"You Complete Me"

After "show me the money" and "you had me at hello" that is probably the most well-known quote from the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire. It gives me a title for a post about one of the concepts behind Romantic music. Way back in 1794 Friedrich Schiller wrote about the need for the audience (or reader, or viewer) to complete the work of art. He said, "the real and express content that the poet puts in his work remains always finite; the possible content that he allows us to contribute is an infinite quality." This is a fascinating idea, but like many Romantic ideas, it can be easily misunderstood and abused. Earlier composers, while they did expect the player to bring the music alive, did not really expect the listener to 'complete' it in any substantial way (with some exceptions that I will get to later) --just to enjoy it. But the Romantics, and especially ones in the first generation like Robert Schumann, were fascinated by the incompleteness of the work and how it might be completed by the listener. The idea was to leave important things unsaid (or unplayed) just as in a novel, the reader must imagine to himself many details about the setting and the characters, especially the visual aspect.

In close listening to the counterpoint of, say, Bach, we imagine voices continuing even after they have died away because of the logic of the voice-leading--in that sense the listener 'completes' the music. Sometimes you can only 'hear' the full texture by looking at the score! But the Romantics went further. In one part of his Humoresque, op 20, Schumann writes a separate melody on a third stave that is meant to be unplayed!
The top stave is the right hand, the bottom stave is the left hand and the middle is, unheard, inaudible, to be imagined. He writes in the score, "inner voice", in the sense of 'interior'. Here is a bit of the score:

Click to enlarge

The written out top voice is a kind of echo of the 'interior' voice, which is not played. Here is a performance by Horowitz. The "Hastig" section starts right at 5:55:

Now I know what you are going to say: "But I don't hear that inner voice!" Well, yes. Thinking about this can get a bit tricky. Here we have an unplayed melody that is presumably thought or imagined by the pianist while he is playing that perhaps influences the way he plays and thereby the way we hear it. But we are really free to hear music any way we want to. Call this an experiment in Romanticism.

I have another, quite different example. Here is the Quebec group Beau Dommage performing their song "La complainte du phoque en Alaska" in concert. The audience joins in from the beginning and by the four minute mark, take over singing the song. At the 4:43 mark, the band stops completely and only comes back to end it. Nice.

UPDATE: Beau Dommage (the name means "beautiful damage") was a hugely popular rock band in Quebec in the 1970s. This clip comes from a reunion concert in 1995. A "phoque" is a seal.

Read more »

Music in the 19th Century: Franz Schubert and "Der Erlkönig"

I've talked about how the 19th century saw many different movements in music, not just romanticism. But romanticism was most certainly an important and powerful trend. The earliest important composer in this area was Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828) who died tragically young at age thirty-one. Despite this, he wrote a huge amount of music in all the important genres. About two-thirds of his compositions were songs of which he wrote 630! This is representative of a significant shift from the big public genres to more private, domestic, music-making. During his short life, Schubert was primarily known for his music for piano, piano duet and his songs, all of which were performed in intimate salon settings. This is introspective music, exploring different kinds of consciousness than the symphony or opera. One of Schubert's most powerful songs, Der Erlkönig, was written in 1815 when he was only eighteen years old. The text is by Goethe. Here it is in a literal translation:

Who rides, so late, through night and wind?
It is the father with his child.
He has the boy well in his arm
He holds him safely, he keeps him warm.

"My son, why do you hide your face so anxiously?"
"Father, do you not see the Elfking?
The Elfking with crown and tail?"
"My son, it's a wisp of fog."

"You dear child, come, go with me!
Very lovely games I'll play with you;
Some colourful flowers are on the beach,
My mother has some golden robes."

"My father, my father, and don't you hear
What the Elfking quietly promises me?"
"Be calm, stay calm, my child;
The wind is rustling through withered leaves."

"Do you want to come with me, pretty boy?
My daughters shall wait on you finely;
My daughters will lead the nightly dance,
And rock and dance and sing you to sleep."

"My father, my father, and don't you see there
The Elfking's daughters in the gloomy place?"
"My son, my son, I see it clearly:
There shimmer the old willows so grey."

"I love you, your beautiful form entices me;
And if you're not willing, then I will use force."
"My father, my father, he's grabbing me now!
The Elfking has done me some harm!"

It horrifies the father; he swiftly rides on,
He holds the moaning child in his arms,
Reaches the farm with trouble and hardship;
In his arms, the child was dead.

There are four 'characters' in the poem: the narrator, the son, the father and the Elfking. Well, actually five as the horse both father and son are riding on is represented in the galloping triplets in the piano! The father and the son see different realities: the son, the Elfking and his daughters, but the father just wisps of fog. Here is an extraordinary performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, perhaps the greatest lieder (German word for 'songs' which signifies this kind of musical genre) singer of all time:

Notice how he changes vocal color and expression for each 'character'. The music changes mode from minor to major for the lines sung by the Elfking, which accords well with the singer's eerie smile during this part of the song. The tonal scheme of the song is also brilliantly fashioned, but we will get involved with Schubert's harmonic innovations in another post. For now, just enjoy the remarkably achievement of this song: the representation of subtle states of consciousness in music. For this is the very starting point of Romanticism.

Read more »

Music in the 19th Century: Deconstructing Romanticism

In my last post I mentioned how complex the term 'romanticism' is because it refers to so many different kinds of things. Taking his cue from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, Richard Taruskin in his Oxford History of Western Music, defines romanticism as "valuing difference and seeking one's uniqueness ... it meant believing that the purpose of art was the expression of one's unique self, one's 'original genius', a reality that only existed within." [vol. 2, p. 641] Others who presented this view of art and aesthetics were the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and the music critic E. T. A. Hoffman. For the latter, the first true romantics were, wait for it, Mozart and Haydn! We may, along with Taruskin, discern a difference between Haydn's kind of 'romanticism' and that of Mozart. It is Mozart, far more than Haydn, that seems to reach another realm in his music, creating a kind of sublime awe that we associate with romanticism. If you listen to the last movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 41, which I have posted about before, it seems to ascend into another dimension entirely and do so without words. Let's listen:

The date of that symphony, 1788, certainly accords with the literary discussions of romanticism. Rousseau's Confessions date from 1782 and Baumgarten's book from 1750. Hoffman was writing in 1813, speaking of Mozart in retrospect. Mozart's operas are even more romantic in their effect, especially The Magic Flute which seems to fit Gustav Schilling's definition of romanticism rather well: "[an] attempt to transcend the sphere of cognition, to experience higher, more spiritual things, and to sense the presence of the ineffable."

I think we can hear in this music, from The Magic Flute, if not romanticism as we usually understand it, then certainly some elements, some germs, that composers like Carl Maria von Weber would build on in composing what is usually regarded as the origin of German romantic opera: Der Freischütz.

What they have in common is the sensation of a glimpse into another world, a sense of the eerie or chilling. In my next post I will look into those elements in Beethoven that also had a big influence on the early romantic composers of the 19th century.

Read more »