Theatrical Marginalia: Pierre Baillot and the Prototype of the Modern Performer

Abstract

Abstract In Western art music, the idea of the professional performer as a versatile interpreter of someone else’s music consolidated around the turn of the nineteenth century. The institutionalization of instrumental training in dedicated schools (such as the Paris Conservatoire, established in 1795) favoured an increasing specialization of composers and performers in their respective tasks. Scholars have often traced the development of these modern professional identities to fundamental innovations in the fabric and conceptions of musical notation. The newly detailed scores by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven specify articulation, phrasing, and even fingerings, suggesting a growing authority of the composer over the performer’s moves, and the score itself as an increasingly important focus of the musical event (scripting both what performers should do and what listeners, ideally, should discern). Rather than focusing on how music was notated by composers, this article proposes to explore the perspective of the performers handling it: how they understood their role in bringing the score to life, and the realms of commentary they inspired in Parisian debates about the progress of the art and the mechanization of performance in the early nineteenth century. At the core of the Paris Conservatoire’s universal pedagogical project, the violinist Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) devised a prototype professional figure for the future of instrumental performance across genres: not a puppet-musician controlled via invisible strings, but an architect of musical impersonations, able to stimulate images or stories in the listeners’ minds and leave them theatrically spellbound.