Page 249 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Impressionism
All good things must come to an end. Romantic music reached its peak during the late nineteenth century in the grandiose works of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Mahler, all of whom were German speaking or composed in a Germanic style. In some ways, this period was the “high-water mark” of Western classical music. By 1900, however, this German- dominated musical empire had started to weaken. Not surprisingly, the strongest challenge to the hegemony of the Germans came from their enemies, the French. French composers began to ridicule the sentimentality of Romanticism in general and the grandiose structures of the German style in particular. German music was said to be too heavy, too pretentious, and too bombastic, like one of Wagner’s Nordic giants from the Ring cycle. Meaningful expression, the French believed, might be communicated in more subtle and decorative ways, in something other than sheer volume of sound and epic length. What the French created, musical Impressionism, was a middle ground between the lush sounds of Romanticism and the bombshells of Modernism that were to come.
Impressionism in Painting and Music
The artistic movement that arose in France in opposition to German Roman- tic music has been given the name Impressionism. We are, of course, more fa- miliar with this term as a designation for a school of late-nineteenth-century painters working in and around Paris, including Claude Monet (1840–1926; Figure 15.1), Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Edgar Degas (1834–
1917), Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), and the American Mary Cas- satt (1844–1926).
You can see the painting that gave its name to the epoch, Monet’s Impression: Sunrise (1873), at the beginning of this chap- ter. There, the ships, rowboats, and other elements in the early morning light are more suggested than fully rendered. In 1874, Claude Monet submitted this painting to be exhibited at the Salon of the French Academy of Fine Arts, but it was rejected. One crit- ic, Louis Leroy, derisively said: “Wallpaper in its most embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” In the uproar that fol- lowed, Monet and his fellow artists were disparagingly called “im- pressionists” for the seemingly imprecise quality of their art. The painters accepted the name, partly as an act of defiance against the establishment, and soon the term was universally adopted.
What irony! French Impressionism, which once generated such controversy, is now the most popular of all artistic styles. Indeed, judging by museum attendance and reproductions sold, there is an almost limitless enthusiasm for the art of Monet, Degas, Renoir, and their associates—precisely the paintings that
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Figure 15.1
Claude Monet, Woman with Umbrella (1886). The Impres- sionist canvas is not a finished surface in the traditional sense. Rather, the painter breaks down light into separate dabs of color and juxtaposes them for the viewer’s eye to reassemble. Here bold brushstrokes convey an astonishing sense of movement, freshness, and sparkling light. And who is the woman? We have no idea—this is an impression of a person, not a portrait, and less a photograph.
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Woman with Parasol turned to the Left, 1886 (oil on canvas), Monet, Claude (1840–1926)/Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library
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