Nations and Romanticism

[Alexander III]

Romanticism is arguably one of the most important movements in literature, as well as a personal favorite. However it was extremely varied from country to country, so I want to hear your opinion on this lit netters, which nations romanticism do you guys prefer, enjoy more ect.

German Romanticism
Italian Romanticism
French Romanticism
English Romanticism
Russian Romanticism

[Virgil]

To be honest, I'm only knowlegable on the English Romantic movement.

[L.M. The Third]

I dare not vote either, for the same reason as Virgil.

[stlukesguild]

With regard to literature and art... I'd go with British Romanticism... with the French not far behind. With regard to music... its the Germans all the way.

[Alexander III]

No one to vouch for Italian literature ? Personaly I think english litearture was the most productive in the movemnt but I would place Italian lit right behinde it, especialy if we also look at it from the angle of the significance of the for the country.

Italian Romanticism produced Leopardi, who most Italians consider the greatest national poet after Dante. Leopardi was arguably unique amongst the romantics yet, he shared many of their common traits. I find him to be like an Italian Keats, except death and life were his two great muses. His poems are intricate, philosophical and highly lyrical. Translations cat reproduce the latter, but read in Italian they sound like a melody from pan's flute. He was an one can say, a typical Romantic whose life was equal in artistic merit to any of his poems, this is a trait which was common for many Romantic Figures.

He was born into a wealthy family, yet one who was dangerously overprotective, he was not allowed to leave the estate until the age of 18 I believe. Thus he had nor friend or love and he devoted his youth to reading and studying the thousands of works in his father library. He developed a form of scoliosis, and became disfigured. In fact this theme is common in his works, he feels that he can never be loved as he is crippled. His works are extremely dark in nature, not alla Baudelaire or Poe, but true darkness, the darkness of a life which fears death yet knows its one of his few comforts due to the tragedy of his life.

Another major poet figure was Ugo Foscolo, a man who fought for liberty of his ountry from the french and austrian invaders, during the unification of Italy he was seen as a national hero as his poem continoual had called for the creation of a new Itlian state. He was seen almost as a secular siant during those times. His novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, is very simmilar to Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. I have not read it yet but many have told me that this more obscure work is of greater aethic merrit than its german predecessor.

I must also mention Vittorio Alfieri, who is deemed the founder of Italian tragedy and is considered the nations finest dramatist. His tragedies were quite revolutionary. In the previous age, Italian drama had been burdened with excessive use of ornate and frivolous language, as well as plots and characters which could be seen as hyperboles at best. He used a new language, one which was poetic, yet the poetry was subtle, it did come in blaring a tuba and with a cacophony of clowns behind it, it slithered in the shadows at the back of the play, holding everything together yet mostly unseen. He also used a new language a harsh and sentimental one which reflected the reality of human tragedies. He is best know however for his characters, he was able to create characters with an astonishing depth and complexity, almost mirroring reality to such a sharp degree that when one saw his plays one was unsure weather it was the character or he who was the fake.

Lastly is is also necessary to mention Manzoni, the poet and writer who was the most famous Italian romantic in his time. Hi poetry earned him important recognition at a young age, but his magnum opus is The Betrothed, which is considered the greatest novel in Italian literature.

[Lokasenna]

I'm in much the same boat as St. Lukes - English for literature, German for music (though Goethe takes some beating). The French are also reasonable for music, particularly if you include Chopin under their banner, but I'm not too keen on their literature.

[Patrick_Bateman]

I have to say German
although Britain had some great poets during the period.

[Nick91]

It's kinda hard to say, I'm not that familiar with russian or italian romanticism.
In the end i'd have to say English followed by German and then French.

[stlukesguild]

I somewhat suspect the Germans may be even better than the French... and perhaps even the English Romantic tradition (especially if not augmented by the American achievements: Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, etc...) but I'm admittedly limited by what is in translation and much of the German literature of the period has not been well serviced by translators into English. Even so... I must agree that Goethe takes some doing to surpass... and he was not alone. There was Holderlin, Lessing, Novalis, Schilling, Schiller, Heine, Ruckert, Brentano, Eichendorff, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Moricke, E.T. A. Hoffmann, etc... The strength of the German poetic tradition is made all the more powerful through the development of the German art song or lieder settings of many of these poets works by composers such as Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Joseph Marx, etc...

I might add that it's interesting that the French currently lead the poll... but no one has yet to offer any reason for this choice.

[Kafka's Crow]

Though the 'Romantic Movement' as we know it now, apparently started in Germany in music and gardening, literary Romanticism of the 19th century had Rousseau as one of the main founding fathers. Obviously English would get more votes because of the language. French Romantic fervour did not flatten out, it was not just a momentary burst but kept momentum all the way from Rousseau, Chateaubriand and Hugo and culminated into modernism via Charles Baudelaire and the Decadents without having a flat period like some of the Victorian art and literature shows in English Literature. Romantic spirit is more evident in French life and politics as well.

Russian Romanticism produced great novelists and narrative poets. Once again linguistic barrier leaves us in touch with the very, very great among these, the Pushkins and the Turgenevs, but we are not much aware of the ones who did not get translated. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are also some time counted among Romantics by some people which makes the Russian output really formidable.

[JCamilo]

Baudelaire is more romantic than anything else and possible the best french argument for poetry alongisde Hugo as romantic production. It is not the language, it is really the romantic poets and romance writers who placed english on such relevant position. In a sense, they did a major shift on reading of literature that is still present. As much Goethe alone - If he is a romantic - is enough argument to end it all, he did not caused it. French romanticism as much a classicism that could not be Voltaire anymore, as the king died...
But frainkly, since it is impossible to define who is romantic, the question is a bit loose...

[Seasider]

Nobody has mentioned the German romantic poet Karoline von Gunderrode. Like the archetypal German Romantic hero, Werther she killed herself for love.

[mayneverhave]

With regard to literature and art... I'd go with British Romanticism... with the French not far behind. With regard to music... its the Germans all the way.

Where would you place Chopin?

As for the literature: I would probably go with British Romanticism with Italian coming in a distant second.

[OrphanPip]

Chopin (who is technically Polish) and Berlioz are important, but it's hard to argue with the German dominance of Romantic music.

Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner are only a handful of the major German composers of the period.

[Alexander III]

I wouldn't really call Wagner a Romantic

[Virgil]

Hey it just occurred to me - don't forget American Romanitcism:
Emerson, Thoreau, Irving, Cooper, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe.

[Virgil]

I wouldn't really call Wagner a Romantic

What? Absolutely he is.

[stlukesguild]

Ummm... Wagner is the penultimate Romanticist. Beethoven still embraces the forms established by classicism while expanding them both in terms of emotion and formally. Berlioz and Weber begin the break away... but they are still both closer to Beethoven and even Mozart than to Wagner and Liszt. Schubert may be the real pivotal figure. In part his break from traditional forms may be attributed to his lack of formal musical education. His efforts with the lieder... musical settings of the poetry of German poetry... mostly of the Romantic era... makes him a central player in the move to Romanticism. Wagner, however, is the central composer of the entire era... to such an extent that virtually no composer until Modernism was well underway went untouched by him. He might also be recognized as the central figure of the more flamboyant, not to say bombastic thread of Romanticism. One might group Wagner with Berlioz, Liszt, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and even early Schoenberg, where Chopin and Schumann represent a more formalist thread of Romanticism which would be carried forth especially by Brahms... and even Schoenberg's chamber works.

[Modest Proposal]

Chopin (who is technically Polish) and Berlioz are important, but it's hard to argue with the German dominance of Romantic music.

Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner are only a handful of the major German composers of the period.

What about the greatest late-romantic German composer Gustav Mahler.

[Modest Proposal]

Hey it just occurred to me - don't forget American Romanitcism:
Emerson, Thoreau, Irving, Cooper, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe.


Yeah, I was kind of wondering about the Americans too.

[stlukesguild]

Its hard to define or establish the limits of Romanticism. In music there is often speak of Romanticism and Post-Romanticism... with Post-Romanticism commonly defining those composers who continue in the Romanticist strain well after Impressionism and Modernism have entered upon the scene. Mahler is commonly termed a late Romantic with Richard Strauss, Szymanowski, Zemlinsky, Joseph Marx, Othmar Schoeck, etc... as Post-Romantics. But then we have the American Romantics or Neo-Romantics such as Samuel Barber, Virgil Thompson, Aaron Copland, Alan Hovhaness... to say nothing of composers such as Delius, Vaughan-Williams, Arnold Bax, Sibelius, and even such living composers as Einojuhani Rautavaara and Daniel Catan.

[mortalterror]

Italian Romanticism produced Leopardi, who most Italians consider the greatest national poet after Dante.
I'd say he's the second best romantic poet, Baudelaire being the absolute greatest.


I must also mention Vittorio Alfieri, who is deemed the founder of Italian tragedy and is considered the nations finest dramatist.
I read his tragedy The Conspiracy of the Pazzi, and wasn't impressed. For all it's flaws, and they are legion, Hugo's Hernani is a way better romantic era play.


Lastly is is also necessary to mention Manzoni, the poet and writer who was the most famous Italian romantic in his time. Hi poetry earned him important recognition at a young age, but his magnum opus is The Betrothed, which is considered the greatest novel in Italian literature.
I read the first couple of chapters. It was very good and reminded me of Hugo's novels.

For my part, I'd say that France dominated the Romantic era, with the combined efforts of Britain and the United States coming in a close second, and Germany a respectable third. I want to give props to the Russians, but I don't think that what Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy were doing was Romantic. They've always felt like they were doing something else out there on their own, not quite attached to what the rest of Europe was doing.

