Concert essay Without possessing the knowledge of what is so called romantic music, we generally refer to it is a kind of music which tends to evoke a soft mood or dreamy atmosphere. However, it is partially true; many musical works in Romantic era produce strong, harsh sounds for agitated emotion. The characteristics of this period’s music are strongly tied to a word, “extreme”; that is, extreme in size, length, pitch, dynamics and tempo in most musical pieces. During this era, the musician has a greater freedom in form and design, and a more intense personal expression of emotion in which fantasy, imagination, and quest for adventure play an important part. Highly accomplished composers such as Frederic Chopin and Eugene Ysaye, had great technical virtuosity in playing piano and violin. Eugene Ysaye’ “Sonata No.2 in A minor, op. 27, no.2” is considered a miniature, a piece that is small in size and short length, consisting only of two movements. The first movement is a little bit vivacious, and the second movement is slower and softer. It is only performed by one performer and one instrument. Because of its short length, smaller size and relative simplicity, this instrumental piece is called a lyric or character piece, which “expresses one emotion or emotional journey.” The lyric or character piece is new genre that appeared in the Romantic period.
The two musical elements Ysaye emphasized most are tempo and dynamic range. The violinist in both movements was struggling to express her personal emotions and manipulating the audience’s emotion by using rubato to alter the tempo. In this first movement, it started with a moderately fast tempo, and gradually increased its pace to an extremely fast tempo, and then went back down to the moderate tempo again. My heart was going up and down with the flow of tempo. The violinist stopped during the piece to show the change in tempo between movements. The dynamic range of this piece was narrow. The same melody repeated over and over, without much variation between the melodies. The melody of the short piece brought me into my childhood: on the regular school day, my mom is trying me to wake me at the very early morning: “Jing, wake up, wake up, wake up …, you are going to be late for your school.” The intense tempo and narrow dynamic range in the melody paralleled my mom’s calling, which was brief but intense.
The tempo in the second movement became much slower than the first movement. The whole part played at a lower pitch range and a wider dynamic range. The melody in this movement also repeated was not varied. The violinist slowed down the tempo in order to express her somber feeling and created a gloomy atmosphere for the audience. I was deeply drawn into the musician’s world, where the sky was dark; all lights were turned off and the air lacked oxygen. Life there was full of miserable experiences. I also felt like I was the only survivor in the battle field, where I couldn’t get help from anybody and had became even more frustrated as the pitch lowered and dynamics became wider. Finally, something bad finally came to me as the pitch went to the lowest part of the movement at the end. In contrast, the ending pitch in the first movement went extremely high, which made my desire to sleep disappear suddenly because in my imagination, my mom finally lost her temper and yelled at me, and I failed to resist and jumped up at lightning speed.
This was the only piece in today’s chamber music that brought me such strong feeling and colorful imaginings. Even though it was relative short and simple, it was really a very creative and wonderful work done by the admirable composer Eugene Ysaye. Through the use of tempo, pitch, and dynamic, the composer expressed his personal emotion well, which is a distinctive characteristic of Romantic music.