après une lecture de liszt: virtuosity and

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

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19th-Century Music, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 52–93. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2008 by the Regents of theUniversity 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.

I owe a keen debt of gratitude to many people for theirhelpful comments on earlier drafts of this study, notably:Carolyn Abbate, John Butt, Kenneth Hamilton, LeslieHoward, Allan Keiler, Lewis Lockwood, Nicholas Marston,Rena Mueller, and Alan Walker. In particular, I want tothank Alexander Rehding, Roger Parker, Berthold Hoeckner,and Lawrence Kramer for their invaluable advice and assis-tance on this project. I am grateful as well to Evelyn Liepschat the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar, and to King’sCollege, Cambridge, and the Center for European Studiesat Harvard, both of whom funded my research at differentpoints. An earlier version of this article was presented atthe seventy-first annual meeting of the American Musico-logical Society in Washington, October 2005. All transla-tions are mine unless otherwise indicated.

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

DAVID TRIPPETT

The change of direction in Franz Liszt’s careerthat took place during the autumn of 1847 wasspectacular. That year he retired from the con-cert stage, finally accepted a salaried conduc-torship, and first met Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. Writing to his new patron, theGrand Duke Carl Alexander, Liszt alluded toDante to mark his moment of transformation:“The time has come for me (Nel mezzo del

1“Le moment vient pour moi (Nel mezzo del camin denostra vita—35 ans!) de briser ma chrysalides de virtuositéet de laisser plein vol à ma pensée,” Liszt to Carl Alexander,6 October 1846, in Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt undCarl Alexander, Grossherzog von Sachsen, ed. La Mara(Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1909), p. 8. During periodsof Liszt’s intense engagement with literature, brief quota-tions of this type are not uncommon in his correspon-dence. Two examples from Dante are: “Society here iszero, absolutely zero. Non ragioniam di lor [let’s not talkof them]” from Inferno, III, 51, in Liszt to Marie d’Agoult,9 November 1839, in Franz Liszt Selected Letters, trans.and ed. Adrian Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998),p. 114; and from Liszt’s diary “Journal des Zÿi,” whoseentry from 2 August includes: “To live, to think, to speak,perhaps to act. / I am like the She-Wolf in Dante: . . . Chedi tutte brame, / Sembiava carca nella sua magrezza [thatwith all hungering / Seemed to be laden in her meager-ness]” from Inferno, I, 49–50. See Marie d’Agoult,Mémoires, 1833–1854 [pseud. Daniel Stern], ed. DanielOllivier (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1927), pp. 173–75.

cammin di nostra vita—thirty-five years old!)to break out of my virtuoso’s chrysalis andallow my thought unfettered flight.”1 Liszt’sdeliciously mixed metaphor suggests that the

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DAVIDTRIPPETTVirtuosity inthe “Dante”Sonata

composer-as-butterfly had finally metamor-phosed from virtuoso-as-caterpillar; the theat-rical performer had represented only an embry-onic stage in artistic development. Liszt thusappeared to reflect a well-documented shift invalues. His emphasis moved from virtuosity tointerpretation, from what Wagner in 1840 hadtermed the “vulgar somersaults” of merepianism to the genius of the artist,2 from theephemeral performance to the immutable work.In a different sense, the reference to Dante’sDivine Comedy also implied that Liszt sawhimself as having earlier wandered down thewrong path: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostravita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / che ladiritta via era smarrita” (Midway in the jour-ney of our life / I found myself within a darkforest, / for the straight way was lost.) By quot-ing the first line, Liszt (who at thirty-five hadgiven his final public concert at Elisavetgrad inSeptember 1847) drew a parallel with Dantemarking his thirty-fifth year in A.D. 1300—the“midpoint” in life’s biblically allotted span aswell as the beginning of Dante’s divine awak-ening. Yet the strange logic of Liszt’s poeticallusion gives us pause. The vision of the un-fettered butterfly clashes with Dante’s midlifeepiphany, since the butterfly lives for only afew weeks after months of gestation. Indeed,the butterfly’s flight is a traditional symbol ofthe soul’s flight after death, hence Liszt’s latemetamorphosis suggests a valedictory coup dethéâtre—an incongruity not untypical of whatLawrence Kramer dubbed a virtuoso “riddledwith ambivalence.”3

Standing at the crossroads between the rolesof virtuoso and composer, Liszt in his lettersexpressed this ambivalence most acutely in hisreflections on Werktreue. On the one hand, he

donned the garb of the penitent performer,claiming publicly in 1837: “I even went so faras to add a host of rapid runs and cadenzas. . . .You cannot believe . . . how I deplore thoseconcessions to bad taste, those sacrilegious vio-lations of the SPIRIT and the LETTER.”4 Onthe other hand, the virtuoso’s blood continuedto run in Liszt’s veins, leading him to declareas late as 1853 that “the letter killeth the spirit,a thing to which I will never subscribe, how-ever specious in their hypocritical impartialitymay be the attacks to which I am exposed.”5

As Susan Bernstein has argued, historical con-cepts of virtuosity are defined by such contra-dictions, which can account equally for tawdrypyrotechnics and transcendental expression:“[Liszt’s] consistent inconsistency forms thevery consistency of the virtuoso—an inconsis-tency determined by the oscillation betweenegoistic protrusion and transmissive self-efface-ment.”6 This fluidity illuminates Liszt’sstruggle to change his artistic identity on the

2“Was sollte euch gelingen, wolltet ihr’ ihm [the virtuosoin a concert hall] es nachthum? Ein schnöder Purzelbaum,nichts Anderes” (Richard Wagner, “Der Virtuos und derKünstler,” Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Ri-chard Wagner, vol. 1 [Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1871/1880],p. 212). The essay title’s pejorative distinction implicitlydenies “artistic” stature to the virtuosity that Liszt repre-sented in 1841. At the time, Liszt was reaping praise fromthe Berlin press amid the popular frenzy associated withHeine’s 1844 catchphrase: “Lisztomania.”3Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a CriticalHistory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p.69.

4From Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique; Liszt toGeorge Sand, Paris, 12 February 1837, Gazette musicale,pp. 53–56. Quoted and translated in Charles Suttoni, AnArtist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique 1835–1841 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 17–18.5This second complaint concerned time, accentuation, andrhythm in Beethoven’s late style. Liszt is responding tocriticism of his conducting during the Calsruhe Festival of1853, explaining to Richard Pohl that “in many cases eventhe rough, literal maintenance of the time and of eachcontinuous measure | 1, 2, 3, 4, | 1, 2, 3, 4, | clashes withthe sense and expression.” Liszt to Richard Pohl, 1 August1853, in The Letters of Franz Liszt, ed. La Mara, trans. C.Bache (2 vols., London: H. Grevel, 1894), I, 175–76. Whiletoying with tempo is surely a lesser “infidelity” than ac-tively embellishing a given text, concert reviews from the1840s continued to record Liszt’s “deliciously fanciful am-plifications” (Franz Liszt Selected Letters, p. 136)—actsexemplifying his later dictum that “virtuosity is not asubmissive handmaiden to the composition.” The latterremark appears in Liszt’s essay on Clara Schumann [1855];see Gesammelte Schriften von Franz Liszt, ed. LinaRamann (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1881–99), vol. IV(1882), p. 193. See also Liszt’s assertion in The Gypsy inMusic [1859] that the virtuoso is not merely a passivepurveyor of an extant creation, a conscientious and precise“mason,” but the sole means of accessing a world of feel-ing to which the work is only a window. The Gypsy inMusic, trans. Edwin Evans, 2 vols. (London: W. Reeves,1926), II, 267.6Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century:Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, andBaudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.112.

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road to Weimar amid the “most intense periodof anti-virtuosity backlash in the history ofinstrumental music,”7 which in turn gave riseto a “strengthening forcefield between virtuos-ity and the work.”8 If Liszt compared thevirtuoso’s career with a caterpillar’s confine-ment, did this disqualify “virtuosity” per se orwas it merely a response to public criticism?The comparison prompts another question thatcritics of many stripes have asked of author-ship within text- and score-based criticism:Who is speaking?9 Liszt’s liquidation of hisperformer’s “self” testifies to his desire to man-age his public identity strategically, to narratehis own story in a self-styled Künstlerroman,and thus to both publicize and legitimize hisnew identity as a composer and ex-virtuoso.10

But as he entered into the service of a patronfor the first time in his professional career—not exactly the unfettered freedom of a butter-fly—did this transformation unequivocally rep-resent a dedicated commitment to a new causeor did it arise, at least in part, from his anxietyover the diminishing status of the virtuoso?

In this article I would like to consider thesequestions in light of Liszt’s Après une lecturedu Dante: Fantasie quasi Sonata. Written be-tween 1839 and 1858, the Sonata survives inthree full manuscripts and four fragments and,I contend, interweaves hours and hours of im-provisation with a gradual process of revisionon a more abstracted, conceptual level. As apiece born expressly from acts of performance,the Sonata appears not to be regulated exclu-sively by the idea that a work is an enduring,

immutable product. It thus subverts what Caro-lyn Abbate calls the “performance network” inwhich performers more or less obey the cen-tripetal force of a “composed” work.11 Liszt’spredisposition toward virtuosity ensured thatcertain musical ideas came to him through im-provisation rather than prior to it. At first blushthis seems unsurprising, yet it nevertheless pre-sents a problem for the ideology of a workconcept that separates Liszt hierarchicallyinto pianist and composer. In contrast to con-temporaries like Felix Mendelssohn or RobertSchumann, Liszt in his virtuosity continuallychallenges the aesthetic boundaries of compo-sition, improvisation, and performance.

Such categories imply a distinction betweenmusical thought in the physical immediacy ofimprovisation and musical thought indepen-dent of physical enactment (even if the com-poser works at the piano). But this distinctionappears increasingly weak in light of Lisztianpractices that seemed to recognize a mutuallyinvertible relation between the fingers’ tactilediscovery of ideas at the keyboard and the cog-nition governing those fingers and ideas. SirJohn Russell even reports that Beethoven con-tinued to improvise “tactilely” as late as 1821despite being almost totally deaf,12 and in ourown time, research into brain activity has es-tablished a substantial anatomical overlap be-tween executing and imaging motor tasks.13

11Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001), pp. 9ff.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-ing Mechanism for Motor Cognition,” NeuroImage 14(2001), 103–09; Marc Jeannerod, V. Frak, “Mental Imagingof Motor Activity in Humans,” Current Opinion in Neu-robiology 9 (2001), 735–39; M. Lotze, P. Montoya, M. Erb,E. Hulsmann, H. Flor, U. Klose, N. Birbaumer, W. Grodd,“Activation of Cortical and Cerebellar Motor Areas duringExecuted and Imagined Hand Movements: An fMRI Study,”Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11 (1999), 491–501. Astudy specific to professional pianists suggests that, ex-cept in the primary sensorimotor area of the left hemi-sphere and the right cerebellum, playing music in one’shead and physically playing at the keyboard activate es-sentially the same cortical regions. There is, in other words,“a subliminal activation of the motor system in motorimagery.” See I. G. Meister, T. Krings, H. Foltys, B.Boroojerdi, M. Müller, R. Töpper, A. Thron, “Piano Play-ing in the Mind—an fMRI Study on Music Imagery andPerformance in Pianists,” Cognitive Brain Research 19

7Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004), p. 13. As Gooley observes, an anti-virtuoso stance was propounded by both Schumann’s NeueZeitschrift and Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette musicale.8Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 74.9To cite two notable examples: Edward T. Cone, TheComposer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press,1974), p. 1; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” inImage—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow:Fontana/Collins, 1977), pp. 142–49.10Within the European press, Liszt’s compound nationali-ties, mobile class status, and musical competencies wereall debated among writers and listeners as part of whatincreasingly became an unstable and over-determined pub-lic identity. See Gooley’s discussion of the multiple sym-bolic identities that Liszt fulfilled for his audiences in TheVirtuoso Liszt, pp. 2ff.

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Playing and imagining music are not as dis-tinct neurologically as they are behaviourally.Nor is this insight confined to modern science.Back in 1852, the Berliner Musik-Zeitung Echotreated as an open secret the fact that thekeyboard’s physical properties functioned as acompositional determinant in the improvisa-tion of operatic fantasies: “In the end, we knowonly too well that the piano forms a covertmemory hook [Eselsbrücke], by means of whichmany composers—who are not in a position towrite at the desk—bungle together their oper-atic hack jobs.”14

By softening, if not quite collapsing, the dis-tinction between the physical/tactile and men-tal/imaginary in music, we might come to re-gard all composition as “slowed down improvi-sation.”15 Yet given that these distinctions de-lineated categories of identity in press re-ports rooted in the twin ascendencies of virtu-osity and Werktreue in nineteenth-century Eu-rope, they remain a historical reality. There isthus a corresponding need to maintain a dis-tinction between improvisation and composi-tion, the former connoting a performativity in-applicable to concepts of the latter within thesemiotics of the self-contained work.16

Liszt’s position with respect to this distinc-tion was indeterminate. Not all nineteenth-century improvisation was virtuosic, but Liszt’sparticular virtuosity during the 1830s was in-herently improvisatory. Its theme-driven,“physical” textures appear to have fed into thegenesis of the “Dante” Sonata in a way thatrenders this particular work a kind of archeo-logical site documenting Liszt’s shifting pro-fessional identity. Although there is a limit towhat we can know about an improvisation withno acoustic trace, Liszt’s apparent incorpora-tion of characteristically improvised traits intohis “compositional” process nevertheless em-bodies a tension between passionate sentiment,in what Edward Said termed the “extreme oc-casion”17 of performance, and the potential ofironic critique introduced by aesthetic distance.This tension bears witness to a collision be-tween Liszt’s twin identities as virtuoso andcomposer.

Fragments of a FRAGMENT DANTESQUE

The two earliest extant fragments of whatwould become the “Dante” Sonata are in Liszt’shand and can be dated within a few months ofhis first-documented performance of it (25 Oc-tober 1839). They capture two characteristicmusical elements that he would retain—bothmodified—as bookends in the final publishedsonata. The blank staves and paper types indi-cate that these remarkable sketches were notsurviving shards from a full manuscript; on thecontrary, I would speculate that they were neverintended to be “complete” for the purposes ofhis performances in 1839–40. Instead, whileLiszt always conceived of this work as his “com-position,” these sketches may well have func-tioned respectively as an aide-mémoire and asa memento for two essential components ofwhat was initially more akin to an improvisedfree fantasy: a rhetorical introduction and aprincipal diatonic thematic progression pre-sented here as the fantasy’s coda. In other words,the sketches might be a mnemonic frame for a

(2004), 219–28, here 224. Only the extent of the activationin these regions (measured using functional magnetic reso-nance imaging) in two areas specific to physical move-ment (the primary sensorimotor cortices and posterior pa-rietal regions) differentiates imaging and executing pianoperformance.14“Wir wissen endlich nur zu gut, daß das Piano dieheimliche Eselsbrücke bildet, mittelst deren vieleComponisten, welche nicht am Pulte zu schreiben imStande sind, ihre Opernsachen zusammenstümpern”(E. K., “Einige Worte über Improvisation,” Berlin Musik-Zeitung Echo 41 [10 Oct. 1852], 323).15Schoenberg famously expressed this opinion in “Brahmsthe Progressive”: “Composition is a kind of slowed downimprovisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keeppace with the torrent of ideas” (Komponieren ist eine Artverlangsamte Improvisation; oft kann man nicht schnellgenug schreiben, um mit dem Strom der Gedanken Schrittzu halten) (Stil und Gedanke [Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer, 1976], p. 69).16Beethoven certainly maintained such a distinction in hisadvice to his student, Archduke Rudolph, tasking him withexercises in composition “when sitting at the pianoforte[where] you should jot down your ideas in the form ofsketches,” adding later that “you should also composewithout a pianoforte” (Susan Kagan, Archduke Rudolph,Beethoven’s Patron, Pupil, and Friend: His Life and Music[Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1988], p. 32. Briefwechsel,no.1686).

