Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The very beginning of the romantic movement, the decade of the 1770s, saw the phenomenon of Sturm und Drang, ‘storm and stress’, a young generation of German poets who rebelled against their strict education and social conventions to explore their emotions.54 The best-known of these ‘ill-considered’ works was Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).55 Here we have the perfect romantic scenario, in which the individual is set against and is at odds with society. Werther is a young, enthusiastic, passionate individual isolated amid strict, desiccated, pious Lutherans. But Goethe was only the beginning. The despair and disillusion, the sentimentality and melancholy of Chateaubriand and Rousseau kick-start romanticism, alongside Goethe, exploring the ways in which conventional society is unable to meet the spiritual needs of its heroes. The vast, the sprawling panoramas of Victor Hugo and the ‘Bohemian groves’ of Théophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas, in which political and personal ambitions are intertwined, confirm Hugo’s argument that ‘romanticism is the liberalism of literature’.56 The approach of Stendhal and Prosper Mérimée, viewing art as a ‘secret paradise forbidden to ordinary mortals’, highlights one of the aims of romanticism, which became know as l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake. Balzac stressed the ‘unavoidable necessity’ of taking sides in the great questions of the day, the argument that one could not be an artist and sit on the sidelines.57

  Whereas French romanticism was essentially a reaction to the French Revolution, the English variety was a reaction to the industrial revolution (Byron, Shelley, Godwin and Leigh Hunt were all radicals, though Sir Walter Scott and Wordsworth remained or became Tories). As Arnold Hauser frames it, ‘The romantics’ enthusiasm for nature is just as unthinkable without the isolation of the town from the countryside as is their pessimism without the bleakness and misery of the industrial cities.’58 It is the younger romantics–Shelley, Keats and Byron–who adopt an uncompromising humanism, aware of the dehumanising effects of factory life on life in general, and even the more conservative representatives, Wordsworth and Scott, share their ‘democratic’ sympathies in that their work is aimed at the popularisation–even the politicisation–of literature.59 Like their German and French counterparts, the English romantic poets believed in a transcendental spirit which was the source of poetic inspiration. They wallowed in language, explored consciousness, and saw in anyone who had the power to generate a poetic form of words an echo of Plato’s contention that here was some sort of divine intention. This is what Coleridge meant by his famous epigram that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’. (Wordsworth feared an ‘apocalypse of the imagination’.60) In a sense the poet became his own god.61 Shelley is perhaps the classic romanticist: a born rebel, an atheist, he saw the world as one great battle between the forces of good and evil. Even his atheism, it has been said, is more a revolt against God as a tyrant, than a denial of Him. In the same vein, Keats’ poetry is imbued with a pervading melancholy, a mourning for ‘the beauty that is not life’, for a beauty that is beyond his grasp. The mystery of art is in the process of replacing the mystery of faith.

  Byron was probably the most famous romantic. (Describing ‘the romantic moi’, Howard Mumford Jones aptly notes that whereas Wordsworth’s egotism was internalised, Byron’s was ‘there for all Europe to see’.62) In his work Byron’s portrayal of the hero as an eternally homeless wanderer, partly doomed by his own wild nature, is by no means original. But earlier heroes of this type invariably felt guilty or melancholic about the fact that they were outside society, whereas in Byron the outsider status becomes transformed into ‘a self-righteous mutiny’ against society, ‘the feeling of isolation develops into a resentful cult of solitude’, and his heroes are little more than exhibitionists, ‘who openly display their wounds’.63 These outlaws, who declare war on society, dominate literature in the nineteenth century. If the type had been invented by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, by Byron’s time it had become narcissistic. ‘[The hero] is unsparing towards himself and merciless towards others. He knows no pardon and asks no forgiveness, either from God or man. He regrets nothing and, in spite of his disastrous life, would not wish to have anything different…He is rough and wild but of high descent…a peculiar charm emanates from him which no woman can resist and to which all men react with friendship or enmity.’64

  Byron’s significance went wider even than this. His idea of the ‘fallen angel’ was an archetype adopted by many others, including Lamartine and Heine. Among other things, the nineteenth century was characterised by guilt, at having fallen away from God (see Chapter 35), and the tragic hero of Byronic dimensions fitted the bill to perfection. But the other changes wrought by Byron were equally significant in their long-term effects. It was Byron, for example, who encouraged the reader to indulge in intimacy with the hero. In turn this increased the reader’s interest in the author. Until the romantic movement, the private life of a writer was largely unknown, and of little interest, to readers. Byron and his self-advertisements changed all that. After him, the relationship between a writer and his audience came to resemble, on the one hand, that of therapist and patient and, on the other, that of a film star and his fans.65

  Associated with this was another major change, the notion of the ‘second self’, the belief that inside every romantic figure, in the dark and chaotic recesses of the soul, was a completely different person and that once access to this second self had been found, an alternative–and deeper–reality would be uncovered.66 This is in effect the discovery of the unconscious, interpreted here to mean an entity that is hidden away from the rational mind which is nonetheless the source of irrational solutions to problems, a secret, ecstatic something, which is above all mysterious, nocturnal, grotesque, ghostlike and macabre.67 (Goethe once described romanticism as ‘hospital-poetry’ and Novalis pictured life as ‘a disease of the mind’.) The second self, the unconscious, was seen as a way to spiritual enlargement and was expected to contribute to the great lyricism that was such a feature of romanticism.68 The discovery of the unconscious is the subject of Chapter 36.

  Furthermore, the idea of the artist as a more sensitive soul than others, with perhaps a direct line to the divine, which went back to Plato, carried with it a natural conflict between the artist and the bourgeoisie.69 The early nineteenth century was the point at which the very concept of the avant-garde could arise, with the artist viewed as someone who was ahead of his time, ahead of the bourgeoisie certainly. Art was a ‘forbidden fruit’, available only to the initiated and most certainly denied to the ‘philistine’ bourgeoisie. And it was not far from there to the idea that youth was seen as more creative than–and as inevitably superior to–age. The young inevitably knew what the coming thing was, inevitably had the energy to embrace new ideas and fashions, being naturally less familiar with more established patterns. The very concept of genius played up the instinctive spark in new talent at the expense of painfully acquired learning over a lifetime of effort.

  In painting romanticism produced Turner, whose pictures, said John Hoppner, were like looking into a coal fire (a metaphor adopted for the music of Berlioz), and Delacroix, who said that a picture should above all be a feast for the eyes. But it was in music that romanticism surpassed itself. The great generation of romantic composers were all born within ten years of one another–Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Verdi and Wagner. Before all these, however, there was Beethoven. All music leads up to Beethoven, says Mumford Jones, and all music leads away from him.70 Beethoven, Schubert and Weber comprised a smaller grouping, of what we might call pre-romantic composers, who between them changed the face of musical thought, and musical performance.

  The great difference between Beethoven (1770–1827) and Mozart, who was only fourteen years older, was that Beethoven thought of himself as an artist. There is no mention of that word in Mozart’s letters–he considered himself a skilled craftsman who, as Haydn and Bach had done before him, supplied a commodity. But Beethoven saw himself as part of a spec
ial breed, a creator, and that put him on a par with royalty and other elevated souls. ‘What is in my heart,’ he said, ‘must come out.’71 Goethe was just one who responded to the force of his personality, writing, ‘Never have I met an artist of such spiritual concentration and intensity, such vitality and great-heartedness. I can well understand how hard he must find it to adapt to the world and its ways.’72 Even the crossings-out in his autograph music have a violence that Mozart, for example, lacked.73 Like Wagner after him, Beethoven felt that the world owed him a living, because he was a genius. At one stage, two Viennese princes settled some money on Beethoven, to keep him in the city. After one of them was killed in an accident, Beethoven took the man’s estate to court, to enforce payment. He felt it was his entitlement.74

