Charles Rosen - The Romantic Generation (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

Based on the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

The Romantic Generation

G Q ^ Q D

C H A R L E S

R O S E N

R O S E

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Copyright 1995 by Charles Rosen

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Sixth printing, 2003

To Henri Zerner

Contents

Preface ix

one Music and Sound

Imagining the sound 1 . Romantic paradoxes: the absent melody 7 . Classical andRomantic pedal 13. Conception and realization 27 . Tone color and structure 38

t w o Fragments

Renewal 41. The Fragment as Romantic form 48. Open and closed SI. Wordsand music 58. The emancipation of musical language 68. Experimental endingsand cyclical forms 78. Ruins 92 . Disorders 95 . Quotations and memories 98

Absence: the melody suppressed 112

three Mountains and Song Cycles

Horn calls 116. Landscape and music 124. Landscape and the double timescale 135. Mountains as ruins 142 .Landscape and memory 150. Music andmemory 166. Landscape and death: Schubert 174. The unfinished workings ofthe past 204. Song cycles without words 220

f o u r Formal Interlude

Mediants 237. Four-bar phrases 257

five Chopin: Counterpoint and the Narrative Forms

Poetic inspiration and craft 279 . Counterpoint and the single line 285 .Narrativeform: the ballade 302 .Changes of mode 342. Italian opera and J. S. Bach 344

six Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

Keyboard exercises 361. Virtuosity and decoration (salon music?) 383. Morbidintensity 398

seven Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Folk music? 410. Rubato 413. Modal harmony? 416. Mazurka as Romanticform 419. The late mazurkas 439. Freedom and tradition 452

eight Liszt: On Creation as Performance

Disreputable greatness 472 . Die Lorelei:the distraction of influence 474. TheSonata: the distraction of respectability 479. The invention of Romantic pianosound: the Etudes 491. Conception and realization 506. The masks of Liszt 511 .

Recomposing: Sonnet no. 104 517. Self-Portrait as Don Juan 528

nine Berlioz: Liberation from the Central European Tradition

Blind idolaters and perfidious critics 542. Tradition and eccentricity: the ideefixe 546. Chord color and counterpoint 550. Long-range harmony and contrapuntal rhythm: the "Scene d'amour" 556

ten Mendelssohn and the Invention of Religious Kitsch

Mastering Beethoven 569 . Transforming Classicism 582. Classical form and modern sensibility 586. Religion in the concert hall 590

eleven Romantic Opera: Politics3 Trash, and High Art

Politics and melodrama 599 . Popular art 602 . Bellini 608. Meyerbeer 639

twelve Schumann: Triumph and Failure of the Romantic Ideal

The irrational 646. The inspiration of Beethoven and Clara Wieck 658. The inspiration of E. T. A. Hoffmann 669 . Out of phase 683. Lyric intensity 689. Failureand triumph 699

Index of Names and Works 711

It is equally fatal to have a system and not to

have a system. One must try to combine them.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

The death of Beethoven in 1827 must have given a sense of freedom to thecomposers born almost two decades earlier: Chopin and Schumann in 1810,Mendelssohn the year before, Liszt the year after. Perhaps only Chopin wasnot intimidated by the commanding figure of authority that Beethoven represented for generations to come. I think it is probable that Beethoven's deathhastened the rapid development of new stylistic tendencies which had alreadymade themselves felt and which, indeed, even influenced his own music.

The death of Chopin in 1849 was not so signal an event for the world ofmusic, but it, too, marked the end of an age. Schumann was to die only a fewyears later, after entering an insane asylum; in the 1850s Liszt renounced muchof his adventurous early manner, pruned his youthful works of their excesses,and developed new directions of style, many of which would be realized onlyafter his death by musicians who took no account of his experiments. In 1850

the young Brahms arrived upon the scene, and it was clear that there was anew and more conservative musical philosophy in the air.

In these writings on music from the death of Beethoven to the death ofChopin, I have limited myself to those composers whose characteristic styleswere defined in the late 1820s and early 1830s, a compact group in spite ofwidely differing musical ideals and the evident mutual hostility frequently metwith among them. Slightly older than the composers born around 1810, Berlioznevertheless belongs essentially with them. In addition, a consideration ofBellini and (more briefly) Meyerbeer is inescapable for an understanding of theperiod.

On the other hand, Verdi and Wagner are absent, as their stylistic individuality was fully shaped only in the 1840s; their greatest achievements belongwith the next generation. A minor figure like Alkan is omitted for the samereason; he became interesting essentially after 1850 by his extension of theLiszt tradition and the way he opened up piano music to the operatic effectsof Meyerbeer. Hummel continued to write in the early 1830s, and Rossini forseveral decades beyond, but they were both, along with Beethoven, the immediate musical ancestors of the composers born around 1810.

This book originated as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, given in 1980-81,and has been expanded at the request of Harvard University Pressalthoughboth the Press and I were somewhat taken aback at the magnitude of theexpansion. I found it harder than I had expected to make some of the pointsboth clear and convincing, and I apologize if I have tried the reader's patience.

The position of Chopin, in particular, has been traditionally surrounded withprejudice and misunderstanding which are only beginning to be cleared up inour time. I do not try to provide a complete picture of the period from 1827

to 1850, but only of those aspects of the music that most interested meor,