The idea for this book came to me in April 2016 during a magnificent recital by Emanuel Ax at Princeton's McCarter Theater, which began with Beethoven's “Pathétique” and ended with his “Appassionata.” Perusing the program notes, I was reminded that the “Pathétique” was first introduced to the public in 1798. As I listened to Ax's dazzling performance, I began to wonder how Beethoven's first audiences in Vienna responded to that powerful and original work as rendered by the composer himself. Those ruminations led me to speculate about that sonata as a reflection of its time and, further, about possible parallels to other works of that productive year. (The Lyrical Ballads and the journal Athenaeum immediately sprang to mind.)

German Romanticism has been foremost in my thoughts ever since I read the basic works in a course with my mentor, Professor Clement Vollmer, at Duke University and, under his supervision, wrote a master's thesis on Hölderlin's translation of Homer (Duke 1952). Later, with the encouragement of my revered Doktorvater, Hermann J. Weigand, I undertook my doctoral dissertation on “Hermann Hesse and Novalis” (Yale 1957). Since that time I have taught German Romanticism many times for generations of challenging graduate students in seminars here at Princeton and published several works on aspects and phases of that phenomenon: German Romanticism and Its Institutions (1990); Clio, the Romantic Muse (2004); and later—in German because the potentially interested audience was larger there—separate monographs on Romantic literature and thought in Jena, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Dresden. that this book should finally have sought to bring it all together, including French, English, and other works that appear to fit.

Over the years I have visited with my wife, herself a trained comparatist, many of the sites in Germany and England associated with Romanticism: the houses in Jena, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Dresden where many of the writers lived and worked; Fichte's hometown of Rammenau, Novalis's birthplace in Oberwiederstedt, Hoffmann's residence in Bamberg and his judicial offices in Berlin, Arnim's estate in Prussia, and others— not to mention Wordsworth's Dove Cottage and his paths through the Lake Country, Walter Scott's residence at Abbotsford, and Byron's estate at Newstead Abbey