The Neo-Romantics

The neo-romantics, or late romantic composers, were those who, while extending their idioms and resources in various ways, built on the work of Wagner and Brahms, and carried on nineteenth-century traditions.

Strauss owed much to Wagner in his operas and to Liszt in his symphonic poems, though he is more of a realist than either, and his harmonies are more astringent.  He writes with mastery for a huge orchestra.

Sibelius was a highly original composer, with a vigorous, rugged quality in his music that brings to mind the cold vast countryside of Finland ' But his music is romantic, though in a very masculine way, and he obviously has an affinity with Brahms.  His 7 symphonies are some of the greatest musical masterpieces of this century.  

The Hungarian composer Bartok (1881-1945) was an experimentalist who wrote in many different styles at different periods of his life, though all of his music was colored by his Hungarian nationality, and his use of Hungarian folk song.  But some of his works have a decided romantic element in them.  

Shostakovitch (1906-), the chief Russian composer of the present generation, has a very varied style, partly because he has to compose music as the Soviet authorities dictate, and this obviously conflicts with his own natural tendencies.  But much of his music is very romantic.  He has written 11 symphonies.

In England Elgar was a warm romanticist, who owed much to Brahms and Franck, and who carried their traditions over into the twentieth century.  So also did Vaughan Williams, though his music owes much to English Tudor and folk Music, as well as to the nineteenth-century European composers.  His friend and contemporary, Gustav Holst, who died in 1934, was fundamentally a necromantic, though he wrote in many styles, and was fond of complicated rhythms. Walton, after an anti-romantic phase in his youth, settled down in his middle age to writing romantic music with its roots in the past, though in a twentieth-century idiom. Rubbra's symphonies also have become progressively more romantic.  Although Vaughan Williams occasionally wrote modal music, most of the music of these English composers is based on major and minor scale relationships, unlike that of some of the composers who are mentioned later.