Oxford Scholarship Online

The Art of Performance

Heinrich Schenker and Heribert Esser

Print publication date: 2002

Print ISBN-13: 9780195151510
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2008
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151510.001.0001
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(p.83) Appendix B
On the Degeneracy of the Virtuoso

[The manuscript of A closes with a chapter “On the Degeneracy of the Virtuoso.” It takes up the idea
developed in chapter 2 on the union of creation and re‐creation. Here follows a summary of its content.]

In an earlier epoch, only that performer who performed his own compositions stepped before the
public. The development of music depended on this identity. Handel, J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms were also the foremost virtuosos of their time. If, however,
Haydn, Schubert, or Schumann did not appear before the public to the same extent, their occasional
performances proved sufficiently that they, too, would have been at the pinnacle of reproducing
musicians had they not been prevented from demonstrating this ability more frequently by
circumstances.

The identity of production and reproduction was lost over the course of time. More and more, people
came to consider a purely reproductive ability as equal to productive ability. This state of affairs, caused
by lack of talent, led to the attempt by thousands—be it from vanity, be it from financial greed—to
appear before the public. Since they lacked true ability in the earlier sense, they made a virtue of their
defect and declared the profession of virtuoso as organically necessary as that of composer. The
profession of virtuoso, based on a lie, prevailed and attained the recognition of artistic justification.

Still at the close of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were virtuosos
with sufficient ability to (p.84) compose and improvise so that one could speak of an integrated whole,
if to a lesser extent. Muzio Clementi may be named as an example; with his “Gradus ad Parnassum” a
rank of composer was assured him such as can hardly be granted later, be it to Thalberg, Tausig, or
Bülow. In the world of etudes, Clementi is only surpassed by Chopin. Liszt, in his etudes, however,
added elements to the music that, beside much that is excellent and original, tended to destroy rather
than develop it. Still in recent times [written 1911] Anton Rubinstein, d'Albert, Busoni, and Paderewski
to a certain degree have achieved a unified whole. All the sadder for the thousands who are brought to
the stages of all the world. The economics of the concert agencies, once in motion, demand more artistic
sacrifices daily. Most virtuosos who go onstage prove themselves artistically not up to the works they are
performing; they speak the tonal language like a badly learned foreign tongue. In order to survive in the
 battle at competition, they grasp for unallowed means of false effect that they want to pass off as marks
of their own individuality. In truth, they are incapable of offering the spiritual equivalent of the
composer's written‐down note symbols. They are outside the sphere of the composer's living vision;
they are merely slaves of engraver and hand position.

The more irresponsibly the virtuosos treat their profession, the easier it is to enter it. In the fight for
survival, the many, too many, must attempt to outdo one another by dishonest means: they must learn
the longest programs; they attempt to play ever louder, ever faster. Banished from a paradise of union of
production and reproduction, a lie avenges itself on them.

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