In this decade

• The arms race and the alliances that lead up to World War I

• US: Progressive movement, closing of the frontier, immigration restrictions, muckraking

• Economics: Sherman Antitrust Act, “robber barons”

• Science: Radiation, psychology, Tesla coil, diesel engine, the mind as a stream of consciousness

• Art: Mucha, Cyrano, Sullivan, skyscrapers, Joplin, Dracula

A few excerpts from the 1890s

I’d always wondered how Progressivism became popular in the greatest industrial age in history, in the greatest nation in history. In these excerpts from the 1890s, look at the assumptions, the things people are worried about, and how they propose to deal with them.

• Riis, How the Other Half Lives {1890 Nonfic}: “The tenements to-day are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population. When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be?”

• Re Populist Party {1892-1896 US}, the Party’s Omaha Platform (7/4/1892) for the 1892 POTUS election: “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. ... The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”

• Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth {1894 Econ}: “Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. ... The true laissez-faire is, let the individual do what the individual can do best, and let the community do what the community can do best. The laissez-faire of social self-interest, if true, cannot conflict with the individual self-interest, if true, but it must outrank it always.”

• Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed” {1897 Educ}: “I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. … [T]he only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity.”

• Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray {1890-1891 Fic}, from Wilde’s Preface (1891): “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

It takes more than the sense of life of Cyrano de Bergerac {1897 Drama} to fight against those sorts of attitudes and assumptions.

Upcoming

I’ll be spending July and August doing a final edit of Timeline 1800-1899, which should be for sale by September 2026. I’ll be offering signed pre-publication copies as soon as I have a page count and a price. (The index on this one is going to be looooong.)

The next installment for paid subscribers will be the “World in 1900”, in September - the beginning of Timeline 1900-2021. In the meantime, I’ll be posting art from the 19th century.

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1. A Revue of Royal & Revolutionary Rhetoric: quotes from primary sources leading up to the Declaration of Independence.

2. The decade of the 1770s, from Timeline 1700-1799 (PDF).

3. Thomas Paine and Common Sense, and reactions to Common Sense by Charles Lee, John Adams, and George Washington.

4. Declaration of Independence, annotated (PDF).

5. Celebrations of major anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence, with historical context and substantive quotes: 1826, 1876, 1926, and 1976.

6. Erastus Salisbury Field, Historical Monument of the American Republic, 1876.

7. Independence Flagpole, Union Square, New York City, 1926.

1. A Revue of Royal and Revolutionary Rhetoric

In 2016-2017, I wrote a series of posts relating Hamilton: An American Musical to historical events, using mostly primary sources. The 15th post is an overview of the world in which the Declaration of Independence was written, broken into “several violent Acts and interludes, with important and incendiary dialogue in (of course) red.”

2. The decade of the 1770s

The more immediate context of the Declaration is the decade of the 1770s. The attached PDF is the version of that decade that appears in Timeline 1700-1799, lightly edited from the version that went out to paid subscribers in April 2026. Aside from the American Revolution, the decade includes entries on the theory of laissez-faire economics, the rise of nationalism, Jefferson on the rights of British Americans, Gibbon on the fall of the Roman Empire, Sturm und Drang, Mozart and Haydn, and much more. It’s a helluva decade.

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3. Paine and Common Sense

In Common Sense, published in January 1776, Thomas Paine urged the colonies to break with Great Britain, and to explain to the world why they were doing so. This is the kick-starter for the Declaration of Independence:

Were a manifesto to be published, and despatched to foreign courts, setting forth the miseries we have endured, and the peaceable methods we have ineffectually used for redress; declaring, at the same time, that not being able, any longer, to live happily or safely under the cruel disposition of the British court, we had been driven to the necessity of breaking off all connections with her; at the same time, assuring all such courts of our peaceable disposition towards them, and of our desire of entering into trade with them: Such a memorial would produce more good effects to this Continent, than if a ship were freighted with petitions to Britain.

An over-life-size sculpture of Thomas Paine stands in Morristown, New Jersey. See this post for photos from all angles, along with substantial quotes from Paine’s works.

Not everyone agreed with Paine, but Common Sense provided a focal point for discussion. See this post for contemporary reactions by John Adams, George Washington, and Charles Lee.

Note: There’s also a bust of Paine at the Hall of Great Americans at Bronx Community College (2155 University Avenue, Bronx): see this post.

4. The Declaration of Independence, annotated

One of my fondest memories of Independence Day is reading the Declaration of Independence aloud with friends, line by line. But while working on Timeline 1700-1799, I realized that I didn’t know the Declaration’s full context: the sources of its philosophical premises, and the actions of the British government that inspired its list of 27 grievances.

That’s not a criticism of Thomas Jefferson’s work. He could safely assume that his fellow Americans were familiar with all those details. Today many of us have forgotten (or never knew) them, so in 2025, I celebrated July 4th by posting an annotated version of the Declaration.

CLICK BELOW to download the PDF of the annotated Declaration of Independence. Note: Cross-references to entries in the Timeline are in curly brackets, with year and category, for example, {6/1/1740 US}. When the entry is included in the PDF (see pp. 1-3), the cross-reference is in bold. If the cross-reference isn’t in bold ... you’ll have to buy the book to see it.

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5. Celebrations of major anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence

In 2025, I also posted on the celebrations of the Declaration’s major anniversaries, in 1826, 1876, 1926, and 1976. Each post includes a quick summary of what happened in the previous 50 years in the US, plus substantial speeches or writings made on the anniversaries by Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, Calvin Coolidge, Gerald Ford, and Queen Elizabeth II.

6. Historical Monument of the American Republic, 1876

In this 13-foot-wide, 9-foot-high painting, Erastus Salisbury Field aimed to represent the whole history of the United States, from the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, to his own time. Field hoped this painting would be the “blueprint” for a cluster of 500-foot-high towers with steam-powered trains running between their tops. This post has details.

7. Independence Flagpole, Union Square, New York City

Did you know that in Union Square, the words of the Declaration of Independence are inscribed on a ten-foot-high bronze tablet? The Independence Flagpole commemorates the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. Around its base are a series of very large reliefs showing the effects of freedom and tyranny.

This post on my personal website has photos of the flagpole base, with comments on the allegorical figures.

On a granite band above the reliefs appear the words: “How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of and which no other people on earth enjoy – Thomas Jefferson”. Still true!

Bonus reading: this article by Coleman Hughes on patriotism for Progressives. I wonder if it will change any minds? As some clever person said: You can’t reason someone out of a position they weren’t reasoned into.

Coming up next: the decade of the 1890s.

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Each decade begins with “Major Events and Trends”, a summary by category. Below are the Major Events for the 1880s - a review for supporters and a teaser for free subscribers. The complete decade of the 1880s (for paid supporters) is here.

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In this decade:

• World: Scramble for Africa, Russian pogroms against Jews.

• US: Wild West outlaws, immigration restriction, merit-based civil service.

• Economics: Austrian School, AFL, ICC, Haymarket Square Riot, Standard Oil Trust.

• Science: Eugenics and blood transfusion. Technology: steam turbine, Benz automobile, Kodak, Tesla’s induction motor, movies.

• Philosophy & religion: Social Gospel movement and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

• Visual arts: Decadent, Symbolist, and Arts and Crafts movements. Skyscrapers, Sagrada Familia, Eiffel Tower, Biltmore. Painting: Monet, Sargent, Cézanne, Van Gogh. Sculpture: Saint Gaudens, Rodin, and the Statue of Liberty.

• Literature: Ben Hur, Looking Backward 2000-1887, Treasure Island, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Sherlock Holmes. Drama: Ibsen and Strindberg.

• Music: Mahler, Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, “Clementine”. Opera: Gilbert and Sullivan.

Coming next (7/4/2026): a summary of posts related to the Declaration of Independence.

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Like most Renaissance scientists (including Galileo, whose life overlaps his), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was a scientist with religious premises ... or a religious man eager to expand scientific knowledge. Today he’s best known for extending Copernicus’s work on the heliocentric solar system. He proposed - for the first time, as far as we know - that stars are distant suns surrounded by their own planets, and that those planets might harbor living beings.

Bruno was outspoken in his theories on both religion and science. When patrons or colleagues disapproved, instead of quietly changing his ideas, Bruno moved on, from Naples to Venice, Padua to Lyon, Geneva to Paris, Wittenburg to Prague. In 1592, in Venice, he was arrested by the Inquisition. Among their accusations: that counter to the Bible, Bruno believed that life existed beyond Earth. Following eight years of imprisonment and trial, he was sentenced to be burned at the stake at the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. At his execution, he was gagged so that he could not speak to the crowds.

Giordano Bruno is a hero to many nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, who regard him as a martyr of science. “If there is, as many have argued, an intrinsic link between science and liberty of inquiry, then Bruno was among those who guaranteed the future of the newly emerging sciences, as well as claiming in wider terms a general principle of free thought and expression.” (Hillary Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science: Broken Lives and Organizational Power [2002], p. 19, quoted in Wikipedia, n. 11.)

