From men to machines and back: Automata and the reception of virtuosity in European instrumental art music, c.1815-c.1850

Abstract

In most histories of Western music, the 1830s and 40s are typically described as "the age/era of virtuosity and/or virtuosi". Indeed, major contemporary sources, including leading musical journals of the time, teem with reports on the latest exploits of Liszt and his rivals and in much of this body of criticism, piano and violin virtuosi were commonly celebrated for pushing the limits of humanly conceivable excellence in musical performance. However, a significant number of these critical responses were also negative, critiquing individual virtuosi for playing not like humans, but like automata. My claim in this article, documented with a detailed perusal of contemporary music criticism, is that this line of anti-virtuosic critique was part of the larger 19th-century suspicion of virtuosity as super but also, perhaps, non-humanly accomplished, automatic technique, devoid of all emotion, expression, that is, of human presence and content. Also, I propose to interpret this line of criticism with reference to the even broader 19th-century anxiety over the issue of human subjectivity, that is, its freedom, evident not only in contemporary philosophy (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Novalis, etc.), but also in literature. Such narratives and, as I argue in this paper, much of contemporary criticism of virtuosity were shaped by the uncanny feeling that the human subject, too, like automata and "automatic" virtuosi, may not be free, contrary to the Enlightenment view of the human subject in Rousseau, Kant, and others, but actually under the power of mechanisms beyond itself, operating automatically and not of its own accord. In contemporary criticism of virtuosity, the elusive notions of expression, expressivity, expressive playing and the like, which were deliberately kept under-explained, were then marshalled to preserve the supposedly ineffable or at least ineffably human core of musical performance, in line with the contemporary Romantic view of music as the only means of expressing what is otherwise inexpressible, that is, ineffable.