A movement or, more commonly, period of cultural history. When understood as a period, Romanticism is usually identified with either the first half or the whole of the 19th century. The term is used with reference primarily to the arts, but it can also embrace philosophy, socio-political history and, more widely, the ‘spirit’ of the era.
JIM SAMSON
In literature Romanticism is commonly taken to cover roughly the first half of the 19th century, though the philosophical origins of the movement lie well back in the previous century. Literary Romanticism took its definitive form in the late 18th century in polemical and creative writings by the Schlegel brothers and their circle in Germany, and in the early 19th century by Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, and by Lamartine and Hugo in France. It is usually accepted that Romantic features continued to exert an influence after the middle of the century, but as a period term ‘Romanticism’ gives way at that point to ‘Realism’ and ‘Symbolism’, movements associated initially with French writers. Historians of the visual arts have conventionally adopted a broadly similar chronology, identifying early Romantics such as Géricault and Delacroix in France, Turner in England and Caspar David Friedrich in Germany, and again arguing for a dispersal of the original Romantic impetus following the middle of the century (1863 is a key date, with the death of Delacroix and the Salon des refusés). In music, however, the Romantic movement has often been located somewhat later, beginning in the post-Beethoven era (c1830) and continuing into the early 20th century, though terms such as ‘Late-Romantic’ and ‘Neo-Romantic’ are applied by some historians to the later stages of this period.
Well before its appropriation by late 18th-century writers to define a movement in art, the adjective ‘romantic’ already had a decisive meaning. It took its name from the ancient lingua romana of France, and from derived Romance literatures, especially ‘romances’ in both verse and prose (e.g. of Arthur, of Charlemagne and of the Iberian peninsula). In the 17th century the term was adopted, initially in England, to describe the perceived tone or character of those literatures, one defined by an opposition to the real, the concrete, the predictable and the rational. By the middle of the 18th century both the specific evocation of an idealized medieval heritage and a more generalized embrace of the irrational, the fantastic and the freely imaginative were firmly established meanings of the word in England and France. The introduction of the term as a generalized literary label is usually attributed to German writers, in particular Friedrich Schlegel in his contributions to Das Athenäum, founded in 1798, Jean Paul in his Vorschule der Ästhetik of 1804, and August Schlegel in his lectures Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur of 1809–11, where the spontaneity of the medieval romance is contrasted favourably with a rule-bound (French) ‘Classical’ tradition. It should be noted that within some philosophical systems of the 19th century, notably Hegel's, a ‘Romantic period’ is taken to embrace the arts of this entire era, from the Middle Ages through to the 19th century.
Musical applications followed on from literary, though there are isolated references in the late 18th century, as in Grétry's Mémoires of 1789. Indeed throughout the Mémoires, Grétry's language is already that of romantic idealism: only through sensitivity to poetry and attunement to the inner truths of the emotions will a composer come to greatness, to ‘genius’. Grétry's text is of some interest, not just because it offers a distinctively French perspective on a subject later to be dominated by German thought (he favoured dramatic over instrumental music and argued for melodic rather than harmonic priority), but also because its obvious and acknowledged debt to Rousseau establishes a direct musical link with one of the major influences on the Romantic movement generally. Rousseau's belief that the artist should aspire, through spontaneity of expression, towards the dignity of ‘natural man’ left its mark on both Goethe and Schiller, and played some part in the formation of the Romantic (usually tragic) hero in literature generally. One might regard Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) as the exemplary work in this respect, and it caught the imagination of composers as well as writers. Rousseau also inspired that idealization of nature and the ‘folk’ which was an important dimension of early Romanticism, notably in Herder. Here too there was a musical resonance in an increasing interest in folksongs in the late 18th century, with notable consequences for the development of the lied. Rousseau's specific writings on music also had a marked influence. In several entries of his Dictionnaire de musique (on ‘genius’, the ‘pathetic’, ‘expression’ and especially ‘imitation’), he took a step beyond an affective towards an expressive aesthetic, celebrating the elusive, suggestive powers of music in ways that depart significantly from Classical thought.
