Individual spontaneity was an important goal of the Romantic movement. And if there was any area in which the composer wanted to seem particularly free and spontaneous, it was the area of musical form. The music should bubble out moment by moment, irrepressible and untrammeled, like churning emotion itself. But composers faced a problem: how to control that spontaneity? They had to provide their music with enough sense of coherence that listeners could follow it.

In their approach to musical form, nineteenth-century composers broke with Classical norms. They wanted each work of art to express its individuality in its form as well as its style (melody, harmony, timbre, etc.). They distrusted conventional, standardized forms just as they flouted society’s other conventions. Even when they followed forms such as sonata form, rondo, and so on, they tended to follow them so loosely that it gets to be a matter of opinion whether they are doing so at all. Themes tend to blend into one another, and there is much less of the neat, clear cadencing of Classical music.

Some Romantic compositions deliberately break down the boundary between music and nonmusical silence. Robert Schumann’s song “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai” (see page 238) begins hesitantly, as though it is already in the middle of a transition; we feel we have just begun hearing music that started long ago. Instead of ending with a decisive cadence, the song comes to a questioning dissonance, then — silence. The vague, atmospheric quality at the start and the suggestion of infinity at the end are typically Romantic.

Yet the music had to avoid real formlessness if it was to hold the attention of an audience. Once again, for Romantic composers the problem was how to create the impression of spontaneous form while at the same time giving the listener some means of following the music. They developed a number of interesting and characteristic solutions.