Twentieth Century Music [antikvár]

Romanticism and anti-romanticism Art in tiie second half of the nineteenth century bears the heavy burden of the Romantic Agony. The pathos and Weltschmerz of Berlioz and Byron was intensified in the philosophy of Wagner and became a cult of suffering finding sanctuary in the idea of redemption. Art had long been a purely subjective means of expression, and the surplus in emotion had long since overrun the frontiers of traditional forms. Wagner was in this sense not merely the great theoretician of the romantic striving for infinity, but the creator of an artistic view of life which knew no rules that cannot be overthrown. The art of the late romantic period can trace its hostility to life back to the worlds of suffering of Tristan and of Amfortas in Parsifal. This is true not of music alone but of a significant part of the literature of the fin de siecle, drama in particular. The immensity of Wagner's European influence is demonstrated by the poetry of Baudelaire and Verlaine and by the novels and plays of Strindberg. Not merely agony, but the ability to give expression to it in its most intensified form, became the paramount aim in the aesthetic hierarchy of the age. Novelists such as Thomas Mann and Proust cultivated this strange pleasure in sickness and disease and exhibited it in works of the highest quality. Whenever music takes on the task of expression, it develops new technical means. Emotional music cannot remain satisfied with well-worn classical elements of construction which have been reduced to mere formulae. In romantic music this urge to create new sounds was stronger than in any previous cultural epoch. The extent to which, new harmonic and melodic techniques were developed from the time of the romantic Lied of Franz Schubert to the early works of Schoenberg exceeded the achievements of the whole period between 1600 and 1800. In an art-form intent on intimacy and subtlety of expression each smallest cell and element in the individual work of art needs to be determined. Eike romantic lyric poetry, romantic harmony is an art of nuances, of minute ramificadons and transitions. When it uses the technique of variation, whether in the rhyme of Mallarmé or the Leitmotiv of Wagner, deviations from the thematic idea are minimal. The smallest