Introduction: Virtuosity and Liszt

Summary

It would not be quite right to say that in [Liszt’s] work the technical aspect stands in the foreground, much less that it was in any sense its own excuse for being. It is inseparable from the creative—from the creative in the service of Romantic ideas and feelings.

—Alfred Einstein

Virtuosity ought to be a subject for today.

—Jim Samson

In many ways Franz Liszt has come to define or incarnate piano virtuosity, even virtuosity tout court. Liszt is certainly the archetypal virtuoso: a flamboyant performer whose hair-raising technical feats at the piano created a sense of awe-inspiring excitement and an icon whose star power radiated far beyond the realm of music. While Liszt's early model, the Italian violinist Niccolo Paganini, may have been the first instrumentalist to define himself principally by virtuosity, Liszt transformed it into a revolutionary musical force, one that pushed the piano aesthetic to the limits of sound and poetic meaning. Lisztian virtuosity did not, however, arise in a vacuum but coincided with a number of interrelated historical phenomena: the rise of the middle-class consumer of concerts and lessons, the emerging centrality of the piano in musical culture, the popularity of opera, and the political shifts that led to a decline in aristocratic influence over music making and the concomitant valorization of the individual artist-genius. Moreover, Liszt forged this virtuoso image not alone but in the company of a host of dazzling pianists who brought keyboard virtuosity to heights not previously imagined: Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Alexander Dreyschock, Henri Herz, Adolf von Henselt, Clara Schumann, and especially Sigismond Thalberg, Liszt's only real rival. But Liszt alone among this group of composer-pianists—which notably does not include Fryderyk Chopin, who performed rarely in public and assiduously avoided the trappings of the virtuoso—was able to rescue this surfeit of virtuosity from its superficial, banal, and time-bound aspects, projecting a brand of romantic virtuosity that would become a wellspring for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century piano writing, most spectacularly in the concertos of Grieg, Anton Rubinstein, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and even Brahms (see David Keep's contribution to this volume on the Brahms-Liszt relation).