Unlike the terms `Baroque' and `Classical', `Romantic' is a word full of meanings in everyday use. Dictionaries define it as to do with romance, imagination, the strange, the picturesque, but the fantastic. In the arts, it is similarly applied - to literature, painting or music in which fantasy and imagination are in their own right more important than such classical features as balance, symmetry and wholeness. Because the Romantic era succeeded the Classical one, roughly at the turn of the 18th century, it is usual, and convenient, to define the characteristics of Romantic art and especially music by comparison with those of the art of the Classical period.

The most obvious difference between Classical music and Romantic music is in the Classical world, form and order come first, in the Romantic, expressive content does. A Classical piece of music has a clear-cut structure that the hearer is intended...