The year 1848 in Europe was a year of failed revolutions in France, Italy, and various German states. Political freedom, which for the Romantics went hand in hand with freedom of personal expression in life and art, seemed further away than ever. While not all the early Romantics lived in free societies, at least by today’s standards, freedom was an ideal they could take seriously as a hope for the future. We recall Beethoven’s enthusiasm for Napoleon as a revolutionary hero, reflected in the Eroica Symphony of 1803, one of the landmarks of nineteenth-century music. In the 1820s, artists and intellectuals thrilled to the personal role of one of them — Lord Byron, a poet — in the struggle for Greek independence. Then they lamented his death near the field of battle.

But the failure of the revolutions of 1848 symbolized the failure of Romantic aspirations. In truth, those aspirations had had little to nourish them since the days of Napoleon. Romanticism lived on, but it lived on as nostalgia.

The year 1848 is also a convenient one to demarcate the history of nineteenth-century music. Some of the greatest early Romantic composers — Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann — died between the years 1847 and 1856. By a remarkable coincidence of history, too, the 1848 revolution transformed the career of Richard Wagner. Exiled from Germany for revolutionary activity, he had no opera house to compose for. Instead he turned inward and — after a long period of philosophical and musical reflection — worked out his revolutionary musical ideas. Wagner’s music dramas, written from the 1850s on, came to dominate the imagination of musicians in the second half of the century, much as Beethoven’s symphonies had in the first half.