A more sustained application of the term ‘Romantic’ to music awaited E.T.A. Hoffmann's extended review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (1810), together with his subsequent article on Beethoven's instrumental music (1813). The major significance of these essays lies in their synthesis of existing aspects of Romantic theory, the transfer of these to the musical sphere, and a prophetic inference that music should be regarded as the supreme Romantic art. The concept of creativity embraced by Hoffmann was already familiar from the Schlegel brothers and was shared by a younger generation of German writers, notably Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Wackenroder and Jean Paul. Above all, that concept highlighted the privilege attaching to the individual creative genius. Characteristics that had already been attributed to art in general within philosophical aesthetics of the late 18th century – its capacity to access a plane beyond the real (variously characterized as the transcendental, the inexpressible or the infinite), its power to arouse the strongest emotions, and its value as a mode of intuitive knowledge of the world – were now particularized, referring to the individual creator and the individual (original and ‘great’) work of art. Moreover, such characteristics were associated specifically with the potency of the creative imagination. The vision or dream-world of the Romantic artist, informed and made aesthetically whole (unified) by his genius, would give the rest of humanity a privileged insight into reality. It is worth stressing the notion of unification here, since Hoffmann supported his central aesthetic insight with detailed technical descriptions of a kind one might today describe as analytical.
In applying such ideas to Beethoven, and also in preparatory measure to Haydn and Mozart, Hoffmann drew together insights from both criticism and philosophy: he fused ideas already associated with the term ‘Romantic’, especially as used by younger German writers of the early 1800s to signify an opposition to the strictures of Classical models, with a tendency (common to several philosophical writings though variously regarded as a weakness or a strength) to classify music as the primary art of the emotions. This conjunction cleared the path for a powerful 19th-century idea: the pre-eminence of music, and specifically of instrumental or ‘absolute’ music. (It is worth adding that this idea, central to German thought and German music, played a more peripheral role in non-German cultures). Thus it was precisely music's independence of reference, its imageless, ineffable, unknowable quality, that gave it privileged access to the ‘wonderful, infinite spirit-kingdom’. The idea would be given its most explicit philosophical expression within Schopenhauer's system, where music, as the only non-representational art, speaks directly of the noumenal (as opposed to the phenomenal) world. But long before the impact of Schopenhauer's seminal work was fully registered (in the second half of the 19th century), music had come to be viewed, at least within one major strand of German thought, as the very essence of Romanticism. Schumann, for instance, remarked that ‘it is scarcely credible that a distinct Romantic school could be formed in music, which is itself Romantic’.
It is striking that Hoffmann described not just Beethoven, but also Mozart and to a lesser extent Haydn, as Romantic composers. In other words, he identified Romantic tendencies in the music of the late 18th century, parallelling rather than succeeding comparable tendencies in literature. This conformed to a general usage of the term from around 1800. In the same year as Hoffmann's famous review of the Fifth Symphony, for instance, Johann Reichardt described Haydn and Mozart as Romantic composers. And some years later Goethe confirmed this usage by describing an antithesis of Classical and Romantic art, characterized in terms of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ tendencies respectively. Significantly, his account of Romanticism (‘the new fantastic essence … the longing and restlessness, bursting all bounds and losing itself in the infinite’) drew on contemporary music (Beethoven) as well as on contemporary literature (Schiller). In such early 19th-century polemics Romanticism was clearly identified as a movement concurrent with Classicism rather than a period succeeding it.
The idea that Mozart as well as Beethoven might be regarded as a Romantic remained current to around the 1840s, at which point a change in the understanding of Romanticism seems to have occurred, allowing it to emerge as a definable period term in something like the modern sense. This perspective sharpened subsequently in the measure that the Viennese ‘classics’ became literally that, with all the Hellenistic connotations. The formation of a classical canon – a central theme of 19th-century music history – carried with it the corollary that modern, ‘Romantic’ music defined itself increasingly through its separation from a Classical golden age, though the position of Beethoven remained purposefully ambivalent within this chronology. Nor is it a coincidence that the modern sense of a Romantic period crystallized around the middle of the 19th century, just when bourgeois musical life in Europe was stabilizing into institutions expressly designed to promote a validating repertory of classical music. An early suggestion that there might be a real division between Classical and Romantic periods is found in Karl August Kahlert, who (in 1848) described Mozart as ‘the most truly Classical of all composers’ and Beethoven as ‘a Romantic composer’, whose ‘tremendous hold over the minds of his contemporaries’ provided the means by which ‘music's Romanticism made its presence felt’. Kahlert's proposal that Beethoven inaugurated a ‘Romantic era’ already approaches modern usage, even if his later remarks suggest that he had by no means lost sight of an earlier understanding of the term: ‘The contrast between the Classical and the Romantic will none the less continue, Classical composers being more interested in the formal structure of music, Romantic composers in free, untrammelled expression’.
