BACKGROUND LANDSCAPE IN ROMANTIC MUSIC

Luis Ángel de Benito

Soft pink, sky blue for Mrs. Andrews. Green and greys for Mr. Andrews. She

is reflected in the sweet sky light. He is reflected in forest and hunting world.

Thomas Gainsborough (1750) paints a landscape as distorted/poetic mirror of the

characters. Later, Romantic artists would paint epic landscapes for heroic characters,

or peaceful landscapes for meditative characters, or would construct paradoxes

between both planes.

One of the most astonishing romantic discoveries is the individual’s projection

in the landscape, or landscapes engendering individuals. In other words, the

individual’s features extend to the mountains around, the clouds, the lakes or the

forests.

You can appreciate the difference between this battle painting,

and this,

In the first the buildings remains serene, contemplating the tragedy from their

classic order. It’s a majestic and perhaps an indifferent landscape. In the second

painting the walls and the air are coloured by the violence and the crash of the war:

the human colours are projected to the bottom.

Frequently the romantic landscape reveal us how the hero feels: if his/her

heart is distraught, the forest will be gloomy; if his heart is euphoric, the forest will

sing plethoric with mountains and rivers.

Usually we consider Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) as supreme

example of this communion between men and landscape. We don’t really know if the

main character is Heathcliff, Catharine, the unhappiness, or the damn mists in those

moors (“The hell has British names there”, Borges said).

However we should remember her sister Charlotte, in Jane Eyre, for having

treated in a subtler way the deep link between Jane’s heart and her landscape.

Charlotte’s methaphors are intense, and all the landscape becomes a great

metonymy, a book of symbols. These are examples:

• Jane, from her loneliness, looks at a “little hungry robin”. This little bird is

of course Jane’s heart (chapter 4). In chapter 24 other bird, a nightingale,

will be the voice of her infancy.

• Later, she spends the night in a “low-ceiled, gloomy room” (chapter 5),

which is her own inside.

• The angelic Helen’s death is the death of Jane’s infancy; her dear Miss

Temple’s leaving is Jane’s window to the outside (chapter 10).

• In Rochester’s mansion, the room, a “bright little place” with sunshine,

blue curtains, carpeted floor, is the rising Jane’s soul (chapter 11).

• Rochester’s cigar, “a trail of Havannah incense on the freezing and sunless

air” is Rochester himself, and is the warmness Jane finds in that cold place

(chapter 15).

• The moon, “full and bright” with “her disk –silver-white and crystal clear”

is Jane’s soul again , “beautiful, but too solemn” (chapter 20).

• Jane’s heart is “skies so pure, suns so radiant”, like “a band of Italian days

from the South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds” (chapter 23).

• A great horse-chestnut which has been struck by lighting in the night

(chapter 23) is her relation with Rochester.

• Later her heart is a “blood-red moon”, apples in the grass, a still and

solitary road (chapter 25).

These comparisons are not told in the novel. The reader guess them easily.

Well, possibly you are forgot the topic of my talk, and perhaps you are

expecting me to tell the end of this novel. But I will not do it today. I recommend you

this reading.

Jane Eyre is useful for us to understand this new model, in mid 19th century, in

which the landscape plane explains the action or the soul of the characters. It’s

interesting to understand that painters had been doing that before for some

centuries. In this novel it’s Jane who projects her conscience to the walls, the moon

and the roads. Possibly Wuthering Heights is an example of the opposite: the terrible

fogs and mists of Yorkshire perhaps have modeled the human souls.

Then, we can admit in literature that the space or landscape has three

modalities:1:

1. The space is created by the character: it doesn’t have proper life. Example:

Goriot’s room, an extension of his soul, in Balzac’s Papa Goriot.

2. The space is an antagonist, a great “character”, hostil to the hero.

Examples: the sordid mine in Zola’s Germinal, Paris city in many Balzac’s

novels, Madrid in Galdós…

3. The space creates the character. The space projects him, “possesses” him

and determines his behaviour. Example: the quoted Wuthering Heights, but

also this wondering tale, The Fall of the House of Usher, by Poe. In this

account Usher and Madeline live in a mansion/fate, which is reflected in a

morbid pond, like a sinister omen. The pond reveals that the house will be

destroyed, like Usher’s soul.

To this classification I would add a fourth modalitiy: the classic landscape,

indifferent, objective, like an independent stage.

Let’s go to music. From Schenker’s view, in which he compared musical

themes with drama characters in 19092, many musicologists have talked of musical

theme as “actor”, “hero”, “character”, “narrative agent”, in other words, living being

who goes through battles, who conquers triumphal spaces, who complains, who

proclaims his happiness… In my opinion, this “actor” would act in an environment,

a dramatic space, which includes a “bottom landscape”. For some authors this

1 Miguel Ángel GARCÍA PEINADO, Hacia una teoría general de la novela. ARCO/LIBROS, Madrid, 1998. Pág. 157-158. 2 Heinrich SCHENKER, Tratado de Armonía

landscape is the group of stilistic features that live in the work and support the main

action.

In this occasion, I refer to “bottom landscape” as the sound plot in the bottom,

the accompaniment, the “other” simultaneous plane in the work.

If we examine almost any Mozart’s fragment,

we can find impulse, urge, boost, in the main plane or main character . But we find

order, serenity, classicism in the accompaniment, almost always an arpeggiated

chord or an “Alberti bass”.

Forty years later, Chopin composes in this way:

The theme of this study is C-D-Eb. The accompaniment is not a bare arpeggio,

but incorporates the C-D-Eb. I mean, the theme is continually projected in the

accompaniment or “bottom landscape”. The landscape picks the “face” of the main

character. This landscape is agitated, violent, perhaps contains a topic romantic

despair. The three notes populates frenetically the whole study, in the theme and in

left hand. We asked ourselves if the main character is the theme, or is the terrific

atmosphere of left hand. Who generated whom?

