Storm and Stress: when young Goethe and Schiller rebelled against reason
For roughly fifteen years from the late 1760s, German writers traded Enlightenment balance for raw feeling, revenge plots and heroes answerable to nobody. The movement took its name from a 1776 play about the American Revolution, produced Goethe's Werther and Schiller's The Robbers, and was later dismissed by its own founders as youthful excess.
Sturm und Drang, usually rendered 'storm and stress', was a proto-Romantic reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and against French neoclassical theatre in particular. Its writers championed individual subjectivity and emotional extremes over order, empiricism and universal rules. The label came from Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's play Sturm und Drang, written for Abel Seyler's touring company and set during the American Revolution. Whether or not similar work existed earlier, that play made German artists conscious they were pursuing something new.
Its thinkers came largely from Königsberg. Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, both once in contact with Immanuel Kant, supplied the theory, and a 1773 essay collection including Herder on Shakespeare and Ossian, with contributions from Goethe, became its central manifesto. Typical protagonists act violently out of revenge or greed rather than noble motives, and the works lean anti-aristocratic, elevating the humble, the natural and the frightening.
Two books define it. Goethe's 1774 novel of hopeless love, The Sorrows of Young Werther, ends in suicide, and Schiller's 1781 play The Robbers, pitting two aristocratic brothers against each other, helped establish melodrama as a recognised form. Both writers later moved on to create Weimar Classicism. Scholars still argue over who belongs in the canon, and some note that women writers such as Marianne Ehrmann have been left out, whether through the movement's masculine ethos or critics' neglect.
Music is a looser fit. Composers associated with the mood favoured minor keys, jagged leaping melodies, sudden dynamic shifts and tremolo strings. Gluck's 1761 ballet Don Juan, whose D minor finale was meant to inspire fear, is often seen as the first musical sign. Haydn's agitated symphonies of the late 1760s and early 1770s, including the Farewell, and Mozart's Symphony No. 25 in G minor are often linked to it, though neither composer claimed the label, and Mozart was probably responding to minor-key works by Johann Baptist Wanhal.
Source: Sturm und Drang
