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

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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
Page 3: composer-as-butterfly had finally m
Page 7 and 8: DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Da
Page 9 and 10: Table 1Transmission of the “Dante
Page 11 and 12: was a leitmotif of Liszt’s recept
Page 13 and 14: scale form, the sense of “form”
Page 15 and 16: misused in our day.” 51 Seven yea
Page 17 and 18: The broader reception of Liszt’s
Page 19 and 20: composing be before the latter’s
Page 21 and 22: a.35Presto agitato assai ♯
Page 23 and 24: Theme ♭ ♭ ♭ ̇̇ ̇ ̇
Page 25 and 26: teenth-century harmonic expectation
Page 31 and 32: . (continued) ♭ MS I 17 ♭
Page 33 and 34: . MS I 13 7 (1854), denoting the fi
Page 35 and 36: sense that each listener being pres
Page 37 and 38: MS I 17(revised)MS I 13MS I 17(revi
Page 39 and 40: substantial fragment, perhaps akin
Page 41 and 42: Regardless of the music’s elusive
Page 43: tween 1848 and 1849, however, for t

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