We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), in the American Declaration of Independence (1776)
To hold as self-evident truths that all men are created equal and are endowed by a benevolent creator with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is an Enlightenment way of thinking. Not just the philosophers and politicians thought this way: You’ll enounter the same sentiments in Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro and the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Enlightenment ideals denying the divine right of kings and promoting alternatives to feudalism steered us through our own relatively tame Revolution (1776–81) and the much bloodier and more confused French Revolution (1789–95).
America, at its best a civilization of laws, rights, reason, and implicit belief in unstoppable progress, is the triumph of Enlightenment thought.
Indeed, one might well conjure up Jeffersonian images to epitomize the period: not just white wigs and fancy signatures affixed with quill
pens on fine pieces of parchment but the very notion that an industrious and thinking citizen in an egalitarian society might frame great institutions, design and build noble edifices, and commit to paper hundreds of provocative observations on everything from seed germination to the immorality of slavery. Or consider Benjamin Franklin, genially and indefatigably darting from the publishing trade, experiments with optics and electricity, diplomacy, and service as postmaster of his new nation—all the while an excellent man of letters.
Following tenets espoused by the great French philosopher Voltaire, thinkers in the Age of Reason promoted learning, deductive thought, and personal industry. It was committed to social progress with the state as the agent of reform. Notions of the worth of the individual led to manifestos on the rights of man (our Bill of Rights comes from 1791, the year of Mozart’s death), the vote for all men and women, and the emancipation of enslaved peoples. Thus the Enlightenment was also a code of behavior—a moral stance, a faith in the limitless potential of humankind.
Thinkers of the era formulated and then pursued the scientific method in their search for the laws and natural order of the universe, discovering oxygen (1794), a smallpox vaccine (1796), and the Voltaic cell (1800). They endeavored to perfect and codify knowledge, as in the 28-volume Encyclopédie (1751–72), edited by Diderot with themselves and their subjects to it: the Austrian emperor Joseph II (1765–90) and his mother Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great in Russia (1762–96), and the flute-playing Frederick the Great of Prussia (1740–86). Others, notably George III of England and Louis XVI of
France (and his wife Marie Antoinette, Maria Theresa’s daughter), as well as the clergy, just didn’t get it.
Meanwhile the middle class—bankers, lawyers, journalists, physicians, the lesser nobility, and government bureaucrats—
flourished. Industrialists harnessed scientific and technological breakthroughs like the steam engine (1769) and cotton gin (1793) with the hope of acquiring, as the shrewdest did, vast wealth. The study of economics was born and the principles of capitalism posited (Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, 1776).
In art, the Enlightenment emphasis on order and rational thought led to a simplicity and elegance of style that turns sharply away from the Baroque. Artists and architects were taken with the graceful forms of Greek and Roman antiquity, prompted in part by the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Gardens and household objects show a similar delight in symmetry and balance. Literature, having in one sense fostered this revolution to begin with, was already occupied with newer concerns. The Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) movement in German-language prose emphasized the emotional turbulence underlying the social order, while Goethe (1749–1832) was describing the situations and feelings that would soon be at the heart of Romanticism.
Composers were sensitive to Enlightenment ideals as well. Music became less the gift of God than a luxury of the good life. We call the music of the Enlightenment Classicism, or Viennese Classicism, or (following the title of a famous book by Charles Rosen) the Classical Style.
Don’t get tangled up with the terminology here. Classical, in its general sense, also means the universal concern for balance, clarity, refinement, and grace in art, which struggles for position in any age alongside the passionate (romantic) and worldly (popular), as in
“classical music” versus “pop music.” The designation “classic”
applies to any creation that endures as a monument to its era: the Ford Mustang, for instance. With Viennese Classicism, however, we are talking of music of a particular time and place.
The Classical period is unlike any of the other commonly accepted style periods in that it’s very short, focused on a single place (Vienna), and largely, for our purposes here, the creation of two men, Haydn and Mozart. It begins to be recognizable in the 1760s, catches fire in the 1770s, and matures in the 1780s with the joint accomplishments of the two masters. Following Mozart’s death in 1791, Haydn was for more than a decade the reigning monarch of music composition. It was thought natural (and quite enlightened) that so promising a student as Beethoven should travel all the way from western Germany to Vienna for tutelage with him. Haydn, meanwhile, was not insensitive to the political and artistic changes around him—this is the period of Napoleon and Goethe—and the acute ear can tell in Haydn’s late masterpieces that he was cognizant of the dawn of Romanticism. By that time Beethoven and others were boldly sweeping musical discourse into the post-Revolutionary era.