[Chapter XIII]
The Romantic Orchestral Composers
Beethoven and his nine symphonies—Significance of his work—His technical alterations—His romanticism—Meaning of classicism and romanticism—The symphonic poem and the programme overture—The Liszt piano concertos—Successors of Beethoven—Berlioz and his programme symphonies—Tschaikowsky and Dvorak—The music of Johannes Brahms.
THE classical period in musical history is that in which composers appear to have been engaged in perfecting the form and technic of composition. The impulse which led them to make their improvements was the romantic impulse, for by romanticism in music we mean an impulse which urges the composer toward expression. Such an impulse has always been at work in music, but it was impossible for the classical composers to give it free exercise, because they had not fully established a method of composition. Beethoven found the method pretty well formulated. His material was ready to his hand. In the sonata form his predecessors had prepared for him a vehicle which they had fully proved to be capable of a clear, logical, and luminous presentation and development of beautiful musical ideas. It remained for Beethoven to prove that the symphony, the orchestral sonata, was not only the most complex, diversified, and yet organically unified of all musical forms, but that most thoroughly suited to the embodiment of great mood-pictures, outpourings of love, suffering, despair, joy, triumph. It remained for Beethoven to show how the four movements of a symphony, without any merely technical links, could be made to picture a succession of emotional states which should have a natural variety and an equally natural homogeneity.
Because Beethoven's symphonies stand today as the highest types of absolute music, and because all of them are living music, heard in concert rooms, I quote the list with dates of production, etc., from Sir George Grove's admirable work: "Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies."
| No. | Key. | Opus No. | Title. | Date of Completion when ascertainable. | Date of First Performance. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | C | 21 | .... | April 2, 1800 | .... |
| 2 | D | 36 | .... | April 5, 1803 | .... |
| 3 | E-flat | 55 | Eroica | August, 1804 | April 7, 1805 |
| 4 | B-flat | 60 | .... | 1806 | March, 1807 |
| 5 | C minor | 67 | .... | Dec. 22, 1808 | .... |
| 6 | F | 68 | Pastoral | Dec. 22, 1808 | .... |
| 7 | A | 92 | .... | May (?) 13, 1812 | Dec. 8, 1813 |
| 8 | F | 93 | .... | October, 1812 | Feb. 27, 1814 |
| 9 | D minor | 125 | Choral | August, 1823 | May 7, 1824 |
In the chapter on the sonata I have already mentioned some of the details of Beethoven's developments. As displayed in his symphonies the technical changes which call for especial mention are first strikingly seen in the "Eroica." Here we find that Beethoven made the progress from his first to his second subject (see outline of [first movement form], Chap. X.) in a thoroughly logical and organic manner. In the working out he introduced new melodic episodes, but he never forgot that they were subordinate to the two melodic topics of his movement. In the third part of the first movement he introduced a coda of 140 measures, in which new subject matter is introduced, and part of it made to act as a "descant" above the first principal theme.