The New German School and Late Romanticism (1850-1900)

Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner founded The New German School and attached to it the slogan "the music of the future".  It was at this time in music history that composers created the belief that music and beauty could be created without the academic rules and conventions of the preceding periods. Building from Berlioz's idea of a program symphony, composers such as Liszt wrote pieces in which the musical structure was created by events in said 'program' (the story off which the piece was composed) rather than by an abstract form (ie. sonata form).  However, this wasn't always the case. Liszt composed Les Preludes before pairing it with a poetic meditation by Lamartine. All in all, composers were relating specific poetry and stories to their music, compared to, say, the Third Symphony of Beethoven, that was inspired by ideals and liberties.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) insisted that art arose from nature instead of convention. He expressed that 'art of the future' should express the 'essence of people from which it comes'. He aimed for his 'art' to include more than just music. It should include staging, singing, many emotions, and long extended passages where a single idea or emotion is expressed.

"The highest collective artwork is the drama; it can only be present in its greatest possible completeness when each type of art in its greatest completeness, is present in it"

These words sum up Wagner's thoughts on music and art. It is quite clear to us his viewpoints when we look at the massive works he composed...works of 5 hours, dense orchestral passages and never-ending emotional drive. To him, this was the music of the future...even more limitless than the music of Beethoven, which during his time was sometimes considered too long and demanding for the audience. His music was to serve the drama...not to 'please the public', as he claimed Mozart's opera did. "Music serves as a means to carry out the dramatic purpose."

I have come to realize that while music history progresses because of innovations in harmony, rhythm, tonality, and the like, it also progressed and developed because of the reactions composers had to the music preceding theirs. And so for Wagner, his music was a reaction to Beethoven's music-he believed the next place music had to progress from was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Some composers of the late romantic period opposed the ideas of the New German School and continued to compose and expand upon the ideas in the classical tradition. That is to say, they expanded tonally the music of their predecessors (Beethoven, Schubert) but remained more in line with the four movement sonata plan and other classical forms. If Beethoven had lived longer, would it be possible to say that his music would have been similar to Brahms'? It is very interesting to compare the music of Brahms and Wagner and realize that they were composing in in the same time.

In Wagner's Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, the constant sense of longing and unresolved desire can be contrasted with the opening of the fourth movement of Brahms' Fourth Symphony. While there may well be a sense of longing in Brahms' music, there are also points of arrival-something that doesn't really happen in Wagner's music until the end of the 4 hour work! This shows how different the composers' interpretations of art and the expression of emotion were. The intense outpouring of emotion into the music of late Romanticism is very starkly contrasted in the next period - impressionism - which proved to be a reaction to the German style that dominated during the time of Wagner, Brahms, and their contemporaries.