Chapter 16: The Early Romantics Early Romantic Program Music

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Chapter 16 The Early RomanticsEarly Romantic
Program Music
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Key Terms

• program music
• concert overture
• program symphony
• idée fixe
• Dies irae
• col legno

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Program Music

• instrumental music associated with poems,
  stories, etc.
• intimately tied with nonmusical ideas
• different genres
• concert overture
• program symphony
• symphonic poem
• many important composers wrote in these genres

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Franz Liszt (18111886)

• Hungarian composer
• learned music at Esterházy estate
• played for Beethoven at age 11
• virtuoso pianist based in Paris
• dazzled audiences with technique
• dashing looks, personality, and affairs
• wrote fiercely difficult piano music
• second career as conductor in Weimar
• wrote symphonic poems championed Wagner

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Felix Mendelssohn (18091847)

• from upper-class family of bankers
• successful composer, pianist, organist,
  conductor, and educator
• founded Leipzig Conservatory
• revived Bachs St. Matthew Passion
• firm foundation in Classical technique
• wrote concert overtures, oratorios, piano works,
  symphonies, etc.

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Fanny Mendelssohn (18051847)

• Felixs equally talented sister
• a highly prolific composer
• oratorios, piano works, chamber music, etc.
• weekly performances at Mendelssohn home
• married painter Wilhelm Hensel
• women composers were not taken seriously
• little of her music was published
• rarely performed outside the home

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The Concert Overture

• a single-movement orchestral work for concert
  performance
• structure rooted in sonata form
• often based on play, long poem, or novel
• resembles opera overture without an opera
• an important step from opera overture to
  symphonic poem
• Mendelssohns A Midsummer Nights Dream and the
  Hebrides Overture

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Hector Berlioz (18031869)

• son of a country doctor in France
• left medical school for Paris Conservatory
• made living as writer on music
• wrote unprecented, ambitious program symphonies
• extraordinary, imaginative orchestration
• inspired by literature (Shakespeare, Virgil)
• toured as conductor of his own music

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The Program Symphony

• the Romantic eras most grandiose orchestral
  genre
• more radical approach than the concert overture
• an entire symphony with a program
• each movement tells part of the story
• story often published in the program

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Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony

• program symphony in 5 movements
• lurid autobiographical fantasy
• inspired by his unrequited love for Shakespearean
  actress Harriet Smithson
• displays unprecedented originality
• imaginative colors drawn from huge orchestra
• use of idée fixe in every movement

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Idée Fixe

• fixed idea, a term popular in medical
  literature of the day
• theme represents the composers beloved
  (Smithson)
• recurs in all 5 movements
• symbolizes each appearance of the beloved

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Movement Format of Fantastic Symphony

• related to Classical symphony format
• middle two movements reversed
• movements IV and V unprecedented
• I fast tempo, sonata form, slow intro
• II moderate tempo, triple meter waltz
• III the slow movement
• IV moderate tempo a march
• V fast tempo, free form follows story

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Fantastic Symphony

• The Program of the Symphony
• A young musician of unhealthy sensibility and
  passionate imagination poisons himself with opium
  in a fit of lovesick despair. Too weak to kill
  him, the dose of the 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. Even the woman
  he loves becomes a melody to him, an idée fixe as
  it were, that he finds and hears everywhere.

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The Program I

• Movement 1 Reveries, Passions
• First he recalls the soul-sickness, the aimless
  passions, the baseless depressions and elations
  that he felt before first seeing his loved one
  then the volcanic love that she instantly
  inspired in him his jealous furies his return
  to tenderness his religious consolations.

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The Program II

• Movement 2 A Ball
• He encounters his beloved at a ball, in the midst
  of a noisy, brilliant party.

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The Program III

• Movement 3 Scene in the Country
• On a summer evening in the country, he hears two
  shepherds piping in dialogue. The pastoral duet,
  the location, the light rustling of trees stirred
  gently by the wind, some newly conceived grounds
  for hopeall this gives him a feeling of
  unaccustomed calm. But she appears again. . . .
  what if she is deceiving him?

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The Program IV

• Movement 4 March to the Scaffold
• He dreams he has killed his beloved, that he is
  condemned to death and led to execution. A march
  accompanies the procession, now gloomy and wild,
  now brilliant and grand. Finally the idée fixe
  appears for a moment, to be cut off by the fall
  of the axe.

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The Program V

• Movement 5 Dream of a Witches Sabbath
• He finds himself at a Witches Sabbath. . . .
  Unearthly sounds, groans, shrieks of laughter,
  distant cries echoed by other cries. The
  beloveds melody is heard, but it has lost its
  character of nobility and timidity. It is she who
  comes to the Sabbath! At her arrival, a roar of
  joy. She joins in the devilish orgies. A funeral
  knell burlesque of the Dies irae.

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Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony, V

• the most audacious movement yet
• orchestral sound effects reign
• idée fixe now treated as vulgar parody
• on piccolo clarinet with carnival ornaments
• his beloved is the witches guest of honor

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Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony, V

• composers funeral at same time
• solemn Dies irae chant ridiculed by witches

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Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony, V

• raucous Witches Round Dance is a fugue
• Round Dance and Dies irae combine at climax
• witches parodying the church melody

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Romantic Features of Fantastic Symphony

• grandiose in scope and scale
• program symphony for large orchestra
• blurs the lines between music, literature,
  theater, and autobiography
• cyclic work, unified by idée fixe
• fascination with supernatural, macabre
• new orchestral colors, expressive effects,
  unusual forms
• only 39 years after Haydns Symphony No. 95!