Hw

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"Mr. Beck's" and "staccato-filled" In terms of Mr. Beck's performance, I was expecting more legato articulation and conjunct melodies in the second bagatelle, but was treated to a staccato-filled and rather disjunct melody instead.

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"after" Moreover, this innovation allows us to listen to the music we wish to hear multiple times, playing back our favorite harmonies, melodies, and syncopations, or simply turning off our music player after the first instance of dissonance.

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"as the boat rocked" Beck did not seem to flinch as the boat rocked, rather continuing his performance as if he were in a static concert hall.

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"at sea" Similarly, I had initially believed that the waves around the boat were temperate because the barge itself was docked rather than at sea.

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"conjunct" in This conjunct melody reminded me

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"expects these sounds" This feeling of continuity can be attributed to semitones being played one after the other, as the listener expects these sounds rather than being shocked by them.

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"instead" in I instead felt a choppy and powerful

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"shocking" to "surprising" This detached articulation was further emphasized by the frequent rests, which made the return of music surprising for me, as the listener.

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"with its" On the other hand, the second bagatelle, with its staccato articulation, faster tempo, and rather disjunct melodies, was the polar opposite of the first bagatelle, reminding me of the choppier waves I felt on the deck of the boat.

The values and artistic practices of the ancient Greeks were much praised and emulated in the later eighteenth century. In 1755 Johann Joachim Winckelmann

(1717-1768) extolled Greek art for its "noble simplicity" and "tranquil grandeur." Winckelmann saw in Greek sculpture and painting the pinnacle of artistic beauty, especially for the perfection of the forms, the contours, the positions of the bodies, and the representation of clothing. He urged contemporary artists to model their works on the Greeks, just as Raphael and Michelangelo had done in the Renaissance. Winckelmann's influence on thinkers and artists helped to usher in a Neoclassical phase in late-eighteenth-century art. The French painter Jacques- Louis David (1748-1825), who worked in Rome for five years, created large canvas- es on classical subjects, such as Oath of the Horatii (1784), renowned for its sharply outlined human figures posed with a frozen, sculptural quality (see Fig. 2.1). In the 1780s, after an extended trip to Italy, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) experienced a conversion to the ideals of Classical art. Living in the town of Weimar in Germany, Goethe, together with his friend Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), shaped what came to be known as Weimar Classicism, manifest especially in their dramatic works. In Hamburg and Berlin, Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781) achieved something similar with his plays based on Aristotelian principles of dramatic unity.

rOmantiC lOnging Berlioz'sthemeisalsotheperfectembodimentofanotherRomanticpreoccupation, that of longing or unfulfilled desire. In Chateaubriand's semi-autobiographical novel René (1802), the young hero suffers from world-weariness and aimless long- ing, which the author describes with the term vague des passions, the emptiness or void of passions, a phrase picked up directly in the Symphonie fantastique, whose hero is described by Berlioz as being afflicted by it. In such a state, one's passions can fixate on an object of desire, as do those of Berlioz's hero on the beloved, whom he represents in the idée fixe. The theme contains chains of long appoggiaturas that delay melodic resolution, and the tonic C major is nowhere stated clearly until the very last cadence. These are the musical techniques of longing—or, to return to the terms of the Schlegel brothers, of becoming rather than being. In German poetry, fiction, and music of the early nineteenth century, we encounter frequent references to Sehnen, Sehnsucht, or Verlangen, the terms for longing or desire. A characteristic example is the brief two-stanza lyric from 1823 by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), whose poems were set to music by Robert Schumann in the magnificent song cycle Dichterliebe (Poet's Love, 1840): Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, Als alle Knospen sprangen, Da ist in meinem Herzen Die Liebe aufgegangen. Im wunderschönen Monat Mai, Als alle Vögel sangen, Da hab' ich ihr gestanden Mein Sehnen und Verlangen. In the wonderful month of May, When all the buds come out, Then in my heart Love burst forth. In the wonderful month of May, When all the birds were singing, Then I confessed to her My yearning and longing. All the images of the poem—buds bursting, love springing, birds singing— prepare for the final words, "Sehnen und Verlangen," so characteristic of Romanticism. In the Schlegels' terms, Schumann's music captures striving rather than being, desire rather than possession (Ex. 2.2). He sets the final words to a melodic line that climbs upward but droops at the end, never reach- ing its goal, the tonic or home key of FG minor. The last word is accompanied by a dissonance, here a dominant seventh chord, which remains unresolved and unfulfilled; it literally, to recall A. W. Schlegel, hovers between remembrance and anticipation. (The next song in Dichterliebe begins in A major, thus provid- ing a surprise resolution for the dissonant chord.)

