Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
2 | pp178–195
Federation for Theatre Research 2007 · Printed in the United Kingdom doi:10.1017/S0307883307002829
C International
This essay considers the virtuoso in music, theatre and dance as a liminal figure of performativity.
It draws on cultural studies as well as the history of science to offer a critical reading which follows
the virtuoso’s oscillation between science and art. The escalating dynamic in the virtuoso’s technical
control of material (of the body, the ‘instrument’, language) leads to a polarization between artistic
‘creation’ and virtuoso performance: the virtuoso thus occupies a seismographic function within the
aesthetic debates of the nineteenth century. The article also outlines the relationship between the media
and virtuoso performance and the relevance of the anecdote for the virtuoso’s charismatic impact. This
essay will contribute to our understanding of how the contemporary media influenced the virtuoso
concept, and address the issue of whether the (partial) disappearance of the virtuoso from the theatre
stage translocates the figure of the virtuoso onto other ‘cultural stages’.
There is a story about Niccolò Paganini, the famous violin virtuoso, which runs as
follows: contemporaries of Paganini are having a conversation after one of his concerts.
Eduard Jaëll, a famous violinist, is discussing his impressions of Paganini with Benesch,
yet another great violinist of the age. ‘We can all make our wills now,’ says Benesch. ‘No,’
replies Jaëll, ‘I am already dead.’2
This anecdote bears witness to the extraordinary resonance of a concert
event. It provides a stage for the evidence of this event, it authenticates its utter
incomprehensibility through the testimony of experts in the field. These experts not
only stand and marvel; they capitulate. Not only can Paginini’s performance – this
monstre on stage – not be explained by the usual recourse made to perfect mastery of the
instrument, his performance also banishes all other violinists to a realm of non-existence.
The virtuoso is a revenant of a different notion of art and technology; he is a magician
whose actions appear to contravene the boundaries of the physically possible while at
the same time concealing from delighted audiences the nature of his transgression.
The topos of the virtuoso marks out a performance event which draws the audience’s
attention, even their awe and amazement. The impression of something overwhelming,
which makes the audience ‘witnesses to a mystery’, drawing ‘shouts of enthusiasm’,3 is
thanks to – and this detail is reported again and again – the sheer human impossibility of
the perfection displayed in the performance, in the virtuosi’s mastery of their instruments,
voices, bodies.4 The audience’s enthusiasm is also and above all linked to the charisma
that the figure of the virtuoso is the first to call forth, the charisma which is bestowed
upon the virtuoso, as a topos of performance. Topoi create an evidential space; they
constitute arguments in support of the truth of the performance. And yet the virtuoso is
the improbable event. A paradoxical situation indeed.
Why is this? The virtuoso as event – the singularity of his appearance – is tied to the
individual performance and its effect. As an insurpassable event, it can only authentificate
itself. The figure of the virtuoso as a model of theatricality and performativity, however,
only reveals itself through the history of its observation: in the reports and tales of
fascinated or critical contemporaries, and in the anecdotes that stage the eroticization
and the demonization of the virtuoso. In this respect the virtuoso is an evidential figure.5
Evidential in what sense, one might ask. The answers that have been given to this
question since the eighteenth century, since virtuosi first began to perform as soloists,
are contradictory. The performance should bear witness to – evidence – the spirit of the
text, the score or the play. Or the magnificent performance itself constitutes the evidence,
creating an impression of the supernatural, the magical, an impression that often makes
reference to the topoi of the angel, the devil or, at a later stage, the machine. We are told
that Alessandro Scarlatti, accompanying the castrato Francischello on the piano, ‘could
not believe . . . that a mortal could sing so divinely and that this must therefore be an angel
that had taken on Francischello’s shape’. This voice had ‘surpassed everything that he –
Scarlatti – had believed possible of a human being’.6 The ambivalent attitudes displayed
towards the virtuoso correspond to this evidential split – the split between the fascination
exerted by the incomprehensible and a rejection of the ‘glitter’ of superficiality. In good
Enlightenment practice, the latter had to be demystified and replaced with qualities of
true (spiritual) expression.
