Eras of Classical Music
1600 – 197161 items
musicFrom Monteverdi to Stravinsky
In 1600 a Florentine singer played Orpheus in the first opera whose music survives. Three and a half centuries later a pianist in the Catskills sat at a closed keyboard for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. In between came the premieres that made the repertoire: in court theatres and churches, in Leipzig, Vienna and St Petersburg, and in Dublin, Cairo, Lima, New York and a prison camp in Japan.
Eras are conventions
Nobody in 1750 knew the Baroque had ended. The four bands are the ones music histories use: Baroque from the first operas to Bach’s death in 1750, Classical to about 1820, Romantic to about 1910 and Modern after 1900. They overlap where the music did: Beethoven belongs to two of them, and Mahler and Debussy were writing at the same time. Shorter bands follow a career or a company: Bach in Leipzig, the Mozarts on tour, Haydn at Eszterháza and in London, the first Bayreuth festival and the Ballets Russes.
Two calendars
England and Ireland kept the Julian calendar until 1752 and Russia until 1918, so Handel’s London and Dublin premieres and the St Petersburg and Moscow premieres of Glinka, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky are dated here the way their audiences dated them. Timescrolly shows each in its own calendar and still puts it in the right place: Messiah opened in Dublin on 13 April 1742, which was 24 April in Rome. English years here begin on 1 January; where a source of the time began the year on 25 March and prints an earlier year, the note says so.
How it is laid out
Events: first performances, and a few publications and deaths that mattered, each at the theatre, church or hall where it happened.
Threads to filter by:
opera,symphony,ballet,religion,instruments,controversyandwar, and the placesvienna,londonandrussia.
“I was cut off from the world … and so I had to become original.” — Joseph Haydn on his years at Eszterháza, as told to Georg August Griesinger
Items
Peri’s Euridice at the Pitti Palace
Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in Mantua
The first public opera house opens in Venice
Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at a Chelsea girls’ school
Cristofori’s piano appears in a Medici inventory
The first opera of the Americas, in Lima
Handel’s Rinaldo at the Queen’s Theatre
Handel’s Water Music on the Thames
Bach dedicates the Brandenburg Concertos
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in print
Bach’s St Matthew Passion
Messiah in Dublin
Messiah comes to London
Music for the Royal Fireworks
Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice
Haydn’s Farewell Symphony
Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Prague
Mozart’s The Magic Flute
Mozart dies, the Requiem unfinished
Haydn’s Surprise Symphony
Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament
Beethoven’s Eroica in public
Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth in one night
E. T. A. Hoffmann hears Romanticism in Beethoven’s Fifth
Beethoven’s Ninth
Mendelssohn revives the St Matthew Passion
Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique
Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar
Verdi’s Nabucco at La Scala
Adolphe Sax patents the saxophone
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
Verdi’s Aida in Cairo
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov
Brahms’s First Symphony
Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake
Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique
Dvořák’s New World Symphony at Carnegie Hall
Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony fails
Stravinsky’s The Firebird
Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand
The Skandalkonzert in Vienna
The Rite of Spring
Beethoven’s Ninth reaches Japan in a prison camp
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method
Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time
The Leningrad Symphony in besieged Leningrad
Copland’s Appalachian Spring
Cage’s 4′33″
Stravinsky is buried in Venice