The Music of the Nineteenth Century
The Romantic era is understood as running from the death of Beethoven in 1827 until 1900. Were we compelled to do so, we could come up with better dates. It is compulsion we will, for now, ignore.
The adjective romantic comes from the noun romance. A romance was a story or poem that dealt with legendary people and/or events written in one of the romance languages, that is one of the languages descended from Roman (Latin). For example, the medieval poems about King Arthur were called Arthurian romances. As a result, when the adjective romantic was first used during the seventeenth century, it referred to something remote, legendary, fantastic, and marvellous, beyond the everyday work of real life.
When applied to the art and literature of nineteenth century, then, the word romantic refers not to physical love or affection but rather something that is beyond the everyday. Where a twenty-first-century individual, when met with something incredible, might say, "Far out, man", her nineteenth-century counterpart would have said, "Most romantic, dude".
The big difference between the music of Classical era and that of the Romantic era has to do with expanded expressive content and the incremental changes to the musical language that were made in order to describe the expanded expressive content.
We must be wary of the word inevitable. In truth, few things are inevitable: death,perhaps (but certainly not taxes, not if you've got your money in a numbered account in Cayman Islands). Nevertheless, given the social evolution that marked the European world from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, there does appear to be a certain inevitability to the development of Romantic art.
The music of the Baroque era in general, and opera in particular, acknowledge and celebrated the individual human voice to a degree entirely new in past-ancient world. During the Enlightenment, the dramatic and homophonic elements of Baroque opera were institutionalised in the instrumental genres and musical forms of classicism. Beethoven, having come to the conclusion that music was above all a self-expressive art, adhered to Classical era rituals only to the degree that they served his expressive needs.
In his lifetime, Beethoven was regarded by many as an eccentric modernist whose late music, in particular, could be written off as the product of a slightly crazy, hearing-impaired composer. However, it didn't take long time for the generation of composers who came into their prime immediately after Beethoven's death to embrace him as the Moses of new music, one that would lead them to an expressive promised land relevant to the changing social and economic realities of 1830s and '40s.
Danhauser's painting Liszt at the Piano (1840) illustrates perfectly the Romantic era infatuation with the Beethovenian "ideal". Pictured is a Parisian salon filled with some of the greatest artists of the day. For his inspiration,Liszt is looking at a monumental marble bust of Beethoven perched on the piano. The bust is seen against a window, which frames a roiling and turbulent sky, as if to say the Beethoven is one with the gods, that he cannot be contained in a mere room.Typical of Beethoven's postmortem deification, the bust looks more like Tyrone Power than the short, ugly, smallpox-scarred Ludwig van Beethoven. For the great majority of composer and listeners of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, Beethoven was viewed as a spiritual guide, as a hero, as a deity, as a catalyst for the expressive evolution that we now call romanticism.
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| Liszt at the Piano, by Josef Danhauser (1840)
For the audiences of the Romantic era, music became the ultimate art form. The remote, boundless, ephemeral, non tactile nature of music, particularly instrumental music, made it the ideal art for the nineteenth century . Its detachment from the world, its mystery, and its incomparable power of suggestion - which works on the mound directly without the mediation of words - made it the dominant art, the one most representative among all the arts of the nineteenth century. According to the nineteenth century English essayist Walter Pater, "All art aspires to the condition of music".
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| Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
From the book 'How to Listen to Great Music', by Robert Greenberg
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