PostRomantic

Post-Romantic is a term used in musicology to describe a tendency or period in late 19th- and early 20th-century European art music that extends Romantic aesthetics while incorporating newer harmonic and formal ideas, serving as a bridge between Romanticism and modernism. The label is not universally defined and its dates vary by region; in practice it often covers works composed roughly from the 1890s to the 1910s or 1920s, depending on geography. Some scholars apply it to late-Romantic composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Jean Sibelius, whose intensely personal expression, expanded orchestration, and harmonic language carry into the early 20th century.

Characteristics include heightened emotional intensity, expansive melodic lines, and a broader, more chromatic harmonic palette that pushes tonal centers toward ambiguity; increased use of orchestral color, orchestration techniques, and larger-scale forms; and a leaning toward introspective, sometimes programmatic content. While retaining core Romantic goals—expressive subjectivity, narrative or emotional program, and absolute or programmatic form—post-Romantic works often show a turn toward modernist concerns: greater formal flexibility, rhythmic complexity, and early experiments with atonality or non-traditional scales in the works of some composers, notably Scriabin.

In scholarship, post-Romantic is a descriptive label rather than a formal movement, and its boundaries overlap with late Romantic, impressionist, and early modernist tendencies. The term helps capture a transitional aesthetic rather than a sharp break, illustrating how composers negotiated tradition while absorbing new harmonic and structural ideas.