(1543), John Calvin warned of music's power to pervert the morals of its listeners and urged strict controls: "Just as wine is funneled into a barrel, so are venom and corruption distilled to the very depths of the heart by melody." The English Puritan Phillip Stubbes wrote in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583) that music "corrupteth good minds, maketh them womannish and inclined to all kinde of whordome and mischeef," while Erasmus censured the appearance of brass and stringed instruments in liturgical settings, which caused people "[to] flock to church as to a theater for aural delight." Calvin banned polyphony from services, though it was permitted in social gatherings; Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) banned all music in services.
In England, Anglican reforms vastly simplified music in both style and text: statutes in Lincoln Cathedral specified that the choir was to sing no anthems to "our Lady or other Saints, but only to our Lord, and them not in Latin." Catholic reform undertaken by the Council of Trent went in the same direction, stopping just short of Calvin's move to ban all polyphony. The council censured music composed merely "to give empty pleasure to the ear" and urged composers to write in such a way as to make the words easily understood by all.
Within fifteen years of his death, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) was hailed as having saved polyphony in the wake of the council's decrees by crafting an audition piece for the Vatican that convinced the authorities of its value through sheer beauty as well as its calculated propriety. The story is likely apocryphal, but it captures the tension between the direction of musical development and the liturgical needs of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century.
It also highlights Palestrina's own solution, which was to craft a style less ornately contrapuntal than that of Lasso by alternating chordal sections and free movement among independent lines. Palestrina was one of the most prolific of all composers, writing some 104 Masses, 250 motets, 68 offertories, 65 hymns, 35 Magnificat settings, and various lamentations and litanies. In contrast to the other major religious reformers, Martin Luther (1483–1546) embraced the widest possible variety of musical expression.
He called music "the mistress and governess" of human emotion, deserving highest praise "next to the word of God," and yet more eloquent than the most powerful orator in its "infinite variety of forms and benefits." Luther's musical ecumenicism, which helped to inspire the popular musical education that spread throughout the Lutheran lands on every level of society, had lasting consequences for music in Germany. The highest expression of this encompassing vision came in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), whose 200 known sacred cantatas (about three-fifths of what he is thought to have composed) convey their texts with remarkable subtlety, variety, and precision.
Here, as well as in his keyboard and orchestral works, Bach employed virtually every European style, high and low, sacred and profane, from the grand French overture to dances of the popular classes. Famously provincial in his aversion to travel, Bach nevertheless drew from all available printed sources to produce works of universal appeal and enduring mastery. Bach's six keyboard partitas, for example, transformed popular dance forms known throughout Europe into virtuoso solo pieces.
These included the a zigzag, hop-stepped Italian dance; its more fluid French counterpart the courante; the noble German allemande, a grave dance involving couples in a line; and the Spanish saraband, a slow, dignified dance of great sweeping gestures. Living on the threshold of musical classicism, an aesthetic whose simplified style he steadfastly resisted, Bach was doggedly anti-progressive. From within this conservative world Bach also surveyed and on occasion borrowed from more recent styles of such contemporaries as Johann Adolf Hasse (1699–1783) and Carl Heinrich Graun (1703–1759).
Like Dante before him, Bach brought the elements of a passing age together in magnificent synthesis. Bach resisted any notion that he possessed special powers of genius; composers were instead to be craftsmen. He said: "I have had to work hard; anyone who works just as hard will get just as far.
" Private and Public Performance Throughout the seventeenth century, and owing to the wide availability of printed scores, amateur music making was increasingly viewed as a pastime for the great and small. One source was the Protestant tradition of hymn singing. The 1561 Sternhold and Hopkins edition of the Psalms in English included a brief introduction on the "Science of Music" that urged readers to sing in common worship and "privately by themselves or at home in their houses.
" There was much secular music, too. New wealth and a taste for luxury among the moneyed in late-sixteenth-century England supported a flourishing publishing industry, with some eighty collections of vocal music published from 1587 to 1630 intended primarily for the amateur market. The large number of dedications to gentry and noble patrons in England in lute and madrigal collections is one indication of their likely audience, but the presence of merchants and tradespeople among the dedicatees suggests that private performance was not limited to elites.
Canzonets to Five and Six Voices (1597), a volume of five- and six-part madrigals with lute accompaniment, was dedicated to "Master Henrie Tapsfield, Citizen and Grocer of the Cittie of London," and Thomas Weelkes's Balletts and Madrigals (1598) was dedicated to Edward Darcye, a groom in the royal household. Such examples notwithstanding, private music making throughout Europe was largely a pursuit of those with the time and money to devote to refining their skills and acquiring the music and instruments. The lute was the aristocratic instrument par excellence in much the same way the piano became a fixture in nineteenth-century middle-class interiors.
