Abstract
In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the pianist Franz Liszt was at the centre of a rising cult of the musical virtuoso, a cultural phenomenon that was at once highly fashionable and highly contested. Descriptions of the pianist’s performances typically painted him as an amalgam of paradoxes, resolved only by imagining him separated into multiple personae. Liszt astounded his listeners’ eyes with displays of the physically impossible, simultaneously soothing their breathless astonishment with heart-rending sentimental expression. His performances presented a spectacle for the eye as much as the ear, falling somewhere between art and entertainment. This dichotomy, emerging across Europe in the early nineteenth century, separated the virtuous man of knowledge from the charlatan. In the German lands the dichotomy was particularly pronounced in the field of music. Whereas works of literature and painting shielded the audience from witnessing the mechanics of creation first hand, in music before the age of mechanical reproduction, the audience generally witnessed the visual spectacle of its mechanical creation.2 In the wake of German idealism around 1800, this necessity for the visual led some to demand that expression be separated from the mechanics of its production. This demand, however, had deeper roots: the mechanics of performance drew attention to a single person’s skills and therefore placed the performer’s ego on stage.
In Liszt the most formidable physical forces meet the most sensual tenderness; the most impossibly complex mechanics of the body abut the most tender secrets of the soul, the most violent battles adjoin the sweet dreams of the innermost emotions.1
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Notes
Although mechanical instruments were available they presented their own interaction with questions of expression, subjectivity and performance. See Annette Richards, ‘Automatic Genius: Mozart and the Mechanical Sublime’, Music & Letters 80.3 (1999), 366–389
and Carolyn Abbate ‘Outside Ravel’s Tomb’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 52.3 (1999), 465–530. Up to the mid-nineteenth century orchestras and performers were generally visible during performances.
Liszt scholar Dana Gooley demonstrates that ‘the intrusion of ego or personality into musical performance’ became a particularly potent argument in the polemics against virtuosity in German-speaking countries. See Dana Gooley, ‘The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley, eds., Franz Liszt and his World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Edmund Jephcott, Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom and Stephen Mennel, trans. and eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994), 110–112.
The relocation of the emotions from the heart to the brain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries forms the subject of Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). This goes hand in hand with the development of the emotions as a psychological category around this time.
See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions. The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Maiko Kawabata, ‘Virtuosity Transfigured: In the Shadow of Paganini’, The Journal of the American Liszt Society 57 (2006), 31–34
and Kawabato, Demythologising Paganini’s ‘Demonic’ Powers of Virtuosity (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, University of Rochester Press, 2010).
Christopher Gibbs notes that this feature appears equally in verbal descriptions of Liszt’s playing in which the pianist is portrayed to ‘defeat the piano, breaking string right and left’. See Christopher H. Gibbs, ‘Just Two Words. Enormous Success’, in Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley eds., Franz Liszt and his World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Ulrich Stadler, ‘Vom Liebhaber der Wissenschaft zum Meister der Kunst. Über die verworrenen Begriffsgeschichte des Virtuosen im England und Deutschland des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Hans-Georg von Arburg, Dominik Müller, Hans-Jürgen Schrader and Ulrich Stadler eds., Virtuosität. Kult und Krise der Artistik in Literatur und Kunst der Moderne (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2006), 19–35.
Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 79,
Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining Features (London: Reaktion, 2000).
Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente of 1775–1778 were perhaps the widestcirculated works on physiognomy, yet the Swiss doctor only reinforced a long history of physiognomic concepts. For his influence on painting, see Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature. Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1996),
Sharrona Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2010)
and John Graham, ‘Lavater’s Physiognomy in England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 22.4 (1961), 561–572.
Dana Gooley argues that Liszt displayed himself in particular ways through these portraits as part of his re-invention of self in each national context. See Dana A. Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Christopher H. Gibbs, ‘Just Two Words: Enormous Success’, 191. See also Ernst Burger, Franz Liszt: A Chronicle of his Life in Pictures and Documents, Stewart Spencer, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 105 and 109.
The Essays were first published in London in 1806 and were reprinted in 1824 as Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. See also Lucy Hartley and L. Smith, ‘The Sign in the Eye of What is Known to the Hand’, Textual Practice 10.1 (1996), 83–122,
Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
Klaus Knecht, Charles Bell: The Anatomy of Expression (1806) (Koln: Forschungsstelle des Instituts fur Geschichte der Medizin der Universität, 1978).
