Essay

MUSIC IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Walter Frisch Columbia University

W. W. NORTON AND COMPANY

NEW Y O R K ' L O N D O N

C H A P T E R T W O

The Romantic Imagination

»W 7~e can sympathize with the French writer F. R. de Toreinx, who in his YY History of Romanticism of 1829 became exasperated when trying to clarify

the term under discussion. "Do you know it? Do I? Has anyone ever known it? Has it ever been defined concisely and exactly?" he asked. "No!" he responded. "Romanticism is just that which cannot be defined!" Almost a hundred years later, in 1924, the intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy could still write, "The word 'romantic' has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means noth- ing." Romanticism remains a slippery concept, even though it was arguably the most pervasive phenomenon in the culture—and the music—of Western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Not until about 1850 were Classicism and Romanticism seen as comprising distinct historical periods or definable artistic styles. Refore that, they were un- derstood as referringto attitudes and practices that had appeared at various epochs of Western culture, even at the same time. Broadly speaking, Romanticism from the 1790s through the first few decades of the nineteenth century represented a re- action against Enlightenment values of rationality and universality. It celebrated subjectivity, spontaneity, and the power of emotions. In Romantic music, more open-ended structures and sonorities tended to replace or inflect the forms and standard harmonic patterns of the later eighteenth century, which, as John Rice has shown in the previous volume in this series, were not perceived as "Classical," but rather as moving on a spectrum between "galant" and "learned" styles.

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Aspects of Romanticism had been prefigured well before 1800. Although he never used the term Romanticism, the great philosopher and writer Jean- Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778) articulated the individualism that would lie at the heart of the movement. Rousseau began his autobiographical Confessions of 1769 by writing: "Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist. If I am not more deserving, at least I am different." In his novels and phil- osophical tracts, Rousseau celebrated the worth of individuals as opposed to larger political and social structures. He valued man in his "state of nature," in his original, unfettered being. Rousseau's ideas became influential during the French Revolution (1789—99) and for many generations thereafter.

A beautiful description of the new directions that would be associated with Romanticism came from the English poet William Wordsworth (1770—1850) in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads (1800):

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its ori- gin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

Wordsworth—who also did not use the term Romanticism—emphasizes the role of feeling and of the lack of restraint, but also stresses that a poem (or by ex- tension any work of creative art) is based not upon the direct experience of an emotion, but upon the reflection that comes afterward. In true art, feelings are always mediated by contemplation and craft.

These passages from Rousseau and Wordsworth capture many of the quali- ties of artworks created in the first half of the nineteenth century and identified at the time, or later, as Romantic. As we will see in Chapter 7, the term is less well suited to the latter part of the century. In what follows we will survey more general aspects of Romantic thought and art, then turn to music, which played an especially large role in the Romantic imagination. A short chapter cannot provide a comprehensive account of the different regions where Romanticism appeared. We will focus primarily on the German-speaking world, in part be- cause it was there that Romanticism was originally defined and self-consciously practiced, and secondarily on France and Italy.

THE REACTION AGAINST CLASSICISM

The values and artistic practices of the ancient Greeks were much praised and emulated in the later eighteenth century. In 1755 Johann Joachim Winckelmann

T H E R E A C T I O N A G A I N S T C L A S S I C I S M 15

(1717—1768) extolled Greek art for its "noble simplicity" and "tranquil grandeur." Winckelmann saw in Greek sculpture and painting the pinnacle of artistic beauty, especially for the perfection of the forms, the contours, the positions of the bodies, and the representation of clothing. He urged contemporary artists to model their works on the Greeks, just as Raphael and Michelangelo had done in the Renaissance.

Winckelmann's influence on thinkers and artists helped to usher in a Neoclassical phase in late-eighteenth-century art. The French painter Jacques- Louis David (1748—1825), who worked in Rome for five years, created large canvas- es on classical subjects, such as Oath of the Horatii (1784), renowned for its sharply outlined human figures posed with a frozen, sculptural quality (see Fig. 2.1). In the 1780s, after an extended trip to Italy, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749—1832) experienced a conversion to the ideals of Classical art. Living in the town of Weimar in Germany, Goethe, together with his friend Friedrich Schiller (1759—1805), shaped what came to be known as Weimar Classicism, manifest especially in their dramatic works. In Hamburg and Berlin, Gotthold Lessing (1729—1781) achieved something similar with his plays based on Aristotelian principles of dramatic unity.

Figure 2.1: Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784

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The self-conscious inventors of Romanticism were a group of like-minded young thinkers gathered in the German city of Jena in the 1790s. They were part of a newer generation, most born in the early 1770s, who found the ideals of Greek art more limiting than inspiring. They included the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel (1767-1845 and 1772-1829), Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). The Jena group gave a name— Romantik in German—to an art that they believed to be more open-ended, more spiritually vibrant than Classical art. This "Romantic" art could be found in many places and eras: Gothic ca- thedrals, and the early Renaissance drawings of Albrecht Diirer, and the plays of Shakespeare were all considered Romantic. Figure 2.2 shows a painting from 1815 in which the artist Karl Friedrich Schinkel sets a Gothic church on a rock by the sea at sunset. The subject is medieval, but the treatment is fully Romantic in spirit: the church, placed on a dramatic outcropping, is backlit by a sun setting under scattered clouds that reflect its light.

The most influential early formulation of a specifically Romantic worldview came in 1797 from Friedrich Schlegel in the journal Athenaum, which he found- ed with his brother August Wilhelm. Athenaum was distinctive for publishing "fragments" or short paragraphs instead of full-fledged essays. (The fragment

Figure 2.2: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gothic Church on a Rock by the Sea, 1815

THE REACTION AGAINST CLASSICISM 17

became one of the most innovative literary forms of Romanticism.) In one, Schlegel defines "Romantic poetry" as "progressive" and "all-embracing." By "poetry" he really means the original Greek sense ofpoesis, or making. Schlegel writes: "Other kinds of poetry are complete and can now be fully and critically analysed. The Romantic kind of poetry is constantly developing. That in fact is its true nature: it can forever only become, it can never achieve definitive form It alone is infinite. It alone is free." Schlegel sees the Romantic outlook as ex- panding rather than excluding or superseding the Classical one. (The title of the journal Athenaum is itself a classical reference to a cultural institution in ancient Rome named after the goddess Athena.)

Friedrich Schlegel's ideas, virtually the credo of Romantic art, were tak- en up at greater length by August Wilhelm Schlegel, who in his "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature" of 1808 noted that the term Romantic had been coined to differentiate the new and unique spirit of modern art from that of an- cient or Classical art. As Schlegel observed, the term derived from "romance," the name applied to the vernacular languages that had developed from Latin and Germanic tongues of the later Middle Ages.

Acknowledging Winckelmann, Schlegel observes that the ancient Greeks cultivated an art of "refined and ennobled sensuality." But, he says, they were too much confined to the present, and not enough concerned with the infinite. For Schlegel, it took the spread of Christianity to regenerate "the decayed and exhausted world of Classical antiquity." The Christian attitude, with its empha- sis on eternity, helped foster a more Romantic perspective. The ancient Greeks held human nature to be self-sufficient. The Christian outlook is opposed to this: "Everything finite and mortal is lost in contemplation of the eternal; life has become shadow and darkness." In a beautifully expressed contrast between the Classical and Romantic outlooks, Schlegel says: "The poetry of the ancients was the poetry of possession, while ours is the poetry of longing. The former is firmly rooted in the present, while the latter hovers between remembrance and anticipation." These statements—however misguided they might be about the true nature of Classical Greek art—capture the essence of Romanticism.

The first generation of French Romantics echoed many of these sentiments. Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand (1768—1848) shared the German Romantics' love of the medieval, the Gothic, and the Christian, as well as their mistrust of Enlightenment rationality and secularism. His book Genie du christianisme (Genius of Christianity, 1802) sees Christianity as a higher, more spiritual— hence more Romantic—culture than that of ancient Greece and Rome.

The fullest expression of these trends in French Romanticism comes with Victor Hugo (1802—1885; Fig. 2.3), whose best-known works were the novels Les miserables (The Wretched) and Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Hugo's preface to the play Cromwell (1827) became a key manifesto of Romanticism. In it, Hugo, like Chateaubriand and the Schlegels, argued that

18 CHAPTER TWO THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION

Figure 2.3: Victor Hugo, Romantic French author, after a photo graph byNadar

Christianity had ushered in a new era for the arts and intellectual life, whose worldview was very different from that of antiquity. Romantic art, going for- ward from Christian spiritualism and melancholy, would embrace many differ- ent styles and moods, including the sublime and the grotesque. As for Friedrich Schlegel, "poetry," in the following excerpt from Hugo's preface, really means all artistic expression:

Christianity leads poetry to the truth. . . . Everything in creation is not humanly beautiful . . . the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. .. .

Then it is that, with its eyes fixed upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and under the influence of that spirit of Christian mel- ancholy and philosophical criticism. . . poetry will take a great step, a de- cisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations—but without confounding them—darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of poetry. All things are connected.

Hugo's comments reflect or anticipate many characteristics of Romantic mu- sic, which is often deliberately hard to listen to and breaks traditional rules to portray extreme emotional contrasts. Many of Beethoven's later compositions from the 1820s—including the Gil-Minor Quartet, Op. 131, which we will

ROMANTIC LONGING 19

examine in the next chapter—manifest a sharp juxtaposition of the heavenly and the down-to-earth, the sublime and the comical, the lyrical and the gruff. Berlioz's Symphonic fantastique (Fantastic Symphony) of 1830 conspicuously mixes the sublime, the humorous, the religious, and the grotesque. The March to the Scaffold (the fourth movement) and the Witches'Sabbath (the fifth) are per- fect musical embodiments of the grotesque in music.

The first movement of the symphony reflects a series of strongly contrast- ing emotional states like those Hugo describes: the movement depicts, accord- ing to Berlioz's program, "the passage from this state of melancholy reverie, interrupted by a few fits of groundless joy, to one of frenzied passion, with its movements of fury, of jealousy, its return of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations." Even the main theme of Berlioz's symphony, the recurring idee fixe (fixed idea, or obsession) that represents the beloved, captures within it- self the wide range of feelings or moods characteristic of Romantic art. At 40 measures (the beginning is shown in Ex. 2.1), this is likely the longest, most complex theme that had been written in European art music. With its irregu- lar phrases, its long notes frequently tied over the barline, and its sharp, oddly placed accents, the idee fixe is by turns impulsive, reflective, hesitant, insistent, and yielding.

Example 2.1: Berlioz, Symphonic fantastique, movement 1, mm. 72—79, idee fixe (beginning) Allegro agitato e appassionato assai

canto espressivo

ROMANTIC LONGING Berlioz's theme is also the perfect embodiment of another Romanticpreoccupation, that of longing or unfulfilled desire. In Chateaubriand's semi-autobiographical novel Rene (1802), the young hero suffers from world-weariness and aimless long- ing, which the author describes with the term vague despassions, the emptiness or void of passions, a phrase picked up directly in the Symphonie fantastique, whose hero is described by Berlioz as being afflicted by it. In such a state, one's passions can fixate on an object of desire, as do those of Berlioz's hero on the beloved, whom he represents in the idee fixe. The theme contains chains of long appoggiaturas that delay melodic resolution, and the tonic C major is nowhere stated clearly until the very last cadence. These are the musical techniques of longing—or, to return to the terms of the Schlegel brothers, of becoming rather than being.

In German poetry, fiction, and music of the early nineteenth century, we encounter frequent references to Sehnen, Sehnsucht, or Verlangen, the terms for longing or desire. A characteristic example is the brief two-stanza lyric from

20CHAPTER TWO THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION

1823 by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), whose poems were set to music by Robert Schumann in the magnificent song cycle Dichterliebe (Poet's Love, 184-0):

Im wunderschonen Monat Mai, Als alle Knospen sprangen, Da ist in meinem Herzen Die Liebe aufgegangen.

Im wunderschonen Monat Mai, Als alle Vogel sangen, Da hab' ich ihr gestanden Mein Sehnen und Verlangen.

In the wonderful month of May, When all the buds come out, Then in my heart Love burst forth.

In the wonderful month of May, When all the birds were singing, Then I confessed to her My yearning and longing.

All the images of the poem—buds bursting, love springing, birds singing- prepare for the final words, "Sehnen und Verlangen," so characteristic of Romanticism. In the Schlegels' terms, Schumann's music captures striving rather than being, desire rather than possession (Ex. 2.2). He sets the final words to a melodic line that climbs upward but droops at the end, never reach- ing its goal, the tonic or home key of F# minor. The last word is accompanied by a dissonance, here a dominant seventh chord, which remains unresolved and unfulfilled; it literally, to recall A. W. Schlegel, hovers between remembrance and anticipation. (The next song in Dichterliebe begins in A major, thus provid- ing a surprise resolution for the dissonant chord.)

Example 2.2: Schumann, Dichterliebe, No. I, Im wunderschonen Monat Mai, mm. 22—26 mm. 22-23, 26

Langsam, zart ill-I =JL

Mein Seh - nen und Ver - Ian - gen.

.. k—,K

My yearning and longing.

After Berlioz and Schumann, it was Richard Wagner who would create the most powerful musical language of Romantic longing, especially in his opera Tristan und Isolde. Completed in 1859, almost twenty years after Dichterliebe, Tristan depicts a searing passion that goes well beyond the more innocent love pangs represented by Berlioz, Heine, and Schumann. The love between Tristan and Isolde is at once all-powerful and ill fated; it is literally "consuming" in that it can be fulfilled only in death.

MUSIC IN THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION 21

Wagner captures the lovers' situation with intensely chromatic music in which the individual lines move by half-step motion and rarely settle into stable consonant chords. The result is constant musical flux or yearning. The most famous musical emblem of this phenomenon is the "Tristan" chord, which is heard at the opening of the Prelude (see Ex. 1.1 in Chapter 1) and then recurs frequently throughout the opera. Just as the passion between Wagner's lovers is more intense than that suggested by Heine and Schumann, so too the "Tristan" chord, a half-diminished seventh chord in an unusual inversion, is more dis- sonant than Schumann's dominant seventh.

The longing depicted in Wagner's Tristan is far removed from that described by the Schlegels or Chateaubriand. It is modeled on the ideas of another im- portant early Romantic, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860). Schopenhauer's major work, Die Welt als Wills und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), was written and published before 1819, but its impact was delayed until the second half of the century. Wagner discovered the work in 1854, wrote extensively about it and its influence upon him, and finally created in Tristan und Isolde the musical and dramatic embodiment of Schopenhauer's philosophy.

For Schopenhauer, who is fundamentally pessimistic, longing is an inevi- table state of permanent suffering in life. He posited a basic force or principle he called the Will, a blind, fundamental drive that longs for satisfaction but never reaches it. All Will is founded in need, he wrote, and thus in suffering. Only in death is the suffering completely alleviated—as happens in Wagner's opera. And yet, according to Schopenhauer, there are other means at least to quiet or calm the Will. One of these is music, which, as we shall now see, played a large role in Romantic thought.

MUSIC IN THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION

The years around 1800 can be seen as a period of liberation for instrumental music, thus marking a key development in Romanticism. Until then, among most aestheticians and philosophers, instrumental music had second-class status, below the prestigious forms of opera and vocal music. Its origin was understood to lie in dance and in more popular genres, like serenades or the opera overture, which were dismissed by some philosophers or aestheticians as displaying empty sensuousness. Instrumental music was deemed to be incapable of independent expression; it could only represent specific, pre- defined emotional states (as in the eighteenth-century theory of "affects") or imitate external phenomena (birds, storms). These views began to change in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In 1785, the French musician and writer Michel-Paul Guy de Chabanon argued in favor of nonrepresentational

22 C H A P T E R TWO THE R O M A N T I C I M A G I N A T I O N

instrumental music that could speak directly to the emotions and to the sen- sory pleasure of the ear.

In the ensuing decades instrumental music was increasingly valued, and deemed Romantic, because of the same abstract qualities that had been seen as its limitations—its ineffability and apparent indistinctness. In what came to be a renowned essay on Beethoven's instrumental music, E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1813 expressed this view clearly: "When we speak of music as an independent art, should we not always restrict our meaning to instrumental music, which, scorning every aid, every admixture of another art (the art of poetry), gives pure expression to music's specific nature, recognizable in this form alone? It is the most romantic of all the arts—one might almost say, the only genuinely romantic one—for its sole subject is the infinite" (SR 160:1193; 6/13:151). Here Hoffmann picks up and applies to music the rhetoric of the Schlegels, especially the cel- ebration and exploration of the infinite in Romantic art.

Schopenhauer further developed early Romantic ideas about the spe- cial qualities of music. He worked more specifically than the Schlegels or Hoffmann in the framework developed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724—1804). Kant had not held music in high esteem; indeed, he con- demned it as a mere play of sensations, of little cultural value. But Kant also noted music's potential to communicate normally inexpressible thoughts. Developing this idea, Schopenhauer understood music as the most immedi- ate expression of the Will, which as we saw above was his term for the essence of all things, and which Kant had called the Ding an Sich (thing-in-itself). All life was a manifestation or representation (Vorstellung) of the Will, which like Kant's thing-in-itself can be experienced directly only under certain circum- stances. Music is the one art that can achieve an unmediated expression of the Will. The other arts objectify the Will only indirectly, by means of ideas, says Schopenhauer. But music,

since it passes over the Ideas, is also quite independent of the phenomenal world, positively ignores it. ... Thus music is as immediate an objectifica- tion and copy of the whole will as the world itself is. ... Music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself.... For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

This problem of how to understand the relationship of music to the world— whether the more metaphysical world beyond our perception or the more ma- terialistic bourgeois, everyday world—is a central issue of Romantic thought. So is the idea that music, especially autonomous instrumental music, has a special connection or a direct pathway to the "essence" of things.

C H A P T E R T H R E E

Music and the Age of Metternich

He was a powerful politician whose name has come to symbolize an entireera in Europe. As chancellor of Austria, Klernenz Wenzel von Metternich (1773—1859) became the chief architect and enforcer of European geopolitics in the period from 1815 up to the revolutions of 1848. In 1814—15 he hosted the Congress of Vienna, which would affect not only the power structure of the con- tinent but also the culture of the arts and music.

Broadly speaking, two trends emerge in musical life during the Metternich era. One fostered private or semiprivate music-making; the other brought music into the larger public spheres of the concert hall and opera house. Although these two realms, private and public, would become associated with different genres of music, many composers and performers participated actively in both. In this chapter we will focus first on the Austro-German realm, specifically on Ludwig van Beethoven (1770—1827) and Franz Schubert (1797—1828), who negotiated the Metternich era in different ways and whose careers and works can be understood in relation to its cultural values. Then we will turn to the new phenomenon of virtuoso performers. Opera will be treated in Chapter 4.

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THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA

"Comment Qa marche?" (How is it going [literally, walking]?), the Prince de Ligne was supposedly asked in 1815 about the Congress of Vienna. "Le congres ne marche pas; il danse" (It's not walking; it's dancing), came the response. Taken literally, the prince's comment would probably refer to the waltz, a dance in triple meter that became popular at the Congress as a high-class version of the earthy Austrian landler. (It was also distinct from the earlier minuet, which was in triple meter as well.) The waltz would be cultivated by countless composers, from Schubert and Chopin, to Johann Strauss, Jr. (the "Waltz King"), to Verdi and Mahler. Figure 3.1 shows a ball given by Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna.

In politics as in music, the Congress of Vienna would cast a long shadow across the nineteenth century. However much they danced and caroused, the diplomats and heads of state who assembled in the capital city of the Austro- Hungarian Empire between September 1814 and June 1815 were occupied with serious business. Their main task was to reconstruct Europe after the disrup- tions and devastations of the Napoleonic Wars. Anxious to put an end to the tur- bulence dating back to the French Revolution, the participants in the Congress of Vienna restored strong monarchies in France, Spain, and the Netherlands, awarded parts of the Italian territories and Poland to other sovereignties, and reshaped the defunct Holy Roman Empire into a German Confederation dominated by Austria and Prussia. These decisions were to have important

Figure 3.1: Ball given by Prince Metternich at the Congress of Vienna in 1815

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consequences in the coming decades, including revolutions that broke out across Europe in 1848 and the strong push for independent national status in Germany, Italy, and among peoples in Central and Eastern Europe.

The new rulers of Europe placed heavy restrictions on personal liberty and freedom of expression. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the German Confederation, which was supervised with an iron fist by Metternich. In the aftermath of the murder of a prominent diplomat by young liberals, he im- posed the repressive Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 on private citizens and institu- tions, including universities and the press. The arts were also affected by the clampdown on politics and other public activities. Schubert's friend Eduard von Bauernfeld, writing in 1872, characterized life in Vienna in the 1820s in this way: "Today's youth cannot imagine the humiliating pressure on our cre- ative spirits under which we, as young people—aspiring writers and artists— suffered. The police in general and censorship in particular weighed on us all like a monkey we could not get off our back." Schubert, although he kept a low profile, had his own brush with the law when he was arrested one eve- ning in 1820 along with several members of his circle. The police report noted the aggressive behavior of the poet Johann Chrysostomus Senn and added that Schubert had "chimed in against the authorized official in the same tone, in- veighing against him with insulting and opprobrious language." Schubert was released with a reprimand, but Senn, whose liberal views were well known to the authorities, was imprisoned for 14 months, then banished from Vienna.

BIEDERMEIER CULTURE

A natural reaction to the repressive atmosphere of the Metternich era was to turn away from the world of politics, inward to the home. Especially within Austro- German culture and society, the era ushered in by the Congress of Vienna and lasting until the revolutions of 1848 has been called the Biedermeier period, after the name of a fictitious schoolteacher featured in a series of humorous poems that appeared in a Munich periodical in the 1850s. Biedermeier has come to indicate a range of values associated with domesticity and the middle class, as manifested in styles of furniture, interior decoration, jewelry, clothing, painting, literature, and even music. The Biedermeier celebration of the cozy life is captured vividly in a memoir about the post-Congress decades by the German novelist Karl Gutzkow:

What charm there is in the intimate sociability of a cultured home! . . . The orderliness and the solicitude spread everywhere a warmth and com- fort that stir the soul as well as the senses. The women's little worktable by the window, the workbasket with its little spools of thread, its blue Eng- lish needle-papers, its little lacquer stars for winding silk, the thimbles,

r B I E D E R M E I E R C U L T U R E 3 5 the scissors, and the pincushions on the little table, alongside the piano with its music, hyacinths in forcing-glasses on the windowsill, a bird in a pretty brass cage, a carpet that softens with every footstep, engravings on the walls, all merely transient necessities cleared away into distant rooms, the gatherings of the family all together in mutual reverence and contentment—no uproar, no running and dashing about.

One could scarcely assemble a list of more domesticated images. Significantly, along with birds, flowers, and pincushions, there is the piano and "its music." Just what might this music have been? Most likely a waltz, a song, or a duet to be played at one piano.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of just such sheet music destined for middle-class homes. Stars in the publishing firmament, some still in business in the twenty-first century, were Chappell and Novello in London, Pleyel in Paris, Diabelli and Doblinger in Vienna, and Breitkopf & Hartel in Leipzig. To increase production and extend print runs of music, these publishers began to replace the older method of engraving, in which the nota- tion was cut into a copper plate by a sharp tool, with the newer, more efficient method of lithography, invented in 1796, in which the surface remains smooth and the notation is drawn with an oil-based substance.

