine, ii (1796–7), 981–5; repr. in C. Cudworth: ‘An
Essay by John Marsh’, ML, xxxvi (1955), 155–64
F.X. Niemetschek: Lebensbeschreibung des k.k. Kapellmeisters
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Prague, 1797, 2/1808/R; Eng. trans., 1956/R)
J.G.K. Spazier: Gretrys Versuche über die Musik (Leipzig, 1800)
H.G. Nägeli: Vorlesungen über Musik mit Berücksichtigung der
Dilettanten (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1826/R)
J.G. [‘Amadeus’] Wendt: Die Hauptperioden der schönen Künste
oder die Kunst im Laufe der Weltgeschichte dargestellt (Leipzig, 1831)
R.G. Kiesewetter: Geschichte der europäisch-abendländischen oder
unsrer heutigen Musik (Leipzig, 1834, 2/1846/R; Eng. trans., 1848)
J.G. [‘Amadeus’] Wendt: Über den gegenwärtigen Zustand der
Musik besonders in Deutschland und wie er geworden (Göttingen, 1836)
A. Sandberger: ‘Zur Geschichte des Haydnschen Streichquartetts’,
Altbayerische Monatsschrift, ii (1900), 41–64
V. Lee: Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (London, 2/1907)
[on the Arcadian Academy]
E.J. Dent: ‘Italian Opera in the Eighteenth Century, and its Influence
on the Music of the Classical Period’, SIMG, xiv (1912–13), 500–09
W. Fischer: ‘Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Wiener klassischen
Stils’, SMw, iii (1915), 24–84
G. Adler: ‘Wiener klassische Schule’, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte
(Frankfurt, 1924, 2/1929–30), pp.768–95
A. Heuss: ‘Einiges über den Stil der Wiener Klassiker’, ZMw, v (1926–
7), 193–6
E. Bücken: Die Musik des Rokokos und der Klassik (Potsdam, 1927)
 G. Adler: ‘Haydn and the Viennese Classical School’, MQ, xviii (1932),
191–207
G. Adler: ‘Style Criticism’, MQ, xx (1934), 172–6
H. Peyre: Qu’est-ce que le Classicisme? (Paris, 1935, 2/1965)
T.S. Eliot: What is a Classic? (London, 1945)
C. Cudworth: ‘Baroque, Rococo, Galant, Classic’, MMR, lxxxiii
(1953), 172–5
H. Tischler: ‘Classicism, Romanticism and Music’, MR, xiv (1953),
205–8
A. Yorke-Long: Music at Court: Four Eighteenth-Century Studies
(London, 1954)
H. Engel: ‘Haydn, Mozart und die Klassik’, MJb 1959, 46–79
H. Engel: ‘Die Quellen des klassischen Stiles’, IMSCR VIII: New York
1961, 285–304 [see also ii, 135–9]
G. Feder: ‘Bemerkungen über die Ausbildung der klassischen
Tonsprache in der Instrumentalmusik Haydns’, IMSCR VIII: New York
1961, 305–13 [see also ii, 135–9]
W.S. Newman: The Sonata in the Classic Era (Chapel Hill, 1963,
3/1983)
N. Dufourcq: ‘Die klassische französische Musik, Deutschland und
die deutsche Musikwissenschaft’, AMw, xxii (1965), 194–207
L. Finscher: ‘Zum Begriff der Klassik in der Musik’,
Musikwissenschaftliches Jb (1966), 9–34
H. Goldschmidt: ‘Über die Einheit der vokalen und instrumentalen
Sphäre in der klassischen Musik’, Musikwissenschaftliches Jb (1966), 35–
49
 J. Harris: ‘Le Geay, Piranesi and International Neo-Classicism in
Rome 1740–1750’, Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to
Rudolf Wittkower (London, 1967), 189–96
D. Heartz, G. Croll, P. Petrobelli and T. Volek: ‘Critical Years in
Music History: 1740–1760’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 159–93
H. Honour: Neo-Classicism (Harmondsworth, 1968/R)
M.S. Cole: ‘Momigny’s Analysis of Haydn’s Symphony no.103’, MR,
xxx (1969), 261–84
C. Rosen: The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York,
1971, enlarged 3/1997)
C. Dahlhaus: ‘Romantische Musikästhetik und Wiener Klassik’,
AMw, xxix (1972), 167–81
H.H. Eggebrecht: Versuch über die Wiener Klassik: die Tanzszene
in Mozarts ‘Don Giovanni’ (Wiesbaden, 1972)
L. Finscher: ‘Das Originalgenie und die Tradition: zur Rolle der
Tradition in der Entstehungsgeschichte des Wiener klassischen Stils’,
Studien zur Tradition in der Musik: Kurt von Fischer zum 60. Geburtstag,
ed. H.H. Eggebrecht and M. Lütolf (Munich, 1973), 165–75
M. Lütolf: ‘Zur Rolle der Antique in der musikalischen Tradition der
französischen Epoque Classique’, Studien zur Tradition in der Musik: Kurt
von Fischer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. H.H. Eggebrecht and M. Lütolf
(Munich, 1973), 145–64
D. Heartz: ‘Idomeneus Rex’, MJb 1973–4, 7–20
E. Wellesz and F. Sternfeld, eds.: The Age of Enlightenment
1745–1790, NOHM, vii (1973)
S. Erikson: Early Neo-Classicism in France (London, 1974)
 J. Starobinski: ‘Le mythe au XVIIIe siècle’, Critique, xxx (1977), 975–
97
L. Somfai: Joseph Haydn zongoraszonátái: hangszerválasztás és
előadói gyakorlat, műfaji tipológia és stíluselemzés (Budapest, 1979; Eng.
trans., 1995, as The Keyboard Sonatas of Joseph Haydn: Instruments and
Performance Practice, Genres and Styles)
L. Finscher: ‘Haydn, Mozart und der Begriff der Wiener Klassik’, Die
Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. C. Dahlhaus (Laaber, 1985), 232–9
W. Weber: ‘The Rise of the Classical Repertoire in Nineteenth-
Century Orchestral Concerts’,The Orchestra: Origins and
Transformations, ed. J. Peyser (New York,1986), 361–86
R. Bockholdt: ‘Über das Klassische der Wiener klassischen Musik’,
Über das Klassische (Frankfurt, 1987), 225–59
J. Webster: Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical
Style (Cambridge,1991)
W. Weber: The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century
England: a Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology (Oxford, 1992)
D. Heartz: Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740–1780 (New
York, 1995)
W. Kinderman: Beethoven (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995)

EMPFINDSAMKEIT
(Ger.).

A musical aesthetic associated with north Germany during the middle

of the 18th century, and embodied in what was called the ‘Empfindsamer
Stil’. Its aims were to achieve an intimate, sensitive and subjective
expression; gentle tears of melancholy were one of its most desired
responses. The term is usually translated as ‘sensibility’ (in the 18th-
century or Jane Austen sense, which derives from the French sensibilité).
‘Sentimental’ is another translation, sanctioned by Lessing when rendering
Sterne’s Sentimental Journey as Empfindsame Reise. One modern scholar,
W.S. Newman, gives ‘ultrasensitive’ as an English equivalent.

German ‘Empfindsamkeit’ was part of a wider European literary and

aesthetic phenomenon, largely British in origin (e.g. Shaftesbury’s cult of
feeling, and Richardson’s novel Pamela, 1741), which posited immediacy of
emotional response as a surer guide than intellect to proper moral
behaviour. C.P.E. Bach (henceforth called simply Bach), who was close to
Lessing and other progressive literary figures, best embodied the ideals of
‘Empfindsamkeit’ with respect to music. In his Versuch über die wahre Art
das Clavier zu spielen (1753) he stated that music’s main aims were to
touch the heart and move the affections; to do this he specified that it was
necessary to play from the soul (‘aus der Seele’). The style of music he chose
was often indistinguishable from the international idiom of finely nuanced,
periodic melody, supported by light-textured accompaniment: it was a
reaction to the ‘strict’ or ‘learned’ style and elsewhere was apt to go under
the name ‘galant’. A main difference was that the north Germans tended to
avoid lavish decoration: both Bach and Quantz cautioned against the over-
use of embellishments. Before them, Marpurg had written approvingly of
the Berlin school, saying ‘The performances of the Grauns, Quantz, Bach, et
al., are never characterized by masses of embellishments; impressive,
rhetorical and moving qualities spring from entirely different things, which
do not create as much stir, but touch the heart the more directly’. The most
easily identifiable ‘rhetorical’ device was instrumental recitative. It evolved
in imitation of the elaborate or obbligato recitative in opera seria, of which
Hasse and his circle at Dresden were the most admired exponents in
Germany. Bach provided a fine example in his ‘Prussian’ Sonatas, written in
1740. The so-called ‘redende Prinzip’ of Bach departs from recitative, but
goes far beyond it in his keyboard and chamber music, for example, in the
trio representing a ‘Dialogue between a Sanguinary and a Melancolic’
(1749). Another fundamental element in Bach’s style, related to recitative
by its freedom of rhythm, was the rhapsodic manner of the keyboard
fantasy, as evolved by Frescobaldi and Froberger, kept alive by German
organists, and passed on by Bach’s father. While Bach’s friends increasingly
saw the need to make explicit by words or programme the rhapsodic and
‘speaking’ elements in his music (e.g. Gerstenberg’s fitting of Hamlet’s
monologue to the music of the final Probestück accompanying the
Versuch), Bach himself held back from verbalization.

In literature the most influential model of ‘Empfindsamkeit’ was

provided by Klopstock’s Messias (1748), a redefinition of the epic in which
internal, subjective events predominate and the external drama exists only
as a point of reference. The poet Ramler wrote the Passion cantata Der Tod
Jesu in imitation of Klopstock. As set by C.H. Graun in 1755, it immediately
became the most central and successful monument of musical
‘Empfindsamkeit’. The drama is expressed mostly through the reflections
and emotions of anonymous devouts, who use the present tense. Their
musical speech is fashionably modern, relying on the aria types as well as
the obbligato recitative of opera seria, of which Graun was the most
important German master, after Hasse. His setting of ‘Gethsemane!’ (ex.1)
shows this conjunction of sentimental meditation and theatrical musical
language. The plethora of melodic sighs, the augmented 6th chord with
Phrygian cadence for questions, the iterated quavers or semiquavers to
express trembling, are all operatic clichés; more individual and expressive
are the choice of darker flat keys and the easy enharmonic manoeuvring.

A critic writing in Cramer’s Magazin der Musik in 1783 (i/2, p.1352)

still preferred Graun’s Der Tod Jesu to a more recent setting, saying that
‘Gethsemane! Gethsemane!’ ‘brought one to tears because of its touching,
heart-rending feeling’. Yet, even very early, voices were raised against the
sentimentality that made Graun so popular. In the article ‘Oratorio’ for his
Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4), Sulzer, writing with
advice from J.P. Kirnberger and J.A.P. Schulz, took exception to Der Tod
Jesu, saying ‘most arias are not differentiated enough from opera arias;
precisely this softness and the exaggerated, almost voluptuous polish of the
melodies, and in some places even playfulness kill the feeling
[Empfindung]’. In the same way Lessing, the man who founded
sentimental, bourgeois tragedy in Germany, ironically condemned
Klopstock’s lyrics, saying that they were ‘so voller Empfindung, dass man
oft gar nichts dabey empfindet’ (Sämtliche Schriften, iii, Brief 51). Schiller
took a similar line when surreptitiously reviewing his own play, Die Räuber
(1782), and saying that its incredibly sentimental heroine ‘has read too
much Klopstock’. Goethe pronounced judgment on the movement when,
looking back at his Werther, he admitted its sentimentality was indebted to
Sterne, and concluded ‘there arose a kind of tender–passionate aesthetic
which, because the humorous irony of the British was not given to us,
usually had to degenerate into a sorry self-torment’.

Writing generally of ‘Musik’ in his encyclopedia, Sulzer put a finer

point on the relationship of modern German style to the galant idiom: ‘that
music in recent times has the nice and very supple genius and fine
sensibility [Empfindsamkeit] of the Italians to thank is beyond doubt. But
also most of what has spoilt the true taste has also come out of Italy,
particularly the dominance of melodies that say nothing and merely tickle
the ear’. Schulz, who contributed music articles from the letter S onwards,
spelt out this criticism further: ‘The sonatas of the present-day Italians are
characterized by a bustle of sounds succeeding each other arbitrarily
without any other purpose than to gratify the insensitive ears of the layman’
(article ‘Sonata’). In order to give an example of music that went beyond
such lowly aims, Schulz resorted to the keyboard sonatas of Bach, praising
them because ‘they are so communicative [sprechend] that one believes
oneself to be perceiving not tones but a distinct speech, which sets and
keeps in motion our imagination and feelings [Empfindungen]’. Bach’s own
remarks about the difference between his art and that of the modern
Italians (among whom he included Schobert and his younger brother,
Johann Christian) are in a letter of 1768: ‘Their music falls upon the ear and
fills it up, but leaves the heart empty; in Italy now, as Galuppi himself told
me, the mode no longer tolerates Adagios, but only noisy Allegros, or at
most an Andantino’. The implication that Galuppi, greatest master of the
galant keyboard idiom in Italy and a personal friend of Bach’s, was in
sympathy with his ideals, lends further credence to the existence of a
galant-‘empfindsam’ symbiosis; another implication is that the aesthetic
ideals of the mid-century were yielding ground by about 1770 to a showier
and stormier phase, so-called ‘Sturm und Drang’.

Some historians have posited ‘Empfindsamkeit’ as a musical parallel to

‘Sturm und Drang’. The dramatic fluidity sought by both encourages such a
parallel. Bach wrote that he wanted to express many affects, closely
following upon one another; and emphasis upon a fluid, transitional
discourse, ranging quickly from one emotion to another, can be found in
many of his pieces. Yet the intimate, almost private, aspect of Bach’s art
represents a quality that helps define ‘Empfindsamkeit’ and set it apart as a
parallel phenomenon, one that anticipates and runs alongside the more
popular appeal of ‘Sturm und Drang’. Bach’s favourite instrument was the
clavichord. The boundaries of his artistic world and the ideals of his
generation were not such as could embrace all the revolutionary visions of
young Herder, Goethe and Schiller. The difference was more of degree than
of kind. Even as late as about 1785 Schubart, a typical ‘Stürmer’, wrote in
the Ideen praising the clavichord as the ‘empfindsame’ instrument par
excellence, calling it ‘this lonely, melancholy, inexpressively sweet
instrument … whoever does not prefer to bluster, rage and storm, whose
heart overflows often and readily in sweet feelings, he passes by the
harpsichord and the piano and chooses – a clavichord’. Bach, unlike his
friend Benda, drew back from melodrama, and even resisted attempts
made by literary friends like Gerstenberg to set texts under his fantasies.
They may be easily enrolled under the banner of Sturm und Drang; by his
caution, his reluctance to indulge in theatrics beyond the scope of his
keyboard, Bach may not.

