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A-R Online Music Anthology

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Genre and Form in the

Nineteenth Century

Christopher Ruth is Visiting Assistant

Professor of Music at the University of

Pittsburgh where he teaches undergraduate

major and non-major music courses. Prior to

his appointment at Pitt, he served on the

music faculty of the Shenandoah

Conservatory (2012–2016). He received his

Ph.D. in Musicology from Pitt in 2012.

by Christopher Ruth

University of Pittsburgh

Introduction

The New Genres

The Old Genres

Chamber Music

Romantic Opera

Choral Music

Form

Conclusion

Bibliography/Further Reading

Music List

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Genre and Form in the Nineteenth Century

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Genre and Form in the Nineteenth Century Christopher Ruth, University of Pittsburgh

Introduction

When considering the genres and forms that dominated the musical activity of the nineteenth

century, it becomes clear that composers felt a keen connection to the past. In no other

consecutive ages of the standard Western music timeline are there so many genres that remain

intact as those from the Classical to the Romantic.1 For all the Romantics’ emphasis on

individuality, subjectivity, and later, progress, composers seemed largely content with expressing

that individuality within the preexisting genres and forms from the eighteenth century (and

earlier). Surprisingly few entirely new genres were adopted to fit the needs of a new age, and of

those that were, most emerged in the early part of the century. The reason for this is a complex

one, rooted in increasingly historicist views held by writers and artists throughout the nineteenth

century.

Romanticism, the term most often invoked to encompass the wide array of often conflicting

aesthetics, ideologies, priorities, and styles that dominated the long nineteenth century, carries

with it an implicit set of paradoxes. Opposites abound in the nineteenth century: optimism and

pessimism, introversion and extroversion, Idealism and Materialism, and the natural and the

supernatural are all examples of attitudes and themes that coexisted with one another, often

within a single work of art. For the early Romantics, the great paradox was one of Romantic

irony: longing for something unattainable (such as the idealized past, a dream, or a lost love). For

the later Romantics, the great paradox concerned their very place in history: how to be at once

innovative and complimentary to past works of art. It was that tendency to look at once forward

and backward that is most readily observable in the music of the nineteenth century. Composers

and artists in the nineteenth century were not unique in turning to the past to seek new paths

forward, but they were the first to do so with a modern sense historical self-awareness that

shaped their art (as it continues to shape the present). To emphasize that awareness, both genre

and form are discussed in the following essay as belonging to one of two distinct camps: entirely

new genres and those which have their roots in earlier eras. Even this broad categorization is an

oversimplification, but it is nonetheless useful in approaching the Romantics’ understanding of

the importance of generic distinction and their perceived relationship to the music of the

“Classics” (itself a construction of nineteenth-century historiography)2. Though the following list

1 For this and many other reasons, some scholars such as Friedrich Blume have argued convincingly that the

Classical and Romantic eras should rather be considered a single era connected by a common set of musical rules.

See Douglass Seaton, Ideas and Styles in the Western Musical Tradition, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2010), 316–17. 2 The philosopher Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) was a key early figure in articulating this dualism, though the

Classical composers wouldn’t achieve their status as models until later in the century, thanks to the work of

historians like Franz Brendel (1811–1868). See Mirko M. Hall, “Friedrich Schlegel’s Romanticization of Music,”

Eighteenth-Century Studies 42:3 (Spring 2009): 413–29.


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is not exhaustive, an effort was made to include the most influential genres and forms within the

narrow confines of the classical canon, in keeping with the explicit scope of this resource.

Genre

The New Genres

The Lied

Among the most thoroughly Romantic of the new genres in the nineteenth century was the

German lied, or art song. A lied, (plural: lieder) was a work for singer with piano

accompaniment, most often the setting of a pre-existing poem. Though examples of accompanied

song can be found throughout the history of Western music, the lied was not a continuation of

those earlier traditions (such as the medieval canso or the Baroque solo madrigal, which were

aristocratic genres). Rather, the German lied was cultivated as an expression of an authentic

“folk” character that was a product of growing German nationalism throughout the nineteenth

century. The appeal of the lied thus rested in its ability to represent at once a collective cultural

and spiritual identity, an emblem for Germans of shared origins and essence, while at the same

time allowing for the kind of subjective interpretations so prized by the Romantics.

Interest in the lied coincided with the rise of German nationalist ideas toward the end of the

eighteenth century. Scholars such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and Achim von

Arnim (1781–1831) began collecting and publishing folk songs, and soon other poets and

composers began imitating the style. The most important of these new poets to tap into the

‘authenticity’ of the folk style in his individual work was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–

1832), the most celebrated German writer of his day (and perhaps of all time). It was Goethe

who most thoroughly captured the spirit of the Volk in his poetry and ultimately created the true

model for the Romantic lied.3

The poetic roots of the lied were of two sorts, the lyric and the ballad. Lyric poetry (the type

most associated with the term “lied” itself) was simple, sentimental, and dealt primarily with

love. Further, lyric poetry typically confined itself to the thoughts and emotions of a single

person. This focus on the inner workings of the mind or heart is often referred to as Romantic

interiority, and the explorations of this type of inwardness by composers became a defining

feature of early nineteenth-century music. Ballads, on the other hand, were longer narrative

poems that covered a wide array of Romantic themes. Ballads also often contained multiple

characters who speak over the course of the poem, such as in Goethe’s famous Erlkönig (The

Erl-King).

The folk origins of the lied initially led to music that was deliberately easy to perform. Early

lieder were not meant for the concert hall, but rather for the living rooms of amateurs who would

3 See Herry Seelig, “The Literary Context: Goethe as Source and Catalyst,” in German Lieder in the Nineteenth

Century, ed. Rufus Hallmark (New York: Routledge, 2010), 1–34.

http://www.armusicanthology.com/anthology/Default.aspx?music_id=471


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sing them around the piano, fast becoming a staple of the proper German home. Even as the

poetry and music became more artful and demanding, the lied remained a domestic genre until

the late nineteenth century, with performances in private salons often attracting accomplished or

professional musicians.4

Although many composers wrote lieder in early nineteenth century, such as Carl Friedrich Zelter,

Johann Friedrich Reichardt, and even Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), the most lauded

master of the genre in its early days was the Viennese composer Franz Schubert (1797–1828).

Schubert composed more than six hundred songs in his short life and was the first celebrated

composer for whom the lied was of major importance. One of his earliest lieder (composed in

1814 when he was only seventeen years old) was his setting of a Goethe poem, Gretchen am

Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel, D. 118). The poem itself was taken from Part I of

Goethe’s most ambitious literary achievement, Faust, where it serves as a lament sung by

Gretchen after her abandonment by the title character. As was typical for Goethe’s recreations of

the folk style, the poem is divided into four-line stanzas with an ABCB rhyme scheme. The first

stanza of the poem functions as a quasi-refrain:

Meine Ruh’ ist hin, My peace is gone,

Mein Herz ist schwer; My heart is heavy;

Ich finde sie nimmer I will find it never,

Und nimmermehr Nevermore

For his setting, Schubert added one more partial repetition of this stanza at the end, which is not

the way the poem appears in Goethe’s Faust. In this way, he fashioned the text into something

even more deliberately folk-like while at the same time providing an outlet for the increasing

intensity of the scene. Schubert’s other musical hallmarks are present as well: musical

onomatopoeia (the sound of the spinning wheel in the constant sixteenth notes), harmonic

complexity (sudden modulations that reach as far afield from the home key of D minor as A-flat

in m. 58), and a demand on the performers that began to elevate the lied beyond the reach of true

amateurs (note the high G at the climax in m. 68).

While both the folk character and subjective rendering are balanced in nearly all of Schubert’s

songs, the next major contributor to the genre, Robert Schumann (1810–1856), often skewed his

lieder more in favor of personal interpretation. Irony, already a central component of Schubert’s

approach, became intensified in Schumann’s songs, particularly when he chose to set Romantic

poets whose work was far more sardonic than Goethe’s. One such poet was Heinrich Heine

(1797–1856), whose work served as the basis for many of Schumann’s lieder.

Schumann’s subtle irony is on full display in the opening song of his song cycle Dichterliebe [A

Poet’s Love, Op. 48, 1840]. A song cycle is a collection of songs that often combine to create a

4 Salon culture in the nineteenth century is central to the development of both domestic musical genres and the

ideology of interiority. See Alice Hanson, “Music in the Salon” in Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1985), 109–26; and Halina Goldberg, “Salons: Background and Intellectual Trends” in

Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 147–216.




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story out of individual lyric poems.5 For this cycle, Schumann arranged sixteen poems from

Heine’s collection entitled Lyrisches Intermezzo (Lyric Intermezzo, 1823) into a loose narrative

of unrequited love. In the opening song, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (In the Lovely Month

of May), Schumann provided Heine’s simple text a strophic setting in true Volkston fashion.

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, In the beautiful month of May,

Als alle Knospen sprangen, As all the buds were blooming,

Da ist in meinem Herzen, There in my heart

Die Liebe aufgegangen. Love was bursting forth

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, In the beautiful month of May,

als alle Vögel sangen, As all the birds were singing,

da hab' ich ihr gestanden There I confessed to her

mein Sehnen und Verlangen. My longing and desire.

Despite all the cheerful imagery of birds singing and flowers blooming, however, Schumann

understood that within the poem there is no indication of the beloved’s response. To express this

ambiguity and thematic irony, Schumann composed music that undermines the beautiful images

(the opening harmony is a dissonant compound major seventh) and never establishes a true tonal

center, but only hints at possible resolutions. The key signature of three sharps would suggest a

key of A major or F-sharp minor, though nowhere does such a cadence occur. Instead, the music

ends unresolved on a dominant of F-sharp that leaves the listener in anticipation.

Lieder continued to be an important outlet for German composers throughout the nineteenth

century. Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) devoted considerable attention to the genre, and Hugo

Wolf (1860–1903) built his reputation solely on his lieder. Rather than rely primarily on the

synthesis at the heart of Schubert’s and Schumann’s songs, Brahms divided his output more

deliberately between Volkslieder [folk songs] and Kunstlieder [art songs]. The folk origins of the

lied are almost completely eliminated from the songs of Wolf, as his setting of Mignon attests,

with its constantly shifting tempo and key, naturalistic (as opposed to melodic) declamations,

and thoroughly complex harmony.6

Romance and Mélodie

Song traditions flourished in other parts of Europe as well, but few shared the origins or

priorities of the German lied. Owing to the proliferation of musical salons throughout France in

the nineteenth century, however, the French song tradition bears a special mention here. Two

types of song were of chief importance: the romance and the mélodie (despite its varied uses in

5 Schubert also composed several, including Die Schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Mill-Maid, D. 795, 1823) and

Winterreise (Winter’s Journey, D. 911, 1827). 6 Compare his setting to Schubert’s “Kennst du das Land” (Mignons Gesang) D. 321 (A-R Online Music Anthology:

http://www.armusicanthology.com/anthology/Default.aspx?music_id=465) and Robert Schumann’s “Kennst du das

Land” (A-R Online Music Anthology: http://www.armusicanthology.com/anthology/Default.aspx?music_id=518)






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both earlier and later periods, the term chanson was typically reserved for a much lighter popular

or drinking song in the nineteenth century).

Of the two styles, the romance was the older and simpler. While it can trace its origins in France

to the eighteenth century, it was most likely related to an even older Spanish genre. In the salons

of the nineteenth century, the romance, as it had always been, remained a strophic song of

modest difficulty. Its accompaniment was typically piano, but could also be for guitar or harp.

Within the first few decades of the nineteenth century, however, the popularity of the romance

began to wane in favor of the more complex mélodie.7 The mélodie itself most likely took its cue

from the increasing popularity of the German lied, and it is often referred to as its counterpart.

Among the early founders of the style was Hector Berlioz (1803–1869), whose song cycle Les

Nuits d’ete (Summer Nights, 1841) was later orchestrated by the composer in 1843 and 1856.

Charles Gounod (1818–1893) was the chief contributor to the genre in the middle part of the

century, and nearly every significant French composer in the later nineteenth century devoted

work to the mélodie as well. Despite its kinship with the German lied, the mélodie remained

popular with French nationalists, and composers such as Gabriel Faure (1845–1924) and Claude

Debussy (1862–1918) used the mélodie to advance French (anti-German) aesthetic goals.

The Character Piece

Another genre that can be (and often is) seen as a counterpart to the German Lied is the character

piece for piano, sometimes called “miniatures” due to their relative brevity. Character pieces are

short, often free (or seemingly free) compositions for piano that explore a single subjective mood

or idea, and often deliberately invoke a sense of contemplation or introspection. Like the lied,

these pieces were typically intended for amateur performance in the home, though many are

quite difficult. Above all, the character piece was a direct embodiment of the Romantic emphasis

on subjectivity and the inspired utterance.

Cultivation of the keyboard miniature was also a rejection of the classical forms that dominated

keyboard music since the early eighteenth century. Although some composers continued writing

piano music in the mold of the classical sonata, the freedom inherent in the character piece

appealed to the early Romantics and their pursuit of new modes of expression. One of the

leading composers of character pieces, Robert Schumann, once defended his Romantic

credentials by commenting:

“As if all mental pictures must be shaped to fit one or two forms.

As if each idea did not come into existence with its form ready-

made! As if each work of art had not its own meaning!”8

7 For more on this complex process, see David Tunley, “Musical Paris” and “The Salons and their Music” in Salons,

Singers and Songs: A Background to Romantic French Song 1830–1870 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 1–35. 8 Robert Schumann, Letter of 22 September 1851. The Letters of Robert Schumann, ed. Karl Stock, trans. Hannah

Bryant (London: John Murray, 1907), 273.


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The Romantic tenet that content should dictate form, rather than the other way around, was one

of the most significant (if fleeting) refutations of Classical ideals in the nineteenth century.9

The link between the lied and the character piece is most clearly observed in the lyrical, song-

like quality that was a hallmark of the genre. That link is most obviously made by Felix

Mendelssohn (1809–1847) in a series of pieces he titled Lieder ohne Worte (Songs without

Words). As shown in Example 1, from Mendelssohn’s second book of Songs without Words,

published in 1834, the lyrical melody in the right hand of the piano would be right at home if

sung to a text. Apparently the publisher thought so too, and added the title “Venetianisches

Goldellied” (Venetian Gondolier’s Song).

Example 1. Mendelssohn, Lieder ohne Worte, Op. 30, no. 6, mm. 6–10 (A-R Online Music

Anthology: http://www.armusicanthology.com/anthology/Default.aspx?music_id=672)

Both Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann were major contributors to the character piece genre.

Schubert’s character pieces tended to focus on the spontaneous, improvisational aspect of the

piano miniature with pieces such as his Moments Musicaux (Musical Moments, D. 780, Op. 94)

and his Impromptus (the four that make up Op. 90 can be found in the A-R Online Music

Anthology: No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4). Schumann, for whom the character piece was as

central to his oeuvre as the lied, composed pieces with evocative titles in collections analogous to

song cycles. Among his most famous character pieces were those he published under the title

Carnaval as his Op. 9 in 1835. Carnaval consisted of twenty-one short pieces with titles that

correspond to characters at a masked ball. Some of the characters were literary inventions, such

as “Pierrot” and “Arlequin,” but others represented real people, primarily those in Schumann’s

own inner circle of friends and collaborators.

For the latter, Schumann often gave them code names, such as “Chiarina” for his beloved Clara

Wieck. Schumann represented himself in two separate pieces as two parts of his personality: the

introverted “Eusebius” and the fiery “Florestan.” The poetic implications of the character piece

were central to Schumann, as the titles to his other collections attest. Two of his works, Papillons

(Butterflies, Op. 2) and Kreisleriana, Op. 16, correspond to literary works by Jean Paul Richter

9 It should be noted that Schumann himself, along with Schubert and Chopin, also composed traditional sonatas as

works meant to indicate their serious engagement with the traditions of classical music, though each did so in novel

ways.









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and ETA Hoffmann respectively. His collections Kinderszenen [Scenes from Childhood, Op.

15], Blumenstücke [Flower Pieces, Op. 19], Novelletten [Novelettes, Op. 21] and Waldszenen

[Forest Scenes, Op. 82] all offer vague imagery with extra-musical associations intended to draw

the listener deeper into the music by contributing their own effort of imagination. He reserved his

most enigmatic title for the third of his Fantasiestücke [Fantasy Pieces, Op. 12], which he simply

titled “Warum?” [Why?]. Though Schumann did not support the explicit kind of program music

as conceived by Berlioz and Liszt (discussed below), his leaving the listener instead to fill in the

blanks further cultivated the sense of interiority that was so important to him and other

Romantics.

No composer was more dedicated to the character piece and piano music in general than Frédéric

Chopin (1810–1849), who composed for the instrument to the exclusion of nearly anything else.

Chopin was not an active advocate for the Romantic movement the way Schumann was, and his

pieces do not use poetic titles or draw on literary images. Despite that, it is hard to imagine more

quintessentially Romantic music than that which Chopin composed, so full as it is of lyricism,

chromaticism, rubato (freely-manipulated tempo), and introspection. Chopin, who was born in

Warsaw before ending up in Paris by way of Vienna, never forgot his Polish homeland, even if

the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians had wiped it off the map in the late eighteenth century. As

a testament to his own nationalist stirrings, many of Chopin’s character pieces bore the titles of

Polish dances, such as his mazurkas and polonaises. Though none of these stylized salon pieces

were meant to be danced to, the four pieces that make up his Four Mazurkas, Op. 17 demonstrate

the range Chopin’s mazurkas often displayed between the clearly dance-like and the abstract.

Perhaps the most famous of all of Chopin character pieces are his nocturnes [night pieces].

Though he did not invent the genre (that credit goes to the Irish composer John Field [1782–

1837]), Chopin did more to popularize it than anyone else. Much like many of Mendelssohn’s

Songs without Words, Chopin’s nocturnes function like a textless melody played in the right

hand over an arpeggiated left-hand accompaniment. Compared to Mendelssohn’s melodies,

however, Chopin’s are more expansive and elaborate. If Mendelssohn owed his melodic style to

the German Volkslied, Chopin owed his to the florid arias of the Italian opera composer

Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835), whom he admired greatly. In keeping with the song-like nature

of the music, Chopin’s nocturnes often resemble strophic repetitions of the same melody, but

always with increasing melodic and harmonic adornment. Compare the appearances of the first

and second iterations of the main theme in Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 27 no. 2, composed

in 1836, given here as Examples 2a, and 2b.





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Example 2a. This example is based on Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 27, no. 2, mm. 6–8 (A-

R Online Music Anthology:

http://www.armusicanthology.com/anthology/Default.aspx?music_id=696)

Example 2b. This example is based on Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 27, no. 2, mm. 30–32

(A-R Online Music Anthology:


Belied by the lavish melodic decorations, the mood of Chopin’s nocturnes is fully in keeping

with the subjective, improvisatory, and introverted nature that defines the character piece and the

Romantic aesthetic from which it was conceived.

The Piano Showpiece

Aside from character pieces and other small pieces, the main generic innovation for piano music

in the nineteenth century came in the form of the virtuosic concert work. While Chopin’s etudes

are worthy of the most distinguished concert stages, the figure that looms largest over this

repertoire is Franz Liszt (1811–1886), a Hungarian-born composer and pianist who many still

regard as the greatest piano virtuoso of all time. When he was only twenty years old, Liszt was

inspired by another performing virtuoso, the violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), to remake

his piano technique from the ground up. He then displayed his formidable technique to

astonished audiences throughout Europe and published his work in collections such as the Études

d’exécution transcendante (Transcendental Etudes, Op. 12) from 1837. The difficulty of

Transcendental Etude no 1 is immediately apparent. This extroverted side of the Romantic

aesthetic was in part a reflection of the increasingly wider audience to which composers had

access in the new social and economic models of the nineteenth century. No longer reliant on

wealthy patrons as the only avenue for the pursuit of a professional career, the ability to amaze a





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large public audience proved often even more lucrative. One of the pianists to rival Liszt in

technique was the German Clara Wieck (1819–1896), who married Robert Schumann in 1840.

At the time of their courtship and into the early years of their partnership, it was Clara who could

boast of the more successful career.

