FELIX MENDELSSOHN

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy—or Felix Mendelssohn—was  a  German  composer,  pianist, musical conductor, and teacher who was among the most celebrated figures of the early Romantic period. In his music Mendelssohn largely observed Classical models and practices while initiating key aspects of Romanticism— the  artistic  movement  that  exalted  feeling  and  the imagination above rigid forms and traditions. Among his most famous works are Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), Italian Symphony (1833), a violin concerto (1844), two piano concerti (1831, 1837), the oratorio Elijah(1846), and several pieces of chamber music.

EARLY LIFE AND WORKS 

Felix was born of Jewish parents, Abraham and Lea Salomon Mendelssohn, from whom he took his first piano lessons. Though the Mendelssohns were proud of their ancestry, they considered it desirable, in accordance with 19th-century liberal ideas, to mark their emancipation from the ghetto by adopting the Christian faith. Accordingly Felix, together with his brother and two sisters, was baptized in his youth as a Lutheran Christian. The name Bartholdy, a family property on the river Spree, was held by a wealthy maternal uncle who had embraced Protestantism. When the fortune of this relative passed to the Mendelssohns, his name was adopted by them.

In 1811, during the French occupation of Hamburg, the family had moved to Berlin, where Mendelssohn studied the piano with Ludwig Berger and composition with K.F. Zelter, who, as a composer and teacher, exerted an enor-mous influence on his development. His personality was nourished by a broad knowledge of the arts and was also stimulated by learning and scholarship. He traveled with his sister to Paris, where he took further piano lessons and where he appears to have become acquainted with the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Mendelssohn was an extremely precocious musical composer. He wrote numerous compositions during his boyhood, among them 5 operas, 11 symphonies for string orchestra, concerti, sonatas, and fugues. He made his first public appearance in 1818—at the age of nine—in Berlin.In 1821 Mendelssohn was taken to Weimar to meet J.W. von Goethe, for whom he played works of J.S. Bach and Mozart and to whom he dedicated his Piano Quartet No. 3. in B Minor (1825). A remarkable friendship developed between the aging poet and the 12-year-old musician. The next year he reached his full stature as a composer with the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Mendelssohn also became active as a conductor. On March 11, 1829, at the Singakademie, Berlin, he conducted the first performance since Bach’s death of the St. Matthew Passion, thus inaugurating the Bach revival of the 19th and 20th centuries. Meanwhile he had visited Switzerland and had met Carl Maria von Weber, whose opera Der Freischütz encouraged him to develop a national character in music. Mendelssohn’s great work of this period was the String Octet in E-flat Major (1825), displaying not only technical mastery and an almost unprecedented lightness of touch but great melodic and rhythmic originality. Mendelssohn developed in this work the genre of the swift-moving scherzo (a playful musical movement) that he would also use in the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1842).

In the spring of 1829 Mendelssohn made his first journey to England, conducting his Symphony No. 1 in C Minor (1824) at the London Philharmonic Society. In the summer he went to Scotland, of which he gave many poetic accounts in his evocative letters. Describing, in a letter written from the Hebrides, the manner in which the waves break on the Scottish coast, he noted down, in the form of a musical symbol, the opening bars of the Hebrides Overture (1830–32; also known as Fingal’s Cave). Between 1830 and 1832 he traveled in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland and, in 1832, returned to London, where he conducted the Hebrides Overture and where he published the first book of the piano music he called Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words), completed in Venice in 1830. Gradually Mendelssohn’s music was becoming the most popular of 19th-century composers in England.

Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 in A Minor–Major, or Scottish Symphony, as it is called, was dedicated to Queen Victoria. And he became endeared to the English musical public in other ways. The fashion for playing the “Wedding March” from his A Midsummer Night’s Dream at bridal processions originates from a performance of this piece at the wedding of the Princess Royal after Mendelssohn’s death, in 1858. In the meantime he had given the first performances in London of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Emperor and G Major concerti. Later the popularity of his oratorio Elijah, first produced at Birmingham in 1846, established Mendelssohn as a composer whose influence on English music equaled that of George Frideric Handel. Later generations of English composers, enamoured of Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, or Igor Stravinsky, revolted against the domination of Mendelssohn and condemned the sentimentality of his lesser works.

In 1833 he was in London to conduct his Italian Symphony (Symphony No. 4 in A Major–Minor), and in the same year he became music director of Düsseldorf. At Düsseldorf, too, he began his first oratorio, St. Paul. In 1835 he became con-ductor of the celebrated Gewandhaus Orchestra at Leipzig, where he not only raised the standard of orchestral play-ing but made Leipzig the musical capital of Germany.

MARRIAGE AND MATURITY 

In 1835 Mendelssohn was overcome by the death of his father, Abraham, whose dearest wish had been that his son should complete St. Paul. He accordingly plunged into this work with renewed determination and the following year conducted it at Düsseldorf. The same year at Frankfurt he met Cécile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a French Protestant clergyman. Though she was no more than 16, they became engaged and were married on March 28, 1837. Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny, the member of his family who remained closest to him, spoke kindly of her sister-in-law. Indeed, Fanny was not only a composer in her own right—she had herself written some of the Songs Without Words attributed to her brother—but she seems to have exercised, by her sisterly companionship, a powerful influence on the development of his inner musical nature.

Works written over the following years include the Variations sérieuses (1841), for piano, the Lobgesang (1840; Hymn of Praise), Psalm CXIV, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor (1837), and chamber works. In 1838 Mendelssohn began the Violin Concerto in E Minor–Major. Though he normally worked rapidly, this final expression of his lyrical genius compelled his arduous attention over the next six years. Later, in the 20th century, the Violin Concerto was still admired for its warmth of melody and for its vivacity, and it was also the work of Mendelssohn’s that, for nostalgic listeners, enshrined the elegant musical language of the 19th century.

In 1843 Mendelssohn founded at Leipzig the conservatory of music where he taught composition. Visits to London and Birmingham followed, entailing an increasing number of engagements. These would hardly have affected his normal health; he had always lived on this feverish level. But at Frankfurt in May 1847 he was greatly saddened by the death of Fanny. His energies deserted him, and, following the rupture of a blood vessel, he soon died.

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FRANZ SCHUBERT

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer who bridged the worlds of Classical and Romantic music.Although especially noted for his songs (lieder) and chamber music, he also wrote symphonies, masses, and piano works.

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER 

Schubert’s father was a schoolmaster, and his mother was in domestic service at the time of her marriage. Franz was their fourth surviving son, and he had a younger sister. The family was musical and cultivated string quartet playing in the home; Franz played the viola. He received the foundations of his musical education from his father and his brother Ignaz. In 1808 he won a scholarship that earned him a place in the imperial court chapel choir and an education at the Stadtkonvikt, the principal boarding school for commoners in Vienna, where his tutors included the composer Antonio Salieri, then at the height of his fame. 

Schubert played the violin in the students’ orchestra and was quickly promoted to leader and sometime conductor.Schubert’s earliest works included a long Fantasia for Piano Duet, a song, several orchestral overtures, various pieces of chamber music, and three string quartets. An unfinished operetta on a text by August von Kotzebue, Der Spiegelritter (The Looking-glass Knight), also belongs to those years. Eventually Schubert’s work came to the notice of Salieri; when his voice broke in 1812 and he left the college, he continued his studies privately with Salieri for at least another three years. During this time he entered a teachers’ training college in Vienna and in 1814 became assistant in his father’s school. 

Rejected for military service because of his short stature, he continued as a schoolmaster until 1818.The numerous compositions he wrote between 1813 and 1815 are remarkable for their style, originality, and imagination. Besides five string quartets, there were three full-scale masses and three symphonies. His first full-length opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss (The Devil’s Palace of Desire), was finished while he was at the training college. But at this period song composition was his chief interest. On Oct. 19, 1814, he first set to music a poem by Goethe, “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”), from Faust; it was his 30th song, and in this masterpiece he created the German lied (art song). The following year brought the composition of more than 140 songs.

The many unfinished fragments and sketches of songs left by Schubert provide some insight into the working of his creative mind. The primary stimulus was melodic; the words of a poem engendered a tune. Harmony (chordal structure of a composition) and modulation (change of key) were then suggested by the contours of the melody. But the external details of the poet’s scene—natural, domestic, or mythical—prompted such wonderfully graphic images in the accompaniments as the spinning wheel, the ripple of water, or the “shimmering robe” of spring. These features were fully present in the songs of 1815. During that year Schubert also was preoccupied with a number of ill-fated operas.In 1816 Schubert took a leave of absence from his duties as school headmaster, and during his teaching hiatus he met the baritone Johann Michael Vogl. 

