1. The Romantic Era

2. Chapter 17: The Romantic Era Outline Chapter 17 OUTLINE
The Concerns of Romanticism
The Intellectual Background
Music in the Romantic Era
Beethoven
Instrumental Music after Beethoven
The Age of the Virtuosos
Musical Nationalism
Opera in Italy: Verdi
Opera in Germany: Wagner
Romantic Art
Painting and the Turn of the Century: Goya
Painting and Architecture in France:
Romantics and Realists
Painting in Germany and England
Literature in the Nineteenth Century
Goethe
Romantic Poetry
The Novel
The Romantic Era in America
American Literature
American Painting
Outline Chapter 17

3. Timeline Chapter 17: The Romantic Era
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
Wordsworth, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"
Beethoven, "Eroica" Symphony (to honor Napoleon)
Goethe, Faust, Part I
Goya, Executions of May 3, 1808
Mary Shelly, Frankenstein
Balzac, The Human Comedy (90 realistic novels)
Daumier, The Legislative Belly (Realism)
Dickens, Oliver Twist
Turner, The Slave Ship
Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Thoreau, Walden
Homer, Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts

4. 19th Century: The Results of Revolutions
The revolutionary changes that ushered in the nineteenth century, and that were to continue throughout it, profoundly affected society and culture. The industrialization of Europe produced vast changes in the life styles of millions of people. The Greek struggle for independence, the unification of Italy and of Germany, and the nationalist revolutionary uprisings of 1848 in many parts of Europe all radically changed the balance of power and the nature of society. The same period, furthermore, saw the gradual assertion of the United States, tested and tried by its own Civil War, as one of the leading Western nations. By the end of the nineteenth century America had not only established itself as a world power; it had produced artists, writers, and musicians who created works with an authentically American spirit.

5. Intellectual Ferment: Darwin and Marx
A period of such widespread change was naturally also one of major intellectual ferment. The political philosophy of Karl Marx and the scientific speculations of Charles Darwin, influential in their day, remain powerful and controversial in the late twentieth century. The optimism of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hegel and the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer were reflected in numerous works of art.
Charles Darwin British Naturalist
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.                                  —Charles Darwin from "The Origin of Species"
Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. He was the fifth child and second son of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. Darwin was the British naturalist who became famous for his theories of evolution and natural selection. Like several scientists before him, Darwin believed all the life on earth evolved (developed gradually) over millions of years from a few common ancestors.
From 1831 to 1836 Darwin served as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle on a British science expedition around the world. In South America Darwin found fossils of extinct animals that were similar to modern species. On the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean he noticed many variations among plants and animals of the same general type as those in South America. The expedition visited places around the world, and Darwin studied plants and animals everywhere he went, collecting specimens for further study.
Upon his return to London Darwin conducted thorough research of his notes and specimens. Out of this study grew several related theories: one, evolution did occur; two, evolutionary change was gradual, requiring thousands to millions of years; three, the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection; and four, the millions of species alive today arose from a single original life form through a branching process called "specialization."
Darwin's theory of evolutionary selection holds that variation within species occurs randomly and that the survival or extinction of each organism is determined by that organism's ability to adapt to its environment. He set these theories forth in his book called, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" (1859) or "The Origin of Species" for short. After publication of Origin of Species, Darwin continued to write on botany, geology, and zoology until his death in He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Darwin's work had a tremendous impact on religious thought. Many people strongly opposed the idea of evolution because it conflicted with their religious convictions. Darwin avoided talking about the theological and sociological aspects of his work, but other writers used his theories to support their own theories about society. Darwin was a reserved, thorough, hard working scholar who concerned himself with the feelings and emotions not only of his family, but friends and peers as well.
It has been supposed that Darwin renounced evolution on his deathbed. Shortly after his death, temperance campaigner and evangelist Lady Elizabeth Hope claimed she visited Darwin at his deathbed, and witnessed the renunciation. Her story was printed in a Boston newspaper and subsequently spread. Lady Hope's story was refuted by Darwin's daughter Henrietta who stated, "I was present at his deathbed ... He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier."
Karl Marx
Karl Marx,
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
The philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is without a doubt the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the 19th century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claim to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified and his meanings adapted to a great variety of political circumstances. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that is been only recently that scholars had the opportunity to appreciate Marx's intellectual stature.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany on May 5, He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family and his father, a man who knew Voltaire and Lessing by heart, had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he would not lose his job as one of the most respected lawyers in Trier. At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn. At Bonn he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen , a prominent member of Trier society, and man responsible for interesting Marx in Romantic literature and Saint-Simonian politics. The following year Marx's father sent him to the more serious University of Berlin where he remained four years, at which time he abandoned his romanticism for the Hegelianism which ruled in Berlin at the time.
Marx became a member of the Young Hegelian movement. This group, which included the theologians Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss, produced a radical critique of Christianity and, by implication, the liberal opposition to the Prussian autocracy. Finding a university career closed by the Prussian government, Marx moved into journalism and, in October 1842, became editor, in Cologne, of the influential Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper backed by industrialists. Marx's articles, particularly those on economic questions, forced the Prussian government to close the paper. Marx then emigrated to France.
Arriving in Paris at the end of 1843, Marx rapidly made contact with organized groups of émigré German workers and with various sects of French socialists. He also edited the short-lived Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which was intended to bridge French socialism and the German radical Hegelians. During his first few months in Paris, Marx became a communist and set down his views in a series of writings known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which remained unpublished until the 1930s. In the Manuscripts, Marx outlined a humanist conception of communism, influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and based on a contrast between the alienated nature of labor under capitalism and a communist society in which human beings freely developed their nature in cooperative production. It was also in Paris that Marx developed his lifelong partnership with Friedrich Engels ( ).
Marx was expelled from Paris at the end of 1844 and with Engels, moved to Brussels where he remained for the next three years, visiting England where Engels' family had cotton spinning interests in Manchester. While in Brussels Marx devoted himself to an intensive study of history and elaborated what came to be known as the materialist conception of history. This he developed in a manuscript (published posthumously as The German Ideology), of which the basic thesis was that "the nature of individuals depends on the material conditions determining their production." Marx traced the history of the various modes of production and predicted the collapse of the present one -- industrial capitalism -- and its replacement by communism.
At the same time Marx was composing The German Ideology, he also wrote a polemic (The Poverty of Philosophy) against the idealistic socialism of P. J. Proudhon ( ). He also joined the Communist League. This was an organization of German émigré workers with its center in London of which Marx and Engels became the major theoreticians. At a conference of the League in London at the end of 1847 Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a succinct declaration of their position. Scarcely was The Communist Manifesto published than the 1848 wave of revolutions broke out in Europe.
Early in 1848 Marx moved back to Paris when a revolution first broke out and onto Germany where he founded, again in Cologne, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The paper supported a radical democratic line against the Prussian autocracy and Marx devoted his main energies to its editorship since the Communist League had been virtually disbanded. Marx's paper was suppressed and he sought refuge in London in May 1849 to begin the "long, sleepless night of exile" that was to last for the rest of his life.
Settling in London, Marx was optimistic about the imminence of a new revolutionary outbreak in Europe. He rejoined the Communist League and wrote two lengthy pamphlets on the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath, The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He was soon convinced that "a new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis" and then devoted himself to the study of political economy in order to determine the causes and conditions of this crisis.
During the first half of the 1850s the Marx family lived in poverty in a three room flat in the Soho quarter of London. Marx and Jenny already had four children and two more were to follow. Of these only three survived. Marx's major source of income at this time was Engels who was trying a steadily increasing income from the family business in Manchester. This was supplemented by weekly articles written as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune.
Marx's major work on political economy made slow progress. By 1857 he had produced a gigantic 800 page manuscript on capital, landed property, wage labor, the state, foreign trade and the world market. The Grundrisse (or Outlines) was not published until In the early 1860s he broke off his work to compose three large volumes, Theories of Surplus Value, which discussed the theoreticians of political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It was not until 1867 that Marx was able to publish the first results of his work in volume 1 of Capital, a work which analyzed the capitalist process of production. In Capital, Marx elaborated his version of the labor theory value and his conception of surplus value and exploitation which would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit in the collapse of industrial capitalism. Volumes II and III were finished during the 1860s but Marx worked on the manuscripts for the rest of his life and they were published posthumously by Engels.
One reason why Marx was so slow to publish Capital was that he was devoting his time and energy to the First International, to whose General Council he was elected at its inception in He was particularly active in preparing for the annual Congresses of the International and leading the struggle against the anarchist wing led by Mikhail Bakunin ( ). Although Marx won this contest, the transfer of the seat of the General Council from London to New York in 1872, which Marx supported, led to the decline of the International. The most important political event during the existence of the International was the Paris Commune of 1871 when the citizens of Paris rebelled against their government and held the city for two months. On the bloody suppression of this rebellion, Marx wrote one of his most famous pamphlets, The Civil War in France, an enthusiastic defense of the Commune.
During the last decade of his life, Marx's health declined and he was incapable of sustained effort that had so characterized his previous work. He did manage to comment substantially on contemporary politics, particularly in Germany and Russia. In Germany, he opposed in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, the tendency of his followers Karl Liebknecht ( ) and August Bebel ( ) to compromise with state socialism of Lasalle in the interests of a united socialist party. In his correspondence with Vera Zasulich Marx contemplated the possibility of Russia's bypassing the capitalist stage of development and building communism on the basis of the common ownership of land characteristic of the village mir.
Marx's health did not improve. He traveled to European spas and even to Algeria in search of recuperation. The deaths of his eldest daughter and his wife clouded the last years of his life. Marx died March 14, 1883 and was buried at Highgate Cemetery in North London. His collaborator and close friend Friedrich Engels delivered the following eulogy three days later:
On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep -- but for ever. An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt. Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated -- and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially -- in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries. Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez. For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung (1842), the Paris Vorwarts (1844), the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung (1847), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ( ), the New York Tribune ( ), and, in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men's Association -- this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else. And, consequently, Marx was the best hated and most calumniated man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers -- from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America -- and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.
Marx's contribution to our understanding of society has been enormous. His thought is not the comprehensive system evolved by some of his followers under the name of dialectical materialism. The very dialectical nature of his approach meant that it was usually tentative and open-ended. There was also the tension between Marx the political activist and Marx the student of political economy. Many of his expectations about the future course of the revolutionary movement have, so far, failed to materialize. However, his stress on the economic factor in society and his analysis of the class structure in class conflict have had an enormous influence on history, sociology, and study of human culture.
Charles Darwin
Karl Marx

6. Romanticism in the Arts
The artistic movement that developed alongside these ideas was
romanticism. The romantics, for all their divergences, shared a
number of common concerns. They sought to express their personal
feelings in their works rather than search for some kind of abstract
philosophical or religious "truth." They were attracted by the fantastic
and the exotic, and by worlds remote in time-the Middle Ages-or in
place-the mysterious Orient. Many of them felt a special regard for
nature, in the context of which human achievement seemed so
reduced. For some, on the other hand, the new age of industry
and technology was itself exotic and exciting. Many romantic artists
identified with the nationalist movements of the times and either
supported their own country's fight for freedom
(as in the case of Verdi) or championed the cause of others
(as did Byron).

