When was classical music invented

But even the larger ensemble was typically far smaller and more homogenous than today's symphony orchestra. Concertos often alternated between passages showing off the soloist's technical prowess and passages showing off the weight of the full ensemble.

The most famous of Baroque violin concertos today are those collected in the Four Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi Reproduced here is the final movement of "Autumn," a movement representing the hunt. The name most closely associated with the toccata is that of Girolamo Frescobaldi This approached consisted of the repetition of the same melody the "subject" in a number of polyphonic "voices," which voices then continued, re-introducing the subject at fairly regular intervals.

Pre-eminent among fugues are the 48 in J. Bach's collection The Well-Tempered Clavier. Yet the transition from Baroque to Classical was gradual. Three trends of the middle years of the 18th century were behind this transition. The first trend was known as Reform Opera. A number of composers reacted against what they saw as the stilted conventions of Italian Baroque opera. They wanted to make Italian opera more natural, more directly expressive, with more focus on the dramatic narrative and less focus on providing solo singers with passages of elaborate, showy ornamentation.

The most successful of these composers was Christoph Willibald Gluck The topics of Reform opera were not new: Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice retells the Orpheus legend, as did Monteverdi's famous Orfeo years before. In the aria "Che fiero momento," Euridice sings of her trepidation at being led away by Orpheus from the calm of the underworld.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach , a son of the now more famous J. Bach, preferred not the harpsichord but the clavichord and the fortepiano, instruments that could play louder or softer depending on the force with which their keys were struck. Bach's keyboard music uses this dynamic variability to appropriate some of the character of 18th-century Italian vocal music. Bach's slow movements, such as the one reproduced here, exemplified the empfindsam "full of feeling" style, which was believed to express restrained passion and melancholy.

Bach, Sonata in B Minor, second movement c. Early symphonies, such as those of Giovanni Battista Sammartini , were modeled on the overtures introductory instrumental pieces of Baroque Italian opera. Yet the late 18th-century orchestra still numbered about 30 players, in contrast to the 70 or more players in modern orchestras. Franz Joseph Haydn wrote symphonies during his long career; many of these were written for the private orchestra of Prince Nicholas Esterhazy.

The following symphony was written near the end of Haydn's career, for the popular audience in London. Unlike the chamber music of the Baroque, the string quartet lacks a basso continuo. Haydn's string quartets typically included four movements, of which the last was often buoyant and rapid. Although Vienna was in German-speaking territory, Viennese opera was dominated by Italian style, as was the opera of much of Europe.

The Italian operas that Mozart wrote in Vienna were in the traditional Italian buffa comic style, yet they went beyond buffa comedy to engage social and moral issues. Although Don Giovanni is normatively an opera buffa , the title character is not comedic; Don Juan, as he is most often known to us, womanizes with a singular ferocity and a disregard for the social class of his victims.

In the following excerpt, the Don's buffa servant Leporello reads from a book listing the Don's thousands of past romantic conquests. LISTEN: Mozart, Don Giovanni , excerpt from Act 1 [ Text ] The piano concerto movement reproduced here reflects both Mozart's orchestral style and his style of writing for the piano, an instrument quickly gaining in popularity at the expense of the harpsichord.

The concerti of the Classical period were usually for single soloists, as opposed to groups of soloists as in concerti grossi ; the orchestra used was comparable to that used in the Classical symphony.

Yet Beethoven was considered a proto-Romantic by his 19th-century successors. Beethoven's image as a scowling, disheveled eccentric is largely undeserved, but it is true that Beethoven fought deafness throughout much of his life, and that some of his music seemed awkward and violent to those who first heard it.

The first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. Those written near the end of his life, such as the one reproduced here, grew farther and farther from the norms of Classical style. Some scholars divide Beethoven's career, rather artificially, into three periods; the Symphony No.

The first period includes works that are considered to be closest to the Viennese Classical style of Mozart and Haydn. What is certain is that many early 19th-century composers were influenced by the literary Romantics, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Poems by Goethe and other German-speaking authors were set to music, to be performed by solo singer and piano; these brief settings were known as Lieder literally, "songs"; but distinguished from the less weighty Gesangen.

Robert Schumann was renowned for his Lieder. A program, in the musical sense, is a narrative that is to be presented, or at least suggested, by a purely instrumental composition. The French composer Hector Berlioz subtitled his Symphonie fantastique "Episode in the Life of an Artist"; at the symphony's performance, he distributed a program that detailed the travails of an artist suffering unrequited love.

