Re: Sturm und Drang

Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 14:01:03 GMT
Newsgroups: it.arti.musica.classica
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"Erewhon" <email-address-deleted> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:58Mxa.194300$email-address-deleted...
> Un dubbio: quali possono essere le caratteristiche dello Sturm un Drang
> riscontrabili in musica? Esempi pratici di composizioni Sturm un Drang?
che du' maroni.
Prima o poi mi paghi, neh?
Sturm und Drang
(Ger.: 'storm and stress').
A movement in German letters, reflected in the other arts, that reached its
highpoint in the 1770s. It is most easily defined by its artistic aims: to
frighten, to stun, to overcome with emotion. In line with these aims was an
extreme emphasis on an anti-rational, subjective approach to all art.
Although almost accidental in origin, the term 'Sturm und Drang' reflected
ancient Stoic concepts of tempestas and affectus, according to Heckscher
(1966-7), now positively rather than negatively valorized with regard to
artistic creation. The young Goethe was the leading figure, with his play
Götz von Berlichingen (1773) on a medieval German subject.
The movement had been prepared by various creative spirits of the
mid-century, who were still half part of the fashionable appeal to
sentimentality of the time, so-called 'Empfindsamkeit'. On an international
level it is necessary to give credit to Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742;
Ger. trans., 1751). Also prefiguring the movement was Rousseau's rediscovery
of nature at its most awesome, from Alpine peaks to ocean depths. A special
kinship may also be established with Diderot because of his frequent and
influential calls for sombre, savage and grandiose qualities in painting,
poetry and music. Mercier worked these precepts into a treatise on drama
that found a wide response among German writers, partly because of its
social aspects, with emphasis on class struggle. No less important was the
widespread revival of Shakespeare's tragedies, which had the effect of
liberating dramatists from subservience to the style and the rules of
classicistic drama and giving them a sense of historicism. The expression
'Sturm und Drang' comes from the title of a play about the American
Revolution, written in 1776 by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. With Schiller's
play Die Räuber (1780-81) the movement is generally accounted to have
reached its zenith, after which both Schiller and Goethe gradually returned
to more generally accepted standards.
There were parallel movements in the other arts. The fashion for storms and
shipwrecks in painting, associated particularly with Joseph Vernet and
Philippe de Loutherbourg, capitalized on the delight in conveying fear and
terror. Painters who specialized in nightmarish visions fall into the same
category. Goethe wrote to a friend in 1779: 'I have got hold of some
paintings and sketches by Fuseli, which will give you all a good fright'.
Blake proved a worthy disciple of Fuseli. The vogue of Piranesi's Carceri
from mid-century on bespeaks another aspect of the revelling in gloom and
tortured feelings, as well as the appeal of a remote and more romantic past.
Gothic dungeons à la Piranesi afforded some of the strongest statements in
visual terms upon the operatic stages of the time. A related phenomenon was
the strongly anti-rational appeal of 'Gothic novels', which began with
Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764). At the same time James MacPherson
published his primitivistic Ballads of Ossian, passing them off as
translations from the Gaelic (1762-3).
A musical parallel is best approached in the theatre, where all the arts
meet. Stimulating strong emotional responses was a prime aim of the operatic
reform about 1760. What was experienced at the time as a most potent weapon
for passionate, unbridled expression was obbligato (or orchestrally
accompanied) recitative. In the hands of Italian masters like Jommelli and
Traetta, this language of orchestral commentary was pushed to unheard-of
lengths of tone-painting. A related territory, by virtue of its freedom of
action and fluid, transitional techniques, was the dramatic ballet, where
music painted various pantomimic gestures. The choreographers Noverre
(Lettres sur la danse, 1760) and Angiolini were both significant in
advancing towards the pantomime ballet; the latter devised the stage action
in Gluck's Don Juan (1761) and wrote a programme note that clearly
proclaimed 'Sturm und Drang' ideals: '[Gluck] a saisi parfaitement le
terrible de l'Action. Il a taché d'exprimer les passions qui y jouent, et l'
épouvante qui règne dans la catastrophe'. The ferocious intensity of the D
minor finale was indeed well calculated to evoke terror - Mozart's Don
Giovanni, 25 years later, was still beholden to it. From here it was but a
step to the scene with the furies in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), also
choreographed by Angiolini. The resources of obbligato recitative and the
dramatic ballet gave composers a ready-made arsenal with which to fashion
the continuous web of pictorial music necessary to accompany mélodrame
(spoken drama supported by orchestral mood music). Rousseau pioneered this
genre with his Pygmalion (1770). It was quickly taken up by Goethe and other
literary figures. Georg Benda's music for Ariadne and Medea (1774-5)
achieved the greatest successes for the genre. Mozart first came into
contact with them in 1777-8 at Mannheim, where one of the German companies
specializing in Shakespeare put on Medea. His pleasantly astonished reaction
led to experiments with the technique in Zaide (1779) and in his revisions
of the stage music for König Thamos. He also planned to write a
fully-fledged mélodrame, on the subject of Semiramide, on which Gluck had
written the most radically innovatory of his dramatic ballets (1765).
