“Virtuosity”

Virtuosity, both vocal and instrumental, is a phenomenon central to nineteenth-century musical life. As a sign of the musician’s need to seek out new audiences to replace the traditional protection of church and court, it plays a crucial role in the social history of music. And as an impetus to seek out newly expressive instrumental techniques and timbres, it plays a role in the history of composition itself. To speak of virtuosity in our context, therefore, is first and foremost to speak of instrumental music, and principally that of the violin and the piano.

One may legitimately wonder how Berlioz might be associated with the question of virtuosity, having himself played neither the violin nor the piano, having rarely composed for these instruments in a solo capacity, and having at times expressed opposition to the use of the piano as the allpurpose stand-in for other instrumental combinations. Let us recall that the first cantata which Berlioz submitted for the Prix de Rome, La Mort d’Orphée, with its freshly conceived sonorities, met with a tragic fate precisely because it was impossible for the pianist hired for the day by the Académie des Beaux-Arts to “reduce” it, at sight, for the purpose of audition and judgment. Rather than as a failing of his own work, Berlioz saw this as a demerit of that sovereign instrument, the piano itself, which he considered “incomplete” and “perfidious” and thus unqualified by definition to reproduce a unique and complex orchestration:

By drawing a distinction between those whom he would call instrumentalistes (“instrumenters,” or “orchestrators”) and instrumentistes (“players”), that is to say, between composers who are true connoisseurs of instruments and their resources and those who are simply performers, most obviously pianists, Berlioz puts forth, it seems to me, one of the key ideas of his vision of instrumental virtuosity.