Romantic music has often been seen as an exploration of ideal, disembodied realms of spirit and feeling. It has also been presented as a consolation against the violent changes, profound uncertainties, and fierce social tensions of industrial modernity. Yet technical inventions and adaptions, such as new and improved instruments and new lighting and staging techniques, were at the heart of many of the defining characteristics of Romantic music: these included the sense of wild, dangerous, creative energies in both nature and human arts, the exploration of the most exalted and sombre of human emotions and states, restless formal invention, and appeals to both the intimacy of the individual soul and to vast audiences. Romantic music was bound up with industrialisation, urbanisation, and imperial expansion. Through its dependence on technology, and its ability to reflect upon technology’s consequences, Romantic music was an exemplary manifestation of its age.

Opening his City of God is a heartfelt dedication from Augustine to his “dearest son” (fili carissime) Marcellinus, a Roman tribune and the imperial commissioner who was dispatched by Emperor Honorius to preside over the Council of Carthage in June of AD 411. Best known for his assistance to the Bishop of Hippo in bringing the Donatist Schism to an end, Marcellinus was not shy in asking Augustine questions by exchanging rich letters (epp. 128, 129, and 133) during this time. Furthermore, Augustine’s On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins and on Infant Baptism (pecc. mer.) and The Spirit and the Letter (spir. et litt.), both dated AD 412, are also dedicated to Marcellinus in response to some answers this theologically cultured aristocrat first posed to the great bishop. Overseeing the debates between Catholics and Donatists in AD 411 would eventually cost Marcellinus his life, yet win him the hallowed crown of martyrdom. The well-connected Donatists were able to convince Marinus, comes rei militaris of both Italy and Africa, that Marcellinus and his brother Apringius (cf. ep. 134), African proconsul in AD 411, were secretly plotting with the comes Africae Heraclinus to usurp imperial power. Despite Augustine’s and other African bishops’ intervention, Marinus ordered the brothers’ beheading in mid-September of AD 413 on charges of high treason. However, a year later the imperial court realized that these charges had been fabricated. Emperor Honorius exonerated both brothers, produced evidence that Marinus had acted out of selfishness, and thereby referred to Marcellinus and Apringius with great honor, and had both celebrated as Catholic martyrs of the Donatist rebellion.

The secularisation paradigm, the notion that religion faded into irrelevance in the post-Enlightenment era, has long defined perceptions of Romantic religiosity and religious art. From this perspective, art – in particular, the phenomenon of art-religion – served to fill the void left by the retreat of religion, offering new secularised forms of transcendence to replace those once offered by conventional religious art. This chapter aims to overhaul our received picture by arguing that rather than usurping the place of religion, art-religion serves as its dynamic continuation. It reveals the porous nature of the boundaries between religious art and art-religion in early Romantic thought, examining key texts by Schleiermacher, Wackenroder, and Tieck. It then demonstrates how a similar logic of recuperation and reinvention is at work in Romantic music, drawing on examples ranging from quasi-liturgical music to the monuments of absolute music. The chapter culminates with an exploration of what are arguably the most complex, multilayered examples of Romantic art-religion in the musical sphere, Liszt’s Christus and Wagner’s Parsifal.

This chapter examines the nature and the origins of what it identifies as a distinctively Romantic view of music. According to this, the purpose of music is to provide non-linguistic knowledge or insight, most usually into one’s inner self or, especially, into the fundamental nature of reality. The chapter starts by charting some key moments in the philosophical background of the 1780s and ’90s. Building on this, it traces the emergence of the Romantic view of music in the works of the two philosophers most closely involved in its earliest formulations: Friedrich Schlegel and Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). It concludes with brief examinations of the ways in which this view was elaborated by two now-canonical philosophers of this era, Friedrich Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer, and with a reflection on the subsequent influence of this view.

