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The Virtuoso's Stage: A Theatrical Topos1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2007

GABRIELE BRANDSTETTER
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Abstract

This essay considers the virtuoso in music, theatre and dance as a liminal figure of performativity. It draws on cultural studies as well as the history of science to offer a critical reading which follows the virtuoso's oscillation between science and art. The escalating dynamic in the virtuoso's technical control of material (of the body, the ‘instrument’, language) leads to a polarization between artistic ‘creation’ and virtuoso performance: the virtuoso thus occupies a seismographic function within the aesthetic debates of the nineteenth century. The article also outlines the relationship between the media and virtuoso performance and the relevance of the anecdote for the virtuoso's charismatic impact. This essay will contribute to our understanding of how the contemporary media influenced the virtuoso concept, and address the issue of whether the (partial) disappearance of the virtuoso from the theatre stage translocates the figure of the virtuoso onto other ‘cultural stages’.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , July 2007 , pp. 178 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2007

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References

notes

2 See Edward, Neill, Niccolò Paganini, trans. Cornelia, Panzacchi (Munich and Leipzig: List, 1990), p. 167Google Scholar. On Paganini see Walter, Gualterio Armando, Paganini. Eine Biographie (Hamburg: Rütten und Loening, 1960)Google Scholar. This article draws on sketches and theses from a wider research project on the topic of virtuosi. This is a field of research which was, up until now, almost exclusively confined to music history; consideration of the phenomenon from a cultural- and theatre-studies perspective has been lacking. Currently I am working with a group of scholars in the field of research ‘Kulturen des Performativen’ in Berlin, focusing on virtuosity (‘Die Szene des Virtuosen – Zu einer Grenzfigur des Virtuosen’, http://www.sfb-performativ.de/seiten/b12.html). See, for example, Vladimir Jankélévitch: De la Musique au silence 5: Liszt et la rhapsodie. 1. Essai sur la virtuosité (Paris: Plon, 1979).

3 According to the reports on, for example, performances by Franz Liszt and Niccolò Paginini; see Neill, Niccolò Paganini, p. 94.

4 This is precisely the aspect of the virtuoso emphasized by entries in handbooks – perfect mastery of body and instrument. See, for example, the Hanns-Werner Heister's article ‘Virtuosen’, in Ludwig Finscher, ed., Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, 26 vols. (Kassel and Stuttgart: Metzler 1994–), Vol. IX, pp. 1722–32, here p. 1723: virtuosity combines two poles, the ‘display of skills and expression, the ability to provoke awe and amazement and, in contrast, the language of affect and emotion’.

5 Adorno attributed this evidentiality to the performance event and the interpreter: ‘The entire richness of the musical texture, the integration of which was the source of Bach's power, must be placed in prominence [zur Evidenz gebracht werden] by the performance’. Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Bach Defended against His Devotees’, in idem, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1981; first published 1967), pp. 133–46, here p. 145Google Scholar.

6 As cited by Gino, Monaldi, Cantanti evirati del Teatro Italiano (Rome: Ausonia, 1920), p. 94.Google Scholar

7 Franz, Liszt, ‘Paganini. Ein Nekrolog’ (1840), in Walter, Salmen, ed., ‘Critiques musicaux d'artiste.’ Künstler und Gelehrte schreiben über Musik (Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 1993), pp. 228–30, here p. 229.Google Scholar

8 Heinrich Heine, Lutezia. Bericht über Politik, Kunst und Volksleben. Zweiter Theil (LVI, Paris, 26 March 1843), in idem, Sämtliche Werke. Düsseldorfer Ausgabe, 23 vols., ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1990), Vol. XIV/1, pp. 48–56, here p. 49. Further references to this edition are given as ‘DHA’, by volume and page number.

9 It is significant that this definition of the term ‘virtuoso’ emerges and becomes more complex in the age of manufacture, so from roughly 1550 to 1750.

10 Cf. R. H. Syfret, ‘Some Early Reactions to the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 7 (1950), pp. 207–58.

11 Lorraine Daston, ‘Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment’, in Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 100–26, here p. 104.

12 See Marjorie, Hope Nicolson's highly informative article, ‘Virtuoso’, in Philip, Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, 5 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), Vol. IV, pp. 486–90Google Scholar.

13 Lorraine, Daston, ‘Attention’; see also Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998)Google Scholar.

14 Objects such as those on display in curio rooms as well as the astonishing and strange objects discussed in scientific treatises such as the monstrous calf's head in Robert Boyle's ‘An Account of a Very Odd Monstrous Calf’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1 (1665/6), p. 10.

15 On evidence in science see Gary Smith and Matthias Kroß, eds., Die ungewisse Evidenz. Für eine Kulturgeschichte des Beweises (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1998).

16 In Aristotle, the proper method of delivery – the actio – ‘is a thing that affects the success of a speech greatly’. Aristotle, Rhethoric (III.1, 1403b) in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 2237–8, here p. 2238.

17 Cicero, De Oratore III/LVI, 213, in Cicero in Twenty-Eight Volumes, trans. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann 1968), Vol. IV, pp. 1–185, here p. 169.

18 There is (still) scope for more extensive research into the issue of the latency of the rhetorical and its displacement into other fields of representation (science, the performing arts, e.g. those which feature virtuosi).