See also Classical; Enlightenment; Galant; Rococo; Sturm und Drang.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (W. Hirschmann)

NewmanSCE
J.H. Campe: ‘Von der nöthigen Sorge für die Erhaltung des
Gleichgewichts unter den menschlichen Kräften. Besondere Warnung vor
dem Modefehler die Empfindsamkeit zu überspannen’, Allgemeine
Revision des gesammten Schul- und Erziehungswesens (Hamburg, 1785)
C.F.D. Schubart: Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Vienna,
1806/R)
E.F. Schmid: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und seine Kammermusik
(Kassel, 1931)
A. Schering: ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und das “redende Prinzip”
in der Musik’, JbMP 1938, 13–29
H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Das Ausdrucksprinzip im musikalische Sturm und
Drang’, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte,
xxix (1955), 323–49
L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: ‘Sturm und Drang in der deutschen
Klaviermusik von 1753–1763’, Mf, x (1957), 466–79
W.J. Mitchell, ed. and trans.: Essay on the True Art of Playing
Keyboard Instruments by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (New York, 1959)
R. Wyler: Form- und Stiluntersuchungen zum ersten Satz der
Klaviersonaten Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs (Biel, 1960)
P. Barford: The Keyboard Music of C.P.E. Bach (London, 1965)
W.S. Newman: ‘Emanuel Bach’s Autobiography’, MQ, li (1965), 363–
72
 G. Kaiser: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Sturm und Drang (Gutersloh,
1966, 3/1979 as Aufklärung, Empfindsamkeit, Sturm und Drang)
F.R. Bosonnet: ‘Die Bedeutung des Begriffs “Empfindsamkeit” für
die deutsche Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 352–5
E. Helm: ‘The “Hamlet” Fantasy and the Literary Element in C.P.E.
Bach’s Music’, MQ, lviii (1972), 277–96
G. Sauder: Empfindsamkeit, i: Voraussetzungen und Elemente
(Stuttgart, 1974); ii: Quellen und Dokumente (Stuttgart, 1980)
U. Karthaus, ed.: Sturm und Drang und Empfindsamkeit (Stuttgart,
1976)
P. Hohendahl: Der europäische Roman der Empfindsamkeit
(Wiesbaden, 1977)

DANIEL HEARTZ/BRUCE ALAN BROWN

ENLIGHTENMENT
(Ger. Aufklärung).

A movement in 18th-century thought dedicated to raising the level of

general education by combating superstition and inherited prejudices, and
by placing human betterment above preoccupation with the supernatural.
‘The proper study of mankind is man’ (Pope, Essay on Man, 1733). The
movement’s origins are placed in English empiricism (Locke, Newton),
French rationalism (Descartes, who was greatly admired for his clarity of
expression and critical methods) and French scepticism (Bayle). Key figures
in the diffusion of what was quite early called ‘les lumières’ were
Montesquieu (Lettres persanes, 1721; L’esprit des lois, 1748); Voltaire,
whose stay in England during the 1720s led to the eloquent defence of
humanitarian ideals in the Lettres philosophiques (1734); and Diderot, who
was the organizing genius behind the Encyclopédie (1751–72). In Italian
letters Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le dame (1737), written under
Voltaire’s aegis, is regarded as a typical specimen of ‘illuminismo’; it
imparted scientific concepts in easy and graceful form, after the model of
Fontenelle’s Eloges des académiques (1729; see illustration). Voltaire
praised Algarotti’s work for achieving the Horatian ideal of ‘instructing with
delight’. Burney sang the praises of another Italian author in the same
terms: ‘A true poet, says Horace, unites the sweetness of verse with the
utility of his precepts: and no author has penetrated so far into the
refinement of the art as Metastasio’.

In Germany similar stirrings came to the fore in the popular

philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing who, following Diderot’s
example, produced bourgeois dramas intended to raise the moral tone of
society. The founding of the various ‘national’ theatres in Germany and
Austria sprang from a desire to improve both society and the vernacular
language, the latter goal a vehicle towards achieving the former. Attempts
at social reform along humanitarian lines reached a highpoint in the Vienna
of Joseph II. The epitome of German enlightened thought was Kant’s Kritik
der reinen Vernunft (1781). Kant gave wide currency to the term itself with
an essay ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ (1784); his answer was couched as an
exegesis of another Horatian precept: ‘Sapere aude!’.
 French Rococo art of the earlier 18th century represented an attempt to
lighten the burden of grandeur left by the colossal undertakings, the
superhuman scale of Louis XIV. Its emphasis upon a light and airy
gracefulness was not without parallels in French music, particularly opéra-
ballet, a genre to which Rameau contributed some of his finest work. His
Indes galantes (1735) opened a sympathetic perspective on other cultures,
while his Fêtes d’Hébé (1739) celebrated the mutual dependence of the
sister arts in liberating the human spirit. Pastorales such as Mondonville’s
Titon et l’Aurore (1753) achieved an informal but elegant simplicity that
typified the age of Louis XV.

In Italian opera the Arcadian reform of the libretto brought a turning

away from the labyrinthine and often lurid plots of the 17th century towards
simpler dramas, where human conflicts were paramount, and the
intervention of superhuman powers rare (see Opera, §IV). Metastasio
combined utmost clarity and beauty of expression with a ‘douce morale’ (as
Goldoni put it) – qualities specially prized by his contemporaries, who saw
his dramas as a school of virtue. The delicate melodies, at once tender and
passionate, with which such composers as Vinci, Pergolesi and Hasse
clothed his verse spoke to the hearts of sensitive souls everywhere, and
account in large part for the vogue of the galant in music, and for
Empfindsamkeit. Goldoni achieved comparable stature in comic opera. His
realism and his gentle satire of social mores were no less motivated by the
double ideal of entertainment and improvement. His librettos, when set by
masters like Galuppi and Piccinni, raised mid-century opera buffa to a level
that inspired the creators of opéra-comique, and both genres affected the
creation of German Singspiel. Gluck synthesized the comic and serious,
both French and Italian, in reconstituting music drama along simpler, more
elementally human lines, beginning with Orfeo ed Euridice (1762).

The international acceptance of Italian opera by critics and arbiters of

taste was facilitated to no small degree by the literary polish lent by
librettists as skilful as Metastasio and Goldoni, and by their successful
application of the ‘utile et ductiles’ aesthetic. Scheibe applied the latter
standard even to instrumental music, as when he posed the question: ‘Who
can listen to a Graun or Hasse symphony without pleasure and benefit?’.
Answer: no-one in north Germany at that time, or at least no-one who
shared the tastes of Frederick II of Prussia, including C.P.E. Bach.
Frederick’s ideals were enlightened (to the extent that circumstances
allowed) and provided an example to other rulers who were important
patrons of music, including Catherine of Russia, Carl Theodor of the
Palatinate and Bavaria, and Joseph II of Vienna.

Diffusion of culture was one of the main goals of enlightened thought;

it affected music in various ways. The public concert was largely an 18th-
century invention. Increasingly large theatres were built to accommodate
an increasing public for spectacles and concerts. Handel’s oratorios were
directed mainly at a middle-class audience. The production of music for the
fashionable amateur to perform at home became a veritable industry. Much
of the instrumental music in the galant style arose in answer to the needs
of the ‘Galantuomo’. Production of musical instruments, especially
keyboard instruments, reached levels that had not been approached since
the 16th century, a resurgence paralleled in the history of music printing.
The immense output of songs with simple accompaniments or no
accompaniment at all (the sentimental romance and ballade were typical)
was destined for amateur circles; so were the unending volumes of
keyboard arrangements devoted to operas, oratorios and other concerted
music. Self-tutors in all aspects of music did not originate in the 18th
century, but there was a new quantity and diversity of publications
available. The historiography of music begun by Burney and others sought
to foster, as well as to record, the progress of civilization.

The anti-rational and even anti-intellectual bias that set in as a

counter-current during the third quarter of the century assumed vehement
expression as early as 1750, in Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les
arts, where civilization was attacked for having corrupted primitive virtue.
Such an about-turn shocked many a sensibility raised on the essential
optimism of enlightened thought. Gloom and pessimism, along with terror
of the unknown, became a counter-cultural fashion. In the visual arts they
found expression in shipwrecks, prisons and nightmares. In literature, and
by way of drama with some extensions into music, they found potent
expression in German ‘Sturm und Drang’.