The Symphonic Poem

One of the most significant musical trends in the nineteenth century was the development of

what became known as program music. Program music is that which attempts to convey a

specific narrative through abstract or mimetic musical associations, often accompanied by a

specific text (a program) meant to be read by the listener. The rise of program music in the

nineteenth century took place initially within the genre of the multi-movement symphony (see

below), but by mid-century, single-movement works, called symphonic poems (or tone poems)

were created to better meet the poetic demands of composers who didn’t want to remain tethered

to the older symphonic model.

Aside from symphonies, however, single-movement programmatic works also had precedence in

overtures to operas or plays, which took as their program the plot or themes of the ensuing

drama. By the early nineteenth century, composers began writing concert overtures as standalone

works not tied to dramatic performances. One such example is Felix Mendelssohn’s Overture to

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 21 (1826). Mendelssohn (1809–1847) composed this work

when he was only seventeen, and though he would later compose more incidental music for

Shakespeare’s play, the overture stands on its own. Mendelssohn’s overture is an essay in

characterization. While the structure of the work does not match the events of the play, each

section corresponds to various characters or sets of characters in the drama.

The concert overture is not unique to Mendelssohn. Other composers would invoke this form

without even the precept of a dramatic work on which to base it. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

(1844–1908) composed his Russian Easter Overture (1888) as a work of program music in the

mold of the concert overture that Mendelssohn introduced. The story depicted in the overture is

that of a typical Russian Easter morning service as experienced in a large cathedral packed with

congregants from all walks of life. Such services were vivid memories Rimsky-Korsakov

cherished from his youth in Tikhvin, a provincial town some 350 miles northwest of Moscow. In

a decision that appalled Tsar Alexander III, Rimsky-Korsakov based the melodic content of the

work entirely on Orthodox Church canticles from the Obikhod, a sixteenth-century collection of

polyphonic liturgical chants that no Russian composer had before used as an exclusive source.

The symphonic poem was the brainchild of Franz Liszt (1811–1886). After his successful career

as a touring virtuoso, Liszt accepted an honorary court position at Weimar in 1848 to establish a

cutting-edge orchestra and develop a new approach to music. The most important legacy of this

phase of Liszt’s career were the twelve symphonic poems he composed in his first decade at

Weimar. Those works formed the aesthetic basis for what became known as the New German

School, and the attendant debate to which it gave rise, programmatic vs. absolute music, lasted

until the end of the nineteenth century. Among Liszt’s most celebrated symphonic poems were




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Les Preludes (1848) and Mazeppa (1851). Mazeppa was an expansion of one of Liszt’s earlier

piano works based on the legend of Ivan Mazeppa, a Cossack Hetman who was tied to a wild

horse. For the symphonic poem, Liszt called for the largest orchestra he ever assembled and

included Victor Hugo’s poetic account of the legend in its entirety as a preface to the work.

The dramatic and associative possibilities of the symphonic poem were more fully realized in the

later nineteenth century by the German composer Richard Strauss (1864–1949). Strauss

preferred the term “tone poem,” of which he composed nine (and one program symphony). The

range of subjects and representational styles was all-encompassing from the mimetic to the

philosophical. He often turned to well-known literary works for inspiration, most notably in Don

Juan (1889), Macbeth (1890), and Don Quixote (1898). Yet for his grandest work, he turned not

outward, but inward, and to the decidedly autobiographical Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life, 1898).

Though Strauss remained equivocal on the subject of the Hero’s identity, there is little doubt that

the Hero is Strauss himself.

Where this work truly stands out, however, is in its scope. Even Liszt’s massive orchestra for

Mazeppa is smaller than Strauss’s score, with woodwinds quadrupled, and the brass section

expanded to eight horns and five trumpets. Aside from the number of players, all of the sonic and

expressive dimensions of the work were greatly exaggerated in keeping with the late-nineteenth

century trend toward bigger and bigger artistic statements that reached its high-water mark in the

symphonies of Mahler. Though cast in a single, forty-minute movement, the music of Ein

Heldenleben can be divided structurally into three main sections. Further, Strauss himself

directed the audience to the intended program by way of six specific titles that suggest specific

events or characters. The opening section, titled “Der Held” (The Hero), is a fittingly triumphant,

sweeping theme primarily in the strings and horns. Strauss’s decision to cast the Hero’s theme in

E-flat major was an explicit reference to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica (a title

Strauss also briefly considered using). The subsequent sections are titled "Des Helden

Widersacher" (The Hero's Adversaries); "Des Helden Gefährtin" (The Hero's Companion), the

depiction of Strauss’s wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna; “Des Helden Waltstatt” (The Hero in

Battle); “Des Helden Friedenswerke” (The Hero’s Works of Peace), which contains more than

twenty-three explicit references to Strauss’s earlier tone poems, various songs, and his first

opera, Guntram; and “Des Helden Weltflucht und Vollendung” (The Hero’s Flight from the

World and Consummation).

The Old Genres

The Symphony

None of the Classical genres to survive into the nineteenth century blossomed so fully as the

symphony. The symphony not only grew to become the grandest of Romantic genres, but the

nineteenth century transformed it into the ultimate monument to the composer’s craft, fraught

with a historical significance composers had to grapple with for the first time.


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If there was any doubt that the modest Classical symphony could be tasked with bearing the

weight of the Romantic sublime, the composer who put that doubt to rest was Ludwig van

Beethoven (1770–1827). After writing two standard Classical-style symphonies, Beethoven’s

Symphony no. 3 was an epoch-making work. In the early age of Romanticism, it was the most

quintessentially ‘Romantic’ composition: the thinly-veiled narrative of heroic struggle and

triumph that came to define not only a period in Beethoven’s life, but an entire defining period in

the history of Western art music. The scale of the symphony was wholly unprecedented. Its first

movement alone was longer than most full symphonies at the time, and the work’s length was

matched by the size of its orchestra, its harmonic complexity, and its exceptional dramatic

force—perhaps the composition’s most conspicuous defining feature.

That dramatic force is evident in the sonorities that open the first movement. The work begins

with two powerful chords that serve a dual purpose. In the practical sense of symphonic

performance in Beethoven’s day (before concert etiquette or even dedicated concert halls), they

served to grab the attention of the audience so that Beethoven could begin his sonata exposition

with a soft theme. In a larger sense, they demand attention and call the listener as a witness to the

art that is about to unfold: a relationship of listener-to-piece familiar to the modern classical

concertgoer, but wholly new in the nineteenth century. The quiet theme that begins in the cellos

serves not only as the sonata form’s first theme, but also as the musical idea that will struggle to

establish itself throughout the movement—the protagonist of the heroic narrative. While initially

seeming to be a simple fanfare, the theme continually gets derailed harmonically and

rhythmically throughout both the exposition and development sections until its ultimate triumph

at the end of the recapitulation.

Composers continued to innovate on the standard symphonic form in the first half of the century,

altering the formula in a number of ways. Schubert’s dark Symphony in B Minor, D. 759 (1822),

which he left incomplete after writing two of its movements (hence the common moniker

“Unfinished”) destabilized the sonata plan by developing its introductory theme and modulating

to unexpected mediant and submediant key areas as he often did in his piano music. Schumann’s

Symphony no. 4 in D Minor (the second in order of composition, 1841; rev. 1851) included

transitional material between the traditional four movements so that it functioned as one

continual work. Schumann further unified it by reusing material from the opening movement in

the later movements as well, a feature known as cyclic form.

Radical change to the symphony, however, occurred not by the alteration of its formal structure,

but by a reimagining of its very potential for expression. The French composer Hector Berlioz

(1803–1869) wrote his Symphonie fantastique in 1828, and with it, laid the groundwork for

experiments in Romantic music that would persist until the twentieth century. Its closest model

was Beethoven’s sixth symphony, with its five movements and representational music, but those

similarities, aside from some of the pastoral music in Berlioz’s third movement that evokes the

older composer, are purely superficial. Where Berlioz’s creation truly stood out was its greatly

expanded orchestration and the nature of its incredibly detailed program. In both cases, Berlioz

owed more to operatic and dramatic practice than symphonic writing, so that the Symphonie

fantastique can be more readily understood as an orchestral drama without words—but with






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action just as explicit. The detailed scenario about love and loss that culminated in an opium-

fueled hysteria, penned by Berlioz himself, was laid out in a program leaflet (hence “program”

music) that was distributed to the audience members at each performance—a practice which

Berlioz specified was as integral to the music as the libretto is to an opera.

Although other composers wrote program symphonies, like Liszt’s Faust Symphony (1857), the

representational potential sparked by Berlioz was more fully manifested in the symphonic poems

discussed above. For Berlioz’s part, the Symphonie fantastique was a comparatively conservative

effort, and he continued to dismantle generic boundaries in other ways. He composed a sequel to

the Symphonie fantastique in 1830 titled Lélio, which he called a “lyric monodrama” for narrator,

chorus, and orchestra that opens with an art song for piano. His other creations included Roméo

et Juliet (1839), a “dramatic symphony” with orchestra, chorus, and soloists, and La damnation

du Faust (1846), a “dramatic legend” for similar forces plus a children’s chorus. These works did

not exert a lasting influence, however, as more conservative and historically-minded tastes would

ultimately reclaim the intellectual content of the symphony.

With the rise of the symphonic poem at midcentury, the standard, four-movement symphony

seemed for a time to have become irrelevant. Though composers still learned the genre in

academic classrooms, few symphonies appeared in the repertoire in the 1860s and 1870s.10 New

reverence for the classical symphony reemerged in the last quarter of the century, however, as

the increasing lionization of Beethoven provided the impetus for composers to return to his

model. Ever more aware of their place in a musical history that was being created for the first

time in the nineteenth century, composers began to find it necessary to position their new works

in direct relation to the established canon. This paradoxical situation, in which composers had to

look behind them to look ahead is one of the signature legacies of the nineteenth century. When

Johannes Brahms completed his First Symphony in 1876 (after two decades of intermittent work

and false starts), he made the reference to Beethoven obvious in both his choice of key (C minor,

the key of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), and the second theme of the finale which bore a

deliberate resemblance to the “Ode to Joy” theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.11

For the composers who follow Brahms back into the symphonic fold such as Anton Bruckner

(1824–1896), Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), and Gustav

Mahler (1860–1911), the most pressing philosophical question concerned the nature of

programmatic content. By the 1850s, the question of program vs. absolute music had become

one of utmost artistic importance, and by the mid-1870s, a vitriolic press war raged between

supporters of both camps: Liszt’s New German School and Brahms’s more conservative circle.