17Edward Said, “Performance as an Extreme Occasion,”Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1991), pp. 1–34.

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planned improvisation. MS I 18, no.1 (plate 1),ca.1839, presents the opening tritones, whichestablish a demonic topic of descent whollyappropriate to the journey into hell that ini-tially inspired the artistic conception.18 Laterrevisions to this passage in manuscripts from1840 to 1858 are cosmetic.19 Dated 11 March1840, MS 1C.51 (plate 2), a manuscript hithertounconnected to the “Dante” Sonata, shows asketch of the Sonata’s characteristic major-chord progression written in the Stammbuchof a female admirer in Prague, suggesting thatLiszt may have performed it there and, on re-quest, copied this music after the fact.20 Curi-ously, the progression is notated in C whereasit occurs (substantively) in both F� and D in theearliest complete manuscript ca.1840 (MS I 76),where it forms the basis of a thematic andmodal contrast with the main chromatic themein the Sonata’s later versions (compare with ex.6). This discrepancy of key could represent akindly simplification by Liszt for an admiringamateur, but it may also suggest a characteris-tically improvisatory performance in Praguethat was more tonally discursive than MS I 76records.

The final version of the Sonata, entitled Aprèsune lecture du Dante—Fantasie quasi Sonata,was first published by Schott in 1858 as theseventh and final piece in the second volume(Deuxième Année, Italie) of Liszt’s collection

Années de Pèlerinage.21 All four principalsources for the Sonata are now housed in theGoethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar;22 the1840 fragment from Prague, plate 2, is in thePrague State Conservatoire. Liszt’s original ex-emplar for MS I 76 from ca. 1840 is lost, and allbut one of the sources from which I have workedare copyist’s versions; all show his corrections,alterations, and revisions. By studying thesedocuments, and following extensive researchby Rena Mueller into Liszt’s manuscripts, Ihave been able to update Sharon Winklhofer’sstudy from 1977 and chart the evolution of theSonata from its origins in 1839 as a sketchentitled Fragment dantesque.23 The genetic andstemmatological information is presented inAppendix A (pp. 92–93), and Table 1; fig. 1gives a chronology of the copyists in the pro-duction of the known manuscripts.

The revisions and evident preparation ofmanuscripts between 1839 and 1840, 1849 and

18MS I 18, no.1 is in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv,Weimar. A transcription of this fragment was first pub-lished in the Journal of the British Liszt Society 28 (2003),34.19See Appendix A for a stemmatological study of theSonata’s extant sources.20Liszt wrote to Marie d’Agoult the same day he signed themanuscript (Wednesday, 11 March 1840), explaining thathe had just given his fifth concert in Prague that morning.His comment that “the Bohemian aristocracy . . . havebeen most charming to me. Here, as elsewhere, the womenare on my side,” makes it plausible that the notated chordprogression from the “Dante” Sonata may have been writ-ten for a female aristocrat following a performance(L’aristocratie de Bohême . . . a été charmantissime pourmoi. Ici comme ailleurs, les femmes sont pour moi). SeeCorrespondance / Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, ed. SergeGut and Jacqueline Bellas (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 551. In1962 a facsimile of this, MS 1C.51, was published in acollection of facsimiles with the text: “Ein Adagio, dasLiszt einer unbekannten Prager Verehrerin ins Stammbuchschrieb.” See Alexander Buchner, Franz Liszt in Böhmen(Prague: Artia, 1962), p. 83.

21Liszt used four different titles in the preparation of hismanuscripts, all of which suggest an explicitly literaryconception: “Fragment dantesque” connotes an unfinishedform that, for Romantic poetry in particular, pointed tothe infinite by its very incompleteness; “Paralipomènes àla Divina Comedia” means material omitted from the bodyof a text, appended as a supplement; “Prolégomènes à laDivina Comedia” indicates that Liszt changed his mind,preferring not to append but to preface his music to areading of the text; “Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasiequasi Sonata” is derived from Victor Hugo’s poem of al-most the same name from the collection Les Voixintérieures (1837) and allowed Liszt to characterize hisrelation to Beethoven with the subtitle. Liszt’s use of “du”rather than Hugo’s “de” in the final title is most likelydeliberate, drawing on the German practice of using thedefinite article to refer to a famous person or thing, andattempting to translate this into French. In a letter toJoachim Raff from 1 August 1849, Liszt refers to his pieceas Fantasia quasi Sonata (Prologomènes [sic] zu DantesGöttlicher Comödie), but this title is not, to my knowl-edge, recorded in any of the extant manuscripts. Raff’sletter is cited in Sharon Winklhofer, “Liszt, Marie d’Agoultand the ‘Dante’ Sonata,” this journal 1 (1977), 30.22In chronological order, these are MSS I 18, no.1; I 18,no.3; I 76; I 17; I 18, no.2; I 1377. See Appendix A for anexplanation of the sources, the findings of which are pre-sented schematically here as fig. 1.23Rena Mueller, Liszt’s “Tasso” Sketchbook: Studies inSources and Revisions (Michigan: UMI, 1986), pp. 147–54.See also Sharon Winklhofer, Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor: AStudy of Autograph Sources and Documents (Ph.D. diss.,University of California, Los Angeles, 1978), subsequentlypublished (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), pp. 53–84, and Winklhofer’s shorter study of the “Dante” Sonata,“Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, and the ‘Dante’ Sonata.”

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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.

http://www.jstor.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1525/ncm.2008.32.1.052&iName=master.img-000.jpg&w=455&h=553

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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.

Figure 1

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 Lisztca. 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 —> Stichvorlage1858 —> Schott’s edition


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Liszt’s own letters make no reference to the1853 performance, it seems likely that althoughhe publicly programmed the Sonata only oncein Vienna, he may have performed it privatelyto Weimar guests on numerous occasions. Thisopens up the possibility that the stages of com-position represented in the early manuscriptsmay have been directed less toward the comple-tion of a final, immutable version than towardan evolving collection of musical ideas subjectto continual reworking. Composition, at leastwith regard to this music, would thus havebecome an open-ended process of refinement.It is revealing that, for Liszt, this was at notime incongruous with his conception of theSonata as a composed work.

I will argue that the relation of the two earlyfragmentary sketches to the completed score isanalogous to the relation of Liszt’s identity as avirtuoso improviser to his identity as a com-

Table 1Transmission of 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 Lisztwas working toward publication at three differ-ent stages.24 Contemporary with the first twostages, a letter to Marie d’Agoult, a concertreview in the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung, anda letter from the Hungarian violinist EduardReményi report that Liszt performed the workin at least three different versions.25 Given that

24There is no doubt Liszt intended his Fragment dantesqueto be published in late 1840. Writing to the portrait artistHenri Lehmann, Liszt asks: “Have I never played you myFragment dantesque? I don’t believe so. I will publish itwilly-nilly at the beginning of Winter with the first of myYears of Pilgrimage” (Vous ai-je jamais joué mon Frag-ment Dantesque? Je ne crois pas. Bon gré mal gré je lepublierai à l’entrée de l’hivera avec la première de Mesannées de pèlerinage). Liszt to Lehmann, 20 September1840, England, in Une Correspondance romantique: Ma-dame d’Agoult, Liszt, Henri Lehmann, ed. Solange Joubert(Paris: Flammarion, 1947), p. 128. Beyond this evidence,the presence of Liszt’s manuscript markings in red crayon—which he tended to use for final corrections—suggests thepreparation of a publishable version. Only red crayon couldbe seen clearly above the often densely layered revisionsin pencil or pen.25Liszt performed the “Dante” Sonata in different forms atthe Hôtel de l’Europe on 25 October 1839, at his fourthmorning concert (of six) in Vienna on 5 December 1839,and in Weimar during June 1853, when he performed alater version entitled Prolégomènes à la Divina Commediato Reményi. Liszt mentions his private performance toMarie d’Agoult on October 25; see Correspondance / Franz

Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, p. 388. Heinrich Adami published areview of Liszt’s performance in Allgemeine Theaterzeitung(7 Dec. 1839), 1197. Reményi reports in a letter that Lisztplayed a version of his sonata for him in June 1853: “Thisscribbler allows himself to address a great man—after hav-ing heard . . . la Fantasie d’après Dante, etc.” (Briefehervorrangender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt, ed. La Mara[Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1895], I, 283).

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poser. Not surprisingly, the manuscripts forthe “Dante” Sonata indicate that his workingmethods did not alter decisively as Liszt as-sumed his duties as Kapellmeister in 1848 andbegan to change his goals and aspirations aswell as his instrument (from piano to orches-tra). When his professional identity changed,Liszt intensified his revision of the Sonata, re-visiting the work at least twice; but, as I willsuggest, the methods by which he continuallyrecomposed this music remain essentially themethods of a virtuoso improviser, lending thepiece a problematic status within the norma-tive categories of work and improvisation. Wecan extrapolate from this that the various stagesof revision to the “Dante” Sonata—like theletter to Carl Alexander—document Liszt’s de-sire to exceed the category of virtuoso and gainacceptance as a composer within the post-Beethovenian canon.

Debating Musical Legitimacy:PHANTASIEREN and KOMPONIEREN

As a composer, Liszt had endured acrimony inthe press ever since 1837, when he lambastedthe music of his rival Sigismond Thalberg as“pretentiously empty and mediocre . . . su-premely monotonous and therefore supremelyboring” in the Revue et Gazette musicale deParis.26 At the time, he misjudged the severityof responses this would elicit from the Parisianbeau monde, anticipating Fétis’s vengeful ar-ticle with the throwaway remark to Maried’Agoult that the journalistic ping pong “couldall become very amusing.”27 Recent studies of

the Liszt-Thalberg rivalry showed the extent towhich Liszt had miscalculated,28 and in thislight his appointment a decade later as Hof-Kapellmeister to the court of Weimar can beviewed as a much-needed public endorsementof his status as a composer through the court’sinstitutional pedigree. Schumann’s oft-citedcomment on the Liszt “problem,” however,remains typical in its marking of a disjuncturebetween identities: “While [Liszt] developed hispiano playing to an extraordinary degree, thecomposer in him lagged behind; this alwaysleads to disparity [Mißverhältnis], the conse-quences of which are felt in his most recentworks.”29 Charles Rosen articulates the mod-ern equivalent of this influential view when heidentifies a passage from Liszt’s tenth Hungar-ian Rhapsody as “the zero degree of musicalinvention if we insist that invention must con-sist of melody, rhythm, harmony, and counter-point.” For Rosen, Liszt’s music is “conceivedabsolutely for public performance,”30 and thepersuasiveness of his remarks derives partlyfrom their congruity with Liszt’s documentedexperience as an improvising and embellishingperformer as opposed to a formally trained com-poser. Back in 1839, Schumann explicitly un-derscored this point, reminding his Neue Zeit-schrift readers that Liszt had received scantformal instruction in composition.31 This lack

26“Prétentleusement vides et médiocres . . . souverainementmonotone, et partant souverainement ennuyeuse” (Liszt,“Revue critique: M. Thalberg.—Grand Fantasie, oeuvre22.—1er et 2e Caprices, œuvres 15 et 19,” La Revue etGazette musicale de Paris 4 [8 Jan. 1837], 17–20, here 19).27“Cela pourra devenir amusant” (Liszt to Marie d’Agoult,13 Feb. 1837, Paris, in Correspondance / Franz Liszt, Maried’Agoult, p. 265). Fétis’s first response to Liszt’s publicdenigration of Thalberg’s Grande Fantasie, op. 22, appearedin Vert-vert on 16 January 1837. His more extended, com-parative article—“MM. Thalberg et Liszt”—was publishedin La Revue et Gazette musicale 17 (23 April 1837), pp.135–42. Liszt failed to avert a thorny public dialogue byresponding: “A M. le Professeur Fétis,” Revue 20 (14 May1837), 169–72; and he was in turn answered by Fétis asecond time: “A monsieur le directeur de la Gazette Musi-cale de Paris,” Revue 21 (21 May 1837), 173–75.

28See Rainer Kleinertz, “Subjektivität und Öffentlichkeit:Liszts Rivalität mit Thalberg und ihre Folgen,” in Derjunge Liszt: Referate des 4. Europäischen Liszt-Symposions:Wien 1991, ed. Gottfried Scholz (Munich: Musikverlag E.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 HisWorld, ed. Gooley and Gibbs (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2006), pp. 167–230.29“Brachte er [Liszt] es nun als Spieler auf eine erstaunlicheHöhe, so war doch der Komponist zurückgeblieben, undhier wird immer ein Mißverhältnis entstehen, das sichauffallend auch bis in seine letzten Werke fortgerächt hat.”Schumann’s comment occurs in his 1839 review of pianoétudes, including Liszt’s Étude en douze exercices (op. 1)and their recomposition as twelve Grandes études. Trans-lation adapted from Schumann, On Music and Musicians,trans. Paul Rosenfeld, ed. Konrad Wolff (New York: Pan-theon, 1946), p. 147.30Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Bath: Fontana,1996), p. 507.31“Zu anhaltenden Studien in der Komposition scheint er[Liszt] keine Ruhe, vielleicht auch keinen ihm gewachsenenMeister gefunden zu haben; desto mehr studierte er als

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was a leitmotif of Liszt’s reception as a com-poser in the 1830s, a time when he chose not topublicize that, in his teens, he had in fact stud-ied with Ferdinand Paër, Antonin Reicha, andbriefly with Salieri.32

Two competing paradigms of artistic creationare concealed here. For Schumann, composing(or improvising) with an innate but unnurturedtalent inevitably produced results inferior tothose of a properly educated mind endowedwith similar artistic gifts. For Liszt, real talent(or perhaps just genius) had the power to nur-ture itself. While many Romantic composers—Schumann and Liszt included—sought to cometo terms with the delicate relationship betweenlearning and inspiration, craft and genius, Liszt’sartistic credo at this time seems to have beenformed according to a blend of pragmatism andidealism. He could no more undo his years ofimprovisatory practice than he could integratea training he never fully absorbed. UnlikeSchumann, therefore, he appears to lean to-ward the notion that the fruits of creation in

the instant of inspiration, unmediated by criti-cal reflection—whether in the extended formof methodical study or the momentary form ofabstraction from improvisation—would surpassthe “mediated” efforts of more schooled com-posers.33

In opposing critical self-reflection, Liszt’sview resonates with a distinguished Romantictradition of subliminal artistic invention, fromShelley, who in his Defense of Poetry (1840)observed: “The mind in creation is as a fadingcoal, which some invisible influence, like aninconstant wind, awakens to transitory bright-ness. . . . When composition begins, inspirationis already on the decline, and the most gloriouspoetry that has ever been communicated to theworld is probably a feeble shadow of the origi-nal conceptions of the poet.”34 To Schopen-hauer, for whom “the sketches of great mastersare often more effective than their finishedpaintings . . . the work done at one stroke . . .[is] perfected in the inspiration of the first con-ception and drawn unconsciously as it were;likewise the melody that comes entirely with-out reflection and wholly as if by inspiration. . . [has] the great merit of . . . free impulse ofgenius, without any admixture of delibera-tion.”35

Writing from a pedagogical perspective in1841, however, A. B. Marx made an antitheti-cal claim when he spoke of a creative processthat proceeds conversely from intuitive con-ception to action, Anschauung to Tat. Marximplies that views like Shelley’s were out ofdate, already ossified by the time of what Heinewould call Lisztomania:

If anyone still desired to return to that old misunder-standing about the dreamlike unconsciousness of

Virtuos” (“Etüden für das Pianoforte,” [1839], rpt. inSchumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musikervon Robert Schumann, ed. Martin Kreisig, vol. 1 [5th edn.Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1914], p. 439).32Gooley’s detailed study of Parisian concert reviews hasdemonstrated that by 1835 the complex textures of Liszt’spublished original works—Apparitions, the Harmoniespoétiques et réligieuses, and the Clochette fantasy—hadonly served to convince audiences that, in spite of receiv-ing wide acclaim as a pianist, he was in fact a deficientcomposer. See Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 24. See alsoDieter Torkewitz discussion of G. Schilling’s article of1836 in “Die Erfassung der ‘Harmonies poétiques etréligieuses’ von Liszt,” Liszt Studien II (Munich: EmilKatzbichler, 1981), p. 228.

Joseph d’Ortigue’s early biography of Liszt (in the Ga-zette musicale de Paris from 14 June 1835) downplays thesignificance of Liszt’s music teachers with witheringdismissiveness: Liszt was “humiliated to find himself treatedlike a school boy and . . . took a dislike to [Czerny, thoughlater 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-tude is given to Liszt’s music pedagogues, and, if anything,d’Ortigue emphasizes the autodidactic aspects of the boy’sschooling. See “Joseph d’Ortigue: Franz Liszt,” trans. VincentGiroud, in Liszt and His World, pp. 313–15. The extent towhich this may be creative self-fashioning on Liszt’s part isdebatable, but as Benjamin Walton points out, both ofd’Ortigue’s earlier biographies of musician friends (Berlioz,George Onslow) had used material “supplied directly bytheir subjects. . . . It is not unreasonable to suppose thatsomething similar happened [with Liszt]” (Walton, “TheFirst Biography: Joseph d’Ortigue on Franz Liszt at AgeTwenty-Three,” in Liszt and His World, p. 305).

33We may speculate that, for Schumann, education andthe requisite qualities of a “legitimate” composer musthave been an ambiguous issue. He felt himselfundereducated in comparison with Mendelssohn, for ex-ample, yet was doubtless aware of Forkel’s claim that J. S.Bach was a “self taught genius.” I am grateful to John Buttfor bringing this observation to my attention.34Percy Bysshe Shelley, Literary and Philosophical Criti-cism, ed. John Shawcross (London: Henry Frowde, 1909),p. 153.35Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Inner Nature of Art,” inPhilosophical Writings, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher (NewYork: Continuum, 1994), pp. 100, 102.

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genial creativity, he would find himself correctednot only by the words of Goethe but by the worksand words of the musical masters, namely by Mozarthimself—who reveals a remarkably clear conscious-ness of his intentions and their execution in hisletters. But principally speaking, this consciousnesscan be nothing other than an artistic consciousness,one that sets out from contemplation [Anschauung]and leads to action [Tat].36

Though he later idealized this progressioninto a “completely integral [einheitsvoll] pro-cess of contemplation and act,”37 Marx, likeSchumann, regarded a lack of training as thefirst stumbling block for a ragged composersuch as Liszt. Not surprisingly, in 1854 Hanslickcodified the necessity of music training as partof a compositional model hostile to virtuosoimprovisation, thereby cementing a paradigmfor composition that would increasingly definethe dominant critical aesthetics of the nine-teenth century. Schumann, too, seemed sym-pathetic to this trend in 1848 and advised astudent: “Above all things, persevere in com-posing mentally, not with the help of the in-strument, and keep on twisting and turning theprincipal melodies about in your head untilyou can say to yourself: ‘Now they will do’.”38

In this view, the authority of historical con-sciousness defeats that of momentary ecstasyin an idealist hierarchy of mind over body: “Thecomposer works slowly and intermittently,”Hanslick insisted pace Liszt, “forming the mu-sical artwork . . . for posterity.”39 Even Wagner,writing to Hanslick about Tannhäuser eightyears earlier, had voiced a similar, historicallyconscious view: “Do not underestimate thepower of reflection; the unconsciously createdwork of art belongs to periods remote from ourown: the work of art of the most advanced

period of culture can be produced only by aprocess of conscious creation.”40

By following the “outmoded” beliefs ofShelley and Schopenhauer, however, Liszt inhis early improvisatory fragments and free fan-tasies would appear—indirectly—to have takenGoethe at his word: Im Anfang war die Tat!41

In a defensive comment on his musical proce-dures dating from 1856, Liszt explicitly cel-ebrates a musical structure that is sinnlichrather than geistig. Writing to Louis Köhler,who had dedicated a treatise on piano playingand composition to him, Liszt eschews all for-malist dogma:

However others may judge of these things, [my works]are for me the necessary development of my innerexperiences, which have brought me to the convic-tion that invention and feeling are not so entirelyevil in Art. Certainly you very rightly observe thatthe forms (which are too often changed by quiterespectable people into formulas) “First Subject,Middle Subject, Closing Subject, etc., may very muchgrow into a habit, because they must be so thor-oughly natural, primitive, and very easily intelli-gible.” Without making the slightest objection tothis opinion, I only beg for permission to be allowedto decide upon the forms by the contents, and evenshould this permission be withheld from me fromthe side of the most commendable criticism, I shallnonetheless go on in my own modest way quitecheerfully. After all, in the end it comes principallyto this—what the ideas are, and how they are carriedout and worked up—and that leads us always backto the feeling and invention, if we would not scramblein the rut of a mere trade.42

The fulcrum on which this comment pivots isthe outward, or let us say readily perceivable,structures of music. In 1856 Liszt was thinkingabout these matters in the context of the sym-phonic poem: a project of serious composition.But even before this new conception of large-

36Cited in, and adapted from, A. B. Marx, Musical Form inthe Age of Beethoven, trans. Scott Burnham (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 19.37Ibid., p. 31.38“Vor Allem beharren Sie dabei, innerlich—nicht mit Hülfedes Instruments—zu erfinden, die melodischen Haupt-motive im Kopfe so lange zu drehen und zu wenden, bisSie sich sagen können: ‘nun ist es gut’” (Schumann toLudwig Meinardus, 16 September 1848, Dresden, in Rob-ert Schumanns Briefe, ed. Gustav Jansen [2nd edn. Leipzig:Breitkopf and Härtel, 1904], p. 289).39Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. anded. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), p. 49.

40Wagner to Eduard Hanslick, 1 January 1847, Dresden, inSelected Letters of Richard Wagner, ed. and trans. StewartSpencer and Barry Millington (New York: W. W. Norton,1988), p. 134.41Goethe’s Faust famously rejects the word, meaning, andmental power before stating: “Mir hilft der Geist! Aufeinmal seh’ ich Rat / Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang wardie Tat” (J. W. von Goethe, Faust, part I).42Liszt to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, Weimar, in La Mara,Letters of Franz Liszt, I, 273–74.

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scale form, the sense of “form” contra “for-mula” evidently sat uneasily at the intersec-tion of music criticism and composition forboth Liszt and Schumann. As early as the mid-1830s it also characterized a virulent line ofcriticism leveled at virtuoso improvisers, andLiszt’s belief in the primacy of literature—thatmusical forms should be determined entirelyby their poetic contents—made him especiallyvulnerable. Carl Gollmick’s 1842 invectiveagainst the “fallen angels” of contemporary vir-tuosity, for example, seems like a thinly veiledassault on the practices that Liszt represented,if not on the man himself. Gollmick’s principalcomplaint was the impossibility of comprehend-ing improvised forms with reference to priormodels:

Give us golden unity in your performance, and theintellectual sympathy of any good composition, yetundestroyed, uninterrupted through bizarre, lugu-brious passions or symptoms of world-weariness.Give us—since you are a pianist—once a free Fantasiewith an elegant and securely performed fugal themeas our simple fathers did—but what do I hear! Noth-ing of these? And you’ve been playing for half anhour! For the sake of the book’s good contents Iwant to forgive you the long confused prelude. Butat last give us something. Begin at long last mynoble-minded artist. But how? You have already fin-ished, wiping the sweat from your brow, and standup exhausted. You can hardly respond to the bar-baric scream with which the mass goes wild aboutyou. Is then the beloved art on the rack for you? . . .the men shout: “God Damn! He is a devil!”—thewomen whisper delightedly: “He is an angel!”—Iagree with the latter. An angel of music—but onewho has fallen!43

The gefallener Engel metaphor is potent notonly for its geistliche connotations and its ironicinversion of the infamous adulation of Liszt bywomen, but also for its invocation of history. Itsuggests that before the shallow virtuosity of apostlapsarian present there were prelapsarian“artists” (“our simple fathers,” like biblical pa-triarchs), the paradigm for which is Beethoven.The latter’s celebrated virtuoso improvisationsinvited comparison—evidently unflattering onoccasion—with Liszt’s, whose efforts Gollmicksought to “demonize” in the grand but cor-rupted form of the fallen angel.

Similarly, if more tolerantly, Carl Czerny inhis treatise Systematische Anleitung zum Fan-tasieren auf dem Pianoforte (1829) explains thatif a composed work may be compared to asymmetrical architectural edifice, an improvisedFantasy is like an English garden: “seeminglyirregular, but full of surprising variety, and ex-ecuted . . . according to a plan.”44 Yet Czerny isalso pragmatic in emphasizing that the distinc-tion between a “work” and an “improvisation”ultimately depends on the listener’s percep-tion: “When the practicing musician possessesthe capability not only of executing at his in-strument the ideas that his inventive power,inspiration, or mood have evoked in him at theinstant of their conception but of so combiningthem that the coherence can have the effect onthe listener of an actual composition—this iswhat is called: Improvising or Extemporizing[Fantasieren. (Improvisieren, Extemporier-en.)].”45 Instating the listener as a barometer of

43“Gieb uns in deinem Vortrage die goldne Einheit, unddie geistige Sympathie irgend einer guten Composition,aber unzerstört, ununterbrochen durch Bizarrien, lugubereLeidenschaften oder Weltschmerz-Symptome. Gieb uns—bist du ein Klavierspieler—einmal eine freie Phantasie miteinem elegant und sicher durchgeführten Fugenthema, wiees unsre einfachen Väter taten.—Aber was höre ich! Vondem allen nichts? Und du spielst schon eine halbe Stunde!Ich will dir die lange bunte Vorrede um des guten Inhaltsdes Buches willen gern verzeihen. Aber gieb uns endlicheinen solchen. Beginne endlich, mein edler Künstler. Dochwie? Du bist schon zu Ende, wischest dir den Schweiß vonder Stirne, und stehst erschöpft auf. Das barbarischeGeschrei, das dir die Menge entgegentobt, kannst du kaumerwiedern vor Ermattung. Wird dir denn die holde Kunstzur Folterbank? . . . Die Männer rufen: ‘God dam! er ist ein

Teufel!’—die Frauen flüstern entzückt: ‘Es ist ein Engel!’—Ich stimme dem letztern bei. Ein Engel der Tonkunst,aber—ein gefallener!” (Carl Gollmick, “Das heutigeVirtuosenwesen,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 45 [2 Dec.1842], 185).44Carl Czerny, Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasierenauf dem Pianoforte, Op. 200 (Vienna: Diabelli, 1829), p. 3;trans. Alice Michell as A Systematic Introduction to Im-provisation on the Pianoforte (New York: Longman, 1983),p. 2.45“Wenn der ausübende Tonkünstler die Fähigkeit besitzt,die Ideed, welche seine Erfindungsgabe, Begeisterung, oderLaune ihm eingiebt, sogleich, im Augenblick desEntstehens, auf seinem Instrument nicht auszuführen,sondern so zu verbinden, dass der Zusammenhang auf denHörer die Wirkung eines eigentlichen Tonstückes habenkann,—so nennt man dieses: Fantasieren. (Improvisieren,Extemporieren)” (Czerny, Systematische Anleitung, p. 3;Michell, A Systematic Introduction, p. 1).

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formal coherence ascribes the unity of a perfor-mance not to the origin of the performance (atext or a sketch) but to its destination. Thelistener qua destination becomes a space inwhich a dazzling multiplicity of rhetorical ef-fects can condense into a “work.” But such awork remains a text without an inscription,irrespective of whether the improvising per-former (after Czerny) or the able listener (afterGollmick) is held to be the agent of cohesion.46

With its implicit emphasis on destination,Czerny’s textbook definition expounds a syn-onymy between “Fantasieren,” “Improvisier-en,” and “Extemporieren,” although the lattertwo terms are largely dropped for the remain-der of the treatise.47 While Czerny explainsmethods practicing improvisation in differentstyles, with different types and numbers ofthemes, and even with different audiences inmind, he offers no discussion of formal organi-zation except as it is determined by the themesand their strategically varied appearances. Inother words, Czerny’s emphasis is on the the-matic invention of the moment rather than onany premeditated design. Of course, this re-sulted in formal organization of a kind, although“in a much freer form than a written work,” forCzerny emphasized the listener qua destina-tion by insisting that an improvisation “mustbe fashioned into an organized totality [only] asfar as is necessary to remain comprehensibleand interesting.”48

In two separate critiques of Czerny’s trea-tise, Hamburg’s Blätter für Musik und Literaturquestioned whether a “systematic” approachto improvisation might render a free Fantasy“only a piece [Musikstück] falling under the

hands ex tempore.”49 Similarly an anonymousViennese critic drew a distinction betweenImprovisieren/Extemporieren, and Phantasier-en, arguing that the terms should differentiatethe levels of formal coherence in an improvisa-tion. Whereas Phantasieren was essentially un-bound from prior conceptions of form, the othertwo expressions: “connote simply the fusion ofinvention and formal realization”—that is, theyrelate to recognizably “composed” forms: “Onecan improvise a regular sonata, an overture, astrict fugue etc. This, however, cannot be calleda “Fantasie” by any means.”50

A review of Liszt’s earliest public improvisa-tion—dating from his tutelage under Czerny—records a similar differentiation. The eleven-year-old’s Viennese debut took place on 1 De-cember 1822, and his concluding “free fantasy”performance at this concert elicited a correc-tive in the Allgemeine Zeitung: “We shouldprefer to call the fantasy a ‘capriccio,’ for sev-eral themes united by voluntary passages donot deserve that magnificent title, too often

46The model for shifting the locus of meaning from originto destination comes from Barthes, “The Death of theAuthor,” which empowers the agency of the reader postmortem. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” p. 148.47Like Czerny, Hummel appears to regard “Phantasiren”and “Extemporiren” as synonymous in his Clavierschule;although he uses the term “Phantasiren” only in the text,the title of his seventh chapter from volume 3 is given as:“Vom freien Phantasiren. (Extemporiren).” See Hummel,Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zumPiano-Forte-Spiel, vol. 3 (Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, 1828),p. 444.48“Obschon in viel freyeren Formen, als eine geschriebene,doch in soweit ein geordnetes Ganzes bilden muss, alsnöting ist, um verständlich und interessant zu bleiben”(Czerny, Systematische Anleitung, p. 3 [Michell, p. 1]).

49“Und die freie Phantasie ist jetzt nur ein unter denHänden gesetztes Musikstück ex tempore” (Christern,“Vom musikalischen Phantasie,” Blätter für Musik undLiteratur 4 [Oct. 1840], 21–22, here 21).50The full comment reads: “We regard the expressionsFantasieren, and subsequently Improvisieren andExtemporieren, however, not quite as synonymous as theauthor suggests, rather we hold that the latter two expres-sions connote simply the fusion of invention and formalrealization, whereas in the concept of ‘Fantasie’ the pow-ers of the imagination predominate over form so that, inthe latter, the artist immediately lends form to ideas whichhis mood, enthusiasm and inventiveness have just inspired,and he only follows formal requirements in so far as theyare essential for an artistic creation. One can improvise aregular sonata, an overture, a strict fugue etc. This, how-ever, cannot be called a ‘Fantasie’ by any means.” (Wirhalten die Ausdrücke Fantasieren, dann Improvisieren undExtemporieren jedoch nicht so ganz gleichbedeutend, wiediess der Verfasser [Czerny] andeutet, sondern glauben,daß die beiden letzen Ausdrücke nur das gleichzeitigeZusammentreffen der Erfindung mit der Ausführungbezeichnen, daß aber im Begriffe der Fantasie auch dasVorherrschen der Einbildungskraft über die Form liegt, so,daß in der letzteren der Künstler Ideen, welche seine Laune,Begeisterung, und Erfindungsgabe ihm eben eingibt,sogleich ausführet, und die Formen nur soweit beachten,als sie zu einer Kunstleistung unerläßlich, sind. Man kanneine regelmäßige Sonate, eine Overtüre, eine strenge Fugeu.s.w. improvisieren. Allein diess nennt man noch keineFantasie.) (“Über die systematische Anleitung zumPhantasieren auf dem Pianoforte con Carl Czerny,” Monat-bericht der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde des Österreich-ischen Kaiserstaates [1830]).

