German romance
The German Romanticism , whose origins can be seen in Jena , shaped literature from around 1800, later also painting and musical aesthetics in Germany . Friedrich von Schlegel , Ludwig Tieck and Novalis were among the formative personalities of early Romanticism. In part, German Romanticism is seen as the origin of a movement that spread across Europe.
origin
At the end of 1797 the term romanticism had already taken on many facets for Schlegel. In a letter to his brother August Wilhelm he wrote: " I cannot send you my explanation of the word romantic because it is - 125 sheets long." In 1798 he found the following definition:
“Romantic poetry is progressive universal poetry. Its purpose is not merely to reunite all the separate genres of poetry and to bring poetry into contact with philosophy and rhetoric. It wants, and should also, poetry and prose, genius and criticism, art poetry and natural poetry, now to mix, now to fuse, to make poetry lively and sociable, and to make life and society poetic, to poetize jokes, and the forms of art with solid educational material fill and satiate of every kind, and inspire with the vibrations of humor. It encompasses everything that is purely poetic, from the greatest systems of art that contain several systems to the sigh, the kiss, which the poet breathes out in artless song. She can so lose herself in what is represented that one would like to believe that characterizing poetic individuals of every kind is her one and all; and yet there is still no form that is so designed to fully express the spirit of the author: so that some artists who only wanted to write a novel have portrayed themselves by accident. Only it can, like the epic, become a mirror of the whole surrounding world, an image of the age. […] Romantic poetry is among the arts what the joke of philosophy is, and society, companionship, friendship and love is in life. Other types of poetry are ready and can now be fully dissected. Romantic poetry is still in the making; yes, that is their real essence, that they can only become eternal, never be completed. It cannot be exhausted by any theory [...] "
This new aesthetic also went hand in hand with a new autonomy of the arts, as demanded by Friedrich Schlegel: “But a philosophy of poetry in general would begin with the independence of the beautiful.” Wackenroder and Tieck put it similarly in the music theory of Wackenroder and Tieck: “In the But the art of instrumental music is independent and free, it only dictates its own laws [...] ”.
At the end of 1797, Tieck met Friedrich Schlegel for the first time. He stayed in Jena from 1799 to 1800, where he was on friendly terms with the two Schlegels ( August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel), Novalis, Clemens Brentano , Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling . For the theories developed by the Schlegels in the so-called Jena Early Romanticism , Tieck provided the literary examples (and vice versa).
Concern of romance
The basic themes of romance are feeling, passion, individuality and individual experience as well as soul , especially the tormented soul. Romanticism emerged as a reaction to the monopoly of the rational philosophy of the Enlightenment , which in Germany was shaped primarily by Immanuel Kant , and to the rigor of classicism inspired by antiquity . In the foreground are sensations such as longing, mystery and mystery. The future-oriented rationalism and optimism of the Enlightenment are contrasted with a recourse to the individual and the numinous . These characteristics are characteristic of romantic art and the corresponding attitude to life.
The romantic locates a rupture that has divided the world into the world of reason, of “numbers and figures” ( Novalis ), and the world of feeling and the wonderful. The driving force of German romanticism is an infinite longing for the healing of the world, for the merging of opposites into a harmonious whole. Symbolic places and manifestations of this longing are mist-shrouded forest valleys, medieval monastery ruins, old myths and fairy tales, nature etc. The central symbol for this longing and its goal is the blue flower , which like no other motif is the romantic search for inner unity, healing and infinity embodied.
"But the blue flower is what everyone is looking for, without even knowing it, call it God, eternity or love."
In contrast to the self-imposed task of the poets of the Weimar Classics as well as Sturm und Drang and Enlightenment , for example the education of the people through literature, the poets of the Romantic period saw their task in the healing of the rift that ran through the world and thus through the Individuals goes. According to them, one possibility was offered by art, mystically exaggerated in the term “poet priest”, because “the world begins to sing / you only meet the magic word” ( Eichendorff ).
