Romanticism and Music

In general the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to mean the period roughly from the 1820s until 1910. The contemporary application of "romantic" to music did not coincide with modern categories: in 1810 E.T.A. Hoffmann called Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven the three "Romantic Composers", and Ludwig Spohr used the term "good Romantic style" to apply to parts of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. By the early 20th century, the sense that there had been a decisive break with the musical past lead to the establishment of the 19th century as "The Romantic Era", and as such it is referred to in the standard encyclopedias of music.

However the 20th century general use of the term 'romanticism' amongst music writers and historians did not evolve in the same way as it did amongst literary and visual arts theorists, so that there now often exists a serious disjunction between the concept of romanticism in music and in the other arts. Whereas the latter may tend to consider romanticism in terms of the 'alienation' of the artist, and the value of art for art's sake, such concepts are only gradually creeping into musicology, where there is still considerable confusion between 'music of Romanticism' and the less definable, (perhaps somewhat redundant,) category of 'music of the Romantic Era'. The 'traditional' discussion of the music of Romanticism indeed includes elements , such as the growing use of folk music, which are more directly related to Nationalism and are only indirectly related to Romanticism.

Some aspects of Romanticism are indeed already present in eighteenth-century music. The style of Sturm und Drang, giving heightened contrasts and emotions, seems a precursor of the Gothic in literature, or the sanguinary elements of some of the operas of the period of the French Revolution. The libretti of Lorenzo da Ponte for Mozart, and the eloquent music the latter wrote for them, convey a new sense of individuality and freedom. In Beethoven, perhaps the first incarnation since the Renaissance of the artist as hero, the concept of the Romantic musician begins to reveal itself - the man who, after all, morally challenged the Emperor Napoleon himself by striking him out from the dedication of the Eroica Symphony. In Beethoven's Fidelio he creates the apotheosis of the 'rescue operas' which were another feature of French musical culture during the revolutionary period, in order to hymn the freedom which underlay the thinking of all radical artists in the years of hope after the Congress of Vienna.

Beethoven's use of tonal architecture in such a way as to allow significant expansion of musical forms and structures was immediately recognised as bringing a new dimension to music. The later piano music and quartets, especially, showed the way to a completely unexplored musical universe. The writer, critic (and composer) Hoffmann was able to write of the supremacy of instrumental music over vocal music in expressiveness, a concept which would previously have been regarded as absurd. Hoffmann himself, as a practitioner both of music and literature, encouraged the notion of thinking of music as 'programmatic' or telling a story - an idea which new audiences found attractive, however irritating it was to some composers (e.g. Felix Mendelssohn). New developments in instrumental technology in the early nineteenth century - iron frames for pianos, wound metal strings for string instruments - enabled louder dynamics, more varied tone colours, and the potential for sensational virtuosity. Such developments swelled the length of pieces, introduced programatic titles, and created new genres such as the free standing overture or tone-poem, the piano fantasy, nocturne and rhapsody, and the virtuoso concerto, which became central to musical Romanticism.

In opera a new Romantic atmosphere combining supernatural terror and melodramatic plot in a folkloric context was most successfully achieved by Weber's Der Freischütz (1817, 1821). Enriched timbre and color marked the early orchestration of Hector Berlioz in France, and the grand operas of Meyerbeer. Amongst the radical fringe of what became mockingly characterised (adopting Wagner's own words) as 'artists of the future', Liszt and Wagner each embodied the Romantic cult of the free, inspired, charismatic, perhaps ruthlessly unconventional individual "artistic" personality.

It is the period of 1815 to 1848 which must be regarded as the true age of Romanticism in music - the age of the last compositions of Beethoven (d. 1827) and Schubert (d. 1828), of the works of Schumann (d. 1856) and Chopin (d.1849), of the early struggles of Berlioz and Richard Wagner, of the great virtuosi such as Paganini (d. 1840), and the young Liszt and Thalberg. Now that we are able to listen to the work of Mendelssohn (d. 1847) stripped of the Biedermeier reputation unfairly attached to it, he can also be placed in this more appropriate context. After this period, with Chopin and Paganini dead, Liszt retired from the concert platform at a minor German court, Wagner effectively in exile until he obtained royal patronage in Bavaria, and Berlioz still struggling with the bourgeois liberalism which all but smothered radical artistic endeavour in Europe, 'Romanticism in music' was surely past its prime - giving way, rather, to the period of musical romantics.

Music after the romantic heyday

Romantic nationalism, the argument that each "nation" had a unique individual quality that would be expressed in laws, customs, language, logic, and the arts, found an increasing following after 1848. Some of these ideals, linked to liberal politics, had been exemplified in Beethoven's antipathy to Napoleon's adoption of the title of Emperor, and can be traced through to the musical patriotism of Schumann, Verdi, and others. For these composers and their successors the nation itself became a new and worthy theme of music. Some composers sought to produce or take part in a "school" of music for their own nations, in parallel with the establishment of national literature. Many composers would take inspiration from the poetic nationalism present in their homeland. This is evident in the writings of Richard Wagner, especially after 1850, but can be clearly seen in Russia, where the 'Kuchka' (handful) of nationalist composers gathered around Balakirev, including Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. These composers were concerned about the enormous influence of German music in Russia, and they largely resented the founding of the conservatoires in Moscow and St. Petersburg by the brothers Nikolai and Anton Rubinstein, which they believed would be Trojan horses for German musical culture. (In fact however Russian 'romantic' music is today now closely identified with Anton's favourite pupil, Tchaikovsky).

This movement continued forward through into the 20th century with composers such as Jean Sibelius, although nationalism found a new musical expression in study of folk-song which was to be a key element in the development of Bartók, Ralph Vaughan Williams and others.

Labels like 'Late Romantic' and 'Post-Romantic' are sometimes used to link disparate composers of various nationalities, such as Jean Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Samuel Barber and Ralph Vaughan Williams, all of whom lived into the middle of the 20th century. See Romantic period in music. The conscious 'Modernisms' of the 20th century all found roots in reactions to Romanticism, increasingly seen as not realistic enough, even not brutal enough, for a new technological age. Yet Arnold Schoenberg's later spare style had its roots in rich freely chromatic atonal music evolving from his late Romantic style works, for example the giant polychromatic orchestration of Gurrelieder; and Stravinsky's originally controversial ballets for Diaghilev seem to us far less controversial today when we can understand their descent from Rimsky-Korsakov.

source: www.wikipedia.com