French aesthetics managed to accommodate both currents. Diderot

encouraged poets, painters and composers to be ‘sombre and savage’.
Conflict between the rational and the emotional, so dear to later
‘Romantics’, was put down as a false dichotomy. The seemingly disparate
claims of the heart and the mind were held instead to be complementary, as
in the Encyclopédie (article ‘Foible’): ‘in the measure that the mind
acquires more enlightenment [lumières] the heart acquires more passion
[sensibilité]’. The interdependence of passion and reason was one of the
main legacies of French 18th-century thought. Berlioz subscribed to a
similar aesthetic, as when he wrote of his idol Gluck that he worshipped
that master’s works with ‘un culte passionné, quoique raisonné, je l’espère’.

One of the recurrent images accompanying enlightened thought was

that of the sun piercing the clouds of superstition and error. It
characterized much philosophic writing from Diderot, through Raynal, to
Condorcet, whose final paean to human perfectability was achieved in
Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1794).
Only after this point, with the onset of the Reign of Terror, and the
reactions that it unleashed, was there a decisive rejection of the idealism
represented by the ‘lumières’.

Music does not lack parallels. The most striking come by way of the
theatre. A turning back from the excessive preoccupation with the darker
side of life and the frankly anti-social irrationality of ‘Sturm und Drang’
marked the last two decades of the century. Goethe led the way towards an
affirmation of earlier ideals about human perfectibility, towards a balance
between objective and subjective forces in art. His return to more universal
standards gave rise to the notion of a ‘Classical’ era, which has since passed
to music. Analogies are not lacking between his mature achievements and
the Olympian works of Mozart’s last decade or Haydn’s most mature
masterpieces. There are other reasons why the greatest works of Mozart
and Haydn may be considered not only ‘Classical’ but enlightened. Both
masters, together with Goethe and Joseph II, became freemasons and
subscribed to the masonic ideals of universal brotherhood and the
liberating power of knowledge. The symbolic role that light assumes in Die
Zauberflöte has its parallel in the resounding ‘Fiat lux’ of The Creation,
which, along with The Seasons, expresses serene confidence in a man-
centred and divinely blessed universe. These sublime works provided the
century with a ‘lieto fine’ consistent with its highest ideals.

See also Classical; Empfindsamkeit; Galant; Rococo; and Sturm und

Drang.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Schering: ‘Die Musikästhetik der deutschen Aufklärung’, ZIMG,

viii (1906–7), 263, 316
P. Maugain: Etude sur l’évolution intellectuelle de l’Italie de 1657 à
1750 (Paris, 1909)
E. Bucken: Die Musik des Rokokos und der Klassik (Potsdam, 1927)
H. Abert: ‘Gluck, Mozart und der Rationalismus’, Gesammelte
Schriften und Vorlage (Halle, 1929), 31–145
P.H. Lang: Music in Western Civilization (New York, 1941)
M. Fubini, ed.: La cultura illuministica in Italia (Turin, 1957,
2/1964)
F. Valsecchi: L’Italia nel Settecento dal 1714 al 1788, Storia d’Italia,
vi (Verona, 1959)
M. Stern: ‘Haydn’s “Schöpfung”: Geist und Herkunft des van
Swietenschen Libretto: ein Beitrag zum Thema “Säkularisation” im
Zeitalter der Aufklärung’, Haydn-Studien, i (1966), 121–98
P. Gay: The Enlightenment: an Interpretation (New York, 1967)
R. Mortier: Clartés et ombres du siècle des lumières (Geneva, 1968)
 F. Venturi: Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan
Century (London, 1972) [chap.2, incl. essay ‘Was ist Aufklärung? Sapere
aude!’]
E. Wellesz and F. Sternfeld, eds.: The Age of Enlightenment
1745–1790, NOHM, vii (1973) [see also review by D. Heartz, MT, cxv
(1974), 295]
H.-J. Horn: ‘Fiat Lux: zum kunsttheoretischen Hintergrund der
“Erschaffung” des Lichtes in Haydns Schöpfung’, Haydn-Studien, iii (1973–
4), 65–84
P.H. Reill: The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism
(Berkeley, 1975)
B. Didier: La musique des Lumières: Diderot, the Encyclopédie,
Rousseau (Paris, 1985)
W. Birtel and C.-H. Mahling, eds.: Aufklärungen: Studien zur
deutsch-französischen Musikgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert: Einflüsse und
Wirkungen, ii (Heidelberg, 1986)
B. Baselt and S. Flesch, eds.: Aufklärerische Tendenzen in der
Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts und ihre Rezeption: Walther Siegmund-
Schultze zum 70. Geburtstag (Halle, 1987)
H. Stille, ed.: Mozart und die Ästhetik der Aufklärung: dem Wirken
Georg Kneplers gewidmet (Berlin, 1988)
W. Schulte: ‘J.A.P. Schulz, a Protagonist of the Musical
Enlightenment: Lieder im Volkston’, Music Research Forum, iii (1988),
23–34
R.R. Subotnik: ‘Whose Magic Flute? Intimations of Reality at the
Gate of the Enlightenment’, 19CM, xv (1991–2), 132–50
 N. Till: Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in
Mozart’s Operas (London, 1992)
T. Christiansen: Rameau and Musical Thought in the
Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1993)
A. Le Bar: Musical Culture and the Origins of the Enlightenment in
Hamburg (diss., Washington U., 1993)
C. Verba: Music and the French Enlightenment: Reconstruction of a
Dialogue, 1750–1764 (New York, 1993)
N.K. Baker and T. Christiansen, eds.: Aesthetics and the Art of
Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of
Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Kock (Cambridge, 1995)
T. Bauman and M.P. McClymonds, eds.: Opera and the
Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995)
D. Heartz: Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740–1780 (New
York, 1995)
P. Vít: Die Aufklärung in Prag und Mozart: zu den ‘oberen’ und
‘unteren’ Schichten in Philosophie und Ästhetik (Milan, 1995)
W. Klante: ‘Die Konstellation von Musik und Aufklärung am Gothaer
Hof’, Mf, xlix (1996), 47–53
R.R. Subotnik: Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in
Western Society (Minneapolis, 1996)

DANIEL HEARTZ
GALANT
(Fr.; It. galante).

A term widely used during the 18th century to denote music with
lightly accompanied, periodic melodies, and the appropriate manner of
performing the same. ‘Being galant, in general’, wrote Voltaire, ‘means
seeking to please’. The old French meaning of the general term with its
emphasis on valour had by the 1630s given way to a newer emphasis on
social or amatory grace: titles like Campra’s L’Europe galante (1697),
Rameau’s Les Indes galantes (1735), Guillemain’s Sonates en quatuors, ou
Conversations galantes et amusantes (1743) and Graun’s Le feste galanti
(1748) are to be understood in that latter sense. Watteau’s epochal
paintings of fêtes galantes contributed further to the vogue of the term.
Applied to letters, the term took on a meaning close to ‘French courtly
manner’, as in a treatise by C.F. Hunold (Menantes), Die allerneuste
Manier höflich und galant zu schreiben (1702), a manual for self-
instruction that Herder later denounced as lacking virility.

