From Classicism to Romanticism

One of the truisms of twentieth-century music history textbooks is that there is a clear distinction between classicism and Romanticism in music, with each term allotted a specific historical period and associated style. Yet there is little evidence of this distinction in nineteenth-century practice or writings. Instead, it is only when musical Romanticism is ostensibly over that the concept of a Romantic era starts being crystallised.

The earliest references to these two terms in a musical context actually undermine any notion of strict historical periodisation. To avoid what he perceived to be the flawed binary opposition between the classical (i.e., ‘the expression of the Greek character’) and the Romantic (i.e., ‘the expression of the Christian religious idea’), Karl August Kahlert, in an 1848 essay called ‘On the Concepts of Classical and Romantic in Music’, suggested opposing Romanticism with antiquity, which would thereby allow for the word ‘classic’ to refer to ‘that which is excellent, exemplary in its kind or genre’.² He conceded, however, that musical categories had grown up around the terms ‘classical’ and ‘Romantic’, with the former designating the music of composers preoccupied with the laws of musical form, and the latter designating composers who wish ‘to assert the freedom of the spirit’ against such formal musical laws. For Kahlert, notably, each of these two categories was populated by post-Beethovenian composers: in the classical, there is Hummel and Spohr, in the Romantic Schumann, Loewe, Berlioz, and Paganini, amongst others.

Over half a century later, in 1911, Guido Adler (1855–1941) discerned a clear division between the ‘classical style’ and the ‘Romantic school’, though again he uses the two primarily as categories that can operate flexibly throughout history and are not confined to one specific age. In Der Stil in der Musik (Style in Music) the ‘classical’ style is characterised as an aesthetic and historical concept which embraces, first, the a cappella music of the sixteenth century; second, the polyphonic music from the time of Bach and Handel (which he designates as ‘alt-klassische’); and third, the Viennese classical composers (the ‘neu-klassische’) with their main focus on the form of the sonata.³ Contrasted with this, in Adler’s schematisation, is the ‘Romantic school’, the music of which exhibits a ‘blurring of form’ (‘Verschwemmung der Form’) which is bound up with ‘disorder and excess’ (‘Regellosigkeit und Ausschweifung’), and a preference for colour and sound-painting.⁴ Much like his ‘classical style’, the ‘Romantic school’ also ‘begins with the heyday of a cappella music’, but it rapidly extends beyond this ‘with the use of chromaticism by the madrigalists’, and it is once again found in the ‘eccentricity’ of the music of those composers he refers to with his singular use of the term ‘neo-Romanticists’ for the nineteenth century.⁵

In places, however, Adler seems to point to the historical usage more familiar to us now. Certain late works by Mozart, for instance, fall in the category of a ‘transition’ to Romanticism, and he also speaks of Romanticism without obvious reference to his transhistorical aesthetic scheme, for instance, ‘the Romantic opera of the nineteenth century’, or Paris as a ‘breeding ground for instrumental virtuosity around 1830, which had a lasting impact on the Romantic style’.⁶ And other writers around this time were similarly reducing what might have originally been considered open aesthetic categories to historical periods.⁷

This growing sense of a distinct Romantic period following an age of musical classicism was widely taken up in subsequent twentieth-century histories. The writings of Alfred Einstein (1880–1952) provide an influential example, from his Geschichte der Musik of 1917 to Music in the Romantic Era thirty years later.⁸ Yet even while the periodisation solidified, the boundaries between the two categories were nevertheless still often blurred. This is exemplified in a classic 1942 study by Paul Henry Lang (1901–91). In Lang’s view, ‘Romanticism should not be taken as the antithesis of classicism, nor was it a mere reaction to it, but rather a logical enhancement of certain elements which in classicism were inherent and active, but tamed and kept in equilibrium.’⁹ For him, the subjectivity that characterised Romanticism was not new, but instead had become increasingly more pronounced since the end of the seventeenth century.¹⁰ Lang also argues that late classicism and early Romanticism did not necessarily alternate, but, instead for a time ran concurrently. He counts Goethe and Beethoven amongst ‘the last giants of classicism, already affected by early Romanticism’, and identifies a pivotal historical moment when ‘in Hegel, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, classicism and Romanticism met, in Beethoven classicism became romantic, and in Schubert romanticism became classic’.¹¹

In 1958, Friedrich Blume (1893–1975) also conceived of a continuum of musical Romanticism running from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. For him, the structural foundations of most Romantic music can be found in late eighteenth-century classical practice. According to this argument, ‘Classicism and Romanticism’ are ‘two aspects of the same musical phenomenon’. There is ‘no “Romantic style” as such, the way there are definable and delimitable styles for other periods of music history’. Instead, for Blume, ‘there is only a slow transforming of the stylistic type that had taken shape at the beginning of the Classic-Romantic age’.¹² The elasticity of Blume’s periodisation is evident when he speaks of ‘the romanticism of J. S. Bach’ in the same breath as he discusses the Infinite in relation to form and content in Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music. Romanticism, in Blume’s formulation, is a ‘reaction against the aesthetics of the Enlightenment’, one that nonetheless continues to contain much of the Enlightenment and to be ‘a variant of musical Classicism’.¹³ He argues that the ‘unity of the [Romantic] period’ was battered to pieces around the time of the First World War such that ‘the generation that came on the scene around 1910–1920 found itself faced with the ruins’.¹⁴ Whereas Blume’s Romanticism embraces an extended periodisation, it is bound by stylistic limitations he draws at the ‘classicistic, thoroughly anti-Romantic musical theater of Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, and the young Verdi’.¹⁵

Despite the fluidity allowed by writers like Lang and Blume, it is nevertheless clear that in the century that separates them from Kahlert the idea of Romanticism in music has solidified from an aesthetic capable of broad historical application (witnessed already in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s use of the term some three decades before) to a more or less definitely circumscribed historical-stylistic category concentrated on the nineteenth century.

