The "War of the Romantics" is a term used by some music historians to describe the schism among prominent musicians in the second half of the 19th century.
The most prominent members of the conservative circle were Johannes Brahms, Joseph Joachim, Clara Schumann, and the Leipzig Conservatoire, which had been founded by Felix Mendelssohn.
Clara Schumann, Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms were early key members of a conservative group of musicians.
[citation needed][1] While Robert Schumann had been a progressive critic and editor of the influential music periodical Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which he had founded in 1834, he was never a true admirer of Liszt.
[4] Though the final break between Liszt and the Schumanns would not come until 1848, the editorial turn that Neue Zeitschrift had taken would color their relations for the rest of their lives.
A child prodigy, Joachim at 17 had become professor of violin at the Leipzig Conservatory, where he forged close ties with Mendelssohn, the Schumanns and Ferdinand David.
[11] The critic Eduard Hanslick was very influential on the conservatives' behalf, as his view of music as "form moving in sound" meshed with their own.
[12] Associated with them at one time or another were Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Friedrich Gernsheim, Robert Fuchs, and Karl Goldmark, among others.
Other notable figures siding with Liszt were the critic Richard Pohl and composers Felix Draeseke, Julius Reubke, Karl Klindworth, William Mason and Peter Cornelius.
The composer and pianist Hans von Bülow supported the Liszt-Wagner side until his wife, Liszt's daughter Cosima, left him for Wagner; he then switched his allegiance to Brahms.
This was an outgrowth of the debate on the viability of the symphony genre, which had grown in the hands of Ludwig van Beethoven from one intended for entertainment to a form that included social, moral and cultural ideals.
[18] Liszt and his circle favored new styles in writing and forms that would blend music with narrative and pictorial ideas.
Before the later signatories could put their names to the document, however, it found its way into the editorial offices of the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo, and from there was leaked to the Neue Zeitschrift itself, which parodied it on May 4, 1860.
Two days later [21] it made its official appearance also in the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo with more than twenty signatures, including Woldemar Bargiel, Albert Dietrich, Carl Reinecke, and Ferdinand Hiller.
Musicians on one side saw the dispute as pitting Brahms' effective and economical sonata and classical forms against some of Liszt's works which appeared in comparison almost formless.
[citation needed] Wagner poked fun at the conservative side in his essay On Conducting, when he portrayed them as 'a musical temperance society' awaiting a Messiah.