Symphony No. 9
1824
Amateur players filled out the orchestra at the premiere after only two rehearsals, and the singers complained that the high notes were unsingable.
★ 9.7
Browse by time · decade
1820s
1820 – 1829
Showing 145 works across all media from the 1820s
The Hay Wain
1821 · National Gallery, London
England ignored it, but the Paris Salon awarded it a gold medal in 1824 and sent Delacroix back to rework his own canvases.
★ 8.9
Saturn Devouring His Son (Goya)
1823 · El Prado, Madrid
Goya painted this straight onto the wall of his own house in his last bitter years and never meant anyone else to see it.
★ 8.5
Winterreise
1827
Schubert found the second half of these poems in a magazine only after he had already set the first twelve as a finished cycle.
★ 8.4
Death of Sardanapalus
1827 · Louvre, Paris
The king watches from his red bed while everything he owns is killed in front of him, on his own orders, before the pyre.
★ 7.8
The Betrothed
1827 · 736 pages
In seventeenth-century Lombardy two peasants want to marry, and a lord who wants the bride frightens their priest into refusing. Riot, famine, and plague come between them. Italian prose was remade on it.
★ 7.2
The Major Works
1822 · 880 pages
Shelley put atheism, revolution, and free love into lines nobody has matched for sheer music. In "Ozymandias" a tyrant's boast survives as two stone legs and a shattered face in empty sand.
★ 7.0
Alcohol is the prince of liquids, and carries the palate to its highest pitch of exaltation.
The Physiology of Taste · 1825
Dante and Virgil (The Barque of Dante)
1822 · Louvre, Paris
Delacroix's debut, and the damned are biting the hull. Romanticism announced itself with churning water and bodies learned from Rubens.
★ 6.8
The Madwoman
1823 · Musee des Beaux Arts Lyon, Lyon
One of a series Géricault painted of asylum patients for a doctor studying obsession, and he gave her the seriousness of a commissioned portrait.
★ 6.5
Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat, Evening
1826 · The Frick Collection, New York City
A packet boat comes in at evening and Turner dissolves the city, the passengers and the river into a single sheet of gold.
★ 6.3
Chichester Canal
1828 · Tate Modern, London
Masts stand black against a sky going from gold to soft blue, and almost nothing else in the picture is solid.
★ 6.1
★ 6.0