Musical culture of romanticism: aesthetics, themes, genres and musical language. Romanticism in a musical dictionary musical dictionary: musical encyclopedia Romanticism, its general and musical aesthetics

Ideological and artistic movement in European and American culture of the late 18th - 1st half of the 19th centuries. Originating as a reaction to the rationalism and mechanism of the aesthetics of classicism and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, established in the era of the revolutionary breakdown of feudal society, the former, seemingly unshakable world order, romanticism (both as a special type of worldview and as an artistic movement) has become one of the most complex and internally contradictory phenomena in cultural history.

Disappointment in the ideals of the Enlightenment, in the results of the Great French Revolution, denial of the utilitarianism of modern reality, the principles of bourgeois practicality, the victim of which was human individuality, a pessimistic view of the prospects for social development, and the mentality of “world sorrow” were combined in romanticism with the desire for harmony in the world order, spiritual integrity of the individual , with a gravitation towards the “infinite”, with the search for new, absolute and unconditional ideals. The acute discord between ideals and oppressive reality evoked in the minds of many romantics a painfully fatalistic or indignant feeling of dual worlds, a bitter mockery of the discrepancy between dreams and reality, elevated in literature and art to the principle of “romantic irony.”

A kind of self-defense against the growing leveling of personality became the deepest interest in the human personality inherent in romanticism, understood by the romantics as the unity of individual external characteristics and unique internal content. Penetrating into the depths of human spiritual life, the literature and art of romanticism simultaneously transferred this acute sense of the characteristic, original, unique to the destinies of nations and peoples, to historical reality itself. The enormous social changes that took place before the eyes of the romantics made the progressive course of history clearly visible. In its best works, romanticism rises to the creation of symbolic and at the same time vital images associated with modern history. But images of the past, drawn from mythology, ancient and medieval history, were embodied by many romantics as a reflection of real conflicts.
Romanticism became the first artistic movement in which the awareness of the creative personality as a subject of artistic activity was clearly manifested. The Romantics openly proclaimed the triumph of individual taste and complete freedom of creativity. Attaching decisive importance to the creative act itself, destroying the obstacles that held back the artist’s freedom, they boldly equated the high and the low, the tragic and the comic, the ordinary and the unusual.

Romanticism captured all spheres of spiritual culture: literature, music, theater, philosophy, aesthetics, philology and other humanities, plastic arts. But at the same time, it was no longer the universal style that classicism was. Unlike the latter, romanticism had almost no state forms of expression (therefore, it did not significantly affect architecture, influencing mainly landscape architecture, the architecture of small forms and the direction of the so-called pseudo-Gothic). Being not so much a style as a social artistic movement, romanticism opened the way for the further development of art in the 19th century, which took place not in the form of comprehensive styles, but in the form of separate movements and directions. Also, for the first time in romanticism, the language of artistic forms was not completely rethought: to a certain extent, the stylistic foundations of classicism were preserved, significantly modified and rethought in certain countries (for example, in France). At the same time, within the framework of a single stylistic direction, the artist’s individual style received greater freedom of development.

Romanticism was never a clearly defined program or style; this is a wide range of ideological and aesthetic trends in which the historical situation, country, and interests of the artist created certain accents.

Musical romanticism, which clearly manifested itself in the 20s. XIX century, was a historically new phenomenon, but showed connections with the classics. Music mastered new means that made it possible to express both the strength and subtlety of human emotional life, lyricism. These aspirations brought many musicians in common in the second half of the 18th century. literary movement "Storm and Drang".

Musical romanticism was historically prepared by the literary romanticism that preceded it. In Germany - among the “Jena” and “Heidelberg” romantics, in England – among the poets of the “Lake” school. Further, musical romanticism was significantly influenced by such writers as Heine, Byron, Lamartine, Hugo, Mickiewicz.

The most important areas of creativity of musical romanticism include:

1. lyrics – are of paramount importance. In the hierarchy of the arts, music was given the most honorable place, since feeling reigns in music and therefore the work of the romantic artist finds its highest goal in it. Consequently, music is lyricism, it allows a person to merge with the “soul of the world”, music is the antipode of prosaic reality, it is the voice of the heart.

2. fantasy - acts as freedom of imagination, free play of thoughts and feelings, freedom of knowledge, striving into the world of the strange, wonderful, unknown.

3. folk and nationally distinctive - the desire to recreate authenticity, primacy, integrity in the surrounding reality; interest in history, folklore, cult of nature (primordial nature). Nature is a refuge from the troubles of civilization; it consoles a restless person. Characterized by a great contribution to the collection of folklore, as well as a general desire for the faithful transmission of folk-national artistic style (“local color”) - this is a common feature of musical romanticism of different countries and schools.

4. characteristic – strange, eccentric, caricatured. To designate it is to break through the leveling gray veil of ordinary perception and touch the motley seething life.

Romanticism sees in all types of art a single meaning and goal - merging with the mysterious essence of life; the idea of ​​a synthesis of arts acquires new meaning.

“The aesthetics of one art is the aesthetics of another,” said R. Schumann. The combination of different materials increases the impressive power of the artistic whole. In a deep and organic fusion with painting, poetry and theater, new opportunities opened up for art. In the field of instrumental music, the principle of programming has acquired great importance, i.e. inclusion of literary and other associations in the composer’s concept and process of music perception.

Romanticism is especially widely represented in the music of Germany and Austria (F. Schubert, E. T. A. Hoffmann, K. M. Weber, L. Spohr), then the Leipzig School (F. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and R. Schumann). In the second half of the 19th century. – R. Wagner, I. Brahms, A. Bruckner, H. Wolf. In France - G. Berlioz; in Italy - G. Rossini, G. Verdi. F. Chopin, F. Liszt, J. Meyerbeer, N. Paganini are of pan-European importance.

The role of miniatures and large one-part forms; new interpretation of cycles. Enrichment of expressive means in the field of melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, instrumentation; renewal and development of classical patterns of form, development of new compositional principles.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, late romanticism reveals a hypertrophy of the subjective principle. Romantic tendencies also appeared in the works of composers of the 20th century. (D. Shostakovich, S. Prokofiev, P. Hindemith, B. Britten, B. Bartok, etc.).

Zweig was right: Europe has not seen such a wonderful generation as the romantics since the Renaissance. Marvelous images of the dream world, naked feelings and the desire for sublime spirituality - these are the colors that paint the musical culture of romanticism.

The emergence of romanticism and its aesthetics

While the industrial revolution was taking place in Europe, the hopes placed on the Great French Revolution were crushed in the hearts of Europeans. The cult of reason, proclaimed by the Age of Enlightenment, was overthrown. The cult of feelings and the natural principle in man has ascended to the pedestal.

This is how romanticism appeared. In musical culture it existed for a little more than a century (1800-1910), while in related fields (painting and literature) its term expired half a century earlier. Perhaps music is “to blame” for this - it was music that was at the top among the arts among the romantics as the most spiritual and freest of the arts.

However, the romantics, unlike representatives of the eras of antiquity and classicism, did not build a hierarchy of arts with its clear division into types and. The romantic system was universal; the arts could freely transform into each other. The idea of ​​a synthesis of arts was one of the key ones in the musical culture of romanticism.

This relationship also concerned the categories of aesthetics: the beautiful was combined with the ugly, the high with the base, the tragic with the comic. Such transitions were connected by romantic irony, which also reflected a universal picture of the world.

Everything that had to do with beauty took on a new meaning among the romantics. Nature became an object of worship, the artist was idolized as the highest of mortals, and feelings were exalted over reason.

Spiritless reality was contrasted with a dream, beautiful but unattainable. The romantic, with the help of his imagination, built his new world, unlike other realities.

What themes did Romantic artists choose?

The interests of the Romantics were clearly manifested in the choice of themes they chose in art.

• Theme of loneliness. An underrated genius or a lonely person in society - these were the main themes among composers of this era ("The Love of a Poet" by Schumann, "Without the Sun" by Mussorgsky).
• Theme of "lyrical confession". In many opuses of romantic composers there is a touch of autobiography (“Carnival” by Schumann, “Symphony Fantastique” by Berlioz).
• Theme of love. Basically, this is the theme of unrequited or tragic love, but not necessarily (“Love and Life of a Woman” by Schumann, “Romeo and Juliet” by Tchaikovsky).
• Theme of the path. She is also called theme of wanderings. The romantic soul, torn by contradictions, was looking for its path (“Harold in Italy” by Berlioz, “The Years of Wandering” by Liszt).
• Theme of death. Basically it was spiritual death (Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, Schubert's Winterreise).
• Nature theme. Nature in the eyes of romance and a protective mother, and an empathetic friend, and punishing fate (“The Hebrides” by Mendelssohn, “In Central Asia” by Borodin). The cult of the native land (polonaises and ballads of Chopin) is also connected with this theme.
• Fantasy theme. The imaginary world for romantics was much richer than the real one (“The Magic Shooter” by Weber, “Sadko” by Rimsky-Korsakov).

Musical genres of the Romantic era

The musical culture of romanticism gave impetus to the development of the genres of chamber vocal lyrics: ballad("The Forest King" by Schubert), poem("Maid of the Lake" by Schubert) and songs, often combined into cycles("Myrtles" by Schumann).

Romantic opera was distinguished not only by the fantastic nature of the plot, but also by the strong connection between words, music and stage action. The opera is being symphonized. Suffice it to recall Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungs” with its developed network of leitmotifs.

Among the instrumental genres of romance are piano miniature. To convey one image or a moment's mood, a short play is enough for them. Despite its scale, the play bubbles with expression. She could be "song without Words" (like Mendelssohn) mazurka, waltz, nocturne or pieces with programmatic titles (“The Rush” by Schumann).

Like songs, plays are sometimes combined into cycles (“Butterflies” by Schumann). At the same time, the parts of the cycle, brightly contrasting, always formed a single composition due to musical connections.

The Romantics loved program music, which combined it with literature, painting or other arts. Therefore, the plot in their works was often controlled. One-movement sonatas (Liszt's B minor sonata), one-movement concertos (Liszt's First Piano Concerto) and symphonic poems (Liszt's Preludes), and a five-movement symphony (Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique) appeared.