After Berlioz and Schumann, it was Richard Wagner who would create the most powerful musical language of Romantic longing, especially in his opera Tristan und Isolde. Completed in 1859, almost twenty years after Dichterliebe, Tristan depicts a searing passion that goes well beyond the more innocent love pangs represented by Berlioz, Heine, and Schumann. The love between Tristan and Isolde is at once all-powerful and ill fated; it is literally "consuming" in that it can be fulfilled only in death. Wagner captures the lovers' situation with intensely chromatic music in which the individual lines move by half-step motion and rarely settle into stable consonant chords. The result is constant musical flux or yearning. The most famous musical emblem of this phenomenon is the "Tristan" chord, which is heard at the opening of the Prelude (see Ex. 1.1 in Chapter 1) and then recurs frequently throughout the opera. Just as the passion between Wagner's lovers is more intense than that suggested by Heine and Schumann, so too the "Tristan" chord, a half-diminished seventh chord in an unusual inversion, is more dis- sonant than Schumann's dominant seventh. The longing depicted in Wagner's Tristan is far removed from that described by the Schlegels or Chateaubriand. It is modeled on the ideas of another im- portant early Romantic, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Schopenhauer's major work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), was written and published before 1819, but its impact was delayed until the second half of the century. Wagner discovered the work in 1854, wrote extensively about it and its influence upon him, and finally created in Tristan und Isolde the musical and dramatic embodiment of Schopenhauer's philosophy. For Schopenhauer, who is fundamentally pessimistic, longing is an inevi- table state of permanent suffering in life. He posited a basic force or principle he called the Will, a blind, fundamental drive that longs for satisfaction but never reaches it. All Will is founded in need, he wrote, and thus in suffering. Only in death is the suffering completely alleviated—as happens in Wagner's opera. And yet, according to Schopenhauer, there are other means at least to quiet or calm the Will. One of these is music, which, as we shall now see, played a large role in Romantic thought.

We can sympathize with the French writer F. R. de Toreinx, who in his History of Romanticism of 1829 became exasperated when trying to clarify the term under discussion. "Do you know it? Do I? Has anyone ever known it? Has it ever been defined concisely and exactly?" he asked. "No!" he responded. "Romanticism is just that which cannot be defined!" Almost a hundred years later, in 1924, the intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy could still write, "The word 'romantic' has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means noth- ing." Romanticism remains a slippery concept, even though it was arguably the most pervasive phenomenon in the culture—and the music—of Western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not until about 1850 were Classicism and Romanticism seen as comprising distinct historical periods or definable artistic styles. Before that, they were un- derstood as referring to attitudes and practices that had appeared at various epochs of Western culture, even at the same time. Broadly speaking, Romanticism from the 1790s through the first few decades of the nineteenth century represented a re- action against Enlightenment values of rationality and universality. It celebrated subjectivity, spontaneity, and the power of emotions. In Romantic music, more open-ended structures and sonorities tended to replace or inflect the forms and standard harmonic patterns of the later eighteenth century, which, as John Rice has shown in the previous volume in this series, were not perceived as "Classical," but rather as moving on a spectrum between "galant" and "learned" styles.