  In a lifetime of creating much beautiful music, two compositions stand out, two works which changed the course of music for all time. These were the Eroica symphony, which had its premiere in 1805, and the Ninth symphony, first performed in 1824.75 Harold Schonberg wonders what went through the mind of the audience on the momentous occasion when the Eroica was first performed. ‘It was faced with a monster of a symphony, a symphony longer than any previously written and much more heavily scored; a symphony with complex harmonies, a symphony of titanic force; a symphony of fierce dissonances; a symphony with a funeral march that is paralysing in its intensity.’76 This was a new musical language and for many the Eroica and its pathos were never surpassed. George Marek says it must have been an experience similar to hearing the news of the splitting of the atom.77

  Beethoven was a romantic enough figure anyway but the hearing difficulties that began to afflict him around the time that Eroica was first performed and would in time develop into complete deafness, also drove him inwards. Fidelio, his grand opera (though perhaps with too many characters), the great violin and piano concertos, the famous piano sonatas, such as the Waldstein and the Appassionata, all had their mysterious, mystic, monumental elements. But the Ninth symphony was pivotal, and was always held in the highest esteem by the romantics who came after. By all accounts, its premiere was disastrous, after only two rehearsals and when many of the singers could not reach the high notes. (The lead singers begged Beethoven to change them, but he refused–no one had a more magnificent will than he.78) However, what the Eroica and Ninth symphonies have in common, what made their sounds so new and so different from the music of, say, Mozart, was that Beethoven was concerned above all with inner states of being, with the urge for self-expression, the dramatic intensity of the soul. ‘Beethoven’s music is not polite. What he presented, as no composer before or since, was a feeling of drama, of conflict and resolution…The music [of the Ninth] is not pretty or even attractive. It merely is sublime…this is music turned inward, music of the spirit, music of extreme subjectivity…’79 It was the Ninth symphony, its gigantic struggle ‘of protest and release’, that most influenced Berlioz and Wagner, that remained the (largely unattainable) ideal for Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler.80 Debussy confessed that the great score had become, for composers, ‘a universal nightmare’. What he meant was that few other composers could match Beethoven, and perhaps only one, Wagner, could surpass him.

  Franz Schubert has been described as ‘the classical romantic’.81 He had a short life (1797–1828), all of which he spent in Beethoven’s shadow. But he too felt that he could only be an artist, telling a friend that ‘I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose.’ He began life as a boy singer in a choir and then as a schoolteacher after his voice broke. But he hated that and turned to composing. Like Beethoven, he was small, five feet one and a half inches, as compared with five feet four. He was nicknamed Schwammerl (‘Tubby’) and as Beethoven’s hearing was bad, so Schubert’s eyesight was poor. More important, he was the perfect example of the romantic with two selves. While, on the one hand, he was very well read and made his name by setting many poems–of Goethe, Schiller and Heine–to music, he drank more than he should, contracted venereal disease and in general let his craving for pleasure drag him down. This showed in his music, especially his ‘Song of Sorrow’, the symphony in B minor.82 He was also the master of music for the unaccompanied voice.83

  Schubert died in the year that followed Beethoven’s death. By that time, much of the modern world was coming into existence. New railways were connecting people rapidly. Thanks to the industrial revolution, vast fortunes were being made by the bourgeoisie, alongside desperate poverty. Aspects of this rubbed off directly on the world of music. It was no longer simply a court experience but was now enjoyed by the newly-emerging bourgeoisie. They had discovered dance music, with the waltz, in particular, becoming a craze at the time of the Congress of Vienna, in 1814–1815. In the 1820s, at the time of Carnival, Vienna offered as many as 1,600 balls in a single night.84 But the city also had four theatres which offered opera at one time or another, and many smaller halls, at the university and elsewhere. Middle-class music-making had arrived.

