6 of the Most Romantic Symphonies in Classical Music History

 by Emily E. Hogstad  February 14th, 2026

What makes a symphony romantic?

For one, a symphony can be stylistically of the Romantic Era – Romantic-with-a-capital-R, full of sweeping melodies, warm orchestral colour, and heart-tugging harmonies.

But a symphony can also be romantic in a more personal sense: when it springs from a composer’s love for someone – or even somewhere.

Today, we’re looking at six symphonies that are Romantic in both senses of the word: stylistically of the era, and emotionally rooted in a love story.

All six of these works remain among the most popular romantic symphonies in the classical repertoire.

Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique (1830)

The Love Story

This symphony’s autobiographical program was directly inspired by Berlioz’s own tumultuous love life and romantic fixations.

In 1827, after seeing Irish actress Harriet Smithson perform the role of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Berlioz became obsessively infatuated with her.

Although the production was in English, Smithson’s performance was so gripping that it electrified Parisian audiences.

Hector Berlioz in 1832

One audience member in particular was electrified: Hector Berlioz.

He fell in love not with Smithson as a person – he wouldn’t get to know her for quite some time – but rather with her talent and appearance, as well as the many Romantic Era ideals she represented.

While in the throes of this fixation, Berlioz channeled his infatuation into a symphony.   

The music is programmatic and, in Berlioz’s own words, follows a “young artist of morbidly sensitive temperament” (a not-so-subtle stand-in for himself) as he plunges from ardent passion into the depths of delusion.

The beloved’s tender theme (idée fixe) is first heard in the symphony’s opening movement, but it later curdles into a vulgar fiddle tune in the witches’ sabbath, symbolising how his idealised love has turned into a nightmare.

The orchestration here is noteworthy, featuring an expanded percussion section, new instruments like the English horn, and striking effects like col legno bowing, where string players tap the wood of their bows on the strings to create spooky sounds.

Harriet Smithson

Berlioz kept trying to get Smithson’s attention. He sent her numerous letters and even went so far as to stalk her lodgings, to no avail. In fact, she didn’t even attend the symphony’s 1830 premiere.

However, two years later, she finally heard a performance. She was astonished that she had inspired such a work, and they soon began dating.

They married in 1833. The marriage collapsed within a matter of years. But this symphony, the spark of inspiration that signaled the start of their relationship, remains a revolutionary Romantic Era statement that out-survived their love – and them.

Mendelssohn – Symphony No. 4, “Italian” (1833)

The Love Story

Horace Vernet: Felix Mendelssohn, 1831

Felix Mendelssohn was not undergoing a tortured love affair while writing the Italian Symphony.

In fact, this work is more influenced by a place he loved than a person: the “romance” here is between the composer and Italy itself.

Mendelssohn’s letters from his 1830–31 Italian journey are ecstatic in their admiration.

“This is Italy! … the supreme joy in life. And I am loving it,” he wrote to his family.   

Each movement of the symphony takes on a different aspect of the life he observed in Italy. The joyful first movement is followed by a slow movement reflecting a religious procession he saw in Naples. The dance of the third movement is a standard minuet and trio, and the final movement incorporates two different Italian dances, the quick Roman saltarello (a jumping dance), and the Neapolitan tarantella.

Its joy makes it one of the most “Romantic” – if not overtly romantic – symphonies of the era. Read more about Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4.

Schumann – Symphony No. 1 “Spring” (1841)

The Love Story

Robert and Clara Schumann

The “Spring” Symphony emerged from the happiest period of Robert Schumann’s life: his first year of marriage to pianist Clara Wieck.

After years of struggling to win the approval of Clara’s father, the star-crossed lovers were finally able to marry in September 1840.

This personal triumph sparked an extraordinary burst of creativity. 1840 had been Robert’s “Year of Song,” when he poured his love into over a hundred love songs.

But by 1841, with Clara’s encouragement, he had turned to the symphony.