Obbligato recitative was pushed to its utmost expressive consequences in
Idomeneo (1780-81), a product of his Mannheim and Paris experiences. His
utterances about this opera betray a typical 'Sturm und Drang' attitude
towards dramatic realism ('Man muss glauben es sey wircklich so!', written
in connection with the oracular pronouncement accompanied by trombones in
Act 3), and with regard to evoking fear and terror from the audience (e.g.
the storm scenes in C minor and F minor, the D minor flight chorus,
described in the libretto as a pantomime of 'Angst und Schrecken'). Mozart's
power in expressing the macabre and the terrible also sometimes came to the
fore in his earlier stage works, notably in the tomb scene of Lucio Silla
(1772) and in parts of La finta giardiniera (1774).
Other composers have been linked with the 'Sturm und Drang' movement with
more or less appropriateness. In north Germany, Rolle went far beyond the
merely sentimental in works such as his Tod Abels (published 1771), Abraham
(1777), Lazarus (1779) and Thirza (1781), which may be compared with Benda's
mélodrames in terms of tragic grandeur, dramatic fluidity, use of unifying
motifs, and large-scale tonal planning. The second Berlin school of lied
composers, although they went beyond the first school's insistence upon
being pleasing at all times, never produced such stark and uncompromising
music as did Rolle at his best. Bücken assessed the operas of Schweitzer on
texts of Wieland (Alceste, 1773; Rosamunde, 1777) as falling between 'Sturm
und Drang' and 'galant Empfindsamkeit', with the composer leaning towards
the former and the poet towards the latter. In south Germany the main
centres were Stuttgart (with Jommelli pupils like Zumsteeg) and Mannheim
(Schobert and Eckhard have been singled out as pioneers of a robust piano
style that imitated the famed orchestral fireworks of the Mannheim band).
Even Mozart admired the fiery music in Holzbauer's Günther von Schwarzburg
(1778 - another medieval German subject). Among the Mannheim composers,
Vogler was the foremost 'Stürmer' with his frankly sensational programme
overtures (Hamlet, 1778), his ballets and other stage works. Of the storm in
his mélodrame, Lampedo (1778), he wrote: 'the orchestra cannot be
distinguished from the thunder ram above the timber-work of the theatre, the
rain machine, and the lightning that pierces the darkness on stage; all work
together to contribute to the dramatic realism by which a horrible tempest
is conjured up for the eyes and ears'. Gradations of lighting in the theatre
accompanied these storms and other incidences of nature in upheaval, an
important visual counterpart to the dramatic fluidity sought through music
(Loutherbourg was a pioneer here). Vogler's significance in establishing a
new, more 'romantic' approach to the lyric stage emerges from his
Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule (1778-81) no less than from his
music. As the respected teacher of a younger generation including Winter,
Weber and Meyerbeer, he may be considered one of the seminal figures linking
the 'Sturm und Drang' variety of 'romanticism' with that of the early 19th
century.
