AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire.(Review)
Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire. By Susan Bernstein. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. [ix, 239 p. ISBN 0-8047-3279-5 (cloth); 0-8047-3505-0 (pbk.). $55 (cloth); $19.95 (pbk.).]
Nineteenth-century virtuosity, especially piano virtuosity, which was a cult object so long that it almost lost its susceptibility to mockery, has lately been given a new claim on intellectual attention by musicologists such as Richard Leppert, James Deaville, Katharine Ellis, and Dana Gooley. At the same time, scholars in other fields are extending this primarily musical concept into larger contexts of nineteenth-century culture. The historian Paul Metzner, in Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), has examined the rise of a cluster of virtuosities--those of the chess master, chef, detective, and automaton builder--alongside the performing of Niccolo Paganini and Franz Liszt. And Susan Bernstein, a comparative literature scholar at Brown University, extends the concepts of musical performance and virtuosity into the literary realm, again of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, in the work under review h ere.
For some time, literary scholars have been drawing attention to the "performativity" of literary texts--the capacity, perhaps, of a literary work to be imagined as a performance. Bernstein is well aware of this branch of literary studies, but a reader from the music disciplines who looks into Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century for a suggestion about how the metaphor of "performativity" might be brought usefully into play in the study of an art in which performance is no metaphor will not find much help in Bernstein's chapter on "The Musical Alibi in Theories of Performativity". In fact, for music scholars interested in enriching their thoughts about music by looking into the work of scholars in neighboring fields of the humanities, there is often more profit to be found in seeing how those scholars deal with the arts in which they are trained than in seeing what they have to say about music.
Most of Bernstein's book actually falls somewhere between these two possibilities: she is writing about writers, but writers writing about music, and in particular about musical virtuosity: Heinrich Heine's reviews of Chopin and Liszt and even Meyerbeer, Charles Baudelaire's writings on Wagner, and Liszt's books on Chopin and on the Gypsies and their music (rather than his musical performing or composing as such). So far so good: these are all central nineteenth-century texts on music, but they have often been ignored as peripheral critical works by major creative artists. It is valuable to have Bernstein point our attention to key passages in these writings and draw Out their authors' thoughts, as when she turns Heine's statement that Paris serves the virtuosos "as a kind of announcement pillar on which their fame can be read" into her own pronouncement that "fame is not simply added on to but is constitutive of the virtuoso" (pp. 78-79 Equally good is her gloss on Heine's description of his experience of a Meyerbeer opera as "the ...
- Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music.(Book review)
- Magazine article from: Victorian Studies Wollenberg, Susan September 22, 2007 700+ words
...as well as, ingeniously, to Liszt's own writings, described by...recent work on the reception of Liszt in nineteenth-century England has highlighted the central...herewith specific reference to Liszt's symphonic poems, intro ducing...
- The Nineteenth-Century Symphony.
- Magazine article from: Notes Warfield, Scott June 1, 1998 700+ words
...looms large over nineteenth-century music. Unlike the...this series, The Nineteenth-Century Symphony is not a...the very end of the nineteenth century, while two more...Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Richard Strauss...
- The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality.
- Magazine article from: Notes Hatch, Christopher September 1, 1997 700+ words
...consistent focus: nineteenth-century tonal-harmonic...p. 103). Nineteenth-century theorists are largely...s study of Franz Liszt and the augmented...Evolutionary Perspective on Nineteenth-Century Semitonal Relations...
- The Nineteenth-Century German Lied.
- Magazine article from: Music & Letters Gramit, David November 1, 1995 700+ words
...its purview to the nineteenth century (with limited discussion...Felix Mendelssohn, Liszt and Wagner, Brahms...aims, however, The Nineteenth-Century German Lied cannot...tine history of the nineteenth-century lied is a story of...
- The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century.(Review)
- Magazine article from: Notes HATCH, CHRISTOPHER March 1, 2001 700+ words
...and Painting in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Marsha...related, and in the nineteenth century especially, this...conflicts that arose in nineteenth-century aesthetic developments...and that of Franz Liszt's symphonic poems...
- Edward MacDowell, Arthur P. Schmidt, and the Shakespeare Overtures of Joachim...
- Magazine article from: Notes Bomberger, E. Douglas September 1, 1997 700+ words
...during the second half of the nineteenth century, few stayed as long or developed...recommending his work to Franz Liszt, who gave MacDowell the opportunity...remembered today for his years with Liszt in Weimar. In the early 1850s Liszt was developing his symphonic...
- Nineteenth-Century Piano Music: Essays in Performance and Analysis.(Review)
- Magazine article from: Notes Bellman, Jonathan December 1, 1998 700+ words
...confused with R. Larry Todd's book Nineteenth-Century Piano Music (New York: Schirmer...Schumann, Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Modest Musorgsky. With the nineteenth-century's "great figures" thus represented...
- Moriz Rosenthal in Word and Music: A Legacy of the Nineteenth Century.(Book...
- Magazine article from: Notes Manildi, Donald December 1, 2006 700+ words
...Rosenthal in Word and Music: A Legacy of the Nineteenth Century. Edited and with an introduction by Mark...Chopin's pupil Karol Mikuli, then with Liszt's pupil Rafael Joseffy, and finally with Liszt himself at Weimar. He divided his performing...
- Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music.(Book...
- Magazine article from: Notes Hatch, Christopher March 1, 2004 700+ words
...Brahms. In fact, were their works excluded, this enjoyable sampling of allusions might lose its pungency. Yet Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Wagner are similarly skilled secret sharers. Lesser masters--Niels Gade, Max Bruch, Fanny Hensel, and Clara Schumann...
- She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century.
- Magazine article from: The Women's Review of Books Loeffelholz, Mary July 1, 1997 700+ words
...The feminist recovery of nineteenth-century American women writers...Many important novels by nineteenth-century American women have been...Talks and articles on nineteenth-century American women's fiction...
Source: HighBeam Research, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language...