Music 160: Romantic Piano and Programmatic Music

[Pages:6]Music 160: Romantic Piano and Programmatic Music

[Keri McCarthy]: So having listened to Schubert, hopefully you developed an appreciation a little bit for the advances made in the piano. We haven't talked too much about it at all, but the Industrial Revolution changes the piano as it was created in Mozart's time through Beethoven was working with a slightly stronger piano. These instruments- the soundboard on which the strings are wrapped was originally made of wood, and if there was too much tension or too much strength in the strings, that wood would break, and so with the advent of the Industrial Revolution we start to pour metal soundboards, which allow the strings also to become metal rather than say gut strings or hair strings, and so we end up with a much stronger piano, a stronger characteristic piano sound then what we had from Mozart or Beethoven, so you may hear that or identify that in some of the piano pieces that we're going to be talking about today.

The Romantic Period was the beginning of real- I guess Beethoven and even Mozart were really virtuosic piano writing, but we're talking today about people like Chopin and Liszt who definitely extend the piano into a different direction: very lyrical, personal, interpretive state for piano music.

Chopin was interesting because he was Polish. His parents recognized right away that he was a young talent, and they sent him from Poland into Paris to study and make a life for himself. There were many virtuosos around at this time, and I will include on our website a link for you to hear some Hilary Hahn, who was a young violinist, a very young violinist, with the clip that we'll use from YouTube, playing Paganini Caprice.

Paganini was a composer at this time and a virtuoso violinist who toured through Europe making a living for himself. He would reassemble an orchestra at each new place and play a concerto or develop a concert program of his own devising that would be Paganini plays Paganini, and he developed all sorts of really interesting features that were idiomatic for the violin and specifically for him. He could pluck the strings with this hand as well as with this hand and created pieces that were particularly played to his strengths, intentionally so. He wanted to be able to sell out crowds and he could. You know, he and Franz Liszt became sort of the rock stars. Liszt, who we'll also talk about momentarily with piano, saw Paganini perform, heard Paganini's music, and thought, "I can do this on piano" and spent hours and hours a day, five or six hours at a time, and was the first pianist to really cultivate as a performer that amount of time with his instrument and created pieces with his long hands that had wide range in the piano and that were intended with Paganini to create pieces that were as with Paganini that were specific to the performer's strength and that would allow them a market across Europe in terms of performing.

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Chopin entered into a scene in Paris I believe in the 1830's where that was similar for him, and it was- he came of age in the 1830's. He was there earlier. You can notice right away that he didn't live very long: 1810 through 1849, so he died when he was 39. He was not very well-suited to this particular scene of big scale performers, lots of virtuosity, and the concert hall, frankly. He was a sickly man. He was often, you know, he was very pale, always looked very ill, and just didn't do well around people, which is sort of a problem if you're a musician because generally speaking you should probably be performing for someone or teaching someone. Chopin really didn't want to do a lot of that at all. He did something instead similar to what Schubert did with his songs and created a "salon culture" in Paris where there was a group of people that he felt comfortable, who knew him, who were influential, wealthy, who would come to hear him play in small areas: in somebody's living room that maybe held for a recital space of, you know, 30-50 people, so not small but certainly not a concert space. Schubert did the same thing; they called him "Schubertiads," which I think is terribly cute. Chopin did this as well, but Chopin did this with piano. Chopin's music is almost entirely written for piano. Every piece that he wrote incorporated a fairly significant piano part. Most of the pieces he wrote were for solo piano or piano concerto. He could perform these himself. They are highly lyric; they're really beautiful pieces. They're a little more chromatic, or there are some extra tense notes within the melody line, so instead of hearing dissonance that's vertical or chords that sound dissonance that resolve themselves into a more sense of dissonance and consonance or dissonance and- or tension and resolution, we hear with Chopin more of a snaking through the line, interesting melodic choices within his melodies, tons and tons in terms of tempo. Good luck sticking with tempo or conducting Chopin. It sounds a little bit uneven to the point that you wonder what he was drinking before he wrote it or performed it, and every interpretation of Chopin- that's really one of the characteristic features for pianists who focus on Chopin is what does so-and-so Chopin sound like, you know? Do they take this passage fast or do they move it slowly? His music was intended to be highly interpretive, and you'll hear that in his playing. The other thing I'd like you to know about Chopin is that, well, he was from Poland. He maintained a sense of Polish identity that chromaticism in the line is part of that, is part of using scales that weren't of Western origin. Not major or minor, but somewhere in between or somewhat model, reflective of music that would have been sung in his native Poland.

The Chopin piece that we're going to be listening to is a nocturne. Nocturne is night music, and this piece exemplifies some of the singing qualities of Chopin's piano music. We talked about the fact that he wasn't as virtuosic either, but this sense of rubato or real stretch in the tempo of his pieces is evident in this, and in this your book talks a little bit about the singing style or the singing nature of the solo line in the top voice and the kind of guitar accompaniment that you hear in the left hand and the lower hand. It talks a little bit about the fact that there is a solo cadenza or vocal cadenza at the end of the piece as well, and it's a really lovely piece by Chopin.

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I might point out in case you were interested that he has other pieces that sound maybe sound more nationalistic that borrow from Polish influences or that are a little bit more virtuosic, but this is a really lovely, very individual piece. It sounds like the pianist is sort of freely composing as they think of the music, and you can hear that lovely rubato and tunudos and cello rondos in this piece of music, so please enjoy the Chopin nocturne.

So we've been talking a little about Chopin and Liszt and what the piano sounded like in the Romantic period. We're going to switch now to talk about larger forms, orchestral forms, in the Romantic period, which are particularly interesting. Many of them borrow from those sort of supernatural or creepy elements that we were referring to in the beginning of the introduction to the Romantic period and stem from romantic literature particularly these German romantic writers who were writing in the late 1700's and then, you know, wrote these lurid stories and either composers would borrow these stories for song cycles or, in the case of what we're going to be talking about today, programmatic music.

The person that we're going to talk about or we associate most early programmatic with is Hector Berlioz, and he is a Frenchman, not a German, but someone who shared a lot of German esthetics and whose music was really appreciated by the Germans much more than the French appreciated their own countrymen. But Berlioz wrote a piece of music called "Symphonie Fantastique." It's in five movements; it's a beautiful piece of music, beautiful in the sense that it's engaging but not in the sense that it's particularly pretty sounding, so I'm curious to see what you think about "Symphonie Fantastique." Berlioz's story is this: once we get out of the land of patronage from pre-Enlightenment and beginning into the Enlightenment period, we talked about this with Mozart and Beethoven, Berlioz ends up deciding- his parents decide for him that he should go and become a doctor, and he goes to school in Paris to become a doctor, realizes he doesn't want to become a doctor, sort of drops out, and enters the conservatory system. He's a little bit late to the party in terms of- this happens a little bit more often in the Romantic period that parents really push their children to go for something that is more marketable, and the child instead- by that point the adult or the college student decides that they want to enroll in classes and understand music theory and history and writing music, and then we end up with a composer who's writing some of their first works, maybe around 25 or 30 as opposed to, say, 5 with Mozart or more like between the ages of 15 and 20 or something with composers from earlier periods who needed to be marketable at that point but would have known if they were able to pick up a patron would have had the education bred in their childhood basically. So Berlioz was a failed doctor and a really kind of successful, I would say, composer. Berlioz was really into the Bohemian scene. He liked to hang out at coffee houses where people smoked funny things; it was wonderful. And he was really interested in Shakespeare. Shakespeare was having a real renaissance during this 19th century and particularly it was being translated into other languages or it was being performed in France in a way that it had not been in Paris before, and so there was a troop of musicians of artists, of actors, that's the word I'm looking for, there was a troop of actors who were coming through and doing a series of Shakespearean plays and Berlioz went

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and I believe fell madly in love with Juliette, and he approached her backstage after the thing and said, you know, "Do you want to go out with me," and she was like, "No, not really." And so you would think that would be it, but then he wrote her a series of letters, and she continually said, "No, thank you, I just don't think this is ever going to work, but it was nice to meet you." And so he goes back to his- probably his friend's house because that's what Bohemian's do, they don't tend to have their own apartments, but he went back to wherever it was he was living, and he wrote a five movement piece. Many people have pointed out that the traditional acts, number of acts in a Shakespearean play, five, the number of movements in his piece, five, and so relating the piece of music to a pre-existing or a newly-created piece of literature to describe what's happening in the piece, that's called programmatic music, and that's what Berlioz wrote.

So I would love for you to listen to all of the movements of Symphony Fantastic. I think you would particularly enjoy the fourth and fifth movements of it, but let me lead you through the piece as a whole. The piece has, which is a new feature, called an id?e fixe, or fixed idea in English, where there's a theme that is attached to the beloved and every time the artist who is our protagonist hears of her or thinks about her or sees her, whenever she shows up on the scene, we hear this theme, and we'll hear it in various ways throughout the piece; it's usually very sweetly sung through the clarinet, and then we'll hear it in other ways later in the pieces as we'll talk about.

So first movement is basically the meeting of the artist and the beloved. We can kind of assume that Berlioz himself is the artist in a sense and this Harriet Smithson, who was the lovely Shakespearean actress, is the beloved. They meet, they are introduced, and then go their separate ways. The second movement is a ball, and in that you can hear the artist, and then the music starts and it sounds very dance like, you'll hear it's in three and completely lovely, and then she enters, and the artist and she dance together, and we- so they've been matched up together, they've been paired off together. The third movement is called "In The Country," and at first it seems like a nice pastoral scene setting; we have this beautiful opening with oboe and English horn, which happen to be the two instruments I play, so I really enjoy the opening of the third movement and the ending, which I'll tell you about in a minute, but we hear the oboe calling and the oboe is off stage. If you can find or go see a performance of this, the oboe either sneaks off stage or they hire a second oboist to be playing off stage this beautiful melody that sounds like shepherds playing from opposite hills kind of apart from each other, and the English horn is seated on stage and plays from the stage, and so the English horn and the oboe have this lovely duet where they play back and forth together usually actually back and forth against each other, and then at the very end of it come together for one soulful little solo, and then the orchestra commences into something that sounds pastoral but not quite right somehow. Then at the end, we have the English horn on stage come back and play the same solo, duet, with the oboe except that the oboe doesn't respond. What responds in its place are a set of I believe five timpanis. Little by little, you hear this timpani roaring together, and you think well that's odd she's not responding perhaps, at least that's what I think when I'm listening to it is that these are the two

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lovers singing to each other, she's not there, and then the timpanis' rolls get bigger until the timpani rolls actually kind of swallow up the sound of the English horn. The fourth movement is called "March To The Scaffold," and in between the third movement and the fourth movement, the artist has realized that in a- heroin, not heroin, sorry, opium, different drug, same plant, right, in an opium-induced haze, the artist has run to his beloved, murdered her, oops, and then now is on trial for her death, and so I like to look back and think about this third movement and him looking for her at the end as being some sort of suggestion that something has gone horrible awry, and then the fourth movement is the "March To The Scaffold," which you will hear is getting increasingly and increasingly violent or terrifying as you get closer to it, to the end, which is the ending to the scaffold where you hear him come up and if you listen very carefully you will hear the guillotine come down and the head roll in the basis led to movement five, which is Sabbath in which the hero's soul has gone to Hell, and you hear all the witches cackling around. You hear a dies irae, which is the melody for the Requiem of the Dead traditionally back from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance period, and you'll hear the beloved taunting him through this piece as though she herself were also in Hell cackling away. Oh, and by the way, very nice touch that as he's marching up to the scaffold, the last thing we hear before the head rolls, the beloved's theme in its original form, so he's thinking of her even as he's being beheaded, so it's a really nice touching story.

Lovely things that you can listen for: listen for the orchestration in this, it's really strange. So he puts the bassoon way high up in the stratosphere and he might double it with something like a trombone. He uses a piccolo, he uses English horn, these are all instruments that haven't been used in the orchestra before, so what we're seeing is the expansion of the orchestra for expressive purposes, specifically dramatic expressive purposes. He's interested in portraying something that would very easily have been something that would have been staged, and so we hear that in the specter of the orchestra or the spectrum of the orchestra. This piece would have been performed in a small room, and it would have been a giant orchestra. It would have been terrifying to really listen to, and the idea of this id?e fixe or musical snippet that is attached to a concept is something that Wagner will run away with in his operas in about 30 years or 40 years from when this is composed, and Wagner will call it his own but we know that Berlioz thought of it first.

This piece leads to problems later in the Romantic period. Maybe 20 or 30 years down the road there is a music critic named Hanslick, and his main ally is Johannes Brahms who is a late Romantic composer I'm sure you've heard of. Berlioz's music leads to a question about whether music should be paired with literature and whether that makes music sort of a secondary art to the primary, which is the literary source. Berlioz would have published the storyline for each of these in the original programs so the audience would have been familiar with it. What we hear is an entirely new breed of symphony, in this case five movements tied instead to a literary theme with extra musical associations, and my question for you with programmatic music always is does this music sound as though it needs a literary backing to understand it or do you appreciate

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it on your own on its own terms? For some pieces in programmatic style it matters not whether or not you understand the storyline; it's just a great piece of music. For some I have difficulty in holding onto what's going on or understanding- there's not a lot of musical form that's used that's predictable like the musical forms used in the Classical period and with non-programmatic music in the Romantic period, so think about those issues as you're listening to programmatic music in the form of Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique."

I needed to tell you one last thing about "Symphonie Fantastique" that is just the most wonderful thing about the story and that is Harriet Smithson decided to date Berlioz after he offered her the opportunity to come and hear the piece that he wrote for her, and despite the fact that in the piece the hero accidentally murders his beloved in the, you know, drug-induced stupor, in fact, in real life they got married and lived unhappily ever after. She became an alcoholic and he dealt with all sorts of issues and so just maybe serves him right for creating such a terrible piece, I have no idea, but I just love that end to the story. It wouldn't be complete without letting you know that, yes, in fact, the piece did woe the beloved and they ended up living together for the rest of her life anyway, so that is the end of the story of "Symphonie Fantastique."

A last addendum to programmatic music- one last piece that I wanted you to listen to is Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet." This is a programmatic- also a programmatic work- not directly programmatic and it just shows the breadth and depth of programmatic music from the Romantic period. Tchaikovsky is borrowing from the concept that was established by Berlioz with the literary theme, but very quickly this emerges as a- composers love this, love the idea that they can borrow from literature, borrow literary elements and add them to their music. So what we're going to hear is another Shakespearean homage piece, and that is Romeo and Juliet of course, and you will hear that the music characterizes individual pieces but does not show the progression through Romeo and Juliet as a full play. What we hear instead are character pieces within the body of a one movement piece, which is also something that is characteristic for programmatic pieces. Berlioz was in five acts, interesting, or five movements, but Tchaikovsky's is in one. Tchaikovsky was of course an important Russian composer. He wrote the Nutcracker, which I'm hoping you might be familiar with; such a beautiful piece of music ballet for in our country anyway, the Christmas spirit, not originally intended to be specifically that in Russia.

What else do I want you to know about Tchaikovsky? There are all sorts of interesting things you could read about him, I'm certain, his biography. All sort of questions about why he was writing the way he was writing. Tchaikovsky is just a note more European sounding Russian composer, and we'll deal with that a little bit when we're talking more about nationalism in late Romantic symphony forms with Mizerski who sort of differentiated himself from Tchaikovsky feeling like Tchaikovsky had become too Europeanized in his music, and so perhaps that will be something that you listen forward to in just a couple of lessons in terms of does this music still sound to have Russian attributes? To me it does and go ahead and listen for that and enjoy Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet."

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