The Romantic Generation: Song and Piano Music Flashcards
Historical Background
- Napoleon’s wars spread ideas of liberty, equality, and nationalism
- composers should write music for their national identity
Professional Musician Job Changes
- aristocracy lost a lot of money from wars and no longer supported the arts
- musicians were freelancers performing, teaching, composing on commission, or publishing music
- virtuosos, who were specialized in one instrument, developed
- music journals developed
Music in the Middle Class
- with the Industrial Revolution came more leisure time
- women of middle and upper classes stayed at home to keep house and play music
- factories created amateur bands to keep workers from getting into trouble
- the piano became cheaper and was used in many households
Romanticism
-focus on melody, emotion, novelty, and individuality
Role of Music
-artists treated music as autonomous, free from the idea that music has to serve a specific social roll or text
Program Music
-recounts a narrative or sequence of events that has accompanying text called a program
Character Piece
depicts or suggests a mood, personality, or scene, indicated in the title
Absolute Music
- an idealized play of sound and form
- this is the only new type of music in this period
Lied
- the perfect Romantic genre
- centered on expression of individual feelings, musical imagery and folk style
The Lyric
- chief poetic genre
- short strophic poem on one subject expressing a personal feeling or viewpoint
The Ballad
- created by German poets
- imitation of folk ballads of England and Scotland
- alternate narrative and dialogue and dealt with romantic adventures or supernatural incidents
- longer than lied and lyric
Franz Schubert
- famous for lieder (600)
- set 59 Goethe poems
- really good at adding emotion and mood to music
Modified Strophic Form
- music repeats for some strophes but others vary or use new music (Der Lindenbaum, The Linden Tree from Winterreise)
- Schubert would use this if the text asks for change from the normal strophic form
Der Lindenbaum from Winterreise
- Schubert’s setting of Muller’s cycle of 24 poems express the nostalgia of a lover revisiting in winter the haunts of a failed summer romance
- modified strophic form; major, minor; new melody; major and original melody
Robert and Clara Schumann
- Schubert’s successor
- wrote 120 songs in 1840, mostly about love for life and Clara
- used the piano as it’s own part rather than accompaniment
Im wunderschonen Monat Mai
- Schumann’s piece
- In the Marvelous Month of May
- newborn love in springtime
America and Great Britian Songs
- parlor songs in America
- ballads in Great Britian
- expression mostly in voice
Home! Sweet Home! 1823
- Henry R. Bishop
- from the opera Clari
- simple, diatonic, stepwise, but also tuneful and charming
Stephen Foster 1826-1864
- Oh! Susanna
- first american to live as a composer
- Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair is a mixture of styles with four-beat phrases
Music for Piano
- the second most popular music to songs with voice
- written for teaching, amateur enjoyment, and public performance
Schubert’s Piano Pieces
- 11 piano sonatas
- Wanderer Fantasy (1822)
- first to use a complete circle of major thirds around an octave in Der Wanderer
Felix Mendelssohn 1809-1847
- leading German Romantic composer
- blended Classical influences into Romantic style
- preferred the older style of virtuosity, saying that it had more substance than the present day
Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without Words)
- Felix Mendelssohn’s famous work
- 48 short pieces in 8 books
- basically lied for piano
- music can express feelings that words cannot
Clara Schumann and Fanny Hensel
- Clara was very public about her talent; she was a better pianist than Robert
- Fanny was as great as her brother Felix, but she kept performances more private in salons; she wrote Das Jar (The Year), a series of character pieces based on the 12 months; she was rediscovered in the past 30 years
Robert Schumann
- mainly wrote piano character pieces
- Carnaval, Papillons, Kinderscenen, etc.
- Carnaval is the one with Florestan, Eusebius, and Coquette
Fryderyk Chopin 1810-1849
- composed pretty much only for piano
- he wrote etudes, and his were among the first with artistic content that were played in concert, creating the concert etude
- he wrote dance pieces like waltzes (style of Vienna), mazurkas and polonaises (style of Poland)
Polonaise
- Chopin wrote a lot of them
- courtly dance in 3/4 marked by eighth and 2 sixteenths at the first beat
Mazurka
- Polish folk dance that had become an urban ballroom dance in Chopin’s time
- 3/4 meter with accents on the second or third beat
- four measure phrases
- dotted rhythms on the first beat
Nocturne
- short mood piece with embellished melodies above sonorous accompaniments
- John Field invented the genre
Chopin’s Ballades and Scherzos
- he was the first to use the name ballade for an instrumental piece
- his scherzos are not joking or playful
Franz Liszt 1811-1886
- prodigy kid, and was given a turnt piano
- he came up with the term recital because he was the first pianist to play in large halls
- he played music from all periods, and he performed them memorized
- transcribed older symphonies and operas for piano
Who Influenced Liszt a Lot?
Nicolo Paganini
Louis Moreau Gottschalk 1829-1869
- first American composer to have international reputation
- adds western sounds to European style pieces
