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2 History of the Classical period

2.1 Beginnings of the Classical style (1730-1760)

At first the new style took over baroque forms - the ternary " aria da capo" and the " sinfonia" and " concerto" - and simply composed with simpler parts and more emphatic sections. However, over time, the new aesthetic caused radical changes in how pieces were put together - the basic layouts changed. (See Sonata Form). Composers from this period sought dramatic effects, striking melodies, and clearer textures. One important break with the past was the radical overhaul of opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, who cut away a great deal of the layering and improvisional ornament, and focused on the points of modulation and transition. By making these moments where the harmony changes more focal, he created the ability for powerful dramatic shifts in the emotional color of the music. He used instrumentation, melody and changes in mode to highlight these moments. Among the most successful composer, Gluck spawned many emulators, for example Antonio Salieri. Their emphasis on accessibility was hugely successful in opera, and in vocal music more widely: songs, oratorios and chorouses. These were considered the most important kinds of music for performance, and hence produced the highest public estimation for success.

The phase between the baroque and the rise of the classical, with its broad mixture of competing ideas and attempts to unify the different demands of taste, economics and idea, goes by many names. It is sometimes called "galant", "rococo", or "pre-classical", or at other times, "early classical". It is a period where composers still working in the baroque style are still successful, if sometimes thought of as being more of the past than the present - Bach, Handel and Telemann all compose well past the point where the homophonic style is clearly on the rise. Musical culture was caught at a cross roads, the masters of the older style had the technique, but the public hungered for the new. One of the reasons why C.P.E. Bach was held in such high regard: he understood the older forms quite well, knew how to present them in new garb, with a variety of form, and soon after as far as overhauling the older forms from the baroque.

2.2 The early Classical style (1760-1775)

By the late 1750's there are flourishing centers of the new style in Italy, Vienna, Mannheim and Paris, dozens of symphonies are composed, and there are "bands" of players associated with theatres. Opera and vocal music is the feature of most musical events, with concerti and symphonies acting as instrumental interludes and introductions, for operas, and even church services. The norms of a body of strings supplemented by winds, and of movements of particular rhytmic character are established by the late 1750's in Vienna. But the length and weight of pieces is still set with some baroque characteristics: individual movements still focus on one affect, their length is not significantly greater than baroque movements and there is not, yet, a theory of how to compose in the new style which is clearly ennunciated. It was a moment ripe for a breakthrough.

Many attribute this breakthrough to be made by C.P.E. Bach, Gluck, and several others. In addition, C.P.E. Bach and Gluck are often considered to be founders of the classical style.

The composer who was the first great master of the style was Joseph Haydn. In the late 1750's he began composing symphonies, and by 1761, and composed a tryptich "Morning", "Noon" and "Evening" which were solidly in the "contemporary" mode. As a "vice-kapellemeister" and later "kapellemeister", his output expanded, he would compose over 40 symphonies alone in the decade. And while his fame grew, as his orchestra was expanded and his compositions were copied and disseminated, his voice was only one among many.

While overshadowed by Mozart and Beethoven, it is difficult to over state Haydn's centrality to the new style, and the future of Western concert music, at the time, before Mozart and Beethoven, with Johann Sebastian Bach known primarily to connoisseurs of keyboard music, Haydn reached a place in music which set him above all other composers except perhaps George Friedrich Handel. Some have pointed out that he occupied a place equivalent to perhaps the Beatles in the history of Rock and Roll. It was he who, more than any other single individual, realized that the new style which had evolved, needed to be written according to new ideas and principles. He took existing ideas, and radically altered how they functioned — earning him the nicknames "father of the symphony" and "father of the string quartet". One might truly say that he was the father of the sonata form — which, in its classical incarnation, relied on dramatic contrast, tension of melody against harmony, rhythm, and required the audience to follow a dramatic curve over a larger span of time than was previously necessary.

Strangely enough, one of the forces that worked as an impetus for his pressing forward was the first stirrings of what would later be called "romanticism" - the " sturm und drang", or "storm and struggle" phase in the arts, a short period where obvious emotionalism was a stylistic preference, which was the fad of the 1770's. This caused him to want more dramatic contrast and emotionally appealing melodies which had more character, more individuality. This period faded away in music and literature — however, it would color what came afterward, and eventually be a component of aesthetic taste in coming decades.

The "Farewell" Symphony, No. 45 in F# Minor, exemplifies Haydn's integration the differing demands of the new style, with sharp surprising turns, and a long adagio which ends the work. In 1772, Haydn completed his Opus 20 set of 6 string quartets, where he uses the polyphonic techniques he gathered from the previous era to provide enough structural coherence to hold together his melodic ideas. For some this marks the beginning of the "mature" classical style, where the period of reaction against the complexity of the late Baroque begins to be replaced with a period of integration of elements of both Baroque and classical styles.

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