Samson, Jim. 2000. Romanticism. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Romanticismo.

Un movimiento o, más comúnmente, un período de historia cultural. Comprendido como período, el romanticismo es identificado usualmente con la primera mitad o todo el siglo XIX. El término es usado en referencia principalmente a las artes, pero puede abarcar filosofía, historia socio política y, más ampliamente, el ‘espíritu’ de la época.

1. Historia del uso

En literatura el romanticismo comúnmente se considera que cubre la primera mitad del siglo XIX, aunque los orígenes filosóficos del movimiento están bien dentro del siglo anterior. El romanticismo literario tomó su forma definitiva a fin del siglo XVIII en los escritos polémicos y creativos de los hermanos Schlegel y su círculo en Alemania, y a principios del siglo XIX por Wordsworth y Coleridge en Inglaterra, y Lamartine y Hugo en Francia. Usualmente se acepta que los rasgos románticos siguieron ejerciendo su influencia después de la mitad del siglo, pero como período el término ‘Romanticismo’ da lugar en ese punto al ‘Realismo’ y al ‘Simbolismo’, movimientos asociados inicialmente con escritores franceses. Los historiadores de las artes visuales convencionalmente han adoptado una cronología ampliamente similar, identificando a románticos tempranos como Géricault y Delacroix en Francia, Turner en Inglaterra y Caspar David Friedrich en Alemania, y nuevamente consideran que el ímpetu romántico inicial se dispersa luego de la mitad del siglo (1863 es una fecha clave, con la muerte de Delacroix y el Salon des refusés). En música, sin embargo, el movimiento romántico frecuentemente se coloca un tanto más tarde, comenzando en la era post-Beethoven (c1830) y continuando a principios del siglo XX, aunque algunos historiadores usan expresiones como ‘romántico tardío’ y ‘neo-romántico’ para describir las últimas etapas de este período.

Mucho antes de su apropiación por escritores tardíos del siglo XVIII para definir un movimiento en arte, el adjetivo ‘romántico’ ya tenía un significado decisivo. Tomó su nombre de la antigua lingua romana de Francia, y de literaturas romance derivadas, especialmente ‘romances’ tanto en verso como en prosa (por ejemplo, de Carlomagno y de la península ibérica). En el siglo XVII el término fue adoptado, inicialmente en Inglaterra, para describir el tono o el carácter de esas literaturas, definido por la oposición a lo real, lo concreto, lo predecible y lo racional. A mediados del siglo XVIII tanto la evocación específica de una herencia medieval idealizada y una adopción generalizada de lo irracional, lo fantástico y la libre imaginación fueron significados fuertemente establecidos de la palabra en Inglaterra y Francia. La introducción del término como una etiqueta literaria es atribuida generalmente a escritores alemanes, en particular Friedrich Schlegel en sus contribuciones a Das Athenäum, fundado en 1798, Jean Paul en su Vorschule der Ästhetik de 1804, y August Schlegel en sus lecciones Über dramatische Kunst un Litteratur de 1809-11, donde la espontaneidad del romance medieval es contrastada favorablemente con la tradición clásica (francesa) limitada por las reglas. Debe destacarse que dentro de algunos sistemas filosóficos del siglo XIX, particularmente el de Hegel, se considera que el ‘Período Romántico’ abarca las artes de toda esta era, desde la edad media hasta el siglo XIX.

