When did the period of musical Romanticism end? This question is enticingly simple, but the answer is surprisingly difficult. Drawing on the recent developments in the historiography of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music, this chapter examines some of the categories commonly used to describe this period – late Romanticism, early modernism, maximalism, and Weltanschauungsmusik – and their methodological and epistemological orientations. It will be argued that these categories, far from being merely convenient labels for stylistic categorisation, can be understood as different responses to the complex historiographical challenges arising from the destabilised ontological foundation of the work-concept. Grounded in a discussion of the alienation between Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss between 1909 and 1914, this chapter contends that the question concerning the end(s) of musical Romanticism can thus only be rendered approachable as a heuristic idea, in the way it prompts us constantly to question, challenge, and rethink the historiographical foundations of an era.

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.

The introductory chapter examines recurring themes in the literary-cultural field of the 1820s: improvisation, speculation, and personal identity. A multivalent notion of performance functioned as a kind of “media concept” during the late-Romantic period, an era characterized by the interwoven evolution of print media and theatrical genres. In order to define the sphere of metropolitan, bourgeois, market–facing culture that was a driving force of the late-Romantic literary field, this chapter focuses on the exemplary year 1824 – a high point for performances of theatrical improvisation and for financial speculation, and a year that saw an extraordinary conjunction of trend-setting productions by William Hazlitt, Tommaso Sgricci, Charles Mathews, Theodore Hook, Mary Russell Mitford, John Galt, Walter Scott, and Lord Byron. An emphasis on the improvisational and speculative nature of writing, acting, and publishing generates a new paradigm for understanding the 1820s as an “age of information” as well as a self-reflective “age-in-formation.”