Module 4
Early Romanticism
a. Romantic Inspiration, Romantic Creativity
Romanticism is often defined as a revolt against the Classical adherence to reason
and tradition. Whereas artists of the eighteenth century sought to achieve unity, order,
and balance, those of the nineteenth century leaned toward self-expression, striving to
communicate with passion no matter what bizarre imbalance might result. If Classical
artists drew inspiration from the monuments of ancient Greece and Rome, those of the
Romantic era looked to the human imagination and the wonders of nature. The Romantic
artist exalted instinctive feelings—not those of the masses, but individual, personal ones.
As the American Romantic poet Walt Whitman said, “I celebrate myself, and sing
myself.”
If a single feeling or sentiment pervaded the Romantic era, it was love. Indeed,
“romance” is at the very heart of the word romantic. The loves of Romeo and Juliet (as
seen in the opening photo) and Tristan and Isolde, for example, captured the public’s
imagination in the Romantic era. The endless pursuit of an unattainable love became an
obsession that, when expressed as music, produced the sounds of longing and yearning
heard in so many Romantic works.
Nature, too, worked her magic on the minds of the Romantics. Beethoven
proclaimed in 1821, “I perform most faithfully the duties that Humanity, God, and Nature
enjoin upon me.” In his “Pastoral” Symphony (Symphony No. 6), the first important
Romantic “nature piece,” Beethoven seeks to capture both nature’s tranquil beauty and its
destructive fury. Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, Schumann’s Forest Scenes, and Strauss’s
“Alpine” Symphony are just a few of the many musical works that continued this
tradition.
Finally, whenever the Romantics embraced subjects like love or nature, or any
other, moderation was in short supply. Despair, frenzy, exaltation, and excess of all sorts
mark the music and poetry of the Romantic era, as well as the lives of the artists who
created it. In Romantic music, for example, the range of expression was broadened by
means of “expression marks,” such as espressivo (expressively), dolente (sadly), presto
furioso (fast and furious), con forza e passione (with force and passion), misterioso
(mysteriously), and maestoso (majestically). Not only do these directives explain to the
performer how a passage ought to be played, they also reveal what the composer wished
the listener to feel while experiencing the music.
b. The Musician as “Artist,” Music as “Art”
We owe to the Romantics the notion that music is more than mere entertainment
and the composer more than a hired employee. Bach had been a civil servant, and Haydn
and Mozart (mostly) musical domestics in the homes of the great lords of Europe. But
Beethoven began to break the chains of servitude. He was the first to demand, and
receive, the respect due a great creative spirit. For the composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886),
who deeply admired Beethoven, the duty of the artist was nothing less than “the
upbringing of mankind.” Never was the position of the creative musician loftier than in
the mid-nineteenth century.
Just as the musician was elevated from servant to artist, so the music that he or
she produced was transformed from entertainment to art. Classical music had been
created for the immediate gratification of patron and audience, with little thought given to
its lasting value. With the Romantics came the advent of “high art.” Symphonies,
quartets, and piano sonatas sprang to life, not to give immediate pleasure to listeners, but
to satisfy a deep-seated creative urge within the composer. They became extensions of
the artist’s inner personality. These works might not be understood by the creator’s
contemporaries, but they would be understood by posterity, by future generations of
listeners. The idea of “art for art’s sake”—art free of all immediate functional concerns—
was born of the Romantic spirit.
Why is everyone so serious in a concert hall? Blame it on the Romantics. Prior to
1800, a concert was as much a social event as a musical experience. People talked, drank,
ate, played cards, flirted, and wandered about. Dogs ran freely on the ground floor, and
armed guards roamed the theater to maintain at least some order. When people turned to
the music, they were loud and demonstrative. They hummed along with the melody and
tapped the beat to music they liked. If a performance went well, people applauded, not
only at the ends of the pieces, but also between movements. Sometimes they demanded
an immediate encore; at other times, they hissed their disapproval.
Around 1840, however, a sudden hush came over the concert hall—rendering it
more like a church or temple. With the revered figure of the Romantic artistcomposer
now before them, the audience sat in respectful silence. A concertgoer who was not
distracted socially became a listener who was engaged emotionally. More was expected
of the audience, because symphonies and sonatas were now longer and more complex.
But the audience, in turn, expected more from the music. The concert was no longer an
entertaining event but an emotionally satisfying encounter that would leave the attentive
listener exhausted yet somehow purified and uplifted by the artistic experience.
Romanticism has kept its grip on the Western imagination. Belief in the artist as
superhero, reverence for the object as a “work of art,” and expectations of silence and
even formal dress at a concert all developed in the Romantic period. What’s more, the
notion that a particular group of pieces merited repeated hearings gained currency at this
time. Prior to 1800, almost all music was disposable: It was written as entertainment for
the moment and then forgotten. But the generation following Beethoven began to
consider his finest symphonies, concertos, and quartets, as well as those of Mozart and
Haydn, as worthy of preservation and repeated performance. These and the best works of
succeeding generations came to form a canon—indeed, a museum—of classical music,
and they constitute the core of today’s concert repertoire. The term classical music itself
was a creation of the early nineteenth century. Thus, what we think about the composer,
how we view the work of art, what we can expect to hear at a concert, and even how we
dress and behave during the performance are not eternal ideals, with us since time
immemorial, but, rather, values created during the Romantic period.
c. The Style of Romantic Music
Why is film music so often written in the Romantic style? Why are collections of
“classical favorites” or “classical moods” filled mostly with music, not of the Classical
period, but of the Romantic era? In brief, it’s because Romantic music hits an emotional
“sweet spot.” We love its long, surging melodies and rich harmonies— rendered all the
more powerful when delivered by the large and colorful Romantic orchestra. The sound
is lush, often sensuous, with little of the aggressive dissonance of more modern music.
Because Romantic music is luxuriant and consonant in tone, our psyches cannot resist the
Romantic pull.
In truth, however, the works of Romantic composers represent not so much a
revolution against earlier Classical ideals as an evolution beyond them. Composers still
wrote symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and sonatas in the Romantic period. But the
symphony now grows in length, embodying the most extreme range of expression, while
the concerto becomes increasingly virtuosic, as a heroic soloist does battle against an
orchestral mass. Romantic composers introduced no new musical forms and only two
new genres: the art song and the tone poem. Instead, they made music more sonorous,
more colorful, and, in some cases, more bizarre.
