The man who most emulated Paganini, on the piano at any rate, was Franz Liszt, the first pianist in history to give a concert on his own. It was partly thanks to these virtuosi that so many concert halls were built all over Europe (and, in a small way, in north America), to cope with the demand from the newly enriched bourgeoisie, who were eager to hear these performers. In turn a raft of composer-instrumentalists emerged to take advantage of this development: Weber, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt were the four greatest pianists of their time and Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Weber and Wagner were the four greatest conductors.90
‘Within one decade, roughly 1830–1840,’ says Harold Schonberg, ‘the entire harmonic vocabulary of music changed. It seemed to come from nowhere, but all of a sudden composers were using seventh, ninth, and even eleventh chords, altered chords and a chromatic as opposed to classical diatonic harmony . . . the romantics revelled in unusual tone combinations, sophisticated chords, and dissonances that were excruciating to the more conventional minds of the day.’91 Romantic music thus had its own sound – rich and sensuous, its own mood, mystical – but it was also new in that it had a ‘programme’, it told a story, something that had been unthinkable hitherto.92 This development underlined the new, close alliance between music and literature where its aim, often enough, was to describe – as Beethoven had pioneered – inner states of feeling, or states of mind.
Carl Maria von Weber was, like Schubert, another very romantic figure, if not quite in the Beethoven or Berlioz sense. He had a diseased hip and walked with a limp but, on top of that, he was a consumptive, perhaps the illness of the romantic age, a slow, tragic, wasting-away (the heroines of La Traviata and La Bohème are consumptives). Weber was also a virtuoso of the guitar and an excellent singer, until he damaged his voice by accidentally drinking a glass of nitric acid. But he also had enormous hands, which meant that he could play certain passages of his music that cannot be played by ordinary mortals.93 He was summoned to Dresden to take control of the opera house there, where he made the conductor (himself) the single most dominant force, setting a fashion. But he also worked hard to counter what was then a craze for Italian opera, based mainly on the works of Rossini. It was thanks to Weber that a German operatic tradition emerged that was to culminate in Wagner. Weber’s own opera Der Freischütz, first performed in 1820, opened up a new world. It dealt with the supernatural, with the mystical power of evil, a form of plotting that would remain popular throughout the nineteenth century. He himself said that the most important line in the opera is spoken by the hero, Max: ‘Doch mich umgarnen finstre Mächte!’ (‘But the dark powers enmesh me’).94
Berlioz was the first composer in history to express himself in music in a frankly autobiographical way, though he also ‘took his fire’ from Shakespeare, Byron and Goethe.95 He has been described as ‘the first truly wild man of music’, eclipsing even Beethoven on this score. A revolutionary, a mercurial figure who shared with Beethoven a self-consciousness about his genius that would become the hallmark of the romantic movement, he wrote a vivid autobiography but his music was autobiographical too. His first great work – and perhaps the greatest of his life, his ‘opium nightmare’, the Symphonie fantastique – recorded his passionate love affair with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.96 The affair was hardly romantic to begin with, at least in the conventional sense. He saw her on stage and began to bombard her with letters before they had even met. These letters were so passionate and so intimate that she became bewildered, even frightened. (He would go to the theatre to watch her, only to scream in rage and leave when she was embraced by her stage lover.) So distressed was he by her behaviour that when he heard rumours that she was having an affair, he put her into the last act of his symphony as a whore. When he learned that the rumours were false, he changed the music. The afternoon when she finally consented to be seen in public at one of his performances set the seal, says David Cairns, ‘on one of the high dates of the romantic calendar’.97 Until Berlioz, music had never been made to tell a story to quite this extent and such an idea changed composers and audiences. Among those who was most impressed was Wagner, who thought there were only three composers worth paying attention to – Liszt, Berlioz and himself. This does little justice to Schumann and Chopin.
Robert Schumann was in some ways the most complete romantic. Surrounded by insanity and suicide in his family, he was worried all his life that he too would succumb in one way or the other. The son of a bookseller and publisher, he grew up surrounded by the works of the great romantic writers – Goethe, Shakespeare, Byron and Novalis – all of whom exerted a great influence on him. (He burst into tears when he read Byron’s Manfred, which he later set to music.98) Schumann tried to write poetry himself and emulated Byron in other ways too, embarking on numerous love affairs. In the early 1850s he suffered a week of hallucinations, when he thought that the angels were dictating music to him, while he was threatened by wild animals. He threw himself off a bridge but failed to kill himself and, at his own request, was placed in an asylum. His best-known, and perhaps best-loved, work is Carnaval, in which he paints pictures of his friends, his wife Clara, Chopin, Paganini and Mendelssohn. (Carnaval was a great influence on Brahms.99)
Though he was a friend of many of the great romantics, including Delacroix (who was the recipient of many letters regarding the love affair with George Sand), Chopin affected to despise their aims. He was polite – rather than enthusiastic – about Delacroix’s painting, he had no interest in reading the great romantic authors, but he did share with Beethoven, Berlioz and Liszt the awareness that he was a genius. Polish by birth, he moved to Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, when that city was the capital of the romantic movement, and at the musical evenings held at the salon of the musical publisher Pleyel he would play four-handed piano with Liszt, with Mendelssohn turning the pages.100 Chopin invented a new kind of piano playing, the one that we are familiar with today. He had certain reflexes in his fingers which set him apart from other players, at that time at least, and this enabled him to develop piano music that was both experimental and yet refined. ‘Cannon buried in flowers’ is how Schumann described it. (The sentiment was not returned.)101 Chopin introduced new ideas about pedalling, fingering, and rhythm, which were to prove extremely influential. (He preferred the English Broadwood pianos, less advanced than some available.)102 His pieces had the delicacy and yet the vivid colourings of impressionist paintings, and just as everyone knows a Renoir from a Degas, so everyone knows Chopin when they hear it. He may not have thought of himself as a romantic but his polonaises and nocturnes are romanticism implicit (after him and his polonaises, music was invaded by nationalism).103 The piano cannot be fully understood without Chopin.