Mid 1700s Music Composers and the Operatic Reform Essay

Beginning in the mid-1700s composers started to resist the changes that occurred in opera. They began to resist: the preferential treatment that the divas and castrati received, the excessive and replaceable arias and the melodic phrasing, and the extreme vocal embellishments. Coming out of the opera seria where the focus remained squarely on the divas, castrati, and where the da capo aria was the standard form of the time Christoph Willibald Gluck was the leader of the Operatic Reform. While Christoph Willibald Gluck and other composers of the time did not abandon the da capo aria entirely, they began to modify it to more effectively to fit the telling of a story. With the reform, opera was returned to expressing dramatic truth.†¦show more content†¦Also more formal structures became standard. One example of one of these formal structures is the sonata form. The sonata form is one of the most common forms in classical a music. This form is commonly used in the first movemen t of sonatas, string quartets, symphonies and even concerts. It has three main sections which are the exposition, development, and the recapitulation. One composer who used the sonata form exclusively was Domenico Scarlatti. Scarlatti was one of the most prominent keyboard composers of his time. The clavier sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti form a separate and distinct species, written mostly in one movement, in song form, and in homophonic style. An example of this is in Scarlatti’s Sonata in D Major. Scarlattis sonatas represent a transitional type between the older and the Viennese sonata One of the most important composers of the early Symphony, Johann Stamitz standardized the four movement plan of what would become the symphony. What Johann brought to the music that was innovative was that he played with different instrument timbres like flutes, oboes, brass instruments, and clarinet. Stamitz was the first composer to use it consistently: well over half his symphonies and nine of his ten orchestral trios are in four movements. He also contributed to the development of sonata form, most often used in symphonic first movements but occasionally in finales and even slow movements as well. Franz Joseph Haydn, by some is thought