Romain Rolland (1866 - 1944) was a French novelist, dramatist, essayist, biographer and historian of music. [1] He is best remembered for the ten-volume novel cycle Jean-Christophe and for the pacifist essays he published from Switzerland during the First World War. Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1915. [2]
Early life and education
Romain Rolland was born on 29 January 1866 in Clamecy, in Burgundy, into a family of notaries. [1] The household moved to Paris so that he could be educated there, and after study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand he entered the École Normale Supérieure. He took a degree in history and then spent two years at the French School in Rome, where an encounter with the elderly German writer Malwida von Meysenbug, a friend of Wagner and Nietzsche, shaped his lifelong preoccupation with the moral vocation of the artist.
Rolland returned to Paris and completed a doctorate on the origins of modern opera before Lully and Scarlatti, the first doctoral thesis in music to be accepted by the Sorbonne. He taught the history of music there and at the École Normale Supérieure. [3]
Writing
His early work was chiefly for the theatre, including a cycle of plays on the French Revolution intended as a drama for the people rather than for a literary audience. He also wrote a series of heroic biographies — of Beethoven, Michelangelo, Tolstoy and Handel — that presented great creators as figures of moral struggle rather than of mere talent. [3]
Between 1904 and 1912 Rolland published Jean-Christophe, a novel in ten volumes following a German composer from childhood to death and using his career to examine the artistic and political life of Europe on both sides of the Rhine. Its scale and its argument for reconciliation between France and Germany brought Rolland an international readership and were cited in the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1915. [2] He later wrote a second large cycle, L'Âme enchantée, centred on a woman's intellectual and political awakening.
Pacifism and public positions
Living in Switzerland when war broke out in 1914, Rolland published articles collected as Au-dessus de la mêlée, appealing to European intellectuals on both sides to resist nationalist hatred. [1] The essays were widely denounced in France as unpatriotic, and he remained a divisive figure there for years afterwards. He donated his Nobel Prize money to humanitarian relief.
In the interwar decades he corresponded with figures across the world, among them Sigmund Freud — to whom he described the "oceanic feeling" that Freud examined in Civilization and Its Discontents — as well as Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse and Rabindranath Tagore. He took a sustained interest in Indian thought, publishing studies of Mahatma Gandhi, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and helped make Gandhi's ideas known in Europe. [3] From the early 1930s he expressed sympathy for the Soviet Union, visiting Moscow in 1935 and meeting Stalin, a position that drew criticism from contemporaries and has remained a subject of debate.
Later life and legacy
Rolland returned to France in 1938 and settled at Vézelay, where he lived through the German occupation and continued to write, completing a large study of Beethoven. He died there on 30 December 1944. [1] His reputation rests on the ambition of his novel cycles, on his contribution to musicology, and on his insistence that intellectuals owe a duty of conscience that overrides national allegiance. [2]
