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Music in the Romantic Era
An illustrated history of musical thought in the nineteenth century and its relationship to the Romantic movement
371 pages, Hardcover
First published December 12, 1947
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 4, 2026
Lovely! Learned lots.
October 15, 2017
Why did I read this book?
I was rather up in the air about what I wanted to read next and, listening to Berlioz, whose music seems a taproot that runs deep into Romanticism, recalled that I had a copy; Einstein seemed more to my taste than anything else and, indeed, I over the 4 days of reading I was glad to pick it up and read more at any time.
But the book is something of a mess. I think some knowledge of the music and the lives of the major composers is needed, so it is not an introduction. Nor, with its absolutely perverse treatment of chronology, does it serve as a work of history.
Perverse? Why, yes, that's what I meant. The main body of the book is organized by musical genre, beginning and ending with a chapter on opera which for some reason Einstein broke in two and used to bookend his other generic chapters. In between, he starts with orchestral music and ends with music for piano; this effectively reverses the compositional chronology of three of his major figures - Schumann, Brahms, and Liszt - and entails discussing the work of late Romantic Anton Bruckner long before that of early Romantic Frederic Chopin. But Einstein evidently prefers dealing with matters in an ass-backwards manner: in his discussion of Wagner, he deals with Wagner's late, post-1850, operas before going back to survey the composer's maturation in works from his early piano compositions up through Lohengrin. This discussion of Wagner comes at an interesting point in the composer's reputation: after WWII and before the re-opening of Bayreuth festival with its radical re-stagings of the operas. Significantly, in the "Conclusion", he says:
I was rather up in the air about what I wanted to read next and, listening to Berlioz, whose music seems a taproot that runs deep into Romanticism, recalled that I had a copy; Einstein seemed more to my taste than anything else and, indeed, I over the 4 days of reading I was glad to pick it up and read more at any time.
But the book is something of a mess. I think some knowledge of the music and the lives of the major composers is needed, so it is not an introduction. Nor, with its absolutely perverse treatment of chronology, does it serve as a work of history.
Perverse? Why, yes, that's what I meant. The main body of the book is organized by musical genre, beginning and ending with a chapter on opera which for some reason Einstein broke in two and used to bookend his other generic chapters. In between, he starts with orchestral music and ends with music for piano; this effectively reverses the compositional chronology of three of his major figures - Schumann, Brahms, and Liszt - and entails discussing the work of late Romantic Anton Bruckner long before that of early Romantic Frederic Chopin. But Einstein evidently prefers dealing with matters in an ass-backwards manner: in his discussion of Wagner, he deals with Wagner's late, post-1850, operas before going back to survey the composer's maturation in works from his early piano compositions up through Lohengrin. This discussion of Wagner comes at an interesting point in the composer's reputation: after WWII and before the re-opening of Bayreuth festival with its radical re-stagings of the operas. Significantly, in the "Conclusion", he says:
In the plastic arts he, the creator of the "art-work of the future," was only too much a "contemporary": his naturalistic stage-setting is the despair of every artist: a sort of diorama with little moving figures of men and animals, and finally even moving stage décor. His Venusberg and flower-maiden scenes are the direct counterpart to the fulsome paintings of Hans Makart, one of the "most decorative" exponents of the art of painting in Germany's Gilded Age.On the whole he admires Tristan the most as a transcendent musical achievement, and seems somewhat uncomfortable with Parsifal, though he recognizes its achievement as a continuation and development of Wagner's unique style. Though he mentions Wagner's antisemitism, he does not lay the excesses of Nazism at the composer's feet, an anachronism some subsequent commentators were eager to commit. This is not to say that Einstein completely ignore the then very recent past; in his Foreword he says:
If in this book the presentation of the Romantic movement in Germany occupies a wide space, it might be remembered that it is, at least in the eyes of a later generation, perhaps not a matter of pride for any nation to have been the one most strongly affected by the Romantic virus.The chapters on musical genres concentrate exclusively on Germany, Italy, and France, with the exceptions of Chopin and, at the end, W. S. Gilbert (as the successor of Offenbach). In a tacked-on chapter on "Nationalism", Einstein does a quick survey of the rest of Europe, Russia, and North America. After worthwhile thumbnail sketches of Smetana, Dvorak, Tchaicovsky, and "the mighty handful", it devolves into little more than a catalog of names and compositions, as in this sentence which represents in its entirety the book's information on Franz Berwald:
The initiator of Swedish Romantic instrumental music, was Franz Berwald (1796-1868), with a G-minor symphony (Symphonie Sérieuse, 1843), another one in C major (Symphonie Singulière) and works of chamber music.While, as mentioned, I did enjoy my initial reading, the book is so disorganized that, unlike Einstein's Mozart: His Character, His Work, I cannot see myself returning to it for either reference or pleasure.
