Romantic Music: The Ideals of Instrumental Music At one point in the study of the Romantic period of music, we come upon the first of several apparently opposing conditions that plague all attempts to grasp the meaning of Romantic as applied to the music of the 19th century. Thisopposition involved the relation between music and words. If instrumental musicis the perfect Romantic art, why is it acknowledged that the great masters ofthe symphony, the highest form of instrumental music, were not Romanticcomposers, but were the Classical composers, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven?Moreover, one of the most characteristic 19th century genres was the Lied, avocal piece in which Shubert, Schumann, Brahams, and Wolf attained a new unionbetween music and poetry. Furthermore, a large number of leading composers inthe 19th century were extremely interested and articulate in literary expression,and leading Romantic novelists and poets wrote about music with deep love andinsight. The conflict between the ideal of pure instrumental music (absolutemusic) as the ultimate Romantic mode of expression, and the strong literaryorientation of the 19th century, was resolved in the conception of program music. Program music, as Liszt and others in the 19th century used the term, is musicassociated with poetic, descriptive, and even narrative subject matter. This isdone not by means of musical figures imitating natural sounds and movements, butby imaginative suggestion. Program music aimed to absorb and transmit theimagined subject matter in such a way that the resulting work, although"programmed", does not sound forced, and transcends the subject matter it seeksto represent. Instrumental music thus became a vehicle for the utterance ofthoughts which, although first hinted in words, may ultimately be beyond thepower of words to fully express. Practically every composer of the era was, to some degree, writingprogram music, weather or no...
