Bach Ascending/Beethoven Launched, 1710–1800

Encounter I

Bach Ascending/Beethoven Launched, 1710–1800

Through such luminaries as Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach, the early eighteenth century saw the creation of music of unprecedented splendor and complexity. By the century’s end, a new vanguard of composers—Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—had reinvented music again, fashioning a language at once elegant and powerfully expressive. Ara Guzelimian, Provost and Dean of the Juilliard School, leads this summer’s first Encounter, focusing on two decades—1710–1720 and 1790–1800—that catalyzed the innovations that, in short order, would forever define the course of Western classical music.