Romanticism: The Artist Hero
The artists of the Romantic generation would take eighteenth-century individualism and lay it at the foundation of a brash new aesthetic.
In 1804, Ludwig van Beethoven, who up to this point had himself been a classicist in the Mozartian vein, penned his groundbreaking Sinfonia Eroica. Unapologetically heady and tempestuous, the Eroica introduced, by means of strident syncopations, slippery modulations, and unrelenting dissonances, an entirely new ideal into symphonic composition: the supremacy of the artist/hero.
Before the Eroica, composers had to a large extent worked collectively – as had, for that matter, artists in all other media. Style was considered shared patrimony; deriving, in other words, not from the efforts of the lone creator who, eager to gain artistic autonomy, shut himself off from his peers and worked in isolation, but rather from subtle, super-individual processes of creative cross-pollination that unfolded slowly and organically over time and could be traced to no one artist in particular. The aesthetic of Mozart had been inherited from previous generations of composers, who had worked collaboratively to prepare it. It was Mozart’s task, not to create anew, but to bring to heights of ever greater perfection that which was already inherently there.
Beethoven changed this. By putting his own stamp on his music and wilfully steering it away from the work of his predecessors, he made a clear and bold statement, game-changing in its effects: it was the individual, not the collective, who was the ultimate font of artistic inspiration. His Eroica had, not by coincidence, originally been dedicated to Napoleon, the heroic figure par excellence. And although Beethoven would, upon learning that his dedicatee had arrogantly crowned himself emperor, later scratch out his name from the original manuscript, the principle remained: this was the hero’s symphony, a homage to the glory of individual brilliance and achievement.
Here, ‘hero’ had a twofold meaning: both the philosopher-king who would save the world, and the artist-genius who would save people’s souls. And the notion of saving souls was not incidental. The Romantic artist had gradually come to see himself as the modern embodiment of an ancient archetype: the high priest or wizard, more pagan than Christian in spirit and function; a special being, gifted with rare, supernatural powers, who had more immediate access to high ideals than the common man.
The artist/hero served as a conduit to an otherworldly realm, purer than our own, and all those seeking contact with it would need to first pass through him. This explains why, in his Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), painter Caspar David Friedrich depicted his hero amid nature, casting his gaze over a rugged, emotionally charged landscape: only the natural world seemed to offer the nineteenth-century painter the transcendence he lusted after.
As the century rolled on and the artist’s ego grew, so too did the creative license he would concede himself. No longer satisfied with having reinvented musical aesthetics, Beethoven would, with his later symphonies, aim to reinvent himself afresh with every new work, producing, a tour-de-force of motivic terseness in his Fifth and a bucolic reverie in his Sixth (1808); and – his final will and testament – the mighty Ninth (1824), which, by far exceeding the average length of the genre and introducing choir and vocal soloists, seemed to set future generations of composers a standard of excellence impossible to match.
But match him they did. A mere few years after Beethoven’s death, Frenchman Hector Berlioz wrote his Symphonie Fantastique, a rambunctious masterpiece, equal parts symphony and programmatic reverie. Subtitled ‘Episode de la vie d’un artiste’, the symphony narrates the hellish descent into madness of a sensitive young artist tormented by his obsessive love for an unattainable woman – his ‘idée fixe’.
When the Symphonie was premiered in 1830, it proved every bit as startling and fresh as the work of his German forebear. Harmonically and structurally, it was world’s away from the poise and restraint of eighteenth-century rationalism, and pushed its listeners to their limits. Aesthetically, it rendered explicit what had merely been alluded to in Beethoven: that the artist was a tragic hero, burdened to feel life more intensely than the average person but, simultaneously, able to savour it more deeply; that the individual could access the highest levels of excellence only if he was true to his feelings, and permitted himself to express them unapologetically.
Berlioz was, in this respect, Beethoven’s direct heir, music’s second grand revolutionary hero, and for this reason his place in the musical firmament is secure. For, without the groundwork he laid, the harmonic upheaval Wagner would later effect with his Music Drama Tristan und Isolde (1865) would have been all but impossible.
It is often claimed that Romanticism was a reaction against Enlightenment values and, therefore, philosophically opposed to them, but I don’t think this is strictly true. I submit, rather, that it was their offshoot; a bringing to fruition of all that had been promised by the Enlightenment and had been latent in its purpose. Romanticism is, after all, a humanism – just like the thought current that predated it; it is the placement of the individual at the centre of the aesthetic and moral world.
This, as we have seen, Locke and Rousseau had foretold in their ethics. Enlightenment and Romantic thought came from the same philosophical well-spring but diverged in their superficial manifestations, forming complementary halves of a whole – much like the primordial yin and yang.
The Romantic found a new angle to assert an already well-established truth: that the human mind, not god’s, was the ultimate font of Beauty and Meaning. The individual possessed all he needed within himself to reach summits of genius and mystical self-actualisation. Heaven was to be found not above but inside him – provided he knew where and how to uncover it. The Romantics felt it was possible to overcome oneself by going deep into one’s self and bringing forth what one encountered there. Beauty, for the Romantics, could hence be defined in these seemingly paradoxical terms: the transcendence of the individual by means of individual; the unveiling of absolute moral Truth through one’s subjective experiences of it.
Romanticism was the West’s first great age of artistic experimentation, directly predating and pre-empting twentieth-century modernism. The insatiable thirst for creative novelty – which we now take for granted but, until the nineteenth century, had been anomalous – was born of the Romantic sense of individual supremacy.
After Beethoven, it would no longer be acceptable for any serious artist to speak the same stylistic language as his influences. ‘Originality’, or the idea that in order to be artistically relevant one had to create one’s own aesthetic, quickly diffused itself and became the norm. All artists working subsequently, including those in the present day, have operated within this paradigm. This is the lasting legacy of nineteenth-century Romanticism.