7. Music: Beethoven and his Successors
In music the transition from the
classical to the romantic style can be heard in the works of
Ludwig van Beethoven. With roots deep in the classical tradition,
Beethoven used music to express emotion in a revolutionary way,
pushing traditional forms like the sonata to their limits. Typical of the
age is his concern with freedom, which appears in Fidelio
(his only opera), and human unity, as expressed in the last movement
of the Ninth Symphony.
Ludwig van Beethoven ( ), the second-oldest child of the court musician and tenor singer Johann van Beethoven, was born in Bonn. Ludwig's father drilled him thoroughly with the ambition of showcasing him as a child prodigy. Ludwig gave his first public performance as a pianist when he was eight years old. At the age of eleven he received the necessary systematic training in piano performance and composition from Christian Gottlob Neefe, organist and court musician in Bonn. Employed as a musician in Bonn court orchestra since 1787, Beethoven was granted a paid leave of absence in the early part of 1787 to study in Vienna under Mozart. he was soon compelled to return to Bonn, however, and after his mother's death had to look after the family.
In 1792 he chose Vienna as his new residence and took lessons from Haydn, Albrechtsberger, Schenck and Salieri. By 1795 he had earned a name for himself as a pianist of great fantasy and verve, admired in particular for his brilliant improvisations. Before long he was traveling in the circles of the nobility. They offered Beethoven their patronage, and the composer dedicated his works to them in return. By 1809 his patrons provided him with an annuity which enabled him to live as a freelance composer without financial worries. Beethoven was acutely interested in the development of the piano. He kept close contact with the leading piano building firms in Vienna and London and thus helped pave the way for the modern concert grand piano.
Around the year 1798 Beethoven noticed that he was suffering from a hearing disorder. He withdrew into increasing seclusion for the public and from his few friends and was eventually left completely deaf. By 1820 he was able to communicate with visitors and trusted friends only in writing, availing himself of "conversation notebooks".
The final years in the life of the restless bachelor (he changed living quarters no fewer than fifty-two times) were darkened by severe illness and by the struggle over the guardianship of his nephew Karl, upon whom he poured his solicitude, jealousy, expectations and threats in an effort to shape the boy according to his wishes. When the most famous composer of the age died, about thirty thousand mourners and curious onlookers were present at the funeral procession on March 26, 1827.
Ludwig van Beethoven

8. Music: Other Composers
Many of Beethoven's successors in the field of instrumental music
continued to use symphonic forms for their major works. Among the
leading symphonists of the century were Hector Berlioz,
Johannes Brahms, and Anton Bruckner. Other composers, although
they wrote symphonies, were more at home in the intimate world of
songs and chamber music; they included Franz Schubert and
Robert Schumann. The romantic emphasis on personal feelings and
the display of emotion encouraged the development of another
characteristic of nineteenth-century music: the virtuoso
composer-performer. Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, and
Niccolu Paganini all won international fame performing their own
works. The nationalist spirit of the times was especially appealing
to musicians who could draw on a rich tradition of folk music.
The Russian Modest Moussorgsky and the Czech Bedrich Smetana
both wrote works using national themes and folk tunes.

9. Opera: Wagner and Verdi
The world of opera was dominated by two giants,
Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. The former took the forms of
early-nineteenth-century opera and used them to create powerful and
dramatic masterpieces. An enthusiastic supporter of Italy's nationalist
movement, Verdi never abandoned the basic elements of the Italian
operatic tradition-expressive melody and vital rhythm-but he infused
them with new dramatic truth. Wagner's quest for "music drama" led
him in a very different direction. His works break with the operatic
tradition of individual musical numbers; the music, in which the
orchestra plays an important part, runs continuously from the
beginning to the end of each act. In addition, the use of leading
motifs to represent characters or ideas makes possible complex
dramatic effects. Wagner's works revolutionized the development
of both operatic and nonoperatic music, and his theoretical writings
on music and much else made him one of the nineteenth century's
leading cultural figures.
Richard Wagner
Biography
[edit]
Early life
Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany, on May 22, His father, a minor city official, died 6 months after the birth, and in August 1814 his mother married the actor Ludwig Geyer. Geyer, who is rumored to have actually been the boy's father, died when he was six, leaving him to be brought up by his mother.
Young Richard Wagner entertained ambitions to be a playwright, and first became interested in music as a means of enhancing the dramas that he wanted to write and stage. He soon turned toward studying music, for which he enrolled at the University of Leipzig in One of his early musical influences was Ludwig van Beethoven.
In 1833, at the age of 20, Wagner had finished composing his first complete opera, Die Feen. This opera, which clearly imitated the style of Weber, would go unproduced until half a century later. Meanwhile, Wagner held brief appointments as musical director at opera houses in Magdeburg and Königsberg, during which he wrote Das Liebesverbot, based on William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. This second attempt was actually staged at Magdeburg in 1836, but met with little acclaim.
Later in 1836, Wagner married actress Minna Planer, and they moved to the town of Riga where he became the musical director at the local opera house. A few weeks afterward, Minna ran off with an army officer who left her penniless. Wagner accepted her back, but it was the start of a troubled marriage that would end, three decades later, in misery.
By 1839, the couple had amassed such a large amount of debt that they were forced to flee Riga to escape their creditors (the recurring problem of debt would plague Wagner for the rest of his life.) During their flight, they took a stormy sea passage to London, from which Wagner obtained the inspiration for Der fliegende Holländer. The Wagners lived in Paris for several years, where Richard made a living writing articles and making arrangements of operas by other composers.
Dresden
Wagner completed writing his third opera, Rienzi, in Fortuitously, it was accepted for performance by the Dresden Court Theatre in the German state of Saxony. In 1842, the couple moved to Dresden, where Rienzi was staged to considerable success. Wagner lived in Dresden for the next six years, eventually being appointed the Royal Saxon Court Conductor. During this period, he wrote and staged Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, the first two of his three middle-stage operas.
The Wagners' stay at Dresden was brought to an end by Richard's involvement in left-wing politics. A nationalist movement was gaining force in the independent German States, calling for increased freedoms and the unification of the weak states into a single nation. Richard Wagner played an enthusiastic role in this movement, receiving guests at his house that included his colleague August Röckel, who was editing the radical left-wing paper Volksblätter, and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
Widespread discontent against the Saxon government came to a boil in April 1849, when King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony dissolved his Parliament and rejected a new constitution pressed upon him by the people. The May Uprising broke out, in which Wagner played a minor supporting role. The incipient revolution was quickly crushed by an allied force of Saxon and Prussian troops, and warrants were issued for the arrest of the revolutionaries. Wagner had to flee, first to Paris, and then to Zürich. His compatriots Röckel and Bakunin failed to escape and were forced to endure long years of imprisonment.
Exile, Schopenhauer, and Mathilde Wesendonk
Wagner spent the next twelve years in exile. He had completed Lohengrin before the Dresden uprising, and now wrote desperately to his friend Franz Liszt to have it staged in his absence. Liszt, who proved to be a friend in need, eventually conducted the premiere in Weimar in August 1850.
Nevertheless, Wagner found himself in grim personal straits, isolated from the German musical world and without any income to speak of. The musical sketches he was penning, which would grow into the mammoth work Der Ring des Nibelungen, seemed to have no prospects of seeing performance. His wife Minna, who had disliked the operas he had written after Rienzi, was falling into a deepening depression. Finally, he fell victim to erysipelas, which made it difficult for him to continue writing.
Wagner's primary output during his first years in Zürich was a set of notable essays: "The Art-Work of the Future" (1849), in which he described a vision of opera as Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork", in which the various arts such as music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts, and stagecraft were unified; "Judaism in Music" (1850), an anti-Semitic tract directed against Jewish composers; and "Opera and Drama" (1851), which described ideas in aesthetics that he was putting to use on the Ring operas.
In the following years, Wagner came upon two independent sources of inspiration, leading to the creation of his celebrated Tristan und Isolde. The first came to him in 1854, when his poet friend Georg Herwegh introduced him to the works of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner would later call this the most important event of his life. His personal circumstances certainly made him an easy convert to Schopenhauer's philosophy, which was centered on a deeply pessimistic view of the human condition. He would remain an adherent of Schopenhauer for the rest of his life, even after his fortunes improved.
One of Schopenhauer's doctrines was that music held a supreme role amongst the arts, since it was the only one unconcerned with the material world. Wagner quickly embraced this claim, which must have resonated strongly despite its direct contradiction with his own arguments, in "Opera and Drama", that music in opera had to be subservient to the cause of drama. Wagner scholars have since argued that this Schopenhauerian influence caused Wagner to assign a more commanding role to music in his later operas, including the latter half of the Ring cycle which he had yet to compose. Many aspects of Schopenhauerian doctrine undoubtedly found its way into Wagner's subsequent libretti. For example, the self-renouncing cobbler-poet Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger, generally considered Wagner's most sympathetic character, is a quintessentially Schopenhauerian creation (despite being based on a real person).
Wagner's second source of inspiration was the poet-writer Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of the silk merchant Otto von Wesendonck. Wagner met the Wesendoncks in Zürich in Otto, a fan of Wagner's music, placed a cottage on his estate at Wagner's disposal. By 1857, Wagner had become infatuated with Mathilde. Though Mathilde seems to have returned some of his affections, she had no intention of jeopardising her marriage, and kept her husband informed of her contacts with Wagner. Nevertheless, the affair inspired Wagner to put aside his work on the Ring cycle (which would not be resumed for the next twelve years) and begin work on Tristan und Isolde, based on the Arthurian love story of the knight Tristan and the (already-married) lady Isolde.
The uneasy affair collapsed in 1858, when Minna intercepted a letter from Wagner to Mathilde. After the resulting confrontation, Wagner left Zürich alone, bound for Venice. The following year, he once again moved to Paris to oversee production of a new revision of Tannhäuser. The premiere of the new Tannhäuser in 1861 was an utter fiasco, due to disturbances caused by aristocrats from the Jockey Club. Further performances were cancelled, and Wagner hurriedly left the city.
In 1861, the political ban against Wagner was lifted, and the composer settled in Biebrich, Prussia, where he began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Remarkably, this opera is by far his sunniest work. (His second wife Cosima would later write: "when future generations seek refreshment in this unique work, may they spare a thought for the tears from which the smiles arose.") In 1862, Wagner finally parted with Minna, though he (or at least his creditors) continued to support her financially until her death in 1866.
Patronage of King Ludwig II
Wagner's fortunes took a dramatic upturn in 1864, when King Ludwig II assumed the throne of Bavaria at the age of 18. The young King, an ardent admirer of Wagner's operas since childhood, had the composer brought to Munich. He settled Wagner's considerable debts, and made plans to have his new opera produced. After grave difficulties in rehearsal, Tristan und Isolde premiered to enormous success at the Munich Court Theatre on June 10, 1865.
In the meantime, Wagner became embroiled in another affair, this time with Cosima von Bülow, the wife of the conductor Hans von Bülow, one of Wagner's most ardent supporters and the conductor of the Tristan premiere. Cosima was the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and the famous Countess Marie d'Agoult, and 24 years younger than Wagner. In April 1865, she gave birth to Wagner's illegitimate daughter, who was named Isolde. Their indiscreet affair scandalized Munich, and to make matters worse, Wagner fell into disfavor amongst members of the court, who were suspicious of his influence on the King. In December 1865, Ludwig was finally forced to ask the composer to leave Munich. He apparently also toyed with the idea of abdicating in order to follow his hero into exile, but Wagner quickly dissuaded him.
Ludwig installed Wagner at the villa Triebschen, beside Switzerland's Lake Lucerne. Die Meistersinger was completed at Triebschen in 1867, and premiered in Munich on June 21 the following year. In October, Cosima finally convinced Hans von Bülow to grant her a divorce. Richard and Cosima were married on August 25, In December of that year, Wagner presented the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end of Wagner's life. They had an additional daughter, named Eva, and a son named Siegfried.
It was at Triebschen, in 1869, that Wagner first met the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who quickly became a firm friend. Wagner's ideas were a major influence on Nietzsche, who was 31 years his junior. Nietzsche's first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie ("The Birth of Tragedy", 1872), was dedicated to Wagner. The relationship eventually soured, as Nietzsche became increasingly disillusioned with various aspects of Wagner's thought, such as his pacifism and anti-Semitism. In Der Fall Wagner ("The Case of Wagner", 1888) and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (Nietzsche vs. Wagner, 1895), he would condemn Wagner as decadent and corrupt, even criticizing his earlier adulatory views of the composer.
Bayreuth
Wagner, settled into his newfound domesticity, turned his energies toward completing the Ring cycle. At Ludwig's insistence, "special previews" of the first two works of the cycle, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, were performed at Munich, but Wagner wanted the complete cycle to be performed in a new, specially-designed opera house.
In 1871, he decided on the small town of Bayreuth as the location of his new opera house. The Wagners moved there the following year, and the foundation stone for the Festspielhaus ("Festival House") was laid. In order to raise funds for the construction, "Wagner societies" were formed in several cities, and Wagner himself began touring Germany conducting concerts. However, sufficient funds were only raised afte King Ludwig stepped in with another large grant in Later that year, the Wagners moved into their permanent home at Bayreuth, a villa that Richard dubbed Wahnfried ("Freedom from Illusion".)
The Festspielhaus finally opened in August 1876 with the premiere of the Ring cycle. Present at this unique musical event was an illustrious list of guests: Kaiser Wilhelm, Dom Pedro II of Brazil, King Ludwig (who attended in secret, probably to avoid the Kaiser), and other members of the nobility; and such accomplished composers as Anton Bruckner, Edvard Grieg, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Franz Liszt.
Artistically, the Festival was an outstanding success. ("Something has taken place at Bayreuth which our grandchildren and their children will still remember," wrote Tchaikovsky, attending the Festival as a Russian correspondent.) Financially, however, it was an unmitigated disaster. Wagner abandoned his original plan to hold a second festival the following year, and travelled to London to conduct a series of concerts in an attempt to make up the deficit.
Final years
In 1877, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final opera. The composition took four years, during which he also wrote a series of increasingly reactionary essays on religion and art.
Wagner completed Parsifal in January 1882, and a second Bayreuth Festival was held for the new opera. Wagner was by this time extremely ill, having suffered through a series of increasingly severe angina attacks. During the sixteenth and final performance of Parsifal on August 29, he secretly entered the pit during Act III, took the baton from conductor Hermann Levi, and led the performance to its conclusion.
After the Festival, the Wagner family journeyed to Venice for the winter. On February 13, 1883, Richard Wagner died of a heart attack in the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal. His body was returned to Bayreuth and buried in the garden of Wahnfried.
Anti-Semitism and Nazi appropriation
During the 20th century, the public perception of Wagner increasingly centered on his anti-semitism, largely due to the appropriation of his music by Nazi Germany.
Wagner promulgated many anti-semitic views over the course of his life, through both conversation and numerous writings. He frequently accused Jews, and in particular Jewish musicians, of being a harmful foreign element in Germany, and called for the abandonment of Jewish culture and their assimilation into German culture. Some scholars have argued that his operas also contain hidden anti-Semitic messages, but this claim is disputed.
Wagner's first and most controversial anti-Semitic essay was "Das Judenthum in der Musik", originally published in 1850 in the Neue Zeitschrift under the pen-name "K. Freigedenk" ("free thought"). The essay purported to explain "popular dislike" of the music of Jewish composers such as Wagner's contemporaries, Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner wrote that the German people were repelled by Jews due to their alien appearance and behavior — "freaks of Nature" blabbering in "creaking, squeaking, buzzing" voices — so that "with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them." He argued that Jewish musicians were only capable of producing music that was shallow and artificial, a parroting of true music, for they had no connection to "the genuine spirit of the Folk". In the conclusion to the essay, he wrote of the Jews that "only one thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus – going under!" Although has been taken to mean actual physical annihilation, in the context of the essay it refers to the eradication of Judaism and the conversion of Jews to Christianity; in essence he called for the complete assimilation of the Jews into mainstream German culture.
The initial publication of the article attracted little attention, but Wagner republished it as a pamphlet under his own name in 1869, leading to several public protests at performances of Die Meistersinger.
Wagner attacked the Jews in several other essays. In "What is German?" (1878), for example, he wrote that
The Jew... [took] German intellectual labour into his own hands; and thus we see an odious travesty of the German spirit upheld to-day before the German Folk, as its imputed likeness. It is to be feared, ere long the nation may really take this simulacrum for its mirrored image: then one of the finest natural dispositions in all the human race were done to death, perchance for ever.
In spite of his anti-Semitic writings, Wagner had an extensive network of Jewish friends and colleagues. The most notable of these was Hermann Levi, a practicing Jew whom Wagner chose to conduct the premiere of Parsifal, his last opera. Initially, Wagner wanted Levi to become baptized before conducting Parsifal, presumably due to the religious content of the opera, but he later dropped the issue. Levi maintained a close friendship with Wagner, and was asked to be a pallbearer at the composer's funeral.
After Wagner's death in 1883, Bayreuth became a meeting place for a group of extreme right-wing Wagner fans that came to be known as the Bayreuth circle, endorsed by Cosima, who was much more anti-Semitic than Richard. After the death of Cosima and Siegfried Wagner in 1930, the operation of the Festival fell to Siegfried's widow Winifred, who was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, a fan of Wagner's music. The Nazis frequently played Wagner during their rallies. Certain scholars have argued that Wagner's views, particularly his anti-Semitism, influenced the Nazis, but these claims remain controversial. Many aspects of Wagner's worldview would certainly have been unappealing to the Nazis, such as his pacifism and calls for assimilation.
Due to the Nazi association, Wagner's works have not been publicly performed in the modern state of Israel. Although they are commonly broadcast on government-owned radio and television stations, attempts at staging public performances have been halted by protests, especially by Holocaust survivors. For instance, after Daniel Barenboim conducted a passage from Tristan and Isolde as an encore at the 2001 Israel Festival, a parliamentary committee urged a boycott of the conductor, and an initially scheduled performance of Die Walküre had to be withdrawn.
Giuseppe Verdi
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Giuseppe Verdi, by Giovanni Boldini, 1886 (National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome)
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (October 10, January 27, 1901) was one of the great composers of Italian opera. His work was already very popular during his lifetime and remains so today.
Born in the Duchy of Parma in Le Roncole, at that time under Napoleon's occupation, he moved to Busseto in 1824 where he started his musical studies with Ferdinando Provesi. Verdi is also known as "the swan from Busseto".
He composed an overture for Gioacchino Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), then he moved to Milan, but he was not accepted at the conservatory, so he had private studies with Vincenzo Lavigna.
In 1838, the leading European musical editor Giovanni Ricordi bought his copyrights and this business would last for the rest of his life, passing through the generations of Ricordi's family, with Tito and Giulio Ricordi being considered as part of his family.
In 1842 his first real success was Nabucco, which followed two earlier operas, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio (opened in Milan on November 17, 1839) and Un Giorno di Regno which was his only attempt at writing a comedy until Falstaff. Un Giorno di Regno was a decided failure and no wonder, it was written shortly after his first wife and child died.
Nabucco premiered at La Scala theatre, with Giuseppina Strepponi, soprano, in the part of Abigaille. The singer became his mistress and, long after the death of his first wife, Verdi would marry her.
After the success of I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata (Milan, February 11, 1843), also increased by some aspects of the political situation (see below), Ernani scored a triumph in La Fenice theatre in Venice.
The following year, Giovanna d'Arco and Attila would enforce his fame, but Verdi did not find the rendering of his scripts by La Scala sufficient, so he asked Ricordi not to allow any more productions of his opera in Milan; Attila, Alzira and Macbeth were premiered in other Italian towns. I Masnadieri was seen in London.
While Milan was lost and reconquered by the Austrians, Verdi wrote Il Corsaro, La Battaglia di Legnano, and Luisa Miller, and started a Manon Lescaut which he would never finish. After the polemics for his Stiffelio, in 1851 Rigoletto was a triumph in Venice, and in 1853 he had another great success with Il Trovatore (in Rome) but a very sad fiasco for the first soirées of La Traviata.
Other famous operas follow in this period: Les Vêpres siciliennes (I Vespri Siciliani) (Paris), Aroldo (a revision of Stiffelio), Simon Boccanegra (La Fenice), and Un Ballo in Maschera (which was censored). He then assisted at the birth of the Kingdom of Italy (he was also elected Deputy). La Forza del Destino had its premiere in St. Petersburg in 1862 and Don Carlos was first presented in Paris.
It was in 1872 that Aida was performed at La Scala with great success. It had been composed for the Egyptian Khedive, on the occasion of the inauguration of a new opera house in Cairo, and not for the opening of the Suez Canal as often mentioned.
Some troubles occurred in his relationship with the Ricordi editors, who were suspected of irregularities concerning huge amounts of money. However, a few years later it was Giulio Ricordi who proposed Otello, which had its premiere in Falstaff would follow after other revisions of older works.
Verdi's works happened to have some resonances with Italian nationalism (e.g. "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" in Nabucco, also known as Va' Pensiero (lyrics with translation here pensiero ( - MP3: [1] ( which still in modern times has repeatedly been proposed as a possible Italian national anthem - obviously, there is no reference to racism). More curiously, someone discovered that his surname, Verdi, is the acronym of Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia (Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), when Milan (still under Austrian occupation) was beginning to consider supporting Victor Emmanuel's effort in Italian reunification, as it afterwards did. Clandestine partisans started therefore plotting to have this King of Sardinia conquer Milan and, due to severe Austrian censorship, this campaign was conventionally called "Viva VERDI" (Verdi stands for Vittorio Emanuele, Re D'Italia. The phrase means 'Long live Victor Emanuele, king of Italy'). The composer was aware of this use of his name and is supposed to have consented. Other references to political events have been seen in his I Lombardi.
He died of a stroke in 1901 in Milan after the completion of his "Casa di Riposo", a retirement villa for poor artists. In keeping with his humble origin, Verdi took pride in the engagement of the peasant girl (Artemisa) he fathered when he was already 63 to the Guardia Forestale Ernesto and attended their wedding in Langhirono a few years before his death. His funeral was extremely well attended, and a quarter of a million mourners were present to show their respect to one of the most important figures in Italian music.

10. Romanticism and Realism in Nineteenth-century Painting: Goya
Just as Beethoven spanned the transition from classical to
romantic in music, so Francisco Goya, some of whose early works
were painted in the rococo style, produced some of the most
powerful of romantic paintings. His concern with justice and
liberty, as illustrated in Execution of the Madrileos on
May 3, 1808 and with the world of dreams, as in
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,
was prototypical of much romantic art.

11. Francisco Goya The Clothed Maja 1800-03. Oil on canvas. The Nude Maja
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (March 30, April 15, 1828) was a Spanish painter and engraver. He was born in Fuendetodos and later lived primarily in Madrid. Brought up in Zaragoza, at thirteen he was apprenticed to an artist friend of his father's. He married Josefa Bayeu (sister of Francisco Bayeu) in 1773.
His later influence is significant since his art was both deeply subversive and subjective, at a time when these attitudes were not predominant. His emphasis on the foreground and faded background portends Manet.
Goya was a portraitist of royalty and chronicler of history who produced a series of eighty prints that he titled Los Caprichos depicting what he called "the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual." [1] (
He painted the Spanish Royal Family, including Charles IV of Spain and Ferdinand VII. His themes go from merry festivals for tapestry draft cartons to scenes of war, fight and corpses. This evolution reflects the darkening of his temper. Modern doctors suspect that the lead in his pigments was poisoning him and was also the cause of his being deaf since These "Black Paintings" prefigure Expressionism.
He retired to his Quinta del Sordo ("Deaf man's villa") after the French troops of Napoleon Bonaparte seized the power in Spain. Some of his paintings depict scenes of the horrors of the Peninsula War.
He died in exile in Bordeaux.
Many of Goya's works are on display at the Museo del Prado. Two of Goya's most famous pictures, shown below, are known as The Clothed Maja and The Nude Maja (La Maja vestida and La Maja desnuda). They depict the same woman in the same pose, clothed and naked respectively. La Maja Vestida was painted after outrage in Spanish society over the previous Desnuda. He refused to paint clothes on her, and so simply created a new painting.
Another one of his more famous works is "Saturn Devouring His Son," which displays a Roman mythological scene of the god Saturn consuming a child.

12. Francisco Goya, continued
This emblematic work -and its counterpart, the 2nd of May, which is on display in the same hall- were painted by Goya in 1814, by commission of the Regency Council governing Spain following the War of Independence. The paintings were to "perpetuate" the most notable and heroic feats of our most glorious insurrection against the Tyrant of Europe and were put on the Arch of Triumph that was built to honour the return to Madrid of King Ferdinard VII. The event depicted in this work is the violent French repression of the patriots who rose up in rebellion on 2nd May, 1808 against the invading forces of Napoleon. This painting has been considered as the greatest symbol of independence and of the defense of liberty of the Spanish people, although it has also become, without doubt, a universal statement about war and its consequences. With the force of the tragedy depicted here, Goya became the most important forbearer of the contemporary artistic movement known as Expressionism
THE 3th of MAY 1808 IN MADRID:
THE EXECUTIONS ON PRINCIPE PIO HILL, 1814

13. Romanticism and Realism in Nineteenth-century Painting: Gericault, Delacroix, Daumier, Ingres
In France, painters were divided into two camps.
The fully committed romantics included Theodore Gericault,
also concerned to point out injustice, and Eugene Delacroix,
whose work touched on virtually every aspect of romanticism:
nationalism, exoticism, eroticism. The other school was that of the
realists. Honore Daumier's way of combating the corruption of his
day was to portray it as graphically as possible. In the meantime
Ingres waged his campaign against both progressive movements
by continuing to paint in the academic neoclassical style of the
preceding century-or at least his version of it.

14. Gericault Portrait of Insane Woman, 1822 The Raft of the Medusa 1819
The start of the work was slow and difficult. The difficulty was to choose from the drama of the shipwreck narrative a single, significant, and pictorially effective moment. Gericault looked at scenes of battle, torment and death in the works of the masters, like Michelangelo, Rubens and Gros, for the appropriate feeling and expression to his subjects. Gericault began by sketching several alternative moments of the disaster, a procedure which he had used in earlier projects. He was initially drawn to five episodes of Correard's and Savigny's account. They were the Mutiny, Cannibalism, Sighting of the Argus, Hailing the Approaching Rowing-Boat and the Rescue. Gericault developed their compositions in concrete detail, concentrating on one after the other, testing each thoroughly before going on to the next. Gericault's characteristic habit of building his compositions was by successive additions and transformations and carried the figure motifs from one compositional version to the next. From Mutiny and Cannibalism's distanced action, Gericault developed his composition of Hailing with the raft close to the foreground as to make the viewer feel transported onto its planks and to involve him in its drama as a participant rather than a detached observer. From the episode of Hailing, Gericault turned to the Sighting of the Argus. Keeping the main features from the previous work, the Sighting retained the closeness of the Raft to the foreground, the diagonal recession of the whole, the coherence of the figure groups, and their orientation toward a point in the distance. The main change is in the relationship between the Raft and rescue vessel. Throughout Gericault further development of the scene, he steadily intensified the effect of extreme distance between Raft and rescue. Taking the Sighting scene as his base, Gericault went on to expand his composition unit by unit. He recorded every step of this process in a separate drawing or a painted study. Whenever possible, he borrowed figures from the discarded projects of Mutiny and Cannibalism, for example the group of Father and Son. Gericault's next step was to give the composition greater unity and to increase its dramatic force. For this effect, he reversed the orientation, making it face to the right. Gericault tried to give force and clarity to the image's he gathered the figures into four distinct groups. By fusing several bodies in one motion, and by drawing all the figures into a single, strong pattern, he not only avoided confusion but actually turned the number of his figures to compositional advantage. The division of four dramatic groups determined the entire subsequent composition. The group of dead, dying or despondent men was the core from which the whole composition originally grew and the first group to be fully developed. The four men who stand, alert and watchful, on the other side of the mast form a second group. This group took shape very early and changed little in the further development. The third group composed of men who struggle to rise to their feet. It is the most vividly pantomimic of the groups, Gericault kept modifying these figures until the end, gradually increasing their number from three to five. The fourth group consists of three men who mount some barrels at the Raft's forward end and signal to the Argus. It is the most important of the four groups, that gives a culmination to the dramatic narrative and compositional structure of the Medusa. Yet it is the last that he invented. The Nero's powerful torso stands out against the sky high above the horizon, the cloth unfurling in the wind from his uplifted arm and gives the scene a splendid climax. Now that the composition was settled, his interest shifted to the Raft's wider setting of water and sky. He improvised a luminous cloudscape and a wide expanse of wind-ploughed sea around the Raft. He had spent half year in preparatory work. Gericault began execution by transferring the composition to the canvas, producing a huge contour drawing. With the concept of the composition in mind and a contour drawing of it on canvas, he went on directly to execute the figure from life. He posed his models singly, placing each in the proper light and exact position prescribed by the design. Then he painted their bodies into the contours. Gericault's sketches can be divided into two groups. Ones that accompanied the early compositional designs was to define postures, placements and board areas of light and shade. The later studies from life expresses Gericault's concern with the effects of light, colour and texture during his work on large canvas. From first to last, Gericault gave his figures, the living and the dead, the appearance of athletes in the vigorous health. His concern with the reality of the event centred throughout on what he regarded as its essential drama, not on its precise aspect. The special difficulty that he faced in the Medusa was to express the human reality of his subject, its content of terror, anguish and tension. To achieve this realism, he drew and painted many studies from life, as a stimulation and relief. The most astonishing among them are the portraits of dying patients at the Hopital Beaujon, and the still-life of dissected limbs and severed heads, painted in his own studio, where for a time he kept these human fragments to observe and record their gradual decay. This exposure to death helped him to gain insight for a special authenticity to his work. If his picture was to carry conviction, it had to express genuine experience. He familiarized himself with the sight and smell of death, and tried to live with it day by day, as had the men on the Raft.
The Raft of the Medusa 1819

15. Delacroix Moroccan Horseman Crossing a Ford about 1850
Delacroix is considered the greatest French Romantic painter. His paintings depicted historical and contemporary events or literature. His vistit to Morocco in 1832 provided him with further exotic subjects.
Eugène Delacroix  Born 1798, Died 1863 Draftsman, Painter Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire described his hero Eugène Delacroix as "a volcanic crater artistically concealed beneath bouquets of flowers." Beneath the surface of Delacroix's polished elegance and charm roiled turbulent interior emotions. In 1822 Delacroix took the Salon by storm. Although the French artistic establishment considered him a wild man and a rebel, the French government, bought his paintings and commissioned murals throughout Paris. Though Delacroix aimed to balance classicism and Romanticism, his art centered on a revolutionary idea born with the Romantics: that art should be created out of sincerity, that it should express the artist's true feelings and convictions.
Educated firmly in the classics, Delacroix often depicted mythological subjects, themes encouraged by the reigning Neoclassical artists at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. But Delacroix's brilliant colors and passionate brushwork frightened them; their watchwords were "noble simplicity and calm grandeur." They barred him from academy membership until 1857, and even then he was prohibited from teaching in the École des Beaux-Arts. For those very reasons, he was an inspiration to the Impressionists and other young artists. Paul Cézanne once said, "We are all in Delacroix." Intensely private, Delacroix kept a journal that is renowned as a profoundly moving record of the artistic experience.
Eugène Delacroix The Massacre at Chios 1824 Canvas H 4.19 m; W 3.54 m INV 3823
The Romantics, Byron especially, keenly espoused the cause of the Greeks under Turkish oppression. The young Delacroix, whose Dante and Virgil crossing the Styx had caused a stir at the 1823 Salon, exhibited the following year this cruel episode from the Greek War of Independence, illustrating the savage repression of an uprising on the island of Chios in Provoking bitter critical divisions, it is a veritable manifesto of Romanticism. Though by no means unimportant, the lavish colours and exotic costumes are secondary to the contemporary subject matter which has political implications (the liberation of the people) and aesthetic undertones (the liberation of form).
Moroccan Horseman
Crossing a Ford
about 1850
The Massacre at Chios 1824

16. Daumier
Daumier, Honoré ( ). French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor. In his lifetime he was known chiefly as a political and social satirist, but since his death recognition of his qualities as a painter has grown.
The Uprising c. 1860

17. Ingres The Turkish Bath 1862 Odalisque with a Slave 1840
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique ( ). French painter, born at Montauban, the son of a minor painter and sculptor, Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres ( ).
The Riviere
After an early academic training in the Toulouse academy he went to Paris in 1796 and was a fellow student of Gros in David's studio. He won the Prix de Rome in 1801, but owing to the state of France's economy he was not awarded the usual stay in Rome until In the interval he produced his first portraits. These fall into two catagories: portraits of himself and his friends, conceived in a Romantic spirit (Gilibert, Musée Ingres, Montauban, 1805), and portraits of well-to-do clients which are characterized by purity of line and enamel-like coloring (Mlle Rivière, Louvre, Paris, 1805). These early portraits are notable for their calligraphic line and expressive contour, which had a sensuous beauty of its own beyond its function to contain and delineate form. It was a feature that formed the essential basis of Ingres's painting throughout his life.
The Valpincon Bather (140 Kb); Oil on canvas, 146 x 97.5 cm (57 1/2 x 41 1/8 in); Louvre, Paris
During his first years in Rome he continued to execute portraits and began to paint bathers, a theme which was to become one of his favorites (The Valpinçon Bather, Louvre, Paris, 1808). He remained in Rome when his four-year scholarship ended, earning his living principally by pencil portraits of members of the French colony. But he also received more substantial commissions, including two decorative paintings for Napoleon's palace in Rome (Triumph of Romulus over Acron, Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1812; and Ossian's Dream, Musée Ingres, 1813). In 1820 he moved from Rome to Florence, where he remained for 4 years, working mainly on his Raphaelesque Vow of Louis XIII, commissioned for the cathedral of Montauban. Ingres's work had often been severely criticized in Paris because of its `Gothic' distortions, and when he accompanied this painting to the Salon of 1824 he was surprised to find it acclaimed and himself set up as the leader of the academic opposition to the new Romanticism. (Delacroix's Massacre of Chios was shown at the same Salon.)
Ingres stayed in Paris for the next ten years and received the official success and honors he had always craved. During this period he devoted much of his time to executing two large works: The Apotheosis of Homer, for a ceiling in the Louvre (installed 1827), and The Martyrdom of St Symphorian (Salon, 1834) for the cathedral of Autun. When the latter painting was badly received, however, he accepted the Directorship of the French School in Rome, a post he retained for 7 years. He was a model administrator and teacher, greatly improving the school's facilities, but he produced few major works in this period. In 1841 he returned to France, once again acclaimed as the champion of traditional values. He was heartbroken when his wife died in 1849, but he made a successful second marriage in 1852, and he continued working with great energy into his 80s. One of his acknowledged masterpieces, the extraordinarily sensuous Turkish Bath (Louvre, 1863), dates from the last years of his life. At his death he left a huge bequest of his work (several paintings and more than 4,000 drawings) to his home town of Montauban and they are now in the museum bearing his name there.
The Turkish Bath (100 Kb); Oil on canvas on wood, Diameter 108 cm (42 1/2"); Musee du Louvre, Paris
Ingres is a puzzling artist and his career is full of contradictions. Yet more than most artists he was obsessed by a restricted number of themes and returned to the same subject again and again over a long period of years. He was a bourgeois with the limitations of a bourgeois mentality, but as Baudelaire remarked, his finest works `are the product of a deeply sensuous nature'. The central contradiction of his career is that although he was held up as the guardian of Classical rules and precepts, it is his personal obsessions and mannerisms that make him such a great artist. His technique as a painter was academically unimpeachable--he said paint should be as smooth `as the skin of an onion'--but he was often attacked for the expressive distortions of his draughtsmanship; critics said, for example, that the abnormally long back of La Grande Odalisque (Louvre, 1814) had three extra vertebrae. Unfortunately the influence of Ingres was mainly seen in those shortcomings and weaknesses which have come to be regarded as the hallmark of inferior academic work. He had scores of pupils, but Chassériau was the only one to attain distinction. As a great calligraphic genius his true successors are Degas and Picasso.
Madame d'Haussonville (40 Kb)
Odalisque with a Slave 1840

18. The World of Nature: Friedrich, Constable, Turner
Painters in England and Germany were particul arly attracted by the
romantic love of nature. Caspar David Friedrich used the grandeur
of the natural world to underline the transitoriness of human
achievement, while in John Constable's landscapes there is greater
harmony between people and their surroundings.
Joseph M. W. Turner, Constable's contemporary, falls into a
category by himself. Although many of his subjects were romantic,
his use of form and color make light and movement the real themes
of his paintings.

19. Caspar David Friedrich
Friedrich, Caspar David
The German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, b. Sept. 5, 1774, d. May 7, 1840, was one of the greatest exponents in European art of the symbolic landscape.
He studied at the Academy in Copenhagen ( ), and subsequently settled in Dresden, often traveling to other parts of Germany. Friedrich's landscapes are based entirely on those of northern Germany and are beautiful renderings of trees, hills, harbors, morning mists, and other light effects based on a close observation of nature.
Some of Friedrich's best-known paintings are expressions of a religious mysticism. In 1808 he exhibited one of his most controversial paintings, The Cross in the Mountains (Gemaldegalerie, Dresden), in which--for the first time in Christian art--an altarpiece was conceived in terms of a pure landscape. The cross, viewed obliquely from behind, is an insignificant element in the composition. More important are the dominant rays of the evening sun, which the artist said depicted the setting of the old, pre-Christian world. The mountain symbolizes an immovable faith, while the fir trees are an allegory of hope. Friedrich painted several other important compositions in which crosses dominate a landscape.
Even some of Friedrich's apparently nonsymbolic paintings contain inner meanings, clues to which are provided either by the artist's writings or those of his literary friends. For example, a landscape showing a ruined abbey in the snow, Abbey with Oak Trees (1810; Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin), can be appreciated on one level as a bleak, winter scene, but the painter also intended the composition to represent both the church shaken by the Reformation and the transitoriness of earthly things.
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1818

20. Constable The Leaping Horse 1825
Constable, John ( ). English painter, ranked with Turner as one of the greatest British landscape artists.
Although he showed an early talent for art and began painting his native Suffolk scenery before he left school, his great originality matured slowly. He committed himself to a career as an artist only in 1799, when he joined the Royal Academy Schools and it was not until 1829 that he was grudgingly made a full Academician, elected by a majority of only one vote. In 1816 he became financially secure on the death of his father and married Maria Bicknell after a seven-year courtship and in the fact of strong opposition from her family. During the 1820s he began to win recognition: The Hay Wain (National Gallery, London, 1821) won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824 and Constable was admired by Delacroix and Bonington among others. His wife died in 1828, however, and the remaining years of his life were clouded by despondency.
After spending some years working in the picturesque tradition of landscape and the manner of Gainsborough, Constable developed his own original treatment from the attempt to render scenery more directly and realistically, carrying on but modifying in an individual way the tradition inherited from Ruisdael and the Dutch 17th-century landscape painters. Just as his contemporary William Wordsworth rejected what he called the `poetic diction' of his predecessors, so Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-century landscape painters, who, he said, were always `running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand'. Constable thought that `No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world', and in a then new way he represented in paint the atmospheric effects of changing light in the open air, the movement of clouds across the sky, and his excited delight at these phenomena, stemming from a profound love of the country: `The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things. These scenes made me a painter.'
He never went abroad, and his finest works are of the places he knew and loved best, particularly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived from To render the shifting flicker of light and weather he abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white or yellow, and the drama of storms with a rapid brush. Henry Fuseli was among the contemporaries who applauded the freshness of Constable's approach, for C. R. Leslie records him as saying: `I like de landscapes of Constable; he is always picturesque, of a fine color, and de lights always in de right places; but he makes me call for my great coat and umbrella.'
Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio. For his most ambitious works--`six-footers' as he called them--he followed the unusual technical procedure of making a full-size oil sketch, and in the 20th century there has been a tendancy to praise these even more highly than the finished works because of their freedom and freshness of brushwork. (The full-size sketch for The Hay Wain is in the V&A, London, which has the finest collection of Constable's work.)
In England Constable had no real sucessor and the many imitators (who included his son Lionel, ) turned rather to the formal compositions than to the more direct sketches. In France, however, he was a major influence on Romantics such as Delacroix, on the painters of the Barbizon School, and ultimately on the Impressionists.
The Leaping Horse 1825

21. Turner The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons,
16th October, 1834, 1835
Ulysses deriding Polyphemus
1829
Turner, Joseph Mallord William
Turner, John Mallord William ( ). One of the finest landscape artists was J.M.W. Turner, whose work was exhibited when he was still a teenager. His entire life was devoted to his art. Unlike many artists of his era, he was successful throughout his career.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London, England, on April 23, His father was a barber. His mother died when he was very young. The boy received little schooling. His father taught him how to read, but this was the extent of his education except for the study of art. By the age of 13 he was making drawings at home and exhibiting them in his father's shop window for sale.
Turner was 15 years old when he received a rare honor--one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was 18 he had his own studio. Before he was 20 print sellers were eagerly buying his drawings for reproduction.
He quickly achieved a fine reputation and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. In 1802, when he was only 27, Turner became a full member. He then began traveling widely in Europe.
Venice was the inspiration of some of Turner's finest work. Wherever he visited he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. His early training had been as a topographic draftsman. With the years, however, he developed a painting technique all his own. Instead of merely recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a light-filled expression of his own romantic feelings.
As he grew older Turner became an eccentric. Except for his father, with whom he lived for 30 years, he had no close friends. He allowed no one to watch him while he painted. He gave up attending the meetings of the academy. None of his acquaintances saw him for months at a time. Turner continued to travel but always alone. He still held exhibitions, but he usually refused to sell his paintings. When he was persuaded to sell one, he was dejected for days.
In 1850 he exhibited for the last time. One day Turner disappeared from his house. His housekeeper, after a search of many months, found him hiding in a house in Chelsea. He had been ill for a long time. He died the following day--Dec. 19, 1851.
Turner left a large fortune that he hoped would be used to support what he called "decaying artists." His collection of paintings was bequeathed to his country. At his request he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.
Although known for his oils, Turner is regarded as one of the founders of English watercolor landscape painting. Some of his most famous works are Calais Pier, Dido Building Carthage, Rain, Steam and Speed, Burial at Sea, and The Grand Canal, Venice.

22. Turner, continued Rain, Steam and Speed 1844
Turner, Joseph Mallord William
Turner, John Mallord William ( ). One of the finest landscape artists was J.M.W. Turner, whose work was exhibited when he was still a teenager. His entire life was devoted to his art. Unlike many artists of his era, he was successful throughout his career.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in London, England, on April 23, His father was a barber. His mother died when he was very young. The boy received little schooling. His father taught him how to read, but this was the extent of his education except for the study of art. By the age of 13 he was making drawings at home and exhibiting them in his father's shop window for sale.
Turner was 15 years old when he received a rare honor--one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was 18 he had his own studio. Before he was 20 print sellers were eagerly buying his drawings for reproduction.
He quickly achieved a fine reputation and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. In 1802, when he was only 27, Turner became a full member. He then began traveling widely in Europe.
Venice was the inspiration of some of Turner's finest work. Wherever he visited he studied the effects of sea and sky in every kind of weather. His early training had been as a topographic draftsman. With the years, however, he developed a painting technique all his own. Instead of merely recording factually what he saw, Turner translated scenes into a light-filled expression of his own romantic feelings.
As he grew older Turner became an eccentric. Except for his father, with whom he lived for 30 years, he had no close friends. He allowed no one to watch him while he painted. He gave up attending the meetings of the academy. None of his acquaintances saw him for months at a time. Turner continued to travel but always alone. He still held exhibitions, but he usually refused to sell his paintings. When he was persuaded to sell one, he was dejected for days.
In 1850 he exhibited for the last time. One day Turner disappeared from his house. His housekeeper, after a search of many months, found him hiding in a house in Chelsea. He had been ill for a long time. He died the following day--Dec. 19, 1851.
Turner left a large fortune that he hoped would be used to support what he called "decaying artists." His collection of paintings was bequeathed to his country. At his request he was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.
Although known for his oils, Turner is regarded as one of the founders of English watercolor landscape painting. Some of his most famous works are Calais Pier, Dido Building Carthage, Rain, Steam and Speed, Burial at Sea, and The Grand Canal, Venice.
Rain, Steam and Speed 1844

23. From Neoclacissism to Romanticism in Literature
Goethe In literature no figure dominated his time more than
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German poet, dramatist, and
novelist. One of the first writers to break the fetters of neoclassicism,
he nonetheless continued to produce neoclassical works as well as
more romantic ones. The scale of his writings runs from the most
intimate love lyrics to the monumental two parts of his Faust drama.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ( )
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THE boy, Goethe, was a precocious youngster. At the early age of eight he had already acquired some knowledge of Greek, Latin, French and Italian. He had likewise acquired from his mother the knack of story telling; and from a toy puppet show in his nursery his first interest in the stage.
Goethe's early education was somewhat irregular and informal, and already he was marked by that apparent feeling of superiority that stayed by him throughout his life. When he was about 16 he was sent to Leipzig, ostensibly to study law. He apparently studied more life than law and put in his time expressing his reactions through some form of writing. On at least two occasions, this form was dramatic.
Finally, in 1770 Goethe went to Strassburg, this time really intent on passing his preliminary examinations in law, and with the somewhat more frivolous ambition of learning to dance. Along with his study of law, he studied art, music, anatomy and chemistry. A strong friendship with the writer, Herder, was likewise no part of Goethe's experience at this time, a contact which was of considerable importance in these formative years.
In 1771 Goethe returned to Frankfurt, nominally to practice law, but he was soon deep in work on what was to be his first dramatic success, Götz von Berlichingen. While this was actually the story of a robber baron of the 16th century it really represented Goethe's youthful protest against the established order and his demand for intellectual freedom. Its success made its hitherto unknown author the literary leader of Germany.
Goethe's invitation in 1775 to the court of Duke Karl August at Weimar was a turning point in the literary life of Germany. He became manager of the Court Theater, and interested himself in various other activities, so that for a period of some ten years not much actual writing was done.
The writing of Faust, however, that best known of Goethe's works, extended over practically the whole of Goethe's literary life, a period of 57 years. It was finally finished when Goethe was 81. Faust is in reality a dramatic poem rather than a piece for the stage. While based on the same legend as Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, it far transcends both its legendary source and the English play. The latter is little more than a Morality illustrating the punishment of sin; Goethe's work is a drama of redemption.
Others of Goethe's works which have stood the test of time include: Clavigo, Egmont, Stella, Iphigenia in Tauris and Torquato Tasso.
…………………..
German poet, novelist, playwright, courtier, and natural philosopher, one of the greatest figures in Western literature. In literature Goethe gained early fame with The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), but his most famous work is the poetic drama in two parts, FAUST. Like the famous character of this poem, Goethe was interested in alchemy. He also made important discoveries in connection with plant and animal life, and evolved a non-Newtonian and unorthodox theory of the character of light and color, which has influenced such abstract painters as Kandinsky and Mondrian.
Noble be man, Helpful and good! For that alone Sets him apart From every other creature On earth. (from The Divine, 1783) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main, the first child of a lawyer Johann Caspar Goethe, and Katherine Elisabeth Textor, the daughter of the mayor of Frankfurt. Goethe had a comfortable childhood and he was greatly influenced by his mother, who encouraged his literary aspirations. After troubles at school, he received at home an exceptionally wide education. At the age of 16, Goethe began to study law at Leipzig University ( ), and he also studied drawing with Adam Oeser. An unhappy love affair inspired Goethe's first play, The Lover's Caprice (1767). After a period of illness, Goethe resumed his studies in Strasbourg ( ). Some biographers have speculated that Goethe had contracted syphilis - at least his relationships with women were years apart. Goethe practised law in Frankfurt ( ) and Wetzlar (1772). He contributed to Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen ( ), and in 1774 he published his first novel, self-revelatory DIE LEIDEN DES JUNGEN WERTHERS (The Sorrows of Young Werther), in which he created the prototype of the Romantic hero. The novel, written in the form of a series of letters, depicted the hopeless affair of a young man, Werther, with the beautiful Charlotte. In the end the melancholic Werther romantically commits suicide, after one brief moment of happiness with Charlotte, when she lets him kiss her. Goethe's model was Charlotte Buff, the fiancée of his friend, whom he had met in Wetzlar in 1772.
Goethe's youth was emotionally hectic to the point that he sometimes feared for his reason. He was recognized as a leading figure in the Sturm und Drang, which celebrated the energetic Promethean restlessness of spirit as opposed to the ideal of calm rationalism of the Enlightenment. Goethe's poem 'Prometheus', with its insistence that man must believe not in gods but in himself, might be seen as a motto for the whole movement. After a relaxing trip to Switzerland, Goethe made a decisive break with his past. In 1775 he was welcomed by Duke Karl August into the small court of Weimar, where he worked in several governmental offices. Occasionally he read aloud his texts to a selected group of persons - among them the Duke and the two Duchesses. To his disappointment a dog-trainer was also allowed to amuse in the court theatre.
"What you don't feel, you will not grasp by art, Unless it wells out of your soul And with sheer pleasure takes control, Compelling every listener's heart. But sit - and sit, and patch and knead, Cook a ragout, reheat your hashes, Blow at the sparks and try to breed A fire out of piles of ashes! Children and apes may think it great, If that should titillate your gum, But from heart to heart you will never create. If from your heart it does not come." (from Faust I) In Weimar Goethe did not have much time to publish fiction. He was a council member and member of the war commission, director of roads and services, and managed the financial affairs of the court. Also Goethe's scientific researches were wide. He discovered the human intermaxilarry bone (1784), and formulated a vertebral theory of the skull. His idea of Urpflanze, the archetypal forms after which all other plants are patterned, has similarities with Plato's theory of eternal and changeless Forms. In general, Goethe's metaphysics and organic view of nature showed the influence of Spinoza.
During this period, his great love was Charlotte von Stein, an older married woman, but the relationship remained platonic. Eventually Goethe was released from day-to-day governmental duties to concentrate on writing, although he was still general supervisor for arts and sciences, and director of the court theatres. After Goethe's emotional dependence on Charlotte ended, he lived happily and unmarried with Christiane Vulpius, who became Goethe's mistress in In spite of public pressure, it was not until 1806 when they married.
In Goethe made a journey to Italy. "In Rome I have found myself for the first time," he wrote. He drew statues and ruins, collected antique and botanical samples, and was shocked by the primitive power of an ancient Greek temple - Renaissance art did not interest him. The journey ended Goethe's celibacy and inspired his play IPHIGENIE AUF TAURIS, and RÖMISHE ELEGIEN, sensuous poems relating partly to Christiane. The ancient monuments he saw in Italy significantly influenced his growing commitment to a classical view of art. "Three things are to be looked to in a building," Goethe later wrote in Elective Affinities (1808), "that it stands on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed."
In the 1790s Goethe contributed to Friedrich von Schiller´s journal Die Horen, published WILHELM MEISTERS LEHRJAHRE (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) in , and continued his writings on the ideals of arts and literature in his own journal Propyläen. Wilhelm Meister's story had preoccupied the author for many years. Wilhelm, disillusioned by love, starts actively to seek out other values, and becomes an actor and playwright. Whereas Werther's life ended in despair, Meister has a more optimistic spirit. At the end he says: "... I know I have attained a happiness which I have not deserved, and which I would not change with anything in life." Wim Wenders and Peter Handke made in 1974 a modernized film adaptation of the book, Wrong Movement, in which Meister's journey has a sad, lonely note. "If only politics and poetry could be united," he says to his friend Laertes, who answers: "That would be the end of longing and the end of the world."
During the French Revolution Goethe reported in letters - sometimes written in the middle of cannon fire - to his family his inconveniences, complaining that he was forced to leave his home and dear garden after the French army attacked Prussia. He also saw killings and looted villages. Although Goethe supported freedom and progress, he wanted to preserve the bourgeois or his artistic-individualistic way of life. However, the majority of the German intelligentsia greeted with enthusiasm the goals of the revolution, including Kant, Schiller, and Friedrich Schlegel.
Faust is an alchemical drama from beginning to end, claims C.G. Jung. Goethe worked for most of his life on this masterwork. He started to compose Faust about the age of twenty-three, and finished the second part in 1832, just before his death. The original figure in the Faust legend was Gregorius Faustus (or Gregorius Sabellicus, Faustus Junior, c /1), a seeker of forbidden knowledge. His true identity is not known, but he claimed to be an astrologer, expert in magic, and an alchemist. This legend attracted Christopher Marlowe, who offered in his play a psychological study of the battle between good and evil. Marlowe's drama ends with the protagonist's damnation. Goethe's story created a new persona for the Devil - Mephistopheles was a gentleman, who had adopted the manners of a courtier. Faust's lust for knowledge is limitless and he makes a contract with Mephistopheles: he will die at the moment he declares himself satisfied, if he should exclaim, "Stay, thou art so fair." When Werther believed that his passion for beauty is fulfilled in afterlife, Faust wants to enjoy his highest moment in this life.
In the first part, published in 1808, Faust seduces and loses Margaret (in German, Margarete, or its diminutive, Gretchen), an innocent girl, who is condemned to death for murdering her illegitimate child by Faust. When she asks Faust, "Do you believe in God?", he answers: "Does not the heaven vault above? / Is the earth not firmly based down here? / And do not, friendly, / Eternal stars arise? / Do we not look into each other's eyes, / And all in you is surging, / To your head and heart, / And weaves in timeless mystery, / Unseeable, yet seen, around you?"
In the philosophical second part Faust marries Helen of Troy and starts to create an ideal community. Harold Bloom has said in The Western Canon (1994), that the monstrously complex poem is a "scandalous pleasure for the exuberant reader, but it is also a trap, a Maphistophelean abyss in which you will never touch bottom." Without knowing that his plans have failed, the blind Faust is finally satisfied. However, Mephistopheles loses his victory, when angels take Faust to heaven. - Faust versions: Gotthold Lessing's ( ) lost play Faust, Don Juan/Don Giovanni (perhaps best known from the Opera by Lorenzo Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorothy L. Sayers's play The Devil to Pay (1939), Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus (1947). - Film adaptations: 1926, dir. by F.W. Murnau; film All That Money Can Buy, 1941, dir. by William Dieterle, based on Stephen Vincent Benét work; 1949, dir by René Clair (La Beauté du Diable); 1974, dir. by Brian DePalma (Phantom of the Paradise, based loosely on Gaston Leroux's novel Phantom of the Opera). - Opera: Gounod's Faust (1859), Buïto's Mefistotele (1866), Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust (1893), Busoni's Doktor Faust (1925) - Animation: 1994, dir.by Jan Svankmaijer.
From 1791 to 1817 Goethe was the director of the court theatres. He advised Duke Carl August on mining and Jena University, which for a short time attracted the most prominent figures in German philosophy, including Hegel and Fichte. In 1812 Goethe met the famous composer Ludwig van Beethoven in Teplitz. Beethoven had admired Goethe already in his youth, although he considered Goethe's attitude toward the nobility too servile. Beethoven composed several music pieces based on the author's texts, among them Egmont. Franz Schubert's ( ) first Lieder masterpiece, 'Gretchen am Spinnrade', took the words from Faust, but Goethe did not much appreciate Schubert's musical achievements.
Goethe remained creative during his last period. He edited Kunst and Altertum ( ) and Zur Naturwissenschaft ( ), wrote his autobiography, Poetry and Truth ( ), and completed the novel WILHELM MEISTERS WANDERJAHRE (1821-9). Interested in visual arts throughout his life, Goethe wrote a large volume on the theory of color, which he considered one of his major achievements. In ZUR FARBENLEHRE (1810) Goethe rejected mathematical approach in the treatment of color, and argued that light, shade and color are associated with the emotional experience - "every color produces a distinct impression on the mind, and thus addresses at once the eye and feelings".
At the age of 74 Goethe fell in love with the 19-year old Ulrike von Levetzow. He followed her with high hopes from Marienbad to Karlsbad, and then returned disappointed to Weimar. There he wrote The Marienbad elegy, the most personal poem of his later years. Goethe died in Weimar on March 22, He and Schiller, who died over a quarter of a century earlier, are buried together, in a mausoleum in the ducal cemetery. The Goethe House and Schiller House stand in the town, and the two statues of these literary giants are outside the National Theatre.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

