19th-century musical life was characterized by the foundation of conservatories, music societies, permanent orchestras, musical schools and theatres. The Philharmonic Society in Bucharest (1834) and Philo-Dramatic Conservatory in Iaşi (1836), the first conservatories set up in Romania, were sponsored by local liberal aristocrats in order to train local artists for a national repertoire and for Romanian productions of international opera classics. In 1868 the Romanian Philharmonic Society was founded in order to provide Bucharest with a permanent symphony orchestra. The first national theatres were set up (again, under aristocratic patronage) in Iaşi in 1846 and in Bucharest in 1852. These theatres had regular operatic seasons and were divided into two branches: national performances and European performances; thus, musical life followed the two-track approach that characterized all modernization initiatives of the Danubian principalities in the 19th century: Europeanization and nation-building. The public could attend Romanian, Italian, German and French performances; this was to remain a fixture throughout the rest of the century. The national performances were constantly increased; and international stars like Liszt, Mascagni, Šaljapin and Johan Strauss II shared the stage with Romanian ones like Hariclea Darclée and George Enescu.

A school of national music grew up from the 1830s in Moldavia and Wallachia. At that time the predominant musical genre was lyrical: vaudevilles and operettas, performed by heterogeneous groups of musicians combining locals with Austrians, Germans, Italians and French; many artists travelling in the Romanian principalities were employed as teachers, orchestral musicians, choral singers, impresarios and Kapellmeisters. In the process they contributed actively to the development of a national school of music.

Musical nationalism in Romania followed the European pattern of using folkloric traditions, music and dance (such as the hora and doina) and libretti based on national history, myths and peasant life in order to create a patriotically rousing effect. Composers such as Eduard Wachmann (conductor for the Philharmonic Society), Anton Pann and Alexandru Flechtenmacher collected folklore and used it in their compositions. Anton Pann mixed Romanian folkloric elements with European patterns and is believed to have co-authored the music of the national Romanian anthem Deșteaptă-te, române! (“Awaken, Romanian!”), composed and published during the 1848 revolution. Flechtenmacher was the composer of the Hora Unirii (“Unity Hora”) that is sung and danced every year on the anniversary of the 1859 union between Moldavia and Wallachia. The most prominent Romanian musician, George Enescu, shows the influence of Romanian folk music in his Romanian rhapsodies. His earliest important composition, Poema română (“Romanian poem”), premiered in 1898 in Paris, Enescu being 16 years old at the time.

Some of the Romanian composers took active part in the national movement and incurred prison sentences. Ciprian Porumbescu, whose choral works and operettas (Dragoș Voda and Ștefan al III-lea) were famous for their folklore content, was arrested in 1877 by the Austrian authorities; his vocal compositions were, indeed, loaded with national rhetoric: Pe-al nostru steag e scris Unire (“On our flag is written «Union»”), Tricolorul (“The tricolour”, i.e. the Romanian national flag), Cântecul gintei latine (“Latin nation song”), La malurile Prutului (“On the Prut’s shores”). His most famous work was the Romanian ballad for violin and orchestra, influenced by the traditional doina. His music for Pe-al nostru steag e scris Unire was used for Albania’s national anthem.

National operatic compositions invoked mythical and historical episodes in order to justify the nation’s claim to independence and the removal of Ottoman suzerainty. The first Romanian vaudeville of this type was Dragoş, întâiul domn suveran al Moldovei (“Dragoş, the first suzerain prince of Moldavia”), composed in 1834 on a text by Gheorghe Asachi. In a similar way, later composers such as Flechtenmacher and George Stephănescu would continue to use references to Romanian historical characters and their battles against Ottoman domination in their composed operettas, vaudevilles, operas and songs. The operas Fata de la Cozia (“The Girl from Cozia”, 1870, by Flechtenmacher on a libretto by Dimitrie Bolintineanu) and Petra (by Stephănescu, 1902) featured a girl heroically facing the Ottoman armies during the reigns of Vlad Țepeș (Vlad the Impaler) and Ștefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great), respectively.

The opera Romanii și Dacii (“The Romans and the Dacians”, 1886), composed jointly by Eduard Caudella and George Otremba, thematized the confrontation between the Romans and the Dacians, who were increasingly seen as the ancestors of the modern Romanians. The plot revolves around the love story between a Dacian leader and the daughter of a Roman consul. Caudella is also the composer of the first representative national Romanian opera, Petru Rareș (1889, on a libretto by Theobald Rehbaum, based on Nicolae Gane’s historical novel of the same title), in which he developed sequences of folkloric dances – hora and brâu – danced by pupils from the ballet school in Bucharest at its premiere. The subject of the opera symbolically portraits the wise, ideal Romanian ruler.

The ideals of the 1848 revolutions urged the composers to focus on the dual agenda of national independence and national unification. Heroic harbingers of this ideal were the focus of the vaudevilles composed in the principalities, mostly in Wallachia and Moldavia. The emblematic national figure here as in other cultural media was Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Great), the first Romanian ruler to reign (at the end of the 16th century) over the three Romanian principalities – Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania. Many of these remained unfinished, unpublished or unperformed, e.g. by Karl Theodor Wagner and Sulzer; of the various treatments by Ion Andrei Wachmann, the 1848 Mihail Bravul stands out.