It’s the same question for Wuthering Heights: Is Heathcliff who extends his own

malediction around him or is the damn atmosphere which engenders Heathcliff?

Multiple examples in Romantic music show this magical link between theme

and accompaniment:

We could suppose that these authors pretended to multiply the theme features

by means of its thousand reflections in “the pond” of the accompaniment.

There is a beautiful paragraph in Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter (1850) where

Pearl, the precious girl of the humiliated and unhappy Hester Pryne, stands at the

brookside. The image of the girl and her reflection is a gust of happiness for the

broken woman (chapter 19):

By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook […]. Just where she had

paused, the brook chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a

perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty,

in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized

than the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to

communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child

herself […] glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a

certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another child--another and the same--

with likewise its ray of golden light.

We have something like that, a happy, hopeful vision, duplicating the real

image with a magic reflection in this page by Chopin, where the music emerges from

a distraught atmosphere to the choral theme like a twinkling of happiness, where

accompaniment in left hand contains a distorted image:

I’m not suggesting an exact parallel between Chopin and Hawthorne, but I’m

proposing that, in certain points of the action, composer and novelist place the main

character in the main plane, and in the bottom there is a magic plane reflecting the

features of the hero.

We can ask what does this procedure have to do with romantic spirit, why the

classic prefers to place the action on arpeggios or Alberti basses and why many

romantics place the hero in a landscape which reflects his face.

Arnold Hauser talks about the “sectional mentality”: the artists in the Old

Regime conceive the work by sections, episodes, from Middle Ages. Life and art

work are conceived like a juxtaposition of phases. However, from pre-Romanticism,

novelists who live in the middle class growing, start to write novels which are not

episodic, but dramatic, on a tension line that becomes sharper in the time. In 18th

century novels like Candide or Gulliver are episodic. At the end of 18th century,

Werther leaves this conception and develops a dramatic form, which would

culminate in works like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina3.

Music also changes in this epoch, but not strictly in a paralel way to literature.

We find sectional mentality in baroque primitive forms, but Bach’s sonatas and

concertos are polarizing: they develop a tension which becomes sharper in certain

points, and they’re perceived like a continuum.

Sonata form in Mozart and Haydn is no more sectional, or the sectional

organisation doesn’t prevail: the interest is in the dramatic plot. In other words, the

sectional mentality doesn’t prevail in the horizontal design.

However, and here is the quid of our subject, the sectional mentality remains in

the vertical relations. Mozart overcomes the sectional in the horizontal structure, but

he preserves it in his designs melody-accompaniment. The melody is a plane, and the

accompaniment is other. There is nor similarities nor influences from one to another.

They are two (or several) lines which walk with great independence.

His universe is like the battle painting. The sky is a sovereign plane,

indifferent, honorable like a majestic scene. In Mozart the objective accompaniments

are his respect for the system. The painters have been painting active landscapes

from Baroque, but music becomes more narrative than discoursive in the end of 18th

century. In this epoch the accompaniments are no more mere harmonic supports of

the melody, but active landscapes.

Probably the great difference between 18th century man and Romantic man is

that the Romantic perceives mysterious forces which act in an inexplicable way

from/in human souls. Romantics think that a mansion has spirit and it can curse the

life of its inhabitants. Or that a pond or a city contains the fate of the citizens. Or they

think that the individual has super-powers. They think that a fierce hero can

determine the colour of the moon, can provocate a thunder, can change the fate of a

nation…

For this reason the romantic musician translates his ego to the landscape. The

main theme is his portrait, and the landscape of semiquavers or chords in which the

theme lives takes the image of his face. It’s a marvelous resource, wonderful, in my

understanding.

3 Arnold HOUSER, Historia Social de la Literatura y del Arte. Labor, Barcelona, 1985. Tomo III, págs. 32 y ss.

We could classify the musical “bottom landscapes” in five modalities:

1. The landscape engenders the theme.

2. The main theme designs its own landscape.

3. The landscape opposes the theme.

4. The landscape support the theme.

We should add other modality: the landscape becomes independent of the

theme, becomes a new character: the shadow becomes a living monster.

We have this modality in limited works, but always it’s impressive. You

know well the Study op. 10 nº3 by Chopin.

The kindest of the melodies is sung over a peaceful bottom of slow

semiquavers. The landscape is a permanent oscilation:

This oscilation is based on the repetition of two notes: #G-B.

This diminutive motive is the fiber, the cell of the landscape.

But this motive becomes independent in central section. First, it turns to a

Polish dance, or a scherzante, and occupies the main plane with its popular air:

And then, as you know, it turns tragic, enormous, perhaps monstrous, like a

great shout, in the most discordant harmony for 1830: a long serial of furious

diminished sevenths. The landscape has converted to its shadow and occupies the

whole space.

There is another notorious example of this phenomenon. In Brahm’s Cello

Sonata 2 (I) we discover one of the most fascinating examples in which the knot of the

tragedy doesn’t contain the main theme nor the secondaries nor any theme: it’s

carried by the landscape.

The sonata starts with a happy theme on an euphoric accompaniment, a

rumor of fast semiquavers, like a tremolo:

Now, in the Development section, after a brief statement in #F minor, the

landscape remains somber and stays alone, without “characters”, filling the complete

atmosphere with an endless storm:

Let’s listen to this fragment.

OK, I have tried to expose the difference between classic feeling and romantic

feeling from the point of view of the landscape. I return to our paintings: the bottom

of the painting remains ordered, classic, because the classic man doesn’t think that he

has the capacity to change the established order. The romantic thinks he can, and

verily they did it, they changed the sense of the world. Today we are grateful for this.

Thank you very much.