Gallant poetry
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Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau , posthumously 1695
So shall the purple of your lips be the Yes, unfortunately! It is no wonder, But the shipwreck is sweetened, Well! this urthel may happen, As soon as I land, I want to build |
In modern literary studies, the umbrella term gallant poetry primarily summarizes a part of the German-language poetry production of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is characterized above all by a particular freedom of movement and erotic ambiguities. More rarely, imitation poems of the 19th and 20th centuries are also referred to as the term. Today's labeling (in contrast to the use of “baroque poetry”, for example) goes back to the judgment structures of the 17th and 18th centuries. In some cases, however, the criteria have shifted considerably. The focus on erotic content was intensified in literary studies. In the German-speaking world, a gallant epoch fitted into an epoch concept that established a baroque style for the 17th century with fixed rules, clear rhetoric and high stylistic demands compared to the Enlightenment as a time of new, now bourgeois morality and rational ideas.
The evaluation of poems as “ gallant ” was not a purely German phenomenon in the 17th and 18th centuries. Here, too, the attempt to create a German epoch created its own perception of gallant poetry as primarily German production. Comparable poetry is traditionally attributed in English to the Stuart Restoration under Charles II and is thus more clearly placed politically.
Judgment structures of the 17th and 18th centuries
Assessments of poems as "gallant" in the 17th and 18th centuries are based on similar principles as assessments of novels and music with the same wording (see the keywords gallant novel and gallant music ): content, conduite of interaction, style are decisive here.
Starting in France in the 1640s, galant is largely all poetry that can be used in love relationships. A playful, ambiguous character becomes modern here, the suggestion with which a poem with amorous implications can, but does not have to be, read.
The design of gallant poetry gains new forms with the genres, which become style-defining in the 17th century. The tragedy loses after 1600 opposite the Opera in rank. With it the opera diminishes the importance of heroic rhetoric . Cantability becomes important in opera , the flow of lyric poetry, sound, the renunciation of too great a pathos that only develops in the declamation .
Opera arias spread as love songs . The simple forms of love songs, on the other hand, gain importance in operas. Gallant arias are distinguished by their simplicity in style compared to complex polyphonic compositions of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Novels of the 17th century open up to opera and love songs: the texts of operas and love songs are reproduced in novels. Notes are not included here. It is assumed that the compositions will be added to the text quickly and according to current fashion.
The gallant posie flourished in the second half of the 17th century when the current gallant conduite required a suitable text production. Purposefully ambiguous texts with erotic sub-texts became a European fashion here in the second half of the 17th century. Court circles differentiate themselves from bourgeois morality. Bourgeois writers, on the other hand, adopt the revealing poems as symbols of attractive modern freedom. In the 1670s and 1680s, the Englischer Hof offered its own space here after the dictatorship of the civil war, in which opera performances, like all public theater performances, were banned. French fashion here becomes a symbol of the new freedom brought back by the court that has returned from France. In Germany, students and leading intellectuals such as Christian Thomasius adopt the gallant poetry of France as a sign of their own ability to set fashions in a break with tradition, especially in relation to the old “pedantic” German scholarship.
The gallant poetry is increasingly brought into play against the rhetorically fixed scholarly, whose main genres, according to Aristotelian poetics, would have to be tragedy and the heroic epic.
In the 1690s, gallant poetry in German took on its stylistic model with the discovery of Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau . His previously largely unpublished erotic poems determine the collections of gallant poses that are now appearing. At the same time, the entire production of occasional poetry gains significance in them compared to the high genres of tragedy and epic. Among the collections of gallant poems, Benjamin Neukirch's anthology, published in several episodes, became famous, which sorted wedding poems, mourning poems and congratulatory poems. Poems were collected here after the occasions of commercial production. Hofmannswaldau's poems became the main advertising factor for the Neukirch collection and shaped the style of the authors of the early 18th century.
Christian Friedrich Hunold became a role model here thanks to his willingness to risk scandals. Johann Christian Günther introduced an examination of personal experience in gallant poetry, but only gained great attention with this note in the 19th century. The poems of Friedrich Rudolf Ludwig von Canitz were published posthumously in 1700 and 1719 and stood for a stricter fashion oriented towards the French style, Johann von Besser followed here as court poet in Prussian service with his own two-pronged, sometimes more gallant, sometimes more representative poetry .
