Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [31]
As part of the Romantic fascination with the past came a new discipline in studying it. During the nineteenth century, history, musicology, and ethnology flourished. In the process the past became even more enchanted as more of it was revealed—still Romantic because distant and unattainable. Meanwhile, obsessed with history and with art and artists, the Romantic era raised creators to the status of pedestaled demigods. Now began the cult of Genius. Accordingly, the art of the past began to accumulate in books and museums and concert halls, piling up to burden the artists of the present.
If the age exalted both passion and scholarship, no less did it honor simplicity and directness in authentic forms, or forms masquerading as authentic. In his 1778–9 collection Stimmen der Völker (Voices of the People), the philosopher Herder declared folk poetry the wellspring of all poetry, a spontaneous and ingenuous outpouring of a people’s soul. Goethe sponsored the epochal collection of German folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). Assembled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in 1805–8, the Wunderhorn became a resource and inspiration for generations of poets and composers.
Yet much of the work in those collections turned out to be ersatz. A great deal of what passed for “folk” music and poetry had been written by professionals, sometimes working anonymously, sometimes under pseudonyms. After the Wunderhorn, creating verse and music in folk style became a commonplace. (One day Brahms would play that game himself, in some of his Hungarian Dances.) In the hands of Franz Schubert the German art song, called lied, became a sublimation of folk song into sophisticated forms. (Brahms was to make folk song the model for many of his lieder.) At the end of the century, Gustav Mahler achieved in his Wunderhorn settings an uncanny evocation of the atmosphere of folk poetry and fairy tale.
Another collection championed by Herder and used by countless composers from Schubert on, including Brahms, was Scottish poet James Macpherson’s “translations from the ancient Gaelic” of fragmentary epics by the bard Ossian—books in fact largely penned by Macpherson himself. This kind of pseudo-mythology, admitted or covert, is manifest in the vogue for building “ruined” castles from the ground up, and in the fake-medieval citadels erected by King Ludwig of Bavaria. Some young Romantics dressed in yellow waistcoats like Goethe’s young Werther and cultivated Romantic yearning, and sometimes followed their hero to the end of the story as suicides. Many Romantic touchstones (folk music and poetry, perhaps nationalism itself) proved like “Ossian” a delusion or a pose or a beautiful fraud.
The obsession with the past in both scholarly and imaginative dimensions, the myth of “authentic” folk art as the soul of a people and a nation, the exaltation of yearning and the supernatural—these hungers and hazy imaginings lay behind the language and metaphor of the age, and its characteristic blurring of boundaries in the arts. Novalis turned from philosophy and declared poetry the ultimate reality: “The more poetic, the more true.”5 Robert Schumann, torn in his youth between poetry and music, determined to compose poetic music and declared that novelist Jean Paul, “with a poetic companion-piece, can perhaps contribute more to the understanding of a symphony or fantasy by Beethoven” than a critic or theorist.6
Beside Schumann the rhapsodic critic and poetic musician, some Romantic composers turned more forcefully to words to inspire and justify their notes. In 1830, Hector Berlioz composed his Symphonie fantastique on a program of an