Romanticism
1830-1890
w^
à
War
Volume IX
The New
Oxford History
of Music
Oxford University Press
IS
9 "780
BN 0-
1
9-3163
09
| |
1
63096
-8
1
93
NEW OXFORD HISTORY OF MUSIC
VOLUME IX
THE VOLUMES ОБУЧЕ
NEW OXFORD HISTORY OF MUSIC
1. Ancient and Oriental Music
п. The Early Middle Ages to 1300 (second edition)
ш. Ars Nova and the Renaissance (1300-1540)
IV. The Age of Humanism (1540-1630)
v. Opera and Church Music (1630-1750)
vi. Concert Music (1630-1750)
уп. The Age of Enlightenment (1745-1790)
уш. The Age of Beethoven (1790-1830)
IX. Romanticism (1830-1890)
X. The Modern Age (1890-1960)
ROMANTICISM
(1830-1890)
EDITED BY
GERALD ABRAHAM
OXFORD NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1990
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press, New York
© Oxford University Press 1990
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior permission of Oxford University Press
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The New Oxford history of music.
Vol. 9: Romanticism (1830-1890).
I. Abraham, Gerald, 1904-1988
780'.9
ISBN 0-19-316309-8
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
New Oxford history of music.
Includes bibliographies.
v. 9. Romanticism, 1830-1890] edited by Gerald Abraham
1. Music— History and criticism. I. Oxford
history of music.
ML160.N44 780'9 54-12578
ISBN 0-19-316309-8
Set by Oxford Text System
Printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk
SON N
EA
CONTENTS
PUBLISHER ’S NOTE Х1У
ILLUSTRATIONS XV
INTRODUCTION xvii
I. NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC: 1830-1850.
By GERALD ABRAHAM 1
The Concert Overture 1
Mendelssohn’s Overtures 2
Mendelssohn’s Followers 5
Berlioz’s Overtures 8
Wagner’s Early Overtures 12
Schumann's Overtures 14
Incidental Music 16
Glinka 18
Mendelssohn's Symphonies 20
Berlioz's Symphonies 25
The French Ode-symphonie 31
Spohr 32
Minor Symphonic Composers 38
Schumann as Symphonist 41
Problems of the Romantic Concerto 45
Enlargement of the Orchestral Palette 49
Berlioz and the Romantic Orchestra 57
П. CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850. By JOHN HORTON 60
Amateur and Professional Players 60
Chamber Music in France 61
Conditions in England 62
Combinations of Strings and Wind 63
Schumann's Chamber Music 65
Duet Sonatas 68
The Piano Trio 69
Scandinavian Chamber Music 72
Chamber Music for Strings by Mendelssohn and Spohr 74
The Period in Perspective 80
vi CONTENTS
III. ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850 -
(a) GRAND OPÉRA. By DAVID CHARLTON
Staging and Costume
Auber's La Muette de Portici
External Traits .
A New Design Element
Internal Musical Traits
Meyerbeer's Robert le diable
Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots
Auber's Gustave III, ou le bal masqué
Halévy's La Juive
Halévy's Guido et Ginevra
Halévy's La Reine de Chypre
Halévy's Charles VI
Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini
Donizetti in Paris
Meyerbeer's Le Prophéte
(b) OPÉRA COMIQUE. By DAVID CHARLTON
The Composers and Librettists
Auber
Halévy
Adam
Thomas
Orchestration
(c) ITALY. By DAVID KIMBELL
Italian Romanticism: Art and Politics
The Place of Opera in Italian Society
Dramatic and Musical Principles
Reappraisal
Donizetti’s Mature Operas: General Characteristics
Donizetti as Musician and Craftsman
Mercadante's Reform Operas
The Inspiration of Extra-musical Ideas: Politics
The Inspiration of Extra-musical Ideas: Literature
Hugo and Verdi
Shakespeare and Verdi
Schiller and Verdi
Lesser Masters
The Decline of Opera buffa
The Performance of Italian Romantic Opera
The Appreciation of Opera
(d) GERMANY. By SIEGFRIED GOSLICH
Stage and Composer
CONTENTS
The Theatre Conductors
The Leading Masters
Lortzing
Mendelssohn and Nicolai
Schumann
Flotow
Wagner
Librettists
The Fate of the ‘Number Opera’
The Overture
The Lied
The Romanze
Ballade, Cavatina, and Preghiera
The Aria
Ensemble and Chorus
Scene Composition
(e) RUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE. By GERALD ABRAHAM
Russia
Verstovsky
Glinka
Dargomizhsky
Poland
Non-German Opera in the Habsburg Empire
(f) BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. By NICHOLAS
TEMPERLEY
Bishop
Barnett and Loder
Balfe
Wallace
The United States
IV. ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850. By WILLI KAHL
The Piano of the 1830s
The Crisis of the Sonata
Schumann's Sonatas
Schumann's C Major Phantasie
Schumann and the Variation Principle
Liszt
Chopin
Other Sonata Composers
Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte
The Slav Lands
vii
186
188
190
190
191
192
193
196
199
200
202
203
203
205
208
209
213
213
214
216
222
229
224
228
228
229
23]
233
235
257
287
238
241
243
243
247
250
252
253
235
уш CONTENTS
V. WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS. By ARNOLD WHITTALL 257
Life and Works 257
Theories 258
Compositional Procedures 263
Tonality e 266
Der Ring des Nibelungen 268
Das Rheingold 270
Die Walküre DAN,
Siegfried (1) 286
Tristan und Isolde 291
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 296
Siegfried (2) 302
Gotterdümmerung 307
Parsifal 315
Wagner's Heritage 319
VI. OPERA: 1850-1890
(a) GERMANY. By GERALD ABRAHAM 322
Cornelius 322
Goetz 324
Goldmark, Bruch, and Rubinstein 327
(b) FRANCE. Ву DAVID CHARLTON 32]
Тһе 1850$ апа 1860$ 327
Opera comique to 1862 328
Meyerbeer’s operas comiques 331
Offenbach and Operetta 333
Gounod’s Minor Works 334
Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict 334
Berlioz's Les Troyens 336
Gounod's Genius Revealed 339
Faust 343
Gounod's Later Works 346
Meyerbeer’s L/ Africaine 349
Verdi in Paris 354
‘Heightened Lyrical Speech’ 362
Thomas’s Later Works 363
Bizet’s Youthful Works 367
Bizet’s Style 370
Les Pécheurs de perles 375
La Jolie Fille de Perth 376
Djamileh 378
Carmen 380
The 1870s and 1880s 385
CONTENTS
Saint-Saéns
Massenet
Offenbach's Les Contes d' Hoffmann
Lalo
Delibes
Reyer
Chabrier
(c) ITALY. By JULIAN BUDDEN
The Later Tragic Operas of Mercadante and Pacini
Opera Buffa and Semiseria
The Middle Generation: Petrella, Pedrotti, and Cagnoni
Reform from the North: Faccio and Boito
The Verdian Synthesis
Italian ‘Grand Opera’
The Later Verdi
Otello and Falstaff
The Conservatives: Ponchielli and Gomes
The Radical Element: Catalani and Franchetti
Towards Verismo
(d) RUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE. By GERALD ABRAHAM
Russia
Serov
The New Generation
Borodin’s Prince Igor
Mussorgsky
Rimsky-Korsakov
Tchaikovsky
Poland and Moniuszko
Moniuszko's Later Operas
Moniuszko's Successors
Czechoslovakia
Smetana
Smetana's Contemporaries
Dvorak
Fibich and Kovarovic
Hungary
(е) BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. By NICHOLAS
TEMPERLEY
British Opera
Macfarren
Later Romantic Operas
Comic Opera
Sullivan
pc CONTENTS
The Savoy Operas in the United States - 485
American Operetta and Opera 486
Incidental Music 487
VII. THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS. By GERALD
ABRAHAM 489
Liszt's Overture Poems 490
Liszt's Earlier Disciples 491
Liszt’s Symphonische Dichtungen 492
Liszt's Influence in Russia 499
Tchaikovsky 504
“Musical Pictures’ 506
The Symphonic Poem in Germany 509
English Progressives 511
The Symphonic Poem in France 512
Franck and his Circle 518
Smetana and Dvoräk 522
The Wagnerian Legacy 325
VIII. MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890. By ROBERT
PASCALL 534
Historical Perspectives 534
Programmaticism 536
Nationalism 540
Brahms and the Piano Sonata 542
Liszt and the Sonata 545
Brahms's Piano Variations 550
Piano Variations by Brahms's Contemporaries 959
German Organ Music 556
French Innovations 558
The Suite 560
The Re-emergence of the Suite in Mid-Century 562
The Suite in the 1880s 570
The Extract Suite 572
The Serenade 573
Varied Conceptions of the Symphony SS
Stylistic Characteristics 578
Programme Symphonies of the 1850s: Schumann, Liszt 580
Raff's Programme Symphonies 582
Revitalization of Classical Forms: Bruckner 585
Brahms's Symphonies 593
The Symphonies of Strauss and Mahler 600
The Symphony in Russia 602
CONTENTS xi
Tchaikovsky’s Symphonies 606
The Symphony in France 610
Dvorak’s Symphonies 611
The Concerto 615
Variations for Soloist and Orchestra 620
Chamber Music 621
Chamber Music in Germany and Austria 624
Brahms's Chamber Works 628
Further Contemporaries of Brahms 635
Russian Chamber Music 636
French Chamber Music 640
Smetana's Chamber Works 647
Dvorak’s Chamber Works 648
IX. SOLO SONG.
(a) GERMANY. By LESLIE ORREY 659
Schumann 659
The 1840 Songs 659
Schumann’s Later Songs 662
Mendelssohn 663
Liszt 666
Franz 669
Wagner, Cornelius, and Jensen 670
Brahms 672
Brahms and the Volkslied 676
Mahler 677
Strauss 678
Wolf 679
Conclusion 682
(b) FRANCE. By DAVID TUNLEY 684
The Romance 684
Romance and Melodie 688
The 1830s 689
The Mid-Century 690
New Directions 692
The Perfection of Melodie 696
The Last Decade 702
(с) RUSSIA. By EDWARD GARDEN 704
Glinka and Dargomizhsky 705
Balakırev and Cui 708
Rimsky-Korsakov 710
Tchaikovsky ШУ
xii
X
CONTENTS
Borodin
Mussorgsky
Rubinstein
(d) POLAND. By ROSEMARY HUNT
Chopin
Moniuszko
Zelenski
Later Nineteenth-century Composers
(e) CZECHOSLOVAKIA. By JOHN CLAPHAM
The Czech Renaissance
Poetic Sources
Bendl
Smetana
Fibich
Dvorak
(f) SCANDINAVIA. By JOHN HORTON
Denmark
Sweden
Finland
Norway
Grieg
(g) BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. By NICHOLAS
TEMPERLEY
German Influence
Sterndale Bennett
Pierson
Sullivan
Women Composers
Art-song in America
Macdowell
Art-song in the English Tradition
Indigenous Song in The United States
The ‘Sacred Song’
Parry and Stanford
. CHORAL MUSIC. By GERALD ABRAHAM
Mendelssohn
Schumann
Berlioz
Berlioz’s Contemporaries
Liszt
714
717
722
725
727
729
133
733
7219
740
742
743
745
747
750
756
756
759
763
765
767
769
770
Т
773
776
777
Л
779
781
784
786
787
793
793
797
799
801
803
CONTENTS
Bruckner
: Brahms
Dvorak
Verdi
France After 1870
Poland
Russia
Spain
Britain
United States
Bibliography
Index
xiii
808
810
813
815
817
820
823
826
827
829
831
905
PUBLISHER S NORME
Gerald Abraham died shortly after sending the typescript of this
book to Oxford. We wish to pay tribute to his incalculable
contribution to the whole of the New Oxford History of Music, for
much of which he served as the general editor. We wish also to
acknowledge the assistance of Professor Robert Pascall of the
University of Nottingham, in assuming the responsibility for seeing
this volume through the press.
Ш.
IA
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
ILLUSTRATIONS
. THE PARIS OPÉRA
Interior of the Paris Opéra during the Act 3 finale (designed by Cicéri) of the
first production of Meyerbeer's Robert le diable їп 1831. Lithograph by J.
Arnout.
Bibliothéque de l'Opéra, Paris
. INSTRUMENT MANUFACTURE
The Adolphe Sax factory in Paris. Engraving from L’illustration (5 Febrary
1848).
Mary Evans Picture Library, London
BERLIOZ: GRANDE MESSE DES MORTS
Opening of the Dies irae, showing the range of instruments required, from
the autograph score (1837).
Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris
CHAMBER MUSIC
Anthony (the artist's husband, facing centre) and friends playing a string
quartet at his Frankfurt home (c.1843). Watercolour by Mary Ellen Best.
Private Collection
. AUBER: LA MUETTE DE PORTICI
Riot sparked off by the performance of Auber's La Muette de Portici (1828)
at the Théátre de la Monnaie, Brussels, on 25 August 1830. Engraving by
Hebert after Henri Hendrick.
Bibliothéque Royale Albert Ier, Brussels
WAGNER: TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
Closing scene of Act 1 in the first production of Wagner's opera at the
Königliches Hof- und Nationaltheater, Munich (1865). Engraving after a
drawing by J. Noerr from the Leipzig /llustrirte Zeitung (15 July 1865).
Mary Evans Picture Library, London
GOUNOD: SAPHO
Pauline Viardot (centre) in the premiére of Gounod's opera at the Paris Opéra
on 16 April 1851; this work's return to Classical subject matter and novel
musical features make it a significant landmark in French opera. Engraving
from £' illustration (26 April 1851).
Mary Evans Picture Library, London
VERDI: OTELLO
Costumes designed by Alfredo Edel for Othello and Desdemona in the
premiére of Verdi's opera at La Scala, Milan, on 5 February 1887.
Boston Public Library (photos Richard Macnutt)
MUSSORGSK Y: BORIS GODUNOV
Opening scene (designed by Shishkov) for the first performance of Mussorgsky’
s opera at the Mariinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, on 8 February 1874.
From V. N. Tumanina: M. P. Musorgskiy: сіст i tvorchestvo (1939)
. HUNNENSCHLACHT
Wilhelm von Kaulbach's painting Hunnenschlacht (1835-7) inspired Liszt's
xvi
XI.
XII.
ILLUSTRATIONS
symphonic poem of the same name (1857). Engraving by J. L. Raab after the
original now in the Muzeum Narodowe, Poznan.
Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Brahms accompanying a solo singer in the Bösendorfer Hall of the Liech-
tenstein (Winter) Palace, Vienna; this building was converted into a concert
hall in 1872, but demolished in 1913. Watercolour by an unknown artist.
Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
LISZT: DIE LEGENDE VON DER HEILIGEN ELISABETH
Liszt conducting the first performance of his oratorio in the Redoutensaal,
Budapest, on 15 August 1865. Engraving after a drawing by Jean Hubert
Reve from the Leipzig Illustrirte Zeitung (16 September 1865).
Mary Evans Picture Library, London
INTRODUCTION
By GERALD ABRAHAM
*ROMANTICISM' is a concept more easily recognized than defined.
"The general idea of romanticism' subsumes *music as a record of
the most subtle and intimate personal emotions and impressions'
and ‘music as a rhetorical language addressed to large audiences’.!
Wyzewa and Saint-Foix thought they had detected symptoms of
Mozart's *grande crise romantique' as early as 1773? and Abert also
found 'ein romantischer Zug’ in the quartets K 136-8.? ‘Romantic
symptoms' certainly appear in Haydn's minor-key symphonies of
the 1770s and in C. P. E. Bach. They are obvious in much of
Beethoven and still more in his younger contemporaries. All the
same there is a case for regarding the years 1830-90 as the ‘Romantic
period' par excellence. It was in March 1830 that Goethe complained
pettishly to Eckermann that ‘everybody talks now about Classicism
and Romanticism— which no one thought of fifty years ago'. Berlioz
was then composing his Symphonie fantastique, Schumann his
Op. 1, and Chopin his E minor Concerto (he had already written
his earliest nocturnes, mazurkas, and études). One full-blooded
Romantic, Weber—who as early as 1800 had styled his boyish
Waldmädchen *romantisch' —had died at a comparatively early age,
but his almost exact contemporary, Spohr, lived until the middle of
the century and a whole generation born during the decade 1803-
13—not only Berlioz, Chopin, and Schumann but Mendelssohn,
Liszt, Wagner, and Verdi—came to maturity in the 1830s. These
composers were to develop new concepts of form and harmony,
extend and elaborate orchestral and pianistic techniques, and re-
volutionize operatic structures, which were further exploited by their
juniors.
However, the first phase of the period was more or less over by
the mid-century: Bellini had died in 1835, Glinka produced little
after 1848, while Mendelssohn died in 1847, Donizetti in 1848, and
Ко X: pole
2 Theodore de Wyzewa and Georges Saint-Fox, Wolfgang Amédée Mozart: Sa vie musicale
et son euvre, de l'enfance à la pleine maturité, i (Paris, 1912), 497.
? Otto Jahn, W. A. Mozart (Leipzig, 1856-9); rev. 5th edn. by Hermann Abert, W. A.
Mozart: Neu bearbeitete und erweiterte Ausgabe von Otto Jahns ‘Mozart’ (1919-21), i. 348.
xviii INTRODUCTION
Chopin in 1849. Schumann's creative career ended with his attempted
suicide in 1854. Wagner produced his last Romantic opera, Lohengrin,
in 1850 and offered the world nothing further for more than ten
years. What we may call the second phase of Romanticism was twice
as long and included the mature Wagner and Verdi, such giants as
Brahms and Bruckner, the Russians and— particularly after 1871—
the French.
As for the terminus ad quem of the period, in 1890 Wagner, Liszt,
and Cesar Franck had recently died while Bruckner and Brahms had
only a few years to live, and in 1893 Verdi and Tchaikovsky produced
their final masterpieces. It is true that the spirit of Romanticism
lived on and was embodied in fresh techniques for another quarter
of a century,* but
the symptoms of decay and exhaustion were already apparent years
before 1914. Sumptuousness of sonority, hypertrophic harmony, emotional
intensity, music-as-a-language could be carried no further. The future of
music lay in other directions, which other composers—indeed sometimes
the late Romantics themselves— had long been pointing to and exploring.?
There had been a return to the ideals of ‘absolute music’, to the
cultivation of techniques and sonorities for their own sakes. Reger's
cerebral fugal writing and Debussy's floating, non-functional har-
monies were both symptoms of the reaction against Romantic
expression.
Goethe touched on the essential problem of musical Romanticism
when he wrote to Zelter (letter, 6 March 1810) of the ‘symbolism
for the ear in which the object ... is neither imitated nor painted
but presented to the imagination in a quite peculiar and in-
comprehensible way in that there seems to be no relationship at all
between the symbol and the object symbolized'. The emotions and
extra-musical meanings that ‘Romantic’ composers sought to convey
often needed more than such tone symbols or even titles to
communicate them more precisely. Music and words were brought
into a closer symbiosis than had generally existed before except in
opera—and even in opera this was brought still closer by Wagner
in particular. In solo song, particularly in German song, the piano
part tended to be less merely supportive, and was more expressive,
even pictorial. Through the later Schubert and Schumann to Hugo
Wolf and Mussorgsky a new conception of solo song was brought
into existence. [n instrumental music the effort to convey the interplay
4 See Vol. X, pp. 1-79.
Dette
INTRODUCTION XiX
or conflict of emotions, the narrative or even the pictorial, tended
to disrupt the ‘Classical’ forms of musical architecture and resulted
in compromises: the piano ballade, the hybrid form of ‘programme
symphony’, the dissolution of the ‘concert overture’ on sonata lines
into the freer structures that after the mid-century began to be
entitled ‘symphonic poem’ or ‘fantasia’ or ‘tone picture’. The
composer of such larger structures—symphony, sonata, concerto—
was faced with a problem unknown to composers of ‘absolute’ music:
the establishment of overall unity in works consisting of markedly
differentiated ideas—even conveying extra-musical ones. And the
usual solutions—themes metamorphosed from movement to move-
ment, or a single ‘motto’ introduced in each, as in Berlioz’s Symphonie
fantastique and Schumann’s D minor Symphony—were apt to betray
their inorganic nature. In many of the most successful large-scale
works of the period the composer simply evaded the issue of overall
unity.
The ‘Romantic period’ of course covered many degrees of Ro-
manticism from the carefully modified (Mendelssohn, Brahms) to
the strongly emphasized (Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Tchaikovsky). It
was qualified by national characteristics in France, Italy, Hungary,
the Slav and Scandinavian lands. It even paradoxically mated with
Realism (Mussorgsky) and invaded religious music (Berlioz, Liszt,
Franck). But, although it was not peculiarly German, Romanticism
had struck deeper in German literature—Novalis, Wackenroder,
Tieck, Jean Paul, Hoffmann—than elsewhere and saturated German
music more thoroughly than any other. English literary Romanticism
flourished in a period when English music was in a poor way,
whereas Hugo and Berlioz were almost exact contemporaries. While
Romanticism impregnated opera everywhere and the instrumental
music of Berlioz, Liszt, and other non-Germans, it subtly infused
that great quantity of German music in which the aural symbolism
is, as Goethe put it, ‘quite peculiar and incomprehensible’. It is a
fundamental paradox of Romantic music that much of it remained
‘incomprehensible’ while composers were striving more and more to
widen its expressive powers.
Romanticism flourished earliest in opera, with Mehul, Spohr, and
(above all) Weber, because text and action not only generated music
but supplied it with meaning, although the earliest Romantic operas
to be so called, notably the youthful Weber’s romantisch-komisch,
Das Waldmädchen (1800) and Romantische Oper, Silvana (1810) were
more Romantic in subject than in musical substance. The same may
XX INTRODUCTION
be said of the Undine (1816) of E. T. A. Hoffmann$— who gave the
‘noun’ ‘Romanticism’ wider currency. Actually Méhul's Mélidore et
Phrosine (1794) and Ariodant (1799)? and Le Sueur's Ossian (1804)8
had more Romantic substance, but it was Weber's Der Freischütz
(1821), his grosse-heroisch-romantische Oper, Euryanthe (1823), and
Oberon (1826)9, with Spohr's Faust (1816), Jessonda (1823), and
Berggeist (1825),!® that were to lead through Marschner to Wagner
and his evolution of *music drama'. Moreover, Romantic opera
supplied instrumental composers with a ‘vocabulary’ derived from
it, even when it did not, as in the case of Berlioz's Symphonie
fantastique, frankly borrow stage music. By the middle of the century
they were borrowing directly from the words of poets.!!
The other area in which music could be charged with specific
meaning was solo song. Eighteenth-century song was essentially
melodious, an affair of vocal melody that would have lost com-
paratively little by transference to an instrument; nineteenth-century
song became more and more a true marriage of music with poetry.
There had, of course, been such marriages before—for instance,
Mozart's ‘Abendempfindung’ (1787), and, just a month before this,
‘Als Luise die Briefe ihres ungetreuen Liebhabers verbrannte’, which
anticipates that perfect union of the 'Sphear-born harmonious Sisters’
which we find in some of the greatest songs of Schubert, Schumann,
and Brahms. Even more 'subtle and intimate personal emotions and
impressions’ were to be conveyed in the Lieder of Hugo Wolf, while
in Russia words and music were united realistically rather than
Romantically in the songs of Modest Mussorgsky, notably in his
cycle Detskaya [The Nursery], based on the inflections of a child's
speech. Wolf's bold piano harmonies and Mussorgsky's empirical
ones did almost as much to enlarge the harmonic vocabulary as the
chromaticism of Tristan and the Prelude to Act III of Parsifal.
$ See Vol. VIII, pp. 474 ff.
7 Ibid., pp. 53-60 and 55-61.
8 [bid., pp. 86-91.
9 [bid., pp. 496 ff.
10 [bid., pp. 483 ff.
11 See chap. 7.
I
NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL
MUSIC: 1830-1850
By GERALD ABRAHAM
THE CONCERT OVERTURE
THE composers of the 1830s inherited a magnificent instrument from
Beethoven and Weber: the Classical orchestra brought to its highest
development in the hands of the former and already subtilized, its
colour effects extended, its sensuous gloss heightened, by the latter.
One cannot add Schubert’s name to these two, for his scores were
practically unknown in the 1830s, but we should certainly add the
names of several other opera composers, such as Spontini, with his
muted woodwind—their bells in leather bags!—in Fernand Cortez
(1809), his divided strings, some with mutes, some without, in
Olimpie (1819), and the rest of his colour devices. The fertilization
of instrumental music by expressive and descriptive resources first
employed in dramatic music, though a fairly constant process, was
never more noticeable than during the second quarter of the
nineteenth century. Opera even supplied Romantic orchestral music
with what is perhaps its most characteristic form: the independent
descriptive overture. For once, history literally repeated itself. Just
as a hundred years earlier the three-movement Italian opera overture,
the sinfonia avanti l'opera, had won independent popularity once it
had broken away from its parent opera and become an important
genre in itself, so too the one-movement dramatic overture in more
or less modified sonata form now also won its independence. Both
Beethoven and Weber had set precedents for the independent
overture. Beethoven had written redundant overtures for his one
opera, superb overtures such as Coriolan and Die Weihe des Hauses
for short-lived plays and unimportant dramatic occasions, and one—
the C major, Op. 115—‘for any occasion— or for concert use’
[Ouvertüre zu jeder Gelegenheit —oder zum Gebrauch im Konzert], as
IBSeeaV oR VII, pr Si.
2 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
the first sketch is headed (the connection with the ‘name-day’ of the
Emperor Franz appears to have been quite fortuitous.? Weber had
drastically recast the overtures to the stillborn operas Peter Schmoll
and Rübezahl years later as a Grande Ouverture à plusieurs instruments
and Ouvertüre zum Beherrscher der Geister, and had composed an
independent Jubel-Ouvertüre to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary
of the accession of Friedrich August I of Saxony. Between 1812 and
1819 the young Schubert wrote no fewer than eight overtures,
unnamed and unconnected with any dramatic work.
The abstract and independent overture seems to have come into
existence at about the same time as its miniature counterpart, the
independent prelude for piano. The overture itself became so popular
that it too was annexed by piano composers, once a precedent had
been set by transcription of orchestral overtures, precisely as J. S.
Bach had annexed the orchestral forms of his day in the Italian
Concerto and in its companion in the second part of the Clavier-
Übung, the Ouvertüre nach Franzósischer Art in B minor. Even if
Schubert's overtures in G minor and F minor for piano duet are
transcriptions of lost orchestral works (and there is little to suggest
that they are) the piano overture established itself and maintained
its existence for several decades. In 1842 we find the 18-year-old
Smetana writing overtures in C minor and A major for piano duet;?
he had already composed an overture for string quartet the year
before.
MENDELSSOHN'S OVERTURES
The outstanding composers of the 1830s were men of wider culture
than most of their predecessors. Berlioz (1803-69), Mendelssohn
(1809-47), Schumann (1810-56)— with whom we may link their elder
contemporary, Spohr (1784-1859)—all had marked literary gifts and
it was natural that they should seek and even proclaim inspiration
in literary masterpieces. The overture form lay ready to their hands
and, if Mendelssohn began in 1826 by writing an overture to Ein
Sommernachtstraum [A Midsummer Night’s Dream] without the
slightest intention of its being played as an introduction to a stage
performance, it was only a very small step to the composition of an
overture to a short lyrical poem by Goethe (Meeresstille und gliickliche
Fahrt [Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage], 1828), to an island
(Ouvertüre zur einsamen Insel, the title of the original (1830) version
2 See A. W. Thayer, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben (rev. 2nd edn., Leipzig, 1911), iii. 477.
3 Souborná dila Bedřicha Smetany, i (Prague, 1924).
MENDELSSOHN’S OVERTURES 3
of the overture, Die Hebriden), and to a legend (Ouvertüre zum
Märchen von der schönen Melusine, 1834).4 Indeed, as early as 1824-
6 he had written two nameless overtures in C major, one for
wind-band, the other the so-called ‘Trumpet’ Overture in which the
most interesting passages are not for trumpet but those in which
first and second violins, and violas, are all divided. But it is worth
noting that he did not always adopt the title and form of ‘overture’
entirely without hesitation. While he writes to his friend Klingemann
(letter, 5 February 1828) that he has “а big overture to Goethe's
Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt ... already complete in the head’,
his sister Fanny tells the same correspondent four months later that
‘Felix is writing a big instrumental piece Meeresstille und glückliche
Fahrt after Goethe ... He has tried to avoid an overture with
introduction and to keep the whole in two juxtaposed pictures.’ Even
when the piece was completely rewritten [ganz umgearbeitet] and
made ‘30 times better’ (letter to Schubring, 6 August 1834), although
the ‘becalmed’ ‘adagio’ may sound like a slow introductory passage,
the ‘prosperous voyage’ (‘molto allegro e vivace") is by no means
cast in conventional sonata form; one may trace in it passages
equivalent to the normal exposition (after a longish transition) and
recapitulation, but they are relatively insignificant, only sixty or
seventy bars each, and between them lies an enormous ‘development’
of more than three hundred bars which centres on the tonic key and
is itself framed by passages based on the most familiar theme in the
whole piece, the dolce cello melody beginning at bar 185. The result
is an archlike structure:
Transition
Two themes in D and A
Cello melody in A
Middle section with D as its centre of gravity
Cello melody in C
Two themes in D
Coda
a form often to be met with in later nineteenth-century music.
Nevertheless Meersstille was published with the Dream and Die
Hebriden (now finally retitled Fingals Höhle) in 1834 as Drei
Concert-Ouvertüren.
Its two predecessors are less unconventionally cast in free sonata
^ Although it was originally conceived as an overture to an opera by Conradin Kreutzer:
see Donald M. Mintz, ‘Melusine: A Mendelssohn Draft’, Musical Quarterly, 43 (1957), 480.
4 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
form, as is the fourth concert overture, Melusine. Die Hebriden is
the most closely knit thematically,? А Midsummer Night's Dream
the most episodic though apparently the original form was much
less so. (The critic A. B. Marx claimed that the music of the rude
mechanicals and other features were inserted later at his suggestion.)
But Mendelssohn had found the right approach as well as the right
generic name—if indeed he was the first to use it—for this type of
composition. The concert overture provided a convenient framework
within which themes or orchestral effects suggested by literature or
landscape or other extra-musical sources could be extended and
worked out more or less in accordance with conventional methods
of musical construction. There was nothing particularly new in the
kind of associative symbolisms used by Mendelssohn to suggest
fairies, lovers, and clowns, the dreary waste of waters in Meeresstille
(which employs more or less the same means as Beethoven in the
first section of his choral setting of the poem), the flowing river of
Melusine; nothing new in his direct imitation of a natural sound, the
donkey's bray, in the Dream. What was new in Mendelssohn was,
above all, the orchestral magic— such things as incessant staccato
quavers of divided violins supported only here and there by nothing
but pizzicato violas. The mosaic of musically diverse ideas 1s fitted
into a sonata-form frame, very much as Weber had fitted together
diverse ideas in his opera overtures, but sonata form is here no more
than a ready-made convention, very different from the living organism
of Beethovenian sonata form. Die Hebriden 1s in several respects a
special case: it is not only more organically conceived than any of
its companions; the pictorially evocative quality of the opening motif
and its orchestral setting was something entirely new in music,
seldom paralleled, and never surpassed since. A few points in the
orchestration are Weberian—the second subject in the reprise (clarinet
over sustained string chords), the soft staccato brass chords, the
rushing semiquavers on all the strings in octaves— but much 1s unique
even in Mendelssohn's own work. Such effects as the sustained pp
F sharps of the trumpets at the end, continued into silence by the
oboes, seem to be completely novel.
The evocative power concentrated in the opening motif set
Mendelssohn a problem which was to confront later nineteenth-
century composers and was first satisfactorily solved only by Debussy.
If a motif can by itself conjure up a mood or a landscape, that
5 See R. Larry Todd, ‘Of Seagulls and Counterpoint: The Early Versions of Mendelssohn's
Hebrides Overture', I9th-century Music, 2 (1979-80), 197.
$ Erinnerungen: Aus meinen Leben (Berlin, 1865), ii. 231 ff.
MENDELSSOHN’S FOLLOWERS 5
power may easily be destroyed by treating it as a theme for
development and it says much for Mendelssohn’s skill and perception
that throughout this extended movement he contrives to weave an
always fresh and interesting texture from the almost unchanged
initial motif, with little pendants, related subsidiary motifs, and one
major contrasting theme (the second subject) that do not seriously
weaken the initial impression, and with a wealth of picturesque
orchestral writing that continues and even heightens it. Passages in
the original version where he had lapsed into conventional 'thematic
working', which brought with it conventional scoring, were excised
from the final version.
MENDELSSOHN'S FOLLOWERS
Most of Mendelssohn's disciples followed him in the cultivation
of the concert overture though few of them achieved conspicuous
success. Of the Overture to Lord Byron's Poem of Parisina (1835),
The Naiads (1836), The Wood-nymphs (1838), and Paradise and the
Peri (1862) by William Sterndale Bennett (1816-75), only the second
is still—very occasionally—heard; it is certainly the best. As its
predecessor Parisina—a very similar *moderato' also in 6/4 time—
demonstrates beyond doubt, The Naiads is not indebted to Men-
delssohn's Melusine, as Schumann suggested, so much as to Weber's
Beherrscher der Geister; the 12/8 ‘allegro’ of The Wood-nymphs is
more Mendelssohnian. Sterndale Bennett's affinity with contemporary
German Romanticism is particularly marked in the second subjects
of The Naiads and The Wood-nymphs, of which the former has a
note-for-note resemblance to the parallel passage in Wagner's earliest
operatic overture Die Feen, which Bennett could not have known.
(Perhaps both derive from a common model.) Bennett's handling of
form and orchestration is very conventional but his harmony
sometimes surprises by such asperities as that from the second bar
of a passage in The Naiads (Ex. 1), which particularly pleased both
Mendelssohn and the composer.’ He had little power as a tone
Ex. 1
* Henry Davison, From Mendelssohn to Wagner (London, 1912), 30.
6
painter; no one would suspect that the ‘adagio’ introduction to The
Wood-nymphs was intended to suggest sunrise if the composer had
not let us into the secret. Yet he was not devoid of artistic personality,
a personality that appears in the peculiarly limpid sweetness of
passages in The Naiads which have the cha
Cotman, Crome, and Samuel Palmer.
From the same year as The Naiads dates another British overture,
the Chevy Chace of George Macfarren (1813-87). Written for a play
by J. R. Planché, it introduces the old ballad tune of that name to
‘God prosper long Our Noble King’. Mendelssohn conducted it at
the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1843 and Wagner in London in 1855
when he was struck by its 'eigentümlich, wild-leidenschaftlich’
NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
character;? it was still performed in London in the 1890s.
br
harp
str
8 Bennett’s symphonies are markedly inferior to his overtures and concertos. The best, in
Ex
Allegro moderato
pice 8va ES Pei
> > 3 ы —— —À[
| bm ЕЕ =: da
ы Ä | eJ sae
a CG H e ef E-- баё сє
ЄЛ” ДНР 2) оГ. WEE DEE ` CR E Ret Ee E „oo imma: Get
PE ar” SO eee > ызы c ——— EM ER 107 eg er er E Ce EE
пе Jay nn I? ee og
avas Р LGL Cé Le: H
ob
Jf marcato > ya
> u utor. Р
el A A 72: » -— Ё 1
rat | SS жс тон Li EE al
Melt СЕЛ SII ` Comes, "me E ` "me ЗЫН БЕН Ee éi хс (Шы Жашык ыж. „атны Do Ee
E [— ck El. ge - 1
U
2 4hn = d
vom: Кы GE ee ee eee Ee кшш
i. UM EEN a TT WEE) EEN ` ee ee GE «89 E EBEN == KE
АД E EE, Eer Bee Tee Ce e i EE E SSS SS a E
D rH.
Jf marcato Ше
trbn ® E
LG ee
a AE SS SS QUEE пас e ree eee na SS
Salt ara [= SS (Se SS eee
a. A x
We Y T ri л m ГЕ?” mr. 6- =
азд: eh Ee Т. таг Б = [у Ж a Ge i 1 ША. Le
є
ee Hm EE
L2—7— SE e Ze р! HS т icm
[————— — EE 4 B:— ——
Peg EM rg Hr p]
e
> =
^ 9 9 55,45 a£ ШС = N
mr si ‘ai ша 2-4 2 WË? DIE RTT BE BE
Wees im er ee te i meta 89У
[08-2 ie —31 7 g
Sa Hs Esser Pe Ehe Ee e a
D
ii
ЕЕЕ Бенг EE
HZ D H
Ы :
d Р2 2 д Е
Fe > араа
eg ee ep ee
Бе Лс Je — ат:
; > OS e i
————— `
re >
>
G minor (1864), has been ed. Nicholas Temperley (New York, 1982).
9 Mein Leben (Munich, 1911), 619, where he calls the composer Mac Farrinc and the work
Steeple-Chase.
rm of paintings by
MENDELSSOHN'S FOLLOWERS 7
|
| =
Ki
=
ки!
EA
hn
iil
|
e
И
|
||
|
[|
{
Д
NS
|
|
GN
T
авав!
WARS KAS
Г
SINN
P
I
| |
Beside these essays of the British Mendelssohnians we may place
the Op. 1 of a Dane of the same school, Niels Gade (1817-90).
Gade's later overtures, / Hojlandene [In the Highlands] (another
Scottish subject), No. 3 in C, Hamlet, and Michel Angelo are of less
account but Efterklang af Ossian [Echo of Ossian] (1839) (Exx. 2-3)
does achieve epic breadth and strength at any rate in the twin
passages that frame the sonata form, where a striking motto-like
theme for solo horn, clarinet, and bassoon gradually emerges from
the Celtic twilight and finally disappears into it again. These 'frame'
passages are not differentiated in any way from the main sonata
movement, into which the motto-theme, usually with brass colouring
and harp accompaniment, is woven at several points Exx. 2 and 3;
the violins in Ex. 2 are playing the ‘true’ first subject. The treatment
of the harp in these two passages, indeed throughout the overture,
is in striking contrast with Mendelssohn's in Athalie (1844), where
its part suggests simple piano music. On the other hand, Gade
8 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
himself writes pianistic passages for strings as accompaniment to the
second subject of Ossian; the fault is common to most of the German
and non-German composers of what we may call ‘the Leipzig group’.
BERLIOZ’S OVERTURES
Complete freedom from pianistic idioms is one of the principal
marks of the orchestral writing of their French contemporary,
Berlioz. But Berlioz shared their predilection for the same Romantic
subjects: Shakespeare's plays, Byron's poems, nature impressions
(particularly of sea or river), fairies, and Scotland— affection for
Scotland being a special manifestation of affection for the exotic in
general. Like them he found a convenient and congenial form in the
concert overture: his Le Roi Lear (1831) expressed his direct reaction
to a reading of the play and was no more intended to be played
before a stage performance than Mendelssohn's 4 Midsummer Night's
Dream; with his Waverley (‘Grande ouverture caractéristique de
Waverley, dédiée au Colonel Marmion’, 1827) and Rob Roy (‘Intrata
Ex. 3
p Т ш a e EES
De u ‚oem =т= Hh ee E]
eines. rn
dt ke eg EE ZE E EE
RE ee — We, EE D СУ
ww Р d
ES
© = bg o
=:
erem Te
D ee а.
P = Ж
hn Ryu ——————À [zl
— = SS
вр и > ek es
"m
tr
. [65:7
timp, | En ZZ st
EI e = Men ST
SS —
P
A en
P
Ba
= eu
pizz.
al
|
8
&
=
|
str mf,
li
| |
ll
І
y
N
1
l
l |
Sol
|
BERLIOZ'S OVERTURES 9
LLL c-r ER hc x ME I E E
EX
e
EE GE
= г ШР
p. PX p р ah mma
m = u m SS | Ber m” e be a a ЕС
Lap weg ра ра раан ER E AER, ————E
Ee SS Se ееси 1 л [err SEENEN
DI e же л с GES EI з шг
= == [ев nni
TO EY SS Ix УЛ АЗ Жылы» УЕ Е) CH e DEE к ыи eee Н
bj WSF 2 зә к г „с ‚цш Уе УЕ
а FP ET Et ee гы eee аай ЭЛ е ИН хс
m | La a
= = 2 Ee =
ge
Seege
di Rob Roy Macgregor’, 1832) he was probably the first to compose
overtures ‘to’ novels. His Grande ouverture des francs-juges (1826)
was certainly intended for a never-completed opera but Le Carnaval
romain (1844) was simply a convenient means of using up material
from the opera Benvenuto Cellini, which appeared to have failed and
already possessed an overture of its own. As for Le Corsaire, it
began its existence in 1844 as La Tour de Nice, the building in which
he was lodging (though sketches date from 1831, when he had first
stayed there), and was reconstructed in 1852, first as Le Corsaire
rouge—Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover!? —though he afterwards
deleted the adjective, no doubt to suggest Byron whose poem he had
read in Rome.
Berlioz's concert overtures differ from those of the Leipzig group,
not only in his treatment of the orchestra (on which, see below) but
in his conception of form. Only in Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt
does Mendelssohn make a really drastic modification of sonata form;
10 See Jacques Barzun, Berlioz and the Romantic Century (London, 1951), ii. 49-50.
10 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
in Die Hebriden, for instance, he merely compresses the recapitulation
rather severely; Gade’s Ossian places an orthodox sonata movement
within a frame. But Berlioz sometimes abandons sonata form
altogether, as in Ze Carnaval romain which is laid out on a free yet
perfectly satisfactory plan, an archlike form very different from that
of Meeresstille: `
‘Allegro assai con fuoco'
‘Ah, sonnez trompettes’ (from Act II of Benvenuto Cellini; A)
“Andante sostenuto’, *Féte chez Capulet’
Love duet from Act I (C, E, and A)
‘Allegro vivace’
"Venez, venez, peuple de Rome’ (from Act II; A)
‘Ah, sonnez trompettes’ (E)
“Venez, venez’ (A) with different
‘Ah, sonnez trompettes’ (E) scoring
Brief development of love duet, with rhythm of ‘Venez’
(various keys)
‘Ah, sonnez trompettes’ (A)
Even when Berlioz preserves the sonata layout as a structural
convenience, he never shows any appreciation of the Classical
meaning of sonata form and makes its apprehension by the unaided
ear more difficult by his interpolation of fresh episodes, as in the
recapitulatory sections of Les Francs-juges and Le Corsaire. In Le
Roi Lear not only is the slow introduction subtly related to the
‘allegro disperato’,!! but its principal theme returns in the course of
the recapitulation. Indeed Berlioz's slow sections are, like those of
one or two Haydn symphonies, always thematically related to, or
interwoven with, the ‘allegro’ sections; and in a number of cases—
Rob Roy, Le Carnaval romain, Le Corsaire, Cellini, and Béatrice et
Bénédict—the slow section is not an introduction but an interlude
early in the 'allegro'. The combination of these devices in his last
concert overture, Le Corsaire, results in a plastic but perfectly clear
and satisfactory form:
‘allegro assai: Introduction (C and A flat)
*adagio sostenuto' (A flat)
Transition of repeat of Introduction (C and A flat)
Principal subject (C and D flat)
Principal subject (G, etc.)
11 See Tom S. Wotton, Hector Berlioz (London, 1935; repr. 1970), 90-1.
BERLIOZ’S OVERTURES 11
Secondary theme (fragments of ‘Adagio’; В flat, etc.)
Theme of ‘Adagio’ in full (C)
Transition and repeat of Introduction (C and A flat)
Principal subject (E flat)
Principal subject (C)
Secondary theme (G, etc.)
Coda, long; based on principal subject in various shapes (C).
It was natural for Berlioz’s contemporaries to account for such forms
by ascribing them to control by concealed programmes. But, despite
its various titles, Le Corsaire is simply a sea piece with no relation
to Nice or Byron or Fenimore Cooper. Such bold and unorthodox
forms sprang solely or mainly from the bold and unorthodox thought
of their creator—who at the same time liked to give his works
attractive literary titles. That was certainly the case with the early
Waverley with its half-jesting dedication (for there was a genuine
Colonel Marmion, the composer's Uncle Felix). ‘Berlioz has now
written a music to Waverley,' said Schumann, reviewing the published
score in 1839. 'One will ask: to which chapter, which scene, wherefore,
to what end? For critics always want to know what the composers
cannot tell them... . Although Berlioz scribbled on the manuscript,
‘a long text made up of sentences from the novel',!? all he actually
tells us is that
Dreams of love and lady's charms
Give place to honour and to arms.
So we can identify the ‘larghetto’ with dreams of love and the ‘allegro
vivace" with honour and arms, but to no great advantage. And it is
useless to seek in the ‘larghetto’ melody any significance beyond
Berlioz's love of canon at the octave (cf. Le Corsaire, the Andante
of Le Carnaval romain). In Les Francs-juges there may be references
to points in the opera that was to have followed it, and there are
certainly similar ones in Le Roi Lear;!? but the greater part of Le
Carnaval romain consists, as we have seen, simply of a long excerpt
from the carnival scene in Cellini arranged for orchestra and played
through twice. Berlioz's creative imagination was actually less
pictorial than the imaginations of the Leipzig composers, who
possessed in varying degrees a real power of pictorial evocation in
themes that were then treated somewhat statically on fairly orthodox
lines. Berlioz commanded little evocative power of this kind; indeed
1? Hugh J. Macdonald, Berlioz Orchestral Music (London, 1969), 12.
13 Ibid., pp. 17-18.
12 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
he once confessed to Wagner! that he was not musically stimulated
by landscape. Waverley conveys no sense of Scotland as Die Hebriden
does (admittedly he had not seen Scotland, as Mendelssohn had); in
Rob Roy he has to help himself out by quoting ‘Scots wha hae’ and
the melody of the slow section is so little characteristic that he was
able to use it as the ‘Harold’ theme in Harold en Italie. (Another
theme from Rob Roy was transferred to the first movement of
Harold.) Le Corsaire is perhaps Mediterranean in quality but as an
evocative seascape is not comparable with Die Hebriden. Berlioz's
imagination was dramatic rather than pictorial and its products are
consequently dynamic rather than static; the tremendous brass
outbursts in Waverley seem to depict specific incidents in an unfolding
drama and we know that the similar, even more powerful, ones in
Les Francs-juges are associated with the villain Olmérik.
WAGNER'S EARLY OVERTURES
Wagner, like Schubert, began his career as an orchestral composer
by writing abstract overtures without titles, of which two—in D
minor and C major (the latter with a fugal coda suggested by
the corresponding part of the "Jupiter Symphony)—have been
published.15 Then came a Polonia (1836), inspired by contact with
Polish political refugees in 1832, and an essay in another variety of
the genre: the overture on some more or less familiar melody, in this
case ‘Rule Britannia" (1837) (cf. Macfarren's already mentioned
Chevy Chace, the Grosse Festouvertüre on ‘God save the Queen’ with
which Marschner saluted the birth of the Prince of Wales in 1842,
Schumann's Fest-Ouvertüre mit Gesang über das Rheinweinlied for
orchestra and chorus of 1853). Wagner did not anticipate Schumann
by introducing optional voices as he himself did many years later in
his Kaiser-marsch, but he did give the ‘Rule, Britannia!’ Overture a
foil in the shape of a second subject (Ex. 4) which, from its similarity
to the ‘veto on love’ theme in his opera Das Liebesverbot, composed
Ex. 4
marcato
14 Correspondance inédite, ed. Daniel Bernard (Paris, 1879), letter, 10 Sept. 1855.
15 First by Michael Balling in his Wagner Gesamtausgabe, xx (Leipzig, 1926); more recently
ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, 18, 1 (Mainz, 1980).
WAGNER'S EARLY OVERTURES 13
coll'iva —
just before (Ex. 5) may be taken to represent the forces of tyranny
and Britannia's enemies in general. Kónig Enzio (1832) and Christoph
Columbus (1835) were both written for actual plays; the former a
weak but orthodox attempt to ape Beethoven and Cherubini, the
latter a curious experiment in both structure and orchestration
betraying the influence of Mendelssohn's recently published Meeres-
stille und glückliche Fahrt but also forecasting a characteristic trait
of Wagner’s mature orchestral style: the multiplication of one
particular orchestral group (the brass in the first Walhalla scene of
Das Rheingold, harps in the final one). In Christoph Columbus he
employs four horns, six trumpets (at first pairs in E flat, D, and C,
finally all six in E flat), three trombones, and tuba.
All these early and immature overtures are completely over-
shadowed by the powerful Faust Overture of 1840. It is true that in
its original form this was cruder in detail, much more heavily scored,
and lacked (among other things) the beautiful twenty-bar passage
which Wagner added at the very end in place of a sudden brutal D
minor chord, tutti, when he revised the work as Eine Faust-Ouvertüre
in 1855,16 but all the essentials, practically the entire substance, were
already there. They are remarkable. The influences of Beethoven
(first movement of the Ninth Symphony) and of Weber had not yet
been completely digested but the piece as a whole has not only great
power in depicting emotional states but a curious felicity in suggesting
that they are the states of one individual: Faust. The opening theme
of the ‘allegro’ from the Faust Overture (Ex. 6) is not only a very
early, perhaps the earliest, instance of octave displacement of
Ex. 6
Sehr bewegt
ausdrucksvoll
16 See Gerald Abraham, "Wagener: Second Thoughts’, in Slavonic and Romantic Music
(London, 1968), 294-7.
14 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
chromatic intervals, not only wonderfully suggestive of painful
brooding, but also the first stroke of a musical portrait more striking
than any of those in his earlier operas. As he was painting a portrait,
he did not need to strain the useful conventions of sonata form. We
have his own authority for taking the second subject as a suggestion
of Faust's yearnings or aspirations, not of Gretchen. She was to be
painted in the second movement of a symphony of which the overture
was intended to be the first movement. That, at any rate, was
Wagner's story in later years, but the cover and first page of the
original score fail to confirm it. The latter is inscribed simply
Ouvertüre
Goethes Faust erster Teil
while the former drops the word ‘overture’ in favour of a new and,
for the future, important addition to musical nomenclature:
Der einsame Faust (oder Faust in der Einsamkeit)
ein Tongedicht für das Orchester
With the Faust Overture Wagner practically ceased to compose
independent orchestral works. In later years he produced only the
Siegfried Idyll and three marches, all three ‘occasional’ works of little
or no value, though one might add to this short list the overture to
Die Meistersinger which came into existence before the opera.
SCHUMANN'S OVERTURES
In the year after that in which Wagner turned away from the
concert hall, another German musician—hitherto known only as a
piano and song composer—decided to enter it. It is true that
Schumann had seven or eight years before composed a symphony
and begun other orchestral works, but this G minor Symphony,
though performed, was suppressed for many years!” and we may
date Schumann's real début as an orchestral composer from the B
flat Symphony, the first version of the D minor, and the Symphonette
(later revised as ‘Ouvertüre, Scherzo, und Finale’), all 1841. Schumann
turned to the independent overture only towards the end of his life,
in the 1850s, and his overtures to Schiller's Die Braut von Messina,
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and a projected Singspiel on Goethe's
Hermann und Dorothea (based largely on the ‘Marseillaise’),!® with
1? An edition of the two completed movements has been published by Marc Andreae
(Frankfurt, London, and New York, 1972).
18 Reasons for doubting the connection between the overture and the Singspiel are suggested
in Abraham, Slavonic and Romantic Music, p. 288.
SCHUMANN’S OVERTURES 15
the already mentioned overture on the *Rheinweinlied', like that to
the Szenen aus Goethes Faust, show his genius in sad decline. The
only interesting point concerning them is that Schumann set out to
write Die Braut von Messina in absolutely free form, following
the dictates of his fancy, and ended by producing a thoroughly
conventional sonata movement.!9 None of these bears comparison
with his earlier opera overture, Genoveva, or the overture written in
1848 to Byron's Manfred.
As a character study the Manfred Overture may be put beside
Wagner’s Faust. It does not bear comparison as a piece of orchestral
writing; like so much of Schumann's orchestral music, it sounds like
piano music scored, and it is marked by other characteristic
Schumannian miscalculations, such as the famous opening chords
which are syncopated before any beat has been established. But as
a musical portrait of a gloomy and passionate poetic hero it yields
little to Wagner. There are even musical traits in common: the
Berliozian use of identical material for slow introduction and ‘allegro’,
the bold, free handling of sonata form with enormous development
(presumably the apparition of Astarte), and a very fine coda (evidently
Manfred’s death), even the characterization by an angular theme
(Ex. 7) which may be compared with the Faust ‘allegro’ (Ex. 6) and
the theme in which Liszt was to personify the brooding Faust a few
Ex. 7
In leidenschaftlichen Tempo ES
years later. The subjective element in both the Wagner and the
Schumann is typical of German Romanticism and in both works
finds expression not only in melody but in harmony overloaded with
appoggiaturas. Wagner could see himself as Faust, Schumann as
Manfred. There is no such element in, for example, Berlioz's Le Roi
Lear.
19 Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski, Robert Schumann: Eine Biographie (rev. and enlarged
4th edn., Leipzig, 1906), 461.
16 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
INCIDENTAL MUSIC
Schumann composed not only an overture but incidental music
for Manfred, despite the total unsuitability of Byron’s play for stage
performance. He certainly wished his music to be used in connection
with a stage adaptation and Liszt actually produced it at Weimar in
1852. Several numbers consist of *melodrama' in the technical sense
of the word and two of them may have been not without influence on
later music: the cor anglais solo, now slow, now quick, accompanying
Manfred's
Hark! the note,
The natural music of the mountain reed—
may have influenced the parallel passage in Tristan; the waterfall
scene with the Witch of the Alps may have influenced Tchaikovsky
and other Russian composers. One passage, 'Rufung der Alpenfee’
[Call of the Alpine Fairy] from the waterfall scene (Ex. 8) is worth
quoting both for its charm and because it demonstrates that
Schumann could sometimes write felicitously for the orchestra.
Schumann's Manfred music occupies a midway position between
normal incidental music for a stage play, like that which Mendelssohn
produced in 1843 for A Midsummer Night's Dream and Meyerbeer
in 1846 for his brother's Struensee, and such a piece as Berlioz's
Marche funébre pour la derniére scéne d' Hamlet (1848), which was
certainly never intended for the theatre and was essentially a personal
reaction to a specific performance. Despite the fact that Mendelssohn
was able to draw an effective concert suite from his Dream music,
as Schumann could never have done from Manfred, his approach
here was different from Schumann's, from Berlioz's and from his
own younger self who had written the Dream overture—and the
difference is perceptible in the music. Then he was musically reacting
to a poetic masterpiece; now he was executing with brilliant technique
a piece of work required of him. The latter was the traditional
approach, the former the Romantic.
Music intended to record and transmit a mood or an impression
of poem or landscape naturally tends to be cast in smaller moulds
and for an intimate medium; consequently the most successful early
Romantic music consists of comparatively short works for piano. We
have seen how Mendelssohn confronted the difficulty of reconciling
personal impression with large-scale structure in Die Hebriden; in
the Romantic symphony this difficulty increased in proportion to
the size of the canvas, with the result that some of the Romantic
INCIDENTAL MUSIC 17
symphonists found themselves willy-nilly thinking mainly in terms
of construction and design like their Classical predecessors. Except
in the compromise of the concert overture, Romantic orchestral
music had not yet found suitable forms. But during the 1840s the
short orchestral piece, counterpart of the more extended kind of
piano miniature, began to appear as ‘characteristic piece’ or idealized
dance or march. Berlioz’s ‘Marche hongroise’, which was inserted in
La Damnation de Faust, not taken from it, and his funeral march for
Hamlet are symptomatic. And no doubt the success of Mendelssohn's
Dream pieces in the concert hall encouraged composers to experiment
on these lines.
18 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
GLINKA
The earliest really notable achievements in this field came from
Russia, a country that had hitherto remained on the fringe of
European musical culture. The earliest Russian composer to make
any substantial contribution to this culture was Mikhail Glinka
(1804-57) and his claim to be considered the founder of Russian
orchestral music is stronger than his title as the first Russian opera
composer. His earliest complete surviving orchestral piece is a
scherzo, Valse-fantaisie, a pastiche in the manner of Joseph Lanner
(1801-49) or the elder Johann Strauss (1804-49) dating from 1839,
though it survives only in the revised and reorchestrated version of
1856. It is quite overshadowed by the overture and incidental music
to Nestor Kukol’nik’s ephemeral tragedy Knyaz’ Kholmskiy [Prince
Kholmsky] (1840), his Capriccio brillante on the Jota aragonesa,
afterwards renamed Spanish Overture, No. 1 (1845), his Recuerdos
de Castilla, later revised and renamed Souvenir d'une nuit d'été à
Madrid, Spanish Overture, No. 2 (1848), and a Wedding Song and
Dance Song afterwards named Kamarinskaya after the second melody
(1848). The Prince Kholmsky music reveals the influence of Beethoven
(cf. Prelude to Act III of Kholmsky with the Andante agitato of
Entr'acte IV of Egmont, and the Prelude to Act IV with the march
in Entr'acte III) and perhaps of Weber's Beherrscher der Geister;
together with the score of Glinka's second opera, Ruslan i Lyudmila
(1842), it provides ample testimony of the Russian composer's
achievement of an individual orchestral technique derived mainly
from Mozart and Cherubini some years before he became acquainted
with Berlioz’s music. In the Kholmsky Overture he had even hit
independently on the typically Berliozian transformation of the slow
introductory theme in the main 'agitato vivace'. But the influence of
Berlioz on the scoring of Kamarinskaya and the two Spanish pieces
is undeniable; the canon between first violins and cellos in Souvenir
d'une nuit d'été à Madrid also sounds very Berliozian.
The Capriccio brillante combines the principles of variation and
sonata,2° the outline and key scheme being that of a sonata form
but with little sonata feeling; the music unfolds in terms of (mainly
instrumental) variations. Recuerdos de Castilla, an occasional piece
composed for the orchestra of the Russian viceroy in Warsaw,
appears to be much more in the nature of a pot-pourri but is by no
means shapeless.?! Kamarinskaya consists mainly of instrumental
?0 See David Brown, Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1974),
247-8.
21 See Brown's parallel analyses of both versions, ibid., pp. 267-8.
GLINKA 19
variations or changing backgrounds to the two folk themes. In these
three works, especially Kamarinskaya, Glinka provided models
adopted by most later Russian composers not only for the variation
treatment of folk material but for brilliant orchestration and clean,
transparent harmony and part writing. Equally characteristic of the
great bulk of later Russian music is Glinka’s objective approach.
The Spanish overtures are the fruits of travel but they are not—
even Souvenir d'une nuit d'été à Madrid is not—subjective travel
impressions like Mendelssohn's Scottish and Italian pieces; they are
simply musical treatments of melodies heard in Spain. Glinka went
there with the deliberate intention, suggested by study of Berlioz and
of Parisian taste, to write
concert pieces for orchestra, under the designation of fantaisies pittoresques.
Up to now instrumental music has been divided into two opposite categories:
quartets and symphonies, valued by a few, but intimidating the mass of
listeners by their depth and complexity; and concertos, variations, etc. which
tire the ear by their lack of connection and their difficulties. It seems to me
that it should be possible to reconcile the demands of art with those of the
age and, taking advantage of improved instruments and performance, to
write pieces equally acceptable to connoisseurs and the general public. . . .
In Spain the originality of the melodies will be a considerable help, the
more so as up to now no one has trodden this path.??
Similarly he wrote Kamarinskaya after discovering an affinity between
the two tunes and ‘guided’, as he insisted, by his ‘inner musical
feelings' without thought of any programme.
Glinka never managed to complete a symphony. He began one in
B flat in his youth, significantly introducing a folk tune in the first
Allegro; in 1834, while studying in Berlin with Siegfried Dehn, he
worked at a Sinfonia per l'orchestra sopra due motivi Russi?3 ‘de-
veloped in the German style'; and again in 1852 he began a 'Ukrainian
symphony’, Taras Bul ba, but soon abandoned it, ‘being unable to
get out of the German rut in the development’. That was Glinka's
way of stating the already mentioned problem that confronted most
of his contemporaries, German as well as non-German: the problem of
the incompatability of their ideas—evocative motifs or instrumental
effects, square-cut lyrical melodies, popular tunes— with the tra-
ditional techniques of large-scale musical construction.
?? Letter, 18 Apr. 1845, in Literaturnoe nasledie Glinki, ed. Valerian M. Bogdanov-
Beryozovsky (Leningrad, 1953), ii. 276.
?3 In Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, i (Moscow, 1955), 193. And see Brown, Mikhail Glinka,
pp. 69-71.
20 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
MENDELSSOHN’S SYMPHONIES
As we have seen, Mendelssohn himself was conscious of the need
‘to get out of the German rut in the development’ in which he had
stuck in the original version of Die Hebriden. Berlioz cut a passage
of precisely the same nature from the beginning of the development
of the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique. The problem, if
difficult in the overture, was aggravated in the symphony. The only
symphonists untroubled by it were the epigones and the future
masters who had not yet found themselves. It will suffice to quote
in skeleton the opening Allegros of Mendelssohn's First Symphony,
in C minor (1824) (Ex. 9), Wagner's in C major (1832) (Ex. 10), and
Schumann's in G minor (1833) (Ex. 11). Such material could scarcely
be harmed by any method of treatment whatever, and could be cast
in almost any mould. But 1f Mendelssohn began his public career as
a symphonist conventionally—one writes ‘public’ advisedly, for the
autograph of this first published symphony is marked 'Sinfonia No.
ХПГ —he continued on lines very characteristic of the period. The
6/4 time of the Minuetto, actually an Allegro molto scherzo which
he replaced in 1829 with an orchestral version of the Scherzo from
his Octet in E flat, op. 20, is almost the only noteworthy feature
of the work, though the sentimental Spohr-like nature of the Andante
Ex. 9
Allegro di molto
MENDELSSOHN’S SYMPHONIES
Ехо
Mese con brio
Ex. 11
Гала E 7 ХСН
EE? Së
Bee =
EE «ЫЗЫ, ee ШЫГ zur mr А EL, a
3 шыр)
ee
NI
|
Se
1 en Di
[L0 ES te "m
I SS = ss
жер ees
22 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
is a Romantic symptom. But his next symphony, misleadingly
numbered 5 owing to late publication, the Reformations Symphonie
(the *Reformation") of 1830 (Exx. 12 and 13), marks a new departure.
It was a piéce d'occasion intended for performance in connection
with the tercentennial commemoration of the Augsburg Confession,
and Mendelssohn thought little of it in later years; but it is in many
respects characteristic of the composer and the period. For one thing,
it is semi-programme music. The quiet string introduction to the first
movement, ending with two quotations of the ‘Dresden Amen’, is
cut through with challenging calls of the wind, and the Allegro con
fuoco which follows—a movement not so distantly related to
Wagner’s Faust Overture in the same key—irresistibly suggests
conflict, spiritual or actual, with the old faith symbolized by the
‘Amen’. Its opening theme, despite its virile leap of a fifth, reminding
one of Haydn and Beethoven, is essentially elegiac in character as
is demonstrated beyond doubt at the beginning of the recapitulation
(Ex. 12), after another reference to the ‘Dresden Amen’. But the
actual course of the music is not controlled in any way by
extra-musical considerations. The only unconventional feature of the
first-movement structure is the curtailed recapitulation, but that
feature is common to Die Hebriden, the first movements of the
‘Italian’ and ‘Scottish’ Symphonies, and other of Mendelssohn’s
symphonic movements. Neither of the two middle movements appears
to have any connection with the Reformation: the Allegro vivace is
a Classical scherzo, the Andante an elegiac ‘song without words’
that was to have sister-pieces in the Adagio of the 'Scottish'
Symphony and Lobgesang. The Finale celebrates the triumph of the
Ех. 12
Allegro
=>
MENDELSSOHN’S SYMPHONIES 23
Reformation in a movement compounded of sonata form and a
chorale-prelude on ‘Ein’ feste Burg’, Luther’s hymn or variations on
it or parts of it being interrupted by an independent sonata exposition
and sonata recapitulation. The Weberian first subject (Ex. 13) is
only one of the numerous traces of that composer’s influence on
Mendelssohn’s melodies and orchestration (for example, the end of
the Dream Overture, the Nocturne from the Dream incidental music,
the Trio of the Con moto moderato of the ‘Italian’ Symphony, the
codetta of the first movement of the 'Scottish").
In the same year as the ‘Reformation’, Mendelssohn began these
two other symphonies, of which the A major (No. 4, the ‘Italian’)
was not completed till 1833, and much revised after that,24 the A
minor (No. 3, the ‘Scottish’) actually not until 1842. Both are typical
of the Romantic love of the exotic, for Mendelssohn approaches
Italy as a tourist and writes ‘Italian music’, the Finale of the A
major Symphony with its saltarello and tarantella rhythms, as a
record of travel experiences, not in the least in the spirit of northern
composers of earlier times, who went to Italy to study and absorb
the Italian style as an important part of European musical culture. On
the contrary Mendelssohn had little but contempt for contemporary
Italian “агі music; his ‘Italian music’ is imitated from that of the
people. So with the ‘Scottish’ Symphony: the theme of the Vivace
non troppo in 2/4 time which occupies the place of a scherzo is
pentatonic except for one note at the cadence and embodies a faint
reminiscence of ‘Charlie is My Darling’, while the opening of the
‘Andante con moto’ introduction to the first movement records his
immediate impression of the Palace of Holyrood on 30 July 1829,
precisely as the opening of Die Hebriden records his immediate
impression of the sea-trip from Fort William to Tobermory eight
days later.
The nature of the musical material of both symphonies and
24 See Wulf Konold, "Die zwei Fassungen der “Italienischen Symphonie" von Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy’, Bericht über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress
Bayreuth 1981 (Kassel, 1982-3), 410-15.
24 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Mendelssohn’s handling of it are equally typical. Almost all the
themes are lyrical in nature—and too many are in 6/8 time—and
proceed in symmetrical phrases like those of a song; it is seldom
possible to extract from them the pregnant motif—particles from
which Haydn and Beethoven built symphonic movements. Nor did
Mendelssohn command lyricism equal in quality to Schubert's or a
gift for generating one melodic shape naturally from another such
as Mozart had; even his second subjects hardly contrast at all,
sounding like continuations rather than foils. In trying to imitate
the plastic motivische Arbeit of the Viennese masters, he can only
dismember song melodies and either distort the fragments or repeat
them in different keys. These weaknesses are particularly noticeable
in the first movement of the ‘Scottish’ Symphony. The opening of
the 'Italian' is saved by its exuberance and brilliant, light-handed
scoring, and its momentum carries off a great deal of skilful padding.
Both works include movements—the Con moto moderato of the
‘Italian’, the Adagio of the 'Scottish' —which, like the inner move-
ments of the ‘Reformation’, seem to have no connection with the
rest of the work and help to give it an almost suite-like character.
It was perhaps recognition of this that led Mendelssohn to experiment
in the ‘Scottish’, not only connecting the movements as in his
concertos but contriving subtle near-relationships, as between the
introduction (Ex. 14), the first movement (Ex. 15), and the conclusion
of the fourth movement (Ex. 16).
In his last symphony, the Lobgesang (‘No. 2’), Mendelssohn
attempted to follow Beethoven in the composition of a symphony
with vocal Finale. The differences are considerable, apart from those
in the quality of the invention. Like the *Reformation' Symphony,
Ex. 14
Andante con moto
EX
BERLIOZ’S SYMPHONIES 25
Ex. 16
Allegro maestoso assai
the Lobgesang was a quasi-occasional work commissioned for
the Gutenberg Festival at Leipzig in 1840, sometimes thought—
erroneously—to have originated in a purely instrumental symphony
in B flat, to which Mendelssohn frequently refers in letters of 1838-
39.25 The vocal part for two sopranos, tenor, and chorus, on
words from the Psalms, so far overweighs the three instrumental
movements— particularly in the revised form of December 1840,
when the three numbers of the “Watchman’ episode were inserted—
that Mendelssohn wisely adopted his friend Klingemann's suggestion
and restyled the work as a Symphonie-Cantate, instead of eine
Symphonie für Chor und Orchester as he had done originally. Nev-
ertheless the Lobgesang is in most respects typical of the symphonic
tendencies of the period; there is a basic extra-musical idea— “first
the instruments praise in their manner, and then the chorus and
single voices’;26 there is a movement, the Allegretto un poco agitato,
equivalent to a scherzo and placed second as in the ‘Reformation’
and ‘Scottish’ Symphonies, which seems to have no connection with
the basic idea; and there is a motto-theme, the first bar of which is
based on a plainsong Magnificat,?? which recurs at the end of the
first movement in its original form (as in the ‘Scottish’ Symphony),
after playing an important part in that movement, and reappears in
the Finale to the words ‘Alles was Odem hat, lobe den Herrn’.
BERLIOZ'S SYMPHONIES
Profound though the differences are between Mendelssohn's music
and Berlioz's, between their whole conceptions of, and approach to,
the art, the Frenchman's four symphonies— Épisode de la vie d'un
artiste (Symphonie fantastique) (1830), Harold en Italie (1834), Roméo
et Juliette (Symphonie dramatique) (1839), and Grande Symphonie
funébre et triomphale for military band with strings and chorus ad
lib. (1840)—share the same characteristics: basic extra-musical ideas,
loose suite-like structure, employment of motto-themes (Fantastique
25 See К. Larry Todd, ‘An Unfinished Symphony by Mendelssohn’, Music and Letters, 61
(1980), 293-309.
?6 Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys Briefwechsel mit Karl Klingemann (Essen, 1909), 245.
27 Tone 8, Liber usualis, p. 218.
26 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
and Harold), compositions for special occasions (the Fantastique for
a projected concert at the Théátre des Nouveautés, the Funébre et
triomphale for the inauguration of the July Column in the Place
de la Bastille), introduction of voices (Roméo et Juliette), travel
impressions (Harold, like Mendelssohn's ‘Italian’ even has a ‘Marche
des pèlerins’), plainsong themes (the ‘Dies Irae in the Finale of the
Fantastique). The most obvious superficial difference is that, whereas
Mendelssohn refrained from giving any but vague general clues to
the extra-musical significance of his works, Berlioz sought by titles
to the separate movements, even in the case of the Fantastique by a
detailed programme intended for distribution to the audience, to
attach more or less precise meanings to music sometimes originally
conceived for quite other purposes. The original programme of the
Fantastique was given by the composer in a letter to Humbert
Ferrand (16 April 1830):
I *Réveries— Passions (double, consisting of a short Adagio im-
mediately followed by a developed Allegro; a void of passions; aimless
reveries; delirious passion, with all its paroxysms of tenderness,
jealousy, fury, fears, etc., etc.).
II [later III] ‘Scene aux champs’ (Adagio, thoughts of love and hope
troubled by dark presentiments).
III [later II] “Ол bal’ (brilliant and seductive music).
IV ‘Marche au supplice’ (wild music, pompous).
V 'Songe d'une nuit du sabbat’.
At present this is how I have contrived my novel, or rather my narrative,
the hero of which you will recognize without difficulty.?8
And he goes on to give the literary fleshing out of this skeleton: an
artist falls violently in love with his ideal woman whose mental image
is always accompanied by a musical idée fixe; his thoughts of her in
the country and at a ball: his opium dreams— result of an attempt
at suicide— that he has killed her and is being led to execution, that
they meet at a witches’ sabbath. When the symphony was first
performed (5 December 1830) an expanded form of this programme
was handed out with a prefatory note:
The composer's aim has been to develop the musical aspects of different
situations in an artist's life. The plan of the instrumental drama, deprived
of the assistance of words, needs preliminary exposition. The following
programme should therefore be considered as the spoken dialogue of an
opera [i.e. of an opéra comique], serving to introduce the musical numbers
whose character and expression it motivates.
?8 Lettres intimes (Paris, 1882), 65.
BERLIOZ’S SYMPHONIES 21
Не had already transposed the positions of the country and ball
scenes. In the revised version of the programme?? prefixed to the
published score, all five movements, not merely the last two, are
supposed to be opium dreams but Berlioz now insisted that the
printed programme was indispensable only when the symphony was
given ‘dramatically’ with invisible orchestra and followed by the
monodrame lyrique of Lélio: Ou le retour à la vie, which completes
the Episode de la vie d'un artiste; otherwise ‘one might even if
necessary dispense with the distribution of the programme, preserving
only the title of the five movements: the symphony (the composer
hopes) being able to offer in itself a musical interest independent of
all dramatic intention’. No doubt Berlioz borrowed the idea of a
printed programme, which must in any case have appealed to his
temperament as a device for attracting public notice, from his old
master Le Sueur, who had published a descriptive brochure for his
Messe de Noél,?? just as he almost certainly got the conception of
his motto-theme, his idée fixe, a theme associated with a character,
from the operas of Le Sueur and Mehul. But his music was
certainly not composed in conformity with the programme, as his
contemporaries supposed; rather, the programme seems to have been
invented as a pretext for the compilation of a large-scale instrumental
work from disjecta membra of the most heterogeneous early com-
positions. The “агро” introduction is based on a song of 1816, a
setting of some verses from Jean-Pierre Florian's Estelle et Némorin:
Je vais donc quitter pour jamais
Mon doux pays, ma douce amie...
The idée fixe itself was taken from the Prix de Rome cantata of 1828,
Herminie; the ‘March au supplice’ originated as a ‘Marche des gardes’
in Les Francs-juges and the ‘Scene aux champs’ probably from a
pastoral scene in Act II of the same opera;?! even the ball scene and
the witches’ sabbath may have been conceived for a projected Faust
ballet. Similarly the sequel to the Symphony, Lélio—in which the
rhetorical extravagance of French Romanticism of the post- Hernani
period is carried to its absurdest extreme—is only another, far
less successful, literary pretext for the salvage of yet other early
compositions. At the end of the symphony, which in these cir-
cumstances must be played behind a curtain, Lelio staggers feebly
29 Both versions are printed in full in The New Berlioz Edition, xvi (Kassel, 1972).
30 See Donald Н. Foster, ‘The Oratorio in Paris in the 18th Century’, Acta musicologica,
47 (1975), 116ff.
31 Adolphe Boschot, La Jeunesse d'un romantique (Paris, 1906), 247-8.
28 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
on to the stage, his attempted suicide by opium poisoning having
failed, and soliloquizes: ud
Heavens! I am still alive! ... Then it is true, after all! Life, like a serpent,
has crept into my heart again to rend it anew.... But, even though that
treacherous poison deceived my despair, how could I survive such a dream?
... Why was I not crushed by the horrible pressure of the iron hand that
had seized me? ... That scaffold, those judges and executioners, those
soldiers, the clamours of that populace, those grave and cadenced steps
falling on my heart like Cyclopean hammers . . . And the inexorable melody
sounding in my ear even in that heavy sleep to recall to me her image and
revive my dormant suffering ... What a night! in my torment I must have
cried out, Horatio must have heard me? ... No, there is still the letter I
had left for him; if he had come in, he would have taken it ... Poor
Horatio! I seem to hear him still, so calm and quiet yesterday at his piano,
while I was writing him this last farewell ... He knew nothing of the
torments of my heart and my fatal resolve; and with that sweet voice of
his, poet untouched by cruel passions, he sang his favourite ballad—
This was Berlioz’s setting of a translation of Goethe's ‘Der Fischer’.
(‘It is five years since Horatio [probably Albert Duboys] wrote this
ballad in imitation of Goethe, and I set it to music,' explains Lélio
after the first strophe. ‘We were happy then . . .") In the same naive
way he introduces numbers from his other Prix de Rome pieces,
Cleopätre and La Mort d'Orphée, a ‘Chanson de Brigands’, and his
Grande Ouverture pour ‘La Tempéte (now styled Fantaisie sur la
‘Tempéte’), till at the end the idée fixe is heard for the last time and
Lélio leaves the stage, murmuring ‘Encore, et pour toujours!’
The method of the pasticcio was not confined to the Épisode de
la vie d'un artiste. (Nor to Berlioz among Romantic composers:
Schumann compiled his F sharp minor Piano Sonata in a not
dissimilar way.) The origin of parts of Harold en Italie їп the Rob
Roy Overture has already been mentioned; they only just escaped
incorporation in Les Derniers Instants de Marie Stuart, a projected
fantaisie dramatique pour orchestre, cheurs et alto principal, instead.
The Larghetto (‘Tristesse de Roméo’) and ball at the Capulets in
Roméo et Juliette are based on themes from the fourth and last Prix
de Rome cantata, Sardanapale, and the end of the ‘Grande féte chez
Capulet may well be identical with the lost 'conflagration' in
Sardanapale. Material so dissimilar in origin was hardly to be welded
into a musical entity comparable with the Classical symphony either
by introducing a common motto-theme in each movement or by
recalling all the earlier movements of the Finale (‘Souvenirs de scènes
precedentes’ in the ‘Orgie de brigands’ of Harold). And Berlioz took
BERLIOZ’S SYMPHONIES 29
even less account of key as a source of unity than Mendelssohn,
who in the ‘Reformation’ (in D) had put his Scherzo in B flat, his
slow movement in G minor, and the opening of his Finale in G
major, and in the B flat Lobgesang had written the second movement
in G minor and the third in D major. (Admittedly these are related
keys but the usual Classical practice had been to desert the main
tonic in only one of the ‘inside’ movements.) The Fantastique is in
C but the three ‘inside’ movements are in A major, F major, and G
minor. The key plan of Harold is closer to orthodoxy:
I *Harold aux montagnes' (scenes of melancholy, happiness,
and joy; Adagio leading to Allegro, G).
II ‘Marche des pelerins’ (singing their evening prayer; Al-
legretto; E).
III ‘Serenade’ (of a mountaineer of the Abruzzi to his mistress;
Allegro assai alternating with Allegretto, C).
IV ‘Orgie de brigands’ (G minor and major).
The Funébre et triomphale neglects key unity, though not key re-
lationship, altogether:
I ‘Marche funebre’ (F minor).
II ‘Oraison funèbre’ (modulating, but ultimately G major).
III ‘Apothéose’ (B flat).
while Roméo pays only lip-service to the key principle by beginning
in B minor and ending in B major. With its loose key scheme, its
additional movements, and the introduction of voices, it buries the
vestiges of the Classical symphony—its second, third, fourth, and
sixth movements are almost purely orchestral—and proposes a new
conception of ‘symphony’, which was to be defined many years later
by Mahler as ‘the building up of a world, using every available
technical means’:
I ‘Introduction. Combats—tumulte—intervention du Prince’
(orchestra only; B minor).
Prologue (contralto, chorus, and orchestra; various keys,
ending in E).
Strophes (contralto, chorus, and orchestra; G).
Recitative and Scherzetto: ‘La Reine Mab’ (tenor, chorus,
and orchestra; F with coda in A minor).
II ‘Roméo seul—tristesse—bruit lointain de concert et de bal;
grande féte chez Capulets’ (orchestra only; F).
III ‘Scene d’amour’ (serene nights; Capulet’s garden silent and
30 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
empty—the young Capulets leaving the ball and singing
reminiscences of the dance music; short Allegretto with male
chorus, leading to Adagio for orchestra only; A).
IV Scherzo: ‘La Reine Mab ou la fée des songes’ (orchestra
only; F).
V ‘Convoi funèbre de Juliette’ (chorus and orchestra; E).
VI ‘Roméo au tombeau des Capulets’ (invocation—Juliet’s
awakening—delirious joy, despair—final anguish and death
of the two lovers; orchestra only; beginning in E minor,
ending in A major).
VII Finale (the crowd rushes to the cemetery—quarrel between
Capulets and Montagues—recitative and aria of Friar
Laurence—oath of reconciliation; bass, chorus, and or-
chestra; beginning in A minor, ending in B major).
It is a curious plan, the second, third, and fourth parts of the first
movement performing the function of the printed programme of the
Fantastique in explaining what the whole thing is about (so that
Queen Mab appears twice in the symphony, unimportant though
the passage is in relation to the tragedy). A certain amount of
thematic cross-reference helps to connect the movements. Yet, despite
the very great beauty of many of the parts, Roméo is a very
unsatisfactory whole. Sometimes, especially in the sixth movement,
Berlioz actually does that of which he has often been wrongfully
accused: writing music the whole course of which is dictated by a
literary programme and makes sense only in terms of the programme.
Berlioz’s own subheading tells only half the tale; there can be little
doubt that his musical imagination was controlled by a more detailed
visualization of the scene—not as in Shakespeare, however, but
closely following Garrick's version of 1750.32
Otherwise the strictly programmatic element in Berlioz's music
(for example, the cutting short of the idee fixe in the ‘Marche au
supplice’ of the Fantastique by the guillotine stroke of the tutti chord)
is not very large. With all the relationship of his music to literary
or pictorial conceptions, it is generally no more controlled by
them than Beethoven’s "Pastoral" The formal unorthodoxies of the
Fantastique and Harold, like the similar ones in the overtures, are to
be accounted for, not by incidents in some detailed but concealed
programme, but as inspirations of a bold mind working from point
to point. One might almost describe a great deal of Berlioz's
32 See Roger Fiske, 'Shakespeare in the Concert Hall', in Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.), Shakespeare
in Music (London, 1964), 192-5, particularly 194.
THE FRENCH ODE-SYMPHONIE 31
symphonic texture as melodic passage-work, sometimes merely
orchestrally effective passage-work, heedless of structural conventions
inherited from the classical past.
THE FRENCH ODE-SYMPHONIE
Roméo et Juliette seems to have appealed to contemporary French
taste, for during the next twenty years it produced some rather feeble
progeny in the form of so-called odes-symphonies, of which Le Désert
(1844) by Félicien David (1810-76), with words by Auguste Colin,
was the earliest and most successful. As late as 1859 we find the
20-year-old Bizet sending home from Rome an ode-symphonie, Vasco
de Gama. They were even less symphonic in the Classical sense than
Romeo et Juliette. The plan of Le Desert is typical:
I Chorus ‘Allah! Allah" (C major); ‘Marche de la caravane’
(A minor); ‘La tempéte au désert; la caravane reprend sa
marche’ (reciting voice, chorus, and orchestra; A minor).
II ‘La Nuit’ (reciting voice, tenor, and orchestra; E flat); ‘La
fantaisie arabe’, orchestra; C major); ‘Danse des almées’
(orchestra; A minor); ‘La liberte au desert’ (chorus and
orchestra; E minor); ‘La réverie du soir’ (tenor, chorus, and
orchestra).
III ‘Le lever du soleil’ (reciting voice and orchestra; A major);
‘Chant du muezzin’ (tenor and orchestra; B minor); ‘Depont
du caravane’ (reciting voice, chorus, and orchestra; A minor
and C major—recapitulating the caravan music and hymn
to Allah from I).
David had travelled in the Middle East and René Brancour suggested
that the Andante of his light, suite-like Symphony in E flat (1841),
his third purely orchestral symphony, may have been ‘inspired by
the memory of one of those lovely nights spent on the terrace of the
house at Smyrna’ and likens the Scherzo to ‘a dance of djinns’.?3 He
certainly introduced genuine Arab melodies in Le Desert (‘Chant du
muezzin’, ‘La réverie du soir’, and the two orchestral pieces of II),
though his harmonization is pitifully limited and unimaginative (Ex.
17). The orchestration of the once-celebrated ‘Lever du soleil’—
woodwind soli against a high shimmering background chord played
only by divided violins, who remove their mutes desk by desk—
shows the influence of Berlioz in the use of orchestral colour for its
own Sake.
33 René Brancour, Félicien David (Paris, 1911), 39.
32 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
The 27-year old Ernest Reyer (1823-1909) similarly brought
back from Algeria travel impressions which he embodied in his
four-movement Le Sélam (1850), with words by Théophile Gautier.
It is constructed on similar lines to Le Désert:
I Serenade, Razzia (choruses of warriors and shepherds),
Pastoral.
II Conjuration of djinns.
III Evening song (including the muezzin’s call).
IV The Dhossa (ceremony of the return of pilgrims from Mecca).
David himself failed in Christophe Colomb (1847) to repeat the
success of Le Désert. The odes-symphonies of Louis Lacombe (1818-
84)— Manfred (1847) and Arva (1850)—are worth mentioning only
to show the temporary popularity of the genre.
SPOHR
The only German composer of the period who rivalled Berlioz as
a composer of frankly programmatic symphonies was Ludwig Spohr
(1784-1859), who followed three normal symphonies with Die Weihe
der Töne (Charakteristiches Tongemálde in Form einer Sinfonie) [The
Consecration of Sounds] (1832). This is a four-movement work
inspired by a poem by Karl Pfeiffer that Spohr had originally
intended to set as a cantata.?^ Its programme, if not the actual music,
is considerably more abstract than that of Berlioz's Fantastique. The
separate movements bear no headings but the following points are
easily deducible from the poem prefixed to the score, which Spohr
34 Louis Spohr, Selbstbiographie (Kassel and Göttingen, 1860-1), ii. 191.
SPOHR 33
like Berlioz wished to have read aloud or distributed to the audience
before a performance:
I Largo: unbroken silence of Nature before the creation of
sound (F minor).
Allegro: subsequent active life; sounds of Nature, tumult of
the elements (D minor).
II Cradle song: dance; serenade (B flat).
III Martial music: departure for battle; feelings of those left be-
hind; return of the victors; prayer of thanksgiving (D).
IV Funeral music (F minor): comfort in tears (F major).
After a non-programmatic Fifth Symphony (1836), with a first
movement based on an overture to Raupach’s tragedy Die Tochter
der Luft, Spohr composed in 1839 a curious Historische Symphonie
(the ‘Historical’) ‘in the style and taste of four different periods. First
movement: Bach-Handel period, 1720. Adagio: Haydn-Mozart
period, 1780. Scherzo: Beethoven period, 1810. Finale: latest period
of all, 1840’. Then in 1841 he composed Symphony No. 7, a
‘double symphony' for two orchestras, /rdisches und Göttliches im
Menschenleben [Earthly and Divine in Human Life]. This is in three
movements, each headed by a stanza of verse: “The World of
Childhood’, ‘The Time of the Passions’, ‘Final Triumph of the
Divine’. His Eighth and Tenth Symphonies have no programme, but
the Ninth (1850) is entitled Die Jahreszeiten [The Seasons] and is in
two main parts:
Winter (Sonata form in B minor)— Transition to Spring— Spring
(Minuet in G).
Summer (Largo in B major)—Introduction to Autumn—
Autumn (Allegro vivace in D).
Thus Spohr's programmes are either generalized and ideal or of such
a nature that music could easily suggest. them without enlarging or
straining its most familiar associative resources; there is, in fact,
nothing in them that would have puzzled an eighteenth-century
composer to translate into music. He approaches most nearly to the
Romantic style of tone painting in the first movement of Symphony
No. 4, Die Weihe der Töne (bird-calls take the place of ‘second
subject’, duly recapitulated in the tonic, and a storm that of the
development section), in the “Transition to Spring’ (bird-calls) and
‘Autumn’ (hunting sounds) of Die Jahreszeiten, and in the Finale of
the ‘Historical’ Symphony where he brings in piccolo, trombones,
and other additional brass, with triangle, side-drum, bass-drum, and
34 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
cymbals to produce a noise presumably intended as a parody of
Berlioz and Meyerbeer. A
Novel instrumentation plays an important part in other of Spohr's
symphonies. In the early Irdisches und Göttliches in Menschenleben
the divine is symbolized by a small orchestra of solo woodwind, two
horns, and solo strings, the earthly by a larger one of double
woodwind, horns, and strings, plus trumpets and trombones in the
Finale, and the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are used antiphonally or
together—often with striking effect, as at the end of the first
movement where the major subdominant of the ‘divine’ orchestra
contradicts the minor subdominant of the ‘earthly’ one (Ex. 18).
Spohr had a marked affection for antiphonal effects— witness his
double quartets—and in the second movement of Die Weihe der Tóne
he combines lullaby, dance, and serenade (Ex. 19) in a manner
reminiscent of the ball scene in Don Giovanni and a passage in the
third movement of Berlioz's Harold. He divides his violins into three
in the pastoral middle section of the first movement of the ‘Historical’
Symphony, writes quasi-thematically for three timpani in its Scherzo
Ex. 18
Allegretto (2) - 138 к= ЕЕ PES
egretto ( ) Dec? ES
Коела To Ile
Il bn cresc. ХЕ f
35
SPOHR
=a.
MÀ MÀ
Ez
E
y,
poussé
mc: =. B Шз == т ип. Jj = "1. + X =... „ыч
- =
gu IE d M m mm mem mm
TIE, Si IT
| | ud 7 | |
o | V Lë DN WE M Om hii li
T Wall | | | |
IW, 3 | n n | е
uu ill (Un By Gu ll. IW | = Т AN Era
©
[| D a el ) TT TUI I| ||
и> з Ы &
| Ak e | de L | |
| [йй d, 1 oH I. Ni Dm Th d at || Š
| D 1 " | 3
lh
LI |
| ||.
Wa |
Ji || HI Ss GN) t THH A D A TMH? dl SNL ФКИ
=
[7
Oé
АМ
Lj
—
-—
(Ex. 20) and introduces a solo violin in the Trio of the non-
programmatic Eighth. Points of affinity with Mendelssohn and
Berlioz include the use of a motto-motif, three rising notes followed
36 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Ex. 19
(4-152) am
= 2а jJ ee : e et EU
epu pP Hec шор а асе
De те es
BES ЕЕН ЫЕ ЕБ НН ЕН ago
pizz.
dim. Allegro a =152
| ы ге
== fs res
by the fall of a perfect fifth in several of the themes of Die Weihe
der Töne, and the quotation of a plainsong melody, ‘the Ambrosian
song of praise', in the third movement of the same symphony. The
SPOHR 37
971
a НТ
= = Ces
EE
o i a
1 10
hh |
Ir
u
TH.
ZS Ee —I——W—HN-— .—1 = SSS Gy = z =- ee ——© SÉ
Ee EE E El E gt Eet En Ee ST Ee шы ` Fe äng Geet "een D E ER Е: ER De АШЫШ
"Ee En SS E E ee 3 Ee шш s 0 Bm E ee ee git — 8 —]
Se EE EE EE EE
Sue —
—
N —
ии EE a т E En Ee сү = н ee
1 Ee ш ee eS ES SE ee en a ВИН ee ee НЕ
Ш ГС oT ТОЛЕ — Lud #— = т——Ыи—4{
ҺИ ре 0 ee ee ы л = тте EE ——]
bue EE Den
(a a ce es E:
SSS ED а „шщ: 10886-38 ee DS EE Ee ee E E
Se и с ‚Єч = ee nn ZE "ee? ——а
a
DV 07037 | M шуш.
кес Se E m m
"EE EE Toma
ES cresc. f am
А
р 7 ss 7 егеу EC EE
Kee Re e E E E E = — Колу =
D se. и. ee
Eesen Be Ee,
a EE KR ===
SSS SSS SSS ES SS SS геч т 3 У ш
1 arco
A
LA Sr ea ee
7. WAE LE ЖЕШ. I —— tte ht ee er | t — 3
у rn — SES SSeS u Eh ooo 3 tee) —5
w 0
ШӘР SS OO Se жел en et S
CC —— — SS) be (SS SS SS SS See ee
pizz. cresc. P
A ELE ==:
[rr гп ЖУРЕТ ЛЕ ШШ у ШИ V" e LU Mj
nn nd P KH D
cresc. Ta dim Р
metrical treatment is typical of the period (Ex. 21). In one instance
Spohr was bolder than his younger contemporaries, ending /rdisches
und Göttliches with an Adagio. Like them he was essentially a lyrical
symphonist and his gentle under-vitalized lyricism, sentimentally
38 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
underlined by his notorious tendency to incessant chromatic move-
ment in inner parts, becomes monotonous when stretched to
symphonic proportions. It was perhaps from the initial Allegro and
Larghetto of his Third Symphony in C minor (1828) that Mendelssohn
caught the habit of writing elegiac movements in 6/8 or 9/8 time.
MINOR SYMPHONIC COMPOSERS
The same warm, sometimes lukewarm, lyricism, unrelieved by
effective thematic contrasts, characterizes much of the work of the
minor Central Europeans of the period: the two symphonies of
Spohr's pupil Norbert Burgmüller (1810-36), the seven by the Czech
Jan Václav Kalliwoda (1801-66), the eight by Schubert's friend Franz
Lachner (1803-90), eldest and most gifted of three distinguished
MINOR SYMPHONIC COMPOSERS 39
brothers, who turned in later years to the composition of orchestral
suites more interesting than his symphonies. In France, apart from
Berlioz, the form was represented only by the few Gallicized
counterfeits of Viennese Classicism produced by George Onslow
(1784-1852) and Napoléon-Henri Reber (1807-80). Scandinavia
could show a more original symphonist, and a more symphonic
symphonist, in the Swede Franz Berwald (1769-1868) whose Sym-
phonie serieuse in G minor, No. 2 (1843), and Symphonie singuliere
in C major, No. 5 (1845)— particularly the latter—show more
originality and virility than most of the symphonies of the Dane
Niels Gade. Of Berwald's six symphonies, the First, A major (1820),
is incomplete, the Third, D major, was completed in 1913 from the
composer's four-stave composition sketch by Ernst Ellberg who
called it Capricieuse, while the Fourth, the real Capricieuse, is 1051.35
There is perhaps an element of self-conscious originality in the
Symphonie singuliére, as the title suggests, but Berwald's other scores
show the same dryness and energy, the same bold handling of
instrumental blocks and long ostinato-like passages. In Ex. 22 from
the Finale of the Singuliere the astringency of the violin melody and
the marcato accompaniment are equally characteristic; but in the
course of the movement it is the latter which becomes decidedly the
more important and it is one of the two main elements that triumph
in the coda (Ex. 23).
There is nothing comparable in Gade, though it is true he sounds
a national, even heroic, note in his First Symphony (1842), echoing
the Ossian Overture, and again in his Eighth (1871). But for the
most part Gade's symphonies are those of a naturalized Leipziger,
conventionally post-Classical or lyrical. Even his First Symphony
Ех 22
35 On Berwald’s symphonies and other orchestral works, see Robert Layton, Franz Berwald
(London, 1959).
NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
40
Ex. 23
opens lyrically with an orchestral version of one of his own songs,
"King Waldemar’s Hunt’; his Fourth (1850), at one time the best
the Allegro con fuoco
of the Fifth (1852) opens like a Schumann piano piece. (The score
includes a part for piano, a noteworthy innovation.)
’
is appropriately dedicated to Spohr;
=
known
SCHUMANN AS SYMPHONIST 41
SCHUMANN AS SYMPHONIST
In Schumann’s own symphonies the problem of discrepancy
between square-cut lyricism and symphonic architecture may be said
to have reached a crisis, if for no other reason than that Schumann
faced it instead of evading it like most of his contemporaries. He
shows most of the other characteristic traits. His first mature
symphony, in B flat (1841), is a typical reconciliation of a programme
with traditional form. According to his wife it was originally entitled
Frühlingsymphonie [Spring Symphony] and inspired by 'a spring
poem',3$ and the separate movements originally bore titles,
*Frühlingsbeginn' [Spring's Opening], ‘Abend’ [Evening], ‘Frohe
Gespielen’ [Merry Playfellows], and ‘Voller Frühling’ [Spring at the
Full, though Wasielewski?? says the first movement was called
‘Spring’s Awakening’, the Finale ‘Spring’s Farewell’. Schumann’s
Third, in E flat (1850), although he did not give it its nickname, the
‘Rhenish’, admittedly ‘reflects here and there’ aspects of life in the
Rhineland,38 and it is well known that the fourth movement was
inspired by the ceremony of Archbishop von Geissel’s elevation
to the cardinalate in Cologne Cathedral. (Although Schumann’s
symphonic works contain no quotation of plainsong, this movement
betrays a tendency to that Catholic mysticism of which interest in
plainsong was a symptom.) We find again in Schumann the suite-like
structure (the Scherzos of both First and Second Symphonies have
two Trios; the Third Symphony has five movements), and use of the
rather mechanical devices of the motto-theme, quotation from one
movement to another, and the elimination of breaks between
movements to counteract it. Trombones at the end of the Larghetto
of the First Symphony solemnly anticipate the theme of the Scherzo
which then follows without a break. The C major Symphony, No.
2 (1846), has a motto-theme stated by the brass at the very beginning
and recalled—always on the brass—at or near the ends of the first,
second, and fourth movements; the main subject of the Adagio
reappears in the Finale, an unconventional movement of which the
principal feature is an entirely new theme (Ex. 24) that appears
Ex. 24
36 By Adolf Böttger. It is given complete in Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: Ein
Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und Briefen (6th edn., Leipzig, 1920), ii. 27.
37 Robert Schumann, p. 298.
38 [bid., p. 456, and letter to Simrock in Hermann Erler, Robert Schumanns Leben Aus
seinen Briefen geschildat (Berlin, 1886-7), ii. 139.
42 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Nimm sie_hin denn, die - seLie - der
(Accept them then, these songs)
half-way through and soon dominates everything. It is a near-
quotation from the last song of Beethoven’s cycle An die ferne
Geliebte (Ex. 25), which also appears in the piano Phantaisie, Op.
17. The violins have already referred to ‘wo ich dich, Geliebte, fand’
from the first song.
Introduction of a completely new, song-like theme at the end of
a movement is a favourite symphonic device of Schumann’s: cf. the
coda of the first movement of the B flat Symphony and the first and
last movements of the D minor. The introduction to the First
Symphony states the main theme of the Allegro molto vivace in slow
tempo, that to the C major foreshadows practically the whole
material of the following Allegro, and even the string counterpoint
to the motto-theme turns out to be thematically important. Thematic
links are less evident in the E flat Symphony, though there are several
references to the fourth movement in the Finale. But Schumann’s
most determined attempt to knit together all four movements is his
D minor, originally composed ın 1841 but revised and rescored ten
years later, first as a Symphonistische Phantasie, later styled ‘Fourth
Symphony'.3? Here again the slow introduction to the first movement
is of great importance. Its opening theme (Ex. 26), reappears in the
slow second movement and throws out tendrils on a solo violin (Ex.
27). Inverted, it generates the theme of the Scherzo while the Trio
Ех. 26
Ziemlich langsam
Ех. 27
Ziemlich langsam
H z mmh ш =
CEDE E ee En
EDO н шшш EE аш: шашы EE Ee eee ШЫ 7 TE EEE —I-J-—Iu—L--—IL——m——I——EEz a
EE Г е oe Oa te 20 э eS == ге =
> bel шшшл Ee ee 29.9393
Р dolce
39 On the two versions see Abraham, “The Three Scores of Schumann’s D minor Symphony,
in Slavonic and Romantic Music, p. 281. But the score of the first version published in 1891 is
inaccurate.
SCHUMANN AS SYMPHONIST 43
Ex. 28
Lebhaft
a E ee DE eme, — 1 — —!
SS Ge ue e — € m MI
сер
zu
әннә
= —
[9 1.07 ШШ SS a eee ee
ro a шу em a eme eem ш
> H 4 Sr Së
is а rhythmic transformation of Ex. 27. The semiquaver motif that
emerges towards the end of the slow introduction is still more vital;
it at once becomes the chief theme of the Allegro first movement,
to which in the definitive version Schumann gave a German
tempo-indication, *Lebhaft'. It is more like pianistic passage-work
than germinal ‘theme’ (Ex. 28). In the relative major it does duty as
second subject and in the development acquires a mate (Ex. 29).
Indeed in the original version it acquired two mates, for it then ran
in counterpoint with the new dolce violin melody which appears at
bar 147. The wind chords of Ex. 29 accompany the inversion of Ex.
26 at the beginning of the Scherzo and, after the solemn passage
44 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
connecting Scherzo and Finale—another structural innovation? —
together they open the Finale itself and provide the binding elements
of the entire movement. All in all, this was the most important of
all attempts to give the Romantic symphony coherence and unity,
as Romeo et Juliette is the most important essay in the opposite
direction. -
Despite their great interest and numerous beauties—among which
the ‘Cologne Cathedral’ movement of the Third and Adagio es-
pressivo of the Second, with its poignant chromatic appoggiaturas, are
outstanding—Schumann’s symphonies are by no means unqualified
masterpieces. They are handicapped not so much by their frequently
thick and generally unimaginative scoring and the doubtfully suc-
cessful structural innovations as by the nature of the material: the
typical Romantic difficulty of the song-like theme in the symphonic
setting. The types of theme that sprang naturally from Schumann's
mind were the symmetrically balanced phrases of song melody and
the kind of rhythmic aphorism composers are apt to find at the
piano; neither is well adapted for expansion in the grand paragraphs
that seem to be demanded by a large-scale orchestral composition.
Schumann is most true to himself in the naturally lyrical slow
movements and naturally aphoristic scherzos; when, following the
lead of Mendelssohn's A minor Symphony, he writes scherzos in 2/4
time (first Trio of the B flat Symphony, entire Scherzo of the C
major), the result is a satisfactory substitute for the Classical scherzo:
a Schumann miniature for orchestra instead of piano. But his first
movements, with the very notable exception of the E flat, and his
finales are very seriously weakened by the over-repetition of rhythmic
patterns and melodic phrases too complete in themselves to demand,
even allow, expansion or indeed any sort of continuation except
symmetrical answering phrases. He can do little but repeat them
sequentially with varied scoring and in different keys. Only in the
first movement of the E flat does he find a long-breathed opening
theme with well-defined features which he can expand in the spacious
periods of a truly symphonic style.
40 The sketches of the C major Symphony show that here also Schumann originally
contemplated a connecting section between Adagio and Finale. See Wolfgang Boetticher,
Robert Schumann: Einführung in Persónlichkeit und Werk (Berlin, 1941), 542, and also Jon W.
Finson, ‘The Sketches for the Fourth Movement of Schumann" Second Symphony, Op. 61’,
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 39 (1986), 143.
PROBLEMS OF THE ROMANTIC CONCERTO 45
PROBLEMS OF THE ROMANTIC CONCERTO
Schumann’s much greater success in his Piano Concerto (1845) is
due above all to his abandonment of any attempt to copy Classical
models. He was content in the first place to write a single-movement
Fantaisie for piano and orchestra (1841), the present first movement,
based on frankly lyrical themes—indeed almost entirely on one lyrical
theme which, slightly transformed and with different continuations (as
in Mendelssohn’s Die Hebriden), supplies the material for amovement
in sonata form though devoid of sonata feeling. The form is simply
a framework for the laying out of a series of delightful ideas that
would have served equally well for short piano pieces; but here they
are set even more delightfully against an unobtrusive orchestral
background which strengthens the climaxes; in particular a wind
instrument sings a melody, perhaps instead of the piano, or with the
piano, or even picking up one that the piano is only implying. Still
less is there any question of rivalling the subtleties of Classical
concerto structure. This first movement is something sui generis or,
as Schumann himself put it,4! ‘something between symphony,
concerto and grand sonata’. The addition, five years later, of an
Intermezzo and Finale did not alter that.
After the sentence quoted, from a letter written in January 1839,
he goes on: ‘I see that I can’t write a concerto for the virtuosi; I
must think of something different.’ That need either to write for the
virtuosi or to think of something different was the major problem
for every composer who at that period wished to write for solo
instrument and orchestra. Writing for the virtuosi, particularly the
piano virtuosi, had for years not only debased the concerto style
itself but brought into existence a quantity of loosely constructed
showpieces—fantasias, sets of brilliant variations—in which the
orchestra was reduced to the role of menial, by no means indispensable
accompaniment. For his Krakowiak (Grand Rondeau de concert)
(1828) Chopin provided here and there an alternative left-hand part
to use when playing without an accompaniment; the orchestral part,
except for an occasional noisily interjected tutti, consists of quiet
string harmonies with here and there a solo wind instrument (almost
invariably marked dolce) winding its way, sometimes thematically,
often rather aimlessly, through the piano figuration (Ex. 30). Such
was to be the basis of much of the scoring of Schumann’s Concerto.
The Krakowiak, with Chopin’s ‘La ci darem' Variations (1827), his
Fantaisie sur des airs nationaux polonais (1828), and his Grande
41 Jugendbriefe von Robert Schumann (Leipzig, 1885), 297.
46 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Allegro non troppo
re mes Ss
Polonaise brillante (precedee d'un Andante spianato) (1831), with
Liszt's Grande Fantaisie symphonique on themes from Berlioz’s Lélio
(1834) and Fantasie über Motive aus Beethovens ‘Ruinen von Athen’
(c.1852), stands on a higher plane than most pieces of this type.
Indeed the Krakowiak itself approximates to the better organized,
less superficial type of composition most successfully practised by
Mendelssohn and Schumann: the former in his Capriccio brillant
(1832), Rondo brillant (1834), and Serenade und Allegro giojoso (1838),
the latter in his Introduction und Allegro appassionato and Konzert-
Allegro for piano (1849 and 1853) and Phantasie for violin (1853).
PROBLEMS OF THE ROMANTIC CONCERTO 47
These hardly differ from their composers’ concerto movements; as
we have seen, Schumann was able to use such a movement as the
basis of a concerto.
Programmatic tendencies had already shown themselves earlier in
the century, more noticeably in the concerto than in the symphony:
in Weber's Konzertstück and in concertos by Steibelt, Field, and
others.?? They quickly disappeared from serious music but were still
exploited by showmen of the concert platform, particularly in the
Paris that could be excited by the programme of the Symphonie
fantastique. Mendelssohn reported to Zelter (letter, 15 February
1832) that he had just heard in Paris Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-
1849) play his Grande Fantaisie, ‘Le Reve’:
This is a new piano concerto he has composed, in which he has gone over
to romanticism; he explains beforehand that it begins with indefinite dreams,
goes on to despair, then to a declaration of love and finally a military
march. Henri Herz had no sooner heard it than he also made a romantic
piano piece and explains it too beforehand: then a storm, then a prayer
with the angelus and finally a military march. You won't believe it; but it
really is so.
Although such ephemera are hardly to be seriously connected with
contemporary tendencies in the symphony, it was only natural that
the symphonists should apply their favourite solutions also to the
structural problems of the concerto as Mendelssohn and Schumann
did. (Berlioz neglected the concerto, for Harold en Italie is em-
phatically a symphony with solo viola, not a viola concerto.) The
Classical—or more precisely Hummelian— piano concerto nearly
died with Chopin's two essays in F minor and E minor (1829 and
1830). It can hardly be said to be still alive in the last works
of Ferdinand Ries or in the elegant—and really very seldom
programmatic— platitudes of Kalkbrenner. However, Hummel:
pupil Adolph Henselt (1814-89) was to develop it powerfully in his
remarkable Concerto in F minor (1844). Henselt's work is warmly
Romantic in idiom, nearly Lisztian in technique; the Chopinesque
Larghetto (Ex. 31) has an extraordinary middle section in C sharp
minor where four staves are needed for the unprecedentedly full
piano writing.
The new type of piano concerto was launched with Mendelssohn's
G minor in 1831, its first movement without introductory ritornello,
simply a piece for piano and orchestra in curtailed sonata form—
4? See Vol. VIII, pp. 206-54.
48 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
the recapitulation compressed even more drastically than usual with
Mendelssohn. All three movements are played without a break, and
the first and third thematically connected by their common link with
the slow movement and by the reappearance of the second subject
of the Molto allegro near the end of the Finale. The material is as
Romantic as the form in which it is cast: the slow movement a
prototype of the nocturne in the Midsummer Nights Dream music,
the second subject of the first movement a typical Romantic
melody alike in its structure, its modulations, and its plastic curves.
Mendelssohn’s friend Moscheles (1794-1870) tightened up this general
concerto pattern with more theme-transformation and much less
display of virtuosity in his Concerto No. 7 (the ‘Pathétique’) (1836)
whereas Mendelssohn himself was content to repeat it in his D minor
Piano Concerto (1837) and his ever popular E minor Violin Concerto
(1844).43 Both of these dispense with introductory ritornellos and
both have carefully composed links between the slow and the two
outside movements. (The first violinist to perform the E minor,
Ferdinand David (1810-73), had already in 1837 published a concerto
on the same lines and in the same key.) This was the pattern that
Schumann borrowed in most essentials in his Piano Concerto (1841
and 1845) and worked out more faithfully and with finer artistry in
the linking passages in his Cello Concerto (1850). Only in the D
minor Violin Concerto (1853), for many years suppressed by his
heirs on the ground of its inferiority, did Schumann surprisingly
43 Work on which was delayed by an attempt at a piano concerto in the same key; see К.
Larry Todd, “Ап Unfinished Piano Concerto by Mendelssohn', Musical Quarterly, 68 (1982),
80-101.
ENLARGEMENT OF THE ORCHESTRAL PALETTE 49
revert to the old ritornello—or, rather, to a somewhat inept ‘double
exposition’ in the tutti of which the second subject already appears
in the relative major. In its compression the Cello Concerto— which
Schumann originally in the catalogue of his works called not
‘concerto’ but Konzertstück für Violoncello mit Begleitung des Or-
chesters—is the counterpart of the D minor Symphony. In all these
works the solo part remains very difficult but ceases to be a vehicle
for mere virtuosic display. The cadenza—as essential a feature of
the Classical concerto as the introductory ritornello—is either
dropped altogether or drastically shortened to a few bars or even,
in Schumann's Piano Concerto, transformed into a slow and dreamy
improvisatory passage. Even the more conventional cadenza of
Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto provides a completely unconventional
and immensely effective return to the recapitulation.
ENLARGEMENT OF THE ORCHESTRAL PALETTE
The unusually rich fertilization of pure orchestral music by
resources drawn from opera has already been mentioned. (At the
same time symphonic music was already beginning to repay its debt
to the theatre.) As we have seen, the latter part of Berlioz's Roméo
et Juliette is very nearly operatic; the ‘marche au supplice’ and
probably the ‘scène aux champs’ of the Fantastique actually originated
in opera. Even the more conservative, least operatically inclined
composers introduce dramatic elements in their symphonies and
concertos, particularly in the transitional passage linking movements
(Mendelssohn's G minor Concerto, Schumann's D minor Symphony
and Cello Concerto). And the enrichment of concert music by the
results of experimentation in the theatre is even more noticeable in
the medium itself than in the forms.
New instruments and additions to the Classical orchestra with its
pairs of wind and timpani plus strings appeared in opera orchestras
and scores earlier and more frequently than in concert orchestras
and scores. By about 1830 the additional wind (piccolo, cor anglais,
bass clarinet, ophicleide, trombones), percussion of indefinite pitch,
and harp or even two harps, were almost universal in opera scores
but still exceptional—though they soon grew less so—in concert
music.^4^ In the early 1830s the only usual addition to the Classical
orchestra was a second pair of horns, generally crooked in a different
key from the first pair in order to give a wider choice of notes,
though Mendelssohn does without them in the ‘Reformation’ and
44 Adam Carse, The History of Orchestration (London, 1925), 220 and 245.
50 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
‘Italian’ Symphonies and in most of his overtures. The ‘Italian’
Symphony, the Violin Concerto, Die Hebriden, and Melusine are all
written for the pure Classical orchestra. In other works Mendelssohn
augmented it: in the Dream Overture with an ophicleide, the new
‘keyed serpent’ which now tended to displace the old serpent (it
seems to have reached England only in 1834) and was itself gradually
displaced by the tuba about the middle of the century;4> in the
‘Scottish’ Symphony with a second pair of horns, in the ‘Reformation’
with serpent and double-bassoon (playing the same part) and three
trombones; in Meeresstille with piccolo, serpent, and double-bassoon,
and a third trumpet; and in Ruy Blas with a second pair of horns
and three trombones. Similar forces, with harp or triangle, bass-drum,
and cymbals for special effects, satisfied almost all symphonic
composers of the period, but not opera composers—or Berlioz.
Berlioz’s ‘extravagance’, except in some quite abnormal works—such
as the Requiem, the Te Deum, the Symphonie funebre et triomphale,
and the cantata L’/mperiale, written for special occasions and
perpetuating a French tradition of ‘monumental’ works dating from
the Revolution and First Empire (for example, Gossec’s Requiem
and second Te Deum, Le Sueur’s Coronation Mass for Napoleon)—
consists mainly of writing concert music for the normal orchestra of
the Paris Opéra, the orchestra commonly employed by Halévy and
Meyerbeer, with piccolo, cor anglais, four bassoons (a peculiarity of
French orchestras), four horns, a pair of cornets (another French
peculiarity), trombones, one or two ophicleides, additional timpani
and other percussion, and a harp or harps. Even his insistence that
his string parts must be played by at least fifteen first violins, fifteen
seconds, ten violas, ten to twelve cellos, and nine (in Roméo only
seven) double-basses means only that he would be content with no
smaller body of strings than Habeneck had for the Société des
Concerts in 1828: fifteen firsts, sixteen seconds, eight violas, twelve
cellos, and eight Баѕѕеѕ.46 He originally scored Waverley for four
clarinets, two in C, two in A, but changed his mind although
Habeneck had them.
The invention of valve-mechanism which gave trumpets and horns
a full chromatic scale made itself felt too late to influence most of
45 Modern editions of scores of this period often indicate a tuba where the composer
specified an ophicleide or serpent. Thus in the ‘Songe d’une nuit du Sabbat’ in the Fantastique
Berlioz originally wrote a part for a B flat serpent; in the first French edition (Schlesinger,
1846), this was given to a second ophicleide, in B flat, and a note elsewhere in the score
authorizes the playing of this second ophicleide part on an E flat tuba. But most modern
editions give both ophicleide parts to tubas in C.
46 Georg Schiinemann, Geschichte des Dirigierens (Leipzig, 1913), 319.
ENLARGEMENT OF THE ORCHESTRAL PALETTE 51
the orchestration of this period, though Meyerbeer introduced a
whole band of saxhorns on the stage in Le Prophete (1849). The
trompette à clefs used by Meyerbeer in Robert le diable (1831) and
Halevy’s trompette a pistons in La Juive (1835) were short-lived
instruments of a different type, the former a keyed bugle, the latter
related to the cornet; indeed Pierné and Woollett^? have suggested
that composers of this period often wrote trompettes à pistons when
they meant cornets à pistons. Berlioz began by writing for trompettes
à pistons in Waverley and Les Francs-juges but when he transferred
the Francs-juges march to the Fantastique he substituted B flat cornets
for the single E flat piston trumpet. In any case, composers had little
idea what to do with the piston instruments, often using them
melodically with rather vulgar effect (for example, *Réunion des deux
thémes, du Larghetto et de l'Allegro' in the second movement of
Roméo et Juliette), though Berlioz does often employ them in
conjunction with a pair of natural trumpets. In the little known and
never used additional cornet part for "Un bal’ in the Fantastique he
gives the instrument a pungent rhythmic figure (See Ex. 32, bars 106
ff).4 The much more important mechanization of the horns, which
ultimately revolutionized the nineteenth-century orchestra by giving
mobility to the Romantic instrument par excellence, was completely
ignored by Mendelssohn and almost completely by Berlioz until late
works (Les Troyens, Béatrice et Bénédict) where he sometimes admits
a pair of valve-horns beside a pair of natural instruments. Yet earlier
he would take elaborate pains to get horn melody, sometimes
employing four natural horns all in different crooks, as in the Prince's
recitative in the introduction of Roméo where the theme of the fugal
*Combats' appears in augmentation (though they really only support
cornets, trombones, and ophicleide). Mendelssohn's ingenuity is fully
exercised in the invention of a lovely melody in the Nocturne of the
Dream based entirely on the open notes and with the few closed
sounds very carefully placed. Oddly enough, one of the first important
symphonic composers to employ a pair of valve-horns in addition
to a pair of natural ones was Schumann; he had made a singularly
unlucky use of closed notes for horns and trumpets in the original
opening of the B flat Symphony. We know from both Berlioz's
Memoirs? and Wagner's Rienzi that the Dresden orchestra, unlike
4” “Histoire de l'orchestration' in Albert Lavignac (ed.) Encyclopédie de la musique, 2/4
(Paris, 1929), 2532.
48 See The New Berlioz Edition, xvi (ed. Nicholas Temperley) (Kassel, 1972), 197.
49 The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. David Cairns (New York, 1969), 306.
52 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
cornet "
à pistons [9
Str
that of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, possessed valve-horns and trumpets
early in the 1840s, so when Schumann moved there at the end of
1844 he was naturally encouraged to write his first and second horn
parts, sometimes all four, and his trumpet parts for valve-instruments
as a matter of course, although he almost always treats them as
Classical horns with extra notes at their disposal, not as flexible new
voices in the middle register. Only in conjunction with the trombones,
as in the famous fourth movement of the ‘Rhenish’ Symphony and
at the beginning of the Neujahrslied for chorus and orchestra (also
1850), does he take advantage of the new resources of the horn quite
freely; indeed his quiet use of trombones, sometimes at dangerous
heights,50 as a real, freely moving choir employed neither for noise
50 Like most of his German contemporaries, he scores for alto, tenor, and bass; elsewhere
three tenors were more usual.
ENLARGEMENT OF THE ORCHESTRAL PALETTE 53
nor for dramatic effect, was a feature of his scoring after his discovery
of Schuberts C major Symphony: see, for instance, his First
Symphony, particularly the end of the Larghetto. In the Scherzo,
however, he reverts to the early nineteenth-century practice, con-
demned by Berlioz, of underlining the string bass part with a single
bass trombone— a practice that survived also in Sterndale Bennett’s
Naiads and the scores of Chopin, Glinka, and others. But in the
Valse-fantaisie Glinka allows his trombone to play cantabile phrases
unsupported, like those of the unison trombones in the Capriccio
brillante.
The improvements in woodwind mechanism introduced by Theo-
bald Boehm and others had even less immediate influence on
orchestral technique than Adolphe Sax's improvements to the brass,
and such experiments as Berlioz's muting of the clarinet in ‘La Harpe
eolienne’ in Lélio by wrapping it in a leather bag, as Spontini had
done long before in Fernand Cortez, never passed into ordinary
practice. But composers did make ever heavier demands on wind-
players' agility and general resourcefulness; the flute solo in the
Scherzo of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Nights Dream music is
famous, and some of the clarinet passages in the same movement
were at first found almost unplayable. In the third movement of Die
Weihe der Tóne Spohr did not hesitate to plunge his A clarinets deep
into a flat key. Similarly the strings, with their centuries-old
‘mechanism’ unchanged, found their upward compass being con-
tinually extended. Devices employed exceptionally by the masters of
the two previous decades—the picking out of a solo violin, division
of violins or cellos into four or even more parts, various kinds
of tremolo, playing sul ponticello—now became quite common,
particularly in the scores of Berlioz and the opera composers. They
too, rather than the more conservative symphonists, began to use
percussion more subtly; Berlioz wrote chords for the timpani (end
of the ‘Scene aux champs’ in the Fantastique, the overture to Cellini);
Meyerbeer uses four timpani thematically in one of the entr'actes of
Le Prophéte, and an example from Spohr has already been quoted
(Ex. 20). In the ‘Grande fête chez Capulet’, the Andante of Carnaval
romain, and Glinka's Spanish pieces even the percussion of indefinite
pitch cease to be mere contributors of noise and are scored with
subtlety.
It is more difficult to generalize on tendencies in the handling of
the orchestra as a whole, thanks to the fact that orchestration was
becoming far more obviously than ever before a matter of personal
54
style апа texture, not of semi-routine. The influence of Weber is
apparent in the work of all the outstanding orchestrators of the
period: on Mendelssohn and Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Glinka, and
the young Wagner. Of all these, Mendelssohn advanced least from
the post-Classical style of Weber, though he used it with supreme
skill and added numerous happy refinements of his own: the rapidly
repeated wind chords against which the octave violins outline the
opening theme of the 'Italian' Symphony, the pianissimo passage for
all the strings in octaves against the harmonies of the woodwind and
brass—a contrast used by Weber only in brilliant tuttis—in the first
movement of the 'Scottish', the organ-like layout of bars 11-19 of
the Andante con moto of the ‘Italian’ where the violins seem to
NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Ех 983
Ruhig
кык I р, SS SS SS E ee
= EE aS a жс
brass
harp
vn
va
vc
db
= ыз
р N
q |
[|
|
|
sehr gesangsvoll
ENLARGEMENT OF THE ORCHESTRAL PALETTE 55
H3
Hi
:
|
"1
4
2
|
N
|
С
|
I
|
{
ку or
лр E EE GEHE BEE шт
represent one manual, the flutes another, and the staccato basses the
pedals, to name three instances at random, though all three, as it
happens, illustrate that clear differentiation of string and wind
colouring which is one of the marked characteristics of the period
as a whole.
Schumann’s timid tendency after the B flat Symphony and the
first version of the D minor to play for safety by constant doubling
of strings and wind was exceptional. The valve-mechanism enabled
him to use the horns (even more than in the earlier works) as inside
padding, but unfortunately this reduced far too much of his
orchestration to an opaque mass of strings, woodwind, and horns,
sounding all the thicker because of the frequent lack of fluidity in
the separate parts. Schumann’s pianistic approach to the orchestra
often shows not only in the invention of pianistic figures but in a
too ‘vertical’ conception of texture. In rescoring the D minor
Symphony he even injects pianistic effects, like the percussive 27
figure on second violins, violas, and cellos at the beginning of the
56 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
first Allegro, into music originally conceived orchestrally. Or he will
double and thicken, and substitute pianistic repeated chords on
second violins and violas for true orchestral texture. However he did
not always mute his imagination in later years. One very different
instance has already been quoted from Manfred (Ex. 8); another is
the ‘Sonnenaufgang’ that opens the second section of the Szenen aus
Goethe’s Faust (Ex. 33), an example of what were then the most
modern orchestral tendencies: division of the strings, limpid texture,
with primary colours alternated or contrasted simultaneously, occur
on many pages of Glinka, the best of Wagner’s earlier operas, and
Meyerbeer—to say nothing of Berlioz the supreme master. Wagner’s
tromboning of themes against glittering backgrounds in the Tann-
häuser Overture of 1845 and the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin
(written in 1848), for which there were Berliozian precedents in Le
Roi Lear and Benvenuto Cellini, illustrate the same tendency at its
coarsest. Ex. 34 from the Prince Kholmsky Overture, showing Glinka
at much less than his most brilliant, is a typical mixture of strings,
woodwind, and brass.
The opening of Meyerbeer’s Struensee Overture illustrates the love
of primary yet novel colours (Ex. 35). The passage is immediately
repeated in staccato quavers, ff and pp, by an entirely unsupported
brass choir of two horns, trompette à pistons, three trombones, and
ophicleide— and the carefully balanced dynamic markings now often
thought necessary.
Such subtleties of balance, like the rhythmic complications of Ex.
34, could never have been achieved under the old system of joint
‘conducting’ by continuo-player and principal violinist which had
survived well into the first quarter of the nineteenth century and
even beyond it; modern conducting was introduced at Leipzig, for
instance, by Mendelssohn, only in 1835—and Schumann at first
disliked it. The music of Berlioz and Wagner, above all, needed the
independent specialist conductor with his baton and it is significant
that both wrote treatises on the new art.?! By 1848 Wagner had in
Lohengrin developed an individual orchestral style which nevertheless
was only a preliminary stage in the evolution of his mature handling
of the orchestra. By the same date Berlioz had closed his career as
a symphonic composer with the Marche funèbre pour la dernière scene
d Hamlet, though he was still to use the orchestra with consummate
51 Berlioz, 'L'Art du chef d'orchestre’ in the 2nd edn. of his Grande Traité de l instrumentation
et d'orchestration modernes (Paris, 1855); Wagner, ‘Über das Dirigieren' (1870); repr. in Richard
Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, viii (Leipzig, 1873), 325-410.
BERLIOZ AND THE ROMANTIC ORCHESTRA 57
g Lë
skill in L’Enfance du Christ and the Te Deum, in Les Troyens, and
Beatrice et Benedict.
BERLIOZ AND THE ROMANTIC ORCHESTRA
It was Berlioz who summed up and refined upon every new
tendency in Romantic orchestration. He often learned from such
contemporaries as Halévy and Meyerbeer and such immediate
predecessors as Weber, Spontini, and Rossini, but he subtilized their
devices and in turn bequeathed a whole encyclopaedia of orchestral
conceptions to those who came after. He scattered the seed of ideas
58 NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Bx)
WW
һагр
solo db
Ber
so lavishly that some was bound to fall upon stony ground; neither
the already mentioned muting of the clarinet nor the famous
combination in the Requiem of high flute chords with the pedal notes
of eight tenor trombones playing in unison has probably ever been
adopted by anyone else. But his fertilizing influence generally was
incalculable, though its action was oddly delayed in his own country.
A few favourite, characteristic, or strikingly novel effects may
be mentioned: the pizzicato arpeggios with thumb glissando in
Mephistopheles' serenade in La Damnation, the violin harmonics in
the ‘Queen Mab’ Scherzo of Romeo, the suspended cymbal struck
softly with a sponge-headed drumstick (probably first used in the
BERLIOZ AND THE ROMANTIC ORCHESTRA 59
Francs-juges Overture), the drawing of scales in one instrumental
group across the solid texture of another group, semiquaver arpeggio
accompaniment figuration in one orchestral group, division of
melodic interest between first and second violins (as in Waverley),
suggestion of bells by flute, oboe, horns, and harp (end of the
‘Marche des pelerins’ in Harold), shimmering rapid passages on
woodwind or muted strings as accompaniment to a melody (in-
troduction to the Fantastique, larghetto" of the Cellini Overture).
Roméo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust are specially rich in
new devices. Yet it is, after all, not in these ‘effects’ that Berlioz's
real greatness as an orchestrator lies, and certainly not in his essays
in the titanic, such as the four additional brass bands in the
"Tuba mirum' of the Requiem which, like the Symphonie funébre et
triomphale, revive the tradition of ‘monumental music'?? and as-
tonished even in those days of Meyerbeerian extravagance. It was
in his ‘normal’ orchestration, his intimate knowledge of the resources
and capabilities of every instrument and combination, his careful
weighing of every detail of execution and of the dynamic balance,
spacing, and colour of every chord and figure and instrumental line,
above all in the fact that he was seldom an ‘orchestrator’ at all in
the sense of one who scores material conceived abstractly or
unconsciously as keyboard music. He thought and wrote directly in
terms of the orchestra more consistently than any of his predecessors
or contemporaries.
32 See Vol. VIII, pp. 67 and 650-1.
П
CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
By JOHN HORTON
AMATEUR AND PROFESSIONAL PLAYERS
THE practice and enjoyment of chamber music was widespread
during the first half of the nineteenth century. Among its most
influential patrons in Germany, Austria, and Russia were aristocratic
dilettanti of the kind who helped to make possible the achievements
of Beethoven's last decade. Their beneficent tradition was kept alive
beyond the mid-century by such enthusiasts as Count Mateusz
Wielhorski, the Polish- Russian amateur cellist to whom Mendelssohn
dedicated his D major Sonata, Op. 58, and Schumann his Piano
Quartet, Op. 47. But the most rapid growth of interest was now to
occur among the middle classes, with their accumulating wealth,
their social aspirations, and their increasing artistic sensibility.
Domestic music-making was a prominent feature of the Biedermeier
scene, where families and friends gathered to read through duos,
trios, quartets, and quintets for their own pleasure or for the
entertainment of guests. Their activities created an insistent demand
for new compositions, especially those that made no unreasonable
calls on technique or comprehension, a market that prolific and
industrious composers toiled to supply. The quartets of Ignaz Pleyel
(1757-1831),! the pianoforte trios of Karl Reissiger (1798-1859), and
the string quintets of George Onslow (1784-1853) were among the
most popular of their time, though the more discerning connoisseurs
based their repertoires on what were already accepted as the
foundations of Classical chamber music: Haydn, Boccherini, Mozart,
and the early Beethoven of the Op. 18 quartets (1800). While much
of this amateur participation can hardly have reached a high level
of technical or interpretative skill, it steadily nurtured a potential
audience for chamber music as performed by serious artists, who
were now beginning to turn their attention more and more in that
direction, while usually combining it with solo and orchestral playing.
1 See Vol. УШ, pp. 304-5.
CHAMBER MUSIC IN FRANCE 61
In both amateur and professional fields the German-speaking
lands claimed superiority. Playing at Strasbourg in 1821 before a
particularly responsive audience, Spohr observed that this was a
town ‘to which the taste for quartet music has more readily penetrated
from its contiguity to Germany’.? It was Germany also that produced
the earliest professional touring quartets, like the Müller brothers
from Brunswick who set out on their travels in 1831.
CHAMBER MUSIC IN FRANCE
In other countries interest tended to be concentrated in the capital
cities. Thus in France, as Mendelssohn soon discovered, most
professional expertise was to be found in Paris? where the violinist
Pierre Baillot (1771-1842) flourished as orchestral and quartet leader
and professor at the Conservatoire. Baillot was versed in the Viennese
classics, which meant to him originally Haydn and Mozart, but he
was progressive in outlook, giving public recitals of Beethoven's
earlier quartets, studying the later ones in private with his colleagues,
and encouraging contemporary composers. Visiting Paris in 1832,
Mendelssohn was gratified to find that the Conservatoire students
had been made to study his works, and were 'practising their fingers
off to play Ist es wahr? (Quartet in A, Op. 13). In 1835 Baillot’s
enterprise was carried further by the cellist P. A. Chevillard, who in
association with the violinist J. P. Maurin formed a society for the
study of Beethoven's last-period quartets.? Standards of string playing
were in fact nowhere higher at this time than in Paris; besides Baillot,
there were Kreutzer and Rode, for both of whom Beethoven had
written sonatas (Op. 47 and Op. 96 respectively). Nor were the wind
instruments neglected: the prolific and versatile Anton Reicha (1770-
1836) had been teaching composition at the Conservatoire since
1818, and through his own works for woodwind and horns with or
without strings was ministering to the French taste for wind and
mixed ensembles. On the other hand, native French composers of
chamber music were few; Reicha, Cherubini, Onslow, and Kalk-
brenner were all expatriates, but among the exceptions may be
mentioned Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831), who was French-born
in spite of his name, Félicien David (1810-76) whose twenty-four
string quintets entitled Les Quatre Saisons have no pretensions
beyond salon entertainment, and Louise Farrenc (1804-74), a
? Louis Spohr, Selbstbiographie (Kassel, 1860-1), ii. 143.
3 Letter to Zelter, 15 Feb. 1832.
^ Even before this, the late Beethoven quartets had been introduced to Parisian audiences
by the Bohrer brothers in 1827.
62 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
redoubtable pianist, teacher, anthologist (Le Tresor des pianistes),
and composer of a considerable amount of serious chamber music—
duet sonatas, piano trios, two piano quintets, a sextet, and a nonet—
which has always been respectfully noted by historians but no longer
has a place even in the national repertoire.
CONDITIONS IN ENGLAND
England characteristically followed a path of compromise in
musical life, with social distinctions scrupulously observed.5 The
aims of the Philharmonic Society included under the terms of its
foundation in 1813 ‘the performance ... of the best and most
approved instrumental music, consisting of Full Pieces, Concertantes
for not less than three principal instruments, Sestetts, Quintetts and
Trios; excluding Concertos, Solos and Duets . . "8 Such intermingling
of what would now be considered distinct genres, against which
Moscheles protested in vain (‘Grand orchestral works and quartet
music are played at one and the same concert, third-rate singers are
engaged...)? persisted for another forty years or so. Chamber
music began to drop out of the programmes during the decade 1840-
50, but did not finally disappear until after 1861, in which year the
Hummel Septet, Op. 74, was still among the items. The English
tradition of heterogeneous programmes was followed by early
American concert organizers, the ubiquitous Hummel Quintet being
performed at the first concert of the Philharmonic Orchestra of New
York City, founded in 1842.8
Meanwhile, London was becoming better provided with spe-
cializing chamber recitals, such as Henry Blagrove's in the Hanover
Square Rooms (1832-42), Joseph Dando's in the same hall and later
at Crosby Hall, Bishopsgate (1842-53), and above all the Musical
Union (1845-81) founded by John Ella (1802-88), who believed in
educating his audiences, taking as a motto Baillot's assertion, 'It is
not enough for the artist to be well prepared to face the public: it
is also necessary for the public to be well prepared for what it is
about to hear, and giving them analytical programme books
5 "There were large numbers of English amateurs who counted it a special honour to
associate with artists and to play by their side at their private soirées. Thus Sir W. Curtis on
the violoncello, Mrs Oom and Mrs Fleming on the piano. Prince Leopold and Princess Sophia,
sister to King George IV, were always attentive listeners to the performers.’ (Charlotte
Moscheles, The Life of Moscheles, trans. Arthur D. Coleridge (London, 1873), i. 77-8.)
$ Myles B. Foster, History of the Philharmonic Society of London 1813-1912 (London,
1912), 4.
7 C. Moscheles, Life, i. 261.
8 Paul Henry Láng, Music in Western Civilisation (London, 1942), 934-5. A Mendelssohn
Quintet Club was founded in Boston, Mass. in 1849.
COMBINATIONS OF STRINGS AND WIND 63
containing notes on specific works and music-type illustrations.
Mention must also be made of the series of chamber concerts
arranged by Sterndale Bennett during the years 1843-56, and the
founding of the Beethoven Quartet Society in 1845 by T. M. Alsager
of The Times in order to promote better understanding of Beethoven's
later works.?
COMBINATIONS OF STRINGS AND WIND
The larger mixed groupings of solo strings and wind popular at
this time were in some sense the successors of the serenade,
divertimento, and cassation of an earlier epoch, though they now
usually conformed to the four-movement pattern of the symphony,
string quartet, and piano trio. Their influence on conditions of
performance is brought out in Schumann's account of musical life
in Leipzig in the winter of 1839-40. Writing about a series of
Abendunterhaltungen or soirées, given by Ferdinand David's quartet
with other artists, he says:
in response to the wishes of the public the scope of these recitals was
enlarged to include works for larger ensembles and also solo items. And
for the sake of the music, as well as of the audience, the small anteroom
[of the Gewandhaus] hitherto used for chamber music was abandoned in
favour of the large concert hall ... quartets by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven,
Cherubini, Franz Schubert and Mendelssohn were played. In addition there
were performances of Spohr’s Nonet and a double quartet, Mendelssohn’s
Octet, a Quintet by Onslow, trios by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Hiller,
and duo sonatas and similar works by Mozart, Beethoven and Spohr.19
This season included the first public performance of Mendelssohn’s
D minor Trio, and Mendelssohn himself played accompaniments he
had written to some of Bach’s solo violin movements.
The quasi-orchestral character of much of the chamber music of
the period is emphasized by the common use of the double-bass to
strengthen the foundations of the larger ensembles, as in Viennese
music of the divertimento kind, as well as the Beethoven Septet, Op.
20, Schubert’s Octet, D 803, and ‘Trout’ Quintet, D 667, and minor
works by Ferdinand Ries, Hummel, Moscheles, and Spohr.!! Even
where a second cello was originally specified in string ensembles the
double-bass was often substituted, an expedient that is said to have
? The Philharmonic, Musical Union, and Alsager institutions are vividly described in Hector
Berlioz, Les Soirées de l'orchestre (Paris, 1852).
10 Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin Kreisig (5th edn.;
Leipzig, 1914), i. 510-11.
11 See Vol. УШ, pp. 320-1.
64 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
arisen fortuitously in London when, Dragonetti deputized at short
notice for a missing second cellist in one of Onslow's quintets. The
result was judged so successful that Onslow himself came to prefer
the cello-bass pairing, and even such carefully balanced works
as Spohr's double quartets were subjected to similar treatment.
Conversely Félicien David scored his quintets Les Quatre Saisons,
four sets of six (1845-6), for the combination with bass, but allowed
a second cello as alternative.
The growing ascendency of the virtuoso performer, especially the
solo violinist and pianist, was not altogether to the advantage of
idiomatic chamber-music composition and interpretation. Haydn
had been fortunate in his daily association, over many years, with
select groups of musicians who were used to working together, and
Beethoven came to rely on that most dedicated of teams, the string
quartet led by Ignaz Schuppanzigh. But Spohr's autobiography
reveals a very different aspect of current performing practice. The
virtuosi who toured Europe in the 1820s and 1830s often treated the
string quartet as a vehicle for the leader's personal display, or the
concerted piano ensemble as a medium for the keyboard executant
aided by subordinate instrumentalists. Describing how he tested the
abilities of the 13-year-old Joachim in 1844, Ella *mustered a notable
assembly of musical lions to hear him play [sic] Beethoven's
posthumous Quartet in B flat'.!? And Mendelssohn, who had
introduced Joachim, discharged his obligation to Ella by ‘playing’
his own D minor Trio, stipulating only that the Moravian violinist
Heinrich Ernst should ‘accompany’ him. Although a few permanently
constituted quartet groups were already to be found in the more
important centres, and some even toured, it was not until after the
middle of the century that it ceased to be taken for granted that a
recitalist ought to be willing to take his place as leader of a chamber
ensemble with little more concern than he would feel in playing a
concerto with an unfamiliar orchestra.
Executants still availed themselves of their traditional licence to
add ornamentation, and early nineteenth-century chamber per-
formance was by no means exempt from such liberties. The London
quartet leader Joseph Dando is said to have ornamented the repeats
of the variation movement of Beethoven's Quartet Op. 18, No. 5,
and even Ferdinand David was 'given to "decorating" chamber
music with trills and grace notes'.!? When Liszt played the piano
1? John Ella, Musical Sketches Abroad and at Home (3rd edn.; London, 1878).
13 Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music (London, 1929-30), i. 314.
SCHUMANN’S CHAMBER MUSIC 65
part of the Hummel D minor Septet at a Philharmonic concert in
1841, he ‘so embellished Hummels passages that the author himself
would scarcely have recognized them'.!4
The most potent influence on performing and compositional styles
and textures during this period was the dominating position occupied
by the pianoforte in musical and social esteem. It was a golden age
of Romantic piano literature and a heroic age of keyboard technique,
aided and encouraged by the inventions and improvements of
instrument makers. With few exceptions, such as the violinists Spohr
and Berwald and the woodwind player Reicha, almost every composer
approached chamber music primarily through the piano. It is true
that one of the most illustrious of the pianist-composers, Hummel,
had the intelligence and sensitivity to control his virtuosity and to
co-ordinate the piano with other instruments in his ensembles, but
on the other hand Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-1849) well-nigh
submerged his ‘accompaniment’ under torrents of brilliant but empty
passage-work and stated the priorities unequivocally by publishing
his Op. 81 (c.1826) as Grand Quintett pour le piano-forte, avec
accompagnement de clarinette, cor, violoncelle et contrebasse.
SCHUMANN'S CHAMBER MUSIC
While Kalkbrenner and his kind hardly survive except as historical
figures, Schumann's chamber music lives on to demonstrate how far
the technical and expressive qualities of the piano could permeate a
Romantic imagination. Up to 1842, when Schumann turned his
attention seriously to chamber music, he had written comparatively
little that was not keyboard-based, for the outpouring of songs in
1840 must surely be included in that category. Now, at the age of
32, he was stimulated by the example of Mendelssohn and by an
intensive study of Classical quartet literature to attempt string-quartet
composition on his own account. His three essays in that medium,
Op. 41, No. 1 (nominally in A minor), No. 2 in F, and No. 3 in
A major, were the outcome of hard self-discipline.!? Their creative
vitality and constructional ingenuity go far to disarm criticism arising
from such stylistic blemishes as the constriction of much of the string
writing within the grasp of a pianist's hands. He actually arranged
14 Foster, History, p. 164.
15 For a close study of Schumann's chamber works, the sketches and the many alterations
they underwent during composition, see Hans Kohlhase, Die Kammermusik Robert Schumanns:
Stilistische Untersuchungen (Hamburg, 1979); also A. E. F. Dickinson, “The Chamber Music’,
in Gerald Abraham (ed.), Schumann: A Symposium (London 1952), 138, and Joan Chissell,
Schumann (rev. edn.; London, 1977), 155-68.
66 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
Nos. 1 and 2 for piano solo in 1853. The Quartet in A, Op. 41, No.
3, is perhaps the most interesting of the set in spite of suffering from
a klaviermássig Finale; the whole work is unified through the motivic
use of the initial falling perfect fifth and its inversion. Yet, although
Schumann had entered upon quartet composition with all the
enthusiasm and concentration characteristic of his most fertile
periods, he returned in this very same year to the piano as the basis
of the rest of his chamber music. "For Schumann the quartet was a
stimulating novelty, not an essential thread, and once tried it gleamed
no more in his mind.'!6
It is worthwhile to look a little further into Schumann's reliance
on the piano. A clue can be found in the remark he made to Clara
Wieck in 1838: "The pianoforte has become too limited for me. In
the compositions I now write I hear many things I can hardly
indicate." In the following year he told his former teacher Heinrich
Dorn that he felt the piano was too narrow for his ideas. Although
these remarks are usually taken as heralding the symphonic com-
positions of 1841, they may also apply with equal relevance to the
chamber works that quickly followed upon the three string quartets
of 1842. From this time onwards he often appears to use other
instruments as a way of enriching and extending the eloquence of
the piano, enabling chords and arpeggios to be sustained, melodies
to be given new colours, and the inner parts of contrapuntal textures
to be enriched. The search for novel shades of colour through the
addition of middle-range instruments was to continue to the end of
Schumann's career. Thus the horn entered into partnership with the
keyboard in the Adagio and Allegro, Op. 70, the clarinet in the
Fantasiestücke, Op. 73, the oboe in the Drei Romanzen, Op. 94,
the cello in Funf Stücke im Volkston, Op. 102, the viola in the
Märchenbilder, Op. 113, both clarinet and viola in the Mar-
chenerzählungen, Op. 132. Of earlier date, but showing a similar
tendency, is the first version of the Andante and Variations, Op. 46
(1843) (Ex. 36), laid out for two pianos, horn, and two cellos. The
supplementary instruments are used sparingly, and chiefly to reinforce
or colour the inner voices and basses of the piano parts. The
alternative two-piano version has obvious practical advantages, but
the original scoring represents the composer's real intentions. The
antiphonal variation between horn and cellos on the one hand and
the pianos on the other (see Ex. 36), which had to be sacrificed in
16 Dickinson, ‘Chamber Music’, p. 140.
SCHUMANN'S CHAMBER MUSIC 67
Ex. 36
Un poco pit lento
the revision, must have had special significance, based as it is on the
motto-theme of the song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben.
The two major works for piano and strings written immediately
after the Op. 41 quartets broke fresh ground by combining the now
fully developed concert grand piano with bowed strings, treated in
a manner that attempts to reconcile Classical quartet or trio textures
with quasi-orchestral density. In the Quintet, Op. 44, the piano is
primus inter pares, throwing out ideas which the strings have no
difficulty in adopting for themselves. In the march-like second
movement, indeed, violin and cello are allowed to take the initiative,
while the piano is held in check, though maintaining a presence with
discreet idiomatic figuration. The Scherzo favours the keyboard
player, but its bold construction, with two trios, and its pulsating
energy carry all before it. In the Finale the piano again takes the
lead, but thins out its texture, so that for much of the movement
the keyboard part is reduced virtually to a single melodic line, broken
from time to time by passages of full chordal harmony, with
cumulative power building up to a climax when, in the coda, the
principal theme of the Finale is combined with that of the first
movement—an idea that Schumann may have borrowed from
Mendelssohn’s Op. 12 String Quartet or his Octet in E flat. This
work was to become a prototype for examples of the genre by
Brahms, Dvorak, Franck, and Fauré. Schumann’s Piano Quartet,
Op. 47, offers the strings fewer opportunities to distinguish them-
selves. Frequent doublings with the piano result in a certain monotony
68 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
of sound, though the falling sevenths and harmonic suspensions of
the Andante cantabile and the luscious cello melody forming a
tribute to the dedicatee, Count Mateusz Wiethorski, cannot fail to
haunt the memory.
DUET SONATAS 9
Schumann’s achievements in two other fields of chamber music
with piano are noteworthy. Important sonatas for a single stringed
instrument and piano are uncommon between those of Beethoven
and Brahms, but Schumann’s examples for violin, Op. 105 in A
minor and Op. 121 in D minor, both written in 1851,17 enrich the
repertoire of the violin as much as Mendelssohn’s Op. 45 (1838) and
Op. 58 (1845-6) enrich that of the cello. Mendelssohn’s sonatas,
grateful as they are to play and listen to, do not altogether lack
rivals: Chopin’s Op. 65 in G minor (1845-6) has claims that are still
sometimes underrated, being splendidly written for both instruments,
probably with the help of Franchomme over the cello parti
and Sterndale Bennett's Sonata-duo, Op. 32, while technically
unambitious, has a melodic charm that is seldom absent from his
slender output. Moreover the Mendelssohn cello works contain much
that is fluent rather than inspired, even if we except the chorale
movement of Op. 58, which may have had its origin in a study of
‘Es ist vollbracht’ in Bach’s St John Passion. But Schumann's violin
sonatas have a more full-blooded quality that transcends their curious
restriction of the violin parts to the lower range of the instrument,
yet another example, presumably, of the effects of subconscious
feeling through pianist's hands. The passionate outer movements of
the A major Sonata are separated by a poetical Allegretto with
constantly fluctuating tempo, one of Schumann's most imaginative
conceptions, which Brahms must have had in mind when he wrote
the Andante tranquillo of his own A major Sonata thirty-five years
later, just as César Franck seems to have been indebted to Schumann's
Op. 121 for a number of ideas: the close relationship between
movements, the whirling, darkly coloured figuration of the lebhaft
section of Schumann's first movement, and even the canonic episodes
of the Finale. The third movement of Op. 121, a delightful set of
variations on a theme (foreshadowed near the close of the Scherzo)
17 A third, also in A minor, dating from 1853, was edited by Oliver Neighbour (London,
1956).
18 Moscheles, when commissioned to make the piano-duet arrangement of Chopin's sonata,
found it “а wild overgrown forest, into which only an occasional sunbeam penetrates'
(C. Moscheles, Life, ii. 213).
THE PIANO TRIO 69
that is itself a free variant of the chorale ‘Gelobet seist du, Jesu
Christ, makes use of a kaleidoscope of delicate colours— violin
pizzicato chords, arco double stopping, and sul ponticello, with the
una corda of the piano and great variety of keyboard textures.
THE PIANO TRIO
Of all the standard chamber music ensembles it was the trio for
keyboard, violin, and cello that had the longest pedigree, had
undergone most fluctuations of intention and style, and was (with
the possible exception of the string quartet) the most prolific in
examples during the late Classical and early Romantic periods. In
Haydn, and in Mozart's greatest trio, K 542 in E major, the cello
is still occupied for most of its time in reinforcing the bass of the
fortepiano. Beethoven brought about the complete emancipation of
both violin and cello, and in his Op. 70 and Op. 97 treated all three
instruments as equals, at the same time enlarging every dimension
of the ensemble to attain a spaciousness, grandeur, and emotional
depth never before realized. These two Beethoven trios, together
with Schubert's in B flat and E flat, formed the heart of a legacy
bequeathed to the 1840s and 1850s.
Few composers of those decades were equipped to take up the
challenge. Amateur players asked for much less formidable material
such as Reissiger, with his twenty-seven trios, was quite able to turn
out. The virtuoso pianist-composers, the Hummels, the Moscheles,
and the Kalkbrenners (and also Chopin in his early Op. 8), wrote
their own pieces for keyboard display, usually with perfunctory
*accompaniment' parts that were seldom included or even fully cued
into the published piano scores, as Schumann complained when
obliged to review these, or unscored sets of parts, for his Neue
Zeitschrift. The occupation must have been almost invariably de-
pressing, as his scathing comments revealed: *A clearer example of
the best intentions towards higher regions, while seated firmly on
prosaic earth ... would be difficult to find anywhere in the world'
(of a Grand Trio by Anton Halm, 1789-1872); ‘Take the key of E
minor and an easy-going triple time, imagine yourself an ardent
pianist, get two gentle understanding friends to accompany you,
suffuse the picture with a rosy dawn, and you have what amounts
to a trio’ (by Jacob Rosenhain, 1813-94);!9 ‘salon-trio, during which
one can just gaze around [/orgnettiren], without completely losing
the thread of the music' (of an early Trio, Op. 2, by Ambroise
19 Neue Zeitschrift, 5 (1836), 4.
70 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
Thomas (1811-96).2° Schumann wrote a long and mainly laudatory
review of Spohr's Trio in E minor, Op. 119, welcoming it not so
much for its intrinsic merits but because it gave further evidence of
Spohr's productivity over a wider field than ever, the sure mark of
a fidelity to German tradition and therefore to be warmly encouraged.
But it was Mendelssohn's D minor Trio, Op. 49, that received, in
1840, the famous accolade of 'the master-trio of the present age, as
Beethoven's in B flat and D, and Schubert's in E flat, were supreme
in their own time'.?! Yet the D minor Trio, for all its suavity, its
balanced sonorities, and its masterly craftsmanship,?? was to be
surpassed six years later by the more closely integrated and emo-
tionally more profound Op. 66 in C minor. The opening Allegro
energico e con fuoco evolves from a single motif by means of
contrapuntal working, variation, and tonal transition while exploiting
all three instruments technically to an even greater degree than in
the earlier Trio. Only in the Finale is there some falling away from
the generally high quality of idiomatic writing, when Mendelssohn
allows himself to be lured into a gradiose peroration based, like the
first of the Six Preludes for piano, Op. 35, on a chorale.?? The
success of Mendelssohn's trios, and perhaps Clara Schumann's
attempt at a Trio in G minor on her own account, encouraged
Robert Schumann also to try his hand.?4 In 1847 he completed the
first two published trios, Op. 63 in D and Op. 80 in F (Ex. 37). The
third, Op. 110 in G minor, followed four years later when his stamina
had begun to fail, and, despite the moving eloquence of the
second movement, a loss of concentration and of sensitivity to the
independence and balance of the instruments is apparent. But Op.
80 is a particularly attractive work with some happy interchanges
among the instruments and a verve that launches the first movement
on its way with an impetus resembling that of the E flat Symphony
written three years later. Captivating also are the subsidiary F major
themes and the C major material of the second subject distributed
20 Leon B. Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven, 1967), 189-190, quotes passages
from this work by Thomas.
?! Neue Zeitschrift, 13 (1840), 198.
?? *A movement so compact and so convincingly launched as the first in the Trio is not
matched by any composer of the romantic era until Brahms' (Láng; Music in Western
Civilisation, p. 822).
?3 Both Mendelssohn and Schumann sometimes reflect their trio styles in solo piano pieces:
Mendelssohn, for example, in the Lieder ohne Worte, Op. 19, no. 5, in F sharp and Op. 38,
no. 6, in A flat, Schumann rather more imaginatively in the F sharp Romanze, Op. 28,
no. 2, spreading himself over three staves.
?4 The Fantasiestücke, Op. 88, for piano, violin, and cello, consist of the dismembered and
retitled movements of a piano trio drafted towards the end of 1842, about the same time as
the Piano Quartet in E Flat, Op. 47.
THE PIANO TRIO 71
Ex..37
Mit innigem Ausdruck
— | "ES 2
N
СУ Ss FH Ber
among the players. The slow movement of this Trio in F recalls
Schumann’s impassioned Lieder, and explores magical realms of
harmony (Ex. 37). The Ländler-like Intermezzo looks forward to
Brahms, but also contains in its last four bars yet another affectionate
72 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
quotation from the motto-theme of ‚Frauenliebe und -leben. In the
Finale the piano over-asserts itself, making the string parts almost
redundant.
The accessibility of the piano trio as an ensemble for easy diversion,
concert display, or serious communication, earned it popularity
over a wide geographical area and allowed it to reflect national
characteristics. For example, Sterndale Bennett’s later Trio in A, Op.
26 (1839), nearly contemporary with Mendelssohn’s in D minor,
shows an originality in Bennett’s handling of the instruments, and
a touch of humour as in the ‘Serenade’ (Ex. 38), that lift it well
above the average.?5
Interesting in other ways is the 18-year-old César Franck's Trio
in F sharp (1841), which d'Indy claimed as introducing new concepts
of form into mid-century instrumental music.?6 While discounting
d'Indy's hyperbole, one can regard this particular work as a distinctive
essay in the medium, abounding in thematic metamorphoses and
other cyclic devices. Such procedures, however, were very much in
the air at this time, and not only in the orchestral compositions of
Liszt and Berlioz; Mendelssohn's experiments in his earlier quartets
and in the Octet were already well known in Paris in the 1830s; even
before then Glinka's Trio pathétique (1826) for piano, clarinet, and
bassoon employs idées fixes with thematic transformations.
SCANDINAVIAN CHAMBER MUSIC
Scandinavian composers associated with the Leipzig group trans-
ported its styles and ideals back to their own countries. Niels Gade
(1817-90), a viola player, served as Mendelssohn's right-hand man
at the Gewandhaus and adopted features of his compositional
practice, showing a particular interest in string ensembles including
a quintet (1845) and an octet (1848). Returning to Denmark at the
height of a national Romantic movement that embraced all the arts,
Gade met the needs of the time by combining sincere workmanship
and moderate technical demands with a breath of the gentle pastoral
atmosphere that frequently characterizes Scandinavian music and
probably takes its origin from a native tradition of lyric song. Several
Swedish composers also advanced the cause of chamber music in
their country. Adolf Fredrik Lindblad (1801-78) produced, among
other chamber works, a Trio in G minor for violin, viola, and piano
25 Ed. with the Cello Sonata, by С. Bush, Musica Britannica, 35 (London, 1972).
26 Cobbett, Survey, i. 419-20.
SCANDINAVIAN CHAMBER MUSIC
Ex. 38
Andante ma un poco scherzando
The pizzicato quite piano throughout, and without ee slightest harshness
senza cresc.
FER BEE
б EL EINE
13
74 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
(1843), a string quintet, and two quartets. But the most original
native composer of the period was Franz Berwald (1796-1868).27
While Berwald's chamber music cannot compare in importance
with the symphonic works he was writing in the 1840s, it shows
much of the freshness of outlook that attracted the attention of both
Swedish and German critics: melodic fluidity, unpredictable harmonic
movement (to some extent indebted to Spohr), and above all an
interest in experiment with design. Even so, the trios and the two
piano quintets hardly show him at his best, owing to his lack of
keyboard expertise. It is only when he writes for strings alone that
his constructive imagination takes wing, as in the String Quartet No.
3 in E flat (1849), where not only is a 'scherzo' episode introduced
into the slow movement, but this already complex structure is itself
embedded in the exposition, development, and recapitulation of a
single large-scale sonata form. At the same time, the string writing
has much elegance (Ex. 39).
CHAMBER MUSIC FOR STRINGS BY MENDELSSOHN AND SPOHR
Whereas the string quartet was for Schumann a transitory interest,
though productive of three works of enduring value, Mendelssohn
was fascinated by the medium almost throughout his career. Except
for the two piano trios and the later duet sonatas, he abandoned
chamber music with piano after his fifteenth year. Between completing
his first and second piano quartets he wrote the earliest of his string
quartets (in E flat), though it did not reach publication until more
than thirty years after his death. The Quartet in A, Op. 13 (1827),
remains, despite its early date, one of his most revolutionary
compositions. Quotations from a song ‘Ist es wahr?', written earlier
in the year, frame the beginning and end of the work, and pervade
the whole of it through subtle derivatives and variations.?8 Much of
the writing is strongly and even harshly linear, though lyrical and
dramatic elements appear in the Intermezzo and Finale, with a
2” Ludwig Norman's ‘Franz Berwalds Kammermusik-verk’, Tidning for teater och musik
(1859), nos. 7, 8, 10, is reproduced in German translation in Franz Berwald: Die Dokumente
seines Lebens, ed. Erling Lomnäs (Kassel, 1979), 490-7.
28 Mendelssohn wrote to A. F. Lindblad in 1828: “The song I append to the Quartet is the
theme. You will hear it note for note in the first and last movements, but its mood
pervades all four of them" (Friedhelm Krummacher, Mendelssohn—der Komponist: Studien zur
Kammermusik für Streicher (Munich, 1978), 87). Krummacher (ibid., p. 592) reproduces in
facsimile the title-page of the holograph manuscript in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. Here the
quartet is explicitly described as ‘sopra il tema . . . [followed by two bars of the song "Frage —
‘Ist es wahr?] Another manuscript of the quartet exists in the British Library (Add. MS.
32179, fos. 45-64). Although this is not confirmed as the composer's autograph, it shows a
number of erasures and alterations, with several attempts at a suitable speed indication for
the scherzando section of the Intermezzo.
CHAMBER MUSIC BY MENDELSSOHN AND SPOHR ds
Ex. 39
[Allegro di molto]
*scherzando' episode incorporated in the former. An encounter with
Beethoven's great A minor Quartet, Op. 132, written barely two
years earlier, must be assumed.29
Mendelssohn's String Quartet, Op. 12—again in E flat —which he
finished in London in September 1829, is less unconventional than
Op. 13, which preceded it in order of composition, but none the less
has some unusual features of structure. Its second movement is the
Canzonetta, with another 'scherzando' middle section, that was for
long the most popular single movement of the composer's chamber
works, but the whole quartet is notable for the beauty of its string
writing, as in the passage leading to the reprise in the first movement
(Ex. 40). The Finale is happily rounded off with a return of the
principal theme of the first movement.
With the three Op. 44 quartets (in order of composition, No. 2 in
E minor, No. 3 in E flat, and No. 1 in D) Mendelssohn reached
29 Mendelssohn's indebtedness to Beethoven in this and other early works is discussed by
Joscelyn Godwin, ‘Early Mendelssohn and Late Beethoven’, Music and Letters, 55 (1974),
272, and with more detail in Krummacher, Mendelssohn, pp. 309 ff.
76 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
what may be regarded as the apex of his powers in this field.
Relationships with his orchestral music of the same period are easy
to point to: the E minor Quartet looks forward to the Violin
Concerto in the same key, and the D major Quartet, for which the
composer showed his own preference by having it published before
the others, looks backward to the ‘Italian’ Symphony of five years
earlier; both symphony and quartet begin with a springing violin
theme over repeated chords, both have one middle movement in the
style of Haydn (actually called Menuetto in the quartet), with the
other taking the form of a grave song without words, and both end
with a saltarello. But perhaps the E flat Quartet, Op. 44, No. 3, is
the most completely satisfying of the three, with its unobtrusive
but strong cyclic links and a most original Scherzo combining
contrapuntal mastery with the lightest touch imaginable.39
It can hardly be doubted that the Op. 44 Quartets owe much of
their finish and assurance to the presence in Leipzig of Ferdinand
David (1810-75), who, after leading a private quartet for six years,
joined the Gewandhaus orchestra as leader in 1836. Seven years later
he was appointed head of the violin department in the new
Conservatory, formed his own quartet there and gave the first
performances of Mendelssohn’s three Op. 44 and Schumann’s three
30 The apparent spontaneity of this group of works hides a considerable amount of revision
and emendation, as shown with the help of a facsimile in Krummacher, Mendelssohn,
pp. 593-612.
CHAMBER MUSIC BY MENDELSSOHN AND SPOHR 77
Op. 41 quartets. As a pupil of Spohr and a teacher of Joachim he
links the Classical and Romantic schools of German violin playing,
and stands at a turning-point in the evolution of nineteenth-century
instrumental technique and interpretation, establishing once and for
all the concept of the permanent, unified chamber music team as a
prerequisite for maintaining the highest standards. His visit to
London in 1839 appears to have been a revelation to English
musicians: Moscheles noted that ‘his quartet playing at Morts and
Blagrove's soirées delighted everyone with a genuine artistic taste;
before he came, such a perfect ensemble had never been realised'.?!
In 1847 Mendelssohn produced, under severe emotional stress,
his last string quartet, Op. 80, which, taking its departure from
Beethoven's Op. 95 in the same key (F minor), sounds depths of
introspection and spiritual drama that might have heralded a new
phase of creative development, as presaged in the searing dissonances
of the opening, the weird Totentanz of the Scherzo (‘allegro assai’),
the tortuous elaboration of the Adagio, and the impressionistic
fragmentation of the Finale.
In his two String Quintets, Op. 18 in A and Op. 87 in B flat,
Mendelssohn used the instrumentation with two violas preferred by
Mozart and Beethoven (both of whom, like Mendelssohn himself,
were violists) rather than the two cellos adopted in quintets by
Boccherini, Schubert, and Onslow. Both the Mendelssohn quintets
have associations with famous violinists of their time: Op. 87 dates
from 1845, the year of the C minor Piano Trio, and its dedication
to Spohr may account for the prominent first violin writing in the
first, third, and fourth movements. The second movement, Andante
scherzando, is noteworthy for its refinements of string technique and
for some lively rhythmic displacements and syncopations. The Op.
18 Quintet was originally a carefree product of Mendelssohn's early
life, but acquired an elegiac character when, before publication in
1832, its original second movement was replaced with an Intermezzo
in memory of the two violinists to whom, up to that time,
Mendelssohn had been most indebted— Eduard Rietz and Baillot.
Their virtuosity seems to be acknowledged in the florid violin and
viola passages of the quintet.??
The unique Octet for strings?? may appear to stand on the
31 C. Moscheles, Life, ii. 47.
32 The original second movement was a Minuetto with a Trio in double canon. Krummacher,
Mendelssohn, pp. 586-90, reproduces it from a set of parts in the Bibliothéque Nationale,
Paris (Cons. MS 204), except for the missing second viola part.
33 A facsimile of the holograph score, formerly the property of Eduard Rietz, and now in
the Whittall Foundation Collection, has been published by the Library of Congress (Washington
78 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
borderline of orchestral and true chamber music, but it belongs to
the latter even more surely than Schubert’s mixed string and wind
Octet composed in the same year, 1825. Mendelssohn at the age of
16 treats his eight instruments on terms of impartial equality, while
ensuring that their most telling registers are interlaced to obtain every
possible shade of colour and density. The Andante is particularly rich
in such effects, and the Scherzo, whether or not it has behind it a
programme such as Goethe's Walpurgis scene, weaves a tapestry of
pure sound extending at a few points into twelve real parts and
surpassing in brilliance the much later Midsummer Night's Dream
Scherzo. The Finale comes perilously close to satirizing Beethoven
by juxtaposing ethereal fantasy with the grotesque, besides bringing
off a coup de theätre with its fleeting reminiscence of the Scherzo.
The Octet remains unchallenged in its inventive distinction, even
though it had its would-be imitators such as Gade, whose String Octet
appeared in 1848. Spohr’s four double quartets, while employing the
same instruments as those of the Mendelssohn Octet, were not
intended as competitors, as Spohr himself made quite clear:
My four double quartets remain the only ones of their kind. An octet for
stringed instruments by Mendelssohn-Bartholdy belongs to quite another
kind of art, in which the two quartets do not concert and interchange in
double chorus with each other, but all instruments work together.?4
The distinction, so frankly and fairly stated, should allow Spohr full
credit for his own kind of originality. In his earlier experiments with
the medium he was inclined to make one of the quartets subservient
to the other, but they are treated more equally in the fourth of the
series (Op. 136 in G minor) (1847). The opening Adagio of the
Double Quartet No. 3, Op. 87, written in 1833, testifies to Spohr's
keen ear for instrumental and harmonic colour (Ex. 41). These four
works represent only a small fraction of Spohr's assiduous cultivation
of the string quartet. In all he left more than thirty examples, ranging
from marketable Gebrauchsmusik to display pieces specified as
Quatuor brillant. Most, if not all of these must be assumed to have
long outlived their usefulness, but the double quartets and the violin
duets—another genre he exploited most ably—constitute subspecies
of string chamber music that should not be entirely neglected. A
DC, 1973), with a critical introduction by Jon Newsom, who lists the cuts and other alterations
made by the composer between completing the manuscript in Berlin on 15 October 1825 and
publishing the string parts with Breitkopf and Härtel in 1832. The first printed full score was
published in 1848, the year after Mendelssohn's death.
34 Spohr, Selbstbiographie, ii. 162.
H9
CHAMBER MUSIC BY MENDELSSOHN AND SPOHR
Ex. 41
I een EH
o ARC Reeg ES
= Cik
RR
Spohr helped to preserve and indeed advance string
technique in an age dominated, as we have seen, by the piano 29
э”
great violinist
35 Yet such a comparatively late work as Spohr's Piano Trio, Op. 133 (1846), shows not
which he plainly
H
only a virtuosic violin part but also a good deal of empty keyboard rhetoric
regarded as proper to the genre though he disclaimed any pianistic skill.
80 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
THE PERIOD IN PERSPECTIVE
It would be easy to regard the period between the death of
Beethoven and the beginning of Brahms’s career in the 1850s as a
trough of depression in chamber music, relieved only by the
complementary talents of Mendelssohn and Schumann. Such a view
would be both superficial and unhistorical. Mendelssohn’s precocity
can give rise to a distortion of perspective. He was writing his first
published works—the Piano Quartets, Opp. 1, 2, and 3)—at a date
when Beethoven was producing his late quartets and Schubert had
not yet written his Octet, his three finest string quartets, the Quintet
with two cellos, and the B flat and E flat piano trios. On the other
hand, the tragic brevity of the lives of both Schumann and
Mendelssohn (and of Schubert) contrasts poignantly with the lon-
gevity of many of their contemporaries who were born in the last
decades of the previous century. Cherubini died in 1842 at the ripe
age of 82, Kalkbrenner at 64, Spohr at 75, and Moscheles at 76, the
last two surviving both Mendelssohn and Schumann. Ferdinand
Hiller, one of Hummel's most successful pupils, was born in 1811,
only two years after Mendelssohn, but lived until 1885, and Gade,
born in 1817, had seventy-three years before him. While a cynic
might contend that all these were men who avoided the proverbial
effects of being beloved by the gods, they were nevertheless able to
amass great volumes of work (whatever judgements may be made
on its quality), to set fashions, and to control taste over many
decades, and their influence must be taken into account in surveying
the period, a point well made by Leon Plantinga. Emphasizing the
need to 'investigate a full cross-section of the repertory’ on the
ground that “Ше commonplace is often of special value in determining
the prevailing norms and procedures of an ега”, he notes that *what
most interested Schumann was the best achievements of his romantic
contemporaries; but he always saw their work against the backdrop
of contemporary musical culture as a whole'.?6
High among the secondary masters of the 1830s, must be placed
Hummel, who in 1834 took Schumann to task for ‘abrupt changes
of harmony’. In fact Hummel was far from being devoid of a spirit
of adventure; his E flat Quintet, Op. 87 (1821), for violin, viola,
cello, double-bass, and piano, has a thoroughly unconventional key
scheme, starting as it does in the tonic minor and soon modulating
enharmonically to A major—a gesture that Schumann himself might
have envied. In his sense of instrumental colour Hummel had shown
36 Plantinga, Schumann as Critic, pp. 137-8.
THE PERIOD IN PERSPECTIVE 81
highly Romantic tendencies even earlier, when in 1816 he produced
his already mentioned D minor Septet. He could equal Weber in
evoking the magic of the natural horn; he had a partiality for viola
tone; he wrote admirably for woodwind; and in the second septet,
Septett militaire, Op. 114 (1830), he anticipated Saint-Saéns by
including the trumpet in a chamber ensemble. Despite the Scan-
dinavians and the modest contributions of Sterndale Bennett, Félicien
David, and the young César Franck, chamber music was essentially
a Teutonic field. The only prolific non-Germans were two wealthy
English amateurs who both studied with Reicha in Paris, George
Onslow (1783-1852) and John Lodge Ellerton (1807-73). Onslow
settled permanently in France where he composed thirty-six string
quartets, thirty-eight string quintets,?” and other chamber music,
including one or two works for wind. The Finale of his Sextuor, Op.
77 (b), for flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, double bass, and piano,
offers a good example of his handling of this medium (Ex. 42). As
exacting a judge as Mendelssohn could enquire through Moscheles
whether Cherubini and Onslow had recently produced anything
new,38 and Schumann coupled Onslow’s name with Mendelssohn's
as a preserver of the authentic Classical quartet style.?? Ellerton also
cultivated that style in his fifty-four quintets, witness the slow
movement (Ex. 43) and the Scherzo (Ex. 44) of his Op. 62.
Yet while all these, with other second- or third-rank figures,
must be taken into account, nothing can diminish the overriding
significance of the brief and meteoric careers of Mendelssohn and
Schumann. It was largely through their efforts that by the end of
the half-century there had come about a regeneration of instrumental
composition in the forms of duet sonata, piano trio, and string
quartet. They had realized, and lost no opportunity of impressing
on their contemporaries, that the way to ensure a bright future for
German music was dependent on taking a long, respectful, but by
no means antiquarian look at the past, now revealed as containing
not only the great masters of the age of the sonata, but also the
supreme contrapuntist, J. S. Bach. Armed with a ready if sometimes
extravagant pen, Schumann had almost completely routed the
philistine army of showy keyboard virtuosi whose exhibitionism was
37 Two of Onslow's quintets are discussed, with quotations, by H. Woollett in Cobbett,
Survey, ii. 195-9.
38 Letter, 30 Nov. 1839, Felix Mendelssohn, Letters, trans. Gisella Selden-Goth (London,
1946), 286.
39 Discussing the paucity of good quartet writing after Beethoven, Schumann sums up in these
words: 'Onslow allein fand Anklang, und spáter Mendelssohn, dessen aristokratisch-poetischem
Character diese Gattung auch besonders zusagen muss' (Neue Zeitschrift, 16 (1842), 160).
CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
Allegretto quasi allegro
82
Ех. 42
fl tacet.
a
=
Den
DNE:
D
Së
ees "RE L
y |)
Andante con moto
Ex. 43
THE PERIOD IN PERSPECTIVE
Ex. 44
Allegretto vivace
|
|
p leggiero
84 CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
in danger of debasing the European inheritance of instrumental
forms. Mendelssohn through his executant skills and his rigorous
educational ideals—and especially through the founding of the
Leipzig Conservatory—had struck powerful blows against amateur-
ism, while providing amateurs with material and standards of
performance that might be within their reach, given sincere endeav-
our. These were policies that had their limitations, one of the most
serious being an excess of zeal for the German tradition and a failure
to discern the distinct but positive qualities of French art. The
flowering, less than a quarter of a century later, of a national French
school of instrumental music, including chamber music, was to take
the form of a conscious reaction against the German aesthetic
hegemony that Mendelssohn and Schumann (and Brahms after them)
had made strenuous efforts to preserve.
ПІ
ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
(a) GRAND OPÉRA
By DAvID CHARLTON
THE phrase grand opéra had been applied to French recitative opera
since the eighteenth century, but it subsequently came to apply
particularly to serious French works in the Romantic period. One
significant milestone in the genre's evolution was Fernand Cortez by
Spontini (1809; rev. 1817), in whose preface the librettist, Etienne
de Jouy, wrote: ‘French grand opéra has at least as much connection
with epic as with tragedy. Napoleon and the Bourbons who
succeeded him gave the Paris Opéra the traditional role of presenting
operas inherently symbolizing the ‘grandeur’ of the State. This was
done as much through richness of material means as through what
was considered proper subject-matter from mythology or history.
Those responsible for grand opéra after 1830 did not abandon such
criteria, but the various developments in public taste, in theatrical
technique, and in musical language coalesced with them, resulting
in a remarkably potent series of works.
STAGING AND COSTUME
Since grand opéra was the product of unusual cultural and political
factors, its evolution can be understood only with reference to the
conditions of the 1820s. Although the Paris Opera received much
subsidy under Louis ХУШ (d. 1824) and Charles X (reigned 1824-
30), it had lost artistic credibility in most spheres of its activity.
Rossini’s presence in Paris! brought about the development of
modern vocal technique, and the nurture of young voices was to be
continued by Meyerbeer, who arrived there in January 1825. The
erection of a new building (rue Le Peletier, 1822) could not disguise
the basic absence of co-ordination between internal departments,
resulting in anachronistic costumes and sets, inexact props, and poor
1 See Vol. VIII, pp. 103 ff.
86 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
lighting. The transformation and artistic reconnection of these
elements occurred little by little, as did the evolution of the required
new type of opera libretto.
Gas stage lighting was available from 1822. The principal set
designer, Pierre Luc Charles Ciceri, tried out at the same time
atmospheric settings which reorganized stage spate on different levels
(for example, diagonal staircases) and made the actors seem part of
their stage environment, using three-dimensional scenery that could
be walked on. These sets were not at first for the Opera but for the
Theätre de la Porte Saint-Martin—for example, Le Chäteau de
Kenilworth (1822).? The 1820s saw the gradual perfection of huge
painted canvases, lit by changing sources of light, and giving the
illusion of a transformation before one's eyes.? Standards of public
expectation in visual matters inevitably rose.
Historical accuracy, in the interests of local colour, was tentatively
explored in the Opéra's troubadour costumes and Ciceri’s and
Daguerre's 'cháteau d’Eidelbert’ in Alfred le Grand (1822), a ballet-
pantomime of no musical importance. But only eight out of thirty-two
works from 1822 to 1830 adopted medieval settings, and very often,
as in the eighteenth century, sets were reused from work to work; it
was traditional for the Opéra to spend more on costumes than sets.4
These priorities were to be reversed in Meyerbeer's Robert le diable
(1831), although Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829) had also had
completely new painted sets.
The official beginnings of the attempt to unify the constituent
elements of opera (a unification such as Weber had dreamed of)
lay in the creation in April 1827 of the ‘Comité de mises-en-scene’
on which sat the architect and stage designer Duponchel, and its
appointment of a staging manager in 1828.? In fact this manager,
Solomé, published the first full account devoted exclusively to an
? Marie-Antoinette Allévy, La Mise en scene en France dans la premiere moitié du dix-neuviéme
siécle (Paris, 1938), Plate 8; Nicole Wild, ‘La Recherche de la précision historique chez les
décorateurs de l'Opéra de Paris au XIXéme siécle', in Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (eds.),
Berkeley 1977: Zwölfter Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft (Kassel, 1981), 453-
63.
3 They were first developed by L. J. M. Daguerre in his Diorama (Paris, 1822-39). Daguerre
designed for the Théátre de l'Ambigu-Comique (1816-22) but also worked for the Opéra
(1820-2) with Ciceri.
4 Catherine Join-Diéterle, ‘Robert le diable: Le premier opera romantique', Romantisme,
28/9 (1980), 147-66; ibid., ‘La Monarchie, source d'inspiration de l'Opéra à l'époque
romantique', Revue d'histoire du théátre, 35 (1983-4), 430-41.
5 H. Robert Cohen, “Оп the Reconstruction of the Visual Elements of French Grand Opera:
Unexplored Sources in Parisian Collections’, in Heartz and Wade (eds.), Berkeley 1977,
pp. 463-80.
A UBERS TA MUETTE DE RORTICI 87
opera’s staging, that of Daniel Auber’s La Muette de Portici, in the
same year, and so inaugurated a long-lasting custom.
AUBER'S LA MUETTE DE PORTICI
Auber’s Muette (1828) takes its place as the prototype of grand
opéra because it was not just a musical triumph, but a carefully
integrated joint enterprise. The libretto was by Eugène Scribe (1791-
1861), already a seasoned and eclectic popular dramatist, and Auber’s
operatic partner since 1823. Its five-act scheme was evolved from a
more conventional three-act one, and six different settings were
stipulated. The chorus evoked scenes from popular life, supposedly
in 1647, local colour being promoted by national dances: guaracha
and bolero in Act I, tarantella in Act III. The sensational close of
Act V, the eruption of Vesuvius, required ‘machinery never before
used in Paris’.” Evidence of a flexible, modern use of the stage,
borrowed, like all the foregoing visual elements, from popular theatre
practice, exists in the published production book.8
While the choice of a subject from history was not a surprise, its
theme of revolution was quite untypical. The political orientation of
the Opéra under the Restoration was often overtly monarchic
blatantly seen in various allegories by lesser composers.? If public
interest in the Masaniello subject was strong, Scribe's first (three-act)
version of the libretto, probably dating from 1825, shows the
Revolution in a more sentimental light than the final one. With the
expansion to five acts came the greater integration of the story of
Fenella (the dumb girl, wooed and rejected by the viceroy's son)
with that of the Revolution (Masaniello's leadership of the revolt of
the Neapolitans against the Spaniards). This fictional interweaving—
Fenella was a character taken out of Walter Scott's Peveril of the
Peak— confirmed the way forward for grand opéra by playing off the
theme of a doomed love against the backdrop of inexorable historical
forces.
Scribe and (we must assume) Auber granted a limited role to
6 The settings, all different, alternated between the court environment (Acts I, III, V) and
the people's environment. This itself dramatized the theme of separation between rulers and
ruled. On the three-act version, see Jean Mongrédien, ‘Variations sur un theme: Masaniello’,
in Michael Arndt and Michael Walter (eds.), Jahrbuch für Opernforschung 1985 (Frankfurt am
Main, 1985), 90-121.
* Hellmuth Christian Wolff, Oper: Szene und Darstellung von 1600 bis 1900 (Musikgeschichte
in Bildern, IV/1; Leipzig, 1968), 166.
8 Karin Pendle, ‘The Boulevard Theaters and Continuity in French Opera of the Nineteenth
Century’, in Peter Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen- Thirties (New York, 1987), 509-
35.
9 See Join-Dieterle, ‘La Monarchie’.
88 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
conventional solos, duets, or trios, but an expanded part for the
chorus both alone and in combination with soloists. All the solos
and ensembles except the Princess Elvire’s Act I showpiece have a
directly dramatic function— whether actively or ironically—and the
chorus, after dominating Act I, leads musically and dramatically in
the climaxes of the next three acts. This ensures the popular tone of
the whole, counterbalancing the facts that Masaniello is murdered
as a counter-revolutionary and that the Spaniards are finally
victorious.
Events surrounding many performances of La Muette in Europe—
not just the one that sparked the Belgian Revolution of 1830— prove
the correctness of Wagner's recollection that ‘seldom was an artistic
phenomenon more closely related to events of world importance'.19
But one must acknowledge, with Wagner, that the opera's power
stems from Auber's intense, imaginative score. (The work was seen
at the Opéra until 1882 in 488 performances.!1) Just as Scribe respects
the unities (those of place and time would in future often be broken),
so Auber confers unusual unity upon his score and the drama by
scrupulously responding to each event, (especially in harmony), by
using flexible verbal-musical rhythms, by the subtle transfer of motifs
from act to act, and by expert pacing of events. The simplest and
most effective example of such pacing is the withholding of the theme
epitomizing Masaniello's revolutionary triumph in Act IV until a
long way into the final sequence (Ex. 45), suddenly raising the whole
temperature. Auber, in the tragic fifth act, shrank neither from a
five-note dissonance, nor from the use of a gong, nor from extended
Ex. 45
Allegro J =88
Hon - neut, hon - neur— et gloi - re, hon-neur. . hon-
neure er ро > ге
(Honour and glory)
10 Richard Wagner, ‘Erinnerungen an Auber’ (1871); repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte
Schriften und Dichtungen, ix (Leipzig, 1873), 51-73; trans. in Richard Wagner's Prose Works,
ed. and trans. William Ashton Ellis, v (London, 1896), 35-55. See too Ludwig Finscher,
*Aubers La Muette de Portici und die Anfänge der Grand-opéra', in Jürgen Schläder and
Reinhold Quandt (eds.), Festschrift Heinz Becker (n.p., 1982), 87-105.
11 Totals for all operas to 1892 are given in Albert Soubies, Soixante-sept ans à l'Opéra en
une page (Paris, 1893); they are updated in Stéphane Wolff, L'Opéra au Palais Garnier (1875-
1962) (Paris, 1962; repr. Geneva, 1983); Wolff gives the total as 489 for La Muette.
EXTERNAL TRAITS 89
periods of free, through-composed irregularity. These tendencies,
and the habitual transformation of conventional Italianate forms in
set pieces, showed that French artists could offer a serious alternative
to the Rossinian styles that had predominated for a decade.
EXTERNAL TRAITS
The success of La Muette and of Guillaume Tell (the latter was
shown every year in Paris until 1892) determined essential traits of
grand opéra before the July Revolution of 1830: however, the regime
of Louis-Philippe (the ‘bourgeois monarch’) until 1848 placed
entrepreneurs in charge of the Opéra, though it limited their freedom
by means of an appointed committee. Louis Veron!? budgeted large
sums for costumes and scenery (Ciceri’s pupils Séchan, Philastre,
and Cambon could create extravagantly realistic backdrops) and
introduced real waterfalls, better gas lighting, etc. Against a different
background for each act, singers, chorus, and dancers in appropriate
costumes—metal armour was created for Halévy’s La Juive—moved
in carefully rehearsed grouped masses, whose disposition (always
published) was integral to the whole.!3 Veron wrote: ‘When one has
... an orchestra of more than eighty musicians, nearly eighty chorus
members, male and female, eighty supernumeraries, not counting
children, a company of sixty stage hands [machinistes] for moving
sets, the public listens and expects great things from you’.!4 Stage
sets became very realistic in the 1840s, attracting Delacroix’s criticism
that they were therefore un-Romantic and puerile.
So grand opéra came to refer to a type of large-scale work at the
Opéra, typically having a tragic or melodramatic ending. It often
consisted of five acts (so renewing Baroque practice), but sometimes
four. Its dramatic sources rejected Classicism in favour of history,
whether medieval (Robert le diable), Renaissance (La Juive), or
modern (Gustave ПЇ).1® In dramatic handling, grand opéra utilized
1? Véron, a doctor and pioneer of patent medicine, was chosen on payment of 250,000
francs to run the Opéra as a private enterprise, with some state subsidy; he was succeeded in
1835 by Edmond Duponchel. Véron's methods included contractual penalty clauses for
composers who did not deliver on time. The exact relation between government, its Commission
de Surveillance, and the entrepreneur-directors, is explored in Jane Fulcher, The Nation's
Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge, 1987).
13 Cohen, ‘Reconstruction’; Wild, ‘La Recherche’, p. 454, shows that the designer for La
Juive undertook research trips in order to achieve a faithful picture of the art and architecture
of South Germany between 1400 and 1430.
14 Louis Véron, Mémoires d'un bourgeois de Paris (Paris, 1853-55), iii. 252, translated and
discussed in Karin Pendle, Eugéne Scribe and French Opera of the 19th Century (Ann Arbor,
1979), 50.
15 Historically informative footnotes appeared in the printed librettos, and are sometimes
essential to the understanding of a work.
90 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
the chorus to a high degree, giving it different roles within one work,
and incorporated at least one ballet sequence, woven into the action
with greater or lesser plausibility, in any act, as in earlier tragedie
lyrique. Certain operas included large ceremonial processions, oc-
casionally using horses, and enabling composers to invent effects on
the largest scale; stage bands found a natural place.
Aspects of grand opéra, including visual local colour, overlapped
with concerns of the Romantics: first, the concern with contrasts,
for example, freedom to jump forward in time, to break the unity
of place, or to exploit enormous contrasts in musical scale, say
between the monumental tutti and the use of only one or two
instruments and a voice; second, the use of musical local colour in
conceiving certain scenes, for example, the Nightwatchman scene in
Les Huguenots; third, the choice of themes involving religion,
reflecting intense Romantic preoccupations with ‘new religious
formulations';!i6 and last, but certainly not least, the portrayal of
individuals in relation to a given society. Without arguing that grand
opéra attained any philosophical depth, one may claim that an
abiding concern (beneath the trappings of history) was morality in
relation to society. Its main characters are placed— often as ordinary
people caught up in events— so that in some sense they are projected
as representatives of groups. This reflected the tendency of French
Romantics ‘less to the particular and private than to the general
and impersonal'.!? Against fateful human decisions, not excluding
political force majeure (as in La Muette de Portici), themes of doomed
love are played out.
At the same time grand opéra did not aspire to Victor Hugo's
formulation of the Romantic contrast between the 'sublime and
grotesque', at least so far as juxtaposing tragedy and comedy,
following Shakespeare. And Hugo's desire for a truly all-pervasive
use of local colour was one that only the greatest composers could
hope to attain on a five-act scale. Some operas concentrated on the
tribulations of leaders more than those of society at large (Gustave
III, Charles VI), and it has been aptly observed that every Paris
Opéra work from 1840 to 1848 made allusion in some degree to
royalty.18
Eugene Scribe, who wrote the texts for all four of Meyerbeer’s
16 D, G. Charlton, ‘Religious and Political Thought’, in D. С. Charlton (ed.), The French
Romantics (Cambridge, 1984), 1. 33 ff.
17 Charlton, ‘The French Romantic Movement’, in The French Romantics, i. 24. Robert le
diable, however, stems from a different type of plot.
18 Join-Diéterle, ‘La Monarchie’, p. 437: she sees here ‘a nostalgia for royal ceremonies’.
Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, which is sui generis, comes nearest to all Hugo’s formulations.
A NEW DESIGN ELEMENT 91
grands opéras was the dominating librettist during the period. That
he worked to a rigid formula is far from the truth; he was ready
both to modify his work for his composer and permit others to make
small text changes, subject to his approval.!? His marked artistic
limitations in language and characterization were made up for by
his eye for piquant situations, and certain techniques from the
‘well-made’ plays which were his trademark: the high point prepared
by events before the story begins; the central misunderstanding (or
quiproquo) clear to the audience but not to all the characters; the
logical progress of each act.2°
A NEW DESIGN ELEMENT
Scribe did, however, develop one particular type of dramatic coup
as he gained grand opéra experience. Typically it is melodramatic,
and springs a problem on a character, the nature of which we already
suspect. But it was found —even by Verdi— most suitable as a central
focus in a long five-act structure. In La Muette de Portici Scribe created
such a focus in Act IV by juxtaposing the ‘private’ and ‘public’ strands
of the story in one climactic episode, using the massed forces of the
Opéra company (see Ex. 45, above). Subsequent librettos by Scribe,
and his emulators, refined the management of this type of coup so that
it became not merely a juxtaposition, but an absolute, even shocking
intersection of the private dilemma and the public ceremony. The vast
stage forces thereby earned their validity through the greater or lesser
worth of the dramatic irony present in a given case.
The coup is still fairly simple in La Juive, Act III. Rachel realizes
Léopold's true identity and denounces him in the midst of state
celebrations in his honour. The /ocus classicus of the Scribe coup
occurs in Meyerbeer's Le Prophéte. Jean, the Anabaptist leader, has
captured Münster. In a spectacular scene in Act IV he is crowned
in the cathedral, as the son of God. Unknown to anyone, his mother
has sought him out; at a crucial moment she recognizes him and
exclaims, ‘My son!’ The whole edifice of the Anabaptists (and of
history: the Münster episode is authentic) is about to be set tumbling,
when Jean simply out-dares his mother by denying her, pronouncing
her silence as a ‘miracle’. The ceremony continues.
Verdi never ceased to be haunted by this coup. In Les Vépres
19 Léon Halévy, F. Halévy: Sa Vie et ses euvres (2nd edn.; Paris, 1863), 23-5. Occasionally
the printed libretto will show significant divergencies from the score. Scribe's career in opéra
comique, before 1828, is described in the following section.
20 Pendle, Eugene Scribe, p. 85. Yet Gustave III is episodic in structure and Guido et Ginevra
has its intrigue curtailed by the disruptive effects of the Florentine plague.
92 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
siciliennes, Act IV, a character reveals his paternity to the assembled
public, forced to do so by his private dilemma. Act III of Don Carlos
contains the equivalent scene of the auto-da-fé. Only in works without
a pronounced public political element is the coup superfluous: Robert
le diable, Guido et Ginevra, L' Africaine, and others.
INTERNAL MUSICAL TRAITS
Important vocal features of grand opéra were the extensive role of
the chorus and the nature of the duet. First acts tended to form an
exposition with chorus present throughout; last acts often harnessed
ensemble and chorus variously with solos; tableaux, processions, or
festivals gave purely musical prominence to the chorus. The duet
often replaced the solo form as the essential vehicle for the voice,
both in ubiquity and variety. In an operatic genre where dramatic
tension was an ideal, duets forwarded the action in myriad ways,
ranging from the imparting of information to argument and sep-
aration of characters, from the most stark confrontation of good
and evil to the most passionate expression of love. Although it seems
possible to relate duet forms (and finale forms) in France to the
four-section Italian outline of active, static-lyrical, active, static-
cabaletta, in practice such formalism is left behind by the dramatic
and musical responses to the individual situation.?! Solos, on the
other hand, were more relevant to the action through narrative
content (strophic forms could be used, as in opéra comique), or by
being interrupted in some way, or by being ceremonial. The basic
matrices of A (slow) B (fast) and ABA could be adopted, disguised,
or developed infinitely, particularly in an age of contrast and
experiment in the field of harmony.
Ensemble scenes could be built up from a sequence of linked
sections. In fact, as the early nineteenth century developed the
sectional solo scena, so one might say that grand opéra applied the
same principle to ensemble scenes. Different soloists could pursue
an action against a background continuum; in the librettos the latter
was indicated by blocks of regular verse, alternating with conversation
in freer form.
The use of the ‘allegro’ choral finale in various act endings (whether
for perplexity, shock, triumph. etc.) was necessary in a genre where
the chorus claimed an almost equal part alongside principals. Yet
?! Steven Huebner, "The Second Empire Operas of Charles Gounod' (Diss., Princeton,
1985), fos. 75-84. The ‘static’ sections involve parallel strophes for the singers in turn, with
more periodic phrasing. The ‘active’ sections use a variety of textures. Much research remains
to be done on formal aspects of French opera in this period.
MEYERBEER’S ROBERT LE DIABLE 93
finales were not over-abundant, if sometimes over-extended. Taken
as a whole, probably too little fresh thought went into their
composition before Meyerbeer's Le Prophéte.
Textural imagination was shown in the accompaniment to recit-
atives, helping to liberate composers from limitations of either the
plain, secco style or the dramatic accompanied style. Halévy, in
particular, used a new ‘lyrical recitative’ style, often with solo
instruments or lower strings, half-way between recitative and arioso.
Such blurring of formal distinctions was typical of the genre.
Immense care was lavished on details of orchestration and choral
textures; technical difficulties in all parts could be numerous. The
cellos played an independent and figurative melodic role. New
instruments became standard participants: trompettes à pistons, cor-
nets, valve horns, bass clarinet. The cor anglais, organ, gong, and
various bells became regular extras, as did substantial stage bands.
Halévy used anvils (La Juive), col legno bowing (Guido et Ginevra),
the mélophon, a portable free-reed instrument invented in 1837 (ibid.),
the musette (La Reine de Chypre), and four saxophones in Le Juif
errant (1852). Saxhorns appeared in the same opera, as they had in
1849 in Le Prophete.
The more popular works could attain around 500 Parisian
performances in a half-century (La Muette, La Juive, La Favorite,
Le Prophéte), while the most popular of all could reach 700-800
(Les Huguenots, Guillaume Tell, Robert le diable). The next average
level of some 150 performances was reached by Halévy's La Reine
de Chypre and Auber's Gustave III. Other works earned some
thirty to sixty performances. Verdi's Les Vépres siciliennes attained
eighty-one between 1855 and 1864.
MEYERBEER'S ROBERT LE DIABLE
The first phases of Meyerbeer's career have been described
elsewhere.?? After the Paris success of // crociato in Egitto (1825),
Meyerbeer eventually began work with Scribe on an opéra comique,
Robert le diable, in 1827. The conception outgrew the genre, but its
reworking from three to five acts was ultimately less successful than
the parallel process undergone by La Muette de Portici; the premiére
was in November 1831. Comparison shows that the scenario and
character relationships were little changed, resulting in loss of
dramatic tension, especially in Acts II and IV.
The medieval source tells of Robert, duke of Normandy, who
?? See Vol. VIII, pp. 426-9.
94 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
terrorized the region until his conversion and visit to Rome.23 Scribe
added the figure of Bertram, a fallen angel who has until midnight
to escape perdition by securing Robert’s everlasting loyalty. He is
taken for Robert’s bosom friend, but thwarts his path to legitimate
happiness, revealing himself as his father in Act V.?4
The dramatic focus of the opera 1s blurred since Robert evinces
no moral position, except chivalric patriotism, but is thrust between
the forces of evil and good. The latter is personified by Alice, the
peasant who brings a testament from Robert's dead mother which
finally causes him to abandon Bertram. Alice is well pitted against
Bertram (whose satanic nature she immediately senses), in both Act
III and V, where she has important trios with him and Robert. This
leaves Princess Isabelle of Sicily (where the action is set) in a poor
dramatic position, even though she sings opposite Robert (whom
she loves) in Acts II and IV.
Robert le diable was perceived at the time as a revolutionary
totality of stage effect, dramatic substance, and music. Its highly-
wrought score exploits great contrasts of timbre (from un-
accompanied Act III trio to full orchestra plus stage band), form,
and harmony; the veteran composer Le Sueur praised not just ‘les
magiques effets de mélodie et d'harmonie' but also the 'étonnant
ensemble simultané' of soloists, chorus, dancers, orchestra, and décor.
Meyerbeer's painstaking preparatory work shows that, although he
was part of a team, his own aim in grand opéra was to be musically
original in every way: his word setting, form, timbre, and melody
are best understood as original developments, appropriate to the
dramatic subject, forged out of a marriage between Italian (Rossini)
and German (Weber) opera types. He took it for granted that his
subject-matter would be original in opera, that it would allow for
local colour, and for sufficient choral scenes. And he habitually
demanded alterations to the libretto as he proceeded.?5
In detail, Meyerbeer's scores confirm that music, not words, took
primary responsibility for the effect; that is, Scribe’s text was cut,
23 The legend comes down in various publications, detailed in Join-Diéterle, ‘Robert le
diable’, p. 154. The opera’s composition history is shown in Pendle, Eugene Scribe, pp. 438-
42.
24 The likeness with Faust and Mephistopheles is obvious. Other sources were Latouche's
novel Le Petit Pierre (1820), Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, and Charles Robert
Maturin’s Bertram.
25 The larger ones were by Scribe, the smaller ones by anonymous assistants. See Heinz
Becker. ‘Giacomo Meyerbeers Mitarbeit an den Libretti seiner Opern’, in Carl Dahlhaus er
al., Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bonn 1970, Gesellschaft
für Musikforschung (Kassel, 1972), 155-60.
MEYERBEER'S ROBERT LE DIABLE 95
repeated, and redivided sectionally in the interests of dramatic truth
as Meyerbeer saw it. This led, for instance, to the happy combination
of chorus with aria in Bertram's Act III solo СО mon fils’); and in
ensemble or duet scenes Meyerbeer would attain impressive forms
of continuum, unified often by the developing presence of an
orchestral motif. In set pieces, Robert le diable employed more
straightforward slow-fast forms than did the composer's later French
works. А rearward-glancing technique was the use of a strophic
ballade in Act I, as often in opéra comique, to provide essential
exposition (the legend of Robert, Ex. 46), together with its later
ironic use in thematic recollections (Ex. 47). Meyerbeer also gives a
recurring motif to Robert's rival, the prince of Granada, which is
instantly recognizable if morally neutral (Ex. 48). However, in
Weber's manner, strong moral qualities were given to various keys;
perhaps Meyerbeer's most ambitious desire was to project this
conception on to a lengthy five-act work: F major ends Acts I and
V, while B minor/major is associated with Bertram and his influence.
In a remarkable section of Act III, Alice's B flat major (‘Quand je
Ex. 46
Allegro molto moderato
RIMBAUD Zu
Ja - dis reg-nait en Nor- man-di-e un prin-ce no - ble et va-leu-reux
(Long ago, in Normandy, ruled a noble, valorous prince)
Ex. 47
Le mouvement de la Ballade
Ex. 48
96 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
quittai 1а Normandie’) is intercut with diabolic В minor passages,
indicating the presence close by of demons.
Delacroix noted his preoccupation with local colour: ‘it depends
on an indefinable thing, which is not at all the exact observation of
usages and costumes,’ Meyerbeer said in 1853.26 In the most carefully
designed orchestral timbres, he sought to impait an individual tone
to all significant utterances. Robert le diable already demanded
trompettes à clef, poignantly deployed under the stage as the hero's
mother's testament is recounted in the last act (Ex. 49).
Were it not for the image of forbearance imparted by the cor
anglais in Act IV (Ex. 50) we should not be half-disposed towards
Isabelle's professed love for Robert, nor towards his decision to
follow the path of virtue which she symbolizes. Perhaps typical of
the opera's problems is that its most celebrated episode is dramatically
tenuous: the moonlit cloister with its eerie frisson of the blasphemous
mixed with the erotic, as spirits of dissipated nuns dance and seduce
Robert into stealing a sacred twig.?" There can be no comparison
Ex. 49
Andante cantabile
keyed tpt (/iez autant que possible)
trés détaché
hn PP d4
db (pizz.), timp timp
The keyed trumpets must be placed outside the orchestra pit: their sound must produce the
effect of distance, and as if below ground. In Paris they are placed under the stage, below the
prompter.
Ex. 50
Poco andantino
26 Journal de Eugène Delacroix: Nouvelle édition publiée daprès le manuscrit original, ed.
André Joubin (Paris, 1932); Eng. trans., Walter Pach, The Journal of Eugène Delacroix (New
York, 1937), 360.
27 The bill for painting sets (37,474 francs) amounted to more than the budget for Guillaume
Tell (Join-Diéterle, ‘Robert le Diable’, p. 161).
MEYERBEER'S LES HUGUENOTS 97
with Berlioz's Ronde du sabbat of 1830, for Meyerbeer is obliged to
paint rather the inner dialogue between male and female, which he
does with great orchestral sensibility, anticipating Berlioz's love scene
in Roméo et Juliette.
Meyerbeer's conception of a given role was always bound up with
the voice of a particular singer. This did not, however, make for
self-indulgent display so much as allow him to stretch technique in
pursuit of new musico-dramatic ideas.
MEYERBEER'S LES HUGUENOTS
Les Huguenots (1836), Meyerbeer's finest French opera, was also
a popular one. The source was a Romantic text: Mérimée's Chronique
du régne de Charles IX (1829). Of all grands opéras, it comes closest
in every way to the acid truth about politics and persecution; not
only are the Protestants Raoul and Marcel killed, but also the
Catholic-born Valentine (who dies loving Raoul and abjuring her
religion) and Valentine's Catholic husband Nevers (who dies for his
humanity towards Marcel). The work ends with the St Bartholomew
Day massacre (24 August 1572) portrayed with brutal force in Act
V; its theme is religious fanaticism, too strong to be quelled by
royalty (in the form of Marguerite de Valois)?* and destined to be
fanned into flame by a tragic misunderstanding between Raoul and
Valentine. The couple's recent meeting and incipient love is told in
Raoul’s Act I romance, ‘Plus blanche que la blanche hermine’, with
viola obbligato. It is abundantly clear that the sympathies of librettist
and composer lay with the Protestant minority; unexpectedly,
perhaps, their engagement transcended historical limitations by
avoiding sentimentality as regards the main characters. They thus
created a masterpiece of Romantic tragedy.
Meyerbeer's fertile musical invention is tailored in an unusually
focused way. The drama commences, in both a spatial and temporal
sense, on a relaxed, idyllic, even lightly humorous plane; but, from
the moment of the (unsuccessful) reconciliation of parties ending
Act II, the work steadily concentrates time, place, and action into a
relentless spiral that ends with cold-blooded murder in a Paris gutter
when Valentine is shot as a Protestant by her fanatical father; he
recognizes her too late. This process is determined by the music both
superficially and internally: the first part of Act II adopts, for
example, a showy, effusive style for Marguerite and includes one of
28 Marguerite's wedding to Henri IV of Navarre (actually 18 August 1572) is represented
in the interrupted ball scene, Act V, sc. i. Henri is not impersonated.
98 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
the obligatory ballet sequences, that of bathing courtesans in the
gardens of Chenonceaux. This and Marguerite’s sentimental approach
towards religious reconciliation—blindfolded Raoul is ushered in to
meet his arranged match— merely reinforces the weak impression of
the monarchy. True power lies with the Catholic conspirators: their
music in Act IV is a depiction of righteous blood-lust, set as a
through-composed ensemble scene and unified by recurrences of a
melody whose similarity to the ‘Marseillaise’ is musically and
politically self-explanatory and abiding (Ex. 51). Yet more chilling,
in the same scene, is the music for the benediction of swords by
monks, as stark, alienating, and horribly inevitable as the gesture
itself (Ex. 52). Its tonal relationship of flat VI to tonic (E to A flat)
exists also simultaneously on a higher structural level (benediction
scene in A flat within general tonic E) and it is no accident that we
have already heard it in Act II at an earlier Catholic ritual: the
wedding procession of Valentine and Nevers (Ex. 53).
In Les Huguenots Meyerbeer attained the Romantic ideal of
pervasive local colour. This was possible through the unique character
Ех. 51
Andantino J =88
ST BRIS
P
Pour cet - te cau - se sain-te o - bé - is-sez sans crain-te, o-
bé - is-sez sans crain-te___ amon Dieu, à mon Dieu et mon roi!
(For this holy cause obey my God and my king without fear!)
Ex. 52 (АП those present draw
Poco andante | =80 their swords and
CONSPIRATORS daggers and the monks
= " б e @ — bless the arms.)
Se Ss ae сте a Ge кле т
aes Ss E se
[2 NEE ML m lE анан
Glai - ves pi - eux sain - tes é- pé- es
ophicleide | `
(Pious, holy swords)
MEYERBEER'S LES HUGUENOTS 99
Ех. 53
Arme
of Marcel, Raoul’s old retainer. Marcel is not only a bluff, implacable,
slightly grotesque veteran of the religious battle of La Rochelle (Act
I aria, ‘Piff, paff). He personifies religious faith at a depth that
makes religion's other manifestations in the opera seem unworthy.
This touches both his vocabulary and his music. Indeed, in Raoul's
and Valentine's last hour, Marcel catechizes them in the faith that
will make them all martyrs. Meyerbeer's extraordinarily futuristic
music is accompanied here by a single bass clarinet (Exx. 54-5).
For his recitative utterances, Marcel has a personal tone-colour:
triple-stopped cello, with double-bass, alternating with very simple
unisons or contrapuntal lines, giving an ‘ancient’ effect.?? Finally,
and most importantly, Marcel is often given the music of Luther's
chorale, ‘Ein’ feste Burg',?? which provides the musical material of
Ex. 54
Molto maestoso J =63
MARCEL А - vez vous re - je - té tou-te chai-ne mor - tel - le?
n |
(Have you cast off all mortal fetters?)
ЕК 55
VALENTINE
Ëss —m
= үа
кг Б — p
Peer
(Yes, faith at last governs our hearts in peace)
29 In a letter to Scribe (2 July 1834) Meyerbeer recalls that Scribe’s 'execution of the role
of Marcel did not agree with the idea of the musical character of the role' that the composer
had desired. ‘I have rewritten the whole of Marcel's part for my musical needs.’ This proves
the composer's unified view of Marcel’s function. See Giacomo Meyerbeer Briefwechsel und
Tagebücher; ii. 1825-1836, ed. Heinz Becker (Berlin, 1970), 376-7.
30 Noted in the full score as ‘Seigneur, rempart et seul soutien’. Thus, ‘sublime’ musical
material issues from a 'grotesque' character.
100 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ex. 56
Poco andante d =84 m m
|
Ex
Andante amoroso J =60
RAOUL ==. у PEN
EEE pp lg ge 8
> =
H
dit: ouitu m’ai - mes! Dans... ma_ nuit
[quelle étoile a brillé?]
TU. e se" las
(You said so: yes, you love me! In my darkness [what star has shone?])
the opera's prelude-like overture (Ex. 56). At first, when sung in Act
I, it appears in gross musical distinction from other material. But,
as matters proceed, Meyerbeer is able to make its scalic motifs form
the basis of important themes, tightening the musical fabric like an
enveloping net in order to form a musical analogue of the resilience
of Huguenot faith, as in the cavatina in Act IV (Ex. 57).?!
Many other scattered musical correspondences add to the force
of this score, as do the beauty of the duet ‘Tu l'as dit’, sung by the
hapless lovers as the hour of the massacre approaches, and the
improved unity of style as compared with Robert le diable. Colourful
invention ran high, too, in the crowd scenes in Act III (Huguenot
soldiers, Bohemian dancers, the calling of the curfew, final festive
music).
AUBER'S GUSTAVE III, OU LE BAL MASQUE
Auber's and Scribe's five-act opéra historique appeared in 1833 but
the libretto stems from before 1830. Telling of the love of the Swedish
3! One need hardly recall the difficulties still faced socially in many quarters by those of
Meyerbeer's own (Jewish) faith.
HALEVY’S LA JUIVE 101
king for Amelie, wife of his adviser Ankaström, it ends with
Gustave’s assassination (actually in 1792) at a spectacular masked
ball. The libretto was adapted by Rossi for Gabussi, by Cammarano
for Mercadante, and by Somma for Verdi, Un ballo in maschera.
Even on the French stage the employment of a fortune-teller, a ball
scene, and a page role sung in travesti was probably influential:
both the latter reappear in Les Huguenots, for example. Seemingly
composed in some haste, Auber’s score lacks the richness and
psychological truth of La Muette, particularly in the ensemble scenes
that include Gustave’s enemies.3? Auber also seems to have been less
than inspired by the character of Amelie herself. However, he covered
a wide spectrum of musical expression in the score as a whole, from
Gustave’s love of the arts, seen in his rehearsal of Gustave Wasa in
Act I, to the stark E flat minor opening of Act III, set in a
horrifying snowbound landscape at night. Auber’s fluency was suited
to the many dances and dance-influenced ensembles, yet
he persistently employed augmented-sixth progressions too, as in
Ex. 58, the moment in Act III when Ankaström first realizes that
his wife has met the king alone.
HALEVY’S LA JUIVE
The outstanding aspects of Halévy's style in his grands operas are,
first, a vocal melody of completely un-Italian cast (except in certain
nostalgic pieces or love duets), produced not by elimination of
symmetry but by elimination of ornament, and a propensity for
syllabic setting; second, a keen sense of choral and orchestral
timbre; and, third, a conscientious approach to dramatic setting,
whether in the matter of altering the layout of a libretto in detail,
or, for example, in the investing of subtle forms of musical local
colour.33 Halévy’s scores now seem wanting in stylistic subtlety and
32 There may have been political reasons for this. Auber had been made aware by the King
of the delicate consequences of the popularity of La Muette.
33 This was strongly appreciated by Wagner: “To solve this problem, it was no question of
consulting antiquarian documents ... [but] to lend the music the perfume of the epoch.’ ‘La
102 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
melodic originality; but this is potentially less damaging than the
way his psychological insight seems to fall prey їо а certain formalism
in organization. One unexpected correlative of this is Halevy’s
reluctance (after La Juive) to build up effective contrapuntal en-
sembles which would express essential differences of motivation.
La Juive (1835) has a finely designed libretto, set in Constance in
1414, where the historical Cardinal Brogni presided over a grand
council to heal the Church’s schisms and thus assert its authority in
a Germany menaced by the teachings of John Hus. Although the
Hussites were used elsewhere in Romantic art to evoke the desire
for freedom,?4 Scribe chose to highlight the persecution of Jews. The
five acts alternate smoothly between public and private events.
Against the massive public celebration of the Council and eventual
entrance of the emperor, Sigismond, Act I depicts the courageous
independence of Eléazar, who is set on by the mob for working (he
is a goldsmith) and for entering the cathedral portico.?? His supposed
daughter, Rachel, is in love with 'Samuel', actually the popular
military leader Léopold, who confesses his Christianity to her in
Act II. His true identity and alliance with Princess Eudoxie is realized
by Rachel only in Act III. Rachel publicly condemns him, but is
herself arraigned. Eléazar refuses to save her life and his own by
abjuring his faith, revealing to the Cardinal at the last moment that
the girl was Brogni's lost daughter, sole vestige of a tragic earlier
life before he entered the Church.
Although it contains the apotheosis of the Scribean quiproquo, La
Juive employs perhaps the least amount of stage action possible in
a grand opéra, giving it an unusually Classical temper. А series of
well-contrived duets exploits the many layers of irony available
(Rachel-Léopold, Brogni-Eléazar, Brogni-Rachel) and Scribe al-
lowed the development of the character of Eléazar: religious per-
secution finally determines his course of vengeance, for he is deeply
attached to Rachel. Brogni is a tolerant figure, not a caricature,
leaving fanaticism as the common enemy.
The three ‘public’ acts are framed in different ways: Act I by a
grand Te Deum, with full organ (Ex. 59), Act III by G minor, and
Reine de Chypre d Halévy’ (1842); repr. in Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen,
ed. H. von Wolzogen and R. Sternfeld, xii (Leipzig, 1911); trans. in Ellis, Prose Works, viii.
181.
31 For example, Carl Friedrich Lessing's painting The Hussite Sermon (1836), reproduced
in Hugh Honour, Remanticism (Harmondsworth, 1981), 227.
35 In the original libretto Eléazar was ducked in the lake by the drunken crowd and
reappeared bleeding and with torn clothes.
HALÉVY'S LA JUIVE 103
Ex. 59
Allegro moderato
CHORUS
(+ organ) (organ holds
chord)
Ex. 60
Allegro moderato
LE CRIEUR Des Hus-si - tes а - yant chá-ti-é lin-so-len - ce de par le saint con-ci - le
I IV bVII
(Having punished the arrogance of the Hussites, in the name of the Holy Council . . .)
IE x«l
Andante moderato ma senza rigore ten
ELEAZAR ^
[principals repeat
the phrase]
O Dieu, Dieu de nos pé - res, par-mi nous des-cends
(O God of our fathers, come down among us)
Act V by B minor. The ‘ecclesiastical’ flattened leading-note chord
in Ex. 59 represents an element of local colour recurring elsewhere,
for example the chorus, the Crieur in Act I (Ex. 60), and Brogni. In
the intimate setting of Act II (which contains no chorus) Jewish
prayers at supper (Ex. 61) echo certain known chants: ‘Akedah’ (Ex.
62), and ‘Shofet Kol hoaretz’ (Ex. 63).36
Halévy's use of chromaticism became subtler, but he already
commanded a forceful rhetoric, using brass techniques both loud
and soft. Liberal use of the ‘anger’ rhythm ; 7... emphasizes
the score’s debt to Cherubini and Mehul; less happily traditional
36 Halévy composed seven now little-known settings in S. Naumbourg's Chants Religieux
des Israelites (Paris, 1847), a publication intended to revitalize the music of Jewish services.
104 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
was the choice of a ‘march duet’ in Act IV where Brogni and Eléazar
argue over the one true God.??
HALEVY’S GUIDO ET GINEVRA
Active, picturesque, and episodic, with a happy ending and no
quiproquo, Guido et Ginevra (1838) forms a complete contrast with
La Juive. Scribe rationed solos to the minimum, organizing the
action into duets and ensembles. Its Renaissance Florentine setting,
atmosphere of contrasting extremes, and character of a sculptor
(Guido) invite comparison with Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. The latter
is an ever-pertinent fable on the subject of art, while Guido et Ginevra
emulates the Romantic historical novel, laid out in vividly sketched
scenes surrounding the plague of 1552-3. Act IV concludes with the
burning of Cosimo de’ Medici’s palace at night, seen from a
snow-filled square; Act V affords a spectacular view of the Apennines,
a symbol of rebirth. Though exceedingly melodramatic, the plot also
took the theme of potential adultery further than had Gustave IIT;
Alexandre Dumas pére's play Antony (1831) had been an influential
attack on the institutions of marriage and the family, in favour of
individualism. The aristocratic heroine of Guido et Ginevra, twice
given up for dead, forms a love match with her young sculptor,
perhaps— we are not told—ignorant that her husband Manfredi has
succumbed to the plague after wounding her in Act IV.
Halévy responded vividly, catching the tone of Forte Braccio's
brigands in their wild 12/8 chorus, or of courtly pomp, or of the
cathedral crypt in Act III; orchestrally he never wrote more richly.
Bells of different pitches, sometimes harmonized subtly, sound in
every act save the last. The high piston trombone has an obbligato;
recitatives can attain a new fluidity with chamber scoring, such as
at the opening of the second act (Ex. 64). Ingenious modulatory
passages are worked into set pieces (e.g. Guido's Act I romance)
instead of staying within recitative. His Act I duet with Ginevra
modulates to the flat mediant (G flat major from E flat) in only two
chords, continuing as though nothing had occurred. The B major
Act III burial chorus jumps to F minor for Cosimo's affecting prayer.
In older opéra-comique fashion Guido's Act I romance becomes a
musical identity motif, announcing his presence even before we notice
37 ‘Ta fille en ce moment.’ These male-voice, dotted-rhythm duets had appeared in Spontini,
Rossini, La Muette, Act II, Robert le diable, Act III, and so on. See Leopold M. Kantner, "Zur
Genese der Marschduette in der Grand Opera’, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Mitteilungen der Kommission für Musikforschung, 25 (Vienna, 1976), 322-34.
HALÉVY'S LA REINE DECHYPRE 105
Ex. 64
(Recitative)
GUIDO
a tempo
[Lut — 3
EES HE
ELEM bal
ТР E L E e
= ЛЕШЕ
dolcissimo cresc. pp
(Since the auspicious day when I rescued her whom 1 adored, all seems to smile on me and lend prosperity)
him.38 These details, however, merely complement the way Halévy
articulates the score through harmonically organized sequences acting
analogously to the drama in their own right. In this sense it is a
descendant of La Muette de Portici.
HALÉVY'S LA REINE DE CHYPRE
The librettists of La Reine de Chypre (1841), C. and G. Delavigne,
based their work freely on the career of Caterina Cornaro (1454-
1510); it describes her separation from her fiancé Gérard de Coucy
through the edict of Venice's Council of Ten, and her enforced
marriage to Jacques de Lusignan, the Councils chosen king of
Cyprus. Gérard follows her to Cyprus, intent on vengeance, as he
has been kept in ignorance of the truth about Venetian influence.
This he exposes in Act V, after two years have passed and Lusignan
is dying, poisoned by Venice for pursuing an independent political
policy. Caterina leads the Cypriots successfully against the Venetians;
Gérard resumes his solitary life as a Knight of Rhodes.
The fatalism and menace of the work, and its literary quality,
were highly regarded in its own time; Wagner particularly admired
its contrasted local colour for Italy (Acts I and II) and Cyprus. The
lovers’ powerful duet of separation— one of several memorable
duets— crowns a second act of distinction. This proceeds from the
scene-setting (off-stage gondoliers) through Caterina's monologue,
balancing traditional forms and use of tonality with modern ‘free’
38 This is especially effective in Act IV. Meyerbeer had made Raimbaut's romance in Robert
le diable (Ex. 46) a recurring symbol of Bertram's satanic influence.
106 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
forms and chromaticism, to a surging coda expressing Gerard’s
uncomprehending fury (Ex. 65). Halevy’s almost Verdian eloquence
in Caterina’s Act V aria—she cannot forget Gerard—sums up the
pain of loss (Ex. 66).
Ex. 65 -
[Allegro molto]
MOCENIGO (CHORUS)
A С = рге! A Chy - :
(To Cyprus!)
Ex. 66
Andante cantabile
CATARINA
(Gérard — and he is the one who calls for him — that name which echoed in my heart immediately)
HALÉVY'S CHARLES VI 107
An orchestral motif symbolizing the insidious power of the Council
was adopted, winding against its agent Mocénigo's threats in Act I
(Ex. 67), or informing us in Act V of Venice's connection with the
dying king.?? Yet, though Halévy's fluid harmony and mature
willingness to avoid cadential closure were undeniably useful, they
could not replace that final necessary degree of discrimination in
melody and dramatic irony. And the gigantic ceremonial scenes for
the Act III celebrations in Cyprus or the Act IV disembarkation of
Caterina at Nicosia seem inadequately balanced by developing
musical portraits of the principals.
HALÉVY'S CHARLES VI
Charles VI (1843) marked a sharp break in substance and style
away from the grand tradition, and almost turned that tradition to
ironic account. The text, by the Delavignes, expresses a French
nationalist response to foreign intervention. Moreover, it portrays
Charles VI of France (reigned 1380-1422) in his last year, episodically
insane and a helplessly pathetic figure. The historical monarch
married his daughter to England's Henry V. The opera makes
Charles's wife, Isabella of Bavaria, into a schemer in league with the
English, and introduces an ersatz Joan of Arc character in the form
of Charles's faithful attendant, Odette.4! A freely Shakespearian
method of approach to the subject was used: the verses are relatively
informal; royal characters can be bereft of all dignity; the king is
visited by ghosts of assassinated acquaintances, including John the
Fearless, in Act IV; other historical characters are brought into the
last act, ready to be rallied by Odette;?? but, above all, the figure of
Charles VI was conceived in complex terms requiring a singer-actor
39 Wagner drew attention to this motif and its function in ‘La Reine de Chypre Г Halévy’,
Ellis, Prose Works, viii. 195. Wagner's translator here confused Ex. 67 with a vaguer, semitonal
one that recurs in the score but is not proper to one person or one emotion.
40 Tt may have been inspired by the threat represented by the attempted coup in 1840 of
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III), and there was an obvious parallel
between the ageing Louis-Philippe and the fictional Charles VI. By 1850 it had become
politically too problematic to be shown in Paris: Léon Halévy, F. Halévy, p. 37.
41 The historical Joan of Arc was to bring about the last major event of the Hundred Years
War, the anointing of Charles VII at Rheims in 1429.
42 [ncluding Tannegui du Chatel and Jean Dunois, count of Orléans (John the Bastard).
108 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
capable of portraying a confused old man, yet one still a king and
at times conscious of the awful consequences of his own madness.
He dies at the end, fulminating against the English.
However, the overall tendency was towards a patriotic spectacle,
not a tragic drama. The initial love-story of Odette and the Dauphin
is soon abandoned. The typical grand opera processional scene, the
entry of English leaders on horseback into ‘old Paris lit by brilliant
autumn sunlight’, ends in chaos as the king unexpectedly rejects
Lancaster. The same tendency relieved Halevy from a problematic
musico-dramatic task: he could throw certain ‘national songs’ into
relief instead, such as ‘Guerre aux tyrans’ and ‘A toi, France chérie’.
Apart from such public statements, Halévy's most successful music
was in Act IV, not, unfortunately, for the ghosts but in Odette's
childlike lullabies sung to the declining king. The all-important first
solo for the king, the Act I romance, is sentimental (Ex. 68) and not
effectively redeemed by its motivic relation to the trio in Act III
(where Odette reconciles Charles with the Dauphin, Ex. 69), the
ghost scene in Act IV (Ex. 70), and the overture (Ex. 71).
BERLIOZ'S BENVENUTO CELLINI
Benvenuto Cellini (1838) fits into no generic category, but is best
discussed at this point. A work of supremely high musical invention,
victim of its own originality, it still awaits publication in a form
Ex. 68
Andantino espressivo
CHARLES
C'est grand pi-tié quece Roi_que leur pé-re Leur bien-ai- mé soit mort si promptement
(So pitiful it is that this king, their father, their well-beloved, should die so soon)
Ex. 69
Andante espressivo
ODETTE
sostenuto
Pour lui ra - e pour Wi га - vir son he-ri - ta - ge
(To rob him of his inheritance)
Ex. 70 Ex
Moderato Moderato assai
vc, db vc, db
BERLIOZ'S BENVENUTO CELLINI 109
permitting the author's first intentions to be fairly judged or
performed. Berlioz was not wanting in operatic experience when—
prompted perhaps by Farjasse's translation of Cellini's Autobiography
(1833)—he fastened on this subject for a two-act opéra comique in
1834.43 Estelle et Némorin, his first opera (1823), is lost. Since 1822
he had learnt his craft by frequent attendance at the Opéra, and
the year 1826 saw the completion of his second operatic work,
Les Francs-juges. This was never accepted for performance and parts
of it were utilized elsewhere. Refused at the Opéra-Comique, the
libretto of Cellini was accepted for the Opera late in 1835 and the
score written in 1836 (scoring completed in April 1837).44 The work
had four complete performances (1838-9) between which cuts were
made; there were then three performances of the first act only. It
was shortened and revised in three acts in 1852, for Weimar.
In a sense the work did well to get so far in 1838, since its score
was explosively modern and remains a breathtaking experience to
hear. Aesthetically it was a Trojan Horse which carried the full
armoury of Berlioz's sardonic genius into the bourgeois stronghold.
The dramatic design has nothing in common with grand opéra.
Admittedly it ends with a stage spectacle; yet the casting of the
Perseus makes its own ironic comment on the catastrophic machines
ending La Muette and other operas. Instead, it fuses three com-
plementary impulses: first, the energy and colour of Cellini's own
story, first written in 1558-66; second, Berliozs Romantic self-
identification with Cellini as one who will liberate his art, and whose
statue of Perseus, which we see physically created at the climax of the
opera, symbolized 'the artist's conquest over a grudging intellectual
environment';^? and, third, the evident desire to put into operatic
practice some essential tenets of modern Romantic drama, as
professed in Victor Hugo's 1827 Preface to his play Cromwell. This
last impulse explains, for example, the work's constant exploitation
of all types of contrast, whether of dramatic event (buffoonery to
manslaughter), or of scoring; its use of some unconventional operatic
diction, and rejection of periphrasis; its being imbued with a single,
governing ‘local colour’ in Berlioz's extrovert ‘Italian’ style; and its
33 Hector Berlioz, Correspondance gónérale, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris, 1972-), ii. 184. The
work's early vicissitudes, including one project for a serious opera, are discussed in Thomasin
K. La May, ‘A New Look at the Weimar Versions of Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini, Musical
Quarterly, 65 (1979), 559-72.
^! Hector Berlioz, Correspondance générale, ii. 184, 248, 263, 319, 341. The authors were
Léon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier, with some contribution from Alfred de Vigny, Berlioz's
friend and (apparently) first choice as his poet.
45 Gary Schmidgall, Literature as opera (Oxford, 1977), 157.
110 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
sheer uniqueness, following Hugo's dictum, ‘Il n'y a ni règles, ni
modèles’.
The opera rejects the structure of intrigue in favour of a spon-
taneously linear sequence, almost reminiscent of a fairy-tale. In Act
I (Tableaux I, II) Cellini plans to elope with his love, Teresa, daughter
of Balducci, the Pope’s treasurer. His commissioned statue (the
Perseus) awaits casting; in the escape with Teresa from the Mardi
Gras carnival, Cellini scuffles with his laughable rivals in art and
love (Fieramosca and Pompeo), killing the latter. Act II (Tableaux
III, IV), next day, sees escape again thwarted as the Pope orders
Cellini to complete his statue forthwith, on pain of death. Fieramosca
fails again to spoil the hero's plan, the statue is successfully cast,
and Cellini and Teresa are triumphant.
Clearly this is basically a comedy, but one projecting a serious,
vivifying philosophy of life: Hugo’s ‘soul beneath the body, a tragedy
beneath a comedy’. The coruscating surface of satire, wit, buffoonery,
colour, and rapidity comes from Berlioz's music; almost a riot of
impressions is created, yet is genially ordered by the recurring chorus
of master metalworkers, a kind of popular hymn to the eternal truth
of art first heard in Tableau II (Ex. 72) (cf. Die Meistersinger). An
opposite pole of energy is the anarchic gaiety of the Mardi Gras
carnival music. There are audacious harmonic episodes everywhere,
for example, for the whining innkeeper enumerating payments due,
also in the second Tableau (Ex. 73). The seemingly endless orchestral
trouvailles entail great individual virtuosity in the pit, but eschew the
[Exo
Allegro con fuoco e marcato assai = 184
CELLINI Si la terre aux beaux jours se cou-ron - ne De
8va bassa =
(Ifthe earth, in summertime, is crowned with corn-sheaves, fruits, flowers)
BERLIOZ'S BENVENUTO CELLINI
EX 78
Andantino non troppo lento J =60
THE INNKEEPER
Vin blanc d’Or-vie
Tren - te fias-ques, tren
The sequence is sung first a tone, then a further semitone, higher.
(White Orvieto wine— Aleatico — and Mareschino — thirty flasks)
II)
current fashion for stage bands, bells, and new-fangled instruments.
Berlioz instead adopted a pair of guitars for local colour in Tableaux
I and IV. But it is the dimension of rhythm that attracts most
attention; probably no score since the Renaissance had played against
the barline more determinedly. In this respect, the /ocus classicus of
the score is Fieramosca's wish-fulfilling anticipation in Act II of a
duel with Cellini that never occurs (Ex. 74). It is entirely typical of
Cellini that the hardest music to execute requires the lightest touch
by the performer.
Ex. 74
Allegretto d =160
FIERAMOSCA Une, deux, trois Une, deux, trois
112 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Berlioz’s love for Gluck’s later operas perhaps predisposed him to
writing arias as well as dramatically vivid ensembles; in fact
a ‘Classical’ articulation of his opera is perceptible; there are
well-developed solos for all main characters, including the Pope (in
a variety of ABA, slow-fast, and non-regular forms), and virtually
no duets involving action. Recitative, orchestral but often secco in
style, moves the action from point to point, and each tableau
culminates in its own ensemble finale, containing (except the last)
more perplexity than action.
By 1839 Berlioz was communicating with Scribe about a new
opera, and prophetically declared, ‘I should very much like an
antique subject but am afraid of our actors’ costumes, as well as the
determined prosaicness of our public.'46 Over the years 1841 to 1847
the two worked on La Nonne sanglante, їп which an unwitting
elopement with the ghost of a murdered nun sets the dramatic
dilemmas in train. Having composed the music for two acts, Berlioz
returned the libretto (eventually set by Gounod, 1854) in the
aftermath of a dispute with the directors of the Paris Opéra.
DONIZETTI IN PARIS
Having laid the groundwork for Parisian commissions through
third parties as early as 1835, Donizetti found the way clear with
the success of Lucia di Lammermoor at the Théátre Italien (1837).
He arrived in October 1838 with Poliuto, recently prohibited in
Naples but written with an eye to Paris.^? Scribe expanded the work to
four acts as Les Martyrs and restored the primacy of religious con-
flict to the action, conforming to Corneille's source-play, Polyeucte.
In view of Donizetti's professed view (when returning another Scribe
libretto by post earlier in 1838) that ‘love treated almost as an
episode' was displeasing to him as a composer, the limited success
of Les Martyrs on 10 April 1840 must have reinforced his faith in
the values he knew. However, Ashbrook reckons that only about
one-fifth of Poliuto was actually altered, including all the recitatives.
These changes he described in formalistic terms to his old mentor,
Mayr: ‘For example, banished are the crescendi, etc., etc., banished
are the usual cadences, felicità, felicità, felicità [i.e. hackneyed V-I
16 Correspondance generale, ii. 575. See also A. E. F.Dickinson, 'Berlioz's “Bleeding Nun" ’,
Musical Times, 107 (1966), 584-8. Berlioz also entered into a contract for a three-act opera in
French projected for Drury Lane in 1849.
47 Letter, 8 May 1838, cited in William Ashbrook, Donizetti and his Operas (Cambridge,
1982), p. 132. Important prefaces to the three serious French operas of Donizetti, by Philip
Gossett, are found in the facsimile scores issued in Early Romantic Opera (London and New
York, 1980, 1982).
DONIZETTI IN PARIS 113
formulas]; then between one verse of the cabaletta and the other you
should always have lines that heighten the emotion . . .`48
Two new trios were added (end of Acts I and IV). An applied
lesson in French formal freedom was the way that Severo’s cabaletta
in Act II, in becoming ‘Je te perds’, was divorced from its original
cantabile and recomposed into a mixed complex including arioso
and ensemble. However, the old Poliuto score already contained the
‘French’ feature of a climactic last-act duet for the doomed lovers,
whereas Italian opera seria traditionally favoured a final exit aria for
the prima donna. Donizetti made good use of the orchestral resources
of the Opéra, for which he was praised by Berlioz in the Journal des
débats.
Donizetti toiled hard in Paris: during the eighteen months it took
Les Martyrs to come into existence he wrote the four-act L'Ange de
Nisida for the new Theätre de la Renaissance, half of Le Duc
d'Albe for the Opéra, plus La Fille du Régiment (1840) for the
Opera-Comique.
This last, the first of Donizetti’s works written specially for Paris,
may be mentioned here although it properly belongs to the next
section. A brilliantly superficial text by Jules-Henri Vernoy de
Saint-Georges and J.-F.-A. Bayard offered Donizetti a series of
diverse set pieces, not just for Marie (brought up from infancy by
the regiment) and her lover Tonio, but also for that collective
*character', the regimental chorus itself; the chorus displaces both
older, potentially sadder characters (Sergeant Sulpice and Marie's
long-lost mother) in musical terms. Donizetti's score sparkles with
memorable tunes, which were quickly pressed into the service of
French patriotism. But the score also has the now traditional
extended opening sequence, plus many later passages of recitative
and mixed conversational textures. These help reduce the amount of
spoken dialogue, and give the work its air of effortless fecundity.
However, the gaiety and joy would not have half their effect without
Donizetti’s technical mastery. (Ex. 75).
The Théátre de la Renaissance went bankrupt and Donizetti recast
L’Ange in Summer 1840 for the Opera: it thus become La Favorite,
whose original libretto by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaéz was
revised by Scribe. Its perennial success shows that the French were
happy to accept a basically Italian product, especially in conjunction
with a sentimental fantasy about a free woman. For Donizetti’s
language remained that of bel canto and his dramatic organization
48 Ashbrook, Donizetti, p. 141.
114 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ex. 75
Allegro +vn I 8va
—
EE
was still articulated through the disjunct technique of recitative-set
piece, however this might be modified through the insertion of short
arioso sections, or the unexpected omission of a cabaletta, or the
addition of an organ part.49 There is no disguising the contrivances
of the plot, set in 1340. Alfonso XI of Spain has taken Léonor de
Gusman as his mistress, a fact known to all except the newcomer,
Fernand. The latter has rejected his religious calling after a chance
encounter with Léonor, and is loved by her. When pressure is applied
on Alfonso by the Church, and after Fernand's triumphs in battle,
the former willingly allows Fernand to marry Léonor. Immediately
afterwards Fernand is informed he has married the ‘favourite’; he
smashes his sword at the king's feet and returns to his monastery.
Finally Léonor comes in disguise requesting her due forgiveness (she
had sent a message revealing the truth, which was intercepted) but
dies even as Fernand reasserts his love for her. The matrix is thus
close to La traviata, the Romantic cliché of 'the fallen woman
49 Winton Dean describes the modifications in ‘Donizetti’s Serious Operas’, Proceedings of
the Royal Musical Association, 100 (1973-4), 123-41. There is no shortage of cabalettas in La
Favorite.
DONIZETTI IN PARIS 118
rehabilitated by a pure love’,50 a theme set forward in Hugo’s early
play Marion de Lorme (1831). Donizetti writes mixed recitative-
arioso continuum textures for the action sequences, for example,
surrounding the Act III wedding, using the chorus of courtiers as a
character in its own right. Likewise, Act IV attains an excellent
continuity between its varied textures, ranging from the penitential
religious chorus with organ through to the lovers’ duet (Ex. 76).51
But admirable parts cannot add up to a whole worthy of the pungent
ironies inherent in the fable: the work’s basic sentimentality is well
captured in the aria sung by Fernand in Act IV as an apostrophe
Ex. 76
Moderato
FERNAND
(Come, I give in, passionately, to the rapture that intoxicates me)
Bx. 77
Larghetto
que dans un son-ge j'ai cru trou-ver
(Angel so pure, whom in a dream I thought I found; happiest dream)
50 W. D. Howarth, ‘Drama’, in Charlton (ed.), The French Romantics, ii. 215, 240-1.
51 A theme they do not sing together, however. Donize.ti had already given it to the cellos
in the Prelude to Act IV as if to suggest that this love had merely been diverted underground.
116 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
to his past, but before Léonor has even reappeared at the monastery
(Ex. 77).52
The five-act Dom Sébastien (1843), the last opera to be completed
by Donizetti, was the only one of his works originally conceived for
the Opéra: it is that which most closely approaches grand opéra,
being a tale of lost love, a lost kingdom, and ultimately the political
murder of both main characters. It is based on King Sebastian of
Portugal's death in the Moorish crusades (1578), the character of
the poet Luis de Camöes (d. 1580), and the loss of Portuguese
independence to Spain in the same year. In the opera Sébastien
survives the battle in Morocco only to fall victim, together with his
Arab friend Zaida, to the usurpers Don Antonio (his uncle) and
Juan da Silva (head of the Inquisition). Each act has a separate
setting (Act II is in Morocco).
Donizetti, as usual, composed rapidly, and was later obliged to
make unwelcome changes at the peremptory behest of his librettist,
Scribe; the music is mostly in a full-blown Italian idiom, organized
around a more or less dramatic arrangement of set pieces, though
with a particularly unconvincing ballet sequence at the beginning of
Act II. After the battle, which is not portrayed, Donizetti explores
his main figures in extended duets for Sébastien and Zaida in Acts
П and V. Romances for Zaida (Act I), Sébastien (Act II), and
Camoes (Act III) eschew cabalettas, but the work remained in many
ways a vehicle for the tenor Gilbert Duprez, whose soft high D flat
in alt came 1n the second of these, and Rosina Stoltz, who was
notable for creating in Zaida (and Léonor in La Favorite) a new
type of mezzo-soprano role, both dramatic and vocally wide-ranging.
However, Donizetti also made efforts to characterize Camóes, who
sings a ‘prophecy’ in Act I, and explore the relationship between
Zaida and her jealous Arab husband Abayaldos, in their Act III
duet; this piece also exemplifies the French Romantic tendency to
give duets the character of an exploratory scena. The septet in Act
IV (the inquisition scene) and its two succeeding ensembles formed
an outstanding last example of Donizetti's art as a master of vocal
drama.
MEYERBEER'S LE PROPHETE
Besides the works by Halévy and Donizetti already described, the
1840s saw the quickly forgotten Richard en Palestine of Adolphe
52 This famous aria stemmed from Le Duc d Albe (1839) which Donizetti abandoned. Its
torso was twice completed by other hands (1882; 1959). See Ashbrook, Donizetti, p. 692, for
table of musical sources of La Favorite.
MEYERBEER'S LE PROPHETE 117
Adam and Louis Niedermeyer's Marie Stuart (both 1844). However,
the unquiet spirit of Meyerbeer's Le Prophéte lurked in many minds:
this had been composed by 1840 but held in abeyance largely owing
to its exceptional demands on leading singers. Meyerbeer was finally
inspired by Pauline Viardot-Garcia's contralto voice and revised the
score for performance (16 April 1849).
Le Prophete (text by Scribe) is one of the most ambitious canvases
attempted by any composer, and represents the ne plus ultra of grand
opéra. The fable traces the fate of Jean (John of Leyden), his
mother Fidés, and his fiancée Berthe, from their obscure beginnings
to Jean's coronation as son of God in Münster Cathedral, following
the capture of Münster by the radical Anabaptists under Jean's
соттапа.5 In the cathedral he denies knowledge of his mother,
but is reconciled with her before finally causing a holocaust that
consumes the forces of reaction and revolution alike. The opera fails
in its attempted synthesis of tragedy, comedy, maternal love,
religious and political history, and the spectacular (the attempt was
extraordinary enough); but with the exception of the ‘skating’ ballet
sequence of Act III (at the Anabaptist army camp outside Münster),
gratuitous musical or visual display is confined to certain parts of
Act V, where the constructive tension lessens and one even finds
residual Italianate cabalettas. In general the drama is expressed not
through *machines' but in terms of human characters, of whom Fides
is the most interesting.
Jean himself is an unusually complex operatic figure whose actions,
as with most people, are motivated by a mixture of personal and
social impulses: Berthe's abduction by Comte d'Oberthal; his own
religious disposition; his natural talent for military leadership; his
Messianic vision, narrated in Act II. It is symptomatic that the
chorus plays a relatively restricted role throughout, sketching in the
background as needed.
Meyerbeer's harmonic language became markedly fluid; it roves
frequently through more distantly related keys, especially a third
apart, and through enharmonic progressions, as with Jean's words
to his mother in Act IV (Ex. 78); it employs numerous chromatic
progressions over pedal points and chromatic discords in sequence.
33 Unlike Robert le diable and Les Huguenots it stretches the unity of time considerably.
Acts III, IV, and V consist of two main scenes each. The sites of action are, respectively,
countryside near Dordrecht (Holland); a suburb of Leyden; a Westphalian forest; and the
cathedral and palace of Münster.
51 The historical John of Leyden (Jan Beuckelszoon) (1509-36) was executed following the
German recapture of Münster in 1535.
118 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ex. 78
Andantino J =60
LIST — ———— JL
[Lp ——— — — р
(May holy light descend upon you, poor madwoman, and enlighten you!)
The music avoids cadential closure in discursive or active dramatic
sections, either by modulating or simply side-stepping chromatically.
The first two acts achieve also a flexibility of musical forms that
comprises undemonstrative solo styles and is almost continuous in
effect; articulating the drama as though unfolding a narrative,
they remain Meyerbeer's most forward-looking achievement. The
coronation march in Act IV, Scene ii, stands at an opposite pole,
yet with a masterly five-bar opening phrase (Ex. 79) that looks
forward to Mussorgsky's ‘Great Gate of Kiev’.
