Romanticism

I

Introduction

Romanticism, artistic movement in music that, as in literature and painting, emerged in the latter part of the 18th century. Romanticism was dominant in Western music from the 1820s until the early part of the 20th century. It followed the classical period in music, which emphasized balance, symmetry, and unity. Classicism had flourished during a time known as the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. Romantic composers, writers, and painters reacted against Enlightenment values and classicism. The romantics favored the imagination and emotion over reason and logic, and they promoted the individual and the subjective approach as opposed to Enlightenment’s endorsement of the universal and the objective. The romantic artists lived in turbulent times that included the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Napoleonic Wars. They sought solace in nature, although they also recognized and appreciated the violent side of nature.

II

Sources of Inspiration

The most significant event for composers, as for all artists of the romantic era, was the French Revolution. The effects of that revolution could be seen immediately in opera. Whereas the plots of earlier French operas had generally been drawn from classical antiquity and reflected an ordered hierarchy of gods, rulers, and peoples, the subjects of operas now began to come from the exciting and dangerous present. One popular new genre, the rescue opera, typically dealt with the imprisonment of the heroine by a tyrant and her rescue by her lover. No longer were wrongs righted by the last-minute appearance of a deus ex machina, a god who descends to bring about a resolution. The reliance on human efforts to resolve the plot marked a significant change. Lodoïska (1791) by Luigi Cherubini, an Italian composer who settled in Paris, is an early example of a rescue opera. In the opera a band of Tatars, based on Jean Jacques Rousseau's notion of “noble savages,” moralize on justice and freedom, and help rescue the imprisoned Lodoïska.

The composer most powerfully influenced by the French Revolution’s ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity was Ludwig van Beethoven, the greatest composer of the age. Beethoven’s Fidelio (1st version, 1805) is the noblest of all rescue operas; Leonore disguises herself as a young man, takes the name Fidelio, and goes to work for the chief jailer so she can find her wrongfully imprisoned husband and save him from execution. In his symphonies Beethoven also responded to the new romantic emphasis on the individual who transcends all difficulties. The romantic era was the age of the hero, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (1804) was titled the Eroica (“Heroic”) Symphony and originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte. (After Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor of France, Beethoven viewed him as a tyrant and tore up the dedication.)

In the Eroica Symphony, Beethoven offered a new direction for the standard classical symphony of the 18th century: The first movement largely ignores the classical sonata form, the second movement substitutes a funeral march for the traditional slow movement, a heroic energy infuses the dynamic third-movement scherzo, and the fourth-movement finale is a set of variations based on a theme Beethoven associated with Prometheus, the defiant god who brought fire to humankind. In Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (1808) the four-note opening theme releases enough energy to animate the entire work. His Symphony No. 9 (Choral, 1824) bursts out of symphonic form when a singer stands up and calls out “Friends, not these sounds!” inviting the chorus to join in singing the “Ode to Joy,” with words by Friedrich von Schiller.

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The increased emphasis on nature that characterized romanticism found vivid expression in romantic music from the start. Many rescue operas inserted a crucial role in the plot for a storm, avalanche, fire, shipwreck, volcanic eruption, or other demonstration of the irrational forces of nature wreaking havoc on human order. One of the most potent romantic myths was that of Undine (the Slavonic Rusalka), a water spirit who attempts marriage to a human but is reclaimed by her own element. This image demonstrated an attempt to heal the rift between nature and reason that the romantics felt had occurred during the Enlightenment. It found early expression in the opera Undine (1816) by E. T. A. Hoffmann, a master of tales of the irrational and an archetypal romantic in combining the talents of writer, composer, and artist. The power of the irrational also found expression in the opera Der Freischütz (1821) by Carl Maria von Weber. In this opera the natural life of a woodland community is disrupted by Satanic practices in the depths of the sinister Wolf’s Glen.

