It is quite apparent that the terms classic or classical which we use so readily and easily nowadays have almost lost their original meaning. Employed in arts and humanities for centuries, they refer to artifacts, written works, or ideas related to Ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism implies high regards for the great Mediterranean civilizations as setting standards for taste and ethics which a �learned� artist or thinker seeks to emulate; Phidias, Aeschylus, Plato, Virgil, and many other greats has created canonic body of works for generations to study, comment on, and admire.
The case of music, however, is unique among the arts. Music has no body of surviving ancient works, and, as a result, no definitive point of reference. Consequently, it has no ancient models on which to build, and no framework for its pedagogy. Until well into the18th century, repertoires had gone through cycles of clearing out the old and bringing in the new, a process so regular, that it was very unlikely for a music piece to continue to be performed after the composer�s death. As an insightful British document from 1770 states, �Nothing in Music is estimable that is not new. No music tolerable, which has been heard before. . . .[Yet, nobody] objects to the works of Virgil or Raphael, that the one wrote in seventeen hundred, or that the other painted two hundred and fifty years ago.�
This contemporaneity of taste, to use the apt expression of William Weber, started to change throughout the 18th, and, especially in the19th century when the very term classical music was coined. So, why do we refer to the period of music between circa 1750 and 1820 as Classical? In truth, the initial usage of the term (as well as the term Romantic) was quite hazy. Classical was simply applied to music works which set standards of greatness. It gradually took on the characteristics of the Viennese late-eighteenth-century music style, mostly by comparison with works on which no final verdict could yet be delivered. It was also quite easy to attribute to that style some aesthetic characteristics associated with the art of Antiquity, such as clarity, balance, rationality, simplicity, and proportion. As a result, the era of Viennese Classicism became a two-millennia-late substitute for an antiquity music never had and a criterion by which to measure music of the future generations.
The charming little Sonata in B-flat Major Op. 5 No.1 by Johann Christian Bach is an excellent example of the early classical style, usually known as Style Galant. Written in London around 1768, it bears virtually no stylistic resemblance to the music of the past, as represented by Johann Christian�s great father J.S. Bach. Instead, it shows a remarkable likeness to the music of the young Mozart, whom J.C. Bach undoubtedly influenced.
Once, describing a recently written set of piano concertos to his father, W. A Mozart wrote that they were a �happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult. . . . Here and there are things that connoisseurs can appreciate, but I have seen to it that those less knowledgeable can also be pleased without knowing why.� This simple and unpretentious comment brilliantly sums up the aspirations and goals of the great classical composers, and can be easily applied to both Sonata in D Major Hob XVI: 37 by Joseph Haydn and Mozart�s own Sonata in A Major K 331. It is indeed hard to find better examples of perfect balance between compositional brilliance, profoundness, simplicity, and user-friendliness.
It has often been said that Ludwig van Beethoven brought the classical style to its peak, and subsequently destroyed it. Indeed, listening to the Sonata in E Major Op. 109 and his last Bagatelles Op. 119, one finds very little evidence of the elegance and charm associated with the earlier forms of classicism. Instead, one witnesses a unique style that goes beyond beauty � a style that is strange, occasionally eccentric, challenging, and transcendentally profound. I can�t help but feel that both the ending of the sonata and the last of the bagatelles sound not only as bidding farewell to life, but also bidding farewell to an entire epoch.
Dimiter Terziev
Sources:
Anderson, Emily, ed. and trans.1938. Letters of Mozart and his Family, Vol. 3, 1242
Lenneberg, Hans. 1994. Classic and Romantic: The First Usage of the Terms. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 3, 610-625
Weber, William. 1984. The Contemporaneity of Eighteenth-Century Musical Taste. The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 70
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