Episode 4 - The Age of Tragedy
In the years between approximately 1850-1900, music was about tragic love and fate, death and destiny. Hector Berlioz, considered a borderline psychopath, was one composer who especially through his weird and wonderful Symphonie Fantastique, legitimised the idea that being isolated and mad was the best qualifications for a composer. In this period French and German music continued this morose and somber style as the 19th century went on.
Meanwhile, in Italian opera, tragedy arose not from pacts with the devil, but bad behavior by men! In 19th century Italy opera was a popular art form; everyone went to see the latest operas, or at least knew their tunes - opera was the peoples entertainment. Giuseppe Verdi had a very successful career as an opera composer, writing 28 of them, with his first hit in 1842, and his last 51 years later. He wrote his operas in such a way that ordinary folk could leave the theatre humming the tunes. Even people who couldn't afford to visit the opera soon heard the big hits. Barrel organists and other musicians would loiter outside of theatres, learn the tunes, and play them to punters on the street the next day - the 19th century equivalent of a jukebox.
Even Verdi got involved in death and destiny fever. To this already inflammatory mix he added sex in his creation La Traviata which was first performed 1853, based on Alexandre Dumas novel Lady of the Camellias. It is about a doomed love affair, and ends with the tragic death from TB of the main character Violetta. Stories such as this one allowed Victorian audiences to enjoy being spectators of lewd behavior, then have their hypocritical morals endorsed by watching the woman who indulged in it die a horrible death; but not before breaking their hearts with a farewell of choking beauty. La Traviata is tuneful, accessible and melodramatic; its aim to force its audience to confront its own double standards. The figure of the 'fallen woman' features in many operas, novels and paintings of the second half of the 19th century. With increased male middle class spending levels came increased prostitution. La Traviata confronts this male sexual hypocrisy that 'every woman has her price yet should be condemned for it' - except in the theatre. Verdi created a solid base for popular Italian opera which was continued by other composers, notably Giacomo Puccini.
Outside of Italy music in the second half of the 19th century was dominated by Franz Liszt. He's not as well known now, but other composers at the time looked up to him; he was a trailblazer and experimenter. Liszt thrilled and terrified a sensation-seeking public. His Totentaz - death dance - triggered a craze for Halloween style ghoulish music - dark deep crashing chords and abrasive strings. He inspired Camille Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre, Grieg's March of the Trolls, and also modern composers like Danny Elfman with his Listzien scores for films such as Batman.
Liszt was a spectacular pianist, his methods at the piano forced piano builders to start using iron frames instead of wooden ones. In contrast, his piece Grand Gallop was a lighter, crowd pleasing style of music which inspired Jacques Offenbach's can-cans. In his 30's Liszt became musics first international star. Women would get hysterical at the sight of him on stage. He created a style that shimmered and gleamed, like a musical Monet; sounds, like colours, blurred and smudged into each other. His piece The Fountains of the Villa d'Este is an excellent example. His incandescent paintings in sound influenced a younger generation of French composers, particularly Debussy.
Liszt's contribution to orchestral works was also immense. He invented what he called the 'symphonic poem' and wrote 13 of them. In his work Prometheus inspired by the Greek myth. pain and anguish saturate the music. His aim was to reduce the four movement symphony into a shorter piece; a musical response to non-musical artwork. Liszt more than anyone shifted the emphasis of orchestral music from pure (absolute) music to music that tried to illustrate something else. His symphonic poem Hunnenschlacht (1857) was based on a painting of one of Attilla the Hun's battles. In the painting you can see Romans carrying a gleaming golden cross. To portray this in his music, Liszt introduced on the trombone an old plainsong chant Crux Fidalis - faithful cross. Wagner and Tchaikovsky were thrilled and inspired by the piece. The same kind of grandiose music has since been used in countless 20th century movies.
Another of Liszt's forward-thinking innovations came in the form of his Faust Symphony composed in 1857. The opening 12 notes of the piece uses all 12 notes of the chromatic scale without repeating them; this was 68 years before Arnold Schoenberg created his twelve-tone composition method, and turned Western art music on its head.
Liszt also played a part in the musical nationalism movement, with his Hungarian Rhapsodies. In 1848 there were a series of revolutions over Europe, many started by people who shared a language and culture and who wanted to be free of the superpowers that controlled them, especially the Austrian empire ruled from Vienna. One such uprising took place in Hungary, but the rebels were crushed.
One such uprising took place in Hungary but the rebels were crushed. Liszt composed some of his Hungarian Rhapsodies around this time,but how Hungarian were they? Liszt and the other composers at the time where confused as to what indigenous Hungarian music actually was. It was believed to be the same as gypsy music, which in turn was often muddled up with Turkish music. They were all wrong; gypsy music was separate and different from Hungarian folk music, and what they thought was gypsy music was actually Hungarian folk music played by gypsies in Budapest and other cities for the enjoyment of better off Hungarians and Austrians. The gypsies kept their own music for themselves.
The nationalism in music movement was no doubt motivated by a deep and sincere love of country and of the traditions and roots of peoples who felt bossed about by other more powerful nations, but it wasn't a grassroots movement where peasant troubadours presented their treasures to the world. In all cases this nationalism in music movement was concocted by sophisticated, highly trained, well traveled, middle class composers who took fragments of folk music they heard and modified it. The resulting music was aimed at a mainstream audience who had no real interest in peasant culture whatsoever. To illustrate the point, among the most popular collections of the time were Brahms's Hungarian Dances, composed between 1869 and 1880. However if they were played to a milk maid on the banks of the Danube river, she would probably remark it was some kind of fancy German music! Many composers wrote many popular tunes of this kind in the 19th century, including Dvorak (Slavonic Dance) and Grieg (Norwegian Dance).
