Après Une Lecture De Liszt: Virtuosity and Werktreue in the “Dante” Sonata Author(S): David Trippett Reviewed Work(S): Source: 19Th-Century Music, Vol

Après une Lecture de Liszt: Virtuosity and Werktreue in the “Dante” Sonata Author(s): David Trippett Reviewed work(s): Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Summer 2008), pp. 52-93 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2008.32.1.052 . Accessed: 23/01/2012 05:50

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http://www.jstor.org 19TH CENTURY MUSIC

Après une Lecture de Liszt: Virtuosity and Werktreue in the “Dante” Sonata

DAVID TRIPPETT

The change of direction in Franz Liszt’s career cammin di nostra vita—thirty-five years old!) that took place during the autumn of 1847 was to break out of my virtuoso’s chrysalis and spectacular. That year he retired from the con- allow my thought unfettered flight.”1 Liszt’s cert stage, finally accepted a salaried conduc- deliciously mixed metaphor suggests that the torship, and first met Princess Carolyne zu Sayn- Wittgenstein. Writing to his new patron, the Grand Duke Carl Alexander, Liszt alluded to 1“Le moment vient pour moi (Nel mezzo del camin de Dante to mark his moment of transformation: nostra vita—35 ans!) de briser ma chrysalides de virtuosité “The time has come for me (Nel mezzo del et de laisser plein vol à ma pensée,” Liszt to Carl Alexander, 6 October 1846, in Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt und Carl Alexander, Grossherzog von Sachsen, ed. La Mara (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1909), p. 8. During periods I owe a keen debt of gratitude to many people for their of Liszt’s intense engagement with literature, brief quota- helpful comments on earlier drafts of this study, notably: tions of this type are not uncommon in his correspon- Carolyn Abbate, John Butt, Kenneth Hamilton, Leslie dence. Two examples from Dante are: “Society here is Howard, Allan Keiler, Lewis Lockwood, Nicholas Marston, zero, absolutely zero. Non ragioniam di lor [let’s not talk Rena Mueller, and Alan Walker. In particular, I want to of them]” from Inferno, III, 51, in Liszt to Marie d’Agoult, thank Alexander Rehding, Roger Parker, Berthold Hoeckner, 9 November 1839, in Franz Liszt Selected Letters, trans. and Lawrence Kramer for their invaluable advice and assis- and ed. Adrian Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), tance on this project. I am grateful as well to Evelyn Liepsch p. 114; and from Liszt’s diary “Journal des Zÿi,” whose at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar, and to King’s entry from 2 August includes: “To live, to think, to speak, College, Cambridge, and the Center for European Studies perhaps to act. / I am like the She-Wolf in Dante: . . . Che at Harvard, both of whom funded my research at different di tutte brame, / Sembiava carca nella sua magrezza [that points. An earlier version of this article was presented at with all hungering / Seemed to be laden in her meager- the seventy-first annual meeting of the American Musico- ness]” from Inferno, I, 49–50. See Marie d’Agoult, logical Society in Washington, October 2005. All transla- Mémoires, 1833–1854 [pseud. Daniel Stern], ed. Daniel tions are mine unless otherwise indicated. Ollivier (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1927), pp. 173–75.

52 19th-Century Music, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 52–93. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2008 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2008.32.1.052. composer-as-butterfly had finally metamor- donned the garb of the penitent performer, DAVID TRIPPETT phosed from virtuoso-as-caterpillar; the theat- claiming publicly in 1837: “I even went so far Virtuosity in rical performer had represented only an embry- as to add a host of rapid runs and cadenzas. . . . the “Dante” onic stage in artistic development. Liszt thus You cannot believe . . . how I deplore those Sonata appeared to reflect a well-documented shift in concessions to bad taste, those sacrilegious vio- values. His emphasis moved from virtuosity to lations of the SPIRIT and the LETTER.”4 On interpretation, from what Wagner in 1840 had the other hand, the virtuoso’s blood continued termed the “vulgar somersaults” of mere to run in Liszt’s veins, leading him to declare pianism to the genius of the artist,2 from the as late as 1853 that “the letter killeth the spirit, ephemeral performance to the immutable work. a thing to which I will never subscribe, how- In a different sense, the reference to Dante’s ever specious in their hypocritical impartiality Divine Comedy also implied that Liszt saw may be the attacks to which I am exposed.”5 himself as having earlier wandered down the As Susan Bernstein has argued, historical con- wrong path: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra cepts of virtuosity are defined by such contra- vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / che la dictions, which can account equally for tawdry diritta via era smarrita” (Midway in the jour- pyrotechnics and transcendental expression: ney of our life / I found myself within a dark “[Liszt’s] consistent inconsistency forms the forest, / for the straight way was lost.) By quot- very consistency of the virtuoso—an inconsis- ing the first line, Liszt (who at thirty-five had tency determined by the oscillation between given his final public concert at Elisavetgrad in egoistic protrusion and transmissive self-efface- September 1847) drew a parallel with Dante ment.”6 This fluidity illuminates Liszt’s marking his thirty-fifth year in A.D. 1300—the struggle to change his artistic identity on the “midpoint” in life’s biblically allotted span as well as the beginning of Dante’s divine awak- ening. Yet the strange logic of Liszt’s poetic 4From Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique; Liszt to allusion gives us pause. The vision of the un- George Sand, Paris, 12 February 1837, Gazette musicale, fettered butterfly clashes with Dante’s midlife pp. 53–56. Quoted and translated in Charles Suttoni, An epiphany, since the butterfly lives for only a Artist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique 1835– 1841 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 17– few weeks after months of gestation. Indeed, 18. the butterfly’s flight is a traditional symbol of 5This second complaint concerned time, accentuation, and the soul’s flight after death, hence Liszt’s late rhythm in Beethoven’s late style. Liszt is responding to criticism of his conducting during the Calsruhe Festival of metamorphosis suggests a valedictory coup de 1853, explaining to Richard Pohl that “in many cases even théâtre—an incongruity not untypical of what the rough, literal maintenance of the time and of each Lawrence Kramer dubbed a virtuoso “riddled continuous measure | 1, 2, 3, 4, | 1, 2, 3, 4, | clashes with 3 the sense and expression.” Liszt to Richard Pohl, 1 August with ambivalence.” 1853, in The Letters of Franz Liszt, ed. La Mara, trans. C. Standing at the crossroads between the roles Bache (2 vols., London: H. Grevel, 1894), I, 175–76. While of virtuoso and composer, Liszt in his letters toying with tempo is surely a lesser “infidelity” than ac- tively embellishing a given text, concert reviews from the expressed this ambivalence most acutely in his 1840s continued to record Liszt’s “deliciously fanciful am- reflections on Werktreue. On the one hand, he plifications” (Franz Liszt Selected Letters, p. 136)—acts exemplifying his later dictum that “virtuosity is not a submissive handmaiden to the composition.” The latter remark appears in Liszt’s essay on Clara Schumann [1855]; 2“Was sollte euch gelingen, wolltet ihr’ ihm [the virtuoso see Gesammelte Schriften von Franz Liszt, ed. Lina in a concert hall] es nachthum? Ein schnöder Purzelbaum, Ramann (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1881–99), vol. IV nichts Anderes” (Richard Wagner, “Der Virtuos und der (1882), p. 193. See also Liszt’s assertion in The Gypsy in Künstler,” Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Ri- Music [1859] that the virtuoso is not merely a passive chard Wagner, vol. 1 [Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1871/1880], purveyor of an extant creation, a conscientious and precise p. 212). The essay title’s pejorative distinction implicitly “mason,” but the sole means of accessing a world of feel- denies “artistic” stature to the virtuosity that Liszt repre- ing to which the work is only a window. The Gypsy in sented in 1841. At the time, Liszt was reaping praise from Music, trans. Edwin Evans, 2 vols. (London: W. Reeves, the Berlin press amid the popular frenzy associated with 1926), II, 267. Heine’s 1844 catchphrase: “Lisztomania.” 6Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: 3Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 69. 112.

53 19TH road to Weimar amid the “most intense period immutable product. It thus subverts what Caro- CENTURY MUSIC of anti-virtuosity backlash in the history of lyn Abbate calls the “performance network” in instrumental music,”7 which in turn gave rise which performers more or less obey the cen- to a “strengthening forcefield between virtuos- tripetal force of a “composed” work.11 Liszt’s ity and the work.”8 If Liszt compared the predisposition toward virtuosity ensured that virtuoso’s career with a caterpillar’s confine- certain musical ideas came to him through im- ment, did this disqualify “virtuosity” per se or provisation rather than prior to it. At first blush was it merely a response to public criticism? this seems unsurprising, yet it nevertheless pre- The comparison prompts another question that sents a problem for the ideology of a work critics of many stripes have asked of author- concept that separates Liszt hierarchically ship within text- and score-based criticism: into pianist and composer. In contrast to con- Who is speaking?9 Liszt’s liquidation of his temporaries like Felix Mendelssohn or Robert performer’s “self” testifies to his desire to man- Schumann, Liszt in his virtuosity continually age his public identity strategically, to narrate challenges the aesthetic boundaries of compo- his own story in a self-styled Künstlerroman, sition, improvisation, and performance. and thus to both publicize and legitimize his Such categories imply a distinction between new identity as a composer and ex-virtuoso.10 musical thought in the physical immediacy of But as he entered into the service of a patron improvisation and musical thought indepen- for the first time in his professional career— dent of physical enactment (even if the com- not exactly the unfettered freedom of a butter- poser works at the piano). But this distinction fly—did this transformation unequivocally rep- appears increasingly weak in light of Lisztian resent a dedicated commitment to a new cause practices that seemed to recognize a mutually or did it arise, at least in part, from his anxiety invertible relation between the fingers’ tactile over the diminishing status of the virtuoso? discovery of ideas at the keyboard and the cog- In this article I would like to consider these nition governing those fingers and ideas. Sir questions in light of Liszt’s Après une lecture John Russell even reports that Beethoven con- du Dante: Fantasie quasi Sonata. Written be- tinued to improvise “tactilely” as late as 1821 tween 1839 and 1858, the Sonata survives in despite being almost totally deaf,12 and in our three full manuscripts and four fragments and, own time, research into brain activity has es- I contend, interweaves hours and hours of im- tablished a substantial anatomical overlap be- provisation with a gradual process of revision tween executing and imaging motor tasks.13 on a more abstracted, conceptual level. As a piece born expressly from acts of performance, the Sonata appears not to be regulated exclu- 11Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 9ff. sively by the idea that a work is an enduring, 12Russell’s account is reproduced in Oscar G. T. Sonneck, Beethoven: Impressions by His Contemporaries (New York: Dover, 1967), pp. 114–16. 13Marc Jeannerod, “Neural Simulation of Action: A Unify- 7Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge ing Mechanism for Motor Cognition,” NeuroImage 14 University Press, 2004), p. 13. As Gooley observes, an anti- (2001), 103–09; Marc Jeannerod, V. Frak, “Mental Imaging virtuoso stance was propounded by both Schumann’s Neue of Motor Activity in Humans,” Current Opinion in Neu- Zeitschrift and Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette musicale. robiology 9 (2001), 735–39; M. Lotze, P. Montoya, M. Erb, 8Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work (Cambridge: E. Hulsmann, H. Flor, U. Klose, N. Birbaumer, W. Grodd, Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 74. “Activation of Cortical and Cerebellar Motor Areas during 9To cite two notable examples: Edward T. Cone, The Executed and Imagined Hand Movements: An fMRI Study,” Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11 (1999), 491–501. A 1974), p. 1; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in study specific to professional pianists suggests that, ex- Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: cept in the primary sensorimotor area of the left hemi- Fontana/Collins, 1977), pp. 142–49. sphere and the right cerebellum, playing music in one’s 10Within the European press, Liszt’s compound nationali- head and physically playing at the keyboard activate es- ties, mobile class status, and musical competencies were sentially the same cortical regions. There is, in other words, all debated among writers and listeners as part of what “a subliminal activation of the motor system in motor increasingly became an unstable and over-determined pub- imagery.” See I. G. Meister, T. Krings, H. Foltys, B. lic identity. See Gooley’s discussion of the multiple sym- Boroojerdi, M. Müller, R. Töpper, A. Thron, “Piano Play- bolic identities that Liszt fulfilled for his audiences in The ing in the Mind—an fMRI Study on Music Imagery and Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 2ff. Performance in Pianists,” Cognitive Brain Research 19

54 Playing and imagining music are not as dis- Liszt’s position with respect to this distinc- DAVID TRIPPETT tinct neurologically as they are behaviourally. tion was indeterminate. Not all nineteenth- Virtuosity in Nor is this insight confined to modern science. century improvisation was virtuosic, but Liszt’s the “Dante” Back in 1852, the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echo particular virtuosity during the 1830s was in- Sonata treated as an open secret the fact that the herently improvisatory. Its theme-driven, keyboard’s physical properties functioned as a “physical” textures appear to have fed into the compositional determinant in the improvisa- genesis of the “Dante” Sonata in a way that tion of operatic fantasies: “In the end, we know renders this particular work a kind of archeo- only too well that the piano forms a covert logical site documenting Liszt’s shifting pro- memory hook [Eselsbrücke], by means of which fessional identity. Although there is a limit to many composers—who are not in a position to what we can know about an improvisation with write at the desk—bungle together their oper- no acoustic trace, Liszt’s apparent incorpora- atic hack jobs.”14 tion of characteristically improvised traits into By softening, if not quite collapsing, the dis- his “compositional” process nevertheless em- tinction between the physical/tactile and men- bodies a tension between passionate sentiment, tal/imaginary in music, we might come to rein what Edward Said termed the “extreme oc- gard all composition as “slowed down improvi- casion”17 of performance, and the potential of sation.”15 Yet given that these distinctions de- ironic critique introduced by aesthetic distance. lineated categories of identity in press re- This tension bears witness to a collision be- ports rooted in the twin ascendencies of virtu- tween Liszt’s twin identities as virtuoso and osity and Werktreue in nineteenth-century Eu- composer. rope, they remain a historical reality. There is thus a corresponding need to maintain a dis- Fragments of a FRAGMENT DANTESQUE tinction between improvisation and composition, the former connoting a performativity in- The two earliest extant fragments of what applicable to concepts of the latter within the would become the “Dante” Sonata are in Liszt’s semiotics of the self-contained work.16 hand and can be dated within a few months of his first-documented performance of it (25 Oc- tober 1839). They capture two characteristic (2004), 219–28, here 224. Only the extent of the activation musical elements that he would retain—both in these regions (measured using functional magnetic reso- modified—as bookends in the final published nance imaging) in two areas specific to physical movement (the primary sensorimotor cortices and posterior pa- sonata. The blank staves and paper types indi- rietal regions) differentiates imaging and executing piano cate that these remarkable sketches were not performance. surviving shards from a full manuscript; on the 14“Wir wissen endlich nur zu gut, daß das Piano die heimliche Eselsbrücke bildet, mittelst deren viele contrary, I would speculate that they were never Componisten, welche nicht am Pulte zu schreiben im intended to be “complete” for the purposes of Stande sind, ihre Opernsachen zusammenstümpern” his performances in 1839–40. Instead, while (E. K., “Einige Worte über Improvisation,” Berlin Musik- Zeitung Echo 41 [10 Oct. 1852], 323). Liszt always conceived of this work as his “com- 15Schoenberg famously expressed this opinion in “Brahms position,” these sketches may well have func- the Progressive”: “Composition is a kind of slowed down tioned respectively as an aide-mémoire and as improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep pace with the torrent of ideas” (Komponieren ist eine Art a memento for two essential components of verlangsamte Improvisation; oft kann man nicht schnell what was initially more akin to an improvised genug schreiben, um mit dem Strom der Gedanken Schritt free fantasy: a rhetorical introduction and a zu halten) (Stil und Gedanke [Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1976], p. 69). principal diatonic thematic progression pre- 16Beethoven certainly maintained such a distinction in his sented here as the fantasy’s coda. In other words, advice to his student, Archduke Rudolph, tasking him with the sketches might be a mnemonic frame for a exercises in composition “when sitting at the pianoforte [where] you should jot down your ideas in the form of sketches,” adding later that “you should also compose without a pianoforte” (Susan Kagan, Archduke Rudolph, Beethoven’s Patron, Pupil, and Friend: His Life and Music 17Edward Said, “Performance as an Extreme Occasion,” [Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1988], p. 32. Briefwechsel, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University no.1686). Press, 1991), pp. 1–34.

