Enfoque metodológico visto desde el estudio para la paz

This new kind of opera can be compared to the most important new literary genre that grew up at the same time. This was the novel, which — together with the symphony — counts as the Enlightenment’s greatest artistic legacy to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Precursors of the novel go back to ancient Rome, but the genre did not really capture the European imagination until around 1750. Among the best-known early novels are Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, the tale of a rather ordinary young man and his adventures in town and country, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a domestic drama that manages to be sexu-ally explicit, sentimental, and moralistic all at the same time. Rousseau wrote several very popular novels; Voltaire wrote Candide. At the end of the century, Jane Austen began her subtle explorations of the social forces at work on the hearts of her very sensitive (and sensible) characters in novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, and others. These novels are still alive and well in Hollywood and on PBS.

Sharp, realistic observation of contemporary life and sensitive depiction of feeling — these are the ideals shared by late eighteenth-century opera and the novel. It is no accident that within a few years of their publication, both Tom Jones and Pamela were turned into major operas, one French, the other Italian.

In Mozart, opera buffa found a master equal to Jane Austen in the sen-sitive response to feeling and action. In his opera Don Giovanni, for example, the three women romantically involved with the hero — the coquettish country girl, Zerlina; the steely aristocrat, Donna Anna; and the sentimental Donna Elvira — are depicted in music with the greatest psychological insight and

Rousseau himself composed a very successful opera of the uncomplicated kind he recommended. Pictured are the shepherdess Colette, with sheep, and her lover Colin from Rousseau’s Le Devin du village (The Village Sooth-sayer), 1752.

same qualities are refl ected in Mozart’s symphonies and concertos.

2 The Rise of Concerts

A far-reaching development in the sociol-ogy and economics of music was the rise of public con certs. Occasional concerts had been given before, in taverns, private homes, palaces, and theaters, but it was only in the middle of the eighteenth cen-tury that they became a signifi cant force in musical life. Concert series, fi nanced by subscription, were put on by the forerun-ners of today’s promoters. Concerts for the benefi t of charity were set up on a regular basis as major society events.

In 1748 Europe’s fi rst hall designed es-pecially for concerts was built in a college

town, Oxford. Still in use, the Holywell Music Room holds about 150 people.

Music of all kinds was presented at these new public concerts. One major series — the Parisian Concert spirituel, founded in 1725 — started out with sacred vocal music. But orchestral music was the staple, and the importance of concerts lay mainly in the impetus they gave to the composition of symphonies and concertos. For there were, after all, other public forums for church music (churches) and opera (opera houses). Now purely orchestral music, too, moved into the public domain, and its importance and prestige grew rapidly.

However, the livelihood of musicians still depended principally on court patronage, the opera house, and the church (see page 110). Concerts were cer-tainly a factor in the careers of both of the masters of Classical style already men-tioned: Haydn wrote his last symphonies, called the London symphonies, for concerts on two celebrity tours to that city, and Mozart wrote most of his piano concertos — among his greatest works — for concerts he himself put on in Vienna.

But concerts were a resource that Haydn did not draw upon much until the end of his long life, and they were not a reliable enough resource, alas, to sustain Mozart.

3 Style Features of Classical Music

In discussing the musical style of the late Baroque period, we started with a single guiding concept. There is a thorough, even rigorous quality in the ways early eighteenth-century composers treated almost all aspects of music, and this quality seems to underpin the expressive gestures of grandeur and over-statement that are characteristic of the Baroque.

Classical music cannot be discussed quite as easily as this. We have to keep two concepts in mind to understand it, concepts that were constantly on the lips of men and women of the time. One was “natural,” and the other was

“pleasing variety.” In the late eighteenth century, it was taken for granted that these two artistic ideals went hand in hand and provided mutual support.

The rise of concerts: With only around 15,000 inhabitants, pre revolutionary Boston already had a concert hall and a concert promoter (bandmaster Josiah Flagg). This advertisement is from the Boston Chronicle of 1769.

although “variety” was called on to ward off boredom, it was also an invitation to complexity, and complexity would seem to run counter to “natural”

simplicity and clarity. In any case, in Classical music one or the other — and sometimes both — of these qualities can be traced in all the elements of musical technique: in rhythm, dynamics, tone color, melody, texture, and form. A new expressive quality developed in this music as a result of its new technique.

Rhythm

Perhaps the most striking change in music between the Baroque and the Classical periods came in rhythm. In this area the artistic ideal of “pleasing variety” reigned supreme. The unvarying rhythms of Baroque music came to be regarded as dreary, obvious, and boring.

Classical music is highly fl exible in rhythm. Throughout a single movement, the tempo and meter remain constant, but the rhythms of the various themes

Domestic music making in the eighteenth century: a group portrait by Johann Zoffany (1733–1810), one of many fashionable painters in Britain (and British India). It was not uncommon for members of the gentry — including, here, an earl — to order pictures showing off their musical accomplishments.

STRINGS

Violins (divided into two groups, called violins 1 and violins 2)

THE BASIC BAROQUE ORCHESTRA THE FESTIVE BAROQUE ORCHESTRA

KEYBOARD

Harpsichord or organ

Mozart’s Symphony in G Minor, for example, the fi rst theme moves almost entirely in eighth notes and quarters, whereas the second theme is marked by longer notes and shorter ones — dotted half notes and sixteenths.

Audiences wanted variety in music; composers responded by refi ning the rhythmic differences between themes and other musical sections, so that the differences sound like more than differences — they sound like real contrasts.

The music may gradually increase or decrease its rhythmic energy, stop suddenly, press forward by fi ts and starts, or glide by smoothly. All this gives the sense that Classical music is moving in a less predictable, more interesting, and often more exciting way than Baroque music does.

Dynamics

Variety and fl exibility were also introduced into dynamics. Passages were now conceived more specifi cally than before as loud, soft, very loud, and so on, and marked f, p, ff, mf by composers accordingly. Composers made variety in dynamics clearly perceptible and, we must suppose, “pleasing.”

Furthermore, instead of using the steady dynamics of the previous period, composers now worked extensively with gradations of volume. The words for growing louder (crescendo) and growing softer (diminuendo) fi rst came into general use in the Classical period. Orchestras of the mid-eighteenth century were the fi rst to practice long crescendos, which, we are told, caused audiences to rise up from their seats in excitement.

A clear sign of the times was the rise in popularity of the piano, at the expense of the ever-present harpsichord of the Baroque era. The older instru-ment could manage only one sound level (or at best a few sound levels, thanks to more than one set of strings). The new pianoforte could produce a continu-ous range of dynamics from soft to loud; the name means “soft-loud” in Italian.

It attracted composers because they wanted their keyboard instruments to have the same fl exibility in dynamics that they were teaching to their orchestras.