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"To Play as If from the Soul of the Composer": The Idea of the Performer in Early RomanticAestheticsAuthor(s): Mary HunterSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 357-398Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4138479Accessed: 15/07/2010 15:35

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"To Play as if from the Soul of the

Composer": The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics

MARY HUNTER

n modern considerations of the aesthetic upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is not unusual to find a more or less sub- sidiary comment devoted to the change in the conception and role of per-

formance in the projection of musical works; the new conception essentially "demoted" the ideal of performance to a position as mere vessel for the musical work, and suggested a smooth progression from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.' There is significant historical support for this view. Hermann Danuser, for example, has shown how Beethoven's piano sonatas were an essential vehicle for the new understanding of the role of the composer, especially (though not exclusively) via the writings and editions of Carl Czerny, who noted in the early 1840s: "In the performance of [Beethoven's] works (and generally for all classical composers) the performer should throughout allow no alteration of the composition, no addition and no abbreviation. ... For one wants to hear the artwork in its original form, as the

Portions of this essay were given as papers at Princeton University, Yale University, the Thirteenth International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music in Durham, UK, and at the 2004 meet-

ing of the American Musicological Society. I am grateful to these institutions for their invitations to speak, and to the audience members who made helpful comments. Thanks also to Wye J. Allanbrook, Mark Evan Bonds, Marshall Brown, Scott Burnham, Elisabeth Le Guin, Richard

Leppert, James Parakilas, and John Spitzer for encouragement and stimulating questions. Thanks to Northwestern University Press for permission to quote from Pierre Baillot, The Art of the Violin, tr. Louise Goldberg (1991).

1. See, for example, Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 230-32, for a description of the idea of Werktreue that stretches from Beethoven via E. T. A. Hoffinann to George Bernard Shaw, and links the idea of the proudly unplayable work to the decreased necessity of the performer in the idea of the work "itself." Rose Subotnik credits Beethoven, Verdi, and Wagner as a single con-

ceptual unit, on the one hand contributing to the triumph of individualism in Western culture, but on the other, helping develop an ideology of merely obedient performance (Developing Variations- Style and Ideology in Western Music [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], 260).

Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 58, Number 2, pp. 357-398, ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN 1547-3848. ? 2005 by the American Musicological Society. 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 website, at

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358 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Master thought and wrote it."2 As Danuser points out, Beethoven's sonatas

may have been the immediate reason for this kind of language, but Czerny positively encouraged the dissemination of this attitude beyond this confined repertory. Johann Heinrich Gottlieb Heusinger had already strongly ex-

pressed a similar opinion in his 1790 Handbuch der Aesthetik: "Whatever is beautiful, brilliant, and well expressed in [a work] belongs to the composer, as [it does to] the poet. The job of the virtuoso in his performance is not to dis- figure the work of the former; to present it as it is."3 This attitude, though strongly promoted in German writings about music, and strongly connected to the notion of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven as a canonic triad, was spread beyond the German-speaking countries by such authors as F.-J. FRtis, whose famous piano tutor, the Mithode des mtthodes of 1840, written with Ignaz Moscheles, tells students in the section on performance in general that the fundamental aim of performance was to "render each work according to the thought that created it" and that "the performer must contemplate the

composer's work, seize its spirit, and then content himself with rendering it with all the facility of which he is capable, with all the life and sensitivity he can muster, and with as much respect for the productions of others as he would wish for his own."4

The notion of following the intentions of the composer was not, of course, new at the turn of the nineteenth century. Francesco Geminiani, for example, uses precisely this phrase in his Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Music of 1749: "Playing in good taste doth not consist of frequent Passages, but in ex-

pressing with strength and delicacy the Intention of the Composer. This Expression is what everyone should endeavour to acquire, and it may be easily obtained by any Person, who is not too fond of his own Opinion and doth

2. "Beim Vortrage seiner Werke, (und fiberhaupt bei alien kdassischen Autoren) darf der

Spieler sich durchaus keine Anderung der Composition, keinen Zusatz, keine Abkiirzung er- lauben. ... Denn man will das Kunstwerk in seiner ursprtinglichen Gestalt horen, wie der Meister es sich dachte und schrieb." Carl Czerny, Kunst des Vortrags der iiltern und neuen Clavier- compositionen oder: Die Fortschritte bis zur neuesten Zeit, Supplement [vol. 4] to the Vollstiindige theoretisch-practische Pianoforte-Schule, Op. 500 (Vienna: Diabelli, n.d.), 34. Cited in Hermann

Danuser, ed., Musikalische Interpretation, Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft 13 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1989), 302.

3. Johann Heinrich Gottlieb Heusinger, Handbuch der Aesthetik, oder Grundsaitze zur

Bearbeitung und Beurtheilung der Werke einer jeden schinen Kunst, als der Poesie, Malerei, Bildhauerkunst, Musik, Mimik, Baukunst, Gartenkunst etc. etc. Fiir Kiinstler und Kunstliebhaber, 2 vols. (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1797); facsimile (Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1970), 1:188: "Was an derselben sch6nes, geistreiches und treffendes ist, das geh6rt dem Componisten, so wie dem Dichter, und die Sache des Virtuosen ist es, dass er in seinem Vortrage das Werk des ersteren nicht

verunstalte; dass er es gerade so gebe, wie es ist." 4. Frangois-Joseph Fbtis, with Ignaz Moscheles, Mdthode des mithodes de piano (Paris:

Schlesinger, [1840]), 75: "rendre chaque oeuvre selon la pensie qui l'a crnie." "II faut que l'exi- cutant midite l'ceuvre du compositeur, qu'il en saisisse l'esprit, puis qu'il se borne

' la rendre avec toute l'habilit6 dont il est capable, avec toute la verve, toute la sensibilit6 qui sont en lui, et avec autant de respect pour les productions d'autres qu'il en voudrait pour les siennes."

The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics 359

not obstinately resist the Force of true Evidence."5 New in early- and proto- Romantic admonitions to follow the intentions of the composer were the lan-

guage about The Master, the increasing prevalence of a hectoring tone about fidelity to the score, and even the occasional sense that the physical performer was more often a hindrance than a help to the detailed comprehension of

great works, as Johann Friedrich Reichardt suggests in his 1782 essay on execution, from the Musikalisches Kunstmagazin:

If [performance] were perfect or at least better than it is, one could hear the works of great masters performed in their full spirit, and composition textbooks ... would be completely dispensable. True execution of these works would affect ear and heart more fully and fruitfully than all the intellectualized rules and the guided--or misguided-glances at scores offered by such books. Now, however, with performance as bad as it is, score-reading is about the only aid to the education of young composers.6

Some discourse about listening to music in these decades also seems quite spectacularly to occlude the presence of the performer. Listening experiences were sometimes described in terms of the listener's imaginative response to the sounds themselves, which could be figured as revelations of the divine or emanations from the spirit world, and sometimes as an experience of intersub-

jective exchange between the soul of the composer and that of the listener. The famous story by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-1798), "The Remarkable Life of the Musician Joseph Berglinger" (1797), includes descriptions of both kinds of experiences. As a youth, for example, Joseph would attend oratorios:

Full of expectation, he awaited the first sound of the instruments: as this now broke forth from out the muffled silence, long drawn and mighty as the sigh of a wind from heaven, and as the full force of the sound swept by above his head, it seemed to him as though his soul had all at once unfurled great wings--he felt himself raised up above the barren heath, the dark cloud-curtain shutting

5. Francesco Geminiani, Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Music (London: n.p., 1749); facsimile (Wyton, UK: King's Music, 1988), 2.

6. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, "Uber die musikalische Ausfiihrung," in Briefe, die Musik be-

treffend: Berichte, Rezensionen, Essays, ed. Grita Herre and Walther Siegmund Schultze, 144-45

(Leipzig: Reclam, 1976): "Wire [Ausftihrung] aber vollkommen oder doch besser, h6rte man die Werke grosse Meister ganz in ihrem Geiste ausgeffihrt, so wiren alle Lehrbiicher der Kompo- sition, die doch immer nur die schon vorhandenen Meisterwerke kommentieren, oft falsch kom-

mentieren, fast entbehrlich. Die wahre Ausfiihrung dieser Werke auf Ohr und Herz weit treffender und fruchtbarer wirken als alle durch den Verstand gefasste Regeln und der durch diese geleitet oder verleitete Blick in Partituren. Itzt, bei der gr6sstenteils so verkehrten Ausfiihrung, bleibt das Partiturlesen fast das einzige Hilfsmittel zur Bildung junger Komponisten." J. A. P. Schulz and Leopold Mozart both mention the possibility that a bad performance could render a work unrecognizeable (see below), but they do not go as far as Reichardt in condemning the vast

majority of contemporary performances or in suggesting that score reading could take the place of

performance, at least for some purposes.


out the mortal eye was drawn, and he soared up into the radiant sky. Then he held his body still and motionless, fixing his gaze steadfastly on the floor. The

present sank away before him; his being was cleansed of all the pettiness of this world-veritable dust on the soul's luster; the music set his nerves tingling with a gentle thrill, calling up changing images before him with its changes.7

As an adult professional composer, however, he laments the philistinism of the audience for his own music, and regrets in particular the lack of communion between creator and listener that he had imagined in composing the work:

To think that I could have imagined that these listeners, parading in gold and silk, had gathered to enjoy a work of art, to warm their hearts, to offer their

feelings to the artist! ... To be sure, there is a little consolation in the thought that perhaps-in some

obscure corner of Germany to which this or that work of mine may penetrate some day, even though long after my death-there may be someone whom Heaven has made so sympathetic to my soul that he will feel on hearing my melodies what I felt in writing them and precisely what I sought to put in them.8

In the first of these passages, the unmediatedness of the experience is striking. The sounds, though clearly physical, seem to be produced by no human labor, to need no technique, and to be engaged in no interpretative act.9 Indeed, the idea of listening here (as in other early Romantic descriptions) is clearly a metaphor for idealized spiritual communion, the idea of harmony applying both to the individual soul and to a community of souls. In the second passage

7. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, "Das merkwtirdige musikalische Leben des Tonkiinstlers Joseph Berglinger," in Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruder, in Werke und Briefe von Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1967), 114; translation from Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed., Leo Treitler, general ed. (New York: Norton, 1998), 1063: "Erwartungsvoll harrte er auf den ersten Ton der Instrumente;--und indem er nun aus der dumpfen Stille, michtig und langgezogen, gleich dem Wehen eines Windes vom Himmel hervorbrach und die ganze Gewalt der T6ne fiber seinem Haupte daherzog,--da war es ihm, als wenn er von einer diirren Heide aufgehoben wuirde, der triibe Wolkenvorhang vor den sterblichen Augen verschwinde, und er zum lichten Himmel emporschwebte. Dann hielt er sich mit seinem K6rper still und unbeweglich und heftete die Augen unverriickt auf den Boden. Die

Gegenwart versank vor ihm; sein Inneres war von allen irdischen Kleinigkeiten, welche der wahre Staub auf dem Glanze der Seele sind, gereinigt; die Musik durchdrang seine Nerven mit leisen Schauern und liess wie sie wechselte, mannigfache Bilder vor ihm aufsteigen."

8. Wackenroder, "Das merkwcirdige musikalischen Leben ... Joseph Berglinger, 125-26; translation from Strunk, Source Readings, 1068-69: "Dass ich mir einbilden konnte, diese in Gold und Seide stolzierende Zuh6rerschaft kime zusammen, um ein Kunstwerk zu geniessen, um ihr Herz zu erwirmen, ihre Empfindung dem Kiinstler darzubringen!...

"Freilich ist der Gedanke ein wenig tristend, dass vielleicht in irgendeinem kleinen Winkel von Deutschland, wohin dies oder jenes von meiner Hand, wenn auch lange nach meinem Tode, einmal hinkommt, ein oder der andere Mensch lebt, in den der Himmel eine solche Sympathie zu meine Seele gelegt hat, dass er aus meinen Melodien grade das herausfiihlt, was ich beim Niederschreiben empfand und was ich so gem hineinlegen wollte."

9. Indeed, there is barely even a work there, let alone all the apparatus needed to realize it.


that spiritual communion is concretized by being located in two specific indi- viduals. In both cases, though, the model is a simple binary, relating pure sound to imagination, or soul to soul. Neither model makes room for the perception of the performer as an entity separable from the sound or from the work.

Despite the abundance of evidence for the conceptual "disappearing" of the performer, however, the view that submissive obedience and self-obliterating fidelity became during this period the only, or even the principal, desirable model for interpretative performance is one-sided. It has long been accepted that performance itself was freer than the prescriptions about it; my point here is that early Romantic thinking about performance was also more complex and performer-centered than the above-described model might suggest. The too-narrow view of the subject results in part from the kinds of sources just mentioned, in part from aestheticians failing to account for the actualities of performance, which clearly included more interpretative freedom than a modernist model would allow,'0 but also from the continuing preoccupation of scholars with the status, meaning, and reception of works "themselves" rather than with the process of conveying them to an audience." In this scholarly context, the apparently diminished role of the performer in musical discourse has typically been a phenomenon to be noted and set aside rather than ex- plored or interrogated in any detail. Once the new aesthetics of music at the turn of the nineteenth century are considered from the perspective of performance, however-that is, partly from the perspective of the performer him- or herself, and partly from the perspective of writers who gave some thought to the role of the performer in the whole music-making nexus-it emerges that there was another kind of discourse about the act of bringing works to life, one in which the performer's role was considered to demand genius and in which the performer-even, or especially, the interpretative (as opposed to the improvising virtuoso) player-was regarded as a fuily fledged artist on a par with the composer.12

10. Cf. Clive Brown's insistence on the perpetuation of a tradition of ornamention in the first half of the nineteenth century, though his models are all vocal (Classical and Romantic Per-

forming Practice, 1750-1900 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], chap. 12). 11. Lydia Goehr (The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 256-60, and The Questfor Voice

[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 145ff) pays more attention than most to the role of the performer, but her concern is much more with the notion of the work. Lawrence Kramer

("The Mysteries of Animation: History, Analysis and Musical Subjectivity," Musical Analysis 20 [2001]: 153-78, which deals with many of the same questions of subjectivity as this essay) locates the "animation" of the music entirely in the listener's engaged response to it, and elides the

performer into the listener or the composer as necessary. 12. Obviously any given performer could be both an improvising virtuoso and an interpreta-

tive performer, devoted to conveying the content of apparently fully formed works. My concern in this essay is with the act of interpretative performance rather than with virtuoso display; and more importantly, with the rhetoric, rather than the actual practice, of interpretation.


