Romantic concerns with nature, history, and the imagination extended well beyond literature into the realms of art and music. France’s Eugène Delacroix (u-JHEHN deh-luh-KWAH) (1798–1863) painted dramatic, colorful scenes that stirred the emotions. The famous German painter Casper David Friedrich (1774–1840) preferred somber landscapes of ruined churches or remote arctic shipwrecks, which captured the divine presence in natural forces.

In England, the most notable romantic painters were Joseph M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837). Both were fascinated by nature, but their interpretations of it contrasted sharply, aptly symbolizing the tremendous emotional range of the romantic movement. Turner depicted nature’s power and terror. Constable painted gentle landscapes in which human beings lived peacefully with their environment.

Musicians and composers likewise explored the romantic sensibility. Abandoning well-defined structures, the great romantic composers used a wide range of forms to create a thousand musical landscapes and evoke a host of powerful emotions. They transformed the small classical orchestra, tripling its size by adding wind instruments, percussion, and more brass and strings. The crashing chords evoking the surge of the masses in Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude,” and the bottomless despair of the funeral march in Beethoven’s Third Symphony — such were the modern orchestra’s musical paintings that plumbed the depths of human feeling.

This range and intensity gave music and musicians much greater prestige than in the past. Music no longer simply complemented a church service or helped a nobleman digest his dinner. It became a sublime end in itself, most perfectly realizing the endless yearning of the soul.