The Virtuoso Liszt (review)

This is a challenging look at Liszt and virtuosity, literally challenging in that it calls into question some of those pedigreed habits of thought that emerge from the biographical tradition. Dana Gooley replaces the synthetic, single-level readings of that tradition with a cluster of more localized studies, where the detailed aperçu has some potential to illuminate larger issues in music history. It may be that the collective effect of these local studies is to overinterpret just how far Liszt was able to manage his career and construct his identity in response to a variety of contingencies, but I am not unduly worried by this, since the angle is so fresh and original. Basically the technique is to allow particular incidents, images, or ideological readings to open windows onto the bigger picture. In the process, to switch metaphors, the spotlight swings back and forth constantly from Liszt to the cultural communities he inhabited or confronted. Mostly this works very well indeed. We learn more about music and social class in early nineteenth-century Paris from Gooley's account of the Liszt–Thalberg duel, for example, than from some of the more earnest surveys of our social historians.

Gooley's account is well grounded in relevant primary sources (especially the journals), but the documentary approach is not fetishized, and it is used in ways that constantly nuance and complement the narrative; in other words, he resists grand theory and reductive approaches to his theme, preferring to highlight its many-faceted qualities. Even such familiar stories as the invention of the piano recital are given a novel and persuasive explanatory gloss. The study of virtuosity and the cult of Napoleon (Liszt's bravura as Napoleonic rather than Faustian or Mephistophelean) is already well known through its presentation in the journal 19th-Century Music, but it neatly exemplifies one of the most productive aspects of Gooley's work: his ability to draw selectively on a source tradition that he clearly commands, so that key events, images, works, and opinions all collide in new ways and in doing so alter and refine our understanding of the larger history; in this case it extends to (possibly risky, but certainly challenging) characterizations of a collective mentalité.

In a similar way, Gooley creatively nuances the treacherous and often controversial subject of Liszt's nationalism, handling the whole topic with greater skill than I have seen elsewhere. Again the discussion centres on a single event, the widely misunderstood sabre of honour episode; again the whole bizarre story is unpicked and analysed by Gooley with remarkable finesse; and again the analysis allows larger points about nationalism, including unsavoury ones, to emerge. This theme is further developed in the fourth chapter, where Liszt's engagements with German Classicism and German nationalism are given a radical twist by means of a characteristically thick interpretation of familiar events. The final chapter then offers what Gooley calls an 'anatomy' of Lisztomania by way of the Berlin concerts of 1841–2. His word is carefully chosen, since his way in is to re-evaluate Heine's invocation of the language of medicine, and specifically Heine's account of what might be termed a pathology of public pleasure. There is of course some discussion of the 'public sphere' in this connection, and here Gooley enlists Habermas (whose larger thesis rides roughshod over inconvenient historical evidence) but makes no reference to Paul Metzner, the one notable lacuna in his bibliography.

It is striking that this book is so much more revealing than the well-known biographical studies of Liszt; indeed it corrects many of the details in those studies, as well as deconstructing some of their larger messages. It is revealing in terms of Liszt's personality, the cultural ambience that enveloped him, the nature of his audiences, and the intellectual climate of his time. It is revealing, too, about the construction of genius. Gooley's primary concern may be with performance rather than composition, but in other...