Discuss the basic characteristics of the Romantic style in art and music

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

As with Romantic literature, artists and musicians reacted to the formality and intellectual discipline of Neoclassicism by embracing emotion and spontaneity. In place of the cool rationality and order of a Neoclassical composition, the Romantics introduced a studied irregularity and disorder.
The Romantic hero also appeared in countless paintings and sculptures. Romantic art glorified the creative individualism, patriotism, and nationalism embodied by this hero. Paintings strove to portray passion, desire, and emotional turbulence. Seeking to heighten intensity, artists often left their brushstrokes visible, as if to underline the immediacy of the creative act. They might deliberately blur details and exaggerate the sensuous aspects of texture and tone.
In music too, Romantic composers shared with the artists of their time the development of a more personal and unconstrained style. They tended to modify the "rules" of classical composition in order to increase expressive effect. They abandoned the clarity and precision of the classical composition, expanding and loosening form and introducing unexpected shifts of meter and tempo. Just as Romantic painters made free use of color to heighten the emotional impact of a subject, so composers gave tone color a status equal to melody, harmony, and rhythm. During the nineteenth century, the symphony orchestra reached heroic proportions, while smaller, more intimate musical forms became vehicles for the expression of longing, nostalgia, and love. Further, the virtuoso became a physical embodiment of the hero—dazzling in ability, egotistical, and praised to mythical proportions.