[stlukesguild]

If we're throwing Baudelaire (and thus I assume the rest of the Symbolists) in under the Romanticist banner then I would probably agree that France then becomes the one to beat. I've always felt, however, that Baudelaire and the rest were not quite Romantics... but proto-Modernists. The very rejection of nature and the embrace of artifice and the urban environment suggest something quite un-Romantic.

[JCamilo]

Well, it is more easily to call of symbolists as those who read baudelaire, than call him a symbolist. Anyways the position of Baudelaire as romantic is almost as problematic as placing Goethe, who can be easily the last neo-classsicist when Baudelaire the last romantic...
Urbanism is quite romantic, after all they are the first to deal with urbarn growth, and it is not an odd theme of some of them, Dickens, Hugo himself, Poe (who is very alike Baudelaire, not hard to place them on the same pack), Jose de Alencar in Brazil, Elizabeth Browning (also a late romantic)...

As Dostoievisky and Tolstoy, they are so second part of XIX century, and in Dostoievisky case, so strongly realists that I never heard him as romantic. I would think it is a bit Pushkhin and Gogol...

[mortalterror]

If we're throwing Baudelaire (and thus I assume the rest of the Symbolists) in under the Romanticist banner then I would probably agree that France then becomes the one to beat. I've always felt, however, that Baudelaire and the rest were not quite Romantics... but proto-Modernists. The very rejection of nature and the embrace of artifice and the urban environment suggest something quite un-Romantic.

Symbolist, or decadent, call them what you will, they're still just a segment of the Romantic movement the way cubism or surrealism were sideshows of the big parade we call modernism. It's a big movement that covers a rather large period of time. You got your proto-romantics like Goethe and Blake, then you got your first generation romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge in the late 1790's. Then come's guys like Byron, Shelley, Keats, Poe, and Leopardi. Guys like Baudelaire come late to the party, at the tale end, after many turns and counter turns, when they have little in common with the guys that started the movement; but they are still clearly struggling with the same concepts and working in the same medium. And besides, Baudelaire still has more in common with Poe than with the realists or modernists that would supersede him. He's very emotional, personal, and prone to flights of fancy rejecting the realism and rationality that is the bedrock of modernism.

[Alexander III]

Symbolist, or decadent, call them what you will, they're still just a segment of the Romantic movement the way cubism or surrealism were sideshows of the big parade we call modernism. It's a big movement that covers a rather large period of time. You got your proto-romantics like Goethe and Blake, then you got your first generation romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge in the late 1790's. Then come's guys like Byron, Shelley, Keats, Poe, and Leopardi. Guys like Baudelaire come late to the party, at the tale end, after many turns and counter turns, when they have little in common with the guys that started the movement; but they are still clearly struggling with the same concepts and working in the same medium. And besides, Baudelaire still has more in common with Poe than with the realists or modernists that would supersede him. He's very emotional, personal, and prone to flights of fancy rejecting the realism and rationality that is the bedrock of modernism.


I would agree to call Baudelaire a romantic, the last great romantic. To place symbolism as a segmentation of romanticism, degrades the entire movement which is of enough importance to be seen as a separate an single movement. I mean most of the symbolists can be see are the originators of modernism rather than the last romantics. They utterly break away from romanticism, except for possibly Verlaine ( Romanticism in his works linger on). In symbolism poetry is taken and is revolutionized, it now no longer imitates strictly personal emotion, it now seeks to emulate the beauty and transediality of music.

Also I would have to argue that Baudelaire been seen as the greatest romantic. His body of work is rather limited, unlike the vast oeuvres of Goethe, or Wordsworth and such. Most Romantics have the excuse that they died young, Baudelaire did die early, but no so early as to excuse the limited nature of his repertoire. Also his poetry like that of Poe, is too focused on the macabre and grotesque, but that is not so much a fault of his as that it is a personal preference of mine to have a wider subject range in my poets.

Personally for greatest romantic, I would cast my vote for either Victor Hugo or Byron.

Also is Walt Whitman considered a romantic ?

[JCamilo]

Whitman is all that a romantic needs to be, except a bit latter. I think we can see the last romantics when the form started to be vital to the poets, Whitman in USA, Baudelaire in France, etc. That why the symbolists do not seem so romantic. There is considerable examples of late modernists, take Tennyson for example.

Theodor Adorno put all that happened from Romanticism to modernism in the same bag, as a development of Englightment, not spliting even the neo-classicism from romantics and frankly, it seems quite logical. The transitions figures are clearly in both worlds and in many aspects, be in both worlds was much a rule. The definition of romanticism can also be completely different. What is yours?

As Baudelaire, I agree his rebelion, his passionate poetry, his individualism, even his sense of french culture was innate, he was not far from romantics. Yet, he is clearly moving ahead, just like Poe, which aesthetic ideas are not like the initial steps of romanticism (Poe minimalism contrast a litte with the struggle to find some epical national modernity, Poe clearly argue against Wordsworth and Coleridge). Baudelaire often writes against the early french poets, he had as much confront with Voltaire as he did with Chateubriand or Hugo, and he also question the Schiller view of beauty, which is the main aesthetic vision of Romanticism. That make him probally the guy closing the door...
Discussion who is the greatest romantic is ranking the canon, it will fail. We know it is not X or Y, but if you talk Baudelaire, Hugo, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Melville, etc... You are bound to fail.

[stlukesguild]

I think it is is impossible in any art form to discern without the least question when one cultural era ends and another begins. There is no point at which the thinking and elements of the middle ages came to a sudden halt and the Renaissance began. One might argue whether figures such as Dante and Chaucer and Giotto should be placed upon one side of the divide or the other... and there are solid arguments for either view.

When did Romanticism begin? We seem to clearly agree that Wordsworth and Coleridge and Rousseau and Holderlin were Romantics... but Byron, Blake, and Goethe have elements of both earlier movements... and Romanticism, while Baudelaire, Mallarme, Tennyson, Wilde, Rilke, etc... clearly seem to be heading away from Romanticism and toward Modernism. And what of "Realism"? What of Dickens, Hardy, Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Kleist, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy?

Elements of Romanticism continue well into Modernism. One might argue that even writers such as Proust, Kafka, Garcia-Lorca, Hesse, Pasternak, Neruda, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Wolfe, Graham Greene, etc... owe as much to Romanticism as Modernism. As I noted earlier, we have figures in music such as Richard Strauss, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Alan Hovahaness and even the contemporaries, Einojuhani Rautavaara and Daniel Catan who might easily be defined as Neo-Romantics. Within the field of art history, painters such as Pollack, Rothko, and DeKooning... for all their Modernism... are often seen as extensions of the Romantic revolution.

Personally, if we are broadening our definition of Romanticism to a cut-off point somewhere around 1880, I would agree that the French would be hard to beat... but then again... so would the Anglo-Americans who would now have Walt Whitman, Tennyson, Dickinson, Henry James, Poe, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Stevenson, Walter Pater, Thomas hardy, Ambrose Bierce, the Rossettis, Thomas Hardy, the Brontes, the Brownings, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, etc... As for placing Baudelaire at the pinnacle of Romanticism... as much as I love Baudelaire and in spite of my sentimental attachment to him as the poet who truly turned me personally onto poetry... I can't quite place Baudelaire above Goethe, Blake, or Dostoevsky... nor even Victor Hugo.

[mortalterror]

I can't quite place Baudelaire above Goethe, Blake, or Dostoevsky... nor even Victor Hugo.

Baudelaire is the best poet, though Goethe and Hugo were more than poets. Hugo and Goethe were triple threats who left massive bodies of first rate poetry, drama, and novels that hold up to this day. Hugo is always writing within the Romantic tradition beginning to end, but Goethe has his classical period, and his oriental period. On top of everything else, Goethe leaves a respectable body of scientific work, and Hugo leaves some decent art. They lived so long and worked so broadly that their reputations became that of sages more than mere literary men. Goethe lights the spark with Sorrows of Young Werther and Hugo produced the largest body of first rate romantic work; so I'd be fine with either man carrying away the laurels for greatest literary man of the era.

Flaubert is a tricky one. He's 60/40 romantic/realist, clearly a transitional figure important in both worlds.

[LitNetIsGreat]

To go over old ground like, but in terms of "what ifs" Keats and Shelley have to be mourned as the greatest losses of potential of the period. Keats for me is the golden child of the Romantics who, when he hits the spot, is perfection.

[JCamilo]

I would never place Rousseau as romantic. He may have teach the basic rules of the french romanticism (emotional premisse, anti-volteirism, burgoise mindset) but he worked and produce a lot under the premisse of enlightment, all his life. His dialogue was mostly with those philosophers and even his novels are more experiments of fiction dealing with social criticism in the Diderot or Voltaire style.

Flaubert much less, a complet cynical, without any idealism, no empathy for the masses, the encyclopedical thinking. Madame Bovary is anti-romantic as much Quixote is anti-chivaliry.

Placing the limits of romanticism is indeed harder, even more as it is close, and the tradition still not sharpened the limits. Byron is clearly romantic, not just his work, but the reading of Milton, his own individualism, the morality of his work and the passion for greece without being so classical. Coleridge is even more classical than him, great knowledge and admiration of classical culture and philosophy. Blake relation with the ideals of freench revolution seems to make him more clearly romantic than not.

Dickens "realism" seems to exactly the best aspect of romanticism reggarding romance and urban changes.

Pushkin is a major loss as well and I would say Emily Bronte.

As Goethe, he is so special, so above everyone else that he would be anything.

[mortalterror]

To go over old ground like, but in terms of "what ifs" Keats and Shelley have to be mourned as the greatest losses of potential of the period. Keats for me is the golden child of the Romantics who, when he hits the spot, is perfection.