Las aplicaciones en música siguieron a las literarias, aunque hay algunas referencias aisladas a fin del siglo XVIII, como en las Mémoires de Gréty de 1789. Efectivamente, a lo largo de sus Mémoires, el lenguaje de Gréty ya es el del idealismo romántico: sólo a través de la sensibilidad a la poesía y la sintonización con las verdades internas de las emociones el compositor podrá llegar a la grandeza, a la ‘genialidad’. El texto de Gréty es de algún interés, no sólo porque ofrece una perspectiva marcadamente francesa sobre un tema que sería dominado por el pensamiento alemán (favorecía la música dramática por sobre la instrumental y daba prioridad a la melodía por sobre la armonía), pero también por su obvia y reconocida deuda con Rousseau, establece una conexión musical directa con una de las mayores influencias del movimiento romántico en general. La creencia de Rousseau en que el artista debe aspirar, a través de la espontaneidad de la expresión, hacia una dignidad del ‘hombre natural’ dejó su marca tanto en Goethe como en Schiller, y tuvo parte en la formación del héroe romántico (usualmente trágico) de la literatura en general. Uno puede ver a la novela Die Leiden des jungen Wethers (1774) de Goethe como una obra ejemplar en este aspect, que atrajo a la imaginación de compositores tanto como de escritores. Rousseau también inspiró la idealización de la naturaleza y de lo ‘folk’ que tuvo una importante dimensión en el romanticismo temprano, notablemente en Herder. Aquí también hubo una resonancia musical y un particular interés en las canciones folklóricas a fin del siglo XVIII, con notables consecuencias para el desarrollo del lied. Los escritos específicos de Rousseau sobre música también tuvieron una marcada influencia. En varias entradas de su Dictionnaire de musique (sobre el ‘genio’, lo ‘patético’, ‘expresión’ y especialmente ‘imitación’), dio un paso más allá de lo afectivo hacia la expresión estética, celebrando el poder elusivo y sugestivo de la música de una manera que se aleja significativamente del pensamiento clásico.

Una aplicación más sostenida del término ‘romántico’ a la música esperaba la extensa crítica de E.T.A Hoffmann a la Quinta Sinfonía de Beethoven (1810), junto con su subsecuente artículo sobre la música instrumental de Beethoven (1813). Estos ensayos son importantes porque sintetizan aspectos ya existentes de la teoría romántica, los transfieren a la esfera musical, y profetizan que la música debe ser vista como el arte romántico supremo. El concepto de creatividad adoptado por Hoffmann ya era familiar a partir de los hermanos Schlegel y fue compartido por una generación más joven de escritores alemanes, como Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Wackenroder y Jean Paul. Sobre todo, el concepto destacaba el privilegio asignado al genio creativo individual. Las características que habían sido atribuidas al arte en general en la estética filosófica de fin del siglo XVIII – su capacidad para acceder a un plano más allá de lo real (caracterizado de diversas maneras como lo trascendental, lo inexpresable o lo infinito), su poder de despertar las emociones más fuertes y su valor como un modo intuitivo de conocer el mundo – fueron particularizadas, refiriéndolas al creador individual la (‘gran’ y original) obra de arte. Es más, estas características fueron asociadas específicamente a la potencia de la imaginación creativa. Esta visión o mundo de ensueño del artista romántico, conocida y estéticamente unificada por su genio, le daría al resto de la humanidad un conocimiento privilegiado de la realidad. Debe destacarse la noción de unificación, ya que Hoffmann apoyaba su estética con detalladas descripciones técnicas que ahora podríamos describir como analíticas.

En la aplicación de estas ideas a Beethoven, y también como anticipo a Haydn y Mozart, Hoffmann reunió a puntos de vista tanto de la crítica como de la filosofía: fusionó las ideas que ya estaban asociadas con el término ‘romántico’, especialmente como eran usadas por los escritores alemanes más jóvenes de comienzos del 1800 para significar una oposición a las restricciones de los modelos clásicos, con una tendencia (común a varios escritos filosóficos, aunque diversamente considerado como una debilidad o una fortaleza) para clasificar a la música como el arte principal de las emociones. Esta conjunción abrió el camino para una idea poderosa del siglo 19: la preeminencia de la música, y en concreto de la música instrumental o ‘absoluta’. (Vale la pena añadir que esta idea, central en el pensamiento alemán y la música alemana, jugó un papel más periférico en las culturas no alemanas). Así fue, precisamente, la independencia de música de la referencia, su calidad, inefable, incognoscible y sin imagen, lo que le dio un acceso privilegiado al ‘maravillosa, infinito reino del espíritu’. Esta idea tendría su expresión filosófica más explícita dentro del sistema de Schopenhauer, donde la música, como el único arte no figurativo, habla directamente del mundo nouménico (a diferencia del fenoménico). Pero mucho antes de que el impacto del trabajo seminal de Schopenhauer fue totalmente registrado (en la segunda mitad del siglo 19), la música había llegado a ser vista, por lo menos dentro de una importante línea de pensamiento alemán, como la esencia del romanticismo. Schumann, por ejemplo, dijo que «es difícilmente creíble que una escuela romántica distinta podría formarse en la música, que es en sí romántica ‘.

Llama la atención que Hoffmann describió como compositores románticos no sólo a Beethoven, sino también a Mozart y en menor medida Haydn. En otras palabras, él identificó tendencias románticas de la música de finales del siglo XVIII, en paralelo en lugar de en sucesión a las tendencias comparables en la literatura. Esto se ajustaba a un uso general del término de alrededor de 1800. En el mismo año de la famosa crítica de la quinta sinfonía de Hoffmann, por ejemplo, Johann Reichardt describía a Haydn y Mozart como compositores románticos. Y algunos años más tarde Goethe confirmó este uso mediante la descripción de una antítesis del arte clásico y romántico, que se caracteriza en términos de tendencias ‘objetivas’ y ‘subjetivas’, respectivamente. De manera significativa, su descripción del Romanticismo ( ‘la nueva esencia fantástica … el deseo y la inquietud, estallando todos los límites y perdiéndose en el infinito’) se basó en la música contemporánea (Beethoven), así como en la literatura contemporánea (Schiller). En este tipo de polémicas principios del siglo XIX el romanticismo se identificó claramente como un movimiento concurrente con el clasicismo en lugar de como un período sucesivo.

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.

2. Significado

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.

3. Estilos

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.

Bibliografía

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Babbitt: Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston and New York, 1919/R, 2/1991)
Abercrombie: Romanticism (London, 1926)
Bücken: Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Moderne (Potsdam, 1929/R)
Tiersot: La musique aux temps romantiques (Paris, 1930/R)
Benz: Die deutsche Romantik: Geschichte einer Bewegung (Leipzig, 1937, 2/1940)
Abraham: A Hundred Years of Music (London, 1938, 4/1974)
Reich: Musik in romantischer Schau (Basle, 1946)
Einstein: Music in the Romantic Era (New York, 1947)
Barzun: Berlioz and the Romantic Century (New York, 1950, rev., abridged 2/1956/R as Berlioz and his Century, 3/1969)
Bowra: The Romantic Imagination (London, 1950)
Praz: The Romantic Agony (London, 1950)
Huch: Die Romantik: Ausbreitung, Blütezeit und Verfall (Tübingen, 1951)
Abrams: The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953)
Chantavoine and J. Gaudefroy-Demombynes: Le romantisme dans la musique européenne (Paris, 1955)
Barzun: Classic, Romantic and Modern (New York, 1961)
Knepler: Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1961)
Frye, ed.: Romanticism Reconsidered (Cambridge, 1963)
Wellek: Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, CT, 1963)
Halstead, ed.: Romanticism: Definition, Explanation and Evaluation (Boston, 1965)
Schenk: The Mind of the European Romantics (London, 1966)
Thorlby, ed.: The Romantic Movement (London, 1966) [selection of documents and critical comments, incl. A. Lovejoy: ‘On the Discriminations of Romanticism’]
Talmon: Romanticism and Revolt: Europe 1815–1848 (London, 1967)
Abraham: Slavonic and Romantic Music (London, 1968)
Frye: Romanticism in Perspective (London, 1969)
Furst: Romanticism (London, 1969)
Furst: Romanticism in Perspective (London, 1969)

R.M. Longyear: Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, 3/1988)

