The Contemporaneity of Eighteenth-Century Musical Taste

Abstract

BETWEEN 1700 and 1870 there occurred an epochal change in the balance between the past and the present in Western musical life. By tradition, most works performed had been written by living composers, and often in fact by the performers themselves. Repertories had gone through cycles of casting out the old and bringing in the new, a process so regular that it was unusual for a work to continue to be performed long after the composer's death. Indeed, an Italian opera rarely survived more than a decade after its premiere. Musical culture had no pantheon of great composers; rather than honor the past, it spurned it. But in the early eighteenth century major exceptions to this rule began to appear. In France the tragedies lyriques of Jean-Baptiste Lully and his successors were performed regularly up through the 1770s. In England music of the sixteenth century was revived in the Academy of Ancient Music, and many of the works of George Frideric Handel remained in performance after his death in 1759. In Vienna as well, his music was played in conjunction with a broader historical repertory at the private concerts of the Baron Gottfried van Swieten. Most significant of all, after the turn of the nineteenth century the symphonic and chamber works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven became the focus of a new set of concerts devoted