Page 209 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 12.2
A large orchestra depicted at Covent Garden Theater, London, in 1846. The conductor stands toward the middle, baton in hand, with strings to his right and woodwinds, brass, and percus- sion to his left. It was typical in this period to put all or part of the orchestra on risers to allow the sound to project more fully. <
nineteenth-century orchestra produced the loudest decibel level of any human contrivance. The big sound—and the big contrasts—of the nineteenth-century orchestra (Figure 12.2) were new and startling, and audiences packed ever-larger concert halls to hear them and the “special effects” they could create.
To maximize (and sometimes minimize) the Romantic sound, composers prescribed an extravagant range of dynamics such as pppp (super pianissimo) and ffff (super fortissimo). Such sonic extremes are typical of the Romantic era, an age that indulged in wild mood swings and excesses of many kinds.
Monumental and Miniature Size
It is axiomatic in music that the greater the number of performers, the greater the length of the performance. Romantic composers took advantage of the newly enriched sounds of the symphony orchestra to lay out broad, sweeping melodies and indulge in gigantic crescendos. Everything in music, it seemed, was expanding—a process that paralleled the ideas of the new scientific age. This was the period, of course, in which Charles Darwin posited that the earth was not merely seven thousand years old, as the Bible implied, but several million. If Mozart’s G minor symphony (1788) lasts twenty minutes, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830) takes about fifty-five minutes, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (1894) clocks in at nearly an hour and a half. Longest of all was Richard Wagner’s four-opera Ring cycle (1853–1874; see “Wagner's Ring...” in Chapter 13), which runs some seventeen hours over the course of four evenings.
Yet, paradoxically, Romantic composers were not interested only in the gran- diose; the miniature fascinated them as well. In works of only a brief minute or two, they tried to capture the essence of a single mood, sentiment, or emotion. Such a miniature was called a character piece. It was usually, but not always, written for the piano and often made use of simple binary (AB) or ternary (ABA) form. In this chapter, we will explore two very different musical works, the first a monumental one by Hector Berlioz, and the second a miniature piece by Peter Tchaikovsky.
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