What did Romanticism sweep away? &c.

[Chaszz]

The thread 'Deep Thought in Classical Era Music?' takes a sort of opposite approach to what I'd like to do here. Instead of trying to prove a positive and have those who disagree attack it piecemeal, a little here and a little there, I invlte those disagreeers to now state fully what their views of the situation are. Just so we can get an idea of their entire worldview of the era. What concepts of music and composers, or art in general, were swept into history's dustbin when the Romantics came along with their new ideas of genius and of nature? What good was lost, either never to be recovered, or perhaps recovered in the 20th century? What is the full catalogue of Romantic sins? What precedents, if any, are there in art and music history for their sins? And on the other hand, what good did they do?

[some guy]

To answer the subject line question, nothing. Not a damned thing.

Here's an interesting quote by Cage about this kind of topic: "We need not destroy the past. It is gone."

What concepts of music and composers, or art in general, were swept into history's dustbin when the Romantics came along with their new ideas of genius and of nature?

None.

What good was lost, either never to be recovered, or perhaps recovered in the 20th century?

None.

What is the full catalogue of Romantic sins? What precedents, if any, are there in art and music history for their sins? And on the other hand, what good did they do?

No catalogue. No precedents. Plenty of good.

Classical and Romantic are two terms for two different approaches to the world. The one wants to control the world. To categorize and standardize. The other wants to allow the world to be itself, in all its richness and contradictoriness. The one is exclusive. The other is inclusive.

I noticed in the wiki article on Romanticism an interesting remark about a literary movement that arose in the late 19th century called Realism. The wiki article referred to that as the opposite of Romanticism. That's how far from understanding Romanticism it is possible to get. Realism is a splinter of Romanticism, a portion of it, broken off and on its own. The same is true for another late 19th century movement, Naturalism. Romanticism included all of those things and more.

The easy thing to do nowadays, now that we've forgotten everything the Romantics stood for, is to pick a few obvious differences between the Romanticism of the 19th century and the Classicism of the 18th, like highly charged emotionalism, and make those the things, the only things, that Romanticism was. (Of course, Classicism gets the same cavalier treatment.)

In any event, the two principles, apart from any particular historical manifestation of them, seem to be permanent principles, and human culture seems to either swing back and forth between the two or split into two contemporaneous groups (as I believe happened in the twentieth century and is still going on) which are engaged in a life or death struggle.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p-cY1XWN_Q)

[Florestan]

Classical and Romantic are two terms for two different approaches to the world. The one wants to control the world. To categorize and standardize. The other wants to allow the world to be itself, in all its richness and contradictoriness. The one is exclusive. The other is inclusive.

The above paragraph puts you firmly in the Classical camp because you've just categorized and standardized. 

[Purusha]

Form, basically. And no, Brahms doesn't count because he "Romanticized" form, so to speak. Nietzsche had as much to say about Brahms as he did about Wagner.

[DavidRoss]

To answer the subject line question, nothing. Not a damned thing.

This is true.

Classical and Romantic are two terms for two different approaches to the world. The one wants to control the world. To categorize and standardize. The other wants to allow the world to be itself, in all its richness and contradictoriness. The one is exclusive. The other is inclusive.

This is rubbish.

If there is an essential difference, classicism is about a rational approach to the objective world, romanticism is about emotional expression of the subjective world.

[some guy]

Form, basically

Nope.

There are two approaches to form, too. One imposes it on the material, the other creates it out of the material.

The above paragraph puts you firmly in the Classical camp because you've just categorized and standardized. 

[DavidW]

What did Romanticism sweep away... I guess it swept me away!

More seriously, the Romantics revered the past more than the previous eras did, if anything they celebrated and appreciated the eras before them.  They transformed the performance culture away from play a piece once and shelf it, as what was seen in the baroque and classical eras.

[Brahmsian]

Yes David, I was going to say that.

Romanticism swept me off my feet, forever! 

[quintett op.57]

Romanticism swept all that it could away, including rythm & tonality sometimes.
Freedom is the principle of romanticism.

I don't like the "Era classification":
Brahms composition are much more similar to Haydn's than to Wagner & Liszt's music.
Haydn's orchestration and Mozart's use of tonality are often freer than those of many composers of the XIXth.
Chopin, Schumann, Bruckner & Mahler never abandoned the classical form completely.
In Russia, the classical period seems to happen after the romantic period.
Richard Strauss was a romanticist who became a classicist.

[Brahmsian]

The masses who diss the Romantic Era are just jealous.  It can never be equaled or matched again.   

[Florestan]

The thread 'Deep Thought in Classical Era Music?' takes a sort of opposite approach to what I'd like to do here. Instead of trying to prove a positive and have those who disagree attack it piecemeal, a little here and a little there, I invlte those disagreeers to now state fully what their views of the situation are. Just so we can get an idea of their entire worldview of the era. What concepts of music and composers, or art in general, were swept into history's dustbin when the Romantics came along with their new ideas of genius and of nature? What good was lost, either never to be recovered, or perhaps recovered in the 20th century? What is the full catalogue of Romantic sins? What precedents, if any, are there in art and music history for their sins? And on the other hand, what good did they do?

IMO the problem lies not with the Romantics themselves. They swept away nothing from the past, in terms of music and musicians; after all, they had much reverence and admiration for its masters and they thought of themselves as continuing, not destroying or obscuring, their heritage.

What they did, though, was to invent new concepts and categories and to come up with completely new ideas --- unheard of prior to the advent of Romanticism. Based on these ideas they composed music of the highest quality.

So far, so good. The problem rises when those Romantic concepts, categories and ideas are applied to pre-Romantic music, resulting in anachronisms at best and far-fetched theories at worst.

I will cite only two such ideas:

1. Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

2. A symphony must be like the world - it must contain everything.

I contend that no composer prior to the Romantics would have subscribed, and as such judging their music by Romantic standards is completely misleading.