Yes,I've always thought these time zones to be useful;the explain why different composers at different times wrote not just different music but different kinds of music, and why,for instance, Bach shouldn't be 'blamed' for not writing romantic symphonies, and that Haydn's quartets aren't just  primitive versions of Beethoven's.

Of course one needs to accept that there will be exceptions.Brahms., it often seems to me, is ahead of his time in matters of harmony and rhythm, particularly cross-rhythm and syncopation, which anticipated  much 20th century music.

Tin hats on!  There's nothing like this topic (plus Rodger Wright's suzerainty of R3, and anything said by Ann Coulter) for provoking controversy.

My own feeling is that these are handy labels to give to kids when they are maybe 15-16 and just getting to grips with music history, but in practice they create more problems than they solve, they are entirely artificial and arbitrary boundaries,  and they encourage in-the-box thinking.  Moreover they are artificially imposed with the benefit of a very myopic hindsight, the terms and definitions are utterly subjective and wouldn't bear holding up to the light.  Additionally, the periods and dates are skewed to allow those we retrospectively consider "great" to "open" each period, and thus appear to have ushered-in a period of music whose parameters we have created in our minds

I honestly think we'd be better off without these silly and meaningless labels - if we need handy thumbnails, then by all means refer to "Seventeenth-Century Music" or "Nineteenth-Century Music".   At least these are informative and what Wikipedia would call "non-POV"

I see what you're saying, Smittims, but this kind of "defence" of Bach as a non-symphonist is only ever called-up for military service against foes on the level of Mumblesford ;-)   In any case, Bach's works are riddled with Sinfonias, and you can very neatly see the development of the Orchestral Suite (I seem to remember old Syd Grew forgot Bach had written any?) into the Symphony...  the French Overture metamorphosed into the Sonata-Form first movement... the old-fashioned Pavane or Dumpe became a melancholy slow movement...  the Minuet & Trio survived longest, eventually giving way to a more grotesque kind of parody of themselves that became amusing, and thus a Scherzo...  and then finally the rumbustious Gigue, the mother-form for final exuberant finishes.  Chopping this up into "Bach was a Baroque Composer and Beethoven was a Romantic Composer" is denying clear historical links.

I would also defy anyone to show a provable musico-artistic ethic between Monteverdi's "The Return Of Ulysses To His Homeland" and Bach's St John Passion - yet both have finished-up in the remainder-bin labelled "Baroque".  Even more absurd is the Fish-Which-John-West-Rejected Bargain-Basement of "Medieval Music", which covers "all the crappy old music we don't like or understand".  Somehow you've got Dufay, Philipoctus da Caserta, Leoninus, Oswald von Wolkenstein, Hildegard of Bingen, The Monk Of Salzburg, Lionel Power, and whoever really wrote "Kalenda Maya" all in a one-size-fits-all basket?    Just the idea of Wolkenstein (with his bizarre epic songs about Crusade-era pillage, having his foot torn-off by infidels, and incontinence) alongside Hildegard in one group is already entirely potty.

I would also contend you can easily find "Romantic" pieces from 1790 and earlier. My hobby-horse composer Stephen Storace (1763-96) wrote Romantic Operas...  dissenters might like to ponder where operas whose plots include "a Haunted Castle (with on-stage ghost)", "the relief of the Siege Of Belgrade by the Austrian Army", "a shipful of Pirates", "Cowboys versus Redskins (including a "War-Whoop Of Indian Braves"), fit into the "Classical" genre of cod-classic deities or masters'n'servants?   I believe it was HC Robbins-Landon (?) who claimed that the Romantic era began "on the Db in the cellos at the opening of Beethoven #3"?   But this is entirely subjective.  Look at the Constanza/Belmonte Act III Duet in SERAGLIO, when they are locked-up in the prison and believe they are about to be killed?  It's the most superb scene that Beethoven never composed, and absolutely "Romantic" in style and ethos.  I'm staggered to see any date LATER than the composition of FIDELIO (1806) for the "Romantic" era?  A woman disguised as a male guard breaks into a top-security prison-cell to spring her political-prisoner husband,  and in the process pulls a gun on the Secret Policeman who put her husband there?  And that's supposed to be, err, "Classical"?  Hmmmmm....

BTW Mozart's opera "Bastien & Bastienne" has da-capo arias and a Siciliana in it - but we have to consider it "classical" because, errr, Mozart wrote it?  Properly the term would probably be rococo, but that's a shoe-box we don't have available...

