This chapter explores a range of possible intersections between music, politics, and Romanticism in France and German lands in the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with a discussion of early German Romantic theories of political organisation and how they influenced Romantic conceptions of art, I subsequently unpick the complicated relationship between the French Revolution and Romanticism in music, and between the politically revolutionary and the artistically revolutionary. I show the extreme adaptability of the Romantic aesthetic when it came to its political interpretation, not only through the contrast between German and French Romanticism, but also through the surprising twists and turns in the political associations of Romanticism in France over three decades. In the second section, I look at the political mobilisation of Romantic symbols in Prussian musical life to nationalist and dynastic ends, before ending with a brief consideration of politicised anti-Romanticism amongst music critics in 1848.

Pauline Anna Milder (1785–1838) undertook the cross-dressing role of Leonore in all three version of Beethoven’s Fidelio. In this detailed study of Milder’s career, the author examines the nature of Milder’s voice (as reported extensively by commentators), the expressive and dramatic consequence of cross-dressing and, more broadly, the development of a recognizably ‘German’ soprano voice, one that was promoted by the most canonical German opera of the time, Beethoven’s Fidelio.