The Rising Status of the Composer.

The experiments with new dramatically expressive kinds of music that the Galant and Sensitive styles fostered, and which were also found in the Sturm und Drang's movement's influence upon music, soon had an important effect on the operatic world of the eighteenth century. Opera was the place in which drama and the emotions had long found one of their most profound platforms for expression, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a distinguished lineage of brilliant composers, including Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and George Frideric Handel, had developed the form in ways that heightened music's ability to give dramatic expression to the subtlest shades of human emotion. In the century after 1650, though, few operas were performed in precisely the ways their composers had originally envisioned them. Opera was a business that, by and large, served...