Essay/Term paper: The ideals of instrumental music

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Miscellaneous

At one point in the study of the Romantic period of music, we come upon

the first of several apparently opposing conditions that plague all attempts

to grasp

the meaning of Romantic as applied to the music of the 19th century. This

opposition involved the relation between music and words. If instrumental

music

is the perfect Romantic art, why is it acknowledged that the great masters of

the

symphony, the highest form of instrumental music, were not Romantic

composers,

but were the Classical composers, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven? Moreover,

one

of the most characteristic 19th century genres was the Lied, a vocal piece in

which

Shubert, Schumann, Brahams, and Wolf attained a new union between music and

poetry. Furthermore, a large number of leading composers in the 19th century



were extremely interested and articulate in literary expression, and leading

Romantic novelists and poets wrote about music with deep love and insight.

The conflict between the ideal of pure instrumental music (absolute music)

as the ultimate Romantic mode of expression, and the strong literary

orientation of

the 19th century, was resolved in the conception of program music. Program

music, as Liszt and others in the 19th century used the term, is music

associated

with poetic, descriptive, and even narrative subject matter. This is done

not by

means of musical figures imitating natural sounds and movements, but by

imaginative suggestion. Program music aimed to absorb and transmit the

imagined

subject matter in such a way that the resulting work, although "programmed",

does

not sound forced, and transcends the subject matter it seeks to represent.

Instrumental music thus became a vehicle for the utterance of thoughts which,



although first hinted in words, may ultimately be beyond the power of words

to

fully express.

Practically every composer of the era was, to some degree, writing program

music, weather or not this was publicly acknowledged. One reason it was so

easy

for listeners to connect a scene or a story or a poem with a piece of

Romantic

music is that often the composer himself, perhaps unconsciously, was working

from some such ideas. Writers on music projected their own conceptions of

the

expressive functions of music into the past, and read Romantic programs into

the

instrumental works not only of Beethoven, but also the likes of Mozart,

Haydn,

and Bach!

The diffused scenic effects in the music of such composers as Mendelssohn

and Schumann seem pale when compared to the feverish, and detailed drama that



constitutes the story of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830). Because his



imagination always seemed to run in parallel literary and musical channels,

Berlioz once subtitled his work "Episode in the life of an artist", and

provided a

program for it which was in effect a piece of Romantic autobiography. In

later

years, he conceded that if necessary, when the symphony was performed by

itself

in concert, the program would need not be given out for the music would "of

itself,

and irrespective of any dramatic aim, offer an interest in the musical sense

alone."

The principle formal departure in the symphony is the recurrence of the

opening

theme of the first Allegro, the idee fixe. This, according to the program, is

the

obsessive image of the hero's beloved, that recurs in the other movements.

To

mention another example: in the coda of the Adagio there is a passage for

solo

English horn and four Tympani intended to suggest "distant thunder".

The foremost composer of program music after Beriloz was Franz Liszt,

twelve of whose symphonic poems were written between 1848 and 1858. The

name symphonic poem is significant: these pieces are symphonic, but Liszt

did not

call them symphonies, presumably because or their short length, and the fact

that

they are not divided up into movements. Instead, each is a continuos form

with

various sections, more or less varied in tempo and character, and a few

themes that

are varied, developed, or repeated within the design of the work. Les

Preludes, the

only one that is still played much today, is well designed, melodious, and

efficiently scored. However, its idiom causes it to be rhetorical in a

sense. It

forces today's listeners to here lavishly excessive emotion on ideas that do

not

seem sufficiently important for such a display of feeling.

Liszt's two symphonies were as programmatic as his symphonic poems.

His masterpiece, the Faust Symphony, was dedicated to Berlioz. It consists

of

three movements entitled respectively Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles,

with a

finale (added later) which is a setting for tenor soloist and male chorus.

The first

three movements correspond to the classic plan of an introduction in Allegro,



Andante, and Scherzo. Liszt attempted to sum up the ideas of Romantic music

in

these words:

"Music embodies feeling without forcing it - as it is forced in its

other manifestations, in most arts and especially in the art of

words - to contend and

combine with thought....it is the embodied and intelligent essence of

feeling;

capable of being apprehended by our senses, it permeates them like a dart,

like a

ray, like a dew, like a spirit, and fills our soul."