Western Art Music: Romantic Period (Part 2)

THE ROMANTIC periOD:
1820-1900

1. Romantic Composers & Their Public

2. Genre Definitions

Romantic Composers and their Public

INNER WORLD

• The Napoleonic Wars (1789-1814) and the French Revolution meant that many members of the aristocracy could not longer fund musicians, opera houses, orchestras etc.

• Musicians lost jobs in small states when they merged into bigger nations politically and borders shifted.

• Romantics wrote primarily for a middle-class audience.

• Music schools or Conservatories were established in the early part of the century.

OUTER WORLD

• Beethoven inspired Romantics with the "free artist" image and ideal; they wrote music to fulfil an inner need rather than a commission. Sometimes their works would sit on a shelf for years before they could be performed.

• Some were looking to leave a legacy, to leave something beautiful, stirring, or important behind artistically.

• Composers came from other walks of life rather than learning the craft from parents/forebears. They had to convince their parents that they could make it as musicians.

​A musical setting of a poem for solo voice and piano, where the voice and piano are partners in the intrepretation and story-telling. Both the melody and the accompaniment can be descriptive of the scene.

The form can be strophic, modified strophic or through-composed, depending on the poem's structure and meaning.

A song cycle is a set of art songs with unifying text or musical ideas.

ART SONG (lied)

A relatively short piece which is descriptive of a particular mood or non-musical subject.

These pieces often have a descriptive title, e.g. Nocturne, Elegy, that give a hint to the mood/scene.

Schumann's Carnaval is a set of character pieces where each piece is either descriptive of a scene of love, of a friend, or of the different sides of his own personality.

​​CHARACTER PIECE

An etudy is a study - a piece that teaches the player some aspect of technique. A concert etude is a study that is written for the concert hall, and is thus composed with more musicality and showmanship than an ordinary technical study.

Concert etudes are impressive, musically rich and large in scale, all while still teaching and showing off technique.

Chopin's Etudes Op. 10 and 25. are a prime example of etudes for public performance.

​​CONCERT ETUDE

An orchestral piece written in the style of an overture without being attached to a stage production.

A concert overture is usually based on a literary theme, e.g. Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Nights Dream Overture or Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.

The music is programmatic and evocative of the various scenes and emotions of the story or text.

CONCERT OVERTURE

A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source.

A tone poem aims to capture the listener's imagination and evoke scenes, ideas and moods in one continous movement. In a sense it is a reflection of romantic intensity: rather than spreading ideas over multiple movements, all emotions and ideas are pulled together - often abandoning form in favour of substance, i.e. using strict sonata form was less important than coveying the ideas and emotions of the subject matter.

TONE POEM (symphonic poem)