It is impossible to assign the so-called Classic Movement to a definite period; its roots strike deep and its limits are indefinite. It gathered momentum while the ideas from which it revolted were in their ascendency; its incipient stage was simultaneous with the reign of Italian opera. To define the meaning of classicism is as difficult as it is to fix the date of its beginning. By contrasting, as we usually do, the style of that period with a later one, usually called the Romantic, by comparing the ideal of classicism with the romantic ideal of subjective expression, we get a negative rather than a positive definition; for classicism is generally presumed to be formal, and antagonistic to that free ideal--a supposition which is not altogether exact, for it was just the reform of the classicists that opened the way to the free expressiveness which is characteristic of the ‘Romantics.’ On the other hand, the classic ideal of just proportions, of pure objective beauty, did find expression in the crystallized forms, the clarified technique, and the flexible articulation that superseded the unreasonably ornate, the polyphonically obscure, or the superficial, trite monotony of a great part of pre-classic music. I When Gluck’s _Alceste_ first appeared on the boards of the Imperial Opera in 1768, Mozart, the twelve-year-old prodigy, was the pet of Viennese salons; Haydn, with thirty symphonies to his credit, was laying the musical foundations of a German Versailles at Esterhàz; Emanuel Bach, practically at the end of his career, had just left Frederick the Great to become Telemann’s successor at Hamburg; and Stamitz, the great reformer of style and the real father of the modern orchestra, was already in his grave. On the other hand, there were still living men like Hasse and Porpora, whose recollection reached back to the very beginnings of the century. These men belonged to an earlier age, and so did in a sense all the men discussed in the last chapter, with a few obvious exceptions. But their influence extended far into the period which we are about to discuss; their careers are practically contemporaneous with the classic movement. The beginnings of that movement, the first impulses of the essentially new spirit we must seek in the work of men who were, like Pergolesi, the contemporaries of Bach and Handel.