In music,galant refers to thestyle which was fashionable in the upper-class societies ofWestern Europe from the 1720s to the 1770s. In the 19th and 20th centuries,musicologists gave the term a narrower meaning. They used it to describe compositions that moved away from the Baroque's rhetorical formal style, but only partly showed traits of the pre-classical period. The galant style can be seen as a step towards the formally freer, sensitive style,Empfindsamkeit, that prepared the early classical period.
This movement featured a return to simplicity and immediacy of appeal after the complexity of the lateBaroque era. This meant simpler, more song-like melodies, decreased use ofpolyphony, short, periodic phrases, a reduced harmonic vocabulary emphasizingtonic anddominant, and a clear distinction betweensoloist andaccompaniment.C. P. E. Bach andDaniel Gottlob Türk, who were among the most significant theorists of the late 18th century, contrasted the galant with the "learned" or "strict" styles.[1][2]
The Germanempfindsamer Stil, which seeks to express personal emotions and sensitivity, can be seen either as a closely related North-German dialect of the international galant style,[3][4][5][6] or as contrasted with it, as between the music of C. P. E. Bach, a founder of both styles, and that ofJohann Christian Bach, who carried the galant style further and was closer to classical.[citation needed]
This musical style was part of the widergalant movement in art at the time.
The word "galant" derives from French, where it was in use from at least the 16th century. In the early 18th century, agalant homme described a person of fashion, who was elegant, cultured and virtuous. The German theoristJohann Mattheson appears to have been fond of the term. It features in the title of his first publication of 1713,Das neu-eröffneteOrchestre, oderUniverselle und gründliche Anleitung wie einGalant Homme einen vollkommenen Begriff von der Hoheit und Würde der edlenMusic erlangen. (Instead of theGothic type rendered here in italics, Mattheson usedRoman to emphasize the many non-German expressions.[7][3]
Mattheson was apparently the first to refer to a "galant style" in music, in hisDas forschende Orchestre of 1721. He recognized a lighter, modern style,einem galanten Stylo and named among its leading practitionersGiovanni Bononcini,Antonio Caldara,Georg Philipp Telemann,Alessandro Scarlatti,Antonio Vivaldi andGeorge Frideric Handel.[8] All were composing Italianopera seria, a voice-driven musical style, and opera remained the central form of galant music. The new music was not as essentially a court music as it was a city music: the cities emphasized by Daniel Heartz, a recent historian of the style, were first of all Naples, then Venice, Dresden, Berlin, Stuttgart and Mannheim, and Paris. Many galant composers spent their careers in less central cities, ones that may be considered consumers rather than producers of thestyle galant: Johann Christian Bach andCarl Friedrich Abel in London,Baldassare Galuppi in Saint Petersburg and Georg Philipp Telemann in Hamburg.[citation needed]
Not every contemporary was delighted with this revolutionary simplification: Johann Samuel Petri, in hisAnleitung zur praktischen Musik (1782) spoke of the "great catastrophe in music".[9]
The change was as much at the birth of Romanticism as it was of Classicism. The folk-song element in poetry, like the singablecantabile melody in galant music, was brought to public notice inThomas Percy'sReliques of Ancient Poetry (1765) andJames Macpherson's "Ossian" inventions during the 1760s.
Some of Telemann's later music and the music of Bach's sons,Johann Joachim Quantz,Johann Gottlieb andCarl Heinrich Graun,Franz andGeorg Anton Benda,Frederick the Great,Johann Adolph Hasse,Giovanni Battista Sammartini,Giovanni Battista Martini,Baldassare Galuppi,Franz Xaver Richter,Ignaz Holzbauer,Johann Stamitz,Jean-Philippe Rameau,François Couperin,Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Domenico Alberti,Carl Friedrich Abel,Johann Schobert,Georg Christoph Wagenseil,Georg Matthias Monn,Leopold Mozart, and earlyHaydn andMozart are exemplars of galant style. Some of the works of the Portuguese composerCarlos Seixas are firmly in the galant style.[citation needed]
This simplified style was melody-driven, not constructed on rhythmic or melodicmotifs as so much classical music was to be: "It is indicative that Haydn, even in his old age, is reported to have said, 'If you want to know whether a melody is really beautiful, sing it without accompaniment'".[10] This simplification also extended toharmonic rhythm, which is generally slower in galant music than is the case in the earlier baroque style, thus making lavish melodic ornamentation and nuances of secondary harmonic colorings more important.[5]
The affinities of galant style withRococo in the visual arts are easily overplayed, but characteristics that were valued in both genres were freshness, accessibility and charm.Watteau'sfêtes galantes were rococo not merely in subject matter, but also in the lighter, cleaner tonality of his palette, and the glazes that supplied a galant translucency to his finished pictures often compared to the orchestrations of galant music.[11]
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