As we saw in Chapter 1, the house of Anton Diabelli made handsome prof- its by issuing thousands of works for domestic consumption, including lighter music for piano solo, for piano four-hands (that is, for two pianists at the same instrument), for guitar, and for voice. Diabelli also published weightier piano sonatas and string quartets by Beethoven. At this time, many members of the middle class had passable musical skills. Young women were trained on the piano, men often on string instruments. Many pieces published by Diabelli were arrangements of popular opera arias; others were dances like waltzes, land- ler, ecossaises (originally from Scotland), and deutsche (literally, German).

These works were enjoyed in settings like the one described by Gutzkow and also as depicted in the watercolor from 1821 reproduced as Figure 3.2. Here the Viennese artist Leopold Kupelwieser happened to include one prominent musi- cian of the day—Franz Schubert, who is seated at the piano. Next to him is a dog, a perfect symbol of domesticity. Schubert's friends are engaged in an innocent and far-from-subversive pastime: a game of charades about Adam and Eve. This event most likely took place at a "Schubertiad," one of the frequent informal gatherings of the composer and his friends at which Schubert's music was per- formed. His initial reputation as a composer spread not through publications of his music or public concerts, but through events like these, much in the spirit of Biedermeier culture.

If these activities of Schubert and his circle represent one side of musical culture in the Metternich era—convivial domesticity—Beethoven represents

36 CHAPTER THREE MUSIC AND THE AGE OF METTERNICH

Figure 3.2: Leopold Kupelwieser, Charade amongthe Schubert Circle inAtzenbrugg: Expulsion from Paradise, watercolor, 1821

the other. In the years after the Congress of Vienna, Beethoven, deaf, eccen- tric, and misanthropic, largely withdrew from Viennese society. His later music, difficult both to play and to hear, and not intended primarily for the par- lor, points up a divide between two "cultures" of music—roughly, the popular and the elite. Schubert was very comfortable in the former, Beethoven much less so. This split—which survives today in our distinction between "popular" and "classical" music—was articulated clearly by the critic Friedrich Rochlitz (1769— 1842) in an 1828 review of a posthumous publication of some of Beethoven's last works:

We must consider the public as belonging to two very different classes in regard to music, much as in regard to reading matter and many other things, according to sensibility and inclination. . . . The first only wants to amuse itself with music, whether hearing or practicing it—to create an agreeable pastime. The second wants, as regularly as possible, to excite, engage, reanimate, uplift, strengthen, and advance its whole inner person.

Rochlitz clearly places Beethoven's late works in the latter category, which "uplifts" rather than entertains.

L U D W I G V A N B E E T H O V E N 3 7

Some middle-class people would have partaken of both cultures—playing landler in their parlors one day and listening to Beethoven symphonies in the concert hall on another. But Rochlitz's comments show the beginnings of a fun- damental divide between the arts as "entertainment" and as what the Germans would call Bildung, meaning education or intellectual formation, and whose sense is perfectly captured in Rochlitz's phrase "uplift, strengthen, advance its whole inner person." The gap between popular and classical music continued to grow during the nineteenth century, leaving behind the musical culture of the later eighteenth century, when a work like Mozart's opera Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute, 1791) could smoothly integrate both styles.

Rochlitz's comments about Beethoven appeared in a musical journal he had founded in 1798, theAllgemeine musikalische Zeitung (General Music Magazine). Published weekly without interruption until 1848 (and later revived), the Zeitung was a part of an important phenomenon of the early nineteenth century—the profusion of music journals in a whole range of European cit- ies. Experts were eager to share their ideas with a growing musical public of both professionals and amateurs. They sought to improve musical Bildung, to "uplift and strengthen" musical life, and the public was eager to learn. Issued by Breitkopf & Hartel in Leipzig, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung was by no means a simple "house organ" used to promote the firm's own composers or in- terests. Under Rochlitz's leadership—he edited the journal until 1818 and con- tinued to write for it well into the 1830s—it provided a model for music journal- ism that is still familiar to us today. Each issue included essays, biographical information, reviews of theoretical works and of music, descriptions of instru- ments, and news items from German, Austrian, Italian, French, Russian, and eventually American venues.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

During the first decade of the nineteenth century, in what would later become known as his "middle" or "heroic" period, Beethoven established his reputa- tion in the Austro-German sphere as a composer advancing in bold new direc- tions. In works like the Third (Eroica) Symphony, Op. 55 (1803), and the three Rasumovsky String Quartets, Op. 59 (1806), traditional forms are expanded by a propulsive rhythmic and thematic language, and by broad harmonic designs. In their intensity these works clearly partake of the Romantic spirit outlined in Chapter 2. Indeed, one of the chief spokesmen of Romanticism, E.T.A. Hoff- mann, claimed Beethoven's middle-period symphonic music as fully Romantic in that it touches on the "immeasurable" and awakens "endless longing" (SR 160:1194; 6/13:152). We recall that striving for the immeasurable or infinite, as well as a sense of longing, were essential components of the Romantic imagination. Also Romantic are Beethoven's view of art as a kind of sacred

42 C H A P T E R T H R E E M U S I C A N D T H E A G E O F M E T T E R N I C H

Example 3.2: Beethoven, String Quartet in Ctt Minor, Op. 131, movement 7 (a) mm. 6-9

Allegro

" r * r , p^ " « * « « «

r ~ n — y \ ' I M k 'f—rl—t^'-'-f

(b) mm. 21-24

A «r p

t,M ^ *s. 1

*j

H

i j — -^ J - J> F

i

_^ j - ̂ j

» L_ , J -_

# i

•L

|

£ _

f r i > h i r *r

V-

' h *r

i ____^[

In its time the C t t -Minor Quartet was often greeted with incomprehen- sion. Today we can recognize in it the summit of Beethoven's skills as an art- ist, especially his ability to bind together into a vast, coherent structure many different movements and sharply contrasting moods. In that sense, the Ctt-Minor Quartet truly stands astride what we have identified as Classicism and Romanticism. The impulse toward rational order is challenged by forces that often fragment the musical and expressive discourse and push it toward what Hoffmann identified as "the monstrous and the immeasurable."

FRANZ SCHUBERT

Although Schubert lived at the same time and in the same city as Beethoven, the generation gap between them made for a big difference in their careers and their place in musical culture. Beethoven, born in 1770, was for much of his life a child of the Enlightenment; his ethical, social, and political values were largely shaped by figures like Kant and Schiller and by the ideals of the French Revolution. Beethoven's works often embody these values in ways that would have been unlikely for Schubert, who was born in 1797 and emerged as a young man and artist contemporaneously with the Congress of Vienna and the advent of the repressive Metternich regime.

Beethoven and Schubert moved in different circles. It is not clear that they ever met, although in the years 1815—18 they seem to have frequented the same music publishing house in Vienna, where composers gathered and exchanged ideas. One story, impossible to confirm but often repeated, says that Schubert visited Beethoven on his deathbed March 1827. We do know that Schubert came

r F R A N Z S C H U B E R T 4 3

to revere Beethoven's music and sought to emulate his achievements in the larg- er instrumental forms.

Schubert was the son of a bourgeois schoolmaster working in a Viennese sub- urb. His musical talent was apparent from ayoung age, and in 1808 he was accepted as a boy soprano into the Imperial Court Choir, which had the special advantage of providing tuition and board at the finest school in Vienna, the Imperial and Royal City College. Schubert played violin in and also occasionally conducted the student orchestra, which performed works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Schubert also had composition lessons with Antonio Salieri, one of the most admired com- posers in Vienna, though today best known as Mozart's archrival, thanks to the fictionalized play and filmAmadeus.

