Blog Series on Romanticism #5: Music

Thus far, the present blog series on Romanticism has focused on literature. Romanticism, though, was a broad cultural movement that affected all the arts. This fifth installment of this series will thus turn attention to Romanticism in European music. The essay will be organized into four parts. The first part will consist of a general overview of the history of European music, in order to better understand Romantic music within its particular context. After this, the second part of the essay will describe some of the main features of Romantic music. Then, the third part will turn to a discussion of some of the main composers of the Romantic era, including (of course) Beethoven. Finally, the fourth part will reflect on the end of the Romantic era in music and the potential significance of this for Western civilization as a whole. 

Overview of European Music

To start with, then, the history of European music can be schematically divided into the following eras: the Medieval, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Classical, the Romantic, and the Modern (see Naxos). In general, Medieval music was strongly choral in nature and focused on religious themes; it was organized around and to a large extent produced by the Church. During the Rennaisance, this tended to change, with composers gaining a greater degree of creative and thematic freedom and shifting toward musical arrangements in which the choir did not necessarily play such a strong role. This gradually gave way to the Baroque period, which is the point at which European music started sounding distinctly "classical" in the way that people normally use the word when they talk about classical music. 

During the Baroque period (which began roughly around the year 1600), orchestral arrangements, as well as the use of scales and modes, began to resemble what they would continue to resemble over the course of the next few hundred years. However, it is clear that personal self-expression was not in fact the objective of Baroque music. For example, Bach was the Baroque composer par excellence; and as Hofstadter's discussions of Bach has made clear, the magnificence of Bach's music consists not of Bach's subjective expression of himself but rather of the intense mathematical permutations and combinations that characterize the objective structure of his works. The point was not to express the self but rather, as it were, to mirror the harmony of the cosmic spheres. To an extent, this was also true of the Classical era that followed the Baroque era. Composers of the Classical era, however, were clearly striving toward a kind of power and intensity of expression that they were having difficulty achieving within the traditional parameters to which they adhered.

Those parameters were essentially blown up by the advent of the Romantic era in European music. As Naxos has written: "The next period in musical history therefore found composers attempting to balance the expressive and the formal in music with a variety of approaches which would have left composers of any previous age utterly bewildered" (paragraph 5). It can be suggested here that with the rise of the Romantic movement, music began to find its own internal telos: the music was to adhere to no standards per se aside from the inherent drive of the music itself to express what it was meant to express. Of course, formal structures were still very much in place, insofar as without such structure, there could be only noise and no actual music. But the formal structures became subservient to the element of subjective expression. With the ride of the Modern era in music, this priority experienced a reversal, with composers once again becoming interested primarily in innovations of formal structure.  

Main Features of Romantic Music

A key feature of Romantic music was clearly its subjective emotionality: from a Baroque perspective, this emotionality must have seemed almost obscene, insofar as it radically disturbed the kind of harmonious serenity that was the ideal of previous eras of European music. To quote Naxos again regarding the Romantic era: "The emotional range of music during this period was considerably widened, as was its harmonic vocabulary . . . Music often had a 'programme' or story-line attached to it, sometimes of a tragic or despairing nature, occasionally representing such natural phenomena as rivers or galloping horses" (paragraph 6). It was only with the Romantic era that the idea came about that music was actually supposed to represent something, or evoke particular emotional states. In the present day, everyone probably assumes that this is of course what music is supposed to do. But this is simply a testament to how thoroughly the Romantic movement managed to transform the general perception of the meaning and purpose of music itself. 

At the time, Romantic music was considered deeply revolutionary—and in some ways, that is still how people see it. Beethoven was the composer who inaugurated the Romantic movement in music. And as Woods has written: "After Beethoven it was impossible to go back to the old days when music was regarded as a soporific for wealthy patrons who could doze through a symphony . . . After Beethoven, one no longer returned from a concert humming pleasant tunes. This is music that does not calm, but shocks and disturbs. It is music that makes you think and feel" (paragraph 3). This is a good encapsulation of the nature of Beethoven's music in general, and of the way in which Romantic music differed starkly in its composition, its ideals, and its effects from all the works that characterized the previous eras of the history of European music. 

Key Romantic Composers

Beethoven was of course the first and the pre-eminent composer of the Romantic era. But he was only the beginning; many composers followed in his footsteps. One of the most important of these composers was Chopin. His compositions were almost exclusively for the solo piano—and given the job he did with this, it is easy to see why. Romantic Piano has dubbed Chopin the poet of the piano: "By the 1830s, the piano could sigh or shiver, quiver and swoon as no other instrument had ever done. No one understood the piano's special resources and enchantments more completely than Frederic Chopin" (paragraph 1). The solo piano also fit well with the Romantic ideal of individual genius: the image of one man summoning brilliant works out of this singular instrument provides an almost archetypical image of the Romantic conception of the nature of music itself. 

