Borrowings in Classical Music Between Countries, Composers, Different Essay - 1

Borrowings in Classical Music Between Countries, Composers, Different Ages - Essay Example The opera Fidelio was performed in 1805 and was the only opera of L. Beethoven. 1805 was a watershed between German Classicism and German Romanticism marked a new era in German music and artistic movement. The opera Fidelio belongs to German Classic era depicting domestic comedy and high seriousness of social landscape. The artistic movement of this age was open to every foreign idea, new or old, and interested itself in every accessible literature. It was partly because the artistic movement was not deeply rooted in the national life that it drew so much of its matter from foreign sources, until as critics have seen a desire for national originality began to arise, in advance of patriotism. It is obvious that the free use of the intellectual and artistic capital of German’s neighbors was an advantage, even a necessity for Germany in her backward condition; these countries themselves had freely plundered superior civilization in their own day as every 'young' literature must; these in their particular made no secret of his immense debt to France and England. That the results of these borrowings were not always fortunate goes without saying; Insel Felsenburg and Die schwedische Grà ¤fin have few of the merits of the work of Defoe and Richardson. But what is perhaps peculiar to Germany in this matter of imitation is that the habit became so deeply rooted that even national pride could not affect it much, and came in fact, by a natural compensation, to claim this very receptivity as a national virtue (Breuilly, 2001). The German nation, narrowly confined geographically and politically disunited, cannot be expected to produce one, and, speaking just after the French Revolution, Goethe hesitates to wish for the upheaval that would be required in Germany to prepare the way for classical works. But his words indicate that it is by no means certain that he would have disapproved of the Nationalism of modern Germany if he could have lived to see it (Gagliardo 19 91). He might have looked upon it as a necessary stage in the evolution of truly classical German literature.