Romanticism as an aesthetic stance in art, letters, and music

 

As an attitude or intellectual attitude that began in England and Germany and spawned over in Europe and America in the 19th century, Romanticism (1800-1850) can be viewed “as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular”. Also, romanticism is considered “to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general”. As “it emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental”, the Romanticism period inspired many artists in the field of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography by rooting artistic vision in spontaneity and endorsing a concept of creativity based on the supremacy of human freedom.
Despite variations, romantics shared similar beliefs and a common view of the world. Among the first romantics were the English poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), whose collaborative Lyrical Ballads (1798) exemplified the iconoclastic romantic idea that poetry was the result of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, rather than a formal and highly disciplined intellectual exercise. Romantics, in general, rebelled against the confinement of classical forms and refused to accept the supremacy of reason over emotions.
As the common attitude in Romanticism was supremacy over emotions and supremacy over human freedom, every artistic venture was valued in a new way as a genius through whose insight and intuition great art was created. Intuition, as opposed to scientific learning, was endorsed as a valid means of knowing. Building on the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), romanticism embraced subjective knowledge. Inspiration and intuition took the place of reason and science in the values of Romantic artists.
In the field of music, the political and social changes which were a part of the Romantic Movement found expression in the growing tendency of composers to free themselves from the bonds of patronage, to take a more independent place in society and a more conscious part in the assertion of national individuality. When Romanticism set the attitude of the supremacy of emotions over reason, the composer found their way into producing works that made them the great romantic composers of the age: Louis Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), the French composer who set Faust’s damnation to music; Polish virtuoso Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849); and Hungarian concert pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886).
However, after 1850, Romanticism was dubbed as no more than an aesthetic stance in art, letters, and music, a posture that had no particular political intent. Yet, its validation of the individual, as opposed to the social status or the country, was a revolutionary doctrine that helped to define a unique political consciousness of its own.