Romantic Century

Unlike the nineteenth century - with which it can be only partically identified - the “Romantic Century” has no beginning, no end and, therefore, no middle. According to Robert Schumann, writing at a time when romanticism was a living and passionate concern, the first of the romantics was none other than Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). And is there any word other than “romantic” to describe the nostalgically expressive Adagio of Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet (1784) or even the disingenuously sentimental Andante of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto (1957)? But if you want to locate the epicentre of the romantic upheaval, at least in terms of the present SCO series, you would need to look somewhere between Berlioz’s La Mort de Cléopâtre (1829) and Schumann’s Symphony No.2 in C major (1845).

La Mort de Cléopâtre was the young Berlioz’s first all-out assault on what he described as the “fanatic priests of the temple of tradition” - and in a way, since it was written to be scrutinised by the arch-academics on the jury of the Prix de Rome, his most violent. Directly subjective feeling and truth to nature were principles which (though he rethought his competition tactics in the following year) he refused to compromise even to win a prize he badly needed. The defining characteristic of Schumann’s Second Symphony, on the other hand, is that, instead of turning to music - romantically - as an outlet for his frustrated passions, as he had in the anguished years before his marriage to Clara Wieck in 1840, he now used it - classically - as a means of sorting himself out and curing his depression.

Of course, there were powerful surges of romanticism before Berlioz was swept up by them, notably by way of the teenage Mendelssohn and the operas (rather than concertante pieces) of Weber. Nor did they stop after Schumann’s reversal of his priorities, least of all in the Wagner, Dvorak and Bruckner items in the present series. But, except when the young Mahler was hit by them, the shock waves became progressively milder. As early as 1846 Mendelssohn had completed a Violin Concerto scarcely more romantic than Beethoven’s, and as for Brahms - whom Schumann had recognised in 1853 as the young romantic he had himself been in his twenties - his symphonies are a progression towards such perfection in long-term harmonic and structural logic as he finally achieved in 1885. Written in a romantic language inherited from Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, Brahms’s Symphony No.4 in E minor is a “classic” in every sense of the word.

Gerald Larner©