The musical language of romantic composers

The synthesis of arts, glorified by the romantics, influenced the means of musical expression. The melody has become more individual, sensitive to the poetics of the word, and the accompaniment has ceased to be neutral and typical in texture.

The harmony was enriched with unprecedented colors to tell about the experiences of the romantic hero. Thus, the romantic intonations of languor perfectly conveyed altered harmonies that increased tension. Romantics loved the effect of chiaroscuro, when the major was replaced by the minor of the same name, and the chords of the side steps, and the beautiful comparisons of tonalities. New effects were also discovered in music, especially when it was necessary to convey the folk spirit or fantastic images in music.

In general, the melody of the romantics strived for continuity of development, rejected any automatic repetition, avoided regularity of accents and breathed expressiveness in each of its motives. And texture has become such an important link that its role is comparable to the role of melody.

Listen to what a wonderful mazurka Chopin has!

Instead of a conclusion

The musical culture of romanticism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries experienced the first signs of crisis. The “free” musical form began to disintegrate, harmony prevailed over melody, the sublime feelings of the romantic soul gave way to painful fear and base passions.

These destructive trends brought Romanticism to an end and opened the way for Modernism. But, having ended as a movement, romanticism continued to live both in the music of the 20th century and in the music of the current century in its various components. Blok was right when he said that romanticism arises “in all eras of human life.”

Content

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………3

XIXcentury……………………………………………………………..6

1. General characteristics of the aesthetics of romanticism……………………………….6

   Features of Romanticism in Germany……………………………………...10

2.1. General characteristics of the category of tragic…………………………….13

Chapter 3. Criticism of Romanticism…………………………………………………...33

3.1. The critical position of Georg Friedrich Hegel……………………………..

3.2. The critical position of Friedrich Nietzsche…………………………………..

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………

Bibliography………………………………………………………

Introduction

Relevance This study lies, firstly, in the perspective of considering the problem. The work combines an analysis of ideological systems and the work of two outstanding representatives of German romanticism from different spheres of culture: Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer. This, according to the author, is the element of novelty. The study makes an attempt to combine the ideological foundations and works of two famous personalities based on the predominance of the tragic orientation of their thinking and creativity.

Secondly, the relevance of the chosen topic lies inthe degree of study of the problem. There are many major studies on German romanticism, as well as on the tragic in different spheres of life, but the topic of the tragic in German romanticism is represented mainly by small articles and individual chapters in monographs. Therefore, this area has not been thoroughly studied and is of interest.

Thirdly, the relevance of this work lies in the fact that the research problem is considered from different positions: not only representatives of the era of romanticism are characterized, proclaiming romantic aesthetics with their ideological positions and creativity, but also criticism of romanticism by G.F. Hegel and F. Nietzsche.

Target research - to identify specific features of the philosophy of art of Goethe and Schopenhauer, as representatives of German romanticism, taking as a basis the tragic orientation of their worldview and creativity.

Tasks research:

Identify common characteristic features of romantic aesthetics.

Identify the specific features of German romanticism.

Show the change in the immanent content of the category of tragic and its understanding in different historical eras.

To identify the specific manifestations of the tragic in the culture of German romanticism using the example of a comparison of ideological systems and the creativity of two major representatives of German cultureXIXcentury.

To identify the limits of romantic aesthetics, considering the problem through the prism of the views of G.F. Hegel and F. Nietzsche.

Object of study is the culture of German romanticism,subject - mechanism of the constitution of romantic art.

Research sources are:

Monographs and articles on romanticism and its manifestations in GermanyXIXcentury: Asmus V., “Musical aesthetics of philosophical romanticism”, Berkovsky N.Ya., “Romanticism in Germany”, Vanslov V.V., “Aesthetics of romanticism”, Lucas F.L., “The decline and collapse of the romantic ideal”, "Musical aesthetics of GermanyXIXcentury", in 2 volumes, comp. Mikhailov A.V., Shestakov V.P., Solleritinsky I.I., “Romanticism, its general and musical aesthetics”, Teteryan I.A., “Romanticism as an integral phenomenon.”

Works of the studied personalities: Hegel G.F. “Lectures on Aesthetics”, “On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism”; Goethe I.V., “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, “Faust”; Nietzsche F., “The Fall of Idols”, “Beyond Good and Evil”, “The Birth of the Tragedy of Their Spirit of Music”, “Schopenhauer as an Educator”; Schopenhauer A., ​​“The World as Will and Representation” in 2 volumes, “Thoughts”.

Monographs and articles dedicated to the personalities under study: Antiks A.A., “Goethe’s creative path”, Vilmont N.N., “Goethe. The story of his life and work,” Gardiner P., “Arthur Schopenhauer. Philosopher of German Hellenism", Pushkin V.G., "Hegel's philosophy: the absolute in man", Sokolov V.V., "Historical and philosophical concept of Hegel", Fischer K., "Arthur Schopenhauer", Eckerman I.P., " Conversations with Goethe in the last years of his life."

Textbooks on the history and philosophy of science: Kanke V.A., “Main philosophical directions and concepts of science”, Koir A.V., “Essays on the history of philosophical thought. On the influence of philosophical concepts on the development of scientific theories”, Kuptsov V.I., “Philosophy and methodology of science”, Lebedev S.A., “Fundamentals of the philosophy of science”, Stepin V.S., “Philosophy of science. General problems: a textbook for graduate students and candidates for the academic degree of candidate of sciences.”

Reference literature: Lebedev S.A., “Philosophy of Science: Dictionary of Basic Terms”, “Modern Western Philosophy. Dictionary", comp. Malakhov V.S., Filatov V.P., “Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary”, comp. Averintseva S.A., “Aesthetics. Theory of literature. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Terms", comp. Borev Yu.B.

Chapter 1. General characteristics of the aesthetics of romanticism and its manifestations in Germany XIX century.

1. General characteristics of the aesthetics of romanticism

Romanticism is an ideological and artistic movement in European culture, covering all types of art and science, which flourished at the end ofXVIII- StartXIXcentury. The term “romanticism” itself has a complex history. In the Middle Ages the word "romance" meant national languages ​​formed from the Latin language. Terms "enromancier», « romancar" And "romanz” meant writing books in the national language or translating them into the national language. INXVIIcentury the English word "romance"was understood as something fantastic, bizarre, chimerical, too exaggerated, and its semantics was negative. In French it was different "romanesque"(also with a negative connotation) and "romantic”, which meant “tender”, “soft”, “sentimental”, “sad”. In England in this sense the word was used inXVIIIcentury. In Germany the word "romantic» used inXVIIcentury in the French sense "romanesque", and from the middleXVIIIcentury in the meaning of “soft”, “sad”.

The concept of “romanticism” is also polysemantic. According to the American scientist A.O. Lovejoy, the term has so many meanings that it means nothing, it is both irreplaceable and useless; and F.D. Lucas, in his book The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal, counted 11,396 definitions of romanticism.

The first to use the term "romantic"in literature by F. Schlegel, and in relation to music - E.T. A. Hoffman.

Romanticism was generated by a combination of many reasons, both socio-historical and intra-artistic. The most important among them was the impact of the new historical experience that the Great French Revolution brought with it. This experience required comprehension, including artistic comprehension, and forced us to reconsider creative principles.

Romanticism arose in the pre-storm environment of social storms and was the result of public hopes and disappointments in the possibilities of a reasonable transformation of society based on the principles of freedom, equality and fraternity.

The invariant artistic concept of the world and personality for the romantics was a system of ideas: evil and death are irreducible from life, they are eternal and immanently contained in the very mechanism of life, but the struggle against them is also eternal; world sorrow is a state of the world that has become a state of spirit; resistance to evil does not give him the opportunity to become the absolute ruler of the world, but also cannot radically change this world and eliminate evil completely.

A pessimistic component appears in Romanesque culture. “The morality of happiness”, affirmed by philosophyXVIIIcentury is replaced by an apology for heroes deprived of life, but also drawing inspiration from their misfortune. The romantics believed that history and the human spirit move forward through tragedy, and they recognized universal variability as the basic law of existence.

Romantics are characterized by dualistic consciousness: there are two worlds (the world of dreams and the world of reality), which are opposite. Heine wrote: “The world split, and a crack passed through the poet’s heart.” That is, the consciousness of the romantic was split into two parts - the real world and the illusory world. This dual world is projected onto all spheres of life (for example, the characteristic romantic opposition between the individual and society, the artist and the crowd). This gives rise to the desire for a dream that is unattainable, and as one of the manifestations of this is the desire for exoticism (exotic countries and their cultures, natural phenomena), unusualness, fantasy, transcendence, various kinds of extremes (including in emotional states) and motive of wandering, wandering. This is due to the fact that real life, according to romantics, is located in an unreal world - a dream world. Reality is irrational, mysterious and opposed to human freedom.

Another characteristic feature of romantic aesthetics is individualism and subjectivity. The creative personality becomes the central figure. The aesthetics of romanticism put forward and first developed the concept of the author and recommended creating a romantic image of the writer.

It was in the era of romanticism that special attention to feeling and sensitivity appeared. It was believed that an artist should have a sensitive heart and compassion for his heroes. Chateaubriand emphasized that he strives to be a sensitive writer, appealing not to the mind, but to the soul, to the feelings of the readers.

In general, the art of the era of romanticism is metaphorical, associative, symbolic and gravitates towards the synthesis and interaction of genres, types, as well as to a connection with philosophy and religion. Each art, on the one hand, strives for immanence, but on the other, tries to go beyond its own boundaries (this expresses another characteristic feature of the aesthetics of romanticism - the desire for transcendence, transcendence). For example, music interacts with literature and poetry, as a result of which programmatic musical works appear; genres such as ballad, poem, and later fairy tale, legend are borrowed from literature.

ExactlyXIXcentury, the genre of the diary (as a reflection of individualism and subjectivity) and the novel appeared in literature (according to romantics, this genre unites poetry and philosophy, eliminates the boundaries between artistic practice and theory, and becomes a reflection in miniature of the entire literary era).

