1969 Articles

18th-Century Music and the Problems of its History

Abraham, Gerald

It is arguable that the first important step in the direction of a comprehensive history of the music of the 18th century was taken the year after Paul Henry Lang's birth, when in 1902 Hugo Riemann published a volume of Mannheim symphonies in the second (Bavarian) series of Denkmiiler deutscher Tonkunst. Up to then the 18th century had seemed to consist musically of "the age of Bach and Handel" and "the age of Haydn and Mozart," with .little but Gluck and C. P. E. Bach in between; that, at any rate, was the impression given not only by late 19th-century histories like Naumann's but also by the original Oxford History of Music (1901-05).