Resumo de Romantic Music - Arnold Whittall

Romanticism?the dominant mode of nineteenth-century musical expression?is associated most readily with the fullblooded passion and emotion to be found in such masterpieces as Chopin?s Revolutionary study and Wagner?s epic music drama, The Ring. Arnold Whittall here describes the emergence of Romantic music in Germany, Italy and France, as seen in the work of Weber, Schumann, Donizetti, Berlioz and Chopin. He goes on to explore the operatic achievements of Wagner and Verdi alongside the predominantly instrumental works of Liszt and the nationalists of Russia, Bohemia, and Scandinavia. Finally he traces the flowering of late Romanticism in Vienna, focusing on Brahms, Bruckner and Wolf, and shows how Mahler, Puccini, Rachmaninov and Sibelius continued the Romantic tradition in this century. Romanticism is more style than language. It remained faithful to tonality and to metrical periodicity. Even its ?new? forms?symphonic poem, song cycle, music drama?were scarcely the result of a wholesale rejection of Classical precedents. Emotions became more intense as form became freer and tone colour richer. The phrase structure became less consistently regular. Romantic music undoubtedly reflects the particular instability of the era between the French and Russian revolutions. It is perhaps when both Weber and Schubert explore more turbulent, disturbed emotions that the strengths of the new forms of expression are most obviously apparent. It is often the case that composers who are regarded by critics of their own time as dangerously radical will be viewed by those of later generations as insufficiently adventurous. Subtle irregulations of phrase structure and unexpected enrichments of harmony. What restores and shores up real feeling is the harmony: the major-minor alternations are so telling that no richer chromaticism or complexities are needed to ensure its effect. This is the essence of Romanticism in miniature. The battle against tonality started, both through themes which point to no absolutely definite tonal centre, and through many harmonic details. Wagner was certainly encouraged by Liszt?s bold approach to harmony to intensify his use of chromaticism and dissonance, whereas what Liszt learned from Wagner was the possibility of organising his music on a larger, more symphonic scale. Verdi: ?Wagner surpasses every composer in his rich variety of instrumental color, but in form and style he went to far.

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