Dreams of Love Mythologies of

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
Dreams of Love:
Mythologies of the “Romantic” Pianist in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in
Music
by
Ivan Raykoff
Committee in charge:
Professor Jann Pasler, Co-Chair

Professor Aleck Karis, Co-Chair
Professor Alain J.-J. Cohen
Professor George Lipsitz
Professor Steven Schick
2002
UMI Number: 3077794
Copyright 2002 by
Raykoff, Ivan
All rights reserved.
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2002
in
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Signature P a g e .................................................................................................................iii
Table of Contents.............................................................................................................iv
List of Illustrations............................................................................................................v
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................xi
V ita...................................................................................................................................xii
Abstract...........................................................................................................................xvi
I. Foreplay..........................................................................................................................1
II. The Dynamics of D esire............................................................................................ 21
HI. Pianistic Progenitors................................................................................................ 77
IV. Piano Women, Forte W om en............................................................................... 135
V. Transcription as Transgression............................................................................... 192
VI. Concerto con am ore................................................................................................236
VII. Afterglow...............................................................................................................292
Appendix I: Illustrations...............................................................................................307
Appendix II: Popular Songs......................................................................................... 380
Appendix IE: Fictional Works and Poetry...................................................................385
Appendix IV: Filmography.......................................................................................... 389
Bibliography..................................................................................................................432
iv
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. I. Chopin Plays in the Salon o f Prince Anton Radziwill.....................................307
Fig. 2. Schumann / Ophuls comparison...................................................................... 308
Fig. 3. “Liebestraum (Dream o f Love)”.......................................................................309
Fig. 4. Caricature of Ignace Jan Paderewski............................................................... 310
Fig. 5. Caricature of Franz L iszt.................................................................................. 311
Fig. 6. Liberace’s You Made Me Love You.................................................................. 312
Fig. 7. Publicity photo: Sincerely Yours......................................................................313
Fig. 8. Liberace Plays Chopin..................................................................................... 314
Fig. 9. “Showpan Boogie” ........................................................................................... 315
Fig. 10. Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. publicity................................................................316
Fig. 11. Publicity photo: Night Song............................................................................ 317
Fig. 12. Rachmaninoff, Disney, Horowitz............................................................... 318
Fig. 13. Urlaub in Hollywood..................................................................................... 319
Fig. 14. Caricature of Leo Ditrichstein........................................................................ 320
Fig. 15. Peanuts cartoon strip....................................................................................... 321
Fig. 16. Romantic Piano and Cocktail Time: After Dark Piano Favorites............... 322
Fig. 17. Only Trust Your Heart advertisement............................................................. 323
Fig. 18. Annan’s “Symphony of Love” piano p in .......................................................324
Fig. 19. Windham Hill catalog...................................................................................... 325
Fig. 20. Li 'I Abner cartoon strip fram e........................................................................ 326
Fig. 21. Hae-Jung Kim recital advertisement.............................................................. 327
Fig. 22. Publicity poster: Romanze in M oll.................................................................. 328
Fig. 23. Van Heflin and Joan Crawford in Possessed................................................. 329
Fig. 24. Arthur Schnitzler’s Fraulein E lse................................................................... 330
Fig. 25. Horowitz on Television.................................................................................... 331
vi
Fig. 26. “O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst” by Franz L iszt......................................332
Fig. 27. Song without E n d ......................................................................................... 333
Fig. 28. “Song without End” sheet m usic.................................................................334
Fig. 29. Double Franz Liszts..................................................................................... 335
