CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:

REVOLUTION, REACTION, AND CULTURAL RESPONSE

 

            As we learned from Mozart, it is the MIDDLE CLASS, those most important people who have some education and some money, but most importantly a MAJORITY who can influence the way of the world.

 

            From that middle class came James Watt (1736-1819) who invented the steam engine in 1769 and began the Industrial Revolution.

 

            The Industrial Revolution began primarily in England, whose political revolution had happened earliest.  It would travel to America after its own revolution was settled, and eventually to France, whose political revolution produced a country in turmoil, no matter how many Neoclassical Artists said otherwise.

 

            Eventually, France elected a dictator to organize the country, Napoléon Bonaparte (1769 –1821)

 

            The Industrial Revolution meant cheaper clothing and other manufactured goods.  People moved to the cities to be near the factories where they could work for good salaries.  But industry did have its drawbacks . . .

            Cities became smokey and crowded, and it was not long before individual people lost their identities in the mob of city people.

 

English painter John Constable (1776–1837) reminded the English of a place in their country that could be soon laid waste by industrialization.

The Hay Wain 1821

Salisbury Cathedral, 1825

Boat-building near Flatford Mill, 1815

Brighton Beach with Colliers, 1824.

 

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 - 1851) followed Constable, as explained here by Sister Wendy.

The Fighting "Temeraire" tugged to her
last berth to be broken up 1838

Dido building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire 1815

Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey (1829)

Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon coming on ("The Slave Ship") 1840

Romanticism was basically anti-classicism, in that it emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

            Romanticism included: appreciation of the beauties of nature; emotions over reason and the senses over intellect; examination of human personality, its moods and potential; a focus on man’s passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as an individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to spiritual truth; an interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.

 

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798 – 1863)

Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable 1860

Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard 1839

Liberty Leading the People (28th July 1830) 1830

The Death of Sardanapalus 1827

The Women of Algiers 1834

Jewish Bride 1832

Girl Seated in a Cemetery 1824

Aspasia c. 1824

 

Théodore Géricault (1791 –1824) was one of the greatest French romantics.

 The Medusa, a government vessel, had foundered off the West African coast and 150 people tried to escape on a raft.  After thirteen days, only fifteen were rescued alive.  They had had nothing but a few drops of wine - and human meat - to sustain them.  The tragedy was blamed on official negligence and created a political scandal, as well as the most famous of all Romantic paintings.

The Raft of the Medusa (1824) 

An Officer of the Imperial Horse Guards Charging, also Chasseur Charging. 1814.

The Derby at Epson. 1821

The Madman. c. 1822

The Madwoman.  1822-23

 

Romanticism in literature began with William Wordsworth (1770 –1850), who published Lyrical Ballads in 1798.

 

ODE

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

1803-6

 

 

 

 

The most famous poets of the romantic period produced some of the greatest poetry in the English Language and led a Bohemian lifestyle that may have been more extravagant than their poetry.  These poets were John Keats (1795 –1821), George Gordon (Lord) Byron (1788 – 1824), and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 –1822). 

 

Knowing that he was dying of Tuberculosis, John Keats often wrote of immortality, including what may be the greatest poems ever written, Ode on  Grecian Urn.

After looking at the immortal figures on a ancient Greek vase, he concludes with these famous lines:

"Beauty is truth; truth, beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.“ (1819)

 

WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be                   

 Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact'ry, 

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain; 

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,         

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 

And feel that I may never live to trace 

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; 

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! 

That I shall never look upon thee more,  

Never have relish in the faery power 

Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore   

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,   

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink. (1818)

 

 

Lord Byron was most famous for long narrative poems, such as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818) and Don Juan (1824), but his personal life was most interesting.

Lord Byron's life featured extravagant living, numerous love affairs, debts, separation, and allegations of incest and sodomy. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." In addition to writing, he fought led Italy's revolutionary organization against Austria, and later fought the Turks in the Greek War of Independence.

 

Byron’s friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a several classic poems, such as “Ode to a Skylark,” and “Adonais,” but my favorite is “Ozymandias” (1818)

I met a traveller from an antique land                 

Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

 Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,                                         

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,   

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,       

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read    

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear–              

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:                

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"                       

Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay              

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare           

The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

 

            “Mad Shelley,” as he was called by students at Eton, who made fun of him, was later expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet in favor of atheism.  He eloped to Scotland with Harriet Westbrook, only to find himself in love with Mary Godwin, 16 year old daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and anarchist William Godwin.

            Deserting his wife, he eloped with Mary and her fifteen year old stepsister Jane “Clair” Claimont. They maintained a ménage à trois with in various parts of Europe for the next eight years.

            In the summer of 1816 Claire urged that they should go to Lake Geneva (to be with Lord Byron, with whom she had previously had a one-night stand and to whom she later bore a child).

            There, one cold housebound evening, they visited with Lord Byron’s physician, John William Polidori (1795–1821).

After reading aloud from the Tales of the Dead, Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story.

Shelley’s and Byron’s work was not very successful, but Polidori wrote “The Vampyre,” about a vampire obviously modeled after Lord Byron himself, named Lord Ruthven.  For this work, John William Polidori is credited with being the father of vampire fiction.  (Bram Stoker wrote Dracula eighty years later.)

            Mary’s story was the most successful.  Married by the time the third edition was published, she used the name Mary Shelley.

            Things soon went sour for Shelley.  That autumn, his first wife died, and he became very ill.  Keats died in 1821, and Mary suffered a miscarriage.  Then on July 8, 1822, Shelley was found dead at the age of 29, drowned.  With Lord Byron in attendance, his body was cremated at the beach.

            Curiously, Shelley’s heart did not burn.  Byron gave it to Mary, who wrapped it in a shroud and carried it with her for the rest of her life.  (Some scientists have suggested it was probably Shelley’s liver, which often survives cremation.)

            Later the heart was buried in a full sized coffin at the English Cemetery in Rome, near the grave of John Keats.  Shelley had written of this cemetery ‘It might make one half in love with death to be buried in such a sweet a place as this’. The cemetery is indeed quite delightful. It is enclosed within ivy covered walls and in Summer the ground is covered with Violets. On Shelley’s tombstone is written the words ‘Cor Cordium’ Latin for ‘Heart of Hearts’. 

 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  (1749 –1832) was a great German writer and scientist.

Published in 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther is a somewhat autobiographical novel about a young man, frustrated in love, who commits suicide.

A favorite of Napolean’s, the novel started the phenomenon known as the "Werther-Fieber" in which Young men throughout Europe began to dress in the clothing described for Werther in the novel. It also led to some of the first known examples of copycat suicide; supposedly more than 2,000 readers committed suicide

Goethe’s most famous work was Faust (1816-1832), the most famous version of the classic tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil.

            Unlike Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, who uses his powers to pull silly pranks, Goethe’s Faust concerns a man’s conflict with good and evil, with his strong sexual needs versus his moral upbringing.  Mephistopheles makes a bet with God that he can bring down God’s favorite human, but giving him anything he wants.

            Faust’s powers cause his love, Margarete (Gretchen) to murder both her mother and her illegitimate child and to eventually die in prison.  Later, he is involved with Helen of Troy, Greek Gods, and war.  Eventually, God takes the good part of his soul to Heaven.

 

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), for awhile a student of Mozart’s, was considered the first Romantic composer.

Like other artists of the Romantic Period, Beethoven made up his own rules, changed music to satisfy his own vision.  He wrote longer symphonies for larger orchestras, built musical motifs on rhythm as well as melody, and used much more complicated development of a musical theme (not unlike a novelist developing characterization.)

He is also said to have put his own feelings and frustrations into his music, trying to make. Consider, on the next slide, how “The Moonlight Sonata” (1801) tries to sound like moonlight on Lake Lucerne.

            Or think about the little girl for whom Beethoven wrote “Fur Elise” (1810) as an exercise for her to practice on the piano . . .

            In his famous 9th Symphony (1822-24), Beethoven used Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy), and set it to music, using singers as part of the orchestra.  (The famous deaf story happened at the first performance.)

            Just for the sake of comparison, let’s view a Turner painting while we listen . . .

            In the famous 5th symphony (1807-8), Beethoven focuses more on rhythms than melody.  (Note—this famous piece played a key role in World War II.)

            In the final movement, we heard the same rhythm developed into an almost different, yet still related piece.

 

 

            Curiously, Beethoven was a student of Mozart, while Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828) studied with Mozart’s old rival, Antonio Salieri.

            Although his famous “Unfinished Symphony” (1822) is well known, Schubert’s greatest contribution to music is in the development of Lieder, individual songs for vocalists.   

“Ellens Gesang III” (1825) is a love song based on Tennyson’s Lady of the Lake.

 

“The Brook’s Lullaby” from Goethe’s “The young lord and the miller-maid” (1824)

Sleep thou! Baby mine,
In thy cradle rocking;
Soft wings pause and shine
'Round thy pillow white.
Hush! While thy mother sings
Songs of olden fancy;
Morn drops down from God,
On the creeping night.

Low to thee, my dear!
Bends thy mother humming;
Stars shine silver, dear!
In the dusky sky.
Fears shall not mar thy sleep;
No sound shall awake thee;
Sleep; my baby, sleep;
'Till the dark creeps by.

 

"Der Erlkönig" from a poem by Goethe, depicts the death of a child assailed by a supernatural being, the "Elf King", in a 1782 opera entitled Die Fischerin, must have been used hundreds of times to tell us the bad guy is here.

 

Francisco José de Goya (1746 –1828) will be the final artist we discuss in the Romantic era, because much of his work goes beyond Romanticism and leads to Realism.

            In his famous work,The Third of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid  (1814), we do not see the idealistic, glorious world of the Romantic, nor do we see the twisted, suffering with hope of “The Raft of the Medusa.  Instead, we see real people being murdered.

The Family of Charles IV, 1800

The Nude Maja (La Maja desnuda) (1800) had no pretense to allegorical or mythological meaning, and was simply profane, creating a terrible scandal.

The Clothed Maja (La Maja vestida) was painted after he refused to paint clothing over his original painting.

In his later years, using oil paints and working directly onto the walls of his dining and sitting rooms, Goya created intense, haunting works with dark themes, such as  

Saturn devouring his son 1819, and  “Fight with Cudgels” 1820-23

 

Remembering the honest, realistic images of Goya, and the darkness of his later vision, we shall move on to the Realistic Movement in Chapter 18.