Overview: Romantic Music — An Introduction

The Romantic Period

The Romantic period in music spans roughly 1820 to 1900 and follows a particularly turbulent time in European history marked by revolution and change. The French Revolution (1789–99), inspired in part by Enlightenment ideas of equality, human rights, and social reform, adopted the motto “Liberty, equality, brotherhood” and opened up the possibility of freedom, democratic reform, the abolition of privilege and rank, and the formation of nations with citizens enjoying equal rights. The Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) saw the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, while the American Revolution (1775–83) had already demonstrated the viability of republican government across the Atlantic. The (First) Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760–1840) brought a massive shift from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban one powered by machine manufacturing, beginning with textiles and expanding through steam- and mill-powered factories, coal and iron mining. For music, the Industrial Revolution was consequential in a very direct way: instrument-making firms replaced hand-crafted workshops, driving down prices and making instruments available to the growing middle class.

It is difficult to define any era, including the Romantic era. Music eras overlap, and changes in styles and artistic ideas are fluid. The nineteenth century is not a unified monolith but is defined by different styles, issues, and trends — and even some quite vehemently competing ideas. The Romantic era begins roughly with the mid-to-late period in Beethoven’s output and extends to the late works of Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, Musorgsky, and Tchaikovsky, as well as early works of Debussy, Richard Strauss, and Elgar. The age of Musical Romanticism is closely bound to Romantic features in the other arts.

The Term “Romantic”

The word “romantic” carries many meanings. It evokes the Romance languages derived from Latin (French, Italian, and others), the realm of love and relationships, and the spirit of someone who is eternally idealistic. Love and idealism were important sentiments in the nineteenth century. Romanticism can be defined as a movement in art and literature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against Neoclassicism and the premise of rationality and reason of the previous centuries. The German poet Friedrich Schlegel first used the term “romantic” in the late 1790s to describe “literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form.” Imagination, emotion, and freedom were the focal points of the Romantic movement.

Some Features of Romanticism

Idealistic Love

Passionate, romantic narratives occupied centre stage in the arts. Stories like Romeo and Juliet and Tristan and Isolde embodied the Romantic ideal of consuming, often tragic love. Eugene Delacroix captured this spirit in his painting Les Adieux de Romeo et Juliette (1845). The Romantics were fascinated with Shakespeare as a rebel and champion of the individual, in contrast to the restrained Classical drama of earlier decades. Tchaikovsky and Berlioz both composed works based on Romeo and Juliet; Verdi drew on Macbeth, Falstaff, and Otello; even Rossini wrote an opera on Otello — with a happy ending. Tchaikovsky’s famous “Love” theme from his Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture (1870) captures the soaring Romantic ideal of passionate love.

Obsession with Nature

Nature held a powerful grip on the Romantic imagination. The natural world was portrayed as wild, untamed, and all-powerful, but also as a place where humans could find harmony — a balm for the urban-weary, since cities were dirty, polluted, and disease-infested. Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) captures the sublime, that feeling of awe mixed with terror before the vastness of nature. Beethoven evoked a similar spirit in his Symphony No. 6 (1808), the “Pastoral,” whose first movement is titled “Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside.”

Dreaming was also part of the Romantic aesthetic. Friedrich’s Ruins of the Oybin (The Dreamer) (ca. 1835) dissolves the barrier between the human and natural world in the imagination of the dreamer. Dreams were evoked through music as well: Schumann’s Traumerei (“Dreaming,” 1838), played memorably by Horowitz, captures this contemplative mood perfectly.

The Supernatural and the Grotesque

Dreaming could turn into nightmares. The Romantics were obsessed with horror, the supernatural, the terrifying, and the grotesque. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Francisco Goya’s disturbing painting Saturn Devouring His Son (1819–23), and Berlioz’s “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” from the Symphonie fantastique (1830) all testify to this darker side of the Romantic imagination. These themes — and how they are expressed through music — will be explored throughout the course.

Ludwig van Beethoven — Biography and Early Works

Some Biographical Information

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was not only one of the most important composers in the history of Western music but a cultural icon whose popularity continues to this day. He was a very real person with real pain, real relationships, and serious health issues, all of which had a profound impact on his music. The historical events unfolding around him — the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Wars — also shaped his worldview and his art.

Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, into a very musical family. His father, Johann van Beethoven, was his first teacher, instructing him in piano, violin, and improvisation. A pivotal encounter occurred when Joseph Haydn passed through Bonn and heard the young Beethoven play; Haydn was so impressed that he recommended Beethoven be sent to Vienna. In 1792, Beethoven moved to Vienna, and there was no turning back. He studied counterpoint with Haydn and cultivated patrons among the aristocracy. Among his other teachers were Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Antonio Salieri (who, contrary to his portrayal in the film Amadeus, was a highly regarded composer and teacher).

Beethoven presumed equality with his aristocratic patrons and students, a remarkable attitude for the time. He fell in love repeatedly with unattainable women from the nobility. Two letters discovered after his death — neither of which appears to have been sent — reveal the depth of his emotional life. The first, from 1812, is addressed to an unknown recipient called the “Immortal Beloved”; her identity has been the subject of enormous scholarly speculation but remains uncertain. The second, written to his brothers but never sent, has been dubbed the “Heiligenstadt Testament”. In this extraordinary document, Beethoven comes to terms with his gradual hearing loss, which reached a crisis in 1802. He considered suicide, but it was his art that saved him — he resolved to continue living and composing. The letter can be heard read aloud by the actor John Bell, and the text is reproduced in the textbook (p. 564).

In 1815, Beethoven became the guardian of his eight-year-old nephew Karl after the death of his brother. A troubled custody battle with Karl’s mother deeply impacted Beethoven, and the situation culminated tragically when Karl attempted suicide in 1826, just a year before Beethoven’s own death. Beethoven also tackled serious illness throughout his life — abdominal and digestive problems that caused him great pain. There is much speculation but no definitive diagnosis of what caused his hearing loss and ill-health. He was enormously popular during his lifetime, and when he died at the age of 56 (not quite 57), his funeral procession was attended by over 10,000 people.

His major works include nine symphonies and eleven overtures, five piano concertos and a violin concerto, sixteen string quartets, nine piano trios, ten violin sonatas and five cello sonatas, thirty-two piano sonatas, the opera Fidelio, the Missa solemnis, the Mass in C Major, the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, and numerous other works.

Beethoven’s Career: Three Periods

Beethoven’s career and music reflect the tumultuous changes of his era. He was steeped in Enlightenment ideas and profoundly affected by the French Revolution; he idealized and then became disillusioned by Napoleon. Scholars traditionally divide his works into three periods:

1. 1770–1802: Youth in Bonn and early Vienna years
2. 1802–1814: A new level of drama and expression
3. 1815–1827: Introspective late works

The crisis of 1802, when Beethoven confronted his encroaching deafness and resolved to live for his art, marks the precipitating event for the shift to the second period. The death of his brother in 1815 and the assumption of his nephew’s guardianship, combined with complete deafness, mark the onset of the late period.

Early Career: Bonn and the First Decade in Vienna

In Bonn, Beethoven and his father were in the service of Maximilian Franz, Elector of Cologne. Even before leaving his hometown, Beethoven was known as a virtuoso pianist and improviser and had gained patrons among the local nobility. After moving to Vienna in 1792, he took lessons with Haydn, Albrechtsberger, and Salieri, and quickly established himself as a pianist through private and public concerts. He taught well-to-do students from noble families and started selling works to publishers as early as 1791. His success as a freelance musician — earning a living through performing, teaching, and publishing rather than through a permanent court appointment — was remarkable for its time.

Early Works and Style

During this early period, Beethoven wrote a great deal of solo piano music: sonatas, variations, and shorter works. This reflected his career as a performing pianist and a teacher of talented students from the nobility; he published this music and aimed it in part at the skilled amateur market. In these works, we already see him taking the Classical style inherited from Haydn and Mozart and making significant changes that we associate more with the Romantic period. Strong contrasts of style delineate the form; the expressive range is much broader than in typical Classical works; and new compositional approaches give the piano music an almost symphonic sound, with frequent octaves, a thicker texture, and abrupt changes in dynamics.

Piano Sonata in C Minor, Op. 13 (“Pathetique”), First Movement (NAWM 129)

The Pathetique Sonata, Op. 13 — which translates roughly as “Sonata with Pathos” — was composed in 1797–98 and published in 1799. It was very popular with the public and sold many copies. The title is evocative and served as a useful marketing tool for publishers, but it also signals the emotional journey at the heart of the work: pity, grief, tenderness, and the attempt to resist and overcome suffering. The sonata features rhetorical gestures suggesting pathos, like a speech designed to evoke strong feelings in the audience — pain, grief, and ultimately resistance. This emotional quality sounds deeply biographical, as if Beethoven felt these struggles very strongly and channeled them directly into his music.

The work is a three-movement piece for solo piano: a fast first movement, a contrasting slow second movement in A-flat major, and a fast finale. The outer movements are in C minor, a key long associated with stormy, passionate character (and one that Beethoven returned to throughout his career).

First Movement: Form and Structure

The first movement is in sonata form with a slow introduction, a feature that is quite unusual for a piano sonata. Slow introductions were usually reserved for symphonies, particularly those of Haydn, so their presence here lends the work a symphonic grandeur from the very first bar.

The slow introduction is marked Grave (solemn). It opens with a grand, serious gesture: a low C-minor forte-piano chord that functions as a cry of pain, plunging the listener immediately into the emotional journey. The first theme struggles to rise from C upward, reaching as far as E-flat before collapsing back down — already conveying difficulty and struggle. It briefly arrives in E-flat major around measure 5, but this brightness is short-lived. Pulsating chords and a descending bass line accompany a grieving motive that keeps trying to rise. At measure 9, a climax is reached on a dominant seventh chord, followed by a pause and a sweeping chromatic scale downward that leads into the fast part of the movement. The slow introduction also contains two cadenza-like passages (mm. 4 and 10) that give it a concerto-like quality, and its dotted rhythms recall the regal character of a French overture.

Exposition: Themes and Character

The exposition begins at measure 11, marked allegro molto e con brio (very fast and with spirit). After the heavy grief of the Grave, this section represents an attempt to overcome suffering. As is typical of Classical forms, the exposition repeats (though some recordings unusually repeat the slow introduction as well, which is not standard practice).

The themes in this movement have a distinctly symphonic and operatic quality rather than the more intimate character typical of Classical piano sonatas. The first theme (mm. 11–27) sounds orchestral, with constant tremolo octaves in the left hand resembling an orchestral bass line. The second theme (mm. 51–88) is like an operatic duet between soprano and baritone, set over an orchestra-like accompaniment of bass notes and offbeat chords. There is a notable rhythmic consistency throughout: the same accompanying patterns appear in the transition and closing theme, lending unity to the movement.

The slow introduction provides a powerful structural contrast. It returns at the opening of the development section, creating the impression that the struggle is beginning anew (though the music soon moves in a different direction), and again at the very beginning of the closing coda, where it sounds like a distant memory. This cyclical return of the Grave material unifies the movement and gives it an arc from grief through struggle toward resolution.

♪ Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 ("Pathetique") — I. Grave; Allegro di molto e con brio ♪

Beethoven — Symphony No. 3, “Eroica”

The Middle Period, 1802–1814

Beethoven’s middle period encompasses the years from about 1802 to 1814, a time of enormous stylistic change precipitated by several factors. By this point, Beethoven had established a very strong reputation as both a pianist and a composer of piano, symphonic, and chamber music. His reputation was so great that in 1809, a group of devoted, wealthy patrons set him up with a lifetime annuity to remain in Vienna. This meant Beethoven was free to follow his own inspiration without worrying about financing his income or pleasing the general public. Publishers competed fiercely for his music; Beethoven drove hard bargains, playing publishers against each other, and published works in several countries simultaneously. He still wrote on commission, but no longer had to meet deadlines as promptly as before.

During this period, Beethoven made extensive use of notebooks of sketches, which provide invaluable insight into his compositional process. These notebooks contain themes, plans for compositions, and successive revisions that reveal a deliberate way of composing and a sophisticated relation of each part to the whole. An example from these sketchbooks appears in the textbook (p. 563).

The other great precipitating event of this period was, of course, Beethoven’s confrontation with his deafness. The psychological crisis of 1802 — documented in the Heiligenstadt Testament — led him to consider suicide but ultimately to resolve to continue composing. As the deafness worsened, he played in public less and less, focusing instead on composition and occasionally conducting.

Stylistic Developments

The compositions of the middle period seem to reflect the struggles of Beethoven’s own life. In the hands of Haydn and Mozart, concerts had been a form of entertainment: they satisfied the general public and the amateurs who went simply to enjoy a concert, while offering substance beneath the surface for connoisseurs to appreciate. Beethoven, freed from the need to entertain the public, transformed the instrumental work into something like a drama or narrative. His compositions are marked by conflict, climax, and catharsis. The thematic material often takes on the character of a protagonist who struggles against great odds and emerges triumphant — a pattern we see vividly in the Third and Fifth Symphonies. This approach effectively replaces the notion of music as entertainment with something far more intense and personal.

Stylistically, Beethoven retained the models of Haydn and Mozart — the genres, forms, melodic types, phrasing, and textures of the Classical tradition — but expanded them to unprecedented lengths. In the Classical period, symphonies were not particularly long; in Beethoven’s hands, a single movement could last longer than an entire four-movement Classical symphony. The development section, for instance, becomes longer than either the exposition or the recapitulation, and the coda — originally a brief punctuation at the end — is hugely expanded into a kind of second development section that builds to a climax just before the work’s conclusion. He also practiced a remarkable economy of material: a small number of thematic ideas or motives are subjected to intense development and ingenious transformation, hooking up powerfully with the narrative of struggle and triumph.

Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 (“Eroica”), First Movement (NAWM 130)

Beethoven’s Third Symphony was composed primarily in 1803 and received its first performance at a private concert in the summer of 1804. The public premiere took place in Vienna in April 1805, and the reception was decidedly mixed. Some listeners recognized a masterpiece, but most audience members found the work difficult to grasp — it was much longer than they expected, strange to their ears, and quite intense. Beethoven had sacrificed immediate widespread appeal in favor of expressing his vision.

The symphony is imbued with the ideal of heroic greatness. The theme of heroism pervades the entire conception of the work: struggle and triumph over difficulty. One compelling interpretation sees the first movement as a story of challenge, struggle, and final victory, played out within a greatly enlarged sonata form.

The Protagonist: Opening Motive

The protagonist of this drama is the opening motive, presented at the very beginning of the work by the cellos after two loud, emphatic chords from the full orchestra. The theme enters softly, in a pastoral character: it is in triple meter, resembling a German peasant dance called the Deutsche. This implies that the protagonist is of common origin — an everyday person. But this regular, everyday figure will undergo radical transformation over the course of the movement, achieving heroic stature through the drama of the music.

The textbook (Example 24.2) illustrates the successive transformations of this main theme:

• (a) The original form: pastoral, quiet, in the cello
• (b) In sequence, with a chromatic tail rising
• (c) Transformed into a new theme in the development section
• (d) Striving upward, tumbling back down
• (e) Achieving a new, sustained form — scored for horn, an instrument associated with fanfare and heroism. Here, the protagonist’s potential for heroism is fully realized.

The Antagonist: Rhythmic and Metric Disruption

For there to be victory, there must be an antagonist. An element from the first theme group introduces tension and challenge early in the symphony. Examples 24.3a and 24.3b in the textbook show this disruptive material: a leaping figure with strong accents on weak beats, thrusting forceful duple meter against the serene triple meter of the main theme. This creates a sense of conflict that drives the movement forward.

Conflict, Resolution, and Victory

The development section brings the conflict between protagonist and antagonist to its most intense expression. The music builds to a highly dissonant climax where it sounds as though all may be lost. The main motive struggles to reassert itself against this antagonistic material. But ultimately, victory is achieved through transformation: the motive emerges in a new form, sustaining a high note while the leaping antagonist figure is stripped of its offbeat accents. Both motives are transformed, and the resolution falls in favor of the main theme.

This victory is confirmed in the recapitulation, where the leaping antagonist figure is omitted entirely. A long coda then revisits episodes from the development section, retracing the path back to victory and providing a climactic reaffirmation just before the movement’s close.

While there are multiple analyses, approaches, and interpretations of this extraordinary movement, scholars and listeners can agree on several things: the remarkable economy of material (a great variety of gestures drawn from very few central ideas), the unprecedented expansion of form, and the overarching sense of struggle, achievement, and progressive change.

Movements 2–4: Heroism and the French Republic

The remaining movements of the Eroica also carry themes of heroism and references to the French Republic. The second movement, titled Marcia funebre (Funeral March) and marked Adagio assai, mourns a fallen hero. Cast in C minor, it imitates the roll of muffled drums and the processions of the French Revolution. A C-major section takes on the character of a Revolutionary hymn.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 3, II. Marcia funebre — Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein

The third movement is a quick scherzo featuring grandiose horn calls in the trio section — a reminder that horns signify heroism, military bearing, and nobility.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 3, III. Scherzo: Allegro vivace — Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale RAI, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung

The finale is an invocation of Prometheus, featuring a complex mixture of variations on a theme drawn from Beethoven’s ballet music The Creatures of Prometheus. The movement includes fugal, developmental, and marchlike episodes.

Beethoven, Symphony No. 3, IV. Finale: Allegro molto — Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale RAI, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung

The Symphony, Heroism, and Napoleon

Beethoven had initially titled the symphony “Bonaparte,” as he admired Napoleon as a hero of the French Revolution. But when Napoleon declared himself Emperor in 1804, Beethoven was furious and violently scratched Napoleon’s name from the title page of the score — so forcefully that he went through the paper. The famous title page with the scratched-out dedication can be seen in the textbook (Figure 24.4). Yet the story is not quite so simple: Beethoven later wavered in his opinion of Napoleon. He indicated to his publisher that the title should be “Bonaparte”; he conducted the symphony at a performance Napoleon was supposed to attend (around 1809); and he considered other dedications to Napoleon afterward. As with many figures in history, Beethoven’s opinions shifted with circumstances, and his relationship to Napoleon was more complex than the popular anecdote suggests.

Other Works of the Middle Period

Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, went through three versions (1805, 1806, and 1814) before achieving its final, successful form. The libretto draws on the tradition of French Revolutionary opera (also called rescue opera), a genre popular in both France and Vienna that featured themes of revolution, tyranny, and humanitarianism. In Fidelio, the heroine Leonore disguises herself as a man named Fidelio in order to rescue her husband, who has been condemned to death by a tyrant and imprisoned in a dungeon. The opera glorifies her heroism and the humanitarian ideals of the Revolution.

The Fifth Symphony (1807–8) symbolizes the struggle for victory perhaps more powerfully than any other work in the repertoire. It moves from C minor to C major over the course of its four movements, enacting a journey from darkness to triumph. The first movement is dominated by the famous four-note motive — a rhythmic idea that recurs and is transformed throughout all four movements. A remarkable passage leads directly from the scherzo (third movement) into the triumphant finale, with the music rising and growing louder until it bursts into C major. The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies were actually premiered at the same concert in December 1808.

The Pastoral Symphony, No. 6 in F Major (1808), is quite different in character. It has five movements depicting scenes from life in the country, including an extra movement before the finale that portrays a storm. Notably, Beethoven wanted to convey the feelings of being in the country rather than trying to paint a literal picture through music — the coda of the slow movement (Scene by the Brook) features woodwinds imitating bird calls, but the overall aim is expressive rather than pictorial.

♪ Beethoven, Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 ("Eroica") — I. Allegro con brio ♪

Beethoven — String Quartet, Op. 132

The Late Period, 1815–1827

The last twelve years of Beethoven’s life were marked by greater isolation and profound deafness — by 1818, he was essentially unable to hear at all. He retreated more into himself, becoming moody and suspicious of others. The pace of composition slowed, and there was a fundamental change in focus and style. Family problems compounded his difficulties: the death of his brother in 1815, the assumption of guardianship over his nephew Karl, a bitter legal fight with his sister-in-law over custody, and his own declining health all weighed heavily on him.

External circumstances were equally difficult. The currency devaluation of 1811 and the severe economic depression that followed the fall of Napoleon in 1815 left Beethoven no longer free of financial worries. One of his patrons, Prince Kinsky, had died, further reducing his income. The annuity that had once liberated him was now diminished. Moreover, the political repression imposed by Count Metternich, head of the Austrian government under the emperor, directly affected Beethoven. His well-known sympathies toward the French Republic made him a target: he was investigated and spied on by the government. As a result, he refrained from writing politically sensitive works — he could not have produced something like Fidelio or the Eroica Symphony during this period. He completed only two large public works (after the economy improved): the Missa solemnis (1819–23) and the Ninth Symphony (1822–24). Instead, he focused on genres intended for private music-making: his last five piano sonatas (1816–21) and his last five string quartets (1824–26).

Characteristics of the Late Style

Beethoven’s late works are compositions for connoisseurs — music that rewards deep study and close listening. The late quartets were published in score (not just parts), so that they could be studied by those who wanted to understand the music from the inside out. The musical language is concentrated and introspective.

Several features define the late style. First, there is a high degree of contrast: contrasts of topic, style, figuration, character, meter, and tempo are exaggerated far beyond what one finds in earlier works. Second, there is a paradoxical emphasis on continuity. Within movements, Beethoven intentionally blurs divisions between phrases and places cadences on weak beats so that the music flows forward without interruption. Between movements, successive sections are sometimes played without pause (attacca), as in the transition from the fourth to the fifth movement of the Op. 132 quartet.

Third, Beethoven makes striking use of traditional styles for expressive purposes. Familiar musical idioms — chorale writing, modal harmony, dance forms — are employed in ways that reflect on tradition while transforming it, creating a kind of dialogue between past and present that appeals to the connoisseur.

Fourth, imitation and fugue play a prominent role. Numerous contrapuntal devices appear, and many movements or sections are predominantly fugal, especially development sections of sonata movements. Examples include the two double fugues in the Ninth Symphony, the Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue) for String Quartet, Op. 133, and the long, slow fugue that opens the C-sharp Minor Quartet, Op. 131.

Finally, Beethoven reconceived multi-movement form. The last five piano sonatas each have a unique succession of movements, often linked without pause. The string quartets push further still: Op. 132 has five movements, Op. 130 has six, and Op. 131 has seven movements played without pauses. Movements are integrated more closely through motivic and key relationships. In Op. 132, for example, a symmetrical key scheme unifies the work, and semitone pairs (particularly F–E and A–G-sharp, derived from the opening four notes of the first movement: G-sharp, A, F, E) reappear pervasively throughout later movements. The relationships between themes are subtle, yet audible.

String Quartet in A Minor, No. 15, Op. 132 (1823–25), NAWM 131

The A Minor String Quartet was the second of the last five string quartets Beethoven composed in the final three years of his life. It was commissioned by the Russian prince Nikolai Galitzin. Beethoven worked on the piece extensively in 1824 but had to abandon it temporarily due to other projects and a serious illness — abdominal and digestive issues so severe that the treatment was reportedly almost worse than the illness itself. Thankfully, he recovered, and in gratitude he replaced the originally planned slow movement with the one we know today: a “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” for his recovery. The work was first performed by the Schuppanzigh Quartet, an early professional string quartet, in two private performances outside Vienna in September and November of 1825. It was published a few months after Beethoven’s death in March 1827 — and notably, it was published with a study score in addition to parts, so that connoisseurs could examine all four voices simultaneously.

Beethoven expanded the string quartet beyond the conventional four movements to five movements, with performances lasting approximately forty-five minutes. The movements and their key relationships reveal a carefully planned symmetry:

The pervasive motivic relationships across movements, especially the semitone pairs F–E and A–G-sharp derived from the cello’s opening four notes (G-sharp, A, F, E) in the first movement, bind the five movements into a tightly integrated whole.

Movement III: “Heiliger Dankgesang”

The third movement is the emotional and spiritual heart of the quartet. It is expansive — approximately fifteen to eighteen minutes in performance — and follows the form A B A’ B’ A’’, an alternation between two radically contrasting types of music. No two sections could be more different in style, and this extreme contrast is one of the defining features of Beethoven’s late period.

Section A (mm. 1–30): The Holy Song of Thanksgiving

Beethoven gave this section a remarkable title: “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart” — “Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity from One Who Has Recovered from Illness, in the Lydian Mode.” The description is apt. This section can best be understood as a chorale motet, a kind of prayer in music. Beethoven likely had in mind the tradition of Bach’s chorale motets, in which a well-known Lutheran hymn (the chorale) is presented in long note values and harmonized in four parts, while each phrase is preceded by a more quickly moving figure in imitation — the different voices entering in succession, imitating one another before the chorale theme arrives in its stately long notes.

The theme is carried by the first violin in a series of phrases, each consisting of eight half notes, harmonized in four parts like a hymn. The cadences fall on F, and the presence of B-natural rather than B-flat signals the Lydian mode — the scale one produces by playing all the white notes on a piano from F to F. This gives the music an archaic, modal quality. Beethoven specifically associated the Lydian mode with healing and recovery, which is surely why he chose it for this movement of thanksgiving.

♪ Beethoven, String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132 — III. Molto adagio, "Heiliger Dankgesang" (Section A) ♪

Section B (mm. 31–83): “Neue Kraft fuhlend” (Feeling New Strength)

The contrast with section A could hardly be greater. Marked Andante and titled “Neue Kraft fuhlend” (“Feeling New Strength”), this section is a moderate triple-meter dance in D major, cast in binary form (typical of dances), with repeats written out to allow for variation. One might ask: is this Beethoven, recovered from his illness, well enough to dance following his earnest prayer? The music is characterized by large leaps, trills, rapid turns and scales, alternation between instruments, alternation between soft and loud dynamics, offbeat accents, and frequently changing textures. Definitive cadences are avoided, keeping the music surging forward. The overall effect is one of grace mixed with a certain awkwardness — perhaps capturing Beethoven’s exuberant but still-convalescent energy. One can almost picture the composer, on the road to recovery, dancing exuberantly around his apartment.

♪ Beethoven, String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132 — III. "Neue Kraft fühlend" (Section B) ♪

Section A’ (mm. 84–114): Return of the Chorale

The music returns to the F Lydian mode and the chorale-motet texture, but with two important differences. First, the points of imitation that introduce each phrase of the chorale are more elaborate than in the original A section. Second, the accompaniment beneath the chorale phrases in violin 1 is altered: instead of all four instruments moving together in block chordal harmonization, they continue the imitative figuration, creating ongoing counterpoint beneath the long chorale notes. The texture is richer and more active.

Section B’ (mm. 115–167): Renewed Strength

The D-major dance material returns, essentially the same in structure, but more energized and slightly varied. The sense of “feeling new strength” is intensified.

Section A’’ (mm. 168–211): “Mit innigster Empfindung” (With the Most Intimate Feeling)

The final return of the chorale is the most elaborate and moving of all. Beethoven adds the performance direction “Mit innigster Empfindung” — “with the most intimate feeling” — signaling that this is the emotional climax of the entire movement. The introductory imitative figures are more ornate than ever, and now each instrument gets a turn playing the chorale theme in those long, stately notes, in counterpoint with the figures played by the other instruments. In measure 184, the cello and then violin 1 play the full chorale theme. The music reaches a climax at measure 191, then gradually disintegrates and fades, closing softly on F major. It is one of the most profoundly moving passages in all of Beethoven’s music.

♪ Beethoven, String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132 — III. Molto adagio (complete) ♪

Other Works of the Late Period

The two large public works of the late period are among Beethoven’s most celebrated achievements. The Missa solemnis (1819–23) comprises the five usual movements of the Mass — Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei — but Beethoven shaped them as a unified five-movement symphony. Choruses and solo ensembles alternate freely, and the work was intended as a concert piece rather than a liturgical one.

The Ninth Symphony (1822–24) is over an hour in length and breaks new ground by introducing solo voices and chorus in the finale. The choral ode is based on Friedrich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy, from which Beethoven selected stanzas that emphasize universal fellowship. The work is at once innovative and reverential toward the past, blending disparate styles with supreme compositional craft and profound emotional expression.

Beethoven’s Centrality

Beethoven became not just a great composer but a cultural hero whose reputation grew throughout the nineteenth century and continues to this day. He helped define the Romantic view of the creative artist: a social outsider who suffers greatly to bring humanity a glimpse of the divine through art. A mythology grew around him — the stormy genius, the defiant rebel, the suffering visionary — and this image persists in popular culture. The scholar Scott Burnham explored these mythic dimensions in his book Beethoven Hero.

The reception of his works followed a revealing pattern. Compositions from the late 1790s through the 1810s were immediately popular with audiences. The late works, however, were idiosyncratic and not written for the general public; they were not fully absorbed into the mainstream until decades after his death. Subsequent generations of connoisseurs came to regard these late compositions as revealing the innermost aspects of Beethoven as a composer. His works formed the core repertoire of every major instrumental form — symphonies, sonatas, and string quartets. Later composers had to confront his towering legacy and try to carve out a place for themselves, a struggle that continued well into the twentieth century. Brahms, for example, did not attempt a symphony until he was about forty, in part because of the anxiety of confronting Beethoven’s achievement in that genre. Music theorists, too, developed new analytical approaches specifically to understand Beethoven’s music, approaches that continue to shape how we study music theory in the twenty-first century.

Perhaps most significantly, the idea of self-expression in music was forged with Beethoven. The image of a composer expressing their innermost feelings, composing when inspired, was crystallized in his persona and his works. This idea was in tune with the growing Romantic movement and helped define the role of the artist for generations to come.

A flash mob performance of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”

Romantic Song — Schubert and Schumann

The Romantic Generation: Changing Social Circumstances

The generation of composers who came of age in the early nineteenth century inherited a world profoundly reshaped by revolution, war, and industrialization. The Congress of Vienna (1814–15) redrew the map of Europe, consolidating many small states into fewer, larger entities and sparking a growing interest in national culture. Composers began incorporating national traits into their music — a development that would accelerate as the century progressed. At the same time, the decline of aristocratic patronage that had already affected Beethoven’s later career continued apace. Wealthy patrons lost fortunes funding war and coping with inflation, and musicians increasingly became free agents, earning their livings through public performance, teaching, commissions, and publications. Opportunities broadened: one no longer needed to belong to a guild or a court to pursue a career in music. Conservatories opened across Europe and in the Americas, and a burgeoning culture of music journalism and criticism emerged.

The Industrial Revolution mechanized manufacturing and swelled the urban middle class in both size and influence. Innovations in manufacturing increased the availability of instruments and lowered their cost, so that families could afford to have instruments in their homes and the disposable income to purchase music to play on them. Middle-class music-making became an important social and cultural outlet for both the middle and upper classes, and the domestic music scene flourished. A typical gathering might feature a woman at the square piano, family members on violin and flute, and others listening attentively or simply going about their activities while music filled the room.

