IB Music SL
Unit 20 – Romantic Vocal Music
Romantic Choral Music
 Increased popularity
 Choral music societies as artistic outlet
 Part songs, the oratorio, the Mass, and the
Requiem Mass
 Repetition helps lead to understanding
Brahms: A German Requiem
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Protestant tradition (console the living)
Old Testament: Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes
New Testament: Paul, Matthew, Peter, John, Revelation
Written after deaths of Robert Schumann and Brahms’s mother
Soloists, four-part chorus, and orchestra
7 movements, arch form
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Connections between movements:
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1 and 7
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2 and 6
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3 and 5
Brahms: A German Requiem
 Fourth movement chorus,
How lovely is thy dwelling place
 Centerpiece of work
 Psalm 84
 Form: A-B-A′-C-A′
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and
the Romantic Part Song
 Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847)
 Older sister of Felix, raised in Berlin
 Trained on the piano and in composition
 Encouraged (as a female) not to pursue music as a
career
 Recognized as a gifted artist
 Participated in salon concerts at parent's home
 After her mother's death Fanny took over the
concerts
 Died suddenly of a apoplectic stroke in 1847
Fanny Mendelssohn's Music
 Output dominated by Lieder, choral part
songs and piano music
 Some large-scale works
 Keyboard music reflects her interest in Bach's
contrapuntal procedures
 In her Lieder she favored the poetry of
Goethe
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel: Under
the Greenwood Tree
 Four-voice part song
 A cappella
 Text drawn from Shakespeare's As
You Like It
 Strophic, with two verses
 Chorus "Come hither" follows each
verse
 Changing textures provide interest
Romantic Opera
 Basic emotions with an elemental force
 Suspension of disbelief
 Superstar performers, extravagant scenery
The Development of National
Styles
France
 Grand opera
 Opéra comique
Germany
 Singspiel
 Music drama
Italy
 Opera seria
 Opera buffa
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Bel canto singing style
Exoticism in Opera
 Verdi’s Aida
 Saint-Saëns’s Samson
and Delilah
 Richard Strauss’s Salome
 Music suggests faraway locale
Georges Bizet (1838–1875)
 French lyric opera composer
 Prix de Rome
 Carmen & Roma (Gypsy) culture in Spain
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Based on Merimée’s story
Realism in opera
Bizet: Carmen excerpt
 Love, hate, desire
 Disintegration of a personality
 Tempestuous Carmen is central figure
 Music evokes colors of Spain
 Realism, sensuality, and a tragic end
 Cuban habanera
Women in Opera
 Visibility for women composers:
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Louise Bertin La Esmerelda
 And singers
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Jenny Lind (1820–1887)
Maria Malibran (1808–1836)
Pauline Viardot (1821–1910)
Verdi and Italian Opera
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Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901)
Italian composer
Studies in Milan
Austrian Hapsburg rule
Patriotic, nationalistic works
28 operas
Composed successfully until age 80
Died at 87
National hero
Verdi’s Music
 Romantic drama and passion
 Melody above all
 Three compositional periods
 Early period:
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Middle period (French grand opera):
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Macbeth, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata
A Masked Ball, The Force of Destiny, Don
Carlos
Final period:
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Aida, Otello, Falstaff
Verdi: Rigoletto
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Based on Victor Hugo’s The King is Amused
Libretto by Francesco Piave
Three acts
Renaissance Mantua
Themes of seduction and deceit, with a tragic end
Popular moments from Act III:
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Tenor aria, “La donna è mobile”
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Strophic
Quartet, “Un di”
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4 characters/emotions
Wagner and the Music Drama
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Richard Wagner (1813–1883)
German composer, early career in Dresden
Grand operas, nationalistic operas
Exile in Switzerland after 1849
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Art and Revolution, The Art Work of the Future, and Opera
and Drama
Music drama
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The Ring of the Nibelung
Ludwig II summoned him back to Germany
Festival Theater at Bayreuth
Married Cosima Liszt
Last work: Parsifal
Died at age 70
Wagner’s Music
 Music dramas
 “Endless melody”
 Total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk)
 Orchestra as unifying element
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Leitmotifs
Chromatic dissonance
Wagner: Die Walküre excerpt
 The Ring of the Nibelung
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Gold in the Rhine River
Rhine Maidens
 Norse sagas, medieval German epic poem,
the Nibelungenlied
 Cycle: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre,
Siegfried, Götterdämmerung
Wagner: Die Walküre
 Act III (Finale) of Die Walküre
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Leitmotifs: slumber, magic sleep, magic fire,
and Siegfried
Puccini and Late Romantic Opera
 Post-Romantic Italian composers
 verismo
 Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo and
Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)
 Italian composer
 Early operatic successes: Manon Lescaut,
La bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly
 Last work Turandot left unfinished
 Died in 1924 of a heart attack
Puccini: Madame Butterfly 1 2
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Verismo and exoticism
Inspired by performance of a play
Disastrous premiere
Revised version
Central tragic-heroic character: geisha CioCio-San
 Act II, Cio-Cio-San’s aria “Un bel di”
describes desire for her lover’s return
Tchaikovsky and the Ballet
 Ballet—Past and Present
 Part of larger work: intermedio, masque,
ballet de cour
 Independent art form in 18th century (France
and Russia)
19th-century Russian ballet (czar’s court)
 Marius Petipa (St. Petersburg)
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Pas de deux
Serge Diaghilev (1872–1929)
 Ballets Russes
 Vaslav Nijinksy and Tamara Karsavina
 Picasso and Braque
 Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
 Russian composer
 End-of-the-century pessimism
 Sexual identity
 Antonina Milyukova
 Nadezhda von Meck
 Correspondence
 Carnegie Hall in New York (1891)
 Died suddenly at age 53
Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker
 Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker
 The Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffmann
 Christmas tale: Clara and her gift nutcracker
 March, Act I
 Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
 Celesta
 “Exotic” dances:
 Arab, Chinese, Trepak