She wrote in her diary:

“It would be best if he composed for orchestra; his imagination cannot find sufficient scope on the piano… His compositions are all orchestral in feeling… My highest wish is that he should compose for orchestra – that is his field! May I succeed in bringing him to it!”

As for his part, Robert later said that the work was inspired not just by spring’s external imagery but by his own “spring of love” (“Liebesfrühling”).   

Astonishingly, Schumann sketched this symphony out over just four days in January 1841. It exudes all of the exuberance you might expect from such an energetic start.

Schumann wanted the opening trumpet fanfare “to sound as if it came from on high, like a summons to awakening,” heralding spring’s (and love’s) arrival. This motto theme, bold and hopeful, recurs as a unifying idea.

He crafted music that somehow sounds like spring, featuring buoyant rhythms, anticipatory tremolo passages in the strings, and woodwind passages that resemble birdsong.

Throughout, the symphony’s tone is one of youthful hope, excitement, and, importantly, satisfaction. It’s very much in line with Romantic Era ideas and idealism about the rejuvenating power of both love and nature.

Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 4 (1877)

The Love Story

Tchaikovsky with his wife Antonina Milykova

Few symphonies are as closely tied to a composer’s personal emotional life as Tchaikovsky’s Fourth.

Written in 1877, it coincided with a period of acute turmoil in Tchaikovsky’s romantic and emotional life.

That year, against his better judgment, Tchaikovsky entered into a hasty marriage with a young conservatory student, Antonina Miliukova – a marriage that proved disastrous and lasted only weeks before he fled her forever.

Tchaikovsky may have hoped marriage might quell rumours about his homosexuality, but the reality drove him to a nervous breakdown.   

During the aftermath of this catastrophic marriage, Tchaikovsky poured his inner despair and conflict into his fourth symphony.

He described the opening fanfare as the “Fate” that hangs over a person’s life: a concept that colored the entire symphony.

In a candid letter to his patroness and confidante, Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky admitted: “I was very depressed last winter when writing the symphony, and it is a faithful echo of what I was experiencing.”

Madame von Meck, who became Tchaikovsky’s benefactor in 1877, actually played a critical role in the symphony’s creation and the composer’s life at that particular time.

She provided financial support so he could quit teaching, along with an emotionally intimate – if strictly epistolary – friendship.

Nadezhda von Meck

The dedication of the fourth symphony even reads “To my best friend”: Tchaikovsky’s tribute to von Meck, and a thank-you for helping to usher him through an especially trying time in his life.

It’s ironic that one of the most infamous marital breakdowns in classical music history inspired one of the standout symphonies of the Romantic Era.

Mahler – Symphony No. 5 (1901–02)

The Love Story

Alma Schindler, 1902

The years 1901–1902, when Mahler composed his Fifth Symphony, were momentous in his personal life, especially in terms of romantic love.

In November 1901, Gustav Mahler met Alma Schindler, a young composer and socialite from Vienna.

Their whirlwind courtship was intense; by March 1902, they were married. (Alma was pregnant at their wedding.)

This intense new love had a profound impact on Mahler, and we see its reflection most clearly in the symphony’s Adagietto.   

According to Alma’s testimony, the Fifth’s Adagietto (which starts at the 46:15 mark in the video above) was Mahler’s love song to her.

Historians have noted that Alma’s picturesque storytelling isn’t always strictly accurate, but the following story remains persuasive. Apparently, he left her a small poem with the Adagietto’s manuscript, saying: “How much I love you, my sun, I cannot tell you in words – only my longing and my love and my bliss.”

Today, the Adagietto is regarded as the wordless love letter from Mahler to his new wife, communicating in music what he felt he was unable to say in words.

It provides a transcendent counterbalance to the earthiness of the rest of the symphony, enhanced by its orchestration for strings and harp alone.

Rachmaninoff – Symphony No. 2 (1907)

The Love Story

Sergei Rachmaninoff and Natalia Satina

The creation of his Symphony No. 2 marked a particularly redemptive chapter in Rachmaninoff’s professional life: one shaped by the support and love he found in his marriage.

