Music History: Romantic Era & 20th Century Movements
The Romantic Era in Music
Characteristics of Romanticism
The Romantic era, a most outstanding period in the history of music, emerged in the 19th century as a result of the new society that appeared since the French Revolution. The Romantic aspiration of “art for art’s sake,” without conditioning, led music to great formal and expressive freedom. Melody was the most important element, and dynamic effects were constant.
Program Music & Forms
While classical instrumental forms were still cultivated, the search for free and open forms made room for the development of program music. This genre is based on the description of a program or plot, usually literary.
- Program Symphony: A compound instrumental form divided into several movements, created by Hector Berlioz.
- Symphonic Poem: A composition in one movement, created by Franz Liszt.
The Lied: Voice & Piano
The Lied is a short form written for voice and piano upon a poetic text. These pieces are popular, simple, short, and easy to sing, even for non-professionals. The most common schemes are:
- Strophic Lied (A A A)
- Two-part Lied (A B)
- Three-part Lied (A B A)
Notable composers of Lied include Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann.
The Romantic Piano
The piano was the favorite instrument of the Romantic era. Due to its features, it made individual performance and the expression of feelings possible. In this period, the piano reached its ultimate technical perfection thanks to improvements in the lever system, which made the keyboard more sensitive to the touch of the performer. The damper pedal was also added, which makes it possible to release the keys and sustain the sound. Many short and long pieces for piano, whose names are quite varied, were composed by masters such as Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, and Frédéric Chopin.
Romantic Opera Development
During Romanticism, opera underwent great development and became the wealthy bourgeoisie’s favorite performance. Large theaters were built across Europe, and singers became true stars thanks to the vocal brilliance of their arias.
Italian Opera: Bel Canto & Verismo
Giuseppe Verdi, who represents the peak of Italian opera, was undoubtedly one of the most prolific opera composers. Born in Italy in 1813, prior to Italian unification, Verdi produced many successful operas, including La Traviata, Falstaff, Nabucco, Rigoletto, and Aida. He became known for his skill in creating melody and his profound use of theatrical effect. Verdi died on January 27, 1901, in Milan, Italy.
Bel Canto Style
Bel Canto, meaning “beautiful singing,” was a genre that prevailed throughout most of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a style of singing in which phrasing and skill in executing highly florid passages are more important than the intensity of voices. It is a style for singers to shine mainly in the highest register. Composers include Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini.
Verismo Opera
Verismo is a late 19th-century style of opera characterized by more realistic plots and characters. Inspired by Émile Zola, Italian composers began to bring realism to the opera house with gritty plots, lower-class characters, and plenty of sordid violence, opposite to the tales of princesses and goddesses that existed in the past. Notable composers include Ruggiero Leoncavallo and Giacomo Puccini.
French Romantic Opera
Main French composers include:
- Giacomo Meyerbeer, creator of the “grand opera” with works like Les Huguenots, which uses large set designs and ballets.
- Jacques Offenbach, main representative of the “operetta” with Orpheus in the Underworld, full of humor and passages with dialogue, and The Tales of Hoffmann (featuring Olympia’s aria).
- Georges Bizet, with his opera Carmen, set in Seville, which used popular dances and themes.
German Opera: Richard Wagner
In Germany, the great leading figure was Richard Wagner (born May 22, 1813, Leipzig, Germany; died February 13, 1883, Venice, Italy). He conceived opera as a “total work of art”: poetry, music, set design, and action put together to create a continuous “musical drama” where the orchestra had a leading role. The texts of his operas, written by Wagner himself, were inspired by Germanic mythology. Among his major works are The Flying Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), Lohengrin (1850), Tristan und Isolde (1865), Parsifal (1882), and his great tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung (1869-76).
Spanish Zarzuela
In Spain, the reaction against the influence of Italian opera revitalized the Zarzuela as a typical national genre, which evolved in two different ways:
- Zarzuela Grande: Three acts with a larger musical development. Composers include Francisco Asenjo Barbieri and his The Little Barber of Lavapiés.
- Género Chico: A single act with fewer characters and a predominance of spoken text over sung text. Notable composers include Federico Chueca (La Gran Vía) and Tomás Bretón (La Verbena de la Paloma).
Leitmotiv: Musical Themes
The Leitmotiv is an association of ideas and musical timbres with particular characters, emotions, actions, or objects, which allowed listeners to follow the narration. It is what Berlioz called an “idée fixe” to represent his loved one. Wagner’s orchestras made extensive use of the leitmotiv to represent all kinds of objects, characters, and emotions.
Musical Nationalisms
Musical Nationalisms appeared in the mid-1800s as another Romantic component. They sought to accentuate the musical and cultural individuality and autonomy of different countries and acquired special relevance in those which had not had much weight in artistic development. They sought to overcome perceived cultural inferiority by exploring their own history and recovering traditions. Music is characterized by the use of folklore in two different ways:
- By literally copying the sources.
- By imitating characteristic musical features, scales, melodies, and dance rhythms.
Russian Nationalism
The most famous representative of Russian Nationalism was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (born April 25 [May 7, New Style], 1840, Votkinsk, Russia; died October 25 [November 6], 1893, St. Petersburg), one of the most popular Russian composers of all time. His music has always had great appeal for the general public by virtue of its tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies, and colorful, picturesque orchestration, all of which evoke a profound emotional response.
Nordic & Central European Nationalism
- Norway: Represented by Edvard Grieg with his incidental music for the play Peer Gynt.
- Czechoslovakia: Antonín Dvořák represents this nationalism with his New World Symphony.
American & Spanish Nationalism
- United States: George Gershwin, who showed the influence of jazz in his Rhapsody in Blue.
- Spain: Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados represent Spanish Nationalism, both famous for their piano works, among other instrumental compositions.
20th Century Music Evolution
Impressionism in Music
Impressionism was a typical French movement related to Impressionist paintings with colorful open spaces and bright landscapes. The main composers, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), sought the pleasure of sounds through “faded” melodies and a new concept of timbre.
Expressionism: Harsh Realities
Expressionism: A German movement that influenced art, literature, and music, characterized by the expression of the human soul in a very harsh and pessimistic way. Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was a key figure. Expressionist music used constant dissonances and an atonal system that broke away from melodic organization and classical harmony.
New Sonority: Igor Stravinsky
The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) marked the beginning of a truly contemporary sonority that influenced composers of this period. His great work was the ballet The Rite of Spring, written in 1913.
Futurism & Musical Rupture
Futurism: Born in Italy in 1909, it broke with the art of the past to defend a new modern era characterized by machines and movement. The Futurist movement did not last very long. However, its idea of connecting music and reality by using noises from modern societies had a great impact on many contemporary composers. Among the most important pieces that can be called Futurist, we can mention Ionisation by Edgard Varèse (1885-1965) and Pacific 231 by Arthur Honegger (1892-1955).
Dodecaphonism: Twelve-Tone Technique
Dodecaphonism: It is a composition technique based on the twelve sounds of the chromatic scale. This method, created by Schoenberg in 1923, aimed to establish a new organized system of musical composition. According to Schoenberg, Dodecaphonism is “a method of composing with twelve notes which are related only to one another”; every note is as important as the rest. The twelve-sound sequences can be presented on the harmonic or melodic level, and in any register or timbre.
Neoclassicism: A Return to Form
Neoclassicism appeared in the 1920s as a reaction against Post-Romanticism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. It returned to the cultivation of forms and genres from Classicism and the Baroque, seeking a new type of simplicity. Notable composers include Erik Satie (1866-1925), who incorporated influences from jazz and music-hall into his music; Carl Orff (1895-1982) with his famous Carmina Burana, based on the songs of goliards from the 13th century; and Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) with his Classical Symphony and the folktale for narrator and orchestra Peter and the Wolf.
20th Century Spanish Music
Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) is notable for his connection with the literary generation. Falla took Nationalism to its peak, but he was also influenced by other tendencies like Impressionism and Neoclassicism. His most important works include the Andalusian ballets El Amor Brujo and El Sombrero de Tres Picos.
The composers of the so-called Generation of the Republic or Generation of ’27, due to their connection with the poetic generation, followed the path started by Falla and achieved international consolidation for Spanish music. Among the main composers of the Generation of ’27, we can highlight Federico Mompou (1893-1987), whose music was remarkably simple and lyrical; and Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999), famous for his Concierto de Aranjuez.