MUS 103 20 Romanticism

Lecture 20: Romanticism
What is music criticism, what musical analysis, and when did these practices first emerge? • Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann’s 1810 review of the Fifth Symphony is one of the key texts in Western music history altogether. What did Hoffmann identify as the chief contemporary criticisms of Beethoven’s music, and how did he seek to defend the composer? • How does Hoffmann’s review signal a radical change in the hierarchical relationship between audience and composer? What is the importance that Hoffmann attributes to musical coherence, structure, and musical understanding? • What is motivic economy, and how can Handel’s “Va tacito e nascosto” (TAM 55) be seen to exhibit it? • What did Hoffmann mean by romanticism, and why did he consider music to be the most romantic of all the arts? And Beethoven the romantic composer par excellence? • Why did Hoffmann have a higher regard for instrumental music than vocal music? • What elements in the plot and setting of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821) make it a typical German romantic opera? What happens in the Wolf’s Glen scene?