A decade earlier, in 1897, Rachmaninoff’s first symphony had premiered to disastrous reviews (one critic likened it to “a program symphony about the Ten Plagues of Egypt”).

The fiasco of that premiere sent the young composer into a deep depression and a creative block. He recovered only with the help of therapy and through composing his successful Second Piano Concerto (1901).

During that same period, he fell in love with and became engaged to Natalia Satina, his cousin and childhood sweetheart.

After overcoming significant obstacles (including family disapproval and Orthodox Church restrictions on cousin marriage), Sergei and Natalia married in 1902 on a rainy spring day.

By the time he was writing the second symphony in 1906, Rachmaninoff had been happily married for a few years and was a father. His first daughter, Irina, was born in 1903, and his second, Tatiana, was born in 1907.

Enjoying such a stable, loving home life provided Rachmaninoff with a foundation of emotional security that was crucial to his productivity after the turmoil of his earlier years.  

In late 1906, he and Natalia moved to Dresden specifically to escape the pressures of Moscow so that he could focus on composition in peace.

There, with his wife and daughter by his side, he worked on the symphony – though not without bouts of self-doubt.

At one point, he nearly abandoned the score, calling it “boring and repulsive” in a typical burst of self-criticism, before eventually returning to it.

It’s easy to imagine that the heartfelt outpouring of the symphony – especially its incandescent Adagio – was nurtured by the contentment and warmth of Rachmaninoff’s married life.

The triumphant premiere of the symphony in early 1908 in St. Petersburg was a vindication; the public and critics hailed it, and it earned Rachmaninoff a prestigious Glinka Award.

Today it remains one of the symphonic highlights of the late Romantic Era, beloved for its lush string writing and deeply felt, warmly expressed emotion.

Conclusion

Romanticism in symphonic music wasn’t just an artistic movement; it was also a way for composers to transform their private longing, devotion, and emotional crisis into publicly performed art.

From Berlioz’s hallucinatory passion in the Symphonie fantastique to Rachmaninoff’s newfound confidence in his Second, these six works reveal how love – fulfilled, frustrated, or otherwise – shaped some of the most powerful music of the Romantic Era.

Taken together, they show just how deeply composers’ love stories shaped their compositions, and why these pieces remain so easy to love even today.

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange: The Great Violinist Who Ravel Loved

 by Emily E. Hogstad  February 11th, 2026

The name Hélène Jourdan-Morhange may be obscure today, but she was the dedicatee of a handful of the most beloved violin works in the repertoire. She was also a muse, interpreter, and chronicler of a golden era of French music.

Today we’re looking at the life and career of Hélène Jourdan-Morhange: her early education, the tragedies that shattered her life, her profoundly influential friendships with Ravel and other composers, and her groundbreaking later work as a writer and radio producer.

Childhood and Early Music Studies

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange

Hélène Morhange was born on 30 January 1888.

She began playing the violin as a young child. She was prodigiously gifted, entering the Paris Conservatoire in 1898 at the age of ten.

Among her fellow students was legendary pianist Alfred Cortot.

From the age of thirteen, her teacher was Édouard Nadaud, who taught at the Conservatoire between 1900 and 1924.

In 1906, she won the Conservatoire’s first prize in violin. She was just eighteen years old.

Performing in Parisian Salons

Left to right: Luc-Albert Moreau, Jourdan-Morhange, Madeleine Grey, Germaine Malançon, and Maurice Ravel (1925)

As a young woman, she played in some of Paris’s most famous salons.

These private performances advertised musicians’ abilities to fellow artists and wealthy patrons.

Eugènie Murat

One famous salon that Morhange played at belonged to Princess Eugènie Murat, an eccentric, wealthy woman whose sapphic tendencies during her widowhood were well-known.