The Piano

The piano saw dramatic innovations in the early nineteenth century. Advances in manufacturing increased the instrument’s availability and lowered its cost, and between about 1820 and 1850 a series of design improvements expanded the range of the instrument and made possible new pianistic effects that were idiomatically suited to it. If one plays a Mozart piano sonata on a modern instrument, the upper and lower registers remain largely unused; by contrast, the Romantic piano repertoire exploits the full compass. The piano was ideal for both home music-making and public concerts because it is a complete instrument — one player can produce harmony, melody, and bass simultaneously.

Women were particularly drawn to the piano, continuing a long tradition of female keyboard performance stretching back to the sixteenth century. Pianist-composers gave lessons to well-to-do women and expected hours of daily practice; many of these students achieved astonishing fluency, even at a professional level. In the first half of the nineteenth century, quite a few professional women pianists emerged, among them Clara Wieck Schumann, whose music we will encounter shortly. Musical accomplishment was also a social asset that could attract a spouse, and music for two players at one piano became a favorite format for domestic music-making.

The Market for Music

If all these households now had a piano, they needed music to play on it. Amateurs created a boom in publishing, and large publishing houses in London, Paris, and Leipzig churned out new works at an astonishing rate to meet consumer demand. This gave the music-buying public an unprecedented influence over the music that was produced. Composers who wanted to earn money from publications wrote what the public wanted: songs, piano works, piano duets, and transcriptions of orchestral and chamber works for piano. It is easy to forget that before recordings, a piano transcription was often the only way a person could hear a symphonic work — a situation that persisted well into the twentieth century.

The public was drawn to the early Romantic style and its new musical idiom: music that was accessible and appealing to amateur performers, built on beautiful melody and striking harmonies within small forms, often bearing evocative titles and national or exotic associations. All of this attracted the music-buying public and shaped the repertoire that composers produced.

Romanticism

The term “Romantic” derives from the medieval romance and connotes something distant, legendary, and fantastic. Applied first to literature, then to art and music, it signals a focus on the individual and the expression of the self. We saw this with Beethoven, for whom self-expression became an artistic imperative rather than the objective rendering of emotional states that had characterized earlier periods. The Romantics searched relentlessly for the original, the evocative, the individual, and the extreme.

As a period designation, Romanticism is conventionally distinguished from Classicism, with the dividing line drawn around the 1820s — though, as always, such boundaries are fluid. Beethoven inherited the Classical tradition but innovated within it so radically that he pushed it toward something new. The political and economic upheavals around 1815 further precipitated these changes. Romanticism can also be understood as a reaction against the Classical mindset: a turn toward the past, toward myth, dreams, the supernatural, and the irrational. The “common folk” were seen as the true embodiment of the nation. Nature offered refuge, inspiration, and revelation from the dirty, mechanized cities. Solitude and the individual were esteemed, and there was a higher ideal of enlightening the world beyond the everyday.

Romanticism in Music

Several hallmarks define Romanticism in music. Composers explored individual paths for expressing intense emotions, expanding the sound palette through new instruments, larger orchestras, and novel timbral combinations. Instrumental music came to be regarded as the ideal art, free from the concreteness of words — a monumental shift from earlier centuries when music was considered subordinate to language. Music became an autonomous art, symbolizing individualism and freed from earlier notions of functional service.

New distinctions arose among instrumental works. A programmatic work recounts a narrative or sequence of events. A character piece depicts or suggests a mood, personality, or scene. Absolute music refers to nothing but itself. The concept of organicism reflected a new understanding of musical form: the relationship of themes, sections, and movements to the whole mattered more than rhetorical structure, and motivic links contributed to unity more powerfully than harmonic plan or conventional form alone. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for instance, was understood as an organic whole growing from the seed of its opening four notes.

Literature was central to the work of most Romantic composers. The integration of music and text in leading genres went beyond older practices of word painting: composers now sought to draw out a poem’s inner meaning and suggested feelings. Instrumental works frequently bore a descriptive title or program; Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, for example, depends on the audience knowing its story. These literary connections led to innovations in harmony, melody, and instrumental color, and the novelty appealed to middle-class consumers. Programs and evocative titles — sometimes added after the fact — enhanced the appeal to the public.

Song

Nineteenth-century song was the perfect medium for marrying literature and music. The voice and the piano, being the preferred medium, were available in virtually every middle- and upper-class home, making song an ideal genre for domestic music-making. The texts were typically strophic poems, set so that the words could be heard and understood — the vocal writing tended toward the syllabic rather than the florid.

The leading type of Romantic song is the German Lied (plural Lieder), meaning simply “song” or, as we often call it today, art song. Different kinds of Lieder existed: some were ballad types, others purely lyrical. But all shared a fusion of poetry and music and an expression of individual feelings — not the objective emotional states of the Baroque, but deeply personal passions, frustrations of love, descriptive musical imagery, aspects of folk style, and nature used as metaphor. Crucially, the piano was not merely an unobtrusive accompaniment but an equal partner, telling part of the story that even the voice might not convey. An art song involves four roles: the poet who wrote the original words, the composer who brings them to life, and the singer and pianist who perform the work — sometimes the singer and pianist are the same person.

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

Franz Schubert was the first great master of Romantic song, and every subsequent song composer measured themselves against his achievement. Born in Vienna in 1797 — twenty-seven years after Beethoven — he was not solely a song composer but was remarkably prolific in all genres. As a child he studied piano, singing, violin, organ, and counterpoint, and he took composition lessons with Antonio Salieri (the same teacher Beethoven had studied with). His first music was published in 1818, when he was about twenty-one, and from that point he devoted himself entirely to composition as a freelance composer, earning his income from publications. His songs were often performed at intimate gatherings known as “Schubertiads” — domestic events where he would accompany a singer at the piano before friends and society acquaintances, rather than in formal recitals. His last years were clouded by illness; he died at thirty-one, possibly of syphilis or from the mercury treatment used against it. His output is staggering: more than 600 Lieder, two song cycles, nine symphonies, thirty-five chamber works, twenty-two piano sonatas, seventeen operas and Singspiels, six masses, and some two hundred other choral works.

Characteristics of Schubert’s Song Style

Schubert drew his song texts from many writers. His favorite was probably Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose poetry he set fifty-nine times; he also favored the poems of Wilhelm Muller. He composed song cycles — series of songs based on a single poet’s work that tell or suggest a continuous story — the most celebrated being Winterreise (Winter’s Journey, 1827) and Die schone Mullerin (The Pretty Maid of the Mill).

The music was the equal of the words, and Schubert chose forms that suited the shape and meaning of each text. Some songs are strophic — the same music for each stanza, presenting a single image or mood. Others are modified strophic, repeating music for some strophes while varying or introducing new music for others, sometimes in ABA or bar form (AAB). His finest songs are often through-composed, with new music for each stanza; the most famous example is Der Erlkonig, a ballad depicting a father galloping on horseback to save his dying child. Even through-composed works, however, achieve unity through recurring themes, a tonal scheme, or a consistent figuration running through the entire piece.

Schubert possessed an extraordinary gift for beautiful melodies that captured the character, mood, and situation of a poem; some have the natural, unpretentious quality of folksong. His piano accompaniments were remarkably varied, each one fitted to the poem’s mood and the personality of its protagonist, often reflecting a specific image in the text. His harmony went further afield than was customary, with modulations by third rather than by fifth, reinforcing the poetry’s tensions and dramatic qualities. Unusual harmonic relationships served as powerful expressive devices. In all these ways, Schubert set the standard that later song composers strove to match.

Schubert, Gretchen am Spinnrade (NAWM 132)

Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”) was composed in 1814, when the composer was just seventeen years old, and published in 1821. He was no novice at seventeen: he had already written over forty songs and was entering his mature style. The text is drawn from Goethe’s drama Faust, one of the best-known literary works of the period. In this scene, Gretchen sits alone at home, spinning thread on her spinning wheel and thinking about the handsome Faust she has recently met. The audience of Schubert’s day would have known the full story — that Faust makes a pact with the devil in order to have a life of knowledge and experience, and that he seduces the innocent Gretchen with devastating consequences. Listening to the song, then, one hears Gretchen’s present infatuation shadowed by the knowledge of her future tragedy.

Musical Setting

Goethe’s poem is strophic, but Schubert’s musical setting is not purely strophic. He uses varied settings for each strophe to convey the drama. The first strophe functions as a kind of refrain: it is repeated after the third and sixth stanzas, and only the first two lines return at the very end, as if the emotional cycle continues. Each return of this refrain emphasizes Gretchen’s despair, growing from piano to forte across the piece. The first six bars establish a relentless D minor — the tonic of the entire song — before a sudden, striking shift to C major (with a minor tinge) in measures 7–12.

The text of this opening strophe translates: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy; I’ll never find peace, never again.” A full text and translation can be found at the Oxford Lieder website.

The Piano Accompaniment

The piano introduces the song’s mood and central image: constant agitation. The right hand plays a sixteenth-note figure that constantly rises and falls, marked sempre legato, suggesting the motion of the spinning wheel. The left hand contributes repeated staccato notes that mimic the motion of the treadle — the foot pedal Gretchen must keep pumping to maintain the spinning. This accompaniment pattern runs throughout the entire song, creating a relentless, almost hypnotic texture — except at one pivotal moment when it stops suddenly, with devastating dramatic effect.

The Progression of the Song

The main key is D minor, and each section between refrains explores new harmonic regions, building to an increasingly intense, impassioned climax. The second and third stanzas move through A minor, E minor, and F major. The fourth through sixth stanzas, in which Gretchen describes her beloved, venture even further afield to G minor, A-flat major, and B-flat major — keys that are quite remote from D minor, heightening the sense of emotional intensity.

The musical and dramatic climax arrives in measures 66–68, when Gretchen recalls Faust’s kiss. She is so overcome with emotion that she completely loses herself: the accompaniment pattern stops, the spinning wheel grinds to a halt, and two harsh diminished-seventh chords sound beneath a high G in the vocal line. It is a breathtaking moment. After this brief pause, the spinning slowly begins again — a couple of tentative tries over several bars before the figuration flows as it did before.

The last two stanzas build through a rising harmonic sequence, and the final stanza is repeated with a high A — the highest note in the piece — in measures 107 and 111. The song concludes with the same opening music and only the first two lines of the opening strophe, fading to ppp. What Schubert achieves is remarkable: he takes a simple strophic poem and transforms it into a vivid musical portrait of Gretchen’s complex, overwhelming feelings.

♪ Schubert, "Gretchen am Spinnrade," D. 118 ♪

Robert and Clara Schumann

Robert Schumann (1810–1856) was born in Germany and studied piano with Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father. He turned to composition and criticism, founding the Leipzig Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik (New Journal for Music), and became one of the first significant music critics. He was among the earliest and strongest advocates of Chopin, Brahms, and the instrumental works of Schubert. His output was characteristically concentrated: he tended to focus intensively on one medium at a time. Before 1840, nearly all his publications were solo piano works; 1840 became his celebrated “Lieder year.” His major works include over 300 piano works, about 300 songs, 75 part-songs, four symphonies, a piano concerto, chamber works, and orchestral pieces.

Clara Wieck (1819–1896) had early studies with her father and by the age of twenty was a leading pianist in Europe, with many published works to her name. Her major compositions include a Piano Trio, Op. 17, a piano concerto, many piano pieces, and several collections of Lieder. The Schumanns’ story is both romantic and tragic. Friedrich Wieck opposed the marriage, and Robert had to take him to court — and won. Robert and Clara married in 1840, the same year of his extraordinary song output, and in their early married life they toured and concertized together, Robert conducting and Clara at the piano. But Robert suffered from increasing mental instability; he attempted suicide in 1854 and was confined to an asylum, where he died in 1856. Clara continued to compose, teach, and tirelessly promote and edit Robert’s works for the rest of her long life.

Schumann’s Songs

The year 1840 saw Schumann compose over 120 songs, many of them love songs inspired by his impending marriage to Clara. The anguish of separation and the frustration of waiting pervade these works, which are filled with expressions of the passions and frustrations of love. He earned money from publishing songs and other works, and in his Lieder he achieved a remarkable synthesis of music and poetry, treating the piano as an equal partner to the voice. Often he would focus on a single figuration to convey the central idea of a poem.

Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love, 1840), NAWM 133

Dichterliebe is a song cycle (Liederkreis) — a group of songs performed in succession that tells or suggests a story. Composed in May 1840, about four months before Schumann married Clara, it sets sixteen poems from Heinrich Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo. The cycle traces the progression of a failed relationship — a downward spiral told in retrospect, with tinges of doubt and melancholy coloring even the earliest, supposedly happy songs.

No. 1: “Im wunderschonen Monat Mai” (In the Marvelous Month of May), NAWM 133a

The text consists of two verses, set strophically with the same music for both. The first verse: “In the marvelous month of May, when all the buds burst into bloom, then it was that in my heart love began to burgeon.” The second: “In the marvelous month of May, when all the birds were singing, then it was I confessed to her my longing and desire.” Sehnen und Verlangen — longing and desire — were charged words in the Romantic lexicon.

The piano provides an introduction, an interlude between the two verses, and a postlude, framing the vocal stanzas with the same music. It begins on a dissonance — C-sharp against D in the bass — that is persistent and inconclusive. Even as the voice tries to focus on the positive, on the blossoming of love, the piano keeps bringing us back to doubt and to minor. There is constant motion, and the true melody of the song is shared between the piano and the voice, sometimes one picking it up where the other leaves off.

The vocal line is syllabic — not florid, because the words must be understood. It begins solidly in the tonic major of A major but moves to B minor by the end of the strophe, rising to a climax on D major that sounds almost like a question mark, a tentativeness, an uncertainty. The same sequence repeats for the second verse.

The harmony is remarkably ambiguous. The listener is never entirely clear what the tonic is, and this ambiguity may reflect the tentative feelings of the poet looking back in retrospect on a love that was not quite as positive as the words suggest. The music alternates between two keys and refuses to settle. Suspensions and appoggiaturas in the piano create tensions that are left unresolved (for example, in measures 9–12). The song ends on an inconclusive cadence on a dominant-seventh chord rather than a solid tonic, sounding like a fragment — something unfinished. This quality of incompleteness was itself a Romantic literary device; Goethe, for instance, wrote many works he called “fragments.”

♪ Schumann, Dichterliebe, No. 1: "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai" ♪

No. 7: “Ich grolle nicht” (I Bear No Grudge), NAWM 133c

The seventh song stands roughly halfway through the cycle’s downward spiral, at a point of raw anger. The text of two four-line verses drips with bitter irony: “I bear no grudge, though my heart is breaking. Oh love forever lost, forlorn, asleep… I saw the night within your heart and saw the serpent gnawing at your heart. I saw, my love, how pitiful you are. Oh, but I bear no grudge.” The poet protests that he harbors no resentment, but the music tells an entirely different story.

The setting is varied strophic, with much repetition of the first line. The melody has a very wide range, descending to the bottom of the singer’s register — a low C at forte — and soaring to a high A in the second verse on the word “heart,” also at forte. The word “lost” in the first verse is set to a high E that clashes dissonantly against the underlying chord. The vocal line proceeds in large leaps rather than conjunct motion, all of which contributes to the sound of barely suppressed rage.

The piano is equally relentless: incessantly repeated, heavily accented chords — eighth notes in the right hand over half notes in the left hand — with the first of every four eighth notes bearing a heavy accent. This pounding accompaniment runs throughout the entire song without respite.

The harmony is firmly rooted in C major, with a conclusive cadence at the end — quite unlike the ambiguity of the first song. Yet there is enormous dissonance and tension within the chords, particularly the four-note seventh chords that appear throughout (for example, measures 5–9). The major key and the emphatic cadence create an effect of grim determination, while the persistent dissonances betray the anguish the poet claims not to feel.

♪ Schumann, Dichterliebe, No. 7: "Ich grolle nicht" ♪

Song Beyond the Art-Song Tradition

The principles that govern how music conveys the meaning of a text in Romantic art song can be applied far more broadly — to popular music, jazz, blues, and rock. As an example, consider Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets” (1934), performed memorably by Ella Fitzgerald with pianist Paul Smith in 1956. The song is strophic — three verses with the same music and a final refrain. The text maintains a veneer of high-society politeness (“Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today, Madam”), but the reasons are brutal: a betrayal, a shooting, and a lynching. Yet the music is controlled, restrained, even pleasant — it subverts the poem’s violence while paradoxically making its horror more effective than harsh-sounding music might have done.

Ella Fitzgerald, “Miss Otis Regrets” (Cole Porter), 1956

Early Romantic Piano Music

Music for Piano

Second only to song in the early Romantic period was music for piano. As the piano became more widely available through mass production and more affordable for middle-class households, a vast repertoire emerged to serve three overlapping purposes: teaching (etudes, progressive studies, and exercises for developing fluency), amateur enjoyment (dances, lyrical pieces modeled on song, character pieces, and sonatas), and public performance (bravura pieces designed to dazzle audiences and showcase virtuosos). The biggest factor shaping this repertoire was the music-buying public, whose tastes and demands had an enormous influence on what was not only published but composed.

Franz Schubert: Works for Piano

What is remarkable about the great composer-pianists of this era is that they managed to write music that satisfied the public’s hunger for new works while also fulfilling their own artistic ambitions. Schubert wrote prolifically for the amateur market: dozens of marches, waltzes, and dances, as well as works for piano duet, which was a favorite format for domestic music-making. His Wanderer Fantasy (1822) combined virtuosity with an unusual form, organic unity, and key schemes based on thirds rather than fifths — features that attracted the attention of fellow composers. He also wrote eleven piano sonatas and a number of short lyrical pieces, including eight Impromptus composed in 1827 — four in the summer and autumn, and four more in December of that year.

Impromptu in G-flat Major, Op. 90, No. 3 (NAWM 135), 1827

The Impromptu in G-flat Major is the third of the first set of four. Numbers three and four were not published until thirty years after Schubert’s death, so only the first two of Op. 90 appeared during his lifetime. The title “Impromptu” was actually suggested by the publisher as a marketing device: it implied sudden inspiration, music composed while improvising, lending the work an allure and a mysterious quality that would pique the public’s interest.

Schubert’s piano idiom grew directly out of the novel piano accompaniments he devised for his songs. This particular piece sounds remarkably like Gretchen am Spinnrade: both feature a single texture of constantly moving triplets beneath a slow melody that unfolds above. The form is also song-like: A B A’ Coda. The opening A section has a sense of serenity, built on two long-breathed eight-bar phrases. The contrasting B section modulates to E-flat minor/major and C-flat major within the overall key of G-flat major; it brings more momentum and unease, a stormier character, with louder dynamics and less smooth articulation than the serene opening and closing sections.

The piece is well suited to the pianos available in the 1820s. The sustain pedal is used extensively, producing a more legato melody and a flowing quality. A particular challenge for the performer lies in the right hand, which must simultaneously sustain the melody and execute the triplet figuration beneath it — effectively three voices managed by two hands. This was made possible by improvements in piano design, and the piece remains very popular with students, though it is deceptively difficult.

Schubert, Impromptu in G-flat Major, Op. 90, No. 3 — performed by Vladimir Horowitz

♪ Schubert, Impromptu in G-flat Major, Op. 90, No. 3 ♪

Robert Schumann: Piano Music

Schumann’s publications before 1840 were almost entirely solo piano works, mostly short character pieces grouped in named sets with evocative titles: Papillons (Butterflies), Carnaval, Fantasiestucke (Fantasy Pieces), Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), and Kreisleriana. These titles were not meant to be prescriptive — they did not dictate what the composer had in mind — but rather to stimulate the player’s and listener’s imaginations, offering possible avenues for exploration and inviting the listener to devise their own narrative. This was very much in the Romantic vein: the life of the imagination, the inner emotional response to art.

Lang Lang performs “Of Foreign Lands and Peoples” from Schumann’s Kinderszenen

Carnaval (1834–35), NAWM 136

Carnaval consists of twenty short pieces mostly in dance rhythms, conjuring a masquerade ball during the carnival season — the festive period before the penitent season of Lent. The guests at this musical ball are characters drawn from Schumann’s own literary writings. As noted earlier, Schumann was not only a composer and performer but one of the first important music critics, and he used alter egos — Florestan and Eusebius — in his Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik to argue different sides of musical debates. These characters embodied facets of his own personality, and the titles of the Carnaval pieces evoke strongly contrasting visual and emotional images that are paralleled in the music.

Eusebius (NAWM 136a) is a visionary dreamer, named after a fourth-century pope. The music is a dreamy fantasy with a slow chromatic bass and a melody cast in septuplets — groups of seven notes played against the regular pulse, lending the music an otherworldly, floating quality. It sounds deceptively simple but is extraordinarily difficult to play smoothly and dreamily.

Florestan (NAWM 136b) is the polar opposite, named after the hero of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio — a prisoner of conscience during the French Revolution, a figure of strength and defiance. In Schumann’s hands, Florestan is mercurial, with rapidly changing moods. The music is an impassioned waltz with angular melodies, pulsating dissonances, and offbeat sforzandos. Sudden sections of Adagio interrupt the forward rush at measures 9 and 19; above measure 19, Schumann writes “Papillon?” — a reference to his earlier work Papillons, weaving an intertextual thread between compositions.

Coquette (NAWM 136c) follows immediately, depicting a flirtatious figure at the carnival ball. It is a waltz with lilt and charm, perhaps suggesting the distraction that has made Florestan so moody.

Ciphers and Motives

The subtitle of Carnaval is “Little Scenes on Four Notes” (Scenes mignonnes sur quatre notes). Schumann loved codes and ciphers, and the four notes in question derive from the letters of his own name and that of a town. Taking the German note-naming convention (where Es = E-flat, H = B-natural, S = E-flat), Schumann extracted the notes E-flat, C, B, A from “SCHUMANN” (S-C-H-A). A second set of four notes — A, E-flat, C, B (A-Es-C-H) — spells “ASCH,” the hometown of Schumann’s then-fiancee (not Clara, but another woman who also studied with Clara’s father). These same letters also evoke Ash Wednesday, the end of carnival. Most movements in the first half of the work begin with one of these note sequences, sometimes presented linearly, sometimes as chords over several bars. The cipher gives unity to the entire work, creating an organic connection beneath the surface variety.

♪ Schumann, Carnaval, Op. 9 — Nos. 5--7: Eusebius, Florestan, Coquette ♪

Women Composers and Performers

The careers of Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel illustrate both the prospects and the severe limitations faced by women composers in the nineteenth century. Both were highly skilled pianist-composers, yet their paths diverged dramatically. Clara performed public concerts, published music, and gained fame as a pianist from a young age. She raised eight children, managed a household with a husband who suffered from serious mental illness, and showcased improvisation — a staple of nineteenth-century concerts — as well as her own and Robert’s music. She was, in every sense, a remarkable figure.

Fanny Hensel, by contrast, was largely confined to the domestic sphere. Despite being at least as talented as her celebrated brother Felix Mendelssohn, she was told that a professional musical career was inappropriate for a woman of her wealth and social class.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805–1847)

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel studied piano, theory, and composition alongside her brother Felix. She married Wilhelm Hensel, a Prussian court painter, and by all accounts their relationship was a happy one. Though a professional career was denied her, she did not entirely abandon music: she led a salon in the family home where she played piano, conducted choral and orchestral works, and presented her own compositions before audiences of up to two hundred invited guests — events that were semi-private but substantial. She composed more than 400 works, mostly in small genres, including some 250 songs and 125 piano pieces.

Fanny died in May 1847 of a cerebral aneurysm — a condition that appears to have been congenital in the family. Her brother Felix, devastated by her death, died just four months later in November 1847 of a similar cause; their father and grandfather had suffered comparable fates at early ages.

Das Jahr (The Year, 1841), NAWM 137

Between August and December 1841, Fanny composed Das Jahr (The Year), a cycle of character pieces depicting the twelve months of the year plus a postlude. She finished it just before Christmas and presented it as a gift to her husband. The work was not published until 1989, when the manuscript was rediscovered. Each month is written on different-colored paper with hand-drawn illustrations by Wilhelm Hensel at the head of each page — a beautiful, intimate collaboration between husband and wife. The movements have cyclic links between them, so that they are conceived as a unified whole rather than twelve discrete pieces.

Several movements incorporate chorales relevant to the seasons. The December movement uses the German Lutheran Christmas chorale “Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her” (“From Heaven High I Come to You”) — the Annunciation of Jesus’ birth: “I bring you good news; of that good news I bring so much that I want to sing and tell of it.” Although the Mendelssohn family was originally Jewish, they had converted to German Lutheranism, and these hymns were very much part of their devotional and cultural life.

The form of December consists of two large sections. The first (mm. 1–70) is a fantasia on an original theme that moves from C minor to C major. This section features what might be called a “snowstorm” theme: soft, light, rapid figuration — almost like the swirling of a blizzard in north Germany in December — subjected to constant variation. The second section (mm. 71 to the end) presents chorale variations in C major, built on “Vom Himmel hoch.” The two sections create a vivid contrast: the turbulence and mystery of winter yielding to the warmth and devotion of the Christmas chorale.

♪ Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Das Jahr, No. 12: December ♪

Romantic Piano Music — Chopin and Liszt

Fryderyk Chopin (1810–1849)

Fryderyk Chopin is the Romantic composer most closely identified with the piano. Born near Warsaw to a French father and a Polish mother, he studied at the Warsaw Conservatory, having already shown prodigious talent — he published his first composition at the age of seven. His pieces have a strong Polish character, a national flavor infused with brilliant virtuosity, reflecting the music and culture he grew up in.

In 1830, following a failed Polish revolt against Russia, Chopin fled to Paris, where he entered the highest social circles. Like several of his Polish compatriots, he had already been a darling of the aristocracy at home, and in Paris he continued to teach wealthy students, perform in private salons, and earn income from publications. He was shrewd about the business of music, sometimes publishing slightly different versions of works simultaneously in Germany, France, and England. He maintained a celebrated nine-year affair with the novelist Aurore Dudevant, better known as George Sand, which lasted until about two years before his death.

Chopin suffered from chronic illness — long attributed to tuberculosis, though recent examination of his preserved heart (encased in a crystal jar of alcohol since 1849 and kept in a Polish church in Warsaw) has raised questions about the precise diagnosis. He died in Paris in 1849, at the age of thirty-nine.

Chopin composed almost exclusively for piano. As a young virtuoso, he wrote music for his own concert appearances, exploring new possibilities and idiomatic writing for the instrument. His output appealed to amateurs and connoisseurs alike: he wrote genres for teaching, works for amateurs, and supremely challenging pieces for his own performances and those of other virtuosos.

Some of Chopin’s Genres

Chopin’s piano works span a remarkable variety of genres. His Etudes come in two sets of twelve, each addressing a specific technical skill and developing a single pianistic figure; some are concert etudes, designed to be performed publicly. His Preludes, Op. 28 (1836–39), cover all major and minor keys, with rich chromatic harmonies that influenced later composers; they are brief mood pictures, each posing specific performance problems. His stylized dances — waltzes evoking the ballrooms of Vienna, mazurkas drawing on Polish folk tradition, and polonaises asserting national identity through a courtly aristocratic dance in triple meter — form a central part of his output. His Sonata No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Op. 35, contains the famous third-movement funeral march that was played at his own funeral.

Chopin’s achievements stem directly from his life and career: Polish nationalism inspired his musical language; his exclusive concentration on piano music allowed him to explore the instrument’s possibilities with unmatched depth; his virtuosity served public performance while his elegant lyricism graced the parlor. He liberated the piano, discovering idiomatic sounds and figurations that were uniquely characteristic of the instrument.

Chopin, Mazurka in B-flat Major, Op. 7, No. 1 (1831, NAWM 138)

The mazurka is a Polish folk dance, here stylized for the concert hall and the salon. It is in triple meter with a characteristic dotted figure on the first beat and frequent accents on the second or third beat, giving it a strongly rhythmic, syncopated profile. The accompaniment follows a simple “oom-pah-pah” pattern in the left hand, and the phrases fall into regular two- and four-bar groups well suited to the dance.

Chopin infuses the piece with the exoticism of Polish folk music. Trills, grace notes, large leaps, and slurs imitate the bowing of a folk violin, giving the music a dynamic, rustic quality. In section C (mm. 45–51), the bass settles on static open fifths — a drone imitating the sound of a bagpipe, a gesture common in music that evokes or imitates folk traditions. At measure 49, Chopin writes “rubato” directly into the score: the performer slightly anticipates or delays the right-hand melody while the accompaniment maintains strict time, producing the malleable treatment of rhythm and tempo that is a hallmark of Romantic piano performance practice.

The form is straightforward: A A ||: B A :||: C A :||. An opening section is essentially repeated, then a contrasting B section leads back to A (with this pair repeated), followed by the bagpipe-flavored C section and a final return to A (also repeated). It is an incredibly attractive work — the kind of piece one finds oneself humming all day.

♪ Chopin, Mazurka in B-flat Major, Op. 7, No. 1 ♪

Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 2 (1835, NAWM 139)

The nocturne — French for “night piece” — connects with the Romantic fascination with night, dreams, and the unconscious. Chopin borrowed the title and concept from the Irish pianist-composer John Field, who had published sixteen nocturnes between 1815 and 1836. These are short mood pieces with embellished melodies and sonorous accompaniments, and Chopin took the genre far beyond Field’s originals.

The style draws on bel canto vocal writing — “beautiful singing” — particularly the opera arias of Bellini. The nocturne is essentially an ornamented song with an arpeggiated accompaniment: the left hand provides flowing figuration while the right hand spins out a melody. But the melody ranges widely, with large leaps and florid embellishment that resemble coloratura singing yet go far beyond what any voice could achieve. There are substantial virtuoso elements: cadenza-like passagework in the right hand over steady sixteenths in the left.

The form is songlike — modified strophic, like verses without text. There are three “stanzas” plus a coda, each stanza varied. Within each stanza, two themes (A and B) appear with a transition, starting in D-flat major and ending on the dominant of D-flat to lead back to the tonic. The opening measures are notably placid, with the sustain pedal held until a harmony change in measure 5, allowing the sound to ring and establishing the dreamy, nocturnal atmosphere. The key of D-flat major, with its five flats, means the pianist uses many black keys, which are raised above the white keys and in some ways lie more naturally under the fingers — a practical consideration that partly explains Chopin’s fondness for flat keys.

♪ Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 2 ♪

Franz Liszt (1811–1886)

Franz Liszt was the most electrifying piano virtuoso of his era — and arguably of any era. Born in Hungary, he introduced new playing techniques and textures for piano music, and as a composer he brought innovations in form and harmony that would profoundly influence the twentieth century. As a teacher, he invented the master class, a format that remains central to musical education to this day.

Liszt’s early studies began with his father, who was an official for Prince Esterhazy and taught him piano — creating an intriguing link with Haydn, who had served the Esterhazy family a generation earlier. He moved to Vienna to study with Carl Czerny (himself a student of Beethoven) and Antonio Salieri (yet again), then went to Paris to study theory and composition.

