Romanticism.

A movement or, more commonly, period of cultural history.

When understood as a period, Romanticism is usually
identified with either the first half or the whole of the 19th
century. The term is used with reference primarily to the
arts, but it can also embrace philosophy, socio-political
history and, more widely, the ‘spirit’ of the era.
JIM SAMSON
Romanticism
1. History of usage.
In literature Romanticism is commonly taken to cover
roughly the first half of the 19th century, though the
philosophical origins of the movement lie well back in the
previous century. Literary Romanticism took its definitive
form in the late 18th century in polemical and creative
writings by the Schlegel brothers and their circle in
Germany, and in the early 19th century by Wordsworth and
Coleridge in England, and by Lamartine and Hugo in
France. It is usually accepted that Romantic features
continued to exert an influence after the middle of the
century, but as a period term ‘Romanticism’ gives way at
that point to ‘Realism’ and ‘Symbolism’, movements
associated initially with French writers. Historians of the
visual arts have conventionally adopted a broadly similar
chronology, identifying early Romantics such as Géricault
and Delacroix in France, Turner in England and Caspar
David Friedrich in Germany, and again arguing for a
dispersal of the original Romantic impetus following the
middle of the century (1863 is a key date, with the death of
Delacroix and the Salon des refusés). In music, however,
the Romantic movement has often been located somewhat
later, beginning in the post-Beethoven era (c1830) and
continuing into the early 20th century, though terms such as
‘Late-Romantic’ and ‘Neo-Romantic’ are applied by some
historians to the later stages of this period.
Well before its appropriation by late 18th-century writers to
define a movement in art, the adjective ‘romantic’ already
had a decisive meaning. It took its name from the
ancient lingua romana of France, and from derived
Romance literatures, especially ‘romances’ in both verse
and prose (e.g. of Arthur, of Charlemagne and of the
Iberian peninsula). In the 17th century the term was
adopted, initially in England, to describe the perceived tone
or character of those literatures, one defined by an
opposition to the real, the concrete, the predictable and the
rational. By the middle of the 18th century both the specific
evocation of an idealized medieval heritage and a more
generalized embrace of the irrational, the fantastic and the
freely imaginative were firmly established meanings of the
word in England and France. The introduction of the term
as a generalized literary label is usually attributed to
German writers, in particular Friedrich Schlegel in his
contributions to Das Athenäum, founded in 1798, Jean Paul
in his Vorschule der Ästhetik of 1804, and August Schlegel
in his lectures Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur of
1809–11, where the spontaneity of the medieval romance is
contrasted favourably with a rule-bound (French) ‘Classical’
tradition. It should be noted that within some philosophical
systems of the 19th century, notably Hegel's, a ‘Romantic
period’ is taken to embrace the arts of this entire era, from
the Middle Ages through to the 19th century.
Musical applications followed on from literary, though there
are isolated references in the late 18th century, as in
Grétry's Mémoires of 1789. Indeed throughout
the Mémoires, Grétry's language is already that of romantic
idealism: only through sensitivity to poetry and attunement
to the inner truths of the emotions will a composer come to
greatness, to ‘genius’. Grétry's text is of some interest, not
just because it offers a distinctively French perspective on a
subject later to be dominated by German thought (he
favoured dramatic over instrumental music and argued for
melodic rather than harmonic priority), but also because its
obvious and acknowledged debt to Rousseau establishes a
direct musical link with one of the major influences on the
Romantic movement generally. Rousseau's belief that the
artist should aspire, through spontaneity of expression,
towards the dignity of ‘natural man’ left its mark on both
Goethe and Schiller, and played some part in the formation
of the Romantic (usually tragic) hero in literature generally.
One might regard Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen
Werthers (1774) as the exemplary work in this respect, and
it caught the imagination of composers as well as writers.
Rousseau also inspired that idealization of nature and the
‘folk’ which was an important dimension of early
Romanticism, notably in Herder. Here too there was a
musical resonance in an increasing interest in folksongs in
the late 18th century, with notable consequences for the
development of the lied. Rousseau's specific writings on
music also had a marked influence. In several entries of
his Dictionnaire de musique (on ‘genius’, the ‘pathetic’,
‘expression’ and especially ‘imitation’), he took a step
beyond an affective towards an expressive aesthetic,
celebrating the elusive, suggestive powers of music in ways
that depart significantly from Classical thought.
A more sustained application of the term ‘Romantic’ to
music awaited E.T.A. Hoffmann's extended review of
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (1810), together with his
subsequent article on Beethoven's instrumental music
(1813). The major significance of these essays lies in their
synthesis of existing aspects of Romantic theory, the
transfer of these to the musical sphere, and a prophetic
inference that music should be regarded as the supreme
Romantic art. The concept of creativity embraced by
Hoffmann was already familiar from the Schlegel brothers
and was shared by a younger generation of German
writers, notably Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Wackenroder and
Jean Paul. Above all, that concept highlighted the privilege
attaching to the individual creative genius. Characteristics
that had already been attributed to art in general within
philosophical aesthetics of the late 18th century – its
capacity to access a plane beyond the real (variously
characterized as the transcendental, the inexpressible or
the infinite), its power to arouse the strongest emotions,
and its value as a mode of intuitive knowledge of the world
– were now particularized, referring to the individual creator
and the individual (original and ‘great’) work of art.
Moreover, such characteristics were associated specifically
with the potency of the creative imagination. The vision or
dream-world of the Romantic artist, informed and made
aesthetically whole (unified) by his genius, would give the
rest of humanity a privileged insight into reality. It is worth
stressing the notion of unification here, since Hoffmann
supported his central aesthetic insight with detailed
technical descriptions of a kind one might today describe as
analytical.
In applying such ideas to Beethoven, and also in
preparatory measure to Haydn and Mozart, Hoffmann drew
together insights from both criticism and philosophy: he
fused ideas already associated with the term ‘Romantic’,
especially as used by younger German writers of the early
1800s to signify an opposition to the strictures of Classical
models, with a tendency (common to several philosophical
writings though variously regarded as a weakness or a
strength) to classify music as the primary art of the
emotions. This conjunction cleared the path for a powerful
19th-century idea: the pre-eminence of music, and
specifically of instrumental or ‘absolute’ music. (It is worth
adding that this idea, central to German thought and
German music, played a more peripheral role in non-
German cultures). Thus it was precisely music's
independence of reference, its imageless, ineffable,
unknowable quality, that gave it privileged access to the
‘wonderful, infinite spirit-kingdom’. The idea would be given
its most explicit philosophical expression within
Schopenhauer's system, where music, as the only non-
representational art, speaks directly of the noumenal (as
opposed to the phenomenal) world. But long before the
impact of Schopenhauer's seminal work was fully registered
(in the second half of the 19th century), music had come to
be viewed, at least within one major strand of German
thought, as the very essence of Romanticism. Schumann,
for instance, remarked that ‘it is scarcely credible that a
distinct Romantic school could be formed in music, which is
itself Romantic’.
It is striking that Hoffmann described not just Beethoven,
but also Mozart and to a lesser extent Haydn, as Romantic
composers. In other words, he identified Romantic
tendencies in the music of the late 18th century, parallelling
rather than succeeding comparable tendencies in literature.
This conformed to a general usage of the term from around
1800. In the same year as Hoffmann's famous review of the
Fifth Symphony, for instance, Johann Reichardt described
Haydn and Mozart as Romantic composers. And some
years later Goethe confirmed this usage by describing an
antithesis of Classical and Romantic art, characterized in
terms of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ tendencies respectively.
Significantly, his account of Romanticism (‘the new fantastic
essence … the longing and restlessness, bursting all
bounds and losing itself in the infinite’) drew on
contemporary music (Beethoven) as well as on
contemporary literature (Schiller). In such early 19th-
century polemics Romanticism was clearly identified as a
movement concurrent with Classicism rather than a period
succeeding it.
