Concise History of Western Music
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Chapter Index Chapter 1: Music in Ancient Greece and Early Christian Rome Chapter 2: Chant and Secular Song in the Middle Ages, 400Ð1450 Chapter 3: Polyphonic Music from Its Beginnings through the Thirteenth Century Chapter 4: French and Italian Music in the Fourteenth Century Chapter 5: England and Burgundian Lands in the Fifteenth Century: The Beginnings of an International Style Chapter 6: The Age of the Renaissance: Music of the Low Countries Chapter 7: The Age of the Renaissance: New Currents in the Sixteenth Century Chapter 8: Church Music of the Late Renaissance and Reformation Chapter 9: Church Music of the Late Renaissance and Reformation Chapter 10: Opera and Vocal Music in the Late Seventeenth Century Chapter 11: Instrumental Music in the Late Baroque Chapter 12: Music in the Early Eighteenth Century Chapter 13: The Early Classic Period: Opera and Instrumental Music in the Eighteenth Century Chapter 14: The Late Eighteenth Century: Haydn and Mozart Chapter 15: Ludwig van Beethoven Chapter 16: Romanticism and Nineteenth-Century Orchestral Music Chapter 17: Solo, Chamber, and Vocal Music in the Nineteenth Century Chapter 18: Opera, Music Drama, and Church Music in the Nineteenth Century Chapter 19: European Music from the 1870s to World War I Chapter 20: The European Mainstream in the Twentieth Century Chapter 21: Atonality, Serialism, and Recent Developments in Twentieth-Century Europe Chapter 22: The American Twentieth Century
 

Outlines:
  - French Opera
  - Italy
  - Giuseppi Verdi (1813–1901)
  - Germany
  - Church Music
  Quiz
  Listening Guide
Chapter 18: Opera, Music Drama, and Church Music in the Nineteenth Century
Germany
  1. Characteristics of German Romantic Opera

    1. The story involves supernatural events.

    2. Humble folk characters

    3. Folklike melodies for nationalistic flavor

    4. Chromatic harmony, orchestral color, and an emphasis on inner voices, instead of the Italian stress on melody

  2. Der Freischütz (The Marksman, 1821)

    1. Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826)

    2. Characteristics, example, NAWM 120
      1. Eerie setting
      2. Melodrama (theatrical genre combining spoken dialogue with background music).

  3. Richard Wagner (1813–1883) and the Music Drama

    1. Music and drama
      1. Wagner believed that the function of music was to serve dramatic expression.
      2. All Wagner's important works were for the theater.

    2. Early operas (to 1850)
      1. Rienzi (1842) was a five-act grand opera.
      2. Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman, 1843).
        1. Wagner wrote the libretto himself.
        2. The libretto is based on legend and concerns the redemption of the hero through the unselfish love of the heroine.
        3. The background is a stormy sea, depicted vividly in the music.
        4. Significant themes recur throughout the work.
      3. Tannhäuser (1845)
        1. A grand opera based on medieval legend
        2. Semi-declamatory vocal writing begins in this work and becomes Wagner's normal method of text-setting.
      4. Lohengrin (1850)
        1. The music flows more continuously between numbers than in previous works, creating long unified scenes.
        2. Recurring themes represent characters and objects.

    3. Wagner's essay, Judentum in der Musik (Judaism in Music)
      1. Essay inspired by his hatred for Meyerbeer and his music
      2. Used as support for anti-Semitism in German culture.

    4. Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs)
      1. A cycle of four music dramas based on Norse legends.
      2. A cursed gold ring links the four plots.
      3. Wagner composed the first two during the 1850s and 1860s and completed the last in 1874. He took breaks during this time to compose Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremburg).
      4. The first performance was in 1876 in Bayreuth, in a theater built according to Wagner's specifications.

    5. Wagner's approach to the music drama
      1. Poetry, scenery, staging, action, and music work together to form a total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk).
      2. Inner vs. outer aspect
        1. Orchestra conveys inner aspect and is the chief factor
        2. Outer aspect portrayed by action and sung words
      3. Music is seamless throughout each act, although there are discernable sections

    6. Leitmotif
      1. A musical theme or motive associated with a person, thing, emotion, or idea in the drama
      2. The first occurrence is usually in the orchestra at the first appearance onstage of the thing represented.
      3. The first time the leitmotif is sung, the words indicate its meaning.
      4. The leitmotif recurs whenever its subject appears or when it is mentioned.
      5. Leitmotifs can be transformed and varied as the plot develops.
      6. Similarities among leitmotifs indicate connections between the subjects they portray.
      7. Wagner's leitmotifs differ from reminiscence motives by other composers.
        1. His motives are shorter and more concentrated.
        2. They characterize their objects at many levels of meaning.
        3. They are the basic themes of the score.

    7. Tristan und Isolde (1857–59)
      1. NAWM 121 integrates action, scenery, and leitmotifs, (CHWM, ex. 18.3).
      2. Tristan und Isolde was the culmination of Wagner's personal style and influenced subsequent generations.
      3. The complex chromaticism of Tristan produced an ambiguity of tonality that defies definition in traditional terms.

    8. Later composers admired his style of orchestration, and his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk.

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