When Denise Dil­len­beck and I were first brain­storm­ing the open­ing con­cert of Clas­si­cally Roman­tic, we began hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions ask­ing our­selves just what we mean by roman­ti­cism. Note the lower case r.

Why the lower case? Most of us know what Roman­ti­cism is, or at least we can remem­ber enough to get a few points on an essay exam in art his­tory or music his­tory.  By pre­sent­ing the Clas­si­cally Roman­tic Series, Denise and I wanted to go beyond the for­mula into what may make music roman­tic in any era or for that mat­ter any art.

I tend to agree with William Flem­ing (Arts and Ideas) that art moves in cycles, that each cycle has its own three-part struc­ture. Each cycle begins with the dis­in­te­gra­tion of the pre­vi­ous cycle, pro­gresses to its clas­si­cal apex, and flames out in glo­ri­ous expan­sions of the ele­ments that iden­tify its essen­tial style. With­out let­ting a blog get too awfully aca­d­e­mic, let me illus­trate how this works with our first program.

The “Clas­si­cal Era”, as we were taught to think of it, is usu­ally accounted for with three com­posers, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Yep. But where did they come from and where did their music go? They wrote sym­phonies, sonatas, con­cer­tos, but they weren’t the first, and when we lis­ten to the music of Bach’s sons, and the slew of other com­posers of the two or so gen­er­a­tions before the “First Vien­nese School” we are lis­ten­ing to sym­phonies, sonatas, and con­cer­tos … but some­how not quite as suc­cess­fully formed as those of late Papa Haydn, Mozart, and early Beethoven. And we also notice that they were also writ­ing in forms that had been pop­u­lar a cen­tury before Haydn but almost unknown in the 19^th century.

Fast for­ward to two gen­er­a­tions of com­posers after Beethoven and we still lis­ten to sym­phonies, sonatas, and con­cer­tos, but these sound like Beethoven push­ing and finally pushed to the extreme (think Liszt, Brahms, Mahler).

Now we have that three-part cycle. The first grow­ing out of the dis­in­te­gra­tion of an era that had cre­ated new forms to sup­plant the older  mod­els, the sec­ond mak­ing per­fec­tion out of what is no longer quite new, and the third glo­ri­ously exag­ger­at­ing these revered forms.

Now the point of a con­cert pro­gram is not ped­a­gog­i­cal, it’s to enter­tain. And what we’ve done is start with a totally Roman­tic com­poser (upper case R intended) Tchaikovsky with his String Quar­tet in D Major. Every era has its three-part cycle includ­ing Roman­ti­cism, the final seg­ment of Clas­si­cism. No one is more Roman­tic than Tchaikovsky; his music belongs in the apex of Roman­ti­cism. Then comes Schön­berg whom we asso­ciate more with his early mod­ern com­po­si­tions (and, there­fore, tend not to like his music) writ­ing out of the ashes of Roman­ti­cism a string sex­tet pushed to its extreme, Verk­lärte Nacht (Trans­fig­ured Night). This is a tone poem that belongs on the orches­tra stage, it is so huge in its con­cep­tion and demands on indi­vid­ual play­ers. That’s what hap­pens in the late stages of any era. And that is also what the con­cert opener rep­re­sents. J. S. Bach’s music is itself the roman­tic cul­mi­na­tion of the Baroque era in music. The cha­conne, a Baroque form most of which can float in and out in about five min­utes and usu­ally requires a key­board instru­ment because it is vari­a­tions over a repeated har­monic pat­tern, Bach here demands be played by a lone vio­lin­ist.
It is glo­ri­ous, an huge exag­ger­a­tion of the musi­cal model as well as an explo­ration of the outer lim­its of vio­lin technique.

Whew, that’s too much stuff for a mere blog. Let’s call it a roman­tic blog (lower case intended).

Brooke Creswell

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