55 19TH planned improvisation. MS I 18, no.1 (plate 1), Années de Pèlerinage.21 All four principal CENTURY MUSIC ca.1839, presents the opening tritones, which sources for the Sonata are now housed in the establish a demonic topic of descent wholly Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar;22 the appropriate to the journey into hell that ini- 1840 fragment from Prague, plate 2, is in the tially inspired the artistic conception.18 Later Prague State Conservatoire. Liszt’s original ex- revisions to this passage in manuscripts from emplar for MS I 76 from ca. 1840 is lost, and all 1840 to 1858 are cosmetic.19 Dated 11 March but one of the sources from which I have worked 1840, MS 1C.51 (plate 2), a manuscript hitherto are copyist’s versions; all show his corrections, unconnected to the “Dante” Sonata, shows a alterations, and revisions. By studying these sketch of the Sonata’s characteristic major- documents, and following extensive research chord progression written in the Stammbuch by Rena Mueller into Liszt’s manuscripts, I of a female admirer in Prague, suggesting that have been able to update Sharon Winklhofer’s Liszt may have performed it there and, on re- study from 1977 and chart the evolution of the quest, copied this music after the fact.20 Curi- Sonata from its origins in 1839 as a sketch 23 ously, the progression is notated in C whereas entitled Fragment dantesque. The genetic and it occurs (substantively) in both F and D in the stemmatological information is presented in earliest complete manuscript ca.1840 (MS I 76), Appendix A (pp. 92–93), and Table 1; fig. 1 where it forms the basis of a thematic and gives a chronology of the copyists in the pro- modal contrast with the main chromatic theme duction of the known manuscripts. in the Sonata’s later versions (compare with ex. The revisions and evident preparation of 6). This discrepancy of key could represent a manuscripts between 1839 and 1840, 1849 and kindly simplification by Liszt for an admiring amateur, but it may also suggest a characteristically improvisatory performance in Prague that was more tonally discursive than MS I 76 21Liszt used four different titles in the preparation of his manuscripts, all of which suggest an explicitly literary records. conception: “Fragment dantesque” connotes an unfinished The final version of the Sonata, entitled Après form that, for Romantic poetry in particular, pointed to une lecture du Dante—Fantasie quasi Sonata, the infinite by its very incompleteness; “Paralipomènes à la Divina Comedia” means material omitted from the body was first published by Schott in 1858 as the of a text, appended as a supplement; “Prolégomènes à la seventh and final piece in the second volume Divina Comedia” indicates that Liszt changed his mind, (Deuxième Année, Italie) of Liszt’s collection preferring not to append but to preface his music to a reading of the text; “Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasie quasi Sonata” is derived from Victor Hugo’s poem of almost the same name from the collection Les Voix intérieures (1837) and allowed Liszt to characterize his 18MS I 18, no.1 is in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, relation to Beethoven with the subtitle. Liszt’s use of “du” Weimar. A transcription of this fragment was first pub- rather than Hugo’s “de” in the final title is most likely lished in the Journal of the British Liszt Society 28 (2003), deliberate, drawing on the German practice of using the 34. definite article to refer to a famous person or thing, and 19See Appendix A for a stemmatological study of the attempting to translate this into French. In a letter to Sonata’s extant sources. Joachim Raff from 1 August 1849, Liszt refers to his piece 20Liszt wrote to Marie d’Agoult the same day he signed the as Fantasia quasi Sonata (Prologomènes [sic] zu Dantes manuscript (Wednesday, 11 March 1840), explaining that Göttlicher Comödie), but this title is not, to my knowl- he had just given his fifth concert in Prague that morning. edge, recorded in any of the extant manuscripts. Raff’s His comment that “the Bohemian aristocracy . . . have letter is cited in Sharon Winklhofer, “Liszt, Marie d’Agoult been most charming to me. Here, as elsewhere, the women and the ‘Dante’ Sonata,” this journal 1 (1977), 30. are on my side,” makes it plausible that the notated chord 22In chronological order, these are MSS I 18, no.1; I 18, progression from the “Dante” Sonata may have been writ- no.3; I 76; I 17; I 18, no.2; I 1377. See Appendix A for an ten for a female aristocrat following a performance explanation of the sources, the findings of which are pre- (L’aristocratie de Bohême . . . a été charmantissime pour sented schematically here as fig. 1. moi. Ici comme ailleurs, les femmes sont pour moi). See 23Rena Mueller, Liszt’s “Tasso” Sketchbook: Studies in Correspondance / Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, ed. Serge Sources and Revisions (Michigan: UMI, 1986), pp. 147–54. Gut and Jacqueline Bellas (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 551. In See also Sharon Winklhofer, Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor: A 1962 a facsimile of this, MS 1C.51, was published in a Study of Autograph Sources and Documents (Ph.D. diss., collection of facsimiles with the text: “Ein Adagio, das University of California, Los Angeles, 1978), subsequently Liszt einer unbekannten Prager Verehrerin ins Stammbuch published (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), pp. 53– schrieb.” See Alexander Buchner, Franz Liszt in Böhmen 84, and Winklhofer’s shorter study of the “Dante” Sonata, (Prague: Artia, 1962), p. 83. “Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, and the ‘Dante’ Sonata.”

56 DAVID TRIPPETT Virtuosity in the “Dante” Sonata

Plate 1: Liszt’s ﬁrst sketch for the opening of the “Dante” Sonata, ca. 1839; MS I 18, no. 1. Courtesy of Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar. Foto: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

57 19TH CENTURY MUSIC

Plate 2: A sketch of the “Dante” Sonata’s diatonic theme, dated 11 March 1840; MS 1C.51. Courtesy of the Prague State Conservatoire Archive.

Date / MS / copyist

9/1839 —> I-18, n.1 (Liszt) 3/11/1840 —> IC-51 “Prague fragment” (Liszt) ca. 1840 —> I-18, n.3 (Liszt) ca. 1840 —> Liszt’s exemplar (lost) ca. 1840 —> I-76 (Gaetano Belloni + Adolph Stahr) revised by Liszt ca. 1849 —> I-17 (Eduard Henschke) revised by Liszt ca. 1853 —> I-18, n.2 (Liszt) ca. 1854 —> I-137 (Joachim Raff) corrected by Liszt ca. 1857 —> Stichvorlage 1858 —> Schott’s edition

Figure 1

58 Table 1 DAVID TRIPPETT Transmission of the “Dante” Sonata Virtuosity in the “Dante” Sonata Date Title MS Folia Watermark Hand

9/26/1839 Fragment . . . I-18, n.1 - G. Eck Liszt 3/11/1840 - IC-51 - - Liszt ca. 1840 - I-18, n.3 - Blacons/Shield Belloni ca. 1840–41 - I-76 3–17 Blacons/Shield Belloni ca. 1848–49 Paralipomènes . . . I-76 1–2 G. Eck Stahr ca. 1848–49 - I-76 18–22, + collettes G. Eck Liszt ca. 7/1849 - I-17 2–23a, 25a-l, 26–31a, 36–37 No watermark Henschke ca. 1851 - I-17 32–35 No watermark Liszt ca. 1852 Prolégomènes . . . I-17 1 No watermark Henschke/Liszt ca. 1852–53 - I-17 10a, 15a, + 24–25 No watermark Liszt ca 1853–54 - I-18, n.2 - No watermark Liszt ca. 1853–56 Après une Lec . . . I-137 Complete No watermark Raff

1853, and ca.1854 and 1858 suggest that Liszt Liszt’s own letters make no reference to the was working toward publication at three differ- 1853 performance, it seems likely that although ent stages.24 Contemporary with the first two he publicly programmed the Sonata only once stages, a letter to Marie d’Agoult, a concert in Vienna, he may have performed it privately review in the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung, and to Weimar guests on numerous occasions. This a letter from the Hungarian violinist Eduard opens up the possibility that the stages of com- Reményi report that Liszt performed the work position represented in the early manuscripts in at least three different versions.25 Given that may have been directed less toward the completion of a final, immutable version than toward an evolving collection of musical ideas subject 24There is no doubt Liszt intended his Fragment dantesque to continual reworking. Composition, at least to be published in late 1840. Writing to the portrait artist with regard to this music, would thus have Henri Lehmann, Liszt asks: “Have I never played you my become an open-ended process of refinement. Fragment dantesque? I don’t believe so. I will publish it willy-nilly at the beginning of Winter with the first of my It is revealing that, for Liszt, this was at no Years of Pilgrimage” (Vous ai-je jamais joué mon Frag- time incongruous with his conception of the ment Dantesque? Je ne crois pas. Bon gré mal gré je le Sonata as a composed work. publierai à l’entrée de l’hivera avec la première de Mes années de pèlerinage). Liszt to Lehmann, 20 September I will argue that the relation of the two early 1840, England, in Une Correspondance romantique: Ma- fragmentary sketches to the completed score is dame d’Agoult, Liszt, Henri Lehmann, ed. Solange Joubert analogous to the relation of Liszt’s identity as a (Paris: Flammarion, 1947), p. 128. Beyond this evidence, the presence of Liszt’s manuscript markings in red crayon— virtuoso improviser to his identity as a com- which he tended to use for final corrections—suggests the preparation of a publishable version. Only red crayon could be seen clearly above the often densely layered revisions in pencil or pen. Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, p. 388. Heinrich Adami published a 25Liszt performed the “Dante” Sonata in different forms at review of Liszt’s performance in Allgemeine Theaterzeitung the Hôtel de l’Europe on 25 October 1839, at his fourth (7 Dec. 1839), 1197. Reményi reports in a letter that Liszt morning concert (of six) in Vienna on 5 December 1839, played a version of his sonata for him in June 1853: “This and in Weimar during June 1853, when he performed a scribbler allows himself to address a great man—after hav- later version entitled Prolégomènes à la Divina Commedia ing heard . . . la Fantasie d’après Dante, etc.” (Briefe to Reményi. Liszt mentions his private performance to hervorrangender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt, ed. La Mara Marie d’Agoult on October 25; see Correspondance / Franz [Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1895], I, 283).

59 19TH poser. Not surprisingly, the manuscripts for the Liszt-Thalberg rivalry showed the extent to CENTURY 28 MUSIC the “Dante” Sonata indicate that his working which Liszt had miscalculated, and in this methods did not alter decisively as Liszt as- light his appointment a decade later as Hof- sumed his duties as Kapellmeister in 1848 and Kapellmeister to the court of Weimar can be began to change his goals and aspirations as viewed as a much-needed public endorsement well as his instrument (from piano to orches- of his status as a composer through the court’s tra). When his professional identity changed, institutional pedigree. Schumann’s oft-cited Liszt intensified his revision of the Sonata, re- comment on the Liszt “problem,” however, visiting the work at least twice; but, as I will remains typical in its marking of a disjuncture suggest, the methods by which he continually between identities: “While [Liszt] developed his recomposed this music remain essentially the piano playing to an extraordinary degree, the methods of a virtuoso improviser, lending the composer in him lagged behind; this always piece a problematic status within the norma- leads to disparity [Mißverhältnis], the conse- tive categories of work and improvisation. We quences of which are felt in his most recent can extrapolate from this that the various stages works.”29 Charles Rosen articulates the mod- of revision to the “Dante” Sonata—like the ern equivalent of this influential view when he letter to Carl Alexander—document Liszt’s de- identifies a passage from Liszt’s tenth Hungar- sire to exceed the category of virtuoso and gain ian Rhapsody as “the zero degree of musical acceptance as a composer within the post- invention if we insist that invention must con- Beethovenian canon. sist of melody, rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint.” For Rosen, Liszt’s music is “conceived Debating Musical Legitimacy: absolutely for public performance,”30 and the PHANTASIEREN and KOMPONIEREN persuasiveness of his remarks derives partly from their congruity with Liszt’s documented As a composer, Liszt had endured acrimony in experience as an improvising and embellishing the press ever since 1837, when he lambasted performer as opposed to a formally trained com- the music of his rival Sigismond Thalberg as poser. Back in 1839, Schumann explicitly un- “pretentiously empty and mediocre . . . su- derscored this point, reminding his Neue Zeit- premely monotonous and therefore supremely schrift readers that Liszt had received scant boring” in the Revue et Gazette musicale de formal instruction in composition.31 This lack Paris.26 At the time, he misjudged the severity of responses this would elicit from the Parisian beau monde, anticipating Fétis’s vengeful ar- 28See Rainer Kleinertz, “Subjektivität und Öffentlichkeit: ticle with the throwaway remark to Marie Liszts Rivalität mit Thalberg und ihre Folgen,” in Der junge Liszt: Referate des 4. Europäischen Liszt-Symposions: d’Agoult that the journalistic ping pong “could Wien 1991, ed. Gottfried Scholz (Munich: Musikverlag E. all become very amusing.”27 Recent studies of Katzbichler, 1993); Gooley, “Liszt, Thalberg and the Pari- sian Publics,” in The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 18–77; Christo- pher H. Gibbs, “‘Just Two Words. Enormous Success’: Liszt’s 1838 Vienna Concerts,” in Franz Liszt and His 26“Prétentleusement vides et médiocres . . . souverainement World, ed. Gooley and Gibbs (Princeton: Princeton Uni- monotone, et partant souverainement ennuyeuse” (Liszt, versity Press, 2006), pp. 167–230. “Revue critique: M. Thalberg.—Grand Fantasie, oeuvre 29“Brachte er [Liszt] es nun als Spieler auf eine erstaunliche 22.—1er et 2e Caprices, œuvres 15 et 19,” La Revue et Höhe, so war doch der Komponist zurückgeblieben, und Gazette musicale de Paris 4 [8 Jan. 1837], 17–20, here 19). hier wird immer ein Mißverhältnis entstehen, das sich 27“Cela pourra devenir amusant” (Liszt to Marie d’Agoult, auffallend auch bis in seine letzten Werke fortgerächt hat.” 13 Feb. 1837, Paris, in Correspondance / Franz Liszt, Marie Schumann’s comment occurs in his 1839 review of piano d’Agoult, p. 265). Fétis’s first response to Liszt’s public études, including Liszt’s Étude en douze exercices (op. 1) denigration of Thalberg’s Grande Fantasie, op. 22, appeared and their recomposition as twelve Grandes études. Trans- in Vert-vert on 16 January 1837. His more extended, com- lation adapted from Schumann, On Music and Musicians, parative article—“MM. Thalberg et Liszt”—was published trans. Paul Rosenfeld, ed. Konrad Wolff (New York: Pan- in La Revue et Gazette musicale 17 (23 April 1837), pp. theon, 1946), p. 147. 135–42. Liszt failed to avert a thorny public dialogue by 30Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Bath: Fontana, responding: “A M. le Professeur Fétis,” Revue 20 (14 May 1996), p. 507. 1837), 169–72; and he was in turn answered by Fétis a 31“Zu anhaltenden Studien in der Komposition scheint er second time: “A monsieur le directeur de la Gazette Musi- [Liszt] keine Ruhe, vielleicht auch keinen ihm gewachsenen cale de Paris,” Revue 21 (21 May 1837), 173–75. Meister gefunden zu haben; desto mehr studierte er als