Early on, Schubert developed a passion for the lied, which was still a relatively newmusical genre in the Austro-German world. The lied (plural: lieder) isasetting of a poem for a singer with the accompaniment of a piano. The growing popularity of the lied around 1800 had much to do with the interest in German folk traditions spurred on by Johann Gottfried Herder in the later eighteenth century, as discussed in Chapter 2. There were two basic types of lieder written in the generation be- fore Schubert. Composers in southern Germany like Johann Zumsteeg tended to favor lengthy, multisectional, narrative ballads that were through-composed, that is, in which there is little repetition of musical material in the setting in the poem. Composers from northern Germany, especially Berlin, including Johann Reichardt (whom we met earlier in this chapter as a critic) and Friedrich Zelter, wrote shorter songs that were mostly strophic, in which the same unit of music is repeated for each stanza of a poem. In the latter songs, the ideal was the Volkston or folklike feeling.

As early as 1811 Schubert began experimenting with both styles of lieder, the ballad and the folklike. By the time of his death in 1828, he had written over 600 lieder. Despite their small scale (relative to symphonies or operas), the greatest of these constitute lyrical masterpieces of the Romantic era, especially because of two distinctive features. First, unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Schubert was often attracted to high-quality texts by leading German poets, in- cluding Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Matthias Claudius, and Friedrich von Matthisson. Second, Schubert took an "interventionist" approach to the setting of a text. He was not content to underpin a melody with simple, discreet accompaniment, as other composers often did; he made the piano part an integral element of the work. Schubert's principal technique was to reach inside a poem for a vivid image, out of which he created a pattern for a piano accompaniment. That pattern then runs throughout the song as a unifying device, but at any moment it can be transformed according to the mood or content of the text.

Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel), his Op. 2 (D. 118), composed in November 1814, is a splendid example of this technique (see Anthology 2). The song is a setting of a text from Part 1 of Goethe's drama

44 CHAPTER THREE MUSIC AND THE AGE OF METTERNICH

Faust. One of the most famous works of German literature, -Faust depicts how a man sells his soul to the devil in his desire to achieve perfect knowledge and happi- ness. Faust seduces Margarete (Gretchen is the familiar form of the name), who has fallen deeply in love with him.

In the scene that so captivated Schubert, Gretchen sits alone in her room, at her spinning wheel, and fantasizes about Faust. She is some ways a perfect Biedermeier portrait: the well-bred middle-class girl engaged in a domestic ac- tivity. But in Goethe's hands, and then Schubert's, any hint of Biedermeier cozi- ness is eliminated by Gretchen's palpable agitation and her infatuation with a man she has met not through normal social interaction, but through demonic interven- tion. Instead of a cheerful folklike tune of the kind we might expect a girl to sing while spinning, she sings a theme that hovers nervously around the pitch A, the song's unstable dominant. The theme and its accompaniment capture perfectly the sense of Gretchen's words, "Meine Ruh' ist hin" (My peace is gone) (Ex. 3.3).

Example 3.3: Schubert, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Op. 2 (D. 118), mm. 1-6 Nicht zu geschwind J > = 72

sempre ligato Mei - ne Ruh' _

¥ s s

i&^

J

h mein

H J * J J J J

i ^— *-

Herz

J

=t ist schwer,

J J~ ft • --

My peace is gone, my heart is heavy.

Underneath the vocal part, Schubert's spinning wheel is rendered with an almost pictorial realism. Spinning wheels have a number of moving parts: the wheel is driv- en by a spindle, which in turn is activated by the motion of the spinner's foot on the treadle near the floor. In Schubert's accompaniment, the right hand of the piano cap- tures the circular motion of the wheel. The bass (the bottom notes in the left hand), with longer rhythmic values, represents Gretchen's foot on the treadle, which keeps

F R A N Z S C H U B E R T 4 5

the wheel turning. The rhythmic pattern in the middle part (also played by the left hand), moving more quickly, represents the click of the spindle as it whirs.

Schubert's great achievement in Gretchen am Spinnrade is to make the piano part not only a representation of the spinning wheel, but also a more abstract reflec- tion of Gretchen's turbulent emotions. Like the motion of the spinning wheel, her thoughts are at once circular and progressive, or, we might say, centripetal and centrifugal—focused on one thing but also pushing outward in many directions. To capture this situation, Schubert fuses elements of two kinds of musical song form discussed above: strophic and through-composed. The result is an innovative and effective "wave" structure: Gretchen's "Meine Ruh' ist hin" is a refrain that returns, obsessively and inevitably, but each time leads off into new musical material.

In later years Schubert composed several song cycles, in which a number of lieder are grouped together into a single work that follows a narrative thread or a coherent psychological trajectory and is intended to be performed in its entirety. Schubert completed two large song cycles, Die schone Mullerin (The Lovely Maid of the Mill, D. 795,1823), with 20 songs, and Winterreise (Winter's Journey, D. 911, 1827), with 24, both settings of the poetry of Wilhelm Miiller. Each traces the emotions and actions of a young male protagonist who is rejected by his beloved.

In Schubert's day, song cycles were often created as Biedermeier party games. Young people would sit around the parlor and make up a story in poems, which composers would set to simple folklike music. The poems of Milller's Schone Mullerin grew out of just such a collective endeavor that took place at the Berlin salon of a wealthy banker. But Schubert's song cycles, like so much of his other work, transcend that Biedermeier context, even while acknowledging it. The main characters of both Schubert cycles long for the quiet, domestic life that is the Biedermeier ideal, but it is beyond their reach. In Winterreise the poet-singer is literally outside any home; he wanders in a frozen landscape and looks long- ingly at various symbols of Biedermeier life—villages, houses, country inns, weathervanes, and even pet dogs.

In his larger-scale instrumental works of the 1820s Schubert sought a place alongside his great contemporary Beethoven. Schubert devoted much attention to four-hand piano music, for two players at one instrument. This was a Biedermeier genre into which Beethoven rarely ventured, but which Schubert transfigured with several masterpieces, including the Fantasy in F Minor (D. 940), written in the last year of his life, 1828. Here Schubert recasts the four traditional movement types into a continuous work of immense tragic power, joining the sections of the Fantasy together in a way different from the movements in Beethoven's Op. 131 Quartet. In what has been called "cyclic" form, the main theme of Schubert's first movement reappears at several important points across the Fantasy and then re- turns at the very end to close the circle. This structural technique would have great appeal for later Romantic composers like Liszt and Chopin.

C H A P T E R F O U R

The Opera Industry

In 1827, the Paris Opera was referred to as a "complicated machine." Two de-cades later, the Italian statesman Camillo Cavour called opera "a great indus- try with ramifications all over the world." "Machine" and "industry" might not be the first terms that come to mind when we think of the lyrical and dramatic art of opera. But from the moment the first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637, opera was big business. It depended on large sums of money and on the combined efforts of many different people—composers, librettists, singers, dancers, choristers, instrumentalists, costume and set designers, directors, stage crew, impresarios, and, of course, audiences.

Opera was also the first truly international musical commodity. By the early nineteenth century there were opera houses—or at least theaters that regularly presented opera—all over the Western world, from St. Petersburg to London, from New York to Buenos Aires. Indigenous cultures of opera written in the lo- cal language, already nascent in the eighteenth century, flourished in many dif- ferent countries, including France, England, Germany, Spain, and Russia. Any consideration of opera in the early Romantic period must take account of these national traditions, each of which operated as a different kind of "industry." In this chapter we can only touch on a few, beginning in Italy, then turning to France, Germany, and Russia.

