The Expansion of Tone Color

While tone color had been treated with considerable subtlety by the Viennese Classical composers, the Romantics seized on this aspect of music with particular enthusiasm. For the first time in Western music, the sheer sensuous quality of sound assumed major artistic importance on a level with rhythm, melody, and musical form.

So it is no accident that all instruments went through major technical developments during the nineteenth century — the piano not least. As orchestral instruments reached their present-day forms, the orchestra was expanded, soon reaching its present standard makeup. The chart below for a typical Romantic orchestra, when compared with the Classical orchestra chart on page 157, shows how the ranks of the brass, woodwind, and percussion sections were filled out:

A TYPICAL ROMANTIC ORCHESTRA
STRINGS WOODWINDS BRASS PERCUSSION
First violins (12–16 players)

Second violins (12–16)

Violas (8–12)

Cellos (8–12)

Basses (6–10)

Note: Each string section is sometimes divided into two or more subsections, to obtain richer effects.

 2 Flutes

1 Piccolo

2 Oboes

1 English horn

2 Clarinets

1 High E♭ clarinet

1 Bass clarinet

2 Bassoons

1 Contrabassoon

 4 French horns

2 Trumpets

3 Trombones

1 Bass tuba

 3 Timpani

Bass drum

Snare drum

Cymbals

Triangle

Tubular bells
2 Harps Piano

What such charts cannot show, however, are the ingenious new combinations of instruments that were now investigated. Composers learned to mix instrumental colors with something of the same freedom with which painters mix actual colors on a palette. Berlioz wrote a treatise on “orchestration,” or the use and combination of the instruments of the orchestra, which is still read today. In his and other composers’ practice, the clear, sharply defined sonorities of the Classical era were replaced by multicolored shades of blended orchestral sound.

Romantic composers and audiences alike were fascinated by the symphony orchestra, and for the first time conductors came to the fore — conductors wielding batons. (Berlioz also wrote a treatise on conducting.) In earlier times, orchestras had simply followed the first violinist or the continuo player, but now they needed experts to control and balance out those special blended effects.

The orchestra also became increasingly important in nineteenth-century opera. Major opera composers, such as Weber, Meyerbeer, and Wagner, specialized in orchestral effects that sometimes even threatened to put the voices in the shade. If today, when one thinks of classical music, the symphony orchestra comes to mind almost automatically, that is a holdover from the Romantic nineteenth century.