After Beethoven’s death in 1827, a kind of parting of the waves took place between two versions of what a composer might do: whether to seek popularity with an audience or to become a martyr to your cause, suffering for your terribly important art. It is a tussle that continues to smoulder.
The most popular composer in Beethoven’s final years, even in Vienna where he lived, was not Beethoven himself but the Italian Gioachino Rossini, whose light-as-a-feather smash-hit comic operas, such as The Barber of Seville (1816) – all laughs, saucy farce and hummable tunes – were arguably closer to the general public’s idea of an ‘Ode to Joy’. The two composers did meet once, an encounter brokered by the kindly Antonio Salieri, and we have it word for word since Beethoven, being deaf, had to have the conversation written down. The rules of engagement between the two types of composer were even evident in their short back-and-forth in 1822, with Beethoven congratulating Rossini on his success but warning him not to write anything other than comic opera as ‘his character wouldn’t suit it’. It is a conversation that continues to be played out between self-styled ‘serious’ composers and ‘crossover’ composers to this day.
Robert Schumann and his friend Felix Mendelssohn were German successors to Beethoven of a gentler mould. Like Schubert, they appealed to their audience not through comic opera, Rossini-style, but by providing bitter-sweet, mostly tender reflections on love, art and life that were instantly enjoyable. Neither Mendelssohn nor Schumann planned to take over the world with his art, though both suffered for it nonetheless.
Mendelssohn was the most conspicuously gifted young musician of the nineteenth century, producing a fabulous octet for strings aged sixteen and an orchestral tribute to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream aged seventeen that dazzled all who heard it at the time. In fact, both pieces are still among the most performed of all nineteenth-century favourites, in a dauntingly strong field. In later years Mendelssohn composed incidental music for a production of the play itself, with additional scenes and characters, including a wedding march – the wedding march – that has since been used at what must now be millions of weddings.
But Mendelssohn had to struggle against both snobbery and bigotry. The very fact that his music was so instantly popular with audiences – particularly among prosperous middle-class Britons and indeed Queen Victoria, with whom he became friends – was enough for there to be a backlash against him. His critics, often motivated by anti-Semitism, branded him old-fashioned or lacking in originality – originality being the most overhyped quality in the history of music. Wagner’s comments in his toxic The Jews in Music (1850) were fairly typical, if more long-winded than most:
Whereas Beethoven, the last in the chain of our true music-heroes, strove with highest longing, and wonder-working faculty, for the clearest, certainest Expression of an unsayable Content through a sharp-cut, plastic shaping of his tone-pictures: Mendelssohn, on the contrary, reduces these achievements to vague, fantastic shadow-forms, midst whose indefinite shimmer our freakish fancy is indeed aroused, but our inner, purely-human yearning for distinct artistic sight is hardly touched with even the merest hope of a fulfillment… The washiness and whimsicality of our present musical style has been, if not exactly brought about, yet pushed to its utmost pitch by Mendelssohn’s endeavour to speak out a vague, an almost nugatory Content as interestingly and spiritedly as possible.
In 1889, the enormous popularity in Britain of Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah caused George Bernard Shaw to lampoon its ‘Sunday-school sentimentalities and its Music-school ornamentalities’.
The composer who stands at the antithesis of Mendelssohn, who took Beethoven’s call to arms most to heart, adopting early on the ‘possessed maestro’ option, all cutting edge and misunderstood angst, was the French firebrand Hector Berlioz.
Despite being French, Berlioz may as well have been German, so keen was he to assume the Beethoven throne. He too was drawn to the same literary icons like a moth to a flame: Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Goethe and Shakespeare. His personal identification with romantic heroes such as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet seemed to have fuelled not just musical inspiration but his crazed, desperate infatuation with a Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson. Mind you, without his twelve-year obsession with her, the world wouldn’t have had Berlioz’s hugely influential Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d’un Artiste in 1830, the oratorio Roméo et Juliette, the operas Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict and his musical treatments of King Lear and Hamlet. In December 1832, he premièred in Paris a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique called Lélio, Le retour à la vie (Return to Life), part of which was a fantasia on The Tempest. At this performance he finally met Harriet, who was somewhat taken aback at how much she seemed to feature in Berlioz’s works, and their tempestuous, unrealistic and ultimately destructive relationship erupted into life, despite the fact that neither spoke the other’s language.