Come to think of it, you could just as easily claim that Dejanira's mad-scene aria "Where Shall I Fly?" (Handel's HERCULES) is the first "Romantic" aria in the repertory - composed in 1745  (Doubters might like to listen to Sarah Connolly singing it on her "Heroes & Heroines" album with The Symphony Of Harmony & Invention (cond H Christophers, released on the CORO/Sixteen label) before overly scoffing )    (You can hear a snippet here, Track 13 - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heroes-Heroines-George-Frideric-Handel/dp/B00030ERP6/ref=sr_1_1/202-2847483-5935825?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1173111587&sr=1-1    Or buy the album there for under six quid from Amazon Sellers - best use of six nicker I can readily suggest  ).

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It'll end in tears, is all I'm saying ;-)  Squeezing music into boxes it never belonged in is just going to end in a load of unnecessary gripes about category-names and dates,  which could be avoided by using division by century.  It's forcing a POV onto music that doesn't need one.

The difficulty I have is accepting the Wikipedia-quoted date of "1815" as the start of "romanticism".  This actually clashes with information elsewhere on Wikipedia - let alone elsewhere!

Let me quote you the opening section of "Romanticism" on Wikipedia:  (the section which refers to music)

In general, the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to mean the period roughly from the 1820s until 1910. The contemporary application of 'romantic' to music did not coincide with modern categories: in 1810 E.T.A. Hoffmann called Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven the three "Romantic Composers", and Ludwig Spohr used the term "good Romantic style" to apply to parts of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. By the early 20th century, the sense that there had been a decisive break with the musical past led to the establishment of the 19th century as "The Romantic Era," and as such it is referred to in the standard encyclopedias of music.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

Don't you think the classification of "Romanticism" ought to at least allow for the possibility that those actually alive at the time of it were right?   Or are we going to give Spohr a flea in his ear and tell him not to be so silly, and that we know far better than he did??   Surely Spohr and Hoffmann at least deserve the benefit of the doubt?

reiner,


Well Spohr and Hoffman certainly deserve more concert plays and more radio air-time. I think I've heard Spohr more often on ClassicFM than I have on Radio 3 (Nick Bailey always plays complete works by Spohr in his Beethoven and Contemporaries series)

Just because Spohr and Hoffman were alive in 1790 - 1810 doesn't mean they can define the Romantic period as starting then (and continuing up to 1900?). It just means that THEY thought 1790 - 1810 was the Romantic Period. If they had lived to hear Brahms and Liszt then they would likely have come up with another name for that music like the Imaginative Period or the Passionate Period.

I'm with t-p on 'modern music'. Critic and composers of today keep referring to atonal music as new music and modern music and contemporary music some of them mean 1950's -1990's while some mean 1940's-2000's and some even mean music since 1911 and use ANY of the three 'labels'. So it will be up to critics and musicians of the 21stC to put meaningful labels to the music of the 20thC. Apart from British Light Music the music of the 20thC is in danger of not being properly labelled and therefore in danger of being neglected..... much like Spohr and Hoffman.


John Wright

The perfect solution - one board for Romantic & Classical.

Nice one 

If you think there's a discussion in it, why not?

It seems to me that the contents of Msg 1 are cast in stone now?

There is a dichotomy which is increasingly used with respect to the nineteenth century, between 'romanticism' and 'realism'. I'm not sure who first coined this, but it was used extensively by Carl Dahlhaus (not least in his book 'Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music'). Very roughly, 'romanticism' implies transcendence, abstraction, inwardness, autonomy, and corresponds to a form of Germanic aesthetics that was articulated by a range of figures from E.T.A. Hoffmann through A.B. Marx to Eduard Hanslick. From a 20th/21st century viewpoint, it can be seen as a break with the 'affective music' of the 18th century. 'Realism', on the other hand, implies representation, evocation, pictorialism, nationalism, and so on. Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz to an extent (notwithstanding the descriptive titles and literary allusions of the latter two), Mendelssohn, Brahms (and later Schoenberg) can thus be considered essentially 'romantic', whereas Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Weber, Meyerbeer, Bizet, Saint-Saens, Smetana, Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev and many others gravitate towards the 'realist' camp. Liszt seems to bridge the two camps (advocates of rival aesthetics both want to claim him as their own); Chopin I would place more towards the 'romantic' camp, Fauré, Franck, Dvořák similarly. With Wagner, Bruckner and Hugo Wolf things get complicated and the two categories no longer seem adequate. Richard Taruskin (who thinks essentially everything has been going wrong since Beethoven, with whom music ceased to cater primarily for consumers, in his view) is an aggressive advocate of the supremacy of the 'realist' over the 'romantic', also claiming that such romanticism finds its continuation in modernist abstraction. I don't necessarily disagree with the latter diagnosis, but the value judgement I would apply is fundamentally different.

Anyhow, I do feel this type of dichotomy, for all its problems (because of various composers who overlap the two categories) might be more productive than simply subsuming the whole diverse century under a notion of the Romantic.