This, of course, was a romantic idea, and what emerged all around it (as well as inside it, right at its core) was the complex of ideas and feelings we now call romanticism. People in the grip of romanticism were consumed by longing -- longing for love, or, even more powerfully, longing for something transcendent and infinite. Sometimes all this was more than a little vague, and that (at least in retrospect) doesn't seem surprising, since as society changed -- growing more uncertain, and also growing both uglier (as factories were built) and less cultured (as the middle class grew, with money to spend, but crass and undeveloped taste) -- what romantics wanted was both an escape, and something (even something intangible, or maybe especially something intangible) to hang onto.

Art became central to their quest. And music seemed like the highest of the arts, precisely because it seemed the most abstract, the least tied to reality. In the 18th century, that had been a problem. This was precisely why music wasn't so highly valued; because it was abstract, it couldn't express any thoughts (or so people thought), unless it had words attached. But now, as the 19th century unfolded, music was "the art which casts off the corporeal"; it was, as Mark Evan Bonds writes in his book Music as Thought (a study of exactly this era) the "highest of all arts" because (as people then thought) it lets us "perceive the Absolute."

And that, as Bonds writes, meant that instrumental music now seemed more vital than vocal music, exactly because its meaning couldn't be fixed. And the symphony -- happily thought of as light entertainment during much of the 18th century -- now seemed like the most profound kind of instrumental music, because it avoided virtuosity; because symphonic composers used sophisticated compositional techniques; because symphonies, thanks to their deep musical coherence, and because they united contrasting elements into a single whole, expressed the deepest truths; and because the many musical instruments that made up an orchestra -- with their cooperative interplay -- evoked an image of an ideal society.

You can see where this is going. If music was this important, so very central to everything that mattered most in life, than of course it had to be heard in perfect, reverent silence. And of course the music of the past had to be preserved, because -- to people living in the early 19th century -- it was music of the past, the 18th century music of Haydn and Mozart, that first had shown (and in the living memory of people who'd heard it when those composers still were alive) what the full, complex power of instrumental music could be.

There was more. Cultured aristocrats and people in the professional classes wanted to preserve what they saw as high culture against the onslaught, as they thought, of middle-class vulgarity. German nationalism played a part; Haydn and Mozart had been German, and many Germans -- with the German nation politically divided -- looked for unifying symbols of German culture. (Note, by the way, that the distinction we make in our time between Germany and Austria didn't exist back then. In the 19th century, Austria was just one of the many German states.)

And then there was Beethoven, whose life straddled the era we're talking about; he was born in 1770 and shook the high-culture musical world until his death in 1827. If he hadn't existed, someone -- or so we might fantasize -- would have had to invent him, because there couldn't have been a more perfect embodiment of all the new romantic musical ideals. He was the first composer who cut himself loose, just about completely, from the ways that 18th century composers made their livings, through employment, patronage, or, sometimes, as musical entrepreneurs. He was the first composer to stand apart from society, to define himself purely as an artist, even to say, in so many words, that he was writing music for the ages.

His music was informed by great ideals, and in fact by the new romantic ideals of freedom and personal transcendence, which he maintained in the face of threats to liberty that came from Napoleon, and from the repressive Austrian state in which Beethoven lived. His music seethed with struggle. His compositions (and especially his symphonies) weren't friendly, like Haydn's, or effortless, like Mozart's (or at least this was the way the 19th century saw Haydn and Mozart). Instead, in many of his major works, Beethoven fought his way from trouble to triumph. For his romantic listeners, he wasn't just emotional; he inspired awe, to a degree that could almost be frightening:

Thus Beethoven's instrumental music also opens up to us the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable. Burning rays of light shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we become aware of giant shadows that surge back and forth, closing in on us in ever-narrower confines until they destroy us, but not the pain of endless longing.

That was the great romantic E. T. A. Hoffman, evoking Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in 1808. Even as late as 1880, more than 30% of the music played by one of Vienna's leading orchestras was by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven.

But how did this impetuous romantic classicism come to dominate musical performance? Not easily, because at first -- as the 19th century dawned -- the music that now was called "classical" had to fight a much stronger wave of impetuous new popular music. And it comes as a shock today to learn that this popular music was written by composers we now think of as classical -- Liszt, for instance (who first became known as a wildly popular, hypnotic piano virtuoso), or Rossini.

In the next episode: classical vs. popular music in the 19th century. Including the British classical music society so stuffy it wouldn't play Haydn -- because, they thought, he was too witty to be serious.

"Formerly if [a musician] wrote a claptrap string quartet to be played by the fiddlers of the Duke of Plaza-Tora, that still left him glowing with the tinge of the duke's greatness. But to write claptrap polkas or romances for a welter of nameless grocers' daughters -- that was somehow humiliating." (Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos)

Citations:

Kant and Burney: quoted in Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Volume IV. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, pp. 23, 16

Wackenroder: quoted in Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 22-3

"the art that casts off the corporeal": from Joseph von Schelling, Philosophy of Art (1802-3), quoted in Bonds, op. cit, p. 20

"highest of all arts" -- Bonds, op. cit, p. 25, paraphrasing Johann Gottfried Herder's essay, "Which Produces the Greatest Effect, Painting or Music? A Dialogue of the Gods" (1785)

18th vs. 19th century symphonies: Bonds, op. cit., pp. 1-4 (though "light entertainment" is my own phrasing, not his);

why symphonies were thought to be profound: Bonds, op. cit., pp. 2, 44ff, 63ff

cultured aristocrats, people in the professional classes: William Weber, Music and the Middle Class. New York: Holmes & Meyer Publishers, 1975; passim

German nationalism: Bonds, op. cit., pp. 79ff

Hoffman on Beethoven: Hoffman's review of Beethoven's Fifth is one of the key texts documenting Beethoven's reception in the early 19th century. Quoted in Bonds, op. cit., p. 35

30% by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: Leon Botstein: "Vienna," §5 (ii), Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 9/24/06), http://www.grovemusic.com. For the increasing percentages of old music on concert programs as the 19th century progressed, see also William Weber, "Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770-1870." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 8, No. 1. (June, 1977), p. 18

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