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misused in our day.”51 Seven years later, Czernywould categorize the Capriccio as the freest,most humorous form of fantasy-style improvi-sation: “an arbitrary linking of individual ideaswithout any particular development, a whim-sical and swift shifting from one motive to theother without further relationship than thatbestowed by chance.” If Liszt’s reviewer had asimilar idea, he was criticizing the boy’s appar-ently underdeveloped ability to relate or trans-form themes.52

From this we can deduce, first, that duringthe 1820s Improvisieren, while not understoodto belong exclusively to genre-based musicalcategories, could conjure the formal traits ofrecognizable sonatas and other structures pub-licly accepted as musical “works,” and, sec-ond, that some contemporary musicians differ-entiated between different kinds of improvisa-tion, the decisive criterion for which was theconstructive element, that is, its form. Phan-tasieren, specifically, was reserved for the voic-ing of a momentary muse, a commingling ofinstant and idea in a Shelleyan attempt to cap-ture the fire of creative inspiration.53 Czerny’sViennese reviewer articulated this ideal mostexplicitly: “The powers of the imagination pre-dominate over form so that . . . the artist im-mediately lends form to ideas which his mood,enthusiasm and inventiveness have just in-spired, and he only follows formal requirementsin so far as they are essential for an artistic

creation.”54 Performers could thus distinguishbetween the Phantasieren of a loose-limbed,fantasy-like work distinguished principally bythematic transformation, and Improvisieren/Extemporieren distinguished principally by ref-erence to an established formal model.

How does this discourse relate to Liszt’s prac-tices? In light of the emerging opposition be-tween Phantasieren and spontaneous form, itis perhaps no coincidence that Heinrich Adami,writing in Vienna’s Allgemeine Theaterzeitung,called the premiere of Liszt’s Fragmentdantesque late in 1839 “something like an im-provisation [Improvisation] to which Liszt hadfelt inspired after a reading of the ‘divine com-edy’.” In contrast to orderly sonata structures,the music was “a collection of colorfully cha-otic ideas chasing each other, often breakingoff quickly, exchanging one mood with another,bold in outline, aphoristic in execution.”55

Within a month of the premiere, a subsequentconcert review in Pressburg described Liszt’s

51Allgemeine Zeitung (Jan. 1823), cited in Alan Walker,Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years 1811–1847 (London: Faber,1983), p. 78.52Czerny, Systematische Anleitung, p. 105 (Michell, p. 121).53A small number of nineteenth-century piano composi-tions published under the title of “Phantasie”—notablyBeethoven’s op. 27 and op. 77, Schubert’s Wandererfantasieand “Graz” Fantasia, Hummel’s op. 123, Mendelssohn’sop. 28, and Schumann’s ops. 12 and 17—elevate this pur-suit of momentary inspiration to the status of a work.These crafted “improvisations” reverse Czerny’s notion ofan unnotated Improvisation that attains the semblance ofa work by its vestige of formal coherence, for they areworks by virtue of being printed and they attain “improvi-satory” status through overt compositional artifice. These“Phantasie” works are thus distinct from the more preva-lent opera “fantasies” of the period; they can be viewed asdirect outgrowths of the improvisatory tradition under dis-cussion. By contrast, it seems that almost no pieces werepublished with the title “Improvisation” because any suchimprovisation, if published, would simply have been givenits appropriate formal title—sonata, variations, etc.

54“Das Vorherrschen der Einbildungskraft über die Formliegt, so, daß in der letzteren der Künstler Ideen, welcheseine Laune, Begeisterung, und Erfindungsgabe ihm ebeneingibt, sogleich ausführet, und die Formen nur soweitbeachten, als sie zu einer Kunstleistung unerläßlich, sind”(“Über die systematische Anleitung zum Phantasieren aufdem Pianoforte con Carl Czerny,” in Monatbericht derGesellschaft der Musikfreunde des ÖsterreichischenKaiserstaates).

An article entitled “Vom muskalischen Phantasieren” adecade later argues similarly that fantasy-style improvisa-tion is neither arbitrary passagework nor preconceived form,but draws its character from the performer’s inner imagina-tion and is predicated on keyboard mastery: “Die Phantasieerhält ihre Nahrung, ihre Stoffe sowohl durch die äußere alsdurch die innere Anschauung. Beide kann die Poesie inihrem Bereiche wiedergeben; erstere allein, objectiv undohne Symbole, kann nur die bildende Kunst darstellen;letztere bleibt der Musik anheimgegeben. Zum Phantasierenbedarf es also der inneren Anschauung, der lebendigenAufregung des Gemüths zu Gefühlen, Eindrücken undleidenschaftlichen, mehr oder weniger schaften Affecten.Der Künstler, welcher phantasieren will, soll seiner Fertigkeitso sehr Meister sein, daß alle Gradationen und Nüancen derTöne, Melodien und Akkorde sich zu bestimmtenEmpfindungs-Ausdrücken runden” (Christern, “Vommusikalischen Phantasie,” Blätter für Musik und Literatur[Oct. 1840], 22).55“Ungefähr wie eine Improvisation, zu welcher sich Lisztnach dem Durchlesen der ‘göttlichen Komödie’ begeistertgefühlt hatte, ein Aggregat von bunt durcheinandersagenden Ideen, oft schnell abbrechend, eine Gemüth-stimmung mit der anderen vertauschend, im Entwurfekühn, in der Ausführing aphoristisch” (Heinrich Adami’sreview in the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung [7 Dec. 1839],1197).

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most recent compositions similarly: “now andthen bizarre . . . not without thoroughness, butstill more deeply felt than thought, they al-most seem more born from the momentarysentiment of the soul, more like one of theFantasies mocking customary bounds than likecalm conception.” Without specifying whetheror not Liszt performed his new Fragment inPressburg, the author (“J. R.”) contributes tothe discourse on Phantasieren by referring the“composed” to a calm aesthetic while constru-ing Lisztian “Phantasie” as more fractured, un-controllable, and volatile: “now [these pieces]spread light and warmth—now wildly flaringflames—consuming for their own hearth.”56

In his first known private performance ofthe Fragment, given at the Hôtel de l’Europe on25 October 1839, Liszt boasted that the solelistener “was taken aback” by the experience.57

And as late as the 1887 English premiere of themuch revised final version, performed by Liszt’sstudent Walter Bache, a baffled critic for theMusical Times wrote: “The most conspicuousof Liszt’s works was a so-called Fantasia quasiSonata, ‘Après une lecture de [sic] Dante.’ Thisis a most extraordinary composition, of whichit is absolutely impossible to form any idea at afirst hearing . . . we could not trace any definitemeaning in the constant progression of dis-cords of which the piece is made up.”58 In view

of these protests against confusion and disor-der, it is revealing that in his review article of1839 Schumann compared Liszt’s compositionalaesthetic unfavorably to that of Chopin, andexplained that the latter “always has structure. . . there always runs the thread of a melody.”59

Similar criticisms were common in this pe-riod—even from would-be supporters—andsome commentators merely assumed that asense of unity had to be determined by thelistener’s ascription of a unified subjectivity tothe performer. Thus in 1838 another Viennesecritic speculated: “The exemplariness of theform leaves something to be wished . . . [Liszt]has perhaps not found the time to make hisworks more vocal and more comprehensible tothe general public. . . . Perhaps it is simplybecause of his all-powerful subjectivity thatthey are in their perfection only comprehen-sible and playable by him.”60

56The full paragraph reads: “Was die Compositionen diesesmusikalischen Byron [Liszt] anbelangt, so sind sie meisteine Mischung des lyrisch-episch und romantischen Styles,doch ist letzterer bei Weitem vorherrschender,—oft weich—nie weichlich, bisweilen bizarre,—immer großartig,—nichtohne Gründlichkeit, doch noch tiefer gefühlt als gedacht,scheinen sie fast mehr Geburten momentaner Seelen-stimmung und einer der gewöhnlichen Schrankenspottenden Phantasie, als ruhiger Konception—sie sind baldLicht und Wärme verbreitend—bald wild aufloderndeFlammen,—verzehrend für ihren eignen Herd” (“Corre-spondenz-Nachrichten: Preussburg, den 23. Dez. 1839”).This is contained in a small collection of thus-far uniden-tifiable German press articles about Liszt between 1838and 1847, which are held in the Nationalarchiv der Rich-ard-Wagner-Stiftung in Bayreuth as: II C b 3.57“À midi chez Fanna auquel je [Liszt] joue mes nouveauxmorceaux. Il est surprise du Fragment dantesque” (Liszt toMarie d’Agoult, 25 Oct. 1839, Venice, in Correspondance/ Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, p. 112).58See “Mr. Walter Bache’s Pianoforte Recital,” MusicalTimes 28 (1 March 1887), 154. See also analytical critiquesof the “Dante” Sonata by William Newman, The Sonatasince Beethoven (3rd edn. New York: Norton, 1983), p.369; Wolfgang Dömling, Franz Liszt und seine Zeit (Laaber:

Laaber-Verlag, 1985), p. 129; Rudolph Kokai, Franz Lisztin seinen frühen Klavierwerken (Budapest: Bärenreiter,1969), pp. 13ff.; Humphrey Searle, The Music of Liszt (Lon-don: Williams & Norgate, 1954), p. 32; Alan Walker, Liszt(London: Faber & Faber, 1971), pp. 42–45; Louis Kentner,“Solo Piano Music: 1827–61,” in Liszt: The Man and HisMusic, ed. Alan Walker (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970),pp. 79–133; Derek Watson, Liszt (London: Dent & Sons,1989), pp. 247–48.59“Chopin hat doch Formen; unter den wunderlichenGebilden seiner Musik zieht sich doch immer der rosigeFaden einer Melodie fort” (rpt. in Gesammelte Schriftenüber Musik und Musiker von Robert Schumann, p. 440).English trans. Paul Rosenfeld, On Music and Musicians,ed. Konrad Wolff (New York: Pantheon, 1946), pp. 147–48.60Carl Tausenau, “Liszt und Thalberg,” Allgemeinemusikalische Anzeiger, 7 February 1838; cited in Gooley,The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 47. When the twenty-two-year-oldFelix Mendelssohn improvised in public, by contrast, theresult was reportedly “as fluent and well planned as awritten work,” according to Sir George Macfarren. SeeGeorge Grove, “Mendelssohn,” in Dictionary of Musicand Musicians (1st edn. London: Macmillan, 1882), vol. 2,p. 300. The composer’s correspondence is peppered withhis complaints of feeling ill at ease at the pressure thisentailed; he once described the illusion of creating worksextempore in public as “madness . . . I rarely feel so fool-ish as when I sat down there to serve up my fantasy to thepublic. . . . It is inappropriate [ein Missbrauch] and absurdat the same time” (ein Unsinn . . . Mir ist selten so närrischzu Muthe gewesen, als wenn ich mich da hinsetzte, ummeine Phantasie dem Publikum zu produciren . . . es istein Mißbruch, und ein Unsinn zugleich). See FelixMendelssohn Bartholody, Reisebriefe von Felix Mendels-sohn Bartholody aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1832, ed. PaulMendelssohn (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1863), p.289. The differing attitudes of Liszt and Mendelssohn toimprovisation are surely idiosyncratic to an extent, but

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The broader reception of Liszt’s virtuosity ascomposition in the 1840s was equally equivo-cal. Critics were troubled by the discrepancybetween his aspirations and his compositionalabilities, between harmonic experimentationand formal mastery. For a virtuoso improvisa-tion to attain the status of a composition, thecritical definition of a “composer” would havehad to expand to accommodate the deliberateintroduction of musical instabilities. It wasprobably for this very reason that Schumann,referring globally to the practice of virtuosoextempore playing, cautioned Clara Wieckagainst improvising too frequently just a yearbefore he diagnosed Liszt’s unhappy “dispar-ity.” Phantasieren uses up too much creativeenergy, Schumann protested, which could bebetter employed otherwise: “be sure to writeeverything down immediately.”61 The loss ofwritten music that improvisation entails wenthand in hand with an emergent conception ofcomposition as a largely documentary, monu-mental endeavor. Schumann’s fear of creativedepletion speaks to the growing anomaly of ayoung virtuoso whose compositional “output”seemed to transgress the hitherto unproblematicboundaries of notation and sound. Given thisperceived loss of parity, we may suspect that inobeying “feeling and invention,” in seeking toloosen the grip of established musical formu-lae, Liszt the improviser occasionally severedevery last “thread” to recognizable forms. Thiseffect has provoked a continuing discourse aboutmusical legitimacy. Bernstein put it memora-bly in 1998: “Liszt is an error that answers tono correction.”62

Liszt’s DÉDOUBLEMENT

Liszt’s letters from the late 1830s show that—in opposition to the task of an éxécutant—he,too, felt the need for “great artistes” to betrained in “the rules of composition,” for themto be well versed “in counterpoint and fugue,”(even though he would later reflect that “I wasalways on bad terms with canon. I always re-mained a stupid man of feeling”).63 Yet giventhat he increasingly differentiates between hisown dual identities in precisely this way, Liszt

nevertheless speak to a psychological division betweenLiszt’s relish of relative imaginative license andMendelssohn’s downright fear of exposing the artifice ofextempore forms. What Mendelssohn found “inappropri-ate and absurd,” we can surmise, is the stage trick ofcreating musical forms that ought to—and might as well—have been pre-formed (i.e., composed). The underlying dis-tinction in these firsthand accounts is therefore the degreeto which Mendelssohn’s approach appears to measure ex-tempore playing against the expectations of a composedtext; Liszt’s perceived weakness was that he did not.61“Nimm Dir immer vor, alles gleich auf das Papier zubrigen” (Schumann to Clara, 3 December 1838, in Robertund Clara Schumann Briefe einer Liebe, ed. Hanns-JosefOrtheil [Königstein: Athenäum, 1982], p. 155).62Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, p. 109.Views of Liszt-as-problem have recently taken a number

of forms. The Liszt of Bernstein’s “error” runs deeper thanan over-determined identity allied to amorphous free fan-tasies, however, for it challenges our very notion of cat-egorical thought. A corresponding critique can be made ofSchumann’s categorical distinction between “Liszt” thecomposer and “Liszt” the pianist. The incessantly fluid“confusion of distinctions” Bernstein cites (p. 109) may, inthis instance, be taken equally as a critique of rigid modesof understanding that have difficulty accounting for suchheterogeneity. If Liszt is a pianist, then he is also a com-poser, hence he becomes a hybrid. If we accept what in-creasingly became a hierarchical separation, however, thereseems to be no possibility of fusing the differentiated partsinto the unified subjectivity of one “Liszt.” Indeed,Alexander Rehding has even proposed the historical mo-ment at which the public transition between “virtuosocareer” and “self-consciously great composer” took place,namely the unveiling of the Beethoven monument at Bonnon 10–13 August 1845. See “Inventing Liszt’s Life: EarlyBiography and Autobiography,” in The Cambridge Com-panion to Liszt, ed. Kenneth Hamilton (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2005), pp. 14–27. Several critiquesof the “Liszt Problem” have been published recently.Bernstein’s “Liszt’s Bad Style” addresses Liszt’s culturalidentity in the postmodern present through critiques ofcontemporary writings about Liszt, in Virtuosity of theNineteenth Century, pp. 109–30; James Deaville’s “Lisztin the Twentieth Century” addresses Liszt’s precariousposition on the margins of a Western classical mainstreamthrough an examination of writings, research, recordings,and film, in The Cambridge Companion to Liszt, ed. Ken-neth Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2006), pp. 28–56; Gooley’s “Liszt, Thalberg, and the Pari-sian Publics” examines the historical overdeterminationof Liszt’s image in the French and German press between1834 and 1848, in The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 18–77. Of greaterrelevance historically is Béla Bartók’s noted critique of theLiszt problem, “Liszt zenéje és a mai közönseg,” Népmvel [ü vel] es 6 (1911), 359–62.63Liszt to Marie d’Agoult, London, 14 May 1840, inCorrespondance / Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, p. 584.Liszt’s comment concerns the famous Norwegian violin-ist Ole Bull, whom Liszt met in London during 1840 andwith whom he performed Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata.Bull evidently impressed Liszt as a performer, but Lisztalso notes that he “is a kind of savage, very ignorant ofcounterpoint and fugue” (Franz Liszt: Selected Letters, pp.137–38). Göllerich, Franz Liszt (Berlin: Marquardt, 1908),p. 160.

