[javivr]

Tchaikovsky DID play the flute, did you know that? He made a few little works for Flute and Orchestra, but it's all too obscure to find.

I love to play French Romantic Flute solos. However, they were more late Romantic, sometimes with more Modern style.

It's very sad that there is very little otherwise for Romantic flute. I've found some, such as Romance in D flat by Saint-Saens, or the Petit Suite by Godard. The only other place to find good stuff is the Orchestral music.

At least in the UK, the flute was a very famous instrument in the early Romantic period. According to Robert Bigio, "it was estimated in 1829 that one man in ten in London played the flute" (http://www.bigio.com/readings.htm). Perhaps the misunderstanding comes from the fact that it was exactly at the end of this period when the flute experienced the most dramatic transformation of its history. Multi-keyed wooden simple system flutes, and their incredible diversity all over Europe, were replaced by the new invention at the time, the Boehm flute. This tremendous change in the evolution and history of the flute possibly led to abandoning the repertoire specifically composed and arranged for the older style flute. Therefore, composers such as John Reid (https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Reid,_John), James Oswald (http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Oswald,_James/Collections) or, the considered at the time a music star, the famous Charles Nicholson (https://www.academia.edu/6447630/Charles_Nicholson_and_the_Making_of_a_British_Flute_Sound) were eventualy ignored.