Did These Seven Great Composers Really Die of Syphilis?

 by Emily E. Hogstad  March 26th, 2026

During the nineteenth century, syphilis was rampant in Europe, and quite a few composers are believed to have had it.

The 2024 article “The Syphilis Pandemic Prior to Penicillin: Origin, Health Issues, Cultural Representation and Ethical Challenges” estimates that during the 1800s, approximately fifteen per cent of European men were infected. Plus, infections were more common in urban areas, where composers tended to live and work.

In a time before antibiotics, syphilis was more than a medical condition: it was often a death sentence. On top of that, the mercury and arsenic “cures” on offer were often just as toxic as the disease itself.

You can imagine how the mental and physical effects of infection and treatment impacted these artists’ lives and work.

Of course, diagnosing composers from centuries away with absolute certainty can be a fool’s errand. But today we’re using historians’ best judgment and looking at seven composers who either are confirmed to have had syphilis, or are widely believed to have had it…as well as how those infections shaped (and in some cases, ended) their careers.

Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840)  

A native of Genoa, Italy, Niccolò Paganini was the greatest violinist of his generation…and maybe of all time.

He became famous for his demonic appearance and seemingly supernatural abilities.

However, although some people felt he was an otherworldly being, he was actually very human, and he struggled with bad health throughout his life.

Niccolò Paganini

Modern historians believe that he had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or Marfan Syndrome. Either would help explain his double-jointedness, which he put to good use while reinventing violin technique.

He was diagnosed with syphilis around 1822, when he was forty. His treatment included mercury therapy and opium. That in turn led to mercury poisoning and opiate addiction.

In 1828, when he was 46, he developed necrotising osteitis of the jaw that had to be operated on.

He also developed tuberculosis, which may have contributed to his dysphonia (loss of voice).

When Paganini met with composer Hector Berlioz in 1838, his voice was so inaudible that his young son had to put his ear next to Paganini’s mouth to hear his words, then translate for Berlioz.

He died in Nice in 1840.

We wrote about the turbulent final years of Paganini, including why he was denied a Catholic burial.

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)  

Donizetti was born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1797. He became one of the most popular opera composers of his generation.

Sometime in his teens or twenties, he came down with syphilis.

In 1828, at the age of thirty-one, he married his eighteen-year-old wife Virginia. She gave birth to three babies, but all died as infants, and the first one was deformed, suggesting he’d passed the disease on.

Portrait of Gaetano Donizetti by Francesco Coghetti

Virginia’s own health deteriorated, as well, and she died young in the summer of 1837. It may have been cholera, but it might also have been a syphilitic infection.

Donizetti eventually began exhibiting a host of alarming symptoms: fevers, headaches, paralysis, speechlessness, incontinence, and more.

He was only formally diagnosed in August 1845. His doctor believed he was no longer able to make sane decisions for himself, and so he was tricked and involuntarily confined in 1846.

It was a darkly ironic fate for someone who had written the most famous “mad scene” in operatic history.

He never lived on his own again and died in 1848.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)  

Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797. He became infected with syphilis in late 1822, when he was in his mid-twenties.

He first noticed symptoms in early 1823, when he began suffering from particularly acute feelings of depression, as well as a red rash and hair loss.

As time passed, and as he got sicker and sicker, he began feeling increasingly doomed, and his compositions started turning darker.

Franz Schubert

His fourteenth string quartet from 1824, nicknamed Death and the Maiden, dates from this time.

In 1828, he saw a physician who told him that the end was near. He began suffering from headaches, joint pain, and fever, and became unable to keep down food.

During the final weeks of his life, he moved in with his brother, who took care of him until he died in November 1828 at the age of thirty-one.

Historians today are split about whether he died from typhoid fever, mercury poisoning, syphilis, or some combination of all three.

Read more about how his illness impacted the composition of the “Death and the Maiden” quartet.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)  

Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Germany, in 1810, and suffered from health issues throughout his life.

By his early twenties, he was wrestling with depressive episodes interspersed with manic ones. A later note he wrote about this time of his life reads, “In 1832, I contracted syphilis and was cured with arsenic.”

If the problem was syphilis, it had actually not been cured; it had only become latent. (This might explain why he apparently never passed it on to his wife, Clara.)

Robert Schumann

By his thirties, his symptoms were turning more physical, with his doctor in Dresden noting he was complaining of “insomnia, general weakness, auditory disturbances, tremors, and chills in the feet, to a whole range of phobias.”

In February 1854, he jumped off a bridge into the Rhine River. He was rescued and agreed to be sent away to a sanitarium. Unfortunately, his health continued to deteriorate there.

In the summer of 1856, he came down with pneumonia. His overtaxed immune system couldn’t fight the infection off, and he died that July.

During his illness and after his death, his wife, Clara, and his friends sorted through his music. One of the works they felt revealed his sickness was his violin concerto. It was suppressed until its rediscovery in the 1930s.  

Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884)  

Composer Bedřich Smetana married his wife, pianist Kateřina Kolářová, in August 1849.

They had four daughters between 1851 and 1855, but by 1856, three of them had died of either tuberculosis or scarlet fever, and Kateřina had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, too. She died in April 1859. He remarried the following year.

Unfortunately, his story wasn’t going to have a happy ending. A couple of years later, he began developing hearing issues, chief among them incapacitating tinnitus.

Although he went to see countless doctors and specialists, he grew more and more deaf over the following years.

Bedřich Smetana

Day-to-day life became excruciating. In January 1875, he wrote, “If my disease is incurable, then I should prefer to be liberated from this life.”

In his first string quartet, dating from 1876, he portrayed the experience of tinnitus by using long high notes in the violin.

A few years after he wrote the quartet, he began expressing fears that he was going mad.

In the early 1880s, his symptoms grew debilitating and included hallucinations and intermittent loss of speech.

By early 1884, he began acting out violently toward his family. In late April, he was committed to an asylum. He died there a few weeks later.

The official death certificate claimed that he’d died of dementia, but his family believed it had been syphilis.

Some twentieth-century doctors took issue with this diagnosis, or whether his hearing loss was due to a syphilitic infection, but it remains a leading theory.

An autopsy was done that revealed high amounts of mercury in his remains.

Read more about how Smetana incorporated autobiography into his first string quartet, including the simulation of tinnitus.

Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)  

Composer Hugo Wolf was born in present-day Slovenia in 1860.

From the beginning, two things were clear: Wolf was incredibly musically talented, and he lacked discipline, at least in part due to his depressive mood swings.

He came down with syphilis young, in his late teens, and became preoccupied with writing lied on themes of sin and suffering.

He had a few ups and downs physically and mentally, but he hit a low point in late 1891, when a combination of his depression symptoms and syphilis symptoms kept him from composing.

Hugo Wolf in 1902

A few years later, in 1897, he began feeling his mind deteriorating. He tried to write an opera, but only managed sixty pages before he became too ill to write.

He attempted to drown himself in 1899 but survived, and he spent the last few years of his life in an asylum before dying in 1903.

Frederick Delius (1862-1934)

Frederick Delius

Frederick Delius was born to a British family in 1862.

As a young man, he traveled to Paris to befriend artists and soak in the bohemian lifestyle there. It is believed that his syphilitic infection originated during these years.

In 1903, at the age of 41, he married a wealthy painter named Jelka Rosen. He had a number of affairs during their marriage, but she never left him.

In 1910, syphilis symptoms began to manifest, chief among them headaches, back aches, and blurred vision.

Within a decade, he could no longer move except with a wheelchair; he was completely blind; and he was on morphine for pain.

Jelka tried her best to take care of him, but she needed help. The couple hired a composer, conductor, and pianist named Eric Fenby, who would serve as Delius’s helper as he navigated the end of his life, dealing with syphilis-related health issues.

Delius’s farewell to music and to life was his setting of some poetry from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in his Songs of Farewell.  

Conclusion

Syphilis diagnoses – and the stigma and shame surrounding them – profoundly impacted the work of many major composers…and therefore, obviously, left a mark on the history of music.

For many composers, the diagnosis impacted not only their health but also the tone, intensity, and subject matter of their work, from Schubert’s haunting reflections on mortality to Smetana’s anguished depiction of his resulting deafness.

While this music offers us a glimpse into the despair and struggle of a pre-antibiotics syphilis diagnosis, what can’t be seen as clearly is, of course, all of the additional music that the disease deprived us of.

It’s a sad truth that without the scourge of syphilis and its deadly treatments, classical music history would look very different today.

Wilhelm Taubert (Born on March 23, 1811) Berlin’s Hidden Romantic

 by Georg Predota  March 23rd, 2026

The German conductor, composer and pianist Wilhelm Taubert (1811–1891), born on 23 March 1811, was part of a Berlin circle of musicians that included Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and the singer and writer Eduard Devrient, the librettist of two of his operas.

Wilhelm Taubert

Mendelssohn and Taubert studied piano with Ludwig Berger, and they exchanged a number of letters. In one of these letters, Mendelssohn identifies “the lack and impetus of spirit which, for all of Taubert’s musicianship, refined taste and great industry, nevertheless hindered him from achieving complete success as a composer.” (Lindeman, Grove Music Online, 2001)

On the occasion of Taubert’s birthday on 23 March, let’s explore the life and works of a capable yet eclipsed composer whose prolific output was ultimately overshadowed by his more illustrious contemporaries.

Childhood Promise

Carl Gottfried Wilhelm Taubert was born into a middle-class family. His father may have held an administrative or civil service position, and he was exposed to Berlin’s vibrant musical and theatrical scene at an early age.

Taubert showed great early promise on the piano, and his first structured lessons came from August Neithardt and, most significantly, Ludwig Berger. Berger was a student of Muzio Clementi and even went with him to Russia.

