The Romantic Era: The Twentieth Century

After Beethoven, composers turned their attention to the expression of intense feelings in their music. This expression of emotion was the focus of all the arts of the self-described "Romantic" movement. Whether in the nature imagery or passionate violence found in the paintings of Frederic, Delacroix, and Goya,

the strange and fanciful literature of Edgar Allan Poe, or the adventure and myths of the great collections of fairy tales and folk poetry, the depiction in art of the beautiful, the strange, the sublime, and the morbid was the ruling credo of the period.

The years spanning the end of the nineteenth century and the earliest part of the twentieth were a time of great expansion and development of, as well as a dramatic reaction to, the prevailing late Romanticism of previous years. In music, as in all the arts, expression became either overt the huge symphonies of Gustav Mahler, or the operas of Gioconda, or was merely suggested (as in the so-called "impressionist" music of Claude Debussy. The previous century's tide of Nationalism found a twentieth century advocate in the Hungarian Bella.

It was a time of deepening psychological awareness, with the works of both Nietzsche and Freud in circulation; and the horrors of the First World War brought death and destruction to the very doorsteps of many people living in Europe. Possibly in reaction to such influences, the expressionistic music of Arnold and his disciples germinated and flourished for a time. Experimentation and new systems of writing music were attempted by avant-grade composers like Eduard Varese and although none gained a foothold with the public, these techniques had a profound influence on many of the composers who were to follow.

Twentieth-century music has seen a great coming and going of various movements, among them post-romanticism, serialize and in the earlier years of the century, all of which were practiced at one time or another by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. More recently, lavatory or "chance" music, , and minimalism have been in vogue by a handful of American composers. With the commercial dissemination of music through the various media providing music as a constant background, the general populace has largely dismissed much of the music produced using bold, new, or experimental styles, preferring to turn to the forms and genres which it is most familiar. Many of the greatest and best-known composers of this century, including Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovitch, and British composer Benjamin Britten, have been those who have written music directly descended from the approved models of the past, while investing these forms with a style and modernistic tone of their own.