Fig. 30. Publicity photo: Fruhlingslied......................................................................336
Fig. 31. Publicity poster: Ungarische Rhapsodie...................................................... 337
Fig. 32. “My Consolation” sheet m usic......................................................................338
Fig. 33. Publicity poster: Das Konzert........................................................................339
Fig. 34. Caricature of Franz L iszt............................................................................... 340
Fig. 35. “Delphine” sheet m usic................................................................................. 341
Fig. 36. Photo of Franz Liszt with his students..........................................................342
Fig. 37. Paul Horbiger, Louis Rainer, and Karin Hardt in Der Kraft-Mayr.............343
vii
Fig. 38. Publicity brochure: Liebestraume.................................................................. 344
Fig. 39. Article on Erwin Nyiregyhazi..................................................................... 345
Fig. 40. Jose Iturbi in Anchors Aweigh.....................................................................346
Fig. 41. John Garfield, Oscar Levant, and Joan Crawford in Humoresque........... 347
Fig. 42. Cartoon illustration in Neue Zeitschrift fiir M usik..................................... 348
Fig. 43. Publicity poster: The Piano......................................................................... 349
Fig. 44. Postcard of piano-girl playing “Songs without Words” .............................. 350
Fig. 45. One Hot M inute.............................................................................................. 351
Fig. 46. Cornel Wilde and Jeanne Crain in Leave Her to H eaven..........................352
Fig. 47. Natassja Kinski in Friihlingssinfonie (Spring Symphony).........................353
Fig. 48. Cartoon illustration in Jugend...................................................................... 354
Fig. 49. Cartoon parody of Schiller’s “Laura am Klavier” in Jugend ..................... 355
Fig. 50. Tabu perfume advertisement........................................................................ 356
viii
Fig. 51. Publicity poster: Die Kreutzersonate.............................................................357
Fig. 52. Elisabeth Bergner in Dreaming U p s .............................................................358
Fig. 53. Ingrid Bergman and Leslie Howard in Intermezzo...................................... 359
Fig. 54. “Widmung” by Robert Schumann................................................................ 360
Fig. 55. Schumann-Liszt “Widmung” ........................................................................ 361
Fig. 56. Clara Schumann’s transcription of “Widmung” .......................................... 362
Fig. 57. Chopin-Godowsky “badinage” ..................................................................... 363
Fig. 58. Schubert-Godowsky “Wohin?” .................................................................... 364
Fig. 59. Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B-flat minor.............................................365
Fig. 60. Mary Astor and Bette Davis in The Great L ie ............................................ 366
Fig. 61. “Concerto for Two” sheet m usic.................................................................. 367
Fig. 62. Simone Signoret in Ombre et lum iere..........................................................368
Fig. 63. “Concerto” by Borden Chase....................................................................... 369
ix
Fig. 64. “Darling I Love You” sheet m usic............................................................370
Fig. 65. Brief Encounter dialogue over Rachmaninoff..........................................371
Fig. 66. John Ericson and Elizabeth Taylor in Rhapsody ..................................... 372
Fig. 67. Anna Damann and O. E. Hasse in Gefahrtin meines Sommers............... 373
Fig. 68. Publicity poster: Love S tory.......................................................................374
Fig. 69. Publicity poster: Night So n g ......................................................................375
Fig. 70. “Star of Love” sheet m usic........................................................................376
Fig. 71. Victorian Jewelry Box advertisement...................................................... 377
Fig. 72. “Desir” by Aleksander Scriabin............................................................... 378
Fig. 73. Peanuts cartoon strip fram e.....................................................................379
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation (and the very idea o f it) would never have come together
without the direction and support of my doctoral committee at the University of
California, San Diego: co-chair Jann Pasler, co-chair Aleck Karis, George Lipsitz,
Alain J.-J. Cohen, Steven Schick, and (early on in the process) William Fitzgerald.
Much gratitude is also due to other scholars who have provided valuable critiques and
opportunities, among them Philip Brett, Mitchell Morris, James Parakilas, Chip
Whitesell, and Fred Maus. Thanks as well to many friends, colleagues, and
acquaintances for their thoughts and assistance along the way, especially Arun
Bharali, Joachim Pfeiffer, Charlotte Eyerman, Sarah Cahill, Marienne Uszler, David
Burge, Peter Rosen, Maximiliaan Rutten, Peter Gimpel, Leonard Pennario, and the
editors of the ECHO on-line musicology journal.
The financial and scholarly support of the following organizations enabled a
substantial portion of my research and writing: the AMS 50 Fellowship program of the
American Musicological Society, the Federal Chancellor Scholarship program of the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, the DA AD (German Academic
Exchange Service), and the UCSD Center for the Humanities.
Throughout the entire process of researching and writing Robert Tobin has
provided wonderful inspiration and encouragement, so this work is dedicated to him.
xi
CURRICULUM VITAE
EDUCATION
2002 PhD in Music (Critical Studies and Experimental Practices),