The idea that Mozart as well as Beethoven might be
regarded as a Romantic remained current to around the
1840s, at which point a change in the understanding of
Romanticism seems to have occurred, allowing it to emerge
as a definable period term in something like the modern
sense. This perspective sharpened subsequently in the
measure that the Viennese ‘classics’ became literally that,
with all the Hellenistic connotations. The formation of a
classical canon – a central theme of 19th-century music
history – carried with it the corollary that modern,
‘Romantic’ music defined itself increasingly through its
separation from a Classical golden age, though the position
of Beethoven remained purposefully ambivalent within this
chronology. Nor is it a coincidence that the modern sense
of a Romantic period crystallized around the middle of the
19th century, just when bourgeois musical life in Europe
was stabilizing into institutions expressly designed to
promote a validating repertory of classical music. An early
suggestion that there might be a real division between
Classical and Romantic periods is found in Karl August
Kahlert, who (in 1848) described Mozart as ‘the most truly
Classical of all composers’ and Beethoven as ‘a Romantic
composer’, whose ‘tremendous hold over the minds of his
contemporaries’ provided the means by which ‘music's
Romanticism made its presence felt’. Kahlert's proposal
that Beethoven inaugurated a ‘Romantic era’ already
approaches modern usage, even if his later remarks
suggest that he had by no means lost sight of an earlier
understanding of the term: ‘The contrast between the
Classical and the Romantic will none the less continue,
Classical composers being more interested in the formal
structure of music, Romantic composers in free,
untrammelled expression’.
It was later in the 19th century, when music history was
subjected to the quasi-scientific study of styles, notably in
the work of Guido Adler, that a cleaner separation of
Classical and Romantic periods was proposed. Adler was a
key figure in the emergent discipline of Musikwissenschaft,
and as that discipline congealed into established themes
and categories the division of history into style periods was
to a degree formalized. For Adler the Romantic movement
crystallized (or achieved full maturity, to adopt his own
organic model) in the post-Beethoven generation of Chopin,
Schumann, Berlioz and Liszt. Beethoven and Schubert
were viewed as ‘transitional’ but linked essentially to so-
called Viennese Classicism. From this perspective
(positioned around 1900), the composers of the New
German School, together with several leading composers
from late 19th-century nationalist schools, were classified
not as Romantics but as ‘moderns’ or even in some cases
as ‘realists’, and that view remained largely intact until the
upheavals of the early years of the 20th century cast new
light on their achievements. 20th-century music historians
have wavered between 1790 and 1830 as starting-points of
Romanticism, and have often refined the chronology by
identifying late 18th-century movements such as Sturm und
Drang and Empfindsamkeit – in C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and
Mozart – as ‘pre-Romantic’. Inevitably, too, they have
reconsidered the classification of late 19th-century music.
Probably the most common tendency (as, for instance, in
Alfred Einstein and Donald Grout) has been to regard the
radical changes in musical syntax of the early 1900s as a
natural caesura, and thus to extend the Romantic period
through to the first decade of the 20th century, at which
point it may be understood to give way to Modernism.
There are, however, two significant variants of this model.
Several historians (Paul Henry Lang, Peter Rummenhöller
and Carl Dahlhaus among them) have been anxious to
draw a line between the two halves of the 19th century, and
have employed such terms as ‘Neo-Romanticism’ to
describe its second half. An old guard of Romantic
composers died or stopped composing around the middle
of the century (Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann), and a
new, very different generation came to maturity (Brahms,
Bruckner, Franck). For both Liszt and Wagner, moreover,
the mid-century signalled new creative directions, with
important consequences for the wider world of music.
According to this view, articulated most forcefully by
Rummenhöller, the heyday of musical Romanticism lay in
the 1830s and 40s. Following the mid-century there was a
distinct change of tone – a new and often selfconscious
working-out of the ideals of Romanticism, an earnest
preoccupation with forms, systems and theories, and at
times too an anti-subjectivism remote from the exuberance
and spontaneity of the earlier movement.
The second variant (associated above all with Friedrich
Blume) identifies a single Classic-Romantic era reaching
back into the 18th century and extending well into the 20th.
To some extent this view seeks to recover something of the
early 19th-century sense of the term as a movement or
tendency running concurrently with Classicism. It is striking,
moreover, that even the patterns of more recent, pre-World
War II music history (expressionism, neo-Classicism) can
be absorbed comfortably within Blume's larger scheme.
Romanticism
2. Meaning.
The term ‘Romanticism’, whether understood as a
movement or as a period, has thus notoriously resisted
synoptic definition. Its students have preferred lengthy
typologies of Romantic characteristics, registering their
contradictions as well as their similarities, and in several
cases citing contradictoriness as itself a defining feature.
Yet, as Lilian Furst has argued, such typologies are as
dangerous as they may be helpful. The principal danger is
that the effects will obscure, or even be mistaken for, the
causes. It is perhaps best to avoid definition altogether, and
to begin rather with context, so that primary causes may be
at least partly revealed. Such an approach would regard
Romanticism as the counterpart within imaginative culture
to the rise of political liberalism (given radical expression in
an age of revolution) and to the parallel investment in
subjectivity within philosophical systems, notably those of
Kant and his successors within German idealist thought,
Fichte and Schelling. Above all, Romanticism shared with
these developments in political and intellectual history the
invention or re-invention of the individual as a potent
enabling force. Indeed, this focus on the individual – on the
self – takes us close to one of two ‘essential’ meanings of
Romanticism. The Romantic artist, privileged by his genius,
would reveal the world in expressing himself, since the
world (according to the influential position established by
Kant) was grounded in the self. Hence the growing
importance of expression as a source of aesthetic value,
overriding the claims of formal propriety and convention.
Music in particular was viewed as a medium of expression
above all else, and crucially its power of expression was at
the same time a form of cognition, albeit one precariously
poised between sensory perception and intellectual
understanding, between sensus and ratio.
Undoubtedly the French Revolution and its aftermath
created the conditions in which this pretension might be
sustained. As music (like art in general) disengaged itself
increasingly from existing social institutions, composers
were inclined – if not always able – to ‘make their own
statement’. It is not difficult to see why Beethoven should
have acquired such an exemplary status for the Romantic
generation in this respect. Even if his political commitment
was to a generalized, abstract and utopian notion of liberty,
it was not something superimposed on his activity as a
composer, but a shaping factor of that activity. As a
committed or engaged artist, he promoted – and
bequeathed to the later 19th century – an increasingly
influential view of music as a discourse of ideas as much as
an object of beauty. His directly ideological motivation
easily transcended earlier attempts to express the politics
of liberalism through music, and might be compared rather
to the ‘social Romanticism’ which formed a significant
strand of early 19th-century literature. For later composers,
that motivation was increasingly difficult to sustain,
especially in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. Yet
even when it was either lost to formalism (Brahms,
Bruckner) or diffused into autobiography and metaphysics
(Berlioz, Mahler), it left its trace in the ambition and
pretension of the musical work, its quest for an epic status.
This invokes a second essential meaning of Romanticism,
one that generates considerable tension with the first. It
might be described as an investment in the self-contained,
closed work of art. There was a growing tendency to regard
musical works in particular as monads, containing their own
meaning rather than exemplifying a genre, articulating a
style or confirming an institution. Moreover, this ‘work
concept’, itself a product of the growing autonomy of the
aesthetic, resulted in a significant change of focus in the
relation between art and the world, as mimesis (imitation)
made way for what has been termed an ‘ideology of
organicism’. Through the creation of monadic, organically
unified works, art was presumed to project an idealized
image of what the world is or, more pertinently, of what it
might become. And ‘absolute’ music, free of any obvious
representational capacity, was especially well placed to
bear the burden of this meaning.
Several manifestations of these two central facets of the
Romantic ideology are apparent in early 19th-century
music. Under pressure of a powerful individualism, there
was a change in the nature and role of virtuosity, for
instance. The bravura styles of such post-Classical
composers as Hummel and Weber, intimately linked to the
rise of the public concert, acquired new layers of meaning
under the weight of Romantic individualism. The career and
reception of Paganini is one obvious example of this. But
an even more potent archetype of the transformation of
post-Classical into Romantic virtuosity was the
recomposition by Liszt of his 1826 Etude en douze
exercises, first as the Douze grandes études of 1837 and
then as the Douze études d'exécution transcendante of
1851. The second set in particular exhibited the virtuoso as
Romantic hero, ‘overcoming’ his instrument in a powerful
symbol of transcendence. The third set sustained this
position, but at the same time threatened to displace it by
proposing the composer (rather than the virtuoso) as hero.
