Harmony music

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Under Harmoniemusik refers to ensembles of wood and brass , a tradition that originated about 1770 and especially for outdoor concerts or board scores was used. The usual line-up consisted of an octet wind instrument (two oboes , two clarinets , horns and bassoons ). Works for this instrumentation are more likely to be classified as chamber music today .

Extensions to the line-up with additional bass instruments ( double bassoon or double bass ) and further wind instruments ultimately led to the emergence of a richly cast wind orchestra. These harmony formations , which are still often called harmony (music) or orchestra , especially in the Benelux and Switzerland , should not be confused with harmony music in the original sense.

Historical practice

Especially in classical Vienna, harmony music was part of the "good tone" of aristocratic houses, which were able to delight their invited societies with arrangements from operas but also from military and promenade music, some of which were specially composed for this purpose. In many cases, harmony music was performed as a (nocturnal) serenade in public space. Even the Habsburg court, which (unlike some lower nobility) could afford large orchestras, founded an Imperial and Royal Harmony in 1782 , which lasted until 1837 and commissioned over 170 opera adaptations and 22 original works for this line-up. In the Musical Lexicon of 1802, the music theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch comments on harmony music :

“One uses either specially assigned pieces of music, which consist of movements of different movement and time signature and can take on any character, but do not follow one another in any particular order, or one arranges operas and other pieces of music for these instruments that actually make one other uses are intended, because up to now there is still a lack of a sufficient number of good pieces of clay. "

Usually it was not the composers themselves who arranged their works as harmony music (see however the significant exceptions mentioned below). Rather, the following have stood out as arrangers: the oboist Johann Nepomuk Wendt , who "put on harmony" around 40 operas (including five by Mozart) and ballets, the oboist Josef Triebensee , who wrote an arrangement of Mozart's Don Giovanni , and the clarinetist Wenzel Sedlák , to whom we owe the version of Fidelio's harmony music authorized by the composer Ludwig van Beethoven . A harmony piece by Weber's Freischütz was written by Karl Flachs from Leipzig in 1822.

A very excellent example is Beethoven himself, who had his 7th and 8th (lost) symphonies edited for harmony under his personal supervision (see Beethoven Archive, Bonn); and at the same time for various other chamber music ensembles.

Great composers and the "harmony"

Joseph Haydn composed some harmony music, most of which were small-scale (as a sextet of two oboes, horns and bassoons). His most famous great work is the Parthita in Bb , whose slow middle movement, the Chorale Sant'Antoni by Johannes Brahms , was chosen as the starting theme for his Haydn Variations . Meanwhile, incidentally, is Ignaz Pleyel identified as the actual composer of "Parthita" but the Brahms Variations title is therefore no change in the "Pleyel Variations".

Mozart , too , reacted to this fashionable trend, initially by placing parts of his operas " on harmony," he wrote to his father on July 20, 1782:

“My opera [probably“ The Abduction from the Seraglio ”] must be set to harmony by Sunday eight days - otherwise someone will come before me - and instead of mine I will profit from it; [...] You don't believe how difficult it is to put something like that on the harmony - that it is characteristic of pale instruments, and yet none of the effect is lost. "

Mozart (like other of his colleagues) was primarily concerned with popularizing his own operas: he promoted his works and also benefited from their secondary use by editing them so that the sequence of the pieces corresponded to the course of the original stage work. This strategy reaches its self-ironic climax when Mozart lets the harmony music on the stage blow a quote from Le nozze di Figaro to the table music in the finale of his Don Giovanni and the heroine cheerfully sings along: "Questa poi la conosco pur troppo (I know that now only too well)". The fact that Mozart provided harmony music for dinner also testifies to Don Giovanni's megalomania, because wind instruments were only used for table music when the volume of the strings was insufficient, for example outdoors or in huge halls. However, Don Giovanni only expects the Commander to eat.

At the same time, however, Mozart's pen also produced works for wind ensembles that have hardly anything to do with the pure entertainment character of harmony music. His Gran Partita for 13 wind instruments and the serenades in E flat major and C minor are real chamber music works that show the master at the height of his creativity and are in no way inferior to his chamber music for strings in terms of form and motifs . The same applies to the wind octets by Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert as well as the harmony music of different sizes by Antonio Salieri . From around 1830, harmony music was slowly displaced from everyday culture by the public bourgeois musical life.

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