In the USA, the moral questions of borrowing elements of ethnic music and putting them into mainstream music was fiercely debated. late 19th century, middle-class Americans didn't want to be outdone by their European counterparts. They built concert halls, established orchestras and invited star names across the Atlantic to perform. One such high profile visitor was Antonin Dvorak, who was headhunted to run a music college in New York in 1892 at 20 times the salary he was earning doing the same thing in Prague. It had an odd effect on his musical compass. The most famous result was his 9th symphony titled 'The New World'. In the adagio-molto movement there was fierce debate over who invented tune, with Dvorak being repeatedly asked if it was a native American folk tune, although he denied this was the case even though it certainly sounds like one! Dvorak urged his students to go out and find native American and African-American folk songs to incorporate into their classical music. Why was there such debate about whether the tunes were borrowed? Looking at it in context, at the time the USA policy - 'manifest destiny' - permitted violent appropriation of the lands of native Americans for the benefit of white settlers. This symphony, though much enjoyed, has also caused some soul searching over the years. In 1895 Dvorak, desperately homesick, returned to his homeland. The moral debate of whether its ethical for richer people to adapt the music of poorer people for their musical entertainment without credit or pay has never gone away. It's still hotly debated today, not least in jazz, blues and world music.
Richard Wagner, Liszt's son in law, was the most needy and argumentative of Liszt's disciple's. Wagner is often credited with the innovation of using diminished and augmented chords in his compositions. He used lots of these unstable chords, using them to represent pain or anguish or signify something grim is about to happen. Wagner certainly made these chords his own, but they were first used in abundance by Liszt, for example in his Faust Symphony. Wagner's most famous chord - the 'Tristan Chord' from his opera Tristan and Isolde is a very revered chord, but in fact it boils down to being a diminished chord. In all the leaps forward by Wagner you can find an example of where it was used first, by Liszt. Composers have always done this though, absorbing the music of their time.
Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is a masterpiece about a doomed love affair - death and destiny - like Verdi's La Traviata 12 years before. There is one very important difference though; Wagner decided to restructure opera. Italians would divide the opera into arias, ariosos, duets, trios, and chorus's resulting in something sounding like a variety show. Wagner instead used a continuous flow, with all those elements mixed together. He decided his best source material wasn't other operas but the symphonic tradition of the concert hall dominated by Germans such as Beethoven, and other composers of a similar style like Liszt and Berlioz. Wagner's main subjects were thoroughly German too. His operas were based on myth and history which put archetypal Germanic heroes to the test, such as in Tannhauser, Lohengrin and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. or depicting sacrifice and denial like Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal, or confronting the inevitability of the corruption of power, or all of the above at once such as in The Ring cycle. It took Wagner 26 years to create ring cycle, and to stage it he had his own theatre erected in Bavaria, designed to his own spec. He wanted all the art forms to combine and fuse, led by the greater power of music.
In his music, Wagner used fragments of rhythm, melody or harmony as calling cards for characters, places, ideas or things; these fragments were called 'leitmotifs'. Contrary to popular belief Wagner didn't invent the idea, the credit for that goes to E.T.A. Hoffman, an opera composer and writer who used leitmotifs 60 years earlier. Wagner, however, perfected the use of leitmotifs. He used lots in his opera Parsifal, where he also used a technique called chromaticism. The word comes from the Greek for colour. Chromaticism is in contrast to the usual harmonic setup where the key chord is most important, with the rest following a rank structure. Chromaticism broke down this structure making all chords of the same importance, creating a more exotic, disorientating and unfamiliar sound.
Politically, Wagner's agenda was to give Germans a sense of their historical destiny. To fulfill that destiny as he perceived it, he firmly believed it was necessary to remove all Jews and Jewish culture from the German Reich. In the newly unified Germany antisemitism was rampant, but Wagner's views were excessive even by the standards of the time. Within 40 years the ultra-German nationalism and antisemitism of the 1880's had evolved into Nazism. Wagner was accessory to this slide into xenophobic vitriol; he advocated the annihilation of all Jews in his many anti Jew publications. The Nazi top brass treated Wagner's opera house as a holy shrine and place of pilgrimage and reverence and were welcomed by Wagner's surviving family members. It became the high temple of Aryian culture. Parsifal inspired hatred; it was put on 23 times in Berlin alone during the time of the 3rd Reich. Wagner's followers looked down at the 'fun' music being composed elsewhere by Brahms Bizet Offenbach J Strauss, Gilbert and Sullivan etc. The dedicated followers of Wagner considered themselves members of an elite club of 'serious' classical music lovers. Their attitude later prompted Arnold Schoenberg in 1946 to declare that 'those who compose because they want to please others, and have audiences in mind, are not real artists'.
Wagner had wanted a fusion of the arts, but it was just after Wagner's death that the combined artwork of the future - motion pictures - stuttered into life. Wagner's main contribution to the music that followed him was that the all the key composers of the next 30 years especially outside of Germany were inspired not to emulate him.
My Response
This was an enlightening episode, and I was surprised, but pleased that Liszt had the lion's share of the focus. Even though I knew that Liszt was a dazzling and popular pianist, I didn't know the importance of his orchestral works, the influence he had on many other composers, and the innovations he brought to the table.
I particularly enjoyed the part of the programme dealing with musical nationalism. It is interesting to discover that a lot of national music (one of my favourite music types), was based more on what the composer thought that a particular folk music sounded like, and what the more wealthy audience wanted to hear, than the reality of the peasant music.
I was aware that Wagner was linked to antisemitism, but I hadn't known the extent to which he was revered in Germany, and the influence his own prejudices may have had on the future policymakers in the country. Having looked ahead in the course materials, I know this is a topic I will be dealing with in the near future, so I'm looking forward to researching this in more detail then.
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