The Romantic Composers

by Daniel Gregory Mason

I

Historians of music are accustomed to speak of the first half or three-quarters of the nineteenth century as the Romantic Period in music, and of those composers who immediately follow Beethoven, including Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and some others, as the Romantic Composers. The word "romantic," as thus used, forms no doubt a convenient label; but if we attempt to explain its meaning, we find ourselves involved in several difficulties. Were there then no romanticists before Schubert? Have no composers written romantically since 1870? Such questions, arising at once, lead us inevitably to the more general inquiry, What is romanticism?

In the broadest sense in which the word "romanticism" can be used, the sense in which it is taken, for example, by Pater in the Postscript of his "Appreciations," it seems to mean simply interest in novel and strange elements of artistic effect. "It is the addition of strangeness to beauty," says Pater, "that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper." Romanticism is thus the innovating spirit, as opposed to the conserving spirit of classicism; romanticists appear in every age and school; and Stendhal is right in saying that "all good art was romantic in its day." It is interesting, in passing, to note the relation of this definition to the widely prevalent notion that romanticism is extravagant and lawless. To the mind wedded to tradition all novelty is extravagant; and since an artistic form is grasped only after considerable practice, all new forms necessarily appear formless at first. Hence, if we begin by saying that romantic art is novel and strange art, it requires only a little inertia or intolerance in our point of view to make us add that it is grotesque and irrational art, or in fact not art at all. Critics have often been known to arrive at this conclusion.

Suggestive as Pater's definition is, however, it is obviously too vague and sweeping to carry us far in our quest. It does not explain why Monteverde, with his revolutionary dominant seventh chords, or the Florentine composers of the early seventeenth century, with their unheard-of free recitative, were not quite as genuine romanticists as Schubert with his whimsical modulation and Schumann with his harsh dissonances. We have still to ask why, instead of appending our label of "romantic" to the innovators of centuries earlier than the nineteenth, we confine it to that comparatively small group of men who immediately followed Beethoven.

The answer is to be found in the distinctness of the break that occurred in musical development at this time, the striking difference in type between the compositions of Beethoven and those of his successors. From Philipp Emanuel Bach up to Beethoven, the romanticism of each individual composer merely carried him a step forward on a well-established path; it prompted him to refine here, to pare away there, to expand this feature, to suppress that, in a scheme of art constantly maturing, but retaining always its essential character. With Beethoven, however, this particular scheme of art, of which the type is the sonata, with its high measure of formal beauty and its generalized expression, reached a degree of perfection beyond which it could not for the moment go. The romantic impulse toward novelty of Beethoven's successors had to satisfy itself, therefore, in some other way than by heightening abstract æsthetic beauty or general expressiveness; until new technical resources could be developed the limit was reached in those directions. Beethoven had himself, meanwhile, opened the door on an inviting vista of possibilities in a new field—that of highly specialized, idiosyncratic, subjective expression. He had shown how music, with Mozart so serene, detached, and impersonal, could become a language of personal feeling, of individual passion, even of whim, fantasy, and humor. It was inevitable that those who came after him should seek their novelty, should satisfy their curiosity, along this new path of subjectivism and specialized expression. And as this music of the person, as we may call it, which now began to be written, was different not only in degree but in kind from the objective art which prepared the way for it, it is natural that in looking back upon so striking a new departure we should give it a special name, such as romanticism.

As for the other line of demarcation, which separates the romantic period from what we call the modern, that is purely arbitrary. "Modern" is a convenient name for us to give to those tendencies from which we have not yet got far enough away to view them in large masses and to describe them disinterestedly. As the blur of too close a vision extends back for us to 1870 or thereabout, we find it wise to let our romantic period, about which we can theorize and form hypotheses, end there for the present. But it already seems clear enough that the prevalent tendency even in contemporary music is still the personal and subjective one that distinguished the early romantic period. Probably our grandchildren will extend that period from Beethoven's later works to those of some composer yet unborn. And thus we have, in studying the romantic composers, the added interest that we are in a very real sense studying ourselves.