The Tempest, by Waterhouse, based on the Shakespeare play. Very turbulent and dramatic, both prized qualities in Romantic art.
Compare that to this, the Hebrides Overture by 19th century Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn, a Sonata-allegro movement based on his impressions of Fingal's Cave on the Scottish coastline.
The Nineteenth century saw a change in musical style that was paralleled by the changes wrought in art and literature by the Romantics. I'm going to discuss some of those changes in style with examples by Chopin, and compare them to the prior Classical style exemplified by Mozart.
I had some fun preparing for this diary, surfing for Romantic paintings like this one, Nymphs and Satyrs by Bougueareau.
I'm going to try not to crib too much from all the encyclopedia entries on the web about Romanticism as a movement. But, aw shucks, here's Wikipedia to save me some typing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The [Romantic] movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.
Did you know that there was a "Romantic" school of chess? Oh yes, although I doubt Paul Morphy or Anderssen would have claimed any aesthetic purpose other than pure victory. [Interesting side note: The much-lauded genius Paul Morphy may have been part black, a matter of some controversy years ago. Likewise, a certain very, very famous composer may have had a bit of chromaticism in his family tree, as well.]
Nineteenth century chess was most notable for crazy, ill-prepared, king-side attacks which ended in beautiful combinations -- or in collapse. What we now call the Classical period of chess came afterward, beginning with the late nineteenth century world champion Steinitz who brought new order and long-term strategy to the game that won him many games but earned him contempt from a few players that thought it was somehow unsporting to win through the accumulation of small advantages rather than through suicidal banzai charges.
It seems doubtful to me that the Classical-style (as opposed to Romantic) composers of the late-eighteenth century thought of themselves as Classical anymore than Morphy thought of himself as Romantic. These are labels attached afterward by those looking back at the trends of the time. But at the moment in time in which they live, all forward-leaning artists are modern. The Classical-era composers like Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were rebelling and evolving from the even prior periods of music, Baroque and Rococo. Their music reflected a period of rationalism. Their art was emotional but also intellectual, for the ego more than the id. Forms and processes and techniques of music were beautiful in and of themselves. Beautiful music was well-done music. It didn't have to too closely represent the Glory of God or the Meaning of Life or the Heartbreak of Lost Love. In their music, as opposed to the coming Romantic music, there was a clearer distinction between music and the narrative we as listeners apply to it.
But as music progressed, and especially starting with Beethoven and the new levels of drama that he brought to classical-style music, the importance of the narrative increased, the importance of form decreased. Music became more a tool for the artist, the composer, to express himself through an explicit idea, an impression, or a story.
Such as Mendelssohn's impression of the turbulent Scottish coastline. It's pure Sonata-allegro form, and we could break it down into its parts just as we did in earlier diaries, but I'll let you do that yourself. It's worth the time. In some ways, the form is even simpler, with fewer idiosyncracies. The huge difference, though, from this and, say, Mozart's Magic Flute Overture, which we analyzed in our OPUS 1 diary, is that we can hear the crashing and surging of waves in the music, the blowing of gale-force winds. Stormy waters were a frequent source of material in both Romantic art and music.
For instance, in this work, the overture to Richard Wagner's opera, The Flying Dutchman. Can't you hear the winds in the sails, the waves breaking against the bow?
Or how about this, Rossini's The William Tell Overture. Would you have to know all the Bugs Bunny cartoons by heart to know that this music is about a violent storm? The first ominous raindrops appear about 3:30, while the full storm blows you away at 4:25.
If you go on to the second half of the video, you'll get to hear the sun come out. What a great flute part! I can see Bugs Bunny coming out of his hole and yawning right now. Of course, after that, comes the Lone Ranger theme song (2:39 on second video). You can hear the galloping horses, the jangling spurs.
Romantic music tends to be very visual. I think that's why, when I took Music Appreciation in college, umpty-ump years ago, they started the course with the Romantics. Thinking a little further back to when I was a kid in grade school, when the teachers played classical music for us, they preferred to play Romantic works.
And why not? It's so much easier to explain, especially to children. Storms, sun comes out, galloping horses. When I was a kid, I could hear all that. And the teacher was relieved of the burden of trying to explain to ten-year olds what a cadence was, or a dominant, or Sonata-allegro form or any of that stuff.
