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15 - Romantic Forms

from Part IV - Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

By
Steven Vande Moortele
Edited by
Benedict Taylor
Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

This chapter offers an introduction to Romantic form, focusing on ways of organising musical forms that were especially prevalent amongst composers working in Germany between 1825 and 1850 but that survived in the music of selected composers until the final years of the century. Using examples drawn from vocal and instrumental works by Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Clara Schumann, and Antonín Dvořák, it discusses a number of characteristics that are typical of Romantic form as well as the ways they relate to theoretical models that have been developed for classical music. The chapter is organised in two sections. The first addresses matters of formal syntax, that is, the construction and interrelation of musical phrases.The second explores issues of formal incompleteness as well as connections that go beyond the single-movement level.

Keywords

formsyntaxprocessexpansionproliferationcyclescyclicityRomantic fragment
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism , pp. 258 - 276
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Caplin, William E. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Davis, Andrew. Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hepokoski, James, and Darcy, Warren. Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horton, Julian. Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 83: Analytical and Contextual Studies (Leuven: Peeters, 2017).Google Scholar
Rodgers, Stephen. Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Google Scholar
Schmalfeldt, Janet. In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Google Scholar
Taylor, Benedict. Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vande Moortele, Steven. The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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