Introduction
Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an
artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe
toward the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the
approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its
emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past
and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a
reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic social and political
norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of
nature—all components of modernity. It was embodied most strongly in the visual
arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education,
and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics,
with romantic thinkers influencing liberalism, radicalism, conservatism and
nationalism.
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Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized
many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and
historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th
century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm,
harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in
general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some
extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century
rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the
individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the
spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a
deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of
emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the
self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental
potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional
figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view
of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more
important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an
emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual
truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural
origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote,
the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even
the satanic.
Literature
Romanticism proper was preceded by several related developments from the
mid-18th century on that can be termed Pre-Romanticism. Among such trends was a
new appreciation of the medieval romance, from which the Romantic movement
derives its name. The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose
emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic and the mysterious was in
clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing
Classical forms of literature, such as the French Neoclassical tragedy or the
English heroic couplet in poetry. This new interest in relatively
unsophisticated but overtly emotional literary expressions of the past was to
be a dominant note in Romanticism.
Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the
publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical
Ballads, in which he described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings,” became the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry.
William Blake was the third principal poet of the movement’s early phase in
England. The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by
innovations in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the
mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural. A wealth of talents,
including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul,
Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich
Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, belong to this first phase. In
Revolutionary France, the vicomte de Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël were the
chief initiators of Romanticism, by virtue of their influential historical and
theoretical writings.
The second phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from about 1805
to the 1830s, was marked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new
attention to national origins, as attested by the collection and imitation of
native folklore, folk ballads and poetry, folk dance and music, and even
previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works. The revived historical
appreciation was translated into imaginative writing by Sir Walter Scott, who
is often considered to have invented the historical novel. At about this same
time English Romantic poetry had reached its zenith in the works of John Keats,
Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
A notable by-product of the Romantic interest in the emotional were
works dealing with the supernatural, the weird, and the horrible, as in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein and works by C.R. Maturin, the Marquis de Sade, and
E.T.A. Hoffmann. The second phase of Romanticism in Germany was dominated by
Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, J.J. von Görres, and Joseph von Eichendorff.
By the 1820s Romanticism had broadened to embrace the literatures of
almost all of Europe. In this later, second, phase, the movement was less
universal in approach and concentrated more on exploring each nation’s
historical and cultural inheritance and on examining the passions and struggles
of exceptional individuals. A brief survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced
writers would have to include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and the
Brontë sisters in England; Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine,
Alfred de Musset, Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas (Dumas Père), and
Théophile Gautier in France; Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy;
Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in Russia; José de Espronceda and Ángel
de Saavedra in Spain; Adam Mickiewicz in Poland; and almost all of the
important writers in pre-Civil War America.
Visual arts
In the 1760s and ’70s a number of British artists at home and in Rome,
including James Barry, Henry Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and John Flaxman,
began to paint subjects that were at odds with the strict decorum and classical
historical and mythological subject matter of conventional figurative art.
These artists favoured themes that were bizarre, pathetic, or extravagantly
heroic, and they defined their images with tensely linear drawing and bold
contrasts of light and shade. William Blake, the other principal early Romantic
painter in England, evolved his own powerful and unique visionary images.
In the next generation the great genre of English Romantic landscape
painting emerged in the works of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. These
artists emphasized transient and dramatic effects of light, atmosphere, and
colour to portray a dynamic natural world capable of evoking awe and grandeur.
In France the chief early Romantic painters were Baron Antoine Gros, who
painted dramatic tableaus of contemporary incidents of the Napoleonic Wars, and
Théodore Géricault, whose depictions of individual heroism and suffering in The
Raft of the Medusa and in his portraits of the insane truly inaugurated the movement
around 1820. The greatest French Romantic painter was Eugène Delacroix, who is
notable for his free and expressive brushwork, his rich and sensuous use of
colour, his dynamic compositions, and his exotic and adventurous subject
matter, ranging from North African Arab life to revolutionary politics at home.
Paul Delaroche, Théodore Chassériau, and, occasionally, J.-A.-D. Ingres
represent the last, more academic phase of Romantic painting in France. In
Germany Romantic painting took on symbolic and allegorical overtones, as in the
works of P.O. Runge. Caspar David Friedrich, the greatest German Romantic
artist, painted eerily silent and stark landscapes that can induce in the
beholder a sense of mystery and religious awe.
Romanticism expressed itself in architecture primarily through
imitations of older architectural styles and through eccentric buildings known
as “follies.” Medieval Gothic architecture appealed to the Romantic imagination
in England and Germany, and this renewed interest led to the Gothic Revival.
Music
Musical Romanticism was marked by emphasis on originality and
individuality, personal emotional expression, and freedom and experimentation
of form. Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert bridged the Classical and
Romantic periods, for while their formal musical techniques were basically
Classical, their music’s intensely personal feeling and their use of
programmatic elements provided an important model for 19th-century Romantic
composers.
The possibilities for dramatic expressiveness in music were augmented
both by the expansion and perfection of the instrumental repertoire and by the
creation of new musical forms, such as the lied, nocturne, intermezzo,
capriccio, prelude, and mazurka. The Romantic spirit often found inspiration in
poetic texts, legends, and folk tales, and the linking of words and music
either programmatically or through such forms as the concert overture and
incidental music is another distinguishing feature of Romantic music. The
principal composers of the first phase of Romanticism were Hector Berlioz,
Frédéric Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, and Franz Liszt. These composers pushed
orchestral instruments to their limits of expressiveness, expanded the harmonic
vocabulary to exploit the full range of the chromatic scale, and explored the
linking of instrumentation and the human voice. The middle phase of musical
Romanticism is represented by such figures as Antonín Dvořák, Edvard Grieg, and
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Romantic efforts to express a particular nation’s distinctiveness
through music was manifested in the works of the Czechs Antonín Dvořák and
Bedřich Smetana and by various Russian, French, and Scandinavian composers.
Romantic opera in Germany began with the works of Carl Maria von Weber,
while Romantic opera in Italy was developed by the composers Gaetano Donizetti,
Vincenzo Bellini, and Gioachino Rossini. The Italian Romantic opera was brought
to the height of its development by Giuseppe Verdi. The Romantic opera in
Germany culminated in the works of Richard Wagner, who combined and integrated
such diverse strands of Romanticism as fervent nationalism; the cult of the
hero; exotic sets and costumes; expressive music; and the display of virtuosity
in orchestral and vocal settings. The final phase of musical Romanticism is
represented by such late 19th-century and early 20th-century composers as
Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Sir Edward Elgar, and Jean Sibelius.
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