This course examines the phenomenon of Romanticism both as an era of European music history with an associated stylistic idiom and as a way of thinking about music present to a greater or lesser degree in many periods and locales other than nineteenth-century Europe. It will also explore the styles of musical Romanticism as well as some of the central tenets of Romantic thinking, such as the necessary connection between art and life, the importance of originality and novelty, the mystery of genius, and the emphasis upon transcendence and sublimity, and consider some of the cultural factors that have problematically promoted the ideology of Romanticism as a “universal” truth about music.