I8th-Century Music and the Problems of its History 
Gerald Abraham 

I t is arguable that the first important step 'in the direction of a 
comprehensive history of the music of the 18th century was taken 
the year after Paul Henry Lang's birth, when in 1902 Hugo 
Riemann published a volume of Mannheim symphonies in the 
second (Bavarian) series of Denkmiiler deutscher Tonkunst. Up to 
then the 18th century had seemed to consist musically of "the age 
of Bach and Handel" and "the age of Haydn and Mozart," with 
.little but Gluck and C. P. E. Bach in between; that, at any rate, 
was the impression given not only by late 19th-century histories 
like Naumann's but also by the original Oxford History of Music 
(1901-05). Even the heroes who exelusivelyfilled the stage were 
seen neither whole nor correctly in detail, neither in perspective 
nor in relation to each other and the period as a whole. Bach was 
just being wrongly re-drawn as a pre-Romantic; Handel's operas 
were regarded as dead; Gluck was the reformer of opera (and 
his non-reformed operas of all periods were conveniently 
forgotten); C. P. E. Bach was mainly interesting as a forerunner 
of Haydn and Beethoven; Haydn himself was known almost ex:-
elusively by his last symphonies and quartets and the two great 
oratorios; and 'Mozart, like Haydn, was a "forerunner" of 
Beethoven who composed music that was divinely innocent and 
beautiful but lacked emotional depth. It was Riemann's discovery 
of the Mannheimers, followed some years later by Guido Adler's 
discovery of the Viennese symphonists, which first obliged 
thinking musicians to recognize that the Baroque wave exhausted 
itself by mid-century, that a new wave-of Rococo or senti-
mentality, two aspects of the same style-was all the while 
forming itself to mount and break in turn. And this recognition 
led in turn to the perception that Gluck's dramatic reforms, 
the elements of Sturm und Drang that came to light in C. P. E. 
Bach and Haydn the more one studied them, and the element 
of the diimonisch in Mozart to which Hermann Abert first drew 
attention in 1919, were the symptoms of yet another wave that 
was to pile up in Beethoven and then curl over and break in the 
flurry of romanticism. Unfortunately, so far as the concert and 
opera repertories are concerned, we are still hardly out of the 
pre-Riemann conception of the 18th century. 

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Delimitation by centuries is an arbitrary way of measuring off 
history, but all ways of delimiting historical periods are arbitrary; 
the frontiers, even the seemingly natural ones, like 1600, always 
cut across something vital. But the 18th century with its two 
great "ages"-or, as we now see it, its three great stylistic 
waves-Baroque/Rococo/pre-Romantic-Iooks temptingly neat. 
Too neat. These are still only the convenient abstractions of the 
historian's mind, and before we can hope to write a really valid 
account of the century's music as it really was, we need to get 
further behind these abstractions, find a great many more facts 
and ask a great many questions about them. The facts are mostly 
purely musical ones, the questions are also partly musical but 
also generally cultural, social, even economic or political. 

The number ofimportant 18th:..century composers whose work 
we still know only in part is enormous. All but a few of the operas 
of even such a key figure as Alessandro Scarlatti are terra incognita 
to all but a few scholars. Vivaldi's vast corpus of instrumental 
music has been well studied and a large proportion of it is now 
readily available in modern editions, but his nearly fifty operas 
remain virtually unknown even to specialists. And Alessandro 
Scarlatti and Vivaldi are not secondary figures. The position 
with minor but not negligible composers is naturally just as 
bad; it could hardly be worse. And attention is still much too 
firmly focused on Italy, the German-speaking lands, and 
France. They are central, of course, but even if we knew all 
we need to know about their music our picture of the 18th 
century would still be very incomplete. British and American 
scholars do not forget England-though the British sometimes 
forget America-and the scholars of every peripheral country 
can be relied on to remember their own cultural heritage; but 
no one takes a grand synoptic view for the very sound reason 
that no one yet is in a position to take it. It is only a few years 
since Barry Brook moved the French symphony into our line of 
vision, but a truly synoptic view of the symphony in the 18th 
century would have to take into account also the really peripheral, 
almost domestic symphonies written in Poland during the second 
half of the century and only now unearthed in any quantity and 
published and studied. It is the peripheral countries-Scandin-
avian, Slav, Iberian-that should fill in the background. 

And like the celebrated incident of the dog that didn't bark in 
the night, the weakness or absence of some particular form of 

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musical culture in a particular environment may guide us to the 
true reasons for its flourishing in another. These reasons are often 
non-musical, sometimes even non-cultural. However 
as an art music may appear to be, it is seldom to 
appreciate accurately and sympathetically the music of any 
country or period in detachment from its social and general 
cultural background. We must beware of detecting superficial, 
and sometimes absurd, pseudo-parallels with other atts, and 
instead trace the noumenal origins of the phenomena. I myself 
once described the young Mozart's church music as "the 
precise musical equivalent of such Rococo churches as Balthasar 
Neumann's Vierzehnheiligen"; I think this is so-but the 
question the musical historian must ask is "why?" What was 
the essence of the religious nature that found expression In such 
music and such churches? Of course all 18th-century :church 
music, like that of other centuries, must be explained in terms of 
religion itself-in the Protestant field alone, in terms of German 
pietism, Anglican latitudinarianism, and Anglo-American non-
conformist "enthusiasm." - . 

To observe and collect facts about compositions, and test 
evidence for this or that manner of performance, is basic but 
it is not enough. Far too much contemporary musicology is 
devoted to this kind of labor for its own sake. It is indispensable 
groundwork and, as I have already observed, much remains to 
be done. But it is only groundwork, the raw material' of history, 
not true history itself. Why the decline of solo song 
in Italy during the century, the gradual death of the solo 
concerto? We must first establish by research that solo song 
really did die out, that our assumption rests on something more 
than our ignorance of the sources in which 18th-century Italian 
solo song is preserved; but before we can go on to write the true 
history of 18th-century Italian music, we must make at least a 
determined attempt to explain why solo song died. 

Perhaps if we could make up our minds as to what are the 
grand problems of musical history in the 18th century, we'could 
profitably reorientate and provisionally delimit the dire1ctions 
and scope of our basic research. 

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