Vibrato in the Classical Orchestra

Thank you for your interest in Part Three of this ongoing series of essays on orchestral vibrato. This latest installment covers the Classical period (and the 18th century more generally), and unlike the previous two parts I wanted to include as many score excerpts as possible, as opposed to simply mentioning them by reference, or listing them in an appendix. I think it's very important that you have the opportunity to see for yourself what composers actually wrote, because the essence of the argument lies in the notion that the scores really do give us just about all of the information we need to come to the reasonable conclusion that pitch vibrato was standard practice in orchestral music of the period.

The structure of the essay consists of a general discussion of the vibrato question as it concerns 18th century music, followed by four detailed case studies centering around Zelenka, Gluck, Boccherini, and Haydn, with additional works by many of their colleagues also considered as necessary. Unfortunately this makes the file size very large, and the complete text is accordingly quite long (about 328 pages). Therefore, to make downloading and reading more manageable, I have broken it up into nine sections that you can download at your convenience by clicking on the following links:

Part 1: Introduction--Vibrato Basics--The Current Orthodoxy Debunked
Part 2: Zelenka
Part 3: Gluck (1)
Part 4: Gluck (2)
Part 5: Boccherini and the Mannheim School
Part 6: Haydn (1)
Part 7: Haydn (2)
Part 8: Haydn (3)
Part 9: General Conclusion

If you have any problems accessing these files, or want the entire essay in one piece, just drop me an email (dhurwitz@classicstoday.com) and I will be happy to send you a link to the complete work.