(Ger.: ‘storm and stress’).
A movement in German letters, reflected in the other arts, that reached its highpoint in the 1770s. It is most easily defined by its artistic aims: to frighten, to stun, to overcome with emotion. In line with these aims was an extreme emphasis on an anti-rational, subjective approach to all art. Although almost accidental in origin, the term ‘Sturm und Drang’ reflected ancient Stoic concepts of tempestas and affectus, according to Heckscher (1966–7), now positively rather than negatively valorized with regard to artistic creation. The young Goethe was the leading figure, with his play Götz von Berlichingen (1773) on a medieval German subject.
The movement had been prepared by various creative spirits of the mid-century, who were still half part of the fashionable appeal to sentimentality of the time, so-called ‘Empfindsamkeit’. On an international level it is necessary to give credit to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742; Ger. trans., 1751). Also prefiguring the movement was Rousseau’s rediscovery of nature at its most awesome, from Alpine peaks to ocean depths. A special kinship may also be established with Diderot because of his frequent and influential calls for sombre, savage and grandiose qualities in painting, poetry and music. Mercier worked these precepts into a treatise on drama that found a wide response among German writers, partly because of its social aspects, with emphasis on class struggle. No less important was the widespread revival of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which had the effect of liberating dramatists from subservience to the style and the rules of classicistic drama and giving them a sense of historicism. The expression ‘Sturm und Drang’ comes from the title of a play about the American Revolution, written in 1776 by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. With Schiller’s play Die Räuber (1780–81) the movement is generally accounted to have reached its zenith, after which both Schiller and Goethe gradually returned to more generally accepted standards.
There were parallel movements in the other arts. The fashion for storms and shipwrecks in painting, associated particularly with Joseph Vernet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, capitalized on the delight in conveying fear and terror. Painters who specialized in nightmarish visions fall into the same category. Goethe wrote to a friend in 1779: ‘I have got hold of some paintings and sketches by Fuseli, which will give you all a good fright’. Blake proved a worthy disciple of Fuseli. The vogue of Piranesi’s Carceri from mid-century on bespeaks another aspect of the revelling in gloom and tortured feelings, as well as the appeal of a remote and more romantic past. Gothic dungeons à la Piranesi afforded some of the strongest statements in visual terms upon the operatic stages of the time. A related phenomenon was the strongly anti-rational appeal of ‘Gothic novels’, which began with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). At the same time James MacPherson published his primitivistic Ballads of Ossian, passing them off as translations from the Gaelic (1762–3).
A musical parallel is best approached in the theatre, where all the arts meet. Stimulating strong emotional responses was a prime aim of the operatic reform about 1760. What was experienced at the time as a most potent weapon for passionate, unbridled expression was obbligato (or orchestrally accompanied) recitative. In the hands of Italian masters like Jommelli and Traetta, this language of orchestral commentary was pushed to unheard-of lengths of tone-painting. A related territory, by virtue of its freedom of action and fluid, transitional techniques, was the dramatic ballet, where music painted various pantomimic gestures. The choreographers Noverre (Lettres sur la danse, 1760) and Angiolini were both significant in advancing towards the pantomime ballet; the latter devised the stage action in Gluck’s Don Juan (1761) and wrote a programme note that clearly proclaimed ‘Sturm und Drang’ ideals: ‘[Gluck] a saisi parfaitement le terrible de l’Action. Il a taché d’exprimer les passions qui y jouent, et l’épouvante qui règne dans la catastrophe’. The ferocious intensity of the D minor finale was indeed well calculated to evoke terror – Mozart’s Don Giovanni, 25 years later, was still beholden to it. From here it was but a step to the scene with the furies in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), also choreographed by Angiolini. The resources of obbligato recitative and the dramatic ballet gave composers a ready-made arsenal with which to fashion the continuous web of pictorial music necessary to accompany mélodrame (spoken drama supported by orchestral mood music). Rousseau pioneered this genre with his Pygmalion (1770). It was quickly taken up by Goethe and other literary figures. Georg Benda’s music for Ariadne and Medea (1774–5) achieved the greatest successes for the genre. Mozart first came into contact with them in 1777–8 at Mannheim, where one of the German companies specializing in Shakespeare put on Medea. His pleasantly astonished reaction led to experiments with the technique in Zaide (1779) and in his revisions of the stage music for König Thamos. He also planned to write a fully-fledged mélodrame, on the subject of Semiramide, on which Gluck had written the most radically innovatory of his dramatic ballets (1765). Obbligato recitative was pushed to its utmost expressive consequences in Idomeneo (1780–81), a product of his Mannheim and Paris experiences. His utterances about this opera betray a typical ‘Sturm und Drang’ attitude towards dramatic realism (‘Man muss glauben es sey wircklich so!’, written in connection with the oracular pronouncement accompanied by trombones in Act 3), and with regard to evoking fear and terror from the audience (e.g. the storm scenes in C minor and F minor, the D minor flight chorus, described in the libretto as a pantomime of ‘Angst und Schrecken’). Mozart’s power in expressing the macabre and the terrible also sometimes came to the fore in his earlier stage works, notably in the tomb scene of Lucio Silla (1772) and in parts of La finta giardiniera (1774).
