Choral Music in theAge of Romanticism

By Andrew H. Weaver, Ph.D.

Ask a classical music enthusiast to think of Romantic music, and what probably comes to mind are operas and symphonies, or possibly small-scale genres like songs and piano works. Choral music, however, thrived during the Romantic era. As a philosophical and cultural movement, Romanticism sought to free the individual from the ills of modern life, encouraging people to unburden themselves of social conformity in favor of imagination, personal expression, and a critical approach to the world. The Romantic individual engaged in a process of interior self-cultivation, using the arts to better themselves, with the aim of rising above the everyday rabble of our broken world. Romantics were thus on a quest for wholeness and redemption, which they sought through such avenues as spirituality, pure love (including the joy and suffering it wrought), the supernatural, the distant past, and especially the wonders and mysteries of nature.

Romanticism was a response to sweeping social changes taking place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and thanks to these changes, the audience for Romantic music was vastly different from that in previous centuries. Whereas the fine arts had long been almost the sole province of the highest classes, there was now widespread cultivation of music by the middle class. Almost every bourgeois home had a piano and, in fact, most piano works and songs were intended, not for concerts, but for private performance among friends and family in the parlor. The song (in German, “Lied”) became a quintessentially Romantic genre, combining poetry on Romantic themes with sophisticated music that adds depths of meaning to the words.

But in addition to encouraging musical activities at home, Romantic composers wanted to bring people together in communal music-making, and choral music was ideal for this purpose. By setting for choir the same poems used for songs, Romantic composers extracted choral singing from the domain of the church and transformed it into an outlet for amateur musicians of all classes. During the nineteenth century, choral societies sprang up in almost every European city, and many famous composers were involved with them. Robert Schumann led choirs in Dresden before accepting a job directing a choir in Düsseldorf. Felix Mendelssohn’s early fame was due in part to directing choirs, and choral conducting formed an important part of his duties at his major posts in Leipzig and Berlin. Johannes Brahms spent much of his life as director of a choir in Vienna. Although Franz Schubert (who spent much of his career out of the public eye) never held a regular choral conducting job, thirty-five years after his death an amateur choral society bearing his name was founded in Vienna. In England, Charles Villiers Stanford conducted the Cambridge University Musical Society during and after his student years, and he was later conductor of the Bach Choir in London. Although Camille Saint-Saëns’s and Gabriel Fauré’s choral activities were mostly within the realm of church jobs, amateur choral organizations were an important part of musical life in nineteenth-century Paris.

While these choral organizations were run by men, Romanticism’s emphasis on nonconformity helped open doors for people who would have had difficulty pursuing musical careers in previous centuries, particularly women. Clara Wieck Schumann, the daughter of a well-known piano pedagogue (the teacher of her future husband), made a name for herself as a virtuoso pianist well before her marriage to Robert in 1840, having given her first public performance in 1828 at the age of nine and her first solo concert at age eleven. She went on to become one of the most famous pianists of her day while also composing and publishing a substantial catalog of music. Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny enjoyed a thorough musical education and blossomed into a talented pianist and prolific composer; however, she pursued a traditional life as wife and mother, confining her musical activities (including running a small choral group) to the home and not publishing any music until a year before her untimely death at forty-one.

Life was challenging for people of color in the nineteenth century, but one successful Black musician was the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. A student at the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Stanford, ColeridgeTaylor became renowned as a composer of choral music, often setting works by African-American poets. So well-known did he become in America that his music inspired the establishment of the Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society in Washington, DC, with which the composer toured several times.

The legacy of Romantic choral music can still be felt in the vibrant choral music scenes that exist to this day in many American and European cities.

Andrew H. Weaver is Professor of Musicology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University and a B.Mus. in musicology and viola performance from Rice University.

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