th to the classical forms of previous years.The Classical Period had lasted from around 1750 – 1820, and was itself a revolt against the previous Baroque era. The arts moved away from the heavily ornamented styles of the Baroque to a cleaner, uncluttered style, thought to be reminiscent of Ancient Greece, and many people interested in music were now the aristocracy rather than the church or monarchy. The social upheavals of the latter part of this period challenged these ideas, and the Age of Reason became the age of the individual, and the beginnings of Romanticism, with its non-rational and disordered reasoning, became predominant. Early Romanticism and the Influence of BeethovenThe Romantic age, although having been in the background in literature in particular since 1750, really began to evolve into mainstream music with the shockwaves caused by the French Revolution. Opera was immediately modernised in France – in particular a style later known as ‘Rescue Opera’, which typically depicted the capture of a heroine by an evil tyrant and then rescued gallantly by her lover. This genre showed the new way of thinking, that the evil was undone by human effort and not by the intervention of an almighty, superior being. Ludwig van Beethoven, seen by many as a Classical composer, used the new romantic ideas in his own music. In 1805 he wrote his own Rescue Opera, Fidelio, and even embraced the new ideas in his symphonic music, as first illustrated in the 3rd Symphony, which was entitled the ‘Heroic Symphony’, or Sinfonia Eroica, taking on the romantic idea of individualism. In this also Beethoven starts to add new dimensions to the 18th Century symphony, such as experimenting with, and often ignoring, the sonata form that makes up the first movement, and also experimenting with emotion; ‘the social upheaval of the 2nd half of the Century can be traced in the Symphonies of Beethoven’ (Oxford His...