Career and Influences

Liszt supported himself through teaching and, spectacularly, through a career as a concert virtuoso. Between 1839 and 1847, he gave over one thousand solo concerts, touring all across Europe and into Russia. The reception rivaled the hysteria of a rock star — long before Beatlemania, there was “Lisztomania,” with women swooning and fainting in his presence. In 1848, like the Beatles ceasing to tour, Liszt settled as court music director at Weimar, turning his energies to composing, conducting, and teaching. Between 1861 and 1870, he lived in Rome and took minor orders in the Catholic Church — quite a transformation for a man who had been known as a consummate ladies’ man.

Several influences shaped his music. Hungarian and Romani (Gypsy) melodies left a deep imprint. His piano style drew on both the Viennese and Parisian virtuoso traditions, and he absorbed Chopin’s melodic lyricism, rubato, rhythmic license, and harmonic innovations. The Italian violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini raised the technique and mystique of the virtuoso performer to unprecedented heights and spurred Liszt to develop his own playing to astonishing new levels.

Liszt’s profound influence on subsequent performers and composers is difficult to overstate. As a piano virtuoso, he established the modern recital. He developed new playing techniques that expanded what the instrument could do. His contributions as a composer were equally important: his later works pushed beyond tonality, anticipating developments that would not become mainstream until the twentieth century.

Liszt, Un sospiro (A Sigh, 1845–49; NAWM 140)

Un sospiro (“A Sigh”) is the third of Liszt’s Three Concert Etudes (Trois etudes de concert). The evocative title was not given by Liszt himself but was added later — perhaps by someone who felt the music’s gentle, sighing quality warranted the name. Like all etudes, the piece presents a specific technical challenge: in this case, the difficulty of accentuating a slower-moving melody that lies outside or within broken-chord figurations. The performer must bring out a long-breathed tune while both hands execute rapid arpeggiated figuration — effectively making two hands do the work of three. The sustain pedal is crucial, allowing chords to resonate beneath the melody. Both hands must execute difficult leaps and crossed-hand passages, and the piece grows more difficult as it progresses. The cadenza passages, featuring parallel major sixths at high velocity, demand extraordinary accuracy.

The key of D-flat major (five flats) places the melody largely on black keys, which are raised above the white keys and easier to target when leaping — a practical advantage for the pianist amid the piece’s formidable technical demands.

Form

The form of Un sospiro can be outlined as: A – A’ – B – cadenza – B’ – cadenza – B’’ – cadenza – A’’’ – B’’’ – Coda, with the key scheme D-flat, D-flat–A, A, F minor, F major, C-sharp minor, C-sharp minor, D-flat. The A sections and their variations present a three-bar pentatonic melody over figuration outlining D-flat major, creating a sense of stasis — the bass line holds still beneath the melody for an extended time. A pentatonic melody uses only five notes (equivalent to playing just the black keys on the piano), contributing to this static, floating quality. The B sections are variants of A, compressed to two bars with more forward movement, removing the static quality and driving the music onward.

The form can be interpreted in several ways. At its simplest, it is a series of variations on the opening theme. It can also be heard as a ternary form (A in the tonic at opening and closing, B modulating in the middle) or even as a modified sonata form (two themes in different keys, a development section focusing on B material, and a recapitulation of both themes in the tonic).

Key Scheme

Regardless of how one interprets the form, the key scheme is revolutionary. The piece moves by major-third relationships — D-flat to A to F — which equally divide the octave into three parts. These keys share very few notes in common, and such remote tonal relationships effectively negate traditional tonal hierarchy, moving far beyond what earlier composers would have attempted. This technique had a profound influence on contemporary and subsequent composers, anticipating the dissolution of traditional tonality that would characterize much of the music to come.

♪ Liszt, Trois études de concert, No. 3: Un sospiro ♪

Romantic Choral Music — Mendelssohn

Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century

Choral music was one of the most popular types of music-making in nineteenth-century Europe. Enormous numbers of people participated in or heard choral performances, attending concerts in churches, public halls, and outdoor venues across the continent. In an age before recorded sound, collective singing offered one of the most accessible and democratic ways to experience music firsthand. Nineteenth-century composers drew heavily on the past, looking back to the choral traditions of earlier eras — reviving the works of Bach, Handel, and Haydn — while simultaneously creating new repertoire for the growing choral movement. This backward glance was not merely nostalgic; it reflected a genuine belief that the choral masterworks of the Baroque and Classical periods offered models of excellence that could inspire and elevate contemporary music-making.

Most choral music of this period was composed for amateurs, making it less prestigious than orchestral music and opera in the eyes of critics, yet far more accessible to everyday music lovers. There were three main types of choral music in this era. First, there were short choral works on secular texts — pieces that could be rehearsed and performed relatively quickly by community groups. Second, there were oratorios and similar large-scale works for large chorus and orchestra, which required more significant forces and preparation. Third, there were liturgical works, including anthems and hymns, which served the needs of church worship. All three types found eager audiences and performers across Europe and the Americas.

Choral music also represented a lucrative field for publishers. Consider the simple economics: rather than selling a single score to a pianist or one copy each to a singer and accompanist, publishers could sell dozens or even hundreds of individual vocal parts to a single choir. Every single member of an amateur or church choir needed a copy of the music, which meant that sales could be extraordinarily large. Moreover, these works were also suitable for home music-making — families and friends could gather around a piano and sing through choral parts in their parlors, further extending the commercial reach of published choral works.

Amateur Choirs and Choral Societies

The amateur choral movement organized itself into choral societies, organizations in which members paid dues, purchased their own music, and paid a conductor to lead rehearsals and performances. These were voluntary associations, born of the same spirit of civic participation that characterized much of nineteenth-century middle-class life. One of the earliest and most important was the Berlin Singakademie, which began in the 1790s as a singing class for wealthy women. It was a remarkable institution. By 1800, the Singakademie had added men to its ranks and engaged an orchestra, transforming itself from a modest vocal class into a formidable musical organization. By 1832, the chorus had swelled to over 350 singers — a force capable of mounting the most ambitious choral works in the repertoire.

Similar organizations flourished across Europe and beyond. Leipzig, Dresden, and Zurich all boasted thriving choral societies, as did Liverpool, Manchester, and Boston. In Germany and the United States, all-male choruses were also popular, often composed of working-class men who found in collective singing a sense of community, camaraderie, and purpose that their daily labor could not always provide. The benefits of choral societies were widely celebrated and went far beyond the purely musical. As the Source Reading “The Value of Amateur Choirs” in the textbook (p. 620) discusses, choral participation was said to occupy leisure time productively, develop a sense of unity among participants, elevate musical tastes in the broader community, encourage spiritual and ethical values, and even serve as practice in democratic processes — since choir members had to cooperate, follow a leader, and subordinate individual desires to the good of the group. It was a remarkable range of social goods attached to the simple act of singing together, and it helps explain why choral music occupied such a central place in nineteenth-century cultural life.

Festivals

The choral movement also gave rise to large-scale festivals at which singers from across a region would gather to perform. These were special events, often lasting several days, that brought together choruses and orchestras from multiple cities for performances of monumental works. The first such festival took place in 1759 in England, the year that Handel died, and was centered on Handel’s works — a fitting tribute to the composer who had become a naturalized English citizen and a pillar of British musical life. Handel had spent decades in England composing operas and oratorios, and his music remained enormously popular long after his death. The festival tradition commemorating his legacy soon spread across Germany, Austria, and North America, taking on a life of its own and becoming occasions not just for performing Handel but for premiering new choral compositions as well.

Among the most prominent and long-running festivals were the Birmingham Music Festival (founded 1784) in England and the Lower Rhenish Music Festival (founded 1818) in Dusseldorf, Germany. Both would play significant roles in the musical life of the century, commissioning and premiering new works by the leading composers of the day, including Mendelssohn.

The scale of these events could be staggering. The Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace in London in 1857, depicted in a famous illustration from The Illustrated London News, featured an orchestra of over 300 performers and a chorus of nearly 2,000 singers — a spectacle that would have been unimaginable just a century earlier and that testified to the extraordinary growth of the choral movement. The Crystal Palace itself, a massive iron-and-glass structure originally built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, provided the cavernous interior necessary to contain such immense forces and their audience.

Partsongs

A somewhat forgotten genre of nineteenth-century choral music is the partsong, the staple of smaller, mixed men’s and women’s choirs. The partsong was the choral parallel to the Lied or parlor song: it featured two or more voice parts, was unaccompanied or sometimes doubled on piano or organ, and could be performed in public concerts or as part of domestic music-making, depending on how many singers were placed on each part. The settings were syllabic — that is, each syllable of text typically received just one or two notes, without the elaborate ornamentation found in operatic singing — and were closely attuned to the poetry. The texts were often patriotic, sentimental, or convivial in character, with nature being a particularly favorite subject.

Schubert wrote approximately 100 partsongs, including Die Nacht (NAWM 142), a work for four-part male ensemble — two tenors and two basses (TTBB). It is relatively simple and easy to sing, evoking the tranquil night sky with gentle, accessible harmonies that any reasonably musical group could manage. The music served an immediate purpose: the pleasure of collective singing, the enjoyment of a beautiful evening gathered around a shared musical experience. These partsongs were hugely important in their day and constituted a significant portion of the choral repertoire. However, as amateur choruses and home music-making declined after the nineteenth century — replaced in part by recorded music and other forms of entertainment — this vast body of repertoire was largely forgotten, a casualty of changing social habits rather than any deficiency in the music itself.

Oratorios and Large Works

For large choruses, the oratorios of Handel and Haydn formed the core of the repertory. Organizations like the Handel and Haydn Society, founded in Boston in 1815, were devoted to performing these monumental works and keeping the tradition alive in the New World. But it was a watershed moment in 1829 that would reshape the entire landscape of choral music. The twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with the Berlin Singakademie — the very institution that had begun as a singing class for women a few decades earlier and had grown into one of Europe’s premier choral organizations.

The choir and orchestra Mendelssohn assembled were much larger than anything Bach would ever have used in his lifetime — Bach’s forces at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig were modest by comparison. But the effect was electrifying. The performance began the great revival of Bach’s vocal music that would reshape how the entire nineteenth century understood the Baroque master. Bach, who had been relatively obscure for decades after his death in 1750, was suddenly recognized as one of the towering figures of Western music. In 1833 and 1834, Mendelssohn followed with performances of the St. John Passion and the Mass in B Minor, respectively. These works left a deep impression on the young conductor and profoundly influenced his own compositions. When Mendelssohn came to write his own oratorios, the example of Bach was never far from his mind.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

Felix Mendelssohn was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg, but the family converted to Christianity, and he was raised as a devout Lutheran in the North German Protestant tradition. The family was quite devoted to their adopted faith, and this religious background would profoundly shape Mendelssohn’s choral compositions. He was a child prodigy on both piano and in composition, displaying extraordinary gifts from an early age. His sister, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, was herself a highly gifted composer and pianist, approximately four years his senior. However, she was in some ways sidelined by the social expectations of the era, which viewed composition as an unsuitable pursuit for a woman of her social standing. The two siblings were extraordinarily close, and both died in 1847 — Fanny in May, Felix in November — likely from cerebral aneurysms, a congenital condition that ran in the family.

The Mendelssohn family was highly connected in the intellectual and artistic circles of their day. Felix was a personal friend of Goethe, the great poet and dramatist, and he also knew Berlioz and Schumann, two of the most important composers of his generation. His career was meteoric: he conducted the epochal revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at age twenty, led performances of Handel oratorios, and in 1835, still in his twenties, became the director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, one of the most prestigious musical positions in all of Europe. The following year, 1836, he completed his oratorio St. Paul, Op. 36, and a decade later produced what would become perhaps his most famous oratorio, Elijah (1846). Yet during his own lifetime, it was St. Paul that enjoyed the greatest popularity among all his works — it was, in fact, his most performed composition.

Mendelssohn’s reception has been problematic over the years. He was often dismissed as bland and superficial — a judgment that was colored in part by anti-Semitic attacks from Richard Wagner, who in 1850, just three years after Mendelssohn’s death, published a vicious tract called “Judaism in Music” that denigrated Mendelssohn’s abilities on the basis of his Jewish heritage. Wagner argued that Mendelssohn’s Jewishness prevented him from achieving the profundity of Bach and Beethoven and that his music could only be a pale imitation of true German art. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, they banned Mendelssohn’s music and tore down his statue in front of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concert hall. These actions damaged his reception for many decades, both in Germany and internationally, since musicology as a discipline was heavily influenced by German academic traditions. Only in recent years has a renewed appreciation of Mendelssohn’s remarkable craft and expressive depth begun to restore his reputation to something approaching the extraordinary esteem in which he was held during his own lifetime.

Mendelssohn’s Oratorios

Choral societies and festivals not only preserved the music of the past but also actively encouraged the creation of new works. Composers were commissioned to write pieces for specific festivals, and the promise of a large, enthusiastic audience was a powerful incentive. St. Paul (1836) was premiered at the Lower Rhenish Festival and became Mendelssohn’s most popular composition during his lifetime. Elijah (1846) was premiered at the Birmingham Festival in England, before an audience that received it with rapturous enthusiasm. Both oratorios are rooted in the Baroque tradition but manifest something new and up-to-date in their musical language.

The choral movements display a variety of styles and textures reminiscent of Handel’s oratorios. Just as Handel’s Messiah, with its famous “Hallelujah” Chorus, mixes passages of homophonic grandeur — where all voices sing the same rhythm together — with imitative, fugal writing where different voice parts enter at different times with the same musical material, so too does Mendelssohn weave together these contrasting textures. He also evoked the style of the chorale, the Lutheran hymn tradition most closely associated with Bach’s cantatas and passions. By incorporating actual chorales into his oratorio, Mendelssohn forged a direct link with the sacred music tradition of the German Protestant church. He also provided unifying motives and links between movements, ensuring that the oratorio would be experienced as a cohesive dramatic whole rather than a mere series of disconnected numbers.

St. Paul, Op. 36 (NAWM 143): 1834–36

Mendelssohn’s St. Paul is an oratorio — a large-scale dramatic work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra on a sacred subject, performed without staging, costumes, or scenery. It encompasses a great variety of movement types, drawing on the full range of vocal and choral writing available to a nineteenth-century composer. The subject is the dramatic biblical narrative of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, a story with a long musical history stretching back to the composer Heinrich Schutz in the 1640s. Saul — later known as Paul — had been a zealous persecutor of the early Christians. As he traveled on the road to Damascus, an ancient city in Syria, he was suddenly blinded by a heavenly light and heard the voice of Jesus asking, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” The experience transformed him utterly, and he became one of the most important figures in the history of Christianity. It is quite a dramatic moment, and Mendelssohn brings to it the full resources of his art.

The recitatives and choral fugues breathe the spirit of Bach; the interweaving of homophonic and fugal textures evokes Handel’s great choruses; the setting of Jesus’s words for chorus recalls Haydn’s Creation; and the melodies, orchestration, and dramatic effects are unmistakably in the Romantic style. The four excerpts we examine (Nos. 13-16) focus on the moment of conversion itself and its immediate aftermath.

NAWM 143a — No. 13: Recitative and Arioso (Alto)

The first excerpt, No. 13, is a recitative and arioso for alto (contralto). The recitative narrates the journey to Damascus in the style of Bach and Handel — a straightforward, declamatory vocal line over sparse accompaniment that serves to advance the story efficiently: “And he journeyed with companions towards Damascus, and had authority and command from the High Priest that he should bring them bound, men and women, unto Jerusalem.” This is functional narrative music, designed to set the scene for the drama to come.

The arioso that follows — essentially an aria, but briefer and less formally structured — provides commentary rather than narrative. Accompanied only by strings, the alto sings the deeply reassuring text: “But the Lord is mindful of His own, He remembers His children. Bow down before Him, ye mighty, for the Lord is near us.” This arioso is more like a German Lied than a traditional operatic aria: it has a syllabic, tuneful melody with a range of about an octave, and its warm, intimate character draws the listener in. The text is both reassuring and prophetic, alluding to the transformative event that is about to unfold. God has not forgotten His people, even as Saul persecutes them — and Saul himself is about to discover this truth in the most dramatic fashion imaginable.

♪ Mendelssohn, St. Paul, Op. 36 — No. 13: Recitative and Arioso ♪

NAWM 143b — No. 14: Recitative and Chorus (The Conversion)

No. 14 brings us to the heart of the drama: the conversion itself. A tenor narrates the flash of heavenly light over trembling string tremolos — rapid, trembling bowing that creates a shimmering, unstable sound, perfectly suited to depicting a supernatural event: “And as he journeyed he came near unto Damascus; when suddenly there shone around him a light from heaven: and he fell to the earth; and he heard a voice saying unto him.” The tenor’s recitative sets the scene with vivid economy, and then the voice of Jesus enters.

Crucially, Jesus’s words — “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?” and “I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest” and “Arise, and go into the city; and there thou shalt be told what thou must do” — are set not for a solo singer but for women’s chorus accompanied by winds and brass, creating a luminous, heavenly sound that is clearly distinguished from the earthly voice of the tenor narrator. This choral treatment of the divine voice recalls Haydn’s practice in The Creation, where God’s utterances are similarly entrusted to the chorus rather than a soloist, and it produces an effect of otherworldly authority and grandeur. The conversation between Saul (the tenor) and the divine chorus creates a dramatic dialogue that is at once operatic in its intensity and oratorio-like in its sacred dignity.

♪ Mendelssohn, St. Paul, Op. 36 — No. 14: Recitative and Chorus ♪

NAWM 143c — No. 15: Chorus, “Arise, Shine, For Your Light Has Come”

No. 15 is a powerful chorus that responds to the conversion with triumphant exultation. It begins in homophonic texture — all voices declaiming together in unified rhythm — on the text “Arise, Shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” The effect is one of radiant affirmation, the full chorus proclaiming the arrival of divine illumination. However, when the text turns to darkness — “For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples” — Mendelssohn introduces a long central fugue, in which the voices enter one by one in imitative counterpoint, each part weaving around the others in increasing complexity. The contrast between homophony for light and fugue for darkness is a brilliant dramatic stroke, using musical texture itself as a vehicle for theological meaning. The fugal writing evokes the obscurity and confusion of spiritual darkness, while the return to homophonic clarity at the end of the chorus represents the triumph of divine light.

♪ Mendelssohn, St. Paul, Op. 36 — No. 15: Chorus, "Arise, Shine" ♪

NAWM 143d — No. 16: Chorale, “Sleepers, Wake, A Voice Is Calling”

The final excerpt is a chorale — a Lutheran hymn — set in straightforward four-part harmony with resplendent brass fanfares. The text, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (“Sleepers, wake, a voice is calling”), is one of the most beloved hymns in the entire Lutheran tradition. Its melody will likely sound familiar even to listeners who have never set foot in a German church, so deeply has it penetrated the Western musical consciousness. It is the same chorale that Bach set so memorably in his Cantata No. 140, and Mendelssohn’s decision to include it here forges a direct, unmistakable link between his own oratorio and the great tradition of Bach’s sacred music.

The hymn takes on a new meaning in the context of St. Paul: rather than its usual association with Advent and Christmas — its traditional liturgical placement — it becomes a call to spiritual awakening in the wake of Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus. “Sleepers, wake!” is no longer addressed to those awaiting the coming of Christ at Christmas, but to all who have been spiritually asleep and must now awaken, following Paul’s transformative example. The brass fanfares add a note of celebratory grandeur, as if heralding the dawn of a new spiritual era. Compare Mendelssohn’s straightforward four-part harmonization, with its simple dignity and congregational accessibility, to Bach’s elaborate cantata setting, with its richly ornamented instrumental accompaniment and complex interplay of voices, to appreciate both the continuity and the transformation of the Lutheran chorale tradition across more than a century of musical history.

♪ Mendelssohn, St. Paul, Op. 36 — No. 16: Chorale, "Sleepers, Wake" ♪

Romantic Chamber Music — Schubert and Schumann

Chamber Music in the Romantic Era

Chamber music — string quartets, trios, quintets, and similar works for small ensembles — underwent a profound transformation in the nineteenth century. In the Classical period, such works had been written primarily for home performance: friends and family gathered in a drawing room to play for their own enjoyment, reading through quartets and trios as a form of sociable entertainment. But in the Romantic era, string quartets and other chamber works were increasingly played in public concerts by professional ensembles, raising both the artistic ambitions and the technical demands of the genre to unprecedented levels. The Joachim Quartet, for instance, one of the most celebrated ensembles of the later nineteenth century, performed the chamber works of Brahms and others in prestigious London concert settings in the 1870s, treating each performance as a serious artistic event. Even earlier, the Schuppanzigh Quartet had premiered Beethoven’s string quartets in private and semi-public concerts in and around Vienna in the 1820s, and had also performed some of Schubert’s chamber works. By bringing chamber music into the public realm and having it played by serious, dedicated professional musicians, these ensembles helped establish small-ensemble works as worthy of the same attention and respect accorded to symphonies — no longer merely pleasant domestic diversions but vehicles for the most profound compositional thought.

The transition from private to public performance had far-reaching consequences for the music itself. When chamber works were played in a concert hall rather than a drawing room, they needed to command the attention of a large, silent audience over the course of an extended evening. Movements grew longer, textures became richer and more complex, and the emotional range expanded dramatically. Throughout the entire century and well into the twentieth, Beethoven’s middle quartets stood as the defining model for the genre. Every composer who wrote chamber music had to contend with Beethoven’s towering example — the way he had taken the quartet and created something much bigger and more dramatically ambitious than anything his predecessors had imagined. Beethoven would pose a problem or conflict at the beginning of a piece and then work it out through the entire movement or the entire multi-movement work, and this approach to form became the benchmark against which all subsequent chamber music was judged.

By midcentury, the genre came to be regarded as a conservative medium — a bastion of traditional craftsmanship and structural rigor that attracted composers who valued formal discipline and the intimate dialogue of a few instruments. Brahms, for example, was deeply drawn to chamber music and wrote two dozen chamber works over the course of his career, though he completed only three string quartets, so powerfully did Beethoven’s example weigh upon him that he destroyed many of his earlier attempts. On the other hand, more radical composers such as Berlioz and Liszt — who were drawn to entirely different kinds of forms, including the program symphony and the symphonic poem — shunned chamber music altogether and did not write works in the genre. For them, the intimate scale of the quartet or trio was too constraining; they sought the vast orchestral canvas instead.

Franz Schubert and the Transformation of Chamber Music

Franz Schubert offers a vivid illustration of how chamber music evolved during this period. His early works were written for home performance — Hausmusik, or “house music,” as the Germans called it — and were modeled on the chamber works of Mozart and Haydn, the acknowledged masters of Classical-era string writing. These early pieces were charming and accessible, designed for the pleasure of amateur musicians and requiring no more than competent, if not virtuosic, technique.

Schubert’s most famous early quintet, the Trout Quintet (1819), included a string quartet — two violins, viola, and cello — plus the addition of a double bass, giving the ensemble a deeper, richer sound than a standard string quartet. The fourth movement is a set of variations on his song Die Forelle (“The Trout”), a delightful tune that was already well known and loved by Schubert’s circle of friends. The nickname stuck, and the work remains one of the most popular pieces of chamber music ever written.

But Schubert’s late works are something altogether different. In the early 1820s, Schubert began to see what Beethoven had done with chamber music — how he had transformed the string quartet from a genteel domestic entertainment into a vehicle for the most intense personal expression and the most rigorous compositional thought — and he resolved to do something similar. Inspired by Beethoven’s example, he began writing dramatic concert music that aspires to the weight and grandeur of a symphony. Works like the String Quartet in A Minor (1824) and the String Quintet in C Major (1828) fuse Schubert’s extraordinary lyricism — his gift for song-like melody, cultivated through the composition of over 600 Lieder — with the drama of Beethoven’s style. Because he was so accomplished as a songwriter, Schubert had an unmatched ability to create melodies of intense emotional expressiveness, and when he brought this gift to bear on the more rigorous forms of chamber music, the results were remarkable. These late works doubled the length of a typical Classical-era string quartet from roughly twenty-five or thirty minutes to nearly fifty minutes or more, taking on the dimensions and ambitions of a symphony.

NAWM 144: Schubert, String Quintet in C Major (1828)

The String Quintet in C Major was composed around September 1828, just two months before Schubert’s death on November 19 of that year. He finished the work in time to hear a run-through on October 2 — a bittersweet occasion, as it would be among the last performances he would witness of his own music. The quintet was not published until 1853, more than two decades after its composition, so the public had to wait quite a few years to have access to it. Today it is universally recognized as one of the supreme masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire.

The quintet is scored for a string quartet with a second cello added — an unusual choice that distinguishes it from most other string quintets of the era, which typically added a second viola (as in Mozart’s celebrated quintets). The decision to add a second cello rather than a second viola has significant consequences for the sound of the ensemble. It gives the quintet a greater depth of sound — a richer, warmer bass register — and also opens up a wider variety of instrumental combinations than would be available with two violas. The five instruments are treated as equals: each is given opportunities to present the main melody, to provide accompaniment, and to engage in dialogue with the others. One instrument is often pitted against two pairs, creating a kaleidoscopic interplay of sonorities — for instance, the two cellos might carry the melody in parallel thirds while the two violins provide an offbeat accompaniment, with the viola plucking a bass line. Then the roles shift, and the violins take the theme while the cellos accompany. This constant redistribution of musical roles ensures that no single instrument dominates and that the listener’s ear is continually refreshed by new combinations of timbre and texture. Throughout the work, there is a strong contrast of mood and style, both within individual movements and between them, giving the quintet a dramatic range that rivals any symphony of the period.

♪ Schubert, String Quintet in C Major — I. Allegro ma non troppo ♪

First Movement: Sonata Form with Three Keys

The first movement alone lasts approximately fifteen minutes — very unusual for the period and indicative of the symphonic ambitions Schubert brought to the genre. It is in sonata form, the standard framework for a first movement, but with a characteristically Schubertian twist that sets it apart from its Classical predecessors.

In a Classical exposition, we would normally expect the music to move from the tonic key to the dominant — in this case, from C major to G major. And indeed, the exposition does arrive at G major by its close. However, what happens along the way is remarkable. Schubert introduces three keys in the exposition: C major, E-flat major, and G major. The second theme actually begins in E-flat before eventually migrating to G — a departure from convention that is typical of Schubert and of the early Romantic period more broadly. Schubert does this sort of thing far more than any other composer of his generation, and it gives his music a quality of harmonic surprise and richness that is immediately recognizable.

The first theme itself contains an opposition between C major and C minor. Its melody begins with a serious, long-breathed opening phrase — grave, expansive, and almost hymn-like — and then shifts to a much more lighthearted character, creating two contrasting ideas that set up tensions requiring resolution over the course of the entire movement. The tempo also plays a subtle trick on the listener: the opening sounds at first as though it might be a slow introduction, as was common in Classical symphonies and sonatas. But when it returns in a varied repeat, the listener realizes that no, this is in fact the beginning of the exposition proper — the main body of the movement has been underway from the very first note.

The harmonic scheme of the movement reveals a deeper logic underlying what might at first seem like arbitrary key choices. The very first chord is followed almost immediately by a diminished seventh chord containing the notes C, F-sharp, E-flat, and A. These four pitches turn out to map onto the key areas that dominate the entire movement: C is the overall tonic; E-flat is the unexpected key of the second theme; and A major and F-sharp minor are the keys featured prominently in the development section. What begins as a disruptive, dissonant sound at the very opening of the work thus gets worked out through the entire movement — an expansion of a single moment of tension into a large-scale harmonic drama. This is a characteristically Romantic approach to form: seeding the beginning of a work with conflicts and ambiguities that drive the music forward through all of its subsequent sections.

The second theme, when it arrives in E-flat, is presented by the two cellos in parallel thirds — a lovely, long-breathed melody of great warmth and lyrical beauty. The viola accompanies with pizzicato (plucked strings), and the violins provide an offbeat accompaniment that gives the passage a light, buoyant texture. Later, the instruments exchange roles: the violins take over the theme while the cellos and viola accompany, demonstrating the equal partnership among all five players and the extraordinary variety of textures that the addition of a second cello makes possible.

Other Movements

The remaining movements showcase the quintet’s extraordinary range and confirm its status as a work of symphonic proportions. The second movement is a slow ternary form (ABA) with an ethereal E-major melody of almost unearthly beauty and a contrasting F-minor middle section that is dramatically more turbulent and intense. The juxtaposition of these two characters — serenity and anguish — within a single movement is deeply moving. The third movement is a C-major scherzo whose trio section moves to the distant key of D-flat major, surrounded by numerous other distant keys that give the movement a sense of harmonic restlessness. The fourth movement is a hybrid sonata-rondo form that combines a rustic dance character — suggesting folk music and the countryside — with a more refined, urban tone. The entire quintet lasts approximately fifty minutes — a remarkable expansion of the chamber music genre that elevates the string quintet to the very dimensions and ambitions of a full symphony. Where a Classical-era quartet might last twenty-five to thirty minutes, Schubert’s quintet essentially doubles that duration, demanding the same level of sustained attention from its audience as any major orchestral work. The first movement alone lasts about fifteen minutes — itself longer than many complete Classical-era quartet movements. This expansion in scale is not mere inflation; it reflects a genuine deepening of the musical argument, with themes developed at greater length, harmonic journeys that range more widely, and contrasts of mood that are more extreme and more dramatically charged.

Clara Schumann and the Piano Trio

Clara Schumann (nee Wieck) is generally considered one of the finest pianist-composers of the nineteenth century, though her reputation as a composer was long overshadowed by that of her husband, Robert Schumann. We have already encountered the Schumanns in earlier lessons — the dramatic story of Clara’s courtship with Robert over the fierce opposition of her father, Friedrich Wieck, and their eventual marriage in 1840. The Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 17 (1846), is widely regarded as her best chamber work, and it was composed about six years into her marriage.

For the 1840s, Robert was quite a liberated man in supporting Clara’s continuing performances and composition — but it was still the 1840s, and the social pressures on women who aspired to compose were immense. Women were often thought incapable of composing at the same level as men, and Clara absorbed some of this prejudice despite her extraordinary abilities. Shortly after completing the trio, she wrote in her diary: “There is no greater joy than composing something oneself and then listening to it. There are some pretty passages in the trio, and I believe it is also fairly successful as far as the form goes. Naturally it is still only woman’s work, which always lacks force and occasionally invention.” This harsh self-assessment, poignant in its internalized doubt, belies the genuine quality of the work — as any listener will quickly discover. Clara also faced practical challenges: she had to be quiet when Robert was composing, she had a growing number of children to care for, and she needed to find time to both practice the piano for her concert career and compose her own music. That she managed to produce a work of such quality under these circumstances is a testament to her remarkable talent and determination.

NAWM 145: Clara Schumann, Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 17 (1846)

The Piano Trio in G Minor is scored for violin, cello, and piano — a combination that had been in common use for roughly a century by the time Clara Schumann wrote her work. The piano trio was a well-established genre with a rich repertoire stretching back to Haydn and Mozart. What is unusual about Clara Schumann’s contribution is the number of movements: where most piano trios of the era had three movements in a fast-slow-fast format, Schumann composed four movements — two sonata-form movements (first and last), a scherzo and trio, and a slow movement as the third. This four-movement plan gives the work a symphonic breadth and ambition that sets it apart from many of its contemporaries.