Performance Genius and Transparency: The Development of an Idea

The discourses of performative genius and faithful obedience are not histori-

cally, socially, or aesthetically separate phenomena, however, though obviously some sources stress one over the other. Rather, encouragements to creativity sit cheek by jowl-often in the same sentence--with admonitions to fidelity. That is, the performer is enjoined to be simultaneously transparent to the work and vividly present to the audience on, so to speak, his own behalf.

One of the few philosophers in this period directly to address the question of musical performance was Hegel, a passage from whose Aesthetics (1818- 29) puts this apparent paradox very clearly. He describes three different kinds of performance: the second refers to Italian opera, which clearly features the

singers in an unabashedly and unproblematically creative role, and the third is a rather odd example of performance whose lowly means (especially un-

promising instruments) can be transformed by virtuosity into something com-

pelling and magical. His first category of performance, however, based on the idea of the epic, is the one that most powerfully articulates the relation of total

fidelity to persuasive self-expression. He writes:

If the composition has, as it were, objective solidity so that the composer himself has put into notes only the subject itself or the sentiment that completely suffuses it, then the reproduction must be of a similar matter-of-fact kind. The executant artist not only need not, but must not, add anything of his own, or otherwise he will spoil the effect. He must submit himself entirely to the character of the work and intend only to be an obedient instrument. [Hegel then warns against the dangers of purely mechanical performance in this model.] If ... art is still to be in question, the executant has a duty, rather than giving the impression of an automaton ... to give life and soul to the work in the same sense that the composer did. The virtuosity of such animation, however, is limited to solving correctly the difficult problems of the composition on its technical side and in that process avoiding any appearance of struggling with a difficulty laboriously overcome but moving in this technical element with complete freedom. In the matter not of technique but of the spirit, genius can consist solely in actually reaching in the reproduction the spiritual height of the composer and then bringing it to life.13

13. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Die kiinstlerische Execution," in Vorlesungen iiber die

Asthetik, in vol. 3 of his Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) 219-20. Translation slightly adapted from Hegel, "The Execution of Musical Works of Art," in Hegel'sAesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, ed. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2:956: "Ist nimlich die Komposition von gleichsam objektiver Gediegenheit, so dass der Komponist selbst nur die Sache oder die von ihr ganz ausgeftillte Empfindung in Tone gesetzt hat, so wird auch die Reproduktion von so sachlicher Art sein miissen. Der austibende Kiinstler braucht nicht nur nichts von dem Seinigen hinzutun, sondern er darf es sogar nicht, wenn nicht der Wirkung soll Abbruch geschehen. Er muss sich ganz dem


Hegel's distinction between technical virtuosity and spiritual genius is an opposition we will meet again, but most salient for present purposes is his notion that self-expression and fidelity to the work are not only not in conflict with one another, but that they are two sides of the same coin; a result achieved by the spiritual work of the performer.

This passage of Hegel includes a number of separable but interdependent ideas: that a particular kind of musical work was essentially complete on the page, that it required total obedience on the part of the performer, that the most desirable performance projected the illusion of a single mind engaged in the act of creating the work "anew," that understanding the work sufficiently to project this illusion was a matter of the spirit, and that performative genius was necessary to communicate this spiritual identity with the composer to an audience. This complex of ideas can be found piecemeal in a variety of sources for several decades preceding Hegel's formulation, and, of course, thereafter as well, but Hegel's formulation of the issue seems to me to encapsulate the essence of a distinctly early Romantic performance concept.

An eighteenth-century source that seems to anticipate something of Hegel's notion of spiritual communion between composer and performer is Rousseau's entry "Ex6cution" in his 1768 Dictionnaire de Musique (which clearly targeted vocal rather than instrumental performance). He writes: "It is not enough [C'estpeu] to read from the music; it is necessary to enter into all the ideas of the composer, to feel and render the fire of expression, to have above all an accurate and attentive ear to listen and follow the ensemble" (emphasis added).14 Despite the apparent prescience of the language about entering into all the composer's ideas, and the proto-Romantic locution about the fire of expression, there are some important differences between Rousseau's notion of what the performer is representing and a more Romantic or Germanic idea as represented by the Hegel excerpt. Rousseau's entry on expression, for example (which again is admittedly about vocal performance rather than instrumental), does not emphasize the illusion of the single mind in performance

Charakter des Werks unterwerfen und nur ein gehorchendes Organ sein wollen. ... Soil ... noch von Kunst die Rede sein, so hat der Kunstler die Pflicht, statt den Eindruck eines musikalischen Automaten zu geben, ... das Werk im Sinne und Geist des Komponisten seelenvoll zu beleben. Die Virtuositit solcher Beseelung beschrinkt sich jedoch darauf, die schweren Aufgaben der

Komposition nach der technischen Seite hin richtig zu 16sen und dabei nicht nur jeden Anschein des Ringen mit einer miihsam iuberwundenen Schwierigkeit zu vermeiden, sondern sich in diesem Elemente mit vollstindiger Freiheit zu bewegen, so wie in geistiger Riicksicht die

Genialitdit nur darin bestehen kann, die geistige Hohe des Komponisten wirklich in der

Reproduktion zu erreichen und ins Leben treten zu lassen." 14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Expression," in his Dictionnaire de Musique (Paris: veuve

Duchesne, 1768); facsimile, ed. with preface by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger (Geneva: Minkoff, 1998), 209: "C'est peu de lire la Musique exactement sur la Note; il faut entrer dans toutes les

id&es du Compositeur, sentir et rendre le feu de l'expression, avoir surtout l'oreille juste & tou-

jours attentive pour ncouter & suivre l'ensemble."


but rather a loosely contrapuntal circulation of musical "power," in which the listener appreciates, as both separable and combined, the distinct contributions of composer and performer (and poet, for that matter):

Everywhere that soberly handled ornaments bear witness to the facility of the singer, without covering up or disfiguring the song, expression will be sweet, pleasant, and strong, the ear will be charmed and the heart moved; the physical and the moral will combine for the pleasure of the listeners, and such a concord between words and music will reign that the whole will seem but a single deli- cious language that can say everything and always pleases."' [emphasis added]

In contrast, two German writers more or less contemporary with Rousseau (and writing more explicitly about instrumental music, or at least allowing room for it), make much more of the indistinuishability of composer and performer. In one of the most extreme formulations of the entire literature, for example, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, who also described as Schipferkraft (creative power) the capacity for bringing a work to life, notes: "The solo performer must play either his own fantasies or those of others. In both cases, genius must be his. If I want to perform a sonata by Bach [C. P. E. rather than J. S.], I have to sink myself so deeply in the spirit of this great man that my ego disappears and becomes Bach's idiom."'6 Johann Adam Peter Schulz's article "Vortrag" in Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schiinen Kiinste of 1775/92 also anticipates the early Romantic emphasis on the merging of two souls, regardless of whether the music is instrumental or vocal:

[Expressive performance] consists in the complete representation of the character and expression of the work. Both the whole and every individual part must be played with the tone, spirit, Affekt, and chiaroscuro that the composer conceived or and put into the work. . . . Every good composition has its own character, and its own spirit and expression, which it broadcasts throughout; the singer or player must transmit this so exactly in his performance that he plays as iffrom the soul of the composer.'7 [emphasis added]

15. Ibid., 215-16: "Partout oii les ornamens sobrement menages porteront t6moignage de la facilit6 du Chanteur, sans couvrir & defigurer le Chant, l'Expression sera douce, agrnable & forte, l'oreille sera charme & le Coeur emu; le physique & le moral concourront

' la fois au plaisir des &coutans, & il regnera un tel Accord entre la parole & le Chant que tout semblera n'etre qu'une langue dlicieuse qui fait tout dire & plait toujours."

16. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Ideen zu einer Asthetik der Tonkunst [written 1784/ 85] (Vienna: Degen, 1806); facsimile, ed. Fritz Kaiser and Margrit Kaiser (Hildesheim: Olms, 1990), 295: "Der Solospieler muss entweder seiner eignen oder fremde Phantasien vortragen. In

beyden FAllen muss Genie sein Eigenthum seyn. Will ich eine Sonata von Bach vortragen, so muss ich mich so ganz in den Geist dieses grossen Mannes versenken, dass meine Ichheit

wegschwindet, und Bachisches Idiom wird." 17. J. A. P. Schulz, "Vortrag," in Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schiinen Kiinste, enlarged ed.,

5 vols. (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1792); facsimile, ed. with pref. by Giorgio Tonelli (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), 4:706-7: "[Der Ausdruck im Vortrage] besteht in der vollkommenen Darstellung des Charakters und Ausdruks des Stdiks. Sowol das Ganze als jeder Theil desselben, muss gerade in dem Ton, in dem Geist, dem Affect und in demselben Schatten und Licht, worin der Tonsetzer


Francesco Galeazzi's Elementi teorico-pratici di musica of 1791-96 seems to continue the paradigm of the soul-merge required for fully effective performance. He describes the need for the music to seem to "issue from a single mind."18 This idea, however, appears at the end of a section on ornamentation, and Galeazzi's point is almost the reverse of Hegel's: whereas Galeazzi asks that the performer's added ornamentation sound as though it were already written in the score, Hegel is asking that the performer reproduce only what the composer actually wrote but make it sound as though he were creating it anew. These differences stem in part from the change in the default notion of "the work" from (to put it crudely) unrealized template to complete record of the composer's thought, but they also reflect the multilayered ways in which the new concept of performance was emerging.

Perhaps the most striking example of the complex layers of this paradigm- and the practical example most obviously connected to the Germanic ideas about the spiritual exercise involved in interpretative performance-is to be found in the writings of Pierre Baillot: the 1803 Mdthode de violon,19 for which he wrote all the prose (Pierre Rode and Rodolphe Kreutzer supplying most of the exercises); and his own Art du violon (1835).20 In the latter he comments on the changed relation of the performer to the emerging canon of German instrumental music and its ilk that Hegel may also have been describing:

An abundance of signs [the need for which is exemplified in the newly "dra- matic" music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Viotti] is favorable to music in that it can prevent many false readings and can serve as a guide to those who could not do without them, but it can end up extinguishing the genius of performance which delights in divining and creating its own way. The violinist can avoid this unhappy effect by studying old music [which required improvised ornamentation] and never losing sight of it; this always leaves a wide field open to his imagination.21

es gedacht und gesetzt hat, vorgetragen werden.... Jedes gute Tonstiik hat seinen eigenen Charakter, und seinen eigenen Geist und Ausdruk, der sich auf alle Theile desselben verbreitet; diese muss der SAnger oder Spieler so genau in seinen Vortrag iibertragen, dass er gleichsam aus der Seele des Tonsetzers spiele."

18. Francesco Galeazzi, Elementi teorico-pratici di musica (Rome: Pilucci Cracas, 1791-96), 230: "come se fosse parto di una stessa mente."

19. Pierre Baillot, Pierre Rode, and Rodolphe Kreutzer, Mithode de violon (Paris: Au Magasin de musique, 1803); facsimile (Geneva: Minkoff, 1974).

20. Pierre Baillot, L'art du violon (Paris: Imprimerie du Conservatoire de Musique, [1835]); facsimile (Courlay, France: Fuzeau, 2001); trans. and ed. Louise Goldberg as The Art of the Violin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991).

21. Baillot, L'art du violon, 162. The Art of the Violin, 287: "L'abondance des signes est favorable '

la musique en ce qu'elle peut emphcher bien des contre sens et servir de guide a ceux qui ne sauraient s'en passer, mais elle pourrait finir par eteindre le ginie d'exicution qui se plait surtout ' deviner,

' crier a sa maniure. On ivitera cet inconvenient en etudiant la musiqe ancienne et en ne la perdant jamais de vue: elle laissera toujours a l'imagination un vaste champ pour s'exercer."


In this excerpt the idea of the "genius of performance" seems, as with Galeazzi, to refer largely to note-adding embellishment and improvisation. Indeed, the chapter in which this passage appears includes his own mar- velously immoderate ornamentation of an Adagio by Viotti. But Baillot's more extended ideas about the genius of performance, first articulated in the 1803 Mithode de violon, make clear that more is at stake than the performer's ornamentational inventiveness.