Small forms appear in music as a reflection of a certain moment of life (this can be illustrated by the words of Goethe’s Faust: “Stop, moment, you are beautiful!”). In this moment, romantics see eternity and infinity - this is one of the signs of the symbolism of romantic art.

In the era of romanticism, interest in the national specifics of art arose: in folklore, romantics saw a manifestation of the nature of life, in folk songs - a kind of spiritual support.

In romanticism, the features of classicism are lost - evil begins to be depicted in art. Berlioz took a revolutionary step in this in his Symphony Fantastique. It was during the era of romanticism that a special figure appeared in music - a demonic virtuoso, prime examples of which are Paganini and Liszt.

Summing up some of the results of this section of the study, it should be noted that since the aesthetics of romanticism was born as a result of disappointment in the Great French Revolution and similar idealistic concepts of the Enlightenment, it has a tragic orientation. The main characteristic features of romantic culture are dualistic worldview, subjectivity and individualism, the cult of feeling and sensitivity, interest in the Middle Ages, the Eastern world and in general all manifestations of the exotic.

The aesthetics of romanticism manifested itself most clearly in Germany. Next we will try to identify the specific features of the aesthetics of German romanticism.

1. Features of Romanticism in Germany.

In the era of romanticism, when disappointment in bourgeois transformations and their consequences became universal, the peculiar features of the spiritual culture of Germany acquired pan-European significance and had a strong impact on social thought, aesthetics, literature and art of other countries.

German romanticism can be divided into two stages:

Jensky (about 1797-1804)

Heidelberg (after 1804)

There are different opinions regarding the period of development of romanticism in Germany when it flourished. For example: N.Ya. Berkovsky in the book “Romanticism in Germany” writes: “Almost all early romanticism comes down to the deeds and days of the Jena school, which developed in Germany at the very end of the 17th century.Icenturies. The history of German romance has long been divided into two periods: heyday and decline. It flourished during the Jena period.” A.V. Mikhailov in his book “The Aesthetics of the German Romantics” emphasizes that the heyday was the second stage of the development of romanticism: “Romantic aesthetics in its central, “Heidelberg” period is a living aesthetics of the image.”

One of the features of German romanticism is its universality.

A.V. Mikhailov writes: “Romanticism claimed a universal view of the world, a comprehensive coverage and generalization of all human knowledge, and to a certain extent it really was a universal worldview. His ideas related to philosophy, politics, economics, medicine, poetics, etc., and always acted as ideas of extremely general significance.

This universality was represented in the Jena school, which united people of different professions: the Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich, were philologists, literary critics, art critics, publicists; F. Schelling - philosopher and writer, Schleiermacher - philosopher and theologian, H. Steffens - geologist, I. Ritter - physicist, Gulsen - physicist, L. Tick - poet, Novallis - writer.

The romantic philosophy of art received a systematic form in the lectures of A. Schlegel and the works of F. Schelling. Also, representatives of the Jena school created the first examples of the art of romanticism: L. Tieck's comedy "Puss in Boots" (1797), "Hymns for the Night" lyrical cycle (1800) and the novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" (1802) by Novalis.

The second generation of German romantics, the “Heidelberg” school, was distinguished by an interest in religion, national antiquity, and folklore. The most important contribution to German culture was the collection of folk songs “The Boy’s Magic Horn” (1806-1808), compiled by L. Arnim and K. Berntano, as well as “Children’s and Family Tales” by the brothers J. and W. Grimm (1812-1814). Lyric poetry also reached high perfection at this time (the poems of J. Eichendorff can be cited as an example).

Based on the mythological ideas of Schelling and the Schlegel brothers, the Heidelberg romantics finally formalized the principles of the first deep scientific direction in folklore and literary criticism - the mythological school.

The next characteristic feature of German romanticism is the artistry of its language.

A.V. Mikhailov writes: “German romanticism is by no means reduced to art, literature, poetry, however, both in philosophy and in the sciences it does not cease to use artistic and symbolic language. The aesthetic content of the romantic worldview lies equally in poetic creations and in scientific experiments.”

In late German romanticism, motives of tragic hopelessness, a critical attitude towards modern society and a feeling of discord between dreams and reality grew. The democratic ideas of late romanticism found their expression in the works of A. Chamisso, the lyrics of G. Müller, and in the poetry and prose of Heinrich Heine.

Another characteristic feature relating to the late period of German romanticism was the increasing role of the grotesque as a component of romantic satire.

Romantic irony has become more cruel. The ideas of the representatives of the Heidelberg school often contradicted the ideas of the early stage of German romanticism. If the romantics of the Jena school believed in correcting the world with beauty and art, they called Raphael their teacher,

(self-portrait)

the generation that replaced them saw the triumph of ugliness in the world, turned to the ugly, and in the field of painting perceived the world of old age

(elderly woman reading)

and collapse, and at this stage called Rembrandt his teacher.

(self-portrait)

The mood of fear in front of an incomprehensible reality intensified.

German romanticism is a special phenomenon. In Germany, the trends characteristic of the entire movement received a unique development, which determined the national specifics of romanticism in this country. Having existed for a relatively short time (according to A.V. Mikhailov, from the very endXVIIIcenturies until 1813-1815), it was in Germany that romantic aesthetics acquired its classical features. German romanticism had a strong influence on the development of romantic ideas in other countries and became their fundamental basis.

2.1. General characteristics of the category of tragic.

Tragic is a philosophical and aesthetic category that characterizes the destructive and unbearable aspects of life, the insoluble contradictions of reality, presented in the form of an insoluble conflict. The clash between man and the world, personality and society, hero and fate is expressed in the struggle of strong passions and great characters. Unlike the sad and terrible, the tragic as a type of threatening or accomplished destruction is not caused by random external forces, but stems from the internal nature of the dying phenomenon itself, its insoluble self-division in the process of its implementation. The dialectic of life turns to man in its tragic and pathetic and destructive side. The tragic is akin to the sublime in that it is inseparable from the idea of ​​the dignity and greatness of man, manifested in his very suffering.

The first awareness of the tragic were the myths relating to the “dying gods” (Osiris, Serapis, Adonis, Mithras, Dionysus). On the basis of the cult of Dionysus, during its gradual secularization, the art of tragedy developed. Philosophical understanding of the tragic was formed in parallel with the formation of this category in art, in reflection on the painful and gloomy aspects of private life and history.

The tragic in the ancient era is characterized by a certain underdevelopment of the personal principle, above which the good of the polis rises (on its side are the gods, the patrons of the polis), and an objectivist-cosmological understanding of fate as an indifferent force that dominates nature and society. Therefore, the tragic in antiquity was often described through the concepts of fate and fate, as opposed to modern European tragedy, where the source of the tragic is the subject himself, the depths of his inner world and the actions caused by it. (as, for example, in Shakespeare).

Ancient and medieval philosophy does not know a special theory of the tragic: the doctrine of the tragic constitutes here an undivided moment of the doctrine of being.

An example of the understanding of the tragic in ancient Greek philosophy, where it acts as an essential aspect of the cosmos and the dynamics of the opposing principles in it, can be the philosophy of Aristotle. Summarizing the practice of Attic tragedies played out during the annual festivals dedicated to Dionysus, Aristotle identifies the following moments in the tragic: a pattern of action characterized by a sudden turn for the worse (peripeteia) and recognition, the experience of extreme misfortune and suffering (pathos), purification (catharsis).

From the point of view of the Aristotelian doctrine of nous (“mind”), the tragic arises when this eternal, self-sufficient “mind” is surrendered to the power of otherness and becomes from the eternal temporary, from the self-sufficient - subordinate to necessity, from the blessed - suffering and sorrowful. Then human “action and life” begins with its joys and sorrows, with its transitions from happiness to unhappiness, with its guilt, crimes, retribution, punishment, desecration of the eternally blissful innocence of “nous” and restoration of the desecrated. This escape of the mind into the power of “necessity” and “chance” constitutes an unconscious “crime”. But sooner or later, a recollection or “recognition” of the previous blissful state occurs, the crime is exposed and assessed. Then comes the time of tragic pathos, caused by the shock of the human being from the contrast of blissful innocence and the darkness of vanity and crime. But this recognition of the crime also means the beginning of the restoration of the violated, which occurs in the form of retribution, carried out through “fear” and “compassion”. The result is a “purification” of passions (catharsis) and restoration of the disturbed balance of the “mind”.

Ancient Eastern philosophy (including Buddhism, with its heightened awareness of the pathetic essence of life, but a purely pessimistic assessment of it), did not develop the concept of the tragic.

The medieval worldview, with its unconditional faith in divine providence and final salvation, overcoming the entanglements of fate, essentially eliminates the problem of the tragic: the tragedy of the world's fall, the falling away of created humanity from the personal absolute, is overcome in the atoning sacrifice of Christ and the restoration of creation to its pristine purity.

Tragedy received a new development during the Renaissance, then gradually transforming into classicist and romantic tragedy.

During the Age of Enlightenment, interest in the tragic in philosophy revived; At this time, the idea of ​​a tragic conflict as a clash of duty and feeling was formulated: Lessing called the tragic “a school of morality.” Thus, the pathos of the tragic was reduced from the level of transcendental understanding (in antiquity, the source of the tragic was fate, inevitable fate) to a moral conflict. In the aesthetics of classicism and the Enlightenment, analyzes of tragedy as a literary genre appear - in N. Boileau, D. Diderot, G.E. Lessing, F. Schiller, who, developing the ideas of Kantian philosophy, saw the source of the tragic in the conflict between the sensual and moral nature of man (for example, the essay “On the Tragic in Art”).

The identification of the category of the tragic and its philosophical understanding is carried out in German classical aesthetics, primarily in Schelling and Hegel. According to Schelling, the essence of the tragic lies in “... the struggle of freedom in the subject and the necessity of the objective...”, and both sides “... are simultaneously presented as both victorious and defeated - in complete indistinguishability.” Necessity, fate makes the hero guilty without any intention on his part, but due to a predetermined combination of circumstances. The hero must fight necessity - otherwise, with its passive acceptance, there would be no freedom - and be defeated by it. Tragic guilt lies in “also voluntarily incurring punishment for an inevitable crime, in order to prove precisely this freedom by the very loss of one’s freedom and to perish, declaring one’s free will.” Schelling considered the work of Sophocles to be the pinnacle of tragedy in art. He placed Calderon above Shakespeare, since his key concept of fate was of a mystical nature.

Hegel sees the theme of the tragic in the self-division of moral substance as the area of ​​will and accomplishment. Its constituent moral forces and active characters are different in their content and individual identification, and the deployment of these differences necessarily leads to conflict. Each of the various moral forces strives to realize a certain goal, is overwhelmed by a certain pathos, realized in action, and in this one-sided certainty of its content inevitably violates the opposite side and collides with it. The death of these colliding forces restores the disturbed balance at a different, higher level and thereby moves forward the universal substance, contributing to the historical process of self-development of the spirit. Art, according to Hegel, tragically reflects a special moment in history, a conflict that has absorbed all the acuteness of the contradictions of a particular “state of the world.” He called this state of the world heroic, when morality had not yet taken the form of established state laws. The individual bearer of tragic pathos is the hero, who completely identifies himself with the moral idea. In the tragedy, isolated moral forces are presented in a variety of ways, but can be reduced to two definitions and the contradiction between them: “moral life in its spiritual universality” and “natural morality,” that is, between the state and the family.

Hegel and the romantics (A. Schlegel, Schelling) provide a typological analysis of the new European understanding of the tragic. The latter proceeds from the fact that man himself is guilty of the horrors and suffering that befell him, whereas in antiquity he acted rather as a passive object of the fate he endured. Schiller understood the tragic as a contradiction between the ideal and reality.

In the philosophy of romanticism, the tragic moves into the area of ​​subjective experiences, the inner world of a person, especially the artist, which is contrasted with the deceit and inauthenticity of the external, empirical social world. The tragic was partly replaced by irony (F. Schlegel, Novalis, L. Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, G. Heine).

For Zolger, the tragic is the basis of human life, it arises between essence and existence, between the divine and the phenomenon, the tragic is the death of an idea in a phenomenon, of the eternal in the temporal. Reconciliation is possible not in the final human existence, but only with the destruction of existing existence.

Close to the romantic understanding of the tragic is S. Kierkegaard, who connects it with the subjective experience of “despair” by a person who was at the stage of his ethical development (which is preceded by the aesthetic stage and which leads to the religious one). Kierkugaard notes the different understanding of the tragedy of guilt in ancient times and in modern times: in ancient times, tragedy is deeper, the pain is less, in modern times it is the other way around, since pain is associated with awareness of one’s own guilt and reflection on it.

If German classical philosophy, and above all the philosophy of Hegel, in its understanding of the tragic, proceeded from the rationality of the will and the meaningfulness of the tragic conflict, where the victory of the idea was achieved at the cost of the death of its bearer, then in the irrationalistic philosophy of A. Schopenhauer and F. Nietzsche there is a break with this tradition, since the very existence of any meaning in the world is called into question. Considering the will to be immoral and unreasonable, Schopenhauer sees the essence of the tragic in the self-confrontation of blind will. In Schopenhauer’s teachings, the tragic lies not only in a pessimistic view of life, for misfortune and suffering constitute its essence, but in the denial of its highest meaning, as well as the world itself: “the principle of the existence of the world has absolutely no basis, i.e. represents the blind will to live." The tragic spirit therefore leads to the renunciation of the will to live.

Nietzsche characterized the tragic as the original essence of existence - chaotic, irrational and formless. He called the tragic “pessimism of force.” According to Nietzsche, the tragic was born from the Dionysian principle, opposite to the “Apollonian instinct of beauty.” But the “Dionysian underground of the world” must be overcome by the enlightened and transformative Apollonian force, their strict correlation is the basis of the perfect tragic art: chaos and order, frenzy and serene contemplation, horror, blissful delight and wise peace in images is tragedy.

INXXcentury, the irrationalistic interpretation of the tragic was continued in existentialism; the tragic began to be understood as an existential characteristic of human existence. According to K. Jaspers, the truly tragic consists in the realization that “... universal collapse is the basic characteristic of human existence.” L. Shestov, A Camus, J.-P. Sartre associated the tragic with the groundlessness and absurdity of existence. The contradiction between the thirst for life of a person “of flesh and blood” and the testimony of reason about the finitude of his existence is the core of the teaching of M. de Unamuno about “The tragic sense of life among people and nations” (1913). Culture, art and philosophy itself are viewed by him as a vision of “dazzling Nothingness”, the essence of which is total randomness, lack of conformity with law and absurdity, “the logic of the worst”. T. Adrono examines the tragic from the angle of criticism of bourgeois society and its culture from the position of “negative dialectics.”

In the spirit of the philosophy of life, G. Simmel wrote about the tragic contradiction between the dynamics of the creative process and those stable forms in which it crystallizes, F. Stepun - about the tragedy of creativity as the objectification of the inexpressible inner world of the individual.

The tragic and its philosophical interpretation became a means of criticizing society and human existence. In Russian culture, the tragic was understood as the futility of religious and spiritual aspirations, extinguished in the vulgarity of life (N.V. Gogol, F.M. Dostoevsky).

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1794-1832) - German poet, writer, thinker. His work spans the last three decadesXVIIIcentury - the period of pre-romanticism - and the first thirty yearsXIXcentury. The first most significant period of the poet’s work, which began in 1770, is associated with the aesthetics of Sturm and Drang.

Sturm und Drang is a literary movement in Germany in the 70sXVIIIcentury, named after the drama of the same name by F. M. Klinger. The work of writers of this direction - Goethe, Klinger, Leisewitz, Lenz, Bürger, Schubert, Voss - reflected the growth of anti-feudal sentiments and was imbued with the spirit of rebellious rebellion. This movement, which owed much to Rousseauism, declared war on aristocratic culture. In contrast to classicism with its dogmatic norms, as well as the mannerisms of Rococo, the “stormy geniuses” put forward the idea of ​​“characteristic art,” original in all its manifestations; they demanded from literature the depiction of bright, strong passions, characters not broken by the despotic regime. The main area of ​​creativity of the Sturm und Drang writers was drama. They sought to establish a third-class theater that actively influenced public life, as well as a new dramatic style, the main features of which were emotional richness and lyricism. Having made the inner world of man the subject of artistic depiction, they developed new techniques for individualizing characters and created a lyrically colored, pathetic and figurative language.

Goethe's lyrics from the period of "Sturm und Drang" are one of the most brilliant pages in the history of German poetry. Goethe's lyrical hero appears as the embodiment of nature or in an organic fusion with it (“The Traveler,” “The Song of Mohammed”). He turns to mythological images, interpreting them in a rebellious spirit (“The Song of a Wanderer in the Storm,” a monologue of Prometheus from an unfinished drama).

The most perfect creation of the Sturm und Drang period is the novel in letters “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” written in 1774, which brought the author worldwide fame. This is the piece that appeared at the endXVIIIcentury, can be considered a harbinger and symbol of the entire coming era of romanticism. Romantic aesthetics forms the semantic center of the novel, manifesting itself in many aspects. Firstly, the very theme of personal suffering and the derivation of the hero’s subjective experiences are not the first plan; the special confessionalism inherent in the novel is a purely romantic tendency. Secondly, the novel contains a dual world characteristic of romanticism - a dream world, objectified in the form of the beautiful Lotte and faith in mutual love and a world of cruel reality, in which there is no hope for happiness and where the sense of duty and the opinion of the world are above the most sincere and deepest feelings. Thirdly, there is a pessimistic component characteristic of romanticism, which grows to the gigantic scale of tragedy.

Werther is a romantic hero who, with the final shot, challenges the cruel, unfair world - the world of reality. He rejects the laws of life, in which there is no place for happiness and the fulfillment of his dreams, and prefers to die rather than give up the passion born of his fiery heart. This hero is the antipode of Prometheus, and yet Werther-Prometheus are the final links of one chain of Goethe’s images from the period of Sturm and Drang. Their existence equally unfolds under the sign of doom. Werther empties himself in attempts to defend the reality of his fictional world, Prometheus seeks to perpetuate himself in the creation of “free” beings independent of the power of Olympus, creates slaves of Zeus, people subordinate to superior, transcendent forces.

The tragic conflict associated with Lotte's line, in contrast to Werther's, is largely associated with the classicist type of conflict - a conflict of feeling and duty, in which the latter wins. Indeed, according to the novel, Lotte is very attached to Werther, but her duty to her husband and younger brothers and sisters, left in her care by her dying mother, takes precedence over her feelings, and the heroine has to choose, although she does not know until the last moment that she will have to choose between life and the death of someone dear to her. Lotte, like Werther, is a tragic heroine, because perhaps only in death she learns the true extent of her love and Werther’s love for her, and the inseparability of love and death is another feature inherent in romantic aesthetics. The theme of the unity of love and death will be relevant throughoutXIXcentury, all the major artists of the Romantic era would turn to it, but it was Goethe who was one of the first to reveal its potential in his early tragic novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther.”

Despite the fact that during his lifetime Goethe was primarily the renowned author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, his most grandiose creation is the tragedy Faust, which he wrote over the course of almost sixty years. It was started during the period of Sturm and Drang, but ended in an era when the romantic school dominated in German literature. Therefore, “Faust” reflects all the stages through which the poet’s work followed.

The first part of the tragedy is in close connection with the period of “Storm and Drang” in Goethe’s work. The theme of an abandoned beloved girl who, in a fit of despair, becomes a child killer, was very common in the literature of the “Sturmanddrang"("The Child Killer" by Wagner, "The Priest's Daughter from Taubenheim" by Burger). The appeal to the age of fiery Gothic, knittelfers, monodrama - all this speaks of a connection with the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang.

The second part, which achieves special artistic expressiveness in the image of Helen the Beautiful, is more closely associated with the literature of the classical period. Gothic contours give way to ancient Greek ones, Hellas becomes the scene of action, the knittelfers is replaced by poems of an antique style, the images acquire some kind of special sculptural compactness (this expresses Goethe’s predilection in maturity for the decorative interpretation of mythological motifs and purely spectacular effects: masquerade - 3 scene of act 1, classic Walpurgis Night and the like). In the final scene of the tragedy, Goethe already pays tribute to romanticism, introducing a mystical chorus and opening the gates of heaven to Faust.

“Faust” occupies a special place in the work of the German poet - it is the ideological result of all his creative activity. The novelty and unusualness of this tragedy is that its subject was not one life conflict, but a consistent, inevitable chain of deep conflicts throughout a single life path, or, in Goethe’s words, “a series of increasingly higher and purer types of activity of the hero.”

In the tragedy "Faust", as in the novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther", there are many characteristic features of romantic aesthetics. The same dual world in which Werther lived is also characteristic of Faust, but unlike Werther, the doctor has the fleeting pleasure of fulfilling his dreams, which, however, leads to even greater sorrow due to the illusory nature of dreams and the fact that they collapse, bringing grief is not only for himself. As in the novel about Werther, in Faust the subjective experiences and sufferings of the individual are placed at the center, but unlike in The Sorrows of Young Werther, where the theme of creativity is not the leading one, in Faust it plays a very important role. At the end of the tragedy, Faust's creativity takes on enormous scope - this is his idea of ​​a colossal construction project on land reclaimed from the sea for the happiness and well-being of the whole world.

It is interesting that the main character, although in alliance with Satan, does not lose his morality: he strives for sincere love, beauty, and then universal happiness. Faust does not use the forces of evil for evil, but as if he wants to turn them into good, therefore his forgiveness and salvation are natural and expected; the cathartic moment of his ascension to paradise is not unexpected.

Another characteristic feature of the aesthetics of romanticism is the theme of the inseparability of love and death, which in Faust goes through three stages: the love and death of Gretchen and her daughter with Faust (as the objectification of this love), the final departure to the kingdom of the dead of Helen the Beautiful and the death of her and Faust's son (as in the case of daughter Gretchen, the objectification of this love), Faust's love for life and all humanity and the death of Faust himself.

“Faust” is not only a tragedy about the past, but about the future of human history, as it seemed to Goethe. After all, Faust, according to the poet, is the personification of all humanity, and his path is the path of all civilization. Human history is a story of search, trial and error, and the image of Faust embodies faith in the limitless possibilities of man.

Now let us turn to the analysis of Goethe's work from the point of view of the category of the tragic. The fact that the German poet was an artist of a tragic nature is supported, for example, by the predominance of tragic-dramatic genres in his work: “Goetz von Berlichingen”, the tragically ending novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, the drama “Egmont”, the drama “Torquato Tasso”, tragedy “Iphigenia in Tauris”, drama “Citizen General”, tragedy “Faust”.

The historical drama "Götz von Berlichingen", written in 1773, reflected the events on the eve of the Peasants' WarXVIcentury, sounding a harsh reminder of the princely tyranny and tragedy of the fragmented country. In the drama "Egmont", written in 1788 and connected with the ideas of "Sturm und Drang", at the center of events is the conflict between foreign oppressors and the people, whose resistance is suppressed, but not broken, and the ending of the drama sounds like a call to fight for freedom. The tragedy “Iphigenia in Tauris” is based on the plot of an ancient Greek myth, and its main idea is the victory of humanity over barbarism.

The Great French Revolution is directly reflected in Goethe's "Venetian Epigrams", the drama "Citizen General" and the short story "Conversations of German Emigrants". The poet does not accept revolutionary violence, but at the same time recognizes the inevitability of social reorganization - on this topic he wrote the satirical poem “Reinecke the Fox,” denouncing feudal tyranny.

One of Goethe’s most famous and significant works, along with the novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and the tragedy “Faust,” is the novel “The Teaching Years of Wilhelm Meister.” In it one can again trace romantic tendencies and themes characteristic ofXIXcentury. In this novel, the theme of the death of dreams appears: the protagonist’s stage hobbies subsequently appear as a youthful delusion, and in the finale of the novel he sees his task in practical economic activity. The Meister is the antipode of Werther and Faust - creative heroes burning with love and dreams. His life drama lies in the fact that he abandoned his dreams, choosing routine, boredom and the actual meaninglessness of existence, because his creativity, which gives the true meaning of existence, went out when he gave up his dream of becoming an actor and playing on stage. Much later in literatureXXcentury, this theme is transformed into the theme of the tragedy of the little man.

The tragic direction of Goethe's work is obvious. Despite the fact that the poet did not create a complete philosophical system, his works set forth a deep philosophical concept associated with both the classicist picture of the world and romantic aesthetics. Goethe’s philosophy, revealed in his works, is in many ways contradictory and ambiguous, like his main work of life “Faust”, but it clearly shows, on the one hand, an almost Schopenhauerian vision of the real world as bringing severe suffering to a person, awakening dreams and desires, but not fulfilling them, preaching injustice, routine, routine and death of love, dreams and creativity, but on the other hand, faith in the limitless possibilities of man and the transformative powers of creativity, love and art. In a polemic against the nationalist tendencies that developed in Germany during and after the Napoleonic wars, Goethe put forward the idea of ​​“world literature”, without sharing Hegel’s skepticism in assessing the future of art. Goethe also saw in literature and art in general a powerful potential for influencing a person and even the existing social system.

Thus, perhaps Goethe's philosophical concept can be expressed as follows: the struggle of the creative creative forces of man, expressed in love, art and other aspects of existence, with the injustice and cruelty of the real world and the victory of the former. Despite the fact that most of Goethe's struggling and suffering heroes die in the end. The catharsis of his tragedies and the victory of the bright beginning are obvious and large-scale. In this regard, the end of Faust is indicative, when both the main character and his beloved Gretchen receive forgiveness and go to heaven. Such an end can be projected onto the majority of Goethe's searching and suffering heroes.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1786-1861) – representative of the irrational trend in the philosophical thought of Germany in the first halfXIXcentury. The main role in the formation of Schopenhauer's worldview system was played by influences from three philosophical traditions: Kantian, Platonic and ancient Indian Brahmanistic and Buddhist philosophy.

The views of the German philosopher are pessimistic, and his concept reflects the tragedy of human existence. The center of Schopenhauer's philosophical system is the doctrine of the negation of the will to live. He views death as a moral ideal, as the highest goal of human existence: “Death, undoubtedly, is the real goal of life, and at the moment when death comes, everything is accomplished for which throughout our entire life we ​​have only been preparing and starting. Death is the final conclusion, a summary of life, its result, which immediately unites into one whole all the partial and scattered lessons of life and tells us that all our aspirations, the embodiment of which was life, that all these aspirations were in vain, vain and contradictory and that salvation lies in renunciation of them.”

Death is the main goal of life, according to Schopenhauer, because this world, according to his definition, is the worst possible: “Leibniz’s obviously sophistic proofs that this world is the best of possible worlds can be quite seriously and conscientiously countered by the proof that this world - the worst of all possible worlds" .

Human existence is placed by Schopenhauer in the world of “inauthentic being” of ideas, determined by the world of the Will - truly existing and self-identical. Life in the time stream seems to be a bleak chain of suffering, a continuous series of large and small adversities; a person cannot find peace in any way: “... in the sufferings of life we ​​console ourselves with death, and in death we console ourselves with the sufferings of life.”

In the works of Schopenhauer one can often find the idea that both this world and people should not exist at all: “... the existence of the world should not please us, but rather sadden us;... its non-existence would be preferable to its existence;... it represents something that really shouldn’t exist.”

Human existence is just an episode that disturbs the peace of absolute existence, which must end with the desire to suppress the will to live. Moreover, according to the philosopher, death does not destroy true existence (the world of Will), since it represents the end of a temporary phenomenon (the world of ideas), and not the innermost essence of the world. In the chapter “Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Being” of his large-scale work “The World as Will and Idea,” Schopenhauer writes: “... nothing invades our consciousness with such an irresistible force as the thought that creation and destruction do not affect the real essence of things , that the latter is inaccessible to them, that is, incorruptible, and that therefore everything that wills life really continues to live without end... Thanks to him, despite thousands of years of death and decay, nothing has yet perished, not a single atom of matter and, even less, not a single fraction of that inner essence which appears to us as nature.”

The timeless existence of the world of Will knows neither gains nor losses, it is always identical to itself, eternal and true. Therefore the state into which death takes us is the “natural state of the Will.” Death destroys only the biological organism and consciousness, and knowledge allows one to understand the insignificance of life and overcome the fear of death, as Schopenhauer claims. He expresses the idea that with knowledge, on the one hand, a person’s ability to feel grief, the true nature of this world, which brings suffering and death, increases: “A person, along with reason, inevitably developed a terrifying certainty of death.” . But, on the other hand, the ability of cognition leads, in his opinion, to man’s awareness of the indestructibility of his true being, which manifests itself not in his individuality and consciousness, but in the world will: “The horrors of death are mainly based on the illusion that with itI disappears, but the world remains. In fact, rather the opposite is true: the world disappears, and the innermost coreI , the bearer and creator of that subject, in whose representation the world alone has its existence, remains.”

Awareness of the immortality of the true essence of man, according to the views of Schopenhauer, is based on the fact that one cannot identify oneself only with one’s own consciousness and body and make distinctions between the external and internal world. He writes that “death is a moment of liberation from the one-sidedness of the individual form, which does not constitute the innermost core of our being, but rather is a kind of perversion of it.”

Human life, according to Schopenhauer's concept, is always accompanied by suffering. But he perceives them as a source of purification, since they lead to the denial of the will to live and do not allow a person to take the wrong path of its affirmation. The philosopher writes: “The entire human existence speaks quite clearly that suffering is the true destiny of man. Life is deeply engulfed in suffering and cannot escape it; our entry into it is accompanied by words about this; in its essence, it always proceeds tragically, and its end is especially tragic... Suffering, this is truly the cleansing process that alone in most cases sanctifies a person, that is, deviates him from the false path of the will of life.” .

An important place in A. Schopenhauer's philosophical system is occupied by his concept of art. He believes that the highest goal of art is to free the soul from suffering and find spiritual peace. However, he is attracted only by those types and kinds of art that are close to his own worldview: tragic music, dramatic and tragic genre of stage art, and the like, since they are the ones who are able to express the tragic essence of human existence. He writes about the art of tragedy: “The peculiar effect of tragedy, in essence, is based on the fact that it shakes the indicated innate delusion (that a person lives in order to be happy - approx.), clearly embodying futility in a great and striking example human aspirations and the insignificance of all life and thereby revealing the deepest meaning of existence; That’s why tragedy is considered the most sublime kind of poetry.”

The German philosopher considered music to be the most perfect art. In his opinion, in her highest achievements she is capable of mystical contact with the transcendental World Will. Moreover, in strict, mysterious, mystically colored and tragic music, the World Will finds its most possible embodiment, and this embodiment is precisely that feature of the Will that contains its dissatisfaction with itself, and therefore the future attraction to its redemption and self-denial. In the chapter “On the Metaphysics of Music,” Schopenhauer writes: “...music, considered as an expression of the world, is an extremely universal language, which even relates to the universality of concepts almost as they relate to individual things... music differs from all other arts in that , that it does not reflect phenomena, or, more correctly, the adequate objectivity of the will, but directly reflects the will itself and, thus, for everything physical in the world it shows the metaphysical, for all phenomena - the thing in itself. Therefore, the world can be called both embodied music and embodied will.

The category of the tragic is one of the most important in the philosophical system of A. Schopenhauer, since human life itself is perceived by him as a tragic mistake. The philosopher believes that from the moment a person is born, endless suffering begins that lasts a lifetime, and all joys are short-lived and illusory. Existence contains a tragic contradiction, which lies in the fact that man is endowed with a blind will to live and an endless desire to live, but his existence in this world is finite and full of suffering. Thus, a tragic conflict arises between life and death.

But Schopenhauer's philosophy contains the idea that with the advent of biological death and the disappearance of consciousness, the true human essence does not die, but continues to live forever, incarnating in something else. This idea of ​​the immortality of man's true essence is akin to the catharsis that comes at the end of tragedy; Therefore, we can conclude not only that the category of the tragic is one of the basic categories of Schopenhauer’s worldview system, but also that his philosophical system as a whole reveals similarities with tragedy.

As was said earlier, Schopenhauer assigns an important place to art, especially music, which he perceives as the embodied will, the immortal essence of being. In this world of suffering, according to the philosopher, a person can follow the right path only by denying the will to live, embodying asceticism, accepting suffering and purifying himself both with its help and thanks to the cathartic influence of art. Art and music in particular contribute to a person’s knowledge of his true essence and the desire to return to the sphere of true existence. Therefore, one of the ways of purification, according to the concept of A. Schopenhauer, runs through art.

Chapter 3. Criticism of Romanticism

3.1. Critical position of Georg Friedrich Hegel

Despite the fact that romanticism became an ideology that spread throughout the world for some time, romantic aesthetics was criticized both during its existence and in the following centuries. In this part of the work we will look at the criticism of romanticism carried out by Georg Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche.

There are significant differences in the philosophical concept of Hegel and the aesthetic theory of romanticism, which caused criticism of the romantics by the German philosopher. Firstly, from the very beginning, romanticism ideologically opposed its aesthetics to the Age of Enlightenment: it appeared as a protest against Enlightenment views and in response to the failure of the French Revolution, on which the Enlightenment had placed great hopes. The romantics contrasted the classicist cult of reason with the cult of feeling and the desire to deny the basic postulates of the aesthetics of classicism.

In contrast, G. F. Hegel (like J. W. Goethe) considered himself the heir of the Enlightenment. Criticism of the Enlightenment by Hegel and Goethe never turned into a denial of the heritage of this period, as is the case with the romantics. For example, for the question of cooperation between Goethe and Hegel, it is extremely characteristic that Goethe in the first yearsXIXcentury discovers and, having translated, immediately publishes Diderot’s “Ramo’s Nephew” with his comments, and Hegel immediately uses this work to reveal with extraordinary plasticity the specific form of the dialectic of the Enlightenment. The images created by Diderot occupy a decisive place in the most important chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Therefore, the position of the romantics contrasting their aesthetics with the aesthetics of classicism was criticized by Hegel.

Secondly, the dual world characteristic of the romantics and the conviction that everything beautiful exists only in the world of dreams, and the real world is a world of sadness and suffering, in which there is no place for the ideal and happiness, is opposed to the Hegelian concept that the embodiment of the ideal is this is not a departure from reality, but, on the contrary, its deep, generalized, meaningful image, since the ideal itself is presented as rooted in reality. The vitality of the ideal rests on the fact that the main spiritual meaning, which should be revealed in the image, completely penetrates into all the particular aspects of the external phenomenon. Consequently, the image of the essential, characteristic, the embodiment of spiritual meaning, the transmission of the most important tendencies of reality is, according to Hegel, the disclosure of the ideal, which in this interpretation coincides with the concept of truth in art, artistic truth.

The third aspect of Hegel's criticism of Romanticism is subjectivity, which is one of the most important features of Romantic aesthetics; Hegel is especially critical of subjective idealism.

In subjective idealism, the German thinker sees not just a certain false direction in philosophy, but a direction whose emergence was inevitable, and to the same extent it was inevitably false. Hegel's proof of the falsity of subjective idealism is at the same time a conclusion about its inevitability and necessity and about the limitations associated with it. Hegel comes to this conclusion in two ways, which are closely and inextricably linked for him - historically and systematically. From a historical point of view, Hegel proves that subjective idealism arose from the deepest problems of our time and its historical significance, the preservation of its greatness for a long time, is explained precisely by this. At the same time, however, he shows that subjective idealism, of necessity, can only guess the problems posed by the times and translate these problems into the language of speculative philosophy. Subjective idealism has no answers to these questions, and this is where its inadequacy lies.

Hegel believes that the philosophy of subjective idealists consists of a stream of emotions and empty declarations; he criticizes the romantics for the dominance of the sensual over the rational, as well as for the unsystematization and incompleteness of their dialectics (this is the fourth aspect of Hegel’s criticism of romanticism)

An important place in Hegel's philosophical system is occupied by his concept of art. Romantic art, according to Hegel, begins with the Middle Ages, but he includes Shakespeare, Cervantes, and artistsXVII- XVIIIcenturies, and German romantics. The romantic art form, according to his concept, is the disintegration of romantic art in general. The philosopher hopes that from the collapse of romantic art a new form of free art will be born, the germ of which he sees in the work of Goethe.

Romantic art, according to Hegel, includes painting, music and poetry - those types of art that, in his opinion, can best express the sensual side of life.

The medium of painting is a colorful surface, a living play of light. It is freed from the sensory spatial fullness of the material body, since it is limited to a plane, and therefore is able to express the entire scale of feelings, mental states, and depict actions full of dramatic movement.

The elimination of spatiality is achieved in the next form of romantic art - music. Its material is sound, the vibration of a sounding body. Matter here no longer appears as spatial, but as temporal ideality. Music goes beyond sensory contemplation and covers exclusively the area of ​​inner experiences.

In the last romantic art - poetry - sound enters as a sign that has no meaning in itself. The main element of poetic representation is poetic representation. According to Hegel, poetry can depict absolutely everything. Its material is not just sound, but sound as meaning, as a sign of representation. But the material here is not arranged freely and arbitrarily, but according to the rhythmic musical law. In poetry, all types of art again seem to be repeated: it corresponds to the visual arts as an epic, as a calm narrative with rich images and picturesque pictures of the history of peoples; it is music as lyrics because it reflects the inner state of the soul; it is the unity of these two arts as dramatic poetry, as a depiction of the struggle between active, conflicting interests rooted in the characters of individuals.

We briefly examined the main aspects of G. F. Hegel's critical position in relation to romantic aesthetics. Now we turn to the criticism of romanticism carried out by F. Nietzsche.

3.2. Critical position of Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche's worldview system can be defined as philosophical nihilism, since criticism occupied the most important place in his work. The characteristic features of Nietzsche's philosophy are: criticism of church dogmas, revaluation of all existing human concepts, recognition of the limitations and relativity of all morality, the idea of ​​eternal formation, the idea of ​​a philosopher and historian as a prophet who overthrows the past for the sake of the future, problems of the place and freedom of the individual in society and history , denial of unification and leveling of people, a passionate dream of a new historical era, when the human race will mature and realize its tasks.

In the development of the philosophical views of Friedrich Nietzsche, two stages can be distinguished: the active development of the culture of vulgar literature, history, philosophy, music, accompanied by a romantic worship of antiquity; criticism of the foundations of Western European culture (“The Wanderer and His Shadow”, “Morning Dawn”, “The Gay Science”) and the overthrow of idolsXIXcenturies and past centuries (“The Fall of the Idols”, “Zarathustra”, the doctrine of the “superman”).

At the early stage of his creativity, Nietzsche’s critical position had not yet taken final shape. At this time, he was interested in the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, calling him his teacher. However, after 1878, his position was reversed, and the critical orientation of his philosophy began to emerge: in May 1878, Nietzsche published the book “Humanity, All Too Human” with the subtitle “A Book for Free Minds”, where he publicly broke with the past and its values: Hellenism , Christianity, Schopenhauer.

Nietzsche considered his main merit to be that he undertook and carried out a revaluation of all values: everything that is usually recognized as valuable, in fact, has nothing to do with true value. In his opinion, everything needs to be put in its place - in place of imaginary values, put true values. In this revaluation of values, which essentially constitutes Nietzsche’s philosophy, he sought to stand “beyond good and evil.” Ordinary morality, no matter how developed and complex it is, is always enclosed within a framework, the opposite sides of which constitute the idea of ​​good and evil. Their limits exhaust all forms of existing moral relations, while Nietzsche wanted to go beyond these boundaries.

F. Nietzsche defined his contemporary culture as being at the stage of decline and decay of morality. Morality corrupts culture from the inside, since it is a tool for controlling the crowd and its instincts. According to the philosopher, Christian morality and religion affirm an obedient “slave morality.” Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a “reassessment of values” and identify the foundations of the morality of the “strong man”. Thus, Friedrich Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of morality: master and slave. The morality of the “masters” affirms the value of life, which is most manifested against the background of the natural inequality of people, due to the difference in their wills and vital forces.

All aspects of Romantic culture were sharply criticized by Nietzsche. He overthrows the romantic double-world when he writes: “There is no point in writing fables about the “other” world, except if we have a strong urge to slander life, to belittle it, to look at it suspiciously: in the latter case we take revenge on life with phantasmagoria.” different”, “better” life.”

Another example of his opinion on this issue is the statement: “The division of the world into “true” and “apparent”, in the sense of Kant, indicates decline - it is a symptom of a declining life...”

Here are excerpts from his quotes about some representatives of the era of romanticism: “”Unbearable:... - Schiller, or the trumpeter of morality from Säckingen... - V. Hugo, or a lighthouse on a sea of ​​madness. - Liszt, or the school of bold onslaught in pursuit of women. - George Sand, or milk abundance, which in German means: a cash cow with “beautiful style”. - Offenbach's music. - Zola, or "love of stench."

About the bright representative of romantic pessimism in philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer, whom Nietzsche first considered and admired as his teacher, it will later be written: “Schopenhauer is the last of the Germans who cannot be passed over in silence. This German, like Goethe, Hegel and Heinrich Heine, was not only a “national”, local phenomenon, but also a pan-European one. It is of great interest to the psychologist as a brilliant and malicious challenge to the name of the nihilistic devaluation of life, the opposite of the worldview - the great self-confirmation of the “will to live”, the form of abundance and excess of life. Art, heroism, genius, beauty, great compassion, knowledge, the will to truth, tragedy - all this, one after another, Schopenhauer explained as phenomena accompanying the “denial” or impoverishment of the “will”, and this makes his philosophy the greatest psychological falsehood in history of mankind."

He gave a negative assessment to most of the prominent representatives of the culture of past centuries and contemporary ones. His disappointment in them is contained in the phrase: “I looked for great people and always found only monkeys of my ideal.” .

One of the few creative personalities who aroused Nietzsche’s approval and admiration throughout his life was Johann Wolfgang Goethe; he turned out to be an undefeated idol. Nietzsche wrote about him: “Goethe is not a German, but a European phenomenon, a majestic attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by returning to nature, by ascending to the naturalness of the Renaissance, an example of self-overcoming from the history of our century. All his strongest instincts were combined in him: sensitivity, passionate love for nature, ahistorical, idealistic, unrealistic and revolutionary instincts (this last is only one of the forms of the unreal)... he did not distance himself from life, but went deeper into it, he did not lose heart and how much he could take on himself, into himself and beyond himself... He achieved integrity; he fought against the disintegration of reason, sensuality, feeling and will (preached by Kant, Goethe’s antipode, in disgusting scholasticism), he educated himself towards integrity, he created himself... Goethe was a convinced realist in an unrealistically inclined age.”

In the quote above, there is another aspect of Nietzsche’s criticism of romanticism - his criticism of the detachment from reality of romantic aesthetics.

About the age of romanticism, Nietzsche writes: “Isn’t thereXIXcentury, especially at its beginning, only intensified, coarsenedXVIIIcentury, in other words: a decadent century? And isn’t Goethe, not for Germany alone, but for all of Europe, just an accidental phenomenon, lofty and vain?” .

Nietzsche's interpretation of the tragic is interesting, connected, among other things, with his assessment of romantic aesthetics. The philosopher writes about this: “The tragic artist is not a pessimist, he more willingly takes on everything mysterious and terrible, he is a follower of Dionysus.” . The essence of not understanding the tragic Nietzsche is reflected in his statement: “What does the tragic artist show us? Doesn't it show a state of fearlessness in the face of the terrible and mysterious? This state alone is the highest good, and those who have experienced it rank it infinitely highly. The artist conveys this state to us; he must convey it precisely because he is an artist—a genius of transmission. Courage and freedom of feeling in the face of a powerful enemy, in the face of great grief, in front of a task that inspires horror—this victorious state is chosen and glorified by the tragic artist!” .

Drawing conclusions on the criticism of romanticism, we can say the following: many arguments related to the aesthetics of romanticism negatively (including G.F. Hegel and F. Nietzsche) really do exist. Like any manifestation of culture, this type has both positive and negative sides. However, despite the censures of many contemporaries and representativesXXcentury, romantic culture, which includes romantic art, literature, philosophy and other manifestations, is still relevant and arouses interest, transforming and reviving in new ideological systems and directions of art and literature.

Conclusion

Having studied philosophical, aesthetic and musicological literature, as well as familiarized ourselves with works of art related to the area of ​​the problem under study, we came to the following conclusions.

Romanticism arose in Germany in the form of an “aesthetics of disillusionment” in the ideas of the Great French Revolution. The result of this was a romantic system of ideas: evil, death and injustice are eternal and cannot be eliminated from the world; world sorrow is the state of the world, which has become the state of the spirit of the lyrical hero.

In the fight against the injustice of the world, death and evil, the soul of the romantic hero seeks a way out and finds it in the world of dreams - this reveals the dualism of consciousness characteristic of the romantics.

Another important characteristic of romanticism is that romantic aesthetics tends towards individualism and subjectivity. The result of this was the increased attention of romantics to feelings and sensitivity.

The ideas of the German romantics were universal and became the foundation of the aesthetics of romanticism, influencing its development in other countries. German romanticism is characterized by a tragic orientation and artistic language, which manifested itself in all spheres of life.

The understanding of the immanent content of the category of tragic has changed significantly from era to era, reflecting changes in the general picture of the world. In the ancient world, the tragic was associated with a certain objective principle - fate, fate; in the Middle Ages, tragedy was viewed primarily as the tragedy of the Fall, which Christ redeemed with his feat; in the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of a tragic collision between feeling and duty was formed; In the era of romanticism, the tragic appeared in an extremely subjective form, putting at the center the suffering tragic hero, who is faced with the evil, cruelty and injustice of people and the entire world order and tries to fight it.

outstanding cultural figures of German romanticism - Goethe and Schopenhauer - are united by the tragic orientation of their worldview systems and creativity, and they consider art to be a cathartic element of tragedy, a kind of atonement for the suffering of earthly life, giving a special place to music.

The main aspects of criticism of romanticism come down to the following. The Romantics are criticized for their desire to contrast their aesthetics with the aesthetics of a bygone era, classicism, and their rejection of the legacy of the Enlightenment; dual world, which is considered by critics as a disconnect from reality; lack of objectivity; exaggeration of the emotional sphere and understatement of the rational; unsystematic and incompleteness of the romantic aesthetic concept.

Despite the validity of the criticism of romanticism, the cultural manifestations of this era are relevant and arouse interest even inXXIcentury. Transformed echoes of the romantic worldview can be found in many areas of culture. For example, we believe that the basis of the philosophical systems of Albert Camus and Jose Ortega y Gasset was German romantic aesthetics with its tragic dominant, but rethought by them in cultural conditionsXXcentury.

Our research helps not only to identify the general characteristic features of romantic aesthetics and specific features of German romanticism, to show the change in the immanent content of the category of the tragic and its understanding in different historical eras, as well as to identify the specifics of the manifestation of the tragic in the culture of German romanticism and the limits of romantic aesthetics, but also contributes understanding the art of the Romantic era, finding its universal imagery and themes, as well as building a meaningful interpretation of the work of the Romantics.

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New images of romanticism - the dominance of the lyrical-psychological principle, the fairy-tale-fantastic element, the introduction of national folk features, heroic-pathetic motives and, finally, the sharply contrasting opposition of different figurative plans - led to a significant modification and expansion of the expressive means of music.

Here we make an important caveat.

It should be borne in mind that the desire for innovative forms and a departure from the musical language of classicism characterizes composers of the 19th century far from the same extent. Some of them (for example, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Brahms, and, in a certain sense, Chopin) have clearly noticeable tendencies towards preserving the classicist principles of formation and individual elements of the classicist musical language in combination with new romantic features. For others, more distant from classicist art, traditional techniques recede into the background and are more radically modified.

The process of formation of the musical language of the Romantics was long, not at all straightforward and not related to immediate continuity. (For example, Brahms or Grieg, who worked at the end of the century, are more “classical” than Berlioz or Liszt were in the 30s.) However, for all the complexity of the picture, typical trends in the music of the 19th century of the post-Beethoven era emerge quite clearly. It's about these trends, perceived as something new, compared to the dominant ones expressive means of classicism, we say, characterizing the general features of romantic musical language.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the system of expressive means among the romantics is the significant enrichment colorfulness(harmonic and timbre), compared with classicist samples. The inner world of a person, with its subtle nuances and changeable moods, is conveyed by romantic composers mainly through increasingly complex, differentiated, detailed harmonies. Altered harmonies, colorful tonal comparisons, and chords of secondary degrees led to a significant complication of the harmonic language. The continuous process of strengthening the colorful properties of chords gradually affected the weakening of functional tendencies.

The psychological tendencies of romanticism were also reflected in the increased importance of the “background”. The timbre-color side acquired unprecedented significance in classicist art: the sound of a symphony orchestra, piano and a number of other solo instruments reached the utmost timbre differentiation and brilliance. If in classicist works the concept of “musical theme” was almost identified with the melody, to which both the harmony and the texture of the accompanying voices were subordinated, then for the romantics the “multifaceted” structure of the theme was much more typical, in which the role of the harmonic, timbre, texture “background” is often equivalent to the role melodies. Fantastic images, expressed mainly through the colorful-harmonic and timbre-figurative sphere, also gravitated towards the same type of thematicism.

Romantic music is not alien to thematic formations, in which the texture-timbre and colorful-harmonic element dominates completely.

We give examples of characteristic themes of romantic composers. With the exception of excerpts from Chopin's works, all of them were borrowed from works directly related to fantastic motifs, and were created on the basis of specific images of the theater or a poetic plot:

Let's compare them with the characteristic themes of the classicist style:

And in the melodic style of the romantics a number of new phenomena are observed. First of all his intonation sphere is updated.

If the predominant tendency in classicist music was the melodic nature of the pan-European operatic style, then in the era of romanticism, under the influence national folklore and urban everyday genres, its intonational content changes dramatically. The difference in melodic style of Italian, Austrian, French, German and Polish composers is now much more clearly expressed than it was in the art of classicism.

In addition, lyrical romance intonations begin to dominate not only in chamber art, but even penetrate into musical theater.

The closeness of the romance melody to intonations poetic speech gives it special detail and flexibility. The subjective lyrical mood of romantic music inevitably comes into conflict with the completeness and certainty of classicist lines. The romantic melody is more vague in structure. It is dominated by intonations expressing the effects of uncertainty, elusive, unsteady mood, incompleteness, and a dominant tendency towards the free “unfolding” of fabric *.

* We are talking specifically about a consistently romantic lyrical melody, since in dance genres or works that have adopted the dance “ostinato” rhythmic principle, periodicity remains a natural phenomenon.

For example:

The extreme expression of the romantic tendency to bring melody closer to the intonations of poetic (or oratorical) speech was achieved by Wagner’s “endless melody”.

The new figurative sphere of musical romanticism also appeared in new principles of shaping. Thus, in the era of classicism, the ideal exponent of modern musical thinking was the cyclic symphony. It was intended to reflect the dominance of theatrical, objective images characteristic of the aesthetics of classicism. Let us remember that the literature of that era is most clearly represented by dramatic genres (classicist tragedy and comedy), and the leading genre in music throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, until the emergence of the symphony, was opera.

Both in the intonational content of the classicist symphony and in the features of its structure, connections with the objective, theatrical and dramatic principle are noticeable. This is indicated by the objective nature of the sonata-symphonic themes themselves. Their periodic structure indicates connections with collectively organized action - folk or ballet dance, with a secular court ceremony, with genre images.

Intonation content, especially in the themes of sonata allegro, is often directly related to the melodic turns of operatic arias. Even the thematic structure is often based on a “dialogue” between heroically stern and feminine mournful images, reflecting the typical (for classicist tragedy and Gluck opera) conflict between “fate and man.” For example:

The structure of the symphonic cycle is characterized by a tendency towards completeness, “dismemberment” and repetition.

In the arrangement of material within individual parts (in particular, within the sonata allegro), the emphasis is placed not only on the unity of thematic development, but to the same extent on the “dismemberment” of the composition. The appearance of each new thematic formation or new section of the form is usually emphasized by a caesura, often framed by contrasting material. Starting from individual thematic formations and ending with the structure of the entire four-part cycle, this general pattern is clearly visible.

The work of the Romantics retained the importance of the symphony and symphonic music in general. However, their new aesthetic thinking led to both a modification of the traditional symphonic form and the emergence of new instrumental principles of development.

If the musical art of the 18th century gravitated towards theatrical and dramatic principles, then the composer’s work of the “Romantic Age” was closer in its composition to lyrical poetry, romantic ballads and psychological novels.

This closeness is manifested not only in instrumental music, but even in such theatrical dramatic genres as opera and oratorio.

Wagner's operatic reform essentially arose as an extreme expression of the tendency towards rapprochement with lyric poetry. The loosening of the dramatic line and the intensification of moments of mood, the approach of the vocal element to the intonations of poetic speech, the extreme detailing of individual moments to the detriment of the purposefulness of the action - all this characterizes not only Wagner’s tetralogy, but also his “Flying Dutchman”, and “Lohengrin”, and “Tristan” and Isolde”, and “Genoveva” by Schumann, and the so-called oratorios, but essentially choral poems, by Schumann, and other works. Even in France, where the tradition of classicism in the theater was much stronger than in Germany, a new romantic current is clearly perceptible within the framework of Meyerbeer’s beautifully composed “theater-musical plays” or in Rossini’s William Tell.

The lyrical perception of the world is the most important aspect of the content of romantic music. This subjective shade is expressed in the continuity of development that forms the antipode of theatrical and sonata “dismemberment”. The smoothness of motivic transitions and variational transformation of themes characterize the development methods of the romantics. In operatic music, where the law of theatrical opposition inevitably continues to prevail, this desire for continuity is reflected in the leitmotifs that unite the different actions of the drama, and in the weakening, if not complete disappearance of the composition associated with dismembered finished numbers.

A new type of structure is being established, based on continuous transitions from one musical scene to another.

In instrumental music, images of intimate lyrical outpouring give rise to new forms: a free, one-movement piano piece that ideally matches the mood of lyric poetry, and then, under its influence, a symphonic poem.

At the same time, romantic art revealed a sharpness of contrasts that objective, balanced classicist music did not know: the contrast between images of the real world and fairy-tale fantasy, between cheerful genre-everyday paintings and philosophical reflection, between passionate temperament, oratorical pathos and subtle psychologism. All this required new forms of expression that did not fit into the scheme of classicist sonata genres.

Accordingly, in the instrumental music of the 19th century there is:

a) a significant change in the classicist genres preserved in the works of the romantics;

b) the emergence of new purely romantic genres that did not exist in the art of the Enlightenment.

The cyclic symphony has changed significantly. A lyrical mood began to dominate in it (“Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony,” Mendelssohn’s “Scottish,” Schumann’s Fourth). In this regard, the traditional form has changed. The ratio of images of action and lyrics, unusual for a classicist sonata, with the predominance of the latter, led to the increased importance of the spheres of the secondary parts. The attraction to expressive details and colorful moments gave rise to a different type of sonata development. Variational transformation of themes became especially characteristic of the romantic sonata or symphony. The lyrical nature of music, devoid of theatrical conflict, manifested itself in a tendency towards monothematicism (Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique, Schumann's Fourth) and towards continuity of development (dismembering pauses between parts disappear). The trend towards one-partness becomes the most characteristic feature of the romantic large form.

At the same time, the desire to reflect the multiplicity of phenomena in unity was reflected in the unprecedentedly sharp contrast between the different parts of the symphony.

The problem of creating a cyclic symphony capable of embodying the romantic figurative sphere remained essentially unresolved for half a century: the dramatic theatrical basis of the symphony, which developed in the era of the undivided dominance of classicism, did not easily lend itself to the new figurative system. It is no coincidence that romantic musical aesthetics is expressed in the one-movement program overture more clearly and consistently than in the cyclic sonata-symphony. However, most convincingly, completely, in the most consistent and generalized form, the new trends in musical romanticism were embodied in the symphonic poem - a genre created by Liszt in the 40s.

Symphonic music has summarized a number of leading features of modern music, which have consistently appeared in instrumental works for more than a quarter of a century.

Perhaps the most striking distinctive feature of a symphonic poem is software, contrasted with the “abstraction” of classicist symphonic genres. At the same time, it is characterized by a special type of programming associated with images modern poetry and literature. The overwhelming majority of names of symphonic poems indicate a connection with images of specific literary (sometimes pictorial) works (for example, “Preludes” according to Lamartine, “What is heard on the mountain” according to Hugo, “Mazeppa” according to Byron). Not so much a direct reflection of the objective world, but rather its rethinking through literature and art lies at the heart of the content of a symphonic poem.

Thus, simultaneously with the romantic attraction to literary programming, the symphonic poem reflected the most characteristic beginning of romantic music - the dominance of images of the inner world - reflection, experience, contemplation, as opposed to the objective images of action that dominated the classicist symphony.

In the thematic theme of the symphonic poem, the romantic features of melody and the enormous role of the colorful-harmonic and colorful-timbre elements are clearly expressed.

The manner of presentation and development techniques generalize the traditions that have developed both in the romantic miniature and in the romantic sonata-symphonic genres. Single-partness, monothematicism, colorful variation, gradual transitions between different thematic formations characterize the “poem” formative principles.

At the same time, the symphonic poem, without repeating the structure of the classicist cyclic symphony, is based on its principles. Within the framework of the one-part form, the unshakable foundations of sonatas are recreated in a generalized manner.

The cyclic sonata-symphony, which took on a classical form in the last quarter of the 18th century, was prepared in instrumental genres over the course of a whole century. Some of its thematic and formative features were clearly manifested in various instrumental schools of the pre-classicist period. The symphony was formed as a generalizing instrumental genre only when it absorbed, ordered and typified these diverse trends, which became the basis of sonata thinking.

The symphonic poem, which developed its own principles of thematism and form-building, nevertheless recreated in a generalized manner some of the most important principles of classicist sonata, namely:

a) the contours of two tonal and thematic centers;

b) elaboration;

c) reprisal;

d) contrast of images;

e) signs of cyclicity.

Thus, in a complex interweaving with new romantic principles of form-building, relying on a new thematic style, the symphonic poem within the one-part form retained the basic musical principles developed in the musical creativity of the previous era. These features of the form of the poem were prepared in the piano music of the romantics (the fantasy “The Wanderer” by Schubert, the ballads of Chopin), and in the concert overture (“The Hebrides” and “Beautiful Melusine” by Mendelssohn), and in the piano miniature.

The connections between romantic music and the artistic principles of classical art were not always directly perceptible. The features of the new, unusual, and romantic relegated them to the background in the perception of their contemporaries. Romantic composers had to fight not only the inert, philistine tastes of the bourgeois audience. And from enlightened circles, including from the circles of the musical intelligentsia, voices of protest against the “destructive” tendencies of the romantics were heard. The guardians of the aesthetic traditions of classicism (including, for example, Stendhal, the outstanding musicologist of the 19th century, Fetis and others) mourned the disappearance in the music of the 19th century of the ideal balance, harmony, grace and refinement of forms characteristic of musical classicism.

Indeed, romanticism as a whole rejected those features of classicist art that retained connections with the “conventional cold beauty” (Gluck) of court aesthetics. The Romantics developed a new idea of ​​beauty, which gravitated not so much towards balanced grace, but towards extreme psychological and emotional expressiveness, freedom of form, colorfulness and versatility of musical language. And yet, all outstanding composers of the 19th century have a noticeable tendency to preserve and implement on a new basis the logic and completeness of the artistic form characteristic of classicism. From Schubert and Weber, who worked at the dawn of romanticism, to Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Dvorak, who completed the “musical 19th century,” one can trace the desire to combine the new achievements of romanticism with those timeless laws of musical beauty, which first took on a classical form in the works of composers of the Enlightenment.

A significant feature of the musical art of Western Europe in the first half of the 19th century is the formation of national romantic schools, which brought forward the world's largest composers from their midst. A detailed examination of the characteristics of the music of this period in Austria, Germany, Italy, France and Poland forms the content of subsequent chapters.