The Romantic Composers

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Schumann adds to the lyrical ardor of Schubert insatiable youthful enthusiasm, whimsicality, a richly poetic fancy, and a touch of mysticism. His songs are even more personal th...

M. Goblot classifies expressive music under three headings, to which he gives the names of "_la musique emotive_," "_la musique descriptive_," and "_la musique imitative_." His...

Born in Vienna, January 31, 1797, Schubert began the study of music when still a child, under the direction of his father, a school-teacher by profession, and his two brothers....

This transition from self-absorbed youth to magnanimous manhood came to Schubert between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years, hastened by the adverse conditions of his lif...

A curious feature of most of these early pieces, due to the literary cultivation and to the fanciful bias of their composer's mind, is their constant reference to all sorts of e...

After his marriage he turned to the larger forms of composition, which he took up in a curiously methodical rotation. First came, in 1841, three symphonies, the B-flat major, op...

It is a relief to turn from the sorry spectacle of these galvanic twitchings of the once so virile intellect to the one happy episode that lightens this period of gloom. This wa...

The chief technical peculiarities of Mendelssohn's music, as we should expect in an art pursued in this spirit of cool and competent impersonality, are fluency, grace, and elega...

The first great merit of Chopin was that he carried to its logical extreme this system of counteracting the piano's defective sonority. The great advance made by him is shown ev...

There is in the "Lettres Parisiennes" of Madame de Girardin a description of a _soirée_ at Madame de Courbonne's, which brings this whole nauseous atmosphere with painful vividn...

[20] Bach's "Well-tempered Clavichord" is an example of a work to which, since its beauty is largely one of line, the piano cannot do justice. See, for instance, Prelude IV, in...

On the other hand, whenever, treating of general topics, as he does in the "Soirées d'Orchestre," the "A Travers Chants," and the "Grotesques de la Musique," he can avoid the pi...

On the other hand, if he was in some degree forced into the dramatic vein by deficiencies on the musical side, he had also some strong positive qualifications for the work he un...

This picture of a disillusion such as inevitably follows a "grande passion" of the romantic order, unpleasant as it is, helps us to a realization of one side of Liszt, his cynic...

Section three, Storm, begins (allegro ma non troppo, page 30) with a very theatrical variant of motive _a_, highly characteristic of Liszt, in which he resorts to the chromatic...