This treatise was produced as the basic violin curriculum for the newly founded (1795) Paris Conservatoire;22 and as a whole it clearly feels the weight of the occasion. The prose preceding and following the exercises lays out in unusually detailed and philosophical23 terms the "means of expression" to be used by the performer. Tone, tempo, style, taste, and a steady sense of rhythm are all included, of course, but the section ends with a long disquisi- tion devoted to the genius of performance.24 This passage exhorts the player "by a sudden inspiration [to] identify himself with the genius of the composer, follow him in all his intentions, and interpret these intentions with both facility and precision," and "to translate everything, to bring everything to life, to transmit to the soul of the listener the feeling that the composer had in his soul."25 But the genius of performance also "allows the artist to imbue himself

22. The title page describes the [Citoyens] Baillot, Rode, and Kreutzer as "Membres du Conservatoire de Musique," and the method as "Adoptae par le Conservatoire pour servir '

l'Etude dans cet 6tablissement." 23. Two English reviews of the 1823 translation of the Mithode-" 'The Violin, Method of

Instruction for,' by Rode, Baillot and Kreutzer .. ." in the Harmonicon 4, no. 19 (1826): 54-55, and "Rode, Baillot and Kreutzer's Method of Instruction for the Violin" in the Quarterly Musical Magazine 6, no. 24 (1824): 527-31-mention the unusually philosophical tenor of this work. The Quarterly, for example, notes: "[The Mithode] forms a part of the plan of the French

conservatory, to inculcate the philosophy of art, together with the practice, and though the maxims introduced into their books are few, brief, and sketchy, yet they can hardly fail to impel the student to use his understanding as well as his fingers, and at the same time to form high and honourable notions."

24. To include a section on the more generalized aspects of performance towards the end of a

performance treatise was not new or unusual: to take only the most celebrated eighteenth-century treatises, such sections can be found in C. P. E. Bach's Versuch iiber die wahre Art das Clavier zu

spielen, Part I (Berlin, 1753); Leopold Mozart, Leopold Mozart's.. .griindlichen Violinschule, 3rd ed. (Augsburg, 1787); Johann Joachim Quantz's Versuch einer Anweisung die Flite traversiere zu spielen (Berlin, 1752); and Daniel Gottlob Tiirk's Klavierschule (Leipzig and Halle, 1789). What is new in Baillot's version of this trope is in part the prolixity of his prose on the subject, but more

importantly, the pervasiveness of his sense of performance as a true higher calling, the need for the performing artist to possess genius, and the notion of taste as being not an end in itself as it is in the earlier treatises, but rather a check on the wild excesses of genius. (See Baillot, Mithode de violon, 2.)

25. Baillot, Mithode de violon, 163; L'art du violon, 266; The Art of the Violin, 479: "par une

inspiration soudaine, s'identifie avec le g6nie du compositeur, le suit dans toutes ses intentions et les fait connaltre avec autant de facilit6 que de pr&cision.... Tout traduire, tout animer, faire

passer dans l'me de l'auditeur le sentiment que le compositeur avait dans la sienne."


with the spirit of a piece to the point of lending it charms not indicated in the music, to go as far as creating the effects that the composer often leaves to instinct."26 The entire "means of expression" section from the 1803 treatise was reprinted nearly without alteration in the 1835 Art du violon. It is evident that the added "charms" mentioned above were not limited to ornamentation, but also, or rather, involved more subtle interpretations of the notes on the page; this evidence can be seen both in the number of examples taken from the increasingly sacrosanct chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven- where it is clear both that no ornamentation was to be added, and that the genius of performance needed to appear as vividly as in music where the composer could invent more of his own notes-and in Baillot's own remarks on the importance of "nuance" in bringing a work to life.27

Although Baillot's formulations about the genius of performance may allow the performer more freedom of invention than Hegel's admittedly abstract notions, in some ways Baillot's ideas come closer to Hegel's than do those of the German writers who might seem to anticipate Hegel more exactly. I refer particularly to Baillot's notion that the performer's apprehension of the music's content comes "by a sudden inspiration," which, in its abstrac- tion from any technical or analytical issues, seems to agree with Hegel's notions of a spiritual communion with the composer somehow separate from the issues of playing notes themselves. This notion of the need for a sudden, or more or less instinctive, grasp of the expressive or spiritual content of the music is not uncommon in nineteenth-century treatises. Johann Nepomuk Hummel's 1838 Mithode complete theorique et pratique pour le pianoforte, for example, describes expression as

the ability to grasp [saisir] what the composer himself has felt, expressing it in his playing, and making it pass into the souls of the listeners. This can be neither notated nor indicated; it is more than one can expect if [the teacher] can give an idea [of the expressive content] with a few general terms with nothing very definite [to them], and which, besides, are only useful to those who already have a true feeling for music.28

26. Baillot, Mithode de violon, 163; L'art du violon, 266; The Art of the Violin, 479: "se penetrer du ginie d'un morceau jusqu'a lui preter des charmes que rien n'indique, aller mhme

jusqu'' crier des effets que l'auteur abandonne souvent ' l'instinct." The exhortation to add ex-

pression that the composer did not include is followed immediately (in the same sentence) by "to translate everything, to bring everything to life....

27. See below. 28. "la facult6 de saisir cc que le compositeur a senti lui-mime, de l'exprimer dans le jeu, et

de le faire passer dans l'ime des auditeurs. Ceci ne peut itre ni note, ni indiqui; c'est tout-au plus si l'on peut en donner une idie par quelques termes giniraux qui n'ont rien de positif, et qui d'ailleurs, ne sont utiles qu'a ceux qui ont en eux le vrai sentiment de la musique." Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Mithode complute thiorique et pratique pour le pianoforte (Paris: Farrenc, [1838]); facsimile (Geneva: Minkoff, 1981), 438. The Hummel was originally published in 1828

by Haslinger in Vienna as Ausfihhrliche theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Pianoforte-Spiel.


These ideas of an instinctive spiritual sympathy for the music are interestingly absent in, for example, the Schulz essay in Sulzer's encyclopedia, even though his ideas about the single consciousness to be communicated through a performance seem close to Hegel's. Indeed, Schulz's sense of the way the performer achieves that illusion of the single mind is essentially through study and habit. He notes that what the performer needs beyond technical preparation and the correct feeling for tempo is "a sufficient fluency in musical language, indeed, that he can read easily not only notes, phrases, and periods, but can understand the sense of it, feel the expression within it, and notice the connections of [these parts] to each other and to the whole; and that he can recognize the particular character of the work from his own experience."29 In other words, for Schulz, as for most Enlightenment writers on music, musical character was, or was supposed to be, readily legible. As Leopold Mozart noted in his treatise, the capacity to discern musical character was a function of "sound judgment by means of long experience,"30 and definitely not of"sudden inspiration." The need to comprehend and communicate the general Affekt and expressive genre of a piece-those features indicated by tempo, surface rhythm, melody type, etc., does not by any means disappear in the nineteenth century,31 but something less concrete and more individual is clearly the object of "sudden inspiration," or "reaching the spiritual heights of the composer."

Another difference between the early Romantic notion of the performer's relation to the work and that found in the classic Enlightenment commentaries on the topic impinges on the ontology of the musical work. The earlier commentaries quite routinely remark that performance is the only way music gets heard (that is, turns into music), and thus that the quality of the performance determines the perception of the quality of the work. Rousseau, for example, writes (1768): "Since music is written to be heard, one can judge it well only through performance."32 Schulz comments (ca. 1774): "Per- formance [Vortrag] is that which makes a composition audible. The good or bad effect of a composition on the listener depends to a great extent on per-

29. "dass er ausser der Fertigkeit und einem richtigen Geffihl eine hinlangliche Geliufigkeit in der musikalischen Sprache selbst habe, ndimlich, dass er nicht allein Noten, Phrasen und Perioden fertig lese, sondern den Sinn derselben verstehe, den Ausdruck, der in ihnen liegt, flihle, ihre Beziehung auf einander und auf das Ganze bemerke; und dass der das eigenthtimliche des Charakters des Tonsttiks schon aus der Erfahrung kenne" (J. A. P Schulz, "Vortrag," 707).

30. "gesunder Beurtheilungskraft durch eine lange Erfahrung." Leopold Mozart, Leopold Mozarts.. .griindliche Violinschule, 3rd ed.; facsimile ed. (Leipzig: VEB, 1978), 258; trans. and ed. Editha Knocker as A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). (The original edition of the Griindliche Violinschule was published in Augsburg by Lotter in 1756; the passage above is on p. 253.)

31. Taste is, for example, included in the "means of expression" segment in both Baillot's 1803 Mdthode and his 1835 Art du violon.

32. "Comme la Musique est fait pour etre entendue, on n'en peut bien juger que par l'ex&cution." Rousseau, "Ex&cution," in his Dictionnaire de Musique.


formance. A mediocre piece can be greatly elevated by means of a good performance; on the other hand, a bad performance can so deform an excellent piece that it is unrecognizeable, even intolerable."33 Leopold Mozart begins his chapter "Of Reading Music Correctly, and in particular, of Good Execution" with the same point, but with characteristic specificity and acerbity:

Everything depends on good execution. This saying is confirmed by daily experience. Many a would-be composer is thrilled with delight and plumes himself anew when he hears his musical Galimatias ["hodgepodge"] played by good performers who know how to produce the affect (of which he never dreamed) in the right place; and how to vary the character (which never occurred to him) as much as it is humanly possible to do so, and who therefore know how to make the whole miserable scribble bearable to the ears of the listeners by means of good performance. And to whom, on the other hand, is it not known that the best composition is often played so wretchedly that the composer himself has great difficulty in recognizing his own work?34

These comments differ from early Romantic notions about performance in a

couple of significant ways. One is the sense that the production of musical works occurs within a strongly social and directly sociable network: works are written to be judged or to have an effect on a listener, or to be played in the presence of the composer, who judges his work in part on the basis of the performers' contributions to it.35 The notion of the filly conceived and essentially self-sufficient work waiting to be rendered into sound through a communion of souls is barely evident in these earlier writings. In addition, and not surpris- ingly, the conceptual boundaries between "the work" and its performance are more porous or fluid than they became with the early Romantic solidification of the "imaginary museum" of works described by Lydia Goehr and others.36

33. "Vortrag ist das, wodurch ein Tonstdik h6rbar wird. Von dem Vortrage h~ingt gr6ssten- theils die gute oder schlechte Wtirkung ab, die ein Stiik auf den Zuh6rer macht. Ein mittelmas-

siges Stdik kann durch einen guten Vortrag sehr erhoben werden; hingegen kann ein schlechter

Vortrag auch das vortrefflichste Stidk so verunstalten, dass es unkenntlich, ja unausstehlich wird"

(J. A. P. Schulz, "Vortrag," 700). 34. "An der gute Ausflihrung ist alles gelegen. Diesen Satz bestittiget die tigliche Erfahrniss.

Mancher Halbcomponist ist vom Vergniigen entziicket, und hilt nun von neuem erst selbst recht viel auf sich, wenn er seinen musikalischen Galimatias von guten Spielern vortragen h6ret, die den Affect, an den er nicht einmal gedacht hat, am rechten Orte anzubringen, und die Charakters, die ihm niemals eingefallen sind, so viel es m6glich ist zu unterscheiden, und folglich die ganze elende Schmiereren den Ohren der Zuh6rer durch einen guten Vortrag ertriglich zu machen wissen. Und wem ist hingegen unbekannt, dass oft die beste Composition so elend ausgefiihret wird, dass der Componist selbst Noth genug hat seine eigene Arbeit zu kennen?" Leopold Mozart, Griindliche Violinschule, 3rd ed., 257; 1756 ed., 252; A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles, 215.

35. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1989), 61. 36. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. See also William Weber, The Rise

of Musical Classics in England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).


These Enlightenment writings conceive of the performer's job more as continuing than as re-creating the work of the composer, and thus fidelity and self-expression do not form the apparent paradox of the sort evident in the Hegel passage, or intimated in the comments of Galeazzi and Baillot.

Self- Transformation and Resolved Dualism: The Spiritual and Structural Features of the Early Romantic Performance Concept

Although the move towards a Hegelian formulation of the issue of performance was not uniform or simple, and although there is obviously consider- able slippage between philosophical or literary ideals and the actuality of performance, two elements characterize what I would call an early (or proto-) Romantic conception of the performer, and distinguish this conception from Enlightenment ideas on the subject. The first is that, in contrast to an En- lightenment notion of "taste," the Romantic sense of the "genius of performance" involves the performer's psycho-spiritual capacity to transform himself into an other. But not just any other: this capacity creates a miraculous merging of his own self with that of the composer to represent a new subjectivity. The anonymous essay "On Musical Expression" from The Harmonicon of July 1824 expatiates explicitly on the difficulty of this kind of self-transformation, and implicitly on the ideal blurring of boundaries between the creator and the re-creator of the musical work (perhaps inadvertently describing the productions of the performer as "his works"):

A brilliant and energetic style of performance is the triumph of art; it can be at- tained only be assiduous application.... But how many qualities must a musician possess ... in order to be master of the true manner of expression! He must have a mind sufficiently acute and extensive to embrace and compare an infinity of analogies, not apparent to ordinary minds; an imagination sufficiently ardent to seize firmly upon its subject, sufficiently fertile to represent it under every kind of image; a soul sufficiently capacious to grasp every object, and sufficiently impassioned to embrace all those points that have any analogy with it; but, above all, he must have a heart tremblingly alive to all the tender- ness, as well as all the impetuosity of the passions; it is thus only that his works can be informed with native fire, and breathe life and identity.37

Reviews of performances from the early nineteenth century also support the idea that self-transformation was seen as an essential element of performative genius. Baillot's own playing of canonical chamber music, for example, was praised in 1831 by music critic and lexicographer Frangois Fayolle in precisely the terms that Baillot had set up in his Mkthode: "He is of the first rank, as a virtuoso and as a teacher. He possesses the genius of performance because

37. "On Musical Expression," Harmonicon 2, no. 19 (1824): 128-29.


he strips away his ego [dipouille son moi] to become, by turn, Haydn, Bocche- rini, Mozart and Beethoven" (emphasis only on "moi" in original).38 One could, of course, read this as simple subordination of the self to the will of the composer. But Fayolle's use of the word "genius," and his evident fascination with Baillot's capacity to "become" four very different compositional person- alities strongly suggests that it was the process of transformation, or the sense of a kind of doubleness between the now-egoless Baillot and the miraculously absent yet reanimated spirit of the composer, that so fascinated him. That Fayolle's comment was not simply a sop to Baillot's own formulation of the

problem is suggested by Christian Urban's review of one of Baillot's German counterparts, the violinist Karl M6ser, who led a long-running and prestigious series of quartet concerts in Berlin in the 1820s:39 "Himself a genius performer [he] truly sympathized with Haydn's humor, Mozart's soul [Gemtith], and Beethoven's sublime genius, and presented them clearly to the listener."40 This is obviously a less extreme formulation, but like Fayolle, Urban clearly connects the genius of the performer with the capacity to enter or to identify completely with the spirit of the composer and bring it to life.

