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.

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).