The Romantic Revolution Read online

  Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

  And thin partitions do their bounds divide.75

  Yet paradoxically, the emphasis on reason engendered by the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment did not encourage a sympathetic attitude to mental abnormality. On the one hand, lunatics were no longer thought to be possessed by demons, but, on the other, they were marginalized as animals bereft of man’s most precious asset: his rational faculty. Even as revisionist a historian as Roy Porter, at pains to rescue the age of the Enlightenment from its image as a “dark age” for the insane, has to concede that “those horror stories of lunatics chained in underground dungeons in France, whipped in Germany, and jeered by ogling sightseers in London’s Bedlam—all are true. Manacled, naked, foul, sleeping on straw in overcrowded and feculent conditions, the mad were dehumanised.”76

  Porter also recognized that “the romantic movement renewed interest in the mad genius that had been cultivated by Renaissance Platonism but dampened by the age of reason.”77 In their different ways, Goethe’s suicidal Werther, Wordsworth’s “Idiot Boy,” Southey’s “Idiot,” Blakes’s Nebuchadnezzar, Fuseli’s Crazy Kate, Byron’s “Lament of Tasso,” Delacroix’s Portrait of Tasso—and the many other depictions of dementia with which the period abounded—testified to the appeal of madness. Introspection, combined with a belief in the paramountcy of the individual, prompted many romantics not just to take an interest in insanity, but also to be sympathetic to those afflicted. The disturbing visions inside their own psyches drew both Fuseli and Goya to depictions of asylums, for example “drawn from memory after a real scene in the Hospital of S. Spirito at Rome” and The Madhouse at Saragossa, respectively.78 A particularly eloquent contrast is provided by the Bedlam scene from Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress of 1735 and Théodore Géricault’s five studies of deranged people almost a century later. The former displays Tom Rakewell in the process of being manacled, as around him cavort such stock types as the religious fanatic, the mad mathematician, the mad musician, and the naked man who thinks he is king, as curious members of the public look on. Géricault, on the other hand, was commissioned to paint the portraits by Dr. Étienne-Jean Georget, one of the pioneers of psychiatric care at the Salpêtrière in Paris. The results were as far removed from Hogarth’s freak show as could be imagined, but all the more disturbing.79

  For some romantics, compassionate understanding could be elevated into something approaching respect or even envy. The insane, they believed, had found a way of getting back to a Rousseauian state of nature by liberating themselves from a repressive civilization that dictated normality. As the creations of Cowper, Hölderlin, Clare, Blake, Kleist, Dadd, Smart, Brentano, or Schumann suggested, access to mystical insights into higher forms of truth awaited those who could let their spirits range uninhibited by social constraints.80 William Blake wrote in the margin of his copy of J. G. Spurzheim’s Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity (1817): “Cowper came to me and said: ‘O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest until I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all—over all of us—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon, Newton and Locke.’ ”81 Those who found their way back to what passed for normality sometimes looked back on their delirium with nostalgia—Charles Lamb, for example, who told his friend Coleridge: “I look back on it at times with a gloomy kind of Envy. For while it lasted I had many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad. All now seems to me vapid; comparatively so.”82 Gérard de Nerval was more terse: “I do not know why they call it illness—I never felt better.”83

  Théodore Géricault, Portrait of a Kleptomaniac (c. 1822)

  Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent (Bridgeman Art Library)

