“Program music is instrumental music that describes some extra musical content be it a picture, a story, or a poem” (L41, 00:50). Program music can invoke an experience beyond listening to musicians play, it relates to Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, a performance synthesizing all forms of art with sound focusing on life’s thoughts and emotions. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Sturm ( ) is a prime example of how expressive content determines the musical composition. Beethoven decided to compose a movement that would musically describe a thunderstorm and “then he came up with the musical materials to fit that expressive and programmatic bill”. It constitutes the broadest difference between Classicism and cutting edge Romanticism. In Classicism, …show more content…
You have to hear it to conceive the degree of truth and sublimity that musical painting can reach at the hands of a man like Beethoven. Listen; listen to these gusts of wind charged with rain, these thunderous growlings of the bases. The storm approaches. It spreads, shuddering like a whirlwind that overturns everything in its path. This is no longer rain and wind. It is an appalling cataclysm, the great flood, the end of the world (L41). In the nineteenth century, literature and folklore had a significant influence on Romantic composers.
Shakespeare’s plays were specifically inspirational to many orchestral compositions. As stated by Greenberg (2009): “Romantic artists identified closely with Shakespeare's plays, in which locations change rapidly from scene to scene, tragedy alternates with farce, rich poetry with body prose and noble characters clash with clowns. The lifelike turmoil and the loose casual form of these plays made Shakespeare enormously popular during the nineteenth century” (L41, 23:29). Many musical works were based on Shakespeare’s plays such as “Verdi's operas, Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff; Berlioz's grandiose composition, Romeo and Juliet and his opera, Beatrice and Benedict; Tchaikovsky's, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; and Felix Mendelssohn's Overture to a Midsummer Night's Dream”