Posted by Professor Stephen Walsh on October 10th, 2022

On the wall of the music- room of my children’s prep school in deepest Herefordshire in the 1990s was one of those time-line c harts that simulate the flow of history in the form of a polyphony of overlapping lines. Music history began sparsely with Pérotin, Machaut, Dufay, then broadened out into the Renaissance – Josquin, Palestrina, Victoria, Tallis, Byrd, etc.: a well-populated er a, it seemed. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, likewise, were busy times for music. But as the eighteenth century faded into the nineteenth there was a curious lull.

In 1800, it turned out, there were only two composers worth mentioning: Haydn, still clinging on, and otherwise only Beethoven, thirty years old and monarch of all he surveyed. A few years into the new century things picked up again, but for a few short years it looked as if music history had practically died out, preserved only in the musical Noah’s Ark by a single pair of composers.

Beethoven’s superiority was certainly no myth. It was recognised in his own day by composers, performers, patrons and musical institutions all over Europe and even, from quite early on, America. In 1803, the Paris piano manufacturer Sébastien Érard sent him a piano as a gift that was also, of course, a promotional exercise. By 1808 Beethoven’s reputation outside Austria was so great that Napoleon’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte, the so- called king of Westphalia, invited him to take up the post of Kapellmeister in Kassel at a tempting salary of six hundred ducats (some sixty thousand pounds in today’s money), while in Vienna his standing was such that a trio of aristocratic patrons put up an equivalent annuity to stop him leaving.

Above all, Beethoven’s fame tended to act as a magnet for sweeping historical classifications, both in his lifetime and in the years that followed. Most notorious was E. T. A. Hoffmann’s description of him, in a contemporary review of the Fifth Symphony, as ‘a purely Romantic, and therefore truly musical, composer’ (because, for Hoffmann, music was ‘the most Romantic of all arts – one might almost say the only one that is purely Romantic’). Admittedly, Hoffmann also considered Haydn and Mozart to be Romantic, though his verbal portraits of their music suggest that their romanticism was largely in the mind of the writer. Haydn’s symphonies, for example, ‘lead us through endless, green forest- glades, through a motley throng of happy people. Youths and girls sweep past dancing the round . . . a world of love, of bliss, of eternal youth, as though before the Fall; no suffering, no pain; only sweet melancholy longing for the beloved vision floating far off in the red glow of evening.’ Mozart, on the other hand, ‘leads us deep into the realm of spirits. Dread lies all about us, but withholds its torments and becomes more an intimation of infinity.’

Hoffmann, as well as being one of the great novella and short-story writers of his day, was himself a composer and a knowledgeable music critic. His best- known opera, Undine (1816), though disappointing for anyone looking for the sources of Romantic music in the literary world of the early 1800s, is important as the first in a line of operas, songs and (eventually) instrumental works about water sprites who marry mortals against the best fairy advice and suffer the bitter consequences. There will be more to say about fairies; but it seems reasonably safe to assert, at this stage, that they are not a significant component of Beethoven’s music.

So does it make sense, at the start of a book about Romantic music, to think of Beethoven and his immediate predecessors as in this or any other sense Romantic? The answer is clearly yes, but only because the idea of romanticism is something altogether broader and richer than might be deduced from Hoffmann’s superbly imaginative definitions. To get at some kind of satisfactory image of what this much abused expression might signify in its particular application to music, we have somehow to get away from the habit of imposing on music our own emotional predilections and try to understand the nature and historical context of the phenomenon itself. After all, Hoffmann’s description could just as well apply to Monteverdi, Handel or Bach, or even Josquin des Prez or Palestrina, as to composers like Schumann or Berlioz or Wagner, of whom he naturally knew nothing but whom we think of as Romantic.

His idea of music as the most purely Romantic art plainly comes from the fact that instrumental music, at least, lacks overt subject matter and therefore lends itself to having subject matter thrust upon it in the privacy of the listener’s mind. We can swoon to Brahms or Tchaikovsky, but we can also swoon, perhaps less dramatically, to Handel or Vivaldi. But if all ‘Romantic’ means is having the capacity to set us all swooning, we might as well pass on to some more interesting topic. Luckily, there is a little more to it than that.

