This chapter explores musical Romanticism as a historiographical concept. Drawing on a range of sources, from nineteenth-century writings to textbooks published in the twentieth century, it probes the distinction that has been made between classicism and Romanticism, noting that it is only when musical Romanticism is over that the concept of a Romantic era starts being crystallised. It investigates the degree to which the year 1848 can be considered to be a symbolic moment for the end of Romanticism and, through the music of the second half of the nineteenth century, considers the relationship between musical Romanticism and closely related concepts such as neo-Romanticism, realism, and modernity. Drawing on a wide range of historiographical writings from the second half of the twentieth century, it explores changing conceptions of where musical Romanticism is deemed to reside, whether in instrumental music or vocal music, and whether within the Germanic realm or beyond it. It investigates the place and role of women within musical Romanticism and explores their absence in writings on musical Romanticism in relation to broader writings on Romanticism and feminism.

Classicism and Romanticism are frequently used as a shorthand to designate the stylistic and aesthetic shifts that occurred as the eighteenth gave way to the nineteenth century. However, this neat picture blurs as one delves into the subject. Not only did Romantic musicians learn the foundations of harmony, phrasing, and texture from their predecessors, but many of the styles of innocent naïveté or exuberant striving beloved by Romantics emerged from specific eighteenth-century genre contexts, including opera, the fantasy, folk song, and church music. Change did happen, of course. Not only did the ethical concerns of the eighteenth century turn towards metaphysical ones in the nineteenth, but the social and institutional divides that had long separated musicians and writers began to lessen. As a result, musicians and writers learned to admire and emulate what each believed the other excelled at.

This chapter first outlines the Romantic perspective on performance as it was elaborated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates on key writers who made music central to their philosophical and literary works, most notably E. T. A. Hoffman and Walter Scott. Both writers foregrounded the immediacy and social intimacy of performance as fundamental to musical beauty, even as they simultaneously discussed music in terms of objects (works, songs, poems). The chapter proceeds with case studies of three early-nineteenth-century performers – Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz (as conductor) – who were considered ‘Romantic’ or who inspired writers to use Romantic literary and journalistic tropes. Each case study considers the interrelations between the performer’s look, onstage behaviour, and musical phenomena, as well as the literary elaborations they inspired. The conclusion suggests ways in these three key performers shaped performance ideals well into the twentieth century.

This chapter offers an introduction to Romantic form, focusing on ways of organising musical forms that were especially prevalent amongst composers working in Germany between 1825 and 1850 but that survived in the music of selected composers until the final years of the century. Using examples drawn from vocal and instrumental works by Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Clara Schumann, and Antonín Dvořák, it discusses a number of characteristics that are typical of Romantic form as well as the ways they relate to theoretical models that have been developed for classical music. The chapter is organised in two sections. The first addresses matters of formal syntax, that is, the construction and interrelation of musical phrases.The second explores issues of formal incompleteness as well as connections that go beyond the single-movement level.

Nothing is more evident, seemingly, about Augustine’s ciu. Dei than its structure. Any reasonably serious relevant website reveals that it is divided into two “halves,” comprising Books 1–10 and 11–22, each further subdivided into halves and thirds, respectively. Augustine himself accounts for the structure in just this way. In retr. he distinguishes the first ten books and the last twelve as the main textual units. The first ten respond to “two groundless opinions that are opposed to the Christian religion.” The first five reply to “those who would have it that human success depends on what they regard as the essential observance of the many gods whom they customarily worship”; the next five books rebut those who argue that the observance they make to the multitude of gods by sacrificing brings profit to life after death.” Augustine adds, lest it be objected that he would then have done nothing but refute the opinions of others without asserting any of his own, the last twelve books accomplish this goal: “in the twelve books that come later, the first four contain an account of the rise of the two cities, the City of God and the city of this world, the second four expound their growth or progress, and the third and final four their appointed ends.” Thus the first “half” leads with response and refutation, and the second half with constructive theology. As Augustine also observes, however, this distinction is not absolute: “Nonetheless, where necessary I both maintain our own standpoint in the first ten books, and reject the opposing views in the later twelve” (retr. 2.69; see also, ep. 1A*.1).

In the first ten books of ciu. Dei, Augustine makes his case for Christian beatitude against the worldly glory of pagan Rome. Book 11 is a pivot. There he tells us – and now “we” seem to be his Christian and not his pagan readership – that we know best of the City of God, that eternal thing that peregrinates through time, from the witness of sacred writings, Psalms especially (87:3, 48:1–2, 48:8, 46:4–5), and from the inspiring love of the city’s founder. Most of us, most of the time, mix self-interest into that love and obscure for ourselves the beauty of the beloved. The moral is not that love must be selfless or worse, self-loathing, but that sacrificial love, sensing what is holy, practices humility. The great mediator between heaven and earth, the Son of God, takes up a human life, his own, without ceasing to be God. His is the original act of humility – think of it also as first love – that speaks consistently through the Scriptures and renders them authoritative (ciu. Dei 11.3). While sin makes it impossible for a mind used to the dark to endure the relentless illumination of pure divinity (incommutabile lumen; ciu. Dei 11:2), Augustine reminds us that we have, by way of mediation, a text to interpret and a spirit of humility to bring to the reading.

Musical Romanticism and nationalism are both concepts closely tied to the idea of ‘the folk’. This chapter considers the twisting and turning relationships in music between Romanticism, nationalism, and the folk. It treats first the origin of the concepts. Next it takes up the importance of music as a folk ‘language of nature’, and the effect of German musical hegemony during the nineteenth century in spurring different configurations of ‘national’ and ‘folk’ music. It also looks at the realities that complicate many Romantic claims about national music, such as the presence and contributions of ethnic minorities. The chapter argues that Romantic musical nationalism in music is ultimately a series of reception tropes, and summarises five key approaches. It concludes with a study of a single piece, Smetana’s The Moldau, to show how these different tropes can converge and play off each other.

In ciu. Dei 6 and 7, Augustine turns from addressing arguments that Rome’s traditional pagan cult is requisite for the this-worldly prosperity of the city and its empire, to the prospects of these rituals conducing to personal well-being after death. Books 6 and 7 form a bridge between Augustine’s history of pre-Christian Rome in all its glory and its misery, and his consideration of philosophic or natural theology, especially accounts offered by the Platonic school, and the place it makes for traditional pagan worship. The main material from which this bridge is made, according to leading pagan intellectuals like Marcus Terentius Varro, is the traditional Roman civil religion. Varro variously presents Rome’s traditional civil religion as framed by its founders for political utility on the one hand, and philosophic pedagogy on the other. Civil theology and its rites thus understood bind mythic pagan deities and popular views of their intervention on behalf of Rome to a naturalistic, pantheist account of God or the gods as the world itself or its soul. As Augustine interprets Varro, the latter lends his learned, public-spirited support to the civil cult, even while directing thoughtful readers beyond it to philosophic or natural theology. Varro is thus an indispensable interlocutor for Augustine in completing the political-historical-religious inquiry of ciu. Dei 1–5, and in preparing for the engagement with Platonic natural theology in Books 8–10.

The complaint that the rise of Christianity had caused a series of calamities due to the neglect of the traditional polytheistic cults had already been combated by the early Latin apologists. In cataloguing catastrophes that had befallen Rome before the advent of Christ, Augustine moves on well-trodden ground, though the traditional complaint apparently had gained new force after the sack of Rome in AD 410. Accordingly, this chapter explores how Augustine adapts a traditional theme to his own apologetic purposes. It shows how he employs rhetorical pathos in order to deconstruct the idealizing view of early Roman history that had been canonized by the literary tradition and kept exerting influence on educated persons – both pagan and Christian – in his days. While he sometimes solicits an emotional response in order to reverse the traditional evaluation of a well-known event (ciu. Dei 3.14 on the Horatians and Curiatians), he is also prepared to exploit the traditional pathetic representation of the Civil Wars, available in authors like Lucan or Florus, to make his own point. His reading of Roman history as an almost uninterrupted series of civil wars reveals the distinction – conceded to the pagan adversaries in the opening chapter – between moral and external evils as artificial and marks the Roman Empire as an avatar of the ciuitas terrena, which is inevitably divided within itself. The chapters on Numa Pompilius briefly touch upon the systematically important issues of the relevance of peace for happiness and the relation of religion and philosophy and help to anchor Book 3 in the overall argument of the ciu. Dei as a whole.

As we arrive at ciu. Dei 21 and 22, we reach the final destination of the two cities after their long pilgrimage on earth. Book 21 deals with the final repudiation of the ciuitas terrena, the eternal punishment of the damned in Hell. Book 22 examines the ultimate fate of the ciuitas Dei, the eternal reward of the blessed in heaven. But, as I will argue in this chapter, one can also read the final books of the City of God as the endpoint of a specific intellectual journey on which Augustine had embarked decades earlier, one that led him to abandon much of the mental furniture of a late antique philosopher and to embrace – even to pioneer – a cosmology and a theological anthropology with specifically Christian contours.

In Book 19, Augustine concentrates on leading two audiences, both beset by different forms of violence, unrest, and insecurity within and without, to accept God’s offer of the peace that endures in heaven’s everlasting life as the supreme good. Primarily, this appeal for peace has a protreptic quality to attract a non-Christian audience. Especially for their sake Augustine uses, in addition to the divine authority of Scripture, the reason of philosophical argument in Book 19. Secondarily, the appeal has a didactic exhortation for a Christian audience to seek more ardently the peace of the heavenly Jerusalem. Even the pilgrim Church has “sheer misery compared to the happiness we call ultimate” (ciu. Dei 19.10; Babcock, 2.364; CCSL 48.674). Augustine makes his appeal for peace by humbling the peace of what each of the two audiences experiences. All people experience in this life on earth, in different ways, not only a broken society, but also a broken heart. But without recognizing that experience in humility, why would readers yearn for heaven’s peace? To all, Augustine makes an appeal for what he calls pax plenissima atque certissima (ciu. Dei 19.10; CCSL 48.674).