60 was a leitmotif of Liszt’s reception as a com- the instant of inspiration, unmediated by criti- DAVID TRIPPETT poser in the 1830s, a time when he chose not to cal reflection—whether in the extended form Virtuosity in publicize that, in his teens, he had in fact stud- of methodical study or the momentary form of the “Dante” ied with Ferdinand Paër, Antonin Reicha, and abstraction from improvisation—would surpass Sonata briefly with Salieri.32 the “mediated” efforts of more schooled com- Two competing paradigms of artistic creation posers.33 are concealed here. For Schumann, composing In opposing critical self-reflection, Liszt’s (or improvising) with an innate but unnurtured view resonates with a distinguished Romantic talent inevitably produced results inferior to tradition of subliminal artistic invention, from those of a properly educated mind endowed Shelley, who in his Defense of Poetry (1840) with similar artistic gifts. For Liszt, real talent observed: “The mind in creation is as a fading (or perhaps just genius) had the power to nur- coal, which some invisible influence, like an ture itself. While many Romantic composers— inconstant wind, awakens to transitory bright- Schumann and Liszt included—sought to come ness. . . . When composition begins, inspiration to terms with the delicate relationship between is already on the decline, and the most glorious learning and inspiration, craft and genius, Liszt’s poetry that has ever been communicated to the artistic credo at this time seems to have been world is probably a feeble shadow of the origi- formed according to a blend of pragmatism and nal conceptions of the poet.”34 To Schopen- idealism. He could no more undo his years of hauer, for whom “the sketches of great masters improvisatory practice than he could integrate are often more effective than their finished a training he never fully absorbed. Unlike paintings . . . the work done at one stroke . . . Schumann, therefore, he appears to lean to- [is] perfected in the inspiration of the first con- ward the notion that the fruits of creation in ception and drawn unconsciously as it were; likewise the melody that comes entirely without reflection and wholly as if by inspiration Virtuos” (“Etüden für das Pianoforte,” [1839], rpt. in Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker . . . [has] the great merit of . . . free impulse of von Robert Schumann, ed. Martin Kreisig, vol. 1 [5th edn. genius, without any admixture of delibera- Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1914], p. 439). tion.”35 32Gooley’s detailed study of Parisian concert reviews has demonstrated that by 1835 the complex textures of Liszt’s Writing from a pedagogical perspective in published original works—Apparitions, the Harmonies 1841, however, A. B. Marx made an antitheti- poétiques et réligieuses, and the Clochette fantasy—had cal claim when he spoke of a creative process only served to convince audiences that, in spite of receiv- ing wide acclaim as a pianist, he was in fact a deficient that proceeds conversely from intuitive con- composer. See Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 24. See also ception to action, Anschauung to Tat. Marx Dieter Torkewitz discussion of G. Schilling’s article of implies that views like Shelley’s were out of 1836 in “Die Erfassung der ‘Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses’ von Liszt,” Liszt Studien II (Munich: Emil date, already ossified by the time of what Heine Katzbichler, 1981), p. 228. would call Lisztomania: Joseph d’Ortigue’s early biography of Liszt (in the Ga- zette musicale de Paris from 14 June 1835) downplays the significance of Liszt’s music teachers with withering If anyone still desired to return to that old misunder- dismissiveness: Liszt was “humiliated to find himself treated standing about the dreamlike unconsciousness of like a school boy and . . . took a dislike to [Czerny, though later recognized his] tact and personality”; he studied only “clefs [and] religious music” with Salieri, and later on, just “counterpoint” with Reicha. No further elaboration or grati- 33We may speculate that, for Schumann, education and tude is given to Liszt’s music pedagogues, and, if anything, the requisite qualities of a “legitimate” composer must d’Ortigue emphasizes the autodidactic aspects of the boy’s have been an ambiguous issue. He felt himself schooling. See “Joseph d’Ortigue: Franz Liszt,” trans. Vincent undereducated in comparison with Mendelssohn, for ex- Giroud, in Liszt and His World, pp. 313–15. The extent to ample, yet was doubtless aware of Forkel’s claim that J. S. which this may be creative self-fashioning on Liszt’s part is Bach was a “self taught genius.” I am grateful to John Butt debatable, but as Benjamin Walton points out, both of for bringing this observation to my attention. d’Ortigue’s earlier biographies of musician friends (Berlioz, 34Percy Bysshe Shelley, Literary and Philosophical Criti- George Onslow) had used material “supplied directly by cism, ed. John Shawcross (London: Henry Frowde, 1909), their subjects. . . . It is not unreasonable to suppose that p. 153. something similar happened [with Liszt]” (Walton, “The 35Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Inner Nature of Art,” in First Biography: Joseph d’Ortigue on Franz Liszt at Age Philosophical Writings, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher (New Twenty-Three,” in Liszt and His World, p. 305). York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 100, 102.

61 19TH genial creativity, he would find himself corrected period of culture can be produced only by a CENTURY not only by the words of Goethe but by the works 40 MUSIC process of conscious creation.” and words of the musical masters, namely by Mozart By following the “outmoded” beliefs of himself—who reveals a remarkably clear conscious- Shelley and Schopenhauer, however, Liszt in ness of his intentions and their execution in his his early improvisatory fragments and free fan- letters. But principally speaking, this consciousness tasies would appear—indirectly—to have taken can be nothing other than an artistic consciousness, 41 one that sets out from contemplation [Anschauung] Goethe at his word: Im Anfang war die Tat! and leads to action [Tat].36 In a defensive comment on his musical procedures dating from 1856, Liszt explicitly cel- Though he later idealized this progression ebrates a musical structure that is sinnlich into a “completely integral [einheitsvoll] pro- rather than geistig. Writing to Louis Köhler, cess of contemplation and act,”37 Marx, like who had dedicated a treatise on piano playing Schumann, regarded a lack of training as the and composition to him, Liszt eschews all for- first stumbling block for a ragged composer malist dogma: such as Liszt. Not surprisingly, in 1854 Hanslick codified the necessity of music training as part However others may judge of these things, [my works] of a compositional model hostile to virtuoso are for me the necessary development of my inner experiences, which have brought me to the convic- improvisation, thereby cementing a paradigm tion that invention and feeling are not so entirely for composition that would increasingly define evil in Art. Certainly you very rightly observe that the dominant critical aesthetics of the nine- the forms (which are too often changed by quite teenth century. Schumann, too, seemed sym- respectable people into formulas) “First Subject, pathetic to this trend in 1848 and advised a Middle Subject, Closing Subject, etc., may very much student: “Above all things, persevere in com- grow into a habit, because they must be so thor- posing mentally, not with the help of the in- oughly natural, primitive, and very easily intelli- strument, and keep on twisting and turning the gible.” Without making the slightest objection to principal melodies about in your head until this opinion, I only beg for permission to be allowed you can say to yourself: ‘Now they will do’.”38 to decide upon the forms by the contents, and even In this view, the authority of historical con- should this permission be withheld from me from the side of the most commendable criticism, I shall sciousness defeats that of momentary ecstasy nonetheless go on in my own modest way quite in an idealist hierarchy of mind over body: “The cheerfully. After all, in the end it comes principally composer works slowly and intermittently,” to this—what the ideas are, and how they are carried Hanslick insisted pace Liszt, “forming the mu- out and worked up—and that leads us always back sical artwork . . . for posterity.”39 Even Wagner, to the feeling and invention, if we would not scramble writing to Hanslick about Tannhäuser eight in the rut of a mere trade.42 years earlier, had voiced a similar, historically conscious view: “Do not underestimate the The fulcrum on which this comment pivots is power of reflection; the unconsciously created the outward, or let us say readily perceivable, work of art belongs to periods remote from our structures of music. In 1856 Liszt was thinking own: the work of art of the most advanced about these matters in the context of the symphonic poem: a project of serious composition. But even before this new conception of large- 36Cited in, and adapted from, A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven, trans. Scott Burnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 19. 37Ibid., p. 31. 40Wagner to Eduard Hanslick, 1 January 1847, Dresden, in 38“Vor Allem beharren Sie dabei, innerlich—nicht mit Hülfe Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. and trans. Stewart des Instruments—zu erfinden, die melodischen Haupt- Spencer and Barry Millington (New York: W. W. Norton, motive im Kopfe so lange zu drehen und zu wenden, bis 1988), p. 134. Sie sich sagen können: ‘nun ist es gut’” (Schumann to 41Goethe’s Faust famously rejects the word, meaning, and Ludwig Meinardus, 16 September 1848, Dresden, in Rob- mental power before stating: “Mir hilft der Geist! Auf ert Schumanns Briefe, ed. Gustav Jansen [2nd edn. Leipzig: einmal seh’ ich Rat / Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war Breitkopf and Härtel, 1904], p. 289). die Tat” (J. W. von Goethe, Faust, part I). 39Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. and 42Liszt to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, Weimar, in La Mara, ed. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), p. 49. Letters of Franz Liszt, I, 273–74.

62 scale form, the sense of “form” contra “for- The gefallener Engel metaphor is potent not DAVID TRIPPETT mula” evidently sat uneasily at the intersec- only for its geistliche connotations and its ironic Virtuosity in tion of music criticism and composition for inversion of the infamous adulation of Liszt by the “Dante” both Liszt and Schumann. As early as the mid- women, but also for its invocation of history. It Sonata 1830s it also characterized a virulent line of suggests that before the shallow virtuosity of a criticism leveled at virtuoso improvisers, and postlapsarian present there were prelapsarian Liszt’s belief in the primacy of literature—that “artists” (“our simple fathers,” like biblical pa- musical forms should be determined entirely triarchs), the paradigm for which is Beethoven. by their poetic contents—made him especially The latter’s celebrated virtuoso improvisations vulnerable. Carl Gollmick’s 1842 invective invited comparison—evidently unflattering on against the “fallen angels” of contemporary vir- occasion—with Liszt’s, whose efforts Gollmick tuosity, for example, seems like a thinly veiled sought to “demonize” in the grand but cor- assault on the practices that Liszt represented, rupted form of the fallen angel. if not on the man himself. Gollmick’s principal Similarly, if more tolerantly, Carl Czerny in complaint was the impossibility of comprehend- his treatise Systematische Anleitung zum Fan- ing improvised forms with reference to prior tasieren auf dem Pianoforte (1829) explains that models: if a composed work may be compared to a symmetrical architectural edifice, an improvised Give us golden unity in your performance, and the Fantasy is like an English garden: “seemingly intellectual sympathy of any good composition, yet irregular, but full of surprising variety, and ex- undestroyed, uninterrupted through bizarre, lugu- ecuted . . . according to a plan.”44 Yet Czerny is brious passions or symptoms of world-weariness. also pragmatic in emphasizing that the distinc- Give us—since you are a pianist—once a free Fantasie tion between a “work” and an “improvisation” with an elegant and securely performed fugal theme ultimately depends on the listener’s percep- as our simple fathers did—but what do I hear! Noth- ing of these? And you’ve been playing for half an tion: “When the practicing musician possesses hour! For the sake of the book’s good contents I the capability not only of executing at his in- want to forgive you the long confused prelude. But strument the ideas that his inventive power, at last give us something. Begin at long last my inspiration, or mood have evoked in him at the noble-minded artist. But how? You have already fin- instant of their conception but of so combining ished, wiping the sweat from your brow, and stand them that the coherence can have the effect on up exhausted. You can hardly respond to the bar- the listener of an actual composition—this is baric scream with which the mass goes wild about what is called: Improvising or Extemporizing you. Is then the beloved art on the rack for you? . . . [Fantasieren. (Improvisieren, Extemporier- the men shout: “God Damn! He is a devil!”—the en.)].”45 Instating the listener as a barometer of women whisper delightedly: “He is an angel!”—I agree with the latter. An angel of music—but one who has fallen!43 Teufel!’—die Frauen flüstern entzückt: ‘Es ist ein Engel!’— Ich stimme dem letztern bei. Ein Engel der Tonkunst, aber—ein gefallener!” (Carl Gollmick, “Das heutige 43“Gieb uns in deinem Vortrage die goldne Einheit, und Virtuosenwesen,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 45 [2 Dec. die geistige Sympathie irgend einer guten Composition, 1842], 185). aber unzerstört, ununterbrochen durch Bizarrien, lugubere 44Carl Czerny, Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren Leidenschaften oder Weltschmerz-Symptome. Gieb uns— auf dem Pianoforte, Op. 200 (Vienna: Diabelli, 1829), p. 3; bist du ein Klavierspieler—einmal eine freie Phantasie mit trans. Alice Michell as A Systematic Introduction to Im- einem elegant und sicher durchgeführten Fugenthema, wie provisation on the Pianoforte (New York: Longman, 1983), es unsre einfachen Väter taten.—Aber was höre ich! Von p. 2. dem allen nichts? Und du spielst schon eine halbe Stunde! 45“Wenn der ausübende Tonkünstler die Fähigkeit besitzt, Ich will dir die lange bunte Vorrede um des guten Inhalts die Ideed, welche seine Erfindungsgabe, Begeisterung, oder des Buches willen gern verzeihen. Aber gieb uns endlich Laune ihm eingiebt, sogleich, im Augenblick des einen solchen. Beginne endlich, mein edler Künstler. Doch Entstehens, auf seinem Instrument nicht auszuführen, wie? Du bist schon zu Ende, wischest dir den Schweiß von sondern so zu verbinden, dass der Zusammenhang auf den der Stirne, und stehst erschöpft auf. Das barbarische Hörer die Wirkung eines eigentlichen Tonstückes haben Geschrei, das dir die Menge entgegentobt, kannst du kaum kann,—so nennt man dieses: Fantasieren. (Improvisieren, erwiedern vor Ermattung. Wird dir denn die holde Kunst Extemporieren)” (Czerny, Systematische Anleitung, p. 3; zur Folterbank? . . . Die Männer rufen: ‘God dam! er ist ein Michell, A Systematic Introduction, p. 1).

63 19TH formal coherence ascribes the unity of a perfor- hands ex tempore.”49 Similarly an anonymous CENTURY MUSIC mance not to the origin of the performance (a Viennese critic drew a distinction between text or a sketch) but to its destination. The Improvisieren/Extemporieren, and Phantasier- listener qua destination becomes a space in en, arguing that the terms should differentiate which a dazzling multiplicity of rhetorical ef- the levels of formal coherence in an improvisa- fects can condense into a “work.” But such a tion. Whereas Phantasieren was essentially un- work remains a text without an inscription, bound from prior conceptions of form, the other irrespective of whether the improvising per- two expressions: “connote simply the fusion of former (after Czerny) or the able listener (after invention and formal realization”—that is, they Gollmick) is held to be the agent of cohesion.46 relate to recognizably “composed” forms: “One With its implicit emphasis on destination, can improvise a regular sonata, an overture, a Czerny’s textbook definition expounds a syn- strict fugue etc. This, however, cannot be called onymy between “Fantasieren,” “Improvisier- a “Fantasie” by any means.”50 en,” and “Extemporieren,” although the latter A review of Liszt’s earliest public improvisa- two terms are largely dropped for the remain- tion—dating from his tutelage under Czerny— der of the treatise.47 While Czerny explains records a similar differentiation. The eleven- methods practicing improvisation in different year-old’s Viennese debut took place on 1 De- styles, with different types and numbers of cember 1822, and his concluding “free fantasy” themes, and even with different audiences in performance at this concert elicited a correc- mind, he offers no discussion of formal organi- tive in the Allgemeine Zeitung: “We should zation except as it is determined by the themes prefer to call the fantasy a ‘capriccio,’ for sev- and their strategically varied appearances. In eral themes united by voluntary passages do other words, Czerny’s emphasis is on the the- not deserve that magnificent title, too often matic invention of the moment rather than on any premeditated design. Of course, this resulted in formal organization of a kind, although 49“Und die freie Phantasie ist jetzt nur ein unter den “in a much freer form than a written work,” for Händen gesetztes Musikstück ex tempore” (Christern, Czerny emphasized the listener qua destina- “Vom musikalischen Phantasie,” Blätter für Musik und Literatur 4 [Oct. 1840], 21–22, here 21). tion by insisting that an improvisation “must 50The full comment reads: “We regard the expressions be fashioned into an organized totality [only] as Fantasieren, and subsequently Improvisieren and far as is necessary to remain comprehensible Extemporieren, however, not quite as synonymous as the 48 author suggests, rather we hold that the latter two expres- and interesting.” sions connote simply the fusion of invention and formal In two separate critiques of Czerny’s trea- realization, whereas in the concept of ‘Fantasie’ the pow- tise, Hamburg’s Blätter für Musik und Literatur ers of the imagination predominate over form so that, in the latter, the artist immediately lends form to ideas which questioned whether a “systematic” approach his mood, enthusiasm and inventiveness have just inspired, to improvisation might render a free Fantasy and he only follows formal requirements in so far as they “only a piece [Musikstück] falling under the are essential for an artistic creation. One can improvise a regular sonata, an overture, a strict fugue etc. This, however, cannot be called a ‘Fantasie’ by any means.” (Wir halten die Ausdrücke Fantasieren, dann Improvisieren und 46The model for shifting the locus of meaning from origin Extemporieren jedoch nicht so ganz gleichbedeutend, wie to destination comes from Barthes, “The Death of the diess der Verfasser [Czerny] andeutet, sondern glauben, Author,” which empowers the agency of the reader post daß die beiden letzen Ausdrücke nur das gleichzeitige mortem. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” p. 148. Zusammentreffen der Erfindung mit der Ausführung 47Like Czerny, Hummel appears to regard “Phantasiren” bezeichnen, daß aber im Begriffe der Fantasie auch das and “Extemporiren” as synonymous in his Clavierschule; Vorherrschen der Einbildungskraft über die Form liegt, so, although he uses the term “Phantasiren” only in the text, daß in der letzteren der Künstler Ideen, welche seine Laune, the title of his seventh chapter from volume 3 is given as: Begeisterung, und Erfindungsgabe ihm eben eingibt, “Vom freien Phantasiren. (Extemporiren).” See Hummel, sogleich ausführet, und die Formen nur soweit beachten, Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum als sie zu einer Kunstleistung unerläßlich, sind. Man kann Piano-Forte-Spiel, vol. 3 (Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, 1828), eine regelmäßige Sonate, eine Overtüre, eine strenge Fuge p. 444. u.s.w. improvisieren. Allein diess nennt man noch keine 48“Obschon in viel freyeren Formen, als eine geschriebene, Fantasie.) (“Über die systematische Anleitung zum doch in soweit ein geordnetes Ganzes bilden muss, als Phantasieren auf dem Pianoforte con Carl Czerny,” Monat- nöting ist, um verständlich und interessant zu bleiben” bericht der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde des Österreich- (Czerny, Systematische Anleitung, p. 3 [Michell, p. 1]). ischen Kaiserstaates [1830]).

