26 - On artificiality

Summary

Irony … can see where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God … [It] is the highest freedom that can be achieved in a world without God.

(Lukács)

Irony, I suggest, is the distinguishing feature of the ‘Classical style’. But what Charles Rosen calls the ‘Classical style’ is problematically just the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Can these three composers legitimately represent the period? For the ‘Classical style’ itself, as a categorisation of the whole period, is not specifically ironic. Perhaps the three composers should be thought of in terms of a difference in style as opposed to their colonisation of the entire epoch. They are not the sole exponents of the ‘Classical style’; rather the Classical language, which takes its vocabulary from Italian opera and style galant, is merely a historical texture from which the three composers try to disentangle themselves. Hence Johann Reichardt could call them ‘the three pure humorists’. The chemistry of their music is ironic activity, and this is the distinctive mark of a style that has been anachronistically and erroneously named as ‘Classical’.

If ‘Classical’ forms – most notably sonata forms – are to be modelled on Haydn, then irony is their definition. His forms are not organic structures, but structures that try to see themselves as organic. There is a perpetual tampering of the music's biology to bring the forms into self-reflection.