  Besides the new theatres, for concerts and opera, for example, the new technologies had a profound impact on instruments themselves. Beethoven had increased the size of the orchestra and, as was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Berlioz would increase it still more. At the same time, the new metal technology greatly improved the otherwise unreliable wind instruments of the eighteenth century. Keys and valves were devised which enabled horns and bassoons, for example, to play more consistently in tune.85 The new metal, articulated keys also enabled players to reach holes their fingers couldn’t otherwise span. The tuba evolved and Adolph Sax invented the saxophone.86 At the same time, as orchestras grew in size, there emerged the need for someone to take control. Until then, most ensembles could be controlled either by the first violinist, or whoever was playing the clavier. But after Beethoven, around 1820, the conductor as we know him today emerged. The composers Ludwig Spohr and Carl Maria von Weber were among those who conducted their own music with a baton, together with François-Antoine Habeneck, the founder of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra (in 1828), who conducted with his bow.

  It was around this time, too, that the modern piano emerged. Two elements were involved here. One was the evolution of the steel frame, steel being developed as a result of the industrial revolution, which enabled pianos to become much more massive and sturdy than they had been in, say, Mozart’s day. The other factor was the genius (and marketing) of Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), who debuted at nineteen and may just have been the greatest violinist who ever existed.87 A superb technician and a flamboyant showman, who liked to deliberately break a string during a performance, and complete the evening using only three strings, he was the first of the supervirtuosi.88 But he did expand the technique of the violin, introducing new bowings, fingerings and harmonics, in the process stimulating pianists to try to emulate him on their new, more versatile instruments.89

  The man who most emulated Paganini, on the piano at any rate, was Franz Liszt, the first pianist in history to give a concert on his own. It was partly thanks to these virtuosi that so many concert halls were built all over Europe (and, in a small way, in north America), to cope with the demand from the newly-enriched bourgeoisie, who were eager to hear these performers. In turn a raft of composer-instrumentalists emerged to take advantage of this development: Weber, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt were the four greatest pianists of their time and Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Weber and Wagner were the four greatest conductors.90

  ‘Within one decade, roughly 1830–1840,’ says Harold Schonberg, ‘the entire harmonic vocabulary of music changed. It seemed to come from nowhere, but all of a sudden composers were using seventh, ninth, and even eleventh chords, altered chords and a chromatic as opposed to classical diatonic harmony…the romantics revelled in unusual tone combinations, sophisticated chords, and dissonances that were excruciating to the more conventional minds of the day.’91 Romantic music thus had its own sound–rich and sensuous, its own mood, mystical–but it was also new in that it had a ‘programme’
, it told a story, something that had been unthinkable hitherto.92 This development underlined the new, close alliance between music and literature where its aim, often enough, was to describe–as Beethoven had pioneered–inner states of feeling, or states of mind.

  Carl Maria von Weber was, like Schubert, another very romantic figure, if not quite in the Beethoven or Berlioz sense. He had a diseased hip and walked with a limp but, on top of that, he was a consumptive, perhaps the illness of the romantic age, a slow, tragic, wasting-away (the heroines of La Traviata and La Bohème are consumptives). Weber was also a virtuoso of the guitar and an excellent singer, until he damaged his voice by accidentally drinking a glass of nitric acid. But he also had enormous hands, which meant that he could play certain passages of his music that cannot be played by ordinary mortals.93 He was summoned to Dresden to take control of the opera house there, where he made the conductor (himself) the single most dominant force, setting a fashion. But he also worked hard to counter what was then a craze for Italian opera, based mainly on the works of Rossini. It was thanks to Weber that a German operatic tradition emerged that was to culminate in Wagner. Weber’s own opera Der Freischütz, first performed in 1820, opened up a new world. It dealt with the supernatural, with the mystical power of evil, a form of plotting that would remain popular throughout the nineteenth century. He himself said that the most important line in the opera is spoken by the hero, Max: ‘Doch mich umgarnen finstre Mächte!’ (‘But the dark powers enmesh me’).94