[HN Gopher] Goethe and Schiller ushered in the romantic age
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       Goethe and Schiller ushered in the romantic age
        
       Author : lermontov
       Score  : 38 points
       Date   : 2022-11-06 02:02 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
        
       | pyuser583 wrote:
       | The original title is: "How Goethe and Schiller ushered in the
       | romantic age" which makes more sense than the current title
       | "Goethe and Schiller ushered in the romantic age."
       | 
       | The fact the Goethe and Schiller ushered in the Romantic Age is
       | pretty uncontroversial.
        
       | 50 wrote:
       | entgotterte Natur (Schiller)
        
       | SkyMarshal wrote:
       | Fwiw Beethoven was inspired by Schiller, and the finale of
       | Beethoven's 9th symphony is an adaptation of Schiller's poem "Ode
       | to Joy".
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_to_Joy
        
       | TomDavey wrote:
       | No: music ushered in the Romantic age, earlier than Goethe and
       | Schiller in literature.
       | 
       | The musical style, a decisive break from the High Baroque, was
       | initially called "Sturm und Drang." It appeared in the work of
       | Gluck and Haydn in the 1760s.
       | 
       | By the first decade of the 19th century, Goethe and Schiller had
       | retreated from Romanticism. In the same decade, middle-period
       | Beethoven had already made Romanticism immortal.
       | 
       | Immortal is not an exaggeration. To this day, orchestral film
       | music remains utterly derivative of late Romantic composers like
       | Richard Strauss.
       | 
       | The most famous example of musical Romanticism's enduring
       | dominion is probably the opening of Kubrick's "2001: A Space
       | Odyssey." Everybody knows the fanfare and the ecstatic harmonic
       | progression that follows in full tutti; few know it was written
       | by Strauss in 1894.
       | 
       | The rip-offs of Academy Award winner John Williams would be
       | impossible without the much better music of the 19th century.
       | 
       | Corresponding data point: in 1822, Beethoven chose Schiller's
       | "Ode to Joy" (1785) to provide the lyrics for the final movement
       | of the 9th Symphony.
        
         | Tainnor wrote:
         | I don't think it's wise to conflate Sturm und Drang with
         | Romanticism, despite their similarities. They are also quite
         | distinct in many respects.
         | 
         | And Beethoven is rightfully considered to be a transition point
         | between the Classical and the Romantic style, you can hear the
         | echos of Haydn (and even Bach) even in his late works.
        
           | TomDavey wrote:
           | I was careful to say "middle-period Beethoven." Beethoven's
           | stylistic evolution over the course of his life truly
           | astonishes. In his late period, e.g., the Grosse Fugue, one
           | can hear Bartok being invented.
           | 
           | And he was stone deaf by then. It's staggering.
        
       | billfruit wrote:
       | Wasn't Hegel a contemporary of Goethe? What effect did both of
       | them have on each other?
        
         | ex3xu wrote:
         | Goethe and Hegel both get some character-driven exposition in
         | this book, but Hegel is about twenty years younger than Goethe,
         | so the interactions focus more on the contemporaneous groupings
         | of Goethe-Schiller-Fichte and later Schelling-Hegel than direct
         | interaction between the two. Goethe as a poet is generally
         | viewed more through the lens of literary criticism as opposed
         | to the philosopher Hegel who is generally studied with the
         | analytical rigor of philosophy, considering his position as one
         | of the premier post-Kantian German idealists.
         | 
         | The two share much ideological agreement, like when both
         | offered great praise for Schiller's _Letters on the Aesthetic
         | of Education of Man_ , but while Hegel generally quotes Goethe
         | with veneration, Goethe seems generally suspicious of Hegel's
         | philosophy -- in one meeting offering open criticism to Hegel
         | about his dialectic, for example.
         | 
         | One work that goes into detail on both thinkers would be the
         | late Walter Kaufmann's first volume of his trilogy _Discovering
         | the Mind_ , in which he offers an opinionated criticism of Kant
         | and Hegel's obscurity and obfuscation by contrasting it with
         | Goethe's thematic clarity.
        
       | ex3xu wrote:
       | Wulf is an unconventional historian with an unconventional
       | background, and her work reads much more like a narrative-driven
       | piece of New Journalism than a theoretical entry from the
       | Cambridge Studies series on philosophy. As revealed by the
       | tagline of this book, _The Invention of the Self_ , Wulf's new
       | work is an exploration into the roots of modern conceptions of
       | self-determination done through character studies of the Weimar
       | classicists -- Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Kant in particular.
       | I could see fans of narrative-driven nonfiction writers like
       | Laura Hillenbrand or Roger Lowenstein enjoying Andrea Wulf in the
       | same way.
       | 
       | While I am always happy to see new work focusing on the Weimar
       | classicists, whose ideas serve as a stark contrast to dystopic
       | forces from the brutality of the French revolution to the
       | banality of corporate life today, I think I agree with this
       | article writer about the weakness of Wulf's synopses. As
       | compelling as Wulf's exposition is, it feels to me somewhat
       | overpractical to constrain these powerful thinkers through the
       | lens of a Socratic _Know Thyself_ commandment in her emphasis on
       | self-determination. Certainly there is a place for a feel-good,
       | narrative-driven book like this, but I personally would point
       | people towards the essays curated by Carroll, Giles, and Oergle
       | in _Aesthetics and Modernity_ or Leslie Sharpe 's _Cambridge
       | Studies_ entry on Schiller for a drier but more thought provoking
       | exploration of German Idealism and the valuable concepts it would
       | spawn through the Frankfurt School in the twentieth century.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | bogomipz wrote:
         | Might you have a link to "Aesthetics and Modernity" or say who
         | the author is? I found a couple of titles but they seemed to be
         | about political theory.
         | 
         | Also might you or someone else recommend something in between
         | Wulf and a Cambridge Studies series style book?
        
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