Romanticism and the Caesura of 1848

If the origins of the idea of a Romantic period in music are less clear than popularly supposed, its end point is no less subject to debate. In many accounts, the year 1848 is considered to be a symbolic moment for the end of Romanticism (and musical Romanticism). At a purely musical level, there are sound reasons for this division. A generation of composers died or else stopped composing around mid-century, including Mendelssohn, Hensel, Schumann, and Chopin, amongst others. At this time, Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt enjoyed increased notoriety and a younger generation of composers including Brahms were on their way to their first compositional maturity. Historiographical writings also emphasise the sociopolitical context for 1848 as a symbolic year of division. The failed revolutions put an end to the era of political liberalism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that had ‘projected an idealised image of what the world is’.¹⁶ ‘It would certainly be naïve’, as Jim Samson notes, ‘to identify the political turning point of 1848 as a precise divider of nineteenth-century music history. But it would be equally misguided to ignore the evidence of a caesura around that time’, not least because of the abundant evidence that writers in 1848 articulated such an aesthetic break.¹⁷

Franz Brendel (1811–68), a proponent of the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner, recognised ‘modern musical romanticism’ as taking a direction that ‘does not have the capability to penetrate and uplift the masses or to wield its power over all’. With its focus on inner subjectivity, he deemed Romanticism to be incompatible with ‘the demands of the community’ after the 1848 revolutions. Rather than ‘seizing hold of reality’, this autonomous art, which is so often ‘inaccessible and unpalatable’, offers only a negation of it.¹⁸ Appealing like Brendel to a Hegelian framework, Kahlert argued that both the classical and Romantic styles were now superseded, for ‘the political gravity of the present has thoroughly defeated the romantic worldview. There is no longer time in which to lose oneself in dreams.’¹⁹ He traced the antecedents for this revolutionary thought back to the writings of the political activists Arnold Ruge and Georg Gottfried Gervinus a decade earlier who had argued that Romanticism ‘had sapped the political energy of the German nation’.²⁰ Carl Kretschmann (1826–97), also writing in 1848, dismissed Romanticism as an aesthetic that led to inward contemplation rather than outward change.²¹

Drawing on these primary sources from 1848, Sanna Pederson argues convincingly for ‘a period of musical anti-Romanticism’ following the revolutions, noting a tendency to ‘re-conceptualise music at the most basic level of perception in order to disavow romantic affiliation’.²² Her historical framework appeals to the lasting and profound legacy of Hegel’s sceptical, anti-Romantic attitude towards music (viewed by him as a highly Romantic art), particularly his argument that ‘amongst all the arts music has the maximum possibility of freeing itself from any actual text as well as from expression of any specific content’.²³ For Hegel, this freedom came at a price, for in liberating itself from the text, music lost its ‘function as bearer of spirit’.²⁴

Later authors have often taken their cue from such pronouncements. Lang, writing in 1942, considered ‘the rekindled liberal movements of 1848’ to have ‘pushed romanticism into the background and it has never again come to life in its original guise’.²⁵ In keeping with Kahlert’s categorisation of 1848, Lang argued that if Romanticism had been bound up with a Kantian expression of the self that revealed a mode of intuitive knowledge of the world through the work of the individual artist, then a return to formal convention, and the resulting prominence of form extinguished the spirit of Romanticism:

Musical Romanticism in the Later Nineteenth Century: Neo-Romanticism, Realism, and Modernity

The Hegelian argument that music could no longer serve as a bearer of spirit, but only as an occasion for regressive subjectivity, has powerfully influenced the bifurcated view of music in the nineteenth century that informs twentieth-century writings. As Walter Frisch frames it, ‘the term [Romanticism] is less well suited to the latter part of the [nineteenth] century’.²⁷ Arnold Whittall similarly argues that music was ‘in a sense anachronistic’ at this time.²⁸ Within the vast periodic expanse of his concept of musical Romanticism explored above, Lang’s distinction between the terms Romantic and Romanticism underlines the same bifurcation, and posits that the discovery of ‘the romantic’ by ‘the romanticists’ was ‘merely a rediscovery, a reawakening of an ageless human quality under a new name’. ‘The romantic was still living in the second half of the nineteenth century’, he claims, ‘though not in its erstwhile ampleness, for life in itself is romantic and always has been; but it was no longer romanticism.’²⁹ With distinct echoes of Hegel, Lang refers to Romantic music after 1848 as ‘artistic atheism’, devoid of its former spirit,³⁰ explaining that ‘there is little of the profound preoccupation with the problems of romanticism of Chopin or Schumann in Grieg or Tchaikovsky’. For the latter composers, ‘romanticism was no longer an ideal to them, only an artistic metier’.³¹ Carl Dahlhaus summarises the situation:

Musical manifestations of Romanticism in the years after 1848 are hence sometimes termed ‘neo-Romantic’ to distinguish them from the Romanticism of the preceding decades, but other terms are also encountered in accounts of this period. Just as a classical period is now popularly supposed to have given way to a Romantic one around the early decades of the nineteenth century, so the concept of ‘Romanticism’ is itself regularly positioned as a precursor to the concept of ‘realism’ in music historical writings, with the two being considered to overlap in the second half of the century. For Paul Henry Lang, the shift ‘from romanticism to realism’ was bound up with social consciousness and the labour movement, played out in ‘a clash between Christian ideals and those of capitalism’. The ‘urge toward the proletarian’ after 1848 did not mean ‘that the romantic root had died, it merely stopped growing upward and continued to spread on the flat ground, for romanticism is not altogether opposed to realism; the social orientation had its beginnings in the romantic movement and subjective moments cannot be denied in nascent realism’.³³ Mark Evan Bonds defines ‘the formalist realism that would come to dominate thinking about music from the second half of the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth’ to be a reaction against the ‘empty dreams’ of Romanticism.³⁴ Again appealing to a Hegelian framework, Dahlhaus argues that the ‘notion of a romantic art flourishing in a realist age contradicts the idea of a Zeitgeist which is of the same nature in all the arts’.³⁵ Critiquing the tendency to view the music of the entire century as the output of Romanticism, he adds that ‘the problem represented by that contradiction will not be solved satisfactorily if it is crudely conceived in terms simply of a confrontation between romantic music and realist literature’.³⁶

