This chapter outlines the specific compositional genesis of the quartet and its private reception during and immediately following its creation. I first discuss the basis of the quartet in an unfinished piano sonata from 1829, and its compositional process in the early 1830s, before turning to some of the possible motivations for writing a string quartet in this period. The last part of the chapter concerns the somewhat-notorious exchange between Hensel and her brother carried out over the winter of 1834–5. In a letter of 30 January 1835, Mendelssohn offered a critique of the quartet, objecting to Hensel’s use of form, specifically her free use of modulation and music that is in places ‘in no key at all’. Hensel’s response – perhaps unnecessarily deferential – is a revealing acknowledgement of how she felt she remained in thrall to Beethoven’s later music.

While it was critics who wrote not none too favourably about Berlioz’s innovative symphony, his work was also noticed by composers, two of whom also wrote symphonies they called ‘fantastic’. Berlioz himself reacted to his own work by producing its sequel (Lélio, or the Return to Life); the protagonist wakes from his nightmare and, eventually, determines to return to his art. Other composers who responded in diverse ways included Franz Liszt, who transcribed the symphony for piano – the form in which it was first published – and Robert Schumann, whose essay is considered in Chapter 10. Later composers took up the challenges posed by the symphony, connecting movements by recurring themes, following the lead of Beethoven and Berlioz by adding instruments to the ‘classical’ orchestra, and composing music of demonic character, some of it using the Dies irae itself.

Returning to the cultural context in which Berlioz conceived his work, other angles of approach to the music, the programme, and the sequel have become a focus of recent approaches to Symphonie fantastique. Some recent overviews appear in biographies of Berlioz, all of which necessarily return to his own Memoirs when relating his music to his personality and life experiences. Scientific developments interested him and may have had an effect on his music, as did his study of instruments, old and new, later expounded in a treatise. Writers have reviewed aspects of the supernatural within the ‘fantastic’ and the importance of the symphony in the development of programmatic instrumental music (related to something outside itself, biographical, literary, or visual). Symphonie fantastique, while it should not overshadow Berlioz’s other works for the concert hall or the stage, remains the critical turning point in his development.

Erwartung was not performed until fifteen years after its feverishly speedy composition. By its very nature, it has not become a regular feature of the operatic repertory, yet its importance is not merely that of an interesting object for musicological study. The dramatic force and lyrical eloquence of its music has been widely acknowledged – a compelling and not unsympathetic psychological study of derangement to be placed alongside more traditionally operatic precedents as Strauss’s Salome. Most published commentaries on it have dealt with compositional materials and techniques, and consideration of a range of such studies focuses on what can be reconstructed about the evolution of the text, as well as the various attempts to find consistency and coherence in the thirty-minute score. By and large, a consensus has evolved, especially through the use of post-tonal analytical techniques, which counterbalances the assumption that the score is a repetition-free ‘stream of consciousness’.

The Introduction appraises recent trends in Schumann scholarship and reception, evaluating perceptions about Schumann’s instrumental music and the Piano Concerto’s place within them. It locates the Concerto within the critical tendency, prevalent since the early twentieth century, to style Schumann’s large-scale instrumental compositions as deficient in comparison with the piano cycles of the 1830s and the songs of 1840, evidencing the inadaptability of Schumann’s style to classical forms. Noting that the Piano Concerto has consistently evaded this criticism, I argue that the work should be understood as a landmark in the development of what John Daverio called Schumann’s ‘system of genres’: it marks the point at which Schumann’s evolving engagement with the genre comes to fruition, and makes possible his subsequent experiments with concerto form.

Although Pierrot lunaire (1912) is technically more radical than Erwartung in some ways, with its pervasive use of ‘speech-song’ vocal technique, it requires only six performers and complements Night Music features with less expressionistic episodes. Since setting Stefan George’s vision of spiritual aspiration in the finale of the second quartet, then contemplating the musical legacy of Mahler and its exploration of transcendent spiritual states, Schoenberg brought consideration of his own relationship with Judaism into an ambitious plan for an oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter. As part of this characteristically far-seeing exercise in rethinking basic principles, he also moved towards the formulation of what became known in the 1920s as the twelve-tone method. Cultural attitudes changed greatly after World War I, and Schoenberg was not impervious to the neoclassical retreat from expressionism. Yet his motivic techniques (not least the variously ordered pitch-class collections formed from the letters of his own name) survived transformation from the pantonality of his earlier music into more systematically ordered twelve-tone compositions. Often making explicit allusions to tonal principles and traditional formal designs, he retained the textural flexibility and expressive intensity of the Night Music years. Elements of technique and ethos already implicit in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung found new purpose in compositions that left the post-Wagnerian spirit of Schoenberg’s Viennese years far behind.

In his original programme, Berlioz called the last two movements a dream – or nightmare. Despairing of the chances of a production of his opera Les Francs-juges, he took from it a ferocious ‘Marche des gardes’ – soldiers who, in the opera, are obedient to a tyrant. The orchestra is enlarged by additional brass (trombones and ophicleide or tuba) and percussion. The main theme is presented in many guises, with much harmonic and instrumental originality. To fit the March into the symphony Berlioz added a recollection of the idée fixe at the end, where the image of the beloved woman is brutally cut off; interrupted as the protagonist dreams of his own execution by guillotine.

Berlioz takes his protagonist to countryside that was surely inspired by the region of his birth in the Dauphiné: a plain, farmland (home to the quail whose call is, perhaps, imitated), and a distant prospect of mountains. The scene is prepared by a stylized ‘cattle-call’, known as ranz des vaches, played on another instrument rarely used up to this time in a symphony orchestra, the cor anglais (Berlioz did not risk ridicule by introducing an actual alphorn). The serene pastoral reverie that follows is disturbed by the idée fixe, arousing memories of the protagonist’s hopes and fears: could she love him? But now he is alone, and his isolation is emphasized when the ranz des vaches on cor anglais, formerly answered by an offstage oboe (another innovation!), is now heard amid the threat of distant thunder.