Gallant style
The aims of the gallant style were similar to those of the gallant conduite . The aim here was lightness, the impression of effortlessness with which something succeeds that can actually only be staged so effortlessly with a lot of practice and well-acquired practice. In practice, one construction rule became particularly important: the restriction to grammar, as it is permitted in prose and spoken language. It brings their naturalness and informality into the verse, which actually only succeeds under composition. Erdmann Neumeister noted the rule in the back-reference in Christian manner in the very latest way of arriving at pure and gallant poetry, published by Christian Friedrich Hunold (1707):
I. Nothing can recommend a verse except when it flows cleanly and freely.
II. To gain this advantage one must be careful not to beat the construction.
III. And this is what the General Lex now says: No construction begins in verse that does not begin in prosa. Or: As the construction is in a common speech and in an oratorio, it must also be in a bound speech.
IV. We owe this incomparable rule to Herr Weisen, who not only demonstrates it, but also happily practices it extraordinair.
V. And as this is the most distinguished main part of pure, unconstrained German poetry, it is also assured that it is the worst.
"Gallant poetry" as a collective term for the small genres
Especially in German, at the beginning of the 18th century, the entire area now recorded as poetry could be grouped into the genre of gallant poetry. Gottlieb Stolle names this structure in his Kurtzen Guide to the History of Gelahrheit 1718 as a German option compared to the more international one, which differentiates subjects according to social locations. Gallant poetry here is all of the rest of poetry below the high genres of tragedy and epic:
XIV. With some one can divide bound poetry into lofty and gallant, the former narrative or heroic, and the latter representative poetry or plays; the gallant, however, includes all other species. [...]
XXI. It has already been suggested that with us Germans poetry is divided into high and gallant. I want to add, however, that Thomas Hobbes differentiated into three parts according to the three places of the human race, the court, the city and the country, since then heroic poetry with the court, the scommatic (or satyrical) with the city, and pastoral matters should have to do with the country.
The classification of all small genres as "gallant" corresponds to the contemporary use of gallantry in music. What is gallant here is the renunciation of the fixed form, the great importance, the weight that the style must take into account. Especially the small genres of the song and the short satirical poem allowed breaks with the greater demands on tradition and formal mastery of art.
Criticism of the gallant poetry
The gallant poetry drew criticism on the one hand in its fixation on love as a subject, on the other hand in the plea for formal freedoms - here the opera was under attack from the 1730s. In the 1730s, critics like Johann Christoph Gottsched called for a return to Aristotelian poetics and the revaluation of ancient forms of tragedy and the epic.
The representatives of Reformed dramas of the mid-18th century did not return to gallant poetry. They devoted themselves to the liberation from the fetters that Gottsched imposed on poetry with the obligation to Aristotle, and pressed for new materials, new morals, new rationality and new naturalness. According to bourgeois criticism, the gallant posie became the epitome of a decadent culture that still endured, especially among the nobility. A focus on erotic permissiveness took place in the context of this criticism, it created the clearer enemy image, which was then revalued again in the course of the 19th century among artists of aestheticism , art nouveau and naturalism .
Footnotes
- ↑ Paul Hankamer , German Counter-Reformation and German Baroque , first pointed out the positive importance of opera as a motor for the development of a stylistic modernity . German literature in the 17th century [= epochs of German literature , 2.2] (Stuttgart, 1935).
- ^ Franz Heiduk : The poets of galant poetry: Studies for the Neukirch collection (Bern [among others]: Francke, 1971).
- ↑ Erdmann Neumeister , Chapter 5, "From the Construction" in Christian Friedrich Hunold , The very latest way to arrive at pure and gallant poetry [...] brought to light by Menantes (Hamburg: Gottfried Liebernickel , 1707).
- ↑ Gottlieb Stolle, Kurtze Instructions for the History of Gelahrheit (Halle: Neue Buchhandlung, 1718), Vol. 1, pp. 220–223.
literature
- Conrad Wiedemann: The gallant style: 1680-1730. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1969.
- Franz Heiduk : The poets of gallant poetry: studies for the Neukirch collection. Francke, Bern [a. a.] 1971.
- Manfred Windfuhr : Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau, poems (= Reclams Universal Library 8889). Reclam, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-15-008889-5 .