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seems to be speaking for a nature divided againstitself, an ironic nature characterized by self-duplication or self-multiplication: dédouble-ment. This splitting describes the particularpsychology of a retired but not entirely “re-formed” virtuoso.

In an examination of irony in Baudelaire’sessay De l’essence du rire (1855), Paul de Manindirectly characterizes Liszt’s condition by ar-ticulating the difference between an intersub-jective relationship and a relationship betweentwo “selves” within a single consciousness—adédoublement such as I argue characterizesLiszt’s persona at this time:

Within the realm of intersubjectivity one would in-deed speak of difference [as between subjects—criticand composer or composer and listener] in terms ofthe superiority of one subject over another, with allthe implications of will to power, of violence, andpossession which come into play when a person islaughing at someone else—including the will to edu-cate and to improve. But, when the concept of “su-periority” is still being used when the self is engagedin a relationship not to other subjects, but to what isprecisely not a self [Liszt’s lack of unified identity],then the so-called superiority merely designates thedistance constitutive of all acts of reflection. Superi-ority and inferiority then become spatial metaphorsto indicate a discontinuity and a plurality of levelswithin a subject that comes to know itself by anincreasing differentiation from what is not.64

By retiring from the stage to pursue a morelofty compositional mission, Liszt effectivelyadopted a state of permanent parabasis,65 bywhich I mean he became the self-consciousnarrator of his own musical endeavors, the au-thor of an extended self-critique of his earlier

musical identity in the public eye. This cri-tique took the form of the revision of earlierwork as well as original composition and absti-nence from concert tours. But it is not easy todifferentiate between a true authorial voice andthe persona of a fictional narrator in this self-critique. Liszt’s quixotic assertion to LinaRamann that “my biography is more to be in-vented than to be written after the fact”66 indi-cates, perhaps intentionally, a dangerously un-stable threshold between fact and fiction.Whether we regard Liszt’s renunciation of vir-tuosity as the expression of an authorial I or afictional character depends on how much sin-cerity we ascribe to his shift of identity. In thiscase, that means how much mobility we findin his allegiance to the hierarchies of profes-sional musical life.

This condition of two “selves” within a singleconsciousness allows Liszt’s ironic rhetoric toelevate the composer over the virtuoso. Butgiven Liszt’s evident ambivalence toward vir-tuosity, a counter impulse might well cry “im-posture” to this dichotomy and seek an alter-native role reversal of the sort that VladimirJankelevitch describes sardonically as “inso-lent” rather than “revolutionary”: “The per-former wants to advance on the composer; theone that was first will be second; the one thatwas second wants to live his life. . . . Nothing ischanged. . . . There will again be a thinkinghead, and at the service of this head the twoarms of the performer, but the occupiers of theroles have exchanged posts with each other.”67

The fulcrum on which this false dichotomypivots is Liszt’s practice of Phantasieren. Forgiven Liszt’s well-documented skills as an im-proviser, just how meaningful can Schumann’srigid distinction between Liszt’s performing and

64See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” inBlindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota Press, 1983), pp. 212–13. To a certain extent, thispsychology is also evident in Liszt’s manipulation of hismultiple identities during his virtuoso career, as Gooleyhas explained: “Liszt’s goals were fundamentally negative.He transformed himself, diversified his affiliations, andintervened in the formation of his reputation in reactionto a major crisis in the musical life of his time” (Gooley,The Virtuoso Liszt, p. 13).65Schlegel’s definition of irony: “eine permanenteParekbase.” See “Fragment 668,” in Kritische Ausgabe,Band 18, Philosophische Lehrjahre (1796–1806), ed. ErnstBehler (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1962), p. 85.

66“Meine Biographie ist mehr zu erfinden denn nach-zuschreiben” (Ramann, Lisztiana: Erinnerungen an FranzLiszt in Tagebuchblättern, Briefen und Dokumenten ausden Jahren 1873–1886/87 [Mainz: Schott, 1983], p. 407).67“L’exécutant veut avoir le pas sur le compositeur; celuiqui était premier sera second; celui qui était second veutvivre sa vie . . . rien n’est changé . . . il y aura encore unetête pensante, et au service de cette tête les deux bras del’exécutant, mais les titulaires des rôles ont permuté l’unavec l’autre” (in Vladimir Jankelevitch, De la Musique auSilence: Liszt et la Rhapsodie [Paris: Plon, 1979], pp. 121–22).

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composing be before the latter’s move toWeimar?68

Jankelevitch took this entanglement of ac-tion and identity to its reductio ad absurdumwhen he protested: “It would be necessary tosay that virtuosic music is a music withoutcomposer.”69 In this abstract reading of key-board virtuosity, the “thinking head” control-ling the fingers can belong—in different ways—to either a performer or composer. But if thesefigures occupy the poles of a continuum, thecontinuum is asymmetrical: only the mobilevirtuoso is capable of traversing the span ofpossibilities in either direction, even to thepoint of usurping either pole. Thus the di-chotomy of performer and composer becomesfalse in the context of Lisztian virtuosity.

To what extent does the biographical evi-dence support the view that Liszt himself ob-served, or at least acted on, this recognition?George Sand’s diary reports that as a touringvirtuoso Liszt wrote his music directly at thepiano. Sand describes his labors on a new projectat Nohant in 1837: “Perhaps it is some compo-sitional task that he [Liszt] tries out in frag-ments at the piano; beside him is his pipe, hisruled paper and quill pens. . . . It seems to methat while passing before the piano he must bechurning out these capricious phrases uncon-sciously obedient to his instinct of feeling ratherthan to the labor of reason.”70 While it is not

uncommon for composers to work at, or atleast within reach of, a piano, Liszt had honedand developed his instinctive abilities at thekeyboard to the extent that he seemed able toimprovise a passage rapidly on specific musicalmaterial71 without feeling bound by whatHaydn—in the context of improvisation—hadcalled “the rules of art.”72 By beginning withphysical performance, Liszt could generate animmediate realization of the music, producingmusical passages first as sonic objects ratherthan as intentional objects. This practice mayhave led the “Dante” Sonata—charged by onecritic in 1887, we may recall, as lacking any“definite meaning in the constant progressionof discords”—to fall victim to Liszt’s own ear-lier capacity for Phantasieren. Schumann an-ticipated this situation with sly irony when he

68By way of historical evidence for Liszt’s improvisations,the journal Le Corsaire, reflecting the typical reception ofLiszt’s concert etiquette, records that, after listening to atrio for cello, piano, and oboe: “Liszt’s natural impulsesthen took over, and he rushed towards the piano despitehimself, took one of the motifs from the trio just executed,varied it, and gave it a new charm . . . every transfixedlistener thought himself transported by a dream into aplace inhabited by the god of harmony.” Thereafter LeCorsaire referred to Liszt as the “famous improviser.” SeeMaurice Henri Cecourcelle, La Société académiques desenfants d’Apollon (Paris: Schoenewerk & cie, 1881), p.137.69“Il faudrait dire . . . que la musique virtuose est unemusique sans compositeur” (Jankelevitch, Liszt et laRhapsodie, p. 122).70“C’est peut-être un travail de composition qu’il essayepar fragments sur le piano; à côté de lui est sa pipe, sonpapier réglé et ses plumes . . . Il me semble qu’en passantdevant son piano, il doit jeter ces phrases capricieuses àson insu en obéissant à son instinct de sentiment plutôtqu’à un travail d’intelligence” (George Sand, “Entretiensjournaliers,” in Œuvres autobiographiques, ed. GeorgesLubin, 2 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1971], II, 981).

71This probably gave Liszt the freedom to realize instantlycertain particular textures of harmony, counterpoint,melody, and rhythm, or the lack thereof (Rosen’s “zerodegree of musical invention”), presenting the sound imageof a virtuoso performance at the point of the music’s in-ception. At the end of his Clavierschule, Hummel’s com-ments on improvisation lend credence to this view. Aprerequisite for free Phantasieren, he asserts, is that “thehands perform what the mind thinks without constraintregardless of which key the player is in, and to be precise,[they] perform without needing to be clearly conscious ofthe mechanical actions” (die Hände ohne Zwang, gleichvielin welcher Tonart sich der Spieler befindet, das ausführen,was der Geist denkt, und zwar es ausführen, ohne dass esdes klaren Bewusstseins über diese mechanischenVerrichtungen bedarf). It is precisely this skill that Lisztrelied on in part—I am suggesting—when “composing” atthe piano during the later 1830s. See Johann NepomukHummel, Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisungzum Piano-Forte-Spiel, vol. 3 (Vienna: Tobias Haslinger,1828), p. 444. For a cultural study of the intersection andcorrespondences between doctrines of sensation and peda-gogical piano methods in the late eighteenth and the earlynineteenth century, see Leslie David Blasius, “The Me-chanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Roman-tic Musical Experience,” in Music Theory in the Age ofRomanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1996), pp. 3–24.72Reading “rules” as synonymous with “formal procedure”in this context further distinguishes Liszt’s attitude tofantasy improvisation from late-eighteenth-century extem-pore practice, for which adherence to certain “rules”seemed de rigueur. Haydn’s full statement reads: “I satdown, began to improvise, sad or happy according to mymood, serious or trifling. Once I had seized upon an idea,my whole endeavor was to develop and sustain it in keep-ing with the rules of art” (Georg August Griesinger,Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn [Leipzig:Breitkopf and Härtel, 1810], trans. Vernon Gotwals, Haydn:Two Contemporary Portraits [Madison: University of Wis-consin Press, 1963], p. 61).

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said that Liszt’s “lively musical nature prefersexpeditiously eloquent tones to dull scoring onpaper.”73

Although Sand’s testimony rehearses theRomantic cliché of the unconsciously inspiredcomposer, it also identifies Liszt’s fractured pro-cess of composition and lends credence to thehypothesis that he tried out the phrases onwhich he was working before notating them.Furthermore, Sand speaks of the governance ofLiszt’s “composition” by the spontaneous “in-stinct of feeling” rather than by the calculated“labour of reason”—an observation that, thoughit too is born of a Romantic commonplace,bears a striking resemblance to Czerny’s advicein his treatise for improvising with severalthemes. An improviser, Czerny states, shouldemploy a variety of developmental procedures:“[for] here he can give free reign to his flights offancy (albeit in rational form); and unexpected,interesting motives . . . frequently enter thefingers while playing. . . . The performer’s mo-mentary mood (be it now cheerful, now serene,serious or melancholy) can be expressed in themost abandoned manner.”74 Czerny’s descrip-tion also anticipates the procedure of Liszt’sthematically driven sonata in striking fashion.If we accept that thematic transformation gen-erates formal coherence in works such as Liszt’s“quasi Sonata,” and that this coherence arisesfrom what Liszt describes as the “necessarydevelopments of . . . inner experiences . . .feeling and invention,”75 it may be that the“compositional” technique of thematic trans-formation is, at root, a product of an improvisa-

tory technique.76 There thus seems good reasonto trace it back through Czerny to Beethovenin an extended pedagogical lineage.

Czerny’s influence on Liszt as a tutor andtechnical taskmaster is well documented, buthis role in the development of Liszt’s capacityfor free improvisation has attracted less schol-arly attention.77 Apparently Phantasieren wasintrinsic to their work together. As Czerny re-calls in his autobiography: “I endeavored toteach [Liszt] Phantasieren by frequently givinghim a theme on which to improvise [improvi-sieren].”78 Equally, Liszt mused in his later yearson this aspect of study with his second—andlast—piano teacher: “[Czerny] made me sight-read all the good music of the time and alsomade me improvise in fantasy-style [Phantasier-en] frequently.”79 There seems little doubt thatthe improvised transformation of musicalthemes characterized the daily contact the twomusicians shared in Vienna over fourteenmonths between 1822 and 1823.

With this in mind, let us compare Liszt’sthematic transformation in the “Dante” So-nata (ex. 1) with Czerny’s illustrated advice

73“Desto mehr studierte er als Virtuos, wie denn lebhaftemusikalische Naturen den schnellberedten Ton demtrocknen Arbeiten auf dem Papier vorziehen” (rpt.Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker von Rob-ert Schumann, I, 439.74“Denn hier kann er seimen Gedankenflug (obschon ineiner konsequenten Form) volle Freyheit lassen; und oftkommen, während dem Spielen ungesucht, interessanteMotive in die Finger . . . Auch kann in dieser Gattung desFantasierens die momentane Stimmung des Spielen (sie seynun lustig, heiterm ernst oder melancholisch) sich amungezwungensten aussprechen” (Carl Czerny: SystematischeAnleitung, p. 63 [Michell, p. 74]).75Franz Liszt letter to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, in Lettersof Franz Liszt, p. 273.

76In this context, it is important to note that Liszt tran-scribed Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in 1833. AsJonathan Kregor has suggested, his keyboard study ofBerlioz’s idée fixe and its accompanimental figures mayhave provided an additional stimulus for Liszt’s explora-tion of thematic manipulation in the late 1830s. The suc-cess of a symphonic model based on thematic unity islikely to have given Liszt the confidence and impetus toapply what, for him, had been largely an improvisatorytechnique to the idea of more lofty compositional struc-tures. See Kregor, “Collaboration and Content in theSymphonie fantastique Transcription,” Journal of Musi-cology 24 (2007), 203.77The only published study is Zsuzanna Domokus’s ex-amination of “Fantasy” in Liszt’s operatic paraphrases. See“Carl Czernys Einfluss Auf Franz Liszt: Die Kunst DesPhantasierens,” in Liszt Studien IV, ed. Serge Gut (Munich:Katzbichler, 1993), pp. 19–28. For a general survey of im-provisation in the nineteenth century, see also Lutz Felbick,“Vom Einfluss der Improvisation auf das mitteleuropäischeMusikleben des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Musik Theorie 20 (2005),166–82.78“Ebenso bestrebte ich mich, ihm [Liszt] das Phantasierenanzueignen, indem ich ihm häufig das Thema zum Impro-visieren aufgab” (Carl Czerny, Erinnerungen aus meinemLeben, ed. Walter Kolneder [Strasbourg: Éditions P. H.Heitz, 1968], p. 28).79“Er [Czerny] legte mir alle guten Musikalien derdamaligen Zeit à vista vor und ließ mich auch gerne phan-tasieren” (August Göllerich, Franz Liszt, p. 160).

71


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concerning improvisation on a theme (ex. 2).The “Dante” Sonata employs thematic trans-formation as both an arbiter of form and as asource of musical development throughout, asmay be illustrated briefly by the episodic recur-rences of the principal chromatic theme in thepublished version from 1858. These transfor-mations appear to follow closely Czerny’s ob-servation that “every theme . . . can serve bymeans of several modifications in meter and

rhythm as . . . [in] all species of compositions”and the prescription that follows: “The per-former must devote time and practice to achievethe capability of transforming each motive thatcomes his way into all . . . styles.”80 A brief

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

80Michell, A Systematic Introduction, pp. 43, 50. Monothe-matic phantasieren held specific connotations for a Ro-mantic theory of the creative imagination. In the NeueZeitschrift, an 1839 article on “Phantasie” by the young

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Königsburg Kapellmeister Eduard Sobolewski cites the in-finite exploration of a single theme/idea as the criticaldifference between artists and normal educated citizens:“The reason why [an intelligent person] never learns tocomprehend life [is] that an idea, a small, petty idea issufficient to relieve all the worry and trouble of this world./ One idea, often even an idea from an idea, [or] what wemusicians call motive, outline. . . . If one steals everythingfrom [an artist] he nevertheless remains rich” (Das ist die

look at Czerny’s written-out examples forFantasy-like Improvisation (Phantasieren) witha single theme makes the likeness clear. Al-

though Czerny’s musical language operateswithin stylistic boundaries such as antecedent-consequent structures and accords with eigh-

Example 2 (continued)

Ursache, weshalb jener nie das Leben . . . recht begreifenlernt, daß eine Idee, eine kleine, winzige Idee hinreichendist, ihn all’ der Sorgen und Mühen dieser Welt zu entheben./ Eine Idee, ja oft nur eine Idee von einer Idee, was wirMusiker Motiv, Umriß nennen . . . Raubt ihm alles, erbleibt dennoch reich). See Sobolewski “Phantasie,” NeueZeitschrift für Musik 51 (24 Dec. 1839), 201–03, here 201.

