The Romantic Era
Click here to link to Power Point presentation with additional notes on Beethoven
Link to Classical MIDI where you may find Beethoven's Symphony #6 "Pastorale"
The first movement will give you the basic idea of the symphony, but listen to the entire piece. (It won't kill you.)
Romantic Movement
Romantic movement replaced the Neo-Classical of the revolutionary period.
Concern with feelings
Rebel against convention
Love of fantastic and exotic
Dream worlds
Search for new sensations
Wild unpredictability of nature
Immanuel Kant (1742 1804)
Art unites opposite principles
Reason with imagination
General with particular
Art is at the same time useless and yet useful
Friedrich Hegel (1770 1831)
Art provides a synthesis of two opposing ideas.
Search for a way t combine differences, thus allowing the widest variety of experience.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Communist Manifesto
(1848)Plight of the working class transcends all national boundaries.
Industrial Revolution
Proletariat (working-class) can only achieve freedom though revolution.
"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"
Karl Marx on the Arts
Art can contribute important social and political changes, and is thus a determining factor in history.
Capitalism is hostile to artistic development because of its obsession with money and profit.
Realism is the only appropriate artistic style for the class struggle and the new state.
Scientific Developments in the 1800s
Steam locomotive
Transcontinental railways completed throughout the world
Erie Canal, Suez Canal
Telegraph and Transatlantic cable
Photography
Pasteur germs, vaccination, sterilization
Telephone and light bulb
Oil wells
dynamite
Charles Darwin (1809 1882)
Species are not fixed categories, but are capable of variation.
Natural Selection
"Survival of the fittest."
Descent of Man
Man is descended from "apes"
Wild religious opposition to Darwins ideas
Social Darwinism
Richard Wagner (1813 1883)
Advanced opera form
Attempted to unite all the arts - music, painting, poetry, movement-in a single work of opera
Subjects in German
mythology
Ride of the Valkyries
Romantic Composers
Frederic Chopin (1810 1849)
Wrote many piano works
Love affair with French novelist George Sand (Aurore Dupin)
Early Death from tuberculosis
Franz Schubert (1797 1828)
Franz Liszt (1811 1886)
Romantic Art
Painters began to abandon neo-classical style for more vivid, emotional images.
Compare the subject: Horrors of War (p.289)
Jacques Louis David The Battle of the Romans and the Sabines
Francisco Goya Execution of the Madrilenos on May 3, 1808
Horrors of War Neoclassical and Romantic
Francisco Goya (1746-1828)
Uses intensity of emotion
Like Beethoven, hatred of tyranny
Painting as personal comment
Goya The Family of Charles IV
Goya Saturn Devouring One of His Sons
Eugene Delacroix (1798 1863)
Vastly popular
Strong advocate of Romantic movement
Used color to create form, instead of drawing first
Delacroix The Death of Sardanapalus
Romantic Poetry
Peak in English literature
Themes of Romantic poetry
Relationship between humans and nature
Passion and demons in life
Eternal problems of art, life and death
"Emotion recollected in tranquility."
Poets were :
"endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who ha[ve] a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul" than ordinary people.
Major English Romantics
Percy Bysshe Shelley married to Mary Shelley
Lord Byron
John Keats
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Major American Romantics
The Transcendentalists
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
The Novel
Victor Hugo Les Miserables
Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary
Leo Tolstoy War and Peace and Anna Karenina
Balzac The Human Comedy
Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust