Teacher's Guide Cambridge Pre-U MUSIC Available for teaching ...

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Cambridge Pre-U Teacher Guide
Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony (1833). But whereas the programme was all-important to Berlioz
it was less significant to Mendelssohn, who used certain elements of local colour to add a kind of
Romantic veneer to a work which in other respects is classically conceived.
In this sense, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony may be taken
to represent two of the most significant trends in nineteenth-century music. Some ‘progressive’
composers eagerly adopted a fully Romantic attitude, developing new genres and new approaches
to harmony and form, in an effort to express their sense of freedom from the Classical restraint
that they saw as restrictive. By contrast, other ‘conservative’ composers avoided what they saw as
the excesses of such overtly Romantic music and continued to uphold the Classical ideals of order,
structure and balance, writing absolute music in traditional genres that included the symphony, the
concerto and chamber music of all kinds. The difference in attitude between these two groups (and
especially between their supporters) was sharply illustrated in 1860, when Brahms and Joachim
published their famous Erklärung (declaration) attacking the ideas of Liszt, Wagner and the so-called
New German School. But the reality was seldom quite as straightforward as this might suggest.
Brahms, a committed conservative who was acutely conscious of his place in the Austro-German
tradition, was fully aware of the influence of his predecessors on the music he composed. Historicism
was therefore an extremely significant aspect of his work – but historicism itself is one of the most
important aspects of Romanticism, and thus characteristic of a progressive composer. Wagner, a
whole-hearted progressive who wrote volumes presenting his music as the ‘Artwork of the Future’,
composed symphonic music dramas that he believed to be a natural extension of the principles of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – but an indebtedness to the legacy of Beethoven was claimed as the
defining characteristic of a conservative composer.
In a strict sense, the term ‘Romantic music’ ought properly to be applied to music that exhibits
the principal features of Romanticism. In the light of such contradictions, however, the definition
of ‘Instrumental or Vocal Music in the Romantic Period’, for the purposes of Paper 11, Section B,
should be taken to include both the progressive music that exhibited these characteristics and the
conservative music that deliberately avoided them.
Topic B1: Instrumental Music
It is important to remember the limitations placed on the repertoire to be studied for this topic: the
genres concerned include symphonies, overtures, tone poems and chamber music, but exclude
solo instrumental music (i.e. both music for unaccompanied solo instrument, and works for solo
instrument with orchestral accompaniment).
The repertoire is nevertheless quite extensive and teachers will need to be highly selective in the
music they choose as the main focus of study. The principal genres of nineteenth-century music that
should be explored include the following:
Symphonic Music: Beethoven, Schubert and their successors, including Mendelssohn, Schumann,
Brahms, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler
Programmatic Music: single-movement works and programmatic symphonies by composers such
as Berlioz, Franck, Liszt, Smetana, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss
Chamber Music: duos, trios, quartets, quintets, etc. by composers such as Schubert, Schumann,
Mendelssohn, Brahms, Dvořák
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