What is classical music? · Unit 2: Five periods
The Classical period
The Classical period runs from about 1750 to 1820, and its centre is Vienna, where Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all worked. Composers now wanted music that was clear and easy to follow: one melody at a time, over a simple accompaniment.
Phrases became balanced like sentences, often four bars answered by four more. Within a single movement, themes of different character could stand side by side, a bold one and a gentle one, and much of the drama comes from setting them against each other. This is the world of .
MozartPiano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor opens with hardly a tune at all. The violins and violas throb quietly off the beat while the cellos and basses rush upwards in quick notes, until the whole orchestra breaks out loudly. It is a mood more than a melody, dark and uneasy.
Clear did not have to mean calm. What the Classical style asked for was contrast that the ear can follow: a stormy idea, then a gentler one, each with its own character.
MozartPiano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466When the storm dies down, the woodwinds put forward a gentler idea, before the full orchestra breaks in again. Setting such different characters side by side, and letting them clash, is at the heart of the Classical style.
The piano gradually replaced the harpsichord, because it could play softly or loudly according to the player’s touch. The symphony, the string quartet, the piano sonata and the concerto became the main kinds of work, and concerts open to anyone with a ticket grew in number.
Mozart wrote this concerto to play himself, on 11 February 1785, at the first of six concerts he gave in Vienna with tickets sold in advance by subscription. His father, who was visiting, wrote that the copyist was still copying the parts when they arrived, and that Wolfgang had not had time to play the finale through. Within a month, his father counted, Mozart’s own piano had been carried to the theatre or to other houses at least a dozen times.
Beethoven belongs to this period too, although his later music points towards the Romantics. As a young man he played this concerto, and the he wrote for it are still the ones most often heard.