'“Yes, by the gypsies. Is that all? Don’t be alarmed. You shall have such a forte as you never heard in your life. You can’t have read the score carefully; remember the end is everything.”
‘All the same, when the day came my throat tightened, as it did in times of great excitement, when this devil of a thing came on. First the trumpets gave out the rhythm, then the flutes and clarinets, with a pizzicato accompaniment of strings—softly outlining the air—the audience remaining calm and judicial. Then, as there came a long crescendo, broken by the dull beats of the big drum (as of distant cannon), a strange restless movement was perceptible among them—and, as the orchestra let itself go in a cataclysm of sweeping fury and thunder, they could contain themselves no longer. Their overcharged souls burst with a tremendous explosion of feeling that raised my hair with terror.’
This bass-drum beat pianissimo ‘as of distant cannon’ has never to this day lost its wild and mysterious potency. But it must not be supposed that the romanticists’ contribution to orchestration consisted mainly in isolated sensational effects. Their work was marvellously thorough and solid. Berlioz in particular had a wizard-like ear for discerning and developing subtleties of timbre. His great work on Orchestration (now somewhat passé but still stimulating and valuable to the student) abounds in the mention of them. He points out the poetic possibilities in the lower registers of the clarinets, little used before his day. He makes his famous notation as to the utterly different tone qualities of one violin and of several violins in unison, as though of different instruments. And so on through hundreds of pages. The scores of the romanticists abound in simple effects, unheard of before their time, which gain their end like magic. Famous examples come readily to mind: the muted violins in the high registers in the ‘Dance of the Sylphs’ from ‘The Damnation of Faust’; the clumsy bassoons for the dance of the ‘rude mechanicals’ in Mendelssohn’s incidental music to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; the morose viola solo which recurs through Berlioz’s ‘Harold in Italy’; the taps and rolls on the tympani to accompany the speeches of the devil in Der Freischütz or the flutes in their lowest register in the accompaniment to Agathe’s air in the same opera—all these are representative of the richness of poetic imagination and understanding of orchestral possibilities in the composers of the romantic period.
II
It was inevitable that the pure symphonic form should decline in esteem during the romantic period; for it is based primarily on a love of pure design—the ‘da capo’ scheme of statement, development, and restatement, which remains the best method ever invented for vividly presenting musical ideas without extra-musical association or aid. It is primarily a mold for receiving ‘pure’ musical material, and the romantic period, as we have seen, had comparatively little use for music without poetic association. Of the best symphonies of the time the greater part have some general poetical designation, like the ‘Italian’ and ‘Scotch’ symphonies of Mendelssohn, or the ‘Spring’ and ‘Rhenish’ symphonies of Schumann. These titles were in some cases mere afterthoughts or concessions to the demands of the time, and in every case the merest general or whimsical suggestion. Yet they can easily be imagined as fitting the musical material, and they always manage to add interest to the work without interfering with the ‘absolute’ musical value. And even when they are without specific title they are infused with the spirit of the age—delight in sensuous effects and rich scoring, emotional melody, and varied harmonic support.
For all this, as for nearly everything else in modern music, we must go back to Beethoven if we wish to find the source, but for purposes of classification Schubert may be set down as the first romantic symphonist. He adhered as closely as he could to the classical mold, though he never had a predominant gift for form. A beautiful melody was to him the law-giver for all things, and when he found such a melody it went its way refusing to submit to the laws of proportion. Yet this willfulness can hardly be regarded as standing in the way of outward success; the ‘Unfinished’ symphony in B minor could not be better loved than it is; it is safe to say that of all symphonies it is the most popular. It was written (two movements and a few bars of a scherzo) in 1822, was laid aside for no known reason, and lay unknown in Vienna for many years until rescued by Sir George Grove. The mysterious introduction in the ‘cellos and basses, as though to say, ‘It happened once upon a time’; the haunting ‘second theme’ introduced by the ‘cellos; the stirring development with its shrieks of the wood-wind—all are of the very stuff of romantic music. A purist might wish the work less diffuse, especially in the second movement; no one could wish it more beautiful. In the great C major symphony, written in the year of his death, Schubert seems to have been attempting a magnum opus. If he had lived, this work would certainly have been regarded as the first composition of his ‘second period.’ He labored over it with much more care than was his custom, and showed a desire to attain a cogent form with truly orchestral ideas. The best parts of the ‘Unfinished Symphony’ could be sung by the human voice; the melodies of the C major are at home only with orchestral instruments. The work was all but unprecedented for its time in length and difficulty; it is Schubert’s finest effort in sustained and noble expression, and, though thoroughly romantic in tone, his nearest approach to ‘absolute’ music. It seems outmoded and at times a bit childlike to-day, but by sheer beauty holds its place steadily on orchestral programs. Schubert’s other symphonies have dropped almost completely out of sight.
