So-called ‘classical’ music was as revolutionary as the modern novel in its storytelling, harmony and depth.
by Joel Sandelson at Aeon:We habitually associate literary realism with things like down-to-earth subject matter, plausible detail and convincing chronology. For the ancients, though, realism had just the opposite meaning. Aristotle argued that art should transcend the mass of incidental details around us and deal with the more important reality of universals. On this view, art imitates reality not by directly copying things around us, but by somehow reflecting our broad experience of reality through its modes of representation. But in the wake of the empiricist philosophy and science of the 1600s and 1700s, this idea was turned on its head: what was ‘realistic’ was now the flux of particulars. This updated notion of realism found classic expression in the novel – novels that depicted particular people having particular experiences at particular times and places. For the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in the 1930s, the quintessential feature of the modern novel was ‘heteroglossia’: a riotous mixture of voices, characters and styles, which undermines the claim to authority of any one of them. And this opens up a tempting musical parallel.
In the early decades of the 18th century, just as the first modern novels were gaining purchase among a new reading public, a new kind of opera from Naples was sweeping Europe. It was a comic style later called opera buffa, distinguished from its forebears by its depiction of multiple character types. Opera seria (and its French equivalent, tragédie lyrique), to which buffa was a democratic alternative, had been based principally on classical subjects featuring characters of noble or mythological origin. It was structurally more static, too: each seria aria froze the forward motion of the plot and expressed the singing character’s particular passion at that moment, through highly conventionalised means. In the new comic style, contrasting styles, textures and topics jostled together in close proximity; this dazzling variety was imported from the opera house into instrumental music by mid-century galant composers like Giovanni Battista Sammartini and Johann Stamitz.
In his dialogue Rameau’s Nephew (1805), Denis Diderot has his title character both advocate and imitate the disjointed discourse of the modern style. ‘We need exclamations, interjections, suspensions, interruptions, affirmations, and negations,’ he says. ‘No more witticisms, epigrams, neat thoughts – they are too unlike nature.’ Whereas a string of arias in a Handel opera seria (or a sequence of dance movements in a baroque suite) each inhabit a singular affect and isolated vantage point, an ensemble finale in a comic opera or a symphony movement of the later 18th century give us a carnival of distinct characters.
