The Romantic Revolution Read online

  Rossini could reach his audience only at one remove, through the medium of the opera singers, who drew off their own share of the applause. The musician who showed the way to a direct relationship with the public was his fellow countryman and near contemporary Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840). It was he who showed what a musician blessed with charisma could achieve. It was not just his technical skill, although everyone agreed that it was phenomenal. He also attracted—and carefully cultivated—an aura of mystery, danger, even diabolism. That his career had taken off so late was thought to be especially suggestive. It was rumored that he had perfected his technique while serving twenty years in prison for murdering his mistress—indeed, that his G-string was made from a section of her intestine.105 Others went further: No one could play so well without supernatural assistance, it was maintained, so it was variously reported that Paganini had captured the Devil in his sound box or that he had made a Faustian pact with the Devil, sacrificing his soul in return for matchless skill. It was further alleged that he never allowed anyone to see him without footwear, lest his cloven hoof should become visible. In Vienna, some members of the audience claimed to have seen the Devil directing his bow, thus allowing him to play at superhuman speed.106 The link with Napoleon was also often made. For example, a member of the orchestra performing his second violin concerto in Paris wrote on the score:

  In our present century nature wished

  To demonstrate her infinite power;

  To amaze the world she created two men:

  Bonaparte and Paganini!107

  Paganini blazed across the musical sky in a career that was as intense as it was brief, his burned-out shell quickly falling back to earth. But long before he died in 1840, a far brighter and much more durable star had risen. This was Franz Liszt, as phenomenally gifted a pianist as Paganini was a violinist. In 1834 Mendelssohn came away from Erard’s piano showroom in Paris shaking his head and proclaiming that he had just witnessed a miracle, for his fiendishly demanding new piano concerto had just been played sight unseen by Liszt with great brilliance and without error.108 As with Paganini, flawless technique was only the start. Liszt also had the ability to inspire in his listeners the belief that he was superhuman, with the capacity to transport them to a level of aesthetic experience previously undreamed of. From the rich repertoire of comments on his charisma, the following, from Hans Christian Andersen, must suffice: “When Liszt entered the saloon, it was as if an electric shock passed through it.… The whole of Liszt’s exterior and movements reveal one of those persons we remark for their peculiarities alone; the Divine hand has placed a mark on them which makes them observable among thousands.”109

  The fame he achieved was commensurate, far greater than anything enjoyed by any previous creative artist. Wherever Liszt went—and his tours took him all over Europe, from Galway to Ukraine—the crowned heads and their courtiers clamored to meet him, to flatter him, and to give him decorations. When he left Berlin in 1842, he did so in a carriage pulled by six white horses, accompanied by a procession of thirty other coaches and an honor guard of students, as King Frederick William IV and his queen waved goodbye from the royal palace. As the music critic Ludwig Rellstab put it, he left “not like a king, but as a king.”110 Perhaps Liszt’s greatest achievement was to complete the transition of musician from servant to master. This was very well put by his biographer, Alan Walker, when he wrote: “Beethoven, by dint of his unique genius and his uncompromising nature, had forced the Viennese aristocracy at least to regard him as their equal. But it was left to Liszt to foster the view that an artist is a superior being, because divinely gifted, and the rest of mankind, of whatever social class, owed him respect and even homage.”111

  As with Paganini, part and parcel of his charisma was his sex appeal. An important part of his titanic image was his well-deserved reputation as a lady-killer, with a preference for ladies of the highest society. Among his early conquests was Countess Adèle Laprunarède, who later became the Duchesse de Fleury, and Countess Pauline Plater. When the latter was asked to rank the three great pianists who had performed in her salon—Hiller, Chopin, and Liszt—she replied that Hiller would make the best friend, Chopin the best husband, and Liszt the best lover. The relative merits of their piano playing do not seem to have been her main concern.112

  Perhaps the only contemporary who could compete with Liszt in terms of charisma was Byron, for whom Liszt himself entertained “an unbelievable passion.”113 Unlike Byron, Liszt was exclusively (and very actively) heterosexual, but that did not prevent him from enthusing again and again about his “beautiful and lasting passion” for the poet.114 The comment of Lady Blessington to Liszt that “[you] resemble Bonaparte and Lord Byron!!!” sent him into a paroxysm of delight.115 Byron would also have been thrilled by such a compliment, for his own identification with Napoleon was both intense and long-lasting. Even as a schoolboy at Harrow, he had treasured a bust of his hero, defiantly disregarding the war that was currently raging.116 The reverse association was often made. In 1831, seven years after the death of Byron and ten years after the death of Napoleon, Macaulay wrote: “Two men have died within our recollection, who at a time of life at which few people have completed their education, had raised themselves, each in his own department, to the height of glory. One of them died at Longwood, the other at Missolonghi.”117 Napoleon and Beethoven—Napoleon and Rossini—Napoleon and Paganini—Napoleon and Liszt—Napoleon and Byron—one contemporary after another made the identification between military conqueror and cultural hero. The French Revolution had cleared the way for the former, the romantic revolution for the latter.