The second characteristic feature of early and proto-Romantic discourse about performance is evident in the fact that the demand for this kind of self- transformation on the part of the performer sets performer and composer in an oppositional relationship but also suggests a remarkable identification between the two poles of the opposition. Indeed the simultaneous establishment and collapse of this dualistic relation is a metonym for the broader discourse of performance in early Romantic aesthetic thought. As we will see below, performance as a concept tends to inhabit a field of dialectical oppositions: composer and performer, performer and listener, the I and not-I of performer and music, the materiality of technique versus the ineffability of expression, the emptiness of mere virtuosity versus the moral high ground of true music-

making, among others. But equally striking is the way performance was conceived, both explicitly and implicitly, as a resolution, or occasion for the

collapse, of those oppositions. These aspects of early Romantic performance discourse, especially its struc-

tural tendency towards collapsed or resolved dualisms, locate it firmly within

38. Frangois Fayolle, Paganini et Biriot, ou, Avis aux Jeunes Artistes qui se destinent a [sic] l'enseignement du violon (Paris: Legouest, 1831), 41: "Quant

' Baillot, il s'est place au premier

rang, comme virtuose et comme professeur. II possede le ginie de l'ex&cution, car il depouille son

moi, pour &tre, tour-i-tour, Haydn, Boccherini, Mozart et Beethoven." 39. It is not by chance that these reviews are about chamber music, since that seems to have

been the place where the interface between virtuosity and subservience to the composer was most

acutely felt. This is the topic for another essay altogether. 40. "Haidn's [sic] Humor, Mozart's [sic] Gemiith und Beethovens hehre Genius wird von

dem selbst genialen Virtuosen wahr empfunden und klar dem Zuh6rer dargelegt" (Christian Urban, "Korrespondenz," Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 3, no. 47 [22 Nov. 1826]: 382).


the broader intellectual context of the era. Dualism itself was, of course, not unique to an early Romantic sensibility, but the persistent and pervasive attempt to resolve apparently intractable oppositions was. Meyer Abrams, for example, writes of the

attempt [in early Romantic philosophies of nature, and in British writings about literature derived from them] to revitalize the material and mechanical universe which had emerged from the philosophy of Descartes and Hobbes, and which had been recently dramatized by the theories of Hartley and the French mechanists of the latter eighteenth century. It was ... an attempt to overcome the sense of man's alienation from the world by healing the cleavage between subject and object, between the vital, purposeful, value-full world of private experience and the dead, postulated world of extension, quantity, and motion.41 [emphasis added]

Within the realm of philosophy more strictly defined, the German Idealists reacting to Kant were also devoted to the attempt to reconcile the Kantian opposition of understanding and sensibility, "the form and content of experience."42 As Frederick Beiser notes about Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of Kant's earliest and most important interlocutors, "Somehow, he had to estab- lish that understanding and sensibility ... stem from a single source and unify- ing principle." Fichte's critics in turn, according to Beiser, continued to face the same demons of dualism:

On the one hand it was necessary for them to overcome the dualism between the subjective and objective, the ideal and the real, for there had to be some correspondence and interaction between them to explain the possibility of knowledge. On the other hand, however, it was also necessary for them to preserve that dualism, because this alone would explain the reality of an external world.43

Several dualisms in Romantic performance discourse connect it to its wider culture. The Romantic idea of performance as a kind of reorganization of the music, already suggested above, unites composer and performer, originator and vessel, in an apparently single creative act. A similar ideal also unites performer and listener, the proximate giver and receiver of the music, in an apparently single interpretative act, which in itself combined both minute and literal attention to the music with its apparent opposite: "imaginative reconstruction."44 In more abstract terms, the relation between the resolvable binary

41. H. Meyer Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradi- tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 64-65.

42. Frederick Beiser, "The Enlightenment and Idealism," in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29.

43. Ibid., 32. 44. The phrase is by Mark Evan Bonds, in "Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental

Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century," this Journal 50 (1997): 393-94.


structure of performance discourse and Idealist epistemology suggests that in some ways performance was conceived of as a kind of simulacrum of Romantic subjectivity. And finally, on a more practical level, musical pedagogy at the turn of the nineteenth century also embodied this pervasive discursive structure of establishing or emphasizing, then mitigating or resolving, an opposition in the way it increasingly separated technique from expression, but then taught expressive gestures as if they comprised a branch of technique. The multiple and various connections between the content and structure of discourse about performance and the larger intellectual context it inhabited suggest that far from being sidelined in the aesthetic debates of the time, the idea of performance was central to it, and in some respects may even have served to model the possibility that intractable oppositions could be resolved.

The most salient intellectual contexts are those of German Romanticism and Idealism, partly because the writers in these schools were particularly in- terested in the aesthetic and broader philosophical status of music, partly because the music to which the new concept of the performer most clearly attaches is German instrumental music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and partly because the intellectual ferment the Idealists and Romantic writers created was sufficiently powerful to reach across both na- tional and disciplinary boundaries, such that Baillot's Mkthode could on the one hand be taken to be particularly "philosophical" by its English readers,45 and on the other be treated as an aesthetic text in its own right and be quoted at length in a prototypically Romantic essay in the Berlinische musikalische Zeitung of 1805.46 My point here is not that there were no other ideas about performance current at the time, or even that there are no other ways to explain the changes in the discourse of performance, but merely that the German Romantic and Idealist framework is both of sufficient historical rele- vance to the new concept of the performer, and sufficiently pervasive, to serve as the main intellectual framework for this initial investigation of the early Romantic idea of performance.

Dualisms in Performance Discourse

As the general summary above suggests, mapping the figure of the composer onto that of the perfomer was among the most powerful ways performance discourse figured the act of performance as both transparent to the work and fully present. This idea obviously required the composer to be understood as fully and finally authoritative, but it also relied on the idea that composition itself was a kind of identification or tapping into something higher, so that the

45. See note 23 about the English reception of Baillot's Mithode. 46. "C. F.," "Uber die moralische Sphdire des Tonkiinstlers," Berlinische musikalische

Zeitung 18 (1805): 69-70.


re-creation of this function by the performer was at least notionally plausible. Gustav Schilling's description of the compositional impetus exemplifies this:

The creative musician, the true tone-poet, experiences [the vivid impression of an object "of outstanding aesthetic appeal"] in much the same way as do all those in whom any kind of divine creative fire is kindled, that of the ideal itself. In his case, this is what he seeks to express in terms of music. The more clearly he has this in the bright place of his mind, the more sun-like it shines in his soul, the stronger its impression on his sensibility, the more he will be throughly in- spired by it, and the more clearly he will formulate it.47 [emphasis added]

Johann Gottfried Herder remarks similarly (1800), though with Nature sub- stituting for the Ideal:

Everything, therefore, that sounds in Nature is music; it contains all its own el-

ements, and demands only a hand to tempt it out, an ear to hear it, and sympathy to perceive it. No artist ever invented a tone, or given it strength, that it did not already have in Nature and her instrument. [The artist], however, found the tone and coaxed it forth with sweet power. The composer has found series of tones and has pushed them upon us with gentle force.48

47. "Beim schaffenden Tonkiinstler, dem eigentlich dichtenden, ist dieser Gegenstand das

gemeinsame Gut mit Allen, in denen eine g6ttliche Kraft zu irgend einer Bildung sich regt, das Ideal selbst, das, was er in seinen Tongebilden darstellen will; je deutlicher dasselbe seinem inneren Lichtblicke vorschwebt, je sonnenheller es daliegt in seinem Inneren, desto krtftiger ist der Eindruck auf sein Empfindungsverm6gen, desto mehr wird er durch und flir dasselbe begeistert, und desto klarer wird er es auch gestalten" (Gustav Schilling, "Begeisterung," in Encycloptidie der

gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, oder Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst, 2nd ed. [Stuttgart: Kihler, 1840], 1:523; translation based on that in Peter Le Huray and James Day, Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries, abridged ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 317-18). Interestingly, Schilling contrasts the inspiration of the instrumental composer with that of the performer or the vocal composer (where composition is a kind of performance of a text), but in fact his description of the process of witnessing and absorbing something and then creating a "clear image" of it seems rather the same. "Hence the inspiration of the virtuoso and the vocal composer, in contrast to that of the true composer or the composer of pure instrumental music, has its basis simply in a strong stimulus which quickly and strongly seizes the powers of the imagination and has its origin solely in the greatness, the richness, or above all, the beauty of the object at hand." ("Daher hat denn auch die Begeisterung des Virtuosen und Vocalcomponisten, abweichend von der des eigentlichen Tondichters oder reinen

Instrumentalcomponisten, ihren Grund nur allein in einem starken Reize, der jene Vorstellungs- kraft schnell und heftig angreift, und entsteht nur durch die Gr6sse, den Reichtum oder iiberhaupt die Schonheit eines schon vorhandenen Gegenstandes" [Schilling, "Begeisterung," 1:524].)

48. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Von Musik," Part 4 of "Kalligone: Von Kunst und Kunst- richterei, Zweiter Theil, 1800," in Herder, Simmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols.

(Berlin: Weidmann, vol. 22, 1880), 22:180: "Alles, also was in der Natur t6nt, ist Musik; es hat ihre Elemente in sich; und verlangt nur ein Hand, die sic hervorlocke, ein Ohr, das sie hore, ein

Mitgefiihl, das sic vernehme. Kein Kiinstler erfand einen Ton, oder gab ihm eine Macht, die er in der Natur und in seinem Instrument nicht habe; er fand ihn aber und zwang ihn mit siisser Macht hervor. Der Compositeur fand Gange der Tine, und zwingt sie uns mit sanfter Gewalt auf."


Both of these passages invoke the familiar model of the composer as a kind of acolyte of the Absolute, mediating for his audience the "spirit-realm of the infinite,"49 as Hoffmann famously described the ineffable (1814-15). This model allows the performer to stand at the altar of the Ideal or Absolute alongside the composer. We might then say that the composer establishes the frame through which the Ideal is to be glimpsed, but the experience of that communion is authentic and original to the performer. Performance thus becomes an act of recomposition through reimagining the experience or inspiration that stimulated the work, and transparency is achieved by the performer's ability to take the listener to the apparent source of the composer's ideas, or his capacity to make the same journey as the composer, and to return to the audience, Orpheus-like, with the results of that journey. As Hoffmann writes about the performance of Beethoven:

The proper performance of Beethoven's works demands nothing less than that one understand him, and that in the knowledge of one's own state of grace one ventures boldly into the circle of magical beings that his irresistible spell summons forth.50 [emphasis added]

Hoffmann's idea that understanding Beethoven (i.e., devoting oneself to the study of his music to gain insight into the man) literally emboldens the performer to develop his own imagination is a good example of the way in which early Romantic performance discourse sets up an opposition-in this case mighty composer and devout performer-and then promptly blurs or collapses it. The collapse here turns it into a paradox: submission to the master magically produces a kind of empowerment of the performer, and his imagination is as necessary as that of the composer.

The sources for performance discourse in this period are quite explicit about the way in which performance reenacts composition. They are less explicit about the relation between performance and listening. Reichardt's comment about the need for young composers to substitute score-reading for performance if they want to get to know the music is as close as I have seen to a statement that a given listening occasion can be a kind of performance, and the indications that the performance of canonic instrumental music involves the kind of interpretation increasingly expected of listeners are mostly

49. "das Geisterreich des Unendlichen." E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Beethovens Instrumental- Musik," in E. T A. Hoffmann Dichtungen und Schriften, sowie Briefe und Tagebiicher, vol. 12, Die

Schriften liber Musik (Weimar: Lichtenstein, 1924), 18; translation from "Beethoven's Instru- mental Music," in E. T A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings. Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, tr. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 98.

