Abstract
Is the Romantic, spiritual experience of landscape still accessible to a contemporary audience? Or was the prediction T.E. Hulme made in 1911 accurate, and did the Romantic spirituality, owing to a lack of doctrinal strictures, fade away over time? In his PhD dissertation, Daan Lodder shows that Hulme’s prediction (which
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originally related to British literary Romanticism), for the non-verbal arts of the German early-Romantic context, has largely come true. In four case studies, Lodder discusses how the spiritual content of this strongly landscape-oriented art has been ‘slipping off the horizon’. In the first case study, he describes how German early-Romantics would intellectually appropriate seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting and he explores the possibilities for a contemporary spiritual engagement with these paintings. This is followed, in the second case study, by a comparison of the aesthetic theory of Johannes Joachim Winckelmann and the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, which features surprising similarities between these supposed icons of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. The third case study sheds light on the spiritual content of landscape in scenographies for Friedrich Schiller’s drama Die Räuber and Wolfgang Mozart’s ‘Singspiel’ Die Zauberflöte, critically comparing early modern and contemporary performances. Finally, Lodder discusses how an outspokenly liturgical engagement with landscape can be discerned in the music and paintings of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, which, however, was obfuscated by a Romantic liturgy among later interpreters, focusing on the person and ‘genius’ of the artist rather than his work. In painting, in the hands of the Romantics, landscape rose to the level of a genre – the genre. In theatre and opera, landscapes abounded during the Romantic era, but as scenography, were inherently forced into the background. In the music of this period, landscape appeared – as it already frequently did during the eighteenth century – as a motif, albeit a ubiquitous one, especially in the oeuvre of Mendelssohn Bartholdy (and, notably, in his friend Robert Schumann’s oeuvre). Between the visual arts on one hand and the performing arts on the other, another interesting contrast arises. The visual arts of the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth centuries, discussed in the first two case-studies, were pervaded by geographical, patriotic (and later nationalistic) considerations. It was crucial to the German Romantics in their (mis-)appropriation of seventeenth- century Dutch landscape painting that the Dutch could be considered their ‘Teutonic’ neighbours and could thus function as intellectual forbearers. In the appreciation of Friedrich’s landscape painting, over the course of the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries, the extent to which it could be termed quintessentially ‘Northern’ (European), also determined the national ‘ownership’ of the origins of modernity in art. However, in the music, theatre, and opera of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century alike, a more cosmopolitan attitude can readily be discerned.
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