Eyes meet, sparks fly – and the music plays. Lean into the tragedy: we're here to explore the many phases of love in classical music. Whether it's those painful stories of unrequited love, the pains of early lust or the beauty of long-term partnership, here are some of the best stories of composers writing love into their music.
From the troubadours who wandered France in the 12th and 13th centuries singing about courtly love to the starry instrumentalists recording love-themed recital albums in our time, from Arne’s comic ballad opera Love in a Village (a hit in its day) to Zemlinsky’s breakup orchestral work Die Seejungfrau, love has, one way or another, been one of the universal, timeless themes explored in western classical music.
Why is classical music so obsessed with love and romance?
Opera almost wouldn’t exist were it not for people falling in love with the wrong characters or for insatiable passion that drives them to extreme ends. Safe to say that in art as in life, love truly is all around.
We’re not talking about the love of friends, family or even nature – although there are plenty of pieces that explore those too – but romantic love, whether that’s the big, swept-off-your-feet kind or something quieter but no less strong. The sort of love that propels the dramas of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (which could be the first opera ever written) or Verdi’s La traviata (which we named as one of the best operas for beginners).
Or the love that’s spurred countless songs, from the amusing to the heartfelt: try Britten’s ‘Tell Me the Truth about Love’, or Poldowski’s ‘To Love’ or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Southern Love Songs. Perhaps it’s the kind immortalised in musical miniatures such as Liszt’s Liebesträum No. 3 (Love’s Dream) and Kreisler’s Liebesfreud (Love’s Joy). Or that turned into allegory by Palestrina in his Canticum Canticorum motets, expressing the pleasures of earthly love via ‘the divine love of Christ and his spouse, the Soul’.
Nearly every composer has something to say about the subject, not least because they so often turned their own turbulent love lives into music. No wonder there’s music that speaks to every step of a romantic relationship.
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The agonising first flushes of a crush
‘Since first seeing him, I think I am blind, Wherever I look, Him only I see,’ sings the narrator of Schumann’s Frauenliebe- und Leben, a sentiment anyone who has ever had a crush will recognise (even if this 19th-century song-cycle goes on to present a decidedly patriarchal view of a woman’s loves and life).
That first flush of romance is fertile ground for composers. Think Rodolfo and Mimì in the chilly garret in Puccini’s La bohème. The poet and seamstress promptly fall in love, expressing their feelings in the rapturous duet ‘O soave fanciulla’ that closes the first act, ending with a repeated word, ‘amor’.
Or how about the most famous western tale of all-consuming love: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy embeds a gorgeous love theme in music of fiery tragedy. Prokofiev went one step further, writing an entire ballet in 1935. Glinting flutes and harp over a soft bed of muted strings set the dreamy mood of the ‘Balcony Scene’, blossoming into music full of wonder. It leads to a beautiful ‘Love Dance’ with soaring strings, swelling brass and harp glissandos that ends with their first kiss.
The painful uncertainty of a new relationship
If playing it cool was never on the cards for some people, others have to deal with the uncertainty of a new relationship. In Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s One Life Stand, a 21st-century response to Frauenliebe- und leben, the narrator weighs up her options in the cycle’s second song, ‘The Pros and The Cons’. ‘He’ll be pleased if orchestral music is worth a thousand words.
Then, of course, there’s the opening to one of Strauss’s masterpieces, Der Rosenkavalier. The curtain rises to reveal the Marschallin and her young lover, but the exultant horns and swooning strings have already given their secret away.
The lover as muse
Sometimes, the lover also becomes the muse. Zdeněk Fibich’s musical diary dedicated to love is a remarkable document. Moods, Impressions and Reminiscences turns the intense relationship the Czech composer had with his pupil Anežka Schulzová into 376 piano works – although the connection to his personal life was only revealed years later. They chart everything from general thoughts on love to specific events – a counterpoint lesson, their walks in the street – and pieces about Schulzová’s body and clothes.
If Fibich himself kept private his inspirations, others found a halfway house, encrypting codes and clues into their music. Robert Saxton’s 2016 piece For Teresa is a recent example in a long tradition of using the musical letters as thematic material, drawing on his wife’s name tErESA CAHill (in German notation, Es being E flat, and H being B natural).
Brahms played with this conceit too, embedding the initials AGAHE in the first movement of his String Sextet No. 2, so representing Agathe von Siebold, his next great love after Clara Schumann. And Clara herself pops up all over the place in music. A theme from her own 1833 Romance variée was taken up by her husband Robert and woven into countless works, including his A minor Piano Concerto.
The problem of unrequited love in music
One of Berlioz’s muses was Harriet Smithson – but what’s often described as a love story borders on a stalkerish obsession. The French composer fell for the Irish actress after seeing her in Hamlet, moved to live near her, bombarded her with letters, then wrote his revolutionary Symphonie fantastique to impress her. The pair later married, unhappily – divorce was to follow.
But the greatest case of unrequited love being matched by an artistic flourishing was that of Janáček. After the married Czech composer fell for Kamila Stösslová, 38 years his junior and also married, he channelled his passion into his song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared, and in his operas Kát’a Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen and The Makropulos Affair.
But it’s his impassioned String Quartet No. 2, ‘Intimate Letters’, that is his ‘manifesto on love’. He confessed: ‘You stand behind every note, you, living, forceful, loving. The fragrance of your body, the glow of your kisses – no, really of mine. These notes of mine kiss all of you. They call for you passionately…’ Janáček loved Stösslová until his death, at the age of 74.
The beauty of long-term love
If composers have been more drawn to writing about the first than last moments of a lifetime’s love, there’s still music that embraces the long-term. Strozzi’s Sino alla morte, from 1659, is a vivid cantata that squares up to the passing of time. ‘Let your adorned locks … be turned to silver by the hand of age,’ sings the narrator, ending, ‘I know that all the oceans of the world are not equal to the sparks that fly between lovers.’
Yet perhaps the last word should go to Strauss, an incurable musical romantic. His radiant sunset of a song ‘Im Abendrot’, the fourth of his Four Last Songs, finds a couple in love, facing death together: ‘We have gone through sorrow and joy/ gone hand in hand;/ From our wanderings, let’s now rest/ in this quiet land.’
