Alright now we're moving into a
little bit more modern time.
We're moving into the 1800's, a period about
which you probably know more than about
the other periods we've
talked about so far.
So we refer to this in music
as the Romantic Period
and it runs basically from 1820 until
around the turn of the century.
The date that we use at the end varies
depending on who you're talking to.
Some people like to use the end of the...
the beginning of the world wars as the
end of this very emotional kind of
period because things change quite a lot
at that point.
So, in the Romantic Period, remember that
we've just come through the Classical era where
we had all those revolutions and
people were taking charge
of their lives and we're going
gangbusters in making our own new
countries and everything. So what happened
out of all that? Were people really
any better off? For the
most part, not a lot.
Lot of talk, lot of talk,
lot of action
in terms of wars and that sort of thing
but in terms of changing every day's...
people's everyday lives, really not very
much happened. So that was kind of a
disappointment
and you can imagine that people are
going to react to disappointments in
different ways.
So what we're going to see is
another pendulum swing here.
So we have had the
very reserved, rational,
thinking kind of approach that the
Classical Period has, swinging back the
other way now,
and we're going to be more emotional again,
just like we were in the Baroque Period.
But if you remember in the Baroque Period, when we
talked about emotions, especially in the arts,
well a piece of art
can only have one emotion.
So if the piece was going to be
melancholy, the whole peace was going to
be melancholy. There was
no changing in the middle.
The big difference in the
Romantic Period is that
the changes in emotion are dramatic.
This is a big highly-charged time period.
So we're going to see that in visual art,
we'll see that in literature, we'll see that in
music,
and so that's sort of our overriding
construct for the Romantic Period is
dramatic emotional changes,
even within an artwork.
So, we went from being very reserved,
not so much interest in religious sorts
of things in the Classical Period.
When we go back to being emotional, people
thought, "Well, what's the most emotional
church I can get involved with, and
for people in the Romantic Period,
that was the Catholic Church. Remember
during the Baroque Period we had
the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation
so lots of Protestant
activity coming along,
which is much more reserved
comparatively speaking, and a little bit
more rational perhaps than the Catholic
Church had been so
now people are thinking, "0h,
the Catholic Church is so mysterious,"
it's sort of ethereal,
its all those things that
aren't rational any more.
Let's go that way. So we see a big
resurgence in the Catholic Church in
the Romantic Period.
Unfortunately, we see some of the bad side
ot that, which is that some of the more
liberal laws that had
come into place
got taken back by the church
and we also had a sort of a second
period of inquisitions which
we had had earlier in time so now we're
having that same sort of activity again
but that's to be expected
when things change.
So what's happening in America? Lots! We know
about American history in this period of
time.
The Civil War happens during
this period of time and,
like our civil war, there are civil wars
going on all over the world. It's just a time where
a lot of people are
having some uproar. This is the time that
we start moving westward, you know we're
crossing the plains, crossing
those mountains,
finding gold in California.
These are really big events.
This is the period of time when
Texas was annexed into the
United States. We
grab the Oregon
territory. We got California, Nevada, and
Arizona, Utah, and that whole bunch of land
over there on the West
away from Mexico. So
now we're really America,
mostly in the sense that we think of it today.
Alaska and Hawaii still aren't part of the
country but we are now
pretty much coast to coast.
So what's happening in Europe?
I think probably the most significant
political events in Europe at
the time are actually happening
in Italy. Up to this point Italy
has been a whole lot of little
city-states and princedoms and
dukedoms, you know, whoever the
ruling person happens to be.
Just a whole bunch of them
who are always fighting with each other
and controlling their own little
territories.
In the Romantic Period, this is
the time that we see Italy become
a unified country. That may be hard to imagine now
because we sort of think of it as... they have been
unified for a long time
but it really has been a hodgepodge of
little things now brought together
in one country and there's a musician
who's very relevant to that as we will see
later.
The Greeks right now had been
being ruled by Turkey and so one of the
big events there is that Greece
gains its independence and we're going to
see that show up in an artwork here in just
a minute.
We also have a second French Revolution
and this is the point where they change
from
having lots of emperors and kings
to a constitutional monarchy. So that's a
big change for them and
then of course we'll have
presidents later in France,
so things change again.
And as I said, almost every country in the
world was having some sort
of internal conflict at the time. That's
sort of to be expected when people have
been
sort of trained for the
last several years that
you can create your own happiness and
obviously having control of your own
destiny would be a way to get some
happiness you would think.
So let's try, let's try to change the way
our political structure works
and to make it better for us. So let's
love move around the world a little bit
more. We've gone from America,
we've gone to Europe.
The Suez Canal is opened up
during this period of time.
So if you remember up until this point if
you wanted to get from Europe to
the east coast of Africa or even to
India or Asia
you had to go all the way around Africa
through their very dangerous section at
the bottom at Cape Horn.
So it was a long journey,
very expensive, and...
and very dangerous. The
opening of the Suez Canal
cut off thousands of miles of
land so you could cut off...
cut right through... whoops... you're out
in the Indian Ocean. So now we have great
access to eastern Africa.
We have much better access to India. We
can get around Egypt, Japan and China all
those areas
much more easily. This is also the time
that they happen to find gold and
diamonds in South Africa, so you can
imagine that was a very hot route
during that period of time and probably
pretty violent as well because where
gold and diamonds go,
violence tends to follow. Now, the British
East India Company was a major economic
player during this period of time.
They were in India for the most part,
growing tea and taking it back to England
where they love their tea.
But they made one really critical
mistake during this period of time.
They had a lot of natives who... native
Indians who worked for them and who were
soldiers
protecting their interests and most
of those soldiers would have been either
Hindu or Muslim.
Well, the British weren't
particularly religiously
aware, I guess would be a good way to put
it, and so they gave these soldiers
guns to protect their property
and they gave them
cartridges to shoot at
whoever they needed to shoot
but what they didn't think about was
that these cartridges were actually
coated in animal fat
and if you want to use it you had to
bite off the top of it to put it in
your weapon before you could fire it.
Well, these are Hindus and
Muslims who don't do,
you know, meat fat, so there's a major
revolt, there's a big mutiny,
and so did the British government
had to come in.
The East India Company had been pretty much
running things for themselves and they actually
took over
India. They just took over the government.
So, you know, we think about
the British in India as bein... you know, you see
it in a lot in movies... don't talk about that
time period.
But it all came about because their
private industry just wasn't very smart
about cultural differences.
In China and Japan
they're fighting. Nothing particularly
new about that I guess.
They're fighting over Korea and Japan
actually wins this particular skirmish
but then the Russians step in and they
just take Korea away from Japan and they
have to fight it out later so
that whole territory right there is
you know a lot of land close together and some
people who don't have very much land
always looking for some more.
So that's an important thing.
As we mentioned earlier,
we've already got the steam
engine going, so now, railroads...
very, very big, especially
in America, you know,
Europe is a very small
continent, it's just
really tiny. You can get from one place
to another on a train quickly there even
if it's not...
if you were going with
wood and coal. A steam engine
can go farther, faster. America was vast
so this is a great way
for us to improve our
commercial ventures. So, the
building of the transcontinental railway
which happens in this period
of time... significant event!
connects the east coast, where
much of the industry was,
to the west coast where all the new
markets are because we've got all those
new people out there who need
steel and wood and all the other
things that we might need. So
we now have trains who could take it all the way across.
This is also the period of time that the telegraph was
invented.
Again, very useful in America because it's a
long way from one place to another.
So we could communicate across
the country much more quickly.
Those same steam engines that
made trains better also helped
steamship travel so instead of having
to deal with sailing boats you could
have self-propelled
ships that were much more speedy,
so people could travel the world
much more than they could before. So
we've got trains that will take you places,
we have ships that will take you places, and
we have more people who can afford to do
that. So it's not just
the rich who can actually go.
This is a period of time with great
immigration to America because people
could buy a cheap ticket
in Europe and you know live in the bowels of
the ship for however long it took to
cross the ocean,
come to America which was the
land of opportunity for them,
and start a new life. So all these
technological things that sort of started
happening in the Classical Period are really
making changes in the political
structure by the time we get to the
1800's.
So, not only do we have all
these people moving around,
they're learning about each other.
You know, up until now, if you were an
American, you probably didn't move very far
beyond your own area. You only knew
people who were like you.
You only knew cultures that were like
you. We're starting to see people come
from all over the world now so we're
learning about Italians and
the Irish and the Germans and
wherever these people are coming from.
Those were sort of the predominant
immigrants at the time.
So we're getting a lot more mixing of
cultures, a little more understanding
of each other.
We also have world
fairs at this time
where people would come together and
every country would bring an exhibit of
all their favorite things, you know,
so you might see some...
you might learn about Japanese
fish and you might learn
about beer from the Germans but it
would all be in one place and people could go
there and see all different kinds of
cultures in one place and just learn a
lot about that.
And as we'll see, that whole
interest in other cultures
comes up a lot in the arts. It's
a very prominent theme.
So, what are other themes in
the arts in this period of time?
We're very interested in the exotic
and so something from a foreign country
can be exotic
especially if it's a country that
seems really exotic like Japan
or some African country or even
India. That's very exotic for
a 19th Century person who's
never seen or been
anything. So there's interest
in exotic things we will see.
As I said they were very interested in the
Catholic Church because it seems sort of more
ethereal and sort of out there.
The supernatural is very popular
as we'll see when we talk
about books and paintings,
anything that has to do
with ghosts and
you know haunted castles, Frankenstein,
that sort of thing, very big
in this period of time. We already said
this is an emotional period so we're
looking at
intense, intense, intense,
emotions, not just
happy, sad. We're talking about angry and
you know I'm so... I love this woman so
much I'm going to kill myself for her;
that kind of intense range of
emotions and it might all happen
within a very short piece of music or it
might all be played out on the stage in
an opera or in a play
or even in a painting where you would get
this really, really intense emotion.
That's the real hallmark
of the Romantic Period,
and that's what we're talking about when
we're talking about the romance of it is the
emotion of it.
Not that we're all in love
and having Valentine's Day.
It's about emotion of all sorts.
So you'll see all kinds of
intense emotions throughout the period.
so we have some sort of common themes
that show up in our literary and visual arts and
musical works that cross... that
incorporate these things and cross a
lot of
things together. One of those things is that
there's a real interest in just
ordinary people. We've had all these
revolutions that are supposed to help out
ordinary people so let's celebrate them
in the arts and that's
particularly true of
people like children and the oppressed.
So as we talk about literary works in
particular we'll see those themes come up.
We also have an emphasis
on faith in humanity
and that people will do the right thing
and that we can make things better.
That comes out of that sort of
enlightenment rationalist idea
but it keeps playing through
here. Social justice,
and we have things like dealing
with people in mental hospitals
and prisons.
Making prison welfare better. All those
sort of things really happen in the
29th Century as a result of our
interest in that sort of social justice.
There's also an emphasis on democracy but
only in its purest form.
Remember they've been through all these
revolutions and some of them were supposed to
bring out democratic kinds of ideals.
That didn't always work out the way they
thought they would, so that they want the
democracy but they want it to be like
the real purest thing which of
course is never going to happen.
There's also a big interest
in ancient history.
We saw in the Classical Period that they
were interested in ancient Rome and
Greece.
We're sort of broadening
that now so...
the Middle East and that sort of area,
a much bigger area of interest in
ancient history. So,
you'll see that play out
in the arts as well. So, the Middle Ages
and even older is a very interesting
period for those. So, let's
talk about literature a little bit.
In literature, a really big focus
for this period is the hero.
You know we've had all these revolutions
and revolutions usually produce
heroes, so there's kind of
a natural progression there.
So who are some of our
heroes of Romantic era
literature? let's start with Victor Hugo and 'Les
Miserables." You know, everybody sort of knows that
now 'cause it's the big hot musical
and it's all over the place.
So, Jean Valjean, the big hero,
classic statement there. Its got
revolution in it. It's got a lot of
action. It's got the poor child
who loses her mother.
It's got all these poor women
who can't make a living.
It's got all those things that we just talked
about. The children, we've got the oppressed,
we've got the ability to overcome.
All that built right in this one...
I don't want to say short story because
it's very long, but in a story.
Look at Charles Dickens. Everything of
Charles Dickens' pretty much is about
very common people. We've
got Oliver Twist, the orphan.
We have slightly crazy people;
we've got Miss Habersham who
runs around in her wedding dress
so we've got a little supernatural
craziness going on there.
So again, taking themes
that we've talked about.
Taking the American, Edgar Allan Poe, who
does supernatural better than Edgar
Allan Poe?
If there's a weird story out
there, he's got it covered.
So he's fitting right in with all those
others. The three musketeers comes
from this period of time.
Think you've got the three heroes
here. So again revolutionary fervor.
You've got these guys who were making
things better for everybody else, saving
the poor people from the bad guys.
We have the Bronte sisters who wrote
Wuthering Heights and other works
like that, so that sort of takes us to
the
more personal, romantic in the way
that we sort of think of romantic
where you know boy meets girl, boy loses
girl, boy gets girl back, whatever themes
we want to run with that.
But in a much more heightened emotional
kind of state you know, Wuthering
Heights are out there on the
moors and everything is "aaaaeeahhhh..."
blowing and nature is all-powerful so
we've got that sort of
thing going as well.
Poetry is also really big in the Romantic
Period and we will see that it plays out very
importantly in music...
in vocal music.
So we have a lot of great names and
poetry in this period of time.
The three great British poets, Keats, and
Shelley, and Byron, and then in Germany
probably the biggest name is Heinrich Heine
whose poetry is set by all sorts of composers.
So those are the names that you'll
encounter
as you look at vocal music because their names
are going to show up as the people who wrote
the text.
Alright let's turn now to visual art.
So we've been looking at a lot of
portraits, those sorts of things.
Start getting into the Romantic Period
and yes we're interested in people
but we're also interested in the bigger
world. So landscapes become
important. In particular, there are two
really big names in landscape
painting. One is JMW
Turner. His name is really long
so we just call him JMW.
And John Constable is the other.
They're both British painters
who specialized in landscapes. So we're
going to take a look at a couple of
Turner's landscapes.
This first one that we're
looking at is called
"Rain, Steam and Speed."
So, it's a landscape.
It's a sort of a...
impression, it's almost impressionistic
which we haven't even got to yet but
you just have this sort of sense that
there's something out there but things
aren't very
clearly defined. So it has a kind of
a supernatural aspect to it in that
respect because
it's not, 'here's the lines of things.'
But what this painting is about is the
railroad.
So we have a landscape but
it's also focusing
on important historical events of
the time period. So it's not just a
landscape because it looks pretty.
It's a landscape that's giving us a message
about something that's happening
in our immediate world if you lived at
that period of time.
Let's look at another of
Turner's paintings. This one
is very different. It's still a landscape.
You can see it's got a sky and clouds
and it's got water and it's got some ships
and a cool rock in the background and all
that sort of thing,
but this is not about what's
going on in the world now.
This painting is called "Ulysses Deriding
Polyphemus," and it's part of a set
of paintings he did about Homer's Odyssey.
So he's going back to really
ancient literary works
and doing a modern landscape
that illustrates
Homer. So he's sort of getting the
double-whammy here; we get our
our modern painting, we get a
landscape, very modern kind of style
but it's showing us the story from way
back which also connects back to their
interest in those
ancient histories. So he's got landscapes
but their historical or they have
literary references; they're not just,
what a lovely place this is to be, even
though he has probably some of those as well.
Let's switch now to the French artist
Eugène Delacroix who
traveled pretty well.
One of the things that we will
see in all the arts is that
artists were interested
in exotic cultures.
Sometimes they actually got to go visit
and so they had first-hand knowledge of
them.
Sometimes they just wrote or painted
based on what they thought that
culture was like. Delacroix did
travel to Africa, so he spent time in
Morocco and in that area
and he did some paintings
that reflect those travels.
The first one
that we're looking at is
called the "Massacre at
Chios." So this is
painting that has current historical
relevance if you live in
this period of time. Remember the
Greeks were being ruled by Turkey
at the time and this
painting illustrates
a major event in Greek Independence.
There was a big massacre, like tens of
thousands of people were killed
by the Turks. They killed tens of
thousands of Greeks on this island.
And so he's using this
painting to sort of...
much the same way that David
did those paintings of
Napoleon, to remind us that this is an
important thing, that these people are
fighting for their independence
and that it was really costly. It's
a dark kind of painting. You have bodies
everywhere. You have living people
to remind you that there are still
people there. So thats
another kind of approach, we've got
the historical kind of approach to that
as well. This third painting
that we're looking at
by Delacroix is called...
second painting, sorry, the "Entry of the
Crusaders into Constantinople" on the 12th
of April, 1204. So,
here's another one of those
instances where we have gone
back into ancient history and
think about it, if somebody had
painted a painting of that particular
event at the time that it happened.
This is in 1200. It's before they
really started doing perspective.
They really didn't do emotionally
charged paintings at the time.
It would have probably been, you know
like everybody came in on their horses,
very neatly in rows and
conquered the city. Not
Delacroix! This is a...
it is an intense kind of
painting. We have a lot of colors.
We have our classical influence
because on the side over here we have a
set of columns so we know
you know we've... we already set this, we're
in Constantinople. We have a lovely set of
columns that are probably actually the
right kind. In the background you see
the walls of the city so you show
that you've really conquered
something here.
We have people trying... a man trying to
protect women so it sort of shows the
violence of such an
event. It's not all pretty,
everybody parading into town.
We have somebody on the side whose
holding somebody who's apparently dead
and in the middle of that we have a man on
a horse and the horse
looks really angry so
a lot of storylines going
just in one painting
and that's very romantic, so I said
you can have lots of emotions going.
We have the emotion of the man who's trying
to save somebody. We have the emotion of
the person who's mourning
somebody who's already gone,
and we have the soldiers who probably
have an entirely different agenda on
their minds
altogether. So...
we've got modern history,
we now have ancient history.