As a result of this meeting, Vogl’s singing of Schubert’s songs became the rage of the Viennese drawing rooms. But this period of freedom did not last, and in the autumn of 1817 Schubert returned to his teaching duties. The leave, however, had been particularly fruitful. Songs of this period include “Ganymed,” “Der Wanderer,” and the Harper’s Songs from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister. There were two more symphonies: No. 4 in C Minor, which Schubert himself named the Tragic (1816), and the popular No. 5 in B-flat Major (1816). A fourth mass, in C major, was composed in 1816. The year 1817 is notable for the beginning of his masterly series of piano sonatas. Six were composed while staying at the home of life-long friend Franz von Schober, the finest being No. 7 in E-flat Major and No. 11 in B Major.

Schubert’s years of schoolmastering ended in the sum-mer of 1818. He had found the position frustrating, and in the spring of that year he had produced only one substantial work, the Symphony No. 6 in C Major. In the meantime his reputation was growing, however, and the first public performance of one of his works, the Italian Overture in C Major, took place on March 1, 1818, in Vienna. In June he took up the post of music master to the two daughters of Johann, Count Esterházy, in the family’s summer residence at Zseliz, Hung. In the summer months Schubert completed the piano duets Variations on a French Song in E minor and the Sonata in B-flat Major, sets of dances, songs, and the Deutsche Trauermesse (German Requiem).MATURITYOn his return to Vienna he composed the operetta Die Zwillingsbrüder (The Twin Brothers), but the production of the work was postponed, and in June 1819 Schubert and Vogl set off for a protracted holiday in the singer’s native district of upper Austria. 

There he composed the first of his widely known instrumental compositions, the Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 664, and the celebrated Trout Quintet for piano and strings. The close of 1819 saw him engrossed in songs to poems by his friend Johann Mayrhofer and by Goethe, who inspired “Prometheus.” In June 1820 Die Zwillingsbrüder was performed with moderate success in Vienna, Vogl doubling in the parts of the twin brothers. It was followed by the performance of inci-dental music for the play Die Zauberharfe (The Magic Harp), given in August of the same year. The melodious overture became famous as the Rosamunde overture. At the close of the year 1820, Schubert composed the Quartettsatz (Quartet-Movement) in C Minor, heralding the great string quartets of the middle 1820s, and another popular piece, the motet for female voices on the text of Psalm XXIII. In December 1820 he began the choral setting of Goethe’s Gesang der Geister über den Wassern (Song of the Spirits over the Water) for male-voice octet with accompaniment for bass strings, D. 714, completed in February 1821.

During September and October 1821 Schubert worked on the three-act opera, Alfonso und Estrell. It was com-pleted in February 1822 but was never performed. In July 1822, he produced the document called Mein Traum (“My Dream”), describing a quarrel between a music-loving youth and his father. The autumn of 1822 saw the begin-ning of the Symphony in B Minor (Unfinished). In November of the same year Schubert composed a piano fantasia and completed the Mass in A-flat Major.At the close of 1822 Schubert contracted a venereal disease, and the following year was one of illness and retirement. He continued to write almost incessantly. In February 1823 he wrote the Piano Sonata in A Minor, and in April he made another attempt to gain success in Viennese theatres with the one-act operetta Die Verschworenen (The Conspirators), the title being changed later to Der häusliche Krieg (Domestic Warfare). 

The famous work of the year, however, was the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin (“The Fair Maid of the Mill”), representing the epitome of Schubert’s lyrical art. Schubert spent part of the summer in the hospital and probably started work—while still a patient—on his most ambitious opera, Fierrabras. The year 1823 closed with Schubert’s composition of the music for the play Rosamunde, performed at Vienna in December.Schubert was ill, penniless, and plagued by a sense of failure early in 1824. Yet during this time he composed three masterly chamber works: the String Quartet in A Minor, a second string quartet in D Minor containing variations on his song Der Tod und das Mädchen, and the Octet in F Major for strings and wind instruments. In desperate need of money, he returned in the summer to his teaching post with the Esterházy family and in May 1824 went again to Zseliz. 

Once more his health and spirits revived. The period was marked by some piano duets, the Piano Sonata in C Major (Grand Duo), the Variations on an Original Theme in A-flat Major, and the Divertissement à la hongroise (Hungarian Divertissement).During these years his songs were frequently performed. Publication proceeded rapidly, and his financial position, though still strained, was at any rate eased. This is the period of the Lady of the Lake songs, including the once popular but later neglected Ave Maria. Instrumental compositions are the piano sonatas in A Minor and in D Major, the latter composed at Badgastein. He sketched a symphony during the summer holiday, in all probability the beginnings of the Symphony in C Major (Great), com-pleted in 1828.

LAST YEARS 

The resignation of Salieri as imperial Kapellmeister (musical director) in 1824 had led to the promotion of his deputy, Josef Eybler. In 1826 Schubert applied for the vacant post of deputy Kapellmeister, but in spite of strong support by several influential people he was unsuccessful. From then until his death two years later he seems to have let matters drift. Neither by application for professional posts nor submission of operatic work did he seek to establish himself.The songs of 1826 include the settings of Shakespeare’s “Hark! Hark! the Lark!” and “Who is Silvia?” Three fine instrumental works of this summer and autumn are the last: String Quartet in G Major, the Piano Sonata in G Major, and the beginning of the Piano Trio in B Flat Major. In 1827 he composed the first 12 songs of the cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey). Beethoven’s death in 1827 undoubtedly had a profound effect on Schubert, for there is no denying that a more profound, more intellectual quality akin to that in Beethoven’s music appears in his last instrumental works, especially the Piano Trio in E-flat Major (1827) and the Piano Sonata in C Minor (1828). 

In September 1827 Schubert spent a short holiday in Graz. On his return he composed the Piano Trio in E-flat Major and resumed work on Part II of the Winterreise. This is the period of his piano solos, the Impromptus and Moments musicaux.A succession of masterpieces marks the last year of his life. Early in the year he composed the greatest of his piano duets, the Fantasy in F Minor. The Great Symphony was concluded in March, as was also the cantata Miriams Siegesgesang (Miriam’s Victory Song). In June he worked at his sixth mass—in E-flat Major. A return to songwriting in August produced the series published together as the Schwanengesang (Swan Song). In September and early October the succession was concluded by the last three piano sonatas, in C Minor, A Major, and B-flat Major, and the great String Quintet in C Major—the swan song of the Classical era in music.The only public concert Schubert gave took place on March 26, 1828. 

It was both artistically and financially a success, and the impecunious composer was at last able to buy himself a piano. At the end of August he moved into lodgings with his brother Ferdinand. Schubert’s health, broken by the illness of 1823, had deteriorated, and his ceaseless work had exhausted him. In October he developed typhoid fever, and his last days were spent in the company of his brother and several close friends.

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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

As the creator of some of the most influential pieces of music ever written, German composer Ludwig van Beethoven bridged the 18th-century Classical period and the new beginnings of Romanticism. His greatest breakthroughs in composition came in his instrumental work, including his symphonies. Unlike his predecessor Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for whom writing music seemed to come easily, Beethoven always struggled to perfect his work.

Beethoven’s father and grandfather worked as court musicians in Bonn. Ludwig’s father, a singer, gave him his early musical training. Although he had only meagre academic schooling, he studied piano, violin, and French horn, and before he was 12 years old he became a court organist. Ludwig’s first important teacher of composition was Christian Gottlob Neefe. 

In 1787 he studied briefly with Mozart, and five years later he left Bonn permanently and went to Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn and later with Antonio Salieri.Beethoven’s first public appearance in Vienna was on March 29, 1795, as a soloist in one of his piano concerti. Even before he left Bonn, he had developed a reputation for fine improvisatory performances. In Vienna young Beethoven soon accumulated a long list of aristocratic patrons.

ONSET OF DEAFNESS AND ILL HEALTH 

In the late 1700s Beethoven began to suffer from early symptoms of deafness. Around the same time he developed severe abdominal pain. By 1802 Beethoven was convinced that his deafness not only was permanent, but was getting progressively worse. He spent that summer in the country and wrote what has become known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament.” In the document, apparently intended for his two brothers, Beethoven expressed his humiliation and despair. For the rest of his life he searched for a cure for his ailments, but his abdominal distress persisted and by 1819 he had become completely deaf. 

Beethoven never married. Although his friends were numerous, he was a rather lonely man, prone to irritability and dramatic mood swings. He continued to appear in public but increasingly focused his time on his compositions. Living near Vienna, he took long walks carrying sketchbooks, which became a repository of his musical ideas. These sketchbooks reveal the agonizingly protracted process by which Beethoven perfected his melodies, harmonies, and instrumentations.

THREE PERIODS OF WORK 

Most critics divide Beethoven’s work into three general periods, omitting the earliest years of his apprenticeship in Bonn. The first period, from 1794 to about 1800, generally encompasses music whose most salient features are typical of the Classical era. The influence of such musicians as Mozart and Haydn is evident in Beethoven’s early chamber music, as well as in his first two piano concerti and his first symphony. Although Beethoven added his own subtleties, including sudden changes of dynamics, the music was generally well constructed and congruent with the sensibilities of the Classical period.

