Romantic Music

The Romantic period runs roughly from 1820 to 1900, following the Classical period. Romantic composers valued feeling over balance and form: music became a way to express intense personal emotion, to tell stories, to describe nature and to evoke the supernatural. Beethoven, whose later works broke many Classical conventions, is often seen as the bridge into the era.

Characteristics

• Long, singing melodies, often modeled on opera.
• Rich, chromatic harmony: more dissonance, more seventh and ninth chords, and surprising modulations. Wagner's Tristan und Isolde pushed chromatic harmony to new limits.
• Extremes: from the tiny piano miniature to symphonies lasting over an hour, from ppp to fff, from the very slow to the very fast.
• A bigger orchestra, with more brass, more percussion and new instruments, used for color as much as for melody.
• Flexible tempo: rubato and frequent changes of speed.
• Virtuosity: performers such as the violinist Paganini and the pianist Liszt became celebrities.

Genres

• Character pieces for piano: nocturnes, preludes, études, ballades, mazurkas and songs without words.
• The art song (Lied) and the song cycle.
• Program music: symphonic poems and program symphonies that tell a story.
• Grand opera and music drama.
• Nationalist music inspired by folk songs and legends.

Composers

Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, Robert and Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi, Johannes Brahms, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Antonín Dvořák, Edvard Grieg and, at the end of the century, Gustav Mahler. Late Romantic styles continued well into the 20th century, in the music of Rachmaninoff, for example.

The piano grows up

The 19th-century piano gained an iron frame, heavier strings and a wider range, producing a bigger, more sustained sound. Romantic piano music relies on the sustain pedal to blend wide-spread accompaniments under a singing melody.

Playing Romantic music

Let the melody sing above the accompaniment, use the pedal to create color (changing it cleanly with the harmony), and shape phrases with rubato, but keep an underlying pulse. Try Chopin's Prelude in E Minor, Schumann's The Wild Rider and Burgmüller's Ballade, and compare the eras in The Periods of Music History.