A Simple Matter of Style
.
. . Renaissance, Baroque,
Classical, Romantic . . .
music’s development, arrayed as neat as
Contrary Mary’s garden. Except, it isn’t.
Like most things, the closer you look the
messier it becomes. Here’s a simple question:
how did Baroque become Classical?
The simple - or least messy - response is
“Style Galant”. The plain man’s answer
to the ever more complicated counterpoints
and confusing curlicues of the Baroque,
it replaced polyphony with homophony: single,
accompanied melodic lines, easier on the
ear and more readily admitting elegance
and even wit.
Early
proponents like Couperin retained some of
the florid decoration, but very soon the
Austro-Germans skimmed off even that remaining
bit of fat. The result? An uncluttered drawing-board
ripe for a fresh start. With the relatively
crude Baroque forms like “ritornello” and
“variation” laid bare, it didn’t take long
for some bright sparks to discern the new
direction. Haydn was arguably the
brightest of these sparks. He contributed
immeasurably to the elaboration of form
that characterises the Classical and enabled
generations of what were formerly “decorators”
to become “architects”.
The
Violin Concerto in C was “fatto per
Luigi [Tommasini]”, the highly capable leader
of the Esterházy orchestra, by all
accounts soon after Haydn’s signing up.
You can almost feel the Style Galant shaking
the shackles of the Baroque. The shadow
of Handel looms large in the sturdy dotted
rhythms of the first movement. Something
of a “stripped down” Concerto Grosso, the
two-part counterpoint of soloist and orchestra
keeps true homophony at arm’s length. The
second movement, however, is bang on the
button: top and tail apart, the orchestra
accompanies the violin’s arioso with simple,
guitar-like plucked chords. This seems to
fire the finale, a right romp in which Haydn’s
legendary wit breaks the bonds of Handelian
pomp. In this music we experience Haydn
not as the accustomed comfortable master
of all he surveys but as a pioneer, right
in the thick of the avant-garde of
his time.
Prokofiev
was never out of the avant-garde!
His acerbic music quickly gained him a reputation
as an enfant terrible. Consequently,
particularly as he wrote it in 1916 amidst
raging war and fomenting revolution, his
First Symphony must have raised a
few eyebrows. His declared intention was
to write “the kind of symphony that Haydn
or Mozart might have written had they lived
in the twentieth century”. Hum! Try to imagine
what they “might have written” if they had
got their mitts on the rich resources of
the post-Romantic symphony orchestra. Nothing
like this, I’m sure! At rock bottom, his
declaration was probably a jokey smokescreen:
wanting independence from the piano as a
compositional tool, Prokofiev sought a simple
path. What better than to emulate the classical
Style Galant of Haydn, his own favourite
composer? Thus, it would be more accurate
to say that the Classical Symphony
represents “the kind of symphony that Prokofiev
might have written had he lived in the eighteenth
century”.
Note
originally commissioned by the Vancouver
Symphony for a concert given on 15 November
2003.
.
© Paul Serotsky
,
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