So, in contrast to the crystal clear symphonies of the eighteenth century and the vocal roulades and delicate clavichord suites, we find in the nineteenth huge orchestral works, grandiose operas, the shattering of established forms, an astonishing increase in the size of the orchestra and the complexity of its parts, the association of music with high poetic ideas, and the utter rejection of most of the prevailing harmonic rules. And with this extension of scope there came a profound deepening in content, as much more profound and human as the Parisian mob’s notion of society was more profound and human than that of Louis XVI. The revolution and the Napoleonic age, which had been periods of dazzling personal glory, in which individual ability and will power became effective as never before, had stimulated the egotistic impulses of the nineteenth century. People came to feel that a thing could perhaps be good merely because they wanted it. Hence the personal and emotional notes sound in the music of the nineteenth century as they never sounded before. The sentimental musings of Chopin, the intense emotional expression of Schumann’s songs, the wild and willful iconoclasm of Berlioz’s symphonies were personal in the highest degree. And, as the complement to this individual expression, there dawned a certain folk or mob-expression, for the post-Napoleonic age was also an age of national awakening. The feeling of men that they are part of a group of human beings rather than of a remote empire is the feeling which we have in primitive literature, in the epics and fairy stories, the ballads and folk epics. This folk-feeling came to brilliant expression in Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies, and the deep heroic note sounds quite as grandly in his symphonic poems. Music took on a power, by the aid of subtle suggestion, of evoking physical images; and, in deeper sincerity, it achieved something like accurate depiction of the emotions. A thousand shades of expression, never dreamed of before, were brought into the art. Men’s ears became more delicate, in that they distinguished nuance of tone and phrase, and particularly the individual qualities of various instruments, as never before; it was the great age of the pianoforte, in which the instrument was dowered with a musical literature of its own, comparable in range and beauty with that of the orchestra. The instruments of the orchestra, too, were cultivated with attention to their peculiar powers, and the potentialities of orchestral expression were multiplied many times over. It was the great age of subdivision into schools and of the development of national expression. The differences between German, French, and Italian music in the eighteenth century are little more than matters of taste and emphasis--variations from one stock. But the national schools which developed during the romantic period differ utterly in their musical material and treatment.