Rome’s Bruno

After Rome came under secular rather than papal rule in 1870 {3/17/1861 World}, a monument to Bruno was erected in the Campo de’ Fiori. The monument’s plaque reads: A Bruno, il secolo da lui divinato, qui dove il rogo arse: “To Bruno, from the generation he foresaw, here, where the fire burnt.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote the poem below in 1889, for the dedication of Bruno’s monument in Rome. It’s a celebration of Bruno and of the Church’s loss of secular power in Rome.

“The Monument of Giordano Bruno”

I.
Not from without us, only from within,
Comes or can ever come upon us light
Whereby the soul keeps ever truth in sight.
No truth, no strength, no comfort man may win,
No grace for guidance, no release from sin,
Save of his own soul’s giving. Deep and bright
As fire enkindled in the core of night
Burns in the soul where once its fire has been
The light that leads and quickens thought, inspired
To doubt and trust and conquer. So he said
Whom Sidney, flower of England, lordliest head
Of all we love, loved: but the fates required
A sacrifice to hate and hell, ere fame
Should set with his in heaven Giordano’s name.

II.
Cover thine eyes and weep, O child of hell,
Grey spouse of Satan, Church of name abhorred.
Weep, withered harlot, with thy weeping lord,
Now none will buy the heaven thou hast to sell
At price of prostituted souls, and swell
Thy loveless list of lovers. Fire and sword
No more are thine: the steel, the wheel, the cord,
The flames that rose round living limbs, and fell
In lifeless ash and ember, now no more
Approve thee godlike. Rome, redeemed at last
From all the red pollution of thy past,
Acclaims the grave bright face that smiled of yore
Even on the fire that caught it round and clomb
To cast its ashes on the face of Rome.

(NOTE: “clomb” is an archaic/poetic past tense of “climb”.)

Swinburne also wrote another poem on Giordano Bruno. Which one do you prefer?

For more on Bruno and the context of this monument, see this post on Naples, where another monument to Bruno stands. The post includes the New York Times’s comments from 1889 on the Pope’s opposition to erecting a monument to Bruno.

S.J. Parris’s Bruno

If you like historical fiction, I recommend S.J. Parris’s series of 7 mysteries involving Giordano Bruno, starting with Heresy. Heresy is set in England in 1583, fifty years after Henry VIII declared himself head of the Church in England; thirty years after “Bloody Mary” reinstated Catholicism as the state religion; twenty-five years after Elizabeth I’s Oath of Supremacy required that anyone taking public or church office, or teaching or studying at a university, swear allegiance to the ruling monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The dialogue near the end between Bruno and the murderer (I didn’t guess who it was: kudos to Parris) deals with religion vs. science and life vs. martyrdom. It’s unusually thoughtful for a murder mystery, and shows Bruno as an intelligent and courageous man. I approve of Bruno’s definition of the “real heresy”.

Coming up next: Major Events of the 1890s.

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1881: Augustus St. Gaudens, Admiral David Glasgow Farragut Monument (New York City). This work commemorating the hero of the Battle of Mobile Bay {8/5/1864 US} is the 1st major commission for St. Gaudens, who becomes one of America’s leading sculptors. St. Gaudens creates iconic images such as the Puritan (1887), Abraham Lincoln (1887), and General William Tecumseh Sherman {1903 Sculp}.

For why Saint Gaudens’s Farragut Monument was unique, see this page and my Artist-Entrepreneurs.

Here’s how Robert Bridges, a contemporary, responded to the unveiling of the Farragut Monument. This poem appears in Poems of American Patriotism, edited by Brander Matthews and illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, 1922.

To live a hero, then to stand
In bronze serene above the city’s throng;
Hero at sea, and now on land
Revered by thousands as they rush along;

If these were all the gifts of fame—
To be a shade amid alert reality,
And win a statue and a name—
How cold and cheerless immortality!

But when the sun shines in the Square,
And multitudes are swarming in the street,
Children are always gathered there,
Laughing and playing round the hero’s feet.

Coming next: Swinburne on Giordano Bruno.

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1. “The Land of Story-Books”

At evening when the lamp is lit,
Around the fire my parents sit;
They sit at home and talk and sing,
And do not play at anything.

Now, with my little gun, I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest track
Away behind the sofa back.

There, in the night, where none can spy,
All in my hunter’s camp I lie,
And play at books that I have read
Till it is time to go to bed.

These are the hills, these are the woods,
These are my starry solitudes;
And there the river by whose brink
The roaring lions come to drink.

I see the others far away
As if in firelit camp they lay,
And I, like to an Indian scout,
Around their party prowled about.

So when my nurse comes in for me,
Home I return across the sea,
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear land of Story-books.

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2. “Bed in Summer”

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

3. “Escape at Bedtime”

The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars.
There ne’er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,
Nor of people in church or the Park,
As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
And that glittered and winked in the dark.
The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall
Would be half full of water and stars.
They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
And they soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.

Coming tomorrow: a poem on Saint Gaudens’s Farragut Monument.

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1. 1881: Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1881 (Apr. 23): W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s Patience premieres in London. The 6th (of 14) comic operas composed by Gilbert and Sullivan, it pokes fun at the Aesthetic movement {1871 Paint}, Gothic novels {1764 Fic, 1818 Fic}, sentimental novels {1740 Fic, 1766 Fic, 1811 Fic}, and those who display a passion for all things medieval {1821-1823 Arch, 1849 Arch}. Along the way, Patience also skewers rural simplicity, vanity, and hypocrisy. When the show moves to the new Savoy theater in Oct. 1881, it becomes the first theatrical production in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. Electrical lights are far less hazardous than gas or limelights, which often caused theaters to go up in flames.

Here’s Bunthorne admitting that in order to be widely admired, he perpetually lies about his tastes: “Am I alone and unobserved?” (4.5 mins.). The whole of Patience is here (2.25 hrs.). The libretto is here, because I love G&S’s witty lyrics.

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2. 1881: Beginning of vaudeville

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1881 (Oct. 24): Tony Pastor and the vaudeville variety show. Previous variety shows incl. burlesque and minstrel shows {1851 Music}. Pastor introduces what he calls a “straight, clean variety show” in New York City: no liquor and no bawdy material, just 10-15 unrelated acts such as acrobats, comedians, singers, magicians, and jugglers. Pastor’s show is so popular that others immediately imitate it. Vaudeville is very popular beginning in the 1890s, and becomes a significant influence on American popular music and musicals. It declines in the early 1930s with the growing popularity of musical broadcasts on the radio {Fessenden, 12/24/1906 Music} and films in theaters {Nickelodeon, 6/19/1905 Film}. Many vaudeville entertainers transition to the new media, among them Charlie Chaplin {1917 Film}, the Marx Brothers {1930 Film}, and James Cagney {1931 Film}.

The heyday of vaudeville was before moving pictures became common. George M. Cohan worked in vaudeville in the 1880s-1890s, before moving on to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. The beginning of the 1942 biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, shows him growing up in vaudeville. It’s a fun movie to watch as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and the tap-dancing is fantastic.

3. 1882: Wagner’s Parsifal

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1882 (Jul. 26): Richard Wagner’s Parsifal premieres at Bayreuth {8/13/1876 Opera}. It is loosely based on a 13th-c. German epic poem about Percival’s quest for the Holy Grail during King Arthur’s reign (late 5th or early 6th c.). Parsifal is Wagner’s 13th and final opera, or, as he called it, a “theater-consecrating festival piece”. Nietzsche {1872 Esth, 1883-1885 Phil} loves the music but hates the story: “I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics.”

Here’s Jonas Kaufmann singing Parsifal’s Act II monologue (2.5 mins.) at the Metropolitan Opera. I saw him in this production, figuring that if I was ever going to find a Wagner opera I liked, it might be one that Kaufmann performed in.

Well, I still don’t like Wagner, and that production was memorably disturbing: red liquid sloshing around on stage. Have a look if you dare. (I assume this was Regietheater, on which see this post.) All of Parsifal is here (3.75 hours)., in a traditional production (non-Kaufmann, non-sloshy).

4. 1882: Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1882 (Aug. 20): Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture premieres in Moscow. The 15-minute work, notable for its use of cannon fire, commemorates Napoleon’s defeat in his Russian campaign {2/1812 World}.

Yes, you know this Overture (this version has cannons, 16 mins.). Napoleon’s defeat in his Russian campaign was a turning point for Napoleon and for Russian history: more on that in the Timeline entry in this post (search “Russia”).

5. 1883: Delibes’s Lakmé

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1883 (Apr. 14 ): Léo Delibes’s Lakmé premieres in Paris. In British India during the mid-19th c., the daughter of a Brahmin priest falls in love with a British soldier; when he returns to his regiment, she commits suicide. Lakmé is an example of the exotic, orientalizing settings and music popular by the late 19th century, incl. Le Roi de Lahore (1877) and Thaïs (1894) by Massenet {2/16/1892 Opera}, and Les Pêcheurs de perles (1863) and Djamileh (1872) by Bizet {3/3/1875 Opera}. Such exotic settings are skewered by Gilbert and Sullivan in Mikado {3/14/1885 Opera}.

