What was the Romantic period and how could a Romantic piece of music be easily identified?

The Romantic period emerged after the Classical period and preceded the 20th century modern era: the start and end dates are slightly up for debate, but roughly speaking, it began around 1800 and ended around the 1880s. We’ll start by looking at Romantic instrumentation. We could identify a piece of Romantic symphonic music against music from other periods often by its sense of scale: after the Classical and Baroque periods, Romantic Symphony orchestras grew extensively in size. If you are able to detect a larger orchestral sound with wider pitch ranges, you should have an immediate indication that the music in question is coming from a later period. Listen out for those additional instruments like the piccolo or double bass which wouldn't have featured in earlier music. This is, however, very simplistic. Symphonic Romanticism shouldn't be confused with the likes of 20th century symphonic music, which was bigger still, but stylistically far more complex in terms of rhythm, tonality and melody. This later music is totally different in style because it completely detracts from usual harmonic and structural norms. How else, then, might we continue to identify Romantic elements in a piece of music? Typically Romantic music is far more lyrical and emotive than its surrounding periods. Whereas a Classical Mozart Sonata might have a basic, functional, small-range melody that repeats itself with variation in 4 or 8 bar phrases, a Romantic piece would be noticeably more adventurous in terms of melody. Romantic music has been described as melodically poetic, and flows with a more of a narrative with twists and turns in its progression. For a good contrasting examples of this, have a listen to Mozart’s Symphony No. 18 (1772) and then Liszt’s Faust Symphony (1857). Liszt’s piece is more dramatic and evolves sections using texture, dynamics and orchestration, with melodies tending not to fit into nicely balanced 4 or 8 bar phrases as in the Classical piece. Liszt’s piece is also noticeably more variant in dynamics, featuring ppp and fff markings which you would not expect to see of a Classical piece. In simple terms, a Romantic piece will usually be one which is tonal - so you can expect to hear functional harmony throughout - and uses more consonant harmonies than dissonant ones, but is far more emotive in melodic style than music of other periods. This can be spotted when listening to a soloist's playing style in a Romantic piece of music, which for Classical and Baroque music could be considered slightly more autonomous.