The Romantic Revolution Read online

  the most original genius I know. Nothing but energy, profusion and calm! The wildness of the warrior—and the feeling of supreme sublimity! … His spirits are storm wind, his ministers flames of fire! He goes upon the wings of the wind. His laughter is the mockery of hell and his love—a deadly lightning-flash.14

  Herder’s own assessment of Fuseli was “a genius like a mountain torrent.”15 Naturally, Fuseli venerated Rousseau, to the extent of writing a book about him, preceded by a frontispiece titled Justice and Liberty Hanged, While Voltaire Rides Monster Humanity and Jean-Jacques Rousseau Takes His Measure.16 A few hours in Rousseau’s company in 1776 made him “as happy as a man can be,” although he later fell out with him (in itself a very Rousseauian thing to do).17 Naturally, too, he venerated all the rough and ready rule-breaking geniuses of the past, especially Shakespeare: that is to say the Shakespeare of violence, the occult, and dreams, of Macbeth’s witches and Titania’s erotic fantasies.18 It was those irregular characteristics of Shakespeare that appalled the classicists that appealed to him most. As he put it in one of his aphorisms (many of which dealt with the nature of genius): “Shakespeare is to Sophocles as the flashes of lightning of a stormy night are to daylight.”19 The academic artists from around Europe he encountered in Rome he dismissed as “vermin.”20

  Fuseli went inside himself for inspiration. The brooding intensity of his many self-portraits suggests that what he found there was disturbing. The eroticism of The Nightmare recurs again and again, albeit often in less manic but more explicit forms. An “erotic group” of 1809, for example, shows a recumbent male being pleasured by three naked women, the first of whom is inserting his penis into the second while the third lowers her genitalia onto his face.21 Although it is not entirely clear whether or not the man is a willing participant, in another similar drawing, created twenty years earlier, his hands are firmly bound. Male oppression by predatory females was something of an obsession for Fuseli, the most explicit being a drawing simply entitled Female Cruelty, and the most memorable Brunhild Watching Gunther Suspended from the Ceiling. In other words, Fuseli believed that his dark fantasies were not something to be hidden, but a legitimate source of inspiration. As he himself wrote: “Dreams are one of the most unexplored regions of art.”22

  But one man’s dream can be another woman’s nightmare. Not everyone cared to follow Fuseli into the darker recesses of his troubled psyche (although of course his more explicit erotica were not exhibited during his lifetime). An anonymous critic writing in the Public Advertiser in 1786 confessed that he was unable to voice an opinion about the merits of Fuseli’s work: “Pictures are, or ought to be,” he observed, “a representation of natural objects, delineated with taste and precision,” whereas Fuseli “seems to be painting everything from fancy, which renders his work almost incomprehensible, and leaves no criterion to judge of them by, but the imagination.”23 Standing in front of The Mandrake: A Charm at the Royal Academy’s exhibition the previous year, Horace Walpole noted in the margin of his catalog: “Shockingly mad, madder than ever: quite mad.”24 Coming from the author of The Castle of Otranto, the phantasmagorian Gothic novel inspired by a bad dream, this verdict was a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

  Henry Fuseli, Symplegma of a Man with Three Women (1809–1810)

  Victoria and Albert Museum, London (AKG)

  In exposing his erotic side to public gaze, Fuseli was following in the footsteps of his mentor, Rousseau. In The Confessions, Rousseau recorded that sensuality had been “burning in my blood” for as long he could remember. In an excited passage recalling his adolescence, he wrote of “the restless tingling in my veins” and “my crazy fantasies, my wild fits of eroticism,” the result of being “ardent, lascivious, and precocious by nature.” Fortunately, “my sensibility, combined with my timidity and my romantic nature,” prevented what might otherwise have been a descent “into the most brutal sensuality.”25 The tension between a horror of immorality and a powerful sex drive found expression not only in his autobiography, but also in his literary creations. Describing the final stages of the composition of La Nouvelle Héloïse in 1757, he wrote: “The return of spring had redoubled my amorous delirium, and in my erotic transports, I had composed for the last parts of Julie several letters that betray the ecstatic state in which I wrote them.”26

