Many terms we use for historical periods in the arts came into use only after the fact. Baroque, as a designation for a style period in music, was adopted from the field of art history by musicologists in the twentieth century. The term Romantic, instead, was used by the Romantics themselves. It first took hold in literature, and by the time the earliest Romantic composers began their careers in the 1820s, their literary contemporaries were already excitedly talking about “Romantic” music.

This tells us two important things about music after the time of Beethoven. One is that, largely thanks to Beethoven, people had become highly aware of music as a major art. Music was treated with a new respect in cultivated circles; it was taken seriously in a way it never had been before.

The other is that it seemed quite natural for observers of the time to link up developments in music with parallel developments in literature. From Homer and Virgil to Shakespeare and Milton, literature had always been considered the most important and most convincing of the arts. The prestige and power of literature were now freely extended to music.

This fact is illustrated in a painting much admired at midcentury, showing a group of literary lions and lionesses listening reverently to Franz Liszt at the piano (see page 219). Their expressions tell us how profoundly the music moves them; their aesthetic experience is very different, clearly, from the casual enjoyment of eighteenth-century listeners pictured on page 133. The painting shows also how important Beethoven was in bringing about this change. Liszt gazes soulfully at Beethoven’s larger-than-life bust. Does it rest on the books stacked on the piano, or loom outside the window, gigantic, against the turbulent sky?