It was an open secret that the artist was a fictionalized version of Berlioz himself, struck with love for with the actress Harriet Smithson. The movement reproduced here, the fourth of five, is meant to depict the artist's drug-induced vision of being marched to the gallows to be hung.

LISTEN: Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique Fantasy Symphony , fourth movement The 19th century was also the heyday of the piano "miniature," short in length yet often emotionally charged.

Fryderyk Chopin was born in Poland, but lived in Paris for most of his working life. He composed solo piano music almost exclusively. Chopin's piano pieces did not carry poetic titles, as did those of some contemporaries; instead, he assigned them to different types etude, ballade, mazurka--the last a Polish dance. The "Preludes" were not introductory to other musical works, despite their names; they were standalone pieces that did not fit into Chopin's other categories.

Chopin's 24 preludes are often played as a set. Like many composers of the middle and late 19th century, Verdi was an ardent nationalist, believing that music written by Italians should exemplify a particularly Italian style. This style was based on a type of singing called bel canto "beautifully sung" , which involved continuous, flowing melodies, emphasis on vowels, and long, high climaxes at dramatic points.

Verdi also made heavy use of onstage choruses, often creating scenes in which the singing of soloists and of the chorus overlapped. Verdi's recitative passages were accompanied by full orchestra, making them more continuous with arias than were 18th-century recitatives, which were accompanied by harpsichord. In this scene from La Traviata , the spurned Alfredo accuses his ex-lover Violetta of infidelity, infidelity Violetta resorted to so as to protect Alfredo's family name.

It's a long story! History of Classical Music. Discover the Classics. Glossary of Musical Terms. Synopses of Opera. Index of Operas by Composer. Opera Libretti. A Note from the Author. The Listener's Job Description. Part 1: Before the Concert. Choosing a Concert. Kinds of Concerts. Styles of Presentation: Formal, Informal, and Beyond. Buying a Ticket. Sections of the Theater. Getting Ready. Getting There. Part 2: At the Concert.

The Concert Ritual. Reading the Program. Instruments of the Orchestra. Ways to Listen. Meeting the Performers. Essential Life Support. A Brief Glossary. Naxos Educational Albums. Naxos Records. Streaming Services.

Recommended Sites. Services below require separate subscription. Click to learn more. The technical aspects of musical composition and the almost mathematical fascination with note combination began slowly to open the door to the personality of a composer being reflected in his music.

By the middle of the 15th century, the royal palaces and the great houses of the noblemen had usurped the Church as the single most important influence on the course of music in , Henry V of England employed more than 30 voices in the Chapel Royal while the Papal Chapel had only nine. One by-product was the closer relationship between secular music and the music of the Church, a cross-pollination which benefited the development of both. The musicians who passed through the Burgundian court disseminated its style and learning to all points of the European compass.

The most noticeable advances during this period were the increased freedom composers gave to their vocal lines and the difference in the treatment of the texts they set.

Previously, words had to fit the music; now the reverse was the case and this is no better illustrated than by the work of one of the next generation of composers to become renowned throughout Europe, Josquin Desprez.

His music incorporates a greater variety of expression than any previously — there are even flashes of quirky humour — and includes attempts at symbolism where the musical ideas match those of the text. With various voices singing in polyphony, it is difficult to follow the words; where the subject called for the words to be heard clearly, Josquin wrote music that had the different voices singing different notes but the same words at the same time — chordal music, in other words.

After him, it is easy for our ears to follow the development of music into the language which is familiar to us today through the works of the great classical composers of two centuries later. The 16th century witnessed four major musical phenomena: the polyphonic school reached its zenith, the tradition of instrumental music was founded, the first opera was produced and music began to be printed for the first time. For most people, the opportunity to see and read music had simply not been there; musicians could now, for the first time, stand around a score printed in a book and sing or play their part.

Limited and expensive though it was, music was now available. No wonder it flourished so rapidly. How was this rich cloth of musical gold woven? Looked at as warp the composition is a horizontal combination of melodies; looked at as woof it is a perpendicular collection of chords. Now, new preoccupations challenged composers.

The reverent, lush choral works of the Church, mainly from Northern Europe, became fertilised by the lively, sunny dances and songs of the south. The secular counterparts of the church musicians led to the madrigal, a contrapuntal setting of a poem, usually about 12 lines in length, and whose subject was usually amorous or pastoral.

