• 1848 was a very important European year

  • Many failed revolutions

    • Including Germany’s revolution, which caused the expulsion of Wagner

Romanticism and Realism

• After the 1850s, literature and art had more realism than romanticism

  • Dickens, Trollope, and George Eliot in England

  • Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola in France

  • Thomas Eakins (painter) and William Dean Howells (novelist) in America

• The camera was invented

• Music was an escape

Program Music

• A symphonic poem is “a one-movement orchestral composition with a program, in a free musical form”

  • Made by Franz Liszt in the 1850s

    • Hamlet, Orpheus, Prometheus, Les Preludes

  • Descended from Mendelssohn’s concert overture

  • Aka tone poems

  • Very popular in the later 19th century

    • Including those by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss

Tchaikovsky, Overture-Fantasy Romeo and Juliet (1869, revised 1880)

• Instead of the term symphonic poem, Tchaikovsky preferred symphonic fantasia or overture-fantasy

  • Substantial one-movement pieces w/ free forms (borrowing features from sonata, rondo, etc.)

• Follows the general outline of the original Shakespeare play

• Structure:

  • Slow Introduction (Andante)

    • Dramatic

    • Sober Hymn theme

    • Low clarinets and bassoons

  • Allegro

    • Vendetta (Fate) theme

    • Short, vigorous rhythmic motives

    • Love Theme

    • Hymn theme returns!

  • Coda (Slow)

    • Romeo gives his final speeches before his suicide

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Biography

• Russian, born in the countryside but then moved to St. Petersburg

• It was hard to have a serious musical education and career in Russia, but Tchaikovsky was lucky in that after a few years he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory

• Professor at the Moscow Conservatory

• Composed 6 symphonies, 11 operas, symphonic poems, chamber music, songs, and many famous ballet scores

• Not a devoted nationalist

  • Toured America, had success in worldwide concert halls

• Depressed and gay, he attempted suicide several times

  • Married a woman who loved him and ran away only weeks after, leaving her to die in an asylum

• Died from drinking unboiled water during a cholera epidemic

Nationalism

• Nationalism was the musical feature of “the incorporation of national folk music into concert pieces, songs, and operas”

• Sometimes nationalist composers deliberately broke traditional rules of harmony, form, etc.

Exoticism

• People started to like the folk music of other countries

  • The was “exotic”

• Composers used music from other countries

The Russian Kuchka

• The “Kuchka” were the “Mighty Five,” a group of 5 Russian nationalist composers

  • Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), the only trained musician

  • Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), a distinguished chemist

  • César Cui (1835-1918), an engineer

  • Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), a navy man

  • Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881), an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard

• Nationalism brought them together

Musorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)

• Refers to a memorial exhibit of Musorgsky’s recently dead friend, Viktor Hartmann, ‘s pictures

• Promenade 1

  • Depicts the composer walking around the exhibit

  • Rare meter, 5/4 alternating with 6/4

• Gnomus

  • “Drawing of a Russian folk-art nutcracker”

• Promenade 2

  • Spectator musing

• The Great Gate at Kiev

  • Last, longest, climatic number (grandiose)

Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881) Biography

• Son of a landowner, supposed to become an officer in the Russian Imperial Guard

• His family struggled for a time and lost their family estate

  • Joined the kuchka during this time

• Not confident in his abilities

• Alcoholic, died of alcoholism and epilepsy

Responses to Romanticism

• “No-nonsense world increasingly devoted to industrialization and commerce”

• Romantic music was “out of step” or prize because it “offered escape”

• Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler are both good composers to look at

The Renewal of Classicism: Brahms

• German Johannes Brahms moved to Vienna

• He liked traditional Classical genres, forms, or even style

  • String quartets, chamber music, symphonies, and concertos

  • Sonata, theme and variations, rondo

  • Oddly also miniatures

Other Nationalists

• Bohemia:

  • modern Czech Republic

  • Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884): nationalist symphonic poems and folk operas

  • Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904): Slavonic Dances and other large-scale works such as symphonies; I recommend his 12th string quartet!

• Scandinavia:

  • Edvard Grieg (1843-1907): Norwegian, wrote sets of piano miniatures (like Norwegian Mountain Tunes), and also a well-known suite of music for Peer Gynt (based on a great drama by a Norwegian playwright)

  • Jean Sibelius (1865-1857): powedul symphonist, produced symphonic poems based on his native Finnish folklore

• Spain:

  • Enrique Granados (1867-1916): Nationalist

  • Joaquín Turina (1882-1949): Nationalist

  • Manuel de Falla (1876-1946): Nationalist known for his Nights in the Gardens of Spain

  • Exotic compositions with “Spanish flavor” included Bizet’s Carmen, along w/ orchestral pieces from Emmanuel Chabrier, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel

• Great Britain:

  • Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958): Major English nationalist

  • Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924): Irish composer who wrote Irish Rhapsodies and the opera Shamus O’Brien

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Biography

• Son of an orchestral musician in Hamburg, had good early music education

• Met and lived with Robert and Clara Schumann

  • After the former’s death, he sent Clara his compositions always and they were very close

• Wrote 4 great symphonies

• Conducted a chorus and wrote a lot of choral music

Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 (1878)

• Brahms wrote this to show off a virtuoso (common at the time), in particular Joseph Joachim

• First movement in double-exposition sonata form

  • Seemed stuffy

• Last movement is a relatively simple rondo

• Third Movement (Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace)

  • Rondo form

  • A had double stops, is in aaba’ form

  • B again has double stops

  • C is in 3/4 time

  • The coda is in 6/8

Romantic Nostalgia: Mahler

• Gustav Mahler was “ambivalent about the Romantic tradition”

• Mahler wrote huge program symphonies

• His works encoded “seemingly profound metaphysical or spiritual messages”

• Mahler has “deliberate and self-conscious” exaggeration in his music

Symphony No. 1 (1888)

• Mahler’s first symphony

• Went from 1 movement to 5 to 4

• Has fragments of some of his other songs

• Special kind of counterpoint (“kaleidoscopic effect”)

• Third Movement, Funeral March (Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen—“With a solemn, measured gait; do not drag”)

  • Section 1: Makes a funeral march from “Frère Jacques,” slow

  • Section 2: “Study in frustration”

  • Section 3: Contrasting “trio” with major mode and triplet harp accompaniment

  • Section 4: Combines elements from 1 and 2

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) Biography

• Really bad childhood

  • Born in Bohemia (not necessarily bad, just part of his story)

  • Abusive father

  • Lost 5 siblings to diphtheria and others to suicide/mental illness

• Jewish, w/ Viennese anti-Semitism around him

• Had other tragedies, such as the young death of his youngest daughter and other “psychological turmoil”

• Studied at the Vienna Conservatory