24. The Romantic Poets and the Novel
The work of the English romantic poets William Wordsworth,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and George Gordon,
Lord Byron touched on all the principal romantic themes.
Other English writers used the novel as a means of expressing
their concern with social issues, as in the case of Charles Dickens,
or their absorption with strong emotion, as did Emily BrontÎ.
Indeed, the nineteenth century was the great age of the novel,
with HonorÈ de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert writing in France
and-above all-Leo Tolstoy in Russia.
Lord George Gordon Byron ( ) was as famous in his lifetime for his personality cult as for his poetry. He created the concept of the 'Byronic hero' - a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past. Byron's influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries. George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the son of Captain John Byron, and Catherine Gordon. He was born with a club-foot and became extreme sensitivity about his lameness. Byron spent his early childhood years in poor surroundings in Aberdeen, where he was educated until he was ten. After he inherited the title and property of his great-uncle in 1798, he went on to Dulwich, Harrow, and Cambridge, where he piled up debts and aroused alarm with bisexual love affairs. Staying at Newstead in 1802, he probably first met his half-sister, Augusta Leigh with whom he was later suspected of having an incestuous relationship. In 1807 Byron's first collection of poetry, Hours Of Idleness appeared. It received bad reviews. The poet answered his critics with the satire English Bards And Scotch Reviewersin Next year he took his seat in the House of Lords, and set out on his grand tour, visiting Spain, Malta, Albania, Greece, and the Aegean. Real poetic success came in 1812 when Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage ( ). He became an adored character of London society; he spoke in the House of Lords effectively on liberal themes, and had a hectic love-affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron's The Corsair (1814), sold 10,000 copies on the first day of publication. He married Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1815, and their daughter Ada was born in the same year. The marriage was unhappy, and they obtained legal separation next year. When the rumors started to rise of his incest and debts were accumulating, Byron left England in 1816, never to return. He settled in Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, who became his mistress. There he wrote the two cantos of Childe Harold and "The Prisoner Of Chillon". At the end of the summer Byron continued his travels, spending two years in Italy. During his years in Italy, Byron wrote Lament Of Tasso, inspired by his visit in Tasso's cell in Rome, Mazeppa and started Don Juan, his satiric masterpiece. While in Ravenna and Pisa, Byron became deeply interested in drama, and wrote among others The Two Foscari, Sardanapalaus, Cain, and the unfinished Heaven And Earth. After a long creative period, Byron had come to feel that action was more important than poetry. He armed a brig, the Hercules, and sailed to Greece to aid the Greeks, who had risen against their Ottoman overlords. However, before he saw any serious military action, Byron contracted a fever from which he died in Missolonghi on 19 April Memorial services were held all over the land. Byron's body was returned to England but refused by the deans of both Westminster and St Paul's. Finally Byron's coffin was placed in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire. ….
Percy Bysshe Shelley ( ), English Romantic poet who rebelled against English politics and conservative values. Shelley drew no essential distinction between poetry and politics, and his work reflected the radical ideas and revolutionary optimism of the era. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4, 1792, at Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex, into an aristocratic family. His father, Timothy Shelley, was a Sussex squire and a member of Parliament. Shelley attended Syon House Academy and Eton and in 1810 he entered the Oxford University College. In 1811 Shelley was expelled from the college for publishing The Necessity Of Atheism, which he wrote with Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley's father withdrew his inheritance in favor of a small annuity, after he eloped with the 16-year old Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a London tavern owner. The pair spent the following two years traveling in England and Ireland, distributing pamphlets and speaking against political injustice. In 1813 Shelley published his first important poem, the atheistic Queen Mab. The poet's marriage to Harriet was a failure. In 1814 Shelley traveled abroad with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of the philosopher and anarchist William Godwin ( ). Mary's young stepsister Claire Clairmont was also in the company. During this journey Shelley wrote an unfinished novella, The Assassins (1814). Their combined journal, Six Weeks' Tour, reworked by Mary Shelley, appeared in After their return to London, Shelley came into an annual income under his grandfather's will. Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in Shelley married Mary Wollstonecraft and his favorite son William was born in Shelley spent the summer of 1816 with Lord Byron at Lake Geneva, where Byron had an affair with Claire. Shelley composed the "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc". In 1817 Shelley published The Revolt Of Islam and the much anthologized "Ozymandias" appeared in Among Shelley's popular poems are the Odes "To the West Wind" and "To a Skylark" and Adonais, an elegy for Keats. In 1818 the Shelleys moved to Italy, where Byron was residing. In 1819 they went to Rome and in 1820 to Pisa. Shelley's works from this period include Julian And Maddalo, an exploration of his relations with Byron and Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama. The Cenci was a five-act tragedy based on the history of a 16th-century Roman family, and The Mask Of Anarchy was a political protest which was written after the Peterloo massacre. In 1822 the Shelley household moved to the Bay of Lerici. There Shelley began to write The Triumph Of Life. To welcome his friend Leigh Hunt, he sailed to Leghorn. During the stormy return voyage to Lerici, his small schooner the Ariel sank and Shelley drowned with Edward Williams on July 8, The bodies were washed ashore at Viareggio, where, in the presence of Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, they were burned on the beach. Shelley was later buried in Rome. …………………
John Keats ( ), English lyric poet, usually regarded as the archetype of the Romantic writer. Keats felt that the deepest meaning of life lay in the apprehension of material beauty, although his mature poems reveal his fascination with a world of death and decay. Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795 as the son of a livery-stable manager. He was the oldest of four children, who remained deeply devoted to each other. After their father died in 1804, Keats's mother remarried but the marriage was soon broken. She moved with the children, John and his sister Fanny and brothers George and Tom, to live with her mother at Edmonton, near London. She died of tuberculosis in At school Keats read widely. He was educated at Clarke's School in Enfield, where he began a translation of the Aeneid. In1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary. His first poem, "Lines in Imitation of Spenser", was written in In that year he moved to London and resumed his surgical studies in 1815 as a student at Guy's hospital. Next year he became a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. Before devoting himself entirely to poetry, Keats worked as a dresser and junior house surgeon. In London he had met the editor of The Examiner, Leigh Hunt, who introduced him to other young Romantics, including Shelley. His poem, "O Solitude", also appeared in The Examiner. Keats's first book, Poems, was published in It was about this time Keats started to use his letters as the vehicle of his thoughts of poetry. "Endymion", Keats's first long poem appeared, when he was 21. Keats's greatest works were written in the late 1810s, among them "Lamia", "The Eve of St. Agnes", the great odes including "Ode to a Nightingale", Ode To Autumn" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn". He worked briefly as a theatrical critic for The Champion. Keats spent three months in 1818 attending his brother Tom, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis. After Tom's death in December, Keats moved to Hampstead. In the winter of he worked mainly on "Hyperion". In 1820 the second volume of Keats poems appeared and gained critical success. However, Keats was suffering from tuberculosis and his poems were marked with sadness partly because he was too poor to marry Fanny Brawne, the woman he loved. Declining Shelley's invitation to join him at Pisa, Keats went to Rome, where he died at the age of 25, on February 23, Keats told his friend Joseph Severn that he wanted on his grave just the line, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Lord George
Gordon Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelly
John Keats

25. The Nineteenth Century in America
The Romantic Era was the first period in which American artists
created their own original styles rather than borrow them from Europe.
Love of nature inspired writers like Henry David Thoreau and painters
like Thomas Cole. The description of strong emotions, often personal
ones, characterizes the poetry of Walt Whitman and many of the
paintings of Winslow Homer. Thomas Eakins, with his interest in
realism, made use of a nineteenth-century invention that had an
enormous impact on the visual arts: photography.

26. The Hudson River School
Thomas Cole
The Voyage of Life: Youth begun 1839
The Voyage of Life: Childhood begun 1839
Cole, Thomas
(b. Feb. 1, 1801, Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, Eng.--d. Feb. 11, 1848, Catskill, N.Y., U.S.), American Romantic landscape painter who was a founder of the Hudson River school.
The Hudson River School
America, 1835 to The Hudson River School was a group of painters, led by Thomas Cole, who painted awesomely Romantic images of America's wilderness, in the Hudson River Valley and also in the newly opened West. The use of light effects, to dramatically portray such elements as mist and sunsets, developed into a subspecialty known as Luminism. In addition to Cole, the best-known practioners of this style were Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church.

27. Winslow Homer The Woodcutter 1891 Watercolor over graphite
Watching the Tempest 1881 Watercolor over graphite
Winslow Homer
[American Painter, ]
"Some major artists create popular stereotypes that last for decades; others never reach into popular culture at all. Winslow Homer was a painter of the first kind. Even today, 150 years after his birth, one sees his echoes on half the magazine racks of America. Just as John James Audubon becomes, by dilution, the common duck stamp, so one detects the vestiges of Homer's watercolors in every outdoor-magazine cover that has a dead whitetail draped over a log or a largemouth bass, like an enraged Edward G. Robinson with fins, jumping from dark swamp water. Homer was not, of course, the first "sporting artist" in America, but he was the undisputed master of the genre, and he brought to it both intense observation and a sense of identification with the landscape-just at the cultural moment when the religious Wilderness of the nineteenth century, the church of nature, was shifting into the secular Outdoors, the theater of manly enjoyment. If you want to see Thoreau's America turning into Teddy Roosevelt's, Homer the watercolorist is the man to consult. "The Homer sesquicentennial (he was born in 1836 and died in 1910) is being celebrated with "Winslow Homer Watercolors," organized by Helen Cooper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Her catalogue is a landmark in Homer studies. It puts Homer in his true relationship to illustration, to other American art and to the European and English examples he followed, from Ruskin to Millet; its vivacity of argument matches that of the paintings. Cooper has brought together some two hundred watercolors-almost a third of Homer's known output. It is a wholly delectable show, and it makes clear why watercolor, in its special freshness and immediacy, gave Homer access to moments of vision he did not have in the weightier, slower diction of oils.
"You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors," Homer once remarked, and he was almost right. He came to the medium late: he was thirty-seven and a mature artist. A distinct air of the Salon, of the desire for a "major" utterance that leads to an overworked surface, clings to some of the early watercolors-in particular, the paintings of fisher folk he did during a twenty-month stay in the northern English coastal village of Cullercoats in Those robust girls, simple, natural, windbeaten and enduring, planted in big boots with arms akimbo against the planes of sea, rock and sky, are also images of a kind of moralizing earnestness that was common in French Salon art a century ago. Idealizations of the peasant, reflecting an anxiety that folk culture was being annihilated by the gravitational field of the city, were the stock of dozens of painters like Jules Breton, Jules Bastien-Lepage and jean-François Millet. Homer's own America had its anxieties too-immense ones. Nothing in its cultural history is more striking than the virtual absence of any mention of the central American trauma of the nineteenth century, the Civil War, from painting. Its fratricidal miseries were left to writers (Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane) to explore, and to photographers. But painting served as a way of oblivion-of reconstructing an idealized innocence. Thus, as Cooper points out, Homer's 1870s watercolors of farm children and bucolic courtships try to memorialize the halcyon days of the 185os; the children gazing raptly at the blue horizon in Three Boys on the Shore, their backs forming a shallow arch, are in a sense this lost America. None of this prevented Homer's contemporaries from seeing such works as unvarnished and in some ways disagreeable truth. "Barbarously simple," thought Henry James. "He has chosen the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier; and, to reward his audacity, he has incontcstably succeeded."
"Once into his forties, Homer rarely went anywhere without rag paper, sable brushes and little pans of color. He took his working vacations in places he knew would give him subjects-the New England coast, the Adirondacks, the tumultuous rivers of Quebec, the Florida Keys and the dark palmetto-fringed pools of Homosassa, the bays and whitewashed coral walls of the Bermudas.
"Although Homer exhibitions up to now have tended to treat his watercolors as ancillary to his oils, mere preparations, it is clear at the National Gallery that Homer did not think the same way and that he did more than any other nineteenth-century American artist to establish watercolor as an important medium in this country. In structure and intensity, his best watercolors yield nothing to his larger paintings. Homer had great powers of visual analysis; he could hardly look at a scene without breaking it down and resolving it as structure, and some of his paintings of the Adirondack woods, with their complicated shuttle of vertical trunks against a fluid background of deep autumnal shade, are demonstration pieces of sinewy design. He was able to isolate a motif in action, as though the watercolor were a pseudo-photograph. This sometimes looks false, but it was exactly the kind of falsity that appealed to popular taste, and Homer's watercolors of leaping trout and thrashing bass, the Big Fish dominating the foreground, are a curious conjunction of the merely illustrative and the frenetically decorative. In his sober moods he was rarely off-key. His Adirondack paintings have the astringent completeness of the Michigan woods in early Hemingway. Perhaps no painting has ever conveyed a hunter's anxiety better than Hound and Hunter, with its flustered boy in the dinghy trying to get a rope on a shot stag's antlers before its corpse sinks, lurching to and fro in a cave of forest darkness and disturbed silver ripples.
"Watercolor is tricky stuff, an amateur's but really a virtuoso's medium. It is the most light-filled of all ways of painting, but its luminosity depends on the white of the paper shining through thin washes of pigment. One has to work from light to dark, not (as with oils) from dark to light. It is hospitable to accident (Homer's seas, skies and Adirondack hills are full of chance blots and free mergings of color) but disaster-prone as well. One slip, and the veil of atmosphere turns into a mud puddle, a garish swamp. The stuff favors broad effects; nothing proclaims the amateur more clearly than niggling and overcorrection. It can be violated (Homer sometimes did his highlights by tearing strips of paper away to show white below), but it also demands an exacting precision of the hand-and an eye that can translate solid into fluid in a wink. Homer understood and exploited all these needs of watercolor better than his contemporaries, and he applied them where they most belonged--to the recording of immediate experience. A painting like Key West, Hauling Anchor, 1903, has a sparkling directness hardly attainable in oil. It is so simple-looking - blue sea, white boat, a patch or two of red shirt, the red picked up again at the boat's waterline and in a jaunty lick or two of carmine reflection - that at first one does not mark the skill that went into it, the power of epigrammatic observation implicit in Homer's ability to convey the milky blue water over a Florida sand bottom in two washes of cerulean and cobalt. One knows how little time it took to see and how little to do; but one senses the years of self-critical practice behind it. No wonder Homer is the despair of every amateur.

28. Thomas Eakins Max Schmitt in a Single Scull 1871
The Biglen Brothers Racing 1873
Eakins, Thomas ( ). American painter. Eakins is regarded by most critics as the outstanding American painter of the 19th century and by many as the greatest his country has yet produced.

29. The situation at the end of the 19th Century
By the end of the century the audience for art of all kinds had expanded
immeasurably. No longer commissioned by the church or the
aristocracy, artworks expressed the hopes and fears of individual
artists and of humanity at large. Furthermore, as the revolutionaries
of the eighteenth century had dreamed, they had helped bring about
social change.
19th century events:
Napoleon, who conquers much of Europe, is ultimately defeated in 1815; some old European regimes are restored, others not.
The modern city of Singapore is established when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company acquires land on the island from the Sultan of Johore in 1819.
The Libertadores lead most of Latin America to independence.
Industrial Revolution continues and spreads, developments include the Rail Transport, telegraph, and telephone.
Belgium becomes independent in 1830 after a massive uprising against the Dutch. Leopold becomes the first king of Belgium.
Belgium will be the second industrial power in the world by the middle of the 19th century.
Leopold II, son of Leopold, becomes the second king of Belgium. He buys the gigantic territory of Congo in Africa with his own fortune and will later (1908) offer it to Belgium.
Discovery of the relationships between magnetism and electricity and light by Hans Christian Ørsted and James Clerk Maxwell. (See:electromagnetism)
Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary is formed in 1867.
Mass migration from Europe to the United States.
During the reign of Queen Victoria, the United Kingdom is the leading economic power in the world giving the term Victorian Age to much of the century.
Political revolution and constitutional reform across Europe severely limits powers of monarchs, advances democracy.
The religious revival of the Second Great Awakening in the eastern United States and Canada gives rise to unique, American, Christian religions during the era of Restorationism
Gold discovered in Australia and throughout the west of the United States, leading to huge increases in national wealth and encouraging mass migration of free settlers there.
Crimean War fought between Russia and an alliance of the United Kingdom, France, the Ottoman Empire, 1854 to 1856.
Slavery ended in British colonies and in America. See American Civil War, 1861 to End of global slave trade enforced by British navy.
Charles Darwin revolutionizes biology with his theories of evolution, 1858.
Europeans conquer and colonize most of Africa and parts of Asia.
Karl Marx writes the Communist Manifesto, encouraging workers to revolt against owners.
Meiji Restoration in 1868 opens Japan to modern influences and returns the emperor to power.
Germany and Italy are formed as nations, uniting from groups of small kingdoms and city states.
Railroads make fast mass transit available to many. Transcontinental railroads built, including the Panama Railway in 1855, the US Transcontinental Railroad finished in 1869 linking to west in the United States, and the Canadian National Railway in 1885.
The Suez Canal is opened, connecting Europe and the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and Asia in 1869.
The British begin their so-called "forward movement" to extend control over the Malay States with the signing of the Pangkor Treaty in 1874.
The quick defeat of Spain by the United States in 1898, the Spanish-American War, knocks Spain off the list of major world powers for good and gives rise to the United States as a major world military power.
The electric telegraph and undersea cables make instant global communication possible for the first time.
Postage Stamps and diamond-shaped paper sheets which folded to form envelopes for carrying letters devised and introduced in Britain, and soon thereafter in many other countries, leading to establishment of the Universal Postal Union.
Manufactured goods become widely available by mail order
19th Century Europe
19th Century US Expansion