Local colour is readily perceptible in Le Prophéte, though it is of
subtle application. There are distinct traits of material associated
with, first, the Dutch countryside, and Jean's roots in peasant culture
(this uses types of drone and is effectively recalled in Act V when
the main characters long to return home); second, the Anabaptists,
who have their own motif (Ex. 80) and various contrapuntal textures;
Ex. 79
Tempo di marcia maestoso d =104
БАЕ. Е
а-а war Ра
Full orchestra, including 4 trumpets апа percussion
MEYERBEER'S LE PROPHETE 119
Ex. 80
Allegretto molto moderato
THE 3 ANABAPTISTS {m
con molto portamento
zd le - ES Ok? > Р
(Come to us again, wretched ones, to the water of salvation)
and, third, the military world of Jean’s period as leader: types of
horn-call material apply here.
The religious world of the Anabaptists tends to be expressed in
flat keys, while the ‘true’ religion of Fides adopts the very sharp
side; but Meyerbeer is not restricted to a rigorous plan and ultimately
ranges as far as the key signature of seven flats (A flat minor) in
Act V.
Meyerbeer assists the work's conceptual unity by using three themes
of recollection (untransformed)?? and two that are transformed: the
Anabaptists’ ubiquitous refrain heard first during their preaching
(Ex. 80) and the couplets of Zacharie in Act III (‘Aussi nombreux’)
recalled in Act V. Other shorter ideas, especially using the flat
supertonic or flat submediant, act on a subtler unifying level.
The score possesses a wealth of orchestral interest, ranging from
sinister divided basses to four harps soli, from tutti with children's
choir and organ duet to the ‘Petits timbres en La (Campanelli) struck
by several children while singing in the coronation scene. (This scene
uses a stage band including eighteen saxhorns.) Yet Meyerbeer's
chamber textures are equally memorable, just as his finely chiselled
arioso sections are to be savoured as much as the large tableaux.
One's appreciation of musical ideas is modified by their constantly
changing timbre, to an even greater degree than happens in Benvenuto
Cellini.
55 The Act II ‘Pastorale’ (‘Pour Bertha’); the Coronation hymn ‘Le voilà, le roi prophète’;
and the march quoted in Ex. 79.
120 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
(b) OPERA COMIQUE
By DAVID CHARLTON
THERE were no great liberalizing changes in theatre government as
a consequence of the July Revolution of 1830. As before, three
Parisian theatres continued to be responsible for three main types
of opera. The Opera gave (apart from ballet) serious opera and some
comedy, using recitatives; the Theätre-Italien existed to display the
best singers in Italian-language opera; and the Opera-Comique gave
the whole range of opera using spoken dialogue. Such, by and large,
had been the situation in 1789; and the remaining theatres, as before
the Revolution, put on a wide range of comedy, melodrama,
vaudeville, and some сопсегіѕ.56 Repeated attempts were made to
create a second Opera-Comique theatre where young composers’
work could be presented (1820, 1829, 1842, 1844) but all were rejected
by the government of the day. The Opera National founded in 1847
by Adolphe Adam fell victim to the upheavals of 1848. Taste outside
Paris differed somewhat from city to city: but all important musical
premieres were the prerogative of the capital.
The Opéra-Comique company had been founded in 1801 and so
had at its disposal the whole repertoire from that date, as well as
earlier opéras comiques.?* New works from 1830 therefore competed
with successes such as Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche (performed
virtually every year to 1893), Auber's Le Масоп (performed frequently
up to 1887), and Isouard’s Les Rendez-vous bourgeois and Joconde.*8
Public taste was inclined to be traditional; the Opéra and the
Opéra-Comique catered for a predominantly moneyed audience
whose furious enthusiasm for music existed almost in spite of the
simultaneous flowering of French Romanticism.
Music, then conceived of as an art of fashion and variety, of fine tone-colour
and the exercise of virtuosity, both satisfied performers receiving the highest
degree of adulation and reinforced in the bourgeois mind the taste for
sensualism and spectacle, changeable attitudes, puerile vanity. In 1856 Scudo
[a well-known musical journalist] ... showed French society divided into
96 See Francois Lesure (ed.), La Musique à Paris en 1830-1831 (Paris, 1983).
57 1e. from the Théâtre Feydeau and the Opéra-Comique National, earlier
Comédie-Italienne.
58 Albert Soubies, Soixante-neuf Ans à ГОрёға-Сотідие en deux pages 1825-94 (Paris, 1894);
but, because the author's statistics were compiled from newspapers, they are subject to errors
of detail.
THE COMPOSERS AND LIBRETTISTS 121
two antagonistic classes: the minority of music-lovers very keen on classical
concerts, and the solid bourgeois class devoted to virtuosos, fashion, facile
music exploited by professional entertainers.°9
So ruthlessly applicable were the laws of supply and demand that
even a successful opéra comique composer like Adam complained,
‘If one says, “The Government encourages the arts", that means
that the Government is ordering statues, paintings, is constructing
monuments ... Of poor musicians no mention is to be made,’60 and
so men of genius were becoming lost amid the drudgery of teaching
and earning their living. Young and skilful players were available to
restock the orchestral desks of the Opéra-Comique only once the
problems of the July Revolution had been solved: in the words of
Mendelssohn in 1832, ‘few German theatres are so bad or in so
dilapidated a condition as the Opéra-Comique here, where one
bankruptcy succeeds another'.6!
THE COMPOSERS AND LIBRETTISTS
In terms of success, opéra comique was dominated by Daniel Auber
(1782-1871), with only two failures out of fourteen works given in
this period; Adolphe Adam (1803-56), with only a handful of failures
out of twenty works; Fromental Halévy (1799-1862), with two
unsuccessful works out of ten; and Ambroise Thomas (1811-96),
whose eight opéras comiques from 1837 all had greater or lesser
success. However, very successful works were also produced by
Hippolyte Monpou (1804-41) in Les Deux reines (1835) and Le
Luthier de Vienne (1836), and by Albert Grisar (1808-69) in Sarah
(1836), L’Eau merveilleuse (1839), Gille ravisseur (1848), and Les
Porcherons (1850). Frangois Bazin (1816-78) and Louis Clapisson
(1808-66), too, had sporadic successes.
Opéra comique as a dramatic genre signified not comedy as such,
but opera with spoken dialogue (occasionally spoken over music to
form mélodrame), designed to give pleasure rather than instruction.
By contrast with the eighteenth century, this produced a concentrated
avoidance of contemporary manners as a subject, let alone con-
temporary politics. Instead, there was a typical exploitation of
59 Joseph-Marc Bailbé, ‘Le Bourgeois et la musique au XIX" siècle’, Romantisme, 13 (1977),
60 Adolphe Adam, ‘Les Musiciens de Paris’ (1834) in Souvenirs d'un musicien (Paris, 1868),
52-3. Cf. Fétis in 1831: ‘We have started down the English road, where nothing is done for
art and artists’ (Lesure (ed.), La Musique à Paris, p.3).
$1 Letter to his father, 21 Feb. 1832, in Letters, trans. Gisella Selden-Goth (London, 1946),
194.
122 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
imaginative escape, whether in time or geographical location. Whereas
the smaller theatres mounted much satire and reflected, in Men-
delssohn's words, the ‘extreme bitterness and deep disgust’ of the
people,®? the Opera-Comique dealt in comedy of manners (Halevy’s
L’Eclair, 1835), comedy of situation (Thomas’s La Double échelle,
1837, or his Le Panier fleuri, 1839; Adam’s Ee Toréador, 1849),
fantasy (Auber’s Le Cheval de bronze, 1835), and sentimental comedy,
whether set in Switzerland (Adam’s Le Chalet, 1834), or at the court
of Louis XIII (Halévy's Les Mousquetaires de la reine, 1846) or of
Louis XV (Adam's Le Postillon de Lonjumeau, 1836) or of Aboul-y-far
of Algeria (Thomas's Le Caid, 1849). A more melodramatic strain
of opéra comique employing definite historical settings and at least
the implication of potential seriousness of theme was represented,
inter alia, by Auber's Haydée ou Le Secret (1847) and Adam's Giralda
ou La Nouvelle Psyché (1850). These librettos, both productions of
Eugène Scribe, portrayed leaders of men such as the Venetian admiral
Lorédan who is elected Doge at the end of Haydée, and the queen
of Spain and her court in Giralda; however both are really comedies
of intrigue in which a series of adventures revolves round a central
character (bearing a guilty secret) and his hoped-for lover, who
herself is the object of desire to one or more further characters.
Scribe himself was the best-known librettist of the period, but was
far from the only successful one. The most notable of his rivals were
Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, Adolphe de Leuven, his
collaborator Léon-Lévy Brunswick, and Thomas Sauvage.63 Scribe's
range and output were so considerable that in some ways the period
1830-50 in French opera is inseparable from his name. He had begun
by writing vaudevilles and plays, creating about eight new works
every year.®4 Although his first librettos (for Luc Guénée and others)
date from 1813-16, his long and important partnership with Auber
began in 1823 with Leicester; by 1828 his and Auber's La Muette de
Portici was mounted at the Opéra. Scribe's opéra comique librettos
naturally exploited the principles that had first made his spoken
dramas successful: ingenious yet transparent construction; focus on
motivation and reverses of fortune instead of the development of
character; colourful choice of setting; and a central misunderstanding
or quiproquo made obvious to the spectator but withheld from certain
$2 Letter to Karl Immermann, 11 Jan. 1832, in Letters, pp. 185-6.
$3 Brief biographies are given in Thomas Joseph Walsh, Second Empire Opera: The Theätre
Lyrique, Paris, 1851-1870 (London, 1981), appendix D. For a complete list of Scribe's librettos
see The New Grove, 'Scribe, Eugene’.
$4 Pendle, Eugene Scribe, p. 6.
AUBER 123
participants.®5 His sources were inevitably eclectic, although the final
results (whether Scribe's alone or produced in authorial collaboration)
had notable consistency. It appears that he remodelled, for example,
his own vaudevilles, Goethe's Singspiel, Jery und Bätely (it became
Le Chalet), and selected themes from contemporary prose fiction
such as Scott's Guy Mannering96 or Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo.
This helped to give certain librettos the flavour of Romanticism
through local colour and strangeness of incident.
Other librettists, who at times could not but follow certain of
Scribe's innovations, developed the more elegant character-comedy
of eighteenth-century tradition, sometimes infusing it with original
strokes of incident (Saint-Georges’s L’ Éclair) or, for example, boldly
separating the first two acts by an imagined interval of ten years
and a change of place (de Leuven's and Brunswick's Le Postillon de
Lonjumeau). A few comic characters of enduring quality were
occasionally happened upon, such as Angélique and Beausoleil in
the same authors’ Le Panier fleuri. An important shift of orientation
occurred in de Leuven's and Rosier's Le Songe d'une nuit d'été
[A Midsummer Night's Dream], set by Ambroise Thomas (1850).
Although it has nothing to do with Shakespeare's play— Shakespeare
and Elizabeth I both appear on stage—it blends historicism and
fantasy with the assumption that an audience will also be interested
by artistic inspiration itself, and in hearing a composer depict this
by analogy; in the event the musical means used were quite radical
for the genre. The work itself proved popular.
Le Songe d'une nuit d'été also discarded assumptions concerning
the disposition of characters in opéra comique. Normally, a three-act
work portrayed a main couple and either a subsidiary pair or else a
single lover who is left.6° However, the character of Shakespeare is
paired not with a lover but with the inspirational figure of the queen,
while the subsidiary female role of Olivia unexpectedly gains in
emotional depth as the opera reaches its final act.
AUBER
Auber's career at the Opéra-Comique began in 1813 with Le Séjour
militaire (a virtual failure), which was followed by another twelve
works to 1830 including the highly successful Le Maçon (1825)
$5 Steven S. Stanton, quoted in ibid., p. 85.
66 Ibid., pp. 273-84. See Vol. УШ, p. 100, for La Dame blanche by Scribe and Boieldieu,
partly taken from Guy Mannering.
$7 Variations readily occurred among subsidiary figures. In Le Postillon de Lonjumeau the
same actress plays both leading female characters.
124 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
and Fra Diavolo (1830), both seen regularly to the end of the century.
Le Cheval de bronze of 1835 demonstrated the freshness of a fantastic
and oriental subject, not far removed from the more innocent gaiety
of similar comic works of the Napoleonic and Restoration eras.
Typically, however, the actual motifs and relationships might have
suited the ancien régime: a farmer’s daughter (Péki) to be married
to an official (the mandarin Tsing-Sing) when she really loves the
local boy, Yanko; and a prince searching for his ideal beloved. But
whereas earlier opéra comique tended to possess a core of three
central characters to which two or three peripheral ones were added,
the newer convention was to have five central characters in addition
to peripheral ones. This consequently gave rise to many more
possibilities for developing subplots, whether or not closely integrated
with the primary fable. In Le Cheval de bronze, for example,
Tsing-Sing's jealous fourth wife assists in furthering the plot against
his marriage with Peki.
Scribe, the librettist, incorporated certain sharp contrasts that are
representative of the period: exotic settings, fanciful events, the
divulging of information when a person is supposedly asleep. The
bronze horse of the title bears both Yanko and Tsing-Sing away by
air to a Venus peopled only by women; on returning, both men
unintentionally reveal this secret destination and are turned into
statues. In a parody of the Orpheus myth, Péki (dressed as a man)
resists Venusian blandishments and so succeeds in bringing her lover
back to life.
The musical planning of this and other works at first sight
resembles earlier opéra comique: sixteen numbers distributed over
three acts, comprising nine solos, five ensembles, and several choruses
either alone or combined with other numbers. It is true that simpler
traditional solo items continued to be composed: stanzaic solos
(called couplets) that not infrequently provided essential background
information,®8 and arias falling into sectional moulds of two or four
parts (ending more rapidly) or three parts (ending how they began).
Although the beginning and ending of sections could at times be
blurred, the basic ABA form remained discernible in opéra comique
arias even in works by Massenet fifty years later. However, the
ensemble and the choral items frequently attained an elongated
sectional construction that existed to provide musical development
for its own sake, unified only by the dramatic conundrum and the
musical logic of its component parts. As if to counter this, Le Cheval
68 [n Le Cheval de bronze Péki's stanzaic solo No. 6 is entitled "Ballade".
AUBER 125
de bronze and other works brought back at the close of Act III a
memorable theme from much earlier (in this case the opening chorus)
to provide a superficial sense of wholeness. This technique is not to
be confused with the occasional recollection of musical material as
an ironic or other type of dramatic reminiscence.
The opéra comique chorus conventionally sang in the first and last
numbers of an act; to omit them thus became a means of creating
special dramatic tension. First and second acts normally concluded
with a finale sequence anchored to a major incident (for example,
the arrival of Yanko on the bronze horse) that occurred within the
duration of the music. The full resources of voices and orchestra
would then be marshalled and united by a theme suitably designed
for repetition.
Auber's music seems never far from the inspiration of movement
or dance; one might even draw a comparison between it and Baroque
music, since it falls into readily perceptible sections, it places a
premium on melody, and it fixes a dominant mood in the hearer by
developing a certain. Affekt through rhythm as well as theme. On
the other hand, like much opéra comique, Auber's music tends to
avold counterpoint, thematic conflict, and the minor mode. Lively
melody, Auber's greatest asset, was still in 1835 (Le Cheval de bronze)
filtered through the experience of Rossini and Weber, as in the
Prince's Act I air (Ex. 81); particularly in earlier works he applied
a bold intervallic spread. There is an attractive strength in Auber's
use of melodic sequence, causing a line to ‘fall into place’ yet
managing to overcome the inherent predictability of the process. His
least original melodies were the slowest ones. The atrociously
insensitive word setting in Ex. 82 (taken from the Act I quintet) also
reflects Auber's allegiance to Italy; his French rivals were not so
cavalier, fortunately.
Le Domino noir (1837), the most popular of all Auber's productions,
shows his musical strengths reflecting Scribe's escapism most clearly.
Ex. 81
Andantino
PRINCE Wa ^
O nuit,.O. nuit monbiensu - pré - me, 0... som - meil. en - chan-teur
(О night, my greatest fortune, О sleep of enchantment)
126 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
62
Allegretto
О ter-reur qui m'ac-cab- le qu’ai-je fait, mis-é - ra-ble à tous les yeux— cou-
(O terror that overwhelms me, what have I done, poor wretch, guilty in the eyes of all,
what shall become of me?)
The plot, set in Madrid, is based on a ridiculous premise: Angele
(the queen's cousin) is a nun who pursues her worldly interests in
society disguised in a black domino (a masquerade cloak); she finally
becomes free to marry, thanks to a timely royal ordinance. For two
acts Angele is on the run, first from a Christmas Eve ball and then
from a private house; Act I, like Verdi’s Rigoletto, sets the action
against a sequence of dance music played by an off-stage orchestra,
and closes after an interlinked series of duets with Angele’s fearful
escape as midnight strikes (Ex. 83). Forced into adopting a maid's
disguise in Act II, she is obliged to perform a "Ronde aragonaise’
complete with castanets (Ex. 84). (Similarly bright 'Spanish' colours
also came to the fore in Adam's Le Toreador, Giralda, and elsewhere.)
The opera became a vehicle for leading singers, its drama an updated
reworking of Cinderella.
One of Auber's most successful and interesting opéras comiques
AUBER 127
Ex. 84
Allegro non troppo
ANGELE
to- теа -= i= elle a des at - traits-
et bien ins. ele a des é - cus
(Beautiful Inés, belle of the ball, is alluring, virtuous, and — what's more— has plenty of money)
was Haydée ou Le Secret of 1847.99 Scribe's sources—a combination
of Dumas and Mérimée— provided material for a work which itself
has the episodic excitement of a Romantic novel."? Each act is set
in a different location, the second being on board the vessel of
Loredan, a quinquecento Venetian admiral. Lorédan's ‘secret’ refers
to a youthful act which has caused both death and suffering, and
which he expiates in the course of the opera. The music remains
largely genial, so that utterances of hatred and irony in particular
fall short of any undue realism. The formal confrontation duet
between Lorédan and his enemy, Malipieri, suffers thus in Act II.
But the broader ground of solo and ensemble is admirably designed,
and in closing Act I Auber even stood Scribe's intended conventional
finale on its head in favour of a chromatic coda, its thematic
distortion symbolizing the hero's plight. The musical scope and
continuity in the more private episodes of Act III (nos. 15 to 17)
enable the tension to reach its climactic level with the self-destructive
urge of Lorédan and the self-sacrifice of Haydée, the slave whom he
loves, powerfully opposed. Auber's increased range of expression
may be seen in Lorédan's music: a revealing aside during the Act I
finale (Ex. 85); the hero's more public remorse, uttered during the
Act II confrontation duet (Ex. 86); and his public farewell to a
beloved Venice in Act III, when he thinks all is lost (Ex. 87). This
dignified solo is heard against the memory of the massed choral
welcome sung to Venice by his crew at the end of Act II, 'Salut cité
chérie', a melody which exemplifies Auber's considerable suggestive
skill in this medium (Ex. 88).
Set By 1890 it had been performed 483 times at the Opéra-Comique. Le Domino noir was
given every year except four up to 1890, by when it had had 1,114 performances.
10 Sources identified as Mérimée's story ‘La Partie de trictrac’ and Dumas's The Count of
Monte Cristo, in Pendle, Eugéne Scribe, pp. 222-6.
128 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Andante
LOREDAN
E
ce J'ai cru. trou-ver la mort
mer 8 | ==
уд diuum —— I A———
Euren M
2 D
(Leading their bravery, I thought I would find death)
Ex. 86
Allegro non troppo
LOREDAN
p à part
Cha - ti- ment. du cri - me, Tour - ment lé -gi - ti -
Oui, je vois l'a - bi-meou-vert______ sous mes pas.
(Punishment for crime, a just torment, yes, I see the abyss open beneath my feet.)
Ex. 87
Andante sostenuto
LORÉDAN 3 nr
(Farewell for ever, noble city which recognised my worth)
Ex. 88
Allegro
UNISON
CHORUS
S
Sa-lut ci - té €) = te eher = time g, Юж Ne
yn See no-tre pa - tri - e
(Hail, beloved city, O Venice our home)
HALEVY 129
HALEVY
Halevy’s first-performed operas comiques, L’Artisan and Le Roi et
le batelier (1827) were not successes, but over the next two decades
Halevy wrote at least five durable works: Le Dilettante d’ Avignon
(1829), L’Eclair (1835), Les Mousquetaires de la reine (1846), Le Val
d Andorre (1848), and La Fée aux roses (1849).?! His most constant
librettist was Saint-Georges, though in 1835 he began an intermittent
collaboration with Scribe. Had he so desired, Halévy could have
given opéra comique a new sense of musical purpose for, as Henry
Chorley said, ‘Among skilled living musicians, there was no one to
be found more available than M. Halévy. If he was rarely fanciful,
he was never vulgar in his music; if seldom spontaneous, he was
always ingenious, and wrote like one to whom all the resources of
his art are known.'?? These resources were manifest most obviously
in his orchestration, which is discussed below. Perhaps the surest
proof of Halévy's musico-dramatic imagination in opéra comique
remains L' Éclair. The drama, by Saint-Georges, is unusually
restricted to four characters without chorus; it is set in Boston, USA.
The young English graduate George has been invited to stay with
the young widowed Lucy, and her sister Henriette. Lionel, a young
American naval officer on shore leave, encounters George and is
then recalled on board; but he is thwarted by a sudden storm and
blinded by a flash of lightning. In time Henriette falls in love with
Lionel as she nurses him, and he with her, though he has never seen
her. But when his bandages are removed he embraces the attractive
Lucy. Henriette's humiliation and Lionel’s error are put to rights by
time, a little subterfuge, and marriage.
Halévy's music can be opposed to Auber's in several ways: it
respects verbal prosody and responds rapidly to the meaning of
single words; it modulates more often and more richly, often using
keys a third apart, in order to build transitional or contrasting
sections; its melody, taken alone, does not always imply or determine
one obvious chord at any point, and it 15 equally comfortable in
slow love-songs and fast ensembles. Although counterpoint as such
plays little part in opéra comique, Halévy's ensembles and orchestral
inventions are often articulated through contrapuntal means. L’ Éclair
thus emerges with the emotional and musical range of a serious
comedy: George remains a little ridiculous, Henriette always sensitive
“1 [n addition to five partly successful ones he also composed an Italian opera semiseria,
Clari, and a second Italian work, La tempestà (after Shakespeare), was written for London,
1850.
72 Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections (London, 1862), ii. 115.
130 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
and Lionel by turns active, anguished, or sentimental. Halevy’s talent
for stylistic parody, having lent success to Le Dilettante d Avignon
through its mock-Italianisms, could respond more creatively to
tradition, for example in Lionel’s ‘Grand Air’ in Act I, for this
account of the sailor's life is related to Philidor and Grétry.*? On
the other hand, the Lionel-Henriette duet in Act II is a fine epitome
of Romantic sensibility, containing both a supposed Provencal
melody and an archetypical declaration of passion (Ex. 89).
Ex. 89
Allegretto
LIONEL
PP
[9
Eegen "een "een Tee ее
ee
Il n'est Seig-neur__ ou Prince ou Roi qui sache ai- mer. au-tant que moi Il n'est Seigneur.
— ou Prince ou Roi _ qui sache ai - mer — au-tant que moi.
(There is no lord, no prince, no king, who can love better than I.)
Ex. 90
Allegro
(LIONEL is brought in by Henriette)
Ww, Str
hn, tpt, trbn + 8va. bassa 4 41
timp и Ж +8va bassa Ke
Un реи moins уйе Ge p ch =.
73 Philidor's arias descriptive of various trades, and Pierrot's nautical aria ‘Notre vaisseau’
in Grétry's Le Tableau parlant.
ADAM 131
Ех. 91
(Lionel (Aria:
(Lionel’s (Ex. 90 again, (Lionel conscious (trioof ^ recalls ‘Adieu
entrance) (his shock) transposed) of darkness) dread) lightning) clarte’)
Ex. 92
Andantino espressivo
OLIVIER
ee ee EE EE EEN I Н
DO KIP ATES. Ep m n E DE E ee E EE" ER e eme ` ee НР EE ee ee LE EECHER Ee een
рр EE E
(EE Ech Ëch
(A sweeter day dawns at last, bringing hope to my heart)
L'Éclair even provides the stricken Lionel with an orchestral motif,
heard first on brass as he is led on stage by Henriette; it is not sung
but is used for his entrances in Acts I and II. It captures the tragic
implications of his blinding (Ex. 90), but these are also expressed in
the tortuous harmonies that illustrate the first reactions to it (Ex.
91).
Les Mousquetaires de la reine (1846) had words by Saint-Georges,
but took its cue from Scribe through being set in the 1620s and the
anti-Huguenot reaction. But the context is confined to courtly
gallantry and Halévy adapted himself to a relaxed evocation of 'the
air of the old French court" as Chorley observed, to set pieces, and
to extrovert melody. When the need to express personal feeling arose,
the composer well satisfied it; but sentimentality was the order of
the day. This provoked the repetition of the hero's third-act romance,
No. 11, at the end (Ex. 92). This melody also betrayed a new syllabic
style in opéra comique, intimate and yet transparent, which could be
seen as the direct ancestor of Debussy's in Pelleas et Mélisande (see
"Heightened lyrical speech’ on p. 362 below). Overall, however, as
in Le Val d' Andorre, the composer stayed within the usual limits of
his medium: vocal forms as summarized above, and the occasional
use of local colour.
ADAM
Whereas Halévy made important contributions to grand opéra,
Adam worked almost wholly in opéra comique, and for the smaller
theatres. He had twenty-five works staged before 1830, fifteen opéras
132 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
comiques staged in the next decade, eight various operas in the next,
and thirteen operas comiques in the Six’ years before his death. Like
Balzac, he served art to pay his debts—a kind of martyrdom made
inevitable by the failure of his Opéra National (1847-8).74 Adam
worked at some time with most of the leading librettists, who
helped him to successes: Scribe in Le Chalet (1834) and Giralda (1850),
de Leuven and Brunswick in Le Postillon de Lonjumeau (1836), and
Thomas Sauvage in Le Toréador (1849).
Adam's music was less demanding than that of his rivals: its
texture, harmony, and orchestration are less varied. Comparatively
uninterested in developing structures, he preferred to build by starting
new sections or using a simple variation principle. His melodic
facility was considerable, typically taking either a dance-rhythm or
a reminiscence of Weber as its starting-point, as can be seen in
Ex. 93, from Act II, No. 8, of Le Postillon. His melody almost seems
to be generated by the simplicity of its accompaniment and static
quality of its bass line. One of Adam's melodic fingerprints was the
beginning of a phrase outside the tonic, giving an informal, optimistic
effect. Local colour did not play a large part in his work, and would
be sufficiently provided by a token song or by suitable themes in the
overture.
The Swiss troops and returning soldier Max in Le Chalet, however,
gave ample opportunity for exploiting the pseudo-military style that
was such a weakness of the 1830s and to some extent the 1840s. The
uproarious ‘Vive le vin’ (brought back at the end simply as a good
tune) may stand for many comparable examples by Adam and Auber
(Ex. 94). Conversely, although her supplies have been ransacked and
her very safety is at risk the heroine Betly can sing no more frightened
Ех. 93
Allegro поп troppo
ST PHAR
P
[vous peindre
ici ma vive
flamme]
Gráce- au ha- sard
(Thanks to good fortune, madam, I can [here reveal to you the intensity of my love])
74 Walsh, Second Empire Opera, Introduction and Appendix E.
ADAM 133
l'a- mour et le ta - bac
(Long live wine, love and tobacco)
Ex. 95
Più mosso
Mal - gré moi je ne De crainte el - le fris - son-ne
WW, Str
(Despite myself, I tremble. She trembles for fear)
Ex. 96
[poco allegro]
CHAPELOU —
: loni tde рол Ец = mean —— —— — —
(Oh! oh! oh! how handsome he was, the postilion of Lonjumeau)
pos - til -
phrases in the ensemble, No. 4, than that of Ex. 95; this echoes the
deft humour of the whole.
The musical identification of an opéra comique with one memorable
theme was happily brought about in Le Postillon de Lonjumeau, a
sentimental comedy about the coachman whose voice is ‘discovered’
by Louis XV's administrator of opera, and becomes a leading tenor
anxious to conceal his past in order to avoid prosecution for bigamy.
Chapelou's theme (first heard in Act I, No. 3) shows, however, the
extent to which purely vocal quality and technique were now essential
to opéra comique: the singer is not celebrating the past through
pastiche, but the present through his living artistry and (later) his
top B natural (Ex. 96). Indeed, a convention developed of allowing
134 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
leading characters to make their first-act entrance with the dra-
matically meretricious aid of lavish vocalises or cadenzas.
The immense popularity of Le Postillon de Lonjumeau was earned
by the superior variety of Adam's score and the ingeniousness of its
libretto. Adam even gave the postillion's neighbours a fugue to sing.
In the two-act Le Toréador, set in the same period, witty musical
reference to eighteenth-century opéra comique played an essential
part of the plot. Quotation from Gretry in particular both revived
the spirit of vaudeville and paid homage to a composer certain of
whose works still held the boards, and whose Richard Ceur-de-lion
and Zémire et Azor were newly orchestrated for modern consumption
by Adam himself.?? Moreover Le Toréador contains a miniature
divertissement for all three characters in the form of variations for
voice and flute on the nursery tune ‘Ah! vous dirai-je maman’. With
this may be compared the closing scene of Auber's Jenny Bell (1855)
which contains vocal variations on ‘Rule, Britannia!’
Le Toréador's gay lack of pretension was carried over into Giralda,
but could not appropriately fill a large three-act canvas. Scribe's
tedious reverses of fortune are too well mirrored in repetitive vocal
lines and cadences; the massive second finale comes to resemble the
monstrous fusion of an opera buffa with the resources of grand opéra.
Only the chromaticism of Manoel's Act I aria (Ex. 97) seems to
suggest an emergent change of sensibility.
THOMAS
Ambroise Thomas's career extended to the 1880s and he only set
one Scribe libretto (Le Comte de Carmagnola, Opéra, 1841), preferring
instead the wit and finesse of Sauvage, Frangois Planard, or de
Leuven. Several distinctive qualities emerged in his first, and suc-
cessful, opéra comique, La Double échelle (1837). They included the
capacity to write as attractively carefree melodies as his elders could;
respect for accurate prosodic word setting and distaste for gratuitous
vocal display; command of contrapuntal lines in ensembles; and a
liking for subtle harmony. Thomas's more personal themes had
greater rhythmic flexibility and subtlety than those of his elder rivals,
particularly in steady 6/8 metre. Moreover, he was willing to employ
thematic interconnections of a more contrived nature, though always
75 Le Toréador quotes from Gretry’s L’Amant jaloux, Le Tableau parlant, and L’ Ami de la
maison; the dramatic situation ending Act I appears to be inspired by the second act close of
the first of these.
76 The action takes place in England. Act III also includes variations on ‘God Save the
King’.
THOMAS 135
Ex. 97
Larghetto
(Sweetest dream, you who always soothe me, Happy enchantment of discreet amours)
Ex. 98
Allegro moderato Andantino
LA MARQUISE LE SENECHAL
Ё
Pe - tits oi -
Allegro vivace
LA MARQUISE
- seaux_jou-ant dans la cam - pa - gne Dis -cret, do-cile et sa - ge
(LA MARQUISE: Discreet, obedient, wise)
(LE SÉNÉCHAL: Little birds, playing in the countryside)
Ex. 99
oS E
LU
Ces
aholi А e 903
_——
with a light touch: Ex. 98 draws on three successive sections of the
opening trio of La Double échelle. Equally lightly worn was the
learned harmonic sequence (Ex. 99) used as the basis for a mere
mélodrame during the serenade, ‘Ah! si j'avais. This sort of in-
telligence set Thomas apart, but for the moment he remained content
to stay within orthodox forms. Le Panier fleuri (1839), another
one-act piece, almost equally successful, again demonstrated his
penchant for character-comedy and traditional dramatic values. He
took up current musical styles and applied them zestfully. For
136 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
example, the opening double chorus of soldiers and drinkers does
not only take in a plethora of conversational details (the scene is a
Parisian bar in 1760) but also goes on to include further action
matched with musical development. Like Adam, Thomas is ready to
parody older styles such as the minuet; like Auber, he can invent a
brazen melody to carry an ensemble (in this case No. 4) triumphantly
through (Ex. 100).
Thomas’s next major success was not until 1849, with Le Caid.
Sauvage’s reworking of the papatachi episode from Rossini’s L’it-
aliana in Algeri naturally provoked some Italianate parody, especially
near the end. However, it also demonstrated the composer’s fertile
use of varied accompaniments and ritornellos, his artful melody
contrasting with Adam’s simpler one. But still the traditional forms
obtained: air, duet, ensembles, finales. It was with Le Songe d’une
nuit d'été (J. B. Rosier and de Leuwen, 1850) that a new orientation
appeared, pointing to future opéra comique librettos that would move
away from novelettish adventure towards something more ambitious
(later undisguised in the form of direct literary adaptation) and more
pretentious treatment of adult relationships. Thomas's work begins
conventionally enough with a celebration in a London tavern given
by Falstaff in honour of Shakespeare's latest success. But a masked
Queen Elizabeth and her maid Olivia are obliged to shelter there
from a storm, having been to the premiére also. The volatile poet,
unmoved by various entreaties, takes refuge from loneliness in
alcoholic confusion. Act II, set in Richmond Park by moonlight,
contains an extended sequence in which the still-masked Elizabeth
calls on Shakespeare as his muse to reform and return to poetry. In
the half-light Shakespeare seizes Olivia's hand in error, only to
become involved with her noble suitor in a duel. He escapes, thinking
he has killed Latimer. Not until Act III does the queen reveal her
identity and give the poet her friendship in return for his rededication
Ex. 100
Allegro con moto
BEAUSOLEIL 0
ё - tes re- ve - nus
(Good old days of chivalry, today you have returned)
ORCHESTRATION 137
Ex. 101
la
CHORUS
(With them, one’s soul bewitched, ah, then one can hasten to battle)
to art. (There are probably direct connections with Offenbach’s Les
Contes d Hoffmann of 1881, discussed later.)
Thomas at first seems to search for a stylistic way; there are echoes
of Weber and Berlioz (among others), notably a sterling version of
the ‘Marche de Pelerins’ from the latter’s symphony, Harold en Italie
(Ex. 101), which occurs in the introductory ensemble. But there is
also a pompous theme for the London revellers that is closer to
grand opera, and prominent use of melodrame to lend heightened
reality to Elizabeth’s pleading in the first two acts. The atmosphere
changes in Act II, No. 8, with the ‘dream’ sequence. In a sense it is
childishly sentimental, but in another it anticipates Act II of Tristan
und Isolde. The music persistently employs enharmonic modulation
by thirds (G flat —A — Е, etc.), requires the use of a harmonium to
create an apparently endless harmonic flux, and adds the disembodied
vocalises of Elizabeth to complete its strange beauty (Ex. 102).
Enharmonic change continues to forestall cadences, and also
applause, as the sequence moves through its duet of principal
characters (in E), the challenge, and the duel itself, which ends the
act in D (an enharmonic third below G flat, which began the
‘dream’). Almost as suggestive of the future are the third-act duet
for Olivia and Latimer, set to a sobbing B minor, and the discordant
openings of both Nos. 12 and 13.
ORCHESTRATION
The conventional 1830s opéra comique orchestra included double
woodwind and piccolo, four horns (crooked in separate keys), two
138 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Andante non troppo
SHAKESPEARE :
een
A >= жш
le par-fum
EE =
aa pm es
or.
= SP == EE =
RE
H seo
[T4 ВЫ “Wa а
| [up = ES 7 ee Pa
КҮ ЛТ EE, — IESSE
Ee SSS SS ee EIN,
qa Tr —— ——À [a s fe Be a
harmonium &:
e uuu un
pp
(I breathe in the sweet perfume of flowers.)
natural trumpets, three trombones, percussion, and strings. A harp
was regularly but not always included. Adam used a cornet à pistons
in the overture to Le Chalet but this was exceptional. In the 1840s
the chromatic (piston) trumpet was specified, the same players
regularly turning to natural trumpet in the course of the same work
(for example, Adam's Le Roi d Yvetot), or else doubling trumpet and
cornet à pistons (Auber’s Haydée).
We can see Thomas's early use of the harmonium (patented only
eight years before in 1842) in Ex. 102. However in 1834 Halévy
ORCHESTRATION 139
Ex. 103
Andantino
HENRIETTE
Maisde la nuit qui trouble le si - len
created a not dissimilar effect in L’Eclair, the finale of Act II, when
Henriette shows her Aeolian harp to her sister (Ex. 103). The music
passes through several enharmonic modulations and requires the use
of both a harp and a ‘piano expressif, evidently a type of free-reed
instrument inspired by Anton Haeckl’s physharmonika.??
Orchestration in opéra comique was an essential ingredient of its
colourfulness, commonly using the full possibilities of wind (solo,
doubling, etc.) and strings (pizzicato, muted, and occasionally solo,
including cello). Adam's orchestration was the least imaginative,
Halévy's probably the most; Halévy and Thomas evidently thought
of material in terms of orchestral colouring, consequently writing
more flexibly and incorporating more interesting detail, even in the
tutti. Cornets à pistons were used to suggest both solemnity and
17? See Alfred Berner, ‘Harmonium’, in The New Grove. Halévy's full score, title-page,
explains: ‘Pour faciliter l'exécution ... qui se fait à Paris avec un piano expressif, ou
fisharmonika, Mr Marix, Passage des Panoramas No. 47, a fabriqué sous le nom d’accordeon
éolien, un instrument ayant le forme d'un accordéon.’
140 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
menace, and of course to double main themes in the largest tuttis.
Stage orchestras were fairly regularly used, drawn from the pit
group.’® Inferior scores, it need hardly be said, succumbed to the
crude rhetoric of bass drum and cymbals.
(c) ITALY
By DAVID KIMBELL
ITALIAN ROMANTICISM: ART AND POLITICS
In 1830 Italy was little more than what Metternich was to call it: ‘a
geographical expression'."? At any rate the word had no political
reality, for the peninsula was still divided into the multiplicity of
kingdoms, duchies, and grand-duchies, and provinces of the Austrian
Empire that had been restored at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
Nor to outward appearance did ‘Italy’ mean much more in 1850.
For in that year, following the failure of the revolutions and wars
of independence of 1848-9, a second Restoration had been effected.
But, if the political map of Italy was little changed, it was otherwise
in the minds of men. The 1830s and 1840s were crucial decades of
the Risorgimento; and the Risorgimento—the ‘rising-up-again’ of
the Italian people to liberty—was at this period more an achievement
of intellect and imagination than of direct political action. Many of
its heroes were intellectuals or artists: the political philosopher
Giuseppe Mazzini, who in an unending stream of writings proclaimed
his belief that nothing could stand in the way of the growth into
nationhood of people who shared a common religion, a common
. way of life, and a common culture; the poet Alessandro Manzoni,
who spent more than a decade refashioning his great novel J promessi
sposi in such a way that it might help provide Italians with an
accepted national language; the composers, Bellini, Donizetti, and
Verdi, whose operas were acclaimed in theatres all over the peninsula
and regarded as part of the patrimony of all Italians. Such men,
directly and indirectly, persuaded their compatriots that ‘Italy’ was
more than a geographical expression: it was an intellectual and
emotional and spiritual reality as well, and once that was well
78 e.g. Le Domino noir, Les Mousquetaires de la reine, Haydee.
79 Letter to Count Apponyi, 12 Apr. 1847.
THE PLACE OF OPERA IN ITALIAN SOCIETY 141
understood social and political reorganization must inevitably follow.
The Italian Romantic movement acquired much of its dis-
tinctiveness from its social and political dimensions. Of course,
Romanticism had complex ramifications in Italy no less than in other
parts of Europe. И entailed a rejection of the past, of Classical and
mythological subject-matter, and the premium put on harmonious
formalism of design. Italians became more enthusiastically cos-
mopolitan than ever before, keenly interested in artistic developments
in those northern countries where Romanticism was most at home:
France, Germany, and Britain. But they did not imitate them
slavishly: not the clamant individualism of the artist-hero, nor the
preoccupation with the supernatural, nor the curious relish for
remote periods of history were generally typical of them. Mazzini,
in his literary essays, insisted that the age of artistic egotism was a
thing of the past, and that the age to come would be one of ‘socialized
humanity’.8° The history with which Manzoni dealt in his plays or
D'Azeglio in his novels interested those authors not for its strangeness
and remoteness, nor because they had an objective curiosity to know
what the past was really like, but because of the light which it shed
on the contemporary plight of Italy. As D'Azeglio quite specifically
put it, ‘I conceived the plan of influencing people through a
patriotically inspired literature.’3! In Italy Romanticism was the
cultural arm of the Risorgimento.
THE PLACE OF OPERA IN ITALIAN SOCIETY
Most Italian artists were, then, not solitary dreamers but men
keenly aware of their social role. To communicate with their fellow
men vividly and attractively was a first priority, and throughout the
period opera remained a popular art form loved by Italians of all
classes and conditions. The number of theatres where opera was
performed was prodigious; and outside the theatre operatic music |
was a mainstay in the repertoire of town and military bands, of
church organists and of barrel-organ grinders. That coachman who
drove Dickens into Italy in 1846, and who had ‘a word and a smile,
and a flick of his whip, for all the peasant girls, and odds and ends
of the Sonnambula for all the echoes’ was a quintessential figure of
the period.
In the larger cities, where opera was performed regularly at most
80 See. for example, ‘Della fatalità considerata com'elemento drammatico’, Edizione nazionale
degli scritti di Giuseppe Mazzini, viii (Imola, 1910), 169-200.
81 Massimo d’Azeglio, / miei ricordi, with posthumous completion by Giuseppe Torelli (2
vols.; Florence, 1867); Eng. trans., E. R. Vincent, Things I remember, (London, 1966), 311.
142 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
seasons of the year, the theatre occupied a central place in social
life. The still flourishing box system, whereby tickets were purchased
not for individual performances but for, usually, the season, en-
couraged people to regard the opera-house as the normal place of
public resort in the evening. Except in those theatres that were
attached to a court, such as the Teatro Regio in Turin and the San
Carlo in Naples, where etiquette was severely formal, such a state
of affairs naturally disposed audiences to treat opera-going as a
convivial activity as much as an artistic one.
DRAMATIC AND MUSICAL PRINCIPLES
In the ever-shifting balance of power between words and music,
the first half of the nineteenth century was, in Italy, an age in
which the primacy of the musicians was overwhelming and largely
uncontroversial. Above all else opera meant the theatrical rendering
of impassioned song: ‘carve in your head in letters of adamant,’
wrote Bellini to the librettist of 7 puritani, ‘the music drama must
draw tears, inspire terror, make people die, through singing.'5? More-
over, despite the violence of the dramatic themes that Romanticism
brought into fashion, this singing was accommodated within an
operatic structure that was still highly formalized, and dominated
by musical values.
An Italian Romantic opera made no attempt to present its subject
in consistent detail or depth. The dramatic action was concentrated
on a comparatively small number of cardinal incidents, and each of
these was structured in the way that Rossini had standardized. To
begin with, a brief instrumental prelude; then a recitative in which
the dramatic business is expounded; this first section of the scene,
generally static in character, culminates in a lyrical aria or ensemble,
the cantabile. After the cantabile there is a marked change of mood,
sometimes brought about by the arrival of more characters, sometimes
by a shift from reflection to decision in the mind of the protagonist.
The transitional passage (tempo di mezzo) that accompanies this
transformation issues in the cabaletta (or stretta as it is usually called
in the case of large-scale ensembles), a fast and brilliant aria, sung
twice to bring the scene to its conclusion. In ensembles the cantabile
is often proceeded by another lyrical movement in a more animated
and erratic style, the primo tempo. The pattern also affects those
numbers of an opera that already in the eighteenth century had been
82 Letter to Count Carlo Pepoli, Vincenzo Bellini: Epistolario, ed. Luisa Cambi (Verona,
1943), p. 400.
DRAMATIC AND MUSICAL PRINCIPLES 143
multipartite—the introduction and the grand finale—for composers
now tended to concentrate the dramatic and musical interest on just
two movements, one slow and one fast. Only the choruses and the
occasional single-movement aria, often distinguished by some such
special term as canzona or romanza, were unaffected.
Within the individual sections of the scene more had changed since
Rossini. Some composers, like Saverio Mercadante and Giovanni
Pacini, still favoured the ‘chainlike’ aria structures of Rossini, in
which one musical idea succeeded another in a loose succession to
which only the internal balance of the phrases and, often, the
increasingly florid character of each succeeding phrase gave any
firmness. Ex. 104, from Act I of Pacini's /vanhoe, illustrates this.
But Bellini popularized a tighter form, in which the aria culminates
in a varied reprise of its opening phrase, and this became the
favourite of Verdi's early years (see Ex. 105 from Oberto, Act II).
During the 1840s Verdi tended increasingly to convert this largely
formal reprise into a climactic phrase in which the initial lyrical
impulse returns intensified and transformed; indeed he often reverted
to the evolving form of Rossini and Pacini, but with a closer
expressive relationship between each succeeding couplet of verses
and each succeeding phrase of song.
At the beginning of this period the freer sections of the operatic
design— recitative or scena, primo tempo, tempo di mezzo— were
very much subordinate to cantabile and cabaletta. But they contained
the seeds of some of the most significant developments in the second
part of the century. Dramatic and expressive considerations often
prompted composers to pack into their ‘recitatives’ sections of lyrical
arioso or of evocative orchestral music, and the primo tempo and
tempo di mezzo— particularly the latter, in which the momentum is
often sustained by the orchestra— were the places where quasi-
symphonic skills were already being applied to dramatic ends.
Only very slowly did Italian composers begin to avail themselves
of the expressive resources of chromatic harmony, or of the
Romantic orchestra. The primacy of the singing voice gave a certain
one-dimensionality to the musical language, and melodic, rhythmic,
and formal considerations therefore weighed heaviest. Harmony was
used to clarify form, and to underline the rhythmic and dynamic
incidents in an aria or ensemble. It is a singular trait, vis-à-vis other
musical traditions, that the most complex chord progressions and
the most abstruse modulations are rarely used to underline the
expressive climaxes of a song; more often they give an almost physical
vehemence to the tutti cadences that follow a cabaletta. The orchestral
144 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ex. 104
Allegro agitato
REBECCA
ре - пе si fie - re, mio so - lo, mio so - lo con-
ma - mi suo сог, che m'a - mi, chem
mor-te èin braccio a a-mor,so - - av E а - mor.
(My only comfort amid such bitter sorrows is the sweet thought that his heart loves me;
Ah! to see him for a moment before dying! to hear the voice of tender love; then let the
harshness of my fate be fulfilled, sweet is death in the arms of love.)
REAPPRAISAL 145
mi-se- ra He єй Мө pia me tro- via - si - lo nel_ mio
МУ
рек =" to; SE dere san тота letz EE
quel - lo del - Ра-тог,а quel - lo del - ^
(The voice of glorious virtue has more effect on my heart than riches and magnificence,
more than deluding praise. Let the sorrow of the unhappy woman find refuge in my bosom;
friendship is a holy affection just as surely as love is.)
writing likewise seldom provides the kind of detailed expressive
commentary that had become fashionable in Germany and France.
When composers sought to diversify their conventional style of
scoring it was to employ devices more typical of eighteenth century
orchestral practice: an obbligato instrument, or a reduction of the
full orchestra to some distinctive chamber grouping.
REAPPRAISAL
For good and for ill, the force of musical tradition was stronger
in Italy than anywhere else in Western Europe. But the Romantic
age brought a series of reappraisals of the tradition which, slowly
and unspectacularly, transformed the language of opera. Composers
grew more confident in imposing their wills on singers; Rossinian
146 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
virtuosity began to give way to an expressive lyricism more sensitive
to dramatic nuance; many composers became acutely conscious of
the splendours of German instrumental music and anxious to
appropriate some of its resources for the native musical style; many
found their ambitions sharpened by an acquaintance with French
grand opéra, whose freedom of form, sumptuous choral and orchestral
resources, and grandiosity of spectacle together constituted an
allurement which Italian composers simply could not put out of
mind, and which unsettled a too complacent satisfaction with their
own tradition. But perhaps the most important development was a
new rapprochement of composer and librettist. By 1830 so cavalier
an unconcern with poetic values as Rossini’s was already out of
date. Bellini and Romani, and later Verdi and Piave, established
working relationships in which the composer was intimately con-
cerned with every detail of the libretto, from its broad structural
outline to the finest details of metre or vocabulary. Before 1850 even
Salvatore Cammarano, the leading librettist in the bastion of tradition
that was Naples could write:
Did I not fear the imputation of being an Utopian, I should be tempted to
say that to achieve the highest degree of perfection in an opera it would
be necessary for both the words and the music to be the product of one
and the same mind; and from this ideal follows my firm opinion that when
it has two authors, they must at least be like brothers, and that if Poetry
should not be the servant of Music, still less should it tyrannize over her.83
DONIZETTI'$ MATURE OPERAS: GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
An account of Donizetti's early career and of his first masterpiece,
Anna Bolena (Milan, 1830), has been given elsewhere.84 The dis-
tinction of that opera was apparent both to popular audiences and
to the subtlest minds of the period. Mazzini admired it for the
way in which it cast off Rossinian lyricism and concentrated on
truthfulness of characterization;8? and old Simone Mayr, Donizetti’s
teacher in Bergamo, at last began to address his former pupil as
maestro. The first of his operas to be performed in Paris and London,
Anna Bolena, marked the beginning of Donizetti’s international
career. Until 1837 (Roberto Devereux) his activities continued to be
centred in Naples, forming the last significant chapter in the glorious
83 Letter to Verdi, 17 July 1849, / copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Gaetano Cesari and
Alessandro Luzio (Milan, 1913), 473.
81 See Vol. VIII, pp. 44-9.
85 Cf. the passage from his ‘Filosofia della musica’, quoted in Herbert Weinstock, Donizetti
and the World of Opera (London, 1964), 75-6.
DONIZETTI'S MATURE OPERAS 147
operatic history of the city; thereafter he was drawn away increasingly
to Paris and Vienna.
Donizetti's maturity was not marked by any decisive rejection of
his Rossinian inheritance. To the end of his working life he recognized
that he and ‘every Italian composer lived and continues to live on
the knowledge, the taste and the experience born from the style
created by that genius’.86 He never outgrew the operatic structures
established by Rossini’s example; and even in matters of style,
old-fashioned traits remained well after Anna Bolena. Chainlike aria
forms still heavily outweighed those in rounded, recapitulatory forms;
as late as L'assedio di Calais (Naples, 1836) Donizetti still used female
singers for heroic male parts; and a delicate and graceful floridity
was still often to be heard in the writing for tenor and bass voices.
But about 1830 he came under the influence of the slightly younger
Bellini, whose style had matured earlier than Donizetti’s own.
Gradually the aria structures became more compact; coloratura
encrusted the melodies less thickly; and instead the lyricism acquired
a new expressive intensity, partly attributable to the profusion of
slow, dissonant appoggiaturas, partly to the scrupulous matching of
word and tone. Soon Donizetti no less than Bellini himself was a
master of a style of which one might say, ‘we do not know whether
it should be called sung declamation or declaimed song'.? See, for
instance, Ex. 106 from Sancia di Castiglia, Act II.
Donizetti was typical of his age in that, in maturity, he concentrated
on the composition of serious opera. The range of subjects he
handled was wide, extending from neo-Classical tragedy in the
French style (Belisario, Venice, 1836) to historical romance (Lucia
di Lammermoor, Naples, 1835); from homely sentimentality (Linda
di Chamounix, Venice, 1843) to themes of national and religious
conflict (Sancia di Castiglia, Naples, 1832). But he had a particular
partiality for sanguinary intrigue, usually focused upon some kind of
love triangle. While some operas—including Belisario and Sancia—
dispense with a conventional love interest altogether, Donizetti's own
recorded views on librettos endorse the taste of the period for
Romantic melodrama: ‘I want love— because without it subjects are
cold — violent love.’88
86 ‘Scritti e pensieri sulla musica’, manuscript notes, possibly for a lecture in Austria in
1843, Museo Donizettiano, Bergamo.
87 From a review of Bellini's La straniera, in L'eco, Milan, 20 Feb. 1829, quoted in Bellini,
Epistolario, p. 196.
88 Letter to Giuseppe Consul, 21 July 1835, Guido Zavadini, Donizetti: Vita-musiche-
epistolario (Bergamo, 1948), 379.
1830-1850
ROMANTIC OPERA:
148
Ex. 106
Larghetto
SANCIA
IRCANO
e per sempre.
o
5
;
=
2
Р
=
=
©
=
o
=
о
S
©
E
o
=
2
tro af - fet- to
(SANCIA: We separated? Ah, no! that horrible thought alone is enough for me. I understand
no other feeling if I must lose you . . .
ho drives me out must die at last. Let him die!)
. and for ever. He w
IRCANO: Yes . .
DONIZETTI'S MATURE OPERAS 149
As Italian composers turned from the archetypal Classical themes
that had dominated the first two hundred years of operatic history
to subjects that were more violently passionate and psychologically
more lifelike, and as they aimed to match ever more closely the
musical expression to the meaning of the words, the tension that
had always existed in opera between 'dramatic truth' and musical
beauty entered a critical phase. Donizetti often emphasized his desire
to ‘serve the words’;89 but the dramatic illumination is in fact fleeting
and fragmentary, for a deeper desire, namely to create beautifully
fashioned artefacts of impassioned song is never repudiated. In the
cantabile of the duet in Act II of Lucrezia Borgia (Milan, 1833) the
disagreement between the friends Orsini and Gennaro is faithfully
reflected in the openings of their solo phrases (Exx. 107 and 108).
But as well as being a juxtaposition of character, a duet was
seen as a musical form which required the harmonization and
reconciliation of its constituent elements; and, notwithstanding the
Ex. 107
Larghetto
ORSINI
Шиг DEET TT Ee ie Ee)
LU OU —[———— SS FS —— —MN- Ae AS eS
EES e ES
jr
(You know, you are fully aware. . .)
*? For example, in the letter to Antonio Dolci, 10 Jan. 1839, ibid., p. 493.
150 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Gen-til da
GENNARO
m ке == are
=! ST ПЕС 7 БЕ
(ORSINI: Negroni is anoble lady...
GENNARO: But now in this court . . .)
sense of the words, Orsini and Gennaro are soon simply “making
music' together (Ex. 109). Such constraints on dramatic fidelity have
been observed in some degree by most opera composers; but Italian
Romantic opera imposed a further one. In another letter Donizetti
speaks of his habit of 'serving the situation and giving the artists
scope to shine’;9° and it is the sense that some of the music has been
written with no other object than that of ‘giving the artists scope to
shine', to earn the admiring applause of their dazzled audience, that
occasions a more destructive tension between music and drama. The
cabaletta at the end of Lucrezia Borgia provides a striking example.
Starting in the grandest tragic style, with plunging arpeggios, and
broken gasps of song, the aria culminates—piu mosso, in the major
key— with a mere tour de force of virtuosity.
The fact of the matter was that Italian opera composers could not
long lose sight of their singers or audiences in pursuit of an ideal
dramatic vision. Operas were still bespoke for a particular company
of performers, and it was essential for the composer to make the
most of their strengths and minimize their shortcomings. When
operas were revived by different companies, it was a quite normal
procedure for the arias to be adapted to suit them—puntature was
the technical term for such adaptations. It was not the least of the
innovations of Macbeth that it marked Verdis break with that
custom. That the consequences of such complaisance were not always
deplorable is shown by Donizetti's response to the talents of Giorgio
99 To Antonio Vasselli, 24 Oct., 1841, ibid., p. 558.
DONIZETTI AS MUSICIAN AND CRAFTSMAN 151
Ronconi, in Torquato Tasso (Rome, 1833); a great singing actor,
Ronconi prompted Donizetti to explore the dramatic potential of
the hitherto neglected baritone voice, thus introducing to Italian
Romantic opera an invaluable new expressive resource.
DONIZETTI AS MUSICIAN AND CRAFTSMAN
Early in his career Donizetti had entertained reforming ambitions:
a fellow-student, Marco Bonesi, tells of his impatience with 'the
predictable situations, the sequence of introduction, cavatina, duet,
trio, finale, always fashioned in the same way'.?! What impresses in
his mature operas, however, is not so much any clear purpose of
reform as the extraordinary resourcefulness he showed while working
within the tradition. Some of this resourcefulness is the result of the
pleasure of the master craftsman in his material: Donizetti's aria
structures are frequently extended and elaborate, far more so than
the merely effective presentation of the text demands, and give an
altogether more leisurely impression than those of the young Verdi.
But more often some dramatically apt point is made by the inventive
stroke in question. Most noticeable, because they occur in what is
normally the most stereotyped part of the opera, are the transforming
touches that Donizetti often introduces into the cabaletta: the
rewriting of its second statement; the temporary transference of the
theme from voice to orchestra; the replacement of the usual exuberant
release of energy by a slow plain kind of song more apt to a scene
of tragedy. But in fact, such felicities are to be found in every part
of his scores; Donizetti's knack of handling the conventional forms
in novel ways that served to illuminate the dramatic task in hand
was inexhaustible.
In 1834 Rossini was quoted by Bellini as expressing the view that
Donizetti was ‘the composer in Italy with the most skill ... in
working out his pieces’ [per la tiratura dei pezzi].?? Donizetti himself
attributed to his knowledge of the quartets of ‘Haydn, Beethoven,
Mozart, Reicha, Mayseder’ the fact that he was able to ‘economize
on imagination and work out a piece from few 1deas',?? and there
are indeed many examples of arias and ensembles in which he pursues
a motif with Beethovenian single-mindedness. The stretta from the
quartet in Act II of Parisina provides an example (Ex. 110). Another
aspect of Donizetti's thematic economy is his handling of recurring
91 Quoted by William Ashbrook, Donizetti (London, 1965), 42.
92 Letter to Francesco Florimo, 4 Oct. 1834, Bellini, Epistolario, p. 443.
93 Letter to Antonio Dolci, 15 May 1842, Zavadini, Donizetti, p. 602.
152 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Vivace
vie - ni, vie- ni, fug -gi, fug-giea - tro - ce sce- na al’ I-
chein pet
ra oan
ИСС ШИВ Р —L
eme ger Get i
сь: ИИ БИНО ЬЕ ЕНН ш D чи шири юг:
Ши ege РАШ. "Т! тШ ЕР DE ШЕ (С 20 ШШЕН: p ШЕ ШШЕ п. ЗЫ ТЫР LE
Te EE,
ta-lia si гі - spar-mi all’ I - ta-lia si гі - spar - Ше
(PARISINA: Go, fly
ERNESTO: Come, fly
UGO: It is not life, it is protracted death, eternal torment, which you give me
AZZO: Go away: as long as in my heart . . .)
| and let Italy be spared an atrocious spectacle
themes. Some such themes are dramatically emblematic, as, for
example, the ballata of Pierotto, the orphan-boy organ-grinder in
Linda di Chamounix; some are largely formal, as when the orchestra
takes up in the tempo di mezzo material already heard in the primo
tempo or scena preceding the cantabile—a feature hardly more
common in Donizetti than in the music of his contemporaries. But
there are many examples that are as unusual and as apt expressively
as they are deft in terms of musical craftsmanship. For example, in
the duet for Giovanna and Enrico in Act I of Anna Bolena the
haunting climactic phrase of the cantabile ‘Di un ripudio avró la
pena' recurs to crown the cabaletta; and the primo tempo of the
DONIZETTI AS MUSICIAN AND CRAFTSMAN 153
Lucrezia-Alfonso duet in Act I of Lucrezia Borgia is a parlante set
against an orchestral theme developed out of the Prelude to Lucrezia's
solo scena in the Prologue—a theme associated, therefore, with her
love for Gennaro.
Donizetti was the master-harmonist among Italians of the age,
though he paraded his skills less ostentatiously than Mercadante. He
made effective play with the wide range of tonal relations that arise
from the Italian habit of regarding each key as having two equally
valid equivalents—relative and parallel—in the opposite mode.
Particularly deft with enharmonic and ‘Neapolitan’ effects, he often
introduced delicious harmonic and tonal shifts to give relish to
repetitions of phrase (see Ex. 111, from Maria Stuarda, Act II).
Typical of much of his mature music was a popular songlike
simplicity which, except as a special effect, was new in Italian opera.
Sometimes this popolaresco note was emphasized for dramatic
purposes—as in the music of Gennaro in Lucrezia Borgia or Pierotto
in Linda di Chamounix; but more generally it appears that Donizetti
was seeking in the full-blooded sentimentality of popular song—
especially Neapolitan popular song—that same antidote to Rossinian
floridity that Pacini confessed himself to have been seeking in the
same place at about the same time.?^ His instrumentation was firmly
within the Germano-Italian tradition established by Mayr, largely
dependent upon a 'variegated pattern of wind colour over a neutral
string background’.?5 Several operas, notably Lucia di Lammermoor,
allotted an unusually prominent role to the horns, as if they had for
Donizetti the same associations with the Romantic as they did for
Weber.
Donizetti’s facility was legendary; tradition reports that L’elisir
d'amore (Milan, 1832) was written and composed in the space of
two weeks, to help out an impresario who had been let down by
another composer.®® In the 1830s and 1840s, however, many critics
regarded such facility with more suspicion than admiration, and
Donizetti—shown in a celebrated caricature in the Paris Charivari
composing with both hands at once??— did not escape their sneers.
While he was far from blind to the abuses of the age and deplored
the compromises with circumstance which he was continually having
to make, Donizetti took pride in his work and resented the insulting
94 Giovanni Pacini, Le mie memorie artistiche (Florence, 1865), 93.
95 Julian Budden, ‘Donizetti’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music (London, 1980).
96 F, Alborghetti and М. Galli, Gaetano Donizetti е G. Simone Mayr: Notizie е documenti
(Bergamo, 1875), 77-8 (quoted in Weinstock, Donizetti and the World of Opera, p. 83).
97 Reproduced in Weinstock, Donizetti and the World of Opera, plate 9.
154
Es Й
ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Allegro Sr
MARIA EE
non. sa
Eeer
mi - se-ro
(Through you I hope that my plight will not be as wretched as this . . .)
MERCADANTE'S REFORM OPERAS 155
and unjust criticism to which he sometimes was subject: he was
particularly hurt when Schumann described Lucrezia Borgia as *music
for a marionette-theatre'.98 Apart from his musical talents, he was
a writer sufficiently accomplished to complete the libretto of Fausta
(Naples, 1832) after the death of the librettist Domenico Gilardoni,
to write the librettos of several of his comic operas himself, and to
translate into French both Belisario and Linda di Chamounix. One
of the most fastidious of the artists who worked with him, Giuseppina
Strepponi, later Verdi's second wife, remembered him as a man of
‘goodness and vast culture... a truly superior artist and gentleman'.9?
MERCADANTE'S REFORM OPERAS
The works of both Bellini and Donizetti showed unmistakably
that a spirit of reform was in the air. But it was not until the late
1830s that a group of operas appeared that were actually claimed by
their composer, Saverio Mercadante (1795-1870), to be revolutionary.
Mercadante was perhaps particularly well placed to make an
objective reappraisal of the tradition, for twice in mid-career he
withdrew from the hurly-burly of Italian operatic life. From 1827 to
1831 he was in Spain, and in 1835-40 he worked at Novara—‘a
provincial city where no-one talks about anything but rice, wheat,
wine and maize’!°°—as director of music at the cathedral. At all
events it was in the first operas composed after his return from
Spain, particularly in / Normanni a Parigi (Turin, 1832), that a new
character begins to be perceptible: the music is less brilliant, less
stereotyped in form, and suggests a close study of the text. And it
was during his service at Novara that Mercadante produced the
series of ‘reform operas' for which he is still dimly remembered: //
giuramento (Milan, 1837), Le due illustri rivali (Venice, 1838), Elena
da Feltre (Naples, 1838), I! bravo (Milan, 1839), and La vestale
(Naples, 1840). Thereafter, with his return to Naples as director of
the Conservatory, his vision of a reformed melodrama seemed to
fade.
In the late 1830s Mercadante's programme for reform was very
much in line with the thinking of (earlier) Bellini and (later) Verdi.
Conventional stereotypes were to be eliminated, the music was to be
more responsive to the dramatic theme, and singers were to be
98 Letter to an unknown friend, 15 Aug. 1839, Zavadini, Donizetti, p. 502.
99 Writing in Gaetano Donizetti, numero unico nel primo centenario della sua nascita, 1797
1897, cited and trans. Weinstock, Donizetti and the World of Opera, p. 162.
100 Letter to Francesco Florimo, 10 July 1835, Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio di
Musica.
156 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
disciplined to perform strictly in accordance with the wishes of the
composer. A letter to Florimo, written while Mercadante was working
on Elena da Feltre, has often been quoted:
I have continued the revolution begun in // giuramento: the forms varied—
trivial cabalettas banished, crescendos eliminated —concise working-out—
few repetitions—some novelty in the cadences— preper attention paid to
the drama: the orchestra rich, without covering the voices—the long solos
in the ensembles, which compel the other parts to stand coldly by and
damage the action, removed—little bass drum and very little banda...
But the most important thing is ... not to allow my score to be altered
in the slightest, whether by additions or cuts or transpositions. The singers
should study it carefully and neglect nothing in the ensembles, putting their
whole heart into declaiming and accentuating it, without any arbitrariness
in tempo or in the addition of fioritura.101
Almost from the beginning of Mercadante's career critics com-
mented on the resourcefulness of his orchestral writing. In his reform
operas this quality is unmistakable: particularly characteristic are
the woodwind solos that he uses, sometimes to introduce, sometimes
to act as obbligatos to his vocal numbers and, more than any of his
contemporaries, to punctuate and support the recitative; he is fond
too of entrusting a section of music exclusively to a somewhat
recherché combination of instruments. Another aspect of Merca-
dante's orchestral skill is the fascinating density of some of the
instrumental patterns set up in more declamatory parts of the score.
Ex. 112 from the primo tempo of the Act II duet in La vestale is
typical of the driving energy which he achieves by such means.
Apart from this orchestral elaboration, the reform operas can
boast a structural freedom that has no parallel among Mercadante's
contemporaries. Indeed few of the formal innovations generally
associated with Verdian scores of ten years later— Macbeth, Luisa
Miller, or even Rigoletto—are not in some way adumbrated here.
The conventional patterns are always liable to be overturned: in
Foscari’s aria in Act I of H bravo, an off-stage romanza is heard
between the two statements of the cabaletta; while Ubaldo's aria in
Act III of Elena da Feltre merges cantabile, declamation, cabaletta
and chorus into a flexible whole that pays as little heed to the formal
layout of Cammarano's text as do some of Verdi's great scenes to
their literary frames. At the same time as loosening the structure of
the individual numbers, Mercadante strove for a more natural sense
of continuity. In ensembles he liked to engage all the singers virtually
101 Letter, Jan. 1838, Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio.
MERCADANTE’S REFORM OPERAS 157
Ех. 112
Allegro giusto (prorompendo)
DECIO
[z-——]
SSS б = Еш ГЕ ==
ser, D
(No, the sword which spilt my blood was not pitiless . . .)
158 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
from the outset, avoiding long solos—as the above-quoted letter to
Florimo confirms. And as Verdi was to do, he tended drastically to
reduce the number of extended arias: there is none in Act I of La
vestale and only a one-movement preghiera in the second; in all acts
of this opera the music is composed in one virtually unbroken sweep,
each number dovetailed smoothly into the next.
The most personal of Mercadante's structural innovations was his
transformation of the cabaletta. Even when he retained the fast final
movement to round off a scene, it rarely had the gaily dancing
rhythms, the florid vocalism, or the repetitive design typical of the
form. The vocal lines tended to be declamatory rather than lyrical
or brilliant; the accompaniments to avoid stereotyped ‘vamping’
patterns; in duets and trios the voices are clearly differentiated in
style and scrupulously avoid repeating one another. In Giuramento,
Elena da Feltre, and La vestale he transforms the convention of the
brilliant concluding aria for the prima donna far more radically than
Bellini or Donizetti had ever done, composing in each case a tiny
cantabile that breaks down into graphic declamation as the hand of
death takes firmer hold of the singer (see Ex. 113 from Act III of H
giuramento).
But even in the late 1830s, when, briefly, Mercadante was the
nearest thing to a great composer permanently based in Italy, there
Ex. 113
Andante sostenuto 7
ELAISA (sic)
À
хаз
LC?
e EE eS ST)
Eo = а ра o —
spe-me non ve 2
MERCADANTE'S REFORM OPERAS 159
(For me there is no hope, and I leave love to you. Ah, do not меер... smile at те... your
hand...here... on my heart. I die happy)
were features in his music to suggest that he was no born progressive.
Despite his concern for musico-dramatic continuity, he elaborated
the individual movements with a care more typical of the eighteenth
than of the mid-nineteenth century. Introductions to arias are often
long and elaborate, with florid cadential material following the
thematic incipit, and not infrequently he rounds off the design
with carefully wrought instrumental postludes. His harmonic and
modulatory resources, much admired by Italian contemporaries, are
also strangely old-fashioned in effect. There is no trace of a new
sensibility, opening up new worlds of feeling by harmonic means;
rather traditional harmonic patterns are elaborated to the verge of
abstruseness; we are still closer to Corelli than to Weber (see Ex.
114 from Elena da Feltre, Act III).
160 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ex. 114
Allegro
eh Д
A nn wp чети 215050 EE Ee
LDLLÁ——Á— НЕ: (e 2. (EE enema
SS — Р
Mercadante’s correspondence with Florimo confirms the suspicion
that his impulse to reform neither welled up from any deep internal
urge nor was inspired by any keen dramatic vision. ‘If I had not
followed your advice, I should still be stuck with those confounded
cabalettas, repetitions, and tedious procedures [/ungagini] etc. This
new career of mine I owe to you, who shook me out of my lethargy
and restored me to new musical life.’102
And his reform of the cabaletta proves to be not the sovereign
gesture of one who was a past master of the style—as Donizetti's
and Verdi's cabaletta reforms were— but rather the refuge of one
who had always been ill at ease with it.
If you should have any good new cabalettas to send me you would be
doing me a pleasure, because I can compose the first movements—the
adagios— but these confounded cabalettas, ... ruin everything for me. The
more I strive to be original, the more antiquated they seem to turn out.103
The object of this remarkable request was presumably to stimulate
102 Letter, 7 Jan. 1839, Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio.
103 Letter, 23 Nov. 1831, Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio.
MERCADANTE'S REFORM OPERAS 161
Mercadante’s creative juices rather than to embark on wholesale
plagiarism: behind a redoubtable exterior hid an artist always
painfully aware of the limitations of his talent. ‘Others with greater
flair and more imagination can complete [the work of reform] and
I shall be content to have initiated it, and that in pursuit of your
suggestions.’104
A very perplexing question is, however, what kind of completion
of his work he might conceivably have wished for. He detested such
innovations in style as he associated with the *northerners', Donizetti
and Verdi; and such general artistic principles as he proclaimed were
nostalgic rather than prophetic. Naples was still “Ше fatherland of
composers', and on assuming the directorate of the Conservatory
there in 1840 he saw his task as being that of ‘restoring the ancient
fame of Neapolitan composers . . . establishing a school founded on
the Old Neapolitan school, but free from prejudice and enriched
with the advances which the art has made’.105 Despite Mercadante’s
admiration for Rossini and Bellini, it sounds as if his old teacher
Zingarelli, together with Cimarosa and Paisiello, had never ceased
to be the chief divinities in his artistic pantheon. Long before his
death he had become a reactionary notorious even by the stand-
ards that are supposed to have prevailed in nineteenth-century
conservatories. The nearest thing he left to an artistic testament,
an extraordinarily ill-informed paper entitled ‘Breve cenno storico
sulla musica teatrale da Pergolesi a Cimarosa’, delivered to the Royal
Academy of Archaeology, Literature and Fine Arts in Naples in
1867, bears witness to a feebly Platonic view of the aesthetics of his
art. In music ‘the idea of the Beautiful and the True’ must never be
lost: the way of the great Neapolitans of the past was that of
‘the effective expression of the words rendered sublime by simple
melodies’. 196
His total indifference to literature was another anachronism in the
Romantic age. He felt most at home with the Metastasian and
post-Metastasian subjects on which he had been brought up, and
had a particular sympathy for themes from Roman history. In his
best years he set more fashionable librettos, apparently because he
was given them: La gioventu di Enrico V (Milan, 1834) is based on
Shakespeare, // giuramento on Victor Hugo’s Angelo. But Mercadante
showed absolutely no interest in their literary pedigree, and nothing
survives to suggest that he ever discussed them with his librettists
104 Letter, 1 Jan. 1838, Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio.
105 Letter, 4 July 1840, Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio.
106 Atti della Reale Accademia di Archaeologia, Lettere e Belle Arti, iii (Naples 1867), 34-5.
162 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
with any kind of critical acumen. One cannot imagine Bellini,
Donizetti, or Verdi happily harnessing their best music to so clumsy
and obscure a libretto as Gaetano Rossi’s for // giuramento; nor
empowering a third party—Florimo again—to act on his behalf in
getting Cammarano to revise the libretto of Elena da Feltre (it had
too many solo arias). ‘I am too far away to go into such details,
and you know the game better than anyone—I shall approve
everything ...!?? In later years he abandoned Romantic librettos
altogether, returning to such archaic themes as Orazi e curiazi,
Medea, and Statira.
THE INSPIRATION OF EXTRA-MUSICAL IDEAS: POLITICS
In their different ways, Bellini, Donizetti, and Mercadante all
helped ensure that in the years after Rossini's exile and retirement
the Italian operatic tradition did not stagnate. The choice of dramatic
theme. the musical language and formal design, the relationship of
words and music, the style of performance, all underwent a gradual
change, a slow but perceptible development towards a more Romantic
ideal of music-drama. In addition, certain extra-musical factors
played a part in increasing the dramatic and emotional range of
opera; it was made to function as the vehicle for new ideas, and it was
subjected to unprecedented ideological and imaginative influences. In
the central decades of the Risorgimento it is not to be wondered at
that one of these extra-musical factors was politics.
Censorship rarely allowed composers to write operas that were
explicitly political. While the censors' duties were interpreted with
varying degrees of severity in the different parts of Italy, it was
everywhere agreed that of all their responsibilities— political, reli-
gious, moral, and ‘philological — the first was of primary importance.
Besides having the power to veto the choice of subject, they could
emend or expurgate a finished libretto; and at performances in the
theatre, the effect of an opera on its audience was carefully supervised
by the police. ш 1847 Angelo Mariani, directing a series of
performances of Verdi’s Nabucco in Milan, was reprimanded by the
police “Гог having given to Verdi's music an expression too evidently
rebellious and hostile to the Imperial Government’.!08
Despite these precautions, the theatre was too central a feature of
Italian life to be kept free from political contamination. If the
deliberate provocation of patriotic riot can have been only very rare,
107 Letter postmarked 27 Apr. 1837, Naples, Biblioteca del Conservatorio.
108 Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (London, 1962), 151.
EXTRA-MUSICAL IDEAS: POLITICS 163
there clearly was some mysterious link between the opera and the
nationalist and libertarian emotions of the age. Even in Rossini’s
heyday, Heine had linked the delirious Italian enthusiasm for opera
with the abject political condition of the country, and with the
passing of the years the link became more specific. Many of
the operas Verdi composed in the 1840s contained not only the
idiosyncratic characters and the stirring dramatic confrontations that
were to remain typical of the mature Verdi; works like Nabucco
(Milan, 1842),!°9 involving the fate of the Jewish people in their
Babylonian exile, or Giovanna d' Arco (Milan, 1845), set against a
background of the fifteenth-century wars that followed the English
invasion of France, had a political and national dimension besides. If
censorship largely banished Italian themes from the stage, librettists,
composers, and audiences alike were adept at perceiving in apparently
remote and exotic subjects analogies to the contemporary Italian
condition.
The emphasis placed on the nation in the librettos of such operas
is matched in the music by a profusion of choral scenes. Indeed, on
the strength of the choruses in Nabucco and its sequel / Lombardi
alla prima crociata (Milan, 1843), Verdi was dubbed A padre del coro
by his Milanese admirers. The term implies nothing elaborately
contrapuntal. On the contrary, the effectiveness of the choruses in
Nabucco was due in no small part to their technical simplicity. Verdi
perceived that if the chorus was to embody the idea of the nation—
not only the Jewish or French nation ostensibly represented on the
stage, but the potential Italian nation among his audience— the
manner of its utterance must be as popularist as possible. This ideal
is realized by writing for it predominantly in unison. Whether echoing
the religious sentiments of their high-priest Zaccaria, or denouncing
the traitor Ismaele, or dreaming nostalgically of their distant
homeland, or glimpsing visions of the downfall of tyranny, the Jews
of Nabucco regularly sing what Rossini was to call ‘arias for chorus’.
The fervour of Verdi's early lyrical style, especially in moods of
militaristic aggression and nostalgic melancholy, combined with the
technical resource of the unison chorus, accounts for much of the
electrifying impact of this early masterpiece. There were precedents,
for example in Donizetti’s Belisario or Vaccai’s Maria Visconti
(Turin, 1838), but no one before Verdi had employed the choral
unison so extensively or with so clear a perception of its demagogic
possibilities. Nabucco also sets the tone for later Risorgimento-
109 Nabucco is in fact an abbreviation of the original full title Nabucodonosor.
164 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
inspired operas by the prevalent brassiness of its orchestral colour-
ing: 'Pourquoi nous annoncer Nabucodonos-or Quand c'est
Nabucodonos-cuivre?” enquired a satirical Frenchman on the ap-
pearance of the opera in Paris. Such a movement as ‘È l'Assiria',
where the choral unison is doubled by woodwind, trumpets, and
trombones, and accompanied by softly thudding chords for strings,
horns, bassoons, and serpent, introduces into Italian opera a new
note of quietly menacing aggression (Ex. 115).
While Nabucco is the opera most fully representative of the political
aspirations of much Italian Romantic art, it certainly cannot be
regarded as a comprehensive political allegory; still less can the
operas that followed it. The ‘political’ scenes are generally passing
incidents in the dramatic design, Risorgimento odes, as it were,
embedded in operas which as a whole lack any specifically political
ideology: the conspiracy scene in Act III of Ernani (Venice, 1844);
the chorus of Scottish exiles in Act IV of Macbeth (Florence,
1847). With the revolutionary upheavals of 1848-9, however, the
opportunity for a full-blooded patriotic opera did arrive. La battaglia
di Legnano, performed in Rome in January 1849 in the heady weeks
lass JUS
Tempo di marcia
CHORUS. S. T. B. p (+fl, ob, cl, tpt, trbn)
rarr..
Ir у WS WS WS |
S20 TE! Ir an arr een
pH 1
(Assyria is a queen as powerful on earth as Bel)
EXTRA-MUSICAL IDEAS: LITERATURE 165
Ex. 116
Grandioso
Stim = Bei fi
(Long live Italy! A sacred covenant binds together all her sons.)
that followed the abolition of the temporal power of the papacy, is
Verdi’s celebration of the Revolution. The censorial restraints had
been removed; the patriotic note no longer needed to be episodic
and ambiguous: it was strident and all-pervasive. The subject—telling
how once, by forgetting their traditional petty rivalries and working
in a common cause, the Italian communes had been able to expel
the German emperor Barbarossa from the land— was hotly topical,
and in virtually every scene the nationalist message was driven home.
The music of the opening chorus (Ex. 116) serves as a kind of
national anthem to which Verdi returns again and again during the
course of the opera. Choral scenes, processions, and tableaux make
up a greater part of the score than in any other Verdi opera, early
or late.
After 1849 long years of political struggle still lay ahead for the
Italian nationalists; but as an artist Verdi was no longer interested.
His patriotic duty honourably done, he moved off to new fields:
intimacy and psychological nuance were to be his preoccupations in
the following years. But scores like Nabucco, I Lombardi, and La
battaglia di Legnano had made him, still only in his mid-30s, a
national hero such as few of the great figures in the history of opera
have been.
THE INSPIRATION OF EXTRA-MUSICAL IDEAS: LITERATURE
Of more enduring significance was the influence on Italian opera
of literary fashions. While pre-Romantic tastes survived surprisingly
long, the literary heroes of Italian Romanticism began to exert some
influence on librettos even as early as Rossini. Rossini's own works
166 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
include a Shakespeare adaptation, Otello (Naples, 1816), a Scott
adaptation, La donna del lago (Naples, 1819), and, among his French
operas, a version of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (Guillaume Tell, Paris,
1829). The effect of these admired authors on the character of Italian
opera was at first negligible: so free were the librettists’ adaptations,
so little was Rossini interested in the sources of his operas, and so
unsystematic was the relationship between text and music, that it is
difficult to attribute any musical features specifically to their influence.
But this state of affairs was soon to change. By the 1830s and 1840s
the Italian Romantics' enthusiasm for such authors could no longer
be dismissed as an irrelevance: the spirit of literature was beginning
to have its effect on the actual style of operatic music.
Particularly was this the case with Verdi. After he had established
himself as a national figure with Nabucco and I Lombardi, almost
all his operas originated in his own literary enthusiasms. Reading
widely in the dramatic literature of most of Western Europe,
sometimes stimulated in his searches by such friends as Giulio
Carcano, Andrea Maffei, and Francesco Piave, Verdi had an unerring
eye for the operatic potential of what he read. Like every great
operista of the age he was particularly thrilled by powerful and
bizarre scenes of confrontation: Pope Leo I partitioning the world
with Attila the Hun, in Zacharias Werner’s Attila, König der Hunnen;
the adulterous Lina in the middle of a church service submitting
herself to the judgement of her husband, the Lutheran pastor
Stiffelius, in Souvestre’s and Bourgeois’s Le Pasteur. More than any
of his senior contemporaries. Verdi had the kind of imagination that
tended to become obsessed by certain of the characters he discovered:
by Lady Macbeth or Triboulet (who became Rigoletto) or Azucena,
for example. But what was unique to Verdi was his conviction that
a composer could find in his literary sources more than a plot, a
series of powerful situations, and a handful of memorable characters.
A good play has an atmosphere all its own which the opera might
aim to recreate; even the dramatist's language—the full, detailed
sequence of ideas, the choice of imagery and metaphor, the sheer
poetry of his verse— might, if faithfully imitated in the libretto,
inspire flights of fancy unimaginable as long as opera continued to
employ the mannered ‘libretto-ese’ of the age. Exhortations to his
librettists to ‘do it exactly as in the original’ run through Verdi’s
correspondence like a leitmotif. To discover the point of this we
must examine the operas inspired by three of the most potent literary
influences of the age: Hugo, Shakespeare, and Schiller.
HUGO AND VERDI 167
HUGO AND VERDI
The operas with which Verdi had established his reputation,
Nabucco and I Lombardi, had both been examples of that kind of
Italian Romanticism that placed Church and State at the centre of
human affairs. Ernani (Venice, 1844), his first Hugo-inspired opera,
marks a change of direction. Verdi had tired of the monumental and
statuesque, and was in search of something 'very fiery, packed with
action and concise’.!!° He found it—at any rate he found the fire
and the action—in contemporary French Romantic drama, of which
Hugo was the most distinguished practitioner, and Hernani (Paris,
1830), the most notorious specimen; and the effect on his operatic
style was immediate. For it was the perfervid passions of Hugo's
characters that gave Verdi the stimulus to explore the scope of
musical characterization, and it was the profusion of astonishing
incidents and strong situations that prompted him to refine his skills
in the writing of dramatic ensembles. The three men who battle for
the heart of Elvira—Ernani, a Romantic rebel; Don Ruy Gomez da
Silva, an addled and vindictive old aristocrat; and Don Carlo, King
of Spain, a prince in whose breast private passions and public
responsibilities struggle for mastery—formed a triad which pres-
surized Verdi, after he had deliberated long and hard about it, into
a ‘definition ... of his male vocal archetypes’,!!! tenor, bass, and
baritone, a definition so persuasive that it served Verdi for the rest
of his career. Indeed it has proved difficult for any subsequent opera
composer to escape from it. And it was in such scenes of confrontation
as the Act I finale, where bandit, grandee, and monarch stand face
to face in Elvira's chamber, that Verdi proved his mastery of the
large-scale ensemble which translated dramatic climax, theatrical
tension, and stage spectacle alike into song.
It is certainly no accident that the list of Italian operas inspired
by Hugo includes several of the most stylish in the repertoire:
Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, Mercadante's Il giuramento, Verdi's
Ernani and Rigoletto (Venice, 1851). The peculiarities of technique
in these plays, which, as Hanslick was to remark, make them resemble
‘less tragedies against which music would do violence, than librettos
which have not yet been composed’,!!2 highlighted certain qualities
that had long been inherent in Italian opera. Hugo's protagonists
are vividly and melodramatically overdrawn in a way that opera,
110 Letter to Domenico Bancalari, 11 Dec. 1843, Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi (Milan,
1959), 1. 469.
111 Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, i. From Oberto to Rigoletto (London, 1973), i. 147.
112 Die moderne Oper, i. Kritiken und Studien (Berlin, 1875), 222.
168 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
where characterization depends upon a tiny number of confessional
emotional outbursts, can reinforce "with perfect aptness. The re-
lationship in Hugo between dramatic action and outpourings of
eloquence is also more akin to operatic techniques than to earlier
models of poetic drama. For, as in an opera, where the recitatives
link and motivate the arias and ensembles, so too in these plays the
dramatic action seems contrived primarily with a view to providing
openings for the poetic ‘tirades’. It is not the dynamic of action nor
the illumination of character that are Hugo's primary concerns, but
passion and eloquence; and something of these still resounds in the
aria texts that Romani, for Donizetti, and Piave, for Verdi, derived
from them. Finally, it is typical of Hugo's dramatic style that his
acts should culminate in blood-tingling tableaux of confrontation:
the exposure of the disguised Lucrezia at the Venetian carnival in
the Prologue of Lucréce Borgia; Don Carlos stepping from the tomb
of Charlemagne to confound the conspirators in Act IV of Hernani.
How much more convincing are such scenes when translated into
operatic ensembles than in their original spoken form where most
of the participants, for most of the time, have to stand by in silence!
No wonder Hugo is reported to have envied Verdi the resources of
a medium that made possible the quartet in Rigoletto; and no wonder
that, on reading Hernani, Verdi perceived in a flash the opera latent
within 11.118
SHAKESPEARE AND VERDI
While Hugo helped Italian composers to realize the Romantic
and melodramatic potential of their most characteristic art form,
Shakespeare offered them more problematic assets. Nineteenth-
century Italian critics tended to emphasize two qualities in Shake-
speare's art: Manzoni commended him for the freedom and
naturalness of his style, remarking how much more spontaneous and
truthful it seemed than the regimented drama of the French
tradition; Mazzini, on the other hand, was eloquent in his praise of
Shakespeare's genius for characterization: ‘he brings to the stage life
and being in the most real, the most true, and the most perfect way
that it has ever been granted a man to achieve. . . .'1!4 But structural
freedom and lifelike characterization were the most difficult of
attributes to transpose into the profoundly stylized medium of Italian
opera. Ostensibly Shakespearean operas were composed even before
113 Letter to Count Mocenigo, 5 Sept. 1843, Abbiati, Verdi, i. 473-4.
114 ‘Della fatalità considerata com'elemento drammatico, p. 186.
SHAKESPEARE AND VERDI 169
Rossini’s Otello, and continued to be composed during the next
thirty years; but it is not until we reach Verdi’s Macbeth (Florence,
1847) that we find an opera which can be described as Shakespearean
in any very meaningful sense.
Macbeth is Shakespearean precisely because of Verdi’s ideal of
fidelity to the literary original, even when— perhaps especially when—
that entailed unprecedented technical and imaginative challenges.
The composer took an active part in the preparation of the libretto,
providing Piave with a full prose synopsis and explaining exactly
how he wanted the musical numbers distributed;!15 and he did this,
one feels sure, so that the amount of conventionalizing undergone
by Shakespeare's tragedy should be reduced to a minimum. Verdi
was determined that its awe-inspiring characters should not be
watered down into stereotypes of Romantic melodrama; and he was
determined that the evocative power of Shakespeare's language
should not be abandoned in favour of the standardized vocabulary
and circumscribed imagery of the professional librettist. The result
of Verdi's participation was a libretto in which all but a handful of
phrases are closely modelled on Shakespeare's own.
This reverence of one great artist for another working in an alien
tradition remote in time was an unprecedented phenomenon in
Italian opera. But it was an issue of real historical moment because
of the impact it had on Verdi's musical imagination. This impact is
clearest seen in the two movements that the composer described as
‘the most important in the opera’,!!® the ‘gran scena e duetto’ in
Act I and the ‘gran scena del sonnambulismo’ in Act IV.
The duet is a recreation of the dialogue between Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth following the murder of Duncan in Act II, Scene
ii, of Shakespeare's play; but anything less like a conventional
conspiratorial duet could hardly be imagined. Verdi has retained
virtually all the evocative details in which the original is so rich, and
for each of these poetic images he has fashioned a musical analogy:
the owl cry (Ex. 117); the perturbed dreams and prayer of Donalbain
and his attendants and the ‘Amen’ that stuck in Macbeth's throat
(Ex. 118); the voice that cried ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder
sleep’ (Ex. 119); and so on throughout the scene. The result is that,
with Verdi's mediation, the pressure of Shakespeare's imagination
begins to wreak havoc on the established forms of Italian opera.
The ensemble no longer has space for fallow interludes and tame
115 Cf, his letter to Tito Ricordi, 11 Apr. 1857, Copialettere, p. 444, n. 2.
H6 Letter to Cammarano, 23 Nov. 1848, ibid., p. 62.
170 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ех. 117
Allegro
LADY MACBETH
eg =a
et a BEE | EEE BEER == E
LE = = T раш = ES
a oo ——3 ы!
In EE nt
—
(I heard the owl scream . . . what was it you said just now?)
Ex. 118
MACBETH
sotto voce 2
Бу Гн ыл
Г ЛОБ н |
2—5 Б аана]
Eech
SHAKESPEARE AND VERDI 171
(I heard the courtiers praying in their sleep, and they cried ‘God help us always’; I wanted to
say 'Amen' too.)
Ex. 119
Andantino
MACBETH 4
son-no рег sem - рге, Gla-mis,
(O Macbeth, you will have only thorns for your pillow! Glamis, you murder sleep for ever.)
symmetries; it has become as densely packed with significantly
expressive music as the Shakespearean dialogue with poetry.
The received conventions of nineteenth-century opera were treated
more freely in Macbeth than in any of Verdi’s operas before Rigoletto,
and, fired by a dramatic vision more haunting than anything Italian
Romanticism had yet afforded, the composer made unprecedented
IR ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
demands on the performers. The score has some extraordinary
directions for interpretation: ‘staccate-e marcate assai: and don't
forget that they are witches who are singing’; ‘the whole of this duet
must be performed sotto voce e cupa by the singers, with the exception
of a few phrases, which have been marked a voce spiegata’. The
original Lady Macbeth, Mariana Barbieri-Nini, described in her
memoirs how 'for three months, morning and evening, I attempted
to impersonate those people who speak in their sleep, uttering words
(as Verdi used to tell me) almost without moving their lips, the rest
of the face motionless, including the eyes', and how the Act I duet
*was rehearsed, you may think I am exaggerating, one hundred and
fifty times: to get the effect, as the maestro said, of being more
spoken than sung'.!!*
SCHILLER AND VERDI
Shakespeare was one of the great discoveries resulting from the
cosmopolitan enthusiasms of Italian Romanticism. So too was
Schiller. In the early years of the Risorgimento his plays and essays
were a favourite topic of discussion in the pages of the Conciliatore,
the leading literary journal of the age; and translations of the plays
began to appear from 1813. Although too young to be involved in
the early stages, Verdi had direct links with later developments of
this kind. Both the first translator of the complete Shakespeare,
Giulio Carcano, and the first translator of the complete Schiller,
Andrea Maffei, were personal friends of his, a fact that was probably
more important in the latter case. In 1845, in collaboration with
Temistocle Solera, Verdi had composed Giovanna Ф Arco, apparently
quite oblivious of its associations—admittedly vague—with Schiller’s
Jungfrau von Orleans. But from the time Maffei interested Verdi in
making a setting of Die Räuber (I masnadieri, London, 1847) Schiller
became one of the most enriching influences on his art.
Compared with Hugo-inspired and Shakespeare-inspired operas,
the number inspired by Schiller is small. The greatest of them,
Guillaume Tell and Don Carlos, are not Italian operas at all, but
grands opéras written in French for Paris. The currency of another
of the most distinguished, Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, was restricted
by censorship. Mercadante, Pacini, and Vaccai all wrote operas more
or less closely modelled on Schiller, and the closing scene of Bellini’s
Beatrice di Tenda (Venice, 1833) was inspired, to some extent, by the
117 Translated from Eugenio Checchi Giuseppe Verdi: le genio е le opere (Florence, 1887),
quoted in David Rosen and Andrew Porter (eds.), Verdis Macbeth: A Sourcebook (New York
and Cambridge, 1984), 51.
SCHILLER AND VERDI 173
matching scenes of Maria Stuart, the most popular of Schiller’s plays
in Italy. But really the only Italian operas closely modelled on
Schiller and widely performed in Italy were J masnadieri, Luisa Miller
(Naples, 1850) and, much later, the Italian revision of Don Carlos.
This is a modest harvest, considering the prestige Schiller enjoyed.
It must have disappointed Mazzini; for he regarded Schiller as the
ideal model for young dramatists, who were to help build the new
Italy with *a profoundly religious, profoundly educative social drama
... greater than Shakespeare by as much as the idea of Humanity
is greater than the idea of the individual’.118
In 1846, after the production in Venice of Attila, Verdi suffered
what seems to have been a nervous breakdown. From the period of
enforced repose that followed, he emerged mentally and imaginatively
renewed. He put aside the styles of opera in which his earliest
successes had been gained— whether Romantic melodramas like
Ernani, or Risorgimento-inspired pageants of national life like
Nabucco—and addressed himself to more ambitious tasks. In par-
ticular he was preoccupied with two issues. The first was how to
escape from the restrictions of conventional characterization, how
to create characters who were as unique and as "real — to use Verdi's
own favourite term of commendation— as those in the poetic drama
he most admired. А second, complementary ambition was to set
these ‘real’ characters in a ‘real’ world—to make society part of the
subject of the drama. If Shakespeare was the principal source of
inspiration in the first case, Schiller surely was in the second.
In Verdi’s first Schiller opera, / masnadieri, the relationship between
the hero Carlo and society is still sketchy. But it is there, and is
important, since Carlo is a classic early example of an outsider,
tragically alienated from the world in which he finds himself. With
Luisa Miller and Don Carlos the aim of setting ‘real’ characters in a
‘real’ world is more fully achieved: Verdi does recreate something of
a lifelike complexity in the relationship between the realm of personal
feelings and that of social organization. To paraphrase one of his
own remarks—and he was echoing Mazzini—he has moved on from
the type of opera that is made of arias and duets to a new type
made of ideas: ideas like the conflict of class structure and humane
feeling (Mode and Menschheit) in Luisa Miller, or of dogmatism and
libertarianism in Don Carlos. Real characters in a real world, with
the emphasis on the characters, was Verdi's diagnosis of what
verismo involved—or ought to involve. After Luisa Miller he was to
118 “Della fatalità considerata com'elemento drammatico’, p. 196.
174 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
carry this preoccupation into other kinds of real world where Schiller
might have been ill at ease, notably in La traviata. But the three
Schiller operas, 7 masnadieri, Luisa Miller, and Don Carlos, are
conspicuous landmarks on the road towards Verdi’s very individual
brand of realism.
LESSER MASTERS
The demand for new operas remained insatiable. In most theatres
Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi shared the repertoire not with
such classics of an earlier era as Cimarosa or Mozart, but with a
host of minor contemporaries. In 1846 an Italian correspondent of
the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung provided statistics to show that
during the previous eight years (1838-45) 342 new operas had been
produced in Italian theatres, and no fewer than 130 new maestri had
made their débuts (Verdi and 129 others).!!? Most of these men
enjoyed only ephemeral or local success; but some—like Pacini or
the Ricci brothers— were immensely popular for many years, and all
of them played a part in helping sustain opera as a living art in
virtually every corner of the land.
Because the music of even the greatest composers of the period
amply partook of the naivety and vulgarity that was undeniably part
of the Italian tradition, it is not easy to approach their lesser
contemporaries without condescension. But some of them were
formidable musical craftsmen and men of wide culture. In the former
category Pietro Raimondi (1786-1853) is remembered. His prodigious
contrapuntal exertions produced not merely vast quantities of fugue,
but a cycle of three oratorios, Putifar, Giuseppe, and Giacobbe
(completed 1848, performed Rome 1852), designed to be performed
first separately and then simultaneously. Among his operas, some
fifty in number, is to be found a comparable tour de force: the opera
seria, Adelasia, and the opera buffa, I quattro rustici, may also be
performed both separately and in combination. In fact, as Raimondi
. died before orchestrating them, they seem not to have been performed
at all.
Perhaps more generally fruitful were the talents of Nicola Vaccai
(1790-1848). An outstanding literary gift—in his adolescence he
produced four Alfieri-inspired tragedies in verse—led him to take an
interest in the translation of foreign musical works, including Méhul's
Joseph and Bach's St. Matthew Passion. As a musical educationalist
he was particularly influential during his period as censore at the
119 Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, xlviii (1846), cols. 141-2.
LESSER MASTERS 175
Milan Conservatory (1838-1844), where he introduced student opera
performances on the Naples model, founded a new choir school, and
spread enthusiasm for the German classics. His textbook on singing—
Metodo pratico di canto italiano (1832)—remains a classic work.
Rossini described Vaccai as a composer ‘in whom sentiment was
allied to philosophy’; and something of his superiority of mind is
perhaps suggested by his tendency to overstrain the medium. The
scoring of his mature operas has a Mercadantean ponderousness,
and from time to time one alights upon little touches of musical
erudition that are scarcely typical of the genre. The quasi-fugal duet
cabaletta quoted in Ex. 120 is from Marco Visconti (Turin, 1838).
The career of Giovanni Pacini (1796-1867) might be cited as an
epitome of the activities of the best and most successful of the minor
masters of the age. By 1830 he had already produced some forty
operas in little more than fifteen years, and was a popular figure
throughout Italy. But in the early 1830s, as the superior talents of
Bellini and Donizetti came into full flower, Pacini suffered something
of an eclipse; and in 1834 he retired from the theatre for some years
Ex. 120
(Allegro) piü mosso
OTTORINO eg
gum EE
Deel nt дес ea ern e eno
фи зеш
Ben_ti co-no - sco,o per - fi-do, per al- trein-si -
LODRISIO
dicam coc see ata
me-co scon-ta - reo рег - fi-do, do - vrai. рій. d'un.of - fe - sa
ren - der sa - pro_
scon-tar do - vra - i più d'un of - fe - (sa)
(OTTORINO: I know you well, faithless man, because of your other treacheries, but I shall be
able to render vain your insane envy.
LODRISIO: O faithless man, there is more than one offence that you must atone for with me.)
(NB Ottorino and Lodrisio are denouncing not one another but a rebellious third party, who
is not on stage.)
176 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Allegro moderato
CLIMENE —
Il cor non ba-sta a reg- ge-re la pie-na del di - let - to! mi
sen-to ad o-gni pal - pi-to no-vel - ja ЕЕЕ T АТ pet Чол
(My heart cannot control the fulness of its delight! At every beat I feel a new joy in my
breast.)
to devote himself to musical education. Having surmounted this
creative crisis he resumed his operatic career in 1839. He now adopted
a new manner and was ‘baptized by public opinion as no longer the
composer of facile cabalettas, but rather of elaborate works, the
product of much meditation'.!?9 Thanks to his early works Pacini
was known as i/ maestro della cabaletta. Many of his cabalettas are
indeed outstanding for their verve and rhythmic originality. This,
the composer emphasized, was not due to instinctive genius, but to
his careful study of the rhythms and metres of the verse (see Ex.
121, which is from Saffo).!?!
Saffo (Naples, 1840) 15 Pacini's masterpiece. This noble work is in
many ways a representative reform opera of the period. The structures
are notably flexible and in many scenes conventional recitative is
abandoned in favour of a dense profusion of ariosos and parlantes
that reflect the flux of emotion with scrupulous care. The orchestration
is full and resourceful; the chorus has a conspicuous dramatic role;
and there is no lack of harmonic felicities. But perhaps the most
remarkable thing about Saffo is that, at the height of the Romantic
movement, Pacini, like Mercadante, should discover the best in
himself in exploring the Classical world. What he has to say about
Saffo in his Memoirs reads more like the reflections of a Renaissance
humanist than of an opera composer of the 1840s:
Reading and re-reading the history of that race which was the torch of all
human learning, and trying to discover what sort of music was employed
by that heroic nation ... I was able to establish that the Greeks attributed
to the word music a wider sense, embracing not only that art which excites
emotion by means of sound, but also poetry, the art of beauty, rhetoric,
120 Pacini, Le mie memorie artistiche, pp. 98-9.
121 Ibid., p. 84.
THE DECLINE OF OPERA BUFFA ШЙ?
philosophy, and that science which the Romans called politior humanitas.
Taking note of the modes which the Greeks used, Dorian, Ionian, Phrygian,
Aeolian and Lydian, and of their intermediaries, Hypodorian etc., I formed
for myself an idea of their system. And always bearing in mind what
Aristides says about the qualities of the three genera, diatonic, chromatic
and enharmonic, that is that the first is noble and austere, the second very
sweet and plaintive, the third mild and exciting (mansueto ed eccitante), I
tried ... to approximate to their Melopea.122
THE DECLINE OF OPERA BUFFA
Rossini had produced his last opera buffa, La Cenerentola, as early
as 1817, concentrating in his last composing years in Italy on the
seria and semiseria genres. Most of his younger contemporaries
followed suit. Though there was a brief revival of the form in the
1850s, the pure opera buffa was all but extinct by 1830. For the
greater part of Bellini’s career, during Donizetti’s maturity and
Verdi's early years, the Italian repertoire was virtually monopolized
by heroic and tragic themes. Only the opera semiseria such as Bellini's
La sonnambula and Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix provided a widely
enjoyed alternative, and that too was often heavily pathetic in tone.
In the smaller Neapolitan theatres dialect operas with spoken
dialogue were popular. Stylistically they were often of the most naive
artlessness, even in the hands of so experienced a master as Luigi
Ricci, and apparently they drew on the rich store of Neapolitan
popular song, which enjoyed one of its vintage periods in the middle
decades of the century (see Ex. 122, from Act I of Luigi Ricci's
Piedigrotta (Naples, 1852) ). But while the decline of opera buffa was
unmistakable and in the long run irreversible, Donizetti ran counter
Ех. 122
ACHILLE
SEE I A шыны Быз ee ae
Te Pe Tg mee DES ee "eem
SS d шшш E Тт een РЕЩ Ca eg ee are
A EE EE EE Ee A
A la fe-ne-staaf-fac - ce-te
122 [bid., p. 95.
178 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
(Look from your window, dove of my heart. Come, for love calls and cannot wait.)
to the tendency of the age in composing two masterly specimens
that must be regarded as his most nearly perfect works: L’elisir
d'amore (Milan, 1832) and Don Pasquale (Paris, 1843).
So completely had the serious opera of Rossini’s day absorbed
the musical language of the opera buffa that there was little in terms
of form and style to distinguish the genres. Generally opera-buffa
lyricism was a little simpler, the forms a little more concise and the
orchestration a little lighter; and in many scenes composers continued
to employ recitativo semplice, accompanied by a keyboard player
reading from a figured bass. Don Pasquale is exceptional in scoring
all the recitatives for strings. Just a few resources remained unique
to opera buffa and were dependent upon the peculiar skills of the
buffo bass. Dulcamara in L'elisir d'amore, for example, makes his
entrance not with the kind of lyrical sortita that was typical of the
serious genre, but with a comic aria, ‘Udite, udite, o rustici’, in
which mock-rhetorical declamation and rapid patter are the principal
elements. Often in cantabiles and slow cabalettas patter from the
comic bass is combined in duet with lyrical singing from soprano or
tenor, creating a mocking or pathetic ambiguity of mood.
Echoes of the great age of Rossinian opera buffa are frequent, and
sometimes reminiscence reaches back even into the eighteenth century.
Only rarely was Mozart to be heard in the public theatres at
this time, but all Italian composers knew and studied at least a
representative number of his major works, including the operas. In
1832 Pacini treated the theatre-goers of Viareggio to a new version
of the Don Giovanni legend, // convitato di pietro, in which allusions
to Mozart's score are frequent and unmistakable (see Ex. 123 from
Act IT).
The comedy of the opera buffa, even in this final phase, remained
rooted in the commedia dell'arte. The four principal characters of
Don Pasquale might have been borrowed straight from a seventeenth-
THE DECLINE OF OPERA BUFRA
ES
COMMENDATORE
Oibó, oibò, si-gnor non può.
(COMMENDATORE: You invited me to dinner; I came here without difficulty. Now I shall
invite you: will you come to dine with me?
FICCANASO: O dear! O dear! His lordship cannot.
DON GIOVANNI: I have no fear in my heart; yes I accept the invitation.)
179
180 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
century commedia scenario. True, there is no zanni, but Don
Pasquale — ‘an old bachelor, set in old-fashioned ways, parsimonious,
credulous, obstinate, but a good fellow at heart’, as the libretto
describes him—is clearly next of kin to Pantalone; and his friend
and confidant, Malatesta, is a doctor. Numerous are the movements
modelled on the гіғаѓе or even the lazzi of the commedia. The primo
tempo of Pasquale and Malatesta's duet ‘Cheti, cheti, immantinente’
is a delicious example of such a musical /azzo. In the comfort of
Pasquale's home, the two men enact in imagination the furtive course
of action which they are planning: as the imagined events take place
in the dark, they provide the same pretext for virtuoso miming as
had the night-scenes beloved of the commedia. The duet ‘Mio signore
venerato' from // campanello (Naples, 1836) is an excellent example
of a piece modelled on the commedia tirata, for in it Enrico simply
reels off an interminable list of ailments, followed by the prescription
for a spoof remedy.!23
To the last, opera buffa was composed according to properly
dramatic principles. When Romani reworked Scribe’s Le Philtre into
L'elisir d'amore the kinds of change he felt moved to make bring
this out very well. Not satisfied, as Scribe in his operetta-like original
had been, to treat the characters as a group of entertainers periodically
breaking into musical ‘turns’, he could not refrain from the exercise
of the dramatist’s prerogative of empathy, entering into their
dilemmas and thereby much enlarging the emotional scope of the
opera: both ‘Adina credimi’, the cantabile of the Act I finale and
‘Una furtiva lagrima’, Nemorino’s romanza in Act II, are Romani
additions of this kind. At the same time he dispensed with those
numbers in the French original which were simply repeated after an
intervening stretch of dialogue. It was alien to Italian operatic
manners to have characters twitching into and out of song without
the developing action having the least impact on the style of that
song. In L’elisir damore such numbers are replaced by Italianate
multisectional forms, in which the dramatic action is embodied in
the succession of musical styles. But while opera buffa remained
unquestionably a species of music drama, it surpassed other genres
in its accommodation of what some critics have described as /udus—
the sense that its characters, as well as being involved in a dramatic
action, are also engaged in a diversionary game. The primo tempo
of the duet ‘Signorina, in tanta fretta’ from Act III of Don Pasquale
provides a good example. The movement begins with close and nicely
123 This movement is not included in the autograph score of // campanello.
THE DECLINE OF OPERA BUFFA 181
observed analogies between music and drama: Norina’s retorts to
Pasquale’s questions acquire their verve from the occasional repeated
words which make a more rapid and zestful enunciation possible:
and the supreme insult, *quando parla non s’ascolta’, is thrown into
harsh emphasis by stripping away the softening harmonies, and by
Pasquale's incredulous echo. But as the scene continues, such
analogies are gradually abandoned; Norina is swept along in the
exhilaration of the game, and music drama yields to lyrical and
virtuoso ‘sporting’ (Ex. 124).
Ex. 124
(Allegro) meno mosso
let- to, va-daa let-to, dor-ma be - ne, dor - ma, dor-ma, dor - ma
e ==
DU E EE DES E E EE ШЕШ "ылышы El El DE EE,
ma, dor-ma,dor-ma,do-ma be-ne, poi do-man si par.le rà,
(Go to bed, sleep well, then we can talk about it tomorrow.)
182 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
THE PERFORMANCE OF ITALIAN ROMANTIC OPERA
In an age that knew neither conductors nor, in the modern sense,
producers, the singers were the principal figures in the performance
of an opera. The 1830s and 1840s saw the fulfilment of changes in
the art of singing that had been preparing since the turn of the
century. The disappearance from the stage of the castrato, Rossini’s
attempts to limit the singer’s freedom to embellish, the taste for
more violently emotional dramas and therefore for heavier orchestral
scoring and louder singing—all contributed to this transformation.
Singing became more directly expressive, but coarser, and left less
to spontaneous inspiration. The expansion of the chest-range of the
tenor voice to top С” (before about 1830 notes above G’ had been
taken falsetto), and the undiscriminating use of vibrato, were two
conspicuous symptoms of the new style. In the absence of a producer,
and given an operatic structure in which substantial musical numbers
alternate with short and sometimes madly eventful recitatives, the
style of acting, in serious opera at least, can hardly have been
naturalistic. It must have been stylized and statuesque, a matter
primarily of grouping, of pose and gesture.
There was as yet no need for a conductor, because of the long
survival of orchestral practices associated with the continuo. А
contract for a new work usually committed a composer to directing
the first three performances of his opera from the keyboard. Normally
he would have had nothing to play except the figured bass sections
of the recitative in opera buffa; but, particularly in smaller theatres
where orchestras were tiny and amateurish, it may have been useful
for the keyboard player to flesh out the music occasionally and to
be able to intervene in cases of emergency. The layout of Italian
orchestras varied a good deal from city to city and was often changed
during the course of the century.!?^ One effective arrangement was
introduced by Donizetti at La Scala in 1834: around the keyboard
sat the principals of the four string sections, and, strategically placed
in this way, the composer could *whenever he wishes, give the leader,
both by word and gesture, the indication of the tempos he desires'.1?5
Once the composer's three performances were up, the direction of
the opera fell to the leader— primo violino, capo e direttore d'orchestra,
as contemporary librettos described him. He directed with his bow,
sometimes using it as a baton, sometimes,—according to the reports
124 Cf. Gregory W. Harwood, ‘Verdi’s Reform of the Italian Opera Orchestra’, /9th-Century
Music, 10 (1986), 108-34.
125 Letter from Donizetti to Duke Visconti, 17 Jan. 1834, Zavadini, Donizetti, p. 343.
THE APPRECIATION OF OPERA 183
of both Berlioz and Mendelssohn—tapping out the beats of the bar
on his music stand: ‘it sounds something like obbligato castanets,
but louder.’126 Not until the 1860s did the leader's bow give way to
the conductor’s baton.
The large professional orchestras attached to the chief theatres in
Milan and Naples represented Italian instrumental skills at their
best, and were good enough to be admired by such connoisseurs as
Spohr and Berlioz. But in most smaller cities the professional ranks
were diluted with dilettantes. In these circumstances, not only were
standards of performance lower; relics of earlier usages— notably
impromptu ornamentation—survived at least into the 1830s and the
whole atmosphere of the performance was more casual and easily
sociable. Like the orchestras, the choruses too were generally
dependent on amateur and— where a local school of music made it
appropriate—student performers. Yet another body of people was
brought into the theatre for those operas that required a stage band.
This, a military-band formation of upward of twenty players, was
normally supplied by musicians from a local garrison.
The staging of an opera was the responsibility of the librettists
attached to most of the leading theatres. They supervised the work
of costume and set designers and directed the rehearsals. In these
particulars, as in so much else, Italy was no longer in the van
of European developments. Traditional types of stage set—the
townscape, the sumptuous interior, the natural (often woodland)
setting—long continued to satisfy most requirements, and traditional
styles of design— notably the elaborate perspective compositions, of
which Sanquirico at La Scala was the last great exponent— survived
into the 1830s. The Romantic movement did, however, lead to a
keener awareness of the picturesque and atmospheric, to an interest
in historical realism, and a new sensitivity to the relationship between
a drama and the landscapes and buildings in which it was set. In
these respects the historical novels of Scott and the new developments
in lighting introduced by Daguerre in Paris were deeply influential.!?"
THE APPRECIATION OF OPERA
There were financial advantages to all concerned and artistic
advantages too in the survival of the box system: ‘a certain degree
of private self-communion is essential to savour the sublimest charms
126 Mendelssohn, Briefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1847 (7th edn., Leipzig, 1899), 116.
127 Cf. Mary Ambrose, ‘Walter Scott, Italian Opera and Romantic Stage-setting’ /talian
Studies, 36 (1981), 58-78.
184 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
of music.’128 But to modern eyes its most remarkable consequence
was the effect upon theatrical tone. To own a box in the opera-house
was tantamount to having a private salon in a public place. One
behaved accordingly, listening to the opera with as much attention
as one wished to give it, but free every moment to draw the curtain
and withdraw into one's own private world, or to tour the theatre
calling upon friends and acquaintances in their boxes. Under these
circumstances many people were so preoccupied with the social
aspects of opera-going that they lost sight of its artistic purpose
altogether; the capacity to listen to music with sustained concentration
was rare. Even in northern Europe the phenomenon of the silent
audience was a late nineteenth-century one. But only in Italy do we
read of such scenes as Berlioz witnessed in Milan at a performance
of L'elisir d'amore; he found
the theatre full of people talking in normal voices, with their backs to the
stage. The singers, undeterred, gesticulated and yelled their lungs out in the
strictest spirit of rivalry. At least I presumed they did, from their wide-open
mouths; but the noise of the audience was such that no sound penetrated
except the bass drum. People were gambling, eating supper in their boxes,
etcetera, etcetera.129
Nevertheless all composers of the period accepted the fact that it
was the acclaim of these easily distracted audiences, not the considered
assessment of critic or connoisseur, that set the seal on an opera's
reputation. What they dreamed of was the sort of reception accorded
the first performances of Lucia di Lammermoor, when 'every piece
was listened to in religious silence, and celebrated with spontaneous
shouts of applause’.130 It was to accommodate such applause that
the composer closed each phase of the musical action with those
loudly reiterated cadences which have no bearing on the dramatic
purpose of the scene, and which are such an embarrassing en-
cumbrance in modern performances of Italian Romantic opera.
Audiences were sometimes cruel and sometimes irrational when they
exercised their prerogative to whistle new operas from the stage; as
yet they approached even the music they loved with no trace of
hushed reverence. But, at its best, opera provided them with an
intoxicating delight which for its spontaneity and conviviality has
no parallel in the modern appreciation of music:
1?8 Stendhal, Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (London, 1956), 428.
129 The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. David Cairns (New York and London, 1969),
208.
139 Donizetti to Giovanni Ricordi, 29 Sept. 1835, Zavadini, Donizetti, p. 385.
STAGE AND COMPOSER 185
In the few performances of La sonnambula given before the theatres closed,
Pasta and Rubini sang with the most evident enthusiasm to support their
favourite maestro; in the second act the singers themselves wept and carried
their audiences along with them so that in the happy days of carnival, tears
were continually being wiped away in boxes and parquet alike. Embracing
Shterich in the Ambassador’s box I, too, shed tears of emotion and
ecstasy.131
(d GERMANY
By SIEGFRIED GOSLICH
STAGE AND COMPOSER
The German-speaking lands were not lacking in theatres. the ruling
princes maintained them in the large and medium-sized capitals; in
1857 there were said to be nineteen.!?? They were financially secure
and commanded resources for casting and production which attracted
composers. But the intendants of the court theatres were as a rule
conservative and seldom willing to take artistic risks. In many
Imperial and Hanseatic towns and other prosperous large towns,
there were numerous other theatres catering for mixed repertoires
and therefore staffed with dramatic, operatic, and ballet ensembles,
chorus, and orchestra. These municipal and commercially run theatres
also tried to get outstanding artists under contract and were to some
extent able to compete seriously with the court theatres. Indeed their
managements often displayed a pioneering spirit which those lacked.
But they often had to cope with economic problems and, in order
to compete with the state theatres, were obliged to adjust their
repertoire in accordance with public taste.
The heyday of Italian opera in Germany was over. The Italian
ensembles were dissolved in Munich in 1826, in Vienna in 1828, and
in Dresden in 1832; the Spontini era at the Berlin Royal Opera came
to an end in 1841. АП the same the stylistic influence of the Italians
and French on repertoires and taste was still considerable— and
remained so until the middle of the century. From 1830 to 1849
twenty-five Italian and forty-five French operas were given, the most
131 Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, Memoirs, trans. Richard B. Mudge (Norman, Oklahoma,
1963), 61. (I have substituted ‘maestro’ for Mudge's ‘conductor’.)
132 F, G. Paldamus, Das deutsche Theater der Gegenwart (Mainz, 1857), 87.
186 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
popular being the works of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Auber.
A few British operas also were produced in the German-speaking
countries; Henry Hugo Pierson’s Der Elfensieg was given at Brünn
(Brno) in 1845 and his Leila at Hamburg in 1848; the Irishman
Michael Balfe’s Bohemian Gir! was produced as Das Zigeunermädchen
at Vienna and Hamburg in 1846, and Brünn, Prague, Frankfurt,
Munich, and Berlin during the next three or four years, while his
Les Quatre Fils Aymon (Die vier Haymonskinder), which had preceded
it in Vienna (1844), was even more successful with the German
public. As for the operas of living German composers, the most
popular around 1850 were Spohr’s Faust and Jessonda, Marschner’s
Der Vampyr, Templer und Jüdin, and Hans Heiling, Conradin Kreut-
zer's Das Nachtlager von Granada, Lortzing's Zar und Zimmermann
and Der Wildschütz, Flotow’s Alessandro Stradella and Martha,
Wagner's Rienzi and (already) Der fliegende Holländer.
The number of German composers who concerned themselves
with opera was astonishing. Many of them spent their lives mainly
as court opera conductors, municipal music directors or theatre
intendants, but soloists, music-pedagogues, and writers also tried
their hands occasionally at opera composition. Many of their
works never reached the stage at all; others achieved one or two
performances— usually in the town where the composer was living—
and were then forgotten. Turning the pages of such operas that have
fallen by the wayside, one comes across already outworn melodic
clichés, conventional cavatinas, romances, and arias, mechanically
constructed ensembles, and well-worn modulations, side by side with
a striving for individual expression in the harmony, motivic detail,
and attempts at scenic composition on the lines of Weber and Spohr.
One often gets an impression of a struggle towards a musical-
dramatic ideal carried out with unsuitable material, where the
composer's creative inspiration was insufficient to breathe genuine
life into his characters and rouse interest in their fates.
THE THEATRE CONDUCTORS
Some of the court conductors in the major capitals also earned
distinction as composers. Schubert's friend Franz Lachner (1803-
90), conductor at the Kärntnerthor Theatre, moved in 1836 to Munich
as Hofkapellmeister, becoming, in 1852, Generalmusikdirektor; his
chief work, Catarina Cornaro, was produced there in 1841. The
Berliner Wilhelm Taubert (1811-91), assistant conductor of the court
concerts at the age of 20, made his operatic debut there in 1832 with
his one-act Die Kermes to a libretto by Eduard Devrient, who also
THE THEATRE CONDUCTORS 187
supplied him with the text of its successor Der Zigeuner (1834); he
showed the same assured, light-handed technique in music to plays
based on Ludwig Tieck’s Der gestiefelte Kater (1844) and Blaubart
(1845). The Darmstadt Hofmusikdirektor Carl Amand Mangold
(1813-89), best known for his male voice choruses, followed Wagner
with a Tannhäuser (1846) on a libretto by the journalist Ernst Duller,
while his colleague at Stuttgart, Peter Josef von Lindpaintner (1791-
1856), continued his long career as an opera composer with Die
Amazone (1831). Weber’s successor at Dresden, Karl Gottlieb
Reissiger (1798-1859), first made his mark with Die Felsenmühle
zu Etalieres (1831), the effective overture to which became very pop-
ular. Turandot (1835), Adele de Foix (1841), and Der Schiffbruch der
Medusa (1846) never achieved much success.
As Hofkapellmeister at Weimar from 1848 onwards, Liszt was an
outstanding champion of contemporary opera; during his ten years
in that post he performed forty-three operas, twenty-four of them
by living composers but none by himself. He thought of composing
a Jeanne Ф Атс,!33 and a Hungarian opera, Janos;!3* the Liszt
Museum at Weimar possesses the prose sketch in French of an opera
Sardanapal, after Byron, dated ‘9 Decembre 1846’; but nothing came
of any of these projects. He served German opera by performing it,
giving the premieres of Lohengrin, Raff's König Alfred, Schubert's
Alfonso und Estrella, and Cornelius’s Der Barbier von Bagdad, and
also by his writings on its problems and its masters, and by piano
transcriptions (particularly of excerpts from Wagner).
Conradin Kreutzer's Nachtlager in Granada—still occasionally
performed—has already been mentioned. In his youth Kreutzer
(1780-1849) had been Hofkapellmeister in Stuttgart and Donaue-
schingen, later conductor at the Kärntnerthor and Josephstadt
Theatres in Vienna, at Cologne, and then again, as Nicolas
successor, in Vienna. The long list of his operas includes Der
Lastträger an der Themse (1832), Melusine (after Grillparzer, 1833),
Fridolin, oder Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer (after Schiller, 1837),
Die beiden Figaro (by G. Е. Treitschke, 1840),135 Des Sängers Fluch
(after Uhland, 1846), and Aurelia, Prinzessin von Bulgarien (1849).
Very successful was Des Adlers Horst (1832) by the German-
Bohemian Franz Gläser (1798-1861), which Wagner conducted at
Magdeburg in 1835; Gläser was conductor at the Königstadt Theatre,
Berlin, where his opera was performed five times by 1837. The
133 See Franz Liszt: Briefe an die Fürstin Sayn-Wittgenstein (Leipzig, 1900), 414-88 passim.
131 Tbid., pp. 420-41 passim.
135 The reviser of the third version of Fidelio.
188 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
libretto was by Karl von Holtei, later theatre director at Riga where
he crossed swords with the young- Wagner. Glaser moved to
Copenhagen in 1842, soon became court conductor there, and
composed three Danish operas (two with librettos by Hans Christian
Andersen).
It was not only conductors who tried their luck on the stage. One
such was Carl Loewe (1796-1869), the master of the ballade. His
comic opera Die drei Wünsche (after Raupach) was given in Berlin
in 1834, but his four other operas were never performed. And two
gifted ‘outsiders’ deserve mention in this survey. Ernst II, duke of
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1818-93), elder brother of the Prince Consort of
England, had studied theory and harmony with Heinrich Breidenstein,
music director at Bonn University, and embarked on opera com-
position with Zayre (after Voltaire) (1846) and Tony (1848). His
most successful work, Santa Chiara, was one of those brought out
by Liszt (1854); it was produced in many German cities as late as
the 1890s, in French translation at the Paris Opera in 1855, and at
Covent Garden in Italian in 1877. Johann Vesque von Püttlingen
(1803-83), an Austrian civil servant who playfully adopted the
pseudonym Hoven (suggesting that he was less than Beethoven),
studied composition with Sımon Sechter in Vienna. His operas, Die
Belagerung Wiens durch die Türken (1833), Turandot (after Gozzi,
1838), Johanna d Arc (after Schiller, 1840), Liebeszauber (after Kleist,
1845), Burg Thaya (1847), and Ein Abenteuer Carls II (1850), are
above the average. The last named work, and Der lustige Rat (1852),
were given by Liszt at Weimar.
THE LEADING MASTERS
Of Spohr’s Faust,!36 Weber, who conducted the first performance
(Prague, 1816), wrote that ‘a few melodies ... weave like delicate
threads through the whole work and hold it together artistically’.137
In this key work Spohr opened the way to systematic employment
of constituent motif, a direction in which he was to go further. In
Jessonda (1823)!88 he enriched the recitative by the quasi-gestural
nature of the accompaniment and the insertion of metrically ar-
ticulated sections, while in Der Berggeist (1825)!3? he reached the
zenith of his dramatic method. That was as far as he was prepared
136 See Vol. VIII, pp. 485-6.
137 Carl Maria von Weber: Writings on Music, ed. John Warrack and trans. Martin Cooper
(Cambridge, 1981), 193.
138 See Vol. УШ, pp. 486-7.
139 Ibid., p. 487.
THE LEADING MASTERS 189
to go for the present; in Pietro von Abano (1827) he turned back to
number opera. And in its successor; Der Alchymist (1830), based
on a story in Washington Irving’s Conquest of Granada by his
brother-in-law Karl Pfeiffer (the librettist of Pietro), he made no
stylistic progress. Spohr then abandoned his operatic career for
fifteen years except for three numbers—overture, song, and finale —
contributed in 1839 to a collective work, Der Matrose, by Moritz
Hauptmann and two others. Then in June 1843 he conducted Der
fliegende Holländer at Kassel—a few weeks before Wagner had
described himself as Spohr's ‘admiring pupil’—and, impressed by its
innovations, returned to through-composed opera in Die Kreuzfahrer
(1845). This had a libretto based on Kotzebue by his wife and
himself, but it lacks both the striking general idea and the gripping
details needed to inspire music.
‘Giacomo’ (properly Jakob) Meyerbeer (1791-1864), a Berliner by
birth, composed unsuccessful German operas until 1814 and Italian
operas during 1817-24 before turning to French grand opéra. But
his first great success, Robert le diable, was quickly translated and
given in Berlin in 1832, and Friedrich Wilhelm III made him
Hofkapellmeister. Les Huguenots was produced in translation in
several German cities before it reached Berlin in 1842, where for six
years Meyerbeer held the post of Generalmusikdirektor, producing
the works of Mozart, Gluck, Spohr, and others for the Prussian
court as well as a masque, Das Hoffest in Ferrara (1843), based on
accounts of the life of Friedrich II, and a Singspiel, Ein Feldlager in
Schlesien (1844), for the reopening of the Berlin opera-house after a
fire. He pleaded with the king for the performance of three new
German operas a year and directed a gala performance of Euryanthe
in aid of a Weber memorial.
Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861) was in 1830 appointed Hof-
kapellmeister at Hanover where his Vampyr had been given in 1828.
After the comic opera Des Falkners Braut (1832), he wrote his
masterpiece Hans Heiling, of which he conducted the Berlin premiere
(1833). (After the Leipzig performance the university gave him an
honorary doctorate.) Das Schloss am Aetna (Leipzig, 1836), Der Bäbu
(Hanover, 1838), and Kaiser Adolph von Nassau (Dresden, 1845)
followed. Marschner was one of the founders of German national
opera; Wagner was indebted to him on several accounts. The
relationship between voice and orchestra was frequently reversed, the
accompanying orchestra now conveying moods and thoughts, the
formerly predominant voice becoming the reciting member in the 'total
orchestra'. Marschner further developed Weber's style of declamation,
190 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
was a master of motivic work, and decisively advanced the method of
scenic composition after Spohr. Kaiser Adolph has some magnificently
conceived scenes.
LORTZING
Gustav Albert Lortzing (1801-51) was highly thought of in the
German-speaking lands for his remarkable many-sidedness, his
dramatic talent, and his humour. As a child he had had his earliest
theory lessons from Friedrich Rungenhagen but was largely self
taught. His father was a strolling player and he himself appeared on
the stage at an early age, acting and singing. At Detmold he played
the cello in the orchestra; in Leipzig he was both actor and buffo
tenor, as well as occasional producer, and in 1844 was appointed
conductor. Despite his swiftly growing reputation as a stage
composer, he settled nowhere. In 1846 he became conductor of the
Theater an der Wien but was unpopular with the Viennese, and,
after the 1848 rising, he returned to Germany where he was obliged
to take up acting again to support his family. In 1850 he was engaged
as conductor at a third-rate Berlin theatre but died in poverty in less
than a year. Lortzing was his own librettist, and his repertoire as an
actor included the Fool in King Lear, Kosinsky in Schiller's Räuber,
the Prince in Lessing's Emilia Galotti, and Valentin in Raimund's
Verschwender. At the first performance of Grabbe's Don Juan und
Faust, for which he provided instrumental music, he played Don
Juan. As librettist Lortzing distinguished himself by his sensitivity
to the material and its treatment; his characters are full of life and
the dramatic events skilfully carried to climax. He was a master not
only of grace and wit but of musical structure and instrumentation.
Independently and in unmistakable fashion he realized the ideas of
the Gesamtkunstwerk. His great successes are Zar und Zimmermann
(Leipzig, 1837), Hans Sachs (Leipzig, 1840), Der Wildschütz (Leipzig,
1842), Undine (Magedeburg, 1845), and Der Waffenschmied von
Worms (Vienna, 1846). But also in the now forgotten works such as
Zum Grossadmiral (1847) and Rolands Knappen (1849) he made
significant contributions to the romantic musical theatre. In Regina
oder die Marodeure (1848) he handled a theme with contemporary
political overtones.
MENDELSSOHN AND NICOLAI
Outstanding among the composers who, despite repeated efforts,
never managed to find a suitable libretto, was Felix Mendelssohn-
Bartholdy (1809-47). After the six comic operas of 1820-9, he sought
5СНОМАММ 191
one in vain. His negotiations with Charles Duveyrier over Schiller’s
Jungfrau von Orleans and with Scribe over Shakespeare’s Tempest
were no more successful than his discussions with the actress-poetess
Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer on a Genovefa (sic). He was unable to make
up his mind over his friend Devrient’s Hans Heiling libretto and it
went to Marschner instead. But he participated in the efforts of the
Prussian court to revive the dramas of classical antiquity and
composed and conducted music to Sophocles’ Antigone and Oedipus
at Colonus and also that to Racine’s Athalie. When at last he decided
on Emanuel Geibel’s Loreley he had composed only the finale of
Act I, a chorus of vintners, and an ‘Ave Maria’ when he died.
Otto Nicolai (1810-49), a student at the Royal Institute for Church
Music in Berlin and a member of the Singakademie, lived in Rome
during 1833-6 as organist of the Prussian Embassy chapel and
studied Palestrina very thoroughly. But he became interested in opera
and in 1837 secured a post as conductor at the Hoftheater in Vienna,
where he was appointed principal conductor ın 1841. In the interval
he had returned to Italy and begun a career as an opera composer,
scoring his first important success with // templario (after Ivanhoe:
Turin, 1840). In 1845 this was adapted in German for Vienna as
Der Tempelritter, and Il proscritto (Milan, 1841) was similarly given
as Die Heimkehr des Verbannten (Vienna, 1844). The translator of
both works, Siegfried Kapper, drew his attention to the figure of
Falstaff in Shakespeare, who had already appeared in operas by
Peter Ritter, Dittersdorf, Mercadante, and Balfe; a libretto was
begun by Jacob Hoffmeister, though the lion's share of Die lustigen
Weiber von Windsor was the work of the Viennese dramatist Salomon
von Mosenthal. In 1849 Nicolai conducted the first performance at
Berlin, where he had been appointed Hofoperndirigent, and two
months later suffered a fatal stroke. Despite the later competition of
Verdi's Falstaff, Die lustigen Weiber has kept its place on the German
stage by the originality of Nicolai’s invention, the ease of the diction,
and its polished humour.
SCHUMANN
Robert Schumann (1810-50) wrestled all his life with the subject
of opera. In 1842 he wrote to the theatre conductor Carl Kossmaly:
‘Do you know my morning and evening prayer as an artist? It is
German opera. There's something to be done there. He had already
in 1840 failed to get a libretto out of E. T. A. Hoffmann's story
Doge und Dogaressa. In 1842 he busied himself with Die Braut des
Kadi but turned to another oriental subject, Das Paradies und die
192 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Peri, a translation of Thomas Moore’s poem; then, having failed to
make an opera from it, he composed-it as a ‘secular oratorio’. In
1844 he contemplated Byron's Corsair and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.
In vain he asked Annette von Droste-Hülshoff to write him a libretto.
He himself rejected Julius Stowacki’s Mazeppa. Then at last in 1847
his choice fell on Hebbel’s play Genoveva, from which Robert Reinick
extracted a libretto; this dissatisfied him and in the end he himself
compiled a text from Reinick's attempt, Hebbel's play, and a play
on the same subject by Tieck. (Its weaknesses were pointed out to
him by Wagner.) The score was finished in 1848 and he conducted
the first performance himself at Leipzig in 1850. In that year he was
attracted by a libretto by Richard Pohl based on Schiller's Braut von
Messina but composed only the overture. Among his other opera
projects were Faust, Maria Stuart, Die Nibelungen, Der falsche
Prophet (from Moore's Lalla Rookh), and Sardanapal (Byron).
FLOTOW
Friedrich (Freiherr von) Flotow (1812-83) studied composition
with Reicha in Paris. He made himself a master of French charm
and owed a great deal to that nation, but even during his longer
stays he never lost touch with his German roots. His first comic
opera, Pierre et Catherine (1831), was produced in German at
Ludwigslust as Peter und Kathinka (1835). In 1833 he composed two
librettos by Theodor Körner, Die Bergknappen and Alfred der Grosse.
Several French operas were given in translation in German theatres
and followed by three original works: Alessandro Stradella (Hamburg,
1844), Martha, oder Der Markt zu Richmond (Vienna, 1847), both
with librettos by Friedrich Wilhelm Riese, and Sophie Katharina
(Berlin, 1850) to a text by Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer. When the material
for the three-act Le Naufrage de la Méduse, composed with Auguste
Pilati (Paris, 1839), was destroyed by fire at the Hamburg theatre,
Flotow rewrote it as Die Matrosen in four acts to a libretto by Riese
(1845). L'Esclave de Camoéns (Paris, 1843) was similarly enlarged as
Indra (1852). His numerous later works were less successful. Flotow
not only conquered Paris; he appealed to the Biedermeier taste of
his fellow-countrymen. Nothing is problematic; everything is solid
and effective. Flotow's melodies catch the ear and some have become
opera-house hits. Martha was internationally successful and even
critical audiences were captivated by the composer's wealth of ideas
and technical ability.
WAGNER 193
WAGNER
In 1832 Wagner (1813-83) based the text and music of the first
scenes of an opera, Die Hochzeit, to some extent on Johann Gustav
Büsching’s Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen.!^" The next year he founded
on Carlo Gozzi's La donna serpente the libretto of Die Feen, which
he composed while chorus director of the Stadttheater at Würzburg.
Beethoven and Weber were, according to his Autobiographische
Skizze, his models. *A great deal was successful in the ensembles; in
particular the finale of the Second Act bid fair to be very effective.’
The 'forbidden question we know from Lohengrin was already
anticipated here; the fairy Ada commands Arinfal, the mortal she
wishes to marry, never to enquire about her origin. When the work
was not accepted at Leipzig, Wagner reflected resignedly that ‘the
performance of an opera by a German composer was evidently
something one had to beg for'. It was not until five years after his
death that Die Feen had its first performance, at the Munich
Nationaltheater. In 1834 he based the libretto of Das Liebesverbot
on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. (Already in the overture
lively carnival music is confronted with the gloomy theme of the
"ban on love’.) As music director at Magdeburg Wagner was able
to produce his opera there in 1836, though not without a concession
to the censorship which insisted on the title being changed to Die
Novize von Palermo. From this period dates a prose scenario on
Heinrich Kónig's opera, Die hohe Braut.
Two articles dating from 1837!^! show Wagner as a close
Observer of contemporary opera. Impressed by the art of Wilhelmine
Schróder-Devrient (who was later to ‘create’ the roles of Adriano in
Rienzi, Senta, and Venus) Wagner wrote in "Der dramatische
Gesang' that the basis of vocal performance lay in purity of tone
and enunciation, precision and labialization as well as the smoothness
of passage-work—a very necessary admonition in view of the dull
routine that reigned in German theatres of that period. In the article
‘Bellini’ he attacked ‘the boundless confusion of forms, style and
modulation of so many German opera composers’.
The dissolution of the Magdeburg company obliged him to move
to Kónigsberg where he was music director for a short time; in 1837
he became conductor of the Stadtheater at Riga. His experience as
a conductor was widened but his personal situation was wretched
and his relations with the theatre director Karl von Holtei were
140 See Max Koch, ‘Die Quellen der “Hochzeit” ', Richard Wagner-Jahrbuch, iv (1912), 105.
141 ‘Bellini’, and ‘Uber Meyerbeers Hugenotten’ (both 1837), both in Richard Wagner,
Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. Н. von Wolzogen and R. Sternfeld, xii (Leipzig, 1911).
194 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
strained. In 1839 he saw no way out but flight— with Paris as his
goal. At Königsberg he had written the libretto of a comic opera,
Männerlist grösser als Frauenlist (from the Arabian Nights), after
which Bulwer Lytton’s novel, Rienzi, suggested the libretto of Rienzi,
der letzte der Tribunen. The bay of Sandwike in Norway, where
Wagner’s ship sheltered from storm on the, voyage from Pillau
to London, became the scene of Der fliegende Holländer. Nature
impressions and his own experiences accelerated Wagner’s creative
imagination; in representing the wanderings of the Flying Dutchman,
descendant of Odysseus and the Wandering Jew, he realized the idea
of a new poetic-musical form of opera. He was about to make a
complete reformation. But bitter necessity forced him to make
concessions. He wrote both poem and music of the Hollünder but,
being unable to get it performed, sold the scenario to the director of
the Opera who commissioned a French libretto, Le Vaisseau-Fantóme,
long thought to have been set by Pierre Dietsch.!42 In the intervals
of hack work he wrote prose scenarios for Die Sarazenin (on Manfred
and his father Friedrich II) and Die Bergwerke von Falun (on E. T.
A. Hoffmann's story). But in 1842 the bad days in Paris ended.
Wagner moved to Dresden where Rienzi had been accepted for
performance. As the Kapellmeister, Reissiger, complained of the lack
of good librettos Wagner offered him Die hohe Braut; when Reissiger
turned it down, it was offered to Johann Kittl (1806-68) who
composed it as Bianca und Giuseppe oder Die Franzosen vor Nizza
(Prague, 1848). But the success of Rienzi led to production of the
Hollánder (1843), which Wagner conducted himself—as he did the
Berlin production in 1844. The success of Rienzi also earned him
appointment as second conductor at Dresden.
The sight of the Wartburg and the Hörselberg near Eisenach on
the journey from Paris to Dresden reawakened his interest in an
opera subject that had been in his mind for some years. Two
characters were fused into one. The first was Tannhäuser, a
thirteenth-century poet who in the medieval legend became a knight,
followed the love-goddess Venus into her magic mountain, and, as
a penitent pilgrim to Rome, sought forgiveness for his sins. Tieck
had introduced him in his story Der getreue Eckart und der Tannhäuser
(1800). The other character was Heinrich von Ofterdingen who is
mentioned in the thirteenth-century poem Singerkriec uf Wartburc
and since the fifteenth century connected with St Elisabeth of
Thuringia. He is also mentioned by the Romantic writers, in a
14? According to The New Grove, v. 470, the libretto of Dietsch's opera was based on a
novel by Marryat, presumably The Phantom Ship.
WAGNER 195
fragment by Novalis (1802) and by La Motte-Fouqué in his play
Der Süngerkrieg auf der Wartburg (1828). In his Sagenschatz des
Thüringer Waldes (1835) Ludwig Bechstein had connected the Tann-
häuser and song-tournament stories and three years later a Königs-
berg professor, C. T. L. Lucas, in a study Über den Wartburgkrieg,
suggested that Tannhäuser and Ofterdingen were identical.
Wagner began to work on his poem, originally called Der
Venusberg, in May 1842 and completed the full score of Tannhäuser
und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg in April 1845. He conducted the
first performance on 19 October. Later the work underwent various
changes. In the original version neither Venus nor Elisabeth's funeral
procession were shown on the stage; the drama ended with a glow
from the Hórselberg while torches on the Wartburg and a passing-bell
suggested Elisabeth's death. The new ending was first performed on
1 August 1847 and the work underwent far more drastic changes
when it was given in Paris in 1861.
With Tannhäuser Wagner turned his back on fashionable taste.
The public was either puzzled by it or rejected it. It was condemned for
lack of melody, formlessness, and excessive modulation. Professional
judgements were hesitant or contradictory; the Berlin General-
intendant уоп Küstner considered it too epic, a Dresden critic too
dramatic, one at Leipzig too lyric. The fundamental idea of the
sinner's redemption was not understood. It was the performances
under Liszt at Weimar (1849) and Spohr at Kassel (1853) which
substantially furthered understanding of the work's unprecedented
structure. Berlin did not decide on Tannhäuser until 1856 when it
had already been given on fifty other stages.
As early as July 1845 Wagner had written the rough draft of
a comic counterpart to the Wartburg tournament of song— Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg—but less than three weeks later he set
down another prose sketch, for Lohengrin. The text was finished in
November. Wagner composed the third act first and the Prelude last;
he completed the full score in April 1848. Here again he conflated
two sources: the legend of the Swan Knight, armed with supernatural
powers who fights wrong-doing; and the myth of the Grail. In
essentials Wagner followed the thirteenth-century Lohengrin epic
published by Joseph Górres, in which the legend is placed in the
time of Henry the Fowler.
Discontent with conditions in Dresden led Wagner, with his
colleague the conductor August Róckel, to become involved in
subversive politics and after the May rising of 1849 he fled to
Switzerland to avoid arrest. Yet the artistic fruits of this turbulent
196 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
period were considerable. Besides Lohengrin they included plans for
an opera Wieland der Schmied, traces ef which appeared in the Ring,
and a prose sketch for a work on the Nibelung myth itself. By the
end of 1848 he had completed the libretto of a ‘grand, heroic opera’,
Siegfrieds Tod—the original form of Gótterdámmerung—and during
1850-1 composed some music for it.!43 As for Lohengrin, the
projected production in Dresden was of course impossible, and when
Liszt gave it in a model performance at Weimar on 28 August 1850
Wagner was unable to be present. He heard it for the first time in
1861, in Vienna.
LIBRETTISTS
German librettists were in an unfortunate position; it was long
before they had copyright protection. But in 1842 the Hamburg
Stadttheater took the bold step of trying to introduce a system of
royalties and the following year Meyerbeer arranged at the Berlin
Opera that authors should receive 10 per cent of the box-office
takings at each performance. Léon Pillet, director of the Paris Grand
Opéra, paid 500 francs for the prose sketch of the Holländer, while
Lachner paid Henri de Saint-Georges 2,000 for the libretto of
Catarina Cornaro. Other—artistic— problems faced German authors
of opera librettos. Whatever their literary powers, they were lacking
in dramatic instinct. They offered series of pictures and scenes but
were incapable of conjuring up an exciting stage happening. Their
texts lacked tense representation of action, concentration, logical
build-up, the hot breath of passion, Dionysian fire. The constant
complaints of composers from Mozart to Mendelssohn that they
could find no suitable libretto in their native country were not
unfounded.
The suitability of a libretto cannot be judged merely by its literary
value; it is more important that it should offer music every possibility
for the development of expression. The librettist of Romantic opera
should have commanded the ability to think in musical relationships,
to write music-inspiring verses, to offer the composer stimuli to new
kinds of theme and harmonic progression, to lend rhythmical and
metrical wings to his fancy. But he had also to be willing and able
to agree with the wishes of his partner in matters of text and
dramaturgy. The ability of a Calzabigi or Hofmannsthal to do this
is not an inborn gift. It can hardly be acquired, at most perfected
143 Published by Robert Bailey in Harold S. Powers (ed.), Studies in Music History: Essays
for Oliver Strunk (Princeton, 1968), 485-94.
LIBRETTISTS 197
and refined by collaboration with the composer. Ideally text and
music should be the work of one person. In his preface to Hoffmann’s
tale Der goldene Topf Jean Paul wrote that one hoped for a man
who would ‘write both the poem and the music of an opera’ [der
eine Oper zugleich dichtet und setzt]. Yet even such personalities as
Spohr and Schumann were unsuccessful in this field. But two
other musicians, thanks to their literary skill, poetic imagination,
comprehensive knowledge of the stage repertoire and dramatic ability
were able to do just that: Lortzing and Wagner. Their works were
in totally different genres—they met only in homage to Hans Sachs—
but both achieved works of strong vitality on the stage thanks to
the successful co-ordination of word and sound. In both the text
produces suitable music.
In many librettos words and dramatic content were equally weak
and colourless. The four-stress line became the rule. The average
composer was content with humdrum verses, feeble rhymes, and
schematic stresses. However, Weber had shown how the words could
be associated with characteristic, rhythmically distinct melodies,
themes, and harmonies. Rhyme, which Mozart had already eschewed
in opera, was avoided by Spohr in his Berggeist as cramping. Wagner
rejected it after Die Feen almost completely but gave his librettos
varying metres and compressed power of expression; he explained
his method in Oper und Drama (Leipzig, 1851), and soon after came
the poem of the Ring des Nibelungen written in a new style marked
by assonance and alliteration. A considerable number of other
authors—respectable poets and men connected in some way or
another with the stage, even music critics— sought subjects in the
fields of Romanticism or national history.
While various stylistic elements were common to French and
Italian opera as well, much was specifically German. The German
Romantic had a quick ear for wind and storm; he peopled rustling
forests, sea, springs, and waterfalls with sprites, woods and meadows
with elves and gnomes and spirits, heaven and earth with angels and
fairies. He saw phantoms, trafficked with the other world and hell,
felt himself at the mercy of dark powers, despaired, fell prey to
illusions. Or life became a dream. Myths and folk-tales spoke to him
and he found inspiration in his country's past. Extremes met; deep
devoutness and pious simplicity came up against the demoniac in
men and spirits. Fantasy was unlimited. Every kind of magic
was taken seriously. Hysterical and clairvoyant characters were
represented and also those endowed with supernatural powers. Purely
literary skill was hardly sufficient to present them convincingly on
198 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
the stage. E. T. A. Hoffmann in ‘Der Dichter und der Komponist’!44
wrote that ‘a truly romantic opera can be written only by the inspired
poet of genius, for only he can bring to life the marvellous apparitions
of the spirit world'. And according to the young Wagner 'the essence
of dramatic art ... lies in the successful grasping and representation
of the inner nature of all human life and affairs, the idea’.145 The
Romantic view of art is admittedly élitist and demanding, not easily
taken by those who—for instance, at the opera— merely wish to be
entertained. Such people preferred the homely style later known as
Biedermeier, marked by pathetic sentimentality and the simply idyllic;
they were breathed on by the spirit of the age but soon abandoned
its higher flight. They were satisfied with the triviality of mere
pseudo-Romanticism—the pseudo-Romanticism of many opera
plots. Anton Reicha considered that in the German view music was
suitable only for the depiction of bizarre, preposterous situations in
which the main part was played by witchcraft, ghostly goings on,
and similar stupidities.!46 But there were librettos of undeniable
quality: Grillparzer’s Melusine was written for Beethoven who
forwent 11,147 and it was finally composed by Conradin Kreutzer in
1833. Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué arranged his tale Undine for E.
T. A. Hoffmann and made a fresh version for Christian Girschner
(1794-1860) whose work was given a partial performance in Berlin
(1830) and complete at Danzig (1837). Lortzing also set it in 1845
and three years later a Rolands Knappen based on a tale by another
well-known author, the Weimar poet Johann Karl Musäus. And, as
we have seen, Tieck's Phantasus contributed to Tannhäuser while his
Leben und Tod der Genoveva together with Hebbel's drama was the
basis of Schumann's opera.
Heinrich von Kleist was another source of inspiration. His Die
Hermannsschlacht provided the basis for an opera (1835) by the
Bavarian Hofkapellmeister Hippolyte Chélard (1789-1861) and Das
Käthchen von Heilbronn inspired both ‘Hoven’ (Vesque von Püt-
tlingen) (1803-83) and the Dessau Hofmusikdirektor Friedrich Lux
(1820-95),148 and the scenes of the trial-by-ordeal and the wedding
procession gave Wagner material for Lohengrin. Heine also con-
141 Originally published in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1813).
145 *Pasticcio', Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 6 and 10 Nov. 1834; repr. in Richard Wagner,
Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, xii (Leipzig, 1911).
146 L Art du compositeur dramatique (Paris, 1833); trans. Carl Czerny, Die Kunst der
dramatischen Komposition (Vienna, 1835).
147 See, for instance, Alexander Thayer, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, iv (rev. 4th edn.,
Leipzig, 1923), 413-14.
148 Hoven's work (1845) was entitled Liebeszauber, whereas Lux's (1846) was named after
the play.
THE FATE OF THE ‘NUMBER OPERA’ 199
tributed; Wagner knew Heine’s version of the Holländer story in the
Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski and it must have been a
passage in ‘Götter im Exil’ that drew his attention to the Singerkriec
uf Wartburc. Wilhelm Hauff's ‘Geschichte von dem Gespensterschiff
(in Die Karawane) was yet another source for the Holländer.
Eduard Devrient’s libretto Hans Heiling, intended for Mendelssohn
who rejected it and admirably composed by Marschner, was inspired
by Theodor Körner’s tale ‘Hans Heilings Felsen’. But Heiling was
Devrient’s only successful libretto; in this field he was completely
overshadowed by August von Kotzebue (1761-1819), whom Beet-
hoven considered to possess a ‘unique genius’ and whose librettos
were set by Spohr (Die Kreuzfahrer), Marschner (Der Kyffhäuser
Berg), and Lortzing (Der Wildschütz).
The Berliner Ernst Raupach— whose name is familiar because of
the young Wagner’s overture and finale music for Act V of his
tragedy König Enzio—provided the libretto for Loewe’s Singspiel,
Die drei Wünsche (1834) and the text of Ferdinand Hiller’s Ein
Traum in der Christnacht (1845) is based on one of his plays. The
poet and critic Ludwig Rellstab provided the libretto of Meyerbeer’s
Ein Feldlager in Schlesien (1844) and translated Scribe’s for Le
Prophete. Some of the most original librettists had no professional
connection with the theatre, for instance Eduard Gehe supplied the
books not only of Spohr’s Jessonda but of three operas by the now
forgotten Joseph Maria Wolfram (1789-1839) and Johann Christian
Lobe’s Die Flibustier (1829); his planned Rübezahl for Spohr remained
unfinished. J. F. Kind never repeated his success as the librettist of
Freischütz, but the book of Konradin Kreutzer’s very popular
Nachtlager in Granada (1834) was based on a play by him. One of
the most successful practitioners of the day was Otto Prechtler who
supplied the librettos of Franz Lachner's Alidia (after Bulwer
Lytton) (1839), Hoven's Johanna d'Arc (after Schiller) (1840),
Liebeszauber (after Kleist) (1845), and Joseph Netzer’s Mara (1841).
He must be counted among the above-average librettists, together
with Friedrich Wilhelm Riese CW Friedrich’), Flotow’s partner in
Alessandro Stradella and Martha.
THE FATE OF THE “NUMBER OPERA’
The long threatened decay of the old opera convention was now
completing itself. The hitherto admissible categories proved more
and more unsuitable for the expressive aims of the new age. If the
Baroque opera and its architectonic forms might be regarded as
statuesque, the Romantic may be described as dynamic. Instead of
200 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
the representation of types, situations, and narrowly circumscribed
emotions, we find the interrelation of-individuals and psychological
developments. The man acting on the stage is, like Tannhàuser, “дет
Wechsel untertan'. What he has to sing and say embraces a wide
scale from tender feeling to the expression of unbridled passion.
Changes of mood demand compositional flexibility beyond the
capability of the conventional ‘number’.
THE OVERTURE
The practice of anticipating in the overture attractive themes from
the opera led as in Italy and France to the worthless pot-pourri
form, although the leading masters knew how to give a theme
announced in the orchestral introduction the character of an
important motto. Alternatively the overture would be replaced by a
short introduction leading directly into the first scene. The short
overture to Spohr’s Die Kreuzfahrer is given a warlike stamp by
ophicleide and military drum, a character which dominates Act I in
the camp of the Christian army before Nicæa. Even the position of
the overture in the general structure was questioned. In Marschner’s
Heiling it is placed not at the beginning but after a scenic Vorspiel
performed on the open stage and before the first act actually so
called. It thus has the character of an entr’acte in which the composer
symbolizes the unbridgeable conflict of the two spheres—of mountain
spirit and man—which characterizes the action. The familiar overture
of Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber is an outstanding essay in Romantic
representation in sound. The depiction of moonrise, Falstaff's
appearance as Herne the hunter, and themes from the ‘fairy’ ballet
(all from Act III) transport the listener into Shakespeare’s fantastic
world. The general tendency is to foreshadow the main lines of the
action in the orchestral introduction. In the overture to Undine (Ex.
125) Lortzing anticipates some of the thematic material of the last
finale (Exx. 126 and 127).
In January 1841 Wagner had contributed an extensive article ‘De
l’Ouverture’ to the Gazette musicale,!^? outlining the development of
Ех 125
Largo
f
гүү с к ==
aS Банн
u IJ
Eed
p Et Ze EH Eesen
bn, trbn, vc, db
149 Repr. in Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1911), 241-56.
THE OVERTURE 201
Ex 126
Andante
P
Eat
Allegro поп {горро
the form from the abstract music of earlier times to the ‘poetic’
overtures of Cherubini (particularly Les Deux Journées) and Beet-
hoven, and the ‘dramatic fantasia’ of Weber's Oberon. ‘The history
of the pot-pourri begins to a certain extent with Spontini's overture
to La vestale. As a composer Wagner had at first followed the
custom of the day. In Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot he extracted
important themes in order to give the audience concise symbolic
indications of the action. In the Rienzi Overture, introduced by the
‘freedom’ fanfare, he presents as essential themes Rienzi's prayer,
the motif of his heroic will, the call to battle against the nobles
(‘Santo Spirito Cavaliere’), and the theme of the people's homage
to the Tribune. But the overture to the Holländer, begun a few
months after the Gazette article, foreshadows the substance of the
action as a whole; Senta's ballad lies at the heart of the tempestuous
drama. A similar idea of ‘redemption’ determined the Tannhäuser
Overture. With it, Wagner felt he had exhausted the genre; he called
the introduction to Act I of Lohengrin Vorspiel.
202 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
PHE LIED
The simple Lied was significant as a species of counterbalance to
the more sophisticated operatic forms. J. A. Hiller and Reichardt
had made their marks as composers of Liederspiele and Singspiele,150
and Mozart had indicated the role of the Lied in opera with
Papageno's ‘Vogelfanger’ song in Die Zauberflöte. Given to simple
folk—peasants, hunters, soldiers—it served to characterize the singer,
as with Friar Tuck and the fool Wamba who have two each in
Marschner’s Der Templer und die Jüdin. Tuck’s second song is typical
(Ex. 128). When sung by operatic heroes the Lied became a symbol
of momentary reflection or characterized a situation. The naive
obviousness of the text distinguished it from the other numbers of
an opera. Drinking songs were always particularly popular (for
example, Plunketts in Flotow’s Martha, Falstaffs ‘Als Büblein
klein’ in Die lustigen Weiber). Key, metre, and accompaniment were
always kept simple. The Tsar's song ‘Einst spielt’ ich mit Szepter’ in
Lortzing’s Zar und Zimmermann and Stadinger’s ‘Auch ich war ein
Jüngling’ in his Waffenschmied are among the most popular operatic
pieces in Germany. Schumann burst open the form in Genoveva
when he dissolved the Lied-duet “Wenn ich ein Vöglein war’ into
passionate declamation.
The young Wagner introduced the Lied as a cheerful, delaying
contrast in the course of serious actions. For instance the libretto of
Die hohe Braut (1837) includes a specimen of grim humour, the song
of the two hermits, ‘Ein armer Sünder liess mich rufen’. And the
sketch for the projected Bergwerke zu Falun (1842) shows that Joens,
just before the catastrophe, was to sing a merry Lied about how
things would go when he married. The helmsman’s Lied, ‘Mit
Gewitter und Sturm’, in Act I of the Holländer characterizes the
Brü-der, wacht! Ha-bet acht! Hör-ner-klanger - schallt! Schon ent-weicht die
dunk - le Nacht,- frisch zum.grü - nen_ Wald!
(Brothers, wake! Look out! Horns are sounding, dark night’s out. Off to the greenwood!)
150 See Vol. VII, pp. 76 and 81-5. In 1830 Lortzing made a new version of Hiller’s Die
Jagd and in 1832 composed two Liederspiele of his own, Der Pole und sein Kind and Szenen
aus Mozarts Leben.
BALLADE, CAVATINA, AND PREGHIERA 203
simple young sailor in contrast with the curse-laden world wanderer
whose aria follows. Two years later in Tannhäuser we no longer find
the term Lied; in his list of numbers the composer calls the shepherd’s
little song Gesang; it is indeed unlike the typical opera Lied.
THE ROMANZE
The Romanze was still at the height of its popularity—in opera,
in the concert hall, and in the drawing-room. As an operatic number
it was indispensable; in Germany hardly any opera was without one
or more. Kreutzer's Nachtlager has three and Lindpaintner's Macht
des Liedes five. It often expressed love—including love of the
homeland—and chivalry, as well as the legendary, fabulous, or
awesome. In contrast with the Lied it is more ‘characteristically’
accompanied, often with solo instruments or instrumental groups
(for example, woodwind and horns or pizzicato strings), and
modulates further (often alternating major and minor) as in Hugo's
‘Ich ritt zum grossen Waffenspiele’ (Lortzing's Undine, Act I).
Emmy’s Romanze ‘Sieh, Mutter, dort den bleichen Mann’, in Mar-
schner's Vampyr, is exceptional; its five recitando stanzas, with
changes of tempo, have a choral refrain:
Denn still und heimlich sag ich's dir,
der bleiche Mann ist ein Vampyr.
Wagner employed a similar ironic refrain in Gernot's Romanze ‘War
einst 'ne böse Hexe wohl’ in Die Feen, a witch hideous yet wearing
a ring which makes her appear young and fair. His last Romanze,
very different, was Wolfram's song to the evening star in Tannhäuser
where the harp, with pp trombone and bass tuba chords, portend
death.
BALLADE, CAVATINA, AND PREGHIERA
The ballade appears rarely but always in an explanatory role, often
with reference to the mysterious: for example, the heroine’s ‘Fur solche
Schmach zu wacker’ in Ferdinand Ries’s Liska (1831),!?! John's ‘Wenn
alles schläft um Mitternacht’ in Hiller’s Traum in der Christnacht
(1843), Frau Reich’s ‘Vom Jäger Herne die Mär ist alt’ in Nicolai's Die
lustigen Weiber (1849). It might be said that Wagner developed the
whole of the Holländer from Senta's "Tratt ihr das Schiff im Meere an?’
The lyrical, predominantly elegiac cavatina in German romantic
opera, something between Lied and aria, had ideal prototypes in
13! There is a lengthy excerpt in Siegfried Goslich, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen
romantischen Oper (Leipzig, 1937), 118.
204 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
‘Porgi amor’ in Figaro and ‘Und ob die Wolke’ in Freischütz. It
differs from the aria in being cast in-a single movement and in
avoidance of word repetition. Its special fields are amorous longing,
pious simplicity, and gentle melancholy. It tends to be in flat keys
and compound triple time, and associated with solo instruments of
elegiac timbre. (But Lindpaintner’s Vampyr has two cavatinas, the
second of which parodies the first.) Wagner gave Ada in Die Feen
an Italianate cavatina, "Wie muss ich doch beklagen’, and Erik’s
cavatina in the Holländer is not without traces of the older style.
The preghiera borrows the form of the cavatina, as in Marschner’s
Kaiser Adolf von Nassau (Ex. 129). As solo, ensemble, or chorus
Exe 129
Andante con moto
>. un 229 He Еа ТЕШ "t
Je, Een Ea Eget pipi EE EY ELE
Wenn das Herz.
gnen Kraft.
auch. bei dir den Trost ge - fun
у
л с == SS = EE
es:
(When the anxious heart despairs, it has always found with thee consolation for its wounds.)
THE ARIA 205
TENIS
Largo espressivo
Geht mit.Gott! Er schüt-ze Euch! Mein Ge-bet, es dringt hin-auf!
mess),
PAD E S E ——] & KE
[pup RE] к=
е G 4 Ka
(Go with God! May he protect you! My prayer ascends urgently!)
number, it was an indispensable requisite of opera. The declamatory
prayer of the imprisoned Rebekka in Marschner's Templer is untypical
in its modulations and rising passion, which were to be echoed in
the middle section, ‘O Gott, vernichte nicht das Werk’, of Rienzi's
prayer. Closely related to this again—even melodically at one point
(‘Lass mich im Staub vor dir vergehen’)—is Elisabeth's prayer in
Tannhäuser. The key of the latter, G flat, was a favourite for German
operatic prayers, for example, in Lindpaintner's Genueserin (1839)
and the Mara (1841) of Joseph Netzer (1808-64) (Ex. 130). The
ensemble or choral prayer was another popular feature, which the
young Wagner employed from Die Feen (Act III) onwards.
THE ARIA
The principal form of earlier opera, the aria, often degenerated
after 1830 into commonplace melody without particular textual
relevance, with poverty-stricken rhythms, weak suspensions, and
expressionless accompaniment. This is true even of such skilful
composers as Kreutzer, Lindpaintner and Reissiger. But with the
leading Romantics the fate of the aria signified a crisis in thinking.
Lortzing in particular was distinguished by his originality. Van Bett's
aria ‘O sancta justitia’ in Zar und Zimmermann and the Schoolmaster's
‘5000 Thaler’ in Der Wildschütz are gems. Marie's aria in the Act I
finale of Der Waffenschmied (Ex. 131) is enlarged into a scena with
such characteristic details as the door-knocking motif and the
pianissimo orchestral reminiscence of the previous quartet, ‘Ich weiss
vor Zagen kein Wort zu sagen’.
With Spohr and Marschner the introductory recitative is often
more important than the aria itself, for example, Jessonda, Act I,
No. 7, where the recitative is one of the finest passages in Spohr
while the aria is relatively weak. The clearest example of the change
206 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ех ЭЛ
MARIE T
(She goes to the door, knocks (louder) (she screams)
and calls softly) pp cresc. Jf
Konrad! Konrad! Konrad! du Murmelthier! Wie
P KREE
|
(Konrad! Konrad! You dormouse! How careless, if anyone should hear me! No, thank God, it’s
all quiet. I wonder whether the knight got home again safely?)
of style is Guilbert's ‘scene and aria’ in Act II of Templer und Jüdin,
concerning which Marschner wrote to his librettist Devrient ‘the
public are not to expect anything aria-like'. The destiny of the form
could hardly have been expressed more brutally. But he brought off
a fine stroke in Heiling's aria ‘An jenem Tag’ where the goblin-king
expresses his passion through the repetition of short chromatic motif
fragments at intervals of tone or semitone. Three years later, in the
terzet, No. 14, of Das Schloss am Aetna, he was to use repetition of
a rising chromatic motif in the orchestra with even more telling effect
QEx. 132).
In Act III of Die Feen the young Wagner gave the delirious Arindal
an aria which in one section approaches the expressive level of Weber
(Ex. 133). And in the Holländer the orchestral exposition of themes
THE ARIA
Bxsl32
Furioso MARCHESE
Kennst du des Si-ci-li-a-ners Blut?
nicht! sonst wä-re je-ner Kna- be, durch dei-nen eig’-nen Dolch schon lángst ge -
—
Kl Il
Narr
=
= Sear ee UMA Ge
SSS = р
в SS
SCH a ЫА be
8] Ч
уа SÉ |
Ca
(Knowest thou the Sicilian's blood? Thou dost not— or that boy would long ago have fallen on
thy own dagger!)
Ех. 133
Adagio та non troppo
ARINDAL
207
208 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
(I see Heaven open itself there, the doors of light spring open.)
in ‘Die Frist ist um’ is similarly more important than the voice part.
In the climactic waves of a short motif, taken over from Marschner,
lie the germ of a technique that was to be more fully developed later.
From Lohengrin on, the concept of Arie was to disappear. And
Schumann applied the term in Genoveva to what is really a prayer-
cavatina СО du, der über Alle wacht’).
ENSEMBLE AND CHORUS
In their ensembles many composers were content with melody
rendered insipid by chromaticism and sentimental coloratura, and
with indefinite accompanying rhythms. The choruses of the average
opera lacked dramatic punch; the singers are scarcely ever participants
in the action but merely spectators. Exceptionally, Meyerbeer knew
how to handle large groups of soloists and choral masses. And not
only in his grands opéras; in the Feldlager in Schlesien he brought
four groups of soldiers into a quadruple chorus. Lortzing excelled
in lively character sketches and strong effects; in the introduction to
Act III of Caramo (1839) an entire family council of aristocrats
swoons at the mention of the word ‘Mésalliance!’ and in the Act I
finale of Casanova (1841) the fugato of the timorous policemen is
irresistibly comic. The billiard-playing scene in the second act of Der
Wildschütz, and the introduction to Act III of Zar und Zimmermann,
SCENE COMPOSITION 209
in which the conceited burgomaster attempts with remarkable lack
of success to conduct a choir, are masterly essays ın a kind of musical
humour rare in Germany.
As for Wagner, he had already planned the introduction to Act I
of Das Liebesverbot as a grand ensemble and then built up great
climactic complexes in both acts. In Rienzi he produced a majestic
effect with the double chorus in the Lateran, and Act II of Tannhäuser
after Elisabeth's ‘Dich, teure Halle’ consists, with the exception of
Wolfram's and Tannhäuser’s songs, almost entirely of ensemble
writing. Only a few remnants of the old kind remain beside new
forms determined by connecting motifs and changes arising from the
situation. Harmonic energy-fields give the extended ensembles in
Lohengrin contrast, profile, and dynamism. Male and female choirs
provide a complete scale of scorings and groupings; they participate
in the action so that everything becomes a scenic happening.
SCENE COMPOSITION
Spoken dialogue was still preserved in comic opera but was in
retreat. The day of secco recitative was also over. After Weber
and Spohr the dominance of measured, orchestrally accompanied
recitative was established and thus became an essential factor in the
through-composition of larger complexes. The declamatory principle
became highly significant. Melodrama, which Schumann was to make
an independent form in his music to Byron's Manfred, was given a
special task in opera. Following the precedent of the dungeon scene
in Fidelio, it was employed for the representation of the marvellous
and sinister: by Conradin Kreutzer when Raimund stands before his
own grave in Melusine; by Ferdinand Hiller for the churchyard scene
in Der Traum in der Christnacht; by Lortzing in the scene of the
Mountain Queen in Rolands Knappen. Marschner was an outstanding
master of the melodrama. The moonlight scene in Der Vampyr was
an exemplar. In Hans Heiling Gertrude is waiting for her daughter
on a stormy night: from the whistling and whispering of clarinets,
bassoons and horns, of muted violas and cellos, a melody emerges
which the old woman begins to hum— an effect which is still gripping
to this day. In 1832 Wagner, in his settings from Goethe's Faust,
composed Gretchen's prayer as melodrama but he found no use for
the device in opera.
Voice parts tended to follow Weber's model in giving more
attention to the emphasis of sense by verbal accentuation. Composers
broke away from the flourishes of secco and melodic melismas.
Wagner said that a singer, to be worthy of the name, must combine
20 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
careful declamation with other basic accomplishments.!52 This pros-
odic manner of performance was ta be given significance in the
future by the ever closer connection with the melos of the orchestra
which would take over the sound symbolism and the establishment
of logical connections.
The network of cross-connections between the different sections
of the opera, including the overture, leads to overall coherence. In
Melusine Grillparzer points out that Raimund must call to mind the
heroine's words by imitating her earlier song. Spontini in Nurmahal
oder Das Rosenfest von Kaschmir (1822) anticipates themes from the
aria No. 27 in the arioso 'Ha, welch ein Traum' (No. 21). Examples
of recurring ‘situation themes’ are to be found in Kreutzer’s Der
Taucher (1813, rev. 1823) (the ‘roaring of Charybdis") and in Lachner's
Catarina Cornaro (1841) (the entry of the Venetian ambassadors). A
whole scene, the hiring of the maids in the finale of Act I of Flotow's
Martha, is recapitulated after the words ‘Gerade, wie es damals war’
[Just as it was before] at the end of the opera. Thematic reminiscences
may be attached to objects, happenings, persons, or supernatural
apparitions, and may prepare, urge on, or delay the course of the
action. Wagner of course was vastly to develop this technique,
though he speaks only of ‘thematic germs’ and the ‘repetition of a
theme with the character of an absolute reminiscence’.153
While the aria became less important, the ‘scene’ expanded as a
connected, through-constructed section of an action. The first five
scenes of Act II of Spohr's Berggeist, a through-composed, unified
complex, represent a high point in this development, and Marschner—
particularly in the second act of Der Templer—shows his command
of an idiom with expressive tone-symbols, as in the Templar's great
scena (the chromatic harmony at his ‘Grausam, lieblos nennst du
mich? and the pp wind triplets at "War ein Ritter’, specially admired
by Wagner) and the chorus in the act finale. He further heightened
this style in the finale of Act III of Heiling (Ex. 134). Recitative,
arioso melody, instrumental stimulus, and motif-work are combined
in a new organic whole. Schumann treated the personal motifs of
Genoveva and her adversary Golo with the same logical consistency
and thereby earned Spohr's арргоуа1.154 We are here at a turning-
point in the history of opera.
152 Tn ‘Pasticcio’.
133 The term leitmotiv appeared for the first time in Friedrich Wilhelm Jáhns, Car/
Maria von Weber in seinen Werken: Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichniss seiner sämmtlichen
Compositionen (Berlin, 1871).
154 Louis Spohr, Selbstbiographie (Kassel and Göttingen, 1860-1), ii. 334.
SCENE COMPOSITION 211
O rech-net mir nicht Eu-ren
Ge-denkst du nicht des — Tag's, da du mir Treu’ __
Andante con moto
In 1834 the young Wagner had objected that German operas
consisted only of a mass of musical numbers with no psychological
connection. While he still composed in these categories himself, he
mixed them with motifs and declamatory elements. He employed
personal themes and ‘fate’ themes throughout and these carry the
new architecture of musical drama. In Tannhäuser the threads of the
212 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
(HEILING: Anna! Why have you done this to me? АММА: О do not blame me for your misery!
HEILING: Do you not remember the day you promised me loyalty, when I struggled in joy and
pain to your feet? Why, why have you broken faith with me?)
action are all gathered in the last finale: the Rome narrative signifies
a definitive supersession of the ‘number’ by the scene. The orchestra
in a hitherto almost unknown manner becomes the partner of the
singer; it fills out the content of his story, carries his declamation,
and elucidates the spiritual connections. Yet many composers still
clung to the traditional keys for separate numbers. The 'revenge'
aria was usually in D minor; F sharp minor was the demonic key.
The Lied was commonly in simpler keys than the Romanze and, as
we have seen, G flat major was often chosen for the preghiera. The
recitative had to intervene between such tonal areas. In contrast
to this practice the harmony of progressive composers directly
characterizes the person, the power of nature or destiny. It determines
the overall formal structure. In Die lustigen Weiber Nicolai con-
structed broadly conceived finales. That to Act I is in C major, the
dominant of the opening and concluding key of the opera, F major.
The separate sections logically modulate to other keys, the tonal
organization giving the work the impress of compelling consistency.
Looking far ahead, Weber had based the Wolfs Glen finale of
Freischütz on four degrees of the scale a minor third apart and
compressed them into the Samiel motif which dominates the whole
opera as a Leitharmonie. Wagner achieved another functional
RUSSIA 213
construction of an entire action in Lohengrin. A major is not only
the key of the Grail, the Prelude, and the final Grail Narrative, it is
the 'starting-point' of the whole work. The dark counterpart of this
bright world (Telramund's and Ortrud's vow of vengeance) is in the
relative minor. A neighbour tonic, А flat (Lohengrin's personal
theme and Elsa's dream in A flat major, the ‘forbidden question’ in
A flat minor), is pertinently contrasted with the main key. The basic
key of Die Meistersinger is C major, that of the Ring D flat.
In the three works before the mid-century Wagner's expressive
style became ever bolder and more original. The main element
was now accompanied recitative. He generally abandoned melodic
melismata. His motifs not only underwent rhythmic and harmonic
metamorphoses; they were shortened or lengthened, closely following
the course of the drama, and thus ensured an enrichment and
deepening of the psychic content, and tightening of the action. The
orchestra provided a running commentary on the inner and external
happenings; in his treatise Oper und Drama (1851) he called it the
equivalent of the chorus in Greek tragedy.
He used the designation ‘Romantic opera’ for the last time for
Lohengrin and soon afterwards announced ‘I write no more operas’.!55
The ‘number’ structure was replaced by the unbroken succession of
big scenes. Liszt praised the work above all for its unity of conception.
No melodic phrase, no ensemble number can be understood apart
from the whole. Wagner was creating a new music out of speech-
rhythm and word-melody, freed from the periodization of Classicism.
Its aim is ‘unendliche Melodie’, the infinite spinning on of the line.!56
(e) RUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE
By GERALD ABRAHAM
RUSSIA
The history of Russian Romantic opera—more precisely, of Russian
opera written under the influence of Weber—begins with the Pan
Twardowski, produced in Moscow on 24 May-5 June 1828, of
Aleksey Nikolaevich Verstovsky (1799-1862).157
155 ‘Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde’ (1851); repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte
Schriften und Dichtungen, iv (Leipzig, 1872), 285-418.
156 The expression appeared in the ‘open letter to a friend’, Zukunftsmusik, written in 1860.
157 See Vol. VIII, pp. 533-4, and Gerald Abraham, ‘The Operas of Alexei Verstovsky’,
19th-Century Music, 7 (1984), 326-35.
214 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
VERSTOVSKY
Freischütz had been performed in -St- Petersburg and Moscow in
1824 and 1825, Preciosa in the northern capital in 1825, and
Verstovsky, a typical aristocratic dilettante who had studied the
piano with Steibelt and Field, was duly impressed by them. In 1826
he published an essay entitled ‘Excerpts from a history of dramatic
music’, in which he says one might have had to agree with the
admirers of Mozart, Cherubini, and Mehul who are convinced that
the age of music is over ‘if Weber had not written his Freischiitz’.
As Inspector of the Imperial Theatres in Moscow, he was able to
express his admiration in practice. A colleague in theatrical offi-
cialdom, the historical novelist Mikhail Zagoskin, supplied him with
a libretto on the legend of the so-called ‘Pol’skiy Faust" —here rather
a Polish Caspar— who sold his soul to the devil. The heroine is
rescued from his power by her former lover, Krasicki, when he
returns from the Turkish war, and Krasicki’s Act I агіа!58 shows
Verstovsky's lyrical invention at its best. Twardowski's aria in the
same act!59 is powerful, Julia’s polonaise готапсе!60 much inferior.
The introduction of a gypsy element may well have been suggested by
Preciosa, though the music is not particularly Weberian. Verstovsky's
harmony is commonplace, his scoring heavy-handed—though he
followed Cherubini and Méhul by writing for an ensemble of solo
cellos (which alternates with the full orchestra in the opening of the
overture). But scenically the Wolf's Glen was paralleled by flood
and an earthquake that destroys Twardowski's castle.
Like Twardowski, Verstovsky's later operas belong to the Freischütz
genre of Romantic Singspiel. In his second, Vadim ili Dvenadtsat?
spyashchikh dev [Vadim or The Twelve Sleeping Maidens] (1832),
even the eponymous hero has only a speaking part. The libretto was
cobbled up by a Moscow university professor from the second part
of a poem by Zhukovsky, the first part of which was to provide the
basis of Verstovsky's last opera, Gromoboy (1858). The subject of
Vadim is Russian but even the quasi-epic song of the old Slavonic
Бага Boyan!®! is devoid of genuine Russian flavour despite Verlody's
claim to have introduced ‘Russian characteristics’. These came only
with Askoľ dova mogila [Askold's Tomb] (16-28 September 1835),16?
158 Excerpt in Vol. VIII, Ex. 195; complete in Semyon L'vovich Ginzburg, Istoriya russkoy
muziki v notnikh obraztsakh (Moscow and Leningrad, 1952), iii. 39.
159 Ginzburg, Istoriya, p. 47.
160 Ibid., p. 62. Krasicki also has a polonaise romance.
161 In Ginzburg, Istoriya, p. 69.
162 Overture and eight other numbers in Ginzburg, Istoriya, pp. 82-165. There are several
editions of the vocal score.
VERSTOVSKY 215
for which Zagoskin fashioned a libretto from one of his own novels,
with the substitution of a happy ending for a tragic one and the
demotion of the heroine's father from former courtier to simple
fisherman. The plot!® is a farrago of tenth-century Russian history
and pagan witchcraft, with a typical Romantic mystery figure, a bass
‘Unknown’ who seems to be an incarnation of the conservative
Slavophilism of the librettist, the composer, and their friends. The
influence of Freischütz is still perceptible not only in the music but
in the first scene of Act IV where the witch Vakhrameevna, another
speaking part, brews a magic potion. The night scene of the
‘Unknown’ on Askold's tomb, with an invisible chorus of Christians
in the ruins of a church, also belongs to the world of German
Romantic opera—as do the occasional polonaise rhythms. Verstovsky
rests under the suspicion of having borrowed operatic numbers from
his early vaudevilles, and the heroine's first song in Act I and the
'allegro agitato’ section of her Act III aria certainly originated in
earlier romances with piano. But it was the imitations of Russian
popular song, albeit of the urban rather than the peasant variety, in
the choruses of fishermen and peasants (Ex. 135) and the songs of
gudok-player Toropka in Act I (Ex. 136) and Act III (Exx. 137 and
Ех 135
CHORUS OF FISHERMEN
(Come, brothers, quickly haul up the nets.)
Ex 136
TOROPKA
Р
Sve - tel me - syats vo po-lu - no-chi, yas -no sol - nish-ko
vvesh - шу den, — ya li!
(Bright is the moon at midnight, bright the sun on a spring day, fa-la-la!)
163 Mikhail Samoylovich Pekelis’s summary of the plot is translated in Gerald R. Seaman,
History of Russian Music, i (1967), 279.
216 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ex. 137
Andantino
ewen 2
De
Sr ee ee == ш
Bliz - ko_go-ro-da Sla - vyan - ska, Na ver-khu kru-toy go - ri___ Zna-me-
-ni- бу zhil__ Бо - ya "Ea pro - zva___n’yu Ka-ra - chun.
(Near the town of Slavyansk, on the top of a steep hill, lived a famous boyar, Karachun [Death]
by name.)
Ex. 138
Allegro
TOROPKA
Za-kho-di- li cha-roch- ki po sto - li - ku! Zaplya - sa - li
(Cups were passed along the table! The lads danced about the room.)
138) that won for Askol’dova mogila its quick and lasting popularity.
(It had four hundred performances in Moscow alone during the last
century.) The work which followed it the following year and has
totally eclipsed it in the pages of history enjoyed nothing like the
same immediate success with the general public.
GLINKA
Zhizn’ za Tsarya [A Life for the Tsar] as it was called originally,
and, since the Revolution, /van Susanin, by Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka
(1804-57) was the first durable Russian opera, though it remained
unperformed in the West, except Prague, until the 1870s and 1880s.
(Askol'dova mogila was given in New York in 1868.) Although
essentially a dilettante like Verstovsky, Glinka was not only very
much more gifted but commanded a much wider and deeper musical
culture. Before he embarked on his first opera he had had practical
experience with an orchestra, spent a considerable time in Italy and
Germany mixing with composers and singers of the first rank, and
lived in Berlin for some months studying composition with the
distinguished theorist Siegfried Dehn. Above all, he was by then
obsessed with ‘the idea of writing music in Russian’. He had already,
about 1824, employed three folk melodies in a jejune attempt to
GLINKA 217
write a symphony in B flat, and in Berlin in 1834 based other
instrumental compositions on folk. material; but his music had
hitherto been essentially Italianate though not without French
influence. The catalyst, suggested by the poet Zhukovsky, was the
story of the heroic peasant Ivan Susanin who in 1613 sacrificed his
life to save the founder of the Romanov dynasty from the Poles.164
Glinka set to work in the most extraordinary way, sometimes
composing passages of music to which the librettist—or, rather,
librettists for more than one lent a hand— had to fit the text.165
Vanya's song at the beginning of Act III, “When they killed my
mother, is one instance. An unmistakably Russian idiom is es-
tablished at once in Act I in the opening choruses of male and female
peasants, first separately, then combined. The coloratura element in
Antonida's cavatina which follows, though Italian in origin, is
subsumed in the general Russianness of her cantilena (Ex. 139) and
nothing could be more racily Russian than the chorus of the
approaching boatmen with its pizzicato accompaniment suggesting
balalaikas. Susanin has made his first entry between the cavatina
and the boatmen's chorus to music that begins with, and grows out
of, a snatch of actual folk-song which will be echoed by him in the
finale of Act IV when he is awakened by the Poles before they
murder him (Ex. 140).166
Ex. 139
Andante mosso ma ben sostenuto
ANTONIDA
a piacere
AN
iS UE A El GE BE
A CE EE p се Se SE
RT кы == = GEBETEN, Dee
EL —-— MÀ ize d ea BSS SSeS =
Que e э. os E der - zhu.
(I gaze into the open country, fix my eyes far off, on my native river.)
164 On the earlier opera on the same subject by Cavos, see Vol. VIII, pp. 530-3. Devoid
of jealousy, Cavos championed Glinka's work and conducted the first performance.
165 The post-Revolution Susanin (1939) has an entirely new libretto by S. M. Gorodetsky.
166 The many, and more subtle, melodic relationships throughout the score—to say nothing
of the extensive use of reminiscence-themes —are discussed by David Brown, Mikhail Glinka:
A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1974), 115-18. Brown's book, with its copious
musical examples, is the best non-Russian study of Glinka.
218 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ex. 140
Moderato
SUSANIN _
Ошо ga-dat’ o__ svad’ - be! Svad'- be ne_ bi - vat’! Za
Д RE
va-lom val і - dyot, A za. gro - 20у gro - za.
(Wedding! There'll be no wedding! One wave comes after another and calamity succeeds
calamity.)
Ex. 141
Adagio amoroso x
SOBININ er a
— «>
= 5 =~
Zhdyot___ ne - ve- sta kra - sna-ya,_ tik,- dlya te - bya
(A lovely bride awaits you, darling. We'll find your father for you and bring him home.)
A Life for the Tsar is the earliest Russian opera with no spoken
dialogue; Glinka replaced it by brief fragments of recitative quickly
flowering into arioso or what he called ‘not recitative but characteristic
song non motive’, the national quality of which is perceptible but
hardly definable. The same may be said of Sobinin's love-song in
Act IV, a perfect fusion of Italian and Russian elements (Ex. 141;
note the motif x common to this passage and Ex. 140). In later
GLINKA 219
years Glinka himself became painfully conscious of such vestiges of
Italian influence. Most purely Russian is the 5/4 bridal chorus in
Act III, most anti-Russian, of course, the polonaise and mazurka
rhythms which characterize the Poles. But the drama of A Life for
the Tsar goes deeper than this crude antithesis. Glinka conceived real
characters in real situations. He wishes Vanya’s song in Act III to
be sung without expression; the boy is singing thoughtlessly to
himself as he works. Susanin's great monologue as he waits for the
dawn that will bring his death recalls no fewer than six themes heard
earlier in association with those he loves and thus cumulatively sums
up the hero's whole character.
Verstovsky was not impressed by his rival’s work. ‘Each kind of
music has its own forms, its own limits,’ he sourly remarked. ‘People
don't go to the theatre to pray.'!9" And in his own later operas—
Toska po rodine [Longing for the Homeland] (1839), on another
Zagoskin novel, Churova dolina [The Valley of Chur] (1841), and
Gromoboy, all very inferior to Askol'dova mogila—he made no
attempt to follow the example set by A Life for the Tsar. Nor, for
that matter, did Glinka himself in Ruslan i Lyudmila (1842). Turning
from Russian history to Russian mythology (as seen through
Pushkin's playfully ironic spectacles), he set a hopelessly undramatic
subject to music more excitingly novel than that of his first opera.
The opening scene of the wedding feast with the song of the
bard Bayan (Verstovsky's Boyan in Vadim), its warm cantilena
accompanied by piano and harp imitating the gusli, the transparent,
slightly chromaticized part-writing, the bright pure orchestral colours
highlighted by triangle and cymbals, presents all the essentials other
than folk melody of Russian lyrical expression during the next
half-century. Folk melody itself is reflected in Finn's ballad in Act
IL, which Glinka had heard in Finland, and in the choral lullaby
when the sleeping Lyudmila is fanned by feathers plucked from the
Firebird. And it 1s hardly too much to say that the later Russian
*oriental convention is entirely based on such things as the Persian
chorus in Act III (Ex. 142) and the romans of the Khazar prince
Ratmir in Act V (Exx. 143 and 144). The tinting of Ex. 144 with
chromatic passing-notes in the harmony illustrates a favourite device
of Glinka's. A much more startling element in Ruslan, quite as
influential as the pseudo-oriental idiom, is the harmonic vocabulary
associated with the magical and fantastic. The descending whole-tone
167 "Avtobiografiya kompozitora A. N. Verstovskogo’, Biryuch petrogradskikh go-
sudarstvennikh teatrov (Petrograd, 1921), 231.
220 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
Ex. 142
Andantino i g
(verse 3) 2
n 2
ee Em ==
CHORUS OF GIRLS
2 —
С7 H EEE Se D DE ee WEE E eem Кен]
SR? ставот E EEEG EE.
M ue ee Pe a a a E — Se SSE ee eee eames „ш
man uu E aS ` eS E e LL ÉL WE) OE Е rc ES E EE EE
QS ART A LC NS — ZR — ae SS
portam SET ap
De . Kees а
U nas nay - dyosh' kra - sa - vits roy,
EET == 1
db pizz. 8va Bee
(You will find with us a swarm of beauties.)
Ех. 143
Larghetto
RATMIR
dolce ma a piena voce
bes" —
En a m eg Гы
tià— la.vnov’ Mo - yu u- tra - chen- nu - yu mla-dost',
(She is life to me, she is joy to me! She has returned to me anew my lost youth.)
lyu - bi - li, No tshchet-no plen - nits
GLINKA 221
mo. ОЛЕ akut — vo-stor - gi
(Beauties have loved me, but in vain the lips of the young captives promised me delights.)
Ex. 145
Moderato
scale of the evil magician Chernomor is familiar from its appearance
near the end of the overture, where its nakedness is veiled by the
harmony; it is used more daringly in the music of Lyudmila’s
abduction, entirely in the whole-tone mode (Ex. 145). Glinka makes
great play with augmented and diminished triads, simultaneous
seconds or sevenths, unrelated chords with a single note in common.
In Act IV the processional march of Chernomor and his train and the
final vivace of the /ezginka are loci classici of mid-nineteenth-century
harmonic daring.
Not everything in Ruslan is so original. The Italian buffo nature
of the cowardly Farlaf's rondo is, of course, intentional. But the
chorus of flowers in Act IV and the latter part of the finale of V
suggest the influence of Euryanthe and Oberon. Glinka was always
apt to be critical of Weber, but Liszt, who had just heard Ruslan at
Petersburg, told him, * You and Weber are like two rivals courting
the same woman.'168
16% Glinka, Literaturnoe nasledie Glinki, Valerian Mikhaylovich Bogdanov-Beryozovsky
(ed.) (Leningrad and Moscow, 1952-3), i. 230.
222 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
DARGOMIZHSKY
During the years between Life for the Tsar and Ruslan a young
friend of Glinka’s, Aleksandr Sergeevich Dargomizhsky (1813-69)
had also been working on an opera which he completed in 1841 or
1842.169 This was an Esmeralda based on Hugo’s Notre-Dame de
Paris and composed in the first instance to a-libretto which Hugo
had prepared for a French woman-composer, Louise Bertin. Instead
of Esmeralda being hanged, Hugo substituted a proclamation of her
innocence by Phebus, who has been mortally wounded by Frollo
and dies in her arms. When Dargomizhsky’s work, for which he
now made his own Russian version, was produced in Moscow in
1847, the censorship imposed further changes: Notre-Dame became
a city hall and Frollo a lay official. The interest of Esmeralda is
twofold. Unlike the work of Verstovsky and Glinka it is a true grand
opera, considerably influenced by Halévy's La Juive which had been
heard in St Petersburg in 1837, and of course completely un-Russian.
But it is the first opera of a composer who was the inferior of Glinka
as a musician, but was nevertheless to exercise an influence on the
evolution of Russian opera hardly less than Glinka's own. Already
in Esmeralda he shows dramatic sense, as in the duet for Phébus and
Frollo in Act III, Scene i, each rival wrapped in his own thoughts
and fears (Ex. 146). He had, of course, models for this in opera
Ex. 146
Adagio
PHÉBUS UTE rn
(PHEBUS: I'm in confusion, suspicious.
FROLLO: Fearful, undecided whether to ruin oneself for love!)
169 The dates in Dargomizhsky's autobiography, written in 1866, are inaccurate (see Mikhail
Samoylovich Pekelis, Aleksandr Sergeevich Dargomizhskiy i ego okruzhenie (Moscow, 1966-
71), i).
POLAND 223
buffa, but before long he was to develop much more subtle powers
of characterization and treatment of the Russian language.
POLAND
Between Kurpinski’s Zamek na Czorsztynie [Czorsztyn Castle] in
1819179 and the first version of Moniuszko’s Halka in 1854, the
history of Polish opera is a chronicle of very small beer. Kurpinski’s
protege Jözef Brzowski (1805-88) produced no more than a single
one-act work, Hrabia Weselinski [Count Merrymaker] (1833). Jözef
Damse (1789-1852) was much more prolific. Encouraged by Kur-
pinski, he brought out from 1820 onward a stream of operettas,
comedy operas, and melodramas (including two on The Bride of
Lammermoor and Kenilworth), mostly on librettos translated from
the French and aiming no higher than pleasing the Warsaw public.
To aim higher was to court failure. In 1838 Ignacy Feliks Dobrzynski
(1807-67), like Chopin a pupil of Elsner, completed a three-act work
Monbar, based on K. Van der Velde’s novel Der Flibustier, which
reflects Italian and grand-opera styles, but it had to wait until 1863
for its first performance. Example 147, an excerpt from Donna
Maria’s aria, greeting the dawn of a spring morning, exemplifies
Dobrzynski’s not strikingly original talent. The rather older Fran-
ciszek Mirecki (1794-1862) had gone to Italy where he spent most
of his time from 1816 to 1838 conducting and composing Italian
operas, one of which, Evandro in Pergamo (Genoa, 1824), had some
success. When he returned to his native land he wrote only one
opera, the comic two-act Nocleg w Apeninach [Night Quarters in the
Apennines] (Cracow, 1845), the vocal score was published by Ricordi
(Milan, 1850),!?! but this failed to keep it alive.
Ex. 147
DONNA MARIA
Ach! za. Ыу- da zo - rza, za - Ыу- sta zo - rza_ ston - ca,
na - stal__wio-sny ra - nek
(Oh the dawn has broken, the dawn of the sun has broken, the spring morning has begun.)
170 See Vol. VIII, p. 528.
171 Mirecki justly claimed in the Preface that it was conceived ‘nello stile е nel gusto
italiano’.
224 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
NON-GERMAN OPERA IN THE HABSBURG EMPIRE
Vernacular opera in Bohemia and Moravia was handicapped by
the fact that the official language and language of the upper classes
was German and the paramount operatic language Italian. Public
performances in Czech were actually forbidden for a time after
1815. However Weigl’s Schweizerfamilie was performed in a Czech
translation at Prague in 1823, Les Deux Journees and Freischütz in
1824, and Don Giovanni ın 1825. These seem to have emboldened
Frantisek Skroup (1801-62), who had taken part in these productions,
to try his hand at an original Czech Singspiel. This was Dráteník
[The Tinker], produced in 1826.172 It is a modest work, without
choruses or ballet, but its humour and local colour, the tinker himself
singing in Slovak, long kept it alive. Vojtéch's song in Act I
bemoaning the happiness he has lost so early (Ex. 148), is typical of
the opera's naive tunefulness, well suited to an anecdote of a young
lover, Vojtéch, who changes clothes with a travelling tinker—a part
played by the composer himself at the first performance—in order
to get access to his sweetheart's house. Skroup's second opera,
Oldřich a Božena (1828), with the same librettist, J. K. Chmelenský,
was a failure, but the composer had a German version prepared and
set it to new music as Udalrich und Bozena (1834). Then came a
number of German operas, one of which, Der Prinz und die Schlange
(1829), was later translated into Czech by Chmelensky. Skroup’s
third and last Czech work, Libusin ѕйаѓек [The Marriage of Libuše]
(1835, fresh version 1850), also to Chmelensky’s text, was more
Ex. 148
Andante con moto
VOJTECH
ao ER,
Zá-hy tak má hvez-da. has-ne, co mne vläs-ky_ ve - dla.
háj? Ja Кае slas - (і ро - znal_ spas-né, dnů kde mých po - čal se
d
serie
máj? dnů- kde. mychpo - cal. se_ тај!
(Is my star burning out so soon, that led me into the grove of love? Where I learnt to know the
saving joys, where the May of my days began, where the May of my days began!)
172 Vocal score (Prague, 1913; 2nd edn., 1926).
NON-GERMAN OPERA IN THE HABSBURG EMPIRE 225
ambitious but a total failure. His most enduring composition was a
song, ‘Kde domov můj? [Where is my home?], sung by a blind
fiddler in J. К. Tyl’s farce, Fidlovacka [The Carousel] (1834), popular
from the first, introduced in a later version of Drätenik, and finally
adopted as the Czech national hymn in 1918.
The Hussite theme in Czech history was first turned to operatic
account by František Kott (1808-84) in the two-act Zizküv dub
[Zizka’s Oak], produced at Brno as Zizkas Eiche in 1841 but in
Czech in 1842. The libretto by Václav Klicpera was set again Бу ЛЇЇ
Macourek (1815-after 1863) and produced at Prague in 1847, but
neither his work nor Kott's was successful enough to get into print.173
The history of vernacular opera in the other non-German Habsburg
dominions is similar. Nationalist feelings were strongly developing
in all of them and national themes were treated in the national
languages—at first with little success. German was not the only
obstacle; in Slavonic Croatia Hungarian was even more dangerous
to national culture and when Croatian opera emerged with the
Ljubav i zloba [Love and Malice] (Zagreb, 1846) of Vatroslav Lisinski
(1819-54), it had a weak champion, an amateur unable to orchestrate
his work. In Hungary itself vernacular opera had started earlier.
One of the first was Jözsef Ruzitska's Bela futása [Bela’s Flight]
(Kolozsvár/Cluj, 1822; Pest, 1826), adapted from a play by Kotzebue
dealing with the escape of Béla IV from the Tatars in 1241. The aria
of the warrior Kálmán!?4 has a national flavour (Ex. 149), and the
Ex. 149
Lassan (slow)
cl
173 One aria from Macourek’s setting was published in Zlatý zpěvník in 1857.
174 Complete vocal score in Bence Szabolcsi, A Concise History of Hungarian Music
(Budapest, 1964), musical appendix, no. XIII (i). This English edition is a somewhat abridged
version of the original Hungarian (2nd edn., Budapest, 1955).
226 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
(My forefathers [gave many warriors] to this house of sorrow.)
soprano aria 'Hunnia nyög letiporva’ [Hungary groans under the
yoke] became almost a folk-song. Although the music as a whole
alternated between Italian, German, and Hungarian styles, even
the foreign ones are sometimes decorated with the ornamental
characteristics of verbunkos,!*? and it was accepted as genuinely
Hungarian, performed all over the country for many years, and
revived at Buda as late as 1862.
In the 1840s a whole group of opera composers emerged: Ferenc
Erkel (1810-93), Gyórgy Czászár (1813-50), Károly Thern (1817-
86), Ferenc Doppler (1821-83). Thern's Gizu/ (1841) and Tihany
ostroma [Siege of Tilhan] (1845), Czászár's A kunok [The Cumanians]
(1848), and Doppler's Benyovszky, yet another Kotzebue opera
(1847), and Ка (1849) had only temporary success. Erkel’s first
opera, Bathori Maria (1840), marked him as an outstanding talent,
175 From the German Werbung [recruitment], the gypsy-style dance music used by the
Imperial officers to attract recruits.
NON-GERMAN OPERA IN THE HABSBURG EMPIRE 229
EX ДЭП
Largo
ERZSÉBET ————
Ah mily va-dul szá-guld -ja ät lel - ke - met. a__ fé - le-lem!
Vá - rat- la - nul el - ra- ga- dák keb - lem- röl_ két— gyer - me-kem. _
(Ah, how fiercely fear runs through my heart! My two children suddenly torn from my arms.)
Si
am =
н к Et En а
eg — ui е И | it]
and his second, Hunyadi László (1844), is the first real masterpiece
of Hungarian opera. Ladislas Hunyadi, brother of Matthias Corvinus,
executed as the result of a palace intrigue in 1457, was a memorable
historical figure popularly transfigured into a national hero and the
national note is sounded at the very beginning of the overture when
a trumpet plays (Ex. 150), a theme associated throughout the work
with the patriotic Hunyadi family in general. Much of the music is
undeniably Italianate: Erzsébet's second big coloratura aria in Act
II, inserted in 1850, breaks into the verbunkos idiom (Exx. 151 and
152). The national strain is particularly strong in the third act, for
instance in the wedding chorus in the second scene; and the final
chorus of Act I, ‘Meghalt a cselszövö’ [The Plotter is Dead], was
popularly adopted as a revolutionary song in 1848. Of the less national
passages the finest is the scene of László V's soon-to-be-broken oath
at the end of Act II. Erkel's third opera, Bánk Bán [The Palatine
Bánk] composed in 1852, was suppressed owing to the political
climate and performed only in 1861 when the absolutist monarchy
was beginning to make concessions.
228 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
(f BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
By NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY
THE 1830s witnessed a determined and not unsuccessful effort to
launch a serious school of English Romantic opera. In 1830 English
opera was perhaps at the lowest point in its uneven history. Between
1826 and 1834, as the critic George Hogarth wrote in 1838, ‘no
English composer produced a single musical piece of the smallest
importance ... and the stage was supplied with importations from
abroad'.!*6 Thus the principal ‘English’ theatres, Drury Lane and
Covent Garden, devoted their energies to garbled versions of foreign
operas, while the King's Theatre, which alone attracted the wealth
and prestige of aristocratic audiences,!7* was strictly confined to
opera in Italian.
The event which sparked the revival was the opening of the rebuilt
Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1834 as the English Opera House. The
lessee, S. J. Arnold, was the son of the eighteenth-century composer!*8
and was himself a dramatist, who had since 1809 used the old
Lyceum theatre for the production of burlettas, melodramas, ‘musical
dramas' (plays with songs and incidental music), and the like. Now,
in the summer of 1834, he opened the new theatre for 'the
representation of English operas and the encouragement of indigenous
musical talent', and it was soon apparent that there was indeed a
fund of indigenous musical talent waiting for just such an opportunity.
The composers who played the chief part in establishing English
Romantic opera were John Barnett (1802-90), Edward James Loder
(1813-65), Michael William Balfe (1808-70), and William Vincent
Wallace (1812-65). Benedict and Macfarren, though of similar age,
did their most important work after the mid-century, and so will be
considered in Chapter VI.
BISHOP
The operatic tradition inherited from the previous generation,
represented chiefly by the works of Henry Bishop (1786-1855), was
one in which the music was still to a great extent episodic. Most,
176 Memoirs of the Musical Drama (London, 1838), ii. 456.
177 See Nicholas Temperley, ‘The English Romantic Opera’, Victorian Studies, 9 (1966),
294 n.
178 See Vol. VII, pp. 263-5.
BARNETT AND LODER 229
but not all, of the action took place in spoken dialogue. Each of the
three acts would include several musical numbers, such as strophic
ballads, duets, glees, choruses, or instrumental pieces; there would
be one or two full-scale arias, or grand scenas incorporating recitative,
or mélodrames;}79 and there was always a full-length overture, and
a short musical finale to each act. Occasionally the musical numbers
might be quite ambitious—for instance, the Act II finale of Bishop’s
Cortez (1823), depicting, in several movements, a wild scene of
human sacrifice interrupted before its consummation. In Clari (1823)
Bishop attempted to unify his work by using the ballad ‘Home,
sweet home’ as a sort of leitmotif, but the experiment did not catch
on. What was lacking was any cumulative musico-dramatic effect;
and the style of Bishop’s music was deferential and undemanding,
hardly attempting to sweep the audience along by its emotional
force. Bishop’s operas generally had some principal characters who
did not sing at all: the only exception was Aladdin (1826).180
The one precursor of the new style was Weber's Oberon (1826),
which was performed at Covent Garden during the closing months
of the composer's life, and made a profound impression on the
English public, already greatly excited by English adaptations of Der
Freischütz that had appeared in 1824. The Oberon libretto by James
Planché was entirely typical of its time and place, but Weber's richly
Romantic score had shown how much emotional depth music could
add even to a spoken drama.
BARNETT AND LODER
Barnett's The Mountain Sylph (1834), which was the most successful
of the new works commissioned by Arnold for his first season, is
strongly influenced by both Freischütz and Oberon. Based on the
ballet La Sylphide, it concerns interactions between mortals and
supernatural beings, and has several Weberian motifs which appear
in the overture and reappear at telling moments later on: most
notable is the opening theme, heard over diminished sevenths
tremolando. The music of the two acts is still broken by spoken
dialogue,!8! but it includes several connected scenes in which action,
179 A mélodrame was an instrumental number accompanying action or dialogue, whereas
a melodrama was a spoken play with some musical numbers.
180 See Bruce Carr, ‘Theatre Music: 1800-1834 in Nicholas Temperley (ed.), Music in
Britain: The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 292-3.
181 Until recently it was thought that The Mountain Sylph was sung throughout, but this
notion was dispelled by Bruce Carr in ‘The First All-sung English 19th-century Opera’,
Musical Times, 115 (1974), 125-6. According to an ‘Advertisement’ prefacing the published
vocal score, Barnett first wrote the work as a *musical drama' for the Victoria Theatre, which
he then ‘heightened’ into a ‘romantic grand opera’.
230 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
conflict, and character development are carried on with the full
collaboration of music. Most of these scenes belong to types well
established in continental opera—there is a fortune-telling scene, a
marriage contract, an invocation scene (the Act I finale), and so on.
A certain British colouring is given by occasional pentatonicism, for
instance in the unison melody of the Act П finale: this suits the
setting of the drama, which is in the Western Isles of Scotland. It
can hardly be said that any of the characters has much depth. But
there is a passionate warmth and vehemence about some of Barnett's
music, for instance the song ‘Oh! no, 'twas no deceptive spell’ (Ex.
153), that goes well beyond anything achieved by Bishop, and does
indeed herald a new era for English opera.
E153
Andantino quasi allegretto
DONALD ZR dolce
TEU eet Eeer = ee =
= ee a ae aO Е
s, L7 Кг шы
‘twas no de-cep-tive spell,
A month before The Mountain Sylph, Loder’s Nourjahad was
produced at the English Opera House, so becoming, in Macfarren’s
words, “Ше inaugural work of the institution of modern English
Opera’. Barnett never again approached the heights he had reached
in The Mountain Sylph, but Loder went on to write two more full-scale
operas, The Night Dancers (Princess’s, London, 1846) and Raymond
and Agnes (Theatre Royal, Manchester, 1855). The Night Dancers is
another fairy opera—it is a version by George Soane of the story
better known from the ballet Gise/le—and indeed it is the ‘fairy’
BALFE 231
parts of the work, those most influenced by Oberon, that аге the
most delightful. Many of the ballads and waltz songs are of the trite,
conventional sort in which Loder was all too fluent, but an exception
must be made for the beautiful serenade, “Wake, my love, all life is
stirring’;!82 here Loder has captured some of the same passionate
musical language that stirred Barnett at his best.
The fairy conventions of the early Victorian period have un-
fortunately succumbed to the satire of /olanthe, and are hardly
acceptable now unless allied to the music of a Weber or a
Mendelssohn. In Raymond and Agnes Loder found a plot of more
enduring value, however dated the style of Edward Fitzball's verse.
Beneath the Gothic and supernatural overtones, it is a classic conflict
between a middle-aged guardian (the Baron) and a young lover
(Raymond) for control of the heroine; and the centrepiece is a long
scene for the two male characters, which builds dramatic tension to
a degree unique in English opera of the nineteenth century. In a full
twenty minutes of compelling music, the men move steadily from
chilly politeness, through mutual suspicion and dismay, to a quarrel
of mounting intensity. At last Raymond recognizes the Baron as his
father's murderer, the two men fight, and a chorus rushes on stage
to a unison tune of positively Verdian energy (Ex. 154). The opera
also boasts a beautiful terzetto in the Act I finale, a fine bass aria,
and a superb sleep-walking scene with a quintet that has been
compared with the quartet ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’ from Fidelio.!5?
There are also— in addition to the normal quota of spoken dialogue,
insipid ballads, and predictable choruses— several songs that suc-
cessfully invoke the appropriate Gothic mood of fear and horror.
Ex. 154
Allegro molto
(unison) ~
BALFE
The English opera movement was soon taken up by other theatres,
182 Reprinted in Musica Britannica, xliii. 92.
183 See Michael Hurd, ‘Opera: 1834-1865’, in Temperley (ed.), Music in Britain, p. 323 (an
excerpt from the quintet appears on pp. 324-7).
232 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
and in 1835 Balfe’s first opera, The Siege of Rochelle, originally
intended for the English Opera House, came out at Drury Lane.
Balfe was the most successful of this group of composers, producing
some two dozen English operas for London, several of which became
popular all over the Western world, and also winning commissions
from Trieste, from Vienna, from the Paris Opera and Opera-Comique,
and even from Her Majesty’s (formerly the King’s) Theatre, London,
which produced his Italian opera Falstaff in 1838.
Balfe was Irish by birth and upbringing, and was a successful
baritone singer; in his youth he spent several years in Italy. For all
these reasons, perhaps, he was blessed with a greater flow of
spontaneous melody than any of his rivals, and this, as almost all
commentators agree, is the strongest quality of his operas. He knew
how to make the most of his singers—and the success of his second
opera, 7he Maid of Artois (Drury Lane, 1836), was in very large
measure due to the singing of Maria Malibran. After a series of
more moderate successes, an abortive attempt to establish his own
English opera company, and a foray to Paris, Balfe brought out his
masterpiece, The Bohemian Girl, at Drury Lane in 1843. This work
was so well and so universally known to the English-speaking public
for the next two generations that at last it seemed that opera in
English had won a place in popular esteem beside the Italian variety.
It was still in the repertoire during the first three decades of the
present century.
The Bohemian Girl, which shares a plot with Weber's Preciosa, is
about noblemen and gipsies; the love between hero (Thaddeus) and
heroine (Arline) can only be brought to a happy resolution when
Arline's father, Count Arnheim, learns that Thaddeus is not a gipsy
but a Polish gentleman (albeit a rebel) in disguise. An interval of
twelve years separates the first two acts. The basic plan of Alfred
Bunn’s libretto is quite orthodox: there is still spoken dialogue,18*
and most of the musical numbers are self-contained and episodic,
but there are substantial connected introductions as well as finales
to each of the three acts. Without a doubt, the great pillars of the
opera's unprecedented fame are the two principal tunes, the chorus
‘In the gipsy's life you read’, and Arline's ballad, ‘I dreamt that I
dwelt in marble halls’.185 Both are used in the overture; ‘In the
gipsy's life’ recurs many times as a leitmotif in the Bishop manner.
181 Of Balfe's operas only Catherine Grey (1837) and The Daughter of St Mark (1844) are
all-sung. See Carr, ‘The First All-sung English 19th-century Opera’.
185 For a detailed discussion of this song, see Nicholas Temperley, 'Ballroom and
Drawing-room Music', in Temperley (ed.), Music in Britain, p. 126.
WALLACE 233
There is a third song of almost equal popularity, Thaddeus’s ‘When
other lips and other hearts’.186 Balfe's tunes, simply constructed and
accompanied, show his understanding of the human voice, for they
allow the singer to exercise sway over the audience's feelings without
competition. He is also very much at home in the love duets.
In other parts of the opera—in the scenas, concerted numbers,
instrumental movements— Balfe is a competent craftsman, no more.
But he does quite as well as Donizetti does in many recently revived
works, and provides just as much tuneful music. He went on to write
another half-dozen successful operas for the Pyne- Harrison Company
(1857-64); they show little or no development of style or technique.
WALLACE
Wallace was also an Irishman, but his career was very different
from Balfe’s. He was first a pianist, second a violinist. He spent
much of his youth in adventures that took him as far afield as
Australia and Chile; he made his name in New York and Holland
before he at last reached London, and his first opera, Maritana
(Drury Lane, 1845), was by far the most successful of the six he
produced —indeed for a time it was a rival to The Bohemian Girl.
Maritana is a macho story about male honour and heroism set in
Spain. The most popular song from it is not an amorous or nostalgic
ballad, but Don Cesar’s blustering “Yes! let me like a soldier fall’.
In plan it follows the usual pattern. Apart from the ballads the
general style is more Italianate than Balfe's, but Wallace added a
more unusual element of Spanish colouring, possibly derived from
his experiences in Latin America. This is most evident in the romance
‘It was a knight’ (Ex. 155), anticipated in the overture, and the gipsy
chorus ‘Pretty Gitana'. Such use of harmonic colouring of the
flamenco type goes far beyond anything to be found in contemporary
operas set in Spain, such as La favorita, Ernani, or Don Pasquale,
and it faintly heralds the spirit of Carmen. Wallace is far more
186 Sims Reeves wrote, in My Jubilee, or, Fifty Years of Artistic Life (London 1889), of one
of Thaddeus's songs in The Bohemian Girl: "The words of Mr. Bunn's extraordinary poetical
effusion run literally as follows:
When the fair land of Poland was ploughed by the hoof
Of the ruthless invader; when Might
With steel to her bosom and flame to her roof,
Completed the triumph o'er Right, etc.
... It was bad enough to have a pause after the word “hoof”, which thus became separated
from the words “ruthless invader”; but it was intolerable that the nominative “Might” should
be separated from its verb by drums and trumpets.' (As a matter of fact the score shows no
pause after ‘hoof’, but the trumpets and drums after ‘Might’ are actual.)
234 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
«Ex
Scherzando MARITANA
Kä ES: eme Ze ВИЕ: E 7 EC we "et
ES EE
Ee Se Ss Se
prince-ly mien, One blue and gol-den day,
ambitious than Balfe in his finales. The Act I finale is based on a
tune which is first heard as a quiet prayer (Angels that around us
hover’) and then rises to a climax à la Meyerbeer—an innovation as
far as English opera was concerned.
Two of Wallace's later operas, Lurline (composed 1848, produced
Covent Garden, 1860) and The Amber Witch (Her Majesty's 1861),
continue the trend of building large-scale scenes in the French
manner; one also detects a new Mendelssohnian flavour, especially
in some of the instrumental music (the F sharp minor tune from the
overture to Lurline, for example). One of the best songs of Victorian
opera also occurs in Lurline, the richly accompanied 'Sweet form
that in my dreamy gaze’.
These four composers—Barnett, Loder, Balfe, and Wallace—
championed the cause of serious opera in English, but they did little
to make their operas English in character, apart from continuing to
incorporate the traditional ballads, glees, and dialogue. Their plots
THE UNITED STATES 235
were usually taken from continental sources and were set in foreign
lands or in fairyland; they were content to set execrable verse, and,
often enough, paid little attention to verbal accent. They were not
worried by the falsity and irrelevance of the situations and emotions
portrayed in the stories they set. The feeling in their music, however,
is strong and convincing, especially in songs of love. As Bernard
Shaw wrote after hearing a revival of Lurline, ‘there are several
moments in the opera in which the string of hackneyed and
trivial shop ballad stuff rises into melody that surges with genuine
emotion’.!8? Perhaps it should be seen as a release of the pent-up
feelings in many a Victorian breast, at a time when direct expression
of love was so painfully circumscribed. All four of these composers
relied primarily on the intuitive, emotional values of their music,
unlike their contemporary George Macfarren.
THE UNITED STATES
The operatic stage in the United States in this period continued to
be almost wholly dependent on imports from London, both of
indigenous English operas and of continental works that had already
appeared on the London stage. After the visit of the Garcia troupe
to New York in 1825, there was a growing taste for Italian opera
in fashionable circles. With such slender foundations the difficulties
of producing an ‘American’ serious opera were vastly greater even
than those faced by composers in Britain.
The first fully-fledged opera (‘grand opera’ as it was usually termed
in America) actually composed in the United States is believed to
have been Ahmed al Кате! by Charles Edward Horn (1786-1849),
an English composer who had produced a score of operas for the
London stage between 1810 and 1830. It was produced at the New
York National Theatre on 12 October 1840, with a libretto by
H. J. Finn after Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, but
unhappily the music has not survived.
Only one ‘grand opera’ by an American-born composer is known
to have been produced before 1850: Leonora, by William Henry
Fry (1813-1864), first performed at the Chestnut Street Theatre,
Philadelphia, on 4 June 1845. It ran for twelve nights. This was
certainly a historical landmark. But, despite the composer’s later
expressed views of musical nationalism, there is nothing very
American about Leonora. It is based on an English novel set in
France, Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons, and the music is
187 London Music in 1888-89 as heard by Corno di Bassetto (London, 1937), 351.
236 ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
thoroughly Italian in style: a contemporary critic called it ‘a study
in the school of Bellini’.188 There is little sign even of the English
ballad, which had been adopted by many American composers. What
is remarkable, however, is the degree of technical skill that Fry
displays in this ambitious score 189 His second opera, Esmeralda
(after Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris), was produced at Philadelphia
in 1864.
On the whole, opera was still an alien growth in the Anglo-Saxon
cultures; they had their own flourishing forms of theatre in which
music was only a perfunctory element. Strong and distinctive
English-language opera came only with the rise of musical nation-
alism, which was a latecomer in both Britain and the United States.
188 Gilbert Chase, America's Music (New York, 1955), 331.
189 For a study of this opera, see K. E. Gombert, ‘ “Leonora” by William Henry Fry and
"Rip Van Winkle” by George Frederick Bristow’ (Ph.D. Diss., Ball State University, 1977).
IV
ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
By WILLI KAHL
THE PIANO OF THE 1830$
WHEN in February 1837 Ignaz Moscheles gave three piano recitals
in London, his programmes included not only recent piano music
but works by Domenico Scarlatti and his contemporaries, which he
performed on a 1771 harpsichord from the Schudi workshops placed
at his disposal especially for these concerts by the firm of Broadwood.
This was probably the first time in the nineteenth century that the
harpsichord was introduced into the concert hall in the role of
‘historical’ instrument. In the course of the preceding decades
the Hammerflügel had undergone structural improvements which
naturally influenced performing technique and composition. One of
these was the repetition mechanism invented by Sebastien Erard and
patented in London in 1808, followed in 1821 by his double
escapement which permitted the same note to be struck several times
in rapid succession. A most important step towards strengthening
the structure of the Hammerflügel, and one which opened up many
new possibilities in the field of dynamics, was the introduction, from
America where it was patented in 1825, of the iron frame cast in a
single piece which gradually superseded the older wooden frame,
and the overstringing of the bass strings. Of far-reaching effect on
the styles of piano music in these decades were the opposing influences
on the one hand of the so-called Viennese school and on the other
of English technical progress which played an increasingly incisive
role in piano manufacture after 1800. All other types of mechanism
developed during this time are variants of these two: the English
mechanism, whose deeper key action gave correspondingly fuller
tone, enabling the pianist to combine a singing melodic line with a
sonorous mobile accompaniment; and the Viennese action, which,
though it produced a thinner tone, was better suited to performing
passages of a sparkling, rippling nature by virtue of its shallower
key movement, which necessitated a lighter touch. The effects of
these contrasting actions on piano style during the first half of the
238 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
century are revealed by comparison of Field’s nocturnes, and later
those of Chopin, with Hummels style of playing and writing, which
was entirely based on the Mozartian tradition.
Among the attempts made towards establishing the Hammerklavier
as a serious competitor to the harpsichord and clavichord, one of
the most interesting was the introduction of such devices as register
stops.!
These modifications, which reached a climax in the first two
decades after 1800, were still in evidence after 1830, though only the
usual three pedals have survived, owing undoubtedly to a reaction
against a superabundance of devices which soon set in. The great
piano teachers of those years, in particular Czerny, Hummel, and
Moscheles disliked them on the grounds that the forte, piano, and
una corda pedals were all that was necessary. Nevertheless the
demand for pianos with built-in modifications persisted; a list of the
patents taken out for such instruments between 1801 and 1851 in
Europe, the United States, and Canada shows that no fewer than
twenty-three were applied for after 1830.? АП the same, they made
little or no impact on composition.
THE CRISIS OF THE SONATA
Even a brief survey of the keyboard music written between 1830 and
1850 shows that the relationships between the various genres had
altered fundamentally since Classical times. With Mendelssohn
single-movement forms predominate. But the development of the
one-movement piano piece into a musical genre did not begin in
1830. The ground had already been prepared, particularly in the
second decade of the new century: one-movement piano pieces started
to take shape as forms in their own right and appeared in ever
increasing numbers, a process which accelerated after 1830. In these
circumstances the fate of the post-Beethoven piano sonata as the
epitome of the cyclic form in solo piano music of the Classical era
was soon decided. Schubert still patterned his sonatas on those of
Beethoven and produced twenty-one, some completed, others not.
With Weber's sonatas, however, which were written between 1812
and 1822, the whole aspect of the genre changed.? The same change
1 On the mechanical development of the piano see, for instance, Rosamund Harding, The
Pianoforte (Cambridge, 1933), and Ernest Closson, Histoire du piano (Brussels, 1944; trans.
Delano Ames, London, 1947).
? Harding, Pianoforte, pp. 147-50.
3 Walter Georgii, Karl Maria von Weber als Klavierkomponist (Leipzig, 1914), 16-27; William
S. Newman, The Sonata since Beethoven (Chapel Hill, 1969), 249 ff. On Weber and his
longer-lived contemporaries, Cramer (1771-1858), Kalkbrenner (1785-1849), Czerny (1791-
1857), and Moscheles (1794-1870), see Vol. VIII, pp. 354-5.
THE CRISIS OF THE SONATA 239
is visible in Mendelssohn if the three early sonatas are set against
the fifty Lieder ohne Worte, while Schumann and Chopin produced
no more than three piano sonatas each. In this context it is interesting
to note what Schumann said in 1839 with reference to the piano
sonatas of his contemporaries:
Most sonatas of this type should be regarded as kinds of academic exercise,
as studies in form; they are scarcely products of strong inner impulse. But
if the older composers no longer write them, then they must likewise have
good reasons for not doing so.
Hummel zealously trod in Mozart's footsteps but left only one sonata,
the F sharp minor, that will survive, while Beethoven's chief disciple was
Franz Schubert, who strove to break new ground, and succeeded. Ries?
worked too hastily, Berger, 5 like Onslow,® was incapable of working out
the full implications of his occasional flashes of inspiration. Most fluent
and fiery of all was Karl Maria von Weber, who evolved his own style and
is in turn influencing several younger composers. This is how the sonata
stood about ten years ago, and the situation has not changed. A few fine
but isolated examples of the genre will certainly emerge from time to time—
some have already done so. On the whole it seems as though, as a form,
the sonata has run its course, and this is in the nature of things; instead of
a century of repetitions we should turn our thoughts to something new. By
all means write sonatas or fantasies— what's in a name!—but don't forget
the music, and your own genius will do the rest.’
Already, eight years before, the 18-year-old Wagner had in two
long unknown works explored the divergent paths large-scale piano
composition might follow. In 1831 he composed a quite respectable
Sonata in A,® following dutifully in the steps of Beethoven and even
demonstrating his knowledge of Op. 110 and Op. 111. Then in
November of the same year he wrote a Fantasie in F sharp
minor,? in which, beside more echoes of Beethoven, appear passages
foreshadowing the idiom of the mature Wagner (Ex. 156). In 1833
Mendelssohn composed a Sonate écossaise, also in F sharp minor,
Op. 28, which (with the uncertainty typical of the period) he restyled
Phantasie before publishing it. But with Wagner there was no
uncertainty. His Fantasie pointed decidedly in another direction, his
own true way, the way of largely instrumental drama.
^ Newman, Sonata, pp. 170 ff.
5 Ibid., pp. 454-5.
6 Ibid., pp. 475-7.
* Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 11/1 (1839), 134; Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über
Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin Kreisig (5th edn.; Leipzig, 1914), i. 395.
8 First published by Otto Daube, ‘Ich schreibe keine Symphonien mehr’ (Cologne, 1960),
230-57. Also in Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus, xix (Mainz, 1970).
9 Leipzig, 1905; also in Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Dahlhaus.
240 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
Ex. 156
Recitativo
Any further evolution of the sonata after Beethoven could only
proceed from the quite different conception of form held by the
succeeding generation, one quite opposed to the Classical deal 10
‘In contrast to Beethoven, the Romantic composer proceeds in a
way that is associative rather than functional.'!! This associative
attitude, closely allied to a basic lyricism, permeates the whole range
of instrumental music of that time; themes typical of the Lied ohne
Worte are frequently introduced even in ‘allegro’ movements!? and
are not easily accommodated in the formal structure of a sonata in
the Classical tradition. Thus traits emerged which had the effect of
radically modifying the traditional concept of sonata form. Similar
characteristics occur in Romantic chamber music: ‘reversal of the
tensional relationship between theme and counter-theme’, ‘division
of thematic energy between theme and counter-theme’,!* resulting in
an episodic type of sonata, breakup of the traditional norm of four
movements by introduction of new formal elements such as the
canzonetta or intermezzo, which often disrupt the sonata sense.
These diverse alterations eventually affected the formal cycle as a
whole, by reversing the usual order of movements or by adding to
them. Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny had produced a five-movement
sonata, Op. 7, in 1820. His Op. 124 (1827) expands to seven
10 Gustav Becking, ‘Zur musikalischen Romantik’, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Lite-
raturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, ii (1924), 581-615.
11 Arnold Schmitz, Das romantische Beethovenbild (Berlin and Bonn, 1927), 114.
12 Ibid., pp. 124-7.
13 See Hans Mersmann, 'Sonaten Form in der romantischen Kammermusik’, in Walter
Lott, Helmuth Osthoff, and Werner Wolffheim (eds.), Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge:
Festschrift für Johannes Wolf (Berlin, 1929), 112-17.
SCHUMANN’S SONATAS 241
movements, but his Op. 788 for four hands (1847) is a one-movement
work ‘in the style of Domenico Scarlatti’. To this haphazard process
of evolution Carl Loewe (1796-1869) made a unique contribution
with his E major Sonata, Op. 16 (1829), the second movement of
which introduces ad libitum tenor and soprano voices singing a
French romance, ‘Toujours je te serai fidéle’.!4 Loewe styled his Op.
47 (comp. 1824; pub. 1835) 'Tondichtung in Sonatenform, Le
Printemps’,!5 and his Zigeunersonate, Op. 107 (1847), has five
movements, each with a title.!6
SCHUMANN'S SONATAS
The extent to which the piano sonata had declined as a commercial
proposition is perhaps best illustrated by the position in which
Robert Schumann (1810-56) found himself, when, in 1836, he offered
his F minor, Op. 14, to the Viennese publisher Haslinger in its
original five-movement form with two scherzos. Haslinger insisted
that it should be described as a ‘Concert sans orchestre’ (a good
selling title in that golden age of the virtuoso concerto) and that the
two scherzos should be omitted. When the second edition was
brought out in 1853, the second Scherzo was restored, now as the
second instead of the fourth movement,!? and the four-movement
piece appears, as it did in the third edition (1862), as ‘Troisième
grande sonate’.!8 It is a personal confession dating from the time of
the composer's unhappy courtship of Clara Wieck and the variation
movement is based on an Andantino composed by her.
Despite disruptive tendencies which threaten the Classical form,
Schumann's sonatas do convey a sense of unity. In the F minor
Clara's variation theme provides the material and Walter Georgii
has demonstrated!? the subtle interrelationship of motifs in the
definitive form (1839) of the G minor Sonata, Op. 22, begun in
1830.20 See Ex. 157 from the first movement, Ex. 158 from the
second, and Ex. 159 from the fourth.
14 See Paul Egert, Die Klaviersonate im Zeitalter der Romantik (Berlin, 1934), 134-6. On
Loewe's sonatas in general, see also Newman, Sonata, pp. 282-6.
15 See Egert, Die Klaviersonate, pp. 132-4.
16 Ibid., p. 138.
1? The original first Scherzo was published separately in 1866 and later included in the
Supplementary Volume of the Gesamtausgabe in 1893.
18 For the whole complicated history of the work, see Linda Correll Roesner, “The
Autograph of Schumann's Piano Sonata in F minor, Opus 14', Musical Quarterly, 61 (1975),
98.
19 Klaviermusik (3rd edn.; Zurich and Freiburg im Breisgau, 1956), 308-9.
20 On the various operations in which Schumann refashioned the movement, see Linda
Correll Roesner, 'Schumann's Revisions in the First Movement of the Piano Sonata in G
minor, Op. 22’, /9th-century Music, | (1977-8), 97.
242 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
Ех. 158 Ех ED
Schumann's method of constructing even a first movement suggests
the assembling of a mosaic, and his sonatas as wholes are assembled
partly from independent pieces. The F sharp minor, Op. 11 (1832-5)
introduces new types of movement. The first began its existence as
a fandango, Rhapsodie pour le piano,?! which he thought of publishing
in 1832 as Op. 4; the second Trio of the Scherzo is a gently ironic
polonaise, marked ‘Alla burla, ma pomposo’, though he also labels
it ‘Intermezzo’ as if to emphasize still further the presence of an
intruder among the sonata movements. The Trio ends with an
unbarred recitative-like passage marked ‘quasi oboe’. It is not so
much a traditional scherzo trio as a kind of 'characteristic piece
disrupting the conventional structure.
As might be expected, Schumann's sonatas also offer examples of
the Lied ohne Worte style which so strongly influenced the in-
strumental works of the Romantic composers. The slow movements
of Op. 11 and Op. 22 have very decided affinities with the Lied,
being indeed based on actual songs: the Aria of the F sharp minor
Sonata goes back to Schumann's song “Ап Anna’ (1828), while the
Andantino of the G minor is a transcription of another song, ‘Im
Herbste', written in the same year.
?! Facsimile of the autograph of the first page is in Hermann Abert, Robert Schumann
(Berlin, 1903), 57.
~ SCHUMANN AND THE VARIATION PRINCIPLE 243
SCHUMANN’S C MAJOR PHANTASIE
Schumann might well have published his F sharp minor Sonata
as a fantasie, as Mendelssohn had done; he took this step with his
` Op. 17, written in 1836. Its earlier titles, Grosse Sonate für Beethoven
and Obolen auf Beethovens Monument, are explained by the fact that
it was intended as a contribution to an appeal for funds to erect a
Beethoven monument at Bonn. The link with Beethoven must have
made the description of the three movements as a 'sonata' seem
appropriate, but the original titles of the movements—‘Ruins’,
‘Trophies’ (later ‘Triumphal Arch’), and ‘Palms’ (later ‘Constel-
lation’)—are characteristic of the poetic language so dear to the
romantic composer. However, when the work was published in 1839,
Schumann entitled it simply Phantasie and replaced the separate
movement headings with a ‘Motto’ by Friedrich Schlegel for the
whole work:
Durch alle Tóne tónet
Im bunten Erdentraum
Ein leiser Ton gezogen
Für den, der heimlich lauschet.
The Phantasie also demonstrates the originality of Schumann's piano
style: for instance, the increased sonority obtained by full chords
anticipating the bass beat as in the middle movement, the bold use
of the pedal, and the intricate interplay of rhythms.
Until the advent of this work by Schumann the connection of the
keyboard fantasia with the sonata is more or less clear. When
Beethoven described each of the two sonatas of Op. 27 as ‘quasi
una Fantasia' this only referred to irregularity in the disposition of
the movements (which recurs in other of his sonatas). And when
Schubert varies the conventional sonata cycle, as in the Fantaisie
Op. 15 (the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasia), and the four-hand Phantasie, Op.
103, he still preserves its basic shape. As we have seen, Mendelssohn's
Op. 28 was originally entitled Sonate écossaise; apart from one or
two improvisatorial features in the Andante first movement, the free
reversal of the movements approximates to what Beethoven intended
to express by the phrase ‘quasi una Fantasia’. With Schumann it
was different.
SCHUMANN AND THE VARIATION PRINCIPLE
While the production of piano sonatas declined steadily after 1830
and the small-scale single piano piece proliferated beyond measure,
new cyclic genres were coming into being. Single piano pieces could
244 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
be linked together superficially, like mosaics, to form collective
wholes with no inner connection, but they could also form planned
structures, often under the influence of poetic concepts. As well as
this, of course, there were the traditional sets of variations based on
purely musical ideas,?? to say nothing of arrangements of songs and
fantasias on operatic melodies, which were at. the height of their
popularity at this time.
Schumann's piano music is rich in examples of the variation
principle.?? His first set, Op. 1 (1830), dedicated to a semi-fictitious
‘Pauline, Comtesse d’Abegg’, appears at a superficial glance to follow
absolutely the traditions of the genre. The models for the variation
technique—even in many details—are obvious (Weber, Hummel,
Moscheles, as well as Beethoven),?4 but there are already signs of a
new element, based on a complete change in the whole concept of
thematicism. For Schumann the theme was no longer to be varied
as a whole; instead, motifs were extracted from it and plastically
remoulded. Thus emerged what has been called the Gefühls- or
Fantasievariation,?? whose inner connection, according to Schumann
himself, required ‘poetic completeness'.?$ Thus the theme of the
ABEGG variations is not first and foremost a musical structure but
a name symbol with implications reaching beyond the series of notes
A, B, E, G, G, the nucleus of a ‘poetic completeness’.
Several other sets of piano variations from this early period were
considered unworthy of publication: on an original theme in G
(1831-2); on the Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony
(1832),2? from which one variation was published in 1854 as Op.
124, No. 2; on Schubert's so-called Sehnsuchtswalzer (1833), and on
Chopin's Nocturne, Op. 15, No. 3, (1834).28 The theme of the next
set to be published, /mpromptus sur une romance de Clara Wieck, Op.
5 (1833),29 was borrowed from the Romance variée, Op. 3, of
22 On Romantic variations in general, see Martin Friedland, Zeitstil und Persónlichkeitsstil
in den Variationenwerken der musikalischen Romantik (Leipzig, 1930); Robert U. Nelson, The
Technique of Variation (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1948), Joseph Müller-Blattau, Gestaltung-
Umgestaltung: Studien zur Geschichte der musikalischen Variation (Stuttgart, 1950).
23 See Werner Schwarz, Robert Schumann und die Variation (Kassel, 1932).
?1 See Wolfgang Gertler, Robert Schumann in seinen frühen Klavierwerken (Wolfenbüttel and
Berlin, 1931), 66-7.
25 Müller-Blattau, Gestaltung- Umgestaltung, p. 57.
?6 Schwarz, Robert Schumann, p. 21.
?7 Ed. Robert Münster, with Schumann's additional variations (Munich, 1976). Kathleen
Dale quotes the theme of the G major set, “The Piano Music’, in Gerald Abraham (ed.),
Schumann: А Symposium (London, 1952), 19.
?8 The second Chopin variation was published in Wolfgang Boetticher, Robert Schumann:
Einführung in Personlichkeit und Werk (Berlin, 1941), 588.
?9 A revised edition, omitting two variations but including a new one, appeared in 1850.
SCHUMANN AND THE VARIATION PRINCIPLE 245
Schumann's future wife. The bass—announced first as in Beethoven's
Eroica set, Op. 35, then presented. with the theme—figures in
subsequent variations, which are thus a new version of the older
type of ostinato variation, hardly impromptus. The work ends like
Beethoven's Op. 35 with a fugue, though it is not isolated but framed
within a prelude and postlude which again refer to the theme. But
all these earlier works are completely overshadowed by one based
on a theme by an amateur flautist, Baron von Fricken, and
successively thought of as Zwölf Davidsbündler Etuden, Etuden im
Orchester Character, von Florestan und Eusebius (differing projections
of his own character), and Études symphoniques which in the second
edition (1852) became Etudes en formes de variations. As with Op. 5,
this second edition was marked by alterations and additions, and in
1893 Brahms published five more variations in Robert Schumanns
Werke: Supplementband. As the titles show, Schumann was still
deliberately employing the variation principle to combine two kinds
of 'study' in compositional technique and in pianistic technique.
More numerous than these variations on purely musical themes—
to which should be added the Andante und Variationen for two
pianos, Op. 46 (1843)—are the poetic cycles in which the musical
ideas are much more freely varied.?? Even one group of sketches for
Papillons, Op. 2, written between 1829 and 1832, was headed
‘Variationen’, though the finished work shows little or no trace
of musical-variation technique. Its unity derives from its poetic
background, the ball scene, ‘Larventanz’, which is the penultimate
chapter of the Flegeljahre of Jean-Paul Richter, whom Schumann
greatly admired.?! In his copy of the novel Schumann marked in the
margin the passages that have musical counterparts in Papillons.??
The cycle is a series of miniatures, teeming with imagery; incidentally,
some of the material was adapted from the four-hand Polonaises of
1828.33
The letter symbolism of the ABEGG variations, translated into
notes, was a pretext rather than a theme for variations. But in
Carnaval: Scénes mignonnes sur quatre notes, Op. 9 (1833-5), a free
cycle of twenty musical vignettes with a ‘Préambule’, it became ‘an
intellectual game, romantic and ironic, built on a small group of
39 Cf. Richard Hohenemser, ‘Formale Eigentümlichkeiten in Robert Schumanns Klavier-
musik', Festschrift zum 50. Geburtstag Adolf Sandberger überreicht von seinen Schülern (Munich,
1918), 21, and Dale, ‘The Piano Music’, pp. 33-41, 51-3, 56-7, 59 ff.
31 Hans Kótz, Der Einfluss Jean Pauls auf Robert Schumann (Munich, 1918), 21.
32 Dale, ‘The Piano Music’, pp. 37-8.
33 Ed. Karl Geiringer (Vienna, 1933), and see Dale, ‘The Piano Music’, pp. 25-7.
246 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
notes’.3* The notes аге the letters АЕрСВЕ = ASCH, home of a
young woman, Ernestine von Fricken, the Baron’s illegitimate
daughter, to whom Schumann was briefly engaged; at the same time
they are the only letters in his own name which have musical
equivalents. Carnaval has been described as an ‘improvement and
expansion’ of Papillons 5 ‘expansion’ particularly as regards the
richer imagery of the separate movements, which are now given titles
and so become character pieces. Beside such types as ‘Coquette’,
‘Arlequin’, and ‘Pierrot’, Schumann portrays people close to him
and composers who had influenced him—‘Chiarina’ (Clara), ‘Estrella’
(Ernestine), ‘Chopin’, and ‘Paganini’ —as well as himself in ‘Florestan’
and ‘Eusebius’. The more introspective Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6
(1837)—in the second edition of 1851 they appear simply as Die
Davidsbündler?$—never became as popular as Carnaval. As with the
first draft of the Etudes symphoniques, Schumann toyed with the idea
of putting the names of Florestan and Eusebius on the title-page as
the actual composers, but in the end compromised by inserting the
initials "E or ‘E’, sometimes both together, at the end of each piece.
Instead of titles, the pieces are given mood descriptions: for example,
‘Hitzig’ [ardent], ‘Etwas hahnebüchen’ [rather heavy-handed], ‘Wie
aus der Ferne’ [as if from a distance]; No. 9 is headed ‘Here Florestan
remained silent, though his lips trembled with emotion’, No. 18,
‘Eusebius thought as follows and his eyes expressed much happiness’.
This list should properly include some of Schumann’s other piano
works which are held together by musical threads as well as by a
‘poetic unity’. To a greater extent even than the Davidsbündlertänze,
with their shades of Florestan and Eusebius, the Kreisleriana, Op.
16, of 1838 offer ‘the most successful self-portrait of Schumann, and
of the Romantic artist in general as symbolized by the Kapell-
meister’ 3° The musical unit of this cycle is assured by the key plan;
and here, after the motley contrasting images of the earlier cyclic
works, Schumann introduces a new element, interspersing the basic
passion with dark, tortuous, and enigmatic ingredients suggested by
the character of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fictitious musician. The
Kinderszenen, Op. 15 (1839),?8 are not really ‘pieces for children’ as
were the subsequent A/bum fiir die Jugend, Op. 68, and the three
34 Friedland, Zeitstil, p. 68.
35 Gertler, Robert Schumann, p. 70.
36 Originally the title of a novel begun in 1831, in which Florestan and Eusebius were the
principal characters. The aim of the ‘David league’ was, of course, to fight philistinism in
music.
37 Werner Korte, Robert Schumann (Potsdam, 1937), 64.
38 Rudolf Steglich, Robert Schumanns Kinderszenen (Kassel and Basle, 1949).
LISZT 247
Sonaten für die Jugend, Op. 118. Schumann himself later described
them as ‘retrospective reflections of an adult and for adults',?? and
they are a most beautiful document of Romantic love of children;
the ‘adult’ himself speaks in the recitative-like ‘Epilog’.
The Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Op. 26 (1840), might perhaps be
considered as a five-movement sonata with an unorthodox first
movement compounded of Rondo and Variation; it is one of
Schumann's most important free cyclic works.?0 And finally there
are the Waldszenen, Op. 82 (1848-9), where the collective title itself
implies a ‘poetic unity’ between the separate parts, and Schumann's
last composition for the piano, the Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133
(1853), a late example of a cycle with fairly strict motivic unity.4!
On the borderline between cycle and single piece are two works
not expressly conceived as cycles with independent parts: the
Blumenstück, Op. 19 (1839), like the first movement of Op. 26, which
is a synthesis of variation-and-rondo form with snatches of each
overlapping and alternating with one another, and the Humoreske,
Op. 20, dating from the same year, whose 'tiresome hotchpotch of
forms’,4? is revealed by closer analysis as an artistic unity.4?
LISZT
In his large-scale piano cycles Franz Liszt (1811-86) deviates from
Schumann’s models. He could never have emulated Schumann’s
introduction of ‘Romantic-ironic’ elements in his cycles. Schumann
loved to infuse poetry with psychological refinements, while Liszt
inclined more to the material. The sets of Années de pèlerinage (1835-
6; 1839-49; 1877) are basically different from, say, Schumann’s
self-portrait in his Davidsbündlertänze. Instead he assimilates the
world around him and reflects the impressions conjured up on his
travels by nature, art, and poetry. Thus the last piece in the second
part of the Années de pèlerinage, ‘Après une lecture de Dante:
Fantaisie quasi sonata’, sketched in 1837 and rewritten in 1849,
follows the three ‘Sonetti del Petrarca’ as homage to a poet. It is a
39 Robert Schumanns Briefe: Neue Folge, ed. Friedrich Gustav Jansen (2nd edn., Leipzig,
1904), 290.
40 Hohenemser, ‘Formale Eigentümlichkeiten’, pp. 31-3.
41 Ibid., pp. 27-8, and Wolfgang Boetticher, ‘Gesänge der Frühe. Schumanns letztes
Klavierwerk’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 107 (1956), 418.
42 Georgii, Klaviermusik, p. 314, And see Kahl, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart,
vi, col. 938.
43 Hohenemser, ‘Formale Eigentümlichkeiten’ pp. 37-40. Kathleen Dale adjudicated nicely:
*Humoreske is not a sonata, neither is it a set of variations, even in the Schumannesque
meaning. It is, however, invested with attributes of rondo-form in that one or two of the
sections recur in part or in whole’ (‘The Piano Music’, p. 60).
248 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
kind of symphonic poem for the piano, written as a result of the
impressions which later inspired his Symphonie zu Dantes Divina
commedia. Thus the Annees is not a musical cycle but an enormous
collection of separate pieces. The Harmonies poétiques et religieuses,
composed at various dates between 1834 and 1852, with a title
borrowed from a collection of Lamartine's poems, are something
else again. They are a set of ten characteristic pieces, predominantly
religious in content, each with its own title. The Consolations (c.1849),
a more closely knit cycle, probably taking its name from a book of
poems by Sainte-Beuve, is perhaps Liszt's nearest approach to
Schumann’s ideal of a ‘poetic unity’; the individual pieces were not
given titles.
Liszt was to turn again to the characteristic piano piece in his last
years, and in such pieces as Csárdás macabre, Nuages gris, La lugubre
gondola I and II, Richard Wagner— Venezia, and Unstern, all from
the 1880s, he embodied some of his most far-reaching tonal,
structural, and textural experiments.
The essence of Liszt's keyboard style can be understood only
against the intellectual backgrounds of his music and his urge to
make it 'speak'. Anxiety to express the underlying poetic idea often
results, understandably, in a superfluity of performance marks. It
may be said that in his piano writing he was emulating what Paganini
had done for violin technique. But that was only part of his
intentions; what concerned him most was to exploit the potential
versatility of the piano at that stage of its structural development,
for instance by suggesting orchestral sound through use of the
extreme registers, while filling the intervening space with sonorous
repeated chords or diatonic and chromatic scales. Among the
hallmarks of his technique and keyboard writing are a highly
developed leaping technique; frequent transposition of the melody
from treble to tenor register (here also in octaves); stretches of a
tenth; and, above all, absolute perfection in the interlacing and
alternation of the hands. The increasing subtlety of his textures
appears in the transformation of the Érudes of 1827 (see Ex. 160),
Ex. 160
Allegretto
DISZT 249
Ex. 161
Allegro patetico tenuto e ben marcato il canto
т
first into the Grandes Études published in 1839 (see Ex. 161), and
then into the Études d'exécution transcendante (1859)! (sce -Ex 162).
The same techniques were employed in a great number of keyboard
fantasias—for the most part, operatic in origin—and also produced
transcriptions of, for instance, Beethoven's symphonies, many Schu-
bert songs, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, which have been happily
described as ‘translations into the sphere of the piano 23
The importance of this type of piano music in the years between
1830 and 1850 is shown at its highest level by what Liszt contributed
to it. Of his sixty-seven fantasias,!? composed at intervals from 1824
until his last years, half date from the period before 1850 and include
such masterpieces as Réminiscences des puritains (1836, after Bellini),
Grande Fantaisie sur la cavatine de l'opéra Niobe de Pacini (1835-6),
the Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor (written during the same
two years), and, above all, the Reminiscences de Don Juan (Mozart's
Don Giovanni) (1841). During 1824-47 Liszt's operatic fantasias
44 Diether Presser, Studien zu den Opern- und Liedbearbeitungen Franz Liszts (Diss. Cologne,
1953); id., ‘Die Opernbearbeitung des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 12
(1955), 228.
45 Six in the Liszt Museum at Weimar are still unpublished.
250 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
ranged from the traditional to the increasingly virtuosic, but thereafter
this element tended to fade out more and more until in its final stage
(1871-82) virtuosity is often subordinated to spiritual content.
Towards the end, most of Liszt’s themes are taken from Verdi (Don
Carlos and Boccanegra) and Wagner (Isolde's ‘Liebestod’, ‘Walhall’
from the Ring, the Grail procession from Parsifal).
CHOPIN
The triad of near contemporary masters of piano composition was
completed by Frédéric (originally Fryderyk) Chopin (1810-49). His
reputation as one of the greatest melodists of Romantic piano music
is based particularly on his nocturnes. Influenced by Italianate
melody, they also provide numerous examples of the variety of his
ornamentation,?6 which he develops to the point where ornament
becomes a constructive part of the compositional technique. Beside
the nocturnes, only Chopin's four impromptus are connected with
types in the early history of the lyrical piano piece—and they have
little in common with those of Schubert and Jan Vorisek.47 One
innovation, however, was the establishment of the large-scale scherzo
as a separate entity outside the framework of the sonata. In Chopin's
four scherzos (1832-9) the passages of gloomy, passionate feeling
once prompted Schumann to wonder in his review of the first, in B
minor, ‘how seriousness should be dressed if *'Scherz" (jesting) goes
darkly veled 29 At all events, this was the first appearance of the
piano scherzo as a large-scale single piece, written in a free form in
many respects related to sonata form and devoid of humour. Another
of Chopin's new creations were his four Ballades (1835-42), the
earliest instrumental compositions to be so called. Instrumental
counterparts of the poetic ballad but extended in free rondo or
sonata form, they often adopt a quasi-narrative tone, as in the
introduction to the G minor Ballade, Op. 23. (Chopin confided to
Schumann that his ballades had been inspired by the ballads of
Adam Mickiewicz.)?? Side by side with these are the Berceuse, Op.
57 (1843-4), with its highly developed ostinato technique, and the
Barcarolle, Op. 60 (1846). All of these characteristic pieces by Chopin,
with the exception of the nocturnes, were published separately, since
their scope made it impossible to group them together.
Like Schumann, he composed ‘concert studies’: two collections,
46 See particularly Maria Ottich, Die Bedeutung des Ornaments im Schaffen Friedrich Chopins
(Berlin, 1937).
47 See Vol. VIII, pp. 370-1.
18 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 2 (1835), col. 156; Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften, i. 111.
19 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 15 (1841), col. 41; Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften, i.
CHOPIN 251
Op. 10 (comp. 1829-32; pub. 1833), and Op. 25 (comp. 1832-6; pub.
1837). With all their poetic qualities, they might be described as an
advanced course in the innovations he had made in the technique
of piano playing, for instance the role of the tenth, obliging the hand
to stretch wide intervals, particularly in arpeggios. In Op. 10, No. 2,
chromatic scales have to be played with only three fingers of the
right hand. Op. 10, No. 5, sets the performer an entirely new task:
every bar but one must be played by the right hand on the black
keys. Several studies exercise passages in thirds, sixths, or octaves.
Chopin's approximation of the étude to the ‘characteristic piece’ is
paralleled in the Preludes, Op. 28 (1839), which are on a smaller
scale and, like the Studies, mostly monothematic, often presenting
special technical difficulties; despite their title, they have no connection
with the praeludium as a musical prologue.
It was more difficult for Chopin than for Schumann to group his
single pieces in collections, since his scale was larger. As for cycles
based on the concept of poetic unity of all the parts, Chopin hardly
touches the areas of programme music or poetic association; his
pieces are characterized sufficiently by the genre—as, for instance,
are his waltzes, mazurkas, and polonaises. His dance music was,
almost from the first, idealized. The waltzes and polonaises of
Schumann's Papillons are still very close to actual dance music
although they were placed in a poetic, or rather novelistic, frame
before they were published. Chopin's are stylized dances, dance
poems in which florid ornamentation, bravura passages, and changes
of tempo often disguise the actual dance melody. It was not for
nothing that Chopin called his Op. 61 (1846) Polonaise-fantaisie;59
the F sharp minor Polonaise, Op. 44 (1841), actually incorporates—
with masterly workmanship—a full-length mazurka.
Chopin's reputation as one of the greatest melodists of Romantic
piano music and master of the bel canto of the piano is based
particularly on his nocturnes. Influenced by Bellini’s melody,5! they
also provide numerous examples of the variety of his ornamentation.
But, despite the importance of ornamental variations in his style, his
variations per se are limited to insignificant early works and Variations
brillantes on a rondo from Herold's Ludovico, Op. 12 (1833).
Chopin's relationship to the Classical sonata is different from
Schumann's. Leaving aside the early C minor, Op. 4 (1828), first
published posthumously in 1851 and frequently dismissed as an
50 On this remarkable work, see Jeffrey Kallberg, ‘Chopin’s Last Style’, Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 38 (1985), 264.
51 See Vol. УШ, pp. 359-60.
252 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
immature early work, there remain the sonatas in B flat minor,
Op. 35 (1839), and B minor, Op. 58 (1845), which, unlike Schumann’s,
show few breaks with tradition. The four-movement form, with the
central movements reversed, is in itself unremarkable, while the
Marche funébre of Op. 35, though composed earlier as an independent
piece, can scarcely be regarded as a new departure since Beethoven
had set the example with his Op. 26. All the more striking, therefore,
is the Finale of the B flat minor, an uninterrupted flow of quaver
triplets to be played by both hands in a passionless sotto voce.
Whereas Schumann was given to describing the content of his
movements by eloquent titles and directions for the player, Chopin
is content to mark this movement ‘Finale. Presto non tanto'. Nor
does he show a conscious preoccupation with unity. Deviating only
slightly from the Classical tradition, Chopin's sonatas always remain
sonatas, and their balance of form and content makes them
outstanding in the context of the time although they are surpassed
by the great single-movement Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49 (1841).
OTHER SONATA COMPOSERS
Chopin's and Schumann's sonatas occupy nothing like the central
position in their piano music that, for instance, Beethoven's occupy
in his. The picture is everywhere the same in this period. Of the 150
or more works published by Stephen Heller (1813-88)— who wrote
exclusively for the piano— between 1829 and 1877, only four are
sonatas, though he described a fifth (c.1847) as a Fantasie in Form
einer Sonate.9?
The first, in D minor, Op. 9 (1838) excited enthusiastic recognition
from Schumann.°3 Both in this and in the second sonata, Heller
undermines the traditional cycle by making the third movement an
Intermezzo. The second, in B minor, Op. 65 (c.1846), includes new
material in the shape of a Ballade and an ‘Epilogue’ Finale?^ marked
“äusserst lebendig und mit charakteristischem Ausdruck’ [very lively
and with characteristic expression], a direction typical of Heller
whose nature was akin to Schumann's. In sonata movements of this
kind, and still more in his later characteristic pieces, Heller emphasizes
the 'speaking' element in the music as clearly as possible; it gave
variety to the lyrical principle underlying instrumental music all
through the Romantic period.
52 See К. Schütz, Stephen Heller. Ein Künstlerleben (Leipzig. 1911), and Newman, Sonata,
pp. 498-502.
53 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 11/2 (1839), 186; Schumann: Gesammelte Schriften, i. 453.
52 See Newman, Sonata, p. 501.
55 The eccentric but prolific Alkan, whose birth and death dates were the same as Heller's,
wrote a sonata, Les Quatre Ages, Op. 33 (c.1847).
MENDELSSOHN'S LIEDER OHNE WORTE 253
Spohr’s A flat major Sonata, Op. 125 (1843), shows the Lied-
ohne-Worte type of melody characteristic of Romantic thematicism,
actually used as the main idea in the first movement. As Egert puts
it, ‘organic work’ is replaced by ‘harmonic successions’ [harmonische
Reihung],?6 and the violinist-composer was unable to think in terms
of pianistic ideas. But the supple chromaticism of the Trio of the
Scherzo is very typical of Spohr (Ex. 163).
Spohr's gifted but short-lived pupil Norbert Burgmüller (1810-
36)?" showed a greater understanding of the piano. His F minor
Sonata, Op. 8 (comp. 1834 or 1835, pub. posthumously 1840), came
at the point where his style was maturing in the Classical mould,
when he was preoccupied with the problem of form. The Spohr-like
sensuousness of his early works recedes and the sonata occasionally
sounds quite harsh. But the middle movement, a Romanze in D flat
major, is on the pattern of Spohr's 9/8 larghettos. With Burgmüller's
death, which Schumann thought ‘the most grievous since
Schubert's',5$ the piano music of the 1830s lost one of its greatest
hopes.
The much larger contributions of Cramer and Hummel to the
sonata repertoire belong to an earlier period. 29 although they were
still writing until 1858 and 1837 respectively. The piano sonatas of
Mendelssohn, who died in 1847, were composed in his youth.60
MENDELSSOHN'S LIEDER OHNE WORTE
Mendelssohn never returned to the piano sonata in his maturity.
Instead he produced capriccios (Op. 33, 1833-5), preludes and fugues
(Op. 35, 1832-7), and sets of variations—of which the Variations
sérieuses (Op. 54, 1841) are by far the finest. But these have been
eclipsed in popularity by the eight books of Lieder ohne Worte,
?6 Die Klaviersonate, p. 102.
5? Heinrich Eckert, Norbert Burgmüller. Ein Beitrag zur Stil- und Geistesgeschichte der
deutschen Romantik (Augsburg, 1932), 89.
58 Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften, i. 430.
59 See Vol. VIII, pp. 356-8.
$0 See Vol. VIII, pp. 374-5.
254 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
Opp. 19, 30, 38, 53, 62, 67, 85, and 102, produced during the last
fifteen years of his bien Most һауе по titles or other clues; the three
Venetian barcaroles, Op. 19, No. 6 (dated Venice, 1830), Op. 30,
No. 6, and Op. 62, No. 5, are exceptions. The popular title of the
‘Spring Song’ is completely justified by the inscription on the
autograph, ‘Ein Frühlings-Lied ohne Worte’; another album in-
scription testifies that Op. 53, No. 4, is an 'Abendlied'. On 17 January
1835 Mendelssohn wrote to Klingemann that, a few weeks before,
he had written ‘by far his best’ Lied ohne Worte and asked whether
he should call it ‘der Sommerabend oder gar nicht’,®? to which his
correspondent evidently advised against a title. The dedication of
Op. 62, No. 1, to Clara Schumann speaks for itself. To what extent
the Lieder were inspired by verbal texts, if at all, it is impossible to
say, but part of their musical ancestry can be traced from the Études
of his teacher, Ludwig Berger$?—compare, for instance, Op. 38,
No. 2 (Ex. 164), with Berger's Op. 12, No. 11 (Ex. 165)—and from
the Acht Minnelieder für das Pianoforte, Op. 16, of another Berger
pupil, Wilhelm Taubert (1811-91), which are headed by quotations
from Goethe, Heine, and others. Fresher than these are the Three
Musical Sketches (1836) of Sterndale Bennett (1816-75) and the
Mélodies orientales of Felicien David (1810-76).
Ex. 164
Allegro non troppo
c EE EER gemens
Ex. 165
61 [n addition to the general literature on Mendelssohn, see Willi Kahl, ‘Zu Mendelssohn's
Liedern ohne Worte’, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 3 (1920-1), 460.
62 Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdys Briefwechsel mit Legationsrat Karl Klingemann in London
(Essen, 1909), 167.
$3 See Vol. VIII, p. 357.
THE SEAN LANDS 255
THE SLAV LANDS
During the first half of the nineteenth century the dominant
influence on piano music in Russia had been that of Field, which
was superseded after the late 1830s by that of the Bavarian Adolf
von Henselt (1814-89). A pupil of Hummel, Henselt composed Douze
Études caractéristiques de concert, Op. 2 (1837), and Douze Études de
salon, Op. 5 (1838), all with poetic titles or quotations (for example,
“Wenn ich ein Vóglein wär’) and a very fine Ballade, Op. 31 (1846).
The leading native composer, Mikhail Glinka (1804-57), showed
little interest in the piano and wrote mainly lightweight pieces,
though his Capriccio on Russian Themes (1834) for piano duet is
noteworthy, and his "Theme écossais varié’, No. 4 of Privet otchizne
[A Greeting to my Native Land] (1847)—really the Irish song we
know as ‘The Last Rose of Summer has a period charm. But his
friend Ivan Laskovsky (1799-1855), an official in the War Ministry,
left a number of compositions published posthumously in 1858. They
include an impressive Ballade (Ex. 166), some bold variations on
*Kamarinskaya' (Ex. 167), and a passionate Pensée fugitive.
Polish piano music of this period is of course completely dominated
by Chopin. The piano compositions of his teacher Jözef Elsner
(1769-1854) practically all date from an earlier period of his
life, and his own contemporary, Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819-72),
distinguished composer of songs and operas, produced for piano
only polonaises, mazurkas, a few bagatelles, and other pieces of no
great significance.
Ex. 166
Allegro
= ——
ES E In Een PE geen ee bes Ер
II
poco riten.
256 ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
In the Czech lands Jan Bedřich Kittl (1806-68) published a
quantity of idylls, scherzos, impromptus, three sets of Aquarelles, a
Notturno, Op. 8, a Romanze, Op. 10, and a Grande Sonate for four
hands, in F minor (1847). But he was completely overshadowed
by his younger contemporary, Bedřich Smetana (1824-84) who
precociously wrote a piano galop at the age of 8 and went on to
compose a vast quantity of piano music: Bagatelles et impromptus
(1844), a set of Characteristic Pieces (1848), fugues, marches, a great
number of polkas from 1840 onwards, and a set of Svatebni sceny
[Wedding Scenes] (1849), of which the second piece, ‘Bridegroom
and Bride’, is—typically—a polka,94^ long before any of the operas
by which he is generally known.
64 For an edition of the complete piano works, see Klavirni dilo Bedřicha Smetany, ed.
Mirko Ocadlik et a/. (Prague 1944-73).
V
WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
By ARNOLD WHITTALL
LIFE AND WORKS
WAGNER'S life can scarcely be considered in other than Romantic
terms, as a highly eventful affair of opportunism, intrigue, intrans-
igence, and the dogged pursuit of the ideals and ambitions which
ultimately found fruition in the Bayreuth Festival. And dangerous
though it is to search for simple parallels, there can be little doubt
that the composer's life and works match each other in their eager
embrace of restlessness and rhetoric, and their reliance on that
‘instinctive impulse’ which, Wagner believed, characterized the nature
of the creative artist's gift.! Nevertheless, the more one examines his
life, from the time he completed Lohengrin in 1848 until his death
thirty-five years later, the more amazing it seems that Wagner found
either the time or the inclination to undertake any creative work at
all. The works are more a triumph over the life than a mere
illustration of it.
When Wagner fled to Switzerland from Dresden in May 1849,
after the political upheavals in that city, he took with him the text
of Siegfrieds Tod, written in 1848, and his first four years of exile
were devoted almost entirely to the writing of words. In 1850 came
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft; їп 1851 he completed Oper und Drama
and Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde. In 1850 there was an abortive
attempt to begin the composition of Siegfrieds Tod, and the following
year, completing the text of Der junge Siegfried, he also made a few
musical sketches for that work. By now, however, he had decided
that the material he had first discussed in Der Nibelungen-M ythus
als Entwurf zu einem Drama (1848) needed to be presented as a
four-part stage work and performed in special, festival circumstances,
to achieve the necessary break with the evils of the Italian-dominated
! See "Zukunftsmusik' (1860), repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dich-
tungen, vii (Leipzig, 1873), 121-80; trans. as ‘Music of the Future’, in Three Wagner Essays,
trans. Robert L. Jacobs (London, 1979), 13-44.
258 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
operatic tradition in Germany. Between 1851 and 1857, while still
living primarily in Zurich, he completed the full text of the Ring?
and composed the music through to the end of Act II of Siegfried;
this act apart, the music was also fully orchestrated. But in 1857
Siegfried was set aside in favour of Tristan, a work which Wagner
had conceived three years previously. Tristan und Isolde was begun
at the Asyl near Zurich, continued in Venice, and completed in the
Hotel Schweizerhof, Lucerne, in August 1859.
From September 1859 to April 1861 Wagner was based in Paris,
preparing the revised version of Tannhäuser for its notorious trio of
performances at the Opéra. Also in 1861 he began to work on Die
Meistersinger, a prose sketch for which he had drafted in Dresden
sixteen years earlier, in 1845. Wagner settled for a time in Vienna,
but in 1864 he was obliged to leave in haste in order to escape his
creditors. That same year King Ludwig II of Bavaria summoned
him to Munich, offering him enthusiastic and generous patronage.
Wagner lived there until the end of 1865, by which time his
relationship with Cosima von Bülow and his general unpopularity
with those who saw him as a malign influence on the impressionable
and unstable young king drove him back to Switzerland, and the
relative peace of the Villa Tribschen near Lucerne. Here he finished
Die Meistersinger in 1867, and Siegfried in 1869. Wagner's first wife
Minna died in 1866, and he finally married Cosima in 1870, a year
after the birth of their son Siegfried. Also in 1870 Wagner began to
consider Bayreuth as a suitable location for his Ring Festival.
The Wagners moved to Bayreuth in 1872, and Götterdämmerung
was completed in their new house, Wahnfried, in 1874. The first
Festival took place in 1876, with three complete cycles of Der Ring
des Nibelungen. In 1877 Wagner returned to the subject of Parsifal,
for which he had made prose sketches in 1857 and 1865. The work
was completed on 13 January 1882 in Palermo, and first performed
at the second Bayreuth Festival on 26 July 1882. A little over six
months later, on 13 February 1883, Wagner died in Venice.
THEORIES
Even from such a sketchy summary, it is clear that Wagner's life
was one of success as well as struggle, fulfilment as well as frustration.
? The poems of the four works were completed in reverse order, but two points should be
noted: first, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre were conceived at the same time, and Wagner
wrote his prose drafts for Das Rheingold first; second, the poems of Der junge Siegfried and
Siegfrieds Tod were revised after the poems of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre were completed.
See Robert Bailey, ‘The Structure of the Ring and its Evolution’, /9th-century Music, 1
(1977-8), 48-61.
THEORIES 259
It is probable that the personal and financial problems he continued
to experience after 1864 were not entirely compensated for either by
the satisfaction of seeing his works performed in something like
suitable conditions, or by the Joys of family life with Cosima, the
children, and his close circle of devotees and acolytes. As far as his
creative work was concerned, however, this later phase of Wagner's
life saw frustration swept aside with notable rapidity, for once he
had begun to compose the music for Das Rheingold in 1853 he was
able to sustain a remarkable level of originality and inventiveness.
Wagner's own memory of the frustrations of the years between 1848
and 1853 is evident in his reference to the ‘abnormal state of mind’
in which his principal prose works were produced: ‘I was straining
to formulate theoretically what I could not communicate in the
infallible form of a convincing work of art, owing to the disparity
between my outlook and the one generally held concerning the
present state of opera.'? There is no space to discuss here the full
ramifications of Wagner's theories; but it is clear that he came to
see himself as a very practical and specific kind of reformer. Looking
back in 1860, he claimed that it was through the artistry of the
celebrated soprano Wilhelmine Schróder-Devrient that he had first
sensed ‘the poetic and musical shape of a work of art which I could
hardly call by the name of opera’.* And during the period of
'sustained reflection', in which, as an exile, he attempted through
theoretical writings to eliminate the ‘great obstacle’ to instinctive
creation which his misgivings about the state of opera in Germany
had erected, he came to realize that the 'perfect opera' could be
achieved only by a ‘complete transformation of the poet's role',? and
by channelling ‘into the bed of music drama the great stream which
Beethoven sent pouring into German music’. But this theorizing
was not completely detached from work of creative significance: in
1860 Wagner argued that
the most daring of my theoretical speculations concerning the form of music
drama were brewing within me precisely because at that very time I was
carrying in my head the plan of my great Nibelung drama ... Thus my
theories were virtually little more than an abstract expression of the artistic
process then at work within me.*
But there was bound to be a vital distinction between abstract and
3 *Music of the Future', p. 29.
4 Ibid., p. 19.
5 Thid., p. 23.
6 Ibid., p. 19.
? Ibid., p. 32.
260 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
actual expression. Wagner was also convinced that ‘the unthinking
sense of absolute certainty, which I experienced when I was creating
Tristan’ was a consequence of the fact that ‘here at last I was able
to proceed with such freedom and disregard of all theoretical
considerations that while writing it I was myself aware that I was
going far beyond my own system’.8 A composer whose ultimate ideal
was the ‘sublime naïveté’ of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? could only
be happy instinctively transcending theories rather than consciously
illustrating them. As Wagner put it in a letter to Berlioz in 1860:
My aim thus became to demonstrate the possibility of a work of art in
which the highest and deepest sentiments that the human spirit is capable
of conceiving could be communicated in a readily comprehensible manner
to minds receptive only to the simplest of purely human sympathies, and
to communicate them moreover so definitely and convincingly that no
critical reflection would be needed for their absorption.10
The transformation of the poet's role in the new drama would be
achieved by the use of verse-forms less narrowly poetic than those
requiring regular stress-patterns and neatly matching end-rhymes,
and of subject-matter drawn from myths and sagas. Wagner regarded
this as the ‘ideal subject-matter' because ‘here all that smacks of
convention and all that pertains to abstract reason is completely
missing: all we have is the eternally comprehensible, the purely
human, albeit presented in that inimitably individual concrete
form which is immediately recognizable in every genuine myth’.!!
Moreover,
from the poet's point of view a legendary subject has another essential
dramatic advantage. Not only does the simple, easily grasped action spare
him the necessity of retarding explanations; it provides the greatest possible
scope for revealing those inner psychic motives which alone can bring home
the inevitability of the action since we ourselves feel them in our own
hearts.12
In his own later texts, Wagner was in general to remain faithful to
text lines of variable length, though he did not invariably exclude
end-rhyme, or show such devotion to alliteration (Stabreim) as he
did in the Ring.
As both theorist and poet, Wagner had a shrewd understanding
i orek, SE
э See The Diaries of Cosima Wagner, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, ii (London, 1980), 994.
10 Herbert Barth, Dietrich Mack, and Egon Voss (eds.), Wagner: A Documentary Study,
trans. P. R. J. Ford and Mary Whittall (London, 1975), 192.
11 ‘Music of the Future’, p. 24.
ams p 34.
THEORIES 261
of what was wrong, for him, with the subject and style of the typical
libretto. But as a composer of genius he was well placed to
misunderstand the achievements and intentions of other composers,
especially those he most admired. It seems clear that only someone
with very strong convictions about what the musical stage work
should become would talk, with respect to Don Giovanni, of ‘looseness,
lack of cohesion’, and complain that it was ‘all so lacking in
integration'.!? Wagner discoursed at length about his desire to
achieve a new kind of unity and coherence, and the eventual results,
as demonstrated for example in Die Meistersinger, struck Hanslick
as ‘the conscious dissolution of all fixed forms in a formless,
intoxicating sea of sound. ... Anxiously avoiding every concluding
cadence, ever renewing itself from itself, this form without bone or
muscle flows on indefinitely.!^ Although Stravinsky for one has
repeated this charge in more recent times,!? it is rarely thought
necessary today to defend Wagner against accusations of form-
lessness: indeed, Pierre Boulez's praise of Parsifal is couched in what
might well be deliberately Hanslickian terms.!6 But it is still possible
to question whether Wagner really understood the one composer
who seemed to mean the most to him: Beethoven. Or, to put it more
melodramatically, whether Wagner could possibly have achieved
what he did achieve had he really understood the essence of
Beethoven's own concerns and achievements.
Not only did Wagner believe that ‘art, in order to be art, must
conceal itself and appear in the guise of nature'.!? He also believed
that ‘absolute music’, which was not motivated by dramatic, poetic
imperatives, and which could manifest itself at times even in as
important a precedent for his own work as Weber's Euryanthe, could
not communicate in the way that music in the middle of the
nineteenth century was destined to communicate.!8 If lack of unity
13 The Diaries of Cosima Wagner, ii. 493.
14 Wagner: A Documentary Study, p. 215.
15 In Poetics of Music, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass., 1947),
64-5 and 80-1.
16 "This music which is in perpetual evolution is probably the most highly personal
musical invention of Wagner—it places the emphasis for the first time on uncertainty, on
indetermination. It represents a rejection of immutability, an aversion to definitiveness in
musical phrases as long as they have not exhausted their potential for evolution and renewal
(Pierre Boulez, notes to recording, DG 2713 004).
17 See Carl Dahlhaus, Die Musikdramen Richard Wagners (Velber, 1971); trans. as Richard
Wagner's Music Dramas, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1979), 69.
18 See Wagner's comments on Euryanthe in ‘Oper und Drama’ (1851; rev. 1868); repr. in
Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, iii and iv (Leipzig, 1872), 269-394 and
3-284; trans. in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, ed. and trans. William Ashton Ellis, ii
(London, 1893), 83-7.
262 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
was one evil, lack of meaning, and failure to communicate, were
others. And Wagner’s zeal for communication was ferocious. As he
belligerently put it near the end of Zukunftsmusik: ‘My primary aim
is to compel the public to focus its attention upon the dramatic
action so closely that it is never for a moment lost sight of: all this
musical elaboration must be experienced simply as the presentation
of this action.’1?
From his early perception, as recollected in Mein Leben, that
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ‘surely held the secret to all secrets’,20
Wagner's sense of almost mystic communion with the composition
which was 'the redemption of Music from out of her own peculiar
elements into the realm of Universal Art’?! remained consistent. And
Beethoven's preference for purely instrumental music made him the
more tantalizing as an ideal who might become a model.
The characteristic of the great compositions of Beethoven is that they are
veritable poems, in which it is sought to bring a real subject to representation.
The obstacle to their comprehension lies in the difficulty of finding with
certainty the subject that is represented.??
Wagner, the scourge of ‘absolute music’, proposed to remove the
obstacle and provide the certainty, with the profoundly simple
thematic material and powerfully progressing variation form of the
Ninth Symphony's Finale as a particular stimulus. But Wagner was
well aware of the distinction between the inspiring example of
Beethoven and the actual musical elements from which he could
build his reforms: ‘I could not have composed in the way I have
done if Beethoven had never existed, but what I have used and
developed ... are isolated strokes of genius in my dramatic pre-
decessors, including even Auber.’?3 Predecessors were important
enough: but there was also the immediate stimulus of at least one
sympathetic contemporary. Having written the text for Der junge
Siegfried in 1851, Wagner told a friend that 'I am now tired of
theorizing: Liszt has inspired me to new creative work 21 And
19 “Music of the Future’, p. 44.
?0 Mein Leben, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin (Munich, 1976); Eng. trans., Andrew Gray, My
Life (Cambridge, 1983), 36.
21 ‘Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849); repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und
Dichtungen, iii (Leipzig, 1872), 51-210; trans. in Ellis, Prose Works, i (London, 1892), 126.
22 Letter to Theodor Uhlig, 13-15 Feb. 1852; Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Gertrud
Strobel and Werner Wolf, iv (Leipzig. 1979), 285; trans. in Wagner on Music and Drama, ed.
Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn (New York, 1964), 160.
23 The Diaries of Cosima Wagner, ii. 572. For an illuminating discussion of Wagner's
musical sources and debts, see John Warrack, ‘The Musical Background’, in Peter Burbidge
and Richard Sutton (eds.), The Wagner Companion (London, 1979), 85.
?4 Wagner: A Documentary Study, p. 182.
COMPOSITIONAL PROCEDURES 263
Wagner recalled in Mein Leben that, at the time when he was
completing the Ring poem, ‘my joy in everything I heard by Liszt
was as profound as it was genuine, but above all it was productively
stimulating; for after such a long interval, I was myself about to
begin composing again'.?5
A full exploration of the whole subject of Wagner's possible debts
to predecessors and contemporaries remains to be undertaken, and
anyone doing so will be faced with formidable difficulties. Certainly
the first hundred years after Wagner's death saw more determined
efforts to analyse his harmony and form than to anatomize his
possible influences. The first major analytical study of the later
works, by Alfred Lorenz, attempted to demonstrate the ‘secret’ of
their formal coherence through Wagner's apparently consistent use,
on both large and small scales, of tripartite models (AAB, ABA)
involving repetition and contrast.26 More recently, scholars have
sought more diverse means of identifying those elements of thematic
process, phrase structure, and harmonic organization with which, in
the later works, the composer's theories were transformed through
new technical considerations, in order thereby to clarify the sense in
which Wagner builds on fundamental formal precedents to create
his radically new flexibility. The central issues raised by attempts to
interpret such large structures analytically will be discussed below.
But Wagner scholarship has also become increasingly concerned with
the ‘background’ to the finished works— with the interpretation of
the voluminous surviving sketches and other documentary material.
COMPOSITIONAL PROCEDURES
It might seem reasonably safe to assume that Wagner wrote his
texts first, then set them to music, sometimes many years later,
always moving logically from beginning to end, with occasional
omissions and alterations, but without major modifications. Robert
Bailey, noting that *with his later operas, at least, there is precious
little documentary evidence showing how he planned them in musical
terms', goes on to argue that 'an important feature of Wagner's later
works is the preparation of their musical structure in the structure
of the poem itself; musical decisions were made in the act of turning
into verse the dramatic conception which he had written out in detail
25 My Life, p. 495.
26 Alfred Lorenz, Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner (Berlin, 1924-33). See David
R. Murray, ‘Major Analytical Approaches to Wagner's Musical Style: A Critique’, Music
Review, 39 (1978), 211.
264 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
in a complete Prose Scenario'.?? And elsewhere Bailey asserts that
'a great deal of the musical setting' suggested itself to Wagner as
the poems were taking shape.28 Wagner did occasionally jot down
musical ideas on the manuscripts of his poems, but not all scholars
accept Bailey's interpretation of their importance. In John
Deathridge's view, for example, Wagner's musical ideas were only
‘rudimentary when he was writing his librettos'.?9
There has also been disagreement among scholars as to what the
various stages of Wagner's creative process should be called. But the
first comprehensive catalogue of Wagner's compositions includes an
authoritative discussion of the issue, and a set of terms likely to be
accepted as definitive.30 This involves a basic distinction between
‘sketch’ (Skizze), which normally refers to material relating to parts
of a work or an entire work in outline, and ‘draft’ (Entwurf), which
refers to fuller, more complete material. For the four stages in the
writing of the poem, the catalogue proposes the following: prose
sketch (Prosaskizze), prose draft (Prosaentwurf), first copy of the
complete poem (Erstschrift des Textbuches), and fair copy of the
poem (Reinschrift des Textbuches). As for the music, what emerges
in broad outline is a process with three principal stages. First, after
various separate, short sketches (Einzelskizzen), a complete draft
(Gesamtentwurf), the vocal line supported by one or two instrumental
staves. For all the music dramas after Die Walküre, Wagner produced
two such drafts, the second with fuller indications of instrumentation
and amounting, often, to a short score. The final stage in all cases
was a fair copy of the full score (Reinschrift der Partitur), but for
the first two acts of Siegfried and the Tristan Prelude Wagner made
a draft of the full score (Partiturerstschrift) before the fair copy.
It must be stressed that this is only the barest outline of a complex
and varied process, the full and fascinating details of which are
provided in the Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis. As John Deathridge has
pointed out,
when Wagner began sketching the music of his later works he had broken
completely with the number convention of traditional opera. He therefore
had little difficulty in first making a rough, through-composed draft of an
27 Robert Bailey, “The Method of Composition’, in Burbidge and Sutton (eds.), The Wagner
Companion, p. 271.
28 "The Structure of the Ring and its Evolution’, p. 48.
29 19th-century Music, 5 (1981), 83.
39 John Deathridge, Martin Geck, and Egon Voss, Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis (Mainz, 1986).
COMPOSITIONAL PROCEDURES 265
entire work (or single acts at a time) which was continuous from beginning
Гогена!
In particular, the surviving sketches of the Ring show а remarkable
fluency, reflecting that ‘unthinking sense of absolute certainty’ which
Wagner himself described;?? and differences between complete draft
and final score are rarely of major significance. Wagner’s own
comments on his following of unconscious impulse are confirmed by
the apparent spontaneity of the compositional process, inasmuch as
this is accurately represented by what is actually written down: ‘one
even has the feeling that, with fundamental motifs already in mind,
Wagner literally improvised from one moment to the next, often too
engrossed in smaller forms and immediate effects to pay much
attention to larger formal relationships.’33 It is certainly not easy to
proceed from a discussion of Wagner’s technique of through-
composition to an argument that unity on the largest scale in either
conception or perception is essential to the fabric of his work as
executed in the score and performed in the theatre. Yet the technique
of composition is the direct result of rejecting what he described as
the ‘mish-mash of petty undeveloped forms cramped by meaningless
conventions’ found in earlier opera.34
In Oper und Drama Wagner did not merely place a theory of music
alongside a theory of poetry. In the new drama, he argued, it was
necessary for the two to come together, to fuse into musico-poetic
periods, sections not self-contained like traditional operatic
‘numbers’, but integrated around specific textual and tonal elements.
Text and melody together would break out of the old constraints,
producing something akin to Classical drama, as Wagner understood
it His theoretical ideal was for music and poetry to coexist,
contributing equally to the drama. But, despite occasional glimpses
of this ideal in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, music— and especially
orchestral music, providing a rich harmonic and tonal context
for the new, flexible melody—came to dominate the completed
compositions, even if it did not literally generate them. The extent
of this distinction between theory and practice is another matter of
dispute among Wagnerians, and discussions of the works will
naturally reflect the convictions of the writer. The account that
31 ‘The Nomenclature of Wagner Sketches’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association,
101 (1974-5), 75-7.
32 ‘Music of the Future’, p. 33.
33 John Deathridge, "Wagner's Sketches for the Ring: Some Recent Studies’, Musical Times,
118 (1977), 386.
31 “Music of the Future’, p. 16.
266 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
follows is an attempt to combine some consideration of the poetic—
those psychological, metaphysical issues so exhaustively discussed by
Deryck Cooke with reference to the Ring—with technical, musical
issues, in an analytical commentary concerned most essentially with
what has been described as ‘perhaps the thorniest of all subjects to
lay hands on, . . . the form-defining function of tonality in Wagnerian
music drama'.3? The aim 1s mediation between the poetic and the
structural, but it may be difficult to avoid contradiction. Cooke, for
one, put the weight of his considerable authority behind the
implication that, in dealing with the Ring, a work whose creator's
original intention *was to set forth the evils of modern civilization
and adumbrate a possible ameliorization of them’,36 it is belittling,
if not entirely irrelevant, to concentrate on abstract, absolute
structural features which, for Wagner, were very much the technical
means to expressive, communicative ends. Certainly it cannot be
argued that tonalities as such—however explicitly associated with
particular characters, objects, or moods—can bear the unambiguous
symbolic and psychological import of the principal thematic ideas
(the Grundthemen or leitmotifs) when these are correctly understood.
Carl Dahlhaus has argued powerfully that one of the fundamental
reasons for distinguishing earlier from later Wagner is that it was
only after Lohengrin that leitmotifs become ‘essential structural
factors’.3° But even if the motifs determine the harmony, rather than
the other way round, the finished product is tonal music whose
evolutionary unfolding is the result of thematic and harmonic
interaction. As Wagner put it, referring to the chorus-like role of
the orchestra in his later works, ‘it will embody the harmony which
alone makes possible the melody's specific expression; it will maintain
the melody in a state of uninterrupted flow so that the motifs will
be able to work with the maximum effect upon the audience's
feelings’.38
TONALITY
Any analysis which seeks to advance beyond description into
interpretation must explore the whole question of whether and how
successive tonalities relate to each other, and the ways in which the
various harmonies which establish and express those tonalities
35 Anthony Newcomb, “The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Drama. An Essay in
Wagnerian Formal Analysis’, /9th-century Music, 5 (1981), 48.
36 Deryck Cooke, / Saw the World end: A Study of Wagner's Ring (London, 1979), 12.
37 Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, p. 108.
38 “Music of the Future’, p. 40.
TONALITY 267
actually function in the context of music whose dramatic subject
must always be absolutely explicit. Many writers have observed that
tonality was as important to Wagner as to any symphonist. But
there is little point in comparing Wagner’s use of tonal relations
with that of a symphonist whose purpose was to demonstrate how
a single key could retain its primacy throughout the complete
structural span of a movement, so that all other keys occurring
within that span have the kind of subordinate status to the tonic
which leads them to be described as dominant, relative minor, and
so on. Indeed, it is often argued that, in the most truly symphonic
symphonies, a single hierarchy of related keys will function through-
out. But even when Wagner does begin and end a work in the same
key, as with Die Meistersinger and Parsifal, it is difficult to feel that
C major and A flat major actually function as tonics throughout the
enormous spans of these works, so that, for example, Act I of Die
Meistersinger could be said to end in ‘the subdominant’, and Acts
II and III to begin in ‘the dominant’.
Wagner’s use of tonal relations and oppositions are always more
dramatic than symphonic, and governed as much by ideas of
remoteness as of relatedness. This was shown at an early stage of
his career by the use of E major and E flat major in Tannhäuser.
Neither is the tonic of the entire work, but both contribute as distinct
tonics, at particular stages, to a dramatic, symbolic harmonic process
involving many other tonalities as well. E and E flat are perhaps the
most important keys in Tannhäuser, but that does not justify
describing every other key in terms of its subordinate relation to
either E or E flat.
Bailey discusses the tonalities of Tannhäuser as a preliminary to
his claim that the whole of the Ring has an underlying plan "based
on the principle of associative tonality'.39 It is not surprising that in
so large and complex a work themes should often recur in the keys
in which they were first presented; and from time to time tonalities
which are close relatives in the symphonic sense may be given
prominence to make a dramatic point— for example, the use of D
flat major for Valhalla and B flat minor for Nibelheim. The extent
to which tonality functions associatively—thematically— may be
debated: analysts will also argue over such details as whether it is
any longer possible to separate major from minor keys, or whether
the frequently found large-scale associations between keys a third
apart justifies talk of a ‘tonic complex’, such as might embrace, for
39 "The Structure of the Ring and its Evolution’, p. 61.
268 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
example, the A minor/major and C major/minor of Act I of
Tristan. But such debates are incidental to the essential matter of
acknowledging the existence of tonal structures which, however
‘opportunistic’ or 'unsymphonic', underpin and promote the grad-
ually evolving coherence and continuity of the whole. These structures
may prolong an established tonality diatonically or, more commonly,
extend it chromatically, with emphasis on more remote regions;4?
and such structures are more fundamental than those which progress
from, or float between, one established tonality and another without
clear commitment to alternatives, however many possible keys may
be hinted at in the process. Wagner's later works are magnificent
examples of such structures, and matters of form, thematic process,
and even orchestral and textural presentation can best be understood
in relation to this most fundamental of compositional entities: the
prolongation and extension of tonal progressions and their placement
as the essential building-blocks of the total structure.
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN
Wagner begins the Ring with a celebration of fundamentals. His
initial, scene-setting stage direction contains a mass of diverse details,
but these come together to stress matters relating to space and light.
The Rhine is depicted as something more than amorphous, uniform:
just as the area nearer the surface 15 lighter than that nearer the river
bed, so it is nearer the surface that one is most conscious of the
actual flow of the water: 'towards the bottom the waters resolve
themselves into a fine, humid mist. And yet the music which
accompanies and portrays this stage picture is radically confined
with respect to the element which tonal composition most commonly
possesses—harmonic progression. Up to the entry of the voices, the
music prolongs a single chord, and only with Flosshilde's words “Оез
Goldes Schlaf does the bass-note change. But the prolongation lacks
nothing in purposefulness; there is a gradual, inexorable increase of
power and intensity. The form of the Prelude might be described as
variations on a chord, or studies in the transformation of an arpeggio
into a scale. Without either harmonic progression or thematic
contrast, it could scarcely be held to set a structural precedent for
the music of the entire cycle, still less for the later Wagner as a
whole; it might seem rather to provide that sense of perspective
against which all the later progressions and contrasts function. But
10 See Schoenberg's discussion of extended tonality in Structural Functions of Harmony, ed.
Leonard Stein (rev. 2nd edn., London, 1969), 76-113.
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN 269
the Prelude is so far from an abstract statement of purely harmonic,
pitch factors that its function as a precedent is by no means to be
entirely excluded. It shows that evolutionary, cumulative variation
of a thematic element is possible even when harmony is prolonged
without progression, and the resultant emphasis on matters of
register, tone colour, and rhythm should act as a caution against
any tendency to ignore such features when harmonic progressions
are present.
Wagner’s account in Mein Leben of the inspiration, the ‘vision’, of
this opening music, which came to him at La Spezia on 5 September
1853 and sent him rapıdly back to Zurich to resume serious
composition after the frustrations of the previous four years, is
too dramatic and too Romantic to have been accepted without
question. Deathridge has suggested that the account is ‘a later
interpretation most likely influenced by his reading of Schopenhauer’s
Parerga und Paralipomena which discusses similar phenomena’; and
he quotes a sketch sheet containing the opening of the Rhinemaidens’
song and two arpeggio figures which dates from ‘at least 14 months
before the composition sketch was begun, as the form of its text
predates the verse draft of Rhinegold (begun on 15 September
18527.41 It could be that what drove Wagner so precipitately back
to Zurich was the realization of how such a basic, previously sketched
musical formula could actually be made to work, generatively, at
the outset of his revolutionary tetralogy. But the most common
subject for debate is not how the work was begun, but what it is
actually about.
Cooke places Der Ring des Nibelungen alongside Hamlet and Faust
in the category of the ‘problematic’: ‘works in which their creators
have attempted to delve so deep into the springs of human action
that they have been unable to make their findings absolutely clear’.*?
He attaches particular importance to the idea that in the Ring
“Wagner’s social and political vision is concerned with the struggle
of love against power. Dahlhaus gives greater emphasis to the
antithetical elements which ‘link Wotan's drama with Siegfried’s, the
divine myth with the heroic tragedy'4?—that is, fear and fearlessness,
and the means whereby love is equated with the latter and lovelessness
with the former. Dahlhaus is certainly the most persuasive recent
exponent of the argument that, despite all his later tinkerings with
the text and his various written remarks, the Ring as Wagner
4i "Wagner's Sketches for the Ring’, p. 387.
42 ] saw the World end, p. 13.
13 Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, p. 99.
270 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
completed it remained faithful to his original conception, in which
we witness ‘the downfall of a world.of.law and force, and the dawn
of a utopian age; though Siegfried and Brünnhilde fall victims to
the old order, they are the first representatives of the new’.44 And
Dahlhaus concludes:
In the prose sketch of 1848 Wagner had written ‘that the gods’ purpose
*will have been achieved when they have destroyed themselves in this human
creation, namely when they have had to surrender their direct influence,
faced with the freedom of the human consciousness’. The music Wagner
wrote in 1874 to bring Götterdämmerung to its conclusion expresses just
that. His first conception was also his last.»
The more detailed the accounts of the meaning of successive events
in the plot of the Ring become, the more likely they are to diverge
in their interpretations. Fortunately, there is less cause for dispute
when it comes to the identification of Wagner's literary sources and
the uses to which he put them. I will not attempt to summarize the
painstaking and fascinating work of Cooke in this field. But it is
clear that, however numerous and diverse these sources, Wagner was
very much in command of materials and methods, as in his adaptation
of the ‘ancient alliterative verse’ to his own purposes, and the way
in which aspects of distinct myths or sagas— primarily the Volsunga
Saga— were fused, transformed, and complemented by material of
Wagner's own. For example, the very first scene of Das Rheingold,
'despite its profoundly mythic character, is Wagners own
invention'.26 So is the character of Fasolt, and what Cooke describes
as ‘the law-enforcing, civilizing aspect of Wotan’.?”
DAS RHEINGOLD
The first scene of Das Rheingold is dominated by the flowing
contours of the music depicting the Rhine and the three Rhine-
daughters— or Rhinemaidens, as they are invariably known in
English. As the disturber of the peace, Alberich is characterized by
more angular, more purposefully animated material: and the dramatic
crux of the scene occurs when Alberich ‘steals’ the Rhinemaidens'
own least characteristic music. They know that the gold can be stolen
by anyone who will ‘renounce the power of love’ and they dismiss
the possibility as too improbable, at least as far as the lovesick
Nibelung is concerned. But it is the brief solemnity of Woglinde's
^4 Ibid., p. 81.
35 Ibid., p. 141.
36 Cooke, / saw the World end, p. 134.
47 [bid., p. 147.
DAS RHEINGOLD ES
music when that possibility is first acknowledged which is recaptured
with terrible economy at Alberich’s moment of decision and action.
It is also a moment of purely musical clarification, as Wagner
reinforces the shift between the scene’s two principal tonal centres
of E flat and C in favour of the latter, but delays the resolution
from the dominant on to the tonic of C minor until the uproar has
subsided and the process of transition—tonal as well as scenic—to
Scene ii has begun (Ex. 168). The focusing of tension on a prolonged
Ex. 168
D кел к II
TE La ЕЕ == a bea 3— 1
=s u E E
e DEEN EE
ep Ee E
i Fu SC T ne
— m Pet Ett EE EE EE
CERS Ss =e zi
eee
AJ
exc ЫЕ
p E SS Р Cas er OEC. Mu Ep Xd
ТТ ————-28——
zu ке т
EI ә
i:
d
N
|
il
І
а
272 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
dominant (thirty-nine bars in this case) and the use of resolution on
to the tonic to initiate a new stage of the musical structure is one
of the most fundamental features of Wagner’s mature musical
language.
If the crucial event of Scene 1 is Alberich's theft of the gold, that
of Scene ii is Wotan's realization of his own need to possess it, and
therefore to rob the robber. In its confrontation between gods and
giants, Scene ii parallels the confrontation between Rhinemaidens
and Nibelung in Scene 1; and one may even argue that, because
Scene ii also progresses through a ‘minor third’ (D flat major to E
minor), its detailed musical processes subtly parallel those of Scene
i. But the second scene is much longer and more diverse than its
preludial predecessor, its length and complexity stemming not only
from the greater number of events and characters, but from their
more varied characteristics. In Scene i the Rhinemaidens are of one
mind: they act and react in concert. But in Scene ii both gods and
giants argue among themselves; and not only the giants, but also
Fricka and Loge, who refuse to do Wotan the courtesy of accepting
his every word as law. It is a scene of many subtleties, since the gods
possess much of the giants' aggressiveness, and the giants— Fasolt,
at least—the capacity for finer feelings. But it has a less explicit
musical continuity than Scene i, and Bailey has argued that, as a
result of Wagner writing his first draft on two staves only, ‘many
vocal portions of the Rheingold, particularly in Scenes ii and iv,
sound like little more than accompanied recitative'.48
Bailey suggests that Wagner’s tendency, from Die Walküre
onwards, to use two instrumental staves as well as the vocal stave
for his first draft was the result of a desire to avoid such ‘sketchy’
passages. But the textural diversity which this occasional sketchiness
promotes can contribute positively to the formal flexibility of Scene
ii of Das Rheingold, and there is no appreciable loss of momentum.
Even at such a point of extreme contrast as that between the rich
yet concentrated lyricism of Wotan's greeting to Valhalla and Fricka's
ensuing recitative, the nature of the plain harmony which occurs in
the non-motivic passages has a purposefulness which rarely produces
any feeling of meagreness, or loss of direction. The circling round
the D minor triad at Fricka's words ‘Herrschaft und Macht | soll er
dir mehren’ may seem harmonically relatively perfunctory, but it is
not dramatically inappropriate for Fricka's somewhat unimaginative
sentiments (Ex. 169).
48 ‘The Method of Composition’, p. 295.
Е DAS RHEINGOLD 273
Ex. 169
FRICKA
Herr-schaft und Macht soll er dir meh - ren; nur rast - lo-ser’n
Sturm zu er-re - gen,
(It is to increase your power and authority; the towering fortress was built
only to provoke greater outbursts of discontent.)
On the larger scale, this exchange establishes a contrast between
the D flat major of Wotan's untroubled delight in the fortress and
the D minor of Fricka's doubts and questions, a tendency to favour
rapid transitions to remote harmonic regions which is reinforced
when the first reminiscence of the Valhalla theme, at Wotan's words
*dass, in der Burg gebunden', occurs in C major, not D flat. As the
scene develops, it is D major which becomes the principal centre for
the lyrical music associated with Freia, the goddess of love hymned
by both Fasolt and Loge. Clearly, therefore, it was not one of
Wagner's concerns to employ only a small group of closely related
tonalities in any particular scene. Just as the drama thrives on
argument and conflict, so the music depends on a wide range of tonal
perspectives, some centres firmly established with the appropriate
cadences and diatonic harmonies, others only hinted at—a diversity
complementing that of the motifs themselves. Such deeper structural
elements may be less immediately apparent to the listener than the
balance the scene strikes between more active and more reflective
episodes; but they are vital in creating that sense of inevitability
which ensures that, for all its fluctuations, the drama never sags or
stagnates.
274 WAGNER’S LATER STAGE WORKS
The third and fourth scenes of Das Rheingold present the con-
frontation between the work’s central pair of characters, Wotan and
Alberich. Scene iii is dominated by Alberich, whose over-confidence
in his own repressive rather than benevolent power leads directly to
his capture. The transition from the second scene (spanning a tritone
from E minor to B flat minor) is achieved, through a powerful
compilation of motifs referring to the gold, the ring, and Freia, but
not to Wotan himself: he will remain in the background, and leave
the tackling of Mime and Alberich to Loge. Since Wotan himself
says so little, the Valhalla theme is most evident in Alberich’s
mockery and Loge's sarcasm: in particular, the improbable idea of
the slavery of the mightiest to the Nibelung is underlined by a skittish
fusion of this theme with Loge's own much less melodic motif. This
material returns to express the triumph of the gods as Alberich is
captured, in a way which confirms Wagner's already impressive skill
at the flexible treatment of his basic, always recognizable themes:
and the exchanges between Loge and Alberich in this scene show
that the emphasis on a web of motifs in the orchestra need not result
in characterless vocal writing, or short-breathed, regularly cadencing
phrases.
At the end of Scene iii B flat minor reappears only briefly and
ambiguously through the agency of a semitone sideslip after a
protracted dominant preparation in A major: the F natural is of
course needed by the monotonal anvils. And the transition to Scene
iv 1s achieved without cadential progression on to tonics; instead the
dominant of C is hugely prolonged and only resolved, almost
incidentally, when the scene has begun, after Loge's words *
bestimmst du drin mir zum Stall"? Wagner’s postponement of the
decisive exchange between Wotan and Alberich until the beginning
of the final scene shows his sure dramatic instinct. Wotan still has
relatively little to say, but he radiates great power, as in the moment
immediately after he wrenches the ring from Alberich, where
triumphant, chromatically ascending triads are framed by the still
potent menace of the ring's own theme. The essential dissonance of
that theme achieves full expression in Alberich's curse, which
gradually clarifies its B minor tonality only to postpone the tonic at
the final climax — ‘meinem Fluch fliehest du nicht! —and resolve on
to it (not a fully emphasized root position, in this case) only as a
process of transition begins to take place.
As the final scene proceeds, the contrasts between triumph
and tragedy, optimism and foreboding are brilliantly focused and
integrated, and nowhere with greater refinement than at the point
DAS RHEINGOLD 275
Ex. 170
Sehr schnell
etwas langsamer
va
Lauschtest du sei-nem Lie - bes- grüss?
1 "C (It continues to get lighter.)
the ring on his finger.) Mässig und sehr ruhig
П
П
кык == Н Cie =
2 s pp sehr weich
sehr gemessen
[m рн... ae
C2 SE
E } 1:088 1 БЕРБЕ ar ПЕЙ ШЕШЕП Ex ШШ) НЫШ oD m |
еы = EE Ee Te EE
== = I[-1— әс
u timp 3 = Р =
( LOGE: Did you listen to his loving salute?
WOTAN: Let him vent his rage!)
shown in Ex. 170, where the sustained B and D from the end of
Alberich's curse prepare the modulation to C major as, in the
brightening light, Freia is brought back by the giants. Once again,
particular significance attaches to a semitone relation in this scene—
C and C sharp/D flat. And its most striking small-scale use comes,
appropriately, in the final stages of the scene. The rainbow-bridge
theme cunningly reflects the Valhalla theme's rhythms: but the use
of the chord of G flat major for its first appearance—Froh’s ‘Zur
Burg führt die Brücke'—ensures that the prompt return of the
Valhalla theme in D flat has a quality of understatement hinting at
instability: the effect of its final return in Götterdämmerung will not
be dissimilar. And that instability, belying the confident words, is
what Wotan's great final statement reveals. The flourishing of the
276 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
WOTAN (Very resolutely as if a grand idea has „ -
struck him.) -
(Thus I salute the fortress, secure from fear and dread. Follow me, wife: live in Valhalla with me!)
sword could seem like an act of crowning confidence, so clearly and
carefully is the modulation to C major prepared. But the suddenness
with which D flat is restored (Ex. 171) has so disorienting an effect
that this final tonic seems less than ideally stable and secure. The
а DIE WALKURE 2277)
chromatic colouring of the Rhinemaidens' lament, which follows,
and what some see as the essentially hollow triumph of the entry
into Valhalla itself, could support this view. But there is an undeniable
and deeply stirring grandeur in the final bars, not just because of
their pure diatonicism and opulent orchestration, but because it is
clear that the gods have achieved their goal, at a price. It is a
poignant rather than hollow triumph.
DIE WALKÜRE
Das Rheingold begins with a theft and ends with the gods taking
possession of their fortress; its emphasis is on power and property.
In Die Walküre human feelings and relationships are given far greater
importance: the power of love now looms larger than the love of
power. The power of love is by no means absent from Das
Rheingold: Loge's reminder to the gods of its existence, and Fasolt's
acknowledgement of it, are two of the work's most haunting
moments. But in Die Walküre the dangers and delights of passion
are placed at the centre of the action, and the phrase ‘the power of
love’ —'der Minne Macht’ or ‘der Liebe Macht —recurs in Wotan's
lines, as in the later stages of Act III:
Du folgtest selig [You were happy to follow
der Liebe Macht: The power of love:
folge nun dem, Now follow him
den du lieben musst! Whom you must love!]
Dahlhaus has argued that, as a drama, Die Walküre ‘is disjointed,
whether considered as a work on its own or as a part of the tetralogy’;*9
and Cooke has shown that Wagner ‘had greater difficulty in
fashioning a convincing dramatic framework for Act I than for any
other act of the tetralogy'.?9? Yet the ultimate power of the drama
derives from the single element at its heart, the process whereby
Wotan isolates himself — from Fricka, Siegmund, Brünnhilde. Indeed,
Die Walküre is as much about isolation as relationships, from its
initial image of the solitary fugitive Siegmund to the presentation,
in Act Ш, of three characters about to experience separation:
Sieglinde, Brünnhilde, Wotan.
It is Act I which expresses "der Liebe Macht’ with the most obvious
inevitability and force, and many commentators have rhapsodized
over the effortlessness of its lyrical flow and steadily mounting
excitement; perhaps only in the extended passage of dumb show near
49 Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, p. 110.
90 [ saw the World end, p. 290.
278 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
the end of the second scene, as Hunding retires to bed, do music
and action temporarily hang fire. The text contains a high proportion
of narration, but Wagner never falters in the musical imagination
with which past events—Siegmund’s earlier life, in particular—are
made to contribute positively to the actual situation as it develops
on stage. The composer’s mastery of form is, especially striking on
the large scale, where widely separated climaxes are connected by
music whose moments of extreme simplicity are no less arresting
than the climaxes themselves. For example: in the third and final
scene, the first climax comes early, as Siegmund calls on his father
for a sword with which to defend himself against Hunding. Very
gradually, after this, the music subsides to the point at which
Sieglinde returns. ‘Der Männer Sippe’ is the moment of maximum
simplicity, and dangerously close to ‘sketchy’ recitative; but in context
it comes as a suppression of the outburst of more passionate music
in Sieglinde's preceding lines, an outburst which anticipates the mood
and material which will erupt extensively and conclusively to end
the scene. It is this checking of momentum, both in order to allow
for further reflection and narration, and to enhance the power of
momentum when resumed, which is at the heart of Wagner's
musico-dramatic technique, his ‘endless melody' shaped and con-
trolled by the ebb and flow of his harmonic processes. As Bryan
Magee sees it, it 15 a kind of drama whose 'chief requirement
was for situations which remain unchanged long enough for the
characters’ full inner experience of them, and response to them, to
be expressed'.?! Act I of Die Walküre reveals complete mastery of
the expression of these crucial inner experiences, even in a character
as unsympathetic as Hunding; and it balances action and reflection,
anticipation and reminiscence, in ways which powerfully increase the
evolutionary power of the whole, and render the eventual, postponed
resolutions as inevitable as they are exciting.
As might be expected, such a process is underpinned not only by
striking motivic development, but by a progressive tonal scheme
which itself embodies a principle of transformation and enrich-
ment. The overall motion from D minor to G major is notable for
the resource with which its successive stages are elaborated, and the
first scene is especially remarkable for its harmonic restraint; the
exploration of closely related regions of its D minor/major tonic
ensures that the function of that tonic is sustained throughout.
The process of extension reaches its climax when the dominant key,
5! Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner (rev. 2nd edn., Oxford, 1988), 8.
DIEWALKÜRE 279
A major, leads on to its own relative minor at Siegmund’s words
*Schmecktest du mir ihn zu?’ This key of F sharp minor—the diatonic
mediant of D major—is defined briefly but distinctly through a
dominant-tonic-dominant progression. But Wagner brings the music
back to the more basic tonic of D minor in one of the most intensely
expressive phrases of the entire work, showing his reliance on two
particularly fruitful techniques: sequence, and stress on a dominant
(of B flat in this case), which generates further linear, modulatory
motion rather than resolving cadentially on to its ‘proper’ tonic. The
actual resolution on to D minor's root-position tonic is also delayed
until Siegmund is four lines into the next stage of his narration
(Ex. 172). And from the end of this scene onwards, it ceases to be
possible to speak of D minor as 'the tonic' at all.
Wagner's use of different cadence forms has been the subject of
much comment. Certainly it would be convenient if it could be
argued that straightforward perfect cadences are always relatively
Ех. 172
SIEGLINDE
Des sei-migen Me-thes süssen Trank mög’st du mir nicht ver-schmäh’n.
Schmecktest du mir ihn zu? Sehr langsam und ausdrucksvoll
it back.) (Siegmund takes a long draught, while his gaze rests on her
260 WAGNER’S LATER STAGE WORKS
with growing warmth. Still gazing, he removes the horn from his lips and lets it sink slowly,
(He sighs deeply and gloomily lets his eyes sink to the ground.)
26. eng hn Langsam
Fr ee
Lebhaft
DIE WALKURE 281
(He goes towards
3 the back.)
(SIEGLINDE: You will not refuse this sweet drink of rich mead.
SIEGMUND: Will you taste it first? You have been caring for an ill-fated man. May you be spared
such misfortune! My rest has done me good: now I must be on my way.)
inhibiting to momentum, and therefore invariably increase the sense
of a sectionalized form, while such ‘evasions’ as occur at the ‘Langsam’
(Ex. 172) ensure a more positive musical continuity. But rhythmic
and general textural contexts often make such interpretations seem
seriously over-simplified. Perfect cadences like those which frame
Wotan's monologue in Act II, Scene ii (the first in A flat minor, the
second in A minor) are both in their very different ways points of
emphasis and definition, while such obvious evasions of prepared
cadences as those at the end of Act I, Scene ш, or during Wotan's
despairing monologue in Act II, Scene ii, after the words “деп Freien,
erlang’ ich mir nicht’, ensure the continuation of tension and
momentum, though in this case the ‘true’ cadence is not long delayed
(Ex. 173). But emphasis and definition. do not in themselves
inhibit forward movement, any more than the postponement of a
root-position tonic in favour of a submediant or some more complex
and remote harmony need create genuine tonal ambiguity. The
evolving tonal process is served by both procedures, and, since there
is no serious doubt that the fundamental tonal goal will eventually
be established by consonant cadential harmony whose finality is
utterly explicit, it is the use of a variety of means to dramatize
progress towards that goal which matters most—not arguments
about whether or not such a goal actually exists.
Act I of Die Walküre is skilfully shaped to reach its point of
highest excitement and greatest musical concentration at the very
end. Wagner himself had doubts about the very different structure
of Act II, in which two distinct ‘catastrophes’ occur: catastrophes
*which are so important and severe that they would really serve for
an act each’.52 Not all commentators agree that Wagner rose
52 Letter to Liszt of 3 Oct. 1855, quoted in Dahlhaus, Richard Wagners Music Dramas,
REI
WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
doch der
in Lieb’ ich frei den Frei-en
er-lang’ ich mir
nimm теі-пеп Se i lungen Sohn!
Was tief mich
DIE WALKÜRE 283
a
zZ
op e-pep]
(Although I wooed with love, I could not beget a free man. So take my blessing,
son of the Nibelungs. What revolts me deeply, 1 bequeath to you: eat your envious
fill of the empty glory of the gods!)
adequately to the occasion in the music which prepares the first of
these climaxes—the long second scene for Wotan and Brünnhilde
which the composer regarded as the most important ‘for the evolution
of the whole, great four-part drama’. But it would be difficult to
argue that the second climax, and the way it is prepared in Scenes
iii and iv, suffers in conviction or impact from following on directly
from the earlier part of the act. The first climax, Wotan's great
outburst of bitterness and despair, grows out of reflection; the
second, linking Brünnhilde's conversion to Siegmund's cause with his
subsequent death, is embedded in action; and this action is not only
the culmination of the steady growth of tension throughout Scene
iv, but the vital counterpart to Brünnhilde's passive role during
Wotan's earlier scene of self-examination and self-accusation. Both
Brünnhilde and Wotan are driven to action in Scene v, and Wagner
guides the final stages of that action to their close with no sense of
anti-climax. To slow up and thin out the texture to the extent that
he does just before Wotan's final outburst is to concentrate and
intensify rather than dissipate the tension of the scene (Ex. 174).
And the act is only structurally complete as Wotan's wrathful exit
balances, with well-nigh ironic force, the warlike confidence with
284 WAGNER’S LATER STAGE WORKS
ББ е
ren riet
ыа
J ww sustain
P
(At this moment the clouds divide, so that Hunding, who has just drawn his spear from the
fallen Siegmuna’s breast, is clearly seen.) u
Fre == р Le Ee E Ee
te TEREE ee oe al | a ee АОС.
SE EE
d гай.
timp
WOTAN (surrounded by clouds, stands on a rock behind leaning on his spear and
(to Hunding) sadly gazing on Siegmund's body.)
e vor Fricka:
(Go, slave! Kneel before Fricka.)
which the act began. At the start of the act, Wotan has urged
Brünnhilde to ensure Siegmund's victory. At the end he himself
declares war on Brünnhilde for forcing him to cause Siegmund's
death directly, through his own intervention in the fight with
Hunding. The full extent of Wotan's shame and disgrace becomes
apparent only at this point.
Act I of Die Walküre begins with a storm, Act II with an
anticipation of the fight to come, and Act III develops this fight
S DIEWALKÜRE 285
music in its first scene, the most extendedly turbulent set piece in
the whole cycle. In the case of Act III, however, the ending does
not concentrate or outdo the initial turbulence, but dissolves it. The
climax of the act's animated music comes with Brünnhilde's last
words, ‘dem freislichen Felsen zu nah’n!’, the apex of an extended
process of gradual intensification from the point of repose at “War
es so schmählich? at the start of Scene iii, which also establishes the
E tonality fundamental to the entire final scene. Wagner's technique
in Scene iii shows the most powerful, large-scale control of tension
and resolution, through motivic development and tonal extension.
He is able to let the almost unbearable excitement generated up to
Brünnhilde's final phrases flow out into the broader, more reflective
final section of the work, from Wotan's ‘Leb’ wohl, du kühnes
herrliches Kind", achieving a dramatic fulfilment founded on finely
proportioned musical architecture. E major is established at an early
stage of this final section, at the line ‘der freier als ich der Gott!’
(Ex. 175), and its subsequent enrichment is a superb example of the
purposeful interaction of diatonic and chromatic, consonant and
dissonant elements. The extended major mode of the ending clearly
represents not only Loge's warm, protective glow, but Wotan's own
286 WAGNER’S LATER STAGE WORKS
sinks in ecstasy on Wotan’s breast: he holds her in a long embrace.)
(One freer than I, the god!)
transfiguring compassion. Yet the ending, like that of Das Rheingold,
is also poignant. Wotan and Brünnhilde may be reconciled, but he
is still unable to let her go free. His sorrow is as much for himself
as for her. The essential image is therefore of isolation, and profound,
helpless regret.
SIEGFRIED (1)
The preferred modern reading of the Ring is likely to be one which
finds Wotan more sympathetic than Siegfried. And, whereas we may
welcome Wagner's remark, with reference to the Wanderer, that *he
resembles us to a tee; he is the sum of the intelligence of the present’,
the thought of Siegfried as 'the man of the future willed and sought
by us, but who cannot be made by us and who must create himself
through our destruction" is remote in tone and temper from the later
twentieth century. For Wagner, Siegfried was 'the most complete
man I could conceive of, whose highest awareness is that all awareness
can be expressed only in the utmost immediacy of life and action’.
In the scene with the Rhinemaidens in Act III of Götterdämmerung,
“Siegfried is immeasurably knowing, for he knows the most important
thing, that death is better than living in fear’. And Wagner exclaims
that ‘the gods in all their glory must pale before this тап!” A
hundred years after Wagner's death, we would probably prefer to
stress what Dahlhaus calls ‘the tragic contradictions of Siegfried's
situation', and to note that the cause of his downfall
lies in the tragic contradiction that his instinct and independence, which
single him out to save himself and others from the entanglements of
contracts and laws and the consequences of reflection, also invite disaster.
The route that avoids catastrophe leads directly to it.54
53 Letter to August Röckel, 25-6 Jan. 1854. See Wagner: A Documentary Study, р. 184.
54 Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, р. 91.
SIEGFRIED (|) 287
Dahlhaus goes so far as to describe Siegfried as ‘a fairy-tale opera
rather than a heroic myth',?? and yet it contains the encounter
which is the crux of the cycle, a scene more decisive, as action, than
Act II, Scene ii, of Die Walküre—the meeting of the Wanderer and
Siegfried in Act III, Scene ii. Siegfried and the Wanderer are the
only two characters to appear in all three acts of Siegfried, and
Wagner delays their meeting until the later stages; yet differences
and similarities between them are essential to the structure of the
whole drama. In Act I, for example, the vital contrast is not between
Siegfried's strength and Mime's weakness, or between the Wanderer's
wisdom and Mime's stupidity: it is between the fearless energy of
Siegfried and the potent resignation of the Wanderer. Act II confirms
that the Wanderer is capable of Siegfried-like humour and harshness,
while Siegfried himself can be tender and thoughtful. But it is only
when they meet in Act III that it is clear that any potential
they might have for thinking and behaving alike—like Wälse and
Siegmund — will have no chance to prosper. Although the Wanderer
has belied his claim to watch, rather than to act, in the way he has
tricked Mime, mocked Alberich and Fafner, and harangued Erda,
there is a ritualistic quality to the actions with which he actually
attempts to prevent Siegfried from passing him which demonstrates
the consequences of his recent admission to Erda that he will gladly
yield his place to the young hero.
The richness of Siegfried lies in the opportunities for contrasts and
elaborations which these dramatic elements provide. The music of
action, with its less developmental song and rondo forms, is most
dominant in Act I. Yet ‘development’ can take various forms: for
example, the obvious reiterations of the forging song (Ex. 176)
transcend their own potential banality, not only by the sheer power
with which they generate a hectic, very un-song-like atmosphere,
Exe 176
and
continues
HE ——
No - thung! No - thung! Neid-lich-es Schwert! Zu Spreu nun
SIEGFRIED
schuf ich die schar - fe Pracht
(Nothung, Nothung! Glorious sword! . . .
I have reduced your sharp splendour to chaff)
55 Ibid., p. 128.
288 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
Als zul-len-des Kind zog ich dich auf, der has -
ti-ge Kna - be mich quält. und hasst!
(As whimpering child, I brought thee up, . . .
the impatient boy torments and hates me!)
but in the way they slyly offer themselves as derivatives of the
corresponding, limp repetitions of Mime's earlier lament (Ex. 177).
Nor is all the music fast and furious: the very first scene links Mime's
own forging music with Fafner's motif, and contrasts both with
reminders of Sieglinde, using more lyrical material which will receive
fuller treatment in Act II. In Act I, Scene ii, the use of question
and answer provides Wagner with a golden opportunity for large-scale
musical reminiscence, motivic and tonal, but the effect of this is the
reverse of mechanical or predictable. The scene becomes an extended
process of development and integration in which mere repetitions
are consistently overridden, and its subtle variations of pace as well
as its inexorably cumulative tension are carried over into Scene iii.
Today we may have some difficulty in seeing such naked delight in
weapons and violence as comic, in true scherzo fashion, but the
delight of the hero in his own skill and strength is the more forcibly
apparent in the way the final D major music offers the closest parallel
in the Ring to Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’.
Like Act I, Act II begins with sinister foreboding, but its course
is very different. Although it embraces the violent deaths of Fafner
and Mime, and reveals that Alberich has not deviated in the slightest
from his demonic determination to regain the ring, it is the less
portentous elements which predominate: Wotan’s wit, Fafner’s
humour and humility, Mime's comic self-betrayal, and the
Woodbird's decoded messages. As for Siegfried, it may be felt that
Wagner tried too hard to give the hero humanity, as well as certain
skills as an instrumentalist, in this act. But the sublime idyll of his
reflection on maternity is composed with sovereign economy: the
music flows ecstatically out of its references to Mime and Sieglinde,
and leads effortlessly into the business with bird and dragon.
Moreover, it is at once clear, when Siegfried emerges from the dead
dragon's cave, with the ring and the Tarnhelm, that the mood of
289
SIEGFRIED (1)
lyrical exaltation to which he has gained access has not been lost.
Rather it has intensified, as the economy with which the music
extends two dominants (a whole tone apart) demonstrates (Ex. 178).
A more strenuous, heroically Romantic quality emerges later as
Ex. 178
sehr weich
SIEGFRIED
ich nicht;
weiss
ihr mir nützt,
Was
[=
o
E
'
om
3
is
T
o
00
Nn
-
i=
©
T
aus des
nahm ich euch
290 WAGNER’S LATER STAGE WORKS
[1:85:78 em, ay.)
EH
m a 0
с en,
"а EE EE DEET (ie ууЁ
| ed! Ee EE EE EE
se EE ER EE DES EE n
E EE ee E EE Dee) EE |
ne der Tand,
рій cresc. _
doch das Fürch
noch nicht
f dim.
(I don't know how you will be of use to me; but I took you from the piled-up hoard of gold because
of good advice; your decoration can witness to this day's deeds, your glitter recall that I fought and
killed Fafner without yet learning what fear is.)
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE 291
Siegfried begins to act out his destiny as the rescuer, lover, and
betrayer of Brünnhilde. But the whole act ends playfully, the sudden,
loud chord of E major offering a foretaste of the still more playful
music (the end of Act II of Die Meistersinger) which Wagner would
compose before completing Siegfried itself.
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
The Wagner literature staggers under the weight of discussions
about the similarities and contrasts between the essential dramatic
theme of Der Ring des Nibelungen and Tristan und Isolde, a topic
made the more tantalizing by the knowledge that in his sketches
Wagner was at one stage unsure whether to use certain material in
Tristan or in Siegfried; after all, both were concerned with expressions
of passionate love and the crossing of an ‘old man’ who tries to
stand in the way of that love. It is in the literature which stresses
purely musical considerations that arguments favouring the view
that Tristan represents a fairly radical break with the past are likely
to be found. It will be claimed not only that the dramatic theme 1s
much less concerned with political, social issues than that of the
Ring, but also that the music seems to be driven by the sheer force
of its symbolic potential to question its own most fundamental
stabilizing functions: if night is the time of true illumination, if death
is the only true fulfilment of love, then the triad and tonality itself
must be challenged by the greater expressiveness and necessary
ambiguities of a chord which encapsulates tension so potently that
all resolutions of it seem illusory.
It cannot be denied that the structural significance of the Tristan
chord extends beyond its frequent surface occurrence as a vertical
entity and its various resolutions. The individual pitch-classes— Е,
B, E flat, and A flat—are all of importance in acting as tonics for
substantial areas of the work, notably the A flat major at the centre
of the Act II love scene, and the spanning of Act III by F minor
and B major. But for all its evident dependence on those intervals
which divide the octave symmetrically—tritone and minor third—
the chord does not in practice promote a harmonic language which
has no points of contact with traditional distinctions between
consonance and dissonance, still less a musical language which is
positively motivic and only negatively harmonic: in Tristan the
functional distinctions between chromaticism and diatonicism, as
well as between consonance and dissonance, are ultimately reinforced.
The effortless and persistent superiority of tonics as controlling
consonances can no longer be taken for granted, but traditional
292 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
relationships are reshaped rather than eliminated. In Act II, Scene
i, for example, the necessary excitement of expectation is created by
prolonging the dominant of the principal tonality (B flat major) and
giving little or no attention to the root-position tonic triad of that
key.
To argue for the unprecedented radicalism of Tristan by detaching
the famous chord from its various contexts of preparation, trans-
position, and resolution is to over-simplify, and prejudge the issue.
The prominence which Wagner gives to the chord is clear evidence
of the special intensity and concentration of the work's atmosphere.
But the nature of its treatment is evidence of a heightened linearity
in which assertions of ‘unity’ by means of strategically placed
repetitions are less vital than the continuous process of trans-
formation. The scale on which Wagner was operating made it
psychologically more satisfying 1f his perorations, in particular, could
be recognized as recollections— or developments— of material heard
earlier. Repetition is absorbed into transformation—as, most ob-
viously, in Isolde's final 'transfiguration'— but the listener is as likely
to be aware of balanced contrasts as of an integrated unity 1n which
contrasts are somehow of inferior status to substantial passages of
repetition.
There are certainly many contrasts and conflicts in Tristan which
cannot be explained away as serving some higher unity. In several
places Wagner exploits the effect of a sudden intrusion to increase
tension or destroy a mood. At the start of Act I the sailor's song
provokes Isolde, and Isolde's own interruptions of Brangäne illustrate
the vital role of harmony in turning potentially mollifying cadences
into new provocations (Ex. 179). The most celebrated example in
Tristan of the combination of a sudden intrusion with a thwarted
cadence is the appearance of King Marke and his followers at the
Ex. 179
BRANGÄNE
—
TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
N
Ne)
w
ISOLDE
chen wir si
Strand.
Schnell Su
ya f u В d
L 1 TD un pe ж уп
TEE ET Ee ee! EI | ee Cee ee eel
en ae saa a ae ee = лие ee eee GER "EC ` П) ERAN | ECH
ee eee И AC;
os SSS SS == a SSS SSS =
р 5 ao d Ч P
буар ——— —— — —5 uf a E H
EE Же E ` el Al KEE = ` (me EL DW?
e eo: LL „< Ree A PATE ee a EE DES 4.7" СЦ
lb, “ылы ee a I — EE ES LR)
ww, hn 1 $ x
( BRANGANE: on this calm sea we're sure to reach land by evening.
ISOLDE: What land?
BRANGANE: Cornwall's verdant strand.
ISOLDE: Never! Not today nor tomorrow!)
start of Act II, Scene iii. But Wagner's technique was as well adapted
to the exploitation of expectation as of intrusion; to portraying
reproachful, resentful, or guilty silence as well as angry, feverish, or
passionate volubility; and the musical means vary according to the
dramatic effect required. Thus, for Tristan's reluctant approach in
Act I, Scene v the initial plain cadence on to the tonic of F minor
generates not a process of expansion within that tonality but a
powerful progression across the tritone, outlined with relative rapidity
(Ex. 180), though B major is only cadentially confirmed thirty-seven
bars later at Tristan’s ‘Gehorsam einzig hielt mich in Bann’. But the
very different use of F minor at the beginning of Act III, with
chromaticism strongly controlled by recurrences of diatonic triads,
is no less expressive of silent suffering; the difference is that here
Tristan himself is physically motionless—indeed the curtain has not
yet risen (Ex. 181).
WAGNER’S LATER STAGE WORKS
294
Ex. 180
ISOLDE (to Kurwenal)
molto cresc.
(Tristan enters and stands respectfully)
+tpt
bei
db
У
=
(Sir Tristan may approach.)
2 TRISTAN UND ISOLDE 295
Ex. 181
Mässig langsam
In a description of Act III of Tristan Wagner referred to ‘the
ceaseless play of musical motifs, emerging, unfolding, uniting,
severing, blending anew, waxing, waning, battling each with each,
at last embracing and well-nigh engulfing one another’. These motifs
‘have to express an emotional life which ranges from the fiercest
longing for bliss to the most resolute desire for death, and therefore
required a harmonic development and an independent motion such
as could never be planned with like variety in any pure-symphonic
piece’.56 This should be sufficient to demolish the stale old argument
56 *Meine Erinnerungen an Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld’ (1868); repr. in Richard
Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, iii (Leipzig, 1872), 221-41; trans. Ellis, ‘My
Recollections of Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld’, Prose Works, iv (London, 1895), 235.
296 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
about whether or in what way Tristan und Isolde is ‘symphonic’, at
least in its tonal structures. As with all Wagner's later works, what
is most essential with respect to its musical organization and dramatic
expression is the existence of a process of tonal enrichment; and this
leads away from the essentially symphonic idea of one governing
key or single hierarchy of related keys to an overriding concern on
both small and large scales with an evolutionary process, with
progressive changes which in fact unify the work more effectively
and decisively than regular, if diverse, references to a single centre.
It is the process which matters more than the idea of a fixed point
of reference. Tristan und Isolde may indeed be so radical in its
fundamental pitch structures that, to quote a present-day analyst, it
is ‘not only *12-tone" in a special sense, but also "serial" in a special
sense’.5” But it is also tonal in a relatively normal, if far from
precisely 'symphonic' sense. The novelty and richness of the music
are not the result of a sudden rejection of tradition, but of the
remarkable way in which new possibilities are opened up within the
framework of the old relationships.
DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG
Nowhere in later Wagner do ‘new’ and ‘old’ confront each other
more directly and disconcertingly than in Act I of the Paris
Tannhäuser, where the distance between the Venusberg and Thuringia
is so much greater than in the original version. The Paris Tannháuser
is very much an appendix to Tristan. But the manifold and obvious
contrasts between Tristan and Die Meistersinger can be manipulated
to make the latter seem a necessary antidote to the former—an
antidote the more explicit for its use of a passing reference to
Tristan’s plot and music in order to reduce rather than heighten
tension. The way in which Hans Sachs addresses the assembled
company at the end, and receives their acclaim, is indeed the
representation of a very different dramatic denouement from that of
Isolde's solitary ‘transfiguration’, just as the triadic amplitude of Die
Meistersinger’s opening contrasts pointedly with the tonally allusive
linearity of the Tristan Prelude’s first bars. It would scarcely be
surprising if both chromaticism and dissonance were more prominent
in the surface detail of Tristan than of Die Meistersinger. But a study
of the ways in which both works prepare and establish their principal
points of tonal emphasis and resolution might discover aspects of
57 Benjamin Boretz, ‘Meta-Variations, Part IV: Analytic Fallout (I), Perspectives of New
Music, 11 (1972), 216.
DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG 299
process and technique which are both more fundamental and more
similar than obvious differences of subject-matter and surface detail
might lead one to expect.
Tristan is unambiguously concerned with the power of love, but
Die Meistersinger is arguably more ambitious in theme. The love
of Walther and Eva is real enough, but— because that love inspires
Walther to invent some remarkably powerful, passionate music,
and Walther's radicalism in turn inspires Sachs to meditate on the
life of art in society—the work seems more fundamentally concerned
with the power of music, and its capacity to advance when a new
naturalness and spontaneity are allowed to sweep away arid and
excessively literary conventions. It may even be held to demonstrate
that such changes can best be achieved by aristocrats arriving from
outside to live purposeful lives within a hierarchically ordered society;
no wonder T. W. Adorno described it disapprovingly as ‘the blueprint
of a pristine bourgeois world'.58
Such a world seems to depend on the recognition that some
intellects are superior to others, and that a superior intellect may
mislead and humiliate an inferior for the greater social good. It will
probably never be possible to attempt to disentangle Wagner's works
from his own beliefs, and their apparent connections with early
twentieth-century German ideology, without accusations of special
pleading, and the unease about Sachs's treatment of Beckmesser—
Sachs standing for Wagner and Aryan Germany, Beckmesser for the
Jews and all persecuted minorities?—is understandable. Post-war
producers have tended to make the final reconciliation more com-
prehensive than Wagner intended, by bringing back a crestfallen
Beckmesser to witness the final jubilation, showing that he has
learned his lesson and bears no lasting grudge. But Wagner was
probably not very interested in treating Beckmesser as naturalistically
as many of the work's other characters. As a senior mastersinger,
his incompetence when trying to improvise appropriate music for
the new poetry of Walther is more comprehensible than his inability
to turn out a satisfactorily simple serenade in Act II; but then, as
Dahlhaus shrewdly points out, ‘Beckmesser does not represent any
sector of art, not even mastersong. ... The Marker is nothing but a
caricature of a critic.°9 One may, in the interests of dramatic
credibility, attribute Beckmesser's elementary errors in his serenade
and prize song to emotional disturbance, and something is certainly
58 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1981), 96.
59 Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, p. 68.
298 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
Mild und lei - se wie er là-chelt, wie das Au-ge hold er óff-net
(Mild and gentle, how he smiles; how sweetly he opens his eyes.)
Am Jor-dan Sankt Jo - han -nes stand, all. Volk der Weltzu tau - fen
(St John stood by the Jordan to baptize the people of every nation.)
lost if we feel no sympathy whatever for him at this point. But it is
not necessary to accept without qualification Dahlhaus's view that
'his role in the action is allegorical' to sense that dream-like
wish-fulfilment matters as much as soberly naturalistic reality in
the unfolding of the dramatic scheme. Wagner's desire to make
Beckmesser ‘a caricature of a critic' conquers Sachs's desire for him
to be a genuine mastersinger whose gifts have been atrophied by
unthinking adherence to ‘the rules’.
To juxtapose the first four bars of Isolde's ‘transfiguration’ (Ex.
182) with the first four bars of David's 'Sprüchlein' from Act III of
Die Meistersinger (Ex. 183) is to highlight two very different examples
of Wagner's characteristic simplicity of shape and rhythm. Although
the first two intervals happen to be the same in both melodies, the
first is harmonically open-ended, the second purely diatonic. Both
are instances of the composer's aspiration to that ‘sublime naivete’
which he valued so highly in Beethoven, and which perhaps achieved
its finest expression at the end of the Good Friday music in Parsifal's
phrase ‘du weinest—sieh, es lacht die Aue!’ Die Meistersinger marks
a particularly important step along the road to that ideal of
communicating directly to the feelings with the greatest naturalness
and simplicity, since its plot involves the argument that there is a
fundamental difference between old and new musical styles, centring
on the contrasts between simplicity and complexity, orthodoxy and
unorthodoxy. But Die Meistersinger is not a documentary, in which
two stylistically incompatible kinds of musical authenticity are
demonstrated. Rather it is a composition in which Wagner displays
his versatility, his ability to represent both sterility and vitality within
the bounds of his own style. Die Meistersinger contrasts the stolidity
DIE MEISTERSINGERVON NÜRNBERG 299
and pomposity of those who support lack of change with the
impetuosity, open-mindedness and more elevated expressiveness of
those—Sachs and Walther— who see no virtue in blind adherence to
old-established procedures which have outlived their usefulness, at
least for a younger generation. But the essential difference between
the two modes of expression is not, as a documentary might be
obliged to demonstrate, in the nature of their basic materials as
represented by generative thematic ideas, but in the way the materials
are treated; in a sense, after all, the basic motif of Walther’s
prize song is scarcely more promising or memorable than that of
Beckmesser’s.
Wagner’s composition of the entire work in his own style results
in many moments of delightful and pointed dramatic irony, and as
soon as the curtain rises Wagner hints at the possibility that the
music might involve disorienting shifts between moods which even
his supremely flexible and diverse idiom might not be able to
accommodate comfortably. There is something wilfully un-
sophisticated about the Romantic instrumental interpolations in the
hymn, and it is perhaps just as well that the issue of the relation
between sacred and secular in sixteenth-century Nuremberg is not
further pursued. As for the earthy yet conservative masters, how,
we might ask, can they take such exception to Walther’s Act I spring
song in F major when they have sat without flinching through the
extraordinary modulation across a tritone with which Pogner recovers
that key in his earlier address (Ex. 184)? Are they making the point
that Pogner is not offering a ‘song’ as such and that only Art must
cherish tradition, leaving Life to be as contemporary as may be?
It can be claimed with some confidence that Act II of Die
Meistersinger is Wagner’s greatest single achievement in the art of
drawing large-scale continuity out of a brilliantly balanced diversity
Ex. 184
POGNER A
d’rum hört, Meis-ter, die Gab’, die als Preis bestimmt ich hab’!
300 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
ger, der im Kunst-ge - sang
sl
Pi le oe
[or —
[LT]
V pee
P dolce pl FTT
ESSE C A
ES"
(So hear, Masters, what prize I have decided to bestow!
The singer, who [is the victor] in the song contest, . . .)
of character and event. The continuity is not one in which incidental
discontinuities need to be explained away. Just as the 'small' is
integrated into the ‘large’ without losing its identity, so the evolu-
tionary progress of the whole may be enhanced by occasional
interruptions and disruptions, such as that which Sachs provides
with the first stanza of his cobbling song. Wagner's particular
enthusiasm for transition was rooted in the obvious point that such
a feature provides the opportunity for heightened expression, not a
merely mechanical ‘continuity’. In Act III of Die Meistersinger some
of the most expressive music of all is concentrated into passages
which cross maximum tonal space between C major and G flat major
(or vice versa). Every commentary on the work remarks on the way
the quintet seems to have been placed on a remote tonal plateau,
and the progression which precedes it—from the dominant of C to
the dominant of G flat—is achieved through the most direct stepwise
descent (Ex. 185). As the quintet ends, there is a much more extended
progression away from G flat to prepare the C major of Scene v.
DIE MEISTERSINGERVON NÜRNBERG
(He moves from the middle of the half-circle which the others have formed round him,
so that Eva stands now in the middle.)
Kr 5
gl г эга”?
лр е 1 a ө!
TE.
p
B 14i
е
(SACHS: Now may it grow large, without hurt or injury.
Let the youngest Godmother speak the fitting words.
EVA: Brightly, as the sun breaks upon my fortune, . . .)
301
And just before Sachs's final address there is a last, concentrated
reminder of the material of the quintet as an even more basic stepwise
motion drags Walther and Eva back from their dream world to the
solid reality of Nuremberg and its well-ordered society (Ex. 186).
Adorno singles out the quintet as what he terms a moving, but
Ex. 186 ар
WALTHER (refusing the chain impetuously.) (He looks tenderly at Eva.)
Will oh-ne Meister se - lig.
302 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
(All look at Sachs in great perplexity.)
Mässig bewegt
(Sachs comes to Walther and takes
him impressively by the hand.)
Сл ae
(Not Master, no! I will be happy without Masterdom!)
impotent gesture, which 'after a few bars of a tender luminous beauty
... falls back on the stock of motives of the Prize song’ and ‘fails
to develop from the new idea’.60 Apart from its insensitivity to
tonal and textural transformations within the quintet itself, this
interpretation fails to detect the pervasive relationship between
‘modulation’, which for Adorno ‘never quite escapes from the sense
of side-stepping’, and ‘seems peculiarly arbitrary’, and the large-scale
generators and goals which shape and control the actual language
of the music. The analytical custodian of the purely symphonic tonal
tradition, Heinrich Schenker, was quite right to see Wagner as an
opponent rather than a continuer of that tradition, but he was quite
wrong to assert in an early polemic that ‘programme music and
music drama are an impediment rather than a stimulus or boon to
musical freedom’.6! The stimulus which music drama did provide to
a development of more flexible and expressive materials is one which
progressive twentieth-century music has found especially attractive.
SIEGFRIED (2)
More than a year elapsed between the completion of Die Meister-
singer and the resumption of work on Siegfried. But the third acts
60 [n Search of Wagner, p. 125.
61 Heinrich Schenker, ‘Essay on Ornamentation’, trans. Hedi Siegel, Music Forum, 4 (New
York, 1976), 36.
SIEGFRIED (2) 303
of both works have at least one fundamental common factor: in
both, the overall tonal motion is from G to C. Nevertheless, the
contrast between Sachs’s contemplative G major and the Wanderer’s
turbulent G minor could hardly be greater. Once again, as in Act I,
the Wanderer comes seeking information, asking questions to which
he does not, this time, appear to know the answers already. But the
‘all-knowing’ Erda is as ineffective a respondent as the foolish Mime,
and the Wanderer 1s again forced to provide the crucial answer for
himself. Siegfried has already claimed two victims— Fafner and
Mime; Wotan will be his third, but only because the god himself
wills it to be so. In Scene ii the ‘Alter Frager' assumes the role of
questioner for the last time, and the effect is only to delay, rather
than divert, the inevitable course of events. The Wanderer's anger
is no more effective than his affability; since the moment in Das
Rheingold when he confessed that ‘care and fear fetter my mind’, he
has ultimately been powerless in the face of fearlessness.
Siegfried himself knows that the will of the enemy who contrived
his father's death is powerless to prevent his own progress. The two
enact a ritual to represent the momentous transfer of power which
has already been accepted by Wotan, and is acknowledged by him
with the brief benediction, ‘Go on, I cannot restrain you.’ It is as
if, at the end of Die Meistersinger, Walther were to supplant Sachs
as the prime object of the crowd's acclaim. There the ‘young’, having
made his point, stands back in respect for the ‘old’. But Wotan is
allowed no aria of farewell, no further prophetic peroration, before
Siegfried advances through the fire (Ex. 187). Wagner's abrupt
dismissal of such a significant character may seem disturbingly casual,
but it has an unsparing dramatic truth. As the scene has unfolded
we have come increasingly to see the god through Siegfried's eyes,
Ex. 187
Mässig
WANDERER
Zieh’ hin!
304 WAGNER’S LATER STAGE WORKS
(He suddenly disappears in complete darkness.)
Ich kann dich nicht hal - ten! —
Mit zer- focht’
a. 257 27 — P—21
[—I T IA HET ZU Let
Teo БЕГЕ] m
( WANDERER: Go on! I cannot restrain you!
SIEGFRIED: With his spear shattered, has the coward run away?)
and Wotan's last decision is not to impose his presence a second
longer. The sooner he returns to Valhalla, the sooner preparations
can begin for 'the end'. After all, as Wagner wrote to King Ludwig
in 1864, ‘he knows ... that he lives on in Siegfried, as the artist lives
on in his work’.6?
Wotan now sees nothing but ‘the end’: yet Siegfried himself has
barely begun. In one of Wagners most extended and extreme
transitions, a huge slowing up of tempo and thinning out of texture
takes place, in total contrast to the rapid replacement of Erda by
Siegfried at the start of the previous scene. The transition begins
with one of Wagner's most emphatic perfect cadences, in F major,
62 Wagner: A Documentary Study, p. 206.
SIEGFRIED (2) 305
then extends that key— with particular reference to the dominant of
G flat major— before reaching E major, the correct chord for the
repetition of the reposeful ‘fire music’ which ended Die Walküre.
Now, however, the E major triad and its dominant together form
just one salient feature in a flux involving the dominants and tonics
of C and D majors as well. The transition reaches its moment of
maximum withdrawal from the fierce energy of its beginning with
the broad unfolding of D major's dominant seventh, which begins
Scene ш. But instead of resolving directly on to its tonic, this
dominant moves up a tone to the dominant of E major as the violin
line reaches its apex. The resolution to the D major tonic is then
achieved, an effect which is not merely texturally understated, but
structurally unstable; far from being the starting-point for a section
of music in that key, it initiates a still more elaborate quest for a
genuine point of stability (Ex. 188).
306 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
(He mounts to the top of the height.)
(Blessed solitude on the sun-lit summit!)
The immensely sustained moment of Brünnhilde's awakening is
notable for the way in which Wagner extends the fundamental C
major with special reference to the dominant of its mediant, E minor,
thereby establishing a third relation which is treated in greater depth
as the scene proceeds: the E major/minor music of the Siegfried
‘Idyll’ episode provides the most stable alternative to C in this long
third scene. The first main diatonic cadence in C occurs when the
couple formally acknowledge each other by singing together (Ex.
189). Only here is the process of progression from the transition's
initial F major to a new stability complete, and this type of cadence,
complete with trills and pauses, returns to create the exalted finality
of the very end. The cadence seems joyous rather than banal because
its diatonic purity is a genuine resolution of the chromatic enrichments
with which the music is principally concerned. Wagner may have
shown a ruthless capacity for cutting harmonic corners when a
sudden shift of perspective was dramatically appropriate, but the
juggler was always guided by the architect, and effects of the moment
never undermine the strength of the edifice as a whole.
Ех. 189
BRÜNNHILDE —3—
nahrt! dein Blick — durf - te mich schau’n,
SIEGFRIED
GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG 307
am FR ee
Te A Ее a
Mae — E EE] == = ==
Dom zg
er - wa - - - - chen
H = 3 {aes ae e
2 ss SESS SS E ee T ES ОУ Эй ИЗ EE ` Eed {Н шй
Cin = = Sa
ser LS E : ү т E В Е Е
ww, brass 2 fi
H E = ==
um Sl = St So See 0053 ei lx m Ml. es TER
a en арра = een
Kat, 5 солае — 0 We nin dl
E ccm uH SS sn
EL ee aS ec Fee ee eee /
= EE mcm : m з=
timp 3 Э
(sehr lang)
rall. ^^
durft' ich nur
(SIEGFRIED: . . . that I behold these eyes which laugh on me now in my joy!
BRÜNNHILDE: Your eyes alone were permitted to see me, you alone could waken me!)
GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG
In Act I of Götterdämmerung contrasts between action and reflection
are delineated with the clarity and sense of impending doom necessary
to this late stage of the drama. The first significant event in the
Prologue—the breaking of the Norns’ rope— sets up a terrible irony
which sustains the drama of the act across the long spans which
308 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
separate this from the two other principal events, Siegfried's drinking
of the potion and his theft of the ring from Brünnhilde. The irony
is clearest in the plain text, where Brünnhilde's cheerful talk of the
hero's longing for new exploits immediately follows the Norns'
despairing conclusion about the loss of their eternal wisdom. The
Norns seem to know little of Siegfried, beyond the fact that it was
‘a bold hero’ who shattered Wotan's spear. Their attention is fixed
on the more fundamental issue of what Wotan will eventually do
with those spear fragments, and the evolution of the scene through
its refrains and tonal recurrences is as inexorable as the workings of
Alberich’s curse.
The second part of the Prologue, the scene for Brünnhilde
and Siegfried, anticipates the action exuberantly portrayed in the
transitional music of Siegfried's Rhine journey. By bringing in the
most direct reference since Das Rheingold to the tonality and theme
of the Rhinemaidens’ music (the tonality of E flat has dominated
the whole Prologue), and dissolving it into the third-related an-
ticipation of the Gibichungs’ B minor music, Wagner not only
contrasts primal lyricism with human villainy, but focuses with great
and timely precision on the images which will only reach their
fulfilment when the Rhinemaidens drag Hagen down to a watery
grave. There is indeed a powerful harmony between all the elements
present in Götterdämmerung:
the scenes in which the divine myth dominates the action ... do not so
much directly influence the course of the action as imbue the events taking
place in a temporal setting with a mythic significance— providing them, as
it were, with a reverberation spreading far beyond their immediate ѕрһеге.63
The first two scenes of Act I demonstrate what Siegfried's principal
exploit is to be—the winning of Brünnhilde for Gunther. Of the
large-scale musical factors through which this action is charted,
special emphasis is given to the opposition between semitones. Scene
i begins in B minor, but, after its ending in an extrovert B flat major
with Siegfried's arrival, the tonality 1s twisted back to B minor
through an emphatic harmonization of the ‘curse’ motif (Ex. 190).
Scene ii therefore begins in the same key as Scene i, but with a
transformation of Siegfried's own motif, not that of the Gibichungs;
the change of identity has already begun. The end of Scene ii is a
kind of reversal of that of Scene 1, as Siegfried departs with Gunther,
and the tonality moves away from B flat minor into the long
transition from action to reflection in Hagen's hopeful brooding. As
$3 Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner's Music Dramas, p. 135.
GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG
Ex. 190
(Siegfried brings his boat to the shore.)
HAGEN ees? E
(Hagen makes the
boat fast with the chain.) (Siegfried springs on shore with his horse.)
Etwas langsamer und breiter
= = >
e >
(ausdrucksvoll und
weich)
(Gunther has come to Hagen on the river bank.)
rer Held!
hn
Zurückhaltend ) —-
(Gutrune looks from the throne in astonishment at Siegfried.
Gunther prepares to offer friendly greetings. All are fixed in
mute contemplation of each other.)
Immer abnehmend und zurückhaltend
(Hail! Siegfried, dearest hero!)
309
310 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
the music rediscovers elements from the early stages of the first scene
it is clear that Brünnhilde remains optimistic, and content to wait
for Siegfried's return. At the very end of the transition, indeed, the
music recalls her original awakening in Act III of Siegfried. But then
a rapid conflict ensues between these recollections and the stormy
approach of Waltraute, the B minor of the original Valkyrie music
serving to reassert the act's principal point of tonal reference.
One important dramatic function of Scene iii 1s to make the horror
of Brünnhilde's eventual betrayal by Siegfried seem the greater by
provoking her to an extravagant affirmation of faith in the power
of his love—something she values to a degree which leaves her
impervious to, though not unmoved by, Waltraute's pleas. Waltrau-
te's description of the broken Wotan in Valhalla is indeed one of
the most moving episodes in all Wagner's work, and seems the more
powerful when one realizes that the musical as well as the dramatic
foundations are being laid for the final stages of the cycle. It is a
structure which, for all the intensity of its chromatic detail, is founded
on the significant relation between a tonic (F sharp minor/G flat
major) and its dominant of D flat; and it is one of the finest examples
in Wagner of a structure placed at the service of a situation *which
remains unchanged long enough for the characters' experience of it,
and response to it, to be expressed’.*4 But the brutal events which
end the act are portrayed in music of such gripping concentration
that there is no sense of anti-climax.
Act II begins like a continuation of Act I, with music in an extended
B flat minor, which is the apotheosis of brooding malevolence: the
entire first scene expands on the material of Hagen's *watch'. Alberich
constantly alludes to the fact that Hagen is his son, but his appearance
serves principally to clarify Hagen's determination to win the ring
for himself. Although at the end of Act II Hagen does refer to
Alberich as the Lord of the Ring, ‘des Ringes Herrn" —the Nibelung
will play no more direct a role in the drama's climax than will
Wotan.
After Scene i, Act II is notably eventful, dominated by arrivals
and accusations. Siegfried’s return is magically abrupt, so much
so that the music, which has begun to move decisively away from
F major, has to be brusquely returned there for the appropriate
horn-call. By contrast, the arrival of Brünnhilde and Gunther is
prepared by an extrovert and extended choral ensemble, skilfully
structured so that clarification of the long-promised C major is itself
64 Magee, Aspects of Wagner, p. 8.
GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG 311
finally swept aside by the approach of В flat major, а basic
confrontation between the act’s first and last tonal centres. After the
diatonic emphasis of the welcome for Gunther and Brünnhilde,
the central part of the act employs an intense chromaticism for
Brünnhilde’s denunciation of Siegfried, and the oaths; nevertheless,
this chromaticism does not override such strongly cadential points
of tonal reference as that to the E flat and B centres (which dominated
Act I) at the end of Brünnhilde’s oath (Ex. 191). After this, the
blithe restoration of a diatonic C major at the end of Siegfried’s
conciliatory peroration seems appropriately ingenuous.
Accusation, self-accusation, and the most concentrated chro-
maticism permeate the final scene of Act II as the plot for Siegfried’s
death is hatched. At the very end of the ensemble passage, C major
re-emerges as the act’s final arrival, that of the wedding procession,
takes place. The sense of a fusion of extremes—the kind of jubilation
achieved at the very end of Siegfried blended with the threatening
jocularity of Hagen’s rousing of the vassals—makes this a complex
Ех. 191
BRÜNNHILDE
schwur Mein - eid jetzt die-ser
VASSALS
(BRÜNNHILDE: . . . this man has sworn falsehood.
VASSALS: Help, Donner!)
312 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
but powerful representation of the evident failure of ‘true love’ to
survive the determined assault of human barbarity. There is a
pervading hollowness, disturbing simply because it is dramatically
so convincing.
Like the first scene of Das Rheingold, the first scene of Act III
shows an encounter between the three Rhinemaidens and a solitary
male. Siegfried is initially as reluctant to return the ring to them as
Alberich was eager to steal the gold. The Rhinemaidens had
themselves provided Alberich with the motive for effecting the theft,
telling him about the powers conferred by the renunciation of love;
and Siegfried comes to claim that, although the ring may have given
him great power, he could in fact be prepared to renounce all
that power for the pleasures of love—'der Minne Gunst’. The
Rhinemaidens provide a Norn-like prophecy of Siegfried’s imminent
death, and they describe with powerful economy the all-too-human
weakness of the hero. In one basic respect, however, they seem to
be under his spell, and their dependence on his fate is represented
in the music by this scene’s use of F major as its basic tonic—the F
of Siegfried’s horn-call. There is no decisive return here to the primal
E flat of the Rhine itself. That particular innocence is irrecoverable.
In Scene i Siegfried is still under the spell of Gutrune’s potion—
though able to remember Fafner's dying warning—and in Scene ii
the gradual lifting of the spell does not result in a sudden access of
cautious common sense, but a suicidal embrace of the ecstasy of
memory. The hero rediscovers the truth in a narration whose stages
summarize the events of Siegfried. First he recounts his relationship
with Mime, the reforging of Nothung, the death of Fafner, and the
first words ofthe Woodbird (remembered exactly) about the treasure.
Then, prompted by Hagen and the vassals, he recalls the bird’s
warning about Mime and its subsequent description of Brünnhilde.
The confirmation of C major towards which the music moves during
Siegfried’s own description of the woken Brünnhilde (he omits any
mention of the Wanderer, or of his long struggle with fear) is now
postponed, so that Hagen’s attack takes place in a structural
parenthesis. C major is asserted first as Siegfried begins his final
lines (the music from Siegfried, Act III) and then, finally, at the
overwhelming climax of the funeral march. But the struggle from
minor to major tonality is then reversed, not to provide a simple
symmetrical design, but with an intensified chromaticism in the final
phase, and the return of C minor is touched on only in passing (Ex.
192).
In the theatre it is occasionally possible to feel that the rest of the
= GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG
(It is night. The moonlight is reflected from
ob the Rhine.) Te
en K
ee eK ef BELLE
u = еш == а
= M. 5 =
re! cun -g I
> piu P
N
(Gutrune comes out from her room into the hall.)
Allmählich etwas bewegter.
LIII
s Aem
Em ED
(Was that his horn?)
work after the funeral march is an anticlimax. The mechanics of the
action, from the re-entry of Hagen to the burning of Valhalla and
the flooding of the Rhine, are all too obtrusive. But even if the
staging of these final events presents producers with well-nigh
insuperable problems, the need for a musical resolution is explicit
from the point at which the march itself fails to resolve conclusively,
and the progress to suitably incontrovertible resolution is superbly
sustained to the very end. On the level of recall, transformation, and
313
314 WAGNER’S LATER STAGE WORKS
combination of motifs, Wagner reveals his full mastery, but this in
itself would count for little without the harmonic framework which
enables the material to unfold with' all the necessary expansiveness
and inevitability.
Only two particularly significant aspects of this process can be
mentioned here. First, the fact that the very opening of Brünnhilde's
final scene—the first paragraph to the line *. .: des hehrsten Helden
verzehrt —moves from one unstable chord to another by way of
more conventional triadic harmony; at this stage things are in a
sense ‘inside out’, and only on the largest scale will this tendency be
conclusively reversed. The second point concerns the establishment
and elaboration of the final tonic, D flat major; something so
powerful can only be accomplished in stages, and the first stage uses
the moment of most profound repose— Brünnhilde's *Ruhe, ruhe,
du Gott" —to launch (with a perfect cadence) the entire final phase
of the scene; here the principle of the generating harmony being
stable is established. The second phase of the scene moves away
from D flat again, and this returns at the end in what might seem
a dangerously plain, conventional cadential preparation. But Wagner
diverts the tonic note into an augmented triad, and the full D flat
major triad finally appears at a moment of relative understatement,
six bars into a section in which its function might at first seem
subordinate—that is, subdominant—to that of the A flat major
Rhine music (Ex. 193). Here Wagner brilliantly casts a slight, highly
effective shadow of doubt over the tonal direction, through a
(Strings and harps omitted.)
PARSIFAL le
significant modification of the passage as first sketched.9? Never-
theless, the remaining music prolongs and confirms that D flat tonic
without any further extensive reference to its dominant. There is no
more decisive perfect cadence, and the final confirmation of D flat
is achieved through coloration of more passive plagal and Neapolitan
harmony.
For Dahlhaus, the inescapable optimism of this ending is enshrined
most essentially in Brünnhilde:
It is only in Brünnhilde that freedom grows to self-awareness: she was
divine and has become human, that is, the gods' self-destruction and their
superseding by the ‘freedom of the human consciousness’ have actually
taken place in her; and it is through her that ‘the new world dawns’.66
It follows that there is also a sense in which she acts as a model
for—or relative of—Parsifal, who grows in a rather different way to
self-awareness and who makes possible, not the birth of a new world
but the survival, healed and reinvigorated, of the old. Even so, trying
at all costs to link all Wagner's later stage works in an unbroken
chain in which each link explores a different aspect of the same
theme is not entirely satisfactory. There are also similarities between
the ending of Parsifal and that of Die Meistersinger. But the
differences may prove to matter, and mean, rather more.
PARSIFAL
As a Bühnenweihfestspiel [a Festival Drama of Consecration or
Dedication], Parsifal has a concern with religious belief and ob-
servance whose precise significance and extent have consistently
diverted commentators into such matters as the possible relation
between Buddhist and Christian elements in Wagner's thought.
Dahlhaus declares that ‘Wagner’s faith was philosophical, not
religious', and cites the composer's comment in Religion und Kunst
(1880) that ‘where religion is becoming artificial it is for art to
salvage the nucleus of religion by appropriating the mythic symbols,
which the former wished to propagate as true’.6” The debate around
these issues is not likely to be easily or quickly resolved. Yet religious
belief and religious ritual are scarcely in the foreground of the events
which motivate and propel the drama. The theme of Parsifal is not
the nature and function of religion in a particular society, but the
nature and qualities of leadership, and the need of a rather special
$3 See Curt von Westernhagen, Die Entstehung des ‘Ring’ (Zurich, 1973); trans. as The
Forging of the Ring, trans. Arnold and Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1976), 263 ff.
$6 Richard Wagner' s Music Dramas, p. 98.
6? Ibid., pp. 143-4.
316 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
kind of religious community to find a new Priest-King worthy of
the office. The drama depicts the process whereby one holder of
that office, Amfortas— whose unworthiness is demonstrated and
explained —is replaced by someone who becomes worthy. Amfortas
has been corrupted by the temptations of the flesh, and the knights
have lost their most prized possession (after the Grail itself) to an
evil magician. Parsifal, first encountered as а ‘pure fool', who acts
without premeditation even when his actions are destructive, begins
to achieve enlightenment through observing the sufferings of Am-
fortas as he reluctantly fulfils the functions of his office; and this
enables Parsifal to withstand the temptations to which Amfortas
succumbed, take back the spear, and return to Monsalvat to assume
Amfortas's office. It is not necessary to argue that Parsifal is
renouncing all contact with the 'real' world, or even with the
legitimate delights of the flesh—as Wagnerians well know, he becomes
Lohengrin's father—but the drama turns on the fact that what traps
Amfortas frees Parsifal. It 15 a plot which provides adequate
opportunity for stage action, and Wagner is sometimes felt to have
been unnecessarily austere in the emphasis given to narration by
Gurnemanz, a character whose sole function seems to be to recall
events at which he was only an observer. But the narrations in
Parsifal perform a musico-dramatic function complementary to that
of the more active episodes which they prepare and frame. In making
such a clear distinction between those events which are enacted, and
those which are described, Wagner achieves an effect of concentration
in which the contemplativeness appropriate to the theme is balanced
and irrigated by a variety of actions, ranging from the brief, hectic
events surrounding Parsifal’s killing of the swan, to the more extended
enactments of the sacramental celebrations, in which action itself
becomes meditative.
For all its contemplative emphasis, however, Parsifal is not a static
triptych in which the outer acts perform parallel, subordinate framing
functions. It is a structure whose internal evolution overrides simple
symmetric correspondences; one need only examine the textual and
musical differences between the two Grail scenes to appreciate this
point. No doubt Parsifal is more symmetrical than Wagner's other
later stage works in the way the actual settings of Act III parallel
those of Act I. But such special features do not invalidate the
argument that the Bühnenweihfestspiel confirms and refines the
essential techniques of composition employed in the earlier works.
Most fundamentally, Parsifal coheres around tonal and thematic
recurrences, and most of the principal tonal centres are in a major
PARSIFAL 317
or minor third relation to the A flat major in which the work begins
and ends. The way in which A flat major is used, as the basis for
music depicting the flower-maidens as well as the knights of the
Grail, suggests that its significance is more than merely associative;
in any case, Wagner’s ability to advance beyond the idea that
particular tonalities should be reserved for single characters, objects,
or moods had been demonstrated before, as in Act I of Die
Meistersinger, where Walther uses D major (‘Am stillen Herd’) and
F major (‘Fanget an") in rather different ways from David and
Pogner respectively. In Parsifal the large-scale third relations around
A flat focus the extended tonality of the work—a tonality in which
the symmetry of dividing the octave into equal intervals (tritones
and minor thirds) coexists with the traditional diatonic hierarchies.
These large-scale third relations are paralleled on the small scale
by the prominence of powerfully expressive non-triadic chords
constructed from thirds—the diminished seventh, the Tristan chord
(a ‘secondary’ seventh), and various ‘dominant quality’ chords. In
Parsifal an increase of tension can be sensed between forces making
for hierarchy and forces making for symmetry, but Wagner’s flexible,
evolving harmonic processes continue to favour the subordination
of the latter to the former, just as dissonance ultimately gives way
to consonance.
Act П of Parsifal is exceptional in Wagner’s later works for
beginning and ending in the same key, B minor. We might therefore
expect any sense of a constant relation to a single, central key to be
most evident here. But even this relatively concentrated musical span
takes a little over an hour to perform, and confirms the contention
that there ıs a very great difference between the statement that the
act begins and ends in the same key, and any claim that B minor
functions as an ‘extended’ tonic throughout. Anthony Newcomb has
argued that contrast between stable and unstable tonality is a
stronger tonal shaping force in some units than any sense of pull
against and return to a single central key’; and when the unit is a
complete act, the fundamental importance of that contrast is the
greater. It is almost as if Wagner decided to return to B minor at
the end of the act not merely for reasons of motif but because he
wanted to compensate for the exceptional amount of tonal instability
which occurs during its course. The analyst must work on a very
small scale to justify any talk of ‘atonality’. But the first stage of
Parsifal’s sudden, sustained outburst of self-understanding shows the
68 “The Birth of Music’, pp. 54-5.
318 WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
Ex. 194
Schnell
PARSIFAL 1 "A!
д
Дз” av.
Ke
ifea wy.
rte? = L3
Sie brennt mir hier zur Sei- te.
- WAGNER’S HERITAGE 319
schreit sie mir auf. __
6
nn —
[a Эши BEN ЕСС De en Ce шн!
BS Sa- ee SB
(Amfortas! The wound! It burns here in my side. Oh! grief, terrible grief!
It cries from the depths of my heart.)
harmony at its least diatonic (Ex. 194). Allusions to keys—F major
or minor, in particular—can certainly be detected, but the harmonic
emphasis 1s on chords whose piled-up thirds prevent pure major and
minor triads, and any progressions based on them, from emerging
as stabilizing forces. This music most certainly does not extend and
prolong the fundamental diatonic triads of a particular tonality in
the way that Kundry's previous lulling paragraphs do, over a span
of some ninety-two bars. The primary role of tonal relations in all
Wagner's later works is to ensure an evolving musical continuity,
employing both remoteness and relatedness, within which the motifs
can function symbolically and structurally. The quality of the motifs
themselves, as memorable representations of a person, a mood, or
an object, is obviously vital to the aesthetic quality and effect of the
drama. But such ideas can only function structurally, and therefore
expressively, through Wagner’s supremely flexible and coherent
techniques of evolutionary harmonic continuity.
WAGNER'S HERITAGE
Martin Cooper has argued that ‘opera during the years between
1890 and 1918 was dominated by Wagner's shadow',9? and Gerald
Abraham has claimed that ‘in Salome (1905) Strauss created perhaps
the greatest of all Wagnerian music-dramas not actually written by
Wagner himself.'? The full impact of Wagner’s influence was
certainly not felt until some time after his death; his later works
were not frequently staged during his lifetime, and an achievement
“69 See Vol. X, p. 145.
70 А Hundred Years of Music (4th edn.; London, 1974), 214.
320 WAGNER’S LATER STAGE WORKS
of such magnitude naturally took time to make its full effect.
Moreover, what immediate influence there was, in the years up to
1890, was almost wholly unfortunate; the fact that “Wagner’s most
ambitious and unabashed imitator"! was a virtual nonentity—
August Bungert (1845-1915)—confirms that coming to terms with
Wagner's genius would be a difficult, even traumatic affair. Before
1890 perhaps only Chabrier, in his Gwendoline (1886), produced
something strongly under Wagner's influence which does contain
some worthwhile music, while far from its composer's best and most
personal idiom. As Hugo Wolf showed in his songs, the best way
to profit from Wagner's example at that early stage of assimilation
was to divert some of his technical and expressive innovations into
channels which Wagner himself had ignored. As early as 1893, with
Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel,’? it was possible to claim that
even a very different kind of opera could profit from Wagner’s
example, and with Richard Strauss and Schoenberg the possibility
of fuelling expressionism with Wagnerian kindling was shown to be
real and valuable. But the whole history of twentieth-century music,
from Debussy and Stravinsky to Boulez, Stockhausen, and beyond,
has been deeply involved with—if not always dominated by—
reactions and responses to the challenge of Wagner himself, and
those who claim to have learned most directly from him.
Wagner's greatness seems far from diminished either by the passing
of time or by the persistence of controversy, and that greatness must
depend on something more than the apparent failure of those who
have followed to make a comparable impact. In this chapter
his achievement has been described and explained through an
interpretation of a highly personal compositional technique in the
service of a particular poetic and dramatic ideal. But many would
prefer to talk of the uniqueness of what the works express, and no
one has done this with more conviction than Magee with his
observation that
Wagner gives expression to things that, in the rest of us, and the rest of
art, are unconscious because they are repressed. . . . Wagner's music
expresses, as does no other art, repressed and highly charged contents of
the psyche, and that is the reason for its uniquely disturbing effect.”
One does not need to translate Wagner's subject-matter into the
language of Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Marx, Jung, or anyone else
! John Warrack, ‘Opera’, The New Grove, xiii, 596.
*? See Vol. X, p. 146.
73 Aspects of Wagner, pp. 34 and 39.
E WAGNER'S HERITAGE 321
to appreciate and experience the force of this effect which, even if it
is less immediately ‘disturbing’ than that of much twentieth-century
music, seems to strike deeper and sustain its impact for so much
longer. This effect is achieved by means of one of the most elaborate,
consistent, and coherent fusions of words and music ever devised.
And while scholars and performers alike continue to remain aware
of the special challenges and rewards which Wagner's works present
to them, it seems possible that his relative stature will actually
increase, as true understanding deepens.
VI
OPERA: 1850-1890
(a) GERMANY
By GERALD ABRAHAM
Two operas produced in 1850 mark a turning-point in the de-
velopment of German opera: Schumann's Genoveva (Leipzig, 25
June) and Wagner's Lohengrin (Weimar, 28 August). Lohengrin,
Wagner's last ‘Romantic opera’, soon proved to be a success;
Genoveva— with all its fine passages, such as Golog's ‘Frieden, zieh’
in meine Brust’ near the beginning, and its recurrent ‘reminiscence
themes'— never was.! Schumann died and Wagner's next stage work,
Tristan und Isolde, was not published until ten years later and
performed five years later still. It was not styled ‘opera’ but—
curiously— Handlung, an ‘action’.
CORNELIUS
Throughout Wagner's lifetime he was, of course, unrivalled; but
outstanding among his younger contemporaries was a Liszt pupil at
Weimar, Peter Cornelius (1824-74), who admired him and whose
individual talent saved him from being a mere camp-follower. His
first, and best, work was a comic opera, Der Barbier von Bagdad, on
a subject from the Arabian Nights, for which he provided his own
libretto; the only performance in his lifetime was given under Liszt
at Weimar in 1858—and ruined by a theatre riot. In 1882 the
26-year-old conductor Felix Mottl found the score, produced a
drastically cut one-act version, and also substituted the alternative
overture in D major—the original is in B minor and major— which
Cornelius composed in 1874 and Liszt orchestrated. In this form the
opera quickly made its way on the German stages.?
Cornelius left two other operatic works: the /yrisches Drama, Der
1 For a discussion of Genoveva see Abraham, Schumann: A Symposium (London, 1952),
272-82.
? A vocal score was published by Kahnt of Leipzig in 1877. The original version was
published by Breitkopf in 1904 and produced at Weimar the same year.
- CORNELIUS =»3
Cid (1864; produced at Weimar the following year), and the unfinished
Gunlöd (completed by Max Hasse and Waldemar von Bausznern; an
earlier attempt at completion, by Karl Hoffbauer, was performed at
Weimar in 1891). But despite some beautiful passages in Der Cid—
for instance, in Chimene’s lament, Act II, Scene u (Ex. 195),
not influenced by Wagner—the work lacks dramatic vitality. The
composer's statement that ‘the music is always the foundation and
provides the inner definition of the text'? 15 hardly necessary. Der
Cid was revived from time to time from 1891 but never enjoyed
anything like the belated success of Der Barbier.
Cornelius's first opera is a real masterpiece, arguably the best
German comedy—as distinct from operetta—of the second half of
the century. Nureddin's first song (Ex. 196) sounds the note of
Ex- 195
Andante sostenuto
O welch ein Heil!
2 5 с EA
2 Ee) Ee D BC DE 7 deg DAC а 18,
Gott, wo dein O-dem ist! Vater un-ser, der Du in Him-mel bist!
Komm Dei - ne Blu - men zu be-gie - ssen, О Mar - gia - па!
(Come to water your flowers, О Margiana!)
3 Peter Cornelius: Literarische Werke, ed. С. M. Cornelius, E. Istel, and A. Stern, i.
Ausgewählte Briefe (Leipzig, 1904), 463.
324 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех 97
Presto
THE BARBER
Bar: "ТСЕ zZ — — See eg
Bin A -ka - de - mi-ker, Dok -tor und Che - mi-ker, Bin Ma - the-
ma-ti-ker und A-rith-me-ti-ker, Bin auch Gram-ma-ti-ker So-wie FS the-ti-ker, Fer-ner Rhe-
=
to-ri-ker,Gro-sser Hi-sto-ri-ker, A-stro-log, Phi-lo-log,Phy-si-ker,Ge-o-log.(and so on)
spontaneous lyricism that permeates many pages of the score. The
harmony is generally Lisztian, but here and there, as for example in
Ex. 197, the Barber's words and music anticipate both Gilbert and
Sullivan, as does Nureddin's
Das Fieber ihn schuttelt
Und ziehet, und ruttelt,
in Act II, Scene x. The pseudo-oriental element is more or less
confined to the music of the three muezzins.
Cornelius admired the work of an almost exact contemporary,
Johann Strauss (1825-99), who was later to win much greater
popularity with a lighter genre, operetta. But it was Strauss the waltz
composer — his first operetta came in 1871 — whom Cornelius ‘loved’:
‘Ich liebe diese Dinge sehr’, he wrote in 1861.4 He never knew the
operettas, for he died three months after the production of Strauss's
first great success, Die Fledermaus (1874). Here, and particularly in
Der Zigeunerbaron (1885), Strauss raised operetta to the level of true
opera—though their popularity was based largely on their dance
rhythms.
GOETZ
Just six months after the appearance of Die Fledermaus a more
ambitious but much less successful comedy was produced at Mann-
heim: Der Widerspänstigen Zähmung [The Taming of the Shrew] by
Hermann Goetz (1840-76). Goetz himself prepared the libretto in
collaboration with Joseph Viktor Widmann, later a friend of Brahms.
They unfortunately tamed Shakespeare as well as his Katharina; the
buffoonery was toned down, Katharina's shrewishness was reduced
4 Ausgewählte Briefe, p. 579.
GOETZ 325
to a 'Brünnhilde-like' unwillingness to submit to a man, and Petruccio
was to be no more than a mere ‘cursing Landsknecht. Even
Shakespeare's purely comic characters are made more sympathetic.
An audience can laugh at Shakespeare's play but only smile at
Goetz's opera. He was a highly talented craftsman but not the genius
as which he was hailed ninety years ago.?
Der Widerspänstigen Zühmung is a beautifully crafted score: light-
handed—the end of Act II, Scene iv, is the only passage (except
in the overture) where trombones are employed—and sometimes
charming—as, for example, in the Bianka-Lucentio scene in Act I,
Scene ii (Ex. 198)—and reaching its emotional climax with Kathar-
ine's E major reply to Petruchio's ‘Let me entreat you!’ (Ex. 199)
which has the ring of Meistersinger. (Indeed his 'Komm! Liebes
Käthchen!’ at the beginning of Act IV, Scene v, is nearly a quotation
from Meistersinger. The scene in which Lucentio makes love ‘to
Bianka while pretending to give her a Latin lesson is amusing; it
was actually this which induced the Mannheim conductor, Ernst
Frank, to perform the work. But there are many uninspired passages:
Ex. 198
Allegretto, ma non troppo
LUCENTIO
er-ste - hen, ein neu -
Meno mosso
BIANKA (suddenly sad and quiet)
AH dë 3
LJ "DW RS р Y
rien H Dn. EE rn ee `
SSS sem. m:
(LUCENTIO: I want to embark on a new life, and a new life will open for you.
BIANKA: A new life! Ah how gladly!)
5 See, for instance, Bernard Shaw, Music in London 1890-94 (London, 1932), iii. 94.
326 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ich hór- te gern dein freund-lich bit-tend Wort,- doch un-ge-beugt bleibt
du dein Herz ge-weiht am heil’-gen Ort,
sienur heu - te nicht ver-ge-bens fleh’n,
(PETRUCHIO: I gladly heard your plea, yet my decision is firm! We are going!
KATHARINE: Let her to whom you vowed your heart at the holy place, let her not
plead in vain today.)
for instance, the Lucentio-Hortensio duet in Act I, Scene iv,
Katharine's Lied in Act II, Scene i, the ensemble in Act II, Scene
ii. And Goetz was unable to make up his mind about the end of
the opera; after the first performance he added a septet and just
before his death he worked out another ending which remained
unpublished. Conversely, performances have sometimes been ended
with the duet in Act IV, Scene v.
The success of the Der Widerspänstigen Zähmung encouraged
Goetz to embark on a second opera, Francesca da Rimini. This was
cut short by his death and, although it was completed and performed
in 1877 by Ernst Frank, it never established itself.
: THE 1850S AND 1860S 327
GOLDMARK, BRUCH, AND RUBINSTEIN
The composition of serious German opera in the latter part of the
century was paralysed by the shadow of Wagner. Mild Wagnerian
influence is apparent in the Kónigin von Saba (1875), the best of the
half-dozen operas of Cornelius's Hungarian friend Karl Goldmark
(1830-1915). Max Bruch (1838-1920), whose work lay mostly outside
the field of opera, based his Die Loreley (1863) on a libretto intended
for Mendelssohn, who died with it only just begun. Brahms's friend
Ignaz Brüll (1846-1907) composed a pleasant lightweight work, Das
goldene Kreuz, in 1875, French in subject and even in style. Another
gallicized work was Der Trompeter von Säkkingen (1884), enormously
popular in its day, by the Alsatian Viktor Nessler (1841-90). Two
second-rate masters were not even German: Franz von Suppé (1819-
95), a composer of successful operettas, born in Dalmatia of a family
Belgian in origin, and Anton Rubinstein (1829-94), son of a Russian
Jew and Silesian mother, a much more substantial figure. Most of
his operas were settings of Russian librettos, but two were German:
Feramors (1863), based on Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, and Die
Makkabäer (1875), produced at Dresden and Berlin respectively. The
‘dances of the Cashmerian brides’ in Feramors (Ex. 200) sound more
Ex. 200
Moderato con moto
authentic than Cornelius's muezzins in Der Barbier. But neither of
Rubinstein's German works won any lasting success.
(b) FRANCE
By DAVID CHARLTON
THE 1850s AND 1860s
The 1850s bear the hallmarks of a transitional period. Major
composers produced penultimate operatic works (Meyerbeer's two
opéras comiques; Berlioz s Les Troyens), Adam (d. 1856), and Halévy
328 OPERA: 1850-1890
(d. 1862) produced their last operas. Verdi wrote Les Vépres
siciliennes, his first for the Opéra (1855). Meanwhile, Gounod was
producing the works culminating in Faust (1859); a new, fourth,
opera house was opened in Paris; and Jacques Offenbach became
established as a composer of operettas with his own company: Orphée
aux enfers (1858) was his thirtieth stage work. As the Opéra-Comique
company was improving its scenic and vocal resources, the conditions
were set generally for the emergence of a new and intermediate
operatic genre: opéra lyrique.
In 1851 the Opera National was restarted in Dumas's Theätre
Historique (which had possessed a partial music licence). Being
without state subsidy it could not afford to alienate audiences, yet
managed to build up a viable new repertoire of opéra comique (by
Adam, Ferdinand Poise, Victor Masse, Halévy) amid the revivals.
It took the name Théátre Lyrique in 1852.6 Under the directorship
of Léon Carvalho (1856-60, 1862-68) a number of significant works
by Gounod and Bizet were staged, together with a cut version of
Les Troyens (last three acts) in 1863.
The 1860s, the decade in which Bizet’s art grew to maturity,
produced many notable works, though not in general at the Opéra.
Through-composed operas of importance were produced at the
Theätre Lyrique (Bizet's Les Pécheurs de perles, Gounod's Roméo et
Juliette) in addition to works with spoken dialogue, while the
Opera-Comique’s first production set to music all through was seen
in 1873. Verdi, whose Italian operas were popular in Paris, wrote
Don Carlos (set in French) for the Opera, first seen in 1867.
OPÉRA COMIQUE TO 1862
A number of light works created in the 1850s attained immense
success: Masse’s Galathée (1852) and Les Noces de Jeannette (1853)
were performed until 1911 and 1942 respectively; Frangois Bazin's
Maitre Pathelin (1856) was perennial. Middlebrow comedy, tending
towards farce, was Adam's favoured medium in Si j'étais roi (1852)
and Le Bijou perdu (1853). The music is ‘tuneful’ yet diverse in scope:
Si j'étais roi, for example, contains a full-scale aria and duet in Act
II, both in several linked sections; the same act ends with a furious
ensemble and chorus in D minor. There is a tendency to group
different numbers together to produce continuous, varied sections
incorporating action. The ‘Duetto, scene et trio’, No. 14, for
6 Thomas Joseph Walsh, Second Empire Opera: The Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, 1851-70 (Lon-
don, 1981), 5-12, 260. He describes it as ‘the opera house of the working man and woman
and the hard-up artist’.
OPÉRA COMIQUE TO 1862 329
example, comprises a sentimental strophic duet; a linking ‘allegro’; a
conversational ‘plus lent’ for the arrival of a third character; a linking
recitative; and a final ABA’ trio. Such techniques prepared the way
for the achievements of Faust and Carmen, as well as for the
elimination of spoken dialogue in opéra lyrique.
Opéra comique in the grand, melodramatic manner of Scribe was
continued in Auber's main success, Marco Spada (1852). Although
Auber sometimes used Italianate vocal style (for example, in caden-
zas), his music had now attained a colourful yet indigenous character,
with predominantly syllabic melodies. Its technical assurance is
admirable, and Auber occasionally used harmonies more surprising
than Donizetti’s. An unaccompanied vocal trio (finale of Act II)
contains simultaneous arpeggios of the diminished seventh. The
dramatic climax resides in the dying confession of Spada (a ‘noble
villain’ character), where the directions state there is to be a tableau
modelled on Horace Vernet's painting La Confession d'un bandit.
Auber was less successful with Jenny Bell (1855), incorporating
the English national anthem and ‘Rule, Britannia", but his Manon
Lescaut of the following year was appreciated; Scribe rewrote
Prevost’s tale in order to appeal to mid-nineteenth-century taste,
adding new characters.” Nevertheless, Manon still dies in Des
Grieux's arms in Louisiana. This ending, and that of Marco Spada,
exemplifies the shifts in public taste which helped make Gounod's
Faust possible in its original opéra comique form, and also a ‘literary’,
demi-character type of work, which included opéras lyriques such as
Gounod's Roméo et Juliette and Massenet's Manon.
Two notable attempts at 'exotic operas were made: Felicien
David's La Perle du Brésil (1851)8 and Halévy's Jaguarita l'indienne
(1855), both at the Theätre Lyrique. The first suffers from an inexpert
libretto, rather too close to Scribe's Haydée, but is distinguished by
the sea storm ending Act II and the setting of Act III in virgin
Brazilian forest. A Brazilian woman, Zora, who has been brought to
Lisbon and educated, saves the lives of a Portuguese expeditionary
force. David's score, often routine or salon-like in character, rises
to the occasion in Act III in Zora’s ‘Couplets du Mysoli’ (Ex. 201).
In the case of Jaguarita, the whole work takes place on ‘foreign’
soil, Dutch Guyana, and the eponymous native heroine plays
* Albert Gier, *“Мапоп Lescaut” als Fabel von der Grille und der Ameise’, in Michael
Arndt and Michael Walter (eds.), Jahrbuch für Opernforschung 1985 (Frankfurt am Main,
1985), 73-89.
8 With parts for organ, bells, harp, ophicleide and cannon, David's score shows the extent
of resources at the Opéra National, later Théátre Lyrique. Berlioz praised the *melodious
dreamer’ but castigated ‘lazy’ aspects of the score: Walsh, Second Empire Opera, p. 17.
330 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 201
Andante
А н
"—U
а= —rF—IÍ iis
,
Mé-lé аа - zur__et
(Mingled with azure and ruby!)
Ex. 202
Allegro non troppo e ben marcato
JAGUARITA |
Au sein inde la nuit sans bruit la tri-bu s'é-lan-ce, Sous le dó-me noir du soir
Comme le ser-pent rampant dans l'om-bre on s’a-van-ce, Nous al-lons saisir, te-nir,
mar-chons a-vec joi-e,
en - fin no-tre proi-e
(Silently in the bosom of night, the tribe presses forward, Like the creeping snake it advances in the darkness,
Under the black vault of evening let us walk joyfully, At last we shall catch and hold our victim)
E5203
Andantino grazioso
JAGUARITA
Gen-til co - li - bri, o doux a- mi, qui de loin_ птар - pel - les,
Jeviens me voi - ci odouxa-mi, que п’аі- је — tes. —— аі - les,
dä
ЕЕ EE en
(Kind humming-bird, O sweet friend who calls me from afar, I come, here I am,
sweet friend, if only I had your wings)
a leading role: she outwits the Dutch—who are led by comic
incompetents—and exerts emotional fascination over the European,
Maurice. Portions of the music are as tedious as the outworn humour,
but other parts allow us to glimpse a forerunner of Carmen, and
hear anticipations of Fauré. Halévy uses some novel metrical
constructions, particularly in ‘Au sein de la nuit' in Act II where
Jaguarita leads a dance (Ex. 202). Maurice administers a love potion
to her later in Act II, which leads to an evocative phrase using the
MEYERBEER'S OPÉRAS COMIQUES 331
chord II?, second inversion. In Jaguarita's song of the Colibri in
Act I, No. 5, the music captures her insouciant, dance-like physique
(Ex 2037.
The transitional nature of the 1850s was also reflected in a return
to Classical sources, in markedly different dramatic genres. Examples
by Gounod and Berlioz are discussed below (Philemon et Baucis;
Sapho; Les Troyens); Ambroise Thomas’s Psyche (1857) was a light
comedy that became the most performed of his five operas comiques
of this decade.
Félicien David's greatest success was the two-act Lalla- Roukh
(1862), after Thomas Moore's ‘oriental romance' of 1817. Its charm
lay chiefly in its dramatic setting; there are pleasant enough songs,
but David's musical language was very conventional and did not
take up the piquant techniques of Halévy, or indeed Meyerbeer.
MEYERBEER'S OPÉRAS COMIQUES
Meyerbeer's opéras comiques stand in a class by themselves. L'Étoile
du nord (1854) originated in an occasional work, Ein Feldlager in
Schlesien (1844), for the Berlin court theatre.? This was based by the
librettist Rellstab on one of Frederick the Great's campaigns, and
was subsequently seen in Vienna as Vielka (1847), the action now in
Bohemia instead of Silesia. For Paris, Scribe wove a story around
Peter the Great and his courtship in Finland of Catherine; she is
represented as the more mature character and he as the impulsive,
slightly dissipated partner. Dressed as a soldier, she learns of an
incipient mutiny in the army, but, having saved Peter's position, she
is shot at for a misdemeanour and barely escapes with her life. Peter,
who has been drunk when this occurs, restores her to sanity some
time later, as Tsar, by the display of tableaux evoking Finland.
Although disposed in fifteen numbers separated by dialogue (made
later into recitative), Meyerbeer's music has a unique density of
texture. It is particularly inventive in harmony, and can be seen as
a genuine growth of his language; the uses of enharmonic modulation
are Schubertian in their ease. The composer's constant changes of
rhythmic pattern (involving limited use of 4/16, 6/16 and 8/16 time
signatures) add to the density and extend often to the choral writing,
whose interest is well above the routine style of most opéra
comique. In the second finale two stage bands help in the grandiose
counterpointing of four militaristic themes. The 'star' of the work's
9 Max Loppert, ‘An Introduction to “L’Etoile du nord", Musical Times, 116 (1975), 130-
3. Only the overture and four vocal numbers (including the Act II and part of the Act III
finales) were taken over from Ein Feldlager (Loppert, ‘Introduction’, p. 132 n. 7).
332 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
title refers to an astrological prediction of Catherine’s great destiny
by her mother; the long-breathed cantabile associated with it occurs
(apart from the overture) twice in Act I and once each in Acts II
and III. There are also thematic repetitions of a growling idea sung
by Peter in anger, and of many Act I ideas during the final tableaux.
In Dinorah or Le Pardon de Ploérmel (1859) the pendulum of
subject-matter swung to the naive and folkloric, akin to the pay-
sanneries of a hundred years before—eighteenth-century opéras
comiques were still revived in the 1850s— but with a regional (Breton)
accent. The librettist Michel Carré, who collaborated with Jules
Barbier for Dinorah, was soon to prepare the Provengal subject
Mireille for Gounod. Incident, of which there is too little spread
over the three acts, has given way to beautifully polished musical
pictures of characters in whom we are not asked to believe. Dinorah
herself, for the most part harmlessly mad, is accompanied by a pet
goat. The musical density of L’Etoile du nord was now concentrated
more on the sensuous sophistication of the orchestral writing,
especially high violins. Rhythmic irregularity was also pursued, as
in the 5/4 bars and other ambiguities of Corentin's Act I couplets,
‘Dieu nous donne’. The 'bitonal cadences to end Act I (Ex. 204)
are as arresting here as similar ones in Verdi’s Otello, while Act II
ends with real orchestral violence. All Meyerbeer's harmonic magic
is concentrated on Dinorah's healing and recollection of the ‘Ave
Ex. 204
(The curtain falls)
Andante quasi allegretto J =60
glockenspiel
Ex. 205
Andante con moto jew
DINORAH (trying to recall the prayer)
OFFENBACH AND ОРЕКАТТА 333
(impatient at not recalling it)
SS as EE
LL ы SS SS SSS
= К]
Еа Fee eg pui
ën?
LV
Sainte Ma-ri - el.
[violins double voice]
Sainte Ma - ri - i" m
Off-stage chorus
(They said . . . Holy Mary!)
Maria', with which the tale comes full circle in Act III, No. 21 (Ex.
205).
OFFENBACH AND OPERETTA
Jacques Offenbach (1819-80) made initiatives in operetta that
affected opéra comique in several ways. In 1855 he was granted a
licence to start his own company, the Bouffes-Parisiens, and rapidly
produced a string of successful one-act works. They blew a welcome
gust of fresh air into musical Paris; even Meyerbeer was a regular
attender. Offenbach published in 1856 a lengthy preamble to a
competition of his own for new works (the joint winners were Bizet
and Lecocq with Le Docteur Miracle), expressing the need to return
to the simplicity, wit, and grace of opéras comiques before 1790. The
genre, he wrote with obvious justice, ‘has taken on proportions that
often make it unrecognizable’.1° Orphée aux enfers (1858), originally
in two acts, was Offenbach's largest-scale piece to date, involving six
principal singers and extensive chorus work. It rudely burlesqued
not only the Orpheus story but the whole pantheon of Greek gods,
and commandeered Gluck's aria ‘Che faró senza Euridice’ to boot.
The brilliant ‘Galop infernal’ (not originally 'Cancan') accompanied
a wild bacchanal in Hades. A new, four-act version of Orphée aux
enfers was mounted in 1874; it had already earned some 1,800,000
francs.
Although Offenbach lived until 1880 and compulsively produced
10 See Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach (London and Boston, 1980), p. 50 etc.
334 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
several works every year, his main successes came within the decade
of Orphee: La Belle Helene (1864), La Vie parisienne (1866), La
Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein (1867), La Perichole (1868). After the
basically straightforward and satirical musical language of Orphee,
the subtlety of Offenbach’s use of discords increased, as did the
economy of his best melodies. In Robinson Crusoé (1867) Offenbach
signalled his desire to write opéra comique of wider, more traditional
scope.
GOUNOD'S MINOR WORKS
Although Offenbach's operettas were frequently execrated, as was
the treatment of Classicism in Orphée aux enfers, they seem to have
encouraged more decorous lightweight opéras comiques; among these
are Gounod's Le Médecin malgré lui (1858), Philémon et Baucis, and
La Colombe (both 1860). The first is a close adaptation of Molière;
the second is a comedy woven around the Classical tale; the third
adapts La Fontaine and Boccaccio. All are unpretentious. Le
Médecin malgré lui.avoids imposing sentiment on Molière and, though
it has quite prolonged ensembles containing action, never musically
overwhelms the text. Yet Gounod's fresh melodic genius was still
apparent.
The plot, but not the dramaturgy, of Philemon et Baucis evokes
the eighteenth century (cf. Philidor's Le Bücheron). The chorus
proved more of a problem than in Le Médecin (where it closed off
Acts I and II), and in the original three-act version was chiefly
confined to Act II for the orgy and then destruction of Philémon's
sacrilegious neighbours. In 1876 it was reduced to two acts by simple
elimination.!? The music is pleasurable and varied, rather than
memorable, probably because the old couple of the title are hardly
given a chance to be individuals.
La Colombe, for all its wonderfully contrived harmonic side-steps,
seems over-artificial, and so to lack dramatic conviction. Its successful
premiére in Germany was followed by a less enthusiastic reception
for the somewhat revised Paris version of 1866.
BERLIOZ'S BÉATRICE ET BÉNÉDICT
Composed almost as a relaxation after Les Troyens, Béatrice et
Bénédict (1862) as an opéra comique related closely to current trends:
11 Le Faucon; The Decameron, Day 5, Story 9. The librettos of all three were by Barbier
and Carré.
1? Fuller details in Steven Huebner, "The Second Empire Operas of Charles Gounod (Diss.,
Princeton, 1985), fos. 236ff. Most of Gounod's stage works entail complex questions of
revision and publication that have still not been resolved by scholarship.
BERLIOZ'S BEATRICE ET BENEDICT 335
literary distinction of its source; modest use of chorus; small number
(three) of main soloists; emphasis on lightness and wit. The text
was, however, fashioned by the composer, from Much Ado about
Nothing.!3 True to form, Berlioz produced something unique: it was
not staged in Paris until 1890, though it was successful in Baden-Baden
(1862) and Weimar (1863). The almost-tragic plot to stain Hero’s
character was omitted, as was the villainous Don John; Hero's
betrothed, Claudio, sings only in the trio, No. 5, and ‘Marche
nuptiale’, No. 13. To substitute for the immortal wit of Dogberry
and the singer Balthasar, Berlioz created Somarone, prototype of
the opinionated bad musician. The chorus performs Somarone's
‘Epithalame grotesque’, No. 6, in academic fugue style, then repeats
it with equally grotesque ornamentation for oboe, sketched on the
spot. However, Somarone's second contribution beginning Act II
rather overplays the musical style of joke, and its position in the
drama creates a gap between the gulling of Beatrice (off-stage, before
the ‘Duo-Nocturne’, No. 8), and her great aria of reaction, ‘Il m'en
souvient, No. 10.
Such things, however, can be overcome in production. Berlioz's
spoken dialogue is concise and his purpose sure: to portray and
develop the characters of his eponymous principals. In particular,
‘Berlioz has to reconcile Béatrice to the very conception of true love,
tenderness and constancy',!4 of which her cousin Hero becomes the
example. The early sparring-match (the Duo, No. 4, 'Comment le
dédain'), Shakespeare's “What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet
living”, excellently captures the badinage of Beatrice and Benedict,
but also its emotional sub-text, entrusted to the orchestra. There are
many haunting pages that paint a valediction to Berlioz's ‘great,
strong Italy’.!5 The ending (Scherzo-Duettino, No. 15) is conceived
in the moral vein of vaudeville opéra comique, after the spirit in
Much Ado of Benedick's *For man is a giddy thing, and this is my
conclusion'; but its cyclic return to the evanescent music of the
overture lends it the Shakespearian ambiguity of ‘Life’s but a walking
shadow' (also the postscript of the Memoirs) (Ex. 206).
13 Apparently the first attempt to make this play into an opera. Berlioz's plans for such a
work went back to an Italian setting (1833) and a much adapted version (c.1852), the scenario
of which is printed in the New Edition of the Complete Works, ed. Hugh Macdonald, iii. 299-
300.
14 Julian Rushton, ‘Berlioz’s Swan-song: Towards a Criticism of Beatrice et Bénédict',
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 109 (1982-3), 113-14: "Thus Berlioz's Beatrice
is his own character, not Shakespeare's, just as his Friar Laurence, Faust, or Dido are his
own.'
15 David Cairns (trans.), The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (New York and London, 1969),
175.
336 OPERA: 1850-1890
Ex. 206
Allegro scherzando d 66
BÉNÉDICT
(Love is a flaming torch)
BERLIOZ'S LES TROYENS
Les Troyens (partial staging, 1863) is obviously a Romantic epic,
its resources matched to those of Parisian grand opéra. Literary epics,
though avoiding antiquity, were perfectly characteristic of French
Romanticism. But they, like Wagner's music dramas, strove for an
encompassing expression of unity. Berlioz had no philosophical
predisposition towards mysticism or renewal. David Cairns has
written:
Remorse and redemption, the /eitmotiv of so much Romantic drama, have
no place in Berlioz's scheme of things. Unlike Goethe, he does not redeem
his Faust.... The heroic figures of The Trojans live their lives without
repining, accept their fate and go down to eternal night, driven by forces
beyond the reach of man. Such a vision is Classical, not Romantic.
The work is, on probably every level, the finest French opera
composed during this period. Its Classical setting was not a novelty;
moreover its five-act format, divided into two ‘dark’ (Trojan) acts,
two ‘bright’ (Carthaginian) acts, and a tragic fifth act, compares
closely with that of La Reine de Chypre. In length —some four hours
of music—it does not exceed larger works by its contemporaries.
Yet it has stood virtually outside musical history since its conception.
The score was composed mainly in 1856-8 but for a century after
its partial staging in 1863 at the Théátre Lyrique was frequently
known as a bipartite work.!6 Publication of the full score had to
wait until 1969.
Les Troyens is based on Books I, II, and IV of Virgil's Aeneid.
Berlioz, who had been profoundly inspired by this epic since
16 The Théátre Lyrique staged Acts III-V (cut) as Les Troyens à Carthage. Vocal scores
are still common of this, and of Acts 1-П as La Prise de Troie, first heard in 1879. Not until
1908, in Munich, was Les Troyens given in the theatre in reasonably complete form on one
evening. See Ian Kemp (ed.), Hector Berlioz, ‘Les Troyens (Cambridge, 1988), Appendix D.
BERLIOZ’S LES TROYENS 337
childhood, wrote the opera (words as well as music) purely from
inner compulsion. The dramaturgy is not only expert, but reflects
all aspects of Virgil’s source— not least the concept of a ruling fate.
It was articulated in a succession of strongly contrasted types of
scene; this aspect, together with the appearance of the shades of
Hector and others, plus the large cast and gently comic duet scene,
‘Par Bacchus’ (No. 40) before the final tragedy, was Berlioz’s
own, mature borrowing from Shakespeare. Contrast, however, was
balanced by objectivity, the more necessary since the opera does not
want for action and excitement. Acts I and II, in which the wooden
horse is brought inside the walls of Troy, and the city sacked, are
given their ironic distancing by Berlioz through the repeated,
unheeded warnings of Cassandra. Aeneas plays his heroic part, but
not so as to predominate. The destruction of a city, its rituals and
its history, are the real themes. Trojan character is established
through the people's initial jubilation, their religious ceremony
mourning Hector, ‘Pantomime’ (No. 6), their determined ‘Marche
Troyenne' (No. 11), and the heroic mass suicide of Trojan women
in the ‘Final’ to Act II. The sheer force and grandeur of all this music
establishes for us that ideal background which Aeneas must keep
alive by pursuing his destiny and winning a kingdom in Italy. In
Act III he is fated to meet Dido; during the ‘Chasse royale et orage—
Pantomime', No. 29 (Act IV) they are fated to become lovers; in
Act V they part and Dido kills herself, prophesying future vengeance
on the race of Aeneas.
Berlioz did not need Scribe. The dramatic motivation of Aeneas
is welcome, following the feeble escapism of so many previous tenor
heroes. None the less, Les Troyens takes what it wants from him:
the acts each build well from first to last, reaching a dramatic climax
expressed in choral and ensemble terms (Acts II, III); however, in
Act I the grand opéra set piece—the ‘Final’, No. 11, with three
off-stage ensembles at differing distances—is capped by the cries of
Cassandre. Act IV is concluded by the main love duet, ‘Nuit
d'ivresse’, No. 37, and an imminent sense of departure (cf. Les
Huguenots). There are exotic, interpolated dances in Acts I, III, and
IV. Yet Les Troyens, with never-flagging musical quality, creates
constant surprises. This is because Berlioz thought out the requisite
musical form, as well as content, anew at each stage: “The hardest
task is to find the musical form, this form without which music does
not exist, or is only the craven servant of speech. ... I am in favour
of the kind of music you call free.’!?
17 Letter of 12 Aug. 1856, cited in Hugh Macdonald, Berlioz (London, 1982), 185.
338 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Sometimes tripartite structure is chosen (Cassandre’s Air, Мо. 2);
sometimes non-repeating dramatic monologue (Didon’s ‘Je vais
mourir', No. 47); sometimes rondo (the love duet, No. 37); sometimes
strophic (‘Chanson d'Hylas', No. 38). The most brilliant stroke was
the dance pantomime inspired directly by Virgil (the "Chasse royale
et orage’).
Dido and Troy's chieftain found their way to the same cavern. Primaeval
Earth and Juno, Mistress of the Marriage, gave their sign. The sky connived
at the union; the lightning flared; on their mountain-peak nymphs raised
their cry. On that day were sown the seeds of suffering and death.18
However, there is also the large-scale application of recurring
motivic features: an upward-rushing scale and a lower mordent figure,
sometimes combined with it (see Ex. 207 from Act I and Ex. 208
from Act II), and a certain rhythmic pattern (see Ex. 209, drawn
EXS 207
Adagio molto sostenuto Jon
EE
Ss MORDENT
Bx. 208
Andante un poco maestoso JSP
MORDENT
Terz
from Acts I and V). These devices do not denote an exact person
or thing, but ‘cluster in certain scenes, turning-points in the fate of
the Trojans and their victim, Dido'.!? Their fateful associations
permit Berlioz to intensify given situations, or underscore ironic
references, as in the otherwise serene duet, No. 37, in Act IV (Ex.
210), or the quintet, No. 35. Another aid to musical consistency is
18 The Aeneid, Book IV, trans. W. F. Jackson Knight (Harmondsworth, 1956), 102.
19 Julian Rushton, ‘The Overture to Les Troyens’, Music Analysis, 4 (1985), 128. Rushton
gives comprehensive tabular enumerations of motifs, and pursues his analysis in chapter 10
of Kemp (ed.), ‘Les Troyens’.
- GOUNOD'S GENIUS REVEALED 339
Ex. 210
Andantino non troppo lento
Б
[ou et
Str +8ve mf Cresc. ===
(+vc, db)
n.b. rhythm
the free foreshadowing of set-piece material (Cassandre-Chorebe
duet, No. 3, bars 308f.) in the preceding dramatic dialogue (ibid.,
bars 165ff., 210). The score also reflects Berlioz’s late interest in
novel musical scales or modes, notably in his music for the doomed
Trojan women in the ‘Cheur-Priere’, No. 14, in Act II (Ex. 211).
Ex 211
Andante non troppo lento
CHORUS OF TROJAN WOMEN
It is safe to predict that Les Troyens, for its unique moral integrity
no less than its ineffable beauty, will gradually assume a leading
place in all assessments of the nineteenth century's artistic legacy.
GOUNOD'S GENIUS REVEALED
Gounod's Sapho, libretto by Émile Augier, was first acted at the
Opera in 1851.20 That it had the first libretto there since 1823 using
a Greek subject is but one of its points of significance. Augier decided
on a three-act structure and a virtually domestic approach to the
20 Revised in 1858, much cut; revised 1884 with extensively rewritten text and music. See
Huebner, “The Second Empire Operas’, fos. 87 ff.
340 OPERA: 1850-1890
subject. Phaon, whose affections have switched from the woman of
beauty, Glycére, to the woman of music and poetry, Sapho, is
involved in a plot to murder the tyrant Pittacus. (The coup never
happens and the tyrant never sings.) Glycére discovers the plot,
blackmails her rival into silence, and escapes with a deceived Phaon
into exile. Sapho drowns herself.?!
Although there are various choruses, representing people, priests,
and so on, they are not given much sense of realism. Musically, they
are routine. The aesthetic focus of the work repudiated grand opéra
in order to concentrate on a musical world of ritual and sensuous
beauty. Both required to be captured in the style of pure song (as
befitted Sapho's Lesbos). Gounod's melodic and harmonic genius
was manifest in a series of individual and subtle lyric utterances.
The entire opera, in fact, ends not histrionically but with neo-Classical
control: Sapho's art expressed as song. In a sense this is the first
opéra lyrique of its period. Avoiding linear extremes, Gounod's
melody found its cachet 1n the small scale, in balancing repetition,
in the use of one or two pitches as a centre of gravity (see Ex. 212
from Act III, No. 17).
Ex. 212
Larghetto J =50
(Be blessed by a dying woman)
21 Glycère extracts the plot from a weak conspirator, Pythéas. His open request for favours
from Glycère as the price of his secret, and the generally revolutionary undertones, caused
problems with the censor.
GOUNOD'S GENIUS REVEALED 341
Gounod's harmony revealed several future paths for French music
and its consistency in this respect may well have caused its lack of
success in 1851 (only nine performances). Several melodies tend
towards the subdominant area, so robbing them of expected forward
motion, as in the ‘Ode’, Act I, No. 6 (Ex. 213). More strikingly,
several vital passages are built up by a piquant or hypnotic circling
round a tonic chord: one simple recitative example from Act I, No.
4, is shown in Ex. 214, while Ex. 215 (reduced from Phaon's ‘Quand
ce qu'on voit' from Act II, No. 10) has its tonic rooted inside the
harmony. Ex. 216, Sapho's ‘Cantiléne’ in Act II, No. 13, illustrates
the end of an eight-bar period consisting of a single oscillation
between I and V, and how, lulling the hearer into security, the
composer steps elliptically on to G major. Above the oscillation
Sapho's melody, ‘Ma vie en ce séjour, was articulated in a quite
un-classical manner. It was revolution from within.
The composer was willing to apply sequential treatment to
secondary dominants, and write sequential and chromatic pro-
Ех. 213
Moderato pomposo
ton Der au - tel
IV IF? IV
(О Liberty, severe goddess, your noble altar has been broken)
Ex. 214
Moderato
m — ES
Kä AT : — a > О ЯШЕ ЫГЫ BER `2: ШЕШЕ DEE Ce DE BE EA RR E GV pm
DA —M—ILB i L5s Гн 1001р та 11-001
E E LJ
342 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 216
Andantino 2.65
ЅАРНО ..
e =- te le
jour
(Is a limpid stream which runs over moss and reflects the light)
Ex. 217
Allegro molto
gressions of sevenths. In Ex. 217, where the Act II trio, No. 15,
sees Glycère’s trap close around Sapho and Phaon, the seven
consecutive sevenths in the context of passionate dialogue (shown in
reduced form) show positively Wagnerian sensibility. Authentically
Wagnerian diction, nevertheless, appears only briefly, in the
heightened recitative prior to the final ensemble of Act II. But
contained, disciplined, linearly clear dissonances in Sapho’s solo of
forbearance (see Ex. 212) point to Fauré and Debussy.
Gounod's second recitative opera, La Nonne sanglante (1854), was
set to Scribe’s five-act melodrama stemming from Lewis’s The Monk.
A passage occurring in Act II before the Bleeding Nun first speaks
broke new ground by exploring a sequence of unrelated triads a
whole tone apart (Ex. 218). But much of the score is conventionally
operatic, with solo parts written for the effect of a high note, severa!
12/8 movements of traditional cut, and an Italianate finale to Act IV
in the normal four sections. However, a waltz for the peasants
beginning Act Ш anticipated Faust. Following the publication of a
government enquiry into the Opéra, which attacked (inter alia) the
FAUST 343
be a Gei
19: pimin Gn Sed SUE er Ee
eet
way the public had been seduced into accepting ‘the trickery of
insincere expression’, its new director, Crosnier, had La Nonne
sanglante withdrawn after eleven performances.22 The two above
works had nevertheless revealed Gounod to be dramatically radical
as well as flexible, and the most outstanding French creative talent
since the advent of Berlioz a generation earlier.
FAUST
In 1859 this long-awaited masterpiece brilliantly deployed
Gounod’s dramatic and musical intelligence. Its diversity of emotion,
which faithfully followed Goethe’s spirit, enabled Gounod’s superior
range to be concentrated within a single work: learnedness, naïveté,
dances, love music, demonic energy, and an apotheosis. He created
a totally original sequence of musical forms. Taken in conjunction
with the flowering of his musical idiom into a degree of chromaticism
as yet unheard on the French stage, these features explain the feeling
behind Gounod’s words to Charles Réty in 1859: ‘I am most anxious
that M. R. Wagner hears my score of Faust. His approval as well
as his criticism are of the kind one seeks.’23
The opera was first heard, with a modest quantity of spoken
dialogue, at the Theätre Lyrique. The substitution of recitative (1860)
was only one of many early adjustments, but these could not
overbalance the work’s coherence. The dramatic source had been
Michel Carré’s play Faust et Marguerite (1850); the opera, with
libretto by Carré himself and Barbier, added other scenes from
Goethe’s Faust.24 If Carré’s play emphasized the popular and
everyday, Gounod’s music gave it convincing poetry. These in
combination (particularly in the spoken dialogue version) produce
22 ‘Rapport de la Commission chargée d'examiner la situation de l'Opéra’, Le Moniteur
universel, 2 July 1854. Private enterprise, as initiated by Véron, had not respected ‘the authority
of good taste’. See Huebner, "The Second Empire Operas’, fo. 157.
?3 Walsh, Second Empire Opera, p. 105 n. Wagner arrived in Paris in September 1859. Full
and vocal scores of his Der fliegende Hollünder, Tannhüuser, and Lohengrin had been published
in 1844, 1845/6, and 1851/2 respectively.
?! i.e, Faust, Part I; see Huebner, ‘The Second Empire Operas’, fos. 169 ff.
344 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
changes of dramatic speed and texture wholly faithful to Goethe.
Indeed, given the limitations inherent in the operatic genre, it is
difficult to imagine a more expert adaptation of the latter half of
Faust, der Tragödie erster Teil 29 Gounod's protagonist is admittedly
the sensualist rather than the Doctor. This, however, allowed the
authors to impose a larger theatrical (and indeed thematic) symmetry
on material which in itself might have been too diffuse:
Act I Act V
Faust's pact; Madness and death;
vision of Marguerite redemption of
Marguerite
(Musically characterized by free, lyrical parlante texture; formal
solos are truncated.)
Act II Act IV
Valentine's departure; Valentine's murder;
public scenes; church scene
first contact with Marguerite
(Musically characterized by mixture of shorter set-piece solos
(often ABA and strophic forms), ensembles, and some chorus
work.)
Act III
Faust's courtship of Marguerite;
garden scene with Mephistopheles and Martha;
love duet
(Musically dominated by the freely continuous, increasingly
chromatic quartet and duet; no chorus.)
All-ımportant, however, was the internal musical design, its
subtlety and unity. Gounod's language accepted the expressive
discord (often in the form of melodic appoggiatura or neighbour note)
and, unlike Meyerbeer's, applied advanced chromatic progressions to
all parts of the score as needed, i.e. from climactic moments down
to merest recitative. With this went the virtual dissolving of the ancient
antithesis between set-piece (e.g. aria) texture and conversation
(recitative) texture. The fluidly alternating pattern of Lully's operas
could have been the model for a heightened, accompanied recitative
25 The opera differs most by having Mephistopheles bribe Faust with a vision of his ideal
woman in Act I. Obviously scenes like the Walpurgisnacht were impractical, though Gounod
at one point wrote an orchestral piece to represent it. Valentine is shown before his departure
for the wars. Siébel is made into Marguerite's adolescent admirer, but this role also personifies
the close-knit environment, both poor and pious, from which Goethe's Margarete comes.
FAUST 345
that gave way freely to brief, memorable solos or ensembles.
Fortunately, Gounod’s themes (more diatonic than Wagner’s) had
the strength of his harmonic repertoire, certain melodies attaining
that brazen power which for decades had seemed the prerogative of
Italian music.
Building on the spirit of the times, Gounod made thematic
recollection an essential part of the score. Faust’s urgent demand
for the return of youth and its pleasures (Act I, “А moi les plaisirs")
returns in Act II (arioso connecting Nos. 5 and 6) and Act III (after
Siebel’s ‘flower’ song, 'Faites-lui mes aveux’, No. 7). The basic
returning image, however, is the music for the Act I vision of
Marguerite (Faust’s *O merveille? in No. 2), which is woven with
immense skill into the Act III love duet, No. 11, at О nuit d'amour,
and will also be recalled, with other painful musical memories, by
the unbalanced Marguerite in prison in Act V (duet No. 19, at *Non!
Reste, Ex. 219). But this theme itself has a three-note conjunct
motif (marked y) that is found in several other diverse themes
throughout the opera: the final ritornello of the love duet, No. 11
(Ex. 220); ‘Le Veau d'or, Act II, No. 4 (Ex. 221); the off-stage
Ex. 219 MARGUERITE
Adagio J =60 Reste en- core_ et que ton
bras, que ton bras. Com-me au-tre - fois au mien s'en-la - ce!
(Stay awhile, and let your arm clasp mine, as in times past!)
Ex. 220
Maestoso
346 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 221
Allegro maestoso
MEPHISTOPHELES
у
Lejveau d’or est tou-jours de - bout!
(The golden calf still stands!)
E
Allegretto
CHORUS (off-stage)
Aux champs l’au - ro - re'nous rap - pel - le
(Dawn summons us to the fields)
Ей 223
Poco andante
VALENTINE
А -vant de quit - ter ces lieux _
(Before 1 leave this place)
chorus near the opening of Act I (Ex. 222); and Valentine’s celebrated
cavatina in Act II (Ex. 223).
Gounod's orchestration attained a high level of refinement, and
embodied a hitherto unheard-of importance relative to the material
given to the voices. These aspects may be seen in Ex. 224 from the
close of Act III, with its Debussy-like ecstasy. As Martin Cooper
has written, ‘this scene . . . set a standard that influenced composers
for the rest of the century’.26 Another novel ingredient was the
‘learned’ contrapuntal music introducing Faust, which probably
reflects the Bach revival but is aptly reinterpreted with Romantic
harmonies.
GOUNOD’S LATER WORKS
Faust was followed by two problematic operas. At the Opéra La
Reine de Saba (1862) suffered from Gounod's habitual over-writing
and indiscriminate cutting in rehearsal. Its concentration on recitative
and solo was found confusing, even a ‘vast physiognomy of vaporous
and fleeting contours’.2? More promising was Mireille (1864), first
26 ‘Charles Gounod’, in The New Grove, vii. 582.
2? Cited in Huebner, ‘The Second Empire Operas’, fo. 260. The work was successful only
in Brussels. It derived from Gerard de Nerval’s Le Voyage en Orient. Several revised versions
exist.
GOUNOD'S LATER WORKS 347
Ex. 224
Larghetto d =50
MARGUERITE
p
Que la feuil-letrem - bleet- pal-
(Does the petal tremble and quiver with love? Tomorrow!)
produced at the Théátre Lyrique. Its originality lay in the subject of
a love tragedy provoked by social differences but set in a timeless,
perhaps modern, rural community. Designed as a five-act opéra
comique with its limited amount of dialogue—in verse—it was
derived from Frédéric Mistral’s provengal poem, Miréio (1859).
Unfortunately, Gounod's conscientious visit to the area was not
enough to transmute the artlessness of the subject into music, and
the characters fall into operatic clichés. There are, naturally, patches
of local colour; but even the ghosts of the Rhóne in Act III could
be mistaken for angels. Act II has a grand opéra sectional finale
which inflates the tale as much as the sanctimonious style of the last
act." The ‘Chanson de Magali’, set entirely in alternate 9/8 and
6/8, looks more original than it sounds. The fragility and inner
depth of the subject could easily, however, be related to the later
world of Pelléas et Mélisande; the mystic forces which destroy the
bullying Ourrias exist as much outside conventional reality as do
Maeterlinck's subtly ambiguous underground scenes.
28 Mireille was long known in a three-act version with happy ending (from 1864). The
Henri Busser recitative edition (1939) does not represent Gounod's original intentions.
348 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Planned, like Mireille, to contain dialogue, Romeo et Juliette (1867)
was given recitatives in time for the first performance at the Theätre
Lyrique.?? (For the first time since the Revolution of 1789, а law
had in 1864 decreed the liberty of the theatres, inasmuch as a director
could now mount a stage work in any genre at will.) Barbier and
Carré followed Shakespeare quite closely, to the extent of including
an 'Ouverture-Prologue, avec chaur', a token part for Paris, and a
Queen Mab solo (‘Ballade’) for Mercutio.30 But by concentrating
attention on the lovers in Acts II, IV, and V, telescoping events
towards the end (Romeo arrives at the Capulets’ vault without our
knowing how or why), and omitting the reconciliation of families,
the authors reduced the whole conception; the play's more abrasive
elements find no place. Indeed the music before Juliette swallows
her sleeping-draught has little of Shakespeare's expression of panic
at this point, and Roméo's music before taking poison is lyrically
passive. The opera is articulated with formal orthodoxy, for example,
closed ABA solo forms and ensemble finales to Acts I and III, the
first of which is wooden in effect. Fortunately, Gounod's music
regained much of its harmonic originality, which was lavished on
the love idylls. Their extent and intensity (almost filling Acts II and
V) entitle us to speak of a French response to Tristan und Isolde
(scores published 1860). Gounod’s phrase structures are persistently
symmetrical, but not his modulation. He now admits seventh chords
functionally on degrees of the scale such as III and VII (see the
asterisks in Ex. 225 from Roméo’s Act II cavatina), which can lead
to a series of exotically related tonal resting places. This music leads
directly to the balcony scene, itself built up as a series of exalted
dialogues and small solos which culminate in two repeated strophes
for the lovers together, making their bitter-sweet farewells: this
vestigial cabaletta (Ex. 226) has been absorbed formally and ex-
pressively into a free-sounding sequence, concluded by Romeo’s
solitary valediction.
Ex. 225
Bb I it VI Vb үү
Өй ЖИГ С ye
С: VII I
29 Joél-Marie Fauquet, ‘Quatre versions de Romeo et Juliette’, L'Avant-scéne, 41 (1982),
66-9.
30 [t was the first operatic setting with such a piece or with a Prologue. See Winton Dean,
‘Shakespeare and Opera’, in Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.), Shakespeare in Music (London, 1964), 151.
MEYERBEER'S L’AFRICAINE 349
Ex. 226
Moderato
[voices doubled by Я p
clarinets and strings] ‚ Quasi andante Tempo I
JULIETTE cresc. "$ retenu ———
Р DM
Ab Ў
CH aute]
ее үү — en БЕГ Ee.
i. = DS == ——
N
De cet a - dieu si douce est la tris - tes - se, Que je vou-
Quasi andante Tempo I?
trés retenu ——
drais te dire a - dieu..jus-qu'à de - main!. .
(So sweet is the sadness of this farewell, that I would bid you farewell until tomorrow!)
In Act V much is sung by the lovers either as musical recollection or
accompanied by such recollection (cf. Tristan): ‘Sois béni’ (Act III);
"Non, ce n'est pas le jour' (Act IV); the 'embrace' theme which fol-
lows the preceding; the ‘Anges du ciel’ theme opening and closing
Act IV, Scene i; and a transformation of ‘Le Sommeil de Juliette’
(beginning Act V) as she awakens. And, for once, Gounod concluded
an operatic love-death without either bombast or more than four
bars of sanctimoniousness.
MEYERBEER'S L AFRICAINE
The original contract for a five-act opera entitled L’ Africaine was
signed by Scribe and Meyerbeer in May 1837. Neither man lived to
see its premiére in 1865 so the preparation was placed in the hands
of Germain Delavigne and others (for the text) and the octogenarian
François Fétis (for the score)?! As Meyerbeer had habitually
modified his music in rehearsal, and since L' Africaine as he left it
lasted four and a half hours exclusive of intervals, the Fétis ver-
sion represents only one attempt at an unobtainable authenticity;
31 Fétis left a record of his procedures both in the published full score and a vocal score
entitled Deuxiéme Partie de l'opéra en cing actes L' Africaine, containing twenty-two deleted
fragments.
350 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
һе favoured cutting whole sections or items—when absolutely
necessary—whereas Meyerbeer would probably have rewritten smal-
ler units.32 Nevertheless, the opera was very successful, regularly
acted at the Opera until 1902.
L' Africaine began and, to a large extent, ended its evolution as an
episodic adventure story with an exotic emphasis. Originally it
concerned a love triangle between the Spanish officer Fernand, the
viceroy of Seville's daughter Inés, and the African queen Selica.
Meyerbeer composed a certain quantity of music but then, under
the fresh influence of Camöes’s account of Vasco da Gama's discovery
of India, got Scribe to rewrite the libretto; this was delivered in 1853.
But his changes were essentially superficial: Fernand became Vasco
and Selika an Indian queen. Nothing was made of Vasco's character
as an explorer. (The work was by now entitled Vasco de Gama but
Fétis insisted on the old title, geographical confusion notwithstanding.
His Sélika rules over an unnamed island.) Meyerbeer composed the
music during parts of 1857 and 1860-4; some music from the version
of 1837-43 was re-used, but was itself often substantially revised.??
The action begins as Vasco returns from Diaz's failed expedition
with Sélika and her chieftain, Nélusko. Vasco's rival Don Pedro is
given charge of a new expedition and also obtains the hand of
Vasco's beloved, Ines. In Act III, set at sea, Pedro’s vessel is wrecked,
in spite of Vasco's warnings. Sélika has always loved Vasco; she now
saves his life from the revenge of her people (who execute Pédro)
but, when Vasco goes back to Inés, dies by inhaling the noxious
perfume of the flowers of a great manchineel tree. The opera may
have been attractive precisely because it retained a totally sentimental
attitude to its material?4^ As the character-motivation becomes
steadily less satisfactory, so the picturesque elements become pro-
gressively more important: the storm and shipwreck; the obeisance
to and celebrations for Sélika in Act IV; Vasco's duet with her, sung
under the influence of a love potion; and the unique final tableau.
‘Oriental’ local colour was, naturally, featured all through, but not
all-pervasively: it can resemble Halévy's music for Jaguarita l'indienne
(cf. Ex. 203), as in Act II, when Selika in an ‘Air du sommeil’ fans
32 Extensive details of L’Africaine’s history are found in John H. Roberts, "The Genesis of
Meyerbeer's "L'Africaine" ' (Diss., Berkeley, 1977). Meyerbeer died on 2 May 1864, shortly
after finishing his work.
33 [bid., fos. 28-30, 161; Roberts notes that Meyerbeer's visual imagination enriched the
1853 conception in many details (fo. 134).
31 Nélusko remains implacably opposed to the Westerners, even delivering a defiantly ironic
salvo in Act I to the Portuguese assembly, aimed at their practices in slavery. But, though he
causes the shipwreck, he is not allowed a solid identity.
MEYERBEER'S L’AFRICAINE 351
Ех. 227
Andante grazioso
SELIKA ¢trésdoux EE
mes_ge-noux fils du. so-leil,
triangle
(et їгё$ mesure les triples croches) touchez legerement
(On my knees, son of the sun, victor on the field of battle)
Vasco while singing (Ex. 227). Orchestral effects exploit both the
rich low wind timbres (two cors anglais and two bass clarinets are
required) and the percussion world of tam-tam and glockenspiel (see
Ex. 229). The four-part off-stage choir vocalises as part of the
accompaniment to Selika’s ‘Un cygne au doux ramage’ in Act V.
The concentration on such things in the final two acts helps lift the
work out of the realms of history or verisimilitude on to its perfumed
plateau and fantastic love-death (Ex. 228).
The opera’s whole fabric supports the same central ethos of
fragmentation and loss of personal will; that is, Meyerbeer uses a
mosaic-like sequence of abbreviated set pieces, minimising assertion
and personal conflict. His actual language becomes maturely lyrical,
relaxing the intensity of rhythmic and chromatic drive seen in the
composer's 1849-59 works. Old-fashioned act endings have almost
gone. The finale of Act I is the most traditional, yet it arises
unobtrusively out of dramatic exchanges. Act II concludes in resigned
352 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
EX23228
Andante
SÉLIKA (feeling the effect of the narcotic flowers)
(What heavenly chords)
Ex32729
Allegretto grazioso 4-88 Un peu plus lent
INDIANS
INES (in the distance)
CHORUS OF PORTUGUESE
(off-stage)
ver - rai plus
2bn off-stage
(INDIANS: Set ablaze on this fine day! INES: Farewell, fair shores, that 1 shall never see again)
MEYERBEER’S L’AFRICAINE 353
mood with an 'andante' septet, Act III with a terse chorus of
conquering Indians, and Act IV with a striking juxtaposition of East
and West, for, while dancers prepare the nuptials of Sélika and
Vasco, the off-stage voice of a supposedly-dead Inés breaks in almost
bitonally (Ex. 229), singing a motif which we recognize from Act I
as Vasco's faithful farewell to her before his departure two years
before the opera's action starts (Ex. 230). Meyerbeer's harmony
could also follow Vasco into intoxicated regions (Ex. 231, from the
Act IV Duo, No. 17), or, briefly, express narcotic ecstasy in the
same duet using a chromatic seventh chord on the flat leading-note
(Ex. 232). The work fails in so far as its construction requires us to
believe in decisions people make; thus Act III and its weakly
characterized Don Pédro fare the least well.
Ех. 230
Andante con moto Jon
A -dieu mon.douxri - va - ge A - dieu_mon seul а - mour!__
(Farewell, gentle shores, farewell my only love!)
Ex9291
Allegro con moto
VASCO avec ardeur
ar
FS ae I IIILNIT—I
| eet TTL EE Sx E d
cresc. molto
(Like a flaming beam has entered my heart)
354 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 232
Allegretto
SELIKA Je me sens au ciel
doux; trainez le ѕоп |“
— фр (+harp, str pizz.)
(I feel as though in heaven)
Each of Meyerbeer's grands opéras, therefore, presented a different
dramatic and even technical milieu. The guiding theme of Robert le
diable is redemption; Les Huguenots is an important Romantic
tragedy; Le Prophéte amounts to an epic concerning a failed re-
volution; and LU Africaine celebrates the unworldly aspects of love
and death. They influenced the public because they contained a
wealth of good music; the profession because they translated ideas
into new musico-dramatic terms; and both because in Paris they set
the highest standards of contemporary operatic stagecraft.
VERDI IN PARIS
Verdi wrote or rewrote four operas for Paris: Jérusalem (4 acts,
Opera, 1847); Les Vépres siciliennes (5 acts, Opera, 1855); Macbeth
(4 acts, Théátre Lyrique, 1865); Don Carlos (5 acts, Opéra, 1867).
The first and third of these were revisions and are discussed elsewhere.
Paris attracted Verdi both financially and artistically. He was to
reside there or nearby at Passy from July 1847 for two years, for
the winter of 1851-2, from October 1853 for over two years, for
parts of 1856 and 1863, and for much of the fifteen months leading
up to Don Carlos.
A contract for an opera with Scribe was ready early in 1848; in
1852 Verdi signed such a contract for a work, yet to be agreed, in
four or five acts.3> The third subject offered by Scribe, Les Vêpres
siciliennes, was accepted late in 1853 as a recasting of the old text
prepared for Halévy and begun by Donizetti as Le Duc d' Albe.
Verdi's ambitions as to scale were as decided as was his preference
35 Frank Walker, The Man Verdi (London, 1962), 184; Andrew Porter, ‘Les Vépres siciliennes:
New Letters from Verdi to Scribe’, 19th-century Music, 2 (1978), 96. This article contains
Verdi’s draft plan for the end of Act IV.
- VERDI IN PARIS 355
for Scribe: the latter recorded, “Verdi wanted a great big opera in
five acts, a work as big as Les Huguenots or Le Prophéte. I agreed
to everything.36 A sixteenth-century Flemish revolt against the
Spaniards became a thirteenth-century revolt against the French.
Though this revolution is successfully accomplished at the end of
the opera, the work concentrates in its last three acts on the loyalties
of the duchess Héléne (whose brother has been executed as a rebel
by the French) and her lover Henri (a Sicilian patriot who turns out
to be the son of the hated French governor, Guy de Montfort). In
variety and dramatic situation the libretto is good: Verdi's active
part in its arrangement is beyond doubt. The French are quickly
seen as irresponsible rulers while Henri, Montfort, and Helene are
established strongly. Procida, the Sicilians' political leader, returns
from a mission to Spain. А first Sicilian revolt (Act II) is avoided
only by Henri’s arrest, while the latter's paternity is revealed in Act
III. Torn between filial duty and patriotism, he foils Montfort's
assassination. Héléne and Procida are saved from execution when,
in Act IV, Henri publicly acknowledges his father, who turns matters
to French advantage by arranging the surprise marriage of Helene
and Henri. But, as the bells ring out for this ceremony at Vespers,
Procida leads a massacre of the unarmed enemy: the principals are
slain.
Acts I and П are full of brilliant musical trouvailles, concisely
expounding both individual and national characters. Musical forms
are variously employed (including ternary, strophic, and free form);
where slow-fast aria form (Procida, Act II) or duet form with
strophic main sections (Montfort-Henri, Act I) are perceptibly
Italianate, they are fleshed out with various irregularities and designed
to sit as justly proportioned parts of a larger whole. A ‘new manner
of Verdian melody appears in the 'three-limbed' cut of AA'B; it has
been shown to be typical of the composer from the 1850s onwards.??
The second act, a fine musical and dramatic entity, grows steadily
in power and complexity towards a double-choir finale juxtaposing
enraged Sicilians with insouciant French officers and women going
to a ball. Additionally, the Sicilians’ music is shot through by a
dactylic rhythm that Verdi had long identified internally with the
36 Letter of 3 Dec. 1853: Porter, ‘Les Vêpres siciliennes, p. 100. The original authors’
preface, by Scribe and Charles Duveyrier, is reprinted in the French-Italian edition of the
libretto edited by Massimo Mila (Turin, 1973).
37 Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, ii. From Il trovatore to La forza del destino (London,
1978), 40, 198; Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Words and Music in Italian 19th-century Opera’, in
William Weaver and Martin Chusid (eds.), The Verdi Companion (London, 1980), 200-1.
356 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 234
Dans l'ombre et le si - len-ce, pré-pa-rons la ven-gean-ce!
(In darkness and silence, let us prepare for vengeance!)
Ex. 235
Andante mosso
FRENCH
Ven ёеап - се
(Ah, let us celebrate, our spirits elated)
concept of vengeance (see Ex. 233 from the overture and Act II
finale; Ex. 234 from Procida’s Act II ‘Palerme, 6 mon pays’, and
Ex. 235 from the Act II finale).38 On the other hand, the fatalistic
quality of the lovers’ emotions is economically conveyed through a
kind of tragic lullaby within their duet, ‘Comment, dans ma
reconnaissance’ (Ex. 236).
Act III is hindered by the long obligatory ballet (‘Les Quatre
Saisons), splitting the action into two. From here on certain problems
also emerge: their basis lies in the text, which, having aligned the
characters well, fails to make them utter or interact in an adult
manner. For example, Montfort becomes almost totally absorbed
with the idea of filial affection. The music thus begins to sound
38 More generally the motif signifies death, the adopted meaning for Budden, The Operas
of Verdi, ii. 51-2, drawing on Frits Noske, ‘The Musical Figure of Death’ in The Signifier and
the Signified: Studies in the Operas of Mozart and Verdi (The Hague, 1977), 171-214.
VERDI IN PARIS 357
Ex:236
Andantino
P HELENE con passione
ой nousal - lonsdes - сеп - dre,
= gt
SS Bm 7r:
SS Se ee ee
= cess ees ани
je ne ré- pon-drais pas!
(Near, perhaps, the tomb into which we shall descend, I could not respond to such self-sacrifice!)
Ех 237
Andante
HELENE AA
а mezza voce
mou-rir_ en t’ai-mant EEE Re oe ee je meurs heu - reuse. .
(To die loving you, ah, I die happy)
unjustifiably rich in the set pieces. The work's intended Meyerbeerian
Act IV climax (cf. Le Prophéte), where public ceremonial and private
agony so intimately intersect, is also adversely affected. This is not
to deny the great beauty of music like Henri's romance, ‘O jour de
peine' (though not its modified cabaletta section), or of the lambent
farewells of Helene in her romance, ‘Ami! le ceur d’Helene’, also in
Act IV (Ex. 237).
358 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Les Vépres siciliennes is characterized by (1) avoidance of simple
repetition, (2) thematic development, (3) flexible rhythmic structure,
and (4) a psychologically detailed approach to texture and scoring.
All these, together with the frequent use of a conceptual motif
(the ‘vengeance’ rhythm), were traits more subtly and ambitiously
employed in Don Carlos.
Although Don Carlos (1867) obviously exists in one sense as one
of the last and greatest of five-act grands opéras, it also exists in an
oblique relation to the grand tradition, as does Les Troyens. On the
one hand, Verdi definitely achieved that freedom from musical
formalism already noted in Opéra works from 1830: Don Carlos
shares many of the external traits seen earlier as characteristic of the
genre. On the other, the political background of the opera, though
consistently felt, is not normally dramatized through the chorus, or
by changing sites of action (cf. La Muette, Le Prophéte). The focus
instead is on a group of principals who tend to use such political
forces as exist to attempt to exorcise personal demons or repressions.
While the central thread is certainly the ‘doomed love’ of Carlos and
Elizabeth de Valois, pitted against 'fateful human decisions’, the
essence of the work is in the emotional interaction of a complex
group of characters. This allowed the composer to make a successful
four-act revision of the work (Milan, 1884). Moreover, it made for
a Paris original that was consistently intense in feeling and rich in
action, while also being rather lengthy. Its demands on audiences
made for a run of only forty-three performances, all in 1867.
The libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle, after Schiller's
eponymous verse drama, was accepted as a theme by Verdi in
summer 1865.39 Its wealth of suggestiveness has prompted mention
of Oedipus, Hamlet, and the 'Saul-David-Jonathan syndrome',49
and presented the musician with the challenge, successfully met, of
translating a rambling structure by Schiller into a musical experience
with a high degree of unity. As in the case of Les Troyens, we
can speak of a late-twentieth-century flowering of knowledge and
appreciation.?! In terms of Verdi’s art, the composer believed that
in La forza del destino, Don Carlos, and, later, Aida, ‘he had composed
39 [t had been mentioned by the Opera as an idea already in 1850 as part of the preliminaries
leading to Les Vépres siciliennes.
40 See the masterly account in Budden, The Operas of Verdi, iii. From Don Carlos to Falstaff
(London, 1981), pp.4-157.
41 Many publications have documented the actual discovery of forgotten music and related
letters: Budden, The Operas of Verdi, iii; Andrew Porter, “The Making of Don Carlos’,
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 98 (1971-2), 73-88. The two-volume vocal score
ed. U. Günther and L. Petazzoni (Milan, 1980), contains the music of all the versions, but
the extensive preface is only in Italian and German.
VERDI IN PARIS 359
operas of a new kind, “modern орега$”” made with ideas, not made
up of numbers. Their production ... should be undertaken only by
an ensemble company. ... He had read Wagner's theoretical works
and approved of many of the ideas expressed in them.’*?
Set around 1560, the action of Act I is located in France, the
remainder in the Spain of Philip II. The privations of winter and
war with Spain are at once exposed. Carlos (free and happy for the
only time) encounters his fiancée, Elizabeth. Their idyll is destroyed
when she is given in marriage by her father (the king of France) to
Carlos's own father, Philip II. The drama plays itself out in two
directions: the attempt by Carlos to cope with lost love, his rejection
of the infatuated Princess Eboli, and the consequences of her
vengeance; and the rise and fall of Carlos's bosom friend, the
Marquis of Posa. Posa harbours libertarian beliefs concerning the
Spanish subject people of Flanders, though he also becomes the
king's confidant. ‘Flanders’, as a place of destiny whither Posa and
Carlos are drawn, may be compared to ‘Rome’ in Les Troyens, but
the later work ends darkly as the mystical apparition of Charles V
(Philip's father, whose death was memorialized in Act II) enfolds
Carlos, saving him from murder at the hands of monarch and
Inquisition.43
The identity of Flanders is not evident in Verdi's music as Rome
becomes a reality in Berlioz's opera. However, in an essential episode
of Act III, all worldly and spiritual powers merge in a spectacular
scene that allowed Verdi, finally, to match Le Prophéte, Act IV.
Before the cathedral of Valladolid, public rejoicing in the presence
of the monarch will include the burning of three men by the
Inquisition. (Stage music with brass and saxhorns was incorporated,
the results foreshadowing Aida.) Suddenly six unknown deputies
from Flanders enter with Carlos to beg for relief from the ravages
of occupation. When Philip dismisses his son's plea to be sent hither,
Carlos draws his sword; only Posa can save the situation. Carlos is
led off to detention and the auto-da-fé resumes. The half-madness
to which he is provoked was captured in a five-note discord of the
ninth (Ex. 238), while the almost ferocious gaiety of the people seems
musically lit by the flames of the stake. Likewise, music of pathological
suggestiveness occurs in Carlos's tortured Act II duet with Elizabeth
3? Porter, 'Verdi', The New Grove, xix. 654.
43 Porter notes (The New Grove, xix. 654) that Carlos himself is the ‘common point of three
emotional triangles’: Elizabeth-Carlos-Eboli; Philip-Posa-Carlos; Philip- Elizabeth -Carlos.
These relationships are essentially chaste; since Eboli is seduced by the king, we can posit the
carnal triad of Elizabeth-Philip- Eboli.
360 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ex. 238
Allegro
DON CARLOS (drawing his sword) Ba Tr pg
LII
- rai ton. sau - veur, no-ble peu-ple fla - mand!
(By the God who hears me, I shall be your deliverer, noble Flemish people!)
Ех. 239
Andante sostenuto J =66
[timpani, bass drum omitted]
etc.
(one which Budden calls ‘one of the most impressive fusions of music
and drama to be found in all opera’).44 The orchestral imagery
illustrates the chasm in his mind between reality and fantasy.4^? Other
of the opera's most memorable phrases also turn out to be orchestral:
the Act IV opening (Ex. 239) summing up the icy depths of loneliness
in Philip, and the mixture of dogmatism and age in the person of
the nonagenarian Grand Inquisitor, slightly later in the act (Ex. 240).
44 Budden, The Operas of Verdi, iii. 75-8. Verdi ‘took infinite trouble with both the scoring
and the distribution between voice and orchestra’.
45 It is in D flat major, ‘always for Carlos the key of illusory happiness’ (ibid., p. 107).
VERDI IN PARIS 361
Verdi’s technique was founded on а fertile supply of ideas that
developed or changed in response to word or act. The frequency of
AA’B vocal themes is less evident to the listener than are the
consequences of an aesthetic formulation by Verdi in a letter to
Cammarano dating from 1851: ‘If only in opera there could be no
cavatinas, no duets, no trios, no choruses, no finales, etc., and if
only the whole opera could be, so to speak, all one number, I should
find that sensible and right.’?# None the less, he did not reject
traditionally static ensembles, such as that in Act III in reaction to
the Flemish deputies, the Act IV quartet, or the Act V finale ensemble
with its chorus of Dominicans.
We are more deeply conditioned by subtleties contributing to
a pervasive emotional local colour—that unyielding, depressed
atmosphere of the Church-dominated Spanish court: low clarinet
tones; low orchestral mixtures; a ubiquitous acciaccatura figure (seen
in Exx. 239-42, the last two from passages opening and closing Act
I) that attains the status of a governing topos of lament; and the
tendency of melodic phrases to fall, even in ostensibly happy passages.
(Antithetically, Carlos’s Act I Romance ‘Je l'ai vue' and Act I duet
are characterized by climbing phrases, joy still unalloyed. In the
auto-da-fé the hysterical upward scales of the orchestra become
psychologically as well as materially suggestive.) Additionally, Frits
Noske has identified *two distinctive elements dominating the score:
(a) a motive ascending from the tonic to the sixth ... and then
descending to the fifth ... (b) non-ornamental, chromatic rotation
around the fifth’. Rare in contiguous Verdi works, these elements
are present in proportion as a given character suffers psychological
frustration.”
Obvious concessions to outward Spanish local colour occur in Act
II, Scene ii (Eboli’s song), and Act III, Scene i (off-stage ball scene
with castanets). And an extensive ballet, called ‘La Peregrina’, bisects
the first half of Act III without adding much to its value.
Ex. 241
Andante mosso
46 Porter, ‘Verdi’, The New Grove, xix. 642.
4” Frits Noske, ‘“Don Carlos": The Signifier and the Signified’ in The Signifier and the
Signified (The Hague, 1977), 294-308.
362 OPERA: 1850-1890
'HEIGHTENED LYRICAL SPEECH’
This important melodic style of later. nineteenth-century French
opera was not characteristic of the period’s greatest melodist, Bizet;
but it was typical of demi-character works, especially those sung
throughout (opéra lyrique), by Thomas, Massenet, and, to a lesser
extent, Delibes. Perhaps, in part, it was a response to Wagnerian
‘continuous melody’; certainly, especially in later Massenet, it helped
to blur divisions between formal set piece and non-formal declamation
to the point of extinction. But it had national roots. These are seen
by reference to its properties of (1) syllabic setting of words, and (2)
commencing with small, stepwise intervals which gradually open out.
The syllabic setting derived from Classical opéra comique, where
Gretry found a way of giving shared importance to the meaning of
sung verse by moulding the line around the most significant words
it contained. Commencing a melody with small intervals was typical
of the eighteenth-century French song, particularly the romance as
it stemmed from Rousseau (see Ex. 243, from his intermede, Le
Devin du village), and was also used in opera. These twin elements
were only partially submerged later by the taste for periodically
structured cantabile.
The revival of syllabic values (see Ex. 92, above) was, therefore,
a kind of neo-Classicism, opposed to the rhetorical German-Italian
Dans mon са - bane.ob - scu - re, Tou-jourssou - cis nou - veaux
(In my lowly hut, always new cares)
Ex. 244
Andante cantabile d= 126
Plus blan = che Miguel la@blane ‘chejher-mi - ne
(Whiter than white ermine)
Ex. 245
Andantino cantabile
SALOME — аанай ———=——
PD Ss en as SS a E
2 981 тано ee кашан a Se exe
En De Se SS Se Se 25
Ш е5 ах il est bon a sa pa-role_ est se - rei - ne
(He is gentle, he is good, his speech is calm)
THOMAS’S LATER WORKS 363
melody style here represented by a romance by Meyerbeer from Act
I of Les Huguenots (Ex. 244), conspicuously different in its use of
wide intervals, non-syllabic setting, and stress on musical symmetry.
Meyerbeer’s approach to word setting was in fact dominated by
musical values. He wanted Scribe ‘to construct his verses in such a
way that they [could] be consistently broken down into smaller units
for musical purposes’,48 and often composed vocal music before the
precise words were available from the librettist.
The loosening of melodic syntax in Gounod's Sapho (see Ex. 216)
had marked a revolutionary stage; in fact his habitual avoidance of
symmetrical or angular rhythms was criticized for incoherence.
Gounod's willingness to fragment a vocal line, while giving more
complete syntactical material to the orchestra, also pointed the way
forward (cf. Ex. 285). But opéra lyrique did not greatly develop the
domestic scale of its lyricism: thus the line of resemblance between
late-eighteenth- and late-nineteenth-century style is perceptible in,
for example, a celebrated melody from Act I of Massenet's Hérodiade
(1881) (Ex. 245). In his later works, such as Werther (1892), the line
was broken up into ‘heightened lyrical speech, strongly reinforced
by the orchestra’;49 such a language was typical of Puccini and other
early twentieth-century composers.
THOMAS'S LATER WORKS
We have already seen Ambroise Thomas's predilection as early
as 1837 for subtle harmony, rhythmic flexibility, and thematic
interconnections in opéra comique. Mignon (1866) was his fifteenth
such work, over thirty years of composition, and it became successful
to a degree enjoyed by only a handful of others: Carmen, Lakmé,
Manon, Le Pré aux clercs.°® Barbier and Carré took their central
character, the ‘mysterious child’, from Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre, and *ingeniously conflated other characters and incidents
to provide an opéra comique setting'.?! Although it is possible that
Mignon would have succeeded merely thanks to several melodies,
sentimental and dance-like, that are hard to forget, the very slightness
of its dramatic intrigue is at one with a fascinating amorality. No
48 See John Н. Roberts, “The Genesis of Meyerbeer's "L'Africaine" ' (Diss., Berkeley, 1977),
fo. 116.
49 Martin Cooper, ‘Jules Massenet', The New Grove, xi. 805.
50 Mignon had 1,833 performances at the Paris Opéra-Comique to 1950; Carmen, 2,607;
Lakmé, 1,265 to 1945; Manon, 2,000 to 1952; Le Pré aux clercs, 1,608 to 1949. See Stéphane
Wolff, Un Demi-siécle d'opéra-comique (1900-1950) (Paris, 1953).
51 Andrew Porter, “Travels with Mignon’ in Music of Three Seasons: 1974-1977 (New York,
1978), 52, an essay which provides information concerning an anterior manuscript version in
the Bibliothéque Nationale.
364 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
character has responsibility for anything except their own transitory
emotions; Mignon herself is an explicitly asexual figure. She grows
emotionally richer as events proceed; Wilhelm comes to understand
his emotions; Lothario (the Harper) regains his memory and finds
his daughter.5? The music, which is quite often melancholy, combines
affective melodies with the glimpses of profundity which modern
harmony could suggest, as in Mignon’s Act II duet with Lothario
(Ex. 246). Thomas’s cadential pauses became a stylistic mannerism
in Massenet; and the polished balance between the final security of
Ex. 246
Andante =
lan-gui sans es - pé -
L’äme en deuil, le cœur dé-chi-ré? A -lors tu соп-паіѕ ma souf-
(Have you suffered? Have you wept? Have you languished without hope? Your soul grieving,
your heart broken? Then you know my suffering!)
52 Such growth makes the happy ending almost inevitable. Thomas did, however, compose
a tragic ending for Germany. The breeches role of Frédéric was also a later adaptation, from
the original tenor part.
THOMAS'S LATER WORKS 365
F major and the excursions to A flat and A minor may be taken as
typical of the language of opéra lyrique. Commencing with smaller
intervals and moving to larger ones, this melody also provides a
point of reference regarding ‘heightened lyrical speech’, discussed
above, as does Ex. 247.
Recitatives composed in lieu of dialogue (1869) were an un-
convincing distortion of Mignon’s genre, and its fragile essence. The
atmosphere of complete debility opening Act III (Mignon lies ill,
sleeping in a deserted palace) was, after all, a precedent for Pelleas
et Melisande (first seen at the Opera-Comique), as indeed were
Thomas’s discreet orchestration and dreamily suggestive use of
thematic recollection. Chief among such material was ‘Connais-tu le
pays’ (Kennst du das Land’), first heard in Act I (Ex. 247), and
given a Berliozian wistfulness in its modulation from D flat to F
minor.
Barbier and Carré cast Hamlet (1868) as a five-act recitative work.
An accomplished score, it had steady success at the Paris Opéra. If
the cues for its literary pedigree and general design were those of
Faust, its predecessors in adapting Shakespeare’s play were Italian:
Mercadante (1822), Antonio Buzzolla (1848) and Franco Faccio
(1865), the last of whom had the distinction of setting Boito’s first
libretto. For Thomas the plot was telescoped and the ending
changed: the Ghost appears to Hamlet for the third time at Ophelia’s
funeral, finally inducing him to kill Claudius and serve his people
by becoming king. Although the tone of the libretto is predictably
operatic, several main scenes are authentically rendered: for example
the Ghost upon the battlements, the Players, the gravediggers, ‘To
be or not to be’, and—most successfully—Hamlet’s great interlocution
scene with Gertrude. Since the leading male roles were for baritone
voice or lower, the work gains an interesting sombreness of colour.
Thomas derived ideas shrewdly. His basic construction kept solos
and duets simple and brief, while heightening the connecting tissue
sometimes to a sustained arioso level. However, clichés of recitative
Ex. 247
Allegretto sostenuto
pa-ys où fleu-rit l’o-ran - ger?
— Ж
Соп - nais-tu le
(Do you know the land where the orange-tree blossoms?)
53 "These works, and Aristide Hignard's Hamlet (1888, but composed before Thomas's), are
discussed in Winton Dean, ‘Shakespeare and Opera’, pp. 163-8.
366 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 248
Ех. 249
Andantino con moto
HAMLET
Dou - ede la uc miè те Doute du so-leil et du jour
=: а e `
>! З = aa палан
0951-47 ol 9 9 9 ot ә —e
(Do you not recognize me? Hamlet is my husband . . .)
could not be avoided, especially given the traditional nature of the
text. Easily recognized recurring themes play a significant part: that
for Hamlet (Ex. 248) is used in Acts I, II, and V, while the motif of
his Act I avowal ‘Doute de la lumière’ to Ophelia (Ex. 249)5* is
recalled four times in different forms (see Ex. 250 from Act IV). This
was the legacy of Faust and of Meyerbeer. But Thomas went
further, recalling (to moving effect) the orchestral theme of Hamlet’s
self-dedication in avenging his father; recalling a motif from the
Players’ scene in Hamlet’s Act III monologue; juxtaposing earlier
fragments (sung by Hamlet) with deliberately alienating effect in the
ensemble finale to Act II; and making the Ghost’s Act I ‘Invocation’
music return with that spectre in Act III.
Elsewhere, Thomas’s style is excessively formalistic. Ophelia’s
character is limited by her symmetrical, short phrases laid over a
static bass; ingenious harmonic progressions are sometimes wasted
in linking material instead of infusing major scenes with greater
interest. The opera succeeds because the main role is so convincingly
created in music, particularly Hamlet’s emotions towards his father:
54 Cf. ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire; | Doubt that the Sun doth move’ (Hamlet, II. ii. 115-
16):
BIZET'S YOUTHFUL WORKS 367
Ех; 251
=54
HAMLET (bidding the Ghost farewell)
rit.
2 Dei
2 Sa PS eee n Е3Е8
En EE E н Ee Gg 5 ЖС a Ce E es ee Ee
douce) - vres - se! A -
(Sweet ecstasy! Adieu!)
Ex. 251, for example (Shakespeare's ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me’
speech), finely encapsulates the quality of his ‘noble heart’ near the
end of Act I. In the scene with Gertrude, Thomas created an
altercation of rare psychological conviction, building up at length
from a discontinuous start. Its force was surely not lost on Bizet, a
known admirer of Hamlet.
The use of a solo alto saxophone in the Players' scene could have
been suggested by Fétis's addition of a baritone saxophone part to
Г Africaine (which was heard at the time but not published). However,
Jean Georges Kastner's opera Le Dernier Roi de Juda (concert
performance, 1844) and Halévy's Le Juif errant (1852) preceded both
in using the instrument, though not soloistically.
BIZET'S YOUTHFUL WORKS
Georges Bizet (1838-75) was, almost from the first, a precociously
original composer, whose colours, rhythmic interest, and forcefulness
marked him out from the prevailing qualities of French opera. Thus
he inherited the mantle of Berlioz, who, in fact, lived long enough
to review and praise Les Pécheurs de perles (1863) in many particulars
as a score that did Bizet ‘the greatest honour'. Others, to a degree
that is at first hard to comprehend today, found Bizet's music
incomprehensible, or heretically Wagnerian.
Bizet was a child prodigy who entered the Paris Conservatoire
before his tenth birthday. He had close connections with Gounod,
his teacher and mentor, and Halévy, whose daughter Bizet married
and whose brother (Léon) and son (Ludovic) both acted as his
librettists. An early opéra comique remains unpublished (La Maison
368 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
du docteur, c.1855).5° The one-act Le Docteur Miracle attained eleven
performances as joint winner, in 1857,-of Offenbach's competition
intended to lead opéra comique back into the fold of traditional
galety. Ironically it was Bizet who was destined to revolutionize the
genre with a new type of tragedy: Carmen. The music of Le Docteur
Miracle indicates both very competent handling of vocal forces and
also embryonic examples of later creative traits: driving rhythm;
piquant harmonies—asterisked —as upbeats to the dominant chord
(see Ex. 252, Le Docteur Miracle, Overture, Ex. 253 from Les
Pécheurs de perles, Ex. 254, the opening of Djamileh, Ex. 271, and
Ex. 272 from Carmen); and, most significantly, the ability to write
extended, shapely melody. This gift, denied to Meyerbeer and
Gounod, is discussed separately below. There was no room for
harmonic innovation—later so important in Bizet's art —though
Pasquin enters in G minor in his couplets, No. 3, whereas the
ritornello is in B flat. But hints of future dissonances appeared in
the ‘Omelette Quartet, where chords of G, C minor, A, and D
minor succeed one another over an F pedal.56
The Roman years (1858-60) as Prix de Rome winner saw the
completion of Don Procopio, a two-act comedy which Bizet set in
Ех. 252 [X259
Allegro non troppo
Allegro
ei = eh $
1р —
nt e ES
` ee er с.
ELE
GES
Ех. 254
Mouvement de marche
55 The libretto, by Henri Boisseaux, has recently been identified by Lesley Wright: see “Bizet
before Carmen" " (Diss., Princeton, 1981), fo. 9, n. 19.
56 Compare Ex. 264, one of many characteristic pedal passages in Bizet. One might observe
that another fingerprint, the held note as part of a melody, can be regarded as an upper or
middle pedal point.
BIZET’S YOUTHFUL WORKS 369
Ex. 255
Allegro vivo
BETTINA
(What a precious scheme, charming idea!)
the original Italian. Although apparently modelled on Donizetti’s
Don Pasquale, whose plot it echoes closely, Don Procopio had
sufficient originality to provide material for several self-borrowings
in Les Pécheurs de perles, La Jolie Fille de Perth, and the Symphony
in C. Of these the most significant was Odoardo's serenade ‘Sulle
piume', No. 7, which became (not without changes) Smith's serenade,
no. 13, in La Jolie Fille de Perth. This is because it possesses a
characteristic form of melodic construction which may be termed
‘additive’. But more standard Italianisms became important too,
typified in the trio, No. 4 (Ex. 255). A second operatic envoi, La
Guzla de l'émir, was completed and even rehearsed, but seems to
have been destroyed. At the same juncture (1862) Bizet apparently
commenced his five-act grand opéra, Ivan IV. It survives only in a
putative early version ( rather than an assumed 1864-5 version which
was refused by the Opéra;?? Bizet was in fact the first great French
composer to have none of his operas originally staged there).
No greater contrast can be imagined than between the dramatic
falsities of Ivan IV, and the triumphs of characterization and timing
achieved in Djamileh (composed 1871). The former has an inept
libretto by F. H. Leroy and H. Trianon that Gounod had tried out
in 1855-6. The abduction in Act I by the Russians of Marie, and
the chance meeting in Moscow of Marie's father and brother in Act
III, recall Le Prophéte (Acts I, IV). Marie marries Ivan; her family's
naive rescue plan fails; Ivan survives an attempted usurpation. There
is no coherence of political or personal motivation; even a duet for
Ivan and Marie is lacking.
Bizet, at least in the surviving score, developed an appropriate
language mainly in the impersonal set pieces: the Act I ensemble of
57 See Winton Dean, ‘Bizet’s “Ivan IV"', in Herbert Van Thal (ed.), Fanfare for Ernest
Newman (London, 1955), 58-85. The published vocal score (1951), among many other liberties,
silently conflates the original Acts I and II.
370 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Аһ: У? , 1с (V) (1)
Caucasian mourning (not printed in the 1951 vocal score); the Act
II serenade; the ensemble finales to Acts II and IV; and ceremonies
and a Russian hymn in Act III. Here Bizet gave some individual
flavour to the manipulation of stock outlines, and his facility is
illustrated in the bold if misjudged string of seventh chords used in
the finale of Act II (Ex. 256). But the principals’ music merely bears
witness to Bizets impulses towards extended melody. This song
impulse—a Mozart-like trait —embarrasses the flow of action; the
melodic influence of Verdi seems incontrovertible,?8 though is kept
within bounds.
Wagner's example surfaced in different ways: a Lohengrin-inspired
ending to Act I; several large closing cadences interrupted by a
diminished seventh; some declamatory recitative using the gestures
of the Ring 29 There was a loose response to recurring motifs, with
ideas associated with Мапе and Yorloff. Displaying his genius for
music suggesting action, Bizet gave a passage to Marie fetching
spring water for the traveller Ivan that parallels Die Walküre, Act
I, Scene 1.60
BIZET'S STYLE
We can perceive Bizet trying and testing new aspects of musical
language with each completed opera, evidently aiming to forge a
unity between the type of drama and its appropriate score. But his
strong compositional personality, which matured early, permits us
to examine three aspects of his style— melody, harmony, rhythm—
with examples all predating Carmen.
Bizet exploited many melodic schemes. From Classical practice he
used both ‘periodic’ construction (ABA’B’) and ‘sentence’ con-
struction (AA'B): the terminology is Schoenberg's. The former, in
its simplest layout of 2+2+2+2 or 4+4+4+4 bars, is most
58 See the arching form and grace notes of ‘Ah! par ces larmes' (vocal score, p. 97), Ivan's
‘Je t'aimais' (ibid., p. 264), or the cadential formula used in ‘J’aimais l'aspect" (ibid., pp. 212-
13). Bizet is known to have admired Rigoletto.
59 E.g. vocal score, p. 92.
$0 Vocal score, p. 22, where Marie's motif is first heard in the orchestra.
BIZEINS STYLE 371
extensively found in Djamileh. The latter, which is inherently inclined
towards growth, occurs in unusual proportions even in Ivan IV: this
work was in fact one of melodic discovery for Bizet. In Ex. 257
(‘Fatigue d'incertitude' from Zvan IV), the ‘sentence’, as normal with
the composer, cadences outside the tonic to begin with, maintaining
harmonic tension and interest over its span.
However, Bizet created at least two other types of structure. One
was the extension of periodic form so that its final segment grew
outwards. It is seen as early as Le Docteur Miracle, No. 5 (Ex. 258),
where it evinces secure grasp of harmonic tension at the same time
as employing unusual phrase lengths. This was a resource regularly
used as needed. АП Bizet's operas used the extended periodic form.
The second extended structure was an additive one. It too was
ubiquitous, but was chiefly evident in Les Pécheurs de perles. Bizet
might write any number of segments, and each segment could be
short or long: whichever pattern was selected for a given melody, its
internal pattern was repeated in each segment. Les Pécheurs de perles,
[Ёх 1257
Moderato
Ex. 258
e
т CA CSC ane
Eee
eg ed D
=
==
5) SSS SS рк SS SS
ер
жа
а
LP eS ES a
|
372 OPERA: 1850-1890
Ex. 259
Andantino
SEGMENT ONE Bt
No. 5, contains seven two-bar segments. No. 3B of the same work,
however, contains five eight-bar segments, each segment itself
comprising three phrases deployed as a miniature ‘sentence’ (Ex.
259). The final held note is a Bizet fingerprint. Later, in Djamileh,
the additive principle was refined to create non-parallel segments:
Haroun’s ‘Dans la blonde fumée’ in No. 1, and Splendiano's *À la
fleur pres de naitre', No. 2.
It was in its harmony that Bizet's modernism was most abruptly
felt. He had a most refined sense of key relationships and the most
vivid harmonic responsiveness to a dramatic situation. In a reduction
from Zvan IV, Act III (vocal score, p. 178) (Ex. 260) we see his use
of the established linear approach to dissonance and the appoggiatura.
Ten years later the more dissonant, Tristanesque appoggiatura style
played a part in Djamileh (Ex. 261 from No. 2). Bizet always fastened
ВЕЛКЕ 373
оп the ii? configuration (asterisked in Ех. 260) in pursuit of tonal
ambiguity. The jump in language from Ivan IV to Les Pêcheurs de
perles is seen in the advanced way Bizet used three such chords
(asterisked in Ex. 262) in the later work as strange, haunting
substitute dominants in the ‘oath’ sequence, No. 3C. In fact they
provide the only ‘cadences’ in the whole thirty-nine-bar scene,
interpretable as one large V-I in B major, and a fine example of
Bizet's precocity.
He often built up dissonant progressions over (or under, or
surrounding) a pedal note. The principle exists in Exx. 260 and 261,
but many more individual examples occur. The reduction in Ex. 263
is from a conversational passage in Les Pécheurs, Act I: Zurga's
words to Léila in No. 3C: 'C'est bien; à tous les yeux tu resteras
voilée.’ The languid luxury of Djamileh’s opening (Ex. 264) led to
Ех. 262
д
es E
*cadence' LS
"EE mm,
eeh
EE EEN LO]
Ех. 264
Moderato
Т.,В. à bouche fermée
(off-stage)
tur mm LEE LE
18 а с == == st
thay
HZ
Ce eg
EE
Tambour
UDIN AER ETT PUE ee га etc.
de basque
374 OPERA: 1850-1890
Ex. 265
Allegro moderato
J CHORUS
(It’s Nadir, wanderer of the forests)
multiple layers of dissonance passing like opium puffs over a held
chord; here, as always in Bizet, the timbre of orchestra and voices
finely complemented the total effect. But ambiguity could even
dispense with a pedal. Gounod’s daring opening to Act V of Faust
(a brassy, shocking augmented chord) found more than one echo in
Act Ш of Les Pécheurs. Even the chorus had to sing elliptical
progressions, as in Ex. 265 from Act I, No. 1B of that work.
The springing vigour of rhythm we admire in Carmen was already
heard in the tambourine-accompanied ‘Serenade’ in Jvan IV, Act П,
but even this came originally from Vasco de Gama (1859-60).
Polymetric picturesqueness—the 12/8 / 9/8 off-stage ‘Chanson’,
No. 8, in Les Pécheurs—was heard publicly before the ‘Chanson de
Magali’ in Gounod’s Mireille, and is the more evocative. Pounding
duple rhythms characterize the St Valentine revellers of La Jolie Fille
de Perth and such rhythmic ostinatos produce many ‘local’ or
‘characteristic’ Bizet effects. Rhythmic counterpoint, however, was
also essential; the best Bizet choruses all contain vividly juxtaposed
rhythms (although those in /van IV contain almost none). The
technique may have stemmed from Berlioz, whose Mardi Gras music
in Benvenuto Cellini seems to lie behind the brilliant tarantella rhythm
in Bizet’s own Choeur dansé’, No. 13 of Les Pêcheurs de perles. In
Carmen new paths opened out thanks to the aptness of dance and
movement to the drama: the ‘Habanera’ (Act I, No. 5), the ‘Seguedille’
[sic] (Act I, No. 10), the ‘Chanson bohème’ (Act II, No. 12), and
creative reminiscences of flamenco.9! Bizet's genius for mimetic
suggestion, noted above, became fused with his natural rhythmic
vigour; and both elements were harnessed to his incomparable
melodic invention. The step cannot have been easy, because the
melodic style of Carmen actually represents a new technical stage of
development in Bizet.
61 Edgar Istel, Bizet und ‘Carmen’ (Stuttgart, 1927), pp. 112 ff., considers the un-Spanish
rhythm of Bizet’s ‘Habanera’, and his Spanish sources elsewhere in the score.
LES PECHEURS DE PERLES 305
LES PECHEURS DE PERLES
From Bizet’s letters to his pupil Edmond Galabert concerning
compositional methods in opera, we know that he possessed acute
theoretical awareness of psychology and dramatic timing. From his
manuscripts we know that theory became practice in the extensive
revisions made during the experience of rehearsals.6? In fact he
turned Les Pécheurs de perles (1863) from an opéra comique to a
through-composed work in its final rehearsal month.5? The richness
of the score has concealed any suspicion of this until recently. Scoring
and rhythmic energy in the linking dialogue sections do not belie
the personality of the whole, which combines vigour with a brilliant
sense of coloration, harmonic and orchestral. In its fine melodies,
Bizet absorbed and extended the language of Verdi. Because the
drama contains so little intrigue, and so few important ensembles,
Bizet was free to spread himself in picturesque solos and choruses;
they contrast sharply with the violently active choral dances of the
Ceylonese pearl fishers.
The libretto is poorly designed in its accommodation of character.
Chance brings the virgin priestess Léila, Zurga (the chief pearl fisher),
and his friend Nadir together. Both men had seen and desired Léila
some time before, in Candy, but agreed to forswear this love. In Act
II Nadir seeks Léila out; they are discovered and condemned to
death, but finally allowed to escape by Zurga, whose life Léila had
once saved as a girl. Bizet endows this cheap romance with a beautiful
sense of fantasy. Where action is required, Bizet’s suggestion of
movement and response is sure; he brings a Germanic kind of power
to the simple passions enunciated. Tying together the threads of past
and present, suggesting dimensions of time and personality so
otherwise lacking, Bizet invented a languid melody symbolizing the
kernel of the tale: the numinous moment in Candy when friendship,
love and circumstance were set on their inevitable course (Ex. 266,
from the Nadir-Zurga duet in Act I). This concept, and its musical
realization, turned Gounod's parallel example in Faust (see Ex. 219)
to much-needed advantage. Unfortunately, the composer somewhat
62 Wright, ‘Bizet before "Carmen" `, fos. 102, 226 ff.; Winton Dean, Georges Bizet: His Life
and Work (London, 1948; enlarged 3rd edn., 1975), p. 60. The work Galabert was attempting,
in 1868, was La Coupe du Roi de Thulé. Bizet's own interest in the libretto became such that
he set it himself and submitted it anonymously in the 1869 competition set by the Opéra. The
manuscript now comprises only fifteen fragments. Dean estimates that it would have ranked
‘second only to Carmen’: ibid., pp. 79, 185 ff.
$3 Wright, ‘Bizet before “Carmen”’, fos. 260-1, citing evidence of censor's manuscript
libretto. Falsifications were perpetrated silently in virtually all vocal score editions of Bizet's
operas other than Le Docteur Miracle. See Dean, Georges Bizet, Appendix F and p. 162 n. 1.
376 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 266
Andante
overplays its recollection, for example, in No. 12C, where dramatic
attention is focused on a quite different aspect of the plot; but he
does sometimes transform its metre.6?
LAYJOLIE PLACE IDE PER TH
Problems of finding a good libretto persisted, despite Bizet’s
fastidious approach to literary subjects—or because of it. (He
habitually took a hand in modifying a text, and rhymed his own
libretto for the early L’ Amour peintre, after Molière, which does not
survive. Later, he was to invent words as well as music for the
‘Habanera’ in Carmen.) The veteran librettist Vernoy de Saint-Georges
worked with Jules Adenis to formulate a conventional plot from
Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth; the result —produced in 1867— bears
only a passing resemblance to episodes and characters in this long
novel.65 Though the Scottish setting is maintained, it seems reflected
only in the dour А minor tune beginning Act II. As a comedy of
intrigue it was the most conventional of Bizet's opera plots, a fact
reflected in some public approbation. It earned, even in eighteen
performances, more exposure than other novelties at the Théátre
Lyrique, only excepting Roméo et Juliette and Flotow's Martha.99
The dramatic ancestry was the good humour of early nineteenth-
century opéra comique; harmony, recitative, and rhythm were more
conventionally handled than in Les Pécheurs de perles.
Although the libretto is best described as unconvincing (if not
downright silly), it afforded a certain amount of characterization for
Bizet to exploit. After a two-year courtship, the union of Henry
64 The Zurga- Nadir duet in Act I should not in fact end with this famous melody; Bizet's
subsequent music throws the emphasis away from it and therefore makes its recollection less
pc Mitchell, The Walter Scott Operas (University of Alabama, 1977), pp. 341-9.
Mab’s character was adapted from Louise the glee-maiden; see Scott's chapters 2, 11, 12, 16,
De Second Empire Opera, pp. 232-5 and 319-21. Verdi’s Rigoletto and Violetta (La
traviata) were still very popular at the same theatre at the time. They left their mark in Bizet's
gaming scene, Act III.
LA JOELDIE'FIDEEO E!PERTH 377
Smith and Catherine Glover is further delayed by unlikely in-
terventions from the gypsy Mab and the profligate Duke of Rothsay.
In the last act Catherine has a brief mad scene (cf. L Étoile du nord).
But for the first time Bizet tested his character depiction in terms of
ensemble writing. There was little occasion for the expansive solo.
In rehearsal, he both changed smaller set pieces (often making
symmetrical structures irregular) and improved larger ensemble
sequences.” Little development is given to Catherine's character,
but Smith, his rival Ralph, and Mab are memorable enough. There
was a subtle use of recurring themes, particularly the waltzing melody
we associate with Rothsay's flirting with Catherine—the mainspring
of the action. In shape, key, and function it relates to the waltz in
Act II of Faust.68
Bizet's score, which awaits accurate editing, eventually satisfied its
composer; Ex. 267, a passage in her Act I aria ‘Vive l'hiver, gives
Catherine a Carmen-like quality that explains her response to the
Ier
Allegro deciso rit. a tempo
E tg ——— =
Pro |-|fi|- tez des_ ins- tants, Car tout pas
(Make the most of every moment, for all passes, all will die!)
67 Lesley Wright considers that perhaps seven numbers, including three of the finales, were
thus rewritten (‘Bizet before "Carmen" fo. 328). Bizet altered the celebrated Act II Serenade
in design to integrate it dramatically. Most scores present a corrupt (regular strophic) version.
68 The rhythms and patterns of Weber are also audible, especially in Act I and II. Oberon
had been revived at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1863; Der Freischütz was seen there throughout
the same decade.
378 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
duke and, perhaps, her temporary instability later in the opera. It is
absent from current editions.$? Bizet's ability to give a work a unique
overall sense of flavour and dramatic propriety gives La Jolie Fille
de Perth its chief distinction.
DJAMILEH
Djamileh (1872), like Le Docteur Miracle; was a one-act opéra
comique. It had been preceded by various projects during which
Bizet’s operatic art matured further.”° The text, by Louis Gallet, is
a simple variation on the Scheherezade idea, in which the slave
discovering that, like her predecessors, she is about to be rejected
after one month by Haroun, convinces him of their genuine love.
But the story is almost the least important element. Immense musical
sophistication, skilled pacing and the lightest handling of material
and orchestration created a miniature masterpiece. The species of
opening music is illustrated in Ex. 264, depicting the palace at sunset
as Haroun reclines, smoking, and is the most authentic counterpart
to Hugo’s Les Orientales or Ingres’s Odalisques.”! If the source, de
Musset’s poem Namouna (1832), actually concerned ‘vulnerability,
the effort to describe the deepest promptings of the quest for
happiness, the inconclusive pursuit of art. "2 much the same cultivated
ambiguity infuses the opera. Particularly interesting were the
through-composition techniques used for scenes of interaction, Nos.
2, 3, and 9. None of these begins or ends in the same key. Bizet
certainly retained traditional forms such as the verse song (couplets),
the duet, and the trio, but blended one into the other with free
declamatory passages infused by capricious emotional oscillation; we
are close to the world of Debussy's Jeux. The idea of a waltz theme,
ironically recalled near the end and symbolizing love's gaiety,
reappeared from La Jolie Fille de Perth” Djamileh has her own
orchestral theme, whose yearning was derived from the ii? chord
itself. It alone accompanies the heroine on her silent first appearance
in Scene iii, attaining high eloquence through its scoring, which is
absurdly simple on paper (Ex. 268): such economy is typical of the
$9 The corruptions in various scores of the work are discussed in Jack Westrup, ‘Bizet’s
La Jolie Fille de Perth’, in J. Westrup (ed.), Essays presented to Egon Wellesz (Oxford, 1966),
157-70.
70 La Coupe du Roi de Thulé; Clarissa Harlowe; Grisélidis. Some music from the first was
introduced in Djamileh and Carmen.
*! The visual setting had been anticipated in the opium-smoking scene that opens Reyer's
opéra comique, La Statue (1861) discussed later in this chapter.
72 J.C. Ireson, ‘Poetry’, in D. С. Charlton (ed.), The French Romantics (Cambridge, 1984),
1. 143.
73 Vocal score p. 65, ‘Enfant, laissons dans les buissons’, recalled on p. 114.
: РЈАМІ ЕН 379
Ех. 268
Andante non troppo
д
pals
ар
з.
(Your perfumed lip)
score. The Wagnerian potentiality it embodies comes to the fore in
the last scene, where Haroun’s solo of self-realization transforms the
intervals diatonically as the scales fall from his eyes (Ex. 269).
Two refinements of melodic style must be mentioned: Haroun’s
twenty-six bars of non-repeating melody ‘Dans la blonde fumée’ in
No. 1, a perfect analogue of narcotic indecision, and Djamileh’s
‘Ghazel’, No. 3. (This acts as a tale within a tale, just as, say, ‘Une
fievre brülante’ from Gretry’s Richard Ceur de lion in 1784 or the
ballade in Act I of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. In all three cases
380 OPERA: 1850-1890
Ex. 270
Andantino DJAMILEH simplement
Nour-Ed-din,_ roi
the music in question is used in a varied and recalled form later in
the work.) The 'Ghazel', of the subtlest beauty, opens with a
fourteen-bar melodic span that is but the first segment of a ‘sentence’
form. It is, further, dispossessed both of a firm down-beat and an
anchoring bass line (Ex. 270). Hardly surprisingly, Djamileh left
audiences at the Opéra-Comique uncomprehending, and was seen
only eleven times. The critics were naturally scandalized by the music
of Ex. 271, which opens the heroine's ‘Lamento’, No. 6.
CARMEN
The commission by the Opéra-Comique for a new piece, text by
Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, was received by Bizet at the time of
Djamileh: the composer himself proposed Carmen, a short novel by
Mérimée (1845). The incidental music for Daudet's L’ Arlésienne
came later in 1872; work on Carmen stretched from 1873 to 1874,
CARMEN 381
being itself interrupted by composition of a five-act opera, Don
Rodrigue (1873), intended for the Opera but not accepted.?4
Although Carmen, produced in 1875, scandalized many in France,
it experienced no delay at the Censor’s office.”® But Bizet was obliged
to insist that his collaborators (both literary and theatrical) maintain
the integrity of their subject. He intended to regenerate opéra comique.
In this one catalyst was Gounod, whose heroines in Faust and
Mireille (originally opéras comiques) die tragically. Another was the
Verdi of La traviata. Carmen was scandalous because she was an
unrepentantly free spirit, quite beyond the pale of bourgeois exper-
ience, and because Don José is both rejected and destroyed after his
affair with her. There was no rescuing bosom in sentiment, the
Church, or the family. ‘Carmen was a landmark because it asserted
that the deeper passions were a matter of every-day life and therefore
a fit subject for opéra comique. The substitution of recitative with its
unnatural grand-opera associations falsifies the entire work.'?6
The drama is articulated with the relentless force of a Classical
tragedy. Action and character are built up rather gradually: Don
José deserts the army only at the end of Act П; no time is wasted
(dramatically or musically) on any idyll between Carmen and him.
By Act III they are quarrelling and Carmen foretells her death in
the cards. Her murder, on stage, posed no legal problem since the
liberalization of 1864, but it assaulted convention just as did the
unified design. As one dissatisfied old witness put it, ‘there ought to
be surprises, happenings, incidents, things that make you say, “What
is going to occur in the next act?" "7?
The Spanish setting took Bizet beyond the fitful liveliness of
Perthshire and Cairo, and beyond simple rhythmic ostinatos. He
actually adopted Spanish folk material and a song by Yradier (for
the Act I ‘Habanera’), thinking it was traditional. In all cases,
however, he does not quote verbatim, but alters notes and rhythms.
It is the rhythmic vitality of the whole score that projects a certain
image of Spain on to almost every page.
But the new conjunction of rhythm, kinetic suggestion, and melody
74 Bizet again suggested the subject: ‘It’s not Corneille's Cid, it’s the original Cid with real
Spanish colouring.' The autograph is preserved but lacks most of the accompaniment details.
See Dean, Georges Bizet, pp. 106-7.
75 Lesley A. Wright, ‘A New Source for Carmen’, 19th-century Music, 2 (1978-9), 68.
76 Winton Dean, ‘The Libretto’ in Carmen: A Romance by Prosper Mérimée (London, 1949),
90-1. In Mérimée the whole story is narrated from his condemned cell by Don José. The
original characters were more rough-hewn: José, for example, kills both the lieutenant and
Carmen's husband, a character excluded from the opera.
*7 Douglas Charles Parker, Bizet (London, 1951), 47. The imperial decree of 6 Jan. 1864
enabled any genre of work to be acted on any French stage.
382 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
had of course a directly dramatic purpose. Carmen and Escamillo
are creatures of movement; Micaela and Jose creatures of sentiment.
Thus, Carmen is pictured in her ‘Habanera’, her mocking ‘Coupe-moi,
brüle-mor, her * Séguedille', her castanet dance, and the ‘Chanson
bohéme'. This pattern is then broken; she sings the slowest music in
the opera in the F minor ‘En vain pour éviter' in Act III, and in the
final Act IV confrontation she rises to a vocal eloquence that confirms
her moral strength in the face of fate. Escamillo 'exists' in the
Toreador's song and, by extension, in the rowdy glory of the march,
‘Les voicr, in Act IV and the overture.
Bizet was censured by some for continuing to be too cerebral in
harmony and melody but, by contrast with Djamileh, he chose not
to dwell on ‘learned’ chords, rather to use them sparingly to highlight
the diatonic colour of the main ‘Southern’ idiom: see Ex. 272 from
Escamillo's Act II couplets, ‘Votre toast’.
The stress on continuity in Djamileh, however, was developed in
Carmen. As in any Romantic recitative opera, the emotional crises
unfold in extended duet sequences (Acts I, II, IV), not self-contained
numbers. In Act III the ‘public’ and private dilemmas are focused
in the finale into opposition within an ensemble context. This, too,
reflects the Scribe tradition of grand opéra on a small scale. How
BK 212
f ESCAMILLO ғ [34 bars)
Chae t-r-rt-tr а мамы Te
Eege, SE eee Se
C'est la fé - te des gens de cœur!
6
Lb pr = £ — FS SWEDEN POE
Hio sl кеи ee --------
Na или и-и F- + [—9 — 44 Su A a сый, Ce cm
[9 i BSS сш с =
= I == Ss ze
(It's the festival of noble hearts! Toreador, on guard!)
CARMEN 383
conscious it was remains matter for speculation, though Micaela’s
revelation that José's mother is dying.was a coup de theätre owing
nothing to Mérimée. Certainly the continuities of design were found
disturbing: "There are three pieces in it which contain music, and
make some effect because they come to an end’, was one representative
view,’8 and presumably these were the three set pieces to be applauded
at the premiére: Act I, Micaela-José duet; Act II, Toreador's song;
Act III, Micaela's aria.
Two significant threads of stylistic development are evinced in
Carmen: thematic unity and melodic concision. There is an abundance
of melodic interest but Bizet controls it motivically, using a basic
cell with the intervals of a perfect fourth, a second, and a third;
often, but not invariably, the second and the third are grouped or
‘contained’ within the perfect fourth. Exx. 273 and 274 illustrate this
cell as it relates to the twin main recurring motifs of the opera: the
first represents Carmen, the second her fateful effect on Don Jose.
The cell is also bracketed in Ex. 272. Other themes built on the same
intervals are the ‘Marche et chœur des gamins’ in Act I (Ex. 275),
Don Jose’s ‘Ma тёге je la vois’ from his Act I duet with Micaela
(Ex. 276), and the Act II duet ‘Je vais danser en votre honneur' (Ex.
277):
Bizet's new melodic conciseness in Carmen, whether in ‘sentence’,
‘period’, or additive form, made for memorability and a proper
balance between personal utterance and the development of material
by another or by an ensemble. Periodic form is most common, but
Ex. 273 Ex. 274
Allegro moderato
Bip se see 1 Andante
Te TS
LEE E AE, EUER. = >
A iz VU
Ex. 275 Ex. 276
Allegro Allegro moderato
Ех. 2717
78 Ibid.
384 OPERA: 1850-1890
Bizet also used a new form, the ABCA or ABB’A melody.?? Even
when sentence form was used (for. example, the refrain of the
Toreadors song) the length was only twelve bars. By contrast,
Micaela's music is in the older, lengthier style, especially ‘Je dis que
rien’ in Act III.
Bizet recast much of Carmen’s music during intensive rehearsals.80
The chorus found its part impossibly difficult; its music had to be
reduced. In general Bizet honed the score so that it became the
infallible cutting edge of the drama at all points, never surer than
in the closing scene. Here, as everywhere, use of thematic recollection
was made with great economy and irony; the culminating entries of
Ex. 274 possess almost physical impact; so do the choral shouts from
the bullfight in its simultaneous climax.
Bizet died (from complicated causes) during the first run of
Carmen, which attained merely forty-five performances, not to be
revived in Paris until 1883. But the opera quickly gained fame. It
particularly influenced Tchaikovsky, Chabrier, the Italian realists,
and, presumably, Alban Berg, while Bizet as a whole affected Faure,
Debussy, Saint-Saéns, and others. Carmen was to become the
modernist stick with which Nietzsche beat Wagner in Der Fall
Wagner:
Bizet’s work also saves; Wagner is not the only ‘Saviour’. With it one bids
farewell to the damp north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian ideal. Even
the action in itself delivers us from these things. From Merimee it has this
logic even in passion, from him it has the direct line, inexorable necessity;
but what it has above all else is that which belongs to subtropical zones. . . .
Here another kind of sensuality, another kind of sensitiveness, and another
kind of cheerfulness make their appeal. ... I envy Bizet for having had the
courage of this sensitiveness, which hitherto in the cultured music of Europe
has found no means of ехргеѕѕіоп.81
Recitatives were added to Carmen by E. Guiraud in 1875. They
remove much of the motivation, plot, and character of the work,
and ruin the point of Carmen's insolent chanson in Act I (which
must contrast with speech).
79 Heard in Micaela’s ‘Et tu lui diras" from her Act I duet with José, and in the ‘chanson
bohéme' commencing Act II.
80 The finales, except the second, ‘were revised several times’ and ‘more than half the pieces
in Act I were cut or revised’ (Wright, ‘A New Source for Carmen’, p. 68). The Oeser full
score edition confuses the status of these and other cuts; see Winton Dean, “The True
“Сагтеп”?, Musical Times, 106 (1965), 846-55.
81 See The Philosophy of Nietzche, ed. Geoffrey Clive (New York, 1965), 259-60.
THE 1870$ AND 1880$ 385
THE 1870$ AND 1880$
The 1870$ was a decade of limited-achievement, and that took
place at the Opera-Comique. The Theätre Lyrique had closed in
May 1870; it had been in decline before Carvalho's bankruptcy in
1868, though its spirit of enterprise flashed intermittently: Rienzi was
staged in 1869. The Paris Opéra was in a period of sclerosis;
Massenet's Le Roi de Lahore (1877) and Le Cid (1885) were the
principal world premieres. It delayed productions of significant works
such as Saint-Saéns's Samson et Dalila (Weimar, 1877), Massenet's
Hérodiade (Brussels, 1881), Reyer's Sigurd (Brussels, 1884) and
Chabrier's Gwendoline (Brussels, 1886). The new spirit was, however,
manifest at the Opéra-Comique, where the most important premières
were: Djamileh (1872); Le Roi Га dit (Delibes) (1873); Carmen (1875,
not revived until 1883); L’Etoile (Chabrier) (1877); Les Contes
d Hoffmann (Offenbach) (1881); Lakmé (Delibes) (1883); Manon
(Massenet) (1884); Le Roi malgré lui (Chabrier) (1887); Le Roi d'Ys
(Lalo) (1888); Esclarmonde (Massenet) (1889).