The contrast between awe-inspiring, breathtaking technical achievement and an
expressive and moving performance has formed part of the virtuoso’s ambivalent
catalogue of characteristics since the eighteenth century. In fact, since the performances
of the legendary nineteenth-century theatrical and musical virtuosi – from Iffland
to Zacconi through to Sarah Bernhardt, from Kalkbrenner and Paganini through to
Liszt – the majority of criticism (particularly in the German-speaking world) has been
pejorative, so that the term ‘virtuoso’ became, to a certain extent, the polar opposite
of the ‘true artist’. The topoi of (mere) brilliance, of angling for effects, of circus
bravura, which draw attention only to the virtuoso’s self-staging; his deliberate dazzling
of the audience with empty, cheap trickery, which fails to extend beyond the soullessly
mechanical – these formulations litter the semantics of numerous articles. Franz Liszt,
in his overwhelmingly admiring necrologue on Paganini, gives the following description
of the virtuoso’s egomania: ‘Paganini’s God has never been any other than his own dark,
tragic self !’7 Heinrich Heine’s Lutetia mentions Paganini and Liszt’s numerous successors,
who arrive ‘like stick insects’ in Paris every winter, ‘invalids of fame’.8 This view, that
the virtuoso’s performance lacks fidelity to the work and displays the superficiality of the
theatrical, crops up frequently even in the twentieth century.
that this occurs precisely in an age – the eighteenth century – when the cultural and
artistic status of rhetoric is beginning to crumble.
Why rhetoric? Here I am referring to that aspect of rhetoric of importance for the
virtuoso’s success, for the performance itself; that dimension of performative practice
denoted by the terms actio and hypocrisis. Actio describes those aspects of knowledge, of
showing, those forms of staging that are performatively evidential, that make use of the
body (the voice, gestures and facial expressions) as well as of space and framing; those
aspects of a performance that were considered decisive for the success (of a speech) in
antiquity; in Aristotle’s Rhetoric16 and even more so in Cicero: ‘Delivery, I assert, is the
dominant factor in oratory; without delivery the best speaker cannot be of any account
at all, and a moderate speaker with a trained delivery can often outdo the best of them.’17
The staging of attestation and authenticity therefore becomes the decisive moment
of the delivery, for – according to the theory of hypocrisis – ars should create the impression
that the speaker is touched by the content of his speech. In the context of theatricality
and evidence, it is interesting that ambivalent layers of meaning converge in the term
hypocrisis. The term implies – in a representationally strategic intersection of ‘staging’
and ‘interpretation’ – the act of both exegesis and performance, as well as pretence and
hypocrisy. Gestures which form part of this actio – that seek to convince the audience of
the performer’s involvement – are always subject to controversy, precisely because they
‘stage authenticity’. Reports of Franz Liszt’s poses – placing his head on the keyboard
and folding his hands after performing Bach’s ‘Air’ from the D-Dur Suite – attest to this.
At precisely this juncture – in the eighteenth century, the period when the virtuoso
‘comes under suspicion’ – the difference between rhetor and actor develops into an
aesthetic conflict and enters the debate on authenticity. The difference between a speaker
and an actor had been a topic of discussion in antiquity: Cicero describes the speaker as
the performer of real life, whereas the actor is the imitator of real life. So whereas the actor
occupies an ‘as-if’ modus, presenting reality as mimesis, the speaker – as performer (in
music too) – presents the reality of a text, as ‘history’. He does not do this in a ‘role’ with
all of its symbolic trimmings, rather he wins over and convinces the audience through
the ethos of his person – via his evidential performance. This differentiation between
mimesis and representation becomes a subject of discussion once again in the eighteenth
century and is reflected upon in the complex context of questions about portrayal,
naturalness and authenticity. Scholarship generally assumes that the rhetorical is
discredited and pushed out of the (theatre and art) milieu of bodily eloquence.18 It
is, however, possible that a shift is taking place here, that the authenticity attributed
to the speaker (rather than the actor) in antiquity is now embodied, in a changing
middle-class culture, by the virtuoso. For actio always implied that the credibility of the
speaker’s performance – beyond its use of staging and argumentation – was ultimately
conveyed via his person: the pathos of the performance was added to by the ethos of his
person, his status, his honour – his virtus. In this respect the virtuoso is a figure of the
latency of the rhetorical; in other words, in the topos of the virtuoso those elements of
the rhetorical which seemed to have been replaced by paradigms of naturalness in the
eighteenth century’s theory of performance, but which actually underlay a hidden turn in
milieu and discourse, find (in a displaced form) another stage. The ambivalence which
Statements such as these, where the altered positions of work and performance and
questions of authentification are given a differentiated consideration, are rare. The
majority of arguments against (argument for are more rare) the virtuoso move between
the poles of spirit and technique. And they map out a field of conflicting authorities: the
authority of the text on the one hand and that of the performer (or interpreter) on the
other. A clear hierarchy emerges at the beginning of the nineteenth century: in favour of
the author and a textual understanding of the ‘work’.
