New German School

The New German School (Neudeutsche Schule) was the progressive party in mid-nineteenth-century European music, named by the critic Franz Brendel in 1859 as an alternative to the derisive label "music of the future". Its acknowledged leaders were *Franz Liszt*, *Richard Wagner* and *Hector Berlioz*, and its programme held that music must take poetry, drama and ideas as its content: hence the symphonic poem, the through-composed music drama, thematic transformation and an expanded chromatic harmony that loosened classical forms. Against it stood the Leipzig conservatives around *Johannes Brahms* and *Eduard Hanslick*, in the polemical stand-off remembered as the War of the Romantics.