Music Essay ⋆ History Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The period from 1750 until 1900 covered the European musical periods of the classicists and romantics. Most European countries had official orchestras, with smaller bands of musicians performing in stately homes, town halls, and other places, and folk music traditions existing throughout Europe, where performers would play at fairs, festivals, and other occasions. However, there was a stronger innovative musical tradition in Germany, where many rulers and states had their own courts and competed with rivals as cultural centers.

Germany And Austria

In Austria and the German lands, there were a number of important patrons of music, one of the foremost in the mid-18th century being the Habsburg rulers of Austria, although the war over Silesia—the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War—were extremely costly, causing Empress Maria Theresa to economize on her court music. In this period Johann Georg Reutter continued to write church music and opera, and Gottlieb Muffat wrote for the harpsichord and the organ.

The elector Palatine also maintained considerable musical talent in his court at Mannheim, recruiting musicians such as the Bohemians Johann Stamitz, Franz Xaver Richter, and Christian Cannabich, as well as a number of Italians. By contrast the Prussian court at Berlin tended to favor more academic music, with Carl Heinrich Graun being the Kapellmeister (director of music) for Frederick the Great. In charge of the Berlin opera, he also wrote The Death of Jesus, a Passion cantata. He was later joined by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Mention should also be made of musicians in Hamburg such as Georg Philip Telemann, director of the Leipzig Opera in 1702, and the Hamburg Opera from 1732 to 1738.

The great age of classicism in Europe started in the 1770s with renewed confidence and increasing wealth at many central European courts. This period saw the Austrian cities of Vienna and Salzburg emerging as centers for this new musical style, with G. C. Wagenseil, a composer of many symphonies, quartets, and piano concertos, and also J. B. Vanhal. Another musician during this period was Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and an important composer in his own right.

Franz Josef Haydn managed to get a position in the choir at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, and then joined the household of the famous Esterhazy family, as their Kapellmeister from 1766.

It was not long before the Italian Antonio Salieri emerged as an important musician at the Habsburg court, with his youthful prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart quickly rising to prominence. Mozart traveled to Italy when he was young, and there he heard many other musicians, remaining in contact with many of them throughout his life. As a result he had a wide knowledge of contemporary European compositions and was able to compose new music, including 21 operas.

His work included Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, as well as 27 concertos, piano trios, and serenades. He worked at the Austrian court in Vienna under Emperor Joseph II, dying from renal failure. A cousin of Mozart’s wife was Carl von Weber. Also a youthful prodigy, he wrote a number of concertos and then the operas Sylvana and Abu Hassan.

The Enlightenment

The forces of the Enlightenment, which came to influence events around the French Revolution, led to the romantic era, which saw a decline in the prestige and wealth of the Austrian court and the rise in importance of France. Franz Josef Haydn died in 1809 on exactly the same day that Napoleon i entered Vienna after defeating Austria. In spite of this decline, there were still a number of Austrian musicians who helped Vienna retain its prominent position, albeit briefly. Italian Luigi Boccherini composed several hundred compositions for string quartets. Franz Schubert was a prolific composer, writing 145 songs in 1815 alone, including nine in one single day. These included some of his best-known works, although critics feel his finest music dates from the 1820s. Another important German composer of this period was Robert Schumann, who produced a choral work titled Paradise and the Peri and was director of the Dusseldorf Orchestra from 1849 until 1853.

By this time new composers had emerged, notably Ludwig van Beethoven, who developed from a classicist from the 1780s into the leading romantic composer of the 19th century. He rose to international prominence with his symphonies, and his music was seen as breaking from the classical tradition and being unpredictable, clearly influenced by Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven used a much greater range of tempos, rhythms, harmonies, and key changes than most of his contemporaries.

Beethoven initially admired Napoleon I and dedicated his Third Symphony, to him, before renaming it the Eroica Symphony when he became disillusioned after Bonaparte crowned himself emperor. Beethoven later went on to compose his Fifth Symphony, known as The Emperor Symphony, and the Ninth Symphony, The Choral Symphony. His other work included the opera Fidelio, originally entitled Leonora. He is also well known for his popular piano pieces Moonlight Sonata and Für Elise. Some of Beethoven’s contemporaries included Johann Ladislaus Dussek, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and the pianist Ferdinand Ries.

The Romantic Period

The romantic period also saw cultural influence from other parts of the world, with music in the Americas becoming influenced by Indian musical traditions alongside a growing appreciation of the indigenous cultural traditions throughout the Americas. This gradually led to some changes in music in the newly independent United States and also in Spain, with some of the rhythms gradually spreading around Europe. In Bohemia, Antonin Dvor˘ák composed From the New World, which shows influences of African-American musical traditions.

The emerging power—political and financial—of France saw Paris become a center of music from the last decade of the 18th century into the early 19th century. The Belgian-born composer François-Joseph Gossec worked in the French capital throughout the Revolution and enduring changes of government, with Nicholas D’Alayrac composing many comic operas in the early French Republic. Later French composers include Hector Berlioz, who composed many symphonies, including the Symphonie Fantastique, and Romeo and Juliet; and also Gioacchino Antonio Rossini from Italy who composed Le Comte Ory and William Tell in France. Jacques Offenbach moved to Paris from Germany and became famous with his Orpheus in the Underworld and La Belle Hélène. Other French composers include Charles Gounod, composer of Faust and Romeo and Juliet; Léo Delibes, composer of ballets including Coppelia and Sylvia; and Jules Massenet, who produced music for the ballet Le Cid.

