The Library Of Romantic Music

Spanning the 19th century, The Romantic Movement was a reaction against many of the assumptions of The Age Of Reason in general and The Industrial Revolution in particular. Music proved to be a particularly rich medium of expression for a new Zeitgeist that prized individualism and spirituality. Drawing together composers as diverse as Mendelssohn, Elgar, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Wagner and Brahms, Romantic Music was clearly a very broad church indeed. Perhaps the lack of any firm central tenets suggests that Romantic Music was more a loose alliance of kindred spirits than any real movement with common musical structures. Even so, for around a century, Romantic Music gave us many extraordinarily rich and varied expressions of the human spirit, as this definitive collection demonstrates.