MUSIC

• Vocal Music - one of the best tools for expressing one's feelings. This became evident in the Romantic period.
• The Romantic Period's basic quality is emotional subjectivity.
• Composers explore feelings of grandiosity, intimacy, unpredictability, sadness, rapture, and longing.
• Romantic Music forms like the art song and operas were about fantasy, supernatural, romance, and the nature as mirror of the human heart.
• Virtuoso performers are not only instrumentalists, but also singers.
• One singer sometimes sounds like several characters by use of different vocal register.
• The parallelism of music and literature were very clearly evident in almost all forms of vocal music during the romantic period.
• Composers interpret poems, mood, atmosphere, and imagery into music.
• Musical composition such as the art song was written for solo voice and piano.
• Like program music, art song has its inspiration for poetry in this period.
• Mood is often set in the beginning with piano introduction and concluded with a piano postlude.
• Romantic artists found inspiration in landscapes. Their subjects were traditional myths, legends, and folklores usually with the supernatural, grotesque, and less ordinary.
• Mood is often set at the beginning with piano introduction and concluded with a piano postlude
• Vocal Music in this period require singers to perform a greater range of tone color, dynamics and pitch.
• Opera is a musical composition having all or most of its text set to music with arias, recitative, choruses, duets, trios, etc sung to orchestral accompaniment.
• Libretto - text of an opera
• Score - book that the composer and the librettist put together
• Recitative - declamatory singing, used in prose parts and dialogue of opera
• Aria - solo singing part sung by a principal character
• Franz Peter Schubert - "lieder"
• Lieder - composition for solo voice and piano
• Franz Peter Schubert - last classical composer, first romantic
• Franz Peter Schubert - have more then 600 pieces composition
• Franz Peter Schubert

  • Gretchen am spinnrade
  • Erikonig
  • Ellens Gesang III (Ave Maria)
  • Schwanege sang (Swan song)
  • Symphony no. 8 in B minor (Unfinished Symphony)
• Giuseppe Verdi - serious love story with unhappy ending
• Giuseppe Verdi - "all the words a joke"
• Giuseppe Verdi - characters are ordinary people
• Giuseppe Verdi - expressive vocal melody
• Giuseppe Verdi

  • La Traviata
  • Rigoletto (La Donna e Mobile)
  • Falstaff
  • Otello and Aida (opening of suez canal)
• Giuseppe Verdi - "oberto", "la scala"
• Richard Wagner - introduced new ideas in harmony and tone
• Richard Wagner - extremes of chromaticism
• Richard Wagner - explored the units of traditional tonal system
• Richard Wagner - rise of atonality
• Richard Wagner - advocate of music drama
• Richard Wagner

  • Tristan and Isolde
  • Die Walkyrie
  • Die Meistersinger
  • Tannhauser
  • Parsifal
  • influenced Lord of Rings and Harry Potter
• George Bizet

  • Carmen
• Carmen - criticized in horrible ways
• La Traviata - music by Verdi. known as "Camille"
• La Traviata - based on La Dame Aux Camelias