Romantic Period
A New Step in Music Since the beginning of
organized music in the Middle Ages,
like all the other fields of creativity
and study, such as art, philosophy, and
architecture, music has made leaps
and bounds in the flow of progression. The
Romantic period was a time
when music began to take on a different meaning. The
music began to become
more subjective as opposed to objective music of the
Classical period.
The artist or composer became much more important as an
individual. An
example of one of these progressions occurring mainly during the
Romantic
period was when composers and audiences alike started turning towards
program
music. Program music is "the term for a nonvocal music that is
associated
with a poem, a story, or some other literary source; the literary
text itself
is the program. This new style of music created waves of joy and
of
controversy that still exist today. This form of music was first derived
to
fulfill a greater need to cease creating and continuing boundaries in
the
separate fields of art. Before this period music and paintings or in this
case
music and literature were not meant to be intertwined. The people did
not see a
need for it since each field was considered a separate entity of
itself. Bent 2
During the romantic period, the general feeling began to
surface that music
could be made even more expressive by channeling it
through literature;
especially poetry. I believe a lot of this had to do with
the new, relaxed frame
of thought for the time period, and the genius of
William Shakespeare’s
writing capabilities. The issue surrounding program
music is that critics
ridicule the idea that the music can actually
illustrate a program. They ask the
question that if the audience did not know
it was program music, then could they
identify it as so, once heard. Some say
that it is entirely possible, and even
would be hard not to while others
claim that there could quite possibly be no
clues to the fashion of program
music. Another argument made by the critics of
program music is music should
be able to stand on its own, with meaning,
feeling, and a general sense or
purpose. With program music, they felt that the
music itself could not stand
alone. However, the people of the Romantic period
did not care. They wanted
program music to increase expressive capabilities, and
to be entertained in a
new fashion. Many of the composers of this time, and
since then have
flourished through the use of program music. Perhaps some of the
most
renowned pieces of music in existence today are forms of program
music.
Hector Berlioz (1803 – 1869) was a truly gifted composer who was
most
definitely inspired by literature; mainly Shakespeare. His composition
Lelio is
a correspondence to the renowned play Hamlet. Probably his best
known piece
though, Symphonie Fantastique was written about a woman that
Berlioz was madly
infatuated with. The Irish Shakespearean actress, Harriet
Smithson, was the Bent
3 object of his affections, and did actually
become his wife for a short time
years after this composition. The remarkable
part about the symphony is that
Berlioz actually had programs made up and
distributed to the audience for the
performance. "A young musician of
unhealthy sensibility and passionate
imagination poisons himself with opium
in a fit lovesick despair. Too weak to
kill him, the dose of drug plunges him
into a heavy sleep attended by the
strangest visions, during which his
sensations, emotions, and memories are
transformed in his diseased mind into
musical thoughts and images."
Berlioz’s symphony was received well and he
ended up getting his beloved, even
though they ended up miserable together.
Another famous work in which this new
form of music was displayed is Mozart’s
Don Giovanni. Mozart used a sort of
foreshadowing in his music to help the
audience along with the story line. In
the second to last scene, Don Giovanni
is carried off to Hell. Before the
curtain opens, the orchestra begins
incorporation a somber tone to signify this
occurrence. He felt that this
foreshadowing made the mood and the music more
interesting. This transition
during the Romantic period, beginning to compose
program music, created a lot
of changes in how composers wrote music, and how
the audience received the
music. Although there were, and still are some
questions and uncertainties in
some people’s minds as to the validity of the
music, program music was an
inspirational change welcomed by most in the
Romantic
era.
Bibliography
Kerman, Joseph. Listen. Third Edition. New York:
Worth Publishers, 1996.
Plantinga, Leon. Romantic Music. London: W. W.
Norton & Company Inc., 1984.
www.home.hkstar.com/~tslw/mozart.html
www.home.pon.net/dougie/berlioz.htm
www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/6014/
www.ozemail.com.au/~phillijr/berlioz.html