52

ITALIAN OPERA

At the start of the nineteenth century, Italy was the source of the most pres- tigious and influential operatic traditions, as it had been during the previous century. Opera buffa, fast-paced comic opera with a mix of character types from different classes of society, remained immensely popular. In addition to the three great Mozart operas of 1786—90—Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figa- ro), Don Giovanni (Don Juan), and Cosifan tutte (Thus Do All Women)—audiences flocked to works by Giovanni Paisiello (1740—1816) and Domenico Cimarosa (1749—1801). Rossini and other Italian composers continued the buffa tradition after 1800. Meanwhile, especially since the French Revolution, there had been a decline of opera seria—serious opera with tragic or heroic plots based on history or myth, and filled with characters of noble rank. But the genre would experi- ence a profound transformation in the first three decades of the nineteenth cen- tury in the work of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini.

T H E I M P R E S A R I O S

Successful businesses depend on capable CEOs, and Italian opera was no ex- ception. The all-powerful impresario was at once the manager of a theater (or more than one) and an entrepreneur. (The name impresario derives from the Italian impresa, "enterprise.") It was the impresario who would select the sub- ject of an opera and engage the poet to create the libretto. He would then hire the composer, who would be under contract to supervise the preparation of the opera and would have to be present for the first three performances. Thereafter the composer would have no obligations and few rights. The impresario would retain ownership of the opera and normally of the original manuscript score. If the opera was successful, the impresario could lend or rent the music to opera houses in other cities; the profits were all his.

An Italian impresario of the early nineteenth century might be a singer or choreographer from the local opera house, but was just as likely to have little or no musical training. One of the most colorful and successful impresarios of the period was a former cafe waiter, Domenico Barbaia (1778—1841). Barbaia was barely literate and wrote his letters phonetically in Milanese dialect. Yet by the end of his life he was a millionaire who owned diamonds, racehorses, and a vast collection of paintings. Barbaia began his operatic career as a contrac- tor for gambling operations at the prestigious Teatro alia Scala in Milan. (This was an era when more than just opera was offered to patrons at opera houses!) He promoted the new game of roulette and went on to create a gambling syndi- cate with a monopoly throughout much of Italy. In 1809 Barbaia became man- ager of the royal opera houses in Naples. He also produced Italian opera at the Karntnertortheater in Vienna during much of the 1820s.

53

5 4 C H A P T E R F O U R T H E O P E R A I N D U S T R Y

Barbaia's main gift was in spotting and nurturing talent. He was among the first to recognize the genius of Rossini, whom he signed to a six-year contract in Naples in 1815, with the obligation to compose two operas a year and to di- rect revivals of older works. Rossini's take would be 200 ducats a month (some- thing like $4,000 in today's monetary values) and part of the proceeds from the lucrative gambling tables—not a bad deal for a young composer of 23. Rossini also managed to steal away Barbaia's mistress, the star soprano Isabella Colbran, who became the composer's wife in 1822. (Even so, Rossini and Barbaia remained on good terms.) Barbaia also nurtured the careers of the two most famous opera composers in the generation after Rossini: in the mid-1820s he helped Bellini gain a foothold in both Naples and Milan, and he signed Donizetti to a three-year contract at Naples.

THE SINGERS

Singers had always wielded enormous power in the world of opera. In the eigh- teenth century the stars were castrati, male vocalists who had undergone opera- tions as young boys to allow them to retain their high vocal register. But by 1800 this barbaric practice had pretty much died out, and most castrati had passed from the scene. Atypical Italian opera had three or four principal roles forprimi or lead singers, and a group of secondary parts for comprimarii. The real star was now the lead soprano, theprima donna, who commanded astronomical fees and would not hesitate to demand that a score be modified to suit her voice. She might insist on the substitution of an aria from another opera, even one by a different composer. Famous singers would have ready several such numbers, called arie di baule or suitcase arias, that showed off their voices to best advantage. Singers would also improvise ornamentation overwhichthe composer had little control.

The great singers of the early nineteenth century came and went long before recording technology permitted their voices to be captured (see Chapter 13). But we do have some vivid earwitness descriptions, including one of Giuditta Pasta (1797— 1865; Fig. 4.1), who merited an entire chapter in the 1824 biography of Rossini by the famous French writer Stendhal. Stendhal described Pasta as an "an actress who is young and beautiful; who is both intelligent and sensitive; whose gestures never deteriorate from the plainest and most natural modes of simplicity, and yet manage to keep faith with the purest ideals of formal beauty." She possessed "a voice which never fails to thrill our souls with the passionate exaltation which we used, long ago, to capture from the great masters of the Golden Age; a voice which can weave a spell of magic about the plainest word in the plainest recitative; a voice whose compelling inflexions can subdue the most recalcitrant and obdurate hearts, and oblige them to share in the emotions which radiate from some great aria."

More specifically, Stendhal pointed to Pasta's exceptional vocal range, extend- ing from the contralto up through the soprano register, and her ability to move from one "voice" or type of vocal production to another:

I T A L I A N O P E R A 55

Figure 4.1: The soprano Giuditta Pasta in the title role of Rossini s Tancredi, 1822

Madame Pasta's incredible mastery of technique is revealed in the amaz- ing facility with which she alternates head-notes with chest-notes; she possesses to a superlative degree the art of producing an immense variety of charming and thrilling effects from the use of both voices. To heighten the tonal colouring of a melodic phrase, or to pass in a flash from one am- biance to another infinitely removed from it, she is accustomed to use a falsetto technique covering notes right down to the middle of her normal range; or else she may unconcernedly alternate falsetto notes with ordi- nary chest-notes. In all such displays of virtuosity, she apparently finds as little difficulty in securing a smooth transition between the two voices when she is employing notes in the middle of her normal chest-range, as she does when she is using the highest notes which she can produce.

From this description, we can understand why audiences flocked to hear a pri- ma donna like Pasta and why composers like Rossini were eager to have their music sung by her. At the height of her career, in 1830, Pasta could command a salary in Milan of 40,000 francs (equivalent to about $140,000 in today's dollars) for singing twelve performances in a season.

Of course, the ultimate control of opera lay in the hands of the public, who bought seats and came to the opera houses to listen, gamble, and socialize. In Italy the opera house was a microcosm of society, its audiences ranging from the aristocracy and upper middle classes to the working classes, the so-calledpopoZo minuto (little people), for whom only standing room was available. In order to get the maximum approval from this mixed crowd, singers would hire claques

5 6 C H A P T E R F O U R T H E O P E R A I N D U S T R Y

to cheer their performances. Rival impresarios or singers and their supporters might also organize an anticlaque to hiss and bring about the failure of an opera. After a successful first performance of a new opera, an enthusiastic audience might participate in a torchlight procession that would end beneath the com- poser's window. This kind of behavior will seem strange to the more restrained audiences for classical music in the twenty-first century. But it was part and parcel of the world of opera in the nineteenth century.

T H E C O M P O S E R S

Composers were at the bottom of the pecking order in the Italian opera industry of the early nineteenth century; only gradually did they begin to gain greater authority. Rossini was the first to assert ownership of his music, a claim that led to a confrontation with Barbaia. In 1823 Rossini declared, "I own all my original manuscripts, it being custom and law that a year after an opera is given, authors have the right to have their autographs back. Did I perhaps steal my originals from Barbaia's archive? I asked him for them, and he granted them to me; then why now does he reclaim them?"

In order to establish definitive texts, Rossini arranged for some of his scores to be printed—a practice rare in opera up to that point. He took up the battle not only with impresarios but also with singers, by writing out his own ornaments and insisting that the music be performed as notated. Stendhal objected to this practice, feeling that it sapped opera of Romantic spontaneity. "The revolution inaugurated by Rossini has killed the gift of originality in the singer," he wrote. "The mere habit of expecting to find everything already worked out, already noted down in black and white in the music from which he has to sing, is enough to kill his own inventiveness, to quench the last spark of initiative within him." This statement acknowledges an important turning point in operatic history, the increasing control by the composer over his own creation. (Not until the mid-twentieth century did opera singers rediscover the art of improvising ornamentation, an ability that was taken for granted in Rossini's day.)

In the following decade, Bellini would insist on writing only one opera per year, a condition that would have been unheard of earlier; he also demanded that he be paid enough to live comfortably off the proceeds from that single op- era. By the early 1840s, Giuseppe Verdi could virtually write his own contracts and set his own conditions. He would choose the librettist and topic; he would select the singers; he would orchestrate the score at his own pace, finishing it just before the dress rehearsal if necessary. In the 1850s Verdi went even fur- ther. He refused to deal directly with the impresario; instead, he sold his operas to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi of Milan, who then handled negotiations and enforced the composer's copyright. Verdi refused to allow any changes to his opera scores, and he held Ricordi responsible: "It is prohibited to subject the score in question to any addition, any mutilation, transposition... under threat

I T A L I A N O P E R A 5 7

of 1000 francs fine which I will extract through you from any theater where alterations are made to the score." Verdi was a great composer, as we will see in Chapter 9, but he was also a very shrewd businessman within the opera industry.

G I O A C H I N O R O S S I N I

Of the many Italian composers striving for success in this competitive environment, Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) stood out (Fig. 4.2). He dominated the world of Italian opera in the way Reethoven did that of German instrumental music. Rossini's musico-dramatic style appealed to the entire spectrum of the audience. He was able to fuse the comic pacing of Mozart's buffa operas with a more Romantic sense of harmony and orchestration.

It is again Stendhal who gives us perhaps the best description of the essential Rossini: "The most striking quality in Rossini's music is a peculiar verve, a cer- tain stirring rapidity which lightens the spirit. . . . And close upon the heels of this first quality comes a second, a kind of freshness, which evokes a smile of pleasure at every bar. As a result, almost any score seems dull and heavy beside one of Rossini." For Stendhal, these qualities were not an unmixed blessing. "Rossinian scores, full of arias and duets which, all too often, are no more than brilliant firework-displays for the concert-platform, demand no more than the slightest, the most careless effort of attention, for the listener to harvest all the pleasure which they may afford." In other words, Stendhal considered Rossini's music to be primarily a form of aural gratification.

Figure 4.2: Gioachino Rossini, composer of Italian bel canto opera, in 1819, after a drawing by Louis Dupre

5 8 C H A P T E R F O U R T H E O P E R A I N D U S T R Y

Yet one can turn Stendhal's valuation on its head, because the "firework-displays" are a key part of Rossini's aesthetic and originality. For him, melody and harmony contain their own expressive qualities apart from any specific dramatic representation. In that sense Rossini is a true Romantic, in light of the ideas discussed in Chapter 2. He wrote, "Music is a sublime art precisely because, not possessing ways and means of imitating the truth, it rises above and beyond everyday life into an ideal world."

The Italian term bel canto, or beautiful singing, has often been applied to the repertory of Rossini and his immediate successors. Although the phrase did not appear until about 1840, well after Rossini had stopped composing operas, bel canto had been in fact an ideal since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when opera composers and star singers collaborated to create compelling new vocal styles. By generating the musico-dramatic content of his operas mainly out of lyrical melody or "fireworks," Rossini is in an important sense the heir to that earlier tradition of bel canto.

Rossini, who worked in both comic and serious styles, revitalized Italian opera in the early nineteenth century, when many contemporaries perceived a decline in the great tradition of Mozart, Cimarosa, and Paisiello. His first two operas to win international attention were written in 1813 for Venice: the opera seria Tancredi and the opera buffa L'italiana inAlgeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers). Rossini began to close the gap between comic and serious opera in ways that would be critical for later composers. Pacing in the ensemble numbers of opera seria became more dynamic and fluid, as in buffa, while his comic operas took on the richly decorated melodic language of opera seria.

In 1815, Rossini was brought to Naples by Barbaia, and here he would reign until 1822, creating some of his finest works, including serious operas adapted from important literary sources, including Otello, based on Shakespeare (1816), and La donna del lago (The Lady of the Lake, 1819), based on a novel by the con- temporary Sir Walter Scott. In the early 1820s Rossini arrived in Paris, where he would eventually relocate, in large part because the conditions for opera com- posers were much preferable to Italy, thanks to large state subsidies, better con- tracts, and carefully prepared productions. Rossini adapted some of his earlier operas for the French stage and—most significantly—wrote several new operas to French librettos. The most famous of these was also his last opera, Guillaume Tell (William Tell, 1829), a historical work on a grand scale that pointed the way to a new style of French opera, to be discussed below.

After William Tell, Rossini gave up operatic composition entirely. Although he was only 37 and would live nearly forty years longer, he produced no more works for the musical stage. The reasons for Rossini's premature retirement re- main unclear, but factors include chronic illness and a changed political and cultural climate in France after the July Revolution of 1830, which overthrewthe Bourbon monarchy.

I T A L I A N O P E R A 59

Rossini's most enduring and popular opera, created for Rome in 1816, is II barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). This libretto by Cesare Sterbini was based on the first play in a trilogy by the French playwright Beaumarchais; the second play of the trilogy had been the basis of the libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte for Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in 1786. In Barber, the young Count Almaviva, with the help of the barber Figaro, is wooing the future countess, Rosina; Rosina is being carefully supervised by her guardian, Don Bartolo. The Barber of Seville had already become an operatic hit before Rossini, in a version composed by Paisiello in 1782 (discussed by John Rice in Music in the Eighteenth Century).

Rossini's Barber follows the basic structure of the comic operas of Mozart and other late-eighteenth-century composers. Each act consists of a succession of solo numbers, duets, and ensembles, separated by recitative that was accompanied by harpsichord or, more likely in Rossini's day, pianoforte. In a famous aria from Act 1, Una vocepocofa (A voice just now; Opera Sampler), Rosina reacts to hearing the offstage voice of her admirer, the Count, who is disguised as a student named Lindoro. The aria falls into two parts, slower (Andante) and faster (Moderate), a form that would become popular with Italian composers. The "verve" and "fresh- ness" to which Stendhal refers are amply evident in the Moderate, where a simple accompaniment, consisting of block harmonies or broken chords, underpins a lithe, wide-ranging vocal melody that features elegant ornamentation. Rosina is a role for which Giuditta Pasta was well known, and in the portion of Una voce shown in Example 4.1, we can well imagine how (as described by Stendhal) her "falsetto" would have rung out on the high, sustained G# in the first measure and how, five measures later, her rich chest voice would have tackled the Gtt two octaves below.

Example 4.1: Rossini, II barbiere di Siviglia, Act 1, aria, Una voce poco fa

Rosina f A tt.. /

-v v \i fo gui - dar_ V V V Ma se mi toe ca - no do-v'e il mio

[I let] myself be led. But if they touch my weaker side, I will be a viper

As in Mozart, each act of a Rossini comic opera ends with an ensemble fi- nale, a string of musical numbers lasting about twenty minutes and bringing various characters into complex and often hilarious interactions. The first- act finale in Barber is a classic of its type, with disguises, deception, and gen- eral confusion. The Count, pretending to be a drunken soldier, slips Rosina

60 C H A P T E R F O U R T H E O P E R A I N D U S T R Y

a love letter. When her guardian Bartolo demands to see it, she substitutes a laundry list. An argument begins and the police arrive to investigate. As an officer is about to arrest him, the Count whispers his identity and is released. The other characters are frozen in astonishment at this turn of events. Rossini moves suddenly from the prevailing key of C major to a remote Al> major (a Romantic type of harmonic shift) and begins a slow, imitative sextet. Rosina sings a melody that is taken up in succession by the Count and Bartolo, and to which three other characters add counterpoint. The result is a polyphonic snap- shot of everyone's consternation (Ex. 4.2; Bartolo has the melody), one that would influence later composers (as we will see in Verdi's Rigoletto in Chapter 9). After the sextet, Rossini breaks the spell with a return to C major and a headlong stretta or rapid conclusion in which all the characters onstage confess that their brains are "reduced to madness."

