the early Romantics, who integrated emotion into the Enlightenment before the Late Romantics drove over the cliff of sentimentality.

.. a good description of Beethoven, who is regarded as the last of the Classicists (in the line of Haydn & Mozart) and simultaneously the first of the Romantics. The fact is however is that for well over a century his music has been 'upwardly scored' for huge late Romantic orchestras, even though he explcitly instructed that no more than 60 musicians should play his symphonies - otherwise as he explained, the details get muddied and transparency is lost. Those are the words of a true, logical Classicist. Since the 90s we are lucky to be able to obtain proper recordings of these symphonies, with John Eliot Gardiner, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and others.

Yes, temperamentally I'm closest to the early Romantics - Berlioz, Chopin et al. But regarding post-modernism: I counterpose this to modernism, not Romanticism. By which I mean modernism in music (not architecture) Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kandinsky et al. I've lived with modernist art since the 1970s.

So, my lifelong influences/loves are: Baroque, Classical, early Romantic, and Modernist. Although Brahms and Mahler (both late Romantics) should also get a special mention. Anyway, Brahms was really a traditionalist, a Classicist on steroids - and also a great scholar of older music.

(Berlioz, 1863)