Like many in her social set, Princess Murat delighted in using powerful drugs like hashish and cocaine. According to one legend, she rented a submarine so she could partake in private.

Winnaretta Singer

Morhange was also a regular at the salon of Princess Edmond de Polignac, an American heiress with the maiden name of Winnaretta Singer.

A lesbian herself, Princess Polignac entered into a friendly lavender marriage with the gay Prince Edmond de Polignac.

After their marriage, she used her money and her newfound social status to entertain – and seduce – the cream of musical Parisian society.

Thanks to these women, Morhange was on the front lines of Parisian art, literature, and music from an early age.

Marriage and War

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange and her husband Jacques Jean Raoul Jourdan

In 1913, at the age of twenty-five, Morhange married painter Jacques Jean Raoul Jourdan. (Interestingly, she hyphenated her surname, instead of changing it entirely…a somewhat unusual choice in the 1910s.)

The summer of the following year, World War I began, and he left to fight.

He died in March 1916 at the Battle of Verdun, one of the longest battles of the war.

Jourdan-Morhange was devastated, and his violent loss would haunt her for years.

During the war, she partnered with pianist Juliette Meerowitch, a student of Cortot’s who was well-known for championing the work of Erik Satie.

Their friendship became deeply meaningful. She began processing the death of her husband and the trauma of the war by talking to Meerowitch and playing with her.

Befriending Ravel  

Another important new friend was Maurice Ravel. She met him after performing Ravel’s piano trio, a piece that he had rushed to finish before the war began, fearing he wouldn’t survive the conflict. (In fact, he was so convinced that he was about to die that he dryly referred to the trio as being “posthumous.”) He was deeply impressed by her playing and musicianship.

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange (on the left) with Maurice Ravel

When he was working on his orchestral showpiece La Valse, he wrote her a letter asking a question about how he should orchestrate a particular part.

Tragically, in 1920, two years after the end of the war, Jourdan-Morhange’s recital partner, Juliette Meerowitch, died suddenly while touring in Brussels.

After this second great loss, coming so close on the heels of the loss of her husband, Jourdan-Morhange began spending more time with Ravel. At the time, Ravel was also in mourning after the death of his beloved mother, so he understood her grief. And of course, both musicians were grappling with the loss of many of their friends in the war.

It’s no surprise that they ended up becoming good friends and colleagues. There are rumours that Ravel thought about marrying her, but there’s no evidence they ever embarked on a romantic relationship.

Inspiring Ravel

Portrait of Hélène Jourdan-Morhange by her husband Jacques

Around this time, Ravel was asked to write a piece to honour Claude Debussy, who had died of cancer in the closing months of the war.

He began the work in 1920 but continued working on it over the following two years.

In 1922, Jourdan-Morhange premiered the resulting piece: Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, sometimes known as his Duo, with cellist Maurice Maréchal.

Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello   

He also began his G-major violin sonata.

Historian Jillian C. Rogers has an intriguing theory about these and other Ravel works in her 2021 book Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars. She believes that the repetitive, flowing rhythms that became integral to Ravel’s musical language originated, in part, from a desire to provide music to his friends that was soothing to practice. Those flowing, repetitive rhythms are in full evidence in the violin sonata.

The sonata took five years to finish, only finally coming to fruition in 1927.

Unfortunately, by that time, Jourdan-Morhange couldn’t premiere it. She was enduring yet another tragedy: chronic pain that no doctor could diagnose, which was keeping her from playing the violin.

It has been theorised that this pain might have originated from arthritis, rheumatism, or an overuse injury.

But whatever the cause, it was severe and long-lasting enough to permanently remove her from the concert stage.

She was forced to make do with accepting the work’s official dedication. Violinist Georges Enescu ended up premiering it, with Ravel on the piano.   

Ravel’s Death

After finishing the violin sonata, Ravel did not have many good years left in him.

In October 1932, he was in a taxi accident that appears to have caused or triggered neurological issues.

