The Imaginary Life of Nineteenth-Century Virtuosity

Abstract

Nineteenth-century virtuosity can be understood as a form of subjection under a musical law whose power could only be broken by hyperbolic responses of self-annihilating over-fulfilment of this law’s relentless demands. Such excesses of the Romantic imagination (Hoffmann, Heine, Lyser, Andersen) had to be domesticated in Realism’s responses to virtuosity (Stifter, Grillparzer).