Symphonies in the Romantic Era. The symphony was the creation of the second half of the eighteenth century and reached its

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1 Symphonies in the Romantic Era 2013 by Helen Kin Hoi Wong The symphony was the creation of the second half of the eighteenth century and reached its first great heights in the mature works of Haydn and Mozart. In the classical period, the symphony typically consisted of four movements - the first, a fast sonata-form movement; the second, a slow movement; the third, a dance, usually a minuet; and the fourth, a fast finale, usually a rondo and frequently a combination of sonata form and rondo. Inspired by the ideal of Romanticism, Beethoven expanded the classical symphonic form and intensified the element of personal expression. After the death of Beethoven, the development of the symphony took two directions. In one, composers continue to sustain the more traditional style laid down by Haydn and Mozart and the less expansive works of Beethoven (e.g. his First, Second and Eighth symphonies). The other directions, based on the more expressive of the Beethoven works (e.g. the Sixth and Ninth symphonies), carried from Beethoven to Berlioz, Liszt, Smetana, Strauss, Mahler, and other composers who sought to expand both the scope and the expressive qualities of the symphony. In spite of this duality of symphonic styles, certain features can be noted in the symphonies of the Romantic period: First and foremost was the overpowering interest in orchestral expression, manifest in the ever-expanding size of the orchestra. Beginning in the works of Beethoven, the brass instruments took an increasingly prominent place. The trombone was used regularly, while the invention of the valve in 1813 soon made the horn and trumpet completely chromatic and made it easier for them to cope with intricate melodies. The woodwinds also were improved mechanically in the nineteenth century, greatly enlarging their technical capabilities. The contrabassoon, bass clarinet, English horn, and piccolo became regular members of the orchestra. Orchestral sounds became more brilliant and sensuously appealing through the 1

2 increased use of cymbals, the triangle, and the harp. Throughout the century the string section was expanded to balance the increasing numbers of wind players. Composers such as Berlioz, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bruckner, Strauss and Mahler created orchestras of unprecedented size. The large orchestra typical of the late nineteenth century incorporated an average of one hundred performers and might include a wide variety of instruments and devices required in specific works. The constant expansion of the Romantic orchestra reflected composers' changing needs for a wide variety of experimentation with orchestral tone colors. With a broader palette of orchestral sounds composers sought new ways of blending tone colors to obtain variety of mood and atmosphere. The Romantic period saw the appearance of the first textbook on the subject of orchestration. It was Berlioz's Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration of 1844, which signaled the recognition of orchestration as an art in itself. The coloristic ideas in Berlioz' music were carried on and reached a culmination in the music of Richard Strauss and the Gustav Mahler - both of whom demanded a virtuoso orchestra and were orchestrated in a complex fashion. In the Romantic period, a typical symphony might last about 45 minutes, as opposed to 25 minutes for an eighteenth-century symphony. As symphonies grew longer, composers concerned themselves with ways of unifying the movements; new techniques were used to unify such long works. The frequent use of recurrent material in large-scale works begins with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (1808), in which movements are bound together by a recurring motive as well as by literal repetition of a sizable section of music. In the Symphony No. 4 of Schumann, a single melodic theme recurs in various guises in all four movements; the last movement introduces new material but without destroying the cyclic nature of the whole work. An advanced form of cyclic construction may be seen in César Franck s influential 2

3 Symphony in D Minor (1888). The ideal of pure instrumental music as the supremely Romantic mode of expression and the strong literary orientation of nineteenth-century composers converged in the concept of program music. As Liszt and others used the term, program music was instrumental music associated with poetic, descriptive, or even narrative subject matter. Lizst's Faust Symphony (1854) consists of three movements, labeled Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles, themes are interchanged among the movements and transformed in accordance with the program. Liszt's other symphonic work, the Symphony to Dante's Divina Commedia (1856), depicts the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Liszt portrayed Dante's scenes with great imagination, cleverly suiting his melody to the special characters of the three levels. Liszt also invented the symphonic poem - an orchestral work, usually in one movement, based on an extramusical idea such as a poem or a narrative. His Les Préludes (1848) used thematic transformation to parallel the poetic emotions. The method of thematic transformation, by which one or two themes in different forms can provide the basis for an entire work is a principle from which Wagner derived his system of so-called leitmotifs in his operas. 3

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