While Bizet assimilated or cast off aspects of Wagner's music,
others could not but succumb, as Wagner's influence widened in
Paris both behind the scenes and on the stage. His actual works did
not appear at the Opéra between the Tannhäuser fiasco of 1861 and
the year 1891 (Lohengrin). But French musicians visited Bayreuth
from 1876 (d’Indy, Saint-Saéns, Widor) and 1882 (Delibes)8? while
César Franck's hearing of the Tristan Prelude in 1874 had a
permanent effect on his work, including the opera Hulda. This was
written in 1881-5 but not performed until after Franck's death
(Monte Carlo, 1894, shortened version).83 Chabrier, the most com-
mitted French Wagnerian of genius, became a full-time composer
after seeing Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1880. La Revue Wag-
nérienne (1885-8) acted as a cultural focus, its contributors including
the musicians Saint-Saéns, d'Indy, Fauré, Hahn, and Schmitt.
Opera on the threshold of the modern period therefore became
primarily eclectic in subject-matter, form, and musical language, with
equally interesting contributions from both Opéra and Opera-
Comique traditions. Only Massenet was to bridge all operatic genres
successfully, but Chabrier and Saint-Saéns both made significant
advances in actually extending the art-form.
3? See Albert Lavignac, Le Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (Paris, 1897), which both typifies
and documents the French interest in all aspects of the ‘pilgrimage’. Nevertheless Wagner:
Scores were available for study at the keyboard much earlier.
83 By G. Franck and S. Rousseau. Restored version by D. Lloyd-Jones (Reading University
performance, 1978). See /9th-century Music, 2 (1978), 162-4.
386 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
SAINT-SAENS
A prodigiously gifted pianist (like his friend Bizet), Camille
Saint-Saéns (1835-1921) was a polymath of a composer. His two
early operas, which both employ spoken dialogue, experienced
production delays and were unsuccessful. La Princesse jaune, in one
act, stems chiefly from 1866 (performed 1872); Le Timbre d'argent,
in four acts, was begun in 1864 but not staged until 1877. Both are
comic moralities involving elements of the surreal. The former— it
involves a Japanese figurine—uses several pentatonic melodies for
local colour, as in the duet, No. 5 (Ex. 278). However, it also pointed
in the direction of Samson et Dalila in its *modern', extended
love duet, complete with enharmonic progressions and passionate
crescendos. The work is long-winded and unsubtle beside Djamileh,
which also had only two main characters. Le Timbre d'argent is out
of the world of E. T. A. Hoffmann, its text by the authors of the
1851 play that was to become Les Contes d' Hoffmann: Barbier and
Carré. (The Hoffmann-inspired ballet, Coppélia, was Delibes's first
great success in 1870.) Saint-Saéns's figure of Dr Spiridion plays the
same ‘evil genius’ role as Lindorf in Offenbach’s work, which was
begun in the year during which Le Timbre d'argent was first seen.
Ex. 278
Graziosamente
Ce em pe
Feen
Cm
Sur leau claire et sans ri - de Glis- se mon ba- teau
(My boat slips over the clear, calm water)
seou
Moderato mesto _ IO
va о === =- жан л CE
EE
je
PP, sotto voce
Dieu d’Is ra
Ыш сш з сс
Ка KEE ee Se ee
hn, bn Le =
DETE u ===
ve (tuned =
down), db PP
sf 4B
— i — —— n 0000090009000
- SAINT-SAENS 387
el! Dieu d’Is - Ta - el!
sotto voce
c B EG KH BG
Д? jee
Dieu d’Is - ra mael Dieu
7 a Toy Women E
(God of Israel!)
The main character, Conrad, pursues the love of the dancer Fiametta
with the supernatural aid of a silver bell that also brings death. The
music is energetic, though without a markedly personal stamp,
and sometimes repetitive. Structurally it tends towards continuous
chaining-together of numbers; there is some use of spoken mélodrame.
Samson et Dalila occupied Saint-Saéns for a decade before its
performance in 1877: the authorities made difficulties, disconcerted
by the biblical material. The dramatic design of the piece is extremely
original, its musical structures unpredictable, and its music, of
unflagging quality, is an unlikely though successful amalgam unified
by certain Wagnerian methods. Baroque neo-Classicism expresses
the sorrows of the Children of Israel, opening Acts I (Ex. 279) and
III. The chorus is given fugue and fugato. The opening, indeed,
could only have made sense to a generation basically familiar with
Bach's church music. Later, the Israelite elders have chant-like music
(Act I, Scene v), involving only four notes over thirty-two bars (Ex.
280). In Act III the Philistines’ dances are given a pungent Middle
Ex. 280
Andantino
Hym - ne de joi - e, hym - пе de dé-li - vran - ce, Mon-tez
v TAE тис
O C EE ` Mee Se > | es
E SS E
vers PE - ter пе!
(Hymn of joy, hymn of deliverance, ascend to the Eternal One)
388 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ex. 281
Malinconico
[+harp in octaves]
Eastern flavour (Ex. 281). Elsewhere in the act the glockenspiel,
wood and metal castanets, and crotales add gaudy colour to the
merrymaking.§4 Because these and other devices remain in command,
proceeding within a dramaturgy that is only to a limited degree
realistic, the opera creates something fresh out of its debt to Wagner.
The structure is chiefly neo-Classical, in that solos, choruses, or
dances are built up in separate blocks, while the more psychologically
realistic—and typically Romantic—duet texture is reserved for the
Dalila-Grand Prétre scene and the Dalila-Samson seduction, which
form the bulk of Act II. Of course, even here, Dalila’s utterances to
Samson are a ‘device’, not genuinely passionate.
More than any before him in France, Saint-Saéns in this work
adopted Wagner’s style of motif identity and transformation for
dramatic purposes. He also used a species of ‘unending melody’
(Ee
Allegro agitato
SAMSON
par un der-nier
84 The glockenspiel, in some form, appeared briefly in the Coronation scene (Act IV, No.
24B) of Le Prophéte, in which Delibes had been one of the boy sopranos in 1849. In 1852
Adam used the instrument in the Act II finale of Si j'étais roi for a Bayaderes’ dance; and in
Lakmé, Act Il, Delibes used а glockenspiel in his own Bayadere scene (1883).
SAINT-SAENS 389
stringendo cresc.
sans mur-mure et sans crain - te Le doux li = en
[+ woodwind]
(With a last farewell, without regret, bravely, we must break the sweet bond of our love!)
texture in the seduction scene, borrowing many Wagnerian formulae
of declamation, orchestral continuity, and interrupted cadences.
Their effect was the more natural since Saint-Saëns shared Wagner’s
proclivity for stolid rhythmic patterns (Ex. 282). In sum, though,
the opera remained sui generis, with the oratorio-like use of chorus
and even a canonic duet in Act HI.
Henry VIII, composed in 1881-2 and produced in 1883, was
Saint-Saéns's second most popular opera in Етапсе.85 The librettists,
Leonce Detroyat and Armand Silvestre, tried to breathe life into the
four-act grand opéra mould, but could not give the king sufficient
personality or make the intrigue other than conventional. Saint-Saéns
used flexible recurring motifs but these seem predictable in themselves
and the composer's language too slack in spite of the efficient
chromaticism and up-to-date use of unrelated triads. Local colour
appeared in the Act II ‘Féte populaire" with Scots tunes and ‘The
Miller of Dee'. Recurring throughout was a melody the composer
35 Originally in four acts and six tableaux, it was rapidly reduced to five tableaux, and
afterwards to three acts in 1889. Two vocal score editions exist.
390 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
e SE EE
IC EE ze E
Ех. 284
Allegro maestoso
(Chorus and soloists in unison)
Cen est donc fait! il a bri-sé ta_ chaine (etc.)
=
(It is all over then! He has severed your bonds)
found in an English manuscript.8® It is identifiable as ‘The New
Medley’ on p. 143 of ‘Will Forster’s Virginal Book’ now in the
British Library (Ex. 283). This symbolizes the schism with Rome,
and acts as a climax in the Act III Synod scene, the ceremony which
also sees the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn (Ex.
284).
Ascanio (five acts; text by L. Gallet), produced in 1890, was based
on Paul Meurice’s 1852 play about Benvenuto Cellini and his
favourite pupil Ascanio. The action, unlike Berlioz’s Benvenuto
Cellini, takes place in Paris in 1539. Though including a traditional
divertissement using, as we might expect, an original melody,8? the
opera is lively and conversational in tone. Saint-Saens found a
comfortable mixture of neo-Classical diatonic music, which neatly
avoids pastiche, and post-Wagnerian warmth for the romantic
sections. The stress on realistic dramatic continuity, in this context,
points to the later style of Richard Strauss.
MASSENET
Like Saint-Saéns, Jules Massenet (1842-1912)88 met the challenge
of writing viable through-composed opera in the wake of Wagner.
86 Saint-Saëns reported ‘I went and rummaged in the library at Buckingham Palace. ...
There I found a big sixteenth-century manuscript volume containing a harpsichord arrangement
of an extremely beautiful melody buried under thickets of pointless ornamentation. This
melody supplied, as it were, the framework of the opera.’ See James Harding, Saint-Saens
and his Circle (London, 1965), 162.
87 From Arbeau, Orchesographie, supplying dance no. 5. The original edition of Ascanio
consists of seven tableaux, the second of six.
88 Jules Massenet's later career is discussed in Vol. X, particularly p. 164.
MASSENET 391
Like Saint-Saéns, he was eclectic in choice of subjects and varied his
musical language to some degree in the appropriate way, though not
all-pervasively. The quality of Massenet’s ballet music deserves
particular mention: bold of colour, memorable of motif, it took on
the mantle of Meyerbeer’s ‘skating’ ballet in Le Prophete. (Of course,
he had before him Delibes's masterpieces of Coppélia and Sylvia too,
dating from 1870 and 1876.) At its sporadic best, Massenet's opera
is a major synthesis of the continuous texture of modern chromatic
harmony and a vocal line developing by short phrases with a
passionate freedom of expression.
Partly owing to his compulsive industry, the quality of Massenet's
operas is distinctly variable. Another cause was the low technical
and artistic level of certain librettos, for Massenet was content to
set supernatural, sentimental, and stupid ones by turns. Hand in
hand with this went his limited ability to suggest character in music.
Massenet also found no reason to reject АВА” arias, traditional
recitative, the aesthetic of the divertissement, the full close inviting
applause, or the choral and ensemble clichés of his grand opéra
predecessors. Such choral episodes can become locked into fixed
tonalities.
Much of Massenet's style was secure by 1877 when he produced
Le Roi de Lahore. Several early works had been composed and
rejected, while the opéra comique of Don César de Bazan (1872)
already displayed vivid Spanish rhythms and melodies even before
Carmen. Dramatically speaking, Le Roi de Lahore is a farrago
resembling, in basis, Les Pécheurs de perles: an Indian leader in
rivalry for the love of a temple girl. The truc is that the king dies at
the end of Act II but is given a new life by the Hindu divinity in
the heavenly fields of Act III. However, he is united in death with
his beloved at the end. A certain essential musical polarity was
evident: attractive melodic episodes (here indebted to Gounod) on
one side, and various ‘effects without causes’ on the other. Striking
ideas tended not to be developed; there were bombastic and warlike
choral ensembles in a manner to be reused in Le Cid.
Hérodiade (1881), derived from Flaubert's ‘Hérodias’ (Trois Contes,
1877), was the most accomplished libretto Massenet set in this
period,5? and it produced his best score. Unlike Strauss’s libretto for
Salomé (a translation of Oscar Wilde), Hérodiade contains substantial
motivation drawn from a state political theme—the domination of
Jerusalem by the Romans—forming a grand opéra antithesis with
89 The librettists were Paul Milliet, Georges Hartmann, and Angelo Zanardini.
392 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Hérode's passion for Salomé.?? The opera is built up in briefer scenes
than normal, which suited Massenet’s gifts; the tendency to bombast
in choruses was mitigated by the presence of the 'religious' element
associated with Jean (John the Baptist); and the inevitable di-
vertissement was most unusually banished to the last act, so that it
avoids a hiatus during the development of the intrigue. The power
of the passions displayed, and their variety, seem to have prompted
a greater musical sense of continuity and development. There was a
suppleness of language, which is easily seen in the flexible motif
signifying Salomé's love for Jean, quoted here from the end of Act
I (Ex. 285). If the underlying harmonic language and diction were
in debt to Gounod, Massenet imposed his own unity on the score.
One fingerprint was the dominant 13th chord (Ex. 285 relies on it).
Another was the 'false dominant' expressive excursion prior to a
tonic cadence; this has already been illustrated in Ex. 246 from
Mignon. A third was Massenet's unexpected way of beginning a
Ex. 285
Andante J =76
JEAN (inspire) f
str pizz. mf
(In that mystic fervour, immersed in the ideal)
90 There is even a grand opera ensemble scene (Act ПІ, sc. xii) juxtaposing private and
public concerns: Herode, having first decided to save Jean for political reasons, condemns
him on discovering that he is loved by Salomé.
MASSENET 393
Ex. 286
Andante cantabile
vn, harps, antique cymbal
PPP,
Sa-lo - mé Sa-lo-mé Lais; se-moi con-tem-plerjta beau
A
. а j an anaU
> []4 4 Ta
ey: | CO EI e I E ÉL —— Á———É——. — —— ——
Te oon OS Bl. ee 2S EE нау E E 8 EE Inge. m c.l erae eee
z 2 SSS TEE {шщ Se Sg niei ————— DEEN
Б See LEE ee ee —.—.._—_———ҥ mia
ve (db. — a ne
pizz ) —————
212
(Salomé, let me gaze upon your lovely, proud beauty!)
melody with basically straightforward harmony, as seen in the Act
III duet for Hérode and Salome (Ex. 286).
The libretto of Manon (1884), by Henri Meilhac and Philippe
Gille, was cast as a five-act, through-composed opera Iyrique, but
with brief spoken episodes over music. Based on Prevost’s novel
(already the source of a version by Auber), the opera tones down
Des Grieux’s original nature as a duplicitous moral coward; we see
him on the verge of taking Holy Orders. The character of Manon
is also less shockingly fickle in the stage work than the novel; she
dies, from no clear malady, before leaving France. Manon begins
slowly; here and in Act III the music associated with de Bretigny is
unengaging, as are the many pastiche rococo elements. Massenet
was proud of using some fifteen motifs, which he said ‘kept the
characters distinct until the end’, but the effect is often of patchwork
and a naive succession of textures. Often the music is either at high
pressure or no pressure at all.
394 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 287
Andante T
MANON (avec un grand charme et trés caressant)
N'est|ce plus ma main
vn, va, div.
solo | vc, db рр sostenuto
SS ES EE
VO: e Gemeen ЕС" SE
EE JE ———' НЕМ
S55
р imp
plus та voix? — N’est-el - le pour toi [plus une caresse]
m
solo vn" P
(Is it no longer my hand that presses this hand, is it no longer my voice? Is there [no longer a caress] for you?)
The individuality of the score lies in the tragic heroine and her
mixture of innocence, gaiety, remorse and passion. She conveys a
kind of fluttering physicality, especially in her melody of Act III,
Scene ii, in which the composer takes rhythmic freedom perhaps
further than he had hitherto (Ex. 287).
Le Cid (1885) demanded character depiction of an order denied
to Massenet, for the drama hinges on a profound dilemma: whether
Chiméne may accept Rodrigue even after the latter has slain her
father over disputed family honour. Much of the score is given over
to inflated ceremonial scenes with effects such as tuned bells and
organ, or even an enacted vision of a benediction sung by St James
himself. The Spanish dance sequence in Act II provides the best
music.
Fantastic manipulation of time, place, and history reached new
extremes in Esclarmonde (1889), a five-act recitative opera about a
Byzantine princess who uses magic to ensnare the French knight
Roland. Since she knows of him at the outset, and he does not
object to the obvious fact that she is an enchantress, who for certain
reasons will not reveal her identity to his face, the opera has a very
OFFENBACH'S LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN D95
Ex. 288
Andante 4-60 F ——
a БЫН " E К е Ь S WI.
episodic structure. The styles of Wagnerian love music, of triumphal
choruses, and of strife had all been used by the composer before.
New ideas included extensive fantastic music in Acts I and IV; while
Massenet disliked composing full-length overtures, he always set a
scene with the orchestra to good effect. Both the phantasmagoric
and the love music gave rise to certain new chords in Massenet's
palette, though any piquant passage would always resolve diatonically
before long, frequently via the hackneyed diminished seventh.
Esclarmonde also rejected the tedium of dry recitative passages for
a permanently active 'endless melody', which helps avoid the
patchwork effect of its two predecessors. The heroine is given a
coloratura treatment aptly suggesting her nature. The unaccompanied
passage in Ex. 288 announces her approach in Act III, tableau 6:
the complete solo is three times as long.
OFFENBACH'S LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN
Three masters whose best works were produced at the Opera-
Comique in the 1880s, either at or near the end of their respective
careers, were Offenbach, Lalo, and Delibes. Offenbach, as mentioned
earlier, had ambitions beyond operetta. Writing Les Contes
d Hoffmann with deliberation from 1877, he left part of Acts IV and
V unfinished at his death in 1880. The work was orchestrated by
Ernest Guiraud, who also wrote some recitatives plus whatever he
felt necessary for the premiére in 1881. Since the work has never
been published in a scholarly edition, there remain many critical
questions.?! No surer evidence of the opera’s stature exists, however,
91 See Hugh Macdonald, ‘Hoffmann’s Melancholy Tale’, Musical Times, 121 (1980), 622
4. The vocal score edited by Fritz Oeser as Hoffmanns Erzählungen (Kassel, 1977) does not
distinguish between the work of Offenbach, Guiraud, or Oeser himself; it is in other respects
the most reliable version, and the one to which reference is made in this account. The problem
is compounded by the fact that Offenbach habitually revised works following the experience
of production: Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach (London, 1980), 203.
396 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
than the fact that each generation has felt impelled to stage or
publish the piece in some way. А
The work presents a highly original scheme and an anti-realistic
dramatic subject. It stemmed from a play of the same name, in
whose first production Offenbach had been involved in 1851, by
Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. This in turn bore strong similarities
to Thomas's unusual opéra comique, Le Songe d'une nuit d'été (1850).
Whereas the latter presented a quasi-realistic framework for Shake-
speare and his muse, the former ingeniously created a symbolically
imaginative one, and this was taken over in Offenbach's setting.
Acts I and V provide an outer frame with Hoffmann, his Muse,
his mistress Stella, and his rival in love, Lindorf. The Muse, a chorus
of spirits of beer and wine, even Lindorf, are allegorical characters
posing metaphysical questions: the distinction between appearance
and reality, and the relation of these twin forces in the life of a
creative artist, the writer E. T. A. Hoffmann. The Muse transforms
herself into Hoffmann's young companion, Niklausse. Stella is the
opera singer who, in the course of Acts II to IV, is understood to
be performing Don Giovanni in the adjoining theatre. At the con-
clusion Stella leaves with Lindorf; Hoffmann, somewhat drunk,
abjures the outer world in favour of his Muse and art.
Acts II to IV are three independent acts, based freely on three
Hoffmann tales,?? representing the poet's telling of these stories to
his drinking friends. But a system of parallels and duplications also
transforms these acts into cumulative variations on the central theme,
Hoffmann's internal nature. This is made clear by having Hoffmann
and Niklausse appear as characters in the tales, and by having the
singers representing Lindorf and Stella also impersonate Coppelius
and Olympia in Act II, Dr Miracle and Antonia in Act III, and
Dapertutto and Giulietta in Act IV.9? Offenbach's music follows the
rising curve of tension simply and effectively, and is admirably free
from any system of recurring motifs. There are set-piece solos,
sometimes with chorus, generally ABA' in form. However, many of
them are filled with stage action, as are the two duets and two trios
of Act III. As Offenbach's melody is euphonious yet apt, the whole
opera possesses an unusual mixture of lyricism and movement.
92 Der Sandmann; Rat Krespel; Die Abenteuer der Silvester- Nacht. The framing acts draw
on Don Juan, and the tavern setting reflects Hoffmann's actual life, particularly the final Berlin
period, 1814-22.
93 Many other subtleties of design, with an interpretation including notions of the beautiful
and grotesque, outer and inner perception, and the death of the ideal figure, are discussed in
Richard S. Huffman, ‘Les Contes d Hoffmann: Unity of Dramatic Form in the Libretto’,
Studies in Romanticism, 15 (1976), 97-117.
s LALO 397
Ex. 289
Andante
Elle a fui, la tour-te - rel-le, Elle a fui loinde toi; Maiselle est
(She has flown, the turtle-dove, far from you; but she is [always faithful])
Ex. 290
Largo
HOFFMANN
pee Fh EY Кел ee
Ô Dieu! de quelle i - vresse_em bra-ses-tumon ä-me! Comme un con-cert di-vin
(Oh God! With what exultation you inflame me! Like a heavenly concert)
(There are dances in Act II and Offenbach's style is suffused with
dance rhythms anyway.)?^This movement is also a consequence of
the greater amount of action present than was normal in a musical
work.
The individuality of Offenbach's melody sometimes took the form
of unusual intervals over straightforward harmony (see Ex. 289, the
romance, No. 11, from Act III, and Ex. 290, the duet, No. 21, from
Act IV). But this may reflect a traditional trait at the Opéra-Bouffe,
since we find similar things in Chabrier's comedies and operettas by
Hervé, Lecocq, and others Hp At least in Acts I to III (where
Offenbach's score is most reliably free from accretions) the composer
found a rapid, heightened recitative style that surely reflects the
experience of decades in capturing the ironic Hoffmannesque cut
and thrust of conversation and the rapid musico-dramatic timing
demanded by the slightly surreal speed of events.
LALO
The three-act opera Fiesque by Édouard Lalo (1823-92), derived
from Schiller, was never produced after its completion in 1868. It
provided most of the material for the composer's Symphony in G
minor (1886).96 Lalo is described by Hugh Macdonald as representing
‘the more red-blooded streak in French music. His harmony [uses]
... frequent chromatic alterations that never approach the more
fluid chromaticism of Wagner, largely because the rhythmic pulse is
strong.’
91 Offenbach, like many others, pressed parts of earlier works into service: Die Rheinnixen
(Vienna, 1864; his first through-composed work) furnished the famous barcarolle and other
sections; Le Papillon (ballet, 1860); Fantasio (1872). See Faris, Offenbach, pp. 216-17.
35 See Gervase Hughes, Composers of Operetta (London, 1962).
96 Description in Hugh Macdonald, `А Fiasco Remembered: Fiesque Dismembered', in
Malcolm Н. Brown and Roland J. Wiley (eds.), Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for Gerald
Abraham (Ann Arbor and Oxford, 1985), 163.85.
398 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Le Roi ď Үз (1875-88), libretto by Edouard Blau, had considerable
success at the Opéra-Comique on its appearance in 1888. It is
through-composed. Blau used Breton legend for a melodrama of
love and revenge, as the population of Ys is almost wiped out by
the sea after Karnac and Margared open the lock gates. The
characters are given little musical individuality, and the stagecraft
can be stiff. The music shows an unhappy reluctance to modulate in
the set pieces, while the recitatives are punctured by noisy orches-
tration. The characteristic chord is the augmented triad, which Lalo
places even in fanfare passages. Much in the earlier acts is underpinned
by fanfares apt to the warlike situation but essentially beside the
point of the drama: Margared's obsessive character. Lalo introduced
a Breton theme in the Act III wedding scene, labelled accordingly
(Ex. 291). Doubtless in this, as in 'Spanish' operas of the time, we
see transitional evidence of the folk-song revival which would stretch
so potently into the twentieth century.
DELIBES
The career of Léo Delibes (1836-91) as theatre composer divides
into his sixteen early operettas and light opéras comiques, often in
one act (1856-69); his contribution to the ballet La Source (1866)
and his important ballet scores of Coppélia (1870, after E. T. A.
Hoffmann) and Sylvia (1876); and the following three opéras comiques.
Le Roi l'a dit (1873) is basically an operetta in style, with the
dramatic development residing in its farcical plot, set in the period
of Louis XIV, rather than in complicated musical units. Traditional
forms such as couplets are still present, and the choral writing is
chiefly homophonic. The idiom often falls into the ‘patter’ style
of repeated-note motifs. In 1885 the work was revised for the
Opéra-Comique, several numbers being moved to a different act,
Ex. 291
Andantino non troppo
ROZENN
[==
> KEE
EH Э en ee wi I 271
у тшт —1
m.
Pour - quoi lut-ter de la sor - te, pensez-vous que je vou - drai— Lais-
- ser Ра-тап а la рог - te, Quand l’a-mour est en - tré! —
Puis-qu'une â -me re - bel - le Peut bri - ser sb ino - Бе. cour...
(Why resist like that, do you think I would want to leave a lover at the door when love has entered in!
Since an unruly spirit can break so noble a heart . . .)
- DELIBES 399
and a fresh score was issued.?” The music added in 1885 includes
the interesting opening to No. 11 (Ex. 292) and the ‘Musique de
scene’, No. 17 bis (Ex. 293), prefiguring Poulenc. Delibes’s invention
was obviously stimulated by the factor of rhythm in itself and he
added to the irregularities noted earlier in Meyerbeer, Gounod, and
others with a comic solo in 5/4, ‘C’est un fait acquis’.
The second opera, Jean de Nivelle (1880), a semi-comic burlesque
set in Louis XI’s reign, was initially very successful. Musically
Delibes's piece was cast as an updated but limited evocation of
Adam (his teacher), extrovert to the point of boisterousness. Older
forms recur in abundance: couplets, romance, march, ensemble.
There was a new essay in irregular metre, but one which dared to
combine 2/4 and 3/4 in asymmetrical patterns of accretion (see
Ex. 294, the Act I finale).
Lakmé, the third work (1883), brought together modern tendencies
in a palatably sentimental way. Designed with dialogue scenes and
a secure sense of the individual number which ‘comes to an end’ (cf.
Ex. 292
Andante
Ех. 293
SC?
ar
CC?
Ех. 294
Allegretto
LES REINES
97 Descriptions of the two versions, together with those of an early unpublished version
and a posthumous version arranged by P. Gille, are in Henri de Curzon, Leo Delibes, sa vie
et ses euvres (Paris, 1926), 117-42.
400 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
П fautqu'il règne à no -tre cour!
(We are queens for the day, our king leaves us on a whim, before the festivity ends he must rule in our court!)
Carmen), it also contained strong ‘Indian’ local colour, enharmonic
progressions (kept under cadential control), a recurring motif, and
love duets in the impassioned style. The latter betray the dull
rhythmic structures of an unpretentious work of art; yet they suit
the English officer-class stiffness of Gérald. He is mostly interested
in his own "ironic dilettantism, [his] sceptical curiosity’,98 and the
one true dramatic stroke is that Lakmé, the Brahmin's daughter,
sees through him. Like Sélika in L’ Africaine, Lakme kills herself (by
eating a poisonous leaf).
Delibes's orgiastic dances in Act II almost anticipate Stravinsky's
ballets: the fourth of these (‘Coda’) uses two extra tuned drums (Ex.
295); elsewhere there are crotales. Although the style may owe a
debt to Samson et Delila (see Ex. 281)— not however staged in France
until 1890—it is worth recalling that Berlioz had created an
extraordinary ‘Nubian’ dance in Les Troyens, Act IV, No. 33c, whose
throbbing bass, non-cadential harmony, quasi-modal melody, and
use of percussion (petites cymbales antiques, tambourin, tarbuka)
were a generation ahead of their time (Ex. 296).
Later in Act II, when the Hindu festival provides the cover for
Gerald’s would-be murderer, Delibes combined energy with harmonic
ambiguity: five of the six notes in the violin figure in Ex. 297 move
by whole-tone intervals. To the modern ear these ‘orientalisms’ are
the most innovative parts of the score; the path to Debussy, via
Chabrier's Gwendoline, was swift and direct. Many other places in
Ex 295
Allegretto marcato
[horns omitted]
98 [bid., p. 178.
REYER 401
Ех. 296
Allegro vivace А = 144
fl, рісс 8va
va, ус p
div., pizz.
Ex. 297
Allegro maestoso
cornets а pistons
=
6] SSS en шр bes [e 5s ый E eT ae
с ышт ы beem
Lakme use the flat seventh and the supertonic to create ambiguity;
for this reason the heroine’s own cantillation prior to her ‘Bell’ song
(the ‘Scene et Legende’, Act II, No. 10) cannot be assigned to any
definite single key. By contrast, the cheap fife-and-drum tune,
signifying the British army's hold over Gérald’s loyalties, has a
boldness of character and application worthy of its probable
inspiration: Carmen, Act II.
REYER
Ernest Reyer (1823-1909) was an unrepentant, intelligent in-
dividualist. He was a later friend of Berlioz and a music critic,
inheriting Berlioz's column on the Journal des débats in 1866 when
d'Ortigue died. From his first performed opéra comique, Maitre
Wolfram (1854), Reyer's musical qualities were manifest: a gift for
extended melody; conscious development of new rhythmic ideas;
rejection of Italianate melody; readiness to create freshness through
modulation; and an affinity with the German tradition, particularly
402 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
in echoes of Weber. Even in this one-act, essentially domestic piece
about a young man, organist of Bonn cathedral, who seeks solace
in composition and the gift of music, Reyer showed that he favoured
the construction of ensemble numbers containing dramatic action
and musical continuity. The score includes an organ part at the
beginning and end, when Wolfram is playing.
Both Maitre Wolfram and La Statue (1861) enjoyed revivals. The
latter began as a substantial opera comique in three acts and was
later given recitatives.?? It is an oriental and magic comedy, somewhat
in the vein of Auber's Le Cheval de bronze or Adam's Si j'étais roi;
but it is more dependent than these upon spectacle.100 Reyer's music
is fluent and enjoyable; if ultimately lacking in melodic originality,
the score is certainly never dull. (One example of its wit is a buffo
canon at the unison for two characters claiming to be the same
person: the duo No. 9.) Within the conventional system of separate
numbers, the emphasis was on continuity and musical development.
The tenor part of Sélim, the main character, was conceived rather
grandiosely, somewhat like the role of Catherine in Meyerbeer's
L'Étoile du nord. Recurring motifs were used for Sélim's and
Margyane's love, and for a prophetic chorus of spirits. More unusual
was the use of a flexible anapaestic motif whose musical intervals
and character constantly varied according to their context. Although
not unlike the Mephistopheles motif in Berlioz's Damnation de Faust,
Reyer's could be woven in and transformed as a symbol of the genie
Amgiad’s controlling influence on the plot at all levels (Ex. 298,
showing No. 5, No. 6, No. 12, and the Act III finale). Such an
organic concept, quite exceptional for its date in French opera,
reflected Reyer's knowledge of modern German music.
Ex. 298
39 Two vocal score editions were published. The recitatives were composed for a German
production in 1864, and subsequently translated into French.
100 The opium-smoking chorus and its similarity to Bizet's in Djamileh has already been
noted. The first production at the Théátre Lyrique was lavish, and newspapers reported that
the décors would be ‘based on photographs brought back from Baalbek itself [the site of part
of the opera] by the French writer Maxime Du Camp'. See Walsh, Second Empire Opera,
pp. 133-6.
REXER 403
Erostrate (1862; premiere at Baden-Baden) was Reyer’s first
through-composed opera; such recitatives as there are differ greatly
from orthodox French formulas and approach a Germanic cut. The
two-act libretto is a bizarre mixture of legend and history, hinging
unfortunately on the loss of the Venus de Milo's arms and ending
with self-sacrifice through pride. Its musical substance did not
encourage its revival.
Sigurd (1884), on the contrary, was a major French work which
was to hold the stage by the side of Wagner for half a century.
Reyer's friend Edouard Blau submitted a scenario to him in the
early 1860s, based on the Edda and the Nibelungen sagas. It was
versified and polished by Camille du Locle, and a significant portion
of the music written by about 1866. But Act IV was not completed
until shortly before the premiere, and the chronology of the work's
progress is obscure. Reyer was committed in his approval of Wagner,
from 1857 if not before, and Sigurd comes by far the closest of any
French opera of its period to reproducing the musico-dramatic
experience of mature Wagner. That said, however, and Reyer's
individuality begins to become apparent.
Sigurd draws mainly on the Eddas and its plot is close to that of
Götterdämmerung, but it stresses qualities of the chivalric and of
clarity rather than of myth and fatalism.!?! It marked a daring break
with prevailing French subject-matter. Blau and du Locle succeeded
well in their venture: the epic material is logically shaped and
motivated, the characters varied and consistent. The score, which is
on an epic scale, creates its own musical and dramatic terms of
reference. In Sigurd the existence of Brunehild in her magically
defended palace is recounted by a bard (in the separate librettos his
speeches are given to Hagen). Gunther's sister, Hilda, ensnares
Sigurd's affections by means of a potion concocted by her nurse,
Uta. Sigurd wins Brunehild for Gunther, concealing his identity by
his visor. She marries Gunther, but is instinctively drawn to Sigurd
(for love of whom she was punished by Odin). After her only duet
with Sigurd, and at Hilda's jealous urging, he is murdered. He
ascends with Brunehild to Valhalla in an apotheosis.
Reyers main achievements can be summarized as harmonic
command to create interest and pacing over very long spans; virtual
elimination of the aesthetic of the set piece; use of a set of
some twelve recurring motifs with fluency and in some cases
101 Henri de Curzon, La Légende de Sigurd dans [ Edda: L'Opéra ГЕ. Reyer (Paris, 1890),
85. Sigurd himself is presented as ‘son of Sigemon'.
404 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
in transformation;!°2 avoidance of rhythmic stagnation; and the
maintenance of overall tension and increase in dramatic feeling in
Act IV as fate closes in on the hero and heroine.
It is easy to criticize aspects of Reyer's art by almost inescapable
reference to Wagner: Reyer is occasionally prolix; his range of chords
has limits; he is less successful depicting evil and anger than heroism
and love. The music for Norns, Kobolds, and spirits defending
Brunehild in Act II looks back to Robert le diable. But this approach
does not reveal the nature of Sigurd, which is elevated and tragic in
the unsentimental way of Les Troyens. Certain passages, indeed,
recall Berlioz's rhythmic surge and shape in that work. The close of
Sigurd borrows from Les Troyens the idea of a vision of future
retribution: Hannibal is prophesied by Dido, and Attila (whose
image is supposed to be seen) by Hilda.
Something of the flavour of Sigurd may be seen through its motifs.
Certain ones are not much transformed on rehearing, being associated
with fixed things like the potion or Attila's envoys. However, a
typical exception is the motif of Sigurd's deliverance of Brunehild,
seen both in an early appearance (Ex. 299, from Act I) and then in
ironic recollection as Gunther, kneeling before Brunehild, claims the
rght to marry her (Ex. 300, from Act III). Reyer's orchestra
comments on the action.
The pithiness and expressive style of his motifs was as Wagnerian
as the irony of their application. But the overall balance between
Ех. 299
Moderato
= [—L 25р ey
йш 10:53 саат ol ЕЕ)
Ce e biet Erde Ee
Pr
I
os
| — D
рл ==
кюе I жел ыт Т
102 Quoted and analysed ibid.
CHABRIER 405
Bx 30
Lento non troppo
Andantino
> = maestoso
—
Revers lyrical invention and motivic working reflects middle-period,
not late Wagner. At the same time the Frenchman's long composi-
tional concern with the work seems to have enabled him to attain
more maturely concentrated effects in Act IV. In Ex. 301, when
Sigurd realizes his true emotions, the motif of Hilda's love (x) is
dramatically subordinated to a development of that of Brunehild (y).
Reyer's Salammbó (1890), a work Flaubert had wished him to
compose, following Verdi's refusal, was also planned in the 1860s.
It too was successful, and confirmed Reyer's exceptional place in
French opera.
CHABRIER
While the musical languages of Reyer, Massenet, and Saint-Saéns
presented syntheses of current practice, that of Emmanuel Chabrier
(1841-94) was a catalyst: his work became the cradle of French
modernism. Debussy's middle-period orchestral style is audible in
parts of Gwendoline, while for his part Ravel asserted, 'It is from
[Chabrier] that all modern French music stems. His role was as
important as that of Manet in painting'.103
Chabrier's music possesses irrepressible qualities of joy and satire,
which were heard in several light operettas. The two early incomplete
103 Roger Delage, ‘Ravel and Chabrier’, Musical Quarterly, 61 (1975), 546-52.
406 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
collaborations with Paul Verlaine (Fisch-Ton-Kan and Vaucochard et
Fils І") probably date from 1865-9 (not ¢.1864, as often stated); they
mock the politics and personality of Napoleon III. Thus, when the
operetta librettists E. Leterrier and A. Vanloo, who had been working
with Lecocq, offered Chabrier L’Etoile (1877), the notion must have
been particularly attractive. Written with dialogue, it is set in the
fantasy dictatorship of the fatuous king, Ouf 1°, and prompted a
richly humorous score. There are subtle passing harmonies, en-
trancing pieces of word-play, and musical parodies of Offenbach
and Donizetti. The one-act operetta Une éducation manquée (1879)
suffered from a weak libretto; an attempt to rescue the work by the
addition of recitatives was made by Milhaud (1934).104
The experience of seeing Tristan und Isolde їп Munich in 1880 did
not cause Chabrier to imitate Wagner, but it did produce a problem
piece, Gwendoline, produced in 1886. The composer admitted he
thought it would be such, even during its composition; yet this is
merely to confirm that the problem lay with the drama, by Catulle
Mendes, which is indeed naive: ‘As to Gwendoline being a flop, it
will be one in a big way, but I'm certainly going to risk it. Opera
librettos are always terrible: look at the “book” for [Massenet's]
Le Roi de Lahore . . 195
In Act I a Saxon community in Britain, led by Armel, is invaded
by the Danes, led by Harald. Armel’s daughter Gwendoline quells
Harald with her beauty and personality, and he asks for her hand
in marriage. Armel hatches a plot. Act II sees the wedding, but
during the feasting the unarmed Danes are slaughtered by the Saxons.
Harald is mortally wounded and Gwendoline stabs herself. (She has
been given a dagger by Armel to kill Harald, but she does not realize
this until too late.)
Perhaps Chabrier actually thought of the action as a peg on which
to hang his astonishing music: the dramatic proportions are awkward,
the wedding scene is over-long, and the work falls into sections with
sometimes disparate musical material. It is certainly not dominated
or unified by the presence of recurring motifs, though Gerald
Abraham has pointed out that ‘it has a dozen or so genuine
Leitmotive which are modified, transformed, combined and woven
into a more or less continuous orchestral texture'.196 The score is,
104 Francis Poulenc, Emmanuel Chabrier, trans. Cynthia Jolly (London, 1981), 32; Rollo
Myers, Emmanuel Chabrier and his Circle (London, 1969), 21.
105 Myers, Chabrier, p. 57.
106 Gerald Abraham, The Concise Oxford History of Music (London, 1979), 741. He adds
that ‘some of the modifications of the “Gwendoline” motive ... are almost too subtle to be
noticed’.
CHABRIER 407
finally, a treasure-trove of infinite promise. It expresses Chabrier’s
great range and sophistication, from the fine Tristan-like love duet
to an almost bitonal yell (Ex: 302, vocal score, p. 81); from folk-tune
to floating tonality (Ex. 303, vocal score, p. 152); and from a superb
evocation of dawn to impressions of hand-to-hand combat in Act
II, with trumpets purely Debussyan yet over ten years before the
Nocturnes (Ex. 304, vocal score, p. 264).
The opera comique Le Roi malgre lui (1887) was Chabrier’s last
Ex. 302
Allegro, con impeto
ШЕ [woodwind double voice] _—
GWENDOLINE S :
be? h E H ^ D I d d
E sg ПАЧ d " s "
pizz. 25 [brass, bass drum omitted]
Ex. 303
Andantino J.=58
GWENDOLINE Р
408 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Paname ESES 1 ы zb Tarta 08 cele miri 31
nu Zi Lp | — 4.4:
Gees? e Eë —
= E
WEEZE nr ae
д
warn
LL ILL
ЕЕЕЕ == = =
ao
(And repeat word and sound with me: ‘Spin, spin, blonde beauty . . .)
Ex. 304
Allegro vivace ДЕ 112
tpt (F) 3 I Fi =
Jf [horns, trombones „ale [+cymbal]
omitted]
completed stage work, and he once again stumbled on the literary
side.107 Although it returns to the theme of an irresponsible king (the
historical Henri III of France when king of Poland), the work was
a full-length attempt to infuse many emotional nuances into a light
framework.!°8 Gaiety dominates, and the score parodies Offenbach
107 The libretto by Emile de Najac and Paul Burani, derived from an 1836 vaudeville, was
revised by Jean Richepin; Chabrier himself had to help with it. The plot is both weak and
confusing. See Myers, Chabrier, p. 70 and also Poulenc, Chabrier, pp. 53-4, for summaries.
108 Changes were made at revivals in 1888 and 1929; the vocal score edited by A. Carré
follows the latter version, altering the order of some items and also changing the words.
ЫШ. Ду 409
Ех. 305
Moderato
Ex. 306
Maestoso
(the Barcarolle), Berlioz (the Hungarian March), and Meyerbeer’s
bold chords in Les Huguenots (cf. Ex. 52), in Chabrier's own
conspirators' ensemble, No. 13 (Ex. 305). These chords were brazenly
developed in the overture (Ex. 306) and apparently influenced Satie
as well as Ravel, who would often say to Poulenc, “The premiere of
Le Roi malgré lui changed the direction of harmony in France.'19?
For Chabrier freed seventh and ninth chords and second inversions
from their orthodox functions; threw in unexpected passing notes;
explored modal relationships; and refused to remove the supertonic
from the final chord of No. 2. Yet the result maintains its fine poise
and taste; Chabrier's goal was the listener's pleasure, his method
conceived of perhaps like an impressionist painting (he owned a
discriminating collection of such works and was very close to Manet)
in which the realistic outline would be broken up by momentary
inflexions and sensations.!!? It is our great loss that he never found
the appropriate dramatic medium to contain the expression of his
extraordinary sensibility.
(c) ITALY
By JULIAN BUDDEN
THE period which followed the fall of Venice in August 1849 was
one of profound demoralization; in no other part of Europe had the
insurgents of 1848 gained so little. The extent to which patriots such
as Verdi had been harassed by the Austrian rulers has understandably
been exaggerated; outside the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the
Papal States the most ‘Risorgimental’ of his operas encountered only
109 Poulenc, Chabrier, pp. 54-5.
110 This general idea is discussed by Myers, who also reproduces the list of works of art
owned by Chabrier: Chabrier, pp. 146-54.
410 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
minimal interference from the censorship. When the publisher of
Attila charged the management of Lä Scala, Milan, an exorbitant
hire fee for its performance, it was the Austrian police who compelled
him to lower it. During the 1850s Verdi’s difficulties with the censors
were continual, and only his personal eminence sufficed to overcome
them; for the lesser composer there was no-such remedy. The
‘enlightenment’ dramas of Vittorio Alfieri were frowned upon no
less than the works of that arch-liberal Victor Hugo, which is why
Mercadante had to wait fifteen years for his Virginia of 1851 to be
performed. New ideas, new dramatic stimuli from contemporary
European literature were barred to the average composer of the time.
All of this would matter less if, Verdi apart, the stagnation of
Italian Romantic opera had not already begun. The tradition
inaugurated by Rossini and his immediate successors had reached
its apogee around 1840. By 1845 Donizetti was confined to an
asylum, Mercadante and Pacini were turning out ever more elaborate
versions of the same product. Federico Ricci was never to regain the
heights scaled in 1841 with Corrado d'Altamura and Luigi Rolla.
Only Verdi continued his steady ascent. Indeed during the next two
decades Italian opera, conservative in the 1830s, was to become
well-nigh anachronistic. Throughout the nineteenth century opera
shows a continuous progress in the direction of dramatic continuity.
The convention of frozen time, essential to eighteenth-century opera
seria, operates less and less in the age of Romanticism. In Italian
opera with its highly formal basis this process was, if not entirely
halted, effectively slowed down. In a type of opera whose twin
principles are balance and contrast, the ‘art of transition’ in Wagner's
phrase, can make little headway. Here the drama is still conceived
as a succession of situations rather than a continuously evolving
action; it moves through a sequence of finite numbers, each designed
to be followed by applause and curtain calls. Linking material
normally takes the form of a so-called scena—a mixture of recitative,
arioso, orchestral gesture, and the type of instrumental melody
known as the ‘parlante’,!!! in which the voices engage sometimes on
the top line (though not for long), at others on the harmony notes.
Duets and trios are set out in contrasted movements, each marked
by a change of mood. Plots are constructed centripetally, working
111 The term ‘parlante’ is defined at length in Abrame Basevi, Studio sulle opere de Giuseppe
Verdi (Florence, 1859), 30-2. Originally used with reference to the voice part only, it came to
embrace the vocal-orchestral design as a whole, of which the orchestral part is the most
important. A parlante melody should not be confused with those short orchestral themes,
often of no more than two or three bars in length and of a cadential character, with which
composers before 1860 liked to punctuate and round off long passages of recitative.
ALY 411
towards а grand confrontation of principals in опе of the middle
acts, the resulting pezzo concertato and associated stretta forming
the architectural pinnacle of the score and allowing the composer to
demonstrate his skill in massive part writing. From then on everything
leads to the death of the hero or heroine, usually amid a crowd of
sympathetic bystanders.
With the proclamation of the Italian state in 1861, censorship was
lifted from most of the peninsula. However, conditions could hardly
change over night; and the tyranny of the prima donna was less easy
to shake off than that of the Austrian rulers. But she already had a
rival in the nascent star conductor,!!? a species long familiar north
of the Alps but unknown in Italy where the musical direction was
normally divided between the maestro concertatore (at premieres
usually the composer himself), who rehearsed the singers, and the
primo violino who guided the performance from a cued violin part
with occasional gestures of his bowing arm.
If the new breed of conductors could not directly bring about the
renewal of Italian opera, it at least facilitated that invasion of Italian
theatres by foreign operas that began during the 1860s. The
latest works of Gounod, Thomas, and Meyerbeer, now assured of
adequate performance, began in their turn to influence contemporary
Italian opera. One of them, L’Africaine, would become seminal,
inaugurating a taste for exotic idioms from which native music had
up till then been free. Italy was no longer immune from the
contemporary trend towards dramatic continuity in opera. The solo
cabaletta with its obligatory repeat fell slowly into desuetude. Prima
donnas with a penchant for brilliance were usually accommodated
with a genre-piece in the manner of French opera. Duet cabalettas
continued to flourish but the threefold statement became increasingly
rare. Aria and romanza were now identical, both cast in French
ternary form with a long middle section which modulates widely.
The pezzo concertato was still de rigueur for a central finale; but the
stretta might occur in another act.
In sum the architectural nature of post-Rossinian Italian opera
was being at last undermined; but no alternative system of con-
struction had been found to replace it. Most Italian operas of the
1860s were amorphous and unsure. It was a state of affairs against
112 After reading an unfavourable report of Toscanini's Falstaff, Verdi wrote, ‘When I
began shocking the musical world with my sins there was the disaster of the prima donna's
rondos; now we have the tyranny of the conductors. The first was the lesser evil.’ (Letter to
Giulio Ricordi, 18 Mar. 1899, quoted in Franco Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1959), iv.
638.)
412 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
which the idealistic Boito railed to little effect. But behind the general
confusion of the time one trend can be-discerned, namely towards
grand opera on the French model; and Verdi would be part of it.
THE LATER TRAGIC OPERAS OF MERCADANTE AND PACINI
By 1850 both Saverio Mercadante (1795-1870) and Giovanni
Pacini (1796-1867) had passed their meridian. Apart from a single
excursion into the semiseria genus, Mercadante continued to turn
out the same massive product, suitably tailored to the singers at his
disposal. His plots are now invariably neo-Classical, with their
suspended weddings (Virginia, 1866), oracular pronouncements
(Statira, 1853), and heroines torn between allegiance to father and
husband (Pelagio, 1857). Arias in two contrasted movements are still
the rule, though the tenor may be granted a romanza (normally in
3/8) and the soprano a preghiera in a later act. The cantabile will
be in 9/8 or 12/8 with woodwind filigree between the phrases and
a few interesting if unmotivated modulations; the cabaletta will be
in common (occasionally triple) time with an accompaniment of
alternating pulsations and a few ‘darting’ interventions from solo
wind including trumpet and piccolo. Here the tonal orbit is wider
than the material warrants and the rhythm often too contrived.
Duets are in the usual two or three movements, the material divided
between the two singers in an eminently traditional manner. Yet,
even when each is allotted a different melody, the contrast is rarely
sufficient to convey the dramatic situation. Too much is sacrificed
to mellifluence. Choruses are heavily scored with abundant use of
full brass. Preludes for one or two concertante instruments treated
in sub-Paganinian style are often to be found.
In two fields, however, Mercadante retains a certain distinction.
The transitional passages (scene, tempi di mezzo) are always finely
wrought, arioso, recitative, and parlante being combined in a manner
which serves to carry the action purposefully forward. Then again,
Mercadante remained a master of the slow pezzo concertato—the
short-breathed declamatory opening that planes out into a broad
period, from which in turn a succession of lyrical ideas unfurl, all
moving with effortless momentum to the final cadence. The finale to
Act П of Statira is a particularly fine example.
Amid much that is predictable—including the maddening tic
(273 Л) which runs through all the later operas as a call to attention—
Bianca’s prayer from Pelagio (‘D’un infelice accogliere") with its
interweaving of voice and obbligato cello stands out as a magnificent
late flowering of Mercadantean melody (Ex. 307). To the end of his
MERCADANTE AND PACINI 413
Ex4307
Andante BIANCA espress.
(Oh Heaven, thou shouldst receive [the prayers] of an unhappy one)
career Mercadante remained one of the few composers to write florid
music for baritone.
A mere practitioner by comparison, Pacini likewise continued to
produce operas in much the same mould as Mercadante. If his
melodies flow more freely, they are more banal and loosely construc-
ted, the ‘andante’ in particular showing a tendency to wander
aimlessly through two or three related keys. The ‘allegros’ however,
display an unusual rhythmic variety; and in certain cases the cabaletta
repeats are shortened. As in Mercadante the style is unremittingly
bland and subservient to the demands of star singers. The duet
between the prima donnas in Malvina di Scozia (1851) reverts to the
canto fiorito of Rossini's Semiramide; while the choral narration of
414 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Wortimer’s (sic) crime proceeds in a sunny B flat major undisturbed
by discord or the minor mode. The instrumental experiments of such
late works as Margherita Pusterla (1856) and Don Diego de Mendoza
(1867) show no advance save in elaboration. Of Pacini's output of
over ninety operas, only Saffo continued to hold the stage throughout
the century; and much of his later activity was devoted to providing
new arias for exponents of the title role.
OPERA BUFFA AND SEMISERIA
One consequence of the escapist mood of the 1850s was a
resurgence of the lighter forms of opera. Yet in form, style, and
expression opera buffa and semiseria were no less stereotyped than
their sister genre. Buffo basses and baritones still chatter either by
themselves or beneath lyrical sopranos and tenors, cavatinas tend to
bein two short movements without tempi di mezzo, and, unbelievably,
recitative secco is still the main connecting tissue. The Piedigrotta
(1852) of Luigi Ricci (1805-59), remembered today for its lively
tarantella, reverts to a no less antiquated convention of spoken
dialogue in Neapolitan patois. The Amori e trappole (1850) of Antonio
Cagnoni (1828-96) is consciously archaic, borrowing its plot from
Rossini’s early farsa, L'occasione fa il ladro, and even including in
the heroine's cavatina an instance of the Rossinian ‘open melody’
with showy, declamatory flourishes which give way to a smooth,
periodic motion. Elderly cuckolds, amorous Turks, heavy fathers,
and bubbling coloratura sopranos still form the staple ingredients
of buffo plots. The only difference between the comedies of the 1850s
and those of twenty years earlier lies in a certain thickening of the
instrumental texture and a somewhat exaggerated use of parlanti—
the besetting sin of the otherwise lively // carnevale di Venezia (1851)
by Errico Petrella (1813-77).
The wonder is that composers still occasionally found something
new to say in the manner of Donizetti and Rossini and that the
young Bizet was sufficiently attracted by the genre to write an opera
such as Don Procopio (1859) for his envoi for the Prix de Rome. The
Tutti in maschera (1856) of Carlo Pedrotti (1817-93) shows refined
harmonic workmanship and has one genuinely original number in
which the mezzo-soprano Dorotea in two alternating movements
devises various ways of vamping the susceptible Abdala. A minor
classic of the period is Crispino e la comare (1850) by the brothers
Luigi and Federico Ricci. Piave's morality, about a poor cobbler
who with the aid of a fairy godmother becomes a rich doctor until
pride and avarice return him to his former state, combines a touch
PETRELLA, PEDROTTI, AND CAGNONI 415
of Moliere with those elements of the fantastic hitherto banned from
Italian operatic comedy and thus provides a relief from the regular
buffo stock-in-trade. The music, if not especially original, has a
certain high spirited spontaneity, in which Luigi’s superior vigour is
offset by Federico’s more refined craftsmanship. Waltz rhythms
abound and many of the numbers end with an attractive teasing out
of the final cadence.
All the operas cited above represent the rump of an Italian
tradition that reaches back into the eighteenth century and which
failed to survive the 1850s. The comedies of the next decade, such
as Cagnoni’s Michele Perrin (1864) and Papa Martin (1871) and
Federico Ricci’s Una follia a Roma (1869), are very different in
character: more individual, freer in structure and richer in individual
personalities. A distinctly Parisian influence is apparent—indeed Una
follia a Roma suggests a French opéra comique with Italian recitative
added. Recitativo secco is now finally obsolete; only the chattering
buffo bass, a remarkably resistant growth, remains as a link with the
past.
The semiseria genre has always been more difficult to define; but
by the 1850s its models would appear to be Bellini’s La sonnambula
and Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix. Constant features were a rural
ambience, a happy ending, and a heroine variously accused of theft
(Mercadante's Violetta, 1853), infanticide (Petrella's Elena di Tolosa,
1852), or mere inconstancy (Pedrotti's Fiorina, 1851). Pacini’s //
saltimbanco (1856) anticipates Pagliacci with an Act I finale for an
actor whose genuine distraction at being deserted by his wife is
mistaken for brilliant acting by an admiring crowd. The forms are
nearer those of tragic opera; but there is usually an abundance of
choruses in 6/8, still the traditional rhythm for peasants, huntsmen,
and the lower orders generally. In Violetta and Fiorina, both set in
Switzerland, there are excursions into a montanaro style. (The latter
even includes a ranz des vaches.) Orchestrally accompanied recitative
prevails, the one exception being Violetta, presumably since it was
intended as a show-piece for the two veteran bassi buffi, Giuseppe
Fioravanti and Leopoldo Cammarano, whose comic bravura would
emerge more clearly from the older convention.
THE MIDDLE GENERATION: PETRELLA, PEDROTTI, AND
CAGNONI
АП three of these composers first made their name in comedy and
all came into national prominence in the 1850s. Errico Petrella was
born in Palermo the same year as Verdi. He made his operatic début
416 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
as early as 1829, before Verdi had even Берип his studies in Milan,
but for many years his works had only limited and local success. With
Il carnevale di Venezia (1851) all this changed. Entirely traditional in
design, it shows a spontaneous gift for melody, and a genuine
resource in adapting stock procedures to a particular situation. (A
hilarious ‘hydrophobic’ aria for the primo buffo remains in the mind,
as does a quartet in which three women make up to a bewildered
Neapolitan.) With the chain of serious operas that begins with Marco
Visconti (1854) the defects in his musical technique become apparent.
Inept progressions, pleonastic fillings out of bars, lapses into banality
are all too frequent. Certain of his works rely on spectacular
stage effects: a storm at sea (Marco Visconti), the flooding of the
Netherlands (Е/пауа, 1856), an eruption of Vesuvius (Jone, 1858);
which is not to deny them occasional moments of power, as in the
duet finale to the second act of Jone where the hero's growing
delirium is reflected in an increasingly busy accompaniment and
chromatically inflected line, only, alas, to culminate in the reprise of
a trivial brindisi. In the first act finale of Morosina (1859) both
concertato and stretta are dominated by an unusually forceful tenor
solo.
During the 1860s Petrella's activity was confined chiefly to Naples
where he produced a string of works often described rather unfairly
as ‘cabaletta’ operas. True, they never failed to satisfy the re-
quirements of a virtuoso prima donna. Celinda (1865) contains two
scenes of laughing madness for the heroine, one feigned, the other
genuine. In Giovanna di Napoli (1869) Ghislanzoni's queen abandons
her regal manner for a showy bolero. In La Contessa d' Amalfi (1864)
the baritone's cavatina (“Non sai tu che il genio chiede’) is in one
movement only but with the gait of a cabaletta (a solution adopted
by Verdi twice in Un ballo in maschera). Leonora's cavatina in the
same opera is an andante in the traditional binary form but with an
extended coda decorated with coloratura. But of the old-style
cabaletta with ritornello and repeat there is not a trace. Duets consist
mainly of alternating solos from each singer with brief interventions
from the other; only in the final movement do they both join.
Throughout old-fashioned binary cantabili jostle with French-style
couplets, strophic romanze and ternary arias with no sense of overall
design. Concertati are still constructed on the 1830s model with a
Bellinian groundswell towards the final cadence. Manfredo (1872)
shows a half-successful attempt to come to terms with the plainer,
more massive style of the 1870s.
If Petrella's operas founder on the lack of musicianship, the same
FACCIO AND BOITO 417
cannot be said of those of Carlo Pedrotti. His comedies show a
refined craftsmanship, an elaboration of detail which in no way
detracts from their freshness. Even in the early // parucchiere della
reggenza (1851)—another of those operas involving Peter the Great—
there are memorable ideas, including a parody of Verdi's early
manner in an aria for the Tsar. His masterpiece, Tutti in maschera,
could well bear revival today. But his serious operas from /sabella
4 Aragona (1859) to Olema (1872) lack even the vigour that helped
to sustain those of Petrella; and he ended by forbidding their
performance (‘old men's stuff’).
Working entirely in the north where French influence was at its
strongest, Antonio Cagnoni (1828-96) brought a certain welcome
crispness to the prevailing Italian idiom. Throughout the 1850s and
1860s he rarely strayed far from comedy. Most of his operas have
substantial overtures showing a skill in development rare for an
Italian composer of the time. Giralda (1852), Michele Perrin (1864),
as well as the more serious Claudia (1866), Un capriccio di donna
(1870), and Francesca da Rimini (1878) make use of ‘labelling’ themes.
Yet like many of his generation Cagnoni found it hard to maintain
consistency of style; his comedies oscillate between Rossinian facility
and an attempt at harmonic piquancy that often results in mere
ugliness. None the less his Papa Martin (1871), known in England
as The Porter of Havre, enjoyed a certain success in Italy and abroad;
and in the later tragedies there are moments of heavily charged
lyricism which anticipate the language of verismo.
Among the more lasting success of the period was the Ruy Blas
(1869) of Filippo Marchetti (1831-1902). Though clearly influenced
by Meyerbeer, the style is Marchetti’s own—somewhat over-sweet
and with a penchant for long pedal points, but musically well
nourished and often haunting. He anticipates Puccini in preparing
well beforehand the obvious gem of the score, the duet “О dolce
voluttà', and using it as a reminiscence theme thereafter. Casilda's
ballata in the Andalusian style breaks new ground for an Italian
opera.
But to certain bold spirits in the north ali such innovations were
far too timid. The time had come, they insisted, for a far more
drastic reform.
REFORM FROM THE NORTH: FACCIO AND BOITO
In Milan, with the proclamation of the Italian state, the dawn of
intellectual freedom came up like thunder. The prevailing cultural
movement was that of the so-called Scapigliatura—a loose association
418 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
of writers, artists, and musicians dedicated to the overthrow of
established canons whether of art ar religion. Much of what they
produced is merely bizarre, a kind of avant-gardisme for its own
sake; but among their more positive beliefs was that in a regeneration
of the arts through mutual intermingling. The chief musical rep-
resentatives of the Scapigliatura were Arrigo Boito (1842-1918) and
Franco Faccio (1840-91), both determined to make a bonfire of
traditional Italian opera. Of the two, Faccio had the greater musical
facility. ‘He is a good musician, Mariani wrote to Verdi, ‘but
unfortunately what is good in his work is not new, and what is new
is rather boring.'!!? Certainly there is nothing very new about J
profughi fiamminghi (1863), written to a text by the scapigliato poet
Emilio Praga. Yet this was the opera which prompted Boito to hail
the composer as ‘perhaps the man who is destined to clean the altar
of Italian opera, now befouled like the walls of a brothel’. For
Faccio's Amleto (1865) Boito himself supplied the libretto. It scored
no more than a succés d'estime, and the vocal score was never
published in full; but from certain excerpts—the funeral march and
the monologue ‘Essere o non essere' —one can discern a rich, carefully
wrought harmonic and orchestral style and a consciously elevated
tone, as of one whose range extended into symphony and chamber
music as well as opera.
Meantime Boito had been active as propagandist in the musical
journals of Milan. He preached the revival of Italian instrumental
tradition, the cultivation of Beethoven, Mozart, and Mendelssohn;
he declaimed against the formulae of Italian operas, likewise the
outworn system of metres which, it seemed, no composer had been
able to shake off. Opera remained his goal and Meyerbeer his chief
model. It remained to be seen how far Boito's ideals would measure
up to his own practice. The original Mefistofele of 1868—so long
that it was decided to give its second performance in two halves
played on successive nights—is now lost beyond recovery. The
Mefistofele that we know today is the revision of 1875 with
improvements added the following year; the autograph does however
allow us to see which passages passed over intact from the first
version to the second. From the reviews alone it is clear that the
first Mefistofele was altogether more radical, avoiding where possible
everything that recalled the formal arias of the past. Several of
the well-known lyrical plums are missing from it—not however,
Mefistofele's Meyerbeerian couplet 'Son lo spirito che nega' each
113 Letter from Mariani to Verdi, 20 May 1865 (Abbiati, Verdi, iii. 17-18). He was referring
to Amleto, of which he conducted the premiere.
FACCIO AND BOITO 419
verse ending with prolonged whistling, the traditional sign of
disapproval. Faust was a baritone, not a tenor; and the fourth act
contained a scene from Goethe’s Part II, where Mefistofele appears
at the Emperor’s court as a jester, followed by a symphonic
intermezzo descriptive of a battle, which Boito subsequently published
in an arrangement for piano duet. Even from an unaltered passage
such as Ex. 308, taken from the Prologue in Heaven, with discords
resolving on discords, an unceasing circle of modulation and the
final cadence continually withheld, one can imagine the effect on
contemporary Italian ears.
Boito’s ideas are usually distinguished; they never contain a
superfluous note; but they are curiously infertile. They lead either
Ex. 308
Andante lento
——— | D
EE GE Eet Eed EE E ee Пр) 5 Ш eee ee Ee Ee Ee
eg EE E Ee E Ei E EE Ae ee „7 ee BE
Ee Eeer E eS] E [E — E 7 EE Een
e Ei SSS E Hu Een eet bi e RE Fee |
Ka
E Н ишн er | aaa
ee Ss Ee Eeer ee SC a SS
(accompaniment only)
420 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
nowhere or back upon themselves. The result is that every act lacks
a sense of scale proportionate to its length. We seem to be hearing
a succession of miniatures. As a musical influence on Italian opera
Boito is negligible. He would have remained a mere footnote of
history but for his collaboration with a genius of a wholly different
calibre. e
THE VERDIAN SYNTHESIS
The qualities which raise Verdi’s operas so far above those of his
Italian contemporaries are various and interdependent; fundamental
to them all, however, is his determination to treat each work as a
separate problem requiring its own unique solution, using traditional
means where they could serve his purpose, striking out in a new
direction where they did not. Having chosen his subject, he devoted
his energies to realizing the drama in music with as few concessions
as possible to the kind of sonorous hedonism in which so many of his
fellow countrymen indulged. In a word Verdi’s music is dramatically
functional. Of this Rigoletto (1851), that masterpiece of his middle
years, furnishes a good example. At the point where Rigoletto mocks
Monterone the music indulges in a series of grotesque cabrioles of
no melodic interest (Ex. 309). Yet not only do they express to
perfection Rigoletto's malign ribaldry; they detonate the hugely
powerful marching periods of Monterone's anger. This is not a case
of music humbly serving drama, but rather of drama taking musical
shape.
Ex. 309
Sostenuto assai J =88
Б =e et
= ==
ILU ee eme e He 1—1
ПУ UD аге 1 әт
=
= «uL. sn
EC LLLI SL DA |
ES ад. m
THE VERDIAN SYNTHESIS 421
(My lord, you did conspire against us.)
Not that Rigoletto is entirely free from concessions to singers and
public. The Duke's aria ‘Parmi veder le lagrime’ is hardly appropriate
to a rake; it does however offer the first instance of a typically
Verdian melodic economy whereby the third and fourth phrases are
run together in a single flight. Three-limbed melodies with the lyrical
emphasis thrown on the final limb were to become a regular feature
of Verdi's mature operas.
Every number of Rigoletto shows the same ability to say as much
as possible in the fewest notes. The first duet between Rigoletto and
Gilda shows traces of the old tripartite scheme; but everything is
inflected towards the unique dramatic situation, so that each fresh
idea occurs as a natural result of what has gone before. Certain of
the recitatives achieve musical parity with the arias. Nowhere except
briefly at the end of the first scene is there a static ensemble. The
famous quartet in Act III, though bearing a family likeness to
Bellini’s ‘A te,o cara’ from / puritani, is in fact an action piece in
which every character receives sharp musical definition. Indeed the
third act is the most obviously original of the three. Operatic storms
were common enough; but they occurred mostly by way of prelude
or interlude. The storm in Rigoletto is the first to proceed pari passu
with the action in a free association of characteristic motifs reaching
its climax with the murder of Gilda. The use of the stage song 'La
donna é mobile' to bring about the anagnorisis is justly celebrated
but there is nothing very new about it. How many operatic heroes
and heroines have been brought back to sanity through hearing ‘our
tune’!
Il trovatore (1853) operates on a quite different principle. Here is
no steadily developing action but a sequence of contrasted situations
with no immediate connection between them. In the person of
Azucena Verdi first exploits the mezzo-soprano voice as the female
equivalent of the baritone. Indeed the whole opera is based on the
422 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
polarity between her and the soprano heroine Leonora. Each inhabits
her own tonal area and speaks her own musical language, lyrical,
aristocratic in Leonora's case, popular and dramatic in Azucena's;
and each dominates alternate scenes of the opera, holding it in a
dynamic equilibrium. The Count belongs naturally to the aristocratic
world of Leonora; Manrico is divided between her and Azucena;
and the turning-point of the drama is where he crosses from
Leonora's sphere into Azucena's with the rousing cabaletta ‘Di quella
pira’. In contrast to those of Rigoletto the arias and duets are divided
in the traditional manner and there is a minimum of recitative, all
of which gives // trovatore a somewhat old-fashioned air. But
abundance of melody, insistent rhythmic vitality, moments of
grandeur such as the ‘Miserere’ scene with its distant echoes of the
Parisian stage all combine to make of // trovatore the fiery essence
of Italian Romantic opera and its ne plus ultra.
In La traviata (1853) it was said that Verdi brought chamber music
into the opera house.!1? The reference is of course not to instrumental
texture but rather to its style of vocal melody, which approached
that of the aria da camera. This is the most intimate of Verdi's
operas, a drama of three characters in which the chorus always
appears as an intrusion. The melodies move by small intervals; the
prevailing rhythm is that of the waltz. At a time when Mercadante
and Pacini were still writing long-limbed melismatic lines in 9/8 and
12/8, Alfredo's declaration of love (Ex. 310), later to become the
Ex. 310
Andante
ALFREDO
er c ms
con espansione L————
Di quel-l'a - mor,quel-l'a - mor. ch'é pal- pi - to del -l'u- ni - ver - so, del-
con grazia
LES
сго-се, cro-ceede- li-zia, cro-cee de - li - zia, de-li-ziaal cor.
(Of that love which is the heartbeat of the whole universe— lofty, mysterious, the heart's cross and its delight.)
114 Basevi, Studio, p. 231.
THE VERDIAN SYNTHESIS 423
main reminiscence theme of the opera, must have sounded dis-
concertingly bare— the Italian lyric style pared down to its simplest.
For Simon Boccanegra (1857) Verdi found a very different tinta
(his own term, denoting a certain combination of harmonic, melodic,
and rhythmic attributes which stamps each opera with an un-
mistakable character of its own).!!5 For him fourteenth century
Genoa was an age of blood and iron. Accordingly the tone of Simon
Boccanegra is unusually dark and austere. The Prologue 1s confined
to basses, baritones, and male chorus. The leading character dom-
inates the opera without a single aria, while in his opponent, Jacopo
Fiesco, Verdi creates his most remarkable bass role so far—a
character as rugged and unyielding as the basalt rocks of his native
Liguria. His cavatina (‘Il lacerato spirito") demonstrates how in
Verdi formal concision and harmonic ellipsis go hand in hand. The
succession of 6-4 and 6-4-3 chords may be unorthodox, but it 1s
the only possible harmonic solution to Verdi’s brief but highly
charged melody (Ex. 311). The central pezzo concertato is conceived
naturalistically with no concessions to melodic charm, while the
stretta abounds in harsh counterpoint. The chief moment of lyricism
is reserved for the ensemble that marks the Doge's death, where it
lights up the end of the opera like a radiant sunset after a stormy
day.
Verdi made use of French ternary form with modulating central
episode for Amelia's cavatina in Simon Boccanegra. French forms
are still more in evidence in his many-faceted Un ballo in maschera
Bx. 5l
FIESCO
cantabile = ===
OR:
ГУ ARTH п
[AT ИП)
fa 2
115 Alarmed by rumours that an opera based on Le Roi s'amuse would not be allowed,
Verdi wrote to the management of the Teatro la Fenice, Venice: 'the whole idea and the
musical colour (tinta) of it have been settled in my mind and I may say that the principal
part of the work has already been done.' (Letter to Marzari 20 Aug. 1850, quoted in Gaetano
Cesari and Alessandro Luzio (eds.), / copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1913), 106-7.) For
a further definition of tinta, see Basevi, Studio, pp. 121-2.
424 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
(Heaven in its mercy granted her the crown of martyrdom. Gathered to the splendour of the angels,
pray, Maria, for me)
(1859). The light soprano page Oscar (a novelty for the Italian stage
where travesti roles were traditionally given to mezzo-sopranos) has
two solos in couplet form, the tenor Riccardo one with choral refrain
(the central concertato ‘È scherzo od è follia’ is wonderfully buoyant).
Much of the score sparkles with Gallic charm and gaiety, beset
however by menacing shadows. The part of the heroine Amelia is
conceived wholly in tragic terms. The centrepiece of the opera is the
love duet, Verdi’s finest next to that of Orello and certainly his most
incandescent. Here the old threefold division is maintained but with
more than one difference. The end of the first movement, instead of
forming a contrast with the cantabile, anticipates its rhythm in the
final bars; the cantabile itself proceeds through the development of
a single thematic cell, which becomes transformed into the following
essentially instrumental culmination. Verdi was clearly learning the
‘art of transition’ (Ex. 312). The same idea recurs, fortissimo, in the
cabaletta —so completely altering the conventional balance. Here for
Ex. 312
Più lento )=100
we
Wie D = == =з
ое rn arzt g — ——— — —m———3À к==р
аж 1—9 r шиш
|I ee 3 ск g Ce
ee Se ыз к= ==
zur
ITALIAN 'GRAND OPERA’ 425
the first but not the last time Verdi uses the duet cabaletta form to
create theatrical tension—as in Act I of La forza del destino and Act
III of Aida, not to mention Act V of Don Carlos; it is his favourite
form for the portrayal of lovers who outstay their own safety.
Verdi’s only Italian opera of the 1860s—excluding the revision of
Macbeth (1865)—is La forza del destino, first given at St Petersburg
in 1862 and revised for La Scala, Milan, in 1869. This is an essay
in epic music drama, in which characters as fantastic as those of Ј/
trovatore are set against a background of ordinary, diverse humanity.
Here Verdi is sometimes accused of musical self-indulgence at the
expense of drama, especially in such peripheral numbers as the
‘Rataplan’ chorus; and the charge would certainly hold good if
the subject required the concentration of Otello. But dispersal is
fundamental to the premiss of Rivas's play in which the hand of
fate must pursue its victims through scenes of the utmost variety.
La forza del destino 1s Verdi's nearest approach to a Shakespearean
chronicle play, embracing the highest and the lowest in the land.
The richness and diversity of language that enabled him to encompass
such a scheme is due partly to lessons learned from Paris and partly
to a renewed study of the musical classics. Among the novelties of
La forza del destino may be noted an aria which begins outside the
home key and only moves into it on the second phrase CO tu che
in sen agli angeli) and a style of declaimed melody with its origins
in the recitatives of Rigoletto and Macbeth for the punning sermon
of Fra Melitone, a comic character entirely sui generis. With its
choruses, dances, and range of characters La forza del destino is more
than half-way towards grand opéra on the French model. By 1870
the age of Italian ‘grand opera’ had arrived.
ITALIAN ‘GRAND OPERA’
‘Grand opera’ may be defined as opera in four or five acts involving
lavish spectacle, an abundance of chorus, at least four principals,
and a central ballet. Originating in Paris around 1830, it had come
to dominate the European scene in the latter part of the century,
though surprisingly few of its products have survived today. In Italy
the vogue received a stimulus from the popularity of Meyerbeer’s
L’Africaine, which was played in almost every major season in the
late 1860s; indeed in Lauro Rossi’s theatrical satire, // maestro e la
cantante (1867), it is the only modern opera that rates a quotation
by the plagiarizing composer. In 1871 Lohengrin was performed in
Bologna, the first of Wagner’s operas to reach Italy; and by 1876
the entire early Wagner canon had been heard. If Der fliegende
426 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Holländer was the least liked, Lohengrin was to acquire honorary
Italian status. Though it lacks a ballet, its slow majestic pace, its
total lack of fioritura, its spectacular pageantry would leave its mark
on many Italian operas of the 1870s and 1880s, with the ironical
result that though Wagner himself was a foe to grand opera his
own music was doing more than anyone else's to keep the genre
alive. Not until Giuseppe Martucci conducted the first Italian
performance of Tristan und Isolde in Bologna in 1888 did native
composers have the chance of coming to grips with Wagner's mature
idiom.
During the 1870s and after, the promotion of operas, both native
and foreign, was in the hands of the publishers. Where earlier a
composer would have been contracted by the management of a
theatre, he now wrote for a publisher, who would assume re-
sponsibility for mounting the opera in a worthy manner and at the
same time allow him a percentage of the hire fees. At the time Italy
was divided between the rival firms of Ricordi and Lucca. Each had
its own house magazine and each its chief theatrical showcase:
Ricordi, La Scala Milan; Lucca, the Teatro Comunale, Bologna.
Ricordi held a stronger suit in native composers with Verdi as his
ace of trumps; Lucca could muster no one of greater consequence
than Petrella (the firm's attempt to boost Gobatti's old-fashioned
and incompetent / Goti (1873) as the ‘music of the future’ failed
lamentably), but he had an impressive tally of foreigners— Gounod,
Meyerbeer, Goldmark and Wagner. The sensation of the late 1870s
was Massenet's Roi de Lahore, first given in Milan in 1870; its success
convinced Ricordi that he had found in Massenet the answer to
Wagner; and he commissioned his next opera, Hérodiade, for Italy.
Both operas, grand and exotic, exercised an influence on composers
of the day, as did Goldmark's Die Kónigin von Saba.
Many factors contributed to the new interest in all things foreign.
The reform of the conservatories in 1870 laid a new emphasis on
the study of German instrumental music, past and present. For part
of every year Liszt held court at the Villa d'Este near Rome. Florence
had become Bülow's home since the break-up of his marriage: he
was even considered as a candidate for the Directorship of the Milan
Conservatory. Thus, during the 1870s and 1880s Italian opera became
less recognizably Italian than before. Critics drew attention to
influences from Schubert, Liszt, and Gounod. Lauro Rossi (1810-
85) in La contessa de Mons (1874) quotes the melody of the jota
aragonesa, something unheard of in the 1860s.
By this time all traces of the post-Rossinian tradition have been
AWE LATER VERDI 427
obliterated. The forms are those of French grand opéra. Arias are in
ternary form; fioritura and melisma have vanished and with them all
trace of the broad compound rhythms typical of the mid-century
cantabile. If the formal numbers are still basically finite, they show
an increasing tendency to merge into the surrounding tissue. Cadenzas
are obsolete. By the beginning of the 1880s the act or tableau has
become the formal unit, as can be seen by comparing Verdi’s
revised Simon Boccanegra (1881) with its original of 1857. All the
conventional applause points have gone; cabalettas are either removed
or so altered as regards form that the term itself becomes a misnomer.
Only the central concertato remains de rigueur as the musical
coping-stone.
THE LATER VERDI
It was unfortunate that by far the greatest of the Italian grand
operas appeared near the beginning of the vogue, making most of
its successors look like poor imitations. Verdi’s Aida (1871) has been
justly described as the only grand opera from which not a note can
be cut. The problems of proportion which had sometimes eluded
him in La forza del Destino and Don Carlos are here triumphantly
resolved. The two prime ingredients of grand opera—grandeur and
exoticism—are held in perfect equilibrium. In the finale to Act II
three themes are piled on top of one another with an ease and
naturalness that Meyerbeer might have envied. The central ballet
springs directly from the trumpet march like an arrow from a bow.
In the trial of Radames monumental use is made of the threefold
statement. The third act, which Verdi wished to be printed without
division into arias and duets (he was over-ruled however), shows a
rare delicacy of harmony and scoring; but Verdi never allows
description to get the upper hand of drama. As usual, old and new
blend in a personal synthesis. In accordance with contemporary
practice Verdi uses labelling themes for Aida, Amneris, and the
priests but always with discretion. The aria “Celeste Aida’ is a perfect
instance of Verdian three-limbed melody evolved into a ternary
design. But where the composer most conspicuously draws ahead of
his countrymen is in his subtle handling of poetic metre as a means
to melodic self-renewal. The so-called eleven-syllable metre was
traditionally considered more suitable for recitative than aria. Verdi
however treats it lyrically in three numbers in Aida, of which the
most striking is the final duet. Here it is set as a widely arched
melody of such simplicity and beauty that Verdi repeats it three
times in the form of an old-style cabaletta; what is more, three of
428 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
its five phrases are identical (see Ex. 313). Not since Bellini had any
composer ventured so much repetition of a single strain.
For ten years Verdi did not write another opera. Then came the
revision of Simon Boccanegra including an entirely new scene set in
the Council Chamber of Genoa, in the course of which orchestral
motifs are developed in a strictly personal manner. The concertato
is a lyrical pendant to Simone's noble plea for peace between the
Italian cities, a superbly controlled melodic paragraph with the
majestic, march-like gait characteristic of the Italian grand opera
style. The act ends with a bout of powerful recitative reinforced by
brutal unison gestures from the orchestra as the villain is made to
curse himself. The revised Simon Boccanegra softens without lifting
the darkness of the original score. It is also one of the finest
expressions of political idealism in all opera.
The Don Carlo of 1884 was written for performance at La Scala,
Milan; but to call it on that account 'the Italian Don Carlos' 15 like
calling the Macbeth of 1865 French because it was designed for the
Theätre Lyrique, Paris, and first sung in French. Both operas were
revised to a text in the original language and in neither case was the
fundamental character altered. The principal innovation of the
four-act score is the duet between Philip and Posa, in which an
intellectual argument about freedom, originally a chain of essentially
lyrical periods, is rewritten as a dramatic dialogue in which all traces
of closed form have gone and each singer reacts to the other at
a length appropriate to his thought—a technique which figures
prominently in Verdi's last tragic opera.
СОЕ А ОМИ ЕСА Т ТЕА Е. 429
OTELLO AND FALSTAFF
Otello (1887) is the Everest among Italian operas but without the
surrounding Himalayas. No other work of the 1880's compares with
it, either in form or in stature. The opening bars present an unheard
of harmonic audacity—a dominant eleventh which never resolves
but merely loses definition (Ex. 314). For all that, Otello cannot be
said to anticipate the more freely dissonant style of the veristi. What
Verdi called the ‘vent-hole’ of a perfect concord quickly arrives; and
even here he does not fail to wind up the profusion of heterogeneous
storm motifs with a simple, regular melodic period (‘Dio fulgor della
bufera’) just as he had done in Rigoletto. Written at a time when
Italian composers were laying ever greater emphasis on the orchestra,
Otello remains a drama for the voice. Thematic recall is restricted
to two ideas: the first phrase of “Ё un'idra fosca, livida’, and the
‘kiss’ motif, an epigram of lyrical magic which ends the love duet
and recurs twice in the last act, bringing down the final curtain
(Ex. 315).
Again the musical organization is entirely personal. Motivic
transformation, bar form (‘Inaffia lugola’ and 'Piangea cantando’),
the projection of three-limbed cantilena into a larger design (‘Dio
mi potevi scagliar), declaimed melody (‘Credo in un Dio crudel’),
dramatic dialogue, whether tense, as between Iago and Otello in Act
Ex. 314
430 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
II, or calm and radiant as in the love duet—all play their part. The
ghost of a cabaletta stalks the oath duet and the last movement of
the handkerchief trio. The concertato of Act III is of a symphonic
grandeur and complexity. External influences can be felt as a
distillation of past experience. The gait and phrase-formation of the
soprano-tenor duet of Lohengrin is reflected in that of Otello, though
at 74 Verdi was more successful than the young Wagner in
avoiding monotonous regularity. Domenico Scarlatti 1s present in the
handkerchief trio; and there is even a recollection of Meyerbeer's
‘Adieu, mon doux rivage’ (L' Africaine) in the ‘willow’ song, that
strangest and most haunting of melodies, half modal, half diatonic,
here harmonized, there totally resistant to harmony. That the
sympathetic Dannreuther should have preferred Rossini's setting!!$
shows how far Verdi had outstripped conventional notions of Italian
lyricism.
If Otello stands apart from the contemporary Italian scene this is
still more the case with Falstaff (1893). Produced in the first flush of
the verismo age— Maurel, the first Falstaff, had created Tonio the
year before in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci— Verdi's comic masterpiece
has a wit and elegance entirely Classical. The musical continuity is
at last seamless, the texture as alive as that of a Beethoven quartet.
Each idea merges into its neighbour, such motifs as recur being
always derived from a line of text (‘Può l'onore riempirvi la pancia’,
‘Dalle due alle tre’, “Те lo cornifico’). Boito's recherché vocabulary,
often irritating in Otello, is here a source of constant delight; and
16 Oxford History of Music, vi (2nd edn., London, 1932), 64.
PONCHIELLI AND GOMES 431
Ex. 316.
ALICE (con caricatura)
dolcissimo
E ————] 2,
e EE дыны Ж
Lose — — EE BEE
Ep ри —
LI
(And your countenance shall shine upon me, like a star upon the vast universe)
the opera abounds in verbal and musical play. To demonstrate his
slightness as page to the Duke of Norfolk, Falstaff sings an aria all
of thirty seconds long.
All the conventions of Italian opera are turned on their head.
Instead of being given each an ‘entrance’, all the women are thrown
on to the stage together. Ford and Falstaff dispute as to which shall
leave the stage first and finally exeunt arm in arm. The idiom is clear
and simple throughout, excesses of Romantic harmony being reserved
for moments of irony, as when Alice comes to the end of Falstaff's
letter (Ex. 316). Yet not even Mendelssohn evoked nocturnal magic
more delicately than Verdi in the Windsor Forest scene.
АП this may seem out of tune with the times. But once the tumult
and the shouting of verismo had died Verdi's last opera could be
seen as a work linked more to the future than the past. For Casella,
Falstaff was the starting-point for modern Italian music.!!?
THE CONSERVATIVES: PONCHIELLI AND GOMES
Inevitably the older composers found the most difficulty in keeping
up with the new trend. In Cleopatra (1876) and La contessa di Mons
117 J segreti della giara (Florence, 1939), 300.
432 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
(1874) Lauro Rossi merely burdens his essentially old-fashioned
schemes with stodgy rhythms and clogged harmonies. Marchetti
followed up his Ruy Blas with Gustavo Wasa (1875) and Don Giovanni
4 Austria (1880), in which the orchestra takes an ever increasing part
in the organization but to no better purpose than before.
His contemporary Amilcare Ponchielli (1834-86) achieved much
greater distinction, even if he took longer to arrive. Born in Cremona,
his operatic career began modestly in the lesser theatres of the north
and included a setting of J promessi sposi (1856). A typical product
of the 1850s it none the less made the composer’s name when
revived in 1872 at the Teatro Dal Verme, Milan, in a more or less updated
version. The public was enthusiastic, the critics were cautious; and it
was not until after the success of his ballet Le due gemelle (1873)
that Ricordi decided to publish the score. He then commissioned
from Ponchielli the ambitious drama J lituani (1874) based on
Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod. Ponchielli rose to the challenge with
a remarkably grand, dark-hued work, in which thematic recall is
used flexibly and to good effect. Outstanding are an overture in full
sonata form, a duet of farewell for Walter and Aldona, and a scene
for the heroine with a subterranean chorus of the Vehmgericht (added
for a later revival). But it was with his next opera, La Gioconda
(1876), to a libretto by Boito based on Hugo's Angelo, that
Ponchielli enjoyed his one lasting triumph. Less musically ad-
venturous than 7 /ituani, it allows greater scope to the lyrical vein in
which Ponchielli excelled. The aria ‘Cielo e mar’ remains one of the
plums of the tenor repertoire—a strophic song whose second verse
begins as an abbreviation of the first and ends as an expansion of
it by way of codetta. Ponchielli has a recognizable melodic line,
sinuous and tending to move by wide intervals, and a gift for pictorial
atmosphere which his pupil Puccini would inherit. Much of the
score is unashamedly old-fashioned. The opening chorus is almost
Donizettian in its 6/8 swagger. La Cieca is clearly based on
Meyerbeer’s Fidés and sings the same language. Barnaba's ‘O
monumento' is sometimes described as an anticipation of Iago’s
‘Credo’, but its bland harmonies rather recall the recitatives of
Rigoletto. Two other features are worth noting: the incorporation of
the ‘rosary’ theme, first heard in the Prelude, into the lyrical
framework of La Cieca’s aria; and the grand orchestral resumption,
fortissimo, of the most memorable idea in the concertato to bring
down the curtain on Act III. Both devices would be exploited by
Puccini. La Gioconda stands in much the same relation to late Verdi
as Webster does to Shakespeare. It is vital, rich in ideas, and in a
z PONCHIELLI AND GOMES 433
sonorous poetry, yet in the last resort too sensational to reach the
depths. But it has sufficient merit to keep it in the repertoire of the
opera-houses that can afford its lavish resources. The ballet ‘La
danza delle ore’ has remained a classic of light music since the time
it was written.
Of Ponchielli’s later works Lina (1877), revised from an earlier
Savoiarda, is, like the Dolores (1875) of Salvatore Auteri-Manzocchi
(1845-1924), a late reversion to the semiseria genre with all the
laughs removed and a tragic denouement. JI figluolo prodigo (1880)
is once again in the grand tradition, touched this time by the
influences of Massenet and Goldmark. Here Ponchielli sets out to
define two contrasted worlds—that of the frugal Judean patriarch
and the wild debauchery of Nineveh—an effect that the French
composer would achieve with far greater economy in Thaïs. Marion
Delorme (1885) aims at a lighter style, akin to that of opéra comique.
Although these works are musically accomplished, they lack the pace
and vitality and the sureness of touch of La Gioconda. A leading
critic of the 1880s described Ponchielli as ‘the Mercadante of our
time’.
The career of the Brazilian Carlos Gomes (1836-96) traced a
somewhat similar graph. He burst upon La Scala, Milan, with //
Guarany (1870), a spiritual offspring of L’ Africaine, mingling elements
of his native folk-dance with the current Italian idiom. The ideas
are often naïve and the scoring brash but the drama moves and
grips. Fosca (1873) is a powerful grand opera comparable to 7 lituani,
the second act containing what must be the most elaborately designed
finale concertato before that of Otello, Act II. The thematic
organization is tight, reaching far beyond the limits of the individual
number. A broad motif of crotchets and crotchet triplets, representing
the corsairs’ honour (Ex. 317) remains a constant point of reference
throughout the score; and the cast includes a particularly subtle
villain in the person of Cambro (first sung by Victor Maurel). Yet
the opera was coolly received; and, like Ponchielli, Gomes lowered
his sights for its successor Salvator Rosa (1874), a drama of love and
politics in the picturesque Neapolitan setting of Masaniello’s revolt.
With its wealth of barcaroles, tarantellas, and marches, not to
Ex. 317
(J=100)
Ener m HET ET pent SS
434 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
mention a ballata for the pert apprentice Gennariello (a travesti role)
which became a popular hit, Salvator Rosa proved the greatest
success of Gomes's career; but it wàs soon offset by the disastrous
failure of Maria Tudor (1879). Unlike Ponchielli, Gomes enjoyed no
salaried post; his wealth melted away and he was forced to return
to Brazil where his next opera, Lo schiavo, was produced in 1889.
Its most distinguished feature is a dawn prelude, a brilliant essay in
orchestral colouring; but the opera moves ponderously. Certain
melodic traits seem to anticipate the style of the veristi, especially
Leoncavallo, the most formally minded of the school. But the
harmonic style remains old-fashioned, never going beyond that of
Verdi in the 1860s. Lively and fluent in his earlier works, Gomes,
like Marchetti, allowed his vital spark to be extinguished beneath
the apparatus of grand opera.
THE RADICAL ELEMENT: CATALANI AND FRANCHETTI
Born in Lucca in 1854, Alfredo Catalani belonged from the
start to the ranks of the esterofili. Before studying at the Milan
Conservatory he had spent some months in Paris, where he absorbed
the influence of Massenet long before that composer had been heard
of in Italy. He was a devoted Wagner enthusiast; and at first despised
Verdi and all he stood for. Characteristically the one-act eclogue La
falce (1875), his passing-out piece for the Milan Conservatory, starts
not with an overture but with a symphonic poem, in which the
influence of Liszt is patent. Throughout, La falce shows a far wider
harmonic vocabulary than anything of Ponchielli or Gomes; the lines
are more supple and flexible; and in the final duet there is a foretaste
of the most famous aria from his masterpiece La Wally (1893). But,
like his contemporaries, Catalani was forced to grapple with the
demands of grand opera; and both in Elda (1880) and Dejanice
(1883) the individual voice is heard only by fits and starts, though
the musical resource is considerable. In Edmea (1886) Catalani won
through to a more intimate type of drama and a consequent
refinement of musical thought. The opening scene is dominated by
a spinning chorus of Mendelssohnian delicacy. In the heroine's mad
scene he achieves a kind of bizarre disjointedness that owes nothing
to Donizetti and his successors. Yet the style remains too eclectic
for the opera to make a strong impression. Moreover Catalani's grip
of the formal aria is not as strong as that of Ponchielli or Gomes.
In his hands the standard ternary structure tends to fall apart in the
middle. Not until his last two operas did Catalani as last find the
organization that suited him. Loreley (1890) is a revised version of
CATALANI AND FRANCHETTI 435
Ex. 318
Allegro
(FORESTERS: Good hunting! HUNTSMEN [BOWMEN]: Who can tell!
FORESTERS: Is anything amiss? HUNTSMEN: The summit of Mount Thabor is tinged with гей...
FORESTERS: What should that mean?)
Elda with all the dead weight of conventional grandeur removed and
a quasi-symphonic working of orchestral motif taking the place of
the scena as the main connecting tissue. The opening chorus scene
(Ex. 318) is a case in point. If this is a parlante, it is of the Wagnerian
variety.
By the time of La Wally (1892) operatic verismo had already
affirmed itself; but, despite the language of Illica's libretto and its
setting amongst the dour peasants of the Tyrol, the opera does not
really belong to that category; Catalani's brand of lyric poetry was
too sensitive. Loreley and La Wally alone among Italian operas
reflect, if somewhat palely, the world of German Naturromantik.
With La Wally it was said that Catalani had brought the 'high
mountain’ into Italian opera.!18
If Catalani died before his talent matured, Alberto Franchetti
118 The phrase is Carlo Gatti's, taken from Lettere di Alfredo Catalani a Giuseppe Depanis,
ed. Carlo Gatti (Milan, 1946), 40.
436 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
(1860-1942) outlived his. А baron, possessed of considerable private
means, he could afford to take endless trouble over his operas, of
which the first, Asrael (1888), is certainly the best. Wagner is a potent
influence. Leading themes are sharp and characteristic, especially
those for the demon Asrael and the redeeming Suor Clotilde, which
Franchetti manages to insert at unexpected moments into the texture
in true Wagnerian fashion. The grand duet between Asrael and the
gipsy girl Loreta, with its gently syncopated accompaniment, its
chromaticism, its huge tonal orbit, and its sensuous interweaving of
vocal lines is clearly inspired by ‘O sink’ hernieder’. Wagner's, too,
is his habit of side-stepping perfect cadences. Elsewhere there are
spectacular choral scenes, which owe much more to Meyerbeer.
Indeed a natural facility in the grandiose vein stood him in good
stead for Cristoforo Colombo (1892). But in his attempt to find an
individual style he failed; and, though he continued to be hailed
as one of the giovane scuola along with Puccini, Mascagni, and
Leoncavallo, by the end of the century he was a spent force. Like
Catalani and Faccio’s pupil, Antonio Smareglia (1854-1929), he was
too fastidious to draw sustenance from the verismo tradition.
TOWARDS VERISMO
Verismo began as a literary movement, the equivalent of Zola’s
‘naturalism’. Its foremost literary representatives, Giovanni Verga
and Luigi Capuana did not produce their best work until the 1880s;
but well before that the term was in general circulation.!!? A number
of chance events, occurring about 1880, sowed the seeds of musical
verismo. The first was the arrival on the scene of Edoardo Sonzogno,
an enterprising publisher determined to rival the reigning dynasties
of Lucca and Ricordi. His first move was to invest in such
ultramontane composers as had escaped the Lucca net. His most
important catch was Bizet’s Carmen. A failure at its premiére in
1875, it proved the success of the season at the Teatro Bellini, Naples,
in 1880 and within the next two years had gone the rounds of the
Italian teatri di cartello, totally eclipsing the operas of Massenet. Its
impact was twofold. A colourful opéra comique for most of its length,
it convinced audiences and managements that grandeur was no
longer essential to the success of an opera; while the last act, with
its naked passion and violence, had a theatrical immediacy that
Italian opera had not known for many years. Shrewdly drawing the
119 Verdi described Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore as ‘an opera eminently suited to this age
of verismo in which there is not a scrap of verity’ (letter to Faccio, c. January 1879, quoted
in R. De Rensis, Franco Faccio e Verdi: Carteggio e documenti inediti (Milan, 1934), 182-5).
TOWARDS VERISMO 437
correct conclusion, Sonzogno then announced a competition for a
one-act opera. The prize was allotted jointly to Guglielmo Zuelli
(1859-1941) for his La fata del Nord, and Luigi Mapelli (1885-1913)
for his Anna e Gualberto, an entry by the young Puccini— Le Villi—
having been turned down because of its illegibility. Friends of the
composer, however, among them Boito, helped him to mount a
performance at the Teatro dal Verme in 1884. It was at once taken
up, together with its author, by Giulio Ricordi. From now on, if
Verdi was his king, Puccini would be his crown prince.
Le Villi, like La fata del Nord, was based on one of those subjects
taken from northern mythology that were in vogue at the time. But
the germs of a new, Massenet-inspired manner are clearly present:
instead of the march of grand opera, a softer more sinuous style of
melody propelled by gentle syncopated pulsations with phrases that
often end in flurries of semiquavers (see Ex. 319 from Act I). This
was to be in essence the lyrical language of verismo.
In Edgar (1889) Puccini develops this style still further increasing
his harmonic range to include unresolved dominant sevenths, ex-
tending his ideas in an ever larger continuity and making imaginative
use of ‘labelling’ themes. Indeed Edgar might well have proclaimed
the new style throughout Italy had not an impossible libretto hindered
its circulation. The honour went instead to Puccini's fellow pupil,
Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945).
Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana (1890) won the same competition
to which Le Villi had been submitted six years before. Apart from
its swift, naturalistic pace, its main novelties were two. First, the
direct language of the libretto; it may not be that of the Sicilian
peasants among whom the action is set but it is recognizably that
of everyday life in contrast to the traditional fustian of a Ghislanzoni
E3719
Andante lento
ROBERTO
=== -
B. — X
= :
(Be not so sad, Anna mine; a few days will pass and 1 shall return.)
438 OPERA: 1850-1890
Ex. 320
Largo assai sostenuto 2) =50
or the preciosity of а Boito. ‘Il cavallo scalpita,' cries Alfio on his
first entrance; previously the ‘cavallo’ would have been a ‘destriere’.
More important is a reckless lyricism that takes no account of good
manners: see, as an illustration, Ex. 320, an extract from the
introduction to Santuzza’s aria ‘Voi lo sapete’. Here after two
decades of uncertainty was Italian opera once more striking out
boldly.12°
(d) RUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE
By GERALD ABRAHAM
RUSSIA
During the 1850s Russian opera stagnated. Glinka composed no
more operas after Ruslan i Lyudmila; Dargomizhsky produced only
Rusalka (1854), and Verstovsky his last work, Gromoboy (1857). The
early attempts of the rising star of Russian music, Anton Rubinstein
(1829-94), were mostly insignificant or total failures. The exception
was the first, Dmitriy Donskoy (1852), based on Ozerov’s tragedy.
(On the insistence of the censors, the names of all the characters
had to be changed and the title altered to The Battle of Kulikovo.)
Verstovsky’s Gromoboy, like his Vadim, was based on Zhukovsky’s
120 On Mascagni’s later works see Vol. X, pp. 154-5, 162, and 193.
RUSSIA 439
Twelve Sleeping Maidens and is said to show a more advanced
treatment of the orchestra particularly in the ‘bright and cheerful
overture and the spirited **Wallachian dance" ';1?! it was still being
performed at the end of the century. But none of his operas had
anything like the lasting success of Dargomizhsky's Rusalka which
reached Paris in 1911, New York in 1922, and London in 1931.
In Rusalka, a variation on the Donauweibchen| Undine theme,
Dargomizhsky turned his back on the grand-opéra style of his
Esmeralda and, making his own adaptation of Pushkin's unfinished
dramatic poem, tried to follow in Glinka's footsteps— with a
difference:
The more I study our folk elements, the more diversity I find in them.
Glinka, ... in my view has touched only one aspect—the lyrical. Drama
with him is too melancholy, the comic side loses national character. I speak
of the character of his music for his technique is always superb. To the
best of my ability I am trying in Rusalka to develop our dramatic elements.
I shall be happy if I succeed half as well as Glinka.!22
In his lyrical music—for example in the Princess's aria and Olga's
couplets in Act III—he succeeded no more than half as well; it was
in the dramatic element that he scored, above all in the char-
acterization of the Miller,!?? driven out of his mind by his daughter's
suicide. When the seducer Prince addresses him as ‘miller’, he says
he is no miller; he has sold the mill to the devils behind the stove
and given the money to the rusalka, his daughter, for safe-keeping
(E3321):
X321
Allegro
MILLER
Ikh rib-ka od-nu-glaz- Ка sto-ro - zhit Kha,kha,kha,kha,kha, kha! One v pes-
121 ОГра Evgen'evna Levashova, in /storiya russkoy muziki, i (Moscow, 1972), 348.
122 Letter to V. F. Odoevsky, 3 June 1853; see А. S. Dargomizhskiy: Izbrannie pis ma, ed.
Mikhail Samoylovich Pekelis (Moscow, 1952), 41.
123 First sung by the famous bass Petrov, the original Susanin in Life for the Tsar and
Ruslan in Glinka's second opera.
440 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
(The one-eyed fish guards them, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Buried in the sands
of the Dnieper, the fish guards, them.)
And Dargomizhsky can also catch subtler nuances, as when in
Act I the false Prince makes smooth excuses to the girl for jilting
herne:
After Rusalka and Gromoboy Russian opera showed no signs of
life until 1863, and even then Rubinstein’s Feramors did not contribute
to a revival. Its quasi-oriental libretto was based by a German poet
on an English poem by an Irishman, Moore’s Lalla Rookh; it was
first produced in Germany and reached the Mariinsky stage only in
1884.
SEROV
Yudif [Judith] (1863) of Aleksandr Serov (1820-71), given three
months after the Dresden première of Feramors, had a better fate,
although it was equally non-Russian.!?5 The heroine is Jewish. Serov
was attracted to the subject by an Italian play, Paolo Giacometti’s
Guiditta, and he began by commissioning an Italian libretto which
became the basis of the Russian one. Serov was then in his forties
and had failed even to complete several earlier operas, but Judith
was an immediate success and for nearly a decade he was the leading
composer of Russian opera.
Although Serov had been profoundly impressed by Tannhäuser,
which he heard in 1858, his real model was his earlier hero,
Meyerbeer; Judith and its successor Rogneda (1865) were grands
opéras.1?$ So also would have been the Salammbö begun by the 24-
year-old Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81) in 1863 after he had written
124 Quoted in The Concise Oxford History of Music, p. 729.
125 Serov's operas and their cultural ambience are studied in detail in Richard Taruskin,
Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practised in the 1860s (Ann Arbor, 1981).
126 See Gerald Abraham, “The Operas of Serov’, in Essays on Russian and East European
Music (Oxford, 1985), 40.
> SEROV 441
a long, detailed and sarcastic account of Judith.12? Flaubert’s
Salammbö is another heroine who penetrates an enemy camp to
seize a precious trophy and the one passage in Judith that Mussorgsky
admired, the swift transition from ff to pp in the chorus at the end
of Act I, was echoed at the end of Act I of Salammbó.!?3 And there
are other musical parallels: between Judith’s prayer in Act II and
Salammbö’s in the temple of Tanit, and between the opening of the
odalisques’ scene in Act III and the scene of Salammbö prostrating
herself before the image in the temple. From Serov’s next opera,
Rogneda (1865), Mussorgsky derived ideas for naturalistic handling
of the chorus in a later and much greater work, Boris Godunov. Even
in Judith, where it is generally treated as a mass, Serov indicates in
the first chorus of Act I that ‘not all’ are to participate in certain
passages, or ‘2 voices’, ‘another 2’, ‘4 voices’, mainly for musical
variety; but in the last finale of Rogneda, when the people of Kiev
flock into the streets at the sound of an alarm bell, the point is
dramatic rather than musical: ‘3 basses (“Hark! Listen, they're
coming here!”)’, *1 tenor (“People are coming in crowds!")', ‘1 bass
(“Look!”), *1 tenor (“Look!”).
Meyerbeerian opera was nothing if not spectacular and Serov
confessed that
the music of this opera (Rogneda), like that of Judith, was composed not
according to the words of the text, which did not yet exist, but according to
‘situations’ which were clearly defined in the author’s imagination. Thus
the words had often to be invented for already prepared or half-prepared
music. 129
The figure of Rogneda herself was borrowed from a poem by Rileev;
she also appears in Verstovsky’s Gromoboy. The opera has plenty of
spectacle, including the ballet in the audience-chamber of Vladimir
of Kiev, a hunting scene for which dogs were borrowed from the
Imperial Kennels, the sacrifice to the idol Perun. (The time is that
of Askol’dova mogila [Askold’s Grave]; indeed, Serov extracted the
subject from the same Zagoskin novel Verstovsky had drawn on in
Askold.) And the Russian subject demanded Russian-flavoured music
which Serov achieved most successfully in the duet for Vladimir and
Dobrinya Nikitich in the hunt scene, in Rogneda’s Act ТУ monologue
127 Translated in Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson (eds.), The Musorgsky Reader: A Life of
M. P. Musorgsky in Letters and Documents (New York, 1947), 48-57.
128 M. P. Musorgskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, iv (Moscow and Leningrad, 1939), 36-7.
This volume contains all the Salammbö fragments.
129 *Avtobiograficheskaya zapiska', in A. N. Serov: Izbrannie stat'i, ed. Georgy N. Khubov
(Moscow and Leningrad, 1950), i. 75.
442 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Бх 322
Andante cantabile
Chto- ti gor’-ko
(Mother dear princess, my own! Why are you weeping bitterly?
You're tiring your eyes! Enough, leave off, my own one.)
(although the sketch was marked ‘imitation of Gounod’), and most
beautifully in the music of her little son, a contralto role, just before
Ex. 522).
But Serov had been mostly interested in Ukrainian folk song; it
was only when in 1867 he had begun work on his last opera, Vrazh’ya
sila [Hostile Power] that he set about serious study of Great Russian
folk-music—and even then its urban rather than its peasant forms.
Vrazh’ya sila is based on a play, Ne tak zhivi kak khochetsya, a
tak zhivi kak Bog velit [Don’t live as you’d like to, but live as God
commands], by Ostrovsky, whose masterpiece the tragedy Groza
[The Storm] had already inspired an absurdly Italianate opera (1867)
by Vladimir Kashperov (1827-94) and an overture by the young
Tchaikovsky (1840-93). (Tchaikovsky was now also working on an
Ostrovsky opera, Voevoda.) The dramatist himself took a hand in
all three opera librettos but his collaborations with Serov and
Tchaikovsky both broke down. Ne tak zhivi КаК khochetsya is a
realistic play, but in the opera Ostrovsky wanted to treat the
maslyanitsa [carnival] scene in Act IV as a fantasy with diabolical
characters, while Serov insisted on realism and also turned the
resigned ending into melodrama: instead of renouncing suicide, Peter
murders his wife.
pe
5 THE NEW GENERATION 443
THE NEW GENERATION
New tendencies were invading Russian opera during the 1860s;
not the influence of Wagner, as might have been expected in Serov,
a professed Wagnerian, but interest in ‘the people’ as a result of the
recent emancipation of the serfs and insistence on dramatic—even
prosaic—truth. Dargomizhsky worked from 1866 until his death in
1869 on a setting of Pushkin’s ‘little tragedy’ in verse, Kamenniy
Gost’ [The Stone Guest],130 ‘just as it stood, without altering a single
word’, and his young friend Mussorgsky emulated him with a setting
of Gogol’s prose comedy Zhenit’ba [The Marriage] (1868),131 which
he fortunately abandoned after one act in favour of a far more
important work: the initial version of Boris Godunov (1869). Serov
himself in the preface to Rogneda had stated as his aim ‘dramatic
truth in sounds’, if necessary at the expense of ‘“‘conventional”
beauty’. In fact there is a great deal of ‘ "conventional" beauty’,
mostly folk-song flavoured, in Vrazh’ya sila (as there is in Boris) and
also a certain amount of bold empirical harmony (see Ex. 323, from
Ex 4323
(Precipitously) PETER raises his knife at Dasha.
130 See Taruskin, Opera and Drama, pp. 249 ff. and Jennifer Baker, ‘Dargomizhsky, Realism
and The Stone Guest’, Music Review, 37 (1976), 193.
131 See Taruskin, Opera and Drama, pp. 307 ff.
444 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Vrazh'ya sila).132 Tchaikovsky’s Voevoda (1869) оп Ostrovsky’s
comedy, Son na Volge [Dream on the Volga], was, despite initial
success, destroyed by the composer after he had transferred some of
the material to later works—it itself includes borrowings from earlier
ones!??— but has been restored from the performing material.!34 The
plot might be described as a Russian version of Die Entführung but
Tchaikovsky shows little sense of musical- characterization; the
dramatic element is conventional and the score rises above the
commonplace only when the composer borrows or skilfully imitates
folk melody. In this respect Voevoda is naturally more Russian than
the Vil yam Ratklif [Wiliam Ratcliff] of the avowed ‘nationalist’ César
Cui (1835-1918), which was produced a fortnight later. But Cui was
half-French, half-Lithuanian; Ratcliff is a Heine play on a Scottish
subject and most of his other operas are non-Russian except in text.
The exceptions are Kavkazskiy plennik [The Caucasian Prisoner]
(Acts I and III, 1857; Act II, 1881), based on Pushkin's poem and
most successful in its oriental element, and the act Cui contributed
to the ‘collective Mlada’ of 1872.135 He admitted to Felipe Pedrell
in 1897: ‘Je n'ai pas le sens de la musique russe dans mes veines. . . .
C'est pourquoi, à l'exception de mon premier opéra Le Prisonnier
du Caucase, tous les sujets de mes opéras sont et seront étrangers.'136
It was very different with Cui's friends, Mussorgsky, Aleksandr
Borodin (1833-87), and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)—
all, like him, non-professional musicians. In 1868 Rimsky-Korsakov
began an opera based on Lev Mey's Pskovityanka [The Maid of
Pskov] and Mussorgsky one on Pushkin's Boris Godunov; the next
year Borodin was attracted by the old Russian epic, S/ovo o polku
Igoreve [The Tale of Igor's Campaign]. And Tchaikovsky began his
Oprichnik, on a tragedy by Ivan Lazhechnikov, in 1870. АП are
historical or quasi-historical. Pskovityanka was the first to reach the
stage (1873); Boris had a curious history: it was rejected by the
Mariinsky opera committee in 1871, drastically recast, and performed
in 1874. Rubinstein also reappeared on the scene with his Demon,
after Lermontov, which he played over to the Cui-Mussorgsky-
132 The brief last act of this ‘national-Russian musical drama’ was written by his widow,
Valentina Serova, a not totally negligible composer, on the basis of what he had often played
to her.
133 On both points see Gerald Abraham, "Tchaikovsky's Operas’, in Slavonic and Romantic
Music (London, 1968), 123-6.
134 P, Chaykovskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, i (dopolnitel niy) (Moscow, 1953).
135 The other composers of this never performed opera-ballet were Mussorgsky, Rimsky-
Korsakov and Borodin. See Abraham, On Russian Music (London, 1939), 91-112.
136 Higinio Angles, ‘Relations épistolaires entre César Cui et Philippe Pedrell’, Fontes Artis
Musicae, 13/1 (1966), 15.
BORODIN'S PRINCE IGOR 445
Oy, uzh gde P ri-e mo- ES tsi? "Vi po-tesh’-te tsa-rya, na-she-go ba-tyush-Ku!
(Hey, where are you, good lads? Make sport for the tsar, our father!)
Rimsky-Korsakov group in 1871; it was produced in 1875. Its
pseudo-orientalism (Caucasian) is more successful than that of
Feramors (Indian), and in Kupets Kalashnikov [The Merchant Ka-
lashnikov] (1880), another Lermontov subject, he often draws near
to the deeply Russian idiom of the young nationalists, as in the
chorus of Kalashnikov’s neighbours trying to console him after the
rape of his wife by an oprichnik, or the herald’s proclamation before
the fatal fight in the last act (Ex. 324).
The misdeeds of Ivan the Terrible and his dreaded bodyguard had
already provided the plot of Tchaikovsky’s Oprichnik: rape of the
heroine and execution of the hero, as in Kalashnikov. In Pskovityanka
the heroine is duly abducted but saved by Ivan’s discovery that she
is his daughter. In contrast with these melodramatic plots, Knyaz’
Igor’ [Prince Igor] and Boris Godunov are as nearly plotless as possible.
BORODIN'S PRINCE IGOR
Prince Igor was based on a scenario by V. V. Stasov,!?? long and
detailed enough for a grand opéra. But Borodin, a distinguished
chemist, was constantly distracted by professional and other non-
musical affairs and sometimes cooled towards the project and
transferred large blocks of music to other compositions. After his
death a performable torso had to be completed by Rimsky-Korsakov
and his young disciple Glazunov.138
Thus /gor is not so much a drama as a series of strikingly original,
gorgeously orchestrated tableaux among which the barbaric festival
in the Polovtsian camp in Act II is outstanding. Borodin was not
incapable of suggesting characters in music: the magnanimous Khan
Konchak, Igor's lovesick son, and above all Igor's devoted wife,
who has some of the most touching music in the opera and
participates in its few passages of genuine drama — but she appears
only in Acts I and IV, and briefly in the Prologue.
137 Printed in full in Serge A. Dianin, Borodin, trans. Robert Lord (London, 1963), 58.
138 Glazunov published an account of his stewardship in Russkaya muzikal'naya gazeta, iii
(1869), col. 155; translation in Abraham, On Russian Music, p. 165.
446 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
MUSSORGSKY
Boris Godunov is also essentially a tableau opera but with the
difference that Mussorgsky possessed that gift for penetrating and
expressing character in which Borodin was weak. And, whereas Igor
remains a simple, rather negative figure, Pushkin’s play offered a
subtle, complicated principal character whose various facets are fully
shown even in the original seven-scene version, as well as a far from
simple anti-hero, the False-Dmitry. The very first scene shatters the
conventions of grand opera, the crowd in the courtyard of the
Novodevichy Monastery are not only fragmented like Serov’s in
Rogneda; they are individualized, and bullied by a police officer to
make them show enthusiasm they are far from feeling. And in the
second, the acclamation of Boris is not brilliantly coloured as in
Rimsky-Korsakov’s well-intentioned but misguided versions of 1896
. and 1908. After two scenes presenting the anti-hero—in the Chudov
Monastery where he hears the story of the true Dmitry’s murder
and gets the idea of his imposture, and in the frontier inn where he
escapes from the police officers— Boris is brought forward again, as
loving but guilt-ridden father, denounced by a holy simpleton in St
Basil's Square in the Kremlin, and dying beside his son to music
which, like other passages in Boris, he adapted from Salammbó.139
Unfortunately this initial 1872 version of Boris underwent a number
of changes before performance in 1874, the major ones being a
wholesale rewriting of the scene with the Tsar's children, the insertion
of two new and musically weak scenes showing the False-Dmitry in
Poland wooing an aristocrat who despises him (a lapse into grand
opéra), and the deletion of the St Basil's scene except for the ‘holy
simpleton' episode, which was now placed at the end of the opera
after a scene in a wood showing peasant anarchy and the passing of
the Pretender with his troops. Even when the musical substance is
the same in both versions, the carrying out is very different. Boris is
not a drama in the normal sense in either version but a sequence of
dramatic scenes with characters portrayed, except in the Polish act,
in music of exceptional power and beauty.!40
In 1872 Mussorgsky began another opera on a historical subject,
Khovanshchina, the plot of the Princes Khovansky against the
Romanov dynasty, and in 1874 Sorochinskaya yarmarka [Sorochintsy
Fair], a comic opera based on one of Gogol's stories of peasant life
139 See Abraham, ‘The Mediterranean Element in Boris Godunov’, in Slavonic and Romantic
Music, p. 188.
140 The best edition is that edited by David Lloyd-Jones (vocal score, London, 1968; full
score, London 1975.)
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV 447
in the Ukraine, but he died in 1881 with both unfinished.!*
Khovanshchina was drastically rewritten and completed by Rimsky-
Korsakov,!4? while several composers have tried their hands with
Sorochinskaya yarmarka. Some of the Khovanshchina fragments—the
instrumental introduction suggesting dawn in the Red Square, the
music associated with Marfa, Shaklovity's aria in Act III, the scene
of Golitsin going into exile—are very fine and there are some
powerful melodramatic strokes (for example, the murder of Ivan
Khovansky), but the work is non-existent as genuine drama. So,
too, is Sorochinskaya yarmarka despite some effective comic scenes.
As an opera composer Mussorgsky stands, but stands very high, on
Boris Godunov.
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV
Rimsky-Korsakov's first opera, Pskovityanka [The Maid of Pskov]
was produced before Boris in 1873. Later he became very dissatisfied
with it, made a second version in 1878 which was never produced,
and a third mainly in 1892. This is the one generally known but it
is the original form!#3 that must be considered here.!44 Based on a
play by Mey, it may be described—like Serov's Rogneda and
Rubinstein's Kalashnikov—as *Russian grand opéra'. (In the later
versions Rimsky-Korsakov even borrowed from the grandest of
Parisian operas, Berlioz’s Les Troyens, a ‘Chasse royale et orage’.)
Ex. 325
Fairly slowly
mf TSAR IVAN
To tol’-ko tsar-stvo krep-ko sil’-no i ve-li-ko, gde ve-da-et na-rod, chtou ne-
141 Khovanshchina is published in M. Musorgskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Pavel
Lamm (Moscow, 1931); Sorochinskaya yarmarka, ibid., iii, vi, p. 1 (Moscow, 1933).
142 This version was published at St Petersburg in 1883 and performed in 1886.
143 Full score in N. Rimskiy-Korsakov: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, la and b, ed. A. М.
Dmitriev (Moscow, 1966). Vocal score (St Petersburg, 1872).
144 For a detailed discussion of all three versions, see Abraham, ‘Pskovityanka: The Original
Version of Rimsky-Korsakov's First Opera’, Musical Quarterly, 54 (1968), 58; reprinted in
Essays on Russian and East European Music, p. 68.
448 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
kak vo e-di-nom sta-de — e- di-niy pa-stir”
(Only that realm is vigorous, strong and great where the nation knows it has
one ruler—as in a single flock a single shepherd)
Ex. 326
Unlike Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov was not a
musical dramatist by nature but in Pskovityanka he achieved at least
one passage not too far from Boris, that in which Ivan, after looking
back to his love for Olga's mother, reflects on his conception of
regal duty (Ex. 325). And just before, after Olga's abduction, at the
end of Act IV, Scene iv, the curtain has fallen on a long quite
Mussorgskian passage ending (Ex. 326). There are effective re-
miniscence themes—a harsh one, often heard on trombones in
octaves, characterizing the Tsar, a naively beautiful suggestion of
Olga (employed as second subject of the overture), and defiant ones
for her lover and the other young rebels of Pskov. More anticipatory
of Rimsky-Korsakov's later works are the girls’ folk-songish
raspberry-gathering chorus in the first scene and Vlasevna's fantastic
'tale of the Tsarevna Lada'. The big choral scene, almost the whole
of Act II, as the people of Pskov await the Tsar, is true grand opéra,
but Acts I and II both end with total instrumental etiolation and
the five pp bars for strings on which the final curtain falls, however
justified dramatically, are not remotely comparable with the quiet
end of Boris. (A grand-opéra end was substituted in the version
completed in 1894.)
If Rimsky-Korsakov sought to rival Mussorgsky in Pskovityanka,
the rivalry is even more obvious in his next opera, Mayskaya noch’
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV 449
[May Night], composed in 1879 while his friend was working
on Sorochinskaya yarmarka, and based on another Gogol story.
(Tchaikovsky's Kuznets Vakula [Vakula the Smith], on ‘Christmas
Eve' in the same Gogol collection, had already been produced in
1876.) In Mayskaya noch’ there is no question of ‘drama’, only of a
young peasant's love-affair and the tricks played by him and his
friends on the rascally village-elders. The score is light-handed, full
of charming melodies—including at least half-a-dozen borrowings
from authentic Ukrainian folk-music!45—and the hero's encounter
with rusalkas bathing in the moonlight at the beginning of Act III
gave an opportunity for Romantic orchestration (Ex. 327). Mayskaya
noch’ is a fulfilment of Dargomizhsky's wish for ‘Glinka with national
comedy’.
Exes 27
Molto andante
145 Taken from A. I. Rubets, 2/6 narodnikh ukrainskikh napevov (Moscow, 1872; 2nd edn.,
1882).
450 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
There is little comedy and no conventional drama in Snegurochka
[Snowmaiden], composed in 1880. ‘Dramatic truth’ had gradually
ceased to be the watchword. Rimsky-Korsakov based his third opera
on a poetic play by Ostrovsky which had been produced in 1873
with incidental music by Tchaikovsky. It is situated in the never-never
land of the Berendeys, ruled by a kindly autocrat whose court music
is provided by blind gusli-players. The characters include both
mortals and symbolic figures such as the shepherd Lel who personifies
music. The heroine is only apparently mortal; daughter of the Spring
Queen and Grandfather Frost, she dies when touched by the rays
of the sun god Yarila. The whole work is permeated by ancient
Slavonic pantheism and its rites (preserved in Christianized forms
down to the nineteenth century); the score is woven from folk-music,
lyrical melody, and what it is tempting to call micro themes,!46 and
saturated with translucent orchestral colour. Snegurochka is a work
sui generis. Rimsky-Korsakov never attempted to recapture its unique
qualities. He composed no more operas for nine years and by then
he was a changed man; the performances of the complete Ring at St
Petersburg by Angelo Neumann's touring *Richard-Wagner-Theater
in 1889 had opened his mind to new concepts both of orchestration
and of opera in general. The great series of works begun with Mlada
(produced in 1892) belong to another chapter in the history of
Russian opera.!4?
TCHAIKOVSK Y
The outstanding opera composer, from 1876, when he produced
Kuznets Vakula [Vakula the Smith], until his death, was Pyotr Il'ich
Tchaikovsky (1840-93). As we have seen, his first opera, Voevoda,
was condemned by himself; his second, Undine (comp. 1869), was
rejected by the Mariinsky opera committee and never performed;
his third, Oprichnik (1874), to which he transferred a great deal of
the Voevoda music, had more success, although in later years he
became dissatisfied with this too and tried in vain to forbid its
performance. It conforms in every respect to the conventions of
grand opéra, but the music itself is as Russian as that of Pskovityanka,
not only borrowing actual folk melodies but employing intensely
Russian cantilena as in the melody to which the hero's mother pleads
with him (Act II, Scene ii), one of the reminiscence themes of the
146 See the detailed analysis in Nikolaus van Gilse van der Pals, М. А. Rimsky-Korssakow:
Opernschaffen nebst Skizze über Leben und Werken (Paris and Leipzig, 1929; repr. 1977), 111-
62
147 See Vol. X, pp. 174-7.
TCHAIKOVSKY
Adagio
BASTRYUKOV
ıEx. 329 Raz - mi - chem mne до A e po_— ma-tush-ke
Andante
sva-mi, dru - gi, zhal na vek do lyu, chto na vsyu li zhizn'
ras - sta - vat’ - sya, v vol’-noy vo le zhit, sluzh-bu chest - nu-yu
(We banish sorrow on Mother Volga.)
(I'm sorry to leave you, friends, sorry I may not freely live in honorable service celebrating
the Tsar.)
452 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
opera, or that in which Andrey takes leave of his fellow oprichniks
in the last scene (Ex. 328). This is one of a number of borrowings
Tchaikovsky incorporated from Voevoda, from which Ex. 329 is
taken. (As in Rubinstein’s Kalashnikov, the hero is executed and the
Tsar seizes the heroine.)
Technically Oprichnik is less crude than Voevoda though still
harmonically and orchestrally heavy-handed, but it is far surpassed
by Vakula. This was a setting of a libretto Yakov Polonsky had
prepared from Gogol’s ‘Christmas Eve’ for Serov. Serov died after
making a quantity of sketches (which his widow was able to work
up into a suite for piano) and in the end the Russian Musical Society
offered a prize for the best setting. Prize operas have seldom been
successful but Vakula was an exception. In his earlier stage works
Tchaikovsky had been obliged to cope with conventional drama for
which he could supply only conventionally dramatic music; in Vakula
there was nothing of this. He could invent music for the village
coquette and her manly lover, a comic devil, and comic peasant
elders without going beyond his natural range. He suggests Oksana's
charm in her very first song (Ex. 330). and very much of the score has
the same limpidity of melody and harmony. Like Rimsky-Korsakov's
Mayskaya noch’, Vakula is ‘Glinka with national comedy’ and the
Ex. 330
Andante
OKSANA
yab-lon'-ka vsa - doch - ke,
TCHAIKOVSKY 453
(An apple-tree bloomed in the little garden, bloomed but faded; the mother spoiled
her daughter, dressed her up and disappeared!)
scene at court where Vakula flies on the devil’s back to secure the
Empress’s ‘little boots’ (the Ukrainian word is cherevichki) gave
Tchaikovsky a pretext for a curiously haunting minuet, an early
essay in the pseudo-rococo in which he delighted.
Yet, partly because of a poor Oksana, the early performances
disappointed the public and Tchaikovsky himself felt his work was
'too clogged with details, too densely orchestrated, too poor in vocal
effects’.148 Accordingly, for a revival in 1878 he made cuts and other
changes!4? and in 1885 he undertook a drastic revision in four acts,
the fourth being the last scene of the original Act 111,150 which he
entitled Cherevichki. The action was speeded up by the substitution
of recitative for arioso: for example, compare Ex. 331 from Vakula
Ex. 331
Moderato
OKSANA
148 P. I, Chaykovskiy—S. I. Taneev: Pis'ma, ed. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Zhdanov
(Moscow, 1951), 11. Two days before, Cui had reported in the Sanktpeterburgskiya vedomosti
that the music was ‘completely beautiful’ but “almost completely melancholy, elegiac,
sentimental’, ibid., n. 4.
149 See K. Yu. Davidova et al., Muzikal noe nasledie Chaykovskogo (Moscow, 1958), 34-6.
150 For particulars of the changes, see Abraham, Slavonic and Romantic Music, p. 137.
454 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
(Odarka! Oh, what marvellous little ornamented boots you have! And new ones!)
Ex332
Adagio (recit.)
OKSANA —.
(Odarka! Oh, what marvellous little ornamented boots you have! And new ones!)
with Ex. 332 from Cherevichki, a dramatic gain entailing a musical
loss. To the end of his life Tchaikovsky considered Vakula/
Cherevichki, as ‘so far as music is concerned, almost my best
opera’.151
The qualification ‘almost’ is accounted for by the work that
followed the original Vakula. A few months after its production
Tchaikovsky was discussing possible opera-subjects with the contralto
151 Letter to his publisher, 2 July 1890. Р. I. Chaykovskiy: Perepiska s Р. I. Yurgensonom,
ed. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Zhdanov and Nikolay Timofeevich Zhegin, ii (Moscow, 1952).
TCHAIKOVSKY 455
Elizaveta Lavrovskaya when she said, ‘What about “Evgeny
Onegin”? The idea of an opera on near contemporary, mostly
everyday life first struck him as ‘wild’, but little by little he felt
drawn to it, re-read Pushkin's ‘novel in verse' and after a sleepless
night began to rough out a scenario.!?? Without waiting to prepare
a libretto — which he did later with a little help from friends— he set
Tatyana's letter to Onegin just as it stands except for lines 11-21
where he substituted two or three sentences in which Tatyana breaks
off to consider what she is doing. He was ‘in love with the image of
Tatyana' and dreaded her impersonation by some veteran of the
Mariinsky stage. Actually the part was first taken by Mariya
Klimentova, a 23-year-old student at the Moscow Conservatory in
1879, who pleased him by her *warmth and sincerity’; the first public
performance of Onegin was also given in Moscow (1881); it reached
the Bolshoy at Petersburg only in 1884. Tatyana's letter might almost
be described as the c/ou of the whole opera. The instrumental *writing'
figures may be compared with Pimen's in Boris and the clerk’s in
the first scene of Khovanshchina; indeed the instrumental share in
the scene is as important as Tatyana's and the segments of the
recurring horn phrase (an echo of John Field's eleventh Nocturne)
which 15 to rise to the climax of the whole scene, stamps its image
on a number of other passages: the end of the quartet (Ex. 333), the
end of the Olga-Lensky duet (Ex. 334), most important of all, the
letter scene (Ex. 335), Gremin's aria in Act III (Ex. 336), and
Ex3333 Ex. 334
ке и үт = сл ee =
кыЛ к-г Ge Ee RE,
AARE = SS
Ss ers ES
i то -lo-dost’, da mo - Іо -dosť
(and youth, yes youth)
152 Translated in Abraham, Slavonic and Romantic Music, р. 143.
456 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
TATYANA
Fon anima
O- ne - gin, v va-shemserd-tse est’ i gor-dost’, i prya-ma - ya chest'!
(Onegin, in your heart there are both pride and candid honour!)
Tatyana's ‘Onegin, in your heart are pride and candid honour’ at
the end of the opera (Ex. 337).
After Onegin Tchaikovsky reacted violently against ‘Russianism’
with a spectacular work, Orleanskaya deva, on a non-Russian subject,
Schiller’s melodramatic Jungfrau von Orleans which existed in a
superb translation by Zhukovsky—though, probably influenced by
the anglophobia of the period, he replaced Schiller’s ‘rose-coloured
death scene’ with her burning by the English. From a musical ‘novel
in verse’ he turned to grand opéra in the true Meyerbeerian tradition,
but also with hints of contemporary French lyric opera—he greatly
admired Gounod’s Faust; for example, in Act II Agnes Sorel’s ‘If
strength is not given thee’ (Ex. 338) and Ioanna's recitative on her
presentation to the King (Ex. 339).
Tchaikovsky’s next two operas, Mazepa (comp. 1881-3; perf.
Ex. 338
Andante
AGNES SOREL
Â
si
sb
ayi e
(If thou art not given strength to wash away from the fatherland the stain of abasements)
TCHAIKOVSKY 457
Ех. 339
Allegro moderato rit.
Ya vi-de-la te -bya... No io tol’- kotam gde tini- Son ne zrim im bil, SS -me Bo-ga
(1 saw you— but only where you were visible to none but God)
1884), based on Pushkin's poem ‘Poltava’ and introducing some
passages from it in Viktor Burenin’s libretto, and Charodeyka [The
Sorceress] (comp. 1885-7; perf. 1887), on a tragedy by Ippolit
Shpazhinsky, seem to have been composed because, as he wrote to
his publisher, opera was ‘now the only form of composition capable
of arousing my enthusiasm’.153 In Mazepa, as in Onegin, he began
in the middle with a scene between the heroine and Mazepa (Act II,
Scene ii). But he confessed that he ‘felt no particular attraction to
the characters’,!54 and he lacked the dramatic power to portray the
divided character of Mazepa as Mussorgsky portrayed Boris, so that
he emerges simply as a villain who occasionally breaks into beautiful
music (his arioso in Act I, Scene i; the beginning of Act II, Scene
ii). Mazepa ends with the heroine going mad over her lover's dead
body; its successor, Charodeyka, ends with the hero's father going
mad after killing his son. It is an absurd melodrama centred on an
innkeeper whose beauty bewitches every man who comes her way,
a Russian Carmen. But, as Tchaikovsky saw her, ‘in the depths of
this loose woman's soul there is moral strength and beauty’ 155 and
in his music he equates *moral strength and beauty' with Russianness.
Her music, for instance the song in which she expresses her love for
the young prince Yury (Ex. 340), is intensely Russian; indeed the
earlier part of the opera, beginning with the folk-song instrumental
introduction, is saturated in folk idioms. But the ghost of Gounod
appears in the old prince's arioso, ‘Net sladu s soboyu’ [I cannot
master myself] in Act III, and the last three acts as a whole seldom
lifted Tchaikovsky's invention above competent commonplace.
153 Perepiska s P. I. Yurgensonom, i (Moscow, 1938), 193.
194 P. I. Chaykovskiy: Perepiska s N. F. fon-Mekk, ed. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Zhdanov
and Nikola Timofeevich Zhegin, iii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1936), 62.
155 Modest Tchaikovsky, Zhizn’ P. I. Chaykovskogo, iii (Moscow, 1900-2), 38.
458 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 340
Andante
SORCERESS with tenderness „=
Vez-de ya, so - kol_moy, uk-rad-koy za to- boy, ta-yas'otvsekh,sle - di - la!
р
CDe a
171
(Everywhere, ту darling, hiding from all, I furtively watched thee!)
Pikovaya dama [The Queen of Spades] (comp. and perf. 1890) is
another matter. By a curious transference Tchaikovsky identified the
weak-willed hero with the tenor Nikolay Figner, for whom he felt
intense sympathy, and the libretto—largely by his brother Modest—
transformed Hermann from the merely ridiculous figure he cuts in
Pushkin's story into a tragic if contemptible one. A number of
additional characters are introduced and the transference of the
period from the contemporary, as in the story, to the eighteenth
century gave Tchaikovsky a pretext for the insertion of any amount
of rococo padding: Tomsky's ballade in Act I, and his song, a setting
of verses by the eighteenth-century poet Derzhavin, in Act III; the
duet for Liza and Polina (on a poem by Zhukovsky) in Act I; the
old countess’s ‘Je crains de lui parler la nuit' (borrowed in its entirety
from Gretrys Richard Ceur de Lion); and the four-movement
interlude ‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ in Act IV.156 The opening scene,
with the boys playing at soldiers, was probably suggested by the
opening scene of Carmen with its soldiers and gamins. But there are
also things in The Queen of Spades, notably Plina's romance in Act
I, Scene ii, and Liza’s ‘Akh, istomilas ya gorem’ [I am worn
out with grief] before her last meeting with Hermann, that only
Tchaikovsky could have written.
There is little of Tchaikovsky's unique invention in his last opera,
Iolanta (comp. 1891; perf. 1892), which is based on a translation of
Henrik Hertz's Kong Renés Datter, a dramatic elaboration of a story
by Hans Andersen. It is a one-act work commissioned by the Director
of the Imperial Theatres to be performed together with a two-act
ballet, Shchelkunchik [The Nutcracker], on E. T. A. Hoffmann's
136 On the adaptations from Mozart, Bortnyansky, and others in the interlude, see Abraham,
‘Tchaikovsky’s Operas’, p. 172.
POLAND AND MONIUSZKO 459
‘Nussknacker und Mausekónig'. Tchaikovsky had already entered
the field of full-length ballet with Lebedinoe ozero [Swan Lake] (comp.
1875-6; perf. 1877) and Spyashchaya krasavitsa [Sleeping Beauty]
(comp. 1888-9; perf. 1890). (In Swan Lake he borrowed an entr'acte
and the opening of the final scene from the condemned Voevoda of
1869, and a love duet from the destroyed Undine.)!5?
Nutcracker has long been a popular work, but Jo/anta, which has
numerous musical affinities with it, has never— despite various
productions in Germany and Scandinavia — won general acceptance.
The setting is fifteenth-century Provence, so that French attributes
in the music are appropriate, but the influence of French opera first
apparent in Orleanskaya deva and very much more in ТЛе Queen of
Spades is overwhelming in /olanta despite traces of Tchaikovsky's
personal idiom. Rimsky-Korsakov rightly judged it to be *one of the
weakest of Tchaikovsky's works' with 'shameless borrowings' and
‘topsyturvy orchestration’.158
Ironically, the ghost of Tchaikovsky's very Russian first opera had
appeared in 1890. Some years before he had given the libretto to his
young friend Anton Arensky (1861-1906) who restored Ostrovsky's
original title, Son na Volge [Dream on the Volga], and also characters
and episodes that Tchaikovsky had excised. Arensky's score is
enriched by skilful borrowings from folk-song but his own pleasant
invention was not strong enough to establish the work in the
repertoire.
POLAND AND MONIUSZKO
The history of Polish opera during the 1830s and 1840s has been
described in Chapter III as ‘a chronicle of very small beer’ and the
work which drew a line under that chronicle, Stanislaw Moniuszko's
Halka, emerged only tentatively and gradually in two acts in a
concert performance by amateurs at Wilno in 1848, with a stage
performance also at Wilno in 1854, and did not reach the Warsaw
Opera— drastically rewritten and in three acts—until 1858. Mon-
iuszko (1819-72) had composed more than half a dozen operettas
before his masterpiece, but Ha/ka aimed higher and immediately
established itself as a milestone in Polish operatic history.
Wlodzimierz Wolski's libretto is melodramatic and the subject is the
not unfamiliar one of peasant girl abandoned by aristocratic lover
when he wishes to marry into his own class. Halka goes mad and
157 See Vladimir Vasil'evich Protopopov and Nadezhda Vasil'evna Tumanina, Opernoe
tvorchestvo Chaykovskogo (Moscow, 1957), 48-9 and 52-3.
158 Letopis moer muzikalnoy zhizni (Sth edn., Moscow, 1935).
460 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
drowns herself and her baby after singing to it a lullaby which is
one of the most beautiful pages of the score. She is a real character,
simple and passionate (as is her faithful peasant lover Jontek), and
Moniuszko skilfully embodied her in generally appropriate music. It
is sometimes Italianate—he had to remember that his Halka at
Warsaw was an Italian, Paulina Rivoli—but on the whole un-
mistakably Polish (Ex. 341). And the Polish ambience is emphasized
in the polonaises, mazurkas, dumki, and the tance góralskie [moun-
taineers’ dances] in Act III (Ex. 342).
Ex. 341
Andantino
Ce
ГЕ
(One cannot see how, one cannot see whence, the Sun will rise.)
4 MONIUSZKO'S LATER OPERAS 461
Ex. 342
Allegro non troppo
ee es m mn 107 ёл: GIE oe
1
Е [7 [7 V V
РР
str, brass í 4 1
s D
MONIUSZKO'S LATER OPERAS
Between the two versions of Halka Moniuszko produced two or
more operettas for Wilno— Cyganie (afterwards renamed Jawnuta)
and Bettly (on a translation of the Scribe- Melesville Le Chálet, first
composed by Adolphe Adam and later in an Italian version by
Donizetti)—and after Halka the Warsaw Opera also wanted a one-act
work. He quickly composed Flis [The Raftsman], a pleasant peasant
comedy in which the heroine is in danger of being forced to marry
a fop from Warsaw instead of her raftsman lover. (Like Halka,
Zosia was sung by Rivoli who was again provided with unsuitable
coloratura.) She is saved by the discovery that the fop is the
raftsman's long-lost brother, who gladly resigns her.
Moniuszko's second major work was a Romantic comedy, Hrabina
[The Countess] (1860), set in the period of the Napoleonic Grand
Duchy of Warsaw. The hero is a young lancer officer, just returned
from the Peninsular War, who nearly falls into the embrace of the
beautiful eponymous young Countess. The third act is set in the
country house where Kazimierz has gone to the girl he really loves,
the Countess's protégée Bronia, and where the Countess follows
him. Two melodies from this act give an idea of Moniuszko's
characterization: the song in which Bronia tells how the chance
mention of Kazimierz's name when he was in Spain would bring
tears to her eyes (Ex. 343), and the Countess's pretended surprise at
finding him at Bronia's home (Ex. 344).
Yet another soldier returned from the wars is the hero of the
one-act Verbum nobile [A Nobleman's Word] (1861). Two old
462 OPERA: 1850-1890
Gdy ті kto z bo-ku wspom-ni Ka-zmie-rza,tez na-gle wo - ku po-tok u - de- rza
(When someone mentions Kazimierz to me in passing, then all at once a stream
breaks forth in my eye)
Ex. 344
er een a ad a nn ce
| ө
Ah! quelle sur-pri-se! со zaspo-tka-nie! | icóz wy- ró - wnara-do - Sci теј
(Ah! what a surprise! What an encounter! and what is equal to my joy)
gentlemen have long ago pledged their words that one's son shall
marry the other's daughter; now the young couple, unknown to each
other, have met by chance and fallen in love. But the hero, Michal,
has stupidly and incomprehensibly told Zuzia that his name is
Stanislaw. Her father has given his verbum nobile, his word as
nobleman, that she shall marry no one but Michal and even the
revelation that Michal and Stanislaw are the same is no immediate
solution, for her father has now given his verbum nobile that she
shall never marry ‘Stanistaw’. However Zuzia's ingenuity solves the
problem and all, of course, ends happily. For this piece of nonsense—
Moniuszko was unlucky in his librettists—the composer supplied
delightful sparkling music with serious, but not too serious, treatment
of the lovers’ plight. (He replaced his original setting of Zuzia's sad
dumka with a less passionate and elaborate one.)
Moniuszko's real masterpiece of comedy was the four-act Straszny
dwór [The Haunted Chateau] (1865) which has two heroes, brothers
who, like Kazimierz in Hrabina and Michal in Verbum nobile, are
yet again soldiers just back from a war. They also are bound by a
pledge: they have sworn never to marry lest they should fall under
feminine domination. But they visit the chateau of their dead father's
friend, who has two daughters—with the inevitable consequence.
The chateau has the reputation of being haunted and the two lively
girls contrive some haunting, with pictures that come to life and a
mysterious chiming clock. The heroes are for a time slightly less
than heroic but they happily surrender their independence in the
end. Straszny dwór offers plenty of opportunities of national colour,
comedy, and vocal display—the part of Hanna, one of the sisters,
is a terrific coloratura role—but Moniuszko could also strike a more
MONIUSZKO’S LATER OPERAS 463
serious note, as in Stefan’s midnight vigil when the carillon of the
clock plays an old polonaise tune reminding him how in childhood
his blood used to be fired when in their family circle their father
sang to him or Zbigniew ‘that Sarmatian song’ (Ex. 345).
Ex. 345
STEFAN
roz-Za-rza w pier-si krew! Mój oj-ciec wko - le rod-zi-nnym
40! a aes | YS ШОУ ЧЕН ОШ
aß Sm
am Ss,
wa, Starsze - go
nianym wła -dać pa -ta-szem, tak czesto пои - cil ten sar- ma - cki— śpiew!
(O God! That melody reminds me of such a time as fires the blood in my breast!
So often did my father in our family circle, teaching me or Zbigniew, his elder son,
how to wield the wooden broad sword, hum that Sarmatian tune!)
464 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
After Straszny dwör Moniuszko accomplished little of note. He
worked on the three-act Parja, based on Casimir Delavigne’s tragedy
Le Paria, from time to time for ten years until it was produced in
1869, but the subject, the Portuguese in fifteenth-century India, was
foreign to him in every sense. It was a complete failure, as was the
one-act operetta Beata, performed in 1872 just before his death.159
-
MONIUSZKO'S SUCCESSORS
Polish operas of the post-Moniuszko period were not particularly
distinguished. The best comic ones were the Paziowie królowej
Marysienki [Queen Mary's Pages] (1864) of Stanistaw Duniecki
(1839-70) and Duch Wojewody [The Spirit of the Voivode] (1873) by
Ludwik Grossman (1833-1915). (Duniecki also embarked (c.1866-
70) on a ‘great Slavonic opera’, taking its subject from the medieval
Russian epic of /gor [Igor's Campaign], but completed only one act.)
More important are the Mazepa (1876), Mindowe (1880), and Jadwiga,
królowa polska [Jadwiga, Queen of Poland] (1886) of Moniuszko's
pupil, Henryk Jarecki (1846-1918), who directed opera at Lwów
from 1872 onwards, and the first opera of Wladyslaw Zelenski
(1837-1921), Konrad Wallenrod (1885), after the poem by Mickiewicz
from which he borrowed a number of passages in the libretto.
Zelenski was musically the most gifted composer of that generation—
but not dramatically. And in the case of Konrad Wallenrod he was
not helped by the lack of dramatic action. The result was a belated
historical grand opéra, eclectic in musical style. Yet he has been
hailed as ‘the standard-bearer of the Moniuszko tradition’
equally in the national subject of the opera and in the similar approach to
the problem of text/music (melody as the point of reference to which the
text is moulded) and also in the connection with Polish folklore. From this
point of view the libretto of Konrad Wallenrod did not offer major
possibilities . . . nevertheless in some passages we already find stylisation of
folk-melodies (the ballet in Act III) and even quotations (‘Święty Boze’ in
the second scene of Act IV).160
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
The history of Czech opera was markedly different. Bohemia lost
her independence two centuries earlier than Poland, at a time when
opera existed only as princely entertainment in half a dozen Italian
cities; the numerous Czech musicians of European repute were
159 On Moniuszko's later operas, see Abraham, ‘The Operas of Stanislaw Moniuszko', in
Essays on Russian and East European Music, pp. 160 ff. ү
160 Włodzimierz Pozniak, in Z dziejów polskiej kultury muzycznej, ii (Krakow, 1966), 284.
SMETANA 465
instrumental performers and composers, while the Bohemian ar-
istocracy gravitated to Vienna and became German-speaking. The
vernacular operas of František Škroup and others were all, except
Skroup's naive Dratenik [The Tinker], complete failures.
Skroup himself turned to German opera and scored a modest
success with Der Meergeuse on the Dutch 'sea beggars' of the 1570s
(1851). The four-act Vladimir, bohu zvolenec [Vladimir, God's Chosen
One] of Frantisek Skuhersky (1830-92)161 was, like his later operas,
originally composed to a German libretto but was translated in time
to appear in 1863 as the first new Czech work to be given in the
Prague Provisional Theatre. Then Karel Sebor (1843-1903) produced
a series of operas: Templári na Moravé [The Templars in Moravia]
(1865), Drahomir (1867), Husitska nevésta [The Hussite Bride] (1868,
but later rewritten), which introduced the Hussite hymn familiar
from Smetana's use of it, and Zmarená svatba [The Ruined Wedding]
(1879), which the conservative Old Czech Party vainly hoped would
overshadow Smetana's Prodaná nevésta. But Sebor's bent was for
grand opéra, not scenes from popular life. Bedřich Smetana (1824-
84) essayed both in two operas produced in 1866: Braniboři v
Cechách [The Brandenburgers in Bohemia] (5 January) and Prodaná
nevěsta [The Bartered Bride] (30 May).!6?
SMETANA
The action of Branibori passes in late thirteenth-century Prague
when Bohemia had a temporary Prussian ruler; the Prussians and
Bohemian Germans are the villains. Yet it 1s, ironically, in some
respects a late ‘German Romantic opera’ employing not very striking
reminiscence themes and a Lisztian musical idiom. And, final irony,
Smetana (like all well-to-do Czechs of the time) had been brought
up to speak and write German; he was never sure of Czech grammar
or pronunciation, so that the original libretto of Branibori had
sometimes to be altered to fit the music. But, whereas Braniboři
enjoyed only short-lived success, The Bartered Bride, after a doubtful
start, quickly became popular in its native land and, after translation
into German by Brahms's biographer Max Kalbeck in 1892, all over
the world. The original The Bartered Bride was in two acts with
spoken dialogue; in 1869 new numbers, including the polka, were
inserted and later in the same year the first act was divided into two
161 The subject is an episode in ninth-century Bulgarian history. Smetana wrote a severely
critical notice on the first performance in Národní listy (3 Jan. 1865), reprinted in V. H. Jarka
(ed.), Kritické dilo Bedřicha Smetany, 1858-65 (Prague, 1948), 147.
162 On Smetana's operas generally, see Brian Large, Smetana (London, 1970), and John
Clapham, Smetana (London, 1972).
466 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
and more dances were added; finally in 1870 Smetana replaced the
spoken dialogue with recitative.!6? Very little of the music employs
actual folk material—the furiant near the beginning of Act II, partly
based on the tune 'Sedlák, sedläk, sedlák' is an exception—for
Smetana considered quotation, even imitation, of folk-song as skin-
deep nationalism; but the whole score has, as he justly claimed in a
notebook entry (23 April 1864), “а completely národní [national or
popular] character', though he might have admitted some influence
from Gounod's Faust which he, like Tchaikovsky, greatly admired.164
But even when he borrows a folk melody, as in the Furiant (Ex.
346), he soon introduces a touch of his personal magic. The
'vivacissimo' overture is a perfect comedy overture and, while the
comedy is nearly reduced to farce by the stuttering character Vašek,
it is raised well above it by the charm of Marfenka’s music. Their
juxtaposition in their Act I duet is piquant.
In his next two operas, Dalibor and Libuse, Smetana abandoned
the librettist of Braniboři and The Bartered Bride, Karel Sabina, and
found a new collaborator in the German Josef Wenzig, whose texts
had to be translated. Dalibor (1868) is a tragic counterpart to
Ex. 346
Meno vivo
p dolce, ma espress.
pizz.
163 For a full account of the various versions, see Abraham, “The Genesis of The Bartered
Bride’, Slavonic and Romantic Music, p. 28.
164 After one performance he is reported to have said, "That's fabulous. Гуе only one wish:
sometime to write something like it.’ See František Bartoš, Smetana ve vzpomínkách a dopisech
(Prague, 1939), p. 69.
SMETANA 467
Braniboři. The fifteenth-century hero is condemned to life-
imprisonment—and, later, death—for trying to avenge the execution
of his friend, the musician Janko (changed after the composer's
death to Zdenék). In an attempt to rescue him the heroine Milada
disguises herself as a boy and penetrates his prison, but unlike
Leonora/Fidelio she fails and the opera ends tragically. Smetana
here develops the musico-dramatic technique of Branibori but with
more use of reminiscence themes so that these nearly become true
leitmotifs; the one first heard when the curtain rises—as in Braniboři,
there is no overture— reappears again and again in numerous Lisztian
metamorphoses.!® And Milada and the jailer Beneš converse in Act
II over a play of motifs (Ex. 347), like characters in Meistersinger
(which was performed a month after Dalibor).
Libuse is similar in style but different in nature. It was completed
in 1872 but set aside first for the celebration of the expected
coronation of the Emperor Franz Josef as king of Bohemia, then
for the also cancelled wedding of the Archduke Rudolf, and at last
performed in 1881 for the official opening of the National Theatre,
by which time the composer was stone deaf. As Smetana himself
wrote some years later, ‘Libuše is not an opera in the old manner
but a festive tableau.’!66 The legendary Czech princess had already
been the heroine of a number of plays and operas, including
165 Some of which are shown in Clapham, Smetana, p. 97.
166 Bartoš, Smetana, p. 221.
1850-1890
ОРЕКА:
Moderato
Ex. 347
468
ELI
vez-mi co
га -dost,chlap - če
I UT
|
| | |
Vi
Ih N
i |
| б
| MRS)
Will
= УП At
vem,
О MI
I [ il 8
ЧА!
IN | | il
Г L
M [|.|]
d =
| de
« E
& H
\| sen: LI
х s 4
* m = = е
“| Шо Ha D ih
мә NE PE. qM GN
= © ka 5 = 3
zte- be
469
SMETANA
Ne
(NI
|11
"|
kdyz
(MILADA: Eat and drink; help yourself, do!
BENEŠ: І get great pleasure from you when
I look at you like this, my lad.)
470 OPERA: 1850-1890
Grillparzer’s Libussa. She took as her husband a peasant farmer,
Premysl, and pointed out to the Czech chieftains the site on which
they were to build a fortress city,- Prague. Dramatic action is slow
and limited mainly to the quarrels of rivals. The work is crowned
by ‘Libuse’s prophecy’, a series of six tableaux representing episodes
of Czech history: the fourth, the Hussites, naturally introduces their
hymn, ‘Kdoz jste Boží bojovnici’ [You who are God's Warriors],
which continues through the fifth and sixth, in the last of which,
showing the royal castle of Prague, the Hradčany, the entire company
echoes Libuse’s affirmation, "The Czech nation is imperishable; it
will survive the horrors of hell" The score tends to be static and
monumental; even the plentiful combinations of leitmotifs have no
polyphonic vitality. But Přemysl has some fine lyrical monologues
and his address to his loved lime-trees in the second scene of Act II
is accompanied by unmistakably Wagnerian ‘forest murmurs’.
Dvé vdovy [The Two Widows] (1874), based by a new librettist,
Emanuel Züngel, on Félicien Mallefille's one-act farce Les Deux
Veuves, 1s a total contrast: a charming light-handed ‘number opera’,
originally with only four characters and spoken dialogue. But in
1876 Smetana had the libretto revised, replaced the spoken dialogue
with recitative, and added two new characters, a peasant couple who
join in a newly composed finale to Act I and a new trio in Act II.
This second version was produced in 1878. In it, he wrote in 1882,
he had ‘combined salon elegance with tenderness and refinement'.167
Smetana's melodic invention is here at its best, though char-
acteristically it is often shown in the orchestral writing as much
as in the vocal part it is supposed to ‘accompany’. The music in
Ex. 348
Andante
LADISLAV p —
N Б Ар ET,
SMETANA 471
zde ted' véz-ném jsem
= п bel
к “т —"g ©
(Love — powerful, noble, ardent, even crazy —led me here; now l’m a prisoner here,
I want to flee but cannot.)
which Ladislav confesses to one widow his love for the other is
typical (Ex. 348).
The original form of Dvé vdovy was the last opera composed by
Smetana before, in October 1874, his deafness became total. Yet he
produced three more: Hubicka [The Kiss] (1882), Tajemstvi [The
Secret] (1878), and Certova sténa [The Devil's Wall] (1882), all with
librettos by Eliška Krásnohorská. There is nothing in Hubička to
suggest any aural handicap; this peasant comedy is one of his finest
scores. Indeed he himself considered the heroine's meditation in Act
I (Ex. 349) ‘decidedly the most beautiful passage in my dramatic
works, whether as regards most perfect fusion of words and melody
or, in the orchestral accompaniment, most complete truthfulness of
the melancholy mood that dominates the deserted Vendulka's
soul'.168 Another favourite of his was Vok's aria near the end of
168 [bid., p. 140.
472 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Ех. 349
Andante amoroso
VENDULKA mf espressivo === = =
EH
tam vSe-rém u-do-lu!
(How should I forget the lovely time when the moon saw us together, then under the alder in the
dusky valley!)
Act I of Certova sténa, ‘which always carries me away when I sing it
inwardly ... it always moves me to tears’.169
These last two works show no decline in technical accomplishment;
indeed the leitmotif technique is developed even further and the theme
of the ‘secret’ in Tajemství in various transformations permeates much
of the score. But there is a decided falling off in inspiration.
SMETANA'S CONTEMPORARIES
Operas by Smetana's younger contemporaries include the one-act
V studni [In the Well] by the somewhat Mendelssohnian Vilém Blodek
Kuala ы.
DVORÁK 473
(1834-74), with a libretto in which Sabina vainly tried to repeat the
success of The Bartered Bride. And he tried again in the Stary Zenich
[The Old Bridegroom] (1882), composed by Dvorák's friend Karel
Bendl (1838-97). Bendl’s gifts lay in the direction of big French
opera, as he showed in his first work, the five-act Lejla (1868) on a
libretto by Krásnohorská, though he made at least one essay in
nationalism, the tragic Hussite opera Díté Tábora [A Child of Täbor]
(comp. 1888; prod. 1892), also on a Krásnohorská text. Rather
younger was Vojtěch Hfrimaly (1842-1908) whose comic opera
Zaklety princ [The Bewitched Prince] appeared in 1872 and kept a
place in the repertoire for several years.
DVORÁK
Though far more gifted than any of these, Antonin Dvorak (1841-
1904) began his operatic career with a number of false starts: a
Wagnerian ‘heroic opera’, Alfred, on a German libretto by Körner
(comp. 1870 but never produced in his lifetime), and Král a uhlir
[King and Charcoal-burner] (comp. 1871), which he suppressed after
rehearsal making an entirely new setting of Bernard Lobesky's feeble
libretto three years later; even this was not very successful and
Dvorák composed Act III afresh in 1887. For the comic one-act
Tvrdé palice [The Pig-headed Ones] (comp. 1874) he had a better
text (by Josef Stolba), but before it was performed in 1881 he had
tried his hand with a five-act tragic opera, Vanda, to an appallingly
bad libretto on a subject from Polish myth-history. It was not until
the comic two-act Selma sedlák [The Rascally Peasant], with a libretto
by J. О. Vesely (1878) that Dvorak scored some success. Essentially
an instrumental composer, his voice parts had tended to be moulded
to the orchestral underlay; now he composed for the voice first and
foremost. But he was still fatally drawn to grand opéra and in Dimitrij
(1882) he returned to it. Based on the historical events that followed
the death of Boris Godunov, Dimitrij had a good libretto by Marie
Cervinková-Riegrová, largely on Schiller's unfinished Demetrius.
Dimitrij and Xenie both have leitmotifs which are heard immediately
at the beginning of the overture: his, powerful and doom-laden, on
the strings; hers, gentle and submissive, on the oboe echoed by the
bassoon. But the opera is most memorable for its massive choral
scenes, for example the opening double chorus in the Kremlin square,
one body hailing Boris's son as tsar, the other supporting the
pretender Dimitrij (Ex. 350).
It was only in Jakobin (1889) that Cervinkovä gave Dvorák a
totally congenial subject: a simple tale set in a late eighteenth-century
474 OPERA: 1850-1890
Ex. 350
CHORUS I
Nač пат Go-du-nov? nač пат ty-ra-nův? Di- mi-trij pra-vý syn je I- va-nüv,
EES
C—3—
(1: Glory to Tsar Fyodor, mighty monarch.
II: What do we want with Godunovs? What do we want with tyrants?
Dmitry is the true son of Ivan.)
village where the typically Czech musician-schoolmaster is a sec-
ondary hero. The eponymous hero is a one-time Jacobin who returns
with wife and child to the Count his father, who has disowned him.
A most effective dramatic stroke is the pianissimo singing of a lullaby
by the ex-Jacobin's wife (Ex. 351), overheard by her father-in-law.
It is the lullaby that had been sung to his own baby son and it melts
his heart. The whole score is rich in pure Dvorákian melody and
colourful orchestration, handled with that unobtrusive technical
mastery which so impressed Brahms.
FIBICH AND KOVAROVIC
Dvorak wrote no more operas for ten years,179 but two notable
talents came to the fore during the last quarter of the century:
Zdenék Fibich (1850-1900) and his pupil Karel Kovarovic (1862-
1920). Kovafovic’s first opera was Zenichové [The Bridegrooms]
(1884) and he made a strong impression with the one-act Cesta
oknem [The Way through the Window] (1885), for which Züngel, as
in Dvé vdovy, went back to a French original, this time by Scribe
and Lemoine. But Kovatovic's masterpiece came later, the tragic
Psohlavci [The Dog-heads] (1898), on a historical novel by Alois
Jirasek.171
170 See Vol. X, p. 177.
171 On Psohlavei, see Rosa Newmarch, The Music of Czechoslovakia (London, 1942), 178.
FIBICH AND KOVAROVIC 475
Ex. 351
Andante cantabile
JULIE (behind the scene)
mm” ar i anar:
au
(Little son, my flower, my happiness, my world, my heaven!)
Fibich was a more important figure; indeed Czech critics have
hailed him as the third figure among the creators of their native
opera. Unlike his compatriots, he had studied in Leipzig, Paris, and
Mannheim, come under the influence of Weber and Wagner, and
composed three unpreserved operas. His first Czech opera, Bukovin
(1874), on a weak Sabina libretto, was heavily influenced by Freischütz
though the second act duet for Dobka and Bukovin has a slightly
Wagnerian flavour (Ex. 352).
For his next work, Blanik, Kräsnohorskä gave him a better poem.
He was now familiar with mature Wagner and Blanik shows the
consequences: leitmotifs, a very large orchestra, Wagnerian harmony,
and polyphony with triple theme combinations, as in the finale of
Act П and introduction to Act III. Nevesta Messinskä [The Bride of
Messina] (1884), the libretto by Otakar Hostinsky on Schiller’s Braut
von Messina, ıs still more Wagnerian, arguably more Wagnerian than
any earlier opera not by Wagner himself. The funeral march for
Manuel at the end of Act III, Scene iv (Ex. 353) is very impressive.
Yet after this fine work Fibich abandoned opera for eleven years
and turned to the composition of melodramy, spoken plays with
ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
476
[55308359
Allegro molto vivace
mi - lo-sti
a
US
c
=
P
1
o
Е
a
c
mi - lo-sti
ra-do-stná
(Moment of joy, moment of love)
Ex. 353
Tempo di marcia funebre
he
v
? before returning to opera with Bou
(1895), a version of Shakespeare's Tempest, and other works which
may not unfairly be described as a reaction from Wagner to Smetana
17
’
orchestral accompaniment
vr
and Dvorak.
-9.
pp. 177
See Vol. X,
172
HUNGARY 477
HUNGARY
The Hungarian opera composers who had come to the fore during
the 1840s, Erkel, Thern, and Ferenc Doppler, were still active during
the next half-century and were soon joined by another master, Mihäly
Mosonyi (1814-70). The leader was still Erkel, who collaborated with
the Doppler brothers, Ferenc and Käroly, Poles by birth, in Erzsebet
(1857), and equalled the success of Hunyadi László with another
historical work, Bank Ban [The Palatine Bank] (comp. 1852; perf.
1861), which Beni Egressy, the librettist of Hunyadi, based on a
tragedy by Jözsef Katona set in 1213. In the absence of Andrew II,
his evil queen Gertrud and her relatives have offended the nobility
and oppressed the serfs; the final crime is the violation of Melinda,
wife of Bank, the ousted palatine of the southern marches, by the
queen’s brother; Bank rebels and kills the queen. One of the finest
passages of the opera is the opening of Act III, where Melinda,
delirious and fleeing with her child and the old attendant Tiborc, is
held up on the bank of the flooded river Tisza (with two pipe-playing
boatmen) while a storm approaches. She sings to the child (Ex. 354).
Erkel never achieved equal success with his later works. After
Bank Bán he attempted comic opera in Sarolta (1862) but returned
to historical tragedy in the five-act Dózsa Gyórgy (libretto by Ede
Szigligeti after Mor Jokai) (1867), in which he may have had the
collaboration of his youngest son, Sándor (1846-1900).173 Here he
Ex. 354
Moderato (Andantino)
173 Sándor Erkel produced an opera of his own, Csobáncz, in 1865, but he was primarily
a conductor.
478 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
(Dream calmly, sweetly, my angel!)
turned away from the set numbers of his earlier works in favour of
continuous music and recitative in a style compounded of Hungarian
folk declamation, Italianate recitative, and Wagnerian speech melody.
The hero was the leader of a sixteenth-century peasant revolt crushed
by the nobles who tortured him to death by crowning him with a
red-hot crown while seated on a red-hot throne. Brankovics Gyórgy
(1874) was another historical work, based on the treachery of
the eponymous Despot of Serbia, Djordje Brankovic— whence the
introduction of Serbian melodies— which led to the defeat and
capture of János Hunyadi (the father of László) at Kossovo in 1448.
Here the Hungarian element in his declamation is more marked, as
it is also in the lighter and more popular Névtelen hösök [Nameless
Heroes] (1880), which celebrates the soldiers of the 1848 war for
independence. His last work, /stvan király [King Stephen] (1885),
celebrating the triumph of Hungary's first king, was his most nearly
Wagnerian; intended for the inauguration of the Pest Opera House
in 1884, it was completed too late.
After Karoly Doppler's A gránátos tábor [The Grenadiers’ Camp],
with spoken dialogue, and Ferenc's А két huszár [The Two Hussars]
(both 1853), the brothers left Hungary and contributed no more to
opera there. The only notable works other than Erkel's were two by
Mosonyi and the Zrínyi (after Kórner) (1868) of Ágost Adelburg
BRITISH OPERA 479
(1830-73). Mosonyi was the most uncompromisingly nationalistic
composer of the period, basing his style on verbunkos. His Szép
Ilonka [Pretty Ilonka] after Vörösmarty (1861) is a charming fantasy
but his Romantic, heroic Almos, composed in 1862, was never
performed in his lifetime.
(e) BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
By NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY
BRITISH OPERA
Changing conditions in London were not particularly favourable to
the continuing development of English opera. The 1843 Act for
Regulating Theatres had taken away the monopoly on Italian opera
hitherto enjoyed by Her Majesty's Theatre, allowing Covent Garden
to open in 1847 as a rival ‘Royal Italian Opera’ and soon surpass
the older house in prestige and success. At the same time, the
two ‘patent theatres’, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, lost their
monopoly for ‘legitimate drama’ (spoken plays), which allowed the
‘minor’ theatres to give up their practice of disguising plays as
burlettas by the addition of a few songs. Thus both Italian opera
and spoken drama were assisted by the new law; English opera,
inevitably, suffered.
Special efforts were needed, therefore, to consolidate the success
of the English romantic opera school, and various schemes were
brought forward during the rest of the nineteenth century. The most
successful was the company formed in 1857 by Louisa Pyne and
William Harrison. It kept the flag flying with annual commissions
of new operas by Balfe, Wallace, and others. After the first two
seasons it found a home at Covent Garden as the Royal English
Opera. Its winter season of English operas alternated with the Royal
Italian Opera in the summer, until its demise in 1864.
One of the triumphs of the Pyne-Harrison company was The Lily
of Killarney (Covent Garden, 1862) by Julius Benedict (1804-85), the
German-born pupil of Weber who had been resident in Britain for
more than thirty years and had produced several Italian and English
operas earlier in his career. It was an adaptation of Dion Boucicault's
already very successful play The Colleen Bawn, set in Ireland, and in
a tragic mode. It can be called the first Irish nationalist opera. The
story has no political overtones, but Benedict's music, especially for
460 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
the humbler characters, deliberately evokes that nostalgia for old
Ireland whose musical conventions had been established by Moore’s
Irish Melodies. Several themes are pentatonic, including the sinister
*murder' motif (anticipated in the overture) as well as such purely
decorative melodies as the boatsmen's chorus, ‘Across the Broad
Waters 'tis Pleasant to Row’.!74 Benedict could write as good a
ballad as anyone, and he could also produee extended scenes of
dramatic tension, such as the Act II finale. The scene for the
hunchback servant Danny Mann, wrestling with conflicting feelings
of devotion to his master and love for his master's wife, is especially
powerful.
MACFARREN
Another opera commissioned by Pyne-Harrison was She Stoops
to Conquer (Covent Garden, 1864) by George Alexander Macfarren
(1813-87). Macfarren also had a long career in English opera behind
him, including an early success at the English Opera House, The
Devil's Opera (1838), with a libretto by his father, an established
dramatist. But Macfarren was a composer of a different stamp from
the Balfe-Wallace school. His gifts were intellectual rather than
lyrical. Endowed with a deep reverence for the Viennese classics by
his teacher, Cipriani Potter, he generally avoided the pervasive Italian
and French influences, modelling himself оп Mozart.!?» He also
possessed a strong feeling for English literature and history, and in
his later years particularly he set out to forge a style of opera that
was really English in character, tending to choose subjects drawn
from English history or literature, to draw on folk idioms as one
element in his musical style, and to pay careful attention to word
setting. This last point is illustrated in Ex. 355, from Don Quixote
(Drury Lane, 1846), where Don Quixote replies to an aggressive
challenge (Who art thou?) by Camacho and the chorus that forms
the end of the preceding section of spoken dialogue.
In short Macfarren was the unrecognized founder of the English
school of nationalist opera, as Benedict was of the Irish. Tendencies
in this direction are already to be seen in King Charles II (Princess's,
1849) and Robin Hood (Her Majesty's, 1860). In the latter work, the
174 A good example of a folklike, though not consistently pentatonic, song from The Lily
of Killarney is quoted by Michael Нига, ‘Opera: 1834-1865’, in Nicholas Temperley (ed.),
Music in Britain: The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 328.
175 Henry Charles Banister, George Alexander Macfarren: His Life, Works and Influence
(London, 1891), 221-3. See also Nicholas Temperley, ‘Musical Nationalism in English
Romantic Opera,’ in Temperley (ed.), The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music (Bloomington,
1989).
LATER ROMANTIC OPERAS 481
Ех. 355
Allegro pomposo
DON QUIXOTE (advancing in a menacing manner)
th’op - press’d!
Act II finale illustrates Macfarren's experienced sense of the theatre,
as well as his penchant both for learned musical devices evoking the
past (the ‘round dance’ is on a ground bass; the Sompnour's
plainsong-like chanting is combined with lively dialogue over a dance
rhythm) and for modal references to English folk-music.
LATER ROMANTIC OPERAS
The Romantic school continued in the next generation with such
works as Pauline (Lyceum, 1876) by Frederic Cowen (1852-1935);
Esmeralda (Drury Lane, 1883), by Arthur Goring Thomas (1850-
92); Colomba (Drury Lane, 1883), by Alexander Mackenzie (1847-
1935); Ivanhoe (Royal English Opera House, 1891), by Arthur
Sullivan (1842-1900); and Shamus O'Brien (Opéra-Comique, 1896),
by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924). The basic traditions of the
school were maintained, with the simple strophic ballad never entirely
superseded, but with more ambitious connected scenes added, and
with new influences coming from the Continent— first of Gounod
and Verdi, then of early Wagner, whose Der fliegende Holländer [The
Flying Dutchman], Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin had been introduced
to London audiences (in Italian) in the 1870s.!76 Ivanhoe, though
ultimately a failure, excited great interest during its one season; it is
Sullivan's most ambitious score and a rare example of a through-
composed Victorian opera. Shamus O’Brien takes up Benedict's vein
of Irish nationalism, in which Stanford was becoming something of
a specialist, and this time with political connotations: the story is
set in the context of the Irish rebellion of 1798.
176 The Dutchman was given in English in 1846, Lohengrin in 1880, Tannhäuser in 1882.
The Ring cycle in German had to await the visit of Angelo Neumann's Richard-Wagner-Theater
in 1882, in which year the earlier operas were also performed in German.
482 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
COMIC OPERA
Comic opera in the 1850s and 1860s was largely dominated by
Parisian opera bouffe and operetta. The only native English type of
any consequence was burlesque, and here the leading figure was the
librettist F. С. Burnand, who produced a series of ‘hearty, rum-
bustious entertainments’ at the Royalty and Royal Strand theatres.177
In some cases the music was merely cobbled together by an
anonymous hack, but Windsor Castle (Royal Strand, 1865) had a
respectable score by Frank Musgrave, who also collaborated with
Burnand in EU Africaine; or the Queen of the Cannibal Islands (1865)
and Der Freischütz; or A Good Cast for a Piece (1866). The success
of these shows depended on satire of grand opéra, topical jokes,
puns, sexual humour and extravaganza; the music, though in-
dispensable, had to be quite undemanding.
The beginnings of a more significant form of light opera were
planted by Thomas German Reed (1817-88) and his wife Priscilla
Horton (1818-95), who in 1855 started a new type of entertainment;
from 1856 they used the Gallery of Illustration, Marylebone. The
‘German Reed Entertainments’ appealed to a large new public by
providing respectable and innocuous pleasure in a building that was
not a theatre, and was thus free of the disreputable associations that
kept a large section of the Victorian public away from theatres and
opera-houses. The Reeds commissioned chamber operas on a small
scale, designated opera di camera, for singers of modest accom-
plishments, generally accompanied on a piano and a harmonium.
Two such were Jessy Lea (1863) and The Soldier's Legacy (1864) by
Macfarren. The situation suited Macfarren's particular gifts and
tastes; he was relieved of the normal need to appeal to a 'gallery' of
unsophisticates who only wanted amorous ballads, heroic crowd
scenes, or low humour. He could deal here with a limited number
of characters, in a good English story made up of credible situations,
and could use his not inconsiderable powers to develop them
musically: for instance in the catty duet “You wicked gipsy girl’
(Jessy Lea). In one scene from The Soldier's Legacy the character
keeps trying to recall a tune he knows; when at last it appears, it is
indeed a reminiscence (no doubt unconscious) of the slow movement
of Mozart's Piano Trio in E major, K 542, which happens to have
a pentatonic first phase. Macfarren's ‘folk-song’ idiom was erected
on a foundation of Classical style, whereas Vaughan Williams was
to base his on the style of the sixteenth century. (Neither conjunction
177 A good account of burlesque in this period is Andrew Lamb, ‘Music of the Popular
Theatre’, in Temperley (ed.) Music in Britain: The Romantic Age, pp. 92-108.
SULLIVAN 483
has any special historical authenticity, but each is valid if artistically
successful.)
SULLIVAN
By far the most successful English operas in this period, of course,
were Sullivan’s comic operas, and here the German Reeds had played
an early part, for they commissioned The Contrabandista (1867) and
revived Cox and Box (1869), Sullivan’s first comic stage pieces (with
librettos by Burnand), as well as some of W. S. Gilbert’s early efforts.
From the start, Gilbert and Sullivan both set themselves against the
risqué humour of burlesque and French operetta and hence could
win and hold the affections of the middle-class Victorian public. The
famous pair came together in Thespis (Gaiety, 1871), but it was a
failure and the music is lost.
The great series of Gilbert and Sullivan operas or operettas began
with the one-act, all-sung Trial by Jury, commissioned by Richard
D'Oyly Carte for the Royalty Theatre and performed there in 1875
(as a curtain-raiser to Offenbach's La Périchole). Its success induced
D'Oyly Carte to form a syndicate to produce Gilbert and Sullivan
operas, first at the Opéra-Comique, then, after 1881, at his own
theatre, the Savoy. From this the name 'Savoy Operas' has become
attached to the series of eleven collaborations, of which the most
famous are HMS Pinafore (Opera-Comique, 1878), The Pirates of
Penzance (Royal Bijou, Paignton, 1879), Patience (Opéra-Comique,
1881), Jolanthe (Savoy, 1882), The Mikado (Savoy, 1885), The Yeomen
of the Guard (Savoy, 1888), and The Gondoliers (Savoy, 1889).178
There is much to link these works to the past history of English
opera—the spoken dialogue interspersed with musical numbers; the
custom of including two or three strophic ballads and one glee or
‘madrigal’ in each work; the melodrame; other standard numbers,
such as the chorus of maidens beginning the second act; and so on.
Sullivan, however, had had the benefit of a more thorough and more
German training than most of his operatic predecessors. He could
command technical resources that they lacked, and the detectable
influence of Mendelssohn may have reinforced, for many Victorians,
the reassuring propriety of Gilbert's librettos. Sullivan had also
imbibed something of Schubert's techniques, most notably the
felicitous use of remote modulations.
The wide appeal and unique staying power of these masterpieces
is in no way lessened by their very clear association with a particular
178 Miniature full score, ed. David Lloyd-Jones (London, Paris, and New York, 1984).
484 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
time and place. It has often been pointed out that Gilbert and
Sullivan were temperamental opposites. Each modified the other’s
psychology towards compatibility with his own; the result was not
a bland compromise, but a meeting ground in which dynamic tension
continued to flourish. Gilbert’s biting wit, shown in unadulterated
form in the spoken dialogue, treats emotion as something to be
observed, analysed, and subjected to logic and satire, but never
shared. Music is scarcely capable of partaking in this process, though
it may accompany it in a neutral way, as Sullivan’s does well enough
in the patter songs. But when the music is given its head, its direct
emotional appeal tends to overwhelm Gilbert’s verbal wit—as he
found to his annoyance—and to give the audience a necessary outlet
for feelings that Gilbert checked in the spoken passages. Sullivan
was capable of musical parody— many of his recitatives are obvious
examples. It is debatable whether Sullivan, like Gilbert, was making
fun of fashionable orientalism in The Mikado; perhaps he was
revelling in the romance of it all. His most valuable contributions
are often in an entirely serious vein, whether sentimental, as in the
gorgeously orchestrated girls’ chorus from The Yeomen of the Guard
(Ex. 356); quasi-religious, as in the unexpected choral outburst ‘Hail,
Poetry!’ in The Pirates; or merely pictorial, as in ‘The Moon and Г
from The Mikado.
Ex. 356
Andante non troppo lento
CHORUS SOPRANOS
Night. has spread her pall once more, And.the pris - 'nerstill is free:
THE SAVOY OPERAS IN THE UNITED STATES 485
A great attraction of the Savoy operas was that they broadened
the possible range of subject matter of light opera, appealing to
sophisticated tastes. Princess Ida dealt with feminism, Patience with
the aesthetic movement, Ruddigore with nouveau-riche snobbery; all
the operas are full of pungent commentary on British institutions,
prejudices, and social customs. These matters often excite more
interest than the inevitable love story, though the latter may have
the best music.
THE SAVOY OPERAS IN THE UNITED STATES
The unprecedented popularity of the Savoy operas, both in Britain
and, after the introduction of HMS Pinafore in New York (1879),
in the United States, overwhelmed the craze for French opera bouffe
which had dominated the London and New York musical stages in
the previous decades. They had many imitators, but no serious rivals
for a long time. In England, Frederic Clay (1838-89) and Alfred
Cellier (1844-91) had some success, as did John Philip Sousa (1854-
1932) and Reginald De Koven (1859-1920) in America; but it was
not until Victor Herbert’s career in light opera began with Prince
Ananias (New York, 1894) that a serious challenge to Sullivan’s
hegemony was brought forward. And even Herbert’s pieces have
succumbed like the rest while Sullivan’s live on.
Deane Root has asked ‘why HMS Pinafore, alone of all the
popular musical stage works performed in the United States between
1860 and 1880, continues to be performed regularly and widely a
century later. He suggests an answer: ‘it is still popular partly
because the musical and textual styles and the methods of performance
which it represented have been perpetuated in American musical
theater. 179 The reason may be simpler: that Gilbert and Sullivan's
individual and complementary abilities were far superior to those of
any of their rivals, and were peculiarly suited to the Anglo-Saxon
temperament. Gilbert was one of the wittiest dramatists of all time.
The British were quite ready to laugh at themselves; the Americans
took themselves more seriously, but had no objection to laughing at
the British, as Root points out.180 But if, in the long run, opera
must depend primarily on its music, let us admit that Sullivan was
one of the most richly endowed composers of the century.18!
179 Deane Root, American Popular Stage Music 1860-1880 (Ann Arbor, 1981), 169.
180 Tbid., p. 167.
181 A German critic, Robert Papperitz, thought that Sullivan's natural musical talent was
greater than Brahms's, but—less perceptively—regretted that he had ‘prostituted his talents
for money-making works’. Samuel Midgley, My 70 Years’ Musical Memories (London, 1934),
21-2.
486 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
AMERICAN ОРЕКЕТТА AND OPERA
American operetta had, however, established an independent
existence before the 'Pinafore fever' began. Entertainments at the
Boston Museum in the 1860s seem to have fulfilled a function similar
to the German Reed entertainments, in reaction to the pervasive
French operettas and burlesques. The Doctor of Alcantara, an operetta
by the German immigrant Julius Eichberg (1824-93), was first
performed there in 1862, and was soon widely popular both in
theatres and in church associations.!82 Its music was simple-minded
but effective, and it was followed by other American works of similar
type. Evangeline (Niblo's Garden, New York, 1874) by Edward
Everett Rice (1848-1924) also maintained accepted standards of
propriety, but was more directly in the burlesque tradition in its
reliance on satire and extravaganza.
The foothold of‘grand opera’ in American life was more precarious.
Many cities boasted opera houses in the later nineteenth century,
but their repertoire was almost exclusively imported; few indeed were
the operas by American composers that managed to reach the stage,
and not one had an unequivocal success. Rip Van Winkle, by George
F. Bristow (1825-98), was produced at Niblo's Theatre, in New
York, in 1855, and ran for four weeks: it had one revival, at Chicago
in 1870, and has been staged again in more recent times.!82
Considering that this was only the third American ‘grand opera’ on
record, and the first on an American subject, it shows a rather
astonishing degree of technique and invention. Bristow uses set-piece
arias, choruses, ballads, recitatives and melodrama as well as spoken
dialogue. Genuine feeling infuses Rip's third-act song, after he has
Ех SEO
Andante affetuoso
RIP VAN WINKLE mf
an
u P EY
182 Root, American Popular Stage Music, p. 139.
183 At the University of Illinois, Urbana, under the direction of Neely Bruce (1974).
INCIDENTAL MUSIC 487
con espress.
DEE
КҮН E E "E 7 27 ШР e Deg E ee
И 1101—17
m
a-las,they know me not; Stran - gers are they, are they_ to
awoken from his long sleep (Ex. 357), and the misunderstandings
that follow are cleverly depicted in the finale.184
Other American ‘grand operas’ of the period, now almost wholly
forgotten, include Antonio (Chicago, 1874), revived in 1887 as
Lucille), and Zenobia (Chicago, 1883), by Silas G. Pratt (1846-1916),
and Otho Visconti (com. c.1877, prod. Chicago, 1907), by William
W. Gilchrist (also 1846-1916).185
INCIDENTAL MUSIC
One other type of stage music that aspired to high art should be
briefly mentioned. The long tradition of incidental music, especially
to the plays of Shakespeare, continued to flourish throughout the
Victorian period. John Liptrot Hatton (1809-86) supplied several
fine examples in the 1850s, while Sullivan wrote some of his
most distinguished music for The Tempest (1861) and four other
Shakespeare plays. A newer development was the provision of
incidental music for Greek plays acted at universities: this attracted
the interest of composers such as William Sterndale Bennett (1816-
75) and Hubert Parry (1848-1918) who were not men of the theatre.
Bennett's Ajax (1872) never progressed beyond the Prelude, but
184 For a study of this opera, see K. E. Gombert, * “Leonora” by William Henry Fry and
"Rip Van Winkle" by George Frederick Bristow' (Ph.D. Diss., Ball State University, 1977).
185 For further details see Edward Ellsworth Hipsher, American Opera and its Composers
(Philadelphia, 1927).
488 ОРЕКА: 1850-1890
Macfarren’s music for the same play (Cambridge, 1882) is vigorous
and convincing. Parry contributed fine scores to Aristophanes’ Birds
(1883) and Frogs (1892) for Oxford, while Stanford continued the
Cambridge line with Eumenides (1885) and Oedipus Tyrannus (1887).
Typically these consist chiefly of instrumental numbers and choruses,
and do not demand the kind of ‘operatic’ writing for which experience
in the theatre is indispensable. An effective American work of the
same genre was Oedipus Tyrannus, by John Knowles Paine (1839-
1906), produced at Harvard in 1881.
VII
THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND
KINDRED FORMS
By GERALD ABRAHAM
Ir has been remarked in an earlier chapter that perhaps the most
characteristic form of Romantic orchestral music was the concert
overture, and at the middle of the century, as music aspired still
more ardently towards the qualities of the other arts, the pro-
grammatic concert overture began to develop new characteristics
and acquired a new generic title: 'symphonic poem'. (It was first
employed by Liszt, on the occasion of a performance of his Tasso
Overture at the Weimar Court on 19 April 1854.) Under its cover
composers felt freer to indulge in structural licences like those taken
by Mendelssohn in Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt and Berlioz in
Le Carnaval romain, and in the devices of tone symbolism and tone
painting that were still regarded with suspicion, if not hostility, by
many musicians at the middle of the century. It is impossible to
draw a defining line between the early symphonic poems and
contemporary concert overtures; the terms were for some time almost
interchangeable. It is true the scores of symphonic poems were
generally prefaced by literary programmes like those to Berlioz's
Symphonie fantastique and Spohr's Die Weihe der Töne, but so too,
occasionally, were the scores of overtures. The Anglo-Alsatian Henry
Litolff (1818-91) issued his overture to Griepenkerl's Maximilian
Robespierre (1850) with a lengthy explanation that 'the tone poem
[Tondichtung] not merely forms the musical introduction to Grie-
penkerl's tragedy, but also— quite independently of the content of
the play— gives its own picture of the life and character of the hero’,
every detail of which is then made clear.
A number of the earliest symphonic poems actually began their
existence as concert or theatre overtures. The Lisztian symphonic
poem was indebted to Berlioz's programme symphonies only for the
idea of the printed literary programme and the wealth of new
orchestral resources which facilitated and encouraged tone painting.
Even Liszt's favourite device of transforming a basic theme into
490 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
surprisingly different shapes each serving as material for a different
section of a work is derived not only from the motto-themes of the
Symphonie fantastique and Harold en Ttalie but from such works as
Schubert's Fantaisie, Op. 15 (the "Wanderer" Fantasia), and the first
movement of Schumann's Piano Concerto, with their ancestry in the
pavane-galliard relationship of the sixteenth century and the variation
suite of the seventeenth. Berliozs programme symphonies had
important progeny during the second half of the century, but the
one-movement symphonic poem was not among them.
Liszt too wrote programme symphonies, Eine Faust-Symphonie in
drei Charakterbildern (the ‘Faust’ Symphony) (first version 1854;
choral Finale added in 1857) and Eine Symphonie zu Dantes Divina
commedia (the ‘Dante’ Symphony), which stand in much the same
relationship to his symphonic poems as Berlioz’s to his concert
overtures. The ‘Faust’ Symphony is indeed less programmatic than
the Berlioz symphonies. Instead of attempting to illustrate specific
episodes from Goethe as Berlioz had done with Shakespeare in
Roméo et Juliette, he made three character studies on the lines of
Schumann's Manfred Overture and Wagner's Faust Overture; indeed
he may have owed the conception to Wagner's project. As musical
portraits, the movements are more effective than psychologically
penetrating; yet they compose into an impressive, thematically unified
triptych. The expansion of the ending into an 'andante mistico'
setting of the closing words of Goethe's Second Part, for tenor solo
and male chorus, was a not altogether happy afterthought. The
greatly inferior ‘Dante’ Symphony also ends chorally and was also
conceived as a triptych,! but on Wagner's advice Liszt substituted a
setting of the Magnificat, for women's or boys's voices, as a coda
to ‘Purgatory’, and scrapped ‘Paradise’.
LISZT’S OVERTURE POEMS
Liszt’s earlier symphonic poems, up to the spring of 1854, were
with two exceptions originally concert or theatre overtures—several
of them for official celebrations at Weimar—scored in the first place
by the operetta composer August Conradi or by Liszt’s young
factotum Joachim Raff. Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne was roughed
out in 1848 and at first described as a ‘concert overture’ with that
title, or alternatively as Bergsymphonie or Meditation symphonie.?
1 In a letter to Rubinstein (3 June 1855) Liszt announces that he has sketched the plan:
‘Symphony in three parts: the two first, “Hell” and “Purgatory”, exclusively instrumental,
the third, Paradise", with chorus’, Briefe, ed. La Mara (Leipzig, 1893-1905), i. 201.
2 See Helene Raff, ‘Franz Liszt und Joachim Raff im Spiegl ihrer Briefe, Die Musik, |
(1901-2), particularly pp. 389 and 1163.
ЫШ Т5 ENRILILERSDISCIREES 491
Tasso was composed the following year as ап overture to a festival
performance of Goethe’s play at Weimar; in 1851 Liszt speaks of it
as ‘Lamento e Trionfo (Tasso Ouvertüre)’ and ‘L’ Ouverture du Tasse’.
A concert overture of 1848, Die vier Elemente, was based on earlier
settings of poems by Joseph Autran, ‘La Terre’, ‘Les Aquilons’, ‘Les
Flots’, and ‘Les Astres’, for male voices and piano (collectively
entitled Les Quatre Elements), and still bearing that title in 1851
though it was performed at a Weimar concert in 1854 as a
symphonische Dichtung. Prometheus was composed in 1850 as the
overture to a set of eight choruses from Herder’s Der entfesselte
Prometheus, with which it is to some extent thematically connected:
Festklänge in 1853 as a simple Festouvertüre, though it was first
performed as an introduction to Schiller's Huldigung der Kunste;
Orpheus in 1854 as a prologue (with an epilogue on the same themes)?
to a gala performance of Gluck’s Orfeo.
LISZT’S EARLIER DISCIPLES
A number of the earlier symphonic poems of Liszt’s disciples also
originated in theatre overtures and acquired programmes, sometimes
incongruous ones, ex post facto. Thus the youthful Hans von Bülow
(1830-94), one of the closest of his immediate followers, wrote an
overture to an unsuccessful tragedy, Ein Leben im Tode, by Karl
Ritter. Having become detached from the play, it then existed for
several years as a Fantaisie without title; for a performance at Berlin
in February 1859 it was described on the advice of Liszt, who was
worried by this lack of a name, as ‘a Symphonic Prologue to Byron's
Cain’. A couple of years later we find Liszt proposing yet another
title: “What do you think of "Symphonischer Prolog zu den Ratibern”
(ог “zu Byrons Cain")??? It seems to me well suited to the work"?
In the end it became Nirwana, an ‘orchestral fantasia in overture
form'.
Similarly, though with more fidelity to his original subjects, Liszt's
Czech admirer Bedřich Smetana (1824-84), then a conductor at
Góteborg in Sweden, wrote his first three symphonic poems under
the direct influence of three plays and in at least one case was
prepared for his music to be used as a theatre overture. He tells
Liszt: ‘I have finished the music for Shakespeare's Richard III and
am now working on music to Schiller's Wallensteins Lager as first
3 Peter Raabe, Franz Liszt: Leben und Schaffen (Stuttgart, 1931), ii. 299.
4 Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt und Hans von Bülow, ed. La Mara (Leipzig, 1898),
307. See also C. F. Barry, ‘Hans von Bülow's Nirwana’, Zeitschrift der Internationalen
Musikgesellschaft, 2/9 (June, 1901).
492 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
part and Wallensteins Tod as second part.’® Wallensteins Tod was
never finished, perhaps never even begun, but when its companion,
Valdstynüuv Tabor [Wallenstein’s Camp], was completed three months
later Smetana provided it with an alternative ending for use in the
theatre. Whether or not he thought of Hakon Jarl (1861) as an actual
overture to Oehlenschläger’s tragedy it is impossible to say, but it
was certainly inspired by the play which had made a ‘powerful
impression’ on him. None of the three works is described on the
autograph score as a symphonic poem, but as ‘To Shakespeare's
Richard III’, ‘Wallensteins’ Camp/by Fr. Schiller/orchestral com-
position’ and ‘Hakon Jarl for full orchestra’. A letter to Smetana’s
former teacher Josef Proksch, makes it clear that he had not yet
heard the new term: Richard III ‘is a sort of musical illustration,
composed in one movement yet neither overture nor symphony, in
short something that awaits a name’.6 The term ‘symphonic poem’
was first used when Richard III was performed—in a sixteen-hand
piano arrangement—at Göteborg in 1860, yet two years later when
it and Valdstynuv Tabor were first performed in Prague both were
described as ‘fantasias’. In his diary during his Swedish period (1856-
61) Smetana refers to all three works as ‘symphonies’; it is only later
that he begins to speak of them in his correspondence as ‘symphonic
poems'.?
LISZT'S SYMPHONISCHE DICHTUNGEN
Having hit upon the term symphonische Dichtung for the 1854
performance of Les Préludes, Liszt applied it in the same year to
Hungaria (which has no programme) and proposed it to Breitkopf
and Hartel for the collection of his orchestral works— which included
Mazeppa (based on a piano étude) and Héroide funèbre (1850) (based
on sketches for the first movement of a ‘revolution symphony’
projected twenty years before) The term itself may have been
suggested by Wagner's Faust Overture, described as ein Tongedicht
für das Orchester on the cover of the original score, but it should be
remembered that such descriptions had earlier Romantic roots: Carl
Loewe in 1835 had styled his Der Frühling for piano eine Tondichtung
in Sonatenform.
After Hungaria, the earliest symphonic poems to be actually
5 Letter, 24 Oct. 1858, František Bartoš, Smetana ve vzpominkäch a dopisech (9th edn.;
Prague, 1953), no. 24.
Р A Ў Sept. 1958, quoted by Josef Plavec in his introduction to the miniature score (Prague,
? Тат indebted for this information to the late Alfons Waissar, formerly Director of the
Smetana Museum at Prague.
- LISZT'S SYMPHONISCHE DICHTUNGEN 493
created as such were the Hunnenschlacht inspired by Kaulbach's
painting in the Altes Museum, Berlin, and Die Ideale after Schiller’s
poem (both 1857). (The main theme of /deale was borrowed from
an earlier choral setting of Schiller's Ал die Künstler.) Hamlet (1858)
was originally intended as a prelude to the play. The last of the
important orchestral works Liszt wrote at Weimar were the Zwei
Episoden aus Lenau’s ‘Faust’ (1860)—'Der nächtliche Zug’ and ‘Der
Tanz in der Dorfschenke’ (sometimes known as ‘the first Mephisto
Waltz’)—miniature symphonic poems in all but name. After leaving
Weimar Liszt wrote only one more symphonic poem actually so
called, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe (1882), inspired by a design by
the Hungarian painter Mihäly Zichy, although several of his later
orchestral works belong to the same genre of poetically inspired
music which the composer wished to be listened to in the light of
the actual poem; thus, for Le Triomphe funebre du Tasse (1866), an
epilogue to the Lamento e Trionfo, he wanted the description of
Tasso's funeral in Pierantonio Serassi’s biography to be printed in
concert programmes. But these compositions are neither more nor
less unorthodox in form than those which began their existence as
overtures.8
Liszts symphonic poems are as heedless of sonata form as
Meeresstille and Carnaval romain but their changes of tempo and
other formal unconventionalities were not dictated by the prefatory
programmes as was supposed by Liszt's adversaries and even by his
disciples. Neither Orpheus, Héroide funebre, Festklünge, Hungaria,
nor Hamlet has anything one could call a programme; the last three
lack even prefaces and, as we have seen, several of the others came
into existence before the programmes were invented. Nor are the
programmes or prefaces, whether written by Liszt himself or the
Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, necessarily reliable accounts of the origin
of the works. That to Tasso, for instance, tells us that
Tasso loved and suffered in Ferrara, was avenged in Rome, and still lives
today in the folk-songs of Venice. These three moments are inseparable
from his imperishable fame. To remember them musically, we called up
first his great shade as it still haunts the lagoons of Venice; then we saw
his proud, sad face pass through the festivities of Ferrara, where he created
his masterpieces; finally we followed him to Rome, the Eternal City, which
by giving him the crown of fame glorified in him the martyr and poet.
But the first conception was certainly not threefold; the Ferrara
8 For detailed formal analyses, see Joachim Bergfeld, Die formale Struktur der Symphonischen
Dichtungen Franz Liszts (Eisenach, 1931).
494 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
section, ‘quasi menuetto’, was inserted some five years after the
composition of the original overture—and the logical position of a
Venetian section would hardly be at the beginning of the work. The
truth is that Liszt began with the idea of a twofold overture reflecting
Tasso’s sufferings and triumph, and musically founded on the melody
to which he had heard the Venetian gondoliers sing the opening of
Gierusalemme liberata.? The printed programme was devised later to
fit existing musical facts.
Liszt’s printed programmes serve as extensions of the titles, giving
the listener a general clue to the extra-musical sense of the scores;
he never used them as blueprints for the layout of compositions.
They are also symptoms of his general culture (typical of musicians
of the period) and of his wish to advertise it (a more personal
characteristic). There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his
statement to Agnes Street-Klindworth in 1860 that during his dozen
years at Weimar he had been upheld by ‘a great idea: that of the
renewal of Music by its more intimate alliance with Poetry; I have
always been spurred on by the idea of a freer development, more
adequate—so to speak—to the spirit of this age'.!?
But this ‘renewal of music’ was not to be effected by subordination
of music to literary details. Such passages of tonepainting as the
rising storm in Les Préludes, the galloping of Mazeppa's horse and
the walking of Faust's in the first of the Lenau Episodes, are relatively
few. Still fewer are such as that at the end of Mazeppa's ride and
before his release by the Cossacks or that near the end of the second
Lenau Episode, ‘Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke’— Faust slipping out
into the night with the innkeeper's daughter while a nightingale sings
(Ex,.358).
Ex. 358
Vivace fantastico
9 Already used in a piano piece, No. 1 of a set of four entitled Venezia e Napoli
(Gesamtausgabe, ii. 5). The form of the melody employed by Liszt is given in Werner Danckert,
Das europdiische Volkslied (Berlin, 1939), 306.
10 Liszt’s Briefe, ii. 135.
495
LISZT'S SYMPHONISCHE DICHTUNG EN
vn 1
J
KE?
eu
x
=
E
©
a
о
>
a
Poco a poco рїй moderato (d
~ (+vn solo)
4
Ja
5.)
=)
(С;
Poco a poco рїй moderato (|
444m 4
3
ad libitum
Р — <A PO
fll
«1 220000115
be
с
4
neg UE S010)
u
223222
222
П only
TET.
—=
accel.
Р————— р
<.
—
y 8T DT
PP = smorz
496 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
Here Liszt writes programme music in the strictest sense, an
attempt to depict a succession of events, each section headed with
the relevant lines of the poem. The score of Die Ideale is similarly
sprinkled with quotations taken at random from Schiller’s poem,
but the extra-musical ideas are less specific and concrete; Die Ideale
was first conceived as a Symphonie en trois parties!!—‘Soaring’
(Allegro spiritoso), 'Disillusion (slow movement), ‘Occupation’
(Scherzo)— with final ‘Apotheosis’, all on transformations of the
same themes, and it remains a condensed symphony closely parallel
in form to the earlier E flat Piano Concerto (1849; rev. 1853 and
1856).
While the different sections of Die Ideale thus correspond to those
of the Classical symphony, those of the majority of Liszt's symphonic
poems are grouped in monistic patterns, enlargements and elab-
orations of the square-cut, sectional forms typical of Romantic piano
music. The only real exception is Mazeppa in which the concluding
section (Allegro marziale) is unrelated to the main part of the work,
the ride. On the other hand in Hunnenschlacht, built on a similar
plan, the final section (beginning at Letter I, Maestoso assai) is
related thematically. Even the apparent three-movement form of
Tasso is really a monistic pattern and the three clearly defined
movements of Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe are arranged in the
clearest ternary form, ABA'. These ground-plans for the layout of
thematically related sections in different keys and tempos, while they
lack the organic cohesion of sonata and cognate forms, generally—
as Bergfeld was the first to demonstrate—have their own, perhaps
rather mechanical, symmetry. One need not agree with the details
of Bergfeld's analyses to endorse his general conclusion. The broad
plan of Les Preludes is typical:
Introduction (on theme А: C major)
Andante maestoso (on theme A: C major)
Theme A (‘cantando’: C major, E, etc.)
Theme B ('amoroso': E major)
Transition (Allegro ma non troppo, on theme A)
Allegro tempestuoso (on theme А: А minor, etc.)
Transition (Un poco più moderato, on theme A)
Allegretto pastorale (E major)
Transition (theme B combined with 'pastorale' theme)
Theme A (Allegro marziale: C major, etc.)
11 Ibid., p. 83. See also Briefwechsel zwischen Liszt und Bülow, p. 248.
LISZT'S SYMPHONISCHE DICHTUNGEN 497
Theme B (similarly transformed: C major, etc.)
Andante maestoso (on theme A: C major)?
The predominance of ‘theme А” almost justifies Liszt's claim!? that
Tasso is construirt with Ex. 359 and the Préludes with Ex. 360. Liszt
went too far; these scores are not literally monothematic. But the
ingenuity of his theme-transformations does enable him to squeeze
the maximum value from such unpromising scraps as these!4 and
partially to counteract the effect of scrappiness that would otherwise
be produced by his sectional structure in contrasting tempos.
[333959 Ex. 360
While this technique of motif transformation goes beyond anything
of the kind attempted by the symphonic composers of the 1830s and
1840s and reminds one rather of Wagner's exactly contemporary
development of the leitmotif, much of Liszt's actual material belongs
to some of the same categories as those of the symphonists: melodies
of lyrical origin — Die Ideale, Tasso, Les Préludes, Prometheus;!? and
plainsong: ‘Crux fidelis’ in Hunnenschlacht, ‘Der nächtliche Zug’, the
‘Dante’ Symphony. And his treatment of it is generally very like
Schumann's: by harmonic sequence and wholesale repetition in fresh
keys (most characteristically in keys a third apart). Like Schumann,
he attaches enormous importance to the theme for its own sake
rather than as a part of a larger whole, but he savours actual sound
effects far more intensely than Schumann ever did. Liszt's own
Ex. 361
Allegro
1? Bergfeld's analysis, Die formale Struktur, pp. 76ff. is much more detailed.
13 [15275 Briefe, viii. 127.
14 Cf. Alfred Heuss, ‘Eine motivisch-thematische Studie über Liszts sinfonische Dichtung
Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne', Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft, 13 (1911-
12), 10.
15 In Prometheus the cello theme (Ex. 361) is modified from a setting of the words ‘und du
allein bist, ja du allein bist, die sie ordet, göttliche, menschliche, weise Themis!’, in the original
Chöre zu Herders ‘Der entfesselte Prometheus’.
498 THE SYMPHONIC РОЕМ AND KINDRED FORMS
defence of repetition as exemplified in Schumann was that ‘from the
point of view of the public it is indispensable for the understanding
of the thought, while from the point of view of art it is almost
identical with the demand of clarity, structure and effectiveness'.16.
A certain sinuous and angular type of theme of which Liszt was
rather fond also seems to derive from Schumann and other German
Romantics (Weber, early Wagner); others of his melodies, such as
the second theme, for horns and divided violas, of Les Préludes and
the middle section of Orpheus, derive from Italian opera either
directly or through Chopin. Most typical of all are the numerous
chromatic recitative-like or ejaculatory themes, slivers of Liszt's
frequently Chopinesque and boldly dissonant harmony. Sometimes
the verbal inspiration of these instrumental recitatives and ejac-
ulations is frankly avowed, as in the opening of the 'Dante' Symphony
where the words of Dante's inscription on the portal of Hell are
printed under the notes in the score. Sometimes it can be dem-
onstrated: the ‘recitativo’, actually so marked, for cor anglais,
bassoon and muted violas, in Prometheus, originated in an alto solo
of the Prometheus choruses (Exx. 362 and 363).
Ex. 362
Andante rinf.
Ex. 363
z
tä = re. Weis - sa - gen-de Träul-Ime
(The altars of the gods stand deserted in the grove. Foreboding dreams. . .)
16 Gesammelte Schriften von Franz Liszt, ed. Lina Ramann (Leipzig, 1880-3), ii. 103.
LISZT'S INFLUENCE IN RUSSIA 499
Liszt's unsureness as an orchestrator has already been mentioned.
When he gained enough confidence to do his own scoring, his
orchestration,!? brilliant as it is, is always that of a pianist.!8 He
very frequently felt the need of the harp, more even than Berlioz. In
Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne he gives it glissandos. Even when he
dispenses with it, he likes to write arpeggio figuration for the strings
and sometimes (the Minuet in Tasso, both Episoden aus Lenau’s
‘Faust’, and the first and second movements of the ‘Faust’ Symphony),
with curiously silvery effect for woodwind.
His scoring in general owes much to Berlioz and to Lohengrin,
though his employment of completely triple woodwind in Mazeppa
is exceptional. In his melodic use of brass and his sharp differentiation
and contrast of pure instrumental colours, he is very close indeed to
Berlioz and fairly early, even mature, Wagner; but he is distinguished
from them by his essentially homophonic texture. Berlioz thinks
directly in terms of his orchestral medium. In the most characteristic
pages of Lohengrin horizontal tendencies are everywhere perceptible;
the parts 'sing'. Liszt often has to use in his scoring all the ingenuity
acquired in his years of piano writing to elaborate blocklike chordal
textures, as in Ex. 364 from Mazeppa.
Like Berlioz, he attached the highest importance to fine balance
and flexible rhythm in the performance of his orchestral music.!?
His scores are very carefully marked. Sometimes he asks for a
gradual acceleration spread over nearly fifty bars, as in Les Préludes;
he occasionally uses fresh signs ‘R ...’ and ‘A...’ to indicate ‘slight
crescendi and diminuendi of the rhythm'. In all these respects his
example was enormously effective, for his disciples were numerous
and often influential in turn.
LISZT'S INFLUENCE IN RUSSIA
Perhaps the most important instance of the transmission of Liszt's
orchestral influence and its crossing with other strains is to be found
in the semi-amateur young Russian school which emerged during
the 1860s under the somewhat despotic leadership of Mily Alekseevich
Balakirev (1837-1910), Glinka's closest disciple. Balakirev and his
group were very consciously ‘progressive’ as well as nationalist, and
Balakirev himself as a conductor was the principal champion of
1? See H. Woollett and Gabriel Pierné, in Albert Lavignac (ed.), Encyclopédie de la musique
et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire (Paris, 1920-31), II. iv. 2602-5.
18 See the facsimiles at the end of Raabe, Franz Liszt: Leben und Schaffen, ii: (a) Liszt's
pencil sketch for Tasso; (b) Conradi's orchestration; (c) Raff's more genuinely orchestral
conception.
19? See his general preface to the symphonic poems, particularly the original, French version.
500 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
Berlioz, and later of Liszt, in Russia. Russian orchestral music of
this period shows all the hesitations, compromises, and varieties
characteristic of contemporary programme music in Western Europe,
and Balakirev’s early works again illustrate the interchangeability of
the terms overture" and 'symphonic poem’, together with the fact
that the existence or lack of a programme is no touchstone
for distinguishing them. Following Glinka's example, the young
Balakirev composed a number of overtures on folk themes: Overture
on the Theme of a Spanish March (1857), Overture on Three Russian
Themes (1858), a Second Overture оп Russian Themes (1864), and
an Overture on Czech Themes (1867). Their several histories are
enlightening. The autograph score of the Spanish Overture was
inscribed in pencil “То the drama, The Expulsion of the Moors from
Ex. 364
Sempre agitato assai
espressivo doluto
Dro == В -
y SS
b
ww, tpt
vn 2
va
db
LISZT'S INFLUENCE IN RUSSIA 501
Spain'.?? No such play is known; this title was never published; but
when in 1887 Balakirev revised and reorchestrated the piece for
publication he gave it a programme which does not mention a play
but indicates content:
The composer had in mind the history of the tragic fate of the Moors,
persecuted and finally driven from Spain by the Inquisition. The first theme
is therefore given an Oriental character; the orchestra at certain places
depicts the organ, the singing of the monks, the burning pyres of the
auto-da-fé with the ringing of bells and the rejoicings of the people.
The first Russian Overture remained without programme or de-
scriptive title, but the second underwent two changes. It appears?!
to have been inspired to some extent by a passage in an article of
Herzen's on the Russian student agitation of 1861:
Give ear, for darkness does not prevent hearing: from every part of our
A; it
кл SS SS en лесе = се л т ee ee а БӘБИ.
КСЕ ааа ne De ш ЬЕ гс ыы ee ee CUN ee ee ee EE ee ee
Н = =
а I à
3 rinf.
уер
АЛЕ mu —— nnb ьа
Be
arco col legno
"== Ee | ae Sa ЫШТ БУЕ ee
eS SSS SSS aE, Ee ET ee CC E EI
fe veer" RBS ECG EEE) Se lerne ES n
E EE
3 3
20 Cf. Grigory Timofeev, 'M. A. Balakirev: Na osnovanii novikh materialov’, Russkaya
Mis? (1912), no. 6, p. 50.
21 V, Karenin (ed.), Perepiska M. A. Balakireva s V. V. Stasovim (Moscow, 1935), i. 270.
502 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
vast fatherland, from the Don and the Urals, from the Volga and the
Dnepr, swells a groan, rises a murmur; it is the first roar of the sea-waves
that are beginning to rise, pregnant with storms after the dreadfully weary
calm. To the people! To the people!—there is your place. . ..
But when the overture was published in 1869 it became a ‘musical
picture’, 7000 let [1000 Years], in allusion to the founding of the
Russian state by Rurik in 862; and in 1887, when it was issued by
a different publisher in a slightly revised and completely reorchestrated
form as the ‘symphonic poem’ Rus’—the old name for Russia—
Balakirev went even further, asserting in a prefatory note that the
composition had been ‘occasioned by the inauguration in 1862, in
Novgorod, of the millenary monument of Russia’ and that by the
three folk themes he had
wished to characterize three elements of our history: paganism, the Muscovite
way of Ше, and the semi-feudal, semi-republican elements later revived
among the Cossacks. Their conflict—terminated by the fatal blow dealt by
the reforms of Peter I to religio-national aspirations— provided the content
of the instrumental drama.
It is true that by 1868 Balakirev had some such characterization in
his mind, but no conflict and no suggestion that the Petrine reforms
were 'fatal'. There is certainly not much 'conflict' of themes in Rus
and nothing that can be called an ‘instrumental drama’. Nor does
the 1887 programme account for the two appearances of a lyrical
theme of Balakirev's own; according to Stasov, this ‘delightful, truly
inspired melody depicts the new life beginning'.?? The composer's
political views had changed by 1887 but the music remained
unchanged in every essential. The Overture on Czech Themes un-
derwent a more effortless change into the symphonic poem V Chekhii
[In Bohemia] when it was belatedly published in 1906. It was revised
and rescored but, as the composer put it, he wanted ‘to call it a
symphonic poem because of its scope and treatment’ (letter, 5 June
1902) and the programme he devised could hardly have been more
naive: ‘A Russian musician visits Bohemia; he hears about him the
sound of Czech songs, arousing in his soul a mighty whirlpool of
memories and reflections on his distant land and the songs of the
Russian people.’
Balakirev's only ‘true’ symphonic poem, the only work initially
conceived as such and attempting picturesque description, is the later
Tamara (begun 1867, completed 1882, and published with a dedication
22 "The Giant Awakens', Kolokol 110 (1 Nov. 1862).
?3 *Nasha muzika za posledniya 25 let', Vestnik Evropi (Oct. 1883), 597.
LISZT’S INFLUENCE IN RUSSIA 503
to Liszt) after Lermontov’s poem. On the other hand, the theatre
overture to King Lear (1859) is almost equally episodic in structure
and the episodes are unmistakably associated with characters and
scenes in the play. To Balakirev the terms overture" and 'symphonic
poem' were equivalent. The essential ground-plan of each of these
works is the same: an Allegro framed, except in the case of the Czech
piece, by a slow opening and close based on identical material. The
Allegros themselves, in their combination of variation and sonata
principles, acknowledge as their parent Glinka's Capriccio brillante
on the Jota aragonesa. (Liszt's example began to influence the
Russians only after 1865 when Balakirev conducted Les Préludes.)
They are not so much “п sonata form' as referable to sonata form.
The themes or groups tend to be self-contained episodes rather than
parts of a whole and the key systems bear little relation to those of
a sonata movement. Rus’ has an ‘allegro’ first subject in D major;
the equivalent of a second-subject group is in B flat minor and major
in the exposition but mainly in B flat, D, and D flat major in the
recapitulation, while a ‘larghetto’ frame opens and closes the work
in B flat minor. The frame of Tamara, a tone picture of the Daryal
Gorge and the rushing river Terek, is heard in B minor at the
beginning and D flat major at the end, while the main ‘allegro
moderato', the orgy in Tamara's castle, has two recapitulations, one
beginning in the orthodox key (D flat), the other in B major.
The theme of Tamara herself stands outside the sonata plan, like
a Berliozian motto-theme, and is sometimes heard in independent
episodes which break into the plan, sometimes interwoven with the
other themes. But the impression of almost complete dissolution of
sonata form is due mainly to the nature of the material generally
and its treatment: a number of tiny quasi-oriental motifs forming
themes initially rather alike and made even more confusingly alike
by subtle variation or remoulding (Exx. 365-7, bars 78-80, 137-9,
329-32). Balakirev's mosaic glows with the colours of Chopinesque
Ex. 365
Allegro moderato ma agitato
8 СЕ. mn pm
ES —
Ha Te Oe off ee eer EM Te eg Teen „= En
ee ане eee Ee
GE ee) 1 Se Os EE EE E S EE u en ES
504 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
harmony and the subtle, brilliant scoring of a natural orchestrator
who learned everything that Glinka, Berlioz, and Liszt could teach
him. The melting kaleidoscopic motif-technique made Tamara an
important archetype of orchestral impressionism.?4
TCHAIKOVSKY
Similar lack of distinction between overture and symphonic poem,
and similar treatment of both in terms of very free and episodic
sonata outline with all sorts of excrescences, mark the programme
music of Balakirevs young compatriot Pyotr Il'ich Tchaikovsky
(1840-93), the earliest Russian composer of note to receive orthodox
academic training. But his teachers at the newly founded Petersburg
Conservatory failed to plant in him the conception of organic form—
or at any rate the ability to realize it. His earliest essay in programme
music, an overture to Ostrovsky's drama Groza [The Storm] (1864),25
is almost exceptional in that its programme was conceived before
the music. It exemplifies the kind of rough guiding plan a composer
is likely to extract from a literary work:
Introduction; 'adagio': Katerina's childhood and all her life before marriage;
‘Allegro’: hints of the storm; her longing for true happiness and love (all
‘appassionato’); her spiritual conflict; —sudden change to evening on the
banks of the Volga; again conflict, but with a trace of a kind of feverish
happiness; foreboding of the storm (repetition of the motif after the ‘adagio’
and its further development); the storm; climax of desperate conflict and
death.?6
On the other hand the symphonic poem Fatum [Fate] of four years
later has no programme; the verses by Konstantin Batyushkov
prefaced to the score were added later by a friend who, according
to one version of the story,?? had not even heard the music. But,
although the Storm Overture is still referable to sonata form, it
includes a number of passages comprehensible only in the light of
the programme and is quite as patchily episodic as Fatum which is
24 See Vol. X, pp. 92 and 94-S.
25 Better known outside Russia in Janácek's operatic version, Кага Kabanova.
26 К. Yu. Davidova er al., Muzikal’noe nasledie Chaykovskogo (Moscow, 1958), 272.
27 [bid., p. 278.
TCHAIKOVSKY 505
in a freely symmetrical form on Lisztian lines. As regards musical
substance, however, the young Tchaikovsky leaned not on Liszt but
on Schumann, the cosmopolitan Litolff (who was enjoying a certain
vogue in Russia at that time) in Groza, and Balakirev in Fatum and
most of his other programme pieces.
Fatum is Tchaikovsky's only symphonic poem actually so called.
The Tempest after Shakespeare (1873) and Francesca da Rimini after
Dante (1876) are both styled ‘fantasia’. The symmetrical arrangement
of the sharply differentiated episodes of The Tempest is evident from
the programme:
The sea (F minor)
Prospero orders Ariel to raise the storm (F minor to E major)
(The storm)
Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love (G flat and B flat)
Ariel — Caliban (G minor, etc.)
The full passion of Ferdinand and Miranda (A flat and C)
Prospero renounces his magic powers (C major and A flat)
The sea (F minor)
One cannot say that the form is conditioned by the programme;
rather, as in Liszt, the programme is laid out in a quasi-musical
pattern. Also as in Liszt, the most crudely realistic episode, the
storm, is a formal excrescence. It is the same in Francesca where the
returning husband's hunting horns, the discovery, and the killing are
naively suggested in a twenty-bar parenthesis:
Introduction (Andante lugubre)
Whirlwind of Hell (Allegro vivo, E minor)
Paolo and Francesca (Andante cantabile, A minor)
Second love theme (perhaps the story of Lancelot)
Paolo and Francesca
(The surprise)
Whirlwind of Hell
In two other programme compositions, Romeo and Juliet (1869,
rev. 1870 and 1880) and Hamlet (1888), the episodes are arranged
on a plan derived from sonata form for which Tchaikovsky adopted
the term ‘overture-fantasia’. In Manfred (1885) he produced a frankly
Berliozian programme symphony—on a programme originally de-
vised by Stasov for Balakirev28—in four movements with a motto-
theme for the hero appearing in each. Only in a later work, the
28 See Gerald Abraham, foreword to miniature score of Manfred (London, 1958).
506 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
'symphonic ballad’ Voevoda (1891), after Mickiewicz's Wojewoda,
did Tchaikovsky adopt a somewhat looser framework. But by that
time the whole nature of the symphonic poem had begun to change
and there were German and French precedents for the narrative
orchestral ‘ballad’.
‘MUSICAL PICTURES’ 3
Exceptionally brilliant orchestration in the Berlioz-Balakirev tra-
dition is the most striking characteristic of Tchaikovsky's con-
temporary Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908). His earliest essay
in programme music was an Epizod iz bilini o Sadko [Episode from
the Legend of Sadko] (1867), a title obviously suggested by Liszt's
Episoden aus Lenau’s ‘Faust’, one of which, the “Tanz in der Dorf-
schenke', confessedly served as a model. But the second and third
versions (1869 and 1892) are styled Muzikalnaya kartina— Sadko
[Musical picture— Sadko) and that title, too, is of some interest. The
‘musical picture’ was a favourite genre in Russia from the late 1860s
for a decade or so. The /vanova noch’ na Lisoy gore [St John's Night
on the Bare Mountain] (1867)?? of Modest Mussorgsky (1839-
81) was a ‘musical picture’, like Balakirev's /000 let (Rus). The
nomenclature suggested something static, the absence of any of those
attempts at musical narrative which were then believed to have
fatally affected the musical form of the symphonic poem, and even
the anti-Lisztian Anton Rubinstein (1829-94), who had composed a
Mendelssohnian Océan symphonie without programmatic indications
(1851; three additional movements, including a storm, later), painted
‘musical characteristic pictures’ of Jvan Grozniy [Ivan the Terrible]
(1868) and Faust (1871). In his Don Quixote ((Humoresque for
orchestra") (1871) he went further and depicted the hero's adventures
with the sheep, the three village-women and the galley-slaves, and
his death in a series of variations (not actually so called). The piece
is skilful and not without humour but Rubinstein's characterization
of the hero (Ex. 368) first announced in bare octaves, and the ideal
Dulcinea (Ex. 369) are not particularly apt. Even the final scene with
Quixote's dying thought of Dulcinea lacks pathos (Ex. 370).
Aleksandr Borodin's V sredney Azii [In Central Asia] (1880) is one
of the most successful of these Russian “musical pictures’; it is a
landscape with a simple action proceeding, an easier musical subject
than a portrait. And the term ‘musical picture’ was still used by
29 First published in 1968. The work which long passed as ‘Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare
Mountain’ is a composition by Rimsky-Korsakov on Mussorgsky's somewhat altered themes.
“MUSICAL PICTURES’
Ex. 368
Allegro non troppo
con energia 3
Ех. 369
con espressione. сс» T
507
508 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
Aleksandr Glazunov to describe his Krem? [The Kremlin] (1890)
and Vesna [Spring] (1891).
Tchaikovsky had written his Manfred Symphony under strong
pressure from Balakirev and the same formidable mentor had
been responsible for the composition of Rimsky-Korsakov's Antar
Symphony (1868; revised 1875 and 1897),?? also on Berliozian lines
with a motto-theme for the hero. But the composer was in later
years troubled by the thought that, unlike Berlioz, he had neglected
to cast his first movement in something like sonata form, and in
1903 he restyled Antar a ‘symphonic suite’, like its later companion-
piece, that still more resplendent display of orchestral virtuosity,
Sheherazade (1888), which is just as much, or as little, a ‘programme
symphony’ with a personal theme for the story-teller herself. Both
Sheherazade and the one-movement Skazka [Legend] (1880) typify
an attitude towards programme music by no means peculiar to
Rimsky-Korsakov: unwillingness to acknowledge—even inability
to decide—to what extent certain borderline works really are
programmatic. The four movements of Sheherazade were first
thought of as Prelude, Ballade, Adagio, and Finale; they were then
given titles— "The Sea and Sinbad's Ship’ and so on— ‘in order to
give the hearer a hint as to the direction taken by my own
imagination'; finally the titles were removed because people made
too much of the hints. Just as Sheherazade was intended to give a
general impression of fantastic oriental tales, the earlier Skazka—
prefaced by a famous passage of Pushkin on the character of Russian
folklore— was meant to give a similar impression of Russian fantasy.
But in both cases the composer, while insisting on his aim of ‘general
impressions’, admitted to his Boswell, V. V. Yastrebtsev,31 a good
many more details of programmatic illustration than he confessed
to in his autobiography:?? for instance in the Skazka the voice of a
rusalka [water-nymph], the witch Baba Yaga and her hut ‘on fowl’s
legs', the whistle of some legendary bird, forest voices, and so on,
are ‘not a complete, organically developed programme but a series
of musical images from Russian legendary lore'. These fantastic
images are reflected in music that is thematically and harmonically
dry and brittle but orchestrated with the utmost virtuosity. Even the
30 See Gerald Abraham, Slavonic and Romantic Music (London, 1968), 199-201.
31 Rimskiy-Korsakov: Vospominaniya V. V. Yastrebtseva (2 vols.; Moscow, 1959-60), 1. 81-
2, 99-100. The first of these passages is given in Florence Jonas's abbreviated translation,
Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov (New York, 1985), 31.
32 Letopis moey muzikal noy zhizni (St Petersburg, 1909); the third edition (Leningrad, 1928)
is the earliest to give the full, nearly unexpurgated text; Eng. trans., by Judah A. Joffe, My
Musical Life (New York, 1942).
THE SYMPHONIC POEM IN GERMANY 509
scoring, though motivated by 'fantastic images’, exists for its own
sake rather than for its evocative power.
The programme symphony, though seldom as closely modelled on
Harold en Italie and the Symphonie fantastique as Tchaikovsky's
Manfred and Rimsky-Korsakov's Antar, made a special appeal also
in Western Europe to those moderately progressive composers
such as Joachim Raff (1822-82) who disliked the ‘excesses’ of
Zukunftsmusik and the ‘formlessness’ of the symphonic poem. Their
ideal was music that made no pretence at absoluteness yet which
could be cast in fairly traditional forms with continuous, as opposed
to episodic, structure: programme music in the sense that Beethoven's
*Pastoral' is programme music. Raff had been befriended by Liszt
and served as his factotum, but he expressed his ‘need to gain the
terra firma of a neutral terrain’ in a letter to the Neue Zeitschrift für
Musik (11 February 1853) even before Liszt had hit on the term
symphonische Dichtung. Nine of his eleven symphonies are coun-
terparts of Spohr's programme symphonies of a generation earlier.
The same path of compromise was trodden by a score of German
composers during the 1860s and 1880s in such once-popular but now
forgotten works as J. J. Abert's Kolumbus (1864), Rheinberger's
Wallenstein (1866), Goldmark’s Ländliche Hochzeit (1876) and Hans
Huber's Eine Tell-Symphonie (1881). It was a dull path and it was
not that of the symphonic poem.
THE SYMPHONIC POEM IN GERMANY
The true symphonic poem found little favour in Germany at first,
even in Liszt's immediate circle. (It is noteworthy that both Hans
von Bülow (1830-94) and Felix Draeseke (1835-1913) eventually
followed Raff in his apostasy from the so-called New German
school.) The most talented member, Peter Cornelius (1824-74), wrote
no independent orchestral music. Draeseke contributed once-
celebrated analyses of Liszt's symphonic poems to the ‘New German’
organ Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft (1858-9) but
did not venture beyond the concert overture himself. Carl Tausig
(1841-71) and Bülow were both more notable as pianists than as
composers, and Tausig's symphonische Ballade, Das Geisterschiff
(which survives only in his piano transcription), with Bülow's
Nirwana (1854, rev. later) and his ‘Ballade für Orchester’, Des Sängers
Fluch (after Uhland) (1863) are typical specimens of epigonism. The
material of Nirwana is completely Lisztian, consisting largely of
ejaculatory fragments from which only the second subject (Ex. 371)
510 THE SYMPHONIC РОЕМ AND KINDRED FORMS
EX- ЭЛИ
Molto tranquillo
va solo dolce espressivo
stands out. The form, too, is that of the Lisztian arch: a sonata
Allegro with the second subject recapitulated before the first, framed
by two ‘grave’ passages. Des Sängers Fluch shows the impact of
Wagner and is constructed in free strophes as becomes a ballad.
Historic importance as the direct link between Liszt and Richard
Strauss has been claimed for one always loyal Lisztian, Alexander
Ritter (1833-96), Bülow’s friend and brother of that Karl Ritter
whose Leben im Tode had been the original inspiration of Nirwana.
But the claim hardly bears investigation. Ritter’s close friendship
with the younger man from 1886 onwards may have helped to wean
him from his conservative upbringing but his own earliest essays in
programme music are even later than Strauss's. It is true that
his Olafs Hochzeitsreigen (1891), a ‘symphonic waltz’ on a grim
programme, ending with the striking of midnight (five years before
it struck in Strauss's Zarathustra), derives from an opera—on a play
by his brother Karl— projected and partly sketched as early as 1868,33
but the Erotische Legende of 1890 is essentially a concert-overture
and Sursum corda! (1894), despite its portentous subtitle, Eine Sturm-
und Drangphantasie, has no programme and is really the third
incarnation of a work which had begun its existence as a violin
concerto in 1860 and then been transformed into a Phantasie und
Fuge for orchestra alone in 1863. The thematic material of these
early conceived works, the sinuous principal theme of Sursum corda!,
with its rhythmic vitality and wide range (Ex. 372) and the waltz
theme of Olafs Hochzeitsreigen (Ex. 373) may possibly have influenced
33 Siegmund von Hausegger, “Alexander Ritter: Ein Bild seines Charakters und Schaffens’,
Die Musik (Berlin, 1907).
ENGLISH PROGRESSIVES 511
Ех. 372
Allegro appassionato
espress.
the young Strauss, but Ritter shows no structural enterprise. Only
his last work, the unpublished Kaiser Rudolfs Ritt zum Grabe (1895),
is, according to Hausegger,?^ ‘a symphonic poem in the strictest
sense of the word’, that is to say ‘a work deriving its organic structure
entirely from the poetic impulse’. But by that time a symphonic
poem of this type was far less uncommon than thirty years earlier,
when it was represented only by a few quite exceptional pieces:
Liszt's ‘Der nächtliche Zug’ and such experimental freaks as the
English Henry Hugo Pierson's 'Symphonic poem to the tragedy
Macbeth’ (c.1865).
ENGLISH PROGRESSIVES
Long resident in Germany, Pierson (1815-73), though not a
member of the Liszt circle, was a camp-follower of the New German
school. He was certainly the only English member of the avant-garde,
although in 1862 the more conservative Sterndale Bennett (1816-75)
produced a 'fantasy-overture', Paradise and the Peri, which went
34 Ibid.
512 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
beyond his usual Mendelssohnian mean of picturesque music in
orthodox moulds, abandoned the sonata-form scheme, and laid out
the work as an introduction, depicting the ‘Peri at the gate of Eden’,
and three ‘scenes’ corresponding to the three episodes of Moore's
poem: the Indian patriot, the Egyptian lovers, the repentant Syrian.
The music of the three scenes corresponds to three great strophes in
D minor, F minor, and G minor, the last returning to the material
and key (D major) of the opening. Each section is headed by a
short quotation from the poem and the music sometimes hints at
programmatic details, for example, the oboe's plaint, “quasi recitativo,
con passione’, in the introduction.
Pierson was progressive in everything but harmony. His or-
chestration is Berliozian, the course of his music almost entirely
dictated by a succession of extra-musical ideas. His Macbeth is far
more heavily peppered with poetic quotations than Liszt's /deale or
"Der nächtliche Zug’; nothing is developed at any length; one brief
episode is succeeded by another so quickly that, despite recurrence
of themes, the music is incoherent; and Lady Macbeth is characterized
by a feeble theme played on the clarinet (Ex. 374), followed by the
rubric, ‘This have I thought good to deliver thee, my dearest partner
of greatness . . `. The later and shorter Concert-Ouverture zu ‘Romeo
und Julie’ (pub. 1874) shows the same qualities in a better light.
Though styled ‘overture’ it is not in sonata form but an agglomeration
of episodes (this time unlabelled). They are not quite so short but
there are ten different tempos on thirty-seven pages of full score,
and, though thematically connected, the episodes are neither well
balanced nor integrated. The ejaculatory nature of much of Pierson's
material, his over-detailed markings, and his disastrous over-reliance
on the explicit expressiveness of his music expose it to every objection
raised by the hostile critics of programme music. Nevertheless, in
orchestral imagination he stands easily first among the British
composers of his day.
THE SYMPHONIC POEM IN FRANCE
Nothing could be in stronger contrast with Pierson's daring,
untidy, semi-amateurism than the cautious, polished, professional
THE SYMPHONIC POEM IN FRANCE 513
assurance of Camille Saint-Saéns (1835-1921). Although well ac-
quainted with Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt, both musically and
personally, Saint-Saéns showed no inclination to outdo them. Quite
the contrary. He himself placed it on record that Liszt’s “first
symphonic poems ... pointed out to me the road on which I was
later to meet the Danse macabre, Le Rouet d'Omphale and other
works of the same nature’,35 yet in these works he seems the heir
not so much of Liszt or Berlioz as of the older French tradition of
graceful pictorialism.
The subject of his earliest symphonic poem, Le Rouet d'Omphale
(1872), based on an earlier rondo for piano, he tells us, is
feminine seductiveness, the triumphant struggle of weakness against strength.
The spinning-wheel is only a pretext chosen solely from the point of view
of the rhythm and the general style of the piece. Those interested in the
search for details will detect at letter J Hercules groaning in the bonds he
is unable to break and at letter L Omphale mocking the hero's useless
efforts.
(Yet the oboe's ‘mocking’ transformation of the hero’s groans is
marked ‘tranquillo’.) The whole piece is in a slightly modified ternary
form, with these pictorial details forming the middle section. The
ternary form of Phaéton (1875), the best of Saint-Saéns's four
symphonic poems, is equally clear, with the launching of Jove's
thunderbolt as the climax; the ride itself is suggested by traditional
tone symbolism. Danse macabre (comp. 1874; pub. 1875) consists of
two themes from one of Saint-Saéns's songs, framed by two
short realistic passages—midnight and the tuning of Death's fiddle;
cockcrow and the dispersal of the skeletons— and once interrupted
by the ‘Dies Irae’ in waltz rhythm. But this is no companion-piece
to Liszt's Totentanz; the words of the original song, by Henri
Cazalis— of which only a few lines are printed in the score— ‘һауе
nothing of the romantic ballad about them; they are familiar and
ironic’.36 The ironic smile is fatal to the Romantic frisson; the true
Romantics never smiled at themselves.
Only in La Jeunesse d Hercule (1877) did Saint-Saëns essay a more
truly Lisztian type. The programme lends itself less easily to refined
tone-painting; the subject is the young Hercules' choice between the
paths of pleasure and of virtue 'disregarding the seductions of the
35 Portraits et Souvenirs (Paris, 1899), 34. The novelty of the symphonic form in France in
the early 1870s may be judged from the fact that Saint-Saéns found it necessary to tell the
readers of the periodical La Renaissance littéraire et artistique (28 Dec. 1872) that the symphonic
poem, created by Liszt, is ‘un nouveau moule qui fera époque dans l'histoire de l'art".
36 Georges Serviéres, Saint-Saéns (Paris, 1923), 124-5.
514 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
nymphs and bacchantes, the hero takes the road of struggle and
combat at the end of which he sees, through the flames of the pyre,
the reward of immortality’.
The free symmetrical arrangement of the episodes of ‘vo-
luptuousness’ and ‘striving’, suggested by themes that are not so
much transformed as presented in different tempos; the recitatives
in which Hercules rejects pleasure and decides for virtue; many
details of the transparent scoring: all suggest Liszt. But it is Liszt
with the Romantic element left out. Even Saint-Saéns's orchestration
really rests on the older Classical tradition, for instance in the
handling of the brass. One has only to compare the climax of the
bacchanale in La Jeunesse d' Hercule (Ex. 375) with (Ex. 376) a
parallel passage in another French symphonic poem, Lenore, written
three years earlier, in 1874, by Duparc, the composer to whom (as
it happens) Hercule 1s dedicated, to see how far Saint-Saéns was
Ex. 375
Allegro
picc
ob, cl
bn
hn
Z7 2 2 SS Semen = 9——1
ome ВЕНЕ Ба E a’
Pa TE A | VE EEE EEN EEE Ce nn eer РВ ЕЕЕ
trbn BET S— ne ee a Teen
Ls eS es) E eh ллы EE nn
СУШ Er er re Ta u EEE
timp SG —FFFFFFFFESSFFEFFFF=FERFFFEFFEFFFERFR
str ucl
If ~~ H
THE SYMPHONIC РОЕМ IN FRANCE 515
from being the leader of the French avant-garde.?? Henri Duparc
(1848-1933), had learned not only from Liszt but from Wagner, as
other pages of Lénore show still more clearly, and the real flowering
of the French symphonic poem in the 1870s and 1880s was due to
37 It is difficult to believe that Saint-Saéns advised Duparc on the orchestration of Lénore
(cf. Léon Vallas, Vincent d Indy (Paris, 1946-50), i. 227). But we must remember that Lénore
underwent considerable revision before its published form. Owing to illness, Duparc composed
hardly anything after 1885.
516 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
OS Ek М e?
пану" E el Ee E ee, ZE E WEE ET e, 001 AER
T [5-1 — rp ee 3 p zum
Li Eesen
sempre fff
the band of Wagnerians who acknowledged César Franck (1822-90)
as their leader.
Outside the Franck circle there was plenty of pictorial and dramatic
French orchestral music at this period when French instrumental
music in general was enjoying a remarkable efflorescence in the early
days of the Third Republic. There were the Patrie Overture of Bizet
and Massenet's Phedre (both 1873). Bizet’s Roma Symphony (1868;
rev. 1871), a decidedly suite-like symphony— originally performed as
517
THE SYMPHONIC POEM IN FRANCE
tits
za
р
3
tt k
zit
3
tutta for.
2
Is M
L.S
FU
Aaa Af dh,
tutta forza
= БЕП
ша EE, oe Lé
L3
LJ
геа ug oe
E]
[zn ee SSS o
3
Ss en
кет==]
р ====—==а@а
topographical orchestral pieces—
‚рр. 1-79.
impressionistic pieces of the next generation.?8 But these compositions
28 See МӨ Ж
a fantaisie symphonique and originally published as a suite de concert—
Spanish symphonies, Norwegian rhapsodies, Algerian suites, im-
pressions of Italy, Alsatian scenes— which poured from Lalo, Saint-
Saéns, Massenet, Chabrier, Charpentier, and others during the next
quarter of a century and continued in a new idiom even in the
was one of the earliest of the ‘
518 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
remain on the very fringe of programme music; they are never quite
programme symphonies or symphonic poems; Roma differs from
Harold en Italie in that it is a landscape without a figure. Chabrier's
dazzling orchestral tour de force, Espana (1883), is no mere pot-pourri;
after some hesitation, he rightly called it a rhapsody—‘C’est un
morceau en fa, et rien de plus.’ But Duparc's Lénore is unquestionably
a symphonic poem.
FRANCK AND HIS CIRCLE
Lénore was the earliest symphonic poem of the Franckist group,
for Franck's own Rédemption, sometimes described as a symphonic
poem, is really part of the middle portion of a poéme-symphonie
(original version 1872; rev. 1874) in the line of Félicien David's
odes-symphonies. Even Duparc's choice of a German subject, Bürger's
famous ballad,?? is characteristic of a period when France seemed
to have been conquered musically almost as thoroughly as she had
been militarily, and for a longer period. Franck himself illustrated
Bürger (‘Der wilde Jäger’) in Le Chasseur maudit (1882); his most
prominent disciple Vincent d'Indy (1851-1931) was inspired by
Uhland (‘Harald’) in La Forét enchantée (1878), and by Schiller in
the three pieces that constitute the Wallenstein trilogy (1879, 1873,
and 1874). But it was, above all, the employment of a modern
German musical technique that makes Lénore remarkable. It is not
only the orchestration that is Wagnerian; the plastic types of theme
and texture, the sensitively changing harmonies, which Duparc had
Observed in 1869-70 when he heard Tristan, Das Rheingold, and Die
Walküre in Munich, gave him the means to fuse his episodes into a
genuine dramatic narrative without obliterating the purely musical
form. Lenore and Wilhelm are not represented by Lisztian motto-
themes ingeniously but mechanically transformed, but by Wagnerian
leitmotifs emotionally moulded and shaded from point to point.
Thus the mourning Lenore of the opening (Ex. 377) becomes the
IE. STI Ex. 378
Andante sostenuto Allegro
39? [ts special popularity as a programmatic subject in the early 1870s was due to the
centenary of the poem, written in 1773. Besides Duparc's piece and Raff's symphony, there
was a Lénore Symphony by a younger Liszt disciple, August Klughardt (1847-1902) (see Otto
Klauwell, Geschichte der Programmusik (Leipzig, 1910), 204-7).
FRANCK AND HIS CIRCLE 59
espress.
terrified Lenore of the climax of the ride (Ex. 378), and the broken,
dying Lenore of the end (Ex. 379).
The course of the narrative is clear: the mourning Lenore, the
appearance of Wilhelm, the ride, the mounting terror, the stroke of
midnight (which Duparc does not render literally with twelve strokes),
the disappearance of the ghosts, and Lenore’s death. Yet there is a
clear and satisfactory musical plan: framed within the two slow
passages of the mourning Lenore and the dying Lenore, the ride
music is played twice—but with many changes. (It grows more
terrifying, see Ex. 376.) And the recurrences of the ‘Lenore’ theme
in its original form but in changing settings, at letters H, F, and X,
suggest an articulation of the whole piece in ballad-like stanzas.
César Franck’s earliest symphonic poem so called. 28 Les Eolides
(1876), though inspired by a poem by Leconte de Lisle, is not so
much programme music as an orchestral scherzo. The orchestration
is Berliozian—Berlioz’s influence on Franck, notably in the Ruth of
thirty years earlier, has never been sufficiently recognized—and as
becomes music addressed to
brises flottantes des cieux,
Du beau printemps douces haleines
more transparent and fanciful than Franck’s scoring often is. The
Wagnerian element is limited to the harmony and to the chromatic
sighs of the 'baisers capricieux’ (Ex. 380); Franck had heard the
Prelude to Tristan not long before.
Le Chasseur maudit (1882), on the other hand, is frankly narrative
and descriptive. Its subject inevitably provokes comparison with
Duparc’s Lénore: an unfortunate comparison, for the master was far
more naive than his disciple. The situations of Le Chasseur maudit
are colourfully depicted—the orchestral procedure this time is
40 The Bibliothéque du Conservatoire possesses the autograph full score of an orchestral
piece by Franck entitled Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne (MS 8561). The score, which has
been dated ‘1846’ by another hand, seems to bear no relation to Victor Hugo’s poem nor any
indication of genre. See Julien Tiersot, ‘Les Œuvres inédites de César Franck’, La Revue
musicale, 4/2 (1922), 117-24.
