While many Romantic compositions last for about as long as works from the eighteenth century, special classes of music arose with quite different dimensions.

First, composers cultivated what we will call miniatures, pieces lasting only a few minutes — or even less. Mostly songs and short piano pieces, these were designed to convey a particularly pointed emotion, momentary and undeveloped. In this way the composer could commune with the listener intensely but intimately, as though giving him or her a single short, meaningful glance. The meaning might well be hinted at by a programmatic title.

Though short pieces were also written in earlier times, of course — think of minuet movements in classical symphonies — usually they were components of larger units, where their effect was balanced by other, longer movements. Romantic miniatures, though they were often published in sets, as we will see, nevertheless were composed so as to stand out as individuals in their own right, apart from their sets. Miniatures for piano were sometimes given general titles, such as Schubert’s Impromptus (Improvisations) and Brahms’s Capriccios (Caprices). Sometimes they masqueraded as dances, like Chopin’s Mazurkas (a Polish dance). Often they were given more suggestive, programmatic titles: Years of Pilgrimage by Franz Liszt; Spring Song by Felix Mendelssohn; To a Wild Rose by Edward MacDowell, America’s leading late Romantic composer. Schumann was something of a specialist in such titles: The Poet Speaks, Confession, The Bird as Prophet, and — Why?

In miniatures the problem of musical form was not so much solved as avoided. They are over before the listener begins to wonder where the music is going, what the next effect will be.