One thing is for sure, no Romantic composer ever wrote music that looked backward to an earlier era like a neo-Romantic does.
And that is true even though one plank in the Romantic platform is Medievalism.
No Romantic composer, not even Mendelssohn, tried to mimic the style of an earlier period like a neo-Romantic does. Romantics were reactionaries, breaking away from the formalism of the past.
The only thing even remotely "Romantic" about neo-Romanticism is the sounds. Neo-Romanticism, in short, mimics the sounds of the Romantic era without being even remotely interested in any of the philosophical or even music preoccupations of that era. And, of course, it's not even the sounds being imitated, but
those sounds as they are now perceived, from the vantage point of decades of familiarity with them. These are sounds, remember, that at the time could and were perceived as crude and illogical and ugly and non-musical and willfully eccentric.
If the Romantics, as a group, had written "neo-" music like their neo-Romantic colleagues in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we would never have had Romantic music. We would have had a nineteenth century take on early Baroque music. We would have had the sounds (kind of (and none of the spirit)) of Monteverdi or Schütz or Lully.
I don't know of anyone who wants Berlioz or Mendelssohn or Schumann or Smetana to have written like Monteverdi. I know of dozens of people (and I know that there are hundreds more) who wish that composers living in 2014 would write like Dvorak and Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Or even, truth be told, like Monteverdi.
Daft I call it.
