Everything about Romanticism totally explained
Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the
18th century in
Western Europe, and gained strength during the
Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the
Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature.
The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of
aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the
sublimity in untamed nature and its qualities that are "
picturesque", both new aesthetic categories. It elevated
folk art and custom, as well as arguing for a "natural"
epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage.
Our modern sense of a romantic character is sometimes based on
Byronic or Romantic ideals. Romanticism reached beyond the
rational and
Classicist ideal models to elevate
medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl and
industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar and distant in modes more authentic than
chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
The ideologies and events of the
French Revolution, rooted in Romanticism, affected the direction it was to take, and the confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, "
Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a
Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
Characteristics
In a general sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain
artists,
poets,
writers,
musicians, as well as
political,
philosophical and social thinkers of the late eighteenth and early to mid nineteenth centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of
intellectual history and
literary history throughout the twentieth century, without any great measure of consensus emerging.
Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his
Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some see in it the inaugural moment of
modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment— a
Counter-Enlightenment— and still others place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from
Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."
Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the
Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the
Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of
deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized
intuition,
imagination, and
feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of
irrationalism.
Etymology
Romanticism is closely tied to the idea of the "Romantic." Note the capital 'R' differs from "romantic" meaning "someone involved in romance," although the words have the same root. The word
romance comes from the Old French
romanz, which is a genre of prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature. Just as we speak of
Romance languages,
romanz was written in the vernacular and not in
Latin.
Romanticism and music
In general, the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to mean the period roughly from the 1820s until around 1900. The contemporary application of 'romantic' to music didn't coincide with modern categories, however: in 1810
E.T.A. Hoffmann called
Mozart,
Haydn and
Beethoven the three "Romantic Composers", and
Ludwig Spohr used the term "good Romantic style" to apply to parts of Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony. Technically, Mozart is considered classical and by most standards Beethoven is the start of the musical Romantic period. By the early twentieth century, the sense that there had been a decisive break with the musical past led to the establishment of the nineteenth century as "
The Romantic Era," and it's referred to as such in the standard encyclopedias of music.
The traditional modern discussion of the music of Romanticism includes elements, such as the growing use of
folk music, which are also directly related to the broader current of
Romantic nationalism in the arts as well as aspects already present in eighteenth-century music, such as the
cantabile accompanied melody to which Romantic composers beginning with
Franz Schubert applied restless
key modulations.
The heightened contrasts and emotions of
Sturm und Drang (German for "Storm and Stress") seem a precursor of the
Gothic novel in literature, or the sanguinary elements of some of the operas of the period of the
French Revolution. The libretti of
Lorenzo da Ponte for
Mozart's eloquent music, convey a new sense of individuality and freedom. The romantic generation viewed Beethoven as their ideal of a heroic artist--a man who first dedicated a symphony to Consul Bonaparte as a champion of freedom and then challenged Emperor
Napoleon by striking him out from the dedication of the
Eroica Symphony. In Beethoven's
Fidelio he creates the apotheosis of the 'rescue operas' which were another feature of French musical culture during the revolutionary period, in order to hymn the freedom which underlay the thinking of all radical artists in the years of hope after the
Congress of Vienna.
In the contemporary music culture, the romantic musician followed a public career, depending on sensitive middle-class audiences rather than on a courtly patron, as had been the case with earlier musicians and composers. Public persona characterized a new generation of virtuosi who made their way as soloists, epitomized in the concert tours of
Paganini and
Liszt.
Beethoven's use of tonal architecture in such a way as to allow significant expansion of musical forms and structures was immediately recognized as bringing a new dimension to music. His later piano music and string quartets, especially, showed the way to a completely unexplored musical universe. E.T.A. Hoffmann was able to write of the supremacy of instrumental music over vocal music in expressiveness, a concept which would previously have been regarded as absurd. Hoffmann himself, as a practitioner both of music and literature, encouraged the notion of music as 'programmatic' or narrative, an idea which new audiences found attractive. Early nineteenth century developments in instrumental technology—iron frames for pianos, wound metal strings for string instruments—enabled louder dynamics, more varied tone colours, and the potential for sensational virtuosity. Such developments swelled the length of pieces, introduced programmatic titles, and created new genres such as the free-standing
concert overture or
tone poem, the piano
fantasia,
nocturne and
rhapsody, and the virtuosic
concerto, which became central to musical romanticism.
In opera, a new Romantic atmosphere combining supernatural terror and melodramatic plot in a folkloric context was most successfully achieved by
Weber's
Der Freischütz (1817, revised 1821). Enriched timbre and color marked the early orchestration of
Hector Berlioz in France, and the
grand operas of
Meyerbeer. Amongst the radical fringe of what became mockingly characterised (adopting Wagner's own words) as 'artists of the future', Liszt and Wagner each embodied the Romantic cult of the free, inspired, charismatic, perhaps ruthlessly unconventional individual artistic personality.
It is the period of 1815 to 1848 which must be regarded as the true age of Romanticism in music - the age of the last compositions of Beethoven (d. 1827) and
Schubert (d. 1828), of the works of
Schumann (d. 1856) and
Chopin (d.1849), of the early struggles of Berlioz and
Richard Wagner, of the great virtuosi such as
Paganini (d. 1840), and the young
Liszt and
Thalberg. Now that we're able to listen to the work of Mendelssohn (d. 1847) stripped of the
Biedermeier reputation unfairly attached to it, he can also be placed in this more appropriate context. After this period, with Chopin and Paganini dead, Liszt retired from the concert platform at a minor German court, Wagner effectively in exile until he obtained royal patronage in Bavaria, and Berlioz still struggling with the bourgeois liberalism which all but smothered radical artistic endeavour in Europe, Romanticism in music was surely past its prime—giving way, rather, to the period of
musical romantics.
Visual art and literature
In visual art and literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "
sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as
Edgar Allan Poe and
Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the
supernatural/
occult and human
psychology.
The Scottish poet
James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his
Ossian cycle of poems published in
1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young
Walter Scott.
An early
German influence came from
Johann Wolfgang Goethe whose
1774 novel
The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men throughout
Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of
nationalism. Another philosophic influence came from the German idealism of
Johann Gottlieb Fichte and
Friedrich Schelling, making
Jena (where Fichte lived, as well as Schelling,
Hegel,
Schiller and the brothers
Schlegel) a center for early German romanticism ("Jenaer Romantik"). Important writers were
Ludwig Tieck,
Novalis (
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1799) and
Friedrich Hoelderlin.
Heidelberg later became a center of German romanticism, where writers and poets such as
Clemens Brentano,
Achim von Arnim, and
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff met regularly in literary circles.
Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, and ancient myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example,
E. T. A. Hoffmann's
Der Sandmann (
The Sandman), 1817, and
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff's
Das Marmorbild (
The Marble Statue), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has
gothic elements.
Romanticism in British literature developed in a different form slightly later, mostly associated with the poets
William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose co-authored book
Lyrical Ballads (1798) sought to reject
Augustan poetry in favour of more direct speech derived from folk traditions. Both poets were also involved in
utopian social thought in the wake of the
French Revolution. The poet and painter
William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain, epitomised by his claim “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's.” Blake's artistic work is also strongly influenced by Medieval illuminated books. The painters
J. M. W. Turner and
John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism.
Lord Byron,
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Mary Shelley and
John Keats constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain.
In predominantly
Roman Catholic countries Romanticism was less pronounced than in Germany and Britain, and tended to develop later, after the rise of
Napoleon.
François-René de Chateaubriand is often called the "Father of French Romanticism". In France, the movement is associated with the nineteenth century, particularly in the paintings of
Théodore Géricault and
Eugène Delacroix, the plays, poems and novels of
Victor Hugo (such as
Les Misérables and
Ninety-Three), and the novels of
Stendhal. The composer
Hector Berlioz is also important.
In Russia, the principal exponent of Romanticism is
Alexander Pushkin.
