Après une Lecture de Liszt: Virtuosity and ... - Free

composer-as-butterfly had finally metamorphosedfrom virtuoso-as-caterpillar; the theatricalperformer had represented only an embryonicstage in artistic development. Liszt thusappeared to reflect a well-documented shift invalues. His emphasis moved from virtuosity tointerpretation, from what Wagner in 1840 hadtermed the “vulgar somersaults” of merepianism to the genius of the artist, 2 from theephemeral performance to the immutable work.In a different sense, the reference to Dante’sDivine Comedy also implied that Liszt sawhimself as having earlier wandered down thewrong path: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostravita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / che ladiritta via era smarrita” (Midway in the journeyof our life / I found myself within a darkforest, / for the straight way was lost.) By quotingthe first line, Liszt (who at thirty-five hadgiven his final public concert at Elisavetgrad inSeptember 1847) drew a parallel with Dantemarking his thirty-fifth year in A.D. 1300—the“midpoint” in life’s biblically allotted span aswell as the beginning of Dante’s divine awakening.Yet the strange logic of Liszt’s poeticallusion gives us pause. The vision of the unfetteredbutterfly clashes with Dante’s midlifeepiphany, since the butterfly lives for only afew weeks after months of gestation. Indeed,the butterfly’s flight is a traditional symbol ofthe soul’s flight after death, hence Liszt’s latemetamorphosis suggests a valedictory coup dethéâtre—an incongruity not untypical of whatLawrence Kramer dubbed a virtuoso “riddledwith ambivalence.” 3Standing at the crossroads between the rolesof virtuoso and composer, Liszt in his lettersexpressed this ambivalence most acutely in hisreflections on Werktreue. On the one hand, he2“Was sollte euch gelingen, wolltet ihr’ ihm [the virtuosoin a concert hall] es nachthum? Ein schnöder Purzelbaum,nichts Anderes” (Richard Wagner, “Der Virtuos und derKünstler,” Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von RichardWagner, vol. 1 [Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1871/1880],p. 212). The essay title’s pejorative distinction implicitlydenies “artistic” stature to the virtuosity that Liszt representedin 1841. At the time, Liszt was reaping praise fromthe Berlin press amid the popular frenzy associated withHeine’s 1844 catchphrase: “Lisztomania.”3Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a CriticalHistory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p.69.donned the garb of the penitent performer,claiming publicly in 1837: “I even went so faras to add a host of rapid runs and cadenzas. . . .You cannot believe . . . how I deplore thoseconcessions to bad taste, those sacrilegious violationsof the SPIRIT and the LETTER.” 4 Onthe other hand, the virtuoso’s blood continuedto run in Liszt’s veins, leading him to declareas late as 1853 that “the letter killeth the spirit,a thing to which I will never subscribe, howeverspecious in their hypocritical impartialitymay be the attacks to which I am exposed.” 5As Susan Bernstein has argued, historical conceptsof virtuosity are defined by such contradictions,which can account equally for tawdrypyrotechnics and transcendental expression:“[Liszt’s] consistent inconsistency forms thevery consistency of the virtuoso—an inconsistencydetermined by the oscillation betweenegoistic protrusion and transmissive self-effacement.”6 This fluidity illuminates Liszt’sstruggle to change his artistic identity on the4From Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique; Liszt toGeorge Sand, Paris, 12 February 1837, Gazette musicale,pp. 53–56. Quoted and translated in Charles Suttoni, AnArtist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique 1835–1841 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 17–18.5This second complaint concerned time, accentuation, andrhythm in Beethoven’s late style. Liszt is responding tocriticism of his conducting during the Calsruhe Festival of1853, explaining to Richard Pohl that “in many cases eventhe rough, literal maintenance of the time and of eachcontinuous measure | 1, 2, 3, 4, | 1, 2, 3, 4, | clashes withthe sense and expression.” Liszt to Richard Pohl, 1 August1853, in The Letters of Franz Liszt, ed. La Mara, trans. C.Bache (2 vols., London: H. Grevel, 1894), I, 175–76. Whiletoying with tempo is surely a lesser “infidelity” than activelyembellishing a given text, concert reviews from the1840s continued to record Liszt’s “deliciously fanciful amplifications”(Franz Liszt Selected Letters, p. 136)—actsexemplifying his later dictum that “virtuosity is not asubmissive handmaiden to the composition.” The latterremark appears in Liszt’s essay on Clara Schumann [1855];see Gesammelte Schriften von Franz Liszt, ed. LinaRamann (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1881–99), vol. IV(1882), p. 193. See also Liszt’s assertion in The Gypsy inMusic [1859] that the virtuoso is not merely a passivepurveyor of an extant creation, a conscientious and precise“mason,” but the sole means of accessing a world of feelingto which the work is only a window. The Gypsy inMusic, trans. Edwin Evans, 2 vols. (London: W. Reeves,1926), II, 267.6Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century:Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, andBaudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.112.DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata53

19THCENTURYMUSICroad to Weimar amid the “most intense periodof anti-virtuosity backlash in the history ofinstrumental music,” 7 which in turn gave riseto a “strengthening forcefield between virtuosityand the work.” 8 If Liszt compared thevirtuoso’s career with a caterpillar’s confinement,did this disqualify “virtuosity” per se orwas it merely a response to public criticism?The comparison prompts another question thatcritics of many stripes have asked of authorshipwithin text- and score-based criticism:Who is speaking? 9 Liszt’s liquidation of hisperformer’s “self” testifies to his desire to managehis public identity strategically, to narratehis own story in a self-styled Künstlerroman,and thus to both publicize and legitimize hisnew identity as a composer and ex-virtuoso. 10But as he entered into the service of a patronfor the first time in his professional career—not exactly the unfettered freedom of a butterfly—didthis transformation unequivocally representa dedicated commitment to a new causeor did it arise, at least in part, from his anxietyover the diminishing status of the virtuoso?In this article I would like to consider thesequestions in light of Liszt’s Après une lecturedu Dante: Fantasie quasi Sonata. Written between1839 and 1858, the Sonata survives inthree full manuscripts and four fragments and,I contend, interweaves hours and hours of improvisationwith a gradual process of revisionon a more abstracted, conceptual level. As apiece born expressly from acts of performance,the Sonata appears not to be regulated exclusivelyby the idea that a work is an enduring,7Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004), p. 13. As Gooley observes, an antivirtuosostance was propounded by both Schumann’s NeueZeitschrift and Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette musicale.8Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 74.9To cite two notable examples: Edward T. Cone, TheComposer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press,1974), p. 1; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” inImage—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow:Fontana/Collins, 1977), pp. 142–49.10Within the European press, Liszt’s compound nationalities,mobile class status, and musical competencies wereall debated among writers and listeners as part of whatincreasingly became an unstable and over-determined publicidentity. See Gooley’s discussion of the multiple symbolicidentities that Liszt fulfilled for his audiences in TheVirtuoso Liszt, pp. 2ff.immutable product. It thus subverts what CarolynAbbate calls the “performance network” inwhich performers more or less obey the centripetalforce of a “composed” work. 11 Liszt’spredisposition toward virtuosity ensured thatcertain musical ideas came to him through improvisationrather than prior to it. At first blushthis seems unsurprising, yet it nevertheless presentsa problem for the ideology of a workconcept that separates Liszt hierarchicallyinto pianist and composer. In contrast to contemporarieslike Felix Mendelssohn or RobertSchumann, Liszt in his virtuosity continuallychallenges the aesthetic boundaries of composition,improvisation, and performance.Such categories imply a distinction betweenmusical thought in the physical immediacy ofimprovisation and musical thought independentof physical enactment (even if the composerworks at the piano). But this distinctionappears increasingly weak in light of Lisztianpractices that seemed to recognize a mutuallyinvertible relation between the fingers’ tactilediscovery of ideas at the keyboard and the cognitiongoverning those fingers and ideas. SirJohn Russell even reports that Beethoven continuedto improvise “tactilely” as late as 1821despite being almost totally deaf, 12 and in ourown time, research into brain activity has establisheda substantial anatomical overlap betweenexecuting and imaging motor tasks. 1311Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001), pp. 9ff.12Russell’s account is reproduced in Oscar G. T. Sonneck,Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries (New York:Dover, 1967), pp. 114–16.13Marc Jeannerod, “Neural Simulation of Action: A UnifyingMechanism for Motor Cognition,” NeuroImage 14(2001), 103–09; Marc Jeannerod, V. Frak, “Mental Imagingof Motor Activity in Humans,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology9 (2001), 735–39; M. Lotze, P. Montoya, M. Erb,E. Hulsmann, H. Flor, U. Klose, N. Birbaumer, W. Grodd,“Activation of Cortical and Cerebellar Motor Areas duringExecuted and Imagined Hand Movements: An fMRI Study,”Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11 (1999), 491–501. Astudy specific to professional pianists suggests that, exceptin the primary sensorimotor area of the left hemisphereand the right cerebellum, playing music in one’shead and physically playing at the keyboard activate essentiallythe same cortical regions. There is, in other words,“a subliminal activation of the motor system in motorimagery.” See I. G. Meister, T. Krings, H. Foltys, B.Boroojerdi, M. Müller, R. Töpper, A. Thron, “Piano Playingin the Mind—an fMRI Study on Music Imagery andPerformance in Pianists,” Cognitive Brain Research 1954

Playing and imagining music are not as distinctneurologically as they are behaviourally.Nor is this insight confined to modern science.Back in 1852, the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echotreated as an open secret the fact that thekeyboard’s physical properties functioned as acompositional determinant in the improvisationof operatic fantasies: “In the end, we knowonly too well that the piano forms a covertmemory hook [Eselsbrücke], by means of whichmany composers—who are not in a position towrite at the desk—bungle together their operatichack jobs.” 14By softening, if not quite collapsing, the distinctionbetween the physical/tactile and mental/imaginaryin music, we might come to regardall composition as “slowed down improvisation.”15 Yet given that these distinctions delineatedcategories of identity in press reportsrooted in the twin ascendencies of virtuosityand Werktreue in nineteenth-century Europe,they remain a historical reality. There isthus a corresponding need to maintain a distinctionbetween improvisation and composition,the former connoting a performativity inapplicableto concepts of the latter within thesemiotics of the self-contained work. 16(2004), 219–28, here 224. Only the extent of the activationin these regions (measured using functional magnetic resonanceimaging) in two areas specific to physical movement(the primary sensorimotor cortices and posterior parietalregions) differentiates imaging and executing pianoperformance.14“Wir wissen endlich nur zu gut, daß das Piano dieheimliche Eselsbrücke bildet, mittelst deren vieleComponisten, welche nicht am Pulte zu schreiben imStande sind, ihre Opernsachen zusammenstümpern”(E. K., “Einige Worte über Improvisation,” Berlin Musik-Zeitung Echo 41 [10 Oct. 1852], 323).15Schoenberg famously expressed this opinion in “Brahmsthe Progressive”: “Composition is a kind of slowed downimprovisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keeppace with the torrent of ideas” (Komponieren ist eine Artverlangsamte Improvisation; oft kann man nicht schnellgenug schreiben, um mit dem Strom der Gedanken Schrittzu halten) (Stil und Gedanke [Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer, 1976], p. 69).16Beethoven certainly maintained such a distinction in hisadvice to his student, Archduke Rudolph, tasking him withexercises in composition “when sitting at the pianoforte[where] you should jot down your ideas in the form ofsketches,” adding later that “you should also composewithout a pianoforte” (Susan Kagan, Archduke Rudolph,Beethoven’s Patron, Pupil, and Friend: His Life and Music[Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1988], p. 32. Briefwechsel,no.1686).Liszt’s position with respect to this distinctionwas indeterminate. Not all nineteenthcenturyimprovisation was virtuosic, but Liszt’sparticular virtuosity during the 1830s was inherentlyimprovisatory. Its theme-driven,“physical” textures appear to have fed into thegenesis of the “Dante” Sonata in a way thatrenders this particular work a kind of archeologicalsite documenting Liszt’s shifting professionalidentity. Although there is a limit towhat we can know about an improvisation withno acoustic trace, Liszt’s apparent incorporationof characteristically improvised traits intohis “compositional” process nevertheless embodiesa tension between passionate sentiment,in what Edward Said termed the “extreme occasion”17 of performance, and the potential ofironic critique introduced by aesthetic distance.This tension bears witness to a collision betweenLiszt’s twin identities as virtuoso andcomposer.Fragments of a FRAGMENT DANTESQUEThe two earliest extant fragments of whatwould become the “Dante” Sonata are in Liszt’shand and can be dated within a few months ofhis first-documented performance of it (25 October1839). They capture two characteristicmusical elements that he would retain—bothmodified—as bookends in the final publishedsonata. The blank staves and paper types indicatethat these remarkable sketches were notsurviving shards from a full manuscript; on thecontrary, I would speculate that they were neverintended to be “complete” for the purposes ofhis performances in 1839–40. Instead, whileLiszt always conceived of this work as his “composition,”these sketches may well have functionedrespectively as an aide-mémoire and asa memento for two essential components ofwhat was initially more akin to an improvisedfree fantasy: a rhetorical introduction and aprincipal diatonic thematic progression presentedhere as the fantasy’s coda. In other words,the sketches might be a mnemonic frame for a17Edward Said, “Performance as an Extreme Occasion,”Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1991), pp. 1–34.DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata55

19THCENTURYMUSICplanned improvisation. MS I 18, no.1 (plate 1),ca.1839, presents the opening tritones, whichestablish a demonic topic of descent whollyappropriate to the journey into hell that initiallyinspired the artistic conception. 18 Laterrevisions to this passage in manuscripts from1840 to 1858 are cosmetic. 19 Dated 11 March1840, MS 1C.51 (plate 2), a manuscript hithertounconnected to the “Dante” Sonata, shows asketch of the Sonata’s characteristic majorchordprogression written in the Stammbuchof a female admirer in Prague, suggesting thatLiszt may have performed it there and, on request,copied this music after the fact. 20 Curiously,the progression is notated in C whereasit occurs (substantively) in both F ♯ and D in theearliest complete manuscript ca.1840 (MS I 76),where it forms the basis of a thematic andmodal contrast with the main chromatic themein the Sonata’s later versions (compare with ex.6). This discrepancy of key could represent akindly simplification by Liszt for an admiringamateur, but it may also suggest a characteristicallyimprovisatory performance in Praguethat was more tonally discursive than MS I 76records.The final version of the Sonata, entitled Aprèsune lecture du Dante—Fantasie quasi Sonata,was first published by Schott in 1858 as theseventh and final piece in the second volume(Deuxième Année, Italie) of Liszt’s collection18MS I 18, no.1 is in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv,Weimar. A transcription of this fragment was first publishedin the Journal of the British Liszt Society 28 (2003),34.19See Appendix A for a stemmatological study of theSonata’s extant sources.20Liszt wrote to Marie d’Agoult the same day he signed themanuscript (Wednesday, 11 March 1840), explaining thathe had just given his fifth concert in Prague that morning.His comment that “the Bohemian aristocracy . . . havebeen most charming to me. Here, as elsewhere, the womenare on my side,” makes it plausible that the notated chordprogression from the “Dante” Sonata may have been writtenfor a female aristocrat following a performance(L’aristocratie de Bohême . . . a été charmantissime pourmoi. Ici comme ailleurs, les femmes sont pour moi). SeeCorrespondance / Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, ed. SergeGut and Jacqueline Bellas (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 551. In1962 a facsimile of this, MS 1C.51, was published in acollection of facsimiles with the text: “Ein Adagio, dasLiszt einer unbekannten Prager Verehrerin ins Stammbuchschrieb.” See Alexander Buchner, Franz Liszt in Böhmen(Prague: Artia, 1962), p. 83.Années de Pèlerinage. 21 All four principalsources for the Sonata are now housed in theGoethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar; 22 the1840 fragment from Prague, plate 2, is in thePrague State Conservatoire. Liszt’s original exemplarfor MS I 76 from ca. 1840 is lost, and allbut one of the sources from which I have workedare copyist’s versions; all show his corrections,alterations, and revisions. By studying thesedocuments, and following extensive researchby Rena Mueller into Liszt’s manuscripts, Ihave been able to update Sharon Winklhofer’sstudy from 1977 and chart the evolution of theSonata from its origins in 1839 as a sketchentitled Fragment dantesque. 23 The genetic andstemmatological information is presented inAppendix A (pp. 92–93), and Table 1; fig. 1gives a chronology of the copyists in the productionof the known manuscripts.The revisions and evident preparation ofmanuscripts between 1839 and 1840, 1849 and21Liszt used four different titles in the preparation of hismanuscripts, all of which suggest an explicitly literaryconception: “Fragment dantesque” connotes an unfinishedform that, for Romantic poetry in particular, pointed tothe infinite by its very incompleteness; “Paralipomènes àla Divina Comedia” means material omitted from the bodyof a text, appended as a supplement; “Prolégomènes à laDivina Comedia” indicates that Liszt changed his mind,preferring not to append but to preface his music to areading of the text; “Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasiequasi Sonata” is derived from Victor Hugo’s poem of almostthe same name from the collection Les Voixintérieures (1837) and allowed Liszt to characterize hisrelation to Beethoven with the subtitle. Liszt’s use of “du”rather than Hugo’s “de” in the final title is most likelydeliberate, drawing on the German practice of using thedefinite article to refer to a famous person or thing, andattempting to translate this into French. In a letter toJoachim Raff from 1 August 1849, Liszt refers to his pieceas Fantasia quasi Sonata (Prologomènes [sic] zu DantesGöttlicher Comödie), but this title is not, to my knowledge,recorded in any of the extant manuscripts. Raff’sletter is cited in Sharon Winklhofer, “Liszt, Marie d’Agoultand the ‘Dante’ Sonata,” this journal 1 (1977), 30.22In chronological order, these are MSS I 18, no.1; I 18,no.3; I 76; I 17; I 18, no.2; I 137 7 . See Appendix A for anexplanation of the sources, the findings of which are presentedschematically here as fig. 1.23Rena Mueller, Liszt’s “Tasso” Sketchbook: Studies inSources and Revisions (Michigan: UMI, 1986), pp. 147–54.See also Sharon Winklhofer, Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor: AStudy of Autograph Sources and Documents (Ph.D. diss.,University of California, Los Angeles, 1978), subsequentlypublished (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), pp. 53–84, and Winklhofer’s shorter study of the “Dante” Sonata,“Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, and the ‘Dante’ Sonata.”56

DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”SonataPlate 1: Liszt’s first sketch for the opening of the “Dante” Sonata, ca. 1839; MS I 18, no. 1.Courtesy of Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar. Foto: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.57

19THCENTURYMUSICPlate 2: A sketch of the “Dante” Sonata’s diatonic theme, dated 11 March 1840; MS 1C.51.Courtesy of the Prague State Conservatoire Archive.Date / MS / copyist9/1839 —> I-18, n.1 (Liszt)3/11/1840 —> IC-51 “Prague fragment” (Liszt)ca. 1840 —> I-18, n.3 (Liszt)ca. 1840 —> Liszt’s exemplar (lost)ca. 1840 —> I-76 (Gaetano Belloni + Adolph Stahr) revised by Lisztca. 1849 —> I-17 (Eduard Henschke) revised by Lisztca. 1853 —> I-18, n.2 (Liszt)ca. 1854 —> I-13 7 (Joachim Raff) corrected by Lisztca. 1857 —> Stichvorlage1858 —> Schott’s editionFigure 158

Table 1Transmission of the “Dante” SonataDate Title MS Folia Watermark HandDAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata9/26/1839 Fragment . . . I-18, n.1 - G. Eck Liszt3/11/1840 - IC-51 - - Lisztca. 1840 - I-18, n.3 - Blacons/Shield Bellonica. 1840–41 - I-76 3–17 Blacons/Shield Bellonica. 1848–49 Paralipomènes . . . I-76 1–2 G. Eck Stahrca. 1848–49 - I-76 18–22, + collettes G. Eck Lisztca. 7/1849 - I-17 2–23a, 25a-l, 26–31a, 36–37 No watermark Henschkeca. 1851 - I-17 32–35 No watermark Lisztca. 1852 Prolégomènes . . . I-17 1 No watermark Henschke/Lisztca. 1852–53 - I-17 10a, 15a, + 24–25 No watermark Lisztca 1853–54 - I-18, n.2 - No watermark Lisztca. 1853–56 Après une Lec . . . I-13 7 Complete No watermark Raff1853, and ca.1854 and 1858 suggest that Lisztwas working toward publication at three differentstages. 24 Contemporary with the first twostages, a letter to Marie d’Agoult, a concertreview in the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung, anda letter from the Hungarian violinist EduardReményi report that Liszt performed the workin at least three different versions. 25 Given that24There is no doubt Liszt intended his Fragment dantesqueto be published in late 1840. Writing to the portrait artistHenri Lehmann, Liszt asks: “Have I never played you myFragment dantesque? I don’t believe so. I will publish itwilly-nilly at the beginning of Winter with the first of myYears of Pilgrimage” (Vous ai-je jamais joué mon FragmentDantesque? Je ne crois pas. Bon gré mal gré je lepublierai à l’entrée de l’hivera avec la première de Mesannées de pèlerinage). Liszt to Lehmann, 20 September1840, England, in Une Correspondance romantique: Madamed’Agoult, Liszt, Henri Lehmann, ed. Solange Joubert(Paris: Flammarion, 1947), p. 128. Beyond this evidence,the presence of Liszt’s manuscript markings in red crayon—which he tended to use for final corrections—suggests thepreparation of a publishable version. Only red crayon couldbe seen clearly above the often densely layered revisionsin pencil or pen.25Liszt performed the “Dante” Sonata in different forms atthe Hôtel de l’Europe on 25 October 1839, at his fourthmorning concert (of six) in Vienna on 5 December 1839,and in Weimar during June 1853, when he performed alater version entitled Prolégomènes à la Divina Commediato Reményi. Liszt mentions his private performance toMarie d’Agoult on October 25; see Correspondance / FranzLiszt’s own letters make no reference to the1853 performance, it seems likely that althoughhe publicly programmed the Sonata only oncein Vienna, he may have performed it privatelyto Weimar guests on numerous occasions. Thisopens up the possibility that the stages of compositionrepresented in the early manuscriptsmay have been directed less toward the completionof a final, immutable version than towardan evolving collection of musical ideas subjectto continual reworking. Composition, at leastwith regard to this music, would thus havebecome an open-ended process of refinement.It is revealing that, for Liszt, this was at notime incongruous with his conception of theSonata as a composed work.I will argue that the relation of the two earlyfragmentary sketches to the completed score isanalogous to the relation of Liszt’s identity as avirtuoso improviser to his identity as a com-Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, p. 388. Heinrich Adami published areview of Liszt’s performance in Allgemeine Theaterzeitung(7 Dec. 1839), 1197. Reményi reports in a letter that Lisztplayed a version of his sonata for him in June 1853: “Thisscribbler allows himself to address a great man—after havingheard . . . la Fantasie d’après Dante, etc.” (Briefehervorrangender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt, ed. La Mara[Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1895], I, 283).59

19THCENTURYMUSICposer. Not surprisingly, the manuscripts forthe “Dante” Sonata indicate that his workingmethods did not alter decisively as Liszt assumedhis duties as Kapellmeister in 1848 andbegan to change his goals and aspirations aswell as his instrument (from piano to orchestra).When his professional identity changed,Liszt intensified his revision of the Sonata, revisitingthe work at least twice; but, as I willsuggest, the methods by which he continuallyrecomposed this music remain essentially themethods of a virtuoso improviser, lending thepiece a problematic status within the normativecategories of work and improvisation. Wecan extrapolate from this that the various stagesof revision to the “Dante” Sonata—like theletter to Carl Alexander—document Liszt’s desireto exceed the category of virtuoso and gainacceptance as a composer within the post-Beethovenian canon.Debating Musical Legitimacy:PHANTASIEREN and KOMPONIERENAs a composer, Liszt had endured acrimony inthe press ever since 1837, when he lambastedthe music of his rival Sigismond Thalberg as“pretentiously empty and mediocre . . . supremelymonotonous and therefore supremelyboring” in the Revue et Gazette musicale deParis. 26 At the time, he misjudged the severityof responses this would elicit from the Parisianbeau monde, anticipating Fétis’s vengeful articlewith the throwaway remark to Maried’Agoult that the journalistic ping pong “couldall become very amusing.” 27 Recent studies of26“Prétentleusement vides et médiocres . . . souverainementmonotone, et partant souverainement ennuyeuse” (Liszt,“Revue critique: M. Thalberg.—Grand Fantasie, oeuvre22.—1 er et 2 e Caprices, œuvres 15 et 19,” La Revue etGazette musicale de Paris 4 [8 Jan. 1837], 17–20, here 19).27“Cela pourra devenir amusant” (Liszt to Marie d’Agoult,13 Feb. 1837, Paris, in Correspondance / Franz Liszt, Maried’Agoult, p. 265). Fétis’s first response to Liszt’s publicdenigration of Thalberg’s Grande Fantasie, op. 22, appearedin Vert-vert on 16 January 1837. His more extended, comparativearticle—“MM. Thalberg et Liszt”—was publishedin La Revue et Gazette musicale 17 (23 April 1837), pp.135–42. Liszt failed to avert a thorny public dialogue byresponding: “A M. le Professeur Fétis,” Revue 20 (14 May1837), 169–72; and he was in turn answered by Fétis asecond time: “A monsieur le directeur de la Gazette Musicalede Paris,” Revue 21 (21 May 1837), 173–75.the Liszt-Thalberg rivalry showed the extent towhich Liszt had miscalculated, 28 and in thislight his appointment a decade later as Hof-Kapellmeister to the court of Weimar can beviewed as a much-needed public endorsementof his status as a composer through the court’sinstitutional pedigree. Schumann’s oft-citedcomment on the Liszt “problem,” however,remains typical in its marking of a disjuncturebetween identities: “While [Liszt] developed hispiano playing to an extraordinary degree, thecomposer in him lagged behind; this alwaysleads to disparity [Mißverhältnis], the consequencesof which are felt in his most recentworks.” 29 Charles Rosen articulates the modernequivalent of this influential view when heidentifies a passage from Liszt’s tenth HungarianRhapsody as “the zero degree of musicalinvention if we insist that invention must consistof melody, rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint.”For Rosen, Liszt’s music is “conceivedabsolutely for public performance,” 30 and thepersuasiveness of his remarks derives partlyfrom their congruity with Liszt’s documentedexperience as an improvising and embellishingperformer as opposed to a formally trained composer.Back in 1839, Schumann explicitly underscoredthis point, reminding his Neue Zeitschriftreaders that Liszt had received scantformal instruction in composition. 31 This lack28See Rainer Kleinertz, “Subjektivität und Öffentlichkeit:Liszts Rivalität mit Thalberg und ihre Folgen,” in Derjunge Liszt: Referate des 4. Europäischen Liszt-Symposions:Wien 1991, ed. Gottfried Scholz (Munich: Musikverlag E.Katzbichler, 1993); Gooley, “Liszt, Thalberg and the ParisianPublics,” in The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 18–77; ChristopherH. Gibbs, “‘Just Two Words. Enormous Success’:Liszt’s 1838 Vienna Concerts,” in Franz Liszt and HisWorld, ed. Gooley and Gibbs (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2006), pp. 167–230.29“Brachte er [Liszt] es nun als Spieler auf eine erstaunlicheHöhe, so war doch der Komponist zurückgeblieben, undhier wird immer ein Mißverhältnis entstehen, das sichauffallend auch bis in seine letzten Werke fortgerächt hat.”Schumann’s comment occurs in his 1839 review of pianoétudes, including Liszt’s Étude en douze exercices (op. 1)and their recomposition as twelve Grandes études. Translationadapted from Schumann, On Music and Musicians,trans. Paul Rosenfeld, ed. Konrad Wolff (New York: Pantheon,1946), p. 147.30Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Bath: Fontana,1996), p. 507.31“Zu anhaltenden Studien in der Komposition scheint er[Liszt] keine Ruhe, vielleicht auch keinen ihm gewachsenenMeister gefunden zu haben; desto mehr studierte er als60

was a leitmotif of Liszt’s reception as a composerin the 1830s, a time when he chose not topublicize that, in his teens, he had in fact studiedwith Ferdinand Paër, Antonin Reicha, andbriefly with Salieri. 32Two competing paradigms of artistic creationare concealed here. For Schumann, composing(or improvising) with an innate but unnurturedtalent inevitably produced results inferior tothose of a properly educated mind endowedwith similar artistic gifts. For Liszt, real talent(or perhaps just genius) had the power to nurtureitself. While many Romantic composers—Schumann and Liszt included—sought to cometo terms with the delicate relationship betweenlearning and inspiration, craft and genius, Liszt’sartistic credo at this time seems to have beenformed according to a blend of pragmatism andidealism. He could no more undo his years ofimprovisatory practice than he could integratea training he never fully absorbed. UnlikeSchumann, therefore, he appears to lean towardthe notion that the fruits of creation inVirtuos” (“Etüden für das Pianoforte,” [1839], rpt. inSchumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musikervon Robert Schumann, ed. Martin Kreisig, vol. 1 [5th edn.Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1914], p. 439).32Gooley’s detailed study of Parisian concert reviews hasdemonstrated that by 1835 the complex textures of Liszt’spublished original works—Apparitions, the Harmoniespoétiques et réligieuses, and the Clochette fantasy—hadonly served to convince audiences that, in spite of receivingwide acclaim as a pianist, he was in fact a deficientcomposer. See Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 24. See alsoDieter Torkewitz discussion of G. Schilling’s article of1836 in “Die Erfassung der ‘Harmonies poétiques etréligieuses’ von Liszt,” Liszt Studien II (Munich: EmilKatzbichler, 1981), p. 228.Joseph d’Ortigue’s early biography of Liszt (in the Gazettemusicale de Paris from 14 June 1835) downplays thesignificance of Liszt’s music teachers with witheringdismissiveness: Liszt was “humiliated to find himself treatedlike a school boy and . . . took a dislike to [Czerny, thoughlater recognized his] tact and personality”; he studied only“clefs [and] religious music” with Salieri, and later on, just“counterpoint” with Reicha. No further elaboration or gratitudeis given to Liszt’s music pedagogues, and, if anything,d’Ortigue emphasizes the autodidactic aspects of the boy’sschooling. See “Joseph d’Ortigue: Franz Liszt,” trans. VincentGiroud, in Liszt and His World, pp. 313–15. The extent towhich this may be creative self-fashioning on Liszt’s part isdebatable, but as Benjamin Walton points out, both ofd’Ortigue’s earlier biographies of musician friends (Berlioz,George Onslow) had used material “supplied directly bytheir subjects. . . . It is not unreasonable to suppose thatsomething similar happened [with Liszt]” (Walton, “TheFirst Biography: Joseph d’Ortigue on Franz Liszt at AgeTwenty-Three,” in Liszt and His World, p. 305).the instant of inspiration, unmediated by criticalreflection—whether in the extended formof methodical study or the momentary form ofabstraction from improvisation—would surpassthe “mediated” efforts of more schooled composers.33In opposing critical self-reflection, Liszt’sview resonates with a distinguished Romantictradition of subliminal artistic invention, fromShelley, who in his Defense of Poetry (1840)observed: “The mind in creation is as a fadingcoal, which some invisible influence, like aninconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.. . . When composition begins, inspirationis already on the decline, and the most gloriouspoetry that has ever been communicated to theworld is probably a feeble shadow of the originalconceptions of the poet.” 34 To Schopenhauer,for whom “the sketches of great mastersare often more effective than their finishedpaintings . . . the work done at one stroke . . .[is] perfected in the inspiration of the first conceptionand drawn unconsciously as it were;likewise the melody that comes entirely withoutreflection and wholly as if by inspiration. . . [has] the great merit of . . . free impulse ofgenius, without any admixture of deliberation.”35Writing from a pedagogical perspective in1841, however, A. B. Marx made an antitheticalclaim when he spoke of a creative processthat proceeds conversely from intuitive conceptionto action, Anschauung to Tat. Marximplies that views like Shelley’s were out ofdate, already ossified by the time of what Heinewould call Lisztomania:If anyone still desired to return to that old misunderstandingabout the dreamlike unconsciousness of33We may speculate that, for Schumann, education andthe requisite qualities of a “legitimate” composer musthave been an ambiguous issue. He felt himselfundereducated in comparison with Mendelssohn, for example,yet was doubtless aware of Forkel’s claim that J. S.Bach was a “self taught genius.” I am grateful to John Buttfor bringing this observation to my attention.34Percy Bysshe Shelley, Literary and Philosophical Criticism,ed. John Shawcross (London: Henry Frowde, 1909),p. 153.35Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Inner Nature of Art,” inPhilosophical Writings, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher (NewYork: Continuum, 1994), pp. 100, 102.DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata61

19THCENTURYMUSICgenial creativity, he would find himself correctednot only by the words of Goethe but by the worksand words of the musical masters, namely by Mozarthimself—who reveals a remarkably clear consciousnessof his intentions and their execution in hisletters. But principally speaking, this consciousnesscan be nothing other than an artistic consciousness,one that sets out from contemplation [Anschauung]and leads to action [Tat]. 36Though he later idealized this progressioninto a “completely integral [einheitsvoll] processof contemplation and act,” 37 Marx, likeSchumann, regarded a lack of training as thefirst stumbling block for a ragged composersuch as Liszt. Not surprisingly, in 1854 Hanslickcodified the necessity of music training as partof a compositional model hostile to virtuosoimprovisation, thereby cementing a paradigmfor composition that would increasingly definethe dominant critical aesthetics of the nineteenthcentury. Schumann, too, seemed sympatheticto this trend in 1848 and advised astudent: “Above all things, persevere in composingmentally, not with the help of the instrument,and keep on twisting and turning theprincipal melodies about in your head untilyou can say to yourself: ‘Now they will do’.” 38In this view, the authority of historical consciousnessdefeats that of momentary ecstasyin an idealist hierarchy of mind over body: “Thecomposer works slowly and intermittently,”Hanslick insisted pace Liszt, “forming the musicalartwork . . . for posterity.” 39 Even Wagner,writing to Hanslick about Tannhäuser eightyears earlier, had voiced a similar, historicallyconscious view: “Do not underestimate thepower of reflection; the unconsciously createdwork of art belongs to periods remote from ourown: the work of art of the most advanced36Cited in, and adapted from, A. B. Marx, Musical Form inthe Age of Beethoven, trans. Scott Burnham (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 19.37Ibid., p. 31.38“Vor Allem beharren Sie dabei, innerlich—nicht mit Hülfedes Instruments—zu erfinden, die melodischen Hauptmotiveim Kopfe so lange zu drehen und zu wenden, bisSie sich sagen können: ‘nun ist es gut’” (Schumann toLudwig Meinardus, 16 September 1848, Dresden, in RobertSchumanns Briefe, ed. Gustav Jansen [2nd edn. Leipzig:Breitkopf and Härtel, 1904], p. 289).39Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. anded. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), p. 49.period of culture can be produced only by aprocess of conscious creation.” 40By following the “outmoded” beliefs ofShelley and Schopenhauer, however, Liszt inhis early improvisatory fragments and free fantasieswould appear—indirectly—to have takenGoethe at his word: Im Anfang war die Tat! 41In a defensive comment on his musical proceduresdating from 1856, Liszt explicitly celebratesa musical structure that is sinnlichrather than geistig. Writing to Louis Köhler,who had dedicated a treatise on piano playingand composition to him, Liszt eschews all formalistdogma:However others may judge of these things, [my works]are for me the necessary development of my innerexperiences, which have brought me to the convictionthat invention and feeling are not so entirelyevil in Art. Certainly you very rightly observe thatthe forms (which are too often changed by quiterespectable people into formulas) “First Subject,Middle Subject, Closing Subject, etc., may very muchgrow into a habit, because they must be so thoroughlynatural, primitive, and very easily intelligible.”Without making the slightest objection tothis opinion, I only beg for permission to be allowedto decide upon the forms by the contents, and evenshould this permission be withheld from me fromthe side of the most commendable criticism, I shallnonetheless go on in my own modest way quitecheerfully. After all, in the end it comes principallyto this—what the ideas are, and how they are carriedout and worked up—and that leads us always backto the feeling and invention, if we would not scramblein the rut of a mere trade. 42The fulcrum on which this comment pivots isthe outward, or let us say readily perceivable,structures of music. In 1856 Liszt was thinkingabout these matters in the context of the symphonicpoem: a project of serious composition.But even before this new conception of large-40Wagner to Eduard Hanslick, 1 January 1847, Dresden, inSelected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. and trans. StewartSpencer and Barry Millington (New York: W. W. Norton,1988), p. 134.41Goethe’s Faust famously rejects the word, meaning, andmental power before stating: “Mir hilft der Geist! Aufeinmal seh’ ich Rat / Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang wardie Tat” (J. W. von Goethe, Faust, part I).42Liszt to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, Weimar, in La Mara,Letters of Franz Liszt, I, 273–74.62

scale form, the sense of “form” contra “formula”evidently sat uneasily at the intersectionof music criticism and composition forboth Liszt and Schumann. As early as the mid-1830s it also characterized a virulent line ofcriticism leveled at virtuoso improvisers, andLiszt’s belief in the primacy of literature—thatmusical forms should be determined entirelyby their poetic contents—made him especiallyvulnerable. Carl Gollmick’s 1842 invectiveagainst the “fallen angels” of contemporary virtuosity,for example, seems like a thinly veiledassault on the practices that Liszt represented,if not on the man himself. Gollmick’s principalcomplaint was the impossibility of comprehendingimprovised forms with reference to priormodels:Give us golden unity in your performance, and theintellectual sympathy of any good composition, yetundestroyed, uninterrupted through bizarre, lugubriouspassions or symptoms of world-weariness.Give us—since you are a pianist—once a free Fantasiewith an elegant and securely performed fugal themeas our simple fathers did—but what do I hear! Nothingof these? And you’ve been playing for half anhour! For the sake of the book’s good contents Iwant to forgive you the long confused prelude. Butat last give us something. Begin at long last mynoble-minded artist. But how? You have already finished,wiping the sweat from your brow, and standup exhausted. You can hardly respond to the barbaricscream with which the mass goes wild aboutyou. Is then the beloved art on the rack for you? . . .the men shout: “God Damn! He is a devil!”—thewomen whisper delightedly: “He is an angel!”—Iagree with the latter. An angel of music—but onewho has fallen! 4343“Gieb uns in deinem Vortrage die goldne Einheit, unddie geistige Sympathie irgend einer guten Composition,aber unzerstört, ununterbrochen durch Bizarrien, lugubereLeidenschaften oder Weltschmerz-Symptome. Gieb uns—bist du ein Klavierspieler—einmal eine freie Phantasie miteinem elegant und sicher durchgeführten Fugenthema, wiees unsre einfachen Väter taten.—Aber was höre ich! Vondem allen nichts? Und du spielst schon eine halbe Stunde!Ich will dir die lange bunte Vorrede um des guten Inhaltsdes Buches willen gern verzeihen. Aber gieb uns endlicheinen solchen. Beginne endlich, mein edler Künstler. Dochwie? Du bist schon zu Ende, wischest dir den Schweiß vonder Stirne, und stehst erschöpft auf. Das barbarischeGeschrei, das dir die Menge entgegentobt, kannst du kaumerwiedern vor Ermattung. Wird dir denn die holde Kunstzur Folterbank? . . . Die Männer rufen: ‘God dam! er ist einThe gefallener Engel metaphor is potent notonly for its geistliche connotations and its ironicinversion of the infamous adulation of Liszt bywomen, but also for its invocation of history. Itsuggests that before the shallow virtuosity of apostlapsarian present there were prelapsarian“artists” (“our simple fathers,” like biblical patriarchs),the paradigm for which is Beethoven.The latter’s celebrated virtuoso improvisationsinvited comparison—evidently unflattering onoccasion—with Liszt’s, whose efforts Gollmicksought to “demonize” in the grand but corruptedform of the fallen angel.Similarly, if more tolerantly, Carl Czerny inhis treatise Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasierenauf dem Pianoforte (1829) explains thatif a composed work may be compared to asymmetrical architectural edifice, an improvisedFantasy is like an English garden: “seeminglyirregular, but full of surprising variety, and executed. . . according to a plan.” 44 Yet Czerny isalso pragmatic in emphasizing that the distinctionbetween a “work” and an “improvisation”ultimately depends on the listener’s perception:“When the practicing musician possessesthe capability not only of executing at his instrumentthe ideas that his inventive power,inspiration, or mood have evoked in him at theinstant of their conception but of so combiningthem that the coherence can have the effect onthe listener of an actual composition—this iswhat is called: Improvising or Extemporizing[Fantasieren. (Improvisieren, Extemporieren.)].”45 Instating the listener as a barometer ofTeufel!’—die Frauen flüstern entzückt: ‘Es ist ein Engel!’—Ich stimme dem letztern bei. Ein Engel der Tonkunst,aber—ein gefallener!” (Carl Gollmick, “Das heutigeVirtuosenwesen,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 45 [2 Dec.1842], 185).44Carl Czerny, Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasierenauf dem Pianoforte, Op. 200 (Vienna: Diabelli, 1829), p. 3;trans. Alice Michell as A Systematic Introduction to Improvisationon the Pianoforte (New York: Longman, 1983),p. 2.45“Wenn der ausübende Tonkünstler die Fähigkeit besitzt,die Ideed, welche seine Erfindungsgabe, Begeisterung, oderLaune ihm eingiebt, sogleich, im Augenblick desEntstehens, auf seinem Instrument nicht auszuführen,sondern so zu verbinden, dass der Zusammenhang auf denHörer die Wirkung eines eigentlichen Tonstückes habenkann,—so nennt man dieses: Fantasieren. (Improvisieren,Extemporieren)” (Czerny, Systematische Anleitung, p. 3;Michell, A Systematic Introduction, p. 1).DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata63

19THCENTURYMUSICformal coherence ascribes the unity of a performancenot to the origin of the performance (atext or a sketch) but to its destination. Thelistener qua destination becomes a space inwhich a dazzling multiplicity of rhetorical effectscan condense into a “work.” But such awork remains a text without an inscription,irrespective of whether the improvising performer(after Czerny) or the able listener (afterGollmick) is held to be the agent of cohesion. 46With its implicit emphasis on destination,Czerny’s textbook definition expounds a synonymybetween “Fantasieren,” “Improvisieren,”and “Extemporieren,” although the lattertwo terms are largely dropped for the remainderof the treatise. 47 While Czerny explainsmethods practicing improvisation in differentstyles, with different types and numbers ofthemes, and even with different audiences inmind, he offers no discussion of formal organizationexcept as it is determined by the themesand their strategically varied appearances. Inother words, Czerny’s emphasis is on the thematicinvention of the moment rather than onany premeditated design. Of course, this resultedin formal organization of a kind, although“in a much freer form than a written work,” forCzerny emphasized the listener qua destinationby insisting that an improvisation “mustbe fashioned into an organized totality [only] asfar as is necessary to remain comprehensibleand interesting.” 48In two separate critiques of Czerny’s treatise,Hamburg’s Blätter für Musik und Literaturquestioned whether a “systematic” approachto improvisation might render a free Fantasy“only a piece [Musikstück] falling under the46The model for shifting the locus of meaning from originto destination comes from Barthes, “The Death of theAuthor,” which empowers the agency of the reader postmortem. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” p. 148.47Like Czerny, Hummel appears to regard “Phantasiren”and “Extemporiren” as synonymous in his Clavierschule;although he uses the term “Phantasiren” only in the text,the title of his seventh chapter from volume 3 is given as:“Vom freien Phantasiren. (Extemporiren).” See Hummel,Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zumPiano-Forte-Spiel, vol. 3 (Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, 1828),p. 444.48“Obschon in viel freyeren Formen, als eine geschriebene,doch in soweit ein geordnetes Ganzes bilden muss, alsnöting ist, um verständlich und interessant zu bleiben”(Czerny, Systematische Anleitung, p. 3 [Michell, p. 1]).hands ex tempore.” 49 Similarly an anonymousViennese critic drew a distinction betweenImprovisieren/Extemporieren, and Phantasieren,arguing that the terms should differentiatethe levels of formal coherence in an improvisation.Whereas Phantasieren was essentially unboundfrom prior conceptions of form, the othertwo expressions: “connote simply the fusion ofinvention and formal realization”—that is, theyrelate to recognizably “composed” forms: “Onecan improvise a regular sonata, an overture, astrict fugue etc. This, however, cannot be calleda “Fantasie” by any means.” 50A review of Liszt’s earliest public improvisation—datingfrom his tutelage under Czerny—records a similar differentiation. The elevenyear-old’sViennese debut took place on 1 December1822, and his concluding “free fantasy”performance at this concert elicited a correctivein the Allgemeine Zeitung: “We shouldprefer to call the fantasy a ‘capriccio,’ for severalthemes united by voluntary passages donot deserve that magnificent title, too often49“Und die freie Phantasie ist jetzt nur ein unter denHänden gesetztes Musikstück ex tempore” (Christern,“Vom musikalischen Phantasie,” Blätter für Musik undLiteratur 4 [Oct. 1840], 21–22, here 21).50The full comment reads: “We regard the expressionsFantasieren, and subsequently Improvisieren andExtemporieren, however, not quite as synonymous as theauthor suggests, rather we hold that the latter two expressionsconnote simply the fusion of invention and formalrealization, whereas in the concept of ‘Fantasie’ the powersof the imagination predominate over form so that, inthe latter, the artist immediately lends form to ideas whichhis mood, enthusiasm and inventiveness have just inspired,and he only follows formal requirements in so far as theyare essential for an artistic creation. One can improvise aregular sonata, an overture, a strict fugue etc. This, however,cannot be called a ‘Fantasie’ by any means.” (Wirhalten die Ausdrücke Fantasieren, dann Improvisieren undExtemporieren jedoch nicht so ganz gleichbedeutend, wiediess der Verfasser [Czerny] andeutet, sondern glauben,daß die beiden letzen Ausdrücke nur das gleichzeitigeZusammentreffen der Erfindung mit der Ausführungbezeichnen, daß aber im Begriffe der Fantasie auch dasVorherrschen der Einbildungskraft über die Form liegt, so,daß in der letzteren der Künstler Ideen, welche seine Laune,Begeisterung, und Erfindungsgabe ihm eben eingibt,sogleich ausführet, und die Formen nur soweit beachten,als sie zu einer Kunstleistung unerläßlich, sind. Man kanneine regelmäßige Sonate, eine Overtüre, eine strenge Fugeu.s.w. improvisieren. Allein diess nennt man noch keineFantasie.) (“Über die systematische Anleitung zumPhantasieren auf dem Pianoforte con Carl Czerny,” Monatberichtder Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde des ÖsterreichischenKaiserstaates [1830]).64

misused in our day.” 51 Seven years later, Czernywould categorize the Capriccio as the freest,most humorous form of fantasy-style improvisation:“an arbitrary linking of individual ideaswithout any particular development, a whimsicaland swift shifting from one motive to theother without further relationship than thatbestowed by chance.” If Liszt’s reviewer had asimilar idea, he was criticizing the boy’s apparentlyunderdeveloped ability to relate or transformthemes. 52From this we can deduce, first, that duringthe 1820s Improvisieren, while not understoodto belong exclusively to genre-based musicalcategories, could conjure the formal traits ofrecognizable sonatas and other structures publiclyaccepted as musical “works,” and, second,that some contemporary musicians differentiatedbetween different kinds of improvisation,the decisive criterion for which was theconstructive element, that is, its form. Phantasieren,specifically, was reserved for the voicingof a momentary muse, a commingling ofinstant and idea in a Shelleyan attempt to capturethe fire of creative inspiration. 53 Czerny’sViennese reviewer articulated this ideal mostexplicitly: “The powers of the imagination predominateover form so that . . . the artist immediatelylends form to ideas which his mood,enthusiasm and inventiveness have just inspired,and he only follows formal requirementsin so far as they are essential for an artistic51Allgemeine Zeitung (Jan. 1823), cited in Alan Walker,Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years 1811–1847 (London: Faber,1983), p. 78.52Czerny, Systematische Anleitung, p. 105 (Michell, p. 121).53A small number of nineteenth-century piano compositionspublished under the title of “Phantasie”—notablyBeethoven’s op. 27 and op. 77, Schubert’s Wandererfantasieand “Graz” Fantasia, Hummel’s op. 123, Mendelssohn’sop. 28, and Schumann’s ops. 12 and 17—elevate this pursuitof momentary inspiration to the status of a work.These crafted “improvisations” reverse Czerny’s notion ofan unnotated Improvisation that attains the semblance ofa work by its vestige of formal coherence, for they areworks by virtue of being printed and they attain “improvisatory”status through overt compositional artifice. These“Phantasie” works are thus distinct from the more prevalentopera “fantasies” of the period; they can be viewed asdirect outgrowths of the improvisatory tradition under discussion.By contrast, it seems that almost no pieces werepublished with the title “Improvisation” because any suchimprovisation, if published, would simply have been givenits appropriate formal title—sonata, variations, etc.creation.” 54 Performers could thus distinguishbetween the Phantasieren of a loose-limbed,fantasy-like work distinguished principally bythematic transformation, and Improvisieren/Extemporieren distinguished principally by referenceto an established formal model.How does this discourse relate to Liszt’s practices?In light of the emerging opposition betweenPhantasieren and spontaneous form, itis perhaps no coincidence that Heinrich Adami,writing in Vienna’s Allgemeine Theaterzeitung,called the premiere of Liszt’s Fragmentdantesque late in 1839 “something like an improvisation[Improvisation] to which Liszt hadfelt inspired after a reading of the ‘divine comedy’.”In contrast to orderly sonata structures,the music was “a collection of colorfully chaoticideas chasing each other, often breakingoff quickly, exchanging one mood with another,bold in outline, aphoristic in execution.” 55Within a month of the premiere, a subsequentconcert review in Pressburg described Liszt’s54“Das Vorherrschen der Einbildungskraft über die Formliegt, so, daß in der letzteren der Künstler Ideen, welcheseine Laune, Begeisterung, und Erfindungsgabe ihm ebeneingibt, sogleich ausführet, und die Formen nur soweitbeachten, als sie zu einer Kunstleistung unerläßlich, sind”(“Über die systematische Anleitung zum Phantasieren aufdem Pianoforte con Carl Czerny,” in Monatbericht derGesellschaft der Musikfreunde des ÖsterreichischenKaiserstaates).An article entitled “Vom muskalischen Phantasieren” adecade later argues similarly that fantasy-style improvisationis neither arbitrary passagework nor preconceived form,but draws its character from the performer’s inner imaginationand is predicated on keyboard mastery: “Die Phantasieerhält ihre Nahrung, ihre Stoffe sowohl durch die äußere alsdurch die innere Anschauung. Beide kann die Poesie inihrem Bereiche wiedergeben; erstere allein, objectiv undohne Symbole, kann nur die bildende Kunst darstellen;letztere bleibt der Musik anheimgegeben. Zum Phantasierenbedarf es also der inneren Anschauung, der lebendigenAufregung des Gemüths zu Gefühlen, Eindrücken undleidenschaftlichen, mehr oder weniger schaften Affecten.Der Künstler, welcher phantasieren will, soll seiner Fertigkeitso sehr Meister sein, daß alle Gradationen und Nüancen derTöne, Melodien und Akkorde sich zu bestimmtenEmpfindungs-Ausdrücken runden” (Christern, “Vommusikalischen Phantasie,” Blätter für Musik und Literatur[Oct. 1840], 22).55“Ungefähr wie eine Improvisation, zu welcher sich Lisztnach dem Durchlesen der ‘göttlichen Komödie’ begeistertgefühlt hatte, ein Aggregat von bunt durcheinandersagenden Ideen, oft schnell abbrechend, eine Gemüthstimmungmit der anderen vertauschend, im Entwurfekühn, in der Ausführing aphoristisch” (Heinrich Adami’sreview in the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung [7 Dec. 1839],1197).DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata65

