Romantic music is a term that traces back its origin to the late eighteenth or the early nineteenth century.

It was related to Romanticism, a movement that took place in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Romanticism was strengthened by The Industrial Revolution and was basically a revolt against the social and political norms of The Age of Enlightenment, and a reaction against the scientific rationalisation of nature. Romantic music though dominant in various parts of Europe, dominated the Romantic Movement in Germany in particular. The seventeenth and the eighteenth century consisted of musicians who had been educated in music by a basic training received from musical establishments present at the court or in the Church, or by fathers who would pass on their skills and sometimes position, to their sons and or nephews. With the beginning of the nineteenth century, most composers came to music later in life and by a different route. Schumann was the son of a bookseller, and his family steered him firmly towards the study of law; Berlioz father was a doctor and expected him to follow in his footsteps. Schuberts and Chopins fathers were schoolmasters. Music therefore did not remain limited to people already in that profession. It rather became a profession pursued by people coming from various classes of the society. There was thus the creation of an intellectual climate in the early nineteenth century. This urged upon the musician, particularly upon the composer, a new and special view of himself and his work. The idea that music was a part of a group of fine arts, distinct from all the other activities people engage, was a relatively new one. From the writings of Charles Batteux- a French philosopher and writer on aesthetics; Alexander Baumgarten- a German philosopher who appropriated that aesthetics, which had always meant sensation to mean the taste or sense of beauty; and Immanuel Kant- another German philosopher who is said to be the central figure of modern philosophy, the idea of a system of fine arts became gradually more comprehensible. By the early nineteenth century, arts or the fine arts had been somewhat assumed to be synonymous. It had been universally presumed as if the constituent members of the above two which were namely literature, sculpture, architecture, painting, music and perhaps even landscape gardening, were in some important ways similar. The philosophers of this time which also included Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer along with the above mentioned names, set themselves very enthusiastically to the task of defining principles, goals, and significance of the arts as a cohesive community. For writers of this time, aesthetics was very serious because art suddenly seemed more important than ever before. Aesthetics basically referred to a branch of philosophy that dealt with the nature of art, beauty and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty. The Romanticism movement validated strong emotion as an aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on emotions such as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe. Romanticism connected the sentiment of passionate love to artistic expression perhaps more closely than any other literary movement by describing both as the undistorted expression of intense and genuine emotion. The damages of revolution and war from 1780 to 1815 left the European intellectual community in considerable disarray and disillusionment. Some, such as Friedrich Schlegel and Francois Chateaubriand, turned again to religion. At this time, the Wesleyan Movement made great strides in

England. The Wesleyan Movement was a movement of the Protestant Christians who wanted to follow the methods, the principles, the theologies given by John Wesley and his brother Charles Wesley who were reformers of the eighteenth century. For others, especially in Germany where romantic music had been very dominant since the beginning, art took on the status of a kind of secular religion- it was widely thought to provide access to a level of reality that exceeded the accidents and restrictions of a persons ordinary existence. Hegel, a German philosopher, in his Lectures on Aesthetic, personified the arts as Geist, which according to him was a primal entity that encompassed the mind of a man and of the universe itself. Music thus came to occupy a central place in such acclaimed portrayals of the role of art and the artist. E.T.A. Hoffmann in the year 1813 said that the most romantic of all the arts was instrumental music. He felt so as its sole subject was infinite. According to him, instrumental music led a man to a world far beyond the external world that surrounded him; a world that had nothing in common with the outside world; a world where he would leave behind all the feelings he could define and instead feel and inexpressible longing. Schopenhauer, a philosopher of that era, stated something similar to Hoffmans ideas in his book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. He believed that the world exhibited various levels of realness. He said that our world was driven by a continually dissatisfied will, continually seeking satisfaction. Objects as we saw or heard or felt them around us were mere phenomena and unreliable as the indicators of the true nature of things. Schopenhauer believed in a kind of elemental, blind powerful force called the will which was present in varying degrees of imperfection in people, objects, ideas, and events we encounter in this world. In other words, he held the belief that humans were motivated by only their own basic desires, or Will, which directed all of mankind. The most appropriate representation of the Will is the traditional Platonic Idea. But even even this is inaccessible to us except through art, as art allows a person to see beyond the particulars of things to this more fundamental level of reality. And music circumvents even this step as according to Schopenhauer. It is the immediate representation of the Will. Thus, in this formulation, art does the duty for both-metaphysics and religion. The will not only controls the actions of individuals, but also all observable phenomena but it also adheres to an ethical attitude by stating that Man can indeed do what he wants. But he cannot will what he wants. This could be thought to be similar to the concluding line of Ode on a Grecian Urn written by John Keats, where he states that Beauty is truth, truth beauty making truth and beauty become one. And music offers us a glimpse of the most fundamental nature of the universe, unknowable in any other way.