  The adulation lavished on these heroes revealed that the dual revolution had given rise to a new kind of relationship with their public. Their earlier equivalents had had admirers, but they had fans—not for nothing does the word derive from “fanatic.” Also significant was the growing importance of sex appeal. The women (and sometimes men, too) who threw themselves at Paganini, Liszt, and Byron were demonstrating that, in the public sphere, an intimate relationship between artist and audience—however virtual it might be—was both possible and necessary. It was encouraged by the technological advances that facilitated the reproduction of images, especially the invention of lithography by the Bavarian Alois Senefelder in 1796. No one seems to have cared much what Mozart looked like, but every music lover wanted a picture of Beethoven, the first musician to become a cult, a legend in his own lifetime.

  The generation of mass enthusiasm could also open the way to a wider sphere of influence. Although Beethoven confined his strongly held opinions to the private sphere, many other romantic heroes used their charismatic appeal to address the public on topical issues. With this, we move from the interior world of the individual artist to the exterior dimension of social and political change, which will be the subject of the next chapter.

  3

  LANGUAGE, HISTORY,

  AND MYTH

  THE LANGUAGE OF THE PEOPLE

  Toward the end of the last letter he writes to his beloved Lotte before shooting himself, Goethe’s Werther begins to lapse into incoherence in a delirious passage that begins: “I am not dreaming, I am in no delusion! When nearing the grave my inner light increases.”1 Always out of joint with the world he had to endure, poor Werther had sought comfort in introspection. As he put it in one of his first letters to his friend Wilhelm: “I return into myself and find a world!” Alas, his interior world proved to be a lonely place—“a world of groping and vague desires rather than one of clear delineation and active force.”2 His predicament was shared by many romantics. Peeling away layer upon layer of inherited rules and traditions both emancipated and isolated the artist. The pure ego was free but frail.

  Caspar David Friedrich was not the only introverted genius to succumb to depression and to attempt suicide.3 One who succeeded in taking his own life was the poet Thomas Chatterton (1752–70), whose untimely end (he was only seventeen) was mythologized by, among other
s, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth (who called him “the marvellous boy, the sleepless soul that perished in his pride”), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. John Keats dedicated Endymion (1818) to him and also wrote an ode in his honor:

  O CHATTERTON! how very sad thy fate!

  Dear child of sorrow—son of misery!

  How soon the film of death obscur’d that eye,

  Whence Genius mildly flash’d, and high debate.

  His posthumous fame as a romantic avant la lettre also crossed the Channel. Alfred de Vigny’s drama Chatterton (1835) contrasted the sensitive, aesthete hero with the brutally philistine materialists John Bell, a manufacturer, and Lord Beckford, a merchant prince. As if the suicide of a young poet in a garret were not romantic enough, de Vigny invented a relationship between Chatterton and Mrs. Bell, thus allowing him to end the play with a Liebestod as the two expired together. Rarely performed today, it nevertheless has good claims to be regarded as “the most intelligent and, in the opinion of many critics, the finest work of the French Romantic theatre.”4

  Rescue from isolation could be achieved by connecting the self to a greater entity, with the nation in pole position for most romantics. Two years before he wrote The Sufferings of Young Werther, Goethe had pointed the way in his essay “Concerning German Architecture,” inspired by the cathedral at Strasbourg. It was there that he had his “German experience” in March 1770 at the age of twenty-one.5 No place could have been better suited to awaken his sense of nationality. A former Free Imperial City and early center of the Lutheran Reformation, it had been seized by Louis XIV in 1681 and formally incorporated into France at the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. So it was on German-speaking but French-ruled soil that Goethe experienced a cultural conversion experience. In his autobiography, Poetry and Truth, published in 1811, he recalled his enthusiastic response to this Gothic masterpiece, which he also claimed for Germany.6

  Henry Wallis, The Death of Chatterton (1858)

  Tate Gallery, London (Bridgeman Art Library)

  The essay in which Goethe had proclaimed his conversion was published in 1773 in a collection titled On the German Character and German Art [Von deutscher Art und Kunst], edited by his friend Johann Gottfried Herder, whom he had first met three years earlier. This slim volume has been hailed as “the manifesto or charter of the Sturm und Drang, indeed one might go further than this and claim it as the true starting point of the German Romantic movement.”7 In fact, as good a case could be made for Herder’s treatise On the Origin of Language, written in 1770 but not published until 1772, for it was his emphasis on the importance of language that was to be at the heart of the cultural and political revolution that followed. Or rather one should say: the importance of each specific national language. For human beings, Herder argued, the vital link between part and whole, between one individual and another, between individual and community, between humans and the natural world, is language, the most important single concept in his intellectual system. Without language there can be no knowledge, no self-consciousness, no awareness of others, no social existence, no history. Language was not the direct creation of God; there had been no Tower of Babel. Nor was it the invention of human reason, rather its precondition, both the most natural and most necessary human function. The earliest language derived from the senses, and even when abstractions and concepts emerged, they were underpinned by sensual impressions and reactions.8 Of all the conditions and forces that underpinned a community, language was the most fundamental: “Each nation speaks in the manner it thinks and thinks in the manner it speaks.… We cannot think without words.”9

  Language was also the force that created what Herder saw as the fundamental unit of human existence—the Volk. Of all German words difficult to translate into English, this is one of the most intractable. “People” seems the most obvious choice, but Volk means much more than just an aggregate of individuals (for which the German equivalent is Leute). It also denotes a community bound by ethnic and cultural ties, as in “the German people,” together with a populist implication, as in “the common people.” For that reason, the Oxford-Duden German Dictionary offers “nation” as one possible translation of Volk. The Volk constitutes the nation, while the nation is of the people (völkisch). In the Volk’s language are expressed all the environmental conditions in which it developed: “Climate, water and air, food and drink, they all affect language.… Viewed in this way, language is indeed a magnificent treasure store, a collection of thoughts and activities of the mind of the most diverse nature.”10 It was also a character that was unique, for “every language bears the stamp of the mind and character of a national group.”11

  This populist view of language was to have a long and influential history. For example, in his “Advertisement” for his enormously successful novel The Antiquary, published in 1816, Walter Scott wrote that he had chosen his principal characters from the common people, because

  I agree with my friend Wordsworth, that they seldom fail to express themselves in the strongest and most powerful language. This is, I think, peculiarly the case with the peasantry of my own country, a class with whom I have long been familiar. The antique force and simplicity of their language, often tinctured with the Oriental eloquence of Scripture, in the mouths of those of an elevated understanding, give pathos to their grief, and dignity to their resentment.12

  Indeed, Scott was the first significant novelist to make any attempt to use the vernacular.13

  Binding together individual and group was the notion of self-determination. Summing up both the aesthetics and ethics of Sturm und Drang, Herder wrote to his fiancée, Caroline Flachsland, in 1773: “All our actions should be self-determined, in accordance with our innermost character—we must be true to ourselves.”14 And so should nations: “The best culture of a nationality … cannot be forced by a foreign language. It thrives only on the native soil of nationality and in the language which the nationality inherited and which continues to transmit itself.”15 Being true to oneself meant being true to one’s nation, and vice versa. Introspective subjectivism did not need to result in the sort of existential loneliness that afflicted Werther but could and should lead to a creative life within the national community.

  Herder was a cultural pluralist, firmly believing that every culture had its own value, a value moreover to be understood on its own terms, from the inside out, and not judged according to some allegedly objective scale of values.16 To paraphrase Ranke’s celebrated dictum about every age, every culture for Herder was immediate to God. That did not inhibit him from advancing the special claims of his own language to be especially “original,” closest to the ancient Greeks and “more perfect for philosophy than any other of the living languages.”17 In part, this pride can be explained by his hostility to the triumphalism of French speakers. In the course of the long reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), a combination of military power and cultural imperialism propelled French from just one of several competing languages to the acknowledged medium for civilized discourse throughout Europe. A symbolic moment came in the year before the Sun King’s death, when for the first time a Holy Roman Emperor (Charles VI) agreed to sign an international treaty (Rastadt) drafted in French rather than Latin.18 The Marquis de Dangeau boasted to the Académie française: “All our works contribute to the embellishment of our language and help to make it known to foreigners. The wonders achieved by the King have made the French language as familiar to our neighbours as their own vernacular, indeed the events of these past few years have broadcast it over all the oceans of the globe, making it as essential to the New World as to the Old.”19

  Along with the French language went French culture in all its various forms. In 1689 an anonymous German writer had lamented his compatriots’ obsession with “French language, French clothes, French food, French furniture, French dances, French music, the French pox … perhaps there is also a French death! Hardly have the children emerged from their mothers’ wombs than people think of giving them a French teacher.
… To please the girls, even if one is ugly and deformed, one must wear French clothes.”20 This trend accelerated during the next half century or so. Frederick the Great of Prussia, a Francophone Francophile who used the German language only to shout at his soldiers, abuse his servants, and instruct his officials, recorded that every German with social pretensions felt obliged to travel to Versailles and ape French fashions: “French taste has ruled our kitchens, our furniture, our clothes and all those knick-knacks which are so at the mercy of the tyranny of fashion. Carried to excess, this passion degenerated into a frenzy; women, who are often prey to exaggeration, pushed it to the point of extravagance.”21

  This kind of modish imitation was as far removed from individual and national self-determination as it was possible to imagine and provoked furious denunciations from Herder. In 1768, when he was only twenty-five, a journey to France had turned him into a Francophobe nationalist. From Nantes, where he spent several months, he wrote to his friend and mentor Hamann: “I am now in Nantes where I am getting to know the French language, French habits and the French way of thinking—getting to know but not getting to embrace, for the closer my acquaintance with them is, the greater my sense of alienation becomes.”22 Paris he detested as a place “festooned with luxury, vanity and French nothingness,” a decadent den of vice.23 In a poem “To the Germans,” he appealed to his fellow countrymen: