ABSTRACT
We are accustomed to dividing the music of eighteenth-century Europe into two convenient categories, the late Baroque and the early Classical, with the division falling neatly at the middle of the century, coinciding with the death of J.S.Bach. Yet the death of an obscure German cantor was an event of very little consequence as far as most European musicians were concerned. Even for Bach’s two eldest sons, who in 1750 were already among the leading musicians in Europe, the stylistic transition that we place at the middle of the eighteenth century was by then an accomplished fact; as for us, we might better view it as an ongoing process that had been underway for at least several decades and would continue for several more.
