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II. The 18th Century: Overview
from: Concise history of musical art (6 volumes),
by Michael Hanslick;
Leipzig 1921.
The 18th century was an epoche of multifarious musical styles, which partially developped from each other, refining and completing their ancestry, but also competing with other simultaneous trends. It has taken much effort by generations of experts to categorize all these different movements, so that we today can present a fairly simple and clear overview.
It started with an overlap with the
Baroque epoche; here especially the late work of
Johann Sebastian Bach is to be mentioned with its perfection of contrapunctal techniques and its strict ideal of purely instrumental, drama-alienated music. For Bach and other late representatives of the Baroque style, see part 3 of vol. 4.
The proper styles of the 18th century are broadly classified into
Roccoco (ca. 1720 - 1780) and
Idealism (ca. 1750 - 1810). The year numbers already reveal that there is a lot of overlap, which is by no means restricted to the timeframe. There has been a constant flow of mutual influence between the two styles, even though the characteristics of each one manifest themselves ever and anon over the whole period. Moreover, the assignment of individual composers to one of these categories is not always clear; often the contour line between them runs along different creative periods of a single artist.
The main criteria of distinction is the attitude towards the Baroque legacy:
Roccoco continues the Baroque tradition relatively faithfully at first. However, the strict obedience contrapunctal rules gave way to a more liberal treatment.
Main subtrends and representants:
- Galant Style: esp. Domenico Scarlatti (Lisbon/Madrid), Johann Gottfried Telemann(Magdeburg/Leipzig/Frankfurt/Hamburg)
- Vienna School: Monn, Wagenseil, Albrechtsberger, Haydn (ealier periods see below)
- Berlin School: brothers Graun, Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach. The latter also has contributed to the "Sensitive Style" (see below).
Idealism, the other style notion, leans heavily on Enlightenment as a philosophical background. The concentration on the human being and the idealization of nature inspired a radical renunciation of Baroque artitstry and a reorientation toward folk music. Pomp and pathos were replaced by clarity and lucidness.
Even more centrally, Roccoco music strives to a close, realistic representation of human emotions; this contrasts the Baroque 'encoding' of emotions into a narrow system of four to six "affectus".
The first such trend became known as
Sensitive Style.
esp.
Mannheim School and there particularly the composers
Johann, Carl, and Anton Stamitz and
Friedrich Benda.
Other important representants include
Johann Christian Bach (Milan/London),
Domenico Alberti (Venice/Rome), and the younger creative periods of
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (eventually Salzburg).
As Idealism in the narrower sense we understand the time since roughly 1780.
This style is characterized by the perfection and at the same time balancing of the different techniques and effects developped before. Now occasionally contrapunctal techniques are employed again in central places - embedded into a larger Idealist framework. Moreover, movements are often dominated by one or a small number of basic ideas ("motives") from which the whole musical work is developped. This has been considered as a reference to the Baroque (and Roccoco)
soggetto technique. These historical references mark the reconciliation of the two most important rivalling styles, and thus lets the whole century appear as a complete and wholesome era.
Compositions counted into this category are the late works of Mozart (now Vienna) and Haydn (Hungary/Vienna), and the Viennean
Antonio Salieri. From the younger generation which has partially contributed to this style mainly
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (Brunsvik) is to be mentioned.
There is another aspect which links these so seemingly adversary trends together:
They both had a strong preference for a genre which did not play a prominent role before, and hardly has been used since: The
symphony ...