Concerts and Lectures: Romantic Masters, Fall 2005.

Marian Burleigh-Motley

Rejecting the emphasis on the rational in the Age of Enlightenment, Romanticism embraced irrationality, imagination, the freedom of the individual, turbulent sensuality, suffering, madness and the power of artistic genius. All the arts participated in the new movement: literature, music, architecture and garden design, as well as painting. Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.