19THCENTURYMUSICmost recent compositions similarly: “now andthen bizarre . . . not without thoroughness, butstill more deeply felt than thought, they almostseem more born from the momentarysentiment of the soul, more like one of theFantasies mocking customary bounds than likecalm conception.” Without specifying whetheror not Liszt performed his new Fragment inPressburg, the author (“J. R.”) contributes tothe discourse on Phantasieren by referring the“composed” to a calm aesthetic while construingLisztian “Phantasie” as more fractured, uncontrollable,and volatile: “now [these pieces]spread light and warmth—now wildly flaringflames—consuming for their own hearth.” 56In his first known private performance ofthe Fragment, given at the Hôtel de l’Europe on25 October 1839, Liszt boasted that the solelistener “was taken aback” by the experience. 57And as late as the 1887 English premiere of themuch revised final version, performed by Liszt’sstudent Walter Bache, a baffled critic for theMusical Times wrote: “The most conspicuousof Liszt’s works was a so-called Fantasia quasiSonata, ‘Après une lecture de [sic] Dante.’ Thisis a most extraordinary composition, of whichit is absolutely impossible to form any idea at afirst hearing . . . we could not trace any definitemeaning in the constant progression of discordsof which the piece is made up.” 58 In view56The full paragraph reads: “Was die Compositionen diesesmusikalischen Byron [Liszt] anbelangt, so sind sie meisteine Mischung des lyrisch-episch und romantischen Styles,doch ist letzterer bei Weitem vorherrschender,—oft weich—nie weichlich, bisweilen bizarre,—immer großartig,—nichtohne Gründlichkeit, doch noch tiefer gefühlt als gedacht,scheinen sie fast mehr Geburten momentaner Seelenstimmungund einer der gewöhnlichen Schrankenspottenden Phantasie, als ruhiger Konception—sie sind baldLicht und Wärme verbreitend—bald wild aufloderndeFlammen,—verzehrend für ihren eignen Herd” (“Correspondenz-Nachrichten:Preussburg, den 23. Dez. 1839”).This is contained in a small collection of thus-far unidentifiableGerman press articles about Liszt between 1838and 1847, which are held in the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftungin Bayreuth as: II C b 3.57“À midi chez Fanna auquel je [Liszt] joue mes nouveauxmorceaux. Il est surprise du Fragment dantesque” (Liszt toMarie d’Agoult, 25 Oct. 1839, Venice, in Correspondance/ Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, p. 112).58See “Mr. Walter Bache’s Pianoforte Recital,” MusicalTimes 28 (1 March 1887), 154. See also analytical critiquesof the “Dante” Sonata by William Newman, The Sonatasince Beethoven (3rd edn. New York: Norton, 1983), p.369; Wolfgang Dömling, Franz Liszt und seine Zeit (Laaber:of these protests against confusion and disorder,it is revealing that in his review article of1839 Schumann compared Liszt’s compositionalaesthetic unfavorably to that of Chopin, andexplained that the latter “always has structure. . . there always runs the thread of a melody.” 59Similar criticisms were common in this period—evenfrom would-be supporters—andsome commentators merely assumed that asense of unity had to be determined by thelistener’s ascription of a unified subjectivity tothe performer. Thus in 1838 another Viennesecritic speculated: “The exemplariness of theform leaves something to be wished . . . [Liszt]has perhaps not found the time to make hisworks more vocal and more comprehensible tothe general public. . . . Perhaps it is simplybecause of his all-powerful subjectivity thatthey are in their perfection only comprehensibleand playable by him.” 60Laaber-Verlag, 1985), p. 129; Rudolph Kokai, Franz Lisztin seinen frühen Klavierwerken (Budapest: Bärenreiter,1969), pp. 13ff.; Humphrey Searle, The Music of Liszt (London:Williams & Norgate, 1954), p. 32; Alan Walker, Liszt(London: Faber & Faber, 1971), pp. 42–45; Louis Kentner,“Solo Piano Music: 1827–61,” in Liszt: The Man and HisMusic, ed. Alan Walker (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970),pp. 79–133; Derek Watson, Liszt (London: Dent & Sons,1989), pp. 247–48.59“Chopin hat doch Formen; unter den wunderlichenGebilden seiner Musik zieht sich doch immer der rosigeFaden einer Melodie fort” (rpt. in Gesammelte Schriftenüber Musik und Musiker von Robert Schumann, p. 440).English trans. Paul Rosenfeld, On Music and Musicians,ed. Konrad Wolff (New York: Pantheon, 1946), pp. 147–48.60Carl Tausenau, “Liszt und Thalberg,” Allgemeinemusikalische Anzeiger, 7 February 1838; cited in Gooley,The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 47. When the twenty-two-year-oldFelix Mendelssohn improvised in public, by contrast, theresult was reportedly “as fluent and well planned as awritten work,” according to Sir George Macfarren. SeeGeorge Grove, “Mendelssohn,” in Dictionary of Musicand Musicians (1st edn. London: Macmillan, 1882), vol. 2,p. 300. The composer’s correspondence is peppered withhis complaints of feeling ill at ease at the pressure thisentailed; he once described the illusion of creating worksextempore in public as “madness . . . I rarely feel so foolishas when I sat down there to serve up my fantasy to thepublic. . . . It is inappropriate [ein Missbrauch] and absurdat the same time” (ein Unsinn . . . Mir ist selten so närrischzu Muthe gewesen, als wenn ich mich da hinsetzte, ummeine Phantasie dem Publikum zu produciren . . . es istein Mißbruch, und ein Unsinn zugleich). See FelixMendelssohn Bartholody, Reisebriefe von Felix MendelssohnBartholody aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1832, ed. PaulMendelssohn (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1863), p.289. The differing attitudes of Liszt and Mendelssohn toimprovisation are surely idiosyncratic to an extent, but66

The broader reception of Liszt’s virtuosity ascomposition in the 1840s was equally equivocal.Critics were troubled by the discrepancybetween his aspirations and his compositionalabilities, between harmonic experimentationand formal mastery. For a virtuoso improvisationto attain the status of a composition, thecritical definition of a “composer” would havehad to expand to accommodate the deliberateintroduction of musical instabilities. It wasprobably for this very reason that Schumann,referring globally to the practice of virtuosoextempore playing, cautioned Clara Wieckagainst improvising too frequently just a yearbefore he diagnosed Liszt’s unhappy “disparity.”Phantasieren uses up too much creativeenergy, Schumann protested, which could bebetter employed otherwise: “be sure to writeeverything down immediately.” 61 The loss ofwritten music that improvisation entails wenthand in hand with an emergent conception ofcomposition as a largely documentary, monumentalendeavor. Schumann’s fear of creativedepletion speaks to the growing anomaly of ayoung virtuoso whose compositional “output”seemed to transgress the hitherto unproblematicboundaries of notation and sound. Given thisperceived loss of parity, we may suspect that inobeying “feeling and invention,” in seeking toloosen the grip of established musical formulae,Liszt the improviser occasionally severedevery last “thread” to recognizable forms. Thiseffect has provoked a continuing discourse aboutmusical legitimacy. Bernstein put it memorablyin 1998: “Liszt is an error that answers tono correction.” 62nevertheless speak to a psychological division betweenLiszt’s relish of relative imaginative license andMendelssohn’s downright fear of exposing the artifice ofextempore forms. What Mendelssohn found “inappropriateand absurd,” we can surmise, is the stage trick ofcreating musical forms that ought to—and might as well—have been pre-formed (i.e., composed). The underlying distinctionin these firsthand accounts is therefore the degreeto which Mendelssohn’s approach appears to measure extemporeplaying against the expectations of a composedtext; Liszt’s perceived weakness was that he did not.61“Nimm Dir immer vor, alles gleich auf das Papier zubrigen” (Schumann to Clara, 3 December 1838, in Robertund Clara Schumann Briefe einer Liebe, ed. Hanns-JosefOrtheil [Königstein: Athenäum, 1982], p. 155).62Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, p. 109.Views of Liszt-as-problem have recently taken a numberLiszt’s DÉDOUBLEMENTLiszt’s letters from the late 1830s show that—in opposition to the task of an éxécutant—he,too, felt the need for “great artistes” to betrained in “the rules of composition,” for themto be well versed “in counterpoint and fugue,”(even though he would later reflect that “I wasalways on bad terms with canon. I always remaineda stupid man of feeling”). 63 Yet giventhat he increasingly differentiates between hisown dual identities in precisely this way, Lisztof forms. The Liszt of Bernstein’s “error” runs deeper thanan over-determined identity allied to amorphous free fantasies,however, for it challenges our very notion of categoricalthought. A corresponding critique can be made ofSchumann’s categorical distinction between “Liszt” thecomposer and “Liszt” the pianist. The incessantly fluid“confusion of distinctions” Bernstein cites (p. 109) may, inthis instance, be taken equally as a critique of rigid modesof understanding that have difficulty accounting for suchheterogeneity. If Liszt is a pianist, then he is also a composer,hence he becomes a hybrid. If we accept what increasinglybecame a hierarchical separation, however, thereseems to be no possibility of fusing the differentiated partsinto the unified subjectivity of one “Liszt.” Indeed,Alexander Rehding has even proposed the historical momentat which the public transition between “virtuosocareer” and “self-consciously great composer” took place,namely the unveiling of the Beethoven monument at Bonnon 10–13 August 1845. See “Inventing Liszt’s Life: EarlyBiography and Autobiography,” in The Cambridge Companionto Liszt, ed. Kenneth Hamilton (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005), pp. 14–27. Several critiquesof the “Liszt Problem” have been published recently.Bernstein’s “Liszt’s Bad Style” addresses Liszt’s culturalidentity in the postmodern present through critiques ofcontemporary writings about Liszt, in Virtuosity of theNineteenth Century, pp. 109–30; James Deaville’s “Lisztin the Twentieth Century” addresses Liszt’s precariousposition on the margins of a Western classical mainstreamthrough an examination of writings, research, recordings,and film, in The Cambridge Companion to Liszt, ed. KennethHamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2006), pp. 28–56; Gooley’s “Liszt, Thalberg, and the ParisianPublics” examines the historical overdeterminationof Liszt’s image in the French and German press between1834 and 1848, in The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 18–77. Of greaterrelevance historically is Béla Bartók’s noted critique of theLiszt problem, “Liszt zenéje és a mai közönseg,” Népmvel [ü vel] es 6 (1911), 359–62.63Liszt to Marie d’Agoult, London, 14 May 1840, inCorrespondance / Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, p. 584.Liszt’s comment concerns the famous Norwegian violinistOle Bull, whom Liszt met in London during 1840 andwith whom he performed Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata.Bull evidently impressed Liszt as a performer, but Lisztalso notes that he “is a kind of savage, very ignorant ofcounterpoint and fugue” (Franz Liszt: Selected Letters, pp.137–38). Göllerich, Franz Liszt (Berlin: Marquardt, 1908),p. 160.DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata67

19THCENTURYMUSICseems to be speaking for a nature divided againstitself, an ironic nature characterized by selfduplicationor self-multiplication: dédoublement.This splitting describes the particularpsychology of a retired but not entirely “reformed”virtuoso.In an examination of irony in Baudelaire’sessay De l’essence du rire (1855), Paul de Manindirectly characterizes Liszt’s condition by articulatingthe difference between an intersubjectiverelationship and a relationship betweentwo “selves” within a single consciousness—adédoublement such as I argue characterizesLiszt’s persona at this time:Within the realm of intersubjectivity one would indeedspeak of difference [as between subjects—criticand composer or composer and listener] in terms ofthe superiority of one subject over another, with allthe implications of will to power, of violence, andpossession which come into play when a person islaughing at someone else—including the will to educateand to improve. But, when the concept of “superiority”is still being used when the self is engagedin a relationship not to other subjects, but to what isprecisely not a self [Liszt’s lack of unified identity],then the so-called superiority merely designates thedistance constitutive of all acts of reflection. Superiorityand inferiority then become spatial metaphorsto indicate a discontinuity and a plurality of levelswithin a subject that comes to know itself by anincreasing differentiation from what is not. 64By retiring from the stage to pursue a morelofty compositional mission, Liszt effectivelyadopted a state of permanent parabasis, 65 bywhich I mean he became the self-consciousnarrator of his own musical endeavors, the authorof an extended self-critique of his earliermusical identity in the public eye. This critiquetook the form of the revision of earlierwork as well as original composition and abstinencefrom concert tours. But it is not easy todifferentiate between a true authorial voice andthe persona of a fictional narrator in this selfcritique.Liszt’s quixotic assertion to LinaRamann that “my biography is more to be inventedthan to be written after the fact” 66 indicates,perhaps intentionally, a dangerously unstablethreshold between fact and fiction.Whether we regard Liszt’s renunciation of virtuosityas the expression of an authorial I or afictional character depends on how much sinceritywe ascribe to his shift of identity. In thiscase, that means how much mobility we findin his allegiance to the hierarchies of professionalmusical life.This condition of two “selves” within a singleconsciousness allows Liszt’s ironic rhetoric toelevate the composer over the virtuoso. Butgiven Liszt’s evident ambivalence toward virtuosity,a counter impulse might well cry “imposture”to this dichotomy and seek an alternativerole reversal of the sort that VladimirJankelevitch describes sardonically as “insolent”rather than “revolutionary”: “The performerwants to advance on the composer; theone that was first will be second; the one thatwas second wants to live his life. . . . Nothing ischanged. . . . There will again be a thinkinghead, and at the service of this head the twoarms of the performer, but the occupiers of theroles have exchanged posts with each other.” 67The fulcrum on which this false dichotomypivots is Liszt’s practice of Phantasieren. Forgiven Liszt’s well-documented skills as an improviser,just how meaningful can Schumann’srigid distinction between Liszt’s performing and64See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” inBlindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1983), pp. 212–13. To a certain extent, thispsychology is also evident in Liszt’s manipulation of hismultiple identities during his virtuoso career, as Gooleyhas explained: “Liszt’s goals were fundamentally negative.He transformed himself, diversified his affiliations, andintervened in the formation of his reputation in reactionto a major crisis in the musical life of his time” (Gooley,The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 13).65Schlegel’s definition of irony: “eine permanenteParekbase.” See “Fragment 668,” in Kritische Ausgabe,Band 18, Philosophische Lehrjahre (1796–1806), ed. ErnstBehler (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1962), p. 85.66“Meine Biographie ist mehr zu erfinden denn nachzuschreiben”(Ramann, Lisztiana: Erinnerungen an FranzLiszt in Tagebuchblättern, Briefen und Dokumenten ausden Jahren 1873–1886/87 [Mainz: Schott, 1983], p. 407).67“L’exécutant veut avoir le pas sur le compositeur; celuiqui était premier sera second; celui qui était second veutvivre sa vie . . . rien n’est changé . . . il y aura encore unetête pensante, et au service de cette tête les deux bras del’exécutant, mais les titulaires des rôles ont permuté l’unavec l’autre” (in Vladimir Jankelevitch, De la Musique auSilence: Liszt et la Rhapsodie [Paris: Plon, 1979], pp. 121–22).68

composing be before the latter’s move toWeimar? 68Jankelevitch took this entanglement of actionand identity to its reductio ad absurdumwhen he protested: “It would be necessary tosay that virtuosic music is a music withoutcomposer.” 69 In this abstract reading of keyboardvirtuosity, the “thinking head” controllingthe fingers can belong—in different ways—to either a performer or composer. But if thesefigures occupy the poles of a continuum, thecontinuum is asymmetrical: only the mobilevirtuoso is capable of traversing the span ofpossibilities in either direction, even to thepoint of usurping either pole. Thus the dichotomyof performer and composer becomesfalse in the context of Lisztian virtuosity.To what extent does the biographical evidencesupport the view that Liszt himself observed,or at least acted on, this recognition?George Sand’s diary reports that as a touringvirtuoso Liszt wrote his music directly at thepiano. Sand describes his labors on a new projectat Nohant in 1837: “Perhaps it is some compositionaltask that he [Liszt] tries out in fragmentsat the piano; beside him is his pipe, hisruled paper and quill pens. . . . It seems to methat while passing before the piano he must bechurning out these capricious phrases unconsciouslyobedient to his instinct of feeling ratherthan to the labor of reason.” 70 While it is not68By way of historical evidence for Liszt’s improvisations,the journal Le Corsaire, reflecting the typical reception ofLiszt’s concert etiquette, records that, after listening to atrio for cello, piano, and oboe: “Liszt’s natural impulsesthen took over, and he rushed towards the piano despitehimself, took one of the motifs from the trio just executed,varied it, and gave it a new charm . . . every transfixedlistener thought himself transported by a dream into aplace inhabited by the god of harmony.” Thereafter LeCorsaire referred to Liszt as the “famous improviser.” SeeMaurice Henri Cecourcelle, La Société académiques desenfants d’Apollon (Paris: Schoenewerk & cie, 1881), p.137.69“Il faudrait dire . . . que la musique virtuose est unemusique sans compositeur” (Jankelevitch, Liszt et laRhapsodie, p. 122).70“C’est peut-être un travail de composition qu’il essayepar fragments sur le piano; à côté de lui est sa pipe, sonpapier réglé et ses plumes . . . Il me semble qu’en passantdevant son piano, il doit jeter ces phrases capricieuses àson insu en obéissant à son instinct de sentiment plutôtqu’à un travail d’intelligence” (George Sand, “Entretiensjournaliers,” in Œuvres autobiographiques, ed. GeorgesLubin, 2 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1971], II, 981).uncommon for composers to work at, or atleast within reach of, a piano, Liszt had honedand developed his instinctive abilities at thekeyboard to the extent that he seemed able toimprovise a passage rapidly on specific musicalmaterial 71 without feeling bound by whatHaydn—in the context of improvisation—hadcalled “the rules of art.” 72 By beginning withphysical performance, Liszt could generate animmediate realization of the music, producingmusical passages first as sonic objects ratherthan as intentional objects. This practice mayhave led the “Dante” Sonata—charged by onecritic in 1887, we may recall, as lacking any“definite meaning in the constant progressionof discords”—to fall victim to Liszt’s own earliercapacity for Phantasieren. Schumann anticipatedthis situation with sly irony when he71This probably gave Liszt the freedom to realize instantlycertain particular textures of harmony, counterpoint,melody, and rhythm, or the lack thereof (Rosen’s “zerodegree of musical invention”), presenting the sound imageof a virtuoso performance at the point of the music’s inception.At the end of his Clavierschule, Hummel’s commentson improvisation lend credence to this view. Aprerequisite for free Phantasieren, he asserts, is that “thehands perform what the mind thinks without constraintregardless of which key the player is in, and to be precise,[they] perform without needing to be clearly conscious ofthe mechanical actions” (die Hände ohne Zwang, gleichvielin welcher Tonart sich der Spieler befindet, das ausführen,was der Geist denkt, und zwar es ausführen, ohne dass esdes klaren Bewusstseins über diese mechanischenVerrichtungen bedarf). It is precisely this skill that Lisztrelied on in part—I am suggesting—when “composing” atthe piano during the later 1830s. See Johann NepomukHummel, Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisungzum Piano-Forte-Spiel, vol. 3 (Vienna: Tobias Haslinger,1828), p. 444. For a cultural study of the intersection andcorrespondences between doctrines of sensation and pedagogicalpiano methods in the late eighteenth and the earlynineteenth century, see Leslie David Blasius, “The Mechanicsof Sensation and the Construction of the RomanticMusical Experience,” in Music Theory in the Age ofRomanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), pp. 3–24.72Reading “rules” as synonymous with “formal procedure”in this context further distinguishes Liszt’s attitude tofantasy improvisation from late-eighteenth-century extemporepractice, for which adherence to certain “rules”seemed de rigueur. Haydn’s full statement reads: “I satdown, began to improvise, sad or happy according to mymood, serious or trifling. Once I had seized upon an idea,my whole endeavor was to develop and sustain it in keepingwith the rules of art” (Georg August Griesinger,Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn [Leipzig:Breitkopf and Härtel, 1810], trans. Vernon Gotwals, Haydn:Two Contemporary Portraits [Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1963], p. 61).DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata69

19THCENTURYMUSIC73“Desto mehr studierte er als Virtuos, wie denn lebhaftemusikalische Naturen den schnellberedten Ton demtrocknen Arbeiten auf dem Papier vorziehen” (rpt.Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker von RobertSchumann, I, 439.74“Denn hier kann er seimen Gedankenflug (obschon ineiner konsequenten Form) volle Freyheit lassen; und oftkommen, während dem Spielen ungesucht, interessanteMotive in die Finger . . . Auch kann in dieser Gattung desFantasierens die momentane Stimmung des Spielen (sie seynun lustig, heiterm ernst oder melancholisch) sich amungezwungensten aussprechen” (Carl Czerny: SystematischeAnleitung, p. 63 [Michell, p. 74]).75Franz Liszt letter to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, in Lettersof Franz Liszt, p. 273.said that Liszt’s “lively musical nature prefersexpeditiously eloquent tones to dull scoring onpaper.” 73Although Sand’s testimony rehearses theRomantic cliché of the unconsciously inspiredcomposer, it also identifies Liszt’s fractured processof composition and lends credence to thehypothesis that he tried out the phrases onwhich he was working before notating them.Furthermore, Sand speaks of the governance ofLiszt’s “composition” by the spontaneous “instinctof feeling” rather than by the calculated“labour of reason”—an observation that, thoughit too is born of a Romantic commonplace,bears a striking resemblance to Czerny’s advicein his treatise for improvising with severalthemes. An improviser, Czerny states, shouldemploy a variety of developmental procedures:“[for] here he can give free reign to his flights offancy (albeit in rational form); and unexpected,interesting motives . . . frequently enter thefingers while playing. . . . The performer’s momentarymood (be it now cheerful, now serene,serious or melancholy) can be expressed in themost abandoned manner.” 74 Czerny’s descriptionalso anticipates the procedure of Liszt’sthematically driven sonata in striking fashion.If we accept that thematic transformation generatesformal coherence in works such as Liszt’s“quasi Sonata,” and that this coherence arisesfrom what Liszt describes as the “necessarydevelopments of . . . inner experiences . . .feeling and invention,” 75 it may be that the“compositional” technique of thematic transformationis, at root, a product of an improvisatorytechnique. 76 There thus seems good reasonto trace it back through Czerny to Beethovenin an extended pedagogical lineage.Czerny’s influence on Liszt as a tutor andtechnical taskmaster is well documented, buthis role in the development of Liszt’s capacityfor free improvisation has attracted less scholarlyattention. 77 Apparently Phantasieren wasintrinsic to their work together. As Czerny recallsin his autobiography: “I endeavored toteach [Liszt] Phantasieren by frequently givinghim a theme on which to improvise [improvisieren].”78 Equally, Liszt mused in his later yearson this aspect of study with his second—andlast—piano teacher: “[Czerny] made me sightreadall the good music of the time and alsomade me improvise in fantasy-style [Phantasieren]frequently.” 79 There seems little doubt thatthe improvised transformation of musicalthemes characterized the daily contact the twomusicians shared in Vienna over fourteenmonths between 1822 and 1823.With this in mind, let us compare Liszt’sthematic transformation in the “Dante” Sonata(ex. 1) with Czerny’s illustrated advice76In this context, it is important to note that Liszt transcribedBerlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in 1833. AsJonathan Kregor has suggested, his keyboard study ofBerlioz’s idée fixe and its accompanimental figures mayhave provided an additional stimulus for Liszt’s explorationof thematic manipulation in the late 1830s. The successof a symphonic model based on thematic unity islikely to have given Liszt the confidence and impetus toapply what, for him, had been largely an improvisatorytechnique to the idea of more lofty compositional structures.See Kregor, “Collaboration and Content in theSymphonie fantastique Transcription,” Journal of Musicology24 (2007), 203.77The only published study is Zsuzanna Domokus’s examinationof “Fantasy” in Liszt’s operatic paraphrases. See“Carl Czernys Einfluss Auf Franz Liszt: Die Kunst DesPhantasierens,” in Liszt Studien IV, ed. Serge Gut (Munich:Katzbichler, 1993), pp. 19–28. For a general survey of improvisationin the nineteenth century, see also Lutz Felbick,“Vom Einfluss der Improvisation auf das mitteleuropäischeMusikleben des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Musik Theorie 20 (2005),166–82.78“Ebenso bestrebte ich mich, ihm [Liszt] das Phantasierenanzueignen, indem ich ihm häufig das Thema zum Improvisierenaufgab” (Carl Czerny, Erinnerungen aus meinemLeben, ed. Walter Kolneder [Strasbourg: Éditions P. H.Heitz, 1968], p. 28).79“Er [Czerny] legte mir alle guten Musikalien derdamaligen Zeit à vista vor und ließ mich auch gerne phantasieren”(August Göllerich, Franz Liszt, p. 160).70

a.35Presto agitato assai ♯ ♭ ♯ ♭ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♭ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♭ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♭ lamentoso ♯ ♭ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♭ ♯ ♭ Example 1: Transformations of the “Dante” Sonata’s principal theme.DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonatab. ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♮ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♯ ♯ ̇ ♮ ̇ ̇ ♮ ̇ ♮ ̇ ̇ ♯ ♯ ♮ ̇♮ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♯ ̇ ̇ ♮ ♮ ♯ ♮ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♮ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ dolcissimo con intimo sentimento ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♯ una corda ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇157̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♮ ♮ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♮ ♮ dolcissimo con amore ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ una corda 124Andante (quasi improvisato)c.̇più tosto ritenuo e rubato quasi improvisatȯ̇̇̇̇̇̇71

19THCENTURYMUSICd.199 ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ agitato poco a poco cresc.♮ ♯ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♭ ♮ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♮ ♭ ♯ ♭ ♯ ♮ ♮ ♭ ♭ ♮ ♭ ♯ ♭ ♯ ♮ 'e.273 ̇ ̇ ♭ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♭ ̇ ̇♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ lamentoso ♭ ♯ ♯ Tempo rubato e molto ritenuto♮♮ ♯♯ ♮♮ ♭♭ ♯♯ ♭♭ ♮♮ ♭ ♯ ♮ ♯♯f. Allegro Vivace 327♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ↓ ♭ff ♭ ♭♯ ♯ ♮ Example 1 (continued) ♮ ♮ ♯ ♯ ' ' '♯ ♮ ' ''''♮ ♯molto appassionato ↑72

Theme ♭ ♭ ♭ ̇̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♮ ̇̇ ♮ DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata“As Allegro”Allegro con brio ♭ ♭ ♭ ̇ ♮ ̇ ̇ff ♭ ♭ ♭ ̇ ̇ ̇ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♮ fḟ♮ ♯ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♮ ̇ ♮ “As Adagio serioso”Adagio serioso ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ 2 4 ̇ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ 2 4 dolce ̇ ̇̇ ̇̇ ̇ ̇ ♮ ♭ ♮ ̇ ̇ ̇̇̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇̇ ̇ etc. ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ̇ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♯ ̇♮ ̇ ♭ ♮ ♭etc.Example 2: Carl Czerny: Systematische Anleitung zumFantasieren auf dem Pianoforte, op. 200, example 38.concerning improvisation on a theme (ex. 2).The “Dante” Sonata employs thematic transformationas both an arbiter of form and as asource of musical development throughout, asmay be illustrated briefly by the episodic recurrencesof the principal chromatic theme in thepublished version from 1858. These transformationsappear to follow closely Czerny’s observationthat “every theme . . . can serve bymeans of several modifications in meter andrhythm as . . . [in] all species of compositions”and the prescription that follows: “The performermust devote time and practice to achievethe capability of transforming each motive thatcomes his way into all . . . styles.” 80 A brief80Michell, A Systematic Introduction, pp. 43, 50. Monothematicphantasieren held specific connotations for a Romantictheory of the creative imagination. In the NeueZeitschrift, an 1839 article on “Phantasie” by the young73

19THCENTURYMUSIC ♭ 6 8 ̇Allegretto graziosȯ ̇ ̇ ♮ dolce ♭ 6 8 ♭ ̇ ♯̇ ♯ ̇ ̇♮ ̇ ̇ ♭“As Allegretto grazioso”“As Rondo”Rondo vivace ♭ ♭ ♭ 2 4 ̇̇ ♮ ↓↓ ↓↓↓↓ ♮ ♮ ↓ ♭ ♭ ♭ 2 ↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓ ↓4 ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ♭ ̇ ♯̇ ̇ ♮ ̇ ♭ ̇ ̇↓etc.♭ ♭ ♭̇ ♮ ♯ ♭ ↓↓↓♮ ♭ ♭ ↓↓↓↓↓♭ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ♮ etc.Example 2 (continued)look at Czerny’s written-out examples forFantasy-like Improvisation (Phantasieren) witha single theme makes the likeness clear. AlthoughCzerny’s musical language operateswithin stylistic boundaries such as antecedentconsequentstructures and accords with eigh-Königsburg Kapellmeister Eduard Sobolewski cites the infiniteexploration of a single theme/idea as the criticaldifference between artists and normal educated citizens:“The reason why [an intelligent person] never learns tocomprehend life [is] that an idea, a small, petty idea issufficient to relieve all the worry and trouble of this world./ One idea, often even an idea from an idea, [or] what wemusicians call motive, outline. . . . If one steals everythingfrom [an artist] he nevertheless remains rich” (Das ist dieUrsache, weshalb jener nie das Leben . . . recht begreifenlernt, daß eine Idee, eine kleine, winzige Idee hinreichendist, ihn all’ der Sorgen und Mühen dieser Welt zu entheben./ Eine Idee, ja oft nur eine Idee von einer Idee, was wirMusiker Motiv, Umriß nennen . . . Raubt ihm alles, erbleibt dennoch reich). See Sobolewski “Phantasie,” NeueZeitschrift für Musik 51 (24 Dec. 1839), 201–03, here 201.Writing in the same journal twenty-three years later,Richard Pohl similarly emphasizes the infinite capacity of74

teenth-century harmonic expectations, his conceptis strikingly similar to the principle behindLiszt’s improvisatory thematic transformation.In terms of the ironic relationship betweenthe two halves of Liszt’s divided identity, thiskind of improvisation would call into questionthe metamorphic space between composer andperformer enunciated so explicitly in Liszt’sletter to Carl Alexander in Weimar. For Liszt,the performer’s craft was to work themes into acoherent improvisation; the composer’s craft,conversely, was to make themes cohere into animprovisational work. Over and above the dialecticor dédoublement between performer andcomposer, Liszt the “improvising performer”creates form through what we might call theintuition of “thematic potential,” whereas Lisztthe composer intuits thematic transformationthrough the creation of form. Any distinctionbetween these actions is one of degree, notkind.A Pedagogical LineageFor Liszt in Weimar, the relationship betweenform and thematic transformation defined hisconnection with the music of the past. 81 HisPhantasie, hinting at the incessant permutation of figures—geometric, musical—in the context of his survey of earlyacoustic theory: “The imagination follows no other laws butits own; it is limitless and unbound, and knows neither spacenor time. We gladly let it prevail, we delight in its majesticcolors, its wealth of shapes” (Die Phantasie folgt keinenanderen Gesetzen, als ihren eigenen; sie ist schrankenlosund fessellos, und kennt weder Zeit noch Raum. Wir lassensie gern walten, wir lassen uns durch ihrer Farben-Pracht,durch ihren Gestalten-Reichthum entzücken) (Pohl,“Akustische Briefe: Achter Brief,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik3 [15 July 1853], 25–28, 33–37, 65–67, 73–74, here 26).81The concept of thematic transformation as the arbiter ofform relates directly to Liszt’s Weimar reforms. Such aconception was born of a shifting musical syntax in whichthe tonal regulation of greatly expanded musical formsgave some ground to their thematic integration—a processAugust Halm identified as a conception of form principallydriven by a theme; or, as he puts it, one in whichform presents “the story of a musical theme.” See AugustHalm, Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (3rd edn. Stuttgart:Ernst Klett, 1947), p. 227. Historically, thematic transformationwas first formulated in relation to Liszt by AlfredHeuß in his influential study of Liszt’s symphonic poems,“Eine motivisch-thematische Studie über Liszts sinfonischeDichtung ‘Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne’,” Zeitschriftder Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 13 (1911), 10–21.See discussion of the term in Alexander Rehding, “Liszt’sagenda for compositional reform involvedclearly advancing beyond earlier forms so thatit became possible to “discern the stagesthrough which [the new] form was graduallyproduced.” 82 The “Dante” Sonata offers a readyexample, in that Liszt symbolically invertedBeethoven’s subtitle for the two Sonatas op. 27,turning “Sonata quasi una Fantasia” into hisown “Fantasia quasi Sonata” and thereby establishinga historical lineage for his musicwhile at the same time loosening its ties with aClassical conception of sonata form.In his autobiography, Czerny reports thatBeethoven (his teacher) “was unsurpassed in[the] style of fantasy-like improvisation,” shownin ex. 2, adding that Beethoven “could hardlyreconstruct in writing the wealth of his ideasand harmonies as well as the nobility and consistencyof his most highly artistic development.”In perhaps his most revealing commenton Beethoven’s improvisations, however,Czerny distinguishes three different formalstyles:1. The form of a first movement or rondo Finale of aSonata. He would play a normal first section,introducing a second melody, etc., in a relatedkey. In a second section, however, he gave fullrein to his inspiration, while retaining the originalmotive, which he used in all possible ways.Allegros were enlivened by bravura passages, manyof which were even more difficult than thosefound in his sonatas.2. Free variation forms somewhat like the ChoralFantasy op. 80 or the choral Finale of the NinthSymphony; both these pieces give a true pictureof his improvising in this manner.3. A mixed form, one idea following the other as ina potpourri, like his Solo Fantasy op. 77. 83Employing an original theme “in all possibleways”—Czerny’s first category—would seemto apply to op. 27, no. 1, where both halves ofMusical Monuments,” this journal 26 (2002), 56, nn. 13,14; and Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, p.217, n.29.82Liszt, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Detlef Altenburg(Wiesbaden: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1989), V, 34–35.83Czerny, On the Proper Performance of All Beethoven’sWorks for the Piano, ed. Paul Badura-Skoda (Vienna: Universal,1970), p. 15.DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata75

