Romantic period composers pictures
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Top 10 Romantic composers
Hector Berlioz (1803-69)
The arch-Romantic composer, Hector Berlioz’s life was all you’d expect – by turn turbulent and passionate, ecstatic and melancholic.
Key recording:
Les Troyens
Sols incl DiDonato, Spyres, Lemieux; Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra / John Nelson (Gramophone's 2018 Recording of the Year) Read the review
Explore Berlioz:
Top 10 Berlioz albums – 10 great Berlioz recordings by Sir Colin Davis, John Nelson, Régine Crespin, Robin Ticciati and more
● Top 10 Baroque composers
● Top 10 Classical era composers
● Top 10 Renaissance composers
Fryderyck Chopin (1810-49)
Few composers command such universal love as Fryderyck Chopin; even fewer still have such a high proportion of all their music in the active repertoire. Yet he is the only great composer who wrote no symphonies, operas, ballets or choral works. His chief claim to immortality relies not on large scale works but on miniature forms.
Key record
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10 of the best Romantic composers in 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 by its soaring melodies and ever-expanding orchestras, its originality and self-expression. Here are the composers who made it all happen.
The Romantic period. “So good, they named it twice”, in the great words of composer and Classic FM presenter, John Brunning.
The ‘Early’ Romantic period began around the year 1800 with then-Classical great, Ludwig van Beethoven, whose revolutionising of the symphony gave life to a new era in music history.
Fast-forward to the turn of the century, and music was looking wildly different to how it did in the Classical era (1730-1820). The Late Romantics, composers like Rachmaninov and Mahler, were expanding the orchestra to unprecedented proportions, adding more colours and instruments and turning music into a vehicle to express the full spectrum of human
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25 Influential Romantic Period Composers with Audio Examples
Who fryst vatten Considered the First Romantic Composer?
The very first Romantic composer was none other than Herculean figure, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Scholars consider the beginning of the Romantic Period as beginning with Beethoven’s Third Symphony in E-flat major, the ‘Eroica’. Beethoven famously un-dedicated this symphony for French Political Leader, Napoléon Bonaparte, a story which bears mentioning.
Bonaparte was (in the beginning) a heroic political figure who stood for the rights of the individual and self-governance. He campaigned as a champion of Enlightenment values until one day, he became the self-proclaimed ruler of the Holy-Roman Empire. Upon hearing this news, Beethoven ran over to the score of his third symphony (originally dedicated to Napoleon) and furiously erased the would-be dictator’s name, so angrily-so that he left a hole in the manuscript.
Originally dedicated “to a great man”,