Much as I like Keats and Shelley, I think the greatest losses of the Romantic era were Leopardi, Pushkin, Poe, Lermontov, and Buchner. Bécquer died young too.

[JCamilo]

I think, specially with Keats, there is always a sense that he did not fullfilled his life. Which is very related to his own poetry (I think Keats is a Major poet, nothing to own to Baudelaire or Schiller)... while Poe, for example, seems to have lived a lot like a crazy teenager, but always at his maximum... So it appears he did all he wanted, all could...

[Alexander III]

1) as for the greatest loss due to a premature death, though Keats does beg for the spot, I would have to give it to Pushkin or Shelley. Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin is one of the finest novels and long works of peotry I have read, and this was created in his 20's, his other works of prose and poesy show that glimmer, which one can clearly identify to know that had he lived he would have produced works which would have equalled and even surpassed the great epics of Tolstoy, Hugo and Goethe. Shelley also died just at the point where his poetry has begun to mature into a truley sublime nature. His final unfinished poem The Triumph of Life is notably seen as his greatest work, even though it was unfinished.

Ou of literature I would say the greatest romantics to be mourned for his premature death is Chopin.

[Patrick_Bateman]

1) as for the greatest loss due to a premature death, though Keats does beg for the spot, I would have to give it to Pushkin or Shelley. Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin is one of the finest novels and long works of peotry I have read, and this was created in his 20's

I want to learn Russian and Cyrillic just so I can read Eugene Onegin in all it's beauty.

[stlukesguild]

I haven't read enough of Pushkin to speak to his loss one way or the other. Considering Keats and Shelley's age, the quality of their work, and the increasing quality at the time of their deaths, either was a devastating loss. Another to consider certainly must be Leopardi... and I would add Holderlin as a special case in which so much was lost due to his early onset of mental illness.

In the case of music, Chopin does not even come close. Schubert's early demise may have been the greatest loss in the whole of music... with the only possible exception being Mozart. Schubert had little formal training in composition and virtually none in orchestration. For this reason he struggled in his early works with larger forms: symphonies, operas, etc... In spite of this, by the time of his death at age 31 (8 years younger than Chopin), he was already composing symphonies that rivaled and expanded upon Beethoven; his chamber works are even more brilliant; his brilliant piano sonatas, in spite of a lack of any Beethovian virtuosity on his part, also point toward the future, and his songs (lieder) and song cycles are still acknowledged as the greatest in the whole of the Western classical music tradition. It is indeed Schubert who is commonly recognized as the first true Romantic (as opposed to Beethoven's position as a transitional figure). In most critical appraisals he is placed just beneath the three towering figures of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart along-side Wagner, Brahms, Haydn, and Handel. Like Mozart, he was creating at the furious speed of white lightning in his final years and gave every sign of continuing to achieve at an ever increasing level... quite probably surpassing Beethoven and Mozart if not Bach.

Chopin, on the other hand, in spite of his advantages of wealth, virtuoso skill as a pianist, education, and living in the cultural center of Paris surrounded by the leading artistic luminaries of the day, showed no sign of developing beyond his admittedly lovely works for solo piano. His sense of orchestration (as found in his piano concertos) was but passable... and certainly not as ground-shaking as what Schubert was doing unknown to the world. Chopin's entire oeuvre is absolutely dwarfed in scale by Schubert's lieder alone, and one gets the feeling... as lovely as the best of Chopin can be... that his success made him something of the dilettante.

[JCamilo]

Well, much of quality of Keats is the contrast between his vigour and a certain sense of loss, had him be healthy, would his perception be so attuned to those aspects who certainly made Nightingale or Grecian Urn so special? It is a bit different between Pushkin or Shelley, both had strange deaths, who seems to be an accident (But obviously, Pushkin personality lead him to that point). I really would place Emily Bronte high up in this list, her poetry was quite good and her only romance was quite unique. Where would her psychological narrative would end had she lived more?

Anyways, like Hoderlin, sometime people are lost without deaths... What loss had the world when someone gave to De Quincey or Coleridge their fist bag of opium? Or if Melville wasnt so attacked after Moby Dick?

[Katluc]

I´m saying German because of the Music, though I do love the English romantic literature. Goethe and Schubert´s lieder are wonderful, though I have yet to read a really good English translation of Erlenkonig.

[EndSarcasm]

I haven't read enough of Pushkin to speak to his loss one way or the other. Considering Keats and Shelley's age, the quality of their work, and the increasing quality at the time of their deaths, either was a devastating loss. Another to consider certainly must be Leopardi... and I would add Holderlin as a special case in which so much was lost due to his early onset of mental illness.




Holderlin's case especially, I find incredibly sad. The entire situation with his health and relations with his family; being reduced to permanent care on the kindness of a reader. Yet he still managed to create works of beauty.

[David Lurie]

.. as lovely as the best of Chopin can be... that his success made him something of the dilettante.

http://digilander.libero.it/le.faccine/faccinea/ride/00028039.gif
1 - take a new instrument and develop a technique to play it which - 160 years later - is still a challenge that only the best pianists can master.
2 - create a language which is aware of the tradition and completely new and personal at the same time.
3 - compose only works that will become standard repertoire.

[stlukesguild]

Virtuosity has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the merits of a work of art. The slow movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata by all accounts is one of the most moving and powerful things he ever composed... and one of the easiest to play. Mozart, by the same token, composed 27 piano sonatas, half of which are acknowledged as being among his greatest achievements and the greatest achievements of Western music... and yet they are in no way virtuoso in the demands they make upon the performer.

The piano was in no way a new instrument by Chopin's time. It had evolved from the harpsichord in the 16th century, to the piano-forte, and finally the grand piano. Works for solo keyboard were turned out by numerous Renaissance and baroque composers and a good many of Bach's works as well as those of other Baroque composers are every bit as challenging (if not moreso) to the performer...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glg99Zc0JjU

...and like Chopin, many of these works were based upon dance forms (polonaise, waltz, gigue, etc....) With Mozart and Haydn we get the piano concerto proper as well as classical forms like the sonata. Beethoven and Schubert push the possibilities of the solo piano form to a level where it becomes almost symphonic in scale and orchestral in its variety of moods and "colors". This was aided by the expansion of the range of the piano to its current 88 keys.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfjD-DQ5REk

If there was a piano composer after Beethoven who truly expanded the potential of the form, it was Franz Liszt, an unrivaled virtuoso whose reputation for instilling hysteria in his audience in response to his dazzling pianistic displays equaled that of today's rock bands. Lisztomania resulted in women fighting over his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves, which they ripped to shreds as souvenirs. Liszt's virtuosic performances on the piano were accompanied by his equally virtuosic compositions for piano:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBygW-3ffOY

but he could compose equally poetic musings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejXPcv9MS7s

Liszt became one of the central figures in Romanticism as a result of his development of the "tone poem"... pushing away from the traditional classical forms. A well-known painting of the era shows Liszt at the piano before a bust of Beethoven... as the clear heir to Beethoven... surrounded by many of the greatest virtuoso of the Romantic era, including Berlioz, Alexandre Dumas, Rossini, Victor Hugo, Paganini (the great violin virtuoso) and Chopin's lover, George Sand... but no Chopin.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4107/5055843990_46c20a6c4f_b.jpg

In contrast to the virtuosity and bombast of Liszt, Paganini, Berlioz... and most importantly, Wagner, an alternative direction in Romantic music began with Robert Schumann. Schumann's dreams of becoming a piano virtuoso were dashed as a result of injury to his hand. Consequently, he began to develop a compositional style that owed much to his love of poetry and might be seen as an equivalent to the lyrical poem. These works were profoundly influenced by Mozart... as well as Schubert's work, which Schumann did much to uncover.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vajd0ypDYQ&feature=fvsr

Chopin, who was deeply enamored of Mozart, leans toward the Schumann side of Romanticism, although he often gave vent to passages of virtuosity inspired by Liszt. Like Liszt, he also drew upon dances and rhythms of his native land, Chopin's Poland to Liszt Hungary. Chopin's greatest innovation was that of striking something of a balance between the two strains of Romanticism and bringing a certain urbane sophistication of the drawing room or the salon to the music... something that would be taken far further by later French composers such as Faure and Debussy. Of course the notion of the small gatherings of close friends and family for intimate musical performances is something that Schubert, unknown to the larger symphonic audiences, had also engaged in. The "Schubertiads", as they were affectionately known, were social gatherings during which Schubert and friends would engage in the performance of small chamber works, piano compositions, and songs newly composed by Schubert.

For all Chopin's brilliance... and he most certainly is a major composer... to suggest that he only composed works that have become standard repertoire ignores the fact that for every marvelous composition in Chopin's oeuvre, there are others that are less than "standard repertoire" and in many cases immature... as might be expected of nearly any composer. There are a number of forgotten chamber and orchestral works... and there is also a small body of songs in Polish which are rarely heard (but I have heard from a Polish acquaintance that some of these are quite lovely).

Of course suggesting that Chopin might fall behind Schubert as a composer is no major insult. There are very few composers that could begin to rival him...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bosouX_d8Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6_SbflSwAg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YWcVO9Mncw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoZJkkWX8Yw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Njg1LFxFk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlxVTpEyMEw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkH0cPzg-IU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOiMVPSzr7E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Ak7Tk9B3s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14AT7-79oJk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7PR2AfCvUw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyxMMg6bxrg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIIS-UgixGE&feature=related

Schubert is clearly no slouch when it comes to composing "standards". He might actually have been the most gifted composer of melody in the whole of music, surpassing even Mozart... especially when one considers his 700+ songs. And none of this even touches upon his efforts with larger musical forms:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JHJU4xtAWY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-GzTj5BZwU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-wU3iRtybE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnoD02pmIhE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU_giDkzwb0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1XVX0gdqtE&feature=related

Chopin is undoubtedly a brilliant composer. His Nocturnes (especially as performed by Rubinstein) are one of my most played discs. With Schubert, however, we have entered into another level altogether.