♪ C. Schumann, Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 17 — III. Andante ♪

Third Movement: Andante

The slow third movement (NAWM 145) is in G major — the parallel major of the trio’s home key of G minor — giving it a markedly different, warmer, more luminous quality than the surrounding movements. This contrast of mode — minor in the outer movements, major in the slow movement — is itself a source of expressive power, creating a sense of refuge and tenderness in the midst of the trio’s more dramatic and turbulent passages. The form is a modified ABA’: a ternary structure in which the opening material returns at the end but is somewhat altered, reflecting the Romantic preference for varied repetition over literal recapitulation.

The A section has a nocturne-like texture and mood — one might almost imagine Chopin’s nocturnes as a point of reference, though the effect here is achieved through three instruments rather than one. The melody is song-like, characteristic of the Romantic emphasis on lyrical, singing lines even in instrumental music. It might sound at first as though we are hearing a piano solo, because the piano begins alone, presenting the theme in its entirety. Then the violin enters and repeats the melody with some changes in ornamentation and register. Finally, the cello finishes the presentation of the theme, its warm, dark tone bringing a new emotional color to the same melodic material. This succession of instruments passing the melody from one voice to the next creates a sense of intimate conversation — as though three friends were sharing a thought, each expressing it in their own way.

The B section shifts to E minor, a key closely related to G major but with a darker, more restless character. E minor is the relative minor of G major, so the tonal relationship is close, but the emotional shift is palpable — the serenity of the A section gives way to something more agitated and searching. The music becomes more animated, with dotted rhythms — long notes followed by short ones — that provide energy and forward momentum, pushing the music ahead with a sense of gentle urgency. The instruments again take turns in leading the musical discourse, creating constantly changing textures, figuration, and combinations of sound. No sooner has one instrument established itself as the leader than another takes over, maintaining a kaleidoscopic interplay of voices that is handled with great skill and sensitivity. The piano, violin, and cello each bring their distinctive timbral qualities to the same musical ideas, so that each statement of the theme sounds subtly different even when the notes are essentially the same.

When the A’ section returns, the opening material comes back in a modified form — not a literal repetition but a varied recapitulation that reflects the Romantic preference for development and transformation over simple restatement. The nocturne-like mood is restored, but enriched by everything that has happened in the B section. The movement as a whole demonstrates convincingly that Clara Schumann’s self-deprecating assessment of her own work was entirely unwarranted. This is chamber music of genuine warmth, subtlety, and compositional craft — music that stands on its own merits, that speaks with a distinctive and personal voice, and that invites repeated listening. The full trio, with its four contrasting movements ranging from dramatic sonata-form arguments to this tender, song-like Andante, is a work that deserves a prominent place in the chamber music repertoire.

The Romantic Program Symphony — Berlioz

The Nineteenth-Century Orchestra

The orchestra was central to public concert life in the nineteenth century, serving as the primary vehicle for the most ambitious and prestigious instrumental music of the age. The number of orchestras increased significantly during this period: some were composed primarily of talented amateurs, but professional orchestras were also established, creating institutions that would endure for centuries. Among the most important were the London Philharmonic (founded 1813), the New York Philharmonic (1842), and the Vienna Philharmonic (1842). By mid-century, most major cities in Europe and the Americas had orchestras providing regular concert series, making orchestral music accessible to a broad public for the first time in history.

Size and Instrumentation

The orchestra grew not only in the number of ensembles but also in the size and composition of each one. New and redesigned instruments transformed the available palette of sound in dramatic ways. Woodwinds acquired elaborate systems of keys by midcentury, greatly increasing their agility, intonation, and ability to play in any key with equal facility. Valves were added to horns and trumpets — replacing the cumbersome natural horns and natural trumpets of the eighteenth century, which had relied on different crooks (interchangeable sections of tubing) to play in different keys. The addition of valves was a revolutionary development that opened up a much wider range of orchestral color and allowed brass instruments to participate more fully in the musical discourse. Winds and brass became more equal partners with the strings rather than mere incidental additions used primarily for emphasis and color.

Additional percussion instruments joined the already established timpani, expanding the rhythmic and coloristic resources of the orchestra. Fully chromatic pedal harps became a regular feature, often played by a woman in an ensemble that was otherwise almost exclusively male — one of the few instrumental roles open to women in professional orchestras of the era. Overall, the orchestra grew from roughly 40 players at the beginning of the century to about 90 by its end, and early twentieth-century orchestras could easily exceed well over 100. The BBC Symphony Orchestra, for example, established in 1929, had 114 full-time members.

Conductors

The rise of the star conductor was another defining feature of the era. Conducting as a specialized profession developed first at the Paris Opera, where a designated figure wielded a baton to beat time and cue entrances — a very different practice from the eighteenth century, when orchestras were typically led by the harpsichord player or the concertmaster, musicians who were themselves part of the ensemble and playing along with the group. By the 1840s, conductors were no longer merely timekeepers but were considered interpreters of the music — artists of genius, as talented as any composer or instrumental virtuoso. Louis Jullien (1812-1860) exemplified the Romantic cult of the individual applied to the conductor’s art: contemporary illustrations show him positioned at the very center of massive ensembles, surrounded by the orchestra rather than standing in front of it, with four additional brass ensembles on risers above. He conducted from memory, without a score — a practice that demonstrated his intimate, inward knowledge of the works he led and further enhanced his aura of genius.

Audiences and Concerts

Orchestral concerts attracted a primarily middle-class audience whose enthusiasm for symphonic music was both genuine and socially significant. Since orchestral music could only be heard live — there were no recordings, no radio broadcasts, no streaming services — publishers offered piano transcriptions for two hands or four hands, so that concertgoers could bring the music home and play these works for themselves on the parlor piano. This was a major commercial enterprise and a significant part of how nineteenth-century audiences engaged with orchestral music outside the concert hall.

Orchestral music carried a special prestige in the hierarchy of musical genres, greatly enhanced by the lasting impression of Beethoven’s symphonies, which were increasingly regarded as the supreme achievements of instrumental music. Concert programs offered a diversity of works and performing forces: audiences did not sit through an evening of nothing but symphonies. Instead, programs alternated instrumental and vocal music, featuring opera singers, concerto soloists, and short orchestral pieces alongside the main symphonic works. New genres emerged to fill the programs: the concert overture, a one-movement orchestral work in sonata form with a descriptive title, became a popular format for composers who wished to write orchestral music on a smaller scale than the full symphony.

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)

Hector Berlioz was a French composer whose lifelong fascination with music led him to abandon his studies in medicine — a decision that horrified his father, a physician, but that proved to be one of the most consequential career changes in the history of music. Berlioz taught himself harmony from textbooks, showing a remarkable natural aptitude for musical understanding even without the formal training that most composers received from childhood. Some of his earliest compositions were written when he was still a teenager, before he had any formal instruction. He went on to study composition at the Paris Conservatoire, and in 1830 — the same year he composed the Symphonie fantastique — he won the Prix de Rome, the premier European prize for composition. (Debussy would win the same prize a generation later.)

By 1835, Berlioz had begun to conduct, becoming one of the first composers to make a full career of orchestral conducting. A famous caricature from around 1850 by Anton Elfinger shows Berlioz at the podium amid apparent chaos — cannons firing, audience members covering their ears — with the composer at the center of it all, controlling the mayhem with his baton. It is a humorous exaggeration, but it captures something of Berlioz’s reputation for producing music of unprecedented power and volume. He also acted as his own impresario, organizing and producing his own concerts — a practical necessity for a composer whose ambitious works required enormous forces and careful preparation.

Berlioz’s chief profession, however, was music criticism: he was a brilliant prose writer whose literary sensibility profoundly shaped his approach to composition. He wrote extensively about his contemporaries and about Beethoven, and his opinions and judgments were widely read and influential. In 1843 he published his landmark Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration, a comprehensive guide to the capabilities and characteristics of every orchestral instrument. This treatise was so brilliantly conceived and so practical in its advice that composers have continued to consult it from Berlioz’s day to our own.

Berlioz’s musical influences included Beethoven’s symphonies — particularly the Fifth and the Sixth (Pastoral) — and Shakespeare’s plays, which had become a cultural obsession in Paris. His personal life was marked by an intense obsession with Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress whom he saw perform Shakespeare in 1827. This obsession would become the driving force behind his most famous work. His total output includes three operas, four symphonies, four concert overtures, over thirty choral works, and an orchestral song cycle — a remarkably varied and ambitious body of work.

Symphonie fantastique (1830)

The Symphonie fantastique was composed in 1830, just three years after the death of Beethoven, a composer whom Berlioz revered above all others. Like Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (the “Pastoral”), it is cast in five movements rather than the usual four — a departure from the standard symphonic template that allowed room for a more elaborate and detailed narrative. The five-movement structure of the Pastoral Symphony had accommodated a thunderstorm scene that would not have fit into the conventional four-movement plan, and Berlioz similarly needed the extra movement to tell his story. The outlines of the traditional symphony remain visible — we can still discern the basic pattern of fast movement, slow movement, scherzo, and finale — but Berlioz took the form in a radically different direction, creating something that had never been heard before.

The symphony includes a recurring theme that is transformed throughout all five movements, an idea inspired by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where the famous four-note motif undergoes constant metamorphosis across the entire work. Berlioz’s recurring theme, however, is much longer than Beethoven’s terse four notes: it is a sinuous, lyrical melody of considerable length that he called the idee fixe — the “fixed idea” — representing the image of the beloved in the composer’s mind. The orchestra Berlioz assembled was enormous, numbering over 100 players, and he deployed new effects and combinations of instruments that demonstrated his genius as an orchestrator. The full instrumentation included two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, an English horn (used in the third movement), clarinets in both B-flat and E-flat, four bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, bells, two harps, and a full complement of strings — an unprecedented array of timbral resources.

Berlioz also drew upon musical topics that were immediately familiar to his Parisian audience — recognizable musical conventions or “memes” that carried well-established associations. These include a waltz in the second movement (evoking ballroom elegance), stock pastoral topics in the third (shepherd’s pipes, 6/8 rhythms, bird calls), a march in the fourth (associated with military processions and public executions), a graphic imitation of a beheading in the fourth, and in the fifth movement, the Dies irae (“Day of Wrath”) — the well-known Catholic funeral chant from the Mass for the Dead — heard at a Witches’ Sabbath. By deploying these familiar musical signs, Berlioz ensured that his audience could follow the story even without consulting the printed program.

Program Music and the Idee Fixe

The Symphonie fantastique reconceived the symphony as a programmatic work. Program music is instrumental music that tells a story or follows a narrative or other sequence of events, often spelled out in an accompanying text called a program. This was not an entirely new idea — Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony had descriptive movement titles, and there were earlier precedents still — but Berlioz took it much further than anyone before him, providing a detailed narrative that the audience was expected to follow while listening.

The program is semi-autobiographical. Berlioz had seen Harriet Smithson perform Shakespeare in Paris in 1827 and became obsessed with her — an unrequited passion that consumed him for years. The Symphonie fantastique tells the story of a young artist’s doomed love affair, and the beloved is represented throughout by the idee fixe — a melody that reappears in transformed guises in each of the five movements, tracking the artist’s emotional journey from infatuation to despair to opium-fueled nightmare. (At a performance after the premiere, Smithson realized she was the subject of the work. Remarkably, rather than fleeing from such intense and public obsession, she agreed to marry Berlioz in 1833. The marriage was not a happy one — as one might well imagine — and they separated in 1844, though Berlioz continued to support her financially for the rest of her life.)

Berlioz distributed a written program to the audience and expected them to read it before or during the performance, much as opera-goers followed a libretto. As he wrote in his introductory note: “The plan of the instrumental drama, since it lacks the assistance of words, needs to be outlined in advance. Thus the following program should be considered in the same way as the spoken words of an opera, serving to introduce the pieces of music whose character and expression it motivates.” He even used the word “drama” to describe his symphony — a signal that he conceived of this work not merely as a sequence of abstract musical forms but as a narrative with characters, events, and emotional trajectory.

The Five Movements

Part I: “Daydreams, Passions.” The first movement has a slow introduction followed by a sonata-form Allegro. The first theme of the Allegro is the idee fixe itself — a long, arching, sweet, melodious line played by flute and strings. The development section consists of a series of dramatic episodes. Berlioz’s program reads: “The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted with that moral disease that a well-known writer calls the vague de passion, sees for the first time a woman who embodies all the charms of the ideal being he has imagined in his dreams, and he falls desperately in love with her. Through an odd whim, whenever the beloved image appears before the mind’s eye of the artist, it is linked with a musical thought whose character, passionate but at the same time noble and shy, he finds similar to the one he attributes to his beloved.”

♪ Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique — I. "Reveries, Passions" (idee fixe) ♪

Part II: “A Ball.” The second movement is in ABA form — a waltz enacting a glittering scene at a ball, with prominent harps contributing to the festive, elegant atmosphere. The idee fixe appears amid the swirling dance, as the artist catches a glimpse of his beloved across the crowded ballroom. The effect is both enchanting and disturbing: the beloved’s image intrudes upon the social gaiety like an obsessive thought that cannot be suppressed.

♪ Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique — II. "A Ball" ♪

Part III: “In the Country.” The slow third movement is a pastoral Adagio in 6/8, and at fifteen to seventeen minutes it is the longest movement in the entire symphony. It opens with an English horn and an offstage oboe in dialogue, representing piping shepherds exchanging a ranz de vaches — a yodeling call associated with the Swiss and French Alps. This pastoral duet, with its evocation of the countryside, bird calls, and rustling trees, is a direct echo of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. The idee fixe appears in the flute and oboe — pastoral instruments, fitting the rural setting — but it does not finish: it is drowned out by cellos and basses and derailed by loud interjections from the full orchestra. Things are not going well for the artist. Toward the end, the first shepherd pipes again, but the second does not answer. Silence. Then a rumble of thunder — timpani rolls — closes the movement on a note of desolation and foreboding. As Berlioz wrote in his program: “He hears in the distance two shepherds piping a ranz de vaches in dialogue… He reflects upon his isolation. He hopes that his loneliness will soon be over. But what if she were deceiving him? This mingling of hope and fear forms the subject of this adagio. At the end, one of the shepherds again takes up the ranz de vaches. The other no longer replies.”

♪ Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique — III. "Scene in the Country" ♪

Part IV: “March to the Scaffold.” Things go from bad to worse. According to the program: “Convinced that his love is unappreciated, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a sleep accompanied by the most horrible visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned and led to the scaffold, and that he is witnessing his own execution.” The march is grim and relentless. The idee fixe appears one last time, very briefly, but is abruptly truncated — a graphic musical imitation of the guillotine blade falling, cutting off not just the tune but the head. It is one of the most vivid moments in all of orchestral music: the melody begins, the blade falls, and a loud orchestral crash signals the severing.

♪ Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique — IV. "March to the Scaffold" ♪

Part V: “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” (NAWM 146). The opium nightmare continues. The artist “sees himself at the sabbath, in the midst of a frightful troop of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind, come together for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, bursts of laughter, distant cries which other cries seem to answer.” The finale brings together transformations of the idee fixe, two other themes, and church bells in a nightmarish tableau.

Berlioz deploys a striking orchestral effect: col legno (“with the wood”), in which string players turn their bows upside down and strike the strings with the wooden stick instead of the hair, producing a dry, eerie sound like rattling bones or crackling fire — perfectly suited to a scene of the macabre. The idee fixe returns in measure 40, played by the clarinet in a grotesque, distorted caricature of its former self. Where the melody had once been long-breathed, noble, and achingly beautiful, it is now decorated with grace notes and trills that make it sound like a vulgar, shrieking parody. As the program states: “The beloved melody appears again, but it has lost its character of nobility and shyness; it is no more than a dance tune, mean, trivial, and grotesque. It is she, coming to join the sabbath.”

Bells sound the funeral knell — actual tubular bells, another of Berlioz’s orchestral innovations — and then the Dies irae enters. The Dies irae — the “Day of Wrath” — is a well-known Catholic chant from the Mass for the Dead, a solemn melody that would have been immediately recognizable to the Catholic church-going audience of Paris. To hear this sacred funeral chant twisted into a burlesque parody in the context of a witches’ sabbath must have been a deeply shocking experience for the original audience. The chant is presented first in its normal form by the low brass, then in diminution (with shorter note values, at double speed), and finally in a skittering, almost comical version — a systematic degradation of the sacred that mirrors the degradation of the idee fixe itself. The sacred melody becomes a potent symbol of death, the macabre, and the diabolical — not death as a solemn religious mystery, but death as a grotesque carnival.

Finally, a witches’ round dance unfolds in fugal entries with offbeat accents, the voices of the orchestra entering one by one in the manner of a formal fugue but with a wild, lurching quality that suggests the chaotic revelry of the sabbath. The round dance builds in intensity, and ultimately the Dies irae and the witches’ round dance are combined simultaneously — two themes layered on top of each other in a climax of pandemonium that pushes the orchestra to its limits. This technique of combining two previously heard themes is a remarkable feat of compositional craft, and it brings the symphony to a close in a blaze of orchestral fury.

Comparing the idee fixe as it appears across all five movements — the transformation from the long, slurred, noble, beautiful phrases of the first movement, through its appearances at the ball and in the countryside, to the abrupt truncation at the scaffold and the grotesque shrieks of the finale — reveals the full arc of the symphony’s narrative: a love story that spirals downward from idealized passion to hallucinatory horror. The Symphonie fantastique remains one of the most revolutionary works in the orchestral repertoire, a composition that expanded the possibilities of the symphony in ways that would influence generations of composers to come. Berlioz himself was not widely appreciated in his own time — his bold innovations were often met with bewilderment or hostility — and it was not until the twentieth century that his genius as a composer and orchestrator was fully recognized.

♪ Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique — V. "Dream of a Witches' Sabbath" ♪

Orchestral Music — Mendelssohn and Schumann

The Rise of the Classical Repertoire

One of the most significant developments of the early nineteenth century was the emergence of a repertoire of musical classics — a canon of works by composers of the past that became a permanent fixture of concert life. This is something we take entirely for granted today when we attend a symphony concert and expect to hear Beethoven, Mozart, or Haydn, but it was a genuinely new phenomenon in the early 1800s. Previously, concert programs had consisted almost entirely of new music; audiences expected to hear the latest compositions, and older works were quickly forgotten. The shift toward a classical repertoire — a body of masterworks that would be performed again and again across generations — fundamentally changed the nature of the concert experience.

Several factors drove this change. Haydn and Beethoven had enjoyed enormous popularity both during their lives and after their deaths, and their music remained in active circulation. It was cheaper for publishers to print works by composers who did not expect direct payment (being deceased), and this music was also more readily available and accessible to amateurs than the increasingly virtuosic new compositions being written by contemporary composers. The technical developments in piano and violin playing, for instance, were making new works harder and harder for amateurs to play at home, while the works of Haydn and early Beethoven remained within reach. The music also had an immediate appeal — it was crafted to engage listeners on the surface while rewarding deeper, repeated listening.

The consequences for audiences, performers, and composers were profound. Concertgoers were now expected to listen in serious silence rather than conversing during performances — a dramatic change from eighteenth-century practice, when audiences had treated concerts as social occasions at which one might talk, eat, and move about freely. Performers became interpreters of the classics rather than simply creators of their own new works; they were now judged not only on their technical skill but on the depth and insight of their interpretations of canonical masterpieces.

For composers, Beethoven’s legacy cast an especially long and daunting shadow. Each of Beethoven’s orchestral works came to be seen as an artistic statement — not merely an entertainment but a profound expression of human experience, a benchmark of excellence against which all subsequent works would be measured. Later composers labored in his shadow, producing a series of varied responses to his example. The weight of this legacy was so great that Brahms, for instance, when he finally approached the symphony form decades later, deliberately invoked Beethoven’s music — quoting from the Ninth Symphony in his own First Symphony as a way of confronting the model head-on before departing from it. It was a heavy burden of excellence that shaped orchestral composition for generations.

Classical Romanticism: Mendelssohn’s Symphonies and Overtures

Felix Mendelssohn exemplified the idea of classical Romanticism — a term that captures the productive tension between adherence to Classical forms and the expressive impulses of the Romantic age. He was trained in classical genres from childhood, and his mature symphonies follow classical models in their basic structure: four movements, sonata form in the first movement, a contrasting slow movement, a scherzo or minuet, and a finale. But his departures from those models reveal the unmistakable impact of Romantic ideals — a fascination with places, landscapes, literature, and religious feeling that transforms the inherited Classical framework from within.

His symphonies illustrate this perfectly. The Symphony No. 5 in D Minor ("Reformation," 1830, rev. 1832) bases its last movement on Luther’s chorale Ein feste Burg (“A Mighty Fortress”) — a reference to Mendelssohn’s deep Lutheran faith and to the Protestant musical tradition he had absorbed since childhood. The Symphony No. 2 in B-flat Major, called Lobgesang (“Song of Praise,” 1840), incorporates solo voices, chorus, and organ — following, in some ways, the model of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which had shattered the boundary between symphony and vocal music by introducing soloists and chorus in its finale. The Symphony No. 3 in A Minor ("Scottish," 1829-42) and Symphony No. 4 in A Major ("Italian," 1833) carry geographical nicknames that reflect the impressions and soundscapes Mendelssohn absorbed during his extensive travels to Italy and the British Isles. These are not merely abstract symphonic structures but works that evoke specific places and the feelings they inspired — the brooding, misty atmosphere of Scotland, the sunny exuberance of Italy.

Mendelssohn was also a gifted painter and sketcher, and his visual sensibility clearly informed his musical evocations of landscape. He composed concert overtures that invoked places and Romantic subjects: The Hebrides (1832), also known as “Fingal’s Cave,” inspired by a trip to Scotland and the dramatic sea caves of the Scottish islands; Becalmed at Sea and Prosperous Voyage (1828-32), based on poems by Goethe; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), after Shakespeare. He wrote four piano concertos for his own performances, in which the virtuosic display of the soloist served as a vehicle for the composer’s expressive intentions rather than as mere empty showmanship.

It is worth pausing here to reflect on the complexities of Mendelssohn’s legacy, which we touched on in Lesson 3a. Born Jewish but baptized and raised as a devout Lutheran, he never wished to abandon the family name Mendelssohn, though his family adopted the additional surname Bartholdy to distance themselves from their Jewish heritage. Just a few years after his death in 1847, the anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner published a vicious tract called “Judaism in Music” (1850), attacking Mendelssohn’s Jewishness and claiming it prevented him from achieving the profundity of Bach and Beethoven — that his music could only be a pale imitation of true German art. This poisonous essay influenced generations of musicians and scholars. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, they banned Mendelssohn’s music entirely and tore down his statue in front of the Leipzig Gewandhaus concert hall — the very orchestra he had directed with such distinction. These actions damaged his reception for decades. Because musicology as an academic discipline was largely a product of German university culture, some of these biases persisted long after the war. It is only in recent years that Mendelssohn’s reputation has begun to recover to something approaching the extraordinary esteem in which he was held during his own lifetime — when he was widely regarded as the greatest living composer.

NAWM 147: Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 (1844)

The Violin Concerto in E Minor was written in 1844 for Mendelssohn’s close friend Ferdinand David, whom he had appointed as concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835 and later as violin instructor at the Leipzig Conservatory. The two had known each other for many years, and the concerto was in some sense a musical gift from one friend to another — though it was also, of course, a gift to the entire world of violin playing. The concerto has a deeply virtuosic violin part that demands the highest level of technical skill, yet the violin and orchestra perform as equal partners — the orchestra is no mere accompaniment but a full participant in the musical discourse. The three movements are played without pause, linked by thematic content and connecting passages, making the concerto a continuous physical and artistic tour de force for the performer.

♪ Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 — I. Allegro molto appassionato ♪

First Movement: Innovations within Sonata Form

The first movement is in sonata form — the standard framework for a concerto first movement — but Mendelssohn introduces a series of remarkable innovations that distinguish his treatment from the traditional blending of sonata form and ritornello form that had characterized the concerto since Vivaldi and had been refined by Mozart and Beethoven.

In a Classical concerto, the orchestra would typically present its own complete exposition — with first theme, transition, second theme, and closing material — before the soloist even entered. This orchestral exposition could last several minutes, during which the soloist sat silently, waiting for their turn. Mendelssohn dispenses with the orchestral exposition entirely: the soloist states the main theme from the very first measure, plunging the listener immediately into the lyrical, passionate world of the concerto. This was a bold departure from convention — the audience would have noticed immediately that something was different — and it has the effect of creating an intimate, almost confessional quality from the work’s opening bars. The violin sings its yearning melody over a murmuring orchestral accompaniment, and the listener is drawn in at once.

Another striking innovation concerns the cadenza — the extended solo passage in which the performer showcases their virtuosity, traditionally placed near the very end of the movement and often improvised or drawn from a repertoire of pre-composed cadenzas by various virtuosos. Mendelssohn places the cadenza before the recapitulation, at the end of the development section, rather than at the end of the movement. This is a highly unusual structural decision that serves a clear formal purpose: the cadenza becomes a bridge between the turbulence of the development and the resolution of the recapitulation, rather than a decorative appendix tacked on near the end. Moreover, Mendelssohn wrote out every note of the cadenza himself, rather than leaving it to the performer’s improvisation. This allowed him to maintain complete control over the expression and the formal articulation of the movement. The cadenza then overlaps with the recapitulation: rather than ending with a clear trill and a pause before the orchestra re-enters (the conventional signal that the cadenza is over), the soloist continues playing right into the return of the first theme and the tonic key. The boundary between cadenza and recapitulation is thus blurred, creating a sense of organic continuity.

The first theme group articulates the form through a series of contrasts — an interplay between lyrical expression and virtuosic display on the part of the soloist, and between the soloist’s music and the orchestra’s. The soloist alternates between singing, cantabile passages of great melodic beauty and brilliant, dazzling runs and figurations that showcase the instrument’s technical possibilities. The exposition blurs seamlessly into the development, with no clear cadential stop between them — a characteristically Romantic preference for continuity over Classical punctuation and sectional clarity.

The recapitulation is telescoped — significantly shorter than the original presentation of the material in the exposition. This is partly because the development section has already thoroughly explored the opening themes, making a full repetition unnecessary, and partly because Mendelssohn wanted to conclude with a long, dramatic coda that brings the movement to a powerful, sweeping close. The coda is far more expansive and dramatically charged than anything that would be found at the end of a Classical concerto movement, and it gives the movement a sense of culmination and finality that is deeply satisfying.

The second movement is a contrasting slow movement in ABA’ form, lyrical and songful, and the third movement is a sonata or sonata-rondo form — lively, brilliant, and ebullient. These outer movements remain recognizably Classical in their basic structure, even as the first movement’s innovations push the boundaries of the concerto genre in ways that would influence virtually every violin concerto written after it.

Robert Schumann and the Romantic Symphony

Robert Schumann approached the symphony fresh from his “song year” of 1840, during which he had composed an extraordinary outpouring of Lieder — well over a hundred songs in a single year of feverish creative activity. As we have seen in earlier lessons, Schumann tended to focus intensely on one genre at a time, and having exhausted his immediate inspiration for song, he turned in 1841 to the form that was considered the ultimate test of a composer’s ability: the symphony. The year 1841 became his “symphony year”: he sketched the Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 38, in just three days in January, working with extraordinary speed and intensity. He then orchestrated and revised the work over the following weeks, and it was premiered at the end of March 1841 — barely two months after it was first conceived.

The premiere was performed by the Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducted by none other than Felix Mendelssohn — a testament to the mutual respect and genuine friendship between the two composers. Schumann admired Mendelssohn greatly and championed his work in his music criticism, writing favorably about Mendelssohn’s compositions at a time when Wagner was attacking them. After Beethoven, the symphony was the form by which a composer was most seriously judged, and Schumann was keenly aware that he was entering territory where the greatest composers had set the highest standards.

Schumann’s primary orchestral models were Schubert’s “Great” C-Major Symphony — a work that Schumann himself had helped to bring to public attention — and the symphonies and concertos of Mendelssohn. But because this is a Romantic work, it was also inspired by poetry: specifically, a poem by Adolf Bottger called “You Spirit of the Clouds” (O wende, wende deinen Lauf — Im Tale bluht der Fruhling auf! — “O turn, turn your course — In the valley, spring blooms forth!”). The poem has a distinctive rhythmic pattern that Schumann actually imitates in the opening of the symphony, creating a direct musical connection between the literary inspiration and the symphonic realization. The work carries the title “Spring”, and each of its four movements has a descriptive title evoking the season: “Spring’s Awakening” (B-flat major), “Evening” (Larghetto, E-flat major), “Merry Playmates” (Scherzo and two trios, G minor), and “Spring’s Farewell” (Allegro animato, B-flat major). These titles evoke the character and mood of each movement without providing the kind of detailed narrative program that Berlioz had written for his Symphonie fantastique.

NAWM 148: Schumann, Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 38 (“Spring”), First Movement

Slow Introduction and Sonata Form

The first movement follows the Classical template of a slow introduction leading into a fast sonata form — a procedure deeply reminiscent of Haydn and Beethoven. Haydn in particular had often begun his symphonies with a stately, slow introduction that established the mood before the main Allegro erupted. Beethoven continued this tradition in several of his symphonies. But what is new in Schumann’s treatment is the degree to which the introduction is closely connected to the rest of the movement, rather than serving as a detachable preamble that could be removed without affecting the structural logic of what follows.

The movement opens with a motto theme in the horns and trumpets — a bold, rhythmically distinctive figure whose rhythm directly echoes the opening of Bottger’s poem. This is not merely a coincidence of rhythm but a deliberate act of musical translation: Schumann takes the metrical pattern of the German verse and transforms it into the opening gesture of his symphony. This motto establishes not just a mood but a rhythmic cell that will permeate the entire movement, creating a powerful sense of rhythmic integration — the feeling that every part of the movement grows organically from this single opening idea. The slow introduction builds in a long crescendo that culminates in the opening of the exposition proper, so that the fast section emerges organically from the slow one rather than starting abruptly. This crescendo creates a wonderful sense of anticipation and release — the feeling of spring itself, breaking through after a long winter.

The opening motto theme reappears as the opening figure of the first theme in the faster tempo of the exposition. This is a crucial unifying device: the introduction is not merely a prelude but the seed from which the entire movement grows. The serious, slow proclamation of the horns and trumpets is transformed into the energetic, dance-like first theme of the Allegro, but the underlying rhythm remains the same.

♪ R. Schumann, Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major, Op. 38 — I. Andante un poco maestoso — Allegro molto vivace ♪

Development

The development section exemplifies a convention that is characteristic of Romantic symphonic writing. Rather than fragmenting motives and recombining them in the analytical manner of Beethoven — who would dissect a theme into its smallest components and develop each one independently — Schumann takes long stretches of material from the exposition and repeats them at a new level, transposed up a perfect fifth. This creates a sense of intensification through transposition rather than through thematic fragmentation: the music we have already heard returns, but pitched higher, creating a feeling of heightened energy and urgency. It is a subtly different approach to the art of development, one that reflects the Romantic preference for broad, sweeping gestures over the microscopic dissection of thematic cells. A triangle even makes an appearance in this section, adding a bright, sparkling color to the orchestral texture.

