183 is another excellent example of this style.
The influence of the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") period in music, with its brief foreshadowing of the Romantic era to come, is evident in some of the music of both composers at that time. Some of his quartets from 1773 have fugal finales, probably influenced by Haydn, who included three such finales in his recently published Opus 20 set. 201 uses a contrapuntal main theme in its first movement, and experimentation with irregular phrase lengths. Mozart's understanding of modes such as Phrygian is evident in such passages.Īs Mozart matured, he began to incorporate some more features of Baroque styles into his music. But Mozart shifted the sequence so that the cadence ended on the stronger half, i.e., the first beat of the bar. This sequence is essentially borrowed from Baroque music, especially J. One of the most recognizable features of Mozart's works is a sequence of harmonies or modes that usually leads to a cadence in the dominant or tonic key. Bach, and others show the simple rounded binary forms commonly being written by composers in Vienna. Some of Mozart's early symphonies are Italian overtures, with three movements running into each other many are "homotonal" (each movement in the same key, with the slow movement in the parallel minor). This style, out of which the classical style evolved, was a reaction against the complexity of late Baroque music. Both in London and Italy, the galant style was all the rage: simple, light music, with a mania for cadencing, an emphasis on tonic, dominant, and subdominant to the exclusion of other chords, symmetrical phrases, and clearly articulated structures. Bach and heard his music when he went to Paris, Mannheim, and Vienna, he heard the work of composers active there, as well as the spectacular Mannheim orchestra when he went to Italy, he encountered the Italian overture and opera buffa, both of which were to be hugely influential on his development. When he went to London as a child, he met J.C. 465, a work that Haydn greatly admired even as it perplexed him, rapidly explodes a shallow understanding of Mozart's style as light and pleasant.įrom his earliest years Mozart had a gift for imitating the music he heard since he traveled widely, he acquired a rare collection of experiences from which to create his unique compositional language.
The slow introduction to the "Dissonant" Quartet, K. In all of Mozart's supreme expressions of suffering and terror, there is something shockingly voluptuous." Especially during his last decade, Mozart explored chromatic harmony to a degree rare at the time. In a paradoxical way, Schumann's superficial characterization of the G minor Symphony can help us to see Mozart's daemon more steadily. Charles Rosen has written (1997): "It is only through recognizing the violence and sensuality at the center of Mozart's work that we can make a start towards a comprehension of his structures and an insight into his magnificence. Clarity, balance, and transparency are hallmarks, though a simplistic notion of the delicacy of his music obscures for us the exceptional and even demonic power of some of his finest masterpieces, such as the Piano Concerto No. The central traits of the classical style can all be identified in Mozart's music. He also wrote a great deal of religious music, including masses and he composed many dances, divertimenti, serenades, and other forms of light entertainment. While none of these genres were new, the piano concerto was almost single-handedly developed and popularized by Mozart. In addition, he was a versatile composer and wrote in almost every major genre, including symphony, opera, the solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintet, and the piano sonata.
Mozart's own stylistic development closely paralleled the development of the classical style as a whole. His works spanned the period during which that style transformed from one exemplified by the style galant to one that began to incorporate some of the contrapuntal complexities of the late Baroque, complexities against which the galant style had been a reaction. Mozart's music, like Haydn's, stands as an archetypal example of the Classical style.
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