[mortalterror]

If there was a piano composer after Beethoven who truly expanded the potential of the form, it was Franz Liszt, an unrivaled virtuoso whose reputation for instilling hysteria in his audience in response to his dazzling pianistic displays equaled that of today's rock bands. Lisztomania resulted in women fighting over his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves, which they ripped to shreds as souvenirs. Liszt's virtuosic performances on the piano were accompanied by his equally virtuosic compositions for piano:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBygW-3ffOY

Oh, so he was like the Billy Joel of his day?


but he could compose equally poetic musings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejXPcv9MS7s

Liszt became one of the central figures in Romanticism as a result of his development of the "tone poem"... pushing away from the traditional classical forms. A well-known painting of the era shows Liszt at the piano before a bust of Beethoven... as the clear heir to Beethoven... surrounded by many of the greatest virtuoso of the Romantic era, including Berlioz, Alexandre Dumas, Rossini, Victor Hugo, Paganini (the great violin virtuoso) and Chopin's lover, George Sand... but no Chopin.

So more like Liberace then?

[Lord Macbeth]

As this is a literature forum I took the English simply due to the sheer number and influence of their Romantic poets and authors.

The French and German Movements, however, were and are also quite incredible, and were this a music forum they would have to get the nod from me (THAT'D be an interesting competition...out of curiosity, who would you all take THERE, Germany vs. France in Romantic Music, that's Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner vs. Offenbach, Bizet, and Chopin...I'll take France as I love Bizet's "Carmen," I'll go on record and say I think that's the greatest opera ever created, and as a Jew I despise Wagner the person, regardless of his talent, and then even on his considerable merits, the fact his operas can be seen as so nationalistic, that they were the operatic score to the Rise of the Third Reich, and that Wagner treated my favorite philosopher and hero Friedrich Nietzsche so poorly the two parted company...I'll take Le Francais.)

[stlukesguild]

As this is a literature forum I took the English simply due to the sheer number and influence of their Romantic poets and authors.

The French and German Movements, however, were and are also quite incredible, and were this a music forum they would have to get the nod from me (THAT'D be an interesting competition...out of curiosity, who would you all take THERE, Germany vs. France in Romantic Music, that's Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner vs. Offenbach, Bizet, and Chopin...I'll take France as I love Bizet's "Carmen," I'll go on record and say I think that's the greatest opera ever created, and as a Jew I despise Wagner the person, regardless of his talent, and then even on his considerable merits, the fact his operas can be seen as so nationalistic, that they were the operatic score to the Rise of the Third Reich, and that Wagner treated my favorite philosopher and hero Friedrich Nietzsche so poorly the two parted company...I'll take Le Francais.)

I'll take Germany for the whole of Western music history until the mid-20th century... with the possible exception of the middle-ages when the French/Flemish composers led the way. France vs Germany in Romantic era music? Its not even close. On the Austro-German side we have late Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Brahms, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Robert Volkmann, Joseph Marx, Alexander Zemlinsky, Erich Korngold, Humperdinck, Mendelssohn, Johann Strauss, Franz Lehar, Max Bruch, Anton Bruckner, etc... On the French side we have Bizet, Berlioz, Offenbach, Franck, Leo Delibes, Saint-Saëns, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Dukas, Massanet, and perhaps a couple more. Not a single major figure in the bunch... with the possible exception of Berlioz, while the German camp has more than a few (in bold font)... and I say this as someone quite enamored of 19th and early 20th century French music. But honestly, French music doesn't really takes off until Impressionism... with Faure, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, etc... when they began to break away from German/Italian approaches to form and structure. Even considering these figures, French music trails far behind the Germanic tradition. The only real rival to the Germanic hegemony at the time would come from the Russians with Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Scriabin, Alexander Grechaninov... and later on such figures as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovitch.

As for Wagner... yes, he was antisemitic, but to blame him for the fact that his work was embraced by the Nazi's is absurd and ignores that fact that an artist cannot choose who likes or dislike his or her work... or misinterprets or abuses it. By the same token, the Nazis made far more use of the writings of your favorite philosopher (who was both antisemitic and anti-Christian) and his concept of the "Übermensch", while Theodor Herzl, father of Zionism, on the other hand, was a great lover of Wagner. Wagner was nationalistic at a time when Germany was struggling toward unification against French control... and at a time when French, Russian, Hungarian, English, etc... composers were all exploring a nationalistic direction in the form of native dances, native musical traditions, native folk music and native folk tales and narratives.

By the way... Wagner's abuse of Nietzsche followed Nietzsche's open and public (Nietzsche Contra Wagner) attack on the composer... largely as a result of his conversion to Christianity (which he dismissed as a sign of weakness) and his composition of a "Christian" opera, Parsifal.

The greatest opera ever created? I would probably go with one of Mozart's: Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, or "The Magic Flute"... followed by Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Carmen, however, would surely rank among my top 20... along with Mme Butterfly, La Boheme, Aida, Tosca, The Barber of Seville, and Montevedi's L'Orfeo.

[David Lurie]

The piano was in no way a new instrument by Chopin's time. It had evolved from the harpsichord in the 16th century, to the piano-forte, and finally the grand piano. Works for solo keyboard were turned out by numerous Renaissance and baroque composers and a good many of Bach's works as well as those of other Baroque composers are every bit as challenging (if not moreso) to the performer...

The piano isn't an evolution of the harpsichord, the keyboard is the only thing they have in common, but they produce sound in completely different ways and therefore they offer the composer/player completely different ways of expressing themselves. The ottavino and the spinet are members of the family of the harpsichord, instruments where the strings are plucked when we press a key and they have no pedals. The fortepiano - invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence around 1700 - introduced a whole new concept: the strings were hammered and not plucked, the difference is that with fortepiano - with hammering instead of plucking - the player has at his disposal a wider dynamic range which varies according to the pressure you apply when you press a key. The pedal - already present in Cristofori's instrument - allows to vary and control timbre and color, later the damper pedal - called simply the pedal nowadays - completely changed the instrument allowing to connect notes and harmonies - legato - or making resonate a note.
The pianoforte evolved into being the instrument we are familiar with at the end of the 19th century but every single change that was made during almost two centuries of evolution changed the way a composer could express himself, most innovations were decided by the piano makers following the suggestions of the composers, Beethoven couldn't have written his late sonatas - not in the way we know them at least - without the renewed instrument he used in his later years - for this same reason it's obvious that the Moonlight sonata that you mention would have been different if Beethoven had had a different piano at his disposal, the fact that he wanted and suggested improvements on the instrument - Haydn and Mozart were not different - testifies that he had musical ideas which required a different instrument that allowed them to come alive. Art is technique and the technical means we can use determine the way we can express ourselves, they define our artistic choices, so you can play Bach or Rameau on the piano, but if you want to understand their musical world you need to play them on the harpsichord.
Chopin was the first composer who had at his disposal a piano not much different from the instrument as we know it, it's not a coincidence that he is the first composer who has been (almost) untouched by the original instrument performance craze of the last 40 years. That's why Chopin is commonly considered the composer who defined piano composing and playing.
When in my previous post I wrote:

1 - take a new instrument and develop a technique to play it which - 160 years later - is still a challenge that only the best pianists can master.

I was not talking about sheer virtuosity - that would be Alkan - though Chopin is not easy, it's the use of the pedal and of the rubato that make him accessible only to the greatest pianists. The pedal and the rubato came into prominence - thanks to Chopin - in the romantic era, to the point that even now when a pianist uses too much pedal and/or rubato people say he is playing in the romantic way.

PS: though I (moderately) enjoy Liszt, the hysteria episodes you mention had more to do with the invention of the claque and the birth of the show business industry than with his music, there is a good lot of books around who analyze this.

PPS: I almost forgot, the Chopin competition in Warsaw is ongoing and there is free live brodcast http://konkurs.chopin.pl/en/edition/xvi/online/broadcasting

[Lord Macbeth]

As this is a literature forum I took the English simply due to the sheer number and influence of their Romantic poets and authors.

The French and German Movements, however, were and are also quite incredible, and were this a music forum they would have to get the nod from me (THAT'D be an interesting competition...out of curiosity, who would you all take THERE, Germany vs. France in Romantic Music, that's Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner vs. Offenbach, Bizet, and Chopin...I'll take France as I love Bizet's "Carmen," I'll go on record and say I think that's the greatest opera ever created, and as a Jew I despise Wagner the person, regardless of his talent, and then even on his considerable merits, the fact his operas can be seen as so nationalistic, that they were the operatic score to the Rise of the Third Reich, and that Wagner treated my favorite philosopher and hero Friedrich Nietzsche so poorly the two parted company...I'll take Le Francais.)

I'll take Germany for the whole of Western music history until the mid-20th century... with the possible exception of the middle-ages when the French/Flemish composers led the way. France vs Germany in Romantic era music? Its not even close. On the Austro-German side we have late Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Hugo Wolf, Brahms, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Max Reger, Robert Volkmann, Joseph Marx, Alexander Zemlinsky, Erich Korngold, Humperdinck, Mendelssohn, Johann Strauss, Franz Lehar, Max Bruch, Anton Bruckner, etc... On the French side we have Bizet, Berlioz, Offenbach, Franck, Leo Delibes, Saint-Saëns, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Dukas, Massanet, and perhaps a couple more. Not a single major figure in the bunch... with the possible exception of Berlioz, while the German camp has more than a few (in bold font)... and I say this as someone quite enamored of 19th and early 20th century French music. But honestly, French music doesn't really takes off until Impressionism... with Faure, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, etc... when they began to break away from German/Italian approaches to form and structure. Even considering these figures, French music trails far behind the Germanic tradition. The only real rival to the Germanic hegemony at the time would come from the Russians with Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glinka, Scriabin, Alexander Grechaninov... and later on such figures as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovitch.