Both Tchaikovsky and Mahler were particularly ambivalent on the subject, and programs for

their symphonies were sometimes deliberate and sometimes repressed (and sometimes denied

altogether). Both of Mahler’s first two symphonies began life as symphonic poems before the

10 Early works by Tchaikovsky and Dvořák date from this time, though most of these were edited or published after

Brahms’s First Symphony. 11 Cementing this relationship, the conductor Hans von Bülow, once a supporter of Wagner, hailed Brahms’s First

Symphony as “Beethoven’s Tenth.” He also canonized Brahms as one of the “Three Bs” alongside Bach and

Beethoven. See Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 443.


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composer recast them with more abstract titles. Mahler’s symphonies, in particular, extended the

historical awareness of Brahms’s works to the point of ironic detachment. The third movement

of Mahler’s Symphony no. 1 (1888), an eerie funeral march, contains distorted children’s tunes

and vulgar musical styles deliberately at odds with the grand symphonic repertoire. Mahler was

among the first to see that the grandiose artistic postures celebrated in the canon were becoming

harder to approach with sincerity, and his outlook was one shared by many modernists in the

decades to come.

The Concerto

After the symphony, the most important historical genre in the nineteenth century was the solo

concerto, still a three-movement work that featured a soloist with orchestral accompaniment.

Though it never attained the privileged status of the symphony, the concerto did boast the longest

history as the only instrumental genre to claim continual relevance since the seventeenth century.

As they did with the symphony, composers updated the concerto to reflect Romantic attitudes by

expanding its scope, intensifying its expressive power, and unifying its formal structure. The

presence of a soloist also resonated with composers in new ways in in the nineteenth century

considering the Romantic fascination with individuality and heroic struggle. What had been a

fairly cooperative genre in the eighteenth century often became a battle of wills in the nineteenth.

Part of this was due to the increased primacy of the composer over performers throughout the

nineteenth century that began with the cult of Beethoven and the composer-as-hero model. This

served to increase reverence for the written score to an almost mythic status, and though

composers would go to great lengths in the nineteenth century to give the impression of

spontaneity in their music, it was almost always calculated to the smallest detail.

One of the first composers to alter the concerto format in ways that would be followed

throughout the nineteenth century was the German composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786–

1826). Though he wrote several classically-styled concertos in the 1810s, his most original work

was his Konzertstück (Concert Piece, Op. 79) for piano and orchestra of 1821. What made

Weber’s concerto obviously atypical was its conception as a fully programmatic work, complete

with a detailed program of a medieval knight’s quest. Though programmatic concertos did not

catch on outside of a few rare instances, Weber’s changes to the concerto form proved more

influential. In a typical classical concerto, the orchestra presents the first sonata-form theme

without modulation before the soloist enters and presents it again, this time modulating dutifully

to the new key. This was known as a double exposition, and for Weber’s programmatic work, it

was completely superfluous. Instead, Weber combined the soloist and orchestra from the outset,

and they both presented the thematic material throughout in full integration.

Weber’s changes were further solidified by Beethoven. While the Romantic symphony often

retained the formal architecture of the Classical one, the concerto in the nineteenth century was

freer than its ancestors. Both the ritornello form of the Baroque concerto and the double-

exposition form of the Classical concerto were abandoned in favor of a more organic interaction



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of the soloist and the orchestra. Another important change was the abandonment of improvised

cadenzas that were a hallmark of the eighteenth-century concerto.

While Beethoven’s first three concertos were close to the Mozartean model he clearly emulated,

the fourth (and later the fifth) broke with convention in several key ways. The first was the

adoption of the kind of unified exposition that combined soloist and orchestra in the presentation

of the thematic material found in Weber’s Konzertstück. The second was to forgo the standard

opening orchestral tutti in favor of solo material from the very beginning, suggesting that the

orchestra was a part of the soloist’s world and not the other way around. (For an example of this,

see the opening of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4, Op. 58.) This was an appealing idea to

many Romantic composers, and the balance of power shifted continually in favor of the soloist

until taken to its extreme by Liszt in the 1850s. The second movement of Beethoven’s concerto

further reimagined the relationship of soloist and ensemble by staging a conflict and resolution

between the piano and the orchestra reduced only to the string section. In this case, the tutti and

solo material are entirely different, another departure from normal procedure with few

precedents.12 This distinction between the soloist and ensemble is further underscored by

dynamic level and harmonic complexity. The drama is enacted as the piano steadily enforces its

will on the strings until they submit, giving the soloist, naturally, the final word.

Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844) adopted some of Beethoven’s

innovations while introducing some new features as well. Like Beethoven’s fourth and fifth

piano concertos, Mendelssohn’s first movement used the standard sonata form approach with a

unified exposition. In a new twist, however, Mendelssohn composed material that linked each of

the movements together, creating the illusion of one single, continuous piece. Many composers

throughout the nineteenth century followed this approach as well, including Clara Schumann,

Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt. Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor (1835) was

even more radical than Mendelssohn’s by dispensing with sonata form altogether. Robert

Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor (1845), and both of Liszt’s Piano Concertos (no. 1 in E-

flat, 1857 and no. 2 in A major, 1861) employed cyclic form by using thematic material that

recurred throughout the entire work. Liszt’s concertos expanded the concept of unity to the point

that they were both single-movement works with internal sections that roughly corresponded to

the movements in symphonic practice.

Beyond these departures from convention, the Romantic spirit gave birth to more unusual and

capricious takes on the soloist/ensemble formula. In the model of Weber, both Schumann and

Liszt produced a number of single-movement concert works such as Schumann’s Introduction

and Allegro appassionato in G major, Op. 92 (1849) and Liszt’s Grande Fantasie Symphonique

(1834) based on themes by Berlioz. Berlioz himself contributed one of his generic oddities to the

repertoire with Harold en Italie (Harold in Italy, 1831), technically a symphony with viola

obbligato, though it had been commissioned by Paganini as a viola concerto to show off his

12 One such precedent can be found in the later concertos by the Czech composer Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760–1812).

See Stephan D. Lindeman, “The Nineteenth-century Piano Concerto” in The Cambridge Companion to the

Concerto, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 94.





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newly acquired Stradivarius.13 Other Romantic creations included Ernest Chausson’s Poème for

violin and orchestra written at the end of the century in 1896, recalling the intimate poetic style

of the early Romantics.

After the concertos of Liszt, however, in which thematic and formal unity and soloistic

dominance reached their apogee, composers in the later part of the nineteenth century primarily

restored Beethoven as the proper model, mirroring the trend in the symphonic repertoire. The

concertos of Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, and Saint-Saëns returned to the more traditional

symphonic style popular in the first decades of the century as the inertia of Romantic innovation

began to slow in the wake of historical self-awareness and invention of a timeless past.

Chamber Music

The term “chamber music” initially denoted nothing more than music that was not intended for

performance in a sacred setting, but by the late eighteenth century it took on a more specialized

meaning that reflected the growing repertoire of music intended for amateur domestic

performance. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most chamber music was still heard

only by the players themselves or in some cases by the semi-private audiences of the salon. By

the end of the century, however, both the increasing demands of and reverence for the music

resulted in its reassignment to the domain of the professional musician and the venue of the

concert hall.

Chamber music in general, and the string quartet in particular, reflects more than any other genre

the power of historical self-awareness in the nineteenth century. While genres of the earlier

epochs always arose in response to a particular social demand, the string quartet persisted into

the nineteenth (and twentieth) century primarily as a model genre with which to compare oneself

to earlier masters despite the fact that the original social impetus for its creation had long lost its

relevance. The piano became the domestic instrument of choice in the nineteenth century, and by

the 1820s, composers of quartets had largely stopped writing with amateurs in mind at all. The

historical imperative for the quartet can yet again be traced to Beethoven (who himself had

historical models in Haydn and Mozart), especially the quartets he composed in the last years of

his life. These so-called “late quartets,” such as Op. 130 in B-flat major and Op. 131 in C-sharp

minor explored the expressive possibilities of the genre for Romantic composers and provided a

blueprint for the kind of abstract approach that would be associated with chamber music

throughout the century. The early Romantics, such as Schumann and Schubert, followed

Beethoven’s example by composing quartets of symphonic depth and complexity, such as that on

display in Schubert’s Quartet no. 13 in A minor, D. 804.

Owing to the popularity of the piano in the nineteenth century, piano trios and quartets also

flourished alongside string quartets. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805–1847) composed several

chamber works in her short life (as did her brother, Felix). The third movement of her Trio in D

13 Needless to say, Paganini was sorely disappointed when he saw the score which was heavily balanced in favor of

the orchestra with no virtuosic passages for the soloist.







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minor, Op. 11 shows the kinship between chamber music and the art song in its function as a

song without words, complete with a modified strophic form, as discussed below.

In the middle decades of the century, the influence of the New German School contributed to the

popularity of both programmatic content and large-scale forms, priorities with which chamber

music was at odds. Much like the traditional symphony, the middle of the century was a lean

time for chamber music, and, like the symphony, it was revived within the context of a rival

conservatism that championed historical models. Johannes Brahms, the leading voice of the

conservative movement, spent considerable energy on chamber music throughout his life. In the

first movement of his Piano Quartet no. 3, Op. 60, Brahms combined his conservative, classicist

approach with a technique borrowed from his mentor Robert Schumann. While the movement is

cast in a traditional sonata form, the opening gesture is a musical cipher of the sort Schumann

was fond of using in works such as his Op. 2 Papillons. The cipher itself is a transposition of

Schumann’s “Clara theme” (C–B–A–G-sharp–A) which the older composer used in several his

works to reference the name of his wife.14 (See Example 3.) By the time Brahms composed his

Piano Quartet no. 3, Op. 60, in 1875, he had cultivated an intimate relationship with Clara that

had been ongoing since Robert’s death nearly twenty years before.

