The later part of the eighteenth century saw a flourishing of art and science that historians have dubbed the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. Politically, its fruits included the American and French Revolutions. Musically, the era is known as the classical period (a name that has caused generations of confusion between the classical period and the broad genre “classical music,” which are two different things). The term “Enlightenment” tells us what the age thought about itself: that humanity had arrived at a historic turning point of higher wisdom and more equitable societies. And reason, as in “Age of Reason,” was the force that was going to bring about this revolution in science, thought, government, and human happiness.
Why reason? Because the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had produced what is known as the scientific revolution, in which the scientific method revealed that the laws of nature were universal and could be manipulated for our benefit. The new science produced astonishing results in physics, astronomy, and biology, new kinds of mathematics, and later ushered in the steam engine, the mastery of electricity, telephones, computers, and space flight (also, on the other side of the equation, the atomic bomb). During the Enlightenment, science provided a grasp of reality that promised to unveil all the secrets of nature. Wrote Alexander Pope about the genius who galvanized the scientific revolution: “NATURE and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night: / God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”
The Enlightenment was an unprecedentedly hopeful era. It seemed that humanity was progressing by leaps and bounds, with no end in sight. Reason, applied to everything from governments to religion and the social and ethical development of human beings, could surely accomplish anything. That turned out not to be true, not by half, and our understanding of the universe remains incomplete. But that period still produced splendid and enduring things, among them modern science and the triumph (more or less) of representative democracy.
For many thinkers, even religion would now have to submit to reason. For many people, God receded beyond the stars in a kind of infinite retirement, letting the perfect mechanism of his universe run on its own. Emanuel Kant, the leading philosopher of the period, declared that the essence of Enlightenment was to think for yourself. Any religion that issued decrees with no room for discussion should be forbidden. No cosmic list of rules from God or from kings was acceptable. From here on, Kant said, we have to figure out for ourselves how to live. That was a simple idea, but it had gigantic consequences.
That was the attitude of the free-thinking humanists who forged the American constitution, based on the principle that people are born equal, that they have the right and the capacity to rule themselves, that the goal of life is not service to God or church or lord of the manor, but rather for each person to find his or her own way. The purpose of government, Thomas Jefferson wrote, is to foster “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The irreplaceable prerequisite for finding happiness is freedom: freedom from tyranny, from inherited power, from dogmas of all kinds.
What this led to in the arts was a new kind of directness and populism. Architecture turned away from the extravagance of the baroque to an elegant simplicity (though simplicity on the outside sometimes concealed extravagance within). Music followed suit. As befitted an optimistic age that prized reason, musical forms and harmonies were expected to be lucid to the ear. Tragic music receded in importance; Mozart’s greatest operas are comedies. The orchestra became to a degree standardized into the familiar modern ensemble of strings, winds, and brass; musical forms became more rationalized.
The Age of Reason proclaimed nature, not religion, as the true scripture. Classical composers looked for what they called a natural style, popularistic and readily communicative, much of it laid out lucidly in dance rhythms and phrasing and style. Baroque music tends to sound big and extravagant, while the classical style sounds restrained, compact, and in many ways intentionally predictable. Haydn was a great master of setting up norms in his work and then surprisingly and wittily fracturing them. Artful sophistication was hidden behind a surface of artlessness. Haydn and his heirs aspired to write a music that was new and original yet seems to have written itself, sounds familiar the first time you hear it. Just as the universe followed consistent laws, musical style became to a degree international; there were regional accents, but everyone proceeded on similar assumptions, and the music of Europe was more unified than ever before. For a beginner it’s often hard to tell the difference in style among artists of this era, such as Haydn, Mozart, and J. C. Bach (the latter a son of J. S. and an important influence on Mozart).
