Class 1: The Wild Within

A. The Noble Beast

1. Title Slide 1 (Stubbs: Horse Attacked by a Lion)

This course is about the movement in the arts known as , which came into prominence in the first quarter of the 19th Century, though began in the middle of the 18th, and lingered on in some media well into the 20th. This extended period, roughly 1750–1925, is sometimes referred to as The Long Nineteenth Century. The main point of this opening class is to enlarge on this statement—or rather to replace it with a series of questions that we can address in future weeks.

I have to say that the course is very much a work in progress. Partly this is a matter of time; there is an enormous amount of material to organize, which was not helped by a total computer crash last month which set me back by several weeks. But mainly it is the nature of the subject. Virtually every book on Romanticism begins with a chapter showing the author reeling with the difficulty of pinning it down in date, place, or meaning. True, I have issued a syllabus, dividing everything into neat packages, but I have little expectation that it will stay like that. I have resigned myself to thinking of Romanticism as a grab bag of fascinating ideas; the only possibility is to take hold of one of them and follow it where it leads.

2. Romanticism 1 (walled city in Malta) 3. Romanticism 2 (steam train) 4. Romanticism 3 (tourist map of Arizona)

If I may offer an analogy: Romanticism cannot be defined as an enclosed territory, still less as a linear journey from point to point, but only as a collection of points of interest, each of which exists within Romanticism, but cannot be said to define it, except collectively. So for the rest of this class and each of the eleven that follow, I shall pick on some point that interests me and just go for it. Sometimes I will be in control of the material; more often, it will take control of me. That is how Romanticism works.

5. Title slide 1 (repeat)

My title slide is a case in point. Originally, I had intended to call this first class “What’s in a Name?” But looking for something to make an arresting beginning, I settled on this picture by George Stubbs (1724– 1806), A Lion Attacking a Horse. But when I came to type, I found that “What’s in a Name?” just didn’t look right; the picture virtually dictated a new title, “The Wild Within,” which sort of works for me. In the first hour, we will look at “the Wild;” “Within” will come after the break.

6. George Stubbs: A Lion Attacking a Horse (1770, Yale) 7. George Stubbs: Horse paintings 8. George Stubbs: Plates from The Anatomy of the Horse (1770, Royal Academy, London)

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Let’s look at the Stubbs more closely. What are its ingredients? It is a dialogue, I think, between the landscape at top left and the terrified horse at bottom right, with the looming rocks somehow mediating between them. Now Stubbs was a painter who specialized in horses. He would do horse portraits for wealthy patrons, two of which are shown here; the landscapes are pretty, but quite conventional. However, Stubbs was deadly serious about his profession. In 1756, he rented a farmhouse and began almost two years of study dissecting horses; and in 1770, he published a set of engravings, The Anatomy of the Horse. In this respect, Stubbs was a citizen of the Age of Reason, when everything was the province of cataloguing and scientific study.

9. Thomas Gainsborough: Mr and Mrs Andrews (c.1750, London NG)

All these come from the middle of the century. Perhaps the loveliest English landscape of that time comes in the portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88). Beautiful indeed, but there can be no doubt about the purpose of the picture if you look at its full title: Robert Andrews of the Auberies and Frances Carter of Ballingdon House After Their Marriage. Clearly, it is all about property—very much like Stubbs’ normal horse portraits.

10. Thomas Gainsborough: Landscape with the Village of Cornard (1750s, Edinburgh) 11. George Stubbs: Grey Hunter with Groom and Greyhound (1772, London, Tate)

Now Gainsborough did paint quite a few more rugged landscapes, such as this Landscape with the Village of Cornard, as did Stubbs in his Grey Hunter with a Groom and a Greyhound at Creswell Crags, whose title nonetheless suggests that it too is a property picture. Both of these could be described as Picturesque, a term that came into vogue in the later 18th century, and is certainly a prelude to Romanticsm, but Stubb’s Horse Attacked by a Lion is something else. How does it differ from the others we have seen? I suggest that the importance is its combination of noble qualities—horse and lion— together with an outbreak of violence that has an animal, rather than a human wildness.

12. Giambologna: Lion Attacking a Horse (1580s, Walters Art Gallery)

Here’s a strange bit of serendipity. In the middle of writing this class, I took my grandchildren to that marvelous Cabinet of Wonders at the Walters Art Museum. And glancing down at a small bronze lying on one of the tables, I saw it was of this exact same subject—only not of the Romantic era at all. In fact, it is one of several versions of the subject done by the Flemish-Italian sculptor Giambologna (1529– 1608). Researching this further, I learnt that the subject is found even in Roman and Greek art. This is one of the curious things about Romanticism: many of its qualities can be found in other centuries also; it is not the originality but the obsession that makes it Romantic.

13. Blake: “The Tyger,” video reading by Tom O’Bedlam 14. Delacroix: Tiger Attacking a Snake (Washington, Corcoran Gallery) 15. Delacroix: comparison of Tiger to Self-Portrait

Artists around 1800 were fascinated by the image of the lion or tiger as symbol of savage power. One only has to look at William Blake’s (1757–1827) famous poem “Tyger, tyger, burning bright” from his Songs of Experience (1794), where the very existence of the Tiger is part of the magnificent mystery of

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God. And both tigers and lions feature prominently in the work of Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), the most quintessentially Romantic artist of all. Indeed, one might speculate that he saw himself as a tiger. In the words of Frederick the Great (1712–86), “Every man has a wild beast within him.”

But it is the horse that became a Romantic symbol par excellence. To prove my point, here is a quick montage of horse pictures, going into the next century; many of these will come back in later classes.

16. Liszt: Mazeppa (orchestral excerpt, with horse pictures) 17. Delacroix and Vernet Mazeppas

The last two paintings I showed, one by Delacroix and the other by Horace Vernet (1789–1863), both illustrate the legend of Mazeppa; the background music came from by the symphonic poem of the same name by Franz Liszt (1811–86), both based on a narrative poem by George Gordon Lord Byron (1788– 1824), another key figure in the Romantic movement.

18. Thomas Phillips: Lord Byron (1812, London NPG), with Vernet Mazeppa

Byron, who will be a major subject of my third class, became an overnight superstar with the publication of his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in 1812; he will be a featured artist in my third class. So, when he published Mazeppa in 1819, it was immediately translated into French and several other languages. And that translation, in turn, triggered the spate of paintings and musical settings that we have already sampled. His subject is an historical legend, that is to say a probably fictional story growing up around a real person. Ivan Mazeppa (1639–1709) became the leader of the Ukrainian armies in the later 17th century. In his youth, so the legend goes, he had an affair with the wife of a Polish Count. Discovering this, the Count had him tied naked to the back of a wild horse, which he then whipped into the forest. Mazeppa lives to tell of his ordeal; when Romantic narratives are not outright tragedies, they tend to celebrate human endurance. To show you the style, here are some lines from the passage that Vernet paints, when Mazeppa and his horse are pursued by wolves.

19. Byron: Mazeppa (text excerpt)

B. Bravura

20. Horace Vernet: Mazeppa and the Wolves (1826, Avignon), with sketch

You may have noticed that I switched between Vernet’s finished painting of Mazeppa and a preliminary sketch. Let’s now look at the two side by side: what differences do you see between them? The final version has more clarity and detail, yes, but there is a sense of action in the sketch that comes solely from the way the artist handles his brush, as a visceral response to a visceral subject. It is an example of something that crops up again and again in Romanticism—bravura. These reproductions are not the best, so let’s go back on a couple of the pictures I have already shown you to see it better.

21. Horace Vernet: Rome, Race of Riderless Horses (1826, NY Met) 22. Eugène Delacroix: Combat between the Giaour and the Pasha (1835, Paris, Petit Palais)

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The first of these is another Vernet, the start of the annual race of riderless horses in Rome. It has the sense of something being quickly done, with the handling of the brush and vivid color mirroring the horses’ excitement. Or rather, the artist’s excitement being drawn into the scene—the personal response is also a key Romantic factor. The other is by Delacroix, Combat between the Giaour and the Pasha. The bravura of the painting needs no comment from me, but I do want to make two other points. First, the subject again comes from Byron: his 1813 poem The Giaour, about an infidel who takes revenge on a Turkish Pasha for drowning one of his concubines who fell in love with him. Second, it is an example of the Orientalism which becomes another important element in Romantic art, especially in France. All of these points will be addressed in later classes.

23. John Constable: The Hay Wain (1821, London NG) 24. — the same, with detail

I will also address the subject of English landscape in both poetry and painting, which also involves a kind of bravura, the spontaneous response of the artist to nature. But there is a direct link here. Delacroix changed aspects of his painting style on seeing The Haywain by John Constable (1776–1837) which was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824. What impressed him was the freedom of the Englishman’s paint handling, and if he had felt this from the polished final version, how much more impressed would he have been with Constable’s final sketch, full-size, but with no attempt to damp down the sparkle of individual brush strokes.

25. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: Niccolò Paganini (1819, Paris Louvre) 26. Eugène Delacroix: Niccolo Paganini (1831, Washington, Phillips Collection)

The term bravura, of course, is principally applied to music, and I currently propose devoting a major part of a class to the phenomenon of the superstar virtuosos: Chopin, Liszt, and the violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), whose playing was so extraordinary that he was nicknamed “The Devil’s Violinist.” Here is a relatively early (1819) drawing of him by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780– 1867), a contemporary of Delacroix, but absolutely no Romantic. He was, however, an accomplished violinist himself, and may have played duets with the Italian. Now compare it with this portrait by Delacroix. It is a few years later, but the approach is quite different. What do you see? To my eye, this seems almost a caricature, a man utterly possessed, if not by the Devil then by the wild genius of his own music.

27. Liszt and the score of Mazeppa

Which brings me back to Franz Liszt and Mazeppa: not now the orchestral piece but the Transcendental Étude he wrote for piano in 1852, challenging himself with every last ounce of difficulty. It’s too long to play complete, but I want to give you at least the last three minutes of this performance by Daniil Trifonov, who seems equally as possessed by the music as Paganini was by the Devil. Of course, it’s difficult—but if you look, you will see that the easier it gets to play, the more possessed Trifonov becomes!

28. Franz Liszt: Transcendental Etude #4 (Mazeppa) (Daniil Trifonov)

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C. Literature and Legend

29. Goethe, with some key dates

You will have noticed that much in the other arts, painting and music, seem to be responses to literature. Byron fathered instrumental music and painting, Schiller and Victor Hugo did the same for opera, and the influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was more pervasive still. Poet, playwright, novelist, philosopher, scientist, and statesman, Goethe was one of the great polymaths of his age, and a key figure in the birth of Romanticism; we shall be coming back to him in later classes.

30. Moritz von Schwind: Der Erlkönig (1830, Belvedere)

Romantic narratives tend to be long, whether in prose or verse, so in order to give us something to analyze complete, I want to turn to the ballad depicted here by the German Romantic painter Moritz von Schwind (1804–71). Can you guess what is going on? Another frantic ride through a forest, clearly. But now the rider seems pursued by the ghostly male figure and perhaps tempted by the younger female ones. It is in fact the ballad Erlkönig (the Alder King), an early work of Goethe’s (1771).

31. Goethe: Der Erlkönig, translation by Richard Wilbur (adapted)

Goethe tells the story almost like a play-script, for Narrator and three characters. There is the Father, riding home with his child in his arms. There is his young Son. And there is the Erl King, or forest wizard, who tries to seduce the boy away from his father. I have color-coded the various voices here. Goethe’s ballad in famous now in the musical setting by (1787–1828), another of those key Romantic artists, like Byron, who led tragically short lives. Der Erlkönig is his Opus 1. His setting is for one voice only, but he depicts the characters brilliantly. The father is set very low in the singer’s range. The Boy is set high, and it gets higher and higher with each entry. The Erl King is given lyrical, seductive music, which provides the only break from the relentlessly pounding hoofbeats that accompany the Narrator and continue almost throughout. I have prepared two short videos (which I might decide instead to play on the piano) giving that instrumental opening, and then illustrating the rising tension of the Boy’s frantic cries:

32. Schubert: Der Erlkönig, introduction 33. Schubert: Der Erlkönig, entrances of the Child 34. — English translation (repeat)

I hope these landmarks will prove helpful. If there are no questions, let’s go on to a performance. The singer is Matthias Goerne with Andreas Haefliger playing the fiendishly difficult piano part.

35. Schubert: Der Erlkönig, Goerne/Haefliger 36. Title Slide 2 (Moritz von Schwind: Schubertiade)

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D. Memory and Regret

The slide I had up during the break is a sketch by Moritz von Schwind, who illustrated the Erlkönig. It shows Schubert playing at a house concert, or Schubertiade. Although I have some doubts as to its authenticity in this colored version, it illustrates another important point. As the other side of the coin to the star virtuosi drawing huge crowds to public halls, music was increasingly coming into the home, and much of it was played by amateurs. They sang songs by Schubert and Schumann, they played chamber music in family groups, and most orchestral music was available in piano-duet arrangements.

One of the songs they might have been listening to is Der Lindenbaum (the linden tree) from the song- cycle Winterreise (winter journey) that Schubert published in 1828, about a young man fleeing a lost love. A year after the death of the poet, in fact: Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827). Müller was not a genius like Goethe, but his texts are valuable as epitomizing the age. As we look at this one, I want you particularly to think about the time-frames of each section.

