The Romantic Overture and Musical Form from Rossini to Wagner by Steven Vande Moortele (review)

For the past several years there has been growing interest in theories of formin nineteenth-century music, to which we can now add Steven Vande Moortele’s new book. In the first instance, it is a genre study, making serious progress in consideration of operatic and concert overture repertory in Europe between 1815 and 1850; at the same time, it is an enriching analytical tour de force focusing on formal organization in the overture, while advancing the discourse on form and Formenlehre for both the overture and the Romantic period. This is a significant publication not only for its empirically driven corpus that incorporates 175 overtures, but also for its broader promotion of theories of form for the early nineteenth century.

The book is divided into two parts. The opening section investigates the genre, beginning in the first chapter with an appraisal of the overture’s historical development, thereby developing a rich context for the genre in the first half of the nineteenth century. Vande Moortele considers the genre’s emancipation and the emergence of overture performances ‘not as introductions to something … but as concert music in their own right’ (p. 17), charting the move from theatre to the concert hall, and the appearance of overture repertory at any point in concert programming, rather than just at the start. He further explores the importance of the overture for the early nineteenth-century composer at a time when musical culture was plagued by doubts of the symphony’s vitality. As he opines, ‘the rise of the concert overture has to be understood in the context of the post-Beethovenian anxieties that plagued many a young composer of symphonies. … Since it was almost impossible for new symphonies to gain access to that canon [of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven], younger composers increasingly turned to the concert overture as an alternative’ (pp. 29–30).

The remaining two chapters in the first section are devoted to a consideration of common types of Romantic overture. In chapter 2, Vande Moortele proposes that Rossini’s overtures resemble the “‘grand sonatina form”: the compact version of sonata form with a nonrepeated exposition and without a development …but preceded by a sizeable slow introduction’ (p. 51). He elaborates by detailing their paradigmatic structure, including the generic characteristics of the main and subordinate themes, the transition’s processes, and the establishment and organization of the recapitulation.

While Vande Moortele assembles arguments to support the long-held view of Rossini’s overtures as formulaic, he also exposes related issues, pointing out that the formula is of limited scope, applicable mainly to the overture repertory between 1814 and 1817: ‘because the overtures to most of Rossini’s best-known operas are so close to the archetype, his partial abandonment of it after 1817 remained largely unrecognized’ (p. 55). By situating this chapter within a reading of nineteenth-century organicist aesthetics, Vande Moortele provides a platform to discuss why Rossini’s overtures were viewed sceptically by German critics. The formulaic approach taken meant that the whole could not be regarded as an organic summation of the constituent parts: the overture was akin to a ‘premade scaffold that simply needs to be filled in by parts that have no intrinsic relationship with one another’ (p. 56). Furthermore, motivic connections become futile given the interchangeability of parts. The second part of the chapter provides an examination of the ‘Rossini crescendo’ (which follows the subordinate theme repeat in both exposition and recapitulation), before turning to a consideration of the reception of Rossini’s overtures by composers such as Auber, Schubert, and Bellini.

Chapter 3 presents a case study of the potpourri overture. It begins by setting out the differences between Vande Moortele’s nuanced categories of the ‘potpourri procedure’ and the ‘potpourri form’. This distinction allows for overtures that are either thematically dependent on or independent from material in the opera...