Counterpoint did not end with Bach. Brahms was a devoted student of Renaissance and Baroque counterpoint; Wagner wove leitmotif lines contrapuntally; Verdi constructed operatic ensembles as polyphonic textures. This lesson traces counterpoint through Romanticism.
The Romantic Relationship with Counterpoint
The Romantic era (c. 1820-1900) is often characterised as the era of melody, personal expression, and harmonic colour — and it was all of these things. But the great Romantic composers were also deeply conversant with counterpoint. Beethoven studied counterpoint with Albrechtsberger and worked through Fux. Brahms, the most contrapuntally rigorous of the major Romantics, owned and annotated dozens of Renaissance and Baroque scores and considered polyphonic thinking central to composition. Wagner, though primarily a harmonist, wove multiple leitmotif threads simultaneously in his orchestral webs. Verdi constructed his greatest ensemble pieces (the Act III quartet in Rigoletto, the storm scene in Otello, the Act I finale of La Traviata) as genuine polyphonic textures.
The conventional opposition between "Baroque counterpoint" and "Romantic harmony" is misleading. Schumann composed fugues throughout his career and edited Bach's keyboard works; Mendelssohn's revival of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion in 1829 set off a century-long Bach revival; Liszt arranged Bach organ works for piano and wrote fugues of his own; Chopin revered Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and is reported to have played from it before his concerts. The Romantic composers did not abandon counterpoint — they absorbed it and used it for new expressive purposes.
Beethoven's Contrapuntal Development
Ludwig van Beethoven studied with Haydn (who himself had studied Fux carefully) and with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, one of the leading counterpoint teachers in Vienna. Beethoven's early counterpoint exercises survive and demonstrate his rigorous training. In his late period, counterpoint becomes increasingly central: the Grosse Fuge (Op. 133, 1825) is one of the most demanding fugues ever written; the Hammerklavier Sonata (Op. 106, 1818) ends with a fugue of comparable difficulty; the Diabelli Variations (Op. 120, 1819-1823) include several variations in strict canonic or fugal style; the Missa Solemnis (Op. 123, 1824) contains multiple fugal passages including the great "Et vitam venturi" double fugue.
The Grosse Fuge is particularly significant. Originally the finale of the String Quartet Op. 130, it was so difficult and so dissonant that Beethoven's publisher persuaded him to issue it separately and write a more accessible finale for the quartet. The Grosse Fuge applies fugal technique to material of extreme rhythmic and harmonic complexity, producing what Stravinsky called "an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever."
Brahms: The Contrapuntal Romantic
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) studied historical counterpoint more seriously than any other major Romantic composer. He collected manuscripts of Palestrina, Schütz, and Bach; he wrote a set of canons for women's voices (Opus 113); he composed in strict counterpoint throughout his career. His German Requiem contains a double fugue of Handelian proportions. His late piano pieces and chamber works use canonic imitation as a structural device, not as academic exercise.
Brahms's contrapuntal style is immediately recognisable, with several distinctive features:
- Hemiola rhythm — the simultaneous presence of duple and triple groupings, creating a complex rhythmic counterpoint between voices.
- Motivic compression — a single short motivic cell is developed canonically and sequentially through an entire movement.
- Variation form as contrapuntal vehicle — his Variations on a Theme by Handel (Op. 24), Variations on a Theme by Paganini (Op. 35), and especially the finale of his Fourth Symphony are extended contrapuntal explorations of a single theme or bass line.
- Imitation between piano and instrument in his chamber works, where the piano frequently states a motive that is then taken up canonically by the cello, violin, or clarinet.
His Fourth Symphony (Op. 98, 1885) closes with a passacaglia (variations over a repeating bass line) of 30 variations — an essentially contrapuntal structure derived from the Baroque ground bass tradition. The repeating bass functions as a long-range cantus firmus against which the upper voices create successive contrapuntal textures of increasing complexity.
Wagner's Leitmotif Counterpoint
Richard Wagner's music dramas use leitmotifs — short, characteristic melodic or harmonic figures associated with specific characters, objects, or ideas — in a contrapuntal texture. In the Ring cycle, Wagner sometimes superimposes multiple leitmotifs simultaneously: at the moment of the Sword motive's first appearance, the Ring motive may be sounding underneath; the hero's motive may appear in the horn while the fate motive sounds in the strings. This leitmotif counterpoint is not strict species counterpoint, but it is genuine polyphonic writing — multiple independent melodic streams that together create harmonic and dramatic meaning.
The Funeral March from Götterdämmerung is the canonical example: Wagner constructs a vast contrapuntal lament from successive and simultaneous statements of leitmotifs associated with Siegfried and his ancestors. The texture is unmistakably contrapuntal, but the rules are not those of species counterpoint — they are the rules of Wagner's own chromatic harmonic language.
Counterpoint in Opera Ensembles
Opera ensembles — duets, trios, quartets — are often polyphonic textures in which multiple characters sing different melodic lines simultaneously, each expressing their own emotional perspective. The Act II quartet in Mozart's Così fan tutte (1790) has four characters each pursuing a different melodic line that together form a complete harmonic texture. Verdi's ensembles in Rigoletto and Otello are constructed similarly. The Rigoletto Act III quartet "Bella figlia dell'amore" has four characters — the Duke flirting with Maddalena, Maddalena laughing in return, Gilda weeping in jealousy, and Rigoletto plotting revenge — each with their own melodic line, and the four lines together form a coherent polyphonic texture that captures the dramatic situation more powerfully than any monophonic setting could.
This is genuine counterpoint serving dramatic purpose: the musical independence of the lines embodies the independence (and conflict) of the characters' perspectives. The technique extends Renaissance imitative polyphony into the world of operatic narrative, where each voice represents a distinct human consciousness.
Verdi and the Final Fugue
Giuseppe Verdi's last opera, Falstaff (1893), ends with a great fugue, "Tutto nel mondo è burla" (Everything in the world is a joke), in which all the characters sing simultaneously a fugal exposition and development. Verdi, who had been criticised for years for his supposedly "non-contrapuntal" style, ended his operatic career with a virtuoso display of fugal technique. The fugue is not academic exercise — it is the dramatic culmination of the opera, the moment when all the comic threads come together into a single statement of life's absurdity.
Sources and Further Reading
- Taruskin, Richard. Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. Volumes III and IV: Romantic era.
- Open Music Theory — Late Nineteenth-Century Counterpoint (openmusictheory.net, CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Gauldin. A Practical Approach to 18th-Century Counterpoint. Waveland Press. Afterword.
- IMSLP — Brahms Symphony No. 4, Shostakovich Op. 87 scores (imslp.org).