GMG Classical Music Forum

From the previous polls.

I chose Post-Romantic but it could have gone the other way. In the absence of the other, later categories 'Post Romantic' is a bit woolly. In any case it is a matter of 'most often listened to' - and that is currently 'Post Romantic' , of the two on offer.

Quote from: Biffo on June 17, 2020, 01:11:38 AM
I chose Post-Romantic but it could have gone the other way. In the absence of the other, later categories 'Post Romantic' is a bit woolly. In any case it is a matter of 'most often listened to' - and that is currently 'Post Romantic' , of the two on offer.

Post Romantic is actually too large an umbrella and too fuzzy a concept. I chose Late Classical for the same reason.

I think the most prominent Post-Romantics are Mahler, Strauss and Rachmaninov.

I voted Late Classical anyway, just because my latest listening habits.

I chose late classical because Post-Romantic is perhaps not what it ought to be, and seems on the whole to be rather overblown Romantic. Oddly, in literature, the Romantic poets lived and worked during the period of classical music and the Post-Romantic began in the 1820s with Letitia Landon in particular and probably Heinrich Heine (these two met in Paris). Their version of Post-Romantic was more of a demolition job. If one took this line with music, one would presumably choose composers such as Eric Satie.

Even more oddly, the term "classical" was not applied to music until 1810, in Germany, and didn't really catch on in English until the mid 20s, after what we now call the "classical" period was over.

The composers now called "classical" did so without the benefit of the term. If they thought of themselves at all in that way, they thought of themselves as romantics.

(Baroque composers did all their work without benefit of that term, too. They didn't become "baroque" until the early 1900s.)

The Romantic era, which was self-conscious, was over by 1848. Or so many people thought who were alive at the time. (1848 was almost as traumatic as WWI or II. Not as devastating numerically, of course, but terrifically traumatic for all that. The whole century was full of shocks, actually, physical and psychological. In many ways, the twentieth century was a continuation (and a repetition) of the traumas of the 19th century, even to details such as Napoleon's and Hitler's defeats by Russians and the Russian winter.

According to Wiki, notable post-romantics were Puccini, Rachmaninov, Mahler, and Strauss.

I guess that's interesting insofar as there is very little which seems to unite these composers stylistically or aesthetically.

Yes, of course, 'Post-Romantic' is a modern invention. Back then it was just a feeling that the Romantic was going out of fashion and looking for something new.

Quote from: Total Rafa on June 18, 2020, 12:28:31 AM
According to Wiki, notable post-romantics were Puccini, Rachmaninov, Mahler, and Strauss.

I guess that's interesting insofar as there is very little which seems to unite these composers stylistically or aesthetically.

At the turn of the century, Mahler and Strauss would both have been thought of as modernists. Puccini was certainly interested in the latest musical developments until the end of his life. Rachmaninoff is the major outlier in my view, someone who was never at any point a member, supporter, or enthusiast of the avant-garde of his day.

Sibelius, the "anti-modern modernist" would be a better fit with the other three, I think.

Quote from: Mahlerian on June 18, 2020, 07:58:38 AM
At the turn of the century, Mahler and Strauss would both have been thought of as modernists. Puccini was certainly interested in the latest musical developments until the end of his life. Rachmaninoff is the major outlier in my view, someone who was never at any point a member, supporter, or enthusiast of the avant-garde of his day.

Imo Rachmaninoff was not a Post-Romantic but a Romantic tout court.  He made it quite clear, actually: "I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me."

Looks like Post-Romanticism will win. I expected that much.

I've performed Rachmaninoff, in a community orchestra. The piece was the Paganini variations.

I was going through one of my periodic sneer phases about Rachmaninoff at the time. (He was my earliest "favorite composer.")

I learned that while Rachmaninoff sounds quite conservative and old-fashioned, his music is quite sophisticated and modern rhythmically. Too tricky for a community orchestra (even a good one like the Napa Symphony, which at the time was pretty respectible--maybe still is). Too tricky for me, for sure. I developed a new respect for Rachmaninoff in that experience. I began to realized that the typical sense that "modern" was mostly a matter of "dissonance" was hopelessly narrow, not nearly inclusive enough to account for all the spectacular variety of the twentieth century.

(I'm sure that it was this experience that eventually led to my sense that the first truly modern piece, the piece that really foreshadowed typical modernist practices was not Debussy's Faun but Ives' Unanswered Question.

Nice though the afternoon is!!