Accepted to the École normale supérieure in 1886, he first studied philosophy, but his independence of spirit led him to abandon that so as not to submit to the dominant ideology.

He received his degree in history in 1889 and spent two years in Rome, where his encounter with Malwida von Meysenbug–who had been a friend of Nietzsche and of Wagner–and his discovery of Italian masterpieces were decisive for the development of his thought.

For the next two decades, he taught at various lycées in Paris before directing the newly established music school of the École des Hautes Études Sociales from 1902 to 1911.

[citation needed] In 1920, Rolland used the phrase, "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" in a review, which Antonio Gramsci adopted from him as a formula for intellectual perseverance during hard times.

[7] In 1928 Rolland and Hungarian scholar, philosopher and natural living experimenter Edmund Bordeaux Szekely founded the International Biogenic Society to promote and expand on their ideas of the integration of mind, body and spirit.

His visit to Moscow (1935), on the invitation of Maxim Gorky, was an opportunity to meet Joseph Stalin, whom he considered the greatest man of his time.

In 1921, his close friend the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig published his biography (in English Romain Rolland: The Man and His Works).

Zweig wrote at length about his friendship with Rolland in his own autobiography (in English The World of Yesterday), discussing, for example, their failed efforts to organize a conference of antiwar intellectuals from both warring camps in neutral Switzerland.

The entry for 4 May 1945, a few weeks after Rolland's death, in Serge's Notebooks: 1936-1947 notes acidly that "At age seventy the author of Jean-Christophe allowed himself to be covered with the blood spilled by a tyranny of which he was a faithful adulator."

Rolland attempted to put his theory into practice with his melodramatic dramas about the French Revolution, Danton (1900) and The Fourteenth of July (1902), but it was his ideas that formed a major reference point for subsequent practitioners.

Rolland's approach is more aggressive, though, than Pottecher's poetic vision of theatre as a substitute 'social religion' bringing unity to the nation.

In proposing a suitable repertoire for his people's theatre, Rolland rejects classical drama in the belief that it is either too difficult or too static to be of interest to the masses.

Rousseau's influence may be detected in Rolland's conception of theatre-as-festivity, an emphasis that reveals a fundamental anti-theatrical prejudice: "Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought.

[16] Rolland's dramas have been staged by some of the most influential theatre directors of the twentieth century, including Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator.

[17] Piscator directed the world première of Rolland's pacifist drama The Time Will Come (Le Temps viendra, written in 1903) at Berlin's Central-Theater, which opened on 17 November 1922 with music by K Pringsheim and scenic design by O Schmalhausen and M Meier.

[18] The play addresses the connections between imperialism and capitalism, the treatment of enemy civilians, and the use of concentration camps, all of which are dramatised via an episode in the Boer War.

In 1899 Rolland started what became a voluminous correspondence with the German composer Richard Strauss (the English translation, edited by Rollo Myers, runs to 239 pages, including some diary entries).

"[22] Rolland was a pacifist and concurred with Strauss when the latter refused to sign the Manifesto of German artists and intellectuals supporting the German role in World War I. Rolland noted Strauss's response in his diary entry for October 1914: "Declarations about war and politics are not fitting for an artist, who must give his attention to his creations and his works.