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Sample tracks

Music in the Romantic era

• Musical life in the nineteenth century moved from the court to the city. By 1900 there were more than a dozen cities with in excess of a million inhabitants.
• Composers were increasingly independent of traditional patrons. Instead they either fulfilled individual commissions or sold their music direct to publishers.
• There was an increase in nationalism throughout the nineteenth century, with states (e.g. Italy) seeking unification and ethnic groups seeking a defined homeland (e.g. Czechs, Poles, Finns etc.). This was paralleled by an increased interest in folk music and the idea of forging national styles.
• There was disagreement in the nineteenth century between those who thought music should build upon Classical genres such as the symphony (e.g. Brahms) and those who saw the future in or new forms better suited to the Romantic aesthetic (e.g. Wagner or Liszt)

Caspar David Friedrich Chalk Cliffs on Rugen (1819)

• Both the harmonic language and the basic forms of the Classical era were retained but composers tend to extend and blur their harmonies and structures rather than aiming for the clarity of Classical music
• The tendency of Romantic music to delay arriving at a point of closure reflects an artistic aesthetic of yearning or striving for things that are out of reach (e.g. unrequited love).
• One consequence of an increased emphasis on the individual was an interest in music’s ability to convey inner thoughts, which might be reflective or full of heroic conflict and turmoil
• Another facet of the emphasis on the individual was the continued rise of the heroically virtuoso instrumentalist such as Liszt and Paganini. From Beethoven onwards, there was also a tendency to see composers too as involved in a heroic artistic struggle.

Stylistic features

Typical pieces (all tracks available on Moodle)