Mendelssohn’s four symphonies, including the ‘Italian,’ the ‘Scotch,’ and the ‘Reformation,’ have had a harder time holding their place. It seems strange that Mendelssohn, the avowed follower of the classics, should not have done his best work in his symphonies, but these compositions, though executed with extreme polish and dexterity, sound thin to-day. A bolder voice might have made them live. But the ‘Scotch’ and ‘Italian’ in them are seen through Leipzig spectacles, and the musical subject-matter is not vigorous enough to challenge a listener in the midst of modern musical wealth. As for the ‘Reformation’ symphony, with its use of the Protestant chorale, Ein feste Burg, a technically ‘reformed’ Jew could hardly be expected to catch the militant Christian spirit. Yet these works are at their best precisely in their romantic picturesqueness; as essays in the ‘absolute’ symphony they cannot match the nobility and strength of Schubert’s C major.
Schumann, the avowed romantic, had much more of worth to put into his symphonies, probably because he was an apostle and an image-breaker, and not a polite ‘synthesist.’ The ‘Spring’ symphony in B flat, written in the year of his marriage, 1840 (the year of his most exuberant productivity), remains one of the most beautiful between Beethoven and recent times. The austerity of the classical form never robbed him of spontaneity, for the ideas in his symphony are not inferior to any he ever invented. The form is, on the whole, satisfactory to the purist, and, beyond such innovations as the connecting of all four movements in the last symphony, he attempted little that was new. The four works are fertile in lovely ideas, such as the graceful folk-song intoned by ‘cellos and wood-wind in the third, or the impressive organ-like movement from the same work. Throughout there is the same basic simplicity of invention—the combination of fresh melodic idea with colorful harmony—which endears him to all German hearts. It is customary to say that Schumann was a mere amateur at orchestration. It is certainly true that he had no particular turn for niceties of scoring or for searching out endless novelties of effect, and it is true that he sometimes proved himself ignorant of certain primary rules, as when he wrote an unplayable phrase for the horns in his first symphony. But his orchestration is, on the whole, well balanced and adequate to his subject-matter, and is full of felicities of scoring which harmonize with the romantic color of his ideas.
Of the other symphonists who were influenced by the romantic fervor the greater part have dropped out of sight. Spohr, who may be reckoned among them, was in his day considered the equal of Beethoven, and his symphonies, though often manneristic, are noble in conception, romantic in feeling, and learned in execution. Of a much later period is Raff, a disciple of Liszt, and, to some extent, a crusader on behalf of Wagner. Like Spohr, he enjoyed a much exaggerated reputation during his lifetime. Of his eleven symphonies Im Walde and Leonore (both of a mildly programmistic nature) were the best known, the latter in particular a popular favorite of a generation ago. Raff further developed the resources of the orchestra without striking out any new paths. Many of his ideas were romantic and charming, but he was too often facile and rather cheap. Still, he had not a little to teach other composers, among them the American MacDowell. Gade, friend of Mendelssohn and his successor at Leipzig, was a thorough scholarly musician, one of the few of the ‘Leipzig circle’ who did not succumb to dry formalism. He may be considered one of the first of the ‘national composers,’ for his work, based to some extent on the Danish folk idiom, secured international recognition for the national school founded by J. P. E. Hartmann. Ferdinand Hiller, friend of Liszt and Chopin, wrote three symphonies marked by romantic feeling and technical vigor, and Reinecke, for many years the representative of the Mendelssohn tradition at Leipzig, wrote learnedly and at times with inspiring freshness.