19THCENTURYMUSICtechniques (and indeed they often have been).For example, whereas Beethoven’s variationform at the end of op. 77 is defined by a generic“style,” Liszt’s thematic transformations arenot limited to any particular style (as is evidentfrom Liszt’s and Czerny’s use of the procedurein their different musical languages). Furthermore,variation form was a musical genre aswell as a mode of invention. Thematic transformationwas not; it could be a generativeprocess within a variety of forms, includingvariation form, but it belonged to no genre outsideof its improvisatory heritage.Nonetheless, the boundaries between thesemusical procedures can become mobile. AsBeethoven himself observed in a sketch from1809, “Real fantasy-like improvisation[Phantasieren] comes only when we are unconcerned[with] what we play, so—if we want toimprovise in the best, truest manner in public—weshould give ourselves over freely towhat comes to mind.” 86 The correspondence toCzerny’s advice to “give free reign to [one’s]flights of fancy” 87 is unmistakable. Beethoven’scomment further presages Liszt’s belief in theprimacy of “feeling and invention” in the creativeprocess. In view of this shared belief, wemay say that in op. 27 Beethoven had writtentwo sonatas, parts of whose form gave the impressionof an improvisation, while in his“Dante” Sonata, Liszt improvised—at least initheprincipal theme, a “normal first section,”are reprised in diminution. The section is theninterrupted by a fantasy-like passage (thoughone that does not retain the original motive),after which the main section returns with thetreble and bass parts reversed. The Sonata alsoalludes to its slow movement just before thecoda of its finale, a more obviously Liszt-likeprocedure.Czerny’s second category—“free variation”—is also relevant to Liszt because of the similaritybetween this subgenre of classical variationform and the principle of thematic transformation.In his discussion of monothematic improvisation,Czerny likened his own musical examples(ex. 2) to the procedure in Beethoven’sChoral Fantasy, op. 80 (containing fifteen variations),where the piano introduction is probablybased on Beethoven’s own extempore performanceat the premiere on 22 December 1808,and in the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony,op. 125 (1824). The two works, Czernyadds, form “two glorious monuments of thisstyle [of Phantasieren].” 84Finally, the great textural and melodic varietyin the “mixed form” of op. 77 (containingseven stable variations) would seem to justifyCzerny’s observation that, in Phantasieren,Beethoven “trusted to his genius for the constantinvention of new subjects.” 85 If this andthe other two works cited by Czerny do indeedreflect Beethoven’s style of improvisation on atheme, they offer an analytical basis for comparingBeethoven’s approach to Phantasierenwith that of Liszt. Pace Czerny, however, theart of thematic improvisation that his treatisedocuments is qualitatively different from thetechnique of theme and variation evident inBeethoven’s “Fantasy” works. It is of coursepossible that these later works fail to documentthe thematic transformations that characterizedBeethoven’s actual improvisations(and such transformations do occasionally surfacein his other works), but this kind of hypothesismust remain speculative. The transformationand the variation of a theme cantherefore be teased apart as separate musical84Michell, A Systematic Introduction, p. 52.85Czerny, On the Proper Performance, p. 58.86This is scribbled on a musical sketch from 1809. I takethis reference from Lewis Lockwood, whose chapter“Beethoven at the Keyboard” explores Beethoven’s extemporepractices. Reports about Beethoven’s improvisationfrequently emphasize the freedom of his musical creativity,and while such reports are hardly more than subjectivereinterpretations of an event, their consistent emphasisseems to indicate that established formal structureshad little bearing on Beethoven’s mixed form Phantasieren.For example, Sir John Russell witnessed an improvisationin 1821 wherein Beethoven “gradually . . . forgot everythingelse, and ran on during half an hour in a fantasy, in astyle extremely varied, and marked, above all, by the mostabrupt transitions” (Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries,ed. O. G. Sonneck [New York: Schirmer, 1926],pp. 115–16; see also pp. 13, 22, 51–52, 208–09). Other contemporaryaccounts of Beethoven’s improvisations includeCzerny, On the Proper Performance of All Beethoven’sWorks for the Piano, ed. Paul Badura-Skoda (Vienna: Universal,1970); and J. G. Prod’homme, “The Baron deTrémont: Souvenirs of Beethoven and Other Contemporaries,”Musical Quarterly 6 (1920), 366–91.87Michell, A Systematic Introduction, p. 74.76

DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”SonataPlate 3: Josef Kriehuber’s lithograph of himself with Berlioz, Czerny, Liszt, and Ernst (1846).Courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth.tially—toward the appearance of a sonata.The subtitles are entirely accurate: what inBeethoven was conceptually Sonata quasi unaFantasia, in Liszt became quite literallyFantasie quasi sonata. The titles chart a pedagogicallineage regulated by the practice of thematicimprovisation, partially self-fashioned,and aptly stylized in Josef Kriehuber’s lithograph“Matinée bei Liszt” from 1846 (plate 3).The lithograph depicts the adoring, bespectacledpedagogue looking on—with Hector Berlioz (besideCzerny), Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (violinin hand), and Kriehuber himself (left)—as theformer student, playing extempore from a closedscore of Beethoven’s op. 26, seems to be revelingin his inheritance.Improvising Revisions,Revising ImprovisationsCarried out over nineteen years, Liszt’s extantdeletions, recompositions, and additions to hisquasi Sonata present a vast complex of documents.Extensive revisions were certainly notatypical for Liszt, whose compulsive practicemay well originate with his habit of improvising.But improvisation is often modular, onboth the level of the measure and the level ofthe section. It is thus necessary to begin uncoveringthe formulaic fillers, the particular techniquesassociated with transitions, openings,progressions, runs, thematic figuration, and soforth that Liszt may have developed betweenthe time of his study with Czerny and thevarious stages of composition of the “Dante”Sonata. Whereas some of his revisions havenothing to do with improvisatory practice—forexample, the rebarring and considerable excisionsin MS I 17 that reduce 864 measures to amere 373, or the decision to merge two separatemovements into one—others, such as newtransitions, and altered musical figures, oftensuggest a physical relation to the instrument.They indicate a preferred way of moving acrossthe keyboard, associated with the visual aspectof virtuosity, which we may suspect influencedthe sonata’s composition at a level of sensationand spectacle anterior to ideation.First, consider Liszt’s transitions. Alteringtransitions between themes provided Liszt with77

19THCENTURYMUSICan opportunity for controlling the rhetoric andpacing of the “Dante” Sonata’s thematic transformations.The improvisatory aesthetic of thefollowing examples, with their potential interchangeability(modularity), suggests they mayhave been engendered more by intuition inperformance than by premeditation—Marx’sAnschauung. In other words, some of thesetransitions may have originated at the keyboardwithout Liszt’s explicitly intending for them toend up in a composition, but at the moment of“composing,” elements of them were at hisfingertips.The transition between two transformationsof the principal chromatic theme is shown inex. 3a/b and summarized schematically in ex.4. There are three versions; the earliest (ex. 3afrom MS I 76 and deleted in Liszt’s hand) iseight measures shorter than the other two andmakes an explicit enharmonic shift between E♭and D ♯ in the middle measure, compacting theharmonic movement into one-and-a-half measures.The directness and brevity of the movesuggest an improvised transition to the extentthat it simply employs chords in different inversions,which, on reflection, Liszt extendedand composed out.The second version (ex. 3b from MS I 76,which remains extant in the manuscript), likethe first, makes both a registral and enharmonicconnection between transition and thematictransformation. But it extends the falling chromaticmelody for a further five measures, addsa brief recitative, and unfolds the half-diminished-seventhchord through flowing eighthnotes rather than block chords. Here Liszt leavesout the dominant-seventh harmony on B, allowingthe lone E♭ to pivot between the twoharmonies by implication. All these measurespoint to a more elaborate musical conception.Yet although they signal an improvisationalprocess more mediated by thought distancedfrom the performative impulse, other elementsin ex. 3b can be seen equally as the result of anongoing process of working out material at thekeyboard. The repetition of m. 3 (as m. 4) couldeasily result from the improvisatory practice ofgaining time and achieving hypermetric balancequickly and easily through a literal repeat,and the recitative-like passage is a long-standingtrick of the trade to “speak extempore”—familiar from C. P. E. Bach’s Fantasias to Beethoven’sop. 110—before launching into anothersection.The final version (MS I 17), also shown in ex.3b, is almost identical to the second, but differsfrom it in m. 9 by inverting the ascending chord,breaking the registral connection with themelody, and creating a new connection withthe harmonic bass note (C ♯ ). Such revisionsrecall Czerny’s advice that the performer mustdevote time and practice to achieve the capabilityof transforming passages “with ease andadroitness. . . . He must not be satisfied with asingle attempt . . . since the modifications inherent. . . are infinite.” 88 Plate 4 shows a facsimilecopy (from MS I 17) documenting thelast two versions.There is also a sense in which revisions, forinstance, the extension of the repeated-notechromatic melody in ex. 3a/b and Liszt’s decisionfirst to isolate a repeated E♭ , then to integrateit three octaves lower through chromaticvoice-leading, are influenced by a slippage betweenthe visual and the auditory. In additionto pure sound, there are the enticing spectacleof rapidly swapping hands and the rhetoric of alone hand, respectively. Traditions of seeingmusic in this way—a phenomenon Kramer hascalled the “listening gaze” 89 —can constitutethe speed of attack, facial expressions, and gesturesof the arms (as well as their absence) aspart of the music being performed. The revisionsto the “Dante” Sonata presented heresuggest that when Liszt was revising at thekeyboard his awareness of how physical gestureswould be seen by a listener may also havefunctioned as a determinant of “composition,”thus encoding soundless spectacle into thesounding work.A later section, shown as ex. 5a/b, illustratesthat in revision Liszt also made more substantialalterations to the material of a passage,changing the length of a transition, its use andreuse of thematic ideas, and its relation to furtherthematic transformations. Example 5a encompassesa harmonic move from A♭ to vii 7 on88Ibid., p. 50.89Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical Theory, p.77.78

DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”SonataPlate 4: Facsimile of MS I 17, fol. 21 (transcribed as ex. 3b); GS A 60/I 17.Courtesy of the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimer. Foto: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.A, with harmonic motion between A♭ , B, and D(denoted by the letters A–C in ex. 5a), followedby a stepwise descending whole-tone progressionfrom mm. 13ff., given in diminution startingat m 17. Liszt’s revisions to this passage(ex. 5b) incorporate and modify the dotted open-79

19THCENTURYMUSICa.MS I 76(deleted) ♭ ♭ 4 4 ♯♯ ♮ ♮ ♭ ♭ ♯ ♮ ♮ ♭4 () ♭ ♭ ♯♯ ♯♯ ♯ 2 ♯ ♯♯ ♭ ♭ritenuto languendo ♯♯ ♯♮ ♮♮ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♭♭ ♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯più tasto ritenuto e rubato3♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇♮ ♯ ♮̇ dolcissimo con amoreb.MS I 76(revised) ♭ ♭ ♭ ♯ ♭ ♯ ♮ ♮ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♮ ♯3 ♮ ♯ ♯ ♭ ♭ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♭ ♭' ' '♭̇ ♭̇ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♯♮ ♯ ♮ ♯ 5 ♭ ♭ ♮poco rinforzando ♭ ♯ ♮ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ̇♭ Example 380

. (continued) ♭ MS I 17 ♭ 7♭' ♭ ♭ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♭ ♮ 10 ♭ ♭ a piacereAdagiȯ♯[cut directly to m. 11]♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”SonataMS I 17(revised)11♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯più tasto ritenuto a rubatȯ ̇ ̇̇ ̇̇ ̇̇♯♮ ♯ ♮ dolcissimo con amore 12♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇̇ ♮ Example 3 (continued) ♭ ♯ ♯ ( )♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯Example 4: Underlying harmonic motion.81

19THCENTURYMUSICa. MS I 76 (1845–48), denoting an early version of the passage in ex. 5b, with correlated letter designations(A–G).Tempo giusto (allegro deciso) ♭ A♭ B♭' ♭' ' ♭' ♯ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯marcatissimo energio assai' ♭♭ ♯♭ ♭♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♭ ' ' ' ' tremolando' ' ' ' ♯ ♮♯♯ C' ' ♯' ♯ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♯ 'D '' ♯'♮ ♭♯ ♯ ♯ 6'' ' ♯ ♮ ♮ ' ( ) ♮ '' ♯ ♭♮ ♮ 12 'E ♭ ♯ ♯ ♭ 18 ♯♯♯ ♮ F ♯ ♭♭() G♭♭ ♭♭ ♭♭♭ ♭♭ ♭ ♭ ♭♭♭♭ ♭♭ ♭ ♭ ♭♭♭♭ Example 5 ♭♭ ♭ ♭♭♭ ♭♭♭ ♭ ♭ ♯ ♭♭♭ ♭ ♯♯ ♯♯♯♯♯ ♯♯ ♯♯♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ loco♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♯infernale♯ ing tritones of the Sonata, resolving them asperfect intervals and elaborating and extendingthe passage. The same initial harmonic motionof ex. 5a is stretched over every four measuresrather than every three (again denoted by lettersA, B, and C); the descending dotted figurefrom the Sonata’s opening again extends over afurther six measures with chromatic left-handoctaves over a tonic pedal (letters C and D);finally, the same rhythmic diminution of thewhole-tone progression begins a measure earlier(at letter F), which leads to another extensionof the descending dotted figure two measuresafter letter G before the diminished octavesreturn to those of ex. 5a and both versionsproceed alike. As with ex. 3a/b, the modestexpansion in ex. 5b of the underlying harmonicstructure present in ex. 5a suggests thatLiszt was gradually composing out an improvisation,incorporating examples of thematic sophisticationsuch as the transformation of theopening motif and left-hand references to thechromatic octaves of the principal D-minortheme. At the same time, ex. 5b can also be82

. MS I 13 7 (1854), denoting the final version of the passage in ex. 5a, with correlated letter designations (A–G).♭↓♭ ↓♭ ♭♭ 4 7 ♭ ̇♭ ̇̇ ♭ ♭ ̇♭ ̇̇ ♭ ff♭♭ ̇̇ ♭ ̇̇ ♭ ↓ ♭B♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ↓♯ ♯ ♯ ↓♯ ♯↑♯ ♯ ↑A ♯ ♯ ↓ ♯ ♯ ♮ ♯ ♮ più moso♯♯ '̇̇̇̇̇ '♭ ♭↓ ♭ ' ♭ ♭ ̇̇ ̇♯ ̇̇ ̇ ♯ ♯↓ ♭ ' ̇̇ ♭ ↑ ↓ ' ♯ ̇̇♮♮ ' ̇̇♯ ♯ ̇̇♯ ♯ ̇̇ ♯ ♯ ̇̇ C ♯ ♯̇̇ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♭ ♯ ♭ ↓ '↓ ♯ ♭ ♯ ♭ ♯ ↓ ̇̇ ̇̇ ̇ sempre♮♮ ff ♭ ♭ ♯ ♭ ♯ ↓ ♭ ↑ ♭ ̇̇ ♭ '↑♯ ♯♯♯♯♯♯ DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata ̇̇̇ ↓ ̇̇ ̇̇'10 ̇̇ 13 ̇̇̇ ̇̇ ↓ ♯ ♯ ↓ ̇ ↓ ̇̇' ̇̇ ↓↓ ↓↓♯♯ ♯♯ ↓̇ ♭♭ ♯♯ ↓ ♯ ♯ ♭ ♮ ♭ ♮ ♯ ↓ ♯ ♭ ♮ ♭ ♮ ♯ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♯ ♯ E♯♯ D ̇̇ ̇̇ ̇ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♭ ♮ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♭ ♮ ♮ ♯ Example 5 (continued)83

