As early as Tancredi , he considered maintaining Voltaire's tragic ending, a taboo in the eyes of 18th-century opera seria, where the outcome was nearly always a happy one. The overall line of thought, however, was becoming increasingly more emotional and less intellectual. The male hero emerges from the youthful, idealistic lover of the Baroque, to the more dangerous and seductive cavalier, very elegant and ardent, yet tragically flawed. During the first years of the 19th century, after the failure of the French Revolution and the advent of Napoleon, the spirit of the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism fell by the wayside. A new intellectual force was in vogue, one that is harder to define yet deeper in sensitivity.
Romanticism looks away from the rational brain and to the liberation of the imagination.
Individual sensibility was the only criteria for aesthetic judgment the only law the artist had to follow was what his or her feelings dictated. On the literary side, subjects were equally vast and ambiguous. The tragedies of Shakespeare, where protagonists became victims of their own emotions, were powerful models for Romantic writers and painters, as was the playwright's occasional use of the supernatural and tempestuous forces of nature. The archetypal relationship of the Romantic period frequently involved two people in a love affair that is somehow forbidden by reasons beyond their control this would become the raison d' tre of bel canto opera. Plots became simpler, and characters were made of flesh and blood less intellectual and more emotional acting on base instinct.