The second period, from 1801 to 1814, includes much of Beethoven’s improvisatory work. His Symphony No. 3, known as the “Eroica,” and the Fourth Piano Concerto are fine examples of this period.The final period, from 1814 to his death in 1827, is characterized by wider ranges of harmony and counterpoint. The last string quartets contain some of the composer’s most vivid melodic and rhythmic material, while the form of the music is notably longer and more complex. In his symphonies and string quartets, he often replaced the minuet movement with a livelier scherzo. 

He also used improvisatory techniques, with surprise rhythmic accents and other unexpected elements.Many critics and listeners regard Beethoven as the finest composer who ever lived. He elevated symphonic music to a new position of authority in the Western music tradition. He also made great strides with chamber music for piano, as well as for string quartets, trios, and sonatas. His works include nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas, five piano concerti, 17 string quartets, ten sonatas for violin and piano, one opera (Fidelio), the Mass in C Major, Missa Solemnis, and other chamber music.

STRUCTURAL INNOVATIONS 

Beethoven remains the supreme exponent of what may be called the architectonic use of tonality. In his greatest sonata movements, such as the first allegro of the Eroica, the listener’s subconscious mind remains oriented to E-flat major even in the most distant keys, so that when, long before the recapitulation, the music touches on the dominant (B-flat), this is immediately recognizable as being the dominant. Of his innovations in the symphony and quartet, the most notable is the replacement of the minuet by the more dynamic scherzo; he enriched both the orchestra and the quartet with a new range of sonority and variety of texture, and their forms are often greatly expanded. 

The same is true of the concerto, in which he introduced formal innovations that, though relatively few in number, would prove equally influential. In particular, the entry of a solo instrument before an orchestral ritornello in the Fourth and Fifth piano concerti (a device anticipated by Mozart but to quite different effect) reinforces the sense of the soloist as a protagonist, even a Romantic hero, an effect later composers would struggle to reproduce. 

Although, in the finale of the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis, Beethoven shows himself a master of choral effects, the solo human voice gave him difficulty to the end. His many songs form perhaps the least important part of his output, although his song cycle An die ferne Geliebte would prove an important influence on later composers, especially Robert Schumann. His one opera, Fidelio, owes its preeminence to the excellence of the music rather than to any real understanding of the operatic medium. But even this lack of vocal sense could be made to bear fruit, in that it set his mind free in other directions. 

A composer such as Mozart or Haydn, whose conception of melody remained rooted in what could be sung, could never have written anything like the opening of the Fifth Symphony, in which the melody takes shape from three instrumental strands each giving way to the other. Richard Wagner was not far wrong when he hailed Beethoven as the discoverer of instrumental melody, even if his claim was based more narrowly on Beethoven’s avoidance of cadential formulas.Beethoven holds an important place in the history of the piano. In his day, the piano sonata was the most intimate form of chamber music that existed—far more so than the string quartet, which was often performed in public. 

For Beethoven, the piano sonata was the vehicle for his boldest and most inward thoughts. He did not anticipate the tech-nical devices of such later composers as Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, which were designed to counteract the percussiveness of the piano, partly because he himself had a pianistic ability that could make the most simply laid-out melody sing; partly, too, because the piano itself was still in a fairly early stage of development; and partly because he himself valued its percussive quality and could turn it to good account. 

Piano tone, caused by a hammer’s striking a string, cannot move forward, as can the sustained, bowed tone of the violin, although careful phrasing on the player’s part can make it seem to do so. Beethoven, however, is almost alone in writing melodies that accept this limitation, melodies of utter stillness in which each chord is like a stone dropped into a calm pool. And it is above all in the piano sonata that the most striking use of improvisatory techniques as an element of construction is found.

AN ENDURING MYSTERY 

Beethoven remained a subject of interest long after his death not only because of his music but also because of unresolved questions concerning his troubled life. An enduring topic of speculation was the cause of his debilitating illnesses and his erratic personality. In the “Heiligenstadt Testament,” the composer recognized that this subject would long be a perplexing one: “After my death,” he wrote, “if Dr. Schmidt is still alive, ask him in my name to discover my disease . . . so at least as much as is possible the world may be reconciled to me after my death.”Nearly two centuries later, a scientific analysis of strands of Beethoven’s hair suggested a possible answer to this lingering question. Four years of study at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., and the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago led researchers to conclude in 2000 that Beethoven had lead poisoning, which may have caused his gastrointestinal distress, irritability, and depression and possibly contributed to his death. The cause of his deafness, however, remained more uncertain, as causal relationships between lead poisoning and the disability are rare.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is widely recognized as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music. With Haydn and Beethoven he brought to its height the achievement of the Viennese Classical school. Unlike any other composer in musical history, he wrote in all the musical genres of his day and excelled in every one. His taste, his command of form, and his range of expression have made him seem the most universal of all composers.

EARLY LIFE AND WORKS 

Mozart’s father, Leopold, was a composer, a well-known violinist, and the author of a celebrated theoretical treatise. From 1762 Leopold took young Mozart and his sister Maria Anna (“Nannerl”), who also was musically talented, on tours throughout Europe in which they performed as harpsichordists and pianists. Young Mozart performed as a violinist and organist and received numerous com-missions. In Paris they met several German composers, and Mozart’s first music was published (sonatas for key-board and violin); in London they met, among others, Johann Christian Bach, and under his influence Mozart composed his first symphonies—three survive (K 16, K 19, and K 19a [K signifying the work’s place in the catalog of Ludwig von Köchel]). Two more followed during a stay in The Hague on the return journey (K 22 and K 45a).While the Mozarts were in Vienna in 1767–69 Mozart wrote a one-act German singspiel, Bastien und Bastienne, which was given privately. In 1769 his comic opera La finta semplice was performed in the archbishop’s palace in Salzburg. Just a few months later, Mozart was appointed an honorary Konzertmeister at the Salzburg court.

THE ITALIAN TOURS 

Mastery of the Italian operatic style was a prerequisite for a successful international composing career, and Mozart accordingly visited Italy with his father. Their first tour, begun on Dec. 13, 1769, took them to all the main musical centres. In mid-October 1770 he reached Milan and began work on the new opera, Mitridate, rè di Ponto (“Mithradates, King of Pontus”), the premiere of which, on December 26, was a notable success.

The second Italian visit, between August and December 1771, saw the successful premiere of Mozart’s opera Ascanio in Alba. Back in Salzburg in 1772, Mozart wrote eight sym-phonies, four divertimentos, several substantial sacred works, and an allegorical serenata, Il sogno di Scipione. The third and final Italian journey lasted from October 1772 until March 1773. The new opera Lucio Silla (“Lucius Sulla”) was given on Dec. 26, 1772, and after a difficult premiere it proved highly successful.The instrumental music of the period around the Italian journeys includes several symphonies (a few of them are done in a light, Italianate style), but others tread new ground in form, orchestration, and scale. There are also six string quartets and three divertimentos.

EARLY MATURITY 

Leopold took Mozart to Vienna in 1773, where the newest Viennese music had a considerable effect on the young composer; he produced a set of six string quartets showing fuller textures and a more intellectual approach to the medium. Soon after his return to Salzburg he wrote a group of symphonies, including, most notably, the “Little” G Minor (K 183) and the A Major (K 201).The year 1774 saw the composition of more symphonies, concertos for bassoon and for two violins, serenades, and several sacred works. At the end of the year Mozart was commissioned to write an opera buffa, La finta giardiniera (“The Feigned Gardener Girl”), for the Munich carnival season, where it was duly successful.A period of two and a half years (from March 1775) began in which Mozart worked steadily in his Salzburg post, now as a salaried Konzertmeister. 

During this period he wrote only one dramatic work, but he was productive in sacred and lighter instrumental music. His most impressive piece for the church was the Litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento (K 243), which embraces a wide range of styles (fugues, choruses of considerable dramatic force, florid arias, and a plainchant setting). The instrumental works included divertimentos, concertos, and serenades, notably the Haffner (K 250). 

MANNHEIM AND PARIS 

In 1777 he petitioned the archbishop for his release and, with his mother to watch over him, set out to find new opportunities. They went first to Munich, then to Augsburg. At the end of October they arrived at Mannheim, where they stayed for more than four months at the musically progressive court of the Elector Palatine. He became friendly with the Mannheim musicians, undertook some teaching and playing, and composed several piano sonatas, some with violin. 

Mozart and his mother reached Paris late in March 1778, and Mozart soon found work. His most important achievement there was the symphony (K 297), a brilliant D Major work.By the time of the symphony’s premiere, on June 18, his mother was seriously ill, and on July 3 she died. Soon after, Leopold negotiated a better post for Mozart in Salzburg, where he would be court organist and still nominally Konzertmeister, and Mozart reluctantly returned home in mid-January 1780. 