Beethoven expressed delight in nature through such sounds as birdsong, a tumbling brook, and thunder in his Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral, 1808). Feelings about nature come to the fore in German song, or Lied. The first great lieder writer was Franz Schubert. His 600 songs typically make use of the piano to provide descriptive imagery, as with the water sounds that run all through his song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin (The Maid of the Mill, 1823) about the unhappy love of a young man for the miller’s daughter. Schubert does more than imitate the sound of an object, however: The brook also reflects the boy’s changing moods and fortunes. In other Schubert songs an object can play an even stronger psychological role. In his setting of Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel, 1814), a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a recurrent cyclical piano figure represents not only a spinning wheel but a betrayed young woman’s obsessive thoughts of her lost love. Schubert’s talent was such that he could make entrancing songs out of minor poems—for example, his song-cycle Winterreise based on the poems of Wilhelm Müller—as well as great works.

Schubert’s successor as a master of the German Lied was composer and critic Robert Schumann, who chose the verse he set to music more carefully. Schumann’s songs were emotional revelations of amazing power and effect. Schumann also explored further the recesses of the romantic imagination—twilight and darkness, the pain of separation from the beloved or the homeland, terror in Germany’s dense primeval forests—and he helped make the realm of the mysterious into true romantic territory.

As part of the age of the hero, the performer, too, became heroic by mastering fearful difficulties of technique and by expressing emotions that many felt but no others could articulate so skillfully. Artistic individuality became prized in an age when the old social and political hierarchy had been discarded and the individual was thrown onto his or her own resources. Carl Maria von Weber, talented like his friend Hoffmann as a writer as well as a composer, was also a brilliant pianist and conductor, and in his piano music he made virtuosity the actual musical subject. The extreme technical difficulties of Nicolò Paganini’s violin music provided their own fascination, heightened by the spell of his gaunt physique. Paganini’s example was consciously followed by Franz Liszt, who became the greatest romantic pianist of all. In the age of the virtuoso, Liszt made unashamed use of his handsome and sexually charged presence to create what poet Heinrich Heine named Lisztomania. Frédéric Chopin explored the poetry to be found in piano technique in his études and also developed the idea of night-pieces (nocturnes), poeticized dances (waltzes, polonaises, and mazurkas), and atmospheric ballades and preludes for the piano.

III

Nationalism

The romantic era was an age of heightened national identity as well as of heightened personal identity. Pianist composers such as Liszt and Chopin turned Hungarian and Polish national dances to virtuoso concert ends. But it was opera that provided the most complete artistic expression of a nation’s individuality through its use of the national language and the local folk music as well as of the nation’s history, myth, and legend. Technique and example spread from Italy, the country where opera had been born, to all parts of Europe, first to be learned and then to be rejected in favor of national methods.

In Germany, Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) was hailed as the first major German romantic opera. Its European success not only fostered a succession of German operas that led to Wagner but also gave encouragement to composers in other countries. Russian opera found maturity with two operas by Mikhail Glinka: the historical A Life for the Tsar (1836) and the fairy legend Russlan and Ludmilla (1842). These operas set an example for Russian composers for the remainder of the century in their use of Russian folk music and the cadences of Russian speech. Hungary found a comparable operatic voice with Ferenc Erkel, who composed the first Hungarian opera, Hunyadi László (1844) about a Hungarian warrior, and also wrote the Hungarian national anthem. Poland acquired its national opera with Halka (1847) by Stanisław Moniuszko. In Czech lands the first major opera composer was Bedřich Smetana, with his village comedy The Bartered Bride (1866).

Romantic opera took different forms in the two countries that already possessed a vigorous operatic tradition: Italy and France. In Italy Gioacchino Rossini was able to turn the Italian gift for singing to sentimental effect, both witty and tender, in a series of operas that made him famous all over Europe. His skillful use of operatic devices, such as the opening scene-setting chorus, and his standardized form and placement for arias and duets became known as the Code Rossini, which later Italian romantic composers followed. Vincenzo Bellini built upon Rossini’s example with long, languorous melodies that influenced, among others, Chopin. Gaetano Donizetti made original use of orchestration in his operas and responded, more than other Italians, to romanticism in northern Europe; Donizetti’s most popular work, Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), for example, is based on the Bride of Lammermoor, a novel by influential Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott.