Here the “Flower Duet” is sung by two of today’s most renowned sopranos, Anna Netrebko and Elīna Garanča (7.5 mins.). I couldn’t find a YouTube video of Lakmé with English subtitles: here’s one with subtitles in the original French (2.5 hours).

6. 1883: New York Metropolitan Opera opens

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1883 (Oct. 22): Metropolitan Opera in New York opens with Gounod’s Faust {3/19/1859 Opera}. Newly wealthy industrialists and bankers such as the Vanderbilts {1857 Econ} and Morgans {1871 Econ} establish the Met as an alternative to the Academy of Music’s opera house, which has a limited number of private boxes monopolized by New York’s “old money”.

7. 1884: Montrose, “Oh, My Darling Clementine”

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1884: Percy Montrose, “Oh, My Darling Clementine.” This folk ballad about the daughter of a gold miner is among the most popular sheet music of the late 19th century.

I can’t find any recordings of this from the early 20th century on YouTube, but here’s Pete Seeger, sounding old-timey (3 mins.). It really is a rather gruesome song!

8. 1885: Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1885 (Mar. 14): W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu, premieres in London. Although it satirizes British politics and institutions, the operetta’s ostensible setting is Japan, whose art and culture have become very popular in the decades since European trade with Japan began {3/31/1854 World, 1857 Paint, 1871 Arch}. Within a year, Mikado is being performed by at least 150 companies worldwide. It remains one of the most frequently performed works of musical theater.

Here’s the aria excerpted in Timeline 1800-1899: “There is beauty in the bellow of the blast” (3.75 mins.), performed with exuberance, as all G&S operas should be. I chose this duet for the Timeline excerpt because of the references to lions, tigers, the Congo and the Niger: the 1880s is when European colonization of Africa really gets under way {Scramble for Africa, 1881-1914 World}.

Here’s the whole Mikado (2 hrs.) performed by the D’Oyly Carte Company, which was founded in the 1870s specifically to perform Gilbert & Sullivan. They’ve been disbanded for decades, but their interpretations are still considered the gold standard for G&S. Here’s the libretto for the Mikado.

9. 1889: Richard Strauss’s Don Juan

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1889 (Nov. 11): Richard Strauss’s Don Juan premieres in Weimar, Germany. Related to program music {1815 Music, 12/5/1830 Music}, Don Juan is a symphonic poem (a.k.a. a tone poem) meant to evoke the despair of Don Juan at his inability to find an ideal woman. Strauss later composes operas, incl. Salomé {1905 Opera}, Elektra (1909), and Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose, 1911). He is often acclaimed as the heir of Wagner {6/10/1865 Opera, 8/13/1876 Opera, 7/26/1882 Opera}, who died in 1883. Strauss is an important composer in the late phase of Romanticism {4/7/1805 Music}.

The complete Don Juan is here (20 mins.)

10. 1889: Mahler’s Symphony No. 1

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1889 (Nov. 20)-1902 (Jun. 9): Gustav Mahler, Symphonies 1, 2, and 3, premiere in Budapest, Berlin, and Krefeld. They comprise the first (of 3) symphonic trilogies by Mahler. Influenced by Wagner {6/10/1865 Opera, 8/13/1876 Opera, 7/26/1882 Opera} and Liszt {1846-1853 Music}, Mahler aims to evoke emotions such as the joy of life, obsession with death, and Christian belief in immortality. Elements of Mahler’s style are a bridge to 20th-c. modernism, incl. progressive tonality (ending a work in a different key), dissolution of tonality (obscuring the perception of key), contrapuntal texture rather than harmony, and inclusion of popular styles and mundane sounds. Mahler is an important composer in the late phase of Romanticism. Although his works are not popular until half a century after his death, he influences Schoenberg {2/25/1924 Music} and Britten {6/7/1945 Music}, among others.

Here’s Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (1 hr.).

11. 1880s: Tin Pan Alley

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1880s-1940s: Tin Pan Alley. In the 1880s, music publishers begin converging on West 28th St. in Manhattan. The nickname of the new center of the US music industry comes from the continuous racket of pianists demonstrating new songs on out-of-tune upright pianos. The songs produced for Tin Pan Alley are used in vaudeville shows {10/24/1881 Music} and sold as sheet music for home pianos {1811 Music}. Among the composers of Tin Pan Alley who become famous are Irving Berlin {1911 Music}, George and Ira Gershwin {1919 Music, 1924 Music, etc.), Al Dubin, Jack Yellen, Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Loesser, and Johnny Mercer {1961 Film}. Tin Pan Alley’s importance fades after World War II {9/1/1939 World}.

Hundreds of songs are associated with Tin Pan Alley. Unfortunately YouTube doesn’t seem to have a chronological medley: look up some of the names above for examples. I’ll leave you instead with a thought about Tin Pan Alley songs versus the grand-scale works of Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler. This is “A Fable for Poets” by Berton Braley (1882-1966).

Once upon a time there was a bard
Who made his tuneful lute to twang,
But found the going rather hard,
Till one day, growing wise, he sang:
“Perhaps my little lays are bad,
Perhaps you think I sing them wrong,
But - none of them are very sad
And none of them are very long!”

Ah, then the people filled his hat
And danced to all the songs he made;
The minstrel waxed exceeding fat
And joyfully his lute he played.
The king came by and heard the lad
Carol his promise to the throng,
“None of my songs are very sad
And none of them are very long!”

“Oh, wondrous minstrel,” quoth the king,
“Oh, wisest of all bards there be,
Come to the royal court and sing
Thy deathless lyrics unto me.”
And so in silk the bard was clad,
His verses rang the well-known gong,
For none of them were very sad,
And none of them were very long!

He sang of love and war and work,
Of little things that men hold dear,
Gay songs wherein the tear-drops lurk,
Grave songs with smiles behind the tear;
But all his many lyrics had
A spirit unafraid and strong,
And - none of them were very sad
And none of them were very long.

Hear, then, this poet’s epitaph;
“He sang of Hope and not Despair,
Of how a man might bravely laugh
Through all the woes that he must bear;
He made a dull old world seem glad
With bits of simple, dauntless song,
For none of them were very sad
And none of them were very long!”

Coming next: poems of the 1880s not included in Timeline 1800-1899.

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Politics

1. Words to the wise from 141 years ago: keep an eye on your politicians

Grover Cleveland {3/4/1885 POTUS}, First Inaugural:

The Constitution which prescribes [the president’s] oath, my countrymen, is yours; the Government you have chosen him to administer for a time is yours; the suffrage which executes the will of freemen is yours; the laws and the entire scheme of our civil rule, from the town meeting to the State capitals and the national capital, is yours. … Every citizen owes to the country a vigilant watch and close scrutiny of its public servants and a fair and reasonable estimate of their fidelity and usefulness. Thus is the people’s will impressed upon the whole framework of our civil polity—municipal, State, and Federal; and this is the price of our liberty and the inspiration of our faith in the Republic.

2. G.B. Shaw on the evils of the 19th century

By all objective measures – infant mortality, life span, income, quality of life, literacy, working hours – Europeans and Americans have better lives in 1900 than in 1800. Statistics on these are in Timeline 1700-1799 (pp. 11-14), and will also appear in Timeline 1800-1899.

But for George Bernard Shaw and avowed socialists at Britain’s Fabian Society {1884 Phil}, the glass is not just half empty: what it contains is filthy sludge. From Shaw’s Manifesto for the Fabian Society {1884 Phil}:

The Fabians are associated for the purpose of spreading the following opinions held by them, and discussing their practical consequences.

That, under existing circumstances, wealth cannot be enjoyed without dishonour, or foregone without misery. ...

That the pretensions of Capitalism to encourage Invention, and to distribute its benefits in the fairest way attainable, have been discredited by the experience of the nineteenth century. ...

That since Competition among producers admittedly secures to the public the most satisfactory products, the State should compete with all its might in every department of production. ...

That the State should compete with private individuals—especially with parents—in providing happy homes for children, so that every child may have a refuge from the tyranny or neglect of its natural custodians.

That we had rather face a Civil War than such another century of suffering as the present one has been.

3. Social Gospel movement: What Would Jesus Do?

On the other side of the pond, the 1880s sees the rise of the Social Gospel movement {1880s-1910s Phil}. Its adherents don’t call for socialism. They merely want the government to help prepare for the Second Coming by correcting the “evils” of industrial society – for example, by legislating a shorter workweek, pushing unionization, regulating corporations, implementing progressive taxation, and eradicating alcoholism and slums. If these sound familiar, it’s because many of the Social Gospel movement’s aims are adopted by the Progressive movement {1890s-1917 US}.

Among those espousing the Social Gospel, a favorite book is Charles Monroe Sheldon’s In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, from 1896. Sheldon’s uses a sort of “aw, shucks” writing style that I haven’t seen before this in nonfiction works, to suggest that what he’s proposing is merely common sense.

“I’m not an ordinary tramp, though I don’t know of any teaching of Jesus that makes one kind of a tramp less worth saving than another. ... I’ve tramped through this city for three days trying to find a job; and in all that time I’ve not had a word of sympathy or comfort except from your minister here, who said he was sorry for me and hoped I would find a job somewhere. I suppose it is because you get so imposed on by the professional tramp that you have lost your interest in any other sort. I’m not blaming anybody, am I? Just stating facts. Of course, I understand you can’t all go out of your way to hunt up jobs for other people like me. I’m not asking you to; but what I feel puzzled about is, what is meant by following Jesus.”