As for Wagner... yes, he was antisemitic, but to blame him for the fact that his work was embraced by the Nazi's is absurd and ignores that fact that an artist cannot choose who likes or dislike his or her work... or misinterprets or abuses it. By the same token, the Nazis made far more use of the writings of your favorite philosopher (who was both antisemitic and anti-Christian) and his concept of the "Übermensch", while Theodor Herzl, father of Zionism, on the other hand, was a great lover of Wagner. Wagner was nationalistic at a time when Germany was struggling toward unification against French control... and at a time when French, Russian, Hungarian, English, etc... composers were all exploring a nationalistic direction in the form of native dances, native musical traditions, native folk music and native folk tales and narratives.

By the way... Wagner's abuse of Nietzsche followed Nietzsche's open and public (Nietzsche Contra Wagner) attack on the composer... largely as a result of his conversion to Christianity (which he dismissed as a sign of weakness) and his composition of a "Christian" opera, Parsifal.

The greatest opera ever created? I would probably go with one of Mozart's: Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, or "The Magic Flute"... followed by Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Carmen, however, would surely rank among my top 20... along with Mme Butterfly, La Boheme, Aida, Tosca, The Barber of Seville, and Montevedi's L'Orfeo.

Well, some of those names were Austrian, so I didn't include them in a strict Germany/France matchup.

And I'm quite aware of the Nazis' perversion of Nietzsche's works (in fact I even STILL, many years after it's been seen otherwise, have to clear Nietzshe's name first and explain away the association if I bring him up in discussion) but Friedrich was fundamentally AGAINST nationalism, a great harbinger of the Reichs, whereas Richard was very much in favor of it and his music is a demonstration of this fact.

That was actually one of Nietzsche's main reasons and criticisms in that book of his you mentioned in which he attacks Wagner, Nietzsche viewed art as, if nothing else, certainly highly influential (at least when, in his view, it was "done right") and as such attacked Wagner's nationalist operas for expressing such ideas--and post-Hitler, we see, perhaps with some good reason.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, did not in his works of brilliance express such views, and as such I promote him while deriding Wagner, a brilliant composer, but the themes and messages he chose to express with that brilliance seem none to enviable...

Nietzsche certaily had his personality issues as well that led to their breakup as friends, making this one of the more intersting celebrity friendships of their age (and perhaps one of the most powerful of all time from an artistic standpoint, here we have two figures who could certaily stake an argument to being the greatest musical figure and greatest philosophical figure in modern German history, and one is thoroughly Romantic and the other winds up rebelling and condemning Romanticism, and yet the two together help shape their country and their fields to this day because of their breakup, the dissention between Romantics and Existentialists and Realists can be seena dn felt to this day in art and beyond) I find Wagner by far the more morally reprehensible figure and the one who was the worst friend of the two, ans so I do blame him to a greater degree.

Finally, I would argue the Nazis did not "make much more use of the Ubermensch" so much as come up with their own idea and use this label to make their idea sound justified and intellectually suffucient; as the Reich was about as far from the Ubermensch and Nietzsche's Zarathustran vision as you could get, I'd argue that to say HIS idea was made use of, rather than puppeted, would be no different than if I likened the 9/11 terrorists to Kierkegaard's "Knight of Faith."

Superman, strong survive, disassociation from Church and State, start anew...surely that's the same as "Build a huge State, kill off the weak, kill of certain racial groups, and practice eugenics to be sure you're strongest and pure racially?"

Or "Between logic and faith, God is that which cannot always be reconciled with the former, and so the latter at some point must be trusted, and so for religion to work and any discourse on a God that does not pertain to logic to be productive, a Leap of Faith is required" is the same as "Those who do not share my faith are illogical and wholly evil and so I must take action in the name of said Faith and kill them all, men, wiomen, and children."

Radically different ideas, adn yet the TERM can be applied to either and SEEM to fit...that was the sick and sad brilliance of the Reich...or the stupidity of the world, either one, or both...





But at least our taste in music appears to be similar--I adore nearly all of those operas as well, I either love or haven't yet heard them...

"The Marriage of Figaro" and "The Magic Flute" certainly are perennial #1 choices (a friend of mine is a Mozart FIEND, she'd likely place them #1 and #2 and fret about which should go ahead of which...she's simply brilliant when it comes to classicla music and judiging it), I ADORE Puccini, he and Tchaikovsky are my favorite composers (Mozart and Bizet or Rossini would round out my personal Rushmore of Opera Composers), and "La Boheme," "Madama Butterfy," and "Tosca" are simply brilliant and his style of powerful or powerfully soft endings (the ending of "Tosca" in particular stands out in this regard) is one of those features about him I like best. "Eugene Onegin" is a great adaptation of Pushkin's piece...Rossini's "Barber of Seville"...

But to be honest, I've heard "Tristan and Isolde," and while good it wasn't quite as incredible as I expected it to be, nor would I personally rank it as being as powerful or "good" (by whatever definition I may use that term) as the pieces by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Puccini above.

Bizet really only has "Carmen" to his everlasting fame, he has other pieces and they are good, but nothing else close to the masterpiece that is "Carmen," but I really do believe that to be of such I high quality I feel I must still rank him highly.

[JCamilo]

Lets just agree, Nazism cultural trait is the corruption of everything, somehow like Andy Pop Art, just that instead of colors, he would use hatred. From Christianism, Darwin ,Nietzche, the german romantic movement (how come a movement created to build a new state cannt be nationalistic?)...

[Alexander III]

"Build a huge State, kill off the weak, kill of certain racial groups, and practice eugenics to be sure you're strongest and pure racially?"

This description of Nazism is of the same intellectual equivalent as this description of the french "a country of wine and cheese loving men with thin mustaches"

While I agree with you that the Nazi's corrupted many of Nietzsche's thoughts to suit their needs, it wasn't a radical corruption of turning Blue into Red, it was more turning blue into Azure. Many of Nietzsche's basic ideas such as Superman, views on the Church, and his survival of the fittest, were used by the Nazi's as they were. Now im not saying that Nietzsche was a nazi or that he would have approved of Nazism, he would have undoubtedly loathed it, but Nazism and Nietzsche's philosophy contain several mutual ideas. Does this mean that they are bad or intrinsically evil ideas, no, I mean even the Nazi's like the communists, had some good ideas.

Wagner on the other hand, was nationalistic and anti-semitic. This was a time when 90% of people were nationalistic and anti-semitic. The germans and Italians were particularly nationalistic, as they had just unified and cerated their countries after years of struggle and oppression from larger empires. As for the anti-semism, well up until post world war two, in europe anti-semism was the norm. In America in the 1930's it was scientifically proven that Italians and Jews had lower IQ's than normal people.

Thus to lower the appreciation of Wagner due to his nationalism and anti-semitism, is not a valid argument.

[JCamilo]

Well, lets just agree, that corruption is always subtle and small. Most of the times, just a matter of saying the same thing ,at the wrong place. The corruption of Darwin for example, was not even not understanding his scientific pratice, was more using it out of place or for social purposes. Nietzche individualism and platonism certainly benefits the discurse of Nazism (I would say, much derivated from Thomas Carlyle. Borges has a brillant essay where he compares Emerson and Carlyle, both incridible similar. But for one, the idea was transcendental and equalitary, for the other, a hateful society) just like Wagner german nationalism did.
Blaming either for anything that Hittle did is really the belief heavy metal music turns younglings in killers. Stlukes could be turned into a killer maybe, but he would be probally killing the headbanger that does not give him peace, not the other way around :D

[stlukesguild]

The piano isn't an evolution of the harpsichord, the keyboard is the only thing they have in common, but they produce sound in completely different ways and therefore they offer the composer/player completely different ways of expressing themselves. The ottavino and the spinet are members of the family of the harpsichord, instruments where the strings are plucked when we press a key and they have no pedals. The fortepiano - invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence around 1700 - introduced a whole new concept: the strings were hammered and not plucked, the difference is that with fortepiano - with hammering instead of plucking - the player has at his disposal a wider dynamic range which varies according to the pressure you apply when you press a key.

Yes, there is a great difference with regard to dynamics... the ability to easily control how loud or softly a note is played... as well as the ability to control how long a note lasts. These were elements picked up and exploited by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Chopin, and all subsequent pianists. This does not make later music any more inherently difficult than earlier any more than the added element of color makes later films more challenging to produce than earlier black and white. Indeed, if I were to suspect which keyboard instrument presents the greatest challenge, I would guess it would be the pipe organ which brought in the added elements of foot pedals, stops, and multiple voices.

Beethoven couldn't have written his late sonatas - not in the way we know them at least - without the renewed instrument he used in his later years - for this same reason it's obvious that the Moonlight sonata that you mention would have been different if Beethoven had had a different piano at his disposal...

Of course all art is limited by the technical limitations of the era. The modern piano has a broader range than the piano employed by the young Beethoven or by Mozart. This grand piano is grossly limited in comparison with the possibilities afforded by electronic and digital instruments. The piano as a whole is also limited in its ability to play only those notes on the Western scale, unlike the violin, wind instrument, the sitar or the instruments invented by Harry Partch which allow for playing of notes of a smaller intervals or glissando.

you can play Bach or Rameau on the piano, but if you want to understand their musical world you need to play them on the harpsichord.