  Of all the romantic depictions of madness, the most popular and enduring were those delivered on the operatic stage, not least because they combined the visual and the poetic with the musical. As Ellen Rosand has observed: “If madness is a peculiarly operatic condition because it licenses the suspension of verisimilitude, so opera itself can be said to be generically mad, for its double language provides a perfect model for the splitting or fragmentation of character.”84 Although not unknown in the past—both Monteverdi and Cavalli had composed operas with mad scenes—there was a veritable flood of them during the first half of the nineteenth century: in Bellini’s Il pirata, La sonnambula, and I puritani; Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Lucia di Lammermoor, Torquato Tasso, Maria Padilla, and Linda di Chamounix; Verdi’s Nabucco and Macbeth; Meyerbeer’s L’étoile du nord and Dinorah; and Thomas’s Hamlet, just to mention the more celebrated.85 They were also among the most popular, reaching a genuinely mass audience right across Europe, as Italian romantic operas swept the board during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The best of them, moreover, have never been out of the repertoire since—indeed, have never been as accessible as they are today. Thanks to technological advances, it is possible to experience, for example, Joan Sutherland’s classic performance of the mad scene in act 3 of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in 1982—and also the ecstatic response of the audience, whose cheering, shouting, and stamping brought the performance to a standstill for several minutes.86

  In depicting Lucia’s collapse into homicidal insanity, Donizetti was able to draw on his own experiences. By the time he came to compose the music in 1835, he had been suffering from the terrible symptoms of syphilis for many years, though it did not kill him until 1848. As two specialists who have examined his medical history conclude, he was able to portray “in musical, physical, psychological, biological and dramatic terms the devastating effects of psychosis on a human being.”87 Unhappily, he was not alone in suffering from this terrible disease. Among other musicians to be afflicted were Schubert, Paganini, Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and Frederick Delius.

  Madness was sung, madness was acted, and madness was also danced, most influentially in Giselle, first performed in Paris in 1841. With a libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy Marquis de Saint-Georges and Théophile Gautier based on a poem by Heinrich Heine, music by Adolphe Adam, and choreography by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, it can claim to be the archetypal romantic ballet. Set in the Rhineland, it tells the story of a peasant girl who goes mad and dies when she discovers that her lover is an aristocrat in disguise already betrothed to a princess. In the second act she returns from the dead to redeem her faithless lover by her loving forgiveness. Of all the performing arts, it was ballet that was most durably affected by the changes brought by romanticism. As Marion Kant has written: “Romanticism gave dance its particular and enduring look.”88

  ROMANTIC HEROES AND HEROINES

  Introspection took the romantics to some of the darker recesses of the human psyche. It also led them to populate their creations with very different kinds of heroes and heroines. Among the many fictional representatives of the Enlightenment available, perhaps the most appropriate choice would be Robinson Crusoe, on account of his immense and enduring popularity. Born into the “middle state” of society, which, his father told him, was the best place to be in terms of happiness, Crusoe embarked on a career in commerce. Establishing himself as a merchant in Brazil, he used the 400 percent profit he realized on his first consignment of English goods to buy a black slave and to hire a white servant. Shipwrecked on his desert island, Crusoe at once set about making the best of it: “As reason is the substance and original of mathematics, so by stating and squaring every thing by reason, and by making the most rational judgment of things, every man may be in time master of every mechanick art.” He soon found himself neglecting worship on Sundays for the good reason that he lost count of the days. When he found barley suddenly starting to grow, he believed a miracle had occurred and turned to God—but rather lost his enthusiasm on discovering that it came from the chick
en feed he had thrown out. Although his first instinct on discovering cannibals was to kill them, more mature reflection prompted him “to leave them to the justice of God, who is the governour of nations, and knows how by national punishments to make a just retribution for national offences.” Man Friday he converted to Protestant Christianity, but without coercion; Friday’s father was allowed to go on worshipping his pagan gods; and a Spaniard whom they liberated was allowed to remain a Catholic. Crusoe concluded proudly: “I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions.”

  No wonder this enterprising, rational, tolerant, well-balanced man survived to return home to England and live happily ever after. His world was very far removed from that of the two archetypal heroes created by Goethe in 1773–74. The first appeared in the eponymous drama Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand. Set at the time of the Lutheran Reformation, it chronicles the decline and fall of a knight for whom the times are seriously out of joint. Confronted by ambitious princes, greedy townspeople, and revolting peasants, not to mention a scheming femme fatale, his virtues of honesty, integrity, and loyalty prove hopelessly inadequate. As he laments to his wife, they live in degenerate times when the rule of deceit has begun. Outmaneuvered and then betrayed, he dies gasping “Liberty!”89

