The Romantic Period

The next great composer to come after Mozart was Ludwig Van Beethoven. He was the first of what we would now call the Romantic Composers.

Beethoven was German, and he had a very unhappy childhood. However, because of this unhappiness, he wrote music that was very powerful and exciting. Here is a clip of Beethoven’s famous 5th Symphony. This is very stormy and dramatic music.

Romantic composers often wrote very long pieces of music, with lots of instruments. Movie directors often put Romantic-sounding music as film soundtracks, because the music goes well with dramatic scenes. The old film ‘Brief Encounter’ is an example. This is the opening of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, which is heard often throughout the film.