At higher grades you must be able to discuss with the examiner musical features such as texture, form, style, and period of a piece of music. My own web pages to help with these parts of the test at Grade 5+ and at GCSE are available here!
Romantic period 1815 - 1910
Romantic style
The Romantic era established the idea of tonality. Composers took the great structural harmonic plans of Bach and Beethoven and added their own chromatic innovations, ranging through key changes like giants in the mountains.
Chromaticism and dissonance started to be used. Modulations could be effected with a single pivot note rather than pivot chords.
Romantic form
The Romantic era extended sonata form, producing huge symphonies.
But alongside this, there was an explosion in the composition of songs and songs without words. Expressive melody writing for the piano is seen in the work of Chopin, Mendelssohn and Grieg. An 1860 Steinway piano
Romantic instruments
The piano reached great levels of technological development in the Romantic era.
The Romantic period also saw the rise of the instrumental virtuoso.
Liszt (right), in addition to his skills as a composer, was also a very popular virtuoso pianist and consummate showman.