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‘You'd think that people would have had enough’ – wrote Paul McCartney, and more to the point he sang with his group Wings on record, in 1976, becoming an overnight world success – ‘of silly love songs’. Enough of love songs; it's quite a thought. Whether one should be quoting a popular singer on the subject is open to question, scholarly question that is, in a study centring on Brahms; while on the other hand one imagines that if anyone is qualified to comment on song at least in the later twentieth century, it ought to be someone like McCartney who was the era's most globalized writer and performer of song. ‘Classical’ his song world may not be, but representative of the most widespread and highly valued form of vocality it certainly was. Admittedly there is something painfully overindulgent in taking too forensic a view of popular culture – not that it fails to be as significant as any other kind of art, and from many points of view it is among the most important expressions of human sentiment, if important means sincere and, in the age of technology, truly widely shared, art of the people if ever there was one. It is always difficult to wonder how to evaluate the fleetingly memorable (deeply though popular art penetrates into our psyche) in comparison with art designed to be lasting; all too easy to give in to some form of cultural imperialism when we compare a work of supposedly ‘high’ art with something perceived to be its opposite – popular, improvisatory perhaps, laden with reference so contemporaneous that it is dated almost the moment it is produced, and in short therefore, dare one even write it, ‘low’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation in musical life at the end of the eighteenth century In few other periods has the social world of music suddenly undergone such vast and radical changes as it did in the years 1770–1820. The life of a musician in 1810 was more like that of one of his present-day colleagues than the life of a maestro di cappella in 1760. The present circle for the production and diffusion of music is still largely that bequeathed by the final decades of the eighteenth century, when the industrial revolution and the bourgeoisie under the leadership of the state changed the face of the greater part of the countries of Europe. The period's great social changes mainly involved, in the musical field, the replacement of the maestro di cappella with the independent professional musician. The old maestro di cappella, like other salaried persons in the service of a gentleman or a council, was a servant of greater or lesser rank depending on his patron's inclination or on the fame that he himself enjoyed. In any case he had a series of stipulated duties: to compose or direct performances of every type of music required by the public or private life of the chapel or municipality; to enforce discipline and see to the good behaviour of the musical personnel; and to buy instruments, to check that they were working properly, and to supervise the musical library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sturm und Drang and music One of the most radical forms of opposition to the taste for pleasantness, formal refinement and expressive simplicity from which Arcadia, the rococo and the galant style were born was the German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang, which developed between 1770 and 1780, at the same time (but without any similar theoretical element) as many sectors of the musical sphere came to an important turning point. The movement's name alludes to a play by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger of 1776 entitled Sturm und Drang (Storm and stress). Besides Klinger and other less important figures, Goethe, Herder, Johann Heinrich Merck, Jakob Lenz and Heinrich L. Wagner were all involved in the movement, which also gained more or less lasting sympathy with other young intellectuals and poets like Bürger, the Swiss pastor Lavater, and Schiller. In 1770 none of the members of this group had yet reached the age of thirty; their origins were middle-class and their economic means (except for Goethe's) modest. They were almost all starting off a career as a tutor, entering the service of a prince, or beginning life as a pastor, and they made themselves known through periodicals such as the Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen, Thalia and Musenalmanac (the magazine of the Göttingen school of poets). Shakespeare was their guardian spirit, but they found encouragement in contemporary, especially English and French, literature: Rousseau, Richardson, Young's Night thoughts, Warton's The Pleasures of melancholy, Gray's Odes and the heroic and tragic ballads of ancient English poetry published in 1765 by Bishop Thomas Percy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]