Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (review)

Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire. By Susan Bernstein. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. [ix, 239 p. ISBN 0-8047-3279-5 (cloth); 0-8047-3505-0 (pbk.). $55 (cloth); $19.95 (pbk.).]

Nineteenth-century virtuosity, especially piano virtuosity, which was a cult object so long that it almost lost its susceptibility to mockery, has lately been given a new claim on intellectual attention by musicologists such as Richard Leppert, James Deaville, Katharine Ellis, and Dana Gooley. At the same time, scholars in other fields are extending this primarily musical concept into larger contexts of nineteenth-century culture. The historian Paul Metzner, in Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), has examined the rise of a cluster of virtuosities--those of the chess master, chef, detective, and automaton builder--alongside the performing of Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt. And Susan Bernstein, a comparative literature scholar at Brown University, extends the concepts of musical performance and virtuosity into the literary realm, again of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, in the work under review here.

For some time, literary scholars have been drawing attention to the "performativity" of literary texts--the capacity, perhaps, of a literary work to be imagined as a performance. Bernstein is well aware of this branch of literary studies, but a reader from the music disciplines who looks into Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century for a suggestion about how the metaphor of "performativity" might be brought usefully into play in the study of an art in which performance is no metaphor will not find much help in Bernstein's chapter on "The Musical Alibi in Theories of Performativity." In fact, for music scholars interested in enriching their thoughts about music by looking into the work of scholars in neighboring fields of the humanities, there is often more profit to be found in seeing how those scholars deal with the arts in which they are trained than in seeing what they have to say about music.

Most of Bernstein's book actually falls somewhere between these two possibilities: she is writing about writers, but writers writing about music, and in particular about musical virtuosity: Heinrich Heine's reviews of Chopin and Liszt and even Meyerbeer, Charles Baudelaire's writings on Wagner, and Liszt's books on Chopin and on the Gypsies and their music (rather than his musical performing or composing as such). So far so good: these are all central nineteenth-century texts on music, but they have often been ignored as peripheral critical works by major creative artists. It is valuable to have Bernstein point our attention to key passages in these writings and draw out their authors' thoughts, as when she turns Heine's statement that Paris serves the virtuosos "as a kind of announcement pillar on which their fame can be read" into her own pronouncement that "fame is not simply added on to but is constitutive of the virtuoso" (pp. 78-79). Equally good is her gloss on Heine's description of his experience of a Meyerbeer opera as "the absorption of a particular I, a finite body sitting in the audience, within the programmed effect planned by another" (p. 71). In general, I found her at her best in her chapter on Heine.

I had the most trouble with her chapters on Liszt. By waiting until the end of two chapters on Liszt's prose works before raising the well-worn question of whether or to what extent they were ghostwritten by Marie d'Agoult, Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, or others, she throws into doubt the status of all that she has said about them before. And her readings of the texts themselves deserve to be doubted. Here, for instance, is Liszt on Gypsy music as national epic: "We say 'epic...