SALZBURG AND MUNICH 

Much of Mozart’s work after his return displayed his command of international styles, notably the symphonies K 318 in G Major and K 338 in C Major, as well as in the sinfonia concertante for violin and viola K 364. Also during this time, Mozart composed the two-piano concerto, the two-piano sonata, as well as a number of sacred works, including the best-known of his complete masses, the Coronation Mass.

But it was dramatic music that attracted Mozart above all, and in 1780 he received a commission to compose a serious Italian opera for Munich. The subject was to be Idomeneus, king of Crete, and the librettist the local cleric Giambattista Varesco. In the resulting Idomeneo, rè di Creta Mozart depicted serious, heroic emotion with a richness unparalleled elsewhere in his operas. It includes plain recitative and bravura singing, and, though the texture is more continuous than in Mozart’s earlier operas, its plan is essentially traditional. Given on Jan. 29, 1781, just after Mozart’s 25th birthday, it met with due success.

VIENNA: THE EARLY YEARS 

Mozart was still in Munich in March 1781, when he was summoned to Vienna to join the celebration of the installation of the new archbishop, Joseph II. Mozart was treated poorly by the new archbishop, and, after only a few months of service, he requested his discharge and set about earning a living in Vienna. He also embarked on an opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), and in December 1781 he married Constanze Weber, daughter of a music copyist, albeit without his father’s blessing.Musically, Mozart’s main preoccupation was with Die Entführung in the early part of 1782. The opera reached the Burgtheater stage on July 16. Stylistically, the work has fuller textures, more elaboration, and longer arias than other German repertory. 

It uses accompanying figures and key relationships to embody meaning. Other noteworthy features include Turkish colouring, created by “exotic” turns of phrase and chromaticisms as well as janissary instruments; expressive and powerful arias for the heroine; and comic musical passages. The work enjoyed immediate and continuing success.Later in the year Mozart worked on a set of three piano concertos and began a set of six string quartets. He also started work on a mass setting, in C Minor, of which only the first two sections, “Kyrie” and “Gloria,” were completed. Among the influences on this music, besides the Austrian ecclesiastical tradition, was the music of the Baroque period, noticeable especially in the spare textures and aus-tere lines of certain of the solo numbers. Mozart and his wife visited Salzburg in the summer and autumn of 1783, when the completed movements of the mass were performed.

THE CENTRAL VIENNESE PERIOD 

Back in Vienna Mozart entered on what was to be the most fruitful and successful period of his life. In 1782–83 he wrote three piano concertos (K 413–415), which he published in 1785 with string and optional wind parts. Six more followed in 1784, three each in 1785 and 1786 and one each in 1788 and 1791. With the 1784 group he established a new level of piano concerto writing; these concertos are at once symphonic, melodically rich, and orchestrally ingenious, and they also blend the virtuoso element effectively into the musical and formal texture of the work. 

After the 1784 group (K 449, 450, 451, 453, 456, and 459), all of which begin with themes stated first by the orchestra and later taken up by the piano, Mozart moved on in the concertos of 1785 (K 466, 467, and 482) to make the piano solo a reinterpretation of the opening theme. The 1786 group begins with the lyrical K 488, but then follow two concertos with a new level of symphonic unity and grandeur, that in C Minor (K 491), and the concerto in C Major (K 503).

Mozart’s other important contributions of this time come in the fields of chamber and piano music. The out-pouring of 1784 included the fine piano sonata K 457 and the piano and violin sonata K 454. He also wrote a quintet for piano and wind instruments (K 452), which he considered his finest work to date. The six string quartets on which he had embarked in 1782 were finished in the first days of 1785 and were published later that year.

FROM FIGARO TO DON GIOVANNI 

In spite of his success as a pianist and composer, Mozart had serious financial worries, and they worsened as the Viennese found other idols. Success in the court opera house was all-important. At Mozart’s request, Lorenzo Da Ponte, an Italian of Jewish descent who was a talented poet and librettist of the court theatre, wrote a libretto, Le nozze di Figaro, based on Beaumarchais’s revolutionary comedy, Le Mariage de Figaro. Both Figaro and the later opera Don Giovanni treat the traditional figure of the licentious nobleman. Perhaps the central achievement of Figaro lies in its ensembles, with their close link between music and dramatic meaning.

Figaro reached the stage on May 1, 1786, and was warmly received. The opera also enjoyed popularity in Prague, and at the end of the year Mozart was invited to go to the Bohemian capital; he went in January 1787 and gave a new symphony there, the Prague (K 504). He returned to Vienna in February 1787.In May 1787 Mozart’s father died. From this time Mozart’s music includes the two string quintets K 515–516, as well as a number of short lieder and three instrumental works of note: the Musikalischer Spass (Musical Joke), a good-humoured parody of bad music; Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the much-loved serenade; and a piano and violin sonata, K 526.But Mozart’s chief occupation during 1787 was the composition of the comic opera Don Giovanni, commissioned for production in Prague; it was given on October 29 and was positively received. Don Giovanni was Mozart’s second opera based on a libretto by Da Ponte. 

THE LAST TRAVELS 

On his return from Prague in mid-November 1787, Mozart was at last appointed to a court post, as Kammermusicus. The salary of 800 gulden seems to have done little to relieve the Mozarts’ chronic financial troubles. Their debts, however, were never large; their anxieties were more a matter of whether they could live as they wished than whether they would starve. Nevertheless, Mozart was deeply depressed during the summer, writing of “black thoughts.”During the time of this depression Mozart was working on a series of three symphonies, K 543, K 550, and K 551 (the Jupiter; these, with the work written for Prague (K 504), represent the summa of his orchestral output.

The summer of 1789 saw the composition of the clarinet quintet, and thereafter Mozart concentrated on completing his next opera commission; the third of his Da Ponte operas, Così fan tutte was given on Jan. 26, 1790. This opera, the subtlest, most consistent, and most symmetrical of the three, was long reviled on account of its subject, female fickleness; but a more careful reading of it reveals that it is no frivolous piece but a penetrating essay on human feelings and their mature recognition. Features of the music of Così fan tutte—serenity, restraint, poise, irony— may be noted as markers of Mozart’s late style. The remainder of the year was difficult and relatively unproductive.

THE LAST YEAR 

Music was flowing again in 1791: for a concert in March Mozart completed a piano concerto (K 595), reeled off numerous dances, and wrote two new string quintets. He also composed the score to Emanuel Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), and received another com-mission, for a requiem, to be composed under conditions of secrecy. In July Constanze gave birth to their sixth child, one of the two to survive. Mozart’s letters to her show that he worked first on Die Zauberflöte before he left for Prague near the end of August. Pressure of work, however, was such that he took with him to Prague, along with Constanze, his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who almost certainly com-posed the plain recitatives for the new opera.

Mozart was back in Vienna by the middle of September; his clarinet concerto was finished by September 29, and the next day Die Zauberflöte had its premiere. The opera became the most loved of all of Mozart’s works for the stage. Mozart had been ill during the weeks in Prague, but in October he managed to write a Masonic cantata and to work steadily on the commissioned requiem. Later in November he was ill and was confined to bed, and on December 5 he died of a severe fever. Constanze Mozart was anxious to have the requiem completed, as a fee was due. She handed it first to Joseph Eybler, who supplied some orchestration, and then to Süssmayr, who produced a complete version, writing several movements. This has remained the standard version of the work, if only because of its familiarity.

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JOSEPH HAYDN

Austrian composer Joseph Haydn was one of the most important figures in the development of the Classical style in music during the 18th century. He helped establish the forms and styles for the string quartet and thesymphony.

EARLY YEARS 

Haydn’s father was a wheelwright, his mother, before her marriage, a cook for the lords of the village. Haydn early revealed unusual musical gifts, and a cousin who was a school principal and choirmaster in the nearby city of Hainburg offered to take him into his home and train him. 

Haydn, not yet six years old, left home, never to return to the parental cottage except for rare, brief visits.The young Haydn sang in the church choir, learned to play various instruments, and obtained a good basic knowledge of music. His life changed decisively when he was eight years old, when the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna invited him to serve as chorister at the Austrian capital’s most important church. Thus, in 1740 Haydn moved to Vienna. He stayed at the choir school for nine years, acquiring an enormous practical knowledge of music by constant performances but receiving little instruction in music theory. When his voice changed, he was expelled from both the cathedral choir and the choir school.

With no money and few possessions, Haydn at 17 was left to his own devices. He eventually was introduced to the music-loving Austrian nobleman Karl Joseph von Fürnberg, in whose home he played chamber music and for whose instrumentalists he wrote his first string quartets. Through the recommendation of Fürnberg, Haydn was engaged in 1758 as musical director and chamber composer for the Bohemian count Ferdinand Maximilian von Morzin and was put in charge of an orchestra of about 16 musicians. For this ensemble he wrote his first symphony as well as numerous divertimenti for wind band or for wind instru-ments and strings.

