ROMANTIC PERIOD

COMPOERS

Western Music - Grade 9

Poornima Pieris

St. Joseph’s College, Colombo 10

Characteristics of Romantic Period Music

• Freedom of form and design. It was more personal and emotional.

• Song-like melodies (lyrical), as well as many chromatic harmonies and discords.

• Dramatic contrasts of dynamics and pitch.

• Big orchestras, due mainly to brass and the invention of the valve.

• Wide variety of pieces (i.e. songs up to five hour Wagner operas)

• Programme music (music that tells a story)

• Shape was brought to work through the use of recurring themes.

• Great technical virtuosity.

• Nationalism (a reaction against German influence)

Frédéric Chopin

(Polish)

1st March1810 to

17th October 1849

Considered Poland's greatest composer,

Frédéric Chopin focused his efforts on

piano composition

Chopin was born in a small village of Zelazowa Wola, Duchy of Warsaw (now Poland). His father, Nicholas, was a French émigré who was working as a bookkeeper and soon after Chopin was born, Nicholas found employment as a tutor for aristocratic families in Warsaw.

His father's employment exposed young Chopin to cultured Warsaw society, and his mother introduced him to music at an early age. By age 6, Chopin was ably playing the piano and composing tunes. Recognizing his talent, his family engaged him with a professional musician for lessons, and soon the pupil surpassed the teacher in both technique and imagination. He published his first composition at age 7 and began performing one year later.

Sensing he needed a broader musical experience, Chopin's parents eventually sent him to Vienna, where he made his performance debut in 1829. Audiences were enthralled with his highly technical yet poetically expressive performances.

Over the next few years, Chopin performed in Poland, Germany, Austria and Paris, France, where he settled in 1832 and socialized with high society and was known as an excellent piano teacher. His piano compositions were highly influential.

Chopin helped to make the piano a successful solo instrument by writing most of his poetic compositions for solo piano. By the mid-1840s, Chopin's health were deteriorating. His behavior had also become erratic, possibly due to an undiagnosed form of epilepsy. He made an extended tour to the British Isles, where he struggled under an exhausting schedule, making his last public appearance on November 16, 1848. He then returned to Paris, where he died on October 17, 1849, at age 39. His body was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery, but his heart was interred at a church in Warsaw, near the place of his birth.

Compositions of Frédéric Chopin

• 54 Mazurkas

• Military Polonaise

• Minuet Waltz

• Raindrop Prelude

• Revolutionary Etude

Robert Schumann

(German)

8th June 1810 to

29th July 1856

Robert Schumann famed for his

concertos, symphonies, chamber works, lieder,

and piano music

One of the great composers of the 19th century, Schumann was the

quintessential artist whose life and work embody the idea of Romanticism in

music. Schumann was uncomfortable with larger musical forms, such as the

symphony and the concerto (nevertheless, representative works in these genres

contain moments of great beauty), expressing the full range of his lyrical genius

in songs and short pieces for piano. Schumann’s extraordinary ability to

translate profound, delicate and sometimes fleeting states of the soul is

exemplified by works such as the song cycle Dichterliebe (A Poet's Love), after

Heinrich Heine, and his brilliant collections of short piano pieces, including

Phantasiestücke (Fantastic Pieces), Kinderszenen (Scenes form Childhood),

and Waldszenen (Forest Scenes). In his songs, as critics have remarked,

Schumann attained the elusive union of music and poetry which Romantic poets

and musicians defined as the ultimate goal of art.

Schumann's father was a bookseller who encouraged Robert's musical and literary talents. Robert

started studying piano at age 10. In 1828, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig as a law student,

although he found music, philosophy, and Leipzig's taverns more interesting there than the law. He

also began studies with a prominent Leipzig piano teacher. was serious mental illness in

Schumann's family, and the composer, who most likely suffered from a manic-depressive

condition, approached madness with the typical Romantic combination of fear and fascination. A

compulsive womanizer and a heavy drinker, Schumann led a life that aggravated his psychological

problems. His efforts to become a concert pianist failed after he developed partial paralysis of his

right hand. Schumann settled on a career as a composer and musical writer. , He virtually

invented the short, poetic, descriptive Romantic piano work, and produced such works in glorious

profusion in the late 1830s. Schumann tackled larger forms in the 1840s. He held several musical

jobs, teaching at the newly-founded Leipzig Conservatory, eventually becoming town music

director in Düsseldorf, but without much success. In 1854, he threw himself into the freezing

waters of the Rhine. After his rescue, he voluntarily entered an asylum. Although he had periods of

lucidity, his condition deteriorated, and he died there in 1856, probably of tertiary syphilis.

Compositions of Robert Schumann

• Scenes from childhood

•

• Albums for the young • The happy farmer

• Soldiers March

• Melody

Franz Schubert

(Austrian)

31st January 1797 to

19th November 1828

Franz Schubert was a prolific composer, having

written some 600 lieder and nine symphonies.

Aged 10, the young Schubert won a place in the Vienna Imperial Court chapel

choir and quickly gained a reputation as a budding composer with a set of facile

string quartets.

After leaving chapel school and having completed the year's mandatory training,

Schubert followed his father into the teaching profession. This was at once a

calamitous move and a blessing, for it was Schubert's deep loathing of the

school environment that finally lit the touchpaper of his creative genius. The

same year he began teaching - 1814 - he produced his first indisputable

masterpiece, 'Gretchen am Spinnrade' ('Gretchen at her spinning wheel').

While Schubert was still struggling to hold down his full-time teaching post, he

not only composed 145 lieder (songs), the Second and Third Symphonies, two

sonatas and a series of miniatures for solo piano, two mass settings and other

shorter choral works, four stage works, and a string quartet, in addition to

various other projects. This period of intense creative activity remains one of the

most inexplicable feats of productivity in musical history.

With little money and nothing much more than his 'groupies' to support him,

Schubert began to produce a seemingly endless stream of masterpieces that for

the most part were left to prosperity to discover, including the two great song

cycles, Die Schone Mullerin and Winterreise, the Eighth ('Unfinished') and Ninth

('Great') Symphonies, the Octet for Wind, the last three string quartets, the two

piano trios, the String Quintet, the 'Wanderer' Fantasy and the last six sonatas

for solo piano.

Compositions of Franz Schubert

• Gretchen at the spinning wheel

• 143 songs including ‘The Erl king’ (Lieder)

• Serenade

• The Unfinished symphony

• The great symphony in C major

Franz Liszt

(Hungarian)

22nd October 1811 to

31st July 1886

Franz Liszt was one of the most important composers of the Romantic period as

his compositions inspired a whole generation of keyboard virtuosi.

Liszt’s output for solo piano was prodigious, centered on a core of more than

100 original titles, many of which subdivide into sets of half-a-dozen pieces or

more.

Liszt’s early progress was so astounding that by the age of nine he had already

mastered Ferdinand Ries’s excruciatingly difficult E flat major Piano Concerto.

Liszt developed a morbid obsession with death in the 1830s. Some particularly

horrific scenes during the Paris cholera epidemic of 1832 so moved him that he

once spent all night thrashing out the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) chant on the

piano.

Between 1839 and 1847 Liszt gave well over a thousand concerts throughout

most of western Europe, Turkey, Poland and Russia, stunning audiences

wherever he went with his blend of pianistic devilry and showbiz razzmatazz.

He started every performance by ceremoniously removing a pair of white gloves

and he invariably employed a second piano on stage so that onlookers could

admire his prowess from every conceivable angle.

In 1848, Liszt accepted a full-time professional post in Weimar where he

increasingly turned his attention towards composing.

In 1861 he moved to Rome. Such was his devotion to the church that Pope Pius

IX conferred on him the title of ‘Abbé’ four years later. The rest of his life was

dominated by a series of inspired sacred compositions, while his piano music

became more calmly reflective and meditative in tone.

Active to the end, even in 1886 (the year of his death) Liszt was on a tour which

embraced his first visit to London in more than 40 years.

July 1886 he died from dropsy complicated by pneumonia

Compositions of Franz Liszt

• Libestraum no 3

• La Campanella

• 20 Hungarian Rhapsodies

• 12 Etudes

• Faust symphony

Giuseppe Verdi

(Italian)

10th October 1813 to

27th January 1901

Giuseppe Verdi was an Italian composer who is

known for several operas, including La Traviata and

Aida.

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was born in a village near Busseto, which

was then a part of the First French Empire. His given name, registered in

French, was Joseph Fortunin François.

When he was still a child, young Giuseppe enjoyed educating himself at the

large library belonging to the local Jesuit school in Busseto. He also received his

first lessons in composition. Verdi went to Milan when he was 20 to continue his

studies. He took private composition lessons while attending operatic

performances and concerts, often of specifically German music. He gave his

first public performance in Bussetto in 1830 at the home of Barezzi, a local

merchant and music lover who had long supported his musical ambitions.

Verdi married Margherita and she gave birth to two children, Virginia and Icilio.

Both died in infancy while Verdi was working on his first opera and, shortly

afterwards, Margherita died aged only 26.

Verdi was devastated by their deaths. Verdi's final opera, Falstaff was based on

Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV Part I which was a

huge international success.In January 1901, while staying in Milan, Verdi

suffered a stroke. He died a few days later. Arturo Toscanini conducted the vast

forces of combined orchestras and choirs composed of musicians from

throughout Italy at his funeral service in Milan. To date, it remains the largest

public assembly of any event in the history of Italy

Compositions of Giuseppe Verdi

• Othello

• Aida

• Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves

• Rigoletto

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

(Russian)

7th May 1840 to

6th November 1893

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s works included

symphonies, concertos, operas, ballets, and

chamber music

Tchaikovsky was born on May 7th 1840 in Votkinsk, a small town in the Russian

Empire.

He displayed exceptional musical ability from an early age, improvising at the

piano and composing his first song in 1844, aged four.

Tchaikovsky persuaded his father that music was his future and he began

composition lessons with Anton Rubinstein in 1861.

Between 1871 and 1876 he produced a series of great works, including Swan

Lake (1876) and the First Piano Concerto (1875), which established him as

Russia’s leading composer.

Following his ill-fated, short-lived marriage in 1877, he made a failed attempt at

committing suicide.

1880 saw Tchaikovsky compose perhaps his most famous piece, the 1812

Overture - cannons at the ready!

By 1887, he was conducting his own music to great acclaim and producing such

works as the Sixth Symphony, the 'Pathetique' in 1893 (the year of his death)

and the ballets The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892).

His death in 1893 in St. Petersburg was believed to be as a result of a decision

made by a ‘court of honour’ following revelations that Tchaikovsky had formed a

relationship with a male member of the Russian aristocracy; it was apparently

decided that the only course of action open to the composer was for him to

commit suicide. It is more commonly attributed to cholera.

Compositions of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

• Swan Lake waltz

• Sleeping Beauty

• 1812 Overture

• Dance of Sugar Plum Fairy

• Waltz of the flowers