Recapitulation and Coda

The recapitulation of the first theme is unusual and surprising. Instead of beginning with the exposition material — the first theme in the tonic key, as convention would dictate — Schumann includes a restatement of the slow introduction in horns and trumpets, going all the way back to the very opening gesture of the entire movement. This is a striking departure from convention: by returning to the introduction, Schumann reinforces the unity between introduction and exposition and gives the recapitulation a grander, more sweeping quality. It is as though the entire cycle begins again — the motto proclaims, the crescendo builds, and the first theme erupts once more — but this time with the weight of everything we have heard in the development behind it.

The movement concludes with a coda in which the motto rhythm is transformed into a new, lyrical theme — a final metamorphosis that demonstrates how thoroughly the opening rhythmic idea has permeated every corner of the movement. What began as a bold, declamatory fanfare in the horns becomes a singing, graceful melody, as though the energy of spring’s awakening has mellowed into the warmth of full bloom. It is a deeply satisfying conclusion to a movement of remarkable unity and vitality.

Romanticism and the Classical Tradition

The first half of the nineteenth century was a paradoxical age. A torrent of new music poured forth from prolific composers, yet at the same time the emergence of musical classics — works by composers of the past — created a permanent canon against which all new music was measured. Elements of Romanticism — expressive melody, harmonic adventurousness, programmatic content, poetic inspiration, evocations of landscape and literary subjects — were blended into the eighteenth-century classical frameworks of sonata form, rondo, theme and variations, and the multi-movement symphony.

Few pieces attained a permanent place in the repertoire during their composer’s own lifetime; some, like the works of Berlioz, had to wait until the twentieth century for full recognition of their revolutionary achievements. Mendelssohn’s reputation suffered grievously from anti-Semitic attacks that distorted his legacy for generations. Schumann’s symphonies were sometimes criticized for their orchestration, though their musical substance was never in doubt. Yet the music endures. What matters most, in the end, is not the taking of notes but the listening — and this is music that richly rewards it. These composers found ways to honor the Classical tradition while transforming it from within, creating works that speak with both the authority of inherited form and the passion of individual expression. Their achievement was to demonstrate that Romanticism and Classicism were not opposites but complements — that the deepest feelings could be expressed within the most rigorous structures, and that the structures themselves could be renewed and revitalized by the force of Romantic imagination.

Romantic Italian Opera — Rossini and The Barber of Seville

Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868): A Life in Opera

The early nineteenth century belonged, in the world of opera, to one man above all others: Gioachino Rossini. Born in 1792 in Pesaro, Italy, to musical parents — his father a brass player, his mother an opera singer — Rossini grew up immersed in the theater. The family relocated to Bologna in 1805, where the young Rossini entered the conservatory and received formal training in composition. By 1810, at just eighteen years of age, he had already secured his first opera commission, and only two years later, in 1812, his opera L’inganno felice was performed in Venice — his first genuine success on the stage.

The pace only accelerated from there. In 1813, two more triumphs in Venice — Tancredi and L’italiana in Algeri — launched Rossini into international fame. By 1815, at roughly twenty-two or twenty-three, he was appointed Musical Director of the prestigious Teatro San Carlo in Naples, one of the most important opera houses in Italy and a historic center for comic opera going back to the days of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona. The following year, 1816, saw the premiere of the work that concerns us most directly: Il barbiere di Siviglia, or The Barber of Seville, in Rome.

Rossini’s personal life intertwined with the operatic world. In 1822, he married the opera singer Isabella Colbran. Two years later, he moved to Paris, where he obtained a contract from Charles X to compose five new operas per year — an extraordinary demand. In 1829, Guillaume Tell (William Tell) premiered in Paris, and then something remarkable happened: Rossini stopped writing operas entirely. At thirty-seven, at the height of his fame, he simply retired from the stage. He lived on for nearly four more decades, dying of pneumonia in 1868 and buried in Paris, but he never returned to opera. In total, he composed thirty-nine operas, along with chamber works, close to two hundred piano works, and pieces in many other genres. If you had asked anyone in 1825 who was the most famous composer in all of Europe, the answer would almost certainly have been Rossini. Both Beethoven and Verdi held him in the highest regard; Verdi called The Barber of Seville the “finest opera buffa ever written.”

Opera in Italian Society

Before we turn to The Barber of Seville specifically, it is worth noting the immense social and economic importance of opera in early nineteenth-century Italy. Opera was not a rarefied art form for the elite alone; it was a central part of public life, drawing audiences from across the social spectrum. The opera house served as a gathering place, a social institution, and a venue for display. Singers were celebrities, orchestras were substantial enterprises, and composers occupied a complicated professional position — constantly under pressure from impresarios, deadlines, and audience expectations. The theme of nationalism was already emerging as a powerful force in opera: Italian operas reinforced a sense of shared Italian identity at a time when the peninsula was still divided into many small states. We will encounter this nationalistic impulse again when we turn to German opera later in the unit.

Il barbiere di Siviglia: Premiere and Background

The Barber of Seville premiered in Rome on February 20, 1816. The libretto was by Cesare Sterbini, based on the 1775 play Le Barbier de Séville by the French playwright Beaumarchais — the same Beaumarchais who wrote the sequel, Le Mariage de Figaro, which Mozart had already set to music in 1786. The Barber story had in fact already been made into a well-loved opera by Giovanni Paisiello in 1782, and Paisiello’s version was considered the benchmark. So when the relatively young Rossini — only twenty-four at the time — dared to approach the same story, there was some consternation. A famous anecdote holds that Rossini wrote the entire opera in just thirteen days; this is probably spurious, but he certainly had only a couple of months between beginning work and the premiere, which in opera terms is lightning fast.

The genre is opera buffa, Italian comic opera, and the work is relentlessly hilarious — never a dull moment, full of wit, disguise, and slapstick. The premiere, however, was a disaster, partly because supporters of Paisiello’s version felt this young upstart had no business touching their beloved opera. But The Barber of Seville quickly overcame that rocky opening night and has remained in the repertoire ever since, entering popular culture through cartoons, commercials, and countless other references.

Characters and Story

The opera takes place in Seville, and the cast of characters includes:

• Count Almaviva (tenor): a nobleman pretending to be a poor student named “Lindoro” so that the woman he loves will love him for himself, not his wealth
• Rosina (contralto/mezzo-soprano): the young ward of Dr. Bartolo, who has fallen for “Lindoro”
• Dr. Bartolo (bass): Rosina’s much older guardian, who wants to marry her himself to collect her dowry
• Figaro (baritone): the Barber of Seville, the title character, a man of endless wit and resourcefulness
• Don Basilio (bass): the scheming music teacher
• Fiorello (bass): a servant to the Count
• Berta (soprano): a servant to Dr. Bartolo

The story is a whirlwind of disguises and schemes. Count Almaviva serenades Rosina from beneath her window in the guise of “Lindoro,” then enlists Figaro to help him gain access to her. Rosina, meanwhile, writes a letter to the student she has heard singing. Don Basilio grows suspicious and offers to spread a scandalous rumor about the Count to drive him out of town. The Count arrives at Dr. Bartolo’s house first disguised as a drunken soldier demanding to be billeted, and then later as a substitute music teacher. Along the way, Figaro distracts Bartolo by offering him a shave, the Count and Rosina declare their love and plan an escape, and eventually — after a convenient storm and a disappearing ladder — the Count must reveal his true identity. A notary is bribed, the marriage contract is signed before Bartolo can stop it, and since the old guardian gets to keep Rosina’s dowry anyway, he accepts the situation. Everyone celebrates. Notice that there are three bass roles — Dr. Bartolo, Fiorello, and Don Basilio — offering ample opportunity for the buffo bass humor that is a hallmark of the comic opera tradition.

Rosina herself is notoriously difficult to cast. She is supposed to be a girl of about fifteen or sixteen, yet the role demands a voice that is both extremely low and extremely high — a range that might suit a lyric coloratura on the soprano side, or a coloratura mezzo-soprano on the lower end. The singer must combine agility, power, and the light quality of a young girl’s voice.

Rossini’s Style: Bel Canto, Recitative, and Large-Scale Form

Rossini’s operas exhibit a curious blend of eighteenth-century holdovers and forward-looking Romantic innovations. On the conservative side, he retained recitative secco — that partly spoken, partly sung conversational style accompanied only by basso continuo (a cello playing the bass line and a keyboardist improvising the harmonies). What is especially curious is that Rossini still used the harpsichord for this accompaniment, even though the piano had largely superseded it as a solo instrument by this time.

On the other end of the spectrum stands bel canto, literally “beautiful singing” in Italian. This is the ideal of nineteenth-century Italian vocal writing: the singer must possess a wide range, great agility, lyrical warmth, and the ability to execute florid ornamentation — much of it improvised — all while making it sound effortless. The training required to achieve this seemingly effortless quality is immense.

Rossini was a master of large-scale form. Rather than a simple standalone song, his arias follow a codified two-part structure: a slow, lyrical opening section called the cantabile, followed by a faster, more brilliant closing section called the cabaletta. Between the two, there is often a tempo di mezzo (middle section) in which some change of mood or dramatic event precipitates the shift. Before the cantabile, one typically finds an orchestral introduction and a scena (scene) — usually recitative that sets the dramatic context. This same structural principle extends to duets, ensembles, and the multi-movement finale structures used at the ends of interior acts. Crucially, in Rossini’s operas the plot continues to move forward during the arias, rather than stopping dead for a moment of reflection as it often did in Baroque opera. This formula — introduction, scena, cantabile, tempo di mezzo, cabaletta — was codified by Rossini and carried forward by Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. Only late in Verdi’s career did the form begin to feel constricting enough for him to push against it. In comic arias, the scena and tempo di mezzo are often omitted, leaving a leaner structure of orchestral introduction, cantabile, and cabaletta.

The Overture and the Rossini Crescendo

The overture to The Barber of Seville — also called a sinfonia, the Italian term for an operatic overture — is one of the most recognizable pieces of orchestral music in the world, having entered popular culture through cartoons and commercials. Interestingly, it was not written for this opera at all. Rossini had already used it in two previous serious operas: Aureliano in Palmira (1813) and Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra (Elisabeth, Queen of England, 1815). This recycling may have helped with the compressed timeline of getting the opera to the stage. The contrast with Beethoven is striking: Beethoven labored over four different overtures for Fidelio, while Rossini simply borrowed a previous one.

The overture prominently features what has come to be known as the Rossini crescendo: the music gets faster and faster, louder and louder, with ever-increasing repetition of musical material and text. This device is both thrilling and comic, and Rossini deploys it throughout the opera to brilliant effect.

♫ Rossini, Il barbiere di Siviglia — Sinfonia (Overture) ♫

Figaro’s Cavatina: “Largo al factotum della citta”

No discussion of The Barber of Seville can omit Figaro’s entrance aria — his cavatina (the first solo aria for a character in an opera). Titled “Largo al factotum della citta” (“Make way for the city’s factotum” — a jack of all trades), it is one of the most famous arias ever written. Figaro sings of his indispensability: everyone needs him, everyone calls for him — “Figaro qua, Figaro la, Figaro su, Figaro giu” — and he boasts of how good he is at what he does. Although he belongs to the servant class, his wit and resourcefulness far exceed those of every other character combined.

The musical writing brilliantly mirrors the text. We hear extremely fast patter — a flood of words set to the simplest, most repetitive of melodies, mirroring the flood of demands that Figaro receives from all sides. The notes run ahead of the singer’s ability to keep up, dissolving into nonsense syllables (“la la la la la”). And of course, the aria builds to a magnificent Rossini crescendo, getting faster and louder until it reaches a breathless conclusion.

♫ Rossini, Il barbiere di Siviglia — "Largo al factotum della citta" (Gino Quilico) ♫

NAWM 149: Rosina’s Aria, “Una voce poco fa” — “Io sono docile”

The featured listening excerpt for this lesson is Rosina’s aria from Act I, scene 2: “Una voce poco fa” (“A voice a while back”). This aria follows the standard two-part Italian aria form. Because it is a comic aria, it omits the scena and tempo di mezzo, proceeding directly from an orchestral introduction into the cantabile and then the cabaletta.

The Cantabile: “Una voce poco fa”

The dramatic situation is simple: Rosina is in her room, writing a letter to “Lindoro” (the Count in disguise). She recalls the voice she heard beneath her window and declares that Lindoro will be hers. The cantabile is set in E major, in a slow triple meter (Andante, 3/4), and demands considerable virtuosity.

The orchestra opens with a kind of fanfare — a dramatic, almost heroic sound that suggests Rosina’s sense of her own self-importance (she is, after all, a teenager, not a general). The first six lines of text are delivered in brief, syllabic phrases with dotted rhythms and pizzicato chords in the accompaniment — a sound that is perhaps tentative, as Rosina works things out in her mind. But then the vocal line erupts in large leaps and sudden coloratura — elaborate, florid vocal display — as Rosina’s determination to win Lindoro takes over. We hear rapidly repeated notes in a comic patter style, violin grace notes, and lightly skipping figures. The coloratura is not mere decoration; it is a depiction of character, conveying the teenage emotional extremes of this young woman who refuses to obey her guardian.

The text employs seven-syllable lines ending on an accented syllable, a standard verse form for the cantabile section.

The Cabaletta: “Io sono docile”

A change of subject marks the transition from cantabile to cabaletta. The cabaletta, “Io sono docile” (“I am docile”), begins at approximately 3:03 in the Naxos Music Library excerpt. This is the second, fast-paced movement of the double aria, and the shift is marked by changes in both tempo and meter — from Andante in 3/4 to Moderato in 4/4. The text shifts to eleven-syllable lines.

An orchestral introduction features flutes and clarinet presenting the melody, which Rosina then repeats — the tune itself suggesting docility and obedience. But the music contradicts the text. Elaborate embellishments creep in, suggesting willfulness beneath the veneer of the good girl. As the aria progresses, coloratura passages grow in virtuosity, conveying Rosina’s defiance.

The text is delicious in its irony. Rosina sings that she is very docile, very obedient, very good — but, she adds (“ma” — “but”), if you cross her, she will be a viper. When she sings the word “viper,” the vocal line slithers down below the staff to a G-sharp below middle C. When she talks about stinging, the voice leaps to accented high notes, punctuated by pizzicato in the orchestra. After the “ma,” the cabaletta text repeats (at approximately 3:31), building to the inevitable Rossini crescendo (at approximately 4:21) — the music speeds up, gets louder, with constantly repeating figures, driving to a rousing coda.

Throughout this complex aria, we hear the many sides of Rosina: Is she shy and innocent, or a beguiling, confident vixen? The answer, of course, is both — all wrapped up in one astonishing aria that is notoriously difficult to sing and invariably embellished dramatically by the singers who take it on. Rossini himself was sometimes disappointed with divas who ornamented so lavishly that the aria became almost unrecognizable — everything in moderation, perhaps.

♫ Rossini, Il barbiere di Siviglia — "Una voce poco fa" / "Io sono docile" (Rosina, Act I) ♫

Ornament, Divas, and the Bel Canto Tradition

The question of ornamentation in Rossini’s operas is a fascinating one. Singers were expected to embellish the written line, sometimes quite extravagantly, as a demonstration of their artistry and vocal command. This practice was central to the bel canto tradition, but it could also lead to excess — a tension that Rossini himself lamented when singers transformed his carefully crafted arias into showcases barely resembling the original. Rossini was quite disappointed with divas who added so much ornamentation that they “barely touched the notes on the page,” making the aria almost unrecognizable. The balance between the composer’s written intentions and the singer’s creative freedom was a constant negotiation in nineteenth-century Italian opera, and it remains a subject of debate among performers and scholars to this day.

Finale Structures: The Act I Finale

The other major formal structure in Rossini’s operas is the multi-movement finale used at the end of interior acts. In The Barber of Seville, with its two acts, the Act I finale is the showcase for this form. The essential requirements are that the action must bring everyone on stage — every soloist, the ensemble, the chorus — and the act must end very fast, in an atmosphere of maximum confusion.

The standard finale form alternates between fast and slow, kinetic and static sections:

1. Orchestral introduction
2. Scena: recitative setting the scene
3. Tempo d’attacco (opening movement): fast, kinetic — the plot moves forward
4. Pezzo concertato (or Largo concertato): slow, static — the concerted piece, where the characters react
5. Tempo di mezzo (middle movement): fast, kinetic, transitional, free in form
6. Stretta (“tightening”): fast, static conclusion

The Act I Finale of The Barber of Seville

In the Act I finale, the story unfolds as follows. The Count, disguised as a drunken soldier, arrives at Dr. Bartolo’s house and demands to be put up. The scena begins in C major as the Count barges in (“Ehi, di casa, buona gente”). Bartolo grows increasingly agitated. In the tempo d’attacco (E-flat major, Allegro), Figaro arrives, there is a knock at the door, and the soldiers (chorus) enter. The action pauses as everyone wonders who is at the door. Bartolo complains to the arriving official (Vivace, C major) about the rowdy soldier. The official goes to arrest the Count, but the Count reveals his identity — only to the official — and this precipitates the pezzo concertato (“Fredda ed immobile” — “frozen and unable to move”), a glorious ensemble number in A-flat major, Andante, where six cast members sing in canon. Everyone is quite literally frozen with shock. The scene is ripe for comic acting.

The characters recover in the tempo di mezzo (C major, Allegro), blithering and protesting (“Ma, signor” — the doctor protests). And then the stretta arrives (C major, Vivace): the confusion has given everyone a headache, and they all stand holding their heads, singing about the hammering in their skulls. The Rossini crescendo drives the finale faster and faster, the chorus chatters in patter, and the act ends in glorious pandemonium. This formula — the gradual accumulation of characters on stage, the freeze, the explosion — works every single time, no matter what the dramatic content.

♫ Rossini, Il barbiere di Siviglia — Act I Finale ♫

Lesson 4a-2: Romantic Italian Opera — Bellini

Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835): The Successor to Rossini

Having examined Rossini’s Barber of Seville from 1816, we now move forward about fifteen years to encounter the next great figure in Italian Romantic opera. When Rossini retired from opera after William Tell in 1829, the torch passed to a younger generation. Chief among the inheritors was Vincenzo Bellini, born in 1801 in Catania, Sicily, who came to prominence precisely as Rossini stepped aside. If Rossini was the supreme master of comic opera and large-scale formal structures, Bellini was the supreme master of melody — of the long, sweeping, endlessly expressive vocal line that seems to go on forever. Bellini’s career was brilliant but tragically short: he died on September 23, 1835, not yet thirty-four years old, from what an autopsy revealed to be acute inflammation of the intestine and abscesses on the liver. He had been ill for several days with no improvement before he finally passed away.

The relationship between the two composers was remarkably close — almost like father and son. When Bellini died, Rossini personally took charge: he planned the funeral, handled the estate, ordered the autopsy, and raised funds for a proper tombstone. The admiration was mutual. Verdi wrote that Bellini had “long, long, long melodies, such as no one ever before had written.” Liszt was deeply taken with Bellini’s music and composed piano transcriptions of themes from La sonnambula, Norma, and I puritani. Chopin wrote a piano transcription of “Casta diva.” Even Wagner, who mainly thought highly of himself, praised Bellini’s ability to bring story and characters to life through melody.

Bellini’s operas are fully, intensely Romantic — there is nothing Classical about them. They are dramas of passion with fast, gripping action that is built directly into the arias rather than stopping for frozen moments of reflection. Unlike the older convention where recitative moved the plot and arias paused for emotional commentary, Bellini’s arias continue the drama, and his recitatives contain lyrical moments of genuine beauty. The traditional boundary between aria and recitative, so clearly drawn in earlier opera, becomes blurred and porous in Bellini’s hands. He completed ten opera serie (serious operas) in his short life, the most celebrated being La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker, 1831), Norma (1831), and I puritani (The Puritans, 1835) — three masterworks produced in just five years. His signature was the long, sweeping, highly embellished, intensely emotional melody — seemingly endless lines that avoid obvious resting points and carry the listener forward on a tide of feeling. As everyone who heard his music commented, there was something about a Bellini melody that simply would not stop: it continued, embellished, reached, and yearned in a way that felt almost infinite.

Bellini’s influence extended well beyond opera. Chopin in particular absorbed the vocal style into his piano writing: the nocturnes, with their long ornamental melodies floating over broken-chord accompaniments, owe a clear debt to Bellini’s cantabile style. There is a direct crossover from the vocal realm to the piano in this music. Beyond the transcription of “Casta diva,” Chopin’s approach to melody — the way a nocturne line will spin out over arpeggiated accompaniment, embellishing and decorating while maintaining an unbroken lyrical thread — is essentially Bellini’s bel canto style translated to the keyboard.

It is worth pausing to note just how many of the greatest musical minds of the century admired Bellini. Verdi praised the “long, long, long melodies, such as no one ever before had written.” Liszt composed piano transcriptions of themes from La sonnambula, Norma, and I puritani, bringing Bellini’s operatic melodies into the concert hall. Even Wagner, who was not given to generous praise of others, acknowledged Bellini’s remarkable gift for bringing story and character to life through melody. The consensus among composers who otherwise agreed on almost nothing was that Bellini had achieved something singular in the art of operatic melody.

Norma (1831): Fast Facts

Bellini wrote the music for Norma, with a libretto by his regular collaborator Felice Romani. The story was based on a verse tragedy by Alexandre Soumet about a Druid priestess in ancient Gaul after the Roman conquest. Soumet’s play had premiered in April 1831, and Romani and Bellini — already commissioned to write an opera for La Scala in Milan — saw its potential immediately. Within months, they had the opera ready, and Norma premiered at La Scala on December 26, 1831, the day after Christmas.

The reception was mixed, and one thing that puzzled the audience was that Bellini omitted the conventional Act I finale with everyone on stage — the very formula we saw Rossini employ so effectively in The Barber of Seville. Audiences expected that standard multi-movement finale with the full cast, the freeze, and the stretta, and instead they got a trio. This deviation from convention confused people at the premiere. In the long run, however, the opera was very well received and has remained one of the absolute cornerstones of the soprano repertoire — a supreme test of vocal artistry and dramatic power.

The original title role was written for the soprano Giuditta Pasta, one of the most celebrated singers of the era, and was tailored specifically to her voice, which sat somewhat lower than a typical soprano. This is one reason the role remains so demanding: it requires both the power and darkness of a lower voice and the soaring high notes of a dramatic soprano. The opera is in two acts (Act I has two scenes, Act II has three), though the scene divisions are sometimes numbered differently in various editions — for example, the scene containing “Casta diva” is labeled Act I, scene 1 in some sources and Act I, scene 4 in others, including the textbook. This is a common complication with operas of this period, so students should not be thrown off by differing numbering systems.

Characters and Story

The setting is the sacred forest and temple of Irminsul in Transalpine Gaul, around 50 BCE, during the Roman occupation. The ancient, mystical world of the Druids — with its sacred rituals, moonlit forests, and simmering resentment against foreign rule — provided Bellini and Romani with a dramatically rich backdrop for a story of forbidden love, betrayal, and ultimate sacrifice.

• Norma (soprano): a Druidess, daughter of Oroveso, who has secretly had two children by the Roman proconsul Pollione
• Oroveso (bass): leader of the Druids, Norma’s father
• Pollione (tenor): Roman proconsul in Gaul, who has abandoned Norma and now loves Adalgisa
• Adalgisa (soprano): a young priestess at the temple of Irminsul
• Flavio (tenor): friend to Pollione
• Clotilde (mezzo-soprano): Norma’s confidante
• Druids, bards, priestesses, and Gallic soldiers (chorus)

The story is one of betrayal, inner conflict, and self-sacrifice — a drama of passion that is fully, thoroughly Romantic. The Druidess Norma has secretly borne two children by her lover Pollione, the Roman proconsul in Gaul. But Pollione has already forgotten her and now thinks only of the young novice Adalgisa, whom he dreams of taking back to Rome. The Roman occupation of Gaul serves as a constant backdrop of tension: the Druids chafe under foreign rule, and Norma, as their priestess, is expected to lead them in resistance against Rome — the very nation her secret lover represents.

When Adalgisa comes to seek advice from Norma and innocently reveals her lover’s name, the terrible truth crashes down. Adalgisa is horrified to discover Pollione’s lie, and Norma is stunned with a rage she can no longer contain. The emotional conflict deepens as Norma wrestles with impossible questions: Can she continue to live? Must she kill her own children — the children of the man who has betrayed her? Should she spare Pollione, or destroy him? Adalgisa, conscience-stricken, renounces Pollione and tries to bind the wound, but nothing helps. After accusing the father of her children and threatening him with death, Norma ultimately sacrifices herself on the pyre. Pollione, suddenly conscious of his acts and moved by a kind of grace, follows her into the flames. It is emphatically not a happy ending — this is serious opera in the fullest sense, driven by passion, betrayal, and an almost unbearable emotional intensity.

“Casta diva” (Chaste Goddess): Norma’s Entrance Aria (NAWM 150)

The subject matter of Norma reflected a broader Romantic fascination with distant times and places, as well as Italian yearnings for freedom from foreign domination. For contemporary audiences, the Gauls struggling under Roman occupation could easily be read as a metaphor for Italians under Austrian rule — a political subtext that gave the opera an additional layer of urgency and relevance. This was a common strategy in Italian Romantic opera: by setting the drama in a distant historical period, composers and librettists could address politically sensitive themes of national identity and resistance without running afoul of the censors. The vocal writing in “Casta diva” is characterized by constant motion, deep expressiveness, and a quality of unpredictability that keeps the listener in a perpetual state of suspense — the melody never quite going where you expect it to, always reaching further, always striving for something just beyond its grasp.

“Casta diva” is Norma’s cavatina — her entrance aria, much as Figaro’s “Largo al factotum” and Rosina’s “Una voce poco fa” serve that function in The Barber of Seville. It follows Rossini’s scene pattern but fills it with an emotional intensity that goes far beyond comedy. Where Rosina’s aria reveals a clever teenager plotting against her guardian, Norma’s aria reveals a woman torn between duty, love, faith, and deception — all within the context of a public religious ceremony. What is particularly striking is the role of the chorus, which participates actively in the ritual that Norma is leading, creating continuous dramatic action rather than a mere showcase for the soloist. The entire scene is realistic in the sense that it portrays a ceremony actually unfolding, with the action moving forward even as the aria is being sung — a far cry from the old Baroque convention of the aria as a frozen moment of reflection.

The Whole Scene: A Complex Four-Part Structure

The full scene follows the standard Italian aria form inherited from Rossini:

1. Scena (dialogue in accompanied recitative): “Sediziose voci, voci di guerra” (“Are there those who dare to raise seditious voices, voices of war?”). Norma entreats the Gauls and her father Oroveso to have patience in fighting the Romans, arguing that the Romans will fall of their own corruption — they do not need to fight. The dramatic irony is thick: Norma, who publicly counsels patience with the Roman occupiers, is secretly the lover of the Roman proconsul and the mother of his children. Everything she says in public is shadowed by what she conceals.

2. Cantabile (slow movement): “Casta diva” (“Chaste Goddess”). Norma enacts the sacred ritual, harvesting the mistletoe with her golden sickle while the priestesses gather it in wicker baskets. She steps forward, raises her arms to the sky, and the moon shines in full brilliance as all prostrate themselves before the moon goddess. Norma entreats the goddess to bring peace with the Romans, and the chorus joins her in this solemn prayer. This is not a frozen moment of reflection — it is a realistic ritual unfolding before the audience’s eyes, with physical action and dramatic development continuing throughout the music. The aria serves a dramatic function within the scene rather than suspending the narrative.

3. Tempo di mezzo (middle movement): “Fine al rito” (“The holy rites are ended”). The ritual concluded, Norma’s tone shifts dramatically. She vows that she will demand the blood of the Romans when the time comes. The chorus echoes her warlike sentiment, declaring that the first to die will be Pollione — the very man Norma secretly loves and has borne children by. The dramatic tension here is almost unbearable: Norma must publicly endorse the murder of her own lover while concealing the anguish that tears at her.

4. Cabaletta (fast final section): “Ah! bello a me ritorna” (“Ah! bring back to me the beauty of our first love”). Here Norma turns aside to the audience with her inner thoughts: despite everything, she longs for Pollione’s return and will protect him. The emotional contradiction — publicly vowing to destroy the Romans while privately yearning for the Roman she loves — is devastating. This is the kind of dramatic complexity that sets Bellini apart from his predecessors: even within the codified structure of the Italian aria, he creates moments of psychological depth that reach far beyond the conventions of the form. The cabaletta, which in a comic opera might simply provide a rousing finish, here becomes a window into a divided soul.

Musical Characteristics of “Casta diva”

The cantabile “Casta diva” is structured in an A B A’ form with an orchestral introduction.

Introduction: Gentle string arpeggios establish a pastoral atmosphere (the key moves from G-flat to F). A solo flute presents the first half of the cantabile melody, which is then passed to the oboe for the second half — but the oboe is cut off before it can finish, a common gesture in Italian arias of this period that builds anticipation for the singer’s entrance. The slow 12/8 meter evokes a pastoral, natural setting — the sacred forest under moonlight.

A section (first stanza): Norma enters with the long, long melodic line that Verdi so admired — a melody that avoids resting points and continues through the entire stanza without pause. It is a simple melody on the surface, but it is highly active, with unpredictable ornamentation that gives it a quality of restless striving. The harmonic language features increased dissonance that builds to a fortissimo climax on a high B-flat (measures 27–28). The shape of the melody — calm beginning, increasing dissonance, regular two-bar phrases giving way to an irregular final phrase — embodies the constant, restless striving of the Romantic movement itself.

B section: The chorus enters and repeats the words that Norma has just sung, but to entirely new music, singing sotto voce — very quietly, almost whispering, in a kind of half-voice that creates an atmosphere of hushed reverence. While the chorus sings below, Norma floats a light coloratura line above them, an ornamental filigree that punctuates and adorns the choral prayer beneath. The effect is of a single voice rising above a congregation in prayer — exactly what is happening dramatically.

A’ section (second stanza, m. 41): The music of the A section returns with the second stanza of text, so we hear different words set to the same melody we heard before — a standard technique that provides formal coherence while allowing the drama to advance. In the second half of this stanza, the chorus accompanies Norma with short, punctuated chords rather than melodic singing, providing rhythmic underpinning while keeping the focus squarely on the soprano’s vocal line. A brief cadenza (m. 56) — a free, unaccompanied ornamental passage — brings the cantabile to its close. Though the aria is already richly ornamented as written, with ornamentation that is integral to the musical argument rather than merely decorative, this cadenza provides a final moment for the soprano to embellish freely, demonstrating her artistry and bringing the prayer to a luminous conclusion.

