The Interaction Between Music and Drama: The Emergence of the New Forms in the 18th Century and the 19th Century

It is suggested that a major change in any form of art is a reflection to its era’s social, political and economic situation as it is seen in literature, painting, and the other forms. Music, on the other hand, is one of the significant art forms that show a perfect and parallel change in combination with the era in which it is produced.  A progression of major elements in music has always been there in the history of it. The shifting can be seen in the change of music from Renaissance to Baroque around the year 1600, and in the equally clear change from Romantic to contemporary style after the year 1900 (Ulrich, 312). Therefore, it can be said that music is always reflected, it did not pave the way for the next step in the understanding of art. On the other hand, it is also significant that music has gradually gained its part in the other forms of art, such as drama and visual arts. The aim of this paper is to show the interaction between music and drama in the 18^th Century and in the early 19^th Century in Europe and England, under the light of one of the major changes in the history of music, that was from Baroque style to Classical, in deference to such composers as Mozart and Beethoven and such newly-emerged forms as sonata and opera.

It is beneficial to have a close look at how music evolved through Baroque period and was turned into a new form towards the end of the 18^th Century to understand the state of affairs music and drama created in the 18^th Century. After the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, the leading composer of the Baroque Music, in 1750, there was not a major successor to him (Ulrich, 312). Bach and Handel were composing their most monumental works between 1720 and 1750, when a competing music style emerged to challenge the values of the Baroque Music.  This new style continued to compete with the Baroque values for another three decades after the death of Bach and finally became the dominant music style in the 1780s, called Classism and often associated with the works of Haydn, Mozart and to some extent, Beethoven (Ulrich, 313).

Classical Period in music can be accepted as the first period in which music and drama came together and constituted a new form of art. This association between music and drama was a consequence of the shifting from Baroque style to Classicism in music. Therefore, this shifting in the history music must be understood to apprehend the sequential new form of art created by music and drama. The period’s perception of music is said to be a reaction against to the formalism, rigidity, and seriousness of the Baroque music by many of the musicologists today. Contrary to what neo-classical movement in literature stood for, classism in music was aimed to obscure the clean structures of the musical compositions. The main influence on the classical style was the period’s French architecture, which was “ornamented and decorated to excess with elaborate stone carvings and plaster encrustations” (Ulrich, 313). A term, Rococo, derived from French word ‘rocaille’, was often applied to the music of the time, and since a great part of music was composed to entertain the aristocracy and the fashionable world in general, the music between the years 1720 and 1780 was named as Style Galant in France (Ulrich, 313). It is assumable that many innovations were made in the structure of musical compositions with the arrival of the classical style, and those innovations paved the way to a kind of interactive art form. One of those changes, the change from the two-part dance music of the Baroque style to Sonata Form of the classical period would be a good example to illustrate in order to understand how great the changes were. For instance, Bach’s Duet 1, composed in 1733, goes with a single main melody that is accompanied by a less populated scheme, following some strict rules such as that the accompanier melody’s corresponding notes must be the thirds or fifths of the main notes. With the arrival of the understanding of the classical music, “the simple two part dance form of the Baroque” (Ulrich, 316) was changed into the sonata form. To compare and contrast, Mozart’s Fantasie and Sonata in C Minor, composed in 1785, can be given as an example. In Mozart’s piece, each hand has almost the same amount of contribution to the composition. While one melody is played in its own harmonic structure, the other melody contributes it by creating an independent melody. Having generally been used as the first movement of the multi-movement pieces, the sonata forms have their own expositions, developments and recapitulations within themselves. However, the shifting from the two-part dance music of the Baroque to the sonata form constituted the first main step towards the future. It was the classic style in music that the sequential interaction between music and drama was influenced. Many open-minded inventors did follow the change from the dance music to sonata and were affected by that newly emerged sonata form of classic style.

In the transition period of music from Baroque to Classic style, there was the Ballad Opera as a genre on the English stage. To illustrate, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera can be evaluated. The Musical Times gives us a precise description of the era and Ballad Opera:

The forty-ninth session of the Musical Association opened on November 7 with a paper by Miss Caroline Lejeune on “Ballad Opera: Its Place in the 18^th Century.” She said that the history of Beggar’s Opera and its sequel, Polly, formed one of the most amazing adventures in that age of adventure. When Gay produced the Beggar’s Opera he unconsciously lighted a social and dramatic bonfire that had been smouldering for nearly two hundred years. (870)

Indeed, Gay was reflecting to the changes and demands of the era. He saw the inessentiality that the ordinary Londoners were exposed, who were “bored with Pastorals of Virgil, and with drama about goddesses and demi-gods, and Virtue with a capital V” (Musical Times, 870) as composers were bored with the inexpedient values of the Baroque style. Gay “never considered the possibility of his opera making history” (Musical Times, 870), yet it was a stone alluded to the norms of art that were established by the high standards of noble people. Consequently, a different approach’s possibility towards the stage had been seen by many people thanks to Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and those open-minded people tried to establish new forms on the stage.

            Beethoven, regarded as the most influential composer of all the times, was the most powerful determiner of the musical forms of the age and their relationship with the stage. Since his productive lifetime covered the both period, classicism and romantic style, he is also a great figure to analyze. Adorno puts forward that “in the early Beethoven, there is a development from the rhetorically decorative through the Romantic to the tragic” (81). Indeed, it was only Mozart who managed to create a synthesis between the new forms of music and the aesthetic principles of Classicism, which resulted in opera. After Mozart, many composers failed to relate drama and music properly. Therefore, “their unsuccessful attempts at synthesis demonstrated to Romantic composers the need for other methods” (Ulrich, 445) and Beethoven was the one who achieved this task by directing the base of his musical composition towards the tragic. Hence, a new form of music, Opera, not for the first time in the history but for the first time as an established genre, became popular towards the end of the 18^th Century and in the beginning of the 19^th Century. Opera did not show up within a day. There were many factors that influenced the emergence of the opera as a genre in the previous centuries, such as the forms on the Italian stage, Mozart’s attempts to combine music with drama and Gay’s intention to bring the stage to the ordinary people. “The study of folk poetry, national legends and remote history opened new vistas for composers of opera” (Ulrich, 446) in the 19^th Century. In the first pieces of opera, there were the stylistic elements showing the basic characteristics of the new form. Beethoven’s opera, Fidelio (1805) was one of the best examples of the first well-structured operas in the history of music (Ulrich, 446). By creating such a work, Beethoven showed the way for the next composers and established the characteristics of one of the first interactive art forms in the world.

            In conclusion, it must be re-stated that the reflection of music to the era in which it was produced was the main reason behind the emergence of the new and interactive art form, opera. Today, music is a great part of many other arts such as cinema, drama, experimental visual arts, and even painting. In this short analysis, the evolution of music in the 18^th Century is shown with examples and the consequence of this evolution is said to be the arrival of musicals on the stage. Although such attempts as experiments on Italian stage and Mozart’s tests with music constituted the way towards a well-established combination of music and drama, it was Beethoven’s stimulating approach towards music that managed to correspond to the needs of the 18^th Century’s perception of art.