Realism was also understood to be bound up with the impact of science on the world of ideas. As a result of the industrial and scientific revolutions, realism was simultaneously seen as inaugurating ‘an art of “scientific” analysis and observation’, and as marking ‘a loss of idealism and subjectivism’.³⁷ Writing in 1937, Ernst Bücken (1884–1949) questioned whether ‘the breakthrough of realism into the art of sound really happened so much later and in a fundamentally different way than in the fields of the visual arts and poetry’. He suggested that the term plays a very minor role in musical terminology, as far as it can be understood for certain, as it cannot be attached to musical features per se. This, he notes, is also true of the concept of Romanticism.³⁸

If it is disputed as to what extent music after 1848 should be considered ‘Romantic’, the issue is only exacerbated when it comes to the question of how a later generation of composers such as Debussy, Elgar, Mahler, Nielsen, Puccini, Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Strauss, and Wolf, who all came to prominence around the end of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth centuries, ought to be categorised. James Hepokoski neatly encapsulates the issues at stake in this debate over what he terms ‘the generation of the 1860s’:

Still, in concert programmes and popular accounts, many of these composers are invariably described as ‘late-Romantic’; the term is unlikely to die any time soon, and has been resurrected by some scholars.⁴⁰

Instrumental versus Vocal Music

Perhaps the most important primary source for recent constructions of musical Romanticism is E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) and his passionate plea that music is ‘the most Romantic of all the arts’. This phrase is famously used in his 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but is also repeated throughout Hoffmann’s writings, where it does not always refer to the metaphysics of instrumental music or to German composers of recent times. Those twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors who extract this phrase as a trope of German Idealist thought overlook a wealth of Hoffmann’s writings that extol vocal music as the true embodiment of the Romantic ideal. They also fixate on the notion that Romantic music is inherently German. There are abundant examples in Hoffmann’s writings that contradict these stereotypes, for instance his writings on Palestrina and ancient church music, or his identification of Spontini and opera as the true source of the impact of Romantic music.⁴¹ This aspect of Hoffmann’s writings, moreover, is consistent with Adler’s conception of the ‘Romantic School’ as being concerned with the a cappella music of the sixteenth century. In fact, Hoffmann’s target of critique in the Beethoven review, as Matthew Riley attests, was not vocal music, but the battle symphony.⁴² Contrary to the well-worn view of Hoffmann and his Beethoven review put forward in recent musicological writings, it was Mozart, and not Beethoven, whom the critic considered to be the greatest composer (he did, after all, adopt the middle name ‘Amadeus’), and it was the Italian traditions of commedia dell’arte and opera buffa that he considered to be the most important genres for the development of character and narrative structure in music.⁴³ Indeed, Hoffmann considered the voice itself as a mechanism through which we are offered spiritual transcendence.⁴⁴

Nonetheless, Hoffmann’s famous phrase is given its most emphatic expression in ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’, where he qualified it to make the case that instrumental music is superior to vocal music.⁴⁵ Carl Dahlhaus’s description of Hoffmann’s Beethoven review as ‘the founding document of Romantic music aesthetics’⁴⁶ has stuck, for better or worse, and it continues to inform a branch of scholarship that has become increasingly essentialist in its reading of music history. Over time, the name Hoffmann has shifted from evoking a figure who promoted music as a pre-eminent art form with the potential to allow us to reach the ineffable, to the ‘chief spokesman’ for the absolute in the programme/absolute music debate that was played out in German music journals in the 1850s, long after Hoffmann’s death in 1822.⁴⁷ Thus Blume, for example, places Hoffmann squarely in relation to ‘absolute music’:⁴⁸ The performer’s

This stereotype of Hoffmann’s view of Romanticism, divorced from literary texts, has become a dubious truism of music history.⁵⁰

Romanticism and Its Home(s)

As touched on here, one of the major considerations in writings on musical Romanticism is the question not only of when it arose, but where it belongs. Romanticism, as Arthur Locke attests, ‘dominated the intellectual current of all Europe’.⁵¹ Arnold Whittall traces Romanticism throughout Italy, France, Poland, Scandinavia, Britain, and America. Rey Longyear asserts that ‘this movement was an international manifestation strongest in Germany, quite influential in England, France, and Russia, but also evident in Bohemia, Poland, Spain, and Italy’.⁵² Katharine Ellis argues that Romanticism was widely considered to be a pejorative term in France, one that indicated smeared harmonies and an over-reliance on literature or programmaticism.⁵³ Whereas the centre of gravity in Blume’s chapter on ‘the Romantic concept in music’ is the Germanic realm, he gives brief consideration to Romanticism in France and Eastern Europe.⁵⁴ In his Music in the Nineteenth Century, Walter Frisch notes that ‘Romanticism was originally defined and self-consciously practiced’ in the German-speaking realm, ‘and secondarily in France and Italy’.⁵⁵

