Romantic Period

Beethoven’s “Razumovsky” Cycle: String Quartet No. 7 in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1

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Beethoven’s three Op. 59 String Quartets were revolutionary. Written in 1806, six years after the composer’s initial Op. 18 set, the so-called “Razumovsky” Quartets were more complex, expansive in scale, and emotionally dramatic than anything previously conceived in the genre. Earlier chamber works were written for the entertainment of aristocratic amateur musicians. With this music, the string quartet moved decisively into the concert hall. Commissioned by Count Andreas Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador …

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Liszt’s “Les Préludes”: The Birth of the Symphonic Poem

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At the dawn of the Romantic period, a dramatic new type of concert piece emerged that was infused with extramusical associations. This programmatic music, usually inspired by literary themes, crystalized with the thirteen symphonic poems (or tone poems) of Franz Liszt. Filled with passion, turbulence, pathos, and heroic exultation, this free-form music probed new psychological depths. Liszt’s Les Préludes, composed between 1849 and 1855, was the first piece to be called a “symphonic poem.” …

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Paganini Meets Rossini: “I Palpiti”

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If the Top 40 popular song charts had existed in the early nineteenth century, they would have been dominated by the melodies of opera composers such as Gioachino Rossini. Today, popular music is distributed through recordings. In the nineteenth century, music distribution came in the form of arrangements and adaptations. Rock star virtuosos such as Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt drew on these melodies in the form of paraphrases. Paganini’s Variations on I …

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Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto: An Intimate Colossus

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I don’t mind telling you that I have written a tiny, tiny pianoforte concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo. This is how Johannes Brahms jokingly described the newly completed Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major in a letter to his friend and former student, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, dated July 7, 1881. In another letter, written around the same time, he referred flippantly to “some little piano pieces.” In fact, …

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Mussorgsky Songs: “Night” and “Where Art Thou, Little Star?”

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Modest Mussorgsky’s 1864 art song, Noch (“Night) inhabits a hazy, sensuous nocturnal dreamscape. The text by Alexander Pushkin begins with the lines, “My voice is for you both tender and languid, it disturbs the late silence of night’s darkness.” Throughout the poem, the brightness of eyes illuminated by the light of a “sorrowful candle” is contrasted with the gloom of the night. The psychologically erratic Mussorgsky (1839-1881) was a member of “The Mighty Five,” a …

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Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto: Oistrakh, Milstein, Heifetz

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Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major has long held a cherished position in the musical canon. Yet, the value of this popular work was not always appreciated. Following the premiere on December 4, 1881, performed by the Russian violinist Adolph Brodsky with Hans Richter leading the Vienna Philharmonic, the influential critic Eduard Hanslick wrote savagely, “Tchaikovsky is surely no ordinary talent, but rather, an inflated one…lacking discrimination and taste.” He continued, “The same …

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Schumann’s “Nachtlied,” Op. 108: The Gentle Approach of Sleep

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Robert Schumann’s Nachtlied, Op. 108 for eight-part chorus and orchestra drifts into the serene, magical world of sleep. Schumann composed this autumnal choral song over the course of a week in November, 1849. It is a setting of a poem by Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863) in which death is met first with fear and then with acceptance. The song begins with a sense of haunting mystery, with the obsessive repetition of a short, disjointed motif. There …

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