Example 3. This example is based on Brahms, Piano Quartet no. 3, Op. 60, mm. 1–10. (A-R

Online Music Anthology:


14 See Eric Sams, “The Schumann Ciphers,” The Musical Times 107 (1966): 392–99; and “Brahms and His Clara

Themes,” The Musical Times 112 (1971): 432–34.





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It is precisely this kind of music, with its references to a multilayered past and a highly personal

present that Brahms was so adept at creating and which encapsulated the late Romantic

condition.15

Romantic Opera

The oldest continually-practiced genre in the nineteenth century (as it remains today) was opera.

Though few musical elements were preserved from the early-seventeenth century dramas of Peri

and Monteverdi, the long tradition of opera was purposefully cultivated and celebrated in the

nineteenth century. Italy, the birthplace of opera, had steered its stylistic development in Europe

over the course of two centuries, and through the eighteenth century most serious operas were

still performed in Italian regardless of the local language of its audience (or composer).

Nationalist tendencies in the nineteenth century, however, gave rise to distinct styles that sought

to align opera with various aesthetic priorities throughout Europe.

Italy

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Italian opera continued in the vein of the

eighteenth-century opera buffa with stories that focused on the plights of lower-class characters,

though with less social commentary.16 As opera became more accessible to the Italian public, a

more melodic style of writing emerged to match the tastes of its audience and with it an

emphasis on beautiful singing. The voice itself became the central musical object in Italian

opera, and demands to feature it grew in relation other dramatic concerns. The leading composer

of Italian opera at this time was Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868). Rossini had the dual gifts of

being a supreme melodist and a fast worker, which was necessary in the breakneck business of

Italian opera in the nineteenth century. It was Rossini who pioneered the scene formulas that

allowed melody to flourish without sacrificing compelling dramatic structure. After Rossini’s

abrupt retirement in 1829, both Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) furthered

Rossini’s style with an increased sense of Romantic lyricism.

The figure who dominated Italian opera in the second half of the nineteenth century was

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). Unlike the earlier generation of opera composers who were

subject to strict censorship, Verdi played an important role in the burgeoning of Italian national

sentiment known as the Risorgimento. Many of Verdi’s early operas contained choruses that

became emblems of Italy’s national struggle, such as the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from

Nabucco (1842). Verdi’s enduring stylistic contributions included the blending of comic and

serious elements which are on display in his three early 1850s operas, Il Trovatore (The

Troubadour, 1851), La Traviata (The Fallen Woman, 1853), and Rigoletto (1853). Those operas

15 For more on this particular aspect of Brahms in relation to the first quartets, see Marie Sumner Lott, “At the

Intersection of Public and Private Musical Life: Brahms's Op. 51 String Quartets,” Journal of the Royal Musical

Association 137, no. 2 (2012): 243–305. 16 Censorship from the Hapsburg government after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 made political themes in Italian

opera almost impossible for composers to pursue, with the result that much early Romantic Italian opera dealt with

the more benign themes of love and light comedy.


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also firmly solidified conventions of voice types and their characterizations, including the love

affair between tenor and soprano (and her inevitable death). La Traviata, which was set in

modern-day Paris, also became one of the earliest examples of verismo, a genre of opera focused

on realism that was cultivated later in the century by composers such as Pietro Mascagni (1863–

1945) and Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). The final scene of La Traviata demonstrates Verdi’s

mastery of characterization, melody, and drama all within the formal conventions pioneered by

Rossini.

France

France could boast an operatic history nearly as old as that of Italy, dating back to the ancien

régime of the Bourbons and the five-act tragedies of Lully and Rameau. France was also one of

the few places in Europe where performance in the local language (French as opposed to Italian)

remained standard, even when translations of major Italian works were required. Yet against that

long history of conservatism, France was ground zero in the revolutionary age of the late

eighteenth century, and political upheaval would continue to see new governments established

and overthrown over the course of the nineteenth century. Throughout these changes in political

moods, composers adapted their approaches to a number of significant operatic styles.

In the decades after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the restored government exerted powerful

influence over the opera to once again turn it into an influential tool of the state, as it had been in

the seventeenth century. The style of opera that resulted was Grand Opera, an opulent display of

heroic deeds, lavish sets, and powerful music. In keeping with the grand revolutionary spirit of

the age, Grand Opera almost always featured historical plots with everyday characters who

changed the course of great events. These stories were also wrapped in spectacle of every sort

from large crowd scenes to ballet numbers to state of the art stage effects.17 The most notable

composers of Grand Opera were the French Daniel Auber who established many of the

conventions of the style with his La muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici, 1828) and the

German-born Giacomo Meyerbeer who further solidified the conventions with his Robert le

diable (Robert the Devil, 1831) and Les Huguenots (The Huguenots, 1836). Rossini, who spent

the last years of his active career in France, also contributed an early archetype with Guillaume

Tell (William Tell, 1829).

By midcentury, the extravagances of Grand Opera began to give way to a smaller, more melodic

style of opera often referred to as Lyric Opera. This was in part a nationalistic response as well,

as French composers were eager to refocus their efforts on accessible, lighthearted music that

refuted the weighty pretentiousness of German opera in general and Wagner in particular. Lyric

Opera, such as those by Charles Gounod (1818–1893), Georges Bizet (1838–1875), and Jules

Massenet (1842–1912) focused on beauty rather than spectacle, and reduced the dimensions of

opera to a more palatable size. The focus on melodic writing can be observed in Bizet’s Carmen

(1872), an opera in which Bizet blended the lyric approach with the exoticism associated with its

title character. In the Act I, no. 10 Seguidilla and Duet, Carmen, a Spanish gypsy, seduces Don

17 For some examples, see Robert Cannon, Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 169–75.




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José through the power of her music, which, though fraught with dangerous chromatic

modulations, represents the lyrical style so prized in the French opera houses of its day.

Germany

In Germany, the demand for a new, fully German opera arose in the first decades of the

nineteenth century as yet another facet of cultural nationalism that was rapidly taking hold there.

Aside from the popular Singspiel with spoken dialogue, no serious tradition of German opera

existed before the nineteenth century. Beethoven’s lone operatic attempt, Fidelio (1805), was a

Singspiel cast in the mold of the “rescue opera,” a popular genre in the years after the French

Revolution that involved the plot to rescue a character and the triumph of morality. Fidelio was a

synthesis of a number of dramatic styles, both high and low, but it did not become the

groundbreaking model Beethoven had hoped it would, and he never wrote another opera. The

composer who did provide the model for German Romantic opera was Carl Maria von Weber.

Weber realized that nationalism, not moralizing, should be the chief function of art in the new

era, and his operas such as Der Freischütz (The Free Shooter, 1821) and Euryanthe (1823)

established the conventions followed by German composers throughout the nineteenth century.

Though Weber’s operas still employed spoken dialogue, the overall concept was much more

symphonic and placed an emphasis on the role of the orchestra both to create the atmosphere of

the drama and to provide formal cohesion. Unlike the Enlightenment themes found in earlier

German operas, Weber drew entirely on Romantic tropes: nature, the folk, and the supernatural.

These elements can be seen at work in the finale to Act II of Der Freischütz, the Wolf’s Glen

Scene. In this scene, the hunters Max and Caspar meet in the woods to cast the magic bullets

with the aid of Samiel, the devil. A combination of sung text, melodrama (spoken text over an

orchestral accompaniment), and chorus, Weber’s music paints the horrifying scene in rich

symphonic detail.

Though later composers attempted to further the legacy of German opera, one figure ultimately

dictated its course: Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Wagner expanded the elements of German

opera in both content (from folklore to myth and legend) and scope, dramatically increasing the

emphasis on the orchestra as the arbiter of truth. Wagner owed this symphonic tendency to his

self-professed Beethovenian heritage. It was not Fidelio, however, but rather Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony to which Wagner traced his roots, in particular the choral finale that pointed toward

the joining of voice and orchestra as the only viable path forward. Indeed, Wagner lamented at

length in a series of writings in the early 1850s about the separation and degradation of the

individual art forms and sought to bring them all together in what he termed a Gesamtkunstwerk

(total work of art), modeled on the tragedies of the ancient Greeks. In another sense of the term,

Wagner also pursued control over every aspect of his own operas, from writing his own librettos

(a rarity for opera composers) to specifying the stage action. He was also the first composer to

conceive of the orchestra out of sight in a pit to further the illusion that the music was emanating

from the world of the drama.




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Wagner’s ultimate realization of his theorizing came in the form of his four-opera cycle Der

Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs) composed over more than twenty years

between 1853 and 1874. In the Ring Cycle, as it is commonly known, Wagner took the concept

of musical association to a degree never before attempted. Part of the reason Wagner expanded

his original idea from one opera into four is so that the earlier operas could provide the musical

“history” on which the later operas could draw. He achieved this feat by employing dozens of

discrete musical motives that coincided with onstage action and therefore became associated

with characters, emotions, or objects. Each of these motives gained more nuanced associations

and relationships as the operas (nearly sixteen hours in total) progressed. These leitmotifs

(leading motives) as they have come to be called (not by Wagner, who never named them),

created an orchestral fabric of ponderous complexity. Unlike Italian opera, which ever favored

the voice as the musical centerpiece, Wagner’s operas were orchestral first and foremost. For the

vocal element, Wagner did away with any distinctions between arias and recitatives in favor of

what he called “endless melody,” a freely unfolding declamatory style that was woven into the

fabric of the score.

Further evidence of Wagner’s orchestra-first approach can be found in his opera Tristan und

Isolde (1859) written during the long work on the Ring Cycle. Tristan und Isolde recounts the

Anglo-Norman tale of forbidden love, but with a modern philosophical flavor. Wagner, who was

a devoted admirer of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), wrote Tristan

und Isolde as an embodiment of the raw force of the will as described in Schopenhauer’s Die

Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation).18 To encode the

unfulfilled desire of Tristan and Isolde, Wagner used as his metaphor the principles of diatonic

resolution. In the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, Wagner continually creates tension by

employing a half-diminished chord (known today as the “Tristan chord”) that never fully

resolves. Only at the end of the nearly five-hour opera, and after the death of both of the title

characters, is the chord finally resolved, and thus their love consummated.