  Liberty is the drama’s central theme. In the most important single line of the play, the antihero, Adelbert von Weislingen, proclaims: “One thing is for certain: happy and great alone is the man who needs neither to command nor to obey to amount to something!”90 Any kind of authority that was not self-generated but was imposed from outside was to be rejected. Rules were out. For this reason, if no other, Goethe turned his back on classical drama with demonstrative radicalism. The unities of time, place, and action—the defining features of the dominant French model—were not so much abandoned as turned on their head. The action sprawls over several months, there are dozens of scene changes, and there are at least two main plots. The reaction of contemporaries brought up in the classical tradition was outraged. In a pamphlet titled Concerning German Literature; the faults of which it can be accused; the causes of the same and the means of rectifying them, Frederick the Great derided Götz as “an abominable imitation of those bad English plays,” by which he meant the “ludicrous farces” of Shakespeare.91

  A year later, in 1774, Goethe created another and very different kind of hero in The Sufferings of Young Werther. Already the leading German poet and playwright of his generation, he now added the novel to the genres he had conquered. With its contemporary setting and epistolary form, Werther had all the apparent immediacy and spontaneity of a private correspondence. Into that realist frame, however, Goethe placed a hero whose morbid hypersensitivity could find release only in language of intense passion. Only about forty thousand words long, it packed an intense punch. The plot is quickly recounted: Werther, a young man of middle-class but respectable station, meets and falls in love with Lotte, who returns his feelings but has already committed herself to another. Unable to come to terms with his frustrated passion, Werther shoots himself.

  The Sufferings of Young Werther evoked a response like few novels before or since. The challenge it thrust in the face of cultural convention was so fierce that indifference was impossible. On the right, clerical conservatives found its glamorization of suicide repugnant; on the left, enlightened progressives found its disparagement of reason equally offensive.92 But the book’s admirers drowned the criticism with paeans of emotional praise worthy of Werther himself. The poet, critic, and journalist Christian Daniel Schubart told his readers: “Here I sit, my heart melting, my breast pounding, my eyes weeping tears of ecstatic pain, and do I need to tell you, dear reader, that I have been reading The Sufferings of Young Werther by my beloved Goethe? Or should I rather say that I have been devouring it?”93 Within a year there were eleven editions in print, most of them pirated; by 1790 there were thirty. Quickly translated into French and English, by the end of the century it was available in almost every European language.94 The novel also created a market for Werther memorabilia such as images, clothes, and all kinds of artifacts, which entrepreneurs were quick to supply. Top of the range were the exquisite dinner services and other china items decorated with characters and scenes from the novel produced by the Royal Saxon porcelain works at Meissen.95

  Goethe’s two types of hero—the anarchic man of action and the melancholy, hypersensitive intellectual—were to recur again and again in every genre. And so was a third kind of hero—the creator himself. In Nick Dear’s play for television Eroica, first transmitted by the BBC in 2003, the first rehearsal of Beethoven’s Third Symphony in the Lobkowitz Palace in Vienna in 1804 is depicted. Halfway through, the aged Joseph Haydn appears. At the end, he is asked for his opinion of the work and replies: “Very long, very tiring,” to which Princess Lobkowitz objects, “Unusual, though, wasn’t it?” Haydn agrees, adding: “Unusual—he’s done something no other composer has attempted. He’s placed himself at the centre of his work. He’s given us a glimpse into his soul—I expect that’s why it’s so noisy. But it is quite, quite new—the artist as hero—quite new. Everything is different from today.”96

  This is fictional, but it is not wrong. Beethoven did make himself the hero of his works, by taking the expressive aesthetic to a new level. In 1802, the year before he began composition of the Eroica, he had written a will, leaving everything to his two brothers. This was not a legal document but an impassioned cri de cœur, railing against the cruel stroke of fate that was depriving him of his hearing. Only his art, he wrote, and the need to express everything that was inside him, had restrained him from taking his own life. He ended with an anguished plea: “Oh Providence, vouchsafe me at least one single day to me—When, oh when, oh Divine Godhead—shall I once feel it in the Temple of Nature and among mankind? Never? No, that would be too hard.”97 Discovered among his papers after his death and promptly published, this “Heiligenstadt Testament,” named after the village outside Vienna where he had written it, became one of the seminal documents of romanticism. Beethoven both personified and advanced the romantic revolution. He succeeded in combining both types of Goethe’s hero—both Götz and Werther dwelled within his breast. In music he was the true mold breaker, establishing the model of the composer as the angry, unhappy, original, uncompromising genius, standing above ordinary mortals and with a direct line to the Almighty. Already during his lifetime a flood of anecdotes was in circulation in the public prints, projecting “the composite picture of the archetype martyr to art, the new kind of secular saint who was taking over from the old Christian calendars as a focus of public veneration.”98

  It was not just the revolutionary originality of his music and his phenomenal pianistic skills that forced contemporaries to view Beethoven as so much more than a musician. It was also his behavior, his way of life, his clothes, even—one might almost say especially—his appearance. The number of people who actually experienced Beethoven at first hand was very small, but his image was broadcast far and wide. He was the first musician to become the center of a cult, a legend in his own lifetime.

  In his review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, published in two installments in the General Musical Review of Leipzig in 1810, E. T. A. Hoffmann, himself a gifted composer, wrote:

  Beethoven’s music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism. Beethoven is a purely romantic, and therefore truly musical, composer. Beethoven bears the romanticism of music which he expresses with such originality and authority in his works, in the depths of his spirit. The reviewer has never felt this more acutely than in the present symphony. It unfolds Beethoven’s romanticism, rising in a climax right to the end, more than any other of his works, and irresistibly sweeps the listener into the wonderful spirit-realm of the infinite.99

  In a later essay on Beethoven’s instrumental music, Hoffmann offered a more general observation that became his most celebrated
aphorism: “Music is the most romantic of all the arts, one might almost say the only one that is genuinely romantic, since its only subject-matter is infinity.”100 With all the other arts, the mediation of the intellect was required for perception; music alone could gain immediate entry to the psyche: “Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible.”101

  In short, Beethoven was the perfect hero for his time. Born in 1770, he reached maturity just as the French Revolution was turning the world upside down. Like his almost exact contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte (born in 1769), he tore up the rule book and proved by example that careers really could be open to talents. Both men demonstrated that although the Revolution had failed to establish the reign of liberty, it did create a culture in which charisma was at a premium. In the recent past, the words charisma and charismatic have been so debased by overusage and careless application to any public figure that catches media attention as to become little more than synonyms for glamour and glamorous. It is therefore necessary to remind ourselves that originally it meant simply “gift from God.” Its emergence as the crucial legitimator in politics and culture was a development of long standing, deriving from the inexorable expansion of the public sphere during the past century or so; but it was only after 1789 that it was able to thrust aside such rival claimants as tradition and contract. With the old regime being shaken until its teeth rattled, politics and culture combined to create a space in which genius could flourish as never before.102

  This comparison between emperor and musician is less fanciful than it might sound, if only because it was often made by contemporaries. Nor was it confined to Beethoven. In 1824 Stendhal published his Life of Rossini, which begins: “Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world; and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta, his name is constantly on every tongue. The fame of this hero knows no bounds save those of civilisation itself; and he is not yet thirty-two! The task which I have set myself is to trace the paths and circumstances which have carried him at so early an age to such a throne of glory.”103 This was no exaggeration. Right across Europe after 1815, Rossini bestrode the musical scene like a colossus. His stupendous success was the clearest possible sign that the musical public sphere had come of age. Lord Byron, whose own charismatic appeal rivaled Rossini’s, wrote in 1819: “There has been a splendid opera lately at San Benedetto—by Rossini—who came in person to play the harpsichord—the people followed him about—crowned him—cut off his hair ‘for memory’—he was shouted for and sonnetted and feasted—and immortalised much more than either of the emperors.”104