A very influential period for the arts and sciences (from around 1800-1850). We will take a look at the historical background, main lines of the thought expressed in the arts, as well as the thinkers and composers of the period, how their work was a generator and product of the modern crisis, and what traces of their influence still permeate the contemporary culture.
We need to talk about German Romanticism.
Historical Setting
With the Napoleonic wars and an emerging bourgeoise community, there was a focus on indoor partying and music playing.
The emerging amateur market, the printed paper, and political repression all contributed to the placement of the musical stage in an intimate setting. The works consisted of simple and easy-to-play pieces, usually one voice accompanied by a piano. In other words, the German Lieder. These vocal works had great potential for portraying not only music but also poetry that was being produced in Germany at the time.
So there you have it, an artistic tool for not only taking the masses by storm through technology (printed paper) and music but also relating to the entirety of German thought, from the poets, novelists, and thinkers that could be enveloped in a musical package and delivered directly at home.
Artists
In this context, many thinkers were at once poets, novelists, composers, and critics (Schumann himself almost decided to let go of composing and focus on his work as a novelist), as well as great connoisseurs very aware of the work being produced by their contemporaries. Take for example Goethe, a poet, novelist, and playwright, who also wrote on botany, anatomy, and a theory of color.
Goethe was on the top list of authors with Herder and Schiller, but in the same literaturary school were also Tick, the Schlegel brothers, JP Richter and Novalis at Iéna, as well as von Arnim and Brentano, and the Grimm Brothers, in Heidelberg.
Some of the tropes common to these schools were
an exacerbated nationalism, an orientation towards the irrational and mythological, the exploration of folklore, and seeing art as a substitute to religion.
Their aims included reconciling poetry with philosophy, huge theorization efforts (they were practitioners but also theorists and critics of their own practice) and also an insistence on the universal character of poetry, and seeing poetry as the transcendence of the real. They were the first to mix genres in works, such as drama, comedy, and tragedy all at once.
Naturally followed an exploration of the past in the ancient (not necessarily authentical) folklore, an idealized ancient Greece, paganism, the exploration of the subconscious, and a valorization of the popular chant (folks lied).
Coming from the second Berlin school (the first being Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven), Schubert and Schumann composed an enormous corpus of work on lieder. By musicating poems charged with the cultural weight of their contemporaries, they mastered the craft of lied composition.
The specifics of how they accomplished that will be explored in the eventual analysis of some of these lieder.
In fact, these composers searched for how to express the meaning of the text in music, and represent the affects in the line of the piano, truly amalgamating the poetry with the musical material, so it became one homologous object. Mendelssohn and Caspar Friedrich David (whose paintings illustrate this post, and decided to portray himself as a magus below) are also important names of this early romantic period.
In this context, were generated archetypes that are common to many works. Here are some examples:
The Fall
The idea that there was a perfect past, an Edenic state that survived only in folklore stories, of a distant and ideal past, one which we will never again be able to attain. A primal state that was pure and full of the sense of a meaningful existence.
An idealized ancient Greece, a state of innocence and union with nature.
Der Wanderer
A portrait of the German romanticist himself, a man that walks the land in search of his homeland but is really a representation of a psychological state of dissociation, and alienation.
Best described in German, Sehnsucht means a form of nostalgia mixed with desire, Der Wanderer walks the land in vagrancy, in search not really of a place but of a time that can never come again, the longing for the perfect past. Extreme anxiety starts creeping into society and Der Wanderer is the representational archetype of the affect.
Der Träume
In escaping the unbearable reality of the real, one would seek refuge in the dark, in sleep, and many of the literary works spoke of the night, the moon, and dreams, there was a surge of curiosity for exploring the subconscious.
Dreams were seen as an exploration and possible escape from the world, idealized dreams as if the original pure state of man could be restored through them.
Among other things, an identification with the earth, with pan, primal nature, time, Bacchus and the sensitive world, the aesthetic experience, and the senses. Taking all this into consideration, German romanticism can be seen as deeply occult, even more so when we see that many of the thinkers considered themselves alchemists and symbolists.
Contemporary Influence
German romanticism is still very much present in current society, although modified. Disney paints a new (increasingly sanitized) version of the Grimm tales, themselves modified folklore that had the objective of molding and unifying the collective unconscious of society.
The Wanderer, and Sehnsucht, the escape from reality through the powers of the night, are all archetypal forces that permeate culture up to this day. The nihilist traces are also obvious there, for meaning is not only manufactured but substituted, fleeting. Religious thought is substituted by immediacy, nostalgia, and indulgence in the senses.
I believe the crisis of modern man may have its roots going even further back in history, but would argue that the first symptoms started appearing in late German romanticism. But as we will soon see, it is also one of the most virtuosically aesthetic moments in history, where this chaotic mix suddenly explodes mastery of craft and great, fine, elaborate, and truly beautiful, deeply meaningful art.
Muito bom.