Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850

Abstract

Reviewed by: Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 Sean Franzel Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850. By Angela Esterhammer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 288 pages. $93.00. Angela Esterhammer's rich and informative book examines the fascination with public improvisational performance between 1750 and 1850, tracking a wide range of European sites of performance and the extensive critical and literary reflection that they occasion. This expansive work makes an essential contribution to re-envisioning Romantic literature as a literature of the public sphere as well as to cultural and discursive histories of notions of improvisation, creativity, and originality. It should be a valuable resource to scholars of European Romanticism as well as to modern cultural historians interested more generally in intersections of performance, sociability, aesthetics, and media. As Esterhammer details, improvisational performances became en vogue in the late eighteenth century. Beginning largely in Italy, travelers increasingly sought out literary performers as the grand tour became a touristic rite of passage for cultural elites. Along with inspiring actual as well as fictional counterparts in other countries, these Italian improvvisatori and improvvisatrici and their "[performances of] natural spontaneity" (128) occasioned and organized notions of creative individuality, gender difference, and differences between national cultures in the eyes of northern European travel writers, critics, and poets. Exhibiting an impressive comparatist range, Esterhammer traces how the fascination with improvisation spreads through France, England, Denmark, Germany, Russia, and Holland. In this context she offers compelling re-readings of the literature and criticism of canonical figures such as Mary Shelley, Goethe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Byron, Pushkin, Madame de Staël, Tieck, and others, along with recalling to scholarly memory lesser-known performers and forgotten celebrities such as Anna Louisa Karsch, Corilla Olympica, and Maximilian Langenschwarz. In what is perhaps the book's key intervention, Esterhammer insists that interaction between audiences and performers organizes sites of improvisation. On the one hand, this interaction plays itself out in actual performances, as audience members suggest topics—the fall of Rome, the changing of the seasons, etc.—upon which the improvvisatori are to riff (to use an anachronistic term) and performers rely on enthusiastic audience reaction. Esterhammer also argues that the reception of these performances in criticism and literature is almost more important than the actual events. The book thus spends much of its time with responses to improvisation that resonate in print, convincingly arguing that attention to various modes of reciprocal interaction between performer and audience helps condition notions of the Romantic age as an epoch of solitary poet-geniuses. Moving with a light touch between reviews, travel writing, fictional accounts of improvvisatori, printed versions of performances, scholarly articles about oral literature, and more, Esterhammer describes a symbiotic "affiliation" and "reciprocal partnership" (222) between oral cultures of performance and emergent print media. In a programmatic gesture common to recent studies of what she calls the "ever more convivial space of Romanticism" (152), Esterhammer describes the scene of Romantic literary production as decidedly public, a social/sociable scene that straddles different media, national borders, and fictional, scholarly, critical, and popular genres. This is a welcome point of departure that Esterhammer shares with [End Page 617] other recent scholarship on the period from different perspectives such as media and book history, history of science, and gender and performance studies. The chapters on German authors and performers show how scenes of improvisation inflect many of the basic aesthetic and social concerns of the period. For example, Esterhammer situates scholarly debates about Homer as an oral poet/performer around 1800 as part of a broader cultural imaginary obsessed with improvvisatori, showing how the argument for the essential orality of the Homeric œuvre relies on a somewhat anachronistic comparison to contemporary Italian performers. Esterhammer also examines Bildungsromane by Tieck (Der junge Tischlermeister), Goethe (Wilhelm Meister), Hans Christian Andersen, and others, asking to what extent improvisation is figured as an essential part of individual self-formation. It is in this context that the book engages most sustainably with recent theories of improvisation, suggesting that notions of Bildung might be fruitfully re-inflected through recourse to recent theories that place improvisation at the heart of social practice. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau, Esterhammer argues...