idyll and elegy

In his programme note for the WNO's current production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro (left), the music scholar Nicholas Till highlights the opera's central theme of loss.

He links this to Schiller's famous essay on the 'naive' and the 'sentimental', where the naive artist is one who doesn't experience existence as a loss, but the sentimental artist (Till writes) 'conveys modern humankind's longing to regain its lost unity with nature through the artistic modes of the idyll and the elegy.'