Mikhail Lermontov attempted to analyse and bring to light the deepest reasons for the Romantic idea of metaphysical discontent with society and self, and was much influenced by Lord Byron. The poet
Fyodor Tyutchev was also an important figure of the movement in Russia, and was heavily influenced by the German Romantics.
Romanticism played an essential role in the national awakening of many Central European peoples lacking their own national states, not least in
Poland, which had recently lost its independence when Russia's army crushed the Polish Rebellion under the reactionary Nicholas I. Revival and reinterpretation of ancient myths, customs and traditions by Romantic poets and painters helped to distinguish their indigenous cultures from those of the dominant nations and crystallise the mythography of
Romantic nationalism. Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became popular themes in the arts of this period. Arguably, the most distinguished Romantic poet of this part of Europe was
Adam Mickiewicz, who developed an idea that Poland was the Messiah of Nations, predestined to suffer just as Jesus had suffered to save all the people.
In the United States, the romantic gothic made an early appearance with
Washington Irving's
Legend of Sleepy Hollow 1820) and
Rip Van Winkle (
1819), followed from
1823 onwards by the
Leatherstocking tales of
James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "
noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of
Rousseau, exemplified by
Uncas, from
The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books.
Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully in
Nathaniel Hawthorne's atmosphere and melodrama. Later
Transcendentalist writers such as
Henry David Thoreau and
Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence, as does the romantic realism of
Walt Whitman. But by the 1880s, psychological and
social realism was competing with romanticism in the novel. The poetry which Americans wrote and read was all romantic until the 1920s: Poe and Hawthorne, as well as
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poetry of
Emily Dickinson – nearly unread in her own time – and
Herman Melville's novel
Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature, or, by interpreting their sometimes subversive subtexts, as successors to it. As in England, Germany, and France, literary Romanticism had its counterpart in American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of untamed America found in the paintings of the
Hudson River School. Painters like
Thomas Cole,
Albert Bierstadt and
Frederic Edwin Church and others often combined a sense of the sublime with underlying religious and philosophical themes. Thomas Cole's paintings feature strong narratives as in
The Voyage of Life series painted in the early 1840s that depict man trying to survive amidst an awesome and immense nature, from the cradle to the grave.
Nationalism
One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages and
folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements which would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning.
Early Romantic nationalism was strongly inspired by
Rousseau, and by the ideas of
Johann Gottfried von Herder, who in 1784 argued that the geography formed the natural economy of a people, and shaped their customs and society.
The nature of nationalism changed dramatically, however, after the
French Revolution with the rise of
Napoleon, and the reactions in other nations. Napoleonic nationalism and republicanism were, at first, inspirational to movements in other nations: self-determination and a consciousness of national unity were held to be two of the reasons why France was able to defeat other countries in battle. But as the
French Republic became
Napoleon's Empire, Napoleon became not the inspiration for nationalism, but the object of its struggle. In
Prussia, the development of spiritual renewal as a means to engage in
the struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among others,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a disciple of
Kant. The word
Volkstum, or nationality, was coined in German as part of this resistance to the now conquering emperor. Fichte expressed the unity of language and nation in his address "To the German Nation" in
1806:
» Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. ...Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality—then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be.
This view of nationalism inspired the collection of
folklore by such people as the
Brothers Grimm, the revival of old epics as national, and the construction of new epics as if they were old, as in the
Kalevala, compiled from Finnish tales and folklore, or
Ossian, where the claimed ancient roots were invented. The view that fairy tales, unless contaminated from outside, literary sources, were preserved in the same form over thousands of years, wasn't exclusive to Romantic Nationalists, but fit in well with their views that such tales expressed the primordial nature of a people. For instance, the Brothers Grimm rejected many tales they collected because of their similarity to tales by
Charles Perrault, which they thought proved they were not truly German tales;
Sleeping Beauty survived in their collection because the tale of
Brynhildr convinced them that the figure of the sleeping princess was authentically German.
The brief revolutionary career of
Robert Emmet in
1803 in
Ireland could have ended in obscurity, but romantic writers such as
Thomas Moore ensured that he'd be remembered long after his death. His good character combined with failure provided an ideal example of the romantic hero.
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