Essay: The way Romanticism influenced music

Romanticism is a term that often causes quite a lot of conflict between music historians, musicologists and other researchers of this era of music. The Romantic period of music roughly spans between 1830-1900. Due to its time frame many people use the term synonymously with 19th century music, however this would disregard many other movements that happened in the 19th century in conjunction with romanticism such as impressionism, naturalism, and expressionism. Romanticism in music came a little bit later than it did in its counterparts in literature and art where they would have begun in the late 18th century.
Right before the Romantic era of music, was the classical era. Classical music would utilise many terms like harmony, equilibrium, clarity rationality and order. In contrast to this, romantic music is visionary, idealistic, imaginative, introvertive, the list goes on. Musical romanticism centres on the artist as creator, as an introvertive, self-expressive art. With this explanation of romanticism we see the individuality of each romantic artist and their work, but we also notice many re-occurring themes. Many pieces of music would have been influenced by literature and poetry. Common symbols and imagery found during this period include night as a symbol for death, nature, and variations of ruins, and churchyards. Night as death gives a clear correspondence between romanticism and its pessimistic traits. Used most notably in German romanticism, night is expressed in drama and poetry as a fantastical escape from the monotony of daily life and these artists were called ‘twilight men’. “Romanticists equated day with reason and society’s conventions, and night with romance and escape from those conventions” (Kravitt, 1992, pg. 102).
The Romantic era was a result of many things including the rise of the middle class. In the classical era, many artists were commissioned to work by patrons or had audiences that would have had a lot of knowledge around music. For the Romantic artist, they were faced with composing for public shows and unsure of the response they would receive from them. Romantic literature introduce this idea of the artist as creator and other pessimistic themes sparked the shift in music at the time. Musical themes and the forms began to change. As the music became more expressive there was an increase in the use of more detailed dynamics and other notations in music that revolved more around the feeling rather than technique, terms such as ‘playfully’ were used in the place of tempo markers.
One notable feature of Romantic music is nationalism. A composer that comes to mind when I think of nationalism in music is Frédéric Chopin. Chopin was born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin just outside of Warsaw, Poland, where he spent his childhood and adolescence. His father Nicolas Chopin was a French man that had emigrated to Poland in his teenage years. Chopin had displayed great talent for music at a young age and was regarded as a child prodigy. Later in life he moved to Paris, France where he continued his career in composing music, teaching piano lessons and performing. His mazurkas marked a close bond that he had with his homeland of Poland. He used the rhythmic and modal patterns found in the folk music of the Mazovian plains of central Poland (Michałowski, 2001). Chopin also composed many polonaises, a professional Polish dance for couples in a dance hall that moved in moderate tempo with triple meter timing. Elements from this Polish folk music and was known for putting mazurkas on “the European musical map” (Jones, 1998, p. 177). Chopin rewrote the standards for these forms of music and broke the rules that existed in the classical period. Schumann remarked the mazurkas and polonaises as “cannon buried in flowers” (Schumann, 1988, p. 114). Furthermore Chopin was accredited “among the first musicians … individualizing in themselves the poetic sense of an entire nation” (Franz Liszt, 1863) in a biography of his life. This nationalistic music would have been a great strength to fellow Poles that had left Poland during The Great Emigration who would ultimately never return to their native country. The music composed by Chopin unified these Poles who had spread out across Europe in the search of a better life and their fight for freedom.
Programme music was popular during the Romantic period, with composers creating music in an attempt to resemble a specific idea, person, place. Music developed a close relationship with literature and art and Romantic musical artists began composing music based on poetry, plays, and paintings. There are many famous pieces of programme music that are widely known such as Tchaikovsky’s take on the Shakespearean play ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Tchaikovsky’s title “Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture” is a full musical representation of the entire play, composed for an orchestra. In the music we see many motifs and themes that are correlated to the different parts of the play, for example, the love theme is quite lyrical and slow and gentle. The contrasting theme of the Montagues and Capulets is much quicker in tempo and uses louder dynamics and syncopation to signify the feud between the two families. As the piece progresses and nears an end we hear a lot of crashing cymbals, percussion and the timpani which create a state of chaos. This type of expressiveness in music stands out in the Romantic period as music can be used as a storytelling device. A motif would be regularly used in programme music to identify a particular character or theme, this would normally be made up of some melody or string of notes that would reappear where suitable in conjunction with the text the music was based from. Tchaikovsky went on to write more programme music for two more of Shakespeare’s plays “The Tempest” and “Hamlet” also. Other than just composing for texts, programme music was also based on real life and nature. Instruments mimicking the sounds of birdsong or the wind in the trees is also a feature of the way Romanticism influenced music which beforehand was quite rigid and technique-oriented