Franz Liszt in the context of "Piano Concerto No. 2 (MacDowell)"

Romantic music is a stylistic movement in Western Classical music associated with the period of the 19th century commonly referred to as the Romantic era (or Romantic period). It is closely related to the broader concept of Romanticism—the intellectual, artistic, and literary movement that became prominent in Western culture from about 1798 until 1837.

Romantic composers sought to create music that was individualistic, emotional, dramatic, and often programmatic; reflecting broader trends within the movements of Romantic literature, poetry, art, and philosophy. Romantic music was often ostensibly inspired by (or else sought to evoke) non-musical stimuli, such as nature, literature, poetry, super-natural elements, or the fine arts. It included features such as increased chromaticism and moved away from traditional forms.

Weimar is a city in the German state of Thuringia, in Central Germany between Erfurt to the west and Jena to the east, 80 km (50 mi) southwest of Leipzig, 170 km (106 mi) north of Nuremberg and 170 km (106 mi) west of Dresden. Together with the neighbouring cities of Erfurt and Jena, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia, with approximately 500,000 inhabitants. The city itself has a population of 65,000. Weimar is well known because of its cultural heritage and importance in German history.

The city was a focal point of the German Enlightenment and home of the leading literary figures of Weimar Classicism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. In the 19th century, composers such as Franz Liszt made Weimar a music centre. Later, artists and architects including Henry van de Velde, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Walter Gropius came to the city and founded the Bauhaus movement, the most important German design school of the interwar period.

Frédéric François Chopin (born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin; 1 March 1810 – 17 October 1849) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period who wrote primarily for solo piano. He has maintained worldwide renown as a leading composer of his era whose "poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation".

Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola and grew up in Warsaw, which in 1815 became part of Congress Poland. A child prodigy, he completed his musical education and composed his early works in Warsaw before leaving Poland at age 20, less than a month before the outbreak of the November 1830 Uprising; at 21, he settled in Paris. Thereafter he gave only 30 public performances, preferring the more intimate atmosphere of the salon. He supported himself, selling his compositions and giving piano lessons, for which he was in high demand. Chopin formed a friendship with Franz Liszt and was admired by many musical contemporaries, including Robert Schumann. After a failed engagement to Maria Wodzińska from 1836 to 1837, he maintained an often troubled relationship with the French writer Aurore Dupin (known by her pen name George Sand). A brief and unhappy visit to Mallorca with Sand in 1838–39 proved one of his most productive periods of composition. In his final years he was supported financially by his admirer Jane Stirling. In poor health most of his life, Chopin died in Paris in 1849 at age 39.

Richard Georg Strauss (/straʊs/; German: [ˈʁɪçaʁt ˈʃtʁaʊs] ; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer and conductor known for his tone poems and operas. A leading figure of the late Romantic and early Modern era, and a successor to Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, he combined, along with his friend Gustav Mahler, subtleties of orchestration with an advanced harmonic style.

His compositional output began in 1870 when he was just six years old and lasted until his death nearly eighty years later. His first tone poem to achieve wide acclaim was Don Juan, and this was followed by other lauded works of this kind, including Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, Symphonia Domestica, and An Alpine Symphony. His first opera to achieve international fame was Salome, which used a libretto by Hedwig Lachmann that was a German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. This was followed by several critically acclaimed operas with librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena, and Arabella. His last operas, Daphne, Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio used libretti written by Joseph Gregor, the Viennese theatre historian. Other well-known works by Strauss include two symphonies, lieder (especially the Four Last Songs), the Violin Concerto in D minor, the Horn Concerto No. 1, Horn Concerto No. 2, his Oboe Concerto and other instrumental works such as Metamorphosen.

The Death of Sardanapalus (La Mort de Sardanapale) is an 1827 oil painting on canvas by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. A smaller replica he made in 1844 is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is a work of Romanticism based on the tale of Sardanapalus, a king of Assyria, from Greek historian Diodorus Siculus's library. It uses rich, vivid and warm colours and broad brushstrokes, was inspired by Lord Byron's play Sardanapalus (1821) and inspired a Hector Berlioz cantata, Sardanapale (1830), and an unfinished Franz Liszt opera, Sardanapalo (1845–1852).

Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumental music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative or description of some aspect of world. The term was invented in the 19th century by Franz Liszt, who himself composed a great deal of program music. However, as Liszt himself noted, program music had been written for centuries before his time.

To give an example, Ludwig van Beethoven's Sixth Symphony narrates a visit to the countryside, portraying in succession a happy arrival, a quiet moment by a brook, an encounter with dancing peasants, a thunderstorm, and the peasants' song of thankgiving when the storm is over. Program music is often written so that the notes themselves convey, at least to some degree, the meaning of what is portrayed; thus the thunderstorm in Beethoven's symphony includes loud timpani strokes to convey the thunder and shrill piccolo music to depict the shrieking winds.

A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term Tondichtung (tone poem) appears to have been first used by the composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term Symphonische Dichtung to his 13 works in this vein, which commenced in 1848.

In the Steppes of Central Asia (Russian: В Средней Азии, romanized: V Sredney Azii, lit. 'In Middle Asia') is a symphonic poem (or "musical tableau") composed by Alexander Borodin in 1880, which he dedicated to Franz Liszt.

There is a long tradition in classical music of writing music in sets of pieces that cover all the major and minor keys of the chromatic scale. These sets typically consist of 24 pieces, one for each of the major and minor keys (sets that comprise all the enharmonic variants include 30 pieces).

Examples include Johann Sebastian Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier and Frédéric Chopin's 24 Preludes, Op. 28. Such sets are often organized as preludes and fugues or designated as preludes or études. Some composers have restricted their sets to cover only the 12 major keys or the 12 minor keys; or only the flat keys (Franz Liszt's Transcendental Études) or the sharp keys (Sergei Lyapunov's Op. 11 set). In yet another type, a single piece may progressively modulate through a set of tonalities, as occurs in Ludwig van Beethoven's 2 Preludes through all the Major Keys, Op. 39.