must surely dwell a loving father.4
Schiller’s lines expressed the highest ideals of his century — the hope that the clearing away of dogma and outmoded institutions would, in time, heal the rifts in modern society and bring an end to war and misery. They also hinted at something new (or something very old, which seemed new); a wish to take leave of one’s senses — to dance, to sing, to lose oneself in a happy throng. Five years after he wrote it, young German poets were running through a meadow near the seminary at Tubingen shouting Schiller’s poem into the night air, and pausing between stanzas to take swigs from a bottle of wine.5
Schiller, like Wordsworth, was deeply sympathetic to the Revolution; and like the English poet, he found his convictions impossible to maintain after the Reign of Terror. But if the Revolution shattered his faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment, it convinced him more than ever of the importance of art and poetry:
If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.6
Even after world events had conspired to make Schiller’s optimism seem naïve, it was impossible to dismiss out of hand the vision he had presented in ‘Ode to Joy’. In fact, as the bright hopes of 1789 receded into the distance, the question of how to make people happy seemed more pressing than ever. Ludwig van Beethoven decided to tackle the problem himself in 1802, announcing his intention to set Schiller’s ‘Ode’ to music. It would be another twenty-two years before he would write to his publisher with good news on this front:
Vienna, March 10, 1824.
… These are all I can at present give you for publication. I must, alas! now speak of myself, and say that this, the greatest work I have ever written, is well worth 1000 florins C.M. It is a new grand symphony, with a finale and voice parts introduced, solo and choruses, the words being those of Schiller’s immortal ‘Ode to Joy’, in the style of my pianoforte Choral Fantasia, only of much greater breadth.7
At the asking price of 600 florins, the publisher had got himself a bargain. The Choral Symphony wedded Schiller’s verses to one of Beethoven’s most powerful pieces of music. The poem appears in the final movement, which begins with the ugliest blast of discordant noise that had been heard in a concert hall up to that time — which, for Beethoven, symbolised nothing less than all the misery in the world condensed into one gigantic, impossible chord. Then, as the smoke clears and the dust settles, a lone voice pipes up in the darkness, ‘Oh friends! No more of these tones! Let us sing something full of gladness!’.
A chorus appears out of nowhere and joins the singer as he belts out Schiller’s ‘Ode’ and the whole thing is carried by a magnificent, soaring melody — the same melody, in fact, that Conor Oberst rides in ‘Road to Joy’. Beethoven, conducting this final section at the piece’s premiere in 1824, got completely carried away — he was still furiously waving his arms in the air long after the orchestra had stopped playing. And Oberst seems to be swept up in the same feeling of wild abandon as his own song comes to its conclusion. ‘Let’s fuck it up boys!’ he tells his band, ‘make some noise!’
But where Beethoven had his cacophony redeemed by a dream of universal brotherhood, Oberst ends his song with the end of the world. Oberst had always tried to write hope into his sadder songs. But you can hear his optimism fading in the last verses, as he looks around at the world and what we’ve made of it. The same suspicion with which he regards Western civilisation in ‘I Believe in Symmetry’ here reaches fever pitch. He sneers bitterly:
I hope I don’t sound too ungrateful,
What history gave modern men.
A telephone to talk to strangers,
A machine gun and a camera lens8
None of these are any consolation for the still missing-inaction dream of universal human brotherhood. It’s over two centuries since Schiller wrote his poem, one hundred and eighty years since Beethoven set it to music, and three decades years since that music was adopted as the official anthem of the European Community. But the dream it represents seems further away than ever.
The cracked howl and burst of noise at the end of ‘Road to Joy’ signalled a shift in Bright Eyes’ music. Oberst had already thrown himself into political activism, performing onstage with his hero, Bruce Springsteen, on the 2004 Vote for Change tour. Later, in May 2005, he released a download-only protest song called ‘When the President Talks to God’ — a direct critique of the Bush Administration. Then, at the beginning of 2008, he fell back — feeling, as he later described it, ‘corrupted and corroded’ — and turned his gaze inward again.9 But the album he recorded — the first to be released since his very early days under his own name — was very different to Lifted or earlier efforts like Letting off the Happiness. Where Oberst used to look inside himself and see a world of trouble, here, on songs like ‘Sausalito,’ he seemed to have found a measure of self-reliance, even peace.
