The 9 best Classical Period tracks of all time
Classical Period
Vienna, roughly 1750 to 1820: the continuo dropped, the orchestra standardised, and music organised around a form built on two contrasting keys arguing and resolving. Balance treated as the highest value, and then Beethoven.
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Ludwig van Beethoven / Symphony No. 5 in C minor
Four notes, and a forty-minute argument about what can be built from them. The most famous opening in music is also the most thoroughly worked-out, which is not a coincidence.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart / Symphony No. 40 in G minor
Written in the space of a few weeks alongside two other symphonies, for no commission anyone can identify. Restless, minor-key and entirely without the charm Mozart is usually accused of.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart / The Marriage of Figaro
An opera about servants outwitting their master, staged three years before the Bastille fell. The Act II finale runs twenty minutes and never once loses the thread.
Ludwig van Beethoven / Symphony No. 3 in E-flat "Eroica"
Twice the length of any symphony before it, and the dedication to Napoleon scratched out so hard it tore the page. The single clearest break between one era and the next.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart / Requiem in D minor
Unfinished at his death and completed by a pupil, so nobody is entirely sure where Mozart stops. The Lacrimosa breaks off after eight bars, which is unbearable and perfect.
Ludwig van Beethoven / Piano Sonata No. 14 "Moonlight"
A first movement marked to be played with the dampers raised throughout, so the harmonies smear into one another. Nobody called it Moonlight until after he was dead.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart / Clarinet Concerto in A
Written in his final months for a friend, for an instrument that barely existed in its modern form. The slow movement is the least troubled music anyone has written.
Joseph Haydn / String Quartet Op. 76 No. 3 "Emperor"
Haydn effectively invented the string quartet and then, at sixty-five, wrote the best ones. The slow movement's hymn tune went on to become two national anthems.
Joseph Haydn / Symphony No. 94 "Surprise"
A quiet tune, then a fortissimo chord placed purely to startle a London audience. Proof that the period's reputation for politeness was mostly the nineteenth century's idea.