Wolf, ed.: R. Schumann: On Music and Musicians (New York, 1969)
Blume: Classic and Romantic Music (New York, 1970) [Eng. trans. of style-period articles orig. pubd in MGG1]
Gleckner and G. Enscoe, eds.: Romanticism: Points of View (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970)
Prawer, ed.: The Romantic Period in Germany (London, 1970)

R.J. Taylor, ed.: The Romantic Tradition in Germany (London, 1970)

Eichner, ed.: ‘Romantic’ and its Cognates: the European History of a Word (Toronto, 1972)
Dahlhaus: Zwischen Romantik und Moderne: vier Studien zur Musikgeschichte des späteren 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1974; Eng. trans., 1980)
Jones: Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, 1974)
Cardinal: German Romantics in Context (London, 1975)
Dahlhaus: Die Idee der absoluten Musik (Kassel, 1978; Eng. trans., 1989)
Honour: Romanticism (London, 1979)
Dahlhaus: Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1980; Eng. trans., 1989)
Le Huray and J. Day, eds.: Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1981)
Menhennet: The Romantic Movement (London, 1981)
Abraham, ed.: The Age of Beethoven, 1790–1830, NOHM, viii (1982)
Dahlhaus: Musikalischer Realismus: zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1982; Eng. trans., 1985)
McGann: The Romantic Ideology: a Critical Investigation (Chicago, 1983)
Kramer: Music and Poetry: the Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984)
Plantinga: Romantic Music: a History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York and London, 1984)
Rosen and H. Zerner: Romanticism and Realism: the Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (London, 1984)
Lippman: Musical Aesthetics: a Historical Reader (Stuyvesant, NY, 1986)
Dahlhaus and R. Katz, eds.: Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music (Stuyvesant, NY, 1986–93)
Whittall: Romantic Music: a Concise History from Schubert to Sibelius (London, 1987)
Bujic, ed.: Music in European Thought (Cambridge, 1988)
Rosenblum: Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1988)
Charlton, ed.: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings (Cambridge, 1989)
Rummenhöller: Romantik in der Musik: Analysen, Portraits, Reflexionen (Munich, 1989)
Abraham, ed.: Romanticism, 1830–1890, NOHM, ix (1990)
Bowie: Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester, 1990, 2/1993)
Ringer, ed.: Man and Music: the Early Romantic Era (London, 1990)
Samson, ed.: Man and Music: the Late Romantic Era (London, 1991)
Goehr: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: an Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992)
Ratner: Romantic Music: Sound and Syntax (New York, 1992)
Bent, ed.: Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993)
Bowie: Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London, 1993)
Daverio: Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York, 1993)
Bent, ed.: Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge, 1996)
Rosen: The Romantic Generation (London, 1996)
Bowie: From Romanticism to Critical Theory: the Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London, 1997)

source writings

J.-J. Rousseau: Les confessions (Paris, 1781)

A.-E.-M. Grétry: Mémoires, ou Essai sur la musique (Paris, 1789, enlarged 2/1797/R

F.W.J. Schelling: System des transcendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen, 1800)

Schlegel : ‘Gesprach über die Poesie’ Athenäum, ii (1800)

E.T.A. Hoffmann: Reviews of works by Beethoven, AMZ, xii–xv (1809–13); repr. in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s musikalische Schriften, ed. H. von Ende (Cologne, 1899)

A.W. Schlegel: Ueber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur: Vorlesungen (Heidelberg, 1809-11, 2/1817)

de Staël: De l’Allemagne (Paris, 1810)

S.T. Coleridge: Biographia literaria (London, 1817/R)

A.-M.-L. Lamartine: Méditations poétiques (Paris, 1820)

Hugo: Preface to Cromwell (Paris, 1828); ed. M. Souriau (Paris, 1897)
Heine: Die romantische Schule (Hamburg, 1836)
Wagner: Oper und Drama (Leipzig, 1852)
Wagner: Beethoven (Leipzig, 1872)
Nietzsche: Die Geburt der Tragödie (Leipzig, 1872)

Repertorio de Guitarra

Unidad 5: Romántico