STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

For this concert I have chosen piano works by four giants of piano literature’s golden age. This historic period is known as the Romantic Period; whether any of these composers identified with the term is its own topic. Romanticism was a deep rejection of the Industrial Revolution and embraced the burgeoning of Humanism, similar to today’s struggle with A.I. One of the main tenets of this emerging cultural shift was the resonance of nature as the essence of the divine. “A direct consequence of the reaction against the Enlightenment’s orderliness was a savoring of chaos, obscurity, and ambiguity that comprise the theme we call ‘The Seductiveness of Mystery.’ The enticement of the mysterious came from every corner of the Romantic’s experience, from the mysteries of the inner psychological domain (the unconscious and dreams), to those within nature’s vastness, to the mystical side of religious devotion.”

The human impulse to dominate fellow humans was keenly felt by these composers, especially Chopin, who spent his adult life exiled in Paris after witnessing Czarist  Russia’s repeated domination of Poland, his home country. Music was also a refuge from worldly pain,which Chopin certainly would have understood as he battled with tuberculosis from the age of nineteen until his death from the disease at thirty-nine.

Brahms was rooted in the ideas of  Humanism and the inspiration of the natural world. Brahms was a scholar of the music of antiquity in addition to having a comprehensive understanding of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Brahms  possessed an extensive knowledge of current and historic literature and poetry. He, like Goethe, the 18th century’s Germanic Shakespeare, embraced the rationality of the enlightenment in its forms of artistic expression, yet Brahms explored the subjectivity of an individual’s emotional world with all of its many complexities, both noble and primitive.

The Romantics Concert Program

Chris Pouliot