[TomDavey]

No: music ushered in the Romantic age, earlier than Goethe and Schiller in literature.

The musical style, a decisive break from the High Baroque, was initially called "Sturm und Drang." It appeared in the work of Gluck and Haydn in the 1760s.

By the first decade of the 19th century, Goethe and Schiller had retreated from Romanticism. In the same decade, middle-period Beethoven had already made Romanticism immortal.

Immortal is not an exaggeration. To this day, orchestral film music remains utterly derivative of late Romantic composers like Richard Strauss.

The most famous example of musical Romanticism's enduring dominion is probably the opening of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Everybody knows the fanfare and the ecstatic harmonic progression that follows in full tutti; few know it was written by Strauss in 1894.

The rip-offs of Academy Award winner John Williams would be impossible without the much better music of the 19th century.

Corresponding data point: in 1822, Beethoven chose Schiller's "Ode to Joy" (1785) to provide the lyrics for the final movement of the 9th Symphony.

[themadturk]

I believe it's unfair to call Williams' music a rip-off; film music, as enjoyable as it can be, has a commercial purpose and is created to stand behind the action and dialog of a film, not stand alone as music of the Romantic masters was. His score to Star Wars: A New Hope was a deliberate call-back to the music of Korngold, Steiner, Newman and others who defined film music in the 1930s and 1940s. Korngold was both a legitimate composer of late-Romantic music and a film composer.

[Tainnor]

I don't think it's wise to conflate Sturm und Drang with Romanticism, despite their similarities. They are also quite distinct in many respects.

And Beethoven is rightfully considered to be a transition point between the Classical and the Romantic style, you can hear the echos of Haydn (and even Bach) even in his late works.

[TomDavey]

I was careful to say "middle-period Beethoven." Beethoven's stylistic evolution over the course of his life truly astonishes. In his late period, e.g., the Grosse Fugue, one can hear Bartok being invented.

And he was stone deaf by then. It's staggering.