4. I do not think that word (“capitalism”) means what you think it means

And then there’s Edward Bellamy, who presents a utopian vision of America’s future in his novel Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887 (1888). Bellamy doesn’t condemn capitalism as such … he just uses the term to mean “government control of all industry and commerce.”

[Around 1900] the industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for their profit, were intrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to say, organized as the one great business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared.

If you’re wondering what happened in philosophy that led to such conclusions in politics, skim through the Philosophy & Religion category of the Timeline.

5. Meanwhile in Norway: the majority is always wrong

Ibsen’s Enemy of the People {1883 Drama} focuses on government corruption and the evils of letting the majority be in complete control. It still resonates.

Dr. Stockton: I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over. But, good Lord!—you can never pretend that it is right that the stupid folk should govern the clever ones! (Uproar and cries.) Oh, yes—you can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has might on its side—unfortunately; but right it has not. I am in the right—I and a few other scattered individuals. The minority is always in the right. (Trans. R. Farquharson Sharp, 1893)

And now, a palate cleanser.

Technology

5. Is Tesla just a genius, or could we learn to do that, too?

In the 1880s there are signs of Bad Things to Come in politics, but science and technology are still thriving. In 1888, Tesla patents a self-starting induction motor, the first motor capable of running on AC power. In 1891, he patents the Tesla coil, a high-frequency, high-voltage transformer that can wirelessly transmit electricity – essential for radio antennas and wireless telegraphy.

Here’s Tesla, in “My Inventions” (1919), explaining how he develops his ideas. I’m very much a work-it-out-on-paper person, but boy, I wish I could work like Tesla!

The moment one constructs a device to carry into practise a crude idea he finds himself unavoidably engrost with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. ... My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination. ... When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it.

Architecture

6. The Eiffel Tower as a blot on the Parisian landscape

What seems outrageous when first suggested often becomes beloved once it’s familiar. Case in point: when Gustave Eiffel proposes a huge iron tower as the anchor point for a Paris World’s Fair {1889 Arch}, prominent artists object vehemently. Below is part of a public statement made in February 1887 by the “Committee of Three Hundred,” whose members include Garnier {Paris Opera, 1861-1875 Arch}, Bouguereau {1875 Paint}, Gounod {3/19/1859 Opera} and Massenet {2/16/1892 Opera}.

Imagine for a moment a vertiginously, ridiculously high tower that dominates Paris like a gigantic black smokestack; it crushes under its barbaric weight Notre Dame, the Saint-Chapelle, the Dome of Les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe. All our monuments are humiliated, all our architecture is dwarfed; they vanish in this stupefying dream. And for twenty years, across the whole city—in which still shimmers the genius of so many centuries—we shall see stretching, like a blot of ink, the odious shadow of the odious column of bolted sheet metal.

Part of Eiffel’s response (also excerpted in the Timeline):

So let us ask: should one refuse the means of attaining an eternal fame, by rejecting that which has never been done before?

7. Sculpture as depression and protruberance

The first time I saw a full-size cast of Rodin’s Thinker was on Columbia University’s campus, where I was collecting photos of outdoor sculpture in New York. (Used to be my niche: see here.) I was delighted to see a work I recognized. Then I started to really look at it: unpleasant surface texture, weird anatomy, and a pose that makes it look like using your brain is difficult, unpleasant chore.

Well, Rodin doesn’t intend to inspire. Here’s Rodin on sculpture:

Others may say that art is emotion, inspiration. Those are only phrases, tales with which to amuse the ignorant. Sculpture is quite simply the art of depression and protruberance. (Rodin, The Man and His Art, comp. J. Cladel, trans. S.K. Star, 1917)

At the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, well over 100 works by Rodin are displayed in a pavilion dedicated to his work. He is respected and extremely influential, and not in a good way … But we don’t have to look at that until the early 20th century.

I would hate to leave you thinking of that (that would make thinking a chore!), so here are a few works by sculptors who didn’t view their works as a combination of bumps and hollows.

On Saint Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, and Frederick MacMonnies, see Artist-Entrepreneurs. On Nathan Hale (one of my favorite NYC sculptures), see here. On Bartholdi’s work, see Statue of Liberty: Timeless Art, Political Hot Topic.

Coming in mid-June: Music of the 1880s.

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A couple notes

Simon Danz, the poem’s main character, is dreaming of the Dutch Golden Age, ca. 1588-1672. At that period, despite its small size, the Netherlands was one of wealthiest nations in Europe, home to the Dutch East India Company (the world’s largest commercial enterprise) and to the Bank of Amsterdam (the world’s most trusted institution for national and international finance). This prosperity occurred despite the fact that from 1566 to 1648, the mostly Protestant Dutch were fighting a brutal war for independence from Catholic Spain. The battles took place not only in the Netherlands but on the high seas, where the Dutch were fighting for control of newly opened trade routes to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. That’s why Captain Simon Danz recalls so fondly that he and his buccaneers “singed the beard of the King of Spain.” (For more on the Dutch and Europe at this period, see Timeline 1700-1799: World in 1700.)

Locations mentioned in the poem:

• Dean of Jaen. Jaen is north of Granada, about 100 miles from the south coast of Spain. Saying a Dutch ship raided Jaen is like saying the British navy sacked Atlanta, Georgia: a very tall tale. The dean of any Spanish church would, of course, be Catholic, hence a bitter enemy of the Dutch.

• Algiers is on the coast of North Africa. The Barbary Coast (Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers), which came under Ottoman domination in the early 16th century, was a notorious haven for pirates. They constantly attacked European ships in the Mediterranean, capturing goods and holding Christian crews and passengers for ransom, or selling them as slaves.

• The Maese is the Maas River (French Meuse). It debouches into the Atlantic just south of The Hague, so Simon Danz lives close to the sea.

• Tarragon is on the east coast of Spain, just south of Barcelona.

“A Dutch Picture”

Simon Danz has come home again,
From cruising about with his buccaneers;
He has singed the beard of the King of Spain,
And carried away the Dean of Jaen
And sold him in Algiers.

In his house by the Maese, with its roof of tiles,
And weathercocks flying aloft in air,
There are silver tankards of antique styles,
Plunder of convent and castle, and piles
Of carpets rich and rare.

In his tulip-garden there by the town,
Overlooking the sluggish stream,
With his Moorish cap and dressing-gown,
The old sea-captain, hale and brown,
Walks in a waking dream.

A smile in his gray mustachio lurks
Whenever he thinks of the King of Spain,
And the listed tulips look like Turks,
And the silent gardener as he works
Is changed to the Dean of Jaen.

The windmills on the outermost
Verge of the landscape in the haze,
To him are towers on the Spanish coast,
With whiskered sentinels at their post,
Though this is the river Maese.

But when the winter rains begin,
He sits and smokes by the blazing brands,
And old seafaring men come in,
Goat-bearded, gray, and with double chin,
And rings upon their hands.

They sit there in the shadow and shine
Of the flickering fire of the winter night;
Figures in color and design
Like those by Rembrandt of the Rhine,
Half darkness and half light.

And they talk of ventures lost or won,
And their talk is ever and ever the same,
While they drink the red wine of Tarragon,
From the cellars of some Spanish Don,
Or convent set on flame.

Restless at times with heavy strides
He paces his parlor to and fro;
He is like a ship that at anchor rides,
And swings with the rising and falling tides,
And tugs at her anchor-tow.

Voices mysterious far and near,
Sound of the wind and sound of the sea,
Are calling and whispering in his ear,
“Simon Danz! Why stayest thou here?
Come forth and follow me!”

So he thinks he shall take to the sea again
For one more cruise with his buccaneers,
To singe the beard of the King of Spain,
And capture another Dean of Jaen
And sell him in Algiers.

Coming next (5/4/2026): the decade of the 1880s.

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“Jeanne était au pain sec” (“Jeanne was sentenced to dry bread”) is one of my favorites in L’Art d’être grand-père. In the rough translation below, I’ve tried to keep the terminology of the criminal courts. (Shades of Jean Valjean!) Although it’s slightly stiff in English, I’ve also kept Hugo’s use of the French “on” (“one”) rather than translating it as “he” or “she”. It makes the looming authority figure (governess? housekeeper? butler?) rather more forbidding. Alas, I can’t do anything about the rhymes: I haven’t the poetic talent to make them work in an English translation. So we lose some of the fun, for example when Hugo rhymes forfeiture (penalty) with confiture (jam). The French original is here (search “pain sec”).