64 misused in our day.”51 Seven years later, Czerny creation.”54 Performers could thus distinguish DAVID TRIPPETT would categorize the Capriccio as the freest, between the Phantasieren of a loose-limbed, Virtuosity in most humorous form of fantasy-style improvi- fantasy-like work distinguished principally by the “Dante” sation: “an arbitrary linking of individual ideas thematic transformation, and Improvisieren/ Sonata without any particular development, a whim- Extemporieren distinguished principally by ref- sical and swift shifting from one motive to the erence to an established formal model. other without further relationship than that How does this discourse relate to Liszt’s prac- bestowed by chance.” If Liszt’s reviewer had a tices? In light of the emerging opposition be- similar idea, he was criticizing the boy’s appar- tween Phantasieren and spontaneous form, it ently underdeveloped ability to relate or trans- is perhaps no coincidence that Heinrich Adami, form themes.52 writing in Vienna’s Allgemeine Theaterzeitung, From this we can deduce, first, that during called the premiere of Liszt’s Fragment the 1820s Improvisieren, while not understood dantesque late in 1839 “something like an im- to belong exclusively to genre-based musical provisation [Improvisation] to which Liszt had categories, could conjure the formal traits of felt inspired after a reading of the ‘divine com- recognizable sonatas and other structures pub- edy’.” In contrast to orderly sonata structures, licly accepted as musical “works,” and, sec- the music was “a collection of colorfully cha- ond, that some contemporary musicians differ- otic ideas chasing each other, often breaking entiated between different kinds of improvisa- off quickly, exchanging one mood with another, tion, the decisive criterion for which was the bold in outline, aphoristic in execution.”55 constructive element, that is, its form. Phan- Within a month of the premiere, a subsequent tasieren, specifically, was reserved for the voic- concert review in Pressburg described Liszt’s ing of a momentary muse, a commingling of instant and idea in a Shelleyan attempt to capture the fire of creative inspiration.53 Czerny’s 54“Das Vorherrschen der Einbildungskraft über die Form liegt, so, daß in der letzteren der Künstler Ideen, welche Viennese reviewer articulated this ideal most seine Laune, Begeisterung, und Erfindungsgabe ihm eben explicitly: “The powers of the imagination pre- eingibt, sogleich ausführet, und die Formen nur soweit dominate over form so that . . . the artist im- beachten, als sie zu einer Kunstleistung unerläßlich, sind” (“Über die systematische Anleitung zum Phantasieren auf mediately lends form to ideas which his mood, dem Pianoforte con Carl Czerny,” in Monatbericht der enthusiasm and inventiveness have just in- Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde des Österreichischen spired, and he only follows formal requirements Kaiserstaates). An article entitled “Vom muskalischen Phantasieren” a in so far as they are essential for an artistic decade later argues similarly that fantasy-style improvisation is neither arbitrary passagework nor preconceived form, but draws its character from the performer’s inner imagination and is predicated on keyboard mastery: “Die Phantasie 51Allgemeine Zeitung (Jan. 1823), cited in Alan Walker, erhält ihre Nahrung, ihre Stoffe sowohl durch die äußere als Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years 1811–1847 (London: Faber, durch die innere Anschauung. Beide kann die Poesie in 1983), p. 78. ihrem Bereiche wiedergeben; erstere allein, objectiv und 52Czerny, Systematische Anleitung, p. 105 (Michell, p. 121). ohne Symbole, kann nur die bildende Kunst darstellen; 53A small number of nineteenth-century piano composi- letztere bleibt der Musik anheimgegeben. Zum Phantasieren tions published under the title of “Phantasie”—notably bedarf es also der inneren Anschauung, der lebendigen Beethoven’s op. 27 and op. 77, Schubert’s Wandererfantasie Aufregung des Gemüths zu Gefühlen, Eindrücken und and “Graz” Fantasia, Hummel’s op. 123, Mendelssohn’s leidenschaftlichen, mehr oder weniger schaften Affecten. op. 28, and Schumann’s ops. 12 and 17—elevate this pur- Der Künstler, welcher phantasieren will, soll seiner Fertigkeit suit of momentary inspiration to the status of a work. so sehr Meister sein, daß alle Gradationen und Nüancen der These crafted “improvisations” reverse Czerny’s notion of Töne, Melodien und Akkorde sich zu bestimmten an unnotated Improvisation that attains the semblance of Empfindungs-Ausdrücken runden” (Christern, “Vom a work by its vestige of formal coherence, for they are musikalischen Phantasie,” Blätter für Musik und Literatur works by virtue of being printed and they attain “improvi- [Oct. 1840], 22). satory” status through overt compositional artifice. These 55“Ungefähr wie eine Improvisation, zu welcher sich Liszt “Phantasie” works are thus distinct from the more preva- nach dem Durchlesen der ‘göttlichen Komödie’ begeistert lent opera “fantasies” of the period; they can be viewed as gefühlt hatte, ein Aggregat von bunt durcheinander direct outgrowths of the improvisatory tradition under dis- sagenden Ideen, oft schnell abbrechend, eine Gemüth- cussion. By contrast, it seems that almost no pieces were stimmung mit der anderen vertauschend, im Entwurfe published with the title “Improvisation” because any such kühn, in der Ausführing aphoristisch” (Heinrich Adami’s improvisation, if published, would simply have been given review in the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung [7 Dec. 1839], its appropriate formal title—sonata, variations, etc. 1197).

65 19TH most recent compositions similarly: “now and of these protests against confusion and disor- CENTURY MUSIC then bizarre . . . not without thoroughness, but der, it is revealing that in his review article of still more deeply felt than thought, they al- 1839 Schumann compared Liszt’s compositional most seem more born from the momentary aesthetic unfavorably to that of Chopin, and sentiment of the soul, more like one of the explained that the latter “always has structure Fantasies mocking customary bounds than like . . . there always runs the thread of a melody.”59 calm conception.” Without specifying whether Similar criticisms were common in this pe- or not Liszt performed his new Fragment in riod—even from would-be supporters—and Pressburg, the author (“J. R.”) contributes to some commentators merely assumed that a the discourse on Phantasieren by referring the sense of unity had to be determined by the “composed” to a calm aesthetic while constru- listener’s ascription of a unified subjectivity to ing Lisztian “Phantasie” as more fractured, un- the performer. Thus in 1838 another Viennese controllable, and volatile: “now [these pieces] critic speculated: “The exemplariness of the spread light and warmth—now wildly flaring form leaves something to be wished . . . [Liszt] flames—consuming for their own hearth.”56 has perhaps not found the time to make his In his first known private performance of works more vocal and more comprehensible to the Fragment, given at the Hôtel de l’Europe on the general public. . . . Perhaps it is simply 25 October 1839, Liszt boasted that the sole because of his all-powerful subjectivity that listener “was taken aback” by the experience.57 they are in their perfection only comprehen- And as late as the 1887 English premiere of the sible and playable by him.”60 much revised final version, performed by Liszt’s student Walter Bache, a baffled critic for the Musical Times wrote: “The most conspicuous Laaber-Verlag, 1985), p. 129; Rudolph Kokai, Franz Liszt of Liszt’s works was a so-called Fantasia quasi in seinen frühen Klavierwerken (Budapest: Bärenreiter, Sonata, ‘Après une lecture de [sic] Dante.’ This 1969), pp. 13ff.; Humphrey Searle, The Music of Liszt (Lon- don: Williams & Norgate, 1954), p. 32; Alan Walker, Liszt is a most extraordinary composition, of which (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), pp. 42–45; Louis Kentner, it is absolutely impossible to form any idea at a “Solo Piano Music: 1827–61,” in Liszt: The Man and His first hearing . . . we could not trace any definite Music, ed. Alan Walker (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970), pp. 79–133; Derek Watson, Liszt (London: Dent & Sons, meaning in the constant progression of dis- 1989), pp. 247–48. cords of which the piece is made up.”58 In view 59“Chopin hat doch Formen; unter den wunderlichen Gebilden seiner Musik zieht sich doch immer der rosige Faden einer Melodie fort” (rpt. in Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker von Robert Schumann, p. 440). 56The full paragraph reads: “Was die Compositionen dieses English trans. Paul Rosenfeld, On Music and Musicians, musikalischen Byron [Liszt] anbelangt, so sind sie meist ed. Konrad Wolff (New York: Pantheon, 1946), pp. 147–48. eine Mischung des lyrisch-episch und romantischen Styles, 60Carl Tausenau, “Liszt und Thalberg,” Allgemeine doch ist letzterer bei Weitem vorherrschender,—oft weich— musikalische Anzeiger, 7 February 1838; cited in Gooley, nie weichlich, bisweilen bizarre,—immer großartig,—nicht The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 47. When the twenty-two-year-old ohne Gründlichkeit, doch noch tiefer gefühlt als gedacht, Felix Mendelssohn improvised in public, by contrast, the scheinen sie fast mehr Geburten momentaner Seelen- result was reportedly “as fluent and well planned as a stimmung und einer der gewöhnlichen Schranken written work,” according to Sir George Macfarren. See spottenden Phantasie, als ruhiger Konception—sie sind bald George Grove, “Mendelssohn,” in Dictionary of Music Licht und Wärme verbreitend—bald wild auflodernde and Musicians (1st edn. London: Macmillan, 1882), vol. 2, Flammen,—verzehrend für ihren eignen Herd” (“Corre- p. 300. The composer’s correspondence is peppered with spondenz-Nachrichten: Preussburg, den 23. Dez. 1839”). his complaints of feeling ill at ease at the pressure this This is contained in a small collection of thus-far uniden- entailed; he once described the illusion of creating works tifiable German press articles about Liszt between 1838 extempore in public as “madness . . . I rarely feel so fool- and 1847, which are held in the Nationalarchiv der Rich- ish as when I sat down there to serve up my fantasy to the ard-Wagner-Stiftung in Bayreuth as: II C b 3. public. . . . It is inappropriate [ein Missbrauch] and absurd 57“À midi chez Fanna auquel je [Liszt] joue mes nouveaux at the same time” (ein Unsinn . . . Mir ist selten so närrisch morceaux. Il est surprise du Fragment dantesque” (Liszt to zu Muthe gewesen, als wenn ich mich da hinsetzte, um Marie d’Agoult, 25 Oct. 1839, Venice, in Correspondance meine Phantasie dem Publikum zu produciren . . . es ist / Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, p. 112). ein Mißbruch, und ein Unsinn zugleich). See Felix 58See “Mr. Walter Bache’s Pianoforte Recital,” Musical Mendelssohn Bartholody, Reisebriefe von Felix Mendels- Times 28 (1 March 1887), 154. See also analytical critiques sohn Bartholody aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1832, ed. Paul of the “Dante” Sonata by William Newman, The Sonata Mendelssohn (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1863), p. since Beethoven (3rd edn. New York: Norton, 1983), p. 289. The differing attitudes of Liszt and Mendelssohn to 369; Wolfgang Dömling, Franz Liszt und seine Zeit (Laaber: improvisation are surely idiosyncratic to an extent, but

66 The broader reception of Liszt’s virtuosity as Liszt’s DÉDOUBLEMENT DAVID TRIPPETT composition in the 1840s was equally equivo- Virtuosity in cal. Critics were troubled by the discrepancy Liszt’s letters from the late 1830s show that— the “Dante” between his aspirations and his compositional in opposition to the task of an éxécutant—he, Sonata abilities, between harmonic experimentation too, felt the need for “great artistes” to be and formal mastery. For a virtuoso improvisa- trained in “the rules of composition,” for them tion to attain the status of a composition, the to be well versed “in counterpoint and fugue,” critical definition of a “composer” would have (even though he would later reflect that “I was had to expand to accommodate the deliberate always on bad terms with canon. I always re- introduction of musical instabilities. It was mained a stupid man of feeling”).63 Yet given probably for this very reason that Schumann, that he increasingly differentiates between his referring globally to the practice of virtuoso own dual identities in precisely this way, Liszt extempore playing, cautioned Clara Wieck against improvising too frequently just a year before he diagnosed Liszt’s unhappy “dispar- of forms. The Liszt of Bernstein’s “error” runs deeper than ity.” Phantasieren uses up too much creative an over-determined identity allied to amorphous free fantasies, however, for it challenges our very notion of cat- energy, Schumann protested, which could be egorical thought. A corresponding critique can be made of better employed otherwise: “be sure to write Schumann’s categorical distinction between “Liszt” the everything down immediately.”61 The loss of composer and “Liszt” the pianist. The incessantly fluid “confusion of distinctions” Bernstein cites (p. 109) may, in written music that improvisation entails went this instance, be taken equally as a critique of rigid modes hand in hand with an emergent conception of of understanding that have difficulty accounting for such composition as a largely documentary, monu- heterogeneity. If Liszt is a pianist, then he is also a composer, hence he becomes a hybrid. If we accept what in- mental endeavor. Schumann’s fear of creative creasingly became a hierarchical separation, however, there depletion speaks to the growing anomaly of a seems to be no possibility of fusing the differentiated parts young virtuoso whose compositional “output” into the unified subjectivity of one “Liszt.” Indeed, Alexander Rehding has even proposed the historical mo- seemed to transgress the hitherto unproblematic ment at which the public transition between “virtuoso boundaries of notation and sound. Given this career” and “self-consciously great composer” took place, perceived loss of parity, we may suspect that in namely the unveiling of the Beethoven monument at Bonn on 10–13 August 1845. See “Inventing Liszt’s Life: Early obeying “feeling and invention,” in seeking to Biography and Autobiography,” in The Cambridge Com- loosen the grip of established musical formu- panion to Liszt, ed. Kenneth Hamilton (Cambridge: Cam- lae, Liszt the improviser occasionally severed bridge University Press, 2005), pp. 14–27. Several critiques of the “Liszt Problem” have been published recently. every last “thread” to recognizable forms. This Bernstein’s “Liszt’s Bad Style” addresses Liszt’s cultural effect has provoked a continuing discourse about identity in the postmodern present through critiques of musical legitimacy. Bernstein put it memora- contemporary writings about Liszt, in Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 109–30; James Deaville’s “Liszt bly in 1998: “Liszt is an error that answers to in the Twentieth Century” addresses Liszt’s precarious no correction.”62 position on the margins of a Western classical mainstream through an examination of writings, research, recordings, and film, in The Cambridge Companion to Liszt, ed. Ken- neth Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, nevertheless speak to a psychological division between 2006), pp. 28–56; Gooley’s “Liszt, Thalberg, and the Pari- Liszt’s relish of relative imaginative license and sian Publics” examines the historical overdetermination Mendelssohn’s downright fear of exposing the artifice of of Liszt’s image in the French and German press between extempore forms. What Mendelssohn found “inappropri- 1834 and 1848, in The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 18–77. Of greater ate and absurd,” we can surmise, is the stage trick of relevance historically is Béla Bartók’s noted critique of the creating musical forms that ought to—and might as well— Liszt problem, “Liszt zenéje és a mai közönseg,” Népm have been pre-formed (i.e., composed). The underlying dis- vel [ü vel] es 6 (1911), 359–62. tinction in these firsthand accounts is therefore the degree 63Liszt to Marie d’Agoult, London, 14 May 1840, in to which Mendelssohn’s approach appears to measure ex- Correspondance / Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, p. 584. tempore playing against the expectations of a composed Liszt’s comment concerns the famous Norwegian violin- text; Liszt’s perceived weakness was that he did not. ist Ole Bull, whom Liszt met in London during 1840 and 61“Nimm Dir immer vor, alles gleich auf das Papier zu with whom he performed Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata. brigen” (Schumann to Clara, 3 December 1838, in Robert Bull evidently impressed Liszt as a performer, but Liszt und Clara Schumann Briefe einer Liebe, ed. Hanns-Josef also notes that he “is a kind of savage, very ignorant of Ortheil [Königstein: Athenäum, 1982], p. 155). counterpoint and fugue” (Franz Liszt: Selected Letters, pp. 62Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, p. 109. 137–38). Göllerich, Franz Liszt (Berlin: Marquardt, 1908), Views of Liszt-as-problem have recently taken a number p. 160.