Romantic melodies move beyond the neat, symmetrical units (two plus two, four
plus four) inherent in the Classical style, becoming longer, rhythmically more flexible,
and increasingly irregular in shape. At the same time, they continue a trend that had
developed in the late eighteenth century, in which themes become vocal in conception,
more singable or lyrical. Countless melodies of Schubert, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky have
been turned into popular songs and movie themes— Romantic music is perfectly suited
to the romance of film—because these melodies are so profoundly expressive. Example
16.1 shows the well-known theme from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. As the brackets
indicate, it rises passionately and falls, only to rise higher again, a total of seven times, on
the way to a fortissimo climax. If we think of music as the sound track for our life, we
don’t do our laundry to such Romantic melodies; we fall in love!
Part of the emotional intensity of Romantic music was generated by a new, more
colorful harmony. Classical music had, in the main, made use of chords built on only the
seven notes of the major or minor scale. Romantic composers went further by creating
chromatic harmony, adding chords constructed on the five remaining notes (the
chromatic notes) within the full twelve-note chromatic scale. This gave more colors to
their harmonic palette, allowing for the rich, sensuous sounds we associate with
Romantic music shows a passage with quick-changing chromatic chords, found in a
nocturne of Chopin. The many sharps and flats signal the twisting chromatic movement.
Chromatic harmony opened up the tonal landscape, encouraging bold shifts
between distant chords. Such striking harmonic juxtapositions allowed composers to
express a wider range of feeling. In, from another nocturne of Chopin, a chord with four
sharps jumps to one with four flats! While such a startling jump violates all the rules of
eighteenth-century harmony, our modern ears, accustomed to more bracing harmonies,
hear the shift only as pleasing.
Finally, nineteenth-century composers gave a “romantic feel” to music by means
of dissonance. In fact, longing, pain, and suffering traditionally have been expressed in
music by dissonance. According to the traditional rules of composition, all musical
dissonance must resolve to consonance. But the longer the dissonance holds, the greater
the pain and the desire for resolution. Delaying resolution intensifies feelings of anxiety,
longing, and searching, all sentiments appropriate to music that deals with love or
loneliness. The very end of Gustav Mahler’s orchestral song Ich bin der Welt abhanden
gekommen (I Am Lost to the World) offers a double dissonance–consonance resolution.
Violins and then English horn (low oboe) hold a dissonant pitch (see arrows) that
resolves downward (see asterisks), dying away (morendo) to the final consonant tonic.
In keeping with an age that glorified personal freedom and tolerated eccentric
behavior, tempo in Romantic music was cut loose from the constraints of a regular beat.
The term coined for this was rubato (in Italian, literally, “robbed”), a tempo mark that the
composer wrote into the score for the benefit of the performer. A performer playing
tempo rubato “stole” some time here and gave it back there, moving faster or slower so as
to create an intensely personal performance. This free approach to tempo was often
reinforced by fluctuating dynamic levels that likewise exaggerated the flow of the music.
Whatever excesses might result could be excused under the license of artistic freedom.
d. Bigger Is Better: Greater Length, More Volume and Color
Arts and ideas almost always march in step, and this is true of the notion of length
as experienced by the Romantics. Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species, 1859)
posited that the earth was not merely 7,000 years old, as the Bible suggested, but several
million. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) runs 1,463 pages in the original edition, a
scant 8 pages more than Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869). And look again at Caspar
David Friedrich’s The Dreamer, in which vines overgrowing the ruins of a medieval
church suggest the slow, yet inexorable passing of the ages.
Time also passes more slowly in the music of the Romantic era—or at least its
pieces last longer. Mozart’s G minor symphony (1788) runs about twenty minutes,
depending on the tempo of the conductor. But Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830)
takes nearly fifty-five minutes, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (1894) lasts nearly an hour
and a half. Perhaps the longest of all musical works is Richard Wagner’s four-opera Ring
cycle (1853–1876), which runs some seventeen hours over the course of four evenings—
the nineteenth-century equivalent of a miniseries.
Music was getting not only longer but also louder. Whereas the range of music in
the Classical era was only pp (pianissimo) to ff (fortissimo), now exaggerated
“hypermarks” such as pppp and ffff appear. To create sounds as loud as ffff, a larger
orchestra and bigger piano were needed. Technology soon obliged to provide them.
Does music change technology, or does technology change music? History says
the latter. The advent of the phonograph record (1877) ended the monopoly of the live
performance; the fidelity wasn’t as good as live music, but millions of new listeners
would soon enjoy it nonetheless. In the 1940s, the advent of the electric guitar sounded
the death knell of swing music and made head-banging rock music possible decades later.
In our day, the digital delivery of sound on YouTube and other streaming sites has
changed how we receive music as well as its quality. And, just as the digital revolution
has altered our contemporary musical landscape, so did technological advancements lead
to the modern symphony orchestra.
In many ways, the symphony orchestra that we hear today was a product of the
nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. Around 1830, several existing orchestral
instruments received mechanical enhancements. The wood of the flute, for example, was
replaced by silver, and the instrument was given a new fingering mechanism that added
to its agility and made it easier to play in tune. Similarly, the trumpet and French horn
were provided with valves that improved technical facility and accuracy of pitch in all
keys. The French horn, in particular, became an object of special affection during the
Romantic period. Its rich, dark tone and its traditional association with the hunt of the
forest—and, by extension, all of nature—made it the Romantic instrument par excellence.
Even the traditional violin was altered, its fingerboard lengthened and its animal-gut
strings replaced with metal wire. This gave the instrument a brighter, more penetrating
sound.
Entirely new instruments were added to the Romantic orchestra as well.
Beethoven had expanded its range both higher and lower. In his famous Symphony No.
5, he called for a piccolo (a high flute), trombones, and a contrabassoon (a bass bassoon)
—the first time any of these had been heard in a symphony. In 1830, Hector Berlioz went
even further, requiring an early form of the tuba, an English horn (low oboe), a cornet,
and two harps in his Symphonie fantastique.
Berlioz, a composer who personified the Romantic spirit, had a typically
grandiose notion of what the ideal symphony orchestra should contain. He wanted no
fewer than 467 performers, including 120 violins, 40 violas, 45 cellos, 35 double basses,
and 30 harps! Such a gigantic instrumental force was never actually assembled, but
Berlioz’s utopian vision indicates the direction in which Romantic composers were
headed. By the second half of the nineteenth century, orchestras with nearly 100 players
were not uncommon. Compare, in Table 16.1, for example, the number and variety of
instruments required for a typical eighteenth-century performance of Mozart’s Symphony
in G minor (1788) with the symphony orchestra needed for Berlioz’s Symphonie
fantastique (1830) and for Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (1888; first performed
1889; published 1906). In the course of 100 years, the orchestra had more than tripled in
size. But it went no further: The symphony orchestra that we hear today is essentially that
of the late nineteenth century.
Our reaction to the Romantic orchestra today, however, is very different from the
response of nineteenth-century listeners. Modern ears have been desensitized by an
overexposure to electronically amplified sound, but imagine the impact of an orchestra of
100 players before the days of amplification. Apart from the military cannon and the
steam engine, the nineteenthcentury orchestra produced the loudest sonic level of any
human contrivance. The big sound—and the big contrasts—of the nineteenth-century
orchestra were new and startling, and audiences packed everlarger concert halls to hear
these impressive “special effects.”
As the streets of London became more congested with wagons in the
midnineteenth century, traffic cops appeared, waving red and green flags, and then
lanterns at night. So, too, as the Romantic symphony orchestra became larger and more
complex, a musical “traffic cop” was needed: the conductor waving a baton. In Mozart’s
day, the leader of the orchestra was one of the performers, either a keyboardist or the first
violinist, who led by moving his head and body. But Beethoven, at least toward the end
of his life, stood before the orchestra with his back to the audience and waved his hands
“like a madman,” contemporaries said, gesturing how the music should go. Conductors
might also lead with a rolled-up piece of paper, a violin bow, a handkerchief, or a
wooden baton, the chosen object intending to clarify the meter and speed of the beat.
Sometimes the leader merely banged the beat on a music stand. Gradually during the
nineteenth century, however, this leader evolved from a mere time beater into an
interpreter, and sometimes a dictator, of the musical score. The modern conductor had
arrived.
Appropriate for an era that glorified the individual, the nineteenth century was the
age of the solo virtuoso. Of course, instrumental virtuosos had been on the scene before:
Bach on the organ and Mozart on the piano, to name just two. Now, though, many
musicians began to expend enormous energy striving to raise their performing skills to
unprecedented heights. Pianists and violinists, in particular, spent long hours practicing
technical exercises—arpeggios, tremolos, trills, and scales played in thirds, sixths, and
octaves—to develop showstopping hand speed on their instrument. Naturally, some of
what these wizards played was lacking in musical substance, little more than tasteless
displays of showmanship designed to appeal immediately to the audiences that packed
the ever-larger concert halls.
Franz Liszt (1811–1886) sometimes played at the keyboard with a lighted cigar
between his fingers. The Italian Niccolò Paganini secretly tuned the four strings of his
violin in ways that would allow him to negotiate with ease extraordinarily difficult,
rollercoasterlike passages. So great was his fame that Paganini became the “celebrity
spokesperson” of the day, his picture appearing on napkins, ties, pipes, billiard cues, and
powder boxes. Celebrity marketing had arrived, and it started with virtuoso musicians.
e. Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797. Among the great Viennese masters
—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler— only he was native-born
to the city. Because his father was a schoolteacher, young Franz was groomed for that
profession. Yet the boy’s obvious musical talent made it imperative that he also take
music lessons; his father taught him to play the violin, and his older brother, the piano. At
the age of eleven, Schubert was admitted as a choirboy in the emperor’s chapel, a group
that is still well known today as the Vienna Boys’ Choir.
After his voice changed in 1812, young Franz left the court chapel and enrolled in
a teachers’ college. He had been spared compulsory military service because he was
below the minimum height of five feet, and his sight was so poor that he was compelled
to wear the spectacles that are now familiar from his portraits. By 1815, he had become a
teacher at his father’s primary school. But he found teaching demanding and tedious, and
so, after three unpleasant years, Schubert quit his “day job” to give himself over wholly
to music.
“You lucky fellow; I really envy you! You live a life of sweet, precious freedom,
can give free rein to your musical genius, can express your thoughts in any way you
like.” This was Schubert’s brother’s view of the composer’s newfound freedom. But, as
many Romantics would discover, the reality was harsher than the ideal. Aside from some
small income that he earned from the sale of a few songs, he lacked financial support. For
most of his adult life, Schubert lived like a bohemian, moving from café to café and
helped along by the generosity of his friends, on whose couches he slept when he was
broke. A true Romantic, Schubert had traded security for artistic opportunity.
Attending Schubert’s decision was a broader change in how and where audiences
heard music. As he was reaching artistic maturity, the era of the great aristocratic salon
(entertainment hall) was drawing to an end, its role now filled by the middle-class parlor
or living room. Here, in less formal surroundings, groups of men and women with a
common interest in music, novels, drama, or poetry would meet to read and discuss the
latest fashions in these arts. The gatherings at which Schubert appeared, and at which
only his compositions were played, were called Schubertiads by his friends. In small,
purely private assemblies such as these, rather than in large public concerts, most of
Schubert’s best songs had their first performance.
In 1822, disaster befell the composer: Schubert contracted syphilis, a venereal
disease that, before the advent of antibiotics, was tantamount to a death sentence.
Although he completed a great C minor symphony (1828), a more lyrical one in B minor
—appropriately called the “Unfinished Symphony”—was left incomplete at his death.
When Beethoven died in 1827, Schubert served as a torchbearer at the funeral. The next
year, he, too, was dead, the youngest of the great composers. The epitaph for his
tombstone reads, “The art of music here buried a rich treasure, but even fairer hopes.”
Although Schubert composed symphonies, piano sonatas, and even operas in the
course of his brief career, he was known in his day almost exclusively as a writer of art
songs (Lieder). Indeed, he composed more than 600 works in this genre, many of which
are minor masterpieces. In a few cases, Schubert chose to set several texts together in a
series. In so doing, he created what is called a song cycle (something akin to today’s
“concept album”)—a tightly structured group of individual songs that tell a story or treat
a single theme. Die schöne Müllerin (The Pretty Maid of the Mill; twenty songs) and
Winterreise (Winter Journey; twenty-four songs), both of which relate the sad
consequences of unrequited love, are Schubert’s two great song cycles.
Like Mozart, Schubert was a child prodigy. To get an idea of his precocious
talent, we need only listen to his song Erlkönig (Elf King), written when he was just
eighteen years old (see Listening Guide). According to a friend’s account, Schubert was
pacing back and forth, reading a book of poetry by the renowned Johann von Goethe.
Suddenly, he reached for a pen and began writing furiously, in one creative act, setting all
of Goethe’s ballad, Erlkönig, to music. A folk ballad is a dramatic, usually tragic, story
told by a narrator (today’s “country music ballad” is a distant descendant of such
European folk ballads). In Goethe’s Erlkönig, an evil Elf King lures a young boy to his
death, for legend had it that whomever the Elf King touched would die. This tale
exemplifies the Romantic fascination with the supernatural and the macabre.
The opening line of the poem sets the frightening nocturnal scene: “Who rides so
late through night and wind?” With his feverish son cradled in his arms, a father rides at
breakneck speed to an inn to seek help. Schubert captures both the general sense of terror
in the scene and the detail of the galloping horse; he creates an accompanying figure in
the piano that pounds on relentlessly, just as fast as the pianist can make it go.
The boy’s cry is heard again and again in the course of the song, each time at a
successively higher pitch and with increasingly dissonant harmonies. In this way, the
music mirrors the boy’s growing terror. The father tries to calm the boy in low tones that
are steady, stable, and repetitive. The Elf King at first charms in sweet, consonant tones
but then threatens in dissonant ones, as seduction gives way to abduction. Thus, each of
the three characters of the story is portrayed with distinct musical qualities (although all
are sung by a single voice). This is musical characterization at its finest; the melody and
accompaniment not only support the text but also intensify and enrich it. Suddenly the
end is reached: The hand of the Elf King (Death) has touched his victim. Anxiety gives
way to sorrow as the narrator announces in increasingly somber (minor) tones, “But in
his arms, his child was dead!”
Just as the tension in Goethe’s poem rises incessantly from the beginning to the
very end, Schubert’s music unfolds continually, without significant repetition. Such a
musical composition featuring ever-changing melodic and harmonic material is called
through-composed, and Schubert’s Erlkönig, accordingly, is termed a through-composed
art song. For lyric poems, as opposed to dramatic ballads like Erlkönig, however, strophic
form is usually preferred. In strophic form, a single poetic mood or emotion is maintained
from one stanza, or strophe, of the text to the next, and the music is repeated. Most pop
songs are written in strophic form, each strophe consisting of a verse and chorus. For a
very familiar example of a nineteenth-century art song in strophic form, revisit the
famous Brahms Lullaby.
f. Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896)
The nineteenth century had few “power couples” because, for the most part, there
were few woman with any power (see box, “Where Were the Women?”). One exception,
however, was the duo of Robert and Clara Schumann. We will get to know Robert bett.
But when Clara met Robert in 1830, he was a nobody and she a star. Robert Schumann
had just dropped out of law school and moved to Leipzig, Germany, to begin the study of
piano under the tutelage of the renowned Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873). Wieck just
happened to have a beautiful daughter, Clara, a child piano prodigy, who at the age of
eleven had already turned heads in Paris. Within a few years, Robert and Clara had fallen
in love; he was then twenty-four, she fifteen. But father Friedrich adamantly opposed
their marriage, and in those days a girl needed her father’s consent. Robert seemed to
have no prospects, especially after an injury to his right hand had ended all hopes of a
career as a concert pianist. Only after a protracted legal battle and a court decree did
Robert and Clara wed, on September 12, 1840. The day Robert Schumann won his court
victory for the hand of Clara, he wrote in his diary, “Happiest day and end of the struggle.
But their struggles had just begun. Clara Wieck Schumann had been one of the
great piano virtuosos of the nineteenth century. After her marriage, she assumed the role
of wife to Robert and mother to the eight children she soon bore him. Clara, too, had tried
her hand at musical composition, writing mostly art songs and other forms of chamber
music. But as her children grew more numerous—and Robert’s mental health
deteriorated (see “Lives of Tragedy and Fidelity” below)—her compositions became
fewer, and her concert tours were curtailed. Self-doubt made things worse, as she came to
question the capacity of any woman to excel as a creative artist (see box, “Where Were
the Women?”). Thus, Clara’s most productive period as a composer coincided with the
very early years of her marriage to Robert.
Beauty”), in 1841, the year after her wedding. Expressing the optimism of a
newlywed, the playful four-stanza text by Friedrich Rückert sets forth three reasons
(stanzas 1–3) why the lady should not be loved—not for beauty, youth, or money (all
three of which Clara actually possessed)—but one (last stanza) for which she should be
loved—for love alone. Although the melodic and accompanimental figures presented in
the first strophe prevail in subsequent ones, Clara varies the musical setting on each
occasion, thereby producing what is called modified strophic form (the music of each
strophe changes slightly from one to the next). Here, a form represented as AA’A’’A’’’
results. Example 17.4 shows the melody of strophe 1 and how it is modified in strophe 2.
The ever-evolving music gives this art song its remarkable freshness. Had you not
known, would you have guessed that this song was composed by a woman? Does such a
thing as a “female sound” exist?
From his earliest years, Robert Schumann had been afflicted with what
psychiatrists now call bipolar disorder. His moods swung from energetic euphoria to
suicidal depression. In some years, he produced a torrent of music; in others, virtually
nothing. As time progressed, Schumann’s condition worsened. He began to hear voices,
both heavenly and hellish, and warned Clara that he might harm her. One morning,
pursued by demons within, he jumped off a bridge into the Rhine River. Nearby
fishermen pulled him to safety, but from then on, by his own request, he was confined to
an asylum, where he died of dementia in 1856 at the age of forty-six.
Clara Schumann outlived Robert by forty years. She raised the children, and to
pay the bills, she gradually resumed her career as a touring piano virtuoso. Always
dressed in black mourning (“widow’s weeds,” as they were called), she played across
Europe into the 1890s. After Robert’s death, Clara never composed again and never
remarried. Proving that life sometimes imitates art, Clara remained true to the pledge
made in her song “Liebst du um Schönheit”: “I will love you eternally.” Today, the
Schumanns rest side by side in a small cemetery in Bonn, Germany—two souls
exemplifying Romantic faith in eternal love.
g. Program Music
The Romantic love of literature stimulated interest not only in the art song but
also in program music. Indeed, the nineteenth century can fairly be called the “century of
program music.” True, there had been earlier isolated examples of program music—in
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, for example. But Romantic composers believed that music
could be more than pure, abstract sound—that musical sounds alone (without a text)
could tell a story. Most important, they now had the power and color of the newly
enlarged orchestra to help tell the tale.
Program music is instrumental music that seeks to re-create in sound the events
and emotions portrayed in some extramusical source: a story, legend, play, novel, even a
historical event. Almost always, program music is composed for a symphony orchestra
because its distinctive instrumental sounds can tell a story in the most colorful, vivid
detail. Similarly, specific musical gestures empower program music because they, too,
evoke particular feelings and associations. A lyrical melody may spur memories of love,
harshly dissonant chords may imply conflict, or a rising trumpet call may suggest the
arrival of the hero, for example. By stringing together such musical gestures in a
convincing sequence, a composer can tell a story through music. Program music is fully
harmonious with the strongly literary spirit of the nineteenth century, when the short
story and the novel became commonplace.
Some Romantic composers, notably Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), resisted the
allure of program music and continued to write what came to be called absolute music—
symphonies, sonatas, quartets, and other instrumental music without extramusical or
programmatic references. The composer of absolute music left it to the listener to infer
whatever “meaning” he or she wished. The composer of program music, however, told
the listener what to experience by crafting a sequence of sounds that implied a narrative.
In 1850, composer Franz Liszt got to the heart of the matter when he observed that a
program “provided a means by which to protect the listener against a wrong poetical
interpretation and to direct his attention to the poetical idea of the whole.”
Dramatic overture (to an opera, a play, or even a festival): a one-movement work,
usually in sonata–allegro form, that portrays through music a sequence of dramatic
events. Many overtures became audience favorites and are today performed at concerts
without the opera or play that originally inspired them. Examples include Rossini’s
overture to his opera William Tell (1829), and Mendelssohn’s Overture (1826) to
Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as Tchaikovsky’s 1812
Overture (1882), written to commemorate Russia’s victory over Napoleon.
Tone poem (also called symphonic poem): a one-movement work for orchestra
that gives musical expression to the emotions and events associated with a story, play,
political event, or personal experience. Examples include Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and
Juliet (1869; revised 1880), Musorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain (1867), and Strauss’s
Also sprach Zarathustra (1896). In fact, the tone poem and the dramatic overture differ
very little: Both are one-movement orchestral works with programmatic content intended
for the concert hall.
• Program symphony: a symphony with the usual three, four, or five movements,
which together depict a succession of specific events or scenes drawn from an
extramusical story or event. Examples include Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830)
and Liszt’s “Faust” Symphony (1857).
Hector Berlioz was one of the most unusual figures in the history of music. He
was born in 1803 near the mountain city of Grenoble, France, the son of a local doctor.
As a youth, Berlioz studied mainly the sciences and ancient Roman literature. Although
local tutors taught him to play the flute and guitar, he had no systematic training in music
theory or composition and little exposure to classical music. Among the major composers
of the nineteenth century, he was the only one without fluency at the keyboard. He never
studied piano and could do no more than bang out a few chords.
At the age of seventeen, Berlioz was sent off to Paris to study medicine, his
father’s profession. For two years, he pursued a program in the physical sciences, earning
a degree in 1821. But Berlioz found the medical dissecting table horrific— “rats in the
corners gnawing on bleeding vertebrae”—and the allure of the concert hall irresistible.
After a period of soul-searching over the choice of a career, he vowed to become “no
doctor or apothecary but a great composer.
If you told your parents that you’d dropped out of medical school to become a
composer, how would they react? Berlioz’s father did the predictable. He immediately
cut off his son’s living stipend, leaving young Berlioz to ponder how he might support
himself while studying composition at the Paris Conservatory (the French national school
of music). Other composers had relied on teaching as a means to earn a regular income.
But with no particular skill at any instrument, what music could Berlioz teach? Instead,
he turned to music criticism, writing reviews and articles for literary journals and
newspapers—both very much on the rise in the more literate society of the nineteenth
century. Berlioz was the first composer to earn a livelihood as a music critic, and it was
criticism, not composition, that remained his primary source of income for the rest of his
life.
Perhaps it was inevitable that Berlioz would turn to writing about music, for in his
mind, a connection had always existed between music and the written word. As a student,
Berlioz encountered the works of Shakespeare, and the experience changed his life:
“Shakespeare, coming upon me unawares, struck me like a thunderbolt. The lightning
flash of that discovery revealed to me at a stroke the whole heaven of art.” Berlioz
devoured Shakespeare’s plays and based musical compositions on four of them: The
Tempest, King Lear, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet. The common denominator in the art
of both Shakespeare and Berlioz is range of expression. Just as no dramatist before
Shakespeare had portrayed the full spectrum of human emotions on the stage, so no
composer before Berlioz, not even Beethoven, had undertaken to create such a wide
range of moods through sound.
To depict wild swings of mood in music, Berlioz called for enormous orchestral
and choral forces—hundreds and hundreds of performers, “Bigger Is Better: Greater
Length, More Volume and Color”). He also experimented with new instruments: the
ophicleide (an early form of the tuba), the English horn (a low oboe), the harp (an ancient
instrument that he brought into the symphony orchestra for the first time), the cornet (a
small, trumpet-like instrument with valves, borrowed from the military band), and even
the newly invented saxophone. In 1843, Berlioz wrote a textbook on orchestration—the
art of arranging a composer’s music for just the right instruments—that is still used today
in colleges and conservatories around the world. The boy who couldn’t play the piano
had become a master of the orchestra!
Berlioz’s approach to musical form was equally innovative; he rarely used such
standard forms as sonata–allegro or theme and variations. Instead, he preferred to create
forms that flowed from the particular narrative of the story at hand. His French
compatriots called his seemingly formless compositions “bizarre” and “monstrous,” and
thought him something of a madman. Subscribing to the adage “No man is a prophet in
his own land,” Berlioz took his progressive music to London, Vienna, Prague, and even
Moscow, introducing such works as Symphonie fantastique and Romeo and Juliet. He
died in Paris in 1869, isolated and embittered, the little recognition he received in his
native France having come too late to boost his career or self-esteem.
Berlioz’s most celebrated composition, then and now, is his Symphonie
fantastique, perhaps the single most radical example of musical Romanticism. Here,
musical form and orchestration are progressive; the programmatic content is
revolutionary. Over the course of five movements, Berlioz tells a story, thus creating the
first program symphony—in today’s terms, a musical miniseries with five episodes. True
to its name, the story surrounding Symphonie fantastique is more fantastical—more
Hollywood—than fiction.
In September 1827, impressionable Hector Berlioz went to the theater in Paris,
specifically to see a troupe of English actors present Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and
then Hamlet. Though he understood little English, Shakespearean drama overwhelmed
Berlioz with its human insights, touching beauty, and sometimes bloody onstage actions.
But Berlioz not only fell in love with Shakespeare’s work, he was also smitten with the
leading lady who played Ophelia to Hamlet and Juliet to Romeo—Harriet Smithson. As a
crazed young man might stalk a Hollywood starlet today, Berlioz wrote passionate letters
and chased after Smithson. Eventually, his ardor cooled—for a time, he even became
engaged to someone else. But the experience of an all-consuming love, the despair of
rejection, and the vision of darkness and possible death furnished the stimulus—and story
line—for an unusually imaginative symphony.
Symphonie fantastique derives its title, not because it is “fantastic” in the sense of
“wonderful” (though it is), but because it is a fantasy: Over the course of a symphony,
Berlioz fantasizes about his relationship with Harriet Smithson. The thread that binds the
five disparate movements is a single melody that personifies the beloved. Berlioz called
this theme his idée fixe (“fixed idea,” or musical fixation); the melody is always present
—like Harriet, an obsession in Berlioz’s tortured mind. However, as his feelings about
Harriet change from movement to movement, the composer transforms the fundamental
melody, altering the pitches, rhythms, and instrumental color. To make sure the listener
could follow this wild progression of emotional states, Berlioz prepared a written
program (quoted below) to be followed as the music was performed. This, too, was
radical, for program notes at concerts at this time were nonexistent. Berlioz’s episodic
tale unfolds like a bad romance: unrequited love, attempted suicide by drug overdose,
murder of a starlet, and a hellish revenge.
h. Peter Tchaikovsky (1840–1893): Tone Poem and Ballet Music
The Romantic passion for program music continued throughout the nineteenth
century, most notably in the tone poems of Peter Tchaikovsky. As defined earlier in this,
a tone poem is a one-movement work for orchestra that captures the emotions and events
of a story through music. Thus, a tone poem is really no different from a program
symphony, except that everything happens in just one movement. Because Tchaikovsky
was less a motivic symphonist and more a musical narrator, he excelled at program music
—he always had a story to tell.
Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 into an upper-middle-class family in provincial
Russia. He showed a keen ear for music in his earliest years and by the age of six could
speak fluent French and German. (An excellent musical ear and a capacity to learn
foreign languages often go hand in hand, as both involve processing patterns of sound
primarily in the temporal lobe of the brain.) As to his career, his parents determined that
law would provide the safest path to success. But, like Robert Schumann before him,
Tchaikovsky eventually realized that music, not law, fired his imagination, so he made
his way to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory of Music. When he graduated in 1866,
Tchaikovsky was immediately offered a position at the newly formed Moscow
Conservatory, that of professor of harmony and musical composition.
In truth, it was not his conservatory job in Moscow that supported Tchaikovsky
during most of his mature years but, rather, a private arrangement with an eccentric
patroness, Madame Nadezhda von Meck. This wealthy, music-loving widow furnished
him with an annual income of 6,000 rubles (about $40,000 U.S. today) on the condition
that she and the composer never meet—a requirement not always easily fulfilled, because
the two sometimes resided at the same summer estate. In addition to this annuity, in 1881,
Tsar Alexander III awarded Tchaikovsky an annual pension of 3,000 rubles in
recognition of his importance to Russian cultural life. Now a man of independent means,
Tchaikovsky traveled extensively in Western Europe, and even to America. He enjoyed
the freedom that so many artists find necessary to creative activity.
Although Tchaikovsky excelled in all genres of classical music, today he is best
known for his program music and ballets. For example, his programmatic The 1812
Overture (1882), which commemorates the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812, is heard
in the United States on the Fourth of July, with Tchaikovsky’s musical pyrotechnics
usually accompanied by fireworks in the night sky. By the end of the nineteenth century,
Tchaikovsky was the world’s most popular orchestral composer, the “big name” brought
from Europe to America when star appeal was needed to add luster to the opening of
Carnegie Hall in 1891. He died suddenly in 1893, at the age of fiftythree, after drinking
unboiled water during a cholera epidemic.
Tchaikovsky termed his most overtly programmatic works “overture,” “overture
fantasy,” or “symphonic fantasy.” Today, we would call each simply a tone poem. Like
Berlioz before him, Tchaikovsky had fallen under the spell of Shakespeare, and he, too,
composed tone poems inspired by Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.
In Romeo and Juliet (see Listening Guide), Tchaikovsky aimed to capture the
spirit, not the letter, of Shakespeare’s play. The play, of course, develops as a continuous
linear story. Tchaikovsky’s tone poem, however, unfolds within the confines of sonata–
allegro form, which gives the music a recursive shape: presentation, confrontation,
resolution. The play lasts about three hours; the tone poem, only about twenty minutes.
Thus, to distill the dramatic material to its musical essence, Tchaikovsky focuses on only
three themes: the compassionate music of the kindly Friar Laurence, whose plan to unite
the lovers goes fatally awry; the fighting music, which represents the feud between the
Capulets and the Montagues; and the famous love theme, which expresses the passion of
Romeo and Juliet.
Tchaikovsky begins slowly with a musical introduction featuring solemn religious
music, pointing to a succession of mysterious chords strummed on a harp, as if a
medieval priest or a bard were about to narrate a long, tragic tale. Suddenly, out rush
angry percussive sounds, racing strings, and syncopated cymbal crashes: We have joined
the violent world of the Capulets and Montagues. And, just where we would expect a
lyrical second theme to appear in sonata–allegro form, on cue steps forth the love theme.
As appropriate for a pair of lovers, this one has two parts, each of which grows and
becomes more passionate when pushed upward in ascending melodic sequence.
The brief development section pits the feuding families against the increasingly
adamant pleas of Friar Laurence. The recapitulation, true to sonata–allegro form, begins
with the feud music but moves quickly to an expanded, more ecstatic presentation of the
love theme (part 2 first, then part 1). Here, Tchaikovsky followed the dictum, “save your
best for last.” In the exposition, the love theme first appeared in a low woodwind and
middle strings; in the recapitulation, however, the composer places the final statement of
the theme on high in the violins, all now surging forward with a powerful but warm
vibrato—the quintessential expression of Romantic love in music.
But all does not end well, as a foreboding roll on the timpani suggests at the
beginning of the coda. The steady drumbeats of a funeral procession and fragments of the
broken love theme tell us that Romeo and Juliet are dead. Yet, suddenly, in a
transformative moment, celestial, hymn-like sounds imply that the lovers have been
reunited in some higher realm. All that remains is to bring the curtain down on the story
of the star-crossed lovers, which Tchaikovsky does with seven fortissimo hammer strokes
for full orchestra, all on the tonic chord.
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet as a tragedy: “For never was a story of more
woe/Than this of Juliet and her Romeo,” say the final lines of the play. By incorporating
a “celestial conclusion” into his coda—a hymn-like choir of angelic woodwinds,
followed by the transformed love theme on high in the violins— Tchaikovsky has
changed the final import of the play. True child of the Romantic age, he suggests that the
love–death of Romeo and Juliet is, in fact, not a tragedy, but a spiritual triumph.
Ballet, like opera, calls to mind “high-end” culture. Indeed, the origins of ballet
and opera go back to the French royal court of Louis XIV (who reigned 1643–1715).
Throughout the eighteenth century, no serious opera was complete without a ballet or two
to provide a pleasant diversion. By the early nineteenth century, however, this dance
spectacle had separated from opera and moved onstage as the independent genre we
know today. A ballet is a dramatic dance in which the characters, using various stylized
steps and pantomime, tell a story. Music expresses the emotions of the story through
patterns of sound, while dance does the same through patterns of physical movement.
Although ballet first developed in France, it gradually gained universal popularity, indeed
an adopted homeland, in Russia. Even today, the terms Russian and ballerina seem
inextricably linked—and so are ballet and Tchaikovsky.
Early in his career, Tchaikovsky realized that ballet required precisely the
compositional skills that he possessed. Unlike Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven,
Tchaikovsky was not a “developer”—he was not good at teasing out intricate motivic
relationships over long spans of time. Instead, his gift was to create one striking melody
and mood after another—to create one vivid scene and then move on to the next. And this
is precisely what ballet music requires—not motivic manipulation or contrapuntal
intricacy, but short bursts of tuneful melody and pulsating rhythm, all of which are
intended to capture the emotional essence of the scene. Short is the operative word here;
because dancing in a ballet is exhausting, neither the principals nor the corps de ballet
hold center stage for more than three minutes at a time. Tchaikovsky’s “short-segment”
style proved perfect for the demands of ballet. From his pen flowed Swan Lake (1876),
Sleeping Beauty (1889), and The Nutcracker, arguably the three most popular works in
the entire repertoire of grand Romantic ballet.
Who doesn’t know some of the ballet music from The Nutcracker (1892), a
holiday ritual as traditional as caroling and gift giving? The story, typical of Romantic-
era narratives, springs from a fairy-tale fantasy. After a Christmas Eve celebration, an
exhausted young girl, Clara, falls asleep and dreams of people from exotic places and
toys that come to life. Fantastical characters parade before us, not merely accompanied,
but literally brought to life, by the music. In “Dance of the Reed Pipes” (see Listening
Guide), sleeping Clara imagines she sees shepherds dancing in a meadow. Because
shepherds since time immemorial had played “pan pipes,” Tchaikovsky orchestrated this
scene in a way that featured flutes. (The tableau is also called the “Dance of the Toy
Flutes.”) The rhythm of the music, first duple and slow, then duple and fast, propels the
dancing shepherds. Indeed, ballet music must not only create evocative moods through
colorful orchestration, it must also project a strong, clear metrical pulse to animate—
indeed, regulate— the steps of the dancers. Whether the music is ballet or hip-hop, if you
can’t hear the beat, you can’t dance to the music.
i. Music and Nationalism
Today, we are witnessing a globalization of music and of culture generally.
Companies such as Apple, Google, and Facebook covertly encourage the adoption of
English as a universal language and overtly promote economic ties that cross borders.
The various nations of Europe have formed a European Community, and we in the
United States participate in the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
University students are encouraged to spend a semester studying abroad. Thousands of
students around the world can take a single course simultaneously online through
providers such as Coursera and edX. Everyone, it seems, is looking and learning outward.
In the nineteenth century, however, things were very different. People were
looking inward, often for a force that would liberate them from political oppression. At a
time when people of one language were frequently ruled by foreign emperors who spoke
another, Europe’s ethnic groups came to realize that their ethnicity might be an agent of
liberation. Driven by the unifying force of group identity, the Greeks threw off the Turks
and formed their own country (1820s), the French-speaking Belgians rebelled against the
Dutch (1830s), the Finns against the Russians (1860s), and the Czechs against the
German-speaking Austrians (1870s). (Some of this move toward national independence
persists today, as the Ukrainians try to remove the controlling hand of Russia.) Before the
nineteenth century, French, German, and Russian were the dominant languages of
Europe; thereafter, literary works published in Czech, Hungarian, Norwegian, and
Finnish, among other languages, were not uncommon.
Music played an important part in this ethnic awakening, sounding out cultural
differences and providing a rallying point in a movement called musical nationalism.
National anthems, native dances, protest songs, and victory symphonies all evoked
through music the rising tide of national identity. “The StarSpangled Banner” (U.S.
national anthem), the “Marseillaise” (French national anthem), and “Italian Brothers,
Italy Has Arisen” (Italian national anthem), for example, were all products of this
patriotic zeal.
But how did a composer create music that sounded ethnic or national? He or she
did so by incorporating indigenous folksongs, native scales, dance rhythms, and local
instrumental sounds. Ethnic sentiments could also be conveyed by the use of national
subjects—the life of a national hero, for example—as the basis of an opera or a tone
poem. Among Romantic compositions with overtly nationalistic titles are Liszt’s
Hungarian Rhapsodies, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, Dvoˇrák’s Slavonic
Dances, Smetana’s Má vlast (My Fatherland), and Sibelius’s Finlandia. For all these
composers, a musical signifier (a folksong, for example) served as a badge of both
personal identity and ethnic pride.
Before the nineteenth century, Russia was a cultural backwater—at least in the
eyes of the West. Gradually, it assimilated the traditions of German orchestral music,
French ballet, and Italian opera, and then went further, developing its own ethnic high art.
An early use of Russian subject matter in opera can be heard in Mikhail Glinka’s A Life
for the Tsar (1836). As a review of the first performance reported: “All were enthralled
with the sounds of the native, Russian national music. Everyone showed complete accord
in the expression of enthusiasm that the patriotic content of the opera aroused.” Glinka’s
nationalist spirit was passed to a group of young composers whom contemporaries
dubbed the “Mighty Handful” or, less grandiosely, the Russian Five: Alexander Borodin
(1833–1887), César Cui (1835–1918), Mily Balakirev (1837–1910), Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov (1844–1908), and Modest Musorgsky (1839–1881). They created a national art
by taking the sophisticated traditions of Western classical music and incorporating
therein simple elements of Russian folk and religious music. Of the Russian Five, the
most original and least Western in musical style was Modest Musorgsky.
As with most members of the Russian Five, Musorgsky (pronounced
“mooSORG-ski”) did not at first seem destined for a career in music. He was trained to
be a military officer and for a period of four years was commissioned in the Russian
army. He resigned his appointment in 1858 in favor of a minor post as a civil servant and
more free time to indulge his avocation, musical composition. The next year he said, “I
have been a cosmopolitan [Western classical composer], but now there’s been some sort
of regeneration. Everything Russian is becoming dear to me.” Unfortunately, his brief,
chaotic life was marked by increasing poverty, depression, and alcoholism, a
development evident in the one surviving portrait of him. During his few periods of
creative productivity, Musorgsky managed to compile a small body of work which
includes a boldly inventive tone poem, Night on Bald Mountain (1867; used prominently
in Walt Disney’s Fantasia); an imaginative set of descriptive pieces called Pictures at an
Exhibition (1874); and an operatic masterpiece, Boris Godunov (1874), based on the life
of a popular sixteenthcentury Russian tsar. Many of Musorgsky’s works were left
unfinished at the time of his death in 1881.
j. Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
We met Robert Schumann, as well as Clara Schumann and Franz Schubert, in our
discussion of the nineteenth-century art song. All three composers wrote extensively for
the piano. Clara Schumann was one of the great virtuosos of the nineteenth century.
Robert Schumann tried to become one, but his career on the instrument ended with a self-
inflicted hand injury. Thereafter, he concentrated on composition.
Robert Schumann was something of a manic composer, his “streaks” being
perhaps manifestations of his bipolar personality. During the 1830s, Robert occupied
himself mainly with the composition of collections of pieces for piano. Among these is
Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood, 1838), a set of thirteen short, intimate pieces
appropriate for the middle-class parlor. Despite the title, these are not pieces intended for
children. Rather, they are musical recollections of events and sensations from childhood
—“reminiscences of a grown-up for grown-ups,” the composer called them. Congruent
with the Romantic fondness for the world of the imagination, the most famous of the set
is a piece about dreaming.
Did you ever daydream about your childhood? Of course—and that’s what Robert
Schumann’s “Träumerei” (“Dreaming”) does in music. The piece is as short and fleeting
—and as perfect—as a pleasant childhood memory. “Träumerei” also demonstrates an
important principle of melodic construction: What goes up, must come down. Melodies
that involve large leaps upward invariably descend in the opposite direction, usually by
smaller steps—think of the leaps and gradual declines in “Over the Rainbow,” for
example. “Träumerei” begins with an opening gesture that spans an octave—tonic to
tonic an octave higher (see example in Listening Guide at asterisks)—and gradually falls
back to the tonic. Thereafter, it spins out a succession of similar, higher ascents and
declines, each creating brief alternations of excitement (quick ascent into the unknown)
and satisfaction (slow descent back home).
Not only is Robert Schumann’s “Träumerei” part of the nineteenth-century
aesthetic that brought dreams to the forefront of the Romantic consciousness, but it also
represents a musical genre new to the nineteenth century: the character piece. A character
piece, usually written for piano, is a short instrumental work that tries to capture the
essence of a single mood, sentiment, or emotion. Because the character piece passes by in
the twinkling of an eye, it was sometimes given a whimsical title, such as bagatelle (a
trifle), humoresque, arabesque, musical moment, caprice, romance, or impromptu.
Although the character piece “Träumerei” is real, the fleeting nature of the listening
experience forces an engagement with the imagination.
k. Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849)
The Beatles or the Stones, Yankees or Red Sox, Liverpool or Manchester United
—whether it’s music or sports, every fan has his or her favorite. So, too, opinions were
passionately divided regarding the two great virtuoso composers of the Romantic era:
Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt.
Frédéric Chopin was born in Warsaw, Poland, to a French father and a Polish
mother. His father taught French—then the universal language of the aristocracy—at an
elite secondary school for the sons of Polish nobility. As a student there, young Frédéric
not only gained an excellent general education but also acquired aristocratic friends and
tastes. Fearing that Warsaw was too small and provincial, the fledgling composer moved
first to Vienna and then, in September 1831, to Paris. That very year, Poland’s fight for
independence was crushed by Russian troops—such tension still echoes today in
Poland’s neighbor, Ukraine. Becoming an expatriate voice for Polish musical
nationalism, Chopin never returned to his homeland.
Although Chopin’s concerts caused something of a sensation when he arrived in
Paris, he wasn’t cut out for the life of the public showman. Unlike Franz Liszt, Chopin
was introverted, physically slight, and somewhat sickly. Consequently, he chose to play
at private musicales (musical evenings) in the homes of the aristocracy and to give
lessons for a fee that only the very rich could afford. As he said within a year of his
arrival, “I hobnob with ambassadors, princes, and ministers. I can’t imagine what miracle
is responsible for all this because I really haven’t done anything to bring it about.”
In October 1836, Chopin met Baroness Aurore Dudevant (1803–1876), a writer
who, under the pen name George Sand, poured forth a steady stream of Romantic novels
roughly akin to today’s Silhouette Romances. Sand, a bisexual, was an ardent
individualist with a predilection for wearing men’s clothing and smoking cigars. Six
years Chopin’s senior, Sand became his lover and protector. Many of the composer’s best
works were written at Nohant, her summer residence that was 150 miles south of Paris.
After their relationship ended in 1847, Chopin undertook a taxing concert tour of England
and Scotland. While this improved his bank account, it weakened his delicate health. He
died in Paris of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine.
Chopin was a rarity among Romantic composers—he wrote only works for solo
piano or ensemble pieces (including songs) in which the piano figures prominently. His
works for solo piano include those in the Polish national style (called mazurkas and
polonaises), three piano sonatas, a set of twenty-four preludes (one in each of the major
and minor keys), twenty-four etudes (technical studies), and twenty-one nocturnes. Far
better than the other genres for piano, the nocturnes embody the essence of musical
Romanticism.
Can music be painfully beautiful? If so, such music surely can be found in this
Chopin nocturne. A nocturne (night piece) is a slow, dreamy genre of piano music that
came into favor in the 1820s and 1830s. It suggests moonlit nights, romantic longing, and
a certain wistful melancholy, all evoked through slightly chromatic melodies and softly
strumming harmonies. To set a nocturnal mood, Chopin usually lays out a very regular
accompaniment, either as an arpeggio going up and down or as chords going low-middle-
high, both of which give the sense of a harp or guitar strumming softly in the night.
Above this support, he places a sensuous melody that plays around and against the very
square accompaniment, as we see in his Nocturne in E♭ major.
Once this melody is in place, Chopin repeats it and varies it twice, with each
variation more florid than the last. Between presentations comes an interlude of rich
chromatic harmony (see Listening Guide). Note in Example 19.1 how Chopin carefully
specifies the use of the sustaining pedal. “Ped.” here means to depress the sustaining
(right) pedal; the asterisk means to release it. In this way, the lowest bass notes can be
sustained (while the left hand moves up for the next two chords), thereby creating a
richer, more sonorous sound.
Where did Chopin derive this nocturnal style? Oddly enough, from the arias
found in the Italian bel canto opera that he heard when he first arrived in Paris in 1831.
In the Nocturne in E♭ major, we have essentially a song or an aria without words, and the
beautiful melody always sounds in the top (soprano) register. At the end, Chopin adds an
elaborate, vocal cadenza that leads to the final tonic chord. Then, as this chord softly
repeats, the nocturnal world dissolves.