Jeanne was sentenced to dry bread in a dark room
For some crime or other; and, failing in my duty,
I went to see the condemned one while she was still suffering the penalty.
And against the rules, I slipped her, in the dark,
A pot of jam. All those in whom, in my city-state,
The good of society reposes,
Became indignant, and Jeanne said, in a gentle voice:
“I won’t touch my nose with my thumb;
I won’t let myself be scratched any more by the kitten.”
But one said indignantly: “This child knows you;
She knows just where you’re weak and lax.
She sees you always laughing when one gets upset.
No exercise of authority is possible. Every moment
The system is troubled by you; power is relaxed;
No moral order. The child has nothing to arrest her.
You demolish it all.” – And I lowered my head,
And I said: “I have no answer for that;
I was wrong. Yes, it’s with such indulgences as these
That one leads the people to their doom.
Let me be sentenced to dry bread.” “You deserve it, certainly,
And one will impose the penalty.” – Then Jeanne, in her dark corner,
Said to me very quietly, raising her beautiful eyes,
Full of the authority of gentle creatures:
“All right then: me, I’ll bring you some jam.”

This article by Lucy Hamilton on Timothy Adès’s translation of L’Art d’etre grand-pere includes excerpts from more of the poems in that volume.

Coming next (6/3/2026): one more poem from the 1870s.

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We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties,
we build up the world’s great cities.
And out of a fabulous story,
we fashion an empire’s glory.
One man, with a dream, at pleasure
shall go forth and conquer a crown.
And three, with a new song’s measure
can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
in the buried past of the Earth,
built Nineveh with our sighing
and Babel itself with our mirth.
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
to the old of the New World’s worth.
For each age is a dream that is dying,
or one that is coming to birth.

In modern anthologies, those three stanzas are usually all that’s included of “Ode”, and those are the ones I’ve memorized. But the poem goes on for 6 more stanzas, in which O’Shaughnessy describes (rather vaguely) the divine brotherhood he envisions and the loneliness of the visionary.

A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming—
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man’s soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.

And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry—
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God’s future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

O’Shaughnessy died at age 36. “Ode”, published when he was 30, is his most famous work. It has been set to music by several composers. The most famous version: “The Music Makers” by Elgar (37 mins.).

Trivia for all you herpetologists (not my usual audience!): O’Shaughnessy made his living studying reptiles at the British Museum. He is commemorated with the scientific names of four species of lizards: Calumma oshaughnessyi, Cercosaura oshaughnessyi, Enyalioides oshaughnessyi, and Pachydactylus oshaughnessyi.

Coming 6/2/26: a late poem by Victor Hugo.

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Each decade begins with “Major Events and Trends”, a summary by category. Below are the Major Events for the 1870s - a review for supporters and a teaser for free subscribers. The complete decade (for paid supporters) is here.

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In this decade:

• World: Franco-Prussian War, followed by German unification and the Paris Commune. Yet another Russo-Turkish War.

• US: New legislation incls. the 15th Amendment, Jim Crow laws, the Page Act (anti-Asian immigration), and the Comstock Act (anti-obscenity). POTUS election of 1876 is settled after nearly 4 months of debate. Centennial Exposition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. US signs treaties with Hawaii and Samoa.

• Economics: Battle over gold and silver currency. Government corruption: Credit Mobilier and Whiskey Ring scandals. Federal expansion: government sets railroad rates because they affect the “common good”, and the Supreme Court rules the government can seize private land via eminent domain. Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan are established. Menger founds the Austrian School.

• Science: Maxwell’s equations, Koch’s postulates, and exploration of Africa. Technology: 1st plastic, QWERTY typewriter, internal combustion engine, telephone, incandescent bulbs, phonograph, reinforced concrete.

• Philosophy & Religion: Vatican I, early Fundamentalists, Christian Scientists, Nietzsche on Apollo vs. Dionysus, and Peirce on truth as convergence. Ingersoll popularizes agnosticism.

• Nonfiction: Russians advocate anarchism. Schliemann discovers Troy.

• Visual arts: In architecture, Whistler’s Peacock Room and Richardsonian Romanesque. Painting: late Hudson River School (Heade, Moran), early Realism (Eakins, Homer), Impressionism (Monet, Degas, etc.), the Aesthetic Movement (Whistler), and French Academics (Bouguereau).

• Literature: Naturalism from Zola, the quintessential all-American boy from Twain, pessimism from Hardy. In drama, Ibsen tackles the status of women.

• Music: In opera, Verdi, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Bizet, and Tchaikovsky. Operetta: Strauss, Gilbert & Sullivan. Music: Grieg, Brahms, and a Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet.

Coming next (6/4/2026): the decade 1880-1889.

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From Timeline 1800-1899:

1876 (Jul. 4): Robert Ingersoll’s “Centennial Oration” celebrates the Founding Fathers and their ideals. Known as the “Great Agnostic”, Ingersoll advocates secularism, reason rather than faith, and individual liberty. His speeches and writings helped convert many Americans to agnosticism. Works such as Some Mistakes of Moses (1879), in which he critiques the book of Genesis and asserts that it is not to be interpreted literally, draw the ire of the speakers and attendees of the Niagara Conferences {1875-1897 Phil} and later Fundamentalists {1910-1915 Phil}.

To get into the 250th-anniversary mindset, this 6,800-word oration is well worth reading. Here’s the excerpt from it that I used in the Timeline:

One hundred years ago, our fathers retired the gods from politics.

The Declaration of Independence is the grandest, the bravest, and the profoundest political document that was ever signed by the representatives of a people. It is the embodiment of physical and moral courage and of political wisdom. ...

Such things had occasionally been said by some political enthusiast in the olden time, but, for the first time in the history of the world, the representatives of a nation, the representatives of a real, living, breathing, hoping people, declared that all men are created equal. With one blow, with one stroke of the pen, they struck down all the cruel, heartless barriers that aristocracy, that priestcraft, that king-craft had raised between man and man. They struck down with one immortal blow that infamous spirit of caste that makes a God almost a beast, and a beast almost a god. With one word, with one blow, they wiped away and utterly destroyed, all that had been done by centuries of war—centuries of hypocrisy—centuries of injustice. ...

Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government; the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights, and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more. In other words, our fathers were the first men who had the sense, who had the genius, to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword; that it should be allowed only to exert its moral influence. ...

The rights of all are equal: justice, poised and balanced in eternal calm, will shake from the golden scales in which are weighed the acts of men, the very dust of prejudice and caste: No race, no color, no previous condition, can change the rights of men.

The whole “Centennial Oration” is in the attached PDF (at end of this post), or listen to it read by Vincent Bagnall.

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2. Ibsen’s Doll’s House

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1879: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House premieres in Copenhagen. In this scathing attack on traditional marital roles, Nora, a conventional wife and mother, is so disillusioned by her husband’s behavior that she deserts him and their children. Ibsen’s plays explore social problems rather than preaching solutions. Here, the issue is the subjugation of women {7/19/1848 US, 1859-1860 Fic}. In An Enemy of the People {1882 Drama}, the issue is government corruption. During his lifetime Ibsen’s works are performed in avant-garde theaters, to the bewilderment and/or protests of many viewers. He becomes Norway’s most famous dramatist.

The issues Ibsen raises in A Doll’s House remind me of this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, from her collection The Harp Weaver and Other Poems. When it was published in 1923, women had gained the right to vote - but not necessarily to be considered as men’s intellectual equals. (Well, such recognition is something you earn rather than being given, isn’t it?)

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
“What a big book for such a little head!”
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
You will not catch me reading any more:
I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

Henry Kitchell Webster’s 1916 novel The Real Adventure (my favorite among his novels) deals with the same sort of issue. More on that in this post.

Ingersoll Centennial Oration 1876 20260512

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Coming next, 5/30/2026: Major Events of the 1870s, as a refresher and a teaser for the 1880s (coming 6/4/2026).

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Nine of the eleven works are part of longer works (links below). If you listen to all the longer works, it’ll take you 30 hours – but 15 of those hours are Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

For other music playlists for the 19th c., see the links in this post.

1. Verdi’s Aida

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1871 (Dec. 24): Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida (his 26th opera) premieres as the inaugural work at Cairo’s opera house. For this love triangle set in Ancient Egypt, Verdi writes not only the music but the scenario. Verdi’s middle period incls. works such as Rigoletto {3/11/1851 Opera}, La Traviata {3/6/1853 Opera}, and Don Carlos {3/11/1867 Opera}. [NOTE: See the playlists for the 1850s and 1860s.] In Aida, from his late period, there are fewer memorable stand-alone numbers; the emphasis instead is on psychological depth and dramatic flow.

The Triumphal March from Aida (7.5 mins.) is often performed as a stand-alone orchestral work. For the full, multimedia effect - with a couple hundred extras and four horses - there’s no beating the Met Opera’s production of ca. 2012. All of Aida runs 2.5 hours.

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2. Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1874 (Jan. 27): Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (his only opera) premieres in St. Petersburg. Based on an 1831 play by Pushkin {1833 Fic}, the opera centers on Tsar Boris Godunov (ruled 1598-1605), who kills the legitimate heir to the Russian throne, goes mad, and dies. Also in 1874, Mussorgsky composes Pictures from an Exhibition, a memorial to painter Viktor Hartmann. After Mussorgsky dies from alcoholism, Pictures is published with orchestration by Rimsky-Korsakov {1900 Music}. Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov are members of The Five (a.k.a. the Mighty Handful), whose common goal is to create a nationalist school of Russian music on a par with contemporary Russian Realism in literature {Turgenev, 1862 Fic; Dostoevsky, 1866 Fic; Tolstoy, 1868-1869 Fic}.