67 19TH seems to be speaking for a nature divided against musical identity in the public eye. This cri- CENTURY MUSIC itself, an ironic nature characterized by self- tique took the form of the revision of earlier duplication or self-multiplication: dédouble- work as well as original composition and absti- ment. This splitting describes the particular nence from concert tours. But it is not easy to psychology of a retired but not entirely “re- differentiate between a true authorial voice and formed” virtuoso. the persona of a fictional narrator in this self- In an examination of irony in Baudelaire’s critique. Liszt’s quixotic assertion to Lina essay De l’essence du rire (1855), Paul de Man Ramann that “my biography is more to be in- indirectly characterizes Liszt’s condition by ar- vented than to be written after the fact”66 indi- ticulating the difference between an intersub- cates, perhaps intentionally, a dangerously un- jective relationship and a relationship between stable threshold between fact and fiction. two “selves” within a single consciousness—a Whether we regard Liszt’s renunciation of vir- dédoublement such as I argue characterizes tuosity as the expression of an authorial I or a Liszt’s persona at this time: fictional character depends on how much sin- cerity we ascribe to his shift of identity. In this Within the realm of intersubjectivity one would in- case, that means how much mobility we find deed speak of difference [as between subjects—critic in his allegiance to the hierarchies of profes- and composer or composer and listener] in terms of sional musical life. the superiority of one subject over another, with all This condition of two “selves” within a single the implications of will to power, of violence, and consciousness allows Liszt’s ironic rhetoric to possession which come into play when a person is elevate the composer over the virtuoso. But laughing at someone else—including the will to edu- cate and to improve. But, when the concept of “su- given Liszt’s evident ambivalence toward vir- periority” is still being used when the self is engaged tuosity, a counter impulse might well cry “im- in a relationship not to other subjects, but to what is posture” to this dichotomy and seek an alter- precisely not a self [Liszt’s lack of unified identity], native role reversal of the sort that Vladimir then the so-called superiority merely designates the Jankelevitch describes sardonically as “inso- distance constitutive of all acts of reflection. Superi- lent” rather than “revolutionary”: “The per- ority and inferiority then become spatial metaphors former wants to advance on the composer; the to indicate a discontinuity and a plurality of levels one that was first will be second; the one that within a subject that comes to know itself by an was second wants to live his life. . . . Nothing is 64 increasing differentiation from what is not. changed. . . . There will again be a thinking head, and at the service of this head the two By retiring from the stage to pursue a more arms of the performer, but the occupiers of the lofty compositional mission, Liszt effectively roles have exchanged posts with each other.”67 adopted a state of permanent parabasis,65 by The fulcrum on which this false dichotomy which I mean he became the self-conscious pivots is Liszt’s practice of Phantasieren. For narrator of his own musical endeavors, the au- given Liszt’s well-documented skills as an im- thor of an extended self-critique of his earlier proviser, just how meaningful can Schumann’s rigid distinction between Liszt’s performing and

64See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press, 1983), pp. 212–13. To a certain extent, this 66“Meine Biographie ist mehr zu erfinden denn nach- psychology is also evident in Liszt’s manipulation of his zuschreiben” (Ramann, Lisztiana: Erinnerungen an Franz multiple identities during his virtuoso career, as Gooley Liszt in Tagebuchblättern, Briefen und Dokumenten aus has explained: “Liszt’s goals were fundamentally negative. den Jahren 1873–1886/87 [Mainz: Schott, 1983], p. 407). He transformed himself, diversified his affiliations, and 67“L’exécutant veut avoir le pas sur le compositeur; celui intervened in the formation of his reputation in reaction qui était premier sera second; celui qui était second veut to a major crisis in the musical life of his time” (Gooley, vivre sa vie . . . rien n’est changé . . . il y aura encore une The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 13). tête pensante, et au service de cette tête les deux bras de 65Schlegel’s definition of irony: “eine permanente l’exécutant, mais les titulaires des rôles ont permuté l’un Parekbase.” See “Fragment 668,” in Kritische Ausgabe, avec l’autre” (in Vladimir Jankelevitch, De la Musique au Band 18, Philosophische Lehrjahre (1796–1806), ed. Ernst Silence: Liszt et la Rhapsodie [Paris: Plon, 1979], pp. 121– Behler (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1962), p. 85. 22).

68 composing be before the latter’s move to uncommon for composers to work at, or at DAVID 68 TRIPPETT Weimar? least within reach of, a piano, Liszt had honed Virtuosity in Jankelevitch took this entanglement of ac- and developed his instinctive abilities at the the “Dante” tion and identity to its reductio ad absurdum keyboard to the extent that he seemed able to Sonata when he protested: “It would be necessary to improvise a passage rapidly on specific musical say that virtuosic music is a music without material71 without feeling bound by what composer.”69 In this abstract reading of key- Haydn—in the context of improvisation—had board virtuosity, the “thinking head” control- called “the rules of art.”72 By beginning with ling the fingers can belong—in different ways— physical performance, Liszt could generate an to either a performer or composer. But if these immediate realization of the music, producing figures occupy the poles of a continuum, the musical passages first as sonic objects rather continuum is asymmetrical: only the mobile than as intentional objects. This practice may virtuoso is capable of traversing the span of have led the “Dante” Sonata—charged by one possibilities in either direction, even to the critic in 1887, we may recall, as lacking any point of usurping either pole. Thus the di- “definite meaning in the constant progression chotomy of performer and composer becomes of discords”—to fall victim to Liszt’s own ear- false in the context of Lisztian virtuosity. lier capacity for Phantasieren. Schumann an- To what extent does the biographical evi- ticipated this situation with sly irony when he dence support the view that Liszt himself observed, or at least acted on, this recognition? George Sand’s diary reports that as a touring 71This probably gave Liszt the freedom to realize instantly virtuoso Liszt wrote his music directly at the certain particular textures of harmony, counterpoint, melody, and rhythm, or the lack thereof (Rosen’s “zero piano. Sand describes his labors on a new project degree of musical invention”), presenting the sound image at Nohant in 1837: “Perhaps it is some compo- of a virtuoso performance at the point of the music’s in- sitional task that he [Liszt] tries out in frag- ception. At the end of his Clavierschule, Hummel’s comments on improvisation lend credence to this view. A ments at the piano; beside him is his pipe, his prerequisite for free Phantasieren, he asserts, is that “the ruled paper and quill pens. . . . It seems to me hands perform what the mind thinks without constraint that while passing before the piano he must be regardless of which key the player is in, and to be precise, [they] perform without needing to be clearly conscious of churning out these capricious phrases uncon- the mechanical actions” (die Hände ohne Zwang, gleichviel sciously obedient to his instinct of feeling rather in welcher Tonart sich der Spieler befindet, das ausführen, than to the labor of reason.”70 While it is not was der Geist denkt, und zwar es ausführen, ohne dass es des klaren Bewusstseins über diese mechanischen Verrichtungen bedarf). It is precisely this skill that Liszt relied on in part—I am suggesting—when “composing” at 68By way of historical evidence for Liszt’s improvisations, the piano during the later 1830s. See Johann Nepomuk the journal Le Corsaire, reflecting the typical reception of Hummel, Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung Liszt’s concert etiquette, records that, after listening to a zum Piano-Forte-Spiel, vol. 3 (Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, trio for cello, piano, and oboe: “Liszt’s natural impulses 1828), p. 444. For a cultural study of the intersection and then took over, and he rushed towards the piano despite correspondences between doctrines of sensation and peda- himself, took one of the motifs from the trio just executed, gogical piano methods in the late eighteenth and the early varied it, and gave it a new charm . . . every transfixed nineteenth century, see Leslie David Blasius, “The Me- listener thought himself transported by a dream into a chanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Roman- place inhabited by the god of harmony.” Thereafter Le tic Musical Experience,” in Music Theory in the Age of Corsaire referred to Liszt as the “famous improviser.” See Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- Maurice Henri Cecourcelle, La Société académiques des versity Press, 1996), pp. 3–24. enfants d’Apollon (Paris: Schoenewerk & cie, 1881), p. 72Reading “rules” as synonymous with “formal procedure” 137. in this context further distinguishes Liszt’s attitude to 69“Il faudrait dire . . . que la musique virtuose est une fantasy improvisation from late-eighteenth-century extem- musique sans compositeur” (Jankelevitch, Liszt et la pore practice, for which adherence to certain “rules” Rhapsodie, p. 122). seemed de rigueur. Haydn’s full statement reads: “I sat 70“C’est peut-être un travail de composition qu’il essaye down, began to improvise, sad or happy according to my par fragments sur le piano; à côté de lui est sa pipe, son mood, serious or trifling. Once I had seized upon an idea, papier réglé et ses plumes . . . Il me semble qu’en passant my whole endeavor was to develop and sustain it in keep- devant son piano, il doit jeter ces phrases capricieuses à ing with the rules of art” (Georg August Griesinger, son insu en obéissant à son instinct de sentiment plutôt Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn [Leipzig: qu’à un travail d’intelligence” (George Sand, “Entretiens Breitkopf and Härtel, 1810], trans. Vernon Gotwals, Haydn: journaliers,” in Œuvres autobiographiques, ed. Georges Two Contemporary Portraits [Madison: University of Wis- Lubin, 2 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1971], II, 981). consin Press, 1963], p. 61).

69 19TH said that Liszt’s “lively musical nature prefers tory technique.76 There thus seems good reason CENTURY MUSIC expeditiously eloquent tones to dull scoring on to trace it back through Czerny to Beethoven paper.”73 in an extended pedagogical lineage. Although Sand’s testimony rehearses the Czerny’s influence on Liszt as a tutor and Romantic cliché of the unconsciously inspired technical taskmaster is well documented, but composer, it also identifies Liszt’s fractured pro- his role in the development of Liszt’s capacity cess of composition and lends credence to the for free improvisation has attracted less schol- hypothesis that he tried out the phrases on arly attention.77 Apparently Phantasieren was which he was working before notating them. intrinsic to their work together. As Czerny re- Furthermore, Sand speaks of the governance of calls in his autobiography: “I endeavored to Liszt’s “composition” by the spontaneous “in- teach [Liszt] Phantasieren by frequently giving stinct of feeling” rather than by the calculated him a theme on which to improvise [improvi- “labour of reason”—an observation that, though sieren].”78 Equally, Liszt mused in his later years it too is born of a Romantic commonplace, on this aspect of study with his second—and bears a striking resemblance to Czerny’s advice last—piano teacher: “[Czerny] made me sight- in his treatise for improvising with several read all the good music of the time and also themes. An improviser, Czerny states, should made me improvise in fantasy-style [Phantasier- employ a variety of developmental procedures: en] frequently.”79 There seems little doubt that “[for] here he can give free reign to his flights of the improvised transformation of musical fancy (albeit in rational form); and unexpected, themes characterized the daily contact the two interesting motives . . . frequently enter the musicians shared in Vienna over fourteen fingers while playing. . . . The performer’s mo- months between 1822 and 1823. mentary mood (be it now cheerful, now serene, With this in mind, let us compare Liszt’s serious or melancholy) can be expressed in the thematic transformation in the “Dante” So- most abandoned manner.”74 Czerny’s descrip- nata (ex. 1) with Czerny’s illustrated advice tion also anticipates the procedure of Liszt’s thematically driven sonata in striking fashion. If we accept that thematic transformation gen- erates formal coherence in works such as Liszt’s 76In this context, it is important to note that Liszt tran- “quasi Sonata,” and that this coherence arises scribed Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in 1833. As from what Liszt describes as the “necessary Jonathan Kregor has suggested, his keyboard study of Berlioz’s idée fixe and its accompanimental figures may developments of . . . inner experiences . . . have provided an additional stimulus for Liszt’s explora- feeling and invention,”75 it may be that the tion of thematic manipulation in the late 1830s. The suc- “compositional” technique of thematic trans- cess of a symphonic model based on thematic unity is likely to have given Liszt the confidence and impetus to formation is, at root, a product of an improvisa- apply what, for him, had been largely an improvisatory technique to the idea of more lofty compositional structures. See Kregor, “Collaboration and Content in the Symphonie fantastique Transcription,” Journal of Musi- cology 24 (2007), 203. 77The only published study is Zsuzanna Domokus’s examination of “Fantasy” in Liszt’s operatic paraphrases. See 73“Desto mehr studierte er als Virtuos, wie denn lebhafte “Carl Czernys Einfluss Auf Franz Liszt: Die Kunst Des musikalische Naturen den schnellberedten Ton dem Phantasierens,” in Liszt Studien IV, ed. Serge Gut (Munich: trocknen Arbeiten auf dem Papier vorziehen” (rpt. Katzbichler, 1993), pp. 19–28. For a general survey of im- Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker von Rob- provisation in the nineteenth century, see also Lutz Felbick, ert Schumann, I, 439. “Vom Einfluss der Improvisation auf das mitteleuropäische 74“Denn hier kann er seimen Gedankenflug (obschon in Musikleben des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Musik Theorie 20 (2005), einer konsequenten Form) volle Freyheit lassen; und oft 166–82. kommen, während dem Spielen ungesucht, interessante 78“Ebenso bestrebte ich mich, ihm [Liszt] das Phantasieren Motive in die Finger . . . Auch kann in dieser Gattung des anzueignen, indem ich ihm häufig das Thema zum Impro- Fantasierens die momentane Stimmung des Spielen (sie sey visieren aufgab” (Carl Czerny, Erinnerungen aus meinem nun lustig, heiterm ernst oder melancholisch) sich am Leben, ed. Walter Kolneder [Strasbourg: Éditions P. H. ungezwungensten aussprechen” (Carl Czerny: Systematische Heitz, 1968], p. 28). Anleitung, p. 63 [Michell, p. 74]). 79“Er [Czerny] legte mir alle guten Musikalien der 75Franz Liszt letter to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, in Letters damaligen Zeit à vista vor und ließ mich auch gerne phan- of Franz Liszt, p. 273. tasieren” (August Göllerich, Franz Liszt, p. 160).

70 DAVID TRIPPETT Virtuosity in the “Dante” Sonata

Example 1: Transformations of the “Dante” Sonata’s principal theme. una corda dolcissimo con intimo sentimento una corda dolcissimo con amore lamentoso (quasi improvisato) agitato assai tosto ritenuo e rubato quasi improvisato ù pi 35 157 124 Presto Andante a. c. b.

71 19TH CENTURY MUSIC

) ↑

continued

Example 1 ( molto appassionato ↓ ﬀ 327 agitato poco a cresc. lamentoso Tempo rubato e molto ritenuto Allegro Vivace 199 273 f. e. d.

