This lesson is designed to introduce you to the “Romantic” movement. Standard histories of music often present the music of the Romantic movement as being the single, most important type of music that you should know about from the nineteenth century. It’s true that the music of Franz Schubert, Fryderyk Chopin, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Hector Berlioz, Pyotr Chaikovsky, and Antonin Dvořák (to name just a few of the best-known Romantic composers) is still performed today and remains influential. It’s easy enough to assume that the music that orchestras regularly perform today enjoyed the same popularity in its own time.
The reality was a bit different, particularly before 1850. Romanticism emerged as a movement around 1815, and it was a reversal and a development of many of the values of the Classical aesthetic. Romanticism did not replace Classicism overnight; plenty of musicians rejected Romanticism and continued to write in an old-fashioned style. Beethoven, who extended Classical forms to their breaking point, was an inspiration for many Romantic musicians, particularly in central Europe, but his innovations were not universally accepted by the general public in Europe or the Americas. Even after 1850, Romantic music regularly inspired mixed reviews and passionate debate. It’s unclear how much the general public actually cared about these debates; written history, however, has a way of centering the concerns of literate people. Certainly other styles of music more rooted in popular culture—such as broadside ballads, vernacular dance music, folksong, even minstrelsy etc.—coexisted with Romantic music and probably enjoyed a wider audience.
Definitions
The key concept of the Romantic style lies in its aesthetic values—its beliefs about what makes music good—rather than in any specific musical technique. The prominent critic E.T.A. Hoffmann summarized the role of music in an essay about listening to Beethoven: “Music discloses…an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensual world that surrounds [us], a world in which [we] leave behind all definite feelings to surrender to an inexpressible longing.”[1] Hoffmann was proposing that music had the ability to transport the listener away from the physical world toward a zone of pure, true feeling. This is music that is designed to be more than entertainment. This zone of pure feeling is hard to explain in words; Romantic writers spoke of “transcendence,” the “noumenal,” the “infinite” in their efforts to capture it.
The idea that music can help you escape from daily reality is powerful, but it made even more sense in the context of the times. Musical Romanticism emerged in a period dominated by violent conflicts: the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), the liberation of South America from Spanish colonial rule (1808–1826), rampant unrest across all European nations (culminating in the revolutions of 1848), and conflicts leading to the creation of Italy and Germany as unified countries (1859, 1866, 1871). Conflicts did not always occur at home: throughout the nineteenth century, Britain and France expanded their colonial empires through violent conquest, while Spain’s gradually collapsed. Even more than during the preceding musical era, this was also a period of heavy industrialization, with many poor people leaving the countryside to work in urban factories, living in crowded slums. In these contexts, it makes sense that musical aesthetics might develop in the way that they did.
Value systems
This idea of music as a gateway to a spiritual experience is not new, but it was new to emphasize this as the chief and most important purpose of music. Romantic aesthetics had major effects on the value systems of Western musical culture.
First of all, it affected the role and status of musicians. If one believed in Romanticism, then music channeled powerful spiritual forces. The Romantics sometimes adapted religious language, such as talking about themselves as priests of art, to reflect the seriousness of their task as musicians. The Romantics helped popularize the idea of musicians as creative geniuses worthy of the greatest respect (although they would never have applied this concept to popular musicians, as we do now). In short, they promoted the concept of the “Great Composer,” which survives in American culture today, and its corollary concept, that performers should be faithful servants of the notated score. And of course, given their view of themselves and their art, Romantic musicians were likely to be critical of music which enjoyed wide public acclaim or which served as entertainment, such as opera, operetta, broadside ballads, or minstrelsy.
Second, Romanticism affected the types of music that enjoyed public prestige. If music itself was such a powerful channel to the infinite, then the best, most important music could not have any external elements—like words or staging—to get in the way of the music. This means that instrumental music was valued over vocal music, with the symphony for full orchestra as the most prestigious genre. Early Romantic composers were shy of opera: it relied on words and staging and costumes for part of its effect. Later composers in the Romantic style, such as Richard Wagner, wrote opera with the explicit aim of improving and elevating it above its role in popular culture.
Musical techniques
Most of the compositional techniques of Romantic music derive directly from the Classical style: melodies are still often structured in two- and four-measure phrases; formal patterns such as sonata form, rondo, theme and variations, and ternary song form are still present. The development of short musical motifs into extended forms (“organicism”) is, if anything, more prominent than in the earlier era.
One area of innovation was in harmony: chords of the 9th and 11th became increasingly common, and chromatic harmony went from being just a coloristic effect (such as an occasional flat VI chord) to a fundamental feature. Tonal structures became more sophisticated, with symphonic composers trying to follow Beethoven’s footsteps in creating long pieces with complex modulations to distant keys. At times, Romantic composers pushed tonality so far that it’s difficult to tell what key the music is in, even though the music relies on tonal principles. By the early 1900s, one branch of Romanticism would morph into the Modernist movement, which embraced atonality.
Orchestration was another area which became important in the nineteenth century, as musicians searched for unique tone colors to heighten the emotional effect of their music. Two of the standard orchestration manuals still studied today—by Hector Berlioz and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov—both date to the Romantic movement. In keeping with this interest in unique sounds, orchestras became larger as the century went on, with public concerts sometimes featuring hundreds of performers.
Romanticism was in many ways a style devoted to extremes of feeling. As the musician’s goal was to provide the listener with a spiritual experience, any musical device could serve this purpose, and any technique was sanctioned as long as it made the listener feel something. So while this was a period in which in forms were stretched to great lengths, it also saw forms shrink and contract. Short pieces of a minute or less could provide also window into the infinite.
[1] “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” 1813.
Matthew Franke's Music History Course Notes 