  Such were the social pressures that few writers dared to be as frank as Rousseau. Nevertheless, the introspection that became one of romanticism’s most prominent defining features ensured that sex was never far away, no matter how much it might be dressed up in a respectable vocabulary. Indeed, it might be said that romanticism was institutionally erotic. When enlightened classicism held sway, there was plenty of erotica to be found, of course—more than ever before—but these were pornographic books, often aimed at the Church, as in the case of Diderot’s La Religieuse or the Marquis d’Argens’s Thérèse Philosophe, for example. Of quite a different order was a novel like Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde of 1799, which treated sex as a path to psychological understanding rather than physical gratification. Its publication unleashed a scandal because it was well-known that it depicted the adulterous relationship between the author and Dorothea Veit, the daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, with whom he lived for some years before “making an honest woman of her,” to employ a phrase that went out of fashion only recently. Even for a reading public brought up on Werther, the carnality of passages such as the following account of an erotic dream by Lucinde’s lover Julius was found shocking:

  A subtle fire flowed in my veins; what I dreamed of wasn’t just a kiss or the embrace of your arms; it wasn’t just a wish to break the tormenting thorn of yearning and cool the sweet flames in surrender; I didn’t yearn only for your lips or your eyes or your body. It was rather a romantic confusion of all these things, a wonderful mixture of the most various memories and yearnings.… Wit and rapture alternated between us and became the common pulse of our united life and we embraced each other with as much wantonness as religion. I begged you that for once you might give yourself completely over to frenzy, and I implored you to be insatiable.27

  To make matters worse—much worse—the illicit relationship between Julius and Lucinde did not make them guilt-ridden or unhappy or lead them to a sticky end; on the contrary, it brought them joyous fulfillment. Nor did Schlegel commend himself to conventional opinion with his aphorism “The rights of love are higher than the ceremonies of the altar.”28

  That the lovers embraced “with as much wantonness as religion” shocked orthodox Christians but did not seem a paradox to the romantics, or at least not to the Germans among them, for whom romanticism was “the continuation of religion by aesthetic means.”29 Those aesthetic means included an appeal to the carnal as much as to the spiritual. Indeed, the two could not be disentangled. As Schlegel’s friend Clemens Brentano put it in his novel Godwi, only the sensuous can be truly religious, adding, “Whoever has a natural inclination for sensual delight [Wollust] and does not indulge it, leads a truly depraved life. There is nothing more unchaste than a sensual girl who remains chaste.” Another member of the Jena group, Novalis, who habitually fused religious revelation with erotic experience, wrote that whoever touches a human body touches heaven.30 In his Hymns to the Night of 1799–1800, Novalis also provided the ultimate poetic expression of this heady mixture of darkness, death, and sex.

  THE WONDER-WORLD OF THE NIGHT

  The night and dreams became a romantic trope. Of the many illustrations that could be found, those of Caspar David Friedrich stand out for their originality and power. The visual evidence suggests that it was mainly at night, or at least in the twilight, that his creative spirit spread its wings, as the titles of some of his most evocative paintings reveal: Sea Piece by Moonlight, Seashore by Moonlight, Northern Sea in the Moonlight, Moonrise by the Sea, Moon Above the Riesengebirge, Greifswald in the Moonlight, Town at Moonrise, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, Two Men by the
Sea at Moonrise, Evening on the Baltic Sea, The Evening Star, not to mention the painting simply titled Night (which depicts a storm-tossed boat).31 The sun does not shine often in Friedrich’s paintings, and when it does, it is usually going down. Representative of his brooding, introspective œuvre is The Graveyard Gate of 1824. According to a Russian visitor to his studio, Friedrich explained that it depicts the nocturnal return of a bereaved couple to the cemetery where their child had been buried earlier that day. As they peer round the gate, they see the infant spirit ascending, to be greeted by the spirits of its ancestors, which hover around the other graves.32 No knowledge of this program is needed, however, to appreciate Friedrich’s extraordinary ability to convey a sense of looking from this world into the next, just as no belief in that next world is needed to appreciate the power of his creation. When he died in 1840 at the age of sixty-five, his reputation had long been in decline, and so it remained for the rest of the century. But the twentieth century witnessed his return to the pinnacle of romantic painters, as his vision took on a renewed appeal. And not just among artists: Standing in front of Friedrich’s Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon in Berlin, Samuel Beckett observed: “This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you know.”33

