The potent force of a Pavarotti aria; the sentimentality of a rom-com; the dashing Mr Darcy look; the sun setting over a moorland landscape; the distant song of a nightingale. What is the common denominator among these disparate items? We might link them by one adjective–romantic. But what does this word mean?
It is important to recognize the two uses of the word–its use in everyday life as a rather vague adjective, romantic, and its more precise meaning historically, in what I shall refer to as the Romantic era. When confronted with the term ‘Romanticism’, one is drawn to images of Romantic landscape, freedom of expression, a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, heroism, nationalism and an ideal of the “sublime”. But with reference to music, this already capacious term becomes hazy, covering a broad range of styles, from the huge symphonies of Berlioz (Symphonie Fantastique, 1830), to the masterful pianism of composers such as Frederick Chopin (1810-49), who, in his short life, produced a wealth of Romantic miniatures for piano, such as the nocturnes and preludes.

Origins and Politics
The word ‘romantic’ is derived from the Old French romanz, or ‘verse narrative’. This noun was originally an adverb, from the vulgar Latin romanice scribere meaning ‘to write in a Romance language’, which in turn derives ultimately from the Latin Romanicus, meaning ‘of or in the Roman style’. The medieval romance or romaunt refers to a tale of chivalry written in one of the romance languages that developed from Latin, namely Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Provencal. Our use of the adjective romantic and colloquial use of the word romance to describe emotional experiences can be traced back to the medieval sense of the word. So too can the eighteenth and nineteenth century concept of Romanticism, which is, in effect, an intellectualised version of the initial term.
Romanticism was an international concept: German, French and Russian Romanticism, for example, exist separately. Broadly speaking, Romanticism covers a wide group of related artistic, political, philosophical and social trends arising out of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe. Although the term has been a subject of much discussion amongst nineteenth and twentieth century historians, a precise characterization and definition of Romanticism has yet to be unearthed. All that is certain so far is that before, but mainly during, the nineteenth century, Romanticism applied across the arts (although not always at the same time), manifesting itself in what is known as The Romantic Era. But, perhaps more significantly, the term does not exclusively apply to this era: writers, composers, and artists from the past and present are described as Romantic. One often hears today, for example, J.S. Bach and W.A. Mozart being described as “Romantic composers”: Some people feel that there is an innate Romantic sound in their music. But this cannot be the same Romanticism that characterises many nineteenth-century compositions, whose creators were steeped in the ideologies of their day. Rather, it is the music itself that appeals to the audience’s emotions today, perhaps in a different way than one would expect other Baroque or Classical works to do.
Every musicologist who tries to define Romanticism agrees that it is a problematic concept, which makes the Romantic period harder to characterise than other periods of music history. Musical periods, in general, succeed their equivalents in the other arts. For example literary Romanticism preceded the so-called Romantic period in music, the former occurring from c. 1785-1830 and therefore overlapping with the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the broad outlines of the Industrial Revolution. This significant point in European political and cultural history inspired writers to address themes of democracy and human rights, and to consider the function of revolution as an invitation to change society and culture. Political revolution and the general hostility towards the aristocracy was therefore a theme penetrating much of Romantic literature.
One of the problems in defining Romanticism stems from the fact that it strives to unify an era that was inwardly divided. The political history outlines a division of the so-called “long nineteenth century”. The two divisions are from 1789-1848, and then 1848-1914. The European revolutions of 1848-1851, although unsuccessful attempts at seizing power, were responsible for re-shaping future developments in Europe at least until 1914. The revolutions brought an end to the utopian phase of liberalism, which simultaneously shattered the political ideology that had been at the fore of art, literature and composition. Indeed, as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians says, it was a time “when artists and intellectuals withdrew from politics to art, from engagement to detachment”. The revolutions gave rise to a mass outpouring of popular political participation. With the demise of the aristocracy and the abolition of serfdom, middle-class power was consolidated and bourgeois nationalism was victorious over the dynastic government.
Nationalism was a predominant strand of Romanticism. The politics of the divided “long nineteenth century” were taken into account more by literary and visual arts historians than by musicologists. However, a wealth of nationalistic music was born during the nineteenth century, which cannot be detached from its various political origins: Chopin’s early piano works, for example, are explicitly Polish–the mazurkas and the polonaises. Chopin was outwardly nostalgic about his homeland, especially after becoming, for composing/performing reasons, an expatriate in Paris, where he remained from 1830 until his death in 1849.