I included an excerpt from Boris Godunov in Timeline 1800-1899, but I saw Godunov once, and didn’t enjoy the story or the music. So instead, let’s do something more familiar: the “Great Gate of Kiev” (yes, that Kiev; 3.5 mins.) from Pictures at an Exhibition, which runs 35 minutes in all.

3. Johann Strauss II, Die Fledermaus

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1874 (Apr. 5): Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus (The Bat) premieres in Vienna. Based on a French farce of 1851, it is a light-hearted operetta about mistaken identities. Much of the music is the lively Viennese dances (waltzes, polkas) that made Strauss famous {2/15/1867 Music}. Die Fledermaus is the supreme example of Viennese operetta, a tradition continued by Franz Lehár {1907 Music} and Emmerich Kálmán.

If I could see Die Fledermaus live every New Year’s Eve, I would: effervescent music and a delightfully silly plot. The Overture (9 mins.) is often performed as an orchestral stand-alone, here in Strauss’s native Vienna. The whole operetta is 2.25 hours.

4. Bizet’s Carmen

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1875 (Mar. 3): Georges Bizet’s Carmen (his 10th opera) premieres in Paris. Based on an 1845 novella by Prosper Mérimée, it breaks conventions by using as main characters gypsies, thieves, and factory workers. In the use of such characters and in its focus on their jealousy and passion, Carmen prefigures the Italian opera style known as verismo {Mascagni, 5/17/1890 Opera}. Thirty-six-year-old Bizet dies 3 months after the premiere, while Carmen is still reviled by critics. It becomes popular only a decade later.

Hands down the most famous bit of Carmen is “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (a.k.a. “La Habanera”, 4 mins.), in which Carmen warns Don Jose that love – especially hers - isn’t, well, predictable. Bonus: see “La Habanera” in a Tom and Jerry cartoon of 1962 (3 mins.; Carmen starts at 1:52). The whole of Carmen runs 2.5 hours.

5. Grieg, Incidental Music to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1876: Edvard Grieg’s incidental music to Peer Gynt premieres, written at the request of Ibsen {1879 Drama, 1881 Drama, 1882 Drama} to be performed with Ibsen’s play of that name. Peer Gynt is based on a fairy tale about a peasant who travels from his native Norway to the African desert and back. Grieg’s music evokes the travels via a wide variety of instruments, styles and effects. The pieces are later arranged into 2 orchestral suites that are among the most popular works by Grieg, an important composer in the Romantic style {4/7/1805 Music}.

One of the most famous bits of Peer Gynt is In the Hall of the Mountain King (2.5 mins.). The whole suite is 45 minutes.

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6. Wagner, Ring of the Nibelung (the Ring Cycle)

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1876 (Aug. 13-17): Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (a.k.a. the Ring Cycle) premieres in Bayreuth. Together the four operas of the Ring Cycle—The Rhine Gold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung)—run about 15 hours. Wagner composes the score and writes the libretti for this tale of gods, giants, and dwarves, based loosely on characters from German and Norse sagas and on a medieval epic poem. He also makes extensive use of leitmotifs (short, recurring musical phrases) to evoke characters, places, emotions, or concepts. Among the many composers in the audience at the premiere of the Ring Cycle are Liszt {1846-1853 Music} and Tchaikovsky {3/4/1877 Music, 3/17/1879 Music, 8/20/1882 Music}. The Bayreuth Festival Theater is specially designed to handle Wagner’s huge orchestras and complex sets. The annual Bayreuth Festival remains an all-Wagner event.

I’m not a big fan of Wagner (more here, #2) - the only bit of his work that I occasionally hum is “Flight of the Valkyries” from Die Walkure (5 mins.). But I do owe Wagner one of the most unintentionally hilarious moments I ever experienced at the Met Opera. This video is from the Met Opera production that used a 45-ton gizmo known as the Machine, whose “planks” were rearranged (via computer) to suggest a forest, a mountain, or, as here, horses. In 2012 or 2013, when I was attending one of the operas in the Ring Cycle, the computer shut down while the Machine was in mountain mode. The audience waited patiently for it to reboot … then laughed hysterically as the Microsoft logo appeared on the peak of Brünnhilde’s mountain.

If you’ve got 15 hours to watch the whole Ring Cycle … then you’ve got time to find appropriate videos!

7. Brahms, Symphony No. 1

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1876 (Nov. 4): Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor premieres. In 1853, Schumann {1838 Music} brings Brahms instant fame when he praised Brahms’s approach to music, which is rooted in the classical and Romantic traditions {4/7/1805 Music}, and is more conservative than the works of Berlioz {12/5/1830 Music}, Liszt {1846-1853 Music}, and Wagner {6/10/1865 Opera, 8/13/1876 Opera, 7/26/1882 Opera}. Brahms spends some 20 years composing his first symphony, and has it 1st performed in Karlsruhe: he believes it will have a better chance of success away from Vienna’s Beethoven-worshipping audiences and critics.

The most famous movement of Symphony No. 1 is the 4th (18 mins.), which is often compared to the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (with the “Ode to Joy” – on which see this post, #3). Have a listen and see which you prefer. Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 runs 45 minutes.

8. Proctor & Sullivan, “The Lost Chord”

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1877: Adelaide Anne Proctor and Arthur Sullivan, “The Lost Chord.” Sullivan is most famous for writing operettas with W.S. Gilbert {5/25/1878 Opera, 4/23/1881 Opera, 3/14/1885 Opera}, but he also composes works such as this sentimental song. By this point many middle- and upper-class homes have pianos {1811 Music}. The piano music for “Lost Chord” is among the bestselling sheet music of the 1880s. When Edison introduces the phonograph {1878 Sci/Tech} to the London press in 1888, he uses a recording of “The Lost Chord”, which thereby becomes one of the earliest musical recordings. {For Sullivan’s reaction to the recording, see 1878 Sci/Tech ¶.}

This recording (3 mins.) includes the lyrics. Bonus track: Jimmy Durante (no relation) singing “I’m the Guy That Found the Lost Chord” (1947).

9. Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1877 (Mar. 4): Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake premieres at Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. Its story is based on a combination of Russian and German folk tales. Tchaikovsky’s other ballets are Sleeping Beauty (1889) and The Nutcracker (1892). Tchaikovsky {3/4/1877 Music, 3/17/1879 Music, 8/20/1882 Music} is an important composer in the Romantic style {4/7/1805 Music} and is the 1st Russian composer to become internationally famous.

The most famous bit from this ballet is the “Swan Theme” (3 mins.). This full-length performance with Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn runs 1.75 hours.

10. Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1878 (May 25): W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore premieres in London, their 4th collaboration and their 1st international hit. The comic operetta lampoons the British class system, patriotism, party politics, people who hold jobs they’re not qualified for, and much more. Pirates of Penzance (1879) is also a huge success. Collectively Gilbert and Sullivan’s works are known as the “Savoy operas”, after the London theater at which the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company performed most of them. The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan influence Victor Herbert {10/13/1903 Music} and modern musical theater.

Here’s the Captain of the Pinafore explaining how he acquired that job (2 mins.). We all know someone like this.

I have very fond memories of the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Society, at which trained singers perform a G&S operetta monthly. The difference from opera elsewhere: at the NY G&S Society, the audience is provided with libretti, so they can sing along as the mood strikes them. Given how fast G&S songs often move, I’m always happy to have the libretto at hand for “subtitles”. The whole operetta is 1.5 hours.

11. Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1879 (Mar. 17): Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (his 6th opera) premieres in Moscow. It is based on Alexander Pushkin’s verse novel of the same title {1833 Fic}, in which a man rejects a young woman’s love and incites a fatal duel with his best friend.

Here’s Lensky’s aria (5.5 mins.), which I used as an excerpt in Timeline 1800-1899. The whole opera is 2.5 hours.

12. BONUS: Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance

It would be mean to end the playlist on that depressing note, so here’s a bonus piece to make you laugh: Kevin Kline singing “Pirate King” (4 mins.) from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance (1879). The clip is from the wonderful 1983 movie starring Kline, Linda Ronstadt, Angela Lansbury, and Rex Smith.

Coming up next: Connections for the 1870s.

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In this decade:

• Napoleon III of France is rousted by the Prussians, and Parisians set fire to Paris.

• In US politics: Jim Crow laws, Comstockery, and a 4-month debate over POTUS election results.

• Economics: corruption leads to widespread distrust of government. Interstate Commerce Commission (1st federal regulatory agency) is formed. J.P. Morgan, Standard Oil, and the Austrian School.

• Science: Maxwell’s equations present a unified theory of light, electricity, and magnetism. Koch’s postulates set out how to tell if a specific microbe causes a specific disease. Tech: first plastic, QWERTY typewriter, telephone, incandescent bulbs. And as a reminder that the Age of Enlightenment has passed, even while its benefits in science remain ...

• Philosophy & religion: Vatican I declares the pope infallible. Early fundamentalists, Nietzsche, Pragmatism, and the Great Agnostic.

• In the arts: Richardsonian Romanesque, Eakins, Winslow Homer, Impressionists. Literature: Twain, Ibsen, Zola.