With the rise of German nationalism and the increasing connections between France and western Germany, many new composers became important, including Giacomo Meyerbeer, Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, Emmanuel Chabrier, César Franck, and Gabriel Fauré. Felix Mendelssohn composed many pieces of music for strings and piano, including the oratorio Elijah. Later the increasing political unity of Germany coincided with the popularity of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. Wagner became an opera conductor at Dresden and produced The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser before spending years perfecting The Ring of the Nibelungs, Siegfried, and Tristan and Isolde. His music came to epitomize German national identity during the late 19th century, building on Teutonic legends and influenced by Greek tragedies and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. Austrian composer Johann Strauss composed over 400 waltzes, including An der Schönen Blauen Donau, better known in English as the Blue Danube, and Richard Strauss, not related to Johann, composed German operatic concertos.

Britain And The Rest Of Europe

In Britain, the most famous composer of the period was Sir Arthur Sullivan, who wrote the music for operas for which W. S. Gilbert wrote the words. Their operas included Trial by Jury, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Patience, Iolantha, The Mikado, Ruddigore, The Yeoman of the Guard, and The Gondoliers.

In eastern Europe, much of the new musical traditions came from Poland, even though Poland as an independent nation had ceased to exist. Frédéric Chopin, who had a French father and Polish mother, embodied both western and eastern European concepts. Most of his music was composed for solo piano, and with the increase in the number of pianos throughout the world, it was not long before his music was being played all over the globe. In Hungary Franz Liszt became popular with his orotorio Christus; Gustav Mahler, best known for his symphonies, directed the Budapest Opera in 1888–1891; and Franz Lehár conducted military bands in Vienna and wrote The Merry Widow. In Italy Niccolo Paganini was an important violinist and composer from Genoa, and Vincenzo Bellini composed a number of pieces of music and had an important influence on Giuseppe Verdi, whose operas included Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and Aida, composed for the opening of the Suez Canal. Other important Italian musicians were Gaetano Donizetti, whose operas included Lucrezia Borgia, Lucia di Lamermoor, and La Favorita; and Giacomo Puccini, who composed La Bohème and later Madama Butterfly. In Spain the major composers included Isaac Albeniz, Emmanuel Charbier, composer of Espana, and Enrique Granados y Campina, who became a prominent pianist. Norwegian composers included Edvard Grieg, who wrote, among other pieces, music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and Rikard Nordraak.

In Russia prominent composers of this period include folk musician Mikhail Glinka; Alexander Dargomizsky; Alexander Borodin; Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky from Ukraine, who composed much work including Boris Gudonov; Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, composer of The Golden Cockerel; Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, who wrote mazurkas and piano concertos; and most notably Piotr Illyich T chaikovsky. T chaikovsky’s great works include Swan Lake, Eugene Onegin, Sleeping Beauty, the Nutcracker, the Pathétique Symphony, and the 1812 Overture. Mention should also made of Sergei Rachmaninov, whose First Symphony was performed in 1897, and Jean Sibelius, whose work En Saga was played for the first time in 1892.

The Rest Of The World

Outside Europe and the Americas, music in Africa involved heavy use of percussion, especially drums, with lutes and zithers also being common in northern and Saharan Africa. Drums and dance played an important part in religious ritual in much of sub-Saharan Africa.

In the Arab and Islamic worlds, chanting of the Qu’ran remained the most esteemed musical form. Even in present-day Islamic societies, such as Malaysia, national competitions in Qu’ranic chanting are held for both men and women. Some local and instrumental improvisational performances were considered the Arab equivalent to classical music in the West. The oud (a short-necked lute), tambourine, qanun, tabla (a small, hand-held drum), and various flutes were the main instruments. Numerous authors from Morocco, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey wrote about musical theory and the lawfulness of singing and musical performances from the 17th to 19th centuries. There was also a lively tradition of folk music and dance.

In India musicians used a very wide range of musical instruments such as the two-stringed lute, the sittar, the tabla, the sarangi, and the tambura, with much of the music being associated with ritual religious festivals. Ghazals—classical Urdu love songs—were popular throughout the year. Chinese music tended to rely on percussion, with drums and cymbals heavily used in theatrical performances, but use of the flute and stringed instruments were also common. Mention should also be made of gamelan bands (musical ensemble bands), which remain common in Java and Bali in modern-day Indonesia. They trace their origins back to medieval times, and during the 18th century most villages in Java and Bali had at least one gamelan— the orchestra being imbued with special spiritual significance. Japanese court musicians were formed into orchestras playing for members of the imperial family and to accompany plays.

Bibliography:

Abraham, Gerald. A Hundred Years of Music. London: Duckworth, 1949;
Bacharach, A. L. The Music Masters, Vol 2: After Beethoven to Wagner. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1958;
Barea, Ilsa. Vienna: Legend and Reality. London: Secker & Warburg, 1966;
Carse, Adam. The Orchestra in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1940;
Cooper, B., ed. The Beethoven Compendium. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1991;
Cooper, Martin. French Music c. 1850–1924. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951;
Einstein, Alfred. Music in the Romantic Era. London: J.M. Dent, 1947;
Hindley, Geoffrey, ed. The Larousse Encyclopedia of Music.London: Hamlyn, 1971;
Lang, Paul Henry. Music in Western Civilization. London: J.M. Dent, 1942;
Robertson, Alec, and Stevens, Denis. The Pelican History of Music. Vol. 3, Classical and Romantic. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1968;
Yorke-Long, Alan. Music at Court. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954.

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