A comparison of Berlioz’s Grande Messe des rnorts (Requiem) of 1837 with Beethoven’s Choral symphony of just thirteen years earlier provides a stark illustration of how far the ambition of large-scale music had already ballooned. It calls for a minimum of two hundred singers, a string section alone of one hundred and eight players, twenty woodwind players (including two cors anglais and eight bassoons), twelve French horns, eight cornets, twelve trumpets, sixteen trombones, six tubas, four ophicleides (a cross between a bass tuba and a prototype saxophone that had only been patented sixteen years earlier), ten timpani players (on sixteen drums), four gongs, two bass drums and ten pairs of cymbals. Even the most generously funded rendition of Beethoven’s ninth would require a meagre third of those forces. While at the heart of Beethoven’s symphony lies a vision of a better civilisation led by a benign deity, Berlioz, a life-long atheist, attempts to evoke the Apocalypse and Final Judgement in sound. In the intervening years, music has grown from joyful servant of humankind and the Almighty to a bigger experience than both of them. Liszt and Wagner idolised Berlioz, which would explain much that happened in the second half of the nineteenth century, a torrid drama that will unfold in the next chapter.
Berlioz never flinched from reminding whoever would listen of his great troubles and adversities, nor from absorbing those torments in his music, much of which is richly rewarding to listen to. His relationships were stormy and plagued with bad luck. The death of his son in 1867 more or less killed him. Yet he survived to the relatively impressive age (for the time) of sixty-six and made a good living as a conductor, music critic and chief librarian of the Paris Conservatoire. Compared to the nightmare existence that Robert Schumann endured, it was a walk in the park, though surprisingly Schumann’s is the music of greater tranquillity and warmth.
Schumann was, however, one of a group of composers who between them made the piano the essential nineteenth-century instrument. The tender serenity found in much of his piano music he and his clique had learnt not so much from Beethoven and his theatricality but from the example of a lesser-known Irish composer, John Field, who made his name first in London, then in Catherine the Great’s Imperial capital of St Petersburg. Field is one of those composers who has been dealt an inexplicably poor hand by posterity but who had a huge influence on other composers in their own time. It is to Field we owe the piano nocturne, a form taken up enthusiastically by Chopin and later many others, and his flowing, rapturous piano style became a rough template for what a composer in the nineteenth century was expected to do at the instrument. Describing Field’s piano music fifty years later, the Hungarian composer-virtuoso Franz Liszt poetically summed up how the Irishman captured the spirit of the early-century Romantic movement in music: ‘these half-formed sighs floating through the air, softly lamenting and dissolved in delicious melancholy’. Quite apart from all that delicious melancholy, there was something else going on, or not going on, in Field’s nocturnes that was to reverberate through the coming century and that was a major break with the Haydn-Mozart era.
Field’s nocturnes a
re not journeys, they’re mood pictures. He abandoned the structural architecture of the previous half-century, Sonata Form, and let his passion at the keyboard have a rhapsodic, free rein. This possibility – simply evoking an unidentified atmosphere in sound – was to lodge in the minds of many composers in the coming decades and bear rich fruit.
Field’s first set of nocturnes were published in his adopted home of Russia in 1812, while Napoleon’s colonial ambitions there were being buried under a mountain of snow, fire, starvation and disease. Two years earlier, he had married his former piano pupil Adelaide Percheron and together they shared the stage as touring pianists. While it may sound a vaguely familiar story – one we will encounter shortly with the similarly passionate and professional partnership of pianist-composers Robert and Clara Wieck Schumann – it is important to note how exceptional the concept was, before the twentieth century, of a woman being able to pursue any professional career in music. These significant exceptions were possible thanks to the piano.
