Personal Experiences with Romantic Art: Example Posts

I've asked my students to explore art of the Romantic period (see instructions). Here, I'd like to model how they might do this. It's a bit tricky, as I want them to write both about Romantic art / artists but also in a romantic way (that is to say, by focusing on personal feeling and experience).

So, in what follows, I give examples of personalizing my experience with some romantic visual art (Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children); with romantic music (Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition); and romantic literature (Melville's Moby Dick). Enjoy.



Example Post #1 (Some visual art):
Title:  Art that Eats at Me

I have to say I felt a bit miffed when my humanities teacher gave me the work of Francisco Goya to report on back in the 10th grade. I would never have chosen this Spanish artist (who lived from 1746-1828), and frankly some if his works offended me, like this one, Saturn Devouring His Child:

Goya made prettier paintings, but it was this one that has stuck in my head for decades. Why? It is grotesque. One more reason to roll your eyes about classical mythology. Would I be less offended if this child were not full grown, or not beheaded, or not bloody? I mean, this painting just makes you recoil. No! Children are precious and life is good and what are you doing with your talent, Francisco? Giving others nightmares?

But it turns out this painting -- one of a series called the "black paintings" -- was painted directly on the plaster walls of his house. Not a commission. Not for others. He surrounded himself with his own nightmares.

There is a kind of raw emotion to this painting, something very primal. I found out Goya's wife had a series of miscarriages and only one child survived to be an adult. Maybe he felt like Fate was eating his children. Maybe this was expressing his wife's dark emotions about childbearing. I found out Goya had serious problems with his mental and physical health. He had tinnitus (a condition that I have, a ringing in the ears that never goes away and can seriously drive you to insanity). He went deaf (which does not solve tinnitus, sadly). And he witnessed his country at war with France.

My life is better than Goya's, but his painting haunts me. It is anything but realistic, but it really does convey the sense of outrage at life that we can feel, the sense that things that should be sacred (like parent-child relations) are often not so -- alarmingly not so. Don't get me wrong. I love pretty paintings. But I also like a painting that somehow names the darkness. His darkness. My darkness. Our darkness.

Example Post #2 (Romantic Music)
Title: My Great Gate of Kiev

Off to one side of my everyday life as an English professor is my life as a minor musician. I sing in the local congregational choir. I accompany singers, like my wife. I compose a little choral music. And I play the piano to relax. It's more than that, though. Something settles in me when I settle into the keyboard. Something goes right. It is something that I make time for, because performing or composing music somehow composes me.

That sounds like music is this calming force in my life -- and it is. But not because the music is calm. When I was young I learned to play the piano-only version of Modest Mussorgsky's suite of 10 pieces, Pictures at an Exhibition (composed in 1874). This video is cued up to one of the most ambitious phrases of the final piece ("The Great Gate of Kiev"). It is grand, indeed!

Mussorgsky was part of a group of Russian artists wanting to find and convey something authentically Russian. Like other Romantic composers, he was inspired by his homeland. And in this case, he was inspired also by a set of watercolor paintings by a friend. The 10 pieces of the suite are sonic responses to the paintings at the exhibition. There is some real variety in the original paintings, and in the music Mussorgsky wrote. The suite is by turns playful and serious. The final piece, "The Great Gate of Kiev" blows it all out. The orchestral version uses horns. The piano version, which I played, uses huge octave jumps across the piano in a torrent of open chords that resonate into a fever pitch. It was hard to play. 

This piece about a gate became a gateway in me, opening me up not just to Russian or Romantic music, but to the grand emotional spaces that a piece of music can open up. Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations are similarly sublime for me. These kinds of pieces construct a cosmos and invite you into open realms. I've walked in those realms -- sometimes by listening, sometimes by playing, and sometimes by returning, again and again, to pieces that keep me open to other dimensions of being --before I return to my everyday world of teaching writing and literature.

My childhood piano teacher always wanted me to do a solo recital of all 10 of those pieces. It excites me, and it scares me, to dare myself. Could I pull it off technically? Would anyone care? And then I realize how the performance is just an excuse for the practicing, that the gateways to other worlds open plenty wide as I privately perfect one bar, then two, and then the next.

Example Post #3 (Romantic literature)

Title: Lost in Moby Dick

People love to hate the novel Moby Dick. But this 1851 behemoth by Herman Melville has become a trusted favorite for me. Why? Because I get lost in that book.

Everybody thinks that Moby Dick is this story of Captain Ahab's quest for vengeance against the white whale that bit off his leg. Fair enough. That happens. But most of what happens in that book has little to do with a plot (to the disappointment of those hoping it to be an adventure novel). It isn't.

What primal creatures await us in the ocean's depths?

Here is one of my favorite passages. The setup: a young black boy, Pip, falls into the water during a whale chase and is forgotten, left alone in the sea. Quite by accident he is later saved, but he is never the same after that. Being alone in the water had freaked him out, permanently. In explaining why, Melville gives us a sense of the terrible, sublime nature of the open ocean and of its depths:

[Pip was] carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. 

The deep ocean seems to go back in time, and Melville loses us in the depths of time with the spell that he casts with his words. He gives you a sense of vision about sea life, and about the ocean, that puts the very salt in the water for you.

Melville actually went out on whaling voyages, and his writing has all the authority of firsthand knowledge. And Melville also got caught up in his own writing -- so much so that he lost sight of the paying public (which really liked an adventure story he did about whaling, but yawned at Moby Dick). But I know Melville loved the lore of whales, loved the sea of knowledge he'd accumulated, even more than the paycheck from his writings that so rarely came. Gotta respect that authenticity.

I reread Moby Dick all the time. I never start at the beginning. I jump into the water of the words until I get lost in that one chapter, that one tidepool or tsunami of words worth wandering in. It is a great place to be lost.