The technical name for music of this type, music that has a visual story associated with it (and this will be on the exam) is Program Music, so called because when you walked into the concert, somebody would pass out a program telling what was to be performed, and what the music literally meant -- storms, sunshine, galloping horses, whatever -- as explained by the composer. This is in contrast with Absolute Music, which is simply music that has no story other than itself. The Romantic period was very rich in program music. The Classical period had quite a bit, as well, for instance Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony, but it wasn't nearly as common, and it wasn't nearly as vivid.
Night Terrors, by Fuseli.
Other common themes for Romantic music, besides storms and stormy water, were the supernatural. Witches, ghosts (a ghost ship in the The Flying Dutchman), the world of dreams, medieval chivalry, the agony of love lost, the political motivations of nationalism. Freud and his theories of the unconscious were some seventy years in the future, but the Romantics were already busily mining it for material before he arrived.
I was struck by this one Romantic painting I found, Sur la Montagne, by Louis Janmot. To me, there is something numinous about it. Why are they going up the hill? For some reason, it's important. I don't think they are fetching water. There is a beautiful light coming from the other side of the hill. Perhaps it's just a sunset. A deeper unconscious symbolism seems to seep through to me. It reminds me of a film, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, where a group of schoolgirls, for no discernible reason, rise together and walk uphill into the rocks, never to be found or seen again, nothing resolved, left only as an enigma of feminine mystery.
Liberty Leading the People, by Delacroix. Delacroix was a personal friend of Chopin's. Hey, if you repainted it orange you could make a cool website banner out of it.
Polish composer Fredric Chopin was perhaps the most Romantic of the nineteenth century piano composers by many measures. His music carried some of that same sense of enigma and mystery, but he also adeptly plumbed the complexity of individual feeling. And nationalism, another important force in Romanticism. Chopin aggressively asserted his Polishness in his polonaises, just as Liszt asserted his Hungarianness in his Hungarian Rhapsodies, as Tchaikovsky asserted his Russianness in his 1812 Overture, as Bedrich Smetana asserted his Chech/Bohemianness in his Tone Poem, Ma Vlast (My Fatherland) (banned by the Nazis during WWII), as Sibelius asserted his Finnishness with Four Legends from the Kalevala, as Grieg asserted his Norwegianness with Peer Gynt.
I didn't mention Wagner and his Ring Cycle, which inspired a very ugly German nationalist movement. We'll talk about him another time.
The Romantics were breaking with the past, with the dominating classical tradition created by Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn. There was a perception that with his nine symphonies, Beethoven had already said everything that could be said, had brought the symphony to its apex and fished that pond dry of all life. There was nothing left for them to explore in those traditional forms that Beethoven hadn't already done and done better. This turned out to be far from true, and there were some very great Romantic symphonies composed during this period, but this sentiment contributed to the move of some composers away from traditional forms and towards something more modern, with a different, Romantic voice, a more emotional and vivid and personal voice.
One of the forms that Chopin turned to was the nocturne, basically a non-formal freestyle impression of introspection, melancholy, and midnight mood, as pioneered by John Field, who can claim credit for it and inspiring Chopin. Chopin's nocturnes tended more towards a more traditional ABA form. I found it amusing to read some of the criticisms of Chopin's nocturnes by nineteenth century Field supporters. From The Chopin Society:
http://www.chopinsociety.org/...
he Nocturnes
The nocturne represents one of he great genres of Romantic art. Chopin inherited the species from John Field and proceeded to obliterate Field's charming naivete with his own highly chromatic and sultry genius. It is said that Field, upon hearing Chopin's first three nocturnes, exclaimed, "Chopin's talent is of the sick-room." The last critic to prefer Field seems to have been the German anti-Chopinist Ludwig Rellstab: "Where Field smiles, Chopin makes a grinning grimace; where Field sighs, Chopin groans; where Field puts some seasoning into the food, Chopin empties a handful of pepper. . . . If one holds Field's charming nocturnes before a distorting, concave mirror, one gets Chopin's work."
Now, honestly, reading the critique by Rellstab above, who was defending Field and attacking Chopin, whose nocturne do you think you would rather listen to, given nothing but that description? The charming one or the one seen through a distorting concave mirror? That's a no-brainer for me.
