Where does romanticism come from?

In the 19th century, romanticism was a strong force in classical music, as it was in poetry and literature. But where did it come from? Why this cultivation of the subjective, of individualism, sometimes beyond all reasonable boundaries?

When – in the course of the 18th century – philosophers began to write about the Self, about the awareness of the individual interior space, it was part of the Enlightenment movement (with its strong emphasizing of rationality) which gave increasing importance to the individuality of man. The gradual unmooring of the subjective part of Self mirrored the process of objectification of the world: the rational, objective view of the world as advocated by the Enlightenment philosophers meant that there was less and less place for the subjective as part of that world, and the subjective became one of the driving forces of the movement of Romanticism in the 19th century, which was cultivated in intellectual and artistic circles, feeding the rest of society with works that compensated for the increasing lack of subjective engagement with an increasingly rationalistic and materialistic world.