Romantic music
Many composers born in the nineteenth century continued to compose in a Romantic style well into the 20th century, such as Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninoff. In addition, many composers who would later be identified as musical modernists composed works in Romantic styles early in their career, including Igor Stravinsky with his Firebird ballet, Arnold Schoenberg with Gurrelieder, and Béla Bartók with Bluebeard's Castle.
The vocabulary and structure of the music of the late 19th century were no mere relics; composers including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Berthold Goldschmidt and Sergei Prokofiev continued to compose works in recognizably Romantic styles after 1950. While new tendencies such as neo-classicism and atonal music challenged the preeminence of the Romantic style, the desire to use a tonally-centered chromatic vocabulary remained present in major works. Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Gustav Holst, Dmitri Shostakovich, Malcolm Arnold and Arnold Bax drew frequently from musical Romanticism in their works, and did not consider themselves old-fashioned.
Musical romanticism reached a rhetorical and artistic nadir around 1960: it seemed as if the future lay with avant garde styles of composition, or with neo-classicism of some kind. While Hindemith moved back to a style more recognizably rooted in romanticism, most composers moved in the other direction. Only in the conservative academic hierarchy of the USSR and China did it seem that musical romanticism had a place. However, by the late 1960s a revival of music using the surface of musical romanticism began. Composers such as George Rochberg switched from serialism to models drawn from Gustav Mahler, a project which found him the company of Nicholas Maw, David Del Tredici and Krzysztof Penderecki, whose Second ("Christmas") Symphony represents a stark contrast to its modernist predecessor. This movement is described as Neo-Romanticism, and includes works such as John Corigliano's First Symphony.
Another area where the Romantic style has survived, and even flourished, is in film scoring. Many of the early émigres escaping from Nazi Germany were Jewish composers who had studied, or even studied under, Gustav Mahler's disciples in Vienna. Max Steiner's lush score for Gone with the Wind provides an example of the use of Wagnerian leitmotifs and Mahlerian orchestration. The "Golden Age of Hollywood" film music rested heavily on the work of composers such as Korngold and Steiner as well as Franz Waxman, Alfred Newman. In Britain, composers such as William Alwyn and Richard Addinsell echoed this approach in their film work. The next generation of film composers, such as Alex North, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone and John Williams drew on this tradition, often replicating the motifs of the earlier era to write some of the most familiar orchestral music of the late 20th century.
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See also
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References
- Zelli, Bijan, German and French, similarities and differences in the late central European 19th century music (in Swedish), The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics Nr 31, 2005 (Thales; ISSN 0284-7698)
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Further reading
- Brill Marlene Targ, Chopin and Romantic Music (Hardcover) ISBN 0764151363 ; ISBN 978-0764151361
- Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Hardcover) ISBN 0393951960 ; ISBN 978-0393951967
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External links
- Romantic era music links
- Music of the Romantic Era
- The Romantic Era
- Era on line
- Romantic Songs of modern day
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