Description
To a modern audience, the term ”classical” has of course come to mean an entire genre of music, but its far more specific use refers to music from the Classical era, a period that ran from about 1750 until the early 1800s. Many of the musical forms that we today associate most strongly with “classical music”—the sonata, the symphony, and chamber groupings like the quartet and quartet—were developed and codified during this period, and gradually instrumentalists began to gain heretofore unheard prominence. Simultaneously, this is also the era in which opera as we know it was most fully established.
During this era, the ideals of classical Greece and Rome became extremely influential among creators and intellectuals from across a variety of disciplines, from literature to the visual arts to architecture. An emphasis on strong, simpler forms with clear construction replaced the floridity of the Baroque era that had preceded it: in the Classical era, one melodic line with accompaniment substituted for the subtle interplays of multi–voiced polyphony. It would be an error, however, to dismiss such a style as more simplistic than the one that came before it; as the great harpsichordist Wanda Landowska famously said of Mozart, that titan of the Classical era: “The works of Mozart may be easy to read, but they are very difficult to interpret. The least speck of dust spoils them. They are clear, transparent, and joyful as a spring, and not only those muddy pools which seem deep only because the bottom cannot be seen.”