520 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
Ex. 380
Allegretto vivo
NT SEMI a m N Sg N
La SA) 2 za ` Bees yf m —— 4 Le 4
Fe
owl" Ae Ф. SS ee
Pp р
bn W p
^ 2d harp N l i
Bp Ee >, Cer E л Geht A =)
ee ШЕШУ WEN „ОШ ee ee eee ee
i. === <. =a EE es "7 te ee Se eS a Ee bi
ja SS ee аы E eg Mm. — Hr Fr 0,
i Ee AN
espress. РР
г EE 2o
vn 1 = = EE
ЛИТЕ, irre, res:
SS SS SS е = М Tee eet u ei I ee u TB
Bo A i SE ES. ` EH ` e, 47 E Fee EEN nie
INI Es e FH
“vn 2 div. 2: :
T
РР
уа 3
(oy: een = IE Im eg (E e Ft ch E e
dac DY^ 7.5 E ——— =] IEN EH Er Se
EE =
ve, db И
pizz.
Lisztian—in easily comprehensible musical terms: church-bells and
hunting horns, the chase, the curse, the Hell-hunt. But the whole
piece remains an aggregation of picturesque episodes. Les Djinns
(1884) is more generalized, like Les Éolides to which it is a kind of
demonic companion-piece. According їо d’Indy,*! it is ‘only rather
remotely connected’ with Victor Hugo’s poem, though Cortot, in his
penetrating study of the work,?? sees analogies between the musical
structure and the ‘lozenge’ shape of the poem. The chief interest of
the music lies in the introduction, for no extra-musical reason, of a
piano in the orchestra—a lady-pianist had asked Franck for a short
work for piano and orchestra??— but, although the piano and the
orchestral writing are both somewhat Lisztian, there is no noticeable
relation to Liszt’s Totentanz, his nearest approach to a symphonic
poem with piano.
Franck’s last essay in this field, Psyche (1888), is nominally a
still more curious experiment, a poéme symphonique pour cheur et
orchestre, though like Rédemption it really owes its origin to the
ode-symphonie. It is in three ‘parts’, each of which is subdivided into
sharply differentiated sections:
I Psyche’s sleep (orchestra only: Lento, B major)
Psyche carried off by the Zephyrs (orchestra: Allegro vivo,
modulating from G major to D flat; based on themes from
Les Eolides)
41 César Franck (8th edn.; Paris, 1919), 143.
42 La Musique française de piano (Paris, 1930-48), i. 80-91.
43 Léon Vallas, La Véritable Histoire de César Franck (Paris, 1950); Eng. trans., Hubert
Foss (London, 1951), 176-7.
FRANCK AND HIS CIRCLE 521
II The gardens of Eros (orchestra and chorus: Poco animato
and Lento, beginning and ending in D flat)
Psyche and Eros (orchestra only: Andante ma non troppo
lento, A major)
III The Punishment—Psyche’s sufferings and lamentations—
Apotheosis (orchestra and chorus: Lento, beginning in F
sharp minor and ending in E major)
The conception is essentially orchestral, the chorus— which Franck
wished to be invisible—entering to comment or to address Psyche
only at certain points to clarify the action:
‘Mais, Psyche, souviens-toi que tu ne dois jamais de ton mystique amant
connaitre le visage ..
‘Amour, elle a connu ton nom. Malheur sur elle! ...
‘Eros a pardonné . . /
,
But the general effect is very patchy and, despite the sensitively
sensuous beauty of certain passages—if Psyche is Wagnerian it is
influenced by the Wagner who wrote the love-music for Eva and
Walther, not the composer of Tristan und Isolde—it is an incident
rather than a milestone in the history of the symphonic poem.
The symphonic poems of the other members of Franck's circle—
Chausson’s Viviane, Lekeu’s Hamlet, and the Irlande of Augusta
Holmes—are overshadowed by those of their more vigorous comrade
d'Indy, whose Forét enchantée and Wallenstein have already been
mentioned. The central piece in the Wallenstein trilogy, the first to
be composed, was Piccolomini, in which, anticipating his friend
Duparc in Lénore, he employed Wagnerian means (personal leit-
motifs, plastic texture, quasi-polyphony) to suggest the course of a
dramatic action,^^ but the form is not completely free—it begins
with an Andante-and-allegro-risoluto in orthodox sonata form—and
d'Indy employed a similar grafting of free to traditional form in La
Forét enchantée, which was styled successively symphonie-legende,
ballade symphonique, and symphonie-ballade. A comparison with
Tchaikovsky's exactly contemporary Tempest illustrates the difference
between what may be called the Wagnerian and the older, Lisztian
type of symphonic poem. The love scenes in The Tempest, though
more convincingly erotic than d'Indy's, are two passages of im-
personal ‘love music’ connected by purely musical methods to the
episodes which precede and follow them, with which they have no
44 The first edition of the Ouverture des Piccolomini was headed by a definite programme,
printed by Vallas, César Franck, i. 185. But the music is so explicit that such guidance is
hardly necessary.
522 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
dramatic connection. D’Indy has already established his hero and
heroine as two musical characters so that when, in the course of
Thekla’s music, Max’s theme enters in counterpoint, the narrative is
as comprehensible as if it were accompanied by action on the stage.
And their idyll is shattered in Wagnerian style by the entry of cornets
and trombones with a new theme on an interrupted cadence: the
leitmotif of Wallenstein.
In 1874 d'Indy produced a second ouverture symphonique inspired
by Schiller, La Mort de Wallenstein, and in 1879 a third, Le Camp
de Wallenstein. Les Piccolomini was now revised and renamed Max
et Thecla and took its place as the central partie of Wallenstein:
Trilogie d'aprés le poeme dramatique de Schiller. This is sometimes
spoken of as a symphony; but, although d'Indy had in earlier days
dreamed of a Wallenstein Symphony,* his descriptions of the existing
work are the only accurate ones; it is a trilogy or suite d'ouvertures
connected by common themes.
D’Indy essayed other forms of programme music: the programme
symphony in the never published Jean Hunyade (1875), the older,
Lisztian type of poem 1n the /égende, Saugefleurie, on a poem by
Robert de Bonniéres (1884)— despite his description of it as an
allégorie musicale avec personnages thématiques^—and the curious
experiment of programmatic variations in /ѕѓағ (1896), where the
theme, the musical equivalent of the heroine of the Assyrian epic of
Izdubar, is revealed in ever clearer simplicity and finally appears in
naked unison.
SMETANA AND DVORÁK
Problems of nomenclature in mid-century bothered others besides
Smetana in the Czech lands. In 1858 Alois Hnilicka (1826-1909)
composed an overture, Táborita [The Taborite], later described as a
symphonic poem. And in the same year Smetana's friend and pupil
Ludevit Procházka (1837-88) conceived an A/fred symphony inspired
by Vitézslav Hálek's poem, the first movement of which survived as
a 'symphonic poem'. Smetana himself, after ten years almost
exclusively devoted to opera, returned to the symphonic poem in the
1870s. The idea of a whole cycle of pieces inspired by Czech landscape
and Czech history under the general title Ма Vlast [My Country]
was suggested by the conclusion of the opera Libuse,?” where the
45 Vallas, Vincent d Indy, p. 105.
46 Cours de composition musicale, II. ii. 327.
47 Otakar Zich, Symfonické Básné Smetanovy: Hudebné esteticky rozbor (Prague, 1924), 61;
Otakar Šourek, Smetanova ‘Ma Vlasť: Její vznik a osudy (Prague, 1939), 9-10; Brian Large,
Smetana (London, 1970), 260-88; John Clapham, Smetana (London, 1972), 75-84.
SMETANA AND DVORÄK 523
heroine has a prophetic vision of a series of episodes in her country’s
history; indeed opera and cycle are related thematically as well as in
general mood; one of the themes of the first poem, Vysehrad (bars
21 ff.), comes from a passage in the opera (Act II, Scene v) where а
character mentions ‘the tower of VySehrad’, and both opera and
cycle close in D major with the Hussite hymn ‘Kdoz jste Bozi
bojovnici' [Ye who are Warriors of God]. The six poems differ
considerably in type of subject and treatment, but are generally
Lisztian in structure as in orchestration, though individual in other
respects. Vysehrad (1874) is a general evocation of Czech history,
symbolized by the ancient citadel, a vision of chivalry, war, and ruin,
while Vitava (also 1874) traces the course of the river in a series of
tone pictures defined by headings in the score and held together only
by the refrain-like appearances of the main ‘river’ music. Sárka
(1875) narrates a historical legend and is frankly programmatic,
though Smetana objected to attempts at over-detailed exegesis. Z
českých luhů a hájů [From Bohemian Fields and Forests] (1875) is,
according to Smetana himself, an attempt to ‘sketch life in songs
and dances, what the Germans call Volksweisen or Tanzweisen 48
against a pastoral background; there is no definite programme,
though the composer no doubt followed some such train of thought
as that outlined by V. V. Zeleny in his authorized programme for
the first performance.*?
Tabor (1878) and Blanik (1879) may be regarded almost as two
halves of a single piece, being united by key and based on the same
material, including the Hussite hymn of Vysehrad; the first looks
back to the heroic days of the Hussite wars, the second forward to
the time when the Hussite warriors shall emerge from the mountain
where they sleep their centuries-long sleep and bring back freedom
and glory to the Czech land. In addition to this close connection
between the last two poems of Ma Vlast, a looser association is
established by the introduction of themes from Vysehrad at the
culminating points of Vitava and Blanik. More important: Ма Vlast
as a whole amounts to something more than the sum of its parts.
The cycle opens and closes in a lofty, heroic vein, while the
picturesque legend of Sárka is flanked by the two mainly pastoral
pieces.
The only other notable Czech exponent of the symphonic poem
at this period, Zdenék Fibich (1850-1900), shows much less in-
48 Bedřich Smetana a Dr. Lud. Procházka: Vzájemná korespondence, ed. Jan Lówenbach
(Prague, 1914). 13. Zich, Symfonické Básné Smetanovy, p. 85, misquotes ‘in work and dance’.
49 See Zich, Symfonicke Basné Smetanovy, p. 86.
324 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
dividuality in his Othello (1873), Záboj, Slavoj a Ludék (1873)—from
which Smetana inadvertently borrowed his ‘VySehrad’ theme—and
Toman a lesni panna [Toman and the wood-nymph] (1874), as well
as two ‘symphonic pictures’, Boure (Shakespeare’s Tempest) (1880)
and Vesna [Spring] (1881). The far more gifted Dvorak (1841-1904)
was late and at first tentative in turning to programme music. The
three overtures now known as V přírodě [Mid-nature] (1891), Karneval
(1891), and Othello (1892) really constitute a trilogy originally entitled
Priroda, Zivot a Láska [Nature, Life, and Love]. They are connected
by a common musical motto and the idea of ‘nature as the source
of life’: the bliss of solitude on a summer night, the joy of mingling
with a happy crowd, and the bitterness of love poisoned by jealousy.59
But it was only at the very end of his career as an orchestral
composer that Dvorak arrived at the symphonic poem proper,
producing a group of five. Even so, the last of these, Pisen bohatyrská
[Heroic Song] (1897), is not programmatic except in the most general
sense. But its four predecessors, all dating from 1896 and all based
on ballads from K. J. Erben's Kytice, are curious attempts by an
essentially ‘abstract’ musician to write detailed narrative music. They
are Vodnik [The Water-sprite], Polednice [The Noon Witch], Zlaty
kolovrat [The Golden Spinning-wheel] and Holoubek [The Little
Dove]; all are peasant tales of the type we associate, in Germany,
with the brothers Grimm. The music is correspondingly naive,
orchestrated in primary colours of extreme brilliance, sharply episodic
and following closely the details of the story, many of which Dvorák
indicated in his composition-sketches,?! though none appear in the
published scores. Yet, paradoxically, it lacks true narrative power;
the descriptive element is conventional and superficial. The material
is for the most part frankly lyrical and often charming, but the
peculiarly interesting feature of these four works is that the themes
and melodies are in a number of cases moulded on Erben's actual
words.5?
Dvorak knew his Wagner very well and sometimes succumbed to
his influence but here he turned his back on Wagner completely; the
themes of his symphonic poems are more or less arbitrary symbols,
not leitmotifs. Yet, as in the cases of Duparc and d'Indy a Wagnerian
technique offered far the best means available for writing music that
could really suggest narrative without loss of musical coherence.
50 Otakar Sourek, Dvorákovy skladby orchesträlni (Prague, 1944-6), ii. 86.
51 See Antonin Sychra, Estetika Dvorákovy symfonické tvorby (Prague, 1959), 43-54, 114-
30, and the facsimiles following p. 520.
52? Gerald Abraham, The Tradition of Western Music (London and Berkeley, 1974), 83.
nouiy ‘f Aq ydessoyiy] [eg] ut o;qnip
д] 142903. S,199q19A9]A[ JO uononpoad Isıy oui Jo (11291) Aq pousisap) o[euy ç 19y ou Suunp vado) sued ou Jo 1
VÀHdO SIAVd AHL 1
DH
INSTRUMENT MANUFACTURE
П.
агіѕ; note the completed baritone saxophone hanging up (right), supporting the theory that Sax made
The Adolphe Sax factory in P
and the ‘Berliner-pumpen’ valves being assembled (centre foreground). Engraving from L’illustration
a
the baritone of the family first
(5 February 1848).
| Andante ME Mi
ët a ай
А NF [mds
К; DE Line dhe Erw WM - $ |
| | aa om ди c 3 as -u ж
| | WR 4 Cou m mi p Gg As == ¢ =
| | CH Gu en Fr Sho Та RK -
E CUP РШ СИН
| E" LIT ve 24 ES
| rech | 5 хф Ex wc й nr
есшен thee —a -49 i- i
жр z; A de |
E UE: = AT ы c A © 74 " y | Г |
"оу Еа - d
те 4 ea Фиг i Ь ES Sei б 1 A
SE ә 9 8 4. 3
№; ыы CH = D g ja EE
ГРА = 4 f ! =
? Alu mpetio edi fx o ^ 4- "8 -
p 4 Crowe ney ^, сы E |
| = 4 ора Ы Че 2g: d ERI
Kë Ber tinal MM Kä ыд. T "m fa. Ee ` - T a E
1 4 Mn нур peu Ar фа” au SH m hib Se а = | xs
3 Due ` py a ыд t» ter. nm Ee 1c P - | =
e f
E Duc 3 pes dios nre - Se -
И ve В кы Cohn dris Р rer
Е 3 ve c Р быз: ke At t E. - = -
vw A. pauza Gimbal e ew ieh, Sc ж ! - -
d aech |
› fat plas cate SCH ù х3
бм КҮЛ Caisje "I" ew Ji b "c c Ф Ge SC
"nali "E
mu a, x Cale] avec Sta Tampone
a i |
Cantante qol. estote 3 Lese. usa den = i
e AL a . Ep ин à SIE o [ex {
1 CU ES? tih н ТЕ ETT m S cb | 2
Kr "UMS - SZ
к De | |
E le = - Sr 3
|
LI
—
DU
t
un
{
|
Gë
p D
b
t = a e " d
{ E or
3 AG. + $ La эд A ne
ў er, Мелс, et
1 EC RR - DM Led ety
a "A em Sib BM SÉ 4 3 i 3
a e EE
Ш. BERLIOZ: GRANDE MESSE DES MORTS
Opening of the Dies irae, showing the range of instruments required, from the autograph
score (1837).
IV. CHAMBER MUSIC
Anthony (the artists husband) and friends playing a string quartet at his Frankfurt home (c.1843). Watercolour by Mary
Ellen Best.
MUUR TTDEDE РОК ТСТ
V. AUBER: LA
arked off by the performance of Auber's La Muette de
28) at the
18
y Hebert after Henri
(
Portici
Riot sp
Theätre
g 30. Engraving b
Hendrick.
a Monnaie, Brussels, on 25 August 18
de |
VI. WAGNER: TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
Closing scene of Act 1 in the first production of Wagner's opera at the Königliches
Hof- und Nationaltheater, Munich (1865). Engraving after a drawing by J. Noerr from
the Leipzig /lHlustrirte Zeitung (15 July 1865).
(1581 Judy 97) uonnaisnjpr/] Woy 8шл®л8ид ‘piodo ypuaıy ш улешрирү JUROYIUTIS
e ү әңеш so1njeoj [eorsnur JOAOU pue Jop joofqns [eoIsse]) OF WAM SIOM STUDI
11568] Judy 91 uo gigdo sueq ou) 18 eodo s,pounor) Јо agud əy} ш joper ourmnveg
OHd¥FS:GONNOD ‘ПА
МШШ ЕБОР О,
Costumes designed by Alfredo Edel for Othello and Desdemona in the premiere of
Verdi's opera at La Scala, Milan, on 5 February 1887.
}/81 &ieniqo4 8
uo *Sunqsiojoq 1S ‘әлвә, AxsuruejA Q) 1e v1odo s AysBiossnyy Jo әзиршлоуләй Isı ou 20) (AONYSIUS Aq pousrsop) əuəəs Suruod()
AONNGOD 51409 :ANSDAOSSNAW XI
=== e
‘UBUZO”d "'9AOpoJeN| шпәгпух
Sy) ш MOU [eurduo ay} JOYE geey 7T `f Aq ЗшлріЗи (0581) 9ureu әшеѕ əy} Jo waod
stuoydurds s Gert pouidsur (/-сєў ү) nopposuauung sunured s.yorqiney пол wym
LHOVIHISNINNNH X
XI. JOHANNES BRAHMS
Brahms accompanying a solo singer in the Bösendorfer Hall of the Liechtenstein
(Winter) Palace, Vienna; this building was converted into a concert hall in 1872, but
demolished in 1913. Watercolour by an unknown artist.
XII. LISZT: DIE LEGENDE VON DER HEILIGEN ELISABETH
Liszt conducting the first performance of his oratorio in the Redoutensaal, Budapest, on
15 August 1865. Engraving after a drawing by Jean Hubert Reve from the Leipzig
Illustrirte Zeitung (16 September 1865).
THE WAGNERIAN LEGACY 525
THE WAGNERIAN LEGACY
The German Wagnerians were strangely slow in turning to the
symphonic poem, being perhaps inhibited by reverence for Wagner’s
own rejection of programme music as an independent, self-sufficient
form of art. But it was impossible not to observe that orchestral
excerpts from Wagner heard in the concert hall often made highly
effective and unusually comprehensible pieces of programme music;
it was increasingly tempting to compose original programme music
on similar lines. Yet the earliest important Teutonic symphonic poem
deriving from Wagner rather than Liszt, the Penthesilea (1883)53 of
Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) is a triptych comparable with d'Indy's
Wallenstein rather than a narrative. It consists of three distinct,
though connected and thematically related, movements: the departure
of the Amazons for Troy, Penthesilea's dream of the Rose Festival
(Ex. 381), and ‘Combats, Passions, Madness, Annihilation’. (Wolf's
programme is derived from Kleist's tragedy in which Penthesilea
kills Achilles, whom she loves, instead of being killed by him.) Except
in the first movement with its trumpet-calls and its ‘ride’ theme—so
like the ‘ride’ themes of Le Chasseur maudit and Saugefleurie — Wolf
seeks not to suggest a series of events but to express the savage and
hysterical emotions of his heroine.
Wolf's solitary essay, after a notorious rehearsal by the Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra (15 October 1886), was never performed in
his lifetime. In any case it would have been eclipsed by the series of
works by Richard Strauss (1864-1949) begun in 1886 with the
'symphonic fantasia' Aus Italien. It was Strauss, a far more assured
master of the Wagnerian orchestra than Wolf, who in Macbeth
(1887; rev. 1890), Don Juan (1888), Tod und Verklärung (1889), Till
Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896),
Don Quixote (1897), Ein Heldenleben (1898) and the Symphonie
Domestica (1904) gradually carried orchestral programme music to
what still appear to be its extreme limits so far as narrative is
concerned. In psychological character drawing on Wagnerian lines,
also, Strauss was most skilful; in evocation of mood and setting and
landscape much less so. Yet it was as a landscape-painter that the
22-year-old Strauss, under the intellectual influence of Alexander
Ritter, first broke away from the Classical leading reins that had
held his earlier compositions. Aus Пайеп is a symphonic suite of four
53 Authentic text published only in 1937, in the series of Nachgelassene Werke, ed. Robert
Haas and Helmut Schultz (Leipzig and Vienna). The score published by the Hugo-Wolf Verein
(Leipzig, 1903) was a much shortened version with a great deal of rescoring, made by the
younger Josef Hellmesberger and Ferdinand Lówe.
526 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
Sehr gehalten!
a!
eng hn ebp иа O O
„МЫ! amaa. ZE:
cl Krb
bn
hn
timp
harp
vn
va
vc
db
THE WAGNERIAN LEGACY 527
СЩ А
A =
E ei al p Lei Hh
a Iz 4 Le
[si 4 La xo 1 LII
528 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
[1
PASE
529
u 1 M i |
ПРА 4 ШУЛ]
Cc»
HI BAD i CL xd > Gol | NH
THE WAGNERIAN LEGACY
Ex. 382
o ccm
hi ; |. a.
AN ji | ll "be
| Ur EN IT WI)
М a
“Др” еа SP Sub "d
EER
M A de x Së 4
g à e
‘a = © © E 8 E S 3
travel impressions,?4 like Berlioz's Harold and Bizet’s Roma. (Italian
travel had been a source of orchestral inspiration during much of
the century; d'Indy wrote an Italian symphony with tarantella Finale,
never published, in 1872.) With all its debts to Liszt and, to a lesser
extent, Wagner, Aus Italien sounds some completely original notes.
Such passages as Ex. 382 from the third movement, ‘On the Beach
at Sorrento’, show that the orchestral technique of impressionism
54 Strauss's own description, written three years later, is given in Michael Kennedy, Strauss
Tone Poems (London, 1984), 11.
530 THE SYMPHONIC РОЕМ AND KINDRED FORMS
was already to hand although the real impressionists did not lavish
such colour on simple triads. dë
Strauss's earliest Tondichtung actually so called—he never used the
term symphonische Dichtung—was Macbeth, although the revised
version ultimately published was made after the composition of Tod
und Verklärung. It is in many respects a near relative of Wolfs
Penthesilea, a character study powerfully executed in rather grey
colouring. Macbeth’s personal theme is actually marked as such in
the score; Lady Macbeth, whose appearance is indicated by the
quotation
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear;
And chastise with the valour of my tongue
All that impedes thee from the golden round
Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown’d withal,
is a function (in the mathematical sense) of Macbeth rather than an
independent character. There is little or no attempt to suggest the
outward events of the play and Strauss clearly did right to suppress
his original ending: the D major triumph of Macduff. Strauss’s
natural gifts as a musical dramatist and his command of a far more
flexible means of expression lifted Macbeth above earlier character
studies; technically, the portrait of Macbeth is more subtly, less
theatrically drawn than Liszts Faust, and the musical material, if
much less striking, is better organized. Macbeth is organic music,
apart from the circumstance that its organism is distantly sonata-like.
In Don Juan, inspired by Lenau's dramatic fragment, Strauss
attempted to combine a character study with some suggestion of a
narrative sequence. The hero is depicted with all his boundless
energy, his boundless erotic desires, his moods of satiety, but he is
also shown in action, flirting with a country-girl, making love to a
countess, nearly conquered by Donna Anna, at a masked ball,
mortally wounded by Don Pedro. Strauss made none of this explicit
in a literary programme; he was content to reveal the source of his
inspiration and, after the first performance, to print in the score
excerpts from Lenau’s poem,?? expressing his hero's erotic philosophy
and his sense of its failure; the music itself is explicit enough.
Dramatically the episodes are subsumed into the portrait of the hero;
musically they are fused into an organic form so original and
unconventional that attempts have been made to refer it now to
ббс рр [8
THE WAGNERIAN LEGACY 531
sonata form,5® now to rondo;?? yet practically all critics have agreed
in finding it totally satisfactory. Orchestrally the score is notable for
a rich and warm brilliance that Strauss in later years often outbid
but never really surpassed. Don Juan was written at a time when
brillant orchestration was becoming more and more common—
Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony
both date from the same year— but its opening (a tremendous C
major ‘up-beat’ to E major, typical of Strauss's masterful treatment
of key) is as outstanding amid the music of its period as the opening
of Berlioz's Carnaval romain in the music of the 1840s. Throughout
the score the Wagnerian thematic polyphony is lightened by a
Berliozian- Lisztian vivacity; the broad diatonic melodies at the heart
of the typically post-Wagnerian texture, with its chromatic harmony
and abrupt key changes, are sweet and sensuous.
Similar qualities, but with dry, grotesque humour in place of lush
Romanticism, inform Till Eulenspiegel, a rather more restrained
display of orchestral virtuosity, though the forces employed are even
larger, including triple woodwind, eight horns, and six trumpets.
Here the hero's character is displayed almost entirely in action and
a series of definite events is narrated with the aid of two leitmotifs
for the hero, wonderfully transformed, and a number of subsidiary
themes in a species of freely varied sonata rondo. And two years
later he frankly adopted the variation form for his much greater
Don Quixote, 'fantastic variations on a theme of chivalrous character
or, rather, on two themes—one for the Don and one for Sancho:
yet another series of specific events, with far more subtle psychological
treatment of the hero than in Till. And just as Berlioz's Harold had
been impersonated by a solo viola, Quixote and his squire appear
not only as leitmotifs but as solo cello and viola. In Til! and Don
Quixote suggestive symbolism and realistic suggestion are carried as
far as it is possible to carry them in music; the bleating of sheep in
the second variation of Quixote is a ne plus ultra—as, in a different
way, is the pathos of the hero's death. Yet even in these essays in
extreme explicitness Strauss was as unwilling as Rimsky-Korsakov
to avow the details of his programme. Neither Til! nor Quixote has
a printed programme, not even section headings. When the conductor
Franz Wüllner asked Strauss to supply a programme note for the
first performance of Till, he replied that it was ‘impossible’ for him
56 Cf. Max Steinitzer, Richard Strauss (13th edn.; Berlin, 1922), 82; Reinhold Konrad
Muschler, Richard Strauss (Hildesheim, 1925), 263, 266; Fritz Gysi, Richard Strauss (Potsdam,
1934), 45; Klauwell, Geschichte der Programmusik, p. 230.
5? Cf. Richard Specht, Richard Strauss und sein Werk (Vienna and Leipzig, 1921), i. 181.
532 THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
BE ww EE EE „=т= en ЁК = а
Fa C6 e ee
to give a programme, that what һе had thought in composing the
various parts would appear ‘often rather odd’ if clothed in words
and would ‘perhaps even give offence’.58 Yet he afterwards allowed
every detail to be made known and placed the autograph score with
his marginal annotations at the disposal of Wilhelm Mauke for his
guide to the work 29 Without such a guide it would be impossible
to guess that Ex. 383 is intended to suggest Till creeping into a
mousehole; with it, one can be amused by Strauss's ingenuity.
Considered from a purely musical point of view, Till is a brilliant
orchestral scherzo or humoresque while many pages of Don Quixote
contain passages unsurpassed in the whole range of post-Wagnerian
orchestral polyphony.
Between these realistic narratives Strauss produced two tone-poems
of a less definite character. Tod und Verklärung, a deathbed scene,
is still a narrative—of the thoughts and pictures that throng the
brain of a dying man. But the two explanatory poems by Alexander
Ritter® were written after the music; he obviously versified a rough
scenario given him by the composer. Yet several critics$! have seen
in it a partial retrogression to Lisztian thought, types of material,
58 The letter is given in full in Muschler, Richard Strauss, p. 315, Gysi, Richard Strauss,
p. 50, Steinitzer, Richard Strauss, p. 133, and elsewhere. And see Richard Strauss und Franz
Wüllner im Briefwechsel, ed. Dietrich Kämper (Cologne, 1963).
59 In the series of Meisterführer, Richard Strauss: Symphonien und Tondichtungen (Berlin,
n.d.)
60 The first ('Stille, einsam öde Nacht), copied on the title-page of the autograph full score
(cf. the facsimile reproduction, Vienna, n.d.), printed in the programme books of the first two
performances, and reproduced in Muschler, Richard Strauss, p. 275; the second ('In der
ärmlich kleinen Kammer’) printed in the published score and also given by Muschler,
pp. 276-7.
61 Cf. Muschler, Richard Strauss, p. 274; Gysi, Richard Strauss, p. 48. Rey M. Longyear
has detected the influence of the last section of Moszkowski's Johanna d Arc (1879), ‘Schiller,
Moszkowski and Strauss', Music Review, 28 (1967), 209.
THE WAGNERIAN LEGACY 533
and even scoring. Also sprach Zarathustra ((freely after Friedrich
Nietzsche’) is in some respects even more Lisztian in style (e.g. the
opening passage) and in its episodic structure, each section being
headed by a chapter-title from Nietzsche’s book despite the general
irrelevance of the music to the content of the chapter. The episodes
are neither symmetrically balanced as in Liszt’s own works nor fused
into a satisfactory organic whole; there is no narrative, only a
sequence of general ideas or, musically, a torrent of rhetoric. The
most striking features of Zarathustra are its inflated orchestra—
Strauss here writes for quadruple woodwind, and adds the organ—
and its tonal antithesis of totally unrelated keys. B major or minor
asserts itself throughout against C major or minor as the principal
key, not only in the subject of the fugue ‘Concerning Science’. And
this dualism persists to the very end, where a trombone chord (C,
E, F sharp) is resolved in different senses simultaneously: by the
lower strings, pizzicato, whose F sharp moves to G, and by the harp
and upper wind which resolve the С and E to В апа D sharp.
The culmination of Strauss’s work in this field was reached in two
quasi-autobiographical compositions, Ein Heldenleben and Sym-
phonia domestica. (The title of the latter implies that its four sections
correspond to the movements of a Classical symphony.) Each
narrates with the aid of a complex of leitmotifs a series of generally
idealized events, those of the hero’s career and those of a few hours
of his domestic life. The orchestra in both is larger even than that
of Zarathustra: the quadruple woodwind are augmented by fifth
members of the clarinet and bassoon groups and a quartet of
saxophones in the Domestica, and both works call for eight horns—
which are treated with all the flexibility of violins. These vast forces
are employed in the weaving of a thematic polyphony so sumptuous,
so loaded with colour, that the ear is liable to be satiated even in
relatively quiet passages.9? Such scores threaten to break down under
the weight not only of their orchestra®? but of their structure.
Recognition that there could be no further progress in this direction
is implicit in Strauss's abandonment of the symphonic poem (except
for the A/pensymphonie of 1915) after the Domestica. He who had
carried the precise expressiveness of purely orchestral music as far,
probably, as it can be carried, now had to call in the aid of words
and action. The Wagnerian aesthetic had avenged itself.
62 See, for instance, Vol. X, p. 5, Ex. 2.
$3 On Strauss’s orchestra, see Н. Woollett and Gabriel Pierné, ‘Histoire de l'orchestration:
Max Reger et Richard Strauss’, in Lavignac (ed.), Encyclopédie, ЇЇ. iv. 2620-35; Egon Wellesz,
Die neue Instrumentation (Berlin, 1928), ii. 36-47, and Norman Del Mar, Richard Strauss:
A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works (London, 1962-72).
УШ
MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS:
1850-1890
By ROBERT PASCALL
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
BEETHOVEN continued to dominate musical creativity for many years
after his death—in choice of genres and instrumental forms, in the
preservation of stylistic essentials based on thematic drama in a tonal
context, and in increased emphasis on originality and significance
(rather than technique and entertainment). Wagner, in one of the
greatest public tributes by any composer to another, wrote in 1870
that Beethoven had lifted music ‘far above the aesthetically beautiful
into the sphere of the totally sublime’ by the emancipation of melody
‘from the influence of fashion and changing taste’ and its elevation
into an ‘eternally valid type for all humanity’.!
Brahms learnt the core of his creative equipment from Beethoven,
rather than his own immediate predecessors, Mendelssohn, Schu-
mann, and Spohr; Lalo took part from 1856 in professional
performances of Beethoven’s chamber music; Berlioz wrote on
Beethoven and published a selection of his writings in 1862,
including studies of all the Beethoven symphonies;? Liszt finished his
transcriptions of the symphonies for piano solo in 1865, in spite of
the near-impossibility he felt of doing justice to the Finale of the
Ninth; and Wagner chose his essay on the hundredth anniversary of
the composer’s birth, cited above, to present his own deepest
philosophy of music. Meanwhile, the scholars von Lenz, A B. Marx,
Nottebohm, and Thayer were at work on Beethoven, and Breitkopf
& Нагїе1 published a Complete Edition in 1862-5.
Wagner's accolade may be seen in the context of the generally
enhanced awareness in the second half of the nineteenth century
of the present value of past achievements, an awareness which
encompassed not only Classical music but also that of the Baroque
1 Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, ix (2nd edn.; Leipzig, 1888), 102.
? Hector Berlioz, А travers chants (Paris, 1862).
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 535
and late-Renaissance. While the latter mainly influenced choral
genres, the continuing rediscovery of Baroque music had a powerful
effect on some of the instrumental genres selected by composers,
especially in the revivification of the suite, prelude and fugue, and
chorale-prelude. It also affected styles in other genres, by the
assimilation of Baroque sequences, imitations, canon, fugue, de-
velopmental processes, and figurations into sonata and other forms.
Such assimilation is especially significant in the styles of Bruckner
and Brahms. Just how far it could extend is well shown by
the Adagio of Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet (1891), where a fully
contemporary movement in ternary form has its opening lyrical theme
based on the Baroque harmonic progression of the chromatically
descending fourth, tonic to dominant, and the theme beginning in
canon; the point is reinforced by the genetic history of this theme,
which is a reworking of an early neo-Baroque Sarabande (1854) by
Brahms.
Bach’s music had been in part known to small circles of cognoscenti
ever since his death; but Mendelssohn gave important impetus to
increased public awareness of this great repertoire with his justly
famous performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829, and in the
first half of the nineteenth century, particularly Bach’s keyboard
music became quite widely known. In 1851 the Bach Gesellschaft
began work on its publication of the Complete Edition; similarly a
Handel Complete Edition was founded in 1858, both editions running
throughout this period. Chrysander included works by Carissimi,
Corelli, and Couperin in his Denkmäler der Tonkunst (1869-71)—
Brahms editing one of the volumes of Couperin’s keyboard music
(he also contributed significantly to the Handel Complete Edition).
Spitta’s great biography of Bach appeared in 1873-80 and Chry-
sander’s unfinished Handel biography in 1858-67.
There were other important strands of historical perspective in
this period. Schubert’s achievements as an instrumental composer
had, even during his life, been largely eclipsed by his Lieder.
Mendelssohn’s performance of the great C major Symphony in 1839
and Schumann’s critique of the work in the subsequent year were
landmarks in the discovery of Schubert as an instrumental composer
of the first rank. In 1846 Liszt played the Fantasie, Op. 15 (the
"Wanderer Fantasia), which he later arranged for piano and
orchestra; Hellmesberger gave first performances of some of the
chamber-music masterpieces during the early 1850s in Vienna; the
Symphony in B minor (the ‘Unfinished’) was first performed in 1865
by Herbeck, and Kreissle von Hellborn's biography appeared the
536 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
same year. Much of Schubert’s instrumental music had to wait until
the 1880s for public rediscovery, and the Complete Edition ran from
1884 to 1897; but those works known earlier became important
sources of influence on Liszt, Bruckner, Brahms, and Dvorák among
others. Mozart also exerted real power over the musical consciousness
of the period; Jahn’s biography appeared in 1836, Köchel’s Catalogue
in 1862, and the Complete Edition ran from 1877 to 1883. Brahms
and Tchaikovsky both viewed Mozart as an example of perfection
and purity in composition.
Historicism in this period must be understood primarily not as
antiquarianism, but as a trend towards the recognition of universal,
a-temporal significance in works of previous times. The musical
horizons of the age thus became very broad and the possibilities for
stylistic influence correspondingly diverse. Naturally this historicism
did not exclude modern composers from exerting influence over
compositional concepts and techniques: the importance of Berlioz
and Liszt, particularly for Russian and French composers, and the
continuing Mendelssohnian styles of Raff, Lachner, and Rheinberger
are cases in point.
PROGRAMMATICISM
An important part of the background to programmaticism as a
way of composing is programmaticism as a way of hearing and
receiving. Specifically musical gestural flux was regarded as analogous
to, and even as incorporating, the flux of felt life. The main thrust
of Hanslick’s famous study Vom Musikalisch-Schönen? is sometimes
oversimplified into a purely formalist one (by concentration on his
aphoristic paragraph “The essence of music is sound and motion’),
but his broad argument, largely concerned with consideration of
music as a referential code, establishes an analogue between expressive
change within a musical work and the general dynamics of emotion.
Liszt went further and defined music in his essay on Berlioz's Harold
en Italie as ‘the embodied, palpable manifestation of feeling’.* The
flux of felt life could naturally be attached to words and concrete
ideas, and the play of ideational fancy around music was a recognized
and valued mode of appreciation. E. T. A. Hoffmann had been one
of the early masters of ‘poetizing criticism’, and the exegesis of music
3 Leipzig, 1854.
1 'Verkórperte, fassbare Wesenheit des Gefühls’ (Franz Liszt, ‘Berlioz und seine Har-
oldsymphonie', Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 43 (1855), 41a). Discussed in Detlef Altenburg,
*Eine Theorie der Musik der Zukunft: Zur Funktion des Programms im symphonischen Werk
von Franz Liszt’, in Wolfgang Suppan (ed.), Liszt Studien 1: Kongress-Bericht Eisenstadt 1975
(Graz, 1977), 9-25.
PROGRAMMATICISM 537
not overtly programmatic by a speculative interpretative programme
was an established form of private and public critical writing. Clara
Schumann wrote in her diary, of the last movement of Brahms’s
First Symphony, ‘the Introduction so shadowy, in a truly staggering
way it then clarifies so gradually up to the sunny theme of the last
movement, at which one’s heart literally swells, as if refreshed by
spring air after long and dismal days ...’.5 Joachim saw in the last
movement of Brahms’s Third Symphony the story of Hero and
Leander, as he told Brahms in his letter of 27 January 1884; and
Clara Schumann wrote of this whole symphony to its composer:
‘How one is from beginning to end surrounded by the secret magic
of the life of the forest" $ Wagner, who maintained in his open letter
Über Franz Liszt's symphonische Dichtungen “Nothing is (nota bene:
for its appearance in life) less absolute than music’,’ wrote Pro-
grammatische Erläuterungen [Programmatic Elucidations] of in-
strumental works by Beethoven and himself; he also included an
interpretation of Beethoven’s C sharp minor Quartet, Op. 131, in
his essay on the composer (quoted above) in which he treated the
work as paralleling a day in Beethoven's life.
Interpretations of this kind must be viewed as conditioned by, and
in some sense appropriate to, the musical work; but they are also
free and inconclusive. Such hermeneutic reception does not necessarily
show naiveté; the interpreter felt the need to discuss music in a
manner that was thought to go further than purely structural analysis
by integrating it into the totality of his experience.
Within the context of this marked tendency to hermeneutic
reception, a given programme attached by its composer to an
instrumental work could act partly as a limitation on receptive
fantasy; indeed Liszt's own definition of programme music draws on
this idea. In the essay on Harold en Italie he wrote that a programme
was a ‘preface by means of which the composer intends to guard
listeners against wilfulness in poetic interpretation, and to direct his
attention to the poetic idea of the whole or to a particular point in
it'.5 We should remember that Poesie was a nineteenth-century term
indicating imaginative value in general, though programme music
often called upon works of literature, and Liszt himself wrote of his
5 Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und Briefen, iii
(4th edn.; Leipzig, 1920), 347.
$ Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, vi. Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim,
ed. Andreas Moser (2nd edn.; Berlin, 1912), 211-12; Clara Schumann-Johannes Brahms: Briefe
aus den Jahren 1853-1896, ed. Berthold Litzmann (Leipzig, 1927), ii. 273.
7 Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, v (2nd edn.; Leipzig, 1888).
8 Cited and discussed in Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding (London and New
York, 1983), 41.
538 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
innovative thrust at Weimar during the 1850s that his aims had been
‘the renewal of music by its deeper connection with the poetic art’.
However one defines programme music, the programmatic function
consists of a verbal ideational premiss acting as at once subject and
metaphor for a composition; this is so even in those somewhat rare
cases where a programme has been written after the completion of
the composition, when a specific interpretation is elevated into a
formal premiss. Mostly, however, the generation of music by a
programme is actual; composers of programme music composed to
a programme. Yet music, even vocal, can never be fully generated
by words alone; it always has its own purely musical generating
factors.
We may recognize a distinction between narrative and meditative
modes of the programmatic function. The narrative mode often
shows a high degree of conditioning by a programme, for a narrative
programme helps generate both the substance and the sequence of
the differentiations in a musical structure. This narrative mode finds
a natural home in the symphonic poem (Liszts Mazeppa and
Smetana's Sárka are examples), though it did penetrate the symphony,
as in Raff's Lénore. The meditative mode is rather in the nature of
either a facet exploration or a mood parallel; the differentiations of
musical substance are not ordered according to a prestated or
pre-existent narrative, and are not necessarily concretely descriptive.
The first movement of Liszt's Eine Faust-Symphonie (the ‘Faust’
Symphony) is an extensive but clear sonata form, while at the same
time being a character study of Faust himself, as the titles of the
work and movement make plain: Eine Faust-Symphonie in drei
Charakterbildern. I. Faust. The title of Rubinstein's Océan symphonie
(in which the separate movements do not carry further titles) invites
the listener to play with ideas of immensity and elemental motion.
In the meditative mode the programme is usually condensed into a
title or titles only. But a title can of course incorporate a work of
literature by referring to it, as is the case with Liszt’s ‘Faust’
Symphony and Rheinberger's symphonic tone picture Wallenstein.
Another form of verbal ideational premiss is the poetic motto;
this appears, for instance, in the second movements of Brahms's
Piano Sonatas, Opp. 2 and 5, and in the first pieces of his collections
Opp. 10 and 117, in Sterndale Bennett's Piano Sonata (where there
9 Letter to Agnes Street-Klindworth, 16 Nov. 1860; cited and discussed in Carl Dahlhaus,
‘Zur Problematik der musikalischen Gattungen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Wulf Arlt, Ernst
Lichtenhahn, Hans Oesch (eds.), Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift
Leo Schrade (Berne and Munich, 1973), 861.
PROGRAMMATICISM 539
are also titles for the movements), and in two of the movements
from MacDowell’s Erste moderne Suite. Poetic mottoes should usually
be taken as in the meditative mode. But some scholars have
controversially unpacked Brahms’s mottoes as narrative programmes,
and the sequence of movement titles and mottoes in Sterndale
Bennett’s Sonata creates a narrative programme for the work as a
whole.
While poetry, literature, and legend provided important sources
of programmatic material, so too did the physical environment.
Following Mendelssohn’s example in his ‘Italian’ and ‘Scottish’
Symphonies, composers made countries the titles and subjects of
their symphonies and suites: Sullivan’s Symphony in E, the Irish,
Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, and Massenet’s Scenes hongroises. Re-
gions or types of environment (sea, forest, mountains) could also be
specified: for example, Charles Bordes’s Suite basque, and Raff's
Symphony No. 7, In den Alpen. The seasons of the year also appeared:
Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1, Winter Daydreams, Lange-Müller's
Symphonie Efteraar [Autumn], and Raff's Symphonies 8-11 (which
form a cycle based on all four seasons). In programmes drawn from
the physical environment the subject could be an environment alone,
or include delineations of events in that environment. Such inclusions
could be highly picturesque, and also employ elements of make-
believe: Ка#ѕ Symphony No. 8, Frühlingsklänge [Sounds of Spring]
has ‘In der Walpurgisnacht’ as its second movement. Where countries
or regions are specified, national or exotic colour is often present in
the music, sometimes borrowing folk-song, as in Bordes's Suite
basque.
In programme music, words and ideas are unequivocally in-
corporated into a musical work, but there are a significant number
of examples of private, secret, or suppressed programmes. Schumann
told his wife through their communal diary that his Fourth Symphony
was to be about her, and the principal theme of this essentially
monothematic work is derived cryptographically from her name 19
Tchaikovsky wrote of his Sixth Symphony that it was to be a
‘programme symphony; but with a programme that should remain
an enigma for everyone but myself'.!! And Mahler's First Symphony,
10 Litzmann, Clara Schumann, ii (Sth edn.; Leipzig, 1918), 30: ‘My next symphony shall be
called “Clara”, and I will depict her therein with flutes, oboes, and harps.' For work on the
‘Clara’ theme, see Eric Sams, ‘Did Schumann use Ciphers’, Musical Times, 106 (1965), 584;
‘The Schumann Ciphers’, Musical Times, 107 (1966), 392; ‘The Tonal Analogue in Schumann’s
Music’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 96 (1969-70), 103.
п Letter to ‘Bob’ Davidov, Feb. 1893; cited in John Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies
and Concertos (London, 1969), 34. See also Gerald Abraham, On Russian Music (repr. New
York, 1980), 143-6, where a fascinating private sketch of a more detailed programme is given.
540 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
while it was still entitled “Symphonic Poem’, had a published
programme for its second and third performances only; this extensive
specification differed slightly in detail between the two performances,
but in any case was completely withdrawn on the subsequent
publication of the work. In these kinds of programme specific
ideational surrounding for the hearing of the work is not part of the
work as given to the world in its finally valid form. However,
together with the tendency to hermeneutic reception previously
discussed, such programmes underline that music takes place in an
essentially human arena, and show something of the proximity of
programme music to non-programme music. In the light of historical
knowledge we should be wary of over-emphasizing the distinctions
between the two.
NATIONALISM
National boundaries offer a rationale for the writing of national
history in music. Nations possess distinctive creative styles, even
though a national style is at root a generalized conceptual construct
based on groupings of individual composers and their personal styles.
Yet, while nationalism could be a strongly felt force (particularly by
prominent non-German musicians), the genres which concerned
composers in this period remained supra-national, and nationalism
manifested itself in music as inflexions of them. Literary and
legendary national heritages would be natural resources for all kinds
of texted music, including programme music. And differing language
characteristics have a powerful effect on national musical styles, even
indirectly on instrumental music—for instance, the tendency in Czech
to stress initial syllables militates against up-beat openings to
instrumental themes.
Political oppression often led to extra pressure on composers to
create a distinctive national music, as was particularly the case for
Smetana. It might further lead to political uses for music. Nations
could be politically independent yet culturally oppressed, and such
oppression was clearly felt by many Russian composers.
The national schools of France, Italy, and Spain had distinctive
bases in opera and church music, though in all these countries some
pressure was felt to create an instrumental musical culture. In Italy
and Spain responses to this pressure were mostly made by minor
composers, and neither the formal nor the informal socio-musical
institutions were sufficiently developed to sustain and nourish such
a culture at all strongly. In France, however, there were powerful
moves towards national instrumental music, and the works of
NATIONALISM 541
contemporary French composers were particularly favoured by the
Société de Jeunes Artistes du Conservatoire (founded by Pasdeloup
in 1853) for orchestral music, and by the Société de Quatuor Frangais
(1862) for chamber music. Further impetus came from the founding
of the Société Nationale de Musique in 1871, which encouraged the
composition of both orchestral and chamber music. Instrumental
genres in France were primarily Teutonic but this did not prevent
César Franck, Saint-Saéns, Fauré, d'Indy, and others from creating
important and highly original works in them.
The thrust towards a national music could characteristically take
strong impetus from the use of folk-song. This was particularly so
in Russia, where, following Glinka's example, composers used such
songs as themes in large-scale instrumental works of elevated import;
Borodin's String Trio in G minor is based on the folk-song ‘Chem
tebya ya ogorchila’ [With what did I vex you]; Tchaikovsky's Second
Symphony is one of his most nationalistic works and introduces
three Ukrainian folk-songs, which led to the establishment of its
nickname (‘Little Russian’, a term very offensive to Ukrainians);!?
the Finale of his Fourth Symphony uses the tune ‘Vo pole beryozon' ka
stoyala’ [In the field stood a birch tree]; and Rimsky-Korsakov's
Sinfonietta (from an unpublished string quartet) is based entirely on
eight folk-tunes, which have been identified by Abraham in his essay
on the folk-song element in Russian music.!? In that essay he also
outlined the incongruity between folk-song and symphonic forms
and described some of the solutions offered by Russian composers
to this compositional problem. The problem is how the self-enclosed
completeness of a folk-tune may be opened into large-scale symphonic
argument. The development section of Tchaikovsky's Second Sym-
phony shows the coming together of Russian folk-song and German
symphonism, for the opening folk-song of the symphony is frag-
mented and modified in a fully Germanic manner.
In the instrumental field Czech nationalism through use of folk
material was principally based on peasant dances: Smetana used the
polka (actually an urban dance in the nineteenth century) and furiant;
Dvorak the furiant, skoéna, and dumka. The dumka was originally a
Ukrainian folk-lament which penetrated Poland during the first part
of the century, and Dvorak’s use of it is a product of the consciously
Panslavonic element in his own nationalist position.!^ When actual
12 David Brown, Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, i. The Early Years (1840-
1874) (London, 1978), 256.
13 Gerald Abraham, Studies in Russian Music (London, 1935), 55-6.
14 [ am greatly indebted to John Tyrrell for this view, as also for his wide-ranging and
invaluable comments on the chapter as a whole.
542 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
folk material was not present, inflexions derived from such material
could nevertheless form part of a comiposer’s personal style; these
inflexions often manifested themselves as specific melodic figures, as
incidental uses of modality, and as dance-derived rhythms.
Folk melodies were usually regionally localized within a country,
and almost always belonged to rural peasant cultures. In taking such
material into nationalist art-music, composers were therefore lifting
folk-music out of its immediate social context—its locality and its
class confines—in order to renew aristocratic- bourgeois city culture.
Thus there is an element of cross-cultural quotation involved in the
basing of nationalist aspiration in art-music on folk material, as
likewise an element of Romantic glorification of the populace and
countryside. In this sense nationalism flourished as a form of
programmaticism. Further, audiences could well read specific na-
tionalist programmes into such stylistic features as peasant drones,
lydian fourths, dance rhythms, or irregular metres, while such features
were in reality common to the peasant cultures of more than one
nation.
Nationalism is close to exoticism (the use of regional colour from
a nation other than that of the composer), and exoticism formed a
significant resource for nineteenth-century composers, as it had for
eighteenth-century masters (Mozart's interest in Turkish music,
Haydn’s in Hungarian Gypsy music). Liszt and Brahms were
particularly interested in this so-called Hungarian Gypsy music—the
music of the Verbunkos, which had already become part of city
culture around the close of the eighteenth century. Lalo, Bizet, and
Rimsky-Korsakov all borrowed Spanish styles. But exoticism tends
towards the picturesque, and cannot support a similar weight of
signification as nationalism.
BRAHMS AND THE PIANO SONATA
In 1839 Schumann had written of the piano sonata: ‘it seems the
form has run its course ...'15 Yet, when Brahms and Liszt met for
the first time in the summer of 1853, each had recently finished a
piano sonata. In Brahms's case his Opp. 1 and 2 are among his
earliest surviving works; in Liszt's, his only work in the genre marked
the interim end, as he put it at the time, of his concern with the
piano.!6 Brahms had learnt how to compose sonata movements as
15 Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin Kreisig
(5th edn.; Leipzig, 1914), i. 395.
16 As stated in Liszt's letter of Spring 1854 to Louis Kóhler (Letters of Franz Liszt, ed. La
Mara, trans. Constance Bache (London, 1894), i. 187).
BRAHMS AND THE PIANO SONATO 543
part of his early training, by modelling them after specific Classical
examples,1? and detailed similarities of theme, harmonic structure,
and development between his Op. 1 first movement and Beethoven’s
Op. 31, No: 1, “Waldstein’, and 'Hammerklavier' Sonatas are outward
signs of a fundamental inclination to Beethovenian style in both
these works. This includes general considerations of form, of texture
(extremes of register, especially the low bass, are important in their
sound world, as is the virtuoso element), and of the varıed and
energetic rhythmic surface, which is more violent than in subsequent
Brahms works; indeed Brahms wrote in 1856 that these sonatas were
‘sometimes raging’.18 These characteristics are also to be found in
the Third Sonata, Op. 5 (1853); more massive yet, it has a
five-movement form and wide-ranging exploitation of the keyboard.
Brahms's piano sonatas are based on sonata and variation forms,
which interact; thus at the very beginning of his creative life
he staked out for himself principles of thematic integration and
modification which were to be central to his musical thought, and
to have profound consequences for the development of musical style
in the early part of the present century. The Finale of Op. 2 shows
variation ideas applied in a sonata form, since one theme appears
in the six distinct guises: introduction (Ex. 384, bars 1-4); first subject
(Ex. 385, bars 25-8); bridge (diminished; Ex. 386, bars 61-5); second
Ex. 384
Sostenuto
Ех. 385
17 Gustav Jenner, Johannes Brahms als Mensch, Lehrer und Künstler (Marburg, 1905), 39.
18 Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, v. Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim,
ed. Andreas Moser (3rd edn.; Berlin, 1921), 158.
MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
544
Ex. 386
Бхр äer Ed =
Besser E E IE Ee BEA ЕЕГ Bob: EE g
f ben marcato
Ex. 387
Ex. 388
Ex. 389
трге
m.g
Du Se et
In.
4а.
9. marcato il basso
subject (further diminished in the left hand, reorganized in the right
hand; Ex. 387, bars 71-3); codetta (Ex. 388, bars 95-7); and coda
(Ex. 389, bars 258
-61).
All these sonatas also contain similar transformations across
movements; in Op. 2 all the material of the third movement is
evolved from the second (thus also extending the variation structure
LISZT AND SONATA 545
of that second movement), while in Op. 1 the opening becomes, in
compound triple time with syncopations, the first theme of its Finale.
Op. 5 has the second and fourth sections and coda of its slow
movement built on a thematic shape from the development section
of the first movement, and the progressive tonality of this slow
movement (A flat to D flat majors) is a further ‘composing out’ of
the same tonal plan for the second subject group of the first
movement. The opening of the second movement is then transformed
into the additional slow fourth movement, entitled ‘Rückblick’
[Retrospect]. Brahms was probably unaware of the contemporary
Lisztian uses of these techniques (before their meeting), as also of
Schubert’s "Wanderer" Fantasia; in which case he was following
earlier models, including Classical variation writing, especially when
the last variation is in rondo style. The variation-form Andante of
Op. 1 uses the folk-song ‘Verstohlen geht der Mond auf as theme
and, unusually, modifies its harmony, texture, and structure in the
variations, leaving the melody as cantus firmus. The slow movement
of Op. 2 duplicates this design, using an original theme based on
the words of a Minnelied. The design of these two movements has
a sonata-form resonance, with variation 2 as development—it is
significantly longer than the themes in both cases—and variation 3
as a transfigured recapitulation.
Brahms wrote no further piano sonatas; in the field of solo piano
writing he turned to variation sets and the poetic miniatures of the
Balladen, Op. 10 (which are nevertheless grouped in a pseudo-sonata
format). In the field of multi-movement instrumental composition,
his ideas became too colossal for two hands on one piano and, via
an incomplete duet sonata, he encountered other, orchestral genres.
(Schumann had indeed called Op. | and 2 ‘veiled symphonies’ in his
laudatory article Neue Bahnen.)
LISZT AND THE SONATA
An important work for Liszt was Schubert’s "Wanderer" Fantasia;
as we have seen, he performed it, then arranged it for piano and
orchestra (he called this arrangement symphonisch bearbeitet); and
its combination of multi-movement with single-movement design had
much influence on Liszt's structural concerns around this time, as
evidenced in the Grosses Konzertsolo (1849) and the two piano
concertos. In his B minor Piano Sonata (1852-3) he created a highly
subtle compressed structure which is both multi-movement and
single-movement, with thematic unification of diversity by motivic
and transformational relations. The structure is thus a combination
546 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
of: (1) introduction, Allegro first movement, slow movement, Finale,
and coda, with: (2) introduction, exposition and development, slow
episode, altered recapitulation, and coda. The opening of the work
draws unambiguously on traditional sonata structure: a tonally
adventurous slow introduction (Ex. 390, bars 1-4) leads to a
sonata-form exposition with two subject groüps, each with two
separate constituent themes (Exx. 391-4: Ex. 391 shows the first
theme of the first subject, bars 8-13; Ex. 392 the second theme of
the first subject, bars 13-17; Ex. 393 the first theme of the second
subject, bars 105-12; Ex. 394 the second theme of the second subject,
bars 153-60). Neither does the ensuing development section yet
explicitly open into the overall structural ambiguity outlined above;
this ambiguity begins with the appearance of the Andante theme in
bar 331 (Ex. 395, bars 331-40).
Ex. 390
Lento assai
Ex. 391
f marcato ~~
547
LISZT AND SONATA
Ex3395
Grandioso
Ex. 394
cantando espressivo
laccompagnamento piano
548 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
dë)
Кы PER ei и
ЭШЕ: en ПШ Gm je gg
[m P
—À
poco rit.
Ех. 395
The sıx examples show the sıx primary themes of the whole work.
While these have separate identities and structural functions, the
second themes of the first and second subject groups (Exx. 392 and
394) are closely related by simple transformation, and all the themes
are related by their sharing of the motivic elements: repeated-note
initiation, scalic descent, and ascending leap. The introduction theme
and Andante theme are particularly close motivically. Although the
slow movement/slow episode is separated from its surroundings by
tempo, metre, and theme, much of its substance is created from
lyrical-decorative versions of the second subject material of the
preceding Allegro; by this means the slow movement/slow episode
is given distinct developmental aspects which serve further to
integrate it into the overall structure of the work. The Finale/altered
recapitulation is heralded by the introduction theme, now more
regularly placed (tonally considered) on F sharp; the Finale/altered
recapitulation then follows the thematic course of the first
movement/exposition and development, with modifications, ex-
pansions, some omissions, and some literal repetitions. The most
LISZT AND SONATA 549
powerful of modifications is that the Finale/altered recapitulation
continues after the introduction theme with the first-subject themes
of the opening of the Sonata as a fugue in B flat minor, thus
following in thematic and structural matters Liszt’s Schubertian
model. The Andante theme reappears in the tonic major near the
close of the work. By these means Liszt created a cogent and positive
ambiguity between multi-movement and single-movement designs.!?
The pianistic virtuosity involved is extreme, but is always for clear
structural purposes of development and elaboration; here virtuosity
finds a truly dramatic role, and the spectacular is tamed and enhanced
by its integration into the heroic-Iyrical.
Wagner wrote his less differentiated Sonate für das Album von Frau
M. W. їп 1853, and Liszt's example was followed in structure and
virtuosity by Rudolf Viole in his Op. 1 (1855) and Reubke in his B
flat minor Sonata (1857). But in the following decades the trend
towards the re-establishment of the structure of the symphony in
four separate movements was also reflected in the piano sonata:
Grieg's Op. 7 (1865); Tchaikovsky's early Sonata in C sharp minor
(1865), and his mature but problematic Op. 37 in G (1878);
Rheinberger's Sonatas Nos. 1 (Sinfonische Sonate), 3 (1883), and 4
(Romantische Sonate), Robert Fuchs’s Sonata in G flat, Op. 19;
Parry's Opp. 71 and 79 (1877-8), and Richard Strauss's Op. 5 all have
this structure. The title Fantasie-Sonate, deriving from Beethoven and
Schubert, found some further use: Raff's Op. 168 (1872) is so titled,
and Draeseke's Op. 6 (1862-7) is headed Sonata quasi fantasia.
The piano sonata, in spite of the precedents of Beethoven's
Lebewohl and Alkan's Grande sonate: Les quatre äges (1848), was
not generally a vehicle for programmaticism, and highly significant
here is the fact that Liszt, the most progressive and committed of
the programmatic composers of the 1850s, wrote his great sonata
without a programme. The genre was closely surrounded by more
established programmatic genres: the cycle of piano miniatures, the
symphonic poem, and the symphony (later the suite also became
programmatic). Yet there are some rare programmatic piano sonatas
in our period. Sterndale Bennett's Sonata Op. 46 (1873) 15 entitled
The Maid of Orleans, and each of its four movements has a title,
together with a superscription from Schiller's play: (1) In the Fields;
19 For detailed studies of the form of the Sonata and its precedents, see Rey M. Longyear,
‘Liszt’s B minor Sonata: Precedents for a Structural Analysis’, Music Review 34 (1973), 198;
Sharon Winklhofer, Liszts Sonata in B minor: A Study of Autograph Sources and Documents
(Ann Arbor, 1980). (Winklhofer does not concur with my view of the importance of Schubert’s
"Wanderer" Fantasia for Liszt.)
550 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
‘In innocence I led my sheep | Adown the mountains silent steep’;
(2) In the Field: ‘The clanging trumpets sound, the chargers rear, |
And the loud war cry thunders in mine ear’; (3) In Prison: ‘Hear me
O God in mine extremity | In fervent supplication up to thee | Up
to thy heaven above I send my Soul’; (4) The End: ‘Brief is the
sorrow, endless is the joy’. The indication ‘alla tromba’ occurs during
the second movement and a further quotation during the course of
the third.
BRAHMS'S PIANO VARIATIONS
Piano variations had been Brahms's chosen genre for his earliest
publicly performed composition (now lost), and, after the piano
sonatas, he returned to the genre in the years 1854-65 with his
most Schumannesque work, Op. 9, his earliest essay incorporating
Hungarian influence, Op. 21, No. 2, his only free-standing set on a
theme of his own, Op. 21, No. 1, and the masterpieces of the early
1860s (Variations on a Theme of Handel, Op. 24, Variations on a
Theme of Schumann, Op. 23, and the two books on a Theme of
Paganini, Op. 35). In a letter of 1856 he wrote to his friend Joseph
Joachim of his underlying attitude to variation writing:
I sometimes ponder on variation form and find variations must be made
stronger, more pure. The ancients held to the bass of the theme, their actual
theme, strongly. With Beethoven melody, harmony and rhythm are all so
beautifully varied. But I sometimes find that moderns (both of us!) more
(I don't quite know how to put it) rummage about over a theme. We
anxiously retain the melody but do not treat it freely, do not create anything
new from it, just punish it. But the melody is nevertheless not recognizable
'20
This letter also has significance for his maturing style in general.
However these private thoughts were not in any sense developing a
theory of variation writing, and Brahms offers no view on the overall
structuring of a variation set—an aspect of his composition in the
genre which is always highly organized and significant.
Such organization was well established in Classical times for
variation sets as movements in multi-movement works. And after
the somewhat experimental movements in his first two piano sonatas,
Brahms reclaimed the general shape of Classical models in the slow
movement of his Op. 18 String Sextet— which he immediately
arranged for piano solo as a free-standing set. This general plan
runs: theme + variations 1-3: increase in animation; variation 4:
?0 Brahms Briefwechsel, v. 150.
BRAHMS’S PIANO VARIATIONS 551
change of mode and slowing of animation; variation 5: increase in
animation, perhaps with reversion to the old mode; coda (in which
the form of the theme, having been retained for the variations, is
broken). This plan remained a generalized basis for Brahms’s
movements in variation form right through to his latest works. The
overall structure for free-standing variation sets is naturally more
varied, but the organization in particular works is nevertheless strong.
In this respect Brahms seems to have placed his Op. 23 set close to
Beethoven's Op. 34 (the tonal schemes of both show much variety
of key), and in Op. 24 he may have had Bach's Goldberg Variations
as a background, not only in the placing of related variations at
regular intervals during the course of the set, but also in the
diversifying of the series by character variations.
The work consists of twenty-five variations and a massive fugue
as finale. Hans Gäl has described it as ‘one of the most important
piano works he ever created'. And Wagner said, after hearing the
piece played by its composer at their only known meeting (at Penzing
in February 1864): ‘One sees what may still be achieved in the old
forms when someone comes who understands how to handle (Һет. 2!
This was the temperate but nevertheless post-Tristan Wagner who
spoke, recognizing the two types of originality represented by the
two composers, both types cogent and deeply expressive—the one
radical in structure and foreground detail, the other firmly rooted
in Classical tradition yet winning significant artistic newness within
that tradition. (Wagner of course became less temperate in his
comments on Brahms as Brahms grew in fame.) The variations in
Op. 24 maintain the form of the theme, though developmental
intricacies of phrase structure and harmony are pervasive. The
placement of the minor variations and thematically linked variation
pairs are primary sources of overall structure, and suggest Brahms
thought in three large groups of eight variations each, with variation
25 as a peroration. Perhaps nowhere else is Brahms's desired creative
newness in individual variations more apparent, and his set includes
a number of character variations: a quiet siciliano, a cheeky musette,
and the following rich and strong response to Hungarian gypsy
music. The examples show how the first half of the theme (Ex. 396,
bars 1-4) was moulded into the first half of variation 13 (Ex. 397,
bars 1-4), exemplifying how Brahms was able to win newness by
following closely the form of the theme. They offer an instructive
?! Hans Gäl, Johannes Brahms: His Work and Personality trans. Joseph Stein (London,
1963), 124; Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, ii (3rd edn.; Berlin, 1921), 118.
552 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
Ex. 397
comparison with Ex. 398 from Dvoräk. Brahms’s fugue follows a
scheme based on episodes, inversions, and augmentations, and its
climax is a remarkable and deep synthesis of Baroque counterpoint
with modern idiomatic piano writing.
This idiomatic pianism as a basic premiss of composition became
even more refined and poetic in the thirty shorter characteristic pieces
Brahms wrote between 1871 and 1893. They were grouped in the
collections Clavierstücke, Op. 76 (publ. 1879), Zwei Rhapsodien, Op. 79
(1880), Fantasien, Op. 116 (1892), Drei Intermezzi, Op. 117 (1892),
and Clavierstücke, Opp. 118 and 119 (1893). The pieces are in-
dividually titled Rhapsodie, Capriccio, Ballade, Romanze, or In-
termezzo. Brahms used the title Rhapsodie for extended, vigorous
fast movements; Op. 79, No. 2, is a fully articulated sonata-form
movement with a tonally allusive opening, and Op. 119, No. 4, an
expanded ternary form with a particularly intensifying coda ending
in the tonic minor. The Capriccii and Ballade are smaller in scale
but also characteristically fast; the Intermezzi are mostly slow and
553
BRAHMS’S PIANO VARIATIONS
E9905
THEME
Tempo di Minuetto
VARIATION 3
>
Росо meno mosso
1850-1890
MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS:
554
Ф. ж Po.
к-с кел== Cen
Bess te ——1
росо a poco accel.
=]
ai
НЕЧЕ D Be
PIANO VARIATIONS BY BRAHMS’S CONTEMPORARIES 555
meditative, as is the Romanze (the original title of which was indeed
Intermezzo). The three Intermezzi, Op. 117, were referred to by
Brahms as Wiegenlieder meiner Schmerzen [cradle-songs for my
sorrows], and the first is prefaced by a verse of a Scottish ballade.
Brahms used sonata or ternary forms in the main for these pieces,
but, as is so characteristic of his larger-scale works, variation
techniques pervade the continuity; for instance, the contrasted theme
in D flat in the Intermezzo, Op. 117, No. 2, is a legato major
simplification of the opening arpeggiated theme in B flat minor, and
the waltz-like middle section of the Intermezzo, Op. 119, No. 2,15
a rhythmically and harmonically altered major variation of the
opening theme. All these pieces grow out of and develop what may
be achieved with two hands on a keyboard, with rich instrumental
melody, imaginative and varied textures; the resonance of the
harmonies is also intimately connected with the charateristics of
the piano. The Intermezzo, Op. 119, No. 1, for instance, one of the
most inwardly reflective of all these pieces, combines elaborately
constructed diatonic discords with the sonic values of the decay-
envelope of piano sound.
PIANO VARIATIONS BY BRAHMS’S CONTEMPORARIES
Dvoräk’s most substantial work for solo piano is the Variations,
Op. 36 (1876) and, unlike his earlier Piano Concerto, it shows a full
command of idiomatic keyboard writing. Commentators have drawn
attention to the resonances of Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms in
this work; those of Beethoven are particularly strong from the
variation movements in the Piano Sonatas, Opp. 26, 109 and 111
(involving the type of theme, use of trills and registral contrasts, and
the return to the unadorned theme for a quiet ending, as well as
particular features of certain of the variations; for example, Beetho-
ven’s Op. 26, variation 1, gives Dvorak his own rhythmic division
in variation 1). Dvorak’s original theme has complex imitation and
chromaticism, and the forms of his variations show a radical contrast
with Brahms's variation writing, for Dvorak nowhere adheres to the
formal confines of the theme but stretches areas of tonality and
figuration, and thus forces the form of the theme into background
structure. In Ex. 398 the opening statement-and-response structure
of the theme (bars 1-12) is shown mapped on to the equivalent
structure (bars 1-23) in his variation 3. Dvořák may have been
encouraged in this radicalism by his recent encounter with the music
of Liszt and Wagner.
Other contributors to the genre of piano variations in this period
556 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
were Stephen Heller, Alkan (Le Festin d Aesop), Bizet (the Variations
chromatiques of 1869, one of his most powerful instrumental works),
Rimsky-Korsakov, whose six variations on BACH are an original
combination of variation, prelude and fugue, and suite, Robert
Volkmann, Busoni, and Sergey Taneev.
GERMAN ORGAN MUSIC
Little significant organ music had been written during the Classical
and early Romantic periods in Germany and Austria, save for
Mendelssohn's great set of six Organ Sonatas, his three Preludes and
Fugues, and Schumann's Fugues on BACH. But during the 1850s
both Liszt and Brahms turned to the organ. Liszt's Fantasia and
Fugue on the chorale ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem undam' (1850) (from
Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots), and Prelude and Fugue on BACH (1855)
successfully adapt virtuosic piano writing to the organ, with full
awareness of the sustaining power of the instrument; sectionalized
transformative structures are fused with inputs from Baroque style.
Julius Reubke's Organ Sonata, from the same year as his Piano
Sonata, is close to the model of Liszt's Piano Sonata, and follows a
movement scheme of introduction, slow, fast, slow, fast (fugue)
which is compressed into the ambiguity of a one-movement structure
depending on an almost exclusive monothematicism (diversified by
thematic transformation). This Sonata on the 94th Psalm quotes
verses of the Psalm “О Lord God to whom vengeance belongeth . . .’
as preface, and is thus programmatic; attempts to show a narrative
programme on the text, however, have not met with success; the
work belongs to the type of *meditative programme music'. Though
Reubke's sonatas are Lisztian in structure and rhetoric, they have a
creative power of their own, and one can only lament their composer's
tragically early death at the age of 24.
Brahms's early organ music comprises two Preludes and Fugues
(A minor and G minor), a fugue in A flat minor (all composed in
1856-7), and the Chorale-prelude and Fugue on 'O Traurigkeit, o
Herzeleid'. These works stem from Brahms's dissatisfaction with his
compositional abilities, following his early public recognition by
Schumann, and the concomitant period of self-imposed re-education.
Indeed some of these works were included in the correspondence
course in counterpoint that he conducted with his friend Joachim in
1856; but they are all much more than exercises, and it is rare, even
among great composers, to find such original and expressive works
written for study purposes. Their style is of great contrapuntal
GERMAN ORGAN MUSIC 557
intricacy, at its most intense in the A flat minor Fugue, with its
many inversions, strettos, multiple countersubjects, augmentations,
and diminutions. There is Baroque influence not only in contrapuntal
technique but also in themes and structures: material based on
decorated scales and sequences proliferates, and Bach’s organ-fugue
designs, involving a central thinning of texture combined with an
increase in animation and new countersubject material, are taken
over by Brahms. A fundamental effect on Brahms’s later style surely
stems from his early organ works, which confirmed and accentuated
the forceful influence of Bach; from them grew such music as the
great sequences at the openings of the A major Serenade, Fourth
Symphony, and Clarinet Quintet.
The title and genre ‘organ sonata’ had really been established by
Mendelssohn for subsequent nineteenth-century composers; he drew
on the Baroque forms of the chorale, chorale-prelude, chorale
variations, and fugue, as well as on the English voluntary tradition,
mediated principally through Samuel Wesley, and created multi-
movement works quite different in structure and scope from the
contemporary piano sonata. In the second half of the century, his
lead was followed particularly by Rheinberger, and Gustav Merkel
(1827-85).
Rheinberger’s sequence of twenty organ sonatas span the years
1868-1901, and was unfinished at his death, for each is in a different
key and he was clearly working towards a set of twenty-four. He
did not use chorales or chorale-related structures, though in Sonata
No. 3 the 8th psalm tone appears as a theme in the outer movements.
But fugue is very common: twelve of the sonatas conclude with
fugues, No. 15 with a ricercar; two more begin with fugues (No. 8,
which ends with the justly famous passacaglia, and No. 10, which
actually begins with a prelude and fugue); No. 14 begins with a
ternary Präludium in which the middle section is a fugue. Sonata
form is also used: No. 7 begins with a clear and powerful example
(again called Preludio), and the first movement of No. 11 (entitled
Agitato) uses sonata form with combined and reordered response.
Suite-like middle movements of lyrical import abound: Marcia
religiosa (Sonata No. 6, movement ii), Romanze (9, ii), Cantilena
(11, ii), Pastorale (12, ii; 20, iii), Idylle (14, ii; 18, iii), Skandinavisch
(16, ii), Provengalisch (19, ii). Rheinberger was a pupil of F. Lachner,
one of the important composers of orchestral suites during our
period. Preludes and fugues also formed a significant part of
Lachner's conception of the orchestral suite, and there is a proximity
in movement types and styles between Rheinberger's organ sonatas
558 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
and Lachner’s suites. Fourteen of these sonatas are in three move-
ments, the remainder in four.
In 1896 Brahms turned again to the organ, with death and religion
much on his mind, and following the Vier ernste Gesänge [Four
Serious Songs] came the posthumously published eleven Chorale-
preludes, Op. 122. They do not really form a set; manuscript evidence
suggests Brahms originally thought in groups of three, but he then
sent the first seven as a group to his copyist, in a revised order. This
grouping in seven itself suggests Brahms had more than another four
pieces in mind, and there survives a sketch for a canonic prelude on
‘Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen'. Brahms himself described these works
as rare, and they come at the end of a barren century for the
chorale-prelude (such pieces were mostly by insignificant musicians).
But these are no mere freak appendage to Brahms’s life’s work; they
are fine, widely underrated music, and a significant development
from the Vier ernste Gesänge. They push towards the objectivity of
liturgical forms, but in spite of this retain a deep expressiveness,
all the more powerful for being regulated and generated within
long-established precepts.
All preludes treat the chorale as cantus firmus, mostly in the top
part. The chorale itself could be spaced, including in the gaps: fugue
(No. 1), imitation (No. 3), pre-echo (Nos. 4, 7, 10), and double
after-echo (No. 11); or the chorale could be continuous. There are
two important kinds of expressive opposition to the structure of the
chorale as formal determinant: (1) Brahms could introduce change
in the third quarter of the prelude, followed by the restoration of
the old texture/figuration in the last quarter; and (2) he could create
an end climax. The elaborative parts surrounding the chorale are
derived from the chorale by either diminution, or decorative variation,
or by a combination of these.
FRENCH INNOVATIONS
Alkan's Symphonie for solo piano is a unique work in many ways.
It is part of his most substantial opus: twelve Études in all the minor
keys, Op. 39 (1857). Perhaps following Clementis grouping of
movements into suites in his Gradus ad Parnassum, Alkan grouped
Nos. 4-7 of his Études into a four-movement symphony (with
progressive tonality—the keys of the movements are C, F, B flat,
and E flat minors) Alkan's symphony cannot be regarded as
mistitled: it shows orchestral effects by variation of register, and the
second movement begins with a quasi-cello melody. There are motivic
relationships across movements, and the movements themselves show
FRENCH INNOVATIONS 539
a clear command of structures associated with the genre of the
symphony: sonata form in first and last movements, and ternary for
the middle movements. Nevertheless the title is an innovation, which
possibly inspired subsequent French composers to overcome accepted
genre boundaries, for Alkan must not be underestimated as a
composer; Liszt and Busoni valued his music highly, and (according
to d'Indy) Cesar Franck called him a ‘poet of the pianoforte'.??
Franck's own Grand piéce symphonique (1860-2) for organ was
dedicated to Alkan, and formed the first of a line of French organ
symphonies continued by Widor and, after 1890, by Vierne and
Dupré; these organ works were related to the new large-scale,
so-called ‘symphonic’ organs being built in France by Cavaillé-Coll.
Franck's Grand piéce has a multi-sectional differentiated structure in
a modified palindromic design, with a motivic principal theme, a
chorale element, fugal textures, andante episodes, and a climactic
conclusion. It had a number of sequels: the organ symphonies already
alluded to, Franck's own orchestral Symphony (for which it provided
the opening motif), and his later original keyboard works (particularly
the three Chorals for organ). It was, however, another piece in the
same collection as the Grand piéce symphonique which formed the
first of Franck's three famous tryptichs: the Prélude, fugue et variation,
a simple but none the less original combination of prelude and fugue,
variation, and ternary forms. Franck arranged this work in 1873 as
a duet for piano and harmonium, in which form he seems to have
preferred it. In 1884 he wrote the Prélude, choral et fugue for piano;
d'Indy narrates how this was originally planned as just a prelude
and fugue.23 The Prelude, aria et final, which followed in 1887, moves
away from the prelude and fugue as basis, towards the piano sonata.
Both these works depend on cyclic thematic principles which include
recall of themes at the close, including one theme in augmentation.
This tryptich form was taken up by Pierre Bréville in his Fantaisie
(1888) consisting of introduction, fugue, and finale. Franck's last
works were his three Chorals for organ (1890); these are types of
extended one-movement sonatas and have nothing directly to do
with the Lutheran chorale, though each includes stately hymnic
writing. The overall forms are substantial, distinctive, and discursive,
but unified and closed: No. 1 fuses variation, ternary, and sonata-form
inputs, No. 2 is a highly diversified binary form, including chaconne,
lyrical themes, recitative, and fugue, and No. 3 is ternary overall,
22 Vincent d'Indy, César Franck, trans. Rosa Newmarch (London and New York, 1910),
95.
?3 [bid., p. 164.
560 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
again with strong input from sonata form. All three have a climactic
version of a principal theme near the end. Experimental is surely a
misleading term for Franck’s structural innovations (and we shall
have occasion to note further such innovations in the fields of
symphony and chamber music); ‘experimental’ makes a judgement
on the enterprise and implies the results of that enterprise are lucky
or unlucky. Franck's use of tradition as a background to his creation
was more controlled than this; he made significant major structural
originalities which were nevertheless formally cogent and com-
prehensible. Because they were at the highest levels of structure, they
occasionally altered the genre system itself (as in the great tryptichs),
and always altered traditions within genres.
Charles-Marie Widor's organ symphonies are a further example
of French genre alteration, related even more closely to the suite
than are Rheinberger's sonatas. Widor noted the justification of their
title in his preface to his Op. 13 collection of such symphonies, by
reference to the new Cavaillé-Coll organs: the dynamic volume and
tonal variety of these instruments (with many pseudo-orchestral
instrument stops) allowed works written for them to adopt a similar
grandeur to orchestral music. Widor's symphonies in his Op. 13
(1876) and 42 (1880), eight symphonies in all (he wrote a further
two organ symphonies after 1890), have resonances from the suite
in their overall movement structures and in their movement types.
Three symphonies from this series are in five movements, four in six
movements, and one (No. 1) in seven; the movement types are a
mixture of symphonic analogues together with preludes, toccatas,
fugues, marches, and poetic movements (just how characteristic such
a mixture is for the Teutonic suite will become apparent in the
following section of this chapter). Examples of the poetic movements
are ‘Meditation’, ‘Pastorale’, and ‘Salve Regina’. While these works
are not profound, they have a distinct originality and nobility, based
on an expert understanding of the idiomatic possibilities of the
organ.
THE SUITE
In the second half of the century, the suite was a genre much
cultivated by composers, indeed the level of production is comparable
with that of the symphony. But the genre has heretofore hardly
provided a central topic for historians. It has an important, distinctive,
and distinguished role in the genre system of this period, and draws
on many cultural concerns of composers; investigation of the genre
casts fresh light on historicism, programmaticism, and nationalism
THE SUITE 561
at a general stylistic level which is neither as elevated as that of the
symphony nor as trivial as that of the salon piece. It is particularly
related to the symphony, sonata, serenade, and set of character
pieces. The late Romantic suite is a multi-movement work with
internal differentiation of movement types which could be extracted
from Baroque, Classical, or modern models. Within certain limita-
tions, which themselves changed through these years, the genre
offered relative freedom to composers and manifested a large degree
of diversity. We may, however, postulate four basic tendencies: the
neo-Baroque, the modern dance, the symphony/sonata substitute,
and the programmatic tendencies. This typology has a chronological
validity, as we shall see. While these four tendencies may exist each
in relative isolation as the chief constitutive rationale of a work, they
are also often mixed with each other in various ways within a single
work. It is the possibility and practice of this mixture which allows
the genre to cohere, for, separately used, these four tendencies could
give rise to highly disparate types of suite. The extract suite has not
been regarded as one of these tendencies, since it is properly a form
of arrangement rather than composition, and in any case is itself
subject to these tendencies (especially the latter three); it will be
considered later in this chapter.
As in the Baroque period the primary performing resources for
the late Romantic suite were orchestra (Lachner, Raff, Saint-Saëns,
Massenet, Tchaikovsky, Debussy) or keyboard— now, of course,
piano (Rubinstein, Raff, d'Albert, Debussy). But suites were also
written for concerto forces or chamber combinations from about the
mid-1860s on, after the re-establishment of the suite for piano or
orchestra. Raff's Op. 180 is for violin and orchestra, Op. 200, for
piano and orchestra; Gounod's Suite concertante is for pedal piano
and orchestra, and Rheinberger's Op. 149 is for organ, violin, cello,
and string orchestra; Raff's String Quartets Nos. 6 and 8 (1874) are
both suites (and so titled); Goldmark's Suites, Op. 11 (1869) and
Op. 43 (1893) are for violin and piano, as is Ignaz Brüll's Suite,
Op. 42 (1882); Rheinberger's Op. 166 (1891) is for violin and organ
(or piano).
The idea that the term ‘suite’ is synonymous with ‘collection’ has
to be considered and modified. It is based in part on the separate
publication of suite items which was common for piano suites;
further, Tchaikovsky performed the variations from his Third Suite
as a separate concert item. But such separation does not deny a
unity operating across movements: several suites from this period
have related movements with thematic recall (Raffs Op. 72, which
562 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
was issued in separate offprints, Massenet’s Scenes alsaciennes,
Strauss's Suite, Op. 4, for wind (1884), Rimsky-Korsakov's She-
herazade (1888), Bordes's Suite basque, Dvoräk’s orchestral Suite in
A (originally for piano, 1894)), and movement schemes for suites
were clearly of creative significance and subject to compositional
choice of a decided kind. Further, the Andante and Scherzo of
Brahms's Piano Sonata, Op. 5, were performed separately, by both
Brahms and Clara Schumann, and the Andante published as an
offprint; but no commentator could wish to suggest that any of this
compromises the unity of the sonata. Similarly the ‘Deuxième
Morceau de la Symphonie Océan' of Rubinstein was issued separately
in score, parts, and two arrangements. It is, however, clear that some
suites were more loosely connected than others. Raff's Op. 75 is a
collection of character pieces for small hands; it shows a rare use of
the term 'Suite' in this period (most character-piece sets of this kind
were not so titled), and an earlier title for this particular work was
'Bibliothéque';?^ it was clearly designed at least in the main for
domestic use, where 11 would naturally be excerpted; whereas to
extract a movement from Sheherazade would be to do violence to a
unified cyclic work.
THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE SUITE IN MID-CENTURY
The term ‘Suite’ was used very rarely in the nineteenth century
before 1855. Clementi had grouped pieces in his Gradus ad Parnassum
into suites; Sterndale Bennett's Suite de piéces, Op. 24 (1842), is a
free-standing composition in the genre, consisting of six pieces, with
titles for Nos. 2 and 4 (‘Capricciosa’ and ‘Alla fantasia’ respectively);
the special form of the title of the work indicates the independence
of the constituent movements (now described as pieces) and the work
displays a progressive tonality overall. Schumann knew it, wrote
about it, and considered titling as Suite his Overture, Scherzo,
and Finale. But the flowering of the late Romantic suite was a
post-Schumann phenomenon, and one to which Sterndale Bennett
contributed no further.?5
In 1851 the Bach Gesellschaft began its monumental publication
of the complete works of Bach, and in 1853 issued volume i of the
?4 | am much indebted to O. W. Neighbour for this information from annotations on a
Raff autograph in his possession; the autograph is of a piece once intended for inclusion in
(Opa
?5 The form of title of the Sterndale Bennett work derives from an English tradition of
publication titling of keyboard music by Handel and Domenico Scarlatti. The latter composer
was particularly important to Sterndale Bennett, as Schumann noted in his review of Bennett's
Op. 24 (Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften, ii. 108-9).
THE SUITE IN MID-CENTURY 563
clavier works, including the six Partitas. The earliest neo-Baroque
suites soon followed; Rubinstein’s Op. 38 for piano (comp. 1855;
pub. 1856) has ten movements: Prelude, Minuet, Gigue, Sarabande,
Gavotte, Passacaille, Allemande, Courante, Passepied, and Bourree.
In September 1855 Brahms finished a Suite in A minor, as we know
from private papers of his friends; it had at least Prelude, Aria,
Sarabande, Gavotte, and probably a Gigue. Brahms destroyed it as
a work, though some of its constituent dances survive, including the
Sarabande and Gavotte, which were played as a concert item by
Brahms and by Clara Schumann in 1855 and 1856, and constituted
the first music of Brahms to be publicly performed in Danzig, Vienna,
and London. In the programme for the London performance the
pieces were described as ‘in the style of Bach’; Ex. 399 shows the
first eight bars of the Sarabande, in its earliest form (written in 1854
in A major). Brahms did not publish any of this music, but recognized
its power and potential by using it as a thematic quarry for later
chamber works (Second String Sextet, First String Quintet, and
Clarinet Quintet); in so doing he provided a compelling example
of the living generative power of historicism. Clara Schumann’s
half-brother, Woldemar Bargiel, wrote a Suite, Op. 7, for piano duet
in the late 1850s; it consists of Allemande, Courante, Sarabande,
Air, and Gigue, and thus follows the German Baroque movement
plan for the suite, which had been so conspicuously denied by
Rubinstein. Both Rubinstein and Bargiel use key contrasts between
movements, though their last movements return to the keys of their
first; Rubinstein particularly uses a heavily Romantic pianism, which
contrasts markedly with the delicacy of Brahms’s response to Baroque
style; and Bargiel begins with a ternary-form Allemande. One cannot
564 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
help but be reminded of Heidegger’s telling phrase, that it is the
‘exclusive privilege of the greatest'tlünkers to let themselves be
influenced. The small thinkers, by contrast, merely suffer from
constipated originality.'?$ Brahms’s little pieces are both closer to
Baroque forms and styles than the works of Rubinstein and Bargiel
and at the same time much greater and more original music.
The pure neo-Baroque suite had a continuing history during this
period, sometimes attracting the title-modifier ‘... in olden form’;
thus Raff's suite for string quartet, Op. 192, No. 1, is entitled Suite
älterer Form (it has the movements Präludium, Menuett, Gavotte
mit Musette, Arie, and Gigue-Finale). Eugen d'Albert's Op. 1 (1883)
is a suite in the old style; its movements are Allemande, Courante,
Sarabande, Gavotte and Musette, and Gigue—all in the one tonic,
D minor. They are in Baroque-style binary forms, and show real
expressive power. Grieg, in his suite Fra Holbergs Tid [From Holberg's
Time] for piano (1884; arr. for strings 1885), and d'Indy in a Suite
en Ré dans le style ancien for trumpet, two flutes, and strings (1886)
made subsequent use of the 'suite in olden style'. And this particular
input from the Baroque directly into the late-Romantic was surely
the basis for the various neo-Classical tendencies of the twentieth
century; it brought with it, even in late Romantic times, a certain
impetus for rhythmic renewal, to some extent countering the
arhythmical implications of Wagnerian chromaticism. Debussy's
Sarabande (1894) in Pour le piano 1s a magnificent creative use of
the old form, with its composer's distinctive harmonic blend of
discord, parallelism, and modality.
The modern dance— Lündler, waltz, mazurka, and polka were
favoured types—entered the suite first as a mixture with the
neo-Baroque tendency.
Between 1857 and 1879 Raff wrote his seventeen surviving suites:
eight for piano, four for orchestra, two for concerto forces, and
three for chamber groups. In his first contributions to the genre, the
three suites for piano, Opp. 69, 71, and 72 (1857-8) he established
a five-movement form mixing Baroque and modern elements. АП
three begin with a Preludio and end with a Fuge; they have a
mazurka or polka or minuetto as second movement, toccatina or
toccata as third, and aria or romanza as fourth. Apart from his Op.
75 (the twelve-piece collection referred to above), Raff's subsequent
suites range from four to seven movements with a clear preference
for five. And, though there are examples of pure neo-Baroque suites,
?6 Martin Heidegger, What is called thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York, 1968), 95.
THE SUITE IN MID-CENTURY 565
programme suites, and one sonata-substitute suite, his preference for
the mixed neo-Baroque and modern type with which he had begun,
is noteworthy. The Rigaudon from his last piano suite, Op. 204 in
B flat (1876), may be taken as an example of his reinterpretation
of Baroque models, involving heavily Romantic colouring; this
movement follows the old couplet form of rigaudons for its initial
stages, then appends a modern development section, a varied
recapitulation, and coda —the whole in distinctly unbaroque keyboard
textures. Ex. 400 shows the end of the recapitulation and beginning
of the coda (bars 106-32).
The great waltz sequences of Johann Strauss the younger were
not called suites. These, such as An der schónen blauen Donau [The
Blue Danube] Op. 314 (1867), or Seid umschlungen Millionen [Be
Ex. 400
[Allegro]
566 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
ee
Embraced Ye Millions] Op. 443 (1892), dedicated to Brahms,
characteristically open with an introduction, beginning in non-waltz
rhythm, followed by a linked series of separately numbered waltz-
movements (five was a favoured number), and a concluding coda
drawing on previous themes. The individual waltzes would be in
binary or ternary form, related by key but not obviously by theme,
and each waltz would characteristically include thematic contrast
within itself. Many of Strauss's works enjoyed immediate, wide-
spread, and enduring popularity; Brahms was a particular admirer
of Strauss's music, and Schoenberg arranged his Kaiser-Walzer,
Op. 437 (1889), for chamber ensemble in 1925.
Suites (so titled) including modern dances had differentiated
movement types. Franz Lachner's Ball-Suite (1874) has Introduktion
und Polonaise, Mazurka, Waltz, Intermezzo, Dreher, and Lance.
THE SUITE IN MID-CENTURY 567
Arensky’s Op. 15 consists of Romance, Waltz, and Polonaise. Both
these examples of course show a slight mixture with other modern
elements, since each contains one character piece which is not a
dance.
A quantity of artistic and biographical data shows the proximity
of the suite to, though at the same time separation from, the genres
of symphony and sonata. A suite need not include any dance
movements: Lachner’s Seventh Suite has Ouverture, Scherzo, In-
termezzo, Chaconne, and Fuga. Julius Otto Grimm's Op. 10, Suite
in Canonform, has four unnamed movements—Allegro con brio,
Andante lento, Tempo di minuetto, and Allegro risoluto—and
although this work includes a dance, the particular placing of a
minuet as third movement in a four-movement work enhances rather
than contradicts its approximation to a symphony. Raff's first Suite
for Orchestra, Op. 101, includes as its last two movements two
movements of his (now otherwise lost) first symphony.?? Lachner
turned from writing symphonies to writing orchestral suites, and
allowed the latter genre to substitute for the former, as did
Tchaikovsky between his Symphonies 4 and 5. Rimsky-Korsakov's
Second Symphony Antar was renamed 'symphonic suite’ many years
after its composition; 'symphonic suite' is also the subtitle of
Sheherazade.
After composing eight symphonies between 1828 and 1851, Franz
Lachner turned to the orchestral suite and produced eight works in
this genre between 1861 and 1881. His seven numbered suites
have an extension and grandeur which confirm their status as
symphony-substitutes (or analogues) in four to six movements. They
are characteristically based on the mixture of neo-Baroque and
modern movement types already noted in Raffs suites. Nos. 2-5
include Baroque dances, of which No. 3 is the most strongly
based on this tendency (its movements are Praeludium, Intermezzo,
Ciaconne, Sarabande, Gavotte, and Courante). Fugues were used as
first movements (Suites 2 and 6) or finales (Suites 1, 4, and 7); No.
l begins with a Praeludium in fully worked-out sonata form with
repeated exposition. Marches occur in Nos. 1 and 6; No. 6 concludes
with the programmatic Finale (‘Trauermusik und Festmarsch’),
which was Lachner’s response to the outcome of the Franco-Prussian
war of 1870-1. This finale has many Mendelssohnian resonances; it
begins in C minor with an oboe recitative, leading to an ‘andante
27 In E minor of 1854, which predates his published Symphony No. 1; see Theodor
Müller-Reuter, Lexikon der deutschen Konzertliteratur (Leipzig, 1909), i. 393-4.
568 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
maestoso', during which the chorale ‘Ein’ feste Burg’ enters as cantus
firmus; the ‘Festmarsch’ is a C major ‘allegro’. Kretzschmar was а
Lachner enthusiast:
Lachner speaks in the authentic tone of the suite; even when sophisticated,
he remains clear and approachable; and when he has to choose he prefers
the trivial to the esoterically complex ... his preferred speech-form [in
minuets and andantes] seems to grow from the idioms of the old Viennese
school, especially that of Schubert, then those of Spohr and Mendelssohn,
to make a new fourth in the constellation.?®
Generally, the symphony/sonata substitute suite would be more
likely to include a prelude and fugue (or the more modern equivalent,
introduction and fugue) than a symphony or sonata. From the
symphony and sonata themselves the suite took over the scherzo,
march, variations, romanza, and, most importantly, the variation of
the tonic through the work. All Lachner's suites vary the tonic,
though some more adventurously than others. The generally lighter
musical discourse of a suite would tend towards separated and
thematically distinct movements. In a discussion which arose after
the appearance of Goldmark's Ländliche Hochzeit Symphony in 1876
as to whether the work should more properly be called a suite,
Brahms was of the view that the two genres differed primarily in
‘character’ and 'treatment'.?? Rimsky-Korsakov's reasons for his
change of title for Antar lay emphasis on the first movement
which ‘has no thematic development whatever; only variations and
paraphrases’.3° A work of lighter musical discourse needed either
a significant dance component, or other Baroque contrapuntal
component, or a programme, to avoid overlap with the genre
serenade; indeed Goldmark's two violin suites, which do not have
such a component, are indistinguishable from serenades.
As with the programme symphony and the symphonic poem, the
programme suite could base itself on literature or legend, or on
subjects from the physical environment (which is indeed a common
type of material for the programme suite). Among the first of the
programmatic suites are: Raff's Op. 75 (1858-9); his Italienische Suite
[Italian Suite] (1871), with the movements Ouverture, Barcarole,
Intermezzo (‘Pulcinella’), Notturno, and Tarantelle; his Suite No. 2,
‘in ungarischer Weise’ [In the Hungarian manner] (1874), with
?8 Hermann Kretzchmar, Führer durch den Konzert-Saal, i. Sinfonie und Suite (5th edn.;
Leipzig, 1919), 661.
29 Karl Goldmark, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Vienna and Munich, 1922), 89-90.
39 Nikolay Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. Judah A. Joffe (3rd
edn.; London, 1974), 93.
THE SUITE IN MID-CENTURY 569
the movements ‘An der Grenze’ (Ouverture), ‘Auf der Puszta’
(Träumerei), ‘Bei einem Aufzug der Honved’ (Marsch), “Volkslied
mit Variationen’, and ‘Vor der Csarda’ (Finale); and his Suite Aus
Thüringen [From Thuringia] (1875), with the movements 'Salus
intrantibus’, ‘Elisabethenhymne’, ‘Reigen der Gnomen und Sylphen',
‘Variationen über das Volkslied’, and ‘Landliches Fest’.
Massenet wrote his seven numbered orchestral suites between 1865
and 1881. Only No. 1 has no programmatic title; the others are No.
2, Scénes hongroises (1871); No. 3, Scénes dramatiques (1873); No. 4,
Scenes pittoresques (1871); No. 5, Scenes napolitaines (1876); No. 6,
Scénes de féerie (1879); and No. 7, Scénes alsaciennes (1881). No. 3
is based on Shakespeare; its three movements are headed: i. Prélude
et divertissement (la tempéte— Ariel et les Esprits); ii. Mélodrame (le
sommeil de Desdémone); iii. Scéne finale: Macbeth (les sorciéres—
le festin—l'apparation—les fanfares du couronnement). This last
movement is highly successful in treating the picturesque elements
of Macbeth while not in any sense being either a résumé of the play
or a disquisition on its serious import. No. 4 has the four movements:
i. Marche, ii. Air de ballet, iii. Angelus, and iv. Féte bohéme; the
Angelus depends on an opening alternation of chant-like material
with bell imitations, and shows well Massenet's gift for succinct,
picturesque vignettes (Ex. 401).
Ex. 401
Andante sostenuto ( J =48)
et nn Ee
EE 5 А E ==]
570 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
Massenet’s Suite No. 7 seems initially to be a physical-environment
suite, but took its inspiration from’a story by Daudet, and lengthy
quotations appear for each of its four movements, creating a narrative
programme. This work also has a nationalist aspect as does Daudet's
story, for Alsace had been lost to France in the Franco-Prussian
war. =
Some of these programme suites, especially those with three or
four movements, partake strongly of the symphony/sonata-substitute
tendency, for that tendency and programmaticism are of course by
no means mutually exclusive. The chief distinction between a three-
or four-movement programme suite and a programme symphony
would be in the size of movements, probably in the form of the
movements (for instance, the first movement of Massenet’s Scenes
pittoresques is a brief ternary March), and weight of musical discourse.
Other composers of the programme suite were Saint-Saéns, Suite
algérienne (1880), Charpentier, Impressions d'Italie (1890) and
Debussy.
THE SUITE IN THE 1880s
Tchaikovsky's suites are in many ways highpoints in suite com-
position; they not only contain great music, but show their composer
moving freely within the field of tendencies already discussed,
elevating and modifying traditions. His four orchestral suites come
from the eleven-year gap between Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5. Early
in the preparation of his First Suite, Op. 43, he wrote to Nadezhda
von Meck (25 August 1878) that, after sketching the scherzo, ‘it
came into my head to write a whole row of pieces for orchestra,
from which I could form a suite in Lachner’s manner’—an interesting
acknowledgement of the importance and priority of Lachner as
example. Modifications to the order and substance of the movements
during the compositional process show that something more than a
haphazard agglomeration of movements was involved. His letter to
Nadezhda von Meck of 16 April 1884 concerning his Third Suite
describes how he was
collecting some materials for a future symphonic composition, the form of
which is not yet defined. Maybe it will be a symphony, on the other hand
it may be a suite. The latter form has for some time been particularly
sympathetic to me because of the freedom it allows a composer not to be
hampered by traditions, conventional examples and established rules.?!
31 These two letters to Madame von Meck are cited and discussed in Gerald Abraham's
Foreword to the Eulenburg Edition of Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 3 (London, 1978).
THE SUITE IN THE 1880s 571
These remarks from one of the period’s foremost composers are of
course extremely important to the definition of the suite in relation
to the symphony (for Tchaikovsky the proximity was close, but the
alternative real): but at the same time they also warn against too
rigorous a delineation of types of suite.
Tchaikovsky began his first suite ‘in Lachner's manner’ (1878-9)
with an ‘Introduzione e fuga’, followed it with the Classical or
Romantic movements— Divertimento, Intermezzo, Marche mini-
ature, and Scherzo—and concluded with a further neo-Baroque
movement, a Gavotte— originally called ‘Giants’ Dance’. A program-
matic tendency emerged quite strongly in his Second Suite, Op. 53
(1883): ‘Jeu de sons’, Valse, Scherzo burlesque (including parts for
four accordions), *Réves d’enfant’, ‘Danse baroque (style Dargomi-
zhsky)’.The first movement contains a massive central fugue. The
Third Suite, Op. 55 (1884), opens with an ‘Elégie’ in which the tone
of lament has become mere wistfulness; it begins with a three-bar
phrased tune which shows all the subtlety, originality, and generative
power one expects of an elevated-style piece; the ambiguity between
tune and accompaniment, as the tune is reiterated over changing
underparts, is a particularly telling sophistication (Ex. 402). This
theme opens an original sonata-form structure with a many-themed
exposition, all themes being related by motif, and with a partial and
reordered recapitulation. The subsequent movements in this suite are
Valse “mélancolique, Scherzo, and Tema con varazioni (with twelve
variations).
Ex. 402
Andantino molto cantabile
P= == — 2
Жеты
А
LF IE 2 ——3-— — 1—
Sp MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
o —
Ne le a
жылык "Р
ral or ЫШ
The suite, particularly the programmatic variety, played a highly
important role in Debussy’s early period—perhaps partly as a result
of his teacher Guiraud’s interest in the genre. A surviving Intermezzo
(1882) (published in 1944) is part of a projected suite for cello and
orchestra. His four-movement orchestral suite Triomphe de Bacchus
(c.1882) is mostly lost, and his Premiere suite d'orchestre (c.1883),
with the movements ‘Fête’, ‘Ballet’, ‘Rêve’, and ‘Bacchanale’, remains
unpublished. The original score of Printemps, symphonic suite for
female chorus, orchestra, and piano (1887), is also lost; the work
appeared arranged for piano duet in 1904 and was reorchestrated
from this version by Büsser under Debussy’s supervision in 1912.
The Petite Suite (1886-9) for piano duet has ‘En bateau’, ‘Cortége’,
‘Menuet’, and ‘Ballet’; and the Suite bergamasque (1890; rev. 1905)
for piano solo consists of Prélude, Menuet, Clair de lune, and
Passepied. In the later suite Pour /e piano Debussy turned to Baroque
models for the three movements Prélude, Sarabande, and Toccata.
THE EXTRACT SUITE
Although primarily an original and self-sufficient genre during this
period, the suite lent itself to the presentation of concert excerpts
from larger works for the theatre—incidental music, ballet, opera.
Bizet’s L’ Arlésienne suite, No. 1 (1872), and Grieg’s two Peer Gynt
suites (1874-5) are early examples of the type. All three show a strong
symphonic-analogue tendency: Bizet’s includes some recomposition,
with a conflation of two originally separate numbers, and all three
suites are four-movement works. Thus, Grieg included in his two
suites only eight of the original twenty-three numbers of the incidental
music. Tchaikovsky’s ballet-suite Shchelkunchik [The Nutcracker],
Op. 7la, is a further example of the extract suite made by the
composer. Others could also create such arrangements, as is the case,
for instance, with Bizet’s L'Arlésienne suite, No. 2, arranged by
Ernest Guiraud.
In his suite Mozartiana, Op. 61 (1887), Tchaikovsky created
something new in this field, for it consists of arrangements of four
THE SERENADE 573
unrelated pieces by Mozart. Perhaps prompted by the 6/8 beginnings
of his own Second and Third Suites, Tchaikovsky here took the bold
step of beginning Mozartiana with a gigue (Eine kleine Gigue für das
Klavier, K 574), which he orchestrated and lightly arranged with
fuller harmonies. The second movement is a similar treatment of the
Menuett für Klavier, K 355. The third movement is entitled Preghiera
and is Mozart's late Motet ‘Ave Verum Corpus’, K 618, in an overtly
Romantic arrangement ‘d’après une transcription de F. Liszt’. And
the fourth, “Theme et variations’, is an arrangement of Mozart's
Zehn Variationen für Klavier, K 455 (on "Unser dummer Póbel meint’,
from Gluck's Singspiel, La Rencontre imprévue); here the arranging
is again done with a light hand, but includes alterations of cadenzas,
and of variation 9 to make it more virtuosic for a solo violin.
The late-Romantic suite was, then, a distinct and significant
genre, arising as a multi-faceted response to a historicized musical
environment, a response free but controlled, liberating but enriching.
THE SERENADE
The serenade is a more recent genre than the suite, and had
flourished, along with its close relatives the divertimento and the
cassation, during the Classical period as a lighter version of the
symphony/chamber music/sonata genres. Heinrich Christoph Koch
had indeed defined the divertimento by comparison with sonata
types; it was ‘not polyphonic or so extensively worked-out as
sonata-types’,?? nor was it, in his view, so organically unified. And
the serenade had a strong life in our period again as a lighter version
of these more weighty genres. Its orientation was towards charming,
entertainment music apt for an evening greeting; the name has
resonances of outdoor performance, and Kretzschmar called the
genre Garten-musik.
Unlike a suite, a serenade might consist of one movement:
Rubinstein's Op. 22 (1855) for piano has three such as a collection,
of which No. 2, in G minor, is in 5/4 time, with a suggestion of
folk-instruments, gusli and balalayka; Tchaikovsky's Serenade
mélancolique, Op. 26 (1876), is a single-movement work for violin
and orchestra; Wolfs Italian Serenade is in one movement, and
so is Strauss's Serenade for thirteen wind instruments. But the sere-
nade was more usually multi-movement, with four or more move-
ments thematically and temporally distinct—not so organically
unified. However, Robert Volkmann's serenades use multi-
32 Cited and discussed in Dahlhaus, "Zur Problematik’, p. 855.
574 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
movement/single-movement structure, involving substantial thematic
unification. Dvorák's D minor Serenade, Op. 44 for wind, cello, and
bass (1878) in four movements, includes a recall of the opening
movement at the end of the Finale.
The serenade was not a genre which included Baroque dances or
other Baroque contrapuntal forms (there is; however, a canonic
serenade by Salomon Jadassohn), though it characteristically included
the Classical minuet or modern dances, particularly march and waltz.
Nor was the serenade so often a vehicle for programmaticism or
national flavour as was the suite; though Wolf's Serenade for string
quartet (1887), orchestrated as /talienische Serenade in 1892, is an
example. The serenade and suite touch as sonata or symphony
substitutes; Goldmark's two violin suites are cases in point, and
Tchaikovsky's Serenade for strings, Op. 48 (1880) consists of
‘Pezzo in forma di Sonatina’ (which he confessed was deliberately
Mozartian), Valse, Elegia, and Finale (introducing two folk-tunes).
The serenade was usually for orchestra (Brahms, Jadassohn), string
orchestra (Volkmann, Fuchs, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak), woodwind
ensemble (Dvorák, Strauss), solo with orchestra (Volkmann, Bruch),
or chamber grouping (Théodore Gouvy, two for flute and strings,
one for piano quartet; Carl Reinecke, two for piano trio).
Brahms's early contributions to the revivification of the genre
mark an important aspect of the relationship of symphony and
serenade. By September 1858 he had written a four-movement
serenade for flute, two clarinets, horn, bassoon, and strings; but by
8 December, persuaded by friends, he had resolved ‘finally to turn
the first Serenade into a symphony’. However, eight days later he
had added two scherzos and was again calling the work a serenade.
It was thus prevented from becoming a symphony by its alteration
into a six-movement work; Brahms clearly recognized that, in their
reliance on Haydnesque and middle-period Beethovenian models,
the four original movements could not form a work of sufficient
import to be a ‘beautiful, grand’ post-Beethovenian symphony.?3
His Second Serenade also shows Classical leanings, firstly in its
five-movement structure, with a Scherzo and Quasi menuetto or-
ganized around a central Adagio, secondly in the purity of its
harmonic resource in the four fast movements, and thirdly in the
setting, for, although the scoring is often commented upon as being
a Romantic innovation (based on a precedent in Méhul), the effect
of omitting violins from the orchestra is suggestive of an accompanied
woodwind serenade.
33 Brahms Briefwechsel, v. 226-8; Clara Schumann-Johannes Brahms Briefe, 1. 254.
VARIED CONCEPTIONS OF THE SYMPHONY 575
The first three Serenades of Robert Fuchs (1847-1927) are
four-movement works for string orchestra; No. 4 adds two horns
and is in five movements, and No. 5 is for small orchestra, again in
four movements. All are significantly smaller in extent than Brahms’s
serenades and than Fuchs’s own symphonies. A particular differ-
entiation from the symphony is also Fuchs’s tendency to begin with
a slowish movement (Andante or Allegretto); his Third Serenade
begins with the graceful melody shown in Ex. 403. The Fifth Serenade
was written as a tribute to Johann Strauss the younger, and includes
themes from his Fledermaus in its last movement. These were among
Fuchs’s most successful and popular works, so that in Viennese
circles he acquired the nickname 'Serenaden-Fuchs'.
VARIED CONCEPTIONS OF THE SYMPHONY
The term ‘symphony’ was now mostly reserved for orchestral
works of serious and substantial musical import in from one to seven
movements. As already noted, the title was used in France also for
Ex. 403
Andante sostenuto
E—14 —94— so oo os
ZZ gg wen
576 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
solo keyboard works which took over something of the textural
weight and stylistic substance of thé orchestral symphony. The genre
had a strong relationship and some overlap (again particularly in
France) with the concerto; and there is one case, also in that country,
of the title being used for a chamber work: Gounod's Petite
Symphonie (1885) for nine woodwind instruments.
The unitary movement for orchestra is primarily found with the
designations 'overture', 'symphonic poem’, or 'fantasia'. Wagner
titled his Siegfried Idyll (1870) ‘Symphonie’ in his manuscript fair
copy, and towards the end of his life conceived the unrealized project
of writing some (further) one-movement symphonies.34^ Puccini's
Capriccio sinfonico (1883) may be regarded as a one-movement
symphony, with ‘capriccio’ added to the title to excuse any ir-
regularities in this first major orchestral essay by the student
composer. But where the designated movements of a symphony are
fewer than three, there is usually some marked differentiation of
musical material to suggest an underlying larger number. Schumann's
Fourth Symphony (1851) was published as a ‘Symphony ... in one
movement' with five specified parts. Arensky's Second Symphony
(1889) is in one movement with slow and scherzo episodes. Liszt's
Eine Symphonie zu Dantes Divina Commedia (the ‘Dante’ Symphony,
1855-6) is in two movements, the second comprising two distinct
sections. Saint-Saéns's Third Symphony (1886) groups an underlying
four-movement design of 2 + 2 into a designated two-movement
structure. True three-movement symphonies are Liszt’s ‘Faust’
Symphony (1854-7) (though the Finale has a differentiated choral
epilogue), Bruch's F minor Symphony (1870) (its central Adagio
leading directly into the final Allegro), Dvorák's Third Symphony
(1873), d'Indy's Symphonie cévenole (1886), César Franck's Sym-
phony (1888) (where the composer included slow and scherzo
elements in the middle movement), and Chausson's Symphony (1890).
Raff could allow his programme for a symphony to group essentially
four-movement works into three ‘divisions’. But the norm of four
movements inherited from Classical and early Romantic times was
maintained during this period, and re-emphasized by the great
symphonists of the 1860s to 1880s: Bruckner, Brahms, Borodin,
Tchaikovsky, and Dvorák. This norm derives from, and is a mark
of, the reverence in which the genre was held, and it embodied
the highest aspirations of instrumental composition. Following
34 Curt von Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1978),
ii. 468, 589-90.
VARIED CONCEPTIONS OF THE SYMPHONY 577
Beethoven's precedent in his ‘Pastoral’, the symphony could be
expanded to five movements: Schumann's Third (1851), Raff's
First, 4n das Vaterland (1861), Lalo's Symphonie espagnole (1874),
Tchaikovsky's Third Symphony (1875), and Goldmark's Ländliche
Hochzeit (1876), but only very exceptionally any further. Rubinstein's
popular Océan Symphonie exists in three versions, in four movements
(1851), six movements (1863), and seven movements (1880).
While the symphony remained normally purely orchestral, it could,
since Berlioz's Harold en Italie, readily incorporate a solo instrument:
Gade's Symphony No. 5 (1852), Giovanni Pacini’s ‘Dante’ Symphony
(1865), and d'Indy's Symphonie sur un chant montagnard frangais
(Symphonie cévenole) are for orchestra with solo piano; Lalo's
Symphonie espagnole is for orchestra with solo violin; and Saint-
Saéns's Third Symphony is for orchestra with piano duet and organ.
In this type of symphony there is already a mixture of the primary
genres of symphony and concerto. Lalo's work is indeed more like
a five-movement concerto than a symphony because of its substantial
and dominating virtuoso writing for the violin; the virtuoso writing
for piano in d'Indy's Symphonie 1s perhaps less dominant, but none
the less real. As always, the title becomes an important part of the
composer's artistic statement. This mixture of genres also occurs in
works which are primarily concertos but entitled concerto
symphonique.
Since Beethoven, composers had also been interested in including
voices, but, perhaps because of proximity to choral genres such as
the ode and cantata, the choral symphony remained a rarity during
this period, though a highly characteristic one. Following Beethoven
and Mendelssohn, Liszt used voices in the final movements of both
his symphonies. But between then and Mahler's Second Symphony
(1894) very few major works of this type were written. Paul Lacombe's
Sapho (1878), Augusta Holmes's Les Argonautes (1880), and Cecile
Chaminade's Les Amazones (c.1888) are all entitled symphonie dra-
matique and draw on models by Félicien David and Berlioz. Elgar's
Op. 25 is entitled “Symphony for Chorus and Orchestra The Black
Knight (1889-92), and is in four scenes (perhaps as movement
parallels). It belongs in the English choral cantata tradition, and
Elgar later called his Symphony in A flat Op. 55 ‘Number 1’. And
when it became clear to Bruckner that he would not finish his
Ninth Symphony, he suggested performance of the three completed
movements with his Te Deum added; this was however substitutive,
and extensive sketches remain for an instrumental Finale.
The diminutive sinfonietta seems to have been first used by Raff
578 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
for his Op. 188 (1876) for ten woodwind instruments.35 Cowen and
Theodore Gouvy wrote orchestral sinfoniettas in 1881 and c.1886.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s String Quartet of 1879, entirely based on Russian
folk-tunes, was subsequently scrapped, and its first three movements
revised and orchestrated as Sinfonietta on Russian Themes, Op. 31
(1884). ә
STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS
The nature of the work of composition and performance, the
imposing and varied sound world involved, together with the very
strong traditions of the genre, made the symphony the ‘apex-work’
for late-Romantic composers. Elevated style was axiomatic, and such
style characteristically involved some kind of integration of movement
structures, which could be effected by various techniques in isolation
or combination: movements or movement types flowing into one
another, thematic quotation or transformation across movements,
motivic unification of themes of different movements. This thrust to
continuity and fusion had its roots in Beethoven (especially in his
Symphonies Nos. 5, 6, and 9); and it nourished a tendency to the
climactic finale (as in Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth). Where one
theme, by prominent quotation or transformation between move-
ments, comes to dominate a complete work, it can be called a
motto-theme (even if other themes also cross movement boundaries
in a less obvious manner); Berlioz had established the use of
motto-themes in symphonies, and his example was followed par-
ticularly by Tchaikovsky.
Thematic materials for symphonies would ideally have epic quality,
often with motivic prominence, elemental ethos, complex phrase
structures, internal developmental processes, integrated contrapuntal
elements, and dependence on instrumental idioms. Sonata form
remained the generating thought process of the symphonic drama;
it was almost always used for first movements, often for finales and
for the sections of scherzo and trio movements, and it also appeared
in slow movements. Where contrast-based forms (ternary and rondo)
or variation form or fugue were used, these were often inflected by
sonata-form influences in types of development and types of relations
between themes. The sense of symphonic pacing thus involved
pregnance, dramatic unfolding, evolution, and rapprochement at all
35 After abandoning his initial title ‘Suite’ for the Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Schumann
referred to the work in 1841 as 'Symphonette', though by the end of that year it had acquired
its present title; see Gerald Abraham, "Robert Schumann’, The New Grove (London, 1980),
xvi. 839.
STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS 579
levels of structure. This could take place in an extended time-span,
related again to the Beethovenian precedents of the Eroica and Ninth
Symphonies; and Bruckner in particular explored such monu-
mentality. Typical expansions of Classical tonality would involve the
use of remote tonal regions (Tchaikovsky's B major second subject
in the first movement of his F minor Symphony is an extreme
example), the multiplication of tonal areas (the three-keyed sonata-
form exposition was a commonly used resource by Brahms and
Bruckner), and the veiling of tonal areas (as in the second subject
of Brahms's Second Symphony first movement, the opening of
Bruckners Eighth Symphony, or the Finale of Dvorak’s Fifth—
where the first subject has its opening fifty bars in the mediant minor,
which key also opens the recapitulation). Developmental techniques
drew on Classical precedent (fragmentation, extension, intervallic
modification, variation), and Baroque devices (inversion, diminution,
augmentation, fugato, contrapuntal combination). Characteristically,
late-Romantic developmental procedures would use such techniques
in the service of expressive alteration; a powerful example is the
manner in which the strongly pastoral second subject of the first
movement of Brahms's Third Symphony becomes an epic-heroic
gesture in the subsequent development section.
The breadth of true symphonic pacing was enabled and enhanced
by the great timbral variety inherent in the orchestral sound world,
as also by the grandeur of the orchestral tutti. Orchestration depends
on the play of timbral colour, but orchestration in these years was
much more than a varied presentation of abstract ideas. The
disposition of themes and their derivations across the available
sound resources becomes part of the thematic substance itself, and
orchestration must be regarded as an element of structure. This
could involve particular emphasis on the idiomatic nature of themes;
Bruckner's trumpet first subject for his Third Symphony, Dvorák's
flute theme within the first subject of his Eighth, grow out of the
instruments concerned, and embody musical aspects of the very
being of these instruments. Tchaikovsky offered a different perspective
on this matter when he wrote ‘the musical idea carries with it the
proper instrumentation for its expression’.?6 Use of the possibilities
of chamber-music-related dialogue appear especially in Dvorak and
Brahms; indeed in Dvorák's mature symphonic style, antiphony of
an integrated instrumental-thematic nature was a mode of pregnance
early in a symphony. Structural orchestration could involve certain
36 Cited and discussed in Warrack, Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, p. 8.
580 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
differentiated orchestrations for specific formal areas: Dvorak fa-
voured an orchestral tutti after the opening of a fast movement as
an early climactic restatement (often marked grandioso); Bruckner
favoured a string contrast for the initiation of his second subjects,
and a quiet string or woodwind initiation of his development sections;
Brahms employed a solo effect for his second-subject initiations. The
block-like orchestration of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s
Fourth Symphony clearly and simply articulates the structure, as
well as the private programme of the movement.
Within the concept of structural orchestration, composers de-
veloped their individual sound preferences. Commentators have noted
Tchaikovsky’s fondness for primary colours; Brahms’s doublings of
melody line across instruments from different sections are highly
characteristic, especially of his later orchestral style; Bruckner’s
treatment of woodwind, brass, and strings as separate departments
to be used en bloc is often related by commentators to his abilities
as an organ virtuoso. Although the writing-out of the full score was
usually the last part of the main compositional effort for a symphony,
this does not of course in any way deny a structural value to
orchestration. And a continuity sketch for the opening of Dvorak’s
Sixth Symphony shows already that flute and oboe were to provide
the initial antiphony to the bass in this theme; indeed Dvorak’s note
of the instrumentation was entered before the tempo-marking of the
movement, which therefore had to be squeezed in.?"
PROGRAMME SYMPHONIES OF THE 1850$: SCHUMANN, LISZT
Beethoven’s concerns with programme and structural matters
involving fusion of movements, expansion of confines, and climactic
finales had been developed by composers up to 1850; Berlioz, Spohr,
Mendelssohn, and Schumann had used some or all of these concepts.
Schumann continued this line into the 1850s with his Third and
Fourth Symphonies (respectively 1850 and 1841; completely rev.
1851). The Third, the ‘Rhenish’, has an additional movement inspired
by a ‘solemn ceremony’ in Cologne Cathedral, a stately slow
movement before the Finale, which uses measured imitative coun-
terpoint on trombones to parallel the solemnity of the programme 29
The Fourth Symphony has great thematic cohesion tending towards
monothematicism. Although it remains possible to identify separate
37 Antonin Hořejš, Antonin Dvorak: The Composer's Life and Work in Pictures (Prague,
1955), unpaginated.
38 For the sources of the nickname and programmatic associations of this Symphony, see
Linda Correll Roesner’s Preface to the Eulenburg Edition of the work (London, 1986).
PROGRAMME SYMPHONIES OF THE 1850s 581
themes, the five-note Clara motif stated at the outset of the
introduction dominates the work, and from it all subsequent themes
may be seen to be derived (even the seemingly new theme of the
development of the first ‘movement’ includes this motif). The work
is also fused by being continuous. Though it was published in this,
its second version, as Symphonie No. IV D moll, Introduction, Allegro,
Romanze, Scherzo und Finale in einem Satze, it is customarily regarded
as having the four traditional movements with introductions to the
first and last.
Liszt’s two symphonies come from his Weimar period, and are
part of his programmatic and idealistic concerns of this decade. In
them, as in his other great ‘multi-movement’ work of these years,
the Piano Sonata, Liszt dispensed with any kind of dance movement.
His ‘Faust’ Symphony was completed in three instrumental move-
ments in 1854; they have been described as ‘a triptych of three of
his finest symphonic poems’,®9 and each movement depicts a principal
character from Goethe’s drama in a meditative, non-narrative
programmatic manner: the first movement is Faust himself, the
second Gretchen, the third Mephistopheles. But the work also
coheres as a symphony. The first movement is a large-scale sonata
form, clearly articulated on Classical precepts (thus less radical than
the Piano Sonata); the second movement uses some first-movement
themes as subsidiary material; and the third movement is a demonic
parody of the first, involving transformation of its themes with the
expressive purpose of representing Mephistopheles as a non-
originating, negative, distorting force. (In this, the processes of the
movement have some kinship with those of the Finale of Berlioz’s
Symphonie fantastique.) Liszt’s third movement follows the formal
and thematic course of the first; it is also, therefore, in sonata form,
but it acts on a higher formal level as a variation of the first
movement, which is only departed from by a quotation of the
principal slow-movement theme just prior to the Finale’s recap-
itulation. In 1857, after completing his next symphony chorally, Liszt
added to the ‘Faust’ the ‘Chorus mysticus’, a short choral epilogue
which sets Goethe’s hymn to the ‘eternal feminine’; this epilogue is
based on the principal theme of the second movement, and the
general large-scale thematic plan of the Symphony thus becomes
ABA, RB.
Liszt’s Symphonie zu Dante’s Divina commedia (the ‘Dante’ Sym-
39 For this stimulating view, see Gerald Abraham, The Concise Oxford History of Music
(Oxford, 1979), 684.
582 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
phony) is also based on a great literary work, and in some ways
may be viewed as more dependent om its programme for coherence
than his "Faust Symphony. It is in two designated movements
(‘Inferno’ and ‘Purgatorio’), but the second falls into two distinct
parts. The first movement opens with a trombone setting of the
inscription over the gates of Hell. Although the 'allegro' sections of
this movement are strongly based on sonata-form procedures, the
overall form is ternary, with a central slow section depicting the
lovers Francesca and Paolo. The almost unrelenting use of discord
in the allegro sections often forces the tonal basis into the background;
this basis is D minor, written without a key signature. The Symphony
as a whole has a progressive tonal scheme, for B minor emerges as
the tonic of the instrumental part of the second movement (also
ternary), and B major as the tonic of the subsequent vocal part of
this movement. The work increases in foreground tonal clarity during
its course, which is clearly a feature of the programmatic depiction.
The last part of the work is a choral Magnificat for women's or
boys' voices—actually a meditative setting of the first verse of the
Magnificat only, with quiet ‘hosannas’ and ‘hallelujas’ appended.
Although it is neither designated a separate movement, nor separated
from the preceding music by a rest, it stands in place of a movement
on Dante's Paradiso and draws its highly distinctive themes in part
from three plainsong psalm-tones. Wagner, who had suggested this
kind of ending to Liszt, called the Symphony ‘one of the most
astounding deeds of music’.*0
RAFF'S PROGRAMME SYMPHONIES
Joachim Raff carried the programme symphony into the next two
decades. Of his eleven surviving symphonies (an early one of 1854
is partly lost) only two are non-programmatic. His First Symphony
is entitled Ал das Vaterland, his Third Im Walde, his Fifth Lénore,
while his Sixth has a poetic motto, the programmatic implications
of which Raff detailed in a letter to von Bülow.*! His Seventh
Symphony is /n den Alpen and his last four form a cycle on the
seasons of the year: No. 8, Frühlingsklünge; No. 9, Im Sommer; No.
10, Zur Herbstzeit; No. 11, Der Winter. These surviving symphonies
were composed in the period 1859-79 and published soon after
completion, for Raff was celebrated during these years as one of
the leading composers of Germany.*? He was a fluent stylist in the
40 Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen x (2nd edn.; Leipzig, 1888), 100.
41 Müller-Reuter, Lexikon, pp. 388-9.
42 Markus Rómer, Joseph Joachim Raff (1822-1882) (Wiesbaden, 1982), 36-7, 55.
RAFF’S PROGRAMME SYMPHONIES 583
Mendelssohn-Spohr tradition, and Liszt had thought highly enough
of his early abilities at instrumentation to enlist his help in the
orchestration of some of his own symphonic poems.
Raff's symphony of 1854 was in five ‘divisions’ [Abtheilungen], two
of which (Scherzo and March) became the last two movements of
his First Orchestral Suite. An das Vaterland is also in five ‘divisions’ —
his term Abtheilung seems to have been equivalent to ‘movement’ at
this time; but thereafter Raff favoured the four-movement symphony,
though he could allow his programme to dominate this structure in
a grouping of movements by larger ‘divisions’—the term now used
in a different sense. This feature may be seen in his two most popular
symphonies, /m Walde (1869) and Lénore (1872). The former, properly
entitled Jm Walde Sinfonie Nr. 3 (the order is significant), has:
Ist Division: Daytime. Impressions and Feelings. Allegro; 2nd Division: At
twilight. A. Dreaming. Largo. B. Dance of the Dryads. Allegro assai; 3rd
Division: Night. Still murmuring of the night in the forest. Entry and Exit
of the wild hunt with Frau Holle (Hulda) and Wotan. Daybreak. Allegro.
The second division is thus linked by its programmatic siting 'at
twilight’, for the Largo and Allegro assai are separated, self-enclosed,
ternary-form movements in different keys, corresponding to the
traditional middle movements of the symphonic genre.
The first movement is in a clear sonata form, beginning with a
highly poetic anticipatory 'curtain'—twenty-six bars in the main
allegro tempo, which adumbrate in lightly sketched form the principal
thematic material of the movement. (The idea of an introduction in
the main tempo, which Raff used again in the last movement, had
a precedent in Mendelssohn— for instance in the piano concertos.)
Raff's first subject shows aspects of his compositional fluency and
ingenuity (see Ex. 404, bars 23-36). It grows imperceptibly out of
the ‘curtain’, and has a structure of statement + semi-palindromic
Ex. 404
584 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
———À
3 +уп
fl
а
|
[repetition
_—
response, in which the eight-bar basis is blurred by motivic means;
its bass is a typically smooth motion paralleling the melody. The
second subject group has two themes, the second a ‘hunting’ theme;
the group is stated in the subdominant, and recapitulated in the
dominant (a lengthy coda re-establishing the tonic). This tonal plan
has a strategic purpose, for the true recapitulation of the second
subject comes at the very end of the Symphony, where it appears,
as apotheosis, in the tonic for the first time. The Finale has another
original introduction in the main tempo: an eleven-bar theme is
stated five times in a mixture of fugue and variation. The main body
of the movement has little to do with this theme, being a fully
worked-out sonata form of vigorous, even raucous tone, owing much
in its portrayal of the supernatural to Weber and Berlioz.
In Lénore movements 1 and 2 are grouped in the first division,
‘Joy of Love’, the next two divisions ('Separation' and ‘Reuniting in
Death’) consisting of one movement each. Again the four movements
follow Classical precedent, the opening Allegro and subsequent
Andante portraying different aspects of the Joy of Love. In the third
movement an army arrives to carry off the beloved in its ranks; the
march makes a steady long-term crescendo depicting the approach,
REVITALIZATION OF CLASSICAL FORMS 585
and, after a central section on the passionate farewell of the lovers,
a corresponding decrescendo to the close of the movement depicts
the departure. This is a simple poetic idea, but is nevertheless very
powerful, almost theatrical in effect. The central part of the fourth
movement portrays Lenore’s horse-ride with her dead lover in a
macabre perpetuum mobile incorporating recall of themes from
previous movements; a discordant climax leads to a slow quasi-
religious ending.
REVITALIZATION OF CLASSICAL FORMS: BRUCKNER
Although Bruckner began composing multi-movement in-
strumental works during the 1860s (the C minor String Quartet
(1862), Studiensymphonie (1863), Symphony No. 0 (1864 and 1869),
and Symphony No. 1 (1866)), his instrumental music did not have
a significant public impact until well into the 1880s, and by 1885
only two of his multi-movement instrumental works were in print.
This slowness of recognition was partly due to performance diffi-
culties, partly due to Bruckner’s adherence to Wagner, which
antagonized the powerful critic Hanslick from 1873 on, and partly
due to the very substance of his music itself. His symphonic style
became so individual that the greatness, expressive coherence and
intensity of his music, now beyond question, were subjects of
controversy; and even Brahms at the very end of his life still could
not comprehend them.?3 Bruckner's dedicated cultivation of the
symphony was thus a triumph of faith over experience. Some
encouragement came in the form of a government grant to assist in
‘the composition of major symphonic works'^^ when he moved to
Vienna in 1868, but undoubtedly Bruckner regarded his creativity
as very separate from worldly concerns and within the context of
his deep religious faith. Symphonies Nos. 2-5 belong to the years
1871-8, and Symphonies Nos. 6-8 to the years 1879-87; No. 9
remained unfinished at his death in 1896.
His symphonic style may be seen as an integrated synthesis of
experience in three different sound worlds. His education, his
appointments prior to the move to Vienna, and many aspects of his
life in Vienna were dominated by the world of the church musician,
and sacred musical styles of the late-Renaissance, Baroque, and
Classical Mass remained a fundamental background to his own
musical thought processes. Bach formed an important part of
his musical education; he copied the Art of Fugue, studied the
33 Richard Specht, Johannes Brahms, trans. Eric Blom (London, 1930), 262.
44 Ernst Decsey, Bruckner: Versuch eines Lebens (Berlin, 1921), 57.
586 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
chorale-harmonizations and the ‘48°. During a period of study under
the theorist Sechter he was compelled to forego free composition
and concentrate on contrapuntal expertise. He remained a practising
virtuoso on the organ until near the end of his life, becoming
internationally famous as such during the 1870s, well before his fame
as composer spread beyond local confines. He was particularly cel-
ebrated for his grand improvisations, which were characteristically,
though not exclusively, fugues. Aged 37, he sought to acquire
command of symphonic form and orchestration, turning to Otto
Kitzler as teacher, with whom he studied particularly sonata form.
Beethovenian precedent, especially in the Ninth Symphony, and
Schubertian instrumental style were to become very important
ingredients of his creativity, and these early nineteenth-century
examples formed the second sound world of the Brucknerian
synthesis. It was also through Kitzler that Bruckner became ac-
quainted with the third—that of Wagner’s music. Kitzler mounted
a performance of Tannhäuser in 1862; Bruckner attended the first
performance of Tristan und Isolde at Munich in 1865, meeting
Wagner. From these beginnings Bruckner became an ardent Wag-
nerian, dedicating his Third Symphony to Wagner, using some
Wagner themes in improvisations and symphonies, and visiting
Bayreuth in later years.
The proximity of Bruckner’s symphonies to liturgical choral music
is suggested by the self-quotations from his Masses and other
church music in his symphonies (these are particularly prominent
in Symphonies Nos. 2, 7, and 9), by his thematic recourse to
pseudo-chorales with measured sostenuto block harmony—especially
in Finales (e.g. in the last movement of Symphony No. 5, where
Bruckner refers to the theme concerned as Choral in the score itself),
by modality (e.g. in Symphony No. 6, which opens with phrygian-
mode inflexion), and by certain similarities between his method of
orchestration and the way organists register. But by far the most
important and fundamental influence from the Kapellmeister sound
world is manifest in Bruckner’s chosen ways of treating and extending
material. Inversions, diminutions, augmentations, sequences, ostinati,
scalic basses, pedals, fugatos, contrapuntal combinations (often
involving rhythmic complexity) were all Baroque modes of extension,
and Bruckner applied them within the context of late-
nineteenth-century harmonic and formal structures in a manner
which is one of the chief marks of his individuality in symphonic
thought.
The unchanging basis of Bruckner’s symphonies is the Classical
REVITALIZATION OF CLASSICAL FORMS 587
model of four separated movements, with slow movements placed
second, except in Nos. 8 and 9 where they are third. Bruckner did,
however, follow contemporary trends by using thematic links between
movements, which could be motivic (e.g. in Symphonies 2 and 8),
transformational (e.g. in Symphony No. 5 between movements 2
and 3), or by quotation. A characteristic linkage of this last kind is
the climactic quotation of the opening theme of a symphony at the
close of its Finale, as it were in triumphant resolution. Bruckner
does this in Symphonies Nos. 3-7, while at the close of the Finale
of the Eighth Symphony the principal themes of all previous
movements are brought back in contrapuntal combination. Sonata
form remained the central basis for movements 1 and 4, as for the
sections of the scherzo and trio movements; the slow movements are
ternary in the Studiensymphonie and Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3,
sonata form in Symphony 0, and follow Bruckner’s favoured
АВА ВА, form in Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4-9.
Sonata form in Bruckner's first and last movements was given
massive internal expansion, often involving three separated thematic
groups with differing keys. His first movements characteristically
open with an elemental theme against a tremolo background.
The second subject group is more lyrical (called by Bruckner
Gesangsperiode), often involving extended tonality, in which a
seemingly roving modulatory scheme is nevertheless anchored at
structurally important moments, the main key becoming a reference
point which prevents large-scale instability. The Gesangsperiode of
the first movement of the Seventh Symphony is an example of this,
where the B major of its opening in bar 51 is neither prepared nor
established, but provides a reference point consolidated by thematic
return (in bars 69, 89, and 103) within the otherwise widely
modulating structure. As Bruckner said: ‘during the audacities I
allow myself here and there in my works, I always return to, and
never lose complete sight of, the basic key.’4° The third subject group
(referred to by Bruckner as Schlussperiode) often involves impressive
orchestral unison or heterophonic writing. First-movement ex-
positions are not repeated, except in the Studiensymphonie. The
development sections characteristically begin quietly; points of re-
capitulation are usually clear, but not so in Symphonies Nos. 3 and
4 because of tonic statements in the development sections, in
Symphony No. 8 because of powerful subsequent development within
15 August Góllerich, Anron Bruckner: Ein Lebens- und Schaffens-Bild, ed. Max Auer (Re-
gensburg, 1922-37, repr. 1974), iv/2, p. 644.
586 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
the recapitulation, and in Symphony No. 9 because of a conflation
of development and recapitulation into a unified responsive second
half of the total structure. Such conflation is effected by having a
single pass through the thematicism of the exposition, combining
restatement and development. Redlich has called this type of structure
*telescoped',^$ but the term is somewhat misleading, because the
movements concerned are not necessarily shorter than more normally
structured movements; here this type of structure is called ‘sonata
form with combined response’.
While the forms of Bruckner's slow movements differ, they have
in common the return of sections or themes much varied both by
sonata-style developments and by elaborative figural decoration. In
his later style Bruckner effected stupendous climactic moments by
these means, particularly in the slow movements of Symphonies
Nos. 7-9. The sonata form of the scherzo and trio sections is
characteristically *neo-primitive', in which the exposition ends in a
related key but with only slight thematic differentiation, which has
been evolved gradually during the course of the exposition. The
thematic substance of the scherzos relies on insistent ostinato-like
repetition of short figures, and scalic and sequential materials
proliferate. By such means Bruckner generated immense energy in
his scherzos, and created a new aesthetic value for foreground
repetition itself. The Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony makes a new
chord into a thematic idea (E, G sharp, B flat, C sharp).^? The trios
are characteristically more relaxed and resonant of Ländler style.
Finales have similar structures to first movements. The Choral
element can be introduced as part of the Gesangsperiode (as in the
Finales of the Third Symphony, where it is counterpointed with a
polka, and of the Seventh), or as part of the Schlussperiode (as in
the Finales of the Second and Fifth Symphonies). The Finale of the
Fifth is unique for Bruckner in two structural respects: it begins with
a review and dismissal of the openings of movements 1 and 2, and
the first subject group of the subsequent sonata form is a fugue,
which comes to dominate later stages of the form in combination
with the Choral of the Schlussperiode. Bruckner used ‘sonata form
with combined response' in the Finales of Symphonies Nos. 6 and
7 (in the latter this form is further complicated by a final restatement
of the first subject), and in the 1889 revision of the Finale of the
Third Symphony.
16 Hans Ferdinand Redlich, Foreword to the Eulenburg Edition of Bruckner's Symphony
No. 9 (London, 1963; Foreword dated 1963), p. vii.
47 Dika Newlin draws attention to Schenker’s analysis of this chord in Bruckner, Mahler,
Schoenberg (rev. edn., London, 1979), 95.
REVITALIZATION OF CLASSICAL FORMS 589
Fundamental to his symphonic thought is the Classically derived
concept of the four-bar phrase, and his manuscripts show numberings
of bars in accordance. His phrases naturally differ in function through
a movement (statement, response, liquidation, contrast, restatement.
etc.), and form thus macro phrase complexes. Such processes may
clearly be seen at work in the exposition of the first movement of
the Fifth Symphony, which relies heavily on four-bar structures. But
in the first movement of the Seventh Symphony, his first real public
triumph, Bruckner seems positively to avoid this four-bar basis to
his discourse. His modulations to third-related keys are derived from
Schubertian style.
From Wagner, as well as from the last symphonies of Beethoven
and Schubert, Bruckner received the impulse towards monumentality
based on length and scale, resulting in a renewal of the late-
nineteenth-century symphony as a noble, even sublime, expressive
genre combining lyricism with music of elemental grandeur and
power. His often slow harmonic rhythm, chromatic harmony, and
epic themes also had strong precedents in Wagner; indeed, Bruckner
signalled his discipleship with quotations from Wagner's music. Yet
in a significant respect—the aesthetic— Bruckner can by no means
be called a Wagnerian. Bruckner's programmaticism was usually of
a private, somewhat trivial kind; and, though he spoke of his
symphonic music freely among friends in representational terms (the
first movement of the Fourth Symphony is ‘dawn in a medieval
town’, its Scherzo ‘portrays the hunt', the second movement of the
Eighth Symphony is ‘der deutsche Michel’), these programmes were
never seriously or formally presented to the world, nor can it be
held that they match up to or generate the music in any significant
way. One of Bruckner's descriptions of the first movement of the
Fourth Symphony (the only one to carry a subtitle—‘Romantic’)
concludes: ‘and so the romantic picture develops.'4? Bruckner had
no need for the Wagnerian dependence on the fusion of words and
music, being, like Brahms, concerned with the self-signification of
discourse based on sonata form.
Although the Eighth Symphony is a profoundly mature master-
piece, it has not escaped the textual problems which affect all
Bruckner's symphonies except the Studiensymphonie, and Nos. 0 and
9—in part resulting from well-meaning but inadequate advice from
friends and well-wishers, and the action of this advice on Bruckner's
deep-seated humility and propensity for self-doubt. The Eighth exists
18 Max Auer, Anton Bruckner (Vienna, 1923), 146.
590 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
in two versions. Robert Haas viewed the second as containing both
deterioration and improvement, and therefore conflated Bruckner’s
two versions in his own edition; his pupil, Leopold Nowak, separated
the versions again; the following remarks on the opening movement
refer to Bruckner’s second version of 1889-90.
For this Symphony Bruckner chose the order of movements of
Beethoven’s Ninth, and indeed began the work with the characteristic
rhythm of Beethoven’s opening. But Bruckner’s first subject (Ex.
405) is otherwise very different; it has an immediate, prominent,
and grinding dissonance in an allusive preparatory tonal setting.
(Attempts to analyse the opening as defining the key of B flat minor
are over-determined and inappropriate.) The subject, involving
auxiliary formations and successive seventh-chords, is organized by
and under a rising scalic top part which moves from the subdominant
to the leading-note; C minor is well established by the end of the
subject, but not until its very last note is there a cadence on to the
tonic, and even then this is on a weak beat with reduced texture.
The subject shows a basis in four-bar phrase structure. It is given a
fortissimo varied repeat which avoids cadence and leads forward
into the Gesangsperiode second subject (Ex. 406) at bar 51. This is
Ex. 405
Allegro moderato i Perese.
vn (hn sustain)
y [
C
REVITALIZATION OF CLASSICAL FORMS 591
hn tacent
Ex. 406
breit und ausdrucksvoll
E ГЕ eS ee
A, D bola Р
592 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
= coll’8va I
>
te
mmm
one of the most hymnic, least dance-influenced of Bruckner's second
subjects; however, it does use a characteristic Brucknerian rhythm,
which has already appeared prominently in the first subject. The G
major tonality of the Gesangsperiode is defined clearly at its beginning
and end, though this key is quickly left at the opening by means of
scalic bass-motion leading to a widely modulating middle. Again the
subject is repeated with variants and without closure, moving to the
heterophonic third subject (Ex. 407) in E flat minor at bar 97. This
includes a huge rising scalic and chromatic bass (ascending through
an augmented eleventh), which culminates in a codetta on the first
subject, now in E flat major. The development section has Bruckner's
characteristic quiet opening, and involves augmentations, inversions,
imitations, and combinations of first and second subjects. At bar
225 the recapitulation begins with the first subject at original pitch,
but reharmonized to cadence on to a chord of C major in its
fifth bar. The subject is then further developed by sequence and
fragmentation, so that the original twenty-two bars of the opening
of the exposition are recapitulated with development as a seventy-
eight-bar period. The Gesangsperiode returns in E flat major, the
third subject in C minor; the codetta is expanded into a climax,
followed by a quiet *winding-down' ending, which Bruckner privately
called the Totenuhr. Hugo Wolf wrote that the Eighth Symphony
'towers over all the other symphonies of the master in spiritual
dimensions, in fecundity and greatness'.??
39 Letter to Emil Kauffmann, 23 Dec. 1892; cited in Leopold Nowak's Foreword to Anton
Bruckner Sämtliche Werke: VIII. Symphonie C-moll, Fassung von 1890 (2nd edn.; Vienna, 1955).
BRAHMS'S SYMPHONIES 593
mf Cresc "I
„37 =
= El. >
=
f cresc.
BRAHMS’S SYMPHONIES
At the beginning of the 1870s Brahms remarked to his friend, the
conductor Hermann Levi: ‘I shall never write a symphony, you have
no idea what it feels to the likes of us constantly to hear such a
giant [Beethoven] marching behind one.’50 This was the time of
Brahms's struggle with two genres of supreme importance to
Beethoven, string quartet and symphony. Some of his early difficulties
with the symphonic genre have already been noted; but in 1862 the
first version of the first movement of his eventual First Symphony,
Op. 68, without its slow introduction, was shown to friends (attempts
by Kalbeck to affix an earlier date to this movement are speculative
and unconvincing).?! Much interest attached to this movement in
Brahms's circle, and he was constantly being pressed by friends to
finish the work. During the struggle to do so Brahms was nevertheless
able to found a new genre by writing the first free-standing variation
set for orchestra. His Variations on a Theme of Haydn (1873) consist
of eight figurative and character variations followed by a passacaglia
finale. The genre became important for subsequent composers—
50 Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, i (3rd edn.; Berlin, 1912), 165.
51 Tbid., pp. 233-6; iii (2nd edn.; Berlin, 1912), 92-3.
594 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
Johann Herbeck, Iwan Knorr, Dvorak, Jean Louis Nicodé and
Ernst Rudorff within this period, and d'Indy, Parry, Elgar, and
Reger shortly after.
It may well have been the opening of Bayreuth in 1876 which
provided Brahms with the final impetus to finish his First Symphony;
Wagner was much in his thoughts that summer, and it is as if the
First Symphony should form a politico-musical counter-statement
to Wagnerian ideals. Brahms worked at the Symphony with a will
that summer, and, most unusually for him, even fixed a performance
before finishing the work. Brahms's triumph over the shadow of
Beethoven in his First Symphony liberated him in the genre, and he
was able to complete his Second within a year of the First. The
Third, composed in 1883, and Fourth, 1884-5, also form a pair.
Brahms did struggle with further projected symphonies in the late
1880s, and some surviving sketch material relates to this struggle;
but he ultimately excused himself by claiming ‘more than four
symphonies are not really possible any longer for the musician
wishing to give them a particular content; after that one is forced
to repeat oneself .52
The overall structure of the symphony for Brahms remained that
of four separated and formally closed movements, albeit with
integration of movements by thematic quotation, transformation,
and motivic unification. The thematic-motivic intricacy and cogency
so characteristic of Brahms's instrumental music from the very
beginning remains fundamental to his symphonic style. But a special |
characteristic of his treatment of this genre is the importance of what
may even be described as pre-thematic material, which appears at
the opening of each symphony and has long-term ramifications over
the whole succeeding work.?3 The First Symphony begins with two
contrapuntally diverging lines over a rhythmically articulated pedal
(Ex. 408). These not only surround the arpeggiaic first subject of the
subsequent ‘allegro’ section, but form one of the main thematic links
between all movements, appearing in the slow second movement at
bar 5 (Ex. 409, which shows bars 4-7), the third movement at bars
23 and 30 (Ex. 410, which shows bars 22-33), and at the beginning
of the slow introduction to the Finale, where they are integrated
with a prefiguring of the main theme of the 'allegro' (Ex. 411).
52 Ibid. iv (2nd edn.; Berlin, 1915), 216. For a brief discussion of the sketch material, see
Robert Pascall, ‘Brahms und die Gattung der Symphonie’, in Christiane Jacobsen (ed.),
Johannes Brahms: Leben und Werk (Wiesbaden, 1983), 114.
53 The concept of pre-thematic necessity in Brahms’s symphonies is introduced and discussed
in Siegfried Kross, ‘Brahms the Symphonist’, in Robert Pascall (ed.), Brahms: Biographical,
Documentary and Analytical Studies (Cambridge, 1983), 125-45.
BRAHMS’S SYMPHONIES 595
Ex. 408
Un poco sostenuto
vn | 8va
vn
ve 8va bassa
fl, ob, cl 8va
va, hn
bn 8va bassa
hn, db
d bn, timp
f pesante
Ex. 409
Andante sostenuto p
Ex. 410
va (+ 8va)
a a EE, к=к EA
vc pizz.
ob (+bn 8va bassa)
596 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
Ex. 411
Adagio 2,5, =
fl 8va
o
bn 8va bassa
vn 1 8va
vn2
hn 8va bassa
va, timp
ус, db, d bn
In the Second Symphony the pre-thematic material is the auxiliary-
note figure in bar 1, which is itself derived from the Finale of the
First Symphony, and which comes to dominate the thematic material
throughout the Second. This domination is obvious in the first and
last movements (and has indeed been studied by Réti);?! in the second
movement the figure is more hidden, being decorated and elaborated,
while the third movement has the figure in inversion. The pre-thematic
material of the Third Symphony is the F-A flat-F motif at the
opening, and in the Fourth it is the concept of the falling third
behind the first subject.?? This pre-thematic element in the symphonies
is not found to nearly such a marked extent in Brahms's sonatas,
concertos, or chamber music. Its use in symphonies did not eliminate
other links between movements: one of the thematic units of the
First Symphony is a ‘Clara’ theme, as Michael Musgrave has pointed
out, and this appears prominently in the first and last movements;5$
the Third Symphony, after using transformations of material from
the slow movement in its Finale, ends with a quiet valedictory
quotation of the opening of the first movement; in the Fourth
Symphony the first theme of the first movement is quoted towards
the end of the Finale in canonic entries over the passacaglia bass.
Brahms used sonata form for all his symphony first movements,
with three thematic groups having motivic elements in common, the
second and third characteristically being in major and minor versions
of the same contrasting key (the First Symphony has C minor,
54 Rudolph Réti, The Thematic Process in Music (2nd edn.; London, 1961), 78-81, 163-5.
55 The opening of the Fourth Symphony formed the material of one of Schoenberg's
analyses in his famous article ‘Brahms the Progressive’, in Dika Newlin (ed.), Style and Idea
(London, 1951), 62.
56 Michael Musgrave, ‘Brahms’s First Symphony: Thematic Coherence and its Secret
Origin', Music Analysis, 2/2 (July 1983), 117-33.
BRAHMS'S SYMPHONIES 597
E flat major, and E flat minor; the Third F major, A major, and
A minor; the Fourth E minor, B minor, and B major). The Second
Symphony uses more distinct tonal areas: D major, F sharp minor,
and A major. Expositions are repeated in the first movements of the
first three symphonies, but never in last movements. The character
of the thematic profile of his first-movement expositions varies from
symphony to symphony; in the Second, for instance, the themes
become increasingly more vigorous, pointing towards a climactic
and contrapuntal development section. Development sections char-
acteristically include some change of ethos: in the First Symphony
the development includes a new chorale-like tune which clarifies the
extreme chromaticism of the exposition; the Third Symphony's
development turns the pastoral second subject into an epic-heroic
gesture, and the vigorous first subject into a restrained, veiled,
somewhat brooding passage just prior to the recapitulation. Re-
capitulations are clear and usually straightforward, though in the
first movement of the Fourth Symphony the recapitulation begins
with a greatly stretched version of the first subject in a moment of
powerfully dramatic calm.
Codas are important and can include the drawing out of new
poetic aspects of thematic material within a strong thrust to closure.
The horn solo in the coda of the first movement of the Second
Symphony is the /ocus classicus of this feature, and it is followed by
material related to a contemporaneous song, which Brahms re-
cognized by writing in his personal copy of the printed score ‘Love
is so lovely in Spring’.
The slow movements are always placed second. That of the First
Symphony was initially a rondo form, but between first performance
and publication it underwent a major structural revision, and was
converted in a highly sophisticated way into a ternary form.??
Subsequent slow movements are ternary in Symphonies Nos. 2 and
3 (both movements including developmental material), and sonata
form with combined response in Symphony No. 4. They are lyrical
and melodic, but not to the exclusion of compositional complexity
in themes, relations between themes, and treatments of them. Even
the simplest thematic opening of a slow movement, that in the Third
Symphony, has the phrase structure 4 + 4 + 6 + 9. The Fourth
Symphony's slow movement opens modally. Brahms was working
on the Complete Edition of Schubert's works at the time of composing
this Symphony, and its second movement shows some specifically
57 Robert Pascal, ‘Brahms’s First Symphony Slow Movement: The Initial Performing
Version’, Musical Times, 122 (1981), 664-7.
598 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
Schubertian traits: the horn introduction, the pizzicato ac-
companiment to the subsequent sustained theme, the very great
melodic beauty of the second subject, and the explosive developmental
outburst late in the movement.
Brahms’s third movements were often innovatory, not only in his
symphonies. The restrained Intermezzo of the First Symphony,
beginning with five-bar phrases and melodic inversion, has a con-
flation of rondo and ternary formal types. The non-recurring and
brief first episode of the rondo plan is integrated more with previous
material than the longer second episode, which therefore establishes
itself as the main contrasting section, and the overall form of the
movement may also be viewed as ternary with shortened return. In
his Second String Quartet Brahms had combined minuet and scherzo
elements in a way which led directly to the third movement of the
Second Symphony. This movement has the plan ABA ,B,A,, where
the scherzo-like B section is motivically extracted from the minuet-like
A section, and B, is a rhythmic transformation of B. A, opens in a
colouristically variant tonality, F sharp major, which is related to
the tonic of the movement as its under auxiliary-note key; this is an
example of a motif (the pre-thematic opening of the Symphony)
generating large-scale tonal ramifications. The Scherzo of the Fourth
Symphony is in sonata form with combined response, and no trio-like
contrasts are established.
Save for the special case of the last Symphony, Brahms’s symphonic
Finales are in sonata form, with combined response in Symphonies
Nos. 1 and 3. The Finale of the First Symphony has a wide range
of expressive content. The dark, chromatically inflected introduction
clarifies at the announcement of an 'Alphorn' melody (so char-
acterized by Brahms in a postcard to Clara Schumann before
the Symphony was completed), which is followed by a stately
pseudo-chorale. The ‘Alphorn’ melody is integrated into the sub-
sequent Allegro, while the pseudo-chorale recurs climactically and
frame-like near the end of the movement. The Allegro has a
three-themed and three-keyed exposition (C major, G major, E
minor); the first subject carries undoubted resonance of the principal
theme of the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth, and this movement has
been a primary focus for critics wishing to emphasize Brahms's
continuity with Beethoven. Von Bülow called this Symphony ‘the
Tenth', since when many commentators have taken him to have
meant Beethoven's Tenth, though von Bülow himself was at pains
to point out he had not intended any such implication.®® Perhaps
58 Hans von Bülow, Briefe und Schriften, ed. Marie von Bülow, iii (Leipzig, 1896), 369.
BRAHMS'S SYMPHONIES 599
following what they thought was his lead, Hanslick called Brahms's
Second Symphony his ‘Pastoral’, and Richter the Third his ‘Eroica’.
Brahms seemed to lay especial weight on the finale in symphonies.
Thematic links, while existing between most movements of each
symphony, are at their most obvious in finales, and all finales
include intricate contrapuntal work. In his First Symphony Brahms
completed the first and last movements before completing the middle
movements; in the Second he turned to the composition of the Finale
immediately on finishing the first movement.
The passacaglia Finale to the Fourth Symphony is a special
creative moment in Brahms's instrumental output. It is based on a
theme from Bach's Cantata 150, *Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich',
to which Brahms added a chromatic passing-note, A sharp, that
seems to entail the F natural in the bass two bars later. See Ex. 412,
where the last section of the Bach Cantata 1s shown mapped on to
the opening of the Brahms Finale. There follow another thirty
statements of this theme, which is often disguised by being embedded
deep within the harmony, followed by a terse, developmental, and
climactic coda. Brahms had earlier arranged for piano left hand
Bach's D minor Chaconne from the second solo violin partita. It
was a movement he very greatly admired, and it gave him the impulse
towards his own highly organized overall structure for the Finale of
the Fourth Symphony. Brahms followed Bach in using a basic overall
ternary design, with a middle section involving the major tonic key.
(In Brahms's movement this middle section is really defined by an
augmentation of the harmonic rhythm, and begins with a poignant
flute solo, still in the minor.) Also following Bach, Brahms used
recapitulatory variations, and the grouping of variations in fours
and pairs. This Symphony was to prove Brahms's valediction to the
genre, and it is in certain ways retrospective and summatory; Bach,
Beethoven, and Schubert had formed the greatest sources of influence
Ех. 412
Сїассопа
600 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
on his instrumental music, yet here, as elsewhere, these influences
are totally assimilated and transformed into mature, compelling and
intensely expressive originality.
THE SYMPHONIES OF STRAUSS AND MAHLER
It was within the context of the revitalization of Classical
symphonic structure that Richard Strauss and Mahler produced their
early symphonies. Strauss's F minor Symphony (1883-4) belongs to
his young traditionalist phase. Its four-movement design has thematic
integration across movements; Del Mar draws attention to influences `
from Schumann and Mendelssohn, and detects ‘more than a hint’
of Bruckner in the Finale (though the possibility of establishing any
biographical basis for this as direct influence seems unlikely).>9
Strauss moved away from the ideals expressed in this Symphony in
his programmatic symphonic fantasia Aus Italien (1886), which
nevertheless takes the four-movement symphony and sonata form as
points of departure; he himself described it as a transitional work,
‘the connecting link between the old and the new methods’.60
Mahler's First Symphony seems to have been preceded by four
other youthful symphonic attempts, now lost. It evolved from
‘Symphonic Poem in two parts’ without programme (1888), to ‘Titan
a tone-poem in symphony-form in two parts' with programme after
Jean Paul Richter (1893-4), to 'Symphony (Titan) in five movements
(two parts)’ with individually titled movements (1894), to ‘Symphony’
in four movements (1896).9! This evolution demonstrates clearly the
gravitational pull of the four-movement symphony of Classical
structure, especially as the discarded second movement, 'Blumine',
is very fine. Mahler said in 1895 'to me "symphony" means
constructing a world with all the technical means at one's disposal’,
but it is clear from letters of 1896 to Max Marschalk that he had
come to regard explicit programmes as inadequate for the genre and
misleading.9? The first movement of his First Symphony makes
already a personal and distinctive approach to sonata form, for the
basic thematic duality is between introduction and exposition, the
exposition itself showing no marked thematic differentiation; further,
59 Norman Del Mar, Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works, i (2nd
edn.; London, 1969), 26; cf. Willi Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years,
1864-1898, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1982), 158.
60 Del Mar, Richard Strauss, i. 41.
$1 See Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (London, 1975), 158-9, for
a useful summary chart of this complex history.
62 Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin (London,
1980), 40; Gustav Mahler: Briefe (1879-1911), ed. Alma Maria Mahler (Berlin, 1924), 185,
187.
THE SYMPHONIES OF STRAUSS AND MAHLER 601
although the exposition begins in D major, A major is very quickly
adopted within that first subject itself. The evocative introductory
material, ‘Wie ein Naturlaut’ [like a Sound of Nature], returns in
the development to establish a hold over the Symphony, which
reaches into and generates much of the structural originality of the
Finale; there is also in the development an F minor treatment of the
first subject, which provides the tonal and thematic starting-point of
the Finale. The Scherzo-and-trio movement shows well Mahler’s
sublimation of popular culture and even perhaps vulgarity, with its
fast Ländler-type Scherzo and gentler cafe-music styled Trio, followed
by a curtailed da capo. The third movement was (and in a sense
remains) ‘a funeral march in Callot’s manner’, with an ostinato-like
treatment of ‘Briider Martin’ as its opening, and a parody of
Bohemian village music in some of its subsidiary material. The Finale
opens with a sectionalized sonata-form exposition; an extensive,
intense F minor ‘storm’, based on material from the development of
the first movement, serves as first subject, followed by a slow lyrical
D flat major second-subject area. Both sections are self-enclosed,
which is part of Mahler’s highly personal solution to the finale
problem here. The development recalls the introduction to the
first movement before treating finale material, but it is in the
‘recapitulation’ that expressive originality based on formal innovation
reaches its highest mark. An unexpected D major eruption offers a
chorale-like transformation of part of the first subject and of part
of the introduction to the first movement; after a restatement of this
introduction in its original guise, the Finale’s own material is
recapitulated—second subject in F major and first subject in F minor.
A second parallel D major eruption then forms a gigantic culminative
gesture. The Finale is thus really in F minor as far as traditional
elements of its structure are concerned; but intrusions of D major
material subvert its own closure into a closure for the Symphony as
a whole. Mahler said of the first of the D major eruptions: ‘My D
major chord, however, had to sound as though it had fallen from
heaven, as though it had come from another world.’
This work thus lays a basis which has many implications for
Mahler’s future symphonic style—a cosmic inclusion of strongly
differentiated and evocative material, including the elevation of the
everyday into higher art (bird sounds, trumpet calls, military and
63 Bauer-Lechner, Recollections, p. 31. For a recent extensive discussion of this movement,
see Bernd Sponheuer, ‘Der Durchbruch als primäre Formkategorie Gustav Mahlers: Eine
Untersuchung zum Finalproblem der Ersten Symphonie’, in Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (ed.),
Form und Idee in Gustav Mahlers Instrumentalmusik (Wilhelmshaven, 1980), 117-64.
602 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
other marches, chorales, café and folk-music resonances), effected by
abrupt and expressive contrasts, sinuous contrapuntal line-weaving,
flexible tempos, and a highly personal approach to traditional forms
(including sonata form). This Symphony also demonstrates Mahler's
characteristic drawing together of instrumental and vocal music, for
it is in many ways a counterpart to the four-movement song cycle
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen [Songs of a Wayfarer] (1883-5), from
which it draws much thematic material, together with an interest in
progressive tonality. The work's beguiling but brittle and psycho-
logically significant glamour forms a strong prelude to the expres-
sionist tendency in early twentieth-century Austrian music.
THE SYMPHONY IN RUSSIA
The basic polarity in Russian musical circles during this period is
marked by the opposing figureheads of Anton Rubinstein and
Balakirev. Rubinstein, the established piano virtuoso and composer,
influential founder of the Russian Musical Society and director of
the St Petersburg Conservatory, was ambitious for Russian music,
but saw its development as best served by professional Teutonic
training. For him, music was ‘a German art’, and he antagonized
particularly Glinka, Balakirev, and the critic Stasov by
an article of 1855 announcing his programme. It was as a direct
counter to this that Balakirev gathered about him the group known
as the kuchka, ‘the handful’, and founded the Free Music School.
The symphony was important to both parties. Balakirev began his
own First Symphony in 1864, abandoned it for thirty years and
completed it only in 1897, but encouraged Borodin to begin a
symphony in 1862 while Rimsky-Korsakov laboured on his First at
intervals from 1861 to 1884. The later circle around Rimsky-Korsakov
included the symphonists Arensky and Glazunov, whose First
Symphony was produced at Weimar in 1884 under the auspices
of Liszt. Rubinstein wrote six symphonies, of which his second
was also an ongoing project, its number of movements being
incremented at intervals.
Tchaikovsky was a pupil of Rubinstein and sought to distance
himself from the kuchka (though he was influenced by Balakirev in
two periods of his life, culminating in the orchestral fantasy Romeo
and Juliet and the Manfred Symphony). Yet Tchaikovsky was steeped
in Russian folk-song (saturating himself 'from earliest childhood
with the inexplicable beauty of the characteristic traits of Russian
folk-song’), used folk-songs in some of his symphonies, and related,
as did the kuchka, particularly strongly to Glinka. (The Russian
THE SYMPHONY IN RUSSIA 603
symphonic school is ‘all in Kamarinskaya, just as the whole oak is
in the acorn’.§4)
Both Borodin and Tchaikovsky, the greatest Russian symphonists
of the period, realized that the Teutonic tradition of the symphony
had to be harnessed rather than rejected; and it 1s a mark of their
greatness that they took aspects of this tradition and blended them
with specifically Russian characteristics. Borodin's two completed
symphonies (composed in 1862-7 and 1869-76), are in four distinct
movements with the Scherzo as second; the slow movement and
Finale of the Second Symphony are joined. His unfinished Third
Symphony was also to use the four-distinct-movement plan. Both its
first movement (Moderato, opening with a simple folk-song-derived
plaint) and its substantial 5/8 Scherzo were originally written for string
quartet, and Glazunov, following Borodin's intentions, completed
and orchestrated these two movements, adding the beautiful coda
to the first movement and the Trio to the Scherzo (using material
rejected from Prince Igor). Borodin's primary Germanic influences
came from Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, and his sym-
phonies show a strong Beethovenian vitality based on terse, rhythm-
ically distinctive motifs, often using syncopation, intricate motivic
developments, and an overall exuberance with concision.
He retained Teutonic forms; each of his symphonies for instance
opens with a sonata-form movement. But his themes are specifically
Russian, including folk-song-like material, sometimes together with
irregular metres, quasi-oriental figures, and modality. Whether
of lyric beauty, energetic allegro or scherzo types, these themes
characteristically rely on short-breathed phrases rotating round and
elaborating a single pitch. Though his developmental techniques
derive from Beethoven in their reliance on motivic fragmentation,
these were employed in original ways. With regard to the first
movement of the First Symphony, Abraham has pointed out that
the ‘allegro’ opens with a fragmentation of the modal introduction,
accompanied by an insistently reiterated modern chord, B flat, E
flat, A flat, C, F (which resolves ultimately on the dominant), and
that the concluding 'andantino' of this movement synthesizes the
thematic duality of the movement also by motivic means.65 Borodin's
harmonic context also is Teutonic in basis, but with a Russian
$^ Letter to Madame von Meck, 5 (17) Mar. 1878, cited and discussed in Warrack,
Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, p. 9; diary entry, 27 June (9 July) 1888, cited and
discussed in Richard Taruskin, "How the Acorn Took Root: A Tale of Russia’ /9th-century
Music, 6/3 (Spring 1983), 190.
65 Gerald Abraham, Borodin: The Composer and his Music (London, 1927), 24-9, and Studies
in Russian Music, pp. 109-15.
604 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
surface inflected by both modality and contrapuntal elaboration
around referential pitches. The enormously powerful opening of the
Second Symphony (Ex. 413) shows this well. Like all profoundly
original music, it challenges normal analytical categories. The first
subject depends on three widely spaced statements on the original
pitch of the opening imposing unitary gesture, bars 1, 25, and 52,
Ex. 413
Allegro
Animato assai
ob, cl, fl (8va)
THE SYMPHONY IN RUSSIA 605
each quitted by sequence. Bars 1-3, incorporating the gesture, show
the elaboration of the pitch B by a phrygian auxiliary C natural,
mixed with an ‘upper part’ descent E-D sharp-D; there is motivic
concentration on semitone and third (major and minor). Bars 5-7
shift the ‘upper part’ descent to the lower part, and the gesture is
repeated on A. Bars 11-16 are harmonically centred on an ambiguity
between A sharp/B flat in the bass, resolved finally on to a dominant
chord, over which ambiguity a new motivic theme centred on F
sharp re-explores the intervals of the third and auxiliary semitone.
The dominant chord is decorated with the opening gesture, prepared
in bars 15-16 by semitone auxiliary G naturals, before an extension
of the same material leads to the restatement at bar 25. The primary
bass-motion of bars 1-23 is thus B, A, G, F sharp. While firmly
based, therefore, on an underlying Teutonicism in thematic and
harmonic techniques, the original thematic and harmonic immediacy
is of a very distinctive order.
606 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
TCHAIKOVSKY’S SYMPHONIES
There is some case for regarding Tchaikovsky’s symphonies as his
most characteristic utterances. Though he was a committed opera
composer, he wrote in 1878 “What you say about words harming
music, often dragging it down from unscalable heights is absolutely
true and I have always felt it deeply—perhaps that is why I have
succeeded better with instrumental compositions than with vocal.’66
He was nevertheless always worried about his formal abilities, and
there are many oft-quoted remarks of his, relating to self-doubt in
this respect; perhaps as a result of this self-doubt his symphonies
show a wide variety of forms both overall and within movements,
a high degree of formal and stylistic originality. He was also, of
course, a fine composer of ballets (as well as operas), but the
symphony remains a profounder form, and already he had included
sublimated ballet influences in symphonies before the two great
ballets he wrote between Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6. Tchaikovsky's
mature view of the symphony was that it was 'the most lyrical of
forms’.§? This view helps explain the absence of explicit programmes
for his symphonies after the First (except for Manfred), and the
prominence he gave in them to what he called 'the lyric idea'. His
genius particularly shone in the lyric idea, though there are many
other elements in the Tchaikovsky symphony. He was the most
highly trained of all the nationalistically inclined Russian composers
of the period, and he brought to the symphony a deep understanding
of German music, with an especially pronounced love for Mozart,
sensitivity to and enthusiasm for French music, particularly of
Berlioz, Bizet, and the ballets of Delibes, which he combined with
the Russian folk element and emotionalism. From the Germanic
tradition he drew an interest in sonata form, scalic basses, pedals,
and contrapuntal developments; from the French a lightness of
touch, especially but not exclusively in middle movements, and
scintillating orchestration.
His First Symphony (1866) shows nationalist aspiration in its
inclusion of a folk-song in the Finale and a folk-style melody as the
principal theme of its slow movement, and the way in which these
make the programme of the title refer to Russia: the Symphony is
called “Winter Daydreams’, with subtitles for its first two move-
ments—‘Daydreams on a Winter Road’ and ‘Dreamy Land, Land
of Mists’. In the substantial sonata-form first movement Tchaikovsky
66 Letter to Madame von Meck, 9 (21) Feb. 1878; cited and discussed in Warrack,
Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos, pp. 7-8.
67 N. S. Nikolaeva, Simfonii P. I. Chaykovskogo (Moscow, 1958), 285.
TCHAIKOVSKY’S SYMPHONIES 607
begins with a large tonic first-subject area including development
within itself; such enclosed subjects remained a distinctive feature of
his sonata forms, and perhaps helped give rise to his worry about
formal technique. For the third movement Tchaikovsky used the
Scherzo from his C sharp minor Piano Sonata, and added as Trio
the first of a long line of symphonic waltzes. The Finale uses
the folk-song ‘Tsveli tsvetiki' [Little Flowers Blossomed] in its
introduction and also as second subject of the ensuing sonata form.
The nationalist inclination of this work reached its culmination in
the Second Symphony (1872: rev. 1880), though folk-song is also
used in the Fourth. The Second found much favour with both
Rubinstein and the kuchka. In it Tchaikovsky used three folk-songs.
The introduction to the sonata-form first movement begins with one,
which is extended by variation and development. It acts like the first
subject, for the succeeding 'allegro' first subject proper is short
and non-lyric—these remarks concern the second version of the
movement, for which Tchaikovsky composed a new first subject,
transferring his previous first subject to act as the new second
subject—and the development section is much concerned with the
folk-song of the introduction extended by counterpoint and sequence.
The slow movement uses the wedding march from Act III of the
abandoned opera Undine (1869), as the outer sections of a ternary
form; the central section is another folk-song, extended by 'changing
background' technique. After a characteristically vital Scherzo as
third movement, the fourth uses the folk-song 'Ta vnadyvsya
zhuravel’’ [The Crane] as the first subject of its sonata form; this
four-bar melody appears twenty-two times within the first subject, and
provides the /ocus classicus of Tchaikovsky's ‘changing background’
technique. These twenty-two appearances are interspersed with
contrasts and developments; Ex. 414 shows the first group of six
appearances.
Ex. 414
Allegro vivo
vn, уа vnl
Pe
=
ВЕ See ge ge re Tr Sp ro top = |
608 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
D
nn — — sg
———— SS U 68 = == a
zZ шыш e m ee ee Se EE EE Ee EE
е
Déier рет ) vp 7
Thus Tchaikovsky’s use of folk-song in this Symphony is very far
from being simply a matter of quotation; folk-songs are used as
themes, subjected to localized variation treatment, and developed
with all the techniques of sonata style. The localized variation
treatment has sometimes been seen as ‘anti-symphonic’, acting against
the proper integration of folk-elements into symphonism. But
we must hear with Russian ears: the tune-ostinato, or 'changing
background' technique itself comes from Russian folk-music and
had already been taken into the world of nationalist art-music. As
a primary activity of Russian folk musicians, short instrumental
dance tunes would be repeated ad libitum as the basis for extemporized
variations. Glinka had taken such structure into that most influential
work, ultimately itself called Kamarinskaya (after the name of just
such a folk-tune which it uses). In Glinka's work this tune appears
seventy-five times with ‘changing background’; he also connects two
folk melodies and uses motivic extraction and development.68
This aspect of Tchaikovsky's deployment of folk-song within the
symphony influenced his structures when he did not use folk-song,
and the Third Symphony (1875), which in other respects betokens a
retreat from nationalism towards Schumannesque models and styles,
begins with a funeral march subjected to ‘changing background’
elaboration. The sonata-form Allegro has a three-theme, three-key
exposition. The work is in five movements, the addition being the
second, Alla tedesca, which is a waltz in all but name. In the Finale
Tchaikovsky moves away from sonata form; the movement is ternary,
yet it begins with a sonata-form exposition as its first section.
The Fourth, Manfred, and Fifth Symphonies (1878, 1885, and
68 See Taruskin, "How the Acorn Took Root’.
TCHAIKOVSKY'S SYMPHONIES 609
1888 respectively), are based on motto-theme structures. The ‘fate’
motif of the Fourth Symphony is an emergence into thematicism of
previously appearing 'arrests' and bridges (for instance at the end
of the development of the first movement of the First Symphony).
This *main idea' of the Fourth recurs between exposition and
development, between recapitulation and coda in the sonata-form
first movement, and before the coda in the rondo-form last movement.
The first subject of the first movement is perhaps the most serious
and significant waltz ever written, while the secondary material is
related to the delicacy of the ballet. The key scheme of this movement
is highly original, with F and A flat minors and B major forming
the basic tonalities of the exposition, and the recapitulation beginning
in D minor and moving to F major; the overall tonal progression is
thus by ascending minor thirds. The motto-themes of Manfred and
the Fifth Symphony recur in all the movements of their respective
works. Balakirev, the instigator of the Manfred project, pointed
Tchaikovsky towards specific models in Berlioz's and Tchaikovsky's
own previous works, but the great chromatic complication of this
work is reminiscent also of Liszt.
The Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique (1893), is Tchaikovsky's
culminating masterpiece. The first movement is again in sonata form,
and raises chromatic scalic writing and large self-enclosed subject
structure to the highest expressive power. The two subjects are here
contrasted by tempo, the furious pithy first subject yielding to a
lyrical and richly suave ‘andante’ second subject. The ‘allegro’
development allows Tchaikovsky to embed the recapitulation of his
first subject seamlessly within it. The use of andante tempo within
the first movement has strategic structural implications in its
preparation for the closing slow movement. The second movement
is a further apotheosis of the waltz, a further exploration of the
remote expressive possibilities of this dance within the symphonic
context, for it is a 5/4 ‘allegro’ waltz, with a melancholic trio bearing
the same time signature. The third movement builds on Tchaikovsky's
use of the march in symphonies, and shows a highly original blend
of scherzo and march within one structure: the march as a fragmentary
accompaniment to the scherzo gives way gradually to the scherzo as
accompaniment to the fully emerged march, this process being
repeated. The chromatic scalic accompaniment to the opening of the
Symphony, which had been transformed into the trio of the second
movement, gives rise to the scalic theme at the beginning of the
'adagio' Finale. The theme here is spread between first and second
violins, and requires their spatial separation in the orchestra. (This
610 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
expressive and telling movement order had already been used by
Spohr and was later followed by Mahler.) Tchaikovsky wrote a
pensive ‘lamentoso’ Finale in ternary form, with a broad cantabile
‘lyric idea’ as central section, which recurs briefly as coda, now in
the tonic minor and with its scalic initiation extended downwards to
a very low pppp ending, echoing the opening of the work. Though
it does not incorporate folk material, this Symphony is in other
respects a summation, blending structural originality at work and
movement levels, lyric ideas, and ballet influence, in a vivid and
profound emotional profile.
THE SYMPHONY IN FRANCE
The symphony in France during this period took a generally
opposite course of development from that in Germany and Austria.
Partly because the French symphonists of the 1850s were largely
composers towards the beginning of their careers still learning
traditional form, and partly because Berlioz remained a peripheral
figure in French culture, much more honoured and influential in
Germany and Russia, the characteristic design for French symphonies
at the beginning of the period was of four separated movements—
as in Gounod's Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2, Saint-Saéns's Symphonies
Nos. 1 and 2, and Bizet’s Symphony in C. (Saint-Saéns’s Second
Symphony shows signs of his later originality; it begins with a fugue,
and themes from the second and third movements cross into the
Finale.) Thereafter the genre was expanded particularly by proximity
to the concerto, and by a significant influence from Liszt. This
influence impinged not at all on Bruckner, and only negatively on
Brahms, but in France it channelled itself strongly through Saint-
Saéns, who wrote his symphonic poems in the 1870s, and César
Franck. Both of these composers were important, dominating leaders
in the evolution of French instrumental styles. French symphonies
from the latter part of the period characteristically show movement
conflations (Saint-Saéns's Third Symphony, Franck's Symphony),
and thematic quotation and metamorphosis between movements
(Saint-Saéns’ Third, d'Indy's Symphonie cevenole, Lalo's G minor
Symphony (1886), Chausson's Symphony, Franck's Symphony). As
Saint-Saéns said of his Third (actually his fifth completed sym-
phony)— with its 2 + 2 movement construction, poetic and grandiose
use of the organ, and thematic transformation between movements
and sections—his object was ‘to avoid the endless resumptions and
repetitions which more and more tend to disappear from instrumental
DVORÁK'S SYMPHONIES 611
music under the influence of increasingly developed musical culture'.5?
This Symphony was dedicated to the memory of Liszt, though
finished just before Liszt died.
Franck's Symphony is part of the corpus of structurally original
works particularly associated with his last period. Its first movement
follows sonata-form outlines, but begins with a massively scaled
sequence: introduction + ‘allegro’ first subject, D minor; introduction
+ ‘allegro’ first subject, F minor. This sectionalization is successfully
incorporated into higher symphonic purposes, and the recapitulation
provides a synthesis, with the introduction appearing in D minor in
canon, and the 'allegro' first subject in E flat minor, moving to a
regular recapitulation of the second subject in the tonic major. The
slow movement, Allegretto, introduces harp and cor anglais, and
conflates slow and scherzo elements in a broad and complex rondo
design. The middle return of the opening tune is a kind of scherzo
variation, and the final return combines the original legato version
with the scherzo variation as accompaniment. The Finale has a
sonata-form basis, but after the exposition, the second movement's
main theme returns in B minor; development of the Finale's subjects
leads to recapitulation of the first subject, another return of the
second movement's tune in D minor, and both subjects of the first
movement, before a triumphal ending with the first subject of the
Finale.
DVORÁK'S SYMPHONIES
Dvoräk hardly ever used actual folk melodies in his works, and,
so far as is known, never in his symphonies. There is nevertheless
real folk influence in his symphonies, which must be sought in
assimilated stylistic features. As he said: ‘I myself have gone to the
simple, half-forgotten tunes of the Bohemian peasants for hints in
my most serious work,' and
I study certain melodies until I become thoroughly imbued with their
characteristics and am enabled to make a musical picture in keeping with
and partaking of those characteristics. The symphony is the least desirable
of vehicles for the display of this work, in that the form will allow only of
a suggestion of the colour of that nationalism to be given.”®
This ‘partaking’ may be seen in melodic turns of phrase, often with
harmonic implications (pentatonic tunes—involving the 'knight's
$9 Arthur Hervey, Saint-Saéns (London and New York, 1921), 99.
70 From interviews given to the New York Herald, 21 May 1893, and Chicago Tribune, 13
Aug. 1893; see John Clapham, Dvorák (Newton Abbot, 1979), 197, 201.
612 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
move ?! —use of the flat seventh, sharp fourth, major-minor mixture,
initial upward leaps, absence of anacrusis, 3-2-1 cadences, doublings
of melody at the third, 'scotch-snap' rhythms, and elaborate fast
ornamentation of slow tunes); also in detailed phrase structure (short
phrases, small-scale repetition sometimes involving transposition),
and most of all in dance-derived rhythms (from the dumka, furiant,
polka, skocná, and sousedská)."? Dvorak’s music often has melodic
naiveté and freshness as primary aesthetic features, and this too may
well be a general influence from his interest in folk melodies. A large
number of his most beautiful themes show pronounced dependence
on arpeggios, repeated notes, auxiliary notes, and scales.
But this inclination to folk-like simplicity is integrated into a
profound understanding of the subtleties and intricacies of Classical
symphonic thought. Dvorák had a deep admiration for the Classical
masters of the symphony, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and latterly
particularly Schubert, about whom he wrote a substantial article. In
this he said: '[Schubert] is never at fault in his means of expression,
while mastery of form came to him spontaneously. In originality of
harmony and modulation, and in his gift of orchestral colouring,
Schubert has had no superior. ... I cordially acknowledge my great
obligations to bm "3 From Schubert too came reinforcement of
Dvorák's primacy for melody, and his love of major-minor mixture.
His early Symphonies, Nos. 1 and 2, both 1865, may be seen as
especially influenced by Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies
respectively. The First, which he supposed lost, was referred to by
him as The Bells of Zlonice; it shows a grand symphonic sweep, with
some motivic connections between movements, and the same key
scheme for the movements as the Beethovenian model. But its rather
ordinary themes are over-extended in treatment, and these treatments
rely on transposition to the virtual exclusion of expressive alteration.
Such ‘young-man’s’ features can also be seen in his Second; and he
recognized the over-extension in his revisions of this Symphony,
which was progressively cut at three different times. (In his article
quoted above he commented adversely on the length of Bruckner's
Eighth and advocated a 'return to the symphonic dimensions
approved by Haydn and Mozart. ... Modern taste calls for music
71 Gerald Abraham, ‘Dvofak’s Musical Personality’, in Viktor Fischl (ed.), Antonin Dvořák:
His Achievement (London, preface dated 1942), 205, 222.
*? The dumka is not strictly of dance origin; see John Tyrrell, ‘Dumka’, The New Grove, v.
ТЇШ.
73 Antonin Dvořák (in co-operation with Henry T. Finck), ‘Franz Schubert’, The Century
Illustrated Monthly Magazine (New York, 1894); repr. in John Clapham, Antonin Dvorák:
Musician and Craftsman (London, 1966), 300.
DVORÁK'S SYMPHONIES 613
that is concise, condensed and pithy.’) In the late 1860s and
early 1870s Dvorák became susceptible to Wagnerian and Lisztian
influences, traces of which can be seen in the cast of the themes,
chromatic harmony, and appoggiaturas of his Third Symphony
(1873), which has no Scherzo. He retreated from these influences,
but an enrichment of his control of chromatic harmony remained
with him. His Fourth Symphony (1874) shows increasing concision,
and by the Fifth his mastery of symphonic form was mature.
Symphonies Nos. 5-9 were published during his lifetime, beginning
with No. 6 which appeared as No. 1 in 1882; he did attempt to
publish earlier symphonies, but without success.
The Fifth (1875) comes from a strongly nationalist phase, and,
after a simple arpeggio opening theme, made subtle by its rhythmic
articulation and delicate cadential harmony, the second theme of the
first subject group shows clear folk resonance. The second movement
is dumka-like, but not so titled; though it has a distinct cadence
followed by a short pause, the Scherzo begins with a bridge based
on it. The Scherzo theme shows folk influence in its repetition of
figures. The Finale has that characteristically Dvorakian opening out
of the main key, already noted, and the movement has a recall of
the opening theme of the Symphony at its end. The Sixth Symphony
(1880) shows a particularly strong influence from his friend and
supporter Brahms, and commentators have rightly pointed to
resonances from Brahms's own Second Symphony. The metre of
Dvorák's first movement, its initial modulation, syncopations and
developments, the relationships between movements 1 and 4, and
the contrapuntal writing (particularly by contrary motion) all have
their sources in the Brahms work. Dvorak’s now mature powers of
development are clearly seen in his slow movement, where the
exquisite opening theme is fluently and effortlessly evolved into new
expressive shapes, in a sonata form with major-minor mixture in its
second subject. The scherzo is the first named Furiant in Dvorak’s
symphonies, with vigorous reliance on mixed 2/4 and 3/4 accentu-
ations, following the well-known folk furiant 'Sedlák, sedlak’ [Farmer,
farmer].
The Seventh Symphony (1885) has been seen by many com-
mentators as Dvorák's greatest symphonic achievement; all diverse
influences are sublimated and integrated in his most dramatic, fierce,
and forceful symphony. The sonata-form first movement has a
narrow-ranged modally inflected opening theme, with prominence
for an auxiliary-note figure. The continuation is dark and passionate,
setting a tone in which naiveté is at its most distant; the chromaticism
614 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
shows how Dvořák has assimilated the influences of Liszt and
Wagner, adapting these to his own purposes. Brahmsian influence is
there too, again in the counterpoint, as also in the second subject,
which is an echo of the slow movement of Brahms’s Second Piano
Concerto. Brahms’s Third Symphony slow movement influences the
course of Dvorak’s; a simple theme gives way te subsidiary material
using discord and appoggiaturas. The third movement, not titled
furiant, has nevertheless the characteristic furiant mixture of ac-
centuations, here with a 6/4 time signature. The structure of the
movement is original; the Scherzo is made up of statement + response
-- statement 4- response, each unit with cadence development. This
allows the strange Trio, with its brief, reticent themes, to be more
discursive; a sonata-form exposition and development lead directly
into a return of the Scherzo, now shortened to one statement 4-
response, but with a luxuriant expansion of its final cadence
development. The fourth movement is in regular sonata form, the
first subject using a sharp fourth and much chromatic development,
the second being the only unequivocally joyful tune in the Symphony,
with folklike profile in overlapped five-bar phrases.
In the Eighth (1889) ОуоїаК set out to write ‘a work different
from the other symphonies, with individual ideas worked out in a
new уау’? and he produced an unobtrusively original work of great
beauty. The Symphony represents a return to naivete, but of a very
subtle kind! The sonata-form first movement combines diverse
materials in its first-subject group: a seventeen-bar irregularly phrased
lyrical cello melody in the tonic minor, a five-bar arpeggiaic flute
theme in the tonic major, a preparatory development mediating
between these two themes, and the initiation of a further cello melody
in the tonic major at bar 39, with 3-2-1 opening. The E flat-D
background structure of the opening melody is modified to E-D in
the flute theme; the 3-2-1 melody recalls the sostenuto and repeated
notes of the opening, but is not permitted to progress to full lyricism
by developmental accretions of previous material. When the flute
theme emerges into a climactic statement at bar 57, it incorporates
bridge elements by cadencing on to a mediant 6-4, and the folk-
influenced second subject group is in the mediant minor-major. The
opening melody returns in its original key for the beginning and the
end of the development section; its latter appearance is on trumpet
and reharmonized over a timpani dominant, in a new way of
obscuring the point of recapitulation. The use of the trumpet here
74 Otakar Sourek, Dvorákovy Symfonie (2nd edn.; Prague, 1943), 156.
THE CONCERTO 615
is a progression towards the opening of the Finale. In the Adagio—
sombre, delicate, charming, and dramatic by turns— material based
on auxiliary-note figures, scales, and arpeggios again features prom-
inently; the movement begins in E flat, but C major becomes the
tonic of most of the remainder of the structure. The third movement
is an Allegretto and Trio, with a continuous stream of simple,
beguiling melody. The Finale is founded on the repeated note and
arpeggio, in a combination of variation and ternary form. A trumpet
introduction, not in the sketches for the movement, leads to a simple
theme, which is a much altered and more solid variant of the flute
theme of the first movement. There are four variations, of which the
second is repeated faster as the fourth. A contrasted episode is
followed by development of the theme, towards the end of which
the introduction returns. The theme is recapitulated and followed by
a further three variations, of which the last is a return of variation
4 and is extended into the final cadence. The theme 15 present in
many of the variations, which are mainly contrasted by texture and
pacing.
The Ninth Symphony (1893), with the title Z nového svéta [From
the New World], must be heard in the context of Dvorak’s wish to
promote a national American music; though certain melodies in this
symphony are close to specific Indian tunes or Negro spirituals,
many of the modal, pentatonic melodic features and scotch-snap
rhythms Dvorak found in these were already part of his Czech-based
style, as Abraham has pointed out "9 Dvorak’s full symphonic
technique is brought to bear, of which a particular feature here is
thematic integration across movements. The first subject of the first
movement returns in all subsequent movements, and the Finale also
uses the main themes of the other two movements integrated into
its main tempo. The closing combination of the main themes of the
first movement and Finale in a cadential context uses powerfully
discordant auxiliary harmony.
THE CONCERTO
The title ‘concerto’ was mostly reserved in this period for works
with one soloist and orchestra, making significant use of idiomatic
virtuoso writing for the soloist, in from one to four movements.
Concertos for other forces appeared very rarely indeed. Delphin
Alard published some symphonies concertantes for two violins and
orchestra (or piano) in the early 1850s, using a title which had been
75 Abraham, 'Dvorák's Musical Personality’, pp. 205-6.
616 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
very popular up to about 1830, and Brahms wrote his Double
Concerto in 1887. These works follow ‘а tradition of concertos for
more than one soloist established in the Baroque era and carried
into Classical and early Romantic times, for instance by Mozart and
Beethoven. (In the early twentieth century Bruch and Delius also
contributed to this tradition, Bruch with his masterpiece for viola
and clarinet, Op. 88, which, though in richly Romantic style, was
written in 1911, and his Concerto for Two Pianos, op. 88a (1915);
Delius with his Double Concerto in 1915-16.) Alkan, in his solo
piano Etudes, Op. 39, grouped numbers 8-10 as a concerto, again
(as with his Symphony in the same opus) with progressive tonality.
And Chausson's Concert for piano, violin, and string quartet (1891)
is a chamber work, for the strings are one player to a part.
The one-movement concerto was a popular type, with its influential
precedents in Spohr's Gesangsszene violin concerto, and Weber's
Konzertstück for piano and orchestra. Joachim's Konzert in einem
Satze (for violin), Liszt's Second Piano Concerto, Saint-Saéns's First
Violin Concerto, and First Cello Concerto, Vieuxtemps's Fifth Violin
Concerto, Hermann Goetz's Violin Concerto, Johan Svendsen's Cello
Concerto, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Piano Concerto all contributed
to this type. But, as with the symphony, there was a tendency in
works where the designated number of movements was less than
three for marked differentiation of material to suggest an underlying
larger number. Liszt's Second Piano Concerto in its final form (1857)
is a complex rhapsodic single-movement structure with much thematic
metamorphosis, suggesting a background movement sequence of
‘adagio’, ‘allegro’, ‘march’, and ‘finale’. Saint-Saéns's First Violin
Concerto, Op. 20 (1859), is an expanded ternary form: ‘allegro’-
‘andante’-‘allegro’. His First Cello Concerto (1872) follows this with
‘allegro’-‘allegretto’-‘allegro’, where the final ‘allegro’ is introduced
and concluded by the main theme of the opening ‘allegro’, but
otherwise has a separate structure with a transformation of a theme
from the ‘allegretto’ as its own main theme. Svendsen’s Cello
Concerto (1870) has a slow section between its development and
recapitulation. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Piano Concerto (1883) is prac-
tically monothematic, but varies its Russian theme through different
tempos, primarily *moderato'-'allegretto quasi polacca’-‘andante’-
‘allegro’.
Liszt’s First Piano Concerto, conceived and sketched in 1830 but
completed in 1849-56, has as background a four-movement design,
with the movement elements grouped 1, 2-4. There are strong thematic
links across the structure, including the use of a motto-theme, and
THE CONCERTO 617
the last movement element has very little underived material.
Saint-Saéns's Fourth Piano Concerto (1875) groups the movement
elements 2 + 2. The three-movement structure inherited from
Classical and early Romantic times remained the norm during this
period, and was used in such important works as Brahms’s First Piano
Concerto, Violin Concerto, and Double Concerto, and Tchaikovsky’s
two complete Piano Concertos and Violin Concerto. The movements
could be linked: Grieg’s Classically shaped three-movement Piano
Concerto (original version, 1868, but drastically revised 1907) and
Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto (1878) both link their slow movements
to their Finales. Schumann's Cello Concerto (1850) has bridge
material joining the three otherwise distinct movements. Strauss's
First Horn Concerto (1883) has three short movements played
without a break, and thematic metamorphosis from its opening into
the principal theme of the rondo Finale. These and suchlike works
need strong resonances of traditional movement forms and types in
order to be distinguished from the more integrated one-movement
concertos discussed above.
However, the concerto was much influenced by the symphony
during this period, and the inherited three-movement norm was
strongly challenged by a four-movement trend. The extra movement
would characteristically be a scherzo type, which would of course
be most apt for showing an additional aspect of a soloist's virtuosity.
Litolffs four surviving piano concertos (1844-67) are entitled Con-
certo symphonique, and use four-movement form. Liszt admired these
works, dedicated his own First Piano Concerto to Litolff, and,
like Litolff, included in that work a scherzo movement element.
Vieuxtemps's Fourth Violin Concerto (c.1850) and Brahms's Second
Piano Concerto are both four-movement structures, and were received
as examples of the symphonic concerto. Berlioz wrote of the
Vieuxtemps work that it was ‘a magnificent symphony for orchestra
with principal violin’.*® Brahms's two previous concertos had touched
four-movement design during their genesis, the First Piano Concerto
as a sonata for two pianos, then a symphony, and the Violin
Concerto as a four-movement work (though the assumption that a
discarded scherzo from this Concerto then became the Scherzo of
the Second Piano Concerto is purely speculative). Lalo's Cello
Concerto (1876) is a three-movement work combining slow and
scherzo elements in the second, entitled Intermezzo, with the
internal structure ‘andantino’-‘allegro’-‘andantino’—‘allegro’. In this
76 Boris Schwarz, ‘Henry Vieuxtemps’, The New Grove, xix. 753.
618 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
work, as in his four-movement Concerto russe (1883) for violin and
orchestra, employing Russian themes in both Lento and Finale, the
movement structure is further elaborated by slow introductions to
first and last movements. Tchaikovsky included a ‘prestissimo’ in
the middle movement of his First Piano Concerto.
However much the soloists were integrated into a symphonic
argument—and in many of the greatest concertos of the period this
integration was very thorough—the defining nature of concerto
texture and continuity was dualist. The principle of opposition and
antiphony is ever present, even when one or other side is silent. The
soloist's role is virtuosic and positively projected; balance of volume
between soloist and a large Romantic orchestra (however lightly
used) remains a crux of the genre. The orchestra acts as accom-
paniment, foil, and carrier of symphonic aspirations. The silences of
one or other side vary in length from large-scale orchestral expositions
and other ritornelli-residues, and soloist’s presentations and cadenzas,
to quick alternations between them— within the space of a bar, or
even sometimes a beat. The double-exposition structure for first
movements was no longer common, but survived in a number of
important works, and Brahms used it, subtly modified, in all four
of his concertos. Following examples in Mendelssohn and Schumann,
the cadenza could be brought more into the prerogative of the
composer by being written out; Grieg's Piano Concerto has a
written-out cadenza, which remains part of the coda in the orthodox
sonata-form first movement, albeit with single exposition. The
cadenza could alter this, its traditional position, to appear between
development and recapitulation; Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto
follows Mendelssohn's in this respect. It could also appear very
near the opening of a work, as in Brahms's Double Concerto;
Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto has a cadenza in this position,
but also one towards the close of the first movement. Short
cadenza-like passage-work during the course of movements could
substitute for a full cadenza, as in Liszt's Second Piano Concerto,
or the cadenza could disappear altogether, as in Brahms's Second
Piano Concerto. The disappearances of both the double exposition
and the cadenza move the genre closer to the symphony.
The orchestra as accompaniment or foil for the soloist may be
treated relatively simply (and detached chords for orchestra were
obviously useful in reaching a just balance of forces), or complexly.
A particular and characteristic mark of such complexity derives from
soloistic virtuosity. An essential of the soloist's part is its difficulty,
hence, compared with the same instrument's role in chamber music,
THE CONCERTO 619
there is generally an increase in rhythmic speed and textural density,
and a soloist often figuratively divides and decorates simpler but
nevertheless structural material in the orchestra. (In such textures a
soloist might even be said to ‘accompany’ the orchestra.)
The increased rhythmic speed usually involves arpeggios, scales,
and trills, and the increased textural density octaves and multiple
stoppings (strings), double, triple, quadruple octaves and full-hand
chords (piano). An important feature of the late-Romantic concerto
solo part is increased speed of registral variation, which applies to
all instruments, and which may happen in very small durations (in
performance, this feature is one of the most visual aspects of
virtuosity). The opening of Liszt's First Piano Concerto provides a
case in point. Figural music thus has an indispensable role to play
in concertos, and a real test of compositional skill was to make this
figural music interesting and expressive. Liszt, Brahms, Bruch,
Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saéns, and Dvoräk had pronounced gifts in this
respect, and the genre brought out some of the best music of Bruch
and Saint-Saéns. Figural work could be decorative, elaborative,
developmental, and thematic: Tchaikovsky's figurations in the first
solo entry of his Violin Concerto exemplify well this latter type.
Registral difficulty is a marked feature of string concertos, mostly
effected by very high writing, but in very low writing tonal strength
and penetration also become difficult.
Fewer concertos than symphonies were written, and composers
generally felt able to be more structurally innovative in concertos
than in the ‘apex-genre’; Liszt, Bruch, Dvorak, and the young
Saint-Saéns are examples of this tendency. Bruch in his Second
Violin Concerto, Liszt, Saint-Saéns, and MacDowell in their Second
Piano Concertos found no need to begin with a fast movement.
Nevertheless sonata form remained the basis of fast first movements,
whether or not with double exposition. Even Bruch's Vorspiel, the
first movement of his First Violin Concerto, uses it. Tchaikovsky
inflected it in his First Piano Concerto and Violin Concerto by
opening in each case with a strong lyrical idea which then plays no
further direct part in the work. Fused movement structure could
give rise to foreshortening of the sonata form, as in Vieuxtemps's
Fifth Violin Concerto, Svendsen's Cello Concerto, and Strauss's
First Horn Concerto. Liszt avoided sonata form altogether in his
First Piano Concerto. The structure of its first movement is original
and radical, while owing something to Baroque ritornello form; it
depends on the opening theme recurring on E flat (bar 27), E (bar
34), F (bar 73), F sharp (bar 94), G (bar 101), and E flat (bar 108).
620 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
Ternary form was favoured for slow movements and rondo for
finales. ue
The concerto in this period was not generally a programmatic
genre, though it had had a distinctly programmatic aspect earlier,
as in the works of Weber, Field, Steibelt, and Moscheles. Liszt's
concertos are non-programmatic. And of Raffs four only one is
programmatic: his Second Violin Concerto is a three-movement work
with one verse of a poem by Börner attached to each movement.
But the concerto could readily be used for nationalist or exotic
inflexions. Joachim's Violin Concerto, *in ungarischer Weise', Op. 11,
was one of his most popular and enduring works. Tchaikovsky,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and Lalo incorporated Russian themes. Bruch's
Schottische Fantasie is really an extended concerto with differentiated
movements and using Scottish melodies. Brahms assimilated Hun-
garian resonances in his concerto finales, and this indeed was one
of the ways he distanced his ‘symphonic concertos’ from the
symphony. Dvorak’s Violin Concerto has Czech folk resonances in
all its movements. Saint-Saéns’ Fifth Piano Concerto is nicknamed
‘the Egyptian’, and contains oriental melodic inflections.
VARIATIONS FOR SOLOIST AND ORCHESTRA
Variations for soloist and orchestra, a genre closely related to the
concerto proper, were established in the nineteenth century by
Chopin’s Variations on ‘La ci darem’ (1827), which Schumann
greeted with acclaim.?? Half a century later Tchaikovsky followed
Chopin’s example with his Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello
and orchestra (1876). This charming work shows the purest expression
of its composer’s neo-Classicism in an original composition. The work
only recently emerged in Tchaikovsky’s own version, unmutilated by
its dedicatee, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, whose changes involved the
reordering of variations and the deletion of variation 8 altogether.?8
Tchaikovsky wrote a simple binary theme with codetta (treated
similarly to Chopin's link between variations), and eight variations
upon it, most of which expand its structure; there is a strongly
virtuosic element in many of the variations, and several cadenza-like
insertions.
César Franck's Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra
(1885) is a further structurally innovative work from his late period,
77 ‘Hats off gentlemen! A genius’, Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften, i. 5.
?8 For an account of Fitzenhagen's alterations, together with a useful tabular analysis of
the work, see David Brown, Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, ii. The Crisis
Years (1874-1878) (London, 1982), 120-3.
CHAMBER MUSIC 621
being a continuous structure of introduction, theme and variations,
episode, and finale. The introduction has two themes, initially in
alternation, the first of which penetrates the latter stages of the
central theme-and-variations section, and the second of which forms
the basis of the quiet episode and of the extended and spirited
sonata-form finale. The theme of the variations, incidentally pre-
figured in the introduction, emerges as an eighteen-bar binary theme,
which is given six unnumbered variations, the earlier ones of which
retain the form of the theme. This theme plays only a subordinate
role in the finale, as bass to the second subject. The Alsatian Leon
Boéllmann followed Franck in writing Variations symphoniques (1893)
for cello and orchestra.
CHAMBER MUSIC
Chamber music is best regarded as a collection of genres and
subgenres, with the common characteristic of having one player per
part. The constituent genres may be identified according to title and
mode of musical discourse; the central chamber music genre is the
multi-movement symphony or sonata analogue normally titled by
the specific performing forces, which range from two performers
upwards, though more than nine are rare. Strings can form a ‘whole’
ensemble up to eight, or be joined by the piano up to six players
(though the earlier fashion for the piano sextet had now been largely
superseded). Woodwind and horn may take part though brass
instruments are very rare. (The trumpet had some vogue in French
chamber music.) As the forces increase so does the reliance on
pseudo-orchestral colour; but chamber music is always prevented
from becoming orchestral by the integrity, identity, and continuity
of its individual parts. Within the great variety of groupings, the
duo sonata with piano, piano trio, string quartet, and string quintet
had important Classical precedents and later emphasis; and during
the later nineteenth century the piano quintet and particularly the
piano quartet became important groupings.
The characteristic of one player to a part had a strong influence
on the nature of chamber style itself; its nature was dialogue, founded
on Beethovenian precedent. The times of the quatuors brillants,
consisting of virtuoso solo plus accompaniment, were past. That
aspect of late-Romantic instrumental style which might be called
‘thematic density’, and which formed one of the most significant
stylistic continuities between Beethoven and Schoenberg, found its
characteristic home in chamber music; and the textural dialogue
gave possibilities of great flexibility in thematic manipulation,
622 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
particularly used by Brahms. Though chamber music was in many
ways a conservative genre, this aspect of its style was importantly
progressive. The eschewing of the wider timbral range and larger
dynamic volume of the orchestra intensified the thematic-structural
dialogue, and the small number of parts emerged each in reinforced
continuity and individuality. The modes of textural articulation are
grouping and distancing. Octave doubling, though a colouristic
device imported from orchestration, becomes a form of grouping.
Chamber music had its origins, to a large extent its rational base,
and a significant part of its use as players’ music. But this performers’
music was always projectible in private circles or on the public
platform as listeners’ music, and an immense growth in importance
of the public chamber music concert is a distinctive feature of this
period; the intimacy of the small group became a public aesthetic
object.
Such was the satisfaction of chamber music composers with the
traditional format of three or four separated movements that, in
spite of the experimental precedent of some of Beethoven’s late string
quartets, they showed little inclination to explore such possibilities
further. Thus the unitary single movement for chamber group (not
including variation sets) is a great rarity; there was no real equivalent
of the orchestral fantasy or symphonic poem, though Puccini’s
Crisantemi [Chrysanthemums] for string quartet (1890) is an example.
Raffs Fourth Violin Sonata (1866) is a single-movement work
incorporating fast and slow material, and Dvorák's String Quartet
in E minor of 1870 is one of his formally experimental works
composed under the influence of Liszt and Wagner, with differentiated
movement types in a one-movement structure. Volkmann's B flat
minor Trio (1854), which aroused much critical acclaim and was
greatly admired by Liszt, combines slow and final movements.
Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in А minor (1882) has two designated
movements, the second in two parts, a set of variations, and a
finale. Saint-Saéns's First Violin Sonata (1885) shows one of his
characteristic groupings of movement types as 2 + 2; and Boéllmann
took this up in his Piano Trio, Op. 19 (i. ‘introduction’, ‘allegro’,
‘andante’; ii. ‘scherzo’, finale’). But three or four separated and
formally closed movements remained the norm for the great
chamber-music composers of this period: Brahms, Borodin, Tchai-
kovsky, Franck, Fauré, Smetana, and Dvořák; as also for the minor
masters who cultivated the genre (such as Friedrich Kiel, Raff,
Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Rubinstein). Of Brahms's twenty-four
chamber works, five are in three movements. The First Cello Sonata
CHAMBER MUSIC 623
and Second Clarinet Sonata omit a slow movement (Brahms actually
composed one for this Cello Sonata, but deleted it before publication),
and the First Violin Sonata omits a scherzo. In his First String
Quintet and Second Violin Sonata he compressed slow and scherzo
movement types into a single movement with formal integration, in
both cases based on an ABA,B,A, design, where A is slow and B
fast. More than four movements for a chamber work in the sonata
analogue are rare, though Friedrich Kiel’s First Piano Quintet has
five, as had Dvorák's G major String Quintet in its first version. His
Bagatelles is a five-movement work; Raff's String Quartet No. 7,
‘Die schöne Müllerin”: cyklische Tondichtung, and Dvorák's Dumky
Trio are both six-movement works, and Dvorák's Cyprise [Cypresses].
for string quartet, but originally conceived as songs with piano has
twelve. The Raff example is close to the suite, and the Dvorák
examples are close to ‘collections’.
In so far as it was analogous to sonata and symphony, chamber
music was elevated in style, though the intimacy of the setting
modified some aspects of this style. Integration of movement
structures remained, characteristically based not on movements
flowing into one another, but rather on thematic quotation, trans-
formation, and motivic unification across movements. Thematic
materials would tend to be less epic and elemental than in the
symphony, more melodic; a comparison of Borodin's string quartets
with his completed symphonies is particularly instructive in this
respect. Thematic materials retained other aspects of the elevated
style. As in the symphony, sonata form was the generating thought
process, again almost always used for first movements (Brahms
providing a rare exception in his Horn Trio of 1865), though it could
more readily than in the symphony give way to ternary or variation
form in slow movements, and rondo or variation form in last
movements.
The chamber work was not greatly used for programmatic
expression. Carl Reinecke wrote an Undine Sonata for piano and
flute; Wilhelm Kienzl used a poetic motto for his First String Quartet,
Op. 57, as did Wolf for his D minor Quartet (1879); and Lux's
String Quartet, Op. 58 (1877), has the title ‘Idyll’ for its slow
movement, with three sub titles. Smetana's Piano Trio in G minor
(1855, rev. 1857) was written in memory of his favourite daughter
and includes a funeral march in its third (final) movement; his First
String Quartet, Z meho Zivota [From my Life], has a powerful
programme in which nationalist and biographically programmatic
elements are combined. Raff's quartet Die schöne Müllerin (1874) has
624 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
six movements: i. "The Youth’, ii. "The Mill’, iii. “The Maid of the
Mill’, iv. ‘Unrest’, v. ‘Declaration’, vi: ‘On the Eve of the Wedding’.
Puccini’s Crisantemi (1890), a lament,’? and Tchaikovsky’s String
Sextet Souvenir de Florence, simply a recollection of a happy time,
have just their titles as programme.
Nationalist and exotic styles were certainly appropriate to chamber
music, as they had been for Haydn and Beethoven. Brahms included
strongly Hungarian music in the Finales of his First Piano Quartet
and Second String Quintet; Dvorak included Czech folk inflexions
in his chamber music, and the three chamber masterpieces of his
American sojourn (String Quartet, Op. 96, String Quintet, Op. 97,
and Sonatina for violin and piano, Op. 100) are part of his attempt
to found a national American music. Rheinberger introduced a
Hungarian element in his String Quintet (1875) and his C minor
Quartet (1876). Karl Schuberth's Third Quartet (1862) is entitled
Meine Reise in den Kirgisen Steppen [My Journey in the Kirghiz
Steppes], and Nikolay Afanas'ev's Quartet in A, The Volga (1866),
includes songs of the Volga boatmen. Tchaikovsky's First String
Quartet, Op. 11, won much of its popularity by its use of a folk-song
as the main theme of its slow movement. Glazunov's Third String
Quartet (1888), titled S/av Quartet, has a mazurka as third movement
and a Finale headed 'Slavonic Festival', a vigorous dance-inflected
rondo which he afterwards orchestrated.
Self-standing variation sets were also written for chamber groups,
but this genre was distinctly overshadowed by the multi-movement
chamber work, and did not establish itself at all forcefully. Such sets
were written by Fibich (1885), Vincenz Lachner (1875), Massenet
(1872), Rheinberger (1876), and Zelenski (1883). Rheinberger's
Theme with Variations for String Quartet, Op. 93, has a short
eight-bar chaconne-like theme followed by no fewer than fifty
variations, all but the last of which (entitled ‘Capriccio’) keep the
eight-bar form. Some variations, especially early in the work, retain
the theme as cantus firmus; others are based on decorative and
figurative elaborations, harmonic alterations, and contrapuntal
devices.
CHAMBER MUSIC IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
Chamber works were, of course, still being written in the two
decades before 1850, especially by Mendelssohn, Schumann and
*9 [t was written on the death of Duke Amadeo of Savoy and is dedicated to his memory.
Mosco Carner describes it as ‘an inspired threnody' (Puccini: A Critical Biography (2nd edn.;
London, 1974), 305).
CHAMBER MUSIC IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA 625
Spohr, Lachner and Reissiger, but the genre was not so characteristic
of the times as, in the instrumental realm, solo piano music and
orchestral music. Some of Schumann’s, Spohr’s, and Lachner’s
chamber music is post-1850, including Schumann’s three Violin
Sonatas and Third Piano Trio, Lachner’s Nonet of 1875, and Spohr’s
last four String Quartets, last String Quintet, some duos for two
violins, and his Septet in A minor. For the second half of the
nineteenth century in these two countries, reckoned by sheer volume
of works produced, chamber music titled by specific performing
forces must be regarded as the most characteristic instrumental genre
of the times. It was of course in many ways easier to write than
symphonies or concertos; but the medium found new vigour, helped
by the increase of professional artists and ensembles playing chamber
music in public, as also by the increased cultivation of Haus-Musik.
The following selective list gives some idea of the numbers of
composers and works involved; the summations after each composer
are of mature completed works in the genre titled by specific
performing forces. Significant composers of chamber music in these
two countries from the 1850s on included: Woldemar Bargiel (9),
Brahms (24) Bruch (6), Eduard Franck (18) Goldmark (11),
Friedrich Kiel (20), Raff (25), Reinecke (24) and Volkmann (12). In
the 1860s the following composers began their production in the
genre: Friedrich Gernsheim (19), Goetz (4), Rheinberger (14); in the
1870s: Brüll (6), Robert Fuchs (40), Heinrich von Herzogenberg (21),
August Klughardt (10); and in the 1880s: Wilhelm Berger (12), Felix
Draeseke (10), Richard von Perger (6), and Richard Strauss (4).
Some of these later composers wrote chamber music in late-
nineteenth-century style well into the twentieth century, and Fuchs’s
serenely beautiful Clarinet Quintet (1917) must serve as an example
of this significant part of early twentieth-century musical activity.
Friedrich Kiel (1821-85) was a highly respected master of the
genre, whose works in it were all published shortly after composition.
Wilhelm Altmann, a Kiel enthusiast, drew attention to his stylistic
lightheartedness and its integration with contrapuntal expertise;80
there is an active Kiel Society in Germany today. His first multi-
movement chamber work is the Piano Trio in D (1850), and his last
the piano quartets of 1874. He wrote two string quartets, two piano
quintets, three piano quartets, seven piano trios, four violin sonatas,
a viola sonata, and a cello sonata, thus preferring groupings involving
80 Wilhelm Altmann, 'Kiel', in Walter Willson Cobbett (ed.), Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey
of Chamber Music ii. (London, 1930), 49-52.
626 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
the piano. He used three- and four-movement forms, though the
First Piano Quintet has five movements. In his three-movement
works he prefers to omit the slow movement. His Viola Sonata, Op.
67 (1871), is a masterly four-movement work. The opening of
his sonata-form first movement (Ex. 415) demonstrates his full
understanding of the dialogue basis of chamber music, and his
expressive and inventive treatment of this opening at the beginning of
the development (Ex. 416), where it is integrated with second-subject
material, gives some indication of his compositional expertise. The
tonic for each movement descends by a major third (G minor, E
flat, B, G); there are motivic connections across all movements, and
Ex. 415
Allegro
| $
a t]
Сача оо ПИАРЫ НЬ ЕС Р Т. mem гс” се ee
Мы бале лы E = e e [LCE е = ==
i E EE
d c 77
fe te E dim. JU fz
e Ce H E М 5
2 h : - ——. Y _——. ~
CHAMBER MUSIC IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA 627
Pp a = ees
pe G o H
the Finale, in a ‘hunting’ rondo style though using sonata form, has
a coda which recalls the opening of the work.
Raff wrote a string octet, a sextet, nine string quartets (one of
which is lost), a piano quintet, two piano quartets, five piano trios
(one lost), five violin sonatas, and a cello sonata. He mostly used
four-movement form, though he departed from this in four works:
the Fourth Violin Sonata (1866), subtitled Chromatische Sonate in
einem Satz, begins with recitative, and includes a slow section before
the main Allegro; and his group of three String Quartets, Op. 192
(1874), consists of two works subtitled suites (in five and seven
movements) and Die schöne Müllerin, whose movements have already
been detailed. Raff had a particular gift in chamber music of
628 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
combining lyricism with virtuosity in the context of a convincing
grasp of chamber textures. JE.
BRAHMS’S CHAMBER WORKS
Brahms had been involved with chamber music from his earliest
years. He played it in a private concert arranged by his father in
1843, the programme including Beethoven’s Op. 16 and one of
Mozart’s piano quartets. He also wrote it early in his composing
career; in 1851 two of his (lost) chamber works were played at
another private concert: a Duo for cello and piano, and a Piano
Trio.8! His early interest remained with him, and performance and
composition in the genre formed central features of his life. It was
partly as a chamber music player and composer that he introduced
himself to Vienna in 1862 with the Piano Quartets Opp. 25 and 26,
and he played in the first performances of his last chamber works,
the two Clarinet Sonatas. His surviving chamber works stretch
throughout his composing career.
His first surviving multi-movement chamber work is the Piano
Trio, Op. 8, of 1854, massively scaled and opening with a lengthy
lyrical melody. He soon became dissatisfied with it, and took occasion
in 1889 to rewrite it, broadly retaining the second movement (the
Scherzo and Trio) and the openings of the other movements. Major
points of his reworking were the creation of new second themes in
movements 1, 3, and 4, in each case more dynamic in ethos than
their predecessors, and the regularization of the recapitulation in the
first movement. This reworking offers absorbing insight into Brahms's
development over almost his entire creative life.82 In 1856 he
completed a Piano Quartet in C sharp minor in three movements,
which in 1875 became his Third Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60.
James Webster has studied the relationship between the lost early
version and its later rewriting.®? Brahms had composed a deeply
personal work reflecting his involvement with Clara Schumann: in
81 An A major Piano Trio published by Ernst Bücken and Karl Hasse (Leipzig, 1938) as
an early work of Brahms is not now generally accepted as such; see Margit L. McCorkle,
Johannes Brahms: Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis (Munich, 1984), 687-8. Other
lost chamber works from Brahms's early years are detailed in McCorkle's Anhang Па Nr. 5,
6, 8, and 10.
82 For studies of this reworking, see Donald F. Tovey, ‘Brahms’, in Cobbett's Cyclopedic
Survey of Chamber Music, i (London, 1929), 159-63, and Ernst Herttrich, 'Johannes Brahms—
Klaviertrio H-dur op. 8, Frühfassung und Spátfassung— ein analytischer Vergleich’, in Martin
Bente (ed.), Musik, Edition, Interpretation: Gedenkschrift Günter Henle (Munich, 1980), 218-
36.
83 James Webster, “The C sharp minor Version of Brahms's Op. 60°, Musical Times, 121
(1980), 89-93.
BRAHMS'S CHAMBER WORKS 629
both versions it opens with a ‘Clara’ theme, and Brahms described
the later version in terms of Goethe's Werther.
The works of the early 1860s, a period named by historians as
Brahms's ‘First Maturity’, show consolidation of influences and an
establishment of his stylistic location, particularly vis-à-vis Liszt
and the New German School. Chamber music was a particular
compositional concern at this time, and he produced the First String
Sextet (1859-60), First and Second Piano Quartets (1861), Piano
Quintet (finished in its first version as a string quintet in 1862,
reworked as two-piano sonata and piano quintet in 1864), First Cello
Sonata (1862 and 1865), Second String Sextet (1864-5), and Horn
Trio (1865). His earlier primarily Beethoven-derived style was now
supplemented and modified by a particularly strong Schubertian
influence. There are direct thematic resonances from Schubert,
especially in the Finales of the Second Piano Quartet (from that of
Schubert's String Quintet) and Piano Quintet (again from Schubert’s
String Quintet and also his Grand Duo); there are structural
influences (three-keyed expositions, lengthy chromatic inflexions of
second-subject initiations, and sonata form with combined response);8*
and Beethovenian dramatic rhetoric is synthesized with Schubertian
lyricism. But these works are far from being epigonal, and show
many elements of Brahms's modernity. For instance, the openings
of the Second String Sextet and the Horn Trio have clearly
new directions in melodic writing, the one immediately registrally
expansive, the other restricted, though evocatively so, in an ostinato
rhythm; both examples use a motivically based lyricism which is
typical of many themes in this group of chamber works. His harmony
could draw on fully contemporary chromatic progressions: for
instance, the close of the recapitulation of the first movement of the
Second Piano Quartet is based on major chords a major third part.
Chromatic inflexion plays a large part in the poetry of the slow
movement of the Horn Trio, and special moments of structural
chromaticism are the developmental continuation of the central fugue
and the coda. In the second movement of the First Piano Quartet
Brahms initiated a series of innovatory non-slow middle movements,
in a veiled scherzo, called Intermezzo, which was continued in the
equally original approach to scherzo writing in the second movement
of the Second String Sextet, based on his early Gavotte in A minor.85
84 For further discussion of Schubertian influence on Brahms during these years, see James
Webster, "Schubert: Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity’, /9th-century Music, 2/1
(July 1978), 18-35; 3/1 (July 1979), 52-71.
85 Robert Pascall, ‘Unknown Gavottes by Brahms’, Music and Letters, 57/4 (Oct. 1976),
404-11.
630 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
This series extends into works of the 1870s and beyond, as has
already been noted with regard to the-symphonies.
Brahms's use of biographically derived elements in his chamber
music continues with the ‘Clara’ theme of the Intermezzo of the
First Piano Quartet, and a similarly evolved ‘Agathe’ theme in the
first movement of the Second String Sextet. He also continued his
massive approach to the genre. The broad sense of scale in all these
works comes from an internal expansion of movements, a particular
mark of which is enlargement of second subject groups in sonata
form to include up to five identifiably distinct themes. The first
movement of the First String Sextet has four such separate themes,
albeit motivically related, but made particularly distinct by each
being accorded an immediate variational repeat; the first movement
of the First Piano Quartet has five such themes (at bars 50, 79, 92,
101, and 113) followed by a lengthy codetta. Other movements
receive similar expansive treatment; for instance the second (slow)
movement of the Second Piano Quartet has the diversified structural
plan ABA,CDA,BC,A, (demonstrating a modification of an extended
ternary design, by ‘relocation’ of the C, section), and the Scherzo
and Trio of its third movement are each a fully articulated sonata
form. Brahms's sensitivity towards sound compelled him to vary his
instrumental groupings; throughout his life he had no really central
chamber-music groupings such as Classical composers had found in
the piano trio, string quartet and quintet. Brahms's search for the
appropriate instrumentation of his Piano Quintet, with its ultimate
integration of string sostenuto and piano percussive nuances, does
not deny this sensitivity, rather manifests it—as does the great
textural variety he used within his sextets and piano quartets. A
particularly scintillating texture from this period is the heterophonic
presentation of the first theme of the slow movement in his Second
Piano Quartet. His luxuriant, spacious, and imaginative textures at
this time act as support and enhancement of the structural breadth
of scale.
The decade of the 1870s in Brahms's chamber music may be
viewed as that of ‘unfinished business’. His productivity in the genre
of the 1860s had been interrupted partly by the completion of Ein
deutsches Requiem (and, in the aftermath of that work's stupendous
success, a concentration on large-scale choral genres), and partly by
a continuing struggle with the string quartet. He had decided not to
publish his early B minor String Quartet, but 'finished' two others
by the mid-1860s (one in C minor) which he showed to friends.
These did not satisfy him, and he did not properly finish his First
ВКАНМ5`5 CHAMBER WORKS 631
and Second String Quartets until 1873, describing them in his own
manuscript catalogue of his works as “written for the second time,
Summer 1873’. His struggle with the string quartet parallels his
longer and more spectacular struggle with the symphony. Although
the core of his creative equipment had been learnt primarily
from Beethoven, he clearly felt overawed in both these supremely
Beethovenian genres. He casually (and possibly exaggeratedly) men-
tioned to a friend that he had completed more than twenty string
quartets before publishing his Op. 51, No. 1. This, together with the
First Symphony, is the most Beethovenian in style of all his mature
masterpieces. Particularly the first and last movements of the Quartet
show a rigorous concision, a motivic and rhythmic urgency and
drive, and a retreat from lyricism. His Second String Quartet,
beginning with Joachim's motto FAE, reinstates Brahms's by now
natural lyricism, and its third movement continues his innovatory
approach to non-slow middle movements with a combination of
minuet and scherzo, incorporating intricate canonic links. By the
Third String Quartet (1875), written after the reworking of the Third
Piano Quartet (1869-75), Brahms had become positively playful in
the medium, though the easy charm of the work incorporates great
structural polish, originality, and subtlety. Its third movement has
what amounts to a viola solo, since the other instruments, though
participating in dialogue, are muted throughout.
Brahms had intended to include an early A minor Violin Sonata
in his first group of publications, but was prevented by having
mislaid the manuscript (the work remains lost); his First Violin
Sonata (1878-9) he described as the fourth actually composed. It
was written during and after the composition of the Violin Concerto.
Brahms's marked tendency to compose pairs of works in close
temporal proximity is a commonplace for commentators (piano
quartets, variation sets, symphonies, overtures, sonatas), and has
important bearing on the artistic significance of the works involved.
But the ‘disparate pairs’ such as the Third Piano Quartet and Third
String Quartet, Violin Concerto and First Violin Sonata, Clarinet
Trio and Clarinet Quintet (which Brahms himself described as ‘twins’)
have not received so much attention, and show in addition an
interplay of genres or sub-genres. The differing types of virtuosic
and intimate violin lyricism in Concerto and Sonata, and the forms
of the movements (especially since the Sonata is also in three
movements without scherzo) are instructive to compare. Brahms
distinguished his violin sonatas by relating them closely to songs,
and his First Violin Sonata uses the song ‘Regenlied’ for the main
632 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
theme of its Finale; this theme is motivically connected to themes
of the first and second movements." *
Brahms was now entering the period of his ripest maturity, with
influences fully assimilated into his lyric-dramatic approach to
chamber writing. Themes have a new suavity, economy, and dis-
tinction, developmental techniques are at their most meaningful and
less separated from thematic presentation, and the rich musical
continuum is of overwhelming beauty. In 1882 he completed his C
major Piano Trio and First String Quintet. The latter uses two violas,
as opposed to the two cellos of his earlier superseded string quintet.
The first movement, with its sostenuto opening, was one of very few
Brahms works to appeal to Hugo Wolf.86 The middle movement
with its compression of slow and scherzo elements is a recomposition
of his early piano Sarabande and Gavotte in A into a self-enclosed
formal scheme which nevertheless shows a very rare Brahmsian use
of progressive tonality.5* The Finale combines sonata form and
fugue, as had that of the First Cello Sonata. In 1886 he wrote the
Second Violin Sonata, C minor Piano Trio, Second Cello Sonata,
and Third Violin Sonata (which did not, however, receive its final
polishing until 1888). Brahms intended his Second String Quintet
(1890), that most poetically Viennese of all his chamber works, to
mark his retirement, but his meeting with the clarinettist Richard
Mühlfeld 1n March 1891 provided the inspiration for the rich final
flowering of the four clarinet works: Clarinet Trio and Quintet (1891)
and the two Clarinet Sonatas (1894).
The Clarinet Quintet is one of the supreme chamber music
masterpieces of the nineteenth century. It combines thematic economy
and density with a profound range and intensity of expression,
relying on the evolution of significant new shapes from simple
primary materials. It incorporates the very highest aspirations of late
Romantic instrumental music within established forms, and in many
ways may be regarded as the summation of Brahms's chamber music
style. In it he further explored the remote possibilities of the group
of dances that had so obsessed him over many years, and the opening
of the Quintet derives distantly from the Gavotte in A minor. The
lyrical-motivic four-bar initiation, thematically differentiated but
bound together by the descending octave it fills, receives an ex-
pansionary developmental response of twenty bars, in which new
shapes are evolved so naturally and simply yet so convincingly and
36 See W. A. Thomas-San-Galli, Johannes Brahms (Munich, 1912), 214-15.
8? Pascall, ‘Unknown Gavottes by Brahms’; Michael Musgrave, The Music of Brahms
(London, 1985), 201-2, 204-5.
BRAHMS'S CHAMBER WORKS 633
decisively from the opening, in a paradigm of what Schoenberg
termed ‘developing variation'. This response elongates the opening
two bars of the movement by internal expansion over an harmonic
sequence based on the Baroque cycle of fifths; bars 3-4 of the
movement then become evolved into a new shape by internal octave
displacement and a new extension (bars 14ff). Ex. 417 shows the
Exodi
Allegro
634 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
==
PU zn vu
x: ueni ss
а раа]
egen BI ee EE. et,
at E He =
© жест: se
f
Beer GR; 43
vn 1 /oco €— |
б == ЕЕЕ ЕН ЫК КЕ = ГЕ
є peus LOT дт Е Видья d Ё H 3 Ee -
y
ПЫ iesse N EN
Lë AUT IH we © Сз ЖО " т
счети г тары }
opening twenty-four bars of the Quintet. A bridge theme, based like
the opening on a descending octave, then presents the Baroque
sequence in a new expressive format, and leads to a second subject
group in which Brahms dissects his opening semiquaver shapes, yet
simultaneously nourishes them into a new sustained lyricism across
the texture. The development section reconciles figurative play on
the first subject with a meditative expressive alteration to the bridge
theme. The recapitulation is basically regular, as was Brahms's
mature custom, and the coda provides further expressive modi-
fications, primarily now to the first subject.
The Adagio has a simple ternary form as its background, which
Brahms complicates in three characteristic and far-reaching ways:
(1) the middle section is built on a variation of the opening section,
(2) developmental bridge passages link the formally closed sections,
but are themselves highly expressive, the second containing a climactic
development based on further extension of the octave-displacement
techniques of the first movement, and (3) a lyrical coda recalls the
middle section in tranquillity, thus extending and modifying the
central contrast of the structure, which leads to final closure on the first
two notes of the movement. The opening section is a recomposition
of the piano Sarabande in A, in a new rhythm; the middle section
FURTHER CONTEMPORIES OF BRAHMS 635
combines Hungarian and concerto elements in its variational
technique.
The Adagio provides primary thematic shapes for the subsequent
movements. In the Andantino Brahms continues his series of formal
innovations for non-slow middle movements by using an intermezzo-
like frame in D major with progressive thematicism (that 1s, without
a self-enclosed form) around a central B minor scherzo in fully
articulated sonata form. The opening of the movement is a simple
decoration of the Adagio theme, which leads into a theme evolved
from the second subject of the first movement; the scherzo begins
with a nervous, incomplete transformation of the opening of the
Andantino, counterpointed against the theme evolved from the first
movement.
In the Finale Brahms wrote a theme again extracted from the
Adagio, as basis for a set of five variations with coda. The structure
across the variations follows Brahms's characteristic grouping by
increase of animation over variations 1-3 and 4-5, with a change of
animation and mode for variation 4. Here, however, variations 4
and 5 begin a closer definition of earlier movements; variation 4 is
a legato lyrical mediation between the second and third movements,
and variation 5 reintroduces the semiquavers of the first movement,
together with their augmentation. The coda is a culmination of this
sophisticated cyclic thrust and recalls directly the opening of the
Quintet in a valedictory setting, achieving final closure on the cadence
of the first movement itself.
FURTHER CONTEMPORARIES OF BRAHMS
Neither Bruckner, Wolf, nor Richard Strauss can be considered
as primarily composers of chamber music, though all three produced
significant chamber works during this period. Bruckner's C minor
String Quartet of 1862 was published only in 1955 and has not
become widely known; although it dates from his student years, it
is a compelling and delightful early work. His String Quintet (1879)
is, on the other hand, a major mature masterpiece; though closely
related to his symphonic style, monumentality here becomes breadth,
and the elemental is given a more lyrical aspect. Wolf's D minor
String Quartet (1879) carries Faust's insight ‘Entbehren sollst du,
sollst entbehren' [Renounce, you must renounce] as motto. Eric Sams
has drawn attention to its incorporation of Beethovenian and
Wagnerian influences, and discussed the proper movement order (the
two middle movements were reversed in early editions).?? Strauss's
88 Eric Sams, "Hugo Wolf, The New Grove, xx. 483.
636 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
chamber music in traditional forms consists of a String Quartet
(1880), Cello Sonata (1882), Piano Quartet (1884), and Violin Sonata
(1888); he did not subsequently cultivate the genre, except in the
wonderful sextet included in his last opera, Capriccio, and the
Sonatines for 16 woodwind instruments of the same period.
RUSSIAN CHAMBER MUSIC
The most prolific composer of multi-movement chamber works in
Russia was Anton Rubinstein, with twenty-seven such works, and
there are clear indications that some Russian composers regarded
the multi-movement chamber music genre as a particularly Teutonic
one. Borodin acknowledged his Germanic bases for chamber music
more openly than for the symphony. Of his String Sextet (1861) in
Mendelssohnian style he said, it was written ‘to please the Germans’;
his First String Quartet (1879) has on its title-page ‘inspired by a
theme of Beethoven', and Borodin related how the initial news that
he was composing a string quartet had horrified Mussorgsky and
Stasov.8? Rimsky-Korsakov said of his own Quintet for piano and
woodwind (1876) that the first movement was ‘in the classic style of
Beethoven’.9°
Borodin was a keen chamber-music player, as cellist, from his
early years, and his first recorded chamber compositions (both lost)
date from 1847. A further nine works date from the period 1850-
62; some of these were never completed, some others may have been
but survive in a fragmentary state. His String Quintet in F minor
(1854) lacks the coda of the Finale; his Cello Sonata in B minor
(1860) lacks most of the Finale; of his String Sextet (1860-1) only
the first movement and the first half of the second survive. As the
complete and incomplete works of this period are in our time
becoming better known, so a fuller picture of Borodin as an
instrumental composer emerges. They show a predominantly Men-
delssohnian stylistic approach to themes and textures, overlaid with
other diverse influences in particular works. His Quartet for flute,
oboe, viola, and cello (1852-6) is based on works by Haydn, his
Trio in G for two violins and cello (1860) on a Russian folk-song,
and his Cello Sonata (c.1860) on a theme from the second movement
of Bach’s first unaccompanied Violin Sonata (BWV 1001), which he
89 For Borodin’s comment on the Sextet, see Gerald Abraham, ‘Alexander Borodin’, The
New Grove, iii. 55; for details concerning the Quartet, see David Brown’s Foreword to the
Eulenburg Edition of the work (London, 1976).
90 Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, p. 169.
RUSSIAN CHAMBER MUSIC 637
used for the openings of his first and last movements and in the
middle of his second movement, titled ‘Pastorale’.
Borodin's two String Quartets, No. 1 in A (1874-9) and No. 2 in
D (1881), are his crowning chamber music achievements, of great
beauty and originality. Both are Classical four-movement structures,
and both use sonata form for their first and last movements. This
form is also used for the Scherzo of the Second Quartet which has
no Trio, the second subject being a contrasted waltz. The other
middle movements are ternary. Specifically Russian elements are
insistent motivic reiteration in themes even when lyrical, slow
movement tunes either derived from folk-song and modally inflected
(as in the First Quartet) or using more quasi-oriental figures (Second
Quartet), changing background technique (as in the first subject of
the Finale of Quartet No. 1), and Borodin's centripetal harmonic
foreground. (The opening of Quartet No. 1 makes significant use of
the ambiguity F natural-E sharp, which takes on a referential value.)
The quartet writing in both works shows great maturity, with a very
flexible approach to textures (the viola, for instance, can act as bass
or high melody instrument in addition to its more normal roles),
even thematic distribution over the instruments, pronounced reliance
on counterpoint in themes and developments, and some radiantly
luminous high writing (such as the harmonics in the trio of the First
Quartet, and the luxuriant cello melody at the opening of the slow
movement of the Second). The first movements of both quartets are
more sustainedly lyrical than the corresponding movements of
Borodin's symphonies. The tonal structure of the exposition of the
first movement of No. 2, D major-A major-F sharp minor-A major,
is altered on recapitulation to D major-E flat major-C minor-D
major.
Tchaikovsky wrote several movements for chamber groups during
his student years (1863-5); these include five for string quartet, one
of which, an Allegro in B flat (1865), has been published. A slow
introduction, adumbrating the folk-song first subject of the Allegro,
and including counterpoint and recitative-cadenzas for each in-
strument in turn, precedes a full sonata-form Allegro. Motivic
reiteration is characteristic for both subjects, there are orchestral
effects with tremolo bowing, and the second subject is recapitulated
a semitone higher than its exposition key. Parts of the introduction
return at the end of the Allegro, and the movement closes with an
unharmonized version of the folk-song first subject. Some of these
features find place in Tchaikovsky's five mature multi-movement
chamber works—the three String Quartets, Op. 11 in D (1871),
638 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
Op. 22 in F (1874), Op. 30 in E flat minor (1876), Piano Trio, Op. 50
in A minor (1882), and String Sextet (Souvenir de Florence), Op. 70
(1890-2).
His First String Quartet was written for a specific fund-raising
concert. It has first and last movements in sonata form: the slow
second movement has a ternary structure, with a folk-song as the
first section, and the third movement is a Scherzo and Trio. In the
first movement counterpoint is the chief means of extension and
development, to the virtual exclusion of expressive alteration. The
'andante cantabile’ folk-song of the slow movement made this work
immediately and lastingly popular. The Second String Quartet
opens with a highly chromatic slow introduction, which includes
instrumental recitative. Both subjects of the ensuing sonata-form
Moderato are strongly motivic, and there is a notable absence of
lyricism in this movement; counterpoint is more integrated into the
subjects themselves than in the corresponding movement of the First
Quartet, and there are some grand textures with tremolo bowing. The
delicate and haunting Scherzo uses a mixture of 6/8 and 9/8 bars to create
seven-beat phrases for its theme, and the Trio has resonances of changing
background technique in the three presentations of its theme. Even in the
slow movement lyricism does not fully emerge; its outer sections are
plangently expressive but rely on strongly motivic melody, and the central
section has much figurative decoration and a massive climax using or-
chestrally derived texture. In the Finale an opening motivic melody with
ostinato tendencies alternates with a simple lyrical idea (accompanied
with the ostinato rhythm) in the overall design ABA,B,A,B, Coda. B is
in D flat, B, in A, and B, in the tonic of the movement, F. A, and A, are
much expanded, A, being a complete fugue; all the A sections are in F.
This movement is thus an original and entirely successful derivative of the
rondo principle. Tchaikovsky was pleased with this work, and it is an
important one in understanding his view of the relationship between
chamber music and symphony.
His next two chamber works were written in memory of close
associates and include specifically elegiac elements. The Third String
Quartet is dedicated to the memory of Ferdinand Laub, the Piano
Trio to ‘the memory of a great artist”— Nicholas Rubinstein. His
last multi-movement chamber work, the String Sextet Souvenir de
Florence, was written shortly after a visit to that city. All three works
are large scale: the sonata-form first movement of the Sextet, for
instance, is of 769 bars. The slow introduction of the Third Quartet
presages the first subject of the ensuing Allegro sonata form; it has
also a theme of its own which recurs in the slow tempo at the end
RUSSIAN CHAMBER MUSIC 639
of the movement. The development of the Allegro combines the
motivic first subject with the more lyrical second and shows
what may be achieved when counterpoint is fused with expressive
alteration. A light ternary Allegretto as second movement precedes
the emotional core of the work, the Andante funebre e doloroso
third movement. Here plangent harmonies, powerfully expressive
textures and rhythms in the outer sections of the ternary form are
contrasted with a sustained 'lyric idea’ in the middle section,
which is given much elaborately figural accompaniment. A light
sonata-rondo Finale creates an unusual and significant movement
balance for the work as a whole.
The two-movement Piano Trio is perhaps Tchaikovsky's greatest
chamber work. Its first movement, titled ‘Pezzo elegiaco’, is in sonata
form, but with differentiations of tempos similar to those Tchaikovsky
was to use later in the first movement of the Sixth Symphony. The
breadth of scale in the first movement of the Trio is enhanced by
very slow harmonic rhythms for the first subject and a massive
virtuoso piano part. The first subject is ‘moderato assar leading to
‘allegro’ for the second subject. The development maintains this
latter tempo in spite of being concerned initially with the first subject;
a new poetic theme 15 generated towards the close of the development,
which returns in the coda of the movement. The recapitulation of
the first subject is initially an ‘adagio con duolo’. Tchaikovsky divided
the second movement into two parts: A. "Tema con variazioni’; B.
*variazione finale e coda’. He thus followed Classical precedent in
the expansion of a variation set into a finale-styled close; here,
however, part one of the movement is in E major, part two in A
major, a fully articulated sonata form. The theme at the beginning
of the movement is often described by commentators as simple,
which is an apt description of the diatonic harmony and chordal
accompanying texture, but its string of ten two-bar phrases, each
with a similar rhythmic shape, has an original internal structure.