The Romantics were also prolific in other genres, though, and especially the symphony. Mahler, for example, is considered one of the last of the Romantics, and he created some of the most awe-inspiring symphonies in the entire repertoire of European music. As Muscato has made clear, Mahler's works were a radical fulfillment of the Romantic ideal regarding the nature of music: "Mahler's symphonies were unique in that they were narrative, meaning they followed something of a storyline because they were based in emotional experiences. This isn't a dry, objective piece of technically perfect music. Its driven by Mahler's own personal emotions dealing with the subject of death" (paragraph 2). In a way, though, Mahler also foreshadowed the end of the Romantic era itself. This was because by pushing emotional self-expression to such extreme limits, Mahler also tended to show how such self-expression is almost always at risk of exhausting itself. Essentially, after Mahler, it would have been difficult to pursue this Romantic ideal without descending into a kind of self-caricature. 

The End of the Romantic Era

The Romantic era in music had a very definite end. That is, we no longer live in the Romantic era today; it was something that happened during a definite historical time in the past, just as the Medieval era began and ended over the course of the historical process. To an extent, the decline of Romanticism in music was catalyzed by changes in the political and social conditions of the time: "For such a decline to set in, various spiritual, cultural, social and historical processes had to coincide and run their course. A great era of crises in European intellectual life ended around 1860, and a new crisis which began again around 1880 confronted literary and musical life with new conditions, impelling it with new requirements" (263). In short, the cultural movement of Romanticism was superseded by a new culture that emerged on the basis of new historical determinants. 

The cataclysm known as World War I probably played a huge role in this turn of fortunes for the Romantic movement. Again, Romanticism is all about subjectivity: it is about the emotional self-expression of the soul of the individual artist. It is difficult to stand up for such a value, however, in the face of a massive objective horror such as World War I, which resulted in trauma and death for literally millions of Europeans (see Christensen). Relative to such a historical experience, individual self-expression can come to seem somewhat trite or even adolescent; it can come to seem like a basic evasion of reality and a refusal to deal with the objective world as it actually stands. New forms of music would have been necessary in order to reflect the experience of living in this brave new world. Such forms would likely consist of a sense of subjective depletion, as well as innovation with formal structure in order to reflect the fragility of the formal structure of the world itself. Indeed, this is the direction in which the Modern music that followed the Romantic era largely went.

A good formulation of the weariness that one can eventually come to experience with Romantic music can be found in the musings of Milan Kundera. The following passage names two towering Romantic composers: "Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Horowitz at the piano .—those I detest, deeply, sincerely. And I am more and more irritated by the kitsch spirit in certain works whose form pretends to modernism" (135). Kundera's main idea here is that in some of the Romantic composers, the desire for emotional self-expression leads to a kind of intoxication in which the composers actually achieve not authentic emotion but just the pantomime of it. In other words, the composers merely convey their own desire to convey emotion. This is what Kundera identifies with the name of kitsch, and this is what he declares to detest. The corrective to this would be to curb the self-conscious desire for self-expression, so that one may sober up for a moment and actually feel real emotion. This kind of sensibility was probably at least part of what led to the twilight and eventual demise of Romanticism, especially within music. In short, people—including the artists themselves—simply got tired of the self-intoxication, and wanted to turn toward a more grounded and authentic form of creation.

Conclusion

In summary, the present essay has consisted of a discussion of Romanticism within the context of music. There are two key points that have been made here. The first is that Romantic music was truly revolutionary within its historical context, and that it broke many of the bounds that and traditionally confined European music. The second, though, is that near the end, the self-expression of Romantic music itself tended toward an increasing grandiosity that veered toward self-caricature and ultimately self-depletion. This is reflective of the broader psychological ambivalence that characterized all of Romanticism from the start. This ambivalence will be the subject of the next post in this blog series, which will explore Romanticism and madness.

Works Cited 

Christensen, Jerome. Romanticism at the End of History. Baltimore: John Hopkins U P, 2004. Print. 

Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print.

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. New York: Harper, 2003. Print. 

Muscato, Christopher. "Mahler, Debussy & Bartok: Transition from Late-Romantic to Modern." Study.com. n.d. Web. 22 Jun. 2016. <http://study.com/academy/lesson/mahler-debussy-bartok-transition-from-late-romantic-to-modern.html>. 

Naxos. "History of Classical Music." Education. Author, n.d. Web. 22 Jun. 2016. <http://www.naxos.com/education/brief_history.asp>. 

Romantic Piano. "Frédéric Chopin: The Poet of the Piano." WQXR, 2 May 2013. Web. 22 Jun. 2016. <http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/289579-frederic-chopin-the-poet-of-the-piano/>. 

Szabolcsi, B. "The Decline of Romanticism: End of the Century, Turn of the Century." Studia Musicologica 12 (1970): 263-289. 

Woods, Alan. "Beethoven: Man, Composer and Revolutionary." In Defence of Marxism. 19 May 2006. Web. 22 Jun. 2016. <http://www.marxist.com/beethoven-man-composer-revolutionary190506.htm>.