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Imagine a European composer: he is a servant of a duke, who pays him a salary. He writes music for important Masses to be celebrated in the duke's chapel. For the duke's daughter's wedding party, he writes a music-drama in which Greek gods and goddesses ultimately add their blessing to the union (arranged, of course) of the young couple. He writes music for entertainment during the duke's garden party; the musicians are carefully arranged among the orderly rows of trees, each pruned to absolute symmetry. The composer takes his meals with the servants, in the servants' quarters. If he wants to hear the music of a notable composer in Vienna, he asks his patron's permission to go there. He does not question the order of his life; he feels fortunate that he has a good patron to support him. He is a man of regular habits, a good family man.
A number of things happened, mostly in the late 18th and early 19th century, to make this picture obsolete. More people than ever lived in cities; some of them made good money through trades, industry, and finance, and wanted to enjoy the same arts that the nobility had always enjoyed. Industrialization was dirtying the air and threatening the old economic order of home production. The French and American revolutions had permanently upset the old political order. Individualism--the idea that we are not just the sum of our social class and birth order--was growing. As more and more of the bourgeoisie (literally city-dwellers, the new middle class) became consumers of art, public concert halls opened, and composers went free-lance. They still needed money, and a lucky few had patrons as well as box office receipts, which were often meager.
We can never speak of a 'cause' of a new paradigm in art or thought; we can only speak, perhaps, of a 'causal soup' in which everything affects everything else. The world rarely changes overnight; however, a new order was emerging. The artist became a hero--invited to sit at the table of the noble or wealthy aficionado of music, painting, poetry. (This did not necessarily translate into financial support for the artist, however.) If the artist in question was a bit eccentric, even a bit mad, well, that went with the territory. Novels and poems dealt with ordinary people, not Greek gods and goddesses; they were often set in an 'exotic' locale (which could mean Egypt, Spain, Scotland) far from the smoggy city. The supernatural was often invoked. Artists rebelled against the rationalism--and often the forms--of classical and neo-classical art; greater emotional expression was valued. They also fell in love with nature--not the ordered rows of espaliered trees, but the wild places and the mountains (which had previously been thought ugly and to be avoided at all cost). The new paradigm that emerged is called Romanticism.
What the new era ushered in was, among other things, the idea that the artist's deeply held feelings were the proper subject of art. Artists were considered more sensitive than other people, and thus able to bring forth the forms and images that would move others. Music, in particular, was considered to be a veritable mirror of inner emotional life, not as a reflection of 'the affections'--feelings shared by all--but rather as the inner life of one individual 'I.'
Sound familiar? Many of the ideas of art and the artist that arose in this era (most of the 19th century) seem so commonplace to us today that we don't think of them as belonging to a certain period in the arts. But they do. (It would be interesting to look back on our own era in the arts 200 years from now; will future historians lump us together with Beethoven and Wagner?)
In looking at the arts of the Romantic era, it is sometimes useful to distinguish, as much as is possible, between the form (often a holdover from an earlier era) and the content. For example, composers still wrote symphonies, concertos, and sonatas along with their rhapsodies, impromptus, and fantasias. The ballet 'Giselle' (1841) has typically Romantic story and imagery; however, it was produced at the Paris Opera, a hierarchically structured organization in which each person had a very well defined role. Perhaps the most artistic freedom was enjoyed by writer Theophile Gautier, who put together a story for use by the librettist based on folk material, including some ideas of the supernatural, from Thuringia (or Turingen, part of modern Germany). But the prima ballerina, Carlotta Grisi, took orders from the choreographers (including her 'husband' Jules Perrot). A whole army of corps de ballet, stagehands, and others all followed orders to make the work a success; the audience, meanwhile, could weep at the sad parts.
Of course, you might say, a large, rationally ordered hierarchy is needed to put on a ballet. This may be true, but there is another model for the dancer as true Romantic; she didn't come along, however, until the turn of the 20th century. Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) was not necessarily the first, or the only, dancer to flout convention, kick off the pointe shoes and the corset, and express 'true human feeling' in dance. However, she was such a bright star (and so well connected with other artists, writers and thinkers) that hers is the name that always comes up. She performed solo, working very intensely with her piano accompanist (who played mostly 19th century works for her dancing), and claimed 'inspiration' and Hellenistic Greek sculpture as her choreographic guide.
(Aside #1: Dance in Eurpopean/American culture has always had a lower status than music, theater, visual art, or literature, so it is not surprising that it manifested the complete Romantic ideal later than all the others.)
(Aside #2: Why is 'husband' in quotes, above, where I mentioned Carlotta Grisi and Jules Perrot? It is said they never actually married; they were not far from an era when the Church refused to marry or bury actors or dancers. But they clearly felt a need to claim marriage to create respectability. Isadora, on the other hand, scandalized everyone by bashing marriage, proclaiming her support for free love, and openly having countless lovers and two children out of wedlock. This freedom of lifestyle resembled that of many of the Romantic composers and poets--mostly male--of 50 to 75 years earlier, though they didn't always proclaim it publicly.)
The case can be made that we are still in the Romantic era, even if the outward forms of our art have seemed to change radically. The consequences of our Romanticism are many and far-reaching, and they may include overcrowding in the mountains (we all gotta go there), the neglect of cities (cities are yukky!), the pretentiousness of those who believe they are Artists, and unrealistic ideas of what makes a marriage work (remember that most Romantic heroines were dead before the piece was over).
The consequences also include a glorification of drugs--though addiction was surely not invented by the Romantics. It was thought that certain drugs--mainly opium and alcohol--were a means to the life of the imagination and the expression of feeling. Many of the Romantic poets and composers used drugs, produced their work early, and died young, though TB was as much a factor as drugs or alcohol. Coleridge's famous unfinished poem 'Kubla Khan' is thought to be inspired by an opium trip; he was well known to be an opium addict. Today we apparently continue to glorify this lifestyle--think of the rock stars you know who died before 40, and how they died, and what we have made of that.
The flamboyance of the rock star also has its antecedent in the Romantic era; Franz Liszt, the great pianist-composer, was said to cause young women to swoon during his concerts, unless he purposely toned down his expressivity on the keyboard a bit. (He also is said to have broken pianos during performances; the piano was not as sturdy an instrument then as it is now.) It is no accident that the role of Liszt was played by Sting in the film 'Impromptu.'
A poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is one of many that sum up the sensibilities of the era; the poet regrets that we are caught up in the material trivia of daily life and have not the sense of Nature as alive, luminous, and full of Powers, as did the ancients:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
The last lines from Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn suggest a new credo, one not based on a formal religion:
... 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
If 'beauty' is not reduced to mere prettiness, if it can encompass the wildness of the Dionysian rites that Keats found depicted on the urn in the British Museum, then this credo seems as valid today as ever.
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