lture’ (New Oxford History of Music). His opera, Russlan and Ludmilla (1842) was based on a fairy tale taken from a poem by the famous Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, and he is seen as one of the founding fathers of a truly Russian musical style, along with Tchaikovsky. This opera, along with A Life for a Tsar (1836), used cadences of Russian speech and Russian folk music, which would have been unheard of in earlier periods. The First World War and the End of RomanticismRomanticism did last to a certain extent into the 20th Century, but composers were already searching for exciting and different modes of expression. The emphasis began to move towards usual and unorthodox harmonies and tonal schemes, Eastern music and the whole tone scale for example, fascinated Debussy. The Great War probably killed off any romanticism that remained in Europe, and this is best shown in the career of the English romantic composer Sir Edward Elgar. In 1899, Elgar produced the Enigma Variations. These were seen immediately as poetic masterpieces, and the ‘Original Theme’ is said to represent Elgar himself, and ‘the rumbustious finale is a self-portrait of a confident, determined Elgar’ (Michael Kennedy, 1985). His Cello Concerto in E Minor (1919) however, was written straight after the First World Word, was his last major piece, and portrays a self-portrait of ‘a man wearied by the world, disillusioned by the war, yet still finding solace in the beauty of music’. The concerto has 4 movements, instead of the usual three, and presents a mood of despair, and a sense of loss, perhaps of the romanticism and the general way of thinking of a now previous age.ConclusionThe romantic period, like so many that preceded it, was a revolt against previous ideologies, mainly due to the social upheavals, and in particular the French Revolution in the latter half of the 18th Century. In musical terms, it added more emotional dept...