Opera, the Italian national art form, soon became identified with the Italian struggle for political independence during the 1800s. The Risorgimento—the movement to unify Italy into a single, independent nation—discovered a spokesperson in composer Giuseppe Verdi. The public seized upon his early works as revolutionary manifestos. For example, Nabucco (1842), which dealt with the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, was regarded as a symbol of the struggle against foreign rule. Verdi’s gift for musical characterization is especially evident in his two late masterpieces: the tragic opera Otello (1887) and the comic opera Falstaff (1893).

After Napoleon’s fall and the restoration of the French monarchy, France developed Grand Opera, a form suited to a newly prosperous bourgeois audience. During the 1820s and 1830s the Paris Opéra became the most important opera house in Europe. Composers of Grand Opera include Daniel Auber (La Muette de Portici, 1828), Jacques Halévy (La Juive, 1835), and especially Giacomo Meyerbeer (Les Huguenots, 1836). The works had in common a romantic dependence on sumptuous staging with realistic sets and ingenious lighting effects (and often a final catastrophe), a cast of many soloists, and a large chorus and orchestra. The plots were also consciously romantic, taking as their subjects the Age of Chivalry, a struggle for independence, a distant land, or doomed passion set against the background of a dynastic struggle.

Common to all these operatic traditions was an increased role for the orchestra. With the emergence of romanticism, the tone color of different musical instruments became a more significant part of musical expression, just as the emphasis on individual sensation and expression increased. Composers of the French Revolutionary era, such as Étienne-Nicolas Méhul, made striking use of orchestral coloring to suit operas of different kinds and with different settings. In writing Der Freischütz, Weber devised an orchestration plot to reflect the work’s descent from sunniness into dark horror and back again. In Weber’s concert works, as well, the orchestration went beyond the expression of the thematic invention to become the invention itself. Weber also used dissonant chords as an effect in their own right rather than as part of a chord progression.

IV

The Influence of Beethoven

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had implications that the greatest composers of the next generation could not ignore. Some tried to accommodate romantic impressions to symphonic form. Felix Mendelssohn, for example, drew upon the romantic delight in travel in his Italian Symphony (1833) and his Scottish Symphony (1843). Robert Schumann wrote symphonies that responded to delight in spring—the Symphony No. 1 (Spring, 1843)—and in the Rhine River—the Symphony No. 3 (Rhenish, 1850). Although the symphonies of Mendelssohn and Schumann extend symphonic form, they do not break it. Other composers felt that after Beethoven’s Ninth, the romantic composer must turn in a completely new direction for symphonic music.

For Hector Berlioz the answer to Beethoven lay in dramatization and in shaping his symphonies with ideas from outside music. His Symphonie Fantastique (1830) dramatizes the composer’s infatuation with a Shakespearean actress, using a theme that recurs incessantly, a so-called idée fixe (obsessive idea) that represents the beloved. The symphony also relies for its effects on music that is alternately erotic, pastoral, and diabolical (including a Witches’ Sabbath). Berlioz produced another novel form for Harold in Italy (1834), a symphony inspired by Lord Byron’s autobiographical poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818). A solo viola depicts Lord Byron, another hero of the romantic era, as he wanders through a landscape and events without being able to take musical part in them. The instrument stands for the Byronic romantic outsider, free from classical constraints but at the same time isolated and prey to the romantic melancholy that the viola’s tone embodies. For the young French romantics, William Shakespeare stood for freedom from the constraints of the French classical drama. For his Roméo et Juliette (1839), based on Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, Berlioz employed a very loose symphonic structure. From Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, he borrowed the idea of including voices to articulate the essence of the drama, although the actual love scene is confined to the orchestra alone.

For Franz Liszt, Beethoven’s genius consisted in having taken thematic development to a point of no return. Liszt created one-movement structures that developed and transformed a musical theme identified with an idea or central set of ideas. He called these single-movement orchestral works tone poems, or symphonic poems, and intended them to express a work of art or literature. His interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the tone poem Hamlet (1858) is an example. Liszt achieves unity through the repetition of an identifying note or theme throughout the composition. In Liszt’s Faust Symphony (1857), which he called “three character studies after Goethe,” each of the three movements is associated with a character from the drama: Faust, Gretchen, and the devil Mephistopheles. Each character has a theme, and the relationship of the themes loosely follows the Faust story. The theme for Mephistopheles loosely parodies Faust’s theme.

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