A musical parallel is at hand in Mattheson’s first publication, Das neu-

eröffnete Orchestre, oder Universelle und gründliche Anleitung wie ein
Galant Homme einen vollkommenen Begriff von der Hoheit und Würde
der edlen Music erlangen (1713); on the title-page roman typeface is used
in place of Gothic, significantly, to emphasize the numerous non-German
expressions. As an imported phenomenon, the galant style in Germany
borrowed much vocabulary from its countries of origin and generated a
more extensive theoretical literature. Mattheson’s ‘galant homme’ must be
taken to include both sexes; as his dedication of this work to a noble lady
indicates, much of the galant literature, like much galant music, was
intended to instruct and entertain female amateurs. Mattheson used the
substantive ‘galanterie’ in this and subsequent treatises with a variety of
meanings. Pieces called ‘galanteries’ were numerous in the suites of 17th-
century French harpsichord composers; the term was used to designate the
lighter, mainly homophonic dances, such as the minuet (J.S. Bach followed
this practice). As early as 1640 ‘galanteria’ was used to describe the playing
and the late style of Frescobaldi. Mattheson preferred that ‘Galanterien’ be
played on the clavichord rather than the harpsichord because its dynamic
nuances approximated more closely to vocal style, a feeling that was to
become widespread with partisans of a specific north German dialect of the
international galant idiom, ‘Empfindsamkeit’. In keeping with the
emphasis on a singing style, Mattheson also used the term in reference to
vocal pieces, saying that a French air had ‘ein etwas negligente Galanterie’
while an Italian aria had this in addition to more musical content, or ‘ein
harmonieusere Galanterie’; as a singer at the Hamburg Opera under Keiser
he was well acquainted with both types. Good music, in his view, required
melody, harmony and ‘galanterie’, the last being equated with the theatrical
style, as opposed to the strict or church style, and not subject to rules
(except those of ‘le bon goût’).

Other writers bear out this fundamental distinction. Scheibe opined in

Der critische Musikus (1737–40) that the galant way of writing had its
origins in the Italian theatre style. Throughout the Versuch über die wahre
Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753) C.P.E. Bach distinguished between the
learned and galant styles. Marpurg in his Abhandlung von der Fuge (1753)
contrasted fugal texture with the freedom of galant writing. Quantz was
more preoccupied than any of his contemporaries with defining the new
style, both in his Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen
(1752) and in his autobiography (1754; first printed in Marpurg’s
Historisch-kritische Beyträge, 1755). In the latter he described Fux’s
Costanza e fortezza, which he had heard at Prague in 1723, as magnificent,
but more in a sacred than theatrical style; he contrasted it with the galant
melodic style, described as being ornamented with many small figures and
passages, which he admitted were less appropriate to a vast space than an
intimate one, with fewer instruments. The following year, in Rome, he
heard Domenico Scarlatti perform and described him as a galant player in
the manner of the time. Having been introduced to the elder Scarlatti by
Hasse, he observed that the master played the harpsichord in a learned
manner but with less finesse than his son. At Paris in 1726–7, Quantz
encountered Blavet, whom he praised most highly among the numerous
composer-performers of the French flute school, the sonatas of which
would seem to qualify on musical grounds as quintessentially galant,
although Quantz did not so describe them. His emphasis upon the manner
of tone production led Quantz in the Versuch to define galant singing: it
consisted of dynamic shadings, joining the chest voice to the falsetto
smoothly, and in skilful ornamentation. Mattheson, Scheibe and other
writers occasionally used the term ‘Galanterie’ to refer to embellishments
themselves – either improvised or incorporated into the notation. Italian
flattery, Quantz said, was effected by slurred notes and by diminishing and
strengthening the tone (a description of the messa di voce). With this he
contrasted the noisy chest attacks and lack of legato in the old manner of
German choral singing. Here the essential musical quality of what the
period meant by galant emerges particularly clearly. Its ideal was the
Italian bel canto, which reached its highest pinnacle, according to Quantz,
in the first third of the century, when the most famous castratos were in
their prime (Farinelli and Carestini were singled out for praise). Flexibility
in dynamic nuance went with rhythmic flexibility, or tempo rubato, in the
modern Italian style. Schäfke showed that Quantz formulated the galant
aesthetic of clarity, pleasingness and naturalness in music on the basis of
several earlier theorists, including Mattheson, and that these ideals, typical
of the Enlightenment in general, went back to the rationalist philosophy of
Descartes (‘clare et distincte percipere’).

Instrumental pieces specifically called ‘galant’ or ‘galanteria’

proliferated in the chamber and solo literature during the third quarter of
the century, which may be considered the highpoint of the galant style in
instrumental music. Newman judged that qualitative peaks were reached in
the keyboard sonatas of Galuppi (who was fond of writing minuets in 3/8
time with the thinnest of textures), Soler and J.C. Bach, and in the chamber
music of G.B. Sammartini. The ‘menuet galant’ represented the epitome of
the style. Rousseau wrote in his Dictionnaire (1768): ‘le caractère du
menuet est une élégante et noble simplicité’ (cf C.P.E. Bach’s chief goal in
keyboard playing: ‘edle Einfalt des Gesangs’). In Sulzer’s Allgemeine
Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4) the minuet’s affect is said to be ‘noble
and of charming decency, yet united with simplicity’; ‘more than any other
dance [the minuet] is appropriate for societies of persons distinguished by
their refined way of life’.

Defenders of the old contrapuntal virtues were heard from more and
more as the 18th century reached its last third, with the onset of an anti-
galant reaction. Parallels may be observed with the turn against the Rococo
style in art and the rise of Sturm und Drang in literature. Adlung
complained that ‘murky’ basses and ‘Galanterien’ were being heard even in
church. In the article on melody in Sulzer’s encyclopedia (written with
advice from Kirnberger), ‘pleasant, so-called galanterie pieces’ and their
‘very small phrases, or segments’ are said to be appropriate for light,
flattering passions, but out of place in serious or sacred compositions,
where their effect is more dainty than beautiful. Under the rubric ‘Musik’
Sulzer noted that ‘the melodic language of the passions has gained
immensely’ from the introduction of ‘the so-called galant, or freer and
lighter manner of writing’, even while claiming that the abuses of this style
were leading to music’s complete degeneracy. Other complaints about the
galant manner were even more specifically moral. As Seidel has shown, the
term ‘galant’, having connoted ease and gracefulness of manner to the early
18th century, later came to stand for an empty, artificial and mainly
aristocratic manner of comporting or expressing oneself, and the opposite
of bourgeois naturalness of feeling.

Freedom of dissonance treatment (e.g. by voice-exchange), defended

by Heinichen in connection with the theatrical style, was further
rationalized by Marpurg and Türk as a specifically galant trait. In the
Fundamentum des General-Basses printed by Siegmeyer at Berlin and
attributed (posthumously) to Mozart, a certain cadential progression is
described as ‘modern (gallant)’: II6–I6-4–V–I. It is illustrated in duple
time and then in triple, the latter approximating to the cadence to the
minuet in Don Giovanni (which first introduces the dance, after hearing the
beginning of which Leporello says ‘che maschere galanti!’). Opposite this is
illustrated a cadence, called ‘contrapunctisch’, that consists of a I–V–I
progression with prepared 4–3 suspensions over the first two chords (see
Heartz and Mann, 1969, p.17). Cudworth (1949), unaware of this instance,
arrived at isolating the ‘cadence galante’ par excellence as IV (or II6)–I6-4–
V–I in minuet rhythm; he hypothesized its origins in some Italian opera
house early in the century. Its antecedents may in fact be discerned in, most
of all, the operatic arias of Leonardo Vinci (1690–1730), who was widely
recognized as an innovator: his light textures, simple harmony, periodic
melody and formula-based cadences typify the early galant. His immediate
followers in this light and gracious manner were Hasse and Pergolesi, who
used more decoration, particularly triplet figures and inverted dotted
rhythms. Burney wrote that Vinci was the first to break away from the older
style, ‘by simplifying and polishing melody, and calling the attention of the
audience chiefly to the voice-part, by disentangling it from fugue,
complication and laboured contrivance’. Before Vinci, elements of the
galant style can be found in the bel canto melodies of Alessandro Scarlatti;
Veracini’s unpublished violin sonatas of 1716, already markedly freer than
Corelli’s classic examples; and in dance music, particularly light
‘galanteries’ like the minuet with their simple textures, periodic structures
and short melodic motifs.

The galant idiom freed composers from the contrapuntal fetters of the
church style, to some degree even in the context of church music; its
simplicities and miniaturistic nature imposed new fetters, which in turn
were thrown off with the reintegration of more contrapuntal means in the
obbligato homophony that matured in the last three decades of the century.

See also Classical; Empfindsamkeit; Enlightenment; Rococo; and

Sturm und Drang.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG2 (W. Seidel)

NewmanSCE
E. Bücken: ‘Der galante Stil: eine Skizze seiner Entwicklung’, ZMw, vi
(1923–4), 418–30
R. Schäfke: ‘Quantz als Aesthetiker: eine Einführung in die
Musikästhetik des galanten Stils’, AMw, vi (1924), 213–42
C. Cudworth: ‘Cadence galante: the Story of a Cliché’, MMR, lxxix
(1949), 176–8
P. Nettl: ‘The Life of Herr Johann Joachim Quantz, as Sketched by
himself’, Forgotten Musicians (New York, 1951), 280–319
C. Cudworth: ‘Baroque, Rococo, Galant, Classic’, MMR, lxxxiii
(1953), 172–5
L. Ratner: ‘Eighteenth-Century Theories of Musical Period Structure’,
MQ, xlii (1956), 439–54
D.D. Boyden: ‘Dynamics in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
Music’, Essays on Music in Honor of Archibald Thompson Davison
(Cambridge, MA, 1957), 185–93
L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: ‘Der “Galante Stil” in der Musik des 18.
Jahrhunderts: zur Problematik des Begriffs’, SMw, xxv (1962), 252–60
G. Kaiser: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Sturm und Drang (Gütersloh,
1966, rev. 3/1979 as Aufklärung, Empfindsamkeit, Sturm und Drang)
D. Heartz: ‘Opera and the Periodization of Eighteenth-Century
Music’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 160–68
 D. Heartz and A. Mann, eds.: Thomas Attwoods Theorie- und
Kompositionsstudien bei Mozart, W.A. Mozart: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher
Werke, x/30/1, Kritischer Bericht (Kassel, 1969)
H. Serwer: Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718–1795): Music Critic in
a Galant Age (diss., Yale U., 1969)
J. Rushton: ‘The Theory and Practice of Piccinnisme’, PRMA, xcviii
(1971–2), 31–46 [on the melodic period]
D.A. Sheldon: ‘The Galant Style Revisited and Re-evaluated’, AcM,
xlvii (1975), 240–69
R. Marshall: ‘Bach the Progressive: Observations on his Later Works’,
MQ, xlii (1976), 313–57
J.W. Hill: ‘The Anti-Galant Attitude of F.M. Veracini’, Studies in
Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J.W. Hill (Kassel and Cliftian,
NJ, 1980), 158–96
H. Eppstein: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und der galante Stil’, Studien
zur deutsch-französischen Musikgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert:
Saarbrücken 1981, 209–18 [with Fr. summary]
D.A. Sheldon: ‘Exchange, Anticipation, and Ellipsis: Analytical
Definitions of the Galant Style’, Music East and West: Essays in Honor of
Walter Kaufmann, ed. T. Noblitt (New York, 1981), 225–41
C. Dahlhaus: ‘Galanter Stil und freier Satz’, Die Musik des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Laaber, 1985), 24–32
B.R. Hanning: ‘Conversation and Musical Style in the Late
Eighteenth-Century Parisian Salon’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxii
(1989), 512–28
M. Havlová: ‘Galanterie und Lebenspraxis’, Stil in der Musik (Brno,
1992), 86–90
 M. Perez Gutierrez: ‘Algunas reflexiones sobre el nuevo estilo
artistico de mediados del siglo XVIII en la musica de tecla de la peninsula
iberica en relacion con Europa’, Livro de homenagem a Macario Santiago
Kastner, ed. M.F. Cidrais-Rodrigues, M. Morais and R.V. Nery (Lisbon,
1992), 265–83
C.A. Le Bar: Musical Culture and the Origins of the Enlightenment in
Hamburg (diss., U. of Washington, 1993)

DANIEL HEARTZ/BRUCE ALAN BROWN

ROCOCO
A term from decorative art that has been applied by analogy to music,
especially French music, of the 18th century. It properly stands for a style of
architectural decoration that originated in France during the last years of
the 17th century, born of a relaxation of the rules of French classicism, not
as a consequence of the Italian Baroque. The derivation of the term
(rocaille, ‘shellwork’) is post facto and pejorative, like most critical
descriptions of the style. The term seems to have originated around 1796–7
as artists’ jargon in the studio of Jacques-Louis David, where (as Sheriff
noted) it was used ‘to denigrate the painting produced during the reign of
Louis XV, when Mme de Pompadour was an arbiter of taste’.
(Condemnation of the more ‘feminized’ features of the Rococo style was
routine until recent times.)
 Kimball, one of the first to establish the origins of the Rococo,
described it as ‘linear organization of surface through the transformation of
the frame on the suggestion of the arabesque’. According to him the first
phase, one of incomparable lightness and grace, lasted until about 1730 and
is properly called ‘style régence’; the main creative figure was Lepautre,
who derived his inspiration from the painted arabesque of Berain, the so-
called prophet of Rococo. A second phase, the ‘genre pittoresque’, ‘genre
rocaille’ or ‘style Louis XV’, lasted until about 1760 and was an elaboration
of the first in the direction of more exaggerated shell- and plant-derived
forms; Pineau and Meissonnier were the main figures. The accompanying
illustration, probably dating from the 1730s, shows the second phase. The
style’s caprices were criticized even during its heyday, by Voltaire (1731)
and the architect Blondel (1738) among others. The Rococo’s downfall was
hastened by its diffusion beyond the nobility, for whom it had connoted a
distinct set of cultural values (Scott, 1995), and by the neo-classical
reaction, begun by French academicians in Rome working in collaboration
with Piranesi. The 1750s marked the triumph of the neo-classical style in
Paris, and in 1754 Cochin published an ironic obituary of Pineau saying
‘everything that separates art from the antique taste may be said to owe its
invention or perfection to Pineau’. In 1763 Grimm summarized the change
in style: ‘The forms of ancient times are much in favour. Taste has benefited
thereby, and everything has become à la Grecque’. The demise of the older
style was less complete or abrupt than he claimed; it was too ingrained and
quintessentially French to disappear without leaving many traces. Several
of the greatest artists, schooled in the playfulness of the Rococo, continued
to draw delight from its manner, albeit in more refined and sober terms, for
example Boquet, whose ethereal costumes and scenic designs set the style
at the Opéra into the 1770s.

The Rococo style, in all its applications, spread rapidly, even as far as
China, generally with a lag of a decade or so behind Paris. A Viennese
equivalent evolved somewhat independently, starting from the same
designs of Berain. As ‘the French style’ it flowered briefly in England (e.g.
Chippendale, and Hogarth’s serpentine ‘line of beauty’), whence it traveled
to the American colonies; there, during the Revolutionary period, it became
so ‘naturalised’ as to acquire patriotic connotations, in opposition to the
neo-classical taste then gaining favour in Britain. The most genial clients of
the Rococo were in the southern, predominantly Catholic, parts of
Germany. By the 1720s French artists, or their plans, were put to use at
Bonn and Würzburg. The elder Cuvilliés, trained in Paris (1720–24),
carried the style to Bavaria, where he worked under the lavish patronage of
the electors for several decades, building several country houses and the
theatre in the Munich residence (1751–3) which has been called the ‘Jewel
of the Rococo’. French architects dominated building at the courts of the
two most important south German music centres, Mannheim (Pigage) and
Stuttgart (Guépière). German artists fused Rococo ornament with
traditional styles of church building, largely Italian-inspired, and achieved
an architectural synthesis that is still much admired. The collision of an
Italian-derived style with a French-derived one in south Germany and
Austria has led to theories that the former yielded to the latter, temporally,
producing the sequence Baroque–Rococo–neo-classicism within a few
decades around the middle of the century. Hitchcock correctly regarded
German Rococo as ‘a sort of enclave in the Late Baroque rather than its
successor’. He added that ‘no inexorable stylistic sequence leads from the
Baroque, through the Rococo, to the Neoclassic. The major historical break
… came not at the beginning but at the end of the Rococo’.

The concept of a Rococo in music has never been seriously elaborated.

Critics have applied the term to a wide variety of musical phenomena, most
of them more appropriately described by the 18th-century expression
‘galant’. Pergolesi’s La serva padrona has been called ‘Italian Rococo’,
which illuminates neither artistic nor musical connections between France
and Italy; nor is Sedlmayr and Bauer’s connection of the stage architect
Galli-Bibiena’s scene vedute per angolo with the Rococo’s characteristic
asymmetry particularly helpful. The concept has been used just as
dubiously about literature, even about the young Goethe. Prudence dictates
that musical parallels with the Rococo style in the visual arts be restricted
to France, or to areas, geographic or artistic, where French culture was
paramount. The ballet is such an area, being largely French-directed
wherever encountered. At Paris itself preferences for the opéra-ballet, a
lighter and less demanding spectacle than the tragédie lyrique,
corresponded in time no less than in aim with the early Rococo. The
opéras-ballets and pastorales of Destouches and Campra represented a
considerable relaxation of tone compared with the solemnity and pathos of
Lully’s heroic tragedies. Favart’s later pastorales for the fairground theatres
inspired notable examples of Rococo decorative art, in tapestries and
porcelains after designs by Boucher. The first phase, or ‘style régence’, of
the Rococo also corresponds with the maturity of François Couperin, who
lightened the French style by further refinements in ornamentation while
continuing the traditions of his 17th-century predecessors; the Rococo
element is especially clear in his little character-pieces on pastoral subjects,
a genre in which Daquin also excelled. The same period saw the emergence
of the French flute school, of significance in helping to establish and further
the galant style, which could also be described as a relaxing of the old rules.
La Laurencie outlined a ‘style rocaille ou galant’ in connection with the
French violin school (Leclair). The second phase (c1730–60) corresponds
with the ascendancy of Rameau, whose works baffled many listeners with
their unexpected harmonic turns and complications. One contemporary
commentator (Bricuaire de la Dixmérie, Les deux âges du goût, 1770)
applied the term ‘pittoresque’ to Rameau’s Platée (1745); Gardel attributed
the perfection of dancing to Rameau, saying he created it by ‘l’expression
pitoresque’ and the prodigious variety of his airs de ballet (Albert de Croix,
L’ami des arts, 1776). Mondonville’s new kind of keyboard sonata with
string accompaniment, a fanciful and rather fussy genre, might also be
compared with the ‘genre pittoresque’. Even so, the clearest parallels
between music and visual arts emerge when the Rococo was overthrown by
neo-classicism (see Classical, §3).

See also Empfindsamkeit; Enlightenment; Galant; and Sturm und

Drang.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

La LaurencieEF
E. Bücken: Die Musik des Rokokos und der Klassik (Potsdam, 1927)
F. Kimball: The Creation of the Rococo (Philadelphia, 1943; Fr.
trans., enlarged, 1949, as Le Style Louis XV)
 C. Cudworth: ‘Cadence galante: the Story of a Cliché’, MMR, lxxix
(1949), 176–8
C. Cudworth: ‘Baroque, Rococo, Galant, Classic’, MMR, lxxxiii
(1953), 172–5
P. de Colombier: L’architecture française en Allemagne au XVIIIe
siècle (Paris, 1956)
H.A. Klaiber: Der württembergische Oberbaudirektor Philip de la
Guépière (Stuttgart, 1959)
L.W. Böhm: Das Mannheimer Schloss (Karlsruhe, 1962) [on Pigage]
G. Zick: ‘D'après Boucher: die Vallée de Montmorency und die
europäische Porzellanplastik’, Keramos, xxix (1965), 3–47
P. Minguet: Esthétique du rococo (Paris, 1966)
H. Sedlmayr and H. Bauer: ‘Rococo’, Encyclopedia of World Art
(New York, 1966)
J. Harris: ‘Le Geay, Piranesi and International Neo-classicism in
Rome 1740–1750’, Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to
Rudolf Wittkower, ed. D. Fraser, H. Hibbard and M.J. Lewine (London,
1967), 189–96
F. Wolf: François de Cuvilliés 1695–1768 (Munich, 1967)
H.R. Hitchcock: Rococo Architecture in Southern Germany
(London, 1968)
A. Mayeda: ‘Ongakushi ni okeru rokoko no gainen ni tsuite’ [The
concept of Rococo in music history], Oto to shisaku: Nomura Yosio sensei
kanreki kinen ronbun-shū (Tokyo, 1969), 362–72 [incl. Ger. summary]
A. Blunt: Some Uses and Misuses of the Terms Baroque and Rococo
(London, 1972)
S. Erikson: Early Neo-classicism in France (London, 1974)
 A. Laing: ‘French Ornamental Engravings and the Diffusion of the
Rococo’, Le stampe e la diffusione delle immagini e degli stili, ed. H.
Zerner (Bologna, 1983), 109–27
A. Laing: ‘Boucher et la pastorale peinte’, Revue de l’art, lxxiii (1986),
55–64
M. Sheriff: Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (Chicago and London,
1990)
M. Levey: Painting and Sculpture in France, 1700–1789 (New Haven,
CT, 1993)
K. Scott: The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early
Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT, 1995)
R. John and L. Tavernier: ‘Rococo’, The Dictionary of Art, ed. J.
Turner (London, 1996)

DANIEL HEARTZ/BRUCE ALAN BROWN

STURM UND DRANG

(Ger.: ‘storm and stress’).

A movement in German letters, reflected in the other arts, that reached

its highpoint in the 1770s. It is most easily defined by its artistic aims: to
frighten, to stun, to overcome with emotion. In line with these aims was an
extreme emphasis on an anti-rational, subjective approach to all art.
Although almost accidental in origin, the term ‘Sturm und Drang’ reflected
ancient Stoic concepts of tempestas and affectus, according to Heckscher
(1966–7), now positively rather than negatively valorized with regard to
artistic creation. The young Goethe was the leading figure, with his play
Götz von Berlichingen (1773) on a medieval German subject.

The movement had been prepared by various creative spirits of the

mid-century, who were still half part of the fashionable appeal to
sentimentality of the time, so-called ‘Empfindsamkeit’. On an international
level it is necessary to give credit to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742;
Ger. trans., 1751). Also prefiguring the movement was Rousseau’s
rediscovery of nature at its most awesome, from Alpine peaks to ocean
depths. A special kinship may also be established with Diderot because of
his frequent and influential calls for sombre, savage and grandiose qualities
in painting, poetry and music. Mercier worked these precepts into a treatise
on drama that found a wide response among German writers, partly
because of its social aspects, with emphasis on class struggle. No less
important was the widespread revival of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which
had the effect of liberating dramatists from subservience to the style and
the rules of classicistic drama and giving them a sense of historicism. The
expression ‘Sturm und Drang’ comes from the title of a play about the
American Revolution, written in 1776 by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger.
With Schiller’s play Die Räuber (1780–81) the movement is generally
accounted to have reached its zenith, after which both Schiller and Goethe
gradually returned to more generally accepted standards.