The overall effect of “Casta diva” is one of sublime beauty and emotional depth. The seemingly simple melody, the pastoral orchestration, the interplay of solo voice and chorus, and the ever-present undercurrent of dissonance and longing combine to create one of the most celebrated arias in the entire operatic repertoire. It demonstrates everything that makes Bellini’s art distinctive: the long, sweeping, intensely emotional melody; the action built into the aria; the chorus as a dramatic participant rather than a backdrop; and the blurring of the boundary between what is sung and what is felt.

Bellini’s Legacy: From Rossini’s Formula to Romantic Expression

What Bellini accomplished with Norma and with “Casta diva” in particular was to take the formal structures that Rossini had codified — the scena, cantabile, tempo di mezzo, and cabaletta — and fill them with a new kind of emotional content. The formula remained, but the spirit was transformed. Where Rossini’s arias delighted through wit, vocal display, and sheer kinetic energy, Bellini’s arias moved audiences through their emotional depth and the seemingly infinite extension of the melodic line. The constant, restless striving of the melody — its refusal to settle, its unpredictable ornamental turns, its way of building through dissonance to a climax and then pulling back — mirrors the Romantic temperament itself: always reaching, never quite satisfied, driven by a longing that is as much spiritual as it is dramatic.

Bellini died in 1835, at just thirty-three — yet another Romantic composer taken far too young, joining the ranks of Schubert, Weber, and others who left behind an extraordinary body of work compressed into a painfully brief career. His relationship with Rossini remained close to the very end, almost like that of father and son. When Bellini passed away, Rossini personally took the reins: he arranged the funeral, took care of the estate, ordered the autopsy that determined the cause of death, and raised funds for a proper tombstone and memorial. The loss was felt across the entire musical world.

But the legacy was secure. Bellini had shown that Italian opera could be not only entertaining but profoundly moving, that the bel canto tradition could serve not only virtuosity but emotional truth, and that a melody, if sufficiently inspired, could seem to go on forever. The path from Bellini’s “Casta diva” to the great Verdi soprano roles of the mid-century is clear and direct, and the crossover influence on instrumental composers like Chopin ensured that Bellini’s melodic ideals would shape not just opera but the broader Romantic aesthetic for decades to come. In the history of Italian opera, Bellini stands as the bridge between Rossini’s brilliant formal mastery and Verdi’s dramatic intensity — the composer who proved that the codified forms of Italian opera could contain the deepest and most searching human emotions.

♫ Bellini, Norma — "Casta diva" (Act I) ♫

Opera in Germany — Weber and Der Freischütz

Nationalism and Opera

To understand the rise of German Romantic opera, we must first consider the broader context of nationalism in early nineteenth-century Europe. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had spread the concept of a nation — a unified group of people bound together by shared characteristics, a national identity that was intentionally created toward social and political goals. The distinction between nation (a people with a shared identity) and state (a political entity) became crucially important. Both Germany and Italy had been divided into small states since the Middle Ages, and both were searching for a foundation for eventual unification. A common language, literature, music, and other arts provided that foundation.

Cultural nationalism became a powerful element in opera. Operas could reinforce group identity, celebrating a people’s history, legends, and values. Russian operas sounded Russian; French operas sounded French; Italian operas sounded Italian; and German operas, as we shall see, sounded distinctly German. Each national tradition developed its own characteristic melodies, harmonies, subject matter, and dramatic conventions. Sometimes this included the use of exoticism — the evocation of a foreign land or foreign culture — as a way of defining one’s own identity by contrast. By portraying what was “other,” composers could sharpen the audience’s sense of what was distinctly their own.

The Roots of German Opera: Singspiel

In Germany, the interaction between music and literature developed more fully than perhaps anywhere else during the Romantic period. If we think of Goethe’s Faust, which was set as opera and also inspired Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” we see how deeply intertwined the literary and musical imaginations were.

The root of German opera lies in the Singspiel — literally “song-play” — a type of opera that alternates between spoken dialogue and musical numbers. Mozart’s Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute) is a Singspiel; so is Beethoven’s Fidelio. Both feature spoken dialogue alongside their musical numbers, and both draw on German literary and theatrical traditions. German opera also absorbed elements from French grand opera, but intensified the genre’s specifically national features — the folk-like melodies, the emphasis on the natural world, the fascination with legend and the supernatural. Weber’s Der Freischütz became the supreme embodiment of this nationally inflected art form, an inspiration for the cause of German nation-building — a work of cultural identity as much as of musical art. When German audiences heard Der Freischütz, they recognized themselves in it: the village life, the dark forest, the interplay of the ordinary and the supernatural were all deeply embedded in the German cultural imagination.

Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826)

Carl Maria von Weber was born in 1786, placing him chronologically between Beethoven (born 1770) and Schubert (born 1797). He inherited the Classical style but transformed it in the Romantic mold. He was a man of many talents — a conductor, a fine pianist, even a guitarist, and a music critic — and one of the first truly significant composers of the Romantic school.

Weber was born into a famous musical family and traveled with his father’s theater company, which gave him an early love of the stage and of storytelling. This childhood immersion in the world of theater — the costumes, the lighting, the dramatic storytelling — left a lasting imprint on his operatic imagination. During his career, he served as music director of opera houses in Breslau, Prague, and Dresden, working tirelessly to improve the quality of opera in each city by employing larger orchestras, programming more challenging repertoire, and seeking out fresh vocal talent. He was driven by a patriotic mission: he wanted German audiences to love German opera and German music as much as they loved Italian opera, which had long dominated the European stage. In each of his positions, he raised standards and championed works that spoke to a specifically German sensibility.

Weber was celebrated above all for his brilliant orchestration. Claude Debussy, the French composer, remarked decades later that the sound of Weber’s orchestra was obtained “through the scrutiny of the soul of each instrument.” Weber was also one of the first conductors to use a baton, though he held it in the middle rather than at the end as is customary today, and he was known for getting very excited during performances. Tragically, like so many Romantic composers, he did not live to old age: he died of tuberculosis in 1826, at just about forty years old.

Der Freischütz (The Free Shooter, Berlin, 1821)

Weber’s masterpiece, Der Freischütz — translated as “The Free Shooter” or “The Free Marksman” — was first performed in Berlin in 1821 and can be said to have established German Romantic opera. The music was daring for its time, featuring unusual orchestration and harmonies. The opera is about ordinary people — not mythological figures or kings, but foresters and villagers — and its plots are drawn from medieval history, legend, and fairy tale. It depicts humble village life and country life, with supernatural incidents intertwined with the fates of human protagonists. The story takes place in the wilderness, enshrouded in mystery — the dark forest is a fundamental element of the German psyche, legend, and cultural identity. And, as in so many German Romantic works, the triumph of good represents a form of salvation or redemption, introducing a spiritual dimension alongside the supernatural one.

The libretto was written by Johann Friedrich Kind, based on a story by Johann August Apel, which was in turn based on German folklore and modeled on Goethe’s Faust — already very well known by this time, and itself set as opera by other composers. At the center of the story is the legend of the Freikugel — the magic bullet. The word “Freischütz” itself is difficult to translate: “Frei” means free, and “Schutz” means shooter or marksman, so “The Free Shooter” or “The Free Marksman” is the best we can manage. The legend of a marksman who makes a pact with the devil for enchanted bullets that cannot miss their target was deeply rooted in German folk tradition, and it resonated powerfully with audiences who recognized the story’s themes of temptation, moral peril, and redemption.

Musical Styles and Forms

In Der Freischütz, Weber drew on musical styles and forms from multiple national traditions. The multi-sectional arias are adapted from the Rossini format, with Italian-style florid vocal characteristics in some numbers. But alongside these, Weber employed distinctly German folk-like melodies — simple, sturdy tunes that any villager might sing. He gave a more equal role to the orchestra, which conveys mood, atmosphere, and narrative information to a far greater degree than in contemporary Italian opera. This expanded orchestral role would have a profound impact on Wagner in the next generation.

Weber used chromatic harmony and orchestral color with extraordinary imagination. Where Italian opera of the period placed the voice at the center with the orchestra in a supportive role, Weber treated the orchestra as an equal partner in the storytelling — using specific instrumental timbres almost like a painter’s color palette. The horns, for instance, appear in the overture to depict the dark German forest, evoking the vast, mysterious wilderness that is so central to the German Romantic imagination, and they return in key scenes throughout the opera. The chorus is vital throughout — representing the village community in rustic choruses, marches, and dances, and also representing the supernatural world in the ghostly offstage singing of the Wolf’s Glen scene. The mixture of rustic choruses, marches, dances, and arias creates a richly varied musical texture that captures the full range of the opera’s world, from sunlit village life to the darkest supernatural terrors.

Characters and Story

The main characters are:

• Max (tenor): a forester
• Caspar (bass): another forester, who has sold his soul to the devil
• Cuno (bass): the head forester
• Agathe (soprano): Cuno’s daughter, whom both Max and Caspar love
• Annchen (soprano): Agathe’s cousin
• Kilian (tenor): a rich peasant
• Samiel (speaking part): the Wild Huntsman, a figure of the devil
• Hunters, peasants, spirits, bridesmaids, followers of the Prince (chorus)

The story, as summarized in the Norton Anthology, runs as follows. Caspar and Max are assistant foresters who are both in love with Agathe, the daughter of the prince’s head forester Cuno. Max has gained Agathe’s affection, but according to tradition he must win a test of marksmanship in order to earn her hand in marriage and become Cuno’s successor as head forester. Yet as the date for the test approaches, Max is unable to hit anything at all. Caspar, who has sold his soul to the devil in the form of Samiel — the legendary Black Huntsman — convinces Max to use magic bullets for the competition. Caspar tells Max that the bullets will obey the marksman’s wishes, but he does not reveal the crucial catch: of seven bullets, six will hit their target, but the seventh will be controlled by Samiel. Caspar believes that the seventh bullet is destined for Agathe, but in the end, it is Caspar himself whom it kills. Good triumphs, but not without terrible cost.

The scene we examine in detail — the Wolf’s Glen scene, the finale of Act II — is where the magic bullets are cast and Samiel is summoned. It is one of the most extraordinary scenes in the entire operatic repertoire, and it draws on every resource at Weber’s disposal: orchestral color, harmonic daring, melodrama, chorus, and the most elaborate stage effects imaginable.

NAWM 152: The Wolf’s Glen Scene (Act II Finale)

The Wolf’s Glen scene is one of the most celebrated scenes in all of opera, a tour de force of orchestral writing, dramatic staging, and psychological terror. Weber employs several techniques to paint this scene of supernatural evil.

Elements and Techniques

The scene makes extensive use of melodrama — not in the modern sense of the word, but in the technical sense: spoken dialogue delivered over orchestral background music. Samiel is strictly a speaking role — he never sings, because he is beyond the reach of heavenly and divine harmony, existing entirely in the world of the devil. Caspar also speaks over the orchestra in several passages.

In depicting the casting of the bullets, Weber exploits the full resources of the orchestra, using it in graphic, pictorial ways to convey the terrors of the scene. An offstage chorus of invisible spirits reinforces the supernatural elements — ghostly, far-off sounds that heighten the eeriness. The harmonic language is dominated by diminished and augmented intervals and daring chromaticism, all depicting evil.

The entire scene is centered on a single diminished seventh chord: E-flat, F-sharp, A, and C. This chord functions as a reminiscence motive from the overture, associated specifically with Samiel. In the overture, it appeared with soft dynamics, dark instrumental timbres, and ominous rhythm — and these associations carry into the Wolf’s Glen scene. The chord sounds whenever Caspar summons Samiel, and it recurs in varied forms throughout the scene, even governing the overall key scheme. Samiel appears twice: his first entrance is marked by a shift from F-sharp minor to C minor, and his second by a shift from C minor back to F-sharp minor. This association of specific motives and keys with particular characters anticipates Wagner’s leitmotif technique.

Form: Three Sections

The scene is divided into three sections, corresponding to NAWM 152a, 152b, and 152c.

Section A (NAWM 152a): Introduction and dialogue between Caspar and Samiel. The scene opens in an atmosphere of unrelieved gloom. Soft tremolos in the strings, trombones and clarinets playing low in their range, and a descending chromatic line in the basses and cellos establish an almost unbearable tension. A ghostly chorus of invisible spirits recites on F-sharp minor — “Moonmilk fell on weeds! … Will the gentle bride be slain!” — and the harmony remains rooted in F-sharp minor throughout this section. The clock strikes twelve. Caspar, who has laid out a circle of black boulders with a skull at the center, calls on Samiel using the diminished chord, and at Samiel’s appearance the harmony switches from F-sharp minor to C minor. Samiel only speaks, never sings. Caspar’s vocal style hovers between recitative and aria, but his tones are drawn directly from the orchestra — he is chained to its harmonies. An insistent, agitated orchestral motive runs throughout the dialogue. The bargain is struck: Caspar offers Max as a substitute sacrifice to buy himself more time, and Samiel agrees — “Tomorrow he or you!”

Section B (NAWM 152b): Max enters the Wolf’s Glen. The texture is accompanied recitative, but with a crucial distinction: Max only sings, while Caspar only speaks. This juxtaposition of singing and speaking captures the division between the human and the diabolical worlds that coexist in this scene. The diminished seventh chord returns in varied forms. Weber’s orchestration is brilliantly programmatic: when Max takes a drink, the orchestra recalls a drinking song from earlier in the opera; references to a preceding scene with Agathe surface as well. Max begins in E-flat major — the first major key heard in the entire scene — but as he descends into the glen and approaches Caspar and the magic stone, the key slides down to Caspar’s C minor. When he finally arrives at the stone, he stops singing and only speaks — a chilling moment that may represent his temporary turn to the dark side. Along the way, Max sees terrifying visions: his mother’s ghost appears on the rocks, warning him to turn back, and then a vision of Agathe, disheveled and apparently mad, seems about to throw herself into the waterfall. These apparitions, conjured by Samiel at Caspar’s request, drive Max onward despite his horror.

Section C (NAWM 152c): The casting of the magic bullets. This is the scene’s climax, and it is pure melodrama — Caspar speaks above ominous orchestral music. He invokes Samiel using the diminished chord, lays out the ingredients (lead, ground glass from broken church windows, quicksilver, three bullets that have hit their mark, the right eye of a hoopoe, the left eye of a lynx), and begins casting. He counts out each bullet — “One!” … “Two!” … “Three!” — and after each one is cast, the orchestra and the staging provide a terrifying tone picture: woodbirds descend and flutter around the circle; a black boar crashes through the bushes; a storm arises, bending and breaking the treetops; a rustling is heard with the crack of whips and trample of hooves, with four fiery wheels racing past; barking dogs and ghostly hunters fly overhead.

After the fifth bullet, hunting horns appear — and here Weber’s ingenuity with natural horns is on full display. Since natural horns of this era could only play in a limited number of keys, Weber solved the problem by using sets of horns in three different keys (B-flat, F, and E) along with specially tuned trombones, alternating between A-flat and a diminished seventh chord (A-flat, C-flat, D, F). The effect is eerie and otherworldly.

The invisible chorus sings: “Over hill, over dale, through abyss and pit, over dew and clouds, tempest and night…” The whole sky turns black, storms clash, thunder and lightning crash, torrential rain pours down, the earth spouts blue flames, will-o’-the-wisps appear, trees crack and are torn out by their roots, the waterfall rages, rocks avalanche. At the seventh bullet, Caspar shudders and calls out “Samiel! Samiel! Samiel!” and is thrown to the ground. Max, buffeted by the storm, leaps out of the magic circle, seizes a branch of the rotten tree, and cries out “Samiel!” — and at that very moment, the storm begins to calm. In place of the rotten tree stands the Black Huntsman, reaching out for Max’s hand. “Here I am!” says Samiel in a terrible voice. Max makes the sign of the cross and falls to the ground. The clock strikes one. Sudden silence. Samiel vanishes. Caspar lies face-down. Max gets to his feet, convulsively.

♫ Weber, Der Freischütz — Act II Finale: The Wolf's Glen Scene ♫

Weber’s Influence

Weber’s achievement in Der Freischütz established conventions and associations that reverberated throughout the rest of the century. He was the direct model for Wagner, who drew on Weber’s example of continuous, through-composed musical drama based on German legend. The associations Weber forged between specific musical materials and dramatic ideas became foundational: mystery, danger, and the supernatural came to be depicted through tritone-related harmonies (the augmented fourth or diminished fifth — long called “the devil in music”), third-related key relationships, diminished seventh chords, and string tremolos. These conventions became the common vocabulary of operatic terror and the supernatural for decades to come.

Weber’s other dramatic works explored quite different subjects: Euryanthe (1823) tells the story of a troubadour in medieval France, and Oberon (1826) depicts a supernatural world and Islamic courts in Baghdad and Tunis. Both demonstrate the range of his imagination and his consistent mastery of orchestral color, even as they move away from the specifically German subject matter of Der Freischütz.

Weber died of tuberculosis in 1826, far too young to see the full flowering of his influence. But in the next generation, Wagner would take what Weber had begun — the elevated role of the orchestra as narrative voice, the association of musical motives with specific characters and ideas, the use of German legend and mythology as subject matter, the aspiration toward continuous musical drama — and develop it into something even more radical. The conventions Weber established for depicting the supernatural — the diminished seventh chords, the string tremolos, the tritone-related harmonies, the dark orchestral colors — became the common vocabulary of operatic terror for decades to come. Wagner revered Weber, and the path from the Wolf’s Glen to the mythological landscapes of Der Ring des Nibelungen is direct and unmistakable. What Weber accomplished in Der Freischütz was nothing less than the founding of a national operatic tradition — one that would grow, in Wagner’s hands, into one of the most ambitious artistic enterprises in Western history.

♫ Weber, Der Freischütz — Overture ♫

Wagner and Tristan und Isolde

Richard Wagner (1813–1883): Life and Controversy

Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany, the ninth child of a police actuary. From the early 1830s he began writing operas and securing positions with regional opera companies in and around Leipzig. Between 1839 and 1842 he lived in Paris, working as a music journalist, and in 1843 he returned to Germany to accept a prestigious appointment as second Kapellmeister for the King of Saxony in Dresden. That royal career was cut short when Wagner actively supported the revolutionary insurrection of 1848–49, a series of republican revolts against European monarchies that swept from Sicily through France, Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire. The revolts all ended in failure and repression, and Wagner had to flee Germany. He settled in Switzerland, where he devoted himself to writing essays that would reshape European musical thought.

In 1864 Wagner gained the crucial patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, which allowed him finally to mount full productions of his ambitious works, including Tristan und Isolde, which had been completed and published in 1859 but did not receive its first full production until 1865. In 1870 he married Cosima von Bulow, the daughter of Franz Liszt; Liszt became his father-in-law, and the two composers were very much aligned in their revolutionary ideas about the music of the future. Wagner’s major works include thirteen operas or music dramas: Der fliegende Hollander, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, the monumental four-opera Ring Cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen), Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and Parsifal.

Wagner was also a prolific writer whose ideas dominated the musical debates of the second half of the nineteenth century. In The Artwork of the Future (1850) and Opera and Drama (1851, revised 1868), he argued that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony pointed the path forward – that the symphony was dead, but the fusion of voices and orchestra in the Ninth opened the way to a new art form. Wagner saw himself, unsurprisingly, as Beethoven’s true successor. His writings also include deeply troubling views on nationalism and anti-Semitism, most notoriously Das Judentum in der Musik (Jewishness in Music, 1850, revised 1869), in which he singled out Mendelssohn as a composer whose Jewish heritage supposedly prevented him from reaching the profundity of Beethoven or Bach. This overt racism is something that listeners and scholars must confront when engaging with Wagner’s legacy. His opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg also includes a caricature of a Jewish character that is widely regarded as deeply repulsive.

Wagner’s Operatic Revolution

When Wagner’s works first appeared, they provoked extreme reactions: audiences and critics were either passionate Wagnerites or adamantly opposed to his radical departure from tradition. Wagner broke decisively with conventional operatic form, presenting his ideals in Opera and Drama. Rather than writing “operas” in the traditional sense, he composed what he called “Music Drama,” shifting the emphasis away from any single element – song, spectacle, poetry – toward the integration of the whole. This vision crystallized in his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), in which action, scenery, poetry, and music constantly mingle and reinforce one another. There were no star turns for divas; everything had to work toward the story and its essence.

Tristan und Isolde was criticized in its own time as “undramatic,” and one can understand why in a superficial sense: it is not driven by swashbuckling stage action but rather by an inner spiritual and psychological journey. Some scholars view it as a psychological drama, others as a religious drama. The opera traces Tristan’s progression from denial to revelation, culminating in his delirium scene in Act III and the famous Liebestod at the very end, where love and death finally merge.

Aspects of Wagner’s Musical Style

Several hallmarks of Wagner’s compositional language are on full display in Tristan und Isolde.

Harmony. Wagner’s music is highly chromatic, saturated with notes outside the main key and journeying to far-flung tonal areas. He introduces dissonance and eludes resolution, creating a visceral sense of constant yearning – really one of the central themes of the entire work. The Prelude to Tristan is widely regarded as one of the decisive turning points in the history of Western music.

Dramatic Continuity and “Endless Melody.” Wagner sought a melodic continuum – a constant flux of singing that moves fluidly from speechlike declamation to soaring lyrical lines. The vocal setting is mostly syllabic because Wagner labored over the text and considered its clarity essential. In Act I, Scene 5, for instance, the text is always paramount, even as the vocal lines shift between conversational and exalted styles.

The Orchestra. Wagner required a large orchestra and was extremely specific about instrumentation; some brass instruments were even created specifically for his music. The orchestra plays the role of an additional character, conveying the drama more powerfully than the voices alone. The singers sometimes blend into the orchestral web, becoming part of a larger sonic tapestry.

Leitmotif. A leitmotif (“leading motive”) is a short musical theme that represents a person, place, or object. In Wagner’s operas – and especially in the Ring Cycle and Tristan – leitmotifs saturate the score; at almost any point, at least one leitmotif is sounding, weaving a network of musical and dramatic associations.

Singers. Wagner’s demanding vocal writing requires a Heldentenor (“hero tenor”) and a dramatic soprano capable of projecting over the massive orchestra. It takes enormous stamina for both singers and orchestral players alike.

Structure and Symbolism of Tristan und Isolde

The libretto was written by Wagner himself, modeled on medieval German poetry and employing an ancient technique called Stabreim (alliteration) – starting successive words with the same sound, drawing deliberately on an archaic style befitting this ancient story. The opera consists of a Prelude followed by three acts, each with its own short orchestral prelude. Within each act, the music and drama are continuous; there are no separable “numbers” that can be extracted. The music responds constantly to the poetry, embodying that ideal of endless melody.

The opera’s symbolism operates on several interlocking levels. The central theme is Liebestod – love-death – the idea that the love between Tristan and Isolde can only be fully realized through death. There is no earthly resolution; only in an eternal love-death can they be united. Closely related is the symbolism of Day and Night: unlike our usual associations, day and light torment Tristan, while he seeks night, darkness, and oblivion. Wagner also creates a pervasive atmosphere of constant yearning, expressed through music that manipulates the listener’s own desire for harmonic resolution. We viscerally want that resolution, but Wagner withholds it for approximately five hours, granting it only at the very end of the opera.

The Story

Before Act I, Tristan has slain Morold, Isolde’s fiance, in combat. Wounded himself, he was nursed back to health by Isolde, who is also a healer with magic potions. She discovers the truth but it is too late – she has fallen in love with Tristan. He is in love with her as well, but neither reveals their feelings, and Tristan is ordered by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, to fetch Isolde to be the king’s bride.

Act I takes place on Tristan’s ship as it nears Cornwall. Isolde, furious at being forced to marry King Mark, confesses to her attendant Brangane that she loves Tristan. She resolves that they should both die and orders Brangane to prepare a death potion. But Brangane cannot bring herself to kill them and substitutes a love potion. Tristan and Isolde drink it, expecting death, and are instead consumed with irresistible love just as the ship pulls into port.

Act II is set at night in the palace garden. The king has gone hunting. Isolde signals to Tristan that the coast is clear and they spend the night together. But Brangane and Tristan’s faithful servant Kurwenal warn that this is a trap set by Melot, one of King Mark’s knights. The hunting party returns early; Tristan and Melot duel, and Tristan is mortally wounded.

Act III finds Tristan at his own castle, delirious and tended by the faithful Kurwenal. A shepherd’s “alte Weise” (ancient tune) will signal when Isolde’s ship arrives. Tristan cycles through delirium: memories of childhood, the deaths of his parents, the drinking of the potion. In a profound moment of spiritual conversion, he realizes he cannot blame the potion for his love – it was always there. He owns his feelings fully, achieving a kind of revelation and transfiguration. When Isolde’s ship finally arrives, Tristan tears off his bandages and rises to greet her, only to die in her arms. King Mark arrives, having learned from Brangane that the love potion was to blame, intending to forgive Tristan. But it is too late. Isolde sings her final song and collapses on Tristan’s body.

NAWM 153a: The Prelude

The Prelude begins with two leitmotifs that are conflated in the famous “Tristan chord” – the first full chord of measure two, spelled F–B–D-sharp–G-sharp. The first motif (marked X in score analyses), played by the cellos, rises from A to F and then falls chromatically; the second motif (marked Y) ascends chromatically through G-sharp, A, A-sharp, and B. Wagner described this chord as expressing “unfulfilled yearning.” It is not that these intervals had never appeared before, but rather the context Wagner created – the way he constantly deflects resolution – that makes the chord epoch-making.

Four successive dissonant sonorities “resolve” into yet more dissonance. The harmony is constantly churning, shifting keys, altering chords chromatically. Wagner manipulates the listener’s desire for resolution through chromatic harmony, delayed resolutions, evaded cadences, and unresolved dissonance. The Prelude introduces important leitmotifs that return at key moments throughout the drama.

♫ Wagner, Tristan und Isolde -- Prelude ♫

Reappearances of the Prelude Leitmotifs

The opening motifs return throughout the opera, gathering new layers of meaning with each appearance. In Act I, Scene 5, after Tristan and Isolde drink the love potion, the opening of the Prelude returns as the potion takes effect. In Act III, Scene 1, during Tristan’s delirium, the motif is heard in a transformed state; after his revelation and conversion, the motif returns but the yearning inherent in it is gone. Finally, in Act III, Scene 3, when Isolde sings “Mild und leise” over Tristan’s body, the Prelude’s music returns one last time and resolves clearly – the Tristan chord is finally resolved in B major at the very end of the opera. Only through death and transfiguration can the yearning cease.

NAWM 153b: Act I, Scene 5 – The Love Potion

This scene takes place at the very end of Act I as the ship pulls into Cornwall. Isolde and Brangane are talking; Isolde wishes to sink the ship but instead begins thinking of Tristan. The two leitmotifs from the Prelude return in various forms when Tristan and Isolde drink what they believe is a death potion – but which Brangane has secretly replaced with a love potion. The Tristan chord sounds as they drink, and the opening of the Prelude floods back as the potion takes effect.

This scene exemplifies the Gesamtkunstwerk: action, scenery, poetry, and music all reinforce one another. The stage scenery includes rails and ropes suggesting a ship at sea. The orchestra creates wavelike musical gestures evoking the motion of the sea – or perhaps the turbulent waves of emotion overwhelming the characters. After drinking the potion, Tristan and Isolde are nearly speechless, overcome with passion, able only to utter short interjections. The orchestra takes over, conveying the drama through the leitmotifs far more powerfully than the characters’ words. Sailors’ songs and shouts as the ship comes into port interrupt Tristan and Isolde, pulling them back to the reality that Isolde must now marry King Mark.

♫ Wagner, Tristan und Isolde -- Act I, Scene 5 ♫

Extra Scene: Act III, Scene 3 – Isolde’s Liebestod, “Mild und leise”

At the very end of the opera, Isolde arrives to find Tristan dying. He expires in her arms. Here the idea of Liebestod reaches its culmination: their love transcends earthly existence and can only be consummated through death. The music that returns is drawn from the Act II love duet, but now it is devoid of yearning. Isolde sings “Mild und leise, wie er lachelt” (“Softly and gently, see him smiling”), an extraordinary passage in which she seems to perceive Tristan ascending, borne on high amongst the stars. “Hore ich nur diese Weise” – “It is only I that hear this melody” – she sings, describing sounds and sensations that penetrate and surround her. The text culminates with the word “Hochste Lust!” – “Highest bliss!” – as she sinks onto Tristan’s body and dies.

The orchestra brings the entire work to resolution. The music of the Prelude returns, and at last the Tristan chord resolves in B major – the final chord of the opera. After five hours of sustained harmonic tension and yearning, the resolution is profoundly satisfying and deeply moving.

♫ Wagner, Tristan und Isolde -- Act III, Scene 3: "Mild und leise" (Waltraud Meier) ♫

Verdi and La Traviata

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901): The Dominant Voice of Italian Opera

Giuseppe Verdi was the dominant figure in Italian music for roughly fifty years after Donizetti. Born in 1813 in northern Italy, the son of an innkeeper, he showed early musical aptitude and was working as a church organist by the age of nine. He pursued a career as an opera composer in Milan, but personal tragedy struck hard: his two children died in infancy, followed by the early death of his wife, Margherita. In the very midst of this grief, in 1842, his opera Nabucco launched him as a star composer, and the next eleven years were the busiest of his career.

Three operas came in rapid succession: Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore (1853), and La traviata (1853). After La traviata, Verdi slowed his pace, eventually retiring from the stage in 1871 to focus on his farm. Yet he remained a national figure, closely associated with the Risorgimento, the ideological movement that aroused Italian national consciousness and led to the political unification of Italy. The rallying cry “Viva Verdi!” served as an acronym for “Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re d’Italia” – long live Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy. Verdi’s historical dramas included camouflaged patriotic messages, oppressed characters, and tyrants that resonated powerfully with Italian audiences. His major works include twenty-six operas, among them Nabucco, Macbeth, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, Les vepres siciliennes, Simon Boccanegra, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino, Don Carlos, Aida, Otello, and Falstaff, as well as the Requiem and other sacred choral works. His operas are programmed more than those of any other opera composer to the present day.

From Novel to Play to Opera

The genesis of La traviata (“The Woman Gone Astray” or “The Fallen Woman”) traces a path through three media. The novel (1848) was Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux camelias (The Lady of the Camellias), a story based on a fictionalized account of Dumas’s own affair with a courtesan named Marie du Plessis. This was turned into a play by Dumas, first performed in Paris in 1852. Verdi saw the play and immediately decided to set it as an opera. He turned to his librettist Francesco Maria Piave, who fashioned the libretto, and the opera premiered in Venice in 1853.

Each medium offered distinct advantages. The novel tells the story from the vantage point of Armand (the Alfredo figure), filtered through an unnamed narrator; Marguerite’s (Violetta’s) sacrifice is only discovered after her death, through her journals, so the emotional impact arrives in retrospect. In the play and opera, however, the confrontation between Alfredo’s father and Violetta is acted out in chronological order before our eyes – this becomes the linchpin of the entire story, and Alfredo himself is absent from it, more a pawn in the struggle between Violetta and his father. The opera adds the further advantage of unfolding in musical “numbers” – separable arias and ensembles that allow us direct access to Violetta’s inner dilemma and suffering. We are given virtual omnipresence alongside her; there are very few moments when she is not on stage.

