This book focuses on the romantic magic opera of Spohr, Weber and Marschner and proposes a new understanding of musical romanticism, according to which it does not lose its affiliation with modernity and its impact on the present for the sake of the fantastic, but rather gains it in the first place. The author examines the Romantic opera and other works by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Wagner, analyses the associated music-aesthetic discourse, which was determined by Tieck, Hoffmann and Horn, A. B. Marx, Brendel and Pohl, and traces it back to considerations by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Jean Paul.