Music for most listeners, it seems, has a lot of romantic content. I use a small "r" to mean music that has a romantic feeling in the everyday sense as opposed to music from the Romantic period. But oddly, most musicians probably don't have these associations to any significant extent. Are we just cold-hearted professionals? Or do we find our work, music, to be more of a distraction when it comes to personal relationships?
The most blatant use of music in a "romantic" context, by which I mean a sexual context, might have been the use of Ravel's Bolero in the movie "10" to accompany a liason between Bo Derek and Dudley Moore:
As I recall, that wasn't very successful. A scene in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Willow is attempting to seduce Oz is accompanied by Barry White:
For classical music buskers, who try to create a romantic vibe, the three big tunes are the Adagio from the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo:
The Romance anonimo for solo guitar:
And possibly Memory from Cats by Andrew Lloyd Weber:
Another good one, if you are a flute player, is the Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo ed Euridice by Gluck:
I avoided getting to know the music of Chopin for a long time, largely because, as a guitarist, I never played any of his music. The Spanish guitarist Francisco Tarrega did a great transcription of one of the nocturnes in the late 19th century and an American guitarist recently did the mammoth job of transcribing all of the mazurkas for guitar, a couple of which I have played in concert. Some composer's stars rise and fall, but Chopin's music has been loved ever since it was first heard and on the occasion of his two hundredth anniversary last year, there were many piano recitals featuring Chopin. For some background, have a look at the Wikipedia article.
I finally got acquainted with his music a couple of years ago when I was asked to give a pre-concert talk on Chopin before a piano recital. I gave myself a graduate seminar in Chopin to prepare. I got a complete recording of his piano music--Chopin wrote almost exclusively for piano--and did a lot of listening. I also got several volumes of the scores and read a couple of books on him, one an excellent collection of essays by musicologists. After all this I realized that I had been missing one of the great composers of the 19th century. Chopin was one of the architects of Romantic music and was a huge influence on later composers.
A very few composers in music history create entirely new forms or genres or so utterly transform existing ones that it has the same effect. Chopin is one of these. He completely transformed the scherzo, prelude and nocturne and more or less invented forms like the ballade and impromptu. In his over fifty mazurkas he took a folk tradition and revitalized it. The polonaises are a greatly expanded version of another tradition.
Chopin is a complex figure—he was born on the periphery of European high culture so was less bound by its forms than composers like Bach or Beethoven who spent their entire lives in the heart of the great European traditions. Chopin absorbed these traditions and made them his own but did so very freely.
A virtuoso pianist, during his short life Chopin only played some thirty public concerts, nearly all of them with other artists. He preferred the ‘salon’, which refers to the interesting social phenomenon, characteristic of Paris, of intimate gatherings of like-minded people to discuss, banter, socialize and experience things of shared interest which would certainly include poetry and music. Chopin was the great master of the salon. Counted as one of the great romantic composers, Chopin himself had little regard for his contemporaries, reserving his admiration for the great classic masters Bach, Handel and Mozart.
Chopin grew up with Bach’s monumental collection of preludes and fugues in all the keys, the Well-Tempered Clavier—as have all classical musicians for the last 250 years! What Bach did was to go beyond all his models both in quality and in the variety of different styles he used. Similarly, Chopin, while owing much to his models, also went far beyond. The main influences on Chopin besides Bach are the melodies of Italian opera, the music of Poland he heard in his youth and the 'brilliant' piano style popular in the early 19th century. We find Bachian counterpoint lurking everywhere in Chopin's music along with operatic melodic decoration, Polish rhythms and brilliant figuration. But he united these things into an absolutely distinctive musical style.
Chopin was a great harmonist: he left behind the Classical clarity and tension between dominant and tonic, substituting instead more ambiguous relations for the sake of color and atmosphere. Here is a magical example:
But in the Berceuse in D flat major, he takes a different approach, contrasting the 'painful simplicity' (in the words of Charles Rosen) of the accompaniment with the freedom of the right hand:
This is my favorite--quite untypical--mazurka:
Let's close with one of Chopin's larger works, the 4th Ballade in F minor. It combines all the elements I have been talking about: the shifting harmonies (it starts by deceiving the listener about what key it is in), imitative counterpoint, brilliant passages, soaring melodies and even a hint of polonaise texture. The opening creates a dreamlike, floating atmosphere through a harmonic ambiguity that previous composers would have avoided. Themes return almost without being noticed and are varied mysteriously—this is a rare blend of complexity hidden within simplicity. The 4th Ballade is one of the greatest piano works of the 19th century.
I said in a previous post that the term 'classical' music is a back-formation, meaning that until popular music became an economically huge force, there was just music with different flavors for different purposes. For listening, you went to the symphony or a chamber or lieder recital, for dancing you had Viennese walzes--just to choose a couple of examples. But once recording technology and television came along, popular music grew to dwarf what we now call 'classical' music. My view is that any music that has long-lasting value, of whatever genre or style, will sooner or later become 'classical' in the sense of "the best that has been done". As you may have noticed, I place the oeuvre of the Beatles in that category.
That aside, people new to classical music notice that it comes in different flavors. The repertoire of symphony orchestras roughly spans the period from when the symphony was invented, mostly by Joseph Haydn around 1770, to the present day, though in the current environment most composers do not choose the symphony as the main focus of their work. But we can divide this repertoire into phases. The Classical phase includes Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven--and possibly Schubert. But between 1820 and 1830 a new spirit came to be: that of Romanticism. This is a bit confusing because we use the word 'classical' in two senses. In one sense it is all that music that is not popular. But in the narrower sense it means music of a particular historical period: from 1770 to the death of Beethoven in 1827. The Romantic phase of 'classical' music starts from then and goes to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Composers like Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin, Bruckner, Mahler, Liszt and Wagner are all Romantic composers.
Another interesting thing happened in the 19th century: there began to be more interest in the music of the past than ever before. This really started in 1829 when Mendelssohn organized a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in Berlin one hundred years after it was first performed in Leipzig. Even though composers like Beethoven had studied the works of Bach, he was not well-known among the general listening public. This changed radically during the 19th and 20th centuries. Bach is from the period known as the Baroque, or what we might call pre-Classical classical music. It was not just Bach that was re-discovered. He brought along with him a host of other Baroque composers like Rameau, a couple of Couperins, Froberger, Corelli and, that bane of background music, the Vivaldi Four Seasons. After that, it was easy to develop an interest in pre-Baroque music and today we have lutenists and madrigal groups that go around playing Renaissance music. There are also ensembles that go further back to the Middle Ages. The wonderful thing is that we have discovered outstanding pieces of music going right back to the beginnings of Western music around the year 1000.
I won't talk about the discovery of non-Western music here, but that has been a trend for the last fifty years or so. But I should mention what came after the Romantic period. In the early 20th century there was a great paroxysm in Western Civilization. One symptom was World War I, followed by the sequel, World War II. Some have called this a "suicide attempt by Western Civilization". There were similar events in music as well. The organization of music in terms of the modes or scales was overthrown with the development of atonal music and the incorporation of percussion, noises and chance procedures. The names to note are Schoenberg, Berg and Webern on the one hand and Cage, Stockhausen and Varese on the other. The first group followed the traditions of using ordinary instruments but in an atonal context; the latter group incorporated new instruments, electronics, noise and chance procedures. It is still an open question whether much of this music will become 'classical' in my sense of the word. I'm sure that some will, but much won't.
So there you have a quick march through several different flavors of classical music. Now for some listening. Here is a piece from the early 20th century that I am fairly sure will become a 'classic' if it isn't already. The Lyric Suite for string quartet by Alban Berg, completed in 1926:
