Romantic Harmony through the Eyes of Contemporary Observers

Abstract

he problem of charting the flow of stylistic currents in music history has been traditionally solved by combining theory with practice: by comparing the neat and at times idealized vision of the style projected in the theoretical literature with the often divergent reality of the musical repertoire. More recently, this approach has been extended in two different directions. On the one 518 hand, increased attention has been paid to the sociological and philosophical contexts within which a given style takes shape.l At the same time, a growing number of musicologists have begun to broaden their analytical field of vision, de-emphasizing stylistic particularity in order to clarify structural principles shared by all tonal compositions. Our understanding of stylistic developments from the late eighteenth century onward may be further enhanced, however, by developing our inquiry in still another direction-to include the musical journals whose first flowering roughly coincided with the emergence of Romantic style. Although this periodical literature has been occasionally sampled for both biographical information and reviews of famous works, it has as yet to be mined systematically as a source for Romantic values.2 The following paper surveys the theoretical attitudes towards