“I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I
Sergei Rachmaninov
cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot
acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel
the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.”
Late Romantic Era: 1886-1900
Background of Late Romanticism
Compositions grew grander and more extensive during the later years of the High Romantic period, culminating in a point where the style could be easily identified as belonging to its own era. Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, founders of the “New German School,” had died in 1884 and 1886, respectively, leaving a musical influence vacuum that many composers would fill. Music would no longer be classified by “schools” but rather by styles of individual composers. Many powerhouses of the previous era, such as Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner, continued to compose their finest masterpieces during the Late Romantic period.
Europe underwent a new golden age under the Second Industrial Revolution. Insanely modern technologies, such as the internal combustion engine, facilitated the very first automobiles. Life significantly improved for the average man, and so with that came abundant free time for many to explore the arts. By the end of the High Romantic period, communities were much more engaged with music than they had been in the first few decades of the 19th century. Countries maintained relative peace with one another, only lightly testing the waters overseas during “the Scramble for Africa,” an imperialist movement in which nations struggled for ownership of colonial territories. In 1871, the Germanic territories unified into the German Empire, led by genius politicians such as Otto von Bismarck. As Germany soon became a major superpower, many German musicians rose to the forefront of the Romantic movement, with notable composers Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss beginning to make a name for themselves in the community (though both would ultimately write their greatest works in the later “Post-Romantic” period).
By the beginning of the Late Romantic period, the rift between the High Romantic conservative and progressive schools widened, leading to the emergence of multiple movements. Impressionism, Expressionism, the relatively limited Parnassianism, and Modernism rose in popularity around this time, though traditional (yet slightly deviant at this point) Romanticism still reigned supreme in cultural tastes. All forgot the piano virtuosos and multitude of composers that had once lived their golden years from 1820 to 1840. This time foreshadowed the stark shift in music that would follow.
The Heart of Late Romanticism
Late Romanticism was marked by a distinctive musical style that retained many of the ideals of previous periods. However, as the beginning of the 20th century neared, a gradually rising neoclassical movement emerged. This constant, repeating back-and-forth of artistic culture from conservative, classical roots to radical, innovative paradigms once again echoes the nature of the human condition: we crave what we do not have. The bread tastes good until one eats it too much too quickly, and then all of a sudden the bland porridge seems utterly enticing, until, of course, the man gets tired of that too. The excessive sentimentalism of the High Romantic era thus made the balanced and restrained music of the 18th century very popular. The main composers of this late Neoclassical period, however, came to fame primarily in the Postromantic 20th century.
Many diverse composers arose during the Late Romantic period. The extensive list includes Edward Elgar, known nowadays for his Cello Concerto and grand Enigma Variations, and Enrique Granados, composer of the very often-played Goyescas. Further, regarding the piano, German-Polish composer Moritz Moszkowski was often likened to Chopin’s successor. Ernst von Dohnányi, a piano hero of the Late Romantic and Postromantic periods for many fond Lisztians, began composing in the final years of Late Romanticism, though his music truly blossomed in the 20th century. Isaac Albéniz and the emerging “Boston Six” (John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, and Horatio Parker) further solidified the prevalence of Western European Romantic music within their countries. The last great Italian opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, lived his golden years during this final decade after Giuseppe Verdi’s success, with major operas Tosca (1900) and La Bohème (1896) becoming extremely successful.
In terms of the orchestra, Richard Strauss embodied a transition from Romantic German values held so fondly by Liszt and Wagner to the incoming modern age. His earliest piece of high acclaim was Don Juan, and until the end of the century, he also composed Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, and a plethora of other successful tone poems. By the end of Late Romanticism, Strauss would also begin writing his best operas, carrying on the legacy. Strauss’s friend Gustav Mahler underwent his first extended period of composition (the Wunderhorn phase) from 1880 to 1901. He wrote many lieder and even attempted traditional chamber music with his early Piano Quartet, though much of these early experiments have been lost or destroyed. Of course, Mahler’s greatest genre was the symphony. Symphony No. 1 “Titan”, Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”, and Symphony No. 3 (the longest of both Mahler’s compositions and of symphonies in the standard repertoire) are modern-day staples of the symphonic repertoire, though they were largely forgotten back in the day and during the Nazi regime.
