Romantic

The Romantic era in music is generally thought to start with the death of Beethoven in 1825 and to tail off somewhere around 1900 with the music of Mahler and Richard Strauss. Romanticism sought to free the composer from the constraints imposed upon him by society and sought spiritual enlightenment, not in the established forms of religion, but in an almost pantheistic deification of nature such sentiments as were expressed in the paintings of William Turner. The music itself reflected this restlesness with composers expanding and often breaking the musical forms inherited from previous eras while creating new ones, as, for example, as the symphonic, or tone, poem. This went hand in hand with the expansion of the orchestra which had reached gargantuan numbers by the time of Mahler's symphonies. As the century progressed a sharp division appeared between those who sought to preserve aspects of the Classical heritage (Schumann and Brahms) and those who wished to build on what they perceived as the achievements of Beethoven (Liszt and Wagner). It was in the work of the latter, particularly, that pushed the Romantic ideal of music to its zenith with their lush, dense chromatic work, that leaned heavily on extra-musical inferences. By the time of the Late-Romantics this style had become inflated and exhausted, paving the way for the emergence of the new music of the early 1900s. In reality Romanticism has never really left and has survived the musical vicissitudes of the twentieth century remarkably well. Shunned by the progressives and the avant-garde it has always found popularity with concert-goers and there were a number of great composers in the previous century who composed successfully in the idiom (Arnold, Barber, Copland, Korngold and Vaughan Williams are just a few examples).

Key Works (a few examples): Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Brahms: Eine deutsches Requiem, Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 'Romantic', Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4, 'Italian', Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia, Schubert: Symphony No. 8 'Unfinished', Winterreise, Verdi: La traviata, Otello, Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Weber: Der Freischutz