AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Classical
• Classical Era

The very name, ‘Classical Era’, speaks for itself: it proclaims a period that is regarded as ‘Standard, first-class, of allowed excellence’, with manifestations that are ‘simple, harmonious, proportioned, finished’, to quote a dictionary definition. The period from 1750 to roughly 1820 is widely recognized as one of exceptional achievement in music – it is the time of all the main works of Haydn, Mozart and Gluck, and most of those ...

• Classical Era
• Opera

The Enlightenment was a natural, if late, consequence of the sixteenth-century Renaissance and Reformation. Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment advanced to be recognized in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and brought with it new, controversial beliefs that upended the absolutisms on which European society had long been based. Absolute monarchy, with its reliance on the Divine Right of Kings, and the Church, with its demand ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

The term Empfindsamkeit (meaning ‘sensitivity’) is associated with a particular aesthetic outlook prevalent in north Germany in the mid-eighteenth century. It refers to an intimate, melancholic expression, the ideals of which are found in the music and writings of C. P. E. Bach. His style is often rhetorical, with sudden pauses and changes of key, and expressive leaning appoggiaturas and chromatic notes. One of his fantasias is said to represent ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

When, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, French critics came into contact with Italian opera, many felt that the musical freedom of the Italians offered something that French opera, so closely tied to theatrical declamatory traditions, made impossible. The Abbé Raguenet, enamoured of Italian singing and the supporting instrumental skills, mocked French opera, which was staunchly defended as more ‘rational’ by Le Cerf de la Viéville. The operatic debut of ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

The dominant style in art at the start of the classical era was the Rococo (from rocaille, ‘shellwork’). Created in early eighteenth-century France, its leading figures in the graphic arts were Antoine Watteau and François Boucher. The closest musical analogue is not Mozart (as once was traditionally argued) but François Couperin (1668–1733) – the late Baroque generation, in fact, for the Rococo is essentially a breaking-down of the Baroque. Rococo ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’), a name taken from a play of the time, began as a literary movement that flourished in Germany and Austria in the second half of the eighteenth century. Easier to recognize than to define, its manifestations included the ‘horrid’ world of the Gothic novel and, in the visual arts, the paintings of Fuseli and the drawings of Giambattista Piranesi. In the violence it expressed ...

• Classical Era
• Houses & Companies
• Opera

A composer, librettist or other musician who attracted a royal patron acquired personal influence as a result. In Germany, this great good fortune devolved on anyone favoured by King Frederick II (‘The Great’) of Prussia. Frederick was an immensely powerful and able ruler and a rigid disciplinarian and it was inevitable that he approached his great interest, opera seria, as a demanding martinet. His control over operas performed in Berlin ...

• Classical Era
• Houses & Companies
• Opera

Opposing tastes in opera have often provoked minor wars. One of them was the guerre des bouffons, which took place in Paris between 1752 and 1754 and ranged the supporters of French serious opera against the advocates of Italian opera buffa. On the French side were King Louis, his influential mistress Madame de Pompadour, his court and the aristocracy. Louis’ Polish queen, Mary, the philosopher Denis Diderot and other French ...

• Classical
• Classical Era
• Influences

The reputation that Paris enjoyed for elegance and culture also attracted many foreign visitors to the city, who carried the French style to their own countries. While Italian opera was occasionally performed, French-language serious and comic opera predominated. The city’s most famous concert series was the Concert Spirituel, founded by Anne-Danican Philidor (1681–1728) in 1725. By the middle of the century, the mainly sacred repertory had expanded to include instrumental ...

• Classical
• Classical Era
• Influences

The literary movement known as Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) takes its name from a play of 1776 by Maximilian Klinger, about the American Revolution. Confined to the German-speaking lands, although it had parallels elsewhere, it contradicted (or reacted to) much current ‘enlightened’ thinking by emphasizing the emotional, the passionate, the irrational, the terrifying. It belonged initially in the theatre, where it was taken up by Friedrich von Schiller, ...

• Classical
• Classical Era
• Influences

In the seventeenth century, a Turkish army was driven back from the walls of Vienna. As diplomatic relations replaced hostilities, Turkish embassies in Vienna used ‘janissary’ or military bands as part of their parade and a Turkish band was presented to the Polish king by the Sultan. In the eighteenth century a fashion for Turkish sounds such as shawms, bass drums, jingles, cymbals and bells developed as admiration for the ...

• Classical
• Classical Era
• Inside the Music

Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet takes its title from the 22-bar adagio introduction to the first movement. It begins with softly repeated quavers on the cello. The note is C, the tonic, which is only to be expected. But expectation is soon confounded: the violin enters on A flat, followed by the second violin on E flat. The viola moves down to G, but if we are expecting a chord of C ...

• Classical
• Classical Era
• Inside the Music

Sonata form was the most important principle of musical structure during the classical period, and has remained so up to the present day. It applies most often to a single movement, part of a sonata, symphony or quartet, but an independent movement, such as an overture, may also be in sonata form. Its principles affect the structural features of other works, including the Mass. Sonata form is most clearly seen ...

• Classical
• Classical Era
• Inside the Music

It was in the late eighteenth century, as Enlightenment thinking developed, that the business of writing about music for an informed public began to flourish. There were historians, such as Padre Martini in Italy, La Borde in France, Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg in Germany and Charles Burney in England; there were lexi­cographers; and there were theorists, eager to codify compositional practices. There were also pedagogical writers, explaining performance techniques for the benefit ...

• Classical
• Classical Era
• Instruments

A baryton is a bass string instrument, similar in appearance to a viol. It is held between the performer’s knees and played with a bow; it usually carries six strings which the bow sounds directly. It has a number of strings (up to 40) which are concealed and which can be plucked by the thumb or allowed to vibrate in sympathy. These run underneath the fingerboard over which the six ...