Book Review: Why the Romantics Matter

Why the Romantics Matterby Peter GayYale University Press, 2015There's a danger inherent in something like Yale University Press's "Why X Matters" series, these 100-page meditations on various subjects farmed out to various famous freelancers. The bedrock mechanics of the whole enterprise virtually guarantees a radically uneven product, as readers saw amply in Penguin's "Brief Lives" series, virtually none of which were produced by actual trained biographers. That series produced one poetic masterpiece for every ten banal little non-events, and it's hard to see the balance value of such an attrition.It happens again in this Yale series. In exchange for misfires, we get gems like Adam Kirsch's Why Trilling Matters or Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters, and the hoping becomes an anxious strain.Books like the latest instalment, Peter Gay's Why the Romantics Matter, don't help things any. Gay, who wrote a very good biography of Sigmund Freud almost thirty years ago, is in the unenviable position of having a commission to generate 100 pages about the Romantics without also having the slightest thing interesting or innovative to say about the Romantics. The resulting text has many odd passages like this one that sails on blissfully unaware that the whole 18th Century actually preceded the whole 19th Century:

The makers and consumers of modern culture rarely confronted one another without intermediaries. Impresarios shepherded violinists and sopranos from concert hall to concert hall, art dealers tried to convince acquisitive customers that they simply must own this or that of their offerings, producers of plays and operas tempted audiences with new compositions, literary and art critics expressed their opinions in as authoritative a tone as they could muster. They, and other middlemen of culture, too, intervened in the making of taste, responding to a need of art, music, and literature lovers, many of them new to the culture market, to rise above easy entertainments and learn to appreciate the sophisticated, the difficult, the unconventional.

And because there's not much actual point in editing a production like this one, passages get through that aren't just dubious but borderline incomprehensible, as in this little rumination on Beethoven's greatest symphony:

Beethoven, sole maker of the Ninth (1823), is among the first of the moderns. Recent listeners to his Ninth Symphony have discovered musical themes wrestling for expression at least from the 1790s. There is, as the symphony shifts from the first three movements to the fourth, a second of overpowering confusion, with all the musical instruments noisily cooperating by creating a flash of supreme disorder. It is as if violins, woodwinds, trumpets, and all of them together are being quickly and pitilessly discarded from their orchestra. And then we get an instant of total clarity, and we are safe in the fourth movement, ready to listen and to share, a new order.

Why the Romantics Matter is a slim, pocket-sized volume, but it's difficult to discern the intellectual needs of the person who'd carry it around. Peter Gay completists, certainly, if there is such a thing, but beyond that?