The romantics sought the lost world in works from the "childhood of man", that is, in fairy tales and legends, in folk songs and in the mysticism of the Middle Ages and its ideally transfigured class order based on loyalty. Initiatives were also sought in exotic countries. The "real" was not seen in the intellectual, but in the behavior of the common people, which was regarded as natural and truthful. Folk dances , for example with Franz Schubert, also flowed into the music of the Romantic period . The Brothers Grimm collected the legends and fairy tales of the oral folk tradition. However, dangers were also seen in this “other world”. The night side of romanticism, shaped by the devil's pacts , madness, ghosts, guilt and death , is particularly pronounced at ETA Hoffmann .
painting
With Caspar David Friedrich , a separate direction in painting developed at an early stage. One of the best-known paintings in this context is the painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog , which was created in the years 1818–1819.
Caspar David Friedrich: Landscape with a Bridge , around 1800
Caspar David Friedrich: Boy sleeping on a grave , around 1801
Caspar David Friedrich: Eldena ruins with funeral , around 1802/03
Caspar David Friedrich: The stages of life , around 1835
music
The adolescent Richard Wagner read the Romantics in his uncle's extensive library, for example ETA Hoffmann. Inspired by the late romanticism , in particular by themes from the age of knights and knighthood, he had written the plan for his first opera under the title The Wedding . He composed the text and began to compose the first numbers of this "night piece of blackest color" (R. W.), whose exaggerated romanticism of the gaze was not well received by his sister Rosalie. Thereupon Wagner destroyed the draft text, parts of the score remained (WWV 31).
Through the music of Wagner, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss , the influences of Romanticism extend into the 20th century. Despite the time lag to the other artists of the era, Strauss' music is based on Wagner's musical language and even returned to a more classical style in his later works.
swell
General
- Rudolf Haym: (1821–1901): The romantic school, a contribution to the history of the German spirit (1870). 2nd edition 1906. Romantic school
- Gerda Heinrich: Historical-philosophical positions of the German early romanticism . Kronberg / Ts .: Scriptor 1977.
- Eckart Kleßmann : The German Romanticism . Cologne: DuMont 1979.
- Theodore Ziolkowski : The Office of Poets. German Romanticism and its Institutions . Munich: dtv 1994.
- Hans Steffen (ed.): The German romanticism . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1989.
To art history
- Werner Busch : Caspar David Friedrich. Aesthetics and Religion . CH Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-406-50308-X .
- Leander Büsing: The attempt to put works of art together appropriately: painting and art discourse in the Dresden of the Romantic period . Norderstedt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8423-5915-4 .
To music history
- Ernst Krause : Richard Strauss - The Last Romantic
- Eckart Kröplin: Richard Wagner - Music from Light: Synesthesia from Romanticism to Modernity. A documentary presentation , 3 parts in 4 volumes, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011.
Web links
- Essays on Romanticism in the Goethezeitportal
- Change of epoch 18./19. Century: Romanticism (project of the high school of the city of Meschede) ( page no longer available , search in web archives )
Individual evidence
- ↑ 125 sheets correspond to 2000 pages. Letter from December 1, 1797 in Ernst Behler u. a. (Ed.): Friedrich Schlegel. Critical Edition Vol. XXIV, p. 53
- ↑ Ernst Behler et al. (Ed.): Friedrich Schlegel. Critical edition. 1. Dept. Vol. II, p. 182 f.
- ↑ Ernst Behler et al. (Ed.): Friedrich Schlegel. Critical edition. 1. Dept. Vol. II, p. 207
- ^ Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder: Complete works and letters. Edited by Silvio Vietta and Richard Littlejohns. Vol. I: Works. Edited by Silvio Vietta. Heidelberg 1991, 243.
- ↑ On Romanticism - The blue flower, the symbol of romanticism ( Memento from June 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
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