Continue the story of classical music through two of its most beloved and formative eras, beginning in the graceful, ordered world of Haydn and Mozart and culminating in the groundbreaking music dramas of Richard Wagner. Against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, rising nationalism, and the artistic ideals of Romanticism, students will discover how a rapidly changing Europe continually reshaped what composers believed music could express. Along the way, we enter the musical centers of Vienna, Paris, and Leipzig, where many of the Romantic era’s greatest figures lived and worked—gathering in intimate Schubertiads and salons, dazzling audiences in the concert hall, transforming the opera stage, and engaging in passionate debates over the future of music itself. Through the trailblazing works of Beethoven, the poetic miniature worlds of the Romantics, the spectacular rise of the virtuoso, the flowering of bel canto opera, and the increasingly ambitious possibilities of the nineteenth-century orchestra, students will experience the Classical and Romantic eras not as a procession of isolated composers, but as one interconnected story of artistic inheritance, friendship and rivalry, cultural upheaval, and extraordinary innovation—an age in which the balanced forms of the eighteenth century were gradually stretched, transformed, and ultimately propelled toward Wagner’s revolutionary vision of music drama.