72 Theme # DAVID & % TRIPPETT Virtuosity in % the “Dante” Sonata

“As Allegro” Allegro con brio % # & " " % ! % ﬀ & % % % % % # % & " " ! ﬀ % etc. & % % % %

“As Adagio serioso” Adagio serioso # 2 4 ! dolce 2 4

# $ ! " etc.

Example 2: Carl Czerny: Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte, op. 200, example 38.

concerning improvisation on a theme (ex. 2). rhythm as . . . [in] all species of compositions” The “Dante” Sonata employs thematic trans- and the prescription that follows: “The per- formation as both an arbiter of form and as a former must devote time and practice to achieve source of musical development throughout, as the capability of transforming each motive that may be illustrated briefly by the episodic recur- comes his way into all . . . styles.”80 A brief rences of the principal chromatic theme in the published version from 1858. These transformations appear to follow closely Czerny’s ob- 80Michell, A Systematic Introduction, pp. 43, 50. Monothe- matic phantasieren held specific connotations for a Ro- servation that “every theme . . . can serve by mantic theory of the creative imagination. In the Neue means of several modifications in meter and Zeitschrift, an 1839 article on “Phantasie” by the young

73 19TH “As Allegretto grazioso” CENTURY Allegretto grazioso MUSIC 6 8 * dolce 6 8 " , + + +

etc. “As Rondo” Rondo vivace ↓ ↓↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ 2 4 ' ↓ ↓ ↓↓ ↓↓ ↓ ↓ 2 ↓ ↓ ↓↓ ↓↓ ↓↓ 4

↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓↓ ' etc. ↓ ↓ ↓↓

Example 2 (continued)

look at Czerny’s written-out examples for though Czerny’s musical language operates Fantasy-like Improvisation (Phantasieren) with within stylistic boundaries such as antecedent- a single theme makes the likeness clear. Al- consequent structures and accords with eigh-

Königsburg Kapellmeister Eduard Sobolewski cites the in- Ursache, weshalb jener nie das Leben . . . recht begreifen finite exploration of a single theme/idea as the critical lernt, daß eine Idee, eine kleine, winzige Idee hinreichend difference between artists and normal educated citizens: ist, ihn all’ der Sorgen und Mühen dieser Welt zu entheben. “The reason why [an intelligent person] never learns to / Eine Idee, ja oft nur eine Idee von einer Idee, was wir comprehend life [is] that an idea, a small, petty idea is Musiker Motiv, Umriß nennen . . . Raubt ihm alles, er sufficient to relieve all the worry and trouble of this world. bleibt dennoch reich). See Sobolewski “Phantasie,” Neue / One idea, often even an idea from an idea, [or] what we Zeitschrift für Musik 51 (24 Dec. 1839), 201–03, here 201. musicians call motive, outline. . . . If one steals everything Writing in the same journal twenty-three years later, from [an artist] he nevertheless remains rich” (Das ist die Richard Pohl similarly emphasizes the infinite capacity of

74 teenth-century harmonic expectations, his con- agenda for compositional reform involved DAVID TRIPPETT cept is strikingly similar to the principle be- clearly advancing beyond earlier forms so that Virtuosity in hind Liszt’s improvisatory thematic transfor- it became possible to “discern the stages the “Dante” mation. through which [the new] form was gradually Sonata In terms of the ironic relationship between produced.”82 The “Dante” Sonata offers a ready the two halves of Liszt’s divided identity, this example, in that Liszt symbolically inverted kind of improvisation would call into question Beethoven’s subtitle for the two Sonatas op. 27, the metamorphic space between composer and turning “Sonata quasi una Fantasia” into his performer enunciated so explicitly in Liszt’s own “Fantasia quasi Sonata” and thereby es- letter to Carl Alexander in Weimar. For Liszt, tablishing a historical lineage for his music the performer’s craft was to work themes into a while at the same time loosening its ties with a coherent improvisation; the composer’s craft, Classical conception of sonata form. conversely, was to make themes cohere into an In his autobiography, Czerny reports that improvisational work. Over and above the dia- Beethoven (his teacher) “was unsurpassed in lectic or dédoublement between performer and [the] style of fantasy-like improvisation,” shown composer, Liszt the “improvising performer” in ex. 2, adding that Beethoven “could hardly creates form through what we might call the reconstruct in writing the wealth of his ideas intuition of “thematic potential,” whereas Liszt and harmonies as well as the nobility and con- the composer intuits thematic transformation sistency of his most highly artistic develop- through the creation of form. Any distinction ment.” In perhaps his most revealing comment between these actions is one of degree, not on Beethoven’s improvisations, however, kind. Czerny distinguishes three different formal styles: A Pedagogical Lineage 1. The form of a first movement or rondo Finale of a For Liszt in Weimar, the relationship between Sonata. He would play a normal first section, form and thematic transformation defined his introducing a second melody, etc., in a related connection with the music of the past.81 His key. In a second section, however, he gave full rein to his inspiration, while retaining the original motive, which he used in all possible ways. Phantasie, hinting at the incessant permutation of figures— Allegros were enlivened by bravura passages, many geometric, musical—in the context of his survey of early of which were even more difficult than those acoustic theory: “The imagination follows no other laws but found in his sonatas. its own; it is limitless and unbound, and knows neither space nor time. We gladly let it prevail, we delight in its majestic 2. Free variation forms somewhat like the Choral colors, its wealth of shapes” (Die Phantasie folgt keinen Fantasy op. 80 or the choral Finale of the Ninth anderen Gesetzen, als ihren eigenen; sie ist schrankenlos Symphony; both these pieces give a true picture und fessellos, und kennt weder Zeit noch Raum. Wir lassen sie gern walten, wir lassen uns durch ihrer Farben-Pracht, of his improvising in this manner. durch ihren Gestalten-Reichthum entzücken) (Pohl, 3. A mixed form, one idea following the other as in “Akustische Briefe: Achter Brief,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 83 3 [15 July 1853], 25–28, 33–37, 65–67, 73–74, here 26). a potpourri, like his Solo Fantasy op. 77. 81The concept of thematic transformation as the arbiter of form relates directly to Liszt’s Weimar reforms. Such a Employing an original theme “in all possible conception was born of a shifting musical syntax in which the tonal regulation of greatly expanded musical forms ways”—Czerny’s first category—would seem gave some ground to their thematic integration—a process to apply to op. 27, no. 1, where both halves of August Halm identified as a conception of form principally driven by a theme; or, as he puts it, one in which form presents “the story of a musical theme.” See August Halm, Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (3rd edn. Stuttgart: Musical Monuments,” this journal 26 (2002), 56, nn. 13, Ernst Klett, 1947), p. 227. Historically, thematic transfor- 14; and Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, p. mation was first formulated in relation to Liszt by Alfred 217, n.29. Heuß in his influential study of Liszt’s symphonic poems, 82Liszt, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Detlef Altenburg “Eine motivisch-thematische Studie über Liszts sinfonische (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1989), V, 34–35. Dichtung ‘Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne’,” Zeitschrift 83Czerny, On the Proper Performance of All Beethoven’s der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 13 (1911), 10–21. Works for the Piano, ed. Paul Badura-Skoda (Vienna: Uni- See discussion of the term in Alexander Rehding, “Liszt’s versal, 1970), p. 15.

75 19TH the principal theme, a “normal first section,” techniques (and indeed they often have been). CENTURY MUSIC are reprised in diminution. The section is then For example, whereas Beethoven’s variation interrupted by a fantasy-like passage (though form at the end of op. 77 is defined by a generic one that does not retain the original motive), “style,” Liszt’s thematic transformations are after which the main section returns with the not limited to any particular style (as is evident treble and bass parts reversed. The Sonata also from Liszt’s and Czerny’s use of the procedure alludes to its slow movement just before the in their different musical languages). Further- coda of its finale, a more obviously Liszt-like more, variation form was a musical genre as procedure. well as a mode of invention. Thematic trans- Czerny’s second category—“free variation”— formation was not; it could be a generative is also relevant to Liszt because of the similar- process within a variety of forms, including ity between this subgenre of classical variation variation form, but it belonged to no genre out- form and the principle of thematic transforma- side of its improvisatory heritage. tion. In his discussion of monothematic impro- Nonetheless, the boundaries between these visation, Czerny likened his own musical ex- musical procedures can become mobile. As amples (ex. 2) to the procedure in Beethoven’s Beethoven himself observed in a sketch from Choral Fantasy, op. 80 (containing fifteen varia- 1809, “Real fantasy-like improvisation tions), where the piano introduction is prob- [Phantasieren] comes only when we are uncon- ably based on Beethoven’s own extempore per- cerned [with] what we play, so—if we want to formance at the premiere on 22 December 1808, improvise in the best, truest manner in pub- and in the choral finale of the Ninth Sym- lic—we should give ourselves over freely to phony, op. 125 (1824). The two works, Czerny what comes to mind.”86 The correspondence to adds, form “two glorious monuments of this Czerny’s advice to “give free reign to [one’s] style [of Phantasieren].”84 flights of fancy”87 is unmistakable. Beethoven’s Finally, the great textural and melodic vari- comment further presages Liszt’s belief in the ety in the “mixed form” of op. 77 (containing primacy of “feeling and invention” in the cre- seven stable variations) would seem to justify ative process. In view of this shared belief, we Czerny’s observation that, in Phantasieren, may say that in op. 27 Beethoven had written Beethoven “trusted to his genius for the con- two sonatas, parts of whose form gave the im- stant invention of new subjects.”85 If this and pression of an improvisation, while in his the other two works cited by Czerny do indeed “Dante” Sonata, Liszt improvised—at least ini- reflect Beethoven’s style of improvisation on a theme, they offer an analytical basis for com- paring Beethoven’s approach to Phantasieren 86This is scribbled on a musical sketch from 1809. I take with that of Liszt. Pace Czerny, however, the this reference from Lewis Lockwood, whose chapter art of thematic improvisation that his treatise “Beethoven at the Keyboard” explores Beethoven’s extem- documents is qualitatively different from the pore practices. Reports about Beethoven’s improvisation frequently emphasize the freedom of his musical creativ- technique of theme and variation evident in ity, and while such reports are hardly more than subjec- Beethoven’s “Fantasy” works. It is of course tive reinterpretations of an event, their consistent empha- possible that these later works fail to docu- sis seems to indicate that established formal structures had little bearing on Beethoven’s mixed form Phantasieren. ment the thematic transformations that char- For example, Sir John Russell witnessed an improvisation acterized Beethoven’s actual improvisations in 1821 wherein Beethoven “gradually . . . forgot every- (and such transformations do occasionally sur- thing else, and ran on during half an hour in a fantasy, in a style extremely varied, and marked, above all, by the most face in his other works), but this kind of hy- abrupt transitions” (Beethoven: Impressions by His Con- pothesis must remain speculative. The trans- temporaries, ed. O. G. Sonneck [New York: Schirmer, 1926], formation and the variation of a theme can pp. 115–16; see also pp. 13, 22, 51–52, 208–09). Other contemporary accounts of Beethoven’s improvisations include therefore be teased apart as separate musical Czerny, On the Proper Performance of All Beethoven’s Works for the Piano, ed. Paul Badura-Skoda (Vienna: Uni- versal, 1970); and J. G. Prod’homme, “The Baron de Trémont: Souvenirs of Beethoven and Other Contempo- 84Michell, A Systematic Introduction, p. 52. raries,” Musical Quarterly 6 (1920), 366–91. 85Czerny, On the Proper Performance, p. 58. 87Michell, A Systematic Introduction, p. 74.

76 DAVID TRIPPETT Virtuosity in the “Dante” Sonata

Plate 3: Josef Kriehuber’s lithograph of himself with Berlioz, Czerny, Liszt, and Ernst (1846). Courtesy of the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Bayreuth. tially—toward the appearance of a sonata. may well originate with his habit of improvis- The subtitles are entirely accurate: what in ing. But improvisation is often modular, on Beethoven was conceptually Sonata quasi una both the level of the measure and the level of Fantasia, in Liszt became quite literally the section. It is thus necessary to begin uncov- Fantasie quasi sonata. The titles chart a peda- ering the formulaic fillers, the particular tech- gogical lineage regulated by the practice of the- niques associated with transitions, openings, matic improvisation, partially self-fashioned, progressions, runs, thematic figuration, and so and aptly stylized in Josef Kriehuber’s litho- forth that Liszt may have developed between graph “Matinée bei Liszt” from 1846 (plate 3). the time of his study with Czerny and the The lithograph depicts the adoring, bespectacled various stages of composition of the “Dante” pedagogue looking on—with Hector Berlioz (be- Sonata. Whereas some of his revisions have side Czerny), Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (violin nothing to do with improvisatory practice—for in hand), and Kriehuber himself (left)—as the example, the rebarring and considerable exci- former student, playing extempore from a closed sions in MS I 17 that reduce 864 measures to a score of Beethoven’s op. 26, seems to be revel- mere 373, or the decision to merge two sepa- ing in his inheritance. rate movements into one—others, such as new transitions, and altered musical figures, often Improvising Revisions, suggest a physical relation to the instrument. Revising Improvisations They indicate a preferred way of moving across the keyboard, associated with the visual aspect Carried out over nineteen years, Liszt’s extant of virtuosity, which we may suspect influenced deletions, recompositions, and additions to his the sonata’s composition at a level of sensation quasi Sonata present a vast complex of docu- and spectacle anterior to ideation. ments. Extensive revisions were certainly not First, consider Liszt’s transitions. Altering atypical for Liszt, whose compulsive practice transitions between themes provided Liszt with

77 19TH an opportunity for controlling the rhetoric and familiar from C. P. E. Bach’s Fantasias to Beetho- CENTURY MUSIC pacing of the “Dante” Sonata’s thematic trans- ven’s op. 110—before launching into another formations. The improvisatory aesthetic of the section. following examples, with their potential inter- The final version (MS I 17), also shown in ex. changeability (modularity), suggests they may 3b, is almost identical to the second, but differs have been engendered more by intuition in from it in m. 9 by inverting the ascending chord, performance than by premeditation—Marx’s breaking the registral connection with the Anschauung. In other words, some of these melody, and creating a new connection with transitions may have originated at the keyboard the harmonic bass note (C ). Such revisions without Liszt’s explicitly intending for them to recall Czerny’s advice that the performer must end up in a composition, but at the moment of devote time and practice to achieve the capa- “composing,” elements of them were at his bility of transforming passages “with ease and fingertips. adroitness. . . . He must not be satisfied with a The transition between two transformations single attempt . . . since the modifications in- of the principal chromatic theme is shown in herent . . . are infinite.”88 Plate 4 shows a fac- ex. 3a/b and summarized schematically in ex. simile copy (from MS I 17) documenting the 4. There are three versions; the earliest (ex. 3a last two versions. from MS I 76 and deleted in Liszt’s hand) is There is also a sense in which revisions, for eight measures shorter than the other two and instance, the extension of the repeated-note makes an explicit enharmonic shift between E chromatic melody in ex. 3a/b and Liszt’s deci- and D in the middle measure, compacting the sion first to isolate a repeated E, then to inte- harmonic movement into one-and-a-half mea- grate it three octaves lower through chromatic sures. The directness and brevity of the move voice-leading, are influenced by a slippage be- suggest an improvised transition to the extent tween the visual and the auditory. In addition that it simply employs chords in different in- to pure sound, there are the enticing spectacle versions, which, on reflection, Liszt extended of rapidly swapping hands and the rhetoric of a and composed out. lone hand, respectively. Traditions of seeing The second version (ex. 3b from MS I 76, music in this way—a phenomenon Kramer has which remains extant in the manuscript), like called the “listening gaze”89—can constitute the first, makes both a registral and enharmonic the speed of attack, facial expressions, and ges- connection between transition and thematic tures of the arms (as well as their absence) as transformation. But it extends the falling chro- part of the music being performed. The revi- matic melody for a further five measures, adds sions to the “Dante” Sonata presented here a brief recitative, and unfolds the half-dimin- suggest that when Liszt was revising at the ished-seventh chord through flowing eighth keyboard his awareness of how physical ges- notes rather than block chords. Here Liszt leaves tures would be seen by a listener may also have out the dominant-seventh harmony on B, al- functioned as a determinant of “composition,” lowing the lone E to pivot between the two thus encoding soundless spectacle into the harmonies by implication. All these measures sounding work. point to a more elaborate musical conception. A later section, shown as ex. 5a/b, illustrates Yet although they signal an improvisational that in revision Liszt also made more substan- process more mediated by thought distanced tial alterations to the material of a passage, from the performative impulse, other elements changing the length of a transition, its use and in ex. 3b can be seen equally as the result of an reuse of thematic ideas, and its relation to fur- ongoing process of working out material at the ther thematic transformations. Example 5a- en- keyboard. The repetition of m. 3 (as m. 4) could compasses a harmonic move from A to vii 7 on easily result from the improvisatory practice of gaining time and achieving hypermetric bal- ance quickly and easily through a literal repeat, 88Ibid., p. 50. and the recitative-like passage is a long-stand- 89Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical Theory, p. ing trick of the trade to “speak extempore”— 77.

78 DAVID TRIPPETT Virtuosity in the “Dante” Sonata

Plate 4: Facsimile of MS I 17, fol. 21 (transcribed as ex. 3b); GS A 60/I 17. Courtesy of the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimer. Foto: Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

A, with harmonic motion between A, B, and D sion from mm. 13ff., given in diminution start- (denoted by the letters A–C in ex. 5a), followed ing at m 17. Liszt’s revisions to this passage by a stepwise descending whole-tone progres- (ex. 5b) incorporate and modify the dotted open-

79 19TH a. CENTURY MUSIC 4 4 "

MS I 76 ritenuto languendo (deleted) 4 4 () 2

più tasto ritenuto e rubato 3

dolcissimo con amore

MS I 76 (revised)

3 % % 1 1 1 1

5 " " " " 1 poco rinforzando 1 & 1

Example 3

80 b. (continued) DAVID TRIPPETT Adagio & Virtuosity in the “Dante” Sonata [cut directly to m. 11] MS I 17 % & 0 7 % ! ** * 10 a piacere *

più tasto ritenuto a rubato 11 dolcissimo con amore MS I 17 (revised)

Example 3 (continued)

( ) % %

Example 4: Underlying harmonic motion.

