Music and Literature

Music and Literature and Art

Music and Literature

Throughout the Romantic era, a powerful desire for fusion of the arts was evidenced perhaps most strikingly in the relations between music and literature. An aesthetic ideal of musical-poetic union was discussed by E. T. A. Hoffmann, who wrote, “How often in the soul of the musician does the music sound at the same moment as the words of the poet, and, above all, the poet's language in the general language of music?” Numerous Romantic critics elaborated upon the relationships between music and other arts, attempting to draw both concrete and abstract parallels between various forms (Plantinga, 1984).. Hegel stated, “Music is most closely related to poetry, since both arts affect the senses through the use of the same medium—sound.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose work provided the most lavish and fertile literary field for musicians of the period to explore, felt that music and words found their most complete fulfillment only in one another; as he wrote to August Wilhelm von Schlegel in 1798, “the link between the two arts [poetry and music] is so crucial, and I already have so much in mind in relation to both”

Many artists came to perceive music, with its ability to evoke intangible effects beyond the reach of words alone, as a superior means of expression. Thus, even in pieces of music that did not actually set words, the use of poetic or literary titles served as a symbol of music's expressive force and potential. Franz Liszt, a leading composer of music with allusive content, noted that “it is in sounds that nature clothes her most intense expressions of the romantic spirit, and it is through the ear that ideas of extraordinary places and things can most readily be conveyed.” The project of conflating music and literature was carried out in three main areas: opera, the Lied (or, in France, mélodie), and programmatic musical genres such as the symphonic poem. Opera had always been to some extent a literary endeavor, in its reliance on an original written text, or libretto. However, in the early nineteenth century preexisting literary forms such as novels and plays increasingly provided the basis for operatic works; in this regard the Romantic William Shakespeare revival and the rage for Walter Scott's historical novels, for example, proved to be potent influences on opera (Rosen, 1995).

The art song, or Lied, developed in tandem with the tremendous outpouring of emotion in poetry that occurred during this era. Musical settings of poems by Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Moore, and many other contemporary poets, along with such rediscovered masters as Petrarch and William Shakespeare, established a new genre that came to be regarded as quintessentially Romantic in its intimacy, introspection, and nuanced expression. Even purely instrumental music, particularly that for piano or orchestra, increasingly evoked literary themes or characters; by applying descriptive titles or epigraphs to musical works, composers could allude to well-known fictional or legendary topics in ...