  Caspar David Friedrich, The Graveyard Gate (1824)

  Gemäeldegalerie, Neve Meister, Dresden (AKG)

  The change in attitude to the night that lay at the heart of romanticism was revealed with special clarity in music. In the eighteenth century, anything titled notturno or Nachtmusik was a cheerful piece to be performed usually by wind or brass ensemble as background for an al fresco summer festivity. Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik (“a little night music” or, more accurately, “a short notturno”) of 1787 is the best example in every sense, its opening bars being one of the most immediately recognizable pieces of music ever written, so overplayed in inappropriate surroundings—from airplanes to shopping malls—that it can now be heard but not listened to.

  Quite a different creature was the “nocturne” composed by John Field in 1812.34 This was the first time that the French word had been used and the first time it had been applied to a solo piano piece. Field was an Irish expatriate, born in Dublin in 1782, who had studied in London with (and been ruthlessly exploited by) Muzio Clementi and had moved to Russia in 1802. Field combined his skills as a virtuoso pianist and intimate knowledge of the Italian operatic repertoire so popular in his adopted country to create a truly distinctive sound.35 As any of the many recordings available reveal, this is music with an immediate, bewitching appeal. In an article written in 1859, no less a musician than Franz Liszt paid tribute: “The name ‘nocturne,’ which Field invented, suits these pieces wonderfully well. For their opening sounds at once transport us into those nocturnal hours when the soul is liberated from mundane cares and, turned into itself alone, is elevated into those mysterious regions of the star-spangled heavens.”36 He added that as a young man he had spent many happy hours lulled into a hallucinatory state by the “soft intoxication” of Field’s music.

  Many composers were to flatter Field by imitation. In his own twenty-one nocturnes, written between 1829 and 1847, Chopin found so much depth and variety as to anchor the genre firmly in the instrument’s repertoire. His Nocturne in E-flat, op. 9, no. 2, has become almost as familiar as Eine kleine Nachtmusik. Moreover, its main rival for pianistic ubiquity is probably Franz Liszt’s Nocturne no. 3, published in 1850 and better known as Liebestraum. In the course of the nineteenth century, countless other composers swelled the genre, including Schumann, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Skryabin, Grieg, Debussy, Fauré, Satie, d’Indy, and Poulenc.

  The night of Field’s or Chopin’s nocturnes is a gentle, melancholy, wistful, yearning, languorous sort of time, in short a time for romance—indeed, initially Field called the first of his nocturnes a “romance.”37 The pace is invariably gentle, with most of the pieces marked “molto moderato,” “andante,” or “lento.” Even if a cloud does occasionally pass across the moon, it always seems to be spring or summer. It is music that is perfect for accompanying—or being accompanied by—the nocturnal poems so popular with the French romantics, with Alfred de Musset, for example, part of whose “May Night” has the Muse saying:

  Poet, take up your lute; the night, above the lawn,

  Rocks the gentle breeze in its fragrant veil.

  The rose, still virgin, closes jealously

  On the pearly hornet, intoxicated as it dies.

  Listen! All is silent; think of your beloved.

  The evening, under the lime trees,

  The glow of sunset leaves a sweeter farewell in the dark foliage.

  This evening, all will blossom; immortal nature

  Is filled with scents, with love and murmuring,

  Like the blissful bed of two young newlyweds.

