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At the beginning of the 19th century, the Viennese classical style as exemplified in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven prevailed throughout Europe. This style provided so satisfactory a means for achieving the musical goals of the time that almost every composer wrote in some variation of it. The style tended to become a mere formula in the hands of less skilled composers. Partly for this reason, experimenting musicians between 1810 and 1820 gradually began to reach out in new directions.
The more adventurous musicians no longer felt that it was essential to coordinate all elements in their music so as to maintain clear formal outlines. They began to value other musical goals more than the goal of formal clarity. Instead of moderation, they began to value such qualities as impulsiveness and novelty. They might, for instance, write an unusual progression of chords even though the progression did not contribute to the overall harmonic direction of a composition. Similarly, if the sound of a particular instrument seemed especially attractive during the course of a symphony, they might write a long solo passage for this instrument, even though the solo distended the shape of the symphony. In this and other ways 19th-century composers began to exhibit a romantic, as opposed to a classical, view of their art. The aesthetic goals of romanticism were especially valued in Germany and central Europe. The instrumental works of Franz Schubert, an Austrian, and the piano music and operas of Carl Maria von Weber, a German, were an early manifestation of this development in music.
The romantic composers were often inspired by literary, pictorial, and other nonmusical sources. Consequently, program music, or music that follows a nonmusical plan, was widely cultivated, leading to the development of the symphonic poem. The French composer Hector Berlioz and the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt became especially prominent in this genre. Poetry of the 18th and 19th centuries formed the basis of art songs in which the composer portrayed with music the imagery and moods of the texts. The German art song is known by its German name, lied. Many hundreds of lieder were composed in the 19th century, the most successful being written by Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and, late in the century, Richard Strauss.
The ideal 19th-century genre was opera. Here, all the arts were joined together to produce grand spectacles, highly charged emotional situations, and opportunities for spectacular singing. In France, Gasparo Spontini and Giacomo Meyerbeer established the style called grand opera. Another Frenchman, Jacques Offenbach, developed a comic-opera style called opéra bouffe. Other important French opera composers were Charles Gounod and Georges Bizet. In Italy, Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini continued the 18th-century Italian tradition of bel canto (Italian, "beautiful singing"). In Italy during the second half of the century, Giuseppe Verdi tempered the emphasis on bel canto by stressing the dramatic values inherent in human relationships. Sentimental love and violent emotions were stressed by Giacomo Puccini. In Germany, Richard Wagner created an opera style called music drama, in which all aspects of a work contributed to the central dramatic or philosophical purpose. Unlike Verdi, who stressed human values, Wagner was usually more concerned with legend, mythology, and such concepts as redemption. Wagner developed the use of short fragments of melody and harmony, called leitmotifs (German, "leading motives"), to represent people, objects, concepts, and so on. These fragments were repeated in the vocal or orchestral parts whenever the thing they represented recurred in the actions or thoughts of the characters.
During the 19th century a tradition of abstract, or nonrepresentational, music was maintained in symphonies and chamber music. Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, and the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner were especially important in this regard. The Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky wrote symphonic and chamber works as well as operas and program music. Works without programs but with freely devised forms were written for the piano by the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin.
In all musical genres, a high value was placed on uniqueness of expression. This gave rise not only to widely differing personal styles of composition but to personality cults of virtuoso performers and conductors. Two of the best known were Liszt and the Italian violinist Nicolň Paganini. The Austrian conductor and composer Gustav Mahler wrote symphonies that incorporated references to his personal life.
By the end of the century the romantic style had modified the language of music in several ways. The taste for unusual chord progressions had brought about a disintegration of tonality. Composers, especially Wagner, made increasing use of chromaticism, a harmonic style with a high proportion of tones outside the prevailing key. Folk music idioms became widespread, particularly on the part of composers from Russia, Czechoslovakia, Norway, and Spain. Among these composers were the Russians Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov; the Czechs Antonin Dvorák and Bedrich Smetana; and Edvard Grieg, a Norwegian. Later composers who made use of folk elements included Louis Moreau Gottschalk, an American; Carl Nielsen, a Dane; Jean Sibelius, a Finn; and Manuel de Falla, a Spaniard.
These folk idioms, along with others discovered at the beginning of the 20th century, reintroduced into art music many older concepts of harmony and rhythm. The same effect resulted from systematic researches into the history of music, which were begun in the 19th century. With the disintegration of tonality, cohesion in a piece of music was less and less dependent on harmonic movement and more and more dependent on the ebb and flow of intensities and densities of sound. The use of sound as a structural element in music was one characteristic of the late romantic French style called impressionism, which was developed by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Other French composers worked in a more satirical style; these included Francis Poulenc and Erik Satie.
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