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.

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.