There is indeed a trope of idealism, which turns up in various forms as the difference
between spirit and technology, and to which Hegel gave expression. Hegel’s lectures on
aesthetics name two types of ‘artistic execution’:
The one immerses itself entirely in the given work of art and does not wish to
render anything beyond what the work in hand already contains: whereas the other
does not merely reproduce but draws expression, interpretation, the real animation
in short, principally from its own resources . . . When virtuosity like this reaches its
culminating point it not only evinces an astounding mastery over external material but
displays its inner unbounded freedom by surpassing itself in playing with apparently
insurmountable difficulties, running riot with ingenuity, making surprising jokes in
a witty mood with interruptions and fancies, and making enjoyable in its original
inventions even the grotesque itself.23
part of the practice of performance, in the nineteenth century it became the locus
of conflict in an aesthetics which increasingly sought to subjugate the interpreter to
authorial intention and the authority of the text. During the nineteenth century the
virtuoso becomes a figure defining the relationship betweeen performer and author as
well as between performer and audience.
Scenes such as this one, recounted anecdotally, describe a – or perhaps the – decisive
paradigm shift in the field of performance. And this shift from performance to the work
is reflected in the various scientific disciplines interested in this topic, but in a very
different way: the concept of hermeneutics (and of the edition), which – until it was
called into question by deconstruction – long determined the undisputed relationship
between text and interpretation in literary studies. In music it was and is the paradigm
of absolute music and ‘fidelity to the work’ that characterized handbook entries and
defined the term ‘performance’ in terms of the realization of a score. And thus it was and
is the task of theatre studies, which conducts research into theatricality, to investigate the
transgressive model of performance offered by the virtuoso’s stage.
One can conclude from this discussion that the controversial emergence of the
virtuoso in the nineteenth century represents the scene of a querelle between composition
and performance.25 I would like to emphasize once again that the virtuoso is controversial
because he constitutes a figure of evidence for the utterly improbable, which is necessarily
and self-evidently tied to the event of his performance. Paradoxically, however (because
one can attest to this event, but the event can only authenticate itself), the virtuoso’s
evidentiality becomes an effect of those topoi and discourses which fulfil the functions of
authentificating and delegitimating, depending on the context: topoi and discourses that
are the first to bring out the theatricality of the virtuoso. The querelle between text and
performance, which – in its various permutations and in its inability to decide whether
it is ‘for’ or ‘against’ the virtuoso – forms the basis of his charismatic performance, and
can equally be found in the theatre, the ballet classroom and the concert hall, fulfils an
important function in staging the virtuoso.
I would now like to shed some more light on the scene of this querelle, its agents
and its discourses.
Heinrich Heine, an exact and critical observer of the music and theatre scene, makes,
in the reports on virtuosi in Lutetia, what is ultimately a Hegelian plea for freedom of
artistic interpretation, but only if the ‘executor’ manages to convey in his performance
‘that wonderful breeze of eternity’ in the music that ‘was composed in the fullness of the
self-confidence bestowed by freedom of the spirit’.26 Richard Wagner expresses himself
much more rigidly than Heine as regards the priority of the work and the prerogative
of the composer. In his essay ‘The Virtuoso and the Artist’ (1840) he writes that the
spirit of the composition should always be the starting point for the performance,
and that the performing artist, the ‘virtuoso’, should ‘conscientiously’ reproduce ‘the
composer’s intentions . . . so that the thoughts of his spirit may be transmitted unalloyed
and undisfigured to the organs of perception’, which can only be effected through
the interpreter’s ‘total abstinence from all inventions’ and through a ‘certain loving
pliability’.27 The virtuoso should not perform as an ‘actor’, who might, through his
‘art-dexterity’, become the ‘virtual representative’ or even ‘tyrant’ of the work. The role
the performer should adopt is rather that of ‘intermediary’. The performer is, according
to Wagner, the ‘vehicle of the artistic intention’.28
Wagner is here linking a media theory with the function of the virtuoso. The virtuoso
is the ‘vehicle’, the relay that activates the spirit of the work, which he must convey with
‘high fidelity’ (in the words of the twentieth-century gramophone advertisement).29
The crisis of representation in the aesthetic and political culture of the nineteenth
century, as embodied in the virtuoso’s performance, also becomes a subject of debate in
the theory of acting. Eduard Devrient, Karl Gutzkow and Heinrich Theodor Rötscher
are the most important agents in an argument which extends beyond the relationship
between text and performance to questions of authority and legitimation of a political
nature – to the tension between unconstitutional and constitutional monarchy.30 Here
the virtuoso becomes the symbol of an outdated system which is in need of reform. In
his treatise entitled ‘Virtuosity in Acting’ (1855) Rötscher writes,
Who is a virtuoso of the stage? He who only has himself, not the thing, only the value
of his person, not the production of the work of art as his aim, who . . . emphasises
himself by searching for the strange and the individual and, instead of making himself
an artistic means, rather makes art the means for his personal interests.31
Whereas Rötscher permits a certain degree of virtuoso mastery in other artistic fields
such as music, he terms ‘virtuosity’ in acting an expression of the ‘unartistic’:
and beauty, which does not have art as such, but the validation of one’s own personality
as its aim.32
The introduction of the ‘self’, the ethos of the person displaying their individuality (in
the sense of the above-mentioned actio principle of rhetoric) is vehemently rejected here
in favour of an overarching concept of aesthetic representation.