The early nineteenth century was the beginning of a new era of amateur musicianship, a mass movement of skilled and semiskilled musical participation that was unprecedented in history and which centred on the piano. Before gramophones and radios, the piano was the only source of music in many a middle-class home and the sharing of home-made music was a habit that lasted for many families until the Second World War. The middle classes proudly installed factory-made pianos in their drawing rooms and needed music to play on them. Composers from Field and Beethoven onwards were happy to oblige, in vast quantities; what’s more, here was a chance for women to become involved in composing and performing – pursuits from which they had largely been excluded up until now. The fact that piano music could be written in the privacy of the home and sent off to a sheet music publisher allowed women, who were routinely taught piano skills from an early age, to compose and – in due course – to perform in public, despite virulent parental disapproval in all but a handful of cases.
Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister Fanny grew up as musical as her brother, their music tutor Carl Zeller writing to Goethe in 1816 about their father Abraham Mendelssohn, ‘He has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special.’ As her talents developed, so did family resistance to her taking up music as a career. Felix published some of her songs under his name and her husband, artist Wilhelm Hensel, was broadly supportive of her composing and of her occasional performances at the piano. Her compositions are delightful – they include exquisite songs in the Schubert tradition, like ‘Die Ersehnte’ (The Yearned-for One), and a characterful portrait of the months of the year for solo piano, Das Jahr, which compares well with her brother’s enormously popular collection of Songs Without Words – and her death aged just forty-two deprived music of a talent formidable enough to have challenged many myths surrounding musical women in the Victorian era.
The reality was, though, that while it might be possible, with good reading and writing, to become the author of a novel, as Jane Austen, the Brönte Sisters or George Eliot proved, it was practically impossible to write large-scale forms such as a symphony or an opera without years of instruction and specialist knowledge. This was the barrier – training – that most prevented women composers coming to the fore in the nineteenth century.
In 1838, twenty-eight-year-old Robert Schumann composed an eight-part homage to Johannes Kreisler, the fictional musician who featured in the comic novels of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Beethoven enthusiast and author of The Nutcracker, Coppelia and The Tales of Hoffmann. Although Schumann dedicated the Kreisleriana to his friend Frédéric Chopin, what it was really was a musical love letter to Clara Wieck, the young woman Schumann would soon marry despite legal proceedings instigated by her father. As well as nurturing and inspiring her husband, even as mental illness drove him to attempted suicide and an early death, Clara Wieck was a composer of distinction, from her astonishingly adept and undeservedly neglected piano concerto, written when she was just seventeen, to her passionate set of six songs for Denmark’s Queen Caroline Amalie, culminating in the enchanting ‘Die stille Lotusblume’, with its unexpectedly bluesy opening chords. She became one of the most famous concert pianists of the century. In a sixty-year career on the concert stage she tirelessly championed the music of her husband, of Brahms and of Chopin. One day, I hope, her immense contribution to Western music and the courage of her determination to pursue music at the highest level against all odds will be properly recognised. The composer who probably owes her the greatest debt of gratitude, Frédéric Chopin, she first met in Paris, when, aged twelve, she played to him one of his own exquisite nocturnes (opus 9, no. 2).
Of the generation that followed Beethoven, Chopin was the composer whose influence was slowest to make its impact. The reason for this is that, like Beethoven’s late quartets, Chopin’s music is unusually intimate. He preferred not to perform in large concert halls, as was increasingly the vogue, but rather in small salons and private homes. Consequently his fame spread person by person, fan by fan. He was arguably more like a novelist than a composer in this respect, people falling for his music as they would a newly discovered secret passion.
