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4.19 The Late Romantics

  • 1848 was a very important European year

    • Many failed revolutions

      • Including Germany’s revolution, which caused the expulsion of Wagner

Romanticism and Realism

  • After the 1850s, literature and art had more realism than romanticism

    • Dickens, Trollope, and George Eliot in England

    • Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola in France

    • Thomas Eakins (painter) and William Dean Howells (novelist) in America

  • The camera was invented

  • Music was an escape

Program Music

  • A symphonic poem is “a one-movement orchestral composition with a program, in a free musical form”

    • Made by Franz Liszt in the 1850s

      • Hamlet, Orpheus, Prometheus, Les Preludes

    • Descended from Mendelssohn’s concert overture

    • Aka tone poems

    • Very popular in the later 19th century

      • Including those by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss

Tchaikovsky, Overture-Fantasy Romeo and Juliet (1869, revised 1880)

  • Instead of the term symphonic poem, Tchaikovsky preferred symphonic fantasia or overture-fantasy

    • Substantial one-movement pieces w/ free forms (borrowing features from sonata, rondo, etc.)

  • Follows the general outline of the original Shakespeare play

  • Structure:

    • Slow Introduction (Andante)

      • Dramatic

      • Sober Hymn theme

      • Low clarinets and bassoons

    • Allegro

      • Vendetta (Fate) theme

      • Short, vigorous rhythmic motives

      • Love Theme

      • Hymn theme returns!

    • Coda (Slow)

      • Romeo gives his final speeches before his suicide

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Biography

  • Russian, born in the countryside but then moved to St. Petersburg

  • It was hard to have a serious musical education and career in Russia, but Tchaikovsky was lucky in that after a few years he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory

  • Professor at the Moscow Conservatory

  • Composed 6 symphonies, 11 operas, symphonic poems, chamber music, songs, and many famous ballet scores

  • Not a devoted nationalist

    • Toured America, had success in worldwide concert halls

  • Depressed and gay, he attempted suicide several times

    • Married a woman who loved him and ran away only weeks after, leaving her to die in an asylum

  • Died from drinking unboiled water during a cholera epidemic

Nationalism

  • Nationalism was the musical feature of “the incorporation of national folk music into concert pieces, songs, and operas”

  • Sometimes nationalist composers deliberately broke traditional rules of harmony, form, etc.

Exoticism

  • People started to like the folk music of other countries

    • The was “exotic”

  • Composers used music from other countries

The Russian Kuchka

  • The “Kuchka” were the “Mighty Five,” a group of 5 Russian nationalist composers

    • Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), the only trained musician

    • Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), a distinguished chemist

    • César Cui (1835-1918), an engineer

    • Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), a navy man

    • Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881), an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard

  • Nationalism brought them together

Musorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)

  • Refers to a memorial exhibit of Musorgsky’s recently dead friend, Viktor Hartmann, ‘s pictures

  • Promenade 1

    • Depicts the composer walking around the exhibit

    • Rare meter, 5/4 alternating with 6/4

  • Gnomus

    • “Drawing of a Russian folk-art nutcracker”

  • Promenade 2

    • Spectator musing

  • The Great Gate at Kiev

    • Last, longest, climatic number (grandiose)

Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881) Biography

  • Son of a landowner, supposed to become an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard

  • His family struggled for a time and lost their family estate

    • Joined the kuchka during this time

  • Not confident in his abilities

  • Alcoholic, died of alcoholism and epilepsy

Responses to Romanticism

  • “No-nonsense world increasingly devoted to industrialization and commerce”

  • Romantic music was “out of step” or prize because it “offered escape”

  • Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler are both good composers to look at

The Renewal of Classicism: Brahms

  • German Johannes Brahms moved to Vienna

  • He liked traditional Classical genres, forms, or even style

    • String quartets, chamber music, symphonies, and concertos

    • Sonata, theme and variations, rondo

    • Oddly also miniatures

Other Nationalists

  • Bohemia:

    • modern Czech Republic

    • Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884): nationalist symphonic poems and folk operas

    • Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904): Slavonic Dances and other large-scale works such as symphonies; I recommend his 12th string quartet!

  • Scandinavia:

    • Edvard Grieg (1843-1907): Norwegian, wrote sets of piano miniatures (like Norwegian Mountain Tunes), and also a well-known suite of music for Peer Gynt (based on a great drama by a Norwegian playwright)

    • Jean Sibelius (1865-1857): powedul symphonist, produced symphonic poems based on his native Finnish folklore

  • Spain:

    • Enrique Granados (1867-1916): Nationalist

    • Joaquín Turina (1882-1949): Nationalist

    • Manuel de Falla (1876-1946): Nationalist known for his Nights in the Gardens of Spain

    • Exotic compositions with “Spanish flavor” included Bizet’s Carmen, along w/ orchestral pieces from Emmanuel Chabrier, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel

  • Great Britain:

    • Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958): Major English nationalist

    • Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924): Irish composer who wrote Irish Rhapsodies and the opera Shamus O’Brien

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Biography

  • Son of an orchestral musician in Hamburg, had good early music education

  • Met and lived with Robert and Clara Schumann

    • After the former’s death, he sent Clara his compositions always and they were very close

  • Wrote 4 great symphonies

  • Conducted a chorus and wrote a lot of choral music

Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 (1878)

  • Brahms wrote this to show off a virtuoso (common at the time), in particular Joseph Joachim

  • First movement in double-exposition sonata form

    • Seemed stuffy

  • Last movement is a relatively simple rondo

  • Third Movement (Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace)

    • Rondo form

    • A had double stops, is in aaba’ form

    • B again has double stops

    • C is in 3/4 time

    • The coda is in 6/8

Romantic Nostalgia: Mahler

  • Gustav Mahler was “ambivalent about the Romantic tradition”

  • Mahler wrote huge program symphonies

  • His works encoded “seemingly profound metaphysical or spiritual messages”

  • Mahler has “deliberate and self-conscious” exaggeration in his music

Symphony No. 1 (1888)

  • Mahler’s first symphony

  • Went from 1 movement to 5 to 4

  • Has fragments of some of his other songs

  • Special kind of counterpoint (“kaleidoscopic effect”)

  • Third Movement, Funeral March (Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen—“With a solemn, measured gait; do not drag”)

    • Section 1: Makes a funeral march from “Frère Jacques,” slow

    • Section 2: “Study in frustration”

    • Section 3: Contrasting “trio” with major mode and triplet harp accompaniment

    • Section 4: Combines elements from 1 and 2

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) Biography

  • Really bad childhood

    • Born in Bohemia (not necessarily bad, just part of his story)

    • Abusive father

    • Lost 5 siblings to diphtheria and others to suicide/mental illness

  • Jewish, w/ Viennese anti-Semitism around him

  • Had other tragedies, such as the young death of his youngest daughter and other “psychological turmoil”

  • Studied at the Vienna Conservatory

NG

4.19 The Late Romantics

  • 1848 was a very important European year

    • Many failed revolutions

      • Including Germany’s revolution, which caused the expulsion of Wagner

Romanticism and Realism

  • After the 1850s, literature and art had more realism than romanticism

    • Dickens, Trollope, and George Eliot in England

    • Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola in France

    • Thomas Eakins (painter) and William Dean Howells (novelist) in America

  • The camera was invented

  • Music was an escape

Program Music

  • A symphonic poem is “a one-movement orchestral composition with a program, in a free musical form”

    • Made by Franz Liszt in the 1850s

      • Hamlet, Orpheus, Prometheus, Les Preludes

    • Descended from Mendelssohn’s concert overture

    • Aka tone poems

    • Very popular in the later 19th century

      • Including those by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss

Tchaikovsky, Overture-Fantasy Romeo and Juliet (1869, revised 1880)

  • Instead of the term symphonic poem, Tchaikovsky preferred symphonic fantasia or overture-fantasy

    • Substantial one-movement pieces w/ free forms (borrowing features from sonata, rondo, etc.)

  • Follows the general outline of the original Shakespeare play

  • Structure:

    • Slow Introduction (Andante)

      • Dramatic

      • Sober Hymn theme

      • Low clarinets and bassoons

    • Allegro

      • Vendetta (Fate) theme

      • Short, vigorous rhythmic motives

      • Love Theme

      • Hymn theme returns!

    • Coda (Slow)

      • Romeo gives his final speeches before his suicide

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Biography

  • Russian, born in the countryside but then moved to St. Petersburg

  • It was hard to have a serious musical education and career in Russia, but Tchaikovsky was lucky in that after a few years he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory

  • Professor at the Moscow Conservatory

  • Composed 6 symphonies, 11 operas, symphonic poems, chamber music, songs, and many famous ballet scores

  • Not a devoted nationalist

    • Toured America, had success in worldwide concert halls

  • Depressed and gay, he attempted suicide several times

    • Married a woman who loved him and ran away only weeks after, leaving her to die in an asylum

  • Died from drinking unboiled water during a cholera epidemic

Nationalism

  • Nationalism was the musical feature of “the incorporation of national folk music into concert pieces, songs, and operas”

  • Sometimes nationalist composers deliberately broke traditional rules of harmony, form, etc.

