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18 - Romanticism and Performance

from Part IV - Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

Benedict Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

This chapter first outlines the Romantic perspective on performance as it was elaborated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates on key writers who made music central to their philosophical and literary works, most notably E. T. A. Hoffman and Walter Scott. Both writers foregrounded the immediacy and social intimacy of performance as fundamental to musical beauty, even as they simultaneously discussed music in terms of objects (works, songs, poems). The chapter proceeds with case studies of three early-nineteenth-century performers – Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz (as conductor) – who were considered ‘Romantic’ or who inspired writers to use Romantic literary and journalistic tropes. Each case study considers the interrelations between the performer’s look, onstage behaviour, and musical phenomena, as well as the literary elaborations they inspired. The conclusion suggests ways in these three key performers shaped performance ideals well into the twentieth century.

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Berlioz, Hector. Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, from 1803 to 1865, Comprising His Travels in Germany, Italy, Russia, and England, trans. Holmes, R. and Holmes, E., ann. Newman, Ernest (New York: Dover Publications, 1960).Google Scholar
Eigeldinger, Jean-Jacques (ed. and trans.). Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, as Seen by His Pupils (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Esterhammer, Angela. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Google Scholar
Garratt, James. Palestrina and the German Romantic Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Gelbart, Matthew. The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Gooley, Dana. Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).Google Scholar
Gooley, Dana. ‘“La Commedia del Violino”: Paganini’s Comic Strains’, Musical Quarterly, 88/3 (2005), 370427.Google Scholar
Gooley, Dana. The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Hamilton, Kenneth. Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Hunter, Mary. ‘“To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer”: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 58/2 (2005), 357–98.Google Scholar
Kawabata, Maiko. Paganini, the ‘Demonic’ Virtuoso (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013).Google Scholar
Richards, Annette. The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Suttoni, Charles (ed. and trans.). Franz Liszt, an Artist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique, 1835–1841 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Williams, Adrian (ed.). Portrait of Liszt: By Himself and His Contemporaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

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