Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and many works of musical nationalism and exoticism reveal the continuing development of Romantic ideals well after the 1850s. But times were changing, and the new realism of literature and the arts embodied new ideals in keeping with a no-nonsense world increasingly devoted to industrialization and commerce. In the age of Victorian morality, a new work ethic gave short shrift to the heady emotion that the Romantics had insisted on conveying in their art. Romantic music came to seem out of step — or else it was prized exactly because it offered an escape, in the concert hall, to a never-never land with little connection to everyday events.

The work of the two greatest late nineteenth-century German composers can be viewed as two different responses to this situation. Johannes Brahms, though a devoted young friend of Robert Schumann, one of the most Romantic of composers, turned back to the Classicism of the Viennese masters. He saw this as a way of tempering the unbridled emotionalism of Romanticism, which he expressed only in a muted mood of restraint and resignation.

A younger composer, Gustav Mahler, reacted differently. Lament was his mode, rather than resignation; his music expresses an intense, bittersweet nostalgia for a Romanticism that seems to have lost its innocence, even its credibility. The lament for this loss is almost clamorous in Mahler’s songs and symphonies.