We call it Classical
By Claus Johansen
‘Classical music’ has today become a popular name for all serious composition music. But it is also a heading with a more specific meaning that we place above the music that was composed in the period between 1750 and 1830. We call this the period of Classicism to distinguish it from the Romanticism that followed. Although many of the Romantic composers saw themselves as part of a movement, there is nothing to indicate that the composers in Mozart’s time regarded themselves as ‘classic’. If we disregard Haydn’s oratorios, Beethoven’s symphonies and Gluck’s last operas, they wrote their music for the concert scene here and now, and they took it for granted that every work passed its sell-by date within a few years. Nevertheless, many of their works became ‘classics’ and our modern musical life is built up on the basis of a number of these ‘one-off’ works. They have been misinterpreted, reworked and incorrectly performed, but have remained, not as canon or monument, but as living, relevant art that speaks directly to anyone who cares to listen.
If we look at the social context, the age of Classicism is roughly speaking the period when the aristocracy slowly lost its monopoly of music and the bourgeoisie took over. But this is only partly true. In the 1770s most European countries were still agrarian societies, and many of their traditions can be traced back directly to the Middle Ages. Among them, art was still aristocratic. It is easy to draw erroneous conclusions, and one of the most erroneous says that the symphony came to Europe on the heels of the popular bourgeois novel. Many of the best music historians come from England, and the idea is perhaps not wrong from an English point of view, but we cannot deny that the best Classical symphonies were in fact written outside England, and there are more of them than one might think. Haydn wrote at least 104, Mozart more than 40 – that sounds like a lot, but if we count them all up we can find around 16,500 symphonies composed between 1720 and 1804. The great majority were written for princely courts, monasteries, aristocratic palaces and public concerts in Central Europe, where self-assured officers, clerics and academics would probably object to being classed as members of the bourgeoisie. The novels and plays of ‘sensibility’ from Mozart’s time are mirrors of the life of the bourgeoisie, but the ideas behind the symphonies of the age are not bourgeois but aristocratic. A symphony can be regarded as an opera without words. In the first movement we are presented with a problem. In the opera it is the conflict between what the characters should do and what they want to do. In the symphony it is the conflict between the first and second subject. In the slow movement of the symphony we meet the aristocratic dream-world: floating, pastoral, beautiful, misty, utopian. The third movement is the old-fashioned, slightly formal minuet with its somewhat rustic trio – never truly rural but always rustic idyll viewed through aristocratic spectacles. And to conclude, the happy, dancing final movement: fine and gay, but still cultivated and civilized; cultivated amusement, harmonious – and no more and no less ‘Classical’ than witty, intelligent conversation in a free-thinking Parisian salon. The balance has been restored, the conflict is over, all is well again – and all is as it was before. For art is meant to move, touch and enlighten – but preferably not to disturb. Beethoven is still a long way off.
A symphony is perhaps an opera without words, but it is also good entertainment, and that is why intelligent people could at one and the same time take pleasure in modern, provocative bourgeois literature and the more stable aristocratic symphonies. That kind of music was appreciated everywhere in Europe, because it was written harmoniously and in the Italian musical language that everyone understood. The period is called Classical now because it has become classic for us. It has become the Golden Age of our music. But the age itself was also interested in the classics in the other sense. Many of the people who lived in Mozart’s time turned for inspiration to Classical Antiquity. Several of Mozart’s operas are in fact set in antiquity. It was in the spirit of this kind of ‘Classicism’ that people began to dig for and find the hidden cities of the past. The cultivated elite began to collect beautiful ancient works of art – like the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who filled his town house in Weimar with Classical statues and plaster-casts, which were displayed against the radiant colours of the ‘Pompeiian’ walls. Goethe went to Italy a few years after Mozart, more to experience than to learn, and he came home with experiences of the genuine southern European landscape, eroticism and art. He never recovered from this, and his experiences left their mark on the whole of intellectual Europe.
Museums and libraries mushroomed. They spoke of ‘eternal art’ – or of ‘art for art’s sake’. Like Goethe they collected fragments from antiquity, because for them these small individual elements had an eternal, universal inner beauty: a Greek vase, a Roman coin, a Classical column from Sicily – these things were moved out of their original context, and from now on stood on shelves and pedestals. There they looked beautiful and simple, and from there they were meant to give the viewers a fashionable kind of aesthetic pleasure. The Italian operas might have had their origins in the classics, but the music was always modern. The Italian musical style was for that age what American pop music is for us: a well-loved and indispensable common denominator. That is why all composers who could afford it went to Italy, including Mozart. They had to listen and learn and travel back home and show what they had learned. Nevertheless, the composers of the eighteenth century had much to say about the mixed style. It is perhaps hard for us to hear it, but what we call Viennese Classicism is pieced together with music from many countries: harmonic patterns and snatches of melody from the Italian cantabile style, mixed with French dance rhythms, German orchestral sounds, Bohemian folk music and the remains of the dogmatic Catholic sacred music. The style is mixed, but it became known as Vienna Classicism and is still regarded as a harmonious totality. Parts of it survived in western Europe all the way up the World War I.
It was in Classicism that the concert activity of the western world was founded, and the strengths and weaknesses of the modern concert world were already in place before 1800. Many of the things that we regard as matters of course in musical life first appeared in the age of Classicism. Our musical world was created in Central Europe two centuries ago. We call it Classicism because in many ways it was influenced by the dream of Classical harmony. The music is built up in clear, transparent forms, there is a system to it. Many movements are governed by the masterplan we today call the sonata form, where two subjects are set up against each other, compete, come together and in the end form a higher unity; and there are other controlling systems and conventions, not least in the operas. The great majority of Classical composers stick to the rules; Beethoven is the first to widen the boundaries of what one can do, and that leads to the death of Classicism.
Classicism forms the transition between the old and the new age. Mozart first and foremost wrote his music for an aristocratic audience, but he experienced the beginning of the French Revolution, and twenty years after his death the modern world had its breakthrough. The first steam engines were on their way, while the folklorists collected all that they could find of folk tales and legends from rural life in the old days. This was something modern man could use: a knowledge and a wisdom that was perhaps about to be lost. They published their finds, both in original and in adapted versions, and in fact there was money in that kind of thing. Just as it had been fashionable to collect Greek vases and Roman coins. The old finds became symbols of something genuine, almost ‘organic’, that could remind us of the harmony we all lack. Something similar happened in music. Popular functional music was collected from everyday life, adapted and used in the concert hall. The pieces that had once been written for particular functions – church services, military parades, weddings and balls – were now played in reworked forms for a sympathetic audience in public concerts. In the age of the Baroque a minuet was something you danced; in the age of Classicism it was something you listened to. Contemporary music was once composed for everyday life; now it is composed for the concert hall. And, like Goethe’s Classical busts, the old music, which once had its own meaning, is set up on a pedestal as an aesthetic experience. It has been standing there ever since.