ESTERHÁZY PATRONAGE 

Haydn stayed only briefly with von Morzin, and soon he was invited to enter the service of Prince Pál Antal Esterházy. The Esterházys were one of the wealthiest and most influential families of the Austrian empire and boasted a distinguished record of supporting music. Prince Pál Antal had an orchestra performing regularly in his castle at Eisenstadt, a small town some 30 miles (48 km) from Vienna, and he appointed the relatively unknown Haydn to be assistant conductor in 1761. While the music director oversaw church music, Haydn conducted the orchestra, coached the singers, composed most of the music, and served as chief of the musical personnel. Haydn worked well with the Esterházy family, and he remained in their service until his death.

In 1766 Haydn became musical director at the Esterházy court. He raised the quality and increased the size of the prince’s musical ensembles by appointing many choice instrumentalists and singers. His ambitious plans were supported by Prince Miklós, who had become head of the Esterházy family in 1762. In addition to com-posing operas for the court, Haydn composed symphonies, string quartets, and other chamber music. The prince was a passionate performer on the baryton, and Haydn provided more than 120 compositions featuring this now-obsolete cellolike instrument.

Haydn served Prince Miklós for nearly 30 years. He frequently visited Vienna in the prince’s retinue. On these visits he developed a close friendship with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The two composers were inspired by each other’s work.The period from 1768 to about 1774 marks Haydn’s maturity as a composer. The music written then, from the Stabat Mater (1767) to the large-scale Missa Sancti Nicolai (1772), would be sufficient to place him among the chief composers of the era. The many operas he wrote during these years did much to enhance his own reputation and that of the Esterházy court. 

Other important works from this period include the string quartets of Opus 20, the Piano Sonata in C Minor, and the turgid symphonies in minor keys, especially the so-called Trauersymphonie in E Minor, No. 44 (“Mourning Symphony”) and the “Farewell” Symphony, No. 45.Haydn’s operatic output continued to be strong until 1785, but his audience increasingly lay outside his employer’s court. In 1775 he composed his first large-scale oratorio, Il ritorno di Tobia, for the Musicians’ Society in Vienna, and the Viennese firm Artaria published his six Opus 33 quartets in the 1780s. These important quartets quickly set a new standard for the genre. In the mid-1780s a commission came from Paris to compose a set of symphonies. Also about this time, Haydn was commissioned to compose the Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, one of his most admired works.

ENGLISH PERIOD 

When Prince Miklós died in 1790, he was succeeded by his son, Prince Antal, who did not care for music and dis-missed most of the court musicians. Haydn was retained, however, and continued to receive his salary. At this point a violinist and concert manager, Johann Peter Salomon, arrived from England and commissioned from Haydn 6 new symphonies and 20 smaller compositions to be con-ducted by the composer himself in a series of orchestral concerts in London. Haydn gladly accepted this offer, and the two men set off for London in December 1790.

On New Year’s Day 1791, Haydn arrived in England, and the following 18 months proved extremely rewarding. The 12 symphonies he wrote on his first and second visits to London represent the climax of his orchestral output. Their style and wit endeared the works to British audiences, and their popularity is reflected in the various nicknames bestowed on them—e.g., The Surprise (No. 94), Military (No. 100), The Clock (No. 101), and Drumroll (No. 103). 

In June 1792 Haydn left London, ultimately for Vienna, where his return was only coolly received. This perhaps prompted him to make a second journey to England in January 1794. The principal compositions of his second visit to London were the second set of London (or Salomon) symphonies (Nos. 99–104) and the six Apponyi quartets (Nos. 54–59). While in London, Haydn reached even greater heights of inspiration, particularly in the last three symphonies he wrote (Nos. 102–104), of which the Symphony No. 102 in B-flat Major is especially impressive. Although King George III invited him to stay in England, Haydn returned to his native Austria to serve the new head of the Esterházy family, Prince Miklós II.

THE LATE ESTERHÁZY AND VIENNESE PERIOD 

While in London in 1791, Haydn had been deeply moved by the performance of George Frideric Handel’s masterly oratorios. Deciding to compose further works in this genre, he obtained a suitable libretto, and, after settling in Vienna and resuming his duties for Prince Esterházy, he started work on the oratorio The Creation, the text of which had been translated into German by Baron Gottfried van Swieten. The work was planned and executed to enable performances in either German or English; it is believed to be the first musical work published with text underlay in two languages. The libretto was based on the epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton and on the Genesis book of the Bible. 

The Creation was first publicly performed in 1798 and earned enormous popularity subsequently. Haydn then produced another oratorio, which absorbed him until 1801. An extended poem, The Seasons, by James Thomson, was chosen as the basis for the (much shorter) libretto, again adapted and translated by van Swieten so as to enable performance in either German or English. 

The oratorio achieved much success, both at the Austrian court and in public performances (although not in London).Haydn’s late creative output included six masses written for his patron Miklós II. He also continued to compose string quartets, notably the six Erdödy quartets known as Opus 76. In 1797 Haydn gave to the Austrian Empire the stirring song Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser (“God Save Emperor Francis”). It was used for more than a century as the national anthem of the Austrian monarchy and as the patriotic song “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” (“Germany, Germany Above All Else”) in Germany, where it remains the national anthem as “Deutschlandlied.” The song was so beloved that Haydn decided to use it as a theme for variations in one of his finest string quartets, the Emperor Quartet (Opus 76, No. 3).

After composing his last two masses in 1801 and 1802, Haydn undertook no more large-scale works. During the last years of his life, he was apparently incapable of further work. In 1809 Napoleon’s forces besieged Vienna and in May entered the city. Haydn refused to leave his house and take refuge in the inner city. Napoleon placed a guard of honour outside Haydn’s house, and on May 31 the enfeebled composer died peacefully; he was buried two days later.

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JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

A prolific  composer  of  the  Baroque  era,  Johann Sebastian Bach was the most celebrated member of a large family of northern German musicians. Although he was admired by his contemporaries primarily as an out-standing harpsichordist, organist, and expert on organ building, Bach is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time and is celebrated as the creator of the Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor, and numerous other masterpieces of church and instrumental music.

EARLY YEARS 

J.S. Bach was the youngest child of Johann Ambrosius Bach and Elisabeth Lämmerhirt. Ambrosius was a string player, employed by the town council and the ducal court of Eisenach. Although Johann Sebastian started school in 1692 or 1693, nothing definite is known of his musical education at that time. By 1695 both his parents were dead, and he was looked after by his eldest brother, Johann Christoph (1671–1721). Christoph was the organist at Ohrdruf, and he apparently gave Johann Sebastian his first formal keyboard lessons.In 1700 the young Bach secured a place in a select choir of poor boys at the school at Michaelskirche, Lüneburg.

Bach evidently returned to Thuringia late in the summer of 1702, already a reasonably proficient organist and composer of keyboard and sacred music. By March 4, 1703, he was a member of the orchestra employed by Johann Ernst, duke of Weimar (and brother of Wilhelm Ernst, whose service Bach entered in 1708). When the new organ was completed at the Neue Kirche (New Church) in Arnstadt, on the northern edge of the Thuringian Forest, Bach helped test it, and in August 1703 he was appointed organist—at age 18.

THE ARNSTADT PERIOD 

At Arnstadt, where he remained until 1707, Bach devoted himself to keyboard music, for the organ in particular. In October 1705 he obtained a month’s leave to walk to Lübeck (more than 200 miles [300 km]), with the specific intention of becoming acquainted with the spectacular organ playing and compositions of Dietrich Buxtehude. He did not return to Arnstadt until mid-January 1706.

During these early years, Bach inherited the musical culture of the Thuringian area, a thorough familiarity with the traditional forms and hymns (chorales) of the orthodox Lutheran service, and, in keyboard music, perhaps a bias toward the formalistic styles of the south. But he also learned eagerly from the northern rhapsodists, Buxtehude above all. By 1708 he had arrived at a first synthesis of northern and southern German styles. 

Among the works that can be ascribed to these early years are the Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo (1704; Capriccio on the Departure of His Most Beloved Brother, BWV 992), the chorale prelude on Wie schön leuchtet (c. 1705; How Brightly Shines, BWV 739), and the fragmentary early version of the organ Prelude and Fugue in G Minor (before 1707, BWV 535a). (The “BWV” numbers provided are the standard catalog numbers of Bach’s works as established in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, prepared by the German musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder.)