With this, further discourses enter the debate on the relationship between author
and interpreter, work and performance, discourses that expand the topos of the virtuoso
and the theatricality attributed to him; a politically coloured discourse on the image of
the virtuoso joins the above-mentioned economic discourse on the division of labour.
Wagner speaks of a ‘tyrant’, as does Rötscher when he accuses the virtuoso of ‘mastery
over the material’. ‘Subjugation of the material’ constitutes abuse of ‘eternal truth and
beauty’.33 Heine describes how the touring ‘celebrated virtuosos’ are ‘like victorious lords
receiving tributes in all the capital cities of Europe’.34 Franz Liszt calls Paganini a ‘king of
artists’35 and in a similar fashion Eduard Hanslick describes the famous violinist Joseph
Joachim as a ‘king of the violin’.36 The degree to which the virtuoso’s position as a ruler
and the allure of his omnipotence once again became a topos for the theatricality of the
political after the revolution – the tension between unconstitutional and constitutional
monarchy37 – can be seen in a text by Robert Schumann, who describes the relationship
between orchestra and soloist as a true allegory of political representation. In the context
of this vocabulary it appears only logical that the end of the ‘virtuoso jamboree’ (the
great age of Paganini, Liszt and Thalberg) appears to parallel the change in the political
situation and the 1848 revolution. This was in any case how contemporaries such as
Franz Liszt and Eduard Hanslick viewed the situation. Liszt writes in his necrologue
on Paganini that he was the monarchy’s ‘final shining representative’ and that now a
‘restructuring of our social relations’ was on the horizon, in which the artist had to
partake.38
There is, however, one trope in particular – in addition to the discourses presented
here, discourses that determine the virtuoso’s image on many levels – that lends the
virtuoso his specific fascination, namely the phantasm of the machine, which bestows
upon the virtuoso the aura of the superhuman and the eroticism of the medial. This is
not merely a matter of technical perfection in the mastery of the instrument, but rather
a quality that extends beyond that, a quality which allows the ‘spirit of the machine’
to appear as a figure of the virtuoso’s evidentiality. Heine ambivalentally describes this
embodiment of the technical as ‘the resounding human being becoming an instru-
ment’39 – the transference of the ‘spirit of the machine’ as a transfiguration of
the virtuoso’s aura, the incomprehensibility of a ‘supernatural’ performance and the
fascination of a display that goes beyond the possible.
the eighteenth century – from Noverre and Angiolini’s ballet d’action – towards virtuoso
body art, is Carlo Blasis. He is the founder of classical ballet’s technique and aesthetic,
creator of the Code of Terpsichore40 (the title of his most important work, published in
1828) which has influenced the dance tradition up until the present day. Blasis himself
delivered the model for this innovation with his demand that the choreographer must
be both a poet and a scientist of movement: ‘In short, a complete Ballet-Master is at once
author and mechanist.’41 But in order to train the body as an artistic figure which can
be employed as a perfect instrument, a grounding in geometry and mechanics, as well
as an extensive education in the arts, is required. Blasis’s approach, which uses abstract
figures42 and sketches as schemata, forms the basis of a set of technical instructions as
well as a code (Fig. 1).
This approach is remarkable for tying a science of movement to a conception of
the body oriented around the aesthetic of the fine arts. The dancer is a machinist and
a sculptor (and a poet) who performs his own body. I would like to return to the
construction of the ‘Code’ and its interface with mechanics. Blasis writes,
I should compose a sort of alphabet of straight lines, comprising all the positions of
the limbs in dancing, giving these lines and their respective combinations, their proper
geometrical appellations, viz: perpendiculars, horizontals, obliques, right, acute, and
obtuse angles, etc., a language which I deem almost indispensable in our lessons.43
Blasis’s ‘alphabet’ of lines, of geometric and stereometric figures and the ways in which
they are combined by bodies in motion – the code of dance – does indeed require the
movement scientist to be a physicist of movement, a mechanic, in other words.
