Between nostalgia and new beginnings: music of the fin de siècle

The number alone must have panicked the superstitious: 1900 – the end and beginning of a century. Even the decades before this turning point were extremely eventful. Industrialisation was progressing rapidly, cities were becoming noisy metropolises, natural science was questioning the divine order, and psychoanalysis was creating a new image of man. In the arts, the end of a great epoch, Romanticism, was looming. There was talk of decadence – the decline of the arts. But this uncertainty was countered by a confident belief in progress. Between 1890 and 1910, compositions of exceptional diversity were created in this tense relationship.

Maurice Ravel reflects the decline of an era in his tone poem La Valse, written between 1906 and 1920. Symbolising the past century, the composer deconstructs the Viennese waltz – in the end, chaos reigns. Richard Strauss, on the other hand, conjures up nostalgic, opulent waltz music in his Rosenkavalier.

Both Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande focus on the human psyche in conflict situations – both works are based on Symbolist texts. In keeping with the complex subject matter, the tonal languages of both composers feature dense harmonies and free forms. Sergei Rachmaninov’s ominous music to Arnold Böcklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead also captures the uncertainty of the fin de siècle.