THE MÜHLHAUSEN PERIOD 

In June 1707 Bach obtained a post at the Blasiuskirche in Mühlhausen in Thuringia. He moved there soon after and married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach at Dornheim on October 17. At Mühlhausen he produced several church cantatas; all of these works are cast in a conservative mold, based on biblical and chorale texts. The famous organ Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565), written in the rhapsodic northern style, and the Prelude and Fugue in D Major (BWV 532) may also have been composed during the Mühlhausen period, as well as the organ Passacaglia in C Minor (BWV 582), an early example of Bach’s instinct for large-scale organization. Cantata No. 71, Gott ist mein König (God Is My King), of Feb. 4, 1708, was the first of Bach’s compositions to be published. 

Bach resigned from his post in Mühlhausen on June 25, 1708, and subsequently moved to Weimar, on the Ilm River.THE WEIMAR PERIODBach was, from the outset, court organist at Weimar and a member of the orchestra. From Weimar, he occasionally visited Weissenfels, and in February 1713 he took part in a court celebration there that included a performance of his first secular cantata, Was mir behagt, also called the Hunt Cantata (BWV 208). On March 2, 1714, Bach became the concertmaster at Weimar; as such, he was charged with composing a cantata every month.

Bach’s development cannot be traced in detail during the vital years 1708–14, when his style underwent a profound change. From the series of cantatas written in 1714–16, however, it is obvious that he had been decisively influenced by the new styles and forms of the contemporary Italian opera and by the innovations of such Italian concerto composers as Antonio Vivaldi. His favourite forms appropriated from the Italians were those based on refrain (ritornello) or da capo schemes in which wholesale repetition—literal or with modifications—of entire sections of a piece permitted him to create coherent musical forms with much larger dimensions than had hitherto been possible. 

These newly acquired techniques hence-forth governed a host of Bach’s arias and concerto movements, as well as many of his larger fugues; they also profoundly affected his treatment of chorales.Among other works likely composed at Weimar are most of the Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book), all but the last of the so-called 18 “Great” chorale preludes, the earliest organ trios, and most of the organ preludes and fugues. The “Great” Prelude and Fugue in G Major for organ (BWV541)was finally revised about 1715, and the Toccata and Fugue in F Major (BWV 540) may have been played at Weissenfels.

THE KÖTHEN PERIOD 

Late in 1717 Bach left Weimar to begin his new appoint-ment as musical director to Prince Leopold of Köthen. In Köthen, Bach was concerned chiefly with chamber and orchestral music, and it was there that the sonatas for violin and clavier and for viola da gamba and clavier and the works for unaccompanied violin and cello were put into something like their present form. The Brandenburg Concertos were finished by March 24, 1721. Bach also found time to complete several cantatas as well as compile pedagogical keyboard works, including the Clavierbüchlein for W.F. Bach (begun Jan. 22, 1720), some of the French Suites, the Inventions (1720), and the first book (1722) of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier), a work that eventually consisted of two books, each of 24 preludes and fugues in all keys. 

The remarkable col-lection of “well-tempered” compositions systematically explores both the potentials of a newly established tuning procedure—which, for the first time in the history of keyboard music, made all the keys equally usable—and the possibilities for musical organization afforded by the system of “functional tonality,” a kind of musical syntax consolidated in the music of the Italian concerto com-posers of the preceding generation and a system that was to prevail for the next 200 years. 

At the same time, The Well-Tempered Clavier is a compendium of the most pop-ular forms and styles of the era: dance types, arias, motets, concerti, etc., presented within the unified aspect of a single compositional technique—the rigorously logical and venerable fugue.Maria Barbara Bach died unexpectedly in 1720, and Bach married Anna Magdalena Wilcken, daughter of a trumpeter at Weissenfels, on Dec. 3, 1721. Apart from his first wife’s death, Bach’s first few years at Köthen were probably the happiest of his life, and he was on the best terms with the prince. 

But after the prince got married—to an apparently antimusical and demanding woman—Bach began to feel neglected. At the same time, he began to consider the education of his elder sons, born in 1710 and 1714, and his thoughts turned to Leipzig. On Feb. 7, 1723, Bach gave a trial performance in Leipzig in application for the position of cantor, which had been vacated some months earlier by the death of Johann Kuhnau. Bach received the appointment, was granted permission to leave Köthen, and was installed in his new position on May 13.

YEARS AT LEIPZIG 

As director of church music for the city of Leipzig, Bach had to supply performers for four churches: Peterskirche, Neue Kirche, Nikolaikirche, and Thomaskirche. His first official performance was on May 30, 1723 with Cantata No. 75, Die Elenden sollen essen. New works produced during this year include many cantatas and the Magnificat in its first version. The first half of 1724 saw the produc-tion of the St. John Passion, which was subsequently revised. The total number of cantatas produced during this ecclesiastical year was about 62, of which about 39 were new works.

On June 11, 1724, Bach began a fresh annual cycle of cantatas, and within the year he wrote 52 of the so-called chorale cantatas. Indeed, during his first two or three years at Leipzig, Bach produced a large number of new cantatas, sometimes at the rate of one a week. The hectic pace of production required Bach (and other Baroque composers) to invent or discover their ideas quickly; they could not rely on the unpredictable arrival of “inspiration.” Consequently, the typical Baroque composer had to be a traditionalist who readily embraced the musical conventions and techniques of the time. 

SYMBOLISM 

A repertoire of melody types existed, for example, that was generated by an explicit “doctrine of figures” that created musical equivalents for the figures of speech in the art of rhetoric. Closely related to these “figures” are such examples of pictorial symbolism in which the com-poser writes, say, a rising scale to match words that speak of rising from the dead or a descending chromatic scale (depicting a howl of pain) to sorrowful words. Pictorial symbolism of this kind occurs only in connection with words—in vocal music and in chorale preludes, where the words of the chorale are in the listener’s mind. 

Number symbolism, another common device of the Baroque period, also is sometimes pictorial; in the St. Matthew Passion, for instance, it is reasonable that the question “Lord, is it I?” should be asked 11 times, once by each of the faithful disciples. The Baroque composer had at his disposal various other formulas for elaborating themes into complete compositions; skilled use of such formulas allowed the arias and choruses of a cantata to be spun out almost “automatically.”As a result of his intense activity in cantata pro­duction during his first three years in Leipzig, Bach had created a supply of church music to meet his future needs for the regular Sunday and feast day services. After 1726, therefore, he turned his attention to other projects. 

He did, however, produce the St. Matthew Passion in 1729, a work that inaugurated a renewed interest in the mid-1730s for vocal works on a larger scale than the cantata; the now-lost St. Mark Passion (1731); the Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248 (1734); and the Ascension Oratorio (Cantata No. 11, Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen; 1735). 

INSTRUMENTAL WORKS

In 1726, after he had completed the bulk of his cantata production, Bach began to publish the clavier Partitas singly, with a collected edition in 1731. The second part of the Clavierübung, containing the Concerto in the Italian Style and the French Overture (Partita) in B Minor, appeared in 1735. The third part, consisting of the Organ Mass with the Prelude and Fugue [“St. Anne”] in E-flat Major (BWV 552), appeared in 1739. From c. 1729 to 1736 Bach was honorary musical director to Weissenfels; and, from 1729 to 1737 and again from 1739 for a year or two, he directed the Leipzig Collegium Musicum. 

For these concerts, he adapted some of his earlier concerti as harpsichord con-certi, thus becoming one of the first composers—if not the very first—of concerti for keyboard instrument and orchestra.About 1733 Bach began to produce cantatas in honour of the elector of Saxony and his family, evidently with a view to the court appointment he secured in 1736; many of these secular movements were adapted to sacred words and reused in the Christmas Oratorio. The Kyrie and Gloria of the Mass in B Minor, written in 1733, were also dedicated to the elector, but the rest of the Mass was not put together until Bach’s last years. 

On his visits to Dresden, Bach had won the regard of the Russian envoy, Hermann Karl, Reichsgraf (count) von Keyserlingk, who commissioned the so-called Goldberg Variations; these were published as part four of the Clavierübung about 1742, and Book Two of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier seems to have been compiled about the same time. In addition, he wrote a few cantatas, revised some of his Weimar organ works, and published the so-called Schübler Chorale Preludes in or after 1746. 

LAST YEARS 

In May 1747 Bach visited his son (Carl Philipp) Emanuel at Potsdam and played before Frederick II the Great of Prussia. In July his improvisations, on a theme proposed by the king, took shape as The Musical Offering. In June 1747 he joined a Society of the Musical Sciences, to which he presented the canonic variations on the chorale Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her (From Heaven Above to Earth I Come).

Of Bach’s last illness little is known except that it lasted several months and prevented him from finishing The Art of the Fugue; he succumbed to his illness on July 28, 1750, at Leipzig. Anna Magdalena was left badly off. Her stepsons apparently did nothing to help her, and her own sons were too young to do so. She died on Feb. 27, 1760, and was given a pauper’s funeral. Unfinished as it was, The Art of the Fugue was published in 1751 and was reissued in 1752. Very few copies were sold, however.