One example of how Blasis uses mechanics as the matrix of virtuosity is the pirouette.
According to Blasis, the pirouette was only really acquired by dance in the nineteenth
century. As these figures, these various ways of turning, are extremely complicated
and demand ‘steady uprightness and unshaken equilibrium’, Blasis gives an extensive
treatment of the turn and its three phases: the preparation, the turn itself and the various
ways of bringing it to an end.44 Here too the perpendicular line and centre of gravity
have to be under precise control. There are additional elements, however, which include
the dynamics of the turn and the regulation of centrifugal force through the arms and
legs. With this extensive discussion of the mechanics of the turn in the human body,
Blasis placed himself at the intersection of the movement sciences and the technological
concepts of his time. These processes had long been familiar to both the theoretical and
the practical history of mechanics. Only at the end of the eighteenth century, however,
were these mechanical investigations applied to the movement of human and animal
bodies and to conceptions of their function: at work, in dance, in the military and during
sport, for example.
Around this time the technology of the steam engine – with flywheel and centrifugal-
force regulator – also found wider application. The first steam engines had in fact been
built at the end of the eighteenth century in the wake of Watt’s revolutionary discovery.
But it was only in the 1820s and 1830s that this engine technology came into its own.
It is striking that the industrial application of this technology was accompanied by a
discursive turn, on the one hand in the aestheticization of engine technology and on the
other in its anthropomorphization – it was conceived of and metaphorized as analogous
to the movement of the human body. This can be seen in nineteenth-century concepts
of labour, in questions of self-steering and in the debates on tiredness that are connected
with them.45
A picture by Jean Ignace Grandville from 1834 depicting moving figures is
characteristic of the context in which this anthropomorphising application took place
(Fig. 2). The mechanical theatre reveals a strange, almost grotesque stage of movement,
framed by the obligatory curtain, with seats for spectators and applauding hands. In the
swing of the turn, in the distorting dynamics of centrifugal force, disparate things and
forms proceed from one other and into one other with no division – a transformation
in a continuous flow of movement. At the centre, however, the sylphide ballerina of
Romantic ballet whirls around en pointe in a pirouette. She is the flywheel of this great,
general rotation. To her left, legs are moving in grotesque-arabesque poses, having
gained their independence as a particularized bodily series. To her right, the human
body is transformed into a doll and finally into a spinning top by the speedy mechanics
of the turn. This scenario pushes the theatricality of movement, as a figure of virtuoso
mechanics, in the sense of Blasis’s body code, to the extreme – crossing the line of what is
considered worthy of admiration and astonishment towards the grotesque. Grandville’s
picture stages a fascination with a uniform, inexhaustible and self-regulating mechanics
of movement, and reveals the new world of energy and of nature cheated by technology
on the threshold of the industrial age.46
This is the point at which mechanics and poetry – as models of virtuosity – quite
literally interface: in the ‘turn-moment’ of the pirouette, in its giddiness, in the giddiness
of a new hybrid concept of the figure. In Grandville’s picture, the game of the aesthetic
attraction of the nineteenth century’s new moving pictures can already be observed –
as embodied in the dance of a Maria Taglioni, a Fanny Elssler or Fanny Cerrito: as a
transitory scene of virtuoso body art.
If a fascination with the technical, with the phantasm of the human-machine, clings
to the virtuoso’s image, lending him a demonic aspect, then it is ultimately media hype
and the media ‘machine’ that propagate, and even create, this image. Heinrich Theodor
Rötscher summed up this scenario using the ‘advertisement’ as illustration. Technology
and narration enter into an alliance in the advertisement – it is a pairing of rhetoric
and economics. The advertisement, in Rötscher’s words, is the ‘driving locomotive of
virtuosity’.47 It gives the virtuoso his ‘true lustre’ and, moreover, ‘The advertisement is
no less the production of ingenuity than virtuosity itself’.48 The sense of wonder which
the ‘virtuoso of the stage’ inspires in his audience, his ingenuity, his eccentricity, Rötscher
notes, are the result of a new media system: journalism, the ‘theatre tabloids’, drive the
‘restless cogs’ of a machine,49 which stages the virtuoso as both agent and product of this
discourse.