It was later in the 19th century, when music history was subjected to the quasi-scientific study of styles, notably in the work of Guido Adler, that a cleaner separation of Classical and Romantic periods was proposed. Adler was a key figure in the emergent discipline of Musikwissenschaft, and as that discipline congealed into established themes and categories the division of history into style periods was to a degree formalized. For Adler the Romantic movement crystallized (or achieved full maturity, to adopt his own organic model) in the post-Beethoven generation of Chopin, Schumann, Berlioz and Liszt. Beethoven and Schubert were viewed as ‘transitional’ but linked essentially to so-called Viennese Classicism. From this perspective (positioned around 1900), the composers of the New German School, together with several leading composers from late 19th-century nationalist schools, were classified not as Romantics but as ‘moderns’ or even in some cases as ‘realists’, and that view remained largely intact until the upheavals of the early years of the 20th century cast new light on their achievements. 20th-century music historians have wavered between 1790 and 1830 as starting-points of Romanticism, and have often refined the chronology by identifying late 18th-century movements such as Sturm und Drang and Empfindsamkeit – in C.P.E. Bach, Haydn and Mozart – as ‘pre-Romantic’. Inevitably, too, they have reconsidered the classification of late 19th-century music. Probably the most common tendency (as, for instance, in Alfred Einstein and Donald Grout) has been to regard the radical changes in musical syntax of the early 1900s as a natural caesura, and thus to extend the Romantic period through to the first decade of the 20th century, at which point it may be understood to give way to Modernism.
There are, however, two significant variants of this model. Several historians (Paul Henry Lang, Peter Rummenhöller and Carl Dahlhaus among them) have been anxious to draw a line between the two halves of the 19th century, and have employed such terms as ‘Neo-Romanticism’ to describe its second half. An old guard of Romantic composers died or stopped composing around the middle of the century (Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schumann), and a new, very different generation came to maturity (Brahms, Bruckner, Franck). For both Liszt and Wagner, moreover, the mid-century signalled new creative directions, with important consequences for the wider world of music. According to this view, articulated most forcefully by Rummenhöller, the heyday of musical Romanticism lay in the 1830s and 40s. Following the mid-century there was a distinct change of tone – a new and often selfconscious working-out of the ideals of Romanticism, an earnest preoccupation with forms, systems and theories, and at times too an anti-subjectivism remote from the exuberance and spontaneity of the earlier movement.
The second variant (associated above all with Friedrich Blume) identifies a single Classic-Romantic era reaching back into the 18th century and extending well into the 20th. To some extent this view seeks to recover something of the early 19th-century sense of the term as a movement or tendency running concurrently with Classicism. It is striking, moreover, that even the patterns of more recent, pre-World War II music history (expressionism, neo-Classicism) can be absorbed comfortably within Blume's larger scheme.
The term ‘Romanticism’, whether understood as a movement or as a period, has thus notoriously resisted synoptic definition. Its students have preferred lengthy typologies of Romantic characteristics, registering their contradictions as well as their similarities, and in several cases citing contradictoriness as itself a defining feature. Yet, as Lilian Furst has argued, such typologies are as dangerous as they may be helpful. The principal danger is that the effects will obscure, or even be mistaken for, the causes. It is perhaps best to avoid definition altogether, and to begin rather with context, so that primary causes may be at least partly revealed. Such an approach would regard Romanticism as the counterpart within imaginative culture to the rise of political liberalism (given radical expression in an age of revolution) and to the parallel investment in subjectivity within philosophical systems, notably those of Kant and his successors within German idealist thought, Fichte and Schelling. Above all, Romanticism shared with these developments in political and intellectual history the invention or re-invention of the individual as a potent enabling force. Indeed, this focus on the individual – on the self – takes us close to one of two ‘essential’ meanings of Romanticism. The Romantic artist, privileged by his genius, would reveal the world in expressing himself, since the world (according to the influential position established by Kant) was grounded in the self. Hence the growing importance of expression as a source of aesthetic value, overriding the claims of formal propriety and convention. Music in particular was viewed as a medium of expression above all else, and crucially its power of expression was at the same time a form of cognition, albeit one precariously poised between sensory perception and intellectual understanding, between sensus and ratio.