1995 Master of Arts in Music (Piano Performance),

1989 1990 Studies at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, Hungary
1989 Bachelor of Arts in Music (Piano Performance),

Eastman School of Music and University of Rochester
1987 1988 Studies at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna, Austria
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
2001 2002 Lecturer in Music History, University of South Carolina
2000 2001 Instructor, Music Department, University of California, San Diego
1998 2001 Instructor, Muir College Writing Program, UC San Diego
1998 Instructor, Extension Program, UC San Diego
1997 Instructor, Summer Session, UC San Diego
1993 1996 Teaching Assistant, Music Department, UC San Diego
GRANTS AND AWARDS
2000 AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship, American Musicological Society
1999 - 2000 German Chancellor Scholarship, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
1998 - 1999 Dissertation Research Grant, UCSD Center for the Humanities
1997 Pre-Doctoral Research Grant, German Academic Exchange Service
1989 - 1990 Fulbright Scholarship for music study in Hungary
1988 - 1989 ‘Take Five” Award (tuition-free fifth year), University of Rochester
PUBLICATIONS
“Transcription, Transgression, and the (Pro)creative Urge.” Queer Episodes in Music

and Modem Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell. University of Dlinois
Press, 2002.
Research Consultant / Co-Writer, Hollywood Loves the Piano (documentary film).

Peter Rosen Productions. Broadcast on ARD, Germany (19 October 2000).
“Concerto con amore: ‘Relationship’ and the Soundtrack Piano Concerto.” ECHO:
An On-line Journal vol. 2, no. I (Spring 2000). <http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo>
“Hollywood’s Embattled Icon.” Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the
Piano, ed. James Parakilas. Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 328-357.
“Piano and Nation in Karl Hartl’s Der Engel mit der Posaune.” Modem Austrian
Literature, vol. 32, no. 3 (December 1999), pp. 314-322.
Entries on Victor Borge, Hoagy Carmichael, Ferrante & Teicher, Liberace, and Freddy
Martin. The St. James Encyclopedia o f Popular Culture, ed. Tom Pendergast and Sara
Pendergast. St. James Press, 1999, vol. I, pp. 320-321, 436-437; vol. U, p. 88; vol. m ,
pp. 155-157, 281-282.
xiii
“Idol Leaps,” review o f Kevin Kopelson’s The Queer Afterlife o f Vaslav Nijinsky.
LGSN: Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter o f the Modem Language Association vol.
25, no. 3 (Fall 1998), pp. 21-22.
“Seeing is Hearing,” review o f Classique en images 1998: Les grands pianistes du

XXe siecle (film series at the Louvre). American Record Guide (May-June 1998), pp.
11-13.
“Great Pianists on Film,” review of Classique en images 1998: Les grands pianistes du
XXe sidcle (film series at the Louvre). Piano & Keyboard (May-June 1998), pp. 21-
23.
Review of John Gill’s Queer Noises. Journal o f the History o f Sexuality vol. 7, no. 1
(July 1996), pp. 137-139.
PRESENTATIONS
“Bahr’s Konzert: Towards an Iconography of the ‘Romantic’ Pianist in Hollywood

Films,” Susan Porter Memorial Symposium: Hollywood Musicals and Music in
Hollywood, University of Colorado at Boulder, August 2001.
“On the Borders of Camp: Transgender Pop Stars in Germany, Turkey, and Israel,”
Toronto 2000: Musical Intersections conference, special session: AMS Gay & Lesbian
Study Group, November 2000.
“ ‘Killing Me Softly’ (Un)Covered: Sexual/Textual Violations,” Toronto 2000:

Musical Intersections conference, program division: Int’l Association for the Study of
Popular Music, November 2000.
Interview on National Public Radio’s Performance Today program with host Lynn
Neary, about the Piano Roles chapter “Hollywood’s Embattled Icon,” broadcast
March 16, 2000.
xiv
“The Piano as an Emotive Technology,” Musik im Spiegel ihrer technologischen
Entwicklung: 14. Internationales Studentisches Symposium, University of Luneburg,
October 1999.
“Soundtracks of Seduction: Piano Music as Cinematic Signifier,” College Music

