‘Sturm und Drang’, Volume 4

“… a series that is special not just for the thought and scholarship that goes into it, but Page’s direction of his fine players. It is throughout beautifully balanced and paced, while at the same time musically highly insightful.”

EARLY MUSIC REVIEW

This recording is the fourth in a projected seven-volume series exploring the so-called ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement that swept through music and other art forms between the early 1760s and the late 1780s. In its strictest sense this was an exclusively literary movement which developed in Germany during the 1770s, and which owes its name to the title of a play written in 1776 by Maximilian Klinger. Its general objectives were to frighten and perturb through the use of a wildly subjective and emotional means of expression, and, taking as its model the recently revived and revered plays of Shakespeare, the movement sought to evoke ground-breaking extremes of passion and sentimentality.

Not surprisingly, the ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement was mirrored in other art forms; the evocation of fear and terror was reflected in the fashion for storms and shipwrecks in paintings of the period by such artists as Joseph Vernet and Philip James de Loutherbourg, while in music there suddenly, and often quite independently, emerged a profusion of intensely dramatic and turbulent minor-key works. It is interesting to observe, though, that the most concentrated period of musical ‘Sturm und Drang’ actually predated the literary movement, suggesting less a conscious and deliberate ‘movement’ than a latent emotional mood. Indeed, it was perhaps inevitable and natural that there should at some point be a reaction to the superficial charm and gentility of the rococo style of the mid-eighteenth century.

This fourth volume in The Mozartists’ ‘Sturm und Drang’ series features feverishly intense symphonies by Kraus and Haydn, opera arias by Mozart and Traetta, and the climactic scene from Jiří Benda’s melodrama Medea, which Mozart excitedly hailed as the future of opera.