  But the night could also be a time of pain, sorrow, and suffering, a time when the weather turns cold and stormy. This was how Franz Schubert saw it in Winter Journey, composed in the penultimate year of his short life. The twenty-four verses that make up the complete work were written by Wilhelm Müller, a Prussian poet whom Schubert never met and who died in the same year (1827). Whatever posterity may have made of the rest of his œuvre, Müller has been granted immortality by providing Schubert with the texts for his two greatest song cycles (the other being Die schöne Müllerin) and deserves appropriate credit. The desperate journey his unnamed hero makes across a frozen landscape, fleeing from a love that was not just unrequited and unconsummated but also unworthy, takes place mainly at night. The linden tree on which he had once carved tokens of his love he now passes in the dead of night. The bright flowers in warm spring sunshine he sees only in a dream when seeking refuge in a charcoal burner’s hovel. The lights he sees in the darkness turn out to be will-o’-the-wisps. As he passes through sleeping villages, the dogs bark and rattle their chains. The signposts to towns he ignores, preferring deserted tracks, for he knows that the road he has to travel leads to a place from which no one returns. Just before the end, in a song titled “Courage,” he interrupts the unrelieved misery of his plight with a defiantly cheerful determination to go off into the world no matter what the wind and weather, for if there are no Gods to be found on earth, he exclaims, at least he himself can be one. The exaltation does not last. In the last verse he finds himself outside a village, his only company an old beggar whose bare feet and fingers are frozen and whose begging-bowl is empty.

  Although Schubert was suffering a long and agonizing death from syphilis, his creative powers were flourishing as never before. The thirty-odd works of his last eighteen months included the Piano Trios in B-flat Major (D898) and E-flat Major (D929), the String Quintet in C Major (D956), the songs posthumously published as Schwanengesang (D957), three piano sonatas (D958–60), and one of his most ambitious (and greatest) songs, “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” [“The Shepherd on the Rock”] (D965). Even in this company, the music he composed for Winterreise stands out for its emotional intensity. Whether sung by a tenor (Ian Bostridge), baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) or even mezzo-soprano (Brigitte Fassbaender), the seventy-odd minutes provide the best possible musical response to Caspar David Friedrich’s injunction to the artist to find what lies inside himself and then “bring to the light of day what you have seen in the darkness, so that it can work on others, from the outside inwards.” Schubert made clear himself that Müller’s poems had affected him deeply. His old friend Josef von Spaun recorded:

  One day he said to me “Come to Schober’s today, I will sing you a cycle of awe-inspiring songs. I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have affected me more than has been the case with any other songs.” So, in a voice wrought with emotion, he sang the whole of the “Winterreise” through to us. We were quite dumbfounded by the gloomy mood of these songs and Schober said he had only liked one song, “Der Lindenbaum” [“The Linden-tree”]. To which Schubert only said, “I like these songs more than all the others and you
will get to like them too”; he was right, soon we were enthusiastic over the effect of these melancholy songs.… More beautiful German songs probably do not exist and they were his real swan-song.38 In 1815 Müller had written in his diary: “I can neither play nor sing, yet when I write verses, I sing and play after all. If I could produce the melodies, my songs would be more pleasing than they are now. But courage! perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me.”39

  THE SLEEP OF REASON

  Field’s night was soothingly warm, Schubert’s night was terrifyingly cold. But what was depicted by Goya in his justly celebrated etching El sueño de la razón produce monstrous of 1799? He presents an artist—the first of the three versions makes it clear that it is Goya himself—who has fallen asleep at his desk.40 From behind him a flock of owls and bats fly out. One owl lands on his back, another appears to offer him a chalk holder. At his left shoulder crouches a black cat; on the floor at the right a lynx stares at him impassively. Written on the side of the desk is the work’s title. It is necessary to give the Spanish title, because sueño can mean either “sleep” or “dream.” This is not pedantry. The most popular reading translates it as The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters and interprets it “not as a manifesto of a new dark art glorifying unfettered phantasy [sic], but as a warning which shows what happens to an artist who lets himself be overcome by his own imagination” (George Levitine).41 Goya himself lent credence to this view of his intentions by commenting on the second version: “The author dreaming. His only purpose is to banish harmful ideas commonly believed, and with this work of Caprichos to perpetuate the solid testimony of truth.” This was at a time when he intended The Sleep of Reason to serve as the frontispiece for the album of etchings called Caprichos [fantasies, plays of the imagination].