Russia

Operatic practice in Russia, which was dominated by Italian practices until the second half of the

century, formed along two paths: one nationalist, one cosmopolitan. The nationalist strain traced

its roots to the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and the composer Mikhail Glinka (1804–

57), whose opera A Life for the Tsar (1836) is often considered to be the first truly Russian

opera.19 Glinka and his devoted followers, the composers known as “The Mighty Five,” sought

to cultivate an opera style based on history, folk music, and naturalism. Modest Mussorgsky

(1839–1881) took the most decisive strides in this direction with his opera Boris Godunov

(1874), based on a Pushkin play. Mussorgsky’s concept was to create a musical style based

faithfully on the cadences and inflections of spoken Russian, and he painstakingly set the text to

capture the language in its most literal sense. Though later revisions softened the dialogue with

more melodic conceits, his naturalist style was a radical departure from earlier Romantic

conventions. The other strain of Russian operatic activity was the cosmopolitan style of Peter

18 Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 3d expanded ed. (Leipzig: F. U. Brodhaus, 1859). 19 Ibid., 226–7.



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Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky and many Russian composers, most notably Anton Rubenstein,

advocated for a more universalist (that is to say, Germanist) approach to writing music, as they

felt that Russians had lagged too far behind the latest musical developments and should emulate

the great Western masters in order to catch up. Thus, Tchaikovsky’s operatic masterpiece

Eugene Onegin (1878, also based on a Pushkin text) is much closer in tone to the lyric operas

being composed in France at the time. In fact, Tchaikovsky’s score resembles nothing so much

as a string of French romances to capture the highly civilized, aristocratic setting of the story.20

Choral Music

Choral music in the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, served a similar nationalist

function as the lied, though with more emphasis on the collective than the individual. While the

collective facet of the lied existed in the abstract connection to its supposedly folk roots, the

essence of the collective in choral music was inherent in its performance forces and, more

importantly, in the act of its performance. Through such performances, often by groups of

amateurs in local groups such as the Männerchor (Men’s chorus) and the Frauenchor (Women’s

chorus), a deliberate sense of community was fostered as a kind of cultural nation-building.21

The special status of choral music for the Romantics, however, was also again ensured by

Beethoven, who used chorus and soloists in the massive finale to his Ninth Symphony, Op. 125

(1824).

The music performed by these community groups were typically called partsongs, and were

usually unaccompanied. The themes of these pieces, like lieder, were often of love or nature,

though brotherhood was a common theme as well. While the men’s and women’s choruses were

most often separate, mixed-voice ensembles were popular as well. It is no coincidence that two

of the most prolific contributors to the genre of the partsong were Franz Schubert and Robert

Schumann, the masters of the German lied. Schubert’s Vier Gesänge für vier Männerstimmen

(Four Songs for Four Men’s Voices, Op. 17, D. 983) is a superb example of this style. It’s fourth

song, “Nacht” (Night), demonstrates many of the hallmarks of German partsongs: a folk-like

melody, simple harmonies, homophonic texture, and strophic form. As nationalist fervor

mounted in the years leading up to and beyond the revolutions of 1848, choral music often

carried an increasingly political message, as in the choral ballades (Opp. 116, 139, 140, and 143)

of Robert Schumann, composed in 1849 and 1850.

The other choral music most significant in the nineteenth century, in the guise of oratorios,

masses, and motets, had long histories that stretched back at least well into the previous century

(and to the Renaissance for masses and motets). The oratorios of Handel and Telemann were still

performed throughout England and Germany in the nineteenth century, and new works in a

similar vein were still being composed. Ferdinand Hiller, Louis Spohr, and Felix Mendelssohn

20 See Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Music in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2010), 3:632–39. 21 See Celia Applegate, “Robert Schumann and the Culture of German Nationhood” in Rethinking Schumann, Laura

Tunbridge and Roe-Min Kok, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–13.



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all contributed sacred oratorios, the latter’s Paulus (St. Paul, 1836) and Elias (Elijah, 1846) are

still performed today. Two trends can be observed in later oratorios: they became increasingly

dramatic, akin to operas without staging, and increasingly secular. Both of Robert Schumann’s

oratorios, Das Paradies und die Peri (Paradise and the Peri, 1843) and Der Rose Pilgerfahrt

(The Pilgrimage of the Rose, 1851) are secular works that adopted sacred idioms and forms to

lend a sense of spirituality to their broader Romantic themes of redemption and the supernatural.

The composition of Masses (settings of the text of the Mass Ordinary for chorus and orchestra),

requiems (Masses for the dead), and other religious works also thrived in the nineteenth century.

Beethoven contributed to the genre with two Masses, the Mass in C, Op. 86 (1807) and the Missa

solemnis, Op. 123 (1823). Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Gounod, and Bruckner

(among many others) also composed Masses of various sizes. The most prominent requiems

include those by Berlioz, Verdi, and Fauré. Brahms composed his Ein Deutsches Requiem

(German Requiem, Op. 45, 1868) not to the liturgical Latin text, but rather to a more generally

sacred German one, based on texts from both the Old and New Testaments. Motets, or short

choral works on a sacred Latin text, were also revived by composers in the later nineteenth

century. Anton Bruckner, an ardent Catholic, composed many, such as the unaccompanied Virga

Jesse (The Rod of Jesse, 1885). Even aside from the language and the sacred text, Virga Jesse

differs from Schubert’s “Nacht” in many ways. Rather than simple, folk-like, homophony,

Bruckner set his text in the elaborate stile antico counterpoint of the sixteenth century, but

updated with rich, Romantic harmonies that express the power of the exultant text.

Form

Song Forms

The prominence of song composition as an independent genre in the nineteenth century demands

a brief look at the formal types that were most often in use. As was the case in many Romantic

genres, individual songs could be unique and respond to the poetic text in novel ways that defy

standard categorization. Nonetheless, composers tended to use one of three main approaches:

strophic, modified strophic, or through-composed.

The most basic approach was strophic form, in which composers used the same recurring music

to set the various stanzas of a poem. Most early lieder were strophic because of the emphasis on

the folk quality of the genre in its earliest phase. However, strophic form could still be used as a

vehicle for more subjective settings as well. In the lied “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” from

Dichterliebe (discussed above), Schumann chose to employ a strophic setting to imbue both

stanzas with the same harmonic ambiguity to subvert the surface banality of the text.

Later composers further exploited this form to highlight ironies in a text. Gustav Mahler (1860–

1911) three of the four couplets to the same music in the first song of his Kindertotenlieder

(Songs on the Death of Children, 1904) for soprano and orchestra. For the opening couplet,





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Mahler’s music echoes the imagery in the text by ascending with the first line and descending

with the second.

Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn, Now the sun rises so brightly,

Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht geschehn!22 As if no tragedy occurred in the night.

When Mahler used the same music to set the second stanza, the resulting mismatch created a

bitter irony that suggests the grief of the speaker is either beyond or numb to conventional

expressive gestures.

Das Unglück geschah nur mir allein! The tragedy happened only to me.

Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein! The sun, it shines for all.

A variant of strophic form, known as modified strophic, was often employed by composers to

react more fluidly to the expressive demands of the poem while retaining an overall similar

rhythmic and melodic profile. In modified strophic forms, successive stanzas are set to music

that varies slightly from stanza to stanza. Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade (discussed above) is

an example of modified strophic form. The opening music for the first two stanzas is provided in

Examples 4a and 4b. While the rhythm of the vocal line and accompaniment remain the same,

the melody and harmony are slightly changed.

Example 4a. This example is based on Schubert, Gretchen am Spinnrade, mm. 2–6 (A-R



22 Text by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866).




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Example 4b. This example is based on Schubert, Gretchen am Spinnrade, mm. 13–17 (A-R



The final song form is referred to as through-composed, or by its German counterpart,

durchkomponiert. As the name suggests, a through-composed song in one in which the composer

continually writes new music for each successive stanza. Ballads or other narrative poetry often

elicited through-composed settings, such as the one Schubert provided for Goethe’s Erlkönig.

While earlier settings of the poem, such as those by Johann Friedrich Reichardt or Carl Friedrich

Zelter were strophic or modified strophic, Schubert used a through-composed approach to better

capture the growing drama of the narrative, as well as to better characterize each of the four

distinct characters in the poem. The near constant triplets in the accompaniment provided the

cohesive structure over which Schubert explored a range of thematic and harmonic material. (See

Erlkönig, D. 328.)

Sonata Form

One of the most emblematic musical creations of the eighteenth century was sonata form, the

elegant synthesis of thematic and tonal organization that served as the basic architecture for

single-movement works or the first movement of larger ones. By the turn of the nineteenth

century, sonata form was defined by its tripartite structure: an exposition of two contrasting

themes that modulates to the dominant or other key, a development section on one or both

themes, and a recapitulation of the exposition that remains in the tonic key. To this structure was

often added lengthy introductions or codas of new or related material. Though it was derived

from binary forms whose defining features were tonal contrast, in the hands of Romantic

composers the emphasis was rather on the competing thematic material. The relationship of the

first and second theme groups was often cast as a heroic struggle for existence as in Beethoven’s

Symphony no. 3 or Brahms’s Symphony no. 1. Composers also avoided repeating sections and

even modified thematic material upon its return in the recapitulation, as Berlioz did in his

Symphonie fantastique.

One such Romanticization of the form can be observed in Schumann’s Fourth Symphony in D

minor. The opening movement begins in typical fashion with a slow introduction and exposition






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that dutifully modulates from the tonic (D minor) to the relative major. From that point on,

however, the form is constantly derailed by new material and remote modulations. The

development section dominates the movement, and though it begins by recalling the first theme

(in distant E-flat minor), Schumann introduces two new themes, which become the focus of the

development section along with references to the first theme from the exposition. The

recapitulation never arrives. Instead, the first theme reprises in A minor, and the new themes are

heard in A major, followed by their appearance in D major at the conclusion of the movement.

The second theme from the exposition never reappears in the first movement, but, strangely,

does appear at the end of the fourth movement, which can be understood on a different level as

being the recapitulation section of a large-scale sonata form that unfolds over all four

movements.

The importance of sonata form in the nineteenth century also owed much to the historical

preservation of the genres like the symphony, sonata and concerto that relied on it, but the

essential design of sonata form is detectable even in music that is outwardly more progressive

and formally free. In works such as Liszt’s symphonic poem Les Préludes or Chopin’s Ballade in

G Minor, an underlying adherence to the broad pattern of exposition—development—

recapitulation can be detected despite the presence of other more dominant (often programmatic)

organizing principles.

Variation Form

Variation forms, far older than even Sonata form, remained relevant for many composers

throughout the nineteenth century. Though the abstract nature of musical variations can seem at

odds with the Romantic penchant for emotional expression generally or programmatic content

specifically, the variation form proved versatile to enough to satisfy a range of artistic demands.

Early in the century, variations on composer’s own melodies often appeared, particularly within

larger works with traditional forms. Schubert was especially fond of this approach, two famous

examples being the slow movements of his Piano Quintet in A Major, D. 667 (1819) and his

Fantasie in C Major for Piano, D. 760 (1822) which he based on lied melodies he composed

himself. Those lieder, titled Die Forelle (The Trout) and Der Wanderer (The Wanderer) have

lent their titles to the larger works in common parlance, which are more commonly known as the

“Trout Quintet” and the “Wanderer Fantasy.”

Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and nearly every major composer in the middle of

the nineteenth century composed variations of some sort, most often for piano.23 By the last

quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the variation form had taken on new historical

significance for composers positioning their work with an eye toward the canon and new

representational possibilities for composers interested in the progressive art of program music.

In his Fourth Symphony (1885), Johannes Brahms turned to an old variation technique for the

fourth movement finale: the chaconne. Chaconnes, sets of variations over a ground bass, were

23 Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, op. 120 (1823), Schumann’s Variations on the Name Abegg, Op. 1 (1830),

Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses, op. 54 (1841), and Liszt’s Variations on a Theme by Bach, S. 180 (1862) are just

a few examples.



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popular from early in the Baroque period. For his movement, Brahms drew on several specific

influences. The ground bass itself was derived from the bass line of the final chorus in Bach’s

Cantata no. 150, though Brahms transposed it and added a chromatic passing tone for more

harmonic interest (as shown in Example 5). Other likely models included Dietrich Buxtehude’s

Ciaccona in E minor and the finale from Bach’s Sonata in D minor for solo violin.24 Precedent

for the symphonic variations can be found in Beethoven’s Eroica finale: another connection of

which Brahms was well aware. Brahms then composed more than thirty variations over the

ostinato bass plus a coda, but rather than fully imitating the Baroque chaconne, Brahms

developed the thematic material of the variations themselves to resemble a kind of sonata form,

adding yet another layer of historical significance.

Example 5. This example is based on Brahms, Symphony no. 4 in E Minor, Movement 4

Ostinato Bass (A-R Online Music Anthology:

http://www.armusicanthology.com/anthology/Default.aspx?music_id=525).

Variation forms were not limited to works of so-called “absolute” music, and composers of

programmatic music found uses for them as well. In his tone poem Don Quixote (1897), Richard

Strauss brought the misadventures of Quixote and his faithful Sancho Panza to life as a set of ten

double-variations on themes that represented each character. Composed two years later, Edward

Elgar’s (1857–1934) most famous work, the Enigma Variations (1899) was a set of variations on

a theme in the guise of fourteen character pieces for orchestra, each representing one the

composer’s friends.

Operatic Forms

In the nineteenth century, composers of opera developed a number of approaches, styles, and

aesthetic philosophies in response to countless and constantly changing artistic priorities (though

chiefly driven by local or nationalist interests.) In so doing, a standard operatic architecture did

not emerge that crossed stylistic or national boundaries the way forms did in instrumental music.

Within the national styles themselves, specific forms were more discernible, though in early

German opera and French Lyric Opera, this is little more than a tendency toward strophic song.

In Wagner’s mature operas even the distinction between recitative and aria had been eliminated,

and therefore his music resists standard formal analysis altogether. Only in the Italian tradition

did a formal structure emerge that became the standard operating procedure for most of the

century.

Credit for developing that procedure is often bestowed upon the most famous (then and now)

Italian opera composer in the early nineteenth century, Giaochino Rossini. By Rossini’s

24 Swafford, Brahms, 523–24.



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generation, the aria had long been the basis for formal structure in Italian opera. The reforms of

eighteenth-century opera and the Italian audience’s demand for melodic writing and dramatic

action, however, conspired to make the old da capo form (with the stagnation implied by the

repeat of its opening section) obsolete. To adapt, Rossini and his librettists developed an aria

with a multi-part structure that could be expanded depending upon the seriousness of the opera

or the complexity of the situation. In its fullest form, the multi-part structure consisted of:

• A scena consisting of (typically accompanied) recitative, setting the stage for the aria;

• A tempo d’attacco which transitions from the recitative into the aria proper;

• A cantabile, a slow, lyrical section which often introduces a dilemma;

• A tempo di mezzo which signals a change of mood or situation;

• A cabaletta, a livelier, more energetic section in which a course of action is plotted.

In Rossini’s opera Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), many of the arias are a

simplified, two-part version of this structure, consisting of just the cantabile and the cabaletta,

including Count Almaviva’s opening aria, “Ecco ridente in cielo” and Rosina’s famous “Una

voce poco fa.” Both of these arias are cavatinas, the term given to a character’s often virtuosic

initial aria in an opera. In Rosina’s aria, multiple sides of the character are on display. In the

cantabile, she declares her love for her suitor Lindoro and her resolve to act, though the music

hints at some reservation. The opening of the cantabile is cast in halting passages in the manner

of recitative, which then give way to more lyrical singing. All uncertainty is cast aside in the

cabaletta, however, which highlights the public and private sides to her personality, particularly

emphasizing her viperous nature if crossed in love (see Table 1).

Table 1. Rossini, “Una voce poco fa,” from Il barbiere di Siviglia Act I, no. 4

Measures Characters Key Style Plot

Cantabile (No. 10)

1–83 Rosina E Major

Halting, lyrical

song

Declaration of

love and resolve

Cabaletta 383–120 Rosina E Major Brilliant, rapid

passagework

Reveal of her

devious side

No composer more fully realized the dramatic potential of the multi-part aria structure than

Giuseppe Verdi. Verdi, whose own career coincided with (and contributed to) the shift in Italy

from opera as mass production to opera as artistic monument, went to great lengths to integrate

the structure more seamlessly into the dramatic action. The penultimate scene of Verdi’s La

Traviata (The Fallen Woman, 1853) is a case in point. In this scene and duet, Verdi tasked every

structural unit with adding another twist to the drama. In the opening scena, Annina, a maid, tells

her suffering mistress Violetta (the eponymous “fallen woman”) about the imminent arrival of

her long-absent lover Alfredo. In the ensuing tempo d’attacco, Alfredo and Violetta are reunited





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and all the plot machinations that kept them apart are quickly resolved. As the cantabile begins,

the lovers sing of their future in a modest, tuneful waltz. The cantabile also conforms to the

standard love-duet procedure of the pair first trading melodic lines, then combining in

countermelodies, and ultimately singing together. The tempo di mezzo interrupts the hopeful

fantasy as Violetta’s illness weakens her body and voice to the point of collapse. The cabaletta,

in which Alfredo tries to comfort Violetta, is full of changing moods and increasing agitation as

the lovers realize this is their farewell. The scene ends as the music transitions to the finale itself

in what was called a stretta, the introduction of the ensemble at the climax of the cabaletta. The

finale reintroduces Annina as well as Alfredo’s father and Grenvil, the doctor (see Table 2).

Table 2. Verdi, La Traviata, Act III nos. 10 and 11

Measures Characters Key Style Plot

Scena (No. 10)

1–34 Violetta, Annina G Major

Accompanied

recitative

Arrival of

Alfredo

Tempo

d’attacco 35–74 Violetta, Alfredo E Major

Lyrical,

alternating duet

Alfredo and

Violetta reunite

and apologize

Cantabile 75–176 “ A-flat

Major Modest waltz

The lovers sing

of their future

together

Tempo di

mezzo 177–238 “

A-flat

Minor

Varied styles,

stark contrasts

Violetta reveals

the seriousness

of her illness

Cabaletta 239–320 “ C Major

Highly

expressive with

rapid dynamic

changes

Alfredo attempts

to comfort

Violetta

Stretta

(No. 11)

1–146

Violetta,

Alfredo, Annina,

Germont,

Dottore

A

Minor,

D-flat

Minor

Increasing

agitation

Alfredo’s father

enters with the

doctor; Violetta

dies in Alfredo’s

arms

Over the course of this single aria duet, therefore, the fortunes of the story’s lovers are taken

from joyful reunion and hope for the future to crushing despair and ultimately Violetta’s death.

This scene also demonstrates how far opera had developed from the eighteenth century, in which

an aria was a moment out of time to reflect on the action, not to further it. Perhaps even Rossini

may not have foreseen how thoroughly his system could subvert the old conventions he sought to

replace.



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Conclusion

The trajectory that emerges in the discussion above is one that begins and ends with classical

models. After the death of Beethoven, the first fully-Romantic generation engaged with those

classical models as force of habit or inertia, but did far more to create new genres and forms in

the name of Romanticism and the expressive passion and subjectivity it stood for. Those most

Romantic genres, including the lied, the character piece, the choral partsong, and the symphonic

poem, were those that were derived from new philosophical, political, and aesthetic ways of

thinking. The subsequent application of those same ways of thinking to the genres and forms of

an earlier and newly-christened Classical era was a development never before seen in Western

music.

Nineteenth-century composers thus engaged with generic and formal constructions far more self-

consciously than composers of earlier eras, and no thorough understanding of Romantic music

would be complete without acknowledging the importance of that engagement. As composers

increasingly confronted the question of genre head on, those very classifications took on

historical dimensions that invited continuing development regardless of their relevance to an

audience or to social function at all. That kind of historically-minded progress of “art for art’s

sake” would come to be a major thread in the development of twentieth-century music, but its

seeds are present in the late-Romantic string quartet and symphony. Musical form in the

Romantic era was similarly tied to its sense of history, and while composers began to subvert the

expectations of formal classical procedures with more regularity, an understanding of those

formal conventions remained a prerequisite for understanding their deviations.

Most of the experimentation in new genres took place in the first third of the century when new

philosophical, political, and aesthetic ways of thinking were emerging. The subsequent

application of those ways of thinking to the genres and forms of earlier eras was the key

development that defined the Romantic outlook. The nineteenth-century gaze was fixed in two

directions. No previous century in the history of the Western tradition placed as much emphasis

on individuality and originality of voice, just as none so privileged the works and composers of

the past. That paradox alone would be among the Romantic era’s most enduring legacies, still

being amplified in the twentieth century and long after the renunciation of both Romantic style

and ideology.


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http://www.worldcat.org/title/rethinking-schumann/oclc/770482679&referer=brief_results

Bonds, Mark Evan. A History of Music in Western Culture. 4th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014.

WorldCat:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-music-in-western-

culture/oclc/918929817&referer=brief_results

Burkholder, J. Peter, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music. 9th

ed. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2014.

WorldCat:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-western-music-9th-

edition/oclc/979972764&referer=brief_results

Cannon, Robert. Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

WorldCat:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/opera/oclc/810648635&referer=brief_results

Cuyler, Louise. The Symphony. 2d ed. Detroit Monographs in Musicology/Studies in Music.

Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1995.

WorldCat:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/symphony/oclc/32237560&referer=brief_results

Daverio, John. Robert Schumann, Herald of a New Poetic Age. New York and Oxford: Oxford


WorldCat:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/robert-schumann-herald-of-a-new-poetic-

age/oclc/797685492&referer=brief_results

Finson, Jon W. Nineteenth-Century Music: The Western Classical Tradition. Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.

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http://www.worldcat.org/title/nineteenth-century-music-the-western-classical-music-

tradition/oclc/751807510&referer=brief_results

Frisch, Walter. Music in the Nineteenth Century. Western Music in Context: A Norton History.

New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2013.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/rethinking-schumann/oclc/770482679&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-music-in-western-culture/oclc/918929817&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-music-in-western-culture/oclc/918929817&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-western-music-9th-edition/oclc/979972764&referer=brief_results

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concerto/oclc/936668834&referer=brief_results

Sams, Eric. “The Schumann Ciphers.” The Musical Times 107, no. 1479 (May 1966): 392–99.

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________. “Brahms and His Clara Themes.” The Musical Times 112, no. 1539 (May 1971):

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Seaton, Douglass. Ideas and Styles in the Western Musical Tradition. 4th ed. New York and

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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tradition/oclc/946725898&referer=brief_results

Smart, Mary Ann. “The Silencing of Lucia.” Cambridge Opera Journal 4, no. 2 (July 1992):

119–41.

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/260829

http://www.worldcat.org/title/german-lieder-in-the-nineteenth-century/oclc/698812951&referer=brief_results

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http://www.worldcat.org/title/musical-life-in-biedermeier-vienna/oclc/816506025&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/musical-life-in-biedermeier-vienna/oclc/816506025&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/cambridge-companion-to-the-concerto/oclc/936668834&referer=brief_results


http://www.jstor.org/stable/954112


http://www.worldcat.org/title/ideas-and-styles-in-the-western-musical-tradition/oclc/946725898&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/ideas-and-styles-in-the-western-musical-tradition/oclc/946725898&referer=brief_results



33

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Strunk, Oliver W. Source Readings in Music History. Vol. 6, The Nineteenth Century. Ed., Ruth

Solie. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/title/source-readings-in-music-history-volume-6-the-

nineteenth-century/oclc/771427360&referer=brief_results

Swafford, Jan. Johannes Brahms: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/title/johannes-brahms-a-

biography/oclc/843012973&referer=brief_results

Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Vol. 3, Music in the Nineteenth

Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/title/oxford-history-of-western-music-vol-3-the-nineteenth-


Todd, R. Larry. “Nineteenth-Century Concertos for Strings and Winds.” In The Cambridge

Companion to the Concerto, edited by Simon P. Keefe, 118–38. Cambridge: Cambridge


WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/title/cambridge-companion-to-the-

concerto/oclc/936668834&referer=brief_results

________, ed. Nineteenth-Century Piano Music. 2d. ed. New York: Routledge, 2010.

WorldCat:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/nineteenth-century-piano-

music/oclc/246561858&referer=brief_results

Tunley, David. Salons, Singers and Songs: A Background to Romantic French Song 1830–1870.

Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002.

WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/title/salons-singers-and-songs-a-background-to-romantic-

french-song-1830-1870/oclc/964554855&referer=brief_results

Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and its Institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton


WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/title/german-romanticism-and-its-

institutions/oclc/473236058&referer=brief_results

Online Sources

The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 3, Music of the Nineteenth Century

(http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume3/actrade-9780195384833-miscMatter-

015008.xml) (subscription required)

Grove Music Online (http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com) (subscription required)

“Romanticism”

(http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/23751)

http://www.worldcat.org/title/source-readings-in-music-history-volume-6-the-nineteenth-century/oclc/771427360&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/source-readings-in-music-history-volume-6-the-nineteenth-century/oclc/771427360&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/johannes-brahms-a-biography/oclc/843012973&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/johannes-brahms-a-biography/oclc/843012973&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/oxford-history-of-western-music-vol-3-the-nineteenth-century/oclc/270939170&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/oxford-history-of-western-music-vol-3-the-nineteenth-century/oclc/270939170&referer=brief_results



http://www.worldcat.org/title/nineteenth-century-piano-music/oclc/246561858&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/nineteenth-century-piano-music/oclc/246561858&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/salons-singers-and-songs-a-background-to-romantic-french-song-1830-1870/oclc/964554855&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/salons-singers-and-songs-a-background-to-romantic-french-song-1830-1870/oclc/964554855&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/german-romanticism-and-its-institutions/oclc/473236058&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/german-romanticism-and-its-institutions/oclc/473236058&referer=brief_results

http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume3/actrade-9780195384833-miscMatter-015008.xml

http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume3/actrade-9780195384833-miscMatter-015008.xml

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/23751


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“Symphonic Poem”

(http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/27250)

“The Romantic Lied”

(http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/16611#S16611.4)

“The Romantic Symphony”

(http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/27254pg2#S27254.2)

IMSLP Petrucci Music Library (http://www.imslp.org/wiki/) (Open access)

Composers from the Romantic Era

(http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:People_from_the_Romantic_era)

Ludwig van Beethoven

(http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Beethoven%2C_Ludwig_van)

Franz Schubert

(http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Schubert,_Franz)

Frédéric Chopin

(http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Chopin%2C_Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric)

Robert Schumann

(http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Schumann%2C_Robert)

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

(http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Hensel,_Fanny)

Giuseppe Verdi

(http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Verdi%2C_Giuseppe)

Richard Wagner

(http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Wagner,_Richard)

Johannes Brahms

(http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Brahms,_Johannes)

Met Opera on Demand (www.metopera.org/Season/On-Demand) (subscription required)

George Bizet, Carmen

(http://metopera.org/Season/On-Demand/opera/?upc=811357017654)

Giaochino Rossini, Il barbiere di Siviglia

http://metopera.org/Season/On-Demand/opera/?upc=811357017685)

Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata


Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde


19th Century Music (http://ncm.ucpress.edu/) (subscription required)

Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000047440) (Open access)

This database contains all of the original issues of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (The

New Journal of Music) from 1834 to 1906. The NZfM was founded by Robert Schumann

as a vehicle for his music criticism and a platform to promote progressive musical ideals

in the early Romantic era. Several key articles can be found in their original German,

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/27250

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/16611#S16611.4

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/27254pg2#S27254.2

http://www.imslp.org/wiki/

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:People_from_the_Romantic_era

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Beethoven%2C_Ludwig_van

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Schubert,_Franz

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Chopin%2C_Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Schumann%2C_Robert

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Hensel,_Fanny

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Verdi%2C_Giuseppe

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Wagner,_Richard

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Brahms,_Johannes

http://www.metopera.org/Season/On-Demand

http://metopera.org/Season/On-Demand/opera/?upc=811357017654




http://ncm.ucpress.edu/

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000047440


35

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such as Schumann’s reviews of contemporary lieder and opera and his prophetic “Neue

Bahnen” [New Paths] article heralding the career of the young Johannes Brahms (Vol.

39, no. 18).

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015023329983;view=1up;seq=7

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015023329983;view=1up;seq=7


36

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Music List

Art Song

Franz Schubert, Die Erlkönig, D. 328

(http://www.armusicanthology.com/anthology/Default.aspx?music_id=471)

Franz Schubert, Gretchen am Spinnrade, D. 118


Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe, Op. 48, no. 1 “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai”


Hugo Wolf, Mignon


Piano Music

Frédéric Chopin, Nocturne in D-flat major, Op. 27, no. 2


Franz Liszt, Études d’exécution transcnedante, Op. 12, no. 1


Felix Mendelssohn, Lieder ohne Worte, Op. 30


Franz Schubert, Impromptus, Op. 90


Robert Schumann, Carnaval, Op. 9


Orchestral Music

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony no. 3 in E-flat major “Eroica”


Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Concerto no. 4 in G major, Op. 58


Hector Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique















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Johannes Brahms, Symphony no. 4 in E minor


Felix Mendelssohn, Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 21


Felix Mendelssohn, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E minor, Op. 64


Franz Schubert, Symphony no. 8 in D minor, D. 759


Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40

(http://www.worldcat.org/title/ein-heldenleben-tondichtung-a-heros-life-tone-poem-op-

40/oclc/893406881&referer=brief_results)

Chamber Music

Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet no. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130


Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 11


Johannes Brahms, Piano Quartet no. 3 in C minor, Op. 60


Opera

Georges Bizet, Carmen, Act I, no. 10 Seguidilla and Duet


Giaochino Rossini, Il barbiere di Siviglia, “Una voce poco fa”


Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata, Finale


Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Prelude






http://www.worldcat.org/title/ein-heldenleben-tondichtung-a-heros-life-tone-poem-op-40/oclc/893406881&referer=brief_results

http://www.worldcat.org/title/ein-heldenleben-tondichtung-a-heros-life-tone-poem-op-40/oclc/893406881&referer=brief_results








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