Aspects of Romanticism had been prefigured well before 1800. Although he never used the term Romanticism, the great philosopher and writer Jean- Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) articulated the individualism that would lie at the heart of the movement. Rousseau began his autobiographical Confessions of 1769 by writing: "Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist. If I am not more deserving, at least I am different." In his novels and phil- osophical tracts, Rousseau celebrated the worth of individuals as opposed to larger political and social structures. He valued man in his "state of nature," in his original, unfettered being. Rousseau's ideas became influential during the French Revolution (1789-99) and for many generations thereafter. A beautiful description of the new directions that would be associated with Romanticism came from the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads (1800): Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its ori- gin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. Wordsworth—who also did not use the term Romanticism—emphasizes the role of feeling and of the lack of restraint, but also stresses that a poem (or by ex- tension any work of creative art) is based not upon the direct experience of an emotion, but upon the reflection that comes afterward. In true art, feelings are always mediated by contemplation and craft. These passages from Rousseau and Wordsworth capture many of the quali- ties of artworks created in the first half of the nineteenth century and identified at the time, or later, as Romantic. As we will see in Chapter 7, the term is less well suited to the latter part of the century. In what follows we will survey more general aspects of Romantic thought and art, then turn to music, which played an especially large role in the Romantic imagination. A short chapter cannot provide a comprehensive account of the different regions where Romanticism appeared. We will focus primarily on the German-speaking world, in part be- cause it was there that Romanticism was originally defined and self-consciously practiced, and secondarily on France and Italy.

The self-conscious inventors of Romanticism were a group of like-minded young thinkers gathered in the German city of Jena in the 1790s. They were part of a newer generation, most born in the early 1770s, who found the ideals of Greek art more limiting than inspiring. They included the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel (1767-1845 and 1772-1829), Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). The Jena group gave a name—Romantik in German—to an art that they believed to be more open-ended, more spiritually vibrant than Classical art. This "Romantic" art could be found in many places and eras: Gothic ca- thedrals, and the early Renaissance drawings of Albrecht Dürer, and the plays of Shakespeare were all considered Romantic. Figure 2.2 shows a painting from 1815 in which the artist Karl Friedrich Schinkel sets a Gothic church on a rock by the sea at sunset. The subject is medieval, but the treatment is fully Romantic in spirit: the church, placed on a dramatic outcropping, is backlit by a sun setting under scattered clouds that reflect its light. The most influential early formulation of a specifically Romantic worldview came in 1797 from Friedrich Schlegel in the journal Athenäum, which he found- ed with his brother August Wilhelm. Athenäum was distinctive for publishing "fragments" or short paragraphs instead of full-fledged essays. (The fragment became one of the most innovative literary forms of Romanticism.) In one, Schlegel defines "Romantic poetry" as "progressive" and "all-embracing." By "poetry" he really means the original Greek sense of poesis, or making. Schlegel writes: "Other kinds of poetry are complete and can now be fully and critically analysed. The Romantic kind of poetry is constantly developing. That in fact is its true nature: it can forever only become, it can never achieve definitive form. . . . It alone is infinite. It alone is free." Schlegel sees the Romantic outlook as ex- panding rather than excluding or superseding the Classical one. (The title of the journal Athenäum is itself a classical reference to a cultural institution in ancient Rome named after the goddess Athena.) Friedrich Schlegel's ideas, virtually the credo of Romantic art, were tak- en up at greater length by August Wilhelm Schlegel, who in his "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature" of 1808 noted that the term Romantic had been coined to differentiate the new and unique spirit of modern art from that of an- cient or Classical art. As Schlegel observed, the term derived from "romance," the name applied to the vernacular languages that had developed from Latin and Germanic tongues of the later Middle Ages. Acknowledging Winckelmann, Schlegel observes that the ancient Greeks cultivated an art of "refined and ennobled sensuality." But, he says, they were too much confined to the present, and not enough concerned with the infinite. For Schlegel, it took the spread of Christianity to regenerate "the decayed and exhausted world of Classical antiquity." The Christian attitude, with its empha- sis on eternity, helped foster a more Romantic perspective. The ancient Greeks held human nature to be self-sufficient. The Christian outlook is opposed to this: "Everything finite and mortal is lost in contemplation of the eternal; life has become shadow and darkness." In a beautifully expressed contrast between the Classical and Romantic outlooks, Schlegel says: "The poetry of the ancients was the poetry of possession, while ours is the poetry of longing. The former is firmly rooted in the present, while the latter hovers between remembrance and anticipation." These statements—however misguided they might be about the true nature of Classical Greek art—capture the essence of Romanticism. The first generation of French Romantics echoed many of these sentiments. François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) shared the German Romantics' love of the medieval, the Gothic, and the Christian, as well as their mistrust of Enlightenment rationality and secularism. His book Génie du christianisme (Genius of Christianity, 1802) sees Christianity as a higher, more spiritual— hence more Romantic—culture than that of ancient Greece and Rome. The fullest expression of these trends in French Romanticism comes with Victor Hugo (1802-1885; Fig. 2.3), whose best-known works were the novels Les misérables (The Wretched) and Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Hugo's preface to the play Cromwell (1827) became a key manifesto of Romanticism. In it, Hugo, like Chateaubriand and the Schlegels, argued that

Christianity had ushered in a new era for the arts and intellectual life, whose worldview was very different from that of antiquity. Romantic art, going for- ward from Christian spiritualism and melancholy, would embrace many differ- ent styles and moods, including the sublime and the grotesque. As for Friedrich Schlegel, "poetry," in the following excerpt from Hugo's preface, really means all artistic expression: Christianity leads poetry to the truth. . . . Everything in creation is not humanly beautiful . . . the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. . . . Then it is that, with its eyes fixed upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and under the influence of that spirit of Christian mel- ancholy and philosophical criticism . . . poetry will take a great step, a de- cisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations—but without confounding them—darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of poetry. All things are connected. Hugo's comments reflect or anticipate many characteristics of Romantic music, which is often deliberately hard to listen to and breaks traditional rules to portray extreme emotional contrasts. Many of Beethoven's later compositions from the 1820s—including the CG-Minor Quartet, Op. 131, which we will examine in the next chapter—manifest a sharp juxtaposition of the heavenly and the down-to-earth, the sublime and the comical, the lyrical and the gruff. Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (Fantastic Symphony) of 1830 conspicuously mixes the sublime, the humorous, the religious, and the grotesque. The March to the Scaffold (the fourth movement) and the Witches' Sabbath (the fifth) are perfect musical embodiments of the grotesque in music. The first movement of the symphony reflects a series of strongly contrasting emotional states like those Hugo describes: the movement depicts, according to Berlioz's program, "the passage from this state of melancholy reverie, interrupt- ed by a few fits of groundless joy, to one of frenzied passion, with its movements of fury, of jealousy, its return of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations." Even the main theme of Berlioz's symphony, the recurring idée fixe (fixed idea, or obsession) that represents the beloved, captures within itself the wide range of feelings or moods characteristic of Romantic art. At 40 measures (the begin- ning is shown in Ex. 2.1), this is likely the longest, most complex theme that had been written in European art music. With its irregular phrases, its long notes frequently tied over the barline, and its sharp, oddly placed accents, the idée fixe is by turns impulsive, reflective, hesitant, insistent, and yielding.

which "can transform all things into show," and in which "all noble or divine truth vanishes away or becomes mere triviality." Hegel believed in tragic iro- ny, as understood by Socrates and practiced by the ancient Greek playwrights. Tragic irony presented individuals in the grip of forces largely beyond their con- trol and awareness. Here was the foundation of what Hegel called the "universal irony of the world," or what Heine would label "world irony." Such irony was fundamental to the actual processes of history, in which the events characteris- tic of tragic drama are projected onto the world stage. Wagner's mature operas, written between about 1850 and 1880, capture this later phase of irony. In Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, the main characters Wotan, Siegfried, and Brünnhilde are caught up in events they often neither under- standnorcancontrol,butthroughwhichtheycometoaccepttheirfate. Events or individual actions are directed ultimately toward the destruction of the gods, a cataclysm that occurs at the end of the final opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). Wagner was following Schopenhauer's pessimism, which adds a

It may seem from the foregoing that Romanticism was concerned mainly with an artist's self-expression, and that the relationship to the real world was usu- ally one of separation and isolation. In fact, Romanticism also had a strong- ly political and social side, which sometimes complemented and sometimes contradicted the artists' individual beliefs. One of the precursors of Roman- ticism in Germany, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), argued that geo- graphical, ethnic, and linguistic identity was essential in shaping the culture and art of a people. In a period where contemporaries like Winckelmann were extolling the virtues of Greek art, Herder praised the native traditions of Ger- many. His published collections of folk poetry would inspire generations of Romantic artists, including the Brothers Grimm, who in 1812 compiled a re- nowned collection of German fairy tales that would go through seven editions up to 1857. The French Revolution also contributed to the rise of Romanticism. Writers, painters, thinkers, and musicians were inspired by the revolution to believe in the power of ideals and values, including artistic ones, to change the world. The first generation of Romantics in France grew up in the aftermath of the revolu- tion. Many maintained its nobler ideals, but were appalled at some of its actual consequences. One of the most famous of all Romantic paintings, Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Eugène Delacroix, shows a woman waving the tricolore (three- color flag) of the French Revolution as she guides the people forward over the bodies of the fallen (see Fig. 2.5). The painting was inspired by the so-called July Revolution of 1830 that overthrew King Charles X. Victor Hugo resolutely opposed the restoration of the monarchy in France in 1814. In 1852, when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon) declared himself emperor, an outraged Hugo went into self-imposed exile from France for almost twenty years. In England, Wordsworth at first embraced the French Revolution and its goals. He wrote in his autobiographical poem The Prelude,"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!" Yet after witnessing the bloody aftermath of the revolution, Wordsworth became disillusioned. Later in The Prelude he wrote of the Reign of Terror:

NAME: _________________________ Music Humanities Listening worksheet: Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 (Classical, Symphony, 1808) Recording: Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Georg Solti (1991) 1. Listen to the first movement. a. This movement, like almost all first movements in the Classical era, is in sonata form. Identify when the following structural points of the sonata structure occur and the relevant modes (major or minor): Exposition: Group 1 (primary theme):​major or minor? Group 2 (secondary theme):​major or minor? Development: Recapitulation: Group 1 (primary theme):​major or minor? Group 2 (secondary theme):​major or minor? ​ b. Does the movement end in the major or the minor mode? c. The famous opening motive, short-short-short-long, is often called the "fate" motive, and is the basis for the primary theme. It also permeates the entire symphony as a recurring rhythmic motive, i.e. the rhythm appears over and over again, though the pitches and intervals change. Where does the "fate" motive lurk during the secondary theme? 2. Listen to the second movement, the slow movement. a. Is the movement in the major or minor mode? (The music does modulate through different keys throughout the movement but the key of the movement as a whole is normally determined by how the movement begins and ends.) b. Compare the following three excerpts: 0:00—0:22, 2:19—2:42, and 4:32—4:52. What musical principle is the basis for this movement? Hint: we talked about this principle in "When I am Laid in Earth" and Bach's Chaconne. c. Where and/or how does the "fate" motive lurk in this movement? Cite recording timings where relevant. 3. Listen to the third movement. a) Is this movement primarily major or minor? b) Describe the form of this movement. If you were to use letters to describe different sections, would the overall structure be AB (binary form), ABA (ternary form) or something more complex (like ritornello form)? c) Where and/or how does the "fate" motive lurk in this movement? Cite recording timings where relevant. d) Listen from 4:50 to the end of the movement. Describe what happens in the music and what emotional effects are generated as a result. 4. Listen to the fourth movement. a. What happens from 6: 02 to 6:40? b. Where and/or how does the "fate" motive lurk in this movement? Cite recording timings where relevant. c. Does the symphony end in the major or minor mode?