Undoubtedly the French Revolution and its aftermath created the conditions in which this pretension might be sustained. As music (like art in general) disengaged itself increasingly from existing social institutions, composers were inclined – if not always able – to ‘make their own statement’. It is not difficult to see why Beethoven should have acquired such an exemplary status for the Romantic generation in this respect. Even if his political commitment was to a generalized, abstract and utopian notion of liberty, it was not something superimposed on his activity as a composer, but a shaping factor of that activity. As a committed or engaged artist, he promoted – and bequeathed to the later 19th century – an increasingly influential view of music as a discourse of ideas as much as an object of beauty. His directly ideological motivation easily transcended earlier attempts to express the politics of liberalism through music, and might be compared rather to the ‘social Romanticism’ which formed a significant strand of early 19th-century literature. For later composers, that motivation was increasingly difficult to sustain, especially in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. Yet even when it was either lost to formalism (Brahms, Bruckner) or diffused into autobiography and metaphysics (Berlioz, Mahler), it left its trace in the ambition and pretension of the musical work, its quest for an epic status.
This invokes a second essential meaning of Romanticism, one that generates considerable tension with the first. It might be described as an investment in the self-contained, closed work of art. There was a growing tendency to regard musical works in particular as monads, containing their own meaning rather than exemplifying a genre, articulating a style or confirming an institution. Moreover, this ‘work concept’, itself a product of the growing autonomy of the aesthetic, resulted in a significant change of focus in the relation between art and the world, as mimesis (imitation) made way for what has been termed an ‘ideology of organicism’. Through the creation of monadic, organically unified works, art was presumed to project an idealized image of what the world is or, more pertinently, of what it might become. And ‘absolute’ music, free of any obvious representational capacity, was especially well placed to bear the burden of this meaning.
Several manifestations of these two central facets of the Romantic ideology are apparent in early 19th-century music. Under pressure of a powerful individualism, there was a change in the nature and role of virtuosity, for instance. The bravura styles of such post-Classical composers as Hummel and Weber, intimately linked to the rise of the public concert, acquired new layers of meaning under the weight of Romantic individualism. The career and reception of Paganini is one obvious example of this. But an even more potent archetype of the transformation of post-Classical into Romantic virtuosity was the recomposition by Liszt of his 1826 Etude en douze exercises, first as the Douze grandes études of 1837 and then as the Douze études d'exécution transcendante of 1851. The second set in particular exhibited the virtuoso as Romantic hero, ‘overcoming’ his instrument in a powerful symbol of transcendence. The third set sustained this position, but at the same time threatened to displace it by proposing the composer (rather than the virtuoso) as hero. Moreover, Liszt's revisions at this third stage supported a set of newly introduced poetic titles, drawing suggestively on Hugo, medieval romance, the cult of nature and the dream-world of the artist.
This use of poetic titles was itself a further manifestation of Romanticism, signalling music's putative expressive powers, while at the same time securing its greater status or ‘dignity’. The latter point is important. It was a key motivation underlying the marked inclination of post-Beethoven composers to look outwards to the other arts, and especially to poetry. This tendency was given its clearest expression, of course, in the development of the art song, and especially the lied. Indeed the art song might sustain a claim to be the quintessential Romantic genre, born with the early Romantics, fading with the rise of Modernism and surviving in the 20th century where the spirit of Romanticism survives. In its intimate, confessional character it epitomized the autobiographical character of Romantic art. In its narrative, descriptive aspects it reflected the programmatic, referentialist tendencies of the music of the period. In its evocation of folksong it echoed a wider 19th-century idealization of the Volksgeist. And above all in its response to the new lyric poetry of the early 19th century it provided a model of the Romantic impulse towards a fusion of the arts, an impulse which would be given theoretical, if not always practical, formulation in Wagner.
The category ‘poetic’ extended well beyond any specific literary or musical genre, however. Above all, it embraced the concrete (epic) expression of that lofty idealism to which the Romantics aspired, the attempt to elevate art to a powerful metaphysical status. And it is in this sense that it became a part of Liszt's renovative programme for an instrumental music that might itself become the highest form of poetry through its association with a poetic idea. Liszt's conflation of music and the poetic required well-known topics – real or fictional heroes from world literature and known legend – so that the programme might take on the character of an essential and familiar background, orientating communication rather in the nature of a genre title. One theme of this kind to which composers constantly returned was the Faust legend, especially as represented by Goethe. This touched a nerve close to the heart of Romanticism. For many 19th-century artists, including composers, Goethe's masterpiece seemed the perfect symbol of humanity's new-found independence, representing the human being as a visionary whose quest for knowledge of the world and of the self would admit no constraining influence, however drastic the consequences. Faust challenged the Godhead, and Romantic composers responded.