37. Müller: “Der Lindenbaum” from Winterreise, slide 1 38. Müller: “Der Lindenbaum” from Winterreise, slide 2 39. Müller: “Der Lindenbaum” from Winterreise, slide 3

So what are the three time-frames? I would say the distant past (1), the recent past (2), and the present (3): nostalgia, trauma, and regret. The song is about memory. What is so painful is his vivid recollection of happier days; the bit about the wind and the winter’s night is merely a Romantic projection of his feelings. Now music is particularly good at conveying the effects of memory, because music so often conjures up the sense that you have heard the thing before. I am going to play the opening of the song twice. I’ll divide the score up into three sections; as we go, I’d like you to think about the associations of each one:

40. Schubert: “Der Lindenbaum” introduction video 41. Schubert: “Der Lindenbaum” introduction score 1 42. Schubert: “Der Lindenbaum” introduction score 2 43. Schubert: “Der Lindenbaum” introduction score 3 44. Schubert: “Der Lindenbaum” introduction score 4 45. Schubert: “Der Lindenbaum” introduction score 5

Let’s take these a section at a time. The first surely represents the rustling of the wind in the leaves. This opening is punctuated by a horn call, a sound from former times. If it is not evocative of memory the first time, it certainly is the second, when it is marked triple-piano. And then the song tune itself. Many Germans probably think of it as a folk-song, but it’s merely composed that way. Again, although this is new music, it feels as though you’ve known it forever. Let’s listen once more to the introduction, and then turn to a full performance by the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Alfred Brendel. As we do so, note how Schubert treats the three time-frames: 1. Folk-like, nostalgic, as we have seen. 2. In the minor key, with the wind whipping up, the most “present” of all three sections. 3. Much as the first section, but now with an added rocking figure.

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Schubert extends this last verse by repeating it, and then gives the piano the last word.

46. Schubert: “Der Lindenbaum” introduction video (repeat) 47. Schubert: “Der Lindenbaum” performance 48. Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey” excerpt, with Thomas Havell painting

For the Romantics, memory seems always to be connected with loss. Sometimes it is the loss of a love; more often it is simply loss of youth. It is the central idea in Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth (1770–1850). Wordsworth is writing in 1798, at the age of 27; the youth he now laments was the time of his previous visit, at the age of 22, only five years before.

Schubert wrote Der Lindenbaum in the style of a folk song, but quite a few Romantic poets wrote poems that in fact became folk-songs. One such is The Banks of Doon, written in 1791 by the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–96), borrowing—and forever popularizing—a pre-existing tune. The poem is remarkable because its original inspiration is a contemporary scandal: the case of a young Ayrshire woman who killed herself after being made pregnant and then abandoned by the local MP. But it is testament to the period that it also works on its own terms, as a lament for the loss of love, loss of innocence, and loss of joy in the countryside of her youth.

49. Robert Burns: The Banks o’ Doon (Kenneth McKellar) 50. Keats and the MS of Ode to a Nightingale

I am sorry to say that, among Romantic poets, nostalgia seems to go hand-in-hand with depression. So it is, anyway, in the Ode to a Nightingale (1819) by John Keats (1795–1821), another of those short-lived geniuses—though he died of tuberculosis, not suicide. Here are the final three stanzas, read by “Tom O’Bedlam.”

51. John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale (final 3 stanzas, read by Tom O’Bedlam) 52. — repeat of the previous slide

Keats’s poem was not about the Nightingale, but his own soul. It is not Nature that is the key to Romanticism, but how Nature reflects the mental state of the artist. There is a well-known book by M. H. Abrams called The Mirror and the Lamp. Until the Romantics, literature and painting were typically understood as a mirror reflecting the real world. For the Romantics, however, the arts were more like a lamp: the light of the artist’s inner soul spilled out to illuminate the world. I emphasize inner soul; it is the reason why I called this course “Inside the Romantic Mind.” The Germans have a special word for this “inside-ness”: Innigkeit. It means inwardness, intimacy, intensity, being guided by feeling rather than form. It is a term most associated with music, but applied to all the arts. It is where I was heading when I promised that our second hour would deal, not with “The Wild,” but “Within.”

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E. Scenes from Childhood

53. Henry Wallis: The Death of Chatterton (1856, London Tate) 54. — the same, with Wordsworth lines

Keats contemplated suicide, but died of other causes. The painting here, though by a much later artist, Henry Wallis (1830–1916) is of an 18th-century poet who rocketed to fame as a teenager, then poisoned himself at 17: Thomas Chatterton (1752–70). Chatterton fascinated the English Romantics, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, who called him “Chatterton, the marvelous boy.” I suspect they were more influenced by his tragic story than his actual output.

