The Styling of the

Avant-Garde
The “Generation of the 1830s”
The “Generation of the 1830s”

Robert Schumann (1810-56) Clara Schumann (1819-1896)

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47) Fanny Hensel (1805-47)

Hector Berlioz (1803-69) Franz Liszt (1811-86)

Frédéric Chopin (1810-49) Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

Richard Wagner (1813-83)

Music Criticism
Part of a greater expansion of “print culture” in the early 1800s, rise of feuilletons

Robert Schumann: Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (Leipzig)

“Neue”, contemplating the concept of musical “progress”, establishing a “classical

music” of an ideal type that would remain eternally valid to the educated listener

Explanation for seemingly contradictory currents in Avant-Garde music community:

- Revival of long-forgotten music vs. demand for increasingly original musical idiom
- Codification of traditional musical forms vs. the avoidance of fixed form
- Fixation of a musical “canon” vs. promotion of stylistic plurality
Avant-Garde Aesthetics
Emphasis on instrumental music

Musical Idealism: music reflects ideas in the spiritual realm, music itself has “spirit”

Music’s ability to communicate: not “whether”, but “how and what”

“Absolute” and “Program” Music: points on a broad spectrum. New terms that
describe basic musical values and practices
 Program Music
Wagner: believed absolute music had to yield to musical drama

Liszt, Berlioz and others embraced “program music.”

Seeks to represent some kind of narrative, poetic, or emotional content, often with the aid of a
written document (“program”) that is meant to be read before or during the performance.

The program becomes an important part of the listener’s experience of the work.

Possibly involves imitations of sounds, but more typically, representations of feelings or ideas.

Historical precedents in Vivaldi (The Four Season), Beethoven (Symphony no. 6) and others
Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz (1803-69)
Unusual background compared to the other composers of this generation.
Comparatively late start in music (age 12): flute, guitar. Studied Rameau’s writings on
harmony.

Gave up medical studies to pursue music at the Paris Conservatoire, 1826.

Passion for literature, especially Shakespeare - Harriet Smithson

Prix de Rome - focus on orchestral music. Paganini: Harold in Italy

Music critic, conductor. Successful tours of Europe. Published collections of articles,

treatise on orchestration, autobiography “Memoires”
Principal Works
1830 Symphonie fantastique
1834 Harold en Italie (Symphony)
1837 Grand messe des morts (Requiem)
1839 Roméo et Juliette (“Dramatic Symphony”)
1845-46 La Damnation de Faust (“Dramatic Legend”)
1856-58 Les Troyens (Opera, based on Virgil’s Aeneid) - perhaps his masterpiece
1860-62 Béatrice et Bénédict (Opera, based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing)

1843 Grande traite d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes

1870 Memoires
Berlioz on his style

“Generally speaking, my style is very bold, but… I am always careful to make

my compositions abundantly melodic… Only, as [these melodies] are often
on a very large scale, a shallow, undeveloped sensibility is slow to grasp
their form. They may also be combined with other subsidiary melodies
which, for these same weak spirits, obscure their outline. Finally, such
melodies are so unlike the desperately trivial little tunes which the riff-raff
of the musical world understands by the term, that it cannot bring itself to
admit that they are tunes at all.”
Berlioz on his style

“The predominant features of my music are passionate expression, inward

intensity, rhythmic impetus, and a quality of unexpectedness. When I say
passionate expression, I mean an expression bent on reproducing the inner
meaning of its subject, even when that subject is the opposite of passion,
and gentle, tender feelings are being expressed, or a profound calm -- the
sort of expression that people have claimed to find in The Childhood of Christ,
and even more, in the scene in Heaven in The Damnation of Faust and the
Sanctus in the Requiem.
 Berlioz on his style
“As to those works… in which I use normal resources, it is precisely their expressiveness, their
inner fire and rhythmic originality that have done them the greatest harm, on account of the
qualities they demand from the performer. To perform them well, everybody concerned, the
conductor most of all, must feel as I feel. They require a combination of irresistible verve and
the utmost precision, a controlled vehemence, a dreamlike sensitivity, an almost morbid
melancholy, without which the essential character of my phrases is falsified or even
obliterated. For this reason I find it exceedingly painful to hear most of my works conducted by
someone other than myself. I thought I would have apoplexy when I heard the King Lear
Overture in Prague directed by a kapellmeister of indisputable merit. It was approximately
right; but in such a case approximately right is totally wrong…”
Symphonie fantastique
Symphonie fantastique (1830)

Episode in the Life of an Artist: Fantastic Symphony in Five Parts

I. Reveries -- Passions
II. A Ball
III. Scene in the Country
IV. March to the Scaffold
V. Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
The Program

“The composer’s intention has been to develop, insofar as they contain

musical possibilities, various situations in the life of an artist. The outline
of the instrumental drama, which lacks the help of words, needs to be
explained in advance… The distribution of this program to the audience…
is indispensable for a complete understanding of the dramatic outline of
the work.”
Instrumentation: over 90 players!

2 Flutes (dbl. Piccolo), 2 Oboes (dbl. English Horn), 2 Clarinets, 4 Bassoons

4 Horns, 2 Cornets, 2 Trumpets, 3 Trombones, 2 Ophicleides (now Tubas)

4 Timpani (played by 4 players), Bass drum, Snare drum, Cymbals, Bells

2 Harps (used in second movement)

Violins I, II, Viola, Cello, Double Bass (calls for at least 15.15.10.11.9)
How can the “fantastic” be defined
as a literary genre?

What key characteristics of the

literary “fantastic” does Marianna
Ritchey observe in Symphonie
fantastique?