The Age of Classicism: Music and Literature

Sources

Music:Courts and Patrons. In 1784 a contemporary estimated that there were nearly 350 composers in German-speaking Europe. Most of them were employed in aristocratic houses and considered little more than upper servants. They were expected to write pleasing music according to the accepted standards of classical composition (symmetry and regularity) and perform it for their patrons and guests. Over the course of a career a musician’s compositions could—as in the case of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725)—exceed one thousand works. Most of these composers were more craftsmen than artists, but within their ranks were Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791). Indeed, Mozart wrote twenty-seven symphonies in 1774-1777, while in the employ of the prince-bishop of Salzburg. Powerful patrons could vault their cities to the forefront of the music world, as King Frederick II “The Great” of Prussia (ruled 1740-1786) or Emperor Joseph II of Austria (ruled 1765-1790) did for Berlin and Vienna. Their patronage attracted capable musicians and large audiences. One of Frederick’s first acts as king was to have an opera house built in Berlin, while in Vienna in 1791 the imperial court of Joseph and his successor, Leopold II (ruled 1790-1792), was the site of the performance of revolutionary operas such as Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute,1791), written in the German language rather than the traditional Italian.

The Emergence of Public Concerts. While the great demand for court music continued in the late eighteenth century, the public opera and orchestral concert emerged in European cities, where music was becoming a central component of social life. Outside the courts, music clubs and concert societies with dues-paying members and amateur musicians sprang up to meet the growing demand, which triggered a boom in music publishing as composers scrambled to provide music for the new groups. Late in the century, such clubs and societies were increasingly supplanted by professional musicians who performed before subscription-paying, anonymous audiences. For example, during the“season” when nobles and aristocrats resided in Vienna, they joined army officers, government administrators, and members of the newly wealthy middle class in attending a public concert or opera nearly every night of the week. This transition from private court performance and semiprivate amateur society to the professional, public concert was rooted in two conditions:a growing, diverse class of concertgoers who could afford to pay for the music and a public authority (sometimes imperial or royal, but often municipal) that provided a concert hall or opera house for the performances. In the early nineteenth century the sizes of audiences, orchestras, and concert halls expanded dramatically, and there was a shift in the nature of the music composed and performed. Classicism was giving way to Romanticism.

Literature. Classicism in literature reached its peak before 1750, and thereafter it was challenged and overthrown by Romanticism. While Classicism reigned, the same characteristics that informed painting, architecture, and music held sway: order, regularity, and rationality. Moreover, during this time there emerged a print culture immersed in a broader consumer revolution. Magazines, newspapers, and popular books were consumed by an increasingly public-minded audience of aristocrats and middle-class men, and through printed matter of all kinds they were immersed in Enlightenment ideas. Gradually, with their readers they fashioned what has become known as “public opinion.” Some writers, such as the French man of letters Voltaire (1694–1778) or the British poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), earned fortunes from their pens in this emergent market society while they embodied and widely disseminated Enlightenment ideas and values to this new public. Pope’s poetry remained popular among some readers during the second half of the eighteenth century. His poem An Essay on Man (1733–1734) provides a clear illustration of the Classical assumption that good poetry starts from a clear idea and gives it form. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), recognized as an authority on Classicism, added that good poets “must not dwell on the minuter distinctions by which one species differs from another” but should instead always strive for the general and the universal that bind species together.

Sources

Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, volume 2 (New York: Knopf,1952).

Henry Raynor, A Social History of Music from the Middle Ages to Beethoven (New York: Schocken Books, 1972).

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).