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Instructor: John Schauer
Publications Editor for the Ravinia Festival
Franz Schubert
(1797-1828), the Viennese composer who was one of the torch-bearers
at Beethoven’s funeral, once asked rhetorically, "Who
would dare to do anything after Beethoven?" Of course many
composers dared to do a great many things after Beethoven (Schubert
himself, for instance, established the song cycle, or a collection
of related songs intended to be performed together, as a new genre
to be taken seriously), but the question illustrates the phenomenal
influence Beethoven had on those who came after him. He had shaken
the music world down to its foundations; the "rules" of
composition had been broken, and as every succeeding artist has
learned, it is far more difficult to work without rules and limitations
than with them. Once you reach the point that anything is possible,
nothing is surprising anymore; you cannot defy the audience’s
expectations if they don’t know what to expect.
 As
we move further into the 19th century, it becomes more and more
difficult to make generalizations, because one of the earmarks of
Romanticism was a new emphasis on and respect for the individual,
for idiosyncrasy. Where the Classical period—the time of the
Enlightenment—emphasized balance, precision and clearly defined
forms, the new world of Romanticism was one in which feeling took
precedence over intellect, in which the fantastic and supernatural
were not only tolerated but celebrated. A famous picture by the
Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828), showing a sleeping man
slumped over his desk while ghastly apparitions of bats and other
creatures filled the air around him, bore the caption, "The
sleep of reason breeds monsters."
The optimism
of the Enlightenment, the faith that human beings were endowed with
an innate goodness and nobility of spirit, was beginning to yield
to a suspicion that a dark side lurked within as well. It was an
1816 soiree devoted to telling ghost-stories, for instance, that
resulted in the literary birth of two monsters that intrigue us
to this day: Frankenstein and Dracula.
 Behavior
and events that earlier would have been considered unsavory and
improper subjects for contemplation now fascinated the newly emerging
Romantic spirit. Berlioz revolutionized symphonic music in 1830
(only three years after Beethoven’s death) with his Symphonie
Fantastique, which portrayed a love-sick poet who overdoses
on opium and hallucinates a nightmare vision of his beloved dancing
obscenely in hell. Romantic ballet was born the following year with
the scandalous divertissement in Meyerbeer’s 1831 opera Robert
le Diable, featuring a moonlit dance performed by ghosts of
nuns who had broken their vow of chastity. The bright sun of reason
was being eclipsed by the haunting shadows of emotion.
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