• Opera & music: Verdi, Wagner, Carmen, Gilbert & Sullivan, Swan Lake.

Coming next: music of the 1870s.

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Requirements: the city had to be old enough to have centuries of visible history and at least a few art museums; it had to be on a major railroad line, so we wouldn’t have to drive between cities; and it had to have a low crime rate, because worrying constantly about safety is not relaxing. Our choices: Dresden, Germany; Prague, Czech Republic; Vienna, Austria; Venice, Italy.

Because I like anticipating what I’m going to see and eat, I researched the history and cuisine of all those cities before we left. I also created a Google Map of the places we most wanted to see in each city - that way when we’re out and about, we can easily check our must-visit list for what’s nearby.

After the trip (it was fabulous!), I lightly edited my notes on history and food, and added photos and comments. These are all available as part of the Fearless Foreign Food series that I’ve been posting sporadically on my personal website for years.

The separate posts are:

• Dresden, Germany

• Prague, Czech Republic

• Vienna, Austria

• Venice, Italy

Enjoy!

Coming 5/4/2026: Timeline 1800-1899, the decade of the 1870s.

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Each decade begins with “Major Events and Trends”, a summary by category. Below are the “Major Events” for the 1860s - a review for supporters and a teaser for free subscribers. The complete decade (for paid supporters) is here.

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Major events

• World: Italian peninsula is unified for the 1st time since the Fall of Rome. France installs an emperor in Mexico. Bismarck begins decades of Realpolitik. Russia abolishes serfdom. Japan’s samurai overthrow the shogunate.

• US: Civil War, waged from Pennsylvania to Florida and from the East Coast to Texas, ends slavery in the US. Other results: 1st US military draft, draft riots in New York City (still the largest civil insurrection in US history), a burgeoning federal government (soon followed by rampant corruption), the assassination of a president, and the death of 2% of the population. Also this decade: Alaska Purchase.

• Economics: Marx’s Capital. Wall Street’s 1st Black Friday.

• Science: Mendeleyev’s periodic table, Mendel’s genetic experiments, Pasteur on the germ theory of disease, Lister on asepsis. Technology: refrigeration, the London Underground, dynamos, dynamite, Eads Bridge over the Mississippi, transatlantic cable, transcontinental railroad.

• Philosophy & Religion: Renan on the historical Jesus. Spencer on survival of the fittest.

• Nonfiction: Blanqui’s guide to armed revolution. Chernyshevsky on the ideal revolutionary’s passion for destruction. Nechayev’s catechism for becoming a revolutionary.

• Esthetics: William Morris rejects “the dull squalor of civilization” (affordable mass-produced goods).

• Visual arts: Garnier Opera in Paris and Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Manet, Cabanel, and the final painters of the Hudson River School. The Albert Memorial and Carpeaux’s Dance.

• Fiction: Hugo’s Les Misérables. A spate of Russian Realist novels: Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. Verne’s science fiction. Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories.

• Opera: Verdi’s middle period, incl. Rigoletto and La Traviata. Early Wagner. Civil War marching songs. Strauss’s “Beautiful Blue Danube”.

Coming 5/4/2026: the decade 1870-1879.

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3. Verdi’s Don Carlos

From Timeline 1800-1899:

¶ 1867 (Mar. 11): Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos (his 25th opera) premieres in Paris, where Verdi has challenged and surpassed Meyerbeer {11/21/1831 Opera} in the creation of spectacular works on serious subjects. Based on a work by Schiller {8/29/1787 Drama}, Don Carlos begins with a love triangle: the King of Spain decides to marry his son Carlos’s fiancée. Soon it morphs into a battle over liberty that pits Carlos and his best friend against Philip II and his advisor, the Grand Inquisitor. Don Carlos incls. some of Verdi’s strongest anticlerical sentiments.

Timothee Chalamet’s comments on opera are getting more attention than they deserve, so I choose not to talk about them. (The name for that particular rhetorical flourish is “preterition”, “going by-ness”. I’m not mentioning him - except that I am.)

Let me tell you instead how opera became one of my favorite art forms, even though until I was many decades old, I never heard it anywhere except in Bugs Bunny cartoons. (On which see the Intermission in Part 1.)

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In the 1980s, a friend gave a lecture on Verdi’s Don Carlos. Since I’m an Objectivist, the philosophical side of the story appealed to me: a fight for liberty from repressive monarchs and the Church. I still love Don Carlos for that angle. Here’s my favorite part (2.5 mins.), known as the “Bro Duet”. Don Carlos and his friend the Marquis of Posa are vowing to fight for liberty.

Dio, che nell’alma infondere
amor volesti e speme,
desio nel core accendere
tu déi di libertà,
desio accendere nel cor
tu déi di libertà!

Oh God, who wished to instil
love and hope in our souls,
Thou must kindle within our hearts
a desire for liberty;
Thou must kindle within our hearts
a desire for liberty. (Trans. from memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki)

For the whole of Don Carlos, see here (3 hrs.).

However, that Don Carlos lecture wasn’t enough to make me listen to more operas. Looking back, I think it was because the lecture only had audio clips, and opera has always been a multimedia extravaganza. You need not only to hear the singers and the orchestra, but to see the performers moving on stage, in their costumes, on their sets.

Fast forwarding a decade: when our daughter was born in the 1990s, my husband and I were terrified that as soon as she became a rebellious teenager, she’d blast rap music through the house. So while she was young, the stereo played everything from Gregorian chant to 1980s pop. But we only played one opera: an abridged English version of Mozart’s Magic Flute (this one, I think, although they’ve changed the cover). When she was 5, as a holiday treat, all three of us went to see the Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera.

By age 10, she was singing and acting in musical theater productions of NYC homeschoolers, and wanted to make a career of that. A few years later, at her first private voice lessons, she heard another student singing opera … and fell in love with it.

Our daughter taught us that opera isn’t always (not even often) about a stout soprano in a horned helmet, and that it really should be seen as well as heard. In the past 15 years or so, I’ve attended dozens of operas - many more than once. In fact, I almost always enjoy an opera more the second time, just as I usually enjoy a favorite book or movie more the second time. I can more easily get swept along by the music and the story if I can watch the acting and really listen to the singing, without trying to follow every word of the subtitles.

But when is a multimedia spectacle less than a multimedia spectacle?

4. Smetana’s Bartered Bride

From Timeline 1800-1899:

1866 (May 30): Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride premieres in Prague. A comic opera inspired by a popular dance, it features more ensemble pieces than arias. Smetana, the founder and most important member of the Czech national school of music, adopts Wagner’s proposed reforms of opera {6/10/1865 Opera}.

Here’s the famous Polka from The Bartered Bride, based on one of the Czech dances that inspired the opera (4.25 mins.). Here’s the whole opera (2.25 hrs.). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any version with English subtitles.

In late March, while my husband and I were in Vienna for the very first time, we wanted to see a production at the State Opera House. The Staatsoper is one of those fantastic late-19th-c.buildings that makes you expect something magnificent the moment you cross the threshold.

Bartered Bride is a 19th-c. small-town rom-com: true love overcomes financial problems and scheming parents. We figured it wouldn’t be as intellectually thrilling as Don Carlos, but pleasant entertainment amid gorgeous architecture would be just fine.

Well. Hmpf. The production turned out to be an example of Regietheater (“director’s theater”), a relatively modern development. In this type of production, the director pushes and prods the opera to make his own in-the audience’s-face statement. Often that statement is related only loosely, if at all, to what the composer and librettist wrote. For example: the Met Opera’s current production of Carmen turns the lead male (a soldier) into an ICE agent, and sets the story not in Seville, but on the US-Mexico border. (More on that production here.) Other popular obsessions of Regietheater include gender roles, capitalism, feminism, and trauma.

Returning to The Bartered Bride: here’s an example of the staging of Act I in the Vienna production. The soon-to-be-bartered bride suddenly appears in a wedding dress (it is not her wedding day), sprawled atop a pile of stuffed animals. A claw machine - the kind you see in coin-operated games, but 10 feet high – slowly descends from the rafters. It latches onto the bride and hauls her up and out of sight. Villagers come onstage to pick up the plushies. A few human-size bears in pastel colors arise from the plushie pile and dance. The bears reappear sporadically, exactly like a Greek chorus if a Greek chorus never spoke and if its members looked just like Ty Beanie Babies. (No photos allowed in the theater, so you’ll have to imagine this.)

None of this stage business has any relationship to Smetana’s story. No explanation is for it is offered. That’s a problem because, as I said, opera is a multimedia spectacle. If the song, acting, costumes, and staging don’t all work together to tell a story, you get a hot and horrible mess. I cannot even guess what the director’s message was in this production of Bartered Bride. My husband was able to toggle the critical part of his brain off, and enjoy the top-notch singing. But I expended a lot of mental effort in being offended on Smetana’s behalf.

The moral of this Viennese vignette is: if you’re a newbie and want to attend an opera live, look for a traditional production – even if it means going to a production by a smaller opera company that can’t afford world-renowned stars. Don’t start with Regietheater versions.

