| Term Paper Title | Romantic Music: The Ideals Of Instrumental Music |
| # of Words | 814 |
| # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) | 3.26 |
Romantic Music: The Ideals of Instrumental Music
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 fa...Read entire document
|
|
