Romantic
The 9 Best Romantic
Tracks of All Time
The nineteenth century, in which the orchestra tripled in size, the composer became an individual with feelings to report, and harmony was stretched until it stopped resolving. Music as autobiography, at enormous volume.
- Origin
- Vienna, Paris and Leipzig, 1820
- Also known as
- romanticism, late romantic, nineteenth century, lieder
- Tracks
- 9
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
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Number 1: Ludwig van Beethoven / Symphony No. 9 in D minor
1824
A choir in a symphony, which was not done, singing Schiller in praise of universal brotherhood. Beethoven was too deaf to hear the applause and had to be turned around to see it.
Number 2: Richard Wagner / Tristan und Isolde
1859
The opening chord does not resolve for four hours, and by the time it does, tonality is on notice. Everything unstable in twentieth-century harmony starts in that first bar.
Number 3: Franz Schubert / Winterreise
1827
Twenty-four songs, one voice, one piano, and a man walking away from a town into snow. Schubert died the following year; the cycle knows it.
Number 4: Hector Berlioz / Symphonie fantastique
1830
An artist takes opium, dreams he has murdered his beloved, and attends his own execution and a witches' sabbath. Written at twenty-six, three years after Beethoven died, and it sounds a century later.
Number 5: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky / Symphony No. 6 "Pathétique"
1893
A symphony that ends by fading into the basses instead of finishing. Tchaikovsky died nine days after conducting the premiere, which has coloured every performance since.
Number 6: Frédéric Chopin / Nocturnes, Op. 9
1832
Chopin wrote almost nothing that is not for piano and needed nothing else. The right hand is an opera singer, the left is the accompanist, and the rubato is the whole art.
Number 7: Gustav Mahler / Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection"
1894
Ninety minutes, an offstage brass band, and a choir that enters almost inaudibly after an hour of noise. Mahler said a symphony must contain the world, and then demonstrated it.
Number 8: Johannes Brahms / Ein deutsches Requiem
1868
A requiem in German, assembled from scripture chosen to comfort the living rather than to judge the dead, with no mention of Christ. Brahms's answer to a form he did not believe in.
Number 9: Antonín Dvořák / Symphony No. 9 "From the New World"
1893
Written in New York by a Czech who had been hired to tell Americans what their national music should sound like. He told them to listen to spirituals, which was a better answer than his employers wanted.