81 19TH a. MS I 76 (1845–48), denoting an early version of the passage in ex. 5b, with correlated letter designations CENTURY (A–G). MUSIC Tempo giusto (allegro deciso) A B & & marcatissimo energio assai tremolando % ## % ## % % % %

C D 6 & & ()# #$$$$$$$$ #$$$$$$$$ % % % % % %%

F E % % 12 % % % % 1 1 1 % 1 1 1 % % % 1 1 1 1 % % 1 1 1 1 % 1 1 1 1 1 1 () % G % % % % % % % % % 18 % % % % % % loco % % 1 % 1 % 1 % ' 1 % 1 % 1 1 % 1 % 1 % infernale 1 % 1 % 1 1 % 1 % 1 % 1 1 % 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 % 1 1 1 1 1 1 %% 1 1 1 1 %

Example 5

ing tritones of the Sonata, resolving them as sion of the descending dotted figure two mea- perfect intervals and elaborating and extending sures after letter G before the diminished oc- the passage. The same initial harmonic motion taves return to those of ex. 5a and both ver- of ex. 5a is stretched over every four measures sions proceed alike. As with ex. 3a/b, the mod- rather than every three (again denoted by let- est expansion in ex. 5b of the underlying har- ters A, B, and C); the descending dotted figure monic structure present in ex. 5a suggests that from the Sonata’s opening again extends over a Liszt was gradually composing out an improvi- further six measures with chromatic left-hand sation, incorporating examples of thematic so- octaves over a tonic pedal (letters C and D); phistication such as the transformation of the finally, the same rhythmic diminution of the opening motif and left-hand references to the whole-tone progression begins a measure ear- chromatic octaves of the principal D-minor lier (at letter F), which leads to another exten- theme. At the same time, ex. 5b can also be

82 b. MS I 137 (1854), denoting the ﬁnal version of the passage in ex. 5a, with correlated letter designations (A–G). DAVID TRIPPETT Virtuosity in A the “Dante” ↓ Sonata più moso ↓ ↓

ﬀ ↓ & ↓ %% ↑

B ↓ ↓ 4

↓ ↓ & %% ↑ C ↓ ↓ ↓ 7 ﬀ ↑ sempre ↓ " ↑ ↑

D ↓ 10 ↓ " ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ " E %

13 ↓ ↓ %

% %

% ↓ ↓ ↓

Example 5 (continued)

83 19TH b. (continued) CENTURY % F↓ ↓

MUSIC 16 %

% %

% % %

% %

% % %

% ↑ ↑

G ↓ ↓↓ 19 ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ () 22 " " " 24 con strepito %% " " " %

Example 5 (continued)

viewed as an increasingly elaborate improvisa- monic substance of composition. This idealist tion in its patterned chordal and octave tex- division becomes increasingly difficult to main- tures between A and C, its reliance on repeti- tain in the “Dante” Sonata, in part due to the tion, and its recourse to “default” chromatic or work’s complex genesis. To conceive Liszt’s diminished octaves before moments of har- patterning of figures as the scripting of physi- monic arrival (mm. 5, 8, 12, 15–17, 25). Because cal, visually virtuosic gestures is to draw atten- the relationship between composition-as-im- tion to him as the performing agent in contrast provisation and improvisation-as-composition to the customary invisibility of a work’s cre- remains fluid in the “Dante” Sonata, it would ator.90 The two reports that document Liszt seem wrong-headed to identify any precise point at which improvisation “becomes” composition. The indeterminacy is wholly in keeping 90In neat summary of the work-condition under scrutiny with Liszt’s conception as projected in his final here, Lydia Goehr writes that composers “should be neither seen nor heard, to underscore the mystery both of title. absence and of genius.” Continuing this model, the sta- Much of Liszt’s virtuosity resides in a world tuses of performers and audience are to be complemen- of expanding keyboard idioms that have tradi- tary: “Performers and their instruments should be heard but not seen, but ‘heard’ only as imperfect pointers to- tionally belonged to the execution of preexist- wards the transcendent. And audiences, to complete the ing material rather than to the thematic-har- triad, should be seen but not heard, but ‘seen’ only in the

84 disappearing entirely behind the musical iden- visions illustrate the extent to which his pre- DAVID TRIPPETT tity of other composers—Chopin, Beethoven— sentation of thematic material depended on Virtuosity in emphasize that he began playing only after ex- modular, idiomatic figures. His use of revised the “Dante” tinguishing all candles and lamps and lowering and reinvented figurations suggests that he was Sonata the curtains; in total darkness, his aural continually reworking and improvising on dif- prosopopoeia reportedly deceived listeners ferent “ideal sound images” at the keyboard, (there were no viewers) to the extent that “it resulting in several actualizations, multiple was impossible not to mistake him [for Chopin]; “versions.” Features considered substantive and indeed, everyone was mistaken.”91 (Schu- (structural rather than ornamental) by main- mann famously reinforced the point when he stream analysis—harmonic motion, voice-lead- recorded Liszt’s own ocular dependencies in ing, contrapuntal framework, registral disposi- 1840: “[if Liszt] played behind a screen, a great tion—remain unchanged in such revisions, but deal of poetry would be lost.”92) their realization tends to favor the performer’s Hyperbole aside, the visual contingency of prerogative to adopt and adapt textures to suit Liszt’s identity would seem to suspend the ges- the “momentary mood,” as Czerny put it, or to tures associated with his idiomatic figures in a follow “feeling and invention,” as Liszt re- limbo between professional identities: the ges- marked, in determining “what the ideas are, tures draw the “listening gaze,” yet as insepa- and how they are carried out and worked up.”94 rable from the figures they also contribute to Because idiomatic figures are by nature irre- the thematic substance of a work.93 Liszt’s re- ducible as patterning components, they oper- ate as basic formal units that can be repeated to form larger paragraphs, which themselves can 95 sense that each listener being present to grasp the work in be sequentially repeated. In Liszt’s case, the the privacy of his or her own contemplative experience” invention and constant morphing of figurations (Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and are guided by a highly developed intuition for the Limits of Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], p. 144). sound images that Rosen calls “the greatest of 91The occasion on which Liszt allegedly disguised his play- any keyboard composer’s between Scarlatti and ing as Chopin’s was first recorded publicly by Charles Debussy.”96 This view can be measured against Rollinet in Le Temps (1 Sept. 1874), thirty years after the fact. Rollinet’s account was disputed in 1888 by Friedrich the figural reworking of the F -major theme Niecks, who reports that the aging Liszt declared he had (shown in ex. 6), in which Liszt revises the no recollection of this occasion. Further details of the dis- theme’s realization three times with different pute are given by Rena Mueller in “The Ramann-Liszt Questionnaires,” Franz Liszt and His World, p. 420, n. 1. figuration. Although the figural patterns remain In 1837 Berlioz describes Liszt’s invisible performance of rooted in mechanical piano methods, they are Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata in audiovisual terms: “It employed in this context to alter the lyrical was the shade of Beethoven himself, his great voice that we heard, called forth by the virtuoso” (Journal des Débats, character of the theme. In a weakening field of 12 March 1837). This anecdote is discussed in relation to opposition between performer and composer, the sonata’s aesthetics of mystery in Lawrence Kramer, the figures that realize Liszt’s theme increas- “Hands On, Lights Off,” from Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History, p. 37; and in relation to Berlioz’s own aesthetics in Katherine Kolb Reeve, “Primal Scenes: Smithson, Pleyel, and Liszt in the Eyes of Berlioz,” this journal 18 (1995), 228–29. 94Liszt to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, in Letters of Franz 92“Aber man muß das hören und auch sehen, Liszt dürfte Liszt, trans. C. Bache (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, durchaus nicht hinter den Kulissen spielen; ein großes 1894), I, 274. Stück Poesie ginge dadurch verloren” (Neue Zeitschrift 95See the detailed study of Liszt’s figures and figurations in für Musik 12 [1840], 102–03). Jim Samson’s Virtuosity and the Musical Work. For a study 93The difficult status of such keyboard figures predates of figurations at both foreground and middleground levels, Liszt’s dédoublement, extending arguably to early-nine- see Thomas Hitzberger, “Zwischen Tonalität und teenth-century pianists including J. N. Hummel, whose Rationalität: Anmerkungen zur Sequenz- und Figurations- keyboard manuscript for the Concerto in C, op. 34a, for technik Liszts,” in Virtuosität und Avantgarde: Unter- example, still retained a figured-bass shorthand ready for suchungen zum Klavierwerk Franz Liszt (Mainz: Schott, realization in the moment, leading Joel Sachs to argue that 1988), pp. 32–59; and Wilhelm Seidel “Über Figurations- Hummel “conceived of music as the decoration of har- motive von Chopin und Liszt,” in Report on the Interna- monic progressions” (Joel Sachs, “Johann Nepomuk tional Musicological Society Congress 1972, ed. Henrik Hummel,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, accessed 4 Glahn (Copenhagen: Hansen, 1974), pp. 647–51. June 2007, http://www.grovemusic.com). 96Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, p. 508.

85 19TH CENTURY MUSIC MS I 76 [covered up hereafter] % % % % MS I 17 (revised) % 1 % % % 1 1 1 1 1 & 1 1 1 1 % % % % % % % %

MS I 13 1 1 1 & 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

3 MS I 17 (revised) 1 1 % 1 & 1 1 1 1 1

% % MS I 13 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 5 & & MS I 17 (revised) 1 1 1 MS I 13 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Example 6: Presentation of theme through differing idiomatic ﬁgures.

86 DAVID 7 TRIPPETT & Virtuosity in the “Dante” MS I 17 Sonata (revised) % 1 1 1 1 1 () % MS I 13 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

9 &

MS I 17 [etc.] (revised) % & & % MS I 13 [etc.] 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Example 6 (continued) ingly become constitutive of the fixed work works by seeking, as Hanslick put it, to write character while the theme’s harmonic and mein Weimar “for posterity” rather than to con- lodic identity remains essentially consistent in tinue to perform for the gratifying heights of all manuscripts. the instant alone. Because musicological scholarship has tended Putting my argument in its most extreme terms, to rely on documentary evidence, improvisa- the considerable revisions to the “Dante” So- tion has remained elusive, relegated to the side- nata suggest a shift in its status from a notated lines of conjecture and imagination.98 Method- aide-mémoire sketch to a post-Beethovenian work, a shift that shadows the mise-en-scène of Liszt’s explicit metamorphosis from virtuoso- 98Adopting a more analytical approach to the problem of improvisation, John Rink has aimed to quantify improvi- as-caterpillar to composer-as-butterfly. By re- sation within Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, op. 61, through signing publicly as a professional performer a Schenkerian graphing of different structural levels. Rink amid a flurry of antivirtuoso criticism,97 Liszt supports his modus operandi with the observation that “certain features of Chopin’s style appear to derive from rendered his self-critique an act of self-efface- the improvisation tradition . . . at a deeper level—at the ment. He effectively determined the negative structural level, however, the influence improvisation had reception of his earlier portfolio of virtuoso on his music . . . is far more difficult to assess precisely. . . . To grasp the essence of Chopin’s music, one must understand how improvisation affected its structure” (“Chopin and Schenker: Improvisation and Musical Struc- 97The most recent analysis of antivirtuoso criticism is that ture,” in Chopin Studies: The International Musicological of Gooley, “The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity in Symposium “Chopin and Romanticism” Warsaw, 17–23 the Early Nineteenth Century,” Liszt and His World, pp. October 1986, vol. 3 [Warsaw: Frederick Chopin Society, 75–112. 1990], pp. 219–23, here 219).

87 19TH ologically, it is by definition impossible to prove no correction”—only presents a kind of Heisen- CENTURY MUSIC through documents that the “Dante” Sonata berg problem: “the greater the accuracy of the was the result of Phantasieren during its early research, the greater, finally, the deviance from phases. Yet given the evidence that traces the what is meant by ‘Liszt’.”101 Like the “Dante” path of an anomalous composition from Sonata, the aggregate impression of “Liszt” re- untexted performance to crafted sonata, the fi- mains indecipherable except as an always ret- nal score can still—with the requisite histori- rospective narrative that, at least in this case, cal imagination—be considered a distilled amal- allows for the permanent over-extension of a gam of momentariness, a tissue of recalled im- single ego. Philological scrutiny in this article provisations and performance ideas, a text ar- has provided the facts about a musical sketch chetype of which Roland Barthes observes: “the redefined as a full-fledged work. Ironically, this writer [or composer] can only imitate a gesture information has allowed us to see that the con- that is always anterior, never original.”99 Liszt’s sistent inconsistency of the work’s “author- status as the composer of his work is unstable ship,” and Liszt’s reliance on a music that is only if it is considered mutually exclusive to “performative” in the sense of reaching its ideal his role as the work’s performer. This exclusiv- conception and completion only through suc- ity is a prerequisite of an idealist aesthetic that cessive acts of delivery, undermines the au- divides the artwork from its realization and thority of the model of identity to which Liszt enables the “disparity” lamented by Schumann. himself sought to subscribe. Barthes’s critique of the festishizing of texts Liszt as modern scriptor only adds to the and authors leads him to draw a useful distinc- “confusions of distinctions”102 surrounding him tion between the author and “the modern as a historical figure. What benefit is there in scriptor,” whereby the former is “always con- applying such a label if “Liszt” is already an ceived of as the past of his own book” and the over-determination that has reached its mo- latter, more akin to Liszt as composer, “is born ment of saturation? One answer is that the simultaneously with the text, is in no way application can support a rereading of the com- equipped with a being preceding or exceeding positional technique of thematic transforma- the writing, is not the subject with the book as tion. Since Alfred Heuß’s study in 1911,103 the- predicate; there is no other time than that of matic transformation has been associated pri- the enunciation and every text is eternally writ- marily with the symphonic poems of the ten here and now.”100 Weimar ex-virtuoso. But as the comparison with Imagining the unwritten musical text of Czerny’s treatise shows, the technique was a Liszt’s improvisation in these terms creates an documented strategy for Phantasieren that can uncomfortable condition of absence for text- be traced via Czerny back to Beethoven. based scholarship, particularly though perhaps But was the “Dante” Sonata not an anomaly? not exclusively for Liszt studies. The music in The answer is: not entirely. Lina Ramann’s question was of course always “present” in a biographical questioning of Liszt from the years final form through its performance—Barthes’s 1875–76 suggests that other potentially similar condition of being eternally “written here and works existed, and that at least one fell on the now”—but the extent to which stemmatology wrong side of Liszt’s self-critique. Although a can illuminate this depends on the fortuitous transmission of fragments such as I suggest for MSS I 18, no.1, and 1C.51. Positivist methodol- ogy plays a crucial role in this study, but as Bernstein suggests, this documentary approach to examining Liszt—the “error that answers to 101Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, p. 109. 102Ibid. 103Daniel Gregory Mason discussed the concept in 1906, but offers only a cursory account of thematic transformation. See The Romantic Composers (New York: Macmillan, 1906), pp. 340ff. Following Heuß’s study Erläuterungen zu 99Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” p. 146. Franz Liszts Sinfonien und sinfonischen Dichtungen, the 100Ibid., p. 145. term proliferated.

