Music in the Galant Style

by Robert Gjerdingen

Many performers can recite a lineage that extends from their own principal teacher back through a chain of teachers to the time of Beethoven or beyond. The great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau (1903–1991), for example, was a proud student of Martin Krause (1853–1918), who was a student of Franz Liszt (1811–1886), who was a student of Carl Czerny (1791–1857), who was a student of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1826), who was a student of Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), who was a student of Nicola Porpora (1686–1768), who was a student of Gaetano Greco (ca. 1657–1728). Greco taught the first generation of galant composers in Naples, so one might leap to the conclusion that Arrau’s performances of eighteenth-century music benefited from this apparently unbroken connection to the roots of the galant musical past. One might even assume that Arrau played Haydn “as it really was.”54