Exoticism

  • People started to like the folk music of other countries

    • The was “exotic”

  • Composers used music from other countries

The Russian Kuchka

  • The “Kuchka” were the “Mighty Five,” a group of 5 Russian nationalist composers

    • Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), the only trained musician

    • Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), a distinguished chemist

    • César Cui (1835-1918), an engineer

    • Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), a navy man

    • Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881), an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard

  • Nationalism brought them together

Musorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)

  • Refers to a memorial exhibit of Musorgsky’s recently dead friend, Viktor Hartmann, ‘s pictures

  • Promenade 1

    • Depicts the composer walking around the exhibit

    • Rare meter, 5/4 alternating with 6/4

  • Gnomus

    • “Drawing of a Russian folk-art nutcracker”

  • Promenade 2

    • Spectator musing

  • The Great Gate at Kiev

    • Last, longest, climatic number (grandiose)

Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881) Biography

  • Son of a landowner, supposed to become an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard

  • His family struggled for a time and lost their family estate

    • Joined the kuchka during this time

  • Not confident in his abilities

  • Alcoholic, died of alcoholism and epilepsy

Responses to Romanticism

  • “No-nonsense world increasingly devoted to industrialization and commerce”

  • Romantic music was “out of step” or prize because it “offered escape”

  • Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler are both good composers to look at

The Renewal of Classicism: Brahms

  • German Johannes Brahms moved to Vienna

  • He liked traditional Classical genres, forms, or even style

    • String quartets, chamber music, symphonies, and concertos

    • Sonata, theme and variations, rondo

    • Oddly also miniatures

Other Nationalists

  • Bohemia:

    • modern Czech Republic

    • Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884): nationalist symphonic poems and folk operas

    • Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904): Slavonic Dances and other large-scale works such as symphonies; I recommend his 12th string quartet!

  • Scandinavia:

    • Edvard Grieg (1843-1907): Norwegian, wrote sets of piano miniatures (like Norwegian Mountain Tunes), and also a well-known suite of music for Peer Gynt (based on a great drama by a Norwegian playwright)

    • Jean Sibelius (1865-1857): powedul symphonist, produced symphonic poems based on his native Finnish folklore

  • Spain:

    • Enrique Granados (1867-1916): Nationalist

    • Joaquín Turina (1882-1949): Nationalist

    • Manuel de Falla (1876-1946): Nationalist known for his Nights in the Gardens of Spain

    • Exotic compositions with “Spanish flavor” included Bizet’s Carmen, along w/ orchestral pieces from Emmanuel Chabrier, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel

  • Great Britain:

    • Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958): Major English nationalist

    • Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924): Irish composer who wrote Irish Rhapsodies and the opera Shamus O’Brien

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Biography

  • Son of an orchestral musician in Hamburg, had good early music education

  • Met and lived with Robert and Clara Schumann

    • After the former’s death, he sent Clara his compositions always and they were very close

  • Wrote 4 great symphonies

  • Conducted a chorus and wrote a lot of choral music

Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 (1878)

  • Brahms wrote this to show off a virtuoso (common at the time), in particular Joseph Joachim

  • First movement in double-exposition sonata form

    • Seemed stuffy

  • Last movement is a relatively simple rondo

  • Third Movement (Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace)

    • Rondo form

    • A had double stops, is in aaba’ form

    • B again has double stops

    • C is in 3/4 time

    • The coda is in 6/8

Romantic Nostalgia: Mahler

  • Gustav Mahler was “ambivalent about the Romantic tradition”

  • Mahler wrote huge program symphonies

  • His works encoded “seemingly profound metaphysical or spiritual messages”

  • Mahler has “deliberate and self-conscious” exaggeration in his music

Symphony No. 1 (1888)

  • Mahler’s first symphony

  • Went from 1 movement to 5 to 4

  • Has fragments of some of his other songs

  • Special kind of counterpoint (“kaleidoscopic effect”)

  • Third Movement, Funeral March (Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen—“With a solemn, measured gait; do not drag”)

    • Section 1: Makes a funeral march from “Frère Jacques,” slow

    • Section 2: “Study in frustration”

    • Section 3: Contrasting “trio” with major mode and triplet harp accompaniment

    • Section 4: Combines elements from 1 and 2

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) Biography

  • Really bad childhood

    • Born in Bohemia (not necessarily bad, just part of his story)

    • Abusive father

    • Lost 5 siblings to diphtheria and others to suicide/mental illness

  • Jewish, w/ Viennese anti-Semitism around him

  • Had other tragedies, such as the young death of his youngest daughter and other “psychological turmoil”

  • Studied at the Vienna Conservatory

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