50. Hoffmann, "Beethovens Instrumental-Musik," 24; "Beethoven's Instrumental Music," 98: "So geh6rt zum richtigen, bequemen Vortrag Beethovenscher Kompositions nichts Geringeres, als dass man ihn begreife, dass man tief in sein Wesen eindringe, dass man im Bewusstsein eigner Weihe es kiihn wage, in den Kreis der magischen Erscheinungen zu treten, die sein machtiger Zauber hervorruft."


implicit.51 Chamber music (and especially the string quartet) is the one venue where writers not unusually comment on the need for performers to pay the same kind of attention to the music "itself" as a serious listener might. Baillot and Galeazzi both compare the restraint and devotion to the processes of the music needed by the chamber violinist (and Baillot refers specifically to quartets) with the relative freedom and self-promotion available in the concerto,52 while Christian Urban's overview of the work of the Karl M6ser quartet suggests a connection between Maser's long years of musical study and the clarity with which the four-part structure can be perceived:

This quartet has only been able indubitably to win such excellence because Herr M6ser has such complete knowledge of quartet music, especially that of

Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, which could be gained only by many years of

study; also, then, because he is a highly skilled violinist, whose skill shines in

many quartets, particularly those of Beethoven. [The other members of the quartet are praised .... ] Listeners also perceive the high pleasure which this

quartet offers, which [perception] is to be noticed not only in the way they ut- ter it publicly after every piece, but also, and principally, in the way they show how attentively they follow the ideas of the composer. For all those who study four-part voice leading, or who want to recognize it in a more casual way, the

greatest profit is available, since they can here hear four-part writing pure and undisturbed, which is not often possible with larger ensembles because of the instrumentation, nor with piano music.53

None of these passages, however, really makes the strongest comparison possible between ideas of performance and ideas about listening at the turn of the nineteenth century, which is that both rely on the dualism of close attention, or "reverent contemplation," and "imaginative reconstruction."54

51. See note 6 above. 52. Baillot, Mithode de violon, 163-64; L'art du violon, 266-67; The Art of the Violin,

479-80; Galeazzi, Elementi teorico-pratici, 231. 53. Christian Urban, "Mtsers Quartetten," Berliner Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 2, no. 9

(12 Jan. 1825): 68-69: "Diese Auszeichnung haben diese Quartette unstreitig nur dadurch

gewinnen k6nnen, dass Herr M6ser eine vollkommene Kenntniss der Quartettmusik iiberhaupt, besonders aber der Haidnschen, Mozart- und Beethovenschen besitzt, die durch vieljdhriges Studium nur errungen werden kann; dann aber auch dadurch, dass derselbe ein h6chst gewandter Violinspieler ist, welches Gewandtheit sich in manchen Quartetten, besonders den Beetho- venschen, im grbssten Glanze zeigt.... Den hohen Genuss, den diese Quartette gewihren, empfinden die Zuh6rern auch ganz; welches nicht allein daran zu merken ist, dass sie es 6ffentlich nach jedem Musikstiick aussprechen, sondern hauptsichlich dadurch zeigen, wie aufmerksam sie den Ideen des Komponisten folgen. Fiir alle diejenigen, welche die Fiihrung der Stimmen im vier-

stimmigen Satze studieren, oder doch auch beiliufig erkennen wollen, findet sich bei diesen Quartetten die gr6sste Ausbeute, denn sie k6nnen hier den vierstimmigen Satz rein und

ungest6rt h6ren, was weder bei grossen Musiken, der Instrumentierung wegen, noch auch bei

Klavierkompositionen, oft maglich ist." 54. See Bonds, "Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music," for a full discussion of

these concepts in the context of German Idealism.


The relation of close attention to imaginative reconstruction in listening is

exemplified in E. T. A. Hoffmann's music criticism, which, as he himself wrote in 1820, was intended to train better listeners.55 Hoffinann essentially justified his close attention to the notes with the most fanciful descriptions. In his 1813 evaluation of Beethoven's Opus 70 piano trios, for example, he writes on the one hand, "Strange shapes begin a merry dance, now converging into a single point of light, now flying apart like glittering sparks, now chasing each other in infinitely varied clusters."56 On the other hand (and following this

metaphorical description), he presents a cool account of the musical processes: "The first four bars contain the main theme, and the seventh and eighth bars in the cello part contain the secondary theme."57 He connects his dancing sparks to the blow-by-blow account of the themes as follows: "The reviewer has found it necessary to preface all these remarks to his appraisal of the individual trios in order to make it absolutely plain how incomparably great Beethoven is in his piano works."58 In other words, the notes would barely be worth the trouble of the account if they did not stimulate this imaginative re-

construction, or, as Hoffinann says, "[conjure] forth an enchanted world."59 Hoffmann here has explicitly acknowledged the different experiences of

close listening and imaginative reconstruction. Other commentators more ac-

tively collapse the opposition, and in this they come closer both to performance discourse and even to performance itself. Johann Gottfried Herder's "Von Musik," for example, describes the experience of listening to polyphonic choral music:

Indescribable the charm of the voices that accompany each other; they are one and not one; they forsake, seek, pursue, contradict, quarrel, reinforce, and anni- hilate each other, and awaken, and animate and comfort and flatter and embrace each other again, until they finally die away in a single tone. There is no sweeter picture of seeking and finding, of friendly spats and reconciliations, of

55. E. T. A. Hoffinann, "Zufillige Gedanken bei dem Erscheinen dieser Blitter," in E. T A.

Hoffmann: Dichtungen und Schriften, 12:396; translation from "Casual Reflections on the

Appearance of This Journal," in E. T.

A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings, 426: "Es ist gewiss, dass

Beurteilungen der Art dazu fiihren konnen dass man gut hort." ("What is certain is that criticisms of this sort can lead people to listen well").

56. Hoffminann, "Beethoven, Trios Op. 70," in E. T A. Hoffmann: Dichtungen und Schriften, 12:240; translation from "Review of Beethoven's Piano Trios, Op. 70, Nos. 1 and 2," in E. T. A.

Hoffmann's Musical Writings, 303-4: "Seltsame Gestalten beginnen einen lustigen Tanz, indem sie bald zu einem Lichtpunkt verschweben, bald funkelnd und blitzend auseinanderfahren und sich in mannigfachen Gruppen jagen und verfolgen."

57. Hoffinann, "Beethoven Trios," 240; "Review of Beethoven's Piano Trios," 304: "Die ersten vier Takten enthalten das Hauptthema, der siebente und achte Takt im Violoncell aber ent- hilt das Nebenthema."

58. Ibid.: "Rez. musste alles dieses der Beurteilung der einzelnen Trios vorauschicken, um es recht ins Licht zu stellen, wie unnachahmlich gross Beethoven in seinen Flilgel-Kompositionen ist."

59. Ibid.:"er eine Zauberwelt entsteigen lisst."


loss and yearning, of doubtful and certain recognition, [and] finally completely sweet unification and conjoining, as [in] these two-voice and polyphonic passages and musical struggles, either wordless or with words.60

The fact that the object here is choral music seems to me not especially rele- vant to the quality of the discourse, which addresses the purely musical processes he hears rather than the qualities of the voices per se or the words. (Indeed the quoted passage ends with a comment that the words are irrele- vant to this kind of hearing.) One pertinent aspect of this passage for present purposes is its strikingly performative character; it displays a kind of verbal virtuosity reminiscent of musical improvisation or the compositional elaboration of a theme. But even more saliently in the present context, this passage represents a remarkable collapse of the opposition between close attention and imaginative reconstruction. At the same time as describing "objective" musical processes (imitation, fugue, homophony, consonance, dissonance, resolution), Herder has imaginatively reconstructed those processes as human relationships in a way that both retains a foothold in the music "itself" and makes it meaningful to himself (and presumably to his readers) by invoking a human affective context that a listener could understand and endow with his or her own particular emotional content. This kind of commentary maps re- markably well onto Baillot's statement in his "genius of performance" para- graphs that the performer should be imbued with the spirit of the piece "to the point of lending it charms not indicated in the music."

Performance discourse had of course always stressed "close attention" to the notes, whether or not that attention was paid in a reverently contemplative fashion. And it had also always emphasized the need for imaginative reconstruction. But as "nuance" came to equal and even in some instances replace ornamentation as the field ofperformative creativity, close attention and imaginative reconstruction were increasingly indistinguishable.

This process was not exclusively tied to a Romantic or Idealist sensibility or agenda, and can be found in otherwise relatively "conservative" works. Giuseppe Cambini's Nouvelle muthode thtorique et pratique pour le violon (ca. 1800), for example, gives a fascinating and historically transitional example of this kind of interpretation in the context of performance. Noting the impossi- bility of devising signs to indicate all the possible expressive uses of the bow, and the likely illegibility of the page even if such signs as could be devised were used, he describes in detail how the player should interpret two phrases of

60. Herder, "Von Musik," 182: "Unbeschreibbar die Anmuth der Stimmen, die einander begleiten; sie sind Eins und nicht Eins; sie verlassen, suchen, verfolgen, widersprechen, bekimpfen, verstirken, vernichten einander, und erwecken und beleben und tr6sten und schmei- cheln und umarmen einander wieder, bis sie zuletzt in Einem Ton ersterben. Es giebt kein stisser Bild des Suchens und Findens, des freundschaftlichen Zwistes und der Vers6hnung, des Verlierens und der Sehnsucht, der zweifelnden und ganzen Wiedererkennung, endlich der v6llig stissen

Vereinigung und Verschmelzung als diese zwei- und merhrstimmige Tongange, Tonkimpfe, wortlos oder von Worten begleitet."


music, one by Boccherini and one by Haydn (from the Andante of Symphony No. 53), providing in stages fingerings, bowings, nuanced dynamics, and texts (the one for the Haydn intended to recall Rousseau's Le devin du village) expressing the general sentiment of the music, the thought of which was supposed to "electrify" the performer's bow arm, and inspire his left hand.61 He writes:

First, grasp the naive and tender sentiment that a pretty village girl, still a maiden, feels in reproaching her lover for an infidelity that she so little de- served. Imagine her a character even more na•ve than Colette in the Devin du village; she knows no spite, she listens only to her own tender feelings, and she

says only the following words: What! you could be unfaithful to me! Who will love you more than I do? If I seem less beautiful to you, Is my heart nothing to you?

Or something similar, but better expressed. So, electrify your arm with a sweeter and more ingratiating fire than that which served you for the Boccherini, and recite with interest this third example with the fingering and

signs I have indicated ...

.62

1.2 443I 2 . 2 .33 I 1F" F)27 - T __1 1.2. 4.4.3.3. 2. 1. 4.2. 2.2.3.3. 1. 1.3.2.2. 4.4.1.

Cambini here builds on a close reading of--and, significantly, no ornamental departures from-the notes, imaginatively to reconstruct the essence of the

61. Giuseppe Cambini, Nouvelle mithode thiorique et pratique pour le violon (Paris: Nader- mann, [ca. 1800]); facsimile (Geneva: Minkoff, 1974), 19: "L'archet peut exprimer les affections de l'ame: mais outre, qu'on manque de signes pour les indiquer; ces signes, quand meme on les

inventeroit, deviendroient si nombreux que la musique deja trop chargie de traits indicatifs de- viendroit pour les yeux un amas informe presque impossible a dichiffrer." ("The bow can express the passions of the soul; but besides the fact that we don't have signs to indicate them, such signs, even if they were invented, would become so numerous that the music, already full of signs to indicate expression, would become a nearly indecipherable mass for the eye.") Peter Walls uses this

passage of Cambini to illustrate the relatively early use of portamento fingerings (History, Imagination and the Performance ofMusic [Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2003], 91).

62. Ibid., 22: "PInitrez vous, d'abord, du sentiment naif et tendre, qu'une jolie villageoise, encore vierge, eprouve, en reprochant a son amoureux l'infideliti qu'elle miritoit si peu. Supposez lui un caractare encore plus naff que celui de Colette, dans le Devin du Village; elle ne connoit pas le depit elle n'icoute que sa tendresse elle ne dit que les paroles suivantes. [']Quoi! tu peux m'etre infidele! / Qui t'aimera plus que moi! / Si je te parois moins belle, / Mon coeur n'est il rien pour toi! [']

"Ou quelque chose de semblable, mais mieux ixprimi. Alors l&ectrisez v6tre bras d'un feu

plus doux, plus bienfaisant que celui dont vous vous ites servi pour la phrase de Boccherini, et recitez avec interht ce troisiime ixample. Avec le doigt6 et les signes que j'ai indique."


music as he understands it.63 The effects of the added "accent" are to link the notes with a gentler phrasing than the naked notation would suggest, to use some dynamic variation, and to finger the excerpt with two slides (from the C# at the end of measure 2 to the E at the beginning of measure 3, and from the B at the end of measure 4 to the D at the beginning of measure 5) and two portamenti (the opening two notes, and the A to the E in measure 2). In other words, even with a somewhat old-fashioned reliance on a rhetorical model of musical meaning and a distinctly old-fashioned text (which is clearly meant as a translation of the musical meaning and not as underlay),64 Cambini is here modeling the application of accent or nuance to the music, paying close attention to the written page, but simultaneously suggesting an imaginative reconstruction of the composer's expressive intent.

A couple of decades after Cambini's treatise, August Leopold Crelle's

Einiges iiber musicalischen Ausdruck und Vortrag fiir Fortepiano-Spieler (1823) laid similar stress on the importance of these unnotable interpretative moves. But unlike Cambini, Crelle sets up a highly moralistic framework about obedience to the composer before describing and recommending the elements of what we might today call interpretation: "It is in fact wickedly pre- sumptuous for a player to alter a work of art according to his mood, since in doing that he suggests that he understands the work better than the composer who invented it."65 His overall principle of musical expression is: "The means of expression in music are time and dynamics. If on the one hand rhythm is neglected by omitting its expression, or on the other, the variety of note- strengths is ignored, what in the end remains of music but a meaningless racket!"66 His sense of what should motivate the application of expression in a performance is rather different from Baillot's or Cambini's, having less to do with the spiritual life of the composer himself and more to do with the formal- istic properties of the music as written.67 Just as earlier treatises provided tables

63. The texts do not work as underlay (though the one for the Haydn is pretty close); in that sense they are closer to Apel's elucidation of the Idee in Mozart's K. 543 than Momigny's more

declamatory verbalization of K. 421. See Lisa Fishman, " 'To Tear the Fetter of Every Other Art':

Early Romantic Criticism and the Fantasy of Empancipation," 19th-Century Music 25 (2001): 75. 64. Cambini clearly finds his exemplar phrases more affectively legible than most Romantic

critics found the music they described. But he also leaves conceptual space for something more than or different from his particular reading; the "or something similar" suggests that there is room for some range of interpretations.

65. August Leopold Crelle, Einiges iiber musicalischesAusdruck und Vortrag: Fiir Fortepiano- Spieler, zum Theil auchfiir andere ausiibende Musiker (Berlin: Maurer, 1823), 21: "Es ist in der That selbst eine arge Anmassung, wenn der Spieler ein Kunstwerk nach seiner Laune verindert, denn er giebt dadurch zu erkennen, dass er besser den Sinn desselben zu verstehen glaubt, als der

Componist, der es erfand." 66. Ibid., 41: "Die Mittel des Ausdrucks in der Musik sind Zeit und StSrke. Wird einer Seite

der Rhythmus durch Unterlassung seines Ausdriiks [sic], auf der andern die Mannigfaltigkeit der St?rke der T6ne vernachlissiget, was bleibt am Ende von der Musik tibrig, als ein Bedeutungslose Getbne!"

67. Indeed, he conspicuously avoids locating meaning in the intentions of the composer himself, but rather finds it strictly in the sense of the work as communicated on the page.


of divisions to assist the performer in the construction of his own passages and embellishments, Crelle tries to provide both principles for and examples of the application of rhythmic and dynamic nuance in order for "music" to eventu- ate. One of his main precepts is that one should not hurry "important and significant" moments,68 and he describes importance on many levels of the music, including the most minute:

If, for example, a higher note sits next to a lower one, the former is naturally owed greater strength, and therefore a more moderate tempo, than the latter. If the high note is also the first note of a phrase, a bar or a motive, then its weight is all the greater. If, on the other hand, the first note is lower, then the two notes are more equal in weight.69

This level of analytical detail is worlds away from Baillot's or Cambini's ef- fusions about performative genius or electrified arms, but it rests on a similar principle of making close attention to the notes result in a living re-creation of the work; the listener's attention would be drawn to the meaning of the work itself, since the point of artfully manipulated time and dynamics was precisely to articulate the "sense of the piece in its particular character;"70 at the same time, the expressive nuances would draw attention to the inner life of the performance. Indeed, Baillot comments in L'art du violon that on occasion the power of nuance is so great that "sometimes a single sound of artfiully determined loudness or softness is sufficient to produce as much of an effect as the most beautiful harmonized passage."71 Crelle's "imaginative reconstruction" of the music is not fanciful, but his reliance on collapsing the dualism of contemplation and imagination is no less profound, and the sense in which his idea that transparency is achieved by replicating (or anticipating) what a "serious" listener would in any case be doing is just as strong.

Crelle's sense that the meaning of music can be read directly off the page is in some ways continuous with Enlightenment notions of comprehensibility, but his sense of what constitutes legibility is distinctly formalist, and thus relatively modern for its time. At the same time as he attempts to categorize all the principles of time and dynamics, however, he acknowledges the difficulty of categorizing all their possible applications. At the end of the treatise he notes that advanced players will of course rely on instinct in manipulating these

68. Crelle, Einijes iiber musicalisches Ausdruck und Vortrag, 46: "Eine allgemeine Regel ... ist ... dass das Bedeutende und Wichtige nicht eilt."

69. Ibid., 65: "Steht z.B. ein h6her Ton neben einem niedrigen, so gebiihrt jenem von Natur eine gr6ssere Stirke, mithin eine missigere Bewegung, als diesem. Ist der hohe Ton zugleich eine erste Note im Abschnitt; im Tacte oder in der Figur, so ist sein Gewicht um so mehr st'rker. Ist dagegen die erste Note ein tiefer Ton, so gleicht sich das Gewicht der beiden T6ne mehr aus."

70. Ibid., 101: The purpose of a good performance is to express "den Sinn des Tonsticks in dem ihm eigenthuimlichen Character" ("the meaning of the work in its particular character").

71. Baillot, L'art du violon, 144; The Art of the Violin, 254: "Leur puissance est si grande qu'elle suppluent la musique meme et qu'il suffit quelqufois d'un seul son, d'un degr6 de force ou de douceur d&termine avec art, pour produire autant d'effet que le plus beau passage d'harmonie."


aspects of the music, but that his efforts may be of some use to less advanced players.

One should not object that all the rules of expression and interpretation, if they really exist, are hardly possible to observe, as they are so many and the excep- tions and alterations could be even more numerous. Since the rules do not come from outside, and are not arbitrary, but lie in the inner nature of the object [the music], they are really just that which the interpreter can observe by himself, if he feels the meaning of the work fully and correctly. It is thus not at all difficult to satsify the rules; rather the advanced player will necessarily come upon them himself, without verbalizing them. They could, however, be useful to the beginner, since they give him a dependable pointer.72

One of the interesting things about this comment is the way in which Crelle assumes that the capacity instinctively, perhaps, to "identify with the genius of the composer," as Baillot said, can be trained by methods (and a rhetoric) that seem in their ponderousness to squash all spontaneous musical response out of the performer. Nevertheless, Crelle notes specifically that one of his main aims is to train feeling ("Geffihl"): "Thus teachers and instruction books may not do well to stick only to the mechanical aspects of the art and to leave further study to the feelings of the student. Experience has shown that feeling is too seldom sufficiently present for self-help. If it is lacking, then the most essential element of instruction remains incomplete."7" The general idea that study hones (or, in some versions, creates) instinct is, of course, utterly ba- nal, and is in any case only rhetorically at odds with calls for "sudden inspira- tions" about the content of the music. A study-sharpened instinct is essentially what Enlightenment writers referred to when they said that taste could be ac- quired by "long experience" and "sound judgment" (see above, p. 368), and it is certainly the basis for most classical music instruction today. But the par- ticularity of the early Romantic version of this truism is that the instinct being honed was conceived as not simply musical but spiritual, psychological, and even moral. (Even in Crelle's dry account of the minute details of musical in-

72. Crelle, Einiges iiber musicalisches Ausdruck und Vortrag, 103-4: "Man wende iibrigens nicht ein, dass die Regeln des Ausdrucks und Vortrages, wenn sie wirklich existiren, alle zugleich kaum zu beobachten m6glich seyn wiirden, da ihrer so viele sind und der Ausnahmen und Modificationen noch mehrere seyn k6nnen. Da die Regeln nicht von aussen kommen und nicht willkiirlich sind, sondern in der innern Natur des Gegenstandes liegen, so sind sie eigentlich nichts anders, als das was der Vortragende von selbst beobachtet, wenn er ganz und richtig den Sinn seines Gegenstandes empfindet. Es ist also auch keinesweges schwer, den Regeln zu geniigen, vielmehr kommt der Geiibte nothwendig von selbst darauf, auch selbst ohne sich dieselbe in Worten deutlich zu machen. Dem Ungeiibten aber kinnen sie niitzlich seyn, da sie ihm einen

Fingerzeig dessen geben, worauf es ankommt." 73. Ibid., 6-7: "Lehrer und Lehrbuicher thun also vielleicht nicht wohl, wenn sie mit ihrem

Unterricht nur mehr bei dem mechanischen Theile der Kunst stehen bleiben und die weitere Lehre dem Geffihle des Lernenden tiberlassen. Diese Gefiihl ist, wie die Erfahrung zeigt, zu sel- ten in einem zur Selbsthiilfe zureichendem Maasse da. Wo es fehlt bleibt dann der Unterricht in seinem wesentlichsten Theile unvollendet."


terpretation and the gradual transformation of analysis into instinct, the moral framework of his prescriptions-namely that the performer should eschew personal feeling and not wickedly presume to change what is in the score- suggests that he considered the performer's soul to be in some way at stake in the enterprise of interpretation.)

The notion that the performer's soul was deeply involved in the act of performance was not simply a stick with which to enforce the notion of the composer's supremacy. Rather, performance as a matter of spiritual self- transformation is an idea profoundly connected to Romantic notions of subjectivity. Indeed, I would suggest that interpretative performance at this time was in many quarters considered to be a public display of precisely that most humanly and philosophically central phenomenon. As with the relation between performance and listening, however, the connection of the idea of performance to the construction of subjectivity is analogical and implicit rather than direct. I have found no source--either musical or philosophical-that makes this link explicitly. It is, however, quite unambiguously noted in the literature that subjectivity was considered to be both the true "content" and the object of music. Hegel, for example, remarks about music's content: "Music ... must limit itself to making apprehensible to one's inner being the inwardness of the heart ... so that this subjective inwardness even becomes its proper material."74 And earlier, Wackenroder had addressed the issue from the point of view of the listener: "In the mirror of tones the human heart learns to know itself; it is through them that we learn feeling; they give living consciousness to [the] many dreaming spirits in hidden corners of the soul, and enrich our inner lives with quite new magical spirits of feeling."75 He suggests quite clearly that the "human heart" involved here is that of each individual listener, even though the subjectivity called up by the music may be one new to that listener, created in part by the music. Hegel's formulation, on the other hand, is interesting because he does not specify whose subjectivity, or which living subject is at issue; it is not clear whether it is the composer or some combination of composer and performer, or, indeed, whether it is an identifiable subject at all, or rather some more abstract idea of subjectivity. Neither writer addresses the particular question of how the performer negotiates the question of his own

subjectivity in relation to that of the composer, but the passages I have already

74. Hegel, "Die kiinstlerische Exekution," 3:149: [Die Musik muss] "sich darauf beschrdinken, die Innerlichkeit dem Inneren fassbar zu machen ... so dass ihr diese subjektive Innigkeit selbst zu ihrem eigentlichen Gegenstande wird."

75. Wackenroder, "Das eigenttimliche innere Wesen der Tonkunst und die Seelenlehre der

heutigen Instrumentalmusik," in Phantasien iiber die Kunst/zweiter Abschnitt, in Werke und

Briefe von Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1967), 223-24: "In dem

Spiegel der Tone lernt das menschliche Herz sich selber kennen; sie sind es, wodurch wir das Gefiihl fIihlen lernen; sie geben vielen in verborgenen Winkeln des Gemiits traumenden Geistern, lebendes Bewusstsein. Und bereichern mit ganz neuen zauberischen Geistern des Gefiihis unser Inneres."


cited about performance as self-transformation suggest quite strongly that the job of the performer was understood to be about developing and displaying a unitary consciousness that merged his own subjectivity with the composer's. The idea of this formation of a single musico-spiritual consciousness from two separate and in some respects opposed ones mirrors to a remarkable extent the broader rhetoric about subjectivity especially, though not exclusively, among the German Idealists.

The Idealist interest in consciousness was spurred by Kant's epistemologi- cal undertakings (the three Critiques were published between 1761 and 1790). Historian of psychology David Leary writes that even during Kant's lifetime "Karl Leonhard Reinhold argued persuasively that the Kantian concern about the nature of the mind-or, as Reinhold preferred to call it, "consciousness"-should be the fundamental issue for philosophy," and that already before Kant's death in 1804, "Reinhold's pupils and colleagues, including Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel--were already establishing the phe- nomenology of consciousness as the basic topic in German philosophy."76 Consciousness had long been understood as a complex combination of the unmediated apprehension of sensations, which present themselves only in fleeting and literally incomprehensible form, and the more intellectual attempt to comprehend those sensations, which of course radically and irrevocably changes them. David Hume, for example, wrote in his 1748 Treatise of Human Nature: "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."77 And Kant, though dis- agreeing with Hume about the value of the attempt to reconcile intuition with understanding, wrote: "I ... have no cognition of myself as I am, but only as I

appear to myself."78 And further: "I cognize myself not by being conscious of myself as thinking, but only if I am conscious to myself of the intuition of myself as determined in regard to the function of thought."79

As many commentators have noted, epistemology and aesthetics were especially closely connected in early Romantic philosophy, in part through questions of judgment and taste, which were considered crucial aspects of the more general relation of the knower to the known. The philosopher who

76. David Leary, "Kant and Modern Psychology," in The Problematic Science, Psychology in

Nineteenth-Century Thought, ed. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash (New York: Praeger, 1982), 31.

77. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Part 4, sect. 6, "On Personal Identity," in The Philosophical Works ofDavid Hume (Edinburgh: Black and Tait, 1826), 1:321.

78. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Immanuel Kants Werke, 11 vols. (Berlin: Cassirer, 1922-29) 3:130. Translation from Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul

Geyer and Alan W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 260: "Ich habe also demnach keine Erkenntniss von mir, wie ich bin, sondern bloss wie ich mir selbst erscheine."

79. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 3:278; Critique ofPure Reason, 445: "Also erkenne ich mich nicht selbst dadurch, dass ich mich meiner als denkend bewusst bin, sondern wenn ich mir die Anschauung meiner selbst als in Ansehung der Funktion des Denkens bestimmt bewusst bin."


demonstrates this most clearly and most relevantly for our present purposes is Novalis, particularly in his Fichte-Studien (1795-96), unpublished responses to Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, a series of lectures in themselves a response to Kant. In the context of ruminations about the relation between subject and object: ("What connects thoughts? /It is the same as with everything-grounded either in the subject, or in the object/.")80 Novalis moves on to the idea of a book as an object of interest, and thence to the function of the artwork in general in stimulating, and helping to constitute the subject:

The artwork ... acquires a free, independent, ideal character-an imposing spirit-because it is the visible product of an I . . . The object may only be the kernel, the type, the fixed point--the formative power first creatively develops the beautiful whole in and through it. Put differently, the object should deter- mine us, asproduct of the I, and not as mere object.8s [emphasis only on "visible" in original; other emphasis added]

A second Novalis excerpt, from a fragmentary comment in a collection of aesthetic writings, represents a complementary view:

The world must be romanticized. In this way one rediscovers the original meaning. Romanticizing is nothing but a qualitative raising to a higher power. The lower self becomes identified with a better self. Just as we ourselves are such a

qualitative series ofpotentializations. This operation is still quite unknown. In

lending a higher sense to something commonplace, a mysterious appearance to

something unusual, an unknown value to something known, an infinite appearance to something finite, I romanticize it-.82 [emphasis added]

This passage, whose immediate topic is the making of poetry, deals more with the relation of the poet to the world than with the relation of the reader to the

80. Novalis, Fichte-Studien, in Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2: Der philosophische Werk, I, ed. Richard Samuel with Hans-Joachim Mdihl and Gerhard Schulz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965), #630, 282. Translation from Novalis, Fichte Studies, trans. and ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 181: "Welcher Zusammenhang ist zwischen Gedanken? /Er ist wie alles-entw[eder] im Subject, oder im Object begrfindet/."

81. Novalis, Fichte-Studien, #633, 282; Fichte Studies, 181: "Dadurch erhilt das Kunstwerck einen freyen, selbststaindigen, idealischen IKarakter--einen imposanten Geist--denn es ist sicht- bares Produkt eines Ich. ... Das Obj[ect] darf nur der Keim, der Typus seyn, der Vestpunct--die bildende Kraft entwickelt an, in und durch ihn erst sch6pferisch das sch6ne Gantze. Anders ausge- drtickt--das Object soll uns, als Produkt des Ich, bestimmen, nicht, als blosses Obj[ect]."

82. Novalis, "Logologische Fragmente," in Novalis, Schriften, 2:545. Quoted and translated in Wm. Arctander O'Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 139: "Die Welt muss romantisirt werden. So findet man den urspr[iinglichen] Sinn wieder. Romantisiren ist nichts, als eine qualit[ative] Potenzirung. Das niedre Selbst wird mit einem bessern Selbst in dieser Operation identificirt. So wie wir selbst eine solche qualit[ative] Potenzenreihe sind. Diese Operation is noch ganz unbekannt. Indem ich dem Gemeinen einen hohen Sinn, dem Gew6hnlichkeiten ein geheimnissvolles Ansehn, dem Bekannten die Wuirde des

Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen unendlichen Schein gebe so romantisire ich es-."


text. It is the shared elements of these passages that interest me, however. The first of these is the applicability of both passages to any artistic activity or medium. Even though they both have the proximate context of literature, both also broaden out from "the book" or poetry to a broader frame of refer- ence, thus inviting their application to other arts. The second is the sense in both passages that aesthetic experience is crucially a process of spiritual interaction between the creative self and a higher domain, and in particular a higher domain that may represent or be the product of another self. Indeed in the first passage in particular Novalis seems to be suggesting that artistic experience -because it relates one ego to another--can actually resolve the dualism of consciousness as the "object" is integrated into the subject's sense of itself.

Novalis's own description of consciousness in the Fichte Studies reinforces the relationship of artistic experience to subjectivity:

Harmony is the condition of [the ego's] activity--of [its] oscillating, between opposites. Being one with yourself is thus the fundamental condition of the highest end-to Be, or to be free. All being, being in general, is nothing but being free--oscillating between extremes that necessarily are to be united and necessarily are to be separated.83 [emphasis in original]

Quite apart from the musical metaphor of harmony, which is highly suggestive in this context, the interdependent opposites here could easily be understood as the artistic product of a creator's spirit versus the reader's self from the first passage I quoted, or as the lower versus the better selves of the romanticizing process described in the second passage. In the first case, observer and artwork are both necessarily united and necessarily separate, and in the second, the lower self identifies with a better self: a process that inevitably involves both a kind of self-loss and a kind of self-discovery as one reflects on the differences between the lower and the higher.

Victor Cousin, a French student of Kant and author of a famous commentary on Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, which included a section on "personal identity," also promulgated the idea that a sense of self is not a static entity but the result of constant processing: "The personal existence, the self that we are, does not fall under the eyes of consciousness and memory; and nothing does, but the operations by which this self is manifested. These operations are the proper objects of consciousness and memory; personal identity is a conviction of the reason" (emphasis added).84 That is, empirical experience

83. Novalis, Fichte-Studien, #555, 266. Fichte Studies, 164: "Harmonie ist die Bedingung ihrer Thitigkeit-des Schwebens, zwischen Entgegengesetzten. Sey einig mit dir selbst ist also

Bedingungsgrundsatz des obersten Zwecks-zu Seyn oder Frey zu seyn. Alles Seyn, Seyn iiberhaupt ist nichts als Freyseyn-Schweben zwischen Extremen, die nothwendig zu vereinigen und

nothwendig zu trennen sind." 84. Victor Cousin, Cours de l'histoire de la philosophie moderne, series 2, vol. 3, 2nd ed. (Paris:

Didier, Ladgrange, 1847), 140: "L'existence personelle, l'htre que nous sommes, ne tombe pas


with consciousness and memory can lead one to reason, by virtue of the continuous operation of those faculties, that a personal identity, or soul, exists, but we cannot be directly aware of it, either by bringing it to consciousness or by remembering it. Consciousness and memory are one pole of the oscillation process that forms a sense of self; reason is the other.

A blurry mutual constitutiveness connects the two terms of all these oscilla- tions; one cannot be entirely clear where subject and object, or intuition and reflection, begin and end, and in any case one mental state cannot exist without the other if a person is to have full human consciousness. This mutuality between subject and object is also suggested in a wonderful passage of Schleiermacher's Uber die Religion of 1799-1800:

As the beloved and always sought after image forms itself, my soul flies to meet it, and I embrace it not as a shadow, but as the holy being itself. I lie in the bo- som of the infinite world; I am in this moment its soul, for I feel all its powers and its infinite life as its own. It is in this moment my body, for I penetrate its muscles and limbs as my own and its innermost nerves move as much in accord with my meaning and intention as do my own.85 [emphasis added]

In his book Impossible Individuality, Gerald Izenberg points out that this is not a description of simple possession by the spirit, but rather a much more reciprocal process: the soul starts out toward the beloved object rather than waiting for it to move, the self penetrates the muscles and limbs of the divine, and the body moves it as if it were its own. For Schleiermacher (according to Izenberg), this "systolic and diastolic" movement of simultaneous absorption and penetration was characteristic not only of religious experience, but also of "the human condition" more generally, as the individual seeks on the one hand to proclaim his individuality and expand it by absorbing elements of the universal, and on the other to abandon his separateness by dissolving into the infinite. Moreover, Schleiermacher saw the mundane instantiation of reciprocal self-loss and self-realization in any activity undertaken purely and disinter- estedly for its own sake.86 Of which, of course, musical performance could be

sous les yeux de la conscience et de la memoire; il n'y tombe que les operations par lesquelles cet

&tre se manifeste. Ces operations sont les objets propres de la conscience et de la memoire; I'iden- tit6 personnelle est une conviction de la raison."

85. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ober die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verfich- tern (Leipzig: Meiner, 1920), 48. Translation from Gerald Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Ro- manticism, Revolution and the Origins of Modern Selfhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 20: "So wie sie sich formt, die geliebte und immer gesuchte Gestalt, flieht ihr meine Seele entgegen, ich umfange sie nicht wie einen Schatten, sondern wie das heilige Wesen selbst. Ich liege am Busen der unendlichen Welt: ich bin in diesem Augenblick ihre Seele, denn ich

ftihle alle ihre Krifte und ihr unendliches Leben, wie mein eigenes, sie ist in diesem Augenblicke mein Leib, denn ich durchdringe ihre Muskeln und ihre Glieder wie meine eigenen, und ihre Innersten Nerven bewegen sich nach meinem Sinn und meiner Ahndung wie die meinigen."

86. Izenberg, Impossible Individuality, 20.


an example. The parallel is strikingly illustrated by a passage from the "Genius of performance" section of Baillot's 1803 Mdthode de violon:

[The performer's] sensitivity prepares him for all that he is going to play; scarcely has he caught a glimpse of his theme when his soul rises to the level of the subject.87 [emphasis added]

If music, then, is considered the art most directly linked to subjectivity, if art- works are considered to be objects to their receivers' subjects, and if subjectivity itself is conceived as a process of oscillation between the intuition of something within and the objectifying reflection on it, or between inner and outer, then the process of musical interpretation is almost inescapably a simulacrum of this process. What is more, in mediating between the "extremes" of dead object (the score) and pulsing but contentless performative life, performance conceived in this way participates both discursively and experientially in a central intellectual debate.

The idea that the early Romantic performance concept reflects or even em- bodies the intellectual concerns of its milieu, however, constructs both performance itself and performance discourse essentially as recipients or traces of the broader intellectual culture. One can also argue that performance discourse also carried out a more active role in promulgating the structures of thought I have been describing to this point.

One of the most striking things about later eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century performance treatises in comparison to earlier ones is the systematiza- tion and advancement of purely technical instruction. As many before me have noted, this period saw an unprecedented explosion of pedagogical material for several instruments, piano and violin chief among them.88 Etudes and exercises were produced in increasing numbers; the performing body was in many ways turned into a machine, with rectilinear grids upon which posture was

mapped, and fiendish exercises devised to put the fingers in every conceivable configuration. Of course the practice of technique as a discipline at least temporarily separate from "real" music was not new. Folke Augustini, for example, points out that until the early nineteenth century it was standard pedagogical practice for teachers to compose and compile their own exercises and Handstiicken,89 as Tartini did in recommending bits of Corelli's sonatas

87. Baillot, Mithode de violon, 163; L'art du violon, 266; The Art of the Violin, 479: "Sa sensi- bilit6 le prepare a tout ce qu'il va jouer: a peine a-t-il entrevu le thime de ses accords, que son anme se monte au niveau du sujet."

88. Dimitris Themelis, Etude ou caprice: Entstehungsgeschichte der Violinetuide (Munich: Fink, 1967), for example, is a careful examination of the relation between nineteenth-century violin etudes and their precursors.

89. Folke Augustini, Die Klavieretiide im 19. Jahrhundert: Studien zu ihrer Entwicklung und

Bedeutung (Duisburg: Gilles & Francke, 1986), 6.


to his student Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen.90 But more interesting than the pre-nineteenth-century existence of opportunities for purely technical practice--whether these were written especially for the purpose, as were, for example, Leopold Mozart's thirty-four bowing variations on a scale9' or ex- cerpted from well-known works, as was Tartini's advice--is the rhetoric about the separation of technique from expression, which was strikingly and newly emphatic at the turn of the century.

Pierre Baillot, for example, stresses this separation in both the Mdthode de violon and L'art du violon. In the latter he has a section entitled: The Division Which Is to Be Preserved between Technique and Expression, which includes the following: "From its inception the Conservatoire method was divided into two parts: the first treated technique, the second treated style and expression. This division must be preserved for the reason we have given: we must concern ourselves with only one thing at a time."92 And in the third volume of his

Vollstindige theoretisch-practische Pianoforte-Schule, entitled Von dem Vortrage ("On Performance"), Carl Czerny points out that this volume, which gives extensive tips about musical interpretation and practical hints about performance, comes only after the student has completed the previous two volumes, which have taught clarity, exactitude, steady rhythm, quick and accurate reading, good tone, correct fingering, great agility in both hands, and accuracy in reproducing written expression marks.93 Czerny also suggested a system for

90. Giuseppe Tartini, Lettera del defonto Signor Giuseppe Tartini alla Signora Maddalena Lombardini, inserviente ad una importante lezione per i suonatori di Violino (Venice, 1770; Udine: Pizzicato, 1992), 3: "Per acquistar poi questa leggerezza di polso, da cui viene la velociti del-

l'arco, sari cosa ottima, che suoni ogni giorno qualche fuga del Corelli tutta di semicrome, e

queste fughe sono tre nell'Opera quinta a Violino solo, anzi la prima e nella prima sonata per Dlasolre" ("To acquire that lightness of the wrist which gives rise to bow speed, it would be best to play every day some allegros by Corelli all in sixteenth notes; there are three of these fugues in the Opus 5 for solo violin, and the first is in the first sonata in D" [My translation]).

91. Leopold Mozart, A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, 120-23. 92. Baillot, L'art du violon, 10. The Art of the Violin, 16: "La mbthode du Conservatoire a

t~6 divisbe, d&s l'origine, en deux parties; l'une, relative au micanisme, l'autre appliquie au style et

3 l'expression: cette division doit &tre maintenue par la raison que nous avons donn e: qu'il ne faut s'occuper que d'une seule chose a la fois."