Other composers have been linked with the ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement with more or less appropriateness. In north Germany, Rolle went far beyond the merely sentimental in works such as his Tod Abels (published 1771), Abraham (1777), Lazarus (1779) and Thirza (1781), which may be compared with Benda’s mélodrames in terms of tragic grandeur, dramatic fluidity, use of unifying motifs, and large-scale tonal planning. The second Berlin school of lied composers, although they went beyond the first school’s insistence upon being pleasing at all times, never produced such stark and uncompromising music as did Rolle at his best. Bücken assessed the operas of Schweitzer on texts of Wieland (Alceste, 1773; Rosamunde, 1777) as falling between ‘Sturm und Drang’ and ‘galant Empfindsamkeit’, with the composer leaning towards the former and the poet towards the latter. In south Germany the main centres were Stuttgart (with Jommelli pupils like Zumsteeg) and Mannheim (Schobert and Eckhard have been singled out as pioneers of a robust piano style that imitated the famed orchestral fireworks of the Mannheim band). Even Mozart admired the fiery music in Holzbauer’s Günther von Schwarzburg (1778 – another medieval German subject). Among the Mannheim composers, Vogler was the foremost ‘Stürmer’ with his frankly sensational programme overtures (Hamlet, 1778), his ballets and other stage works. Of the storm in his mélodrame, Lampedo (1778), he wrote: ‘the orchestra cannot be distinguished from the thunder ram above the timber-work of the theatre, the rain machine, and the lightning that pierces the darkness on stage; all work together to contribute to the dramatic realism by which a horrible tempest is conjured up for the eyes and ears’. Gradations of lighting in the theatre accompanied these storms and other incidences of nature in upheaval, an important visual counterpart to the dramatic fluidity sought through music (Loutherbourg was a pioneer here). Vogler’s significance in establishing a new, more ‘romantic’ approach to the lyric stage emerges from his Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule (1778–81) no less than from his music. As the respected teacher of a younger generation including Winter, Weber and Meyerbeer, he may be considered one of the seminal figures linking the ‘Sturm und Drang’ variety of ‘romanticism’ with that of the early 19th century.
A persuasive case has been made (Brook, 1970) for considering Haydn’s phase of passionate works in the minor mode, characteristic of the years round 1770, along with similar works of other Austrian symphonists, as a ‘Sturm und Drang’ phenomenon. Their vocabulary of syncopations, wild leaps and tremolo passages is much the same as in slightly earlier musical depictions of furies in Viennese stage works; Sisman (1990) has likewise identified close links between Haydn’s symphonic and theatrical music during this period. (The symphony ‘La casa del diavolo’, 1771, composed by the former Burgtheater cellist Luigi Boccherini in imitation of Gluck’s ballet Don Juan, is another notable example of such direct theatrical-symphonic interchange.) Brook compared Haydn’s turn towards more Olympian ideals in the following decades with the turn of events in German letters, and with Goethe in particular. Although parallel movements to the musical ‘Sturm und Drang’ can be discerned in other countries, it seems unwise to apply this term, because of its very nature, beyond the German-speaking lands, except in cases of direct imitation – as with Gaetano Pugnani’s orchestral suite or Melodram (c1790) based on Goethe’s 1774 novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Even within German-speaking lands the appeal of ‘Sturm und Drang’ was limited; Johann Pezzl (Skizze von Wien, 1786–90) noted that this ‘paroxysm … was never able to take root in Vienna, or in any large city where one possessed knowledge of the world and its manners [Weltkennt-nis und Lebensart]’. C.P.E. Bach has been held up as an archetypal representative in music of the ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement. While such a case can be made, his age and his reluctance to participate directly in musical theatre make it more appropriate to view him as a particularly powerful creator within the preceding and related aesthetic sphere of Empfindsamkeit.
See also Classical; Empfindsamkeit; Enlightenment; Galant and Rococo.
E. Bücken: Die Musik Des Rokokos und der Klassik (Potsdam, 1927)
R. Pascal: The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester, 1953)
R. Mortier: Diderot en Allemagne (Paris, 1954)
H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Das Ausdrucksprinzip im musikalischen Sturm und Drang’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, xxix (1955), 323–49
H.C.R. Landon: ‘La crise romantique dans la musique autrichienne vers 1770: quelques précurseurs inconnus de la Symphonie en sol mineur (KV 183) de Mozart’, Les influences étrangères dans l’œuvre de Mozart: CNRS Paris 1956, 27–47
L. Hoffmann-Erbrecht: ‘Sturm und Drang in der deutschen Klaviermusik von 1753–1763’, Mf, x (1957), 466–79
J. and B. Massin: ‘Mozart et le “Sturm und Drang” (à propos des œuvres de l’hiver 1772–1773)’, Essais sur la musique, xiii (1959), 29–47
H. Majewski: ‘L.S. Mercier: a Pre-Romantic View of Paris’, Studies in Romanticism, v (1965), 16–29
G. Kaiser: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Sturm und Drang (Gütersloh, 1966; rev. 3/1979 as Aufklärung, Empfindsamkeit, Sturm und Drang)
W. Heckscher: ‘Sturm und Drang: Conjectures on the Origins of a Phrase’, Simiolus, i (1966–7), 94–105
B.S. Brook: ‘Sturm und Drang and the Romantic Period in Music’, Studies in Romanticism, ix (1970), 269–84
D. Heartz: ‘Sturm und Drang im Musikdrama’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 432–5
P.F. Marks: ‘The Rhetorical Element in Musical Sturm und Drang: Christian Gottfried Krause’s “Von der musikalischen Poesie”’, IRASM, ii (1971), 49–64
E. Loewenthal, ed.: Sturm und Drang: kritische Schriften (Heidelberg, 1972)
K. Clark: The Romantic Rebellion (London, 1973) [chaps. on Piranesi, Fuseli and Blake]
G. Gruber: ‘Glucks Tanzdramen und ihre musikalische Dramatik’, ÖMz, xxix (1974), 17–24
M. Mann: Sturm und Drang Drama: Studien und Vorstudien zu Schillers ‘Räubern’ (Berne, 1974)
H.C.R. Landon: ‘Crisis Years: Sturm und Drang and the Austrian Musical Crisis’, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, ii Haydn at Eszterháza, 1766–1790 (Bloomington, IN, and London, 1978), 266–393
A. McCredie: ‘Handlungsballet, Melodrama und die musikdramatischen Musikformen des Sturm und Drangs und des Weimarschen Klassizismus’, MZ, xv (1979), 42–62
R.L. Todd: ‘Joseph Haydn and the Sturm und Drang: a Revaluation’, MR, xl (1980), 172–96
G. Le Coat: ‘L'expression musicale pour Diderot: instinct ou eloquence?’, Diderot: Les beaux-arts et la musique (Aix-en-Provence, 1986), 175–82
S. Mauser: ‘Mozarts melodramatischer Ehrgeiz: zu einer vernachlässigten Gattung des Sturm und Drang’, NZM, Jg.147, no.12 (1986), 17–23
E. Sisman: ‘Haydn's Theatre Symphonies’, JAMS, xliv (1990), 292–352
U. Kuster: Das Melodrama: zum aesthetikgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang von Dichtung und Musik im 18. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Duisburg, 1993)
R. Kohler: ‘Johann Gottfried Herder und die Überwindung der musikalischen Nachahmungsästhetik’, AMw, lii (1995), 205–19
DANIEL HEARTZ/BRUCE ALAN BROWN