Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Question about play romantic period compositions

Actually, I will be surprised if you say you heard of it, since you already mentioned you never heard of it before.

I also "heard" or was told 1750-1830 for Classical Period and 1830-1900 for Romantic Period.

By the way, the word "definitive" was added by someone else to my post while describing the time frame, so I didn't use it.

Like you said before, you never heard of it.....and that makes sense.

The so-called "periods" of music were defined after the fact, are imprecise, and the borders between them are fuzzy- if they exist at all. At any given moment in time composers are writing in range of styles some embracing new trends, others perfecting old ones and some switching around at will.

Bach, for instance, near the end of his life held fast to High Baroque traditions at same time that composers such as Gluck were composing in what we now call the classical style. (But, which, at the time was thought of as just an extension of traditions that had been percolating for some time.) The music of late Beethoven, who we normally lump in with "classical" is harmonically adventurous and structurally complex in a manner closer to that of composers we call "romantic" than it is to the earliest "classical" composers. There is no sharp border between the eras.

Question: Is Schubert late classical or early romantic? If he changed, did he all the sudden start writing "Romantic" music at some point? What about Weber who died in 1826 but is generally considered "Romantic", or John Field, a contemporary of Beethoven who wrote music that sounds quite a bit like, and inspired, the decidedly romantic Chopin. Is Debussy late romantic- as some suggest- or early modern? If he's modern, what about Liszt, who we think of as Romatic, who used techniques that, in retrospect, look very "Debussy-ian" Maybe they're both? What about Richard Strauss, who wrote Lisztian style tone poems until his death in the 1940s?