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Essay about The Ideals Of Instrumental Music

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At one point in the study of the Romantic period of music, we come upon the first of several apparently opposing conditions that plague all attempts to grasp the meaning of Romantic as applied to the music of the 19th century. This opposition involved the relation between music and words. If instrumental music is the perfect Romantic art, why is it acknowledged that the great masters of the symphony, the highest form of instrumental music, were not Romantic composers, but were the Classical composers, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven? Moreover, one of the most characteristic 19th century genres was the Lied, a vocal piece in which Shubert, Schumann, Brahams, and Wolf attained a new union between music and poetry. …show more content…

Instrumental music thus became a vehicle for the utterance of thoughts which, although first hinted in words, may ultimately be beyond the power of words to fully express. Practically every composer of the era was, to some degree, writing program music, weather or not this was publicly acknowledged. One reason it was so easy for listeners to connect a scene or a story or a poem with a piece of Romantic music is that often the composer himself, perhaps unconsciously, was working from some such ideas. Writers on music projected their own conceptions of the expressive functions of music into the past, and read Romantic programs into the instrumental works not only of Beethoven, but also the likes of Mozart, Haydn, and Bach! The diffused scenic effects in the music of such composers as Mendelssohn and Schumann seem pale when compared to the feverish, and detailed drama that constitutes the story of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830). Because his imagination always seemed to run in parallel literary and musical channels, Berlioz once subtitled his work "Episode in the life of an artist", and provided a program for it which was in effect a piece of Romantic autobiography. In later years, he conceded that if necessary, when the symphony was performed by itself in concert, the program would need not be given out

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