“The whole Church of the true God holds, confesses and professes that Christ is going to come from heaven to judge the living and the dead” (ciu. Dei 20.1; Babcock 2.390), as Augustine shows throughout ciu. Dei 20. As simple as this affirmative statement may sound, its emphatic nature masks the complexity of thought about God’s final judgment that had already come to challenge the Christian community by the early 5th century AD, and which Book 20 was designed, in part, to address. True enough, all known early creeds encapsulated the promise of a future judgment requiring Christians to affirm their belief that Christ, with the Father, would judge the living and the dead. But this still left many questions unanswered. When would this judgment occur? How would the events of the last day unfold? How would divine justice be done, and be seen to be done? How did the ordinary experience of human death relate to the events outlined in the Book of Revelation? And what kind of community would result?

When did the period of musical Romanticism end? This question is enticingly simple, but the answer is surprisingly difficult. Drawing on the recent developments in the historiography of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music, this chapter examines some of the categories commonly used to describe this period – late Romanticism, early modernism, maximalism, and Weltanschauungsmusik – and their methodological and epistemological orientations. It will be argued that these categories, far from being merely convenient labels for stylistic categorisation, can be understood as different responses to the complex historiographical challenges arising from the destabilised ontological foundation of the work-concept. Grounded in a discussion of the alienation between Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss between 1909 and 1914, this chapter contends that the question concerning the end(s) of musical Romanticism can thus only be rendered approachable as a heuristic idea, in the way it prompts us constantly to question, challenge, and rethink the historiographical foundations of an era.

At the heart of Romantic supernaturalism was a newly ‘real’ or ‘material’ magic described by philosophers and aesthetic theorists including Friedrich Schlegel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Théophile Gautier, Charles Nodier, and others. Rejecting the illusory marvels of the eighteenth century and recalling aspects of natural magic associated with Renaissance cosmology, Romantic fantasy reconciled science and enchantment, phenomena and noumena. This chapter explores how such a reconciliation happened, outlining the impact of post-Kantian Idealist thought, the role of pantheism, the social shifts initiated by eighteenth-century revolutionary and imperialist activity, and the emergence of Gothic culture. From these developments, a new magical mode emerged – a fantastic epistemology – with special implications for music. It allowed fairies to converge with insects, demons to merge into colonial Others, and supernatural spirits to enter the domain of the real. These ideas are fleshed out via close readings of Schubert’s Erlkönig, Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable.

This chapter outlines the work of music for Romantic literature. The Romantic era was a pivotal period in the formation of literature as we now tend to understand it, as a category of imaginative and expressive prose and poetry, and writers deployed music in a number of ways to explore the power, limits, and nature of the literary. While lofty claims were made for literature as an ideal art form, one of the strongest uses of music for literature was to suggest its failures – to indicate kinds of freedom, fulfilment, and plenitude only pointed to by verbal language. The paradoxical uses of failure are discussed in this chapter through texts by writers including Blake, Kleist, Hoffmann, Coleridge, and Mérimée.

This chapter provides an accessible starting point for discussion of the relation between music and Romanticism, giving an overview of some of the issues frequently encountered in coming to an understanding of how the two intersect.It outlines some of the main debates about the nature of Romanticism, before turning attention specifically to the idea’s application to music. Three main positions are set out: Romanticism as a period in music history, Romanticism as a musical style, and Romanticism as an aesthetic or mode of understanding.Although these three definitions are not without their problems, each relates to an important aspect of how Romanticism may relate to music, and while the third is probably to be preferred, the first two also demand consideration in any account of this topic.

Studies treating Augustine’s City of God normally begin with the year AD 410 and Alaric’s infamous Sack of Rome. Yet, might it not be more accurate to start in AD 380 when the Emperor Theodosius (d. AD 395) presented himself for Christian baptism at fifty-three years of age in the middle of a severe sickness? Upon recovering, this new and grateful Christian issued the Edict of Thessalonica, Cunctos Populos, along with the Emperors Gratian (d. AD 383) and Valentinian II (d. AD 392), now making Catholic Christianity the official religion of the the Roman Empire. Furthermore, in just a decade thereafter, in AD 391, the ancient rites would be banned, and the old ways authoritatively denounced. It was a truly watershed moment. The strength of the reliable Roman pantheon had been replaced with the weakness of religious novelty professing faith in a humbly vulnerable God-man hanging on a cross.