The Romantic Spirit in Music

Extract

So much has already been written on the antithesis of “classical” and “romantic” music that it may seem a waste of time to approach the subject again. I certainly have no intention this afternoon of re-opening all the old controversies, or even of attempting to summarize the attempts that have been made to define exactly the meaning of these two familiar adjectives. My object is to look at romantic music—more especially the earlier romantic music—from a point of view which seems hitherto to have been neglected.