The symphony in the Romantic era evokes, for the modern music lover, a pleiad of big names: Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Bruckner, Mahler, at the same time as the most recorded orchestral repertoire and most played. So that symphony and romantic seem almost synonymous.
Yet Beethoven masterfully opening the way marks the genre so much that his direct successors, intimidated by his success, are shown only moderately, although most often brilliantly, preferring the piano, the chamber music or the lied .
Stimulated by the overwhelming example of Wagner, the genre finds its strength in Germany at the end of the century, especially with Brahms, Mahler and Bruckner, while the young Russian and Czech schools are the parent of national themes and the French make it their own. banner of pure music.
Corridor between two prodigiously fecund centuries symphonies are the eighteenth and twentieth century, the symphony during the Romantic period is the locus of a series of paradoxes, this book highlights. Thus, this book does not limit itself to drawing up a list of works and names, but attempts a living and complex history of the genre as such from the inside , situating it in the general context of musical history, and by attempting a original classification of the works (symphonies-dramas, symphonies-frames). Each symphonist (the best known but also others forgotten or little played: Spohr, Raff, Bruch, Berwald) is studied not only for himself, but also in the way he tries to assume the unique and privileged character that this form takes place within musical history: as an expression of an individual in the name of the collectivity, of an I who strives to tell us what it is in the endlessly sought and almost always unfulfilled purpose of recreating the perfect union, realized by Beethoven, between singularity and universality.
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