Cassation (music)

Cassation is a minor musical genre related to the serenade and divertimento. In the mid-to-late 18th century, cassations commonly comprised loosely assembled sets of short movements intended for outdoor performance by orchestral or chamber ensembles. The genre was popular in southern German-speaking lands. Other synonymous titles used by German-speaking composers and cataloguers included Cassatio, Cassatione and Kassation. An equivalent Italian term was Cassazione. The genre is occasionally alluded to in the titles of some twentieth-century compositions.

Works titled cassation were especially common in southern Germany, Austria and Bohemia in the mid-to-later part of the eighteenth century. Some early works by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart bear the title cassation; other composers of the classical and pre-classical era who produced cassations include Franz Joseph Aumann, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Michael Haydn, Leopold Hofmann, Antonio Rosetti, Joseph Schmitt, Johannes Sperger and Johann Baptist Wanhal.Leopold Mozart's Toy symphony was a reduction of his earlier Cassation in G. The Italianized term, cassazione, appears to have been used by Antonio Salieri.

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