Howard Goodall's The Story Of Music Episode 3

Episode 3 - The Age of Elegance & Sensibility

The period 1750-1820 was a time of social and political upheaval, with people enduring the Napoleonic Wars, and the American and French Revolutions. In music, this was a time when faith and morality gave way to the principle of pleasure, and the social status of the composer and the target audience changed.
The music had a lack of direct relevance to the times, as if the composers were glossing over real-life and keeping the aristocracy calm. Life during this age was dirty and unsafe except for the very rich, and composers, like the painters of the day, were trying to reflect the best of life in their art. The structure of music also became simpler, using a limited palette of chords, the primary chords of I, IV and V used especially frequently. This didn't create bland music though; the composers just wanted to ensure clear form and structure.

Two of the greats of this period – Haydn and Mozart – had an underlying logic to their music. Whereas their predecessor Bach would find the perfect accompaniment to the meaning of the text, Haydn and Mozart were concerned with plotting the perfect harmonic ‘route’ through the music.

The Symphony was developed extensively during this period. This form didn't have parallel’s in other artistic fields, a similar concept only became popular in the visual arts 120 years later.

Johann Stamitz was a composer who worked in the court in Mannheim, Germany which had a reputation for a large orchestra and highly skilled players. Stamitz used lots of repeated sections and ideas in his symphonies.

Haydn refined this musical form. He took the idea of proportion and balance, utilizing a similar idea but without exact repetition. He managed to achieve this balance but without an excess of repetition which can be wearing. Haydn taught to the world this process of taking a small cell of music then building on it to create longer units with more interesting features. Mozart and Beethoven would both later utilize this technique.

Mozart was a great ‘tune’ writer, his music being uncluttered and without intellectual pretension. This was important as he was writing for mostly a paying audience unlike his predecessor Bach. If the people didn't like Mozart’s music, he would starve. He would make great use of a classical technique of basing phrases around the home triad; for example phrase one based around C, phrase two around E and phrase 3 around G. For the last ten years of his life, Mozart worked freelance performing, some teaching, writing on commission, composing for theatre and writing dance music. After Mozart, this freelance model would become the norm rather than composers working solely in the employ of a rich patron. Haydn and Mozart were at the pivot of this change.

Beethoven is known as a great innovator, but his early music takes the music of the day and adapts it. You can hear this clearly when comparing some of Jan Dussek’s piano works with Beethoven’s. A few years later though he would develop his own style with the composition of the Eroica Symphony. This work was a challenge for audiences used to the predictable music of Haydn. There were noisy surprises and unexpected changes of key. It was also very long; its opening movement was as long as the average Haydn or Mozart symphony. He dedicated the work to Napoleon Bonaparte. It is said that when Napoleon declared himself emperor, Beethoven scratched his name from the score, but recent investigation points to this probably being a myth.

The second movement of the Eroica is a funeral march. Unlike the music of Haydn and Mozart which put on a ‘happy face’, this music was serious, portraying grief, sadness and fear. He re-calibrated what music was for, changing it from gentile after-dinner entertainment to a state of mind, infused with his own. Music was previously about elegance, now it was about the psychology of the composer. In Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony composed in 1808, he assigned human emotions to nature.

Beethoven’s near contemporary Franz Schubert was the unmatched song writer before the 20th Century. He wrote almost 600 songs or ‘Leider’ before he died at the age of 31. His songs were often about love, and were meant to sound like upmarket folk songs; immediately memorable, lyrically easily understandable and with predictable melodies. He was basically the inventor of the three-minute song for piano and voice that is still alive today in the likes of Adele’s music.

Some composers such as Mendelssohn were a type of ‘composer-painter’ their music evoked strong imagery. During the age of steam, where people were creating greater industrial forces, Beethoven’s 7th Symphony was unleashing music on a more forceful scale. The symphony orchestra was now in full force and the audience were in awe, but it was nothing compare to what Beethoven unveiled in his 9th Symphony, which confirmed the symphony as music on an epic scale. After this he turned his back on music of this scale for something smaller and more intimate. In the last two years of his life, Beethoven, deaf and bed-ridden composed two string quartets, which have a very ‘private’ feel to them.

Frederic Chopin’s music, like Beethoven’s late quartets is very intimate. He preferred smaller venues like salons and private homes to large concert halls. Because of this his influence spread slowly. His music has an exquisite melancholy, which inspired an era of amateur musicianship, centred on the piano. From the early 19th Century onwards, the middle-class installed factory made pianos in their drawing rooms and needed music to play on them, and a wealth of sheet music appeared. The piano was the only way of hearing music in the average middle-class home. Women, who were excluded from composing or performing in orchestras, could now play music on piano; this was a social accomplishment and a chance to compose. Like her brother Felix, Fanny Mendelssohn’s music conjured great imagery.

One of the most famous concert pianists of the 19th Century was a friend of Fanny Mendelssohn called Clara Wieck, who later married Robert Schumann. Whereas Schubert’s love songs were about unobtainable women, Schumann’s centred on Clara. Clara, as a leading pianist tirelessly promoted her husband’s works and also championed Chopin’s work, travelling the world performing it.

Chopin and Schumann’s music left behind the primary colour certainties of Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven. After a period of simplicity, music was moving back towards complexity.

My Response

I enjoy the music of many of the composers in this era, and I think it is striking the development that music went through in this period, from the absolute music of Haydn and Mozart to the image-conjuring harmonies of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Chopin.

The influence that the piano had on the availability of music to the public is a great story and one that I plan to explore at some length for Assignment Three. It was interesting to note how this music gave Women the opportunity to perform and compose music, something they had previously been unable to do.