Ludwig Berger

A capable composer and piano virtuoso, Berger built his reputation as a teacher, counting Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Dorn, August Wilhelm Bach, and Wilhelm Taubert among his most distinguished students.

Dual Path in Berlin

Bernhard Klein

Under Berger’s guidance, Taubert progressed rapidly, and he was allowed to perform publicly as early as age 13. Taubert also studied composition with Bernhard Klein, himself a student of Luigi Cherubini, who held the professorship of composition at the Royal Institute for Church Music and served as music director at the University of Berlin.

Alongside music, Taubert also pursued philosophy studies at the University of Berlin, preparing for a dual path that shaped his refined taste and intellectual approach to music. Among his first compositions were small instrumental pieces and sets of songs which attracted favourable comments from Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn and Taubert engaged in a busy exchange of letters that discussed various aspects of musicianship and artistry. When a critic highly praised the uniqueness of the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mendelssohn wrote to Taubert, “…the first obligation of any artist should be to have respect for the great men and to bow down before them…and not try to extinguish the great flames in order that his own small candle can seem a little brighter.” (Green, Biography as Ethics, 2006). 

The Working Musician

Wilhelm Taubert

At the age of 20, Taubert was appointed assistant conductor and accompanist for the Berlin court concerts. He would subsequently become associated with the Berlin Königliche Schauspiele under Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, and served as Generalmusikdirektor there from 1845 until 1848.

Taubert also held the appointment of court Kapellmeister until 1869, and in this position, he would conduct the royal orchestra until 1883. As far as we can tell, Taubert was highly regarded as a teacher, instructing Theodor Kullak, among others, at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Taubert composed in a graceful and popular style, and he soon attracted the attention of Robert Schumann. As the editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann reviewed a great many of Taubert’s compositions, indicating his high regard. He even asked Taubert to contribute to the journal.  

Encounter with Schumann

In his early twenties, Taubert composed his Piano Concerto No. 1, dedicated to his piano teacher Ludwig Berger. Schumann heard the concerto performed by the composer in 1833, and three years later, after the score was published, he remembered many of the positive aspects of his first impression.

As Schumann writes in his 1836 review, “Without waxing lyrical, I could call this Concerto one of the most excellent.” (Lindemann, Hyperion, 2010) However, Schumann also found too many similarities to Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25. In the end, Schumann credits Mendelssohn as the original.

Challenges in Complexity

Wilhelm Taubert composed five symphonies that reveal the challenges of writing longer, more complex music. He also composed six operas that were all staged at the Königliches Theater in Berlin. “Although these works seem not to have stood the test of time, they were well received and often highly admired when written.” (Smith, Naxos, 2024)

In his compositional style, Taubert stayed close to the traditional models offered by Mendelssohn and Carl Maria von Weber. His music is highly diatonic and cadential, with chromaticism primarily reserved for modulatory passages.

As has been noted, Taubert’s music is full of graceful and gentle melodies of light lyrical charm, and therefore well adapted to smaller and more intimate musical forms. As such, it is hardly surprising that Lieder form an important part of his output.  

A Forgotten Footnote

For much of the 20th century, Wilhelm Taubert was little more than a forgotten footnote in music history. Overshadowed by Mendelssohn and Schumann, his extensive oeuvre was quickly forgotten after his death.

Mendelssohn’s assessment, quoted at the beginning, might well have played its part. While he praises Taubert’s technical skill and competence, and acknowledges his diligence and productivity, he pinpoints a core deficiency.

What Mendelssohn misses in Taubert’s music is the inner fire and passion, or, in other words, originality and creative energy. This isn’t just a mild criticism but a clear statement that Taubert might well have been a capable composer, albeit one without genius.   

21st-Century Revival

Wilhelm Taubert

Fortunately, the 21st century has engaged in a quiet rediscovery that finally gives listeners a chance to hear this forgotten voice. Initially, Hyperion Records released Taubert’s two piano concertos as Volume 51 of its acclaimed “Romantic Piano Concerto” series.

However, the real breakthrough arrived in September 2025 when pianist Lucas Wong released the world-premiere recording of Taubert’s Piano Sonatas. Praising its pastoral charm, light virtuosity and intimate storytelling, critics have found great delight in the discovery of a once-neglected composer.

In an age hungry for fresh repertoire, the works of Wilhelm Taubert remind us of the vast untapped 19th-century music. While his symphonies and operas still await full revival, Taubert is finally restored to the broader narrative of 19th-century Romanticism.

Khatia Buniatishvili

 

I love how she always thanks the orchestra with applause before she takes a bow. Class act all the way. Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 by Robert Schumann is a lyrical and intimate masterpiece, blending poetic expression with symphonic depth. In this performance, Khatia Buniatishvili brings fiery passion and delicate nuance, while Paavo Järvi leads the hr-Sinfonieorchester with clarity and balance. The result is a vivid dialogue between piano and orchestra, rich in emotion and Romantic spirit.

https://www.ganjingworld.com/s/oo6xXyqRB8

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.