A character piece is a musical composition which is expressive of a specific mood or non-musical idea. [1]
A character piece is a musical composition which is expressive of a specific mood or non-musical idea. [1]
The first appearance of the term "character piece" is in the avertissement (preface) to Marin Marais's fifth book of viola da gamba music published in 1725. [2] He writes that pièces de caractère are now received favorably by the public, so he has decided to insert many of them. Marais's pieces such as "La Petite Badinage" and "Dialogue" have descriptive, literary titles, as opposed to the ordinary titles of stylized dances such as the allemande and courante.
In German, the term Charakterstück was originally used to denote a broad range of 19th-century piano music based on a single idea or program, although attempts to use musical effects to describe nonmusical subjects are “probably as old as music itself.” [3]
Character pieces are a staple of Romantic music, and are essential to that movement's interest in the evocation of particular moods or moments. What distinguishes character pieces is the specificity of the idea they invoke. Along with invoking these ideas, composers such as Robert Schumann use romantic irony to enhance the depth of their works, creating powerful illusions, “[Music] is an evidently art which lifts mankind above life”. Some of these illusions through romantic irony are broken, “this technique exposes an illusion the view that the composition in question came into existence purely spontaneously”, adding color and individuality into the classical mainstream. [4] Many character pieces are composed in ternary form, but that form is not universal in the genre. A common feature is a title expressive of the character intended, such as Stephen Heller's Voyage autour de ma chambre ("Voyage around my room"), an early example of the genre, or Bruckner's Abendklänge ("Evening harmonies"). Many character pieces have titles based on literature (Schumann's Kreisleriana , 1838) or personal experiences (Schumann's Kinderszenen , 1838). [1] Other character pieces have titles suggesting brevity and singularity of concept, such as Beethoven's Bagatelles, or Debussy's Préludes, or casual construction: the title Impromptu is common. Many 19th-century nocturnes and intermezzi are character pieces as well, including those of Chopin and Brahms, respectively.
Large sets of many individual character pieces, intended to be played as a single piece of music, were not uncommon; Schumann's many works of this form (including Kreisleriana and Carnaval ) are the best known examples. In the late 19th and twentieth centuries, as piano music became ambitious and larger in scale, the scope of what a character piece could reference grew as well. The New Grove cites Smetana's "Festival of the Gypsy Peasants" and Sibelius's "The Oarsman" as examples of this later trend.
Romantic music is a stylistic movement in Western Classical music associated with the period of the 19th century commonly referred to as the Romantic era. It is closely related to the broader concept of Romanticism—the intellectual, artistic, and literary movement that became prominent in Western culture from about 1798 until 1837.
In musical terminology, tempo, measured in beats per minute, is the speed or pace of a given composition, and is often also an indication of the composition's character or atmosphere. In classical music, tempo is typically indicated with an instruction at the start of a piece and, if a specific metrical pace is desired, is usually measured in beats per minute (BPM). In modern classical compositions, a "metronome mark" in beats per minute, indicating only measured speed and not any form of expression, may supplement or replace the normal tempo marking, while in modern genres like electronic dance music, tempo will typically simply be stated in BPM.
Overture is a music instrumental introduction to a ballet, opera, or oratorio in the 17th century. During the early Romantic era, composers such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn composed overtures which were independent, self-existing, instrumental, programmatic works that foreshadowed genres such as the symphonic poem. These were "at first undoubtedly intended to be played at the head of a programme".
Robert Schumann was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the early Romantic era. He composed in all the main musical genres of the time, writing for solo piano, voice and piano, chamber groups, orchestra, choir and the opera. His works typify the spirit of the Romantic era in German music.
The sonata form is a musical structure generally consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of the 18th century.
A nocturne is a musical composition that is inspired by, or evocative of, the night.
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term Tondichtung appears to have been first used by the composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term Symphonische Dichtung to his 13 works in this vein, which commenced in 1848.
Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumental art music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience through the piece's title, or in the form of program notes, inviting imaginative correlations with the music. A well-known example is Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
Entr'acte means 'between the acts'. It can mean a pause between two parts of a stage production, synonymous to an intermission, but it more often indicates a piece of music performed between acts of a theatrical production.
An impromptu is a free-form musical composition with the character of an ex tempore improvisation as if prompted by the spirit of the moment, usually for a solo instrument, such as piano. According to Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Johann Baptist Cramer began publishing piano pieces under the (sub-)title of "impromptu.", which seems to be the first recorded use of the term impromptu in this sense.
In music, an intermezzo, in the most general sense, is a composition which fits between other musical or dramatic entities, such as acts of a play or movements of a larger musical work. In music history, the term has had several different usages, which fit into two general categories: the opera intermezzo and the instrumental intermezzo.
Tempo rubato is a musical term referring to expressive and rhythmic freedom by a slight speeding up and then slowing down of the tempo of a piece at the discretion of the soloist or the conductor. Rubato is an expressive shaping of music that is a part of phrasing.
Carnaval, Op. 9, is a work by Robert Schumann for piano solo, written in 1834–1835 and subtitled Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes. It consists of 21 short pieces representing masked revelers at Carnival, a festival before Lent. Schumann gives musical expression to himself, his friends and colleagues, and characters from improvised Italian comedy. He dedicated the work to the violinist Karol Lipiński.
Robert Schumann's Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, is a set of eight pieces for piano, written in 1837. The title was inspired by the 1814–15 collection of novellas, essays, treatises, letters, and writings about music, Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier by one of his favourite authors, E. T. A. Hoffmann. Schumann dedicated the pieces to Fräulein Anna Robena Laidlaw, an accomplished 18-year-old Scottish pianist with whom Schumann had become good friends.
Kreisleriana, Op. 16, is a composition in eight movements by Robert Schumann for solo piano, subtitled Phantasien für das Pianoforte. Schumann claimed to have written it in only four days in April 1838 and a revised version appeared in 1850. The work was dedicated to Frédéric Chopin, but when a copy was sent to the Polish composer, "he commented favorably only on the design of the title page".
A ballade refers to a one-movement instrumental piece with lyrical and dramatic narrative qualities reminiscent of such a song setting, especially a piano ballade. In 19th century romantic music, a piano ballad is a genre of solo piano pieces written in a balletic narrative style, often with lyrical elements interspersed. Emerging in the Romantic era, it became a medium for composers to explore dramatic and expressive storytelling through complex, lyrical themes and virtuosic techniques.
The Davidsbündler was a music society created by German Romantic composer Robert Schumann in his writings. It was inspired by literary societies, real and imagined ones, such as the Serapionsbrüder of ETA Hoffmann, however as Richard Taruskin noted, the concept was most realized in Schumann's reviews of his fellow composers and their aesthetic styles. The illusory group was created to defend the cause of contemporary music against its detractors to whom Schumann routinely called philistine.
The symphonic poems of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt are a series of 13 orchestral works, numbered S.95–107. The first 12 were composed between 1848 and 1858 ; the last, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe, followed in 1882. These works helped establish the genre of orchestral program music—compositions written to illustrate an extra-musical plan derived from a play, poem, painting or work of nature. They inspired the symphonic poems of Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Richard Strauss and others.
The radical change Franz Liszt's compositional style underwent in the last 20 years of his life was unprecedented in Western classical music. The tradition of music had been one of unified progression, even to the extent of Johannes Brahms' First Symphony being known as "Beethoven's Tenth". Beethoven's own three periods of composition are monolithic and united. Liszt's, by comparison, seem deconstructivist. Replacing pages which in Liszt's earlier compositions had been thick with notes and virtuoso passages was a starkness where every note and rest was carefully weighed and calculated, while the works themselves become more experimental harmonically and formally.
Although Franz Liszt provided opus numbers for some of his earlier works, they are rarely used today. Instead, his works are usually identified using one of two different cataloging schemes:
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