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

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