The separation of musical styles by time periods is not always precise. Some composers begin experimenting with more modern musical techniques that do not become popular in musical circles for decades. Additionally, the complex nature of musical history dictates that cutting a timeline into exact, moment-marked chunks is fundamentally flawed. The Romantic era did not start immediately after the death of Beethoven or Schubert. Yet, for ease and to maintain consensus regarding definitions of musical styles, time periods are generally given a starting point and an ending point (with the assumption that the reader understands that such markings are rough and may, in actual history, deviate). It is true that musical taste and style change slowly over time and also vary depending on geographic location. Revue des Romantiques, as does essentially all other schools of musicology studying “classical” music, restricts its dominions mainly to Western Europe. The field acknowledges composers from different areas, such as America and Russia, but usually only if they have objective musical or historical ties to Western European music. “Classical” composers such as Gottschalk or Rachmaninoff, though they indeed exhibit foreign quirks, are studied and considered in the field because they still fundamentally use Western European forms and also remain very relevant in Western European musicology and historical study.
Revue des Romantiques, as its name suggests, focuses primarily on Romantic-era music. Typically, most musicological circles define “1800-1910,” though, technically, if one were to split this periodization further into more specific (and consequently, far more useful) categories, it would actually extend slightly into the 18th century and further into the 20th century.
Romanticism was arguably the most significant artistic and cultural movement ever. Its intentional connection to human instinct and emotion made it seem natural and beautiful. The essence of Romanticism is wonder and amazement, enthralling European culture for over a century until the First World War. Of course, after such a horrible scar in human history, many found Romanticism naive and foolish. The world, for most, grew too complicated with new sciences, politics, and artificiality for the rather naturalistic and straightforward Romantic movement. And yet, the fundamentals persisted in the work of post-Romantic composers such as Sergei Rachmaninoff and Sergei Dohnányi.
It seems that after the Second World War, humans collectively realized (at least in part) the cruelties of war and the dangers of mechanical cultural conformity. A new group of Romantics, called “Neo-Romantics,” emerged from the backstage, revitalizing the musical genre in an age of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Queen. The Neo-Romantics also helped repopularize classical music, and so nowadays it seems pretty standard to find musicians as young as 3.
Why then is Romanticism so popular in the modern age? The answer lies in human nature: we crave what we do not have. The early Romantics sought an artistic and emotional freedom that they did not have after a century of strict rationalism under the Enlightenment. Romanticism lost its aesthetic value between the two World Wars because the public was surfeited with emotional mushiness and a lack of artistic restraint, and it wanted what it did not have: order and judgment. Then, in the decades that followed, people grew tired of societal structure and control, picking up the same thing they had left behind earlier. Such it has been, and so it will continue to be.