Characters and Story

The setting is mainly Paris in the early eighteenth century (Verdi wanted a contemporary setting, but Venetian censors forced him to set it back in time). There are three acts: Acts I and III each have one scene at Violetta’s house; Act II has two scenes, one at the country home Alfredo and Violetta share, the other at a party hosted by Violetta’s friend Flora.

Violetta Valery is a Parisian courtesan – a woman living a lavish lifestyle funded by a wealthy lover, enjoying the highest social circles yet possessing very little personal power. She also suffers from tuberculosis, a terminal illness that has already produced episodes before the opera begins and will claim her life at its end. Alfredo is a young aristocrat who has fallen in love with Violetta from afar, asking after her health day after day when she was ill. His father, Germont, plays a pivotal role in the drama. Flora hosts the crucial dinner party in Act II, Scene 2. Gaston introduces Alfredo to Violetta. Annina, Violetta’s maid, is present in the devastating final scene.

In Act I, a grand party rages at Violetta’s house with diegetic dance music. Alfredo is introduced to Violetta and raises a toast to her in the famous Brindisi. After the guests leave, Alfredo stays behind and confesses his love. Violetta is tempted but ultimately resolves to continue her life of freedom, singing “Sempre libera.” In Act II, Violetta has gone with Alfredo to a country home, selling off her jewels to fund their life. Germont confronts her: her relationship with his son compromises the family’s respectability and his daughter’s marriage prospects. Violetta, good-hearted and self-sacrificing, agrees to leave Alfredo. At Flora’s dinner party, Alfredo, unaware of his father’s intervention, publicly humiliates Violetta by throwing his gambling winnings at her. In Act III, Violetta is dying. A letter from Germont reveals the truth and promises Alfredo’s return. Alfredo arrives, they reconcile and dream of escaping Paris together, but it is too late – she is too ill. She dies, her last word being “gioia” – joy.

The Prelude

The slow Prelude is only about four minutes long but includes two melodies that return within the opera in reverse order. The first melody depicts Violetta’s final decline in Act III, with a sobbing, chromatic quality in the strings. The second is a direct statement of love from Act II. This same melody reappears in the low strings with delicate ornamentation associated with Violetta from Act I, capturing the fragility and decoration that characterize her. After the Prelude, we are jolted into the grand party of Act I – constant diegetic music from a dance band depicting the lavish lifestyle, over which characters must strain to be heard in short interjections.

♫ Verdi, La Traviata -- Prelude ♫

Act I: The Brindisi

A Brindisi is a toast in song – a drinking song. The orchestra introduces and accompanies a simple strophic melody: three ten-line stanzas, short and peppered with rhyming pairs. Alfredo sings the first stanza, “Libiamo, ne’ lieti calici” (“Let’s pour a drink”), in which the first two pairs of lines and the second two pairs begin with the same music but end differently, forming a unit. The final two lines are sung by Alfredo and then repeated by the chorus as a refrain. Violetta introduces the second stanza to the same music, and the chorus joins for the third. It is irresistibly catchy and one of the most famous moments in all opera.

♫ Verdi, La Traviata -- Act I: Brindisi ♫

Act I Aria: “Sempre libera” (Cabaletta)

Violetta’s Act I aria concludes with the cabaletta “Sempre libera” (“Always free”), an Allegro brillante in 6/8 time, A-flat major. It is highly virtuosic – trills, ornaments, runs, rhythmically displaced notes, leaps, and stratospheric high notes all convey the delights and freedom she is embracing. But Alfredo’s voice intrudes from beneath her balcony, singing his melody from their earlier love duet (“Amor e palpito”) in a slow tempo but in her key. She stops, stunned. She returns to “Follie!” (“Crazy!”) and restarts the cabaletta, but Alfredo interrupts again, this time matching her fast tempo. She continues singing, but there is always this nagging reminder of his love, hinting that her resolve may be weakening.

♫ Verdi, La Traviata -- Act I: "Sempre libera" (Natalie Dessay) ♫

NAWM 154: Act III – Scene and Duet (Alfredo and Violetta)

The main excerpt from La traviata comes from the final act, as Violetta lies dying. She has received Germont’s letter revealing that he told Alfredo everything and that Alfredo is on his way. She clings to this hope, reading the letter again and again. The scene follows Rossini’s scene structure, which had been established earlier in the century and codified through Italian opera: Scena (scene), Tempo d’attacco (opening movement), Cantabile (slow movement), Tempo di mezzo (middle section), and Cabaletta (fast movement).

A) Scena: “Signora.” Violetta and Annina converse in rapid, unrhymed verse over a continuous melodic orchestra. The dialogue builds to a climax as Alfredo arrives.

B) Tempo d’attacco: “Colpevol sono” (“I am guilty”). Alfredo and Violetta exchange tuneful melodies over a simple accompaniment. Rhyming pairs of lines fall into balanced four-measure phrases, and each character repeats the other’s melody as they go back and forth – “I’m guilty.” “No, I’m guilty.” – reconciling and promising never to part again.

C) Cantabile: “Parigi, o cara” (“Paris, my dear”). Here Alfredo and Violetta plan to leave Paris and live their lives together. The music modulates from E major to a glorious A-flat major. It is slow, simple, direct, and tuneful, with a waltz rhythm. The form is AA’BB: Alfredo sings the A section, Violetta repeats it slightly differently (A’). In the B section, they take the same text, but Alfredo sings a grandiose legato melody while Violetta has a chromatic staccato line above it. They come together in a cadenza-like coda.

D) Tempo di mezzo: “Ah non piu” (“Ah, no more”). Hope gives way to despair. Violetta tries to dress and go to church but collapses – she is simply too ill. The passage is marked by startling contrasts in mood and singing style, with interjections from the orchestra. Rather than building momentum toward the cabaletta as convention would dictate, the momentum collapses entirely, which is far more realistic and devastating.

E) Cabaletta: “Ah! Gran Dio!” (“Ah! Great God”). Violetta cries out: “That I should die so young, after so much suffering! To die so near the dawn after the long night of tears! It was only an illusion, my hope and my belief!” Her desperation is expressed through plodding rhythms and quick dynamic changes. The form is AA B A’ with a coda: Alfredo repeats her A section with his own text, then tries to calm her in the B section. This deeply moving conclusion shows how Verdi could work within and against the inherited formal structures to create something profoundly realistic. In subsequent operas he would chafe against these forms more and more, and by the end of the century – as we will see with Puccini – they would give way to a far more continuous, Wagnerian approach.

♫ Verdi, La Traviata -- Act III: Scene and Duet ♫

Puccini and Madama Butterfly

Italian Opera After Verdi

After Verdi, it was extremely difficult for any Italian opera composer to escape his shadow. He had dominated the stage for decades, composing late masterpieces like Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) well into the 1890s. Moreover, opera houses were increasingly programming established works from the repertoire rather than seeking new commissions, making it very challenging for younger Italian composers to gain a foothold.

A significant movement that characterizes much late-nineteenth-century Italian opera is Verismo (Italian “realism”). This was an operatic movement that presented everyday people in familiar – and often sordid or brutal – situations, turning away from romantic idealism and the reliance on formal conventions such as inherited aria and finale structures. The influence of La Traviata and Carmen on Verismo was considerable: both operas presented main characters in all their messy, painful reality. Two quintessential Verismo operas that permanently entered the repertoire are Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry, 1890) and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (Clowns, 1892), often performed together. Applied more broadly, the Verismo label encompasses late Verdi and Puccini’s operas as well.

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)

Giacomo Puccini was undoubtedly the most successful Italian opera composer after Verdi. Born in 1858 in Lucca to a family of musicians – music had been the family business for about two hundred years – he composed and played organ as a teenager. His father died when he was five, but in 1876 he attended a performance of Verdi’s Aida that convinced him to become an opera composer. He entered the Milan Conservatory in 1880 on a scholarship from a Lucchese patron.

In 1884, his opera Le villi (The Fairies), an opera-ballet, was produced in Milan. Though it had not won the competition he entered, it attracted the attention of the great publisher Giulio Ricordi and of Arrigo Boito (Verdi’s librettist and a composer himself). Ricordi published an expanded version, which was then staged at La Scala to huge success, launching Puccini’s career. Around 1890, Ricordi sent Puccini to Bayreuth to see Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and this experience profoundly influenced his approach to opera.

His major operas include Manon Lescaut (1893), La Boheme (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West, 1910), the triptych Il Trittico (1918, comprising Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi), and finally Turandot, which he was working on when he died of throat cancer in 1924. It was completed by the composer Alfano from Puccini’s sketches and premiered posthumously at La Scala in 1926. In all, Puccini completed nine operas, and they remain staples of the repertoire worldwide.

Aspects of Puccini’s Style

Puccini’s operas frequently employ exoticism as a form of realism, exploring settings that are geographically or temporally distant and unfamiliar: La fanciulla del West (the American West), Madama Butterfly (Nagasaki, Japan, around 1900), and Turandot (ancient China).

His style represents a blend of Verdi and Wagner. From Verdi he took the focus on vocal melody; from Wagner he absorbed elements including recurring melodies and leitmotifs, freedom from conventional operatic forms, and a greater role for the orchestra in creating musical continuity. Arias, choruses, and ensembles are all part of a continuous flow rather than standalone numbers. There is a fluid succession of sections with different tempos, moods, and characters; musical ideas grow directly out of dramatic action. The distinction between recitative and aria is blurred, and Puccini juxtaposes different musical styles and harmonic idioms to serve the drama.

Madama Butterfly: Background

The music is by Puccini, with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (who had also written the libretti for Tosca and La Boheme). In 1900, in London, Puccini saw a play by David Belasco based on an 1898 novella by American author John Luther Long, who had based it on a story heard second- or third-hand from a family member. Puccini was captivated and immediately asked for the rights to set it as an opera. The work intersects with the Western world’s fascination with the “Orient” – a term that encompassed everything from the Middle East to East Asia, anything considered “other.”

The premiere at La Scala in Milan in February 1904 was a disaster; critics felt the music was derivative of Puccini’s earlier works. Puccini worked furiously on revisions, and the revised performance at Brescia in May 1904 was a triumph. The opera has remained immensely popular ever since. It is in three acts.

Characters and Story

The setting is Nagasaki Bay, Japan, around 1900. Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly) is a fifteen-year-old geisha. Suzuki is her companion and servant. Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton is a U.S. Navy officer. Sharpless is the American consul in Nagasaki. Goro is a marriage broker. Prince Yamadori wishes to marry Cio-Cio-San. Kate Pinkerton is the lieutenant’s American wife.

In Act I, matchmaker Goro shows Pinkerton his new Japanese house and introduces him to Suzuki. Sharpless warns Pinkerton against marrying the young geisha, but Butterfly radiates happiness at the prospect. During the wedding, Butterfly shows Pinkerton her father’s sword – used for ritual suicide at the emperor’s request – and reveals that she has forsaken her ancestral religion to adopt Christianity. At the ceremony’s conclusion, her uncle disowns her and the family withdraws. A long love duet follows between the newlyweds.

In Act II, three years have passed. Pinkerton has long since returned to America, and Butterfly waits faithfully, convinced he will return. She has a small son, Pinkerton’s child. She rejects the wealthy Prince Yamadori. Sharpless, knowing that Pinkerton has married in America, tries to reason with her; when he asks what she would do if Pinkerton did not return, Butterfly replies she would kill herself. A cannon signals the arrival of Pinkerton’s ship, and Butterfly scatters flower petals through the house to welcome him.

In Act III, after a sleepless night, Butterfly falls asleep just as Pinkerton arrives with Sharpless. Seeing the flowers, Pinkerton is overcome with guilt and flees, leaving Suzuki to explain. Butterfly comes upon his new American wife and agrees to relinquish her son on the condition that Pinkerton come personally to collect him. Once alone, Butterfly hands the child an American flag, then commits suicide with her father’s sword, collapsing in front of the just-returned Pinkerton.

NAWM 155: Act I – The Wedding Scene

The wedding scene in Act I is quintessentially Puccinian: it moves seamlessly between sections of dialogue and brief aria-like moments. The orchestra provides continuity and inserts important melodies in a manner very much influenced by Wagner – making subliminal suggestions rather than spelling things out through character arias. Because the scene involves the meeting of a Japanese bride and an American bridegroom, Puccini employs five contrasting musical styles to portray the mixing of cultures and the desires of the characters.

1) Pinkerton: European normative style. Pinkerton is characterized by lyrical melodies and standard Western harmonic vocabulary, representing the familiar, normative culture against which the audience views the entire opera.

2) Butterfly: Westernized Japanese style. Puccini drew on two songs from collections by Rudolf Dittrich, a German teacher of Western music at the Tokyo School of Music in the 1880s. Dittrich’s Nippon Gakufu contained Japanese songs arranged for piano (1894): specifically, the opening of Ha-Uta (eighth song in the second collection) and Sakura (third song in the first collection). Arranging these for Western piano already westernized them to some degree. Butterfly, a fifteen-year-old geisha aware of Westerners’ tastes, presents herself as a charming, exotic woman who can also navigate the Western world – astute and determined to convince Pinkerton she can be a proper Western wife.

3) Reference to her father’s sword: “Japanese” style. When Butterfly shows Pinkerton the sword her father used for ritual suicide, the music shifts to a less westernized style. The accompaniment derives from yet another Dittrich arrangement but uses an unharmonized drone rather than Western-style harmonization, suggesting something so deeply personal that Butterfly cannot reconcile her two cultural worlds. The melody itself is a fragment of a Chinese tune from a Swiss music box – already westernized, but it would sound “Asian” to a European audience. A brief aria follows, “Io seguo il mio destino” (“I follow my destiny”), drawn from another Chinese song from the same music box, an erotic song with European-style accompaniment. Here Butterfly signals her offer of body and soul – exotic enough to be alluring, but Western and Christian enough for Pinkerton to take her fully to his heart.

4) The marriage ceremony: dry recitation. The official reading of the marriage document is set in a flat, declamatory style.

5) Quotation of The Star-Spangled Banner. When reference is made to Pinkerton’s country during the ceremony, Puccini quotes the American national anthem – a subtle allusion that grounds the scene in cultural specificity.

As a bonus, the celebrated Act II aria “Un bel di” (“One Fine Day”) captures Butterfly’s dreams of Pinkerton’s return and their life together.

♫ Puccini, Madama Butterfly -- Act I: Wedding Scene ♫

Bizet and Carmen

Georges Bizet (1838–1875) and the Genesis of Carmen

Georges Bizet composed one of the most beloved operas in the repertoire but did not live to see its success. Born in 1838, he worked on Carmen for several years, completing it for a premiere on March 3, 1875, at the Opera-Comique in Paris. He died in June of that same year, after a brief illness that may have been precipitated by the devastating reaction to the premiere. The libretto was by Ludovic Halevy and Henri Meilhac, based on an 1845 novella by Prosper Merimee.

Carmen belongs to the genre of opera comique, a French genre of opera that uses spoken dialogue interspersed with musical numbers – somewhat analogous to the German Singspiel. There are twenty-seven musical numbers in all. The initial performance was a colossal failure. The scholar Susan McClary suggests that the quite brutal realism on stage, combined with a sympathetic focus on characters whom French culture considered “other” and exotic, contributed to its poor reception. After Bizet’s death, the Vienna Court Opera produced a shortened version with added recitative replacing the spoken dialogue. Carmen was not revived in France until 1883, at which point it became enormously popular and has remained so ever since.

Characters and Story

The setting is Seville, Spain, and the hills outside the city, around 1830. There are four acts, each in a different location: a square in Seville (Act I), Lillas Pastia’s tavern (Act II), a rocky place near Seville at night (Act III), and outside the bullring in Seville (Act IV).

Carmen is a Gypsy (Romani) tobacco factory worker, sung by a mezzo-soprano. Don Jose is a corporal in the regiment, a tenor from a somewhat aristocratic background in the north. Micaela is a peasant girl from Don Jose’s village, a soprano who brings a letter, a kiss, and money from his mother. Escamillo is a toreador (bass-baritone) who becomes Carmen’s new lover.

In Act I, soldiers loiter by the cigarette factory in Seville. The factory women emerge on a break, and Carmen, the crowd’s favorite, sings the Habanera (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”). Only Don Jose pays no attention to her. She throws a flower at him. Micaela arrives with a letter from his mother; after she leaves, he is about to discard the flower when a fight erupts in the factory. Carmen is arrested, and Don Jose is charged with guarding her. She seduces him with a dance and a promise to meet him at the tavern, and he lets her escape. He is jailed for it.

In Act II, at the tavern where smugglers meet, Carmen waits for Don Jose’s release. The arrogant toreador Escamillo arrives, biding his time. Don Jose comes, torn between duty and infatuation. Carmen dances for him but then mocks him, claiming she does not love him. Unable to return to duty, Don Jose joins the smugglers.

In Act III, in the hills outside Seville, Don Jose has become increasingly possessive and jealous. Carmen senses she is in danger. Micaela bravely sets out to find Don Jose.

In Act IV, outside the bullring, Carmen has broken off with Don Jose and is now in love with Escamillo. Don Jose confronts her, begging her to return. Carmen is brutally honest: she does not love him, and she will not be possessed. “Free she was born and free she will die,” she declares. She flings the ring he gave her back at him. In a rage, just as the crowd inside the bullring cheers Escamillo’s triumph, Don Jose stabs Carmen. She falls dead as the chorus sings the “Toreador” song. “You can arrest me,” Don Jose says. “I was the one who killed her.”

Exoticism in Carmen

Spain – and Seville in particular – was lumped in by the French with the “exotic” and “Oriental,” a broad category encompassing the Middle East, East Asia, Africa, and the Romani people. The premiere in 1875 came only a few years after the Franco-Prussian War (1870), the siege of Paris, and the Paris Commune of 1871, all of which had deeply shaken France’s collective sense of security and imperial power. Against this backdrop, there was both fascination and anxiety regarding the “other.”

Carmen embodies this otherness: she is from Seville, she is Romani, and her difference is defined from the very first production through her costume, behavior, movement, language, and music. She is outside the “normal,” considered dangerous, and threatening to patriarchal society. There are even suggestions that the parallel between Carmen’s death outside the bullring and the bull’s death inside it is deliberate – that she, like the bull, is something wild that must be “conquered.”

In contrast, Micaela and Don Jose come from the north and are characterized by a Western European musical sound. Carmen’s exoticism is set against their normative culture.

Realism in Carmen

Carmen also trades heavily in realism: women smoking and physically fighting on stage; ugly settings like a cigarette factory and a smuggler’s den; real places in Seville (the old tobacco factory, now a university building, and the bullring on the river); no tenderness or “true love” in the conventional sense – only Don Jose’s destructive obsession; and a brutal murder on stage at the end. The exotic and the real collide in this opera, powerfully and uncomfortably.

The Prelude

The Prelude to Act I introduces three themes heard later in the opera: music from the corrida (bullfight) in Act IV, the famous Toreador Song from Act II (associated with Escamillo), and, in its second part, the ominous “Carmen” or “Fate” motive. This motive features a distinctive augmented second between C-sharp and B-flat, an interval associated in European musical consciousness with Jewish, Arabic, African, and “Gypsy” music. It represents Carmen’s identity and her ultimate fate. Other acts have their own orchestral preludes called entr’actes (“between acts”), much of which will also sound very familiar.

♫ Bizet, Carmen -- Prelude to Act I ♫

Carmen’s Music: Characterized by Dance

Carmen is musically characterized through dance. Her first major number, the Habanera (Act I, No. 5, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” – “Love is a rebellious bird”), is set to a Cuban dance rhythm that became popular in Spain: a slow 2/4 time with a characteristic dotted-rhythm pattern that is almost tango-like. Bizet’s inspiration came from a published edition by the Spanish composer Sebastian Iradier, from whom he borrowed the melody.

The Habanera’s melody is chromatic, descending by half-step, and Carmen conspicuously withholds the tonic note, manipulating the listener’s desire for resolution just as she manipulates Don Jose’s growing obsession. The text is perfectly clear about who she is: “Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame … Love is a gypsy child who has never, ever known the law.” The crowd joins in, reacting to her irresistible charisma.

♫ Bizet, Carmen -- Act I, No. 5: Habanera ♫

Gender in Carmen: The Duet of Jose and Micaela

Immediately after Carmen’s Habanera, Act I, No. 7 presents the duet between Don Jose and Micaela: “Parle-moi de ma mere!” (“Tell me about my mother”). Don Jose’s music throughout the opera tracks his trajectory. At the beginning, in this duet with Micaela, he sings in a diatonic, Western European classical style – lyrical, controlled, normative. As the opera progresses and he becomes increasingly desperate and obsessed with Carmen, his singing becomes more angular and chromatic; by the Flower Song in Act II and especially by the end of the opera, his vocal style is completely transformed from where it began, musically charting his fall from grace.

Micaela’s music stands in stark contrast to Carmen’s: it is pastoral, lyrical, sweet, diatonic, and set to traditional, simple harmony, accompanied by oboe, piccolo, and harp – instruments evoking the countryside. She represents the height from which Don Jose has fallen, his wholesome past, and the middle-class values of the audience. She is more than a simple foil, however; in Act III she demonstrates real courage and determination in seeking out Don Jose among the smugglers.

NAWM 156: Seguidilla and Duet (Act I, No. 10)

“Pres des remparts de Seville” – “Near the ramparts of Seville.” Carmen has been arrested after a fight with another factory worker and is being guarded by Don Jose, who must ensure she goes to prison. Her plan is to escape. She tells him about her friend Lillas Pastia’s tavern, promising to dance the Seguidilla for him and drink Manzanilla together, mentioning that she has just tossed her latest lover.

The Seguidilla is a bona fide Spanish song in fast triple meter. The accompaniment imitates the strumming of a guitar, possibly with castanets. The vocal melody is full of melismas and grace notes typical of the seguidilla style, with a flamenco-style downward cadence by half-step as a central feature. The refrain is slippery and enticing: the harmony moves through different keys constantly, circling through the circle of fifths, landing on C and then slipping down to B, the real key. This constantly shifting harmony mirrors Carmen herself – she cannot be pinned down. Don Jose’s contributions are limited to interjections in recitative: “Be quiet!” gradually giving way to “Will you be there? Dance the seguidilla?” – his resistance crumbling in real time. They do not sing together as in a conventional duet.

♫ Bizet, Carmen -- Act I, No. 10: Seguidilla (Maria Ewing) ♫

Act IV, No. 27: Finale – Duet and Chorus

The devastating finale takes place outside the bullring. Carmen, now with Escamillo, confronts Don Jose rather than live in fear. The duet consists of back-and-forth dialogue in which they never truly sing together, using different words and different melodies, effectively singing past each other. Carmen is monotone, short, and blunt – the vocal equivalent of someone being brutally, painfully direct with a former lover. Don Jose sings broad, increasingly complex and chromatic lines that betray his escalating desperation. The scene passes through many keys, reflecting its emotional volatility.

Carmen declares her love for Escamillo in a clear A major. The offstage chorus signals the death of the bull – a dramatic parallel to what is about to happen. The Fate motive sounds twice. Don Jose stabs Carmen just as the chorus sings the “Toreador” song in E-flat. The opera ends in F-sharp major rather than the overall key of A major, yet this key resolves the dissonance and chromaticism, returning to clear diatonic writing. Some scholars observe that this restoration of the dominant Western European musical style, after all the chromatic volatility, suggests a kind of cultural “victory” that is in fact devastating for everyone involved.

♫ Bizet, Carmen -- Act IV, No. 27: Finale ♫

Musorgsky and Boris Godunov

Opera in Nineteenth-Century Russia

The cultural landscape of nineteenth-century Russia shaped its opera profoundly. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs, part of a larger modernization effort. Two main approaches to this modernization emerged. The nationalists or “Slavophiles” idealized Russia’s distinctiveness and viewed Westernization as a threat to Russian identity. The internationalists or “Westernizers” sought to adapt Western European technology and education. This tension played out in music as well: Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory on a Western model, and his brother Nikolay Rubinstein (1835–1881) founded the Moscow Conservatory in 1866.

The Mighty Five

Opposing the professionalism of the conservatories was a group of five composers dubbed the “Mighty Five” (or “Mighty Handful”): Mily Balakirev (1837–1910), Aleksandr Borodin (1833–1887), Cesar Cui (1835–1918), Modest Musorgsky (1839–1881), and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908). Only Balakirev had conventional music training. They stood against the Western conservatory model and sought a fresh approach to composition by incorporating Russian folk song, modal and exotic scales, and folk polyphony. Rimsky-Korsakov eventually became a teacher himself and took it upon himself to revise – or “correct” – many of his colleagues’ works, including those of Musorgsky. By the 1920s, however, composers like Debussy recognized that what Musorgsky wrote in its original form was highly revolutionary and worthy of the highest regard. Debussy even quoted or paraphrased Musorgsky’s music in works such as the piano prelude La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair) and the orchestral Nocturnes.

Modest Musorgsky (1839–1881)

Modest Musorgsky (the name appears in numerous transliterations from the Cyrillic alphabet) is widely considered the most original of the Mighty Five. He earned his living as a clerk in the civil service and received musical training from Balakirev rather than attending a conservatory. His best-known work is Pictures at an Exhibition, originally a piano composition later orchestrated by Ravel and others.

One of his principal stage works is Boris Godunov, originally composed 1868–69, then revised 1871–74. The premiere of the second version took place at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on January 27, 1874. In this opera, realism and nationalism are powerfully reflected. The libretto was written by Musorgsky himself, based on the historical tragedy by Alexander Pushkin (written 1824–25, premiered 1866), which dramatizes the rule of the Russian Tsar Boris Godunov around 1600. Musorgsky’s ideal was always to take a well-crafted play and set it as faithfully to the original text as possible.

A portrait of Musorgsky from March 1881, just weeks before his death from complications of alcoholism, shows him wearing a peasant shirt – a gesture of nationalist identification. His eyes and complexion betray his ill health. It was a sad end for an incredibly talented composer.

Historical Background and Plot

Boris Godunov (baritone/bass) was the historical Tsar of Russia from 1598 to 1605. Fyodor (mezzo-soprano) is Boris’s son who becomes tsar briefly. Xenia (soprano) is Boris’s daughter. Grigory Otrepyev (tenor) is a young monk who pretends to be the murdered Tsarevich Dimitri.

The historical background begins with Ivan the Terrible, who reigned for about fifty years until 1584. Ivan’s eldest surviving son, Fyodor, was unfit to rule, so his brother-in-law Boris Godunov served as de facto leader. The younger brother, Dimitri, died under mysterious circumstances in 1591 – possibly murdered. For the purposes of the opera, Musorgsky assumes Boris ordered the murder. When Fyodor died in 1598 with no heirs, an assembly of clergy and gentry elected Boris to the throne. He was opposed by noble families, spied on them, and tried them for treason. He died in 1605. His son Fyodor II ascended the throne but was killed within two months by the pretender Grigory, who claimed to be the miraculously surviving Dimitri, supported by the Polish Princess Marina. This is the Time of Troubles in Russian history.

The opera unfolds in seven scenes (a prologue and four acts). It tells of Boris’s coronation, his guilt-ridden reign, and his fall. His crimes – the murder of the child Dimitri – his suffering, the fear of being overthrown, and his paranoid remorse gradually bring him into solitude and madness. When Grigory marches on Moscow with an army, Boris does not even have time to fight; he collapses dead at the end of his delirium.

NAWM 158: The Coronation Scene (Scene 2)

The Coronation Scene is the opera’s most famous passage and a perfect illustration of Musorgsky’s distinctive compositional style. Several key features deserve attention.

Vocal Line. The vocal writing follows the rhythm and pacing of Russian speech with meticulous fidelity. It is syllabic, with accented syllables placed on strong beats, ensuring that the words are perfectly clear. Boris’s monologue is written in a fluid arioso style derived from Russian folk songs: narrow in range, built on repetition of short motifs, with phrases that rise and then slowly sink down to a cadence. Musorgsky wanted to set Pushkin’s well-crafted text as faithfully as possible, and the vocal style reflects this commitment.

Block Construction. The opera as a whole is built on what we call block construction – a series of relatively unconnected tableaux or episodes, all tied by the central figure of the Tsar. There is a juxtaposition of blocks of material that are individually consistent in style but contrast sharply with what comes before and after. This is quite different from the organic, continuously developing approach of a Wagnerian music drama.

The Opening. The Coronation Scene begins with a striking brass fanfare whose chords alternate between A-flat and D – roots a tritone apart. Above this, an ostinato layer of strings and winds repeats patterns that get rhythmically shorter and faster, building intensity. The entire section then repeats with the addition of bells, perfectly consistent with the coronation ceremony and incredibly evocative.

When the chorus sings, they sing an adapted Russian folk song – one of the closest instances of Musorgsky drawing on an actual existing melody. The Prince’s pronouncement (“Long live Tsar Boris!”) is set to major chords related by thirds – E major, C major, A major, E major – all sharing the common tone E.

Harmony. Musorgsky’s harmony is essentially tonal but operates by assertion rather than conventional harmonic function. Rather than following the Western European tradition of chord progressions that create hierarchical motion, he establishes key areas through repetition and emphasis – for instance, the note C in the bass line is hammered over and over in the opening to assert tonal dominance. Some passages are more modal, employing unconventional scale structures including whole-tone and octatonic (alternating semitones and tones) collections, as well as elements closer to the old church modes. Dissonances resolve in unconventional ways. He juxtaposes distantly related or coloristic harmonies joined by a common tone.

The Coronation Scene’s opening “Boris chords” (two dominant-seventh chords on A-flat and D, a tritone apart) share two notes in common: C and F-sharp/G-flat. This creates an unsettling sonority that hints at the darkness beneath the ceremonial splendor. For all its pomp and grandeur – the bells, the cheering crowd, the sumptuous costumes with orb, scepter, and crown – the scene carries an undercurrent of unease. The people of Russia, who suffered greatly under Ivan the Terrible, have a moment of hope in their new Tsar, but we know, and Musorgsky makes us feel, that this hope is fragile.

The Coronation Scene is one that truly must be watched, not merely heard. The visual dimension – the ceremony, the crowds, the costumes – works inseparably with the music, making it a powerful example of how opera can create meaning through the synthesis of all its elements.

♫ Musorgsky, Boris Godunov -- Coronation Scene ♫

Brahms

Late Romanticism in German Musical Culture: Johannes Brahms

Dichotomies and Disputes

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the concert landscape was shifting in ways that would have seemed strange to earlier generations. We are so accustomed today to going to a symphony concert and hearing a real mix of new works and classics – works from the nineteenth century and beyond, a variety of different types of music – that it is easy to forget this was not always the case. Around 1850, however, concerts were increasingly focused on what audiences regarded as musical classics, and the proportion of older works performed on any given program grew steadily. A canon of the finest music was forming – works by Haydn, Mozart, and above all Beethoven that audiences expected to hear over and over again. The result was a kind of growing standard repertoire, a body of music that defined what “the best” sounded like.

