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Paper 11 Section B: Instrumental or Vocal Music in the Romantic Period
Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
There are two topics for Section B and candidates may choose either. The repertoire from which
the questions will be taken continues chronologically from Topic A, but focuses now on either
instrumental or vocal music.
The Romantic Period
The music of the nineteenth century is often described as belonging to the Romantic Period, but this
is not a wholly satisfactory way of describing a century in which such diverse music was composed.
Romanticism itself grew out of the so-called Sturm und Drang literature written in late eighteenthcentury
Germany, which gave expression to a range of extreme and often violent emotions that
were consciously subjective and represented a deliberate reaction against the rationalism of the
Enlightenment. An approximate musical counterpart is found in some of the symphonies written by
Haydn and others in the late 1760s and early 1770s. In some contemporary paintings, subjects such as
storms and shipwrecks were chosen to show the terrifying and irrationally destructive power of nature,
while the Gothic horror of novels by a group of English authors (notably Horace Walpole, Matthew
Lewis and Ann Radcliffe) was intensified by a mysterious, medieval setting. The two themes of nature
and history soon became predominant, not only in literature and painting but in many branches of the
arts. A growing interest in folklore led to an exploration of legends and songs which seemed to speak
of a way of life that was more in tune with the natural world and far removed from the increasingly
industrialised society that was rapidly emerging. That in turn led to the notion of a nation and its
people being significant both in personal and in political terms. This spirit of nationalism began in
Germany and in the course of the nineteenth century it was to spread through much of Eastern Europe.
Against this background it is perhaps surprising that the characteristics of Romanticism were slow
to manifest themselves through music. The social changes that followed the French Revolution
led to a gradual reduction in the aristocratic patronage which had provided a livelihood for many
musicians. In these altered circumstances composers increasingly needed to satisfy the tastes of a
paying public, whether in the concert hall or the opera house. This was to be a major catalyst for the
earliest examples of musical Romanticism. The hero figure was Beethoven, especially because of his
famous rejection of Napoleon as the dedicatee of the Eroica Symphony – an act which epitomised
a popular belief in the quest for liberty in political terms, and for freedom of expression in artistic
terms. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, too, represented a supreme example of the way in which
music could address the subject of nature, complete with a cataclysmic storm. Yet one of the most
remarkable features of Beethoven’s music is the way it retains the principal virtues of the Classical
style: in its language, in its emphasis on structural balance and above all in the fact that it is primarily
abstract, ‘absolute’ music, it remains recognisably Classical in conception.
It was in the operas of the early nineteenth century that the first systematic exploration of the
possibilities of Romanticism took place. Spontini’s La Vestale (1807), with its historical setting, and
particularly Weber’s Der Freischütz (1820), with its scene of Gothic horror in the Wolf’s Glen, were
among the earliest examples, and in the following decades they were followed by many others, often
with libretti based on such Romantic novelists as Byron, Schiller, Goethe or Scott, and by the literary
god of the Romantic movement, Shakespeare. Orchestral programme music, based on an extramusical
stimulus such as a story or a descriptive subject, was a natural extension of one aspect of
Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony; early examples include Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830) and
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