Moreover, Liszt's revisions at this third stage supported a
set of newly introduced poetic titles, drawing suggestively
on Hugo, medieval romance, the cult of nature and the
dream-world of the artist.
This use of poetic titles was itself a further manifestation of
Romanticism, signalling music's putative expressive
powers, while at the same time securing its greater status
or ‘dignity’. The latter point is important. It was a key
motivation underlying the marked inclination of post-
Beethoven composers to look outwards to the other arts,
and especially to poetry. This tendency was given its
clearest expression, of course, in the development of the
art song, and especially the lied. Indeed the art song might
sustain a claim to be the quintessential Romantic genre,
born with the early Romantics, fading with the rise of
Modernism and surviving in the 20th century where the
spirit of Romanticism survives. In its intimate, confessional
character it epitomized the autobiographical character of
Romantic art. In its narrative, descriptive aspects it reflected
the programmatic, referentialist tendencies of the music of
the period. In its evocation of folksong it echoed a wider
19th-century idealization of the Volksgeist. And above all in
its response to the new lyric poetry of the early 19th century
it provided a model of the Romantic impulse towards a
fusion of the arts, an impulse which would be given
theoretical, if not always practical, formulation in Wagner.
The category ‘poetic’ extended well beyond any specific
literary or musical genre, however. Above all, it embraced
the concrete (epic) expression of that lofty idealism to which
the Romantics aspired, the attempt to elevate art to a
powerful metaphysical status. And it is in this sense that it
became a part of Liszt's renovative programme for an
instrumental music that might itself become the highest
form of poetry through its association with a poetic idea.
Liszt's conflation of music and the poetic required well-
known topics – real or fictional heroes from world literature
and known legend – so that the programme might take on
the character of an essential and familiar background,
orientating communication rather in the nature of a genre
title. One theme of this kind to which composers constantly
returned was the Faust legend, especially as represented
by Goethe. This touched a nerve close to the heart of
Romanticism. For many 19th-century artists, including
composers, Goethe's masterpiece seemed the perfect
symbol of humanity's new-found independence,
representing the human being as a visionary whose quest
for knowledge of the world and of the self would admit no
constraining influence, however drastic the consequences.
Faust challenged the Godhead, and Romantic composers
responded.
Yet poetic programmes were by no means confined to the
heroes of world literature. For some composers, the licence
of the programme invited music to attempt to express the
beauties and terrors of nature, now sublime and ordered,
now destructive and irrational; for others it was the
invocation of a glorious, idealized past that appealed, as
either a nostalgic retreat from, or a necessary validation of,
the present; for yet others an exotic dream-world of folktale
and legend, of grotesquerie and fantasy, became their
alternative reality. And most common of all were nationalist
themes. The attempt by so many composers to lend their
support to nationalist causes is revealing both of the
unprecedented ambition of music in the Romantic era, and
of a widespread belief in its expressive competence. As the
century unfolded, an ever clearer differentiation between
national styles was actively cultivated, influencing Italy,
Germany and France every bit as much as Russia and east
central Europe. Nationalist projects were registered by
musical institutions (national theatres, publishing projects
and the like), by subject matter (national histories and
myths) and by musical style (the rediscovery or
manufacture of ancient stylistic roots, and of course the cult
of folksong). This last is of special importance. Indeed, the
role of folksong in colouring the musical styles of the
century could scarcely be overestimated. And the
underlying impulse was Romantic to the core – a
characteristically Rousseau-esque notion (adopted and
transmitted by Herder) that the ‘spirit of the people’, which
quickly became synonymous with the ‘spirit of the nation’, is
embodied in its folk music, as in its language.
