1. The Romantic Era extends from about 1825-70's.
In the arts, Romanticism expressed intense emotion and a rejection of traditions that limited free expression, including the conventions of society. Artists could be scruffy, thin and undernourished, moody, introspective, unconventional, irrational, spontaneous, mysterious, self centered, and emotional.
2. There were major changes in social & economic conditions.
a. The French and american Revolutions, Napoleonic Wars,
Franco-Prussian War.
b. The Industrial Revolution: People leave the country/farms to work in city/factories.
c. The end of patronage for artists.
3. The negative effects of these changes on people.
a. Humans leave the farm areas for the cities to work at machines, like robots, in factories with little or no light or ventilation. Many live in barracks or rented rooms, their families left behind in the countryside.
b. The loss of connection with the land; separation from nature.
c. Dehumanization in cities.
4. Antidotes for the negative effects of these changes.
a. Art as the other side of reality: Love of beauty and unspoiled nature.
b. Artists express feelings and needs through themes about human life: birth to death, youthful enthusiasm, discovery of love, search for wisdom, sadness and hope, perfect beauty.
c. Romanticism elevated ordinary people and their struggles in artwork and in music, and as such could be seen as a rejection of 18th century materialism.
Some characteristics of Romanticism
1. Love for the beauties of unspoiled nature.
2.The preference in the arts for emotion and passion rather than reason and logic.
3. Moody introspection, the time of the "brooding artist". Beethoven is a fine example.
4. Love of genious, of artists and their virtuosity, love of heroes and with all, looking at artists as people who struggle and suffer with their passions.
5. A new view of artists as individual creative spirits who create art of all types from their inner struggles without regard for rules or tradition or conventions.
6. An emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth;
7. All the arts investigate a new interest in nationalism, in folk culture and cultural origins.
8. A taste for that which is exotic, mysterious. A time of seances and occult societies, mysticism.
9. In music and art the depiction of subjects of intense emotional content, often depicting the struggles of ordinary people.
10. Romantic Opera stories include the loves and disappointments, the suffering of artists,and of beautifuil women.
Program Music
1. Music that reflects a story, something literary or historical. The composer uses sound to describe events. Tchaikovsky tells many stories in music with his ballet scores, and of a war in his 1812 Overture, where he paints a movie in sound of the defeat of Napoleon on the Plains of Borodino outside of Moscow in 1812. We will listen to this in class and follow the story with a Listening Guide that I will project from a floppy disk.
2. Opera is Program Music
There may be no more intense expression of the inner human struggle than in the operas of Verdi, Puccini and other Italian Romantic opera composers including Giordano, a late Romantic Era composer best known for the opera Andrea Chenier, which, as you might now suspect, is filled with passion, terror, love, hope, desolation, sacrifice, and redemption of the battered soul. We will listen to one aria, (link to) La Mama Morta, from this opera, set during the terrors of the French Revolution. From a recording by Montserrat Caballe, the aria was played during the closing scene of the movie Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas.
Link to Romantic Era Painting