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14 - Romantic Languages

from Part IV - Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

By
Julian Horton
Edited by
Benedict Taylor
Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

The analogy between music and language is both problematic and essential for any rich understanding of musical Romanticism. Few commentators today would accept that music functions as a language; but the idea that music has poetic, literary, or dramatic substance is foundational to Romantic aesthetics and find expression in music as stylistically disparate as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Schumann’s Papillons. This chapter explores the musical languages of Romanticism, focusing both on the melodic, harmonic, and formal dimensions of musical practice and on the literary and linguistic labour they perform. It explores music from Beethoven and Field at the turn of the nineteenth century to Brahms and Mussorgsky at the century’s end, paying attention to the contrasted thematic cultures that Beethoven and Field instantiate, the harmonic innovations of Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, and Mussorgsky, and the intersections of form and narrative in Schumann’s Second Symphony.

Keywords

musical languagemelodytextureharmonytonalitynarrative form
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 231 - 257
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Caplin, William E. ‘Beyond the Classical Cadence’, Music Theory Spectrum, 40/1 (2018), 1–26.Google Scholar
Dahlhaus, Carl. Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Whittall, Mary (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dahlhaus, Carl Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Robinson, J. Bradford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Daverio, John. Robert Schumann: Herald of a New Poetic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Horton, Julian. Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 83: Analytical and Contextual Studies (Leuven: Peeters, 2017).Google Scholar
Newcomb, Anthony. ‘Once More “Between Absolute and Programme Music”: Schumann’s Second Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 7/3 (1984), 233–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmalfeldt, Janet. In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Walton, Benjamin and Mathew, Nicholas. The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).Google Scholar

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