Whatever its subject matter, the status of ‘poetic’
(programme) music was hotly debated in late 19th-century
music criticism, and it naturally invoked the polemically
related concept of absolute music. We need to be clear that
absolute music was more a metaphysical than a technical
concept. Far from requiring an alliance with poetry to
achieve its full dignity, the absolute musical work was
deemed to be uniquely privileged. Through organicism it
would establish a purpose in nature, healing the division of
subject and object by uniting both in the self. The unified
work would thus transcend the divisions of the self, its
individual moments cohering in a whole which might
present a sort of utopian promise; in short, it could stand for
the indivisible Absolute, beloved of idealist thought. Viewed
in these terms, the rival claims of poetic and absolute music
echoed conflicting early 19th-century positions concerning
the meaning and classification of music, positions
articulated above all by Hegel and Schopenhauer. But the
claims themselves were argued out later in the century – by
critics and historians such as Karl Brendel and Hanslick, as
well as by leading composers such as Liszt, Brahms and
Wagner. There may be a case for according special
privilege to Wagner in this debate. Dahlhaus has argued
that Wagner's apparently contradictory views on the role of
music in the music drama established a kind of synthesis
between poetic and absolute music, a single ‘twofold truth’,
which recognized that music may serve poetry on a
compositional level while embodying it on a metaphysical
level. The potency of this idea lies in its implicit proposal
that Wagner might indeed be seen to embrace the
apparently contradictory tendencies of a Romantic
aesthetic.
Romanticism
3. Styles.
It is arguable that any attempt to define a Romantic period
in narrow stylistic terms will founder on inherent diversities.
How do we deal with neo-classical tendencies in
Mendelssohn and Brahms, with realists such as
Musorgsky, or even with the Italian operatic tradition, which
although clearly influenced by the Romantic ideology,
remained essentially separate from it? More radically, how
do we accommodate that extensive repertory of ephemeral
music that formed the mainstay of public taste, to say
nothing of publishers' incomes, during much of the 19th
century? Such difficulties suggest that we are on safer
ground considering Romanticism in relation to ideas and
motivations rather than styles, and that if we must invoke
styles, we will do better to confine the term to a description
of the larger tendencies flowing from those ideas and
motivations that apply it to the period as a whole. Such
tendencies were dictated above all by the investment in
subjectivity and the ideology of organicism, in short by the
two essential meanings outlined above. And since both
these projects were born of the Enlightenment and ran into
difficulties with the rise of Modernism in the 20th century,
there are perhaps further grounds for considering this
period (roughly from the late 18th century to the early 20th)
as something like a unit. In technical terms, then, we would
trace some of the effects of an expressive aesthetic,
notably on harmonic practice, while recognizing the
arguably opposing impulse towards organically unified
works, notably in thematic working.
One strength of this chronology, essentially that of Blume,
is its implicit recognition that the structural foundations of
most Romantic music remain firmly embedded in late 18th-
century Classical practice. Even the rhetoric of gestural
contrast, so characteristic of the Romantic century and so
neatly embodied in the name and character of its
archetypal medium, the pianoforte, accentuated rather than
displaced Classical tendencies. What really changed in the
19th century was the weighting of existing components of
musical syntax rather than the components themselves.
Under the expressive imperative there was a subtle but
decisive shift in the balance between the diatonic and
chromatic elements of a tonal structure, for instance, and
this operated both at the level of the musical phrase, and,
through far-reaching modulation schemes (tonicizing non-
diatonic scale degrees), that of the musical work as a
whole. There was no obvious dividing-line between
Classical and Romantic practice in this respect. Yet by the
late 19th century, notably in works by Wagner, Reger,
Mahler and Schoenberg, the capacity of tonal harmony to
shape and direct the musical phrase was already
compromised. Likewise there was a shift in the balance
between triadic and dissonant harmonies, culminating in
the poignant dissonance of some Wolf songs, for example,
or alternatively in the aggressive dissonance of Richard
Strauss's Salome and Elektra. Here, too, there was a threat
to an underlying tonal structure. As Schoenberg later
remarked of the tonal crisis of 1908–9: ‘The overwhelming
multitude of dissonances cannot be counterbalanced any
longer by occasional returns to such tonic triads as
represent a key’. In short, the increasing weight of both
chromatic and dissonant elements prepared the ground for
those radical changes of syntax which accompanied the
rise of modernism.
