The Romantics’ search for higher experience and more intense expression provoked a reaction against the restraints of artistic form and genre. Artists resisted all rules and regulations. They distrusted abstract notions of “beauty” and rules of “decorum” that they felt might hamper their spontaneity.

Eighteenth-century drama, for example, was hemmed in by such rules until the Romantics overturned them. Against the rules they cited the works of Shakespeare, where locations change scene by scene, tragedy mixes with farce, rich poetry collides with bawdy prose, and noble characters share the stage with clowns. The lifelike turbulence and loose form of these plays made Shakespeare enormously popular in the nineteenth century. Dozens of composers wrote music associated with them, including Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Verdi.

In music itself, composers worked to break down barriers of harmony and form. All the Romantic composers experimented with chords, or chord progressions, that had previously been forbidden. From the time of Schubert on, their music was enriched by imaginative new harmonies. Sonata form, the hallmark of Classicism, was already treated freely by Beethoven, especially in his late style, as we saw in his Piano Sonata in E, Op. 109 (see page 216). The Romantic composer Robert Schumann went further, treating the form so freely in his piano sonatas that he finally labeled the last (and greatest) of them “Fantasy.” It was a proclamation of his spontaneity on the one hand, and insurance against accusations of rule-breaking on the other.