Writing in the same journal twenty-three years later,Richard Pohl similarly emphasizes the infinite capacity of

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teenth-century harmonic expectations, his con-cept is strikingly similar to the principle be-hind Liszt’s improvisatory thematic transfor-mation.

In terms of the ironic relationship betweenthe two halves of Liszt’s divided identity, thiskind of improvisation would call into questionthe metamorphic space between composer andperformer enunciated so explicitly in Liszt’sletter to Carl Alexander in Weimar. For Liszt,the performer’s craft was to work themes into acoherent improvisation; the composer’s craft,conversely, was to make themes cohere into animprovisational work. Over and above the dia-lectic or dédoublement between performer andcomposer, Liszt the “improvising performer”creates form through what we might call theintuition of “thematic potential,” whereas Lisztthe composer intuits thematic transformationthrough the creation of form. Any distinctionbetween these actions is one of degree, notkind.

A Pedagogical Lineage

For Liszt in Weimar, the relationship betweenform and thematic transformation defined hisconnection with the music of the past.81 His

agenda for compositional reform involvedclearly advancing beyond earlier forms so thatit became possible to “discern the stagesthrough which [the new] form was graduallyproduced.”82 The “Dante” Sonata offers a readyexample, in that Liszt symbolically invertedBeethoven’s subtitle for the two Sonatas op. 27,turning “Sonata quasi una Fantasia” into hisown “Fantasia quasi Sonata” and thereby es-tablishing a historical lineage for his musicwhile at the same time loosening its ties with aClassical conception of sonata form.

In his autobiography, Czerny reports thatBeethoven (his teacher) “was unsurpassed in[the] style of fantasy-like improvisation,” shownin ex. 2, adding that Beethoven “could hardlyreconstruct in writing the wealth of his ideasand harmonies as well as the nobility and con-sistency of his most highly artistic develop-ment.” In perhaps his most revealing commenton Beethoven’s improvisations, however,Czerny distinguishes three different formalstyles:

1. The form of a first movement or rondo Finale of aSonata. He would play a normal first section,introducing a second melody, etc., in a relatedkey. In a second section, however, he gave fullrein to his inspiration, while retaining the origi-nal motive, which he used in all possible ways.Allegros were enlivened by bravura passages, manyof which were even more difficult than thosefound in his sonatas.

2. Free variation forms somewhat like the ChoralFantasy op. 80 or the choral Finale of the NinthSymphony; both these pieces give a true pictureof his improvising in this manner.

3. A mixed form, one idea following the other as ina potpourri, like his Solo Fantasy op. 77.83

Employing an original theme “in all possibleways”—Czerny’s first category—would seemto apply to op. 27, no. 1, where both halves of

Phantasie, hinting at the incessant permutation of figures—geometric, musical—in the context of his survey of earlyacoustic theory: “The imagination follows no other laws butits own; it is limitless and unbound, and knows neither spacenor time. We gladly let it prevail, we delight in its majesticcolors, its wealth of shapes” (Die Phantasie folgt keinenanderen Gesetzen, als ihren eigenen; sie ist schrankenlosund fessellos, und kennt weder Zeit noch Raum. Wir lassensie gern walten, wir lassen uns durch ihrer Farben-Pracht,durch ihren Gestalten-Reichthum entzücken) (Pohl,“Akustische Briefe: Achter Brief,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik3 [15 July 1853], 25–28, 33–37, 65–67, 73–74, here 26).81The concept of thematic transformation as the arbiter ofform relates directly to Liszt’s Weimar reforms. Such aconception was born of a shifting musical syntax in whichthe tonal regulation of greatly expanded musical formsgave some ground to their thematic integration—a processAugust Halm identified as a conception of form princi-pally driven by a theme; or, as he puts it, one in whichform presents “the story of a musical theme.” See AugustHalm, Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (3rd edn. Stuttgart:Ernst Klett, 1947), p. 227. Historically, thematic transfor-mation was first formulated in relation to Liszt by AlfredHeuß in his influential study of Liszt’s symphonic poems,“Eine motivisch-thematische Studie über Liszts sinfonischeDichtung ‘Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne’,” Zeitschriftder Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 13 (1911), 10–21.See discussion of the term in Alexander Rehding, “Liszt’s

Musical Monuments,” this journal 26 (2002), 56, nn. 13,14; and Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, p.217, n.29.82Liszt, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Detlef Altenburg(Wiesbaden: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1989), V, 34–35.83Czerny, On the Proper Performance of All Beethoven’sWorks for the Piano, ed. Paul Badura-Skoda (Vienna: Uni-versal, 1970), p. 15.

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techniques (and indeed they often have been).For example, whereas Beethoven’s variationform at the end of op. 77 is defined by a generic“style,” Liszt’s thematic transformations arenot limited to any particular style (as is evidentfrom Liszt’s and Czerny’s use of the procedurein their different musical languages). Further-more, variation form was a musical genre aswell as a mode of invention. Thematic trans-formation was not; it could be a generativeprocess within a variety of forms, includingvariation form, but it belonged to no genre out-side of its improvisatory heritage.

Nonetheless, the boundaries between thesemusical procedures can become mobile. AsBeethoven himself observed in a sketch from1809, “Real fantasy-like improvisation[Phantasieren] comes only when we are uncon-cerned [with] what we play, so—if we want toimprovise in the best, truest manner in pub-lic—we should give ourselves over freely towhat comes to mind.”86 The correspondence toCzerny’s advice to “give free reign to [one’s]flights of fancy”87 is unmistakable. Beethoven’scomment further presages Liszt’s belief in theprimacy of “feeling and invention” in the cre-ative process. In view of this shared belief, wemay say that in op. 27 Beethoven had writtentwo sonatas, parts of whose form gave the im-pression of an improvisation, while in his“Dante” Sonata, Liszt improvised—at least ini-

the principal theme, a “normal first section,”are reprised in diminution. The section is theninterrupted by a fantasy-like passage (thoughone that does not retain the original motive),after which the main section returns with thetreble and bass parts reversed. The Sonata alsoalludes to its slow movement just before thecoda of its finale, a more obviously Liszt-likeprocedure.

Czerny’s second category—“free variation”—is also relevant to Liszt because of the similar-ity between this subgenre of classical variationform and the principle of thematic transforma-tion. In his discussion of monothematic impro-visation, Czerny likened his own musical ex-amples (ex. 2) to the procedure in Beethoven’sChoral Fantasy, op. 80 (containing fifteen varia-tions), where the piano introduction is prob-ably based on Beethoven’s own extempore per-formance at the premiere on 22 December 1808,and in the choral finale of the Ninth Sym-phony, op. 125 (1824). The two works, Czernyadds, form “two glorious monuments of thisstyle [of Phantasieren].”84

Finally, the great textural and melodic vari-ety in the “mixed form” of op. 77 (containingseven stable variations) would seem to justifyCzerny’s observation that, in Phantasieren,Beethoven “trusted to his genius for the con-stant invention of new subjects.”85 If this andthe other two works cited by Czerny do indeedreflect Beethoven’s style of improvisation on atheme, they offer an analytical basis for com-paring Beethoven’s approach to Phantasierenwith that of Liszt. Pace Czerny, however, theart of thematic improvisation that his treatisedocuments is qualitatively different from thetechnique of theme and variation evident inBeethoven’s “Fantasy” works. It is of coursepossible that these later works fail to docu-ment the thematic transformations that char-acterized Beethoven’s actual improvisations(and such transformations do occasionally sur-face in his other works), but this kind of hy-pothesis must remain speculative. The trans-formation and the variation of a theme cantherefore be teased apart as separate musical

84Michell, A Systematic Introduction, p. 52.85Czerny, On the Proper Performance, p. 58.

86This is scribbled on a musical sketch from 1809. I takethis reference from Lewis Lockwood, whose chapter“Beethoven at the Keyboard” explores Beethoven’s extem-pore practices. Reports about Beethoven’s improvisationfrequently emphasize the freedom of his musical creativ-ity, and while such reports are hardly more than subjec-tive reinterpretations of an event, their consistent empha-sis seems to indicate that established formal structureshad little bearing on Beethoven’s mixed form Phantasieren.For example, Sir John Russell witnessed an improvisationin 1821 wherein Beethoven “gradually . . . forgot every-thing else, and ran on during half an hour in a fantasy, in astyle extremely varied, and marked, above all, by the mostabrupt transitions” (Beethoven: Impressions by His Con-temporaries, ed. O. G. Sonneck [New York: Schirmer, 1926],pp. 115–16; see also pp. 13, 22, 51–52, 208–09). Other con-temporary accounts of Beethoven’s improvisations includeCzerny, On the Proper Performance of All Beethoven’sWorks for the Piano, ed. Paul Badura-Skoda (Vienna: Uni-versal, 1970); and J. G. Prod’homme, “The Baron deTrémont: Souvenirs of Beethoven and Other Contempo-raries,” Musical Quarterly 6 (1920), 366–91.87Michell, A Systematic Introduction, p. 74.

77


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.The subtitles are entirely accurate: what inBeethoven was conceptually Sonata quasi unaFantasia, in Liszt became quite literallyFantasie quasi sonata. The titles chart a peda-gogical lineage regulated by the practice of the-matic improvisation, partially self-fashioned,and aptly stylized in Josef Kriehuber’s litho-graph “Matinée bei Liszt” from 1846 (plate 3).The lithograph depicts the adoring, bespectacledpedagogue looking on—with Hector Berlioz (be-side Czerny), Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (violinin hand), and Kriehuber himself (left)—as theformer student, playing extempore from a closedscore of Beethoven’s op. 26, seems to be revel-ing in his inheritance.

Improvising Revisions,Revising Improvisations

Carried out over nineteen years, Liszt’s extantdeletions, recompositions, and additions to hisquasi Sonata present a vast complex of docu-ments. Extensive revisions were certainly notatypical for Liszt, whose compulsive practice

may well originate with his habit of improvis-ing. But improvisation is often modular, onboth the level of the measure and the level ofthe section. It is thus necessary to begin uncov-ering the formulaic fillers, the particular tech-niques associated with transitions, openings,progressions, runs, thematic figuration, and soforth that Liszt may have developed betweenthe time of his study with Czerny and thevarious stages of composition of the “Dante”Sonata. Whereas some of his revisions havenothing to do with improvisatory practice—forexample, the rebarring and considerable exci-sions in MS I 17 that reduce 864 measures to amere 373, or the decision to merge two sepa-rate movements into one—others, such as newtransitions, and altered musical figures, oftensuggest a physical relation to the instrument.They indicate a preferred way of moving acrossthe keyboard, associated with the visual aspectof virtuosity, which we may suspect influencedthe sonata’s composition at a level of sensationand spectacle anterior to ideation.

First, consider Liszt’s transitions. Alteringtransitions between themes provided Liszt with


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an opportunity for controlling the rhetoric andpacing of the “Dante” Sonata’s thematic trans-formations. The improvisatory aesthetic of thefollowing examples, with their potential inter-changeability (modularity), suggests they mayhave been engendered more by intuition inperformance than by premeditation—Marx’sAnschauung. In other words, some of thesetransitions may have originated at the keyboardwithout Liszt’s explicitly intending for them toend up in a composition, but at the moment of“composing,” elements of them were at hisfingertips.

The transition between two transformationsof the principal chromatic theme is shown inex. 3a/b and summarized schematically in ex.4. There are three versions; the earliest (ex. 3afrom MS I 76 and deleted in Liszt’s hand) iseight measures shorter than the other two andmakes an explicit enharmonic shift between E�and D� in the middle measure, compacting theharmonic movement into one-and-a-half mea-sures. The directness and brevity of the movesuggest an improvised transition to the extentthat it simply employs chords in different in-versions, which, on reflection, Liszt extendedand composed out.

The second version (ex. 3b from MS I 76,which remains extant in the manuscript), likethe first, makes both a registral and enharmonicconnection between transition and thematictransformation. But it extends the falling chro-matic melody for a further five measures, addsa brief recitative, and unfolds the half-dimin-ished-seventh chord through flowing eighthnotes rather than block chords. Here Liszt leavesout the dominant-seventh harmony on B, al-lowing the lone E� to pivot between the twoharmonies by implication. All these measurespoint to a more elaborate musical conception.Yet although they signal an improvisationalprocess more mediated by thought distancedfrom the performative impulse, other elementsin ex. 3b can be seen equally as the result of anongoing process of working out material at thekeyboard. The repetition of m. 3 (as m. 4) couldeasily result from the improvisatory practice ofgaining time and achieving hypermetric bal-ance quickly and easily through a literal repeat,and the recitative-like passage is a long-stand-ing trick of the trade to “speak extempore”—

familiar from C. P. E. Bach’s Fantasias to Beetho-ven’s op. 110—before launching into anothersection.

The final version (MS I 17), also shown in ex.3b, is almost identical to the second, but differsfrom it in m. 9 by inverting the ascending chord,breaking the registral connection with themelody, and creating a new connection withthe harmonic bass note (C�). Such revisionsrecall Czerny’s advice that the performer mustdevote time and practice to achieve the capa-bility of transforming passages “with ease andadroitness. . . . He must not be satisfied with asingle attempt . . . since the modifications in-herent . . . are infinite.”88 Plate 4 shows a fac-simile copy (from MS I 17) documenting thelast two versions.

There is also a sense in which revisions, forinstance, the extension of the repeated-notechromatic melody in ex. 3a/b and Liszt’s deci-sion first to isolate a repeated E�, then to inte-grate it three octaves lower through chromaticvoice-leading, are influenced by a slippage be-tween the visual and the auditory. In additionto pure sound, there are the enticing spectacleof rapidly swapping hands and the rhetoric of alone hand, respectively. Traditions of seeingmusic in this way—a phenomenon Kramer hascalled the “listening gaze”89—can constitutethe speed of attack, facial expressions, and ges-tures of the arms (as well as their absence) aspart of the music being performed. The revi-sions to the “Dante” Sonata presented heresuggest that when Liszt was revising at thekeyboard his awareness of how physical ges-tures would be seen by a listener may also havefunctioned as a determinant of “composition,”thus encoding soundless spectacle into thesounding work.

A later section, shown as ex. 5a/b, illustratesthat in revision Liszt also made more substan-tial alterations to the material of a passage,changing the length of a transition, its use andreuse of thematic ideas, and its relation to fur-ther thematic transformations. Example 5a en-compasses a harmonic move from A� to vii-7 on

88Ibid., p. 50.89Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical Theory, p.77.

79


A, with harmonic motion between A�, B, and D(denoted by the letters A–C in ex. 5a), followedby a stepwise descending whole-tone progres-

sion from mm. 13ff., given in diminution start-ing at m 17. Liszt’s revisions to this passage(ex. 5b) incorporate and modify the dotted open-

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.


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82

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a. MS I 76 (1845–48), denoting an early version of the passage in ex. 5b, with correlated letter designations(A–G).

Example 5

ing tritones of the Sonata, resolving them asperfect intervals and elaborating and extendingthe passage. The same initial harmonic motionof ex. 5a is stretched over every four measuresrather than every three (again denoted by let-ters A, B, and C); the descending dotted figurefrom the Sonata’s opening again extends over afurther six measures with chromatic left-handoctaves over a tonic pedal (letters C and D);finally, the same rhythmic diminution of thewhole-tone progression begins a measure ear-lier (at letter F), which leads to another exten-

sion of the descending dotted figure two mea-sures after letter G before the diminished oc-taves return to those of ex. 5a and both ver-sions proceed alike. As with ex. 3a/b, the mod-est expansion in ex. 5b of the underlying har-monic structure present in ex. 5a suggests thatLiszt was gradually composing out an improvi-sation, incorporating examples of thematic so-phistication such as the transformation of theopening motif and left-hand references to thechromatic octaves of the principal D-minortheme. At the same time, ex. 5b can also be

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83



b. MS I 137 (1854), denoting the final version of the passage in ex. 5a, with correlated letter designations (A–G).

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84

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CENTURYMUSIC

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viewed as an increasingly elaborate improvisa-tion in its patterned chordal and octave tex-tures between A and C, its reliance on repeti-tion, and its recourse to “default” chromatic ordiminished octaves before moments of har-monic arrival (mm. 5, 8, 12, 15–17, 25). Becausethe relationship between composition-as-im-provisation and improvisation-as-compositionremains fluid in the “Dante” Sonata, it wouldseem wrong-headed to identify any precise pointat which improvisation “becomes” composi-tion. The indeterminacy is wholly in keepingwith Liszt’s conception as projected in his finaltitle.

Much of Liszt’s virtuosity resides in a worldof expanding keyboard idioms that have tradi-tionally belonged to the execution of preexist-ing material rather than to the thematic-har-


monic substance of composition. This idealistdivision becomes increasingly difficult to main-tain in the “Dante” Sonata, in part due to thework’s complex genesis. To conceive Liszt’spatterning of figures as the scripting of physi-cal, visually virtuosic gestures is to draw atten-tion to him as the performing agent in contrastto the customary invisibility of a work’s cre-ator.90 The two reports that document Liszt

90In neat summary of the work-condition under scrutinyhere, Lydia Goehr writes that composers “should be nei-ther seen nor heard, to underscore the mystery both ofabsence and of genius.” Continuing this model, the sta-tuses of performers and audience are to be complemen-tary: “Performers and their instruments should be heardbut not seen, but ‘heard’ only as imperfect pointers to-wards the transcendent. And audiences, to complete thetriad, should be seen but not heard, but ‘seen’ only in the

85


disappearing entirely behind the musical iden-tity of other composers—Chopin, Beethoven—emphasize that he began playing only after ex-tinguishing all candles and lamps and loweringthe curtains; in total darkness, his auralprosopopoeia reportedly deceived listeners(there were no viewers) to the extent that “itwas impossible not to mistake him [for Chopin];and indeed, everyone was mistaken.”91 (Schu-mann famously reinforced the point when herecorded Liszt’s own ocular dependencies in1840: “[if Liszt] played behind a screen, a greatdeal of poetry would be lost.”92)

Hyperbole aside, the visual contingency ofLiszt’s identity would seem to suspend the ges-tures associated with his idiomatic figures in alimbo between professional identities: the ges-tures draw the “listening gaze,” yet as insepa-rable from the figures they also contribute tothe thematic substance of a work.93 Liszt’s re-

visions illustrate the extent to which his pre-sentation of thematic material depended onmodular, idiomatic figures. His use of revisedand reinvented figurations suggests that he wascontinually reworking and improvising on dif-ferent “ideal sound images” at the keyboard,resulting in several actualizations, multiple“versions.” Features considered substantive(structural rather than ornamental) by main-stream analysis—harmonic motion, voice-lead-ing, contrapuntal framework, registral disposi-tion—remain unchanged in such revisions, buttheir realization tends to favor the performer’sprerogative to adopt and adapt textures to suitthe “momentary mood,” as Czerny put it, or tofollow “feeling and invention,” as Liszt re-marked, in determining “what the ideas are,and how they are carried out and worked up.”94

Because idiomatic figures are by nature irre-ducible as patterning components, they oper-ate as basic formal units that can be repeated toform larger paragraphs, which themselves canbe sequentially repeated.95 In Liszt’s case, theinvention and constant morphing of figurationsare guided by a highly developed intuition forsound images that Rosen calls “the greatest ofany keyboard composer’s between Scarlatti andDebussy.”96 This view can be measured againstthe figural reworking of the F�-major theme(shown in ex. 6), in which Liszt revises thetheme’s realization three times with differentfiguration. Although the figural patterns remainrooted in mechanical piano methods, they areemployed in this context to alter the lyricalcharacter of the theme. In a weakening field ofopposition between performer and composer,the figures that realize Liszt’s theme increas-

94Liszt to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, in Letters of FranzLiszt, trans. C. Bache (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1894), I, 274.95See the detailed study of Liszt’s figures and figurations inJim Samson’s Virtuosity and the Musical Work. For a studyof figurations at both foreground and middleground levels,see Thomas Hitzberger, “Zwischen Tonalität undRationalität: Anmerkungen zur Sequenz- und Figurations-technik Liszts,” in Virtuosität und Avantgarde: Unter-suchungen zum Klavierwerk Franz Liszt (Mainz: Schott,1988), pp. 32–59; and Wilhelm Seidel “Über Figurations-motive von Chopin und Liszt,” in Report on the Interna-tional Musicological Society Congress 1972, ed. HenrikGlahn (Copenhagen: Hansen, 1974), pp. 647–51.96Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, p. 508.

sense that each listener being present to grasp the work inthe privacy of his or her own contemplative experience”(Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, andthe Limits of Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press,1998], p. 144).91The occasion on which Liszt allegedly disguised his play-ing as Chopin’s was first recorded publicly by CharlesRollinet in Le Temps (1 Sept. 1874), thirty years after thefact. Rollinet’s account was disputed in 1888 by FriedrichNiecks, who reports that the aging Liszt declared he hadno recollection of this occasion. Further details of the dis-pute are given by Rena Mueller in “The Ramann-LisztQuestionnaires,” Franz Liszt and His World, p. 420, n. 1.In 1837 Berlioz describes Liszt’s invisible performance ofBeethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata in audiovisual terms: “Itwas the shade of Beethoven himself, his great voice thatwe heard, called forth by the virtuoso” (Journal des Débats,12 March 1837). This anecdote is discussed in relation tothe sonata’s aesthetics of mystery in Lawrence Kramer,“Hands On, Lights Off,” from Musical Meaning: Toward aCritical History, p. 37; and in relation to Berlioz’s ownaesthetics in Katherine Kolb Reeve, “Primal Scenes:Smithson, Pleyel, and Liszt in the Eyes of Berlioz,” thisjournal 18 (1995), 228–29.92“Aber man muß das hören und auch sehen, Liszt dürftedurchaus nicht hinter den Kulissen spielen; ein großesStück Poesie ginge dadurch verloren” (Neue Zeitschriftfür Musik 12 [1840], 102–03).93The difficult status of such keyboard figures predatesLiszt’s dédoublement, extending arguably to early-nine-teenth-century pianists including J. N. Hummel, whosekeyboard manuscript for the Concerto in C, op. 34a, forexample, still retained a figured-bass shorthand ready forrealization in the moment, leading Joel Sachs to argue thatHummel “conceived of music as the decoration of har-monic progressions” (Joel Sachs, “Johann NepomukHummel,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, accessed 4June 2007, http://www.grovemusic.com).

86

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87


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97The most recent analysis of antivirtuoso criticism is thatof Gooley, “The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity inthe Early Nineteenth Century,” Liszt and His World, pp.75–112.

98Adopting a more analytical approach to the problem ofimprovisation, John Rink has aimed to quantify improvi-sation within Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, op. 61, througha Schenkerian graphing of different structural levels. Rinksupports his modus operandi with the observation that“certain features of Chopin’s style appear to derive fromthe improvisation tradition . . . at a deeper level—at thestructural level, however, the influence improvisation hadon his music . . . is far more difficult to assess precisely.. . . To grasp the essence of Chopin’s music, one mustunderstand how improvisation affected its structure”(“Chopin and Schenker: Improvisation and Musical Struc-ture,” in Chopin Studies: The International MusicologicalSymposium “Chopin and Romanticism” Warsaw, 17–23October 1986, vol. 3 [Warsaw: Frederick Chopin Society,1990], pp. 219–23, here 219).

ingly become constitutive of the fixed workcharacter while the theme’s harmonic and me-lodic identity remains essentially consistent inall manuscripts.

Putting my argument in its most extreme terms,the considerable revisions to the “Dante” So-nata suggest a shift in its status from a notatedaide-mémoire sketch to a post-Beethovenianwork, a shift that shadows the mise-en-scèneof Liszt’s explicit metamorphosis from virtuoso-as-caterpillar to composer-as-butterfly. By re-signing publicly as a professional performeramid a flurry of antivirtuoso criticism,97 Lisztrendered his self-critique an act of self-efface-ment. He effectively determined the negativereception of his earlier portfolio of virtuoso

works by seeking, as Hanslick put it, to writein Weimar “for posterity” rather than to con-tinue to perform for the gratifying heights ofthe instant alone.

Because musicological scholarship has tendedto rely on documentary evidence, improvisa-tion has remained elusive, relegated to the side-lines of conjecture and imagination.98 Method-


88

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CENTURYMUSIC

ologically, it is by definition impossible to provethrough documents that the “Dante” Sonatawas the result of Phantasieren during its earlyphases. Yet given the evidence that traces thepath of an anomalous composition fromuntexted performance to crafted sonata, the fi-nal score can still—with the requisite histori-cal imagination—be considered a distilled amal-gam of momentariness, a tissue of recalled im-provisations and performance ideas, a text ar-chetype of which Roland Barthes observes: “thewriter [or composer] can only imitate a gesturethat is always anterior, never original.”99 Liszt’sstatus as the composer of his work is unstableonly if it is considered mutually exclusive tohis role as the work’s performer. This exclusiv-ity is a prerequisite of an idealist aesthetic thatdivides the artwork from its realization andenables the “disparity” lamented by Schumann.Barthes’s critique of the festishizing of textsand authors leads him to draw a useful distinc-tion between the author and “the modernscriptor,” whereby the former is “always con-ceived of as the past of his own book” and thelatter, more akin to Liszt as composer, “is bornsimultaneously with the text, is in no wayequipped with a being preceding or exceedingthe writing, is not the subject with the book aspredicate; there is no other time than that ofthe enunciation and every text is eternally writ-ten here and now.”100

Imagining the unwritten musical text ofLiszt’s improvisation in these terms creates anuncomfortable condition of absence for text-based scholarship, particularly though perhapsnot exclusively for Liszt studies. The music inquestion was of course always “present” in afinal form through its performance—Barthes’scondition of being eternally “written here andnow”—but the extent to which stemmatologycan illuminate this depends on the fortuitoustransmission of fragments such as I suggest forMSS I 18, no.1, and 1C.51. Positivist methodol-ogy plays a crucial role in this study, but asBernstein suggests, this documentary approachto examining Liszt—the “error that answers to

no correction”—only presents a kind of Heisen-berg problem: “the greater the accuracy of theresearch, the greater, finally, the deviance fromwhat is meant by ‘Liszt’.”101 Like the “Dante”Sonata, the aggregate impression of “Liszt” re-mains indecipherable except as an always ret-rospective narrative that, at least in this case,allows for the permanent over-extension of asingle ego. Philological scrutiny in this articlehas provided the facts about a musical sketchredefined as a full-fledged work. Ironically, thisinformation has allowed us to see that the con-sistent inconsistency of the work’s “author-ship,” and Liszt’s reliance on a music that is“performative” in the sense of reaching its idealconception and completion only through suc-cessive acts of delivery, undermines the au-thority of the model of identity to which Liszthimself sought to subscribe.

Liszt as modern scriptor only adds to the“confusions of distinctions”102 surrounding himas a historical figure. What benefit is there inapplying such a label if “Liszt” is already anover-determination that has reached its mo-ment of saturation? One answer is that theapplication can support a rereading of the com-positional technique of thematic transforma-tion. Since Alfred Heuß’s study in 1911,103 the-matic transformation has been associated pri-marily with the symphonic poems of theWeimar ex-virtuoso. But as the comparison withCzerny’s treatise shows, the technique was adocumented strategy for Phantasieren that canbe traced via Czerny back to Beethoven.

But was the “Dante” Sonata not an anomaly?The answer is: not entirely. Lina Ramann’sbiographical questioning of Liszt from the years1875–76 suggests that other potentially similarworks existed, and that at least one fell on thewrong side of Liszt’s self-critique. Although a

99Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” p. 146.100Ibid., p. 145.

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 transforma-tion. See The Romantic Composers (New York: Macmillan,1906), pp. 340ff. Following Heuß’s study Erläuterungen zuFranz Liszts Sinfonien und sinfonischen Dichtungen, theterm proliferated.

89


substantial fragment, perhaps akin to a sketchedimprovisation, it never reached completion:

Ramann: A Berlin reporter indicated that on 11 Janu-ary 1843, you played a “New Fantasy onThemes from Le Nozze di Figaro.” Of yourworks on Mozartian themes, I know onlythe Don Juan fantasy. Was this Figaro fan-tasy written out, or was it improvised? Ifit was written out, where can it be found?Has is been published? By whom?

Liszt: It remained only in sketches, and has beenlost.104

In fact, the sketches were found in Weimar andhave been “completed” three times: in 1912 byBusoni, who suppressed all thematic materialfrom Don Giovanni (245 measures) and addedthirty-seven measures of his own as well asseveral cadenzas;105 in 1989 by Kenneth Hamil-ton, who excised nothing and added a merefifteen measures in order to complete gaps in atransitional passage and at the coda;106 and in1994 by Leslie Howard, who similarly addedsixteen measures.107 Given that Liszt performedthe Mozart Fantasy in the absence of a com-plete score in 1843, he almost certainly impro-vised some sections in his performance, though

the extent to which his playing exceeded thesurviving notation cannot be known.108

Manuscript sources are lacking altogetherfor another fantasy-work Liszt performed dur-ing this period. The Gazette musicale reportsthat Liszt performed “une nouvelle fantaisiecomposée par lui [Liszt] sur des mélodies duGuitarrero, de M. Halévy” in the Grand Théâtreat Kassel on 19 November 1841 (ten monthsafter the Opera premiered in Paris).109 There isno mention of this particular performance inLiszt’s correspondence, and in the absence ofmanuscript sources two competing hypothesesseem plausible: either the work was writtendown to some extent and lost, or—perhaps morelikely—it may never have been notated andwas considered a composition only to the ex-tent that the Gazette reviewer’s impressionswere conditioned through his experience ofLiszt’s performance.

This reasoning may become dangerously hy-pothetical, but it nevertheless serves to dislo-cate our notion of composition by separating itfrom the notion of a text. The dislocation fur-ther complicates the inherited idealism thatrequires a “work” to be an a priori form preced-ing any realization in performance. It is tellingin this connection that, contrary to his earliertendency to perform from memory (with allthe attendant associations of spontaneous cre-ation), Liszt’s rule of thumb in Weimar—asWilliam Mason recounts—was always to playfrom scores, presumably to indicate that whathe was playing were serious, texted composi-tions rather than fleeting improvisations.110 Yet

104Ramann’s question dates from December 1875; it wasanswered by Liszt in April 1876. See “The Ramann-LisztQuestionaires,” trans. Susan Hohl, in Liszt and His World,p. 411.105Busoni’s excision was possibly carried out in order toaccord with Ramann’s report that the sketches were for aFantasy on Le nozze alone. The passage quoted above in“The Ramann-Liszt Questionaires” first appeared in 1887giving Busoni easy access to it. See Lina Ramann, FranzLiszt: Als Künstler und Mensch, vol. 2/1 (Leipzig: Breitkopfand Härtel, 1887), p. 202. Busoni’s work was published byBreitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig as “Fantasie / über zweiMotive aus W. A. Mozarts / Die Hochzeit des Figaro /nach dem fast vollendeten Originalmanuscript / ergänztund Moriz Rosenthal zugeeignet von Ferruccio Busoni /Erste Ausgabe 1912” (Plate no.: V. A. 3830).106Hamilton’s unpublished completion occurs in appendixIV of his doctoral dissertation: The Opera Fantasies andTranscriptions of Franz Liszt: A Critical Study (BalliolCollege, Oxford University, 1989).107Howard’s edition was published in 1997 by Editio MusicaBudapest under the title “Fantasie / über Theman ausMozarts Figaro / und Don Giovanni / For piano solo—fürKlavier / Op. post. / First Edition—Erstausgabe (Z. 14,135).” A recording of the piece was released prior to thescore in 1994: Liszt at the Opera III (Hyperion: CDA66861/2).