Thematically, we can identify two opposing tendencies in
Romanticism, and again both were rooted in late 18th-
century practice. The melodic-motivic balance characteristic
of that practice separated out into sustained songlike
melody on one hand, and an ever more closely integrated
motivic process on the other. In some late 19th-century
music, notably in Brahms, these two tendencies achieved a
new balance or synthesis, where a powerful motivic rigour
informed the melodic process. The term ‘developing
variation’ has sometimes been used (particularly by
Schoenberg) to describe this tendency in Brahms, and it
tells a yet larger story, easily relatable to an ideology of
organicism. Like the thematic transformation of Liszt and
Wagner, it signifies the enhanced structural weight
assigned to thematic working in late 19th-century music in
response to a weakening tonal foundation. In this respect
Webern identified a kind of ideal when he remarked of
Schoenberg's First String Quartet: ‘There is … not a single
note … that does not have thematic basis. If there is a
connection with another composer then that composer is
Johannes Brahms’. This was symptomatic of a more
general preoccupation with unity, with the integration of part
and whole, which would find its culminating expression in
the 12-note technique devised by Schoenberg in the early
1920s. That technique formalized the late 19th-century
perception that music took its unity from a Grundgestalt, a
single basic shape – in effect the basic ‘idea’ of the piece.
Thus Wagner, writing of Beethoven: ‘At every point in the
score he would have to look both before and after, seeing
the whole in each part and each part contributing to the
whole’; and of the Ring: ‘[It] turned out to be a firmly
entwined unity. There is scarcely a bar in the orchestral
writing that doesn't develop out of preceding motives’.
Indeed, Wagner might well be identified as a determinate
pivotal stage in the progression from a Classic-Romantic to
a modern syntax, the point at which ‘statement’ and
‘development’ are fused in endless melody.
There were distinctive national variants to these larger
tendencies in harmonic and thematic process, and of these
the achievements of Russian composers merit special
mention. In Russia, modal and symmetrical chromaticisms
supported a uniquely colourful, often exotic and pictorial
blend of national Romanticism, distinctly at odds with
Austro-German introspection. The harmonic practice of
19th-century Russian composers, together with a thematic
process favouring melodic repetition and variation over
motivic working, and a tendency to give unprecedented
structural status to timbre, texture and rhythm, would later
prove of special importance to early 20th-century
modernists working outside Austria and Germany, notably
Debussy, Janáček and Stravinsky. There was here a real
source of renewal, as national Romanticism was
imperceptibly transmuted into realism and modernism,
affording a late 19th-century alternative to, rather than an
extension of, the Romantic aesthetic. To a very large
extent, Russian music managed to avoid or bypass the
expressionist crisis so characteristic of central European
music at the turn of the century.
It is to that expressionist crisis we must turn if we are to
chart the closing stages of Romanticism in music, at least in
its 19th-century guise. Through the uncompromising
agency of an Expressionslogik, a ‘law of feeling’, an
essentially Romantic subjectivity was finally given its head,
resulting in a singularly radical reorientation of musical
styles and musical syntax, nothing less than a challenge to
several centuries of harmonic tonality. Long established,
historically sedimented forms and conventions were all but
burnt out in the intensity of this impulse, and nowhere more
so than in the fiercely idealistic modernist (and
predominantly Jewish) circles of a deeply divided Vienna.
This was truly the cusp ‘between Romanticism and
Modernism’, to borrow the title of a thoughtful commentary
by Dahlhaus. The massive tensions so characteristic of the
music of Mahler and of the Second Viennese School –
most obvious in Schoenberg, but discernible in different
ways in Berg and Webern too – gave supreme expression
to these crucial stages of a disintegrating Romantic
heritage in central Europe. They were also the birth-pangs
of a new musical world.