Romantic Army on the March off Cliffs!

In belated honor of this blog's one year birthday, have a free opera from Paris! This is Massenet's Werther. Unfortunately the subtitles are in French, but the Amateur Historian would like to point out two scenes of Romantic OTT that need to be seen- 82:16-83:00 where Werther falls to the floor and curls into a fetal position at the loss of Charlotte, and 88:18-30, where Werther jumps off a wall in lieu of any other civilized way of ending a conversation. I highly recommend the opera, which is lovely, musically speaking, and suffers only slightly from being a Romantic work of literature that got reinterpreted into Victorian sentimentalism.

The Amateur Historian adores Romanticism, but is more of Byron's camp than Wordsworth's. The best Romanticism is done with a straight-face, but with tongue firmly in cheek.