19 On this see, for example, Rousseau's and Diderot's critique of the traditional style of acting (for more on this see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1980)).

20 See Friedrich, Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’, in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 4 vols., ed. Alexander, Tille, trans. Thomas, Common (London: Henry and Co., 1896), Vol. XI, pp. 1–60, here p. 39Google Scholar.

21 Friedrich Nietzsche, in ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’, in ibid., pp. 61–94, here p. 70; original emphasis

22 Friedrich, Nietzsche, ‘From the Souls of Artists and Writers’, in idem, The Complete Works, ed. Ernst, Behler, trans. Gary, Handwerk, 20 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), Vol. III: Human, All too Human I, pp. 114–52, here p. 130; original emphasisGoogle Scholar.

23 Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, III vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. II, pp. 955, 957–8.

24 Alistair, Bruce, ed., The Musical Madhouse: An English Translation of Berlioz's ‘Les Grotesques de la Musique’ (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), pp. 22–3Google Scholar.

25 On the music and intellectual-historical background to this issue see Susan, Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

26 Heinrich Heine, Lutezia, p. 48.

27 Cf. Richard Wagner, ‘The Virtuoso and the Artist’, in idem, Prose Works, 8 vols., trans. William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892–9), Vol. VII (1898), pp. 108–22, here p. 111.

28 Ibid, pp. 111–12.

29 Wagner and Liszt took opposing points of view in this discussion (on the occasion of a performance of Lohengrin, which Wagner had asked Liszt to conduct). Liszt was of the opinion that the virtuoso is the one who brings a composition to life, as cited in Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, p. 91. On Liszt see also Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (London: Knopf, 1983).

30 Jörg Wiesel has explored this issue in his dissertation, Zwischen König und Konstitution. Der Körper der Monarchie vor dem Gesetz des Theaters (Vienna: Passagen-Verlag, 2001).

31 Heinrich Theodor Rötscher, ‘Das Virtuosenthum in der Schauspielkunst’, in idem, Kritiken und dramatische Abhandlungen (Leipzig 1859), pp. 241–9, here p. 241.

32 Ibid., p. 242.

33 Ibid.

34 Heinrich Heine, Lutezia, p. 46.

35 Franz Liszt, ‘Paganini’, p. 229.

36 As cited by Konrad Küster, Das Konzert: Form und Forum der Virtuosität (Basel/London/New York: Bärenreiter 1993), p. 125.

37 On the political context and on the logic of representation see Wiesel, Zwischen König und Konstitution, particularly pp. 73–5.

38 Franz Liszt, ‘Paganini’, p. 230.

39 Heine writes in Lutezia (p. 45) that virtuosity attests ‘in truth to the victory of the machine over the spirit’ and that ‘the precision of an automaton, identification with the stringed piece of wood, the resounding human being becoming an instrument’ are being celebrated.

40 Carlo Blasis, The Code of Terpsichore: The Art of Dancing: Comprising its Theory and Practice, and a History of its Rising and Progress from the Earliest Times (London: Barton, 1830).

41 See ibid., p. 95.

42 Blasis provides a structural plan for the study and memorization of complex movements: ‘In order that [the] execution may be correct, I have drawn lines. . . over the principal positions of these figures, which will give [them] an idea of the exact form they have to place themselves in, and to figure the different attitudes of dancing.’ Ibid., p. 96.

43 Ibid., pp. 96–7.

44 For Blasis's precise description of the pirouette in The Code of Terpsichore see pp. 82–7.

45 In this context it is interesting to note that, in the discourse surrounding the virtuoso, the observation that he never seems to tire – despite his incomprehensible physical achievement – is made again and again. See also Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

46 Cf. Alan Feldman, ‘The Human Touch: Toward a Historical Anthropology and Dream Analysis of Self-Acting Instruments’, in Gabriele Brandstetter and Hortensia Völckers, eds., ReMembering the Body (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), pp. 224–58.

47 Rötscher, ‘Das Virtuosenthum in der Schauspielkunst’, p. 244.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid. Rötscher also uses the metaphor of the ‘advertisement's steam power’ in this context; p. 247.

50 The magnetiseur was conceived as a romantic figure in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story of the same name: a magician who penetrates the soul of the (female) other via hypnotic powers and who seizes control of the images of the unconscious.

51 Thalberg was Franz Liszt's great adversary. Audiences, critics and agents followed the careers of the two men, which saw direct contests between the pianists – duelling virtuosos, as it were.

52 Heine, Lutezia, p. 51.

53 Heine, Florentine Nights, in The Works of Heinrich Heine, 8 vols., trans. Charles Godfrey Leland (London: Heinemann, 1891), Vol. I, pp. 1–92, here p. 33.

54 Ibid., p. 28. Johann Peter Lyser (1803–70, real name Ludwig Peter August Burmeister) was a busy artist who also wrote music critiques and literary texts.

55 Ibid.; original emphasis.

56 Ibid., p. 31.

57 On the importance of the anecdote for a theory of cultural studies, as developed by new historicism, cf. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000) (which includes, for example, ‘Counterhistory and the Anecdote’, pp. 49–75), as well as Joel, Fineman, ‘The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction’, in Veeser, H. Aram, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 49–77Google Scholar.

58 Franz Liszt, ‘Paganini’, p. 228.