Western Music: Early Romantic
Years: 1828 - 1839
Related Events
Filter results
Showing 10 events out of 42 total
Romanticism exerts the strongest influence on the Polish national consciousness.
The artistic element of nineteenth-century European culture, the Romantic movement is a natural partner of political nationalism, for it echoes the nationalist sympathy for folk cultures and manifests a general air of disdain for the conservative political order of post-Napoleonic Europe.
Under this influence, Polish literature flourishes anew in the works of a school of nineteenth-century Romantic poets, led by Adam Mickiewicz.
Mickiewicz concentrates on patriotic themes and the glorious national past.
Frederic Chopin (1810-49), a leading composer of the century, also uses the tragic history of his nation as a major inspiration.
Nurtured by these influences, nationalism awakens first among the intelligentsia and certain segments of the nobility, then more gradually in the peasantry.
At the end of the process, a broader definition of nationhood has replaced the old class-based " gentry patriotism" of Poland.
Bel canto (”beautiful singing”) refers to the art and science of vocal technique that had originated in Italy during the late seventeenth century and had reached its pinnacle in the early part of the nineteenth century during the Bel Canto opera era.
Sicilian opera composer Vincenzo Bellini, known for his flowing melodic lines, is the quintessential composer of Bel canto opera.
Bellini and his Italian contemporaries Gaetano Donizetti and Gioacchino Rossini best exemplify this style, which flourishes from approximately 1805 to 1830.
Bellini, who had moved in 1827 to Milan, where all doors are open to him, is supported solely by his opera commissions, for this year’s La straniera is even more successful than last year’s Il pirata, sparking controversy in the press for its new style and its restless harmonic shifts into remote keys.
The composer Daniel Auber gives the common people a voice, in opera at least, in this year, when he writes his popular opera La Muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici).
Familiarly known as Masaniello after its hero, it is the first opera to treat the aspirations of common people in a heroic style.
Rossini, well compensated as chief composer to the king and inspector-general of singing in France and comfortably ensconced in Paris, now produces his first original opera, le Comte Ory (Count Ory), a lively, original opera comique.
Gioachino Rossini produces his grand opera, Guillaume Tell (“William Tell”) in 1829.
This landmark romantic opera is his thirty-ninth, and will be his last.
Vincenzo Bellini’s “Zaira,” opening a new theater in Parma, the Teatro Ducale, is a flop.
Alexandre Dumas, working for the past several years at the Palais Royal in the office of the powerful duc d'Orléans, had begun to write articles for magazines as well as plays for the theater.
Strongly influenced, like most of the romantics of the 1820’s, by the historical evocation and theatrically of Shakespeare’s plays and Walter Scott’s novels, he writes “Henri III et sa cour” (“Henry III and His Court”), the first genuinely romantic melodrama produced by the Comedie Francaise.
Mounted in 1829, when Dumas is twenty-seven, it meets with great public acclaim.
The soon-to-be-popular concertina, an improved small accordion but lacking the accordion keyboard. oi patented on June 19, 1829, by Charles Wheatstone, a British scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of what will come to be known as the Victorian era, who had in 1828 improved the German wind instrument, called the Mundharmonika.
“What experience and history teach is that nations and governments have never learned anything from history."
―Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures (1803)