There are glimpses of social mixing in private performance even at the highest levels. Roger North (1653–1734), gentleman and brother to Baron Francis North, who was keeper of the Great Seal of England, described musical evenings of his childhood involving solo and ensemble performances by his sisters, the servants, the steward, and the clerk of the kitchen. In England, public concerts were first offered in private houses, taverns, and other meeting halls.
Old forms of patronage persisted into the eighteenth century—and in some places on a scale greater than ever—but the new public concerts fundamentally recast the relationship between composer and audience by granting immediate access to large numbers and creating a venue for the rise of popular individual performers. The first truly public musical recital in England, and probably in Europe, occurred in 1672 when the composer and violinist John Banister opened his home for regular 4:00 P.M.
performances given, as the promised, "by excellent masters." Other series soon followed, with their success a part of the overall exuberance in public entertainments associated with the Restoration. Cromwell's destruction of organ pipes with battle-axes at Chichester, Worcester, Norwich, Peterborough, Canterbury, and Winchester was only the most dramatic example of the socalled purification of music during the Protectorate.
The appearance of public concerts also marked a shift from church-sponsored to more secular music, much of it tied to the court. Entrepreneurs such as Banister and Robert King, who obtained a license to offer concerts in 1689, also oversaw performances within the royal household. This was the context for one of England's most versatile and gifted composers, Henry Purcell (c.
1659–1695), who was appointed composer-in-ordinary for the king's violins in 1677, just four years after his voice changed. Principal organist at Westminster Abbey from a young age and later at the Chapel Royal, Purcell also wrote for the stage. His output included anthems, overtures, "semioperas," entr'actes, dances, instrumental works for harpsichord, organ, and viol consort, and royal birthday odes and welcome songs.
He was also famous for his catches, a popular form that in England displaced the madrigal and which, especially in Purcell's hands, delighted in randy lyrics. His catch on the plot of Titus Oates includes a characteristic mix of politics, religion, and sport: To make laws for English-born freemen. Since 'tis dang'rous to prate of matters of state Let's handle our wine and our women.
Let's drink to the Senate's best thoughts For the good of the King and the nation. May they dig on the spot as deep as the plot As the Jesuits have laid the foundation. A plague of all zealots and fools, Better turn cat-in-pan and live like a man Than be hanged and die like a traitor.
As court composer and keeper of the king's instruments, Purcell wrote music for state occasions—including five welcome songs for Charles II, three for James II, and six birthday odes for Queen Mary—but neither he nor his contemporaries undertook the kinds of lavish productions deifying the monarchy that composers in absolutist France were perfecting at the time. There is a discreet reference to William and Mary in the prologue to Purcell's best-known work, Dido and Aeneas (1689), an opera staged at the Josiah Priest Boarding School in Chelsea just after the Glorious Revolution. A Nereid announces the appearance of a "new divinity," to which the chorus responds: "To Phoebus and Venus our homage we'll pay, / Her charms bless the night, as his beams bless the day.
" In eighteenth-century France, private concerts in aristocratic salons were an important feature of upper-class sociability, though, as Mozart related to his father, the attention of the listeners was not always fixed on the musicians. "What vexed me most of all," he wrote of a performance for the duchesse de Chabot's circle, "was that Madame and all her gentlemen never interrupted their drawing for a moment, but went on intently, so that I had to play to the chairs, tables, and walls." The first public concerts in France began in 1725 with the a regular series of sacred music held in the Tuileries Palace.
Among favored works, performed by an orchestra of forty players and a chorus of fifty-three singers, were motets by André Campra (1660–1744), Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657–1726), and Jean-Joseph de Mondonville (1711–1772) and chamber works by Guiseppe Tartini (1692–1770) and Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741). Given the high ticket prices, concert audiences were necessarily the moneyed, and the atmosphere was uniquely aristocratic. There were other semipublic concerts in France later in the century, most notably those sponsored by the celebrated musical patron Alexandre-Jean-Joseph Le Riche de La Popelinière, a wealthy tax farmer who invited the likes of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) and Johann Stamitz (1717–1757) to conduct their own music with an orchestra whose members lived on the premises.
Late in the century, subscription concerts, one of them sponsored by the Freemasons, attracted a broader public with programs that regularly featured the symphonies of Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809). Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, music making in Paris was dominated by the Opéra, whose state monopoly on virtually all staged productions dated from its 1669 establishment as the Académie Royale de Musique. France's most celebrated composer in the epoch of Louis XIV was Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), whose operas came to define the French style of the with their characteristic mix of stately pomp, dazzling effects, and refined graciousness.