Example 4.2: Rossini, II barbiere di Siviglia.^ct 1 finale Rosina

do ed im - mo - bi le co - me u

I/They hardly have breath to breathe. Cold and motionless like a statue.

GAETANO D O N I Z E T T I A N D V I N C E N Z O B E L L I N I

In serious operas, which dominate his output from about 1817 on, Rossini creates large, coherent musical-dramatic units around the pairing of recitative-aria or recitative-duet. These innovations were carried forward in the next generation by Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) and Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835), both of whom focused most of their efforts on serious opera. Donizetti, a prolific composer, wrote about 75 operas. As with opera seria of the previous century, some had his- torical plots, most notably his trilogy of operas that chronicle the English royal court from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I: Anna Bolena (Anne Boleyn, 1830), Maria Stu- arda (Mary Stuart, 1835), and .Roberto Devereux (Robert Devereaux, 1837).

Donizetti's best-known opera, Lucia di Lammermoor (Lucy of Lammermoor, 1835), places him firmly in the culture of Romanticism. Its libretto by Salvadore Cammarano was adapted from a novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, published in 1819 by Sir Walter Scott. Scott's novels, involving family or heroic dramas played out in his native Scotland, were enormously popular and were translated into

R O B E R T S C H U M A N N A N D T H E L I E D 1 0 9

There is no explicit story behind Chopin's Fourth Ballade, and the trans- formations of his main theme are very different from the explicitly program- driven modifications to which Berlioz subjects his idee fixe in the Symphonie fantastique. Yet Chopin's music "speaks" as powerfully as that of any of his con- temporaries. It is as if with the increasingly polyphonic versions of the main theme Chopin is telling us that musical structures can become as complex as life itself, without ever losing their appeal or comprehensibility.

ROBERT SCHUMANN AND THE LIED

Finally in this chapter we turn to another way in which the generation of the 1830s made music speak—through song. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, the lied emerged as an important genre in Bomanticism because of the strong affinity of some composers for high-quality lyric poetry. In the hands of Schubert, the lied developed into something more than the sum of its parts, words and mu- sic. The poet set most often by Schubert was Goethe, the leading figure of late Classicism. At the very end of his life Schubert turned to poems by the early Romantic Heinrich Heine, who would become the preferred poet of Schumann and also popular among other composers. As suggested in Chapter 2, Heine's poetry captured a new subjectivity, a more personal style that appealed to a younger generation.

Many Bomantic composers contributed to the lied. Mendelssohn wrote about 70 solo songs, drawing on a wide range of poets including Goethe, Schiller, and Heine. Liszt composed about the same number, in a variety of languages includ- ing German, French, Italian, and Hungarian. Chopin did not show much interest in the genre, leaving only about 15 songs, set to Polish texts. In France, Berlioz created a small number of important melodies (the analogue to lieder), including the first orchestral song cycle, Les nuits d'ete (The Nights of Summer, 1841).

Among his contemporaries, Schumann emerged as the greatest and most prolific composer of lieder, one who lifted the genre to new levels. Schumann wrote almost 250 solo songs, over half of them within his so-called Liederjahr (Year of Song), 1840. This was the year in which he was finally able to marry Clara Wieck, overcoming a long process of obstruction by Clara's father. The happy event released a flood of creativity in Schumann, mainly in the form of songs.

Among the works of 1840 are several song cycles analogous in scope and ambition to Schumann's piano cycles of the 1830s, and also worthy as successors to Schubert's song cycles Die schone Mullerin and Winterreise, discussed briefly in Chapter 3. Schumann wrote two cycles on poems of Heine: the Liederkreis (Song Cycle), Op. 24, and Dichterliebe (Poet's Love), Op. 48. Two other important song cycles of 1840 aretheliederfcreis, Op. 39, set to the poetry of Joseph Eichendorff; and Frauenliebe und -leben (A Woman's Love and Life), Op. 42, which sets the poems of Adalbert von Chamisso.

no C H A P T E R S I X M A K I N G M U S I C S P E A K In Chapter 2 we looked briefly at the first song of Dichterliebe, emphasizing

how Schumann creates a musical language of longing and desire analogous to that of Heine's compact lyrics and Romantic in spirit (see Anthology 10). Schumann selected 16 poems from a much larger collection by Heine, Lyrisches Intermezzo (Lyrical Intermezzo). His song cycle traces a range of emotions in the protago- nist, from tenderness, to excitement, to frustration and bitterness at rejection by his beloved—and finally to a kind of defiant acceptance, when in the last song he metaphorically puts his songs in a coffin and tosses them into the Rhine River, thus burying his "love and pain." Yet the listener learns that moving on is not so easy. For after the final words are sung comes a long, lyrical postlude for piano, bringing back material from an earlier song (No. 12) that communicates more longing and regret than angry resignation.

Dichterliebe has no clear narrative, nor even a linear progression of feelings. As with the piano cycles discussed above—and as with much of the music examined in this chapter—Schumann aims not to tell a story but to portray a series of "states of the soul." Nowhere has Romantic irony been better captured in music. As we saw in Chapter 2, Schumann is responsive to the frequent moments in Heine's verses where the poet is saying one thing but clearly meaning something else. Irony can take a form as in the song Bin /tingling liebt ein Madchen (A Boy Loves a Girl, No. 11), when the poet bitterly reports the story of a youth who loves a girl who loves an- other boy, who in turn marries a different girl. Schumann creates a melody and accompaniment that are on the surface simple and folklike, with mainly tonic and dominant harmonies (Ex. 6.6). The music seems thus to be in ironic contrast

Example 6.6: Schumann, Dichterliebe, Op. 48, No. 11, Bin Jtingling liebt ein Madchen, mm. 5—12

iP* Bin

V

Lp — » — • — p — Jung - ling liebt ein

H L^i — I

-j Mad

— L^1 —

"̂ P ' chen, die hat e

— f

4^ b^=

p r — f—i — LI \i — i - nen An - dern er - wahlt, der

1 ,,|f i . J =^

1 1 J ^^T

J i J> * "^

l^^l., n H

JsL- Lf — L

An - d're liebt ei - ne

L . I.J

Lr

\4= An

5 — I d're, und

^̂ ' ' P P P u ^= hat sich mit die - ser ver - mahlt.

^

-r r ri~ iT =t — * — tr-

' r A boy loves a girl, who has chosen another. The other loves another and has married her.

FOR F U R T H E R R E A D I N G 111

to the text. Yet at another level, the patterns of sharply syncopated accents, the fragmentary musical texture, and the thumping, angular bass line tell us that all is not right. The yearning postlude of the final song (No. 16) presents a still dif- ferent instance of musical irony in that the composer reveals to us something that the protagonist may not even be aware of—the desire he still feels for his beloved.

That within one song cycle Schumann can create musical languages for so many emotional states shows his unparalleled ability to communicate through music. As we have seen in this chapter, he was one of a group of composers in the years after 1830 to achieve that goal in a wide array of forms, including pro- gram music, character pieces for piano, and lieder. Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Chopin all were composing in a musical culture which, after the first flush of Romanticism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, became increasingly concerned with what music could express and how it could do so. In the next chapter we will see that concerns about music's relationship to the individual and to the world did not go away, but that new ways of explain- ing and negotiating it developed around the middle of the nineteenth century.

FOR FURTHER READING

The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, ed. Halina Goldberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) Berlioz, Hector, Fantastic Symphony, ed. Edward T. Cone, Norton Critical Score (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971)

Dahlhaus, Carl, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989)

Daverio, John, Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age" (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)

Franz Liszt and His World, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) Hanslick, Eduard, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957)

Parakilas, James, Songs without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1992) Will, Richard, The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

[la] Additional resources available atwwnorton.com/studyspace