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GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL

A German-born English composer of the late Baroque era, George Frideric Handel—or, Georg Friedrich Händel, as he was known for the first 30 years of his life—was noted particularly for his operas, oratorios, and instrumental compositions. He wrote the most famous of all oratorios, Messiah (1741), and is also known for such occasional pieces as Water Music (1717) and Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749).

LIFE 

The son of a barber-surgeon, Handel showed a marked gift for music and became a pupil in Halle of the composer Friedrich W. Zachow, from whom he learned the principles of keyboard performance and composition. In 1702 Handel enrolled as a law student at the University of Halle. He also became organist of the Reformed (Calvinist) Cathedral in Halle but served for only one year before going north to Hamburg. In Hamburg he joined the violin section of the opera orchestra and also took over some of the duties of harpsichordist; early in 1705 he presided over the premiere in Hamburg of his first opera, Almira.Handel spent the years 1706–10 traveling in Italy, where he met many of the greatest Italian musicians of the day. 

He composed many works in Italy, including two operas, numerous Italian solo cantatas (vocal compositions), Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (1707) and another oratorio, the serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (1708), and some Latin (i.e., Roman Catholic) church music. His opera Agrippina enjoyed a sensational success at its premiere in Venice in 1710.Also in 1710 Handel was appointed Kapellmeister to the elector of Hanover, the future King George I of England, and later that year he journeyed to England. Handel’s opera Rinaldo was performed in London in 1711 and was greeted with great enthusiasm. Over the next two years his operas Il pastor fido (1712) and Teseo (1713) were also staged in London. 

In 1713 he won his way into royal favour by his Ode for the Queen’s Birthday and the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate in celebration of the Peace of Utrecht, and he was granted an annual allowance of £200 by Queen Anne.On the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the elector George Louis became King George I of England, and Handel subsequently made England his permanent home. In 1718 he became director of music to the duke of Chandos, for whom he composed the 11 Chandos Anthems and the English masque Acis and Galatea, among other works. Another masque, Haman and Mordecai, was to be the effective starting point for the English oratorio. 

In 1726 Handel officially became a British subject, which enabled him to be appointed a composer of the Chapel Royal. In this capacity he wrote much music, including the Coronation Anthems for George II in 1727 and the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline 10 years later.From 1720 until 1728 the operas at the King’s Theatre in London were staged by the Royal Academy of Music, and Handel composed the music for most of them. Among those of the 1720s were Floridante (1721), Ottone (1723), Giulio Cesare (1724), Rodelinda (1725), and Scipione (1726). From 1728, after the sensation caused by John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (which satirized serious opera), the Italian style went into decline in England, largely because of the impatience of the English with a form of entertainment in an unintelligible language sung by artists of whose morals they disapproved. 

But Handel went on composing operas until 1741, by which time he had written more than 40 such works. As the popularity of opera declined in England, oratorio became increasingly popular. The revivals in 1732 of Handel’s masques Acis and Galatea and Haman and Mordecai (renamed Esther) led to the establishment of the English oratorio—a large musical composition for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, without acting or scenery, and usually dramatizing a story from the Bible in English-language lyrics. Handel first capitalized on this genre in 1733 with Deborah and Athalia.

In 1737 Handel suffered what appears to have been a mild stroke. After a course of treatment in Aachen (Germany), he was restored to health and went on to compose the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline (1737) and two of his most celebrated oratorios, Saul and Israel in Egypt, both of which were performed in 1739. He also wrote the Twelve Grand Concertos, Opus 6, and helped establish the Fund for the Support of Decayed Musicians (now the Royal Society of Musicians).

Handel was by this time at the height of his powers, and the year 1741 saw the composition of his greatest oratorio, Messiah, and its inspired successor, Samson. Messiah was given its first performance in Dublin on April 13, 1742, and created a deep impression. Handel’s works of the next three years included the oratorios Joseph and His Brethren (first performed 1744) and Belshazzar (1745), the secular oratorios Semele (1744) and Hercules (1745), and the Dettingen Te Deum (1743), celebrating the English victory over the French at the Battle of Dettingen. 

Handel had by this time made oratorio and large-scale choral works the most popular musical forms in England. Even during his lifetime Handel’s music was recognized as a reflection of the English national character, and his capacity for realizing the common mood was nowhere better shown than in the Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749), with which he celebrated the peace of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Handel now began to experience trouble with his sight. He managed with great difficulty to finish the last of his oratorios, Jephtha, which was performed at Covent Garden Theatre, London, in 1752. He kept his interest in musical activities alive until the end. 

After his death on April 14, 1759, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. 

MUSIC

The first basis of Handel’s style was the north German music of his childhood, but it was soon completely overlaid by the Italian style that he acquired in early adulthood during his travels in Italy. The influences of Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti can be detected in his work to the end of his long life, and the French style of Jean-Baptiste Lully and, later, that of the English composer Henry Purcell are also evident. There is a robustness in Handel’s later music that gives it a very English quality. Above all, his music is eminently vocal. His choral writing is remarkable for the manner in which it interweaves massive but simple harmonic passages with contrapuntal sections of great ingenuity, the whole most effectively illustrating the text. 

His writing for the solo voice is outstanding in its suitability for the medium. Handel had a striking ability to depict human character musically in a single scene or aria, a gift used with great dramatic power in his operas and oratorios.Though the bulk of his music was vocal, Handel was nevertheless one of the great instrumental composers of the late Baroque era. His long series of overtures (mostly in the French style), his orchestral concertos (Opus 3 and Opus 6), his large-scale concert music for strings and winds (such as the Water Music and the Fireworks Music), and the massive double concertos and organ concertos all show him to have been a complete master of the orchestral means at his command.

Handel had a lifelong attachment to the theatre—even his oratorios were usually performed on the stage rather than in church. Like other composers of his time, he accepted the conventions of Italian opera, with its employment of male sopranos and contraltos and the formalized sequences of stylized recitatives and arias upon which opera seria was constructed. Using these conventions, he produced Italian operas, such as Giulio Cesare (1724), Sosarme (1732), and Alcina (1735), which still make impressive stage spectacles.But Handel’s oratorios now seem even more dramatic than his operas, and they can generally be performed on the stage with remarkably little alteration. 

Most of them, from early attempts such as Esther to later works such as Saul, Samson, Belshazzar, and Jephtha, treat a particular dramatic theme taken from the Hebrew Bible that illus-trates the heroism and suffering of a particular individual. The story line is illustrated by solo recitatives and arias and underlined by the chorus. With Israel in Egypt and Messiah, however, the emphasis is quite different, Israel because of its uninterrupted chain of massive choruses, which do not lend themselves to stage presentation, and Messiah because it is a meditation on the life of Christ the Saviour rather than a dramatic narration of his Passion. 

Handel also used the dramatic oratorio genre for a number of secular works, chief among which are Semele, Hercules, and Acis and Galatea, all based on stories from Greek mythology.Handel’s most notable contribution to church music is his series of large-scale anthems. Foremost of these are the 11 Chandos Anthems. Closely following these works are the four Coronation Anthems for George II, the most celebrated of which is Zadok the Priest.

Most of the orchestral music Handel wrote consists of overtures, totaling about 80 in number. Handel was equally adept at the concerto form, especially the concerto grosso. His most important works of this type are the Six Concerti Grossi (known as The Oboe Concertos), Opus 3, and the Twelve Grand Concertos, which represent the peak of the Baroque concerto grosso for stringed instruments. The Water Music and Fireworks Music suites, for wind and string band, stand in a special class in the history of late Baroque music by virtue of their combination of grandeur and melodic bravura.

Handel also published harpsichord music, of which two sets of suites, the Suites de pièces pour le clavecin of 1720 and the Suites de pièces of 1733, containing 17 sets in all, are his finest contribution to that instrument’s repertoire. Handel’s finest chamber music consists of trio sonatas, notably those published as Six Sonatas for Two Violins, Oboes, or German Flutes and Continuo, Opus 2 (1733). He also wrote various sonatas for one or more solo instruments with basso continuo accompaniment for harpsichord. In addition, he composed more than 20 organ concertos.

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ANTONIO VIVALDI

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an Italian composer and violinist who left a decisive mark on the form of the concerto and on the style of late Baroque instrumental music.

LIFE

Vivaldi’s main teacher was probably his father, Giovanni Battista, who in 1685 was admitted as a violinist to the orchestra of the San Marco Basilica in Venice. Antonio, the eldest child, trained for the priesthood and was ordained in 1703. He made his first known public appearance playing violin alongside his father in the basilica in 1696. He became an excellent violinist, and in 1703 he was appointed violin master at the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned or orphaned children. The Pietà specialized in the musical training of its female wards, and those with musical aptitude were assigned to its excellent choir and orchestra. 

