(Fr.; It. galante).
A term widely used during the 18th century to denote music with lightly accompanied, periodic melodies, and the appropriate manner of performing the same. ‘Being galant, in general’, wrote Voltaire, ‘means seeking to please’. The old French meaning of the general term with its emphasis on valour had by the 1630s given way to a newer emphasis on social or amatory grace: titles like Campra’s L’Europe galante (1697), Rameau’s Les Indes galantes (1735), Guillemain’s Sonates en quatuors, ou Conversations galantes et amusantes (1743) and Graun’s Le feste galanti (1748) are to be understood in that latter sense. Watteau’s epochal paintings of fêtes galantes contributed further to the vogue of the term. Applied to letters, the term took on a meaning close to ‘French courtly manner’, as in a treatise by C.F. Hunold (Menantes), Die allerneuste Manier höflich und galant zu schreiben (1702), a manual for self-instruction that Herder later denounced as lacking virility.
A musical parallel is at hand in Mattheson’s first publication, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, oder Universelle und gründliche Anleitung wie ein Galant Homme einen vollkommenen Begriff von der Hoheit und Würde der edlen Music erlangen (1713); on the title-page roman typeface is used in place of Gothic, significantly, to emphasize the numerous non-German expressions. As an imported phenomenon, the galant style in Germany borrowed much vocabulary from its countries of origin and generated a more extensive theoretical literature. Mattheson’s ‘galant homme’ must be taken to include both sexes; as his dedication of this work to a noble lady indicates, much of the galant literature, like much galant music, was intended to instruct and entertain female amateurs. Mattheson used the substantive ‘galanterie’ in this and subsequent treatises with a variety of meanings. Pieces called ‘galanteries’ were numerous in the suites of 17th-century French harpsichord composers; the term was used to designate the lighter, mainly homophonic dances, such as the minuet (J.S. Bach followed this practice). As early as 1640 ‘galanteria’ was used to describe the playing and the late style of Frescobaldi. Mattheson preferred that ‘Galanterien’ be played on the clavichord rather than the harpsichord because its dynamic nuances approximated more closely to vocal style, a feeling that was to become widespread with partisans of a specific north German dialect of the international galant idiom, ‘Empfindsamkeit’. In keeping with the emphasis on a singing style, Mattheson also used the term in reference to vocal pieces, saying that a French air had ‘ein etwas negligente Galanterie’ while an Italian aria had this in addition to more musical content, or ‘ein harmonieusere Galanterie’; as a singer at the Hamburg Opera under Keiser he was well acquainted with both types. Good music, in his view, required melody, harmony and ‘galanterie’, the last being equated with the theatrical style, as opposed to the strict or church style, and not subject to rules (except those of ‘le bon goût’).
Other writers bear out this fundamental distinction. Scheibe opined in Der critische Musikus (1737–40) that the galant way of writing had its origins in the Italian theatre style. Throughout the Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753) C.P.E. Bach distinguished between the learned and galant styles. Marpurg in his Abhandlung von der Fuge (1753) contrasted fugal texture with the freedom of galant writing. Quantz was more preoccupied than any of his contemporaries with defining the new style, both in his Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (1752) and in his autobiography (1754; first printed in Marpurg’s Historisch-kritische Beyträge, 1755). In the latter he described Fux’s Costanza e fortezza, which he had heard at Prague in 1723, as magnificent, but more in a sacred than theatrical style; he contrasted it with the galant melodic style, described as being ornamented with many small figures and passages, which he admitted were less appropriate to a vast space than an intimate one, with fewer instruments. The following year, in Rome, he heard Domenico Scarlatti perform and described him as a galant player in the manner of the time. Having been introduced to the elder Scarlatti by Hasse, he observed that the master played the harpsichord in a learned manner but with less finesse than his son. At Paris in 1726–7, Quantz encountered Blavet, whom he praised most highly among the numerous composer-performers of the French flute school, the sonatas of which would seem to qualify on musical grounds as quintessentially galant, although Quantz did not so describe them. His emphasis upon the manner of tone production led Quantz in the Versuch to define galant singing: it consisted of dynamic shadings, joining the chest voice to the falsetto smoothly, and in skilful ornamentation. Mattheson, Scheibe and other writers occasionally used the term ‘Galanterie’ to refer to embellishments themselves – either improvised or incorporated into the notation. Italian flattery, Quantz said, was effected by slurred notes and by diminishing and strengthening the tone (a description of the messa di voce). With this he contrasted the noisy chest attacks and lack of legato in the old manner of German choral singing. Here the essential musical quality of what the period meant by galant emerges particularly clearly. Its ideal was the Italian bel canto, which reached its highest pinnacle, according to Quantz, in the first third of the century, when the most famous castratos were in their prime (Farinelli and Carestini were singled out for praise). Flexibility in dynamic nuance went with rhythmic flexibility, or tempo rubato, in the modern Italian style. Schäfke showed that Quantz formulated the galant aesthetic of clarity, pleasingness and naturalness in music on the basis of several earlier theorists, including Mattheson, and that these ideals, typical of the Enlightenment in general, went back to the rationalist philosophy of Descartes (‘clare et distincte percipere’).