The source of this new strength, it turned out, was nature. In ‘Sausalito’, the singer describes a camping trip with his girlfriend — they drive out into the desert so as to have the stars all to themselves. Here, Oberst’s experience of the landscape becomes almost religious; he has a sense of a spirit moving through creation, a ‘sound too soft to hear’. This mysterious ‘something’ accounts for the new feeling of calm in the songs on his self-titled album, which was recorded in a small cabin in rural Mexico. The music, as Oberst explained to triple j’s Zan Rowe, sprang from the landscape itself and the feelings it stirred in him. ‘I believe places have an energy to them,’ he said. ‘I felt at peace, but also inspired.’10
A Motion and a Spirit
IN JULY 1798 Wordsworth and Dorothy travelled to Bristol to see Lyrical Ballads through the presses. They made their way up the Wye River and stopped at a place called Tintern, not far from the ruins of an old gothic abbey. Wordsworth was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. On his last visit to Tintern five years previously, his state of mind had been desperate, to say the least. He’d had his heart broken by a woman he had to leave, and by a cause he could no longer believe in. He’d found himself a traitor to his own country, an apologist for tyranny, and an apostate to a faith he’d only recently converted to. He was, in other words, a wreck. Back then, he’d raced around this landscape:
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads than one
Who sought the thing he loved…1
But since then, much had changed in Wordsworth’s life. In 1798 he could look back at the Wordsworth of five years previously with not a little admiration for his hot-headed romantic passion. But he knew he wouldn’t trade that for what he’d found since:
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.2
Here, in ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wordsworth is describing the almost mystical faith in nature that would sustain him for the rest of his life. This feeling runs through even the plainest of the Lyrical Ballads, and it’s the key to his admonishment to poets in ‘The Tables Turned’ to put down the books and go for a walk. Wordsworth’s faith, and his ability to write poetry, had been restored by his year in the country. It seemed to him as though the source of life and the source of his creative power were one and the same. But this realisation had not come easily to him — to reach it he had, in a sense, found it necessary to jettison almost four hundred years worth of European history; four centuries in which man’s ability to reason was prized above all else, and the kind of simple faith Wordsworth was longing for was thought to be a relic of a (thankfully) lo
ng-gone era. Wordsworth’s new philosophy turned this attitude on its head.
For the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote a preface explaining his new ideas as they related to poetry. He warned his readers that they were about to enter a poetic universe in which the laws laid down by Pope and the coffee-house classicists did not apply. He had powerful feelings to communicate, feelings which had come to him in the presence of nature; feelings which could not be made to abide by a set of rules any more than nature itself could be made to fit the harsh geometry of an eighteenth-century garden.
‘All good Poetry,’ Wordsworth insisted in his now-famous preface, ‘is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’ But Wordsworth was careful to add a disclaimer to this, saying that poets should make sure they don’t get too carried away with their emotions:
The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in coexistence with an overbalance of pleasure… But if the words by which this excitement is produced are in themselves powerful, or the images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond its proper bounds.3
Here, Wordsworth is insisting on one hand that poetry must come from feeling, while warning on the other that the poet must temper this feeling with a mood of calm repose such as the one in which he wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’. Over the coming century, generations of younger poets happily embraced the first part of his formula while completely disregarding the second. This, in a sense, was entirely fair. Wordsworth had revealed that the rules of poetry were a sham, and that the only authority the poet ought to respect was the poet’s own feeling for truth. It was a bit late now to start talking about ‘proper bounds’.
Romantic
WHEN CONOR OBERST said, back in 2002, that people who thought his songs were too long could just fade them down, it’s almost as if he was saying, ‘I don’t care if you listen — these are my feelings’. This is the kind of thing Wordsworth warned about in his preface — the poet’s ‘excitement carried beyond its proper bounds’ perfectly describes Bright Eyes’ early music. The singer has rejected formalism, and replaced it with nothing. As a result, Oberst sings too long, confesses too much, cries too easily, and screams too loud.
These days Oberst’s position is closer to the Wordsworth of ‘Tintern Abbey’; his music still comes from feeling, but that feeling is tempered by a sense of spiritual calm. He’s even made some concessions to form — although the forms he uses are much more likely to come from the street-level tradition of popular balladry than from any encyclopedia of pop. And yet it’s no less personal — everything comes from feeling and the artist’s inner life, and he shares it with us because it moved him. No other reason is required. When he starts screaming and hollering in ‘I don’t wanna die in the hospital’ or over-sharing about his sex life in ‘Sausalito’, the old Conor Oberst is not too far away. Is it a bit much for you? he seems to be asking. Go on, fade it down — see if I care.
He can afford to say this because he knows we won’t — not all of us anyway. For every hundred souls who fade him down and fade up the new Maroon 5 album, there’s at least one or two who stay the distance, and those special few are hooked for life. Music writer Brian Howe has said that being a Bright Eyes’ fan is about having ‘a sense of being a part of a special moment governed more by intuition than intellect’.1 Conor Oberst’s music is about feelings, not rules; and to love him is to choose the sound of gut-wrenching sadness over polished perfection, to prefer soul-baring excess to cool refinement.
To like these things in 2005 made you emo; in 1798 it made you romantic. Romanticism is often seen as a reaction to the Enlightenment — a rejection of the philosophical and literary ideals of the eighteenth century. Its earliest stirrings can be found in the very midst of the Enlightenment itself. Rousseau was, in many ways, a typical Enlightenment philosopher, since he sought to improve life by discrediting assumptions. But because he preferred nature to society and strong passion to rational thought, he was also the first of the romantics.
