Liszt's Hands, Marie's Stammbuch, and the Technology of Relational Inscription

Abstract

Abstract The tradition of collecting quotes, mottos, signatures, and musical miniatures in Stammbücher and Albumblätter offers a site of gift exchange where “the thing received is not inactive” (Mauss), but inscribes networks of social relationships, presence, musical encounters and memory. Liszt engaged this tradition in hotel visitor books, but perhaps most notably in the Stammbuch he gave to Marie von Hohenlohe in 1847, and curated for over a decade. This article examines the tradition of collecting musical entries, the complex of social communications and gift exchange they represent, and the negotiable space between private and public display of such entries' afterlife, a gray zone for music and letters that sets the concept of domestic privacy against the enthusiasm of the autograph hunter. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from Berlioz and Hans von Bülow to Liszt and Wagner, it investigates the Stammbuch as a medium for “relational inscription”: a semiotics of personalized writing, defined as the tracing of subjective relations through linguistic or musical codes, often as part of a gift economy. Arising from this concept, four types of entry from Marie's Stammbuch are examined in the context of a discourse about handwriting and typewriting, where the hand-as-subject (Heidegger) collides with that of “type and its other” (Kittler), opening up the question of value within Stammbuch entries conceived as “active” gifts that exceed the context of their genesis.