Yet poetic programmes were by no means confined to the heroes of world literature. For some composers, the licence of the programme invited music to attempt to express the beauties and terrors of nature, now sublime and ordered, now destructive and irrational; for others it was the invocation of a glorious, idealized past that appealed, as either a nostalgic retreat from, or a necessary validation of, the present; for yet others an exotic dream-world of folktale and legend, of grotesquerie and fantasy, became their alternative reality. And most common of all were nationalist themes. The attempt by so many composers to lend their support to nationalist causes is revealing both of the unprecedented ambition of music in the Romantic era, and of a widespread belief in its expressive competence. As the century unfolded, an ever clearer differentiation between national styles was actively cultivated, influencing Italy, Germany and France every bit as much as Russia and east central Europe. Nationalist projects were registered by musical institutions (national theatres, publishing projects and the like), by subject matter (national histories and myths) and by musical style (the rediscovery or manufacture of ancient stylistic roots, and of course the cult of folksong). This last is of special importance. Indeed, the role of folksong in colouring the musical styles of the century could scarcely be overestimated. And the underlying impulse was Romantic to the core – a characteristically Rousseau-esque notion (adopted and transmitted by Herder) that the ‘spirit of the people’, which quickly became synonymous with the ‘spirit of the nation’, is embodied in its folk music, as in its language.
Whatever its subject matter, the status of ‘poetic’ (programme) music was hotly debated in late 19th-century music criticism, and it naturally invoked the polemically related concept of absolute music. We need to be clear that absolute music was more a metaphysical than a technical concept. Far from requiring an alliance with poetry to achieve its full dignity, the absolute musical work was deemed to be uniquely privileged. Through organicism it would establish a purpose in nature, healing the division of subject and object by uniting both in the self. The unified work would thus transcend the divisions of the self, its individual moments cohering in a whole which might present a sort of utopian promise; in short, it could stand for the indivisible Absolute, beloved of idealist thought. Viewed in these terms, the rival claims of poetic and absolute music echoed conflicting early 19th-century positions concerning the meaning and classification of music, positions articulated above all by Hegel and Schopenhauer. But the claims themselves were argued out later in the century – by critics and historians such as Karl Brendel and Hanslick, as well as by leading composers such as Liszt, Brahms and Wagner. There may be a case for according special privilege to Wagner in this debate. Dahlhaus has argued that Wagner's apparently contradictory views on the role of music in the music drama established a kind of synthesis between poetic and absolute music, a single ‘twofold truth’, which recognized that music may serve poetry on a compositional level while embodying it on a metaphysical level. The potency of this idea lies in its implicit proposal that Wagner might indeed be seen to embrace the apparently contradictory tendencies of a Romantic aesthetic.
It is arguable that any attempt to define a Romantic period in narrow stylistic terms will founder on inherent diversities. How do we deal with neo-classical tendencies in Mendelssohn and Brahms, with realists such as Musorgsky, or even with the Italian operatic tradition, which although clearly influenced by the Romantic ideology, remained essentially separate from it? More radically, how do we accommodate that extensive repertory of ephemeral music that formed the mainstay of public taste, to say nothing of publishers' incomes, during much of the 19th century? Such difficulties suggest that we are on safer ground considering Romanticism in relation to ideas and motivations rather than styles, and that if we must invoke styles, we will do better to confine the term to a description of the larger tendencies flowing from those ideas and motivations that apply it to the period as a whole. Such tendencies were dictated above all by the investment in subjectivity and the ideology of organicism, in short by the two essential meanings outlined above. And since both these projects were born of the Enlightenment and ran into difficulties with the rise of Modernism in the 20th century, there are perhaps further grounds for considering this period (roughly from the late 18th century to the early 20th) as something like a unit. In technical terms, then, we would trace some of the effects of an expressive aesthetic, notably on harmonic practice, while recognizing the arguably opposing impulse towards organically unified works, notably in thematic working.
