The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

It is the musical period that still comfortably outnumbers all others in terms of commercial recordings and airtime on classical radio stations. The Romantic era encompasses the music of well over a century, although the 19th century was undoubtedly its heyday. Its early roots lay in classicism (much as the wider Romantic movement in the arts, philosophy and politics had its origins in 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism), while its late blossoming in the hands of such figures as Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninov comfortably overlapped with Impressionism, Expressionism and modernism. (One still has to pinch oneself when noting that Boulez's 12 Notations for piano, First Piano Sonata and Le Visage nuptial all predate Strauss's Four Last Songs!)

Some idea of the sheer range of musical Romanticism can be gathered from considering the composers covered in Hyperion's Romantic Piano Concerto series (83 volumes and still counting!): the earliest repertoire includes Beethoven's friend and pupil Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838). and Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826), while among the most recent works represented are pieces by Arnold Bax (188-1953), Arthur Bliss (1891-1975) and Edmund Rubbra (1901-1986). If the virtuoso piano concerto was one of the most characteristic genres of the period (which is one of many reasons why this ongoing collection has proved so popular with collectors), other quintessentially Romantic genres are instrumental and vocal miniatures (the former epitomised by the character-piece for solo piano, the latter by the art song (Lied, Mélodie, etc.) and, at the other extreme, the through-composed symphonic poem for large orchestra pioneered by Liszt and soon taken up by Smetana, Franck and many, many others. And then there's the huge range of chamber music and opera to consider, everything from violin sonatas and string quartets with Beethoven's shadow firmly in the background, to the sprawling canvases of Wagnerian music dramas which, paradoxically, still owe an enormous debt to the Master from Bonn.

The geographic sweep is just as daunting: from the neo-Brahmsian Dubliner Charles Villiers Stanford in the west to the 'Mighty Handful' of Russians in Moscow, from Sibelius in the north to the Sicilian-born Bellini in the south. (And even this picture excludes Romantic musical voices from the other side of the Atlantic.)

How to make sense of this vast chronolgical, generic and geographic spread is one of the perennial problems facing those who think, write or talk about music, those who perform it and their audiences. One solution is simply to dismiss the catch-all term 'Romantic music' in popular parlance as too wide-ranging, and to limit discussion to what most music lovers would now regard as the 'early Romantics', up to about 1850 and largely from the German-speaking lands. Yet this approach has its drawbacks, too: the extraordinary fertility of ideas and attitudes unlocked in the late 18th and early 19th centuries still reverberate today, and to circumscribe discussion to a mere four or five decades seems both miserly and unambitious.

Over the next few weeks, we hope to explore some of the most potent ideas, trends and figures from this remarkably protean period of musical and artistic history. Yet they all, at some level or other, bear witness to one of the defining traits of Romanticism in general: the focus on the individual, whether that be the individual creative artist, a hero in a narrative, or the aesthetic response of the individual listener or viewer. This is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the Romantic era as opposed to the universalism of the Enlightenment period, with its roots in the philosphy of Rousseau, Kant and Herder, and it left its mark particularly strongly on early modernism, which sought to make sense of the individual's place in a world of ever more dizzying change, innovation and alienation.

And it is no doubt Romanticism's reflection of and appeal to the individual human consciousness (as opposed to more universal concepts derived from folk tradition, religion or scientific positivism) that accounts for its continuing appeal to so many, in a world now very far removed from the circumstances of its original creation. In the next few weeks, we will explore the origins of musical Romanticism and its earliest exponents; the huge variety that characterises the ‘high’ Romanticism of the 1850s onwards, particularly in opera; and the late Romanticism of the 1890s onwards, a pre-modernist period that many still look back on with nostalgia and regret.

In the meantime, some suggested reading to get the grey cells rolling:

Carl Dahlhaus (transl. J Bradford Robinson): Nineteenth-Century Music (University of California Press, 1992)
D Heath & Judy Boreham: Introducing Romanticism (Icon Books, 1999)
Charles Rosen: The Romantic Generation (Harvard University Press, 1995)