2: Learned and Galant

Captions for the illustrations above

Antoine Watteau, The Scale of Love, 1715–1717

Integration of wood carving, stuccowork and fresco in the abbey church of Zweifalten, Baden-Württemberg (1739–1747)

A shepherd playing a bagpipe: porcelain figure made around 1750 at the Meissen factory near Dresden. No real shepherd, of course, but a young man dressed in the expensive clothes of a nobleman, playing a rustic instrument that in our period enjoyed a vogue among the aristocracy. With the wave-like shapes around the base, the pure white of the porcelain, pastel colors, and gold, craftsmen at Meissen expressed on a small scale much the same artistic values as those expressed on a grand scale in such buildings as the churches at Zweifalten and Steingaden (see below). 

The child Mozart performs at a salon in Paris. The sunlight, entering through big windows and reflected on mirrors and white walls with gold trim, is a visual counterpart to Mozart's music. The prince of Conti's guests experience enlightenment both literal and artistic.

August the Strong (1670–1733), elector of Saxony and king of Poland, and King Frederick William I of Prussia (1688–1740): double portrait by Louis de Silvestre, ca. 1730. With his long wig August declares allegiance to the tastes of the court of Louis XIV. Frederick William's much shorter hair identifies him not only as an officer in the Prussian army (where the fashion for shorter hair was adopted very early) but also as a man considerably younger than the elector of Saxony. This portrait thus exemplifies the dichotomy characteristic of the first half of the eighteenth century between old and new: a dichotomy audible in the coexistence of the learned and the galant in music.

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Ratner, Leonard G. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980)  Worldcat

Schönberger, Arno, and Halldor Soehner. The Rococo Age: Art and Civilization of the Eighteenth Century (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960)  Worldcat 

Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 399–444  Worldcat  

Yearsley, David. Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)   Worldcat

Yonan, Michael. "The Wieskirche: Movement, Perception, and Salvation in the Bavarian Rococo," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 41 (2012)