The dissertation proposes to analyze the encounters and disagreements between music and language in German Romanticism, a period in which instrumental music definitively reaches its legitimacy as an autonomous artistic form. Once dependent and subject to poetry, music is then conceived as the language of the ineffable, capable of expressing a dimension of the sayable that exceeds the merely communicable through words. In addition to investigating the philosophical and historical assumptions of the different approaches of music as a language in German Romanticism, the present work also deals with the points of convergence and tension between language of words and musical language. The clashes between vocal music and instrumental music, programmatic music and absolute music, as well as the question of the translatability between music and word are developed from diverse sources, most notably the philosophical-literary writings of authors like Wackenroder, Tieck, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel; the newspaper criticisms of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Robert Schumann; and the aesthetic-musical essays of Richard Wagner and Eduard Hanslick.