S

S

Sa

Meine Ruh' ist hin, Mein Herz ist schwer, Ich finde sie nimmer Und nimmermehr. Wo ich ihn nicht hab Ist mir das Grab, Die ganze Welt Ist mir vergällt. Mein armer Kopf Ist mir verrückt, Mein armer Sinn Ist mir zerstückt. Meine Ruh' ist hin, Mein Herz ist schwer, Ich finde sie nimmer Und nimmermehr. Nach ihm nur schau ich Zum Fenster hinaus, Nach ihm nur geh ich Aus dem Haus. Sein hoher Gang, Sein' edle Gestalt, Seine Mundes Lächeln, Seiner Augen Gewalt, Und seiner Rede Zauberfluß, Sein Händedruck, Und ach, sein Kuß! Meine Ruh' ist hin, Mein Herz ist schwer, Ich finde sie nimmer Und nimmermehr. Mein Busen drängt sich Nach ihm hin. [Ach]1 dürft ich fassen Und halten ihn, Und küssen ihn, So wie ich wollt, An seinen Küssen Vergehen sollt My peace is gone, My heart is heavy, I will find it never and never more. Where I do not have him, That is the grave, The whole world Is bitter to me. My poor head Is crazy to me, My poor mind Is torn apart. My peace is gone, My heart is heavy, I will find it never and never more. For him only, I look Out the window Only for him do I go Out of the house. His tall walk, His noble figure, His mouth's smile, His eyes' power, And his mouth's Magic flow, His handclasp, and ah! his kiss! My peace is gone, My heart is heavy, I will find it never and never more. My bosom urges itself toward him. Ah, might I grasp And hold him! And kiss him, As I would wish, At his kisses I should die!

Symphonie op 14 iv

the "Davidsbund," the Band of David, who saw their goal to fight against the poor taste of the bourgeoisie (see Chapters 5 and 6). Schumann especially took issue with the prevailing enthusiasm for (as he saw it) salon-style and empty virtuoso piano music. He championed great composers of the remote and re- cent past like Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, and composers of his own time like Chopin and Liszt.

The problems of split identity in Hoffmann's tales and novels reveal an im- portant dimension of early Romantic aesthetics: irony. Irony was an ancient rhetorical practice, that of saying or implying the opposite of what you really mean. In Romanticism, irony became more than just a strategy; it became a worldview. In part Romantic irony consisted in acknowledging, and even cel- ebrating, the divide between the real and imaginary worlds. For Friedrich Schlegel, writers had a duty to employ irony as a way of acknowledging the con- tradictory, unresolvable qualities of the relationship between an individual and the world. This attitude accounts for the apparently bizarre practices of Romantic writers like Hoffmann, who often undercut any clear story line or single authorial stance by stepping outside the narrative, or, as in Tomcat Murr, by constantly shifting the point of view. In one play by Ludwig Tieck, the char- acters gang up at the end and murder the author. Schlegel described the key aspect of Romantic irony as the destruction of illusion. Romantic irony figures heavily in the poetry of Heine and was captured musically in Schumann's Dichterliebe. The text of the song Ich grolle nicht claims that the poet never complains, even when his heart is broken, even when love is lost: Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht, Ewig verlor'nes Lieb! Ich grolle nicht. I don't complain, even when my heart is breaking, Love forever lost! I don't complain. This is classic irony in the sense that the text is saying more or less the opposite of what is really meant: the poet is certainly complaining. Schumann captures this irony perfectly with his musical setting—an accompaniment of continually unresolved dissonance, with angrily throbbing chords in the right hand and powerful octaves in the left (see Ex. 2.3). As the nineteenth century wore on, Romantic irony lost much of its sense of innocence. The philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) had little use for Schlegel's variety of Romantic irony, which he dubbed "trifling with everything,"

In Italy, Romanticism, politics, and music were directly connected in the figure of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), who was both a philosopher and a statesman. Mazzini would play a large role in the revolutions of 1848, and then in the 1850s and 1860s as a leader in the Risorgimento, the movement to create a unified Italy (discussed in Chapters 7 and 9). Earlier, in his Philosophy of Music of

