The Early Romantics

    New movements in music were stirring in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it is customary to call the cornposers who reached maturity at that time "The Early Romantics".  

    Romanticism is a word of which everyone is more or less conscious of the meaning, but is quite difficult to define.  One good definition is "the blending of strangeness with beauty".  Romanticism stresses the imaginative and the visionary rather than the formal, classical aspect of art-poetry rather than pattern.  The French Revolution did much to produce explosive forces which had an emotional effect on the arts.  Men such as Byron, Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth show the romantic element in English poetry.  Interest in nature and in the supernatural grew in all the arts; and the nationalistic element began to come to the fore.  

    The romantic composers reacted away from the excessive preoccupation with the formal conventions of the lesser classical contemporaries of Mozart and Beethoven.  And perhaps, too, they unconsciously felt that they could not write better symphonies than Mozart and Beethoven themselves, and wished to experiment in other mediums.  They tended to take more interest in literature than the earlier composers had done, and it often affected their music.  We find some of them writing symphonic poems, with a programmatic basis, instead of symphonies; others developing the poetic tonal possibilities of the piano; and they were often more interested in writing short pieces in free forms, with titles, than large formal structures, with mere opus numbers.