For many other commentators writing in the genre of the music textbook, however, musical Romanticism is routinely presented as a concept that is dominated by German thought and German music. In Donald J. Grout’s conception of Romanticism in A History of Western Music, Chopin, for instance, barely features. He is relegated to a single mention in a sentence that contrasts the grandiose creations of Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler with the ‘lyrical effusions of Schumann’s Lieder [and] Schubert’s, Mendelssohn’s and Chopin’s short piano pieces’.⁵⁶

Few scholars have accepted René Wellek’s invitation to transcend national boundaries and to explore instead the unity of European Romanticism as it applies to music.⁵⁷ John Michael Cooper is perhaps the only scholar to have done so convincingly. He disputes ‘the notion that Romanticism was a predominantly European force whose leaders were all or mostly French, German, Italian and Russian males’. He draws an important distinction between Romantic music and ‘the latter-day canon of Romantic music’ which, he asserts, ‘is itself a culturally and politically self-affirming construct whose cult of “masters” and “masterworks” either implicitly or explicitly excluded composers, ideas, and repertoires that it deemed alien or (in the verbiage of the 19th century itself) “inferior” or “primitive”’.⁵⁸

Such a latter-day canon referred to by Cooper firmly underpins Grout’s broader conception of Romanticism, which is governed by a series of dualities: between words and music; between the strong literary orientation of nineteenth-century music and pure instrumental music; and between the mass audience and the solitary composer. The weight of Grout’s oppositions invariably falls to the latter. For him, instrumental music is conceived of as ‘a vehicle for the utterance of thoughts which, though they may be hinted in words, are ultimately beyond the power of words to express’.⁵⁹ This passage from ‘Classicism and Romanticism’ exemplifies Grout’s tendency to paint over a great variety of difference in music of the period:

The vastness of Grout’s lunar imagery is grounded by the geographical narrowness of his account of ‘Classicism and Romanticism’, which, in turn, is firmly entrenched in earth and restricted to composers in a German-speaking realm. The depiction of this realm, moreover, is devoid of the ethnic and political diversity that characterised the Habsburg Empire, and of the music-stylistic diversity contained therein.

Romanticism and Diversity

Women are largely conspicuous by their absence in the constructions of musical Romanticism sketched in this chapter. As a general rule, throughout the twentieth century women tended to be safely siphoned off from any serious discussion of musical Romanticism, their contributions to that artistic concept and movement found only in those spaces clearly marked out for women. We must turn to The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers to learn of Bettina von Arnim (née Brentano), for instance, that ‘her versatility, intellect and enthusiasm reveal one of the most accomplished women of German Romanticism’.⁶¹ There are some notable and welcome exceptions to this, such as Charles Rosen’s Romantic Generation where Clara Wieck is given sustained attention, albeit within a discussion of Robert Schumann.⁶² But the broader trend to marginalise women in the discourse on musical Romanticism is intricately related to the ‘devaluation of the feminine’ that Alan Richardson observes in relation to literary Romanticism.⁶³

Closely related to this is the degree to which Romanticism was gendered feminine in the nineteenth century, reports of which are ubiquitous throughout the twentieth century, such as Pederson’s account of Kretschmann’s framing of ‘the manly side, to which “character” and history belonged and the feminine side, sentimental and nature-loving’. In Kretschmann’s conception, an ‘over-reliance on the feminine in artistic production had resulted in romantic music’.⁶⁴ Indeed, Hoffmann satirised this very gender stereotype in characters such as Olimpia in the novella ‘Der Sandmann’ (1815).⁶⁵

Gendered readings of Romanticism were given renewed strength after the Second World War, when books such as Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Georg Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason implicated German Romanticism as a progenitor of fascism. Such literary depictions of Romanticism, as Erik Levi has shown, had a firm basis in historical events repositioning Romanticism within the masculine realm of heady ideas. Consider, for instance, this passage, from Goebbels’s opening address of the Reich’s Chamber of Culture, which embraces the view that the Nazi revolution was ‘inspired by the rebirth of a national romantic art’:

‘Because the nineteenth-century lied embodies romanticism’, Edward F. Kravitt argues, ‘enthusiasm for the genre declined in postwar years.’⁶⁷ What the New York Times referred to in 1988 as ‘The vanishing Lieder ritual’ in the mid-twentieth century went hand in hand with the enduring tendency to see Romanticism in music as being bound up with pure, instrumental music.⁶⁸ Grout exemplifies the point by considering art song to be just one of a number of genres in which the text is entirely incidental. According to his account, the degree to which ‘the Romantics reconciled music with words is reflected in the importance they placed on the instrumental accompaniment of vocal music, from the Lieder of Schubert to the symphonic orchestra that enfolds the voices in Wagner’s music dramas’.⁶⁹ Musicologists such as Jim Samson, who argues convincingly to the contrary that ‘art song might sustain a claim to be the quintessential Romantic genre’,⁷⁰ provide hope for the twenty-first century. We might yet recover a fuller understanding of musical Romanticism, one that restores the relationship between music and language. Rather than privileging modes of thought that stifle the (literary) imagination, we can instead – in the spirit of Ali Smith and her focus on Beethoven’s ‘An die Hoffnung’ in the novel Spring – allow musical Romanticism to celebrate its multifaceted richness.

