Page 190 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

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The mature music of Beethoven, with its powerful crescendos, pounding chords, and grand gestures, announces the arrival of the Romantic era in music. Today we think of a “romantic” as an idealistic person, a dreamer, sometimes fearful, always hopeful, and eternally in love. This view resonates with and emerges from the values of the Romantic era (1820–1900), when reason gave way to passion, objective analysis to subjective emotion, and “the real world” to a realm of the imagination and of dreams. In all the arts of the nineteenth century, freedom, spontaneity, and personal expression became paramount. And just as Beethoven cast off the face paint, wig, and powdered hair of the eighteenth century (he rarely combed his shaggy mop), so Romantic artists generally cast aside the formal constraints of the older Classical style.
Romantic Inspiration, Romantic Creativity
Romanticism is often defined as a revolt against the Classical adherence to rea- son and tradition. Whereas artists of the eighteenth century sought to achieve unity, order, and a balance of form and content, those of the nineteenth cen- tury privileged self-expression, striving to communicate with passion no matter what imbalance, even excess, might result. If Classical artists drew inspiration from the monuments of ancient Greece and Rome, those of the Romantic era looked to the human imagination and the wonders of nature. The Romantic art- ist exalted instinctive feelings—not those of the masses, but individual, personal
ones. As the American Romantic poet Walt Whitman said, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”
If a single feeling or sentiment pervaded the Romantic era, it was love. Indeed, “romance” is at the very heart of the word romantic. The loves of Romeo and Juliet, and Tristan and Isolde, for example, captured the public’s imagination in the Romantic era. The endless pursuit of an unattainable love became an ob- session that, when expressed as music, produced the sounds of longing and yearning heard in so many Romantic works.
Nature and natural feelings were also subjects dear to the Romantics (Figure 11.1). As Beethoven proclaimed in 1821, “I perform most faithfully the duties that Humanity, God, and Na- ture enjoin upon me.” In his “Pastoral” Symphony (Symphony No. 6), the first important Romantic “nature piece,” Beethoven sought to capture both the tranquil beauty and the destructive fury of the natural world. Indeed, the Romantic vision of na- ture, and human nature, had its dark side. Composers, writers, and painters were now increasingly fascinated with the occult, the supernatural, and the macabre. This was the age not only of composer Robert Schumann’s The Happy Farmer, but also of writer Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Figure 11.1
The Dreamer, by German Ro- mantic artist Casper David Friedrich (1774–1840). The painting suggests two forces dear to the hearts of the Romantics: the natural world and the world of dreams. Here timeless nature, creator and destroyer of all things human, surrounds a dreamer lost in soli- tary contemplation. Notice how the tree to the left is squarely centered within the “window” on the left, as if an altar has been erected in honor of nature.
168 chapter eleven romanticism and romantic chamber music
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