The madrigals, like the liturgical motets and settings of the Mass, were all for unaccompanied voices — that was how the vast majority of music produced up to this time was conceived. The recorder, lute, viol and spinet had played their part in dance music and in accompanying voices occasionally replacing them but now composers such as Byrd, Gibbons, Farnaby and Frescobaldi began to write music for specific instruments, though it must be said that the art form did not truly flourish until the Baroque era.

Other innovations were by the Italians Andrea Gabrieli c — the first to combine voices with brass instruments — and his nephew Giovanni , whose antiphonal effects for choirs of brass instruments might have written for our modern stereo systems. And it was from Italy that the next important step in musical history was taken.

Indeed Italy was the country — actually a collection of small independent states at the time, ruled by a number of affluent and cultured families — which would dominate the musical world for a century and a half from Such was the power of Italian influence at this time that music adopted the language as its lingua franca. To this day, composers almost universally write their performance directions in Italian. One particular word, opera, described a new art form: that of combining drama and music.

No one had thought of the concept till the end of the 16th century. In the late 16th century, artists, writers and architects became interested in the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. In Florence, a group of the artistic intelligentsia became interested in how the ancient Greek dramas were performed.

Into the ring then came one of the supreme musicians of history, Claudio Monteverdi. He did not write the first opera that honour goes to Jacopo Peri and his Dafne , now lost, of or but with one work, Orfeo he drew up the future possibilities of the medium.

Solo singers were given a dramatic character to portray and florid songs to sing, there were choruses, dances, orchestral interludes, scenery.

Opera was a markedly different entertainment to anything that had gone before but, more importantly, it was a completely new way of using music. Dramatic truth soon went out of the window in favour of the elaborate vocal displays of the opera soloists — composers were only too happy to provide what their new public wanted — and no class of singers were more popular than the castrati.

Feted wherever they appeared, the castrati, who had had their testicles removed as young boys to preserve their high voices, were highly paid and immensely popular, a not dissimilar phenomenon to The Three Tenors of today with two small differences. The practice of castration to produce an entertainer, an extraordinarily barbaric concept, was only halted in the early 19th century.

The last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, actually survived until and made a dozen or so records in St Paul had written that women should keep silent in church. They were therefore not available for the taxing high lines in church music. If the origins of the castrati could be laid firmly at the door of the Church, similar dogma can also be held responsible for the slow progress of instrumental composition.

From the earliest times the Church had voiced its disapproval of the practice. St Jerome had declared that no Christian maiden should know what a lyre or flute looked like let alone hear what they sounded like. The same change of emphasis led also to a flood of brilliant instrumental soloists. Among them was a brilliant Italian-born violinist named Jean-Baptiste Lully who went to France in Another important by-product of the Italian opera was the introduction of the sonata — the term originally simply meant a piece to be sounded played , as opposed to sung cantata.

Although it quickly took on a variety of forms, the sonata began with the Italian violinists imitating the vocal display elements of opera — a single melody played against a harmonised background or, if you like, accompanied by chords.

This was a huge difference from the choral works of a century before driven by their polyphonic interweavings. With the musical emphasis on harmony — a key feature of the coming century and a half — rhythm began to take an increasingly important part.

Chordal patterns naturally fall in sequences, in regular measures or bars. Listen to a chaconne by Purcell or Handel and you realise that the theme is not a tune but a sequence of chords. Measuring the beats in a bar one -two or one - two-three or one -two-three-four — the emphasis always on the first beat gives the music a sense of form and helps its onward progress. Phrases lead the ear to the next sequence like the dialogue between two people, exchanging thoughts in single words, in short sentences or in long paragraphs.

Sing a simple hymn tune like All people that on earth do dwell and you are aware of what music had now acquired — a strong tonal centre. Makers of musical instruments responded by adapting and improving instruments: the great Italian violin makers Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri, the Ruckers family of Antwerp with its harpsichords and the Harris family of England building organs.

A final contribution to this period was made by Italian opera. The use of the orchestra in opera naturally led to the expression of dramatic musical ideas — one reason why the Italian orchestra developed faster than elsewhere.

Round about the start of the 18th century composers began to write overtures in three sections fast-slow-fast , providing the model for the classical sonata form used in instrumental pieces, concertos and symphonies for the next years and more. The concerto developed from the dance suites popular in Italy at the beginning of the 17th century, known as the sonata da camera.

