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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