Romantic eras

**Romantic music** is a period of Western classical music that began in the late 18th or early 19th century. It is related to Romanticism, the European artistic and literary movement that arose in the second half of the 18th century, and Romantic music, in particular, dominated the Romantic movement in Germany.

## Composers

In the Romantic period, music became more expressive and emotional, expanding to encompass literary, artistic, and philosophical themes. Famous early Romantic composers include Beethoven (whose works span both this period and the preceding Classical period), Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Bellini, and Berlioz. The late 19th century saw a dramatic expansion in the size of the orchestra and in the dynamic range and diversity of instruments used in this ensemble. Also, public concerts became a key part of urban middle-class society, in contrast to earlier periods, when concerts were mainly paid for by and performed for aristocrats. Famous composers from the second half of the century include Bruckner, Johann Strauss II, Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Verdi, and Wagner. Between 1890 and 1910, a third wave of composers including Mahler, Richard Strauss, Puccini, and Sibelius built on the work of middle Romantic composers to create even more complex – and often much longer – musical works. A prominent mark of late 19th-century music is its nationalistic fervour, as exemplified by such figures as Dvořák, Sibelius, and Grieg. Other prominent late-century figures include Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Rachmaninoff and Franck.

## Traits

Characteristics often attributed to Romanticism:

* a new preoccupation with and surrender to Nature
* a fascination with the past, particularly the Middle Ages and legends of medieval chivalry
* a turn towards the mystic and supernatural, both religious and merely spooky
* a longing for the infinite
* mysterious connotations of remoteness, the unusual and fabulous, the strange and surprising
* a focus on the nocturnal, the ghostly, the frightful, and terrifying
* fantastic seeing and spiritual experiences
* a new attention is given to national identity
* emphasis on extreme subjectivism
* interest in the autobiographical
* discontent with musical formulas and conventions

Such lists, however, proliferated over time, resulting in a "chaos of antithetical phenomena", criticized for their superficiality and for signifying so many different things that there came to be no central meaning. The attributes have also been criticized for being too vague. For example, features of the "ghostly and supernatural" could apply equally to Mozart's *Don Giovanni* from 1787 and Stravinsky's *The Rake's Progress* from 1951 (Kravitt 1992, 93–95).

From a musical stance the following aspect could be used to distinguish romantic music from previous era's:

* The use of a wider range of dynamics (from ppp to FFF);
* Using a larger tonal range (exp. using the lowest and highest notes of the piano);
* Large orchestrations (Started by Ludwig Beethoven)
* The use of more elaborate harmonic progressions (Wagner and Liszt are known for their experimental progressions);
* The use of new or previously not so common musical structures like the nocturne, concert etude, arabesque and rhapsody
* Lead by the characteristics described above composers were more inclined to write programme music (Most notably Franz Liszt)

## Trends of the 19th-century

### Non-musical influences

Events and changes that happen in society such as ideas, attitudes, discoveries, inventions, and historical events always affect music. For example, the Industrial Revolution was in full effect by the late 18th century and early 19th century. This event had a very profound effect on music: there were major improvements in the mechanical valves, and keys that most woodwinds and brass instruments depend on. The new and innovative instruments could be played with greater ease and they were more reliable (Schmidt-Jones and Jones 2004, 3).

Another development that had an effect on music was the rise of the middle class. Composers before this period lived on the patronage of the aristocracy. Many times their audience was small, composed mostly of the upper class and individuals who were knowledgeable about music (Schmidt-Jones and Jones 2004, 3). The Romantic composers, on the other hand, often wrote for public concerts and festivals, with large audiences of paying customers, who had not necessarily had any music lessons (Schmidt-Jones and Jones 2004, 3). Composers of the Romantic Era, like Elgar, showed the world that there should be "no segregation of musical tastes" (Young 1967, 525) and that the "purpose was to write music that was to be heard" (Young 1967, 527).

### Nationalism

During the Romantic period, music often took on a much more nationalistic purpose. For example, Jean Sibelius' *Finlandia* has been interpreted to represent the rising nation of Finland, which would someday gain independence from Russian control (Child 2006). Frédéric Chopin was one of the first composers to incorporate nationalistic elements into his compositions. Joseph Machlis states, "Poland's struggle for freedom from tsarist rule aroused the national poet in Poland. … Examples of musical nationalism abound in the output of the romantic era. The folk idiom is prominent in the Mazurkas of Chopin" (Machlis 1963, 149–50). His mazurkas and polonaises are particularly notable for their use of nationalistic rhythms. Moreover, "During World War II the Nazis forbade the playing of … Chopin's Polonaises in Warsaw because of the powerful symbolism residing in these works" (Machlis 1963, 150). Other composers, such as Bedřich Smetana, wrote pieces that musically described their homelands; in particular, Smetana's *Vltava* is a symphonic poem about the Moldau River in the modern-day Czech Republic and the second in a cycle of six nationalistic symphonic poems collectively titled *Má vlast* (My Homeland) (Grunfeld 1974, 112–13). Smetana also composed eight nationalist operas, all of which remain in the repertory. They established him as the first Czech nationalist composer as well as the most important Czech opera composer of the generation who came to prominence in the 1860s (Ottlová, Tyrrell, and Pospíšil 2001).