88 substantial fragment, perhaps akin to a sketched the extent to which his playing exceeded the DAVID 108 TRIPPETT improvisation, it never reached completion: surviving notation cannot be known. Virtuosity in Manuscript sources are lacking altogether the “Dante” Ramann: A Berlin reporter indicated that on 11 Janu- for another fantasy-work Liszt performed dur- Sonata ary 1843, you played a “New Fantasy on ing this period. The Gazette musicale reports Themes from Le Nozze di Figaro.” Of your that Liszt performed “une nouvelle fantaisie works on Mozartian themes, I know only composée par lui [Liszt] sur des mélodies du the Don Juan fantasy. Was this Figaro fan- Guitarrero, de M. Halévy” in the Grand Théâtre tasy written out, or was it improvised? If at Kassel on 19 November 1841 (ten months it was written out, where can it be found? 109 Has is been published? By whom? after the Opera premiered in Paris). There is Liszt: It remained only in sketches, and has been no mention of this particular performance in lost.104 Liszt’s correspondence, and in the absence of manuscript sources two competing hypotheses In fact, the sketches were found in Weimar and seem plausible: either the work was written have been “completed” three times: in 1912 by down to some extent and lost, or—perhaps more Busoni, who suppressed all thematic material likely—it may never have been notated and from Don Giovanni (245 measures) and added was considered a composition only to the ex- thirty-seven measures of his own as well as tent that the Gazette reviewer’s impressions several cadenzas;105 in 1989 by Kenneth Hamil- were conditioned through his experience of ton, who excised nothing and added a mere Liszt’s performance. fifteen measures in order to complete gaps in a This reasoning may become dangerously hy- transitional passage and at the coda;106 and in pothetical, but it nevertheless serves to dislo- 1994 by Leslie Howard, who similarly added cate our notion of composition by separating it sixteen measures.107 Given that Liszt performed from the notion of a text. The dislocation fur- the Mozart Fantasy in the absence of a com- ther complicates the inherited idealism that plete score in 1843, he almost certainly impro- requires a “work” to be an a priori form preced- vised some sections in his performance, though ing any realization in performance. It is telling in this connection that, contrary to his earlier tendency to perform from memory (with all the attendant associations of spontaneous creation), Liszt’s rule of thumb in Weimar—as 104Ramann’s question dates from December 1875; it was answered by Liszt in April 1876. See “The Ramann-Liszt William Mason recounts—was always to play Questionaires,” trans. Susan Hohl, in Liszt and His World, from scores, presumably to indicate that what p. 411. 105 he was playing were serious, texted composi- Busoni’s excision was possibly carried out in order to 110 accord with Ramann’s report that the sketches were for a tions rather than fleeting improvisations. Yet Fantasy on Le nozze alone. The passage quoted above in “The Ramann-Liszt Questionaires” first appeared in 1887 giving Busoni easy access to it. See Lina Ramann, Franz Liszt: Als Künstler und Mensch, vol. 2/1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf 108As Hamilton’s and Howard’s completions indicate, the and Härtel, 1887), p. 202. Busoni’s work was published by “sketches” are arguably more complete than Liszt’s recol- Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig as “Fantasie / über zwei lection to Ramann might imply, but this does not miti- Motive aus W. A. Mozarts / Die Hochzeit des Figaro / gate their fractional status. Hamilton certainly takes the nach dem fast vollendeten Originalmanuscript / ergänzt view that the surviving sources for the Mozart Fantasie und Moriz Rosenthal zugeeignet von Ferruccio Busoni / are “almost complete.” See The Cambridge Companion Erste Ausgabe 1912” (Plate no.: V. A. 3830). to Liszt, p. 83. 106Hamilton’s unpublished completion occurs in appendix 109See “Chronique étrangère” in Gazette musicale 6 (12 IV of his doctoral dissertation: The Opera Fantasies and Dec. 1841), p. 560. For an itinerary of ninety-five “lost” Transcriptions of Franz Liszt: A Critical Study (Balliol pieces by Liszt, see Friedrich Schnapp “Verschollene College, Oxford University, 1989). Kompositionen Franz Liszts,” in Von Deutscher Tonkunst: 107Howard’s edition was published in 1997 by Editio Musica Festschrift zu Peter Raabes 70. Geburtstag, ed. Alfred Budapest under the title “Fantasie / über Theman aus Morgenroth (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1942), pp. 119–53. Mozarts Figaro / und Don Giovanni / For piano solo—für 110Mason’s memoirs record this particularly through a con- Klavier / Op. post. / First Edition—Erstausgabe (Z. 14, trastive anecdote about Johann Peter Pixis, who performed 135).” A recording of the piece was released prior to the together with Liszt before the latter’s move to Weimar score in 1994: Liszt at the Opera III (Hyperion: CDA66861/ and begged him to use sheet music on stage, which he did 2). not: “Later on [Liszt] very rarely played even his own

89 19TH even remaining cautious, we can confirm that nally as transcriptions or amalgams of perfor- CENTURY MUSIC Liszt performed at least three partially unwrit- mance events in which the composer and per- ten “works” during the 1840s, that his sketches former are one, these “compositions” may be- were roughly coeval with their improvisation/ gin to assume a new and perhaps unfamiliar performance, and that their performance pre- integrity. For rather than measuring them ceded their final “composition,” or rather, that against the “covert ideological agenda,”112 as at this stage in Liszt’s life, performance and Samson has called it, of the German sonata- composition were effectively synonymous pro- symphonic tradition, we can view them as prod- cesses within the economy of his creative pro- ucts of a different ideology: that of the impro- duction. viser-virtuoso. This revisionist perspective reso- This condition undermines the unqualified nates suggestively with an early-nineteenth- aspiration of Werktreue in performance by in- century sentiment perhaps most eloquently— verting conventional ideas about what it is that if hyperbolically—formulated in the mid-1840s is inscribed by a classical score. For Liszt’s early by an anonymous Darmstadt correspondent work on the “Dante” Sonata, notation seems who dispelled any ambivalence about Liszt’s to function, not as the basis for future perfor- Werktreue and his stature as a composer by mance, but at least in part as the recording explicitly construing performance and compo- medium of past performance. This status is sition as synonymous acts in the mind of the most apparent in plate 2, written as a memento genius: for an admirer ex post facto. The changes between this manuscript and ex. 6 are suggestive His performance is never a mechanical utterance of the considerable distance traversed between [Vonsichgeben], rather a composition in the truest improvisatory performance and final notation. sense of the word, an artistic creation existing en- We may therefore think of the successive revi- tirely for itself, reborn through fire and passion from sions as “virtual” performances that inscribe within. In general he regards every piece he plays as a theme on which to improvise and almost always hypothetical (or perhaps real) improvisations creates anew something wonderful, in doing so [he] that may or may not have originated in con- simultaneously declares the aspiration of the true cert. Rosen may have been thinking along these genius: always to loosen his art more from all formal lines when he stated that Liszt’s music was and frightening shackles, and with true enthusiasm conceived absolutely for performance and that and unconstrained by all external rules, to reproduce its “realization . . . took precedence over the in a carefree manner what his inner eye has intu- underlying compositional structure.”111 In this ited.113 repertoire, a performer ascends in the norma- tive musical hierarchy, assuming aspects of what conceptually is a compositional preroga- 112Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, p. 112. tive: to prescribe the notes and their order. 113“Sein Vortrag ist niemals ein mechanisches Vonsich- This late-twentieth-century viewpoint re- geben, sondern im eigentlichsten Sinne des Wortes eine Composition, eine ganz für sich bestehende Schöpfung der flects a performance-centered aesthetic that may Kunst, durch Feuer und Leidenschaft von innen heraus add another facet to our assessment of certain wiedergeboren. Jedes Stück, das er spielt, betrachtet er im of Liszt’s pre-Weimar piano works. Seen origi- Allgemeinen als ein Thema, über welches er phantasirt und fast immer etwas Wundervolles neu erschafft, und wobei sich zugleich die wahrhaft geniale Strebung kundgibt: seine Kunst immer mehr von allen formellen und beängstigenden Fesseln loszumachen und in wirklicher compositions without having the music before him,” Ma- Begeisterung und unbekümmert um allen äußeren son recalls, “and during most of the time I was [in Weimar] Regelzwang, das sorglos nachzubilden, was sein inneres copies of his later publications were always lying on the Auge geschaut hat” (“Franz Liszt [in Darmstadt]” [6 Oct. piano, and among them a copy of the ‘Bénédiction de Dieu 1845], 1499. This is contained in a small collection of dans la Solitude,’ which Liszt had used so many times thus-far unidentifiable German press articles about Liszt when playing to his guests that it became associated with between 1838 and 1847, which are held in the National- memories of Berlioz, Rubinstein, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski, archiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung in Bayreuth as: II C b Joachim, and our immediate circle” (William Mason, 3. Memories of a Musical Life [New York: Century, 1901], p. Hummel’s comments on the prestige of improvisation 118). align him with this view and offer a complementary per- 111Rosen, Romantic Generation, p. 507. spective to the listener-based quotation above. In the final

90 Regardless of the music’s elusive history and former. The staggered compositional history of one DAVID particular piano work, Après une lecture du Dante— TRIPPETT genesis, a modern performer can hardly treat Virtuosity in the published “Dante” Sonata from 1858 as Fantasie quasi Sonata (1839–58), straddles this the “Dante” improvisatory. Rather, in a final ironic turn, it schism uniquely in that it bridged two distinct peri- Sonata is a fixed work to be played “quasi improvisato” ods of Liszt’s life: the Glanzzeit of immensely suc- cessful European concert tours, and the predomi- (mm. 124, 157), a layering of artifice that fi- nantly compositional span as Kapellmeister in nally consigns the indecipherable virtuoso to Weimar. As such, it documents the mise-en-scène of history. The work’s fluid formative stages con- Liszt’s self-fashioned metamorphosis from virtuoso geal into a compositional topic—a manner to composer. rather than a mode of delivery, the identity of As a work borne expressly of improvisational acts, which must remain “undecidable” within the the “Dante” Sonata exhibits paradoxical traits that semiotics of virtuosity and Werktreue. bind it to both performance and compositional traditions. Through a study of Carl Czerny’s influence on Liszt, and the latter’s own improvisational practices, lines of his Clavierschule, Hummel identified his public I take a medium-sensitive approach to the “Dante” artistry more with improvisatory performance than what he Sonata by interrogating the historical concept of perceived as a text-based, reproductive practice: “I confess Phantasieren as part of a rereading of the composi- that, from that moment on [when he was fully proficient at tional technique of thematic transformation. improvisation], I was less embarrassed to improvise [phantasiren] before an audience of 2000–3000 listene rs Based on the excised material from the extant than to play a notated composition I was menially bound to” manuscripts, I reconstruct the genesis of the “Dante” (Ich gestehe, ich war von dem Augenblick an weniger Sonata and chart its compositional history and ge- verlegen, vor einem Publikum von 2–3000 Zuhörern zu neric evolution. A comparative presentation of se- phantasiren, als eine niedergeschriebene Komposizion, an die ich knechtisch gebunden war, zu spielen) (Hummel, lected revisions, alternatives, and variants from the Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum work illustrates the problematic juncture between Piano-Forte-Spiel, vol. 3 [Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, 1828], p. improvisation and composition, the extent to which 444). self-borrowing and the interchangeability of texts raise questions about our modern work-concept, the Abstract. notion of a musical text, and the functions of perfor- The European press of the late 1830s indicates a mance within a text. Key words: Virtuosity, glaring disparity between Liszt’s questionable status Phantasieren, “Dante” Sonata, Liszt, compositional as a composer and his eminence as a virtuoso per- process.

91 19TH Appendix A: CENTURY MUSIC Chronology of Revisions for the “Dante” Sonata 1839 (February) Vienna on 5 December 1839 in the fourth morn- Liszt first refers to the projected work in his ing concert he gave there.4 diary—Journal des Zÿi—as a symphony, which The extent to which the music had been he would complete separately in 1855–56 as written out at this stage, whether as a continu- Eine Symphonie zu Dantes Divina Commedia: ity draft or collection of sketches, remains un- known. If I feel within me the strength and life, I will attempt a symphonic composition based on Dante, 1840 then another on Faust—within three years—mean- The appearance of the Prague fragment (MS while I will make three sketches: the Triumph of Death (Orcagna), the Comedy of Death (Holbein), 1C.51), dated 11 March 1840, and the differ- and a Fragment dantesque.1 ences between this fragment and the first full MS suggest both that Liszt performed the work 1839 (September) on his tour of Bohemia and that it may still Marie d’Agoult’s letter to Henri Lehmann re- have remained largely unwritten at this stage. veals that written work on the Fragment Whatever Liszt performed in 1839–40 must dantesque (for keyboard) had only just begun have resulted in the written exemplar of a com- on 26 September 1839: plete piece (now lost) that was copied by Geatano Belloni as the original portions of MS I Le bravo suonatore began this morning a Fragment 76. In a letter to d’Agoult dated 22 September dantesque which is sending him to the very Devil. 1840, Liszt explains that he had been revising He is so consumed by it that he won’t go to Naples several sections of Belloni’s manuscript.5 The in order to be able to complete this work (destined to remain in his sketch portfolio!).2 results of these revisions appear to be contained in MS I 76 in graphite pencil and reflect the Paper-type analysis, the fact that this sketch first extant (notated) version of the piece, a was in Liszt’s hand, the spacious use of three source thought by Walker and Winklhofer no staves, the occasionally wayward spacing, and longer to exist. d’Agoult’s demonic reference (suggestive of MS I 18 No. 3—a more concise ending to the Liszt’s opening tritones) indicate that this Sonata—is also in Belloni’s hand and on the sketch is most likely MS I 18, No.1,3 contain- same “Blacons” paper and seems to have been ing the first twenty-four measures of the So- discarded from MS I 76. For this reason, MS I nata. No further notation survives prior either 18 No. 3 is likely to be the very first notated to Liszt’s private performance of the piece a conclusion to the Fragment dantesque, if we month later on 25 October 1839 at the Hôtel de accept that the Prague fragment from 11 March l’Europe or to his public performance of it in 1840—also a concluding fragment—was not Liszt’s own manuscript.

1848–49 1“Si je me sens force et vie, je tenterai une composition The title page of MS I 76—“Paralopomènes à la symphonique d’après Dante, puis une autre d’après Faust— dans trois ons—d’ici-là, je ferai trois esquisse: le Triomphe ‘Divina Comedia’”—must have been added be- de la mort (Orcagna), la Comédie de la mort (Holbein), et une Fragment dantesque” (Liszt, Journal des Zÿi in d’Agoult, Mémories par Daniel Stern [pseud.], ed. Daniel Ollivier [Paris, 1927], p. 180). 4Christopher Gibbs’s study of Liszt’s concert tours of 2Solange Joubert, Une Correspondance romantique: Madam Vienna in 1838 and 1839 provides the most detailed pic- d’Agoult, Liszt, Henri Lehmann (Paris, 1947), p. 33. ture of Liszt at this time to date. See “‘Just Two Words: 3A transcription of this fragment was published in the Jour- Enormous Success’: Liszt’s 1838 Vienna Concerts,” in Liszt nal of the British Liszt Society, as “Dante fragment, S701e,” and His World, pp. 167–230. 28 (2003), 34. The date given in this publication was ca. 5“Je vais bien – j’ai corrigé ces jours derniers quelques 1837, which is almost certainly incorrect, for it predates parties du fragment Dantesque,” Liszt to Marie d’Agoult, any mention of the work in Liszt’s correspondence by two 22 September 1840, Ipswich, in Correspondance / Franz years. Liszt, Marie d’Agoult (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 645.

92 tween 1848 and 1849, however, for the first The result is MS I 17, the hand-made paper of DAVID TRIPPETT bifolium of MS I 76 is a different paper-type which is without watermark but can be dated Virtuosity in and is in the hand of Adoph Stahr, who was in between January and August 1849.9 Liszt sub- the “Dante” Liszt’s employ between 1848 and 1851.6 sequently revised this MS in stages using vari- Sonata The next stage of revision saw two further ous writing implements, collettes, and inserts. sessions of correcting and amending MS I 76 by The results were stitched together, concealing Liszt, in purple ink and red crayon, respec- all the excised material, in a copy that may tively. The use of red markings strongly sug- well initially have been intended, though later gests that he was again preparing the MS for retracted, as a Stichvorlage. Fortunately the publication. Additionally, correction leaves stitching was subsequently undone and the were inserted at the end of the MS on the same collettes released, which has allowed scholars paper as that used by Stahr for the opening to investigate this complex stage of revision. bifoluim. Liszt’s final title after Victor Hugo—Après une Following these extensive revisions, it was Lecture du Dante – Fantasie quasi Sonata—is evidently impossible for Liszt to make further written for the first time in graphite pencil on progress on the Sonata using MS I 76, and he this title page. contracted Eduard Henschke to prepare a fair copy. Henschke evidently went through MS I 1853 76 adding accidentals and clefs (on pp. 5–8, and A separate correction leaf, MS I 18, n. 2, con- 11) before transcribing the work as it then ex- tains Liszt’s reworking of the opening transi- isted onto paper that Mueller has associated tion into the Presto agitato toward the end of with the post-1848 period in Weimar.7 the Sonata. It was copied into the final manu- Winklhofer dates this, MS I 17, prior to 1 Au- script source (MS I 137), but is not in MS I 17 gust 1849 on the basis of its altered title, thus and therefore seems to have been written ca. narrowing the time frame: 1853–54 in between the last additions to I 17 and its being copied out as I 137. In the earliest extant manuscript source [sic] for the “Dante” sonata, an undated Abschrift with numer- ca. 1853–56 ous corrections in Liszt’s hand, the title is The final stage in the genesis of the work was “Paralipomènes à la Divina Commedia. Fantasie Joachim Raff’s fair copy—MS I 137—prepared Symphonique pour Piano par F. Liszt.” Later, Liszt from the extensive revisions to MS I 17 for crossed out the first word, replacing it with inclusion in the Années. “Prolegomèmes.” This alteration can be dated prior to August 1, 1849, for when Liszt wrote to Raff on that date the score was completely finished, the title ca. 1857–58 7 he used had an additional ingredient probably drawn Following Liszt’s corrections, MS I 13 formed from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. He now calls the Stichvorlage for the 1858 Schott edition the work. “Fantasie quasi Sonata (Proligomènes [sic] and represents the work as it was published in zu Dantes Göttlicher Comödie).”8 the New Liszt Edition in 1974. The origination of the notated work in all its known sources is presented diagrammatically 6 l Mueller, Liszt’s “Tasso” Sketchbook: Studies in Sources as figure 1. and Revisions (Michigan: UMI, 1986), p. 363. 7Ibid., p. 378. 8Sharon Winklhofer, “Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, and the ‘Dante’ Sonata,” this journal 1 (1977), 30. 9Mueller, “Tasso,” p. 379; Winklhofer, “Dante,” p. 30.