Listening to Chopin after the helter-skelter psychological drama of Beethoven or the theatrical bravado of Berlioz, it is as if someone has opened a window and let in some fresh, balmy evening air. Though he settled in France, the quality that most pervades Chopin’s style is homesickness for his native Poland. Unlike expat composers Rossini, Cherubini, Meyerbeer and others drawn to Paris in the nineteenth century, seeking career upgrades and access to a lucrative Parisian penchant for opera, Chopin arrived there as a refugee from political repression at home. Sometimes he expressed his longing for Poland, at that time swallowed up in the Russian Empire, through his highly stylised adaptation of Polish folk dances – mazurkas and polonaises. Though they were intended to evoke such rustic dances, they were meant to be played and listened to, not as accompaniment for actual dancing.
Chopin stands at the critical pivot in nineteenth-century music. In his over sixty heartfelt mazurkas, love letters to a homeland he would never see again, he anticipated composers in every European country in the second half of the century, especially those in nations struggling to shrug off an imperial yoke, finding inspiration in the folk music of their own communities.
In his twenty-one nocturnes and twenty-seven études Chopin managed to set a staggering standard of technical virtuosity for players at the same time as creating something beautiful for listeners to enjoy, and he initiated a golden age of the piano; his example was still proving influential for the likes of Debussy, Ravel and the jazz legend Bill Evans in the twentieth century. Chopin’s rich and ambiguous harmonies, interwoven intricately between the hands, looked to the future, leaving behind the primary-colour certainties of Gluck, Mozart, Haydn and early Beethoven once and for all. After a period of simplicity, Chopin was nudging music’s pendulum back towards complexity once more.
There is a delicacy and gentleness to Chopin’s music, though, that represents the final curtain call of the age of elegance and gracefulness, of sense and sensibility. His heroes, notwithstanding the underrated John Field, were Mozart and Bach, composers in whose music dignity was everything. Ill health plagued Chopin throughout his life, and in his final three years he became so weak he needed round-the-clock care; TB finally killed him in 1849. His last public concert was given at London’s Guildhall in November 1848, a fund-raising event for Polish refugees. He may have been unable to return home to Poland to die, but his heart had never left it.
The year of Chopin’s final concert, 1848, was one of huge political upheaval across Europe; it was a year of revolutions. One of the rebels clamouring for social change in an uprising in Dresden was a young Richard Wagner. Trouble was brewing, and a period that began with fear of Apocalypse was replaced with one in which the Apocalypse might be played out within music itself – by that same firebrand
on a Dresden street.
5
The Age of Tragedy
1850–1890
‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,’ says David Copperfield in the opening line of the eponymous novel by Charles Dickens, published in 1850. It is a book about the twists and turns of destiny and, it being an English novel rather than a German, Italian, French or Russian one, despite tragedy along the way, all ends satisfactorily, with a fresh start in the New World the reward for stalwart and honest perseverance.
The second half of the nineteenth century was, for music, all about destiny too, though since music was dominated by Germans, Italians, Frenchmen and Russians, tragedy triumphed, and it all ended in death. Indeed, Continental European composers of the second half of the nineteenth century were completely obsessed with death and destiny; it is hard to find a piece of music written between 1850 and 1900 that isn’t about one or the other. Composers were never happier than when they were able to combine them both, preferably bolted on to a doomed love affair. In an opera.
But what these Victorian Age composers didn’t realise was that destiny was about to give them a tremendous jolt. As the six million visitors to London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 were prophetically promised, the future was about two things: technology and the world beyond Europe.
If you were looking for a starting point for the death and destiny craze in music you could do a lot worse than Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d’un Artiste… en cinq parties, first performed in Paris in 1830. Although it is called a symphony, Berlioz’s intention with the five-episode orchestral fantasy was to tell a story, without words, a story that begins with a dream (which, unsurprisingly, turns into a nightmare, this being the nineteenth century). His written introduction to it explains:
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 17
