Haydn accordingly wanted more dramatic contrast and more emotionally appealing melodies, with sharpened character and individuality. This period faded away in music and literature: however, it influenced what came afterward and would eventually be a component of aesthetic taste in later decades. The Farewell Symphony , No. In , Haydn completed his Opus 20 set of six string quartets, in which he deployed the polyphonic techniques he had gathered from the previous era to provide structural coherence capable of holding together his melodic ideas.
Haydn, having worked for over a decade as the music director for a prince, had far more resources and scope for composing than most and also the ability to shape the forces that would play his music.
This opportunity was not wasted, as Haydn, beginning quite early on his career, sought to press forward the technique of building ideas in music. His next important breakthrough was in the Opus 33 string quartets , in which the melodic and the harmonic roles segue among the instruments: it is often momentarily unclear what is melody and what is harmony.
This changes the way the ensemble works its way between dramatic moments of transition and climactic sections: the music flows smoothly and without obvious interruption. He then took this integrated style and began applying it to orchestral and vocal music. Whereas Haydn spent much of his working life as a court composer, Mozart wanted public success in the concert life of cities. This meant opera, and it meant performing as a virtuoso.
Haydn was not a virtuoso at the international touring level; nor was he seeking to create operatic works that could play for many nights in front of a large audience. Mozart wanted both. Moreover, Mozart also had a taste for more chromatic chords and greater contrasts in harmonic language generally , a greater love for creating a welter of melodies in a single work, and a more Italianate sensibility in music as a whole. Mozart rapidly came to the attention of Haydn, who hailed the new composer, studied his works, and considered the younger man his only true peer in music.
In Mozart, Haydn found a greater range of instrumentation, dramatic effect and melodic resource; the learning relationship moved in two directions. There Mozart absorbed the fusion of Italianate brilliance and Germanic cohesiveness that had been brewing for the previous 20 years. His own taste for brilliances, rhythmically complex melodies and figures, long cantilena melodies, and virtuoso flourishes was merged with an appreciation for formal coherence and internal connectedness.
It is at this point that war and inflation halted a trend to larger orchestras and forced the disbanding or reduction of many theater orchestras. This pressed the Classical style inwards: toward seeking greater ensemble and technical challenge—for example, scattering the melody across woodwinds, or using thirds to highlight the melody taken by them.
This process placed a premium on chamber music for more public performance, giving a further boost to the string quartet and other small ensemble groupings. It was during this decade that public taste began, increasingly, to recognize that Haydn and Mozart had reached a higher standard of composition. By the time Mozart arrived at age 25, in , the dominant styles of Vienna were recognizably connected to the emergence in the s of the early Classical style. By the end of the s, changes in performance practice, the relative standing of instrumental and vocal music, technical demands on musicians, and stylistic unity had become established in the composers who imitated Mozart and Haydn.
During this decade Mozart composed his most famous operas, his six late symphonies that helped to redefine the genre, and a string of piano concerti that still stand at the pinnacle of these forms. Also in London at this time was Jan Ladislav Dussek, who, like Clementi, encouraged piano makers to extend the range and other features of their instruments, and then fully exploited the newly opened possibilities.
They were composers of many fine works, notable in their own right. When Haydn and Mozart began composing, symphonies were played as single movements—before, between, or as interludes within other works—and many of them lasted only ten or twelve minutes; instrumental groups had varying standards of playing, and the continuo was a central part of music-making.
In the intervening years, the social world of music had seen dramatic changes. International publication and touring had grown explosively, and concert societies formed.
Notation became more specific, more descriptive—and schematics for works had been simplified yet became more varied in their exact working out. The time was again ripe for a dramatic shift. In the s, a new generation of composers, born around , 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 Luigi Cherubini settled in Paris and in composed Lodoiska , an opera that raised him to fame. Its style is clearly reflective of the mature Haydn and Mozart, and its instrumentation gave it a weight that had not yet been felt in the grand opera. The most fateful of the new generation was Ludwig van Beethoven, who launched his numbered works in with a set of three piano trios, which remain in the repertoire.
Somewhat younger than the others, though equally accomplished because of his youthful study under Mozart and his native virtuosity, wasJohann Nepomuk Hummel. Hummel studied under Haydn as well; he was a friend to Beethoven andFranz Schubert. Taken together, these composers can be seen as the vanguard of a broad change in style and the center of music. In short, the late Classical was seeking a music that was internally more complex. The growth of concert societies and amateur orchestras, marking the importance of music as part of middle-class life, contributed to a booming market for pianos, piano music, and virtuosi to serve as examplars.
Hummel, Beethoven, and Clementi were all renowned for their improvising. Direct influence of the Baroque continued to fade: the figured bass grew less prominent as a means of holding performance together, the performance practices of the midth century continued to die out.
However, at the same time, complete editions of Baroque masters began to become available, and the influence of Baroque style continued to grow, particularly in the ever more expansive use of brass.
Another feature of the period is the growing number of performances where the composer was not present. The First Viennese School is a name mostly used to refer to three composers of the Classical period in lateth-centuryVienna: W.
Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Franz Schubert is occasionally added to the list. Of the early Romantic composers, two Nationalists deserve special mention, the Russian Glinka of Russlan and Ludmilla fame and the Bohemian Smetana composer of the popular symphonic poem Vltava or 'The Moldau'. However, the six leading composers of the age were undoubtedly Berlioz , Chopin , Mendelssohn , Schumann , Liszt and Verdi. With the honourable exceptions of Brahms and Bruckner , composers of this period shared a general tendency towards allowing their natural inspiration free rein, often pacing their compositions more in terms of their emotional content and dramatic continuity rather than organic structural growth.
This was an era highlighted by the extraordinarily rapid appearance of the national schools, and the operatic supremacy of Verdi and Wagner. The eventual end of Romanticism came with the fragmentation of this basic style, composers joining 'schools' of composition, each with a style that was in vogue for a short period of time.
Breiner Naxos 8. The period since the Great War is undoubtedly the most bewildering of all, as composers have pulled in various apparently contradictory and opposing directions. Typical of the dilemma during the inter-war years, for example, were the Austrians, Webern and Lehar, the former was experimenting with the highly compressed and advanced form known as 'serial structure', while simultaneously Lehar was still indulging in an operetta style which would not have seemed out of place over half a century beforehand.
So diverse are the styles adopted throughout the greater part of the present century that only by experimentation can listeners discover for themselves whether certain composers are to their particular taste or not. However, the following recordings serve as an excellent introduction and will certainly repay investigation:. Keyword Search in Albums.
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Composition Title. Disc Title. Catalogue No. Introduction to Classical Music. Music Categories. Musical Instruments. They make me think of Father Bach who is still breeding new generations of musicians and will go on breeding them forever. VI, No. Facebook Twitter Email. Father of classical music turns JJ Abernathy.
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