Introduction to the Classical Era

Enlightened Is as Enlightened Does

An Introduction to the Classical Era

The Classical era is understood as running from 1750 to 1827, from the death of Bach to the death of Beethoven. Even as period dates go, these are awful, and here's why.

While Johann Sebastian Bach's death in 1750 affords us a serviceable year to end the Baroque era, it's a fairly useless year with which to begin what we now call the Classical era. Those musical stylistic elements that we will soon enough define as being "Classical" reached their first real flower in Italy in the early1730s. For at least twenty-five years, stylistically Baroque and stylistically Classical era music coexisted, like the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. In reality, it isn't until the 1760s that those stylistic elements we would identify as Baroque had become a thing of the past.

Concluding the Classical era in 1827 with Beethoven's death is absurd. Instead, we should end it in 1803, the year Beethoven composed the bulk of his Symphony no.3 and, in so doing, rendered classicalism obsolete in our outrageous act!

The evolution from the high Baroque to Classical musical style was a mirror of an extraordinary social evolution that we, today, call the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, circa 1730 to 1780, was a period that saw the institutions of Europe - religious, political, social, educational, industrial, financial, and artistic - slowly but inexorably lower their focus from the aristocracy and the high clergy to a new class of people then emerging from the bowels of the new European mercantilism and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. For lack of a better name, we call this new and growing class the middle class, and the Enlightenment marked their initial entry into the mainstream of European society. A new brand of humanism, philosophical humanism, evolved, one that asserted that all people were important, not just representatives of the Church and the state.

Since the beginning of recorded time, European class structure and wealth had been based upon hereditary land ownership, But by the early eighteenth century, new patterns and methods of trade and manufacturing had contributed to creating a nouveau wealthy class whose wealth was based not on inherited real estate, but rather on accumulated cash.

This new middle and non-aristocratic upper class, by the sheer weight of their numbers, buying power, and growing political influence, began to assert terrific pressures on their respective societies to meet their needs and desires.

The nouveau riche wanted to be educated and consequently, it was during the Enlightenment that the concept of universal education first emerged. They wanted at least a modicum of political power and greater degree of control over their own lives.

The new middle class also wanted an end to social and religious injustice. People in the middle and upper classes began to believe that and institution was "good" tot he extent that it did the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The faith in reason that had inspired the scientific community during the seventeenth century was steered, with the result that social institutions and mechanisms were put under the scrutiny of common sense. The middle class wanted quality of life, comfort, and upward mobility.

From a purely social point of view, Enlightenment humanism was, perhaps, the most important of all the intellectual currents of the the time. Enlightenment humanism stated that life on earth and the quality of that life were as important as the afterlife promised by religion. Making the best out of an earthly life became a basic desire for the new middle class.

For the most part, the hereditary monarchies and aristocracies that still ruled Western Europe are grudgingly willing to oblige. In the 1760s, '70s, and '80s (up until the advent of the French Revolution), most such bigwigs were, to some degree or another, "enlightenment": that is, concerned for the well-being of the "little people" to a degree unheard of in previous European history.


From the book "How To Listen To Great Music", by Robert Greenberg