The pomp surrounding the virtuoso’s performance, its singularity, its evidential
nature, is ultimately due to its circulation in the media, and to the media’s re-staging of
its theatricality. And this is the point of interface between the image of the virtuoso, the
charisma of the diva and – in the twentieth century – the media staging of the star.
Heinrich Heine fully realized this, and wrote the best and most succinct stories
about virtuosi – in the form of newspaper reports. He also reflected upon the function
of the media in creating the virtuoso, when he observed, for example, the bowing and
scraping of numerous virtuoso-wannabes before the director of the gazette musicale, for
these ‘new lords’ only wielded power bestowed on them by the press and the public.
Heine is well aware of the importance of the media and their informative function.
‘Transfigurations’ was the term he gave to the inter-semiotic translation of Paganini’s
virtuoso milieu into the linguistic milieu of his own virtuoso narrative style, achieved
by, to borrow a phrase from Adorno, playing language like a keyboard.
The virtuoso’s rumoured charisma spread and was strengthened through its
circulation by the media – in pictures, reviews and, above all, numerous anecdotes. Again
and again one comes across the Romantic topos of the magnetiseur as an explanation of
why hysteria swept the audience, particularly the female audience.50 As Heine reports on
the pianist Sigismund Thalberg (who admittedly constituted a notable exception):51
Women, both healthy and sick, love him, even though he does not arouse their sympathy
with epileptic attacks on the piano, even though he does not play with their overwrought
and delicate nerves, even though he does not electrify or galvanise them.52
Thus the myth of the virtuoso – an intricate web of diverging discourses – enters into
historical memory, through the anecdote. Heine begins his story of Paganini in the
Florentine Nights with an anecdote that thematizes the problem of how to portray the
virtuoso and his incomprehensible performance. The text tells us that the only person
who has ever succeeded in doing this is in fact a deaf artist:
I think that only one man ever succeeded in putting the true physiognomy of Paganini
on paper. He who did it is a deaf painter named Lyser, who, in his inspired frolicking,
hit off with a few pencil strokes the head of Paganini so well that one laughs and is
frightened at the truth of the portrait.54
The deaf artist becomes a measuring point, the narrator’s ‘persona’, for, just as the artist
is in a position to ‘read the music in the faces of the musicians, and judge of the more
or less successful execution by the fingering’, to take up what is quite literally ‘unheard’
about the virtuoso and ‘in the visible signature of the playing, see the tones’, the poet
seeks to form this event in language: ‘Are there not men to whom tones themselves are
only invisible signatures in which they hear colours and forms?’55
Nothing makes the figure of the virtuoso and the patterns of its topical appearance
more convincing to the senses than the anecdote about the deaf artist, who puts the
phantasm of the unheard music down on paper as signature of the ephemeral event
in spite of his deafness. These ‘transfigurations’, together with the fictional ecphrasis of
Lyser’s Paganini drawings, ultimately become the medium through which the poet stages
the virtuoso’s performance as that of a demonic fiddling devil: re-composing a concert
evening in several parts as a theatrical display where heaven and hell are set in motion to
authenticate the magic of the virtuoso’s performance. It is only logical within the context
of this poetic–transfigurative process, which allows the figure of the virtuoso to emerge
from the anecdote, that Paganini is assigned a ‘servant’, a writer of anecdotes, a special
one of course, in whose form Satan is concealed:
Ignorant people think, of course, that this companion is the writer of comedies and
anecdotes, Harrys of Hanover, whom Paganini takes with him as business-manager
for his concerts; but the multitude does not know that the devil took the form of Mr.
George Harrys. . .56
The narrator in Heine’s text acts as the anecdote writer’s anecdote writer, who, in the
role of director and drama king, as it were, has formed a pact with the virtuoso.
The anecdote – as a way of conjuring up spirits – becomes a narrative container for
the epheremality of the performance; for the eroticizing power and the extraordinariness
of this event. The anecdote is a receptacle for the social energy within which the
virtuoso’s stage unfolds.57 The virtuoso’s importance for the nineteenth century’s cultural
imaginary can (perhaps only) be gleaned from these narratives.
To conclude my discussion on the figure of the virtuoso, I would like to present an
anecdote which establishes his evidentiality by bluntly conjuring up the haunting quality
of his erotic–demonic features. It is an anecdote often told about Paganini and which his
virtuoso contemporary Franz Liszt included in his necrologue on the famous ‘fiddling
devil’:
The sensation that he [Paganini] created was so extraordinary, the magical effect on
his listeners’ imagination so great that these listeners were not satisfied with a natural
explanation. Old witch and ghost stories from medieval times emerged, his wonderful
playing was explained by reference to his past, the unheard-of nature of his genius
comprehended in terms of the supernatural, there were rumours that he had sold
his soul to evil, and that every fourth string from which he coaxed such magical
melodies was made from the gut of his wife, whom he had strangled with his own bare
hands.58
Finally – almost as a coda – a look forward into the twentieth century: with the question
of how and if the virtuoso’s stage changed in the age of mechanical reproduction of
image and sound. In this context one reads again and again that performing artists now
find themselves competing with recordings, that they find themselves in the unfortunate
situation of never being able to live up to their own ‘ideal’ productions, as well as those
of others. Does this mean that the virtuoso has disappeared from the concert, theatre
and dance scene?
Or should we perhaps rephrase the question? This is not a bid to save the nineteenth
century concept of the virtuoso, which now has to compete against new media – and
is forced to exit the stage. This is rather to investigate a change in perception, where
those evidential events which are linked to the virtuoso’s stage take place differently and
nonetheless over and over again, and this perhaps in a manner which only becomes
possible with the advent of the media and the specific opportunities they open up.
This would explain Glenn Gould’s piano playing (and his media myth) as well as the
transfiguring dance concept of William Forsythe.
What remains is virtuosity as a ‘transgressive scene’. And this draws our attention
to the fact that contemporary performance is ‘deferred’, that it may be precisely in the
‘withdrawal of the virtuoso’ that the stage opens up for a new and different evidencing of
the improbable. And it may be that this does not take place, as one might perhaps believe,
in globally marketed big ‘events’ – in the milieu of the stars in sports, Hollywood, arena
of politics or even in economy and management – but on the edges of cultural space
and the performing arts: as an undermining of the virtuoso, as a (nevertheless virtuoso)
play with the risk and as well with the failure as performance: ‘small transgressions’ in
passing.
notes
1 Translated from the German by Chantal Wright.
2 See Edward Neill, Niccolò Paganini, trans. Cornelia Panzacchi (Munich and Leipzig: List, 1990), p. 167.
On Paganini see Walter Gualterio Armando, Paganini. Eine Biographie (Hamburg: Rütten und Loening,
1960). This article draws on sketches and theses from a wider research project on the topic of virtuosi.
This is a field of research which was, up until now, almost exclusively confined to music history;
consideration of the phenomenon from a cultural- and theatre-studies perspective has been lacking.
Currently I am working with a group of scholars in the field of research ‘Kulturen des Performativen’ in
Berlin, focusing on virtuosity (‘Die Szene des Virtuosen – Zu einer Grenzfigur des Virtuosen’,
http://www.sfb-performativ.de/seiten/b12.html). See, for example, Vladimir Jankélévitch: De la
Musique au silence 5: Liszt et la rhapsodie. 1. Essai sur la virtuosité (Paris: Plon, 1979).
3 According to the reports on, for example, performances by Franz Liszt and Niccolò Paginini; see Neill,
Niccolò Paganini, p. 94.
4 This is precisely the aspect of the virtuoso emphasized by entries in handbooks – perfect mastery of
body and instrument. See, for example, the Hanns-Werner Heister’s article ‘Virtuosen’, in Ludwig
Finscher, ed., Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, 26 vols.
(Kassel and Stuttgart: Metzler 1994–), Vol. IX, pp. 1722–32, here p. 1723: virtuosity combines two poles,
the ‘display of skills and expression, the ability to provoke awe and amazement and, in contrast, the
language of affect and emotion’.
5 Adorno attributed this evidentiality to the performance event and the interpreter: ‘The entire richness
of the musical texture, the integration of which was the source of Bach’s power, must be placed in
prominence [zur Evidenz gebracht werden] by the performance’. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Bach Defended
against His Devotees’, in idem, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
1981; first published 1967), pp. 133–46, here p. 145.
6 As cited by Gino Monaldi, Cantanti evirati del Teatro Italiano (Rome: Ausonia, 1920), p. 94.
7 Franz Liszt, ‘Paganini. Ein Nekrolog’ (1840), in Walter Salmen, ed., ‘Critiques musicaux d’artiste.’
Künstler und Gelehrte schreiben über Musik (Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 1993), pp. 228–30, here p. 229.
8 Heinrich Heine, Lutezia. Bericht über Politik, Kunst und Volksleben. Zweiter Theil (LVI, Paris, 26 March
1843), in idem, Sämtliche Werke. Düsseldorfer Ausgabe, 23 vols., ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg:
Hoffmann & Campe, 1990), Vol. XIV/1, pp. 48–56, here p. 49. Further references to this edition are
given as ‘DHA’, by volume and page number.