The music of the classical period flowed from the developments of the baroque, which had created opera, challenged the primacy of counterpoint, focused more on accompanied melody as the basic texture of music, and gotten increasingly involved in abstract musical form. The baroque also came up with the three-part Italian symphony, which evolved into the classical symphony as practiced from the eighteenth century on. By Haydn’s time the addition of a dance genre—minuet—expanded symphonies and quartets and the like from three to four movements. Counterpoint endured, with its canons and fugues, but was relegated mostly to episodes in larger pieces. Now the name of a genre—symphony, piano sonata, string quartet, and so on—meant something fairly specific, and the forms of the individual movements that filled out those genres were, while always flexible, still relatively rationalized and standardized.
String quartets—music written for four instruments—came to prominence for the first time in the eighteenth century. During the Enlightenment quartets were the most popular kind of chamber music, and the majority of amateurs played string instruments. (The piano took over that position in the nineteenth century.) Quartets were house music, done by amateurs in programs for friends in the parlor or music room, often part of enormous grab-bag programs that might have everything from quartets, to piano sonatas, to arias, to symphonies and concertos with a small, scraped-together orchestra. Private concerts in the homes of aristocrats and the well-to-do were the most important venue for most music in the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. Only once in his lifetime was one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas played in public, and he was closely involved with the first professional quartet in Europe, who were the first to mount public subscription concerts. Music still thrived within the church, but in the classical period, secular music for the first time became more important than sacred. Music publishing burgeoned, catering to a growing class of amateur music lovers. Beethoven would be the first composer to be published steadily from the beginning of his career.
As specific formal outlines were applied to nearly every kind of music, there was a basic regularization of phrasing: two-bar semiphrases make up a four-bar phrase, two four-bar phrases make up an eight-bar period, sixteen bars are the next level, and so on. This is the phrasing of dance music. But like everything else, that was a norm made to be played with, to be inflected and bent in creative ways.
In terms of musical organization, the age produced the most sophisticated model in history: sonata form. Joseph Haydn put the finishing touches on it toward the end of the eighteenth century. From Haydn on, sonata form was the essential outline for first movements of nearly every multimovement instrumental work and sometimes last movements, and it invaded other forms such as concerto and rondo.
So, we need to examine sonata form. I call its basic outline “school sonata form,” because it’s one of those theories that in practice rarely happens according to the rules. The general idea—one of the few nearly invariable elements—is a three-section movement, the sections we call exposition, development, and recapitulation. (There may also be an introduction, usually slow, and a coda at the end.) The exposition puts forward a leading theme in the home key, then modulates to a related key for a contrasting second theme, then the whole exposition is repeated. The development section in sonata form is essentially a kind of on-paper improvisation on the themes of the exposition, often dramatic in tone and exploring a variety of keys. Then comes the recapitulation. The school version of the form says that the recapitulation brings back the themes of the exposition in their original guises and resolves everything into the home key.
Those are the rules in theory, but again, few pieces in sonata form happen just that way. In fact, both first and second themes are commonly full sections involving other subthemes and a variety of keys. But in the exposition there will usually be a clear sense of two theme sections, and always a modulation away from the home key, which creates a long-range tension in the harmony that eventually has to be resolved. Again, there may be a profusion of subthemes in the exposition. In any case, the first theme lays out the tone, the leading motifs, the general direction of the whole piece. Usually the exposition themes are contrasting; say, the opening theme bold and the second theme gentler. There may be a new theme or two in the development, and it may not treat all the themes of the exposition. The recapitulation usually has some modulations; to stay in the home key would be boring.
Sonata form was largely developed so as to rationalize and manage new intensities of contrast in material, and a broader variety of keys. While a baroque movement was founded on one basic musical idea and one expressive mood, the classical style was interested in a variety of ideas and moods within a single movement. Sonata form was able to keep those unprecedented contrasts under control. Connoisseurs were familiar with the basic formal model, so composers could play games with their expectations: say, a wrong-key false recap in the development, or an elided recap that sneaks in or starts on the second theme. Sometimes the recapitulation keeps on developing the themes. The way a composer handled a musical form became an expressive and distinctive element of the piece: a broken-up form might be part of an anguished or comic piece, and the like. In other words, the handling of form in a piece is as expressive as its melodies and harmonies and rhythms.
Meanwhile the model invaded other musical forms. The old simple tutti–solo–tutti–solo, etc. outline of baroque concertos was turned into concerto sonata form. Here the repeat of the exposition became a double exposition, where the orchestra first lays out the basic material, then the soloist enters on a second exposition. The old pattern called rondo, ABACADA, etc., became sonata-rondo, something like ABACABA, the A and B functioning like the two theme sections of sonata form, the C section standing in for the development. In the end, the power and flexibility of sonata form was one of the reasons instrumental music came to reign as the greatest of the arts in the nineteenth century, called “the art to which all other arts aspire.” Instrumental music was pure expression, without words or story—though it could imply them, and so took on some of the qualities of drama and poetry and fiction.
A more consistent thematic logic also came to prominence during the latter part of this period. A theme is basically a tune of some sort, though classical ones tend to be open-ended so they can be manipulated and extended. Most often, either composers will build up a theme from motifs, which are a collection of two to four notes—a simple rhythm, a bit of scale, a turning figure, and the like; or the beginning lays out a main theme and the composer breaks off motifs from it with which to make further themes. A familiar example is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where the da-da-da-dum rhythm of the opening turns up in myriad forms in every theme of the piece right down to the last pages. A chord change or even a single strong-colored chord can be a motif. Often Beethoven uses single-note motifs, such as the out-of-key C-sharp on the first page of Symphony No. 3, “Eroica,” which has implications for the key structure of the rest of the symphony. So the new contrast and profusion of themes in the classical style was held together partly by a rigorous formal logic, and also by thematic interrelationships that unified a whole piece.
It was often noted that sonata form echoed the literary arts, reflected in the titles of the sections: an exposition was like the thesis of an essay or a sermon; the development worked with the themes like the body of an essay, or like a drama with its conflicts among the characters. In the eighteenth century composers played and composed as a profession; their career was based on pleasing the public, and they wrote largely on commission. Individuality in artists was prized, but only up to a point. The idea of “expressing yourself” in art would be a symptom of the next century. Classical composers wanted to express universal emotions, not just their own. They therefore favored traditional forms because it gave listeners a starting point in following the music, but they also could play creative games with the norms and expectations of the form.
In the classical era a multimovement musical work—symphony, sonata, concerto, quartet, and so on—is a genre made up of smaller genres, each with its own history. The typical genres and tempos involved in a piece might run as follows: (1) fast first movement in sonata form; (2) slow movement in ABA; (3) stately minuet or racing scherzo, which have an outline close to sonata form, and with a central section called the trio; and (4) fast finale in sonata-rondo form. Other formal outlines that commonly turn up in movements are theme and variations or ABAB. Piano sonatas and concertos commonly have three movements, omitting the scherzo/minuet. Sometimes the scherzo precedes the slow movement. Sometimes, as in the finales of Beethoven’s “Eroica” and Ninth Symphonies, the composer will create a unique, ad hoc form, but that’s rare. Sonata form also turns up in freestanding pieces, such as concert overtures, in operatic numbers, and so on.
The coming romantic generation of the nineteenth century rejected what one poet called the Enlightenment’s “cold light of reason” for a doctrine of individuality, innovation, the sublime, the godlike genius. But though romantics were less rigorous than classicists about form, composers still wrote fugues, often still used sonata form and the other classical patterns—forms so universal and useful they endure even today.
In many ways the illusions of the Enlightenment period—that we could forge a perfect science, a perfect society, an exalted humanity—fell to pieces like so many pipe dreams. But they were magnificent dreams, and achievements of the era, like the scientific method, sonata form, and the towering music of the classical period, live on undiminished.