The Shipwreck, 1772, by Claude Joseph Vernet. Image: Wikimedia Commons
The Shipwreck, 1772, by Claude Joseph Vernet. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Sturm und Drang

With an ambitious new musical survey underway, Clive Paget looks at the 18th-century movement that made bold men quake with fear and women fall into a faint.

“Sturm und Drang”. Is there any more apposite phrase to conjure images of brooding men on windswept peaks, their faces set against the storm? Roll it around in your mouth and the very words seem to drip Germanic turmoil and gloom. If the term survives at all today it is thanks to a handful of Haydn’s symphonies to which it has remained doggedly attached. Once, however, albeit for a...