After Rousseau came the Germans, who took things an important step further. Rousseau, as Isiah Berlin has shown in Against the Current, may have rejected the culture of science, but he never abandoned the idea that the world made sense.2 The Germans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century — Haman, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hegel, Fichte and Schopenhauer — would not be so squeamish. These writers would replace the Enlightenment’s clockwork universe with a world of flux and chaos, and this change was mirrored in the art and literature they produced and championed — classicism was replaced by folklore; refined elegance by untamed nature; good sense by intense emotion.
Meanwhile, in England, the achievements of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were followed in the early nineteenth century by stronger stuff from Byron, Shelley and Keats. These poets looked to Wordsworth sometimes as an elder statesman, sometimes as an embarrassing old uncle. They were generally less cautious in their methods and more extreme in temperament than Wordsworth — and they augmented his idea of poetry as a description of the poet’s inner life with an interest in darkness, despair, madness and other altered states. This was the legacy of another Counter-Enlightenment tendency — the gothic revival, which had been gaining momentum for almost half a century before the Lyrical Ballads was published.
By the time Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage became a surprise smash hit in 1812, romanticism was a craze, and by 1830 any adherents to the school of Pope would be feeling — as literary historian Robert Barnard puts it — ‘very lonely indeed’.3 Romanticism would, in various forms, dominate the artistic and philosophical world of the nineteenth century. By 1900 it had given the world Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, Goethe’s Faust, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Puccini’s La Boheme and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey.
If we could somehow get the authors of all these great works together in a room, we’d have a tough time getting them to agree on anything — and no hope at all of discovering a single artistic principle they all share in common. Romanticism is hard to define, partly for the same reason emo is; it’s entirely predicated on the idea that the artist is a unique and special individual, and there’s nothing unique and special individuals hate more than the implication that they are somehow one of a ‘type’. But even if the artists’ objections are ignored, the historian will have a tough time coming up with a definition of ‘romantic’ that holds true in every case. Romanticism seems to dissolve as it’s subjected to scrutiny — a metaphor the romantics, with their suspicion of reason and science, would appreciate:
Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things;
— We murder to dissect.4
In fact if one thing could be said to connect the movement’s most famous voices — to provide a link between the careers of such singular and unclassifiable personalities as Shelley, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Puccini, Hugo, Friedrich and Keats — it’s the idea Wordsworth speaks of here in ‘The Tables Turned’:
Enough of science and of art;
Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.5
Nature is greater than science, emotion more important than reason. The romantic artist favours passion over good sense. He prefers the sound of lusty old ballads to well-observed satires, and he certainly prefers the sight of mountains to neatly trimmed hedges. Wordsworth was by no means the first to express this preference, but in art, timing is everything, and Wordsworth’s timing was impeccable. Lyrical Ballads appeared in the midst of one of the greatest upheavals in European history,
a period of time in which almost every aspect of life — politics, religion, philosophy and the arts — was fundamentally altered. The crisis of faith Wordsworth had been through in his twenties, when his head led him badly astray and his heart put him back on track, seemed to play out, in microcosm, the crisis of a whole generation.
Gerard Way: A world that sends you reeling.
Disenchanted
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE front man, Gerard Way, has only just turned thirty, but we get the feeling he’s already seen more of the world and what it can do than he’d care to, as he steps up to the microphone to introduce the next number. ‘This is a song about dreams’, he tells the audience. ‘It’s called “Disenchanted”.’1
The occasion is a sold-out concert at Mexico’s Palacio de los Deportes on 7 October 2007. My Chemical Romance has been on the road for over a year, playing to hundreds of thousands of fans all over the world. During that time, the band’s most recent album, The Black Parade, has never stopped selling — gathering rave reviews and topping readers’ polls as it goes. Before the inevitable world tour had even hit the road, Gerard Way was well on the way to the upper echelons of rockstardom. Now, he treads the stage as though he’s never been anything less than a glam-rock superhero. He dips a shoulder, and thousands of girls scream. He shares his pain and millions of kids adore him for it. All of which begs the question: what does Gerard Way have to be disenchanted about? All his dreams would appear to have come true — and then some. So what exactly is the problem? A closer listen to The Black Parade uncovers the malaise at the heart of Gerard Way’s emotional world, and — more importantly — reveals the means by which he hopes to transcend it. The album is a loosely structured rock opera in the vein of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, and the star of the show is a little guy called ‘the patient’ — a shell of a human being, eaten away from the inside by disease, connected by wires and tubes to obscure machinery, counting out his last days staring at the blank walls of a hospital ward. The album’s centrepiece is a song called ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, in which death finally comes for our hero, in the shape of an undead marching band. Death, Way insists, arrives in the form of our most treasured childhood memory. For the patient, this was the day his father took him into town to see a parade. On that day, he recalls — as he lies in his hospital bed and the machines count out what’s left of his life in metrical beeps — his father said something to him that would stay with him forever:
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 5