There were parallel movements in the other arts. The fashion for
storms and shipwrecks in painting, associated particularly with Joseph
Vernet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, capitalized on the delight in
conveying fear and terror. Painters who specialized in nightmarish visions
fall into the same category. Goethe wrote to a friend in 1779: ‘I have got
hold of some paintings and sketches by Fuseli, which will give you all a
good fright’. Blake proved a worthy disciple of Fuseli. The vogue of
Piranesi’s Carceri from mid-century on bespeaks another aspect of the
revelling in gloom and tortured feelings, as well as the appeal of a remote
and more romantic past. Gothic dungeons à la Piranesi afforded some of
the strongest statements in visual terms upon the operatic stages of the
time. A related phenomenon was the strongly anti-rational appeal of
‘Gothic novels’, which began with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
(1764). At the same time James MacPherson published his primitivistic
Ballads of Ossian, passing them off as translations from the Gaelic (1762–
3).

A musical parallel is best approached in the theatre, where all the arts
meet. Stimulating strong emotional responses was a prime aim of the
operatic reform about 1760. What was experienced at the time as a most
potent weapon for passionate, unbridled expression was obbligato (or
orchestrally accompanied) recitative. In the hands of Italian masters like
Jommelli and Traetta, this language of orchestral commentary was pushed
to unheard-of lengths of tone-painting. A related territory, by virtue of its
freedom of action and fluid, transitional techniques, was the dramatic
ballet, where music painted various pantomimic gestures. The
choreographers Noverre (Lettres sur la danse, 1760) and Angiolini were
both significant in advancing towards the pantomime ballet; the latter
devised the stage action in Gluck’s Don Juan (1761) and wrote a
programme note that clearly proclaimed ‘Sturm und Drang’ ideals: ‘[Gluck]
a saisi parfaitement le terrible de l’Action. Il a taché d’exprimer les passions
qui y jouent, et l’épouvante qui règne dans la catastrophe’. The ferocious
intensity of the D minor finale was indeed well calculated to evoke terror –
Mozart’s Don Giovanni, 25 years later, was still beholden to it. From here it
was but a step to the scene with the furies in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice
(1762), also choreographed by Angiolini. The resources of obbligato
recitative and the dramatic ballet gave composers a ready-made arsenal
with which to fashion the continuous web of pictorial music necessary to
accompany mélodrame (spoken drama supported by orchestral mood
music). Rousseau pioneered this genre with his Pygmalion (1770). It was
quickly taken up by Goethe and other literary figures. Georg Benda’s music
for Ariadne and Medea (1774–5) achieved the greatest successes for the
genre. Mozart first came into contact with them in 1777–8 at Mannheim,
where one of the German companies specializing in Shakespeare put on
Medea. His pleasantly astonished reaction led to experiments with the
technique in Zaide (1779) and in his revisions of the stage music for König
Thamos. He also planned to write a fully-fledged mélodrame, on the
subject of Semiramide, on which Gluck had written the most radically
innovatory of his dramatic ballets (1765). Obbligato recitative was pushed
to its utmost expressive consequences in Idomeneo (1780–81), a product of
his Mannheim and Paris experiences. His utterances about this opera
betray a typical ‘Sturm und Drang’ attitude towards dramatic realism (‘Man
muss glauben es sey wircklich so!’, written in connection with the oracular
pronouncement accompanied by trombones in Act 3), and with regard to
evoking fear and terror from the audience (e.g. the storm scenes in C minor
and F minor, the D minor flight chorus, described in the libretto as a
pantomime of ‘Angst und Schrecken’). Mozart’s power in expressing the
macabre and the terrible also sometimes came to the fore in his earlier
stage works, notably in the tomb scene of Lucio Silla (1772) and in parts of
La finta giardiniera (1774).

Other composers have been linked with the ‘Sturm und Drang’
movement with more or less appropriateness. In north Germany, Rolle
went far beyond the merely sentimental in works such as his Tod Abels
(published 1771), Abraham (1777), Lazarus (1779) and Thirza (1781), which
may be compared with Benda’s mélodrames in terms of tragic grandeur,
dramatic fluidity, use of unifying motifs, and large-scale tonal planning.
The second Berlin school of lied composers, although they went beyond the
first school’s insistence upon being pleasing at all times, never produced
such stark and uncompromising music as did Rolle at his best. Bücken
assessed the operas of Schweitzer on texts of Wieland (Alceste, 1773;
Rosamunde, 1777) as falling between ‘Sturm und Drang’ and ‘galant
Empfindsamkeit’, with the composer leaning towards the former and the
poet towards the latter. In south Germany the main centres were Stuttgart
(with Jommelli pupils like Zumsteeg) and Mannheim (Schobert and
Eckhard have been singled out as pioneers of a robust piano style that
imitated the famed orchestral fireworks of the Mannheim band). Even
Mozart admired the fiery music in Holzbauer’s Günther von Schwarzburg
(1778 – another medieval German subject). Among the Mannheim
composers, Vogler was the foremost ‘Stürmer’ with his frankly sensational
programme overtures (Hamlet, 1778), his ballets and other stage works. Of
the storm in his mélodrame, Lampedo (1778), he wrote: ‘the orchestra
cannot be distinguished from the thunder ram above the timber-work of
the theatre, the rain machine, and the lightning that pierces the darkness
on stage; all work together to contribute to the dramatic realism by which a
horrible tempest is conjured up for the eyes and ears’. Gradations of
lighting in the theatre accompanied these storms and other incidences of
nature in upheaval, an important visual counterpart to the dramatic fluidity
sought through music (Loutherbourg was a pioneer here). Vogler’s
significance in establishing a new, more ‘romantic’ approach to the lyric
stage emerges from his Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule (1778–
81) no less than from his music. As the respected teacher of a younger
generation including Winter, Weber and Meyerbeer, he may be considered
one of the seminal figures linking the ‘Sturm und Drang’ variety of
‘romanticism’ with that of the early 19th century.

A persuasive case has been made (Brook, 1970) for considering

Haydn’s phase of passionate works in the minor mode, characteristic of the
years round 1770, along with similar works of other Austrian symphonists,
as a ‘Sturm und Drang’ phenomenon. Their vocabulary of syncopations,
wild leaps and tremolo passages is much the same as in slightly earlier
musical depictions of furies in Viennese stage works; Sisman (1990) has
likewise identified close links between Haydn’s symphonic and theatrical
music during this period. (The symphony ‘La casa del diavolo’, 1771,
composed by the former Burgtheater cellist Luigi Boccherini in imitation of
Gluck’s ballet Don Juan, is another notable example of such direct
theatrical-symphonic interchange.) Brook compared Haydn’s turn towards
more Olympian ideals in the following decades with the turn of events in
German letters, and with Goethe in particular. Although parallel
movements to the musical ‘Sturm und Drang’ can be discerned in other
countries, it seems unwise to apply this term, because of its very nature,
beyond the German-speaking lands, except in cases of direct imitation – as
with Gaetano Pugnani’s orchestral suite or Melodram (c1790) based on
Goethe’s 1774 novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Even within German-
speaking lands the appeal of ‘Sturm und Drang’ was limited; Johann Pezzl
(Skizze von Wien, 1786–90) noted that this ‘paroxysm … was never able to
take root in Vienna, or in any large city where one possessed knowledge of
the world and its manners [Weltkennt-nis und Lebensart]’. C.P.E. Bach has
been held up as an archetypal representative in music of the ‘Sturm und
Drang’ movement. While such a case can be made, his age and his
reluctance to participate directly in musical theatre make it more
appropriate to view him as a particularly powerful creator within the
preceding and related aesthetic sphere of Empfindsamkeit.

See also Classical; Empfindsamkeit; Enlightenment; Galant and

Rococo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Das Ausdrucksprinzip im musikalischen Sturm
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DANIEL HEARTZ/BRUCE ALAN BROWN