In Lieu of an Introduction: An Anecdote

Arnold Schoenberg had been receiving unreserved support from Richard Strauss for years, in the form of much-needed scholarships and copying work, when in July 1909 he asked the elder composer for help in finding a performance opportunity for a new set of orchestral pieces (later to become his Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16). Writing with a tinge of enticement, Schoenberg expressed ‘great hopes’ for the affective qualities that he imagined would radiate from their sound world, describing the pieces as an uninterrupted flow of ‘varied colours, rhythms and moods’.¹ In his response, Strauss, by that time general musical director at the Berlin State Opera and still closely connected with the Berlin Philharmonic (as whose principal conductor he had served in 1895–6), seemed interested and invited Schoenberg to send him the scores.² It would not have been the first time that Strauss had given Schoenberg a leg up. Only two years earlier, Schoenberg had succeeded in getting his First String Quartet Op. 7 performed at the Tonkünstlerfest in Dresden, after Gustav Mahler had put in a good word for him to Strauss, who, in his capacity as honorary president of the General German Musical Society, thereupon seems to have arranged to cover the Rosé Quartet’s expenses.³ This time, however, the situation turned out very differently. Strauss replied in the negative, and returned the scores accompanied with the explanation that, although generally ‘happy to help’ and also willing to act with ‘courage’, he found that the pieces comprised ‘experiments of such an audacious character, both on the level of content and presentation’, that he ‘dare not introduce them to the extremely conservative Berlin public’.⁴

While there is little reason to doubt that Strauss did genuinely fear the public response and possible damage to his reputation – especially if he were to conduct the pieces himself, as Schoenberg had probably hoped – this external reasoning likely reveals only part of the picture. It is quite conceivable that looming behind his rejection was a much more personal, internally rooted scepticism concerning Schoenberg’s latest creative direction, as a well-known letter he sent to Alma Mahler in 1914 suggests. Although still signalling his general support for Schoenberg’s application for a scholarship endowed in memoriam of Gustav Mahler, on a personal note Strauss did not hide his more recent reservations against Schoenberg, railing that ‘it would be better for him to be shovelling snow than scrawling on music paper’.⁵ Curiously enough, Schoenberg seems to have learned about Strauss’s disparaging comment shortly thereafter, through indiscretion. When in the same year he was approached by Strauss’s later biographer Richard Specht to write an essay on the occasion of the elder composer’s fiftieth birthday, he turned the offer down, referencing this condemning remark in nearly its exact wording.⁶ In fact, Strauss’s remark seems to have sent tangible shockwaves through Schoenberg’s inner circle, as evinced by both Alban Berg and Anton Webern’s biographical documents. Berg was somehow able to copy out the precise quotation from Strauss’s letter to Alma Mahler into one of his notebooks. And in a letter to Schoenberg featuring one of his numerous anti-Strauss bouts during that time, Webern alludes to Strauss’s aspersion in quotation marks, ranting and raving that it was Strauss himself who ‘should be “shovelling snow”’, before continuing with vehemence that ‘[t]his chap should really have to clear the snow from all of his Bavarian mountains as a punishment’.⁷ These glimpses provide an idea of the extent to which, by 1914, Strauss’s reservations against the path that Schoenberg had embarked upon had created a deep rift between the two composers on a personal level. Even though Schoenberg maintained a degree of admiration for Strauss and his music, the two of them would never fully reconcile.

Three Different Historiographical Interpretations

With anecdotes like these, the waters of music historiography begin to part. Interpreted through the Adornian lens of the ‘historical dialectic of musical material’⁸ and the teleological narrative of history as progress therein embedded, Schoenberg’s bitter disappointment about Strauss’s distancing from him shines forth as heroic, self-asserting defiance, the testament of a man unwilling to compromise his vision of emancipating harmony, form, and timbre into the new idiom of ‘high modernism’.⁹ In contrast, Strauss stands revealed as a kind of regressive, old ‘neo-Romantic’ beyond hope – in Carl Dahlhaus’s words, as an ‘about-face from modernism’¹⁰ – who, for opportunistic reasons, merely ingratiates himself with the philistine masses, assumed to be relentlessly ignorant of high art and ever liable to overshadow performances with riots and turmoil. Cast in this polarising light, Strauss’s rejection gains the veneer of a sheer, unshatterable adherence to the ‘Romantic’ tradition (in some textbooks simply moulded into the problematic rubric of the ‘survival of tonality’ beyond Schoenberg’s ‘atonal revolution’¹¹), as much as it marks the ultimate confirmation that Schoenberg, during these years, was breaking through to a new stage of history for which, to speak after Webern’s well-known turn of phrase, the time ‘wasn’t yet ripe’.¹² When understood in these terms, the alienation between the two men encapsulates in the private sphere the ostensible break between Romanticism and Modernism in the public-cultural sphere (which may justify the use of capitalised letters for these terms).

This being said, the same anecdote could also be interpreted in a very different light. It has been well observed that Schoenberg – the ‘anti-bourgeois bourgeois’¹³ – continued to rely heavily on ‘conservative’ tenets and ideas, in his own way. For a start, it is possible to argue that Schoenberg’s resistance to making any aesthetic concessions grows out of the aesthetics of inwardness and expressive authenticity deeply rooted in nineteenth-century thought. Holly Watkins speaks rightly about ‘innerness, the unconscious, necessity, and organicism’ as belonging to ‘an essentially Romantic set of concepts’ that ‘still governed attitudes toward artistic creation’ amongst the members of the Schoenberg circle.¹⁴ Moreover, as Richard Taruskin has argued – playing the heretic with palpable joy in heralding Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and eventually Igor Stravinsky as the ‘real’ figureheads of modernism, contra Adorno and Dahlhaus – Schoenberg can be denied entrance into the pantheon of modernists on the grounds of, for example, the seemingly uncritical use of high-classical formal types in his dodecaphonic works.¹⁵ Indeed, the project of ‘remaking the past’, to mention the title of Joseph N. Straus’s important study on the topic,¹⁶ is so deeply ingrained in Schoenberg’s musical imagination that it is of little surprise to find, in some of his sketches, the primary row and its tritone transposition referred to by the letters ‘T’ and ‘D’ respectively, the designations for ‘tonic’ and ‘dominant’. Approached from this perspective, the grand historiographical narrative of nineteenth-century music advocated by Adorno as a ‘history of emancipation’ culminating with Schoenberg’s accomplishments is thus outflanked by a ‘history of continuity’ – or, in Taruskin’s idiosyncratic term, ‘maximalization’.¹⁷

Then again, it is possible to read the same anecdote in a way that, refreshingly, defies any Procrustean temptation to categorise it along the progressive–regressive axis. To this end, we may wish to attend to a detail that at first glance seems somewhat negligible: the fact that Schoenberg, in the cited letter to Strauss, claims that his set of orchestral pieces conjures up a distinctive mood or atmosphere – he uses the existential term Stimmung (twice). By this claim, he can be taken to situate his pieces within the horizon of Stimmungsmusik, a new aesthetic trope of musical composition that, as Erik Wallrup has shown, crystallised towards the end of the nineteenth century across Europe as a musical genre in its own right, giving rise to such works as – notably – Strauss’s Stimmungsbilder, Op. 9.¹⁸ If we dismiss the idea that Schoenberg might have cast his orchestral pieces in the light of Stimmungsmusik for purely sycophantic reasons, it seems not implausible to see both works alike, despite their undeniably different stylistic physiognomies, as contributions to one and the same philosophical discourse: the formation of a new phenomenological epistemology, pivoting on notions of presence, immediacy, and ephemerality. As Daniel M. Grimley pointed out, the critical impulse ascribed to Stimmung at the post-linguistic turn related to ‘breaking down a monistic sense of autonomy or individual being into a more blended understanding of space, place, and time, one that dissolves or suspends the familiar subject-object distinction that underpins much nineteenth-century writing on music’.¹⁹ Considered against this backdrop, Schoenberg’s orchestral pieces can be construed as sharing the same aesthetic vision as that expressed in some of Strauss’s early works (which makes the fact that Strauss rejected them particularly curious).

By unpacking some of the divergent, even contradictory ways in which the alienation between Strauss and Schoenberg during the years around 1909–14 can be interpreted in historiographical terms, my aim is not to opt for one reading over another. Instead, my concern is with the ways in which these different modes of historiographical interpretation sensitise us to the very challenges posed by any attempt to come to grips with the historical terminus of musical Romanticism. If we consider the view expounded by Benedict Taylor in the opening chapter of this volume that the concept of Romanticism may be best conceived as ‘a mode of understanding music rather than a style or historical era’ (my emphasis), then the question concerning its ‘end’ can surely only be rendered approachable as a heuristic idea, in the way it prompts us constantly to question, challenge, and rethink the methodological foundations and historiographical categories, as well as the discursive strategies, based on which we – implicitly or explicitly, and be this in the arena of cultural and intellectual history, biographical hermeneutics or musical analysis – theorise the periodisation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music history. In other words, discussion of the ‘end’ of musical Romanticism is contingent not merely on the empirical facts chosen to include as the subject for historical reflection, but already, in a much narrower sense, on the way we choose to approach them.

The Historiographical Challenges of Aesthetic Autonomy

This is no news. Ever since the publications of Leo Treitler’s Music and the Historical Imagination, Leonard B. Meyer’s Style and Music, and Carl Dahlhaus’s Nineteenth-Century Music, all in 1989, this meta-discursive perspective has been well established in music history classes. This, however, has not rendered the question concerning the ‘end’ of musical Romanticism obsolete. Rather, modern-day scholarship has seen the rise of a number of powerful categories conceived to address the end of the long nineteenth century (to use the well-worn phrase), including ‘late Romanticism’, ‘early modernism’, ‘maximalism’, and ‘Weltanschauungsmusik’. In the hands of such writers as Peter Franklin, James Hepokoski, Richard Taruskin, and Hermann Danuser, to name but a few of the most influential voices from recent years, these categories have crystallised into fully fledged historiographical theories, each underpinned by its own set of methodological predilections. On the most fundamental level, these theories can be understood as different responses to the profound historiographical challenges emerging from the destabilised ontological foundation of the work-concept: the notion that the ‘musical work’ is an ‘open’ and ‘regulative’ category which hinges on a complex nexus between score, performance, and reception, cultivating and mediating ever-fluid productions of meaning, agency, cultural value, and social function.²⁰ These historiographical categories thus are not descriptive labels for easy stylistic categorisation, but rather represent distinct discursive operations.

It is in particular the writings of Carl Dahlhaus that continue to inspire controversial debate and serve as a critical reference amongst both his advocates and his critics. This is to no insignificant extent because of a provocative streak in his thought. There can be little doubt that Dahlhaus contributed to the theory of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music historiography in a manner like no one else. His Foundations of Music History – a study inspired by his attempt to think through what he described as the ‘practical difficulties’²¹ he saw himself confronted with when working on Nineteenth-Century Music – remains, to this day, an unsurpassed juggernaut of (self-reflexive) methodological criticism. Broadly speaking, it sets out to tackle head-on the momentous aporetic question of how modern-day music scholarship in the face of the work-concept’s destabilised ontological foundation can write of a ‘history of music’ – which is, for Dahlhaus, a ‘history of musical composition’ – at all. Resisting easy solutions, his response calls for a recalibration of our dialectical and epistemological sensibilities towards what he terms the ‘relativity’ of aesthetic autonomy. Thus, while in the opening of his study he maintains that it would be ‘inconceivable in scope’ to discard the aesthetic autonomy of the ‘work’ altogether,²² the chapters that follow make a powerful argument for a nuanced engagement with post-Kantian questions of the artwork and the notion of disinterested aesthetic contemplation. In advocating a hermeneutic-contemplative and critical-rational approach to our understanding of musical works and their place in music history, the fierce dialectical efforts that lead Dahlhaus to assert the relativity of aesthetic autonomy actually push the concept precariously to its very limit – for Lawrence Kramer even beyond it: ‘the relative autonomy of music’, he writes succinctly, ‘just is its lack of autonomy’ (emphasis in the original).²³

And yet, despite the tour de force in Foundations of Music History, the conclusion that Dahlhaus arrives at in Nineteenth-Century Music is puzzlingly orthodox. Instead of dissolving the question concerning the ‘end’ of nineteenth-century music into some kind of critical pluralism – into a set of loose ‘ends’²⁴ – he chose to maintain, in fact to reinforce, the notion of an absolute ‘end’, in the singular. In his final chapter, suggestively entitled ‘End of an Era’, he contended with a nod to Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music (albeit palpably dimming its polemical tone) that it is perfectly apt to ‘end our history of “nineteenth-century” music in 1907, the watershed year of Schoenberg’s transition to atonality’, because, so he implied (and again, not uncontroversially), Schoenberg’s accomplishments had a much more decisive impact on what ‘constitut[es] the “genuine” modern music of our own [twentieth] century’ than those of, say, Strauss or Stravinsky.²⁵ It is this unresolved tension in Dahlhaus’s work – his manoeuvre undertaken in Nineteenth-Century Music to putty the craquelures inherent in the concept of aesthetic autonomy that Foundations of Music History so insightfully threw into focus – that makes his work provocatively resonant to this day.

One of the first scholars to have taken on the productive tensions pervading Dahlhaus’s conception of the ‘end’ of musical Romanticism was James Hepokoski. In his now-classic essay on ‘The Dahlhaus Project’,²⁶ published in 1991, only two years after Dahlhaus had passed away, Hepokoski historicises Dahlhaus’s theory of music historiography and illuminates the axiomatic configuration that gave rise to some of its most troubling, solipsistic tendencies – including Dahlhaus’s linear conception of music history, his chauvinistic focus on the Austro-German canon, and his refusal to engage thoroughly with so-called ‘lowbrow’ genres – with such acuity that it is, without much of a stretch, possible to read his essay as an early attempt to outline the contours of what could today be called the ‘Hepokoski Project’.

The ferments for such a project are fully articulated for the first time two years later, in Hepokoski’s study of Jean Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. On the one hand, Hepokoski adopts Dahlhaus’s term ‘early modernism’ to describe the period 1889–1914, and accepts the principal methodological premises built into it. Yet at the same time, he refurnishes the term, giving it a fresh historiographical spin, in at least three fundamental ways. Geographically, for one, he usefully instals a new dialectical axis oriented around issues of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, thus broadening the Austro-German local-topographical scope of Dahlhaus’s discussion of ‘early modernism’ to include a more encompassing conception of modernism as a European event. Moreover, historically, Hepokoski liberates the concept of ‘early modernism’ from the suffocating Hegelian grip, espoused by Dahlhaus, of history as progress, breathing into it the life of a much more flexible and transgressive category. Whereas Dahlhaus, basing himself upon the influential Viennese cultural critic Hermann Bahr, amongst others, invites his readers to understand the ‘breakaway mood’ following 1889 – the year of Mahler’s First Symphony and Strauss’s Don Juan – as the ‘dawning of “musical modernism”’ (Aufbruch zur musikalischen Moderne) in the emphatic sense of the term, paving the way for ‘the musical revolution captured in Schoenberg’s dictum “emancipation of dissonance”’,²⁷ Hepokoski blurs these clear-cut historiographical delineations. Commissioned by the Finnish government on the occasion of Sibelius’s fiftieth birthday in 1915, the Fifth Symphony, strictly speaking, falls outside the historical confines of Dahlhaus’s definition of ‘early modernism’. And perhaps more crucially, the newly introduced formal categories of ‘sonata deformation’ and ‘rotational form’ by means of which Hepokoski seeks to elicit some of the symphony’s compositional strategies are also, he implies, characteristic of the Romantic repertoire in general. These categories of sonata deformation theory thus cannot be thought of in terms of fetishised stylistic yardsticks for progress in the same way that, for example, ‘developing variation’, ‘endless melody’, or ‘“wandering” tonality’ are for Dahlhaus.²⁸ Instead, for Hepokoski sonata form is primarily conceived of as a kind of centralising vehicle, a communicative matrix that is capable of engendering highly expressive contents and meanings.²⁹

In this way, Hepokoski’s use of the term ‘early modernism’ in effect not only diffuses into ‘Romanticism’, but also calls, thirdly, for a new hermeneutic practice, one that brings the aesthetic tropes at the heart of Weltanschauungsmusik – such as pantheism, symbolist naturalism, the uncanny, voluptuous eroticism, decadence, monumentality, historicism, exoticism, nationalism, imperialism, childhood nostalgia, bourgeois humanism, and pessimistic notions of metaphysical redemption³⁰ – into dialogue with solid, music theory-based analytical insights. By reorienting our attention to the interstice between ‘absolute’ and ‘programmatic’ strata and the ways in which they can help to illuminate each other and, as a consequence, open up hidden hermeneutic depths, Hepokoski’s post-Dahlhausian concerns thus powerfully reveal the individual work as mediating on (not merely embodying a reflection of) the ideas that were widely proliferating at the turn of the century. In so doing, Hepokoski’s study suggests new productive avenues for a critical reappraisal of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony and its place in music history (more than half a century after Adorno’s trenchant polemical characterisation of the work as strangely out of touch with the historical situation³¹) as well as, indeed, of an entire generation of composers that ‘[came] of age in a post-Lisztian/post-Wagnerian world’³² yet resist easy categorisation along the stylistic and aesthetic occupations commonly associated with the Schoenberg circle, including such composers as Edward Elgar, Carl Nielsen, and indeed Richard Strauss. Hepokoski’s concept of ‘early modernism’ has since served as a beacon in the sea of scholarship concerned with those composers whom Dahlhaus was quick to relegate, quite literally, to footnotes.³³

