‘In the realm of ideas there are internal wars … during which everyone is declared traitor to his fatherland who does not publicly take one side or the other’. With these fighting words, Franz Liszt opened his polemical essay, ‘Berlioz and His “Harold” Symphony’ in 1855, an important salvo in an aesthetic debate now known as the ‘War of the Romantics’.1 This conflict blazed throughout the German-speaking lands in the period following the failed 1848–49 revolutions. It lasted for decades: an 1884 article by the participant journalist Richard Pohl noted that the ‘musical war’ had been going for thirty-two years and was not yet at an end. While his starting date is debatable, his characterisation of the ‘violence and bitterness’ with which it had initially been waged is right on the money.2 Savage polemics, sniping journalism and scandal-ridden performances were the norm throughout the 1850s and beyond, with the central issues of dispute being music’s relationship with other arts and the legitimacy of particular innovations in form, harmony and genre. Viewed with hindsight, these musical debates can be seen as symptoms of larger socio-political tensions in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the forces of progress and reaction clashed in a rapidly modernising Europe.