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Unit 7: The Restoration Period or Beginning of Neoclassicism, Comedy of Manners

7.1 Romanticism of Neoclassicism Notes

If the Enlightenment was a movement which started among tiny elite and slowly spread to make
its influence felt throughout society, Romanticism was more widespread both in its origins and
influence. No other intellectual/artistic movement has had comparable variety, reach, and staying
power since the end of the Middle Ages.
Beginning in Germany and England in the 1770s, by the 1820s it had swept through Europe,
conquering at last even its most stubborn foe, the French. It traveled quickly to the Western
Hemisphere, and in its musical form has triumphed around the globe, so that from London to
Boston to Mexico City to Tokyo to Vladivostok to Oslo, the most popular orchestral music in
the world is that of the romantic era. After almost a century of being attacked by the academic
and professional world of Western formal concert music, the style has reasserted itself as neo-
romanticism in the concert halls. When John Williams created the sound of the future in Star
Wars, it was the sound of 19th-century Romanticism—still the most popular style for epic film
soundtracks.
Beginning in the last decades of the 18th century, it transformed poetry, the novel, drama, painting,
sculpture, all forms of concert music (especially opera), and ballet. It was deeply connected with
the politics of the time, echoing people’s fears, hopes, and aspirations. It was the voice of revolution
at the beginning of the 19th century and the voice of the Establishment at the end of it.

Did u know? Last shift was the result of the triumph of the class which invented, fostered,
and adopted as its own the Romantic Movement: the bourgeoisie.

7.2 Origins of Neoclassicism

Folklore and Popular Art

Some of the earliest stirrings of the Romantic movement are conventionally traced back to the
mid-18th-century interest in folklore which arose in Germany—with Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
collecting popular fairy tales and other scholars like Johann Gottfried von Herder studying folk
songs and in England with Joseph Addison and Richard Steele treating old ballads as if they were
high poetry. These activities set the tone for one aspect of Romanticism: the belief that products of
the uncultivated popular imagination could equal or even surpass those of the educated court
poets and composers who had previously monopolized the attentions of scholars and connoisseurs.
Whereas during much of the 17th and 18th centuries learned allusions, complexity and grandiosity
were prized, the new romantic taste favored simplicity and naturalness; and these were thought to
flow most clearly and abundantly from the “spontaneous” outpourings of the untutored common
people. In Germany in particular, the idea of a collective Volk (people) dominated a good deal of
thinking about the arts. Rather than paying attention to the individual authors of popular works,
these scholars celebrated the anonymous masses that invented and transmuted these works as if
from their very souls.

Notes All of this fantasizing about the creative folk process reflected precious little
knowledge about the actual processes by which songs and stories are created and
passed on and created as well an ideology of the essence of the German soul which
was to be used to dire effect by the Nazis in the 20th century.

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