Romantic Anatomies of Performance [Hardcover]

Romantic Anatomies of Performanceis concerned with the very matter of musical expression: the hands and voices of virtuosic musicians. Rubini, Chopin, Nourrit, Liszt, Donzelli, Thalberg, Velluti, Sontag, and Malibran were prominent celebrity pianists and singers who plied their trade between London and Paris, the most dynamic musical centers of nineteenth-century Europe. In their day, performers such as these provoked an avalanche of commentary and analysis, inspiring debates over the nature of mind and body, emotion and materiality, spirituality and mechanism, artistry and skill. J. Q. Davies revisits these debates, examining how key musicians and their contemporaries made sense of extraordinary musical and physical abilities. This is a history told as much from scientific and medical writings as traditionally musicological ones. Davies describes competing notions of vocal and pianistic health, contrasts techniques of training, and explores the ways in which music acts in the cultivation of bodies..

J.Q. Daviesis Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley.

List of Illustrations and Musical Examples
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Veluti in Speculum: The Twilight of the Castrato
2. Reflecting on Reflex: A Touching New Fact about Chopin
3. The Sontag-Malibran Stereotype
4. Boneless Hands{ths}/{ths}Thalbergs Ready-Made Soul{ths}/{ths}Velvet Fingers
5. In Search of Voice: Nourrits Voix Mixte, Donzellis Bari-Tenor
6. Franz Liszt, Metapianism, and the Cultural History of the Hand

Epilogue
Notes
Index

This book presents a brilliant cultural history of musical performance in the first half of the nineteenth century. Taking an original approach to the study of virtuosity, Davies uses a rich set of primary sources, both medical and musical, to conjure a new history of the music-making body, of sound and its physical production.
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