Other writers equally believed in the divine contrition of the physical and argued that the passions of the mind were expressed through involuntary physical signs. See Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 164 and Roger D. Gallie, Thomas Reid: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Anatomy of the Self (Dordrecht, London: Kluwer Academic, 1998).
For physicality and sensibility, see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
For the shift in the physical conception of emotions, see Fay Bound Alberti, ‘Emotions in the Early Modern Medical Tradition’ in Fay Bound Alberti, ed., Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
See also Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical Histoty (Berkeley, CA: London: University of California Press, 2001), 69.
Liszt reported proudly to his lover Marie d’Agoult that ‘Fifty copies of my portrait have been sold in a single day’. Adrian Williams, Franz Liszt: Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89.
For a summary discussion of music and idealism, see Mark Evan Bonds, ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 50.2/3 (1997), 387–420, 390–391.
For the change in listening habits in the concert hall, see James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris. A Cultural History (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1995).
The rise of instrumental music at the end of the eighteenth century has been comprehensively documented and discussed in Bellamy Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music in 18th Century Germany (Epping: Bowker, 1981),
John Neubauer, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1986),
Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
See James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), particularly Chapter 2, ‘From Sensibility to Pathology’, 23–62;
see also Leslie David Blasius, ‘The Mechanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Romantic Musical Experience’, in Ian Bent ed., Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–24.
E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘Rezension der 5. Symphonie von Ludwig van Beethoven’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12.40 (1810), cols. 630–642 and 12.41, cols. 652–659, translation quoted through David Gramit, Cultivating Music. The Aspirations, Interest, and Limits of German Musical Culture (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002), 3.
See Gramit, Cultivating Music, Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, Music and German National Identity (Chicago, IL, London: University of Chicago Press, 2002),
Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005),
see also Eric J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Dana Gooley argues that the infrastructure of the predominantly small towns of the German countries in the early nineteenth century favoured the adherence to amateur music-making. See Dana Gooley, ‘The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley, eds., Franz Liszt and his World (Princeton and Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2006).
For a discussion of monumental effects in music, see Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Centuty Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Gramit, Cultivating Music, particularly the final chapter, ‘Performing Musical Culture: The Concert’, 125–60.
For a discussion of the popularity of virtuosity, bordering on a mania for the pianist, in the same cultural context that attacked the musician in journalistic writing, see Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989), particularly chapter 5, ‘Anatomy of “Liztomania”: The Berlin Episode’.
Ivan Waddington, ‘The Role of the Hospital in the Development of Modern Medicine: A Sociological Analysis’, Sociology 7 (1973), 211–224,
N.D. Jewson, ‘Medical Knowledge and the Patronage System in Eighteenth Century England’, Sociology 8 (1974), 369–385,
N.D. Jewson, ‘The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770–1870’, Sociology 10 (1976), 225–244.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock Publications, 1973).
Dieter Duding, Organisierter gesellschaftlicher Nationalismus in Deutschland (1808– 1847): Bedeutung und Funktion der Turner- und Sangervereine fur die deutsche Nationalbewegung (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1984).
In the eighteenth century this interest in the six non-naturals was part of an empowerment of the individual and a turn away from the idea that health or illness were caused by ill will or by divine providence, usually in response to repeated acts of sin. In the late eighteenth century, broadly speaking, these belief systems were replaced by the myriad manners of understanding the body and its workings, and by the resulting measure of secular and personal control as suggested in conduct manuals and popular medical treatises. See Roy Porter ed., The Popularisation of Medicine, 1650–1850 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992),
Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765–1914 (Frankfurt, AM: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), particularly 34–42.
James L. Larson, ‘Vital Forces: Regulative Principles or Constitutive Agents? A Strategy in German Physiology, 1786–1802’, Isis 70.2 (1979), 235–249.
For the historically contingent concept of emotions as man’s motivating forces see Dixon, From Passions to Emotions and Jan Plamper, Geschichte und Gefühl. Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte (München: Siedler Verlag, 2012).
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Thormählen, W. (2014). Physical Distortion, Emotion and Subjectivity: Musical Virtuosity and Body Anxiety. In: Kennaway, J. (eds) Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339515_9
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