It is noteworthy that romantic music is a continuation and development of classical music, from the point of view of composer techniques, classical music already contains romantic elements, and there are also many features of classical music in romantic works.
Theme of music in classical period is mostly motivational, however, the theme of romantic music is completely different from the classical style of writing, since the era of romanticism is the best era to express feelings, lyrical nature of most musicians’ works is extremely strong and it is fundamentally unsuitable for development of classical motivation, so the development of theme of the their works uses more variation technique (Palisca, 1996).
In the classical period, dominated by rational thought, music was rigorous and standardized, musical form was substantially fixed (Grout and Palisca, 1996). From the early Romantic composer Schubert, some of the principles of classical musical form had gradually disappeared (Cairns, 1969), in terms of Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms and other great composers, their song styles were more creative freedom and flexible (Plantinga, 1984). Their work reflected the musical form of the free and flexible composition of the Romantic period, it also reflected the distinctive, personalized characteristics of a romantic music era (Plantinga, 1984).
From the perspective of melody, melody of traditional music is based on smooth, nature undulating, regularity (Schonberg, 1997), and the melody of music in Romantic period was often not smooth, there was angular, sometimes it avoided melody factors in traditional music and replaced melody with other sound manners (Treitler, 1998).
Harmony is an important tool for the performance of romanticism, expansion and free use of dissonance, frequent appearance of 7 and 9 chord, chromatic method and inflection in music expand the scope of harmony to enhance the expression of harmony (Grout and Palisca, 1996).
