Creative Critics

In earlier years, up to the time of Haydn and Mozart, the typical composer was regarded as a kind of tradesman, or in Haydn’s case, a liveried servant in the employ of nobility. Even Mozart for a time had to endure the incivilities of Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg. But Beethoven, with his fierce independence and disdain for subservience, opened the path to such successors as Mendelssohn, Wagner and Liszt (Liszt served the Grand Duke of Weimar for a brief period, but in a relationship which constituted almost a role-reversal of earlier practices). Nineteenth century composers no longer composed for Church or court functions, other than on rare occasions, but out of an inspiration frequently stimulated by literary or dramatic models. The independent, autonomous composer now constituted a new element in the musical world.

Musicologists such as Carl Dalhaus have noted that the high period of the Romantic age, roughly from 1820 to 1850, saw a close correlation between the literary and musical worlds. Composers such as Schumann, Berlioz and Mendelssohn were well acquainted with the Romantic literature of the period and drew on it (along with the powerful stimulus of Shakespearean drama) for their inspiration. The revolutions of 1848-1849 and the waning of literary Romanticism combined to create a gap between the larger cultural world and music that continued for decades along the lines of what became known as Late Romanticism. New trends arose, such as the symphonic poem (practically invented by Liszt) and Wagner’s music dramas. The expanding symphony orchestra now included more versatile instruments such as the valved horn and the English horn, supplemented by percussion instruments adopted from military usage and even new instruments such as the Wagner tuba. This trend continued until we arrive at the turn of the century, when Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler were composing for orchestras, which sometimes required a hundred or so musicians.

The late nineteenth century also saw the revival of the symphony at the hands of men such as Bruckner, Brahms, Dvořák, and later, Mahler. In opera, the field was dominated by the powerful and controversial figure of Richard Wagner. Although he died in 1883, his influence continued for decades to come.

With the onset of the twentieth century, composers such as Debussy, Schönberg and Webern became convinced that the Romantic era had outlived its time, had in a word become "overripe," destined either for repetition or irrelevance. One can sense in Schönberg’s Transfigured Night of 1899 that the over-lush harmonies, lovely as they are, represented the summing up of an age.

Shortly after Transfigured Night, Schönberg moved into atonal and later serial techniques of composition. With his innovations, along with Claude Debussy’s impressionism and Anton Webern’s cryptic minimalist approach (and we cannot ignore the path-breaking dissonance of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring), the Romantic age was for all practical purposes at an end. Twentieth century modernism was at hand.

More than any other, the year 1911 might well mark the end of late Romanticism. That was when Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier premièred as a kind of looking-back nostalgically to an age that probably never existed in fact, but which evoked would-be memories of a happier time. The year also saw the death of Mahler at the tragically early age of fifty, leaving his Ninth Symphony, his song-cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, and his unfinished Tenth Symphony as his heart-rending legacy. When Deryck Cooke’s realization of the unfinished work was performed in New York, it was reported that even veteran concertgoers were moved to tears. In the first and last movements of the five-movement work, there occurs in each case a dramatic, passionately dissonant chord that revealed Mahler’s anguish, as he knew that his life was to be a brief and unfulfilled one. At the conclusion of the last movement, there appears a passage of transcendental resignation which can easily impress the involved listener as truly otherworldly. In its own way, it was yet another way of saying, along with Schönberg, that there was nothing more to be said.