1820 in poetry

Transcription

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.