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Instructor: John Schauer
Publications Editor for the Ravinia Festival
By the time
of his death in 1750, Bach was considered musically old-fashioned.
Some of the best representatives of the new winds blowing through
the musical world were Bach’s own sons, especially Wilhelm
Friedemann Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Christian
Bach (there were others–Bach fathered 22 children!).
Patronage was
shifting from the court to the middle class, and composers’
audiences were less clearly defined. C.P.E. Bach, for instance,
composed a set of sonatas and fantasias für Kenner und Liebhaber
("for connoisseurs and amateurs"). Instead of trying to
express emotions common to everyone, the new music—called stile
gallant and Empfindsamkeit—tried to express something
unique. The steady metrical pulse of Baroque music became more varied
and erratic, harmonic design became more symmetrical, and harmonic
rhythm slowed down. Pieces often started out with fanfare-like figuration,
scales or arpeggios stretched out over a single harmony, sort of
like an idling car about to be put into gear.
The style we
now term Classical owes much of its formation to one genius: Franz
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). He was one of the last major composers
to enjoy steady patronage throughout most of his career, working
for Prince Paul Anton Esterházy and his descendents for three
decades. To illustrate the relatively low position a musician still
held in society, consider the fact that during his tenure at the
Esterhazy estate near Vienna, Haydn wore the livery of a servant.
He was extremely
prolific, composing 14 Masses, more than two dozen operas, nearly
70 string quartets, about 175 works for a stringed instrument called
the baryton (a favorite instrument of one of his Esterhazy patrons),
over 50 keyboard sonatas, approximately 500 song settings and hundreds
and hundreds of serenades, cantatas, divertimentos and chamber works.
Yet his place in history is best summarized by the nickname history
has given him—Father of the Symphony—for nearly single-handedly
creating the genre as we know it today (he had ample opportunity
to hone his craft, composing over 104 of them!).
Throughout his
long career, his symphonies became longer, more developed, more
expressive. He went through one period (during the 1770s) when his
work reflected an aesthetic trend called Sturm und Drang
("Storm and Stress"), an idiosyncratic style that featured
more violent shifts of emotion, more emphasis on minor keys–in
its more brooding aspect, it has sometimes been seen as a precursor
of Romanticism.
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