The expression "romantic music" and the polyseme phrase "Romantic music" have two essentially different meanings.

The first, "romantic music," is commonly used to indicate any kind of music which supposedly expresses or encourages tender emotions of intimate personal attraction, attachment, or "love."

In contrast, "Romantic music" is a more technical term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in European music history. Only some of "Romantic" music is "romantic;" and only a minor part of "romantic" music is "Romantic."

The era of Romantic music is defined in this article as the period of European classical music that runs roughly from 1820 to 1910, as well as music written according to the norms and styles of that period. The Romantic period was preceded by the classical period, and was followed by the modernist period.

Romantic music is related to romanticism in literature, visual arts, and philosophy, though the conventional time periods used in musicology are very different from their counterparts in the other arts, which define "romantic" as running from the 1780s to the 1840s. The Romantic movement held that not all truth could be deduced from axioms, that there were inescapable realities in the world which could only be reached through emotion, feeling and intuition. Romantic music struggled to increase emotional expression and power to describe these deeper truths, while preserving or even extending the formal structures from the classical period.

Romance is a traditional song for guitar. It has numerous other names such as Spanish Romance, Romanza, and Romance d'Amour. It was played throughout René Clément's 1952 film Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games) by Narciso Yepes.