The Study Of Berlioz’s Art Songs

The thesis aims to use multiple perspectives,including cultural ecological environment,individual spells of good or bad fortune,creative mentality,connotation of the works and characteristics of music,to examine the 40 songs composed by Hector Berlioz.This paper intends to make the morphological analysis of music based on the songs instead of focusing on the particularity of each one works,in order to comprehend the process of songwriting by composer,it also covers creation motive,aesthetic taste and the historical changes of technology means.The study belongs to the research field of western music which included creation background,composer’s mental state and artistic characteristic.The research approach of the paper involves music historiography,music rhetoric,cultural interpretation and so forth.This essay figures out the historical changes that these songs had been witnessed from French romance to French art song.The 40 songs suggest the composer’s individual process of creation,which reflects the transformation from immature to mature,passion to hopelessness.These songs are related to the French Revolution,trend of thought of combining music and literature.On the other hand,Berlioz personalized his miserable experiences of love and death which can’t counteract in his life,becaming the most important factors to affect his music.These songs based on lots of technology means,such as the melodies which produced from harmony thinking,continous secondary dominant chord progression,the functional group of duplicate subdominant’s expansion and so on,Berlioz reshapes the implicit tone of the song’s text and characters.These songs reveal the ambitions that composer chased for enormous passion and dramatic conflict,also express his devotion to create the emotional expression and aesthetic taste that conveys his plainness,sincerity,bitterness,and immersion in sorrow.