Books › The Instruments of the Modern Orchestra and Early Records of the Precursors of the Violin Family, in Two Volumes, Vol. I- Modern Orchestral Instruments, 1910 › scan 37
Scan 37
The Instruments of the Modern Orchestra and Early Records of the Precursors of the Violin Family, in Two Volumes, Vol. I- Modern Orchestral Instruments, 1910
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1"Don Giovanni." Beethoven attained to the highest pinnacle of dramatic art and of elevation of style in his overtures, notably, that to "Fidelio," "Leonora" No. 3. Weber invested the overture with the richest local colour and romanticism, and Wagner with the grandest and most splendid orchestration. At the end of the sixteenth century, the word Sonata began to be used by the two Gabriels in Venice, for organ compositions; it seems to have been a portion of a larger work of which the rest was vocal. The Sonata was brief, solemn, slow, pouring forth volumes of sound. The word was similarly applied in Germany (probably through Heinrich Schütz, a pupil of Gabrieli's, who composed the first German Opera in 1627 to the text of "Daphne"). In the seventeenth century, when instrumental and solo music began to develop, the sonata assumed a certain definite form under Bibers and Corelli, who wrote for the violin. It consisted then of four or five movements more or less like a "Suite de pieces," and kept this form under Domenico Scarlatti and Bach. Kuhnau was the first to write sonatas for the harpsichord. Haydn by introducing two contrasted chief themes, in properly related keys, began the evolution of the sonata-form. Mozart followed in his footsteps. Beethoven, however, it was, who gave us the perfect sonata as it now stands with three or four movements, of which the first, the most important, is called sonata-form or first movement. The Symphony, a sonata for orchestra, the chamber quartet and trio, etc., all are built on this grand plan of the Sonata. The first to introduce the symphony was Haydn; Mozart further improved it, and Beethoven, with bold regenerating touch gave it what it required to make it perfect.
3The Modern Orchestra.—Our orchestra practically began to assume a definite shape, and to have an independent existence, as well as music and laws of its own, with the revival of the drama in the seventeenth century. As the instruments were
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