Classical period (music)

Schubert is also a transitional figure, as were Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Luigi Cherubini, Gaspare Spontini, Gioachino Rossini, Carl Maria von Weber, Jan Ladislav Dussek and Niccolò Paganini.

The period is sometimes referred to as the era of Viennese Classicism (German: Wiener Klassik), since Gluck, Haydn, Salieri, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert all worked in Vienna.

This taste for structural clarity began to affect music, which moved away from the layered polyphony of the Baroque period toward a style known as homophony, in which the melody is played over a subordinate harmony.

As the 18th century progressed well, the nobility became the primary patrons of instrumental music, while public taste increasingly preferred lighter, funny comic operas.

One way to trace the decline of the continuo and its figured chords is to examine the disappearance of the term obbligato, meaning a mandatory instrumental part in a work of chamber music.

This contrasts with the Baroque era, when melodies were typically written with no dynamics, phrasing marks, ornaments, as it was assumed that the performer would improvise these elements on the spot.

The Classical approach to structure again contrasts with the Baroque, where a composition would normally move between tonic and dominant and back again,[citation needed] but through a continual progress of chord changes and without a sense of "arrival" at the new key.

Among the stylistic developments which followed the High Baroque, the most dramatic came to be called Empfindsamkeit, (roughly "sensitive style"), and its best-known practitioner was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

The outstanding achievement of the great classical composers (Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven) was their ability to make these dramatic surprises sound logically motivated, so that "the expressive and the elegant could join hands.

As mentioned previously, Carl Philipp Emmanuel sought to increase drama, and his music was "violent, expressive, brilliant, continuously surprising, and often incoherent."

Another important break with the past was the radical overhaul of opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, who cut away a great deal of the layering and improvisational ornaments and focused on the points of modulation and transition.

By the late 1750s there were flourishing centers of the new style in Italy, Vienna, Mannheim, and Paris; dozens of symphonies were composed and there were bands of players associated with musical theatres.

One of the forces that worked as an impetus for his pressing forward was the first stirring of what would later be called Romanticism—the Sturm und Drang, or "storm and stress" phase in the arts, a short period where obvious and dramatic emotionalism was a stylistic preference.

45 in F♯ minor, exemplifies Haydn's integration of the differing demands of the new style, with surprising sharp turns and a long slow adagio to end the work.

In 1772, Haydn completed his Opus 20 set of six string quartets, in which he deployed the polyphonic techniques he had gathered from the previous Baroque era to provide structural coherence capable of holding together his melodic ideas.

However, a younger contemporary, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, brought his genius to Haydn's ideas and applied them to two of the major genres of the day: opera, and the virtuoso concerto.

By the end of the 1780s, changes in performance practice, the 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 composed his most famous operas, his six late symphonies that helped to redefine the genre, and a string of piano concerti that still stand at the pinnacle of these forms.

Also in London at this time was Jan Ladislav Dussek, who, like Clementi, encouraged piano makers to extend the range and other features of their instruments, and then fully exploited the newly opened up 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 base for composers who, while less notable than the "Vienna School", had a decisive influence on what came later.

In 1790, just before Mozart's death, with his reputation spreading rapidly, Haydn was poised for a series of successes, notably his late oratorios and London symphonies.

The crucial differences with the previous wave can be seen in the downward shift in melodies, increasing durations of movements, the acceptance of Mozart and Haydn as paradigmatic, the 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" forward as an element in music.

As with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, it may not have been the first in all of its innovations, but its aggressive use of every part of the Classical style set it apart from its contemporary works: in length, ambition, and harmonic resources as well making it the first symphony of the Romantic era.

Attempts to extend the First Viennese School to include such later figures as Anton Bruckner, Johannes Brahms, and Gustav Mahler are merely journalistic, and never encountered in academic musicology.

[10] Musical eras and their prevalent styles, forms and instruments seldom disappear at once; instead, features are replaced over time, until the old approach is simply felt as "old-fashioned".

Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Carl Maria von Weber, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and John Field are among the most prominent in this generation of "Proto-Romantics", along with the young Felix Mendelssohn.

Greater knowledge of works, greater instrumental expertise, increasing variety of instruments, the growth of concert societies, and the unstoppable domination of the increasingly more powerful piano (which was given a bolder, louder tone by technological developments such as the use of steel strings, heavy cast-iron frames and sympathetically vibrating strings) all created a huge audience for sophisticated music.

Even before Beethoven's death, composers such as Louis Spohr were self-described Romantics, incorporating, for example, more extravagant chromaticism in their works (e.g., using chromatic harmonies in a piece's chord progression).

However, Vienna's fall as the most important musical center for orchestral composition during the late 1820s, precipitated by the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, marked the Classical style's final eclipse—and the end of its continuous organic development of one composer learning in close proximity to others.

Composers such as Carl Czerny, while deeply influenced by Beethoven, also searched for new ideas and new forms to contain the larger world of musical expression and performance in which they lived.