Sabby Sagall with a bust of Beethoven

MUSIC reflects the society in which it is produced – and we can trace social, political and economic trends by considering the composer’s responses to the times they lived in.

For historian and musicologist Sabby Sagall, listening to the great classical composers over a 400-year span offers more than a journey through genius.

It is a musical reflection of the human condition, an artistic response to changing worlds.
Sabby’s new book, Music and Capitalism, charts four classical music movements and shines a light on conditions that created new forms of expression.

“Every human society in history has produced a characteristic style of music,” he says. “You cannot understand styles without looking at the social context. As Trotsky said: ‘Art is one of the ways in which man finds his bearings in the world’.”

The book begins in the late-Baroque period ­– coinciding with the rise of bourgeois capitalism – with composers such as Handel, Bach and Vivaldi.

The late-Baroque expressed the aspirations of that emerging class. It ended with Handel’s death in 1759, to be replaced by a classical style that sprung from Vienna and was the age of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

From there, Romanticism emerged as a lament over the failure of the promises of the French Revolution, while the last movement, Modernism, expressed the crisis of capitalist society in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Sabby points out the late-Baroque work was revolutionary.

For centuries, the Catholic Church had dictated how hymns could be written and sung. Rome used music to guide services that paid respect to God and the body politic that managed an individual’s religious relationship.

The use of harmony was a direct challenge to Papal authority. Music in Medieval times was designed to make the listener know their place and was characterised by a style of orderly arranged notes and chords with no emotional variations.

“It emphasised a society dominated by timeless, God-given institutions – the church, monarchy and feudal hierarchy. Every voice had its allotted place.

“For hundreds of years music had barely changed. But at the start of the late 17th and early 18th century there was the introduction of strong melodic lines as a direct rejection of authority.

“Music changed as society changed. There was the growth of a mercantile class, there were voyages of discovery. European nations sought to conquer the world. All this was reflected in music.”

The period of the late 1700s and early 1800s was rife with upheaval as revolution ripped through France and the rise of Napoleon threatened absolute monarchies.

They provided the soundtrack to a revolution.

“Mozart was a contradiction,” adds Sabby. “He was dependent on Viennese aristocracy for his livelihood but he had a rebellious nature.”

His operas had noblemen whose servants got the better of them. He cites Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute as examples.

“In The Marriage of Figaro, Figaro defies his master Count Almaviva’s previously undisputed feudal right to the first night with his servant bride. The Count spends much of the story chasing the maid. He is an object of ridicule. Don Giovanni is the same – he tries to seduce his servants throughout the opera but is a singularly unsuccessful rake.”

The Magic Flute reveals Mozart’s interest in the Freemasons – then a force for progressive thought – while the final scene makes Mozart’s views clear – “the sun that floods the stage at the end symbolises the truth and light of the Enlightenment, the power of reason, progress, constitutional government, to liberate society from the darkness of the old order,” adds Sabby.

Beethoven, born in 1770, lived through the upheaval of the French Revolution and its fall out.

“He was a great admirer of the revolution and of human solidarity,” says Sabby.

“This was demonstrated in his Ode To Joy, which represented a cultural movement: there had not been a symphony before that had a choral element.”

Beethoven held great hopes for Napoleon, believing him to be a democratic leader.

“He had dedicated work to him – but would change his mind when Napoleon was asked to take on the title Emperor in 1804,” says Sabby.

“Beethoven scratched out the dedication, making a hole in the paper, and declaring: ‘Now he too will trample on the rights of man!’,” says Sabby.

The Industrial Revolution and the creation of a poor urban working class and a middle class formed in trade and professions ushered in the period of Romantic music.

“Coupled with this was a rise in nationalism and the growing misery of the masses in emerging industrial societies,” says Sabby.

“The Romantic movement in music, literature and art was a reaction against the capitalist machine. It rejected the new society with its materialistic ideals and values.”

As with the later Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris, destruction caused by industrial capitalism prompted a wistful imagining of a more simple and equal time.

“Romanticism looks back to a world of cohesion and integration, a time when people looked after each other,” says Sabby. “It was a backward vision found across the arts.”

Economic change created new opportunities for composers.

“The rise of the Romantic movement coincided with the rise of a new middle-class audience. As they were enriched, they developed an interest in the arts.

“New audiences helped composers earn a living. Concerts with the middle classes in mind were being commissioned.”

The final period Sabby studies is Modernism, dating from the late-Victorian period.

“Modernism was prompted by crisis capitalism, starting with depression in the 1870s and tied up with imperial conquests,” he says.

“There was a decline in the confidence of capitalists and conflicts that would culminate in the First World War. A more discordant approach was a reflection of a world that gave us The Great War, Auschwitz, Hiroshima.”

The book is a culmination of a lifetime of music.

Sabby first sat down at a piano aged five, and 81 years later, describes himself as a “lover of music, and of all manner of styles,” he says.

He has written and lectured on musical movements as well as politics.

Music is such an inherent part of our humanity, he argues.

“Every society produces art – be it music, literature, painting,” he says. “Culture reflects the lives of the people who it was made by and for.”

• Music and Capitalism. By Sabby Sagall, Palgrave, £25