Ten Famous Composers of the Romantic Era and their Cause of Death

The musical composers in the Romantic Era (1800-1910) strived for compositions that expressed human life, including happiness, harmony and despair. They lived in a period in which freedom of thinking, expression of emotion and inspiration by nature predominate. During this period, intensive trading with other parts of the world brought new microorganisms along, which made infections and epidemics very common. This article serves to address the cause of death and relevant biographic data of a number of well- known Romantic composers. Primarily, this review refers to clinically significant findings using reports that were retrieved from Pubmed, Embase and Google over the 19th, 20th and 21st century till 14th June 2021. Here, this text dwells on diseases and the cause of death of ten composers, namely Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Liszt, Mahler and Bruckner. It is evident that, in the sight of modern medicine, symptoms and forensic facts are not complete, but witnesses' reports and recent medical research have provided passable and plausible clarity. Although many questions will remain unanswered, it appears that the diseases of these composers and their causes of death have their origins in alcohol abuses, age, epidemics (like tuberculosis) and syphilis.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

Romantic Periods

This article examines the transformation of the period in the early Romantic era. While in Classical periods the end of the antecedent phrase is harmonically closed off from the beginning of the consequent phrase, Romantic periods often join the end of the antecedent to the beginning of the consequent, creating an undivided progression. Voice-leading analyses illustrate three different means of joining the antecedent to the consequent: 1) by overlapping the two phrases, 2) by prolonging and resolving the antecedent’s closing dominant, and 3) by ending the antecedent on a predominant. All three procedures involve converting a dividing dominant into a progressive dominant.

The Madness of Free Indirect Style

This chapter considers the emergence of moral therapy in early psychiatry in order to argue that the Romantic-era innovation of free indirect style shares an affinity with eighteenth-century psychiatric diagnosis and case records. While the origin of free indirect style is often ascribed to Jane Austen, the chapter finds emergent forms of free indirect style appearing in psychiatric notebooks by mad-doctors practicing moral management, as well as in the political literature of the 1790s and in Romantic-era realist prose fiction. Free indirect style has a monitory function that abetted the psychiatric practice of moral management in the late eighteenth century: as a strategy for mediating the voice of a speaker in a text, free indirect style allowed early psychiatrists, who believed madness was transmitted orally, to regulate their patients’ conditions by moderating their speech. Free indirect style continues to bear the traces of the madhouse in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. The chapter thus uncovers pathological traces underlying the representational device that has been called the novel’s most distinctive formal feature. Free indirect style also thus inaugurates the association of the novel with the patient’s narrative, anticipating modern discussions of “psycho-narration” as a medico-literary formal device. Ultimately, free indirect style allows the writer to intimate forms of pathology that the reader is invited to, in effect, diagnose.

Romantic Autopsy

Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading charts how medicine influenced the literature of British Romanticism in its themes, motifs, and—most fundamentally—forms. Drawing on new medical specialties at the turn of the nineteenth century along with canonical poems and novels, this book shows that both fields develop analogies that saw literary works as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Such analogies invited readers and doctors to produce a shared methodology of interpretation. The book’s most distinctive contribution is protocols of diagnosis: a set of practices for interpretation that could be used by doctors to diagnose disease, and by readers to understand fiction and poetry. In Romanticism, such interpretive protocols crossed between the emergent medical fields of anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology, and the most innovative literary texts, including the lyrics of William Wordsworth and John Keats, the elegies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Romantic poems and novels were read through techniques designed for the analysis of disease, while autopsy reports and case histories employed stylistic features associated with poetry and fiction. Such practices counter the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, while suggesting that symptomatic reading (treating a text’s superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still debated today, originated from medicine. Romantic Autopsy provides an original account of the life and afterlife of Romantic-era medicine and literature, offering an important new history underlying modern-day approaches to literary analysis.

Unreliable Semiology from Frankenstein to Freud

Examining how prose fiction and the case history share certain formal features, this chapter turns to the medical field of semiology to investigate how the Romantic-era case history models a diagnostic reading practice that extends from medicine to the novel. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a notable, even parodic, literary case history informed by conventional protocols of medical reporting, visible both in Romantic-era case histories, and, at the end of the nineteenth century, in the case histories of Sigmund Freud. The Romantic case history captures fundamental tensions between the physician’s scientific report and the patient’s autobiography, which compromise the physician’s ability to trace a semiotic relationship between external symptom and underlying condition. The case history proves to be a site of disciplinary quarrel between literature and medicine: not only does it anticipate many of the epistemological problems that attend our modern attempts to read “symptomatically” or “deeply,” it also interrogates the notions of authority, personhood, and normality that continue to sustain modern medical discourse and literary criticism. As the case history reveals the unreliability of the diagnostician’s production of narrative, it also shows the limitations of interpretation in the emergent medical and literary fields of semiology.

ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS POETRY: A STUDY OF GARY SYNDER'S POETRY

Ecological consciousness poetry is considered as a modern literary movement, it has its roots in the west side of the world originated in the United States of America on the second half of 20th century. The concept of nature was the major theme in the Romantic era. On the other hand, eco-writers have their consideration of nature. This research highlighting on one of the most important parts in this movement which is "ecopoetry" by explaining its implications of nature in Gary Snyder's poetry, who is one of the pioneers of beat generation. The first section of the research concerns with Gary Snyder's early life and highlights on his most significant perspectives. The second one is a kind of a critical part, which concerns with eco-critical approach, its roots, concept, and a list of a critical questions which asks by its critics. The third section is the most important one in my opinion, which is the implication of ecological consciousness poetry in Gary Snyder's poems and how he reads this kind of poetry. And last but not least, a conclusion which sums up my perspectives and readings to the ecocriticism in general, and Gary Snyder's poetry in special. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0821/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>