Sturm und Drang

Sturm und Drang  (Storm and Stress)  (Germany: Late 1760s - early 1780s)

      Sturm und Drang was a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements. It lasted about 15 years.

      Writers emphasized subjective emotion, often violent and for ignoble purposes (rejection, jealousy, revenge, power).  The philosopher Johann Georg Hamann is considered to be the ideologue of Sturm und Drang.

      Writers Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were participants in the movement, but left to found Weimar Classicism.  Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which he penned at 24, was about a young man who commits suicide because he cannot have the woman he loved.  The book inspired copycat suicides and was banned in three countries.  Goethe regretted writing it and moderated his romanticism the rest of his life.

     The use of minor keys were much rarer in the neoclassical era than the Baroque era that preceded it or the Romantic era that followed it.(roughly 20% of Beethoven's music is in minor keys while less than 10% of Mozart's is).  Minor keys have a "darker" sound than major keys, and invoke a range of feelings from sadness and solemness to foreboding and despair.

      C.P.E. Bach's piano fantasias are full of dramatic silences, harmonic surprises, and perpetually varied figuration.  Slight pauses in phrasing create an intimacy not unlike the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata which is titled Sonata quasi una fantasia ("sonata in the manner of a fantasy") which is a direct precursor of Chopin's "fantasy-impromptu."  

     In music, Sturm und Drang featured minor key compositions, angular themes with large leaps and unpredictable melodic contours.  Tempos and dynamics change rapidly and unpredictably in order to reflect strong changes of emotion.  Pulsing rhythms and syncopation, dynamic changes and accents.  Hayden's Symphony No. 45 in F# minor ("Farewell Symphony") (1772) (listen) is another example of the genre. 

      Mozart's Symphony No. 25 in G minor  (1773), only 1 of 2 symphonies (out of 41) he wrote in a minor key, is thought by some to be related to the movement (listen).  Mozart also used minor keys to dramatic effect in his unfinished Requiem mass in D minor (1791).