The Futurist Manifesto

On the morning of February 20, 1909, Parisians who opened their copy of Le Figaro with their café et croissant and might have been amused, outraged, dismayed, enlivened, non plussed, or simply puzzled by the “Manifeste de Futurisme” by one Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that appeared on the newspaper’s front page.

In an era that can rightly be called the Age of Manifestos or the Age of Isms, the Manifesto of Futurism harks back to Marx and Engels and sets the tone and style for those “isms” to come, including Vorticism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in a 1915 photograph; britannica.com

Marinetti’s manifesto was, to put it mildly, over the top.

The manifesto is one part prose-poem, one part wholehearted embrace of modernity, and one part a hysterical screed decrying anything perceived as peaceful, bourgeois, traditional, or feminine.

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Modernity and Modernism

Imagine you live in a world once quiet but now suddenly noisy. A world once slow but now rapidly gaining speed. A world where people who used to stay put are now migrating from villages to cities, across borders, and even from continent to continent.

Imagine a world where things once made by hand are now made by machine. A world where the day’s progress is marked not by the rising and setting of the sun, but by town clocks and pocket watches. A world where power comes not from muscle but from steam and electricity.

What you are imagining happened in many parts of the globe during the nineteenth century. Scholars refer to these technological changes and the influences they wrought as “modernity.”

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Construction of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, historytoday.com

Charles Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life

Baudelaire’s 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” is considered by scholars to be one of modernism’s foundational texts.

In his essay, Baudelaire praises fellow Parisian Constantin Guys for his illustrations and watercolors that capture the fleeting, ephemeral, and ever-changing aspects of modernity.

Guys was also one of the first visual journalists, sent by a London newspaper to cover the Crimean War—which I think makes him doubly modern.

Guy’s illustrations, some just hasty sketches done in the line of fire, were engraved and published only weeks after the events they depicted, a first for journalism.

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La Loge de l’opéra (“A box at the opera”), Constantin Guys; wikiart.org

The Birth of Modern Music: Claude Debussy

Where would classical music go after Richard Wagner? How would composers who followed in his footsteps deal with his gargantuan presence?

For his part, French composer Claude Debussy decided to challenge Wagner head on. First, he absorbed Wagner’s lessons on dissonance from the prelude to Tristan and Isolde. Then he set out to surpass his teacher.

In his first major orchestral work, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Debussy paid tribute (or perhaps slyly parodied) Wagner’s prelude, with plenty of unresolved dissonances and even a version of the famous Tristan chord.

But Debussy created a unique sonic world that sounds nothing like Wagner’s. In doing so, he led music into the modern era.

Ultimately, Debussy came to view Wagner as a monument doomed to suffer the ravages of time, “a beautiful sunset which one mistook for a dawn.”

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Claude Debussy, britannica.com

Precursors to Modernism: Richard Wagner, Part 2

Opera was the original multimedia entertainment, combining text, singing, orchestral music, dance, costumes, sets, and lighting. German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), a consummate showman, had a hand in all aspects of the creation and production of his operas.

When the audience at the premiere of Wagner’s 1865 opera Tristan and Isolde heard the opening measures of the prelude, they were hearing sounds that would change the future of music–not just classical but jazz, Broadway, and rock.

The pulsating, swelling, unresolved dissonances mirrored the longing and lust experienced by the story’s namesake characters. Wagner had broken the sound barrier of traditional classical music, and in doing so paved the way for modernist composers such as Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg.

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Met Opera staging of Tristan from 2016, with Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton, metopera.org

Precursors to Modernism: Richard Wagner, Part 1

It is hard to overstate the importance of German opera composer Richard Wagner, one of music’s first rock stars, to the cultural life of the mid- to late-nineteenth century (and even beyond). So writes Alex Ross in his 2020 book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.

Ross presents a long list of familiar artists, poets, and novelists who engaged with Wagner’s dramas—whether by appropriating his themes, adopting his compositional methods, or using specific operas as inspiration, plot driver, or metaphor.

Ross says Wagner was particularly influential to the development of modernism. He quotes the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who was friends with the composer (until they fell out over Nietzsche’s repudiation of Wagner): “Wagner sums up modernity. It can’t be helped, one must first become a Wagnerian.”

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German opera composer Richard Wagner, wagnermuseum.de

Recap and Resources

To learn about the books and websites I found useful when designing my modernism course and writing the articles for this website, click here….

Cracks in the Facade: the Blackbody Problem

As if the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment to find any evidence of the “luminiferous ether” wasn’t vexing enough, another mystery plagued physicists near the end of the nineteenth century.

Metal heated sufficiently will begin to emit electromagnetic radiation, in the form of light—first red, orange, yellow, then blue.

The so-called blackbody problem was the inability of classical physics to explain the exact relationship between heat applied to the metal, the frequency of the radiation emitted (color of light), and the energy contained in the radiation.

German Physicist Max Planck solved the problem, Albert Einstein provided additional insights, and a new field of physics, quantum mechanics, was born in the early twentieth century.

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Max Planck, britannica.com

Cracks in the Facade: Michelson-Morley Experiment

Science in the second half of the nineteenth century was jolted out of complacency by the failure of physicist Albert A. Michelson and chemist Edward W. Morely to find any evidence of the “luminiferous ether,” the hypothetical medium through which light waves were supposed to travel.

This failure upended aspects of Newtonian physics and ultimately led to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

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American physicist Albert A. Michelson, news.uchicago.edu; American chemist Edward W. Morley, worldofchemicals.com

Cracks in the Facade: Charles Darwin

For my study of modernism, I consider Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species, to be the second great disruptor of the nineteenth century.

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Charles Darwin, en.wikipedia.org