During the nineteenth century, musicians and critics began developing new ways of talking about and categorizing types of instrumental music. These new categories—which are now commonly described as program, characteristic, and absolute music—did not emerge overnight. They’re significant both through their relationship to modern musical practice, and because they reveal a major divide inside the Romantic movement.
The basic concept of Romanticism in music, remember, was that music is a uniquely powerful form of art, which create a spiritual experience. Vocal music was generally considered a less powerful form of music, because it partly relies on lyrics for its effect.
The issue at stake with program, characteristic, and absolute music is: how much we should allow non-musical elements to affect the ways that we make music, that we think about music, and that we listen to music. This question, of course, is a matter of personal taste; individual musicians answered it in different ways in different contexts.
Program music’s basic concept is: instrumental music is accompanied by a detailed prose narrative which explains the story, concepts, or ideas that the music depicts. A common example is Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830), a massive symphony in five movements, which depicts a variety of scenes, including a drug trip (program here). Another common version of program music does not contain a written narrative, but refers extensively to a written work that would have been familiar to listeners: for example Chaikovsky’s symphony after Lord Byron’s poem “Manfred” doesn’t need a written narrative—it depicts the poem, and the title alone is a clue for any listener who wants to understand the strange sequence of moods.
Characteristic music, on the other hand, has an evocative title, but no written narrative, and does not refer to a stand-alone text. “Dreaming” and “The Sick Doll” are examples of this.
Absolute music, finally, has an abstract title that gives the listener no clue as to how to interpret it. Mendelssohn’s “Octet in E flat major” is an example of this type of piece.
So these categories are less about the sound of the music, than about the level to which the composer tells the listener what to think about while listening to the music. In other words, these categories describe cultural rather than musical elements of the work.
At the same time, plenty of people certainly ignored the composer’s directions. Interpretative listening—in which the listener makes up a story to explain the emotions and feelings that music seems to suggest—was practiced by prominent music critics such as Robert Schumann, who opened his review of Chopin’s piano variations, op. 2., in the following manner:
Part of Schumann’s strategy as a critic is to explain how different types of listeners will interpret the same music in different ways; therefore, he created alter egos (including Florestan and Eusebius) who usually argue about the meaning of the music they hear, so that his reviews often present the reader with several possible interpretations of the same piece. Note that Schumann doesn’t mean to suggest that the listener will literally see a basilisk from looking at or listening to this music; he implies that the experience is so extraordinary that it requires a verbal explanation.
The intentional writing of programs for instrumental music makes more sense in this context. If your audience subscribed to Romantic ideals and was willing to translate their experience into words, why not simply forestall them by providing a ready-made story so that your work would not be misinterpreted? If your goal was to create a particular emotional, even spiritual experience, wouldn’t you want to make sure that everyone who heard your piece got the message?
At the same time, this process risked relying on words, rather than music, for the effect of your work, which would weaken its ability to serve as a conduit to a spiritual experience—and in fact, some critics attacked program music for relying on words to explain music instead of letting music speak for itself. Others insisted that one should be able to ignore the program, that the music should make sense on its own, and that programs were only there for those who needed it. Yet—and this is important—musicians also increasingly wrote autobiographical program works. Some of these programs were made public, and others remained hidden and private.
Programs that were made publically available need to be taken with a grain of salt. They are, in a way, an attempt to control the audience’s perceptions, and an attempt to control one’s public image. Even the program for Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which is based on his own life (it is subtitled “episodes in the life of an artist”) was not definitive, and was in fact revised over time (this link contains both versions).
Characteristic music, on the other hand, sidestepped all these issues. Effectively, the composer places greater trust in the listener’s ability to understand the music as music, with minimal explanation or direction. Listeners weren’t always comfortable with this. Felix Mendelssohn wrote a series of characteristic pieces called “Songs without words”—a poignant concept, suggesting meaning, but leaving it completely up to the listener. One fan wrote to Mendelssohn, asking him to explain the meanings of the pieces; the composer responded:
If you ask me what I had in mind when I wrote it, I would say: just the song as it is. And if I happen to have certain words in mind for one or another of these songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to others. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling that is not expressed, however, by the same words.[1]
Absolute music, on the other hand, gave the listener nothing to work with but the sound of the music—or, to put it another way, made the most demands on the listener’s intelligence and perception. The Romantic emphasis on the power of music meant that absolute music was often held up as the ideal, the ultimate expression of musical thought. This attitude survives today in the respect given to abstract symphonic music, which has long enjoyed higher cultural status than program music or opera. Absolute music, interestingly enough, was actually a new idea in the nineteenth century and arose in response to the emerging Romantic aesthetic; program and characteristic music were not invented by the Romantics (one can find them in the Baroque period if not earlier).[2]
Ironically, musicians working in all three genres could claim descent from Beethoven if they chose. Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6, “the Pastoral,” has descriptive titles which link each movement to experiences to a day in the country, including a thunderstorm. This of course is not really program music, as Beethoven did not provide a detailed story to go along with it, but composers of both program and characteristic music could claim it as precedent. Similarly, the composers of abstract symphonies could claim inspiration from Beethoven’s similarly abstract works (such as the fifth and seventh symphonies).
Spending all this time on cultural concepts, however, should not make us deaf to each genre’s economic and social contexts. Characteristic music tended to sold in collections of short pieces for the piano, sometimes specifically marketed toward amateurs and domestic musicians (especially women). For example, one can look at Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) which portrays a series of topics associated with childhood—note the pieces are not for children to play! Program music was often written for large orchestras and could employ novel effects, which would have been shocking if there were no program to explain them away. Absolute music (associated with symphonies and chamber music) often took over the abstract forms of the classical period, such as sonata form and variations, and used them as vehicles for Romantic expression. Musicians whose work remains canonic chiefly enjoy this status through their long, symphonic works (Brahms and Chaikovsky are good examples), while musicians who chiefly wrote short pieces are often dismissed as minor talents (Edvard Grieg is perhaps the most typical example). And yet even the canonic musicians’ most popular works were usually the short ones, as these were most likely to sell sheet music: thus Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances (for piano) would have sold more copies than a symphony for full orchestra.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Songs-Without-Words
[2] For example, one can think of Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni, which depict the four seasons of the year, in turn.
Matthew Franke's Music History Course Notes 