In 1810 the writer E. T. A. Hoffmann reviewed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and argued that instrumental music, needing no words, was the most romantic of the arts, because it opens a realm beyond ordinary speech. That belief, that music could say what language cannot, sits at the heart of the period. Romantic music, roughly 1820 to 1900, prized personal emotion, individual genius, nature, the supernatural and national identity.

Beethoven, the hinge

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 to 1827) trained in the Classical style and then stretched it almost to breaking. His symphonies grew longer, louder and more dramatic. His Third Symphony, the Eroica, was first meant to honor Napoleon as a hero of liberty. According to his pupil Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven struck out the dedication when he heard in 1804 that Napoleon had made himself emperor, exclaiming that Napoleon was only an ordinary man who would trample on the rights of others. The surviving copy shows the name scratched out so hard the paper tore.

Beethoven began losing his hearing in his late twenties and was almost totally deaf in his last years. In 1802 he wrote a letter to his brothers, never sent, confessing despair and his resolve to live for his art. He composed his Ninth Symphony in near silence, and its finale adds a chorus and vocal soloists singing Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy," whose line "all men become brothers" made it a hymn of human fellowship. Its melody is now the anthem of the European Union.

The cult of the virtuoso

Public concerts grew, and with them the star performer. The violinist Niccolò Paganini played with such speed that rumors said he had sold his soul to the devil. The pianist Franz Liszt drew such frenzied crowds that the poet Heinrich Heine coined the word "Lisztomania." A virtuoso is a performer of dazzling technical skill, and the Romantic age made the virtuoso a celebrity in ways that resemble modern pop stardom.

Songs, stories and pictures in sound

Franz Schubert (1797 to 1828) wrote more than six hundred songs before dying at thirty one. The Lied (plural Lieder) is a German art song for solo voice and piano that sets a poem so the piano becomes a full partner: the galloping horse in Schubert's "Erlkönig," the spinning wheel in "Gretchen am Spinnrade."

Composers also told stories without words. Program music is instrumental music meant to depict a story, scene or idea, often explained in a printed program. Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (1830) follows an artist through love, an opium dream, his own execution and a witches' sabbath. Its opposite, absolute music, is meant to be heard on its own terms, and critics argued fiercely over which was higher.

Richard Wagner pushed opera toward what he called music drama, joining music, poetry and staging into one total artwork. A leitmotif is a short musical idea tied to a character, object or idea, and Wagner wove dozens through his four opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. He was also a bitter antisemite whose 1850 essay attacking Jewish musicians later made him a Nazi favorite, which forces listeners to ask whether, and how, to separate art from its maker.

Music and the nation

Romanticism grew alongside nationalism. Musical nationalism draws on folk songs, dances, legends and landscapes to express a national identity. Frédéric Chopin, living in Paris after Russia crushed a Polish uprising, wrote mazurkas and polonaises rooted in Polish dances. Bedřich Smetana's Má vlast (My Homeland) follows the river Vltava through Bohemia. In Italy, the chorus of Hebrew exiles from Verdi's Nabucco (1842) became a symbol of longing for unity, though historians think some tales of its rebellious first reception were embellished later.

Women faced sharp limits. Fanny Mendelssohn, a gifted composer, was discouraged by her family from publishing, and some of her songs first appeared under her brother Felix's name. Clara Schumann was among the century's great pianists and also composed, yet she often doubted that a woman should compose at all, a doubt her world had taught her.

Worked example: Dvořák in America

In 1892 the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák came to New York to lead the National Conservatory of Music, which, unusually for the time, admitted Black and women students. There the young Black baritone Harry T. Burleigh sang him spirituals. In 1893 Dvořák told a New York newspaper that the future music of America should be founded on the melodies of Black Americans, which he found beautiful and noble enough to support a great national school.

That year his Symphony No. 9, "From the New World," premiered at Carnegie Hall to huge acclaim. Its slow movement has a melody so like a spiritual that it was later turned into the song "Goin' Home," often mistaken for a folk song.

Dvořák was applying nationalist logic to a new country: a nation's music should grow from its own folk roots. Some white critics scoffed at the idea of building American music on the songs of formerly enslaved people. Others noted the irony that a European had to tell Americans to value it. Either way, he was right that this music would shape American sound, as the next level shows.