Music and literature: the tune and the lyrics

Abstract

During Romanticism, a musical par excellence, great composers like Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz and Wagner strove for a synthesis of the arts, with a special focus on literature. The question was based on two chief concepts: the idea that music, according to its etymological origin, was the "art of the muses", i.e. "the art of arts", and the historical consciousness, leading to Historicism.