A persuasive case has been made (Brook, 1970) for considering Haydn's phase
of passionate works in the minor mode, characteristic of the years round
1770, along with similar works of other Austrian symphonists, as a 'Sturm
und Drang' phenomenon. Their vocabulary of syncopations, wild leaps and
tremolo passages is much the same as in slightly earlier musical depictions
of furies in Viennese stage works; Sisman (1990) has likewise identified
close links between Haydn's symphonic and theatrical music during this
period. (The symphony 'La casa del diavolo', 1771, composed by the former
Burgtheater cellist Luigi Boccherini in imitation of Gluck's ballet Don
Juan, is another notable example of such direct theatrical-symphonic
interchange.) Brook compared Haydn's turn towards more Olympian ideals in
the following decades with the turn of events in German letters, and with
Goethe in particular. Although parallel movements to the musical 'Sturm und
Drang' can be discerned in other countries, it seems unwise to apply this
term, because of its very nature, beyond the German-speaking lands, except
in cases of direct imitation - as with Gaetano Pugnani's orchestral suite or
Melodram (c1790) based on Goethe's 1774 novel Die Leiden des jungen
Werthers. Even within German-speaking lands the appeal of 'Sturm und Drang'
was limited; Johann Pezzl (Skizze von Wien, 1786-90) noted that this
'paroxysm . was never able to take root in Vienna, or in any large city
where one possessed knowledge of the world and its manners [Weltkennt-nis
und Lebensart]'. C.P.E. Bach has been held up as an archetypal
representative in music of the 'Sturm und Drang' movement. While such a case
can be made, his age and his reluctance to participate directly in musical
theatre make it more appropriate to view him as a particularly powerful
creator within the preceding and related aesthetic sphere of Empfindsamkeit.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
E. Bücken: Die Musik Des Rokokos und der Klassik (Potsdam, 1927)
R. Pascal: The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester, 1953)
R. Mortier: Diderot en Allemagne (Paris, 1954)
H.H. Eggebrecht: 'Das Ausdrucksprinzip im musikalischen Sturm und Drang',
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte, xxix (1955), 323-49
H.C.R. Landon: 'La crise romantique dans la musique autrichienne vers 1770:
quelques précurseurs inconnus de la Symphonie en sol mineur (KV 183) de
Mozart', Les influences étrangères dans l'ouvre de Mozart: CNRS Paris 1956,
27-47
L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: 'Sturm und Drang in der deutschen Klaviermusik von
1753-1763', Mf, x (1957), 466-79
J. and B. Massin: 'Mozart et le "Sturm und Drang" (à propos des ouvres de l'
hiver 1772-1773)', Essais sur la musique, xiii (1959), 29-47
H. Majewski: 'L.S. Mercier: a Pre-Romantic View of Paris', Studies in
Romanticism, v (1965), 16-29
G. Kaiser: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Sturm und Drang (Gütersloh, 1966; rev.
3/1979 as Aufklärung, Empfindsamkeit, Sturm und Drang)
W. Heckscher: 'Sturm und Drang: Conjectures on the Origins of a Phrase',
Simiolus, i (1966-7), 94-105
B.S. Brook: 'Sturm und Drang and the Romantic Period in Music', Studies in
Romanticism, ix (1970), 269-84
D. Heartz: 'Sturm und Drang im Musikdrama', GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 432-5
P.F. Marks: 'The Rhetorical Element in Musical Sturm und Drang: Christian
Gottfried Krause's "Von der musikalischen Poesie"', IRASM, ii (1971), 49-64
E. Loewenthal, ed.: Sturm und Drang: kritische Schriften (Heidelberg, 1972)
K. Clark: The Romantic Rebellion (London, 1973) [chaps. on Piranesi, Fuseli
and Blake]
G. Gruber: 'Glucks Tanzdramen und ihre musikalische Dramatik', ÖMz, xxix
(1974), 17-24
M. Mann: Sturm und Drang Drama: Studien und Vorstudien zu Schillers 'Räubern
' (Berne, 1974)
H.C.R. Landon: 'Crisis Years: Sturm und Drang and the Austrian Musical
Crisis', Haydn: Chronicle and Works, ii Haydn at Eszterháza, 1766-1790
(Bloomington, IN, and London, 1978), 266-393
A. McCredie: 'Handlungsballet, Melodrama und die musikdramatischen
Musikformen des Sturm und Drangs und des Weimarschen Klassizismus', MZ, xv
(1979), 42-62
R.L. Todd: 'Joseph Haydn and the Sturm und Drang: a Revaluation', MR, xl
(1980), 172-96
G. Le Coat: 'L'expression musicale pour Diderot: instinct ou eloquence?',
Diderot: Les beaux-arts et la musique (Aix-en-Provence, 1986), 175-82
S. Mauser: 'Mozarts melodramatischer Ehrgeiz: zu einer vernachlässigten
Gattung des Sturm und Drang', NZM, Jg.147, no.12 (1986), 17-23
E. Sisman: 'Haydn's Theatre Symphonies', JAMS, xliv (1990), 292-352
U. Kuster: Das Melodrama: zum aesthetikgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang von
Dichtung und Musik im 18. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Duisburg, 1993)
R. Kohler: 'Johann Gottfried Herder und die Überwindung der musikalischen
Nachahmungsästhetik', AMw, lii (1995), 205-19