Society national conference, San Juan P.R., October 1998.
“Eurovision: The Politics of Kitsch,” Int’l Association for the Study of Popular Music
national conference, University of California, Los Angeles, October 1998.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
Program Committee for Feminist Theory & Music VI conference, Boise State
University, July 2001.
Co-Editor, Newsletter o f the Gay & Lesbian Study Group o f the American
Musicological Society, 1998 - 2002.
RECORDINGS and MAJOR PERFORMANCES as pianist
2000 “Zwischen zwei Sprachen,” with dancer Karen Mozingo (Cologne, Germany)
1997 Afazim by Chaya Czemowin (1996), with SONOR ensemble, CD (Mode)
1996 Ballet mecanique by George Antheil, with “red fish blue fish” ensemble,
Bang On A Can Festival (Lincoln Center, New York)
1996 Regan by Arun Bharali (1995), with SONOR ensemble,

Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series (Los Angeles)
xv
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Dreams of Love:
Mythologies of the “Romantic” Pianist in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture
by
Ivan Raykoff
Doctor of Philosophy in Music
University of California, San Diego 2002
Professor Jann Pasler, Co-Chair
Professor Aleck Karis, Co-Chair
The concert pianist does not only perform a musical role in cultural life o f the
past two centuries. Through established rituals and familiar representations of music
practicing, performing, and listening, the pianist has also become an iconic figure both
on the concert stage and in the popular imagination. Such representations function
within a larger system of cultural meanings, or mythologies, linking music to aspects
of gender, social relationships, and the politics of the body.
This dissertation examines how and why representations of the nineteenth-
century Romantic pianist (Chopin and Liszt in particular) perpetuate a mythology of
xvi
the seductive, eroticized virtuoso-lover throughout twentieth-century popular culture.
Here romantic is intended both as the label for a historical musical era, and in the
more colloquial sense referring to love, desire, and sensual feeling. Through this two
fold interpretive approach, historical context and popular mythology can be read
alongside one another to reveal a powerful and persistent process of music’s cultural
mediation. The dissertation analyzes representations of the pianist in an
interdisciplinary context (including films, literature, reviews, recordings, popular
songs, and advertisements) to investigate how these popular Liebestraume (dreams of
love) have evolved since the nineteenth century, and how they still function as a social
pedagogy of desire for performers and audiences today.
xvii
I. FOREPLAY
“The handsome, brooding and forgetful composer, it seems, thought of

her as no more than a brief and romantic moment musical, but to this
child o f love he was a full five-movement Hungarian rhapsodie,
complete with violins, brasses, and tinkling czymbaloms.” —Review of
Letter from an Unknown Woman, Cue magazine (May 1, 1948).
There is, and has long been, something sexy about pianists and the music they
play. Certain stories and personalities associated with the instrument stimulate our
imagination, certain sounds from the instrument excite our emotions, certain sights of
it getting played hold our gaze and make us want to see and hear more. These
attractions are part of a long tradition of meanings or signification around the piano,
involving the people who play it, the ways they play it, the music they play on it—and
involving as well those who watch and listen to the whole affair. The nineteenth-
century Romantic virtuoso has long been associated with spectacle and desire; today’s
“classical” pianist still commands our attention through the emotional and even
physical sensations conveyed in his or her performance.
This tradition of piano playing, watching, and listening can be traced back to
the early part of the nineteenth century. In one of his music reviews from the 1830s,
Robert Schumann describes a fanciful scene in which piano music and story-telling
accomplish a romantic seduction. Dancing together at an elegant society ball, the
2
narrator Florestan and his partner, Beda, become “ever more deeply enveloped by the
dark flood of Chopin’s body-and-soul-inspiring waltz.” Florestan begins to reminisce
about Chopin, “a gallant robber of hearts,” which causes a sudden spark of interest
from Beda (a character based on Clara Wieck, Schumann’s love interest at the time,
and later his wife). She asks, “You know him? Have you heard him?”
And then I told her what an unforgettable sight it was to see him sitting
at the piano like a dreaming visionary, and how, as he played, one
seemed to become identified with the dream he created, and how it was
his irredeemable habit, at the end of each piece, to run a finger from
one end of the keyboard to the other in a whistling glissando, as if to
tear himself out of his own spell, and how he had to protect his delicate
health, and so forth. She pressed herself ever more closely to me out of
anxiety and pleasure, and wanted to know more and more about him.1
In Schumann’s scenario, as in an 1880 painting of Chopin at the piano by Henryk
Siemiradzki2 (fig. 1), a memory of the Romantic pianist inspires an evocative
representation. In both examples, the figure of Chopin becomes a dream-like
reminiscence that casts its spell far beyond the pianist’s once-upon-a-time playing.
By 1837, the year Schumann’s review was first published, Fryderyk Chopin
(1810-1849) was already becoming a mythic figure in the popular imagination. He
was beginning his fabled romance with George Sand, which lasted nearly a decade,
and he was also beginning to show the first symptoms of tuberculosis, the disease
which eventually claimed his life. Schumann’s scenario makes reference to these
3
familiar associations—Chopin’s romantic allure and his “delicate health”—as it
conjures up the imagined idol.
But Chopin remains imagined: an absent, phantom figure represented second
hand through Florestan’s description and through the vague associations of popular
legend. Chopin’s music is also reproduced second-hand: not by Chopin himself, but
by another pianist playing at the ball. These aspects o f displacement through
representation and reproduction establish a gap, or distance, between the pianist and
the music-lover, and they provoke a degree of longing for the “real” Chopin and his
playing.
Schumann captures this sense of longing or desire as Beda begs to know “more
and more” about Chopin. She even clutches to her breast a sketch she once drew of
Chopin without ever having actually seen him. (Siemiradzki also never saw Chopin
perform, having been only six years old when the celebrated pianist died in Paris.)
Indeed, Beda’s interest in the elusive Chopin seems less musical than sensual, even
voyeuristic. She wants to imagine in her own mind a fantasy of the “dreaming” pianist
and to feel his musical “spell” with her own body. Beda falls in love with a reproduced
dream-image of Chopin, while lucky Florestan stands in for the absent virtuoso and
gains her embrace. (Of course, this is all Schumann’s own fantasy, with Florestan as
Schumann’s alter-ego and the fictional mediator of his dream of Chopin.)
4
Throughout the twentieth century, the figure of the Romantic pianist—whether
“real” or represented second-hand—has continued to sway the imagination and
emotions o f the music Lover. One hundred years after Schumann’s review, Max
Ophuls presented another vision of the spell-binding pianist through story-telling and
music in the 1948 Hollywood film Letter from an Unknown Woman. Ophuls’s film
similarly engages the interplay of visual fantasy and nostalgic memory described in
Schumann’s scenario, but adds “real” music (by another idolized pianist, Franz Liszt)
to the dream.
In this story, Lisa Bemdle (played by Joan Fontaine) recounts her life-long
infatuation with the handsome but dissolute Viennese concert pianist Stefan Brand
(Louis Jourdan), another “gallant robber of hearts.” Lisa recalls how, as a teenager,
she would listen enchanted to Stefan’s practicing from the courtyard below his
apartment, or secretly eavesdrop through the transom over his apartment door. Like
Florestan, Lisa serves as a first-person narrator in this reminiscence of the pianist,
having once heard Stefan play and now telling the viewer-listener “more and more