That is arguable. Of course there is an entire purist movement (HIP- Historically Informed Performance) that would champion such a concept... but then we are confronted with the reality that the cello, violin, trumpet and other instruments used in Monteverdi's time and Bach's time and Mozart's time (and the manner in which they were played) were all distinctly different from the modern instruments and techniques... a were all different from each other. We have the HIP approaches to music employing period instruments (or recreations) as well as using choir boys or counter-tenors in place of the soprano (although we have yet to get around to a return to castrati) and while the best of these offer some marvelous insights into the music, they are not always the sole best approach to take. Handel and Bach sound far better in most instances with the rich and sensuous voice of female mezzo-sopranos and sopranos. Bach's keyboard works as played on piano by the likes of Glenn Gould or Murray Perahia sound far better than most harpsichord performances.

Chopin was the first composer who had at his disposal a piano not much different from the instrument as we know it, it's not a coincidence that he is the first composer who has been (almost) untouched by the original instrument performance craze of the last 40 years. That's why Chopin is commonly considered the composer who defined piano composing and playing.

According to whom? Beethoven's sonatas are still the touchstone of piano compositions. Certainly elements of Chopin's approach to the piano can be found in Scriabin, Rachmaninoff... and perhaps even Debussy... but far less exists in Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Brahms, let alone Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Prokofiev, Bartok, Shostakovitch and later composers. Considering music as a whole, Beethoven was clearly far more central to subsequent musical developments. His symphonies are the foundation for Schubert's, Schumann's, Dvorak's, Brahm's, Bruckner's, and Mahler's (as well as Wagner, Berlioz, and Liszt's approach to orchestration). His string quartets set the ideal for Schubert, Dvorak, Shostakovitch, and Bartok).

Again, I am not downplaying Chopin. He was a major composer... but his impact was no where near that of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, or Wagner.

I was not talking about sheer virtuosity - that would be Alkan - though Chopin is not easy, it's the use of the pedal and of the rubato that make him accessible only to the greatest pianists. The pedal and the rubato came into prominence - thanks to Chopin - in the romantic era, to the point that even now when a pianist uses too much pedal and/or rubato people say he is playing in the romantic way.

And of course "simplicity" is never all that simple. Very few pianists can bring out the best in Mozart such as Alfred Brendel, Mitsuko Uchida, Rudolf Serkin, or Murray Perahia. Some pianist who are masterful within the more flamboyant Romantic repertoire fall flat with Mozart. No one can touch Kempff, Brendel, and Uchida for Schubert... while these same pianists may not be the best suited for Chopin, Tchaikovsky, or Rachmaninoff. Still another group of pianists excel with Debussy and Ravel... or Bach and Scarlatti.

PS: though I (moderately) enjoy Liszt...

I'd probably place Chopin above Liszt... although he must be credited with developing the "tone poem" which become increasingly influential.

...the hysteria episodes you mention had more to do with the invention of the claque and the birth of the show business industry than with his music, there is a good lot of books around who analyze this.

Of course... not unlike the hysteria surrounding the castrati craze during the Baroque era... especially in England and Italy. Both the Germans and the French had the good sense to avoid this.:goof:

Well, some of those names were Austrian, so I didn't include them in a strict Germany/France matchup.

Of course there was no Germany or Austria... or Italy for that matter... as we know it at the time. Modern political divisions often have little to do with the culture of individuals. The usual approach is to look at the language of the artists. Mozart Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, etc... are all generally categorized as part of the Austro-German tradition of music.

And I'm quite aware of the Nazis' perversion of Nietzsche's works...

one of Nietzsche's main reasons... (for) which he attacks Wagner (is) Nietzsche viewed art as, if nothing else, certainly highly influential (at least when, in his view, it was "done right") and as such attacked Wagner's nationalist operas for expressing such ideas--and post-Hitler, we see, perhaps with some good reason.

But where are the horrible nationalistic elements of Wagner? Die Mesitersinger is simply based on medieval German composers/poets, the Ring upon the medieval German saga, the Nibelungenlied, Tristan und Isolde was based upon Gottfried von Strassburg's medieval German poem, Tristan, and Parsifal upon Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. These are no more or less "nationalistic" than many Victorian explorations of early medieval English narratives (King Arthur, Sir Gawain, etc...) or the use of Russian folk tales and characters by Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. One might note that there is less overt antisemitism and nationalism in Wagner than there is in Shakespeare and Marlowe. Wagner's reputation merely suffers because of the manner in which he was used by the Nazis.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, did not in his works of brilliance express such views, and as such I promote him while deriding Wagner, a brilliant composer, but the themes and messages he chose to express with that brilliance seem none to enviable...

Again... where is the overt antisemitism or extreme nationalism in the actual music?

I find Wagner by far the more morally reprehensible figure...

He was a liar and a cheat and a home-wrecker and a poor husband who had an affair with one patron's wife, and another affair (eventually leading to marriage) with the conductor of the premier of his opera Tristan und Isolde. He was indeed an altogether unlikable individual... but he was also one of the most brilliant composers and the most influential composer of the 19th century... and since. Even those who eventually headed in another direction altogether (Debussy, Delius, Schoenberg) were forced to confront Wagner. Mahler, Bruckner, Richard Strauss, and others were his sworn acolytes.

Bizet really only has "Carmen" to his everlasting fame, he has other pieces and they are good, but nothing else close to the masterpiece that is "Carmen," but I really do believe that to be of such I high quality I feel I must still rank him highly.

Recently Bizet's other works have begun to gain further recognition: the L'Arlesienne Suites, The Pearl Fishers, La Jolie Fille De Perth, Symphony in C, the Te Deum, etc...

[Lord Macbeth]

"Build a huge State, kill off the weak, kill of certain racial groups, and practice eugenics to be sure you're strongest and pure racially?"

This description of Nazism is of the same intellectual equivalent as this description of the french "a country of wine and cheese loving men with thin mustaches"

While I agree with you that the Nazi's corrupted many of Nietzsche's thoughts to suit their needs, it wasn't a radical corruption of turning Blue into Red, it was more turning blue into Azure. Many of Nietzsche's basic ideas such as Superman, views on the Church, and his survival of the fittest, were used by the Nazi's as they were. Now im not saying that Nietzsche was a nazi or that he would have approved of Nazism, he would have undoubtedly loathed it, but Nazism and Nietzsche's philosophy contain several mutual ideas. Does this mean that they are bad or intrinsically evil ideas, no, I mean even the Nazi's like the communists, had some good ideas.

Wagner on the other hand, was nationalistic and anti-semitic. This was a time when 90% of people were nationalistic and anti-semitic. The germans and Italians were particularly nationalistic, as they had just unified and cerated their countries after years of struggle and oppression from larger empires. As for the anti-semism, well up until post world war two, in europe anti-semism was the norm. In America in the 1930's it was scientifically proven that Italians and Jews had lower IQ's than normal people.

Thus to lower the appreciation of Wagner due to his nationalism and anti-semitism, is not a valid argument.

I don't lower the appreciation of Wagner's technical ability as an artist and composer, along those grounds he is without question one of the most innovative forces in musical history.

The MESSAGE of a work, however, MUST contribute to its scoietal and personal worth, ie, "Would I want these ideas repeated?"

A poem by Pol Pot praising his genocides, describing it all in vivid detail and making himself out to be an epic hero, CAN be technically good in that the rhythm and technique and the like can all be extraordinary--but would we VALUE such a poem?

I would have to say generally not, and so, while Wagner's not at that level by any stretch of the imagination, the fact that his operas endorse and express views I find to be reprehensible to some degree DOES lessen my enjoyment and, more importantly, my valuation of his work as a whole on THAT level--this isn't a devaluation based upon the man's personal beliefs, but rather what he put into his work and what that work expresses.

The sweetest music sometimes cannot completely obscure a foul idea.

I'll not touch the IQ comment, "scientific" or not, as that's a can of worms, bside the point, and all in all "science" of that era certainly seemed to, ahem, "have it out" for some groups...wanting to "prove" and thereby "justify" some actions that, without said "proof"...

Finally, Nietzsche's Ubermensch isn't the Hitler Superman, the ideas are rather opposite.

To put it another way, Zarathustra, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, while attacking nationalism and the Church, NEVER attacked the Jews as a race nor did he express trhat some are BIOLOGICALLY supeior, etc.

The Church/State attacks by Nietzsche are judgment calls whether or not you want to view that as "bad," but I certainly don't think his work--or, perhaps more accurately, MOST of his work, as most everyone has a dark splotch--promotes ideas the whole would find reprehensible, whereas Wagner's wildly pro-German, pro-militant, pro-nationalist operas, perhaps a bit more so.

[QUOTE=stlukesguild;963704][COLOR="DarkRed"]Nietzsche, on the other hand, did not in his works of brilliance express such views, and as such I promote him while deriding Wagner, a brilliant composer, but the themes and messages he chose to express with that brilliance seem none to enviable...

Again... where is the overt antisemitism or extreme nationalism in the actual music?

Again, technically, ie, in the scores themselves, they're masterful, and "fine."

It's really the libretto and, more than that, the images that come to mind with Wagner...he isn't quite so overt, but rather implies in his music...this is part of the reason he and Nietzsche split, the latter couldn't stand the romanticizing of past events to a pro-German tune (literally and figuratively.)

Wagner's Valkyrie doesn't pop onto the stage singing "Death to the Jews, men, What have we to lose, then, How could God choose them, They must die..."

It's just the strong pro-German, pro-nationalist power, the image conveyed by the librettos' characters' dialogue/arias (and set to the tune of his VERY beautiful and powerful music) paints the Aryan race as being dominant racially and THERE'S the rub, or part, again, it's not so overt, and today can be lost, but in Wagner's days the symbolism rang clear with the audiences.

[stlukesguild]

Wagner made the mistake of putting his antisemitic thoughts into writing in various letters and essays... but I have never found any of this suggested... even obliquely... in his operas. It is quite possible that what you... and others imagine as being proto-Nazi expressions of antisemitism and the superiority of the German race is simply something imagined... because you are looking for it. How is Wagner's "nationalism" any different from that of Victor Hugo, Tennyson, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, J.L. David, Jackson Pollack, Bartok, Liszt, Shakespeare, Dante, Tolstoy, Emerson, Whitman, etc... ? In ever case the artists sought to build upon native traditions and native narratives. They all suggested an national vision... and quite often a belief in the unique merits of their nation expressed from a position of often struggling for recognition. Again... where is even the oblique antisemitism found in Wagner's operas? Where is anything approaching Shakespeare's Shylock or Marlowe's Jew of Malta? Indeed... where is there any sort of nationalism at all equal to that of the Hebrew Biblical claim to being "the chosen people"?

Of course I am a sworn admirer of Oscar Wilde who recognized:

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

[JCamilo]

Obviously, a work which the only message is "I am big, doh" is poor, but works without prejudice or political expression would imply in something non-human, as we have prejudices and political.
Virgil Aeneid is primary a prograganda of Roman Empire, obviously Virgil went beyond it, but the moral message is clear. Dante Comedy is also filled with personal bias, El Cid is clearly anti-islamic, even the Sistine Chappel screams out loud "how big the catholic church is". Wagner is a man of his time, of his generation, of his own prejudices. Not naive (not all world was anti-semetic, this could be said about africans in some aspects, but nevertheless, not forgettable) but his music went beyond just like the drama of Dido went beyond the "Haha, Cartage lost" from Aeneid.

[Lord Macbeth]

Obviously, a work which the only message is "I am big, doh" is poor, but works without prejudice or political expression would imply in something non-human, as we have prejudices and political.
Virgil Aeneid is primary a prograganda of Roman Empire, obviously Virgil went beyond it, but the moral message is clear. Dante Comedy is also filled with personal bias, El Cid is clearly anti-islamic, even the Sistine Chappel screams out loud "how big the catholic church is". Wagner is a man of his time, of his generation, of his own prejudices. Not naive (not all world was anti-semetic, this could be said about africans in some aspects, but nevertheless, not forgettable) but his music went beyond just like the drama of Dido went beyond the "Haha, Cartage lost" from Aeneid.

I don't mean to say that a work must or even should be free of a bias or prejudice of some kind; on the contrary, this would, as you rightly point out, seem to strip it pof it's ability to convey any sort of meaning or message and leave it feeling empty.

What I mean to say, have been trying to say as that I do not believe Wagner's prejudice/bias/slant/message (whichever term you wish) is one that is morally palatable in places.

Virgil and Dante? OH YES, you'd better BET they have issues in there works as well! I think we are generally inclined to allow for Virgil's more than Dante's critically, seeing as Virigil's main bias is supporting his home nation and mocking a hostile one that Rome foguth wars against (which is nationalist, but somewhat more acceptable as, well, the romans and Carthaginians WERE already hated enemies and Carthage had attacked Rome on ehr home soil...anti-Japanese cartoons from the 1940s are DEFINITELY politically incorrect, but we can generally forgive this to a certain degree because the feeling and motivation was understandable, they attacked us, with or without provocation, and so we felt enraged, a natural human response...Virigil does a similar thing in his work) whereas Dante...

Well, Dante threw the religious leader and prophet of a whole other religion into his hell...THAT, while being, again, somewhat understandable for the time, is a bit harder to swallow.

Wagner is Dante in this regard and then some--Anti-Semitism was certainly rampant in Germany at the time of hisn writings, but there were pro-Jew or at least non-hostile Germans as well, and so really it was somewhat less of the absolute, Christian vs. Muslim world from which Dante writes.

Further, not all Germans, DEFINITELY not all Germans embraced nationalism, this wasn't just a trend Wagner went with--Germany had just recently unified, or at least relatively recently unified, certainly a collectivist feeling was not in place with the masses, and certainly not a "we're better than the rest of the world, biologically, artistically, mentally, we are THE Master Race" mentality (which is, finally, one of the greatest points to show that Nietzsche's Ubermensch is not the Reich's Superman--theirs is a RACE, Nietzsche spends a great deal of Thus Spoke Zarathustra attacking the diea of race and religion alone, stating such ideas are foolishness in the football, "We're Number One!" mentality the Nazis preached, so agaion, they just took a nice name and slapped it onto their own idea, the concept of strength over weakness can be atrributed to both, sure, but THAT idea has existed since the Greeks and Plato, so really that's not so much Nietzsche's idea as perhaps a Western idea overall.)

[Alexander III]

"Wagner is Dante in this regard and then some--Anti-Semitism was certainly rampant in Germany at the time of hisn writings, but there were pro-Jew or at least non-hostile Germans as well, and so really it was somewhat less of the absolute, Christian vs. Muslim world from which Dante writes."

Have to disagree slightly on both points. When Dante was writing, tales of the (untrue) atrocities committed by muslim men in the crusades would have reached him.

And as for Wager, it is quite true that in europe Jew's of that time were associated with money lenders, as in fact a large percentage dealt with that occupation, after the unification of Germany, the nation went through an economic crisis. Now think of how much hate the bankers received the last couple years for the recession. Now take that hate, and consider that most bankers were jewish, and then consider that germany was a new born nation and it could appear that the jew's were intentionally trying to undermine the unity of the new nation.

This is the very reason 40-50 year later, 48% of Germans voted for Hitler.

Now im not justifying racial hatred, but one must understand that it is never out of the blue, there is always a cause to the effect. Oh an Shakespeare was far more anti semitic than Wagner, does that mean you do not like his plays ?


"A poem by Pol Pot praising his genocides, describing it all in vivid detail and making himself out to be an epic hero, CAN be technically good in that the rhythm and technique and the like can all be extraordinary--but would we VALUE such a poem?"

The Iliad has been around for almost 3000 years and its has always been seen as one of the great poems of europe.

[Lord Macbeth]

"Wagner is Dante in this regard and then some--Anti-Semitism was certainly rampant in Germany at the time of hisn writings, but there were pro-Jew or at least non-hostile Germans as well, and so really it was somewhat less of the absolute, Christian vs. Muslim world from which Dante writes."

Have to disagree slightly on both points. When Dante was writing, tales of the (untrue) atrocities committed by muslim men in the crusades would have reached him.

And as for Wager, it is quite true that in europe Jew's of that time were associated with money lenders, as in fact a large percentage dealt with that occupation, after the unification of Germany, the nation went through an economic crisis. Now think of how much hate the bankers received the last couple years for the recession. Now take that hate, and consider that most bankers were jewish, and then consider that germany was a new born nation and it could appear that the jew's were intentionally trying to undermine the unity of the new nation.

This is the very reason 40-50 year later, 48% of Germans voted for Hitler.

Now im not justifying racial hatred, but one must understand that it is never out of the blue, there is always a cause to the effect. Oh an Shakespeare was far more anti semitic than Wagner, does that mean you do not like his plays ?


"A poem by Pol Pot praising his genocides, describing it all in vivid detail and making himself out to be an epic hero, CAN be technically good in that the rhythm and technique and the like can all be extraordinary--but would we VALUE such a poem?"

The Iliad has been around for almost 3000 years and its has always been seen as one of the great poems of europe.

-I wasn't saying that the hatred came out of the blue, but rather that it wasn't the solid, stone-cold norm that Dante's anti-Islam attitude was in his Medevial worlkd, there were Germans on both sides, and Wagner took one side, and Nietzsche another.

-I actuall have argued frequently against Shakespeare being an Anti-Semite, and I think, ironically, the play that would seem to most enforce the charge of Anti-Semitism, The Merchant of Venice, somewhat clears him; Shylock IS the villian, and IS a bitter one, but there is no issue about making a Jew a villian, everyone and anyone can be a villain, so nothing is intinsically wrong with this idea. Further, Shakespeare is notorious for having a wide following that would read him as being potentially femminist, particularly for his time, and giving the characters he thought most vital and true the best lines...the "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech is porbably the most memorable from the play, along with the adaptation of the Medevial phrase "All that glisters is not gold" and Portia's often misunderstood but still-brilliant line "The quality of mercy is not strained." Shylock IS depicted as being, while a villain, a villain BECAUSE OF SOMETHING, and NOT, as is the case in Marlowe's sister play The Jew of Malta, merely a wicked monster. As such, Shakespeare probably did think Jews a bit odd, most English Elizabethans probably did (at best, at worst its FAR uglier) but I don't think his qritings qualify him as an overt Anti-Semite, and CERTAINLY not as great an Anti-Semite as Wagner. Had Shakespeare not given Shylock that depth and his motivations, made these motivations logical and sympathetic (he even goes to the lengths of having Shylock's wife dead adn showing that Shylock really does love his daughter...did this in Shakespeare seem Anti-Semitic?) then we might have a Dante/Marlowe situation where we would say yes, insensitive but somewhat explainable due to the norms of the day; Shakespeare's characters have depth, and he, unlike Marlowe, gives HIS prominent Jewish character a reason for his actions and a story so sympathetic the play is often done today with an emphasis on Shylock (who is NOT the Merchant of the title, Antonio is) and his being almost a tragic hero surrounded by a farce of a society (that's another thing, the Venetians in Shylock's Venice are portrayed as corrupt and hypocritical, and, and, as such, we can see, perhaps, Shakespeare even siding with the Jews and shylock a bit, showing at the very least Shylock has some very good reasons for calling his Christian neighbors false and despising them.)

-On The Iliad...what was your point? If it was that the book promotes genocide...well, as that's an outright war I think that's a hard case to make, but even if it was made, the Trojans are long gone, so just as we don't really hold it agaisnt Virgil for laughing in the Carthaginians' faces, we don't hold this against Homer, either...

[Lord Macbeth]

And if that Shakespeare explanation seemed long, almost too long for a passing comment...

Maybe so--but look at who I am, and tell me you didn't expectme to be just a tad intersted in preserving Shakespeare's name? ;) Plus I really DON'T think the charge sticks, in terms of his era Shakespeare DOES have his issues, but generally he's viewed as one of the most progressive writers ever--again considering the time and place--and so that charge seemsa bit hard to hold, even if plays outside Shlock's are brought in and passing references collected, the mere fact that the Bard took the time to give a human Jewish character rather than just a wicked Marlovian monster (I'm really picking on Marlowe here too much, I like him as well, I need to compliment him later at some point haha) seems to refute the point that Shakespeare was an Anti-Semite and at least places him back in the "ambiguous" category in regards to his feelings about Jews.

[Alexander III]

"On The Iliad...what was your point? If it was that the book promotes genocide...well, as that's an outright war I think that's a hard case to make, but even if it was made, the Trojans are long gone, so just as we don't really hold it agaisnt Virgil for laughing in the Carthaginians' faces, we don't hold this against Homer, either..."

So genocides of forgotten people are art, but genocides of our grandparents aren't ?

The basic defense you gave Shakespeare was valid, however it began with the presumption of your opinion. However the mainstream opinion, believes the bard to have been anti-semitic.

Personally I dont care is an artist is racist, misogynistic, sadistic and an *******, as beauty is quite above such trivialities.

[stlukesguild]

If we are excusing Virgil and Dante for their prejudices as a result of their personal experience, we might want to look more closely at Wagner. Wagner, for all of his influence, struggled for recognition and in financial terms early on in his career. Wagner's most famous and damning expression of antisemitism took the form of an essay written in 1850 entitled, Das Judenthum in der Musik ("Jewishness in Music"). At the time, Wagner's latest opera, Tannhäuser (his first opera of his mature style) had not been the success that his previous Rienzi had been. He was living in exile in Zurich as a result of his participation in the failed 1849 Revolution in Dresden. Wagner was active in socialist circles involved in the efforts calling for constitutional freedoms and the unification of the German states. The revolution turned violent with Prussian troops called in and the old Dresden opera house burned during the uprising.

In Zurich, Wagner began to lash out at all those he saw as responsible for the failure of German unification... and for his personal failures. His targets included musical and political conservatives. He lashed out specifically at Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer whose conservative style he felt was cramping the potential of German music. Meyerbeer had earlier supported Wagner, and his highly successful opera, Rienzi, was very much in the style of Meyerbeer. Breaking away from this 'conservative" mold with Tannhäuser resulted in a critical and popular flop. Where Wagner had not previously expressed the least antisemitic ideas, he drew ammunition from an essay written by one of his disciples, Theodor Uhlig, attacking Meyerbeer's successful opera, Le prophète, which portrayed sinister Anabaptists. Uhlig was outraged by the Jewish composer's use of Christian clerics as villains. Wagner built upon Uhlig's antisemitism as a means of undermining not only Meyerbeer, but also Mendelssohn... and most importantly Eduard Hanslick, the powerful music critic (of a Jewish mother) who was openly hostile toward Wagner and Liszt and the new directions in music, and supportive of the conservative trend represented by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms.

Interestingly enough... for all his supposed antisemitism, Wagner employed an array of convoluted logic to defend the work of Jewish writers such as Achim von Arnim and Heinrich Heine. Wagner actually drew from Heine for the narrative of his Flying Dutchman. Wagner also maintain close relationships with many important and supportive Jewish figures, including Hermann Levi, his favorite conductor, the pianist Carl Tausig, and Samuel Lehrs, who he spoke of as "one of the most beautiful friendships of my life."

[Lord Macbeth]

"On The Iliad...what was your point? If it was that the book promotes genocide...well, as that's an outright war I think that's a hard case to make, but even if it was made, the Trojans are long gone, so just as we don't really hold it agaisnt Virgil for laughing in the Carthaginians' faces, we don't hold this against Homer, either..."

So genocides of forgotten people are art, but genocides of our grandparents aren't ?

The basic defense you gave Shakespeare was valid, however it began with the presumption of your opinion. However the mainstream opinion, believes the bard to have been anti-semitic.

Personally I dont care is an artist is racist, misogynistic, sadistic and an *******, as beauty is quite above such trivialities.

Where is this "mainstream" that calls the Bard an Anti-Semite?

To this day, spoken to hundreds of Shakespeare lovers and know-nothings and in-between...

NEVER have I heard the charge of Anti-Smitism meant seriously...the issue is brought up but generally the above defense is seen as valid...I've heard folks call him a mysognist (there, too, I'd argue and say if he WAS he at least also gave some great feminist characters, particularly Lady Macbeth and the heroinnes of the comedies, so at least something of a balance there) but never this charge seriously...

Where is this mainstream? Where are the masses that call him Anti-Jew?

[Lord Macbeth]

If we are excusing Virgil and Dante for their prejudices as a result of their personal experience, we might want to look more closely at Wagner. Wagner, for all of his influence, struggled for recognition and in financial terms early on in his career. Wagner's most famous and damning expression of antisemitism took the form of an essay written in 1850 entitled, Das Judenthum in der Musik ("Jewishness in Music"). At the time, Wagner's latest opera, Tannhäuser (his first opera of his mature style) had not been the success that his previous Rienzi had been. He was living in exile in Zurich as a result of his participation in the failed 1849 Revolution in Dresden. Wagner was active in socialist circles involved in the efforts calling for constitutional freedoms and the unification of the German states. The revolution turned violent with Prussian troops called in and the old Dresden opera house burned during the uprising.

In Zurich, Wagner began to lash out at all those he saw as responsible for the failure of German unification... and for his personal failures. His targets included musical and political conservatives. He lashed out specifically at Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer whose conservative style he felt was cramping the potential of German music. Meyerbeer had earlier supported Wagner, and his highly successful opera, Rienzi, was very much in the style of Meyerbeer. Breaking away from this 'conservative" mold with Tannhäuser resulted in a critical and popular flop. Where Wagner had not previously expressed the least antisemitic ideas, he drew ammunition from an essay written by one of his disciples, Theodor Uhlig, attacking Meyerbeer's successful opera, Le prophète, which portrayed sinister Anabaptists. Uhlig was outraged by the Jewish composer's use of Christian clerics as villains. Wagner built upon Uhlig's antisemitism as a means of undermining not only Meyerbeer, but also Mendelssohn... and most importantly Eduard Hanslick, the powerful music critic (of a Jewish mother) who was openly hostile toward Wagner and Liszt and the new directions in music, and supportive of the conservative trend represented by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms.

Interestingly enough... for all his supposed antisemitism, Wagner employed an array of convoluted logic to defend the work of Jewish writers such as Achim von Arnim and Heinrich Heine. Wagner actually drew from Heine for the narrative of his Flying Dutchman. Wagner also maintain close relationships with many important and supportive Jewish figures, including Hermann Levi, his favorite conductor, the pianist Carl Tausig, and Samuel Lehrs, who he spoke of as "one of the most beautiful friendships of my life."

For a literature thread we've sure speant a while now talking about a musical figure, eh? ;) (Though opera DOES give us a written story with the music, so I suppose it can be likened to the theatre in this sense...)

Really, I don't know what else to say, and I don't think this is a winnable debate one way or another.

I find the man to be reprehensible in some ways, his msuci to be incredible, and his librettos to be just not what I'd quite call kosher, so for me that's two out of three, and with plenty of other brilliant composers to listen to, I really don't mind snubbing Wagner.

Maybe my points have credence or maybe it's just a personal matter, biut I just don't care for the man and his librettos, and sadly that for me is enough to ruin a good deal of his music, and with Tchaikovsky and Puccini and Mozart and Beethoven and Rossini and Arthur Sullivan and so many more...

I'm fine staying "contra Wagner" with Nietzsche. ;)

[JCamilo]

I do not see any point excusing Virgil or Dante and Not Wagner. It is not a coincidence that the explosion of radicial nationalism in europe happens after Napoleon. Wagner also had his country destroyed, etc.
And as Dante, it is not about sending muslims to hell (He actually respected and had influence of islamic thinkers) but he literally sent to hell all he disliked. Dare you to step on his toes, 8th circle for you. Dante literally goes to another circle while dealing with personal stuff.

But if the examples do not persuade we can add Camoes and his vision of muslims. He is clearly a nationalist. Oh there goes...

As the Iliad, it is not genocide, as there is not a mass murderer, but it is glorication of war. No wonder plays like Hecuba or The Trojans are all sided with the women of Troy, even the greeks feel pity for them.

[Kafka's Crow]

I was told 20 years ago that 'Romanticism' is one of those terms which have lost meanings due to overuse and over-explanation. Who was the first Romantic? Was it Prometheus or Satan in the Garden of Eden? To some people, Shakespeare had quite a few Romantic tendencies. Milton created a great Romantic figure in Satan. When did it all begin and where it ended? Comte de Lautreamont was hugely influenced by Lord Byron and Byron's influence on the French Romantics can never be over-stressed (arguably the most influential Romantic poet outside England). The French were hugely influenced by Poe as well. If Romanticism is the name of a literary and artistic attitude whereby an individual exerts his self-expression against the traditions of the genre than all art is fruit of this tension between tradition (form) and self-expression (content).

Romanticism is defined as 'shifting from static mechanism to dynamic organicism' (Irving Babbitt, 'Rousseau and Romanticism').