CHARACTER PIECE

relatively brief musical composition, usually for piano, expressive of a specific mood or nonmusical idea. Closely associated with the Romantic movement, especially in Germany, 19th-century character pieces often bore titles citing their inspiration from literature (e.g., Robert Schumann's collection Kreisleriana) or from personal experience (e.g., Schumann's Scenes from Childhood). Others refer to specific personages directly or in disguise (e.g., Schumann's Carnaval) or evoke geographical and/or national images (e.g., Frdric Chopin's polonaises, mazurkas, and Barcarolle). Felix Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words covered a particularly wide range of subject matter, while Chopin tended to favour musico-literary genres (e.g., the ballades) and more generalized idyllic or melancholy associations (e.g., the nocturnes). Many, though by no means all, character pieces are relatively simple in design with a preference for ternary (aba) structures, emphasizing expressive melody and harmony, not unlike the contemporaneous German lied. Were it not for often elaborate idiomatic keyboard figurations derived more likely, especially in Chopin's case, from Italian opera, the 19th-century character piece might be identified as an instrumental song intended, like its German vocal counterpart, primarily for home rather than concert performance. Antecedents of the 19th-century character piece abound especially in French keyboard music, in which the perennial tendency to link music with extramusical subject matter accounted for a host of titled harpsichord pieces as early as the 17th century. The clavecin works of Franois Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau represent the first culmination of a French tradition pursued by Emmanuel Chabrier, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Maurice Ravel, among many others, well into the 20th century.