Description
The composer, huddled over his manuscript and piano in the light of a flickering candle, plumbing the depths of his tortured soul: that's probably one of the most archetypal images of classical music--and it's an image straight out of the Romantic period.
Running from roughly 1800 to 1900, this era bears a name that refers not to romantic love, but to an aesthetic that prizes the power of individual experience and emotion above all else. In turning away from the Classical-era ideal of achieving perfect "architectural" balance within a musical work, Romantic-era composers sought to explore extremes, often taking emotion, dynamics, scale, chromaticism, and structure to what seemed to be (at least at the time) their absolute breaking points.
From the music of Beethoven (who was arguably the first true Romantic, although his early works are still rooted in the Classical era) to Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and Schumann, and then on to composers like Wagner, a continuous thread of guiding principles dominate the aesthetic, including the use of expansive melodies and more extended forms, as well as an affinity to poetry and literary allusions. This is the era in which the art song exploded in popularity; for example, in his more than 600 lied (and despite his predilections in other forms to sprawl out to what Schumann famously dubbed "heavenly length"), Franz Schubert crafted perfect miniatures that encompass entire microcosms of meaning--in works that sometimes last for barely a minute and a half.)
This is also the era in which many of the most enduringly popular operas were penned, starting with the early 19th-century bel canto (literally, "beautiful singing") style of Donizetti and Bellini, continuing with the dramatic pinnacles of Verdi, and onwards to the verismo ("true") works penned by Puccini and his contemporaries. In Germany, Wagner staged a musical revolution not just with the visual spectacle of his Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art," that involves multiple artistic disciplines, but in terms also of his incredible and innovative use of ambiguous tonality--a new approach that was to have immense repercussions in the 20th century.
see all »
Featured Releases
