Compilation The age of Enlightenment Multiple performers

or an exploration of the age of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Jefferson and Kant through the musical genius of their contemporaries: Bach, Handel, Rameau, Pergolesi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and many others.

The Age of Enlightenment marked a far-reaching cultural revolution, which also profoundly affected music. Equal temperament was adopted, a new harmonic language founded on tonality took shape, melody gained in autonomy, and there were significant transformations in listening practices (the invention of the modern concert hall, the establishment of the bourgeois 'salon', broader access to musical instruction, etc.). It can easily be understood that our conception of music, and the way we practise or consume it, still remain in a sense contemporary with the agenda set by the eighteenth century; and that is why harmonia mundi has thought it worthwhile today to look back on that flourishing era, to present a survey of it which, without claiming to be exhaustive (an impossible task), makes it possible to grasp the main outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.