The Baroque and the Romantic Periods:

The Baroque Period (1600-1750)

The Baroque Era is usually defined as the period from about 1600 to the middle of the 18th century. Its music is widely considered to have certain common features that justify it being regarded as a ‘style period’. In criticism of the fine arts, the term ‘Baroque’, a French word, derived from the Portuguese Barroco, meaning a mishapen pearl, was applied to the music of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Hyppolite et Aricie (1733), to signify boldness, harshness, and incoherence. It was soon adopted into criticism of the art and architecture of the preceding era, to indicate irregularity and extravagance.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1768) defined Baroque music as that in which “the harmony is confused, charged with modulations and dissonance; the melody is harsh and unnatural, the intonation awkward, and the movement constrained.”
In art criticism it came during the 19th century to stand for the ‘decadent’ and final stages of the Renaissance art. It was only in early 20th century that it began to be used for a musical style period and lost its negative connotations.

Stylistically speaking, several features can be specified as characteristic of the early Baroque, distinguishing it from the preceding era. While Renaissance music, broadly speaking, is seen as characterised by smooth polyphony, flowing lines, and homogeneous textures, in the Baroque era composers sought contrast, on several different planes. It is between loud and soft, between solo and tutti or otherwise contrasting groups, as in the various kinds of concerto, including the vocal motet, as well as the instrument type that came into existence during the era, and affected many other genres of music. The late Renaissance Venetian tradition of writing multiple choirs and using spatial effects, and later development of that tradition on a more massive scale associated with the Roman church music of 17th century, is central to Counter-Reformation thinking. It overwhelms the listener’s emotions with the grandeur and magnificence of the music, just as the great cathedrals of the time did with their massive architecture.

Until its final decades the Baroque era was a predominantly Italian musical hegemony. Monody arose out of the thinking of the Florentine academicians and humanists. It was in Florence that the first operas were produced, in Rome that the first oratorio was given in 1600, and in Venice that the first public opera house was opened in 1637. Dramatic music continued to flourish, especially in Venice where Cavalli and Strada worked, and in Naples with Alessandro Scarlatti, as a leading figure for 40 years. The earliest ensemble and violin sonatas are by such men as Giovanni Gabrieli, Meruda, Salamone Rossi, Castello and Marini, and it was in the works of Corelli that the trio sonata arrived at its classical shape.

It is in the work of Handel and Bach, along with a select group of their contemporaries, among them Dominico Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Rameau and Telemann that the Baroque era reached its climax. Bach worked in a local, ecclesiastical based, German Protestant tradition, centred on Thuringia and Saxony. His music is more learned and richly worked than any of his contemporaries.
Handel, born in Saxony, trained in central Germany, (Hamburg) and in Italy, and domiciled in London, composed in a fully cosmopolitan musical language. He wrote the finest Italian operas of the day, creating the English oratorio and the organ concerto, and investing traditional forms with new meanings through the richness and variety of his invention. These two men, born a few kilometres and a few days apart, and at opposite poles temperament, crown the musical achievements of the Baroque era. 

Extracts from Oxford Companion to Music

The Romantic period (1815 – 1910)

The era of Romantic music is defined as the European classical music that runs roughly from the early 1800s to the first decade of the 20th century, as well as music written according to the norms and styles of that period. The Romantic period was preceded by the classical period, and was followed by the modern period.

Romantic music is related to Romantic movements in literature, art, and philosophy, though the controversial periods used in musicology are now very different from their counterparts in arts, which define “romantic” as running from the 1780s to the 1840s. The Romanticism movement held that all truth could be deducted from the axioms, that there were inescapable realities in the world, which could only be reached through emotion, feeling and intuition. Romantic music struggled with deeper truth, while preserving or even extending the formal structures from the classical period.

The vernacular use of the term romantic music applies to music, which is thought to evoke a soft or dreamy atmosphere. This usage is rooted in the connotations of the word “romantic” that were established during the period, but not all “Romantic” pieces fit this description. Conversely, music that is “romantic” in the modern everyday usage of the word is not necessarily linked to the Romantic period. 

Music theorists of the Romantic era established concept of tonality to describe the harmonic vocabulary inherited from the Baroque and Classic periods. Romantic composers sought to fuse the large structural harmonic planning demonstrated by earlier masters such as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven with further chromatic innovations, in order to achieve greater fluidity and contrast, and to meet the needs of longer works. Chromaticism grew more varied, as did dissonances and their resolution. Composers modulated to increasingly remote keys, and their music often prepared the listener less for these modulations than music of the classical era. Sometimes, instead of a pivot chord, a pivot note was used. The properties of the diminished seventh and related chords, which facilitate modulation to many keys, were also extensively exploited. Composers such as Beethoven and, later, Richard Wagner expanded harmonic language with previously unused chords, or innovative chord progressions. Much has been written, for example, about Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde chord, found in the opening of Tristan and Isolde, and its precise harmonic function.

Some Romantic composers analogised music to poetry and its rhapsodic and narrative structures, while creating a more systematic basis for the composition and performing of concert music. Music theorists of the Romantic era codified previous practices, such as the sonata form, while composers extended them. There was an increasing focus on melodies and themes, as well as an explosion in the composition of songs. The emphasis on melody found expression in the increasingly extensive use of cyclic form, which was an important unifying device for some of the longer pieces that became common during the period.

The greater harmonic elusiveness and fluidity, the longer melodies, poesis as the basis of expression, and the use of literary inspirations were all present prior to the Romantic period adopted them as the central pursuit of music itself. Romantic composers were also increasingly influenced by technological advances in the range and power of the piano and the improved chromatic abilities and greater projection of the instruments of the symphony orchestra.

Extracts form Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia