Romantic Works Romantic Background

Review of periods of Music History so far...
1600-1900 Common Practice Period
1600-1750 Baroque (invention of opera and beginning of Common Practice Period to death of Bach)
1750-1825 Classical (death of Bach to Beethoven's second period)
1820-1900 Romantic (Beethoven's second period to twentieth century)

Romantic Terms:
Much of the philosophy, attitude, and music of Romantic artists can be directly traced back to Beethoven's career. From the suffering of isolation and loneliness to the new position that music now has as an ñartî, the music of the Romantics often has a sense of yearning for what we can not have - our youth, our homeland, the magical or supernatural, nature, etc.
Heiligenstadt Testament - Beethoven's suicide note to his brothers in which he addresses the topics of music as art, the composer as isolated, enduring suffering, longing for death as a release, reconciling himself for later generations with his illness and art, wearing multiple hats (a philosopher and musician), patience for creativity rather than deadlines.

Romantic period 1820-1900. Nineteenth century.
Themes of nostalgia
Freedom (Revolutions and upheavals)
Nature - Industrial Revolution forces masses to move to cities. Nature is idealized.
Fascination with the Macabre, Death
Exoticism - not here and now, foreign countries, distant times
Importance of the individual and freedom
Dramatic - emotion and expression
Breakdown of Artistic Barriers
Nationalism - pride of larger conquering nations vs. heritage of the smaller countries that were being conquered
Endless Search for New Forms of Expression - after Beethoven, what more is there to do in composing a [symphony, string quartet, sonata, etc.]

Program music is music overtly inspired by a nonmusical idea, which is usually indicated in the title and sometimes by introductory remarks or even running comments in the score. Because vocal music with a text (not just vocalizations) has a built-in program, musicians and commentators have long used the term program music primarily with specific reference to instrumental music, not vocal music.
Program music reached its greatest prominence during the Romantic era of the 19th century. The aesthetic of the time regarded instrumental music as the supremely Romantic mode of expression because, unlike the other arts, it was free to explore the entire range of emotions unencumbered by words or material objects.

Therefore, the composers of that period especially cultivated program music: instrumental music associated with poetic, descriptive, or narrative subject matter.

Often the "program" was merely a general feeling, as in most of the era's character pieces for piano, such as those in Robert Schumann's cycles Carnaval (Carnival, 1835) and Kinderscenen (Scenes from Childhood, 1838), including the famous "TrŠumerei" (Dreams).

A similar example in the orchestral realm was Ludwig van Beethoven's Pastoral (Sixth) Symphony (1808). The composer inscribed each of the five movements with a descriptive title, such as "Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arrival in the Country" for the first movement. But Beethoven warned in the score itself that the descriptions were merely "expressions of feelings rather than depiction."

Full-blown music depiction began in earnest with Hector Berlioz's programmatic Symphonie fantastique (Fantastic Symphony, 1830, revised 1831). The composer subtitled the work "Episode in the Life of an Artist" and provided all five movements with a detailed autobiographical program. The entire symphony is united by a recurring theme that Berlioz called the idŽe fixe (fixed idea), which, according to the program, represents the obsessive image of the hero's beloved.

Berlioz followed up with another program symphony, Harold en Italie (Harold in Italy, 1834). He inspired Franz Liszt to compose similar works, notably the Faust Symphony (1854), with a vocal finale added later (1857).

Program Music - Specifically, Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique.
Symphony is in five movements, and is autobiographical (an artist has poisoned himself with opium and has a dream in which his beloved becomes a "fixed idea" or an idee fixe - the melody that reappears in each movement of the symphony).
Berlioz is remarkable for his use of orchestration in achieving timbres that were never heard before in orchestral music.
The fifth movement contains the idee fixe in a warped tempo/rhythm/timbre that implies that she has been behind his misery and sentence to death.
The fifth movement also contains the "Dies Irae" or "Day of Wrath" from the Requiem Mass (Mass for the Dead) of the early church.



Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique. Leonard Bernstein Orchestre Nationale de France
Part 2- 13:40
Part 3- 20:30
Part 4- 37:30
Part 5- 42:30



Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique. DRSymfoniOrkestret - Rafael FrŸhbeck de Burgos.
© Danmarks Radio
The symphony is in 5 movements:
The score calls for a total of over 90 instrumentalists, the most of any symphony written to that time.
Specificially: 2 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (one doubling cor anglais), 2 clarinets (one doubling E? clarinet), 4 bassoons 4 horns, 2 cornets, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas/ophicleides 2 pairs of timpani, cymbals, suspended cymbal, tenor drum, bass drum, bells (sounding C and G) 4 harps, Strings (Berlioz specified at least 15 1st violins, 15 2nd violins, 10 violas, 11 celli and 9 basses on the score) Source:Wikipedia)
The movements:
Rveries -- Passions (Daydreams -- Passions)
Un bal (A ball)
Scne aux champs (Scene in the Country)
Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold)
Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (Dream of a Witches' Sabbath)




Miniatures:
Piano character piece - small-scale work (short, only involves one player) for piano solo featuring one musical idea. Ideas are not usually developed.
Chopin is the representative composer and his work often features "Tempo Rubato" or robbed time. This is a fluctuation of the beat - sometimes faster, sometimes slower - done for expressive purposes.
Lied - art song. German. Small scale work (short, involves vocalist and piano accompanist). Role of piano is more important to the song, it's not just accompaniment. Schubert was the master of the Lied, writing over 600!

Franz Liszt - 4 notable achievements
1. patronage job
2. turned piano sideways for profile
3. discovered Wagner
4. transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies, operas, and other difficult large-scale works for piano solo


Liszt also created a one-movement version of the program symphony and in 1854 called it a Symphonische Dichtung ("symphonic poem," also known as a "tone poem"). Such a work is a continuous form with sections in contrasting character and tempo, and with various themes developed and transformed to create a musical analogy to a word poem.
The inspiration for a symphonic poem could be a literary work, a picture, a natural scene, a personality, or anything else. For example, Liszt's Les PrŽludes (1854) was based on a poem by Alfonse-Marie de Lamartine, while his Die Hunnenschlacht (The Battle of the Huns, 1857) was inspired by a mural painting.
Created the "Tone Poem" or "Symphonic Poem"; a one-movement programatic work for orchestra. The thinking was that Beethoven had done so much with the symphony as an art form, to work in the same medium is to be compared to Beethoven. No composer wanted that, because they wouldn't be able to stand up against the Master!
Liszt created the Symphonic Poem partly to avoid the comparison's with Beethoven.
The most successful composer of symphonic poems after Liszt was Richard Strauss, as in his Don Juan (1889), Tod und VerklŠrung (Death and Transfiguration, 1889), Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, 1895), Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1896), Don Quixote (1897), and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life, 1898).
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, other contributions to the genre, showing various degrees of extramusical depiction and bridging the stylistic change from Romanticism to Impressionism, include Paul Dukas's L'Apprenti sorcier (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, 1897), Jean Sibelius's Finlandia (1899), Claude Debussy's La Mer (The Sea, 1905), Igor Stravinsky's Fireworks (1908), and Ottorino Respighi's Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome, 1924).