5. Strauss’s “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”

And finally, a beautiful, lilting ending to 1860s music. From Timeline 1800-1899:

§ 1867 (Feb. 15): § 1867 (Feb. 15): Johann Strauss’s “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” originally written for a men’s chorus, premieres at the 1867 Paris World’s Fair as an orchestral piece. It is the most famous work by the “Waltz King”, who makes the Viennese waltz {1815 Music} famous worldwide.

“The Blue Danube” is the unofficial Viennese anthem. This version (8.25 mins.) was recorded at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace by André Rieu and his Johann Strauss Orchestra, with couples waltzing in the background. I know people who are bored to tears by this waltz, but for me, it’s an immediate mood lift. It transports me to a world that’s bright and cheerful.

Coming up 5/1/2026: a recap of major events of the 1860s.

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1. Civil War Music

You may not know that these songs date to the Civil War, but you’ve surely heard “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Dixie” so often that you can sing or hum along. From Timeline 1800-1899:

1862: Civil War popular music. The unofficial marching song of the Union Army is Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 1st published in Atlantic Monthly in Feb. 1862. Howe, an abolitionist, uses biblical imagery to paint the Union as fighting a divinely sanctioned war to end slavery. Her lyrics are set to the tune of the already popular “John Brown’s Body” {10/16/1859 US}. In the South, the unofficial marching song is “Dixie’s Land”, written by Ohioan Daniel Decatur Emmett in 1859 for Bryant’s Minstrels, a blackface minstrel troupe {1851 Music} in New York City.

Re “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: If you’ve been paying attention to the illustrations in Timeline 1800-1899, you’ll recognize a lot of the archival images in this video (5.5 mins.). This screen capture, for example, is the image I used in the Timeline for Manifest Destiny {1845 US}.

The final stanza of the “Battle Hymn” as written by Howe is: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” In the video, that’s changed to: “As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free” - which is surely far more appealing to soldiers and their families.

This video of “Dixie” (3.75 mins.) also uses archival images.

Bonus video (2.5 mins.): the Union version of “Dixie”, written in 1861 by Fanny Crosby. It begins:

Away down South in the land of traitors,
Rattlesnakes and alligators,
Right away, come away, right away, come away. …

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2. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde

If you think of opera as a stout, middle-aged female in a horned helmet belting out a solo while she dies in slow-mo … blame Wagner.

From Timeline 1800-1899, the 1st entry for a Wagner opera:

§ 1865 (Jun. 10): Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde premieres in Munich. It’s based on a 12th-c. German version of the story of the ill-fated lovers Tristan and Iseult. Wagner calls it not an opera but a “music-drama”. He composes the score, writes the libretto, and gives instructions for production and acting—all with the goal of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) in which text, music, direction and stage design are blended so that no one element dominates. […] In Tristan, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), and Parsifal (1882), Wagner’s views on art are clearly influenced by Schopenhauer {1818 Phil}, a profound pessimist who asserted that true reality is Will. Will can only be grasped by non-rational means such as music, and suffering can only be escaped via renunciation. In Tristan, this is exemplified in the famous “Liebestod” (Love-Death) aria, when Isolde, singing over the body of her dead lover, exults at the thought that soon she will be united with him by being merged with the All. In Germany, Wagner’s works are considered the peak of Romantic opera {5/22/1813 Opera}. His style influences Mahler {1888-1894 Music}, Richard Strauss {11/11/1889 Music}, Schoenberg {2/25/1924 Music}, and Britten {6/7/1945 Music}, among others. Wagner’s antisemitic views make him a hero of Hitler and the Nazi Party {1925-1927 Nonfic}.

Fair warning: I’d prefer a standing-room-only ticket to a Baroque, classical, or bel canto opera over a best-seat-in-house ticket to a Wagner opera. Perhaps because his work is influenced by Schopenhauer, I’ve never seen an opera by Wagner whose characters and plot meshed with my sense of life.

But your context is not mine, and you should make your own judgment. (My husband likes Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and sometimes Wagner, yet I still love and respect him.) Have a listen to these two famous bits of Tristan und Isolde, and see if you like them: the Prelude (11 mins.) and the “Liebstod” (7.25 mins.). One of Wagner’s innovations is the unresolved, dissonant “Tristan chord”. It appears early in the Prelude, recurs elsewhere in the opera, and is only “resolved” in the opera’s final moments, when Isolde is dying.

Here’s a recording of the whole opera (4 hrs.) performed at Bayreuth, whose opera house was built specifically for the staging of Wagner’s works.

SIDE NOTE: I just had an ironic thought about Schopenhauer {1818 Phil}, given how much I’ve written on artificial intelligence. When I’m writing Timeline 1700-1900, I scrupulously try to understand each philosopher on his own terms. I look at him in historical context: what did he take from others, and what did he pass on? I check whether his statements correspond to my own knowledge of reality: is any of what he says true? And then I write a blurb that sets that information out clearly but neutrally. This process is extraordinarily difficult when it comes to a philosopher like Schopenhauer, one of whose major premises is that no one can actually perceive reality. That premise makes so little sense to me that I find it difficult to write about the rest of his theories. But if I ignore him, then we lose some of the historical context for Wagner, Nietzsche, etc. So I compromise: I essentially become a large-language model. I look up what scholars say about Schopenhauer and regurgitate the points they have in common in a way that I hope will make sense to a novice, if not to Schopenhauerians. Ugggghhhhh. This sort of mental dissonance becomes even more of a problem in the late 19th and the 20th centuries. But … if you read the philosophy entries in the Timeline in sequence, you can at least get a grip on the progression of premises from bad to worse to worstest. The 2010s will make more sense if you know what was going on in the 1870s.

Intermission

NOTE: YouTube doesn’t allow children’s videos such as Bugs Bunny to be added to playlists. Click the links below to get to them.

I was sure I remembered a Bugs Bunny cartoon with a Wagnerian soprano in a horned helmet. Since we deserve a breather after Wagner and Schopenhauer, let me tell you what happened when I tried to find that cartoon - bearing in mind the cold in my head was messing with my usual scholarly self-discipline.

When asked Grok about Wagner and Bugs Bunny, it referred me to “The Rabbit of Seville” (2.5 mins., 1st of 3 videos). That was hilarious and worth watching, but it’s based on Rossini’s Barber of Seville {2/20/1816 Opera}, not Wagner.

It turns out a surprising number of Bugs Bunny clips are opera-related. Purely for the sake of knowledge, I checked them all. The clip most closely related to Wagner features Elmer Fudd in a horned helmet, chasing wabbits (3.5 mins.).

From Bugs Bunny I somehow veered off to a Bardcore (medieval!) version of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” (4.5 mins.). That brought to mind this version of “Bad Romance”, on the women’s suffrage movement of ca. 1900 (5 mins.). That in turn led me to look up the official music video of “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga (5 mins.). What a surprise! Anyone who didn’t sleep through the 2010s has heard the song, but I’m sure I’d never seen that video. It’s too weird to forget. Having finally watched it, I understand why the Women’s Suffrage video has the costumes and movements that it does. Whoever was responsible did a brilliant variation.

Then I went back to Bardcore. It has a certain fascination because the images are quasi-medieval, and I handled a lot of medieval manuscripts while writing my doctoral dissertation decades back. Favorite Bardcore songs: “Paint It Black” (very un-Rolling Stones-like), “Viva La Vida” (the Bardcore version is so different musically that I had to relisten to the Coldplay original), and “Holding Out for a Hero” (some very clever lyric changes). I like figuring out which rhythms and instrumentation and lyrics appeal to me most.

So much for the Intermission.

Coming up next (4/19/2026): Music of the 1860s part 2, with Verdi, Smetana (including a rant), and the unofficial Viennese anthem.

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Gifford, Passing Storm in the Adirondacks (1866)

This may look like a mere landscape, but there’s a symbolic meaning: the storm that’s passing is the Civil War. Sanford Robinson Gifford was a leading figure in the Luminists {1862 Paint}, a subset of the Hudson River School {1836 Paint}.

Field, Erastus Salisbury. Historical Monument of the American Republic (1867?-1888)

And then there’s this work: a quirky 9 x 13 foot summary of America until Field’s time.

The details are remarkable. For example: rising between the first and second towers at the left is a short tower topped by a jaunty figure of Satan. Below him is an inscription in Field’s somewhat shaky lettering: “The institution of Slavery we inherited from the good old patriarch, please let us alone all ye trouble of Israel.”

More details of the Historical Monument appear in this post and this video. Field seems to have placed the topics on the towers in no particular order. Some scenes have explanatory inscriptions. Some don’t. To help viewers decipher the painting, Field published an eleven-page pamphlet explaining it scene by scene: Descriptive Catalogue of the Historical Monument of the American Republic (Amherst, MA, 1876).

Astonishingly, Field didn’t intend this painting merely as a symbolic representation. He hoped to see these towers built for the 1876 Centennial Exposition {5/10/1876 US}. The tallest tower would have been 500 feet tall. For scale: the Washington Monument, under construction 1848-1884, is 555 feet.

Up next (mid-April 2026): music of the 1860s, including Civil War marching songs, opera, Elmer Fudd, Lady Gaga, and the “Blue Danube”.

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