108As Hamilton’s and Howard’s completions indicate, the“sketches” are arguably more complete than Liszt’s recol-lection to Ramann might imply, but this does not miti-gate their fractional status. Hamilton certainly takes theview that the surviving sources for the Mozart Fantasieare “almost complete.” See The Cambridge Companionto Liszt, p. 83.109See “Chronique étrangère” in Gazette musicale 6 (12Dec. 1841), p. 560. For an itinerary of ninety-five “lost”pieces by Liszt, see Friedrich Schnapp “VerscholleneKompositionen Franz Liszts,” in Von Deutscher Tonkunst:Festschrift zu Peter Raabes 70. Geburtstag, ed. AlfredMorgenroth (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1942), pp. 119–53.110Mason’s memoirs record this particularly through a con-trastive anecdote about Johann Peter Pixis, who performedtogether with Liszt before the latter’s move to Weimarand begged him to use sheet music on stage, which he didnot: “Later on [Liszt] very rarely played even his own

90

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CENTURYMUSIC

even remaining cautious, we can confirm thatLiszt performed at least three partially unwrit-ten “works” during the 1840s, that his sketcheswere roughly coeval with their improvisation/performance, and that their performance pre-ceded their final “composition,” or rather, thatat this stage in Liszt’s life, performance andcomposition were effectively synonymous pro-cesses within the economy of his creative pro-duction.

This condition undermines the unqualifiedaspiration of Werktreue in performance by in-verting conventional ideas about what it is thatis inscribed by a classical score. For Liszt’s earlywork on the “Dante” Sonata, notation seemsto function, not as the basis for future perfor-mance, but at least in part as the recordingmedium of past performance. This status ismost apparent in plate 2, written as a mementofor an admirer ex post facto. The changes be-tween this manuscript and ex. 6 are suggestiveof the considerable distance traversed betweenimprovisatory performance and final notation.We may therefore think of the successive revi-sions as “virtual” performances that inscribehypothetical (or perhaps real) improvisationsthat may or may not have originated in con-cert. Rosen may have been thinking along theselines when he stated that Liszt’s music wasconceived absolutely for performance and thatits “realization . . . took precedence over theunderlying compositional structure.”111 In thisrepertoire, a performer ascends in the norma-tive musical hierarchy, assuming aspects ofwhat conceptually is a compositional preroga-tive: to prescribe the notes and their order.

This late-twentieth-century viewpoint re-flects a performance-centered aesthetic that mayadd another facet to our assessment of certainof Liszt’s pre-Weimar piano works. Seen origi-

nally as transcriptions or amalgams of perfor-mance events in which the composer and per-former are one, these “compositions” may be-gin to assume a new and perhaps unfamiliarintegrity. For rather than measuring themagainst the “covert ideological agenda,”112 asSamson has called it, of the German sonata-symphonic tradition, we can view them as prod-ucts of a different ideology: that of the impro-viser-virtuoso. This revisionist perspective reso-nates suggestively with an early-nineteenth-century sentiment perhaps most eloquently—if hyperbolically—formulated in the mid-1840sby an anonymous Darmstadt correspondentwho dispelled any ambivalence about Liszt’sWerktreue and his stature as a composer byexplicitly construing performance and compo-sition as synonymous acts in the mind of thegenius:

His performance is never a mechanical utterance[Vonsichgeben], rather a composition in the truestsense of the word, an artistic creation existing en-tirely for itself, reborn through fire and passion fromwithin. In general he regards every piece he plays asa theme on which to improvise and almost alwayscreates anew something wonderful, in doing so [he]simultaneously declares the aspiration of the truegenius: always to loosen his art more from all formaland frightening shackles, and with true enthusiasmand unconstrained by all external rules, to reproducein a carefree manner what his inner eye has intu-ited.113

compositions without having the music before him,” Ma-son recalls, “and during most of the time I was [in Weimar]copies of his later publications were always lying on thepiano, and among them a copy of the ‘Bénédiction de Dieudans la Solitude,’ which Liszt had used so many timeswhen playing to his guests that it became associated withmemories of Berlioz, Rubinstein, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski,Joachim, and our immediate circle” (William Mason,Memories of a Musical Life [New York: Century, 1901], p.118).111Rosen, Romantic Generation, p. 507.

112Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, p. 112.113“Sein Vortrag ist niemals ein mechanisches Vonsich-geben, sondern im eigentlichsten Sinne des Wortes eineComposition, eine ganz für sich bestehende Schöpfung derKunst, durch Feuer und Leidenschaft von innen herauswiedergeboren. Jedes Stück, das er spielt, betrachtet er imAllgemeinen als ein Thema, über welches er phantasirtund fast immer etwas Wundervolles neu erschafft, undwobei sich zugleich die wahrhaft geniale Strebung kundgibt:seine Kunst immer mehr von allen formellen undbeängstigenden Fesseln loszumachen und in wirklicherBegeisterung und unbekümmert um allen äußerenRegelzwang, das sorglos nachzubilden, was sein inneresAuge geschaut hat” (“Franz Liszt [in Darmstadt]” [6 Oct.1845], 1499. This is contained in a small collection ofthus-far unidentifiable German press articles about Lisztbetween 1838 and 1847, which are held in the National-archiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung in Bayreuth as: II C b3.

Hummel’s comments on the prestige of improvisationalign him with this view and offer a complementary per-spective to the listener-based quotation above. In the final

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Regardless of the music’s elusive history andgenesis, a modern performer can hardly treatthe published “Dante” Sonata from 1858 asimprovisatory. Rather, in a final ironic turn, itis a fixed work to be played “quasi improvisato”(mm. 124, 157), a layering of artifice that fi-nally consigns the indecipherable virtuoso tohistory. The work’s fluid formative stages con-geal into a compositional topic—a mannerrather than a mode of delivery, the identity ofwhich must remain “undecidable” within thesemiotics of virtuosity and Werktreue.

Abstract.The European press of the late 1830s indicates aglaring disparity between Liszt’s questionable statusas a composer and his eminence as a virtuoso per-

former. The staggered compositional history of oneparticular piano work, Après une lecture du Dante—Fantasie quasi Sonata (1839–58), straddles thisschism uniquely in that it bridged two distinct peri-ods of Liszt’s life: the Glanzzeit of immensely suc-cessful European concert tours, and the predomi-nantly compositional span as Kapellmeister inWeimar. As such, it documents the mise-en-scène ofLiszt’s self-fashioned metamorphosis from virtuosoto composer.

As a work borne expressly of improvisational acts,the “Dante” Sonata exhibits paradoxical traits thatbind it to both performance and compositional tradi-tions. Through a study of Carl Czerny’s influence onLiszt, and the latter’s own improvisational practices,I take a medium-sensitive approach to the “Dante”Sonata by interrogating the historical concept ofPhantasieren as part of a rereading of the composi-tional technique of thematic transformation.

Based on the excised material from the extantmanuscripts, I reconstruct the genesis of the “Dante”Sonata and chart its compositional history and ge-neric evolution. A comparative presentation of se-lected revisions, alternatives, and variants from thework illustrates the problematic juncture betweenimprovisation and composition, the extent to whichself-borrowing and the interchangeability of textsraise questions about our modern work-concept, thenotion of a musical text, and the functions of perfor-mance within a text. Key words: Virtuosity,Phantasieren, “Dante” Sonata, Liszt, compositionalprocess.

lines of his Clavierschule, Hummel identified his publicartistry more with improvisatory performance than what heperceived as a text-based, reproductive practice: “I confessthat, from that moment on [when he was fully proficient atimprovisation], I was less embarrassed to improvise[phantasiren] before an audience of 2000–3000 listene rsthan to play a notated composition I was menially bound to”(Ich gestehe, ich war von dem Augenblick an wenigerverlegen, vor einem Publikum von 2–3000 Zuhörern zuphantasiren, als eine niedergeschriebene Komposizion, andie ich knechtisch gebunden war, zu spielen) (Hummel,Ausführliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zumPiano-Forte-Spiel, vol. 3 [Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, 1828], p.444).

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19TH

CENTURYMUSIC

Appendix A:Chronology of Revisions for the “Dante” Sonata

1839 (February)Liszt first refers to the projected work in hisdiary—Journal des Zÿi—as a symphony, whichhe would complete separately in 1855–56 asEine Symphonie zu Dantes Divina Commedia:

If I feel within me the strength and life, I will at-tempt a symphonic composition based on Dante,then another on Faust—within three years—mean-while I will make three sketches: the Triumph ofDeath (Orcagna), the Comedy of Death (Holbein),and a Fragment dantesque.1

1839 (September)Marie d’Agoult’s letter to Henri Lehmann re-veals that written work on the Fragmentdantesque (for keyboard) had only just begunon 26 September 1839:

Le bravo suonatore began this morning a Fragmentdantesque which is sending him to the very Devil.He is so consumed by it that he won’t go to Naplesin order to be able to complete this work (destined toremain in his sketch portfolio!).2

Paper-type analysis, the fact that this sketchwas in Liszt’s hand, the spacious use of threestaves, the occasionally wayward spacing, andd’Agoult’s demonic reference (suggestive ofLiszt’s opening tritones) indicate that thissketch is most likely MS I 18, No.1,3 contain-ing the first twenty-four measures of the So-nata. No further notation survives prior eitherto Liszt’s private performance of the piece amonth later on 25 October 1839 at the Hôtel del’Europe or to his public performance of it in

Vienna on 5 December 1839 in the fourth morn-ing concert he gave there.4

The extent to which the music had beenwritten out at this stage, whether as a continu-ity draft or collection of sketches, remains un-known.

1840The appearance of the Prague fragment (MS1C.51), dated 11 March 1840, and the differ-ences between this fragment and the first fullMS suggest both that Liszt performed the workon his tour of Bohemia and that it may stillhave remained largely unwritten at this stage.

Whatever Liszt performed in 1839–40 musthave resulted in the written exemplar of a com-plete piece (now lost) that was copied byGeatano Belloni as the original portions of MS I76. In a letter to d’Agoult dated 22 September1840, Liszt explains that he had been revisingseveral sections of Belloni’s manuscript.5 Theresults of these revisions appear to be containedin MS I 76 in graphite pencil and reflect thefirst extant (notated) version of the piece, asource thought by Walker and Winklhofer nolonger to exist.

MS I 18 No. 3—a more concise ending to theSonata—is also in Belloni’s hand and on thesame “Blacons” paper and seems to have beendiscarded from MS I 76. For this reason, MS I18 No. 3 is likely to be the very first notatedconclusion to the Fragment dantesque, if weaccept that the Prague fragment from 11 March1840—also a concluding fragment—was notLiszt’s own manuscript.

1848–49The title page of MS I 76—“Paralopomènes à la‘Divina Comedia’”—must have been added be-

1“Si je me sens force et vie, je tenterai une compositionsymphonique d’après Dante, puis une autre d’après Faust—dans trois ons—d’ici-là, je ferai trois esquisse: le Triomphede la mort (Orcagna), la Comédie de la mort (Holbein), etune Fragment dantesque” (Liszt, Journal des Zÿi ind’Agoult, Mémories par Daniel Stern [pseud.], ed. DanielOllivier [Paris, 1927], p. 180).2Solange Joubert, Une Correspondance romantique: Madamd’Agoult, Liszt, Henri Lehmann (Paris, 1947), p. 33.3A transcription of this fragment was published in the Jour-nal of the British Liszt Society, as “Dante fragment, S701e,”28 (2003), 34. The date given in this publication was ca.1837, which is almost certainly incorrect, for it predatesany mention of the work in Liszt’s correspondence by twoyears.

4Christopher Gibbs’s study of Liszt’s concert tours ofVienna in 1838 and 1839 provides the most detailed pic-ture of Liszt at this time to date. See “‘Just Two Words:Enormous Success’: Liszt’s 1838 Vienna Concerts,” in Lisztand His World, pp. 167–230.5“Je vais bien – j’ai corrigé ces jours derniers quelquesparties du fragment Dantesque,” Liszt to Marie d’Agoult,22 September 1840, Ipswich, in Correspondance / FranzLiszt, Marie d’Agoult (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 645.

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The result is MS I 17, the hand-made paper ofwhich is without watermark but can be datedbetween January and August 1849.9 Liszt sub-sequently revised this MS in stages using vari-ous writing implements, collettes, and inserts.The results were stitched together, concealingall the excised material, in a copy that maywell initially have been intended, though laterretracted, as a Stichvorlage. Fortunately thestitching was subsequently undone and thecollettes released, which has allowed scholarsto investigate this complex stage of revision.Liszt’s final title after Victor Hugo—Après uneLecture du Dante – Fantasie quasi Sonata—iswritten for the first time in graphite pencil onthis title page.

1853A separate correction leaf, MS I 18, n. 2, con-tains Liszt’s reworking of the opening transi-tion into the Presto agitato toward the end ofthe Sonata. It was copied into the final manu-script source (MS I 137), but is not in MS I 17and therefore seems to have been written ca.1853–54 in between the last additions to I 17and its being copied out as I 137.

ca. 1853–56The final stage in the genesis of the work wasJoachim Raff’s fair copy—MS I 137—preparedfrom the extensive revisions to MS I 17 forinclusion in the Années.

ca. 1857–58Following Liszt’s corrections, MS I 137 formedthe Stichvorlage for the 1858 Schott editionand represents the work as it was published inthe New Liszt Edition in 1974. The originationof the notated work in all its known sources ispresented diagrammaticallyas figure 1.

tween 1848 and 1849, however, for the firstbifolium of MS I 76 is a different paper-typeand is in the hand of Adoph Stahr, who was inLiszt’s employ between 1848 and 1851.6

The next stage of revision saw two furthersessions of correcting and amending MS I 76 byLiszt, in purple ink and red crayon, respec-tively. The use of red markings strongly sug-gests that he was again preparing the MS forpublication. Additionally, correction leaveswere inserted at the end of the MS on the samepaper as that used by Stahr for the openingbifoluim.

Following these extensive revisions, it wasevidently impossible for Liszt to make furtherprogress on the Sonata using MS I 76, and hecontracted Eduard Henschke to prepare a faircopy. Henschke evidently went through MS I76 adding accidentals and clefs (on pp. 5–8, and11) before transcribing the work as it then ex-isted onto paper that Mueller has associatedwith the post-1848 period in Weimar.7

Winklhofer dates this, MS I 17, prior to 1 Au-gust 1849 on the basis of its altered title, thusnarrowing the time frame:

In the earliest extant manuscript source [sic] for the“Dante” sonata, an undated Abschrift with numer-ous corrections in Liszt’s hand, the title is“Paralipomènes à la Divina Commedia. FantasieSymphonique pour Piano par F. Liszt.” Later, Lisztcrossed out the first word, replacing it with“Prolegomèmes.” This alteration can be dated priorto August 1, 1849, for when Liszt wrote to Raff onthat date the score was completely finished, the titlehe used had an additional ingredient probably drawnfrom Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. He now callsthe work. “Fantasie quasi Sonata (Proligomènes [sic]zu Dantes Göttlicher Comödie).”8

6Mueller, Liszt’s “Tasso” Sketchbook: Studies in Sourcesand 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.

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