Classicism Vs.
Romanticism
• Classic-defined by Aulos
Gallius, 2nd century A.D.
grammarian
• “A correctness of language and
style for a unique, elite,
civilized class of people
• Romantic-from “romance”
• A Medieval tale of poem
treating heroic personages or
events written in one of the
Romance languages
 Classicism
• Reason prevails in all provinces of thought. The universe
is capable of rational explanation as orderly, purposive,
structured, and regular
• Belief in reality, leaving little of validity to emotion.
Mystery and miracle are dispelled
• Uniform excellence desired in morals, social function,
and art
• The artist sought to appeal to rational good taste
• For the species, not the individual
• For seeking what is common to all
• For revealing the order and form inherent in a work of art
to thinking people of good taste
 Romanticism

• Distrust of universal formulae and impatience with rules

of procedure
• Development of a sense of awe and mystery
• Cultivation of individual, national, and racial peculiarities
• High value place upon originality
• Every person appreciates and understands through his
senses
• The glorification of self-rebellion & struggle
• Strong, Byronic heroes, masculine; later the emphasis shifts
to the willful, dominant female ideal
 Romanticism

• Nature not as rational and ordered but as a mirror of

unpredictability of human emotion and of the
uncertainties of life
• Fascination with the remote, the distant past. Revival
in interest in Roman Catholicism as a timeless
institution rooted in mystery
• Life is ever becoming…evolving. Romantic artists
express a longing for the unattainable. Death becomes
an obsession as the only haven for fulfilling the
struggle toward completeness
 Romanticism
• Romantic spirit
• “Something far off, legendary,
fictitious, fantastic, and
marvelous-imaginary and
ideal contrasted to the world
of the present.”
• Implies a freedom of the
individual, represents all that
man can become, possibility
Romanticism • Traits:
• Remoteness from everyday world
• Emphasis on the strange and the
fantastic
• Boundless: Aspires
• To transcend the immediate
• To reach backward and
forward in time
• To range outward to reach the
cosmos
 Romanticism
• Traits
• Cherishes freedom, passion, and endless pursuit of the
unattainable-a yearning after the impossible with longing
• The personality of the artists merges with the work of art
• The arts themselves merge
• Instrumental music seen as the only perfect vehicle for
communicating deep emotions, abstract and divorced from
the world, it is detached completely from the world and
therefore free to work on the mind and heart
 Music & Words
 Instrumental music is dominated by lyrical spirit of the
Lied
 Composers were also writers
 Carl Maria von Weber
 Robert Schumann
 Hector Berlioz
 Richard Wagner

 Program music was the solution to imbuing

instrumental music with the poetic & the pictorial
 Instrumental accompaniment of vocal music is
endowed with pictorial qualities itself
 Romanticism
• As containing contradictions and opposites
• The crowd and the individual
• Composers sought haven with a few friends, while at the same time
writing for a large new audience
• Disappearance of patronage system
• Composers write for posterity-an “ideal” audience which would
appreciate work
• Rise of the virtuoso performer-Paganini, Liszt-performer as hero
• The composer as prophet, along & struggling heroically against a hostile
environment
• The simple & complex existing side by side
• The Lied & Character piece-small, intimate forms
• The Program Symphony & Romantic Opera: enormous works in which the
composer creates an entire universe
 Science & the Irrational

• While the nineteenth century

saw an expansion of exact
knowledge, music delved into the
unconscious and the
supernatural, into dreams and
myth.
• Nature was seen as fraught with
mysterious significance way
beyond scientific fact-finding
Materialism & Idealism

• A secular, materialistic age

• Rise of the Industrial
Revolution
• A turning away from organized
religion, revival of interest in
Catholicism was for its
tradition & mystery of ritual
• The arts were seen as a
religion in themselves
• Sacred music was often
idealistic and of immense
proportion, a longing for the
eternal
 Nationalism
• A patriotic movement
which glorified the heritage
of a country by using its folk
music and historical
subjects in theatrical or
program music