Warhorses: Liszt, Weber's "Konzertstück", and the Cult of Napoléon

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music.If other concert halls are salons in which exquisite, sumptuous pleasures are offered, those of Liszt are battlefields, and his successes are victories and triumphs. The feeling conveyed by this image comes over everyone who hears him, and hence he has rightly been called, so often and from so many directions, the Napol on of the piano.-Franz von Schober, 1843We use the word "warhorse" to designate a weighty, highly virtuosic composition, typically a violin or piano concerto that is well known and demands strong rhetorical and interpretive skills. It is a "work," a musical object already there, ready and waiting for the interpreter to come along and master it. Yet the metaphor of the warhorse does not in fact originate in the musical work. It is rather the drama of virtuosic performance, regardless of musical content, that gives rise to battle imagery. Nowhere is this more evident than in the nineteenth century's favorite image of the virtuoso Liszt: plate 1 shows this image. The symbolic fusion of the horse with the miniature keyboard-both of them dominated and mastered by Liszt-suggests how his virtuosity could serve as a displaced image of heroic military valor. Liszt authored a bravura conception in which the virtuoso struggles with technical difficulties or with the orchestra, heroically dominates the instrument, and victoriously sweeps away the audience. By amplifying vertical gestures into the keys, introducing stormy embellishments, and mimicking the musical drama with facial expressions and physical movement, he made virtuosity an agonistic spectacle of domination and triumph that invited listeners to imagine the performance as a battle, the virtuoso as a valiant warrior. The latent homology between military spectacle and virtuosic performance gave rise to an important but underrecognized dimension of Liszt's public identity during his concert career. Contemporary writers repeatedly drew on battle and military imagery to evoke the atmo-6219th-Century Music, XXIV/1, pp.

Performing Civility

“…claim was more of a stretch (Gooley, 2000). That today we are unable to recognize any physical resemblance between Liszt and Napoléon, and would find such a claim preposterous, only serves to demonstrate the power and historicity of culture structures.…”

“…This term continues to be used, especially in the context of competitions, to describe large-scale, highly virtuosic compositions that place particular interpretive and technical demands on the performer. Gooley (Gooley, 2000(Gooley, , 2004 argues that this term has actually drifted to the musical work from its original source -the performer, whose dramatic and virtuosic performance evoked battle imagery quite independent of the content of the musical text performed.…”

“…When he performed in public concerts, Liszt kept two pianos on stage because one instrument was unlikely to make it through the entire performance. For contemporary accounts of Liszt's creative acts of destruction, see Gooley (2000).…”

Intertextuality, Subjectivity, and Meaning in Liszt’s Deux Polonaises

“…75 The onstage drama in which the pianist took the leading role.' 78 Gooley argues that the dynamism of Liszt's playing style was key to his inserting himself into the piece, not as a narrator, or even as a character, but as a 'locus of subjectivity, or expressive zone, through which characters and events materialize.' 79 In Polonaise I we encounter a similar effect.…”

“…78 Gooley argues that the dynamism of Liszt's playing style was key to his inserting himself into the piece, not as a narrator, or even as a character, but as a 'locus of subjectivity, or expressive zone, through which characters and events materialize.' 79 In Polonaise I we encounter a similar effect. Initially, disruptions (generated by intertextual allusions) create the impression that the pianist has both a distanced narrative/diegetic role, commenting on the action, but also a mimetic role, immediately conjuring different subjectivities.…”