One strength of this chronology, essentially that of Blume, is its implicit recognition that the structural foundations of most Romantic music remain firmly embedded in late 18th-century Classical practice. Even the rhetoric of gestural contrast, so characteristic of the Romantic century and so neatly embodied in the name and character of its archetypal medium, the pianoforte, accentuated rather than displaced Classical tendencies. What really changed in the 19th century was the weighting of existing components of musical syntax rather than the components themselves. Under the expressive imperative there was a subtle but decisive shift in the balance between the diatonic and chromatic elements of a tonal structure, for instance, and this operated both at the level of the musical phrase, and, through far-reaching modulation schemes (tonicizing non-diatonic scale degrees), that of the musical work as a whole. There was no obvious dividing-line between Classical and Romantic practice in this respect. Yet by the late 19th century, notably in works by Wagner, Reger, Mahler and Schoenberg, the capacity of tonal harmony to shape and direct the musical phrase was already compromised. Likewise there was a shift in the balance between triadic and dissonant harmonies, culminating in the poignant dissonance of some Wolf songs, for example, or alternatively in the aggressive dissonance of Richard Strauss's Salome and Elektra. Here, too, there was a threat to an underlying tonal structure. As Schoenberg later remarked of the tonal crisis of 1908–9: ‘The overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be counterbalanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonic triads as represent a key’. In short, the increasing weight of both chromatic and dissonant elements prepared the ground for those radical changes of syntax which accompanied the rise of modernism.
Thematically, we can identify two opposing tendencies in Romanticism, and again both were rooted in late 18th-century practice. The melodic-motivic balance characteristic of that practice separated out into sustained songlike melody on one hand, and an ever more closely integrated motivic process on the other. In some late 19th-century music, notably in Brahms, these two tendencies achieved a new balance or synthesis, where a powerful motivic rigour informed the melodic process. The term ‘developing variation’ has sometimes been used (particularly by Schoenberg) to describe this tendency in Brahms, and it tells a yet larger story, easily relatable to an ideology of organicism. Like the thematic transformation of Liszt and Wagner, it signifies the enhanced structural weight assigned to thematic working in late 19th-century music in response to a weakening tonal foundation. In this respect Webern identified a kind of ideal when he remarked of Schoenberg's First String Quartet: ‘There is … not a single note … that does not have thematic basis. If there is a connection with another composer then that composer is Johannes Brahms’. This was symptomatic of a more general preoccupation with unity, with the integration of part and whole, which would find its culminating expression in the 12-note technique devised by Schoenberg in the early 1920s. That technique formalized the late 19th-century perception that music took its unity from a Grundgestalt, a single basic shape – in effect the basic ‘idea’ of the piece. Thus Wagner, writing of Beethoven: ‘At every point in the score he would have to look both before and after, seeing the whole in each part and each part contributing to the whole’; and of the Ring: ‘[It] turned out to be a firmly entwined unity. There is scarcely a bar in the orchestral writing that doesn't develop out of preceding motives’. Indeed, Wagner might well be identified as a determinate pivotal stage in the progression from a Classic-Romantic to a modern syntax, the point at which ‘statement’ and ‘development’ are fused in endless melody.
There were distinctive national variants to these larger tendencies in harmonic and thematic process, and of these the achievements of Russian composers merit special mention. In Russia, modal and symmetrical chromaticisms supported a uniquely colourful, often exotic and pictorial blend of national Romanticism, distinctly at odds with Austro-German introspection. The harmonic practice of 19th-century Russian composers, together with a thematic process favouring melodic repetition and variation over motivic working, and a tendency to give unprecedented structural status to timbre, texture and rhythm, would later prove of special importance to early 20th-century modernists working outside Austria and Germany, notably Debussy, Janáček and Stravinsky. There was here a real source of renewal, as national Romanticism was imperceptibly transmuted into realism and modernism, affording a late 19th-century alternative to, rather than an extension of, the Romantic aesthetic. To a very large extent, Russian music managed to avoid or bypass the expressionist crisis so characteristic of central European music at the turn of the century.
It is to that expressionist crisis we must turn if we are to chart the closing stages of Romanticism in music, at least in its 19th-century guise. Through the uncompromising agency of an Expressionslogik, a ‘law of feeling’, an essentially Romantic subjectivity was finally given its head, resulting in a singularly radical reorientation of musical styles and musical syntax, nothing less than a challenge to several centuries of harmonic tonality. Long established, historically sedimented forms and conventions were all but burnt out in the intensity of this impulse, and nowhere more so than in the fiercely idealistic modernist (and predominantly Jewish) circles of a deeply divided Vienna. This was truly the cusp ‘between Romanticism and Modernism’, to borrow the title of a thoughtful commentary by Dahlhaus. The massive tensions so characteristic of the music of Mahler and of the Second Viennese School – most obvious in Schoenberg, but discernible in different ways in Berg and Webern too – gave supreme expression to these crucial stages of a disintegrating Romantic heritage in central Europe. They were also the birth-pangs of a new musical world.
See also Classical; Expressionism; Modernism; Nationalism; Neo-classicism; and Neo-romantic.
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