In Lithuanian musical culture, Romantic attitudes enhanced the value of folk songs, encouraged their recording and the study of their melodies, enriched the folk-song tradition with patriotic themes and ideals of national freedom, and infused international musical influences. During the Romantic period, folk music merged into the expanding popular leisure and entertainment culture. Romanticism also established the art song as a socially important genre, and laid the foundations for national professional music.

Recording, publishing and researching melodies of folk songs

The Romantic appreciation of folk song took hold among the educated classes in Lithuania in the early 19th century. The focus was initially on folk-song lyrics, now appreciated as works of poetry; the recording and publishing of the melodies came later, including research into their musical qualities.

An initial seven folk-song melodies were published, with an accompanying article, in 1825 in Lithuania Minor (Eastern Prussia) as part of the collection Dainos, oder Littauische Volkslieder compiled by Martynas Liudvikas Rėza (Ludwig Rhesa, 1776–1840), professor at the University of Königsberg. This established the foundations, and provided an inspiration, for the study of Lithuanian popular culture. A large body of recorded folk-song melodies sent to Rėza remained in manuscript form for the next century. The collection itself, however, quickly gained popularity; as it was translated into Czech, Polish and Russian, the author's name became also well known in Lithuania Major (those portions of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth now merged into the Russian Empire).

At Vilnius University in 1822–23, an informal group of Lithuanian (Samogitian) students was active. Inspired by the reformist ideas of the Philarets, many of them engaged in ethnography and the study and popularization of Lithuanian folklore. Simonas Stanevičius completed a collection of c.30 Lithuanian folk-song melodies in 1833, having published the lyrics in 1829. This was the first of its kind in Lithuania Major. In the preface, he noted that only melodies gave life to the songs, a song without melody being like a body without a soul.

The publication of folk-song melodies then stalled, owing to the political turmoil of the uprisings of 1831 and 1863 and the subsequent tsarist repression, which eased only in the early 20th century. During these decades, the cultivation of national culture intensified on the Prussian side of the border, in Lithuania Minor. Here, the expectation that Lithuanian language and culture were doomed to disappear in the near future prompted a cultural salvage campaign, often led by German scholars around the University of Königsberg. In 1853, the collection Littauische Volkslieder by Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann (1811–1881) was published in Lithuanian and German, containing 410 texts and 55 melodies. The linguist and archeologist Adalbert Bezzenberger (1851–1922) collected a large amount of Prussian-Lithuanian melodies. The folk songs that he collected in 1879–80 (including 67 lyrics and 34 melodies) were published as part of his Litauische Forschungen (1882).

Eight folk-song melodies were also published in the Lithuanian periodical Auszra (“Dawn”), which appeared in East Prussia in the 1880s. Auszra pursued an agenda of popular instruction, idealized the Lithuanian past and aimed to revive and restore Lithuanian culture and traditions. In 1889-1905, the monthly political magazine Varpas (“The bell”), published in Tilsit/Sovetsk and Ragnit/Neman, included eighteen Lithuanian folk songs with their melodies. Both periodicals were illegally distributed by booksellers in Russian-ruled Lithuania Major, where the Lithuanian press (and all non-Cyrillic printing) was banned at the time.

The Lithuanian Literary Society (Litauische Litterarische Gesellschaft, founded in Tilsit in 1879) included in its studies and publications the collection Dainu Balsai: Melodieen litauischer Volkslieder (2 vols, 1886-89) edited by Christian Bartsch (1832–1890). In addition to the melodies of the Lithuanian folk songs that he and others had noted down, and those taken from various other publications (452 in total), Bartsch provided German translations of the lyrics alongside their opening verses in Lithuanian and the melody. His introductions discussed melodies, texts and musical instruments (with illustrative drawings).

Antanas Juška (1819–1880), a priest, folklore collector and lexicographer working in Lithuania Major, diligently recorded about 7000 lyrics and nearly 2000 melodies. Thanks to the efforts of his brother Jonas Juška (1815–1886) and of various Polish academicians and musicians, Antanas Juška’s collection of folk-song melodies (Melodje ludowe litewskie) was published in Krakow in 1900. Juška’s working methods significantly influenced Lithuanian folklore studies in the 20th century.

The personality and works of Oskar Kolberg (1814–1890), a Polish historian and pioneer in ethnography, folkloristics and cultural anthropology, proved no less influential. His field work in recording and preserving folk culture also covered Lithuanian folk songs and their melodies. His collection of Lithuanian folk songs Pieśni ludu litewskiego (1879) contained 59 melodies and included a comparative study on the poetic motifs of the lyrics. Kolberg noted the similarity between Lithuanian folk melodies and those of German, Polish and other Slavic folk songs, and Italian cantilena, and highlighted the predominant triple metre and restrained tempo.

After the lifting of the Russian ban on printing in the Latin script (1905), long-accumulated song collections were published. Major contributors to the recording of folk songs and their promotion as a means of national self-awareness were the priests Pranas Bieliauskas (1883–1957), Teodoras Brazys (1870–1930), Adolfas Sabaliauskas (1873–1950), and Jurgis Narjauskas (1876–1943).

Folk-music tradition, popular music and the origins of national professional music

In the 19th century, anonymous works and translated songs grew increasingly popular, echoing revolts, wars and social conflicts. Their melodies (modern in character) spread primarily from Poland. Some modern songs pursued educational goals as well, promoting education, literacy, sobriety, and Christian morality, while expressing or encouraging a national self-awareness based on the glorious past. Poets like Antanas Strazdas (1760–1833), Silvestras Teofilis Valiūnas (1789–1831), Antanas Baranauskas (1835–1902), and Antanas Vienažindys (1841–1892) created, performed, taught and distributed these new songs with original or adapted folk melodies. The ballad Birutė, based on the mythical love story of the Grand Duke Kęstutis and the eponymous pagan priestess, created by Valiūnas around 1823, quickly spread and became a widely popular song. It is still performed in Lithuania in the 21st century, using several different melodies of Polish origin.

Traditional folk songs and the new stylized songwriting were both adapted as parlour music from the early 19th century on; later on, they were also performed publicly by Lithuanian choirs and by the wind orchestras organized by the Lithuanian diaspora in the USA. Published collections of song and dance melodies appeared and folksong melodies were arranged – initially by non-Lithuanians (Kolberg, Friedrich Wilhelm Rauschning, Wojciech Albert Sowiński), later by Lithuanian amateur composers such as Vincas Kudirka (1859–1899), Vydūnas (ps of Wilhelm Storost / Vilius Storostas), Leonas Ereminas (1863–1927), Petras Juozas Pranaitis (1868–1942). The arrangements were mostly for choir, vocal ensemble or voice with piano accompaniment, with the instrumental parts stylizing folk dances. The arrangements kept close to the original melody and form and used the straightforward expressive techniques characteristic of Romantic music.

Such music was performed in the manors, in the houses of the urban intelligentsia, and in public (choral performances, and also in the newly emerging entertainments called “Lithuanian evenings”). The early-20th-century songs composed by the classically-trained, professional composers Juozas Naujalis (1869–1934) and Ignas Prielgauskas (1871–1956) were also in the parlour music mode. The creative legacy of the priest Teodoras Brazys, a choral conductor with a professional music education, contains about 150 folk songs (collected by himself) arranged for choir. They were published in 1913 in the issues of Vilnius newspaper Aušra. Brazys was also the author of the first scholarly study of folk songs, published in German in 1918, in Lithuanian in 1920.

The choral movement, supported by church choir leaders and organists as well as secular choir leaders, played a particularly significant role in shaping Lithuanian national culture and professional music. Choirs promoted, popularized and disseminated the repertoire of arranged Lithuanian folk songs, as well as stylized songs and national/religious hymns; later, that repertoire also included original songs by professional composers. As parlour-music folk-song stylizations, amateur patriotic songs, arrangements of traditional folk songs and dances developed, they became a formative influence on an emerging professional musical culture self-identifying as nationally Lithuanian.

Around 1900, the composers Česlovas Sasnauskas (1867–1916) and Naujalis developed a restrained Romantic style. The first Lithuanian opera “Birutė” (1906) by Mikas Petrauskas, which belongs to the Romantic tradition, contained numerous quotations from and stylizations of folk songs. The opera premiered in the Vilnius City Hall and was performed by members of the local choral society Kanklės.

Late Romanticism characterizes the folk-song arrangements of the composer and artist Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911). He also recorded Lithuanian folk songs, not in order to preserve them, but rather for applying his innovative creative ideas. He emphasized the relevance of archaic folklore as a register and inspiration for modern creativity. Most of the composers of the first Republic of Lithuania (1918-40) also worked in the style of Late Romanticism, mixing folk elements with modern techniques (indebted largely to German early Modernism). At the forefront of this group was Juozas Gruodis (1884–1948), the founder of the Lithuanian school of musical composition and one of the most eminent figures in Lithuanian music.