It has seemed to me that the best way of exploring this complicated question would be through the entirely enjoyable process of writing a narrative history of what most of us think of as the Romantic epoch, very broadly defined; enjoyable, of course, because a lot of the research involved would be simply listening to an immense amount of music, including a good deal that, quite frankly, I had not heard before, and some that I barely knew existed. The nineteenth century was crucially a time of stylistic diversity, a time when a composer asserted his or her existential being through a recognisable, even idiosyncratic musical language, after several centuries during which composers were generally less concerned with self than with craftsmanship, and individuality emerged almost by accident, in small turns of phrase rather than wholesale linguistic contrasts. This is much truer for music than for literature, because music is less restricted by semantics; truer perhaps than for the visual arts, which, in the nineteenth century, were still largely tied to representation, or for the architectural design of buildings, which, after all, had to be lived in and to stay up.

Even within its seemingly rather strict grammatical rules, music turned out to be the most naturally deviant art form; the textbook rules proved less limiting than had been thought and could be broken without much damage as long as a coherent framework were preserved and could be perceived. I don’t want to characterise Romantic composers as a procession of irresponsible tearaways. All the composers in this book were conscientious artists who knew what they were doing and who took the risks they took with a clear intention and an understanding of the always precarious balance between expression and technique. But risk-taking – the braving of the unknown – was certainly an important part of what they wanted to do, and that is as true of Chopin and Verdi as it is of Berlioz and Wagner. Perhaps one can say that the riskiest thing of all for an artist, the baring of the soul in language that might collapse under the weight of its own emotion, is an essential part of Romantic music, independent of categories and ostensible subject matter. But it is certainly not the only part.

The new, the original, the unexpected, the beautiful, the sublime, but also the intimate and domestic, what Germans call the gemütlich, the supremely brilliant and the supremely simple: there is a range to Romantic music that is absent from the music of earlier centuries, with all its perfection. These things bring with them imperfections, disasters as well as triumphs. Writing music, when you leave the safety and comfort of the well- trodden, well-mapped path, is a diffcult and dangerous undertaking, and what could be more Romantic than that?

In what follows I have tried not to be dogmatic about terminology. The academic fraternity, of which I was once a fortunate member, would be careful to limit what was meant by romanticism. We would hear about various categories: the Individual, Nature, the Outcast, Magic, the Antique, Dreams, Nightmares, Insanity, Folk Tales and Poetry, Myth, the Exotic, the Artist as God, etc., categories into which it would be hard or in one or two cases impossible to fit several of the greatest composers in what Eric Hobsbawm called the long nineteenth century. Verbal categories can be met by verbal, less well by instrumental, music. Programme music can help bridge the gap, but only if we take its assurances on trust, since they can hardly be demonstrated beyond question. If, on the other hand, we start with Hoffmann’s idea and project it exclusively on to the music of his own time and the following hundred years or so, we may conclude that the issue is less about subject matter as such, more about freedom and individuality of style, allied to an increasing consciousness of self. More perhaps than in the other arts, the Romantic composer is the real subject of his own work, while any ostensible subject matter is merely its vehicle. Most of this book has been written at a time when, for reasons that are all too well known, libraries have been closed, and research has mostly been limited to one’s own bookshelves, the vast but by no means unlimited resources of the internet, and the remarkable amenity of overnight book deliveries – expensive but occasionally life-saving.

I have availed myself of all these aids; and perhaps it has even been a mercy, with a topic of this kind, to have been denied the kinds of research facility that would have resulted in a still more tiresomely detailed, perhaps more erudite, probably longer and certainly later text than the present one. This is, in other words, an armchair book which, I optimistically hope, will also be an armchair read, at least for those who love this music and would like a conspectus of how it all came about, why it took the form it did, and indeed what it actually amounts to.

The Beloved Vision: Music in the Romantic Age by Stephen Walsh is published by Faber on October 6th, 2022