During the second half of the nineteenth century, varieties of Realism and later Romanticism dominated art and music.  This chapter discusses these styles, as well as the profound influence that nationalism exerted on composers.

As Realist artists worked to represent the world accurately, they both participated in the Renaissance tradition and drew inspiration from scientific advances.  One of the most influential of these advances was photography.  Early photographersincluding Daguerre, Archer, Nadar, and Bradyshared Realist artists concern with light, and their work encouraged artists both to strive for ever greater accuracy of detail (particularly in portraiture) and to consider the distinctiveness of their media.  France was the center of Realism, but Realist artists, many of whom were republicans or socialists, had to contend with the conservative French Academy that constantly excluded their works from the annual Salons.  The leading French Realists were Courbet and Daumier, both of whom expressed their sympathies for the rural and urban poor by portraying them in realistic settings engaged in everyday tasks, using subdued, even monochromatic, colors.

Impressionism emerged as a logical extension of Realism.  However, while Realists focused on objects themselves, the Impressionists attended to the effects of light and shade on surfaces, thus breaking significantly with the Renaissance tradition.  Further, although the Impressionists shared the Realists interest in everyday life, they generally depicted middle-class leisure rather than working-class toil.  Manet bridged Realism and Impressionism by emphasizing surface light and color.  Following Courbet and reacting to the precision of photography, he also gave himself to purely artistic considerations, experimenting with perspective and composition in flat, two-dimensional spaces.  Manet pioneered the signature Impressionist style, rendering surface forms with dabs of color.  Influenced by Constable and Turner, he painted series of landscapes capturing the subtle progression of light over particular objects.  Morisot used Impressionist techniques to portray domestic scenes, and Renoir depicted the middle-class at play until he abandoned Impressionism as an artistic dead-end.  Degas also strove to capture fleeting moments but did so through well-modeled forms, such as those in his famous ballerina pictures, and with emphasis on human character.  Cassatt also focused on character, depicting ordinary scenes involving women and children.  Drawing on Italian Renaissance influences, Rodin developed an Impressionist sculpture, modeling surfaces to capture realistic details and heighten their sensuality.

Architecture was transformed by the emergence of mass-produced iron and steel, the latter through the Bessemer process.  Strong and fire-resistant, structural steel in particular enabled architects to cover vast spaces.  Paxton took advantage of this material to build the Crystal Palace, creating the largest enclosed space to date.  Unlike the Palace, Garniers vast Paris Opera concealed the steel supports, masking them with an opulent, eclectic amalgam of Renaissance and Baroque designs.

Late-Romantic music divided into various schools and traditions based on aesthetics and/or national allegiance.  Advocates of Classical music and program music squared off, some of the latter forming the Neudeutsche Schule under the leadership of Liszt and Wagner.  A renowned pianist, Liszt pioneered the technique of thematic transformation, the tone poem genre, and the practice of transcribing orchestral works for piano.  Italian and German composers battled over true opera, the former emphasizing melody and the reality of human experience, the latter developing ideal character types and experimenting with harmony, musical texture, and recurring musical themes.  The leading Italian composer was Verdi, whose Classical operas expressed nationalistic themes and literary concerns.  Wagner transformed German opera into music drama, unifying music, poetry, and other art forms.  Through his operas based on Germanic folk tales and mythology, Wagner developed the leitmotif device and expressed his nationalist vision of a distinct German culture.

Several notable composers represented strains of Classicism, experimentalism, and nationalism.  Brahms led a Romantic Classicist reaction against Liszt and Wagner, composing symphonies and lieder in the tradition of Schubert, Schumann, and the Classical Beethoven.  Mahler and Strauss continued the experimentalism of Wagner with innovative tone poems, symphonies, and operas.  Dvoák and Sibelius composed nationalist music inspired by the landscape, legends, and folk music of their countries.  The Mighty Handful composersincluding Glinka, Borodin, and Mussorgskyincorporated uniquely Russian material into their works in an effort to create their own national musical tradition.  Though not a Russian nationalist, Tschaikovsky composed the patriotic 1812 Overture but is better known for his ballets, one of whichSwan Lakefeatured the new interpretive dance.  Inspired by painters, Debussy developed an Impressionist music that linked Romanticism to Modernism in its revolutionary approach to harmony and use of pentatonic and whole-tone scales.

From Whitmans benign admiration of America to Dosteovskis dark vision of Slavic triumph, nationalism was one of the most striking hallmarks of later nineteenth-century art.  The most extreme expression of aesthetic nationalism was Wagners virulently anti-Semitic conception of German culture.  Accepted by many German nationalists, this conception was later appropriated by the Nazis, who incorporated it into their program for eradicating the Jewish people.