Sturm und Drang Enters Music

In the 1770s German lands, minor keys, syncopation and sudden accents put ungovernable emotion into instrumental music.

Related

ClassicalSonata FormMode

The literary Sturm und Drang left no manifesto score, but instrumental music in the 1770s suddenly learned an unseemly way of speaking.

Time and place

The German lands in the 1770s, with Vienna, Salzburg and Hamburg as nodes. In 1773 Mozart wrote the Symphony No. 25 in G minor at Salzburg, while Haydn was producing minor-key symphonies and sonatas at Eszterhaza.

What happened

In the 1770s German literature pushed genius, nature and revolt to the front, and Klinger's play Sturm und Drang gave the movement its name in 1776. Music had no manifesto, but the gestures match. Haydn wrote a group of minor-key symphonies in the late 1760s and early 1770s; Mozart's Twenty-Fifth opens with syncopation and dissonance; C. P. E. Bach's fantasias hand tempo and dynamics to the player's mood. The usual devices are minor mode, syncopation, sudden forte and piano, phrases cut off mid-air, and dissonance that refuses to resolve.

What changed

Instrumental music no longer expressed only decorous feeling. Minor became a key that could carry a whole work rather than a local colour, and development sections began to admit breaks and extreme contrast. The performer's role changed too, requiring an actor's sense of pause and weight instead of evenness. Romanticism later inherited this vocabulary as common sense; the idea that music is inner life rests technically on these few decades. It also left an argument behind, whether feeling should be fixed by notation or decided in performance.

Listen for the turn

Begin with the opening of Mozart's Twenty-Fifth, where a dissonant chord and urgent syncopation pin the music to G minor. Then C. P. E. Bach's Fantasia in F sharp minor, where the beat almost dissolves and dynamics behave like speech, the same language taken to a late extreme. Finally the Andante of Haydn's C minor sonata, where minor can avoid shouting and press the unease into phrase endings. Together they show Sturm und Drang as a set of postures rather than a style.

Related

This turn belongs to Classical and connects 海顿, Sonata Form and Mode.

Sources

• Grove Music Online, entry "Sturm und Drang" — literary and musical usage checked, not quoted
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Haydn, Joseph" — symphonies and dates checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.