19THCENTURYMUSICb. (continued)16 ♭♭ ♮♮♮♮♯♯♯♯♭♭♮♮ 19↓♯ ♯ ♯ 22 24 () ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♮ ♮ ↓♭ ♭ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♭ ♭ ↓ ♯♯♮↓♯ ↓ ♮ ↓ ↓ ♭ ↓ ♭ ↓ ♯♮ ♮ ♭ ♭♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♮ ♮ ♭ ♭ ♯ ♮ ♮ ♭♭ ♭♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭ ♭♭ ♮ ♭ ♭ con strepito♮ ♭ ♭ ♯ ♮ ♭ ♯♯ FG♭ ♭ ♭♭ ♭♭ ♭ ♭ ♭♭ ↑♭♭ ♯ ♯♯♯↑♯ ♯♯ ↓ ♭♭ ♯♯♯♯♭ ♭ ♭♭ ♭♭̇̇ ̇̇♭ ̇̇ ̇̇♭ ♭♭ ♯♯ ♭ ♯ ♮♮ ♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♭ ♭ Example 5 (continued)viewed as an increasingly elaborate improvisationin its patterned chordal and octave texturesbetween A and C, its reliance on repetition,and its recourse to “default” chromatic ordiminished octaves before moments of harmonicarrival (mm. 5, 8, 12, 15–17, 25). Becausethe relationship between composition-as-improvisationand improvisation-as-compositionremains fluid in the “Dante” Sonata, it wouldseem wrong-headed to identify any precise pointat which improvisation “becomes” composition.The indeterminacy is wholly in keepingwith Liszt’s conception as projected in his finaltitle.Much of Liszt’s virtuosity resides in a worldof expanding keyboard idioms that have traditionallybelonged to the execution of preexistingmaterial rather than to the thematic-har-monic substance of composition. This idealistdivision becomes increasingly difficult to maintainin the “Dante” Sonata, in part due to thework’s complex genesis. To conceive Liszt’spatterning of figures as the scripting of physical,visually virtuosic gestures is to draw attentionto him as the performing agent in contrastto the customary invisibility of a work’s creator.90 The two reports that document Liszt90In neat summary of the work-condition under scrutinyhere, Lydia Goehr writes that composers “should be neitherseen nor heard, to underscore the mystery both ofabsence and of genius.” Continuing this model, the statusesof performers and audience are to be complementary:“Performers and their instruments should be heardbut not seen, but ‘heard’ only as imperfect pointers towardsthe transcendent. And audiences, to complete thetriad, should be seen but not heard, but ‘seen’ only in the84

sense that each listener being present to grasp the work inthe privacy of his or her own contemplative experience”(Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, andthe Limits of Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press,1998], p. 144).91The occasion on which Liszt allegedly disguised his playingas Chopin’s was first recorded publicly by CharlesRollinet in Le Temps (1 Sept. 1874), thirty years after thefact. Rollinet’s account was disputed in 1888 by FriedrichNiecks, who reports that the aging Liszt declared he hadno recollection of this occasion. Further details of the disputeare given by Rena Mueller in “The Ramann-LisztQuestionnaires,” Franz Liszt and His World, p. 420, n. 1.In 1837 Berlioz describes Liszt’s invisible performance ofBeethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata in audiovisual terms: “Itwas the shade of Beethoven himself, his great voice thatwe heard, called forth by the virtuoso” (Journal des Débats,12 March 1837). This anecdote is discussed in relation tothe sonata’s aesthetics of mystery in Lawrence Kramer,“Hands On, Lights Off,” from Musical Meaning: Toward aCritical History, p. 37; and in relation to Berlioz’s ownaesthetics in Katherine Kolb Reeve, “Primal Scenes:Smithson, Pleyel, and Liszt in the Eyes of Berlioz,” thisjournal 18 (1995), 228–29.92“Aber man muß das hören und auch sehen, Liszt dürftedurchaus nicht hinter den Kulissen spielen; ein großesStück Poesie ginge dadurch verloren” (Neue Zeitschriftfür Musik 12 [1840], 102–03).93The difficult status of such keyboard figures predatesLiszt’s dédoublement, extending arguably to early-nineteenth-centurypianists including J. N. Hummel, whosekeyboard manuscript for the Concerto in C, op. 34a, forexample, still retained a figured-bass shorthand ready forrealization in the moment, leading Joel Sachs to argue thatHummel “conceived of music as the decoration of harmonicprogressions” (Joel Sachs, “Johann NepomukHummel,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, accessed 4June 2007, http://www.grovemusic.com).disappearing entirely behind the musical identityof other composers—Chopin, Beethoven—emphasize that he began playing only after extinguishingall candles and lamps and loweringthe curtains; in total darkness, his auralprosopopoeia reportedly deceived listeners(there were no viewers) to the extent that “itwas impossible not to mistake him [for Chopin];and indeed, everyone was mistaken.” 91 (Schumannfamously reinforced the point when herecorded Liszt’s own ocular dependencies in1840: “[if Liszt] played behind a screen, a greatdeal of poetry would be lost.” 92 )Hyperbole aside, the visual contingency ofLiszt’s identity would seem to suspend the gesturesassociated with his idiomatic figures in alimbo between professional identities: the gesturesdraw the “listening gaze,” yet as inseparablefrom the figures they also contribute tothe thematic substance of a work. 93 Liszt’s revisionsillustrate the extent to which his presentationof thematic material depended onmodular, idiomatic figures. His use of revisedand reinvented figurations suggests that he wascontinually reworking and improvising on different“ideal sound images” at the keyboard,resulting in several actualizations, multiple“versions.” Features considered substantive(structural rather than ornamental) by mainstreamanalysis—harmonic motion, voice-leading,contrapuntal framework, registral disposition—remainunchanged in such revisions, buttheir realization tends to favor the performer’sprerogative to adopt and adapt textures to suitthe “momentary mood,” as Czerny put it, or tofollow “feeling and invention,” as Liszt remarked,in determining “what the ideas are,and how they are carried out and worked up.” 94Because idiomatic figures are by nature irreducibleas patterning components, they operateas basic formal units that can be repeated toform larger paragraphs, which themselves canbe sequentially repeated. 95 In Liszt’s case, theinvention and constant morphing of figurationsare guided by a highly developed intuition forsound images that Rosen calls “the greatest ofany keyboard composer’s between Scarlatti andDebussy.” 96 This view can be measured againstthe figural reworking of the F ♯ -major theme(shown in ex. 6), in which Liszt revises thetheme’s realization three times with differentfiguration. Although the figural patterns remainrooted in mechanical piano methods, they areemployed in this context to alter the lyricalcharacter of the theme. In a weakening field ofopposition between performer and composer,the figures that realize Liszt’s theme increas-94Liszt to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, in Letters of FranzLiszt, trans. C. Bache (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1894), I, 274.95See the detailed study of Liszt’s figures and figurations inJim Samson’s Virtuosity and the Musical Work. For a studyof figurations at both foreground and middleground levels,see Thomas Hitzberger, “Zwischen Tonalität undRationalität: Anmerkungen zur Sequenz- und FigurationstechnikLiszts,” in Virtuosität und Avantgarde: Untersuchungenzum Klavierwerk Franz Liszt (Mainz: Schott,1988), pp. 32–59; and Wilhelm Seidel “Über Figurationsmotivevon Chopin und Liszt,” in Report on the InternationalMusicological Society Congress 1972, ed. HenrikGlahn (Copenhagen: Hansen, 1974), pp. 647–51.96Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, p. 508.DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata85

19THCENTURYMUSICMS I 76 ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ̇ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ̇ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ [covered up hereafter]MS I 17(revised) ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ̇ ♮♮ MS I 13♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♮ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♮ ♮ ̇MS I 17(revised)♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ 3 ♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ̇ MS I 13♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♮♮ ♮♮ ̇̇ ♮ ♮ ♭ MS I 17(revised)MS I 13 ♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯♭♮ ♭♮ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♮ ♭♮ ♭5♮ ♮ ♭ ♮ ♭♭ ♭ ♮ ♭ ♭ ♮ ♮♭ ♮ ♭ ♮ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♭♮ ♭ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♯ ♯ ♯ ''''♯ ♯♯ ♮ ♮ ♭ ♮ ♭ ♮̇♭ ♮ ♭ ♮ ♭ ̇ ♮♭ ♮ ♮♭ ♭ ♭♮ ♮ ♮̇ ♮ ♭ ♮ 86Example 6: Presentation of theme through differing idiomatic figures.

MS I 17(revised)MS I 13MS I 17(revised)MS I 13♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♭ ♮♮ ♮ ♮ ♭ ♮ ♮ ♭ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮♮ ♭̇ ̇♮ ♮ ♯ ♮♮♭ ♮ ♮♭♯ ♯ ♮♮ ♮ ♮ ♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♭ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ ♮♮ ♮ (♮)♭̇ ̇ ♯ ♯ ♯ ' ' ' ''♯ ♯♯ ♮ ♮ ♯ ♮ ♮ ♭♯ ♮9♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯ ♮♮♮ 7♯ ♯ ♯ ♯ ♯♯♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯♯ ♯♯ ♯ ♯♯♮ ♮ ̇♮ ♮ ♮ ̇ ♮♮ ♮♮ ♮ ♮♮ ♮ ♮ ♮ ̇ '♮♮♯ ♮ ♮♮ [etc.][etc.] ♮ DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”SonataExample 6 (continued)ingly become constitutive of the fixed workcharacter while the theme’s harmonic and melodicidentity remains essentially consistent inall manuscripts.Putting my argument in its most extreme terms,the considerable revisions to the “Dante” Sonatasuggest a shift in its status from a notatedaide-mémoire sketch to a post-Beethovenianwork, a shift that shadows the mise-en-scèneof Liszt’s explicit metamorphosis from virtuosoas-caterpillarto composer-as-butterfly. By resigningpublicly as a professional performeramid a flurry of antivirtuoso criticism, 97 Lisztrendered his self-critique an act of self-effacement.He effectively determined the negativereception of his earlier portfolio of virtuoso97The most recent analysis of antivirtuoso criticism is thatof Gooley, “The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity inthe Early Nineteenth Century,” Liszt and His World, pp.75–112.works by seeking, as Hanslick put it, to writein Weimar “for posterity” rather than to continueto perform for the gratifying heights ofthe instant alone.Because musicological scholarship has tendedto rely on documentary evidence, improvisationhas remained elusive, relegated to the sidelinesof conjecture and imagination. 98 Method-98Adopting a more analytical approach to the problem ofimprovisation, John Rink has aimed to quantify improvisationwithin Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, op. 61, througha Schenkerian graphing of different structural levels. Rinksupports his modus operandi with the observation that“certain features of Chopin’s style appear to derive fromthe improvisation tradition . . . at a deeper level—at thestructural level, however, the influence improvisation hadon his music . . . is far more difficult to assess precisely.. . . To grasp the essence of Chopin’s music, one mustunderstand how improvisation affected its structure”(“Chopin and Schenker: Improvisation and Musical Structure,”in Chopin Studies: The International MusicologicalSymposium “Chopin and Romanticism” Warsaw, 17–23October 1986, vol. 3 [Warsaw: Frederick Chopin Society,1990], pp. 219–23, here 219).87

19THCENTURYMUSICologically, it is by definition impossible to provethrough documents that the “Dante” Sonatawas the result of Phantasieren during its earlyphases. Yet given the evidence that traces thepath of an anomalous composition fromuntexted performance to crafted sonata, the finalscore can still—with the requisite historicalimagination—be considered a distilled amalgamof momentariness, a tissue of recalled improvisationsand performance ideas, a text archetypeof which Roland Barthes observes: “thewriter [or composer] can only imitate a gesturethat is always anterior, never original.” 99 Liszt’sstatus as the composer of his work is unstableonly if it is considered mutually exclusive tohis role as the work’s performer. This exclusivityis a prerequisite of an idealist aesthetic thatdivides the artwork from its realization andenables the “disparity” lamented by Schumann.Barthes’s critique of the festishizing of textsand authors leads him to draw a useful distinctionbetween the author and “the modernscriptor,” whereby the former is “always conceivedof as the past of his own book” and thelatter, more akin to Liszt as composer, “is bornsimultaneously with the text, is in no wayequipped with a being preceding or exceedingthe writing, is not the subject with the book aspredicate; there is no other time than that ofthe enunciation and every text is eternally writtenhere and now.” 100Imagining the unwritten musical text ofLiszt’s improvisation in these terms creates anuncomfortable condition of absence for textbasedscholarship, particularly though perhapsnot exclusively for Liszt studies. The music inquestion was of course always “present” in afinal form through its performance—Barthes’scondition of being eternally “written here andnow”—but the extent to which stemmatologycan illuminate this depends on the fortuitoustransmission of fragments such as I suggest forMSS I 18, no.1, and 1C.51. Positivist methodologyplays a crucial role in this study, but asBernstein suggests, this documentary approachto examining Liszt—the “error that answers to99Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” p. 146.100Ibid., p. 145.no correction”—only presents a kind of Heisenbergproblem: “the greater the accuracy of theresearch, the greater, finally, the deviance fromwhat is meant by ‘Liszt’.” 101 Like the “Dante”Sonata, the aggregate impression of “Liszt” remainsindecipherable except as an always retrospectivenarrative that, at least in this case,allows for the permanent over-extension of asingle ego. Philological scrutiny in this articlehas provided the facts about a musical sketchredefined as a full-fledged work. Ironically, thisinformation has allowed us to see that the consistentinconsistency of the work’s “authorship,”and Liszt’s reliance on a music that is“performative” in the sense of reaching its idealconception and completion only through successiveacts of delivery, undermines the authorityof the model of identity to which Liszthimself sought to subscribe.Liszt as modern scriptor only adds to the“confusions of distinctions” 102 surrounding himas a historical figure. What benefit is there inapplying such a label if “Liszt” is already anover-determination that has reached its momentof saturation? One answer is that theapplication can support a rereading of the compositionaltechnique of thematic transformation.Since Alfred Heuß’s study in 1911, 103 thematictransformation has been associated primarilywith the symphonic poems of theWeimar ex-virtuoso. But as the comparison withCzerny’s treatise shows, the technique was adocumented strategy for Phantasieren that canbe traced via Czerny back to Beethoven.But was the “Dante” Sonata not an anomaly?The answer is: not entirely. Lina Ramann’sbiographical questioning of Liszt from the years1875–76 suggests that other potentially similarworks existed, and that at least one fell on thewrong side of Liszt’s self-critique. Although a101Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, p. 109.102Ibid.103Daniel Gregory Mason discussed the concept in 1906,but offers only a cursory account of thematic transformation.See The Romantic Composers (New York: Macmillan,1906), pp. 340ff. Following Heuß’s study Erläuterungen zuFranz Liszts Sinfonien und sinfonischen Dichtungen, theterm proliferated.88

substantial fragment, perhaps akin to a sketchedimprovisation, it never reached completion:Ramann: A Berlin reporter indicated that on 11 January1843, you played a “New Fantasy onThemes from Le Nozze di Figaro.” Of yourworks on Mozartian themes, I know onlythe Don Juan fantasy. Was this Figaro fantasywritten out, or was it improvised? Ifit was written out, where can it be found?Has is been published? By whom?Liszt: It remained only in sketches, and has beenlost. 104In fact, the sketches were found in Weimar andhave been “completed” three times: in 1912 byBusoni, who suppressed all thematic materialfrom Don Giovanni (245 measures) and addedthirty-seven measures of his own as well asseveral cadenzas; 105 in 1989 by Kenneth Hamilton,who excised nothing and added a merefifteen measures in order to complete gaps in atransitional passage and at the coda; 106 and in1994 by Leslie Howard, who similarly addedsixteen measures. 107 Given that Liszt performedthe Mozart Fantasy in the absence of a completescore in 1843, he almost certainly improvisedsome sections in his performance, though104Ramann’s question dates from December 1875; it wasanswered by Liszt in April 1876. See “The Ramann-LisztQuestionaires,” trans. Susan Hohl, in Liszt and His World,p. 411.105Busoni’s excision was possibly carried out in order toaccord with Ramann’s report that the sketches were for aFantasy on Le nozze alone. The passage quoted above in“The Ramann-Liszt Questionaires” first appeared in 1887giving Busoni easy access to it. See Lina Ramann, FranzLiszt: Als Künstler und Mensch, vol. 2/1 (Leipzig: Breitkopfand Härtel, 1887), p. 202. Busoni’s work was published byBreitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig as “Fantasie / über zweiMotive aus W. A. Mozarts / Die Hochzeit des Figaro /nach dem fast vollendeten Originalmanuscript / ergänztund Moriz Rosenthal zugeeignet von Ferruccio Busoni /Erste Ausgabe 1912” (Plate no.: V. A. 3830).106Hamilton’s unpublished completion occurs in appendixIV of his doctoral dissertation: The Opera Fantasies andTranscriptions of Franz Liszt: A Critical Study (BalliolCollege, Oxford University, 1989).107Howard’s edition was published in 1997 by Editio MusicaBudapest under the title “Fantasie / über Theman ausMozarts Figaro / und Don Giovanni / For piano solo—fürKlavier / Op. post. / First Edition—Erstausgabe (Z. 14,135).” A recording of the piece was released prior to thescore in 1994: Liszt at the Opera III (Hyperion: CDA66861/2).the extent to which his playing exceeded thesurviving notation cannot be known. 108Manuscript sources are lacking altogetherfor another fantasy-work Liszt performed duringthis period. The Gazette musicale reportsthat Liszt performed “une nouvelle fantaisiecomposée par lui [Liszt] sur des mélodies duGuitarrero, de M. Halévy” in the Grand Théâtreat Kassel on 19 November 1841 (ten monthsafter the Opera premiered in Paris). 109 There isno mention of this particular performance inLiszt’s correspondence, and in the absence ofmanuscript sources two competing hypothesesseem plausible: either the work was writtendown to some extent and lost, or—perhaps morelikely—it may never have been notated andwas considered a composition only to the extentthat the Gazette reviewer’s impressionswere conditioned through his experience ofLiszt’s performance.This reasoning may become dangerously hypothetical,but it nevertheless serves to dislocateour notion of composition by separating itfrom the notion of a text. The dislocation furthercomplicates the inherited idealism thatrequires a “work” to be an a priori form precedingany realization in performance. It is tellingin this connection that, contrary to his earliertendency to perform from memory (with allthe attendant associations of spontaneous creation),Liszt’s rule of thumb in Weimar—asWilliam Mason recounts—was always to playfrom scores, presumably to indicate that whathe was playing were serious, texted compositionsrather than fleeting improvisations. 110 Yet108As Hamilton’s and Howard’s completions indicate, the“sketches” are arguably more complete than Liszt’s recollectionto Ramann might imply, but this does not mitigatetheir fractional status. Hamilton certainly takes theview that the surviving sources for the Mozart Fantasieare “almost complete.” See The Cambridge Companionto Liszt, p. 83.109See “Chronique étrangère” in Gazette musicale 6 (12Dec. 1841), p. 560. For an itinerary of ninety-five “lost”pieces by Liszt, see Friedrich Schnapp “VerscholleneKompositionen Franz Liszts,” in Von Deutscher Tonkunst:Festschrift zu Peter Raabes 70. Geburtstag, ed. AlfredMorgenroth (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1942), pp. 119–53.110Mason’s memoirs record this particularly through a contrastiveanecdote about Johann Peter Pixis, who performedtogether with Liszt before the latter’s move to Weimarand begged him to use sheet music on stage, which he didnot: “Later on [Liszt] very rarely played even his ownDAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata89

19THCENTURYMUSICcompositions without having the music before him,” Masonrecalls, “and during most of the time I was [in Weimar]copies of his later publications were always lying on thepiano, and among them a copy of the ‘Bénédiction de Dieudans la Solitude,’ which Liszt had used so many timeswhen playing to his guests that it became associated withmemories of Berlioz, Rubinstein, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski,Joachim, and our immediate circle” (William Mason,Memories of a Musical Life [New York: Century, 1901], p.118).111Rosen, Romantic Generation, p. 507.even remaining cautious, we can confirm thatLiszt performed at least three partially unwritten“works” during the 1840s, that his sketcheswere roughly coeval with their improvisation/performance, and that their performance precededtheir final “composition,” or rather, thatat this stage in Liszt’s life, performance andcomposition were effectively synonymous processeswithin the economy of his creative production.This condition undermines the unqualifiedaspiration of Werktreue in performance by invertingconventional ideas about what it is thatis inscribed by a classical score. For Liszt’s earlywork on the “Dante” Sonata, notation seemsto function, not as the basis for future performance,but at least in part as the recordingmedium of past performance. This status ismost apparent in plate 2, written as a mementofor an admirer ex post facto. The changes betweenthis manuscript and ex. 6 are suggestiveof the considerable distance traversed betweenimprovisatory performance and final notation.We may therefore think of the successive revisionsas “virtual” performances that inscribehypothetical (or perhaps real) improvisationsthat may or may not have originated in concert.Rosen may have been thinking along theselines when he stated that Liszt’s music wasconceived absolutely for performance and thatits “realization . . . took precedence over theunderlying compositional structure.” 111 In thisrepertoire, a performer ascends in the normativemusical hierarchy, assuming aspects ofwhat conceptually is a compositional prerogative:to prescribe the notes and their order.This late-twentieth-century viewpoint reflectsa performance-centered aesthetic that mayadd another facet to our assessment of certainof Liszt’s pre-Weimar piano works. Seen originallyas transcriptions or amalgams of performanceevents in which the composer and performerare one, these “compositions” may beginto assume a new and perhaps unfamiliarintegrity. For rather than measuring themagainst the “covert ideological agenda,” 112 asSamson has called it, of the German sonatasymphonictradition, we can view them as productsof a different ideology: that of the improviser-virtuoso.This revisionist perspective resonatessuggestively with an early-nineteenthcenturysentiment perhaps most eloquently—if hyperbolically—formulated in the mid-1840sby an anonymous Darmstadt correspondentwho dispelled any ambivalence about Liszt’sWerktreue and his stature as a composer byexplicitly construing performance and compositionas synonymous acts in the mind of thegenius:His performance is never a mechanical utterance[Vonsichgeben], rather a composition in the truestsense of the word, an artistic creation existing entirelyfor itself, reborn through fire and passion fromwithin. In general he regards every piece he plays asa theme on which to improvise and almost alwayscreates anew something wonderful, in doing so [he]simultaneously declares the aspiration of the truegenius: always to loosen his art more from all formaland frightening shackles, and with true enthusiasmand unconstrained by all external rules, to reproducein a carefree manner what his inner eye has intuited.113112Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, p. 112.113“Sein Vortrag ist niemals ein mechanisches Vonsichgeben,sondern im eigentlichsten Sinne des Wortes eineComposition, eine ganz für sich bestehende Schöpfung derKunst, durch Feuer und Leidenschaft von innen herauswiedergeboren. Jedes Stück, das er spielt, betrachtet er imAllgemeinen als ein Thema, über welches er phantasirtund fast immer etwas Wundervolles neu erschafft, undwobei sich zugleich die wahrhaft geniale Strebung kundgibt:seine Kunst immer mehr von allen formellen undbeängstigenden Fesseln loszumachen und in wirklicherBegeisterung und unbekümmert um allen äußerenRegelzwang, das sorglos nachzubilden, was sein inneresAuge geschaut hat” (“Franz Liszt [in Darmstadt]” [6 Oct.1845], 1499. This is contained in a small collection ofthus-far unidentifiable German press articles about Lisztbetween 1838 and 1847, which are held in the Nationalarchivder Richard-Wagner-Stiftung in Bayreuth as: II C b3.Hummel’s comments on the prestige of improvisationalign him with this view and offer a complementary perspectiveto the listener-based quotation above. In the final90

Regardless of the music’s elusive history andgenesis, a modern performer can hardly treatthe published “Dante” Sonata from 1858 asimprovisatory. Rather, in a final ironic turn, itis a fixed work to be played “quasi improvisato”(mm. 124, 157), a layering of artifice that finallyconsigns the indecipherable virtuoso tohistory. The work’s fluid formative stages congealinto a compositional topic—a mannerrather than a mode of delivery, the identity ofwhich must remain “undecidable” within thesemiotics of virtuosity and Werktreue.lines of his Clavierschule, Hummel identified his publicartistry more with improvisatory performance than what heperceived as a text-based, reproductive practice: “I confessthat, from that moment on [when he was fully proficient atimprovisation], I was less embarrassed to improvise[phantasiren] before an audience of 2000–3000 listene rsthan to play a notated composition I was menially bound to”(Ich gestehe, ich war von dem Augenblick an wenigerverlegen, vor einem Publikum von 2–3000 Zuhörern zuphantasiren, als eine niedergeschriebene Komposizion, andie ich knechtisch gebunden war, zu spielen) (Hummel,Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zumPiano-Forte-Spiel, vol. 3 [Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, 1828], p.444).Abstract.The European press of the late 1830s indicates aglaring disparity between Liszt’s questionable statusas a composer and his eminence as a virtuoso performer.The staggered compositional history of oneparticular piano work, Après une lecture du Dante—Fantasie quasi Sonata (1839–58), straddles thisschism uniquely in that it bridged two distinct periodsof Liszt’s life: the Glanzzeit of immensely successfulEuropean concert tours, and the predominantlycompositional span as Kapellmeister inWeimar. As such, it documents the mise-en-scène ofLiszt’s self-fashioned metamorphosis from virtuosoto composer.As a work borne expressly of improvisational acts,the “Dante” Sonata exhibits paradoxical traits thatbind it to both performance and compositional traditions.Through a study of Carl Czerny’s influence onLiszt, and the latter’s own improvisational practices,I take a medium-sensitive approach to the “Dante”Sonata by interrogating the historical concept ofPhantasieren as part of a rereading of the compositionaltechnique of thematic transformation.Based on the excised material from the extantmanuscripts, I reconstruct the genesis of the “Dante”Sonata and chart its compositional history and genericevolution. A comparative presentation of selectedrevisions, alternatives, and variants from thework illustrates the problematic juncture betweenimprovisation and composition, the extent to whichself-borrowing and the interchangeability of textsraise questions about our modern work-concept, thenotion of a musical text, and the functions of performancewithin a text. Key words: Virtuosity,Phantasieren, “Dante” Sonata, Liszt, compositionalprocess.DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata91

19THCENTURYMUSIC1839 (February)Liszt first refers to the projected work in hisdiary—Journal des Zÿi—as a symphony, whichhe would complete separately in 1855–56 asEine Symphonie zu Dantes Divina Commedia:If I feel within me the strength and life, I will attempta symphonic composition based on Dante,then another on Faust—within three years—meanwhileI will make three sketches: the Triumph ofDeath (Orcagna), the Comedy of Death (Holbein),and a Fragment dantesque. 11839 (September)Marie d’Agoult’s letter to Henri Lehmann revealsthat written work on the Fragmentdantesque (for keyboard) had only just begunon 26 September 1839:Le bravo suonatore began this morning a Fragmentdantesque which is sending him to the very Devil.He is so consumed by it that he won’t go to Naplesin order to be able to complete this work (destined toremain in his sketch portfolio!). 2Paper-type analysis, the fact that this sketchwas in Liszt’s hand, the spacious use of threestaves, the occasionally wayward spacing, andd’Agoult’s demonic reference (suggestive ofLiszt’s opening tritones) indicate that thissketch is most likely MS I 18, No.1, 3 containingthe first twenty-four measures of the Sonata.No further notation survives prior eitherto Liszt’s private performance of the piece amonth later on 25 October 1839 at the Hôtel del’Europe or to his public performance of it inAppendix A:Chronology of Revisions for the “Dante” SonataVienna on 5 December 1839 in the fourth morningconcert he gave there. 4The extent to which the music had beenwritten out at this stage, whether as a continuitydraft or collection of sketches, remains unknown.1840The appearance of the Prague fragment (MS1C.51), dated 11 March 1840, and the differencesbetween this fragment and the first fullMS suggest both that Liszt performed the workon his tour of Bohemia and that it may stillhave remained largely unwritten at this stage.Whatever Liszt performed in 1839–40 musthave resulted in the written exemplar of a completepiece (now lost) that was copied byGeatano Belloni as the original portions of MS I76. In a letter to d’Agoult dated 22 September1840, Liszt explains that he had been revisingseveral sections of Belloni’s manuscript. 5 Theresults of these revisions appear to be containedin MS I 76 in graphite pencil and reflect thefirst extant (notated) version of the piece, asource thought by Walker and Winklhofer nolonger to exist.MS I 18 No. 3—a more concise ending to theSonata—is also in Belloni’s hand and on thesame “Blacons” paper and seems to have beendiscarded from MS I 76. For this reason, MS I18 No. 3 is likely to be the very first notatedconclusion to the Fragment dantesque, if weaccept that the Prague fragment from 11 March1840—also a concluding fragment—was notLiszt’s own manuscript.1“Si je me sens force et vie, je tenterai une compositionsymphonique d’après Dante, puis une autre d’après Faust—dans trois ons—d’ici-là, je ferai trois esquisse: le Triomphede la mort (Orcagna), la Comédie de la mort (Holbein), etune Fragment dantesque” (Liszt, Journal des Zÿi ind’Agoult, Mémories par Daniel Stern [pseud.], ed. DanielOllivier [Paris, 1927], p. 180).2Solange Joubert, Une Correspondance romantique: Madamd’Agoult, Liszt, Henri Lehmann (Paris, 1947), p. 33.3A transcription of this fragment was published in the Journalof the British Liszt Society, as “Dante fragment, S701e,”28 (2003), 34. The date given in this publication was ca.1837, which is almost certainly incorrect, for it predatesany mention of the work in Liszt’s correspondence by twoyears.1848–49The title page of MS I 76—“Paralopomènes à la‘Divina Comedia’”—must have been added be-4Christopher Gibbs’s study of Liszt’s concert tours ofVienna in 1838 and 1839 provides the most detailed pictureof Liszt at this time to date. See “‘Just Two Words:Enormous Success’: Liszt’s 1838 Vienna Concerts,” in Lisztand His World, pp. 167–230.5“Je vais bien – j’ai corrigé ces jours derniers quelquesparties du fragment Dantesque,” Liszt to Marie d’Agoult,22 September 1840, Ipswich, in Correspondance / FranzLiszt, Marie d’Agoult (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 645.92

tween 1848 and 1849, however, for the firstbifolium of MS I 76 is a different paper-typeand is in the hand of Adoph Stahr, who was inLiszt’s employ between 1848 and 1851. 6The next stage of revision saw two furthersessions of correcting and amending MS I 76 byLiszt, in purple ink and red crayon, respectively.The use of red markings strongly suggeststhat he was again preparing the MS forpublication. Additionally, correction leaveswere inserted at the end of the MS on the samepaper as that used by Stahr for the openingbifoluim.Following these extensive revisions, it wasevidently impossible for Liszt to make furtherprogress on the Sonata using MS I 76, and hecontracted Eduard Henschke to prepare a faircopy. Henschke evidently went through MS I76 adding accidentals and clefs (on pp. 5–8, and11) before transcribing the work as it then existedonto paper that Mueller has associatedwith the post-1848 period in Weimar. 7Winklhofer dates this, MS I 17, prior to 1 August1849 on the basis of its altered title, thusnarrowing the time frame:In the earliest extant manuscript source [sic] for the“Dante” sonata, an undated Abschrift with numerouscorrections in Liszt’s hand, the title is“Paralipomènes à la Divina Commedia. FantasieSymphonique pour Piano par F. Liszt.” Later, Lisztcrossed out the first word, replacing it with“Prolegomèmes.” This alteration can be dated priorto August 1, 1849, for when Liszt wrote to Raff onthat date the score was completely finished, the titlehe used had an additional ingredient probably drawnfrom Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. He now callsthe work. “Fantasie quasi Sonata (Proligomènes [sic]zu Dantes Göttlicher Comödie).” 8The result is MS I 17, the hand-made paper ofwhich is without watermark but can be datedbetween January and August 1849. 9 Liszt subsequentlyrevised this MS in stages using variouswriting implements, collettes, and inserts.The results were stitched together, concealingall the excised material, in a copy that maywell initially have been intended, though laterretracted, as a Stichvorlage. Fortunately thestitching was subsequently undone and thecollettes released, which has allowed scholarsto investigate this complex stage of revision.Liszt’s final title after Victor Hugo—Après uneLecture du Dante – Fantasie quasi Sonata—iswritten for the first time in graphite pencil onthis title page.1853A separate correction leaf, MS I 18, n. 2, containsLiszt’s reworking of the opening transitioninto the Presto agitato toward the end ofthe Sonata. It was copied into the final manuscriptsource (MS I 13 7 ), but is not in MS I 17and therefore seems to have been written ca.1853–54 in between the last additions to I 17and its being copied out as I 13 7 .ca. 1853–56The final stage in the genesis of the work wasJoachim Raff’s fair copy—MS I 13 7 —preparedfrom the extensive revisions to MS I 17 forinclusion in the Années.ca. 1857–58Following Liszt’s corrections, MS I 13 7 formedthe Stichvorlage for the 1858 Schott editionand represents the work as it was published inthe New Liszt Edition in 1974. The originationof the notated work in all its known sources ispresented diagrammaticallyas figure 1.l6Mueller, Liszt’s “Tasso” Sketchbook: Studies in Sourcesand Revisions (Michigan: UMI, 1986), p. 363.7Ibid., p. 378.8Sharon Winklhofer, “Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, and the ‘Dante’Sonata,” this journal 1 (1977), 30. 9Mueller, “Tasso,” p. 379; Winklhofer, “Dante,” p. 30.DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata93