Question: Yeah, Mr. LaRouche. I was just hoping you could enlighten us on Romanticism.

LaRouche: Okay. Let's take Romanticism as it has existed in it's modern form. Romanticism essentially takes two aspects: the dichotomy between passion and deduction. That's where it lies.

So, let's take the case of Franz Liszt, or Berlioz. We call him "belliose," sometimes, or bellicose (laughter), or Wagner. (Now, Wagner, forget--he's something else; but Liszt, is a clear case.) Now, Liszt was a young man who was brought to [Beethoven] by Carl Czerny, who was his teacher, the young man's teacher. And Czerny wished to exhibit, that this fellow was a keyboard master. So, Beethoven went through the exercise with Czerny. And, so, the people said, "What do you think of the young boy, Liszt, Franz Liszt? And he said, "He's a very talented young boy. But, under that bastard, Czerny, he will come to no good." And that was sound, absolutely sound.

If you look at some of the notes that Czerny made on Beethoven concertos, and other things, you realize that this guy was a real piece of work, a butcher.

Now, what's the difference between Liszt and Classical composers? Say, through Mozart; take Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms. What's the difference? Is there a difference. Yes. There is a fundamental difference. But there is also a deceptive similarity. Something that's called "passage work"--which is not diarrhea, but, it's the musical equivalent of diarrhea. You just use half-tone progressions, chromatic progressions, and you try to scintillate; make a scintillating performance. It's a parody. It's like a doll; or, it's like a dog dressed up as a person; or, a monkey dressed up as a person. It's like what happened in Britain, where they had a baboon escape from a church, and the baboon was discovered running around the neighborhood in a woman's dress. And he was being used in some kind of an obscure sexual ritual by the members of one of these cults, in Britain in the 18th Century. So, this is sort of--Liszt and Romanticism, is the baboon in a woman's dress trying to pretend to be a person, or trying to avoid having to pretend to be a person (in the case of the baboon).

So, the way that it happened was the following. It happened through demoralization. You take the Classical humanist movement in Europe, in its modern form, developed in Germany around the influence of Abraham Kästner, who was famous as a teacher of mathematics. [Kästner] was born in 1719, which is three years after the death of Leibniz. He comes from the same city where Leibniz was born, Leipzig, and a city associated with much of the career of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the same city from which a young Efraim Lessing came, who was actually one of the most important pupils of Kästner.

This was the same Kästner who, in the 1750s, became aware of the importance of Benjamin Franklin in the United States and through this connection from Leipzig to Halle, to Göttingen, which became a very influential center, actually made a direct intervention to bring some of the works of Leibniz into possession of Franklin--there were two efforts in that direction. And the concept of the American physical economy, the concept of the American Constitution, was largely a result of the influence of Leibniz, in several respects, but notably including his essays, the so-called New Essays on Human Understanding, which were transmitted to Franklin and circles from Germany from this circle of this Leipzig-Halle-Göttingen group. In the 1760s, Franklin was a guest in Göttingen of Kästner. Kästner had devoted his life--he was technically a teacher of mathematics--and had devoted his life, as he expressed it, to defending the ideas of Leibniz and of Johann Sebastian Bach against their opponents. So, that this relationship between Leibniz and Bach was a characteristic feature of what became known as the Classical humanist revolution in Germany. With the influence of Kästner--.

For example, Shakespeare, in England, had become a dirty word. That's the way it was done, on the stage. Just filth; foolish nonsense. This had started with Francis Bacon and company, who had done everything possible to crush and end the career of Shakespeare. And so, Shakespeare spent the last years of his life--the greatest dramatist in English history--in relative obscurity to which he was forced under King James I, under the influence of Sir Francis Bacon and his circle, and Hobbes and company. So, Shakespeare was performed as some of the great dramatists today in Germany or the United States: Great dramas are turned into garbage and put on the stage. And this was done to Shakespeare. Shakespeare was revived in the early 18th Century to some degree in England, but in a fragmentary form, in much the way that most great drama is destroyed in the United States on the stage today, eh?

So, as a result of Kästner's influence, and the association with Lessing, you had a rebirth of the concept of Classical drama and poetry in Germany. This revolution in Germany radiated throughout much of Europe and was associated with the rise of the pro-American circles throughout Europe from the period of about the middle of the 18th Century until 1789.

And, this was the Classical movement. It was a Classical movement in poetry, in drama, and so forth. We discussed it yesterday in Baltimore--this question of how drama works, Classical drama works. So this was the basis of the Classical humanist movement. It was a realization of what had been anticipated by the best of the Classical Greeks: the Pythagoreans, Socrates, Plato, and so forth. And it occurred there.

With the French Revolution, from 1789, July 14th on, and the Reign of Terror, and the reign of Napoleon, Romanticism emerged out of a reaction to awe at the terror of the Jacobin Revolution, the Jacobin Terror, and Napoleon Bonaparte's empire. You had the characteristic features: Hegel. Hegel was almost a sexual lover, intellectually, of Napoleon; a real degenerate. The theory of fascism actually was codified, for the first time, by Hegel, with his papers on history and philosophy, on the state of philosophy.

Kant is an example of Romanticism. Kant became extremely influential as an anti-Classical figure in the 1790s. And the birth of Romanticism, philosophical Romanticism in Germany, comes largely from Kant. Hegel is another one. In this process, even Goethe had a period of "affection" for Napoleon.

So, the Napoleonic image, the image of the great beast marching across Europe, subjugating all Europe; was the image. There was a slight change in 1812-1814, when the resistance, organized largely by Prussians who were representatives of the Classical humanist tradition, joined with Alexander I, the Tsar of Russia, to design a policy of strategic defense against Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Napoleon came out of Russia without any troops. He went in with a half-million. This created, very briefly, a period of great optimism in Europe, until the Congress of Vienna. And, with the travesty which was the Congress of Vienna, in which the Anglo-Dutch interests and the Hapsburg interests, divided power over the world, produced a great period of pessimism and a resurgence of Romanticism. So, Romanticism, in general, was to be understood historically, not as a category of a fixed definition. It's simply the idea that the acceptance of blind passion, as such, must rule. And the basis is the idea of the person of passion--. For example, we have this today in figures. You have stupid figures, incompetent figures, disgusting figures of art, who are faddish, like Hollywood stars, rock stars, and so forth--they are nothing! They are junk. They're garbage, but once they are established as having an image of something which is emotionally appealing, then they become figures to reckon with; against all reason--that is Romanticism.

So, Romanticism is of that form. It takes the form with Liszt, of someone who is clever, who is well trained, who knew how to fake it, and could fake Classical performance, Classical forms and composition. That is one form.

The other form is the more extreme form of Nazism and similar kinds of things, or the rock-drug-sex counterculture. This is another form of Romanticism. Complete irrationalism, controlled by wild emotions--"I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel." That's Romanticism.

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