Hector Berlioz: Music In The Romantic Period

1. Music in the Romantic Period was characterized by a re-emergence of music that evokes specific ideas and images. This led to the re-emergence of program music, a genre of music characterized by instrumental music associated with literary or pictorial elements, usually provided by poetry. The opposite of this type of music is absolute music, which in contrast to program, is characterized by instrumental music that lacks any sort of accompanying literary or pictorial meanings.

2. The first real proponent of Romantic music in France, Hector Berlioz was a French composer who became an avid user of program music in the 19th century. Born in southern France, he was supposed to become a physician like his father, but with the surge of Romantic artists and writers like Victor Hugo and Eugene Delacroix, he was inspired to study music. Mostly inspired by Shakespeare, he began to compose various successful pieces based on his plays, such as Romeo and Juliet, Beatrice et Benedict, and King Lear. He was so infatuated by Shakespeare’s works, that he obsessed over an actress of one of the plays he saw, and he went on to court her and marry her, only to find he was really in love
The Romantic Period was an era of innovation, and one such innovation was Franz Liszt’s baby, the symphonic poem, and the Romantic Era’s contribution to musical history. The symphonic poem was a type of program music that involved only one movement with developing ideas, which set a mood or suggested a scene. This symphonic poem was quite different from the typical symphony seen in the Classical Era, mainly it had only one movement and was the devoid of many of the structural characteristics of symphonies, making them much more free-verse than the symphonies; another particularly obvious difference was the fact that the symphonic poem was programmatic in nature, while the symphony was absolute in nature. However, there were some similarities, mainly the fact that they were scored for