January 30, 2021
Complete and utter garbage. Slightly embarrassing. Not worth reading by anyone. I wouldn't even recommend this to somebody studying the art of musicology itself.
I only read it for sentimental reasons. It was the first book of musicology I ever bought. But it is not really musicology. It is just utter, nonsensical bullshit.
It is pretty inexcusable to write musicology without true reference to the music. What is the point in music otherwise than the music itself? But, okay, is it a review of a concept: that of Romanticism in music. Well, apart from that being meaningless without the music itself, it utterly fails at that too. It does not define Romanticism properly, almost as if the reader needs to understand their narrow concept of it.
The concept of Romanticism dying with Wagner is completely ridiculous anyway.
Old musicology is often laced with so much poeticism and subjectivity, you have to 'interpret' what is meant to found anything worth saying. Well, that isn't here. Stupid subjectivisms dominate the text. It is laced with fundamental judgmentalism. Beethoven worship is common in...well, it's still common nowadays. Here's a choice sample anyway:
'One could also represent the essential history of Romantic music as a history of the incipient degradation of the elements of music: melody, rhythm and harmony...but with the master we realize that he was the last great master of rhythm.'
Words cannot describe how wrong this is. I will drop one in anyway: Stravinsky. The one who brought rhythm to the fore. (And this book was written in the 1940s, even if it was by an American with his head up the proverbial, Teutonic butt, perhaps so far, he had never even heard of an LP player - arguably, it wasn't until the early 20th century that US composers gained confidence).
His complete dismissal of entire swathes of music because of his own arrogant judgments...'oh, immature, immature Scandinavia!' It tells you something important that the person who wrote this book also wrote a book called 'On Greatness in Music'. How completely meaningless a concept! How arrogant! How many exclamation marks! Even early musicologists from 100 years before this tempered their language enough so as to make some actual, objective comments and modes of understanding that are useful in understanding what Romantics thought and thus how this is reflected in music.
Einstein arrived at the party late and had nothing, literally nothing, to say.
I only read it for sentimental reasons. It was the first book of musicology I ever bought. But it is not really musicology. It is just utter, nonsensical bullshit.
It is pretty inexcusable to write musicology without true reference to the music. What is the point in music otherwise than the music itself? But, okay, is it a review of a concept: that of Romanticism in music. Well, apart from that being meaningless without the music itself, it utterly fails at that too. It does not define Romanticism properly, almost as if the reader needs to understand their narrow concept of it.
The concept of Romanticism dying with Wagner is completely ridiculous anyway.
Old musicology is often laced with so much poeticism and subjectivity, you have to 'interpret' what is meant to found anything worth saying. Well, that isn't here. Stupid subjectivisms dominate the text. It is laced with fundamental judgmentalism. Beethoven worship is common in...well, it's still common nowadays. Here's a choice sample anyway:
'One could also represent the essential history of Romantic music as a history of the incipient degradation of the elements of music: melody, rhythm and harmony...but with the master we realize that he was the last great master of rhythm.'
Words cannot describe how wrong this is. I will drop one in anyway: Stravinsky. The one who brought rhythm to the fore. (And this book was written in the 1940s, even if it was by an American with his head up the proverbial, Teutonic butt, perhaps so far, he had never even heard of an LP player - arguably, it wasn't until the early 20th century that US composers gained confidence).
His complete dismissal of entire swathes of music because of his own arrogant judgments...'oh, immature, immature Scandinavia!' It tells you something important that the person who wrote this book also wrote a book called 'On Greatness in Music'. How completely meaningless a concept! How arrogant! How many exclamation marks! Even early musicologists from 100 years before this tempered their language enough so as to make some actual, objective comments and modes of understanding that are useful in understanding what Romantics thought and thus how this is reflected in music.
Einstein arrived at the party late and had nothing, literally nothing, to say.
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