Storm and Stress

Emotional Turbulence in the Early Symphony

A new emotional language burst onto the European musical scene in the second half of the eighteenth century. Far from the courtly balance of the late Baroque and the decorum of the Galant style, music began to explore realms of tension, unrest, and extreme anxiety. This aesthetic shift found its most acute expression in the German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang, whose echoes resounded immediately in German instrumental music.

Storm and Stress explores this exalted and contradictory sensibility. Through symphonies by Franz Ignaz Beck and Joseph Haydn, and a cello concerto by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the program portrays the overflowing emotion of a brief yet intense historical moment. These are works in which silences are as eloquent as their searing dissonances, where formal structure yields to individual expression, and the subject emerges as the true protagonist of the musical narrative.

Presented at Teatro Otraparte and the Patio Teatro of Claustro Comfama as part of our 2025 season, this program offered an opportunity to listen to the liminal states of the Enlightenment spirit — its struggle with convention, its longing for expressive freedom, and its early premonition of Romanticism.