Page 238 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 14.2
Composer Carl Maria von Weber conducting with a rolled sheet
of music so as to highlight the movement of his hand and thereby show the beat >
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forgotten. But the nineteenth century looked back on Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, and began to see them as geniuses whose great symphonies were wor- thy of preservation and repeated performance. These and the best works of suc- ceeding generations came to form a canon—indeed a museum—of classical music, and still today they form the core of the concert repertoire.
How we experience concert hall music today is a result of values created during the Romantic era, when music came to occupy a newly exalted posi- tion. Before 1800, a concert was as much a social event as a musical one. People talked, drank, ate, played cards, flirted, and wandered about during the perfor- mance. Dogs ran freely on the ground floor, and armed guards roamed the hall to maintain at least some order. When people turned to the music, they were loud and demonstrative. They hummed along with the melody and tapped the beat to the music they liked. If a performance went well, people applauded, not only at the ends of pieces but during them as well.
Around 1840, however, a sudden hush descended upon the concert hall—it became more like a church or temple. With the revered figure of the Romantic artist-composer now before them, members of the audience sat in respectful silence, though they might read a text: program notes entered the concert hall about this time. Listeners expected not merely to be entertained, but to be educated, perhaps even morally uplifted, by the music. In sum, the attitudes about classical concert music that arose in the nineteenth century still govern our thinking today. Where we go for a concert, whom we see on stage, what we hear, and how we dress and behave are not eternal ideals, with us since time immemorial, but are instead values created during the Romantic period.
The Conductor
As the streets of London became more congested with wagons in the mid- nineteenth century, traffic cops appeared, waving red and green flags and then lanterns at night. So, too, as the Romantic symphony orchestra be- came larger and more complex, a musical “traffic cop” was needed: the conductor waving a baton. In Mozart’s day, the leader of the or- chestra was one of the performers, either a keyboardist or the first violinist, who led by moving his head and body. Beethoven, however, at least at the end of his life, stood before the orchestra with his back to the audience and waved his hands, gesturing how the music should go. Thereafter, conductors might lead with a rolled-up piece of paper (Figure 14.2), a violin bow, a handkerchief, or a wooden baton, each ob- ject intending to clarify the meter and the speed of the beat. Sometimes the leader merely banged the beat on a music stand. Gradually during the nineteenth century, however, this director evolved from a mere time- beater into an interpreter, and sometimes a dictator, of the musical score. The modern conductor had arrived, and what he conducted was usually a
symphony or a concerto.
chapter fourteen late romantic orchestral music
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