• Terms for historical periods of arts are used after the fact, generally

  • Baroque was adopted from art historians in the 20th century

  • Romantic, was uniquely used by the Romantics themselves

• Earliest Romantic composers were in the 1820s

• Music after Beethoven

  • Music was seen as a major art now

  • Music was taken seriously

• Some think that lit. and music developments line up

Romanticism

• Great age of English literature around 1800-1829

  • Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron

• There was also German Romantic lit. around the same time

  • Less commonly known

  • Tieck, Novalis, Kleist, Hölderlin, and E. T. A. Hoffmann

• “Romantic” meaning love started with this literary movement

  • Glorification of love was a theme in literature and music

The Cult of Individual Feeling

• “Striving for a better, higher, ideal state of being was at the heart of the Romantic movement”

• Emotional expression was the highest goal

• Bohemians

• Jean-Jacques Rosseau was an Enlightenment philosopher who was “hailed as the philosophical father of the French Revolution”

• The Industrial Revolution and smokestacks could be stifling, Romantic art was also escapism

Romanticism and Revolt

• The Industrial Revolution brought political revolutions, such as the American Revolution and French Revolution

• Romantics were considered rebels

• Social revolution as well, such as in the levels of nobility

Artistic Barriers

• Artists resisted rules and regulations

• Music had a lot of experimentation, with chords, chord progressions, harmony, and form

Music and the Supernatural

• Supernatural content was bizarre/macabre, and it was more popular in the romantic age

• Weird painting- “Nightmare”- by Henry Fuseli

• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

• Operas such as Robert the Devil, The Vampire, The Magic Bullet

Music and the Other Arts

• Efforts were made to blend arts

  • Poetry was more “musical”

  • Paintings and musical works had “poetic” titles

  • See Gesamtkunstwerk, “total artwork,” by Wagner

• Music was seen as being capable of expressing inner experience more deeply than anything else

Concert Life in the Nineteenth Century

• Concert halls and opera houses “dominate[d] the presentation of music”

• Carnegie hall was built

• Concerts of lieder (German songs) and string quartets were common

• Musicians would go on tour to remote areas too

The Artist and the Public

Composers depended on public interest, and the public wanted things they already knew they liked

Style Features of Romantic Music

Every artist had a personal style, but there were some common interests (even though a big one was trying “to sound different from everybody else”)

Romantic Melody

• Emotional, effusive, demonstrative

• Ranged more widely

• Irregular in rhythm and phrase structure

• All were meant to express some feeling

Romantic Harmony

• Great technical advances

• Harmony was either used to highlight emotionality in the melody, or to be “savored for its own sake”

• Chromaticism: music that has all 12 notes of the chromatic scale

Rhythmic Freedom: Rubato

• Rubato, or tempo rubato, was a term that showed rhythm would be “handled flexibly” in performance; means “robbed time”

• Hardly ever indicated in a score

• Improvisation was no more, but performers still added their own touches in rhythm with rubato

The Expansion of Tone Color

• All instruments had major technical advances

• Orchestra was vastly expanded

• New combinations of instruments

• Orchestration- the use and combination of the instruments of the orchestra

• Orchestra was more important in opera

Program Music

• Program music is “instrumental music written in association with a poem, a story, or some other literary source”

  • Sometimes only music that has a distinct story (the program) itself is program music

  • Others just try to capture a mood instead of a story

    • Nocturnes, by Frédéric Chopin

• Not new, just more important now

• Lead to debate if music really illustrated or represented the program

Form in Romantic Music

• Particularly free and spontaneous

• Use of distinct forms was very loose

• Couldn’t truly be formless

Miniature Compositions

• Miniatures are pieces that are a few minutes long, or shorter

• Convey “a particularly pointed emotion”

• Often published in sets

Grandiose Compositions

• Very long

• Listeners were impressed by them

• Form was considered a problem

The Principle of Thematic Unity

• Some thematic material was maintained for whole works

• Themes from one movement come back in others

• New versions of a single theme

• Thematic transformation- short themes freely varied at relatively wide/unpredictable intervals of time

• Vague similarity was more popular than clear likeness