(Some historians have suggested that he had Pick’s disease, an incurable early-onset dementia similar to Alzheimer’s.)

By 1937, he could no longer compose. He complained bitterly to his friends and colleagues: he could hear music in his head, but could no longer write it down. He told Jourdan-Morhange that he was frustrated because he felt he had so much left to give the world musically.

Maurice Ravel

Although it was difficult to see her dear friend in such pain, Jourdan-Morhange spent as much time as she could with him in his final illness.

She later spoke about the long walks they took together in nature. He could identify birds with ease based on their songs, but hearing music at concerts became extremely difficult and even traumatic for him.

His condition worsened. After a failed exploratory brain surgery, Ravel died in December 1937.

A Second Marriage and a New Career

After twenty years of living with painter Luc-Albert Moreau, Jourdan-Morhange married him in 1946.

During the interwar period, while living with Moreau, Jourdan-Morhange had become very close to author Colette, who lived nearby.

Colette encouraged Jourdan-Morhange that even if she could no longer play the violin, she could at least write about music.

So in addition to teaching, Jourdan-Morhange began writing, submitting reviews and reminiscences to a variety of different French journals.

After World War II ended, she also began producing radio programs for RDF (Radiodiffusion française).

Partnership with Perlemuter

Vlado Perlemuter

In 1950, she produced and co-hosted a radio series with pianist Vlado Perlemuter, who had studied Ravel’s entire piano output with the composer in his early twenties.

During the radio shows, Perlemuter would play the works, and he and Jourdan-Morhange would both talk about what interpretive ideas Ravel had in mind.

Perlemuter playing Ravel’s Toccata from Le tombeau de Couperin   

The transcriptions and translations of these programs were later published as Ravel According to Ravel. They serve as an important window into his famously exacting ideas.

In the late 1940s, Jourdan-Morhange became one of the founding members of the Maurice Ravel Foundation, which sought to memorialise his life and career.

She once wrote of Ravel, “His friends and those close to him looked for him in his work, sometimes remembering him in a rhythm, an unpredictable harmony, the fleeting memory of a look, a tender expression, where their lost friend was wholly revealed to them.”

Remembering Her Musical Colleagues

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange

Her memories of Ravel and the other great composers whose works she inspired and championed contain valuable insights.

During the radio program with Perlemuter, she said:

“So Ravel used to say everything that had to be done, but above all…what was not to be done. No worldly kindness restrained him when he was giving his opinion… Having worked on the Sonata, the Duo and the Trio with Ravel when I was a violinist, I recognise in Perlemuter’s interpretations all the idiosyncrasies, all Ravel’s wishes: exaggerated swells, crescendi which explode in anger, turns which die on a clear note, the gentle friction of affectionate cats…and in all this fantasy, strict time in expression and rigour even in rubato.”

Of course, Ravel wasn’t the only composer she knew well. She wrote down a couple of evocative memories about composer Gabriel Fauré, too:

“It would be difficult for me to describe his special wishes in the way that I could with Ravel. Just one directive stands out, and very strongly so: play in time without slowing, without even taking time to ‘prepare’ those voluptuous harmonies that the slightest hesitation might underline for the audience’s ears… Fauré, completely kind as he was, could be terribly direct with those who struck him as snobbish – most usually fashionable ladies.”

However, when it came to the music of French composer Pierre Boulez, she was puzzled. In 1950, she wrote in a review:

“It’s difficult for me to follow Pierre Boulez, because I admit I was so bored by his 30-to-35-minute-long sonata that I forbid myself from talking about it… I don’t understand. I am one of those listeners who demand from music what the Greek philosophers called a ‘moral force.’ It was Aristotle who saw people’s faces relax and their expressions lighten when a performance was beautiful… Well, the audience the other evening didn’t radiate goodness; rather, it was boiling.”

Conclusion

Hélène Jourdan-Morhange died on 15 May 1961. She was 73 years old.