Art and Romanticism
Art is rarely separate from its historical context. Romantic landscapes such as J. M. W. Turner’s “Rain, Steam and Speed–The Great Western Railway” (figure 1), address the theme of nature, which was a preoccupation of nineteenth century art. The Industrial Revolution increased awareness of the powers of machinery upon the natural landscape: a theme, which this painting illustrates. Nature was idealised by the Romantics in both literature and art. This was partly because nature represented everything contrary to the growing urban industry, and partly due to its nostalgic appeal: yearning for the past is captured in the longest surviving part of our world’s existence–the natural world. Artists such as Turner began to reject realism in favour of abstract suggestion, focusing on light and its effect on the landscape. This powerful appeal to the imagination gave its audience an individual, unique experience that strived to go beyond the senses.
The artist’s changing ideals and self-awareness are characteristics of Romanticism throughout the arts. German idealist thought penetrated the Romantic world. Philosophers such as Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831) promoted the idea of “the self”, viewing the individual as a potent, enabling force. They surmised that the world was grounded in the self, which did wonders for the artist’s stature; hence the development of the Romantic hero in literature, art and music. Kant’s theories did not comply with traditional Christian dogma, however. The old belief that man was born sinful went against the new Romantic grain: self-belief and utter commitment to one’s art.
Artists such as the German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) often juxtaposed man with nature, creating, again, a sense of yearning for the natural world. Here there is a sort of Romantic irony at work (figure 2): the Romantic hero in the foreground is merely a silhouette, vastly separated from the natural world–a dream-like backdrop that he wishes to be a part of.
The changing role of the composer is one of the main factors that separates Romantic from Classical music; as creativity took on a whole new meaning “the artist could lead the way into a transcendental world and thus came to be regarded as a spiritual hero”. And so the artist became the hero with a purpose to fulfil. If the artist–poet, painter or musician–died young, his position as a Romantic hero was further elevated. Examples include John Keats, who died aged 26 in 1821; Theodore Gericault who died aged 33 in 1824; and Frederick Chopin, who died aged 39 in 1849.

Literary Themes
Another Romantic preoccupation was the ideal of innocence, a theme characterised by William Blake in his Songs of Innocence (1789):

“I have no name:
I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy, but two days old.
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while,
Sweet joy befall thee!

Blake printed a beautiful illustration with each poem, intending them to be observed together. This set of symbolic poems was therefore revolutionary in its ingenious merging of the arts: it was, at the time, an extraordinary idea to mix poetry with art. It is a further example of the Romantic tendency to stretch the boundaries. Music, of course, combined the arts as well, an idea that climaxed in Wagner’s creation of the Gesamtkunstwerk (”total artwork”). Franz Liszt (1811-1886) used lines of Byron’s poetry, for example, to preface some of his L’Années de Pelerinage (collections of piano pieces). This tendency relates to the complex subject of Programmatic music, as typified by the French composer Hector Berlioz (1803-69), who borrowed poetry such as Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) to compose his own musical work Harold in Italy.
William Wordsworth was also a great poet of childhood and innocence, best exemplified in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1803). His poem reveals that the child, far from being clothed in mankind’s original sin, inhabits a kind of heaven before birth, a place of ideal beauty: “Trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God who is our home”. According to Wordsworth’s poem, as children we unconsciously remember that ideal heavenly state when we experienced the beauty of nature. The child’s spiritual response to nature is gradually lost as he grows older and begins to forget pre-birth experience in the common light of day.

