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.

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This book is the first history of keyboard improvisation in European music in the postclassical and romantic periods (c. 1815–1870). Grounded in primary sources, it documents practices of improvisation on the piano and the organ, with a particular emphasis on free fantasies and other forms of free playing. Case studies of performers such as Abbé Vogler, J. N. Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Robert Schumann, Carl Loewe, and Franz Liszt describe in detail the motives, intentions, and musical styles of the nineteenth century’s leading improvisers. The book further discusses the reception and valuation of improvisational performances by colleagues, audiences, and critics, which prompted many keyboardists to stop improvising. Its central argument is that amid the decline of improvisational practices in the first half of the nineteenth century there emerged a strong and influential “idea” of improvisation as an ideal or perfect performance. This idea, spawned and nourished by romanticism, preserved the aesthetic, social, and ethical values associated with improvisation, calling into question the supposed triumph of the “work.”