Much is still left to rediscover about her life and career, as well as the profound influence she had on Ravel and the other Parisian composers who surrounded them both.

But even with the sketchy biographical information we have about her today, it is clear that she was a major force in French classical music between the wars. She should be remembered and celebrated more often.

7 Classical Pieces That Were Secret Love Letters

 by Emily E. Hogstad  February 13th, 2026

Love stories in classical music aren’t always written with words; sometimes they’re written in music.

Many composers have turned to music when emotions were too intense for letters or speech to express.

In fact, some of the most iconic pieces in the repertoire began as deeply personal love letters, whether hopeful, obsessive, nostalgic, or even forbidden.

Today we’re looking at seven unforgettable works of classical music that were written as love letters, ranging from Berlioz’s feverish Symphonie fantastique to Janáček’s volatile Intimate Letters.

Together, they reveal how love and romantic obsession have shaped classical music.  In 1827, Berlioz became infatuated with Irish actress Harriet Smithson after seeing her perform the role of Ophelia in Hamlet.

She didn’t speak French, and he didn’t speak English, and she – understandably – ignored his repeated requests to meet.

Consequently, the lovelorn Berlioz channeled his unrequited passion into his Symphonie fantastique.

Harriet Smithson

Over the course of five imaginative movements, the symphony’s autobiographical hero experiences a variety of love-induced (and drug-induced) visions.

The dreamy “idée fixe” melody in the opening movement represents the beloved.

In the second movement, that theme is transformed into a waltz at a ball, where she appears, then vanishes.

Next, a peaceful rural scene is disturbed by his doubt about her love.

Opium-fueled nightmares of murdering his beloved and being executed follow, culminating in a macabre “Witches’ Sabbath” where the beloved’s theme returns in a grotesque manner.

This emotionally charged fantasy was Berlioz’s way of immortalising his love and despair.

Six years later, in October 1833, Hector Berlioz ended up marrying Harriet Smithson. The marriage was a nightmare, but that’s a story for another day.

In the late 1830s, composer Robert Schumann was in love with virtuoso pianist Clara Wieck.

Separated by Clara’s disapproving father, Robert poured his emotions into a piano piece called Ruines in early 1836.

Later he added two movements to the piece, creating a new work to help fundraise for a Beethoven monument in Bonn, Germany. It became known as the Fantasie.

But although the outside world might have seen it as a work written to pay tribute to Beethoven, it was still meant to be a love letter. In a March 1838 letter to Clara, Schumann confessed that the Fantasie contained “perhaps the most impassioned music I have ever written.”

Clara Wieck Schumann

Schumann even embedded a secret message in the music. In the quiet coda of the first movement, he quotes a phrase from Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte” (“To the Distant Beloved”) – “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder” (“Take then these songs, beloved”).

We went into detail about how Robert Schumann’s Fantasie is a love letter to Clara  .

The Siegfried Idyll was composed as an intimate musical love letter to Richard Wagner’s second wife, Cosima.

On Christmas morning, 1870, the day after her 33rd birthday, Cosima awoke in their villa to the sound of music rising up the stairs.

Wagner had assembled a 13-player ensemble on the staircase to surprise her with this sweet and tender piece.

The Siegfried Idyll incorporates themes from Wagner’s opera Siegfried (the year before, they had named their infant son Siegfried) and a German lullaby that was meaningful to their family.

Cosima recounted waking to “such music!… Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears.”

Cosima and Richard Wagner

This piece was initially meant to be a private message of love. Only later did financial need cause Wagner to publish it, in 1878.

Even today, the Siegfried Idyll remains a touching musical portrait of marital love and domestic bliss.

Edward Elgar – Salut d’Amour (“Liebesgruß”), Op. 12 (1888)   

Elgar wrote this piece as an engagement present to his fiancée, Caroline Alice Roberts, in the summer of 1888.

Alice was a poet and had given Elgar a poem she wrote (“The Wind at Dawn”) as a token of love. Elgar responded in kind with this musical greeting of love.