The first three phrases group as a statement, the next three as
response cadencing on to the tonic; a further group of two phrases
acts as a new statement in the dominant (the starting-point of the
ternary form of some variations), and a two-phrase group concludes.
The set of eleven variations begins in a figural decorative mode,
maintaining the form of the theme, but already in variation 3
Tchaikovsky veers away into character variations based on elements
of the theme only. Variation 5 is a high-pitched musette, 6 an
extended waltz, 8 a fully worked-out three-part fugue with the piano
in octaves acting as the lowest voice and with imposing use of
640 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
augmentation, 10 a mazurka, and Il a modified recapitulation of
the theme. For the B section of the-movement a transformation
of the first phrase of the theme with new extensions acts as the first
subject, and phrase 7 of the theme, again with new extensions, as
second subject. The movement ends with the opening theme of the
entire work set first as a massive culminative gesture, then as a
simple funeral march. Both movements of this work are thus
of structural originality on traditional bases, and Tchaikovsky's
characteristic gifts for blending lyric ideas with counterpoint, intimacy
with grandeur, and emotional expression with formalism, create a
powerful and deeply felt masterpiece.
Chamber music played an important part in the Friday meetings
at the Maecenas publisher Belyaev's in the late 1880s, and a number
of light works were produced. The String Quartet for Belyaev's
name-day in 1887 was Jour de Féte: Glazunov provided the first
movement, called ‘Christmas Singers; Lyadov the second, ‘Glo-
rification’, and Rimsky-Korsakov the third, 'Khorovod'.
FRENCH CHAMBER MUSIC
As in Germany and Austria during this period, so in France more
chamber works than symphonies were written. Minor masters such
as Henri Bertini, Charles Dancla, Louise Farrenc, Théodore Gouvy,
and Paul Lacombe cultivated the multi-movement chamber work,
as did Lalo, Saint-Saéns, Castillon, Fauré, Franck, d'Indy, Chausson,
and Lekeu. The artistic environment in Paris was one in which
chamber music played a large part. In 1856 the Gazette musicale
announced ‘a new era, the era of the quartet’, and Jeffrey Cooper's
monumental survey of Parisian concert life from 1828 to 1871 shows
that in 1856 there were nine established concert series either primarily
of chamber music (as Dancla's Concerts and ‘Seances’, those of the
'Société des Derniers Quatuors de Beethoven', and 'Société des
Quatuors de Mendelssohn’) or including chamber music in more
mixed programmes. In 1870 there were nineteen such series.?! The
'Société des Quatuors Frangais' (1862-5) was founded to perform
French chamber music composed within the previous thirty years,
and the famous 'Société Nationale de Musique’ (founded 1871)
promoted contemporary French music, concentrating on chamber
and orchestral works.
Of Lalo's seven multi-movement chamber works, five belong to
91 Jeffrey Cooper, The Rise of Instrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris, 1828-1871
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983), passim.
FRENCH CHAMBER MUSIC 641
the 1850s (two piano trios, the Violin Sonata, Cello Sonata, and
String Quartet); thereafter he turned away from the genre until 1880,
when he revised his String Quartet, giving it a new opus number,
and wrote his Third Piano Trio, which Florent Schmitt extolled as
‘held with good reason to be Lalo’s finest and most finished
chamber composition . . . a splendid and original work'.9? Saint-Saëns
composed a piano quartet in 1853 which remains unpublished; his
subsequent multi-movement chamber works in our period are the
Piano Quintet (1855), First Piano Trio (1863), First Cello Sonata
(1872), Piano Quartet in B flat (1875), Septet (1881), and First Violin
Sonata (1885). His Piano Quintet is one of his earliest cyclic
compositions, and serves as a reminder that cyclic structures, though
arguably more popular in France towards the close of this period,
were in fact used throughout. Saint-Saéns's Septet, for trumpet,
piano, two violins, viola, cello, and double bass, was written for the
chamber music society La Trompette; though not so titled, it shows
a suite-like tendency, with the movements: Préambule, Minuet,
Andante, Gavotte, and Finale. The First Violin Sonata shows the 2
+ 2 movement conflation (‘allegro’-‘adagio’, 'allegretto'- finale"),
which Saint-Saéns also used in his Fourth Piano Concerto and Third
Symphony; as with his First Cello Sonata, it contains a pronounced
virtuosic element. Alexis de Castillon met César Franck in 1868,
after a period of despondency about composition, and in the few
years from then until his early death in 1873 produced most of his
seven multi-movement chamber works: the Piano Quintet, Op. 1;
String Quartet, Op. 3; Piano Trio, Op. 4; Violin Sonata, Op. 6;
Piano Quartet, Op. 7; Second Piano Trio, Op. 17b; and part of a
Second String Quartet (unfinished). Opp. 1 and 7, both in four
movements, use cyclism in the inclusion of themes from their slow
third movements in their respective Finales. D'Indy wrote of him,
‘No man was ever more thoroughly a chamber composer.'??
Three of Fauré’s ten great multi-movement chamber works
were written before 1890: the First Violin Sonata (1875-6), First
Piano Quartet (1876-9; Finale rev. 1883), and Second Piano Quartet
(?1885-6). He was distinctly less innovative in large-scale structural
considerations than some of his contemporaries, but his combination
of melody and motif into a passionate lyricism is highly expressive;
he also demonstrated a deep understanding of the textural essence
of chamber music. His First Piano Quartet opens with a char-
acteristically modally inflected theme, the melodic continuity of
9? Florent Schmitt, ‘Lalo’, in Cobbett, ii. 89.
93 Vincent d'Indy, ‘Castillon’, in Cobbett, i. 232.
642 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
Ex. 418
Allegro molto moderato 4-284
эс = == Hs
f AXE OQ E
1 == Br Ims >
НЭ Ge pa ee Ee Gel
Ji
$5 о па a ee oes eS ee ee
peg -y- ee Ша ЭНЕСЕ Гүя ж ee е
i
Allegro molto moderato J=84
Le E кыис E me e ker arm ee en к= es T
=== ратар ee re NENS
D al d ln
la E E fei x sea ===
p = ieee ar a 4
Kean Te Te 7 7
[) 5 | D |)
R p ,
which depends upon a motivic prominence for the interval of a fifth
(C-G) and two important rhythmic cells (dotted quaver-semiquaver,
and quaver-semiquaver-semiquaver) (Ex. 418). This sonata-form
movement initially opposes piano and strings, but the textural
dialogue becomes more involved at the restatement of the first theme
in bar 18 (Ex. 419, which shows bars 17-21), and the second subject
is based upon imitative sequence across the instruments (Ex. 420,
bars 38-48). The unity of this Quartet does not draw on techniques
of thematic quotation or metamorphosis between movements, rather
Ex. 419
Ch юз ==! - Te?
se EE EE EE E EE
P dolce e espress.
pizz. |) arco pe EE
[63 ar) раваны
[27 р 9 = mass. GL 29 Ge Zë 1 ня
т ==
=> detur, SE T FH
BER ER > en, EEE бый TEE RE EEE TI
= Fe Aw 9 oa
ic КЕ
FRENCH CHAMBER MUSIC 643
beem been
EE
EE l [he ЗЕ-
гу,» I. „u... el eo
OSS SSS т ES ы eee E ees m LI
E EE EE
Ce E en EE H
me
——— mm
H D D Ц
SE = ее == == EE
ee ii. Ка d
—— gru mm
a
= =
on a subtle exploration of motivic ramifications. The opening two
chords of the work become the key relationship between the first
two movements, and the main ‘scherzo’ theme of the second
movement depends heavily on them in retrograde for its harmonic
and melodic contours. In the Adagio third movement Faure fills the
interval of the fifth with scale figures which become the basis also
for the great central melody of the movement. The Finale expands
this scale to an octave for its first subject, which also reactivates the
dotted rhythm of the opening of the work; indeed all the themes of
Ex. 420
espress.
[ 4 OH mI m
en Ss zz en
See ЗЫ" ы" ER 7 = м
P trés également
espress.
— — u uoo oL
ae ee a
he | zy: = E p en | VE rn
Ê Sia WES E EO e (EE Била ME Е: DEE DEENEN nn nn
LI зз ee |
trés également ————
espress.
— ^Ш
ED
ros [EIL I-3
Lo) DG m eeu LTEI mud...
a T
Р trés également
E К ы — .— ee е e I o od
De AN Ы: I. w Se SS Sars a ИК 7 IW LN =]
89—24 SEE eS a a See ES rn. Se
(€ — се, С — LE Ii о лр
pp h
| E EE SSS ees FE, aaa Se
Zehen = к= ——— Al
"OPEM. bee
644 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
Бет Т Б E E E EE EE e А ET ee НЕТО 02—07
this sonata-form Finale are differing manifestations of the scale as
melody, and the high degree of thematic differentiation Faure
achieves is a mark of his greatness as a sonata-form thinker.
Some of Franck’s earliest compositions were in the field of chamber
music; his First Piano Trio in F sharp minor, Op. 1, No. 1 (1841),
has a cyclic approach to thematic structure for which Franck was
later to become famous. His Fourth Piano Trio, Op. 2 (1842), was
highly regarded by Liszt and dedicated to him.?* But it was not until
94 "This Trio, in one movement, originally formed the Finale of the Third Piano Trio, Op.
1, No. 3, and it was at Liszt’s suggestion that Franck made it into a separate work; see
Vincent d'Indy, César Franck, pp. 110-12.
FRENCH CHAMBER MUSIC 645
his last period that Franck returned to chamber music, and produced
three highly original major works: the Piano Quintet (1879), Violin
Sonata (1886), and String Quartet (1889). The Violin Sonata
modifies a traditional four-movement plan by opening with a short
sonata-form Allegretto, based initially on chord pairs, and following
this with a more extended sonata-form Allegro which, because of its
closely argued motivic style, is much closer to first-movement ethos
than that of a scherzo. In both these movements the second subject
area, so often in late-nineteenth-century music an area of tonal stasis,
is highly modulatory and developmental; these second subjects are
identifiable because of their qualities of thematic initiation in a
suitably prepared and related key, but they quickly progress into
thematic and tonal instability. Ex. 421 shows the opening of the
Ex. 421
a tempo sempre forte (2 largamente
646 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
second subject of the first movement. The third movement is headed
Recitativo-Fantasia, and opens with a transformational precis of
the main theme of the second movement, progressing to a trans-
formation of the first subject of the first movement. The Recitativo
is tonally fluid; in the succeeding binary Fantasia, parts of the
Recitativo become the piano accompaniment to sustained lyrical and
dramatic violin melodies. The second part of the Fantasia includes
an extension of the main theme of the first movement. The tonally
stable Finale begins as if it were a canonic rondo, but becomes an
original fusion of rondo with sonata form: A, B (from movement 3),
A, B, A (dominant), C (from movement 2), development (move-
ments 4 and 3), A. Themes are here used between movements without
transformation, yet they hardly become motto-themes in the Berliozian
or Tchaikovskian sense either, for they do not occur as quotations
in prominent relief, rather as subsidiary material embedded within
the movement structure; this extends ‘theme-quotation’ into ‘theme
re-use’.
D’Indy gave a detailed analysis of the String Quartet in Cobbett,9>
demonstrating Franck's innovatory use of a lyrical, self-enclosed,
non-preparatory 'lento' introduction to its first movement, which
recurs for development after an 'allegro' sonata-form exposition, and
as conclusion after the 'allegro' development and recapitulation;
d'Indy treated this movement as an interleaving of two separate
structures. The ‘lento’ theme reappears in the second movement, and
the Finale begins with a review of movements.
D'Indy's own Piano Quartet, Op. 7 (1878-88), caused him much
difficulty, and probably contains residues of a student work severely
criticized by Franck. Two of his further eleven chamber works in
the symphony-sonata genre belong to this period: the Trio for
clarinet or violin, cello, and piano, Op. 29 (1887), and First String
Quartet, Op. 35 (1890). Following Franck, d'Indy valued cyclic
structure, and these three works all make use of it, the Trio and
String Quartet strongly. The Trio has four movements: Ouverture,
Divertissement, Chant élégiaque, and Finale.
95 Vincent d'Indy, ‘Cesar Franck’, in Cobbert, i. 426-8.
SMETANA'S CHAMBER WORKS 647
Chausson is not known today as a chamber-music composer, but
Franck liked his four-movement Piano Trio (1881), and it was
performed at the Société Nationale de Musique in 1882. His Concert
for piano, violin, and string quartet (1889-91) is a powerful work,
with an original textural basis: the string quartet is treated chiefly
en bloc as accompaniment, with concerto elements in the writing for
solo violin and piano. Both these works have cyclic thematic
procedures, though this is not a strong feature of the Concert.
A significant interest in Wagner developed in France from the
mid-1870s; many French composers travelled to Bayreuth or Munich
to hear performances, and La Revue Wagnérienne (1885-7) provided
a focus of this interest not only for musicians but also for poets and
painters. Wagner's influence on French music towards the close of
the nineteenth century was naturally chiefly manifest in opera, but
some of the chromaticism and sequential structuring of Chausson's
and Lekeu's instrumental music owes more to Wagnerian than to
Franckist harmonic practices—this in spite of distinct elements of
love/hate in Chausson's response to Wagner. Lekeu wrote four
complete chamber works, of which his poetic Violin Sonata (1891),
with cyclic structure, remains the crowning achievement. At his early
death a cello sonata and piano quartet were left unfinished, and were
completed by d'Indy.
SMETANA'S CHAMBER WORKS
As with Brahms and Tchaikovsky, multi-movement chamber music
attracted Smetana to utterances of personal significance in a way
that other major instrumental genres did not. Although he wrote
only four mature chamber works, Smetana was much involved with
the genre from his earliest years. He knew and played many chamber
works, especially those by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann
(whose Piano Quartet was a particular favourite), and the genre
formed a vehicle for student writing— music now either lost or
suppressed. His three-movement Piano Trio (1855) contains much
energetic, even grandiose chromatic and contrapuntal writing in its
sonata-form first movement. The Allegro second movement has the
opening section of its rondo form based on materials from the first
movement; of the two distinct slower episodes, the second is a march.
The final Presto is a rondo with one recurring episode, altered on
its second appearance to include a funeral march element. His First
String Quartet, Z mého Zivota [From my Life] (1876), is a classically
shaped four-movement work with a programme both nationalist and
648 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
biographical. Smetana gave several versions of this; in a letter to
Srb-Debrnov he wrote: oj
The first movement depicts my youthful leanings towards art, the Romantic
atmosphere, the inexpressible yearning for something I could neither express
nor define, and also a kind of warning of my future misfortune.... The
long insistent note in the finale owes its origin to this. It is the fateful
ringing in my ears of the high-pitched tones which, in 1874, announced the
beginning of my deafness. The second movement, a quasi-polka, brings to
my mind the joyful days of youth when I composed dance tunes and was
known everywhere as a passionate dancer. The third movement . . . reminds
me of the happiness of my first love, the girl who later became my faithful
wife. The fourth movement describes the discovery that I could treat
national elements in music, and my joy in following this path until it was
checked by the catastrophe of the onset of my deafness, the outlook into
the sad future, the tiny ray of hope of recovery; but remembering all the
promise of my early career, a feeling of painful regret.96
Although the work is clearly programmatic— because of its title, its
unmistakable and poignant representation of the onset of deafness
in the coda to the last movement and the retrospection this engenders
in the subsequent recall of fragments of the first movement—the
details of the programme remained private. The two duos for violin
and piano, Z domoviny [From my Homeland] (1880), include
small-scale multi-movement/single movement fusion, using folk
material. The Second String Quartet (1883), a product of his sorely
disabled and distracted last years, was described by Smetana in his
own catalogue of works as ‘String Quartet in D minor (the
continuation of From my Life). Composed in the nervous illness
which arose out of deafness’.9* It may thus be heard as a pro-
grammatic sequel to the First Quartet, though it has no public or
explicit programmatic indications. Like the First Quartet, it is a
four-movement work, but now characterized by violent contrasts
with much disruption of tempos, and original formal structures in
which discontinuity is a notable feature; Schoenberg was greatly
drawn to 11.98
DVORÁK'S CHAMBER WORKS
From Dvorak’s own listings we know he composed at least
thirty-seven multi-movement chamber works, of which five were
96 Letter of 12 Apr. 1878; see Karel Janeček, Smetanova komorní hudba: Kompoziční výklad
(Prague, 1978), 222-3.
97 Karel Teige, Prispévky k životopisu a umělecké činnosti mistra Bedřicha Smetany, i. Skladby
Smetanovy (Prague, 1893), 109.
98 František Bartos’s Preface to Bedřich Smetana, Komorní skladby (Prague, 1977), p. xliv.
DVORÁK'S CHAMBER WORKS 649
destroyed, three survived Dvorák's attempt at destruction complete,
one survived incomplete, and one remains unfinished. This total
includes thirty-three works that are clearly symphony/sonata ana-
logues, a destroyed Octet (Serenade), and the three works which
border on the genre ‘collection’: the Bagatelles, Op. 47, Cyprise
(without opus-number), and Dumky Trio, Op. 90. Dvoräk’s in-
clination towards chamber music is a general confirmation of his
ready embrace of aspects of Teutonic tradition; nevertheless there
was a particularly rich flowering of chamber music production during
his most strongly nationalist phase, in the latter half of the 1870s,
and the limitations he recognized on nationalist expression in
symphonies clearly did not extend fully to chamber music. Dvorak
was a viola player, and understood string writing in a double sense
from ‘inside’. He wrote chamber music throughout his productive
life, except for his final years when, in spite of publishers’ pressure
to produce more chamber works, he turned to symphonic poems
and opera. The backbone of his production is the fourteen string
quartets, though some of his greatest chamber works are for smaller
or larger groupings. He found his most natural form of expression
in the three or four separated movement structure, but during the
early 1870s he experimented with movement compression, to his
evident dissatisfaction, and the three works bordering on the genre
‘collection’ listed above have five, twelve, and six movements
respectively.
His first chamber works, the three-movement String Quintet in
A minor, Op. 1 (1861) and four-movement String Quartet in A, Op.
2 (1862), are Classical in form and proportion, with clear sonata-form
first and last movements. Dvorak was immediately able to write
convincing chamber texture, and the first subject of the first movement
of the Quintet is a typically Dvorákian blending of arpeggios,
scales, and repeated notes into a memorable lyric theme. The slow
movements are richly lyrical, showing early a Schubertian gift for
inventive figurative accompaniments.
From the time of Dvorák's greatest susceptibility to influences
from Liszt and Wagner came four works which he attempted
unsuccessfully to destroy: three String Quartets of c.1869-70 (in B
flat, D, and E minor) which survived in part-sets, and a Cello Sonata
(c.1870-1) of which the cello part only survives. The B flat major
Quartet is in four separated movements, but shows significant
experiment with movement forms, and melodic and harmonic styles.
The first three movements are each essentially monothematic, the
Finale combining its own material with substantial sections from the
650 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
first movement. The striving for a Wagnerian emotional temperature
made Dvoräk evolve radically new forms, and in the first movement
ritornello-like recurrences of the theme in the tonic are followed
by fertile but prolix sonata-style developments involving much
chromaticism and concentration on short thematic fragments; lyri-
cism has no space to shine through, and phrase structures are not
articulated. Though locally always vital and convincing, by Dvorak’s
later standards the movement is severely underdifferentiated for its
length, and the resultant somewhat amorphous formal profile suggests
improvisation. The work, however, remains a highly original and
interesting attempt to write Wagnerian chamber music. The D major
Quartet, also in four separated movements, is another extended
work; it uses a folk-song for its Scherzo, though the melody is
modified by elaboration and variation of its phrase lengths. The E
minor Quartet compresses five sections into a one-movement design
ABA,B,A,, with ‘allegro’ sonata-style A sections and 'andante' В
sections; it concludes in B major. The Cello Sonata is in three linked
sections.
Dvorak’s lack of assurance in chamber music continued as he
retreated from these Wagnerian-Lisztian influences, and of two
destroyed piano trios from 1871-2 no details are known. The
three-movement Piano Quintet of 1872 was extensively revised in
1887, when Dvorak cut two-fifths of the first movement and modified
the others. Motivic and contrapuntal work is already less intense
than in the works of 1870, allowing articulate lyricism more place.
The Finale begins out of the tonic key, a feature of a significant
number of later chamber works. In 1873 a destroyed Violin Sonata
in A minor, a prolix F minor String Quartet, and the A minor String
Quartet, Op. 12, were composed. Op. 12 is particularly interesting
in charting Dvorák's recapture of Classical precepts, since he first
wrote the work in one movement and five sections, but soon began
to split it into four separate movements, entirely removing one
section and rounding the others into closure; he abandoned this
revision before completing it, and Jarmil Burghauser has carried the
project through in our time. By the A minor String Quartet, Op. 16
of 1874, Dvorák's first chamber work to be published, his re-
trenchment was achieved, with a concise, restrained work reaffirming
delicacy, melodic grace, and articulative clarity of expression.
The next five years were particularly rich in chamber music
masterpieces. From 1875 (the year of the Fifth Symphony) come the
String Quintet in G, Op. 77, for string quartet and double bass,
Piano Trio in B flat, Op. 21, Piano Quartet in D, Op. 23; from 1876
DVORÄK’S CHAMBER WORKS 651
the Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 26, String Quartet in E, Op. 80;
from 1877 the String Quartet in D minor (Op. 34, dedicated to
Brahms); from 1878 the Bagatelles, Op. 47, for two violins, cello,
and harmonium, and String Sextet in A, Op. 48; and from 1879 the
String Quartet in E flat, Op 51. These years show Dvofäk growing
into and establishing a distinctly national style in chamber music.
The dance-like shaping of fast themes with small-scale rhythmic
repetitions and strong accentuation, already noted in the Fifth
Symphony, continued in the String Quintet (first and last movements),
Piano Quartet (first movement), and the Finales of the String
Quartets in E and D minor. The Piano Trio in B flat second
movement shows Dvorák inclining towards the ruminative, elegiac
dumka style; it has a simple slow tune in duple time and minor key,
with figurative ornamentation of phrase-endings. The E major String
Quartet has a similarly dumka-styled slow movement but in triple
time. The String Sextet shows the first use of such a movement with
title: ‘Dumka (Elegie)’; and the String Quartet in E flat has a titled
Dumka as second movement, in which a contrasted vivace transforms
the main theme into a furiant. Furiant rhythms appear in the Finale
of the Piano Quartet, and third movement of the E major String
Quartet; the first named Furiant is the third movement of the String
Sextet. The polka appears in the third movement of the B flat Piano
Trio; though the movement is not so named, it has even quavers in
allegretto duple time with upbeat and simple short phrases. The D
minor String Quartet has a named ‘Alla polka' as second movement,
and the E flat Quartet has a polka second subject in its first
movement; its Dumka second movement and Finale related to the
skocna make it one of the most nationalistically inflected of these
chamber works; indeed it was written in response to a request from
the Florentine Quartet for a quartet ‘in the Slavonic style’. The
Bagatelles introduce part of the folk-song ‘Hraly dudy u Pobudy’
[Bagpipes Played at Pobuda] in the first, third, and fifth.
Though some of these dance-influenced movements are highly
sophisticated in their continuations, the general effect is a re-
inforcement of stylistic simplicity in clarity of phrase structure and
a primacy of melody. Large-scale forms continue clear and concise;
movements are self-enclosed, though there are examples of thematic
transformations across movements in the String Quintet and B flat
Piano Trio. The basing of the first and third Bagatelles on the same
theme, and the transformation of this theme in the fifth, are a
compelling reason for regarding the Bagatelles as a multi-movement
work, in spite of the plural title. It is a slighter, more domestically
652 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
oriented work than Dvorak’s other multi-movement chamber music
so far, and in this sense points forwärd to the Terzetto. Sonata form
is used for the first movements of all the chamber works of this
nationalistic phase, including the Bagatelles, where it is foreshortened.
Following Schubert" lead, Dvorak included development of the
second subject within the exposition, particularly in the B flat Piano
Trio and D minor String Quartet, and favoured a three-key
exposition. In the String Quintet the second subject is in the key of
the flat leading-note, the exposition ending on the dominant; the
Piano Quartet has a tonally wide-ranging first subject, a second
subject in the dominant, and the exposition closes in the mediant.
Ternary form is the basis of many slow movements and all
scherzo-and-trio movements; the form may be expanded by a coda
referring to the middle section, as in the dumka movements of the
String Sextet and E flat String Quartet. The slow movement of the
Piano Quartet is a theme with five variations and coda, where Dvorak
reconstitutes rather than decorates the theme in the variations. The
slow movement of the G minor Piano Trio is a most telling and
original monothematic form combining elements of variation and
ritornello; the theme is presented in the tonic five times, each
presentation leading into new developmental extensions. The resultant
sections are of 10 + 16 + 23 + 16 + 27 bars. Finales also show
much formal originality. That of the Piano Quartet combines
'scherzo' (A) and ‘finale’ (B) elements in a sonata-form design: A
(tonic first subject + bridge) B (dominant second subject +
development), A, (extended recapitulation + bridge), B, (shortened
recapitulation + coda). Finales begin out of the tonic in the B flat
Piano Trio, G minor Piano Trio, E major String Quartet, and String
Sextet, this last having a theme-and-variation Finale where the theme
is mostly in the supertonic minor (a tonal profile replicated in the
variations). In such cases the opening of a finale becomes an
harmonically auxiliary area to the tonic of the work, the movement
requiring and using its context. Most finales of this period blend
rondo and sonata principles, that of the G minor Piano Trio
being highly innovative: AB (first subject), A,B, (bridge), A,B, (a
transformation in second-subject style, tonic major!), development,
AB (first subject recapitulation), B,A, (second subject recapitulation).
Dvorak’s next three chamber works, the Violin Sonata, Op. 57
(1880), C major String Quartet, Op. 61 (1881), and F minor Piano
Trio, Op. 65 (1883), show a partial retreat from nationalism, a new
susceptibility to Brahmsian influence (also found in his con-
temporaneous Sixth Symphony), and an intensification of expressive
DVORÁK'S CHAMBER WORKS 653
power. The Violin Sonata has many Brahmsian resonances: flexible
treatment of metre, including different metrical alterations in violin
and piano simultaneously, contrapuntal intensifications of themes and
developments, sequences involving diatonic discords, and contrary
motion arpeggios; the second subject of the Finale is a broad
Brahmsian ‘chorale’ in even crotchets.
The opening of the C major Quartet fuses Schubertian harmony
(deriving directly from the opening of the great C major Quintet)
with a Brahmsian approach to thematic shape, involving development
within presentation. The chief means of this development is an
elaborative figure in bar 2, which is also the main feature of the
Scherzo; from this figure comes much of the impetus of the
sonata-form first movement. It has a three-keyed, three-themed
exposition which also derives from Schubert's Quintet. Ex. 422 shows
the first subject, Ex. 423 (bars 47-56) its varied return in the
exposition, and Ex. 424 (bars 112-25) its treatment at the beginning
Ex. 422
Allegro
i? up Fe
EE
[3X5
|
|
|
[9
P
|
FT | а
EEG
^1 2
CS" L-]
КШ —— —— nf m DER — 3)
к=н
1850-1890
MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS:
654
poco
a
Ex. 423
| | &
p espress.
DVORÁK'S CHAMBER WORKS 655
of the development, demonstrating something of the intensity,
complexity, and imaginative idiomatic quartet textures characteristic
of this fine movement. The ternary Adagio opens with a sustained
melody over a rich rhythmically complex Brahmsian accompaniment;
as with several of Dvorak’s slow movements there is duetting within
the theme. This Quartet was written for Vienna, specifically for the
Hellmesberger Quartet, a commission which may have reinforced
Dvoták's turning away from nationalist inflections towards overtly
Austrian models. But Dvorak could not avoid writing a finale with
Czech resonance even here, and sko¢nd-styled figures appear in the
first subject, initially simple in phrase structure.
The epic, passionate F minor Piano Trio also opens with a
sonata-form first subject of particularly Brahmsian cast, conflating
presentation and development in a motivically based lyricism.
National elements are again combined into Viennese style: the second
movement uses an ostinato folk-styled allegretto melody in a
monothematic form, and the Finale begins in furiant rhythm, with
a waltz as second subject.
1850-1890
MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS:
656
Ex. 424
ә
е s
Кереге кк кт шүр шешке саса шшс шн
Kë,
HT
о ее 1
la is Lei
Ei
SE E и эш ип БШ пш иш EE EE EE
Ге
Lé
Ai
DVORÁK'S CHAMBER WORKS 657
Dvorak’s remaining chamber music—the Terzetto, Op. 74,
Cyprise, and A major Piano Quintet, Op. 81, of 1887; the E flat
Piano Quartet, Op. 87 (1889); Dumky Trio, Op. 90 (1891); the F
major String Quartet, Op. 96, E flat String Quintet, Op. 97, and
Violin Sonatina, Op. 100 of 1893 (his three American chamber
works), and the String Quartets in G and A flat majors (Opp. 106
and 105) of 1895—shows a continuation and enhancement of stylistic
trends already well established.9? Emphasis on the domestic aspect
of the genre is found in the Terzetto, Cyprise, and Violin Sonatina.
The inclusion of nationalist inflexion continued in the Terzetto, Piano
Quintet and Quartet, finding its most concentrated expression in the
Dumky Trio, a serious, complex multi-movement work in which each
of the six movements is a dumka. The expansion of genre-horizons
is particularly important in Cyprise—an arrangement of twelve songs
99 The nickname ‘American’, which is sometimes applied to both the F major String Quartet
and the E flat String Quintet, is not part of Dvorak’s own published titles for these
compositions; see Jarmil Burghauser, Antonin Dvořák: Thematicky Katalog (Prague, 1960),
pp. 307-9.
658 MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
selected from an early song cycle, in revised order—and in the
Dumky Trio. And, after the effortless grace of the American works,
the G major Quartet must be regarded as the culmination of Dvorak’s
formal innovation within the separate four-movement structure. Its
formal originality is of the very highest order, based on extensive
experience and personalization of traditional structures, which are
now explored to some of their remotest possibilities, and Dvorák here
radicalizes form in a way that can be compared with late-Beethoven.
Particularly his fantasia variations on a double theme (the two halves
of which are motivically related) as second movement, his obsessive
opposition of B and G sharp minors in the Scherzo, and the
confrontation of light dance-inflected opening with an integrated
retrospective of the first movement as Finale, all demonstrate him
to be one of the most expressively innovative formal thinkers of the
closing years of the nineteenth century.
IX
SOLO SONG
(а) GERMANY
By LESLIE ORREY
SCHUMANN
SCHUBERT'S death in 1828 closed the first important chapter in the
history of the Lied. The next is dominated by Robert Schumann
(1810-56). Between the two, song as a genre continued to flourish,
and we meet some of the composers in the pages of Schumann's
periodical, Die neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which absorbed much of
his time between 1834 and 1844. They include the gifted Norbert
Burgmüller (1810-36), Josef Dessauer (1798-1876), Bernardt Klein
(1793-1832), Carl Zóllner (1800-60), Josef Klein (1802-62), Wenzel
Veit (1806-64), and Heinrich Esser (1818-72).! Schumann himself
was hesitant to approach the form. As a young man, brought up in
the shadow of Beethoven, he valued instrumental art higher than
vocal? and he made a reputation with his piano music before any
of the songs by which he is universally known had been written. The
conversion to song came only a few months after the letter to
Hirschbach; another, equally famous, letter to Clara Wieck testifies
to his sudden joy in the new medium.?
THE 1840 SONGS
During this one year Schumann wrote some 140 songs—that is,
1 See Hans Hermann Rosenwald, Geschichte des deutschen Liedes zwischen Schubert und
Schumann (Berlin, 1930); W. K. von Jolizza, Das Lied und seine Geschichte (Leipzig, 1910);
Hans Joachim Moser, Das deutsche Lied seit Mozart (2nd rev. edn.; Tutzing, 1968), and Hugo
Reimann, Musik-Lexikon (12th edn.; Mainz, 1967).
2 See his letter to Hermann Hirschbach, in Robert Schumanns Briefe: Neue Folge, ed.
F. Gustav Jensen (Leipzig, 1886), 143.
3 See Jugendbriefe von Robert Schumann (Leipzig, 1885), 309. About a dozen songs had in
fact been written before this, c.1827-8, and sent to Gottlob Wiedebein for comment. Three
were published by Brahms, in a Supplement to the Gesamtausgabe; six more were issued by
Karl Geiringer in 1933, and one as a Supplement to the Zeitschrift für Musik, 1933.
660 SOLO SONG
about half his total output. For a comparable burst of song we
have to go back to Schubert at his most prolific. Hardly one is
unimportant. Some of the poets drawn upon, such as Goethe,
Rückert, and Heine, had already been used by Schubert, though
none of the poems had been chosen by him; but there were
many fresh names— Eichendorff, Chamisso, Reinick, Kerner, Hans
Christian Andersen, Burns, Thomas Moore, and Byron. After 1840
Schumann returned only very occasionally to a few of these (Goethe
for the Wilhelm Meister songs of 1849, Byron for the Drei Gesänge,
Op. 95, of the same year).? Moore and Byron furnished librettos for
important works later in his life (Das Paradies und die Peri and
Manfred), but for the solo songs he moved on to other writers
such as Lenau, Mórike, Geibel, Heyse, Platen, and some poetical
nonentities such as Elisabeth Kulmann and ‘Wielfried von der Neun’.
More than any composer before him, and than most after him,
Schumann conceived his songs in connected groups or cycles. The
‘scenario’ was sometimes due to the poet, as in the Heine Liederkreis,
Op. 24 (nine poems taken bodily from the first part of the Buch der
Lieder entitled Junge Leiden), or їп Chamisso's Frauenliebe und
-leben.9 In other instances Schumann himself strove to give his
selection a thread of meaning. The Eichendorff Liederkreis, Op. 39,
for example, is drawn from various sources (chiefly the short story
Viel Lärm um Nichts and his “Wanderleben’ romance Ahnung und
Gegenwart) to form a series of nocturnes. All are concerned with
moods and fears associated with night, whether the supernatural
(‘Waldesgesprach’—a variant of the Loreley legend), enchantment
(‘Mondnacht’), eeriness (‘Zwielicht’), or distance (‘In der Fremde).
His most important song cycle, Dichterliebe, Op. 48, is selected from
the sixty-five poems of Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo to make a more
or less coherent story of love’s awakening, rapture, disillusionment,
betrayal, and final renunciation. The scheme shows some indebtedness
to Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.”
4 The release of Schumann's pent-up emotions in song is inevitably linked with Clara
Wieck, but the matter is far from simple. They had become engaged in 1837; 1840 was the
blackest year in the struggle with her father, and the marriage was not consummated until
September 1840, by which time the bulk of the songs had been written and, indeed, published.
See Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und Briefen
(Leipzig, 1902-8), i; also Fritz Feldmann, ‘Zur Frage des " Liederjahres" bei Robert Schumann’,
Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 9 (1952), 246.
5 All his Heine songs were written in 1840, though some were published later.
6 Nine poems again, but Schumann set only eight. The gist of the last, not set by Schumann,
is 'nought is now left but memories, dreams of days long past', hence Schumann's epilogue,
repeating in the piano part the first song of the cycle.
7 See Raymond Duval, "LU Amour du poète de Schumann-Heine', Rivista musicale italiana,
8 (1901). Schumann originally intended twenty songs, as in Die schöne Müllerin, but four
THE 1840 SONGS 661
Dichterliebe is a unity, a convincing whole, with a wide-ranging
and carefully thought-out key scheme. The first eight songs are linked
in obvious sequence: F sharp minor, A major, D major, G major,
B minor, E minor, C major, A minor. The move to the flat side
continues: D minor (‘Das ist ein Flöten und Gegen, G minor, E
flat major. ‘Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen’ is in B major, related
enharmonically to E flat, followed at once by the darkest key, E flat
minor, and the nadir from the opening F sharp minor/A major.
Another enharmonic change brings us to B major again ('Allnáchtlich
im Traume’); then follows E major and, for the last song, C sharp
minor/major. This is the dominant of the original and in fact the
first song had ended on its dominant, C sharp major. Thematic
connections are present, though subtle. Several songs (Nos. 2, 4, 7,
8, and 10) begin on a mediant in the vocal line; others feature a
falling scale passage, d', t, l, s, f (No. 2, opening bass line; Nos. 5,
8, 10, and possibly elsewhere).® The rippling waltz tune of No. 9 is
hinted at in the postlude to the previous song;? the final epilogue is
clearly related to the piano postlude of No. 12 (bars 23-6).
Most of the 1840 songs were short, two or three stanzas. Longer
poems were often treated in some variant of rondo form, as, for
example, ‘Er, der Herrlichste von Allen’ from Op. 42. Among the
longer poems are some ballads, by Heine and Chamisso. Some of
these, such as Heine's ‘Belsazar’, Op. 57—one of the earliest of the
1840 songs—are only half successful; others, such as Chamisso's
‘Die röte Hanne’ or ‘Die Lówenbraut, are among his weaker
compositions. But the striking ‘Die beiden Grenadiere' Op. 49, No.
1, shows him handling a varied strophic design with much skill and
imagination.!
In many of the 1840 songs the piano part had already moved
away from ‘accompaniment’, to be fused with the vocal line in a
new way. In Op. 48, No. 1 ((Im wunderschónen Monat Mar), for
instance, the evanescent sonorities of the piano are exploited in a
(Dein Angesicht’, ‘Lehn’ deine Wang `. ‘Mein Wagen rollet langsam’, and ‘Es kuchtet meine
Liebe’) were eventually published separately.
8 For a discussion of the extra-musical significance of these and many other motifs see Eric
Sams, The Songs of Robert Schumann (London, 1969; rev. 2nd edn., 1975); also the article by
Sams, ‘Did Schumann use Ciphers?’, Musical Times, 106 (1965), 584.
9 Cf. Frauenliebe und -leben where the main vocal line of No. 5 is transformed, in its
postlude, into a wedding march.
10 The poem comes from Heine’s Buch der Lieder under the heading, Romanzen. Its title
there is simply ‘Die Grenadiere’. Schumann’s title may stem from Chamisso who in 1838
translated a poem by Beranger, ‘Les Deux Grenadiers’. Beranger’s poem is a dialogue supposed
to take place in the chäteau de Fontainebleau where Napoleon took leave of his Guards on
20 April before going to Elba.
662 SOLO SONG
typically Schumannesque manner, with tender, shy wisps of melody
emerging indistinctly from the quasi-extemporary arpeggios. In
‘Zwielicht’ or ‘Muttertraum’, Op. 40, No. 2, there are sinuous threads
of melody which can be related with some difficulty to the Classically
‘correct’ harmony of the time.!! In ‘Mein Herz ist schwer’, Op. 25,
No. 15, this technique, now more chromatie, is combined with a
vocal line that embeds such expressive melodic dissonances as the
diminished fourth in spacious arches of melody with a total compass
of a thirteenth. This was a style fundamentally different from that
of most of his contemporaries!?—a style that was to reach its
culmination in Wolf.
SCHUMANN'S LATER SONGS
The standard of the 1840 songs had been extraordinarily high and
generally consistent, but Schumann's later work is much more
uneven. The songs, more than one hundred, date from 1849 to
18521?— years which Gerald Abraham has characterized as the period
of ‘some of Schumann's finest music’.!4 Yet most critics have been
reluctant to recognize masterpieces among these late songs, and it
must be confessed that few have the immediate attractiveness of the
earlier Schumann. One or two of the 1849 Liederalbum für die Jugend,
Op. 79 (a parallel to the piano album of the previous year) such as
‘Der Sandmann’ and ‘Marienwirmchen’, are vignettes sketched in
the best 1840 manner. In other songs new methods are grafted on
to old techniques. In the Lenau ‘Meine Rose’, Op. 90, No. 2, the
1840 style of emotionally charged repeated chords (as in ‘Er, der
Herrlichste’ from Op. 42 or ‘Ich grolle nicht’ from Op. 48) is
combined with hesitant fragments, to form an accompaniment almost
completely independent of the vocal line—a development that once
again leads to Wolf.
The most important of the 1849 songs are the Goethe set—nine
out of the ten lyrics that were interspersed in the novel Wilhelm
Meister. Although they have tempted dozens of composers, including
Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt, and Wolf,!5 they have proved deceptively
11 This linear writing has been linked with his Bach studies.
1? These include, besides those already mentioned, Heinrich Dorn (1804-92), whose songs
were praised by Schumann: Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861); Karl Gottfried Wilhelm Taubert
(1811-91), whose long list of compositions includes some 300 songs; Theodor Kirchner (1823-
1903); Johann Vesque von Püttlingen (1803-93).
13 Two excellent settings of Mörike in 1847 must also be mentioned —'Die Soldatenbraut’
and ‘Das verlassene Mägdlein’.
14 In Gerald Abraham (ed.), Schumann: A Symposium (London, 1952), 260.
15 The first edition of the novel (1795) contained melodies to eight of them by Friedrich
Reichardt (repr. in Das Erbe deutsche Musik, lviii). For a list of other settings, see Willi Schuh,
Goethe-Vertonungen: ein Verzeichnis (Zurich, 1952).
MENDELSSOHN 663
difficult to set. Schumann's settings have come in for some harsh
criticism, and have even been written off as 'among Schumann's
most conspicuous failures as a song-writer’.!® This is too severe.
Philine's 'Singet nicht in Trauertónen', for example, recaptures the
piquant spirit of the earlier ‘Die Kartenlegerin'; ‘An die Türen will
ich schleichen' is a graphic picture of the Harper's shambling gait
and pitiful begging (for food, love, and forgiveness), while *Nur wer
die Sehnsucht kennt', though Schumann deals in arbitrary fashion
with Goethe's verse and, like every other composer, writes music
that is too sophisticated for the child Mignon, catches much of the
febrile mood of the poem.
It is clear that here, and in some of the songs in the cycles by
Wielfried уоп der Neun, Op. 89, and Nikolaus Lenau, Op. 90,
written in 1850, Schumann, in common with Liszt, Wagner, and
others, is striving towards a new relationship between voice and
instrumental support 17 His vocal line had always tended to be
declamatory rather than lyrical (the fusion of the two in his best
songs is one of his chief glories); it now becomes freer tonally, more
chromatic, often enigmatic and fragmentary. The piano part may
suggest the orchestra and in ‘Es stürmet am Abendhimmel’, Op. 81,
No. l, is gloomy, nebulous, with tremolandi and sweeping crescendos
and diminuendos. (The song is unusually fully marked.). In the
Lenau song "Kommen und Scheden" the accompaniment is derived
almost entirely from the opening bar, while in 'O Freund, mein
Schirm, mein Schutz" (Rückert, Op. 101, No. 6) the piano pursues
its way with the single-mindedness of a Bach prelude.
MENDELSSOHN
The eighty songs of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47) are of minor
importance.!? His ideal seemed to be a well-turned phrase, supported
by an elegantly decorated accompaniment with smoothly managed
modulations and no harmonic surprises. His attitude towards the
words is suggested by his own Lieder ohne Worte; it was no hardship
for him to omit them altogether. Examples of such artless songs are
‘Frühlingslied’, Op. 19, No. 1 (1830-4) (Ulrich von Lichtenstein), ‘Der
Blumenstrauss’, Op. 47, No. 5 (Klingemann), and ‘Der Blumenkranz’
16 By Martin Cooper in Abraham (ed.), Schumann: A Symposium, p. 110. For a more
sympathetic assessment see Jack M. Stein, Poem and Music in the German Lied from Gluck to
Hugo Wolf (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). See also Karl Wórner, Robert Schumann (Zürich, 1949).
17 See Wörner, Schumann, especially pp. 222 ff.
18 No critical edition has been published. They were originally issued in sets, six or twelve
at a time, by Schlesinger of Berlin or Breitkopf and Hártel. A convenient edition is Peters
(plate number 6022).
664 SOLO SONG
(1829?) (Thomas Moore). The best of this type is certainly ‘Auf
Flügeln des Gesanges', Op. 34, No. 2 (1833/4) (Heine).
Occasionally, as in Heine's ‘Reiselied’, Op. 19, No. 6, the piano's
role becomes more significant. A subtler song is the Eichendorff
*Nachtlied', Op. 71, No. 1 (1845),!9 which captures something of
Eichendorff's melancholy. One of the tenderest and most delicate of
all his songs is ‘Das erste Veilchen’ Op. 19, No. 2 (1837). Both poem,
by Egon Ebert, and setting pay tribute to the Goethe-Mozart ‘Das
Veilchen', K 476. The song is through-composed, and Mendelssohn
seems to have taken unusual care over detail. See, for instance, the
long, arched phrase in bars 10-15 at the repetition of the words 'die
Botin des Lenzes drückt’ ich voll Lust an meine schwellende, hoffende
Brust' (Ex. 425). A notable point is the treatment of the motif in
bar 6, which goes far to bind the work together. Repeated as an
interlude in bars 15 and 16, it is used again, in the tonic minor, for
the opening of the second stanza (‘der Lenz ist vorüber’); it reappears,
with an extension, in bar 33 and, most imaginatively, in the piano
postlude.
Ex. 425
Andante con moto
tin des Ben = zes drückt ich voll
=
ne schwel-len-de hof
t)
= Ps
= р ттш e
(rm I 113
Se Jet an
19 About half of Mendelssohn’s songs were written before Schumann’s ‘song year’. The
mutual influence of these two composers remains to be fully studied, but see Rudolph Felber,
‘Schumann’s Place in German Song’, Musical Quarterly, 26 (1940), 340.
MENDELSSOHN 665
(1 joyfully pressed the herald of Spring to my swelling, hoping breast.)
The Goethe settings are all interesting. The two Suleika songs (the
first not by Goethe but by Marianne von Willemar, the youthful
protégée of his old age) are typical Mendelssohn; the E major section
of ‘Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen’ Op. 34, No. 4 (1833/4),
could be by no other composer. The second, “Was bedeutet die
Bewegung?' Op. 57, No. 3 (c.1840), is more fully developed, and in
‘Erster Verlust’, Op. 99, No. 1 (1841), there is a wider emotional
and musical range than usual. But the most enterprising of all, and
the high-water mark of Mendelssohn as a song-writer, is his setting
of Goethe's sonnet ‘Die Liebende schreibt’, Op. 86, No. 3—and
incidentally one of the earliest, composed in 1833.?? It has a wide
modulatory range, moving from E flat to the tonic minor (bar 10,
“entfernt von dir ...’), thence to G flat major, where it stays for a
dozen or more bars of entrancing music. The long passage beginning
at bar 16, ‘die einzige, da fang’ ich an zu weinen’, has a bloom and
a sensuous quality anticipating the ıdyllic love music of Tristan or
the hushed, suspended adagios of Mahler (Ex. 426).
Ex. 426
Andante con moto
20 Op. 86 was published posthumously.
666 SOLO SONG
ee?
ы — | — [m —]
Br SaaS
=
== CSS
Cem ишин E. —1—8—1—1 53
[T [eI |.
(the only one, then | begin to weep)
LISZT
The contribution of Ferenc Liszt (1811-86) to German song has
a significance which is only gradually becoming fully recognized.?!
His mixed Hungarian, French, and German background brought a
fresh, and refreshing, outlook on song. If it is true that ‘Upon the
pure soil of German song, which so often touches the deepest recesses
of the heart, Liszt did not feel altogether at home'?? (which could
be disputed), on the other hand he rarely lapsed into the sentimentality
or the Gemütlichkeit that threatened the lesser German composers
of the nineteenth century. Even when his choice of poem led him
towards the sentimental there was usually some felicity in the piano
part as compensation. Of the seventy or so songs?? there are few
without some claim on our attention.
They can conveniently be divided into three periods: (1) songs
from the early 1840s; (2) the Weimar period, 1849-58, and (3) a final
period from about 1870 until his death in 1886.24 The early songs,
as might be expected, have elaborate piano parts, which in later
revisions were often simplified.?? The writing is always pianistic
without being too exacting. One or two call for a certain amount of
dexterity (Es war ein König in Thule’ (Goethe, 1843); ‘Die Loreley’
(Heine, 1841, rev. 1856); ‘Die drei Zigeuner’ (Lenau, 1860)), but
none is so difficult as ‘Erlkönig’ or some of Jensen's or Wolfs
21 The literature is fairly extensive. See E. Reuss, Liszts Lieder (Leipzig, 1906); Bernhard
Vogel, Franz Liszt als Lyriker (Leipzig, 1887); Carl Kittel, ‘Uber das “Gesangliche” in Franz
Liszts Vokal-Kompositionen’, Die Musik (Oct. 1936); Martin Cooper, ‘Liszt as a Song Writer’,
Music and Letters, 19 (1938), 171; Christopher Headington, “The Songs’, in Alan Walker (ed.),
Franz Liszt: The Man and his Music (London, 1970; 2nd edn., 1976), 221-47.
22 Quoted from the Preface, by Carl Armbruster, to Ditson’s Boston edition of thirty songs
(1911).
23 Complete lists in Walker (ed.), Franz Liszt, and in Peter Raabe, Franz Liszt: Leben und
Schaffen (rev. 2nd edn., Tutzing, 1968).
24 The chronology is based on Raabe, Franz Liszt, ii. 341 ff. Many songs were extensively
revised.
25 See Headington, “The Songs’, for a discussion of some of these revisions.
BIS 667
accompaniments. But no composer before Liszt had asked for such
detail, control, or nuance in the handling of the ріапо.26 Schumann,
his contemporary, had certainly demanded great subtlety and intim-
acy, but both he and Schubert had been modest in their demands
on the range of the piano part. Liszt for the first time utilized the
whole keyboard, exploiting the tone colours of the upper registers
as freely as the sonorities of the bass. Later the piano became terse
and laconic; it ceased to be an ‘accompaniment’ and instead acted
as a commentary on the words, often interlocked in dialogue with
the vocal line, itself a simple type of recitative.
About two dozen songs come from the first period. They include
a setting, c.1840, of Heine’s ‘Im Rhein . . .’, strikingly dissimilar from
Schumann’s setting, full of deft, pictorial touches such as the
fluttering angels’ wings at ‘Es schweben Blumen und Englein’; and
what is probably his most famous song, ‘Die Loreley'.?? This Siren
legend, the beautiful Loreley singing her seductive song on the rock
high above the Rhine, is due to Clemens Brentano who invented it
in 1802; Heine’s poem immortalizing the legend was published in his
Buch der Lieder (1827). Liszt’s treatment is highly descriptive, the
Rhine flowing majestically in compound time, as in Wagner. The
cello-like recitative in the opening bars is a Liszt fingerprint that
recurs time and again. Another Heine song, ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’
(1840), is a little masterpiece. It also opens with a ‘cello’ melody
which is the kernel of the song; it blossoms like a flower in the voice
part, the piano muses over it in the middle section, and it forms the
most delicate of postludes. Another successful Heine song 15 'Vergiftet
sind meine Lieder’ (1842). The grinding dissonances in the prelude
(Ex. 427) anticipate Wolf. The three songs from Schiller’s Wilhelm
Tell (1845) are also attractive examples of his early style.
The songs of the Weimar period, about twenty, show a notable
change in subject matter and style. The descriptive, ballad-like poems
now had less attraction for him than the more compact form of the
Ex. 427
26 See Raabe, Franz Liszt, ii. 112 ff.
27 Both were revised c.1856.
668 SOLO SONG
lyric, though his treatment did not always correspond. In Goethe’s
‘Uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’ (pub. 1848, and, somewhat revised,
1859) the scene is set by the tranquil opening chords (the progression
includes the out-of-key common chord that is a Liszt fingerprint for
‘repose’); but the mood of the poem is shattered by the working up
to a forte climax, in a song the essence of which is peace and silence,
and by an inexcusable extension: the last two lines of the poem are
spun out, by word and phrase repetition, to twenty-nine bars out of
a total of forty-five. The same elongation is seen in Heine's ‘Anfangs
wollt’ ich fast versagen’ (1856; rev. 1880). Structurally this song is
interesting as showing Liszt anticipating Wolf's habit of building a
song on an ostinato one-bar motif; the rhythm of the first
bar ---. is present with little modification in twenty-nine bars
out of a total of forty. But in Heine’s ‘Ein Fichtenbaum’ (1855), one
of his best songs, he shows a more artistic restraint. The poem,
simple and short, draws two contrasting pictures of loneliness, the
pine in the far, frozen North dreaming in its long winter sleep of
the palm, equally lonely, in the blistering sand. Once again an
opening ‘cello’ motif plays an important part. The leaning towards
the terse and epigrammatic is also observable in the second setting
of the Harper’s song from Wilhelm Meister, ‘Wer nie sein Brot mit
Tränen ass’ (c.1860), which is a foretaste of the increasingly
experimental work of his last years. ‘Die drei Zigeuner’ (Lenau, 1860),
on the other hand, brilliantly recaptures the zest and exuberance of
his earlier, more pictorial manner.
About a dozen songs belong to his last period. They tend to be
spare, almost austere, like some of the later piano works. They are
increasingly experimental, especially in their cadences; they often end
on inversions, or on chords other than the tonic. The coda to ‘Die
Fischerstochter’ (Coronini, 1871) is a typical ending (Ex. 428). Not
surprisingly, his choice of poems during these latter years led him
Ex. 428
FRANZ 669
(the heart is broken.)
to some quasi-religious poetry; gratifyingly, the settings emerged on
the whole purged of the religiosity that sometimes marred his earlier
work. ‘Und sprich’ (Beigeleben, 1874) is touchingly simple, but the
more involved ‘Gebet’ (Bodenstedt, c.1878) puts us in mind of the
tortuous, self-immolatory penitential songs of Wolfs Spanisches
Liederbuch [Spanish Songbook ].?8
FRANZ
Though Robert Franz (1815-92) was much admired in his day,?9
few of his three hundred songs have survived the test of time. ‘Franz
war der erste Liederjournalist,’ wrote Oskar Bie;?? the journalism is
occasionally elevated to literature, but on the whole this judgement
is just.
His first songs were written c.1842, inspired by and dedicated to
one of his pupils. He was persuaded to send them to Schumann,
who found a publisher for them and reviewed them in his journal.?!
The gem of this collection is ‘Die Lotosblume’ (Geibel). The texture
is transparently simple, a gently undulating arpeggio figure; but the
harmonies are curiously shifting, prophetic of Faure. In none of the
twelve does Franz attempt much realism in the piano part, though
in No. 7, ‘Sonntag’ (Eichendorff), in a song that otherwise moves in
solemn four-part harmony, there is just a suggestion of church bells.
Franz subsequently declared himself opposed to such pictorialism,??
preferring to express the meaning and mood of the poem mainly
through the melodic line. This, however, presupposes a finer melodic
gift than his.
28 Wolfs relationship with Liszt remains unexplored.
29 He was extravagantly over-praised during his lifetime. Thus Franz Brendel wrote, in the
Neue Zeitschrift für Music (1857): ‘Song in Robert Franz has fulfilled what Schubert only
anticipated.” Even as late as 1900 the Bostonian William Apthorp could write, ‘In the domain
of the purely lyrical Lied no greater songs than his can be written’ (Preface to Fifty Songs of
Robert Franz (Boston, 1900)).
30 Das deutsche Lied (Berlin, 1926).
31 12 Gesänge für Sopran oder Tenor mit Pianoforte, Werk 11. See Schumann, Gesammelte
Schriften (Berlin, 1888), iii. 135-55.
32 See his opinions quoted in Wilhelm Waldmann (ed.) Robert Franz: Gespräche aus zehn
Jahren (Leipzig, 1895).
670 SOLO SONG
Some of his best songs are found among his Heine settings.
“Allnächtlich im Traume’, Op. 9, No. 4, is imaginative and free from
sentimentality, and the last one of the same set, ‘Auf dem Meere’,
is a song of some distinction. 'Meerfahrt', Op. 18, No. 4, uses the
mannerism of sequence less mechanically than some and by exploiting
judiciously spaced harmonies combined with the use of the sustaining
pedal also anticipates the sensuous sounds of French impressionistic
writing. Another Heine song which stands out is ‘Der Fichtenbaum',
an attractive miniature which compares favourably with Liszt's
setting. Other songs that might be singled out are “Wonne der
Wehmuth’, Op. 33, No. 1 (Goethe); ‘Die Lotosblume’, Op. 25, No. 1
(Heine); and, for its experimental nature, ‘Ja, du bist elend’, Op. 7,
No. 6. This is the poem which, not set by Schumann, follows ‘Ich
grolle nicht’ in Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo. It is the most restless
tonally of all Franz's songs; the C major chord at the beginning lasts
for only half a bar before the music is swung violently into C sharp
minor, thence through D minor, E flat minor, E minor, finally
cadencing on E major.??
WAGNER, CORNELIUS AND JENSEN
The two or three composers in Wagner's circle made only a small
contribution to the history of German song. Richard Wagner (1813-
83) himself, though he professed an admiration for the songs of
Franz 23 was very little in sympathy with such a miniature art-form.35
The five Wesendonck songs, written in 1857-8, are closely bound up
with Tristan, having much the same musical technique; indeed the
third, ‘Im Treibhaus’, and the fifth, "Tráume', provided some of the
raw material for that work. When the simple throbbing quavers
of ‘Träume’ were incorporated into the love duet in Act II of Tris-
tan (at ʻO sink’ hernieder ...’) they became the more complex
pattern AJ ;2 7. —perhaps the prototype of a similar nervous
rhythm in a number of Wolf's songs. Wolf is also anticipated in the
pulsating secondary sevenths of the first song, “Оег Engel', and by
the persistent dissonances of the fourth, 'Schmerzen'.
One of Wagner's faithful disciples was Peter Cornelius (1824-74).
33 Franz's songs, now out of print, have never been published in a critical edition. A
selection, in maddening disarray, is published by Peters in five volumes.
34 In 1857 Franz visited Wagner in Switzerland, and found some of his own compositions
in the master's study. Wagner sang his "Widmung, Op. 14, No. |, which he ‘declaimed with
extravagant pathos, dramatically' —and added that Franz ought to write opera.
35 In 1839-40 in Paris Wagner wrote four songs to French words—‘Dors, mon enfant’;
‘Mignonne’; ‘Attente’, and ‘Les Deux Grenadiers’. They are discussed, together with the only
other German song to be published in his lifetime, ‘Der Tannenbaum’, in Ernest Newman,
Wagner as Man and Artist (rev. 2nd edn.; London and New York, 1924).
WAGNER, CORNELIUS, AND JENSEN 671
He had also been close to Liszt in the Weimar days. The song cycles
Vater Unser, Op. 2 (1854-5)—nine poems meditating on the Lord’s
Prayer, each with a plainsong incipit; Trauer und Trost, Op. 3; the
Brautlieder (1856-9),26 and the Weihnachtslieder, Op. 8 (1856-70)
were much admired in their day, but there is little to single them
out from the average Lied of the time. Perhaps he found little
inspiration in his own verse; at any rate two songs from his Op. 5,
‘Zum Ossa sprach der Pelion’ (words by Annette von Droste-
Hülsdorf) and ‘Auftrag’ (Holty), are much more worthy of
investigation.
A more interesting figure is Adolf Jensen (1837-79).?? He was an
East Prussian, born in Kónigsberg; his career as pianist, conductor,
and composer was interrupted more and more as time went on by
illness, and his last years were spent in a vain struggle against the
tuberculosis to which he finally succumbed. For his more than 170
songs he drew on a wide variety of poets including Heine, Eichendorff,
Geibel, Heyse (the Spanisches Liederbuch was used extensively),
Daumer, Chamisso, and Rückert. There was also an array of English,
Scottish, and Irish poetry, by Tennyson, Thomas Moore, Walter
Scott, Alan Cunningham, and Mrs Hemans, in translations by
Ferdinand Freiligrath. Like most composers he is as good as his
poets, and some of the lesser writers lure him into a chromatic,
saccharine style. A simple melodic line, as in ‘Und schläfst du, mein
Mädchen’, for example, from the Spanisches Liederbuch (it is headed
‘Im Volkston’), is given a lush accompaniment quite out of keeping.
Other songs from the same source, however, hold a comfortable
balance between voice and piano, and reveal him as a by no means
unworthy forerunner of Wolf. The declamation in ‘In dem Schatten
meiner Locken' (written in 1853, thirty-six years before Wolf's
setting) may not be quite so meticulous as Wolf's, and Jensen is too
preoccupied with Spanish local colour to bring out the touching,
caressing sweetness of the poem to the extent that Wolf does; but
for all that it is a fine song, with the guitar idiom well controlled,
and the chromaticisms in this instance not at all obtrusive. More of
these Spanish songs were set in 1860 as Op. 4, and again some of
them can stand comparison with Wolf. ‘Sie blasen zum Abmarsch'
and 'Dereinst, dereinst Gedanke mein' are both fine songs; another
36 The Brautlieder seem indebted to Chamisso's Frauenliebe und -leben—the musings of a
bride on her wedding day. By far the best is No. 4, ‘Am Morgen”.
3? See E Baser, "Der Nachlass des Liedmeister A. Jensen’, Musica, 7 (1953). The standard
biography is still Arnold Niggli, Ado/f Jensen (Zurich, 1895), but see also the article by
Reinhold Sietz, ‘Jensen’, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vii.
672 SOLO SONG
excellent one, with a far more manageable piano part than Wolf's,
is ‘Klinge, klinge, mein Pandero', Op. 21, No. 1.
Being a pianist, he made considerable demands on the accompanist.
Songs such as ‘Die Schwestern’, Op. 53, No. 1, ‘Der letzte Wunsch’,
Op. 53, No. 6, or ‘Eduard’, Op. 58, No. 3, require an almost Lisztian
technique; nevertheless the writing is always pianistic. But the
emphasis is by no means concentrated on the piano, and often, as
in ‘Murmelndes Lüftchen, Blüthenwind', ‘Holde, schattenreiche
Bäume’, ‘Ach, ihr lieben Aeuglein’ (Ex. 429), and others from the
Spanisches Liederbuch, he calls for something of the effortless floating
of the soprano voice over the accompaniment that we associate with
Richard Strauss.
Jensen indeed had a high talent bordering on genius. He was a
composer fastidious within the limits imposed by the climate and
conventions of his time. He used the techniques of the period with
skill and artistry, perhaps not with boldness but with some originality.
His best work does not justify the neglect into which it has fallen.
BRAHMS
Johannes Brahms (1833-99) is most familiar to us in the concert
hall as an instrumental composer, but more than half his 122 opus
numbers incorporate the voice in one form or another. His interest
in the solo song was lifelong: the earliest songs, published as Opp.
6 and 7, date from 1851-3, the last, Op. 121 (the Vier ernste Gesánge),
appeared in 1896. Publication was largely concentrated in three
periods, 1868, 1877, and 1884-8, but these dates give little clue to
dates of composition. We have it from Brahms himself that he kept
songs by him often for a considerable time before the final polishing
preparatory to their appearance. Altogether he wrote about 250
songs.
Apart from folk poetry he drew on the work of some forty-five
writers, including Goethe, Heine, Tieck, Mörike, Platen, and Lili-
encron. His favourite seemed to be the orientalist Georg Friedrich
Daumer, who provided texts for nineteen of the solo songs, as well
as the words for the two sets of Liebeslieder waltzes for four voices
and piano duet, Opp. 52 and 65. Another favourite was the North
German Klaus Groth, with twelve.?8 His approach was quite the
antithesis to that of his junior, Wolf. His concept of the vocal line
38 For further details of the sources of Brahms's texts, see Max Friedlaender, Brahms’
Lieder (Berlin, 1922; Eng. trans. C. Leonard Leese, London, 1928), and Gustav Ophüls,
Brahms-Texte (Bonn, 1898; 2nd edn., 1908). There are fifteen songs by Ludwig Tieck, but all
are concentrated in one group, the Romanzen aus L. Tiecks Magelone, Op. 33.
673
BRAHMS
Ex. 429
zunehmend
Bewegt, sehnsuchtsvoll
Aeug
lie - ben
ihr
be doch der
- denkt
ge
ihr mein
dass
ge- denkt!
ihr mein
dass
Him - mel,
|
k of me!)
Heaven grant that you thin
d
blue eyes,
dear eyes,
(Ah,
674 SOLO SONG
was lyrical, with recitative almost non-existent. There are few
attempts at the dramatic, and those not among his best. Nor did he
favour the ballad, and indeed his attempt at setting the old Scottish
Ballad ‘Edward’ ended as a piano piece, Op. 10. On the instrumental
side he shied away from the overtly graphic and pictorial, preferring
to let the accompaniment reflect the general: mood of the poem,
responding where necessary, as in the masterly ‘An ein Veilchen’,
Op. 49, No. 2 (Hólty), to its varied emotional needs. Sometimes he
seems too concerned with purely musical considerations, so that a
song such as ‘Abschied’, Op. 69, No. 3 (Wenzig), gives the appearance
of being too pedantically derived from the opening four-note motif
in the bass: E flat, F, A flat, G. The unification of a work by
means of ‘academic’ techniques such as inversion, diminution or
augmentation, and canonic and other contrapuntal devices was such
a feature of his style that it would be strange not to find them in
his songs.
Formally he leaned towards the strophic rather than the through-
composed —a reflection of his lifelong enthusiasm for the Volkslied.
Once again the contrast with Liszt, Jensen, and, above all, Wolf is
very marked. But he used the basic strophic form with much variety
and subtlety,?? as, for example, in ‘Wie Melodien zieht es’, Op. 105,
No. 1 (on a poem by Hermann Lingg). Moreover the contours and
span of the vocal line and the harmonic and rhythmic richness of
the piano part often belied or disguised the essential simplicity. The
same, incidentally, is true of Wolf.
A Brahms ‘fingerprint’, not confined to the songs, is the cross-
rhythm two against three, which he used more frequently than most
composers.^? There are enough instances in the songs to suggest that
this device was used to depict mental conflict, doubt, indecision.
These were characteristics of Brahms the man;?! they guided
instinctively his choice of poems. By far the majority are love songs,
usually telling of unhappy or unrequited love.4? * Liebestreu', Op. 3,
No. 1 (Reinick), the finest of his early songs (1853), is of this nature.
39 See the discussion in Paul Mies, Stilmomente und Ausdrucksstilformen im Brahmsschen
Lied (Leipzig, 1923)—one of the few books in the large Brahms literature to attempt a serious
examination of his songs.
30 [n Book I of the Lieder in the Peters edition this device occurs more or less prominently
in fourteen out of fifty-one songs. By comparison, the first volume of Schumann's songs in
the same edition, comprising a large selection of the 1840 songs, has six out of a total of
seventy-eight.
41 ‘Many passages in the letters afford touching illustration of his constitutional lack of
self-confidence and his desire for sympathy' (quoted in Florence May, The Life of Johannes
Brahms (London, 1905), ii. 489).
42 ‘Brahms is the greatest master of resignation, pessimism and Weltschmerz in nineteenth-
century song' (quoted in Walter Niemann, Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1920), 295).
BRAHMS 675
It is a dialogue between mother and daughter: ‘O my child, sink
your sorrow in the deep, deep sea'—'a stone will stay in the water's
depths, my sorrow surges ever upwards.’ The melody, in canon with
the bass (this in itself is a symbol of stress), evolves from the first
three-note motif, and the conflict expressed by the cross-rhythm is
emphasized, especially in the third stanza, by chromaticism and
harsh dissonances.
Brahms showed comparatively little interest in the song cycle. His
principal contributions were the somewhat unsatisfactory Magelone
Lieder, Op. 33— fifteen songs, written in 1861-9, drawn from Tieck's
romance, Wundersame Liebesgeschichte der schónen Magelone und des
Grafen Peter aus der Provence (1797)*3 —and his farewell to song and
last important work, the Vier ernste Gesänge for bass of 1896. During
the previous few years death had taken a severe toll among his
friends— Gottfried Keller (1890), Elisabet von Herzogenberg (1892),
Hermine Spies (1893), Billroth and Hans von Bülow (1894). Clara
Schumann died in the very month that Op. 121 was completed,
May 1896. With words drawn from Ecclesiastes, the Apocryphal
Ecclesiasticus, and the first Epistle to the Corinthians, these songs
represent a conscious summing up of his thoughts concerning life
and death.
A major contribution by Brahms to the art of song lies in the
impressionism of his late style, following on from the Schumann of,
for example, ‘Zwielicht’ or ‘Mondnacht’ (also set by Brahms). Such
a song is ‘Feldeinsamkeit’, Op. 86, No. 2 (Hermann Allmers) (1879)—
a summer landscape, the serenity of which is unsurpassed in
nineteenth-century song literature. The great 'Sapphische Ode', Op.
94, No. 4 (Hans Schmidt) (1884), is suffused by the same serene but
melancholy radiance. All Brahms's late works are characterized by
an astonishing sensitivity towards instrumental, vocal, and harmonic
colour, which in the songs reached its culmination in two of the Op.
105 set, ‘Wie Melodien zieht es’ and ‘Immer leiser wird mein
Schlummer’ (1886). The unresolved 6/4 chords at bars 44-6 of the
latter illustrate beautifully the colouristic, non-functional harmony
which Brahms had been increasingly exploring (Ex. 430).44
43 The cycle is discussed in A. Н. Fox Strangways, ‘Brahms and Tieck’s “Magelone’”',
Music and Letters, 21 (1940), 211.
44 There is a revealing commentary on this song by Elisabet von Herzogenberg, who says
of these bars: ‘I know of no other passages to equal it for harshness in the whole of your
music’ Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsael mit Heinrich und Elisabet von Herzogenberg, ed. Max
Kalbeck (Berlin, 1907), 132.
676 SOLO SONG
Ex. 430
Langsam und leise
me bald.
(Come, come soon.)
BRAHMS AND THE VOLKSLIED
In a letter to Clara Schumann (27 January 1860) Brahms wrote:
"Song is at present following such a wrong course that one cannot
hold up an ideal before one too consistently. And, in my opinion,
this ideal is the Volkslied.’*5 He had just been busy on his Lieder
und Romanzen, Op. 14, in which he deliberately set out to catch the
flavour of German folk song as it was understood at the time.
He had also (1858) completed the Volkskinderlieder, intended for
Schumann's children 28 Settings of Volkslieder, often in translation
from Serbian or Czech, occur from time to time among his songs,
but the culmination was the forty-nine Volkslieder published in
1894.47
Yet here again there is a contradiction; for the volkstümlich style
hardly figures at all among his best songs. The popular ‘Vergebliches
45 Quoted in Niemann, Brahms, p. 359.
46 No doubt conceived as a pendant to Schumann's own Op. 79. A further set, also dating
from 1858, remained unpublished until 1926.
47 For a discussion of Brahms and the Volkslied, see Friedlaender, Brahms’ Lieder, pp. 192 ff,
also ‘Brahms’ Volkslieder’, Jahrbuch des Musikbibliothek Peters, 9 (1902), and Neue Volkslieder
von Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1926).
MAHLER 677
Ständchen’, Op. 84, No. 4, for instance, is not, as Brahms thought,
a Rhenish folk-poem;*8 and, if it were, the treatment is far from
volkstümlich. All the songs so far mentioned—to which might be
added ‘An eine Aeolsharfe’, Op. 19, No. 5; ‘Wie bist du meine
Königin’, Op. 32, No. 9; ‘Ruhe, Süssliebchen’, Op. 33, No. 9; ‘Die
Mainacht’, Op. 43, No. 2, and many others— display a sophistication
far removed from the Volkslied.
Writing to Elisabet von Herzogenberg in 1879 he comments, à
propos some compositions by Herzogenberg: ‘I am rather embarrassed
on this point, as I am forced to remember the innumerable Volkslieder
I myself have dabbled with [verwuzelt].'^? This perhaps refers to the
posthumous collection (1926), fourteen of which are reworkings of
some that appeared in his 1858 collection (*Sandmännchen’ and
“Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf? are two popular songs from this). The
reworkings often transform an appropriately simple piano ac-
companiment into a more or less elaborate 'art-song'. Brahms, like
other nineteenth-century masters, while paying lip service to the
notion of folk art, had not yet reached the stage when he could let
it stand by itself. The urge to improve was irresistible.
MAHLER
It is impossible even to list more than a few of the German Lied
composers of the second half of the century. They include Hugo
Brückler (1845-71), Alexander Ritter (1833-96) Albert Fuchs (1858-
1910) (about 100 songs), Hans Pfitzner (1869-1949), Martin Plüd-
demann (1845-97), important in the history of the ballad, as well as
non-German composers such as Dvorak and Rubinstein.°°
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) almost from the first took the natural
and, from his point of view, inevitable step of transferring the
accompaniment from the monochrome piano to the multi-coloured,
infinitely variable orchestra. His only songs conceived originally for
voice and piano were two of the Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit
(1885)—'Frühlingsmorgen' and ‘Erinnerung’. All his other songs
(Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen; Lieder aus des Knaben Wunderhorn,
the Kindertotenlieder; the Fünf Lieder nach Rückert, and one or two
isolated songs) were designed with orchestral accompaniment; they
38 [t had appeared in Deutsche Volkslieder (Berlin, 1840). But this collection, edited by
Franz Kretschmar and Anton Wilhelm von Zuccalmaglio, was most unreliable, for it included
not only a quantity of verse by Zuccalmaglio himself (including this particular poem) but at
least thirty compositions by J. F. Reichhardt and Otto Nicolai. Brahms drew extensively on
this volume.
49 Briefwechsel, p. 106.
50 See Hermann Kretzschmar, ‘Das deutsche Lied seit dem Tode Richard Wagners’,
Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, 4 (Leipzig. 1897), 45-60.
678 SOLO SONG
have moved outside the frame of the ‘Lied mit Klavierbegleitung'.
They have also, like much of the late nineteenth-century song
production, moved out of the domestic sphere into the concert hall.
German song in both composition and performance had become
highly professional.
STRAUSS
If Mahler and Wolf could be said to have an excess of introspection
and an almost morbid sensitivity, the defects of Richard Strauss
(1864-1949) lay in the opposite direction. Gifted with the self-
confidence that Brahms lacked, he composed rapidly and con-
tinually—and, it seems on looking through his copious output of
two hundred songs, indiscriminately.?! Though up to date and
‘modern’ in his composition, and with an unrivalled command of
the technique of his craft, he seems on the whole to have thought
of song in the old-fashioned sense of ‘voice’ and ‘accompaniment’,52
as in the early ‘Zueignung’, Op. 10, No. 1 (1882), and ‘Winternacht’,
Op. 15, No. 2, are examples. The vocal line may become more
opulent and exacting, as in ‘Cacilie’, Op. 27, No. 2 (1893). While
the accompaniment may become highly ornate as in ‘Hochzeitlied’,
Op. 37, No. 6 (1896), or the Lilienkron setting, ‘Bruder Liederlich’,
Op. 41, No. 4 (1899), the genre remains essentially that of Men-
delssohn or Jensen, whose songs Strauss almost certainly knew.53
The best known song of this type is of course the von Schack
"Ständchen". Op. 17, No. 2 (1885), with an accompaniment which
is exactly right for the teasing intimacy of the song. Others, such
as the Carl Busse ‘Wenn’, Op. 31, No. 2, or Rückert's "Anbetung,
Op. 36, No. 4, have accompaniments that are obvious, fulsome, or
over-blown, suggesting that Strauss has too readily yielded to his
own pianistic agility or a desire for an effective climax.
The quieter songs often reveal a more endearing side. The Bierbaum
"Traum durch die Dämmerung’, Op. 29, No. 1 (1894), or the Falke
*Meinem Kinde', Op. 37, No. 3 (1897), are remarkably successful in
their evocation of atmosphere. Another striking song is Dehmel's
‘Leises Lied, Op. 39, No. 1, which flirts with the whole-tone scale
51 For a discussion of all the songs see ‘A Lifetime of Lieder Writing’, chap. 22, in Norman
Del Mar, Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works (London, 1962-72),
iii. Alan Jefferson deals with a selection in The Lieder of Richard Strauss (London, 1971).
5? [n accompanying his wife, Pauline de Ahna, to whom he dedicated the four songs of
Op. 27, he often permitted himself to vary his own accompaniments—a procedure one can
hardly imagine the fastidious Wolf adopting.
53 Jensen's songs, written mainly in the decade 1860-70, were highly regarded. Some of the
poets he used were also drawn upon by Strauss in his early songs: see Jugendlieder, in the
Complete Edition (London, 1964), iii.
WOLF 679
in language of, for Strauss, unusual simplicity; and when, as in the
popular ‘Morgen’, Op. 27, No. 4, words by John Henry Mackay
(1893), both instrumental and vocal parts seem conceived as one
indivisible whole, we get a masterpiece. A song such as the Rückert
‘Die sieben Siegel’, Op. 46, No. 3 (1899), has a compactness of design
that puts us in mind of his Austrian contemporary, Wolf, but on
the whole the two composers were poles apart, and would seem to
have had little sympathy for each others’ music.
WOLF
The first songs by Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) to be published were
Sechs Lieder für eine Frauenstimme and Sechs Gedichte von Scheffel,
Mörike, Goethe und Kerner, selected by himself and printed in 1887.
Other early songs were published in 190354 as Lieder aus der
Jugendzeit; then in 1936 four books containing thirty-seven songs
were brought out as Nachgelassene Werke. The poets set were Heine,
Hebbel, Matthisson (the ‘Andenken’ set by Beethoven and Schubert),
Kórner, Lenau, Julius Sturm, and others.
In these early songs one catches only now and then a glimpse of
the quality of the mature Wolf. Thus in the Lenau ‘Nächtliche
Wanderung' (1878; pub. 1903) there is a foretaste of the Goethe
‘Prometheus’, and the Heine “Wie des Mondes Abbild ziltert (1880;
pub. 1936) not only looks forward to the Keller “Wie glänzt der helle
Mond', but also introduces the syncopated chord figure, mixed
duplets and triplets, that occurs frequently as a nocturne motif, often
associated with sleeplessness.55 In the last few bars of the Hebbel
*Knabenton' (1878; pub. 1936) we find his characteristic acid
harmonies (bars 29 and 30), and the first few bars of the Kórner
"Ständchen" (1877; pub. 1936) show another Wolf mannerism, the
persistent use of a one-bar ostinato figure in the accompaniment.56
But on the whole it 1s easier to see influences of earlier composers
than premonitions of the later Wolf. Schumann stands behind two
54 Not supervised by Wolf, as by this time he was in an asylum. Frank Walker in Hugo
Wolf: A Bibliography (London, 1951; 2nd edn., 1968), lists more than 100 early songs (i.e.
before 1880), many of which are incomplete and even fragmentary. Eric Sams, in The Songs
of Hugo Wolf (London, 1961), does not discuss any of these but limits himself to those
published by Wolf himself. Mosco Carner, Hugo Wolf Songs (London, 1982), is an excellent
general survey.
55 In addition to songs such as ‘Alle gingen, Herz, zur ruh' and ‘Sonne der Schlummerlosen',
see also the Night Watchman's song in Der Corregidor (Act IV, Scene i). Sams, Songs of Hugo
Wolf, p. 7, cites a similar rhythm as associated with ‘worship, submission, self-surrender' and
(p. 15) connects ‘night and sleep’ with a ‘rocking, lulling motif, usually a shifting semitone in
cross rhythm'.
56 Familiar instances are ‘Die du Gott gebarst', from the Spanisches Liederbuch; the Goethe
‘Frühling übers Jahr’ and the Mörike ‘Das verlassene Magdlein’.
680 SOLO SONG
Heine songs of 1876 (pub. 1936), "Mädchen mit dem roten Mündchen’
and ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’; two other Heine songs 'Spátherbstnebel
and ‘Mit schwarzen Segeln’ (both 1878; pub. 1936), suggest Schubert.
Goethe’s *Gretchen vor dem Andachtsbild der Mater Dolorosa’
(1878; pub. 1936), a free recitative with an elaborate accompaniment,
bears Wagner" hallmark, as does one of the largest of these early
songs, the Lenau ‘Herbstenschluss’ (1879; pub. 1936), the dark
colouring and foreboding tremolandi of which seem clearly influenced
by the gloomy Wagnerian orchestration then in vogue (Gér-
terdämmerung had its first Viennese performance on 14 February
1879).
Some of the texts Wolf chose suggest that his literary taste at that
time lacked discrimination. ‘Ein Grab’ (1876; pub. 1903), by his
friend Paul Peitl, is a sentimental essay in the watered-down macabre
German Romanticism such as attracted the boy Schubert; other
songs (‘Traurige Wege’, ‘Nachtliche Wanderung’) show a similar
leaning. The worst lapse of taste is the Hebbel ‘Das Kind am
Brunnen’ (1878; pub. 1903)—a childish story of a nursemaid who
sleeps while her charge totters to the brink of a well.
The only contemporary writer drawn upon was the Swiss Gottfried
Keller; the 240 songs on which Wolfs fame rests almost entirely
were drawn largely from five earlier poets, Mörike, Eichendorff,
Goethe, Geibel, and Heyse. They occupied him during two periods
of intense activity, Ше first and most prolific beginning in 1888 with
the fifty-three Gedichte von Eduard Mörike and ending in 1890-1
with the first part of Paul Heyse’s Italienisches Liederbuch [Italian
Songbook]; this was completed in 1896 after a gap of five years. His
last songs, three poems by Michelangelo (translated by Walter
Robert-Tornow), were composed in March 1897, just before his
mental collapse and removal to an аѕуіит.5?
In Wolfs hands, as never before, the Lied became a tone poem
for piano with vocal commentary. In comparatively few instances
can the singer’s part be classed as a ‘melody’ in the Classical sense
of a vocal line obviously related to or derived from predictable
harmonic movements of diatonic simplicity. (The vocal lines of
Brahms, Strauss, and Mahler are extensions of this.) Examples in
57 On the songs in general see Georg Bieri, Die Lieder von Hugo Wolf (Berne, 1935); Sams,
Songs of Hugo Wolf, Frank Walker, Hugo Wolf, Carner, Hugo Wolf Songs. On the Mörike
songs, see Anton Tausche, Hugo Wolfs Mörike-Lieder in Dichtung, Musik, Vortrag (Vienna,
1947); Jack M. Stein, ‘Poem and Music in Hugo Wolfs Mörike Songs’; Musical Quarterly,
53 (1967), 22; Walter Legge, ‘Hugo Wolf's Afterthoughts on his Mörike Lieder’, Music Review,
2 (1941), 211. See also Rita Egger, Die Deklamationsrhythmik Hugo Wolfs in historischer Sicht
(Vienna, 1963).
WOLF 681
Wolf are ‘Der Gärtner’ and ‘Fussreise’ (both by Mörike); and each
has what may be described as a traditional piano accompaniment.
Other songs where the piano part, though little more than a support
to the vocal line, contributes essentially to the mood of the song are
‘Das verlassene Mägdlein’ and ‘Auf ein altes Bild’ (both Mörike);
the accompaniments of ‘Nun wandre, Maria’ (from the Spanisches
Liederbuch), ‘Epiphanias’ (Goethe), and ‘Der Tambour (Mörike)
are more pictorial, but still in line with the Classical style of Schubert
or Schumann. By contrast, ‘Der Glücksritter’ (Eichendorff) or
‘Schweig’ einmal still’ (/talienisches Liederbuch)—and many others
could be cited—have accompaniments that are virtually self-sufficient
compositions.
Wolfs method of composition, broadly speaking, was that of
Wagner—a free declamation in the voice part, the piano com-
plementing and amplifying this in a rich and complex texture, often
monothematic and chromatic. Every inflexion of the poet's thought
is underlined in a careful, indeed sometimes pedantic, manner.
Occasionally, as in Schubert, this had led to a certain aimlessness of
form, but far more often Wolf keeps a tight hold on the structure
of the song. This is most clearly to be seen in the piano part, which
often shows a fairly obvious ABA or rondo form. Even the strophic
form is not entirely abandoned; 'Kennst du das Land' for example
is strophic, appropriately so, while in others the strophic skeleton
can be clearly recognized. The harmonic usage is often unorthodox;
there is much in his harmony that is cryptic. In a song such as ‘Die
du Gott gebarst’, where a motif involving a high degree of dissonance
is relentlessly pursued, he does not, as earlier composers would have
done, graft this on to a familiar chord progression, but uses harmonies
that are as individual and peculiar to him as the vocal line. On the
other hand the exquisite ‘Anakreons Grab’ (Goethe) is a model of
orthodoxy.
Wolf set a greater variety of poems than any other of the great
Lieder writers. He was especially at home in the realm of whimsy
and humour—an area that Schubert had avoided, where Strauss was
heavy-handed, but which Schumann occasionally attempted with
success, as, for example, in ‘Die Kartenlegerin’. The Mörike volume
is particularly rich in examples, with ‘Der Tambour’, ^Zitronenfalter
im April’, ‘Storchenbotschaft’, ‘Elfenlied’, ‘Nixe Binsefuss’; but the
charming ‘Epiphanias’ and some from the /talienisches Liederbuch,
such as ‘Mein Liebster ist so klein’ or “Ри denkst mit einem Fadchen
mich zu fangen’, must also be mentioned. His love-songs are
unrivalled; his choice of poem is often unconventional. Mórike's
682 SOLO SONG
"Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens’ is not at all what its title might
suggest; nor, one imagines, would thé same poet’s ‘Nimmersatte
Liebe’ have been acceptable in Victorian drawing-rooms.58 There is
a wide variety in the Spanisches Liederbuch, from the conventional
‘Auf dem grünen Balkon’ (a serenade) through the tender ‘In dem
Schattem meiner Locken’, the mocking 'Treibe nur mit Lieben Spott’,
and the pert ‘Mögen alle bösen Zungen’, to the passionate ‘Da nur
Leid und Leidenschaft’. The religious songs range from the quietly
devotional (‘Auf ein altes Bild’) to the almost hysterical outbursts
of the Spanisches Liederbuch. The first ten songs in this volume
constitute almost a Passion cycle, from the opening prayers to the
Virgin—the first, ‘Nun bin ich dein’, full of passionate adoration,
the second, ‘Die du Gott gebarst’, a rapt contemplation of the
mystery of the Virgin birth, flecked with anticipation of the agony
of the Cross—through the weary trudge to Bethlehem (‘Nun wandre,
Maria’) to the final agony at Golgotha (‘Herr, was tragst der Boden
hier’ and “Wunden trägst du, mein Geliebter’).
The fifty-one Goethe poems look like a conscious challenge to
himself. They open with all ten of the poems in Wilhelm Meister—
songs that have attracted, and defeated, dozens of composers; even
Wolf is not wholly successful. The set ends with three monumental
poems, "Prometheus". 29 ‘Ganymed’, and ‘Grenzen der Menschheit’,
all set magnificently. There are ballads, a form notoriously difficult
to handle; in at least one, ‘Der Rattenfánger, Wolf succeeds
brilliantly. There is the delightful pictorialism of ‘Sankt Nepomuks
Vorabend’ (lights twinkling on the water, bells tinkling) and the
hushed adoration of ‘Morgengruss’. There are settings of rococo
verse, such as ‘Der Schafer’ or ‘Die Spröde’, and numerous songs
from the Westöstlicher Divan that seem chosen expressly for their
problems. Altogether these songs, written in the space of five months,
October 1888 to February 1889, at a time when Wolf was at the
height of his powers, offer a remarkably comprehensive survey of
his range, power, and inventiveness.
CONCLUSION
The development of the Lied during the nineteenth century can
be traced along two lines: the ever-increasing weight thrown on the
instrumental side, and the constant drive towards more exact and
58 Mörike’s strange personality is discussed in Margaret Mare, Eduard Mörike: The Man
and the Poet (London, 1957).
59 For an interesting comparison between Schubert’s and Wolf's settings see G. Mackworth-
Young, ‘Goethe’s “Prometheus” and its settings by Schubert and Wolf, Proceedings of the
Royal Musical Association, 78 (1951-2), 54.
CONCLUSION 683
expressive declamation by the singer. Even їп the eighteenth century
the keyboard part was beginning to emerge from its role as a
mere support for the voice.6° In Schumann's hands it became,
characteristically, not so much accompaniment as an instrumental
commentary, often a complete entity in itself. The increasing technical
demands on the performers have already been mentioned, as has the
pressure to replace the piano by the variegated colours of the
nineteenth-century orchestra.
The pattern for the song with orchestral accompaniment was
Berlioz’s Nuits d'été, most of which were scored by him in 1856.5!
Wagner followed only a little later with one of the Wesendonck
songs in 1857-8.9? At about the same time Liszt was busy scoring
some of his own songs,9? for example the three songs from Wilhelm
Tell, *Mignons Lied’, and ‘Die Loreley’. The pattern continued in
the next generation, especially with Wolf, who orchestrated no fewer
than twenty-seven, and Strauss, who scored even more.94
With the instrumental side assuming more and more responsibility
for musical illustration of the words, a logical further development
was for the voice to renounce music altogether. The step from
recitative to recitation, in other words to melodrama, was taken in
1849 by Schumann in his setting of Hebbel’s ‘Schön Hedwig’, Op.
106, for voice and piano, and, three years later, Hebbel’s ‘Ballade
vom Haideknaben' and ‘Die Flüchtlinge’, a translation of Shelley's
"The Fugitives’, Op. 122, No. 2. There was precedent for this in
Fidelio and Der Freischütz, as well as in Schumann's own Manfred
(1848-9). It was later taken up by Liszt, Grieg, Strauss, and
Humperdinck, and ultimately developed by Schoenberg in his
Sprechstimme, first used in the Gurrelieder, written in 1900-1 on the
very threshold of the twentieth century.
$0 See the discussion re Naumann, Reichardt, and others in Vol. VIII, pp. 537-43.
61 At least two songs by Berlioz were orchestrated earlier, in 1834—‘La Belle Voyageuse’
and ‘Le Jeune Pätre breton’. Concert arias such as Beethoven’s ‘Ah! Perfido! come in a quite
different category.
62 The other four were scored later by Felix Mottl.
63 He also orchestrated several Schubert songs including ‘Die junge Nonne’, ‘Gretchen am
Spinnrade’, ‘Erlkönig’, and ‘Der Doppelganger’.
64 Complete lists in Walker, Hugo Wolf, and Del Mar, Richard Strauss. The Strauss songs
are in the Gesamtausgabe, iv. Brahms remained true to the concept of song with piano
accompaniment, but his Vier ernste Gesänge have been orchestrated by other hands.
684 SOLO SONG
(b) FRANCE
By DAVID TUNLEY
The history of French song in this period “is concerned almost
exclusively with the transformation of the simple drawing-room
romance, inherited from the later years of the previous century, into
the sophisticated mélodie. Like most derived forms, the mélodie
retained some traits of the earlier one—in particular, an easy flow
of lyricism—so that even in the later songs of Fauré and others
where a remarkable closeness lies between text and music, the words
(with few exceptions) are not set at the expense of the melodic line.
If in the romance the weakest composers could only express their
feelings through sentimental music of a most obvious kind, the
earliest composers of significance who concern us in this chapter,
while still retaining the essential simplicity and lyricism of the form,
imbued it with real tenderness and passion. As the century wore on
these feelings were increasingly heightened through the sensuous
beauty of new-found harmonies, creating that atmosphere of mystery
tinged with sadness so characteristic of the later mélodie. The
extraordinary beauty of this last manifestation of nineteenth century
French song should not blind us, however, to its links with the
unpretentious romance, nor to the rich repertoire that preceded the
melodies of Fauré, Duparc, and Debussy.
THE ROMANCE
The simple romance must be the point of departure for any study
of nineteenth-century French song. Hippolyte Monpou (1804-41)
established his reputation as a fashionable song-writer in 1830 with
his setting of Alfred de Musset's L' Andalouse. He also set six poems
by Victor Hugo, his setting of ‘La Captive’, (Ex. 431) making an
interesting comparison with that by Berlioz (Ex. 432). Monpou's
setting clearly illustrates the typical features of the popular romance
at the beginning of the period.
Simplicity was one of the most highly prized attributes of the
romance, but, as can be easily gauged from Ex. 431, it was rarely
gained without banality in the hands of the many mediocre and
justly forgotten composers who cultivated it. Their names need not
concern us here, but by the middle of the century they had produced
some thousands of such songs. Another feature of the typical
romance was its strophic form. To enable the singer to cope with
THE ROMANCE 685
Ex. 431
Andante melancolico
=
Eër
ën
GE
ессе те тег
пот -bre si lelong du
som - bren'é-tin-ce - lait dans... Рот - bre le sa-bre des
(If I were not prisoner, I would love this land, and this plaintive sea, and these fields of maize, and these
countless stars; if the spahee's sabre were not glinting in the shadows along the dark wall.)
SOLO SONG
686
Ex. 432
Ed
Andantino
cet aple
Et
pa - ys,
J’ai-me-rais ce
ma - is,
е
72
wn
a
E
Gi
=
m
Bé
o
Etic
>
(cresc.)
e
long du mur som
le
sans nom - bre, Si,
as-tres
ces
THE ROMANCE 687
tin - ce-lait dans
(If I were not prisoner, I would love this land, and this plaintive sea, and these fields of maize, and these
countless stars; if the spahee’s sabre were not glinting in the shadows along the dark wall.)
the different verses (called strophes), published songs usually included
an extra copy of the melody line, rewritten (with modifications where
necessary) for each verse, and often offering a modest cadenza at
the end. Infiuenced by late eighteenth century Classical style and by
the direct tunefulness of opera comique, the vocal line was invariably
symmetrical and repetitive in its phrases, which were generally
moulded in two- and four-bar lengths. This effectively inhibited a
flow of just that kind of melody which might have caught the
Romantic fervour of the texts. One of the changes wrought to the
romance by gifted song-writers, who brought the form up to the
level of real art, lay in eliminating this disparity.
Monpou's position in the history of French song is obviously a
very modest one, despite his popularity in his own day. Perhaps his
most significant achievement lay in his being one of the first
composers to set the poetry of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset,
and in so doing ally the genre with the new school of French lyric
poetry. The emergence of this school of poetry was symptomatic of
a new era in French artistic life after the upheavals of the Revolution
and the First Empire. During the 1830s Paris regained her position
as Europe's cultural capital and, as in the days of the young Mozart,
acted as a magnet drawing artists, musicians, and writers to it from
all over the world. For example Heine made Paris his home, exerting
an influence over French literature. Inspired by the intensely personal
and Romantic poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) and
the innovations of Victor Hugo (1802-85) many poets sought a
seemingly more spontaneous and intimate expression. ‘I am the first’,
said Lamartine, ‘to bring poetry down from Parnassus, and in place
of a seven-stringed lyre have given to the so-called muse the very
cords of man's heart touched and set in motion by the countless
tremblings of the soul and of nature "99 The example of Lamartine
$5 Preface to Méditations poétiques (1820).
688 SOLO SONG
and Hugo was followed by de Musset, Gautier, Delavigne, Beranger,
and others, and the existence of a rich ’corpus of lyric poetry was to
be one of the catalysts of French art song, as it had been in the
evolution of German Lied. In fact, the Lied itself was to be a catalyst
in the evolution of mélodie, for it was during the 1830s that Paris
discovered the songs of Schubert. Through collections in translation
(largely by Béranger) and through performances by Adolphe Nourrit,
a celebrated tenor at the Paris Opéra, Schubert's songs became well
known in France, probably the first country outside Germany to
appreciate them.
It was inevitable that the romance would be affected by all these
developments. Thus alongside the sentimental drawing-room pieces
pouring from Parisian publishing houses there appeared a trickle of
more serious songs, usually still called romances but in later years
more frequently known as mélodies.
ROMANCE AND MÉLODIE
The term ‘melodie’ was used as early as 1829 by Berlioz in his
Neuf Mélodies, Op. 2, a setting of poetry in imitation of texts found
in Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies. (The third edition of Berlioz’s
work changed the title to /r/ande.) Even when ‘mélodie’ had gained
wide currency by the middle of the century, it was still regarded as
just one of the many categories of the romance (like chansonette,
pastorale, tyrolienne, valse, nocturne, etc.). In describing *mélodies
réveuses et graves' in his romance-types, Romagnési wrote 'they
recall the German Lied in their employment of a richer and more
complex harmonic accompaniment than other kinds of romance'.$6
That such songs were still regarded in 1846 as something of a
curiosity is suggested by his comments:
Pieces of this kind, especially when the seriousness of the subject rises above
sentiment, are especially suited to deep voices like the bass, baritone or
contralto. They demand fullness of voice, but should not be sung with too
much power, as so often happens with singers. The art is not to sing loudly,
but to catch the nuances according to the meaning of the words. This kind
of romance, because of the monotony of deep voices and serious subjects,
may be embellished with ornaments, but of a very subdued kind appropriate
to this special kind of music.
In the light of the tenor Nourrit's celebrated performances of
Schubert's songs (which were called mélodies from the first French
66 A. Romagnési, L’Art de chanter les romances, les chansonettes et les nocturnes et géné-
ralement toute la musique de salon (Paris, 1846), 18.
THE 1830s 689
edition in 1831 onwards), it is puzzling to read of Romagnesi’s
suggestion that the mélodie was better suited to lower voices,
something not borne out by the repertoire. What is clear, however,
is that in the middle of the century mélodie was still regarded as
part of the romance tradition. Even in the later repertoire the
relationship was still often so close as to defy terminology. Indeed,
to understand that special quality which sets French art-song apart
from German Lied we must recognize how the romance fertilized
the mélodie. Perhaps no clearer contrast between the two national
schools of song writing could be found than by comparing, say,
Schubert" ‘Heidenröslein’ with Berlioz's ‘La Captive’ (see Ex. 432).
Typical of the German school, when Schubert sought simplicity the
effect was something of a folk-song; the simplicity of Berlioz's song
has its roots, not in folk-music but in the romance of the salon.
When Lied composers moved to a more serious style, the folk-song
element disappeared; in the French school the romance was absorbed.
It therefore matters little whether or not composers called their songs
romances or mélodies, for the two came naturally together in a
characteristically French expression.
THE 1830s
Nineteenth-century French art-song begins with Hector Berlioz
(1803-69). After composing a few youthful romances, neither better
nor worse than those by Monpou and others (and which he
apparently later withdrew from circulation) Berlioz composed his
first songs of quality in 1829: Neuf Mélodies (Irlande). Only five of
the nine pieces belong to the category of solo song, the others being
composed for duet or choral forces, and of these five solo songs four
belong to the romance tradition by virtue of their strophic form and
unpretentiousness. Yet in some of them a rather uneasy balance was
struck between melodic simplicity and Berlioz's penchant for unusual
harmonic progressions. At the vocal entry in ‘Adieu Bessy’, for
example, there is a striking dissonance over a chromatic chord which
seems at odds with the obvious and very conventional treatment of
the words which give the song its title. (Berlioz must have recognized
this, for he toned down the abrasiveness of this bar when he revised
the song a few years later.) It was, however, in the final song ‘Elegie’
(No. 9) that Berlioz took the romance to a new level of passionate
intensity, the wide-ranging vocal line being supported by an expansive
piano accompaniment and rich harmony. ‘Elégie’, in anticipating
Berlioz’s greatest songs, those of Les Nuits d'été, broke new ground
in the history of French song. Yet one of the most satisfying songs
690 SOLO SONG
he composed during the 1830s was a setting of Victor Hugo’s ‘La
Captive’ in which the elements of the traditional romance were
brought together in perfect balance (Ex. 432). Berlioz’s song achieves
a degree of rhythmic suppleness through its six-bar phrasing at the
beginning, while of course its strong, yet straightforward harmonies
and fine melodic span combine to give the work a character quite
beyond anything found in the typical romance of that time. Berlioz
was to return to this poem ten years later and replace his strophic
setting with one in which each verse was treated differently and in
which the piano gave way to an orchestra. His first setting, however,
remains a splendid example of the early romance in the hands of
youthful genius.
Only one other composer contributed significantly to the romance
during the 1830s: Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864), many of whose
forty songs took on the style of a cavatina. Nevertheless some, like
"Rachel à Nephtal (1834), shed the simple strophic form and
assumed an intensely dramatic character, which, like Berlioz's ‘Elegie’,
demanded considerable vocal power and range. Indeed, most of
Meyerbeer's songs, despite their tunefulness, require some agility in
execution, not least in the delightful ‘Chant de mai’ (1837) in which
the gentle humour of the text is underlined in music of exquisite
irony.
THE MID-CENTURY
If Berlioz and Meyerbeer were the only significant composers of
the romance and emerging mélodie during the 1830s, the next decade
saw the first songs of a group of composers who were to cultivate
the genres over a number of years: Saint-Saéns, Reber, Lalo, Louis
Niedermeyer, Felicien David, Victor Masse. Some of them were later
to contribute songs that are amongst the finest in the repertoire. It
was during the 1840s also that Liszt composed his handful of French
songs. But above all, it was the decade in which appeared one of
the greatest collections of the nineteenth century: Berlioz's Les Nuits
d'été (1841). This is a setting of six poems by Théophile Gautier. A
collection of songs rather than a true song cycle, it expresses love's
eagerness (‘Villanelle’), its fantasy and rapture (‘Le Spectre de la
rose’, ‘L'Île inconnue"), its despair and grief through separation and
death (‘Sur les lagunes’, ‘Absence’, ‘Au cimitiere’), in music which
had no precedents in French song and which remained unmatched
for many years in the fluidity of its vocal line and in its harmonic
originality. Although none of the songs is through-composed, there
is a sense of organic growth in each (even those with refrain), for in
THE MID-CENTURY 691
Les Nuits d’ete Berlioz gave full rein to his gift for melodic variation
and transformation. This, together with the motivic interplay of
the accompaniment, imparts to the music a remarkable sense of
architecture, particularly in the version for voice and orchestra which
he made in later years.
The innovations in Les Nuits d'été were followed neither in Berlioz's
later songs nor in any others composed during the 1840s. The simple
romance still held favour, and the early songs of Saint-Saéns, Masse,
and others were in this unpretentious style. Félicien David's romances
are good examples of the genre at this stage, featuring as they do
well-shaped melodies and a degree of suppleness in the phrasing
without, however, asserting much personality. The cultivation of
French song as a serious pursuit of gifted composers had to wait
largely for the second half of the century.
The development of those resources that transformed the romance
into mélodie was, of course, no guarantee of quality. In his famous
‘Le Lac’, as well as ‘L’Automme’ and ‘L’Isolement’, the Swiss-born
Louis Niedermeyer (1802-1861) extended the structure of the romance
by setting the opening verses in declamatory style, while his 'Le
Poéte mourant' is almost a through-composed piece. But neither the
extended structure, nor the greater demands of the accompaniment,
nor the enriched harmonies of these works can hide their period
mannerisms. Indeed, the greater the resources, the greater the risk
there always was of bringing to the surface that cloying sentimentality
latent in the nineteenth-century Romantic style. Even Gounod and
Massenet were not entirely to avoid these pitfalls, although their
later songs included some masterpieces. The best songs of the middle
years of the century are those in which the composers recognized
the ‘miniature’ nature of the romance and burgeoning mélodie and
worked within its limits. A particularly fine example of this is ‘L’Aube
nait' by Lalo (1823-92), one of six settings of poems by Victor Hugo
which the composer published in 1856. Although the three verses
are set differently, the refrain-like ending of each provides a strophic
element, and with its mellifluous vocal line, and its simple yet finely
wrought accompaniment, ‘L’Aube nat" and the other songs of this
collection take the romance to one of its highest levels of artistry.
Lalo's later songs, especially those of 1879 which he entitled
5 Lieder— despite the title they are composed to French texts— are
in the more expansive style of the true mélodie.
Other composers who brought artistry to the romance were Henri
Reber (1807-80), Victor Masse (1822-84), and Ernest Reyer (1823-
1909), who despite his long life wrote most of his music before the
692 SOLO SONG
age of 40. While these composers also wrote quite ambitious songs,
their talents seemed best suited to the simpler style. One indication
of the seriousness with which they approached song writing can be
seen in the care taken over the accompaniment. Even in the simplest
songs the piano writing is finely polished, particularly in those by
Reber and Masse who were clearly influenced by the example of
German Lied as far as the accompaniment was concerned. The piano
part of Reber’s ‘Au bord d’un ruisseau’, with its figuration suggestive
of rippling water, is just as indebted to Schubert’s example as is his
‘A un passant’, which, through its relentless rhythmic motif, evokes
the popular Romantic image of the ‘wanderer’.
NEW DIRECTIONS
Of the composers whose early songs became widely known in the
middle years of the century the most important was Camille
Saint-Saéns (1835-1921) who wrote more than a hundred, half before
1890. Songs were among the earliest works of this precocious
composer, his first group having been written at the age of 6. These
were merely in the style of the fashionable drawing-room romance.
At the age of 20 he produced a group of separately published
mélodies that marked a new direction in French song. One of these
was ‘La Cloche’ (1855). Hugo's poem, likening the poet's soul to a
bell hanging solitary in its vault, inspired from Saint-Saéns a song
of great grandeur and passion, notable for its complex harmonies
and colourful sonorities. Sheer beauty of sound was to fascinate
French song writers more and more, and this predilection can be
traced to some of Saint-Saéns's songs written in his twenties. For
example, later French fondness for the effect created by doubling
treble with bass (as in Faure’s ‘La Fée aux chansons’) is seen as
early as 1857 in Saint-Saéns's ‘La Mort d'Ophélie'. The opening of
another song of the same period, ‘L’Attente’ (Ex. 433), foreshadows
by some twenty years the opening of Duparc's 'L'Invitation au
voyage’ (Ex. 434).
From the same period comes his ‘Extase’. In this remarkable song,
Ex. 433
y $e agitato
0—9 i— 21-404 9I ES SER:
NEW DIRECTIONS 693
Ex. 434
Presque lent
Te 8
perhaps to match Hugo’s constant repetition of the word ‘puisque’
in the first half of the poem, Saint-Saéns sounds the same low note
at the beginning of every bar, forcing him to explore chordal
relationships that look ahead to later practice in the mélodie. Such
harmonic experiments, together with rhythmic ones like the 7/4
metre frequently used in ‘La Solitaire” (Melodies persanes, 1870),
suggest that Saint-Saéns regarded song writing as a challenging
medium, and his works in this genre deserve to be far better known
than they are.
With the songs of Georges Bizet (1838-75) there also enters into
the emerging mélodie considerable exploitation of colourful harmony.
Most of his songs were written during the 1860s, even though their
publication was often considerably later. The element of the exotic
is found frequently in his songs, such as ‘Le Matin', which, with its
bolero rhythm and piquant dissonances is like an early sketch for
Carmen. Composers from Monpou onwards had been drawn to
the exotic—'L'Andalouse' and ‘La Captive’ have already been
mentioned— but, except for Berlioz, Bizet seems to have been the
first to have gone beyond conventional harmonic practice to evoke
it successfully. It is not evident in all his songs, of course— his Feuilles
d'album (1860), for example, is a collection of six conventional (but
charming) romances—but works like ‘N’oublions pas’ with its
unusual chord progressions, and ‘Chant d'avril with its im-
pressionistic accompaniment, are amongst those which reveal Bizet's
originality and place in the history of French song.
If Bizet wrote most of his songs during a relatively short period
of his life, those of Charles Gounod (1818-93) and Jules Massenet
(1842-1912) span both their long careers. In a survey as brief as this
the songs of Gounod and Massenet are best treated together, for in
many ways they share similar characteristics. The products of
composers whose main medium was opera, the songs of Gounod
and Massenet reveal, not surprisingly, a true understanding of the
voice, and hence are invariably effective as vocal pieces. On the other
694 SOLO SONG
hand both possessed a facile technique that was too often turned in
the direction of drawing-room sentiméntality and archness.
The songs of Massenet and Gounod can be seen as a culminating
point in the development of nineteenth-century French song before
it moved into its final —and very individual— stage in the hands of
Faure, Duparc, and Debussy, and few song-writers in France escaped
the influence of their style. Massenet's “А Mignonne’ (Ex. 435), a
song in the romance tradition, shows this style at its most charming.
A move towards that evocative world which Fauré, Duparc, and
Debussy were to make peculiarly their own is found in the songs of
Alexis de Castillon (1838-73), whose untimely death cut short one
of France's most promising musical talents. He wrote six songs—
settings of words by one of Faure’s favourite poets, Armande
Ex. 435
Allegro appassionate
с=с ==
Pour qui se-ra, Mi - gnon - ne,
L'on-doy-an - te cou -
NEW DIRECTIONS 695
(For whom will it be, Mignonne, the wavy crown of your chestnut-brown hair? For whom will be your smile,
your eyes where І love to gaze, your little roguish feet?)
Ex. 436
Moderato
fuit le sang de nos vei-nes?
Hyg No e EE EE Pre
EE
Lé-vres de fleurs plei-nes,qui sait,dans la nuit, —
696 SOLO SONG
Fo. * Ke? Se Фа. *
(Who knows where flows the blood from our veins? What futile things does our love pursue! Lips of
full-blown flowers, who knows where, in the night, the wind carries your sweet breath?)
Sylvestre— composed during the last five years of his life. In ‘Sonnet
melancolique’ (Ex. 436) one senses those qualities that Baudelaire
believed to be the attributes of the Beautiful: ‘something passionate
and sad, something a little vague ... mystery and regret.’
Of his six songs ‘Renouveaw’ is perhaps the one that best reveals
the composer's gift for evoking the mood of passionate grief so
poignantly through melodic and harmonic suggestion. It is certainly
not unworthy of the songs which it so remarkably foreshadowed.
THE PERFECTION OF MÉLODIE
The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw songs by Fauré,
Duparc, and Debussy. With them French mélodie entered its final
stage of development and, in popular estimation, achieved its most
characteristic voice. The lyrical element in their mature songs, while
ever present, was gradually transformed, the once clear lines of
melody more sensitively moulded to the nuances of the text, more
subtly blended into the richly suggestive harmonies of the piano
part, together creating in each song a tiny world of mystery,
enchantment, sadness, and passionate longing, particularly in those
of Fauré and Debussy. So palpable the atmosphere, and so strong
the impression of shifting scenes bathed in Romantic half-light, that
one might be tempted to think of each song as part of a mise-en-scéne,
were it not that the intensely personal and intimate nature of most
of the songs seems to remove all associations with opera or stage.
Each of these composers began his song-writing career with
romances strongly influenced by Gounod and Massenet. The songs
of Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) in particular illustrate the trans-
formation of the conventional romance into mélodie of a highly
individual kind. His first song was ‘Le Papillon et la fleur' (1861) to
a poem by Victor Hugo which had also been set some twenty years
THE PERFECTION OF MELODIE 697
earlier by Reber. Both settings were in the simple romance style, as
were the many charming songs that Fauré was to compose during
the next fifteen years. During this period there was only the occasional
hint of the originality to come. In 1878 appeared ‘Apres un réve',
in which Faure’s gift for melody began to be matched by his genius
for harmony. Yet it was only a beginning, for the richness of ‘Apres
un réve' was largely the result of chromatic embellishment of
traditional devices (such as the cycle of fifths at the opening) rather
than innovation. The song also reveals its Italianate inspiration (it
can be sung either in the original, anonymous Italian text or—as is
invariably the case—in Bussine's French translation) through its
clear distinction of vocal line and throbbing chordal accompaniment.
More characteristic of Fauré’s maturer style is ‘L’Automne’, written
SOLO SONG
D — D. 5 A
dim.
sans re - tour.
love withers.)
you flees my hand forever. Like the mown flower,
hich has touched
(The hand w
THE PERFECTION OF MELODIE 699
in the same year but published in 1880. Here the vocal line and the
wonderfully evocative piano accompaniment merge in a song that
conveys the grief of the young poet who sees in autumn the symbol
of his fading youth. His most original song of this period, however,
is ‘Fleur jetee’ (Ex. 437), in which the voice soars above harmonies
of extraordinary power: typical of Fauré's mature harmonic style,
the originality lies not in the creation of new chords but in new
relationships.
During the 1880s Fauré composed those songs which are amongst
his most frequently performed: ‘Notre amour, ‘Claire de lune’,
‘Toujours’, ‘Les Roses d'Ispahan'. Yet perhaps his finest songs are
the more austere examples of his art composed after 1890.67
Fauré's output of 105 songs stands in marked contrast to the
small number composed by Henri Duparc (1848-1933), whose
reputation rests upon thirteen songs composed between 1868 and
1884. Although invariably linked with Faure and Debussy in the
history of French song, Duparc's style has its own individuality.
Only one song might be mistaken for a Fauré setting—‘L’Invitation
au voyage’. Duparc's harmony, for all its colour and sometimes
unusual progressions, lies far closer to the central European tradition
than does Fauré's, being influenced by Wagner (among others),
whom Duparc knew personally. What links Duparc's songs closely
to the French tradition is the suaveness of the vocal line, evident as
much in his extrovert and pictorially explicit ballad songs (Ге
Manoir de Rosemonde', ‘La Vague et la cloche") as in his early
romance-inspired pieces (‘Chanson triste’, 'Soupir). This, together
with heightened sensitivity towards poetry and the gift for evoking
atmosphere and mood, links him to both Fauré and Debussy.
Songs were among the earliest significant compositions by Claude
Debussy (1862-1918). Even though his so-called ‘impressionist
period' came after 1890, in the fifty songs (not all of them published)
which he composed up to that date can be traced the evolution of
his highly personal style. Working through the conventional romance
form in such songs as ‘Beau soir’, ‘Fleur des bles’, and ‘Paysage
sentimentale', he struck a more individual note in ‘Mandoline’ by
Verlaine,63 whose poetry he began setting in 1882 and who was to
inspire some of his finest songs. The best Verlaine settings before
1890 were those which, having been published separately, were put
together in a collection of six songs first called Ariettes, paysage
67 See Vol. X, pp. 25-9 and 232.
68 See the quotation in Vol. X, p. 89.
700 SOLO SONG
belges et aquarelles and then (in their 1903 edition) Ariettes oubliees.
Right from the opening bars of the first song of the collection, ‘C’est
l'extase' (Ex. 438) (originally published in 1887), we recognize those
characteristics which were to form the basis of his art: chains of
Ex. 438
. Lent et caressant
réveusement
C'est la fa - tigue a- mou - reu
Un poco mosso ———— ———
— FF
C'est tous les fris - sons des bois Par -
SEH wi
Ча ne Dee Eege BE Ee и ———— Gah ee ee 0 ДЫН EE и ==
Ech z: = Е KEE,
mi l'é-trein - te des C'est, vers les ra - mu-res gri - ses,
THE PERFECTION OF MELODIE 701
molto rit. a tempo
frais mur-mu - re Ce-la ga-zouille
semble__ aucri doux Quel’herbe a - gi - tée ex - pi
[—I-5
a
(It is languid ecstasy. It is love’s weariness. It is the shiver of the woods at the breezes’ embrace. It is, in the
grey foliage, the choir of tiny voices. O the thin, cold murmur, it warbles and whispers like a gentle cry
until the restless grass withers.)
chords recalling the old medieval techniques of organum and dissonant
rich clusters of sevenths and ninths which, like other chords, were
used by Debussy to establish relationships which defied traditional
harmonic practice and conjured up a new world of sound and
sensation.
Yet what are we to make of the vocal line? Was it, too, so
revolutionary in concept that all links with mélodie were severed?
The answer is that, while Debussy’s melodic line may indeed spring
from the harmonies, it is shaped in a way that reveals a true lyrical
702 SOLO SONG
impulse, and in its gentle undulations is characteristically French. In
fact, Debussy was far freer to give shape to his melodies unhampered
as they were by the restrictions of harmonic rhythm and sequence
which are so closely associated with traditional tonal procedures.
Indeed shape is the essence of lyricism: phrases follow one another
in such a way that one gives meaning to another, the whole melody
unfolding in a series of spans that reach out to notes as though
seeking a goal before falling back in repose. This Debussy's songs
do to perfection, even if on the surface they sometimes, through
repeated notes, appear to be almost recitative-like. ‘C’est l’extase’ is
a good example. The third phrase at the words 'C'est tous les frissons
des bois' at first glance might give the impression that melody has
given way to recitative. As Ex. 439 illustrates, the repeated notes
hide in notation what in performance comes through as a superbly
Ex. 439
Un poco mosso
PP-
EE
C'est tous les fris - sons des bois Par - mi Ге-їгеїп - te des
pp molto ги. a tempo
C'est, vers les ra - mu-res gri - ses, Lechoeur des pe - ti-tes voix
a age:
Poco a poco animato
m Iu mE
Р
sl rn SS e ES a See EO Xn een Ie s
|ll[-— ST Ree EE RES Ge Ce ы сщ
ИШНЕН gë ПРЫ. ee eee Wee CH (ee em ` 1-4
о le frele et frais mur-mu - те Ce-la ga-zouille
4 ^ h D
Ze ture ce Dif — — — un. =
anas,
pam
л o au
Gert ee xum e di - mi
SS o NZ en, Bee. en
: = I
EM n CHEERS
res - semble... au cri doux Que l'herbea - gi-
THESAST (DECADE 703
tee eR ps "we
(It is the shiver of the woods at the breezes’ embrace. It is, in the grey foliage, the choir of tiny voices.
O the thin, cold murmur, which warbels and whispers like a gentle cry until the restless grass withers.)
shaped flight of lyricism. In the context of the whole song this
particular span is reaching out for the later climax on top A.
This element of lyricism alone links the Ariettes oubliées to the
tradition of mélodie, and if, in the Cinq poémes de Baudelaire (1890),
Debussy produced (as a result of the Wagnerian influence in Paris
at the time) a rather over-rich and convoluted set of songs, it was
the more limpid and clearer style of the Ariettes oubliées which the
composer took up in his songs after 1890.69
THE LAST DECADE
In a brief survey it is impossible to discuss all the composers who,
while contributing to the repertoire of romance and mélodie, did not
alter the course of its development. Delibes, Chausson, and Franck
were such composers. One composer, however, must be singled out—
Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-94) some of whose songs are unique in
the nineteenth century for their wit and satirical humour. Perhaps
only Meyerbeer's "Chant de mai’ mentioned earlier shares these
qualities, although Chabrier went very much further in this direction.
Songs such as 'Villanelle des petits canards', ‘Ballade des gros
dindons’, and ‘Pastorale des cochons roses’ (from the 6 Mélodies of
1890) anticipated by some years the twentieth-century reaction
against Romantic song.
For much of the nineteenth century, serious song composition in
France held a position vastly inferior to that of opera, yet the best
songs of the repertoire now have a far better chance of survival
than the many grand opéras and opéras comiques that once reigned
supreme.
$9 On these, see Vol. X, particularly p. 94.
704 SOLO SONG
(c) RUSSIA
By EDWARD GARDEN
In the 1830s the majority of solo songs composed in Russia were
still of the lyrical Italo-French 'abstract' romance type, with the
melody and accompaniment not particularly underlining the meaning
of the text, rather than of the ‘expressive’ German type where the
opposite is the case. The so-called ‘Russian songs’ were of this type
too. often settings of folk or pseudo-folk texts by the likes of
Kol'tsov. in which the melody, usually in the minor mode, might or
might not be reminiscent of folk-song. Many such songs were written
by Gurilyov and Varlamov, whose best-known song, a setting of
Tsiganov's ‘Krasniy sarafan’ [The Red Sarafan], is still sung in
Russia today.” Glinka and Dargomizhsky also wrote a number of
‘Russian songs’ such as the latter's ‘Bez uma, bez razuma’ [At Опе”
Wits End] to words by Kol'tsov, set in G minor with a very simple
stereotyped accompaniment and conventional cadences. More typical
of later examples is the same composer's 'Okh, tikh, tikh, tikh, tikh,
ti!’ (1852) with its pseudo-folklike piano introduction. Other examples
are: Balakirev's ‘Pesnya razboynika’ [Brigand’s Song] and ‘Mne li,
molodtsu razudalomu' [I’m a Fine Fellow], both settings of Kol'tsov
written in 1858; Rimsky-Korsakov's setting of Pleshcheev's "Noch"
[Night] (1868), which has a piano refrain of the ‘Russian song’ type
but then branches out into a more Romantic lyricism; Tchaikovsky's
setting of Mey's 'Kak naladili: Durak’ [As they kept on saying: Fool]
(1875); Borodin's 'U lyudey-to v domu’ [Those Folk] (Nekrasov,
1882); and, as late as 1903, Balakirev still showed himself to be
addicted to the genre in the song "Zapevka' [Prologue] (Mey). In all
these cases the folk-song imitations, such as they are, are for the
drawing-room in the time-honoured salon tradition. They are totally
unlike Balakirev's actual folk-song harmonizations Sbornik russkikh
narodnikh pesen [Collection of Russian Folk-songs] (1886),?! which
probe the songs to their very depths and give a feeling of authenticity.
The art-song of the pseudo-Russian type was in a quite different
tradition, not undistinguished in its own way.
70 For instance, it is the first song in a miscellaneous collection, Romans? russkikh
kompozitorov, ed. V. Zharov (Moscow, 1979).
*! Published, together with his later collection, in M. Balakirev: Russkie narodnie pesni, ed.
E. V. Gippius (Moscow, 1957).
GLINKA AND DARGOMIZHSKY 705
By far the best song-writer amongst Glinka’s older contemporaries
was Aleksandr Alyab'ev (1797-1851). In ‘Lyubovnik rozi, solovey’
[Lover of the Rose, the Nightingale] he initiated in song the
orientalism later to be exploited so successfully by Balakirev and
Rimsky-Korsakov in some of their best songs. But the orientalism
in this song is much tamer than the more rugged Circassian element
to be found both in his setting of Lermontov's ‘Mnogo dev u nas v
gorakh' [We have Many Girls in the Mountains] with its augmented
seconds and also in other similar songs. Moreover, he anticipated
Dargomizhsky in certain realistic peasant songs, though Alyab'ev's
songs in this vein cannot match the best of Dargomizhsky's, far less
Mussorgsky's.
One other important type of song to be exploited by later
composers was the dramatic ballad. Aleksey Verstovsky (1799-1862),
better known for his operas, wrote a number of ballads extended
enough to allow space for development of characterization, changes
of key and tempo, and variation of piano accompaniment figures.
Besides his setting of Pushkin’s ‘Chornaya shal’’ [The Black Shawl],
no less than 219 bars in length, mention must be made of the highly
dramatic ‘Tri pesni skal’da’ (Zhukovsky, after Uhland’s ‘Die drei
Lieder’), the march-like opening of which anticipates many later and
more distinguished Russian ballads. His version of the same poet’s
‘Nochnoy smotr’ [Midnight Review] was soon to be eclipsed by
Glinka’s setting of the text.
GLINKA AND DARGOMIZHSKY
Though Mikhail Glinka (1804-59) wrote a handful of fine songs,
he contributed little to the development of the genre. Most of his
songs are at best delicately refined, at worst vapidly superficial if
seldom mawkishly sentimental. The one song which is none of these
things, ‘Nochnoy smotr’, stands on its own as a dramatic ballad,
composed in one day and immediately sung to Zhukovsky and
Pushkin; the subject is the ghost of a general, rising from his grave
and surveying his spectral army, and the song shows real power,
providing a prototype for such songs as Mussorgsky’s ‘Polkovodets’
[The Field Marshal] from Pesni i plyaski smerti [Songs and Dances
of Death]. It was written in 1836 shortly before the completion of
the opera Zhizn’ za Tsarya [A Life for the Tsar], and Glinka’s other
best songs were composed between then and 1840. Two excellent
examples of charming lyricism are ‘Severnaya zvezda’ [North Star],
based on the slow ‘wedding song’ later to be used in Kamarinskaya,
and ‘V krovi gorit’ [Fire of Longing in my Blood], the latter originally
706 SOLO SONG
(in 1838) set to words by Aleksandr Rimsky-Korsakov but with
Pushkin verses substituted in 1839. It is a delightful valse, fore-
shadowing the Valse-Fantasie for piano written in the same year,
but obviously there is no close correlation between words and music.
Glinka's most sustained effort in the composition of songs resulted
in a collection of twelve (not a cycle) published in 1840 with the title
Proshchanie s Peterburgom [Farewell to Petersburg]. The poems, by
his friend Kukol’nik, are not of any great merit, and the music made
more impression on Glinka's successors than it can do on us in the
twentieth century. The free decorative arrangement for piano solo
of ‘Zhavoronok’ [The lark] written by Balakirev in the early 1860s
greatly improves upon the refinedly nostalgic but rather pallid
original, in the *Russian song' tradition. A cradle song, a barcarolle
and a 'Hebrew song’ were all to have some influence on Balakirev,
if only in his choice of the same titles. But none of the songs in the
group can compare with ‘Gde nasha roza? [Where is our Rose?],
his finest setting of a poem by Pushkin, written three years earlier
in 1837. This perfect gem of only seventeen bars, ten in 5/4 followed
by seven in 3/4, beautifully matches the tender regret of the роет.??
Such exquisite laconism was not to reappear until Borodin's song
'Fal'shivaya nota’ [The False Note] (1868), which also happens to
be exactly seventeen bars long. (As it is a setting of Borodin's own
words, this may well have been deliberately contrived.) In Glinka's
song the singer's even-flowing crotchets in 5/4 may have provided
the starting-point for Mussorgsky's ‘Svetik Savishna’ [Darling Sa-
vishna], in which a similar technique is used for very different ends.
But, unlike so many of Glinka's songs, it is a masterpiece in its own
right, regardless of its influence on the next generation of song-writers.
Some of the songs of Aleksandr Dargomizhsky (1813-69) were
altogether more innovatory than Glinka's, but, like his, many of the
younger man's were equally weak lyrical romances. Although there
were some earlier hints of dramatic characterization in, amongst
other songs, 'Mel'nik^ [The Miller] (1851), a song about a drunken
miller scolded by his wife when he comes home very late, it was not
in the main until after Serov had written, in a review of Dargo-
mizhsky's opera Rusalka [The Water-nymph] (1856), of the compo-
sers ‘truth of musical expression ...' (Serov's italics)? that
Dargomizhsky consistently aimed for the musical truth which was
so to impress Mussorgsky and his friends. Serov wrote that it was
72 The whole of ‘Gde nasha roza?’ is given in David Brown, Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical
and Critical Study (London, 1974), 149.
73 Serov, Izbrannie stat i, i (Moscow, 1950), 323.
GLINKA AND DARGOMIZHSKY 707
where the requirements of effectiveness coincide with ‘musical truth’
that Dargomizhsky’s triumph was complete, and in the following
year Dargomizhsky himself wrote his often-quoted letter’? to the
singer Lyubov’ Karmalina, in which he emphasized that he wanted
the sound to express the word directly. It thus seems to have been
Serov who was the first publicly to pinpoint the importance of this
aspect of Dargomizhsky’s work, which up till then even the composer
himself had not appreciated, valuing just as highly more derivative
lyrical characteristics of his style.
It is not surprising, therefore, that it was only after this that
Dargomizhsky’s best songs were to appear. In the dramatic song or
ballad tradition he produced two masterpieces: ‘Stariy kapral’ [The
Old Corporal] (1857-8), set to Kurochkin’s translation of a poem
by Beranger, and ‘Paladin’ (1859), a setting of a poem by Zhukovsky
(Ex. 440). The old corporal is condemned to death for insulting a
young officer. At the end of each verse the unwilling squad of
soldiers, as they march the old campaigner to his execution, are
ordered (and the pace quickens): ‘In step, lads, one! two! ... don’t
Ex. 440
Allegro К 3 3
trup po-glo-shchon bil glu - bo - Коу re- Коу,
shchon bil glu - bo
(the corpse was engulfed by the deep river!)
*! Aleksandr Sergeevich Dargomizhskiy (1813-1869): Avtobiografiya, pis'ma, vospominaniya
sovremennikov, ed. Nikolay Fyodorovich Findeisen (Peterburg, 1921). 55, letter of 9 Dec.
1857. See Richard Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the
1860s (Ann Arbor. 1981), 253 and 258.
708 SOLO SONG
complain, get in line, one! two!’ This simple but striking song is less
adventurous than ‘Paladin’ as far as the harmonies are concerned.
Subtitled ‘ballad’, the poem tells of a knight (paladin) killed by his
faithless servant, who throws the corpse down into a deep river,
dons the knight's armour, and mounts his horse; but, as they ride
off, it refuses to go over the bridge, rears up, and throws itself and
its rider down the bank into the river, in which, weighed down by
the heavy armour, the murderer sinks and drowns. Near the opening
of the song Dargomizhsky's word-painting as the knight's corpse is
engulfed by the river is exceptionally telling (Ex. 440). The reiterated
A in the right hand of the accompaniment and the empirical
harmonies in the left which sinks with the body, as it were, are just
the kind of treatment which might have been given by Mussorgsky
at the height of his powers.
It was Dargomizhsky, more than any other composer before
Mussorgsky, who developed the satirical song. ‘Chervyak’ [The
Worm] (1858), another translation of Beranger by Kurochkin, is
subtitled ‘comic song’. The arioso vocal line carries the words with
consummate art, and the plain accompaniment has the effect of
aiding the singer to present the grovelling of the flatterer, who is a
mere worm in comparison with the Count whose attention he wishes
to attract. ‘Titulyarniy sovetnik’ [The Titular Councillor] (1859),?5
telling of a councillor who endeavours to court a general's daughter
far above him in the social scale, is similarly simple and effective. In
neither of these songs does Dargomizhsky reveal the exceptional
character Mussorgsky was to show, but they provide an excellent
vehicle for a good singer to make of them what he will.
BALAKIREV AND CUI
The twenty early songs of Mily Balakirev (1837-1910) were written
between 1858 and 1864, and Stellovsky had published them all by
1865. His next collection was not composed until the mid-1890s and
a further collection appeared a decade or so after that. While there
are some distinguished examples in these later collections, they lack
the creative intensity evident in the early songs, which, however, do
not break new ground in the manner of his overtures. Nevertheless,
in the early set his contribution to existing types of song is very
important. He was particularly fond of a number of Glinka's
romances and examples of this kind of song include ‘Pridi ko mne'
[Come to me], No. 10 (1858), the most popular of the group during
75 Printed complete in Gerald R. Seaman, History of Russian Music, i (Oxford, 1967), 234-5.
BALAKIREV AND CUI 709
Balakirev's lifetime, and 'Vzoshol na nebo mesyats yasniy’ [The
Bright Moon], No. 5 (1858), an engaging song in D flat in which
the vocal line and accompaniment are perfectly wedded, as is the
case also in the beautiful 'Kolibel'naya pesnya’ [Cradle Song], No.
4 (1858), similar in type to Glinka's cradle song in Proshchanie s
Peterburgom.
Balakirev's three songs with oriental overtones are all masterpieces,
far greater than their prototypes in Alyab'ev, Glinka, and Dar-
gomizhsky,’® not to mention Anton Rubinstein and his quite
appropriate settings of twelve poems by the Persian poet Mirza-Shafi
(1854)."* The earliest of this type is ‘Pesnya Selima’ [Song of Selim],
No. 11 (1858), Balakirev's first setting of his favourite poet, the
vividly Romantic Lermontov. It is not so much the augmented
second between the third and fourth degrees of the scale in the piano
refrain as the economical beauty of the vocal line which gives the
song its feeling of restrained power. The other Lermontov setting,
‘Pesnya zolotoy ribki’ [Song of the Golden Fish], No. 16 (1860), is
a delicate and gentle siren's song in which the fresh, passionately
frigid enchantment of Lermontov's words, of the mermaid enticing
her victim to the soft sea-bed where the years and centuries will glide
past in marvellous dreams, is perfectly caught in the music; the clean,
cool chromaticism of the harmony is an enchantment in itself. The
frail, brittle beauty of this song was much admired by the other
members of Balakirev’s circle, and by Tchaikovsky. ‘Gruzinskaya
pesnya' [Song of Georgia], No. 19 (1863), to words by Pushkin, was
written as a result of Balakirev's visits to the Caucasus in 1862 and
1863. It is the first attempt of any of his circle at Caucasian
orientalism, and Balakirev's first-hand association with it results in
a song of exceptional merit with a gorgeously eastern accompaniment
in which the piano introduction and postlude consist of delicate
quasi-oriental roulades over a double pedal of tonic and dominant.
Although the sinuous right-hand piano parts which occur there
are matched in the vocal line, 'Gruzinskaya pesnya' is a good example
of the increasing importance of Balakirev's piano parts, a feature of
the songs of Balakirev's circle, the so-called kuchka, including those
of César Cui (1835-1918), Franco-Lithuanian by parentage. But
*$ Dargomizhsky's 'Vostochniy romans’ [Eastern Romance]. which includes a curious
whole-tone figure in the left hand of the short piano introduction and postlude, was much
admired by Balakirev. The introduction is quoted in Gerald Abraham's chapter on Russian
song in Denis Stevens (ed.), A History of Song (London, 1960), 355; repr. in his Essays on
Russian and East European Music (Oxford, 1985), 17.
7? Originally published in a German translation by F. Bodenstedt, but subsequently
translated from this into Russian by Tchaikovsky, and published in this version in 1870.
710 SOLO SONG
Cui’s songs cannot equal Balakirev’s in the quality of their inspiration.
He was considerably influenced by Dargomizhsky. His ‘Lyubov’
mertvetsa’ [A Dead Man's Love], Op. 5, No. 2 (1859), is indebted
to ‘Paladin’, for example. Like Dargomizhsky, too, he often makes
use of arioso and considered correct declamation to be very important,
though, in spite of this, his declamation is sometimes faulty. He set
a number of poems by Heine in the Russian translation of Mikhaylov,
as did all Balakirev's circle, perhaps as a result of their admiration
for Schumann's Lieder, which influenced them all. One of Cui's
earliest songs, dating from 1858, is a setting of a translation of
Heine's ‘Aus meinen Tränen’ (translated as ‘Iz slyoz moikh’). Indeed,
Balakirev himself was the only one of the kuchka not to set this
poem; their versions are all inferior to Schumann's delicate morsel
in the Dichterliebe cycle where its place (as No. 2) is vital. (With the
exception of Mussorgsky, none of the Auchka wrote songs in cycles.)
In spite of some beautifully written piano parts, Cui’s overriding
fault is that his powers of invention are cliché-ridden in the extreme,
embodying much of what was worst in the romance tradition and
of what was most pallid in the Dargomizhsky style. But an occasional
song, such as the ‘epic fragment’ ‘Menisk’, Ор. 7, No. 4 (1868),
does rise above the commonplace, and one very late song is an
epigrammatic masterpiece, on a par with Glinka's ‘Gde nasha roza?’.
This is Cui’s masterly setting of Pushkin's ‘Tsarskosel’skaya statuya’
[The Statue at Tsarskoe Selo] (1899).
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV
With the exception of a ‘Barcarolle’ composed before he met
Balakirev, all the early songs of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-
1908) were composed while he was under the influence of Balakirev's
songs. That is not to say that they contain nothing original—on the
contrary, Rimsky-Korsakov reveals how extensive was the seam of
gold discovered by Balakirev in the Glinka- Dargomizhsky mine;
having mined the ore, he himself decorated it prodigiously, showing
it in ever-changing colours. But he did not endeavour to dig deeper
to discover new seams of his own, as Borodin and Mussorgsky did.
Rimsky-Korsakov's best songs are to be found among the thirty-
three composed between 1865 and 1870. The greater sophistication
and more obviously *vocal approach of the later songs, such as the
Op. 39, Op. 43, and Op. 46 settings of the Parnassian poet A. K.
Tolstoy, whose works typified the 'art for art's sake' antithesis of
the realist writers and poets with a social message, cannot compensate
for their lack of youthful freshness and, more importantly, the lack
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV 7M
in many of them of the crucial spark of creative energy so apparent
in the earlier period. $
Balakirev’s quasi-oriental vein is explored in a number of songs.
‘Plenivshis’ rozoy, solovey’ [Enslaved by the Rose, the Nightingale],
Op. 2, No. 2 (1866), provides an example in which almost all the
interest is in the exotic piano accompaniment and the voice has
only—often unaccompanied—arioso. While oriental arabesques in
‘V tyomnoy roshche zamolk solovey’ [In the Dark Grove the
Nightingale is Silent], Op. 4, No. 3 (1866), are still allotted to the
piano, the vocal line is integrated much more satisfactorily into
the overall texture. A setting of Lermontov’s ‘Kak nebesa, tvoy vzor
blistayet’ [Thy Glance is Radiant as the Heavens], Op. 7, No. 4
(1867), is very heavily indebted to Balakirev's ‘Gruzinskaya pesnya’.
There are no less than six settings of Mikhaylov's translations of
poems by Heine. One of these, ‘El’ 1 pal’ma’ [The Fir and the Palm],
Op. 3, No. 1 (1866), also introduces oriental roulades at the point
where the fir, in the northern wasteland under ice and snow, dreams
of a palm tree ‘in a far eastern land’; Rimsky-Korsakov revised this
song in 1888 introducing, among other things, more elaborate
arabesques.
The finest songs are not of the oriental type. The most beautiful
of the songs from Op. 2 is No. 3, a Cradle Song in D flat major
even more gently lyrical and beguiling than Balakirev's. It contains
a quirk of harmony of which Balakirev was very fond at the time,
a minor chord of the (flat) leading note used in a tonic context.
Another excellent song is the first to be dedicated to Balakirev,
“Yuzhnaya noch’’ [Southern Night], Op. 3, No. 2, which Mussorgsky
considered to be Rimsky-Korsakov's best song. But the very
next one, a magnificent setting of Lermontov’s *Nochevala tuchka
zolotaya' [The Golden Cloud has Slept], Op. 3, No. 3, has an even
stronger claim to this accolade. Its sombre opening (Ex. 441) owes
Ex. 441
Andante
No-che - va - latuch-ka zo-lo -
(The golden cloud has slept)
Тї? SOLO SONG
something to the last of Balakirev’s folk-song harmonizations of
1866, his arrangement of ‘Ey, ukhnem" {Song of the Volga Hauliers],
No. 40, employing as it does gruff low thirds. The piano figure at
the end of the song, Ex. 442, includes a folklike final fall from the
unsharpened leading-note to the dominant and may well have
influenced the close of Varlaam's drunken song in Act I, Scene ii,
of Boris Godunov. Also written at this time was a fine declamatory
setting of Pushkin's ‘Na kholmakh Gruzii' [On the Hills of Georgia],
Op. 3, No. 4.
Two of the songs written in 1870 are of a very high standard. One
was dedicated to his future wife's sister, Alexandra Purgold, a good
singer. ‘Tayna’ [The Secret], Op. 8, No. 3, imaginatively starts
with four beautifully tender, halting, tonally equivocal bars before
unexpectedly settling on a chord of C major, which turns out to be
the tonic (Ex. 443). The other, ‘V tsarstvo гої i vina’ [Into the
Kingdom of Roses and Wine], Op. 8, No. 5, was dedicated to
Borodin's wife. Fet's poem inspired the composer to waft his singer
and audience into a fantastic land, a ‘kingdom of dreams’, with a
delicately fragrant accompaniment and sensitive vocal writing far
removed from the often harsh world of Mussorgskian reality.
TCHAIKOVSKY
In the vast majority of his songs, from the six in Op. 6, written
at the end of 1869, to the six of Op. 73, written in the last year of
his life, 1893, Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840-93) reveals grave limitations
as a song-writer. His setting of words was not only often inappropriate
from the declamatory point of view, words or sometimes even phrases
of the poems being altered to suit the musical needs, but his depiction
of mood tended to be static, with only one mood for the whole song,
regardless of any change required by the words. These are definite
Ex. 443
Moderato
(when [you kissed] me on the lips and eyes)
TCHAIKOVSKY 713
failings in songs, many of which are of the ‘expressive romance’
type, and one might almost say that Tchaikovsky was all too prone
to write a kind of stereotyped romance with the emotional content
drawn from the appropriate pigeon-hole. The form is often ternary
(as in ‘Ni slova, o moy drug’ [Not a Word, О my Friend], Op. 6,
No. 2, where the opening verse is even repeated at the end to allow
a ternary structure), with a piano prelude which recurs at the end,
frequently repeated note-for-note (as in the same song). These
conventional salon romances are a far cry from the best early
romances of Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov, to leave out of account
altogether the magnificent realistic songs of Mussorgsky. As was not
the case with much of his orchestral and other music, including some
excellent folk-song arrangements which owe much to Balakirev's
1866 collection, the bulk of these romances were quite out of tune
with the Russian art of the period, mere escapist trifles composed,
admittedly, by a man whose professional competence was beyond
dispute. Nevertheless, they were the kind of songs which sold well,
as for example the last from Op. 6, a setting of Mey's translation
of Goethe's ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’, ‘Net, tol’ko tot, kto znal’
[None but the Lonely Heart], which became a popular favourite and
has remained so ever since. This is certainly one of the best of
Tchaikovsky's songs of the romance type. It reveals, from the
delicately drooping downward leap of a seventh onwards, the kind
of tenderness which was an essential ingredient of the opera Eugene
Onegin. The piano prelude is not repeated at the end and the sad
mood of the poem is poignantly encapsulated in the music. The same
kind of delicate poignancy occurs at the first entry of the voice in
"Zachem? [Why did I dream of you?] Op. 28, No. 3, with its
wayward chromatic descent, like a falling leaf in autumn. Tchaikovsky
may have been influenced by the ‘fate’ motif in Carmen, the score
of which he had just received before composing this song. But it
does not live up to the expectations aroused by its opening. It is
very much in the typical mould: the first stanza 1s repeated at the
end, and the piano prelude and postlude are identical, to make a
ternary form. He attempted only once to employ a quasi-oriental
vein, in 'Kanareyka' [The Canary], Op. 25, No. 4. But formula-type
augmented seconds and triplet twiddles are not enough to weave a
magic spell in the manner of the Petersburg composers. The
sentiments are only skin deep.
Besides ‘Net, tol'ko tot, kto znal', good songs of the romance type
include the first four of Op. 38 (1878), all expressive settings,
composed in the wake of Eugene Onegin, of poems by A. K. Tolstoy,
714 SOLO SONG
and some of the songs in Op. 73, such as No. 6, 'Snova, КаК prezhde,
odin’ [Again, as before, Alone]. And’ one of the 76 Pesen dlya detey
[Songs for Children], ‘Legenda’ [The Christ-child had a Garden],
Op. 54, No. 5 (1883), is a gem. There are also one or two powerful
dramatic songs. The best known is another setting of A. K. Tolstoy,
the operatic 'Blagoslavlyayu vas, lesa’ [I bless you, Forests], Op. 47,
No. 5 (1880), with a piano part which seems to have been conceived
in orchestral terms. But Tchaikovsky's finest song of this type is
the ballad *Korol'kr [The Corals], Op. 28, No. 2 (1875). When
endeavouring to write music of an epic nature, it is perhaps not
surprising that, whether consciously or subconsciously, he may have
turned to Borodin for inspiration. The opening phrase, Ex. 444, the
motif of the corals which a young Cossack setting forth to war must
bring back to his beloved — who unfortunately dies before his return—
is similar to a motif used by Borodin in three of the four movements
of his First Symphony, most prominently in the Trio, where it is
employed sequentially (Ex. 445). At the end of the song, after the
singer has sung climactically of his beloved’s death, the ‘corals’ motif
is used in a deeply moving fashion, as they are hung upon an ikon
in her memory and the song gradually dies away. 'Korol'ki' proves
that Tchaikovsky was not completely incapable of putting his best
music into song, but the songs mentioned above and a handful of
others hardly compensate for the poverty of real emotion and the
commonplace level of invention in the remainder.
BORODIN
In the songs of Borodin and Mussorgsky the Russian solo song
reached its zenith. But while Mussorgsky wrote a fair number of
Ex. 444
Moderato assai
ee H
Ех. 445
BORODIN 715
songs of different kinds, Aleksandr Borodin (1833-87) produced only
sixteen altogether, if one childhood effort is excluded. Of these, four
were written before he met Balakirev and are of no importance,
while five date from the 1880s by which time there was a distinct
fall in Borodin’s already meagre output and any really inspired vocal
music was destined for Prince Igor. His version of ‘Iz slyoz moikh'
(1870-1) is no more than a charming essay, if more substantial than
the settings of this poem by other Petersburg composers. The six
songs written between 1867 and 1870 are all lyrical; none has any
pretension to realism. Thus Borodin's claim to fame as the song-writer
rests on a much narrower base than Mussorgsky's. That he does
have such a claim, however, is made clear by the supreme mastery
displayed in ‘Spyashchaya knyazhna’ [The Sleeping Princess] (1867),
'Pesnya tyomnogo lesa’ [Song of the Dark Forest], 'Morskaya
tsarevna’ [The Sea Princess], ‘Fal’shivaya nota’ [The False Note],
‘Otravoy polni moi pesni’ [My Songs are Poisoned] (all 1868); and
‘More’ [The Sea] (1870). The perfectly balanced ‘Otravoy polni moi
pesni', with its unconventional arioso, is a setting of a Russian
translation of Hemes ‘Vergiftet sind meine Lieder’; the other five
are all settings of Borodin's own texts, in which, as was so often the
case with Mussorgsky, words and music are a single act of creation.
The most powerful of Borodin's songs is ‘Pesnya tyomnogo lesa’,
subtitled ‘staraya pesnya’ [Ancient Song]. It seems to rise from the
mists of prehistory in exactly the same way as some of Balakirev's
folk-song harmonizations, to which it is deeply indebted. Balakirev’s
imaginatively evocative ‘Ne bilo vetru’ [There was no Wind] is
combined with the elemental power of the ‘Ey, ukhnem" to create
an individual masterpiece. The time signature constantly changes to
suit the subtle metre of the words: after four bars of piano
introduction in 7/4 there is a bar each of 5/4, 3/4, 7/4, 5/4, 3/4,
and so on. Balakirev had used such unconventional metres in No.
17 (2/4, 7/4, 4/4) No. 20 (5/4, 3/4, 4/4), and No. 32 (3/4, 5/4) of
his collection. Low bare octaves with some held notes in the
accompaniment persist until the middle of the song, ‘più animato’,
where successive empirical unresolved seconds are used. The song
ends with a bare chord of F sharp, without the third. Open chords
had abounded in Balakirev's folk-song collection, for instance in
No. 18 (the one later to be used by Rimsky-Korsakov as the basis
of his Piano Concerto). The sensation of epic antiquity evinced by
Borodin in this original song, however, is even more remarkable
than that demonstrated by Balakirev in his collection.
In all the other settings of his own words, Borodin introduces the
716 SOLO SONG
whole-tone scale. In 'Spyashchaya knyazhna' it is used in a two-octave
descent over a very low reiterated pedal note when the singer tells
of a future time when a hero (‘bogatir’') will come, break the magic
spell and free the princess. The magic ‘lullaby’ material of the
opening. with its imaginative alternating seconds, periodically returns,
giving a satisfactory rounded structure. Whole-tone material occurs
in a more chordal manner at the beginning of ‘Morskaya tsarevna’,
in which the second chord on the piano involves alternating seconds
a tone apart in the right hand (Ex. 446) over a D flat and A flat
Ex. 446
Moderato
bass. Later the quavers become more agitated and turn into triplets
at a modulation from F major to D flat and finally, as we might
expect in this siren's song, the descending whole-tone scale appears
in the accompaniment as the luckless male is swallowed by the sea.
Debussy, on his summer vacation visits to Russia in the early 1880s
as the musician-in-residence of Tchaikovsky's benefactress, Nadezhda
von Meck, must surely have come across these songs (published
between 1870 and 1873) as well as Mussorgsky's, and such use of
whole-tone material as this provided a starting-point from which he
could develop. Borodin's vocal material in 'Spyashchaya knyazhna?
tends to be rather stiff, matching the princess's inanimation which
persists throughout the song for the hero never actually does come
to wake her. It is quite otherwise with 'Morskaya tsarevna',
where the seductive melody is as enchanting as the mellifluous
accompaniment.
In ‘Fal’shivaya nota’, Borodin's finest epigrammatic song, after
the singer has protested her undying love, a gently rising whole-tone
scale appears in the left hand of the accompaniment at the mention
of the ‘false note’ in her protestations. "More is a dramatic ballad,
as extended as the previous song is concise. It is a superb piano
toccata with vocal obbligato, clearly composed in the immediate
aftermath of Balakirev's virtuosic Lisztian /slamey, written a few
months before. It originally told of a young exile banished from his
country, who on his return home is caught in a storm and in sight
of his native shore is overwhelmed by the waves. According to
Vladimir Stasov, to whom the song is dedicated, the censor rejected
MUSSORGSKY 717
Ex. 447
Allegro tempestuoso
рїй animato IT TEE р “== =; ==
ID
Pe Tu 0 > эй N
D ty 17
(but he could not contend wıth the unrelenting sea)
1,8 and a much tamer text was substituted. The bold originality
of the principal toccata sections, based in G sharp minor, contrast
with the slightly more relaxed lyricism of a D flat major passage
where the young man's thoughts turn to home and his beloved.
Before the final storm section, at a point where the singer relates
that in spite of redoubled efforts, ‘he cannot contend with the
unrelenting sea’ and it is realized that there is no hope—a climactically
despairing point—whole-tone material is insinuated into the ac-
companiment (Ex. 447).
MUSSORGSKY
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81) found it difficult to find inspiration
in a purely lyrical vein. In 1866 he gathered together all the
manuscripts of his earliest songs in a bound volume. The feeble
lyricism of a number of them, such as ‘Otchego, skazhi’ [Tell me
why] (1858), one of only four of the songs to be published in his
lifetime, testifies to the difficulty he had in writing such romances.
But another of the songs to be published, the second version of
78 Serge A. Dianin, Borodin, trans. Robert Lord (London, 1963), 68.
718 SOLO SONG
"Noch" "` [Night] (1864), demonstrates his pure lyricism at its best,
while the first of two versions of the dramatic ‘Tsar’ Saul’ [King
Saul] (words by Kozlov after Byron, 1863), red-blooded though it
is, reveals that his technique still lagged behind his ideas.
Mussorgsky's first song to be completely successful in every respect
was the bass song 'Kalistratushka' (1864), revised for tenor as
‘Kalistrat’. This peasant character study, subtitled ‘study in the folk
style', was considerably influenced by Balakirev's ideas and methods
in dealing with folk-song, for, although Balakirev's collection had
not yet been published, many of his versions of the songs (mostly
collected in 1860) had been extemporized to his circle. ‘Kalistratushka’
is a realistic portrayal of a Russian peasant recalling a lullaby his
mother sang to him, in which she had foretold that he would ‘live
in clover’ and how true, ironically, her prophecy proved to be. The
singer's opening phrase (Ex. 448) is apparently based on No. 30 of
Balakirev's folk-song collection (Ex. 449). Melodic shape, modality,
and cadence on the (flat) leading note are strikingly similar.
Peremennost (tonal variability) between two tonics a tone apart was
characteristic of a number of Balakirev's folk-song harmonizations,
including No. 18, which, though in the Dorian mode (D minor
without a B flat), has its final cadence a tone lower on C. In addition,
as with Borodin in ‘Pesnya tyomnogo lesa’, Mussorgsky was indebted
to Balakirev in the use of changing time signatures and the bare
chord without the third. Some of these characteristics are also to be
Ex. 448
Not fast, quietly
=] EF HE EEEE gp
mnoy — la__ ma-tush -
(Over me my mother used to sing [a lullaby])
Ex. 449
Slow
MUSSORGSKY 719
found in the final version of ‘Gde ti, zvyozdochka?' [Where art thou,
Little Star?]."?
While it was Balakirev's folk-song arrangements which helped
Mussorgsky to achieve maturity, from 1866 onwards he quickly
developed his own musical personality which differed widely from
any of the other composers in Balakirev's circle. Mussorgsky's
writings mirrored his preoccupation with ‘truth before beauty’, ‘the
artistic reproduction of human speech’,8° and the importance of
original Russian productions 'springing from our native fields and
nourished with Russian bread'. This was to be achieved not only by
the use of folk intonations, as with Balakirev, but by getting under
the skin of the ordinary Russian peasant, representing his true
feelings, not idealized travesties of them, and also sometimes by
making a social protest about his position in society. The first song
in which Mussorgsky achieved these ends was 'Svetik Savishna’
[Darling Savishna] (1866), a masterpiece of the front rank. Like the
vast majority of Mussorgsky's greatest songs written between 1866
and 1872, it is a setting of his own words. An idiot declares his love
to a young woman, knowing that because of his unhappy condition
his suit is hopeless. The singer sings uninterrupted crotchets through-
out the song, in 5/4 time, and the right hand of the piano part
suggests both the physical and mental agitation of the idiot with its
incessant 'J]J... rhythm.
Two other brilliant realistic songs written to his own texts were
‘Ozornik’ [The Ragamuffin] (1867) and ‘Sirotka’ [The Orphan] (1868).
In ‘Ozornik’, in which a ragamuffin shouts insults at an old woman,
we are treated to a display of comic realism with much use of
empirical harmonies (Ex. 450). ‘Sirotka’ is a song with a ‘social’
message of the kind to be found in paintings and writings of the
period, especially as the Russian word of the title was used in
Mussorgsky's day not only with the meaning *orphan' but also as a
collective noun to denote the Russian реаѕапігу.81 The song ends
with an impassioned plea to ‘take pity’ and dies away in recitative
style at the words 'on a miserable little orphan', over a dominant
chord (which does not resolve on the tonic).
*9 The version previously thought to have been written in 1857 has now been proved
beyond reasonable doubt to date from the mid-1860s. See Richard Taruskin, ‘ “Little Star”:
An Etude in the Folk Style’, in Malcolm Hamrick Brown (ed.), Musorgsky in Memoriam,
1881-1981 (Ann Arbor, 1982), 57-84.
80 Mussorgsky's letters of the period are peppered with such references, e.g. a letter of 30
July 1868 to Glinka's sister Lyudmila Shestakova (M. P. Musorgskiy: Pis'ma (Moscow, 1981),
68).
8! See Richard Hoops, 'Musorgsky in the Populist Age’, in Brown (ed.), Musorgsky in
Memoriam, p. 282.
720 SOLO SONG
Ex. 450
Very fast = >
(Hoy, hoy, granny! hoy, hoy, darling, hoy.)
The apogee of achievement in the setting of his own words is
Mussorgsky’s song cycle Derskaya [The Nursery] (1868-72). He had
set Mey's ‘Detskaya pesenka' [Child's Song] in April 1868, and in
the same month he completed the first and most radical song in the
cycle, 'S nyaney’ (With Nurse), dedicated to ‘the great teacher of
musical truth, Aleksandr Sergeevich Dargomizhsky’. Changing
time signatures are at last totally dissociated from any folk-song
connections and are used solely in order that the music shall exactly
follow the rhythm of the child's speech as he asks his nurse to tell
him the story of the bogyman who ate up naughty children, then
changing his mind and asking instead to be told about the limping
tsar and sneezing tsaritsa who lived in a house overlooking the sea.
Mussorgsky makes the most of the opportunities for word painting
with a liberal use of empirical harmonies.
The six other songs in the cycle are slightly less radical than 'S
nyaney'—there are very few changing time signatures, for example—
but they are hardly less unconventional even if their unconventionality
sometimes admits of more lyricism. Particularly delightful is *Po-
ekhal na palochke' [On the Hobby-horse], No. 6; the child rides in
his imagination to invite his next-door friend to come to play,
whoaing and hallooing to a clip-clopping accompaniment. On his
way home, he falls off—not in his imagination but in reality —and
the singer changes voice to the rounded mature tones of his
comforting mother. The music in this central section is a charming
skit on a sentimental drawing-room romance, contrasting with the
outer sections.
Mussorgsky wrote no more songs until after the first performance
of Boris Godunov 1n 1874. Perhaps because he became depressed as
a result of the reviews of Boris, which were at best equivocal and at
worst violently hostile, the songs in his next cycle Bez solntsa
MUSSORGSKY 721
[Sunless], settings of poems by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov, show
a pessimism not previously to be found in his music. He was never
again to write important realist songs unless, as in Pesni i plyaski
smerti [Songs and Dances of Death] (by the same poet), the realism
was imbued with horror.
It has often been pointed out that Bez solntsa contains a number
of impressionistic features which were to influence Debussy. A
passage in 'Okonchen prazdniy, shumniy den’’ [The Idle, Noisy Day
is Ended], No. 3 (starting at bar 17), has been cited as influencing
the opening of the first of Debussy’s orchestral Nocturnes, *Nuages'.8?
In the most lyrical song, *Nad rekoy' [On the River], No. 6, there
are consecutive ‘dominant’ sevenths, and it ends where it began, on
a tonic seventh. The most radical song is the shortest, ‘Menya ti v
tolpe ne uznala' [Thou didst not know me in the crowd], No. 2.
Only eleven and a half bars in length, this song is on a par with
Borodin's ‘Fal’shivaya nota’. The typically supple recitative is
accompanied by sensitive chords and the song, in D major, ends ‘in
the air', as it were, on a first inversion of B flat major. This final
chord follows one which had appeared near the outset, resolving
then on a chord of D major; but Mussorgsky did not make this
obvious resolution at the end since this would have destroyed its
whole ambience.
In the first song of the cycle Pesni i plyaski smerti, 'Kolibel'naya'
[Lullaby], a dying child's mother, with agitated and despairing pleas,
and Death, crooning ‘hush-a-bye’ in soothing tones, vie for the soul
of the sick child. Death’s serenade itself, in ‘Serenada’, No. 2, has
modal inflections which had by this time become totally integrated
with Mussorgsky's style. In the third song, “Trepak’ (a Russian
folk-dance), Death dances with a drunken peasant who is lost in a
forest at night in a snowstorm. The song is based on a single motif
which undergoes a number of metamorphoses including echoes of
Liszt's Totentanz, for the motif has its origins in the Dies Irae
(although the quality of all the intervals is not exact). Compare the
opening of the Dies Irae (Ex. 451) with the opening of the song (Ex.
452). Figures a and b show how two four-note figures are derived
Ex. 451
82 M. D. Calvocoressi, Modest Mussorgsky: His Life and Works (London, 1956), 269.
722 SOLO SONG
Ex. 452
Lento assai. Tranquillo ei
da po-Iya - ni,
(Forest and glades are deserted. The snowstorm wails and moans;)
from the Dies Irae. The song is in D minor, with the main motif
starting at the fourth bar of Ex. 452. The three-bar introduction not
only begins completely out of key but proceeds through a chord of
the dominant to one of F sharp minor, as unexpected as it is alien,??
depicting starkly the desolation of the scene. (Rimsky-Korsakov's
‘correction’ of these three bars is one of the curiosities of Russian
music.) After the dance itself, when Death is certain that the
peasant will be his, in a final poignant 'andante tranquillo' section
he croons an ironic lullaby over the recumbent form; the lullaby
periodically ceases for a bar while the piano momentarily increases
the pace as Death seems to give a little gleeful skip, a typical
Mussorgskian pantomimic gesture.
The first three songs in the cycle were all written in 1875. The
last, 'Polkovodets' [The Field Marshal], was added in 1877. The first
section in this tripartite song is a very effective battle painting; in
83 [n choosing this unexpected F sharp minor chord, in the key of D minor, Mussorgsky
may possibly have been subconsciously recollecting Dargomizhsky's use of the very same
chord in ‘Paladin’, also in D minor (see Ex. 440, bar 5), though Mussorgsky's approach to
the chord is more startling than Dargomizhsky's.
84 See Calvocoressi, Mussorgsky, p. 247, for this ‘correction’.
RUBINSTEIN 723
the second, the pace moderates to depict the battle field deserted by
all but the wounded and dying, and, in the last, Field Marshal
Death, in a baleful march, exults over the dead of both sides; only
he is the victor. This final section affords another fine opportunity
for Mussorgsky to employ empirical harmonies as Death promises
never to forget the dead, but to visit them and dance upon their
graves to ensure that they never rise again.
Mussorgsky was unique in his ability to produce works which
were rooted in the realistic ethos of his period but which, at the
same time, transcend their period, remaining timeless masterpieces.
RUBINSTEIN
As well as setting German texts, Anton Rubinstein (1829-94), like
Cui a composer of non-Russian origin, wrote songs to Russian
words. When 16 or 17 he set Lermontov's famous ‘Molitva’ [Prayer],
Op. 4, and in 1850 composed his ‘Zhelanie’ [Wish], Op. 8, No. 5. In
1849 he published nine songs by Kol’tsov, Op. 27; in 1850 ten, most
of them by Pushkin or Lermontov, Op. 36; in 1864 Shest basen I.
Krilova [Six Fables by Krilov], composed in 1849 but numbered Op.
64.85 His Op. 78 (1868) includes five Pushkin settings and one each
by Lermontov, Kol'tsov and Maykov; Op. 101 (1877) consists of
twelve songs by A. K. Tolstoy; in 1891 he set verses by Semyon
Nadson and Dmitry Merezhkovsky.
Of all Rubinstein's Russian songs the most interesting are the
early settings of Krilov's fables, far indeed from the polished textures
of his Lieder and related to Dargomizhsky by their humour and
characterization. Good examples are ‘Kvartet’ (in which a monkey,
donkey, goat, and bear get hold of instruments and try to play a
string quartet) and ‘Osyol i Solovey’ [The Ass and the Nightingale],
in which the amusing characterization is particularly well done (Exx.
453-4).
Ex. 453
Kg Allegro moderato
O-syol u-vi-del So-lo-v'ya i go-vo-rit e-mu:
85 Rubinstein's opus numbers, often given by German publishers, are wildly misleading.
Senff of Leipzig published Op. 64 some years before Op. 3.
724 SOLO SONG
- slu-shay-ka, dru-zhi- shche! Ti, ska-zi - va- vut, pet
(The ass saw the nightingale and said to him. Listen, old friend! They say your singing is very fine.)
Ex. 454
Meno mosso
shchol-kal, za-svi-stal na ti - sya-chu la-dov, tya - nul pe-re - li - val - sya, to
H
(Upon which the nightingale began to show off his art; he trilled, һе whistled a thousand times, he sang,
made roulades, then tenderly relaxed and languidly, as if from far off, echoed his piping.)
киини
POLAND 725
The members of the kuchka despised Rubinstein and he was a
minor composer in comparison with all of them, with the exception
of Cui; even his former pupil Tchaikovsky came to regard much of
his music with disfavour. Nevertheless his songs to Russian texts
contain some of his best music and no account of Russian song
would be complete without mention of them.
(d POLAND
By ROSEMARY HUNT
In the nineteenth century Poland was ruled by the three partitioning
powers who had divided her among themselves in 1795: Russia,
Prussia, and Austria. Polish education and culture was at best
neglected by the authorities, at worst subjected to wide-ranging
repression—censorship, the banning of books, travel restrictions—
and after the November Rising of 1830, which had repercussions all
over the Russian sector, large numbers of intellectuals were forced
to emigrate. The Universities of Vilna and Warsaw, both under
Russian rule, were closed; Russian was imposed as the official
language wherever possible, and numerous other efforts were made
to obliterate all traces of Polish culture and national identity.
Polish Romantic poetry, from the 1820s onwards, became the voice
of the Polish nation, and at times its only means of self-expression. The
new interest in folklore was, in Poland, an important element in
the movement to preserve national consciousness. In the first half of
the nineteenth century organized cultural life, especially musical
activities, faced enormous problems. Public gatherings, such as
concerts, were discouraged; there were virtually no facilities for
training musicians and it was almost impossible to travel abroad to
study. Musical performance was confined principally to the home
and to private social gatherings, and was therefore restricted to solo
piano and vocal music, and other compositions suitable for small
groups of amateurs. Songs held an important position in musical
life; they demanded few resources and through the text they could
speak to the Polish nation as directly as the poetry itself.
The Warsaw Conservatory which Chopin attended was closed in
1830 and not until 1861 was the violinist, teacher, and composer
Apolinary Katski (1826-79) permitted to open the Instytut Muzyczny
726 SOLO SONG
(Institute of Music). After the Warszawskie Towarzystwo Muzyczne
(Warsaw Music Society) was founded in 1871 to popularize music
and hold public concerts, other societies began to spring up. Music
classes were held under their auspices and, in the 1880s, these formed
the basis for conservatories in Lvov and Cracow. Musical tastes
were unformed compared with those of Western Europe. Songs were
written principally for amateur performance and so tended to be
technically uncomplicated. Poets and translators of librettos began
to study the works of the Polish prosodists, and, in their turn,
composers paid closer attention to the specific problems of suc-
cessfully setting to music an inflected language with a fixed stress.
Polish Romantic songs tend to fall into three groups.86 The first
includes the romance, ballad, and dumka; in the second are songs
containing strong folk elements, especially dance rhythms; and in
the third group are the lyrical songs in which poetry and music are
in equal partnership.
The pianist Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831) composed ap-
proximately nineteen songs, only three unpublished. Of the earliest
group, Pięć śpiewów historycznych [Five Historical Songs] to texts
by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1757-1841), three were published in
Moscow in 1816 and are of little artistic value. In 1820 Le Départ
and Six Romances (one with an Italian text, the others with French
texts or translations into French) were published in Leipzig. They
are still part of an earlier song tradition. The vocal line in these,
over generally similar broken-chord accompaniments, is not always
very comfortable and the strophic patterns make no attempt to
reflect changes of mood in the texts. The same is true of one of
Szymanowska's settings of the work of Adam Mickiewicz (1795-
1855), the ballad ‘Switezianka’ [The Maid of the Switez], published
in Moscow in 1828. The strict strophic pattern, incorporating two
stanzas of the poem, cannot follow the dramatic course of the text.97
Szymanowska's three other settings of Mickiewicz poems were
published in Kiev and Odessa in 1828. Of these, one is more
successful: “Wilija’ (Ex. 455) describes the Lithuanian river of that
name, and the vocal line is superimposed upon the flowing A flat
nocturne, ‘Le Murmure'. The song is on the whole prosodically
satisfactory.88
86 See Alicja Matracka-Koscielna, ‘Twórczość piesniarska warszawskiego środowiska kom-
pozytorskiego w drugiej połowie XIX wieku’, in Andrzej Spóz (ed.), Kultura muzyczna
Warszawy drugiej polowy XIX wieku (Warsaw, 1980), 206, 211.
87 See Vol. VIII, pp. 577-8.
88 Of the other two, ‘Alpuhara’ is unobtainable; ‘Piesn z wieży’ appears in Jerzy Gabryś
CHOPIN 727
stru - mie-ni
Baw =
ret ibe tte
зрачи ==
УО = EE = 5 Be en
Be: Кыллы ==
E
em mans
(Wilija, the mother of our streams, her depths are golden and azure her face.)
CHOPIN
Fryderyk Chopin (1810-49) probably composed more than the
nineteen songs that are known and have been published. The majority
appeared in Siedemnascie piesni polskich na glos [Seventeen Polish
Songs for Voice], Op. 74, in Berlin 1859, and two, ‘Czary’ [Spells]
and ‘Dumka’, were published later. Chopin did not attach much
importance to his songs, some of which were improvised, and he
probably made little attempt to preserve them. Several are mazurkas:
‘Zyczenie’ [The Wish] (1829) with a text by Stefan Witwicki (1802-
and Janina Cybulska, Z dziejów polskiej pieśni solowej w latach 1800-1830 (Cracow, 1960),
191-3. Szymanowska's daughter, Celina, was married to Mickiewicz.
728 SOLO SONG
Ex. 456
Vivace
e risoluto Pons "= 29 4 e BERE
Eck - czko, sza-fa-re - czko, bój sie Bo - ga, stój! Tam sie smie- jesz,
a tu le- jeszz miód na ka-ftan то), tam sie $mie-jesz, a tu le - jesz
>
miód па ka - ftan moj!
(O little barmaid, take care, stop!
There you are smiling, here you are pouring mead over my jacket!)
Ex. 457
Allegretto
See Dee ee =
Mo-ja pie -szezo - tka, gdy м we-so- Àj chw AE po-cznie szcze -
Мс, 1 gru chat,
(When in a joyous moment my little pet
begins to chirrup, to chirp, and to warble)
47); ‘Hulanka’ [Drinking Party] (1830) (Witwicki) (Ex. 456); ‘Sliczny
chłopiec’ [Handsome Lad] (1841) (Jozef Bohdan Zaleski, 1802-86)
and ‘Moja pieszczotka’ [My pet] (1837) (Mickiewicz) (Ex. 457).
Among the more lyrical songs are ‘Nie ma czego trzeba’ [There is
no Need] (1845) (Zaleski); ‘Precz > moich oczu’ [Away from my
Sight!] (1830) (Mickiewicz), and ‘Wiosna’ [Spring] (1838) (Witwicki),
though this last has an uncomfortable vocal line.
MONIUSZKO 729
Chopin’s published songs date from the period 1829-45, yet their
style does not develop correspondingly. Most of them are strophic,
one or two are prosodically uncomfortable and the accompaniments
are uncomplicated. The songs, which were not published until at
least ten years after Chopin’s death, had little influence on later
composers.
MONIUSZKO
The first songs by Stanisław Moniuszko (1819-1872), however,
were published in Berlin as early as 1838: Trzy śpiewy do slow Adama
Mickiewicza [Three Songs to Words by Adam Mickiewicz]. These
were ‘Sen’ [Sleep], ‘Niepewnosc’ [Uncertainty], and ‘Do р.р. [To
D.D.], later called ‘Pieszczotka’.89 They were the first of an impressive
group of Mickiewicz settings, among the best of Moniuszko’s
several hundred solo songs, and among the best in the Polish
nineteenth-century repertoire.
In 1840 Moniuszko settled in Vilna, having completed just two
years of study at the Singakademie in Berlin, and began the struggle
to make a living as a musician. Two years later his Spiewnik domowy
[Home Song book]—the first of six—was published, to be sold on
subscription. By way of introduction to the volume he wrote an
explanation of his aims in composing the songs, stressing his wish
to create music of a Polish character. In order to do this, he had
chosen texts by the best Polish poets and considered that vocal music
provided the best means of establishing contact with the public.’
This declaration outlined principles to which he adhered throughout
his life.
Another early Mickiewicz setting, one of Moniuszko’s most simple
lyrical songs, is the second version of ‘Rozmowa’ [Conversation]
(1839). The flowing melody lies over a frequently used accompaniment
of repeated chords in one hand, with a second melody in the other
at times, echoing the vocal part (Ex. 458). The same pattern is used
in ‘Znasz-li ten kraj?’, the second of two settings of Mickiewicz’s
paraphrase of Goethe’s ‘Kennst du das Land?’, and composed in or
before 1846. Mickiewicz reshaped the love for Italy in the poem into
romantic love for a woman, and Moniuszko captures the sensuous
quality of the Polish poem in the long, unbroken phrases that soar
89 A poem that attracted not only many Polish composers, but some Russians: Glinka,
Rimsky-Korsakov, and Cui (a pupil of Moniuszko).
90 See Witold Rudzinski, Stanislaw Moniuszko: Studia i materialy (Cracow, 1955, 1961), 1.
94-7; the first songbook was artistically quite ambitious but unfortunately Moniuszko heeded
the criticism of J. I. Kraszewski and wrote consciously simpler songs after that.
730 SOLO SONG
Ex. 458
Andantino
— 7
mo - wa? Cze-mu,chcac zto - ba u- czu - cia po-dzie
(My darling! What need have we to talk?
Why, when I want to share my feelings
with you, can I not pour them from my
heart into yours?)
over the unelaborate accompaniment to this, possibly his finest song
(Ex. 459).
Moniuszko was always guided by the style or mood of the text
he was setting. A flowing, unbroken melodic line over a continuous
piano part creates a similar effect to that of Schubert’s ‘Gretchen
MONIUSZKO
Ex. 459
Moderato
OO Bg
Neu Go
LA мт LS
CRR S E
eme Ce?
Cy oo aa —]
Ir ana 2 1e 01
Znasz - li ten kraj,gdzie cy - try - na doj-rze - wa,
KR
CFE ew?
Kine ` Л\ ‹ ШШЕ
(Do you know that land where the lemon grows,
Where the bright orange gilds the green trees,
Where a garland of ivy decorates the ancient ruins,
Where the laurel flourishes and the cypress tranquil stands?)
731
732 SOLO SONG
Ex. 460
Andantino ^17
Po no-cnej ro - sie phyri,dzwie-czny gto-sie,niech sie twe e-cho roz -sze - rzy,
(Flow over the night dew, melodious voice,
Let your echo spread)
am Spinnrade' — the perpetual motion of a spinning-wheel— in ‘Przas-
niczka’ [The Spinner], composed before 1846 to a text by the poet
Jan Czeczot (1796-1847). His most effective setting of a poem by
Władysław Syrokomla,?! the lyrical ‘Piesn wieczorna’ [Evening Song],
captures the tranquility of idealized country life (Ex. 460).
Moniuszko wrote a number of songs in an overt folk style,
including a version of Witwicki's ‘Hulanka’ (composed between 1846
and 1850), also set by Chopin (Ex. 456). Moniuszko more than once
employed a declamatory style, and in various ways; it is evident
throughout ‘Tren ПГ [Lament III], written between 1843 and 1852
to a text by the sixteenth-century poet Jan Kochanowski, but in
'Switezianka' it is used in combination with other dramatic effects—
to illustrate the original ballad in a manner very different from that
of Szymanowska's setting.
In two other Mickiewicz ballads, ‘Trzech Budrysow’ [The Three
Budrys Brothers] (1839 or 1840) and ‘Czaty’ [The Ambush] (before
1846) (Ex. 461) Moniuszko wisely followed the specific metre of the
original poems,?? to great effect. Moniuszko, more than any other
composer of the period, spoke directly to his public through his
music, and set a standard that shaped the further development of
Polish song.
Ex. 461
Molto agitato
Z o-gro - do- меј a-lta-ny wo-je - wo-da zdy-sza-ny bie-zy w za-mek 2 wscie-kto-sciai
по - gą
(From the garden bower the breathless voivode runs into the castle in fury and alarm.)
9! Pseudonym of Ludwik Kondratowicz (1823-62).
92 The metre is the anapaest, possibly influenced by Sir Walter Scott’s ‘The Eve of St John’.
~ LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY COMPOSERS 733
ZELENSKI
The most important composer after Moniuszko was Władysław
Zelenski (1837-1921), who represented Polish neo-Romanticism. He
studied in Cracow, Prague, and Paris, and in 1872 took over
Moniuszko's harmony class in the Instytut Muzyczny in Warsaw.
His earliest songs (including ‘Moja pieszczotka’, which pre-dates the
Chopin and Moniuszko settings) are marked by faulty prosody,
which Zelenski corrected in his later compositions. These display a
lyricism reminiscent of Moniuszko and are often very descriptive of
the text. The vocal line is usually closely integrated with a rich,
almost independent piano part. Zelenski wrote more than seventy
songs, practically all of them to Polish texts. Some are settings of
folk-type texts, with the rhythms and melodic patterns of dances
such as the mazurka, and some are more lyrical. ‘Zawód’ [Dis-
appointment], for example, echoes the sensuality of the poem by
Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer (1865-1940) (Ex. 462).
LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY COMPOSERS
Zygmunt Noskowski (1846-1909) was the first really talented
Ex. 462
Andante sostenuto (ma non troppo)
P (rubato)
wsród fal mych snow jak li-mbe gdzieś nad
LÀ
———H—
(I rocked you on the waves of my dreams
Like some stone-pine by the water's edge.)
734 SOLO SONG
composer to have studied music in Poland, though he also spent
some time abroad, in Germany. He attended Moniuszko’s harmony
class and himself joined the staff of the Instytut Muzyczny in 1886.
He wrote with ease, sometimes carelessly, but although the first ten
songs of his Spiewnik dla dzieci [Children's Songbook] (1889) were
written in a few hours, they remain popular to.this day. He worked
on some of these with the author, Maria Konopnicka (1842-1910),
and achieved a remarkable blend of words and music. His style
of composition was traditional, but melodically displayed greater
invention than Zeleüski's.? He wrote approximately eleven song
cycles, none of which is really outstanding, however; see, for example,
‘Skowroneczek śpiewa’ [The Little Skylark] (1894) (Ex. 463), written
in a few minutes on demand!
Ex. 463
Allegretto amabile
p leggiero
por = г =
Sko - wro-ne-czek śpie - wa, sto - necz-ko do - grze- wa,
a dziew-czy - na wo- kie-necz - ku Ja - sia sie spo - dzie- wa,
Ja -sia sie spo- dzie- wa.
(The little lark is singing, the sun is warming,
And the girl in the window is waiting for Jaś.)
93 See Henryk Swolkien, ‘Od Chopina do Szymanowskiego’, in Tadeusz Ochlewski (ed.),
Dzieje muzyki polskiej (Warsaw, 1977).
LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY COMPOSERS 785
Both Piotr Maszynski (1855-1934) and Jan Gall (1856-1912) wrote
a large number of songs that were very popular in their composers’
day. Maszynski studied at the Instytut Muzyczny, under Noskowski
for composition, but Gall went to Vienna, Munich, and Italy to
study. Both were active in developing choral music and raising
singing standards. Maszynski wrote approximately a hundred solo
songs. Gall composed about ninety, generally uncomplicated but
prosodically very carefully worked, partly as a result perhaps of
some vocal training undergone in Italy. One of his most popular
songs was ‘Barkarola’, Op. 13, No. 3 (1890) (Ex. 464).
The music of Eugeniusz Pankiewicz (1857-98), unlike that of his
predecessors, was not fully appreciated in his short lifetime, and was
criticized as being too intellectual.?* He studied composition with
Zelenski and Noskowski, but was also alert to the way in which
music was developing outside Poland. He wrote about fifty songs,
which are now considered to bridge the gap between those of Chopin
and Szymanowski, through their folk-music elements and advanced,
almost impressionistic harmonies. Pankiewicz developed the role of
the accompaniment in his songs, some of which on the other hand
are treated in a declamatory manner, reminiscent of Schumann and
Wolf.°> Unfortunately, many are marred by slightly faulty prosody.
Ex. 464
Con moto m (mp)
do gon - do-li,
p =—— Еа. —7 0
ES El EH mn
EE
Spee Zei a E
(Ah! Come into the gondola, my dearest one.)
94 See Włodzimierz Pozniak, Eugeniusz Pankiewicz (Cracow, 1958).
95 [bid.
736 SOLO SONG
Ex. 465
Allegretto 4 5
Сау o-stat-nia — ró-za zwie -dfa, rze-klam chlop-cu: „Idz”! Ze-rwa-la sie...
zlo-ta ni¢, — któ-ra mi-tos¢ prze - da
(When the last rose had withered, I said to the boy! ‘Go!’
The golden thread spun by love had broken.)
His setting of ‘Gdy ostatnia róża zwiedla' [When the Last Rose had
Faded], to a text by Adam Asnyk (Ex. 465), is in a more stylized
folk idiom.
Stanisław Niewiadomski (1859-1936), by contrast, was perhaps
the most popular song-writer of his day; he studied in Lvov, Vienna,
and Leipzig. His compositions were true to the Romantic tradition,
combining folk elements (although never using an actual folk melody)
and a pleasing lyricism. His harmonies are uncomplicated and the
rich vocal lines reveal faultless prosody. He wrote approximately
fifty songs, many of which form cycles of six or twelve, for example:
Kurhanek Maryli [Maryla's Grave] by Mickiewicz, Jaskowa dola
[Jasiek's Fate] by Konopnicka; Astry [Asters] by Asnyk; Piękne
tulipany [Beautiful Tulips]—one of three groups to old Polish texts.
Two of the titles from the Mickiewicz cycle are ‘Znaszli ten kraj?’
and ‘Moja pieszczotka’, popular among so many composers of the
second half of the nineteenth century. One of Niewiadomski's most
popular songs, however, was ‘Kołysanka’ [Cradle Song] (Ex. 466).
Two composers whose music already belongs in part to the
‘New Poland’ period are Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941) and
Mieczyslaw Karlowicz (1876-1909). Their songs, however (with the
Ex. 466
Andantino
d А
Ko-lysz mi sie, ko-tysz, ko - ty - sko li - po-wa!____ Nie-chaj
(Rock for me, rock, cradle of linden!
May the Lord Jesus watch over you, Jasienko!)
LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY COMPOSERS 737
exception of Paderewski’s Catulle Mendes cycle), still belong chiefly
to the neo-Romantic tradition. Paderewski employed Chopin-like
harmonies, especially in his Mickiewicz settings (Sechs Lieder, Op.
18) (1894) and his writings about Chopin reveal his strong feelings
concerning the national character of Polish music 29 ‘Moja piesz-
czotka', Op. 18, No. 3 (Ex. 467) is an unexpectedly dramatic version
of the Mickiewicz poem.
Kartowicz studied extensively abroad, principally in Germany, and
also in Warsaw where he attended Noskowski’s and Maszynski’s
Ex. 467
Allegretto giocoso
pie - szczo - tka, gdy
cznie szcze - bio
f)
TE” па — —— as
Kë?
(When in a joyous moment my little pet
begins to chirrup, to chirp, and to warble)
96 See Swolkien, ‘Od Chopina’.
738 SOLO SONG
classes in composition. His songs are among his early works, when
his style had yet to develop from the neo-Romantic towards a style
influenced by Grieg and Tchaikovsky, and finally Wagner and
Richard Strauss." His songs are lyrical and melancholy, features
influenced by his choice of texts, especially those of Kazimierz
Tetmajer. Yet he apparently attached little value to them and called
them his ‘souvenirs’ or ‘sins of youth’.98 He was very self-critical,
and only some of the songs were published in his lifetime.9? Amongst
these were a Tetmajer setting 'Pamietam ciche, jasne, zlote dnie’ [I
remember those Tranquil, Clear, Golden Days), Op. 1, No. 5 (Ex.
468), and ‘Z erotyköw’ [From the Love Poems], Op. 3, No. 6 (Ex.
469), to a text by Jan Wasniewski.
Ex. 468
Moderato
p ë р
co mi sie dzi
- siaj
Pa-mie-tam ci - che,
(I remember those tranquil, clear golden days, which now seem to me like some marvellous dream.)
Ex. 469
Moderato ee
I za-miast stoncigwiazd,a - nie-le ty mój dro - gi, ja tyl-ko
97 See Feliks Kecki, Mieczyslaw Karlowicz: Szkic monograficzny (Warsaw, 1934).
эв See letter from Felicjan Szopski to Adolf Chybinski, 31 Jan. 1934, in Henryk Anders
(ed.), Karlowiez w listach i wspomnieniach (Cracow, 1960).
99 See Swolkien, ‘Od Chopina’.
CZECHOSLAVAKIA 739
D
{гу i zy dziś skta-damci pod no - gi prze-bacz, ze du-szy mej u-
bo-gie sa tak zdro - je, lecz przyj-mij ar ciaz Se bo Ен. te, to łzy то - je.
(Апа іп place of suns and stars, ту dear angel,
I lay at your feet only tears now, only tears;
Forgive me, that the springs of my heart are so poor,
But at least accept these tears, for they are my tears.)
When Moniuszko was struggling in Vilna, another composer was
active there, writing his own Spiewnik (1855): Wiktor Kazynski
(1812-67). His thirty songs were popular at the time but have not
been reprinted since. A later composer who was also popular in the
nineteenth century and who modelled himself largely on Moniuszko
was Ignacy Komorowski (1824-57), an excellent performer of his
own songs. Another imitator of Moniuszko was Aleksander Zarzycki
(1834-95), one of the founder members of the Warszawskie Towa-
rzystwo Muzyczne; unfortunately some of his many songs are spoilt
by faulty prosody. The songs of Kazimierz Kratzer (1844-90) were
very popular in his day and for many years were in all singers
repertoires.
(e) CZECHOSLOVAKIA
By JOHN CLAPHAM
There were unquestionable artistic advantages for the Czechs, the
most westerly of the Slav races, in being encompassed by such rich
areas of European culture. To the north and west stood the German
states, so strong in music and literature, while to the south and east
lay the Austrian empire, to which they themselves belonged. Vienna,
acknowledged by many to be the musical hub of Europe, was close
at hand, and firm cultural links had been established with Paris and
Italy. Nevertheless, when the desire arose to create a repertoire of
indigenous art song, the Czechs encountered serious difficulties.
The decisive defeat of the Czechs in 1620 in the battle of the White
740 SOLO SONG
Mountain, which sparked off the flight abroad of Komensky
(Comenius) and other leading Protestants, brought with it the
suppression of the Czech language, and its relegation to a wholly
subordinate and insignificant position. German became the official
language, and for well over two centuries it remained the dominant
language of the Czech towns and cities. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century, influenced by the writings of Rousseau and
Herder, and affected by the ferment at the time of the French
Revolution, the first clear signs of an awareness of national con-
sciousness emerged, with the greatest emphasis being placed on the
history of the Bohemian lands and the revival of the Czech language.
Progress in building up a repertoire of Czech poetry, suitable for
composers of song, took time; and consequently in the early years
of the nineteenth century the leading song composer, Väclav Jan
Tomášek (1774-1850),100 showed a marked preference for setting
the work of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Bürger, Hólty, Voss, and other
German poets.
THE CZECH RENAISSANCE
Owing to the combined efforts of the poet and critic Josef
Krasoslav Chmelensky (1800-39) and the composer Frantisek Jan
Skroup (1801-62), who had already co-operated in the opera Drätenik
[The Tinker] (1826), the first opera with a Czech libretto to receive
public acclaim, a new venture was launched which was warmly
welcomed by all those who were eager to reinstate the Czech
language. Over a five-year period, 1835-9, these two men issued a
collection of 123 Czech songs in monthly parts, under the title Vénec
ze zpévü vlasteneckych [A Garland of Patriotic Songs]. It contains
settings of verses by thirty-two poets, headed by Chmelensky himself,
whose poems appear in one-third of the songs.!?! Twenty-three
composers contributed to the collection, and the little-known teacher
and organist Václav Josef Rosenkranz (1797-1861) wrote eighteen.
Eleven songs are credited to Skroup, and in addition he included
fourteen extracts from his works for the stage, which are arias rather
than songs with piano accompaniment. Four composers, namely
F. Drechsler, J. B. Kittl, A. Růžička, and J. Vorel, each contributed
100 On his songs, with one Czech example, see Vol. VIII, pp. 572-3.
101 There are 41 settings of verses by Chmelensky, 14 by V. J. Picek, 10 of J. J. Marek, 8
of F. J. Kamenicky, 7 of F. L. Celakovsky and 6 of F. B. Trojan. There are in addition two
settings each of Karel Sabina (the librettist of Prodaná Nevésta [The Bartered Bride]), Václav
Hanka (the author of the forged Dvür králové manuscript), and K. J. Erben (author of
‘Svatebni košile [The Spectre's Bride] and other ballads), and one of K. H. Macha, who
wrote the celebrated poem ‘Maj’ [May].
THE CZECH RENAISSANCE 741
eight songs, and there are seven by J. Karas. Three of Tomasek’s
songs are included in the collection.!9? In 1844, following the death
of Chmelensky, Skroup brought out one further collection, planned
on similar lines and containing twenty-eight songs and two vocal
quartets. The title this time was Vénec: Sbirka českých zpěvů
[Garland: A Collection of Czech Songs]. The characteristically Czech
‘Jabli¢ka’ [The Little Apples] by Josef Ondřej Novotny (1778-1856)
appeared in the first volume of Vénec (Ex. 470).
Ex. 470
Allegretto
Sto-jí jab-lon vši- rém po - li
102 Complete contents in Zdeněk Nejedlý, Bedřich Smetana, ii (Prague 1925), Appendix B.
А number of Czech social songs of the 1830s and 1840s appear in this book, between pp. 224
and 225; several of these come from Vénec, but they lack accompaniments. Josef Vorel's
‘Společná’ [Sharing] and Jan Nepomuk Skroup's ‘Kytka vlastenkám' [A Posy for Patriots]
both from Vénec, appear in Jaroslav Pohanka, Déjiny české hudby v příkladech (Prague, 1958).
A modern edition of Vénec, ed. Josef Plavec, appeared in 1960.
742 SOLO SONG
^ PP гай. A
(An apple-tree stands in the broad field on the green grass,
the very green grass; ah, why does my heart ache so under my
red bodice?)
POETIC SOURCES
The emergence of the nature poet Vitezslav Hálek (1853-74), as
also of Jan Neruda (1834-91), Svatopluk Čech (1846-1908), and the
epic poet Jaroslav Vrchlický (1835-1912), greatly strengthened the
standing of Czech poetry, but it was often such lesser figures as
Gustav Pfleger-Moravský (1833-75), Adolf Heyduk (1835-1923),
Josef Václav Sládek (1845-1912), Karel Jaromir Erben (1811-70),
and Eliška Krásnohorská whose work had a special appeal for Czech
composers and whose poetry was better suited to their needs. Dvořák
set eighteen and Bendl four of Gustav Pfleger-Moravsky's Cyprise
[Cypresses]. Bend! set thirty of Sladek’s Skřivánčí pisné [Lark’s Songs],
while Fibich set four of his poems in Poupata [Buds]. Krásnohorská,
the librettist of Bendl’s Lejla and of Smetana’s last three operas, and
also of Fibich's Blanik, was the authoress of Z mäje ziti [From the
Spring of Life], a collection of poems, at least four of which Dvorak
set. Six of her poems were set by Hynek Palla (1837-96). A few of
her poems were set by the Slovak composer Ján Levoslav Bella
(1843-1936).
Two more composers deserve mention: Frantisek 7. Skuhersky
(1830-92), who published Tři písně [Three Songs] from the Dvůr
králové [Queen's Court] manuscript, Drei Gedichte of H. Heine, Op.
BENDL 743
6, Sest pisni [Six Songs], Op. 8, and Drei Lieder, Op. 10; and Leopold
E. Méchura (1804-70), who set German texts by G. T. Drobisch,
Heine, Mörike, Uhland, and others, and composed Šest písni [Six
Songs], Op. 103, on poems by Celakovsky.
Especial interest was being shown in the Zigeunermelodien [Gypsy
Melodies]!03 by Adolf Heyduk, seven of which were set by Dvorak.
Bella set ten of them, and Bendl twenty-six. For the Czechs the free
and easy life of the gypsies was symbolic. As they saw it, the gypsies
possessed something which they dearly wanted for themselves,
something which they longed for but which eluded them: genuine
freedom. Lastly there was the Dvür králové manuscript, which for
many years has been regarded as a forgery, and the work of Václav
Hanka (1791-1861). This has proved to be particularly fruitful. It
provided the basis for Fibich's symphonic poem Záboj, Slavoj a
Ludék, served as an important source for Smetana's festival opera
Libuse, and contained the six poems that were set by Fibich, Dvorak,
and Bendl.
BENDL
Karel Bendl (1838-97) was best known for his operas and also as
a conductor. He was a fluent composer with a gift for melody, who
came under the influence of Mendelssohn,!?4 and wrote 150 or more
songs to German and Czech texts.
Bendl’s Zigeunermelodien appear in two sets, the first of fourteen
songs in German, the second of twelve songs in Czech. In his setting
of the first song, ‘Der wilden Steppe Sohn bin ich’ [A Son of the
Wild Steppe am I], the description of the gypsy's way of life is
presented with a defiant ring (Ex. 471). Another song from the
German set, “Wenn einst der Tod mich ereilt’ [When Once Death
Overtakes me] (Set I, No. 13), expresses a yearning for death by
leaning on a dominant minor ninth. Having firmly established the
key of F minor from the beginning (Ex. 472), the composer modulates
to G minor and, as if to suggest uncertainty as to when he may be
granted release, the song ends suspended on the dominant chord in
D major. In one of the Czech songs, ‘Už dávno tomu dávno je’
[Thats Already Long Past] (Set II, No. 10), the so-called gypsy
scale emphasizes the sorrowful mood.
103 The title of Heyduk's collection was Cikanské melodie (old spelling). Gustav Walter,
tenor soloist at the Vienna Court Opera, gave the first performance of two of the songs of
Dvorak on 4 Feb. 1881, singing, naturally, in German. Heyduk had written his verses in
Czech and then translated them into German. Dvorák set his German version, and consequently
the original Czech version does not fit Dvorák's music and cannot be sung.
104 *Es will mir oft das Herz verbluten' shows this exceptionally clearly.
744 SOLO SONG
Ex. 471
Allegro feroce f
wil - den. Step-pe Sohn bn ch, ge - bràunt sind.mei - ne Wan - реп, ein |
„тйл Oda. лао.
Be с een
grob’ Ge-wand halı al le - zeit die e Brust um - fan - gen!
|
==
= у:
e
>
(A son of the wild Steppe am I! My cheeks are brown,
a coarse garment always wraps my free breast!)
Another set of German songs, Stimmungsbilder [Mood Pictures],
Op. 101, is dated 1889-90. No. 6 in this set of twelve songs is a
setting of Heine’s "Wir wollen jetzt Frieden machen’ [We want now
to Make Peace], in which Bendl responds ecstatically to mention of
the rose, the carnation, and the forget-me-not, while modulating
from E flat to F sharp minor, A major, D flat, and back to E flat.
The setting of Ada Christen’s ‘Am schwarzen Teich’ [At the Black
Pond] (No. 5), which calls to mind ‘Der Doppelganger’ of Schubert,
depicts the poet contemplating the body of his sweetheart, thrown
down on the shore by rough hands.
SMETANA 745
(SR
Andantino
(When one day death overtakes me, let a song ring out.)
Although here and there interesting points arise from Bendl’s
settings of the verses, it must be admitted that the great majority
lack distinction, sequences and repeats are common, the phrases tend
to be square, and the introductory bars are perfunctory and
unimaginative.
SMETANA
As a young man Bedfich Smetana (1824-84) was first and foremost
interested in instrumental music, and in particular in music for his
own instrument, the pianoforte. In 1846, however, while studying
with Josef Proksch (1794-1864), he composed four songs with
German words as an exercise, and seven years later, evidently stirred
by the impression Rückert's 'Liebesfrühling' made upon him, he
made a setting of Rückert's lines. Having been brought up to speak
German with his family, he was seriously ignorant of the Czech
language; but this did not prevent him from composing a "Disch
svobody' [Song of Freedom] to words by Josef Jiří Kolar (1812-96),
and two marches, to raise the spirits of those taking part in the
revolutionary uprising in Prague in 1848. Only gradually did it
become clear to Smetana that, if he were to play a leading part in
the music of Bohemia in the years ahead, it would be essential for
him to know the Czech language.
746 SOLO SONG
After nearly twenty years almost wholly concerned with opera in
Czech he was better equipped technically for song composition. So
in 1879 he turned to five of Hálek's Vecerní pisne [Evening Songs];
by this time he was completely deaf. The choice of poems was very
carefully made, as a reminder of the kind of treatment that had been
meted out to the composer by his enemies and by fate. The cycle
starts with ‘Kdo v zlaté struny zahrát zná’ [Honour Him who Knows
how to Sound the Golden Strings], and continues with ‘Nekamenujte
proroky! [Do not Stone the Prophets!]. It continues with ‘Mně zdálo
se: "bol sestár' uz...” [It Seemed to me: that Pain had Already
Grown Old] (Ex. 473) and ‘Hej, jaká radost v kole’ [Hey, what Fun
in a Round Dance!] and concludes with 'Z svych pisni trün Ti
udělám za velkých pěvců’ [Out of my Songs I shall Build a Throne
for you].
Ex. 473
Andante P ==
FIBICH 741
I thought, *pain has grown old and it will soon be all up with him, and the tears have run out,
for their source has dried ир.”
Gerald Abraham suggests that, since the words of the first two
songs are not reflected in the music, it is quite possible that the
music may have been sketched first and the words added later. The
first song, with its highly characteristic feminine endings, is extremely
typical of the composer, and is a particularly attractive example of
a simple and unpretentious song. It would not be difficult to imagine
it coming from Smetana's opera Hubicka [The Kiss], and being sung
by Vendulka when puzzled by the strange conduct of Lukas and left
on her own to ponder on the situation. The third song is written in
quasi-recitative style, as shown in Ex. 473, making a welcome stylistic
change. In the fourth song the composer was obliged to emphasize
his love of dancing and show how fate had intervened once again:
a lively polka is promptly snuffed out almost as soon as it has begun.
The fifth song is twice as long as the others and seems unable to
break away from a long succession of two-bar phrases; but eventually
Smetana succeeds in ridding himself of the habitual mould.
It will be seen that Smetana lacked a natural aptitude for song
writing and needed an inducement of some kind to tempt him to
chance his arm in this direction.
FIBICH
Among the leading Czech composers of song during the second
half of the nineteenth century, Zdenék Fibich (1850-1900) appears
to have been different in one respect from all the rest: he alone seems
to have been almost wholly unaffected by the Czech nationalist
movement. In his works for the stage he was indifferent as to whether
he should take subjects from Shakespeare, Schiller, Byron, or Greek
legend, or from Czech sources; in his songs this stance is even more
pronounced. Among his two hundred or so songs with piano
accompaniment he made fifty-two settings of Heine, nineteen of
Goethe, and fourteen of Eichendorff, and the others include settings
748 SOLO SONG
ofthe work of Rückert, Saphir, Lenau, Chamisso, Scheffel, Brentano,
Herder, Lingg, Geibel, Sturm, Groth, and Fischer.105 Compared to
these, his thirty settings of Czech verses pale into insignificance.
(These include seven settings of Hälek, six of Celakovsky, four of
Sládek, and six based on verses drawn from the Dvür králové
manuscript.) His musical studies in Leipzig had equipped him well
for what he set out to do, and his admiration for German Lieder
resulted in his work reflecting the influence of Schumann and Robert
Franz. It was customary for him to adopt a semi-strophic structure
as a means of achieving unity, allowing for modifications when he
deemed these were necessary.
A collection of fourteen songs, bearing the title Jarní paprsky
[Rays of Spring], may be taken to be fully representative of the
composer's song writing in general. The title in Czech, however, is
very misleading, for the album contains only one Czech song. The
Czech translations were provided by L. Dolansky, and appear
immediately above the original German text. In ‘Der träumende See’
[The Dreaming Lake] (Julius Mosen), the gentle ripple of water is
attractively conveyed; and in *Das Kriegerweib' [The Soldier's Wife]
(Ex. 474) from the same collection, to words by the Plattdeutsch
poet Klaus Groth, the intensity of feeling is finely controlled.
Like so many other composers Fibich set Goethe's immortal lines
‘Kennst du das Land?’ Fibich rejected Schumann's strictly strophic
solution, because the last stanzas, describing the perilous route across
the mountains, demanded a significant change of mood, which could
be suggested by changing from the major key to the tonic minor.
Ex. 474
Inquieto
Wenn A - bends roth die
105 Judging by the frequent faulty declamation in the Czech translations of the original
German text, it must be assumed that Fibich made settings of the German text, and that the
Czech version was then added to the completed composition. A possible exception to this
may be seen in ‘Wie der Mond sich leuchtend dranget’ [As the Moon Pushes her Light]
(Heine), in which trochaic rhythms are conspicuous.
FIBICH 749
д
var
AH ze
mre
паха»,
(When in the evening the clouds аге red, I think of your fidelity;
the entire army marched past, and you too were there.)
The four ballads, Op. 7, of 1872-3 mark the composer’s vintage
period. ‘Der Spielmann’ [The Fiddler] (Andersen/Chamisso), No. 1,
and ‘Tragödie’ [Tragedy] (Heine), No. 4, are settings previously
selected by Schumann; between these come ‘Waldnacht’ [Night in
the Forest], (Hermann Lingg), No. 2, and Heine's ‘Loreley’, No. 3.
It is apparent that Fibich is concerned mainly with the poet's moods,
and the balance of the song as a whole, in preference to a sensitive
response to emotive words such as ‘Tod’ and ‘sterben’. The three
separate sections of *"Tragódie' stem directly from the songs striking
opening phrase (Ex. 475). In ‘Der Spielmann' the tragic reality of
the wedding festivities is conveyed by means of a lively waltz theme
alternating between C major and C minor, which prevails until the
climax. At this point the totally crushed fiddler intones a despairing
appeal to the Almighty.
750 SOLO SONG
Ex. 475
Sehr feuerig mit Leidenschaft
und sei__ mein Weib
(Flee with me and be my wife)
DVORÁK
Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) wrote rather less than a hundred
solo songs. Among these are three settings of liturgical texts, seven
of Heyduk's Zigeunermelodien using the German text, two folk
poems in German, and Vier Lieder, Op. 82, using poems by Otilie
Malybrok-Stieler. АП the rest of his songs are in the Czech language.
Dvorak composed his first solo songs, eighteen in all, as a
spontaneous expression of his bitter disappointment and profound
sorrow, when in 1865 his charming pupil, Josefina Cermáková,
rejected his proposal of marriage. He had taken the verses from
Gustav Pfleger-Moravsky's Cyprise [Cypresses]. Dvorák's friend
Karel Bendl was quick to point out that Dvoräk had no notion how
to set Czech words to music in accordance with the accepted
principles of Czech prosody in favour at that time. If the songs were
performed just as Dvorak wrote them, the resulting distortion of the
Czech language would be intolerable.
The dilemma has been overcome by providing an alternative text
designed to be sung to the composer's vocal line. This has been
attempted with some success in the English language, and a similar
DVORÄK 751
attempt with the Czech language is awaiting publication. An
unexpected outcome of these experiments is that it becomes possible
to reassess the state of Dvorak’s development from a new angle
during 1865 which was indeed one of the most remarkable years of
his life. Despite his immaturity, here was a keen young musician,
well endowed with a plentiful supply of musical ideas.!06
Four of the Cyprise were revised and published as Čtyři písné
[Four Songs], Op. 2. Two of these, namely ‘V té sladké moci očí
tvých’ [Overcome by your Powerful Eyes], No. 2, and ‘Ja vim, Ze v
sladké naději Um Sure, and Hope Sustains me], No. 6, were revised
a second time, and, together with six other revised Cyprise songs,
were issued as Písné milostné [Love Songs], Op. 83. Eager to provide
himself with further memories of the girl he had loved so dearly
(and who was now his sister-in-law), he adapted twelve of these
songs for string quartet, at first with the title Ohlas pisni [Echo of
Songs], sharing the vocal melody between the first violin and viola,
and in some cases adhering fairly closely to the original song.!0*
Dvorak improved the second of the Cyprise songs, ‘V té sladké moci
oči tvých’, by changing the key from G major to G minor. If
allowance is made for the faulty declamation, then it will be seen
that, among the early versions of Cyprise “О, du&e drahá, jedinká'
[O One and Only Soul so Sweet], No. 4, and ‘Zde hledim na tvůj
drahy list’ [Here Concealed in a Book's Pages], No. 12, show promise;
in both cases the treatment of the melodies was envisaged by the
composer in 1865.
In the early version of No. 14, ‘Zde v lese u potoka’ [I Stand here
in Forest Glade], Dvořák was remarkably sure of the powerful
climax he required, but he was uncertain as to how it should be
timed. However, in a later revision of the song (Op. 83, No. 6) he
gave It a better overall balance by ensuring that the climax coincided
with the real climax of the poem, and by shortening the final section
of the song. The early version is shown in Ex. 476. It may seem
strange that “Маа krajem vévodi lehky spanek’ [E'en now the
Countryside Lightly Slumbers], No. 17, overlooks completely the
ultimate pessimism of the poem, and becomes a dance. This is an
106 Radio Prague has a recording of the complete cycle sung by Eva Serning in English,
accompanied by Radoslav Kvapil. These two artists performed all of the songs at the Düm
umélcü, Prague, on 1 May 1983.
107 He used No. бапа 10 in Král a uhlíf and No. 10 in Vanda. In 1881-2 he revised Nos.
1,5, 9, 8, 13, and 11. Stary published the first four of these as Vier Lieder (1882), with the
misleading opus No. 2. The composer revised Nos. 8, 3, 9. 6, 17, 14, 2, and 4 (Nos. 9 and 8
for the second time), and Simrock issued these as Písné milostne (Liebeslieder), Op. 83, in
1889. Dvorak arranged Nos. 6, 3, 2, 8, 12, 7, 9, 14, 4, 16, 17, and 18 for string quartet. The
only song he did not use a second time was No. 15.
752 SOLO SONG
Ex. 476
[Andante] $g
dim sta-ry Ка-теп nad nimž se vm
stringendo
— a a шн
* S
>
ө 2—
dmou; ten ká-men ustou-pá, ра-да bez kli-du pod vl-nou.
=
crescendo
(I see here an old rock on which the waters surge;
that rock without respite begins to sink beneath the torrent.)
exact parallel with Dvorak’s overture V přírodě [In Nature's Realm],
and so provides an important clue to the composer's attitude to
nature.
The remainder of Dvorak’s early songs are as follows: two songs
for baritone (Heyduk; 1865); Písné na slova Elišky Krásnohorské
[Songs on words of E. Krásnohorská] (1871); ‘Sirotek’ [The Orphan]
(Erben; 1871); ‘Rozmaryna’ [Rosmarine] (Erben; 1871); Čtyři písně
na slova Srbské lidové poesie [Four Songs on Serbian Folk Poetry],
Op. 6 (18722); Ріѕпё z rukopisu Královédvorského [Songs from the
Dvür králové Manuscript], Op. 7 (1872); Vecerní pisne [Evening
Songs] (Hálek), Opp. 3, 9, and 31 (1876).
For the most part these are simple and semi-folklike in style, with
comparatively straightforward accompaniments. The Cyprise have
much more character and intensity of feeling because they were
written from the heart. Although ill equipped for the task he had
undertaken, Dvorak composed as well as he was able, and oc-
casionally with modest success.
Early in 1879 the Moravian duets appeared in concert programmes,
followed a little later by performances of ‘Das Sträusschen’ from
DVORÄK 753
Op. 7 and ‘Blumendeutung’ from Op. 6 by Amalie Joachim. Other
singers followed suit, showing a marked preference for these two
songs.108
Dvorak had composed his first ballad in 1871, when he set 'Sirotek'
by J. K. Erben. His next attempt may perhaps be described as a
valiant attempt to master a form for which he was not very well
equipped. This time he chose the Tři novorecké básně [Three New
Greek Poems] (1878). The first two are somewhat repetitive, but the
third, a warning that the city of Parga has been betrayed, and calling
on the inhabitants to throw away their weapons and dig up the
bones of their fathers to prevent the Turks from treading on those
they never conquered, is more satisfying. The three ballads were
originally written with an orchestral accompaniment, and were first
performed in that form by Josef Lev on 17 November 1878.
Early in 1880 Dvorak wrote the Zigeunermelodien [Gypsy Melod-
ies]. This cycle of seven songs represents the peak of his song writing.
Dvorak favoured minor keys and gave each of the songs a specific
and distinctive character. Particularly memorable are the irrepressible
spirit of the dance that runs through the second song; the expressive
beauty of the melodic line and especially the haunting octave leap
and then a further rise of a semitone in ‘Rings ist der Wald so
stumm und still’ [All round about the Woods are Still, No. 3 (Ex.
477), and the subtlety of rhythm in ‘Als die alte Mutter’ [Songs my
Mother Taught me], No. 4. Dvorak has taken a big stride forward
in his accompaniments, and the varied accompaniment for each verse
in ‘Horstet hoch der Habicht’ [Give a Hawk a fine Cage], No. 7,
shows skill and imagination.
Dvorák set the two German folk poems on 1 and 2 May 1885
Ex. 477
А
17 1077 sn El Ben
a= se a
2 р
y GEZ
G
108 Amalie Joachim introduced ‘Das Sträusschen’ at Leipzig on 8 Jan. 1880 and ‘Blu-
mendeutung' in Berlin on 7 Mar. that same year.
754 SOLO SONG
(He who can only sing of his sorrow will not curse death.)
while staying at Sydenham during his third visit to England. The
first of these, ‘Schlaf, mein Kind, in Ruh’ [Sleep, my Child,
Peacefully], includes an early version of the musical idea that sustains
Julie’s lullaby in Act III of Jakobin, his opera of 1887-8.109 The
lullaby’s companion piece, ‘Seh’ ich dich, mein liebes Mädchen’, is
a love song. Both songs reflect the simple folk style of their verses.
His next songs were again settings of folk poetry, as their title H
národním tonu [In Folk Style], Op. 73 (1886) suggests; but this time
three are Slovak and one, ‘Ach, neni tu’ [Nothing can Change], No.
3, is Czech (Ex. 478). This song is remarkable both for its continuity
of line and also for its poignancy and mood of deep despair.
Next came Dvorák's settings of four German poems by Otilie
Malybrok-Stieler, the Vier Lieder, Op. 82 of 1887-88. Curiously, the
second song, ‘Die Stickerin’ [Over her Embroidery], having opened
in C major, shifts halfway through to B major, and concludes with
a touch of B minor— for which it is difficult to offer a reason. The
first song, ‘Lasst mich allein’ [Leave me Alone], is perhaps the finest
of the set. It was highly regarded by the composer and greatly
admired by his sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunizová. When she wrote
to America on 26 November 1894, telling Dvorak how seriously her
health was declining, and how she was being neglected by those she
loved, the composer, conscience-stricken because he had not written
to her, immediately introduced two phrases from this song into the
Adagio of his B minor Cello Concerto.
During March 1894, following the death of Gounod and of his
friends Tchaikovsky and Hans von Bülow, and while his own father
lay desperately ill, Dvorak felt a strong urge to reaffirm his religious
faith. He selected suitable verses for his cycle of ten Biblické písné
109 An extract from his song ‘Zezhulice’ [The Cuckoo] in Písně z rukopisu Královédvorského
[Songs from the Dvür králové Manuscript] reappears in an important transition in the first
movement of the F minor Trio, Op. 65, brought to life in a remarkable way.
DVORÁK 755
Ex. 478
Andante
(Oh! what would bring me joy is not here; Oh! what brings me joy is not here.)
[Biblical Songs], Op. 99, from the Book of Psalms in the earliest
Czech translation, the Kralice Bible of 1613. Although a Catholic
himself, he recognized this Protestant translation as a national asset.
It is preferable for the accompaniment to be played on an organ,
rather than on a piano. However, since Dvorak before long scored
the accompaniment of the first five songs for orchestra, this makes
a welcome alternative. After setting the Czech text, Dvorák unwisely
modified the vocal rhythm to accommodate the German translation,
and an English translation was then fitted to the modified rhythm.
In the Critical Edition the original rhythm has been restored, and
756 SOLO SONG
alternative German and English translations are provided. The
songs are simple and direct, at times displaying a little American
pentatonicism. After the declamatory song ‘Oblak a mrakota jest
vükol Ného' [Clouds and Darkness are Round him] (No. 1), comes
a charmingly melodious setting of verses from Psalm 23 ‘Hospodin
jest müj pasty (No. 4), a forthright ‘Boze! Boze! Pisen novou' [I
will Sing a new Song unto thee] (No. 5), a moving setting of ‘Při
řekách babylonských’ [By the Rivers of Babylon] (No. 7), with a
memorable climax on recalling Jerusalem, and finally a paean of
praise, "Zpivejte Hospodinu рей novou’ [Oh Sing unto the Lord a
new song] (No. 10).
(f) SCANDINAVIA
By JouN HORTON
The main Nordic lands— Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland —
experienced during the nineteenth century an abundant flowering of
lyric poetry and solo song, with close though shifting relationships
between the two arts and many cross-cultural exchanges, both within
the region and with foreign countries, the German-speaking ones in
particular. Over the period it is possible to trace lines of development
from rudimentary models of romance and ballad, revitalized by the
recovery and imitation of indigenous traditions, through processes
of technical evolution that were eventually to bring Scandinavian
art-song very near to the continental Lied, though without complete
sacrifice of national identity.
DENMARK
Danish national Romanticism in music might be said to date from
1780, when Johann Hartmann (1726-93) introduced into Johannes
Ewald's syngespil of Fiskerne [The Fishers] a narrative romance,
'Liden Gunver [Little Gunver], which, with its touching story,
melancholy minor tune in 6/8 measure, and omkvæd or refrain,!10
appeared to be an ideal pastiche of the medieval Danish ballad. It
had a twofold appeal to Copenhagen theatre-goers, since the term
romance, already familiar from imported French opéra comique and
110 ‘CQ vog dig, mit barn, for de falske mandfolk’ [O beware, my child, of deceitful men].
DENMARK 757
vaudeville, was rapidly becoming naturalized, and was to remain a
favourite genre in all the Scandinavian countries during the first half
of the nineteenth century.!!!
Christoph Ernst Weyse (1774-1842), the chief exponent of the
romance in the first four decades of the century, extended the scope
of the simple strophic song-form in two ways: first, by encouraging
the current practice of detaching it from its theatre setting and
bringing it into the bourgeois parlour, and secondly by giving more
attention to the keyboard accompaniment, to which he added
preludes, interludes, and postludes. His conservative outlook can be
appreciated, however, if one contrasts his unpretentious setting of a
German text—Goethe’s ‘Nahe des Geliebten'!!?— with Schubert's
impassioned strophic Lied of 1815.
More functional than the klaverromance was the vise or social
song, much promoted at this time with religious, patriotic, or
educational intention. The popular, easily memorized vise, together
with anthologized ‘folk-song’ (in the English sense) gathered from
literary or oral sources and cherished for its native associations,
became assimilated to the general romance convention, thereby
providing fertile soil for the growth of free composition in a ‘national’
idiom.!!? The narrative romance or ballad was cultivated as an
art-form by leading composers, who elaborated their primitive models
both vocally— as, for example, by introducing passages of recitative—
and instrumentally. Specimens of the genre are A. P. Berggreen's
setting of Oehlenschlager’s 'Skjeterloberen' [The Skater], J. P. E.
Hartmann’s ‘Nokken’ [The Watersprite] to text by B. S. Ingemann,
Henrik Rung's 'Valdemars Sang' [Valdemar's Song] to text by
Carsten Hauch, and the large-scale, through-composed setting of
‘Knut Lavard' by Niels W. Саде (1817-90), also to a text by Hauch.
Gade's years in Leipzig and his association with Schumann and
Mendelssohn had their effect on the course of Danish art-music after
his return to his native country in 1850. He brought to the lyrical
romance and the ballad a practised skill in keyboard and orchestral
techniques; in fact, his song writing is distinguished more than
anything by its accompaniments, either with orchestra, like the rich
111 Niels Martin Jensen points out that in the syngespil tradition the romance, unlike the
aria, is not ‘an arena [tumleplads] for strong emotions or inner conflicts’ (Den danske romance
1800-1850 (Copenhagen, 1964), 19).
112 Included in Weyse’s collected Romancer og Sange (1852 and 1860). About a third of the
hundred songs are from stage works; the rest are “keyboard songs’, excerpts from occasional
cantatas, patriotic songs, children’s songs, and narrative ballads.
113 The most successful early example of ballad opera, Friedrich Kuhlau's Elverhoj, contains
traditional songs from Danish, Jutlandish, Norwegian, and Swedish sources, all styled
romancer.
758 SOLO SONG
colours of Oluf's ballad ‘Saa tidt jeg rider mig under О” [Whenever
I ride about the isle] in the cantata Elverskud [The EIf-King’s
Daughter] (1853), or with piano in chamber music texture, as in the
strophic romance ‘Sol deroppe’ [Sundown] (to verses Бу H. C.
Andersen), where an innocent eight-bar vocal melody is encapsulated
in a total of twenty-five bars of prelude, interlude, and postlude.
The greater demands made on singers and accompanists by Gade
and others after the middle of the century reflect the growth of
professional recitals and increased awareness of the development of
the art-song in German-speaking lands and of Italian bel canto, with
which Henrik Rung (1807-71) had become familiar through his
travels. The songs of J. P. E. Hartmann (1805-1900), as exemplified
in the Ingemann cycle Sulamith og Salomon (1847-50), owe much to
the contemporary Lied.!!4
A flair for long, flexible vocal lines, rich harmonic colouring, and
idiomatic picturesque keyboard figuration characterizes the many
romances of Peter Lange-Müller [1850-1926]. Like Hartmann, he set
the cycle of Ingemann poems Sulamith og Salomon, giving in the
third song a charming representation of the message dove and its
flight to Sulamith with a palm-leaf letter from her lover. Some of
Lange-Müller's later songs show a determination to respond to the
painter-poet Holger Drachmann's passion for the sea, as in ‘Jeg
sejled en Nat over Havet’ [I Sailed One Night across the Sea], Op.
54, No. 3 (Ex. 479, with its heaving piano arpegggios and sweeping
vocal phrases articulated to accommodate poetic as well as musical
rhythm.
Ex. 479
Moderato con moto
..det var i denly - seSom - mer, hvor So - len kun paa Skremtgaar ned; jeg
blun-ded med aab - ne £j - ne, mens Ski-bet paa Ha - vet gled.
(It was in the radiant summer, when the sun only pretends to go down;
I dozed with open eyes, while the ship glided over the sea.)
114 Nils Schierring admits that Hartmann's reputation is somewhat faded, but maintains
that ‘it was through him and him alone that inspiration from the romantic German Lied first
entered Danish music’ (Musikkens Historie i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1977-8), ii. 201).
SWEDEN 759
Ex. 480
Lento con espressione
Blik, derer i Ly - den af din Stem-me,en Droms z-the - ri-ske Mu- sik.
(There is an enchantment on thy lip, there is a depth in thy glance,
there is the ethereal music of a dream in the sound of thy voice.)
Danish late-Romantic song reaches its zenith with Peter Heise
(1830-79), who like Grieg studied with Moritz Hauptmann in Leipzig,
and again like Grieg returned with the technical equipment to put
fresh blood into the native lyric tradition. Heise's setting of 'Til en
Veninde’ [To a Woman-friend] (Ex. 480), a compact four-stanza
poem by Emil Aarestrup (1800-56), reveals a command of harmonic
tensions that enables him to achieve a perfect match for the poet's
erotic verses.115
SWEDEN
Whereas the earlier phases of Danish Romantic music were in the
hands of professional composers, a number of whom, like Schulz,
Kunzen, Kuhlau, and Weyse, were German by birth or training but
happy to work in harmony with a golden age of Danish poetry,
in Sweden the influence of the dilettante was paramount. The
diktarmusiker or man of letters with musical interests (a peculiarly
Swedish phenomenon going back to C. M. Bellman or even further)
was at this time usually a member of the Uppsala coterie led by
115 Features of this setting, such as its economy and its progressive enharmonic modulations,
suggest that Heise knew Schumann's ‘Dein Angesicht’, Op. 127, No. 2.
760 SOLO SONG
Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783-1847), Professor of History and a prominent
figure in the so-called Gothic League; which was dedicated to the
study and revival of ancient Scandinavian culture and moral virtues.
Geijer was a lifelong music lover with a modest though undeveloped
talent for composition; he produced a quantity of naive, amateurish
songs, mostly to his own verses, was concerned to maintain the
primacy of melody (no doubt as part of aesthetic theories derived
from Rousseau), and lent his influential name to a collection of
folk-music (Svenska folkvisor fran forntiden [Swedish Popular Songs
from Olden Times]) published between 1814 and 1817 in collaboration
with the antiquary A. A. Afzelius. This, and some other pioneer
anthologies, though succeeded later in the century by more scientific
studies, became the basis of a Swedish national- Romantic style that
was by no means extinct by the beginning of the twentieth century.!16
Other literary members of the Uppsala circle were Gunnar
Wennerberg (1817-1901), who wrote both words and music of
dialogue songs depicting student life (G/untarne), and Karl Jonas Love
Almgvist (1793-1866), a fastidious prose writer whose interpolated
dreamlike melodies (called Songes) with their affinity to folk-song
were innocent of accompaniment of any kind. Professional musicians
who associated with the Uppsala dilettanti seem to have fallen under
the spell of their aesthetic philosophies. Jacob Axel Josephson (1818-
80) and Adolf Fredrik Lindblad (1801-78) may be said to have
reversed the roles of the diktarkomponist, since both wrote the lyrics
for a considerable proportion of their songs. Josephson held the post
of Director Musices at Uppsala from 1849; Lindblad had a wider
range as a composer, and his studies with Zelter in Berlin, his
friendship and correspondence with Mendelssohn, and his devotion
to the interpretative art of Jenny Lind, who took his songs into her
repertoire, earned him a central position in Swedish song during the
first half of the century.!!?
Bernhard Crusell (1775-1838), now remembered chiefly for his
contributions to instrumental music, was another member of the
Uppsala group. He attempted solo settings of lyric poems from
Frithjofs Saga, the magnum opus of Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846),
Professor of Greek at Lund University. While Tegnér's writings
116 Carl-Allan Moberg showed that the Geijer-Afzelius collection had acquired the status
of a classic by mid-nineteenth century, with the result that 'national- Romantic folk-song had
begun to permeate the whole of Swedish musical life, from the infant school to the State
Conservatory’, ‘Fran kämpevisa till locklat’, Svensk tidskrift for musikforskning, 33 (1951), 5.
117 Lindblad's collected songs were published by Hirsch of Stockholm between 1878 and
1890, and the composer was the subject of an important critique by C. R. Nyblom, Adolf
Fredrik Lindblad (Minnesteckning) (Stockholm, 1881).
SWEDEN 761
stand high in Swedish Romantic literature, the vigour of his poetry
is but feebly conveyed in Crusell’s dozen settings made in 1842. Franz
Berwald (1796-1868), whose own lyric songs were comparatively few,
considered that association with the Uppsala coterie had inhibited
Crusell’s talents, and in more general terms Berwald deprecated
Swedish composers’ preoccupation with romancer and Lieder, when
they should have been grappling with the major instrumental
forms.118
Events in the 1840s and 1850s, however, marked a turning-point
in Swedish song. Geijer died in 1847, Lindblad settled in Stockholm,
a strong reaction!!? against amateurism and the diktarmusiker set
in, and the founding of the Leipzig Conservatory gave Swedish
musicians, along with other Scandinavians, opportunities for a
thorough musical education, and not least for experience of the more
progressive European tendencies. А transitional personality, bridging
what might be called the ‘Uppsala’ and the ‘Leipzig’ schools, was
Ivar Christian Hallström (1826-1901), whose absorption of German
Romantic influences, especially from Mendelssohn and Schumann,
appears in his freedom of piano writing in such songs as the setting
of a 'Serenad' by Stagnelius in 1854. Hallstróm's eclectic interests
led him to experiment with the contemporary French chanson,
thereby in a sense reintroducing to Sweden the French-born strophic
romance in up-to-date guise, with piquant harmonies. He also made
striking advances in the declamation of Swedish verse, as in ‘Syarta
svanor’ [Black Swans] (1879), where every detail of Snoilsky’s poem
is vividly pointed.
In the works of August Sóderman (1832-1876) Swedish song
achieved a full measure of national identity through the fusion of
contemporary German styles with distinctively Swedish idioms drawn
from folk-music, and also with Norwegian national traits, as in his
setting of Bjernson's ‘Ingerid Sletten’ (Ex. 481).!2° On a much
grander scale, though still paying allegiance to traditional models,
are Sóderman's extended ballads, most with German texts and
orchestral accompaniments; a fine example (with Swedish text by
Frans Hedberg) is ‘Kung Heimer och Aslóg [King Heimer and
Aslög] . This was a vein to be exploited by later Swedish composers,
118 Erling Lomnäs (ed.), Franz Berwald— Die Dokumente seines Leben (Kassel, 1979),
186 ff.
119 Led by Albert Rubenson (1826-1901), himself a composer whose songs show originality
in harmony and structure.
120 The importance of Bjornson's verse to Swedish as well as Norwegian song, especially
after 1870, can hardly be overstated.
762 SOLO SONG
Ex. 481
Andante Et
In- ge-rid Slet-ten af Sil - legjord hav-de hverken sólv el-ler guld;
(Ingerid Sletten of Sillegjord had neither silver nor gold.)
like Wilhelm Stenhammar in ‘Florez och Blanzeflor' (text by Levertin)
(1891).
As much of the song production of Emil Sjógren (1853-1918)
extends well beyond the limit of 1890, and is further enriched by
discoveries among late Romantic poets such as Gustaf Fróding and
Erik Axel Karlfeldt, a complete review of his career cannot be
attempted here. Sjógren's style, like Sóderman's, was grounded in
the nationalist folk-music tradition, but was also indebted to a wide
variety of European contemporaries— Brahms, Wagner, Liszt, and
César Franck among them. He drew upon both Scandinavian and
German poets, the latter including the Geibel and Heyse Spanische
Lieder, settings of which precede Hugo Wolf's by almost a decade
and are not altogether put in the shade by them.!?! The two
Tannhäuser cycles must also be mentioned: the earlier one (Op. 3,
1880) to the Danish verses of Holger Drachmann, and the second
(Op. 12, 1883-4) to the German of Julius Wolf. Through an analysis
of ‘Lad Vaaren komme’ [Let Spring Come], a two-page song to
words by the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen, Axel Helmer!?? sums
up the salient features of Sjógren's style round about 1890, mentioning
in particular the way in which the course of the poem is faithfully
mirrored in the mounting tension of sequential chromatic harmonies,
the elliptic chord progressions of the penultimate section, the singer's
final despairing monotone, and the use of a leitmotiv unifying the
whole conception.
121 Sjógren's ‘Dereinst, Gedanke mein’ can be compared both with the tensely durch-
komponiert setting by Wolf and with Grieg's Op. 48, No. 2 (1889); the latter is impressive in
its way, with a modal, chorale-like setting repeated identically for the second half of the poem,
but Sjógren's gains by being through-composed and moving inexorably towards its climax.
122 Svensk solosång 1850-1890 (Uppsala, 1972), i. 290-1.
FINLAND 763
FINLAND
Separated from Sweden since 1809 and made a grand duchy of
the Russian Empire, Finland was still in the process of emerging as
a cultural entity.!?3 The high quality of the Swedish verse of Johan
Ludvig Runeberg (1804-77) was, however, recognized throughout
Scandinavia and was frequently used by song-writers. Passages from
his major work, Fänrik Stäls sägner [Ensign Stäl’s Stories], a cycle
of poems dealing with the Russian-Swedish wars of 1808-9, had
been set by A. F. Lindblad, but it was the opening invocation ‘Vart
Land' [Our Country] that became universally known when it was
enshrined as a national anthem with music by Fredrik Pacius (1809-
91). Pacius was a pupil of Spohr and one of several German-born
musicians who devoted their energies to fostering musical life in their
adopted country. No small part of Pacius's service to the nation was
his publication of folk-music in the Finnish language.!?4
A fair idea of the state of Finnish song during the first nine
decades of the century can be obtained from the anthology Det
sjungande Finland [Finland in Song], edited in the 1880s by Martin
Wegelius (1846-1906), founder of the Helsingfors Institute of Music
that was to become the Sibelius Academy. The contents include
folk-song arrangements from the two cultures, romance-style com-
positions like the Tegnér settings by Crusell (who was of Finnish
origins), and attempts to naturalize the German Lied and parody
the Scandinavian ballad. In ‘Paimenessa’ [Herding Song] Ilman
Krohn (1867-1960) paints a rural idyll with passages in 5/4 time
imitative of the shepherd's pipe, Robert Kajanus (1856-1933) sets
Runeberg’s ‘Fly ei undan’ [Fly not away] as a strophic Lied, and
the 23-year-old Jan Sibelius contributes his first known solo song, a
setting of a Runeberg 'Serenad'. Filip von Schantz (1835-65),
composer of the Kullervo Overture, one of the first orchestral pieces
to be inspired by the Kalevala, is represented by several songs that
testify to the loss Finnish music sustained through his early death.
His setting of the Runeberg ‘Blomman’ [The Flower] (Ex. 482), with
its intriguing chiastic structure, seeks to transplant Schumannesque
idioms into Finnish earth.
123 Swedish remained the language of administration and higher learning, but since the
attainment of political independence in 1979 the country has been officially bilingual. Only
about 7 per cent of the population is now Swedish-speaking.
1?4 Texts of traditional Finnish songs had been collected by Elias Lónnrot, who also wove
into a continuous narrative legendary material he had collected from oral sources, thus
creating the national epic Kalevala that was to provide composers with so valuable a body of
mythology.
SOLO SONG
764
Ex. 482
Con forza tempo
Vak - nar
len glö - der,
кее |:
più lento
Die Im p er EE
gU SJ sf ee SIS Ss Gee
Lt E ae “|
dolce
NORWAY 765
(When spring is reborn, bright and pleasant, and the day laughs and the sun glows, you awaken;
you bind to your pliant stem leaf and bud and you are raised up like an angel from the dust.)
NORWAY
For several decades before L. M. Lindeman’s great collection of
folk tunes (Ældre og nyere Fjeldmelodier) [Older and More Recent
Mountain Melodies], published between 1853 and 1867, came to the
enthralled attention of Edvard Grieg, Norwegian folk-music had
already entered the bloodstream of his predecessors and con-
temporaries. Stylized folk idioms occur frequently in the romances
of Halfdan Kjerulf (1815-68) and Rikard Nordraak (1842-66). The
latter, a kinsman of Bjernstjerne Bjernson, ardently shared that
writer's enthusiasm for a regenerated, independent Norway, but his
slender output, impatience of technical disciplines, and early death
combined to make it difficult even now to assess his creative potential,
766 SOLO SONG
though it is certain that he awakened Grieg to the possibilities of
blending a nationalist style with German Romantic song.
Grieg may have been more realistically indebted to Halfdan
Kjerulf, whose romances are miniatures in delicate pastel colours,
their voice and keyboard parts integrated with unostentatious skill.
Among Norwegian poets, Johan Welhaven (1807-73) inspired some
of Kjerulfs most picturesque songs, such as 'Lockender toner
[Luring sounds] and ‘Paa fjeldet [On the Mountain] (Ex. 483), in
which crystalline diatonic harmonies float upon sustained pedal
notes, and the sounds of traditional instruments are suggested. But
Ex. 483
Andante
- der Hul-dren paa
- ser i Lu - ren og
a
E == Fee
va D EESESROHESESESESRESERES
Ed SE
(Now sits the woodsprite on the hillock and blows on the horn and is so happy.)
GRIEG 767
it was even more often that Bjornson brought out the best in Kjerulf,
as he did with many another Scandinavian composer— hardly
surprisingly, since more than any other major poet of his time he
meant his sonorous verse to be sung.!25 Among Bjornson-Kjerulf
settings may be mentioned ‘Synnoves sang’ with its hummed prelude
and postlude, ‘Ingrids sang’ in the rhythm of a springdans, and the
magical ‘Prinsessen’.
GRIEG
The career of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) as a song-writer!26 сап
almost be charted according to the poets from whom he took his
texts: German Romantics set in Lied-forms during student days at
Leipzig; Danish poets such as Christian Winther and Hans Christian
Andersen set chiefly as strophic romances during the stay in Denmark
(1863-6) and after the meeting with Nina Hagerup; and Norwegian
poets almost exclusively for about a decade and a half after the
Griegs' removal to Christiania, the period when the easygoing
Danish romance-style gives place to a terse, deeply expressive mode
yielding masterpieces like the Bjornson ‘Det forste Mode’ [The First
Meeting] and Ibsen's ‘Svanen’ [The Swan] and ‘Borte’ [Departed].
New paths were again opened by the poems of Aasmund Olavsson
Vinje (1818-70), written in the broad-vowelled synthesis of regional
dialects called /andsmäl (now the basis of Nynorsk or New Nor-
wegian). In setting the Vinje poems (and ten years later in the
Garborg Haugtussa [The Hillock-Maid] cycle), Grieg reverts to
strophic patterns, combining them with a harmonically advanced
tonal language to form a medium of poignant nostalgia. Between
1880 and 1890, however, the choice of verse is more diversified, with
a miscellaneous collection of Romancer (ældre og nyere) [Romances
Old and New], among them the large-scale episodic setting of ‘Fra
Monte Pincio', and two sets of songs to texts by the irrepressible
Dane, Holger Drachmann. Norwegian verse is represented at this
time by settings of poems by John Paulsen, a personal friend who
supplied Grieg with more texts than any other writer.
The songs of the 1890s must be mentioned here, however briefly,
since they include some of Grieg's finest work: the settings of the
late- Romantic Norwegian poet, Vilhelm Krag (among them the
125 Bjørnson wanted to publish his 1870 verse collection under the simple title Sange, and
only after some argument with the publisher settled for Digte og Sange [Poems and Songs].
1?6 Grieg's songs are discussed by Astra Desmond in Gerald Abraham (ed.), Grieg: A
Symposium (London, 1948), 71-99, and by John Horton in Grieg (London, 1974), chap. 10.
The early German and Danish songs are dealt with by Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe in Edvard Grieg
1858-1867 (Oslo and London, 1964).
768 SOLO SONG
wonderfully impressionistic ‘Der skreg en fugl’ [A Bird Cried]), some
delightful children's songs, and the Háugtussa cycle based on Arne
Garborg's classic of landsmål poetry. Finally, Grieg turned to an
amateur Danish poet, Otto Benzon, and in two books of settings
attempted a fusion of Scandinavian traditions with the contemporary
world of Wagnerian declamation and quasi-orchestral keyboard
writing—and by no means without success in such examples as ‘Der
gynger en Ваа ра Bolge' [A Boat is rocking on the Wave] and 'Lys
Маг [Lucent Night] (Ex. 484), a magical impressionist painting.
A survey of Grieg's entire song production reveals that he made
use of a considerable variety of forms, ranging from the simplest
strophic romance to quite complex through-composed or episodic
structures. Even strophic repetitions may be redeemed from mono-
tony by the introduction of fresh points of interest in the piano part,
by changes of tempo, key, and mode, or by adept transitions, as in
the early Andersen ‘Rosenknoppen’, Op. 18, No. 8.
Grieg maintained that, with the isolated exception of Solvejg's
repeated song in the Peer Gynt theatre music (1876), no quotation
from folk music occurs in the whole of his original song writing.
There are, however, many passages strongly reminiscent of traditional
Ex. 484
Andantino con moto
Nep- pekom -men dra- ger du bort!___
(Scarcely come, you depart! Lucent night, why are you so short?)
BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES 769
songs or dances: melodically in head-motifs and cadential formulae,
harmonically in the employment of pedal-points and bare fifths (as
already noted in the songs of Nordraak and Kjerulf), and rhythmically
in the introduction of dance-measures and the frequent mingling of
duplet and triplet pulse-divisions.
While Grieg inevitably overshadows other Norwegian song-writers
of the nineteenth century, alike in response to a wide variety of
poems, in formal diversity, and in harmonic resource, he was
generous enough to appreciate merit in a number of his compatriots.
The programme book of the first Bergen Festival which he helped
to organize in the summer of 1898 provides a roll-call of Norwegians
whose songs were included in the recitals: Nordraak, Kjerulf, Eyvind
Alnes (then in the early years of a career in which song writing was
to play a prominent part), Johan Backer-Lunde, Per Winge, Otto
Winter-Hjelm, the short-lived Sigurd Lie, the rather mannered Johan
Selmer, and two composers who stood high in Grieg's esteem: Agathe
Backer-Grendahl (1847-1907) and Christian Sinding (1856-1941).
The former, a fine concert pianist, was also a prolific song composer
who ranks with the most commanding exponents of Scandinavian
Romantic song. Sinding had by the date of the Festival published
nearly twenty books of settings of Norwegian, Danish, and German
texts, but much of his best work in the field was yet to come. His
entire output of about 250 solo songs is overdue for reassessment.1??
(с) BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
By NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY
Both Great Britain and the United States experienced difficulty,
during the nineteenth century, in establishing a native tradition of
art-song. Part of the problem was shared with continental Europe:
that the song with plano accompaniment had long been regarded as
a purely domestic, amateur form of music and, as such, not worthy
of the higher creative efforts of the composer. Even Beethoven only
occasionally exerted himself when composing Lieder. Such views
were still held by Schumann in the 1830s, and they also tended to
prevail in the English-speaking countries. Thus we find a writer in
127 A beginning has been made with a selection of fifty songs, edited by Oystein Gaukstad
and David Monrad Johansen (Oslo, 1978).
770 SOLO SONG
1823 illustrating the low state of English song writing with a list of
the ‘few English songs’ that had ‘risen to a high estimation, taken
as compositions for the orchestra or the stage, within the last
twenty-five years’;128 he did not think it worthwhile to mention the
serious domestic songs with piano that had been published by such
composers as Thomas Attwood, John Clarke-Whitfeld, George
Frederick Pinto, and Samuel Wesley.!?? Leading professional singers
performed only with orchestral accompaniment, and in this domain
English or American composers had to compete with the over-
whelming prestige of Italian operas and concert arias.
There was, indeed, a large and flourishing market for domestic
songs, but the publishers who controlled it found that only a
comparatively simple-minded product was likely to be profitable.
The drawing-room ballad, or ‘concert-household song’ as Wiley
Hitchcock has called it,130 was often launched on the stage or concert
platform by a prima donna with an orchestra; but it was emphatically
aimed at the amateur, who would buy it in sheet-music form with
piano accompaniment, in large numbers if its appeal was sufficiently
broad—hence the term ‘[music] shop ballad’.
Two important sub-categories of ballad, both destined to influence
art-song, were the national and the exotic. Various collections of
‘national songs’, mostly of a Celtic flavour, had appeared in the
earlier decades of the century; Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies (1807-
34) were the most famous. Again, Isaac Nathan and John Braham's
Hebrew Melodies (1816) are an early musical example of the growing
taste for oriental art.
