Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
There are several overlaps between these genres – some of Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s
symphonies, for example, are programmatic in content though conservative in language and
structure. The Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven and the Symphonie fantastique of Berlioz (which
was partly based on it) provided the impetus for much of the programmatic music of later Romantic
composers. Beethoven’s overtures (especially Egmont, Coriolian and Leonore No. 3) established a
fashion for descriptive, single-movement orchestral works, leading directly to the quasi-dramatic
overtures of Berlioz (Waverley, Rob Roy, Le Roi Lear) and ultimately to the symphonic poems of Liszt
and others.
For many of the progressive composers of the Romantic period, a primary source of inspiration was
literature. Literary sources included Byron (Berlioz’s Harold en Italie, Liszt’s Tasso), Shakespeare
(Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, Liszt’s Hamlet,
Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet), Goethe (Beethoven’s Egmont, Liszt’s Eine Faust-Symphonie),
Schiller (Liszt’s Die Ideale) and Nietzsche (Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra). For composers who
sought to express Nationalist sentiments, the history, literature and folklore of their own countries
provided a potent stimulus (Smetana’s Ma Vlást, Dvořák’s Water Goblin and Noonday Witch,
Mussorgsky’s St John’s Night on the Bare Mountain, or Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia).
Exotic subjects were popular in Russia, and although they were more often found in operatic settings
they occasionally gave rise to colourful concert works (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and even –
exotic from a Russian perspective – the Capriccio Espagnol).
For the conservative composers of the nineteenth century, Beethoven was an ever-present influence
and virtually all absolute music from this period (symphonies and chamber music in particular)
sought to emulate his achievements in one way or another. The so-called Romantic Classicists,
Mendelssohn and Schumann, composed in a loosely post-Beethovenian style and the genres in which
they worked can almost all be traced back to precedents in Beethoven’s output. For Brahms, the
perceived impossibility of building on such precedents was severely problematic: it was not until he
was well over 40 that he felt confident enough to write his first symphony, although he had already
completed several chamber works by this time. Brahms’s formal structures are often complex, and
typically depend on the development of motivic cells to unify both individual movements and entire
works. It is perhaps significant that the first theoretical codification of Classical forms had been made
before Brahms’s major symphonic compositions were written, but after Beethoven’s death. This fact,
together with Brahms’s known interest in historical styles from the Renaissance and Baroque periods,
may suggest that he had a greater awareness of the theoretical basis of his forms than any of his
predecessors in the Austro-Germanic symphonic tradition, and that the conscious complexity of some
of his structures may have been a direct result of this historicism.
The expansion of Classical form that began with Beethoven continued throughout the nineteenth
century, nowhere more obviously than in the symphonies of Bruckner, although his style possibly
owes more to Schubert than to Beethoven. Comparable in length and scope (though different in
almost every other respect) are the symphonies of Mahler, who used this genre for the expression of
philosophical ideas and psychological exploration, sometimes incorporating musical events that have
their origins in his own experiences. It is no accident that these works emerged from Vienna against
the background of Freud’s new theories of psychology.
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