Musical politics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (sep 1, 1825 – may 1, 1875)

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By the mid-nineteenth century, a "War of the Romantics" pitted the so-called conservative composers (Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms) against progressive ones (Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner). The music historian Franz Brendel took up the progressive cause. He named this movement the "New German School"adn celebrated their work as the "Music of the Future". Influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Brendel saw Fran Liszt as best fulfilling the compositional ideals of the time.

After a decade of touring as a virtuoso pianist, in 1848 Liszt settled down in Weimar, where he shifted his compostiional focus to insturmentla music. He composed innovative works, uincluding symphonic poems, single-movement works intended to express a poetic idea, as in "Les Preludes". These works exhibit features of sonata form, but with contrasting sections that can be viewed as different movements played without break. The content is developed through a technique Liszt called "thematic transformation" in which a musical idea is transformed to reflect the program.

The ideas of the NEw German School were not universally accepted. Their chief opponent, the Viennese critic and music historian Eduard Hanslick, argued that the beautiful in music lay in its sound and form. Although music can express emotions and poetic content, Hanslick believed this was not its central aim or purpose. Rather, music should follow its own inherent laws that transcend the composer's intentions and the listener's reactions. For Hanslick, the music of Brahms best fulfilled these aesthetic ideals.

The growth of virtuoso culture led to new concertos; ones that increasingly were equally demanding for both the soloist and the orchestra. In Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64, the orchestra and soloist share thematic material in a way that is formally innovative but Classical in its sense of balance. Other concertos were influenced by the enw trends in orchestral music. Liszt's Eb Major Piano Concerto, for example, uses thematic transformation. Berlioz's Harold en Italie, commissioned by Paganini as a viola concerto, is more like a symphony in scope, with a program derived from a poem by Lord Byron.


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