Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [30]
Brahms took the quotes and aphorisms of “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein” largely from German Romantic writers. Carl Dahlhaus dates the musical part of Romanticism between Viennese landmarks: from Beethoven’s late works and Schubert’s early lieder around 1814, to the combination of Arnold Schoenberg’s “emancipation of the dissonance” and Richard Strauss’s backward-looking opera Der Rosenkavalier in 1914.4 Like all periods, the Romantic is a vast, cloudy, and self-contradictory affair, different in each country and in each medium, yet the zeitgeist was pervasive and powerful.
Literary and philosophical ideas defined the era. When Johannes read The Beautiful Magelone he unknowingly steeped himself in a founding element. Romanticism is named for the medieval prose narrative called the romance, one example of which is Schöne Magelone—not the real medieval but the Romantic-medieval, a fairy-tale world of gallant knights and minstrels and fair maidens and sorcerers. That in turn suggests one of the foundations of Romanticism, a turning away from the Classical notions of beauty and logic that dominated the eighteenth century, and an embrace of the boundless territory of creative fantasy. As a product of fantasy, art could conjure a world beyond this one, a place infinite and mysterious. And art was the only thing that could bring us to that territory. (Already a doctrine like that implies the course of Romanticism through the century: art merging with religion, eventually taking over religion, finally becoming religion, and artists priests in that religion.)
Through the course of the century the corollaries of these intuitions played out in myriad ways, but for all the contradictions some essentials are plain to see and hear. In the nineteenth century there rose a craving to shatter boundaries, leave old forms behind, throw over tired notions of beauty and taste. What we call the Classical period of the eighteenth century exalted the lucid, objective, unpretentious, universal, and finished. Its defining figures include the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment and the composers Haydn and Mozart. The Romantic period of the nineteenth century preferred the subjective and emotional, the characteristic and idiosyncratic and fantastic, the nationalistic, the grand and terrible, the quality of the sublime that passes human understanding. Its figures include the philosophers Herder and Schopenhauer, the writers Hoffmann, Novalis, Eichendorff, and Heine, the composers Schubert, Schumann, and Berlioz.
In Germany, the heart of the Romantic movement, Goethe spanned Classical and Romantic in literature as Beethoven did in music (music generally following in the wake of literature). Above all, Beethoven expressed for the first time in music the overwhelming force of an individual personality. His music seems to take each of us by the shoulders and shake us, speaking person to person, saying: I am telling you something of supreme importance. Still, during the nineteenth century, which saw the ascendancy of the middle class across Europe, all those cloudy intuitions were counterbalanced by a rejection of anarchy as such, and in practical terms by the pressures of the marketplace—artists had to live largely by selling their wares to the bourgeoisie. The marketplace and the holding back before the specter of anarchy served as brakes on the boundless creative imagination of the era.
The Classical era admired restraint, practicality, the practical present; the Romantics exalted the emotional, the idealistic, the mysteries of past and future. The eighteenth century exalted Greek architecture and formal gardens and ironic detachment; the nineteenth preferred savage forests, castles in ruins, and a different kind of irony. The philosopher Schlegel defined Romantic irony as the creator’s freedom to shatter his own illusions on the page, to break