5 - Brahms “versus” Liszt: The Internalization of Virtuosity

Summary

For all of virtuosity's striking qualities, it resists definition. In part, this is due to the multiplicity of its interacting dimensions. In the context of nineteenth- century piano music, Jim Samson has described virtuosity's “relational field” through its connections between at least four constituent parts: text, instruments, performer, and audience. Here virtuosity's “object-status” and “event-status” are always in tension: the performer's engagement with the text draws them “right into the heart of the work,” while the instrumental idiom is projected to the audience. In Samson's view, execution of idiomatic figures supports the moment of virtuosity and compels the audience's attention, highlighting the performer's abilities above all. Although the difficulties of execution are often genuine in such situations, at times the emphasis on fostering their clear perception can magnify the actual demands made on the performer to appear greater than they might be. However one may define “difficulty” in a performance context, its presence plays a foundational role in the understanding of virtuosity. Sigismond Thalberg's “three-hand” technique is an example of how perceived difficulty can be maximized from the listener's perspective, when a passage's demands are perhaps not as great as they seem. Such passagework, in its display, projects engagement with difficulty to the audience as audibly as possible. Thus, the relational field of virtuosity described by Samson centers on the performer's external projection of difficulty and its effective transcendence to the listener. Yet what would happen if this relationship were rearranged while still preserving virtuosity's emphasis on overcoming difficulty? For example, what if difficulty's projection were downplayed, while less immediately appreciable challenges (such as dense contrapuntal textures, unidiomatic passagework, or terse presentation of thematic material) for the performer were intensified by the demands of the musical text, purposefully without making audience perception a critical component? In this reconfiguration, the instrument serves as a channel through which both the performer and listener are drawn toward the musical text, centering attention perhaps less on the performative gesture and more upon the work in the abstract. In terms of the second relational field discussed above, the composer's text in this configuration maximizes experienced difficulty for the performer while shielding the listener from awareness of this aspect of music making. Instead, the listener's attention is drawn foremost to the text's attributes rather than to the displays of the performative act.