What Specific Romantic Ideals Did Nineteenth-century Ballet and Opera Express to Its Audience?

The Classical Period

The dates of the Classical period in Western music are generally accepted as existence between about 1750 and 1820. All the same, the term classical music is used in a colloquial sense as a synonym for Western art music, which describes a diversity of Western musical styles from the ninth century to the present, and especially from the sixteenth or seventeenth to the nineteenth. This article is nigh the specific menses from 1730 to 1820.^[1]

The Classical period falls between the Baroque and the Romantic periods. The best-known composers from this period are Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert; other notable names include Luigi Boccherini, Muzio Clementi, Antonio Soler, Antonio Salieri, François Joseph Gossec,Johann Stamitz, Carl Friedrich Abel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and Christoph Willibald Gluck. Ludwig van Beethoven is also regarded either equally a Romantic composer or a composer who was function of the transition to the Romantic.

Franz Schubert is also something of a transitional figure, as are Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Mauro Giuliani, Friedrich Kuhlau, Fernando Sor, Luigi Cherubini, Jan Ladislav Dussek, and Carl Maria von Weber. The period is sometimes referred to as the era ofViennese Classic or Classicism (German: Wiener Klassik ), since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Antonio Salieri, and Ludwig van Beethoven all worked at some time in Vienna, and Franz Schubert was built-in there.

Classicist door in Olomouc, The Czechia. An example of Classicist compages.

Classicism

In the middle of the 18th century, Europe began to movement toward a new fashion in architecture, literature, and the arts, generally known asClassicism. This style sought to emulate the ideals of Classical antiquity, especially those of Classical Greece. While still tightly linked to court civilisation and absolutism, with its formality and accent on order and hierarchy, the new style was likewise "cleaner". It favored clearer divisions between parts, brighter contrasts and colors, and simplicity rather than complexity. In addition, the typical size of orchestras began to increase.

The remarkable evolution of ideas in "natural philosophy" had already established itself in the public consciousness. In particular,Newton'south physics was taken equally a paradigm: structures should be well-founded in axioms and be both well-articulated and orderly. This taste for structural clarity began to affect music, which moved abroad from the layered polyphony of the Baroque period toward a style known equally homophony, in which the melody is played over a subordinate harmony. This move meant that chords became a much more than prevalent characteristic of music, fifty-fifty if they interrupted the melodic smoothness of a single part. As a result, the tonal construction of a piece of music became more audible.

The new mode was likewise encouraged by changes in the economic club and social structure. As the 18th century progressed, the nobility became the main patrons of instrumental music, while public taste increasingly preferred comic opera. This led to changes in the way music was performed, the most crucial of which was the move to standard instrumental groups and the reduction in the importance of thecontinuo—the rhythmic and harmonic footing of a slice of music, typically played by a keyboard (harpsichord or organ) and potentially by several other instruments. One way to trace the decline of the continuo and its figured chords is to examine the disappearance of the termobbligato, meaning a mandatory instrumental role in a piece of work of bedroom music. In Bizarre compositions, additional instruments could be added to the continuo according to preference; in Classical compositions, all parts were specifically noted, though non alwaysnotated, and then the term "obbligato" became redundant. By 1800, it was practically extinct.

Economic changes too had the outcome of altering the balance of availability and quality of musicians. While in the late Baroque a major composer would accept the entire musical resources of a town to draw on, the forces bachelor at a hunting lodge were smaller and more fixed in their level of ability. This was a spur to having primarily unproblematic parts to play, and in the case of a resident virtuoso group, a spur to writing spectacular, idiomatic parts for sure instruments, as in the case of the Mannheim orchestra. In add-on, the appetite for a continual supply of new music, carried over from the Baroque, meant that works had to be performable with, at best, one rehearsal. Indeed, even after 1790 Mozart writes about "the rehearsal", with the implication that his concerts would take only one.

Since polyphonic texture was no longer the main focus of music (excluding the development section) only rather a unmarried melodic line with accessory, there was greater emphasis on notating that line for dynamics and phrasing. The simplification of texture made such instrumental detail more than of import, and also made the use of characteristic rhythms, such equally attending-getting opening fanfares, the funeral march rhythm, or the minuet genre, more of import in establishing and unifying the tone of a single movement.

Forms such as the concerto and sonata were more heavily defined and given more specific rules, whereas the symphony was created in this period (this is popularly attributed to Joseph Haydn). Theconcerto grosso (a concerto for more than ane musician) began to exist replaced by thesolo concerto (a concerto featuring only i soloist), and therefore began to place more importance on the particular soloist's ability to prove off. There were, of class, someconcerti grossi that remained, the most famous of which being Mozart'due south Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola in E flat Major.

A string quartet. From left to right: violin i, violin 2, cello, viola

Main characteristics

Classical music has a lighter, clearer texture than Bizarre music and is less complex. It is mainly homophonic—melody in a higher place chordal accompaniment (but counterpoint is past no means forgotten, especially later in the period). It besides make utilize of Style gallant in the classical menses which was drawn in opposition to the strictures of the Baroque mode, emphasizing light elegance in identify of the Bizarre'south dignified seriousness and impressive grandeur.

Variety and contrast inside a piece became more than pronounced than before. Multifariousness of keys, melodies, rhythms and dynamics (usingcrescendo, diminuendo andsforzando), forth with frequent changes of mood and timbre were more commonplace in the Classical period than they had been in the Baroque. Melodies tended to be shorter than those of Baroque music, with clear-cutting phrases and conspicuously marked cadences. The orchestra increased in size and range; the harpsichord continuo fell out of use, and the woodwind became a cocky-contained section. As a solo musical instrument, the harpsichord was replaced by the piano (or fortepiano). Early piano music was light in texture, frequently with Alberti bass accessory, but it afterwards became richer, more than sonorous and more powerful.

Importance was given to instrumental music—the principal kinds were sonata, trio, cord quartet, symphony, concerto, serenade and divertimento. Sonata form developed and became the most important form. It was used to build upward the first motility of most large-scale works, merely also other movements and single pieces (such as overtures).

History

The Baroque/Classical transition c. 1730–1760

Gluck, detail of a portrait by Joseph Duplessis, dated 1775 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

At outset the new style took over Baroque forms—the ternaryda capo aria and thesinfonia andconcerto—but composed with simpler parts, more notated ornamentation and more emphatic division into sections. Yet, over time, the new aesthetic caused radical changes in how pieces were put together, and the basic layouts changed. Composers from this menstruum sought dramatic effects, striking melodies, and clearer textures. The Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti was an important figure in the transition from Bizarre to Classical. His unique compositional style is strongly related to that of the early Classical period. He is best known for composing more than than five hundred i-movement keyboard sonatas. In Spain, Antonio Soler also produced valuable keyboard sonatas, more varied in grade than those of Scarlatti, with some pieces in 3 or four movements.

Baroque music generally uses many harmonic fantasies and does non concentrate that much on the structure of the musical slice, musical phrases and motives. In the classical flow, the harmonic functions are simpler. Nevertheless, the structure of the piece, the phrases and motives, are much more than of import in the tunes than in the Baroque catamenia.

Another important pause with the by was the radical overhaul of opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, who cut away a groovy deal of the layering and improvisational decoration and focused on the points of modulation and transition. By making these moments where the harmony changes more focal, he enabled powerful dramatic shifts in the emotional color of the music. To highlight these episodes he used changes in instrumentation, melody, and mode. Among the nearly successful composers of his fourth dimension, Gluck spawned many emulators, 1 of whom was Antonio Salieri. Their emphasis on accessibility brought huge successes in opera, and in song music more widely: songs, oratorios, and choruses. These were considered the most important kinds of music for performance and hence enjoyed greatest success in the public estimation.

The stage between the Bizarre and the rise of the Classical, with its broad mixture of competing ideas and attempts to unify the different demands of sense of taste, economics and "worldview", goes by many names. It is sometimes calledGalant,Rococo, orpre-Classical, or at other timesearly on Classical ^{[commendation needed]}. It is a period where some composers still working in the Baroque style flourish, though sometimes thought of as being more of the past than the present—Bach, Handel, and Telemann all composed well beyond the point at which the homophonic manner is clearly in the ascendant. Musical civilization was caught at a crossroads: the masters of the older way had the technique, but the public hungered for the new. This is one of the reasons C. P. E. Bach was held in such loftier regard: he understood the older forms quite well and knew how to present them in new garb, with an enhanced variety of form.

Circa 1750–1775

Haydn portrait by Thomas Hardy, 1792

By the late 1750s there were flourishing centers of the new style in Italia, Vienna, Mannheim, and Paris; dozens of symphonies were equanimous and there were bands of players associated with theatres. Opera or other vocal music was the feature of most musical events, with concertos and symphonies (arising from the overture) serving as instrumental interludes and introductions for operas and church building services. Over the class of the Classical period, symphonies and concertos developed and were presented independently of vocal music.

The "normal" ensemble—a trunk of strings supplemented past winds—and movements of particular rhythmic grapheme were established by the late 1750s in Vienna. However, the length and weight of pieces was even so set with some Baroque characteristics: individual movements still focused on one "affect" or had only one sharply contrasting eye section, and their length was not significantly greater than Bizarre movements. There was non yet a clearly enunciated theory of how to compose in the new style. It was a moment ripe for a quantum.

Many consider this quantum to have been fabricated by C. P. E. Bach, Gluck, and several others. Indeed, C. P. Due east. Bach and Gluck are ofttimes considered founders of the Classical style.

The first great master of the style was the composer Joseph Haydn. In the late 1750s he began composing symphonies, and by 1761 he had equanimous a triptych (Morning,Apex, andEvening) solidly in the contemporary fashion. Equally a vice-Kapellmeister and later Kapellmeister, his output expanded: he equanimous over forty symphonies in the 1760s lone. And while his fame grew, equally his orchestra was expanded and his compositions were copied and disseminated, his voice was merely ane amongst many.

While some suggest that he was overshadowed by Mozart and Beethoven, it would be difficult to overstate Haydn's centrality to the new style, and therefore to the future of Western art music as a whole. At the time, before the pre-eminence of Mozart or Beethoven, and with Johann Sebastian Bach known primarily to connoisseurs of keyboard music, Haydn reached a place in music that set him in a higher place all other composers except perhaps George Frideric Handel. He took existing ideas, and radically contradistinct how they functioned—earning him the titles "father of the symphony" and "father of the string quartet".

I of the forces that worked every bit an impetus for his pressing frontward was the first stirring of what would after be called Romanticism—theSturm und Drang, or "tempest and stress" phase in the arts, a short period where obvious emotionalism was a stylistic preference. Haydn accordingly wanted more dramatic dissimilarity and more than emotionally highly-seasoned melodies, with sharpened graphic symbol and individuality. This period faded away in music and literature: however, it influenced what came afterward and would somewhen be a component of artful taste in later decades.

TheFarewell Symphony, No. 45 in F♯ Modest, exemplifies Haydn's integration of the differing demands of the new way, with surprising precipitous turns and a long adagio to end the work. In 1772, Haydn completed his Opus 20 set up of six string quartets, in which he deployed the polyphonic techniques he had gathered from the previous era to provide structural coherence capable of holding together his melodic ideas. For some, this marks the beginning of the "mature" Classical style, in which the catamenia of reaction against late Baroque complexity yielded to a period of integration Baroque and Classical elements.

Circa 1775–1790

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, posthumous painting past Barbara Krafft in 1819

Haydn, having worked for over a decade equally the music director for a prince, had far more resources and telescopic for composing than virtually and also the ability to shape the forces that would play his music. This opportunity was not wasted, as Haydn, commencement quite early his career, sought to press forward the technique of building ideas in music. His next important breakthrough was in the Opus 33 cord quartets (1781), in which the melodic and the harmonic roles segue amid the instruments: it is oftentimes momentarily unclear what is melody and what is harmony. This changes the fashion the ensemble works its mode between dramatic moments of transition and climactic sections: the music flows smoothly and without obvious interruption. He and then took this integrated style and began applying it to orchestral and vocal music.

Haydn's gift to music was a manner of composing, a style of structuring works, which was at the aforementioned time in accord with the governing aesthetic of the new style. However, a younger contemporary, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, brought his genius to Haydn's ideas and applied them to ii of the major genres of the day: opera, and the virtuoso concerto. Whereas Haydn spent much of his working life every bit a court composer, Mozart wanted public success in the concert life of cities. This meant opera, and it meant performing as a virtuoso. Haydn was not a virtuoso at the international touring level; nor was he seeking to create operatic works that could play for many nights in forepart of a big audience. Mozart wanted both. Moreover, Mozart also had a taste for more than chromatic chords (and greater contrasts in harmonic language generally), a greater love for creating a welter of melodies in a single piece of work, and a more Italianate sensibility in music as a whole. He found, in Haydn'south music and after in his study of the polyphony of Bach, the means to discipline and enrich his gifts.

The Mozart family circa 1780. The portrait on the wall is of Mozart's female parent.

Mozart chop-chop came to the attention of Haydn, who hailed the new composer, studied his works, and considered the younger man his only true peer in music. In Mozart, Haydn institute a greater range of instrumentation, dramatic effect and melodic resources; the learning relationship moved in ii directions.

Mozart'south arrival in Vienna in 1780 brought an dispatch in the development of the Classical manner. There Mozart captivated the fusion of Italianate brilliance and Germanic cohesiveness that had been brewing for the previous 20 years. His ain taste for brilliances, rhythmically complex melodies and figures, long cantilena melodies, and virtuoso flourishes was merged with an appreciation for formal coherence and internal connexion. It is at this bespeak that war and inflation halted a tendency to larger orchestras and forced the disbanding or reduction of many theater orchestras. This pressed the Classical way inwards: toward seeking greater ensemble and technical claiming—for example, scattering the melody beyond woodwinds, or using thirds to highlight the tune taken past them. This process placed a premium on sleeping accommodation music for more public performance, giving a further boost to the string quartet and other pocket-size ensemble groupings.

Information technology was during this decade that public taste began, increasingly, to recognize that Haydn and Mozart had reached a higher standard of limerick. Past the fourth dimension Mozart arrived at age 25, in 1781, the ascendant styles of Vienna were recognizably connected to the emergence in the 1750s of the early Classical style. By the end of the 1780s, changes in performance practise, the relative standing of instrumental and song music, technical demands on musicians, and stylistic unity had become established in the composers who imitated Mozart and Haydn. During this decade Mozart composed his nearly famous operas, his six belatedly symphonies that helped to redefine the genre, and a string of piano concerti that even so stand at the pinnacle of these forms.

1 composer who was influential in spreading the more serious style that Mozart and Haydn had formed is Muzio Clementi, a gifted virtuoso pianist who tied with Mozart in a musical "duel" earlier the emperor in which they each improvised and performed their compositions. Clementi'due south sonatas for the piano circulated widely, and he became the most successful composer in London during the 1780s. Too in London at this fourth dimension was Jan Ladislav Dussek, who, like Clementi, encouraged piano makers to extend the range and other features of their instruments, and then fully exploited the newly opened possibilities. The importance of London in the Classical menstruation is often disregarded, just it served as the abode to the Broadwood's factory for piano manufacturing and as the base of operations for composers who, while less notable than the "Vienna School", had a decisive influence on what came later. They were composers of many fine works, notable in their ain correct. London's taste for virtuosity may well have encouraged the circuitous passage work and extended statements on tonic and dominant.

Circa 1790–1820

When Haydn and Mozart began composing, symphonies were played as single movements—before, between, or as interludes within other works—and many of them lasted only ten or twelve minutes; instrumental groups had varying standards of playing, and the continuo was a central part of music-making.

In the intervening years, the social globe of music had seen dramatic changes. International publication and touring had grown explosively, and concert societies formed. Notation became more specific, more descriptive—and schematics for works had been simplified (however became more varied in their verbal working out). In 1790, only earlier Mozart's decease, with his reputation spreading speedily, Haydn was poised for a series of successes, notably his late oratorios and "London" symphonies. Composers inParis, Rome, and all over Deutschland turned to Haydn and Mozart for their ideas on form.

Portrait of Beethoven past Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820

The time was again ripe for a dramatic shift. In the 1790s, a new generation of composers, born effectually 1770, emerged. While they had grown up with the earlier styles, they heard in the recent works of Haydn and Mozart a vehicle for greater expression. In 1788 Luigi Cherubini settled in Paris and in 1791 equanimousLodoiska, an opera that raised him to fame. Its style is clearly reflective of the mature Haydn and Mozart, and its instrumentation gave information technology a weight that had not yet been felt in the k opera. His gimmicky Étienne Méhul extended instrumental effects with his 1790 operaEuphrosine et Coradin, from which followed a series of successes.

Hummel in 1814

The most fateful of the new generation was Ludwig van Beethoven, who launched his numbered works in 1794 with a set of iii piano trios, which remain in the repertoire. Somewhat younger than the others, though equally accomplished considering of his youthful study under Mozart and his native virtuosity, wasJohann Nepomuk Hummel. Hummel studied under Haydn as well; he was a friend to Beethoven andFranz Schubert. He concentrated more on the piano than any other instrument, and his time in London in 1791 and 1792 generated the composition and publication in 1793 of three piano sonatas, opus 2, which idiomatically used Mozart's techniques of avoiding the expected cadence, and Clementi's sometimes modally uncertain virtuoso figuration. Taken together, these composers tin can be seen as the vanguard of a broad change in manner and the center of music. They studied i another's works, copied ane another'due south gestures in music, and on occasion behaved similar quarrelsome rivals.

The crucial differences with the previous wave can be seen in the downwards shift in melodies, increasing durations of movements, the credence of Mozart and Haydn as paradigmatic, the greater use of keyboard resources, the shift from "vocal" writing to "pianistic" writing, the growing pull of the minor and of modal ambiguity, and the increasing importance of varying accompanying figures to bring "texture" frontward every bit an element in music. In short, the late Classical was seeking a music that was internally more complex. The growth of concert societies and apprentice orchestras, marking the importance of music as part of middle-class life, contributed to a booming marketplace for pianos, piano music, and virtuosi to serve every bit examplars. Hummel, Beethoven, and Clementi were all renowned for their improvising.

Direct influence of the Baroque continued to fade: the figured bass grew less prominent every bit a means of holding performance together, the performance practices of the mid-18th century continued to die out. However, at the same time, complete editions of Baroque masters began to become available, and the influence of Baroque way connected to grow, particularly in the always more than expansive employ of brass. Another feature of the period is the growing number of performances where the composer was not present. This led to increased particular and specificity in notation; for example, there were fewer "optional" parts that stood separately from the main score.

The force of these shifts became apparent with Beethoven'southward 3rd Symphony, given the proper nameEroica, which is Italian for "heroic", by the composer. Equally with Stravinsky'southwardThe Rite of Spring, information technology may not take been the first in all of its innovations, but its aggressive employ of every part of the Classical fashion gear up it autonomously from its contemporary works: in length, ambition, and harmonic resources too.

First Viennese School

View of Vienna in 1758, by Bernardo Bellotto

The Commencement Viennese School is a name generally used to refer to three composers of the Classical menses in late-18th-centuryVienna: W. A. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Franz Schubert is occasionally added to the list.

In German language speaking countries, the termWiener Klassik (lit.Viennese classical era/fine art) is used. That term is often more broadly applied to the Classical era in music every bit a whole, as a ways to distinguish information technology from other periods that are colloquially referred to asclassical, namely Baroque and Romantic music.

The term "Viennese Schoolhouse" was start used by Austrian musicologist Raphael Georg Kiesewetter in 1834, although he only counted Haydn and Mozart equally members of the school. Other writers followed suit, and somewhen Beethoven was added to the list. The designation "first" is added today to avoid defoliation with the Second Viennese Schoolhouse.

Whilst, Schubert apart, these composers certainly knew each other (with Haydn and Mozart even existence occasional chamber-music partners), there is no sense in which they were engaged in a collaborative effort in the sense that one would associate with 20th-century schools such as the Second Viennese Schoolhouse, or Les Six. Nor is there any significant sense in which one composer was "schooled" past another (in the manner that Berg and Webern were taught by Schoenberg), though it is true that Beethoven for a fourth dimension received lessons from Haydn.

Attempts to extend the First Viennese School to include such after figures as Anton Bruckner, Johannes Brahms, and Gustav Mahler are merely journalistic, and never encountered in academic musicology.

Classical influence on after composers

1875 oil painting of Franz Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder, after his own 1825 watercolor portrait

Musical eras seldom disappear at once; instead, features are replaced over fourth dimension, until the old is simply felt as "old-fashioned". The Classical fashion did not "dice" and so much equally transform under the weight of changes.

Felix Mendelssohn

Portrait of Mendelssohn past the English miniaturist James Warren Childe (1778–1862), 1839

Ane crucial change was the shift towards harmonies centering around "flatward" keys: shifts in thesubdominant direction. In the Classical fashion, major key was far more than mutual than minor, chromaticism existence chastened through the use of "sharpward" modulation, and sections in the pocket-size style were often merely for contrast. Beginning with Mozart and Clementi, in that location began a creeping colonization of the subdominant region. With Schubert, subdominant moves flourished after being introduced in contexts in which earlier composers would have confined themselves to dominant shifts. This introduced darker colors to music, strengthened the minor mode, and made construction harder to maintain. Beethoven contributed to this by his increasing use of the fourth as a consonance, and modal ambiguity—for example, the opening of the D Minor Symphony.

Franz Schubert, Carl Maria von Weber, and John Field are among the virtually prominent in this generation of "Classical Romantics", along with the immature Felix Mendelssohn. Their sense of form was strongly influenced past the Classical fashion, and they were not notwithstanding "learned" (imitating rules which were codified past others), but they directly responded to works by Beethoven, Mozart, Clementi, and others, every bit they encountered them. The instrumental forces at their disposal were also quite "Classical" in number and variety, permitting similarity with Classical works.

However, the forces destined to finish the agree of the Classical style gathered strength in the works of each of the above composers. The nearly commonly cited one is harmonic innovation. Also important is the increasing focus on having a continuous and rhythmically uniform accompanying figuration:Beethoven'due south Moonlight Sonata was the model for hundreds of later pieces—where the shifting movement of a rhythmic effigy provides much of the drama and interest of the work, while a tune drifts above it. Greater knowledge of works, greater instrumental expertise, increasing variety of instruments, the growth of concert societies, and the unstoppable domination of the piano—which created a huge audience for sophisticated music—all contributed to the shift to the "Romantic" style.

Cartoon the line between these 2 styles is impossible: some sections of Mozart'due south works, taken solitary, are indistinguishable in harmony and orchestration from music written 80 years later—and composers keep to write in normative Classical styles into the 20th century. Even before Beethoven'due south decease, composers such as Louis Spohr were cocky-described Romantics, incorporating, for case, more improvident chromaticism in their works.

However, Vienna'south autumn every bit the most of import musical center for orchestral composition is generally felt to marker the Classical style's terminal eclipse—and the finish of its continuous organic development of one composer learning in close proximity to others. Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin visited Vienna when young, but they so moved on to other vistas. Composers such as Carl Czerny, while deeply influenced past Beethoven, as well searched for new ideas and new forms to incorporate the larger world of musical expression and functioning in which they lived.

Renewed involvement in the formal balance and restraint of 18th century classical music led in the early on 20th century to the evolution of then-called Neoclassical style, which numbered Stravinsky and Prokofiev amongst its proponents, at least at certain times in their careers.

Classical period instruments

Fortepiano past Paul McNulty afterward Walter & Sohn, ca. 1805

Strings

Violin
Viola
Cello
Contrabass

Woodwinds

Basset clarinet
Basset horn
Clarinette d'flirtation
Classical clarinet
Chalumeau

Keyboards

Clavichord
Fortepiano
Harpsichord

Brasses

Buccin
Ophicleide – serpent replacement, precursor of tuba
French horn

Timeline of Classical composers

External links

Pandora Radio: Classical Period
Classical Net – Classical Music Reference Site
Directories of composers and performers of classical.music
NMA (Neue Mozart-Ausgabe) Online – Mozart'southward scores
Free scores by various classical composers at the International Music Score Library Project

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Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/musicapp_historical/chapter/history-of-classical-music/