Let's look at our last painting
by Delacroix and this is called
"Algerian Women in Their Apartment."
So this is a very different
kind of approach. We've had
some very intensely emotionally charged
paintings so far, the two historical ones.
This one is more like a portrait.
We've gone in, we see these women
but they're exotic women, you know,
they're African, they're not
your pretty European French
women. They're wearing
clothes that you would not see in
Europe. The space that they're
in has carpet on the floor so
you get all that sort of
African flair that we know
because we see those things all
the time now but
this was really modern at the time,
to be able to see how people in another
country
really lived. It's not just,
"Oh, let's bring back the
war pictures," if you of those
others that way. This is what
real people are like. This is
how they spend their time. So
that shows that interest in people,
regular people, and the exotic
nature all in one painting.
So those kind of give
you some range of paintings
and Delacroix has a vast range.
He has lots of paintings like
he's got a lovely one of a lion
attacking a man on a horse... (crash noise).
Very violent kind of painting.
But during this period of time, if you were
an artist, a painter in particular, and even
musicians,
the feeling was that if you were
really good at what you did
you'd be poor. The whole
idea of the starving
artist is a very romantic
kind of notion.
You know its I'm giving myself up
for my art. I'm starving for my art!
So, you see movies that are set in this time
period and you know the artist lives in this really
horrible apartment
but if they're lucky it's on top of a building
and they have lots of wonderful light so
they can paint.
And they are barely surviving.
They have a croissant and a cup of
coffee for breakfast because
that's all they can afford.
But that was the image they wanted
to project because that was... the
idea was,
if I'm selling my art
and making money at it,
it's probably not art, its
commercial. So we really wanted...
you know, it's like a separating here.
There's commercial art and there's
art and to be art, I have to be poor.
Now that doesn't mean
that these people were
not savvy, so what they would often do
is you know sort of cozy up to rich
people because remember we have
not only the rich people who are already there
but we have all these newly rich people
because they've
come up through the industrial ranks
and we now have a big middle class of
merchants and that sort of people
and they want to be associated with
the arts because that shows
that they have arrived.
So, a really smart artist,
musician, whatever
art they happen to be in, could
get friendly with these people
who would invite them to come
to parties at their houses
or even come to stay at their
country home for weeks on end
because that way they could impress
their friends with all the artsie people
that they hung out with.
So the artist could have the satisfaction
of saying, well, you know I'm really
a poor starving artist. I
livei n this terrible place,
but they could eat really well and
these people would supply them with
the paints and the easels and a place
to paint, and whatever they needed
to support their art. But the artist
could still get that, well, you know,
I really am a starving
artist, so that's kind of
a 19th Century idea.
On the musician side,
what we often see
is what we would think of
now as rock star musicians.
Remember in the Classical Period you might
go to a recital... to a concert and
be able to hear
an orchestra or maybe a soloist
but for the most part
there aren't any great big stars.
Now, Beethoven starts to be one.
You know he made a lot of money as a
performer. Mozart did a lot of performing,
probably didn't make as much money at it as
some others might have done, but the idea
of the artist as the big performer
is really a romantic
notion. So we had
people... we had art musicians who
basically had groupies who would
follow them around
and the women who... if they'd had
phone numbers, they would have given them
their phone numbers.
So it was a... it was very much the kind
of model that we're used to seeing now
with popular artist. So, we take somebody
like Franz Liszt who is a pianist from the
period
who did a lot of important
things musically
but some of the things that we remember
him for are about his sort of...
his status. Until we get to this period
of time if you played the piano
it was turned the wrong way. You would have
your back to the audience because that
was a tradition of having the keyboard
in the middle of the orchestra.
Well, Liszt wanted all those women in
the audience to see his profile. He thought
he looked really good from the
side so he just turned the piano,
to the way that we now are used
to seeing the pianist come out.
You know, you come out, you sit down,
and everybody can see you.
He was way ahead of Michael Jackson. He used to throw his gloves down on the edge of the
stage so the women could fight over them.
He's the one who started wearing black.
He thought he would look good in it so
that's sort of where our tradition
of wearing black comes from.
So these musicians, in many cases
made quite a lot of money
just as performers. So they could sort of
support their composing habit because most of
them also
wrote music by being solo performers
or playing with orchestras and that
is a big change from the patronage
system that we saw from the Classical
Period.
So, that gives you a general idea about the
Romantic Period, the kinds of ideas that
are going about.
Now let's see how that all
plays out in the music.