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Art in this period became more actively political than it had been in centuries. And very often, the politics that such art and artists were concerned with were a politics of change. As intellectuals from Jean-Paul Marat, to Karl Marx, to Vladimir Lenin were concerned with effecting social change through their writings, so a great many artists expected to support or bring about social change through their art.
No better example of this campaign exists than with nationalism. Nationalism, together with socialism and liberalism, stands as one of the earth-shaking social movements of the decades between the French Revolution and the First World War. The effort to forge a single people united culturally and politically in a single state—which fanned out from Jacobin Paris right across the entire European continent—swept up not just politicians, soldiers, writers, and peasants, but artists as well. These are artists of all genres and lands, including the painter Jacques-Louis David in France, the poet Pushkin in Russia, the architect Gottfried Semper in Germany, and musicians such as Wagner, Smetana, and Grieg, in their respective countries. Nationalism—perhaps even more than the other two great-isms of liberalism and socialism—inspired some of the most gifted creative minds of the century, deeply impacting both their artistic works and their engagement in society.
For Wagner, Smetana, and Grieg, their moments of dodging enemy bullets or brokering the creation of a new kingdom were unquestionably the most actively political in their lives. However, their involvement with their countries’ nationalist movements stretched over their entire adult careers, as artists fervently engaged with political and social change. A nationalist music was the principal vehicle for both their artistic and political ideas. These ideas, and the goals they sought to realize, are consistent among these three composers—and indeed, this is what unites them with other nationalist artists across Europe. What nationalist artists are fundamentally engaged in is an epochal project to build a national culture. This culture was intended to be an expression of a nation’s past, future, landscape, language, and artistic aspirations. Even beyond that, though, in nationalist artists’ minds, the national culture would actually help to create the nation, in particular by creating national citizens, the bearers and representatives of that culture.