about him.”3
But Lisa is also another Beda, under the spell of the pianist herself. Like Beda,
Lisa’s encounter with the pianist is at first mediated, not direct: she hears his music
but has never actually seen him playing. “I didn’t see you that day, or for many days
thereafter,” Lisa explains in the film’s voice-over, “but I could listen to your playing.”
Instead, Ophuls directs the cinematic camera to convey the images o f Lisa’s fetishistic
desire to the film viewer.4 As Stefan practices Liszt’s concert etude “Un sospiro,” the
viewer is privileged with intimate sights of his body in the act of making music. We
first see an extreme close-up of Stefan’s fingers on the keys, then a frontal view of
Stefan from the far side of the piano under the raised lid. Finally there is another close-
up on his hands, but this time from below, as if one were crouching next to the piano
bench. In the visual and aural psychology of Ophuls’s film, these camera angles and
soundtrack music serve as an extension of Lisa’s desiring eyes and ears, enabling the
viewer-listener to identify with her desire for Stefan and to participate in her figurative
subjugation under the spell of his playing.s
THREE MODES OF MEDIATION
In both Schumann’s and Ophuls’ scenarios, the relationship between music-
lover and idolized Romantic pianist is one of distance and displacement. In turn, a
mediating agent or apparatus bridges this distance. Schumann/Florestan conveys the
image and sound of Chopin’s playing through anecdotal description to inspire the
imagination of both the fictional Beda and the actual reader. Ophuls’s cinematic
6
technologies of image- and sound-track mediate Stefan Brand, the virtuoso-lover, for
both Lisa (the “unknown woman” narrating the story) and the “unknown” public
viewer (anyone watching and listening to the film). Thus Beda, Lisa, and the viewer-
listener-reader come to occupy a similar position as fantasizing and desiring subjects,
reliant on certain processes of mediation to encounter the Romantic pianist (fig. 2).
These relationships operate in terms of three different modes of mediation:
memory, identity, and technology. First, in each case the “dream” of the pianist is a
function o f m e m o r y , by which real experience is transformed into nostalgic
reminiscence. Schumann’s anecdote recalls a past encounter with Chopin for the
inquisitive Beda. Ophuls’s film sets up a flashback narrative structure in which Lisa
recounts her story for both Stefan and the inquisitive film-viewer. “By the time you
read this letter I may be dead” is Lisa’s first spoken line in the film, a statement which
establishes a time-frame of melodramatic present and nostalgic past. Her statement
also addresses both “you,” Stefan, reading her fateful letter in the story’s past, as well
as “you,” the film viewer, who can also see the letter’s shaky handwriting on the
screen in the present. Like Florestan, Lisa remembers so that the viewer-listener can
encounter the Romantic pianist of the past in the present. Indeed, this memory-object
seems remarkably persistent from 1837 to 1948, and even to the present moment for
anyone watching the film. “He’s old, quite old,” Lisa tells a friend who wonders about
7
Mr. Brand’s age.
Second, both the Schumann and Ophuls examples demonstrate a process of
identification by which the mediator not only relates the pianist to the dreamer, but
also becomes the pianist’s “real-life” representative. Florestan tells Beda that he
“identified with” Chopin’s dream by observing and listening to Chopin’s playing, thus
Beda can find in him a personification of the distant and unattainable object. Similarly,
Stefan Brand is accessible to us only through the medium of Ophuls’s film— not,
incidentally, through the original novella by Stefan Zweig, in which the male
protagonist is a celebrated novelist.6 In the film it is actor Louis Jourdan who identifies
with the Romantic pianist in playing the part of Stefan Brand, one of many roles that
secured Jourdan’s status as a leading romantic male star in 1950s Hollywood.7
A third point o f comparison concerns the role of a mediating technology in
these representations. Here technology refers to a range of means or practices
(including the technique of playing and “practicing” an instrument) and their
deployment as modes of musical production and reception. In each of the literary,
artistic, and cinematic examples mentioned so far, a mediating agent between pianist
and dreamer performs a technological role in conveying the sights, sounds, and/or
story of the fantasy. This mediation works through language (Schumann’s writing,
Lisa’s narration), image (Siemiradzki’s painting, Ophuls’s cinematography), and
8
music (Liszt’s “Un sospiro,” Jakob Gimpel’s soundtrack recordings for the film).
Schumann writes his own literary account o f Chopin’s playing, conveying through
words the sights and sounds of Chopin’s performance. Howard Koch’s screenplay is
Lisa’s “letter” read aloud to us. Letter's soundtrack tells us that Lisa hears the Liszt
etude Stefan plays, allowing us to hear that music, too. The camera shows us what
Lisa at first cannot see (Stefan’s body, his hands on the keys), further establishing her
sensory and sensual desires as our own.
Perhaps today’s concert pianist engages similar processes of mediation as a
“real-life” representation and reproduction of the nineteenth-century virtuoso. Still
today, a typical performance involves a grand piano placed on stage perpendicular to
the audience (as Jan Ladislav Dussek first did in the 1790s). The pianist still performs