Here a group of solo string instrumentalists alternate with the main body of strings in a work, usually of three or four movements. Geminiani, Albinoni, Torelli, Handel and others contributed to the form. The solo concerto was but a short step from here where a soloist is contrasted with later pitted against the orchestra. The Four Seasons , among the best known and most frequently-played pieces of classical music, illustrates the new concept.

Northern Europe provided the springboard for the rapid development of keyboard music: the North German school of organ music, founded by Frescobaldi and Sweelinck a century before, with its interest in contrapuntal writing, laid the way for the likes of Pachelbel and Buxtehude whose line reached its peak in the great works of Bach.

It was predominantly diverting rather than elevating and rococo usefully defines the character of lighter music written in the Baroque period, especially when contrasted with the works of the two musical heavyweights of the time, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Bach in his own time was considered old-fashioned, a provincial composer from central Germany. But his music contains some of the noblest and most sublime expressions of the human spirit and with him the art of contrapuntal writing reached its zenith.

The 48 Preludes and Fugues for The Well-Tempered Clavier explore all the permutations of fugal writing in all the major and minor keys; his final work, The Art of Fugue left incomplete at his death takes a mathematical delight in the interweaving of contrapuntal variations on the same theme. His instrumental music is evidence that he was by no means always the stern God-fearing Lutheran — the exuberant six Brandenburg Concertos show that he was well acquainted with the sunny Italian way of doing things and many of his most beautiful and deepest thoughts are reserved for the concertos and orchestral suites.

His influence on composers and musicians down the years has been immeasurable. For many he remains the foundation stone of their art. He developed the typical 17th-century dance suite into such famous and still immensely popular occasional works as The Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music. Opera was a field into which Bach never ventured but Handel — between and , — produced nearly 30 operas in the Italian style until the public tired of these when, ever the pragmatist, he turned to oratorio.

An oratorio is an extended setting of a usually religious text in dramatic form but which does not require scenery or stage action. Bach was the last great composer to be employed by the church, fittingly, for the church had been the mainspring for the progress of polyphonic music and Bach was the ne plus ultra of the style. One such was the court of Mannheim where an orchestra under the direction of Johann Stamitz raised orchestral playing to a standard unheard of previously.

A new era, breaking away from the contrapuntal writing of the later Baroque, was ushered in. This can be summarised as music which is notable for its masterly economy of form and resources and for its lack of overt emotionalism. If Bach and Handel dominated the first half of the 17th century, Haydn and Mozart are their counterparts for the latter half and represent all the virtues of the Classical style. This can be traced back to a generation or so before the birth of Haydn to the rococo style of Couperin and Rameau and, more powerfully, in the invigorating keyboard works of Domenico Scarlatti whose more than short sonatas composed in his sixties demonstrate a brilliance that only Bach equalled.

Scarlatti, though, writing on a smaller scale, had the specific intent of delighting and instructing his pupil, the Queen of Spain. His near-contemporary Georg Philipp Telemann brought the rococo style to Germany. Lighter and even more fecund than Bach, Telemann was held in far greater esteem in his lifetime than Johann Sebastian.

Now the sonata became a formalised structure with related keys and themes. These Bach developed into extended movements, as opposed to the short movements of the Baroque form.

Listening to CPE, perhaps the most original and daring composer of the midth century, one becomes aware of the serious and comical, the inspired and the routine, lying side by side with engaging unpredictability. Parallel to this was the work of Johann Stamitz. His music is rarely heard today yet he and his son Carl were pioneers in the development of the symphony. This form had grown out of the short quick-slow-quick one-movement overtures or sinfonias of Italian opera.

Stamitz, in the employ of the Mannheim court, had one of the most distinguished orchestras in Europe under his direction.

He was the first to introduce the clarinet into the orchestra and was probably the first to write a concerto for the instrument , also allowing the brass and woodwind greater prominence. His orchestral crescendos, a novel effect at this time, were said to have excited audiences to rise from their seats. Italy had dominated the musical world of the 17th and early 18th centuries with its operas and great violinists.

From the middle of the 18th century, the centre of musical pre- eminence moved to Vienna, a position it would retain until the last of the Hapsburg emperors in the early years of the 20th century. The Hapsburgs loved music and imported the best foreign musicians to court; the imperial chapel became a second centre of musical excellence. With the Viennese court as its focus, all kinds of influences met and mingled from nearby Germany, Bohemia and Italy.