Musical Era
Late Romantic / Post-Romantic
The Romantic era pushed to its lushest, largest extreme.
Late Romanticism is best understood as the Romantic era's ideals taken to their logical extreme, right up until they start to break. Orchestras grow larger still; symphonies grow longer still (Gustav Mahler's routinely run past an hour); and harmony becomes so chromatic and unstable that it sits right on the boundary of traditional tonality, setting the stage for the 20th century composers who would push past it entirely.
The world it came from
These were the years around 1900, the fin de siècle ("end of the century"), a time of glittering prosperity shadowed by anxiety. Vienna, home of the painter Gustav Klimt and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was its cultural capital, and Mahler ran its opera house. Wagner had died in 1883, but his music dominated the imagination of younger composers, who absorbed his rich harmony and enormous orchestra - or struggled to escape them.
What it sounds like
- Huge orchestras - quadruple woodwinds, eight or more horns, extra brass, harps, and an ever-growing percussion section. Mahler's Eighth Symphony had over a thousand performers at its 1910 premiere.
- Harmony at the edge - chords that hover, slide, and delay resolution, following the path opened by Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
- Vast scale - symphonies and tone poems of an hour or more, often telling stories or wrestling with philosophical questions.
- Big themes - death and transfiguration, nature, love, the meaning of life; often a deep nostalgia, as if for a world about to disappear.
The main forms
The symphony and the symphonic poem reached their largest scale, and songs for voice and full orchestra became a favorite genre. Opera flourished too, from Richard Strauss's Salome to the passionate realism of Puccini's La Bohème.
Composers to know
Gustav Mahler (vast, searching symphonies) and Richard Strauss (tone poems and opera, with a gift for orchestral color) define the era, and Sergei Rachmaninoff carried its sound deep into the 20th century. Beyond them:
- Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) - monumental, cathedral-like symphonies.
- Hugo Wolf (1860 – 1903) - intense, psychologically acute songs.
- Edward Elgar (1857 – 1934) - his Enigma Variations (1899) put English music back on the map.
- Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957) - Finland's great symphonist, whose early works belong to this world.
- Alexander Scriabin (1872 – 1915) - a mystic whose harmony dissolved into shimmering, ecstatic color.
Into Modernism
It's a relatively short period, but a pivotal one: it's simultaneously the last full flowering of the Romantic sensibility and the direct on-ramp to Modernism. Around 1908, Schoenberg - whose early Verklärte Nacht is pure Late Romanticism - abandoned tonality altogether, and in 1913 Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring blew up the old rules from another direction. The First World War swept away the world that had produced this music. Some composers, like Strauss and Rachmaninoff, kept writing in the Late Romantic style for decades - and others, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, carried it to Hollywood, where it became the sound of the film score. See the 20th century.
Where to start listening: Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra (the opening is instantly familiar) is a good introduction to the era's sound before committing to a full Mahler symphony. Then try Elgar's "Nimrod" from the Enigma Variations, or the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth.