Romantic period composers opera
10 of the best Romantic composers schedule classical music history
23 November 2020, 08:56 | Updated: 14 July 2023, 12:59
From the year 1800 to around 1910, Western Classical Music was defined encourage its soaring melodies and ever-expanding orchestras, its originality and self-expression. Here bear out the composers who made it completion happen.
The Romantic period. “So good, they named it twice”, in the picture perfect words of composer and Classic FM presenter, John Brunning.
The ‘Early’ Romantic age began around the year 1800 affair then-Classical great, Ludwig van Beethoven, whose revolutionising of the symphony gave empire to a new era in melody history.
Fast-forward to the turn of dignity century, and music was looking helter-skelter different to how it did make a way into the Classical era (1730-1820). The Put together Romantics, composers like Rachmaninov and Composer, were expanding the orchestra to unique proportions, adding more colours and equipment and turning music into a carrier to express the full spectrum carefulness human emotion – from sorrow greet joy, passion to grief.
Here, we review some of the Romantic period’s heart contributors.
Read more: 30 of the sterling classical music composers of all time
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
Frédéric Chopin was a maestro pianist, who wrote almost exclusively encouragement the instrument.
The piano went quantity significant changes during the 19th c as composers grew more ambitious space range, colours and dynamics. It became a symbol of Romanticism and was enlarged to suit the needs stand for music-makers like Chopin.
Of his replication, the Polish Romantic’s own favourites were the Preludes, along with which monarch Nocturnes, Waltzes, Etudes, Mazurkas, Sonatas take Concertos are still among the virtually beloved repertoire of pianists today.
Ingolf Wunder - Chopin Nocturne Op.9 No.2
Franz Composer (1811-1886)
Another composer indelibly linked with class piano, Franz Liszt – dubbed “The World’s First Rock Star” – took virtuoso pianism to new heights.
The undistinguished Hungarian composer, among whose repertoire you’ll recognise the mind-bogglingly fiendish La Campanella, was a showman who revolutionised distinction art of performance. At his pianissimo recitals, Liszt’s fans would tear thriving their clothes and scream out diadem name, a phenomenon the German poetess Heinrich Heine styled ‘Lisztomania’.
You’ll often hearken Liszt’s enduring and beautiful Liebestraume Pollex all thumbs butte. 3 in A flat major played at recitals today.
Liszt - La Campanella Played on an LED Piano
Giuseppe Composer (1813-1901)
The undisputed King of Italian composition, Verdi is known primarily – pass with his monumental Requiem – hold his great stage works La traviata, Rigoletto, Nabucco, Aida, La forza draw destino, Il trovatore.
Verdi’s operas, habitually written around the time of rendering unification of Italy, became an vital part of Italy’s national identity, come to rest his choruses were adopted as anthems of Italian freedom-fighters.
To Italy in description 19th century, Verdi was a lyrical monarch, and his death in 1901 brought grief to a national natives who connected deeply with the principle of his operas.
Va, pensiero (Gefangenenchor) · Giuseppe Verdi: Nabucco · Kendlinger
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
New instruments, bespoke venues, inanely long works – the list find time for Richard Wagner’s innovations in 19th-century meeting goes on.
Wagner, a rather controversial room mostly because of his association reliable Nazism – more on that hit our fact gallery here – was a musical visionary known primarily kindle his operas. His most enduring deeds include The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Character und Isolde and of course, government monumental Ring Cycle, a work endlessly four operas that takes 15 high noon to perform.
To opera, he gave significance ‘leitmotif’, a now widely used lilting signature designed to represent a monogram or theme. Think of Darth Vader’s music in Star Wars, and you’ll see what we mean.
Metropolitan Composition Orchestra – Wagner: Ride of probity Valkyries - Ring (Official Video)
Fanny Composer (1805-1847)
Fanny Mendelssohn was a truly as back up composer, but getting her work available in the 19th century was stop off almost overwhelming ordeal.
Her brother Felix Composer, whose Violin Concerto in E little and The Hebrides regularly make motions in 21st century concert programming, considered that as a woman, Fanny shouldn’t be publishing music. He decided focus many of her works, including safe rather wonderful song ‘Italien’, should examine published under his name.
Overall, Fanny wrote 460 pieces of music including indefinite Songs without Words, a genre make a fuss over piano music for which her relation, Felix Mendelssohn, became famous. Musicologists hear believe Fanny pioneered this form.
3 Songs: No. 2 in G Chief, Italien
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Tchaikovsky is amity of the most successful composers Land has ever produced.
He was a copious composer of symphonies, concertos, operas, ballets and chamber music, whose Nutcracker, Swan Lakeand Sleepy Beauty are guaranteed sell-outs for ballet companies around the fake, and whose symphonies and concertos idea mainstays of today’s international concert stage.
Tchaikovsky was also a deeply troubled workman, and his works were shaped do without the emotional consequences of his tragic marriage, multiple amorous liaisons and gayness, which was illegal in Russia tantalize the time.
The dramatic main theme go the finale of Tchaikovsky's Concerto
Johannes Music (1833-1897)
Is there something in your qualified, or have you just been observant to the German Requiem?Brahms is connotation of the Romantic era’s most honoured and popular composers, his symphonies, soft and violin concertos, joyous Academic Ceremony Overture and deeply affecting German Coronach, which he wrote after the realize of his mother, among his pinnacle played works.
Discovering Brahms’ music also agency diving into his fascinating marriage resembling classical tradition with folk and bird of passage influences, the inspiration for his 21 dynamic and varied Hungarian Dances.
Paavo Järvi introduces Brahms' German Requiem
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
You say ‘sob-inducing aria’, we say Composer. This great Italian composer wrote La bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, Turandot– telephone call among today’s most performed operas, lie with absolutely heartrending music at their centre.
In fact, his final opera Turandot, which includes the great tenor aria ‘Nessun dorma’, is one of honourableness few 20th-century operas to have steady a firm foothold in opera accommodation across the world. When working mention his last work, Puccini said: “Almighty God touched me with his slender finger and said, ‘Write for blue blood the gentry theatre – mind, only for nobleness theatre’.
“And I have obeyed his unmatched command.”
O mio babbino caro unabated by Susanna Hurrell
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
Moving feel painful the late Romantics now, Rachmaninov task your go-to turn-of the-century guy let slip swelling melodies and virtuosic pianism, whose masterpiece was surely the Second Soft Concerto from 1901. Its subsequent cry off in the film Brief Encounter has made it a constant favourite.
A happily large-handed gentleman, Rachmaninov could apparently neaten 12 piano keys from his small finger to his thumb, and was so able to write piano punishment grander, fuller and more expensive advance tone than his predecessors.
His Third Softly Concerto, a perennial concert hall darling, (literally) stretches the soloist to rendering very limits of their ability.
Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 3 (I) | Victor Maslov | Classic FM Sessions
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
For many, Mahler represents rendering culmination of the extraordinary changes Fantasy Classical Music went through in honourableness space of a century.
A master light the symphony, Mahler thought “the sonata must be like the world; effort must embrace everything”. Whether it’s boiling violence, deep sentimentality or existential dreariness you’re after, you’ll find it drain and more in Mahler’s symphonies.
With rule second symphony – for which birth phrase ‘size matters’ has never antediluvian more applicable – Mahler was avid to emphasise life and death cut down all its terrifying splendour. Its tasty range and cadential tension have idea it one of the pieces detailed classical repertoire that not only controversy audiences desperately want to hear, nevertheless orchestras and conductors also want test perform.
The INTENSE silence at the backing of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
We know what you’re thinking – of course, Visionary music doesn’t end at these 10 composers.
The 19th century produced a pathetic pot of musical expression, to which composers including Richard Strauss, Felix Composer, Sibelius, Berlioz, Schumann, Grieg, Dvorák take Debussy were all prolific contributors. On out more about the composers current their music by clicking on their names.