Vivaldi had dealings with the Pietà for most of his career: as violin master (1703–09; 1711–15), director of instrumental music (1716–17; 1735–38), and paid external supplier of compositions (1723–29; 1739–40).Vivaldi’s earliest musical compositions date from his first years at the Pietà. Printed collections of his trio sonatas and violin sonatas respectively appeared in 1705 and 1709, and in 1711 his first and most influential set of concerti for violin and string orchestra (Opus 3, L’estro armonico) was published by the Amsterdam music-publishing firm of Estienne Roger. In the years up to 1719, Roger pub-lished three more collections of his concerti (opuses 4, 6, and 7) and one collection of sonatas (Opus 5).

Vivaldi made his debut as a composer of sacred vocal music in 1713, when the Pietà’s choirmaster left his post and the institution had to turn to Vivaldi and other com-posers for new compositions. He achieved great success with his sacred vocal music, for which he later received commissions from other institutions. Another new field of endeavour for him opened in 1713 when his first opera, Ottone in villa, was produced in Vicenza. Returning to Venice, Vivaldi immediately plunged into operatic activity in the twin roles of composer and impresario. From 1718 to 1720 he worked in Mantua as director of secular music for that city’s governor, Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt. 

This was the only full-time post Vivaldi ever held; he seems to have preferred life as a freelance composer for the flexibility and entrepreneurial opportunities it offered. Vivaldi’s major compositions in Mantua were operas, though he also composed cantatas and instrumental works.The 1720s were the zenith of Vivaldi’s career. Based once more in Venice, but frequently traveling elsewhere, he supplied instrumental music to patrons and customers throughout Europe. Between 1725 and 1729 he published five new collections of concerti (opuses 8–12). 

After 1729 Vivaldi stopped publishing his works, finding it more profitable to sell them in manuscript to individual purchasers.In the 1730s Vivaldi’s career gradually declined. The French traveler Charles de Brosses reported in 1739 with regret that his music was no longer fashionable. Vivaldi’s impresarial forays became increasingly marked by failure. In 1740 he traveled to Vienna, but he fell ill and did not live to attend the production there of his opera L’oracolo in Messenia in 1742. The simplicity of his funeral on July 28, 1741, suggests that he died in considerable poverty.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC 

Almost 500 concerti by Vivaldi survive. More than 300 are concerti for a solo instrument with string orchestra and continuo. Of these, approximately 230 are written for solo violin, 40 for bassoon, 25 for cello, 15 for oboe, and 10 for flute. There are also concerti for viola d’amore, recorder, mandolin, and other instruments. Vivaldi’s remaining concerti are either double concerti (including about 25 written for two violins), concerti grossi using three or more soloists, concerti ripieni (string concerti without a soloist), or chamber concerti for a group of instruments without orchestra.Vivaldi perfected the form of what would become the Classical three-movement concerto. 

Indeed, he helped establish the fast-slow-fast plan of the concerto’s three movements. Perhaps more importantly, Vivaldi was the first to employ regularly in his concerti the ritornello form, in which recurrent restatements of a refrain alternate with more episodic passages featuring a solo instrument. Vivaldi’s bold juxtapositions of the refrains (ritornelli) and the solo passages opened new possibilities for virtuosic display by solo instrumentalists. 

The fast movements in his concerti are notable for their rhythmic drive and the boldness of their themes, while the slow movements often present the character of arias written for the solo instrument.Several of Vivaldi’s concerti have picturesque or allusive titles. Four of them, the cycle of violin concerti entitled The Four Seasons (Opus 8, no. 1–4), are programmatic in a thoroughgoing fashion, with each concerto depicting a different season of the year, starting with spring. Vivaldi’s effective representation of the sounds of nature inaugurated a tradition to which works such as Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony belong. Vivaldi also left more than 90 sonatas, mainly for stringed instruments.

VOCAL MUSIC 

More than 50 authentic sacred vocal compositions by Vivaldi are extant. They range from short hymns for solo voices to oratorios and elaborate psalm settings in several movements for double choir and orchestra. He composed some 50 operas (16 of which survived in their entirety) as well as nearly 40 cantatas. Many of Vivaldi’s vocal works exhibit a spiritual depth and a command of counterpoint equal to the best of their time. Moreover, the mutual independence of voices and instruments often anticipates the later symphonic masses of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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JOSQUIN DES PREZ

Josquin des Prez was one of the greatest composers of Renaissance Europe. Josquin’s early life has been the subject of much scholarly debate, and the first solid evidence of his work comes from a roll of musicians associated with the cathedral in Cambrai in the early 1470s. During the late 1470s and early ’80s, he sang for the courts of René I of Anjou and Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan, and from 1486 to about 1494 he performed for the papal chapel. Sometime between then and 1499, when he became choirmaster to Duke Ercole I of Ferrara, he apparently had connections with the Chapel Royal of Louis XII of France and with the Cathedral of Cambrai. In Ferrara he wrote, in honour of his employer, the mass Hercules Dux Ferrariae, and his motet Miserere was composed at the duke’s request. He seems to have left Ferrara on the death of the duke in 1505 and later became provost of the collegiate church of Notre Dame in Condé.

Josquin’s compositions fall into the three principal cat-egories of motets, masses, and chansons. Of the 20 masses that survive complete, 17 were printed in his lifetime in three sets (1502, 1505, 1514) by Ottaviano dei Petrucci. His motets and chansons were included in other Petrucci publications, from the Odhecaton (an anthology of popular chansons) of 1501 onward, and in collections of other print-ers. Martin Luther expressed great admiration for Josquin’s music, calling him “master of the notes, which must do as he wishes; other composers must do as the notes wish.” In his musical techniques he stands at the summit of the Renaissance, blending traditional forms with innovations that later became standard practices. 

The expressiveness of his music marks a break with the medieval tradition of more abstract music.Especially in his motets, Josquin gave free reign to his talent, expressing sorrow in poignant harmonies, employing suspension for emphasis, and taking the voices gradually into their lowest registers when the text speaks of death. Josquin used the old cantus firmus style, but he also developed the motet style that characterized the 16th century after him. His motets, as well as his masses, show an approach to the modern sense of tonality. In his later works Josquin gradually abandoned cantus firmus technique for parody and paraphrase. 

He also frequently used the tech-niques of canon and of melodic imitation.In his chansons Josquin was the principal exponent of a style new in the mid-15th century, in which the learned techniques of canon and counterpoint were applied to secular song. He abandoned the fixed forms of the rondeau and the ballade, employing freer forms of his own device. Though a few chansons are set homophonically—in chords—rather than polyphonically, a number of others are examples of counterpoint in five or six voices, maintaining sharp rhythm and clarity of texture.

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GUIDO D’AREZZO

Guido d’Arezzo was a medieval music theorist whose principles served as a foundation for modern Westernmusical notation.Educated at the Benedictine abbey at Pomposa, Guido evidently made use of the music treatise of Odo of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés and apparently developed his principles of staff notation there. He left Pomposa in about 1025 because his fellow monks resisted his musical innovations, and he was appointed by Theobald, bishop of Arezzo, as a teacher in the cathedral school and commissioned to write the Micrologus de disciplina artis musicae. The bishop also arranged for Guido to give (c. 1028) to Pope John XIX an antiphonary he had begun in Pomposa.

Guido seems to have gone to the Camaldolese monastery at Avellana in 1029, and his fame developed from there. Many of the 11th-century manuscripts notated in the new manner came from Camaldolese houses.

The fundamentals of the new method consisted in the construction by thirds of a system of four lines, or staff, and the use of letters as clefs. The red F-line and the yellow C-line were already in use, but Guido added a black line between the F and the C and another black line above the C. The neumes could now be placed on the lines and spaces between and a definite pitch relationship established. No longer was it necessary to learn melodies by rote, and Guido declared that his system reduced the 10 years normally required to become an ecclesiastical singer to a year.

Guido was also developing his technique of solmization, described in his Epistola de ignoto cantu. There is no evidence that the Guidonian hand, a mnemonic device associated with his name and widely used in the Middle Ages, had any connection with Guido d’Arezzo.Guido is also credited with the composition of a hymn to St. John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, in which the first syllable of each line falls on a different tone of the hexachord (the first six tones of the major scale); these syllables, ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la, are used in Latin countries as the names of the notes from c to a (ut was eventually replaced by do). 

His device was of immense practical value in teaching sight-reading of music and in learning melodies. Singers associated the syllables with certain intervals; mi to fa, in particular, always represented a half step.Before Guido an alphabetical notation using the letters from a to p was used in France as early as 996. Guido’s system used a series of capital letters, small letters, and double small letters from a to g. Guido’s system also came to be associated with the teaching of the gamut—the whole hexa-chord range (the range of notes available to the singer).

In addition to his innovations Guido also described a variety of organum (adding to a plainchant melody a second voice singing different pitches) that moved largely, but not completely, in parallel fourths. Guido’s work is known through his treatise the Micrologus.

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