“The Romantic,” Jean Paul concludes, “is the beautiful without boundaries, or beautiful infinity, just as there is sublime infinity” (61). Similarly, he argues that with its walls and clear-cut hedges “a Dutch garden seems the very opposite of Romanticism, but an English garden which extends into an undefined landscape can surround us playfully with a Romantic region, that is, with the background of an imagination left free to wander in the beautiful” (60). Jean Paul observes that “a statue with its sharp and precise contours excludes everything Romantic painting approximates it in groups of human figures and reaches it in landscapes without men, like those of Claude Lorrain” (60). ![]() Jean Paul’s definition of the Romantic as boundless beauty appears in a well-known passage from his Vorschule der Ästhetik ( 1973) that contrasts the clear contours of the Classical with the blurry outlines of the Romantic. I note that there are rhythmic dislocations in their works that prevent harmonies from emerging clearly and propose that the frequency of these passages in their piano works may help explain why the misty quality of their music was often associated with their playing style. This section draws a connection between Jean Paul’s definition of the Romantic as boundless beauty, the blurry backgrounds of landscape paintings, and the view that Schumann’s and Brahms’s works share a misty, Romantic quality. The findings suggest that by blurring the harmonies in their music Schumann and Brahms romanticized the basic harmonic schemas they inherited from past traditions and imbued them with the quality of something experienced from afar rather than in its immediacy. The musical examples are roughly organized in order from those where the harmonic blurring is more localized to those in which it is more widespread, culminating with an extensive analysis of the second movement from Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata in F minor, op. It does so first from a historical, then from a structural, and finally from a semantic perspective. ![]() This article examines Schumann’s and Brahms’s practice of blurring chords together. The chords generally overlap and blur together at the beginning and end of phrases, and frequently at the point of recapitulation. The underlying progression is always a stock progression, typically a descending-fifths sequence. In every case, a rhythmic dislocation causes the chords to spread completely over one another and form illusory tertian sonorities, making the underlying progression sound blurry. Passages like this are characteristic of the music of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The descending-fifths progression becomes blurry precisely when the opening theme comes back, causing what is typically a point of harmonic and formal clarity to appear out of focus.Įxample 1. Schumann depresses the pedal as the two chords overlap, resulting in a rich, smooth blend of the two harmonies. As the two chords overlap, their notes blend together to form an extended tertian sonority. A rhythmic dislocation in the bass causes the E$$\flat$$ dominant seventh to appear above the root of the following A$$\flat$$ dominant seventh (V 7). ![]() But the E$$\flat$$ dominant seventh chord (II 7) within this progression does not emerge as a discrete verticality. The passage features a descending circle-of-fifths progression from a B$$\flat$$ dominant seventh chord (VI 7) to a D$$\flat$$ major triad (I). Suggested Citation IntroductionĮxample 1 shows the return of the opening theme in Robert Schumann’s “Warum?” op. Keywords and phrases: schema harmony Romantic aesthetics rhythm painting distance. The essay bridges a gap between an important aspect of the Romantic aesthetic and our theoretical understanding of Schumann’s and Brahms’s harmonic vocabulary. After identifying the basic progression that underpins the music, the analyses discuss the rhythmic dislocations that cause chords to overlap and merge together. This article argues that Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms gave their music a blurry, Romantic quality by distorting well-known harmonic progressions.
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