55. Early 19th-century portraits of children

But I don’t want to be entirely morbid. Artists, especially in Germany, seem to have been fascinated with children. Here are three child portraits from the first quarter of the century. I am especially fascinated by the middle one, a painting by Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow (1789–1862) of his young step- brother. What do you see in his expression What does the painter see?

56. Schumann: Kinderszenen, title page

Robert Schumann (1810–56) was another of those piano virtuoso composers, and most of his music is very difficult. But he also wrote a number of collections of music for the young. The earliest is Scenes from Childhood (1838). Schumann was 28 when he wrote it; again, these scenes are an act of memory, attempting to recover a lost world. All the pieces have titles; this would be the case with many of Schumann’s adult works too; the Romantics delighted in fragments, short pieces that would conjure up a particular mood and then be gone. As you can see from the list, most of the pieces refer to childhood preoccupations, and a lot of them are pretty lively, and not all as easy as it says on the title page. But I want to play the simplest of the lot—the famous Träumerei or “Dreaming.” Yes, I’m sure you all know it already! But I chose it because nothing could better illustrate the quality of Innigkeit in music, and it so perfectly calls up the Romantic style of playing. I have chosen a performance by the young Hong Kong pianist Tiffany Poon because the sound is clear, and she is playing on an ordinary piano in an ordinary domestic setting. As you listen, think of one simple question: Where is the music coming from?

57. Schumann: Träumerei (Tiffany Poon) 58. — still from the above

What did you think? To my mind, she seems to be channeling the music from somewhere in the ether; the notes do not come through her fingers one after the other, but by way of her mind. The result is a very flexible approach to playing, the opposite of going strictly by the metronome. We call this rubato, or stealing time from one phrase to give to the next. It is the essence of Romantic music, for whatever medium—though I have to tell you that you will hear performers (especially of an older generation) applying Romantic rubato to works by Mozart, Handel, or even Bach, where purists would say it does not belong at all.

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F. A Late Farewell

59. Moritz von Schwind: Des Knaben Wunderhorn (sketch)

We were talking of writing for children. In 1806, the poets (1781–1831) and Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) published the first volume in their collection of folk verse, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or “Youth’s Magic Horn.” It was an immediate success; Goethe proclaimed that no household should be without one. Germany was still reeling from Napoleonic defeat, and the return to the myths and folklore of the German people gave a significant boost to national pride. It was at Brentano’s suggestion that the went on to compile their collection of fairytales. In fact, though, the two compilers felt entirely free to edit the found material and even to insert their own poems, so this is a consciously shaped folklore.

Many composers set individual songs from the collection, but the one most associated with Des Knaben Wunderhorn was Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), who set over a dozen of the songs, first for voice and piano, and later with orchestra. I want to look at just one of these settings: Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (“Where the splendid trumpets sound”), composed in 1898. Note that this comes at the far end of the century; it is an example of how long Romanticism lingered on, especially in German music, well into the 20th century, actually. You will see a similar nostalgia to Der Lindenbaum, a touch of the spookiness of Erlkönig, and a sweet Indian Summer quality shared by many composers of the period.

60. Mahler: Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, title slide.

Excuse the fact that one of the pictures here seems to take place in Scotland; it was the best background I could find; the little figurine is more to the point. The song is intended for a single singer, but like Der Lindenbaum. the text has several voices. One of these is the Narrator, who sets up the scene of a young woman alone in her room at night, and occasionally speaks through her voice. Another is the Man, her lover, clearly a soldier returned from the field. And the third is the Young Woman herself, speaking warmly to her lover, in a surprising shift of key; this music continues into the next bit of narration, more magical than anything before. I have written the text out in sections as a video, adding piano music to show the three major themes.

61. Mahler: Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, text and analysis 62. — still from the above

What do you think that last verse means? To me, there is a prosaic explanation and a poetic one. Prosaically, he is going off to war and intends to come back and marry her on his next leave, though both know he may be killed. Poetically, he has already been killed and that “home of green turf” is his grave; the whole thing has been a visit by his ghost. It is this interpretation that gives me the shivers every time I play it, and which I hear in Mahler’s uncanny orchestration. See what you think.

63. Mahler: Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, Lucia Popp with Leonard Bernstein 64. Title Slide 3 (Anton Ivanov: Crossing the Dnieper at Sunset)

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