Alice Roberts and Edward Elgar

He originally titled it “Liebesgruß” (“Love’s Greeting”) and dedicated it “à Carice” – a contraction of Caroline Alice.

They would later name their daughter “Carice.”

“Salut d’Amour” is imbued with the gentle charm of a love letter, featuring a singing melody, warm harmonies, and a sweet violin line.

Elgar’s publisher later used the French title Salut d’Amour to appeal to the commercial market, but its true origin remains that private exchange between two lovers.

Johannes Brahms – Intermezzo in A-major, Op. 118, No. 2 (1893)   

By 1893, Brahms was in his sixties, and his musical soulmate Clara Schumann had been a widow for nearly four decades.

Both were feeling their age, especially Clara, who was thirteen years his senior.

Brahms’s set of Six Pieces for Piano, Op.118 was published with a dedication to Clara.

Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms

The A-major Intermezzo (marked Andante teneramente, or “tenderly”) is often seen as Brahms’s musical love note to her…and maybe a kind of thank-you note, as well as a goodbye.

Its gently arching melody and warm harmonies exude a truly pungent, poignant mix of love and nostalgia.

Alban Berg – Lyric Suite (1926)   

For decades, the Lyric Suite was admired as an abstract, modernist masterpiece.

Only in the 1970s did musicologists discover that Berg had actually woven a hidden romantic narrative into the work.

Hanna Fuchs-Robettin © The Guardian

Through the use of cyphers and musical quotes, the Lyric Suite became Berg’s private love letter to his married lover, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin.

He subtitled several movements with suggestive indications: “amoroso” (lovingly), “appassionato” (passionately), “estatico” (ecstatically), and “delirando” (deliriously).

He also embedded both his and Hanna’s initials as musical notes (A–B-flat for “Alban Berg” and B-natural–F for “Hanna Fuchs”) throughout the score.

He even slipped in the famous “Tristan chord” from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (the quintessential musical symbol of adulterous love) as a reference to their circumstances.

In the final movement, marked Adagio appassionato, Berg quoted a clandestine message: a melody from Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony that set the words “Du bist mein eigen” (“You are my own”) – explicitly tying the music to the idea of the lovers’ union.

In short, this is among the most carefully crafted works in the history of classical music, taking on two seemingly opposed identities simultaneously: an expressive atonal string quartet and a secret love letter.

Leoš Janáček – String Quartet No. 2 “Intimate Letters” (1928)   

In his sixties, composer Leoš Janáček fell in love with Kamila Stösslová, a married mother who was nearly forty years his junior. Over the last decade of his life, he sent her over seven hundred letters.

This quartet, which Janáček nicknamed “Intimate Letters”, was inspired by his love for her: a love that is, from a modern perspective, deeply uncomfortable to ponder.

Kamila Stösslová in 1917

Among the unsettling words he wrote to her: “Our life is going to be in this piece… I composed the first movement as my impression when I saw you for the first time… It will be beautiful, strange, unrestrained, inspired… this piece was written in fire.”

The first movement’s surging motif depicts his first glimpse of Kamila (“the chilling mystery of an encounter”), while later movements reference a tender shared moment. Janáček even imagines having a love child with her.

The third movement he called one of the “Love Letters”, and the finale ends in “great longing and fulfilment.”

As disturbing as its backstory may be when seen through a modern lens, Janáček’s “Intimate Letters” quartet is still remarkable for its emotional expressivity and autobiographical inspiration.

Conclusion

From Berlioz’s hallucinatory visions to Janáček’s fevered late-in-life obsession, these love letters in music reveal just how vulnerable composers can be when writing under the influence of romantic and erotic obsession.

Each work distills a private emotion into something listeners can still feel generations later, whether it’s Schumann’s yearning, Wagner’s domestic warmth, or Berg’s encoded passion.

If you want to understand the emotions behind some of classical music’s most famous works, these seven musical love letters are a great place to start!