93. Carl Czerny, Von dem Vortrage (1839), dritter Teil aus Vollstandige theoretisch-practische Pianoforte-Schule (Vienna: Diabelli, 1839); facsimile ed., with preface by Ulrich Mahlert (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hdrtel, 1991), 1: "In den zwei ersten Theilen dieses Lehrbuches sind dem Schiiler alle Mittel angegeben worden, die mechanische Geschicklichkeit seiner Finger auszubilden, und folgende, dem Pianisten unerlissliche Eigenschaften zu erwerben: a) Reinheit und Genauigkeit des Spiels. b) Festes Takthalten, und genaue Eintheilung. c) Richtiges und schnelles Notenlesen. d) Fester Anschlag der Tasten und sch6ner voller Ton. e) Richtiger Fingersatz. f) Grosse Geliufigkeit und Leichtigkeit in beiden Hinden, selbst bei bedeutenden Schwierigkeiten. g) Genaue Beobachtung der gew6hnlichen Vortragszeichen, insofern sie sich auf den mechanisch zu erlernenden Unterschied zwischen Forte und Piano, so wie zwischen Legato und Staccato beziehen."


studying new pieces that kept technique and expression comparably separate; his idea was first to achieve correctness, then get the piece up to tempo, and only thereafter think about interpretation.

Despite their thoroughness in teaching technique, however, Baillot and Czerny both stress that technique, once mastered, should be "forgotten" in the heat of performance. Baillot writes:

One aspect of the means of expression ... depends on skill; it concerns what must be done to perform well, but genius of performance leads to doing it better; when an artist is motivated by feeling, it is genius of performance that takes off in bold flight into the vast empire of expression in order to make new dis- coveries there. Here, no more thought, no more calculation; the artist gifted with superior talent has made such a habit of subordinating his playing to the rules of the art that he follows them without study or trouble; he has made such a habit of it that far from putting a chill on his imagination, these rules

only serve to make his ideas bloom and instill themselves more deeply into what he performs.94

In his predictably more prosaic way, Czerny says essentially the same thing:

All these particularities [exactitude, etc.] are only the means to the true goal of the art, which is without doubt to put spirit and soul into performance, and thus to affect the soul and the understanding of the listener.... Everything about performance can be put into two divisions: exact attention to all the

performance indications that the composer himself already put in the piece, and the expression that the player can or should add to the piece from his own

feelings.95

The physical labor of learning to play an instrument, then, like the intellectual and spiritual work of interpretation, also existed in a field of tension between the discipline of obedience and the ecstasy of self-expression; and the treatises' rhetoric about the separation of the two kinds of work stressed a kind of opposition between them, just as Novalis's discussion of "romanticizing" the world emphasized the opposition between the lower and better selves, and just as

94. Baillot, Mithode de violon, 163; L'art du violon, 266, The Art of the Violin, 479: "Une

partie des moyens d'expression ... tient 5 l'art et indique ce qu'il faut pour bien faire, mais le

genie d'execution conduit ' faire mieux: c'est lui qui, pousse par le sentiment, s'elance d'un vol hardi dans le vaste empire de l'expression pour y faire de nouvelles decouvertes: ici, plus de reflex- ion, plus de calcul, l'artiste doue d'un talent superieur est tellement habitue ' subordonner son jeu aux regles de Part, qu'il les suit sans etude comme sans peine, et que loin de refroidir son imagination elles ne servent qu'a faire eclore ses id6es et ' le penetrer davantage de ce qu'il execute."

95. Czerny, Von dem Vortrage, 1: "Aber alle diese Eigenschaften sind nur die Mittel zum

eigentlichen Ziele der Kunst, welches unbedingt darin besteht, Geist und Seele in den Vortrag zu

legen, und hiedurch auf das Gemiuth, und den Verstand des H6rers zu wirken. . . . Man kann alles, was auf den Vortrag Bezug hat, in zwei Hauptabtheilungen absondern, nimlich: itens: In die

genaue Beobachtung alle Vortragszeichen, welche der Autor selber schon seinem Sticke bei- setzte, und 2tens: In denjenigen Ausdruck, welchen der Spieler aus eigenem Geftihl in das Tonwerk legen kann oder soll."


discussions of the workings of the ego emphasized the opposition between subject and object or intuition and reflection.

However, just as interpretative performance could temporarily collapse the distinction between self and other, forging, so to speak, a complete self out of the oscillation between them, so the new musical pedagogy also presented a resolution of the opposition between the exactitude and finiteness of tech-

nique and the ineffability of expression. This resolution came in the exercises and examples in the treatises themselves, which taught (essentially as tech- niques) expressive devices and "effects" that could be applied to the music at hand, as well as some ideas about how and where to apply them. As we have seen in relation to August Friedrich Crelle's piano treatise, such effects could often be categorized under the general headings of "time" and "strength," or dynamics, but they also included such effects as particular tone colors, and ornamentation. In his Art du violon, Baillot gives excerpts from the classical chamber music and solo violin literature with prose that suggests how the ap- propriate bow strokes contribute to the expressive effect of the music and how fingerings color the individual notes and shape the phrases. Czerny provides large numbers of similar examples, mostly written by himself, with extraordi- narily detailed instructions about dynamics, rubato, the weight of the two hands in relation to each other, and the technical means of achieving this.

Such examples, despite their sometimes obsessive attention to detail implicitly, if counterintuitively, teach a kind of improvisational mentality. To think of these "effects"-the slow bow, the special fingering, the singing sound, the lighter touch for ornamentation, the extra time for "important" notes-as "riffs," may clarify the analogy to improvisation. The isolation of these riffs in treatises, abstracted either from "real" published music, or from their original musical context, also contributes to the idea that certain kinds of bow strokes or fingering patterns, or degrees of ritardando, could be practiced outside the context of particular musical works. Thus abstracted and perfected, the effects could be applied as the spirit moved the performer (pace Crelle), and not necessarily at predetermined places in any given piece. These kinds of effects, applied more or less improvisationally, thus bridge the opposition between composer and performer, and make it possible to see how the music might seem to issue "from a single mind," or "from the soul of the composer." By the same token, this improvisationally obedient approach in a medium understood to be about subjectivity can also be understood to enact and display- perhaps even to model-the same resolution of oppositions for which the Idealist philosophers were searching in the domain of epistemology.

It should be remembered here that my argument makes not the music- critical point that applying nuance without changing the notes gives life to an otherwise obedient performance, but rather the historical one that the pedagogical structures that taught this set of attitudes and practices absorbed, re- flected, and then modeled and disseminated the discursive structures that configured performance as a simultaneous absence and presence, and, indeed,


the intellectual structures that wove musical performance and subjectivity into the same web.

The imperative to transform oneself in the act of performance in the direc- tion of a pre-ordainedly greater spirit, and further, to model the processes of subjectivity, lends an essentially moral weight to the idea of performance that was not part of Enlightenment thinking on the topic.96 Indeed, both the Harmonicon essay on expression, quoted above, and Baillot's Art du violon discuss the moral preparation or organization necessary for good performance; and in an essay by "C. F." in the Berlinische musikalische Zeitung of 1805, entitled "Ober die moralische Sphire des Tonkiinstlers," which explicitly applies both to composers and performers (and which quotes the Baillot

Mdthode at some length), the author describes the musician's responsibility to awaken in the audience the highest kinds of feelings and yearnings:

Thus he also attempts through his art to awaken and give life to the higher sen- timents in the moral sphere that require such stimulation; to raise up, in league with the noble poet, every tendency that should be part of the enchanting picture of humanity; forcefully to set the strings vibrating that have sounded too little in the sensitive human heart, in order to fill it with religious thanks, with the adoration of godliness, with heroism in life's struggle, with manliness and innocence, with holy intimations and with the love of humanity.97

Combined with the increasingly moralistic language about adhering to the composer's wishes, this kind of high-minded demand on the perfomer created a milieu in which music-making was a grave responsibility as well as a pleasure, and in which the performer was enjoined to mitigate the separation between all selves and their others by modeling an exemplary Romantic consciousness of himself and the world.

Epilogue

Much of what I have outlined above will doubtless seem familiar-even second nature or crashingly obvious-to many who have taken classical music

96. Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau, which is very much about the appearance versus the real-

ity of performance, does surely raise moral questions, but these are essentially to do with the sin-

cerity of the performer vis-a-vis the emotion he is communicating; and moral concern of any sort is explicitly or directly transmitted in none of the classic Enlightenment performance treatises, beyond the common idea that virtuosic showing-off is less admirable than plain and apparently heartfelt performance.

97. "C. F.," "Uber die moralische Sphdire des Tonkiinstlers," 70: "So sucht er auch im sitt- lichen Gebiete durch seine Kunst die h6hern Empfindungen zu wecken und zu beleben, welche dieser Aufregung bedtirfen, im Bunde mit dem edlen Dichter jeden Zug, der in das begeisternde Gemailde der Humanitdit geh6rt, hervorzuheben, mit Kraft die Saiten in Schwingung zu setzen, die noch zu wenig ins flihlende Menschenherz ert6nten, um es mit religi6sem Dank, mit

Anbetung der Gottheit, mit Heroismus im Kampf des Lebens, mit Mannessinn und mit Kindlichkeit, mit heiligen Ahnungen und mit Menschenliebe zu erfiillen."


lessons or participated in classical music performance in some way. The ideal of a performance that is clearly not, but seems to be, created on the spot is still with us, for example. Indeed, the memory of performances that achieved exactly that illusion animates Carolyn Abbate's recent book In Search of Opera. She writes of the half-dozen such performances listed at the end of the book that they "conveyed the impression that a work was being created at that moment, 'before one's eyes,' never seeming to invite comparison between what was being heard and some lurking double, some transcendent work to which they had to measure up."98 In the nonscholarly world of classical music performance almost any random search will find the same the same qualities valued. For example, a recent Yorkshire Post review of pianist Noriko Ogawa notes, "She has a rare gift of making the most meticulously prepared performances appear totally spontaneous, as if she is just discovering the music."99 The process on which this illusion depends is precisely the psychological legerdemain by which the performer simultaneously abrogates and expresses him- or herself that Baillot and others advocated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that essentially all classical music teachers still teach- honor the composer; express yourself; don't think of this as a contradiction.

In modern times, we have, I think, translated what early Romantic writers would have figured as a psychological or spiritual capacity to identify with the genius or intentions of the composer into the catchall adjective "musical." But that translation has not released us from the moral obligations attendant on the notion of identification with a genius with quasi-religious powers. In many classical music milieux, the idea of musicality is about much more than music. As Henry Kingsbury has pointed out, to be designated musical carries extra- ordinary power-both moral and professional-in modern classical music culture,100 and to be designated unmusical or insufficiently musical feels like a negative comment on one's deepest character.

Richard Taruskin and others have established the idea that "historically authentic" performances are nothing of the sort, but rather perfect manifesta- tions of modernist concerns and attitudes to music, in that they substitute the defensibility of "objective" historical research for the nebulousness and inde- fensible "subjectivity" of a more "Romantic" classical performance.101 What- ever one thinks of historically informed performance, and however fair or unfair one finds this kind of criticism, it is indubitably true that the "authentic- ity" movement reflects its historical moment. By the same token, it seems to me worth pointing out the obvious: that what is now a series of default

98. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), xv-xvi.

99. David Denton, Review of recital by Noriko Ogawa, The Yorkshire Post, 2 February 2004, from http://www.norikoogawa.com/reviews/rev.html, accessed 11 March 2005.

100. Henry Kingsbury, Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), passim.

101. Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1995), introduction.


attitudes and assumptions about classical music performance (which, moreover, are largely particular to it) also have their roots in a particular and limited milieu. In suggesting the historical intellectual underpinnings of these attitudes this essay probably raises more questions than it answers, particularly with respect to the actual practice of performance. For example, what value do these attitudes and assumptions have in a world where classical music has lost its place as a generally agreed-upon spiritual experience or as a way of expressing the philosophical truths that mere words cannot reach, or where reconcil- ing dualisms is not at the center of intellectual life? What does it mean when we attach moral weight to "musicality" but do not look for the spiritual self- transformation valued by the early romantics? What does it mean to honor "the music" when we no longer believe that it is a reliable or close to complete record of the composer's intentions, and when in any case we think of the attempt to recover those intentions as a "fallacy"? These questions obviously do not have easy answers, if, indeed, they have answers at all; and it is not the purpose of this essay to propose them. My point is that to consider the intellectual background of our own more or less unexamined assumptions about the value of the illusion of the "single mind," and to realize its origin in particular historical circumstances may free us to think in new ways about the practice of

performance-ways that reflect the particularities and complexities of our own historical moment, much as the idea of the genius of performance did at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Works Cited

Abbate, Carolyn. In Search of Opera. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Abrams, H. Meyer. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical

Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Augustini, Folke. Die Klavieretiide im 19. Jahrhundert: Studien zu ihrer Entwicklung

und Bedeutung. Duisburg: Gilles & Francke, 1986. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel. Versuch iiber die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. Berlin:

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Abstract

Performance discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (i.e., writing about interpretative performance in treatises, reviews, dictionar- ies, articles, and philosophical works) is distinct from that in both earlier and later periods. Although a full early Romantic paradigm of interpretative performance, as articulated in Hegel's Aesthetics, came about piecemeal and was instantiated in different ways in different kinds of sources, the texts examined in this essay communicate two particularly salient features. These are, first, the idea that interpretative performance involves a profound spiritual transformation on the part of the performer, requiring the merging of his own soul with that of the composer; and second, the idea that performance both establishes and collapses apparently intractable dualisms. This structural feature of performance discourse, as well as its content, links the idea of performance to contemporary discussions of consciousness in such a way that performance emerges as a simulacrum of early Romantic subjectivity. At the same time, this discursive structure also finds its way into the more mundane world of pedagogy. Performance thus emerges as more central to the intellectual milieu of Romanticism than has previously been recognized. The structures of discourse established at the turn of the nineteenth century persist in classical music culture today, but devoid of their historical underpinnings.

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