CHAPTER XXXV
SYMPHONISTS AND INSTRUMENTALISTS
211. Competing Orchestral Ideals.—The middle of the century
was a time of transition in every department of composition.
The divergences of ideal were specially conspicuous in orchestral
music, partly because of the close interrelation of such
music with dramatic music.
A considerable number of composers adhered in general to the forms and the ways of the classical style, with its emphasis upon tonal design and formal development. The romantic craving for picturesqueness or for the warmly personal touch led constantly toward modifications of the strict classical patterns of structure, but with no deliberate intention in this group to set them aside. Spohr is one typical illustration here. Mendelssohn is another, with greater flexibility and animation. And there were numerous lesser writers who may be counted as essentially classicists.
The more positive romanticist Schumann theoretically went further than any of the foregoing group in the effort to find outlet for subjectivity and a new range of imagination. But Schumann himself was hampered by his imperfect knowledge of the technique of instrumentation. And the full influence of his style was delayed until a later point.
Over against all these stood the class of deliberate innovators in technical method. Wagner and the many who came to be affiliated with him aimed to reconstruct style on the basis of a new view of the nature and function of melody. The classical type of melody came from folk-music, and from such music came also a tendency to adopt compact and highly symmetrical forms of development. The new type, so far as it had any vocal prototype, came from far more sentimentalized and impassioned song-patterns or from free dramatic declamation. And the treatment of materials departed widely from the conventional etiquette of the classical period, in some respects recalling