At the same time, a revival of past music was reaching back even further than the Classical era. A new scholarly discipline called musicology (in German, Musikwissenschaft – the science or study of music and music history) was unearthing, publishing, and studying compositions that had been dormant for generations. Ambitious editions of the complete works of Bach, Handel, Palestrina (from the sixteenth century), Mozart, Heinrich Schutz (a German composer from the seventeenth century), and Orlando de Lassus (reaching back into the Renaissance) appeared, carrying music from earlier periods into modern libraries and concert programs. Editions of early nineteenth-century masters followed: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and Schubert all received collected editions that were considered definitive versions of their output. This music got dispersed and discussed, becoming a topic of great interest among musicians and audiences alike.

Most of the scholars driving this activity were German, and they naturally brought a special interest in German composers. The revival was thus linked to national pride – a force that, as with so many nationalisms, could work both for and against the broader culture of music. German nationalism was very much a factor in shaping which composers received attention and how their legacies were framed. Paradoxically, this increasing supply of older music was itself experienced as something new, because so much of it was unfamiliar to contemporary audiences. But it also made things considerably more difficult for living composers trying to make their mark on the stage. It was much harder than it had been in previous decades to establish a place for new music when audiences were increasingly satisfied with the old.

Brahms versus Wagner

The preponderance of older music on concert programs posed a serious problem for living composers. Everyone had to grapple with the past in some way, and the looming shadow of Beethoven – and even Bach – fell heavily over composers working in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Some met the challenge head-on, saying they would create new works squarely within the Classical tradition; Johannes Brahms was chief among them, writing symphonies and chamber works very much in keeping with inherited forms. Others saw the legacy of Beethoven pointing in a fundamentally different direction. Richard Wagner, with his ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art that fused music, drama, poetry, and visual spectacle – pursued a path that joined all the arts together in a multimedia work. All of these composers got their inspiration from Beethoven, but there were different deltas flowing out from Beethoven in different directions, and the impact would be felt for many decades to come.

In the German-speaking lands this divergence polarized around Brahms and Wagner, generating heated disputes organized around a series of dichotomies: absolute music versus program music, tradition versus innovation, classical genres and forms versus new ones. Brahms was championed as the standard-bearer of absolute music – music that is “about music,” music for music’s sake, as the phrase went – and was enthusiastically supported by the influential music critic Eduard Hanslick. Wagner and his circle, meanwhile, championed program music: music that paints a picture, tells a story, or evokes a legend or image beyond the music itself. These terms – absolute and program music – are attached specifically to instrumental works; when a text is present, as in song or opera, there is clearly a literary element. But program music aspires to tell a story through purely musical means, and absolute music asserts that music needs no story beyond itself.

It is important to note that the new genre of the tone poem (or symphonic poem), in which an orchestra tells a story in a single movement, emerged as one of the central innovations of this period. Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote, which we will examine in the next lesson, is a prime example.

Yet the picture was never as simple as the polemics suggested. There was mutual respect and influence across the divide. Hans von Bulow, for instance, maintained friendly relations with both camps, even after Wagner fathered two children with Bulow’s wife Cosima (who was Liszt’s daughter) and Cosima eventually married Wagner. Some people saw a lot of innovation and promise on both sides. Composers shared common goals: all linked themselves to Beethoven, all sought to appeal to audiences familiar with the classical masterworks, and all wished to secure a permanent place for their own music in the repertoire. There was a very strange, difficult, yet inspired kind of relationship between composers of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the earlier music that surrounded them. As the twentieth-century composer Arnold Schoenberg would later observe in a famous essay, the supposedly conservative Brahms was in many respects remarkably progressive – “Brahms the progressive,” Schoenberg called him, identifying a wealth of innovations beneath the seemingly traditional surface.

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)

Johannes Brahms was the leading German composer of his time. Born in Hamburg, he studied several instruments as a child and by his teens was already earning money playing popular music at restaurants and private parties. A decisive moment arrived in 1853, when the twenty-year-old Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann. Robert Schumann publicly extolled the potential of this young composer, really bringing him to the fore, and both Schumanns saw great promise in him. They became his strongest supporters, offering advice and encouragement. Clara, herself a distinguished composer and pianist and a superb connoisseur, would remain an important musical confidante throughout Brahms’s career.

Brahms made his living concertizing as a pianist and conductor and from sales of his music to publishers – he lived off the royalties and did quite well for himself. By 1868 he had settled permanently in Vienna. He was also something of a scholar, a kind of musicologist in his own right, actively editing editions of Baroque, Classical, and Romantic composers. This work brought him into intimate, hands-on contact with earlier music and profoundly shaped his own compositional thinking. It is part of the larger picture of how composers in this era related to the past – whether embracing it, fighting against it, or somehow finding their place within it and reconciling their relationship to it.

His catalogue of major works is vast: four symphonies (we will listen to the finale of the last one), two piano concertos, a Violin Concerto, two overtures, two serenades, three string quartets, twenty-one other chamber works, three piano sonatas, numerous shorter piano pieces, A German Requiem, several choral works, works for vocal ensembles, and about two hundred Lieder (art songs). He was, by any measure, a remarkably prolific composer, and many performers today will have played some of his piano or chamber music – it is wonderful, wonderful repertoire.

Brahms’s Style

Brahms possessed a unique personal style. He worked very slowly and was severely self-critical, holding himself to the highest standards. He was deeply versed in the music of the past – not only Beethoven and the early Romantics but also Renaissance and Baroque composers whose editions he had helped to prepare. He synthesized elements drawn from these traditions with current classical and folk idioms. He was especially fond of Hungarian Romani (Gypsy) style, and he had a genuine gift for melody and the direct expression of emotion.

Two short works illustrate these qualities nicely: the orchestral Hungarian Dance in G Minor, No. 1, with its fiery rhythmic energy, and the tender Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2 in A Major, famously recorded by the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Both pieces show Brahms’s remarkable ability to combine learned craft with immediate emotional appeal.

Orchestral Works: The Road to the Symphony

The symphonic standard had been set by Beethoven, and it was a very high standard to reach. Brahms did not produce his first symphony until he was past forty – and for good reason. After Robert Schumann publicly extolled the potential of the young Brahms, the weight of expectations was enormous. Brahms himself confessed: “I shall never write a symphony. You have no idea how it feels to hear behind you the tramp of a giant like Beethoven.” Later, still laboring on the work, he added: “Writing a symphony is no laughing matter.” These remarks give a very visceral sense of the burden that rested on anyone who dared to write a symphony after Beethoven. The genre was regarded as a real test of a composer of instrumental music – the supreme challenge.

What may have helped was his appointment in 1872 as conductor of the Viennese Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music), a post that allowed him to work from the inside out, gaining firsthand knowledge of the different parts of the orchestra, what they could do, and how they interacted. Within a few years the long-awaited symphony was complete. He mainly worked on it in most earnest between 1874 and 1876, and it was premiered in November 1876.

Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68 (1876) had occupied Brahms for over twenty years (1856–76). It follows a conventional sequence of movements, with a lyrical intermezzo standing in for the usual scherzo in the third movement. The overall trajectory from C minor to C major deliberately echoes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, probably the most famous work of what we call absolute music. Here was Brahms, writing his very first symphony at age forty-three and meeting Beethoven head-on – a vivid example of what literary critic Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence, the way creative artists confront the towering achievements of their predecessors. The overall key scheme, which moves by major thirds rather than by the traditional dominant, recalls the practice of Schubert and Liszt – a reminder that cross-fertilization occurred even across the supposed divide between the Brahmsians and the Wagnerians. Slow introductions to both the first and fourth movements recall Schumann’s Symphony No. 4. Most strikingly, the hymnlike main theme of the finale invites direct comparison with the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. When listeners remarked on the similarity, Brahms replied dryly: “Any jackass could see that.” The symphony also includes a magnificent, confident horn solo in the finale that proclaims Brahms’s hard-won victory over the symphonic demons he had wrestled with for two decades.

He went on to compose three more symphonies in relatively rapid succession:

• Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73 (1877)
• Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Op. 90 (1883)
• Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98 (1885)

♫ Brahms, Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68 -- IV (horn solo) ♫

Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98: Finale (NAWM 160)

Brahms composed his Fourth and final Symphony between 1884 and 1885. He premiered it himself, conducting in Meiningen in October 1885, and it was warmly received. The finale is one of the most remarkable movements in the entire symphonic repertoire, because it combines the nineteenth-century symphonic tradition with music of the distant past. The autograph manuscript score of the finale shows the stark opening chords that outline the main theme – the germinal idea that will be spun out, varied, and developed throughout the entire movement.

The form of this finale is a chaconne – a set of variations over a repeating bass line in triple meter. The choice of form, in and of itself, is quite old, and it reflects Brahms’s deep fascination with Baroque music. He was familiar with chaconnes by several Baroque composers and used them as models:

• Dietrich Buxtehude’s Ciacona in E Minor for organ shares the key of E minor and certain aspects of the theme and variations.
• Francois Couperin’s Rondo Passacaille from the Eighth Harpsichord Suite, which may seem unusual because everyone else is German. But the idea of returning to or echoing earlier variations may derive from this work, which Brahms had edited for Couperin’s complete-works edition. Here we have his editorial work intersecting directly with his compositional imagination.
• Bach’s Cantata Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich, BWV 150: a friend of Brahms recalled that the composer adapted the bass ostinato of this movement from the cantata’s final chorus. The two bass lines share a similar rising scalar contour that culminates in a descending octave leap and then returns to the tonic. Brahms extends the theme to eight bars and adds a passing tone (A-sharp moving to B).
• Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1004, which Brahms had transcribed in 1877 as a left-hand exercise for piano. Shared features include the minor key, a midsection shifting to major before returning to minor with the opening idea, and a sarabande rhythm – a triple-meter rhythm with emphasis on the second beat, realized as a dotted quarter note on that beat. There are also rhythmic and textural aspects that may derive from this work.
• The finale of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, itself a variation movement. Like Beethoven, Brahms groups his variations into larger sections that suggest sonata form: an exposition-like first section, a more developmental middle section that varies ideas that have come before, and a recapitulation marked by the return of earlier variation material.

There are thirty-one variations on the eight-bar theme, yet the movement never feels episodic. Brahms constantly varies the theme, but almost every new idea is an extension of something already heard – all of it ultimately deriving from the germinal ideas presented at the very start of the movement. Arnold Schoenberg later celebrated this technique under the name “developing variation”: a process of ceaselessly spinning new material from what has come before, with everything traceable back to the opening idea. This movement is a rich web of allusions, entirely typical of Brahms. In many ways, even taking this very old material and these old models and putting them into a newly composed work was seen by subsequent composers as highly innovative. What seemed conservative on the surface was, under close examination, genuinely path-breaking.

♫ Brahms, Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98 -- IV. Allegro energico e passionato ♫

Quintet for Piano and Strings in F Minor, Op. 34: First Movement (NAWM 161)

Brahms’s Quintet for Piano and Strings in F Minor, Op. 34 is one of the most popular chamber works in the repertoire to this day. It reached its final form only after three attempts. Brahms first composed the piece as a string quintet with two cellos, very similar to Schubert’s quintet. He heard it performed, and it was not quite right. Then he rescored it for two pianos, and that was performed too, but it did not sound right either. Clara Schumann, the connoisseur composer that she was, heard both versions and thought that some of the themes were lost with just two pianos and needed the contrasting sound of strings against the piano. Brahms took her advice and rescored it a third time for string quartet plus piano – two violins, viola, cello, and piano. Third time proved the charm: the work was published in 1865 and premiered in 1866, four years after he had first started working on it.

The first movement is in sonata form – exposition (repeated), development, recapitulation, and coda. The opening theme’s melodic motion from F to D-flat expands outward to govern the keys of the exposition itself: F minor (tonic), C-sharp minor (enharmonically D-flat minor), and D-flat major. So there is a motivic idea that translates into an expansion at the level of the actual keys in the exposition. This idea of a small interval expanding to the level of tonal architecture is reminiscent of Schubert’s quintet, which also features three keys in its exposition, with some similarities in having a melodic motion expand into keys.

The movement is a textbook demonstration of developing variation, continuously building on germinal ideas. The very first theme is itself a series of variants of its opening measure: each subsequent bar varies the preceding one, and any new figures derive from earlier ones. Even ideas that seem to have little in common can, on closer inspection, be traced back to the same germinal figure. All the themes and several other elements in the exposition – as well as the development and recapitulation – are derived from the opening bar through this process.

In the textbook (p. 720, Example 29.3), four excerpts illustrate the technique:

• (a) A lyrical opening in octaves, where each bar varies the preceding bar. The minor-mode-to-major-mode motion (F to D-flat) foreshadows the exposition’s overall key scheme.
• (b) A piano variant of the opening idea, starting in measure five. The high notes of the piano’s sequences spell out D-flat, F, A-flat, G, and F – the notes of the opening theme in retrograde (backwards), embedded on a deeper, less immediately audible structural level. It is a remarkable example of how every place you slice this music, it contains some aspect of the opening theme.
• (c) The transition between the first and second theme groups, presenting a new melody clearly derived from (a). Here we also encounter another very typical Brahmsian feature: two-against-three rhythmic tension, with triplets in one hand against duples in the other. Anyone who has played Brahms on the piano will feel this tension keenly. This rhythmic interplay carries on into the second theme group as well.

The development section showcases Brahms’s contrapuntal skill, incorporating a five-part canon. Quite a few nineteenth-century composers studied counterpoint and used techniques often considered old-fashioned, belonging to the eighteenth century, within their own thoroughly modern compositions. Brahms is showing his chops here. The recapitulation is particularly unusual and subtle: although the music returns to F minor and the opening material, a sustained C pedal point carries over from the development, so the recapitulation initially sounds as though the development is still continuing. Only when a familiar piano figuration enters does the listener fully recognize the return. It is a wonderfully inventive manipulation of the traditional form.

Performance with score: Amadeus String Quartet with Christoph Eschenbach, piano.

Live performance: Rashkovskiy Ilya, piano, and the Ariel String Quartet.

♫ Brahms, Quintet for Piano and Strings in F Minor, Op. 34 -- I. Allegro non troppo ♫

Brahms’s Place

It is important at this point to step back and consider Brahms’s place, not only in his own musical world but in how he impacted later composers. He was often called a conservative when compared on the surface to other composers who followed Wagner’s ideas, but he was actually a path breaker. That is why someone like Arnold Schoenberg in the twentieth century, himself considered a radical, could look back and, instead of “Brahms the conservative,” call him “Brahms the progressive,” identifying innovations that lay beneath the seemingly traditional surface. Brahms introduced new elements into traditional forms, and when composers use forms that are traditional, that are older, they are too often dismissed as conservative – yet composers can do really quite remarkable things within those traditional forms and truly transform them. Brahms is one of those people and is recognized to this day for that achievement.

He developed subtle and complex techniques – things that take a little study, a closer look, and a very keen ear – that were enormously important to later composers. But he never lost sight of the average listener or the musical amateur. He satisfied connoisseurs with the organic integration of elements – every part relating to the whole through developing variation – while offering music of such logical flow and engaging melodies that the amateur could just listen to it and enjoy it without noticing all the interesting elements beneath. In this way, Brahms carried forward the ideals of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: their music had to sound easy to the average music listener but had to have a tremendous depth that other composers and connoisseurs could dig into. Brahms continued in that tradition in a whole different age, and that is his significance. It is also why he remains so popular in the concert hall today.

Richard Strauss

Late Romanticism in German Musical Culture: The Wagnerians and the New German School

In the previous lesson we focused on Johannes Brahms and his approach to symphonic and chamber music within the Classical tradition. In this lesson we turn to composers on the other end of the divide – those who followed in Wagner’s footsteps. This includes Franz Liszt, whom we revisit to see what he accomplished with thematic transformation; Anton Bruckner, a very important symphonist of the late nineteenth century who learned a great deal from Wagner; and our principal focus, Richard Strauss, whose Don Quixote is our main excerpt (NAWM 162). We will see how these composers learned from Wagner’s way of writing music and his ideals, and how that was somewhat different from Brahms. But of course, as we always find, it was never a clear-cut divide – composers were learning from each other even while locked in a grand dispute about the future of music.

The “New German School”

The rival camp to Brahms and the absolute-music advocates coalesced under a banner coined by the music critic Franz Brendel in 1859 – right around the time Wagner was completing Tristan und Isolde. Brendel called it the “New German School” and applied the label to composers he thought were leading the newest developments in music. The roster included Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz (whose Symphonie fantastique had premiered nearly three decades earlier and had advanced the cause of program music), Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf (a celebrated composer of Lieder), and Richard Strauss. What united them was the conviction that music could – and should – be linked to the other arts. Even though Liszt was Hungarian and Berlioz was French, they were considered German “in spirit,” because all of them took Beethoven as their model.

Now, we saw that on the other side of things, the absolute-music advocates like Brahms and Eduard Hanslick also took Beethoven as their model. Beethoven really started a whole new delta of different directions flowing from his music. Both camps could share the same model but arrive at different results. The term “New German School” crystallized the polarization of late-nineteenth-century German musical life: on one side, Liszt, Wagner, and their followers; on the other, the advocates of absolute music, led by Brahms and the critic Eduard Hanslick. Source readings on page 723 of the textbook present passages from Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful alongside Liszt’s defense of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, offering a vivid glimpse into the differences of opinion between absolute music and program music.

Franz Liszt and the Symphonic Poem

We encountered Franz Liszt earlier in his career as one of the most dazzling touring pianists in history and listened to his piano piece Un sospiro. By 1848 he had retired from the concert stage and taken a position as court music director at Weimar, where he focused more and more on composition. For Liszt, the poetic ideal and the logical development of material were the most important things.

Between 1848 and 1858 he composed twelve symphonic poems (thirteen in all) – a genre he invented and named, the most significant formal innovation to emerge from the New German School. A symphonic poem is a one-movement programmatic work for orchestra whose content and form are suggested by something outside the music itself: a person, a story, an artwork. Each work is identified by a title and usually accompanied by a written program. Sections contrast in character and tempo; the music is symphonic in sound, weight, and developmental procedures. They are “poems” in the sense that they are analogous to poetry, especially narrative poems – telling a story through symphonic music.

The sources for these works were wonderfully varied. Prometheus (1850–55) drew on myth and a poem by Herder; Mazeppa (1852–54) was based on a poem by Victor Hugo. Liszt also composed programmatic symphonies bearing literary titles: the Faust Symphony (1854), an enormous work lasting about seventy minutes across three movements, and the Dante Symphony (1856). The story of Faust, as we have discovered, was central to much Romantic music – a story that composers turned to in more than one genre and on more than one occasion.

Central to Liszt’s compositional method was thematic transformation – the process of transforming a theme or motive into entirely new themes, thereby providing unity, variety, and a narrative-like logic to a composition. It is a little bit like Brahms’s developing variation, but different in that these transformations present different characters or different moods of a character, reflecting and portraying the programmatic subject. In Les preludes (The Preludes, 1854), linked to a poem by Alphonse-Marie de Lamartine, the music follows the same sequence of moods as the poem. A three-note motive is modified and expanded to take on different characters corresponding to the program. Examples (b) through (h) in the textbook (Example 29.4, p. 724) show the motive in various guises; example (i) presents a more distant metamorphosis – a contrasting theme that is itself transformed. The technique ensures that what sounds like constantly fresh invention is, at a deeper level, always traceable to a single seed.

♫ Liszt, Les preludes, S. 97 ♫

Liszt’s Influence

Liszt was hugely influential, not just in his earlier period of expanding the piano repertoire and its technical and emotional content, but through his symphonic poems. The symphonic poem was taken up by many composers after him and became a dominant kind of symphonic repertoire – contentious in the fight between absolute music and program music, but it definitely won out for some time with critics and audiences. His thematic transformation paralleled and extended Berlioz’s technique of the idee fixe – the recurring theme in the Symphonie fantastique that is constantly reshaped across five movements. Liszt’s chromatic harmonies helped to form Wagner’s style after 1854 (Liszt eventually became Wagner’s father-in-law when Cosima married Wagner, adding a close family tie to the artistic one). His experiments with even divisions of the octave – including octatonic scales (alternating half and whole steps, creating an eight-note scale) and whole-tone scales – had a major impact on Russian and French composers, including Debussy. His harmonic innovations would reverberate well into the twentieth century.

Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)

Anton Bruckner was another key figure who could be counted among the composers of the New German School. He was primarily an organist, quite a virtuoso, and was trained in counterpoint. He served as organist of the Cathedral at Linz before becoming court organist in Vienna (1867–96), a post he held for about thirty years. He was internationally renowned as an organ soloist, taught at the Vienna Conservatory, lectured at the University of Vienna (which awarded him an honorary doctorate around 1891), and was highly regarded there. Bruckner absorbed Wagner’s style and ethos but channeled them into the traditional symphony. He was a devout Catholic and brought a reverent, liturgical approach to sacred texts, uniting the technical resources of nineteenth-century music with deep religious feeling. His symphonies are highly important and were influential on subsequent composers as well.

Bruckner’s Symphonies

Bruckner composed nine numbered symphonies (plus two unnumbered – eleven in total), working very hard at them and frequently revising them so that most exist in two or three versions. He took Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 as his principal model, and this is a key point: everybody saw Beethoven as their model, but it might have been different symphonies that pointed them in different directions. Wagner, for example, said the Ninth was the last true symphony and pointed toward a whole new dimension for music’s future. Bruckner looked at Beethoven’s Ninth in terms of the procedures, the purpose of the symphony, the proportions, and the religious spirit (remember, the Ninth ends with the “Ode to Joy”). Like Beethoven’s Ninth, Bruckner’s first movements often emerge from inchoate intervals and rhythms that gradually coalesce into a main theme. His finales feature chorale-like themes (even without voices) and recycled subjects from earlier movements, so that themes return and take on new meaning in the finale.

The influences of Wagner appear in the large-scale structures, great length, lush harmonies, and sequential repetition of entire passages. Bruckner’s orchestration was also shaped by his experience as an organist: the music unfolds in massive blocks of sound that suggest an organist’s improvisation, as if he were changing stops and shifting registrations on a grand instrument.

Symphony No. 4 (“Romantic”), First Movement (1874–80)

The Symphony No. 4, composed between 1874 and 1880, was dubbed “Romantic” – an unofficial and unusual title for Bruckner, who did not typically give programmatic titles to his symphonies. The first movement opens much like Beethoven’s Ninth: a pianissimo tremolo in the strings creates a vague agitation over which the horns enter with descending and rising fifths and a triple-dotted rhythm. Out of this inchoate, mysterious beginning, a main theme gradually coalesces. Subsequent thematic material includes a birdlike spiccato figure in the first violin (Bruckner himself called it a bird) and a more lyrical theme in the viola. The exposition moves through three keys, recalling Schubert’s practice, and ends in the dominant B-flat. The movement is cast in sonata form but features continuous development – not confined to the development section alone but extending even into the recapitulation, with themes constantly transforming and spinning out. The result is the kind of monumental dimensions for which Bruckner is so celebrated.

Bruckner, Symphony No. 4 – I. Bewegt, nicht zu schnell (Conductor: Heinz Rogner; Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin).

♫ Bruckner, Symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major -- I. Bewegt, nicht zu schnell ♫

Richard Strauss (1864–1949)

The next composer who belongs to this Wagnerian, New German School lineage is Richard Strauss. Born in 1864 and living until 1949, he had a remarkably long life – almost fifty years into the twentieth century – though we are mainly concerned here with the early part of his career. He was the dominant figure in German musical life for most of his career. He was celebrated as a conductor, holding positions at the opera houses of Munich, Weimar, Berlin, and Vienna, and conducting most of the world’s greatest orchestras on numerous international tours, often guest-conducting in England and the Americas. As a composer, he is best remembered for his tone poems, his operas, and his Lieder (art songs).

Strauss focused primarily on tone poems during the 1880s and 1890s, becoming the leading composer of the genre after Liszt. But just around the turn of the century, around 1900, he turned to opera, producing daring works such as Salome (the story of the woman who asked for John the Baptist’s head – a very daring subject), Elektra (1906), the anachronistic comedy Der Rosenkavalier (1909–10), and Ariadne auf Naxos. He continued composing into the 1940s – a longevity complicated by his explicit support of the National Socialists in the 1930s and his prominent role in the Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Chamber of Music) and the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), established in 1933. Other composers were not so fortunate, finding themselves dismissed from these organizations because of their ethnicity or religious beliefs. Strauss remains a complex and controversial figure, but our focus is on his earlier career and his tone poems.

Strauss’s Tone Poems

Tone poems are essentially symphonic poems – Strauss simply preferred the alternative term. They are one-movement orchestral works with a representational or programmatic dimension. As a young composer, Strauss studied the score of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and the experience changed his style profoundly. His tone poems are modeled after Liszt and Berlioz: colorful orchestration, transformation of themes, and vivid, varied programs.

The programs fall into two broad categories. Some are based on literature:

• Don Juan (1888–89), after a poem by Nikolaus Lenau
• Macbeth (1888, revised 1891), after Shakespeare
• Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1896), after the prose-poem by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Don Quixote (1897), after the novel by Miguel de Cervantes

Others draw on personal experience:

• Symphonia domestica (1902–03), an idealized portrait of domestic life
• Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life, 1897–98), openly autobiographical

The programs range from the representational to the philosophical. Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, 1894–95) tends toward the representational end: a comic tale of a trickster’s exploits, complete with realistic details and marginal notes in the printed score. Two themes for Till are used and developed as leitmotifs. The music uses novel kinds of sounds, gestures, and forms, but it still has to stand on its own feet as music – both sides have to be satisfied: the novel sounds that paint a picture and the form that must cohere.

Also sprach Zarathustra, by contrast, is more philosophical – a musical commentary on Nietzsche’s vision that the Christian ethic should be replaced by a superman who transcends conventional morality. While the program is broadly philosophical, certain moments are directly representational, such as the famous opening fanfare depicting Zarathustra’s address to the rising sun in the prologue.

Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 – Opening.

♫ R. Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 ♫

Don Quixote, Op. 35: Themes and Variations 1–2 (NAWM 162)

Don Quixote (1897) is based on Cervantes’s novel of 1605 – the same beloved story that inspired the 1965 musical Man of La Mancha. Don Quixote is obviously a beloved character whom many people have wanted to set in different ways, and the story suits music wonderfully well. The music closely follows the events of the novel, depicting the adventures of the knight Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. Sometimes the depiction is strikingly literal: a windmill that Don Quixote takes for a giant that must be slain, a flock of sheep he mistakes for an army that must be battled. In his fantastical, otherworldly view of these otherwise everyday things, we get the heart of the character.

The subtitle is “Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character,” and the form – a Prologue introducing two principal themes, followed by ten variations and an Epilogue – fits the episodic nature of the knight’s adventures perfectly. Each variation portrays a different adventure, complete with the split personalities and double meanings that run through Cervantes’s novel. The texture is notably chamber-like and beautiful: Strauss conceived the work in contrapuntal lines, with themes attached to particular solo instruments, producing a transparent texture and clarity that we might not find in other works by Strauss. The themes of the two main characters are continuously transformed – the variation form here does not preserve a single harmonic or melodic identity in the traditional sense, but rather takes the two main characters and, through thematic transformation inherited from Liszt, varies them according to the different situations they imagine themselves in.

Theme 1: Don Quixote, “The Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance”

The knight’s theme is carried by a solo cello in D minor, joined by solo violin and English horn (a double-reed instrument sounding a fifth lower than the oboe). The melody soars and sinks twice: even when knocked down, Don Quixote is always renewed by his frustrated idealism, only to be frustrated again. This rising-and-falling contour captures the very essence of the character – a man whose noble aspirations are perpetually thwarted by reality, yet who never stops striving.

Theme 2: Sancho Panza

Sancho Panza’s theme is assigned to bass clarinet, tuba, and solo viola – lower, earthier instruments befitting the squire’s personality. A contemporary commentary noted that this instrumentation was meant to suggest Sancho’s speech: naive, rough, focused only on material things and given to platitudes. The theme is in F major (contrasting with Don Quixote’s D minor) and features a turning gesture and a wide leap that musically evoke a lumbering servant riding on a donkey.

♫ R. Strauss, Don Quixote, Op. 35 -- Theme 1 (Don Quixote) and Theme 2 (Sancho Panza) ♫

Variation 1: Adventure at the Windmills

In the first variation, the two main themes are transformed and set against one another in a kind of abstract conversation between the cello and bass clarinet, each retaining its characteristic instrument. The tilting windmills with their creaking blades are depicted through fast repeated notes that represent the turning blades, col legno (the strings striking with the wood of the bow – a technique we encountered in the fifth movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, the Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath, and which surely gave Strauss ideas), and staccato figures in the flutes and piccolo. All of this sounds wonderfully evocative of windmills. When Don Quixote is knocked off his horse, the orchestra crashes through downward arpeggios by thirds – but the knight, true to form, gets right back up again.

Variation 2: “The Victorious Struggle Against the Army of the Great Emperor Alifanfaron”

The second variation opens with the knight’s theme in the strings, portraying Don Quixote’s attempt to be heroic. He is promptly ridiculed by a mocking transformation of Sancho’s theme. The adventure here is the encounter with a flock of sheep, which Don Quixote mistakes for a hostile army. To depict the bleating of the sheep, the brass and winds employ flutter-tongue – an effect produced by very rapid tongue movements while otherwise playing relatively normally. It is another vivid orchestral effect deployed in service of the narrative.

What Strauss creates across these variations is a dream world: because Don Quixote does not inhabit reality, the normal dimensions of melody and harmony do not really pertain here. It is telling the story of a man who lives in a fantasy, and the music reflects that. Knowing the literary source helps the listener make sense of the musical events, but even without that knowledge the variations stand as compelling orchestral music in their own right. The variation form provides the perfect vehicle for the knight’s episodic adventures, and Strauss’s extraordinary command of orchestral color brings Cervantes’s characters vividly to life.

R. Strauss, Don Quixote, Op. 35 – Complete performance (Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; conductor: G. Pehlivanian).

♫ R. Strauss, Don Quixote, Op. 35 -- Variations 1 and 2 ♫

The Legacy of the New German School

The composers surveyed in this lesson – Liszt, Bruckner, and Strauss – each charted a path that led away from the absolute-music tradition championed by Brahms, yet all remained rooted in the same Beethovenian inheritance. Liszt invented the symphonic poem and the technique of thematic transformation; Bruckner absorbed Wagner’s harmonic language and dramatic scale into the traditional symphony; Strauss brought the tone poem to its highest level of narrative sophistication and orchestral virtuosity. Together they represent a whole other avenue of development in nineteenth-century German musical culture – one that would prove enormously influential on subsequent generations of composers. All of these composers were very influential, and if one follows the story into the twentieth century, one can trace their impact clearly. The disputes between the Brahmsians and the Wagnerians generated great heat in their own time, but from a modern vantage point we can appreciate how both sides contributed indispensably to the richness of the late Romantic repertoire.