empfindsamer Stil

The sensitive style , empfindsam style, or tender style is a style of musical composition and poetry developed in 18th-century Germany, intended to express "true and natural" feelings, and featuring sudden contrasts of mood. The German noun Empfindsamkeit is usually translated as sensibility (in the sense used by Jane Austen), while the adjective empfindsame is sometimes rendered as sentimental or ultrasensitive . Empfindsamkeit is also sometimes translated, and may even be derived from the English word sentimentality, since it is related to the contemporary English sentimentality literary movement . It was developed as a contrast to the Baroque Affektenlehre (lit. "The Doctrine of Affections"), in which a composition (or movement) would have the same affect, or emotion, throughout.