The Romantic age grew out of the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. As these spread across Europe, so there developed a modern sense of nationhood and popular freedom that was expressed according to each country's historic and political needs through their particular cultural traditions. However, a characteristic of Romanticism was its shared themes and the close relationship between all the arts, in particular music, poetry, painting and theatre.

Revolution and war

Eighteenth-century Sentimentality had begun to value the importance of emotional response, reflected in the German Sturm und Drang (Storm and stress). But a major change came from an increasing sense that the Enlightenment's belief in rationalism had failed. The rationalist project had sought to control nature, both within and without the individual, to create an ordered world. But by the last decades of the century it was clear that poverty, crime, disease, war – all the blights of mankind – were still its major condition. At the same time, whatever its merits, the project had depended upon centralist, aristocratic imposition. But as the century advanced so did the power of the bourgeoisie, who increasingly became the real driving force of the European economies. Despite this they were excluded from the machinery of state, able neither to advise upon nor influence the laws that regulated their role. This ultimately exploded first in the American and then the French Revolutions which had in common the struggle against unbalanced and inept financial management, taxation policy and legislation.

The motifs from TheRing used in the analysis of Wotan's monologue set out in Table 10.7b are listed below. The numbers attached to each theme refer to those in the ‘Thematic Guide’ in Spencer and Millington (2000). The motif names in this appendix and Table 10.7b are not Wagner's but interpretative names, albeit broadly agreed by most commentators.

Nationalist composers, principally in Bohemia, Hungary, Poland and Russia, were not isolated from mainstream European traditions. Their struggle was not, as is often naively proposed, to learn how to compose in countries where musical education was not available. In each of them there was a flourishing operatic and general musical life. But this was dependent on Western European models that represented the culture of alien dominant regimes from which the Nationalists struggled to emancipate themselves. In doing so, they contributed a series of major works to the international repertoire and, equally significantly, introduced or emphasised a number of elements that affected the future development of opera. These included:

• The use of vernacular elements drawn from the life of ordinary people, bourgeoisie and peasantry, especially in music, song and dance;

• In particular cases, the idea of deriving musical lines not just from the broad expression, but the precise shape and rhythm of language.

Nationalist composers are identified by their (musical) roots in folk material. But this is a simplistic and often misleading notion. Despite this, however, it is clear that in part their drive was to create music from sources outside the languages of the international mainstream. This meant that they made a major contribution to the development of music itself, by providing one means of renewing music after the apparent impasse of late Romanticism.

Debussy and Symbolism (Pelléas et Mélisande)

Pelléas et Mélisande and Wozzeck signal the true beginning of modernism in opera. Pelléas is revolutionary because of the kind of text Debussy needed to set, and the way in which he set it. A major preoccupation was how to get out of the impasse that Wagner had come to represent in music generally, and opera in particular, as Debussy himself wrote: ‘Contemporary dramatic music, however, embraces everything from Wagnerian metaphysics to the trivialities of the Italians – not a particularly French orientation. Perhaps in the end we will see the light and achieve conciseness of expression and form (the fundamental qualities of French genius)’ (Debussy, in Strunck, 1998: 1431–2). What he wanted was to ‘purify our music! Let us try to relieve its congestion, to find a less cluttered kind of music’ (1998: 1433). Just as painters and sculptors had turned to other, often ‘primitive’, traditions for new ways of looking at and representing the world, so Debussy turned to alternative forms of music encouraged by what he heard at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle:

The result was not an imitation of the oriental, but an impulse to rethink how music might sound and be structured, and Debussy emphasised that:

Naturalism and Verismo

Operatic Naturalism, most often associated with Italian Verismo, was the culmination of straightforward dramatic narrative and musical language: thereafter both started to fragment and develop more complex experiences. Until the later nineteenth century, the history of the arts presents a relatively clear development. From thereon, under a number of pressures, they began to fragment into a series of alternative, vying and often simultaneous movements. These ‘isms’ of the early twentieth century are most clearly seen in painting with several of them (highlighted in Table 13.1) paralleled in opera.

Naturalism is a philosophical movement that emerged in the mid nineteenth century as a response to growing industrialisation, urbanisation and the Darwinian scientific view of man. This responded to a view of the the human condition as completely determined by the material forces of the market and the social and physical environment this created. To Victor Hugo's emphasis on ‘exactness in the matter of locality’, Zola now added specific period, saying that his Rougon-Maquart novels would have been impossible before 1889: ‘I shall show this group at work, participating in an historical period…And thus the dramas of their individual lives recount the story of the Second Empire, from the ambuscade of the Coup d’Etat to the treachery of Sedan’ (Zola, ‘General Preface’ to the Rougon-Maquart novels).