Ian, It is very interesting what you say about shift in music around Beethoven's time which is connected with the French Revolution. I've never seen it put this way. It gives me a little more understanding of composers before that time.

I think it is important for all: performers, listeners and composers to externize their emotions. Listeners can relate to whatever composer is going through or what he is expressing. If I am listening in a concert emotions that perhaps were suppressed are comming out. Sometimes one can be driven to tears. It works for performers as well. After a good rehearsal I feel much lighter and on the whole better. It means that I let out my bottled up emotions out while playing. I am not talking if I am nervous and pushing toward a concert, because then anxieties about performance come forward and I block my real feelings.
Composers like Beethoven, Liszt and many after them have authobiographical music that expresses their mental state.

On the whole I am bad theoretic and bad writer, so if I am not taken seriously it is ok.

Fascinating theory, Reiner. And I wouldn't dare to disagree with it, but how do you explain away Britain's failure to to develop Romanticism much earlier when we first came up with the idea of lopping off king's heads and giving power to "commoners" (some hundred years before the French tried it)?

This is fascinating.  But using artificial titles for periods and styles is standard practice for all art forms.  Any comment on how the musical periods relate to other art forms?

The term "classical" (meaning Mozart, Haydn and possibly Beethoven) seems unique for music.  A popular style for decorative arts and architecture in the post Revolutionary period was Grecian revival, which is undoubtedly "classical" in one sense of the term.  As far as I can make out it was favoured by both the heirs of the French and American revolutions (Washington DC designed by a French architect)  and by their opponents.

I suppose this shouldn't be entirely surprising, Don B, as music travels much more easily, due to its freedom from linguistic dependence, than literature does.  I may be wrong here, but isn't the period of that coincides with Mozart and Haydn in English Literarture known as the "Augustan" period?  This is obviously a term which applies only to literature in England - the Germans use something else entirely.

However, "Romanticism" was a more Europe-wide movement, and Germans would point to Goethe's "Werther" (1774!) as one of the first proto-Romantic, if not fully "Romantic" texts.  Even here in England, there's general agreement that Wordsworth and Coleridge's "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) was a mould-breaking work that flung-aside the Augustan period irrevocably.  A youthful Shelley at Oxford contrived to get himself expelled from the University for penning the Gothic novel "Zastrozzi",  although it might have been his pamphlet "On the Necessity Of Atheism" (1811), and another one advocating the abolition of the monarchy which finally twitched the Master's fury.

As I have already said, if we're looking for Romanticism in Music, I'd say that FIDELIO is the place to look.  The scene in which "Fidelio" and Rocco are digging their way through the covered opening to the door of Florestan's cell is clearly "Romantic" to me... and written, ehem, in 1806  

Ian, very interesting points about Mehul and Co.  I sometimes wonder if what Mozart was doing outside the sphere of opera seria - and his motivation for working for Schikanaeder "on tick" - was to sidestep the opera seria conventions entirely, and found a more realistic form of Germanic opera that wasn't so hidebound by conventions?   Interestingly, FIDELIO is also - a Singspiel :-)   

On British opera Romanticism...  rather unfairly (since his music is entirely unrecorded and only available in a few archives) I also press-on with my campaign to have English composer Stephen Storace recognised as our very own proto-romantic composer.  Have a look at the last page (there are five pages in this long "Act III" aria) written for his sister to perform in "The Siege Of Belgrade" (1791).  The scene at this point is that Lilla, a Serbian peasant girl, has escaped from being kidnapped at the Turkish Army's camp, and is running through the enemy lines towards the smoke-clouds "billowing" over "long-lost home", Belgrade.  It's a "female heroine saves the day" opera, she's taking on the entire Turkish Army single-handed, and then she sings this...  (It's marked "Allegro", and you have to imagine a Beethovenian orchestration - look at the sustained fortissimo top Bb with horn-calls underneath it!  And then "just when you think it's all over" she clunks into a Callas-style chest-register to belt-out that low Db (4th system, 1st bar) that leads into the double-octave scale to the top c's.  I'd imagine the horn-calls are rocking Eb-Bb in the last six bars, but of course that's just my speculation :-)

(Storace had clear pro-revolutionary leanings, and was visiting Republican France throughout the 1790s until his death (aged 32) in 1796. He also helped to circumvent a censor's ban on a stage adaptation of Godwin's 1794 "rage against the establishment" novel "Caleb Williams" by converting it into an "opera", under the title "The Iron Chest" (in reality, a play with extensive musical numbers). Unfortunately the stage script of what was performed is lost, although Storace's musical numbers survive - like all his works, in piano-score only.)