62 CHAPTER 29 The Romantic Style in Art and MusicBlack62 Book5
TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)(a father’s desperate effort to save the life of his ailing son).
Here, Schubert’s music mingles the rhythms of the stormy
ride on horseback, the struggle for survival, and the threat-
ening lure of death. Schubert himself died of syphilis at the
age of thirty-one.The Programmatic Symphonies of Berlioz
The French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) began
his first symphony in 1830. An imaginative combination of
the story of Faust and Berlioz’s own life, the Symphonie
fantastiquetells the dramatic tale of Berlioz’s “interminable
and inextinguishable passion”—as he described it—for the
captivating Irish actress Harriet Smithson. Berlioz wrote
the symphony in the first flush of his passion, when he
was only twenty-seven years old. Following an intense
courtship, he married Harriet, only to discover that he and
the woman he idolized were dreadfully mismatched—the
marriage turned Smithson into an alcoholic and Berlioz
into an adulterer.
TheSymphonie fantastiquebelongs to the genre known
as program music, that is, instrumental music endowed
with a specific literary or pictorial content indicated by the
composer. Berlioz was not the first to write music that was
programmatic: in The Four Seasons, Vivaldi had linked
music to poetic phrases, as had Beethoven in his “Pastoral”
Symphony. But Berlioz was the first to build an entire
symphony around a musical motif that tells a story. The
popularity of program music during the nineteenth centu-
ry testifies to the powerful influence of literature upon the
other arts. Berlioz, whose second symphony, Harold in Italy,
was inspired by Byron’s Childe Harold(see chapter 28),
was not alone in his attraction to literary subjects. The
Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886) wrote
symphonic poems based on the myth of Prometheus
and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He also composed the Faust
Symphony, which he dedicated to Berlioz. The Russian
composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) wrote
many programmatic pieces, including the tone poem
Romeo and Juliet. European political events inspired the
composition of nationalistic program music, such as
Beethoven’s Battle Symphony of 1813 (also known as
“Wellington’s Victory”) and Tchaikovsky’s colorful 1812
Overture (1880), which, commemorating Napoleon’s
retreat from Moscow, incorporated portions of the nation-
al anthems of both France and tzarist Russia.
In the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz links a specific
mood or event to a musical phrase, oridée fixe(“fixed
idea”). This recurring motif, becomes the means by which
the composer binds together the individual parts of his dra-
matic narrative. Subtitled “Episode in the Life of an Artist,”
theSymphonie fantastiqueis an account of the young musi-
cian’s opium-induced dream, in which, according to
Berlioz’s program notes, “the Beloved One takes the form of
a melody in his mind, like a fixed idea which is ever return-
ing and which he hears everywhere.”Vivaldi’sFour Seasons(see chapter 23), Beethoven occa-
sionally imitated the sounds of nature. For example, at the
end of the second movement, flute, oboe, and clarinet join
to create bird calls; and a quaveringtremolo(the rapid
repetition of a tone to produce a trembling effect) on the
lower strings suggests the sounds of a murmuring brook.
Some critics regard Beethoven’s last symphony, the
Ninth Symphony (1824), as his greatest work. It is the first
example of a symphony that uses the human voice as a
component of the instrumentation: In the last movement
Beethoven took the unprecedented step of including four
solo voices and a large chorus. The inspiration for the
“Choral Symphony” was a poem by Friedrich Schiller (see
chapter 27): An die Freude(“To Joy”), an ode that cele-
brates the joy of universal brotherhood. The final, choral
movement of this long, ambitious symphony is a brilliant
exposition of Beethoven’s imaginative power and his
defense of a humanistic ideal. At the premier performance
of the symphony in Vienna, the aging composer shared the
stage with the conductor, beating out the tempo for music
he could hear only in his head.Art Songs
The art songs of Beethoven’s Austrian contemporary
Franz Schubert (1797–1828) aptly reflect the nineteenth-
century composer’s ambition to unite poetry and music.
Schubert is credited with originating the Romantic lied
(German for “song,” pl.lieder), an independent song for
solo voice and piano. Theliedis not a song in the tradition-
al sense but, rather, a poem recreated in musical terms. Its
lyric qualities, like those of simple folk songs, are generated
by the poem itself. The lieder of Schubert, Robert
Schumann (1810–1856), and Johannes Brahms (1833–
1897), which set to music the poetry of Heine and Goethe,
among others, are intimate evocations of personal feelings
and moods. They recount tales of love and longing,
describe nature and its moods (some forty songs are related
to water or to fish), or lament the transience of human
happiness.
Among Schubert’s 1000 or so works (which include nine
symphonies, five operas, and numerous chamber pieces) are
600 lieder. Of these, his musical settings for Goethe’s ballads
rank as landmark expressions of the Romantic spirit of
music.Gretchen am Spinnrade(“Gretchen at the Spinning
Wheel”), written when the composer was only seventeen
years old, is based on a poem by Goethe which occurs near
the end of Part One ofFaust. In the piece, Gretchen laments
the absence of her lover Faust and anticipates the sorrows
that their love will bring. Repeated three times are the
poignant lines with which the song opens: “My peace is gone,
my heart is sore:/I shall find it never and never more.” While
the melody and tone color of the voice line convey the sad-
ness expressed in the words of the poem, the propelling piano
line captures the rhythms of the spinning wheel.
Yet another of Schubert’s finest art songs isErlkönig
(“The Erlking”), which combines elements of the natural
(a raging storm), the supernatural (the figure of death in the
person of the legendary king of the elves), and the heroic See Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.BK5_001-141.indd 62BK5_001-141.indd 62 04/12/2009 8:54 AM04/12/2009 8:54 AM