The most notable composers who were born in the early years of the nineteenth century illustrate in a marked manner the general tendencies of artistic progress in instrumental music since Beethoven. Hector Berlioz, born 1803; Mendelssohn, 1809; Chopin, 1809; Schumann, 1810; Liszt, 1811; Henselt, 1814; Stephen Heller, 1815; Raff, 1822; Rubinstein, 1830, all show a disposition to drop the sonata form, and to seek new principles of procedure and greater variety of design to meet the requirement of new types of musical ideas, and new ways of looking at music.

The works of the first member of this group seem to emphasize most forcibly the tendencies towards “programme“ and independence of form. But it must not be forgotten that the French have never shown any aptitude for pure instrumental music, and need the stimulus of ideas external to music to excite them to musical utterance. The stage is their natural field of artistic action, and the only music they have succeeded in at all notably is in some way connected with it, either as actual operas or as ballet tunes. The fact that Berlioz wrote large instrumental works on theatrical lines is, therefore, less significant historically than the fact that a programme was so frequently adopted by Teutonic composers. All the traditions of classical art were distasteful to his eager and impatient temperament.