9 It is significant that this definition of the term ‘virtuoso’ emerges and becomes more complex in the age
of manufacture, so from roughly 1550 to 1750.
10 Cf. R. H. Syfret, ‘Some Early Reactions to the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of
London, 7 (1950), pp. 207–58.
11 Lorraine Daston, ‘Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment’, in Lorraine Daston and
Fernando Vidal, eds., The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 2004),
pp. 100–26, here p. 104.
12 See Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s highly informative article, ‘Virtuoso’, in Philip Wiener, ed., Dictionary of
the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, 5 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973),
Vol. IV, pp. 486–90.
13 Lorraine Daston, ‘Attention’; see also Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of
Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
14 Objects such as those on display in curio rooms as well as the astonishing and strange objects discussed
in scientific treatises such as the monstrous calf’s head in Robert Boyle’s ‘An Account of a Very Odd
Monstrous Calf’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1 (1665/6), p. 10.
15 On evidence in science see Gary Smith and Matthias Kroß, eds., Die ungewisse Evidenz. Für eine
Kulturgeschichte des Beweises (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1998).
16 In Aristotle, the proper method of delivery – the actio – ‘is a thing that affects the success of a speech
greatly’. Aristotle, Rhethoric (III.1, 1403b) in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford
Translation, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 2237–8,
here p. 2238.
17 Cicero, De Oratore III/LVI, 213, in Cicero in Twenty-Eight Volumes, trans. H. Rackham (London:
Heinemann 1968), Vol. IV, pp. 1–185, here p. 169.
18 There is (still) scope for more extensive research into the issue of the latency of the rhetorical and its
displacement into other fields of representation (science, the performing arts, e.g. those which feature
virtuosi).
19 On this see, for example, Rousseau’s and Diderot’s critique of the traditional style of acting (for more
on this see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1980)).
20 See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’, in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, 4 vols., ed.
Alexander Tille, trans. Thomas Common (London: Henry and Co., 1896), Vol. XI, pp. 1–60, here p. 39.
21 Friedrich Nietzsche, in ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’, in ibid., pp. 61–94, here p. 70; original emphasis
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘From the Souls of Artists and Writers’, in idem, The Complete Works, ed. Ernst
Behler, trans. Gary Handwerk, 20 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), Vol. III: Human, All
too Human I, pp. 114–52, here p. 130; original emphasis.
23 Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, III vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. II, pp. 955, 957–8.
24 Alistair Bruce, ed., The Musical Madhouse: An English Translation of Berlioz’s ‘Les Grotesques de la
Musique’ (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), pp. 22–3.
25 On the music and intellectual-historical background to this issue see Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the
Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998).
26 Heinrich Heine, Lutezia, p. 48.
27 Cf. Richard Wagner, ‘The Virtuoso and the Artist’, in idem, Prose Works, 8 vols., trans. William Ashton
Ellis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892–9), Vol. VII (1898), pp. 108–22, here p. 111.
54 Ibid., p. 28. Johann Peter Lyser (1803–70, real name Ludwig Peter August Burmeister) was a busy artist
who also wrote music critiques and literary texts.
55 Ibid.; original emphasis.
56 Ibid., p. 31.
57 On the importance of the anecdote for a theory of cultural studies, as developed by new historicism, cf.
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2000) (which includes, for example, ‘Counterhistory and the Anecdote’,
pp. 49–75), as well as Joel Fineman, ‘The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction’, in H. Aram
Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 49–77.
58 Franz Liszt, ‘Paganini’, p. 228.
gabriele brandstetter received her Ph.D. from Munich University and habilitation from Bayreuth
University. From 1993 to 1997 she was Professor of Theatre Studies at Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen, and from
1997 to 2003 Professor of Modern German Literature Studies at the University of Basel. Since 2003 she has been
Professor of Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focus is on performance theories; concepts of
body and movement in notation, image and performance; and dance, theatricality and gender differences.
Publications include Loie Fuller. Tanz – Licht-Spiel – Art Nouveau 1989, (co-authored with B. Ochaim);
Tanz-Lektüren. Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (1995); ReMembering the Body.
Körperbilder in Bewegung (2000, co-edited with H. Völckers); de figura. Rhetorik – Bewegung – Gestalt (2002,
co-edited with S. Peters); Erzählen und Wissen. Paradigmen und Aporien ihrer Inszenierungen in Goethes
‘Wahlverwandschaften’ (ed., 2003), Bild-Sprung. TanzTheaterBewegung im Wechsel der Medien (2005).