Of the many successful composers of drawing-room ballads on
both sides of the Atlantic, perhaps the greatest was an American,
Stephen Foster (1826-64).!3! Some devoted their energies entirely to
ballads; some, particularly in Britain, consciously divided their time
between ballads written for profit and ‘serious’ songs written for
their own satisfaction or the esteem of like-minded musicians. Others
again idealistically confined themselves to serious art-song.
GERMAN INFLUENCE
In attempting to establish the art-song, composers had to contend
128 Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, v (1823), 257 n.
129 See Vol. VIII, pp. 591-2.
130 Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (rev. 3rd edn.; Englewood Cliffs,
1988), 69.
131 See Gilbert Chase, America's Music From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York, 1955),
chap. 15. For an account of the ballad in England, see Harold Simpson, A Century of Ballads
1810-1910 (London, 1910).
STERNDALE BENNETT 771
not only with the indifference or pessimism of publishers, but also
with the attitudes of some critics and fellow-musicians who were
inclined to despise the whole genre of keyboard songs because of its
association with the ballad. And here the Anglo-Saxon composer
faced an additional dilemma: the best models of art-song tended
increasingly to come from Germany. Some serious-minded composers
responded by whole-heartedly modelling their songs on the German
Lied. Others—to be considered later— reacted by asserting the value
of the English song tradition, and emphasizing recognizably British
or American characteristics.
STERNDALE BENNETT
The tradition of sending young composers to Germany (particularly
Leipzig) for their training was established rather sooner in Britain
than in the United States. Among early examples were Charles Neate
(1784-1877) and Cipriani Potter (1792-1871), both for a time in
Beethoven's circle at Vienna. One of the first whose careers were
strongly shaped by this process was William Sterndale Bennett (1816-
75), a pupil of Potter's. His early friendship with Mendelssohn led
to four long visits to Germany in the years 1836-42, where he
attracted the admiration not only of Mendelssohn and Schumann,
but of the German musical world in general; German publishers
pressed him to produce songs. He composed twelve (published in
two sets as Op. 23 (1842) and Op. 35 (1856)), which were clearly
and consciously modelled on the German Lied. We know from
surviving letters that Bennett was determined to have them published
simultaneously in England and Germany, and that he held them up
for years because of the problem of finding suitable translations
(most of the texts were originally English, but some were German).
When he had the translations, he took great pains in adapting the
melodic lines to suit the varying rhythms of the two languages.1??
In ‘Gentle Zephyr’, Op. 23, No. 6133 (comp. c.1837), Bennett
adopted the simple strophic form, but constructed the melodic line
with a subtlety unknown to the ordinary ballad (Ex. 485). The piano
introduction, instead of presenting a plain statement of the first
phrase of the song, gives its own transformation of the phrase,
shifting the stress and harmonic rhythm; and it is in this form— with
still other harmonies—that the phrase returns near the end of each
182 Nicholas Temperley, ‘Sterndale Bennett and the Lied’, Musical Times, 106 (1975), 958-
61 and 1060-3.
133 Geoffrey Bush and Nicholas Temperley (eds.), English Songs (1800-1860) (Musica
Britannica, 43; London, 1979).
IR SOLO SONG
Ex. 485
Allegro leggiero
nm
H == рш сеч.
t m ren
wo 2201—18 —=_ er
ep CR жа Н
Fu 2 -H E pN
7 i ES 82
== = SSS Sa Ss ES eT Se ae eee ey
1. Gen - tle Ze-phyr,
Hol - der Ze-phyr,
=] SS sa
as you fly, If__ you kiss my fair one's ear, Whis-per soft that
wenn dein Hauch Him den Flug zur Lieb-sten nahm, Kun -de dass ein
Sen SEHE BEE
you're а sigh, But from whose heart she must not hear, Whis-per soft that
Seuf-zer du, doch sag’ ihr nicht von wem er kam, Kun-de dass ein
SS See
you'rea sigh, But from whose heart she must not hear, But from whose heart she
Seuf-zer du, doch sag’ ihr nicht von wem erkam, doch sag’ ihr nicht von
wem er kam.
PIERSON 773
verse. The accompaniment figuration sweeps through the whole song,
carrying over the full closes and breaks between phrases, sections
and stanzas, and making the song a single, cumulative experience;
and of course at the same time it depicts the wind and the stream.
It is obvious that this song is permeated by German influence. It
was the Germans, from Mozart's ‘Abendempfindung’ [Evening
Mood] onwards, who had developed the song unified by its ac-
companiment. Schubert Schöne Müllerin songs might seem the
obvious models. But Mendelssohn loomed larger than Schubert to
Bennett in the 1830s, and we can find a similar mood and procedure
in Mendelssohn’s ‘Andres Maienlied’ [Another May Song], Op. 8,
No. 8, and ‘Im Frühling’ [In Spring], Op. 9, No. 4, and ‘Frühlingslied’
[Spring Song], Op. 19, No. 1. None of them, however, is quite like
Bennett’s: his style had its own character; the harmony of the second
bar, for instance, has a piquancy that is quite individual. Within its
modest scope ‘Gentle Zephyr’ was a masterpiece equal to any song
Mendelssohn had yet written. Bennett extended the principles
established here in the other songs of Opp. 23 and 35, within a fairly
wide range of mood and form. All but three of the twelve are
strophic; all are amorous or lyrical. From first to last Bennett was
greatly concerned with refinement and sensibility, and was extremely
sensitive to the problems of bilingual and multi-verse word setting.!34
The Mendelssohnian tradition was carried on in the songs of
Bennett's short-lived pupil, Francis Bache (1833-58).
PIERSON
Henry Hugo Pierson (1816-73) was a contemporary of Bennett's,
and was briefly associated with him at Dresden (he provided a
translation for one of Bennett’s songs). Afterwards their paths
diverged, and Pierson was, in any case, a very different type by
background and temperament. The son of an Anglican clergyman
and Oxford don, Pierson’s social and educational background was
higher than that of most English musicians of the day. He was
educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was well imbued with
the Romantic movement in literature. Without acquiring a degree
he left for Germany in 1839, and took private lessons from several
German musicians. Though elected to the Reid Professorship of
Music at Edinburgh in 1844, he never took up the post, but settled
permanently in Germany, where he was briefly a member of
134 Temperley, ‘Sterndale Bennett’, pp. 1062-3.
774 SOLO SONG
Mendelssohn’s circle but soon repudiated his influence and began to
work out his own methods and ideals irr composition. His music was
decisively rejected in England — ће leading critics made a determined
attack on his oratorio Jerusalem (1852)—but won a good deal of
respect in Germany: his music to the second part of Faust (1854),
for instance, was for many years regularly played at performances
of Goethe's drama. Pierson adopted a kind of German nationalism,
but nevertheless constantly returned to Shakespeare and the modern
English poets for inspiration.135
About a hundred songs by Pierson were published. There were
some early English settings of Byron, Shelley and Burns. The Burns
songs, Op. 7, published with bilingual texts, were praised by
Schumann, who found their 'strong, manly expression' [kráftigeren
männlichen Ausdruck] a pleasant change from fashionable effem-
inacy,!?6 though he regarded the music as often too elaborate for
the simple verses. In one of these, 'John Anderson, my jo' (Ex.
486),1?? Pierson respected the simple repeating rhythm of the poem,
but by surprising turns of melody and harmony turned the strophic
‘ballad’ into an art-song of some sophistication. The second verse
diverges from the first after its opening phrase.
Ex. 486
Un poco adagio espressivo
+
John An -der-son, my jo, John, When we were first ac - quent, Your
John An -der-son,mein Lieb, John, als ich zu-erst dich sah, wie
locks were like the ra - ven, Nour bon-nie brow was brent;
dun - kel war dein Haar,_ und wie glatt deiz Ant- litz da!
From 1845 all Pierson's songs were published in Germany, with
German and English texts underlaid, or German only. Unlike
Bennett, he rarely used the simple strophic form, preferring to vary
his verses or to write entirely continuous settings closely following
the changing imagery and emotion of the text. A powerful example
of his later style is the Dirge: ‘Fear no more the Heat of the Sun’
(Shakespeare).138 It has two verses with almost identical music; in
each case the first half is in A minor common time (Ex. 487), the
135 Temperley, ‘Henry Hugo Pierson, 1815-73', Musical Times, 104 (1973), 1217-20 and
105 (1974), 31-4.
136 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, viii (1842), 32; repr. Schumann, Schriften über Musik und
Musiker, iii (4th edn.; Leipzig, 1891), 113.
137 English Songs (1800- 1860), p. 98.
138 [bid., p. 110.
PIERSON 775
Ex. 487
Larghetto molto tranquillo (à =69)
Fear. no. more. the- heat. of the sun,
Fürch-te.nicht. mehr. Son - nen - gluth,
second, unexpectedly, in D major 6/8, reflecting the refrain-like text
*Golden lads and girls all must | Follow thee, and come to dust',
and a similar sentiment in the second verse. For the last verse Pierson
suggests the melody of Ex. 487 in the accompaniment, but then,
following a metrical change (‘No exorciser harm thee’), writes entirely
new music, with an extraordinary harmonic progression for the
closing lines.
These brief excerpts give only a glimpse of the freedom and boldness
of Pierson's writing, particularly in his harmonic unpredictability. It
could be said that in many songs his disrespect for convention brings
him close to the unintelligible, but this fault is in the opposite
direction from those of every other contemporary British composer.
Among his most rewarding songs are ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’
(Shakespeare) (1839); 'Beware the Black Friar' (Byron) (1839); “АП
my Heart’s thine own’ (1844?);13? ‘Heimweh’ (Beck) (c.1850); ‘Take,
oh take those Lips away’ (Fletcher) (c.1852);!49 ‘Those Evening Bells’
(Moore) (c.1854);1*! ‘Der gute Kamerad’ (1859); ‘Thekla’s Klage’
(Schiller) (c.1861); *Claribel' (Tennyson) (c.1861); and ‘The White
Owl’ (Tennyson) (c.1868).!42 The last exploits a rare comic vein in
Pierson's make-up which was all too little developed. It is entirely
individual in style and bears comparison with any song of the period.
Another type was classified as a Ballade in Pierson's collected
songs;!43 it has no connection with the drawing-room ballad, but is
an evocation of medieval chivalry, akin to the Lohengrin brand of
Romanticism. His best effort in this direction is possibly ‘Sturmritt’
139 Thid., p. 106.
140 Ibid., p. 103,
141 [bid., p. 106.
142 [bid., p. 114.
143 15 Liebeslieder; 15 Balladen und Romanzen (Leipzig, с.1875).
776 SOLO SONG
[The Cavalier’s Nightsong], to a text by Feodor Loewe beginning
‘Zu Ross! zu Ross" o
SULLIVAN
Of the next generation Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) is perhaps to
be classified among the ‘Germans’: certainly he completed his
musical education at Leipzig as the first holder of the Mendelssohn
Scholarship, awarded by the Royal Academy of Music. His serious
songs are all early in date; among them are five Shakespeare settings
of 1863-4, the finest of which is also the best known, “Orpheus with
his Lute' (Ex. 488). Its richly textured accompaniment can be called
Mendelssohnian in a general way, but there is much about the song
Ex. 488
Allegro moderato
flowrs E-ver sprung.
that is fresh and original, and it has a youthful forthrightness and
confidence perhaps well calculated to appeal to Anglo-Saxon ears.
Sullivan was responsible for the first English ‘song cycle’ in the
German sense, The Window, or The Songs of the Wrens (1869), in
which he collaborated with Tennyson. (The original plan was for Sir
John Millais to provide illustrations, but this English Ge-
samtkunstwerk was never fully realized.) Despite the poor quality of
the verses, Sullivan produced some very attractive songs, exploiting
to the full his natural melodic gift as well as the technical resources
he had acquired in Leipzig. No. 8, ‘No Answer’, shows what he
could do with a simple sixteen-bar tune (Ex. 489).
ART-SONG IN AMERICA 777
Ех. 489
Andante espressivo
Winds are loud and you— are dumb: Take my love, for
love_ will come, Love will come but oneei a life,
Love will come but Опсе = a life.
WOMEN COMPOSERS
The first woman to hold the Mendelssohn Scholarship, Maude
Valérie White (1855-1937), published ап A/bum of German Songs
which included several successful Lieder in the Mendelssohn- Brahms
tradition; in Geoffrey Bush's opinion her masterpiece in this genre
is ‘Die Himmelsaugen’ (1885),^^ while her English songs never
reached the same level of inspiration. Liza Lehmann (1862-1918),
herself a soprano singer of some note, also succeeded in this line,
publishing two sets of German Lieder, but then went on to
produce some excellent songs in her own language. Lacking a great
spontaneous gift for melody, she gains her best effects by unexpected
harmonic and rhythmic twists, by unusually full and rich piano
accompaniments and interludes, and by intelligent text setting. Her
highest achievement is the song cycle based on Tennyson’s In
memoriam (1898). It is so continuous as to be almost a cantata,
with few decisive breaks between songs, many thematic links and
recapitulations, and a predominantly narrative-dramatic tone broken
by occasional spells of more regularly phrased lyrical material. The
cycle ends with an optional epilogue for spoken voice with piano.
A work of this kind may be said to have transcended the direct
German influence, and this is still more clearly true of the late-
nineteenth-century songs of Parry, Stanford, and Somervell.
ART-SONG IN AMERICA
The American art-song had come even more strongly under
German hegemony, as a whole procession of composers, beginning
with Richard Willis (1819-1900) in 1841, travelled to Leipzig to
144 Bush, ‘Songs’, in Nicholas Temperley (ed.), Music in Britain: The Romantic Age 1800-
1914 (London, 1981), 281.
778 SOLO SONG
complete their studies; their number was augmented by several
German born and trained composers who settled in the States.145
John Knowles Paine (1839-1906) published only eight songs, but
they show a refined skill and a surprising affinity with Sterndale
Bennett: for example, ‘I wore your Roses yesterday’ (1879), quoted
by Upton. The same may be said of Dudley- Buck (1839-1909),
whose ‘Sunset’ (1877), to a poem by the American poet-musician
Sidney Lanier, attains some melodic distinction. The chief resource
of these German-trained Americans, by then somewhat outdated,
was the continuous accompaniment of broken or repeated chords
sustaining a melody of regular phrase structure. But Buck in his
later songs, such as 'Spring's Awakening’ (1893), moved on to freer
and more varied styles. In the songs of Homer Bartlett (1846-1920)
a certain lushness of harmony infuses the texture, and this is further
developed in the work of George Chadwick (1854-1931) and, above
all, Edward Macdowell (1861-1908).
Chadwick, belonging to the school of "Boston Classicists', perhaps
awaits upward re-evaluation; and two sets of his songs to lyrics by
Arlo Bates (1850-1918) have been reprinted.!46 Boston intellectual
society was in the 1890s experiencing a delayed wave of orientalism,
represented in Bate's poems Told in the Gate (1892), some settings
of which Chadwick published in 1897. The other Bates set is a Flower
Cycle (1902), each poem a miniature describing a particular flower.
Chadwick writes effective melodies, using the high notes of the voice
to good effect; his harmonies and accompaniment textures are quite
varied, though in all cases German-derived. “The Cardinal Flower’
has three verses, each divided into a quiet 3/4 section in which the
Ex. 490
largamente
[1.] low; then the Car - di-nal a
[2.] all; flower, her im - age mir-rored
145 Details in William T. Upton, Art-song in America (Boston and New York, 1930), chaps.
4 and 5.
146 In Earlier American Music, xvi (1980), with an introduction by Steven Ledbetter.
MACDOWELL 779
blaze withsplen - did fire, their fan
throws while proud as beau-ti - ful
voice doubles the lowest note of repeated chords in the piano, and
a passionate outburst in 4/4 (Ex. 490). In the first two verses the
first section is in D minor and the second in F major; in the last,
the keys are respectively D major and F sharp major. Unfortunately
the character of this passage is justified only by the words of the
first verse. But this is a resourceful song.
MACDOWELL
Macdowell came into early contact with Latin American and
French musicians, but the decisive period in his training was spent
in Germany (1879-88), where the predominant influence was that of
Raff. For some years he contemplated settling in Germany, but he
returned to the United States in 1887, and there spent the rest of
his short career. Several of his earliest sets of songs were written to
German texts. Their accompaniments are almost complete piano
pieces in themselves: in ‘Oben, wo die Sterne glühen' [In the Skies,
where Stars are Glowing], Op. 11, No. 3 (1883) (Ex. 491), for
instance, the voice often sings little more than an inner harmonic
part, though the rich texture is undeniably attractive.
Ex. 491
Andante, ma non troppo
В,
ben, wo die g Ster
the skies, where stars are glow - ing, Must— sweet
Ber.
Ce
780 SOLO SONG
uns." die "Freu ©- den ББ. еп die uns un = ten
joys for us be grow - ing, Which on earth pass
[4 A ai EE Ses EES =}
==
ae ee E EE CS E e mc]
у me air? АЕР ee
The set From an Old Garden, Op. 26 (1887), suffers from impossibly
arch texts by Margaret Deland; again, each is about a flower. With
Six Love Songs, Op. 40 (1890),147 Macdowell comes into his own as
a setter of English verse. He begins to write more convincingly vocal
melodies (Op. 40, No. 2) and to explore other moods besides the
sweetly sentimental (e.g. in ‘Folksong’, Op. 47, No. 3). In the later
sets there is a welcome simplification of the piano texture which
forces greater concentration on melody. From Op. 56 onwards
Macdowell largely supplied his own verse, and his final mastery of
the art-song is well demonstrated in ‘Long Ago’, Op. 56, No. 1, a
sophisticated ‘folk’ song in simple ternary form; or in ‘Fair Spring-
tide’, Op. 60, No. 2, where a like simplicity is enhanced by the
contrasting plunge from D minor to A flat major at the words ‘Ah
Springtide, thou dost touch the quick of ev'ry creature here below'.
Macdowell's edge over other Americans lay chiefly in his mastery of
late-Romantic European harmonic style. His songs have been greatly
underestimated, chiefly because they are not ‘American’ enough for
such intensely patriotic critics as Gilbert Chase.148 But he never
came to grips with the challenge of setting great poetry to music.
1^7 Macdowell's songs, Opp. 40, 47, 56, 58, and 60, have been reprinted in Earlier American
Music, vii (1972).
148 Chase, America's Music, pp. 363-4.
ART-SONG IN THE ENGLISH TRADITION 781
ART-SONG IN THE ENGLISH TRADITION
All through this period there were British and American composers
who resisted or ignored the German dominance and achieved some
success in the development of art-song in the English tradition. Of
course, the line cannot be strictly drawn, either between these
composers and the ‘German’ school, or between the art-song and
the drawing-room ballad. But in Britain, at least, there arose a group
of composers not without talent who were determined to keep alive
a type of song represented in the early nineteenth century by the
serious work of composers like Clarke-Whitfeld, Wesley, and Bishop.
They tended to find models in stage music, where the predominant
foreign influence was Italian rather than German, but where English
opera was also experiencing a rebirth; or in the indigenous traditions
of church music. The bolder spirits were inspired by the English
Romantic poets.
John Barnett (1802-90), Michael William Balfe (1808-70), Edward
James Loder (1813-65), and George Alexander Macfarren (1813-
87) were all leading figures in the development of English Romantic
opera. All composed a fair number of ballads (often the most
profitable parts of their operas); Barnett and Loder produced them
on a massive scale. In this respect they differed from the 'German'
school— Bennett and Pierson regarded ballads as betrayals of their
artistic integrity —but all four, given the opportunity, aimed at higher
artistic goals.
Barnett in 1834 published an ambitious collection entitled Lyric
Illustrations of the Modern Poets, which contains some of the earliest
settings of Shelley and Wordsworth, in an uncompromising style
quite distinct from his facile ballad idiom. He claimed to have written
them purely ‘for his own gratification’ and to have had them 'bitterly
abused by the ... Musical Profession and Press',!4? and indeed
Henry Chorley in the Athenaeum did maintain that 'the dreamy
reveries of Shelley are not things to be sung ... Mr. Barnett seems
to have been overborne by the fullness and spirituality of the
poetry he had selected.’150 Several of the songs, however, achieve
considerable stature without close imitation of existing models: best
of all is ‘I arise from Dreams of thee’ (Shelley).15!
Balfe and Loder enjoyed a facility in writing memorable melodies
that was denied to Barnett. Balfe’s famous ‘Come into the Garden,
149 Bush, ‘Songs’, pp. 269-70. Two songs from this collection are in English Songs (1800-
1860), pp. 44 and 49.
150 Athenaeum (1834), 753.
151 English Songs (1800-1860), p. 44.
782. SOLO SONG
Maud’!5? is a serious song rather than a ballad, and he also wrote
serious settings of Kingsley (e.g. “The Sands of Dee’)!53 and
Longfellow (‘Goodnight, beloved’). Loder, though trained in Ger-
many, indicated his loyalty to the tradition of Bishop’s Shakespeare
songs in the preface to his collection Songs of the Poets (1844), some
of which suggest nationalism by their emphasis on the pentatonic
scale. But his outstanding work is elsewhere, particularly in ‘In-
vocation to the Deep’ (c.1845) (Ex. 492),!54 and ‘I heard a Brooklet
Gushing’ (1850),155 the latter a setting of Longfellow's translation
Ex. 492
Andante
póco'accel.- een ша e Be =
I ЕЕРЕЕ
must thou hear, yet must thou hear a
Dem Tr e
ran WA G
=
Pt ee ey EE d Ee Ed
Lee e
152 Ibid... p. 52.
за рот
154 Complete ibid., р. 88.
155 Ibid., p. 94.
ART-SONG IN THE ENGLISH TRADITION 783
of Wilhelm Müller’s “Wohin? from the Schöne Müllerin cycle. In
these songs Loder combines a richness of fundamentally diatonic
melody and harmony with well-developed pianism.
Macfarren demonstrated his nationalism by his choice of subjects
for operas and texts for songs, and by his undaunted championship
of British music. Of his few serious songs, a pair published in 1867
with clarinet obbligato are the most remarkable: ‘Pack, Clouds,
away’ (Heywood) and ‘The Widow Bird’ (Shelley).!?6 Geoffrey Bush
has also drawn attention to an unusual set of four songs with prose
texts taken from The Arabian Nights.15*
John Liptrot Hatton (1809-86) was also a man of the theatre; he
composed operas and incidental music, and developed a one-man
show in which he delivered recitations and comic songs at the piano.
He also published an important collection of English songs. His
Songs, and other Poems by Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Sedley (1850) has
much in common with Barnett's and Loder’s ‘serious’ collections,
including the claims in the preface, in which Hatton said he had
written the songs ‘for his own amusement’. These are miniatures,
and as such can withstand the unvarying four- or eight-bar phrase
structure which was Hatton's weakness. They are unpretentious,
highly apt for their texts, and benefit from excellent writing for the
piano, as in No. 12, ‘To Daisies’ (Ex. 493), which can claim authentic
English roots in the line of Clementi, Field, and Bennett. In the best
known song of this set, ‘To Anthea’,158 Hatton rises to considerable
passion.
Ex. 493
Con moto
- lia close Her.. life- be - get - ting
156 [bid., p. 80.
15? One of these ibid., p. 76.
Ir Hoster SE).
784 SOLO SONG
selfe to live or
let the whole world then dis-pose It
——=j_ che
INDIGENOUS SONG IN THE UNITED STATES
This type of song had its parallel in a later generation of American
composers. Nationalism ran high in the United States in those times.
William Н. Fry (1813-64), who wrote the first American ‘grand
opera’, made a strong plea for an indigenous style in American
art-music.!?? But he left no independent songs. George F. Bristow
(1825-98), also an opera composer, studied with Macfarren in
London, and his songs, on the borderline between ballad and
art-song, have much affinity with both Macfarren's and Loder's.
Francis Boott (1813-1904) was a prolific song-writer who took his
main models from Italian opera. His setting of Kingsley’s “The Sands
of Dee’160 makes an interesting contrast with Balfe's.
The most talented American of the ‘indigenous’ school, however,
was Alfred H. Pease (1838-82), whose songs have been woefully
neglected despite strong advocacy by William Upton. After his
training in Germany, which gave him ample technical mastery, Pease
reverted to a style that owed much to the ballad or ‘national song’,
and worked on the problems of setting Romantic English poetry.
“беа Song’ by Kingsley (1872), is modal; ‘It’s we two for aye’ by
Jean Ingelow (1874), is pentatonic; many others contain moments
of quite individual colouring, for instance ‘My Little Love’ by Mary
H. Higham (1878). The beginning of this last song is shown in
Ex. 494. It is ternary in form, the first (and third) parts beginning
159 Musical World and Times, 21 January 1854.
160 Quoted in Upton, Art-song in America, p. 32.
INDIGENOUS SONG IN THE UNITED STATES 785
Ех. 494
Moderato Р
Rest close in his en-cir-cling
My heart is with you, as
kneel topray, Good-night! God keep you in His care al-way. Good-night!
786 SOLO SONG
in A minor and ending in С major; the middle section is in В major
and E major. Ternary form was often chosen by Pease, but the
middle section is often in an unexpected key. Of fifty-four known
songs, nine (including Ex. 494) are lullabies, but he explored a
number of different veins including a ‘Hungarian Air’, a ‘Bedouin
Song’, and an Italianate ‘Brindisi’, and he set poems of Tennyson,
Longfellow, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as well as some of
little worth. Unhappily Pease failed to gain recognition from his
compatriots, and any further development of a distinctively American
art-song had to await the coming of Charles Ives.!61
THE ‘SACRED SONG’
A sub-genre cultivated in Victorian homes on both sides of the
Atlantic was the ‘sacred song’. Large quantities of simple-minded
ones were published, often of still less worth than the average secular
ballad. But on occasion serious composers tried their hand. Sterndale
Bennett wrote a few sacred songs of some merit (“The Better Land’
is the most notable); Loder published a collection of fine and deeply
felt Sacred Songs and Ballads, dedicated to Bennett, in 1840, the texts
being metrical paraphrases of biblical passages by M. D. Ryan.
Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-76), by profession a church musician,
contributed some fine songs that partake of his very individual
anthem style, especially ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ (1836) and a set
of three metrical collects published as Sacred Songs in 1851.19? In
the United States, Dudley Buck, also a leading organist and church
musician, was the best representative of this tradition; his Three
Offertories, Op. 91 (1882), bring an unabashed Romanticism, not
unlike that of Sullivan’s ‘The Lost Chord’, to the setting of strictly
liturgical texts in a way that offends some tastes but shows undeniable
skill and resource.
161 See Vol. X, pp. 575, 582.
162 ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ and one of the collects are in English Songs (1800-1860)
pp. 65 and 70.
PARRY ANDSTANFORD 787
PARRY AND STANFORD
In the last three decades of the century foundations for a new
flowering of English song were laid by Charles Hubert Hastings
Parry (1848-1918) and Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), though
the idea that they led an English musical renaissance is perhaps
exaggerated since, at least in this branch of the art, a worthy tradition
already existed. German influence, by this time chiefly in the person
of Brahms, was clearly evident in both men's work, but their powers
were of an order to assert strong independent personality. Parry in his
youth spent only one long summer in Germany, where, interestingly
enough, he studied with Pierson; it was perhaps due to his teacher's
example that he composed Four Sonnets of Shakespeare with German
and English words between 1873 and 1882 (pub. 1837).163 The
Anglo-Irish Stanford studied at Leipzig with Reinecke, and at Berlin
under Kiel, and published two sets of Heine Lieder (Opp. 4 and 7).
Of the two, it was Parry who made the art-song one of the most
important branches of his activity as a composer. He organized
seventy-four major songs into a series of books published as English
Lyrics, Sets 1-10, between 1885 and 1918; two more sets were
published after his death, made up of songs from various periods of
his life; and there were many more, some published, some left in
manuscript.
Parry's superior education and knowledge of literature and aes-
thetics made him exquisitely sensitive to the rhythms and finer
connotations of English poetry. As a result, he wrote few strophic
songs; even those that come close to repeating the music of the first
verse make slight variations to fit the text. A good example occurs
in ‘Blow, blow, thou Winter Wind’ (1886),1594 one of the most
deservedly well known of his Shakespeare settings. Ex. 495 shows
Ex. 495
Moderato, deciso
Thou art not so un-kind As man's in - gra - ti-tude;
163 All four pub. in Hubert Parry: Songs, ed. Geoffrey Bush (Musica Britannica, 49; 1982).
хаав p28:
788 SOLO SONG
Thy tooth is not so keen
how Parry avoids the first beat of the bar in the second, third, and
fourth lines of verse 1, and uses an imperfect cadence before returning
to the opening melody at ‘Thy tooth ...’. In verse 2, however, the
line ‘As benefits forgot’ has a different natural accentuation from its
correlate in verse 1. Parry shifts the musical phrase accordingly, so
that it ends on a G; and he now takes advantage of this change to
omit the dominant harmony of the imperfect cadence (Ex. 496).
Ex. 496
cresc. molto
—
S / D d La am
| EE EE
Both verses reach a splendid climax on a high G sharp near the end;
Parry was acutely conscious of the need to reserve highest notes for
a climax near the end of a song, and, indeed, he discussed this matter
in one of his essays. There are several other first-rate Shakespeare
settings: finest of all, perhaps, is ‘Take, О take those Lips away’,165
with voice and piano well integrated, phrase structure perfectly
matched to the poem, shapely vocal phrases of slightly uneven length,
and a wonderful control of harmony to induce, in a mere twenty-three
bars, a mood of mellow reminiscence. In its economy of means this
song resembles the best of Hugo Wolf.
Parry responded well to other English classics such as Lovelace
and Suckling, and to the Romantic poets, though he could also
165 [bid., p. 24.
PARRY ANDSTANFORD 789
make something out of second-rate contemporary verse. Although
his predominant mood is grave, he could adapt his style to a lighter
humour, as in his second, published setting of Suckling’s “Why so
Pale and Wan?’ (1895). Among the more obviously Brahmsian songs
are “Willow, Willow’ (1895), ‘There be none of Beauty’s Daughters’
(1897), and ʻO never say that I was False of Heart’ (1907).166 He
was also capable, however, of a robust ‘English’ style, as in ‘Under
the Greenwood Tree’ (1902).167
One of his most original, and perhaps greatest, songs is ‘Lay a
Garland on my Hearse' (1902),168 to a short text from Beaumont
and Fletcher. Again the song is only twenty bars in length; it is in
G minor, in a free ternary form, with an unusual piano coda turning
to G major. A point of particular acumen is the setting of the line
‘My love was false, but I was firm’ (Ex. 497): the word ‘false’ is set
on an E to the totally surprising chord of A major, soon followed
by ‘firm’ on an F with a 6/4 harmony of B flat, a more predictable
chord in the middle section of such a song.
Ex. 497
Lento espressivo f rit. f —
L. E аа 0
Му Іохе wae Valse, u =... —_ but I was
For Stanford, songs were a proportionately less significant part of
a very large output which included major contributions to opera,
166 All three are ibid.. pp. 22, 43, and 77.
167 [bid., p. 67.
168 [bid., p. 54.
790 SOLO SONG
symphony, cathedral music, part-songs, and chamber music. He
composed more fluently than Parry ‘and was less critical of the
results, so that there are many mediocre songs, though the days
when an aspiring serious composer might also publish ballads were
now past. Nothing in his work ever surpassed the early ‘La Belle
Dame sans merci' (1877), a ballad in another sense—a narrative
romance. This was extraordinary in several respects. It was virtually
the first setting of any poem by Keats, the most difficult of all the
Romantics (and indeed, not widely known until the publication of
his Complete Poems in 1876). The young composer embarked with
confidence on the setting of this long, mysterious and difficult poem;
and he attempted a feat scarcely known before in English music, the
unification of an extended work by deriving the whole from a short
opening motif. In the telling of the dream the music mounts to a
most powerful and passionate climax (Ex. 498), before returning to
the sparse, understated texture of the first verse. It is the obvious
way to shape the song, but supremely effective in this instance. There
are several other examples of Stanford using his greater fluency to
carry off narrative songs on the grand scale, such as Parry rarely
attempted: 'Prospice' by Browning (1884) and ‘Tears’ from
Whitman's Songs of Faith, Op. 97 (1908), are among the best.
Ex. 498
Con moto Poco più mosso
PARRY AND STANFORD 791
Stanford could also succeed on a smaller, homelier scale, as in
A Child's Garland of Songs, by Stevenson (1892) and Three Songs,
Op. 43, by Bridges (1897). He also developed a humorous ‘dialect’
vein more successfully than Parry, as in Burns's ‘Dainty Davie’ and
"The Bold Unbiddable Child' (by W. M. Letts) Op. 140, No. 5
(1914).
Stanford devoted much energy to the folk-songs of his native
Ireland. He brought out Songs of Old Ireland (1883), then prepared
his own edition of Moore's Irish Melodies, Op. 60 (1895), in which
he reharmonized all the songs in a way he considered more
appropriate to the style of the tunes. The harmonic idiom that he
evolved in this process is only lightly coloured by modality and
pentatonicism; it differs from his normal style chiefly in the avoidance
of chromatic dissonance. But it is a significant step towards the more
thorough-going folk idiom of the next generation. It seems to have
had a good deal of influence, for example, on J. A. Fuller Maitland's
settings of folk-songs collected by Cecil Ѕһагр.!69
Beginning with An Irish Idyll in Six Miniatures, by Moira O'Neill
(1901), Stanford brought out several sets of songs with texts in Irish
dialect verse, in which the style he had developed in his folk-song
settings was applied to original compositions with little apparent
difficulty. Often his most effective device was the haunting juxta-
position of two remote chords, as in the best-known example, “The
Fairy Lough’ from the /rish Idyll. Greater harmonic originality is
displayed in another from the same set, ‘A Broken Song’. The verse
depicts a man wistfully talking to himself about his departed love.
The questions he asks himself (Where am I from? “What o my
love? etc.) are all at the same pitch, in A minor,!?? in the first verse;
the second contains a short happy interlude as the speaker remembers
her ‘laughin’ ... blushin’...’. In the third the questions descend
169 One Hundred English Folk Songs (London, 1916; repr. 1975).
170 The keys mentioned refer to the high-voice edition.
792 SOLO SONG
through increasingly dark harmonies on the flat side of the tonic, at
one point reaching E flat minor. The masterly closing bars (Ex. 499)
return to the tonic in a way that is mysterious, melancholy, and yet
expressive of resignation: a perfect representation of the feeling of
the verse.
Ex. 499
One other late-nineteenth-century British composer, Arthur
Somervell (1862-1937), deserves mention for his contributions to the
song cycle, a genre in which neither Parry nor Stanford took much
interest. He wrote five cycles for voice and piano, of which by far
the most distinguished is Maud (1898). Instead of merely extracting
the obviously lyrical passages from Tennyson's poem, Somervell
chose portions that would allow the songs to represent fully the
tragic story, explaining his purpose in the preface. He then produced
a series of settings that quite equals the poetry in passion, range of
feeling, invention, and psychological depth, taking care to unify the
cycle tonally and thematically.
x
CHORAL MUSIC
By GERALD ABRAHAM
THE vast output of choral music, religious and secular, during this
period was not only heterogeneous but often hybridized by crossing
with symphony and opera. Even the Mass was sometimes affected,
but religious music at its best was often extra-ecclesiastical. The most
characteristic form was oratorio, exemplified by Carl Loewe’s
Die Zerstörung Jerusalems (1832), Die sieben Schläfer (1835), and
Palestrina (1841)—in which the master himself and part of his Missa
Papae Marcelli are introduced—and Johann Hus (1843). Loewe's
Gutenberg (1835) is only peripherally religious, but the chorus of
printer apprentices as they carry their master's Psalter to the cathedral
at Mainz (Ex. 500) is a charming chorale pastiche.
An early champion of Bach was Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859), one
of the first to revive the Matthew Passion, although his own music
shows little Bachian influence. In Die letzten Dinge (1826), Des
Heilands letze Stunden (1835), and Der Fall Babylons (1840) he escapes
from his notorious chromaticism only into square-cut diatonicism,
as in the fugal entry in Die letzten Dinge in Ex. 501.
MENDELSSOHN
On a higher plane are the oratorios of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
(1809-47), Paulus (1836) and Elias (1846). In the former he adopted
Ex. 500
Andante grazioso
orch 8va
Pu
(Thou baptizest the child in the dream; thou baptizest the metal.)
794 CHORAL MUSIC
Ex. 501
Allegro moderato
i - ne Wer-ke Herr
All-mäch -ti-ger Gott, — All-mách
[G3 M — a o nem o
Rd Dagmar mg ee ees
EE Р „з fe ашыш SS EE EE ER
[uu Se) he ms
са
(Great and wonderful are Thy works, God Almighty!)
from Bach, whose Matthew Passion he had resuscitated in 1829, the
interpolation of chorales. The overture opens with “Wachet auf,
which recurs later in the work, punctuated by brass fanfares, and
one of the finest chorales (sung by a solo quartet instead of chorus)
is 'O Jesu Christe, wahres Licht’, a simple jewel in a beautifully
wrought setting (Ex. 502). Fine in totally different ways are the
chorus ‘Aber unser Gott ist im Himmel’ (sung first by Paul alone)
with the chorale melody ‘Wir glauben All’ an einem Gott’ as cantus
firmus, and the idyllic chorus 'Siehe, wir preisen selig'. On the other
hand the ease with which Mendelssohn could lapse into amiable
platitudes is demonstrated in ‘Wie lieblich sind die Boten’. Amiable
platitudes are depressingly predominant in Elias, which has definite
characters— not only Elijah himself but Obadiah, Ahab, the widow,
and the priests of Baal; musical characterization was not
Mendelssohn's forte. Following Handel’s precedent in opening /srael
in Egypt with a recitative, he opened Elias with the prophet's
MENDELSSOHN 795
Ex: 502
Adagio
g кс. CHORUS
{ ==
а ee ie
TE Pn joe | ESCH 1С Zi
mae La
Je - su Chri-ste, wah-res Licht
(O Jesus Christ, true light)
announcement of the coming drought, which is duly suggested by
the fugal overture. His genius is displayed only in commentary,
above all in the idyllic chorus ‘Siehe der Hüter Israels schläft noch
schlummert nicht’.
The most ambitious of Mendelssohn’s other works for chorus and
orchestra was the Lobgesang (1840), which he styled Sinfonie-Kantate,
a disastrous attempt to follow in the wake of Beethoven’s Ninth:
three instrumental movements followed by ten vocal ones—by far
the finest of which is, significantly, the chorale, one verse for
six-part choir a cappella and one for unison chorus with orchestral
accompaniment. Mendelssohn had been particularly struck by the
power of the Lutheran chorales when he was given them in Weimar!
and he made a setting of ‘Aus tiefer Not’, Op. 23, No. 1; even earlier
he had composed ‘Christe, du Lamm Gottes’ (1827) and ‘Jesu, meine
Freude’ (1828);? ‘Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh’ darein’? dates from
1832. The finest of his psalms for chorus and orchestra, ‘Da Israel
aus Egypten zog’, was composed in 1839. Much more unusual was
a secular work, a setting of Goethe’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht ‚which
1 Letter to Zelter, 16 Oct. 1830.
? Ed. Brian W. Pritchard (Hilversum, 1972); facsimile of the autograph, with introduction
by Oswald Jonas (Chicago, 1966).
3 Ed. Pritchard, and see Pritchard, ‘Mendelssohn’s Chorale Cantatas: An Appraisal’,
Musical Quarterly, 62 (1976), 1.
CHORAL MUSIC
796
Ex. 503
Allegro molto
in
und Eul’
үза аруана EE) Ea F |
ra
IP T
LZ
(Owl and screech-owl hoot in our hooting round! Come! Come!)
5СНОМАММ 797
in its original form was ‘half-composed’ in Rome early in 1831 and
completed in July of that year but ‘resurrected’ in somewhat altered
form in December 1842.4 Its most remarkable number is the chorus
‘Kommt mit Zacken’ (Ex. 503), which has been described as ‘one of
the most powerful things that Mendelssohn ever wrote'.? A cantata
Lauda Sion (1846), a quantity of church music, some of it Anglican,®
and a score or more unaccompanied part-songs are of little account.
SCHUMANN
Robert Schumann (1810-56) was late in attempting choral music
and he was never really happy in it. His pianist hands betrayed him
into block-chordal writing and he sensibly converted his first choral
essay, a setting of Heine's Tragódie (1841), into songs with piano.
Two years later came the far more ambitious Das Paradies und die
Peri, possibly suggested by Heinrich Marschner's ‘overture, songs
and choruses’, Klänge aus Osten, which he had admired the year
before and compared with Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette. He described
his own work, based on a sometimes very free adaptation of part
of Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh by his friend Emil Flechsig, as "an
oratorio but not for the oratory—rather for cheerful people’. The
best choral numbers are the chorus of Nile spirits, ‘Hervor aus den
Wassern' in Part II, and the chorus of houris which opens Part III
(Ex. 504). But the solo parts are unlit by the genius which informs
so many of Schumann's Lieder; Moore-Flechsig was much less
inspiring than Heine and Goethe, Ruckert and Eichendorff.
Ex. 504
Nicht sehr schnell
Schmück-et die Stu - fen zu Al - lahs Thron, Schmückt sie mit
E
5. |623 хош ЕЕРЕЕ
Schmück - et die Stu-fen zu
See his letters, 22 Feb. and 15 July 1831 and 11 Dec. 1842.
5 Philip Radcliffe, Mendelssohn (London, 1954), 139.
6 See Rudolf Werner, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy als Kirchenmusiker (Frankfurt, 1930).
798 CHORAL MUSIC
Blu - men Freun-din-nen al - le
pe
Schmückt.sie mit Blu - теп, _
rE
KE EE SE
(Deck the steps to Allah’s throne; deck them with flowers)
Ех. 505
Lebhaft
ri
[2 ==; LE
3 3 3f
3
go ent) Fre P P XM
СЕ CRRERCESELLEECHEERERE
= ze
m N
(Just look at the mighty wings!)
BERLIOZ 799
Schumann seldom breaks away from note-against-note choral
writing, even in ‘Seht die machtigen Flügel doch an!’ in the beautiful
Requiem für Mignon (1840) from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (Ex. 505),
nor in much of the fine second setting of ‘Alles Vergängliche’ in the
zenen aus Goethes Faust (1847). Der Rose Pilgerfahrt is notable only
for the curiously Wagnerian tenor solo ‘Und wie ein Jahr verronnen
ist. From these last years of his sanity, 1851-3, also dated four
ballad-cantatas for soloists’ chorus, and orchestra, and a Mass and
Requiem composed in the atmosphere of Catholic Düsseldorf. During
his later years, particularly 1849, he also composed choral music for
the amateur choirs he conducted in Leipzig and Dresden.
Catholic Bavaria and Austria themselves had nothing more
memorable to show. The Masses and oratorios of Sigismund
Neukomm (1778-1858)— Christi Grablegung (1827), Auferstehung
(1841), and Himmelfahrt (1842)—and the thirty-five Masses of Simon
Sechter (1788-1867) only gather the dust of history.
BERLIOZ
Five months before the first performance of Das Paradies und die
Peri, Wagner had conducted his Liebesmahl der Apostel at Dresden
with a male choir of 1200 and an orchestra of a hundred, a force
no doubt suggested by the Grande Messe des morts (1837) and the
Symphonie funébre et triomphale (1840) of Hector Berlioz (1803-69).
His Te deum (‘a trois chœurs avec orchestre et orgue concertants’)
was composed later (1849) and not performed until 1855 to preface
the opening of the Exposition Universelle in Paris. (At the end of
the Exposition he conducted a cantata for two choirs and orchestra,
L’Imperiale, dedicated to Napoleon III; it was his last choral
composition.) These monster conceptions hark back to open-air
festival works of the First Republic which culminated in Méhul's
Chant national for three choirs and three orchestras and Le Sueur's
Chant du Ier Vendemiaire” for four choirs and four orchestras (both
1800). In strong contrast are the /égende dramatique of La damnation
de Faust (1846), and, still more, the touching little oratorio, L Enfance
du Christ (1854).
Even the Grande Messe des morts conceived for performance at
the Invalides, with its four brass orchestras, four cornets, four
trombones and two tubas to the north, four trumpets and four
trombones to the east, four trumpets and four trombones to the
west, four trumpets, four trombones and four tubas to the south in
* See Vol. VIII, p. 656.
800 CHORAL MUSIC
the Tuba mirum, has touching passages: the ‘Quid sum miser’, the
exquisite Sanctus, the Agnus Dei. And nowhere in all music are
strokes on bass-drum and cymbals, pianissimo possibile, employed
with more thrilling effect. In the ‘Tibi omnes’ of the Te deum there
is similar restraint: the third choir (of sopranos and altos) enters
only four times for a few bars to add brightness and strength to the
acclamation 'pleni sunt coeli'. None of these effects is as theatrical
as the upward sweep of the hitherto silent orchestra in Wagner's
Liebesmahl, intended to suggest the ‘sound from heaven as of a
rushing mighty wind’ on the day of Pentecost.8
In L’ Enfance the theatrical is limited to the first part of the trilogie
sacrée, ‘Herod’s dream’, and to the first eight numbers of that. When
the Virgin sings 'O mon cher fils’ and Joseph adds his blessing,
Berlioz prepares to pass into a Pre-Raphaelite vision of the shepherds'
farewell (Ex. 506), followed by the Narrator’s ‘Repos de la Sainte
Famille’. The summit of naiveté is touched when the Holy Family
are entertained by three young Ishmaelites with a very long trio for
harp and two flutes, but Berlioz turns from the pleasantly ridiculous
to the near sublime at the end of his final, unaccompanied, chorus:
О mon coeur, emplis-toi du grave et pur amour
Qui seul eut nous ouvrir le celeste sejour.
La Damnation de Faust is a revised and vastly expanded version
of the Huit scénes de Faust of seventeen years earlier, the expansion
Ex. 506
Allegretto
E fy
= = = 5 = e a o
Е men уа loin H ter- re Où dans Пе = ta bles
(He goes far from the land where in the stable he saw the light.)
8 Acts 2: 2.
BERLIOZ’S CONTEMPORARIES 801
consisting most importantly of the introduction of Faust himself
whose ‘Nature immense, impénetrable et fiere’ in Scene xvi is one of
Berlioz's finest inventions. But the chorus was rarely a dispensable
ingredient in his compositions; the symphonie dramatique Roméo et
Juliette (1839) has choruses, solos, and a 'prologue en récitatif
choral’; the Symphonie funebre et triomphale was given a final
chorus; the three 7ristia are all for chorus and orchestra, although
in No. 3 (1848), the March funébre pour la derniére scéne de Hamlet,
the choir have only one word to sing. Of the six pieces constituting
the preposterous monodrame lyrique of Lélio, which Berlioz appended
to the Symphonie fantastique, three involve a chorus.
BERLIOZ'S CONTEMPORARIES
In his Conservatoire days Berlioz had incurred the enmity of Luigi
Cherubini (1760-1842); nevertheless he admired a great deal in the
older man's work, and when his own Requiem was preferred to
Cherubini’s for the Invalides ceremony in 1837 he wrote the old man
a touching letter.? The veteran died a few years later but younger
men were coming along: Félicien David (1810-76), Charles Gounod
(1818-93), César Franck (1822-90). Before turning to opera, David
composed four choral works: an ode-symphonie, Le Désert (1844); an
oratorio, Moise au Sinai (1846), a second ode-symphonie, Christophe
Colomb, ou la découverte du nouveau monde (1847), and a mystére,
L’ Eden (1848). Le Désert, for speaker, solo tenor, male choir and
orchestra, is notable less for its musical value than for its claim to
be one of the earliest European compositions to borrow authentic
oriental material. David was in the Middle East during 1833-5 and
the ‘Chant du Muezzin’ which opens the troisieme partie (Ex. 507)
is certainly authentic, as are probably the ‘Réverie du soir’ and some
of the themes іп the ‘Fantaisie arabe’ and ‘Danse des Almées’.
Ex. 507
El___Sa-la-ma-lek a lei-kou-mel Sa - lah
9 24 Mar. 1837. On Cherubini’s D minor Requiem see Vol. VIII, pp. 623-5. The Dies irae,
a shattering stroke worthy of the younger man, is quoted in Basil Deane, Cherubini (Oxford,
1965), 31-
802 CHORAL MUSIC
(Peace be with you)
Gounod was much more gifted by nature, more thoroughly trained,
and vastly more prolific. His envois from Rome—he had been
awarded the Grand Prix in 1839—included two Masses and a Te
deum. Plainsong and old Italian church music became lasting
influences. On his return from Rome he spent five years as maitre
de chapelle of a Paris church and even contemplated taking orders.
He dreamed of restoring religious art in France,!? and during his
long life he composed nine Masses, three Requiems, and an enormous
quantity of other church music—to say nothing of a dozen operas—
and two 'sacred trilogies’. The fine Messe solennelle à Sainte-Cécile
(1855), with the solo soprano soaring above the chorus à bouche
fermée (Ex. 508), and the confidently affirmative Credo, are in marked
contrast to the saccharine chromaticism and diatonic platitudes of
the late trilogies.
As for Franck, his short églogue biblique en 3 parties, Ruth (1846),
Ex. 508
Larghetto
S. solo не = SSS
E >
10 Letter, 25 Mar. 1843, in J.-G. Prod’homme and Arthur Dandelot, Gounod (1818-1893)
(Paris, 1911), i. 89.
603
SS. Sa EE
ES > et EE аш A
22
shows little promise of the master who was to emerge nearly thirty
years later. His petit oratorio, La Tour de Babel (1865), was not even
published, and the only tolerably interesting number of Rut is the
chorus of reapers which opens the second part, ‘Le Champ de Booz’,
with its scoring for flutes, clarinets and bassoons, and joyous choral
crescendo (Ex. 509).
LISZT
The dominant figure in the world of Catholic music during the
latter part of the century was Ferenc Liszt (1811-86). His view was
liberal. In 1834 he wrote for the Gazette musicale de Paris an article
Ex. 509
Allegretto non troppo vivo molto cresc.
Char-monsla fa - ti - gue Par de joy-eux chants, char-mons іа fa-
ре nm N | EE g = =
[A pe EE E ey fe
Ue Zeg SS жишш DE Eee 0 eee A1 8 E E EE) Ben
Te AB SS eS SS SS EE eee ee a
v i-i PP Ben = =
Char - mons la fa-ti- gue Par de joy - eux
Char - mons la fa - ti-gue Par de joy - eux
es. bn, air pt uita
PP UPS с ОР wl
Ley: | |= 2] [ > ol rmm E uad oe ee |: — c 3
Ag
Char - mons la__ fa - ti- gue Pr ______ de joy-euxchants, char -
Lem mme 2 а ШТ ГТ
EE
TI... ei E EE „ышты a em ME HERO Le a een Een
804 CHORAL MUSIC
ti - gue Par de joy-eux chants.
А ПИЈЕ led Coe pee
2 Oe ee сс кшш ua
bb H ry]
res v р [ 1 Pr lef, SS OÖ un
Dé rE EE ED) EE DEE Se 155 re
chants, Par de joy-eux chants.
ei = = Ze = : = - =
И а RE BE К Л BE) Ber er We BT ei EE a d eo
Geier Ee
EES) Ee ` Fee Ce Feel Ee Tu Se
monsla_fa - ti-gue Par de joy-eux chants.
> >
ra% а 0а аав
Гак Ба кеттет лит —J ЕЕ FF SS SS SSS == и: er ==
КМ”, 12 Г] ET wi Si iS 7 Адыл u en m
А ы >= йй
s |] 2
= E I +
De E EE Bunde
E D) = SS aap еш EE RE
kc cec ces D
um ER EIS ie
МЗ 3 В
(Let's charm away fatigue with joyous songs.)
propounding the idea of ‘a new music... which shall be devotional,
strong and effective, uniting on a colossal scale theatre and church,
at the same time dramatic and sacred, splendid and simple, ceremonial
and sincere ... clear and profound’.!! His own earliest essay in this
field was a four-part Mass (1848), which he later revised, with the
addition of an organ part, in 1869. Next came a Missa solemnis with
orchestra for the consecration of the Basilica at Gran (Esztergom)
(1856), notable for the composer's favourite device of cross-reference:
thus the Christe is quoted at the Benedictus; the orchestral motif
which opens the Credo (and is transformed at ‘qui propter") reappears
at the final ‘Amen’; the triumphant ‘resurrexit’ of the Credo rings
out for the 'Hosannas' and for the 'Dona nobis pacem' of the Agnus
Dei. This was followed by another Missa choralis with organ (1865),
a Mass for the coronation of Franz Josef as King of Hungary (1867),
using some Hungarian themes and also, for some reason, a Credo
borrowed from Henry Du Mont's Cinq Messes en plain-chant of
1669,12 and a Requiem for male voices, organ, and brass (ad libitum).
Another work from the same period is a dramatic, not to say
theatrical, setting of Psalm 13 for tenor, chorus and large orchestra
(1855; rev. 1859).
Liszt turned rather belatedly to the favourite nineteenth-century
form: oratorio. He began Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth, with
a libretto by Otto Roquette, in 1857 and finished it in 1862; it had
11 German translation in ‘Über zukünftige Kirchenmusik’, Gesammelte Schriften, ii (Leipzig,
1881).
1? See Vol. V, p. 444.
SAT 805
Ex. 510
Andante moderato
dolcissimo
Ех. 511
Andante moderato
y— 4D
“т л A a Е.
ч
Y
de
SEI
to wait three more years for performance. St Elisabeth was a
Hungarian princess and the motto-theme pervading the whole work
is an antiphon, ‘In festo s. Elisabeth’ (actually for another Elisabeth,
a queen of Portugal) (Ex. 510). Another theme, associated with the
mourning of the poor for their benefactress and with her burial, is
taken from the Lyra coelestis of György Naray (Nagyszombat, 1695).13
A third quasi-Leitmotif is that of Hungary itself (Ex. 511). Die
Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth is organized in two parts, each
consisting of three scenes: Elisabeth's arrival at the Warburg, her
meeting with the Landgraf Ludwig who marries her, parting from
her as he sets off on a crusade; and the rage of Ludwig's jealous
mother who turns her out of the castle, Elisabeth's death, her burial
and canonization. Ex. 510 is treated with exquisite sweetness when
the bread and wine she 15 taking to a dying man miraculously turn
to roses. But the music of Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth
is somewhat operatic, with the result that it was later given
stage-performances for which it was unsuited. There is very little
element of opera in Liszt's second oratorio, Christus (1867), where
more of the material is based on plainsong but plainsong treated
rhythmically. He had quoted the Good Friday hymn ‘Crux fidelis’
in the Hunnenschlacht, and alluded to it, as a symbol of the Cross,
in connection with the crusaders in Die Legende von der heiligen
Elisabeth.
Christus is a triptych: ‘Christmas Oratorio’, ‘After Epiphany’, and
‘Passion and Resurrection’. The ‘Oratorio’ opens with the Advent
introit ‘Rorate сае’ (Ex. 512), a transformation of which, tutti
Ex
2 vn con sord.
P= =
13 Quoted in Bence Szabolcsi, 4 magyar zenetörtenet kezikönyve (2nd edn.; Budapest, 1955),
musical examples, p. 52.
806 CHORAL MUSIC
fortissimo, appears at the end of the work. The Angel’s message is
delivered by a soprano soloist, unaccompanied; the chorus answers
and goes on to sing the ‘Stabat mater speciosa’ also unaccompanied.
The ‘Song of the Shepherds at the Crib’ and the ‘March of the Three
Kings’, orchestral and mood-shattering, are redeemed by the ‘adagio
sostenuto’ for the Kings’ presentation. The Beatitudes—purely vocal
except for unobtrusive organ support—are introduced by Ex. 512.
The tempest and Christ’s stilling of the waves are dealt with in pages
of conventional noisy tone-painting, and ‘The Entry into Jerusalem’
is hardly more impressive until the mezzo-soprano soloist enters with
‘Benedictus’ (Ex. 513). The third part of the triptych, ‘Passion and
Resurrection’, begins with an impossible task, a setting of Christ’s
agony, "Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem’, and then takes up
a text that has attracted so many musicians, ‘Stabat mater dolorosa’.
Next follows the Easter hymn, “О filii et filiae', to be sung to the
traditional tune by a small invisible female chorus, accompanied by
flutes, oboes, and clarinets. The work ends with a tremendous
‘Resurrexit’ with an electrifying entry for solo soprano at ‘Christus
vincit’ (Ex. 514).
Christus is a very uneven work but it has a very high place among
the oratorios of the mid-century. It is Liszt’s masterpiece among his
innumerable religious works, beside which such late ones as the
ES
Un poco meno allegro, ma sempre mosso e alla breve
sb espressivo con serenita
N m
w, e m Eee Il — Rr M Ee PET
—E— 3
cl т-та umo o
А П
ee ИИ WEE un en a —— ЁШ Ce m, er — ШШ Be ` en
m "Je
man ge
Een
әәә о гооо Кз ол е Бе lil eile
Li 3 Е) EEE ER ШОШ баай EE, „иң BEENDETE El Ei мшш reet ee «рр
We ae eS
à m
= en Te emp ттр a ie EEE) aie ee
Mezzo- Ke EE m rn
Sop. Solo Ai EL ee розе) DERE ee (EE) Eesen Geet [|
Be - ne - di -
P\ dolce
9 5 =
CHORUS ES E I————————] aM] ELE
1 В. Be Se > uni
i a а
Pax in
ШЕЕ SET i | Del ee RUE
bai Ee ` Leet," Ыы" SUME EEN SRE Ee SEER Se Rr
VC, db ae A SEES Le BEE E
IIS Zi 807
boe F
9, 9-591595? 3?
ems суны сс _
2
І%_
808 CHORAL MUSIC
Ex. 514 |
S. solo , Chri E >
Itate
"ET i NN
Lk et ee =
nem Be —— ==!
Sae cu la
AUF. " =
Ze
‘legend’ Die heilige Cäcilia and Die Glocken des Strassburger Münsters
(both 1874) are insignificant.
BRUCKNER
One outstanding church composer who came under Liszt’s influence
from the 1860s—though as deeply Austrian as Liszt was Hungarian —
was Anton Bruckner (1824-96). He was a composition pupil of the
great contrapuntist Simon Sechter (1788-1867), himself the composer
of a great number of Masses, though only twelve were published.
Before his study with Sechter (1855-61), Bruckner had produced a
Requiem, a Missa solemnis and some psalm-settings. Then came a
Mass in D minor (1864, three times revised), one in E minor for
chorus and wind only (1866; rev. 1885), a Grosse Messe in F minor
(1868; four times revised), a Te deum (1881; rev. 1884), and a setting
of Psalm 150 (1892), the power of which—especially near to the end
where the fugue theme is combined with its inversion (Ex. 515)—
BRUCKNER 809
Bx, 315
Al - les was О -dem hat, Al - les was O-dem hat, Al - les, AI - les,
- les was O-demhat Al - les, Al-[les]
O - dem hat, Al - les, Al - les
Al - leswas O-demhat, Al - les was O-dem hat, Al - les, Al-[les]
(АП, that has life and breath)
Ex. 516
TIN
makes Mendelssohn's setting of the same words in the Lobgesang
sound conventionally pompous. The octave leaps and double-dotting
are typical of Bruckner: cf. the Kyrie of the D minor Mass (Ex.
516). The fugal ‘In gloria Dei patris’ in the F minor belongs to the
same family of ideas. But Bruckner could also aspire to emotional
warmth as in the Benedictus of the same Mass, where the long-drawn
cello melody marked “уоп Vielen zu spielen' at the beginning (Ex.
517), later taken up by the soloists in close imitation, records a
spiritual crisis.
Bruckner's secular choral works are mostly for male choir:
unaccompanied, accompanied by organ or wind band, trombones,
or choral humming or yodelling, sometimes with soloists and
piano. This excerpt from his setting of Heinrich von der Mattig's
"Abendzauber' (1878) is a good example (Ex. 518).
A younger contemporary, Joseph Rheinberger (1836-91), who
spent most of his life in Bavaria, was a more conservative talent.
810 CHORAL MUSIC
Era
Langsam, feierlich, doch nicht schleppend `
T. solo Р ruhig GENE: =
Eder
7 GS SS) ern Jr mm ae ee =
a ee ee == == eS See See ee EE
E н Der See träumt zwi - schen Fel - sen
humming voices
MEM EA -
Q Ra Q
Be u tt
le г ДР) Чаа: ee == =» ——=„—„——-—-———_.
РР = e ва ааа Ор
SAE ES Di
WHY
Lm lake dreams among wer? cliffs)
Immensely prolific, he produced an oratorio, Christophorus (1885),
twelve Masses, three Requiems, two settings of Stabat mater,
motets, and numerous small choral pieces both sacred and secular—
technically accomplished but low in inspiration.
BRAHMS
The Protestant inverse of Liszt was Johannes Brahms (1833-97),
by no means an orthodox Lutheran but ethically Lutheran and an
admirer of Luther’s translation of the Bible on which he drew for
the text of his greatest choral work, Ein deutsches Requiem. A certain
amount of mystery surrounds the inception of this masterpiece; it
has been associated with the death of Schumann; the original
two-piano form of the saraband-like second movement, ‘Denn alles
Fleisches ist wie Gras’, came from the same period; but the Requiem
was not completed until 1868—a year after Liszt’s Christus. It begins
with a beatitude, ‘Selig sind, die da Leid tragen’, and ends with
another, ‘Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herren sterben’; in the
middle, No. 4, is the gracious, consoling “Wie lieblich sind deine
Wohnungen'. These are the three pillars of the work. Between Nos.
] and 4 stand the slow, marschmässig ‘Denn alles Fleisch’ and ‘Herr,
lehre doch mich' (with baritone solo); between Nos. 4 and 7, two
further passages of consolation, 'Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit' (with
soprano solo) and ‘Denn wir haben hie keine bleibende Statt’ (with
baritone), with the triumphant fugal
Herr, du bist würdig zu nehmen
Preis und Ehre und Kraft.
The final beatitude comes from Revelation (14: 13), a book which
BRAHMS 811
[Dass er die gro - sse Hu - re ver- ur-theilt hat]
(That he hath damned the great whore)
Ex. 520
Poco adagio
Pa-ra-die - se noch ein-mal _
P dolce
(Bring back once more the golden days of Paradise)
was probably a favourite with Brahms, since he returned to it for
the text of his Triumphlied (1871), celebrating the recent victory of
German arms. His adaptation was not without coarse humour; in
setting Revelation, 19: 2, he omitted part of the words but substituted
a forte orchestral unison (Ex. 519), which left his listeners in no
doubt.
Brahms's earliest choral work was an Ave Maria for female voices
and small orchestra (1858), and more part-songs followed. Then,
after the Requiem, in 1869 came two Goethe settings: Rinaldo for
tenor, male voice choir and orchestra, and a Rhapsodie (from the
Harzreise im Winter) for alto, male chorus, and orchestra. In Rinaldo
the hero's almost Italianate lyricism, as in Ex. 520, is more attractive
than the choral writing. Conversely, in the Alto Rhapsody the soloist
has to cope, at 'aus der Fülle der Liebetrank', with the most unvocal
writing Brahms was ever guilty of—though he immediately atones
when the chorus enters (Ex. 521).
At the time of the Rhapsody Brahms was also working on a setting
of Hólderlin's Schicksalslied for chorus and orchestra, inspired by
reading the poem very early one morning and making the first
sketch at once on the beach at Wilhelmshaven.!4 It is one of his
finest choral compositions, with a masterly final orchestral dissolution
14 Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, ii (2nd edn.; Berlin, 1910), 361.
812 CHORAL MUSIC
Bx 521
Adagio CS
==
Efa /
LV ДЫ
Ein ЕЕЕ
Lë E 72 - I DI
Р Lei
A. solo
PS em. SSE 1 Le
а 7—7 [e eebe
wur ee SSS SSS e
Ist auf dei - nem Psal ter
pp mezza voce d
eS Eeer ro EES E
EE eech
Ist auf dei - пет Psal - ter
TE. 3 3 3 3 3 3
| qe а не SESS MN Fr
SE =й SE EE EE
db 8va f
———
ПЕР
, 4- . 3t. EE
E. Eg L—s——F—$— — 1]— —
E 3l Шы
(If thy psaltery, loving Father, has a note his ear can catch)
of the poem's pessimism. But the clouds descend again in his last
two choral works, short as they are: the gentle Nänie, ‘Auch das
Schóne muss sterben', for the painter Anselm Feuerbach (1881), and
the pessimistic Gesang der Parzen (1882), from Goethe's Iphigenie
auf Tauris.
Besides these choral works with orchestra, Brahms composed
more than fifty part-songs and motets, and numerous folk-song
DVORÁK 813
arrangements, for unaccompanied choir. They culminate in the three
Fest- und Gedenksprüche of 1889 to Bible texts, and three motets,
Op. 110—one of them likewise to a biblical text —from the same
period.
DVORÁK
Antonin ОуоїаК (1841-1904), Brahms's friend for nearly twenty
years, produced half-a-dozen substantial choral works whereas his
compatriot, Smetana (1824-84) composed only one noteworthy
choral composition, Píseň na mori [Song of the Sea] for un-
accompanied male voices. In the same year, 1877, ОуоїаК made a
number of settings of Czech and Moravian folk-poems for the same
combination, but was at the same time orchestrating a more
substantial composition, a Stabat mater which reached England in
1883 and made a considerable impression on audiences accustomed
to such works as Sullivan's Martyr of Antioch. Much of the Stabat
mater is poor Dvoräk, but his personality shows in such passages
as that 1n Ex. 522.
EX 522
Larghetto
ti _ mor-tem
3 1
Zei
Ee
їй Gë" ee Ee ‚> Ee ES
E Se
EE 2000 em EEN БЫРЫШ WE E P ER i:
[Emo
ЕЕ, —
mor - tem pas-si - о -
(Cause me to carry Christ's death, make me a partner in his Passion.)
814 CHORAL MUSIC
The Stabat mater so impressed the committee of the 1885
Birmingham Festival that they commissioned a secular work. Dvorak
responded with a setting of К. J. Erben's ballad Svatebni kosile [The
Bridal Garment], known in England as The Spectre's Bride, a brave
attempt at Schauerromantik, foreign to his genius. At Birmingham
it figured beside Gounod’s Mors et vita, which it eclipsed, and was
quickly performed again and again in Britain and the United States.
The success of the Bride led to the commission of St Ludmila (Svatá
Ludmila to a text by Jaroslav Vrchlicky) for Leeds in 1886, and that
in turn to a Requiem for Birmingham in 1891. At Leeds St Ludmila
had to compete with Sullivan's Golden Legend and a new work by
an Irishman, Stanford's Revenge; it added nothing to Dvorák's
reputation. The Saint herself 1s musically colourless and the heathen
deities— particularly the three-headed Triglav—are much more lively.
Dvorák's score or more of short choruses are mostly for male
voices with or without accompaniment. His last important choral
works were a Mass (with organ, 1887; orchestrated 1892), a Requiem
(1890), and a Te deum (1892). The Requiem is by far the finest. Its
twelve movements are related by a motto-theme, played at the
beginning of the Requiem aeternam by muted violins and cellos (Ex.
523), sung by a solo soprano, unaccompanied, to open the next
Ех.®23
Poco lento
Fe
mg —SSS —À =
movement, extended in the prelude of Tuba mirum, woven into the
bass of ‘Quid sum miser’, predominant in the Lacrimosa, returning
in its original form but now lightly harmonized in the Agnus Dei
where presently various soloists take it up, indeed making various
other appearances. But the Requiem is notable for much more than
ingenuity. In sheer beauty of sound the choral Agnus Dei is
outstanding—as is the power of the choral response at ‘Rex tremendae
majestatis’ in the ‘Quid sum miser’. The fugue subject of ‘Quam
olim Abrahae’ seems to have been suggested by a melody in a
kancionál of 1541,15 fitted to a text of forty years earlier and also to
later texts.
15 See Jan Kouba, ‘Nejstarší cěský tištěný kancionál z roku 1501 jako hudební pramen’,
in Studie a materiály k dějinám starší české hudby (Prague, 1965), 98.
VERDI 815
VERDI
More than one writer!® has drawn attention to Dvorák's in-
debtedness to the Requiem of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901). Verdi's
was his earliest choral composition of any note, preceded only by
an Inno delle nazioni written for the London Exhibition of 1861 but
not performed there. In 1868 he had suggested that a number of
composers should collaborate in a Requiem for Rossini and actually
composed for it the Libera me which he used in his Requiem of
1874 ‘in memory of Alessandro Manzoni’. It is square-cut and
heavy-handed in contrast with the greater part of the work, which
is dramatic (as might be expected) especially in such passages as
‘Rex tremendae majestatis’ where a ‘tremendous’ descent of the
basses from ff to pp in three bars evokes a pianissimo repetition of
the words by the tenors on a repeated three-part chord. And nothing
in all Verdi is more exquisite than the passage in the Offertorio
shown in Ex. 524.
After the Requiem Verdi’s most impressive choral works were a
dramatic Stabat mater for chorus and orchestra and a Te Deum for
double chorus and orchestra (1898), his last composition, a work of
Ex. 524
S. solo
2 vn solo
el Ir
Cy Brice ae 40 tr m. }
LA "чей RLAR o in 0 у JS ENSE = zu mm ЖЕШ Be Bl Bee) е ө ғ е е е
ën ZG с=т с=т=: er
16 e.g, Alec Robertson, Dvořák (London, 1945), 119-20, and John Clapham, Antonin
Dvorák: Musician and Craftsman (London, 1966), 258.
816 CHORAL MUSIC
(The standard-bearer St Michael)
great power, as in the ‘Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine’, and
lyrical beauty as at 'Sanctum quoque Paraclitum Spiritum’. On a
smaller scale are two a cappella Dante settings from 1880, a five-part
Pater noster and very beautiful four-part Laudi alla Vergine Maria,
St Bernard’s prayer which Chaucer translated in ‘The Second Nonnes
Tale":
Thou mayde and moder, doughter of thi sone,
Humblest and best of every creatüre.
Another a cappella piece is a curiosity, the Ave Maria (c.1890) headed
‘Scala enigmatica armonizzata a 4 voci on an ‘awkward bass’ he
had come across in the Gazetta musicale. As he said himself, ‘It isn't
real music but a tour de force, a charade.’
A curiosity of a different kind was the Petite Messe solenelle of
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), composed in 1863, when he was 71
years old. The original accompaniment was for two pianos and
harmonium but it was later orchestrated, in which form it was
performed posthumously in 1869. Rossini's only other work of any
consequence was the once celebrated Stabat mater (1842), with its
strikingly harmonized a cappella quartet setting of ‘Quando corpus’
(Ex. 525).
E525
Andante
T. B.
(When the body dies)
FRANCE AFTER 1870 817
FRANCE AFTER 1870
The first notable French oratorio after the collapse of the second
Empire was Franck’s Rédemption of 1872—not to be confused with
its later versions or compared with Gounod’s of 1881. But it
was eclipsed by the sensational success of the drame sacre, Marie
Magdeleine, of Jules Massenet (1842-1912), the following year, a
work in which the love duet for Jesus and the heroine impressed
Tchaikovsky as ‘a chef d'euvre' and made him shed ‘whole torrents
of tears’.17 Eve, un mystere, for Adam, Eve, and a narrator, with
chorus, followed in 1875; its ‘note tendre, voluptueuse’, so char-
acteristic of Massenet, delighted Gounod. But La Vierge (1880), a
légende sacrée, was a failure. The unison chorus of angels which the
Virgin hears at night (Ex. 526) and the later ‘Danse galiléenne’ are
typical of Massenet’s saccharine charm. He was well advised to turn
to opera in Herodiade.
Towards the end of his long life Camille Saint-Saéns (1835-1921)
wrote that Bizet and Delibes had been friends and comrades:
‘Massenet était un rival’.18 But he had come near to Massenet in
the solo violin theme symbolizing the anti-Diluvial happiness of
Ex526
-lant vers le cha - ste ré - duit de la vierge in-con-nue en - co - re
(The messenger of the King of Kings appears among the stars, flying toward the humble
dwelling of the still unknown virgin)
Ex. 527
Andante sostenuto 3
17 Letter to Nadezhda von Meck, 19 July 1880.
18 Ecole buissonniére (Paris, 1913), 275.
818 CHORAL MUSIC
mankind in his poéme biblique, Le Déluge (1876). Before Le Déluge
he had composed a Mass for chorus; orchestra, and organ (1856),
an Oratorio de Noél (1863), which reveals the influence of Gounod
in the pastoral prelude and elsewhere, and a setting of Psalm 18 (19
in the Authorized Version) for soloists, chorus and orchestra (1875)
where again the shadow of Gounod appears in passing. But Bach is
more apparent than Gounod in the Psalm and when Saint-Saéns
embarked on Le Déluge, he suggested Jehovah's displeasure in a
fugue (Ex. 527).
After Le Deluge Saint-Saéns's interest in choral music declined,
although he composed a considerable number of motets, with or
without accompaniment, and a noteworthy Hugo setting, La Lyre
et la harpe, for soloists, chorus, and orchestra (1879).
Gounod himself continued to pour out quantities of religious
music, culminating in two ‘sacred trilogies’, La Rédemption (1881)
and Mors et vita (1884), for both of which he compiled his own texts.
Like Liszt’s Christus, they are triptychs: Rédemption—‘Passion’,
‘Resurrection’, ‘Outpouring of the Holy Spirit’; Mors et vita—
‘Requiem Mass’, ‘The Last Judgement’, ‘Life (The Vision of St John)’.
Redemption was first performed at the Birmingham Festival of 1882
and Mors et vita was specially written for Birmingham. Gounod is
too often weak and cloying but when he breaks into clean diatonic
writing he can be very effective; it is said that when Mors et vita was
first performed in Paris in 1888 the quartet entry with ‘Oro supplex
et acclinis’ in the ‘Confutatis’ was applauded.
Franck’s poéme-symphonie, Rédemption (1872), has already been
mentioned. Coming after various motets and Masses for solo voices,
it marked his return to oratorio for the first time since Ruth.
Employing a libretto by Eduard Blau, it is in three parts, the second
of which is styled symphonie and represents the passing of the
centuries and the gradual transformation of the world under the
influence of Christ’s teaching. A solo mezzo-soprano represents an
Archangel. But in its original form the work was a complete failure.
Franck withdrew it, but in 1874 published a new edition with a
different morceau symphonique!? and a great deal of fresh music in
the remaining part. But La Rédemption was an interruption to the
composition of a much finer, though very unequal, work or series
of works, Les Béatitudes (libretto by a certain Mme J. Colomb),
begun in 1869 and finished only in 1879. Each Béatitude is sung by
antithetic choirs and soloists: one celestial, with the Voix du Christ
19 The two main themes of the original version are printed in Vincent d’Indy, Сёзаг Franck
(Paris, 1906), 127.
FRANCE AFTER 1870 819
Ex. 528
dolcissimo `.
VOIX DU CHRIST
(Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth)
(baritone) and his motto-theme coming in near the end, as in the
second movement (Ex. 528); the other representing money-grubbers,
Pharisees, oppressors, warmongers, and persecutors. Franck intended
these to be sung separately; indeed the prologue and first Béatitude
were given in 1878 and the first complete performance in 1891, the
year after the composer's death. The Béatitudes finished, Franck
produced one more oratorio, the scéne biblique, Rebecca, on a poem
by Paul Collin, an idyllic counterpart to the Ruth of nearly forty
years earlier. But he was now much more interested in instrumental
composition and even opera. His disciple Vincent d'Indy (1851-
1931) composed, mostly during 1879-83, a légende dramatique— Le
Chant de la cloche—an adaptation of Schiller's "Lied von der Glocke’,
which is musically descended from Berliozs Damnation, and he
expressed warm admiration of the 26-year-old Debussy's setting of the
Rossetti-Sarrazin La Damoiselle élue (1888). But the most beautiful
French choral work during this period was the Requiem (1888) of
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), intimate and simple throughout. Nothing
could be more exquisitely peaceful than the final antiphon, In
Paradisum (Ex. 529).
820 CHORAL MUSIC
GE = p— —— 15
EE m
BS EEE KE ed eme: Seege
De - du DE ап - Ре
p =~ ү = =~ p
"== — ez an} bes == эмы Gass)
4 F3 udi Peg [ugs Едт a erm I s Ear
Lu Le bei Le Ee (ЫР | Cen ж үш
f S-—— 7 Se SC em EE ii ga EE
h | ] we,
Le Ge ei
SSS
NS
pa
|
(Let the angels lead him into paradise)
POLAND
The renaissance of choral music in Poland was due above all to
the example and teaching of Jozef Elsner (1769-1854), who composed
a vast quantity of secular cantatas and Masses with or without
orchestra from 1785 onward, and a Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi
(1837), which he misguidedly dedicated to Tsar Nicholas I as King
of Poland. The first choral entry is shown in Ex. 530.20
20 Taken from Alina Nowak-Romanowicz, Jözef Elsner (Cracow, 1957), musical supplement,
pp. 130ff. She also gives extended excerpts in full score from the ‘Qui passus est’ and “Deus
meus es tu’.
POLAND 821
Ex. 530
Allegro maestoso
CHORUS
сус == onen em ees TI Fe
GG ee EE Cu
И) T H Ge i "
(Compose, my tongue, the laurel of the glorious contest)
But it was Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819-72) who was mainly
responsible for the revival of Polish church music, infusing national
elements and, as Elsner also had done, composing Polish paraphrases
of the Mass, including two for female voices in two or three parts,
for convent use. His Latin church music includes а Requiem in D
minor (c.1850), four Litanies to the Virgin at Ostra Brama (during
the 1850s), and some half a dozen Masses, perhaps the finest of
which is the E flat (1865), notable among other things for the
intensity of the second Kyrie (Ex. 531). The best of Moniuszko's
secular compositions are his settings of Mickiewicz, above all the
Sonety krymskie [Crimean Sonnets] for chorus, tenor solo, and
orchestra (1867); see Ex. 532 from 'Bakezysaraj w nocy’ [Bakhchisaray
at Night].
In the 1880s Moniuszko was bitterly attacked for his vernacular
paraphrases of the Mass by Jozef Surzynski (1851-1919), himself a
prolific composer of Masses and other church music, who denounced
Moniuszko's ecclesiastical music as fit for ‘a drawing-room or theatre
but not for a Catholic church'. Yet another composer of Masses was
Ex. 531
Ky-ri - e e - lei-son, e - li - son,Chri-ste, Chri - ste
822 CHORAL MUSIC
[LJ EI ==]
ВА с и Г EE RE
Ee De A E EE E Ee Ee, E
Sol EECH
P =
E
и Tee
i=]
aS
CS = p SL
IA TY u SOL. eee
Hm" DS L CG Lay ee Ee E
e SS See =
(Silver king of the night, hastening to rest with his love!)
RUSSIA 823
Wojciech Sowinski (1805-80), of whose Oratorio Swiety Wojciech [St
Albert] (1845) Chopin wrote that he had now become so easy to
please that he could cheerfully listen to it without dropping down
dead 21 But, torn between Orthodox Russia, Lutheran Prussia, and
Catholic Austria, Poland was not a fertile soil for vernacular choral
music.
RUSSIA
Russian ecclesiastical music was a totally different matter, different
above all in the rejection of instrumental participation. The first
composer of any note after Bortnyansky,?? was Aleksandr Alyab'ev
(1787-1851), best known for his songs, who composed a Liturgy,
two Kheruvimskie [Cherubic Hymns], and a psalm-concerto when
exiled to Siberia in 1828, while an older contemporary, Pyotr
Ivanovich Turchaninov (1779-1856), harmonized ecclesiastical mel-
odies with simple triads, sometimes placing them in the alto or even
the bass and sprinkling them freely with flats and sharps. He
published four volumes of them towards the end of his life and some
survived much later. Glinka (1804-57) wrote little choral music
although his brief appointment to the directorship of the Imperial
Chapel led to the composition of a short Kheruvimskaya, and towards
the end of his life he produced a four-part Liturgy, a couple of
extremely simple hymns,?? and a few secular pieces including a
setting of Lermontov's ‘Molitva’ [Prayer], based on an earlier piano
piece.
In 1833 Aleksey Fyodorovich L'vov (1799-1870), whose father
had succeeded Bortnyansky at the Imperial Chapel, composed a new
national anthem, ‘Bozhe, Tsarya khrani' [God preserve the Tsar],
which led in turn to his own appointment to the Chapel and its
sponsorship of a seven volume edition of four-part settings of the
Obikhod (music for the daily service), introducing more rhythmic
freedom (Ex. 533). In this he was probably content to supervise the
EX 533
?! Letter, 18 Aug. 1848.
?? See Vol. VIIT, p. 648.
23 Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, xvii (Moscow, 1968).
824 CHORAL MUSIC
(It is truly meet to bless Thee, O Virgin, eternally blessed and immaculate mother of God)
work of Gavriil Yakimovich Lomakin, but L’vov himself composed
four a cappella Kheruvimskie, a quantity of other church music and
a Stabat mater for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Lomakin (1812-
85) produced ten Kheruvimskie and other church music, and also
collaborated with Balakirev (1837-1910) in a Free School of Music
which cultivated amateur choral singing.
Balakirev composed no choral music, but his first disciple, César
Cui (1835-1918), launched out with secular choruses in 1860 and a
*mystic chorus' for female voices on a text translated from Dante's
Purgatorio in 1871. Other sets followed in the 1880s and 1890s. His
colleagues of the ‘Mighty Handful’,24 Mussorgsky and Borodin,
produced little or no significant choral music. Mussorgsky's Po-
razhenie Sennakheriba [The Destruction of Sennacherib] (first version
1867, second 1874), on a free prose translation of Byron, and /isus
Navin [Jesus Navin] (1874-7),25 rescued from a projected opera on
Flaubert's Salammbö, are essentially orchestral conceptions with
vocal obbligatos; for more imaginative choral writing one must turn
to his operas.
The choral music of the remaining member of the ‘Handful’,
Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), falls into three groups: sets of mostly
a cappella pieces, some of them folk-song arrangements (1876-9);
24 Moguchaya kuchka, a term coined by Vladimir Stasov in 1867, sometimes referred to in
English as ‘The Five’, originally Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov,
though the phrase is also used to refer to Dargomizhsky and Glinka.
?5 Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, vi (Moscow and Leningrad, 1939), 56, 97, 113. Mussorgsky
is said to have heard the themes of Jisus Navin sung by Jewish neighbours celebrating the
Feast of Tabernacles.
RUSSIA 825
liturgical music, including eight settings from the Liturgy of St John
Chrysostom (1883), and three late cantatas, Svitezyanka (1897), Pesn’
o veshchem Olege [Song of Oleg the Wise] (1899), and /z Gomera
[From Homer] (1901). The liturgical music was the result of his
appointment as assistant director of the Imperial Chapel under
L'vov's successor in 1861, Nikolay Ivanovich Bakhmetev (1807-91).
Bakhmetev himself was a tentative modernist, who ventured to
introduce mildly dissonant chromatic harmony (Ex. 534).
(We who mystically represent the Cherubim [and sing the
thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity])
826 CHORAL MUSIC
(We who mystically represent the Cherubim [and sing the
thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity])
Anton Rubinstein (1829-94) is doubly problematic, for he com-
posed what he called ‘sacred operas (oratorios)’ intended for stage
performance and wrote them to German librettos. But his most
famous pupil, Tchaikovsky (1840-93), was a prolific composer of
choral pieces, many of them short but including the inevitable Liturgy
of St John (1878)— written in a more polished idiom than Bakhmetev's
(Ex. 535).
SPAIN
At the other end of Europe the outstanding composer of church
music was Rodriguez de Ledesma (1779-1847) who spent two periods
of his life in England: 1811-14, when he was made a member of the
Philharmonic Society, and 1823-31. His best works date from 1836
onwards, when he was Master of the Capilla Real; they included
three Misas solemnes, Responses for the Matins of Epiphany, a
Stabat mater, and striking Lamentaciones de Semana Santa (1838)
(Ех. 536).
Prominent in the next generation were Hilarión Eslava (1804-81)
and Benigno Carinena (d. 1886). Eslava was a scholar as well as
composer. He edited a ten-volume collection of Spanish church
music, Lira sacro-hispana (Madrid, 1869), in which he included his
own Requiem and Te deum, though not his Lamentaciones. Cariñena
also left a Requiem and Lamentaciones as well as Misas de Gloria, a
Miserere, and many smaller works.
BRITAIN 827
3
PP crescendo poco a poco
жеси аал а
nV E SSS SS С БЕ РБА |
А ш LER с (ZUBE 9 ——R:— | — — —4
LV [в ч.
ип tes per vi am si - bi- la - ve runt
Иык ==” E
ey eye u — — —9 —89 og | —— — —j
hA ШШ Л от EE ne Ó———— Ó— a
[uen ier E
| 3 3 3 3
Le АЫ:
hy Se Ee an as [ 2 LI d у ашшы шшш оса |
Е SS SS SS SS SS SS SS SS = SS SS SS SS SS SS SS SS Su
| TE) 1 SS хш] Бар ШШЕ (po o ee Е] SS Sr SS See aS eee ef
a =) Гаја] EES
3 3 3
(All they that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss . . .)
BRITAIN
At the mid-century the three most notable composers of choral
music were Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-76), Henry Hugh Pierson
(1815-73), and William Sterndale Bennett (1816-75)—a conservative,
who composed little but anthems and Anglican services; a radical,
whose choral music consisted only of one completed oratorio
(Jerusalem, 1852), one incomplete (Hezekiah, 1869), and the choruses
828 CHORAL MUSIC
in his considerable music to the second part of Faust (1854); and a
moderate, who produced anthems, a cantata, The May Queen
(1858), and an oratorio, The Woman of Samaria (1867), both festival
commissions. It was the conservative whose work has survived;
Wesley’s anthems—for example, ‘O Lord, thou art my God’, ‘Cast
me not away’ and ‘Thou wilt keep him in’ perfect peace'—are
masterpieces of their kind. Younger than these was Arthur Sullivan
(1842-1900), master of comic opera but a mediocrity in such works
as The Prodigal Son (1869), The Light of the World (1873), The
Martyr of Antioch (1880), and The Golden Legend (1886)— all festival
commissions. Only in the last scene of the Legend, when Elsie and
the Prince listen to the distant bells of Geisenheim does Sullivan
come near to real poetry.
Sterndale Bennett and Pierson did, however, contribute to the
accomplishment of Hubert Parry (1848-1918) for he studied with
both. Parry's virile diatonic idiom informs everything he wrote and
breathes life into late Victorian oratorio—the best passages of Judith
(1888), Job (1892), King Saul (1894)—but nothing in these surpasses
his setting of Milton's Ode at a Solemn Music (Blest Pair of Sirens)
(1887) with its great opening demonstration of the power that still
resided in pure diatonicism (Ex. 537), a power that drives the fugal
“О may We soon again renew that Song', which remained with him
to the end of his life, and which shows even in unison songs such
as ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘England’.
EXSI
Allegro moderato
Sphere - born, har - mo-nious sis- ters, Voice and Te Verse
UNITED STATES 829
Second only to Parry was Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924),
at first, like him, a ‘festival composer’: for instance, the Whitman
Elegiac Ode (Norwich, 1884), Tennyson’s The Revenge (Leeds, 1886),
the oratorio Eden on a poem by Robert Bridges (Birmingham, 1891).
But a greater than any of these was waiting in the wings: the
35-year-old Elgar set about his 'symphony for chorus and orchestra’,
The Black Knight, in 1892. But eight years were to pass before The
Dream of Gerontius was heard at the Birmingham Festival of 1900
and opened the last phase in the history of a dying form.
UNITED STATES
Two notable American composers of choral music were John
Knowles Paine (1839-1906) and Dudley Buck (1839-1909). Paine's
Mass in D was given by the Berlin Singakademie in 1867, his oratorio
St Peter at Portland (Maine) in 1873, a cantata setting of Milton's
Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity at Boston in 1883, and
another cantata, A Song of Praise, at the Cincinnati Festival of 1888.
Buck, also German-trained, had already appeared at Cincinnati in
1880 with a Golden Legend seven years before Sullivan's, and in
1893 a much stronger composer than either— Horatio Parker (1863-
1919)—attracted general respect with an oratorio, Hora novissima
(1893), which six years later was performed at the Worcester Festival,
the first American work to be heard there. The rather younger
George Chadwick (1854-1931), after the then obligatory German
training, produced a number of choral works showing considerable
talent, from The Viking's Last Voyage (1881) onwards.
A greater than any of these was to visit the United States during
1892-5. Dvorak was invited to accept the directorship of a newly
founded National Conservatory of Music in New York and, while
he was there, composed some of his most popular and most delightful
works. Unfortunately the one he wrote on the eve of his departure
for America, The American Flag for soloists, chorus, and orchestra,
with words by Joseph Drake, is not in that category—and he left
the United States before it was performed.
3st
жап}
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Compiled by ROSEMARY DOOLEY
GENERAL
(i) Modern Anthologies
GINZBURG, SEMYON L’VOVICH: Istoriya russkoy muziki v notnikh obraztsakh (Len-
ingrad and Moscow, 1949 and 1952).
KiRBY, FRANK E: Music in the Romantic Period: An Anthology with Commentary
(New York, 1986).
PLANTINGA, LEON B.: Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-
century Europe, ii (New York, 1985).
POHANKA, JAROSLAV: Déjiny české hudby v příkladech (Prague, 1958).
STEPHENSON, KURT: Romantik in der Tonkunst (Das Musikwerk, 21; Cologne, 1961);
Eng. trans., Robert Kolben, Romanticism in Music (Anthology of Music, 21;
Cologne, 1961).
STRUMILLO, TADEUSZ: Zródla i poczatki romantyzmu w muzyce polskiej (Kraków,
1956) [supplementary volume].
WOLFF, HELLMUTH CHRISTIAN: Die Oper III— 19. Jahrhundert (Das Musikwerk, 40;
Cologne, 1972); Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Opera III — 19th Century
(Anthology of Music, 40; Cologne, 1975).
(ii) Books and Articles
ABRAHAM, GERALD: А Hundred Years of Music (London, 1938; 4th edn., 1974).
ARTZ, FREDERICK B.: From Renaissance to Romanticism: Trends in Style in Art
Literature and Music (Chicago, Ill., 1962).
BARZUN, JACQUES: Berlioz and the Romantic Century (Boston, Mass., 1950; rev. 2nd
edn., 1956 as Berlioz and his Century; rev. 3rd edn., 1969).
Classic, Romantic and Modern (2nd edn., New York, 1961).
BECKER, HEINZ (ed.): Beiträge zur Geschichte der Oper (Regensburg, 1969).
—— Die ‘Couleur locale’ in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1976).
BELZA, IGOR: Ocherki razvitiya cheshskoy muzikalnoy klassiki (Moscow, 1951);
Czech trans., Ceska klasická hudba (Prague, 1961).
BLUME, FRIEDRICH: Classic and Romantic Music: A Comprehensive Survey (London,
1972):
BÜCKEN, ERNST: Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Moderne (Wildpark-Potsdam,
1929; repr. 1949).
Волс, BOJAN (ed.): Music in European Thought 1851-1881 (Cambridge, 1988).
CHASE, GILBERT: America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York,
1955; rev. 3rd edn., 1977).
CHECHLINSKA, ZOFIA (ed.): Szkice o kulturze muzycznej XIX w. (Warsaw, 1973-80).
CONRAD, PETER: Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
Calıf., 1977)
CookKE, DERYCK: Vindications: Essays on Romantic Music (London, 1982).
Cooper, MARTIN: French Music from the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré
(London, 1951).
DAHLHAUS, CARL: Asthetik (Cologne, 1967); Eng. trans., William Austin, Esthetics
of Music (Cambridge, 1982).
832 BIBLIOGRAPHY
—— Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1980); Eng. trans., J. Bradford
Robinson, Nineteenth-century Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1988).
— — Musikalischer Realismus: Zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich,
1982); Eng. trans., Mary Whittall, Realism in Music (Cambridge, 1985).
—— Studien zur Trivialmusik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1967).
Zwischen Romantik und Moderne: Vier Studien zur Musikgeschichte des
späteren 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1974); Eng. trans., Mary Whittall, Between
Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth
Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1980).
DENT, EDWARD J.: The Rise of Romantic Opera, ed. Winton Dean (Cambridge,
1976).
DUCKLES, VINCENT: ‘Patterns in the Historiography of Nineteenth-century Music’,
Acta musicologica, 42 (1970), 75-82.
DUMESNIL, RENE: La Musique romantique frangaise (Paris, 1944).
EINSTEIN, ALFRED: Music in the Romantic Era (New York, 1947; 2nd edn., 1949).
Encyklopedia muzyczna: Część biograficzna (Kraków, 1980- ).
FULLER MAITLAND, J. A.: English Music in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1902).
GROUT, DONALD J.: A Short History of Opera (New York, 1947; 2nd edn., 1965).
HANSLICK, EDUARD: Die moderne Oper (Berlin, 1900; repr. 1971); selection ed. and
trans. Henry Pleasants, Eduard Hanslick: Music Critieisms 1846-99 (New York,
1950; rev. 2nd edn., 1963).
HONOUR, HUGH: Romanticism (London, 1979).
HUGHES, GERVASE: Sidelights on a Century of Music 1825-1924 (London, 1969).
ISTEL, EDGAR: Die Blütezeit der musikalischen Romantik in Deutschland (Leipzig,
1921; 3rd edn., 1968).
JACHIMECKI, ZDZISLAW: Muzyka polska w rozwoju historycznym od czasów najdaw-
niejszych do doby obecnej (Kraköw, 1948-51).
KELDISH, YURY: Istoriya russkoy muiki (Moscow and Leningrad, 1947-54).
KERMAN, JOSEPH: Opera as Drama (New York, 1956).
KNEPLER, GEORG: Musikegeschichte des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1961).
Koury, DANIEL J.: Orchestral Performance Practices in the Nineteenth Century:
Size, Proportions, and Seating (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1986).
KRAMER, LAWRENCE: Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, Calif., 1984).
LANG, PAUL HENRY (ed.) One Hundred Years of Music in America (New York,
1961).
LAUDON, ROBERT T.: Sources of Wagnerian Synthesis: A Study of the Franco-German
Tradition in Nineteenth-century German Opera (Munich, 1979).
Lr Huray, PETER and Dav, JAMES (eds.): Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth
and Early-nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1981; abridged 1988).
LEVASHOVA, OL'GA EVGEN’EVNA, KELDISH, YURY, and KANDINSKY, A. (eds.): Istoriya
russkoy muziki (Moscow, 1970-).
Lissa, Zoria: ‘Polish Romanticism and Neo-Romanticism', in Stefan Jarocinski
(ed.), Polish Music (Warsaw, 1965), 104-27).
LOEWENBERG, ALFRED: Annals of Opera 1597-1940 (Cambridge, 1943; 3rd edn.,
1978).
LoNGYEAR, REY M.: Nineteenth-century Romanticism in Music (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ, 1969; 2nd edn., 1973).
MCGANN, JEROME J.: The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, Ill.,
1983).
Mala encyklopedia muzyki (Warsaw, 1981).
NEWMAN, WILLIAM S.: ТЛе Sonata since Beethoven (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969).
NEWMARCH, Rosa: The Music of Czechoslovakia (London, 1942; repr. 1969).
Nineteenth-century Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1977- ) [journal].
BIBLIOGRAPHY 833
Мосним, LINDA: Realism (Harmondsworth, 1971).
Nowak-ROMANOWICZ, ALINA et al.: Z dziejów polskiej kultury muzycznej (Krakow,
1965- ).
OCADLIK, MIRKO (ed.): Československá vlastivěda, dil IX: Umeni, svazek 3: Hudba
(Prague, 1971).
OCHLEWSKI, TADEUSZ (ed.): Dzieje muzyki polskiej (Warsaw, 1977); Eng. trans.,
Magdalena Mierowska-Parzkiewicz, An Outline History of Polish Music (War-
saw, 1979).
PLANTINGA, LEON B.: Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-
century Europe, i (New York, 1985).
Praz, MARIO: The Romantic Agony (London, 1950).
RACEK, Jan: Česká hudba (Prague, 1958).
Reiss, JOZEF: Historia muzyki w zarysie (Warsaw, 1931).
RICH, NORMAN: The Age of Nationalism and Reform, 1850-1890 (New York, 1970).
RIDENOUR, ROBERT C.: Nationalism, Modernism and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-
century Russian Music (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981).
RIEMANN, HuGo: Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, ii, ed. Alfred Einstein (Leipzig,
1913; 2nd edn., 1922, repr. 1972).
ROSEN, CHARLES, and ZERNER, HENRI: Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of
Nineteenth-century Art (London, 1984).
SADIE, STANLEY (ed.): Opera (London, 1988) [part III ‘Nineteenth Century ].
SCHMIDGALL, GARY: Literature as Opera (Oxford, 1977).
ScHOLES, PERCY: The Mirror of Music, 1844-1944 (London, 1947).
SIMPSON, ROBERT (ed.) The Symphony, i (Harmondsworth, 1966) [chapters on
Berlioz, Berwald, Borodin, Brahms, Bruckner, Dvořák, Franck, Liszt, Men-
delssohn, Schumann, Tchaikovsky].
Slownik muzyków polskich (Kraków, 1964-7).
SMITH, PATRICK J.: The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (New
York, 1970), chaps. 13-19.
SowiNski, WOJCIECH: Les Musiciens polonais et slaves anciens et modernes: Dic-
tionnaire biographique (Paris, 1857; repr. 1971); Polish trans., Slownik muzyków
polskich dawnych i nowoczesnych (Warsaw, 1874; repr. 1982).
SPÓz, ANDRZEJ: Warszawskie towarzystwo muzyczne (Warsaw, 1971).
STOWELL, ROBIN: Violin Technique and Performance in the Late Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1985).
STRUMIŁŁO, TADEUSZ: Szkice z polskiego życia muzycznego ХІХ w. (Krakow, 1954).
——— Zrödla i początki romantyzmu w muzyce polskiej (Kraków, 1956).
STRUNK, OLIVER: Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1950; repr. in
separate vols., including v. The Romantic Era, 1965).
Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1965-).
zkice o kulturze muzycznej XIX w. (Warsaw, 1971-84).
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS (ed.): Music in Britain: The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London,
1981).
TIERSOT, JULIEN: La Musique aux temps romantiques (Paris, 1930).
Tovey, DONALD F.: Essays in Musical Analysis (London, 1935-9; repr. 1972).
WHITTALL, ARNOLD: Romantic Music: A Concise History from Schubert to Sibelius
(London, 1987).
Worr, Hugo: Musikalische Kritiken, ed. Richard Batka and Heinrich Werner
(Leipzig, 1911; repr. 1976); Eng. trans., ed. Henry Pleasants, The Music
Criticism of Hugo Wolf (New York, 1978).
ZDUNIAK, MARIA: Muzyka i muzycy polscy w dziewietnastowiecznym Wroclawiu
(Wrocław, 1984).
834 BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER I
NEW TENDENCIES IN ORCHESTRAL MUSIC: 1830-1850
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
BROOK, BARRY S. (gen. ed.): The Symphony 1720-1840 (60 vols.; New York, 1979-
86).
ENGEL, Hans: Das Solokonzert (Das Musikwerk, 25; Cologne, 1964); Eng. trans.,
Robert Kolben, The Solo Concerto (Anthology of Music, 25; Cologne, 1964).
HOFFMANN-ERBRECHT, LOTHAR: “The Symphony in the 19th Century after Beetho-
ven’, Die Sinfonie (Das Musikwerk, 29; Cologne, 1967); Eng. trans., Robert
Kolben, The Symphony (Anthology of Music, 29; Cologne, 1967).
LANG, PAUL HENRY: The Concerto 1800-1900 (New York, 1969) [includes works
by Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Schumann].
—— The Symphony 1800-1900 (New York, 1969) [includes works by Berlioz,
Mendelssohn, and Schumann].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
BENNETT, W. S.: Three Symphonies, ed. Nicholas Temperley (The Symphony 1720-
1840, series E, 7; New York, 1982) [symphonies nos. 3-5].
—— Overture ‘Parisiana’, Overture ‘The Naiads’, ed. Nicholas Temperley (The
Symphony 1720-1840, series E, 6: New York, 1984).
BERLIOZ, H.: Hector Berlioz: Werke, ed. Charles Malherbe and Felix Weingartner
(Leipzig, 1900-10; repr. 1971): series I Symphonien; series II Ouvertüren.
— New Berlioz Edition of the Complete Works, ed. Hugh Macdonald er al.
(Kassel, 1967-): 16 Symphonie fantastique, ed. Nicholas Temperley (1972); 19
Grande symphonie funébre et triomphale, ed. Hugh Macdonald (1967); 18 Roméo
et Juliette, ed. D. Kern Holoman (1988); 17 Harold en Italie, ed. Paul Banks;
20 Overtures, 21 Other Orchestral and Instrumental Works (forthcoming).
Fantastic Symphony, ed. Edward T. Cone (Norton Critical Score; New York,
1971).
— Les Feuilletons de critique musicale par Hector Berlioz, ed. H. Robert Cohen
and Yves Gérard (Vancouver, 1988-).
BERWALD, F.: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Berwald Kommittén (Monumenta musicae
svecicae, 2nd series; Kassel, 1966-82): Orchesterwerke 9 vols.
CHoPIN, F. F.: Friedrich Chopins Werke, ed. Woldemar Bargiel et al. (Leipzig,
1878-1902): 12 Concerte und Concertstücke.
Fryderyk Chopin: Dzieła wszystkie/ Complete Works, ed. Ignacy Jan Paderewski,
with Jözef Turczynski and Ludwik Bronarski (Warsaw, 1949-61): 21 Works
for Piano and Orchestra (1962); 19 Concerto in E Minor (1961); 20 Concerto in
F Minor (1961).
GADE, N.: Sinfonie für das grosses Orchester (Samfundet til udgivelse af dansk
musik, series 3, no. 197; Copenhagen, 1967).
GLINKA, M. 1.: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin er
al. (Moscow, 1955-69): 1 Sinfonia per Torchestra sopra due motivi Russi,
Quverture (1955).
KALLIWODA, J. W.: Symphony No. 2 in E» Symphony, No. 4 in C, ed. David E.
Fenske (The Symphony, series C 13, New York 1984).
MACFARREN, С. А.: Overture ‘Romeo and Juliet, ed. Nicholas Temperley (The
Symphony, series E, 6; New York, 1984).
MENDELSSOHN, F.: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's Werke: Kritisch durchgesehene
Ausgabe, ed. Julius Rietz (Leipzig, 1874-7; repr. 1967-9): series 1 Symphonien;
BIBLIOGRAPHY 835
series 2 Ouvertüren; series 4 Für Violone und Orchester; series 8 Für Pianoforte
und Orchester; selection repr. 1975 [Symphonies 3 & 4, and overtures].
——— Leipziger Ausgabe der Werke Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys, ed. Internationale
Felix-Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1960-): series 1 Orchesterwerke, ed.
Hellmuth Christian Wolff (1965-72); series 2 Konzerte, ed. Karl-Heinz Kóhler
et al. (1960-1).
OnsLow, G.: Symphony in A Major, Symphony in D Major, ed. Boris Schwartz
(The Symphony, series D, 9; New York, 1981).
SCHUMANN, R.: Robert Schumann's Werke, ed. Clara Schumann (Leipzig, 1881-93;
repr. 1967-8): series 1 Symphonien für Orchester; series 2 Ouverturen für
Orchester; series 3 Concerte und Concertstücke für Orchester.
— Symphony in G Minor, ed. Marc Andrae (Frankfurt, 1972).
SMETANA, B.: Souborná dila Bedřicha Smetany, ed. Zdeněk Nejedlý (Prague, 1924-
36): | Skladby z mladi (1924).
—— Studijni vydání děl Bedřicha Smetany, ed. František Bartoš, Josef Plavec, et al.
(Prague, 1940- ): 13 Orchestrální skladby sv. 1 (1962).
SPOHR, L.: Neue Auswahl der Werke, ed. Folker Göthel and Herfried Homburg
(Kassel, 1963- ): 5 Klarinettenkonzert IV, ed. Heinrich Geuser (1976).
——— Three Symphonies, ed. Joshua Berrett (The Symphony, series C, 9; New York,
1980) [in F Major Op. 86, G Major Op. 116, C Major Op. 121].
Selected Works of Louis Spohr (1784-1859), ed. Clive Brown (New York,
1987- ): 6 Symphonies [includes No. 5 in C Minor].
WAGNER, R.: Richard Wagners Werke: Musikdramen— Jugendopern— musikalische
Werke, ed. Michael Balling (Leipzig, 1912-29; repr. 1971) 18 & 20
Orchesterwerke.
—— Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Egon Voss, er al.
(Mainz, 1970- ): 18 Orchesterwerke, ed. Egon Voss (1973).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
CARSE, ADAM: The History of Orchestration (London 1925; repr. 1964).
—— The Orchestra from Beethoven to Berlioz (Cambridge, 1948).
DAVISON, HENRY: From Mendelssohn to Wagner (London, 1912) [memoirs of James
William Davison].
ENGEL, Hans: Die Entwicklung des deutschen Klavierkonzerts von Mozart bis Liszt
(Leipzig, 1927; repr. 1970).
FiNSON, JOHN W., and Topp, К. Larry (eds.): Mendelssohn and Schumann: Essays
on their Music and its Context (Durham NC, 1984).
Fiske, ROGER: ‘Shakespeare in the Concert Hall’, in Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.),
Shakespeare in Music (London, 1964), 177-241.
HILL, RALPH (ed.): The Concerto (Harmondsworth, 1952; repr. 1978).
KLOIBER, RUDOLF: Handbuch der klassischen und romantischen Symphonie (Wies-
baden, 1964; 2nd edn., 1976).
— Handbuch des Instrumentalkonzerts (Wiesbaden, 1972-3).
LAVIGNAC, (A. J.) ALBERT, and LA LAURENCIE, LIONEL DE: Encyclopédie de la
musique et dictionnaire du conservatoire (Paris, 1920-31), part 2, iv. ‘Histoire
de l'orchestration'.
MCCREDIE, ANDREW W.: ‘Symphonie concertante and Multiple Concerto in
Germany (1780-1850): Some Problems and Perspectives for a Source- Repertory
Study', Miscellanea musicologica, 8 (1975), 115-47.
MARX, ADOLF BERNHARD: Erinnerungen: Aus meinem Leben (Berlin, 1865).
Mies, PAUL: Das Konzert im 19. Jahrhunderts: Studien zu Formen und Kadenzen
(Bonn, 1972).
836 BIBLIOGRAPHY
NEWMAN, WILLIAM S.: History of the Sonata Idea, ii. The Sonata since Beethoven
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1969; rev. 3rd edn., 1983).
ROSEN, CHARLES: “Sonata Form after Beethoven’, in Sonata Forms (New York,
1980), 292-335.
SCHÜNEMANN, GEORG: Geschichte des Dirigierens (Leipzig, 1913; repr. 1965).
SIMPSON, ROBERT (ed.): The Symphony, i. Haydn to Dvorak (Harmondsworth, 1966).
STEINBECK, S.: Die Ouvertüre in der Zeit von Beethoven bis Wagner: Probleme und
Lösungen (Munich, 1973).
SWALIN, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: The Violin Concerto: A Study in German Romanticism
(New York, 1941; repr. 1973).
Tovey, DONALD (FRANCIS): Essays in Musical Analysis (London, 1935-6; repr. 1972
and 1981).
VEINUS, ABRAHAM: “The Romantic Concerto’, in The Concerto (New York, 1948;
rev. 2nd edn., 1964), 155-235.
WEINGARTNER, (PAUL) FELIX: Die Symphonie nach Beethoven (Leipzig, 1897; 4th
edn., 1926; repr. 1975); Eng. trans., Arthur Bles, The Symphony Writers since
Beethoven (London, 1907).
(b) Individual Composers
Beethoven
THAYER, ALEXANDER WHEELOCK: Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, ed. and trans.
Hermann Dieters, 1 (Berlin, 1866; rev. 2nd edn., 1901; rev. 3rd edn., Hugo
1910-11); iv-v, ed. Hugo Riemann (Leipzig, 1907-8). Eng. original, ed. Henry
Edward Krehbiel (New York, 1921); rev. and ed. Elliot Forbes, Thayer’s Life
of Beethoven (Princeton, 1964; 2nd edn., 1967).
Berlioz
BARZUN, JACQUES: Berlioz and the Romantic Century (London, 1951; rev. 2nd edn.,
as Berlioz and his Century, 1956; rev. 3rd edn., 1969).
BERLIOZ, HECTOR: Correspondance inédite, ed. Daniel Bernard (Paris, 1879; 2nd
edn., 1879); Eng. trans., H. Mainwaring Dunstan, Life and Letters of Berlioz
(London, 1882), i.
—— Grande Traité d instrumentation et d orchestration modernes (Paris, 1843; 2nd
edn., 1855); Eng. trans., M. C. Clarke, А Treatise upon Modern Orchestration
and Instrumentation (London, 1856).
— — Lettres intimes (Paris, 1882); Eng. trans., Н. Mainwaring Dunstan, Life and
Letters of Berlioz (London, 1882), ii.
—— Mémoires de Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1870; ed. Pierre Citron, 1969); Eng. trans.,
David Cairns, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (New York and London, 1969).
Воѕснот, ADOLPHE: La Jeunesse d'un romantique (Paris, 1906).
Соме, EDWARD T.: ‘Inside the Saint's Head: The Music of Berlioz, Musical
Newsletter, 1/3 (1971), 3-12; 1/4 (1971), 16-20; 2/1 (1972), 19-22.
Foster, DONALD H.: ‘The Oratorio in Paris in the 18th Century’, Acta musicologica,
47 (1975), 67-133.
HoLoMAN, D. KERN: Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz (Kassel, 1987) [part
of the New Berlioz Edition].
MACDONALD, HucH J.: Berlioz Orchestral Music (London, 1969).
Berlioz (London, 1982).
RUSHTON, JULIAN: The Musical Language of Berlioz (Cambridge, 1983).
WARRACK, JOHN, MACDONALD, HUGH, and KOHLER, KARL-HEINZ: The New Grove
Early Romantic Masters 2 (London, 1985) [includes Berlioz].
WoTTON, Том S.: Hector Berlioz (London, 1935; repr. 1970).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 837
Berwald
BERWALD, FRANZ: Franz Berwald: Die Dokumente seines Lebens, ed. Erling Lomnäs
et al. (Kassel, 1979).
LAYTON, ROBERT: Franz Berwald (Stockholm, 1956); Eng. orig. (London, 1959).
David
BRANCOUR, RENE: Felicien David (Paris, 1911).
HaGan, DOROTHY: Félicien David, 1810-1876: A Composer and a Cause (Syracuse,
NY, 1985).
Glinka
Brown, Davip: Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1974).
GLINKA, MIKHAIL IVANOVICH: Literaturnoe nasledie Glinki, ed. Valerian
Mikhaylovich Bogdanov-Beryozovsky (Leningrad and Moscow, 1952-3).
— Memoirs, trans. Richard B. Mudge (Norman, Okla., 1963).
Mendelssohn
DAHLHAUS, CARL (ed.): Das Problem Mendelssohn (Regensburg, 1974).
ELVERS, RUDOLF: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Briefe (Frankfurt, 1984); Eng. trans.,
Craig Tomlinson, Felix Mendlessohn: A Life in Letters (New York, 1986).
GROSSMANN-VENDREY, SUSANNA: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy und die Musik der
Vergangenheit (Regensburg, 1969).
KLINGEMANN, KARL (ed.): Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys Briefwechsel mit Le-
gationsrat Karl Klingemann in London (Essen, 1909).
KONOLD, WULF: ‘Die zwei Fassungen der “Italienischer Symphonie" von Felix
Mendelssohn Bartholdy’, in Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and Sigrid Wiesmann
(eds.), Kongressbericht Bayreuth 1981: Bericht über den internationalen Kongress
der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung (Kassel, 1984).
MiNTZ, DoNALD M., 'Melusine: A Mendelssohn Draft, Musical Quarterly, 43
(1957), 480-99.
RADCLIFFE, PHILIP: Mendelssohn (London, 1954; rev. 2nd edn., 1967).
THOMAS, MATHIAS; Das Instrumentalwerk Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys: Eine
systematisch-theoretische Untersuchung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der
zeitgenössischen Musiktheorie (Kassel, 1972).
Topp, К. Larry: ‘An Unfinished Piano Concerto by Mendelssohn’, Musical
Quarterly, 68 (1982), 80-101.
—— ‘An Unfinished Symphony by Mendelssohn’, Music and Letters, 61 (1980),
293-309.
——— Mendelssohn's Musical Education: A Study and Edition of his Exercises in
Composition (Cambridge, 1983).
—— ‘Of Sea Gulls and Counterpoint: The Early Versions of Mendelssohn's Hebrides
Overture’, /9th-century Music, 2 (1979-80), 179-213.
WARRACK, JOHN, MACDONALD, HUGH, and KOHLER, KARL-HEINZ: The New Grove
Early Romantic Masters 2 (London, 1985) [includes Mendelssohn].
WERNER, ERIC: Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and his Age (New
York, 1963).
Schumann
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘The Three Scores of Schumann's D Minor Symphony’, in
Slavonic and Romantic Music (London, 1968), 281-7.
BOETTICHER, WOLFGANG: Robert Schumann: Einführung in Persönlichkeit und Werk
(Berlin, 1941).
ERLER, HERMANN: Robert Schumanns Leben: Aus seinen Briefen geschildert (Berlin,
1886-7; 3rd edn., 1927).
FINSON, Jon W.: ‘The Sketches for the Fourth Movement of Schumann's Second
838 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Symphony, Op. 61’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 39 (1986),
143-68.
GEBHARDT, ARMIN: Robert Schumann als Symphoniker (Regensburg, 1968).
SCHUMANN, ROBERT: Jugendbriefe von Robert Schumann, ed. Clara Schumann
(Leipzig, 1885; 4th edn., 1910); Eng. trans. May Herbert, Early Letters
(London, 1888).
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS, ABRAHAM, GERALD and SEARLE, HuMPHREY: The New Grove
Early Romantic Masters 1 (London, 1985) [includes Schumann].
WASIELEWSKI, WILHELM JOSEPH VON: Robert Schumann: Eine Biographie (Dresden,
1858; rev. 4th edn., Waldemar von Wasielewski, Leipzig, 1906); Eng. trans.,
Abby Langdon Alger, Life of Robert Schumann, with Letters, 1833-1852
(London, 1878; repr. Detroit, 1975).
For further Schumann bibliography see $ II and $ IV.
Clara Schumann
LITZMANN, BERTHOLD: Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und
Briefen, i (Leipzig, 1902; 8th edn., 1925, repr. 1971); 11 (Leipzig, 1905; 7th edn.,
1925, repr. 1971); iii (Leipzig, 1908; 6th edn., 1923, repr. 1971); abridged Eng.
trans., Grace E. Hadow, Clara Schumann: An Artist's Life Based on Material
Found in Diaries and Letters (London, 1913; repr. 1979).
Spohr
BROWN, CLIVE: Louis Spohr: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, 1984).
SPOHR, Louis: Selbstsbiographie (Kassel and Göttingen, 1860-1); ed. F. Góthel as
Lebenserinnerungen (Tutzing, 1968); Eng. trans., Ludwig Spohr's Autobiography
(London, 1865, repr. 1969; 2nd edn., 1878); part trans., Henry Pleasants, The
Musical Journeys of Louis Spohr (Norman, Okla., 1961, repr. 1987).
Wagner
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘Wagner’s Second Thoughts’, in Slavonic and Romantic Music
(London, 1968), 294-312.
WAGNER, RICHARD: Mein Leben (Munich, 1911; ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin, 1963);
Eng. trans., Andrew Gray and Mary Whittall, My Life (Cambridge, 1983).
—— ‘Uber das Dirigieren’ (1870), repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften
und Dichtungen, viii (Leipzig, 1873), 325-410; Eng. trans., William Ashton Ellis
(ed. and trans.), Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, iv (London, 1895; repr. 1972),
289-364; and Robert L. Jacobs (trans.), Three Wagner Essays (London, 1979),
45-93.
For further Wagner bibliography see $ V.
CHAPTER II
CHAMBER MUSIC: 1830-1850
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
KRAMARZ, JoAcHIM: Vom Haydn bis Hindemith: Das Streichquartett їп Beispielen
(Wolfenbüttel, 1961).
UNVERRICHT, HUBERT: Die Kammermusik (Das Musikwerk, 46; Cologne, 1972);
Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, Chamber Music (Anthology of Music, 46;
Cologne, 1975).
(b) Works by Individual Composers
BENNETT, W. S.: Piano and Chamber Music, ed. Geoffrey Bush (Musica Britannica,
37; London, 1972).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 839
BERWALD, F.: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Berwald Kommitten (Monumenta musicae
svecicae, 2nd series; Kassel, 1966-82): Kammermusikwerke, 7 vols.
Chopin, F. F.: Fryderyk Chopin: Dziela wszystkie/Complete Works, ed. Ignacy Jan
Paderewski with Jözef Turczynski and Ludwik Bronarski (Warsaw, 1949-61):
16 Chamber Music (1961).
Friedrich Chopin's Werke, ed. Woldemar Bargiel er a/. (Leipzig, 1878-1902):
11 Für Pianoforte und Saiteninstrumente.
Симка, M. I.: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin er
al. (Moscow, 1955-69): 3 Septuor, Kvartet D-dur (1957).
MENDELSSOHN, F.: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's Werke: Kritisch durchgesehene
Ausgabe, ed. Julius Rietz (Leipzig, 1874-7; repr. 1967-9): series 5 Kammermusik
für fünf und mehrere Saiteninstrumente; series 6 Quartette für 2 Violinen, Bratsche
und Violoncell; series 9 Für Pianoforte und Saiteninstrumente.
—— Leipziger Ausgabe der Werke Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys, ed. Internationale
Felix-Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1960- ): series 3 Kammermusikwerke,
ed. Gerhard Schuhmacher (1976-7).
—— Octet, ed. Jon Newson (Washington, DC, 1973) [facsimile of holograph score].
SCHUMANN, R.: Robert Schumann's Werke, ed. Clara Schumann (Leipzig, 1881.93;
repr. 1967-8): series 4 Für Streichinstrumente (1881); 5 Für Pianoforte und
andere Instrumente (1880-7).
SMETANA, B.: Studijni vydáni del Bedřicha Smetany, ed. František Bartoš, Josef
Plavec, and Karel Šole (Prague, 1977): 15 Komorni skladby.
SPOHR, L.: Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Friedrich Otto Leinert (Kassel, 1950s): Klaviertrio
Nr. 4 (repr. in The Nineteenth Century, no. 19106, Kassel, 1969).
—— Selected Works of Louis Spohr (1784-1859), ed. Clive Brown (New York,
1987- ): 9 Chamber Music for Strings, 10 Chamber Music with Piano.
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
ALTMAN, WILHELM: Kammermusik-Katalog (6th edn., Leipzig, 1945; repr. 1967).
COBBETT, WALTER WILLSON (ed.): Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music
(2 vols.; London, 1929-30; 2nd rev. edn., with supplement by Colin Mason,
1963).
ELLA, JOHN: Musical Sketches Abroad and at Home (London, 1869; 3rd edn., ed.
J. Belcher, 1878).
FINSCHER, LUDWIG: Studien zur Geschichte des Streichquartetts (Kassel, 1974).
FosrER, My ces B.: History of the Philharmonic Society of London 1813-1912
(London, 1912).
GRIFFITHS, PAUL: The String Quartet: A History (London, 1983).
Hınson, MAURICE: The Piano in Chamber Ensemble: An Annotated Guide (Bloom-
ington, Ind., 1978).
LAnG, PAUL HENRY: Music in Western Civilisation (New York, 1941; London, 1942;
repr. 1963).
MERSMANN, HANS: Die Kammermusik, її. XIX Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1930-3).
ROBERTSON, ALEC (ed.): Chamber Music (Harmondsworth, 1957) [incl. essays on
Mendelssohn by Andrew Porter and Schumann by Joan Chissell].
Tovey, DONALD (FRANCIS): Essays in Musical Analysis: Chamber Music, ed. Hubert
J. Foss (London, 1944; repr. 1972).
UNVERRICHT, HUBERT: Geschichte des Streichtrios (Tutzing, 1969).
840 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(b) Individual Composers
Berlioz
BERLIOZ, HECTOR: Les Soirées de l'orchestre (Paris, 1852; ed. L. Guichard, Paris,
1968); Eng. trans., Jacques Barzun (trans. and ed.), Evenings with the Orchestra
(New York, 1956; 2nd edn., 1973).
For further Berlioz bibliography see $ I.
Berwald
NORMAN, Lupwic: ‘Franz Berwalds kammarmusik-verk’, Tidning for teater och
musik (1859), nos. 7, 8, 10; Ger. trans., Erling Lomnäs (ed.), Franz Berwald:
Die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel, 1979), 490-7.
Mendelssohn
Gopwin, JOSCELYN: “Early Mendelssohn and Late Beethoven’, Music and Letters,
55 (1974), 272-85.
Horton, JOHN: Mendelssohn Chamber Music (London, 1972).
KRUMMACHER, FRIEDHELM: Mendelssohn—der Komponist: Studien zur Kammermusik
für Streicher (Munich, 1978).
For further Mendelssohn bibliography see § I.
Moscheles
MOSCHELES, CHARLOTTE (ed.): Aus Moscheles’ Leben (Leipzig, 1872); Eng. trans.,
Arthur D[uke] Coleridge, The Life of Moscheles (London, 1873).
Schumann
CHISSELL, JOAN: Schumann (London, 1948; rev. edn., 1977).
DICKINSON, A(LAN), E. F.: “The Chamber Music’, in Gerald Abraham (ed.),
Schumann: A Symposium (London, 1952), 138-75.
FULLER MAITLAND, J(OHN) A.: Schumann’s Concerted Chamber-Music (London,
1929):
KOHLHASE, Hans: Die Kammermusik Robert Schumanns: Stilistische Untersuchungen
(Hamburg, 1979).
PLANTINGA, LEON B.: Schumann as Critic (New Haven, 1967; repr. 1977).
SCHUMANN, ROBERT: Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin
Kreisig (4 vols., Leipzig, 1854; 4th edn., 2 vols., 1891; repr. 1968; Sth edn.
1914); Eng. trans., Fanny Raymond Ritter, Music and Musicians: Essays and
Criticisms (London, 1877-80); new selected Eng. trans., Konrad Wolff (ed.)
and Paul Rosenfeld (trans.), On Music and Musicians (New York, 1947; repr.
1982); selections, Henry Pleasants (ed. and trans.), The Musical World of Robert
Schumann: A Selection from his own Writings (London, 1965).
WILCKE, G.: Tonalität und Modulation in Streichquartetten Schumanns und Men-
delssohns (Leipzig, 1933).
For further Schumann bibliography see $ I and $ IV.
Spohr
SPOHR, Louis: Selbstsbiographie (Kassel and Göttingen, 1860-1); ed. F. Göthel as
Lebenserinnerungen (Tutzing, 1968); Eng. trans., Ludwig Spohr’s Autobiography
(London, 1865, repr. 1969; 2nd edn., 1878); part trans., Henry Pleasants, The
Musical Journeys of Louis Spohr (Norman, Okla., 1961; repr. 1987).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 841
CHAPTER III
ROMANTIC OPERA: 1830-1850
(a) GRAND OPÉRA
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
GossETT, PHILIP, and ROSEN, CHARLES: Early Romantic Opera (New York, 1978-
83) [complete operas cited under individual composers].
WOLFF, HELLMUTH CHRISTIAN: Die Oper III—19. Jahrhundert (Das Musikwerke,
40; Cologne, 1972); Eng. trans., А. Crawford Howie, The Opera III— 19th
Century (Anthology of Music, 40; Cologne, 1975) [includes extracts from
Auber, La Muette de Portici, and Meyerbeer, Les Huguenots].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
AUBER, D. F.: La Muette de Portici, ed. Philip Gossett and Charles Rosen (Early
Romantic Opera, 30; New York, 1980).
— — Gustave ou le Bal Masqué, ed. Philip Gossett and Charles Rosen (Early
Romantic Opera, 31; New York, 1980).
BERLIOZ, H.: New Berlioz Edition of the Complete Works, ed. Hugh Macdonald er
al. (Kassel, 1967- ): 1 Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Hugh Macdonald (forthcoming).
DonizeTTI, G.: Collected Works [Donizetti Society] (London, 1973- ): 4 Les Martyrs
(1975).
—— Les Martyrs, La Favorite, Dom Sébastien, ed. Philip Gossett and Charles
Rosen (Early Romantic Opera, 27, 28, 29; New York, 1982, 1982, 1980).
Har£vv, J.-F.: La Juive, ed. Philip Gossett and Charles Rosen (Early Romantic
Opera, 36; New York, 1980).
La Juive, ed. Karl Leich-Galland (Saarbrücken).
MEYERBEER, G.: Robert le Diable, Les Huguenots, Le Prophéte, ed. Philip Gossett
and Charles Rosen (Early Romantic Opera, 19, 20, 21; New York, 1980, 1980,
1978). A
Rossini, G.: Guillaume Tell, ed. Philip Gossett and Charles Rosen (Early Romantic
Opera, 17; New York, 1980).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
ALLEVY, MARIE-ANTOINETTE: La Mise en scéne en France dans la premiére moitié
du dix-neuvieme siécle (Paris, 1938).
ARNDT, MICHAEL, and WALTER, MICHAEL (eds.): Jahrbuch für Opernforschung 1985
(Frankfurt am Main, 1985).
BECKER, HEINZ: ‘Die historische Bedeutung der Grand Opéra’, in Walter Salmen
(ed.), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikanschauung im 19. Jahrhundert (Re-
gensburg, 1965), 151-9.
BUCKEN, Ernst: Der heroische Stil in der Oper (Leipzig, 1924).
CARLSON, MARVIN: The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, NJ,
1992
CHARLTON, D. G.: ‘The French Romantic Movement’, in D. G. Charlton (ed.), The
French Romantics (Cambridge, 1984), 1. 1-32.
—— ‘Religious and Political Thought, in D. G. Charlton (ed.), The French
Romantics (Cambridge, 1984), 1. 33-75.
CoHEN, Н. ROBERT: ‘On the Reconstruction of the Visual Elements of French
Grand Opera: Unexplored Sources in Parisian Collections’, in Daniel Heartz
842 BIBLIOGRAPHY
and Bonnie Wade (eds.), Berkeley 1977: Zwölfter Kongress der Gesellschaft
für Musikwissenschaft (Kassel, 1981), 463-80.-
—— (ed.): Les Gravures Musicales dans L'Illustration (1843-1899) (Quebec, 1983).
—— and GIGOU, MARIE-ODILE: ‘La Conservation de la tradition scénique sur la
scene lyrique en France au XIX" siècle’, Revue de musicologie, 64 (1978), 253-
67.
— and — Cent ans de mise en scene lyrique en France (env. 1830-1930):
Catalogue descriptif des livrets de mise en scene, des libretti annotes et des
partitions annotées dans la Bibliothèque de l'Association de la Régie Théâtrale
(Paris) (New York, 1986).
CROSTEN, WILLIAM L.: French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business (New York,
1948; repr. 1972).
FULCHER, JANE: The Nation's Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized
Art (Cambridge, 1987).
GAUTIER, THEOPHILE: Histoire de l'art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cing ans
(Paris, 1858-9; repr. 1968). £
GERHARD, ANSELM (ed.): ‘Victor-Joseph Eteinne de Juoy: Essay sur Г Opéra français’,
Bollettino del Centro Rossiniano di Studi (1987), nos. 1-3, pp 63-91.
—— ‘Une véritable révolution opérée à l'Opéra français’, L'Avant-scéne opéra, 81
(Nov. 1985), 19-23.
—— ‘Die französische "Grand Opera” in der Forschung seit 1945’, Acta musi-
cologica, 54 (1987), 220-70.
GOSSETT, PHILIP: ‘Music at the Theatre-Italien’, in Peter Bloom, Music in Paris in
the Eighteen-Thirties (New York, 1987), 327-64.
GOURRET, JEAN: Histoire de l'Opéra de Paris, 1669-1971 (Paris, 1977).
Honour HuGu: Romanticism (Harmondsworth, 1981).
HOWARTH W. D.: ‘Drama’, in D. G. Charlton (ed.), The French Romantics
(Cambridge, 1984), ii. 205-47.
JoIN-DIETERLE, CATHERINE: "La Monarchie, source d'inspiration de l'Opéra à
l'époque romantique’, Revue d'histoire du théâtre, 35 (1983- 4), 430-41.
KANTNER, LEOPOLD M.: "Zur Genese der Marschduette in der Grand Opera’,
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Mitteilungen der Kommission für
Musikforschung, 25 (Vienna, 1976), 322-34.
KRAKOVITCH, ODILE: ‘Les Romantiques et la censure au théátre', Revue d'histoire
du theätre, 36 (1984), 56-68.
LOCKE, RALPH P.: Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (Chicago, 1986).
*L'Opéra-Comique au XIXe siècle’, La Revue musicale, 14/4 (1933), no. 140, pp.
243-308 [special issue].
MITCHELL, JEROME: The Walter Scott Operas (Alabama, 1977).
MOYNET, J.: L’Envers du théâtre: Machines et décorations (Paris, 1873; repr. 1972).
PENDLE, KARIN: Eugene Scribe and French Opera of the 19th Century (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1979).
—— "The Boulevard Theaters and Continuity in French Opera of the Nineteenth
Century', in Peter Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties (New
York, 1987), 509-36.
PROD'HOMME, JACQUES-GABRIEL: L'Opéra (1669-1925) (Paris, 1925; repr. 1972).
ScHMIDGALL, GARY: Literature as Opera (Oxford, 1977).
SMITH, PATRICK J.: "The French Grand Opera’, in The Tenth Muse: A Historical
Study of the Opera Libretto (London, 1971), 207-32.
SOUBIES, ALBERT: Soixante-sept ans à l'Opéra en une page (Paris, 1893).
VÉRON, Louis: Mémoires d'un bourgeois de Paris (Paris, 1853-5).
Vingt-six livrets de mise en scéne datant de créations Parisiennes (Auber, Bellini,
Donizetti, Gounod, Halévy, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Thomas, Verdi et Weber),
BIBLIOGRAPHY 843
selected and introduced by H. Robert Cohen with a preface by Marie-Odile
Gigou (New York, forthcoming).
WALTER, MICHAEL: ‘Die Darstellung des Volkes in der französischen Oper von der
Revolution bis 1870', Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, Heft
3/4 (1986), 381-400.
WILD, NICOLE: ‘La Recherche de la précision historique chez les décorateurs de
l'Opéra de Paris au XIXéme siécle', in Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (eds.),
Berkeley 1977: Zwölfter Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft (Kassel,
1981), 453-63.
——— Dictionnaire des théâtres lyriques à Paris au XIXe siècle (New York,
forthcoming).
WOLFF, HELLMUTH CHRISTIAN: Oper: Szene und Darstellung von 1600 bis 1900
(Musikgeschichte in Bildern, 4; Leipzig, 1968).
WOLFF, STEPHANE: L’Opera au Palais Garnier (1875-1962) (Paris, 1962; repr. 1983).
For further general bibliography on French opera see $ VI (b)
(b) Individual Composers
Auber
FINSCHER, LUDWIG: 'Aubers La Muerte de Portici und die Anfänge der Grand-opéra',
in Jürgen Schläder and Reinhold Quandt (eds.), Festschrift Heinz Becker (n.p.,
1982), 87-105.
LONGYEAR, Rey: ‘La Muette de Portici’, Music Review, 19 (1958), 37-46.
MALHERBE, CHARLES: Auber (Paris, 1911).
MONGRÉDIEN, JEAN: ‘Variations sur un theme: Masaniello', in Michael Arndt and
Michael Walter (eds.), Jahrbuch für Opernforschung 1985 (Frankfurt am Main,
1985), 90-121.
WAGNER, RICHARD: ‘Erinnerungen an Auber’ (1871), repr. in Richard Wagner:
Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, ix (Leipzig, 1873), 51-73; Eng. trans.,
William Ashton Ellis (ed. and trans.) Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, v
(London, 1896; repr. 1972), 35-55.
WALTER, MICHAEL, ' “Мап überlege sich nur Alles, sehe, wo Alles hinausläuft!” Zu
Robert Schumanns “Hugenotten”-Rezension’, Die Musikforschung, 36 (1983),
127-44.
Berlioz
BERLIOZ, HECTOR: Correspondance generale, ed. Pierre Citron, 1. 1803-1832 (Paris,
1972); п. 1832-1842 (Paris, 1975).
DICKINSON, A E. F.: 'Berlioz's “Bleeding Nun” °, Musical Times, 107 (1966), 584-8.
La May, THOMASIN K.: ‘A New Look at the Weimar Versions of Berlioz's Benvenuto
Cellin, Musical Quarterly, 65 (1979), 559-72.
MACDONALD, HuGH: ‘The Original “Benvenuto Cellini” ’, Musical Times, 107
(1966), 1042-5.
For further Berlioz bibliography see $ I
David
BRANCOUR, RENE: Felicien David (Paris, 1911).
Hagan, Dorothy Veinus: Felicien David, 1810-1876: A Composer and a Cause
(Syracuse NY, 1985).
Donizetti
ASHBROOK, WILLIAM: Donizetti and his Operas (Cambridge, 1982).
DEAN, WINTON: ‘Donizetti’s Serious Operas’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical
Association, 100 (1973-4), 123-41.
MESSENGER, MICHAEL F.: ‘Donizetti, 1840: 3 ‘French’ Operas and their Italian
844 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Counterparts’, Journal of the Donizetti Society, 2 (1975) 99-115.
For further Donizetti bibliography see $ Ш ei" "
Halevy
BERLIOZ, HECTOR: Les Musiciens et la musique, ed. A. Hallays (Paris, 1903) [contains
several notices of Halévy's operas].
HALEvy, LEON: F. Halévy: Sa vie et ses euvres (Paris, 1862; 2nd edn., 1863).
*HaLÉvy: La Juive’, L' Avant-scéne opera, 100 (July 1987).
WAGNER, RICHARD: ‘La Reine de Chypre d'Halévy' (1842); repr. in Richard Wagner,
Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. Н. von Wolzogen and К. Sternfeld, xii
(Leipzig, 1911), 404-11; Eng. trans. William Ashton Ellis (ed. and trans.),
Richard Wagner's Prose Works, viii (1899), 175-200.
—— ‘Bericht über eine neue Pariser Oper: La Reine de Chypre von Halevy’ (1842);
repr. in. Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 1 (Leipzig,
1871), 299-319; Eng. trans., Ellis, Prose Works, vii (1898), 205-22.
— — ‘Halévy und die franzósiche Oper’ (1842); repr. in Richard Wagner, Sämtliche
Schriften und Dichtungen, xii (Leipzig, 1911), 129-46.
Meyerbeer
BECKER, HEINZ: ‘Giacomo Meyerbeers Mitarbeit an den Libretti seiner Opern’, in
Carl Dahlhaus et al. (eds), Bericht über den internationalen musik-
wissenschaftlichen Kongress Bonn 1970 [Gesellschaft für Musikforschung] (Kas-
sel, 1972). 155-60.
BLOOM, PETER A.: ‘Friends and Admirers: Meyerbeer and Fétis’, Revue belge de
musicologie, 32-3 (1978-9), 174-87.
DELACROIX, EUGENE: Journal de Eugene Delacroix: Nouvelle édition publiée d’apres
le manuscrit original, ed. André Joubin (Paris, 1932); Eng. trans., Walter Pach,
The Journal of Eugéne Delacroix (New York, 1937).
DIEREN, BERNARD VAN, ‘Meyerbeer’, in Down Among the Dead Men (London,
1935), 142-74.
FRESE, CHRISTHARD.: Dramaturgie der grossen Opern Giacomo Meyerbeers (Berlin,
1970).
FULCHER, JANE: ‘Meyerbeer and the Music of Society’, Musical Quarterly, 67 (1981),
213-29.
JOIN-DIETERLE, CATHERINE: ‘Robert le Diable: Le Premier Opera romantique’,
Romantisme, 28/9 (1980), 147-66.
MACDONALD, HUGH: ‘Robert le Diable’, in Peter Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the
Eighteen-Thirties (New York, 1987), 457-69.
MEYERBEER, GIACOMO: Giacomo Meyerbeer: Briefwechsel und Tagebucher, ed. Heinz
Becker (Berlin, 1960-75).
(b) OPÉRA COMIQUE
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
WOLFF, HELLMUTH CHRISTIAN: Die Oper III—19. Jahrhundert (Das Musikwerke,
40; Cologne, 1972); Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Opera III—19th
Century (Anthology of Music, 40; Cologne, 1975) [includes extracts from
Meyerbeer's Fra Diavolo].
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
BAILBE, JOSEPH-MARC: ‘Le Bourgeois et la musique au XIX siécle’, Romantisme, 13
(1977), 123-36.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 845
BossUET, PIERRE: Histoire des théâtres nationaux (Paris, n.d.).
CHORLEY, HENRY F.: Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections (London, 1862; rev. and
slightly abridged 2nd edn., Ernest Newman, 1926).
CLÉMENT, FELIX, and LAROUSSE, PIERRE: Dictionnaire lyrique, ou Histoire des opéras
(Paris, 1867; enlarged 3rd edn., 1905, repr. 1960; ed. Arthur Pougin as
Dictionnaire des opéras).
CooPER, MARTIAN: Opéra comique (London, 1949).
LEPEINTRE DESROCHES, PIERRE MARIE MICHEL: Suite du répertoire du theätre frangais
(81 vols.; Paris, 1882-3; repr. 1970).
LESURE, FRANCOIS (ed.): La Musique à Paris en 1830-1831 (Paris, 1983).
*L'Opéra-Comique au XIXe siècle’, La Revue musicale, 14/140 (1933), 243-308.
PENDLE, KARIN: Eugene Scribe and French Opera of the 19th Century (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1979).
SOUBIES, ALBERT: Soixante-neuf ans à l'Opéra-Comique en deux pages 1825-94 (Paris,
1893).
WALSH, THOMAS JOSEPH: Second Empire Opera: The Theätre Lyrique, Paris, 1851-
1870 (London, 1981).
(b) Individual Composers
Adam
ADAM, ADOLPHE: "Les Musiciens de Paris’ (1834), in Souvenirs d'un musicien (Paris,
1857; later edn., 1868).
HALEvY, FROMENTAL: Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. Adolphe Adam (Paris,
1859; repr. as 'Adolphe Adam' in Souvenirs et portraits, Paris, 1861).
PouGiN, ARTHUR: Adolphe Adam: Sa vie, sa carrière, ses mémoires artistiques (Paris,
1876).
STUDWELL, WILLIAM E.: Adolphe Adam and Leo Délibes: A Guide to Research (New
York, 1987).
Auber
See $ III (a)
Halévy
See $ III (a)
Mendelssohn
MENDELSSOHN, FELIX: Letters, trans. Gisella Selden-Goth (New York, 1945, London,
1946; repr. 1969).
For further Mendelssohn bibliography see $ I
Thomas
CooPER, MARTIN: ‘Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas’, in А. L. Bacharach (ed.), The
Music Masters (London, 1957-8), ii.
DEAN, WINTON: 'Shakespeare and Opera', in Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.), Shakespeare in
Music (London, 1964), 89-176.
(c) ITALY
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
GossETT, PHILIP: Italian Opera 1810-1840 (New York, 1985) [includes operas and
opera excerpts by Raimondi and Vaccai; other operas cited under individual
composers].
846 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(b) Works by Individual Composers
MERCADANTE, S.: / Normanni a Parigi, Il guiramento, Le due illustri rivali, Elena da
Feltre, Il bravo, La vestale, ed. Philip Gossett, Italian Opera 1810-1840, 17,
18, (New York, 1986), 19, 20 (1985), 21, 22 (1986).
Pacını, G.: Saffo, in Italian Opera 1810-1840, 36, ed. Philip Gossett (New York,
1986).
VERDI, G.: The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Philip Gossett et al. (Chicago and
Milan, 1983- ): series 1, 5 Ernani, ed. Claudio Gallico (1985); 3 Nabucco, ed.
Roger Parker (1987); 4 I Lombardi, 7 Giovanna d Arco, 10 & 25 Macbeth, 14
La battaglia di Legnano (forthcoming).
— — Full scores of Ernani, Giovanna d Arco, I Lombardi, La battaglia, Macbeth,
and Nabucco (Milan, c. 1882- ; repr. New York, n.d.).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
AMBROSE, Mary: ‘Walter Scott, Italian Opera and Romantic Stage-setting’, Italian
Studies, 36 (1981) 58—78.
BERLIOZ, HECTOR: Mémoires de Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1870; ed. Pierre Citron, 1969);
Eng. trans., David Cairns, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (New York and
London, 1969).
BLACK, JOHN N.: The Italian Romantic Libretto; A Study of Salvadore Cammarano
(Edinburgh, 1984).
D'AzEGLIO, MassIMO: / miei ricordi, with posthumous completion by Giuseppe
Torelli (2 vols.; Florence. 1867); Eng. trans., E. R. Vincent, Things I Remember
(London, 1966).
DEAN, WINTON: “Shakespeare and Opera’, in Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.), Shakespeare in
Music (London, 1964), 89-175.
Di STEFANO, CARLO: La censura teatrale in Italia (1600-1962) (Bologna, 1964).
EINAUDI, GINO (ed.): // melodramma italiano е Ottocento: Studie e ricerche per
Massimo Mila (Turin., 1977).
FLoRIMO, FRANCESCO: La scuola musicale di Napoli e i suoi conservatorii (Naples,
1881-3; repr. 1969).
GLINKA, MIKHAIL IVANOVICH: Memoirs, trans. Richard B. Mudge (Norman, Okla.,
1963).
GOSSETT, PHILIP, et al.: The New Grove Masters of Italian Opera (London, 1983)
[Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini].
HANSLICK, EDUARD: Die moderne Oper, i. Kritiken und Studien (Berlin, 1875; repr.,
1971).
KiMBELL, Davip: ‘The Setting’, in Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism
(Cambridge, 1981), 3-87.
LASTER, ARNAUD: ‘Victor Hugo, la musique et les musiciens, V. Hugo; Œuvres
complétes (Paris, 1967).
LIPPMANN, FRIEDRICH: ‘Der italienische Vers und der musikalische Rhythmus: Zum
Verhältnis von Vers und Musik in der italienischen Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts,
mit einem Rückblick auf die 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Analecta
musicologica, 12 (1975), 253-369; 14 (1977), 324-410; 15 (1978), 298-333.
— ‘Zur italianità der italienischen Oper im 19. Jahrhundert’ Die ‘Couleur locale’
in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1976), 229-56.
LoNGYEAR, REY M.: Schiller and Music (Chapel Hill, NC, 1966).
MAZZINI, GIUSEPPE: ‘Della fatalità considerata com’elemento drammatico’, Edizione
nazionale degli scritti di Giuseppe Mazzini, viii (Imola, 1910), 169-200.
— ‘Filosofia di musica’, Edizione nazionale degli scritti di Giuseppe Mazzini, viii
(Imola, 1910), 119-65.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 847
MENDELSSOHN, FELIX: Briefe aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1847, ed. Paul and C.
Mendelssohn (Leipzig, 1863-4; 7th edn., 1899); Eng. trans., Lady Wallace,
Letters of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (London, 1863; 4th edn., 1864, repr.
1970).
RINALDI, MARIO: Felice Romani: dal melodramma classico al melodramma romantico
(Rome, 1965).
RossELLI, JOHN: The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of
the Impresario (Cambridge, 1984).
ScHLITZER, FRANCO: Mondo teatrale dell'Ottocento (Naples, 1954).
— Storia dell'opera, ed. Alberto Basso, i. L’opera in Italia (Turin 1977).
SCHMIDGALL, GARY: Literature as Opera (New York, 1977).
ZAMBONI, GIUSEPPE: Die italienische Romantik: Ihre Auseinandersetzungen mit des
Tradition (Krefeld, 1953).
(b) Individual Composers
Bellini
ADAMO, MARIA ROSARIA, and LIPPMANN, FRIEDRICH: Vincenzo Bellini (Turin, 1981).
BELLINI, VINCENZO: Vincenzo Bellini: Epistolario, ed. Luisa Cambi (Verona, 1943).
ORREY, LESLIE: Bellini (London, 1969).
WEINSTOCK, HERBERT: Vincenzo Bellini: his Life and his Operas (New York, 1971).
Donizetti
ALBORGHETTI, F., and GALLI, M.: Gaetano Donizetti e G. Simone Mayr: Notizie e
documenti (Bergamo, 1875).
ASHBROOK, WiLLIAM: Donizetti (London, 1965).
Donizetti and his Operas (Cambridge, 1982).
Atti del 1° convegno internazionale di studi donizettiani Bergamo 1975.
DENT, EDWARD J.: ‘Donizetti: An Italian Romantic’, in Herbert Van Thal (ed.),
Fanfare for Ernest Newman (London, 1955), 86-107.
GossETT, PHILIP: ‘Anna Bolena’ and the Artistic Maturity of Gaetano Donizetti
(Oxford, 1985).
LIPPMANN, FRIEDRICH: ‘Die Melodien Donizettis', Analecta musicologica, З (1966),
80-113.
WEINSTOCK, HERBERT: Donizetti and the World of Opera in Italy, Paris and Vienna
in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1964; repr. 1979).
ZAVADINI, GUIDO: Donizetti: Vita-musiche-epistolario (Bergamo, 1948).
Mercadante
CARLI BALLOLA, GIOVANNI: ‘Incontro con Mercadante’, Chigiana, 26-7 (1969-70),
465-500.
FLORIMO, FRANCESCO: Cenno storico sulla scuola musicale di Napoli (Naples, 1869-
71; rev. enlarged 2nd edn. as La scuola musicale di Napoli e i suoi conservatorii,
1880-3, repr. 1969).
NOTARNICOLA, BIAGIO: Saverio Mercadante, biografico critica (Rome, 1945, rev. and
enlarged as Saverio Mercadente nella gloria e nella luce, 1948).
SCHMID, PATRIC: ‘Rediscovering Mercandante', Opera, 26 (1975), 332-7.
WALKER, FRANK: “Mercadante and Verdi’, Music and Letters, 33 (1952), 311-21;
34 (1953), 33-8.
Pacini
LIPPMANN, FRIEDRICH: ‘Giovanni Pacini: Bemerkungen zum Stil seiner Opern’,
Chigiana, 24 (1967), 111-24.
PACINI, GIOVANNI: Le mie memorie artistiche (Florence, 1865; ed. F. Magnani,
Florence 1875).
848 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rossini
OSBORNE, RICHARD: Rossini (London, 1986). - -
STENDHAL: Vie de Rossini (Paris, 1824; rev. 2nd ейп. by Henry Prunieres, 1922);
Eng. trans., Richard N. Coe, Life of Rossini (London, 1956; rev. 2nd edn.,
1970).
Verdi
ABBATE, CAROLYN, and PARKER, ROGER (eds.): Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1988).
ABBIATI, FRANCO: Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1959).
BALDINI, GABRIELE: Abitare la battaglia: La storia di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1970);
Eng. trans., Roger Parker, The Story of Giuseppe Verdi (Cambridge, 1980).
BUDDEN, JULIAN: The Operas of Verdi, i. From Oberto to Rigoletto (London, 1973).
—— Verdi (London, 1985).
CHECCHI, EUGENIO: Giuseppe Verdi: Le genio e le opere (Florence, 1887).
CONATI, MARCELLO (ed.): Interviste e incontri con Verdi (Milan, 1980); Eng. trans.,
R. Stokes, Interviews and Encounters with Verdi (London, 1984).
—— La bottega della musica: Verdi e La Fenice (Milan, 1983).
GARIBALDI, LUIGI AGOSTINO: Giuseppe Verdi nelle lettere di Emanuele Muzio ad
Antonio Barezzi (Milan, 1931).
GERHARTZ, LEO KARL: Die Auseinandersetzungen des jungen Giuseppe Verdi mit dem
literarischen Drama: Ein Beitrag zur szenischen Strukturbestimmung der Oper
(Berlin, 1968).
GODEFROY, VINCENT: The Dramatic Genius of Verdi: Studies of Selected Operas, i.
‘Nabucco’ to ‘La traviata’ (London, 1975).
HARWOOD, GREGORY W.: 'Verdi's Reform of the Italian Opera Orchestra’, 19th-
century Music, 10 (1986-7), 108-34.
KIMBELL, Davip: "The Young Verdi and Shakespeare’, Proceedings of the Royal
Musical Association, 101 (1974-5), 59-73.
—— Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism (Cambridge, 1981).
Mepici, Mario (ed.): Atti del I? congresso internazionale di studi verdiani: Situazione
e prospective degli studi verdiani nel mondo (Parma, 1969).
——— Atti del III’ congresso internazionale di studi verdinai: Il teatro e la musica di
Giuseppe Verdi (Parma, 1974).
Miva, Massimo: Giuseppe Verdi (Bari, 1958).
—— La giovinezza di Verdi (Turin, 1974).
— — L'arte di Verdi (Turin, 1980).
Момаи, Gino: Verdi (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1898; 4th edn., 1951).
PouGIN, ARTHUR: Giuseppe Verdi: Vita aneddotica con note ed aggiunte di Folchetto
(Milan, 1881).
Rosen, DaviD, and PORTER, ANDREW (eds.) Verds Macbeth: A Sourcebook
(Cambridge and New York, 1984) [papers given at the 5th international Verdi
congress].
VERDI, GIUSEPPE: Carteggio Verdi- Войо, ed. Mario Medici and Marcello Conati
(Parma, 1978).
—— I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio
(Milan, 1913; repr. 1973); abridged Eng. trans., Charles Osborne (ed. and
trans.), Letters of Giuseppe Verdi (London, 1971).
WALKER, FRANK: The Man Verdi (London, 1962; repr. 1982).
WEAVER, WILLIAM: Verdi: А Documentary Study (London, 1977).
—— and CHUSID, MARTIN (eds.): The Verdi Companion (London, 1980).
WERFEL, FRANZ, and STEFAN, PAUL: Verdi: The Man in his Letters (New York,
1942; repr., n.d.).
For further Verdi bibiography see $ VI (c)
BIBLIOGRAPHY 849
(d) GERMANY
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
GossETT, PHiLIP: Early Romantic Opera (New York, 1978) [includes operas by
Meyerbeer].
WOLFF, HELLMUTH CHRISTIAN: Die Oper III— 19. Jahrhundert (Das Musikwerke, 40;
Cologne, 1972) Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Opera III— I9th Century
(Anthology of Music, 40; Cologne, 1975) [includes extracts from Lortzing,
Hans Sachs, and Spohr, Faust].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
ScHUMANN, R.: Robert Schumann's Werke, ed. Clara Schumann ег al. (Leipzig,
1881-93; repr. 1967-8): series 9 Grössere Gesangwerke, 1 Das Paradiso und die
Peri (1883), 3 Genoveva (1886).
SPOHR, L. Selected Works of Louis Spohr (1784-1859), ed. Clive Brown (New
York, 1987- ): 1 Faust, 2 Jessonda, 3 Pietro von Abano.
WAGNER, R.: Richard Wagners Werke: Musikdramen— Jugendopern— musikalische
Werke, ed. Michael Balling (Leipzig, 1912-29; repr. 1971): 3 Tannhäuser; 4
Lohengrin; 12 Die Hochzeit; 3 Die Geen; 14 Das Liebesvot.
—— Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Egon Voss er al.
(Mainz, 1970- ): series A Musikbände: 3 Rienzi, ed. Reinhard Strohm and
Egon Voss (1974-7); 4 Der fliegende Holländer, ed. Isolde Vetter (1983); 5-6
Tannhäuser, ed. Reinhard Strohm (1980-6); 1 Die Feen, 2 Das Liebesvot, 7
Lohengrin, 15 Unvollendete Bühnenwerke und Einlage Stucke (forthcoming).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
DENT, EDWARD J.: The Rise of Romantic Opera, ed. Winton Dean (Cambridge,
1970).
FLAHERTY, MARIA GLORIA: Opera in the Development of German Cultural Thought
(Princeton, NJ, 1978).
GARLINGTON, AUBREY S.: ‘German Romantic Opera and the Problem of Origins’,
Musical Quarterly, 68 (1977), 500-6.
—— ‘Е. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Der Dichter und der Komponist" and the Creation of
the German Romantic Opera', Musical Quarterly, 65 (1979), 22-47.
GÖPFERT, BERND: Stimmtypen und Rollencharakten in der deutschen Oper von 1815-
1848 (Wiesbaden, 1977).
GOSLICH, SIEGFRIED: Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen romantischen Oper
(Leipzig, 1937; enlarged 2nd edn., as Die deutsche romantische Oper, 1975).
HOFFMANN, E. T. A.: ‘Der Dichter und der Komponist’, Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung, 15 (1813), repr. in E. T. A. Hoffman: Schriften zur Musik: Nachlese,
ed. Friedrich Schnapp (Munich, 1963; 2nd edn., 1978); Eng. trans., Martyn
Clarke, E. T. A. Hoffmann: Writings on Music, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge,
forthcoming).
HORTSCHANSKY, KLaus: "Der Deus ex machina im Opernlibretto der ersten Hälfte
des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Heinz Becker (ed.), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Oper
(Regensburg, 1965), 45-76.
PALDAMUS, F. G.: Das deutsche Theater der Gegenwart (Mainz, 1857).
REICHA, ANTOINE(-JOSEPH): L'Art du compositeur dramatique, ou cours complet de
850 BIBLIOGRAPHY
composition vocale (Paris, 1883); trans., Carl Czerny (ed. and trans.), Die Kunst
der dramatischen Composition (Vienna, 1835). -
SCHIEDERMAIR, LUDWIG: Die deutsche Oper: Grundzuge ihres Werdens und Wesens
(Leipzig, 1930; repr. 1971; 3rd edn., 1943), chap. III ‘Romantik’.
SCHLETTERER, HANS MICHAEL: Das deutsche Singspeil (Augsburg, 1863; repr. 1975).
WAGNER, RICHARD: ‘Die deutsche Oper’ (1834), repr. in Richard Wagner: Sämtliche
Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. H. von Wolzogen and R. Sternfeld, xii (Leipzig,
1911), 1-4; Eng. trans., William Ashton Ellis (ed. and trans.), Richard Wagner’s
Prose Works, viii (London, 1899; repr. 1972), 55-8.
—— ‘Pasticcio’ (1834), Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, xii
(Leipzig, 1911), 5-11; Eng. trans., Ellis, Prose Works, viii (London, 1899), 59-
67.
——— ‘Uber die Ouverture’ (1840), repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften
und Dichtungen, i (Leipzig, 1871), 241-56.; Eng. trans., Ellis, Prose Works, vii
(London, 1898), 151-65.
—— ‘Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde’ (1851), repr. in Richard Wagner: Ge-
sammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, iv (Leipzig, 1872), 285-418; Eng. trans.,
Ellis, Prose Works, i (London, 1892), 267-392.
(b) Individual Composers
Beethoven
THAYER, ALEXANDER WHEELOCK: Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, ed. and trans.
Hermann Dieters, i (Berlin, 1866; rev. 2nd edn., 1901; rev. 3rd edn., Hugo
1910-11); ıv-v, ed. Hugo Riemann (Leipzig, 1907-8. Eng. original, ed. Henry
Edward Krehbiel (New York, 1921); rev. and ed. Elliot Forbes, Thayer’s Life
of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ, 1964; 2nd edn., 1967).
Flotow
WEISSMAN, JOHN S.: Flotow (London, 1950).
Liszt
LiszT, FRANZ: Franz Liszt: Briefe an die Fürstin Sayn-Wittgenstein (Leipzig, 1900).
For further Liszt bibliography see $ VII
Lortzing
KRUSE, GEORG RICHARD (ed.): A. Lortzing: Gesammelte Briefe (Leipzig, 1902; 3rd
edn., 1947).
SUBNOTNIK, ROSE ROSENGARD: 'Lortzing and the German Romantics: A Dialectical
Assessment’, Musical Quarterly, 62 (1976), 241-64.
Marschner
PALMER, A. DEAN: Heinrich August Marschner 1795-1861: His Life and Stage Works
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980).
Mendelssohn
Mintz, DoNALD M.: ‘Melusine: A Mendelssohn Draft, Musical Quarterly, 43
(1957), 480-99.
WaRRACK, JOHN: 'Mendelssohn's Operas’, in Nigel Fortune (ed.), Music and Theatre:
Essays in Honour of Winton Dean (Cambridge, 1987), 263-98.
For further Mendelssohn bibliography see $ I
Meyerbeer
See § III (a)
Nicolai
ALTMANN, WILHELM (ed.): Otto Nicolais Tagebücher (Regensburg, 1973).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 851
HANSLICK, EDUARD: Die Moderne Oper, vin. Am Erde des Jahrhunderts (Berlin,
1899).
KONRAD, ULRICH: Orto Nicolai, 1810-1849: Studien zu Leben und Werk (Baden-
Baden, 1986).
Schumann
ABRAHAM, GERALD: “The Dramatic Music’, in Gerald Abraham (ed.), Schumann:
A Symposium (London, 1952), 260-82.
HANSLICK, EDUARD: *R. Schumann als Opernkomponist', Die Moderne Oper (Berlin,
1875; repr. 1971), 256-73.
SIEGEL, LINDA: ‘A Second Look at Schumann’s Genoveva’, Music Review, 36 (1975),
17-41.
For further Schumman bibliography see § I, § II, and $ IV
Spohr
SPOHR, Louis: Selbstsbiographie (Kassel and Göttingen, 1860-1); ed. F. Góthel as
Lebenserinnerungen (Tutzing, 1968); Eng. trans., Ludwig Spohr's Autobiography
(London 1865, repr. 1969; 2nd edn., 1878); part trans. Henry Pleasants The
Musical Journeys of Louis Spohr (Norman, Okla., 1961, repr. 1987).
Wagner
BAILEY, ROBERT: ‘Wagner’s Musical Sketches for Siegfrieds Tod, in Harold S.
Powers (ed.), Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk (Princeton,
NJ, 1968), 459-95.
DEATHRIDGE, JoHN: Wagner's Rienzi A Reappraisal Based on a Study of the Sketches
and Drafts (Oxford, 1977).
HOPKINSON, CECIL: Tannhäuser: An Examination of 36 Editions (Tutzing, 1973).
KocH, Max: ‘Die Quellen der “Hochzeit” ', Richard Wagner-Jahrbuch, iv (1912),
105-14.
WAGNER, RICHARD: Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 1-x
(Leipzig, 1871-3, 1883; 2nd ейп. 1887, repr. 1976; 5th edn., with vols. xi-xii
added, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. Н. von Wolzogen and К.
Sternfeld, 1911; 6th edn., with vols. xiii-xvi added, ed. H. von Wolzogen and
R. Sternfeld, 1914).
Richard Wagner's Prose Works, ed. and trans. William Ashton Ellis (London,
1892-9; repr. 1972).
—— Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz, 1970- ): series
B Dokumentenbände: 23 Rienzi, ed. Reinhard Strohm (1976); 29 Der Ring des
Nibelungen, ed. Werner Brieg and Hartmut Fladt (1976); 30 Parsifal, ed. Egon
Voss and Martin Geck (1972-3); 22 Die Feen und Das Liebesvot; 24 Der
fliegender Holländer; 25 Tannhäuser; 26 Lohengrin; 27 Tristan und Isolde; 28
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (forthcoming).
— — Three Wagner Essays, trans. Robert L. Jacobs (London, 1979).
‘Uber das Dirigieren’ (1870), repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften
und Dichtungen, viii (Leipzig, 1873), 325-410; Eng. trans., William Ashton Ellis
(ed. and trans.), Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, iv (London, 1895; repr. 1972),
289-364; and Robert L. Jacobs (trans.), Three Wagner Essays (London, 1979),
45-93.
For further Wagner bibliography see § V
Weber
JAHNS, FRIEDRICH WILHELM: Car! Maria von Weber in seinen Werken; Chronologisch-
thematisches Verzeichniss seiner sämmtlichen Compositionen (Berlin, 1871; repr.
1967).
WEBER, CARL MARIA VON: Sämtliche Schriften von Carl Maria von Weber: Kritische
Ausgabe, ed. Georg Kaiser (Berlin and Leipzig, 1908); Eng. trans. Martin
852 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cooper, Carl Maria von Weber: Writings on Music, ed. John Warrack
(Cambridge, 1981). ..
(е) RUSSIA AND EAST EUROPE
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies ©
WOLFF, HELLMUTH CHRISTIAN: Die Oper П1—19. Jahrhundert (Das Musikwerke,
40; Cologne, 1972); Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Opera IH—19th
Century (Anthology of Music, 40; Cologne, 1975) [includes extracts from
Moniuszko's Halka].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
DARGOMIZHSKY, A. S.: Esmeralda, ed. Mikhail Samoylovich Pekelis (Moscow, 1961).
GLINKA, M. I.: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin er
al. (Moscow, 1955-69): 12-13 Ivan Susanin, 14-15 Ruslan i Lyudmila.
LISINSKI, V.: Vatroslav Lisinski: Izabrana djela, ed. Lovro Županović (Zagreb, 1969):
6 Ljubav i zloba.
Skroup, F.: Dräternik (Prague, 1913; 2nd edn., 1926).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘The Early Development of Opera in Poland’, Essays on Russian
and East European Music (London, 1985), 122-40.
et al.: The New Grove Russian Masters 2 (London, 1986) [Rimsky-Korsakov,
Skryabin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich].
Brown, Davip et al.: The New Grove Russian Masters 1 (London, 1986) [Glinka,
Borodin, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky].
CooPER, MARTIN: Russian Opera (London, 1951).
GINZBURG, SEMYON L’vovicH: Istoriya russkoy muziki v notnikh obraztsakh
(Moscow and Leningrad, 1952; enlarged 2nd edn., 1967-70).
GOSENPUD, ABRAM AKIMOVICH: Russkiy operniy teatr XIX veka, i. 1836-56
(Leningrad, 1969).
MICHALOWSKI, KORNEL: Opery polskie (Krakow, 1954).
LEVASHOVA, O. E., KELDisH, YURY, and KANDINSKY, A. (ed.): Istoriya russkoy
muziki (Moscow, 1972).
PEKELIS, MIKHAIL SAMOYLOVICH: Istoriya russkoy muziki (Moscow and Leningrad,
1940; repr. 1963).
SEAMAN, GERALD R.: History of Russian Music, i (Oxford, 1967).
SZABOLCSI, BENCE: A magyar zenetórténet kezikönyve (Budapest, 1947; 2nd edn.,
1955; 3rd edn., 1977); abridged Eng. trans. of 2nd edn., A Concise History of
Hungarian Music (Budapest, 1964; 2nd edn., 1965).
TYRRELL, JOHN: Czech Opera (Cambridge, 1988).
(b) Individual Composers
Dargomizhsky
PEKELIS, MIKHAIL SAMOYLOVICH: Aleksandr Sergeevich Dargomizhskiy i ego okru-
zhenie (Moscow, 1966-71).
TARUSKIN, RICHARD: ‘Realism as Preached and Practiced: The Russian Opera
Dialogue', Musical Quarterly, 56 (1970), 431-54.
For further Dargomizhsky bibliography see $ VI (d)
BIBLIOGRAPHY 853
Glinka
Brown, Davip: Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1974).
GLINKA, MIKHAIL IVANOVICH: Literaturnoe nasledie Glinki, ed. Valerian Mi-
khaylovich Bogdanov-Beryozovsky (Leningrad and Moscow, 1952-3).
——— Memoirs, trans. Richard B. Mudge (Norman, Okla., 1963).
TARUSKIN, RICHARD: ‘Glinka’s Ambiguous Legacy and the Birth Pangs of Russian
Opera’, 19th-century Music, 1 (1977-8), 142-62.
Moniuszko
ABRAHAM, GERALD: "The Operas of Stanistaw Moniuszko’, Essays on Russian and
East European Music (Oxford, 1985), 156-71.
MACIEJEWSKI, B. M.: Moniuszko, Father of Polish Opera (London, 1979).
RUDZIŃSKI, WITOLD: ‘Halka’ Stanislawa Moniuszko (Krakow, 1972).
——— Moniuszko (Kraków 1971).
——— Stanislaw Moniuszko: Studia i materiały (Kraków, 1955-61).
Verstovsky
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘The Operas of Alexei Verstovsky’, 19th-century Music, 7 (1983-
4), 326-35.
DOBROKHOTOV, B.: А. N. Verstovskiy (Moscow, 1949).
VERSTOVSKY, ALEKSEY NIKOLAEVICH: ‘Avtobiografiya kompozitora A. N. Ver-
stovskogo’, Biryuch petrogradskikh gosudarstvennikh teatrov (Petrograd, 1921).
(f) BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
(i) Books and Articles
(a) General
BARNETT, JOHN FRANCIS: Musical Reminiscences and Impressions (London, 1906).
British Opera in Retrospect (British Music Society, London, 1985).
CHASE, GILBERT: America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York,
1955; rev. 2nd edn., 1966).
Carr, BRUCE: “Theatre Music: 1800-1834’, in Nicholas Temperley (ed.), Music in
Britain: The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 288-306.
HAMM, CHARLES: Music in the New World (New York, 1983).
HURD, MICHAEL: ‘Opera: 1834-1865’, in Nicholas Temperley (ed.), Music in Britain:
The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 307-57.
HOGARTH, GEORGE: Memoirs of the Musical Drama (London, 1838; repr. 1972).
MATES, JULIAN: America’s Musical Stage: Two Hundred Years of Musical Theatre
(Westport, Conn., 1985).
REEVES, Sms (J.): My Jubilee, or, Fifty Years of Artistic Life (London, 1889).
SHAW, BERNARD: London Music in 1888-89 as heard by Corno di Bassetto (London,
1937).
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS: ‘Ballroom and Drawing-room Music’, in Nicholas Temperley
(ed.), Music in Britain: The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 109-34.
—— ‘The English Romantic Opera’, Victorian Studies, 9 (1966), 293-301.
WHITE, ERIC WALTER: ‘Romantic Operas—XIXth Century’, in A History of English
Opera (London, 1983), 243-59.
(b) Individual Composers
Balfe
BARRETT, WILLIAM ALEXANDER: Balfe: His Life and Works (London, 1882).
WHITE, ERIC WALTER: ‘Balfe and his Contemporaries’, in A History of English
Opera (London, 1983), 260-94.
854 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barnett
CARR, BRUCE: ‘The First All-sung English 19th-century Opera’, Musical Times, 115
(1974), 125-6.
Loder
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS: ‘Raymond and Agnes’, Musical Times, 107 (1966), 307-10.
Wallace К
KLEIN, J. W.: “Vincent Wallace (1812-65): A Reassessment’, Opera, 16 (1965), 709-
16.
CHAPTER IV
ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC: 1830-1850
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
FARRENC, ARISTIDE and LouisE: Le Tresor des pianistes (Paris, 1861-72; repr. 1977)
[23 includes works by Mendelssohn and Chopin].
FERGUSON, HOWARD: Style and Interpretation: An Anthology of Keyboard Music, 4
Romantic Piano Music (London 1964; 2nd edn., 1972) [includes works by
Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt].
GEORGI, WALTER: ‘Romanticism and the National Efforts in the 19th Century’,
400 Jahre europäischer Klaviermusik (Das Musikwerk, 1; Cologne, 1959); Eng.
trans., 400 Years of European Keyboard Music (Anthology of Music, 1; Cologne,
1959) [includes music by Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin].
GILLESPIE, JoHN: Nineteenth-century European Piano Music: Unfamiliar Masterworks
(New York, 1977) [includes music by Heller].
KaHL, WILLI: Lyrische Klavierstücke der Romantik (Stuttgart, 1926).
—— — Das Charakterstück (Das Musikwerke, 8; Cologne, 1955); Eng. trans., A.
Crawford Howie, The Character Piece (Anthology of Music, 8; Cologne, 1961)
[includes music by Heller].
NEWMAN, WILLIAM S.: Thirteen Keyboard Sonatas of the 18th and 19th Centuries
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1947).
POHANKA, JAROSLAV: Dějiny české hudby v příkladech (Prague, 1958).
ScHLEUNING, PETER: Die Fantasie 2 (Das Musikwerk, 43; Cologne, 1971); Eng.
trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Fantasia: 18th to 20th Centuries (Anthology
of Music, 43; Cologne, 1971) [includes music by Czerny].
STEPHENSON, KURT: Romantik in der Tonkunst (Das Musikwerk, 21; Cologne, 1961);
Eng. trans., Robert Kolben, Romanticism in Music (Anthology of Music, 21;
Cologne, 1961) [includes music by Heller, Schumann, and Liszt].
TEMPERLEY, NicHOLAS: The London Pianoforte School 1766-1860 (New York, 1984-
7) [includes continental composers in London].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
ALKAN, C. V.: Guvres choisies pour piano, ed. Georges Beck (Le Pupitre, 16; Paris,
1969).
—— The Piano Music of Alkan, ed. Raymond Lewenthal (New York, 1964).
BENNETT, W. S.: Piano and Chamber Music, ed. Geoffrey Bush (Musica Britannica,
37; London, 1972); selection as Suite de pieces (Early Keyboard Music, 32;
London, 1972).
— Complete Works for Piano Solo (The London Pianoforte School 1770-1860,
ed. Nicholas Temperley, New York, 1985).
CHOoPIn, F. F.: Friedrich Chopin's Werke, ed. Woldemar Bargiel, Johannes Brahms,
BIBLIOGRAPHY 855
August Franchomme, Franz Liszt, Carl Reinecke, Ernst Rudorff (Leipzig,
1878-1902: vols. 1-10 and 13 [Works for solo piano].
—— Fryderyk Chopin: Dziela wszystkie| Complete Works, ed. Ignacy Jan Paderewski,
with Jozef Turczynski and Ludwik Bronarski (Warsaw, 1949-61): 1 Preludes
(1949); 2 Studies (1949); 3 Ballades (1949); 4 Impromptus (1949); 4 Scherzos
(1950); 6 Sonatas (1949); 7 Nocturnes (1952); 8 Polonaises (1952); 9 Waltzes
(1950); 10 Mazurkas (1953); 11 Fantasia etc. (1954); 12 Rondos (1954); 13
Concert Allegro etc. (1954).
—— Complete Works for Piano, ed. Carl Mikuli (New York, 1934).
— Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig, Peters; new edn., ed. Bronislaw von Pozniak).
GLINKA, M. I.: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin er
al. (Moscow, 1955-69): 5 [Piano Duet] (1957); 6 [Piano Solo] (1958).
—— Complete Works for Piano Solo and Piano 4 Hands (Moscow and New York,
1952).
Liszt, F.: Franz Liszts Musikalische Werke, ed. Franz Liszt-Stiftung (Leipzig, 1907-
36; repr. 1966): Part 2 Pianoforte-Werke.
—— Liszt Society Publications (London, 1950- ): 1 Early and Late Piano Works.
—— [Works]. ed. V. Belov and К. Sorokin (Moscow, 1958- ): 1/1 [Piano Works].
Franz Liszt: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke/New Edition of the Complete
Works, lst series, ed. Zoltán Gárdonyi and István Szelényi, Works for Piano,
Two Hands (Kassel and Budapest, 1970-85).
—— Werke für Klavier zu 2 Händern, ed. Emil von Sauer (Leipzig, 1917).
MENDELSSOHN, F.: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy s Werke: Kritisch durchgesehene
Ausgabe, ed. Julius Rietz (Leipzig, 1874-7; repr. 1967-9): series 10 Für Pianoforte
zu 4 Händen; series 11 Für Pianoforte allein (repr. 1975).
—— Complete Piano Works (London, 1909).
—— Sämtliche Klavierwerke, ed. Theodor Kullak (Leipzig, Peters).
MONIUSZKO S.: Stanislaw Moniuszko: Dziela]Werke (Krakow, 1965- ): series E, 34
Klavierwerke (1976).
SCHUMANN, R.: Robert Schumann’s Werke, ed. Clara Schumann (Leipzig, 1881-93;
repr. 1967-8: series 7 Für Pianoforte zu zwei Händen (1879-87), 6 Für ein oder
zwei pianoforte zu vier Händen (1887).
Abegg-Variationen, ed. Robert Münster (Munich, 1976).
—— Sämtliche Werke für Klavier, ed. Emil von Sauer (Leipzig, Peters).
—— Papillons, ed. Karl Geiringer (Vienna, 1933).
SMETANA, B.: Studijni vydáni del Bedřicha Smetany, ed. Frantisek Bartoš, Josef
Plavec, ег al. (Prague, 1940- ): [Piano Works] 7 vols. (1944-78).
—— Klavirni dilo Bedřicha Smetany, ed. Mirko Ocadlik er al. (Prague 1944-73): 1
Prvni cykly; 2 Polky; 3 Skladby studijni.
WAGNER, R.: Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz,
1970- ): 19 Klavierwerke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (1970).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
BARENBOYM, L. A., and MUZALEVsKY, V. I.: Khrestomatiya po istorii fortep' yannoy
muziki v Rossii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1949).
BECKING, GusTAV: ‘Zur musikalischen Romantik’, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für
Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, ii (1924), 581-615.
CLOSSON ERNEST: Histoire du piano (Brussels, 1944); Eng. trans., Delano Ames,
History of the Piano (London, 1947; rev. 2nd edn., Robin Golding, London,
1974).
CORTOT, ALFRED: La Musique francaise de piano (Paris, 1930-44).
856 BIBLIOGRAPHY
DALE, KATHLEEN: Nineteenth-century Piano Music (London, 1954; repr. 1972).
EGERT, PAUL: Die Klaviersonate im Zeitalter-der Romantik (Berlin, 1934).
EHRLICH, CYRIL: The Piano: A History (London, 1976).
FRIEDLAND, MARTIN: Zeitstil und Persönlichkeitsstil in den Variationenwerke der
musikalischen Romantik (Leipzig, 1930).
GEORGII, WALTER: Klaviermusik: Geschichte der Musik für Klavier für zwei und vier
Напае (Berlin and Zurich, 1941; 5th edn., 1976; 6th edn., 1984).
HARDING, RosAMOND: The Pianoforte: Its History Traced to the Great Exhibition
of 1851 (Cambridge, 1933; rev. 2nd edn., 1978).
KRUEGER, WOLFGANG: Das Nachtstück: Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklung des einsátzigen
Pianofortestückes im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1971).
LENZ, WILHELM VON: Die grossen Pianoforte-Virtuosen unserer Zeit aus persónlicher
Bekannschaft: Liszt, Chopin, Tausig, Henselt (Berlin, 1872); Eng. trans., The
Great Piano Virtuosos of our Time (New York, 1899: rev. Philip Reder, London,
TOT:
MERSMANN, Hans: ‘Sonaten Form, in der romantischen Kammermusik’, in Walter
Lott, Helmuth Osthoff, and Werner Wolffheim (eds.), Musikwissenschaftliche
Beitráge: Festschrift für Johannes Wolf zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1929;
repr. 1973), 112-17.
MÜLLER-BLATAU, JOSEPH M.: Gestaltung- Umgestaltung: Studien zur Geschichte der
musikalischen Variation (Stuttgart, 1950).
NELSON, ROBERT U.: The Technique of Variation: A Study of the Instrumental
Variation from Cabézon to Reger (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1948; rev.
2nd edn., 1962).
NEWMAN, WILLIAM S.: A History of the Sonata Idea, iii. The Sonata since Beethoven
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1969; rev. 2nd edn., 1972).
PRESSER, DIETHER: ‘Die Opernbearbeitung des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Archiv für Musik-
wissenschaft, 12 (1955), 228-38.
PUCHELT, GERHARD: Variationen für Klavier im 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim and
New York, 1973).
——— Verlorene Klünge: Studien zur deutschen Klaviermusik 1830-1880 (Berlin, 1969).
ScHMITZ, ARNOLD: Das romantische Beethovenbild (Berlin and Bonn, 1927).
SCHÜNEMANN, GEORG: Geschichte des Klaviermusik (Hamburg, 1940; rev. Herbert
Gerigk, 1953; 2nd edn., 1956).
SMIRNOV, M.: Fortep' yannie proizvedeniya kompozitorov moguchey kuchki (Moscow,
1971).
(b) Individual Composers
Alkan
SMITH, RONALD: Alkan, i. The Enigma (London, 1976), ii. The Music (1987).
Burgmiiller
ECKERT, HEINRICH: Norbert Burgmiiller: Ein Beitrag zur Stil- und Geistesgeschichte
der deutschen Romantik (Augsburg, 1932).
Chopin
ABRAHAM, GERALD: Chopin’s Musical Style (London, 1939; rev. 4th edn., 1960).
CHOMINSKI, JOZEF MICHAL: Fryderyk Chopin (Leipzig, 1980).
CHOPIN, FRYDERYK FRANCISZEK: Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin, ed.
and trans. Arthur Hedley (London, 1962).
— Korespondencja Fryderyka Chopina z rodziną, ed. Krystyna Kobylanska
(Warsaw, 1972).
—— Korespondencja Fryderyka Chopina, ed. Bronisław Edward Sydow (Warsaw,
1955):
BIBLIOGRAPHY 857
EIGELDINGER, JEAN-JACQUES: Chopin vu par ses eleves (Neuchätel, 1970), Eng. trans.,
Naomi Shohet and Krysia Osostowicz, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, ed. Roy
Howat (Cambridge, 1987).
HEDLEY, ARTHUR: Chopin (London, 1947; rev. 3rd edn., Maurice J. E. Brown,
1974).
JACHIMECKI, ZDZISLAW: Chopin: Rys Zycia i twórczosci (Warsaw, 1949).
KALLBERG, JEFFREY: ‘Chopin’s Last Style’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 38 (1985), 264-315.
Lissa, ZoFIA (ed.): The Book of the First International Musicological Congress
Devoted to the Works of Frederick Chopin (Warsaw, 1963).
METHUEN-CAMPBELL, JAMES: Chopin Playing (London, 1981).
NIECKS, FRIEDRICH: Frederick Chopin as a Man and a Musician (Leipzig, 1888; 3rd
edn., 1902, repr. 1973).
OrricH, Mania: Die Bedeutung des Ornaments im Schaffen Friedrich Chopins (Berlin,
1937).
SAMSON, JiM: The Music of Chopin (London, 1985).
—— (ed.): Chopin Studies (Cambridge, 1988).
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS, ABRAHAM, GERALD, and SEARLE, HUMPHREY: The New Grove
Early Romantic Masters 1 (London, 1985) [includes Chopin].
WALKER, ALAN (ed.): Frederic Chopin: Profiles of the Man and the Musician
(London, 1966; rev. 2nd edn., as The Chopin Companion, 1973).
ZEBROWSKI, Dariusz (ed.): Studies in Chopin (Warsaw, 1973) [Proceedings of 1972
Warsaw conference].
Dargomizhsky
DARGOMIZHSKY, A. S.: Sobranie sochineniy dlya fortep' yano, ed. Mikhail Samoylovich
Pekelis (Moscow and Leningrad, 1954).
Sochineniya dlya simfonicheskogo orkestra, ed. Mikhail Samoylovich Pekelis
(Moscow, 1967).
Heller
EIGELDINGER, JEAN-JACQUES: Stephen Heller: Lettres d'un musicien romantique à
Paris (Paris, 1981).
ScHÜTZ, R.: Stephen Heller: Ein Künstlerleben (Leipzig, 1911).
Liszt
Busoni, FERRUCCIO: “Die ausgaben der Lisztschen Klavierwerke’, Allgemeine
Musik-Zeitung, xxvii (1900), repr. in Gesammelte Aufsatze: Von der Einheit der
Musik (Berlin, 1922).
LONGYEAR, REY M.: ‘The Text of Liszt’s B Minor Sonata’, Musical Quarterly, 40
(1974), 435-50.
WINKLHOFER, SHARON: Liszt's Sonata in B minor: A Study of Autography Sources
and Documents (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980).
For further Liszt bibliography see $ VII
Mendelssohn
FELLERER, KARL GusrAv: ‘Mendelssohn in der Klaviermusik seiner Zeit’, in Carl
Dahlhaus (ed.), Das Problem Mendelssohn (Regensburg, 1974), 195-200.
KAHL, WILLI: ‘Zu Mendelssohn’s Liedern ohne Worte’, Zeitschrift für Musik-
wissenschaft, 3 (1920-1), 459-69.
KLINGEMANN, KARL (ed.) Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdys Briefwechsel mit Le-
gationsrat Karl Klingemann in London (Essen, 1909).
For further Mendelssohn bibliography see $ 1
Schumann
ABERT, HERMANN: Robert Schumann (Berlin, 1903; 4th edn., 1920).
858 BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOETTICHER, WOLFGANG: ‘Gesänge der Frühe: Schumanns letztes Klavierwerke’,
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 107 (1956), 418-21.
—— Robert Schumann: Einführung in Persönlichkeit und Werk (Berlin, 1941).
—— Robert Schumanns Klavierwerke: Neue biographische und textkritische Un-
tersuchungen, 1. Opus 1-6 (Wilhelmshaven, 1976).
CHISSELL, JOAN: Schumann Piano Music (London, 1972).
DALE, KATHLEEN: “The Piano Music’, in Gerald Abraham (ed.), Schumann: A
Symposium (London, 1952), 12-97.
GERTLER, WOLFGANG: Robert Schumann in seinem frühen Klavierwerken (Wol-
fenbüttel and Berlin, 1931).
HOHENEMSER, RICHARD: ‘Formale Eigentümlichkeiten in Robert Schumanns Kla-
viermusik’, in Festschrift zum 50. Geburtstag Adolf Sandberger überreicht von
seinem Schülern (Munich, 1918), 21-50.
КОКТЕ, WERNER: Robert Schumann (Potsdam, 1937).
Кӧт2, Hans: Der Einfluss Jean Pauls auf Robert Schumann (Munich, 1918).
ROESNER, LINDA CORRELL: 'Schumann's Revisions in the First Movement of the
Piano Sonata in G minor, Op. 22’, 19th-century Music, 1 (1977-8), 97-109.
— ‘The Autograph of Schumann’s Piano Sonata in F minor, Opus 14’, Musical
Quarterly. 61 (1975), 98-130.
SCHUMANN, ROBERT: Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin
Kreisig (4 vols., Leipzig, 1854; 4th edn., 2 vols., 1891; repr. 1968; 5th edn.
1914); Eng. trans., Fanny Raymond Ritter, Music and Musicians: Essays and
Criticisms (London, 1877-80); new selected Eng. trans., Konrad Wolff (ed.)
and Paul Rosenfeld (trans.), On Music and Musicians (New York, 1947; repr.
1982); selections, Henry Pleasants (ed. and trans.), The Musical World of Robert
Schumann: A Selection from his own Writings (London, 1965).
—— Robert Schumanns Briefe; Neue Folge, ed. Friedrich Gustav Jensen (Leipzig,
1886; 2nd edn., 1904); Eng. trans., May Herbert, The Life of Robert Schumann
Told in his Letters (London, 1890).
SCHWARZ, WERNER: Robert Schumann und die Variation mit besonderer Be-
rucksichtigung der Klavierwerke (Kassel, 1932).
WALKER, ALAN (ed.): Robert Schumann; The Man and his Music (London, 1972;
rev. 2nd edn., 1976) [includes articles on the piano music by Yonty Solomon
and Bálint Vázsonyi].
SrEGLICH, RUDOLF: Robert Schumanns Kinderszenen (Kassel and Basle, 1949).
For further Schumann biblography see $ I and $ II
Wagner
DAUBE, OTTO: ‘Ich schreibe keine Symphonien mehr’ (Cologne, 1960).
Weber
GEORGI, WALTER: Karl Maria von Weber als Klavierkomponist (Leipzig, 1914).
CHAPTER V
WAGNER'S LATER STAGE WORKS
(i) Modern Editions
WAGNER, R.: Richard Wagners Werke: Musikdramen— Jugendopern —musikalische
Werke, ed. Michael Balling (Leipzig, 1912-29; repr. 1971): 3 Tannhäuser; 5
Tristan und Isolde.
— Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Egon Voss, er al.
(Mainz, 1970- ): series A Musikbände: 5-6 Tannhäuser, ed. Reinhard Strohm
(1980- ); 9 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ed. Egon Voss (1979-8); 13
BIBLIOGRAPHY 859
Götterdämmerung, ed. Hartmut Fladt (1980-2); 14 Parsifal, ed. Egon Voss and
Martin Geck (1972-3); 8 Tristan und Isolde, 10 Das Rheingold, 11 Die Walküre,
12 Siegfried.
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
ABRAHAM, GERALD: A Hundred Years of Music (London, 1938; rev. 4th edn., 1974).
ADORNO, THEODOR: Versuch über Wagner (Berlin, 1952; 2nd edn., 1964); Eng. trans.,
Rodney Livingstone, /n Search of Wagner (London, 1981).
BAILEY, ROBERT: “The Method of Composition’, in Peter Burbidge and Richard
Sutton (eds.), The Wagner Companion (London, 1979), 269-338.
— — (ed.): Prelude and Transfiguration from Tristan and Isolde (Norton Critical
Score; New York, 1985).
BARTH, HERBERT, МАСК, DiETRICH, and Voss, EGON (eds.): Wagner: Sein Leben
und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern und Texten (Vienna, 1975); Eng.
trans., P. R. J. Ford and Mary Whittall, Wagner: A Documentary Study
(London, 1975).
BECKETT, Lucy: Richard Wagner: Parsifal (Cambridge, 1981).
BERGFELD, JOACHIM (ed.): Richard Wagner: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1865-1882:
‘Das braune Buch’ (Zurich, 1975); Eng. trans., George Bird, The Diary of
Richard Wagner 1865-1882: The Brown Book (London, 1980).
BORETZ, BENJAMIN: ‘Meta-Variations, Part IV: Analytic Fallout (I), Perspectives of
New Music, 11 (1972), 159-217.
BURBIDGE, PETER, and SUTTON, RICHARD (eds.): The Wagner Companion (London,
1979)%
DAHLHAUS, CARL: Die Musikdramen Richard Wagners (Velber, 1971); Eng. trans.,
Mary Whittall, Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas (Cambridge, 1979).
DEATHRIDGE, JOHN: "The Nomenclature of Wagner": Sketches’, Proceedings of the
Royal Musical Association, 101 (1974-5), 75-83.
—— and DAHLHAUS, CARL: The New Grove Wagner (London, 1984).
—, Сеск, MARTIN, and Voss, EGON: Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis (Mainz, 1986).
FÖRSTER-NIETZSCHE, ELISABETH: Wagner und Nietzsche zur Zeit ihrer Freundschaft:
Erinnerungsgabe zu Friedrich Nietzsches 70. Geburtstag den 15. Oktober 1914
(Munich, 1915; Eng. trans., Caroline V. Kerr (1921, repr. 1970, as The
Nietzsche- Wagner Correspondence).
HoLLOwAY, Rosin: Debussy and Wagner (London, 1979).
LORENZ, ALFRED: Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner (Berlin, 1924-33;
repr. 1966).
MAGEE, BRYAN: Aspects of Wagner (London, 1968; rev. 2nd edn., Oxford, 1988).
MANN, THOMAS: Wagner und unsere Zeit: Aufsätze, Betrachtungen, Briefe, ed. E.
Mann (Frankfurt am Main, 1963); Eng. trans., (a) Allan Blunden, Pro and
Contra Wagner (London, 1985) [complete German text]; (b) H. T. Lowe-Porter,
2 essays in T. Mann: Essays of Three Decades (London, 1947), and 'The
Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner', in Thomas Mann: Past Masters
and other Papers (London, 1933), 15-96.
MILLINGTON, BARRY: Wagner (London, 1984).
MITCHELL, WILLIAM J.: ‘The Tristan Prelude: Techniques and Structures’, Music
Forum, 1 (1967), 162-203.
Murray, Одмор R.: ‘Major Analytical Approaches to Wagner's Musical Style: A
Critique', Music Review, 39 (1978), 211-22.
860 BIBLIOGRAPHY
NEWCOMB, ANTHONY: ‘The Birth of Music out of the Spirt of Drama: An Essay in
Wagnerian Formal Analysis’, 19th-century Music, 5 (1980-1), 38-66.
NEWMAN, ERNEST: The Life of Richard Wagner (London, 1933-47; repr. 1976).
—— Wagner Nights (London, 1949, repr. 1977, as The Wagner Operas, New York,
1949, repr. 1963).
—— Wagner as Man and Artist (London, 1914; rev. 2nd edn., 1924; repr. 1969).
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH WILHELM: Die Geburt der Tragódie aus dem Geiste der Musik
(Leipzig, 1872); Der Fall Wagner (Leipzig, 1888); Eng. trans., Walter Kaufmann,
The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (New York, 1967).
SCHENKER, HEINRICH: Ein Beitrag zur Ornamentation als Einführung zu Ph. E. Bachs
Klavierwerke (Vienna, 1904; rev. 2nd edn., 1908; repr. 1954); Eng. trans., Hedi
Siegel, 'Essay on Ornamentation', Music Forum, 4 (1976), 1-140.
SCHOENBERG, ARNOLD: Structural Functions of Harmony, ed. Humphrey Searle
(London, 1954; rev. 2nd edn., ed. Leonard Stein, 1969).
SKELTON, GEOFFREY: Wagner at Bayreuth: Experiment and Tradition (New York,
1965; rev. and enlarged, 1976).
STRAVINSKY, IGOR: Poétique musicale (Cambridge, Mass., 1942); Eng. trans., Arthur
Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, Poetics of Music (Cambridge, Mass., 1947); Eng./Fr.
edn., 1970.
WAGNER, Cosma: Cosima Wagner: Die Tagebucher 1869-1877, ed. Martin Gregor-
Dellin and Dietrich Mack (Munich and Zurich, 1976-7); Eng. trans., Geoffrey
Skelton, The Diaries of Cosima Wagner (London, 1978-80).
WAGNER, RICHARD: Mein Leben (Munich, 1911; ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin, 1963,
repr. 1976): Eng. trans., Andrew Gray, My Life (Cambridge, 1983).
Familienbriefe уоп Richard Wagner 1832-1874, ed. C. Friedrich Glasenapp
(Berlin, 1907); Eng. trans., William Ashton Ellis, The Family Letters of Richard
Wagner (1911, repr. 1972).
— Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 1-х (Leipzig, 1871-3,
1883; 2nd edn., 1887.8, repr. 1976; 5th edn., with vols. xi-xii added, Sämtliche
Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. H. von Wolzogen and R. Sternfeld, 1911; 6th
edn., with vols. xiii-xvi added, ed. H. von Wolzogen and R. Sternfeld, 1914).
—— Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Gertrud Strobel and Werner Wolf
(Leipzig, 1967- ).
—— Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz, 1970- ): series
B Dokumentenbände: 23 Rienzi, ed. Reinhard Strohm (1976); 29 Der Ring des
Nibelungen, ed. Werner Brieg and Hartmut Fladt (1976); 30 Parsifal, ed. Egon
Voss and Martin Geck (1972-3); 22 Die Feen und Das Liebesvot, 24 Der
fliegender Holländer; 25 Tannhäuser, 26 Lohengrin; 27 Tristan und Isolde; 28
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
— Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, ed. and trans. William Ashton Ellis (London,
1892-9; repr. 1972).
Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry
Millington (London, 1987).
— Three Wagner Essays, trans. Robert L. Jacobs (London, 1979).
—— Wagner on Music and Drama: A Compendium of Richard Wagner's Prose
Works, ed. Albert Goldman and Evert Sprinchorn (New York, 1964; repr.
1981).
— ‘Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft’ (1849); repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte
Schriften und Dichtungen, iii (Leipzig, 1872), 51-210; Eng. trans., William
Ashton Ellis (ed. and trans.), Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, i (London, 1892;
repr. 1972), 69-213.
—— ‘Meine Erinnerungen an Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld’ (1868); repr. in
Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, iii (Leipzig, 1872), 221-
41; Eng. trans., Ellis, Prose Works, iv (London, 1895), 225-43.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 861
—— ‘Oper und Drama’ (1851; rev. 1868); repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte
Schriften und Dichtungen, iii and iv (Leipzig, 1872), 269-394 and 3-284; Eng.
trans., Ellis, Prose Works, ii (London, 1893).
— — ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (1860); repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und
Dichtungen, vii (Leipzig, 1873), 121-80; Eng. trans., Ellis, Prose Works, iii
(London, 1894), 293-345, and Robert L. Jacobs, Three Wagner Essays (London,
1979), 13-44.
WESTERNHAGEN, CURT VON: Wagner (Zurich, 1968); Eng. trans., Mary Whittall,
Wagner: A Biography (Cambridge, 1978).
WOLZOGEN, HANS PAUL VON: Richard Wagner über den ‘Fliegenden Holländer’: Die
Entstehung, Gestaltung und Darstellung des Werkes aus den Schriften und Briefen
des Meisters zusammengestellt (Leipzig, 1914).
ZUCKERMAN, ELLIOTT: The First Hundred Years of Wagner's Tristan (New York,
1964).
(b) The ‘Ring’
BAILEY, ROBERT: “The Structure of the Ring and its Evolution’, /9th-century Music,
1 (1977-8), 48-61.
CookE, Deryck: / Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner’s Ring (London, 1979).
DEATHRIDGE, JOHN: “Wagner’s Sketches for the Ring: Some Recent Studies’, Musical
Times, 118 (1977), 383-9.
—— Review of Recent Wagner Literature, /9th-century Music, 5 (1981-2), 81-9.
DONINGTON, R.: Wagner's ‘Ring’ and its Symbols (London, 1963; rev. 3rd edn.,
1974).
McCRELESS, PATRICK: Wagner's Siegfried: Its Drama, History, and Music (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1982).
PORGES, HEINRICH: Die Bühnenproben zu den Bayreuther Festspielen des Jahres 1876
(Leipzig, 1876); Eng. trans., Robert L. Jacobs, Wagner Rehearsing the ‘Ring’:
An Eye-Witness Account of the Stage Rehearsals of the First Bayreuth Festival
(Cambridge, 1983).
SHAW, BERNARD: The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
(London, 1898; 4th edn., 1923; repr. 1972).
WESTERNHAGEN, CURT VON: Die Enstehung des ‘Ring’ (Zurich, 1973); Eng. trans.,
Arnold and Mary Whittall, The Forging of the Ring: Richard Wagner's
Composition Sketches for ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ (Cambridge, 1976).
CHAPTER VI
OPERA: 1850-1890
(a) GERMANY
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Works by Individual Composers
CORNELIUS, P.: Peter Cornelius Musikalisches Werke, ed. Max Hasse (Leipzig, 1905-
6; repr. 1971): 3 Der Barbier von Bagdad, 4 Der Cid, 5 Gunlód.
STRAUSS, J. (ii): Johann Strauss: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Fritz Racek (Vienna, 1967- ):
series 2 Bühnen- und Vokalwerke: 3 Die Fledermaus (1974).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
SHAW, BERNARD: Music in London 1890-94 (London, 1932; repr. 1973).
862. BIBLIOGRAPHY
(b) Individual Composers
Bruch а
KÄMPER, DIETRICH: Max Bruch-Studien: Zum 50. Todestag des Komponisten
(Cologne, 1970).
Cornelius
CORNELIUS, PETER: Literarische Werke, ed. C. M. Cornelius, E. Istel, and A. Stern
(Leipzig, 1904-5), i. Ausgewählte Briefe.
FEDERHOFER, HELLMUT, and OEHL, KURT (eds.): Peter Cornelius als Komponist,
Dichter, Kritiker und Essayist (Regensburg, 1977).
WAGNER, GÜNTHER: Peter Cornelius: Verzeichnis seiner musikalischen und li-
terarischen Werken (Tutzing, 1986).
Goetz
KREUZHAGE, E.: Hermann Goetz: Seine Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig, 1916).
KRUSE, G.: Hermann Goetz (Leipzig, 1920).
Goldmark
GOLDMARK, KARL: Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Vienna, 1922; 2nd edn., 1929).
HANSLICK, EDUARD: Die moderne Oper (Berlin, 1875-1900; repr. 1971).
Rubinstein
ABRAHAM, GERALD: "Anton Rubinstein: Russian Composer, Musical Times, 86
(1945), 361-5.
BARENBOYM, L.: Anton Grigor evich Rubinshteyn (Leningrad, 1957-62).
— (ed.): /sbrannie pis'ma (Leningrad, 1954).
Schumann
ABRAHAM, GERALD: “The Dramatic Music’, in Abraham (ed.) Schumann: A
Symposium (London, 1952), 260-82.
For further Schumann bibliography see $ I, $ II, and $ IV
(b) FRANCE
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
WOLFF, HELLMUTH CHRISTIAN: Die Oper III- 19. Jahrhundert (Das Musikwerke, 40;
Cologne, 1972); Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Opera III-19th Century
(Anthology of Music, 40; Cologne, 1975) [includes extracts from Gounod,
Philémon et Baucis, and Meyerbeer, Dinorah].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
BERLIOZ, H.: Hector Berlioz: Werke, ed. Charles Malherbe and Felix Weingartner
(Leipzig, 1900-10; repr. 1971): series 19 Opern: 19-20 Béatrice et Bénédict.
—— New Berlioz Edition of the Complete Works, ed. Hugh Macdonald et al.
(Kassel, 1967- ): 2 Les Troyens, ed. Hugh Macdonald (1969); 3 Béatrice et
Bénédict, ed. Hugh Macdonald (1980); 4 Incomplete Operas, ed. Eric Gräbner
and Paul Banks (forthcoming).
DELIBES, L.: Lakme (Biblioteca musica Bononiensis, No. 268; Bologna, 1967- ).
MEYERBEER, G.: L'Étoile du Nord, Le Pardon de Ploërmel, L’Africaine, ed. Philip
Gossett and Charles Rosen (Early Romantic Opera, 22, 23, 24; New York,
1980, 1981, 1980).
VERDI, G.: The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Philip Gossett er al. (Chicago and
Milan, 1983- ): series 1 Operas: 10 Macbeth, 12 Jerusalem, 20 Les Vepres
Siciliennes, 26 and 29, Don Carlos (forthcoming).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 863
—— Full scores of Don Carlos, Jérusalem, Les Vépres Siciliennes, and Macbeth
(Milan, c.1882- ; repr. New York, n.d.).
Don Carlos (Leipzig, 1954).
Don Carlos: Edizione integrate delle varie versioni in cinque e in quattro atti,
ed. Ursula Günther and Luciano Petazzoni (Milan, 1980).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
ABRAHAM, GERALD: The Concise Oxford History of Music (London, 1979).
ANSELM, GERHARD: ‘Die französische "Grand Opéra" in der Forschung seit 1945’,
Acta musicologica, 59 (1987), 220-70.
BECKER, HEINZ (ed.): Die Couleur locale in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg,
1976).
CHARLTON, DAVID: ‘Revival or Survival?’, /9th-century Music, 2 (1978-9), 159-64.
CLIVE, GEOFFREY (ed.): The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York, 1965).
CooPER, MARTIN: French Music from the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré
(London, 1951; repr. 1984).
GUICHARD, LEON: La Musique et les lettres en France au temps du wagnérisme (Paris,
1963).
HARDING, JAMES: Folies de Paris: The Rise and Fall of French Operetta (London,
1979).
HUGHES, GERVASE: Composers of Operetta (London, 1962).
LAVIGNAC, ALBERT: Le Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (Paris, 1897; rev. H. Busser,
1951); Eng. trans., Esther Singleton, The Music Dramas of Richard Wagner
and his Festival Theatre in Bayreuth (London, 1898; 2nd edn., 1904; repr. 1968).
LOCKSPEISER, EDWARD: The Literary Clef: An Anthology of Letters and Writings by
French Composers (London, 1958).
MACDONALD, HUGH: "Hoffmanns Melancholy Tale’, Musical Times, 121 (1980),
662-4.
MITCHELL, JEROME: The Walter Scott Operas (University of Alabama, 1977).
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH: Der Fall Wagner (1888), Friedrich Nietzsche: Der Mu-
sikalische Nachlass, ed. Curt Paul Janz (Basle, 1976).
*Rapport de la Commission chargée d'examiner la situation de l'Opéra', Le Moniteur
universel, 2 July 1854.
WALSH, THOMAS JOSEPH: Second Empire Opera: The Théâtre Lyrique, Paris, 1851-
1870 (London, 1981).
WILD, NICOLE: Dictionnaire des théâtres lyriques à Paris au XIX" siècle (New York,
forthcoming).
For further general bibliography on French Opera see $ III (a) and (b)
(b) Individual Composers
Auber
GIER, ALBERT: * “Manon Lescaut” als Fabel von der Grille und der Ameise: Eugene
Scribes Libretto für Daniel-Frangois-Esprit Auber’, in Michael Arndt and
Michael Walter (eds.), Jahrbuch für Opernforschung 1985 (Frankfurt am Main,
1985), 73-89.
For further Auber bibliography see $ III (a)
Berlioz
BERLIOZ, HECTOR: Mémoires de Hector Berlioz (Paris, 1870; ed. Pierre Citron, 1969);
Eng. trans., David Cairns, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (New York and
London, 1969).
CAIRNS, Davip: ‘Berlioz and Virgil: A Consideration of “Les Troyens” as a Virgilian
864 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Opera’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 95 (1968-9), 97-110.
—— ‘Les Troyens and the Aeneid’, in Respönses (London, 1973), 88-110.
FAUQUET, JOEL-MARIE: ‘Quatre versions de Roméo et Juliette’, L’avant-scene, 41
(1982), 66-9.
КЕМР, Ian: Hector Berlioz: The Trojans (Cambridge, 1988).
MACDONALD, HugH: Berlioz (London, 1982).
RUSHTON, JULIAN: 'Berliozs Swan-Song: Towards a Criticism of Béatrice et
Bénédict', Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 109 (1982-3), 105-18.
—— ‘The Overture to Les Troyens’, Music Analysis, 4 (1985), 119-44.
For further Berlioz Bibliography see $ I
Bizet
Curtiss, Mina: Bizet and his World (London, 1959; repr. 1974).
DEAN, WINTON: ‘Bizet’s “Ivan IV” ’, in Herbert Van Thal (ed.), Fanfare for Ernest
Newman (London, 1955), 58-85.
——— Georges Bizet: His Life and Work (London, 1948; enlarged 3rd edn., 1975).
—— "The Libretto’, in Carmen: A Romance by Prosper Mérimée: With a Study of
the Opera of the Same Name (London, 1949), 85-108.
—— ‘The True **Carmen"?, Musical Times, 106 (1965), 846-55.
ISTEL, EDGAR: Bizet und ‘Carmen’ (Stuttgart, 1927).
PARKER, DOUGLAS CHARLES: Bizet (London, 1951).
WESTRUP, JACK: ‘Bizet’s La Jolie Fille de Perth’, in J. Westrup (ed.), Essays Presented
to Egon Wellesz (Oxford, 1966), 157-70.
WRIGHT, LESLEY A: ‘A New Source for Carmen’, 19th-century Music, 2 (1978-9),
61-71.
Chabrier
DELAGE, КОСЕК: ‘Ravel and Chabrier', Musical Quarterly, 61 (1975), 546-52.
Moore, C. H.: ‘Verlaine’s Opéra Bouffe’, Publications of the Modern Language
Association of America, 83 (1968), 305-11.
Myers, RoLLo: Emmanual Chabrier and his Circle (London, 1969).
POULENC, FRANCIS: Emmanuel Chabrier (Paris, 1961); Eng. trans., Cynthia Jolly,
Emmanuel Chabrier (London, 1981).
David
BRANCOUR, RENE: Felicien David (Paris, 1911).
HAGAN, DOROTHY VEINUS: Felicien David, 1810-1876: A Composer and a Cause
(Syracuse, NY, 1985).
Delibes
CURZON, HENRI DE: Léo Delibes, sa vie et ses euvres (Paris, 1926).
STUDWELL, WILLIAM E.: Adolphe Adam and Leo Delibes: A Guide to Research (New
York, 1987).
Gounod
Cooper, MARTIN: ‘Charles Gounod and his Influence on French Music’, Music and
Letters, 21 (1940), 50-9.
Curtiss, Mina: ‘Gounod before Faust’, Musical Quarterly, 38 (1952), 48-67.
DEAN, WINTON: ‘Shakespeare and Opera’, in Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.), Shakespeare in
Music (London, 1964), 89-175.
HARDING, JAMES: Gounod (London, 1973).
Lalo
MACDONALD, Huch: ‘A Fiasco Remembered: Fiesque Dismembered’, in Malcolm
H. Brown and Roland J. Wiley (eds.), Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for
Gerald Abraham (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985), 163-85.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 865
Massenet
BECKER, HEınz: ‘Zur Frage des Stilverfalls, dargestellt an der französischen
Oper’, in Carl Dahlhaus (ed.), Studien zur Trivialmusik des 19. Jahrhunderts
(Regensburg, 1967), 111-20.
Meyerbeer
BECKER, HEINZ: ‘Die Couleur locale als Stilkategorie des Oper’, in H. Becker (ed.),
Die Couleur locale in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1976), 23-45.
LoPPERT, Max: ‘An Introduction to “L’Etoile du nord" ', Musical Times, 116
(1975), 130-3.
For further Meyerbeer bibliography, see $ III (a)
Offenbach
FARIS, ALEXANDER: Jacques Offenbach (London, 1980).
HARDING, JAMES: Jacques Offenbach: A Biography (London, 1980).
HUFFMAN, RICHARD S.: ‘Les Contes d Hoffmann: Unity of Dramatic Form in the
Libretto', Studies in Romanticism, 15 (1976), 97-117.
Reyer
CURZON, HENRI DE: Ernest Reyer, sa vie et ses euvres (Paris, 1924).
La Légende de Sigurd dans P Edda: L'Opéra д E. Reyer (Paris, 1890).
JULLIEN, ADOLPE: Ernest Reyer: Sa vie et ses euvres (Paris, 1909).
Saint-Saéns
HARDING, JAMES: Saint-Saéns and his Circle (London, 1965).
LYLE, WATSON: Camille Saint-Saéns: His Life and Art (London, 1923; repr. n.d.).
ROLLAND, ROMAIN: Musiciens d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1908, repr. 1946); Eng. trans.,
Mary Blaiklock, Musicians of To-day (London, 1914; repr. 1969).
SAINT-SAENS, CAMILLE: Outspoken Essays on Music, trans. F. Rothwell (New York,
1922; repr. 1970) [collection of Saint-Saéns’s writing on music].
WOLFF, STÉPHANE, Un demi-siecle d'opéra-comique (1900-1950) (Paris, 1953).
For further Saint-Saens bibliography see $ VII
Thomas
PORTER, ANDREW: ‘Travels with Mignon’, in Music of Three Seasons: 1974-1977
(New York, 1978).
Verdi
BUDDEN, JULIAN: The Operas of Verdi, п. From Il Trovatore to La Forza del destino
(London, 1978); iii. From Don Carlos to Falstaff (London, 1981).
DALLAPICCOLA, Luici: “Words and Music in Italian 19th-century Opera’, in William
Weaver and Martin Chusid (eds.), The Verdi Companion (London, 1980), 193-
216:
MEDICI, MARIO (ed.): Atti del II° Congresso internazionale di studi verdiani: Don
Carlos/Don Carlo (Parma, 1971).
Noske, Frits: ‘ “Don Carlos”: The Signifier and the Signified’, in The Signifier and
the Signified: Studies in the Operas of Mozart and Verdi (The Hague, 1977),
294-308.
—— ‘The Musical Figure of Death’, in The Signifier and the Signified, pp. 171-214.
PORTER, ANDREW: ‘Les Vépres siciliennes: New Letters from Verdi to Scribe’,
19th-century Music, 2 (1978-9), 95-109.
—— ‘The Making of Don Carlos’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association,
98 (1971-2), 73-88.
WALKER, FRANK: The Man Verdi (London, 1962).
For further Verdi bibliography see $ III (c) and $ VI (c)
866 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(c) ITALY
+ e
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
WOLFF, HELLMUTH CHRISTIAN: Die Oper III—19. Jahrhundert (Das Musikwerke,
40; Cologne, 1972); Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Opera III— 19th
Century (Anthology of Music, 40; Cologne, 1975) [includes extracts from Verdi,
La forza del destino].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
MARCHETTI, F.: Ruy Blas (Biblioteca musica Bononiensis, No. 267; Bologna,
1967- ).
MERCADANTE, S.: Virginia (Biblioteca musica Bononiensis, No. 265; Bologna,
1967- ).
VERDI, G.: The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Philip Gossett et al. (Chicago and
Milan, 1983- ): series 1 Operas: 17 Rigoletto, ed. Martin Chusid (1983); 10
Macbeth, 18 Il trovatore, 19 La traviata, 21 Simon Boccanegra, 23 Un ballo in
maschera, 24 La forza del destino, ed. William C. Holmes, 25 Don Carlos, 26
Aida, 27 Otello, 28 Falstaff (forthcoming).
— Full scores of Aida, Don Carlos, Falstaff, La forza del destino, La traviata, Il
trovatore, Macbeth, Otello, Rigoletto, Simon Boccanegra and Un ballo in
maschera (Milan, c.1882; repr. New York, n.d.).
— Study scores of Aida, Falstaff, Il trovatore, La traviata, Otello, Rigoletto, and
Un ballo in maschera (Milan, 1913-14; repr. 1950s).
—— L'abbozzo del Rigoletto (Rome, 1941).
—— Falstaff [facsimile of autograph] (Milan, 1951).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
BUDDEN, JULIAN: ‘Wagnerian Tendencies in Italian Opera’, in Nigel Fortune (ed.),
Music and Theatre: Essays in Honour of Winton Dean (Cambridge, 1987), 299-
332.
CASELLA, ALFREDO: I segreti della giara (Florence, 1939); Eng. trans., Spencer
Norton, Music in my Time: The Memoires of Alfredo Casella (Norman, Okla.,
1955).
GossETT, PHILIP ег al.: The New Grove Masters of Italian Opera (London, 1983)
[Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini].
HADOW, WILLIAM HENRY: Oxford History of Music (London, 1950; 2nd edn., 1932).
LIPPMANN, FRIEDRICH: ‘Der italienische Vers und der musikalische Rhythmus: Zum
Verhältnis von Vers und Musik in der italienischen Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts,
mit einem Rückblick auf die 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Analecta
musicologica, 12 (1975), 253-369; 14 (1977), 324-410; 15 (1978), 298-333.
NICOLAISEN, JAY: Italian Opera in Transition, 1871-1893 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980).
(b) Individual Composers
Boito
BOITO, ARRIGO: Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi (Verona, 1942).
NARDI, PIERO: Vita di Arrigo Boito (Verona, 1942).
Catalani
CATALANI, ALFREDO: Lettera di Alfredo Catalani а Giuseppe Depanis, ed. Carlo
Gatti (Milan, 1946).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 867
GATTI, CARLO: Alfredo Catalani: La vita e le opere (Milan, 1953).
ZURLETTI, MICHELANGELO: Catalani (Turin, 1982).
Gomes
BRITO, JOLUMA: Carlos Gomes (Rio de Janeiro, 1956).
Mercadante
CaRLI BALLOLA, GIOVANNI: ‘Incontro con Mercadante’, Chigiana, 26-7 (1969-70),
465-500.
For further Mercadante bibliography see $ III (c)
Pacini
LIPPMANN, FRIEDRICH: ‘Giovanni Pacini: Bemerkungen zum Stil seiner Opern’,
Chigiana, 24 (1967), 111-24.
PACINI, GIOVANNI: Le mie memorie artistiche (Florence, 1865; ed. E Magnani,
1875).
Petrella
FLORIMO, FRANCESCO: Cenno storico sulla scuola musicale di Napoli (Naples, 1869-
71; rev. 2nd edn., 1880-3; repr. 1969, as La scuola musicale di Napoli e i suoi
conservatori).
Ponchielli
ALBAROSA, NINO (ed.): Amilcare Ponchielli (1834-1886): Studi e ricerche (Casal-
morano, 1984).
CESARI, GAETANO: Amilcare Ponchielli nell'arte del suo tempo (Cremona, 1934).
DE NAPOLI, GIUSEPPE: Amilcare Ponchielli (1836-1886) (Cremona, 1936).
Puccini
ADAMI, GUISEPPE: Giacomo Puccini: Epistolario (Milan, 1928; Eng. trans., 1931,
repr. 1974).
ASHBROOK, WILLIAM: The Operas of Puccini (London, 1969; repr., ed. Roger Parker,
1985).
CARNER, Mosco: Giacomo Puccini: Tosca (Cambridge, 1985).
Puccini: A Critical Biography (London, 1958; rev. 2nd edn., 1974).
САКА, EUGENIO: Carteggi Pucciniani (Milan, 1958).
GREENFELD, HOWARD: Puccini: A Biography (New York, 1980).
GROOS, ARTHUR, and PARKER, ROGER: Giacomo Puccini: La Bohéme (Cambridge,
1986).
КАҮЕ, MICHAEL: The Unknown Puccini (Oxford, 1987).
MARCHETTI, LEOPOLDO (ed.): Puccini nelle immagini (Milan, 1949).
MAREK, GEORGE: Puccini: a Biography (New York, 1951).
SARTORI, CLAUDIO (ed.): Puccini (Milan, 1959).
Verdi
ABBATE, CAROLYN, and PARKER, ROGER (eds.): Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., 1988).
ABBIATI, FRANCO: Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1959).
Atti dei congressi (Parma, 1969- ).
BASEVI, ABRAMO: Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Florence, 1859).
BUDDEN, JULIAN: The Operas of Verdi, vols. 2 and 3 (London, 1978 and 1981).
—— Verdi (London, 1985).
BuscH, Hans: Verdis Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents
(Minneapolis, 1978).
——— Verdi's ‘Otello’ and ‘Simon Boccanegra’ (Revised Version): A History in Letters
and Documents (Oxford, 1988).
CHusiD, MARTIN: Giuseppe Verdi: Il trovatore (Cambridge, 1988).
CONATI, MARCELLO: La bottega della musica: Verdi e La Fenice (Milan, 1983).
868 BIBLIOGRAPHY
DE Rensıs, R.: Franco Faccio e Verdi: Carteggio e documenti inediti (Milan, 1934).
GATTI, CARLO: Verdi nelle immagini (Milan, 1941).
GODEFROY, VINCENT: The Dramatic Genius of Verdi: Studies of Selected Operas, ii.
‘I vespri sicilian? to ‘Falstaff (London, 1977).
HEPOKOSKI, JAMES A.: Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff (Cambridge, 1983).
—— Giuseppe Verdi: Otello (Cambridge, 1987).
KERMAN, JosEPH: 'Otello: Traditional Opera and the Image of Shakespeare’, in
Opera as Drama (New York, 1956), 129-67. E
LUZIO, ALESSANDRO: Carteggi Verdiani (Rome, 1935-47).
MARTIN, GEORGE: Verdi, his Music Life and Times (New York, 1964).
Aspects of Verdi (New York, 1988).
MiLA, Massimo: Giuseppe Verdi (Bari, 1958).
MORELLI, GIOVANNI (ed.): Tornando a Stiffelio: Atti del convegno internazionale
(Venice, 1985), Quaderni della Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, XIV (1987).
PASCOLATO, ANTONIO: Re Lear e Ballo in Maschera: Lettere di Giuseppe Verdi (Città
di Castello, 1902).
Quaderni dell Istituto di studi verdiani (Parma, 1963- ).
Studi verdiani, i- (Turin, 1982- ).
Verdi: Bollettini dell Istituto di studi Verdiani (Parma, 1960- ).
VERDI, GIUSEPPE: Carteggio Verdi- Boito, ed. Mario Medici and Marcello Conati
(Parma, 1978).
— — Carteggio Verdi- Ricordi 1880-1881, ed. Pierluigi Petrobelli, Marisa Di Gregorio
Casati and Carlo Matteo Mossa (Parma, 1988).
—— I copialettere di Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Gaetano Cesari and Alessandro Luzio
(Milan, 1913; repr. 1973); abridged Eng. trans., Charles Osborne (ed. and
trans.), Letters of Giuseppe Verdi (London, 1971).
For further Verdi bibliography see $ III (c)
(d) RUSSIA AND EAST EUROPE
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
WOLFF, HELLMUTH CHRISTIAN: Die Oper III—19. Jahrhundert (Das Musikwerke,
40; Cologne, 1972); Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Opera III— 19th
Century (Anthology of Music, 40; Cologne, 1975) [includes extracts from
Borodin, Prince Igor, Moniuszko, Halka, and Smetana, Dalibor].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
DARGOMIZHSKY, A. S.: Rusalka (Moscow, 1949).
— — Kamenniy gost’ (Leningrad, 1929).
DvoRÁK, A.: Antonin Dvorak: Souborné vydáni, ed. Otakar Šourek et al. (Prague,
1955- ) [Czech, German, English, French]: series 1 Theatrical Works: 1 Alfred,
2-3 Kral a uhlif, 4 Tvrdé palice, 5 Vanda, 6 Selma sedlák, 7-8 Dimitrij, 10
Jakobin (1966).
FIBICH, Z.: Studijni vydání del Zdenka Fibicha, ed. L. Boháček et al. (Prague, 1950-
67): libretto of Nevésta messinska.
MussorGsky, M. P.: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Pavel Aleksandrovich Lamm
with Boris Vladimirovich Asaf'ev (Moscow, 1928-34; repr. 1969): 1-3 Boris
Godunov, 4 Khovanshchina, 5-6 Sorochinskaya yarmarka.
Boris Godunov, ed. David Lloyd-Jones (London, 1975).
Rimsky-Korsakov, N.: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Andrey Nikolaevich
Rimsky-Korsakov et al. (Moscow, 1946-70): 1 and 29 Pskovityanka, ed.
A. N. Dmitriev (1966-8 and 1965-7); 2 and 30 Mayskaya noch’ (1948 and
1951); 3 and 31 Snegurochka (1953).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 869
SMETANA, B.: Souborná dila Bedřicha Smetany, ed. Otakar Ostrčil (Prague, 1932-6):
2-4 Prodaná nevěsta.
——— Studijni vydání děl Bedřicha Smetany, ed. František Bartoš, Josef Plavec, et al.
(Prague, 1940- ): 1 Prodaná nevěsta (1940); 3 Hubička (1942); 5 Dalibor (1945);
6 Libüse (1949); 7 Dvě vdovy (1950); 9 Braniboři v Čechách (1952); 10 Tajemství
(1953);712 Certova stena (1959).
TCHAIKOVSKY, P. I.: Pyotr Mich Chaykovskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy (Moscow
and Leningrad, 1940-71): 1 Voevoda, 2 Undine, 3 and 34 Oprichnik, 4 and 36
Evgeniy Onegin, 5 and 37 Orleanskaya deva, 6 and 38 Mazepa, 8 and 40
Charodeyka, 9 and 41 Pikovaya dama, 10 and 42 Jolanta, 11 and 56 Lebedinoe
ozero, 12 and 57 Spyashchaya krasavitsa, 13 and 54 Shchelkunchik.
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
ABRAHAM, GERALD: Essays on Russian and East European Music (Oxford, 1985).
— — On Russian Music (London, 1939; repr. 1982).
——— The Concise Oxford History of Music (Oxford, 1979).
— et al.: The New Grove Russian Masters 2 (London, 1986) [Rimsky-Korsakov,
Skryabin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich].
Brown, DaviD et al.: The New Grove Russian Masters 1 (London, 1986) [Glinka,
Borodin, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky].
CooPER, MARTIN: Russian Opera (London, 1951).
GOZENPUD, ABRAM AKIMOVICH: Russkiy operniy teatr XIX veka 1857-72 (Leningrad
1971).
vius OL’GA EVGEN’EVNA, KELDISH, YURY VSEVOLODOVICH, and KANDINSKY,
A.: Istoriya russkoy muziki, 1 (Moscow 1972).
MICHAŁOWSKI, KORNEL: Opery polskie (Krakow, 1954).
NEWMARCH, КО$А: The Music of Czechoslovakia (London, 1942; repr. 1969).
POZNIAK, WŁODZIMIERZ: ‘Główne gatunki i formy muzyki polskiej XIX wieku’, in
Z dziejów polskiej kultury muzycznej, ii (Kraków, 1966), 265-401 and 463-552.
RUBETS, A. I.: 216 narodnikh ukrainskikh napevov (Moscow, 1872; 2nd edn., 1882).
SEAMAN, GERALD R.: History of Russian Music: From its Origins to Dargomyzhsky,
i (Oxford, 1967).
SZABOLCSI, BENCE: A magyar zenetörténet kézikönyve (Budapest, 1947; 3rd edn.,
1977); abridged Eng. trans. of 2nd edn., 1955, A Concise History of Hungarian
Music (Budapest, 1964; 2nd edn., 1965).
TARUSKIN, RICHARD: Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the
1860s (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981).
TYRRELL, JOHN: Czech Opera (Cambridge, 1988).
(b) Individual Composers
Borodin
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘Arab Melodies in Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin’, in Essays
on Russian and East European Music (Oxford, 1985), 93-8.
—— ‘The History of Prince Igor’, On Russian Music (London, 1939; repr. 1982),
147-68.
BOBETH, MAREK: Borodin: The Composer and his Music (London, 1927; repr. n.d.).
Borodin und seine Oper Furst Igor: Geschichte, Analyse, Konsequenzen (Munich,
1982).
DIANIN, SERGEY A.: Borodin: Zhizneopisanie, materiali i dokumenti (Moscow, 1955;
rev. 2nd edn., 1960); Eng. trans., Robert Lord, Borodin (London, 1963).
870 BIBLIOGRAPHY
SOKHOR, ARNOL’D NAUMOVICH: Aleksandr Porfir’evich Borodin: Zhizn’, deyatel-
nosť, muzikalnoe tvorchestvo (Moscow, 1965).
Cui
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘Heine, Cui, and “William Ratcliffe” ’, in Essays on Russian
and East European Music (Oxford, 1985), 56-67.
ANGLES, HIGINIO: ‘Relations épistolaires entre César Cui et Philippe Pedrell’, Fontes
Artis Musicae, 13 (1966), 15-21.
Dargomizhsky
ABRAHAM, GERALD: 'Glinka, Dargomizhsky and The Rusalka’, On Russian Music
(London, 1939; repr. 1972), 43-51.
— — ‘The Stone Guest’, in Studies in Russian Music (London, 1936), 68-86.
BAKER, JENNIFER: 'Dargomizhsky, Realism and The Stone Guest’, Music Review, 37
(1976), 193-208.
DARGOMIZHSKY, A. S.: A. S. Dargomizhskiy: Izbrannie pis ma, ed. Mikhail Sa-
moylovich Pekelis (Moscow, 1952).
TARUSKIN, RICHARD: 'Realism as Preached and Practiced: The Russian Opera
Dialogue’, Musical Quarterly, 56 (1970), 431-54.
Erkel
LEGÁNY, Dezső: Erkel Ferenc művei (Budapest, 1974).
VÉBER, GYULA: Ungarische Elemente in der Opernmusik Ferenc Erkels (Bilthoven,
1976).
Fibich
HUDEC, VLADIMIR: Zdeněk Fibich (Prague, 1971).
SMACZNY, JAN: "The Operas and Melodramas of Zdeněk Fibich (1850-1900),
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 109 (1982-3), 119-33.
For further Fibich bibliography see 8 IX (e)
Kovarovic
NĚMEČEK, J.: Opera Národního divadla za Karla Kovarovice (Prague, 1968-9).
Moniuszko
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘The Operas of Stanislaw Moniuszko’, in Essays on Russian
and East European Music (Oxford, 1985), 156-71.
RUDZINSKI, WITOLD: Moniuszko (Krakow, 1972).
Mussorgsky
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘Mussorgsky’s Boris and Pushkin’s’, in Slavonic and Romantic
Music (London, 1968), 178-87.
— ‘The Mediterranean Element in Boris Godunov’, in Slavonic and Romantic
Music (London, 1968), 188-94.
BROWN, MALCOLM HAMRICK (ed.) Musorgsky in Memoriam, 1881-1981 (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1982).
CALVOCORESSI, М. D.: Modest Mussorgsky: His Life and Works (London, 1956;
rev. edn. by Gerald Abraham, 1974).
EMERSON, CARYL: Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1986).
LEYDA, Jay, and BERTENSSON, SERGEI (eds.): The Musorgsky Reader: A Life of
M. P. Musorgsky in Letters and Documents (New York, 1947; repr. 1970).
LLoYD-JoNEs, Одур: Boris Godunov: A Critical Commentary (London, 1975).
Rimsky-Korsakov
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘Arab Melodies in Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin’, in Essays
on Russian and East European Music (Oxford, 1985), 93-8.
—— ‘Pskovityanka: The Original Version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s First Opera’, in
BIBLIOGRAPHY 871
Essays on Russian and East European Music (Oxford, 1985), 68-82.
—— *Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada’, in On Russian Music (London, 1939; repr. 1982),
113-21.
— ‘Rimsky-Korsakov’s First Opera’, in Studies in Russian Music (London, 1935;
rev. 2nd edn., 1969; repr. 1976), 142-66.
GILSE VAN DER PALS, NIKOLAUS VAN: N. A. Rimsky-Korssakow: Opernschaffen nebst
Skizze über Leben und Werken (Paris and Leipzig, 1929; repr. 1977).
Rimsky-Korsakov, NIKOLAY ANDREEVICH: Letopis moer muzikalnoy zhizni
(St Petersburg, 1909; enlarged 3rd edn., 1926; ed. Andrey Nikolaevich
Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksandr Vyacheslavovich Ossovsky, Polnoe sobranie
sochineniy, i (1955); Eng. trans., Judah A. Joffe, My Musical Life (New York,
1942; repr. 1974; 5th edn., 1935).
For further Rimsky-Korsakov bibliography see $ VII
Serov
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘The Operas of Serov’, in Essays on Russian and East European
Music (Oxford, 1985), 40-55.
KHuBOv, GEORGY N.: Zhizn’ A. Serova (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950).
Serov, А. N.: A. N. Serov: Izbrannie stat'i, ed. Georgy N. Khubov (Moscow and
Leningrad, 1950-7).
Smetana
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘The Genesis of The Bartered Bride’, in Slavonic and Romantic
Music (London, 1968), 28-39.
BARTOŠ, FRANTISEK: Smetana ve vzpominkach а dopisech (Prague, 1939; 9th edn.,
1953); Eng. trans., Daphne Rusbridge, Smetana in Letters and Reminiscences
(Prague, 1955).
CLAPHAM, JOHN: Smetana (London, 1972).
JARKA, V. Н. (ed.): Kritické dilo Bedricha Smetany, 1858-65 (Prague, 1948).
LARGE, BRiAN: Smetana (London, 1970).
NEJEDLY, ZDENÉK: Zpévohry Smetanovy (Prague, 1908; 3rd ed., 1954).
For further Smetana bibliography see $ IX (e)
Tchaikovsky
ABRAHAM, GERALD: 'Tchaikovsky's Operas’, in Slavonic and Romantic Music
(London, 1968), 116-77.
Brown, Davip: Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, i. The Early Years
(1840-1874) (London, 1978); п. The Crisis Years (1874-1878) (London, 1982);
ili. The Years of Wandering (1878-1885) (London, 1986).
Davipova, K. YU., PRorTOPOPOV, V. V., and TUMANINA, N. V.: Muzikal’noe nasledie
Chaykovskogo (Moscow, 1958).
PROTOPOPOV, VLADIMIR VASIL’EVICH, and TUMANINA, NADEZHDA VASIL’EVNA:
Opernoe tvorchestvo Chaykovskogo (Moscow, 1957).
TCHAIKOVSKY, MODEST: Zhizm P. I. Chaykovskogo (Moscow, 1900-2); abridged
Eng. trans., Rosa Newmarch, The Life and Letters of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(London, 1906).
TCHAIKOVSKY, PYOTR IL’ICH: P. I. Chaykovskiy: Perepiska s. N. Е. fon-Mekk, ed.
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Zhdanov and Nikolay Timofeevich Zhegin (Moscow
and Leningrad, 1934-6).
——— P. I. Chaykovskiy: Perepiska s P. I. Yurgensonom, ed. Vladimir Aleksandrovich
Zhdanov and Nikolay Timofeevich Zhegin (Moscow, 1938-52).
——— P. I. Chaykovskiy- S. I. Taneev: Pis'ma, ed. Modest Tchaikovsky (1916); rev.
edn. ed. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (Moscow, 1951).
Letters to his Family: An Autobiography, trans. Galina von Meck (New York,
1981).
872 BIBLIOGRAPHY
WILEY, ROLAND JOHN: Tchaikovsky’s Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nut-
cracker (Oxford, 1985). vh
For further Tchaikovsky bibliography see $ VIII
(€) BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
(i) Modern Editions `
(b) Works by Individual Composers
Bristow, G. F.: Rip Van Winkle, ed. Н. Wiley Hitchcock (Earlier American Music,
25; New York, 1980).
Loper, E. J.: Raymond and Agnes, ed. Nicholas Temperley (Cambridge, 1966) [vocal
score].
SULLIVAN, A. S.: The Operas by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert: A Critical
Edition, ed. Reginald Allen, Steven Ledbetter, Jane Stedman, and Percy Young
(New York, forthcoming).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
British Opera in Retrospect (British Music Society, London, 1985).
BURTON, NIGEL: ‘Opera: 1865-1914’, in Nicholas Temperley (ed.), Music in Britain:
The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 330-57.
GÄNZL, KURT: British Musical Theatre, i (London, 1986).
HAMM, CHARLES: Music in the New World (New York, 1983).
HiPSHER, EDWARD ELLSWORTH: American Opera and its Composers (Philadelphia,
1927; repr. 1978).
HURD, MICHAEL: “Opera: 1834-1865', in Temperley (ed.), Music in Britain: The
Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 307-29.
LAMB, ANDREW: ‘Music of the Popular Theatre’, in Temperley (ed.) Music in Britain:
The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 92-108.
MATES, JULIAN: America's Musical Stage: Two Hundred Years of Musical Theatre
(Westport, Conn., 1985).
MIDGLEY, SAMUEL: My 70 Years’ Musical Memories (London, 1934).
ROOT, DEANE: American Popular Stage Music 1860-1880 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981).
SONNECK, OSCAR С. T.: ‘A Survey from 1781 to 1792’, Early Opera in America,
(New York, 1915; repr. 1963), 57-83.
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS: “The English Romantic Opera’, Victorian Studies, 9 (1966),
293-301.
WHITE, ERIC WALTER: ‘Some National Opera Schemes; and Gilbert and Sullivan’,
A History of English Opera (London, 1983), 295-334.
(b) Individual Composers
Macfarren
BANISTER, HENRY CHARLES: George Alexander Macfarren: His Life, Works and
Influence (London, 1891).
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS: ‘George Alexander Macfarren and English Musical
Nationalism,’ in Temperley (ed.), The Lost Chord: Studies in Victorian Music
(Bloomington, Ind., 1989).
Sullivan
DUNHILL, THOMAS F.: Sullivan's Comic Operas: A Critical Appreciation (Oxford,
1928; repr. 1981).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 873
HAYTER, CHARLES: Gilbert and Sullivan (London, 1987).
JACOBS, ARTHUR: Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician (Oxford, 1984).
CHAPTER VII
THE SYMPHONIC POEM AND KINDRED FORMS
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
STOCKMEIER, WOLFGANG: Die Programmusik (Das Musikwerke, 36; Cologne, 1970);
Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Program Music (Cologne, 1970) [includes
piano score of Liszt's Manfred].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
DvoRÁK, A.: Antonin Dvorak: Souborné vydani, ed. Otakar Sourek et al. (Prague,
1955) [Czech, German, English, French]: series 3 Orchestral Works 24 vols.
(1955-63).
FiBICH, Z.: Studijní vydání del Zdeňka Fibicha, ed. L. Boháček et al. (Prague, 1950-
67): Orchestrální hudba (1954-63).
Liszr, F.: Franz Liszts Musikalische Werke, ed. Franz Liszt-Stiftung (Leipzig,
1907-36; repr. 1966): Part 1 Für Orchester [including Bd 1-6 Symphonische
Dichtungen].
—— Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke/New Edition of the Complete Works (Kassel
and Budapest, 1970- ): series 6 Works and Arrangements for Orchestra
(forthcoming).
MUSSORGSKY, M. P.: Modest Petrovich Musorgskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed.
Pavel Aleksandrovich Lamm, with Boris Vladimirovich Asafev (Moscow,
1928-34): 16 Six Works for Orchestra.
Rimsky-Korsakov, N.: Nikolay Rimskiy-Korsakov: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed.
Andrey Nikolaevich Rimsky-Korsakov et al. (Moscow, 1946-70): 19A Sadko
(1951):
SMETANA, B.: Studijni vydáni del Bedřicha Smetany, ed. František Bartoš, Josef
Plavec, et al. (Prague, 1940- ): 14 Má Vlast (1966).
TCHAIKOVSKY, P. I.: Pyotr Mich Chaykovskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy (Moscow
and Leningrad, 1940-71; repr. 1974): 18 Manfred Symphony (1949); 21-2
Overtures [including Groza and Fatum] (1952); 23 Romeo and Juliet (1950); 24
[Including Tempest and Francesca da Rimini] (1961); 26 Hamlet.
—— Manfred (London, 1958) [miniature score, with foreword by Gerald Abraham].
WAGNER, R.: Richard Wagners Werke: Musikdramen—Jugendopern— musikalische
Werke, ed. Michael Balling (Leipzig, 1912-29; repr. 1971): Band 18 & 20
Orchesterwerke.
— Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz, 1970- ): 18
Orchesterwerke, ed. Egon Voss (1973).
WoLr, H.: Hugo Wolf: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Internationale Hugo Wolf-
Gesellschaft/Hans Jancik (Vienna, 1960- ): 16 Penthesilea (1971).
—— Hugo Wolf: Nachgelassene Werke, ed. Robert Haas and Helmut Schultz
(Leipzig and Vienna, 1936): 3 Instrumentalwerke; 2 Penthesilea.
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
CookE, DERYCK: The Language of Music (London, 1959; repr. 1962).
DANCKERT, WERNER: Das europäische Volkslied (Berlin, 1939; 2nd edn., 1970).
874 BIBLIOGRAPHY
FINSCHER, LUDWIG: ‘Zwischen absoluter und Programmusik: Zur Interpretation der
deutschen romantischen Symphone’, in Christoph Hellmut Mahling (ed.), Über
Symphonien: Beiträge zu einer musikalischen Gattung: Festschrift Walter Wiora
zum 70. Geburtstag (Tutzing, 1979), 103- 15.
FISKE, ROGER: ‘Shakespeare in the Concert Hall’, in Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.),
Shakespeare in Music (London, 1964), 177-241.
KLAUWELL, OTTO: Geschichte der Programmusk von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart
(Leipzig, 1910). Ё
KLOIBER, RUDOLF: Handbuch der symphonischen Dichtung (Wiesbaden, 1967).
LOCKSPEISER, EDWARD: Music and Painting (London, 1973).
Myers, RoLLo: Modern French Music (Oxford, 1971).
OnnEY, LESLIE: Programme Music (London, 1975).
SCHUBERT, K.: Die Programmusik (Wolfenbuttel, 1933; 2nd edn., 1961).
Tovey, DONALD (FRANCIS): Essays im Musical Analysis, iv. Illustrative Music
(London, 1937; repr. 1972).
YouNG, PERCY M.: "Orchestral Music’, in Nicholas Temperley (ed.), Music in
Britain: The Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 358-80.
ScRUTON, ROGER: “Representation in Music’, Philosophy, 51 (1976), 273-87.
WELLESZ, EGON: Die neue Instrumentation (Berlin, 1928).
WIORA, WALTER: ‘Zwischen absoluter und Programmusik’, in Anna Amalie Abert
and Wilhelm Pfannkuch (eds.), Festschrift Friedrich Blume zum 70. Geburtstag
(Kassel, 1963), 381-8.
(b) Individual Composers
Balakirev
GARDEN, EDWARD: Balakirev: A Critical Study of his Life and Music (London,
1967).
KARENIN, V. (ed.): Perepiska M. A. Balakireva s V. V. Stasovim (Moscow, 1935).
STASOV, VLADIMIR VASIL'EVICH: ‘Nasha muzika za posledniya 25 let’, Vestnik Evropi
(Oct. 1883), no. 10, pp. 561-623.
TIMOFEEV, GRIGORY: ‘М. A. Balakirev: Na osnovanii novikh materialov’, Russkaya
Mis (1912), no. 6, pp. 38 ff., and no. 7, pp. 55 ff.
D’Indy
VALLAS, LEON: Vincent d Indy (Paris, 1946-50).
Dvoräk
ABRAHAM, GERALD: The Tradition of Western Music (London, 1974).
SOUREK, OTAKAR: Dvořákovy skladby orchestrální (Prague, 1944-6); abridged Eng.
trans., Roberta Finlayson Samsour, The Orchestral works of Antonin Dvorák
(Prague, 1956).
SYCHRA, ANTONIN: Estetika Dvořákovy symfonické tvorby (Prague, 1959).
For further Dvorak bibliography see $ VIII
Franck
CORTOT, ALFRED: La Musique francaise de piano (Paris, 1930-48); Eng. trans., Hilda
Andrews, French Piano Music (London, 1932).
DaviEs, LAURENCE: César Franck and his Circle (London, 1970).
Franck (London, 1973).
D’Inpy, VINCENT: César Franck (Paris, 1906; 8th edn., 1919); Eng. trans., Rosa
Newmarch, César Franck (London, 1910; repr. 1965).
MoHR, WiLHELM: César Franck (Stuttgart, 1942; 2nd edn., 1969 incl. thematic
catalogue of published works).
SEIPT, ANGELUS: César Francks Symphonische Dichtungen (Regensburg, 1981).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 875
TIERSOT, JULIAN: "Les CEuvres inédites de César Franck’, La Revue musicale, 4/2
(1922), 97-138.
La Veritable Histoire de Cesar Franck (Paris, 1950); Eng. trans., Hubert Foss,
Cesar Franck (London, 1951).
Liszt
BARRY, C. F.: ‘Hans von Bülow’s Nirwana’, Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musik-
gesellschaft, 2/9 (June 1901).
BERGFELD, JOACHIM: Die formale Struktur der symphonischen Dichtungen Franz
Liszts (Eisenach, 1931).
HEUSS, ALFRED: “Eine motivisch-thematische Studie über Liszts sinfonische Dichtung
Ce qu'on entend sur le montagne’, Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musik-
Gesellschaft, 13 (1911-12), 10-21.
Liszt, FRANZ: Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt und Hans von Bülow, ed. La Mara
(Leipzig, 1898).
Briefe, ed. La Mara (8 vols.; Leipzig, 1893-1905); Eng. trans., Constance
Bache, Letters (2 vols.; London, 1894).
Franz Liszt: Correspondence, ed. Pierre-Antoine Hure and Claude Knepper
(Paris, 1987).
Gesammelte Schriften von Franz Liszt, ed. Lina Ramann (Leipzig, 1880-3).
MERRICK, PAUL: Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt (Cambridge, 1987).
RAABE, PETER: Franz Liszt: Leben und Schaffen (Stuttgart, 1931; rev. 2nd edn.,
1968).
RAFF, HELENE: ‘Franz Liszt und Joachim Raff im Spiegel ihrer Briefe’, Die Musik,
1 (1901-2).
SoMFAI, LAszLo: ‘Die Gestaltwandlungen der *Faust-Symphone" von Liszt’, in
Klara Hamburger (ed.), Franz Liszt: Beiträge von ungarischen Autoren (Buda-
pest, 1978), 292-324.
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS, ABRAHAM, GERALD, and SEARLE, HUMPHREY: The New Grove
Early Romantic Masters 1 (London, 1985) [includes Liszt].
WAGNER, RICHARD: ‘Uber Franz Liszt’s symphonische Dichtungen: Briefe an M.
W. (1857), repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, v
(Leipzig, 1872), 235-55; Eng. trans., William Ashton Ellis (ed. and trans.),
Richard Wagner's Prose Works, iii (London, 1894; repr. 1972), 235-54.
WALKER, ALAN: Franz Liszt: The Man and his Music (London, 1970; 2nd edn.,
1976).
Franz Liszt, i. Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847 (London, 1983).
WOOLLETT, H., and PIERNE, GABRIEL: ‘Histoire de l'orchestration: Franz Liszt (1811-
1866)’, in Albert Lavignac (ed.), Encyclopédie de la musique et Dictionnaire du
Conservatoire (Paris, 1920-31), II. iv. 2602-5.
Raff
КАРЕ, HELENE: Joachim Raff: Ein Lebensbild (Regensburg, 1925).
КОМЕК, MARKUS: Joseph Joachim Raff (1822-1882) (Wiesbaden, 1982).
Ritter
HAUSEGGER, SIEGMUND Von: ‘Alexander Ritter: Ein Bild seines Charakters und
Schaffens', Die Musik (Berlin, 1907).
Rimsky-Korsakov
ABRAHAM, GERALD: Slavonic and Romantic Music (London, 1968).
JONAS, FLORENCE (trans.): Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov (New York, 1985).
OSSOVSKY, ALEKSANDR VYACHESLAVOVICH (ed.): Rimskiy-Korsakov: Vospominaniya
V. V. Yastrebtseva (Moscow, 1959 60).
Rimsky-Korsakov, NIKOLAY ANDREEVICH: Letopis? moey muzikalnoy zhizni
876 ВЇВЇЛОСКАРНҮ
(St Petersburg, 1909; enlarged 3га edn., 1928; ed. Andrey Nikolaevich
Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksandr Vyacheslavovich Ossovsky, Polnoe sobranie
sochineniy, i (1955); Eng. trans., Judah A. Joffe, My Musical Life (New York,
1942, repr. 1974; 5th edn., 1935).
For further Rimsky-Korsakov bibliography see $ VI (d)
Saint-Saéns
Catalogue général et thématique des euvres de Saint-Saéns. (Paris, 1897; терг. 1908)
[ed. Durand et Cie].
SAINT-SAENS, CAMILLE: Portraits et souvenirs (Paris, 1899; 3rd edn., 1909).
SERVIERES, GEORGES: Saint-Saéns (Paris, 1923; rev. edn., 1930).
For further Saint-Saens bibliography see $ VI (b)
Smetana
BARTOS, FRANTISEK: Smetana ve vzpominkäch a dopisech (Prague, 1939; 9th ейп.
1953); Eng. trans., Daphne Rusbridge, Letters and Reminiscences (Prague,
1955).
CLAPHAM, JoHN: Smetana (London, 1972).
LARGE, BRIAN: Smetana (London, 1970).
SMETANA, BEDRICH: Bedřich Smetana a Dr. Ludevit Procházka: Vzájemná kore-
spondence, ed. Jan Löwenbach (Prague, 1914).
SOUREK, OTAKAR: Smetanova ‘Ma Vlasť: Její vznik a osudy (Prague, 1939).
ZICH, OTAKAR: Symfonické Básně Smetanovy: Hudebně estetický rozbor (Prague,
1924; 2nd edn., 1949).
For further Smetana bibliography see § IX (e)
Strauss
ARMSTRONG, THOMAS: Strauss’ Tone Poems (London, 1931).
DEL Mar, NORMAN: Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works
(London, 1962-72; rev. repr. 1978, repr. 1986).
Gysi, Fritz: Richard Strauss (Potsdam, 1934).
KENNEDY, MICHAEL: Strauss Tone Poems (London, 1984).
LONGYEAR, REY M.: ‘Schiller, Moszkowski and Strauss: Joan of Arc's “Death and
Transfiguration" ', Music Review, 28 (1967), 209-17.
MAUKE, WILHELM: Richard Strauss: Symphonien und Tondichtungen (Berlin, n.d.).
MUELLER VON Asow, ERICH H.: Richard Strauss: Thematisches Verzeichnis (Vienna,
1959-74).
MUSCHLER, REINHOLD KONRAD: Richard Strauss (Hildesheim, 1925).
SPECHT, RICHARD: Richard Strauss und sein Werk (Vienna and Leipzig, 1921).
STEINITZER, МАХ: Richard Strauss (Berlin, 1911; 13th edn., 1922; final enlarged
edn.. 1927).
STRAUSS, RICHARD: Richard Strauss und Franz Wüllner im Briefwechsel, ed. Dietrich
Kämper (Cologne, 1963).
TRENNER, FRANZ: Richard Strauss: Werkverzeichnis (Vienna and Munich, 1985).
WOLLETT, H., and PIERNE, GABRIEL: ‘Histoire de l’orchestration: Max Reger et
Richard Strauss’, in Albert Lavignac (ed.), Encyclopedie de la musique et
Dictionnaire du Conservatoire (Paris, 1920-31), II. iv. 2619-35.
Tchaikovsky
Davibova, К. Yu. Protopopov, V. V., and TuMANINA, N. V:
Muzikal’noe nasledie Chaykovskogo (Moscow, 1958).
TCHAIKOVSKY, P.: P. 1. Chaykovskiy o programmnoy muzike (Moscow, 1952).
For further Tchaikovsky bibliography see $ VI (d) and $ VIII
Wagner
Voss, EGon: Richard Wagner und die Instrumentalmusik: Wagners symphonischer
BIBLIOGRAPHY 877
Ehrgeiz (Wilhelmshaven, 1977).
For further Wagner bibliography see § V
CHAPTER VIII
MAJOR INSTRUMENTAL FORMS: 1850-1890
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
BEDELL, ROBERT LEECH: The French Organist (New York, 1944) [includes music by
Widor].
BONNET, JOSEPH: Historical Organ- Recitals (New York, 1917-40): 4 Three Composers
of the Romantic Period [Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Liszt]; 5 Modern
Composers [includes Franck, Brahms, Saint-Saéns, and Widor].
ENGEL, HANS: Das Solokonzert (Das Musikwerk, 25; Cologne, 1964); Eng. trans.,
Robert Kolben, The Solo Concerto (Anthology of Music, 25; Cologne, 1964).
FERGUSON, HOWARD: Style and Interpretation: An Anthology of Keyboard Music, 4
Romantic Piano Music (London, 1964; 2nd edn., 1972) [includes works by
Brahms and Liszt].
GEORGII, WALTER: ‘Romanticism and the National Efforts in the 19th Century’,
400 Jahre europäischer Klaviermusik (Das Musikwerk, 1; Cologne, 1959); Eng.
trans., 400 Years of European Keyboard Music (Anthology of Music, 1; Cologne,
1959) [includes works by Brahms, Liszt, Mussorgsky, and Smetana].
GILLESPIE, JOHN: Nineteenth-century European Piano Music: Unfamiliar Masterworks
(New York, 1977) [includes works by Arensky, Bizet, Chabrier, Dvorak, Gade,
Smetana, R. Strauss, and Wagner].
HOFFMANN-ERBRECHT, LOTHAR: “The Symphony in the 19th Century after Beetho-
ven’, Die Sinfonie (Das Musikwerk, 29; Cologne, 1967); Eng. trans., Robert
Kolben, The Symphony (Anthology of Music, 29; Cologne, 1967) [includes
extracts from works by Brahms, Bruckner, and Tchaikovsky].
KAHL, WILLI: Das Charakterstiick (Das Musikwerk, 8; Cologne, 1955); Eng. trans.,
A. Crawford Howie, The Character Piece (Anthology of Music, 8; Cologne,
1961) [includes works by Bizet, Fibich, Jensen, Liszt, and R. Strauss].
——— Lyrische Klavierstücke der Romantik (Stuttgart, 1926).
KRAMARZ, JoAcHIM: Vom Haydn bis Hindemith: Das Streichquartett їп Beispielen
(Wolfenbüttel, 1961).
LANG, PAUL HENRY: The Concerto 1800-1900 (New York, 1969).
—— The Symphony 1800-1900 (New York, 1969) [includes works by Brahms,
Bruckner, Dvorak, and Tchaikovsky].
POHANKA, JAROSLAV: Déjiny ceské hudby v prikladech (Prague, 1958).
SCHLEUNING, PETER: Die Fantasie 2 (Das Musikwerk, 43; Cologne, 1971); Eng.
trans., A. Crawford Howie, The Fantasia 2: 18th to 20th Centuries (Anthology
of Music, 43; Cologne, 1971) [includes music by Liszt].
STEPHENSON, KURT: Romantik in der Tonkunst (Das Musikwerk, 21; Cologne, 1961);
Eng. trans., Robert Kolben, Romanticism in Music (Anthology of Music, 21;
Cologne, 1961) [includes piano music by Brahms and Liszt].
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS: The London Pianoforte School 1770-1860 (New York,
1984-7).
UNVERRICHT, HUBERT: Die Kammermusik (Das Musikwerk, 46; Cologne, 1972);
Eng. trans., A. Crawford Howie, Chamber Music (Anthology of Music, 46;
Cologne, 1975) [includes music by Herzogenberg and Raff].
878 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(b) Works by Individual Composers
ALKAN, C. V.: CEuvres choisies pour piano, ed. Georges Beck (Le Pupitre, 16; Paris,
1969).
—— The Piano Music of Alkan, ed. Raymond Lewenthal (New York, 1964).
BALAKIREV, M. A.: Miliy Alekseevich Balakirev: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy dlya
fortep'yano, ed. К. S. Sorokin (Moscow, 1951-4).
Bizet, G.: Symphony, C Major, ed. Hans-Hubert Schónzeler (London, 1973).
BORODIN, A.: First String Quartet (London, 1976) [Foreword by David Brown].
BRAHMS, J.: Johannes Brahms: Sämtliche Werke, 1-10 ed. Hans Gal, 11-26
ed. Eusebius Mandyczewski (Leipzig, 1926-7; repr. 1964-5 and 1971): 1-2
Symphonien für Orchester (repr. 1974 with Eng. trans. of text); 3 Ouvertüren
und Variationen für Orchester; 4 Serenaden und Tänze für Orchester; 5 Konzerte
für Streichinstrumente und Orchester; 6 Konzerte für Klavier und Orchester; 7
Kammermusik für Streichinstrumente; 8 Klavier-Quintett und -Quartette; 9
Klavier-Trios; 10 Klavier-Duos; 11-15 Klavierwerke [including 13 Sonaten und
Variationen für Klavier zu zwei Händen] (13-15 repr. 1971, 12 repr. 1976, both
with Eng. trans. of text); 16 Orgelwerke (repr. 1949 with Eng. trans. of text).
Johannes Brahms Autographs: Facsimiles of Eight Manuscripts in the Library
of Congress, with introduction by James Webster and preface by George
Bozarth (New York, 1983) [includes chamber and piano works].
—— Klavierwerke, ed. Carl Seeman, rev. Kurt Stephenson (Frankfurt, 1974).
—— Kleine Stücke für Klavier, ed. Robert Pascall (Diletto musicale No. 819; Vienna
and Munich, 1979) [includes Sarabande and Gavottes].
—— Quintett, H. Moll, ed. Kurt Herrmann (London, 1938).
Sämtliche Orgelwerke: Neue Ausgabe/Complete Organ Works: New Edition,
ed. Walter E. Buszin and Paul G. Bunjes (New York, 1964).
BRUCKNER, A.: Anton Bruckner: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Vienna,
1930 -50): 1-2, 4-8 Symphonien, ed. Robert Haas; 3 Symphonie, ed. Fritz Oeser
(Wiesbaden, 1950).
—— Anton Bruckner Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Leopold
Nowak (Vienna, 1951- ): 1-11 Symphonien (1951-81); 13/1 Streichquartett
c-Moll (1955); 13/2 Streichquintett F-Dur, Intermezzo d-Moll für Streichquintett
(1963).
—— Orgelwerke, ed. Hans Haselbóck (Diletto musicale, No. 364; Vienna and
Munich, 1970).
— — Symphony No. 9, ed. Hans-Hubert Schónzeler (London, 1963) [Foreword by
Hans Ferdinand Redlich].
— Organ and piano works incl. in Göllerich, August: Anton Bruckner: Ein Lebens-
und Schaffens-Bild, | (Regensburg, 1922), 2-4, ed. Max Auer (Regensburg,
1928-37); all repr. 1974.
Desussy, C.: Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy (Paris, 1985- ): series 1: Piano
Works; series 3 Chamber Music; series 5 Orchestral Works.
DvoRÁK, A.: Antonin Dvorak: Souborné vydani, ed. Otakar Sourek et al. (Prague,
1955- ) [Czech, German, English, French]: series 3 Orchestral Works: 24 vols.
including 1-9 Symphonies (1955-63); 4 Chamber Music: 11 vols. (1955-79); 5
Piano Works: 6 vols. (1955-76).
ELGAR, E.: Elgar Complete Edition, ed. Jerrold Northrop Moore and Christopher
Kent (London, 1981- ): series 1 Choral Works (forthcoming); series 4 Orchestral
Works (1984) [including Symphony No. 1].
FiBICH, Z.: Studijni vydáni del Zdeňka Fibicha, ed. L.. Boháček et al. (Prague, 1950-
67): Orchestrální hudba (1954-63); Klavir na dvě ruce, Klavír na čtyři ruce,
Housle a klavir, Klavirni výtahy; Komorní hudba.
FRANCK, C.: Œuvres complètes pour orgue, ed. Marcel Dupré (Paris, 1955- ).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 879
—— Organ Works, ed. Harvey Grace (London, 1942).
GRIEG, E.: Edvard Grieg: Gesamtausgabe/Complete Works, ed. Edvard-Grieg-
Komitee (Frankfurt, 1977- ): І Instrumentalmusik: 1-7 Klaviermusik, 8-9
Kammermusik, 10-13 Orchestermusik.
Sämtliche Klavierwerke (Leipzig, Peters).
Liszt, F.: Franz Liszts Musikalische Werke, ed. Franz Liszt-Stiftung (Leipzig, 1907-
36; repr. 1966): Part 1 Für Orchester: 1-6 Symphonische Dichtungen, 7 Eine
Symphonie zu Dantes Divina commedia, 8-9 Eine Faustsymphonie, 10-12 Kleinere
Orchesterwerke, 13 Werke für Pianoforte und Orchester.
—— Liszt Society Publications (London, 1950- ): 1 Late Piano Works; 2 Early and
Late Piano Works; 3 Hungarian and Late Piano Works; 4 Dances for Piano; 5
Various Piano Pieces (1968); 7 Unfamiliar Piano Works.
—— [Works], ed. V. Belov and K. Sorokin (Moscow, 1958- ): i/1 [Piano Works];
iv/3 [Organ Works].
Franz Liszt: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke/New Edition of the Complete
Works: series 1 Works for Piano, Two Hands, ed. Zoltan Gárdonyi and Istvan
Szelényi (Kassel and Budapest, 1970-85); Transcriptions and Arrangements
of Original and Other Works, series 3 Works including Transcriptions and
Arrangements of Original and Other Works for Piano, Four Hands or Two
Pianos; 6 Works and Arrangements for Orchestra [20 vols.] (all forthcoming).
—— — Werke für Klavier zu 2 Händen, ed. Emil von Sauer (Leipzig, 1917).
— — Complete Organ Works, ed. Sandor Margittay (Budapest and London, 1970-
3).
MAHLER, G.: Gustav Mahler: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed.
Internationale Gustav-Mahler-Gesellschaft (Vienna, 1960- ): 1-8, 10 Sym-
phonien Nr. 1-9 (1960-9).
MENDELSSOHN, F.: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's Werke: Kritisch durchgesehene
Ausgabe, ed. Julius Rietz (Leipzig, 1874-7; repr. 1967-9): 12 Für Orgel.
MONIUSZKO, S.: Stanislaw Moniuszko: Dziela/Werke (Krakow, 1965- ): series E
Instrumentalmusik: 33 Streichquartett I, H (1971); 34 Klavierwerke (1976).
MUSSORGSKY, M. P.: Modest Petrovich Musorgskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy,
ed. Pavel Aleksandrovich Lamm, with Boris Vladimirovich Asaf'ev (Moscow,
1928-34; repr. 1969): 16 [Six Works for Orchestra]; 17-18 [Piano Works].
RiMSKY-KORSAKOV, N.: Nikolay Rimskiy-Korsakov: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed.
Andrey Nikolaevich Rimsky-Korsakov ег al. (Moscow, 1946-70): 16-18
[Symphonies] (1949-59); 19, 20, 21, 22 [other orchestral works] (1951-8); 27
[Works for Chamber Ensemble] (1955); 28A [Chamber Works] (1951); 49A
[Piano Works] (1959).
SCHUMANN, R.: Robert Schumann's Werke, ed. Clara Schumann (Leipzig, 1881-93;
repr. 1967-8): 8 Für Orgel (1881).
—— — Symphony No. 3, ed. Linda Correll Roesner (London, 1986).
— — Symphony No. 4, ed. Linda Correll Roesner (London, 1978).
SMETANA, B.: Studijni vydáni del Bedřicha Smetany, ed. Frantisek Bartoš, Josef
Plavec, et al. (Prague, 1940- ): 4 Symf. básně Sveds. období (1942); 8 Orchestrálni
skladby sv. 2 (1952); 11 Triumfalni symfonie (1955); [Piano Works] 7 vols.
(1944-78).
— — Studijni vydáni del Bedřicha Smetany, xv. Komorni Skladby, ed. František
Bartoš, Josef Plavec, and Karel Šolc (Prague, 1977) [Foreword by Frantisek
Bartoš].
STRAUSS, JOHANN (ii): Johann Strauss: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Fritz Racek (Vienna,
1967- ): series 1 Instrumentalwerke: 18 Opp. 292-303 (1968); 19 Opp. 304-16
(1967); 20 Opp. 317-29 (1971).
TCHAIKOVSKY, P. I.: Pyotr Mich Chaykovskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy (Moscow
and Leningrad, 1940-71): 14-17 [Symphonies nos. 1-6] (1949-63).
880 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Suite No. 3 (London, 1978) [miniature score].
——— Ausgewählte Klavierwerke in drei Bänden, ed. Fritz Weitzmann (Leipzig, n.d.).
WAGNER, R.: Richard Wagners Werke: Musikdramen—Jugendopern—musikalische
Werke, ed. Michael Balling (Leipzig, 1912-29; repr. 1971) 18 & 20
Orchesterwerke.
—— Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz, 1970- ): 18
Orchesterwerke, ed. Egon Voss (1973).
Worr, H.: Hugo Wolf: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Internationale Hugo Wolf-
Gesellschaft/Hans Jancik (Vienna, 1960- ): 15 [Works for string quartet]
(1960- ); 17 Italienische Serenade (1965); 18 Klavierkompositionen (1974).
—— Hugo Wolf: Nachgelassene Werke, ed. Robert Haas and Helmut Schultz
(Leipzig and Vienna, 1936): 3 Instrumentalwerke.
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
ABRAHAM, GERALD: The Concise Oxford History of Music (Oxford, 1979).
— The Tradition of Western Music (London, 1974).
Совветт, WALTER WILLSON (ed.): Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music
(2 vols.; London, 1929-30; 2nd rev. edn., with supplement by Colin Mason,
1963).
COOPER, JEFFREY: The Rise of Insrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris, 1828-
1871 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983).
DAHLHAUS, CARL: ‘Zur Problematik der musikalischen Gattungen im 19. Jahrhun-
dert’, in Wulf Arlt, Ernst Lichtenhahn, and Hans Oesch (eds.), Gattungen der
Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade (Berne and Munich,
1973), 840-95.
GUT, SERGE, and PISTONE, DANIELE: La Musique de chambre en France de 1870 à
1918 (Paris, 1978).
HEIDEGGER, MARTIN: What is called thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York,
1968).
KocH, HEINRICH CHRISTOPH: Musikalisches Lexikon, welches die theoretische und
praktische Tonkunst, encyclopädisch bearbeitet, alle alten und neuen Kunstwörter
erklärt, und die alten und neuen Instrumente beschrieben, enthält (Frankfurt am
Main, 1802; 2nd edn., 1817, abridged, 1807, as Kurzgefasstes Handwörterbuch
der Musik für praktische Tonkünstler und für Dilettanten).
—— Versuch, aus der harten und weichen Tonart jeder Tonstufe der diatonisch-
chromatischen Leiter vermittels des enharmonischen Tonwechsels in die Dur- und
molltonart der übrigen Stufen auszuweichen (Rudolstadt, 1812).
—— Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Rudolstadt and Leipzig, 1782-93;
repr. 1969).
KRETZSCHMAR, HERMANN: Führer durch den Konzert-Saal (Leipzig, 1887-90, with
later editions).
MÜLLER-REUTER, THEODOR: Lexikon der deutschen Konzertliteratur (Leipzig, 1909,
supplement, 1921; all repr. 1972).
ROLLAND, ROMAIN: Musiciens daujourd hui (Paris, 1908); Eng. trans., Mary Blaik-
lock, Musicians of To-day (London, 1914; repr. 1969).
SALMEN, WALTER: Zur Orgelmusik im 19. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck, 1983).
SCRUTON, ROGER: The Aesthetic Understanding (London, 1983).
TARUSKIN, RICHARD: ‘How the Acorn Took Root: A Tale of Russia’, /9th-century
Music, 6 (1982-3), 189-212.
Tovey, DONALD (F.): Essays and Lectures on Music, ed. Hubert J. Foss (London,
1949).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 881
(b) Individual Composers
Alkan
SMITH, RONALD: Alkan, i. The Enigma (London, 1976), ii. The Music (1987).
Berlioz
BERLIOZ, HECTOR: A travers chants: Études musicales, adorations, boutades et critiques
(Paris, 1862); Eng. trans. [3 books], Edwin Evans, A Critical Study of Beethoven's
Nine Symphonies (London, 1913); Gluck and his Operas (London, 1913);
Mozart, Weber and Wagner, with Various Essays on Musical Subjects (London,
1918; repr. 1969).
Borodin
ABRAHAM, GERALD: Borodin: The Composer and his Music (London, 1927; 2nd edn.,
1935, repr.).
DIANIN, SERGEY A.: Borodin: Zhizneopisanie, materiali i dokumenti (Moscow, 1955;
rev. 2nd edn., 1960); Eng. trans., Robert Lord, Borodin (London, 1963).
For further Borodin bibliography see $ VI (d)
Brahms
BOZARTH, GEORGE (ed.): Brahms Studies: Proceedings of the Washington Brahms
Conference, 1983 (Oxford, 1990).
BRAHMS, JOHANNES: Johannes Brahms Briefswechsel, i-xvi (Berlin 1907-22).
COOKE, DERYCK et al.: The New Grove Late Romantic Masters (London, 1985)
[includes Brahms].
DuNsBY, JONATHAN: Structural Ambiguity in Brahms: Analytic Approaches to Four
Works (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981).
FRISCH, WALTER: Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, Calif., 1984).
GAL, Hans: Johannes Brahms (Frankfurt am Main, 1961); Eng. trans., Joseph Stein,
Johannes Brahms: His Work and Personality (London, 1963; repr. 1975).
GEIRINGER, KARL: Brahms: Leben und Schaffen eines deutschen Meisters (Vienna,
1935; 2nd edn., 1955); Eng. trans., H. B. Weiner and Bernard Miall, Brahms:
His Life and Work (Boston, Mass.,1936; rev. 2nd edn., 1947).
HERTTRICH, ERNST: ‘Johannes,Brahms—Klaviertrio H-dur op. 8, Frühfassung und
Spatfassung—ein analytischer Vergleich’, in Martin Bente (ed.), Musik, Edition,
Interpretation: Gedenkschrift Günter Henle (Munich, 1980), 218-36.
JENNER, GUSTAV: Johannes Brahms als Mensch, Lehrer und Künstler: Studien und
Erlebnisse (Marburg, 1905; 2nd edn., 1930).
KAHL, WILLI: *Viertes rheinisches Kammermusik im Brühler Schloss’, Zeitschriftfür
Musikwissenschaft, 7 (1924-5), 575-80.
KALBECK, Max: Johannes Brahms (4 vols.; Berlin, 1904-14; reprint of latest edition
of each vol. (1921, 1921, 1912-13, 1915), Tutzing, 1974).
Kross, SIEGFRIED: ‘Brahms the Symphonist’, in Robert Pascall (ed.), Brahms:
Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies (Cambridge, 1983), 125-45.
LITZMANN, BERTHOLD (ed.) Clara Schumann-Johannes Brahms: Briefe aus den
Jahren 1853-1896 (Leipzig, 1927; abridged Eng. trans., Letters of Clara
Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853-1896 (New York, 1927; 2nd edn., 1971).
McCoRKLE, MARGIT L.: Johannes Brahms: Thematisch-bibliographisches Werk-
verzeichnis (Munich, 1984).
MUSGRAVE, MICHAEL: 'Brahms's First Symphony: Thematic Coherence and its
Secret Origin’, Music Analysis, 2 (1983), 117-33.
— — ‘Frei aber Froh: A Reconsideration’, /9th-century Music, З (1979-80), 251-8.
—— The Music of Brahms (London, 1985).
882 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(ed.): Brahms 2: Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies (Cambridge,
1987).
NIEMANN, WALTER: Johannes Brahms (Berlin; 1920); Eng. trans., Catherine Alison
Phillips, Brahms (New York, 1929; repr. 1969).
PASCALL, ROBERT: ‘Brahms’s First Symphony Slow Movement: The Initial Per-
forming Version', Musical Times, 122 (1981), 664-7.
— ‘Brahms und die Gattung der Symphonie’, in Christiane Jacobsen (ed.),
Johannes Brahms: Leben und Werk (Wiesbaden, 1983), 113-14.
—— ‘Unknown Gavottes by Brahms’, Music and Letters, 57 (1976), 404-11.
——— (ed.): Brahms: Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies (Cambridge,
1983).
RETI, RUDOLPH: The Thematic Process in Music (New York, 1951; 2nd edn., 1961).
SCHOENBERG, ARNOLD: 'Brahms the Progressive', in Dika Newlin (ed.), Style and
Idea (New York, 1950; London, 1951), 52-101.
SPECHT, RICHARD: Johannes Brahms: Leben und Werk eines deutschen Meisters
(Hellerau, 1928); Eng. trans., Eric Blom, Johannes Brahms (London, 1930).
THOMAS-SAN-GALLI, W. A.: Johannes Brahms (Munich, 1912; 5th edn., 1922).
WEBSTER, JAMES: 'Schubert's Sonata Form and Brahms's First Maturity’, 19th-
century Music, 2 (1977-8), 18-35; 3 (1978-9), 52-71.
Bruckner
AUER, Max: Anton Bruckner: Sein Leben und Werk (Vienna, 1923; 6th edn., 1967).
СООКЕ, Deryck: ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified’, Musical Times, 110 (1969),
20-2, 142-4, 362-5, 479-82, 828.
et al: The New Grove Late Romantic Masters (London, 1985) [includes
Bruckner].
DECsEv, ERNST: Bruckner: Versuch eines Lebens (Berlin, 1921; 3rd edn., 1930).
GÖLLERICH, AUGUST: Anton Bruckner: Ein Lebens- und Schaffens- Bild, i (Regensburg,
1922), ii-iv, ed. Max Auer (Regensburg, 1928-37); all repr. 1974.
GRASBERGER, RENATE: Bruckner- Bibliographie (Graz, 1988).
KURTH, ERNST: Bruckner (Berlin, 1925; repr. 1971).
NEWLIN, DIKA: Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg (New York, 1947; rev. edn., 1979).
REDLICH, HANS F.: Bruckner and Mahler (London, 1955; rev. edn., 1970).
SCHÖNZELER, HANS HUBERT: Bruckner (London, 1970).
SIMPSON, ROBERT: The Essence of Bruckner: An Essay-towards the Understanding of
his Music (London, 1967).
WATSON, DEREK: Bruckner (London, 1975).
Bülow
BürLow, Hans von: Hans von Bülow: Briefe und Schriften, ed. Marie von Bülow
(Leipzig, 1896-1908; i-ii, 2nd edn., 1899).
Dargomizhsky
DARGOMIZHSKY, А. S.: Sobranie sochineniy dlya fortep' yano, ed. Mikhail Samoylovich
Pekelis (Moscow and Leningrad, 1954).
Sochineniya dlya simfonicheskogo orkestra, ed. Mikhail Samoylovich Pekelis
(Moscow, 1967).
Dvoräk
BURGHAUSER, JARMIL: Antonin Dvořák: Thematicky Katalog, bibliografie, přehled
Zivota a dila (Prague, 1960).
CLAPHAM, JOHN: Antonin Dvorák: Musician and Craftsman (London, 1966).
—— Dvorák (Newton Abbot, 1979).
СоокЕ, DERYCK et al.: The New Grove Late Romantic Masters (London, 1985)
[includes Dvorák].
DvoRAK, ANTONÍN, and FINCK, HENRY T.: ‘Franz Schubert’, The Century Illustrated
Monthly Magazine (New York, 1894; repr. in Clapham, Antonin Dvorak).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 883
FiscHL, VIKTOR (ed.): Antonin Dvorak: His Achievement (London, 1942).
HOREIS, ANTONIN: Antonin Dvořák: The Composer's Life and Work in Pictures
(Prague, 1955).
LAYTON, ROBERT: Dvorak Symphonies and Concertos (London, 1978).
SOUREK, OTAKAR: Dvořákovy Symfonie (Prague, 1922; 2nd edn., 1943, 3rd edn.,
1948); Eng. trans., Roberta Finlayson Samsour, in The Orchestral Works of
Antonín Dvorák (Prague, 1956; repr., n.d.).
— Dvorak ve vzpominkách a dopisech (Prague, 1938; 9th edn., 1951); Eng. trans.,
Roberta Finlayson Samsour, Antonin Dvorak: Letters and Reminiscences
(Prague, 1954; repr. 1983).
Franck
Davies, LAURENCE: César Franck and his Circle (London, 1970).
D'iNDY, VINCENT: César Franck (Paris, 1906); Eng. trans., Rosa Newmarch, César
Franck (London, 1910; repr. 1965).
Glinka
Brown, Davip: Mikhail Glinka (London, 1974).
For further Glinka bibliography see § III (e)
Goldmark
GOLDMARK, KARL: Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Vienna and Munich, 1922; 2nd
edn., 1929).
Liszt
ALTENBURG, DETLEF: ‘Eine Theorie der Musik der Zukunft: Zur Funktion des
Programms im symphonischen Werk von Franz Liszt’, in Wolfgang Suppan
(ed.), Liszt Studien 1: Kongress-Bericht Eisenstadt 1975 (Graz, 1977), 9-25.
COLLET, ROBERT: ‘Works for Piano and Orchestra’, in Alan Walker (ed.), Franz
Liszt: The Man and his Music (London, 1970; 2nd edn., 1976), 248-78.
HARASZTI, EMILE: Franz Liszt (Paris, 1967).
Liszr, FRANZ: ‘Berlioz und seine Haroldsymphonie', Neue Zeitschrift für Musik,
43 (1855), 37-46.
Franz Liszt’s Briefe, ed. La Mara (Leipzig, 1893-1902); Eng. trans., Constance
Bache, Letters of Franz Liszt (London, 1894).
LONGYEAR, REY M.: 'Liszt's B minor Sonata: Precedents for a Structural Analysis’,
Music Review, 34 (1973), 198-209.
RAABE, PETER: Franz Liszt: Leben und Schaffen (Stuttgart, 1931; rev. 2nd edn.,
1968).
SEARLE, HUMPHREY: The Music of Liszt (London, 1954; rev. 2nd edn., 1966).
WAGNER, RiCHARD: 'Über Franz Liszts symphonische Dichtungen: Brief an
M. W? (1857), repr. in Richard Wagner: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtun-
gen, v (Leipzig, 1872), 235-55; Eng. trans., William Ashton Ellis (ed. and
trans.), Richard Wagner's Prose Works, in (London, 1894; repr. 1972), 235-54.
WINKLHOFER, SHARON: Liszt's Sonata іп B minor: A Study of Autograph Sources
and Documents (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980).
For further Liszt bibliography see $ VII
Mahler
BAUER-LECHNER, NATALIE: Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler (Vienna and Zurich,
1923); Eng. trans., Dika Newlin, Recollections of Gustav Mahler (London,
1980).
BLAUKOPF, KURT: Gustav Mahler (Vienna, 1969); Eng. trans., Inge Goodwin, Gustav
Mahler (London, 1973; repr. 1985).
with ROMAN, ZOLTAN: Mahler: Sein Leben, sein Werk, und sein Welt in
zeitgenössischen Bildern und Texten (Vienna, 1976); Eng. trans., P. Baker er al.,
Mahler: A Documentary Study (London, 1976).
884 BIBLIOGRAPHY
CookE, DERYCK: Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to his Music (London, 1980).
DE LA GRANGE, HENRI-Louts: Mahler (London, 1973- ); Fr. trans., rev. (1980- ).
MAHLER, GUSTAV: Gustav Mahler: Briefe 1879-1911, ed. Alma Maria Mahler
(Berlin, 1924); Eng. trans., Eithne Wilkins, Ernest Kaiser, and Bill Hopkins,
Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Knud Martner (London, 1979).
MITCHELL, DONALD: Gustav Mahler: The Early Years (London, 1958; rev. edn.,
Paul Banks and David Matthews, 1980).
—— Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (London, 1975).
NEWLIN, Dika: Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg (New York, 1947; rev. edn., 1979).
REDLICH, Hans F.: Bruckner and Mahler (London, 1955; rev. edn., 1970).
SPONHEUER, BERND: "Der Durchbruch als primäre Formkategorie Gustav Mahlers:
Eine Untersuchung zum Finalproblem der Ersten Symphonie’, in Klaus
Hinrich Stahmer (ed.), Form und Idee in Gustav Mahlers Instrumentalmusik
(Wilhelmshaven, 1980), 117-64.
Puccini
CARNER, Mosco: Puccini: A Critical Biography (London, 1958; rev. 2nd edn., 1974).
For further Puccini bibliography see $ VI (c)
Raff
RAFF, HELENE: Joachim Raff: Ein Lebensbild (Regensburg, 1925).
Romer, Markus: Joseph Joachim Raff (1822-1882) (Wiesbaden, 1982).
SCHAFER, A.: Chronologisch-systematisches Verzeichnis der Werke Joachim Raffs
(Wiesbaden, 1888; repr. 1974).
Rimsky-Korsakov
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay Andreevich: Letopis moey тигїКаГпоу zhizni
(St Petersburg, 1909; enlarged 3rd edn., 1926); ed. Andrey Nikolaevich
Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksandr Vyacheslavovich Ossovsky, Polnoe sobranie
sochineniy, i (1955); Eng. trans., Judah A. Joffe, My Musical Life (New York,
1942, repr. 1974; Sth edn., 1935).
For further Rimsky-Korsakov bibliography see $ VI (d) and $ VII
Saint-Saéns
HERVEY, ARTHUR: Saint-Saëns (London and New York, 1921).
For further Saint-Saéns bibliography see § VI (b) and § VII
Schumann, Robert and Clara
CHISSELL, Joan: Clara Schumann: A Dedicated Spirit (London, 1983).
LITZMANN, BERTHOLD: Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und
Briefen (Leipzig, 1902-8; all later edns. repr. 1971); abridged Eng. trans., Grace
E. Hadow, Clara Schumann: An Artist's Life Based on Material Found in
Diaries and Letters (London, 1913; repr. 1979).
Reca, Nancy B.: Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (London, 1985).
Sams, Erıc: ‘Did Schumann use Ciphers?, Musical Times, 106 (1965), 584-91, 767-
70, 949.
—— ‘The Schumann Ciphers’, Musical Times, 107 (1966), 392-400, 1050-1.
— ‘The Tonal Analogue in Schumann's Music’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical
Association, 96 (1969-70), 103-17.
SCHUMANN, ROBERT: Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin
Kreisig (4 vols., Leipzig, 1854; 4th edn., 2 vols., 1892; repr. 1968; 5th edn.
1914); Eng. trans., Fanny Raymond Ritter, Music and Musicians: Essays and
Criticisms (London, 1877-80); new selected Eng. trans., Konrad Wolff (ed.)
and Paul Rosenfeld (trans.), On Music and Musicians (New York, 1947; repr.
1982); selections Henry Pleasants (ed. and trans.), The Musical World of Robert
Schumann: A Selection from his own Writings (London, 1965).
For further Schumann bibliography see § I, § II, and $ IV
BIBLIOGRAPHY 885
Smetana
JANECEK, KAREL: Smetanova komorní hudba: Kompoziční výklad (Prague, 1978).
LARGE, BRIAN: Smetana (London, 1970).
TEIGE, KAREL: Příspěvky k životopisu a umělecké činnosti mistra Bedřicha Smetany,
i. Skladby Smetanovy (Prague, 1893); ii. Dopisy Smetanovy (1896).
For further Smetana bibliography see § VI (d) and § VII
Strauss
DEL Mar, NoRMAN: Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works
(London, 1962-72; rev. repr. 1978, repr. 1986).
SCHUH, WILLI: Richard Strauss: Jugend und frühe Meisterjahre: Lebenschronik 1864-
1898 (Zurich, 1976); Eng. trans., Mary Whittall, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle
of the Early Years, 1864-1898 (Cambridge, 1982).
For further Strauss bibliography see $ VIII
Tchaikovsky
ABRAHAM, GERALD: On Russian Music (London, 1939; repr. 1982).
—— Studies in Russian Music (London, 1935; rev. 2nd edn., 1969, repr., 1976).
——— (ed.): Tchaikovsky: A Symposium (London, 1945; repr., 1979).
Brown, Davip: Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study, 1. The Early Years
(1840-1874) (London, 1978); ii. The Crisis Years (1874-1878) (London, 1982);
in. The Years of Wandering (1878-1885) (London, 1986).
NIKOLAEVA, N. S.: Simfonii P. I. Chaykovskogo (Moscow, 1958).
TCHAIKOVSKY, PYOTR IL’ICH: Letters to his Family: An Autobiography, trans. Galina
von Meck, with additional annotations by Percy M. Young (New York, 1981).
WARRACK, JOHN: Tchaikovsky (London, 1973).
—— Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos (London, 1969).
WEINSTOCK, HERBERT: Tchaikovsky (New York, 1946; repr. 1980).
For further Tchaikovsky bibliography see $ VI (d)
Wagner
WESTERNHAGEN, CURT VON: Wagner (Zurich, 1968); Eng. trans., Mary Whittall,
Wagner: A Biography (Cambridge, 1978).
For further Wagner bibliography see $ V
Wolf
WALKER, FRANK: Hugo Wolf: A Biography (London, 1951; enlarged 2nd edn.,
1968).
For further Wolf bibliography see $ IX (a)
Widor
THOMPSON, ANDREW: The Life and Times of Charles-Marie Widor (Oxford, 1987).
CHAPTER TX
SOLO SONG
(a) GERMANY
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
Moser, HANS-JOACHIM: Das deutsche Sololied und die Ballade (Das Musikwerke,
14; Cologne, 1957); Eng. trans., The German Solo Song and Ballad (Anthology
of Music, 14; Cologne, 1958) [includes works by Brahms, Cornelius, Franz,
Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Wolf].
REIMANN, HEINRICH: Das deutsche Lied: Eine Auswahl aus den Programmen der
886 BIBLIOGRAPHY
historischen Lieder-Abends der Frau Amalie Joachim (Berlin, 1892-3) [includes
works by Bernardt Klein, Spohr, and, other early 19th-century Lieder
composers].
STEPHENSON, KURT: Romantik in der Tonkunst (Das Musikwerk, 21; Cologne, 1961);
Eng. trans., Robert Kolben, Romanticism in Music (Anthology of Music, 21;
Cologne, 1961) [includes works by Franz, Jensen, Schumann, and Wagner].
THYM, JURGEN: 100 Years of Eichendorf Songs (Recent Researches in the Music of
the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Rufus Hallmark, 5; Madison,
Wis., 1983).
(b) Works by Individual Composers
BRAHMS, J.: Johannes Brahms: Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1926-7; repr. 1964-5 and
1971): 23-6 Lieder und Gesänge für eine Singstimme mit Klavierbegleitung, ed.
Eusebius Mandyczewski.
—— Deutsche Volkslieder, ed. Franz Kretschmer and Anton Wilhelm von Zuc-
calmaglio (Berlin, 1840).
—— Lieder (Leipzig: Peters).
— Neue Volkslieder von Johannes Brames, ed. Max Friedlaender (Berlin, 1926).
Folk Songs for Women’s Voices, ed. Vernon Gotwals and Philip Keppler
(Smith College Music Archives, 15; Northampton, Mass., 1968).
—— Volksliedbearbeitungen für Frauenchor, ed. Siegmund Helms (The Nineteenth
Century, No. 19302; Kassel, 1970).
CORNELIUS, P.: Peter Cornelius: Musikalisches Werke, ed. Max Hasse (Leipzig,
1905-6; repr. 1971): 2 Merhstimmige Lieder und Gesänge, Duette, Mannerchor,
Gemischte Chore.
—— Weihnachtslieder und Trauer und Trost, ed. Gerhard von Westerman (Mu-
sikalische Stundenbücher; Munich, 192]).
—— Weinachtslieder (The Nineteenth Century, No. 19304; Kassel, 1970).
FRANZ, R.: Fifty Songs of Robert Franz, ed. William Apthorp (Boston, Mass.,
1900).
Liszt, F.: Franz Liszts Musikalische Werke, ed. Franz Liszt Stiftung (Leipzig, 1907-
36; repr. 1966): part 7 Einstimmige Lieder und Gesänge.
—— Liszt Society Publications (London, 1950- ): 6 Selected Songs (1975).
——— Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke|New Edition of the Complete Works (Kassel
and Budapest, 1970- ): 8 Lieder, Songs, Choral Works [with piano, 5 vols.], 9
Vocal Works with Orchestra [12 vols.] (forthcoming).
LOEWE, C.: Carl Loewes Werke: Gesamtausgabe der Balladen, Legenden, Lieder und
Gesänge, ed. Max Runze (Leipzig, 1894-1904; repr. 1970).
MAHLER, G.: Gustav Mahler: Sämtlicher Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed.
Internationale Gustav-Mahler-Gesellschaft (Vienna, 1960- ): 9 Das Lied von
der Erde (1964).
MENDELSSOHN, F.: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's Werke: Kritisch durchgesehene
Ausgabe, ed. Julius Rietz (Leipzig, 1874-7; repr. 1967-9): 19 Lieder und Gesänge
für eine Singstimme mit Begleitung des Pianoforte.
SCHUMANN, R.: Robert Schumann’s Werke, ed. Clara Schumann (Leipzig, 1881-93;
repr. 1967-8): series 13 Für eine Singstimme mit Begleitung des Pianoforte
(1882-95).
Frauen-Liebe und -Leben, Musikalischer Stundenbücher (Munich, 1921) [with
foreword by Walter Courvoisier].
SPOHR, L.: Selected Works by Louis Spohr (1784-1859), ed. Clive Brown (New
York, 1987- ): 8 The Complete Lieder Sets.
——— Sechs deutsche Lieder für eine Singstimme, Klarinette und Klavier, ed. Friedrich
Leinert (The Nineteenth Century, No. 19306; Kassel, 1971).
Strauss, R.: Richard Strauss: Lieder, Gesamtausgabe| Complete Editions, ed. Franz
BIBLIOGRAPHY 887
Trenner (London, 1964-5): 1-3 Lieder für eine Singstimme und Klavier (1964);
4 Lieder für eine Singstimme und Orchester (1965).
WAGNER, R.: Richard Wagners Werke: Musikdramen— Jugendopern— musikalische
Werke, ed. Michael Balling (Leipzig, 1912-29; repr. 1971): 15 Lieder und
Gesange.
— Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Mainz, 1970- ): 17
Klavierlieder, ed. Egon Voss (1976).
—— Zehn Lieder aus den Jahren 1838-1858, ed. Wolfgang Golther (Musikalische
Stundenbücher; Munich c.1920).
Wo tr, H.: Hugo Wolf: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Internationale Hugo Wolf-
Gesellschaft/Hans Jancik (Vienna, 1960- ): 1-9 [Lieder] (1963- ).
—— Hugo Wolf: Nachgelassene Werke, ed. Robert Haas and Helmut Schultz
(Leipzig and Vienna, 1936): 1 Lieder mit Klavierbegleitung; 2/1 Zwei Or-
chesterlieder aus dem Spanischen Liederbuch.
—— Hugo Wolf: Lieder aus des Jugendzeit, ed. F. Foll (Leipzig, 1903).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
BÜCKEN, ERNST: Das deutsche Lied: Probleme und Gestalten (Hamburg, 1939).
DALTON, Davip: ‘Goethe and the Composers of his Time’, Music Review, 34 (1973),
157-74.
GRASBERGER, FRANZ: Das Lied, Kostbarkeiten der Musik (Tutzing, 1968).
Ј01177А, W. K. von: Das Lied und seine Geschichte (Leipzig and Vienna, 1910).
KRAVITT, EDWARDS F.: “The Lied in 19th-century Concert Life’, Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 17 (1965), 207-18.
KRETZSCHMAR, HERMANN: ‘Das deutsche Lied seit dem Tode Richard Wagners’,
Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, 4 (Leipzig, 1897), 45-60.
—— Geschichte des neuen deutschen Liedes (Leipzig, 1911; repr. 1966).
Moser, Hans JOACHIM: Das deutsche Lied seit Mozart (Berlin and Zurich, 1937;
rev. 2nd edn., 1968).
MÜLLER, GÜNTHER: Geschichte des deutschen Liedes vom Zeitalter des Barocks bis
zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1925; repr. 1959).
PAMER, FRITZ EGON: 'Deutches Lied im 19. Jahrhundert', in Guido Adler (ed.),
Handbuch des Musikgeschichte (2nd edn., Berlin, 1930; repr. 1961), ii. 939-55.
RADCLIFFE, PHILIP: ‘Germany and Austria’, in Denis Stevens (ed.), A History of
Song (London, 1960; repr. 1971), 228-64.
RAUHE, HERMANN: ‘Zum volkstümlichen Lied des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Carl
Dahlhaus (ed.), Studien zur Trivialmusik des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg,
1967), 159-98.
RiEMANN, HuGo: Musik-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1882; 8th edn., 1916; 9th-11th edn., ed.
Alfred Einstein, 1919-29; 12th edn., ed. Wilibald Gurlitt, Carl Dahlhaus, and
Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 1959-67; Eng. trans., J. S. Shedlock, Dictionary of
Music (London, 1897; repr. 1972).
ROSENWALD, HANS HERMANN: Geschichte des deutschen Liedes zwischen Schubert
und Schumann (Berlin, 1930).
SEATON, DouGLas: The Art Song: A Research and Information Guide (New York,
1987).
SMEED J. W.: German Song and its Poetry, 1740-1900 (London 1987).
STEIN, JACK M.: Poem and Music in the German Lied from Gluck to Hugo Wolf
(Cambridge, Mass., 1971).
WIORA, WALTER: Das deutsche Lied: Zur Geschichte und Ästhetik einer muikalischen
Gattung (Wolfenbüttel and Zurich, 1971).
888 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(b) Individual Composers
Brahms Er
Fox STRANGWAYS, A. H.: ‘Brahms and Tieck’s *Magelone" ', Music and Letters,
21 (1940), 211-29.
FRIEDLAENDER, Max: Brahms’ Lieder: Einführung in seine Gesänge für I und 2
Stimmen (Berlin, 1922); Eng. trans., C. Leonard Leese, Brahms’s Lieder: An
Introduction to the Songs for One and Two Voices (London, 1928).
—— ‘Brahms’ Volkslieder’, Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, 9 (Leipzig, 1902),
67-88.
JACOBSEN, CHRISTIANE: Das Verhältnis von Sprache und Musik in ausgewählten
Liedern von Johannes Brahms (Hamburg, 1975).
May, FLORENCE: The Life of Johannes Brahms (London, 1905; rev. 2nd edn., 1948).
Mies, PAUL: Stilmomente und Ausdrucksstilformen im Brahmsschen Lied (Leipzig,
1923).
NIEMANN, WALTER: Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1920); Eng. trans., Catherine Alison
Phillips, Brahms (New York, 1920; repr. 1969).
OPHÜLS, GusTAv: Brahms-Texte: Vollständige Sammlung der von J. Brahms com-
ponirten und musikalisch bearbeiteten Dichtungen (Bonn, 1898; 2nd edn., 1908).
PASCALL, ROBERT (ed.): Brahms: Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies
(Cambridge, 1983).
Sams, Eric: Brahms Songs (London, 1972).
For further Brahms bibliography see § VIII
Cornelius
FEDERHOFER, HELLMUT, and Ont. KURT (eds.): Peter Cornelius als Komponist,
Dichter, Kritiker und Essayist (Rebensburg, 1977).
WAGNER, GUNTHER: Peter Cornelius: Verzeichnis musikalischen und literarische
Werken (Tutzing, 1986).
Franz
BooNIN, ЈОЅЕРН M.: An Index to the Solo Songs of Robert Franz (Hackensack, NJ,
1970).
BRENDEL, FRANZ: Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 47 (1857).
LiszT, FRANZ: Robert Franz (Leipzig, 1872).
PORTER, ERNEST G.: ‘Robert Franz on Song’, Music Review, 26 (1965), 15-18.
— ‘The Songs of Robert Franz’, Musical Times, 104 (1963), 477 9.
WALDMANN, WILHELM (ed.): Robert Franz: Gespräche aus zehn Jahren (Leipzig,
1895).
Jensen
BASER, F.: ‘Der Nachlass des Liedmeister A. Jensen’, Musica, 7 (1953), 581-2.
NiGGLI, ARNOLD: Adolf Jensen (Zurich, 1895).
Liszt
Cooper, MARTIN: ‘Liszt as a Song Writer’, Music and Letters, 19 (1938), 171-81.
HEADINGTON, CHRISTOPHER: “The Songs’, in Alan Walker (ed.), Franz Liszt: The
Man and his Music (London, 1970; 2nd edn., 1976), 221-47.
KITTEL, CARL: “Über das “Gesangliche” in Franz Liszts Vokal-Kompositionen’,
Die Musik (October 1936).
RAABE, PETER: Franz Liszt: Leben und Schaffen (Stuttgart, 1931; rev. 2nd edn.,
1968).
Reuss, E.: Liszts Lieder (Leipzig, 1906; also pub. in Bayreuther Blätter, nos. 7-12,
1906).
For further Liszt bibliography see $ VII
BIBLIOGRAPHY 889
Loewe
BROWN, MAURICE J. E.: “Сагі Loewe, 1796-1869, Musical Times, 110 (1969),
357-9.
ELSON, JAMES: ‘Carl Loewe and the Nineteenth Century German Ballad’, National
Association of Teachers of Singing Bulletin, 28 (1971), 16-19.
ENGEL, Hans: Karl Loewe: Überblick und Würdigung seines Schaffens (Greifswald,
1934).
KLEEMAN, Hans: Beiträge zur Ästhetik und Geschichte der Loeweschen Ballade
(Halle, 1913).
Schumann
COOPER, MARTIN: “The Songs’, in Gerald Abraham (ed.), Schumann: A Symposium
(London, 1952), pp. 98-137.
DuvaL, RAYMOND: ' “L’Amour du poète”? de Schumann-Heine', Rivista musicale
italiana, 8 (1901), 656-73.
FELBER, RUDOLF: 'Schumann's Place in German Song’, Musical Quarterly, 26 (1940),
340-54.
FELDMANN, FRITZ: ‘Zur Frage des “Liederjahres” bei Robert Schumann’, Archiv
für Musikwissenschaft, 9 (1952), 246-69.
HALLMARK, RUFUS E.: The Genesis of Schumann’s ‘Dichterliebe: A Source Study
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1979).
LITZMANN, BERTHOLD: Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben, i (Leipzig, 1902; 8th
edn., 1925, repr. 1971); ii (Leipzig, 1905; 7th edn., 1925, repr. 1971); iii (Leipzig,
1908; 6th edn., 1923, repr. 1971); Eng. trans., Grace E. Hadow, Clara Schumann:
An Artist's Life Based on Material Found in Diaries and Letters (London, 1913;
repr. 1979).
Sams, Eric: ‘Did Schumann use Ciphers?', Musical Times, 106 (1965), 584-91, 767-
70, 949, and 107 (1966), 392-400, 1050-1.
—— The Songs of Robert Schumann (London, 1969; rev. 2nd edn., 1975).
SCHUH, WILLI: Goethe-Vertonungen: Ein Verzeichnis (Zurich, 1952; enlarged 2nd
edn. in Ernst Beutler (ed.), Goethe: Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und
Gespräche (1953), ii. 665-760).
SCHUMANN, ROBERT: Jugendbriefe von Robert Schumann, ed. Clara Schumann
(Leipzig, 1885; 4th edn., 1910); Eng. trans., May Herbert, Early Letters
(London, 1888).
—— Robert Schumanns Briefe: Neue Folge, ed. F. Gustav Jensen (Leipzig, 1886;
2nd edn., 1904); Eng. trans., May Herbert, The Life of Robert Schumann Told
in his Letters (London, 1890).
WÖRNER, KARL H.: Robert Schumann (Zurich, 1949).
For further Schumann bibliography see $ I, $ II, and $ IV
Strauss
DEL Mar, NorMan: Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works
(London, 1962-72; rev. repr. 1978, repr. 1986), iii. 246-404.
JEFFERSON, ALAN: The Lieder of Richard Strauss (London, 1971).
PETERSON, BARBARA A.: Ton und Wort: The Lieder of Richard Strauss (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1980).
For further Strauss bibliography see $ VII
Wagner
NEWMAN, ERNEST: Wagner as Man and Artist (London, 1914; rev. 2nd edn., 1924,
repr. 1969).
For further Wagner bibliography see $ V
Wolf
Bieri, GEORG: Die Lieder von Hugo Wolf (Berne, 1935).
890 BIBLIOGRAPHY
CARNER, Mosco: Hugo Wolf Songs (London, 1982).
Cooke, DERYCK, et al.: The New Grove Late Romantic Masters (London, 1985)
[includes Wolf].
EGGER, RITA: Die Deklamationsrhythmik Hugo Wolfs in historischer Sicht (Vienna,
1963).
LEGGE, WALTER: ‘Hugo Wolf’s Afterthoughts on his Mörike Lieder’, Music Review,
2 (1941), 211-14.
MACKWORTH-YOUNG, G.: ‘Goethe’s "Prometheus" and^“its Settings by Schubert
and Wolf', Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 78 (1951-2), 53-65.
MARE, MARGARET: Eduard Mörike: The Man and the Poet (London, 1957).
NEWMAN, ERNEST: Hugo Wolf (London, 1907; repr. 1966).
PLEASANTS, HENRY (ed. and trans.): The Music Criticism of Hugo Wolf (New York,
1978) [articles for Wiener Salonblatt, 1884-7].
SAMS, ERIC: The Songs of Hugo Wolf (London, 1961; 2nd edn., 1983).
STEIN, JACK M.: ‘Poem and Music in Hugo Wolf's Mörike Songs’, Musical Quarterly,
53 (1967), 22-38.
TAUSCHE, ANTON: Hugo Wolfs Mörike-Lieder in Dichtung, Musik, Vortrag (Vienna,
1947).
WALKER, FRANK: Hugo Walker: A Biography (London, 1951; 2nd edn., 1968).
Gesammelte Aufsatze über Hugo Wolf (Berlin, 1898-1900).
(b) FRANCE
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
Noske, Frits: Das ausserdeutsche Sololied 1500-1900 (Das Musikwerk, 16; Cologne,
1958); Eng. trans., The Solo Song outside German-speaking Countries (Anthology
of Music, 16; Cologne, 1958) [includes works by David, Debussy, Faure,
Gounod, and Saint-Saéns].
TUNLEY, Davip: Le Bel Age: 10 Romantic French Songs (London, 1985) [includes
songs by Berlioz, Reyer, Reber, Masse, Lalo, Saint-Sáens, Gounod, Massenet,
Bizet, de Castillon].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
BERLIOZ, H.: New Edition of the Complete Works, ed. Hugh Macdonald et al.
(Kassel, 1967- ); 13 Songs for Solo Voice and Orchestra, ed. Ian Kemp (1975);
15 Songs for One, Two, or Three Voices and Piano, ed. Ilan Kemp (forthcoming).
—— Hector Berlioz: Werke, ed. Charles Malherbe and Felix Malherbe (Leipzig,
1900-10; repr. 1971): series 6 Gesänge mit Orchesterbegleitung: 15 Für eine oder
zwei Singstimmen; series 7 Gesänge mit Klavier: 17 Für eine Singstimme.
—— Ausgewählte Lieder, ed. Karl Blessinger (Musikalische Stundenbücher; Munich,
1920).
Desussy, C.: Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy (Paris, 1985): series 2 Songs
(forthcoming).
Duparc, H.: Cinq mélodies (Paris, 1869) [Op. 2].
—— Recueil de mélodies (Paris, 1894).
— Nouvelle édition complete (Paris, 1911).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 891
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
BERNAC, PIERRE: The Interpretation of French Song (London, 1970).
Cooper, MARTIN: French Music from the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré
(London, 1951; repr. 1984).
Cox, Davin: ‘France’, in Denis Stevens (ed.), A History of Song (London, 1960;
repr. 1971), 194-227.
HALL, J.: The Art Song (Norman, Okla, 1953).
LOCKSPEISER, EDWARD: “The French Songs in the 19th Century’, Musical Quarterly,
26 (1940), 192-9.
MEISTER, BARBARA: Nineteeth-century French Song: Faure, Chausson, Duparc and
Debussy (Bloomington, Indiana, 1980).
Мо$кЕ, FRITS: La Melodie frangaise de Berlioz à Duparc: Essai de critique historique
(Paris and Amsterdam, 1954); Eng. trans., rev., Rita Benton, French Song from
Berlioz to Duparc: The Origin and Development of the Mélodie (New York,
1970).
REUTER, EvELYN: La Mélodie et le Lied (Paris, 1950).
(b) Individual Composers
Berlioz
DICKINSON, А. E. F.: ‘Berlioz’s Songs’, Musical Quarterly, 55 (1969), 329-43.
WARRACK, JOHN: ‘Berlioz’s Mélodies', Musical Times, 105 (1969), 252-4.
For further Berlioz bibliography see § I
Bizet
DEAN, WINTON: Georges Bizet: His Life and Work (London, 1948; enlarged 3rd
edn., 1975).
For further Bizet bibliography see § VI (b)
Debussy
HARDECK, ERWIN: Untersuchungen zu den Klavierliedern Claude Debussys (Re-
gensburg, 1967).
Duparc
MORTHCOTE, S.: The Songs of Henri Duparc (London, 1949).
Faure
LOCKSPEISER, EDWARD: ‘Fauré and the Song’, Monthly Musical Record, 75 (1945),
79-84.
ORREY, LESLIE: “The Songs of Gabriel Faure’, Music Review, 6 (1945), 72-84.
Massenet
D'uniNE, J.: L’Art du Lied et les mélodies de Massenet (Paris, 1931).
(c) RUSSIA
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
Albums of Russian Songs for Soprano (London, 1917-21) [includes songs by Borodin,
Cui, Dargomizhsky, Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others].
Albums of Russian Songs for Bass or Baritone (London, 1917-21) [includes songs
by Balakirev, Tchaikovsky, and others].
892 BIBLIOGRAPHY
ZHAROV, V. (ed.): Romansi russkikh kompozitorov (Moscow, 1979) [includes songs by
Borodin, Cui, Dargomizhsky, Glinka, Gurilyov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rubinstein,
Tchaikovsky, Varlamov, and others].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
BALAKIREV, M.: Romansi i pesni ed. R. Rustamov (Moscow, 1968-79).
——— Russkie narodnie pesni, ed. Evgeny Vladimirovich Gippius (Moscow, 1957).
BORODIN, A.: Romansi i pesni, ed. Pavel Aleksandrovich Lamm (Moscow, 1967;
new edn.. ed. M. Gorodetskaya, Moscow, 1985).
DARGOMIZHSKY, A. S.: Polnoe sobranie romansov i pesen, ed. Mikhail Samoylo-
vich Pekelis (Moscow and Leningrad, 1947; rev. edn., ed. E. Stempneveskaya,
1970-1).
GLINKA, M. I: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin
and others (Moscow, 1955-69): 10 [songs for voice and piano]; 11 [vocalises].
MussorGsky, M. P.: Modest Petrovich Musorgskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy,
ed. Pavel Aleksandrovich Lamm and Boris Vladimirovich Asafev (Moscow,
1928-34; repr. 1969); 9-15 [songs]: 20 [folk-songs].
-Izbrannie romansi i pesni, ed. R. N. Kotlyarevsky and С. V. Krasnov
(Leningrad, 1979) [includes most of the songs].
— song cycles Nursery. Without Sun, Songs and Dances of Death (New York,
1951) [Russian;/ English versions].
Rimsky-Korsakov, N.: Nikolay Rimskiy-Korsakov: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed.
Andrey Nikolaevich Rimsky-Korsakov er al. (Moscow, 1946 70): 45 [complete
collection of songs, voice and piano]: 47 [Russian folk-songs, voice and piano].
RUBINSTEIN, A.: /zbrannie romansi, ed. R. Rustamov (Moscow, 1979).
TCHAIKOVSKY, P. I.: Pyotr Iich Chaykovskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy (Moscow
and Leningrad. 1940-71): 44-55 [Songs]: 27 [vocal works with orchestra]; 66
[Russian folk-songs, voice and piano].
VERSTOVSKY, A.: Izbrannie romansi i pesni, ed. M. Gorodetskaya (Moscow, 1980).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘Russia’, in Denis Stevens (ed.), A History of Song (London,
1960; repr. 1971), 338-75; repr. as ‘Russian Song’ in Essays on Russian and
East European Music (Oxford, 1985), 1-39.
SEAMAN, GERALD R.: History of Russian Music from its Origins to Dargomyzhsky,
i (Oxford, 1967).
TARUSKIN, RicHARD: Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the
1860s (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981).
VASINA-GROSSMAN, VERA ANDREEVNA: Russkiy klassicheskiy romans XIX veka
(Moscow, 1956).
(b) Individual Composers
Balakirev
GARDEN, EDWARD: 'Songs', in Balakirev: A Critical Study of his Life and Music
(London, 1967), 270-90.
VIKHANSKAYA, ANNA: *Romansi i pesni’, in Yuly Anatol'evich Kremlyov and others
(ed.), Miliy Alekseevich Balakirev: Issledovaniya i stať i (Leningrad, 1961), 271-
340.
Borodin
ABRAHAM, GERALD: 'Borodin's Songs’, in On Russian Music (London, 1939), 169-
78.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 893
DIANIN, SERGEY A.: Borodin: Zhizneopisanie, materiali i dokumenti (Moscow, 1955;
rev. 2nd edn., 1960); Eng. trans., Robert Lord, Borodin (London, 1963).
For further Borodin bibliography see $ VI (d)
Dargomizhsky
DARGOMIZHSKY, ALEKSANDR: Aleksandr Sergeevich Dargomizhskiy (1813-1869):
Avtobiografiya, pis ma, vospominaniya sovremennikov, ed. Nikolay Fyodorovich
Findeisen (Peterburg, 1921).
PEKELIS, MiKHAIL SAMOYLOVICH: A. S. Dargomizhskiy i ego okruzhenie (Moscow,
1966-83).
SEROV, ALEKSANDR NIKOLAEVICH: A. N. Serov: Izbrannie stat'i, ed. Georgy N.
Khubov (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950-7).
Glinka
BROWN, Davip: Mikhail Glinka: A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1974).
For further Glinka bibliography see $ VI (d)
Mussorgsky
BASMAJIAN, NANCY: ‘The Romances’, in Malcolm Hamrick Brown (ed.), Musorgsky
in Memoriam, 1881-1981 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982), 29-56.
CALVOCORESSI, M. D.: Modest Mussorgsky: His Life and Works (London, 1956;
repr. 1967).
and ABRAHAM, GERALD: Mussorgsky (London, 1946; rev. edn., 1974).
DURANDINA, E. E.: Vokal’noe tvorchestvo Musorgskogo (Moscow, 1985).
GORDEEVA, E. (ed.): M. P. Musorgskiy: Pis'ma (Moscow, 1981).
Hoops, RICHARD: *Musorgsky and the Populist Age’, in Malcolm Hamrick Brown
(ed.), Musorgsky in Memoriam, 1881-1981 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982), 271-306.
TARUSKIN, RICHARD: ‘ “Little Star”: An Etude in the Folk Style’, in Malcolm
Hamrick Brown (ed.), Musorgsky in Memoriam, 1881-1981 (Ann Arbor, Mich.,
1982), 57-84.
WALKER, JAMES: ‘Musorgsky’s “Sunless” Cycle in Russian Criticism: Focus of
Controversy’, Musical Quarterly, 67 (1981), 382-91.
For further Mussorgsky bibliography see § VI (d)
Rimsky-Korsakov
ABRAHAM, GERALD: “Rimsky-Korsakov’s Songs’, in Slavonic and Romantic Music
(London, 1968), 202-11.
Rimsky-Korsakov, NIKOLAY ANDREEVICH: Letopis moey muzikalnoy zhizni
(St Petersburg, 1909; enlarged 3rd edn., 1926); ed. Andrey Nikolaevich
Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksandr Vyacheslavovich Ossovsky, in Polnoe sobranie
sochineniy, 1 (1955); Eng. trans., Judah A. Joffe, My Musical Life (New York,
1942, repr. 1974).
For further Rimsky-Korsakov bibliography see § VI (d) and § VII
Rubinstein
BARENBOYM, LEV ARONOVICH: Anton Grigor’evich Rubinshteyn (Leningrad, 1957-
62).
Tchaikovsky
ALSHVANG, A.: ‘The Songs’, in Gerald Abraham (ed.), Tchaikovsky: A Symposium
(London, 1945; repr. 1979), 197-229.
ORLOVA E.: Romansi Chaykovskogo (Moscow and Leningrad, 1948).
For further Tchaikovsky bibliography see § VI (d) and § VIII
894 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(d) POLAND
(i) Modern Editions
Works by Individual Composers
CHoPIN, F. F.: Friedrich Chopin’s Werke, ed. Woldemar Bargiel, Johannes Brahms,
August Franchomme, Franz Liszt, Carl Reinecke, and Ernst Rudorff (Leipzig,
1878-1902): 14 Lieder für eine Singstimme.
— Fryderyk Chopin: Dziela wszystkie/Complete Works, ed. Ignacy Jan Paderew-
ski, with Jozef Turczynski and Ludwik Bronarski (Warsaw and Krakow, 1949-
61): 17 Songs for Solo Voice with Piano Accompaniment (1959).
GaLL, J.: Pieśni wybrane (Krakow, 1957): Zeszyt 1, ed. Stanislaw Lachowicz
(Kraków, 1957).
KARLOWICZ, M.: Piesni zebrane, ed. Jerzy Mlodziejowski (Krakow, 1953).
MONIUSZKO, S.: Stanislaw Moniuszko: Dziela/Werke, ed. Witold Rudzinski
(Krakow, 1965): series A Lieder (1965-70).
PADEREWSKI, I. J.: Sześć pieśni do slow Adama Mickiewicza, op. 18 (Krakow).
— Vier Lieder, Op. 7, No. 1 (Berlin, 1888).
PANKIEWICZ, E.: Pieśni wybrane, ed. Włodzimierz Pozniak (Krakow, 1957).
ZELENSKI, W.: Piesni wybrane (Krakow, 1958): Zeszyt 1 (1958).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘Poland’, in Denis Stevens (ed.), A History of Song (London,
1960; repr. 1971), 323-37.
BARBAG, SEWERYN: ‘Polska piesn artystyczna', in Mateusz Glinski (ed.), Muzyka
polska (Warsaw, 1927), 91-107.
DZIEBOWSKA, ELŻBIETA: ‘О polskiej szkole narodowej', Szkice o kulturze muzycznej
XIX wieku, ed. Zofia Chechlinska (Warsaw, 1971), 20-6.
GABRYŚ, JERZY, and CYBULSKA, JANINA: Z dziejów polskiej pieśni solowej (Kraków,
1960).
JACHIMECKI, ZDZISLAW: ‘Muzyka polska od roku 1796 do roku 1930’, Polska, Jej
dzieje i kultura od czasów najdawniejszych do chwili obecnej, ed. Stanisław Lam,
3 (Warsaw, 1937).
MATRACKA-KOSCIELNA, ALICJA: “Tworzcos¢ piesniarska warszawskiego środowiska
kompozytorskiego w drugiej połowie XIX wieku’, Kultura muzyczna Warszawy
drugiej polowy ХІХ wieku, cd. Andrzej Spöz (Warsaw, 1980), 202-16.
SIMON, ALICJA: The Polish Songwriters (Warsaw, 1936).
(b) Individial Composers
Chopin
BARBAG, SEWERYN: Studium o pieśniach Chopina (Lwów, 1927).
JACOBSON, BERNARD: ‘The Songs’, in Alan Walker (ed.), Frederic Chopin: Profiles
of the Man and the Musician (London, 1966), 187-211.
PRISILAUER, RICHARD: ‘Frédéric Chopins “Polnische Lieder" ’, Chopin-Jahrbuch, ii
(1963), 117-32.
STOOKES, SACHA: ‘Chopin, the Song-writer, Monthly Musical Record, 53 (1950),
96-9.
For further Chopin bibliography see $ IV
Kartowicz
ANDERS, HENRYK (ed.): Karlowicz w listach i wspomnieniach (Krakow, 1960).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 895
—— ‘Pieśni solowe Mieczysława Karłowicza’, Studia muzykologiczne, 4 (1955), 292-
415.
CHMARA-ZACZKIEWICZ, BARBARA, SPÓZ, ANDRZEJ, and MICHAŁOWSKI, KORNEL:
Mieczyslaw Karlowicz: katalog tematyczny dzieł i bibliografia (Kraków, 1986).
CHYBINSKI, ADOLF: Mieczyslaw Karlowiez: Kronika życia artysty i taternika (Kraków,
1949).
DZIEBOWSKA, ELŻBIETA (ed.): Z życia i twórczości Mieczyslawa Karlowicza (Kraków,
1970).
KECKI, FELIKS: Mieczysław Karlowicz: Szkic monograficzny (Warsaw, 1934).
Рогомү, LESZEK: Poetyka muzyczna Mieczysława Karlowicza: program literacki,
ekspresja i symbol w poemacie symfonicznym (Kraków, 1986).
Moniuszko
JACHIMECKI, ZDZISLAW: Moniuszko (Kraków, 1921; 2nd edn., 1983).
Mazur, KRZYSZTOF: Pierwodruki Stanisława Moniuszki (Warsaw, 1970).
NOWACZYK, ERWIN: Pieśni solowe S. Moniuszki (Kraków, 1954).
RUDZINSKI, WITOLD: Moniuszko (Krakow, 1971).
— Stanislaw Moniuszko: studia i materiały (Krakow, 1955-61).
—— and Prosnak, JAN: Almanach moniuszkowski (Krakow, 1952).
—— and STOKOWSKA, MAGDALENA: Stanislaw Moniuszko: listy zebrane (Krakow,
1969).
Noskowski
SUTKOWSKI, ADAM: Zygmunt Noskowski (Krakow, 1957).
Pankiewicz
POZNIAK, WLODIMIERZ: Eugeniusz Pankiewicz (Krakow, 1958).
Szymanowska
IwANEJKO, MARIA: Maria Szymanowska (Krakow, 1959).
MIRSKI, JÓZEF: ‘Zapomniana artystka polska: № setną rocznicę śmierci Marji
Szymanowskiej’, Muzyka, 11-12 (1931), pp.
SYGA, TEOFIL, and SZENIC, STANISLAW: Maria Szymanowska i jej czasy (Warsaw,
1960).
Zelenski |
JACHIMECKI, ZDZISLAW: Wladyslaw Zlelenski: Zycie i twórczość (Krakow, 1952).
(е) CZECHOSLOVAKIA
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
POHANKA, JAROSLAV: Dějiny české hudby v prikladech (Prague, 1958).
(b) Works by Individual Composers
DvoRAk, A.: Antonin Dvorak: Souborné vydáni, ed. Otakar Šourek et al. (Prague,
1955- ) [Czech, German, English, French]: 6 Vocal Music.
FiBICH, Z.: Studijni vydáni del Zdeňka Fibicha, ed. L. Boháček et al. (Prague, 1950
... 67): Zpěv a klavir.
SKROUP, F: Vénec, ed. Josef Plavec (Prague, 1960).
SMETANA, B.: Studijni vydáni del Bedřicha Smetany, ed. Frantisek Bartoš, Josef
Plavec, et al. (Prague, 1940- ):
Pisne, ed. Josef Plavec (Prague, 1962).
896 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General э =
ABRAHAM, GERALD: ‘Czechoslovakia’ in Denis Stevens (ed.), A History of Song
(London, 1960; repr. 1971), 181-93.
(b) Individual Composers
Bendl
PoLAK, ЈОЅЕЕ: Karel Bendl (Prague, 1938).
Dvorak
CLAPHAM, JOHN: Antonin Dvorak: Musician and Craftsman (London, 1966).
— Dvorák (Newton Abbot, 1979).
ROBERTSON, ALEC: ‘Dvorak’s Songs’, Music and Letters, 24 (1943); repr. in
Robertson, Dvořák (London, 1945; 2nd edn., 1964).
SOUREK, OTAKAR: Dvořákova čitanka: články а skladby (Prague, 1929) [includes
l0th Cypresses song].
—— Život а dilo Antonina Dvořáka (Prague, 1916-33; 2nd edn., 1955-8).
For further Dvořák bibliography see § VIII
Fibich
DorEZiL, HUBERT (ed.): Fibichova čítanka: články a skladby (Prague, 1930) [includes
3 songs from 1871-2].
HUDEC, VLADIMÍR: Zdeněk Fibich (Prague, 1971).
JIRÁNEK, JAROSLAV: ‘Die Beziehung von Musik und Wort im Schaffen Zdeněk
Fibichs’, Music and Word IV, 1969, ed. Rudolf Peéman (Brno, 1973), 159-70.
— — Zdenék Fibich (Prague, 1971).
PLAVEC, ЈОЅЕЕ: Zdeněk Fibich: Mistr české balady (Prague, 1940).
REKTORYS, ARTUŠ (ed.): Zdeněk Fibich: Sbornik dokumentů a studii o jeho životě a
dile (Prague, 1951-2).
TOMASEK, J.: ‘Písňová tvorba Zd. Fibicha’, Hudebni rozhledy, 2/3-4 (1925-6).
Škroup
Pravec, Joser: František Škroup (Prague, 1941).
NEJEDLÝ, ZDENĚK: Bedřich Smetana (Prague, 1924-33; 2nd edn., 1950-4) [includes
list of contents of Věnec].
Smetana
BALTHASAR, VLADIMIR: Bedřich Smetana (Prague, 1924).
BARTOS, FRANTISEK: Smetana ve vzpominkach a dopisech (Prague, 1954).
CLAPHAM, JOHN: Smetana (London, 1972).
HOLZKNECHT, VACLAV: Bedřich Smetana: Zivot a dilo (Prague, 1979).
JIRÁNEK, JosEr: Vzpominky a korespondence s Bedřichem Smetanou (Prague, 1957).
LARGE, BRIAN: Smetana (London, 1970).
MaLY, Miroslav: Jabkenicka léta Bedřicha Smetany (Prague, 1968).
NEJEDLÝ, ZDENEK: Smetanova čítanka: články a skladby (Prague, 1924) [Includes
Evening Songs nos. 1 and 2].
RYCHNOVSKY, ERNST: Smetana (Stuttgart, 1924).
SMOLKA, JAROSLAV: Smetanova vokälni tvorba: Pisné, sbory, Kantata (Prague, 1980).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 897
(f) SCANDINAVIA
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Works by Individual Composers
BERWALD, F.: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Berwald Kommittén (Monumenta musicae
svecicae, 2nd series; Kassel, 1966-82): 17-24 Vokalwerke.
GRIEG, Е. Edvard Grieg: | Gesamtausgabe| Complete Works, ed. Edvard-
Grieg-Komitee (Frankfurt, 1977- ): II Vokalmusik: 14-15 Lieder mit Kla-
vierbegleitung, 16 Vokalwerke mit Orchesterbegleitung.
LANGE-MÜLLER, P. E.: Sange (Copenhagen, 1911-12).
NORDRAAK, R.: Samlede verker (Oslo, n.d.).
SINDING, C.: 50 sanger, ed. Oystein Gaukstad and David Monrad Johansen (Oslo,
1978).
SÖDERMAN, J. A.: Songs, ed. Axel Helmer (Monumenta musica svecicae;
forthcoming).
WEYSE, C. E. F.: Romancer og Sange (Copenhagen, 1852 and 1860).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
BRUUN, K. A.: Dansk musiks historie (Copenhagen, 1969).
GRINDE, №15: Norsk musikkhistorie (Oslo, 1971; 3rd edn., 1981).
HELMER, AXEL: Svensk solosäng 1850-1890 (Stockholm, 1972).
HORTON, JOHN: Scandinavian Music: A Short History (London, 1963; repr. 1975).
JENSEN, NIELS MARTIN: Den danske romance 1800-1850 og dens musikalske
forudsetninger (Copenhagen, 1964).
LANGE, KRISTIAN, and Ostvedt, Arne: Norwegian Music (London, 1958).
MAASOLA, K.: Suomalaisia sávellyksia (Porvoo, 1964-9).
MAKINEN, TIMO, and Nummi, SEPPO: Musica fennica (Helsinki, 1965) [in English].
MOBERG, CARL-ALLAN: ‘Fran kämpevisa till locklát', Svensk tidskrift för mu-
sikforskning, 33 (1951), 5-52.
RADCLIFFE, PHILIP: ‘Scandinavia and Finland’, in Denis Stevens (ed.) A History of
Song (London, 1960; repr. 1971), 376-81.
SCHIORRING, NILs: Musikkens Historie i Danmark (Copenhagen, 1977-8).
(b) Individual Composers
Berwald
LoMnÄS, ERLING (ed.): Franz Berwald: Die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel, 1979).
Grieg
DESMOND, AsTRA: “The Songs’, in Gerald Abraham (ed.), Grieg: A Symposium
(London, 1948), 17-92.
HORTON, JOHN: Grieg (London, 1974).
MURADOVA, E.: Romansi i pesni Edvarda Griga (Baku, 1962).
SCHJELDERUP-EBBE, Dac: Edvard Grieg 1858-1867, with Special Reference to the
Evolution of his Harmonic Style (Oslo and London, 1964).
Heise
BEHREND, WILLIAM: ‘Peter Heise; ein dänischer Liederkomponist’, in Riemann-
Festschrift (Leipzig, 1909), 496-503.
Lindblad
NYBLOM, CARL RUPERT: Adolf Fredrik Lindblad (Stockholm, 1881).
898 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Weyse
FoG, Dan: Kompositionen von C. E. F. Weyse (Copenhagen, 1979).
LARSEN, JENS PETER: Weyses sang: deres betydning for sangen i hjem, skole og kirke
(Copenhagen, 1942).
(g) BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
BOUCHELLE, JOAN Hotness: With Tennyson at the Keyboard: A Victorian Songbook
(New York. 1985) [includes songs by Parry, Pease, Somervell, Stanford, and
Sullivan].
BUSH. GEOFFREY, and TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS: English Songs 1800-1860 (Musica
Britannica, 43; London, 1979) [includes works by Balfe, Barnett, Sterndale
Bennett, Hatton, Loder, Macfarren, Pierson, and S. S. Wesley].
MARROCCO, WILLIAM THOMAS: Music in America: An Anthology from the Landing
of the Pilgrims to the Close of the Civil War (New York, 1964): chap. 10
*Romantic Ballads and Nationalist Composers' [includes music by Bristow].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
BENNETT, W. S.: Twelve Songs with English and German Words Op. 23 and Op. 35,
ed. Arthur O'Leary (London [1877].).
CHADWICK, С. W.: Songs to Poems by Arlo Bates [with introduction by Steven
Ledbetter] (Earlier American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock, 16; New York,
1980).
FosrER, S. C.: Stephen Foster Song Book: Original Sheet Music of 40 Songs,
compiled by Richard Jackson (New York, 1974).
MACDOWELL, E.: Songs (Earlier American Music, ed. Н. Wiley Hitchcock, 7; New
York, 1972).
PARRY, H.: Hubert Parry: Songs, ed. Geoffrey Bush (Musica Britannica, 49; London,
1982).
PiERSON, H. H.: H. Hugo Pierson Album (Leipzig, c.1875).
STANFORD, C. V.: C. V. Stanford: Songs (Musica Britannica, in preparation).
(ii) Books and Articles
(a) General
BANFIELD, STEPHEN: Sensibility and English Song (Cambridge, 1985).
BUSH, GEOFFREY: ‘Songs’, in Nicholas Temperley (ed.), Music in Britain: The
Romantic Age 1800-1914 (London, 1981), 266-87.
CARMAN, J. E., GAEDDERT, W. K., and Resch, R. M.: Art Song in the United States
1801-1976: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1976; supplement, 1978).
CHASE, GILBERT: America's Music from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York,
1955; rev. 2nd edn., 1966).
Нітснсоск, Н. Wiley: Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969; rev. 2nd edn., 1974).
HOWARD, JOHN TASKER: Our American Music: Three Hundred Years of It (New
York, 1931; 3rd edn., 1946, repr. 1954 with supplement by J. Lyons).
NATHAN, Hans: “United States of America’, in Denis Stevens (ed.) A History of
Song (London, 1960; repr. 1971), 408-60.
SiMPSON, HAROLD: A Century of Ballads 1810-1910: Their Composers and Singers
(London, 1910).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 899
‘Sketch of Music in London’, Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 5 (1823),
241-75.
UPTON, WILLIAM T.: Art-song in America: A Study in the Development of American
Music (Boston, Mass., and New York, 1930; supplement 1938; all repr. 1969).
WALKER, ERNEST: A History of Music in England (4th edn.), rev. J. A. Westrup
(Oxford, 1952).
(b) Individual Composers
Balfe
BARRETT, WILLIAM ALEXANDER: Balfe: His Life and Works (London, 1882).
Barnett
CHORLEY, HENRY F.: Review of John Barnett, Lyric Illustrations of the Modern
Poets, Athenaeum (1834), 753 ff
Bennett
STERNDALE BENNETT, JAMES ROBERT: The Life of William Sterndale Bennett
(Cambridge, 1907).
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS: ‘Sterndale Bennett and the Lied’, Musical Times, 106 (1975),
958-61, 1060-3.
Chadwick
ENGEL, CARL: George W. Chadwick’, Musical Quarterly, 10 (1924), 438-57.
Macdowell
SUMMERVILLE, SUZANNE: “The Songs of Edward Macdowell', NAB Bulletin, 35/4
(March/April 1979), 36-40.
Macfarren
BANISTER, HENRY CHARLES: George Alexander Macfarren: His Life, Works and
Influence (London, 1891).
Parry
CoLLEs, Н. C.: ‘Parry, as Song-writer’, Musical Times, 62 (1921), 82-7, 155-8,
235-8; repr. in Essays and Lectures (London, 1945), 55-75.
FULLER MAITLAND, J. A.: The Music of Parry and Stanford (Cambridge, 1934).
HOWELLS, HERBERT: “Hubert Parry’, Music and Letters, 50 (1969), 223-9.
Pierson
POLLIN, ALICE and BURTON: ‘In Pursuit of Pearson's Shelley Songs’, Music and
Letters, 46 (1965), 322-31.
SCHUMANN, ROBERT: Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin
Kreisig (Leipzig, 1854; 4th ейп. 1891, repr. 1968; 5th ейп. 1914); Eng. trans.,
Fanny Raymond Ritter, Music and Musicians: Essays and Criticisms (London,
1877-80); new selected Eng. trans., ed. Konrad Wolff, trans. Paul Rosenfeld,
On Music and Musicians (New York, 1947; repr. 1982).
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS: ‘Henry Hugo Pierson, 1815-73’, Musical Times, 104 (1973),
1217-20 and 105 (1974), 31-4.
Somervell
BANFIELD, STEPHEN: “The Immortality Odes of Finzi and Somervell’, Musical Times,
116 (1975), 527-31.
HUGHES, LINDA: ‘From Parlor to Concert Hall: Arthur Somervell’s Song-cycle on
Tennyson’s Maud, Victorian Studies, 30 (1986-7), 113-29; repr. in Nicholas
Temperley (ed.), The Lost Chord: Studies in Victorian Music (Bloomington,
Ind., 1989).
900 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stanford
FULLER MAITLAND, J. A.: The Music of Parry and Stanford (Cambridge, 1934).
GREENE, HARRY PLUNKET: ‘Stanford’s Songs’, Music and Letters, 2 (1921), 94-106.
Sullivan
JACOBS, ARTHUR: Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician (Oxford, 1984).
CHAPTER X `
CHORAL MUSIC
(i) Modern Editions
(a) Anthologies
KNIGHT, GERALD H., and REED, WILLIAM LEONARD: The Treasury of English Church
Music 1760-1900, iv (London, 1965) [includes anthems by Bennett, Stanford,
Sullivan, and Wesley].
(b) Works by Individual Composers
BENNETT, W. S.: Anthems (London, c.1885).
BERLIOZ, H.: New Berlioz Edition of the Complete Works, ed. Hugh Macdonald er
al. (Kassel, 1967- ): 8 La Damnation de Faust, ed. Julian Rushton (1979); 9
Grande Messe des Morts, ed. Jürgen Kindermann (1978); 10 Te Deum, ed.
Denis McCaldin (1973); 19 Grande Symphonie funebre et triomphale, ed. Hugh
Macdonald (1967); 7 Lélio, ed. David Cairns; 11 L’ Enfance du Christ; 12 Works
for Chorus and Orchestra, A. ed. Julian Rushton, B. ed. David Charlton; 14
Choruses Unaccompanied or with Piano, 18 Roméo et Juliette, ed. D. Kern
Holoman (1988).
— Hector Berlioz: Werke, ed. Charles Malherbe and Felix Weingartner (Leipzig,
1900-10; repr. 1971): series 4 Geistliche Werke: 3 Grande Messe des Morts, 6
Te deum, 7 L'Enfance du Christ; series 5 Weltliche Kantaten: 3 La Damnation
de Faust, 4 Lélio, 6 L'Impériale; series 6: Gesänge mit Orchesterbegleitung: 14
Für Chor; series 7 Gesánge mit Klavier; 16A Für Chor.
BRAHMS, J.: Johannes Brahms: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Eusebius Mandyczewski
(Leipzig, 1926-7; repr. 1964-5 and 1971): 17 Ein deutsches Requiem; 18 Rinaldo;
19 Ave Maria, Rhapsodie, Schicksalslied, Nänie, Gesang der Parzen; 20
Mehrstimmige Gesänge mit Klavier oder Orgel; 21 Mehrstimmige Gesänge ohne
Begleitung; 22 Duette mit Klavierbegleitung.
BRUCKNER, A.: Anton Bruckner: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe: 13
Messe e-Moll, Grosse Messe f-Moll, ed. Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak
(Leipzig, 1940); 14 Messe d-Moll, 15 Requiem d-Moll, Missa solemnis b-Moll,
ed. Robert Haas (Vienna, 1930-49).
—— Anton Bruckner: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Werke, ed. Leopold Nowak
(Vienna, 1951- ): 14 Requiem d-Moll (1966); 15 Missa solemnis b-Moll (1975);
16 Messe d-Moll (1957); 17 Messe e-Moll; 18 Grosse Messe f-Moll; 19 Te deum;
21 Kleine Kirchenmusik 1835-1892 (1984); 22 incl. Psalm 150, ed. Franz
Grasberger (1964).
— — Chorwerke aus dem Nachlasse Anton Bruckners, ed. Viktor Keldorfer (Vienna,
1911).
——— Choral music incl. in Göllerich, August: Anton Bruckner: Ein lebens- und
Schaffens- Bild, 1 (Regensburg, 1922), 2-4, ed. Max Auer (Regensburg, 1928-
37); all repr. 1974.
Desussy, C.: Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy (Paris, 1985- ): series 4 [Choral
Works].
BIBLIOGRAPHY 901
DvoRÁK, A.: Antonin Dvorak: Souborné vydáni, ed. Otakar Šourek er al. (Prague,
1955- ) [Czech, German, English, French]: series 2 Oratorios, Cantatas, Mass:
1 Stabat mater (1958), 2 Svatebni košile (1967), 3 Svatá Ludmila (1964), Requiem
(1961), 5 incl. The American Flag, 6 Te deum; series 6 Vocal Music: 4 Male,
Female, and Mixed Choruses.
ELGAR, E.: Elgar Complete Edition, ed. Jerrold Northrop Moore and Christopher
Kent (London, 1981- ) series 1 Choral Works [including The Dream of
Gerontius (1982)].
Eslava, H.: Oficio de difuntos, Te deum in Lira sacro-hispana, ed. Hilarion Eslava,
Siglo, 2nd series, 1 (Madrid, 1869)..
GLINKA, M. I.: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin er
al. (Moscow, 1955-69): 8 [Vocal Works with Orchestra] (1960); 9 [Vocal Works
with Piano and a capella] (1960); 17 [Unfinished Works] (1968).
Liszt, F.: Franz Liszts Musikalische Werke, ed. Franz Liszt-Stiftung (Leipzig, 1907-
36; repr. 1966): Part 5 Kirchliche und geistliche Gesangwerke incl: 1 Missa
solemnis, 3 Messen und Requiem mit Orgel; Part 6 Weltliche mehrstimmige
Gesangwerke.
Franz Liszt: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke/New Edition of the Complete
Works, ed. Zoltan Gárdonyi (Kassel and Budapest, 1970- ): series 8 Lieder,
Songs, Choral Works with piano; series 10 A capella Choral Works; series 16
Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth, Christus (all forthcoming).
—— Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth, ed. Oliver Nagy (Budapest, 1975) [vocal
score].
MENDELSSOHN, F.: Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Werke: Kritisch durchgesehene
Ausgabe, ed. Julius Rietz (Leipzig, 1874-7; repr. 1967-9): series 13 Oratorien:
85 Paulus, 86 Elias; series 14 Geistliche Gesangwerke: 93 Lobgesang, 94 Lauda
Sion; series 17 Lieder und Gesänge für vier Männerstimmen; series 18 Lieder
und Gesänge für zwei Singstimmen mit Begleitung des Pianoforte; series 16
Lieder, für Sopran, Alt, Tenor und Bass.
—— Leipziger Ausgabe der Werke Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys, ed. Internationale
Felix-Mendelssohn-Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1960- ): series 6 Geistliche Vo-
kalmusik (1977- ).
—— anthems, ed. Brian W. Pritchard (Hilversum, 1972).
MONIUSZKO, S.: Stanislaw Moniuszko: Dziela/ Werke, ed. Witold Rudziński (Krakow,
1965- ): series D. Chormusik.
MussorGsky, M. P.: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Pavel Aleksandrovich Lamm
with Boris Vladimirovich Asafev (Moscow, 1928-34; repr. 1969): 19 Sa-
lammbó;. 21 [Choral Works, with piano].
PARKER, H. W.: Hora novissima (Early American Music, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock,
2; New York, 1972).
Rimsky-Korsakov, N.: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, ed. Andrey Nikolaevich
Rimsky-Korsakov ег al. (Moscow, 1946-70): 24 and 44 [Cantatas] (1952 and
1953); 46A [Duets and Trios] (1949); 46B [Choruses, a capella] (1954); 47
[Russian Folk-songs] (1952).
SCHUMANN, R.: Robert Schumann's Werke, ed. Clara Schumann ег al. (Leipzig,
1881-93; repr. 1967-8): series 9 Gróssere Gesangwerke (1882-7); series 10
Mehrstimmige Gesangwerke mit Pianoforte (1883-4); 11 Für Männerchor (1887);
12 Für Sopran, Alt, Tenor und Bass (1886).
SMETANA, B.: Studijni vydáni del Bedřicha Smetany, ed. Frantisek Bartoš, Josef
Plavec er al. (Prague, 1940- ): 2 Ceska pisen (1941).
SPOHR, L.: Selected Works of Louis Spohr (1784-1859), ed. Clive Brown (New
York, 1987- ): 4 Die Letzten Dinge; 5 Des Heilands Letzte Stunden.
TCHAIKOVSKY, PL: Pyotr Mich Chaykovskiy: Polnoe sobranie sochineniy (Moscow
and Leningrad, 1940-71): 27 [Vocal Works with Orchestra].
902 BIBLIOGRAPHY
VERDI, G.: The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, ed. Philip Gossett et al. (Chicago and
Milan, 1983- ): series 3 Sacred Music [includes Messa de Requiem, ed. David
Rosen (1966)]; series 4 Cantatas and Hymns.
WESLEY, S. S.: Anthems (London, 1853).
— — The European Psalmist (London, 1872) [includes service music by Wesley].
(ii) Books and Articles -
(a) General
BLUME, FRIEDRICH (ed.): Die evangelische Kirchenmusik (Potsdam, 1931; 2nd edn.,
1965, as Geschichte der evanglischen Kirchenmusik), Eng. trans. enlarged as
Protestant Church Music: A History (New York, 1974).
BURBACH, HERMANN-JOSEPH: ‘Das “triviale” in der katholischen Kirchenmusik des
19. Jahrhunderts’, in Carl Dahlhaus (ed.), Studien zur Trivialmusik des 19.
Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1967), 71-82.
FELLERER, KARL: Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik (Düsseldorf, 1939; 2nd
edn., 1949); Eng. trans., Francis A. Brunner, The History of Catholic Church
Music (Baltimore, Md., 1961).
— — ‘Das deutsche Chorlied im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Wulf Arlt et al. (eds.), Gattungen
der Musick in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift für Leo Schrade (Berne and
Munich, 1973), 785-812.
GATENS, WILLIAM J.: Victorian Cathedral Music in Theory and Practice (Cambridge,
1986).
HuTCHINGS, ARTHUR: Church Music in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1967).
JACOBS, ARTHUR (ed.): Choral Music: A Symposium (Harmondsworth, 1963).
KRABBE, WILHELM: ‘Chormusik (Lied und kleinere Chorwerke)’, in Guido Adler
(ed.), Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, ii (Frankfurt, 1924; 2nd edn., 1930, repr.
1961), 955-63.
KRUMMACHER, FRIEDHELM: ‘Kunstreligion und religiöse Musik: Zur ästhetischen
Problematick geistlicher Musik ım 19. Jahrhundert’, Die Musikforschung, 32
(1979), 365-93.
MOSER, HANS-JOACHIM: Die evangelische Kirchenmusik in Deutschland (Berlin, 1954).
TEMPERLEY, NICHOLAS: The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979)
i; chap. 8 "The Rediscovery of Tradition (1800-50)', pp. 244-67; chap. 9 “The
Victorian Settlement (1850-1900), pp. 268-314.
UnsPRUNG, Orro: Die katholische Kirchenmusik (Potsdam, 1931, repr. 1949).
VALENTIN, ERICH (ed.): Handbuch der Chormusik (Regensburg, 1953-8).
WIORA, WALTER (ed.): Religiöse Musik in nichtliturgischen Werken von Beethoven
bis Reger (Regensburg, 1978).
(b) Individual Composers
Berlioz
PROD’HOMME, J.-G.: Le Cycle Berlioz, i. La Damnaton de Faust, ii. L’Enfance du
Christ (Paris, 1898-9).
RUSHTON, JULIAN: ‘The Genesis of Berlioz’s "La Damnation de Faust" ', Music
and Letters, 56 (1975), 129-46.
For further Berlioz bibliography see $ I
Brahms
BLUM, Kraus: Hundert Jahre Ein deutsches Requiem von Johannes Brahms:
Entstehung, Urafführung, Interpretation, Würdidung (Tutzing, 1971).
HANCOCK, ViRGINIA: Brahms's Choral Compositions and his Library of Early Music
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 903
KALBECK, Max: Johannes Brahms (4 vols; Berlin, 1904-14; reprint of latest edition
of each vol. (1921, 1921, 1912-13, 1915), Tutzing, 1974).
Kross, SIEGFRIED: Die Chorwerke von Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1958; 2nd edn.,
1963).
For further Brahms bibliography see $ VIII
Bruckner
AUER, Max: Anton Bruckner als Kirchenmusiker (Regensburg, 1927).
Номе, A. CRAWFORD: “Traditional and Novel Elements in Bruckner's Sacred
Music', Musical Quarterly, 66 (1981), 544-67.
SINGER, KURT: Bruckners Chormusik (Stuttgart, 1924).
For further Bruckner bibliography see $ VIII
Cherubini
ALBERTI, LUCIANO: ‘I tempi e i modi della produzione sacra di Luigi Cherubini’,
in Adelmo Damerini (ed.), Luigi Cherubini nel II centenario della nascita
(Florence, 1962), 70-92.
DEANE, BasıL: Cherubini (Oxford, 1965).
Dvorak
CLAPHAM, JOHN: Antonin Dvořák: Musician and Craftsman (London, 1966).
Kousa, JAN: ‘Nejstarší Cesky tištěný kancionál z roku 1501 jako hudební pramen’,
in Studie a materiály k dějinám starsi české hudby (Prague, 1965).
ROBERTSON, ALEC: Dvořák (London, 1945; 2nd edn., 1964).
For further Dvořák bibliography see § VIII
Elsner
NOWAK-ROMANOWICZ, ALINA: Józef Elsner (Kraków, 1957).
Franck
D’InDY, VINCENT: Cesar Franck (Paris, 1906; 8th edn. 1919); Eng. trans., Rosa
Newmarch, César Franck (London, 1910; repr. 1965).
LANDGRAF, ARMIN: Musica sacra zwischen Symphonie und Improvisation: César
Franck und seine Musik für den Gottesdienst (Tutzing, 1975).
Gounod
PROD’HOMME, J.-G., and DANDELOT, ARTHUR: Gounod (1818-1893): Sa vie et ses
æuvres (Paris, 1911; repr. 1973).
WAGENER, HEINZ: ‘Die Messen Charles Gounods’, Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch,
51 (1967), 145-53.
Liszt
Liszr, FRANZ: Gesammelte Schriften von Franz Liszt, ed. Lina Ramann (Leipzig,
1880-3).
MERRICK, PAUL: Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt (Cambridge, 1987).
SEGNITZ, E.: Franz Liszts Kirchenmusik (Langensalza, 1911).
SZABOLCSI, BENCE: A magyar zenetórténet kézikónyve (Budapest, 1947; 3rd edn.,
1977); Eng. trans. of 2nd edn., 1955, abridged as А Concise History of Hungarian
Music (Budapest, 1964; 2nd edn., 1.965).
For further Liszt bibliography see $ VII
Loewe
BITTER, CARL HERMANN (ed.): Dr. Carl Loewe's Selbstbiographie (Berlin, 1870; repr.
1976).
Mendelssohn
Über Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys Oratorium Paulus (Kiel, 1842).
904 BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRITCHARD, BRIAN W.: ‘Mendelssohn’s Chorale Cantatas: An Appraisal’, Musical
Quarterly, 62 (1976), 1-24. TA
RADCLIFFE, PHILIP: Mendelssohn (London, 1954; rev. 2nd edn., 1967).
WERNER, JACK: Mendelssohn’s ‘Elijah’: A Historical and Analytical Guide to the
Oratorio (London, 1965).
WERNER, RUDOLF: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy als Kirchenmusiker (Frankfurt,
1930).
For further Mendelssohn bibliography see $ I =
Moniuszko
JACHIMECKI, ZDZISLAW: Muzyka koscielna Moniuszki (Warsaw, 1947).
Rossini
AMBROS, AUGUST WILHELM: ‘Die “Messe solennelle” von Rossini’, Bunte Blätter
(Leipzig, 1872; 2nd edn., 1896), i. 81-92.
D’ORTIGUE, JOSEPH L.: Le ‘Stabat de Rossini (Paris, 1841).
Saint-Saéns /
SAINT-SAENS, CAMILLE: Ecole buissonniere: notes et souvenirs (Paris, 1913); abridged
Eng. trans., Edwin Giles Rich, Musical Memories (London, 1919, repr. 1969).
For further Saint-Saens bibliography see $ VI (b)
Schumann
HALSEY, Louis: “The Choral Music’, in Alan Walker (ed.), Robert Schumann: The
Man and his Music (London, 1972; rev. 2nd edn., 1976), 350-89.
Horton, JOHN: “The Choral Works’, in Gerald Abraham (ed.), Schumann: A
Symposium (London, 1952), 283-99.
For further Schumann bibliography see $ I, $ II, and $ IV
Verdi
CONATI, MARCELLO: ‘Le Ave Maria su scala enigmatica di Verdi dalla prima alla
seconda stesura (1889-1897), Rivista italiana di musicologia, 13 (1978), 280-
SE
GIRARDI, MICHELE and PETROBELLI, PIERLUIGI (ed.): Messa per Rossini: La storia, il
testo, la musica, Quaderni dell’Istituto di Studi Verdianı, 5 (Parma and Milan,
1988).
PIZZETTI, ILDEBRANDO: ‘La religiosita di Verdi: Introduzione alla Messa da Requiem’,
Nuova antologia (Jan.-Feb. 1941), 209-13.
Rosen, Davip: ‘Verdis “Liber scriptus" Re-written’, Musical Quarterly, 55 (1969),
151-59.
—— ‘La Messa a Rossini e il Requiem per Manzoni’, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia,
4 (1969), 127-37; 5 (1970), 216-33.
WALKER, FRANK: ‘Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces’, Ricordiana, vi/2 (1961), 1-3.
For further Verdi bibliography see $ III (c) and $ VI (c)
INDEX
Compiled by FREDERICK SMYTH
Page numbers in bold type indicate the more important references.
Operas and oratorios are indexed under composers and librettists, the latter
being identified as such.
Aarestrup, Emil, 759
Abert, Hermann, хуп
Abert, J. J., Kolumbus, 509
Abraham, Gerald, q. 319, q. 406, 541, 603,
615, 662, 747
Adam, Adolphe, 120-1, 139, 327-8
operas, 131-4
Bijou perdu, Le, 328
Chalet, Le, 122-3, 132-3 (Exx. 94-5),
138, 461
Giralda, 122, 126, 132, 134-5 (Ex. 97)
Postillon de Lonjumeau, Le, 122-3, 132-
4 (Exx. 93, 96)
Richard en Palestine, 116-17
Roi d Yvetot, Le, 138
Si j'étais roi, 328-9, 388n°*
Toréador, Le, 122, 126, 132, 134 & п?
Adelburg, Ágost, Zrínyi, 478-9
Adenis, Jules (librettist), La Jolie Fille de
Perth (Bizet), 376
Adorno, Theodor W., д. 297, q. 301-2
Afanas’ev, Nikolay, Quartet in A, The
Volga, 624
Afzelius, A. A., and E. E. Geijer, Svenska
folkvisor fran forntiden (collection,
1814-17), 760 & n!"
Ahna, Pauline de (Frau Strauss), 678n?
Alard, Delphine, symphonies concertantes,
615-16
Alfieri, Vittorio, 174, 410
Alfred le Grand (ballet-pantomime, 1822), 86
Alkan, Charles Henry, piano works
Etudes, Op. 39, 558-9, 616
Festin d Aesop, Le, 556
Grande Sonate: Les quatre äges, 549
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1846), 174
Allmers, Hermann, 675
Almqvist, Karl Jonas Love, 760
Alnaes, Eyvind, 769
Alsager, T. M., 63
Altmann, Wilhelm, 625
Alyab'ev, Aleksandr
church music, 823
songs, 705, 709
Andersen, Hans Christian, 458
as librettist, 188
as poet, 660, 749, 758, 767-8
Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und
Wissenschaft (periodical, 1858-9),
509
Apthorp, William, q. 669n?
Arensky, Anton, 602
opera, Son na Volge, 459
Suite, Op. 15, 567
Symphony No. 2, 576
aria, the, in opera, 205-8
Aristophanes, 488
Arnold, S. J., 228-9
Ashbrook, William, 112
Asnyk, Adam, 736
Athenaeum, The, q. 781
Attwood, Thomas, 770
Auber, Daniel, 121, 186, 262
operas
Cheval de bronze, Le, 122, 124-6 (Exx.
81-2)
Domino noir, Le, 125-7 (Exx. 83-4),
140n^*
Fra Diavolo, 124
Gustave III, 89-90, 93, 100-1 (Ex. 58),
104
Haydée, 122, 127-8 (Exx. 85-8), 138,
140n7*
Jenny Bell, 134, 329
Leicester, 122
Magon, Le, 120, 123
Manon Lescaut, 329, 393
Marco Spada, 329
Muette de Portici, La, 87-9 (Ex. 45),
90-1, 93, 101, 104n*’, 109, 122
Philtre, Le, 180
Séjour militaire, Le, 123
Augier, Emile (librettist), Sapho (Gounod),
339
Auteri-Manzocchi, Salvatore, opera,
Dolores, 433
Autran, Joseph, 491
Azeglio, Massimo, Marchese d', q. 141
906 INDEX
Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, xvii
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 81, 535
choral works
Cantata (BWV 150), 599 (Ex. 412)
St John Passion (BWV 245), 68
St Matthew Passion (BWV 244), 174,
535, 793-4
keyboard works
Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), 551
Italian Concerto (BWV 971), 2
Ouvertüre nach Franzóschicher Art
(BWV 831), 2
Partitas (BWV 825-30), 563
Art of Fugue, The (BWV 1080), 585
Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied
violin (BWV 1001, 1004), 599, 636
Bach Gesellschaft, 535, 563
Bache, Francis, 773
Backer-Grendahl, Agathe, 769
Backer-Lunde, Johan, 769
Bailbe, Joseph Marc, д. 120-1
Bailey, Robert, q. 263-4, 272
Ballo, Pierre, 61, а. 62, 77
Bakhmetev, Nikolay Ivanovich, 825
Liturgy of St John, 825 (Ex. 534)
Balakirev, Mily Alekseevich, 499-504, 505,
602, 824 & ni
influenced by Glinka, 708-9
influence on Mussorgsky, 718-19
orchestral works, 500-4
Islamey, 716
King Lear, overture, 503
overtures on folk themes, 500-3, 506
Symphony No. 1, 602
Tamara, 502, 503-4 (Exx. 365-7)
songs, 704-6, 708-10, 713
"Gruzinskaya pesnya’, 711
‘Ne bilo vetru', 715
Sbornik russkikh narodnikh pesen
(collection, 1886), 704, 712-13, 715,
718-19 (Ex. 449)
Balfe, Michael William, 191, 228, 231-3,
234, 479
operas 232-3
Bohemian Girl, The, 186, 232-3
Quatres Fils Aymon, Les, 186
songs, 771-2, 784
ballade, the, in opera, 203
Barbier, Jules, and Michel Carré
(dramatists), Les Contes d Hoffmann
(1851), 386, 396
as librettists
Dinorah (Meyerbeer), 332
Faust (Gounod), 343
Hamlet (Thomas), 365
Mignon (Thomas), 363
Roméo et Juliette (Gounod), 348
Barbieri-Nini, Mariana, q. 172
Bargiel, Woldemar, 625
Suite, Op. 7, 563-4
Barnett, John, 228, 230, 234
opera, The Mountain Sylph, 229n'5!, 229-
30 (Ex. 153)
songs, 781, 783
Bartlett, Homer, 778
Bates, Arlo, 778
Batyushkov, Konstantin, 504
Baudelaire, Charles, 696
Bausznern, Waldemar von, 323
Bayard, J. F. A., and J. H. V. de
Saint-Georges (librettists), La Fille du
Régiment (Donizetti), 113
Bayreuth Festival Opera, 257-8, 594
Bazin, Frangois, 121
opera, Maitre Pathelin, 328
Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, 789
Bechstein, Ludwig (writer), Sagenschatz des
Thüringer Waldes (1835), 195
Beck (poet), 775
Beethoven, Ludwig van, xvii, 1, 198, 243,
534, 537
influence on
Berlioz, 534
Borodin, 603, 636
Brahms, 534, 543, 593, 598-9
Bruckner, 635
Donizetti, 151
Dvoräk, 555
Mendelssohn, 75 & n?
Rimsky-Korsakov, 636
Wagner, 13, 193, 259, 261-2, 298, 534
aria, ‘Ah! Perfido!’, 683n°!
chamber music, 63, 593
Piano Trios, Opp. 70/1 and 97, 69-70
Quintet for piano and wind, Op. 16,
628
Septet, Op. 20, 63
String Quartets
Op. 18, 60, 64
Op. 95, 77
Ор S37
Фр ШВ2 E
posth. in В flat, 64
Violin Sonatas, Opp. 47 and 96, 61
opera, Fidelio, 209, 683
orchestral works, 1-2
Egmont, incidental music, Op. 84, 18
piano works
sonatas, 238-9, 252
Op. 26, 252. 555
Op. 27, 243
Op. 31/1, 543
Op. 53 (Waldstein), 543
Op. 81a (Lebewohl), 549
Op. 106 (Hammerklavier), 543
Opp. 110-11, 239
variations
Op. 34, 551
Op. 35 (Eroica), 245
songs, 662, 769
INDEX 907
symphonies
No. 3 (Eroica), 579
No. 5, 578, 612
No. 6 (Pastoral), 577-8, 612
No. 9 (Choral), 262, 288, 578-9, 590,
598
Beethoven Quartet Society (1845), 63
Beigeleben (poet), 669
Belyaev, Mitrofan, 640
Bella, Jan Levoslav, 742-3
Bellini, Vincenzo, хуп, 151
operas, 140, q. 142, 143, 146-7, 155, 162,
186
Beatrice di Tenda, 172
Puritani, I, 142, 249, 421
Sonnambula, La, 177, 185, 415
Straniera, La, 147n*
Bellman, Carl Mikael, 759
Bendl, Karel, 750
operas, 473
Lejla, 473, 742
songs, 742-3, 743-5
Zigeunermelodien, 743-5, (Exx. 471-2)
Benedict, Sir Julius, 228, 480
opera, The Lily of Killarney, 479-80
Bennett, Sir William Sterndale, 63, 81, 786,
828
chamber music, Piano Trio ın A, 72-3
(Ex. 36)
choral works, 827-8
overtures
Naiads, The, 5-6 (Ex. 1), 53
Paradise and the Peri, 5, 511-12
Parisina, 5
Wood-nymphs, The, 5-6
piano works
Sonata (The Maid of Orleans), 538-9,
549-50
Sonata-duo, Op. 32, 68
Three Musical Sketches, 254
Prelude, Ajax, 487
songs, 771-3, 778, 781, 786
*Gentle Zephyr', 771-3 (Ex. 485)
Suite de piéces, Op. 24, 562 & n^?
symphonies, 6n*
Benzon, Otto, 768
Béranger, Pierre Jean de, 661n'?, 688, 707-8
Berg, Alban, 384
Berger, Ludwig, 239
Étude, Op. 12/11, 254 (Ex. 165)
Berger, Wilhelm, 625
Berggreen, A. P., 757
Berlin
court theatre, 331
Königstadt Theatre, 187
Opera, 185, 196
Singakademie, 191, 829
Berlioz, Hector, xvii, xix, 50-1, 57-9
and
Beethoven, 534
Bizet, 367
Cherubini, 801
David, 329n*
Donizetti, 113, 183
Reyer, 401
Vieuxtemps, 617
Wagner, 11-12, 260
influenced by Weber, 54
influence on
Balakirev, 504
Franck, 519
Rimsky-Korsakov, 509
Tchaikovsky, 509
others, 536
Memoirs, 51, q. 184
cantatas, 27-8
Damnation de Faust, La, 58-9, 799,
800-1, 819
"Marche hongroise', 17
Impériale, L', 50, 799
church music
Grande Messe des Morts (Requiem), 50,
58-9, 799-800
Te Deum, 50, 57, 799
operas
Béatrice et Bénédict, 334-6 (Ex. 206)
Benvenuto Cellini, 9-11, 53, 56, 59, 104,
108-12 (Exx. 72-74), 374, 390
Estelle et Némorin, 109
Francs-juges, Les, 109
Troyens, Les, 51, 57, 327-8, 331, 336-9
(Exx. 207-11), 358-9, 400, 447
oratorio, L' Enfance du Christ, 57, 799,
800 (Ex. 506)
orchestral work, Marche funèbre pour . . .
Hamlet, 16-17, 56, 801
overtures, 8-12
Béatrice et Bénédict, 10, 51, 57
Carnaval romain, Le, 9-11, 53, 489, 531
Corsaire, Le, 9-12
Francs-juges, Les, 9-12, 27, 51, 58-9
Grande Ouverture sur la Tempéte, 28
Rob Roy, 10, 12, 28
Roi Lear, Le, 10-11, 15, 56
Waverley, 11-12, 50-1, 59
songs, 689-91
*La Captive', 684, 686-7 (Ex. 432), 689-
90
songs with orchestra, 683 & nu
Neuf Mélodies (Irlande), 688, 689-90
Nuits d'été, Les, 683, 689, 690-1
symphonies, 25-31, 39, 489-90, 578, 580,
801
Grande Symphonie funebre et
triomphale, 25-6, 29, 50, 59, 799
Harold en Italie, 12, 25-6, 28-9, 47, 59,
137, 490
Liszt's essay, 536-7
Roméo et Juliette, 25-6, 28, 29-30, 49,
53, 97, 490, 797
908 INDEX
Berlioz, Hector (cont.)
symphonies (cont.)
Roméo et Juliette (cont.)
a choral work, 801
orchestration, 51, 58-9
Symphonie fantastique, xvii, xix-xx, 20,
25-7, 29-30, 49, 489-90, 581
orchestration, 50n?, 51-3 (Ex. 32), 59
"Rond du Sabbat’, 97
Lélio, appended, 27-8, 53, 801
Bernard, St, 816
Bertin, Louise, 222
Bertini, Henri, 640
Berwald, Franz, 39, 65, 74, 761
songs, 761
String Quartet No. 3, 74-5 (Ex. 39)
Symphonie singuliére, 39-40 (Exx. 22-3)
Bie, Oskar, q. 669
Billroth, Theodor, 675
Birch-Pfeiffer, Charlotte, 191
as librettist, Sophie Katharina (Flotow),
192
Bishop, Sir Henry, 228-9
operas, 229
songs, 781-2
Bizet, Georges, 328, 362, 367-84, 385, 542
incidental music, L’Arlesienne, 380, 572
ode-symphonie, Vasco de Gama, 31, 374
orchestral works
Patrie, 516
Roma, 516-18, 529
operas
Amour peintre, І’, 376
Carmen, 363, 368, 374, 376, 378n”,
380-5 (Exx. 272-7), 436, 458, 713
Clarissa Marlowe, 378n”
Coupe du Roi de Thule, La, 375n™, 378179
Docteur Miracle, Le, (with Lecocq),
333, 368 (Ex. 252), 371 (Ex. 258), 378
Djamileh, 368-9, 371-3 (Exx. 261, 264),
378n”, 378-80 (Exx. 268-71), 382, 385-6
Don Procopio, 368-9 (Ex. 255), 414
Don Rodrigue, 381 & n?
Griséldis, 378n”
Guzla de [ Emir, La, 369
Ivan IV, 369-70 (Ex. 256), 371 (Ex.
257), 372 (Ex. 260), 373-4
Jolie Fille de Perth, La, 369, 376-8 (Ex.
267)
Maison du docteur, La, 367-8
Pécheurs de perles, Les, 328, 367-9 (Ex.
253), 371-2 (Ex. 259), 373 (Exx. 262-
3), 374 (Ex. 265), 375-6 (Ex. 266)
songs, 693
Symphony in C, 610
Variations chromatiques for piano, 556
Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne, 761 & n'*°, 765, 767
& n5
Blagrove, Henry, 62, 77
Blau, Édouard (librettist)
Rédemption (Franck), 818
„Roi d Ys, Le (Lalo), 398
Sigurd (Reyer), 403
Blodek, Vilém, opera, V studni, 472-3
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 334
Boccherini, Luigi, 60, 77
Bodenstedt, Friedrich von, 669
Boehm, Theobald, 53
Boélmann, Léon
Piano Trio, Op. 19, 622
Variations symphoniques for cello and
orchestra, 621
Boieldieu, Adrien, opera, La Dame blanche
120, 123n**
Boisseaux, Henri (librettist), La Maison du
docteur (Bizet), 368n?
Boito, Arrigo, 412, 418-20, 437-8
opera. Mefistofele, 418-20 (Ex. 308)
as librettist
Amleto (Faccio), 365, 418
Falstaff (Verdi), 430
Gioconda, La (Ponchielli), 432
Otello (Verdi), 430
Bologna, Teatro Communale, 426
Bonesi, Marco, 151
Bonniére, Robert de, 522
Boott, Francis, 784
Bordes, Charles, Suite basque, 539, 562
Bórner (poet), 620
Borodin, Aleksandr, 444, 446, 576, 824 & n”
influences on, 603, 636
chamber music, 622-3, 636-7
String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2, 636, 637
orchestral work, V sredney Azii, 500
operas
Prince Igor, 444, 445, 603, 715
with others, Mlada, 444 & n!
songs, 704, 706, 710, 714-17
‘More’, 715, 716-17 (Ex. 447)
"Morskaya tsarevna’, 716 (Ex. 446)
‘Pesnya tyomnogo lesa’, 715, 718
symphonies, 603-5
No. 1, 602-3, 714 (Ex. 445)
No. 2, 602, 604-5 (Ex. 413)
No. 3, 603
Bortnyansky, Dmitry, 823
Boucicault, Dion (dramatist), The Colleen
Bawn (1859), 479
Bouffes-Parisiens, theatre company, 333
Boulez, Pierre, q. 261 & n!, 320
Braham, John, and Isaac Nathan, Hebrew
Melodies (1876), 770
Brahms, Johannes, xviii-xix, 485n'*', 535,
542, 568, 678
and
Bruckner, 585
Brüll, 327
Dvorak, 555, 651-3, 655
Joachim, 537, 550
Liszt, 542
INDEX
Clara Schumann, q. 537, 628-30, 675-6
J. Strauss, 566
Widmann, 324
Wolf, 632
his biographer, 465
as editor of others’ works, 245, 597
influenced by
Bach, 599
Beethoven, 534, 543, 550-1, 629, 631
Mozart, 536
Schubert, 536, 598-9, 629
influence on
Parry, 787
Sjögren, 768
Stanford, 787
chamber music, 67, 622-5, 628-35
Cello Sonatas
Op. 38, 622-3, 629, 632
Op. 99, 632
Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115, 535, 557,
563, 631-2, 632-5 (Ex. 417)
Clarinet Sonata, Op. 120, 623, 628, 632
Clarinet Trio, Op. 114, 631-2
Horn Trio, Op. 40, 623, 629
Piano Quartets
Op. 25, 624, 628-30
Op. 26, 628-30
Op. 60, 628, 631
Piano Quintet, Op. 34, 629-30
Piano Trios
Op. 8, 628
Opp. 87 and 101, 632
String Quartets
B minor (early), 630
Op. 51/1, 630-1
Op. 51/2, 598, 631
Op. 67, 631
String Quintets
Op. 88, 563, 623, 632
Op. 111, 624, 632
String Sextets
Op. 18, 550, 629
Op. 36, 563, 629-30
Violin Sonatas
A minor (early), 631
Op. 78, 623
Op. 100, 68, 623, 632
Op. 108, 632
choral works, 810-13
Alto Rhapsody, 811-12 (Ex. 521)
Deutsches Requiem, Ein, 630, 810-11
Rinaldo, 811 (Ex. 520)
Schicksalslied, 811-12
Triumphlied, 811 (Ex. 519)
concertos, 617-19
Piano Concerto in D minor, 617
Piano Concerto in B flat, 614, 617-18
Violin Concerto in D, 617, 631
Violin and Cello Concerto in A minor,
616-18
909
orchestral works
Serenade, Op. 11, 574
Serenade, Op. 16, 557, 574
Suite in A major, 563-4
Sarabande, 536, 563 (Ex. 399), 627,
634
Variations on a Theme of Haydn, 593
organ works, 556-7
Choral Preludes, Op. 122, 558
piano works, 552, 555
Balladen, Op. 10, 538, 545
Piano Pieces, Op. 117, 538
Piano Sonatas, 542-5
Op. 1, 542-3, 545
Op. 2, 538, 542-5 (Exx. 384-9)
Op. 5, 538, 543, 545, 562
variations, 550-2
Op. 24, 550, 551-2 (Exx. 396-7)
songs (Lieder), xx, 672-7
“Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer’,
675n*, 675-6 (Ex. 430)
Liebeslieder, Op. 52 and 65, 672
Lieder und Romanzen, Op. 14, 676
Magelone Lieder, Op. 33, 675
*Regenlied', 631
Vier ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, 558, 672,
675, 683n**
Volkskinderlieder, 676
Volkslieder, 674, 676-7
symphonies, 576, 579, 593-600. 610
No. 1 in С minor, 537, 593-4, 594-6
(Exx. 408-11), 597, 598
No. 2 in D, 579, 594, 596-9, 613
No. 3 in F, 537, 579, 594, 596-8, 614
No. 4 in E minor, 557, 594, 596-8, 599
(Ex. 412)
Brancour, René, 31
Breidenstein, Heinrich, 188
Breitkopf and Hártel (publishers), 492, 534
Brendel, Franz, q. 669n?
Brentano, Clemens, 667, 748
Bréville, Pierre, Fantaisie, 559
Bridges, Robert (poet), 791, 829
Bristow, George F.
Rip Van Winkle, 486-7 (Ex. 357)
songs, 774
Broadwood (piano-makers), 237
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 786
Browning, Robert, 790
Bruch, Max, 574, 619
chamber music, 625
concertos, 616, 619
opera, Die Loreley, 327
Schottische Fantasie, 620
Symphony in F minor, 576
Brückler, Hugo, 677
Bruckner, Anton, xviii, 535, 576
influenced by others, 536, 585-6, 589, 808
influence on R. Strauss, 600
chamber music, 585, 635
910 INDEX
Bruckner, Anton (cont.)
choral work, ‘Abendzauber’, 809-10 (Ex.
518)
church music, 808-9
Masses, 808-9 (Exx. 516-17)
Psalm 150, 808-9 (Ex. 515)
symphonies, 577, 579-80, 585-93, 610
No. 8 in С minor. 579, 587-8, 589-93
(Exx. 405-7), 612
Brüll, Ignaz, 625
opera, Das goldene Kreuz, 327
Suite, Op. 42, 561
Brunswick. Léon-Lévy (librettist), 122
with de Leuven
Panier fleuri, Le (Thomas), 123
Postillon de Lonjumeau, Le (Adam),
123-2182
Brzowski, Jozef, opera, Hrabia Weselinski,
223
Buck, Dudley, 778, 786
choral works, 829
Bülow, Cosima von, see Wagner, Cosima
Bülow, Hans von. 426, 509-10, 582, 598,
675
Nirwana, overture, 491. 509-10 (Ex. 371)
Sängers Fluch, Des, for orchestra, 509-10
Bulwer-Lytton, see Lytton
Bungert, August, 320
Bunn, Alfred (librettist), The Bohemian Girl
(Balfe), 232, 233n'56
Burani, Paul (librettist), Le Roi malgré lui
(Chabrier), 408n!'”
Burenin, Viktor (librettist), Mazepa
(Tchaikovsky), 457
Bürger, Gottfried August (poet), 740
Lenore (1774), 518 & n?
Wilde Jäger, Der (1778), 518
Burghauser, Jarmil, 650
Burgmüller, Norbert
Piano Sonata in F minor, 253
songs, 659
symphonies, 38
Burnand, F. C. (librettist), 482
Africaine, L' (Musgrave), 482
Contrabandista, The (Sullivan), 483
Cox and Box (Sullivan), 483
Freischütz, Der (Musgrave), 482
Windsor Castle (Musgrave), 482
Burns. Robert, 660, 774, 791
Büsching, Johann Gustav (writer), Ritterzeit
und Ritterwesen, 193
Bush, Geoffrey, 777, 783
Busoni, Ferruccio, 556. 559
Busse, Carl, 678
Büsser, Paul-Henri, 572
Bussine (poet), 697
Buzzolla, Antonio, opera, Amleto, 365
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 660, 774-5,
824
Manfred (1817), 15-16, 209, 660
Cagnoni, Antonio, 417
operas
* Amori e trappole, 414
Michele Perrin, 415, 417
Papa Martin, 415, 417
others. 417
Cammarano, Leopoldo, 415
Cammarano, Salvatore (librettist), 101, q.
146 E
Elena da Feltre (Mercadante), 162
Camöes (Camoens), Luis de, 350
Capuana, Luigi, 436
Carcano, Giulio, 166, 172
Carinena, Benigno, 826
Carissimi, Giacomo, 535
Carré, Michel (dramatist), Faust et
Marguerite (1850), 343
as librettist, Mireille (Gounod), 332
see also Barbier and Carré
Carvalho, Léon, 328, 385
Casella, Alfredo, 431
Castillon, Alexis de, 640
chamber music, 641
songs. 694-6
‘Sonnet mélancolique’, 695-6 (Ex. 436)
Catalani, Alfredo, 434-5, 436
operas, 434-5
Elda (Loreley), 434-5 (Ex. 318)
Wally, La, 434, 435
Cavaillé-Coll, Aristide, 559-60
cavatina, the, in opera, 203-4
Cavos, Caterino, opera, /van Susanin,
2l nie"
Cazalis, Henri, 513
Cech, Svatopluk, 742
Čelakovský, F. L., 740n!°', 743, 748
Cellier, Alfred, 485
Cellini, Benvenuto, Autobiography, 109
Cermáková (Kaunizová), Josefina, 750-1,
754
Cervinková-Riegrová, Marie (librettist),
Dimitrij and Jakobin (both Dvorak),
473
Chabrier. Emmanuel, 384-5, 397, 405-9
operas, 405-9
Étoile, 17, 385. 406
Gwendoline, 320, 385, 400, 405, 406-8
(Exx. 302-4)
Roi malgré lui, Le, 385, 407-9 (Exx.
305-6)
orchestral works, 517-18
Espana, 518
songs. 703
Chadwick, George
choral works, 829
songs, 778-9
"The Cardinal Flower', 778-9 (Ex. 490)
chamber music, defined, 621
Chaminade, Cécile, orchestral work, Les
Amazones. 577
INDEX 911
Chamisso, Adalbert (poet), 660, 661 & n", Cobbett, Walter Willson, 646
671, 748-9 Colin, Auguste, 31
Frauenliebe und -leben, 660 & n°, 671n?6 Collin, Paul, 819
Charivari (periodical), 153 Colomb, J., 818
Charpentier, Gustave, 517 concert overtures, 1-2
Suite, Impressions d Italie, 570 Conciliatore (literary journal), 172
Chase, Gilbert, 780 conducting, 182-3
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 816 introduced (1835), 56
Chausson, Ernest Conradi, August, 490
chamber music, 640, 647 Cooke, Deryck, 266, 269-70, 277
Concert for piano, violin and string Cooper, James Fenimore, The Red Rover
quartet, 616, 647 (1827), 9, 11
songs, 703 Cooper, Jeffrey, 640
Symphony in B flat, 576, 610 Cooper, Martin, q. 319, q. 346
Viviane, symphonic poem, 521 Corelli, Arcangelo, 535
Chélard, Hippolyte, opera, Die Corneille, Pierre (dramatist)
Hermannschlacht, 198 Le Cid (1637), 381n’”®
Cherubini, Luigi, 61, 80-1, 103, 201, 214, Polyeucte (1643), 112
801 Cornelius, Peter, 322-4, 327, 509
opera, Les Deux Journées, 201, 224 operas, 322-4
Requiem in D minor, 801n? Barbier von Bagdad, Der, 187, 322-4
Chevillard, P. A., 61 (Exx. 196-7), 327
Chmelensky, Josef Krasoslav (poet), 741 Cid, Der, 322-3 (Ex. 195)
as librettist Gunlód, 323
Drátenik (Skroup), 224, 740 songs, 670-1
Libusin sňatek (Škroup), 224 Cortot, Alfred, 520
Oldřich a Božena (Škroup), 224 Couperin, François, 535
with Škroup, Věnec ze zpěvů vlasteneckých Cowen, Sir Frederic
(collection, 1835-9), 740-1 opera, Pauline, 481
Chopin, Frédéric (Fryderyk) François, xvii- Sinfonietta, 578
xviii, 223, 255, 725, 823 Cramer, Johann Baptist, 253
influenced by Bellini, 251 Crosnier (opera-house director), 343
influence on Liszt, 498 Crusell, Bernhard, songs, 760-1, 763
chamber music, 68 & ns 69 Cui, Сахл, q- 453n!*, 723% 125% 729п®,
824n?
concertante works
Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise choral works, 824
brillante, 45-6 operas, 444
Fantaisie sur des airs nationaux polonais, songs, 709-10
45 Cunningham, Alan, 671
Krakowiak, 45-6 (Ex. 30) Czászár, Gyórgy, opera, A kunok, 226
Czeczot, Jan, 732
Czerny, Carl, 238
piano sonatas, 240-1
*La ci darem' Variations, 45, 620
Piano Concerto No. 1, xvii, 47
Piano Concerto No. 2, 47
piano works, 250-2
Nocturnes, 238, 250-1 Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mande (as a
sonatas, 239, 251-2 designer), 86 & n^, 183
songs, 727-9 Dahlhaus, Carl, 266
"Hulanka', 728 (Ex. 456), 732 on Die Meistersinger, q. 297-8
“Moja pieszczotka’, 728 (Ex. 457) on Parsifal, q. 315
Chorley, Henry, q. 129, 131, q. 781 on Der Ring, 269, q. 270, 277, q. 286-7,
Christen, Ada, 744 а. 308, а. 315
Chrysander, Karl Franz Friedrich, 535 d'Albert, Eugene Francis, 561
Denkmäler der Tonkunst (1869-71), 535 Suite, Op. 1, 564
Cicéri, Pierre Luc Charles, 86 & ui 89 Damse, Józef, 223
Cimarosa, Domenico, 161 Dancla, Charles, 640
Clapisson, Louis, 121 Dando, Joseph, 62, 64
Clarke-Whitfeld, John, 770, 781 Dannreuther, Edward, 430
Clay, Frederic, 485 Dante Alighieri (poet), 505, 816
Clementi, Muzio, Gradus ad Parnassum Paradiso, 582
(piano studies), 558, 562 Purgatorio, 825
912 INDEX
Dargomizhsky, Aleksandr Sergeevich, q.
439, 449, 720, 723, 824n^*
operas
Esmerelda, 222-3 (Ex. 146), 439
Kamenniy Gost’, 443
Rusalka, 438-40 (Ex. 321), 706
songs, 704-5, 706-8, 709-10
‘Paladin’, 707-8 (Ex. 440), 722n*
Daudet, Alphonse, 570
as dramatist, L’ Arlésienne (1872), 380
Daumer, Georg Friedrich, 671-2
David, Felicien, 81, 518, 577, 801
odes-symphonies
Christophe Colombe, 32, 801
Désert, Le, 31-2 (Ex. 17), 801-2 (Ex.
507)
operas
Lalla-Roukh, 331
Perle du Bresil, La, 329n°, 329-30 (Ex.
201)
oratorio, Moise au Sinai, 801
piano work, Mélodies orientales, 254
songs, 690-1
String Quintets (Les Quatre Saisons), 61,
64
Symphony in E flat, 31
David, Ferdinand, 63-4, 76-7
Violin Concerto in E minor, 48
D'Azeglio, Massimo, Marchese, q. 141
Deathridge, John, q. 264-5, 269
Debussy, Claude, xviii, 384, 405, 716
choral work, La Damoiselle élue, 819
opera, Pelléas et Melisande, 131, 365
orchestral works
Jeux, 378
Nocturnes, 721
piano works, 561, 564, 570, 572
songs, 684, 694, 696, 699-703
Ariettes oubliées, 700-3
"C'est l'extase', 700-1 (Ex. 438), 702-
3 (Ex. 439)
Cinq poémes de Baudelaire, 703
Dehmel (poet), 678
Dehn, Siegfried, 19, 216
de Jouy, Étienne (librettist), Fernand Cortez
(Spontini), q. 83
De Koven, Reginald, 485
Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugene, 89, 96
Deland, Margaret, 780
Delavigne, Casimir (poet and dramatist),
688
Le Paria, 464
as librettist, with Germain Delavigne
Charles VI (Halevy), 107
La Reine de Chypre (Halévy), 105
Delavigne, Germain (librettist), L' Africaine
(Meyerbeer), 349
de Leuven, Adolphe (librettist), 122, 134
with Brunswick, Le Postillon de
Lonjumeau (Adam), 123, 132
with Rosier, Le Songe d'une nuit d'été
(Thomas), 123, 136
Délibés, Léo, 362, 385, 388n**, 395, 399-401
ballets
Coppélia, 386, 391, 398
Source, La, 398
Sylvia, 391, 398
operas, 398-401
Jean de Nivelle, 399-400 (Ex. 294)
Lakmé. 363, 385, 388n**, 399-401 (Exx.
295-7)
Roi Га dit, Le, 385, 398-9 (Exx. 292-3)
songs, 703
de Lisle, Leconte, 519
Delius, Frederick, Double Concerto, 616
Del Mar, Norman, 600
de Najac, Emile (librettist), Le Roi malgré
lui (Chabrier), 408n!”
Derzhavin, Gabvriil, 458
Dessauer, Josef, 659
Detroyat, Leonce (librettist), Henry VIII
(Saint-Saéns), 389
Devrient, Eduard (librettist)
Hans Heiling (Marschner), 191, 199
Kermes, Die (Taubert), 186
Templer und die Jüdin, Der (Marschner),
206
Zigeuner, Der (Taubert), 187
Dies Irae, 721-2 (Ex. 451)
Dietsch, Pierre, 194
D’Indy, Vincent, 385, 524, 541, 594, 647
and Debussy, 819
and Franck, 559
as a critic, 72, 641, 646
chamber music, 640, 646
choral work, Le Chant de la cloche, 819
orchestral works
Forét enchantée, La, 518, 521
Istar, 522
Jean Hunyade, 522
Saugefleurie, 522, 525
Suite en Ré, 564
Symphonie cévenole, 576-7, 610
Wallenstein, 518, 521-2, 525
Dittersdorf, Karl Ditters von, 191
Dobrzynski, Feliks, opera, Monbar, 223 (Ex.
147)
Dolansky, L. 748
Donizetti, Gaetano, xvii, 140, 160-2, 177-8,
182, 186, 410
operas, 112-16, 146-55
Anna Bolena, 146, 152
Assedio di Calais, L’, 147
Belisario, 147, 155, 163
Campanello di notte, Il, 180
Dom Sébastien, 116
Don Pasquale, 178, 180-1 (Exx. 124,
369)
Duc d' Albe, Le, 116n”, 354
Elisir d'amore, L', 153, 178, 180, 184
INDEX 913
Fausta, 155
Favorite, La, 93, 113-16 (Ex. 76-7)
Fille du Regiment, La, 113-14 (Ex. 75)
Linda di Chamounix, 147, 152-3, 155,
177, 415
Lucia di Lammermoor, 112, 147, 153,
184, 249
Lucrezia Borgia, 149-50 (Exx. 107-9),
153, 155, 167
Maria Stuarda, 153-4 (Ex. 111), 172
Martyrs, Les, 112-13
Parisina, 151-2 (Ex. 110)
Roberto Devereux, 146
Sancia di Castiglia, 147-8 (Ex. 106)
Torquato Tasso, 151
Doppler, Ferenc, 477
operas
A két huszár, 478
Benyovszky, 226
with Károly Doppler and Ferenc Erkel,
Erzsébet, 477
Doppler, Karoly, opera, A gránátos tábor,
478
Dorn, Heinrich, 66, 662n"
d'Ortigue, Joseph, 401
Drachmann, Holger, 758, 762, 767
Draeseke, Felix, 509, 625
Sonata quasi fantasia, Op. 6, 549
Dragonetti, Domenico, 64
Drake, Joseph, 829
Drobisch, G. T., 743
Droste-Hülsdorf, Annette von, 671
Duller, Ernst (librettist), Tannhäuser
(Mangold), 187
du Locle, Camille (librettist)
Don Carlos (Verdi), 358
Sigurd (Reyer), 403
Dumas, Alexandre, pére
Antony (1831), 104
The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-5), 123,
127 & n?
Du Mont, Henry, Cing Messes en
plain-chant, 804
Duniecki, Stanislaw, 464
Duparc, Henri, 515 & n°’, 518, 524
orchestral work, Lénore, 514-19 (Exx.
376-9), 521
songs, 684, 694, 699
‘L'Invitation au voyage’, 692-3 (Ex.
434), 699
Duponchel, Edmond, 86, 89n"?
Dupré, Marcel, 559
Duprez, Gilbert, 116
Duveyrier, Charles, 191
Dvorak, Antonin, 67, 541, q. 611, 612, 619,
829
influenced by
Beethoven, 555, 612
Brahms, 555, 613-14, 652-3, 655
Liszt, 555, 613-14, 622, 649-50
Schubert, 536, 555, 612, 649, 652-3
Verdi, 815
Wagner, 555, 613-14, 622, 649-50
chamber music, 622, 624, 648-58
Bagatelles, Op. 47, 623, 649, 651-2
Cello Sonata, 649
Cyprise, for string quartet, 623, 649,
657-8, 751
Piano Quartet in D, Op. 23, 650-2
Piano Quartet in E flat, Op. 87, 657
Piano Quintet in A, Op. 5, 650
Piano Quintet in A, Op. 81, 657
Piano Trios, 650-2
F minor, Op. 65, 652, 655, 7541?
E minor, Op. 90 (Dumky), 623, 649,
657-8
Sonatina for violin and piano, Op. 100,
624, 657
String Quartets, 649-58
No. 1 in A, Op. 2, 649
No. 2 in B flat, 649-50
No. 3 in D, 649-50
No. 4 in E minor, 622, 649-50
No. 5 in F minor, Op. 9, 650
No. 6 in A minor, Op. 12, 650
No. 7 in A minor, Op. 16, 650
No. 8 in E, Op. 80, 651-2
No. 9 in D minor, Op. 34, 651-2
No. 10 in E flat, Op. 51, 651-2
No. 11 in С, Op. 61, 652, 653-7
(Exx. 422-4)
No. 12 in F, Op. 96, 624, 657
No. 13 in G, Op. 106, 657, 658
No. 14 in A flat, Op. 105, 657
String Quintets
A minor, Op. 1, 649
С, Op. 77, 623, 650-2
E flat, Op. 97, 624, 657
String Sextet in A, Op. 48, 651-2
Terzetto, Op. 74, 652, 657
Violin Sonata in A minor, 650
Violin Sonata in F, Op. 57, 652-3
choral works, 813-14
American Flag, The, 829
Requiem, 814 (Ex. 523)
Spectre's Bride, The, 814
Stabat Mater, 813-14 (Ex. 522)
concertos
Cello Concerto in B minor, 754
Piano Concerto in G minor, 555
Violin Concerto in A minor, 62
operas, 473-5
Dimitrij, 473-4 (Ex. 350)
Jakobin, 473-5 (Ex. 351), 754
piano works, 553-5
sonatas, 555
Variations, Op. 36, 553-5 (Ex. 398), 594
Serenade in D minor, Op. 44, 574
songs, 677, 742-3, 743n!®, 750-6
Biblické pisne, 754-6
914 INDEX
Dvořák, Antonin (cont.)
songs (cont.)
Cyprise, 750-2 (Ex. 476)
Tri novorecké basné, 753
V narodnim tonu, 754-5 (Ex. 478)
Vier Lieder, Op. 82, 750, 754
Zigeunermelodien, 750, 753-4 (Ex. 477)
symphonic poems, 524
V рёіғоаё, 524, 752
symphonies, 376, 579-80, 611-15
No. 3 in E flat, 576, 613
No. 5 in F, 579, 613, 651
No. 6 in D, 580, 613, 652
No. 7 in D minor, 613-14
No. 8 in G, 579, 614-15
No. 9 in E minor, 615
Dvir králové MS, 743, 748, 752, 754п!%
Ebert, Egon, 664
Eckermann, Johann, xvii
Egressy, Beni (librettist), Bank Bán and
Hunyadi László (both Erkel), 477
Eichberg, Julius, operetta, The Doctor of
Alcantar, 486
Eichendorff, Joseph von, 660, 669, 671, 680-
1, 747
Elgar, Sir Edward, 594
The Black Knight, 577, 829
The Dream of Gerontius, 829
Symphony No. I in A flat, 577
Ella, John, 62-4
Ellberg, Ernst, 39
Ellerton, John Lodge, 81
Quintet, Op. 62, 81-3 (Exx. 43-4)
Elsner, Józef, 223, 255, 820-1
Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi, 820-1
(Ex. 530)
ensemble and chorus, in opera, 208-9
Erard, Sébastien, 237
Erben, Karel Jaromir (poet), 740n'?!, 742,
752-3
Kytice, 524
Svatebni kosile, 814
Erkel, Ferenc
operas, 227, 477-8
Bank Ban, 227, 477-8 (Ex. 354)
Bathori Märia, 226
Hunyadi László, 227 (Exx. 150-2)
Erkel, Sándor, 477
Ernst П, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,
operas, 188
Ernst, Heinrich, 64
Eslava, Hilarión, church music, 826
Esser, Heinrich, 659
Ewald, Johannes, Fiskerne (Singspiel), 756
Faccio, Franco, 418, 436 & n!”
operas
Amleto, 365, 418
I profughi fiamminghi, 418
Falke, Gustav, 678
Fantasievariation, 244
Farrenc, Louis, 61-2, 640
Fauré, Gabriel, 67, 384-5, 541, 622
chamber music, 640, 641-4
Piano Quartet No. 1. 641-4 (Exx. 418-20)
Requiem, 819-20 (Ex. 529)
songs, 684, 694, 696-9
‘Fleur jetée’, 697-9 (Ex. 437)
Ferrand, Humbert, 26
Fet, Afanasy, 712
Fétis, Frangois, 349-50, 367
Feuerbach, Anselm, 812
Fibich, Zdenék, 474, 475-6, 523-4
chamber music, 624
operas, 475-6
Blanik, 475, 742
Boure, 476
Bukovin, 475-6 (Ex. 352)
Nevésta Messinska, 475-6 (Ex. 353)
songs, 742-3, 747-50
ballads, Op. 7, 749-50 (Ex. 475)
Jarní paprsky (collection), 748-9 (Ex.
474)
symphonic poems, 524
Záboj, Slavoj a Ludék, 524, 743
Field, John, 47, 214, 255
concertos, 620
Nocturnes, 238, 455
Figner, Nikolay, 458
Finn, Н. J. (librettist) A/mied а! Ramel
(Horn), 235
Fioravanti, Giuseppe, 415
Fischer, Johann Georg von, 748
Fitzenhagen, William, 620
Flaubert, Gustave (novelist)
Salammbó, 405, 441, 824
Trois Contes, 391
Flechsig, Emil, 797
Fletcher, John, 775, 789
Florentine Quintet, 651
Florian, Jean-Pierre (poet), Estelle et
Némorin, q. 27
Florimo, Francesco, 155п!%, 156, 160, 162
Flotow, Friedrich von, 192
operas, 192
Alessandro Stradella, 186, 192, 199
Martha, 186, 192, 199, 202, 210, 376
Foster, Stephen, 770
Franchetti, Alberto, 435-6
operas, 436
Franchomme, Auguste Joseph, 68
Franck, César, xviii-xix, 67-8, 81, 385, 516,
518-22, 541, 801
and Alkan, 559
and Castillon, 641
influence on Sjógren, 762
chamber music, 622, 640, 644-6
Piano Trio in F sharp, 72, 644
Violin Sonata in A, 645-6 (Ex. 421)
opera, Hulda, 385
1МОЕХ 915
oratorios, 802-3, 818-19
Les Beatitudes, 818-19 (Ex. 528)
Redemption, 817, 818
Ruth, 802-4 (Ex. 509), 818
orchestral works, 518-21
Le Chasseur maudit, 518-19, 525
Les Eolides, 519-20 (Ex. 380)
organ works, 559-60
piano works, 559
songs, 703
Symphony in D minor, 559, 576, 610, 611
Variations symphoniques, 620-1
Franck, Eduard, 625
Frank, Ernst, 325-6
Franz, Robert, songs, 669-70, 670nn, 748
Free Music School, Russia, 602, 824
Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 671
Fricken, Baron von, 245
Fricken, Ernestine, 246
Fröding, Gustaf, 762
Fry, William Henry, 784
operas, 235-6
Fuchs, Albert, 677
Fuchs, Robert
chamber music, 625
Piano Sonata in G flat, 549
serenades, 575
No. 3, 575 (Ex. 403)
Fuller Maitland, John Alexander, 791
Gabussi, Vincenzo, 101
Gade, Niels, 80
chamber music, 72, 78
cantata, Elverskud, 758
overtures, 7
Efterklang af Ossian, 7-9 (Exx. 2-3),
10, 39
songs, 757-8
symphonies, 39-40
No. 5 in D minor, 40, 577
Gál, Hans, 551
Galabert, Edmond, 375 & n?
Gall, Jan, 735
*Barkarola', Op. 13/3, 735 (Ex. 464)
Gallet, Louis (librettist)
Ascanio (Saint-Saéns), 390
Djamileh (Bizet), 378
Garborg, Arne (poet), Haugtussa, 767-8
Garcia Opera Company, 235
Gatti, Carlo, 435n'!*
Gautier, Théophile, 32, 688, 690
Gazetta musicale, Il, 816
Gazette musicale, La, 200-1, 640, q. 803-4
Gefühlsvariation, 244
Gehe, Eduard (librettist)
Die Flibustier (Lobe), 199
Jessonda (Spohr), 199
Geibel, Emanuel (poet), 660, 669, 671, 680,
748, 762
as librettist, Loreley (Mendelssohn), 191
Geijer, Erik Gustaf, 760-1
with Afzelius, Svenska folkvisor fran
forntiden (collection, 1814-17), 760 &
mI
Georgii, Walter, 241
German Reed Entertainments, 482
Gernsheim, Friedrich, 625
Ghislanzoni, Antonio (librettist), 437
Giovanna da Napoli (Petrella), 416
Gilbert, Sir William Schwenk (dramatist),
485
as librettist, 324, 483-4, 485
Gilchrist, William W., opera, Otho Visconti,
487
Gille, Philippe (librettist), Manon
(Massenet), 393
Girschner, Christian, opera, Undine, 198
Giselle (ballet), 230
Gläser, Franz, 187-8
opera, Des Adlers Horst, 187
Glazunov, Aleksandr, 445, 603
orchestral works, 508
string quartets, 624, 640
Symphony No. 1 in E, 602
Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich, xvii, 18-19, 53,
216-21, 438, 541, 824n*4
and Balakirev, 499, 503-4
and Rubinstein, 602
influenced by other composers, 18, 54
Memoirs, q. 185
choral works, 823
operas
Ruslan i Lyudmila, 18, 219-21 (Exx.
142-5), 438, 439n'?
Zhizn za Tsarya, 216-19 (Exx. 139-41),
439n'?, 705
orchestral works, 18-19
Capriccio brillante, 18-19, 53, 503
Kamarinskaya, 18-19, 603, 608, 705
Knyaz’ Kholmskiy, 18, 56-7 (Ex. 34)
Souvenir d'une nuit d'été à Madrid, 18-
19
Valse-fantaisie, 18, 53, 706
piano works, 255
songs, 704-5, 705-6, 708-10, 729n”
symphonies, 19
Trio pathétique, 72
Gluck, Christoph Willibald von
operas
Orfeo ed Euridice, 491
‘Che faro’, 333
Rencontre imprevue, La, 573
Gobatti, Stefano, opera, Z Goti, 426
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, q. xvii-xix,
123, 269
composers inspired
Berlioz, 28
Boito, 419
Brahms, 672, 811-12
Fibich, 747-8
916 INDEX
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (cont.)
composers inspired (cont.)
Franz, 670
Gounod, 343-4
Liszt, 490-1, 581, 666, 668
Mendelssohn, 3, 78, 664-5, 774, 795
Moniuszko, 729 2
Schumann. 14-15, 660, 662-3, 799
Tchaikovsky, 713
Thomas, 363
Tomasek, 740
Wagner, 14-15, 209
Weyse, 757
Wolf, 679 & п, 680-2
Goetz, Hermann, 324-6
chamber music, 625
operas
Francesca da Rimini, 326
Widerspänstigen Zühmung, Der, 324-6
(Exx. 198-9)
Violin Concerto, 616
Gogol, Nikolay (writer), 446, 449, 452
Zhenit ba (1834), 443
Goldmark, Karl, 426, 433
chamber music, 625
opera, Die Kónigin von Saba, 327, 426
suites for violin and piano, 561, 568, 574
symphony, Ländliche Hochzeit, S09, 568,
277
Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Arseny, 721
Gomes, Carlos, operas, 433-4
Fosca, 433 (Ex. 317)
Gorodetsky, S. M. (librettist), /van Susanin
(Glinka), 217n!6
Görres, Joseph, 195
Gossec, Frangois Joseph, 50
Gounod, Charles, 328, 339-49, 367, 391,
411, 426, 801
апа Massenet, 817
influence on
England, 481
Italian opera, 426
Smetana, 466
church music, 802
Messe solenelle à Ste-Cécile, 802-3 (Ex.
508)
operas, 339-49
Colombe, La, 334
Faust, 328-9, 343-7 (Exx. 219-24), 374-
5, 377, 381, 456
Medecin malgre lui, Le, 334
Mireille, 346-7, 371, 381
Nonne sanglante, La, 112, 342-3 (Ex. 218)
Philémon et Baucis, 331, 334
Reine de Saba, La, 346 & n?
Roméo et Juliette, 328-9, 348-9 (Exx.
225-6), 376
Sapho, 331, 339-42 (Exx. 212-17), 363
oratorios
Mors et Vita, 814, 818
Rédemption, 817, 818
Petite Symphonie for woodwind, 576
songs, 691, 693-4
Suite concertante, 561
Symphonies Nos. | and 2, 610
Gouvy, Théodore, 640
serenades, 574
Sinfonietta, 578
Gozzi, Carlo (dramatist)
La donna serpente (1762), 193
Turandot (1762), 188
Grabbe, Christian Dietrich (dramatist), Don
Juan und Faust (1829), 190
Grétry, André, 362
operas, 134 & п?
Richard Coeur de Lion, 134, 379, 458
Tableau parlant, Le, 130 & n”, 134n’°
Grieg, Edvard, 683, 759, 762n"!
Fra Holbergs Tid, suite, 564
Peer Gynt, incidental music, 572, 768
Piano Concerto in А minor, 617-18
Piano Sonata, Op. 7, 549
songs, 765, 767-9
‘Lys Nat’, 768 (Ex. 484)
Grillparzer, Franz (dramatist), Libussa, 470
as librettist, Melusine (Kreutzer), 187, 198,
210
Grimm, Julius Otto, Suite in Canonform,
Op. 10, 567
Grisan, Albert, operas, 121
Grossman, Ludwik, opera, Duch Wojewody,
464
Groth, Klaus, 672, 748
Guénée, Luc, 122
Guiraud, Ernest, 384, 395, 572
Haas, Robert, 590
Habeneck, Frangois Antoine, 50
Haeckl, Anton, 139
Hagerup (Grieg), Nina, 767
Hahn, Reynaldo, 385
Halek, Vítézslav (poet), 522, 742, 748, 752
Vecerní písné, 746
Halévy, Fromental, 50, 57, 103n*°, 121, 139,
327-8, 331, 367
operas, 101-8, 129n’', 129-31, 329-31
Charles VI, 90, 107-8 (Exx. 68-71)
Éclair, L^, 122, 129-31 (Exx. 89-91),
138-9 (Ex. 103)
Guido et Ginevra, 92-3, 104-5 (Ex. 64)
Jaguarita ľ indienne, 329-31 (Exx. 202-
3), 350
Juif errant, Le, 367
Juive, La, 51, 89, 91, 93, 101-4 (Exx.
59-62), 222
Mousquetaires de la reine, Les, 122, 129,
131 (Ex. 92), 140п*
Reine de Chypre, La, 93, 105-7 (Exx.
65-7), 336
Halévy, Léon (librettist), 367
INDEX 917
Halevy, Ludovic (librettist), 367
Carmen (Bizet), 380
Hallström, Ivar Christian, songs, 761
Halm, Anton, 69
Hamburg, Stadttheater, 196
Handel, George Frideric, 535, 562n^
Israel in Egypt, 794
Hanka, Vaclav, 740n'!!, 743
Hanslick, Eduard (critic), q. 167, 585, 599
Vom Musikalisch-Schónen (1854), 536
Harrison, William, 479
Hartmann, Georges (librettist), Hérodiade
(Massenet), 391n*?
Hartmann, Johan Peter Emilius, 757-8,
758n'^
Hartmann, Johann Ernst, 756
Haslinger, Tobias, 241
Hasse, Max, 323
Hatton, John Liptrot, 487
songs, 783-4
‘To Daisies’, 783-4 (Ex. 493)
Hauch, Carsten, 757
Hauff, Wilhelm (writer), Die Karawane, 199
Hauptmann, Moritz, 759
with others, opera, Der Matrose, 189
Hausegger, Siegmund von, q. 511
Haydn, Joseph, xvii, 60, 68, 151, 542, 612
Hebbel, Friedrich (poet), 679-80, 683
Genoveva (1843), 198
Hedberg, Frans, 761
Heidegger, Martin, q. 564
Heine, Heinrich (poet), 687
composers inspired
Bendl, 744
Borodin, 715
Brahms, 672
Cui, 710
Fibich, 747, 749
Franz, 670
Jensen, 671
Liszt, 666-8
Mechura, 743
Mendelssohn, 664
Rimsky-Korsakov, 711
Schumann, 660-1, 661n'?, 797
Skuharsky, 742
Tomášek, 740
Wagner, 198-9
Wolf, 679-80
Heise, Peter, 759 & п!
song, “Til en Veninde’, 759 (Ex. 480)
Hellborn, Kreissle von, 535
Heller, Stephen, 556
piano sonatas, 252
Hellmesberger, Josef, 535
Hellmesberger Quartet, 655
Helmer, Axel, 762
Helsinki, Sibelius Academy, 763
Hemans, Felicia, 671
Henselt, Adolph von
Piano Concerto in F minor, 47-8 (Ex. 31)
piano works, 255
Herbeck, Johann, Ritter von, 535, 594
Herbert, Victor, 485
opera, Prince Ananias, 485
Herder, Johann Gottfried von (writer), 740, 748
Der entfesselte Prometheus, 491
Hérold, Ferdinand, operas
Ludovico, 251
Pré aux clercs, Le, 363
Hertz, Henrik (writer), Kong Renés Datter,
458
Hervé (Ronger, Florimond), 397
Herz, Henri, 47
Herzogenberg, Elizabeth von, 675 & п“, 677
Herzogenberg, Heinrich von, 622, 625, 677
Heyduk, Adolf (poet), 742, 752
Zigeunermelodien, 743 & n'™, 750
Heyse, Paul (novelist and poet), 660, 680
Italienisches Liederbuch, 680
Spanisches Liederbuch, 671, 762
Higham, Mary H., 784
Hignard, Aristide, opera, Hamlet, 365n?
Hiller, Ferdinand, 63, 80
opera, Ein Traum in der Christnacht, 199,
203, 209
Hiller, Johann Adam, 202
opera, Die Jagd, 202n'??
Hirschbach, Hermann, 659
Hitchcock, Wiley, 770
Hnilicka, Alois, Táborita, overture, 522
Hoffbauer, Karl, 323
Hoffman, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, xix-xx,
q. 198, 246, 386, 396, 398, 536
opera, Undine, xx, 198
stories
Bergwerke von Falun, Die (1819), 194
Doge und Dogaressa, 191
Goldene Topf, Der (1815), 197
Nussknacker und Mausekónig (1816),
458-9
Hoffmeister, Jacob (librettist), Die lustigen
Weiber von Windsor (Nicolai), 191
Hogarth, George, q. 228
Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich
(poet), Schicksalslied, 811
Holmes, Augusta
Argonautes, Les, 577
Irlande, symphonic poem, 521
Holtei, Karl von (theatre director), 193-4
as librettist, Des Adlers Horst (Gläser),
187-8
Hölty, Ludwig, 671, 674, 740
‘Home, sweet home’, 229
Horn, Charles Edward, opera, Ahmed al
Ramel, 235
Horton, Priscilla, 482
Hostinsky, Otakar (librettist), Nevésta
Messinská (Fibich), 475
Hoven, see Püttlingen, Johann Vesque von
918 INDEX
Huber, Hans, Eine Tell-Symphonie, 509
Hugo, Victor (writer), xix, 166, 410, 520,
687-8
and Verdi, 167-8
Angelo (1835), 161, 432
Cromwell (1827), 109-10
Hernani (1830), 167-8
Lucrece Borgia (1833), 168
Marion de Lorne (1831), 115
Notre Dame de Paris (1831), 222, 236
Orientales, Les (1829), 378
poems set as songs by
Berlioz, 690
Faure, 696
Lalo, 691
Monpou, 684, 687
Saint-Saëns, 692-3, 818
Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 47, 63, 65, 69,
80, 238
Piano Quintet in E flat, Op. 87, 62, 80
piano sonatas, 230, 253
Septet in D minor, Op. 74, 62, 65, 81
Septett militaire, Op. 114, 81
Humperdinck, Engelbert, 683
opera, Hänsel und Gretel, 320
Ibsen, Henrik, 767
Igor's Campaign, Russian epic, 444, 464
Illica, Luigi (librettist), La Wally (Catalani),
435
incidental music, 16-17, 487-8
Ingelow, Jean, 784
Ingemann, B. S. (poet), 757
Sulamith og Salomon (1847-50), 758
Ingres, Jean Auguste, 378
Irving, Washington (writer)
Conquest of Granada, The (1829), 189
Tales of the Alhambra (1832), 235
Isouard, Nicoló, operas, 120
Ives, Charles, 786
Jacobsen, Jens Peter, 762
Jadassohn, Salomon, 574
Jahn, Otto, 536
Janáček, Leos, opera, Káťa Kabanová,
504n^
Jarecki, Henryk, operas, 464
Jensen, Adolf, 666, 671, 674
songs. 671-2, 678 & n?
“Ach, ihr lieben Aeuglein', 672-3 (Ex.
429)
Jeunes Artistes du Conservatoire, Société de
(1853), 541
Jirásek, Alois, 474
Joachim, Amalie, 753 & п!%
Joachim, Joseph, 64, 77, 537, 550, 556, 631
Konzert in einen Satze, 616
Violin Concerto, Op. 11, 620
Jokai, Mor, 477
Josephson, Jacob Axel, 760
Journal des débats, 113, 401
Kajanus, Robert, 763
Kalbeck, Max, 465, 593
Kalevala, Finnish epic, 763 & n"*
Kalkbrenner, Friedrich, 47, 61, 69, 80
Grande Fantaisie, Le Réve, 47
Grand Quintett, Op. 81, 65
Kalliwoda, Jan Václav, symphonies, 38
Kamenický, F. J., 740n'?!
Kapper, Siegfried, 191
Karas, J., 741
Karlfeldt, Erik Axel, 762
Karłowicz, Mieczysław, songs, 736-9
‘Pamiętam ciche’, 738 (Ex. 468)
`7 erotykow’, 738-9 (Ex. 469)
Karmalina, Lyubov’, 707
Kashperov, Vladimir, opera, Groza, 442
Kastner, Jean Georges, opera, Le Dernier
Roi de Juda, 367
Katona, József, 477
Katski, Apolinary, 725
Kaulbach, Wilhelm, 493
Kaunizová (née Čermáková), Josefina, 750-
1, 754
Kazynski, Wiktor, 739
Keats, John, 790
Keller, Gottfried, 675, 679-80
Kerner, Andreas Justinus, 660
Kiel, Friedrich, 622, 625, 787
chamber music, 623, 625-7
Viola Sonata, Op. 67, 626-7 (Exx. 415-
16)
Kienzl, Wilhelm, String Quartet, Op. 57,
623
Kind, J. Friedrich (dramatist), Der
Freischütz (Weber), 199
Kingsley, Charles, 782, 784
Kirchner, Theodor, 662п!?
Kittl, Jan Bedfich (Johann)
opera, Bianca und Giuseppe, 194
piano works, 256
songs, 740
Kitzler, Otto, 586
Kjerulf, Halfdan, 765-6
songs, 766-7, 769
‘Paa fjeldet’, 766 (Ex. 483)
Klein, Bernardt, 659
Klein, Josef, 659
Kleist, Heinrich von (dramatist), 188, 525
Hermannsschlacht, Die (1810), 198
Käthchen von Heilbronn, Das (1810),
198-9
Klicpera, Vaclav (librettist), Žižkův dub
(Kott, Macourek), 225
Klimentova, Mariya, 455
Klingemann, Ernst August, 3, 25, 663
Klughardt, August, 625
Lénore Symphony, 518n?
Knorr, Iwan, 594
INDEX 919
Koch, Heinrich Christoph, 573
Kochanowski, Jan, 732
Köchel, Ludwig von, 536
Kolär, Josef Jiti, 745
Kol’tsov, Aleksey, 704, 723
Komorowski, Ignacy, 739
König, Heinrich, opera, Die hohe Braut, 193
Konopnicka, Maria, 734, 736
Körner, Theodor (poet), 199, 478, 679
as librettist
Alfred der Grosse (Dvořák, Flotow),
192, 473
Die Bergknappen (Flotow), 192
Kossmaly, Carl, 191
Kott, František, opera, Žižkův dub, 225
Kotzebue, August von (librettist), 189, 225-
6
Kreuzfahrer, Die (Spohr), 199
Kyffhäuser Berg, Der (Marschner), 199
Wildschütz, Der (Lortzing), 199
Kovafovic, Karel, operas, 474
Krag, Wilhelm, 767-8
Krásnohorská, Eliška (poet), 752
Z maje Ziti, collection, 742
as librettist, 471, 473, 475, 742
Kratzer, Kazimierz, 739
Kretschmar, Frank, and A. W. von
Zuccalmaglio, Deutsche Volkslieder
(1840), 677n*
Kretzschmar, Hermann, q. 568, 573
Kreutzer, Conradin, 3n*, 187, 205
operas, 187
Melusine, 187, 198, 209
Nachtlager von Granada, Das, 186-7,
199, 203
Taucher, Der, 210
Kreutzer, Rodolphe, 61
Krilov, Ivan Andreevich, 723
Krohn, Ilman, 763
kuchka, a group of Russian composers, 602,
607, 709-10, 725, 824 & n?
Kuhlau, Friedrich, 759
Kukol’nik, Nestor, 706
opera, Knyaz’ Kholmskiy, 18
Kulmann, Elisabeth, 660
Kunzen, F. L. A., 759
Kurpinski, Karol, opera, Zamek na
zorsztynie, 223
Küstner, К. T. von, 195
Kvapil, Radoslav, 751n!%
Lachner, Franz, 536, 557, 570
operas
Alidia, 199
Catarina Cornaro, 186, 196, 210
suites, 557-8, 561, 566-7, 567-8
Lachner, Vincenz, 624-5
Nonet, 625
Lacombe, Louis, odes-symphonies, 32
Lacombe, Paul, 640
Sapho, for orchestra, 577
La Fontaine, Jean de, 334
Lalo, Édouard, 395, 397-8, 517, 534, 542,
620, 640
chamber music, 640-1
concertos, 617-18
operas
Fiesque, 397
Le Roi d Ys, 385, 388 (Ex. 291)
songs, 690, 691
Symphonie espagnole, 539, 577
Symphony in G minor, 397, 610
Lamartine, Alphonse de, q. 687
La Motte-Fouqué, Friedrich, Baron de
(writer), Der Sängerkrieg auf der
Wartburg (1828), 195
Lange-Müller, Peter Erasmus
songs, 758
‘Jeg sejled en Nat over Havet', 758 (Ex.
479)
Symphonie Efteraar, 539
Lanier, Sidney, 778
Laskovsky, Ivan, piano works, 255
Ballade, 255 (Ex. 166)
Variations on Kamarinskaya, 255 (Ex.
167)
‘Last Rose of Summer, The’, 255
Laub, Ferdinand, 638
Lavrovskaya, Elizaveta, 455
Lazhechnikov, Ivan, 444
Lecocq, Charles, 397, 406
with Bizet, Le Docteur Miracle, 333
Ledesma, Rodriguez de, church music, 826-7
Lamentaciones de Semana Santa, 826-7 (Ex.
536)
Lehmann, Liza, song-cycle, /n Memoriam,
777
Leipzig, Conservatory (1843), 76, 84, 761
Leipzig, Gewandhaus, 6, 52, 76
‘leitmotiv’, the term, 210n'?
Lekeu, Guillaume
chamber music, 640, 647
Hamlet, symphonic poem, 521
Lenau (von Strehlenau), Nikolaus, 530, 660,
662-3, 666, 668, 679-80, 748
Leningrad (St Petersburg)
Bolshoy Theatre, 455
Conservatory, 602
Mariinsky Theatre, 440, 444, 450
Lenz, Wilhelm von, 534
Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 434, 436
I Pagliacci, 430
Lermontov, Mikhail (writer), 705, 709, 711,
723,828
Demon, The (1841), 444
Kalashnikov (1837), 445
Tamara (1841), 502-3
Leroy, F. Н. (librettist), /van ТУ (Bizet), 369
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (dramatist),
Emilia Galotti (1772), 190
920 INDEX
Le Sueur, Jean-Frangois, 27, 94
Chant du I“ Vendemiaire, 799
Coronation Mass, 50
Messe de Noel, 27
Ossian, хх
Letevrier, E. (librettist), L’ Etoile (Chabrier),
406
Letts, W. M., 791
Lev, Josef, 753
Levi, Hermann, 593
Lewis, Matthew (novelist), The Monk
(1796), 342
librettos and librettists, 196-9
Lichtenstein, Ulrich von, 663
Lie, Sigurd, 769
Lied, the, in opera, 202-3, 212
Liliencron, Detlev, Freiherr von, 672, 678
Lind, Jenny, 760
Lindblad, Adolf Fredrik, 74n**, 760-1
chamber music, 72, 74
songs, 760, 763
Lindeman, Ludvig Mathias, Ældre og
nyere Fjeldmelodier, collection (1853-67),
765
Lindpaintner, Peter Josef von, 205
operas
Amazone, Die, 187
Genueserin, 205
Macht des Liedes, Die, 203
Vampyr, Der, 204
Lingg, Hermann, 674, 748-9
Lisinski, Vatroslav, opera, Ljubav i zloba,
225
Liszt, Franz (Ferenc), xvii-xix, 489-504, д.
536-8, 542
and
Alkan, 559
Brahms, 542
Bülow, 491, 509-10
Cornelius, 322, 671
Franck, 644
Glinka, 222
Litolff, 617
Raff, 490, 509, 583
Saint-Saëns, 513 & n”, 514, 611
Schubert, 683n*
Schumann, 497-8
Volkmann, 622
Wagner, 213, 262-3, 490, 499
as a pianist, 64-5
at Villa d'Este, 426
at Weimar, 16, 187-8, 195-6, 322, 489-1,
493, 602, 666
disciples, 491-2, 518n??
influenced by Berlioz, 499
influenced by Schubert, 536
influence on
Bruckner, 808
Duparc, 515
Dvořák, 649
French composers, 536
French symphonies, 610
“ Italian opera, 426, 434
Russian composers, 499-504, 536
Sjógren, 762
R. Strauss, 529
proposed operas, 187
church music, 803-8
concertante works, 46
Piano Concerto No. | in E flat, 496,
545, 616-17, 619-20
Piano Concerto No. 2 in A, 545, 616,
618-19
Totentanz, 513, 520, 721
oratorios, 804-8
Christus, 805-8 (Exx. 512-14)
Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth, 804-
5 (Exx. 510-11)
organ works, 556
overture poems, 489, 490-1
Bergsymphonie, 491, 499
Festklänge, 491, 493, 498
Prometheus, 491, 497 (Ex. 361) & n^,
498 (Exx. 362-3)
Tasso, 489, 491, 493
Vier Elemente, Die, 491
piano works, 247-50
Années de Pélerinage, 247-8
Études (1827), 248 (Ex. 160)
Etudes d'exécution transcendante, 249
(Ex. 162)
Grandes Études, 249 (Ex. 161)
Sonata in B minor, 542, 545-9 (Exx.
390-5), 556, 581
transcriptions of Beethoven's
symphonies, 534
programme symphonies, 490, 581-2
‘Dante’ Symphony, 248, 490, 497-8,
576-7, 581-2
"Faust Symphony, 490, 499, 530, 558,
576-7, 581-2
songs, 662, 666-9, 674, 683
*Die Fischerstochter', 668-9 (Ex. 428)
"Die Loreley’, 666-7, 683
*Mignons Lied’, 683
‘Vergiftet sind meine Lieder’, 667 (Ex.
427)
for male voices and piano, Les Quatre
Éléments, 491
Symphonische Dichtungen, 492-9, 509, 513
& n?, 537
Ideale, Die, 493, 496-7, 512
Mazeppa, 492, 494, 496, 499-501 (Ex.
364), 538
Préludes, Les, 492, 494, 496-7 (Ex.
360), 498-9, 503
Triomphe funébre du Tasse, Le, 493-4,
496-7 (Ex. 359), 499
Zwei Episoden aus Lenau's ‘Faust’, 493,
494-5 (Ex. 358), 499, 511-12
INDEX 921
Litolff, Henry, 505, 617
Concertos symphoniques, 617
Maximilien Robespierre, overture, 489
Lobe, Johann Christian, opera, Die
Flibustier, 199
Lobesky, Bernard (librettist), Kral a uhlir
(Dvorak), 473
Loder, Edward James, 228, 234, 784
operas, 230-1
Raymond and Agnes, 230, 231 (Ex. 154)
songs, 781, 782-3, 786
‘Invocation to the Deep’, 782 (Ex. 492)
Loewe, Carl
opera, Die drei Wiinsche, 188, 199
oratorios, 793
Gutenberg, 793 (Ex. 500)
piano works, 241, 492
Loewe, Feodor, 776
Lomakin, Gavriil Yakimovich, 824
London concert halls, 62
London opera companies, 479-80
London theatres
Covent Garden (Royal Opera from 1892),
188, 228-9, 234, 479-80
Drury Lane, 228, 232-3, 479-81
Gaiety, 483
Gallery of Illustration, 482
King’s (Her Majesty’s, 1837), 228, 232,
234, 479-80
Lyceum (English Opera House, 1812),
228, 230, 232, 480-1
Opera-Comique, 481, 483
Princess’s, 230, 480
Royal English Opera House (Palace), 481
Royal Strand, 482
Royalty, 482-3
Savoy, 483
Victoria, 229n!*!
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 782, 786
Lönnrot, Elias, 763n"*
Lorenz, Alfred, 263
Lortzing, Gustav Albert, 190, 197
incidental music, Don Juan und Faust, 190
operas, 190, 202 E n'?, 208
Rolands Knappen, 190, 198, 209
Undine, 190, 198, 200-1 (Exx. 125-7),
203
Waffenschmied von Worms, Der, 190,
202, 205-6 (Ex. 131)
Wildschütz, Der, 186, 190, 199, 205, 208
Zar und Zimmermann, 186, 190, 202,
205, 208-9
Lovelace, Richard, 788
Lucas, C. T. L. (writer), Über den
Wartburgkrieg (1838), 195
Lucca, Francesco, 426, 436
Ludwig П, King of Bavaria, 258, 304
Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 344
Luther, Martin, 810
‘Ein fest Burg’, 99-100
Lux, Friedrich
opera, Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, 198
String Quartet, Op. 58, 623
L'vov, Aleksey Fyodorovich, 823-5
church music, 823-4 (Ex. 533)
Lyadov, Anatoly, et alia, String Quartet, Jour
de Féte, 640
Lytton, Edward Bulwer, Ist Lord (Bulwer
Lytton, novelist)
Lady of Lyons, The (1838), 235
Rienzi (1835), 194
Macdonald, Hugh, q. 397
MacDowell, Edward
Erste moderne Suite, 539
Piano Concerto No. 2, 619
songs, 778, 779-80
‘Oben, wo die Sterne glühen’, 779-80
(Ex. 491)
Macfarren, Sir George, 228, q. 230, 235, 784
incidental music, Ajax, 488
operas, 480-2
Don Quixote, 480-1 (Ex. 355)
songs, 781, 782
Macha, К. H., 740п!°!
Mackay, John Henry, 679
Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, opera, Colomba,
481
Macourek, Jiří, opera, Žižkův dub, 225 &
n?
Maeterlinck, Maurice (as dramatist), Pelleas
et Mélisande, 347
Maffei, Andrea, 166, 172
Magee, Bryan, 278, q. 320
Mahler, Gustav, q. 29, q. 600-1
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, 602, 677
songs, 677-8
symphonies, 610
No. 1 in D, 539-40, 600-2
No. 2 in С minor, 577
Malibran, Maria, 232
Mallefille, Félicien (dramatist), Les Deux
Veuves (1860), 470
Malybrok-Stieler, Otilie, 750, 754
Manchester, Theatre Royal, 230
Mangold, Carl Amand, opera, Tannhäuser,
187
Manzoni, Alessandro, 140-1, 168, 815
Mapelli, Luigi, opera, Anna e Gualberto, 437
Marchetti, Filippo, 434
operas, 432
Ruy Blas, 417, 432
Marek, J. J., 740n'*!
Mariani, Angelo, 162, q. 418
Marschalk, Max, 600
Marschner, Heinrich, xx, 189-90, 205,
662п!?
choral work, Klänge aus Osten, 797
Grosse Festouvertüre, 12
922 INDEX
Marschner, Heinrich (cont.)
operas, 189-90, 199-200, 202-7, 209-12
Babu, Der, 189
Falkners Braut, Des, 189
Hans Heiling, 186, 189, 191, 199-200,
206, 209-12 (Ex. 134)
Kaiser Adolphe von Nassau, 189-90, 204
(Ex. 129)
Kyffhäuser Berg, Der, 199
Schloss am Aetna, Das, 189, 206-7 (Ex.
132)
Templer und die Jiidin, Der, 186, 202
(Ex. 128), 205-6, 210
Vampyr, Der, 186, 189, 203, 209
Martucci, Giuseppe, 426
Marx, Adolph Bernard, 534
Mascagni, Pietro, 436
Cavalleria rusticana, 437-8 (Ex. 320)
Masse, Victor, 328
operas, 328
songs, 690-2
Massenet, Jules, 362, 385, 390-5, 405, 436
influence on
Catalani, 434
Ponchielli, 433
Puccini, 437
chamber music, 624
choral works, 817
La Vierge, 817 (Ex. 526)
operas, 391-5
Cid, Le, 385, 391, 394
Don César de Bazan, 391
Esclarmonde, 385, 394-5 (Ex. 288)
Herodiade, 362-3 (Ex. 245), 385, 391-3
(Exx. 285-6), 426, 817
Manon, 329, 363, 385, 393-4 (Ex. 287)
Roi de Lahore, Le, 385, 391, 406, 426,
436n!"
Thais, 433
Werther, 363
orchestral works, 516-17, 561, 569-70
Phédre, 516
Scenes alsaciennes, 562, 569-70
Scénes hongroises, 539, 569
Scenes pittoresques, 569 (Ex. 401), 570
songs, 691, 693-4
‘A mignonne’, 694-5 (Ex. 435)
Maszynski, Piotr, 737
songs, 735
Matthisson, Friedrich, 679
Mattig, Heinrich von der, 809
Mauke, Wilhelm, 532
Maurel, Victor, 430, 433
Maurin, J. P., 61
Mayr, Simone, 112, 146
Mayseder, Josef, 151
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 140, 146, 168, 173
Méchura, Leopold E., 743
Meck, Nadezhda von, 570, 716
Méhul, Etienne Nicolas, xix, 27, 103, 214, 574
Chant national, 799
. Operas, xx, 174
Meilhac, Henri (librettist)
Carmen (Bizet), 380
Manon (Massenet), 393
melodrama and mélodrame, 299n'”
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Fanny, q. 3
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, xvii, q. 47,
61, а. 74n5, д. 121-2, д. 183
and S. Bennett, 771, 773
and Lindblad, 760
as a conductor, 6, 56, 535
as a pianist, 63-4
compared with Mozart and Schubert, 24
influenced by
Beethoven, 75 & n?
Weber, 521
influence on
Bendl, 743
Borodin, 603
Hallstróm, 761
R. Strauss, 600
Sullivan, 483
others, 536
chamber music, 63, 80-4, 624
Cello Sonata, Op. 45, 68
Cello Sonata, Op. 58, 60, 68
Piano Quartets, Opp. 1-3, 80
Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 49, 63-4,
70, 72
Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 66, 70
String Quartets
Op. 12, 67, 75-6 (Ex. 40)
Op. 13, 61, 74n?®, 74-5
Op. 44/1-3, 75-6
Op. 80, 77
String Quintets, Opp. 18 and 87, 77
String Octet, Op. 20, 63, 67, 72, 77
choral works, 795-7
Erste Walpurgisnacht, Die, 795-7 (Ex.
503)
Lobgesang, 795
concertos, 583, 618
Piano Concerto ın G minor, 47-9
Piano Concerto in D minor, 48
Violin Concerto in E minor, 48-50, 76
incidental music
Antigone, 191
Athalie, 7, 191
Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 16-17,
23, 48, 51, 53, 78
Oedipus at Colonus, 191
opera, 190-1, 199
Loreley, 191, 327
oratorios, 793-5
Elias, 793, 794-5
Paulus, 793-5 (Ex. 502)
organ works, 556 7
overtures, 2-5
Hebriden, Die (Fingals Höhle), 2-3, 10,
INDEX
12, 16, 20, 22-3, 45, 50
Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt, 2-3,
9-10, 13, 50, 489
Ruy Blas, 50
Schöne Melusine, 3, 5, 50
Sommernachtstraum, Ein, 2-3, 23, 50
piano works, 253
Lieder ohne Worte, 70n?, 239-40, 253-4
(Ex. 164), 663
Sonata écossaise, Op. 28, 239, 243
Sonatas, 238-9, 253
with orchestra, 46
songs, 663-5, 773
*Das erste Veilchen', 664-5 (Ex. 425)
‘Die Liebende schreibt’, 665-6 (Ex. 426)
symphonies, 20-5, 580
No. 1 in C minor, 20 (Ex. 9), 22
No. 2 in B flat, 22, 24-5, 29
No. 3 in A minor (Scottish), 22-5 (Exx.
14-16), 44, 50, 54, 539
No. 4 in A (Italian), 22-4, 50, 54, 76,
539
No. 5 in D (Reformation), 22-3 (Exx.
12-13), 25, 29, 49-50
Mendes, Catulle, 406
Mercadante, Saverio, 153, 176, 422
operas, 101, 143, 155-62, 172, 191, 410,
412-13
Amleto, 365
Elena da Feltre, 155-6, 158, 159-60 (Ex.
114), 162
Giuramento, Il, 155, 158-9 (Ex. 113),
161, 167
Pelagio, 412-13 (Ex. 307)
Statira, 162, 412
Vestale, La, 155-7 (Ex. 112), 158
Violetta, 415
Virginia, 410, 412
Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 723
Mérimée, Prosper (writer), 127 & n”
Carmen (1845), 380, 381n/6, 383-4
Chronique du régne de Charles IX (1829),
97
Merkel, Gustav, 557
Mery, Joseph (librettist), Don Carlos
(Verdi), 358
Meurice, Frangois Paul (dramatist), Ascanio
(1852), 390
Mey, Lev (poet and dramatist), 704, 713,
720
Pskovityanka (1860), 444
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 50, 85, 90, 189, 196,
331
and Scribe, 90, 363
influenced by Weber, 54
influence on
Berlioz, 57
Franchetti, 436
Marchetti, 417
Serov, 440
923
incidental music, Struensee, 16, 56, 58
(Ex. 35)
masque, Das Hoffest in Ferrara, 189
operas, 93-100, 117-19, 189, 331-3, 349-
54, 411, 420
Africaine, L’, 92, 349-54 (Exx. 227-32),
367, 411, 425, 430, 433
Crociato in Egitto, Il, 93
Dinorah, 332-3 (Exx. 204-5)
Étoile du nord, L’, 331-2, 377
Feldlager in Schlesien, Ein, 189, 199,
208, 331
Huguenots, Les, 90, 97-100 (Exx. 51-7),
101, 189, 354, 362-3 (Ex. 244), 409
Prophete, Le, 51, 53, 91, 117-19 (Exx.
78-80), 199, 354, 369, 388n**, 391
Robert le diable, 51, 86, 92-3, 93-7
(Exx. 46-50), 104-5nn, 189, 354, 379
songs, 690
‘Chant de mai’, 690, 703
Michelangelo Buonarroti (as poet), 680
Mickiewicz, Adam (poet), 250, 726, 728-9,
732, 736-7
Konrad Wallenrod (c.1824), 432, 464
Wojewoda, 506
Milan, Conservatory, 174-5
Milan, La Scala Opera House, 182-3, 410,
425-6, 433
Milan, Teatro dal Verme, 432, 437
Millais, Sir John, 776
‘Miller of Dee, The’, 389
Milliet, Paul (librettist), Hérodiade
(Massenet), 381n*
Milton, John (poet), 828-9
Mirecki, Franciszek, 223 & п!"
operas, 223
Mirza-Shafi, 709
Mistral, Frederic (poet), Miréio (1859), 347
Moberg, Carl-Allan, 760n'!6
Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 376
Le Médecin malgré lui (1666), 334
Moniuszko, Stanislaw
choral works, 821-2
Mass in E flat, 821 (Ex. 531)
Sonety krymskie, 821-2 (Ex. 532)
operas, 459-64
Halka, 223, 459-60 (Exx. 341-2)
Hrabina, 461-2 (Exx. 343-4)
Straszny dwór, 462-3 (Ex. 345)
Verbum nobile, 461-2
songs, 729-32
*Czaty', 732 (Ex. 461)
‘Pieśń wieczorna’, 732 (Ex. 460)
‘Rozmowa’, 729-30 (Ex. 458)
*Znasz-li ten kraj?', 729-31 (Ex. 459)
Monpou, Hippolyte
operas, 121
songs, 684-7, 689
‘La Captive’, 684-5 (Ex. 431)
Moore, Thomas (poet), 192, 660, 664, 671, 775
924 1МОЕХ
Moore, Thomas (poet) (cont.)
Lalla Rookh (1817), 327, 331, 440
"Paradise and the Peri’, 191-2, 512, 660, 797
as a musician, /rish Melodies (1807-34),
480, 688, 770, 791
Mörike, Eduard (poet), 660, 662n'?, 672,
679n”, 680-1, 743
Moscheles, Charlotte, q. 62n?
Moscheles, Ignaz, q. 62, 63, q. 68, 69, q. 77,
80-1, 620
as a pianist, 237-8
Piano Concerto No. 7, 48
Mosen, Julius, 748
Mosenthal, Salomon von (as librettist), Die
lustigen Weiber von Windsor, (Nicolai),
191
Mosonyi, Mihaly, 477-8
operas, 479
Mottl, Felix, 322, 683n9?
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, xvii, 480, 536,
542, 612
chamber music, 60, 63, 151, 628
Piano Trio in E (К. 542), 69, 482
String Quartets (Divertimenti, K. 136-
8), xvii
keyboard works in Tchaikovsky's
Mozartiana, 573
motet, 'Ave Verum Corpus' (K. 618), 573
operas, 178, 197
Don Giovanni, 178, 224, 249, 261
Nozze di Figaro, Le, 204
Zauberflóte, Die, 202
songs
“Abendempfindung’ (К. 523), xx, 773
"Als Luise die Briefe’ (К. 520), xx
‘Das Veilchen’ (К. 476), 664
Mühlfeld, Richard, 632
Müller, the brothers, quartet, 61
Müller, Wilhelm, 783
Musäus, Johann Karl, 198
Musgrave, Frank, comic operas, 482
Musgrave, Michael, 596
Musical Union (1845-81), 62
Musset, Alfred de (poet), 687-8
Andalouse, L’, 684
Namouna (1832), 378
Mussorgsky, Modest, xix, 444, 636, 711, 824
& nn
choral works, 824
operas, 446-7, 448
Boris Godunov, 441, 443-5, 446, 447,
455, 457, 712, 720
Khovanshchina, 446-7, 455
Salanınıbö, 440-1, 446, 824
Sorochinskaya yarmarka, 446-7, 449
Zhenit ba, 443
with others, Mlada, 444 & n?
orchestral work, St John's Night on the
Bare Mountain, 506
piano work, "The Great Gate of Kiev', 118
songs, xviii, 705, 710, 713-16, 717-23
.Detskaya, song-cycle, xx, 720
*Kalistratushka', 718 (Ex. 448)
"Ozornik', 719-20 (Ex. 450)
*Polkovodets', 705, 722-3
‘Svetik Savishna’, 706
‘Trepak’, 721-2 (Ex. 452), 722n®
Nadson, Semen, 723
Naples, Conservatory, 155, 161
Naples, Teatro Bellini, 436
Naray, Gyórgy, Lyra coelestis, 805
Nathan, Isaac, see Braham, John
nationalism in music, 540-2
Neate, Charles, 771
Nekrasov, Nikolay, 704
Neruda, Jan, 742
Nerval, Gérard de (writer), Le Voyage en
Orient (1846-7), 346n?7
Nessler, Viktor, opera, Der Trompeter von
Säkkingen, 327
Netzer, Joseph, opera, Mara, 199, 205 (Ex.
130)
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Die, 63, q. 81n”,
509, 659, 669n?
Neukomm, Sigismund, 799
Neumann, Angelo, 450, 481n"$
"Neun, Wielfried von der’, 660, 663
New York, National Conservatory of
Music, 829
New York, National Theatre, 235
New York, Niblo's Theatre, 486
New York, Philharmonic Orchestra (1842),
62
Newcomb, Anthony, q. 317
Nicode, Jean Louis, 594
Nicolai, Otto, 187, 677n^5
operas, 191
Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, 191,
200, 202-3, 212
Niedermeyer, Louis
opera, Marie Stuart, 117
songs, 690, 691
Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn, 726
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 533
Der Fall Wagner (1888), q. 384
Niewiadomski, Stanistaw, songs, 736
‘Kołysanka’, 736 (Ex. 466)
Nordraak, Rikard, 765-6, 769
Noske, Frits, 361
Noskowski, Zygmunt, 735, 737
songs, 733-4
‘Skowroneczek śpiewa’, 734 (Ex. 463)
Nottebohm, Martin Gustav, 534
Nourrit, Adolphe, 688
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), xix,
195
Novotny, Josef Ondřej, song ‘Jabli¢ka’, 741-
2 (Ex. 470)
Nowak, Leopold, 590
INDEX 925
odes-symphonies, 31-2
Oehlenschläger, Adam Gottlob (writer)
Hakon Jarl (1805), 492
Skjoterloberen, 757
Offenbach, Jacques, 328, 395
ballet, Le Papillon, 397n™
operas, 333-4, 395-7, 397n™
Les Contes d Hoffmann, 137, 385-6,
395-7 (Exx. 289-90)
Orphée aux Enfers, 328, 333
O'Neill, Moira, 791
Onslow, George, 61, 81 & n?
chamber music, 81-2
Sextuor, Op. 77b, 81-2 (Ex. 42)
string quintets, 60, 63-4, 77, 81 & n?
piano sonatas, 239
symphonies, 39
opera
buffa, 177-81, 414-15
comique, 120-40, 328-36
lyrique, 328-9
romantic (1830-50), 85-236
romanticism in, xix-xx
semiseria, 415
opera in
Britain, 228-35, 479-85
Croatia, 225
Czechoslovakia, 224-5, 464-76
France, 85-140, 327-409
Germany, 185-213, 322-7
Hungary, 225-7, 477-9
Italy, 140-85, 409-38
Poland, 223, 459-64
Russia, 213-23, 438-59
United States, 235-6, 486-7
orchestras, early 19th C., 49-57
orchestras, opéra-comique, 137-40
Ostrovsky, Aleksandr (dramatist), 442
Groza (1860), 442, 504
Ne tak zhivi (1854), 442
Snegurochka (1873), 450
Son na Volge (1865), 444, 459
overture, the, in opera, 200-1
Pacini, Giovanni, 143, 172, 174, 175-7, 410,
413-14, 422
operas, 413-15
Convitato di Pietro, Il, 178-9 (Ex. 123)
Ivanhoe, 143-4 (Ex. 104)
Niobe, 249
Saffo, 176-7 (Ex. 121), 414
Symphony, ‘Dante’, 577
Pacius, Fredrik, 763
Paderewski, Ignacy Jan, songs, 736-7
‘Moja pieszczotka’, 737 (Ex. 467)
Paine, John Knowles
choral works, 829
incidental music, Oedipus Tyrranus, 488
songs, 778
Paisiello, Giovanni, 161
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi, Missa Papae
Marcelli, 793
Palla, Hynek, 742
Pankiewicz, Eugeniusz, songs, 735-6
‘Gdy ostatnia róża zwiedla', 736 (Ex. 465)
Papperitz, Robert, q. 485n'*!
Paris, Conservatoire, Société des Concerts
du, 50, 61
Paris, theatres and opera companies
Comédie-Italienne, 120n*”
Opera, 85-119 passim, 120, 196, 232, 342-
3, 369, 385, 688
orchestra, 50
productions, 122, 188, 328, 339-54
passim, 365, 385
Opéra-Comique, 109, 120-1, 232, 385
orchestra, 137-40
productions, 113, 121-3, 328, 365, 380,
385, 395, 398
Opéra-Comique National, 120n?
Opéra National, 120, 132, 328, 329n*
Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique, 86n?
Théátre de la Porte Saint-Martin, 86
Théátre de la Renaissance, 113
Théâtre Feydeau, 120n?
Théâtre Historique, 328
Théâtre Italien, 112, 120
Théâtre Lyrique, 328, 329n*, 385
productions, 336, 343, 347-8, 354, 376,
377n8, 402n!, 428
Parker, Horatio, oratorio, Нога novissima,
829
‘parlante’, the term, 410п!!!
Parry, Sir (Charles) Hubert, 487, 594, 787
choral works, 828
Blest Pair of Sirens, 828 (Ex. 537)
incidental music, 488
piano sonatas, 549
songs, 777, 787-9, 790
‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’, 787-8
(Exx. 495-6)
‘Lay a garland on my hearse', 789 (Ex.
497)
Pasdeloup, Jules Étienne, 541
Pasta, Giuditta, 185
Paul, Jean (pseud.), see Richter, Jean Paul
Paulsen, John, 767
Pease, Alfred H., songs, 784-6
‘My Little Love’, 784-6 (Ex. 494)
Pedrell, Felipe, 444
Pedrotti, Carlo, operas, 417
Fiorina, 415
Tutti in maschera, 414, 417
Peitl, Paul, 680
Pepoli, Count Carlo (librettist), / puritani
(Bellini), 142 & n*
Perger, Richard von, 625
Petrella, Errico, operas, 414-16, 426
Petrov, Ivan, 439n'?
926 1МОЕХ
Pfeiffer, Karl (librettist), 32
Der Alchymist and Pietro von Abano
(Spohr), 189
Pfitzner, Hans, 677
Pfleger-Moravsky, Gustav (poet), 742
Cyprise, 742, 750-1
Philadelphia, Chestnut Street Theatre, 235
Philharmonic Society, London, 62
Philidor, Frangois André, 130 & n?
opera, Le Bücheron, 334
piano, development of the, 237-8
piano music, 237-56, 542-56, 558-9
Piave, Francesco Maria (librettist), 146, 166,
168
Crispino e la comare (L. and F. Ricci), 414
Picek, V. J., 740п!°!
Pierné, Gabriel, 51
Pierson, Henry Hugo, 511-12, 787, 627-8
church works, 827-8
Jerusalem, 774, 827
operas, 186
orchestral works, 511-12
Faust, incidental music, 774, 828
Macbeth, symphonic poem, 511-12 (Ex.
374)
songs, 773-6. 781
‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’,
773-4 (Ex. 487)
‘John Anderson, my jo’, 773 (Ex. 486)
Pilati, Auguste, & F. von Flotow, opera, Le
Naufrage de la Méduse, 192
Pillet, Léon, 196
Pinto, George Frederick, 770
Planard, Frangois, 134
Planché, James (librettist), 6
Oberon (Weber), 229
Plantinga, Leon, q. 80
Platen, Karl August, Count von
Hallermund-, 660, 672
Pleshcheev, Aleksey, 704
Pleyel, Ignaz, quartets, 60
Plüddemann, Martin, 677
Poise, Ferdinand, 328
politics and Italian opera, 140-1, 162-5
Polonsky, Yakov (librettist), Vakula
(Tchaikovsky), 452
Ponchielli, Amilcare
ballet, Le due gemelle, 432
operas, 432-3
La Gioconda, 432-3
Potter, Philip Cipriani, 480, 771
Poulenc, Francis, 409
Pozniak, Wlodzimierz, q. 464
Praga, Emilio (as librettist), / profughi
fiamminghi (Faccio), 418
Prague, National Theatre, 467
Prague, Provisional Theatre, 465
Pratt, Silas G., operas, 487
Prechtler, Otto, 199
preghiera (prayer), the, in opera, 204-5, 212
Prévost (d'Exites), Abbé Antoine, . . .
Manon Lescaut (1731), 329, 393
Prochäzka, Ludevit, Alfred Symphony, 522
Proksch, Josef, 492, 745
Przerwa-Tetmajer, Kazimierz, 733, 738
Puccini, Giacomo, 417, 432, 436-7
chamber music, Crisantemi, 622, 624
orchestral work, Capriccio sinfonico, 576
operas, 437 ~
Le Villi, 437 (Ex. 319)
Purgold, Alexandra, 712
Pushkin, Aleksandr (poet), 508, 705-6, 709-
10, 712, 723
Boris Godunov (1825), 444, 446
Eugene Onegin (1828), 455
Kamenniy Gost (1830), 443
Kavkazskiy plennik (1821), 444
Pikovaya dama (1834), 458
Poltava (1829), 457
Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820), 219
"Tsarskosel'skaya statuya', 710
Püttlingen, Johann Vesque von (‘Hoven’),
188, 662n"*
operas, 188
Johanna von Orleans, 188, 199
Liebeszauber, 188, 198 & n!*, 199
Pyne, Louisa, 479
Pyne-Harrison Opera Company (1857-66),
233, 479-80
Quatuor Frangais, Société de (1862-5), 541,
640
Racine, Jean (dramatist), Arhalie (1691), 191
Raff, Joachim, 490, 509, 536, 779
chamber music, 622-5, 627-8
concertos, 620
Fantaisie-Sonate, Op. 168, 549
opera, Kónig Alfred, 187
Sinfonietta, Op. 188, 577-8
suites, 561, 564-6, 568-9
Op. 204, 565-6 (Ex. 400)
symphonies, 509, 539, 582-5
E minor, 567, 582-3
An das Vaterland, 577, 582-3
Im Walde, 582, 583-4 (Ex. 404)
Lénore, 518n??, 538, 582-3, 584-5
Raimondi, Pietro, 174
Raimund, Ferdinand (as dramatist), Der
Verschwender, 190
Raupach, Ernst (dramatist), 188, 199
Kónig Enzio, 199
as librettist, Die drei Wünsche (Loewe),
188, 199
Ravel, Maurice, q. 405, q. 409
Reber, Napoléon-Henri
songs, 690-2, 697
symphonies, 39
Redlich, Hans Ferdinand, 588
Reed, Thomas German, 482
INDEX 927
186
Reeves, Sims, q. 233n
Reger, Max, xviii, 594
register stops, 238
Reicha, Anton, 61, 65, 81, 151, 192, 198
Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 202, 662n^,
677n*
Reinecke, Carl, 787
serenades, 574, 625
Undine Sonata for piano and flute, 623
Reissiger, Karl Gottlieb, 194, 205
chamber music, 60, 69, 625
operas, 187
Rellstab, Ludwig (as librettist)
Ein Feldlager in Schlesien (Meyerbeer),
199, 331
Le Prophete (Meyerbeer), 199
Rety, Charles, 343
Reubke, Julius, 556
Organ Sonata, 556
Piano Sonata in B flat minor, 549
Revue Wagnerienne, La (1885-8), 385, 647
Reyer, Ernest, 401-5
ode-symphonie, Le Sélam, 32
operas, 401-5
Sigurd, 385, 403-5 (Exx. 299-301)
Statue, La, 378n", 402 (Ex. 298)
songs, 691-2
Rheinberger, Josef, 536
chamber music, 624-5
choral works, 809-10
organ sonatas, 557-8, 560
piano sonatas, 549
suites, 561
‚ Wallenstein, orchestral work, 509, 538
Ricci, Federico, 174
operas, 410, 415
Ricci, Luigi, 174, 176
opera, Piedigrotta, 177-8 (Ex. 122), 414
with F. Ricci, Crispino e la comare,
414-15
Rice, Edward Everett, opera, Evangeline,
486
Richepin, Jean (librettist), Le Roi malgré lui
(Chabrier), 408n!%
Richter, Hans, 599
Richter, Jean-Paul (novelist), xix, 197, 600
Flegeljahre (1804-5), 245
Ricordi, Giulio, 411n!!?, 437
Ricordi, publishers, 223, 426, 432, 436
Ries, Ferdinand, 47, 63, 239
opera, Liska, 203
Riese, Friedrich Wilhelm (librettist)
Alessandro Stradella (Flotow), 192, 199
Martha (Flotow), 192, 199
Matrosen, Die (Flotow), 192
Rietz, Eduard, 77
Riga, Stadtheater, 193
Rimsky-Korsakov, Aleksandr, 706
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay, 444-7, 459,
531, 542, 602, 824n*4
and Mussorgsky, 506n”’, 722
influenced by Balakirev, 710-12
chamber music, 636, 640
choral works, 824-5
operas, 447-50
Mayskaya noch’, 448-9 (Ex. 327), 452
Mlada, 450
Pskovityanka, 444-5, 447-8 (Exx. 325-
6), 450
Snegurochka, 450
with others, Mlada, 444 & nii"
orchestral works, 506, 508-9
Antar, 508-9, 567-8
Night on the Bare Mountain (after
Mussorgsky), 506n”
Sadko, 506
Sheherazade, 508, 531, 562, 567
Skazka, 508-9
Piano Concerto in C sharp minor, 616,
620, 715
Sinfonietta on Russian Themes, Op. 31,
541, 578
songs, 704-5, 710-12, 713, 729n*°
*Nochevala tuchka zolotaya', 711-12
(Exx. 441-2)
‘Tayna’, 712 (Ex. 443)
Symphony No. 1 in E flat, 602
Variations on BACH, 556
Ritter, Alexander, 525, 532, 677
orchestral works, 510-11
Olafs Hochzeitsreigen, 510-11 (Ex. 373)
Sursum Corda!, 510-11 (Ex. 372)
Ritter, Karl (dramatist), Ein Leben im Tode,
49], 510
Ritter, Peter, 191
Rivoli, Paulina, 460-1
Robert-Tornow, Walter, 680
Róckel, August, 195
Rode, Jacques Pierre, 61
Romagnési, A., q. 688-9
Romani, Felice (librettist), 146, 168
L'elisir d'amore (Donizetti), 180
romanticism, xvii-xx
in Italy, 140-1
Romanze, the, in opera, 203, 212
Ronconi, Giorgio, 150-1
Root, Deane, q. 485
Roquette, Otto, 804
Rosenhain, Jacob, 69
Rosenkranz, Václav Josef, 740
Rosier, J. B., with de Leuven (librettists), Le
Songe d une nuit d'été (Thomas), 123, 136
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (poet, transl. G.
Sarrazin), La Damoiselle élue, 819
Rossi, Gaetano (librettist), 101
Il giuramento (Mercadante), 162
Rossi, Lauro, operas, 425-6, 431-2
Rossini, Gioacchino, 57, 85, 151, q. 175, 815
church music, 816
Stabat Mater, 816 (Ex. 525)
928 INDEX
Rossini, Gioacchino (cont.)
Stabat Mater, 816 (Ex. 525)
operas, 104n?', 146, 165-6, 182, 186, 410
Cenerentola, La, 177
Donna del lago, La, 166
Guillaume Tell, 86, 93, 166, 172
Italiana in Algeri, L', 136
Occasione fa il ladro, І’, 414
Otello, 166, 169, 430
Semiramide, 413
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 740
opera, Le Devin du village, 362 (Ex. 243)
Royer, Alphonse, and Gustave Vaéz
(librettists), La Favorite (Donizetti), 113
Rubenson, Albert, 761n!!?
Rubini, Giovanni Battista, 185
Rubinstein, Anton, 327, 602, 607, 725
chamber music, 622, 636
operas, 444-5
Demon, The, 444-5
Dmitriy Donskoy, 438
Feramors, 327] (Ex. 200), 400, 445
Kupets Kalashnikov, 445 (Ex. 324), 447.
452
Makkabder, Die, 327
oratorios, 826
orchestral works, 506-7
Don Quixote, 506-7 (Exx. 368-70)
Faust, 506
Ivan Grozniy, 506
Océan Symphonie, 506, 538, 562, 577
suites, 561. 563-4
Serenades, Op. 22 for piano, 573
songs, 677, 709, 723-5
*Osyol 1 Solovey’, 723-4 (Exx. 453 4)
Rubinstein, Nicholas, 638
Rückert, Friedrich (poet), 660, 663, 671,
678 9, 748
*Liebesfrühling', 745
Rudorff, Ernst, 594
‘Rule, Britannia’, 329
Runeberg, Ludvig (poet), Fanrik Stats
sägner, 763
Rung, Henrik, 757-8
Rungenhagen, Friedrich, 190
Russian Musical Society, 602
Ruzicka, A., 740
Ruzitska, Jozsef, opera, Béla futasa, 225-6
(Ex. 149)
Ryan, M. D., 786
Sabina, Karel (librettist), 740п!°!
Bartered Bride, The (Smetana), 466,
740п!°!
Braniboři (Smetana), 466
Bukovin (Fibich), 475
V studni (Blodek), 472
Saint-Foix, Georges, xvii
Saint-Georges, Jules-Henri Vernoy de
(librettist), 122, 129
Catarina Cornaro (Lachner), 196
Éclair, L', (Halévy), 123, 129
~ Fille du Regiment, La (Donizetti), 113
Jolie Fille de Perth, La (Bizet), 376
Mousquetaires de la reine, Les (Halévy), 131
Saint-Saéns, Camille, 81, 384-5, 386-90,
405, 541, 817
and Duparc, 515n?
and Liszt, q. 513 & n”, 514
chamber music, 641
Violin Sonata No. 1, 622, 641
choral works, 817-18
Le Déluge, 817-18 (Ex. 527)
concertos
Cello Concerto No. 1, 616
Piano Concerto No. 4, 617, 641
Piano Concerto No. 5, 620
Violin Concerto No. 1, 616
operas, 385-90
Henry VIII, 389-90 (Exx. 283-4), 390n°°
Samson et Dalila, 385-6, 387-9 (Exx.
279 82), 400
Timbre d'argent, Le, 386-7 (Ex. 278)
orchestral works, 513-14, 517, 561, 610
La jeunesse d Hercule, 513-14 (Ex. 375)
Suite algérienne, 570
songs, 690-1, 692-3
‘L’Attente’, 692 (Ex. 433)
symphonies, 610
No. 3 in С minor, 576-7, 610, 641
Sams, Eric, 635
Sanquirico, Alessandro, 183
Satie, Erik, 409
Sauvage, Thomas (librettist), 122, 134
Le Caid (Thomas), 136
Le Toréador (Adam), 132
Sax, Adolphe, 53
Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princess Carolyne von,
493
Scapigliatura, a cultural association, 417-18
Scarlatti, Domenico, 237, 430, 562n?
scene composition in opera, 209-13
Schantz, Filip von, 763
overture, Kullervo, 763
song, ‘Blomman’, 763-5 (Ex. 482)
Scheffel, Joseph Victor von, 748
Schenker, Heinrich, q. 302
Schiørring, Nils, 758п!!*
Schlegel, Friedrich von, q. 243
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von
(dramatist and poet), 166, 172-4, 187,
397, 740, 775
An die Künstler, 493
Braut von Messina, Die (1803), 14, 475
Demetrius, 473
Don Carlos (1787), 172, 358
Huldigung der Kunste: Orpheus, 491
Ideal und das Leben, Das, 493, 496
Jungfrau von Orleans, Die (1801), 172,
188, 191, 199, 456, 549
1МОЕХ 929
‘Lied von der Glocke, Das’, 819
Maria Stuart (1800), 172-3
Räuber, Die (1782), 172, 190
Wallenstein (1799), 491-2, 518, 522
Wilhelm Tell (1804), 166, 172, 667
Schmidt, Hans, 675
Schmitt, Florent, 385, 641
Schoenberg, Arnold, 320, 370, 566, 633, 683
Gurrelieder, 683
Schopenhauer, Arthur, Parerga und
Paralipomena (1851), 269
Schröder-Devrient, Wilhelmine, 193, 259
Schubert, Franz, xviii, 1, 38, 186, 535-6, 659
influence on
Brahms, 536, 598-9
Dvorak, 555
Italian opera, 426
Sullivan, 483
others, 536
chamber music, 63, 69-70
Grand Duo, 629
Octet (D. 803), 63, 78
String Quintet in C, 77, 629, 653
Lieder, xx, 535, 659-60, 662, 667, 683n9^,
688
‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, 130-2
*Heidenróslein', 689
‘Nähe des Geliebten’, 757
Schöne Mullerin, Die, 660, 773
opera, Alfonso und Estrella, 187
overtures, 2
piano works
Fantaisie (Wanderer), 243, 490, 535, 545
impromptus, 250
overtures for piano duet, 2
Phantasie, Op. 103, 243
sonatas, 238-9
symphonies
No. 8 in B minor, 535
Мо О С, 537535
Schuberth, Karl, Quartet No. 3, 624
Schudi, harpsichord-makers, 237
Schulz, J. A. P., 759
Schumann (nee Wieck), Clara, 66, 241, 254,
539 & пі, 562-3, 659, 660n*, 675
and Brahms, q. 537, 628-30, 675-6
Romance variee, Op. 3, 244-5
Trio in G minor, 70
Schumann, Robert, xvii-xix, 51-3, 55-6, q.
63, 80-4, 250-2, 769
and
S. Bennett, 771
Brahms, 556
Franz, 669
R. Strauss, 600
Wagner, 15
аз а critic, 69
on S. Bennett, 5, 562n^
on Brahms, 545
on Chopin, q. 250, 620 & n"
on others, 11, 70, 669, 774, 797
on piano sonatas, q. 239, q. 542
influence on
Borodin, 603
Hallstróm, 761
Liszt, 497-8
Tchaikovsky, 505
chamber music, 65-8, 624-5
Andante and Variations, Op. 46, 66-7
(Ex. 36), 245
Fantasiestück, Op. 88, 70n”
Phantasie for violin, 46
Piano Quartet in E flat, 60, 67-8, 70n°*,
647
Piano Quintet in E flat, 67
piano trios, 70-2, 625
No. 2 in F, 70-2 (Ex. 37)
violin sonatas, 68 & n?, 625
choral music, 797-9
Neujahrslied, 52
Paradies und die Peri, Das, cantata,
192, 797-8 (Ex. 504)
Requiem für Mignon, 798-9 (Ex. 505)
concertos, 45-9, 618
Cello Concerto in A minor, 48-9, 617
Introduction and Allegro appassionata,
46
Piano Concerto in A minor, 45, 47-9,
490
Violin Concerto in D minor, 48-9
Lieder, xx, 659-63, 667, 683, 710, 748
‘An Anna’, 242
‘Ballade von Hardeknaben’, 683
‘Dein Angesicht’, 759n!?
Dichterliebe, 660-1, 710
Frauenliebe und -leben, 67, 72, 660
& n°
*Kartenlegerin, Die’, 681
Liederalbum für die Jugend, 662, 676n*
operas, 191-2, 197
Genoveva, 15, 192, 198, 202, 208-10,
322
Hermann und Dorothea, 14
orchestral works, 12, 14-15, 16-17
Manfred, overture, 15 (Ex. 7), 490
incidental music, 16-17 (Ex. 8), 56,
209, 683
Overture, Scherzo and Finale, 562,
578n*?
Szenen aus Goethes Faust, 15, 54-6 (Ex.
33), 799
organ work, Fugues on BACH, 556
piano works, 243-7, 251
Konzert Allegro, 46
Phantasie in C, Op. 17, 243
Romanze in F sharp, Op. 28/2, 70n?
sonatas, 239, 241-3, 252
Sonata in G minor, 241-2 (Exx. 157-
9)
Symphonette, 14
930
Schumann, Robert (cont.)
symphonies, 41-4
іп С minor, 14, 20 1 (Ex. 11)
No. 1 in B flat (Spring), 14, 41-2, 44,
553955
INDEX
Richard III, 491-2
„Romeo and Juliet, 348, 490
Taming of the Shrew, The, 324-5
Tempest, The, 129n"', 191, 476, 487, 505,
524
No. 2 in C, 41 (Ex. 24), 44 & n®
No. 3 in E flat (Rhenish), 41-2, 44, 52,
70, 577, 580
No. 4 in D minor, xix, 14, 42-4 (Exx.
26-9), 49, 55, 539 & п!, 576, 580-1
Schuppanzigh, Ignaz, 64
Scott, Sir Walter (novelist), 183, 671
Bride of Lammermoor, The (1819), 223
Fair Maid of Perth, The (1828), 376
Guy Mannering (1815), 123 & n“
Kenilworth (1821), 223
Lady of the Lake, The, 166
Peveril of the Peak (1823), 87
Scribe, Eugene (as librettist), 90-1, 112,
122-3, 129, 191, 363, 384
composers worked with
Adam, 132, 134
Auber, 87-8, 91, 100, 122, 124-5, 127,
180, 329
Berlioz, 112
Boieldieu, 123n**
Donizetti, 112-13, 116
Gounod, 342
Halévy, 102. 104
Meyerbeer, 93-4, 94п°°, 99n”, 117, 199,
Sharp, Cecil, 791
Shaw, George Bernard, q. 235
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 683, 774, 781
Shpazhinsky, Ippolit, 457
Sibelius, Jan, song, ‘Serenad’, 763
Silvestre, Armand (librettist), Henry VIII
(Saint-Saéns), 389
Sinding, Christian, songs, 769
Singerkriec uf Wartburc, 13th-C. poem, 194
Sjogren, Emil, songs, 762 & n"!
Škroup, František Jan
operas, 224-5
Drätenik, 224 (Ex. 148), 225, 465, 740
Meergeuse, Der, 465
songs, 740-1
“Where is my home?', 225
Škroup, Jan Nepomuk, 741n'?
Skuhersky, Frantisek Z.
opera, Vladimir, Роһи zvolenec, 465
songs, 742-3
Sládek, Josef Václav, 742, 748
Slovo o polku Igoreve (Igor's Campaign,
Russian epic), 444, 464
Smareglia, Antonio, 436
Smetana, Bedřich, 540-1, q. 648
331, 349-50 chamber music, 622-3, 647-8
Moniuszko, 461 choral work, Píserí na mori, 813
Thomas, 134 operas, 465-72
Verdi, 354-5 Dalibor, 466-7, 468-9 (Ex. 347)
as dramatist, 474
Scudo, Pierre, 120
Sebor, Karel, operas, 465
Sechter, Simon, 188, 586, 808
Masses, 799, 808
Selmer, Johan, 769
Serassio, Pierantonio, 493
serenade, the, 573-5
Serning, Eva, 751n'^*
Serov, Aleksandr, 443, 452, q. 706-7
operas, 440-2
Judith, 440-1
Dvé vdovy, 470-1 (Ex. 348)
Hubička, 471-2 (Ex. 349), 747
Libuse, 466-7, 470, 522-3, 743
Prodaná nevésta (Bartered Bride), 465-7
(Ex. 346)
overtures, 2
piano works, 256
songs, 745-7
Večerní pisnä, 746-7 (Ex. 473)
symphonic poems, 491-2, 522-3
Ма Vlast, 522-3, 524, 538
Snoilsky, Count Carl, 761
Rogneda, 440-2 (Ex. 322), 443, 446-7 Soane, George (librettist), The Night
Vrazh ya sila, 442,443-4 (Ex. 323),444n'” Dancers (Loder), 230
Serova, Valentina, 444n'? Société Nationale de Musique (1871), 541,
Shakespeare, William, 136, 166, 168-72, 173, 640, 647
569, 774-6, 787-8 Södermann, August, songs, 761-2
Hamlet, 269, 365, 367, 493 ‘Ingerid Sletten’, 761-2 (Ex. 481)
Julius Caesar, 14 Solera, Temistocle (librettist), Giovanna
King Lear, 190 d Arco (Verdi), 172
Macbeth, 169, 171, q. 530, 569 Somervell, Sir Arthur, 777
Measure for Measure, 193 songs, 792
Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 191 Somma, Antonio (librettist), Un ballo in
Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 123, 396 maschera (Verdi), 101
Much Ado about Nothing, 335 song, solo
Othello, 166 Britain and United States, 769-92
INDEX 931
Czechoslovakia, 739-56
France, 684-703
Сегтапу, 659-83
Poland, 725-39
Russia, 704-25
Scandinavia, 756-69
Sonzogno, Edoardo, 436-7
Sophocles, 191
Sousa, John Philip, 485
Souvestre, Emile, and Bourgeois
(dramatists), Le Pasteur, 166
Sowinski, Wojciech, church music, 823
Spies, Hermine, 675
Spitta, Julius Auguste, 535
Spohr, Louis (Ludwig), хуй, 46, 74, 80, 183,
793
as a conductor, 189, 195
his pupils, 38, 77, 763
chamber music, q. 61, 63-5, 78-9, 625
Double Quartet, Op. 87/3, 78-9 (Ex. 41)
piano trios, 70, 79n®
operas, xix-xx, 186, 188-9, 197, 199, 210
Berggeist, xx, 188, 197, 210
Jessonda, xx, 186, 188, 199, 205
Kreuzfahrer, Die, 189, 199-200
oratorio, Die letzten Dinge, 793-4 (Ex.
501)
Piano Sonata, Op. 125, 253 (Ex. 163)
symphonies, 32-8, 580, 610
No. 4, Die Weihe der Töne, 32-3, 34,
36-7 (Ex. 19), 38 (Ex. 21), 53, 489
No. 6, Historische, 33-5, 38 (Ex. 20)
No. 7, Irdisches und Göttliches in
Menschleben, 33, 34-5 (Ex. 18), 37
Violin Concerto, 616
Spontini, Gasparo Luigi, 57, 104n”, 185
operas
Fernand Cortez, 1, 53, 85
Nurmahal, 210
Olimpie, 1
Vestale, La, 201
Stagnelius, Erik Johan, 761
Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers, 777, 787
choral works, 829
The Revenge, 814, 829
incidental music, 488
opera, Shamus O' Brien, 481
songs, 787, 789-92
‘Belle dame sans merci, La’, 790-1
(Ex. 498)
"Broken Song, A’, 791-2 (Ex. 499)
Stasov, Vladimir, 445, 502, 505, 602, 636,
716, 824п2*
Steibelt, Daniel. 47, 214, 620
Stellovsky, Fyodor, 708
Stenhammar, Wilhelm, 762
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 791
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 320
Stolba, Josef (librettist), Tvrdé palice
(Dvořák), 473
Stoltz, Rosina, 116
Strauss, Johann, the younger, 324, 565-6,
5175
орегаз, 324, 575
waltzes, 565-6
Strauss, Richard, 320, 390, 510-11, 530, 600
chamber music, 625, 635-6
Concerto for horn and orchestra, Op. 11,
617, 619
operas
Capriccio, 636
Salome, 319, 391
piano works, 549
Serenade for wind, 573
songs, 672, 678-9, 683
Suite for wind, Op. 4, 562
symphonic poems, 530-3
Also sprach Zarathustra, 510, 525, 533
Aus Italien, 525, 529-30 (Ex. 382), 600
Don Juan, 525, 530-1
Don Quixote, 525, 531-2
Ein Heldenleben, 525, 533
Macbeth, 525, 530
Symphonie Domestica, 525, 533
Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, 525,
531-2 (Ex. 383) “
Тоа und Verklärung, 525, 530, 532
symphonies, 533, 600
Stravinsky, Igor, 261, 320
Street-Klindworth, Agnes, 494, 538n?
Sturm, Julius, 679, 748
Suckling, Sir John, 788-9
suite, the, 560-73
Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 324, 485n!*!
incidental music, The Tempest, 487
operas, 483-5
Iolanthe, 231, 483
Ivanhoe, 481
The Yeomen of the Guard, 483-4 (Ex.
356)
oratorios, 813-14, 828
songs, 776-7
"Lost Chord, The’, 786
*No Answer', 776-7 (Ex. 489)
‘Orpheus with his Lute’, 776 (Ex. 488)
Suppe, Franz von, 327
Surzynski, Józef, 821
Svendsen, Johan, Cello Concerto, 616, 619
Sylphide, La, ballet, 229
Sylvestre, Armande, 694
symphonic poems, etc., 489-533
symphony, the term, 575-6
Syrokomla, Władysław (Ludwik
Kondratowicz), 732 & п?!
Szigligeti, Ede (librettist), Dózsa György
(Erkel), 477
Szymanowska, Maria, songs, 726-7
"Wilija', 726-7 (Ex. 455)
Taneev, Sergey, 556
Tasso, Torquato, 493
932 INDEX
Taubert, Karl Gottfried Wilhelm, 662n'?
Acht Minnelieder für das Pianoforte, 254
operas, 186-7
Tausig, Carl, Das Geisterschiff, symphonic
ballad, 509
Tchaikovsky, Modest (as librettist),
Pikovaya dama (Tchaikovsky), 458
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilich, xvii-xix, 16, q.
466 & n", q. 817
and Rubinstein, 602, 607, 725
influenced by
Balakirev, 505, 508, 602, 609, 709
Berlioz, 505, 606, 609
Bizet, 384, 458, 686
Delibes, 606
Liszt, 609
Litolff, 505
Mozart, 536, 606
Schumann, 505
ballets, 458-9
The Nutcracker, 458-9, 572
chamber music, 622, 637-40
String Sextet, Souvenir de Florence, 624,
638
choral works, 826
Liturgy of St John, 825-6 (Ex. 535)
concertos, 617-20
incidental music. Snegurochka, 450
operas, 450-9
Charodeyka, 457-8 (Ex. 340)
Cherevichki (Vakula), 453-4 (Ex. 332)
Eugene Onegin, 455-6 (Ex. 333-7), 713
Iolanta, 458-9
Kuznets Vakula, 449-50, 452-4 (Exx.
330-1)
Mazepa, 456-7
Oprichnik, 444-5, 450-2 (Ex. 328)
Orleanskaya deva, 456-7 (Exx. 338-9), 459
Pikovaya dama, 458, 459
Undine, 450, 459, 607
Voevoda, 442, 444, 450-2 (Ex. 329), 459
overture, The Storm, 442
piano works, 549, 607
programme music, 504-6
Manfred Syniphony, 505, 508-9, 602,
606, 608-9
Romeo and Juliet, 505, 602
The Tempest, 505, 521
serenades, 573-4
songs, 704, 712-14
*Korol'ki', 714 (Ex. 443)
suites, 561, 567, 570-2, 573
No. 3, 561, 571-2 (Ex. 402), 573
Mozartiana, 572-3
symphonies, 576, 578-80, 603, 606-10
No. | in G minor, 539, 606-7, 609
No. 2 in C minor, 541, 607-8 (Ex. 414)
No. 3 in D, 577, 608
No. 4 in F minor, 541, 579-80, 607,
608-9
No. 5 in E minor, 531, 608-9
. No. 6 in B minor, 539, 609-10
Tégner, Esaias, 760-1, 763
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 671, 775-7, 786,
792, 829
Thayer, Alexander Wheelock, 534
Thern, Károly, 477
operas, 226 E
Thomas, Ambroise, 121, 139, 362, 411
operas, 134-7, 363-7
Caid, Le, 122, 136
Comte de Carmagnola, Le, 134
Double échelle, La, 122, 134-5 (Exx.
98-9)
Hamlet, 365-7 (Exx. 248-51)
Mignon, 363-5 (Exx. 246-7), 392
Panier fleuri, Le, 122-3, 135-6 (Ex. 100)
Psyché, 331
Songe d'une nuit d'été, Le, 123, 136-8
(Exx. 101-2), 396
Piano Trio, Op. 2, 69-70
Thomas, Arthur Goring, opera, Esmeralda,
481
Tieck, (Johann) Ludwig (writer), xix, 672,
675
Blaubart (1845), 187
Gestiefelte Kater, Der (1844), 187
Getreue Eckart und der Tannhäuser, Die
(1800), 194, 198
Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva
(1799), 198
Tolstoy, Aleksey, 710, 713-14, 723
Tomášek, Vaclav Jan, songs, 740-1
Toscanini, Arturo, 411n!!?
Treitschke, G. Friedrich, 187
Trianon, Н. (librettist), /van IV (Bizet), 369
Trojan, F. B., 740п!°!
Trompette, La, chamber music society, 641
Turchaninov, Pyotr Ivanovich, 823
Tyl, J. K. (dramatist), Fidlovacka (1834),
225
Uhland, Johann Ludwig (poet), 187, 705,
743
‘Harald’, 518
Sängers Fluch, Des (c.1810), 509
Upton, William T., 778, 784
Vaccai, Nicola, 172, 174-5
opera, Maria Visconti, 163, 175 (Ex. 120)
text-book, Metodo pratico di canto italiano
(1832), 175
Vaéz, Gustave, see Royer, Alphonse
Van der Velde, K. (novelist), Der Flibustier,
223
Vanloo, A. (librettist), L’ Étoile (Chabrier), 406
Veit, Wenzel, 659
Venice, Teatro la Fenice, 423n'°
INDEX 933
Verdi, Giuseppe, xvii, 409-10, q. 411n!!?, 219, 441
418, 434, 436п!, 437 Churova dolina, 219
church music, 815-16 Gromoboy, 214, 219, 438-9, 441
Requiem, 815-16 (Ex. 524) Pan Twardowski, 213, 214
operas, xviii, 140, 146, 161, 410, 412 Toska po rodine, 219
and Wagner, 359 Vadim, 214, 219, 438
aria, the, 143, 151, 158, 160 Vesely, J. O., (librettist), Selma sedläk
influence on Dvorak, 815 (Dvorák), 473
influence on English opera, 481 Viardot-Garcia, Pauline, 117
later operas, 155, 427-31 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 525
literary influences, 166 Vienna theatres
Hugo, 167-8 Hoftheater, 191
Schiller, 172-4 Josephstadt, 187
Shakespeare, 168-72 Kärntnertor, 186-7
Paris, in, 354-61 Theater an der Wien, 190
political influences, 162-5 Vierne, Louis Victor, 559
Verdian synthesis, 420-5 Vieuxtemps, Henry, violin concertos, 616-
Aida, 358, 425, 4277-8 (Ex. 313) 17, 619
Attila, 166, 173, 410 Vinje, Aasmund Olavsson, 767
Ballo in maschera, Un, 101, 416, 423-5 Viole, Rudolfe, Piano Sonata, Op. 1, 549
(Ex. 312) Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), Aeneid,
Battaglia di Legnano, La, 164-5 (Ex. 336-8
116) Volkmann, Robert, 556, 625
Don Carlos, 92, 250, 425, 427 serenades, 573-4
in France, 172, 328, 354, 358-61 Trio in B flat minor, 622
(Exx. 238-42) Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 188
in Italy, 428 Vorel, Josef, 740, 741n'?
Ernani, 164, 167-8, 173 Vofisek, Jan, 250
Falstaff, 191, 411n'?, 430-1 (Ex. 316) Vórósmarty, M., 479
Forza del destino, La, 358, 425, 427 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 740
Giovanna d Arco, 163, 172 Vrchlicky, Jaroslav, 742, 814
Jérusalem, 354
Lombardi, I, 163, 165-7
Luisa Miller, 156, 173-4 Wackenroder, Wilhelm, xix
Macbeth, 150, 156, 164, 169-72 (Exx. Wagner, Cosima, 258-9
117-19), 354, 425, 428 Wagner, Minna, 258
Masnadieri, I, 172-4 Wagner, Richard, xvii-xix, 193-6, q. 198,
Nabucco, 162-4 (Ex. 115), 165-7, 173 211, 343
Oberto, 143, 145 (Ex. 105) and
Otello, 332, 424-5, 429-30 (Exx. 314- Auber, q. 88
15), 433 Beethoven, q. 534
Rigoletto, 156, 167-8, 420-1 (Ex. 309), Berlioz, 11-12, 260
422, 425, 429, 432 Brahms, 551
Simon Boccanegra, 250, 423-4 (Ex. Franz, 670 & nii
311), 427, 428 Halévy, q. 101n?, 105, 107n”
Stiffelio, 166 Holtei, 188
Traviata, La, 174, 381, 422-3 (Ex. 310) Liszt, 262-3, 490, 499
Trovatore, Il, 421-2 Marschner, 189
Vepres siciliennes, Les, 91-3, 328, 354-8 Schróder-Devrient, 193, 259
(Exa 2337) Schumann, 15
Verga, Giovanni, 436 Spohr, 189
Verlaine, Paul (poet), 699 and the overture, 200
as librettist for Chabrier, 406 as conductor, 6, 187
Vernet, Horace, 329 as librettist for others, 193-4, 202
Véron, Louis, 89 & n? influenced by
Verstovsky, Aleksey Nikolaevich, 213, 214- Beethoven, 13, 193, 259, 261-2, 298
16, 438-9 Schopenhauer, 269
ballads, 705 Weber, 13, 54, 193
operas, 214-16 influence in England, 481
Askol'dova mogila, 214-16 (Exx. 135-8), influence in France, 385, 516, 647
934
Wagner, Richard (cont.)
influence on
Bruckner, 585-6, 589, 635
Bülow, 510
Chabrier, 320, 385
D’Indy, 521
Duparc, 515, 518, 699
Dvorák, 524
Fibich, 475
Franchetti, 436
Franck, 385
Massenet, 434
Saint-Saéns, 385, 388-9
Schoenberg, 320
Serov, 443
Sjógren, 762
R. Strauss, 320, 529, 531
Wolf, 320, 525, 680-1
influence on orchestral music, 525-33
life and works, 257-8
on singing, 193, 209-10
theories, 258-63
writings, q. 193, 257, 537
Mein Leben (1976 edn.), q. 262-3, 269
Oper und Drama (1851), 197, 213, 257,
265
‘Zukunftsmusic’ (‘Music of the Future’,
1860), q. 259-60, q. 262
choral work, Das Liebesmahl der Apostel,
799-800
incidental music
Faust, 209
König Enzio, 13, 199
operas, xviii, xx, 193-6, 197, 213, 257-
321, 425-6
compositional procedures, 263-6
heritage, 319-21
tonality, 266-8
Feen, Die, 193, 203-8 (Ex. 133)
overture, 5, 201
Fliegende Holländer, Der, 186, 193, 425-6
overture, 101
productions, 189, 481 & п!
score, 202-4, 206-8
sources, 194, 196, 199
Hochzeit, Die, 193
Liebesverbot, Das, 12-13 (Ex. 5), 209
overture, 201
Lohengrin, 193, 195, 499
preludes, Acts I and III, 56, 201
productions, xviii, 187, 196, 322, 385,
425-6, 481 & п!”
score, 208-9, 212-13, 430
INDEX
Parsifal, xx, 250, 258, 261, 267, 298,
315-19 (Ex. 194)
7 Rienzi, 51, 186, 193-4, 205, 209, 385
overture, 201
Ring, Der, see below Tristan und Isolde
Tannhäuser, 193, 195, 258, 441
overture, 56, 201
productions, 195, 258, 296, 385, 481
& nU$, 586
score, 195, 203, 205, 209, 211-12, 267
sources, 194-5, 198
Tristan und Isolde, xx, 258, 296-7, 322
prelude, 264, 296, 385
productions, 322, 385, 426, 586
score, 16, 137, 250, 268, 291-6 (Exx.
179-81), 298 (Ex. 182), 670
Ring des Nibelungen, Der, cycle, 196-7,
213, 250, 258 & n?, 265-70, 291
complete productions, 258, 450,
481n"*
A. Das Rheingold, 269-70, 286, 303, 312
score, 13, 259, 265, 270-7 (Exx. 168-
71)
B. Die Walküre, 287
score, 265, 277-86 (Exx. 172-5), 305,
370
C. Siegfried, 257, 262
score, 258, 264, 286-91 (Exx. 176-8),
302-7 (Exx. 187-9), 310-12
D. Gétterdammerung, 196, 257-8, 286
score, 270, 275, 307-15 (Exx. 190-3)
operas projected
Bergwerke von Falun, Die, 194, 202
Sarazenin, Die, 194
Wieland der Schmied, 196
orchestral works
Kaiser-marsch, 12
Siegfried Idyll, 14, 576
overtures, 12-14
in С major and D minor, 12
Christoph Columbus, 13
Faust, 13-14 (Ex. 6), 15, 22, 490, 492
Polonia, 12
“Rule Britannia’, 12-13 (Ex. 4)
piano music, 239-40
Fantasie in F sharp minor, 239-40 (Ex.
156)
Sonata in A, 239
Sonate für das Album von Frau M.W.,
549
songs, 670 & n^
Wesendoncklieder, 670, 683 & п?
Symphony in C, 20-1 (Ex. 10)
sources, 195, 198-9 Wagner, Siegfried, 258
Meistersinger, Die, 195, 258, 261, 315, Wallace, William Vincent, 228, 233-5, 479
467 operas, 234-5
overture, 14 Maritana, 233-4 (Ex. 155)
productions, 467 Walter, Gustav, 743n'??
score, 213, 267, 291, 296-302 (Exx. Warsaw
183-6), 317, 325 Conservatory, 725
INDEX 935
Institute of Music, 725-6, 733-5
Music Society, 726, 739
Opera House, 459, 461
Wasielewski, Wilhelm Joseph von, 41
Wasniewski, Jan, 738
Weber, Carl Maria von, хуй, xix, 1, 187,
189, 197, 209
as conductor, 188
influence on others, 54, 57, 475
influence on Russian opera, 213
on Spohr, q. 188
concertos, 620
Konzertstück for piano and orchestra,
47, 616
incidental music, Preciosa, 214, 232
operas, хуп-хх, 2
Euryanthe, xx, 189, 221, 261
Freischütz, Der, xx, 204, 212, 214-15,
224, 229, 475, 683
Oberon, xx, 201, 221, 229
overtures, 2
Ouvertüre zum Beherrscher der Geister,
2S lg
piano sonatas, 238-9
Webster, James, 628
Wegelius, Martin, 763
Weigl, Joseph, opera, Die Schweizerfamilie,
224
Welhaven, Johan, 766
Wennerberg, Gunnar, 760
Wenzig, Josef (poet), 674
as librettist for Smetana, 466
Werner, Zacharias (dramatist), Attila, König
der Hunnen, 166
Wesley, Samuel, 557, 770, 781
Wesley, Samuel Sebastian
choral works, 827-8
sacred songs, 786
Weyse, Christoph Ernst, 757, 759
White, Maude Valérie, songs, 777
Whitman, Walt, 790, 829
Widmann, Joseph Viktor (librettist), Der
Widerspänstigen Zähnung (Goetz), 324
Widor, Charles-Marie, 385
organ symphonies, 560
Wieck, Clara, see Schumann, Clara
Wiedebein, Gottlob, 659n?
Wiethorski, Count Mateusz, 60, 68
Wilde, Oscar, 391
Will Forster's Virginal Book (1624), 390
Willemar, Marianne von, 665
Willis, Richard, 777-8
Winge, Per, 769
Winter-Hjelm, Otto, 769
Winther, Christian, 767
Witwicki, Stefan, 727-8, 732
Wolf, Hugo, xviii, q. 592, 671-2, 674, 786
Lieder, xx, 320, 662, 666-8, 679-82, 683,
762n"!
Gedichte von Eduard Mórike, 680-1
Italienisches Liederbuch, 680-1
Spanisches Liederbuch, 669, 681, 682,
762
Italian Serenade, 573-4
opera, Der Corregidor, 679n°°
String Quartet їп D minor, 623, 635
symphonic poem, Penthesilea, 525, 526-8
(Ex. 381), 530
Wolf, Julius, 762
Wolfram, Joseph Maria, 199
Wolski, Wlodzimierz (librettist), Halka
(Moniuszko), 459
Woollett, H., 51, 81п??
Wordsworth, William, 781
Wüllner, Franz, 531
Würzburg, Stadttheater, 193
Wyzewa, Theodore de, xvii
Yastrebtsev, V. V., 508
Yradier, Sebastien, 381
Zagoskin, Mikhail (as librettist), 219
Askol'dova mogila (Verstovsky), 215, 441
Pan Twardowski (Verstovsky), 214
Zaleski, Jósef Bohdan, 729
Zanardini, Angelo (librettist), Hérodiade
(Massenet), 391n*?
Zarzycki, Aleksander, 739
Zelenski, Wladyslaw, 735
chamber music, 624
opera, Konrad Wallenrod, 464
songs, 733, 734
‘Zawód’, 733 (Ex. 462)
Zelter, Carl Friedrich, xviii, 47, 760
Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreevich (poet), 217,
456, 458, 705, 707
Twelve Sleeping Maidens, 214, 438-9
Zichy, Mihály, 493
Zingarelli, Niccoló Antonio, 161
Zola, Émile, 436
Zóllner, Carl, 659
Zuccalmaglio, A. W. von, see Kretschmar,
Franz
Zuelli, Guglielmo, opera, La fata del Nord,
437
Züngel, Emanuel (librettist)
Cesta oknem (Kovafovic), 474
Dvé vdovy (Smetana), 470, 474
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American Libraries
TV News
Understanding 9/11