I love this book The Vintage Guide to Classical Music by Jan Swafford, and how he sums up the Romantic era. Its easy to see where musicians of all kinds, are steeped in this reality today. I personally am, for better or worse. Whereas Mozart and Hayden wanted the listener to feel pleasure, wanted to inspire, uplift, even edify, now composers wanted to melt the heart, reduce to tears, astound, overwhelm, set hair on end. Where the Enlightenment stressed reason and disinterested discourse, the Romantics loved legends, folk songs, the fantastic, irrational, and idiosyncratic. It was the time of Edgar Allen Poe, the eerie last songs of Schubert, the great collections of fairy tales and folk poetry, the exotic violence of Delacroix. Now begins the cult of the Genius. Romantic artists inflated their own image to the role of demigods, half demons and half priests in a new religion of the subjective, the sublime, the magnificent and the terrible. Increasingly throughout the nineteenth century, the self-absorption and self-inflation of artists pulled them away from the main stream of middle-class life; and just as well said the artists, drawing around themselves a mantle of contempt for the commercial and popular.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:19:04 +0000
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