There is a sound in certain late-Romantic music which is easy to recognize but difficult to name. It is not simply Wagnerian, though Wagner is everywhere behind it; not merely chromatic, though its harmony is rarely content to remain still. It is not quite decadent, though it belongs unmistakably to the fin de siècle and often carries the atmosphere of a civilization very old. Bruckner, though old (medieval) in conception, does not belong to this certain sound, because Bruckner is concerned with God, judgment, eternity, and the architecture of the cosmos. Mahler is already too advanced, too fractured, too aware that the world around him is coming apart. The sound I refer to occupies another realm. It is worldly without being trivial, beautiful without embarrassment, serious but absent revelation. It belongs to the city and the countryside at once: the opera house and the railway station, the drawing room and the village road, a streetcar passing beneath gaslight and a boy riding his bicycle through a field. It is the sound of cultivated European life, already touched by nostalgia before that life had disappeared entirely.
I have come to think of this as Twilight Grand Style. At its center is something like non-metaphysical high chromatic Romanticism, or, from another direction, metropolitan Romanticism haunted by nature. It might also be called high late-Romantic chromatic classicism, because for all its harmonic richness and emotional pressure, the old vessels remain intact. Symphony, march, waltz, song, chorale, scherzo, procession: these forms still carry authority. The music has not yet become suspicious of beauty, nobility, culmination, or the long line. Wagnerian suspension may disturb the harmony, and Franckian cyclic gravity may pull themes backward upon themselves, but the structure still believes that something can arrive, that a phrase may fulfill itself, that an orchestra may gather its forces and speak grandly without first having to justify the grandeur.
Chausson’s Symphony in B-flat Major is perhaps the clearest example available. It is not perfect music, and this is partly the point. Twilight Grand Style does not require the absolute mastery of a Brahms or a Bruckner; indeed, its peculiar atmosphere may sometimes be easier to hear in composers who were more influenced than influential. In the first movement of the Chausson, after the slow introduction has withdrawn and the music turns into three, a theme begins in the bassoon and horn, then passes to oboe and cellos. There it is. This whole sound world seems to be present in a few phrases: cultivated melancholy, forward motion, oldness, distance, a beauty that does not sound newly created but remembered. Near the end of the movement the effect becomes even clearer. High, sweet strings move against the winds; darkness gathers below in the low strings and brass; the trumpets enter; the strings plead again; and finally the great B-flat theme returns with an old nobility that seems at once public and private. One can imagine a city beyond it, and a countryside beyond the city.
This quality of oldness is essential. I first thought of it as a “classic” sound, but classic is not quite right, since the word suggests proportion, restraint, or the formal clarity of an earlier age. What I mean is the felt presence of an old world. The music sounds as though it comes from a civilization already furnished before we arrived in it, filled with rooms, institutions, landscapes, and ceremonies. Nothing in it has the blankness of the newly invented. The orchestra itself seems old. The opera house is old, the railway is old, the house is old, the road leading out of town is old.
This may explain why the style has always made me think of childhood, although I grew up in America in the 1990s and not in Vienna a hundred years earlier. The association is not with the literal surroundings of childhood but with the way a child perceives surroundings. A child enters a world that is already there. Adults know things he does not know; buildings have histories he cannot yet understand; rituals recur before he knows why they matter. The world is larger, older, and more mysterious than the self. Twilight Grand Style often sounds like the adult recollection of that condition. Its nostalgia is not necessarily for a particular lost place but for the experience of inhabiting a world before one had learned to analyze it.
This is why anticipation, though present in the harmony, is not the style’s deepest emotion. Its deepest emotion is the reverse glance. A delayed resolution may create expectation, but the larger impression is often that the thing being approached has already passed. The boy on the bicycle is already remembered. The evening train has already departed. The adults have already left for the opera, and the child remains at the window. This is not nostalgia as sentimentality; it is nostalgia as a structural condition of the music.
Not all music that looks back belongs to Twilight Grand Style. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 15, for example, begins in recollection; from its opening measures there is already the sense of something bucolic, familiar, and half-remembered. Yet it is not Twilight Grand Style. The style requires a later harmonic and historical condition: high chromaticism, the pressure of Wagner, the accumulated weight of nineteenth-century civilization, and the awareness that the inherited world is becoming old while still remaining habitable. Beethoven can look backward without twilight because the world before him has not yet become this twilight world. His nostalgia is elemental, pastoral, and personal; Twilight Grand Style requires nostalgia after history has thickened around it.
Zemlinsky is another central figure, especially in his first two symphonies. The Second, in particular, lives almost entirely inside this world, and its scherzando movement may be one of the purest examples of the style. Zemlinsky is more urban than Chausson, more Viennese, more psychologically restless, but he has not yet broken the frame in the manner of Mahler. The inherited forms still hold. The old civilization is still habitable, even where the harmony has begun to make the walls tremble. Later, in the Lyric Symphony, or Die tote Stadt of Korngold, that same atmosphere becomes more erotic, fevered, and self-conscious, but the lineage remains recognizable.
Franck stands somewhat above the category while also forming one of its principal foundations. His Symphony in D minor contains much of the Twilight Grand Style: chromatic gravity, cyclic memory, nobility, and oldness. Yet Franck is often too vertical for the designation. His music can seem to turn toward the organ loft, doctrine, transformation, and the testing of the soul. Magnard presents a similar problem. His Fourth Symphony, especially in its remarkable third and fourth movements, belongs clearly to this same civilization, but it often rises toward something sterner and more religious. The nobility is nostalgic, but also moral. It concerns conscience, duty, stone, procession, perhaps even honor. Yet Magnard never leaves the earthly world entirely, and this is why he can remain within the boundaries of the style.
Scriabin approaches the boundary from another direction. His first three symphonies contain much that belongs here, particularly the Third, with its extraordinary atmosphere of recollection and landscape, although his natural tendency was ultimately upward and outward, toward ecstasy, mysticism, and a metaphysical system all his own. Yet Scriabin was also, in a certain sense, a painter. His orchestra creates atmosphere before it creates doctrine, and many passages seem to inhabit that same intermediate country between city and nature, interiority and landscape. Even The Poem of Ecstasy, though perhaps too elevated (and influential) to be a central example, retains enough of the old chromatic world to remain visible from the border.
The style naturally crosses national boundaries because it is not a school and was never a movement. Elgar enters it when his public nobility becomes inward and retrospective, especially in the two symphonies, where the ceremonial exterior so often opens into some private chamber of memory. Delius belongs whenever the countryside seems less observed than remembered, as with In a Summer Garden. Vaughan Williams enters through A London Symphony, where the city is inhabited memory, full of bells, distances, crowds, and the countryside pressing upon its edges. Bax, especially in the Third and Fourth symphonies and in his finest tone poems, represents a more mythic branch: less metropolitan, more concerned with sea, forest, autumn, ruins, and an imagined ancestral past. Even Kalinnikov, far to the east, who lacks the chromatic saturation necessary to stand at the center of the style, approaches it through the pastoral side, through the sadness of open fields and song remembered from a distance.
The extraordinary score Gottfried Huppertz wrote for Metropolis in 1927 may be the great retrospective summation of the entire style. The film itself belongs to the machine age, to skyscrapers, electricity, mass society, and industrial terror, but the music that gives this world an emotional soul remains grounded in the older language. Waltz, march, Wagnerian gesture, symphonic development, chorale, lyric song, grand brass rhetoric: all are gathered together and placed at the service of a city that has already moved beyond them. This is why the score can sound strangely backward-looking even while accompanying one of the great visions of technological modernity. The city is modern; the heart remembering it is not.
Huppertz also makes clear why so much late-Romantic concert music now sounds like film music, although the historical direction runs the other way. When I was fourteen, riding in a car with a friend and his father, Mahler’s Ninth came on the radio, and the father—probably the most intellectually and culturally formidable of all my friends’ fathers—exclaimed, “This sounds like film music.” He was not wrong about the resemblance, only about the direction of inheritance. Film inherited a language the concert world gradually became embarrassed to speak. The long string line, the noble brass chorale, the dark procession, the rural episode, the yearning cadence, the sudden vision of a city or landscape: all of these passed naturally into cinema because cinema still required music to communicate grandeur, tragedy, love, childhood, memory, and fate directly. What later audiences came to think of as “cinematic” was often simply the afterlife of the nineteenth-century orchestra.
One can place a symbolic boundary around 1913, although no style ends on a particular evening and Romanticism certainly continued long after The Rite of Spring. What changed was the direction of authority. After Rite, after Schoenberg, after the Great War, the old grand language could still be spoken, sometimes magnificently, but it no longer represented the uncontested future. The movement was increasingly toward something more primal, fractured, mechanical, cerebrally abstract, ironic, or jagged. Beauty did not disappear, nor did tonality, nobility, religion, or the symphony itself, but each became more self-conscious. The inherited frame had been broken, and those who continued to use it often did so as an act of preservation or recollection.
Twilight Grand Style belongs to the moment just before (and sometimes just after) that break, when the old frame could still be inhabited without apology. It is not the highest music simply because it occupies this world. Bruckner exceeds it; Mahler tears through it; Strauss often stands above it by sheer mastery and range. It is narrower than late Romanticism and broader than any national school. Its proper domain is worldly grandeur under the pressure of memory: cultivated life suspended between city and countryside, public nobility and private longing, modern movement and inherited form.
Perhaps this is why the style can be so moving even in the hands of a second-rank master. Magnard does not need to be Brahms for the final moments of his Fourth Symphony to matter. Chausson does not need to possess the complete mastery of Wagner for those extraordinary pages in the Symphony in B-flat Major to open a world. The style itself carries an inheritance of immense richness. Harmony, form, orchestration, folk memory, public ceremony, domestic life, landscape, and the accumulated emotional vocabulary of the nineteenth century remain close enough to one another that even an imperfect composer can sometimes strike the right structured vibration.
That world is gone, but the vibration remains. In Chausson, Zemlinsky, Franck, Magnard, Scriabin, Elgar, Bax, Huppertz, and the others who pass through it, one hears not merely a historical style but a particular relationship to civilization: the belief that ordinary earthly life, properly seen, could carry grandeur; that the street and the field could belong to the same imaginative world; and that music could look back without irony and find there something beautiful enough to mourn. This is the twilight in Twilight Grand Style.