Chopin's Nocturne #2 is the more famous one, but I'll skip that because it has been beaten to death, and go to the one I prefer, Nocturne #1 in B-flat minor, performed by Ashkenazy. Try not to just skim this one, guys. I'd like to talk about it and compare it to Mozart after. I want to focus more on the difference in style than the content.
All the formal breakdown I will give it is this: That's in a type of A-B-A format, with the B portion starting about 1:25 and going to 4:25, when the A portion returns. The B part could be broken down even further, but that's not important to me.
We have no program for this music, no explicit story line other than the title, "Nocturne," but we can sense a distinct introspective mood to it that is consistent and seems to be the purpose of the music. Notice, also, how the tempo of the music shifts freely, slowing and speeding up at the whim of the performer. This is a characteristic of Romantic music, which freely emphasized changes in dynamics (speed and volume) as part of the expression of the music. And this gives an ennormous latitude to the performer or a conductor to interpret as he sees fit, with an emphasis on bringing out the emotional content. Notice how vague and shifting the accompaniment is, not in complete lockstep with the main melody, as if the two hands are individual voices reading from different pages. These are not the way the Classical composers did things.
I'm going to compare this to the slow movement from Mozart's Piano Concerto #23 in A Major, one of my favorites. I chose this for a reason: One, it is similar in some ways to the Chopin nocturne, similar enough to let us see what's different. I also chose it to remind us that the emotion Romanticism brought to music was already there before, but it was expressed differently, more constrained by the form.
The rhythm is a bit complicated, with a few unusual rests (silent pauses), and it is very precise. There isn't the same ambiguity in the tempo, the same interpretive changes, that you hear in Chopin. Performers of Classical period music aren't expected to insert too much of their own interpretation into the music. Their burden is more to just not ruin the music! The most acclaimed conductors of Classical period music are the ones that restrain themselves and are faithful to the music as written while bringing out all the detail. Not a single note is to be wasted. In Romantic music, quite a few notes get lost and are meant to be so. Not so in Classical. If a note is on the page for the oboe, it's meant to be heard even in the back row as an integral part of the whole, in its proper place, not washed out by the volume of the rest of the orchestra. Otherwise, why put it in the score? Bad economy is bad art.
This movement is also ABA form. Notice how, in the middle section, it changes from minor to major, with a variation on the rather grim main melody, but now carried by the woodwinds, sounding as cheerful as champagne bubbles. I remember, the first time I heard this movement, I thought to myself, okay, okay, I was really enjoying this, but this is just all wrong! You can't just change mood like that! Well, Chopin wouldn't have done it that way, but Mozart would, because to him, this was about the music, not a particular mood that the music was supposed to create in you. The change in mood was intentional, based on the same melody, the contrast meant to be aesthetic but not to carry a particular introspective narrative. Mozart would say, "Look what I can do with the same melody! Blows your mind, doesn't it?" With Mozart, faithfulness to the individual notes was expected. With Chopin, faithfulness to the mood was expected.
Just for giggles, here's another interpretation of the Mozart #23 slow movement that I found on Youtube, an eccentric, almost Romantic interpretation by the famous Maria Yudina in a scratchy 1943 recording, performing it as if it were Chopin.
I'm not going to call it bad. It's very interesting! But it's more interesting if you have heard it played "faithfully" in other recordings. Is it better? Is it worse? I don't know. I just find it interesting if somewhat heretical.
I do think it's very wrong, though, to make absolute statements about the superiority of Romantic versus Classical composers, or vice versa. They represent different worlds and can both be appreciated as representatives of two different types of art, as long as you keep the distinction in their goals and methods in mind.
CONCLUSION:
Last week, I said that Beethoven was our musical equator, that this week we would choose whether to head north, into Romanticism, or south, into the Classical and Baroque. I think I've already made that decision, and we're heading NORTH in coming weeks. Next week we'll analyze some Tchaikovsky. I'm going to break up the Romantics into two separate groups, to make things easier for myself. First we will do the pre-Wagnerian romantics, which lets me postpone having to do a long diary about tonality and harmony. After we've milked that, then we'll get to Wagner and the later Romantics (later in harmonic complexity, not chronology) such as Mahler and Strauss and early Schoenberg. From there, we'll explore more modern music before making the round trip all the way back to Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert and Haydn.