¹ The term ‘Biedermeier’ was applied retrospectively to bourgeois middle-class German and Austrian art from 1815 to 1848, the name itself deriving from a fictional character from a journal of the period.

² Images of Liszt have already received some attention in musicological or historical studies. Most significant is Ernst Burger's comprehensive study (originally published in German, then in English three years later), Franz Liszt: A Chronicle of His Life and Times in Pictures and Documents, trans. Spencer, Stewart (Princeton, NJ, 1989). Burger's study is an outstanding work in itself as well as being a valuable resource for iconographic study. Also of note are essays or articles by Richard Leppert, Elaine Brody, Alessandra Comini and a chapter on Lisztian iconography by Bertrand Ott. Some of these works will be discussed and cited later in the course of this articleGoogle Scholar.

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⁴ Samson, Jim, Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge, 2003), 75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁷ Biedermeier culture itself was not restricted to Vienna in the sense that a ‘Biedermeier phase’ of Romanticism can be identified as occurring throughout Europe after the initial heat of high Romanticism had cooled. This more reserved stage of Romanticism rejected the ‘visionary, all-integrating, titanic claims of high romanticism’ and partially returned to the attitudes of the eighteenth century. See Nemoianu, Virgil, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier (Cambridge, 1984), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁰ Some notable portraits of Liszt from the 1830s do indeed show Liszt as the ‘Romantic virtuoso’: portraits such as those by Ary Scheffer and Henri Lehmann. This distinctive iconography of Liszt has been discussed recently elsewhere, but it is worth noting that these portraits show Liszt in a typically Romantic manner, stressing his difference and isolation. For a discussion of the significance of this type of Lisztian portraiture in the developing imagery of the musician see Davison, Alan, ‘The Musician in Iconography from the 1830s and 1840s: The Formation of New Visual Types’, Music in Art, 28 (2003): 145–60Google Scholar.

¹¹ This split is discussed by Weber, William in Music and the Middle Classes: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (New York, 1975; Aldershot, 2003)Google Scholar.

¹² Himmelheber, Georg, Biedermeier 1815–1835: Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, Fashion (Munich, 1989), 34.Google Scholar

¹³ Comini, Alessandra, The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking (New York, 1987), 209.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Walker, Alan, Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years, 1848–1861 (Ithaca, 1996), 560.Google Scholar

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¹⁷ Liszt attempted to write a Byronic opera, making efforts towards a setting of Le Corsaire and then Sardanapale. Both attempts were aborted, although some music was sketched for the latter. See Hamilton's, Kenneth ‘Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Death of Liszt's “Sardanapale”’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 8 (1996): 45–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Comini, , The Changing Image of Beethoven, 207.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Brody, Elaine, ‘Paris, 1840’, American Scholar, 53 (1983): 83–90Google Scholar , and Leppert, , ‘Cultural Contradiction’, 252–81Google Scholar.

²⁰ Comini, , The Changing Image of Beethoven, 202.Google Scholar

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²² Wythe, Deborah, ‘Conrad Graf (1782–1851): Imperial Royal Court Fortepiano Maker in Vienna’, Ph.D. diss. (New York University, 1990), 270.Google Scholar

²³ See Good, Edwin M., Giraffes, Black Dragons, and other Pianos: A Technological History from Cristofori to the Modern Concert Grand, second edition (Stanford, 2001), 178–85.Google Scholar

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²⁶ Brody, , Paris, 1840, 90.Google Scholar

²⁷ Wythe, , Conrad Graf, 17.Google Scholar

²⁸ Wythe identifies this piano in Danhauser's Die Klavierspielerin and Die Bratschau.Google Scholar

²⁹ Hanson, Alice M., Musical Life in Biedermeier Vienna (Cambridge, 1985), 109.Google Scholar

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³² See Piper, David, The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits (Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar

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³⁶ Farwell, Beatrice, French Popular Lithographic Imagery, 1815–1870: Portraits and Types (Chicago, 1997), 1.Google Scholar

³⁷ The following biographical information is based upon Krasa, Selma, Josef Kriehuber: Der Porträtist einer Epoche (Vienna, 1987)Google Scholar.

³⁸ This distortion of physiognomy is significant in itself and should not be dismissed lightly as it usually reflects commonly held assumptions of the time regarding the physical qualities of musicians. See Davison, Alan, ‘High-Art Music and Low-Brow Types: Physiognomy and Nineteenth-Century Music Iconography’, Context, 17 (1999): 5–19Google Scholar.

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