Rewriting Mazeppa: Meaning and communication in Liszt’s virtuoso and program music

Abstract

Musical virtuosity is often studied with an emphasis on the outstanding skills of the performer and their sensory and emotional effects on the listener. However, Franz Liszt, one of the main virtuosos in music history, was convinced that what matters in virtuosity is its specific function within the semantic and communicative processing of music. This article proposes a theoretical framework to further investigate Liszt's intuitions in light of contemporary research on musical meaning and communication. First, we analyze philological data concerning Liszt's creative process in the Mazeppa works, a set of works including both his virtuoso and program music. Second, we compare our results with recent research on music semantics based on inferential processes about the composer/performer's intentions (Antović, Stamenković, & Figar, 2016; Schlenker, 2017). We criticize the associationist hypothesis (the idea that the composer's intention is that the listener infers an association between the music and a real or fictional state of the world) and we defend a causalist hypothesis (the idea that the composer's intention is that the listener recognizes the music as being an intentional "rewriting" of the states of the world, mental or physical, that are the causes of the music itself). Third, we suggest that what distinguishes Liszt's virtuoso and program music rewritings are the visual and gestural components of two listening experiences: the virtuoso music "rewrites" its episodic causes (memories, personal experiences) whereas the program music "rewrites" its genetic causes (the work's creative path and intertextual relations).

Velocity and Virtuosity: An Empirical Investigation of Basic Tempo in Contemporary Performances of Two Large-scale Works of Chopin and Liszt

“…However, the concept itself is rather elusive, mainly because empirical study of the notion of virtuosity remains limited despite its long history. In musicology, virtuosity has been mainly explored from historical and philosophical perspectives, with research focusing primarily on its reception (Cvejić, 2016;Stefaniak, 2016), anthropology (Gooley, 2004;Kawabata, 2007Kawabata, , 2013Royce, 2004), semiotics (Bauer, 2019;Howard, 1997;Kawabata, 2004;Larkin, 2015;Parncutt, 2018) and more recently, psychology (Lisboa, Demos, & Chaffin, 2018;Rodriguez, 2018;Stachó, 2018). Yet, little scholarship investigates how virtuosity may defer from expertise and, importantly for the present study, how defining features of virtuosity may manifest in performance from an analytical perspective, which is essential for an evidence-based discussion of the concept and its manifestation in practice.…”