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Haydn, having worked for over a decade as the music director for a prince, had far more 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, restlessly sought to press the technique of building ideas in music forward. His next important breakthrough was in the Opus 33 string quartets (1781), where individual parts changed from melody to harmony and back again, and worked their way between dramatic moments of transition, and climactic sections where music flowed smoothly and seemingly without interuption. He would then take this integrated style and begin applying it to orchestral and vocal music.
Haydn's gift to music was a way of composing, a way of structuring works, which was, at once, within the new style, and rooted in principles of the old style which he drew primarily from CPE Bach. It would, however, be a younger contemporary, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who would bring his genius to Haydn's ideas, and apply them to two of the major genres of the day: opera, and the virtuoso concerto. 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 neither 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, a greater love for creating a welter of melodies in a single work and a more Italiante sensibility towards music as a whole. He found, in Haydn's music, and in a study of the polyphony of Bach, the means to discipline his gifts.
Mozart rapidly came to Haydn's attention, who hailed the new composer, studied his works, and considered the younger man his only true peer in music. Their letters to each other are filled with the kind of asides that only two people working at a higher plane than their contemporaries, can share. From Mozart, Haydn found a greater range of instrumentation, dramatic effect and melodic resource - the learning relationship moved in two directions.
The arrival in Vienna by Mozart in 1780 marked the acceleration of the development of the classical style, here, Mozart absorbed the fusion of Italianate brilliance and Germanic cohesiveness which 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. Strangely enough, it is at this point that war and inflation halted a trend to larger and larger orchestras and forced the disbanding or reduction of many theatre orchestras. This pressed the classical style inwards: towards seeking greater ensemble and technical challenge. For example, scattering the melody across woodwinds, or using thirds to create a melody between 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. When Mozart arrived at age 25, the dominant styles of Vienna were recognizably connected to the emergence of the early classical style in the 1750's. By the end of the decade, changes in performance practice, 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 would compose his most famous operas, his six late symphonies which would help redefine the genre, and a string of piano concerti which are still among the pinnacle works of the form.
One composer who was influential in spreading the more serious style which Mozart and Haydn had formed is Muzio Clementi, a gifted virtuoso pianist who dueled Mozart to a draw before the emperor in playing compositions. His own sonatas for the piano circulated widely, and he became the most successful composer in London during this decade. The stage was set for a generation of composers, having absorbed the lessons of the new style earlier, and having clear examples to aim at, who would take the classical style in new directions. Also in London at this time was Johann Ladislaus Dussek, who, like Clementi, encouraged piano makers to extend their instruments and made full use of the possibilities. The importance of London in the classical period is often overlooked - but it served as the home to the Broadwood's factory for piano manufacturing, and as the home base for composers who, while less famous than the "Vienna School" would have a decisive influence on what came later, and were composers of a number of fine works in their own right. London's taste for virtuosity may well have encouraged the complex passage work and extended statements of tonic and dominant.
When Haydn and Mozart began composing, symphonies were played as single movements between other works, and many lasted only 10 or 12 minutes, instrumental groups had varying standards of playing and the "continuo" was a central part of music making. In the intervening years, music had seen a dramatic change, international publication and touring had grown explosively, concert societies were beginning to be formed, notation had been made more specific, more descriptive, schematics for works had been simplified, and yet made more varied in their exact working through. In 1790, just before Mozart's death, his reputation was spreading rapidly, and Haydn was poised for a series of successes, including his late oratorios and "London" symphonies. Composers in Paris, Rome and all over Germany turned to Haydn and Mozart for their ideas on form.
The moment was ripe for a dramatic shift. The decade of the 1790's saw the emergence of a new generation of composers, born between around 1770, who while they had grown up with the earlier styles, found in the recent works of Haydn and Mozart a vehicle for greater expression. In 1788 Luigi Cherubini settled in Paris, and in 1791 composed "Lodoiska", an opera that shot him to fame. Its style is clearly reflective of the mature Haydn and Mozart, and its instrumentation gave it a weight which had not yet been felt in the grand opera. His contemporary Etienne Méhul extended instrumental effects with his 1790 opera "Euphrosine et Coradin", from which followed a series of successes. Of course, the most fateful would would be Ludwig van Beethoven, who launched his numbered works in 1794 with three Piano Trios, which remain played even today. Somewhat younger than these, though equally accomplished because of his youthful study under Mozart and virtuosity, was Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who studied under Haydn and Mozart, was friends with Beethoven and Schubert, and a teacher to Franz Liszt. He concentrated more on the piano than any other instrument, and his time in London in 1791 and 1792 saw the composition, and publication in 1793 of a 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 composer can be seen now as the vanguard of a broad change in style and the center of gravity in music. They would study each others works, copy each others gestures in music, and on occasion behave like quarrelsome rivals.
The crucial differences with the previous wave can be seen through the shift in gravity of the melody downward, the increasing length, the acceptance of Mozart and Haydn as paradigmatic, the greater and 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" foward as an element in music. In short - the late classical was seeking a more complex music internally. The growth of concert societies, amateur orchestras and the importance of music as part of middle class life contributed to a booming market for pianos, piano music, and virtuosi who could provide examples. Hummel, Beethoven, Clementi were all known for their improvising.
One explanation for the shift in style was advanced by Schoenberg and others: the increasing centrality of "theme and variations" in compositional thinking. Schoenberg argued that the classical style was one of "continuing variation", where a development was, in effect, a theme and variations with greater continuity. In any event, theme and variations replaced the fugue as the standard vehicle for improvising, and was often included, directly or indirectly as a movement in longer instrumental works.
The influence of the baroque directly continued to fade: the figured bass grew less prominent as 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 style, as the classical period understood it, continued to grow, particularly in the more and more expansive use of brass. Another feature of the period is the growing assumption that the composer would not be present at many performances: and therefore more and more would have to be written down. There were fewer and fewer "optional" parts that stood separately from the main score.
The force of the shift would be made abundantly appearant with Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, subtitled "Eroica". As with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, it may not have been the first in all of its features, but its aggressive use of every part of the classical style set it apart from its contemporary works: in length, ambition and harmonic resources.
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