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm "Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?" - "Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht? Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?" - "Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif." "Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir! Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir; Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand, Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand." - "Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht, Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?" - "Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind; In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind." - "Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn? Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön; Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn, Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein." - "Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?" - "Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau: Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau. -" "Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt; Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt." - "Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an! Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!" - Dem Vater grauset's, er reitet geschwind, Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind, Erreicht den Hof mit Müh' und Not; In seinen Armen das Kind war tot. Who rides, so late, through night and wind? It is the father with his child. He has the boy well in his arm He holds him safely, he keeps him warm. "My son, why do you hide your face in fear?" "Father, do you not see the Elfking? The Elfking with crown and cape?" "My son, it's a streak of fog." "You dear child, come, go with me! (Very) beautiful games I play with you; many a colourful flower is on the beach, My mother has many a golden robe." "My father, my father, and heareth you not, What the Elfking quietly promises me?" "Be calm, stay calm, my child; Through scrawny leaves the wind is sighing." "Do you, fine boy, want to go with me? My daughters shall wait on you finely; My daughters lead the nightly dance, And rock and dance and sing to bring you in. "My father, my father, and don't you see there The Elfking's daughters in the gloomy place?" "My son, my son, I see it clearly: There shimmer the old willows so grey." "I love you, your beautiful form entices me; And if you're not willing, then I will use force." "My father, my father, he's touching me now! The Elfking has done me harm!" It horrifies the father; he swiftly rides on, He holds the moaning child in his arms, Reaches the farm with great difficulty; In his arms, the child was dead.

One of the images to emerge from Wackenroder's tale of Joseph Berglinger is a gap between the world of the artist-creator and the "real" world. The artist feels underappreciated, or at least not adequately understood, by the more materialis- tic world of commerce. This kind of split did not exist before about 1800, when the patronage system prevailed. Most artists were servants of nobility and pro- duced their art on demand. Joseph Haydn spent most of his career in service to the aristocratic Esterházy family. Wolfgang Mozart was also supported by pa- trons, although less consistently. Later in life, both composers began to work on amorefreelancebasis. JosephBerglinger'scareerisonthecuspofthesekindsof changes. He is a kapellmeister in service to a bishop, but he also feels himself an artist, one who should be above all worldly things. After 1800, many artists and thinkers found it increasingly hard to recon- cile the bourgeois, capitalist world with the realm of art. Looked at from a more metaphysical or philosophical point of view, the relationship between the artist and society may be said to have embodied the split posited by Kant between the phenomenal world (the world of appearances) and the noumenal world (the world we cannot see). Artists began to view the phenomenal world with scorn; they longed for the noumenal world, the world of artistic fantasy. The theme of the artist in isolation from, and often in conflict with, the real world, is common in Romanticism. We see it with particular force in the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, where the sensitive protagonist is often trapped or torn between the everyday bourgeois world and a supernatu- ral realm to which only he has access. In The Mines of Falun, Elis Fröbom is enticed by magnificent lodes deep inside a mine—lodes that no one else can see—and eschews the surface world of love, marriage, and family. Like so many Hoffmann characters, Elis feels "split in half." In The Golden Pot, one of Hoffmann's greatest tales, Anselmus is a poor, beleaguered student who rejects the real world into which he fits awkwardly (he rips his coat on a nail, loses his hat while bowing, breaks things easily, and so on) and flees

to a fantasy world of green-gold snakes, bronze-gold palm trees, and tropical birds who make music when they fly. Hoffmann's greatest fictional creation is the kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, who appears in numerous works of fiction and whom Hoffmann also captured in a whimsical drawing (Fig. 2.4). Like Berglinger, Kreisler is an ec- centric conductor and composer who is utterly devoted to his art but is awkward and ill suited for the real bourgeois world of which he is a part. He even views himself as partly mad, signing his letters "Johannes Kreisler, Kapellmeister and Crazy Musician par excellence." In one of Hoffmann's major works of fiction, Leben- Ansichten des Katers Murr (The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr), the biography of Kreisler is interwoven with the memoirs of the cat, who is writing them on the reverse sides of paper he has recovered from the trash on which the memoirs of Kreisler are contained. Hoffmann's stories had wide appeal throughout the nineteenth century. The French composer Jacques Offenbach (whom we discuss in Chapter 9) used five of them as the basis for his best-known opera, Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1880). Robert Schumann steeped himself in Hoffmann's writings. He entitled one of his major piano cycles Kreisleriana (1838). And on three occasions he used the term Fantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces) for a set of short pieces, a likely reference to Hoffmann's collection of writings Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Pieces in the Style of Callot [a French artist]). Above all, Schumann, like Hoffmann, saw a conflict between the real and imaginary worlds. In his own music criticism and in the titles of some of his piano pieces, Schumann (drawing on a biblical rivalry) pitted the "Philistines," who were the general public and conservative musicians, against