Schumann's Virtuosity

Alexander Stefaniak

Description

Considered one of the greatest composers—and music critics—of the Romantic era, Robert Schumann (1810–1856) played an important role in shaping nineteenth-century German ideas about virtuosity. Forging his career in the decades that saw abundant public fascination with the feats and creations of virtuosos (Liszt, Paganini, and Chopin among others), Schumann engaged with instrumental virtuosity through not only his compositions and performances but also his music reviews and writings about his contemporaries. Ultimately, the discourse of virtuosity influenced the culture of Western "art music" well beyond the nineteenth century and into the present day. By examining previously unexplored archival sources, Alexander Stefaniak looks at the diverse approaches to virtuosity Schumann developed over the course of his career, revealing several distinct currents in nineteenth-century German virtuosity and the enduring flexibility of virtuosity discourse.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Virtuosity Discourse

Part I: Schumann and the Piano Virtuosity of the 1830s
Part I Introduction
1. Florestan among the Revelers: Postclassical Virtuosity and Schumann's Critique of Pleasure
2. Florestan's Wine, Clara Wieck's Spirit: Postclassical Virtuosity and Poetic Interiority
3. Poetic Showpieces in the Cultivated Salon
4. Virtuosity and the Rhetoric of the Sublime

Part II: The Virtuoso on Mount Parnassus: Schumann and the Culture of the Work Concept
Part II Introduction
5. Steps to Parnassus? Schumann's Equivocal Work Concept
6. Festivals of the Virtuoso Priesthood: Collaborating with Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim
Epilogue
List of Endnote Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• History
• European
• Musicology
• History of classical music traditions
• Criticism
• Multiple signal classification
• 19th century

