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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30.4 (2000) 676-678



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Book Review

Crescendo of the Virtuoso:
Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution


Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution. By Paul Metzner (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 385 pp. $50.00

Trivia can have great historical appeal. Museum showcases and newspaper columns often testify to it, as do historians when they search for the telling detail that will evoke an era or the minor incident that places their subject in conjunction with famous figures or historical trends. On such pleasures, Metzner builds a book, starting in reverse--with the trivia. His first five chapters center around men he calls virtuosos--a chess master, a pastry chef, a detective, two musicians, and a magician. Only Nicol<149> Paganini and Franz Liszt, the musicians, remain famous today; the other virtuosos are largely forgotten. The study's originality lies in its recognition that these disparate figures have something in common--highly developed skills and the self-seeking use of them. Metzner asserts that the qualities they shared mark an important historical change.

To make his points, he recounts bits of the virtuosos' extraordinary lives and a lot about how they acquired their proficiency and made their careers. His chapters thus become brief histories of public chess matches, of great banquets with sugar sculptures, of criminology and the detective novel, of concert performance, and of automatons and magic shows. Using a remarkable range of printed sources, Metzner provides striking information and anecdotes that will enliven many a lecture. His footnotes direct interested readers into paths of erudition rarely touched upon in more conventional histories.

Although the book's declared focus is Paris during the century between 1750 and 1850, each chapter sprawls beyond these limits. References to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to the present enrich the discussion but leave the ostensible periodization seeming rather forced. Similarly, Paris may well have held a special importance for the practices that Metzner describes; yet, the characters that he follows come from, and go to, other cities and make their fortunes in London and Vienna as well as Paris. The argument that the prominence [End Page 676] of virtuosos in Paris during this period reflects, or maybe even constitutes, a significant historical transition is implicitly comparative. It is not, however, accompanied by any systematic comparison of Paris with other cities, of virtuosos in this period with those of the Renaissance or the twentieth century, or of Western response to virtuoso talent with that in other cultures.

In other respects as well, structural and conceptual looseness weakens the book's suggestive claims. That these examples of profitable self-assertion express an important social transformation is credible enough, but their relationship to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic example, Romanticism, and industrialization remains shadowy despite frequent re-assertion. Multiple examples establish Metzner's perceptive eye but not his broader interpretations. Instead, potted accounts of Enlightenment thought, the bourgeois revolution, or secularization detract from the freshness of the information in which the book is rich. The principle of selection remains unclear (why these virtuoso performances more than others?). Within the examples chosen, accounts are suddenly truncated, wander into digressions (some of them delightful), leap across omissions, and repeat each other. For all its scholarly apparatus, this is a rather whimsical exploration.

Nor is it written with the slight of hand that might hide such gaps, or with the art that could build finger exercises into a harmonious whole. Deft lines lose their force next to awkward phrases and overindulgent puns. The strain of roping together distant nuggets shows through the clever use of Denis Diderot's story of Rameau's Nephew (1761); incidents and comments taken from that tale are cleverly cited in chapter after chapter but only sometimes with telling effect. The reasoning stretches across time and context: Jean-Jacques Rousseau was something of an outlaw figure. He and his followers were drawn to the...

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