Romantic music has often been seen as an exploration of ideal, disembodied realms of spirit and feeling. It has also been presented as a consolation against the violent changes, profound uncertainties, and fierce social tensions of industrial modernity. Yet technical inventions and adaptions, such as new and improved instruments and new lighting and staging techniques, were at the heart of many of the defining characteristics of Romantic music: these included the sense of wild, dangerous, creative energies in both nature and human arts, the exploration of the most exalted and sombre of human emotions and states, restless formal invention, and appeals to both the intimacy of the individual soul and to vast audiences. Romantic music was bound up with industrialisation, urbanisation, and imperial expansion. Through its dependence on technology, and its ability to reflect upon technology’s consequences, Romantic music was an exemplary manifestation of its age.

The secularisation paradigm, the notion that religion faded into irrelevance in the post-Enlightenment era, has long defined perceptions of Romantic religiosity and religious art. From this perspective, art – in particular, the phenomenon of art-religion – served to fill the void left by the retreat of religion, offering new secularised forms of transcendence to replace those once offered by conventional religious art. This chapter aims to overhaul our received picture by arguing that rather than usurping the place of religion, art-religion serves as its dynamic continuation. It reveals the porous nature of the boundaries between religious art and art-religion in early Romantic thought, examining key texts by Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, and Tieck. It then demonstrates how a similar logic of recuperation and reinvention is at work in Romantic music, drawing on examples ranging from quasi-liturgical music to the monuments of absolute music. The chapter culminates with an exploration of what are arguably the most complex, multilayered examples of Romantic art-religion in the musical sphere, Liszt’s Christus and Wagner’s Parsifal.

This chapter examines the nature and the origins of what it identifies as a distinctively Romantic view of music. According to this, the purpose of music is to provide non-linguistic knowledge or insight, most usually into one’s inner self or, especially, into the fundamental nature of reality. The chapter starts by charting some key moments in the philosophical background of the 1780s and ’90s. Building on this, it traces the emergence of the Romantic view of music in the works of the two philosophers most closely involved in its earliest formulations: Friedrich Schlegel and Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). It concludes with brief examinations of the ways in which this view was elaborated by two now-canonical philosophers of this era, Friedrich Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer, and with a reflection on the subsequent influence of this view.

When did the period of musical Romanticism end? This question is enticingly simple, but the answer is surprisingly difficult. Drawing on the recent developments in the historiography of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music, this chapter examines some of the categories commonly used to describe this period – late Romanticism, early modernism, maximalism, and Weltanschauungsmusik – and their methodological and epistemological orientations. It will be argued that these categories, far from being merely convenient labels for stylistic categorisation, can be understood as different responses to the complex historiographical challenges arising from the destabilised ontological foundation of the work-concept. Grounded in a discussion of the alienation between Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss between 1909 and 1914, this chapter contends that the question concerning the end(s) of musical Romanticism can thus only be rendered approachable as a heuristic idea, in the way it prompts us constantly to question, challenge, and rethink the historiographical foundations of an era.

At the heart of Romantic supernaturalism was a newly ‘real’ or ‘material’ magic described by philosophers and aesthetic theorists including Friedrich Schlegel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Théophile Gautier, Charles Nodier, and others. Rejecting the illusory marvels of the eighteenth century and recalling aspects of natural magic associated with Renaissance cosmology, Romantic fantasy reconciled science and enchantment, phenomena and noumena. This chapter explores how such a reconciliation happened, outlining the impact of post-Kantian Idealist thought, the role of pantheism, the social shifts initiated by eighteenth-century revolutionary and imperialist activity, and the emergence of Gothic culture. From these developments, a new magical mode emerged – a fantastic epistemology – with special implications for music. It allowed fairies to converge with insects, demons to merge into colonial Others, and supernatural spirits to enter the domain of the real. These ideas are fleshed out via close readings of Schubert’s Erlkönig, Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable.

This chapter outlines the work of music for Romantic literature. The Romantic era was a pivotal period in the formation of literature as we now tend to understand it, as a category of imaginative and expressive prose and poetry, and writers deployed music in a number of ways to explore the power, limits, and nature of the literary. While lofty claims were made for literature as an ideal art form, one of the strongest uses of music for literature was to suggest its failures – to indicate kinds of freedom, fulfilment, and plenitude only pointed to by verbal language. The paradoxical uses of failure are discussed in this chapter through texts by writers including Blake, Kleist, Hoffmann, Coleridge, and Mérimée.

This chapter provides an accessible starting point for discussion of the relation between music and Romanticism, giving an overview of some of the issues frequently encountered in coming to an understanding of how the two intersect.It outlines some of the main debates about the nature of Romanticism, before turning attention specifically to the idea’s application to music. Three main positions are set out: Romanticism as a period in music history, Romanticism as a musical style, and Romanticism as an aesthetic or mode of understanding.Although these three definitions are not without their problems, each relates to an important aspect of how Romanticism may relate to music, and while the third is probably to be preferred, the first two also demand consideration in any account of this topic.

This chapter explores musical Romanticism as a historiographical concept. Drawing on a range of sources, from nineteenth-century writings to textbooks published in the twentieth century, it probes the distinction that has been made between classicism and Romanticism, noting that it is only when musical Romanticism is over that the concept of a Romantic era starts being crystallised. It investigates the degree to which the year 1848 can be considered to be a symbolic moment for the end of Romanticism and, through the music of the second half of the nineteenth century, considers the relationship between musical Romanticism and closely related concepts such as neo-Romanticism, realism, and modernity. Drawing on a wide range of historiographical writings from the second half of the twentieth century, it explores changing conceptions of where musical Romanticism is deemed to reside, whether in instrumental music or vocal music, and whether within the Germanic realm or beyond it. It investigates the place and role of women within musical Romanticism and explores their absence in writings on musical Romanticism in relation to broader writings on Romanticism and feminism.

Classicism and Romanticism are frequently used as a shorthand to designate the stylistic and aesthetic shifts that occurred as the eighteenth gave way to the nineteenth century. However, this neat picture blurs as one delves into the subject. Not only did Romantic musicians learn the foundations of harmony, phrasing, and texture from their predecessors, but many of the styles of innocent naïveté or exuberant striving beloved by Romantics emerged from specific eighteenth-century genre contexts, including opera, the fantasy, folk song, and church music. Change did happen, of course. Not only did the ethical concerns of the eighteenth century turn towards metaphysical ones in the nineteenth, but the social and institutional divides that had long separated musicians and writers began to lessen. As a result, musicians and writers learned to admire and emulate what each believed the other excelled at.