If Hepokoski’s theory can thus be understood as a critical continuation of Dahlhaus’s historiography of ‘early modernism’, then Franklin’s ‘late romanticism’ – a term dismissed categorically by Dahlhaus – is set out as a fundamental departure from it. Taking the cue from Taruskin’s rejection of Dahlhaus’s concept of (relative) aesthetic autonomy and its implied focus on the music’s ‘gnostic’ dimension, Franklin’s category of ‘late romanticism’ aims to provide an understanding of the ways in which music of that time is ‘marked by implicitly communicated meaning, mediated as private subjective experience prompted in public among the “unmusical”’.³⁴ With his heightened concern for the ‘unmusical’, he draws renewed attention to those socially coded ‘lowbrow’ genres and forgotten works that fared badly in Dahlhaus’s Nineteenth-Century Music, yet enjoyed much popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century. In so doing, he makes a persuasive case for the rehabilitation of the ‘unmusical’ masses and their appreciation of the ‘drastic’,³⁵ not in order to launch a defence of their inexorable views but rather to (re)claim those views as worthy of serious critical and hermeneutic inquiry, indeed in a manner not dissimilar from the way Dahlhaus advocated for the ‘autonomous’ works of high art.

To illustrate the critical potential inherent in Franklin’s agenda to ‘reclaim’ late Romanticism, we may wish to return, for one last time, to the anecdote presented at the beginning of this chapter. Once attuned to Franklin’s sensitivities, Strauss’s characterisation of the Berlin audience as being ‘extremely conservative’ can be cast in a new light. There is certainly no mistaking that this characterisation was intended to flatter Schoenberg. By implicitly elevating him to the status of a ‘radical artist’, Strauss played up Schoenberg’s own self-cultivated image. Yet his instincts may have been profoundly ambivalent. As Franklin pointed out, ‘[b]y rejecting the bourgeois audience that had created the social possibility of nineteenth-century music, he [the radical artist, implying here Schoenberg] condemned himself to the role of the uncomprehended outsider, with only ironic counterfeits, mystic invocations and penitential silences with which to beg his keep from those same consumers of art that he had previously rejected’.³⁶ Strauss’s reference to the ‘extremely conservative’ Berlin public is, in this sense, not simply diametrically opposed to the ‘dawning of musical modernism’ but must be understood as integral to it, as yet another response to the highly complex processes of aesthetic, cultural, and sociopolitical diversification at the turn of the century.³⁷

In Lieu of a Conclusion: A Meditation

It seems, then, that with these post-Dahlhausian sensibilities, the historiographical challenges posed by the (relative) autonomy of music can be reframed as heuristic opportunities. Rather than asking whether fin-de-siècle music historiography would be better off with or without the concept of aesthetic autonomy, it appears apt to make full use of the varied arsenal of methodological and interpretative approaches available to us today in order to rethink how the end(s) of musical Romanticism can be conceived. For the purpose of promoting fresh historiographical perspectives, such an eclectic perspective is of crucial significance: it can, after all, serve to foster a healthy scepticism towards the historical baggage of this era and our own biases and blind spots as well as the ways in which the canonisation(s) of ‘Romantic music’, for the better or worse, has ‘disciplined’³⁸ scholarly and cultural practices. Indeed, as the dust over so many hard-fought polemical debates about the end(s) of musical Romanticism has begun to settle, it seems more important than ever that we – as critical and imaginative thinkers, performers, and listeners – enter into an intellectually playful yet conscientious engagement with music’s historical (un)situatedness, and feel encouraged to reinscribe our own subjectivity, modern-day sensitivities, and historical experiences, in the sense of a radical hermeneutic practice, into the tropes that make up the rich and variegated aesthetic imagination of turn-of-the-century music and its cultural life. Fed into such a hermeneutic metabolism, the idea of the ‘end’ of musical Romanticism can only be understood within and against contemporaneous cultural ideas and social values – that is, to speak after Julian Johnson, in the way that the discursive ‘voices’ that sing through the individual work resonate with our own.³⁹ So, for example, the pictorial depictions of forests, gardens, steppes, rural landscapes, mountainscapes, and seascapes as evoked in such works as Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Frederick Delius’s In a Summer Garden, Rued Langgaard’s Fifth Symphony, Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony, or Claude Debussy’s La Mer, not only touch upon crucial issues entrenched in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought but can moreover be read as vital contributions to recent discourses on historical ecology and human geography, in the ways that they engage us – at this challenging time of anthropogenic climate change, environmental catastrophes, and biopolitical ‘governmentality’ – in more fundamental questions of how humans construe their relationship with the natural world. Similarly, the way Salome, during her dance of the seven veils in Strauss’s opera, is empowered yet also objectified by the male gaze poignantly addresses central issues relating to gender equality and power differentials. And indeed, with the cultural memory set smarting like a reopened wound (to adapt a famous phrase from George Eliot’s Middlemarch), the imperialist imagination espoused in Elgar’s The Crown of India raises far-reaching ethical and political questions in a world tinged with what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘postcolonial melancholia’.

Once we acknowledge our very own cultural entanglement, musical Romanticism indeed ‘persists’ in the specific sense described by Richard Eldridge for the Romantic arts in general: as a concept that ‘remains with us as a form of scrutiny of our human possibilities … because of its own persistence in the open itinerary of thinking about value, embodied in its own resistances to authoritative closure’.⁴⁰ But once we take the view that the question concerning the terminus of Romanticism thus pushes on us the very presuppositions of our own ‘post-historical’ era,⁴¹ it turns out that the era of Romantic music is not one ‘of the past’ that has, in one way or another, come to an ‘end’, but is rather, to speak in Schlegelesque fashion, fragmentary and inconclusive – essentially open-ended.