Other remarkable composers included Jean Sibelius, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (carried over from High Romanticism), and the famous pianist Alexander Scriabin. Scriabin was a very interesting composer because his style dramatically changed. During this Late Romantic period, Scriabin still composed music heavily based upon German piano principles, including the fundamentally Romantic Piano Sonata No. 2 “Sonate-Fantaisie“, Piano Sonata No. 3, and some early études, préludes, and nocturnes. By 1900, hints of Post-Romantic influence emerged, visible chiefly in the Fantaisie in B Minor and ultimately honed in later sonatas. Akin to Scriabin, Max Reger began pushing tonal boundaries in early string and keyboard compositions, while remaining relatively faithful to Romanticism, especially to Bach of the Baroque. Sergei Rachmaninov began composing seriously after his training in Moscow, developing a distinctive style. Early compositions include the “Prelude in C-sharp minor,” two Trio Elegiaque, and the diabolically underplayed Piano Concerto No. 1.
Finally, particularly in the latter years of Late Romanticism, Impressionism emerged as a powerful and progressive French movement. The style had already begun to gain popularity in art as early as the 1870s (Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet), though, as has been the case with every radical artistic shift in history, the music industry lagged by about two decades. Impressionism in music focused on evoking a mood or atmosphere through unique colors and nontraditional scales rather than telling a specific story with rigid structure and clear musical references. In general, sensualism replaced sentimentalism. The champions of Impressionism were Claude Debussy and, later, Maurice Ravel. Interestingly, they both rejected this term, though it still remains as the standard descriptor for their works. One can find exotic modes, scales (whole-tone, pentatonic), and differing uses of dissonance in pieces like the Deux Arabesques and the Suite Bergamasque, which was technically inspired during the Late Romantic period. Many new Impressionist powerhouses would join in by later years, like Scriabin himself.
The End of Late Romanticism
Late Romanticism, and the standard definition of the Romantic movement in general, ended by the turn of the century. Art and literature had already moved away from the sentimentality and “mushiness” of Romanticism decades earlier, but the music community was more tenacious. In the end, a mixture of nationalism and modernism ultimately made the diverse styles of the early 20th century more attractive. Expressionism, Serialism, and a push towards microtonality and atonality rendered traditional Romantic styles impossible to convey.
Of course, many Romantic composers continued to live and compose in the 20th century, but they were quickly overshadowed. With resistance to 19th-century music came a flowering of interest in the Baroque and early Classical schools. Obvious pianists who fall into the category of traditional revivalists include Reger, Ferruccio Busoni, and even Ravel, who came to the fore during the golden age of musical Impressionism in the 1910s and 1920s. Impressionists like Lili Boulanger, Neoclassicists like Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, and pioneers of modern music like Alban Berg, Béla Bartók, Charles Ives, and Arnold Schoenberg dominated the industry.
In opera, Puccini ushered in the final golden age of Italian opera, where the Italian verismo tradition displaced the quite outdated bel canto style, emphasizing raw emotion and realism. Sibelius’ Finlandia clearly shows the nationalist trend at its all-time high.
In the Post-Romantic period, music grew highly polarizing and distinctive. Nationalism reached an all-time high (hence the breaking point of the First World War), and America finally caught up with European music. In addition to classical American composers popularizing Romantic and Modernist music, jazz, blues, and ragtime stood as defining styles. The compositions of composers working in the Late Romantic period grew more radical in the 20th century, a pattern especially noticeable in Scriabin’s late sonatas. Music of this modern era remains controversial to this day, as factions reveal fissures between the old-school and the contemporary, the Western and the Oriental, and the folk and the national.