Instrumental pieces specifically called ‘galant’ or ‘galanteria’ proliferated in the chamber and solo literature during the third quarter of the century, which may be considered the highpoint of the galant style in instrumental music. Newman judged that qualitative peaks were reached in the keyboard sonatas of Galuppi (who was fond of writing minuets in 3/8 time with the thinnest of textures), Soler and J.C. Bach, and in the chamber music of G.B. Sammartini. The ‘menuet galant’ represented the epitome of the style. Rousseau wrote in his Dictionnaire (1768): ‘le caractère du menuet est une élégante et noble simplicité’ (cf C.P.E. Bach’s chief goal in keyboard playing: ‘edle Einfalt des Gesangs’). In Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4) the minuet’s affect is said to be ‘noble and of charming decency, yet united with simplicity’; ‘more than any other dance [the minuet] is appropriate for societies of persons distinguished by their refined way of life’.
Defenders of the old contrapuntal virtues were heard from more and more as the 18th century reached its last third, with the onset of an anti-galant reaction. Parallels may be observed with the turn against the Rococo style in art and the rise of Sturm und Drang in literature. Adlung complained that ‘murky’ basses and ‘Galanterien’ were being heard even in church. In the article on melody in Sulzer’s encyclopedia (written with advice from Kirnberger), ‘pleasant, so-called galanterie pieces’ and their ‘very small phrases, or segments’ are said to be appropriate for light, flattering passions, but out of place in serious or sacred compositions, where their effect is more dainty than beautiful. Under the rubric ‘Musik’ Sulzer noted that ‘the melodic language of the passions has gained immensely’ from the introduction of ‘the so-called galant, or freer and lighter manner of writing’, even while claiming that the abuses of this style were leading to music’s complete degeneracy. Other complaints about the galant manner were even more specifically moral. As Seidel has shown, the term ‘galant’, having connoted ease and gracefulness of manner to the early 18th century, later came to stand for an empty, artificial and mainly aristocratic manner of comporting or expressing oneself, and the opposite of bourgeois naturalness of feeling.
Freedom of dissonance treatment (e.g. by voice-exchange), defended by Heinichen in connection with the theatrical style, was further rationalized by Marpurg and Türk as a specifically galant trait. In the Fundamentum des General-Basses printed by Siegmeyer at Berlin and attributed (posthumously) to Mozart, a certain cadential progression is described as ‘modern (gallant)’: II6–I6-4–V–I. It is illustrated in duple time and then in triple, the latter approximating to the cadence to the minuet in Don Giovanni (which first introduces the dance, after hearing the beginning of which Leporello says ‘che maschere galanti!’). Opposite this is illustrated a cadence, called ‘contrapunctisch’, that consists of a I–V–I progression with prepared 4–3 suspensions over the first two chords (see Heartz and Mann, 1969, p.17). Cudworth (1949), unaware of this instance, arrived at isolating the ‘cadence galante’ par excellence as IV (or II6)–I6-4–V–I in minuet rhythm; he hypothesized its origins in some Italian opera house early in the century. Its antecedents may in fact be discerned in, most of all, the operatic arias of Leonardo Vinci (1690–1730), who was widely recognized as an innovator: his light textures, simple harmony, periodic melody and formula-based cadences typify the early galant. His immediate followers in this light and gracious manner were Hasse and Pergolesi, who used more decoration, particularly triplet figures and inverted dotted rhythms. Burney wrote that Vinci was the first to break away from the older style, ‘by simplifying and polishing melody, and calling the attention of the audience chiefly to the voice-part, by disentangling it from fugue, complication and laboured contrivance’. Before Vinci, elements of the galant style can be found in the bel canto melodies of Alessandro Scarlatti; Veracini’s unpublished violin sonatas of 1716, already markedly freer than Corelli’s classic examples; and in dance music, particularly light ‘galanteries’ like the minuet with their simple textures, periodic structures and short melodic motifs.
The galant idiom freed composers from the contrapuntal fetters of the church style, to some degree even in the context of church music; its simplicities and miniaturistic nature imposed new fetters, which in turn were thrown off with the reintegration of more contrapuntal means in the obbligato homophony that matured in the last three decades of the century.
See also Classical; Empfindsamkeit; Enlightenment; Rococo; and Sturm und Drang.
MGG2 (W. Seidel)
NewmanSCE
E. Bücken: ‘Der galante Stil: eine Skizze seiner Entwicklung’, ZMw, vi (1923–4), 418–30
R. Schäfke: ‘Quantz als Aesthetiker: eine Einführung in die Musikästhetik des galanten Stils’, AMw, vi (1924), 213–42
C. Cudworth: ‘Cadence galante: the Story of a Cliché’, MMR, lxxix (1949), 176–8
P. Nettl: ‘The Life of Herr Johann Joachim Quantz, as Sketched by himself’, Forgotten Musicians (New York, 1951), 280–319
C. Cudworth: ‘Baroque, Rococo, Galant, Classic’, MMR, lxxxiii (1953), 172–5
L. Ratner: ‘Eighteenth-Century Theories of Musical Period Structure’, MQ, xlii (1956), 439–54
D.D. Boyden: ‘Dynamics in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music’, Essays on Music in Honor of Archibald Thompson Davison (Cambridge, MA, 1957), 185–93
L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: ‘Der “Galante Stil” in der Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts: zur Problematik des Begriffs’, SMw, xxv (1962), 252–60
G. Kaiser: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Sturm und Drang (Gütersloh, 1966, rev. 3/1979 as Aufklärung, Empfindsamkeit, Sturm und Drang)
D. Heartz: ‘Opera and the Periodization of Eighteenth-Century Music’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 160–68
D. Heartz and A. Mann, eds.: Thomas Attwoods Theorie- und Kompositionsstudien bei Mozart, W.A. Mozart: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, x/30/1, Kritischer Bericht (Kassel, 1969)
H. Serwer: Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718–1795): Music Critic in a Galant Age (diss., Yale U., 1969)
J. Rushton: ‘The Theory and Practice of Piccinnisme’, PRMA, xcviii (1971–2), 31–46 [on the melodic period]
D.A. Sheldon: ‘The Galant Style Revisited and Re-evaluated’, AcM, xlvii (1975), 240–69
R. Marshall: ‘Bach the Progressive: Observations on his Later Works’, MQ, xlii (1976), 313–57
J.W. Hill: ‘The Anti-Galant Attitude of F.M. Veracini’, Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J.W. Hill (Kassel and Cliftian, NJ, 1980), 158–96
H. Eppstein: ‘Johann Sebastian Bach und der galante Stil’, Studien zur deutsch-französischen Musikgeschichte im 18. Jahrhundert: Saarbrücken 1981, 209–18 [with Fr. summary]
D.A. Sheldon: ‘Exchange, Anticipation, and Ellipsis: Analytical Definitions of the Galant Style’, Music East and West: Essays in Honor of Walter Kaufmann, ed. T. Noblitt (New York, 1981), 225–41
C. Dahlhaus: ‘Galanter Stil und freier Satz’, Die Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Laaber, 1985), 24–32
B.R. Hanning: ‘Conversation and Musical Style in the Late Eighteenth-Century Parisian Salon’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxii (1989), 512–28
M. Havlová: ‘Galanterie und Lebenspraxis’, Stil in der Musik (Brno, 1992), 86–90
M. Perez Gutierrez: ‘Algunas reflexiones sobre el nuevo estilo artistico de mediados del siglo XVIII en la musica de tecla de la peninsula iberica en relacion con Europa’, Livro de homenagem a Macario Santiago Kastner, ed. M.F. Cidrais-Rodrigues, M. Morais and R.V. Nery (Lisbon, 1992), 265–83
C.A. Le Bar: Musical Culture and the Origins of the Enlightenment in Hamburg (diss., U. of Washington, 1993)
DANIEL HEARTZ/BRUCE ALAN BROWN