18th century
Showing 963 works across all media from the 18th century
Goldberg Variations
The pianist Glenn Gould plays it fast and dry and hums audibly throughout, which the engineers could never get him to stop doing.
St Matthew Passion
Two choirs and two orchestras face each other across the church and answer one another, while a boys' choir cuts through both from above.
Requiem
An anonymous stranger commissioned it and Mozart died before finishing. A pupil completed the rest, and arguments about which bars are his continue.
Mass in B minor
Bach assembled it late in life partly from music he had written decades earlier, and never heard the whole thing performed in his lifetime.
Don Giovanni
Mozart is said to have written the overture the night before the Prague premiere, and the orchestra sight-read it at the first performance.
Messiah
Handel wrote it for a Dublin charity concert, and the hall asked women to come without hoops in their skirts so more people could fit.
The Death of Marat
David was Marat's friend and political ally, and he laid the murdered man out in his bath with the gravity of a religious lamentation.
Red and White Plum Blossoms
A stylized river runs down the gold between two plum trees, one young and white, the other old and red, leaning toward each other.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never is, but always to be blessed.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gibbon follows Rome from its imperial peak to the fall of Constantinople thirteen centuries later, in the finest prose English history possesses. His contempt for Christianity still makes readers laugh.
Critique of Pure Reason
Western thought divides at this book. Kant argues that space, time, and cause belong to the mind doing the looking rather than to the world, and marks the boundary reason cannot cross.
The Oath of the Horatii
Three brothers salute the swords their father holds up while the women of the house collapse at the right, four years before the Revolution.