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 19 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253022097
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Schumann s Virtuosity
ALEXANDER STEFANIAK
Schumann s Virtuosity
Criticism, Composition, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Germany
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Alexander Stefaniak
Publication of this book was supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stefaniak, Alexander, 1983- author.
Title: Schumann s virtuosity : criticism, composition, and performance in nineteenth-century Germany / Alexander Stefaniak.
Description: Bloomington ; Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016021002 (print) | LCCN 2016021399 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253021991 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780253022097 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Schumann, Robert, 1810-1856-Influence. | Virtuosity in musical performance-Germany-History-19th century. | Music-Germany-19th century-Philosophy and aesthetics.
Classification: LCC ML410.S4 S83 2016 (print) | LCC ML410.S4 (ebook) | DDC 780.92-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021002
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
For Eliana, a poetic virtuoso
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Virtuosity Discourse
Part I. Schumann and the Piano Virtuosity of the 1830s
1. Florestan among the Revelers: Postclassical Virtuosity and Schumann s Critique of Pleasure
2. Florestan s Wine, Clara Wieck s Spirit: Postclassical Virtuosity and Poetic Interiority
3. Poetic Showpieces in the Cultivated Salon
4. Virtuosity and the Rhetoric of the Sublime
Part II. Schumann s Virtuosity and the Culture of the Work Concept
5. Steps to Parnassus? Schumann s Equivocal Work Concept
6. Festivals of the Virtuoso Priesthood: Collaborating with Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim
Epilogue
List of Endnote Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of writing this book has been meeting and working with many generous, kind people who have helped the project along at various stages. I especially owe thanks to several archivists who shared sources from their collections, guided me through their holdings, and extended their hospitality during my research trips: in particular, Thomas Synofzik and Hrosvith Dahmen of the Robert Schumann Haus in Zwickau, Matthias Wendt of the Robert-Schumann-Forschungsstelle in D sseldorf, and the staff of the music reading room at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich.
Numerous friends and colleagues in musicology and other disciplines gave freely of their expertise and provided moral support. Ralph Locke, Bill Marvin, and Holly Watkins were instrumental in shaping this book s methodological pluralism. At Washington University in Saint Louis, Ben Duane, Denise Gill, and Paul Steinbeck read several of chapters, and the university s Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon (led by Tili Boon Cuill ) workshopped chapters 1 and 4 . Brad Short of Gaylord Music Library tirelessly acquired resources important for my work. Other friends and colleagues in Saint Louis and elsewhere commented on sections of the book or answered specific queries: Jonathan Bellman, Julie Hedges Brown, Todd Decker, Matt Erlin, Catherine Keane, Caroline Kita, Jonathan Kregor, Karen Leistra-Jones, Att and Robert McDowell, Laurie McManus, Craig Monson, Dolores Pesce, Robert Snarrenberg, Hanne Spence, Marie Sumner Lott, Lynne Tatlock, and Kira Thurman. All shortcomings, of course, remain my own.
Some individuals and institutions granted me permission to quote extensively from sources to which they hold rights. Claudia Macdonald allowed me to draw a music example from her edition of Schumann s F-Major Piano Concerto; Hofmeister Verlag-to draw a music example from their edition of Schumann s Sehnsuchtwalzer Variations; and Thomas Synofzik-to publish my translation of Schumann s epilogue to his Ein Opus II essay. A version of chapter 4 has appeared in Journal of Musicology 33, no. 4 (2016).
Raina Polivka and her colleagues at Indiana University Press have steered this book steadily through review and production. Janice Frisch, Naz Pantaloni, and my anonymous readers were especially helpful in the earlier stages, and David Miller and Mary Ribesky oversaw production. Eileen Allen prepared the index. Washington University PhD student Joseph Jakubowski engraved the music examples-no small feat, given the complex piano textures-and Karen Olson proofread them with an eagle eye.
Finally, my family has been at my side from the beginning of this project. My parents, Martha and Carl, and my brother, Andy, have always supported my musical and scholarly endeavors and were ever ready to hear more about nineteenth-century virtuosity and the writing process. My wife, Eliana Haig, was behind this book in ways big and small, sharing every day her ready humor, infectious curiosity, unsinkable confidence, and musician s ear.
Schumann s Virtuosity
Introduction: The Virtuosity Discourse
In 1843, Robert Schumann published a review that captures, in miniature, the range and urgency of the issues that virtuosity raised for him. The essay covered violinist Antonio Bazzini s May 14 concert at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Its opening does not bode well for the Italian star: Schumann seems to announce himself as a staunch antivirtuosity critic. He describes a horde of virtuosos glutting the concert scene and suggests a sweepingly negative view of their work:
The public has lately begun to notice a surplus of virtuosos, and so has this journal (as it has often made known). Their recently arisen desire to travel to America seems to indicate that the virtuosos themselves feel this, and there are many of their enemies who harbor the silent wish that, for Heaven s sake, they will all stay over there. For, all things considered, the newer virtuosity has contributed but little to the benefit of art. 1
And yet, in his next breath, Schumann claims that Bazzini himself stood apart from this multitude. But when virtuosity confronts us in as delightful a form as the above-mentioned young Italian, he wrote, we gladly listen to it for hours. The rest of the review suggests diverse ways in which Bazzini, for Schumann, redeemed virtuosity. Schumann praises Bazzini s compositions, specifically his Concertino in E, Op. 14: The natural flow of the whole the really enchanting luster and euphony of individual passages most virtuosos have barely any idea of these things. He describes Bazzini s stage presence, his strong, youthful face that provided a welcome contrast to world-weary, pale virtuoso figures. He acknowledges Bazzini s nationality and distanced him from stereotypes of Italian frivolity, calling him an Italian through and through, but in the best sense. Schumann also surely recognized that, on this occasion, Bazzini was lending his star power to an orchestra that had become an exemplar of serious programming under Felix Mendelssohn s baton. At times, Schumann did worry that Bazzini stumbled off this pedestal and delighted the crowd with merely physical stunt-artistry. Schumann chided him for programming his Fantaisie dramatique on themes from Donizetti s Lucia di Lammermoor and his Capriccio on themes from Bellini s I Puritani . In both of the following pieces, he complained, I saw unhappily that he was not ashamed of flattering the public. Here was not so much music but rather a piling up of violin artifice, in which, in any case, nobody can imitate Paganini. Mostly, though, Schumann commended Bazzini s virtuosity. In one striking passage, he suggested that the violinist embodied Romantic ideals about music s ethereal qualities, its transcendence of the sensuous world: Sometimes when he played, it seemed that he came from the land of song-not a land that lies here or there, but that land from which everything unknown eternally beckons. 2
This review represented one small episode in Schumann s lifelong effort to shape what I call the virtuosity discourse: a lively, at times acrimonious discussion in which musicians and writers debated the imagined distinctions between transcendent and superficial virtuosity. Participants ranged across Europe and included often-anthologized writers such as Schumann himself, Fran ois-Joseph F tis, Eduard Hanslick, Heinrich Heine, Franz Liszt, A. B. Marx, and Richard Wagner, but also myriad anonymous reviewers of sheet music and concerts. In its most basic definition, virtuosity entailed an extraordinary display of physical skill from the performer-velocity, power, facility, even the ability to invent and execute radically new sounds. 3 As the Bazzini review illustrates, Schumann and his contemporaries examined virtuosity in various guises. In some cases, they viewed virtuosity in soloists live performances or public images. In others, they considered how musical compositions scripted virtuosic display. Often, these works came from genres that conventionally promised flashy passagework and were designed to show off or train a performer, such as conce