Empfindsamkeit (music)

Empfindsamkeit (English: sentimental style) or Empfindsamer Stil is a style of musical composition and poetry developed in 18th-century Germany, intended to express "true and natural" feelings, and featuring sudden contrasts of mood. It was developed as a contrast to the Baroque Affektenlehre (doctrine of the affections), in which a composition (or movement) would have the same affect (e.g., emotion or musical mood) throughout.

Etymology[edit]

The German noun "Empfindsamkeit" is usually translated as "sensibility" (in the sense used by Jane Austen in her novel Sense and Sensibility), while the adjective empfindsam is sometimes rendered as "sentimental" or "ultrasensitive".^[1] "Empfindsamkeit" is also sometimes translated, and may even be derived from the English word sentimentality, since it is related to the then-contemporary English literature sentimentality literary movement.^[2]

Carl Friedrich Abel

the second eldest son of J. S. Bach

C. P. E. Bach

the eldest son of J. S. Bach

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

Georg Benda

Anton Fils

Carl Heinrich Graun

Gottfried August Homilius

Nicola Porpora

Giovanni Alberto Ristori

Giuseppe Tartini

Johann Adolph Hasse

Johann Gottlieb Janitsch

Johann Joachim Quantz

Johann Friedrich Reichardt

Christoph Schaffrath

Carlos Seixas

Leonardo Leo

. 1969. Harvard Dictionary of Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-37501-7.

Apel, Willi

. 1941. Music in Western Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 585ff. Reprinted 1997, ISBN 978-0-393-04074-6.

Lang, Paul Henry

Newman, William S. 1963. The Sonata in the Classic Era. A History of the Sonata Idea 2. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.