Lully reworked and enlarged the elements of Italian courtly spectacles in the Renaissance to produce a musical formula that shaped the monarchy's public image, depicting and occasionally casting Louis XIV in productions that were transparent homages to the state in the dress of Olympians. "The Peace which Your Majesty has given as generously to his conquered enemies," Lully wrote of his work (1685), "is the subject of this ballet." While French operatic audiences retained their aristocratic complexion in the decades before the French Revolution, such royal allegories receded before the ambitious musical innovations of Rameau, whose dense textures and bold orchestral effects shocked some listeners, and the reforms of Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–1787), who simplified plotlines and concentrated musical expression to heighten the dramatic intensity of his operas.
The Composer and His Public The relationship of Haydn and Mozart to their publics, which grew in many ways from their differing professional status as composers, shaped the nature and style of their works. Haydn was among the last of the great classical composers to live on the premises of his patron; over a thirty-year period beginning when he was twenty-nine, Haydn existed as a virtual ward of Prince Paul Anton Esterházy. He was required by contract to dress in uniform at all times and to provide music whenever requested; he was regularly denied visits to Vienna and forbidden to copy his music or compose for others without the prince's permission.
Nevertheless, pirated editions of his symphonies flooded Europe, possibly with his clandestine assistance. The isolation and routine of Esterháza castle proved extraordinarily fertile for the composer, whose prodigious output revealed the expressive range of the classical form. Deft, witty, harmonically rich, and endlessly inventive, Haydn's string quartets are the essence of eighteenth-century grace and refinement.
"A certain kind of humor takes possession of you, and cannot be restrained," Haydn remarked to a visitor. Haydn typically led over 100 concerts a year that featured newly composed orchestral, chamber, vocal, and keyboard repertoire. His oeuvre includes 107 symphonies, over 60 string quartets, 58 keyboard sonatas, 42 keyboard trios, and 24 operas.
Mozart, by contrast, was the first major composer to flourish without a permanent position or sustained patronage. His famous indignation over his treatment by his employer, Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg ("When I see that someone despises me and treats me with contempt, I can be as proud as a peacock"), was a mark of his temperament, but it was also an indication of the changed relationship between the artist and his public. It was possible for Mozart to leave his position as only because of new public opportunities in the Vienna of Emperor Joseph II (ruled 1765–1790).
Vienna was home to two flourishing opera companies, the Italian-language and the German both of which mounted his productions. Mozart also taught privately, encouraged commissions, and wrote numerous works, for his own performances and those of his students, with particular audiences in mind. His letters are explicit and even gleeful about his opportunities as a free agent.
In a 1778 letter to his father he wrote: "I pray to God daily to give me grace to hold out with fortitude and to do such honor to myself and to the whole German nation as will redound to His greater honor and glory; and that He will enable me to prosper and make a great deal of money." The rise in public musical performance encouraged the explosion of new forms in the eighteenth century. Audiences in rapture over virtuoso performers fueled the composition of solo instrumental and vocal works.
The fireworks of Mozart's Queen of the Night aria in were an exuberant and gloriously exaggerated version of what attracted many to opera in the late 1700s, a lesson not lost on Rossini and the nineteenth-century school of bel canto. The eighteenth century witnessed the appearance of keyboard sonatas and solo concertos in unprecedented numbers, as well as the birth of the a concertolike genre involving multiple soloists and orchestral accompaniment. The development of the string quartet from the 1760s is among the century's most important musical achievements, with the quartets of Haydn and Mozart the best known among a field of composers that included the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (c.
1739–1799) and François Joseph Gossec (1734–1829) in Paris, Carl Friedrich Abel (1723–1787) in London, and the Italian Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805). Between 1760 and 1780 over five hundred quartets were printed in Paris alone. At the same time, the modern symphony found immense approval in public settings, with some twelve thousand composed in Europe from 1720 to 1810.
Its centers were Vienna, Mannheim, Paris, and London. In many ways, the musical public in European capitals on the eve of the French Revolution resembled modern audiences. Its tastes increasingly drove programming decisions and influenced compositional styles.
The public could select from among competing theaters and concert halls. It was the key ingredient in an increasingly commercialized art. The French Revolution and its effects across Europe hastened these tendencies and introduced others that changed the nature of public performance by ending state theater monopolies and reducing aristocratic and church patronage.
The new taste for "ancient music"—works generally over twenty years old—formed an emerging canon of classics to be performed, preserved, and repeated in everlarger concert halls and opera houses. (1543), John Calvin warned of music's power to pervert the morals of its listeners and urged strict controls: "Just as wine is funneled into a barrel, so are venom and corruption distilled to the very depths of the heart by melody.
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