The period from around 1840 (Tchaikovsky’s birth) to World War I saw a seismic shift in the agendas and techniques of romantic composers.
The period from around 1840 (Tchaikovsky’s birth) to World War I saw a seismic shift in the agendas and techniques of romantic composers.
The early romantic generation of Chopin and Mendelsohn had used modest means — piano solos, lieder and intimate chamber music — as a platform for introspective, often quirky, personal expression. Their successors employed far grander means — opera, ballet, large-scale symphonic works — for more public, even political expression.
Whether obsessed with imperial, nationalistic, or purely philosophical themes, these composers — Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Strauss, Mahler, Bruckner and others — were in their own way as revolutionary as those that came before.
Among the works studied: Swan Lake and the imperial Russian ballet tradition; the cultivated elegance of the France’s Third Republic composers as represented by Saint-Saëns; the Super-Wagnerism of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben; Mahler’s oddly conflicted mixture of naivete and Weltschmerz; and the ecstatic visions Bruckner.