Music
The nineteenth century was one of opposing ideologies, and a wide range of nineteenth century composers fit the term Romantic, if we broadly use it to denote a preference for emotion and inspiration above rational expression. Historians and musicologists avoid precisely dating and defining the music’s characteristics while loosely linking historical, ideological and cultural aspects.
It is, however, largely agreed that the Romantic period in music runs between 1828 and 1880 at the narrowest span and between 1789 and 1914 at the very broadest. By the 1790s a new sound world had developed in music. By c. 1830 the term Romantic was used to define the period, largely in relation to the Classical Golden age, rather than to describe a style, (although it does both today). The notion of a Romantic period in music was employed at a time when bourgeois music in Europe was stabilising into “institutions expressly designed to promote a validating repertory of classical music” (the New Grove again). Music that was somehow breaking away from the Classical convention of a tightly balanced structure with functional harmony and tonality was considered Romantic and modern.
To make any sense of it, we must conclude that the term Romanticism is virtually meaningless unless it is applied to a specific writer, artist, or composer and re-defined according to that artist’s work. Romantic music is loosely stereotyped as being directly expressive. Priority is generally given to the music’s expression: overall emotion is to govern form and a greater sense of freedom therefore prevails. Although composers of the Romantic period employed varying, even opposing styles, there were fundamental musical changes that were markedly unlike their Classical predecessors. These changes include increased expression markings; longer, unbalanced phrases; wide leaps for expressive purposes, and virtuosity, which appear in, for example, Liszt’s B minor Sonata for piano. Freedom of form and individualism led to the development of new musical forms: piano examples include Chopin’s four Ballades, Schubert’s Impromptus, and Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words”. Narrative took on greater significance in, for example, the song cycles of Schubert (Wintereisse) and Schumann (Dichterliebe). There was a heightened sense of the power of the orchestra, as exemplified by Beethoven’s third symphony, the “Eroica”. Harmony was used for colour rather then structural purposes. Wagner, for example, invented his own harmony in Tristan und Isolde with the infamous “Tristan chord”, that was later to be adopted by other composers such as Liszt and Debussy.

Romanticism and Beyond
When trying to define Romanticism, it vital to look at what came after it: history does not, after all, exist in neat blocks. Direct expressivity in music gradually turned to abstraction in expressionism. The boundaries of representation and the imagination were blurred (figure 4). This change can be appreciated within single artists such as Turner, whose works so clearly progressed towards abstraction as he neared the end of his career. An unclear emotion was regarded more highly than an apparent one. This was a result of the fashion for soul searching and infinite yearning that derived from Romantic ideas in eighteenth-century bourgeois culture. Music that was overtly ’sentimental’ formed a foil to the rationalism of social practice that prevailed: the idea of ‘the sublime’ was founded and the boundaries of music, as in art, were stretched. Claude Debussy (1862-1918), for example, produced works full of timbre and harmonic colour, whose formal structure, although scrupulously worked out, gave the illusion of spontaneous unfolding (such as L’Apres midi d’un Faune, 1894). Harmonic freedom eventually led to the dissolution of tonality.

Conclusions
Historians do not label Romantic music as modern today, but contemporary feeling was that it was extremely modern-sounding. The main difference between so-called Romantic and (what we now call) Modern music is that Romantic usually, in its composer’s or artist’s mind at least, serves a purpose beyond the music itself, whether it be expressive, heroic, nationalistic or narrative. Romantic music is not, in other words, “absolute” or formulaic music, but it is instead steeped with intention. This intention was a result of the ideology and philosophy that prevailed throughout nineteenth century Europe. The doing was as important as the finished work; the purpose for composing had changed, and so had the music itself.
So, what is it that makes art Romantic? Are we any clearer about what Romanticism means? In terms of its connection with ‘isms’, or movements, Romanticism is thriving: individualism, nationalism, Romantic heroism, expressionism, not to mention its connection with political revolution, innocence, and even its (sometimes negatively portrayed) links with fantasy, the grotesque, and supernatural, which are all creative results of this era.
In terms of music, as with all the arts, this question can have no concise answer. Perhaps Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was accurate in his description of Romanticism as “a certain vague and indefinable fantasy”. With the birth of neo-Romanticism, the concept has been further confused. Other than a multi-faceted ideology that permeated the arts in nineteenth-century Europe, it is difficult to describe exactly what the term means to us today. Romanticism is especially complicated by the fact that we still use this adjective, romantic, with a small ‘r’, to describe a great many things: behaviour, performance, gesture, scenery: none of which are intellectually linked with Romanticism. But why do we describe a painting, a piece of music or a poem as Romantic? Maybe it is merely a sense of yearning, striving to go beyond our senses that so-called Romantic works induce? To conclude the matter would not be possible, or indeed, in-keeping with the Romantics at all, since every Romantic composition, painting or poem has its own unique qualities. The work suggests to the individual only what that person wishes to take from it, according to their own imagination–simultaneously everything and nothing.