The Romantic period in music extended from about 1820 to 1900. Among the most significant musicians were Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Clara Wieck Schumann, Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Antonin Dvorak, Johannes Brahms, Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. The length of this list – and some important composers have been omitted from it – testifies to the richness and variety of romantic music and to its continuing impact on today’s concert and operatic repertoire.
Composers of the romantic period continued to use the musical forms of the preceding classical era. The emotional intensity associated with romanticism was already present in the work of Mozart and particularly in that of Beethoven, who greatly influenced composers after him. The romantic preference for expressive, songlike melody also grew out of the classical style.
Nonetheless, there are many differences between romantic and classical music. Romantic works tend to have greater ranges of tone colour, dynamics and pitch. Also, the romantic harmonic vocabulary is broader, with more emphasis on colourful, unstable chords.
Romantic music is linked more closely to the other arts, particularly to literature. New forms developed, and in all forms there was greater tension and less emphasis on balance and resolution. But romantic music is so diverse that generalizations are apt to mislead. Some romantic composers, such as Mendelssohn and Brahms, created works that were deeply rooted in classical tradition; other composers, such as Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, were more revolutionary.
Important Style Features
Mood and Emotional Expression
Art forms, including music, exhibited extreme interest in subjects related to nature, death, the fantastic, the macabre, and the diabolical.
Unprecedented emphasis was placed on self-expression and the development of a uniquely personal musical style or voice.
Music explored a universe of feelings that included flamboyance and intimacy, unpredictability and melancholy, rapture and longing, the mysterious and the remote.
Some composers wrote music evoking a specific national identity (“nationalism”) or exotic location (“exoticism”).
Rhythm
Rhythm is extremely diverse
Tempos are flexible and may change frequently
Tempo rubato permitted great expressivity and freedom in performance
Dynamics
Dynamic changes can be sudden or gradual.
Extremely wide dynamic ranges, from very soft to very loud, add considerably to emotional excitement and intensity.
Tone Colour
Romantic music exhibits a wide range of expressive tone colour and sensuous sound
The addition of new instruments and the increased size of the orchestra led to new and varied timbres.
Woodwind, brass and percussion instruments played prominent roles in orchestral and operatic works.
Composers experimented with timbre through unusual combinations of instruments or by having instruments play in unusual ways.
Melody and Harmony
Melodies are often long, complex and highly expressive.
Recurring melodies and thematic transformation unify longer works.
Prominent use of chromatic harmonies that are rich, colourful and complex.
Dissonance is used more freely; resolutions are often delayed to create feelings of yearning, tension and mystery.
A wide range of keys and frequent modulations sometimes obscure the sense of an overall tonic or home key.
Texture
Texture is generally homophonic, but fluctuations of texture may occur to provide contrasts.
A piece may shift gradually or suddenly from one texture to another.
Form
Forms are rooted in the classical tradition, but now are more expansive and treated freely.
New forms and genres were developed, such as the symphonic poem and the art song.
Symphonies are typically longer than those of the classical era.
Less emphasis is placed on balance, proportion and resolution of tension than in the classical era.
Works can be very brief (e.g. Chopin’s Minute Waltz) or long and monumental (e.g. Wagner’s four-evening opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen).