music
YANGYANG
kerman7e_ch17earlyromantics-1.pptChapter 17
The Early Romantics
The Lied
- German lied = song
- Piano accompaniment
- Romantic poetry
- Intimate mood
*
Strophic Songs
- Use the same music for all stanzas
- Often used when stanzas are all similar in construction
- Difficult to create variety
*
Through-Composed Songs
- Use different music for each stanza
- Often used for poems with frequent changes of mood or voice
- Difficult to create unity
*
Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
- Earliest (and possibly greatest) master of the Lied
- Born and trained in Vienna
- Supported by teaching, publications, and friends
- Prolific—wrote nearly 700 songs in addition to symphonies, sonatas, etc.
- Died in a typhoid epidemic
*
Schubert, “Erlkönig”
- Story song on a ballad poem by Goethe
- Eight-stanza poem with many voices
- Through-composed setting
- Themes of death and the supernatural
*
The Music of the Erlking
- Fast triplets suggest hoofbeats
- Father’s music is low, gruff, stable
- Son’s music is high, frantic, unstable
- Demon’s music is ominously sweet
- Tension lets up as they reach home
- Stark recitative announces boy’s death
*
The Song Cycle
- A group of songs with a common theme
- Sometimes based on ready-made group of poems
- Unified cycle more impressive than single miniatures
*
Robert Schumann
(1810–1856)
- Studied for career as piano virtuoso
- Married his teacher’s daughter after court battle
- Wrote piano music, songs, works for orchestra, and chamber music
- Founded The New Music Journal
- Attempted suicide; died in an asylum
*
“Im wunderschönen
Monat Mai”
- The first song in Dichterliebe
- Strophic
- Piano Effects
- flowing interlude with some dissonant chords
- the end leaves you hanging, no real cadence
(longing and desire)
*
“Die alten, bösen Lieder”
- The last song in Dichterliebe
- Through-composed
- Mood change in stanza 6- morbid end
- Ends with long piano coda
*
The Character Piece
- Short piano pieces (miniatures)
- Portray a distinct mood or character
- Simple, sectional forms
- Thematic unity
- Recurring motives
- Similarity of mood
*
Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849)
- Born near Warsaw; settled in Paris
- Pianist of miraculous ability and delicacy
- Composed almost exclusively for piano
- Frail health—died of tuberculosis at age 39
*
Chopin, Nocturne in F-sharp
- Nocturnes (“night pieces”)—various moods
- Singing quality, melodic decorations
- Relaxed rubato, subtle chromaticism
- Form uses repetition, contrast, return (a a´ b c a´´ coda)
*
Program Music
- Instrumental music associated with poems, stories, etc.
- Intimately tied with nonmusical ideas
- Different genres
- Concert overture
- Program symphony
- Symphonic poem
*
The Concert Overture
- A single-movement orchestral work for concert performance
- Resembles opera overture without an opera
- Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Hebrides Overture
*
The Program Symphony
- The Romantic era’s most “grandiose” orchestral genre
- An entire symphony with a program
- Each movement tells part of the story
- “Story” often published in the program
*
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)
- Son of a country doctor in France
- Left medical school for Paris Conservatory
- Made living writing about music
- Wrote unprecedented, ambitious program symphonies
- Toured as conductor of his own music
*
Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique
- Program symphony in five movements
- Shocking autobiographical fantasy
- Inspired by his unrequited love for Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson
- Unprecedented originality
- Imaginative colors drawn from huge orchestra
- Use of idée fixe in every movement
*
Movement Format of Symphonie Fantastique
- Related to Classical symphony format
- Middle two movements reversed
- Movements IV and V unprecedented
- I: Fast tempo, sonata form, slow intro
- II: Moderate tempo, triple meter; waltz
- III: The slow movement
- IV: Moderate tempo; a march
- V: Fast tempo, free form follows story
*
Symphonie Fantastique
The Program of the Symphony
- A young musician of unhealthy sensibility and passionate imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. Too weak to kill him, the dose of the drug plunges him into a heavy sleep attended by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, emotions, and memories are transformed in his diseased mind into musical thoughts and images. Even the woman he loves becomes a melody to him, an idée fixe as it were, that he finds and hears everywhere.
Idée Fixe
- “Fixed idea,” a term popular in medical literature of the day
- Theme represents the composer’s beloved (Smithson)
- Recurs in all five movements
- Symbolizes each appearance of the beloved
*
The Program: I
Movement 1: Reveries, Passions
- First he recalls the soul-sickness, the aimless passions, the baseless depressions and elations that he felt before first seeing his loved one; then the volcanic love that she instantly inspired in him; his jealous furies; his return to tenderness; his religious consolations.
*
The Program: II
Movement 2: A Ball
- He encounters his beloved at a ball, in the midst of a noisy, brilliant party.
*
The Program: III
Movement 3: Scene in the Country
- On a summer evening in the country, he hears two shepherds piping in dialogue. The pastoral duet, the location, the light rustling of trees stirred gently by the wind, some newly conceived grounds for hope—all this gives him a feeling of unaccustomed calm. But she appears again. . . . What if she is deceiving him?
*
The Program: IV
Movement 4: March to the Scaffold
- He dreams he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. A march accompanies the procession, now gloomy and wild, now brilliant and grand. Finally the idée fixe appears for a moment, to be cut off by the fall of the ax.
*
The Program: V
Movement 5: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
- He finds himself at a Witches’ Sabbath: unearthly sounds, groans, shrieks of laughter, distant cries echoed by other cries. The beloved’s melody is heard, but it has lost its character of nobility and timidity. It is she who comes to the Sabbath! At her arrival, a roar of joy. She joins in the devilish orgies. A funeral knell; burlesque of the Dies irae.
*
Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, V
- The most audacious movement yet
- Orchestral sound effects reign
- Idée fixe now treated as vulgar parody
- On piccolo clarinet with carnival ornaments
- His beloved is the witches’ guest of honor
*
New effects
- Col legno- striking the strings with the wooden backside of the bow
- Used in Mvt 5 to represent the witches gathering their brooms for flying
- Smear (glissando)- smooth, chromatic descending line for spooky effect at beginning of Mvt 5
- Dies Irae- chant melody used for its association with death
Romantic Features of Symphonie Fantastique
- “Grandiose” in scope and scale
- Program symphony for large orchestra
- Blurs the lines between music, literature, theater, and autobiography
- Cyclic work, unified by idée fixe
- Fascination with supernatural, macabre
- New orchestral colors, expressive effects, unusual forms
- Only 39 years after Haydn’s Symphony No. 95!
*
Key Terms
- Lied (plural: lieder)
- Through-composed
- Strophic
- Song cycle
- Character pieces
- Nocturnes
- Program music
- Concert Overture
- Program symphony
- Idée fixe
- Dies irae