alone in the solo “recital,” a format initiated by Franz Liszt in 1839 as a means to
communicate “musical soliloquies” to the viewer-listener.8 Since the mid-nineteenth
century, performance ritual stipulates that the pianist play standard repertoire from
memory, perhaps as a means to identify more closely with the music on an intellectual
and psychological level. The well-trained pianist even assumes a technological role in
providing an accurate and “authentic” interpretation of the music at hand.9 Ideally the
pianist has learned those notes from a carefully-edited Urtext score, another instance
of the music’s representation and reproduction.
9
While these traditions and ideals have their most familiar context in the concert
hall and the music conservatory, they function even more extensively and effectively
in the wider social and artistic realm called popular culture. There the Romantic
pianist’s performance achieves its most potent and enduring spell through the
workings of mythology and ideology.
A “POPULAR” DREAM
It may seem peculiar to compare Schumann’s nineteenth-century music review
with Ophuls’s twentieth-century film as manifestations of the same phenomenon, the
dream of the Romantic pianist. Not only is there an intervening century of musical and
cultural history between the two productions, they also demonstrate very different
creative motivations, means of circulation, and contexts of reception. A categorization
which would typically differentiate these two artifacts is the conventional hierarchy of
high versus low art, or serious versus popular culture.
In this perspective, Schumann’s review represents “high” tradition because it is
original, historical, literary, European, etc. The review reflects the attitudes of
Schumann’s circle of musical and artistic Davidsbiindler (League of David), a group
of early nineteenth-century cultural critics fighting “Philistine” practices in music
10
criticism and bourgeois tastes in musical culture (particularly the fad of the Parisian
piano virtuosi, who were then taking Europe by storm). Furthermore, it was written by
a respected canonical figure of Western concert music whose contributions to both
composition and criticism have had a significant impact on subsequent historical
developments.
Letter from an Unknown Woman, on the other hand, might be considered a
passing popular entertainment of its day, one of many films from a Hollywood studio
(Universal) known for melodramas and horror movies during the late 1940s. In this
perspective, the film is commercial and derivative, a mass-market American
production based on a best-selling novella by a middle-brow European writer.10But an
easy assessment of Letter from an Unknown Woman as “low” culture faces a number
of contradictions. Though its production involved a cast, crew, and story of established
popular reputations,11 the film proved to be rather unpopular among critics and general
audiences upon its initial release.12 Universal Studios marketed the film poorly,
assuming it was too “foreign” to appeal to American audiences.13 Revived by British
critics in the 1950s, Letter from an Unknown Woman has subsequently risen in critical
estimation to become an acknowledged cinematic classic. The film has generated
significant academic scholarship, including a volume devoted to its different scripts,
production history, and critical reception.14 In 1992 it was included in the prestigious
11
National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
If Ophuls’s film qualifies as twentieth-century popular culture, Schumann’s
review is a nineteenth-century production which can also be considered a popular-
culture artifact. The Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik (a renowned music journal still
published today) began its circulation history in 1834, during an era of burgeoning
professional and amateur musical activity and growing musical literacy in Europe. At
a time when institutions of public performance, commercial music publishing, and
music education were being established, the NZfM and other music journals helped to
shape the tastes and attitudes of an expanding middle-class populace.
Music historians have asserted the influence of a general audience on
Schumann’s style of criticism. Ronald Taylor argues that Schumann had a “didactic
purpose” in writing for the “untutored public.”15 Percy Young asserts that Schumann
“domesticated music so that its practices and discussion became a familiar middle-
class habit.”16 Schumann’s literary manner of representing Chopin in this particular
review may demonstrate an awareness of his popular audience, that is, the amateur
musician-reader more accessible through “poetic” description than through technical
or stylistic details about the music itself. Henry Pleasants calls this review “one of
Schumann’s most imaginative literary productions,” while Martin Kreisig notes that
“even among Schumann’s many fantastically-dressed reviews this one is one of the
12
strangest, a kind of novella.”17
Schumann himself suggested one motivation for writing in such a manner in
another review. Raro (like Florestan, another of Schumann’s self-representations)
praises Florestan for frequently providing an “image” instead of a critical evaluation,
since “understanding is more easily achieved through poetic or metaphoric description
than through musical jargon, which remains incomprehensible to the uneducated.”18
Leon Plantinga, citing G. Noren-Herzberg, considers the social context of Schumann’s
writing when he notes that during this era in Germany even post office clerks and
accountants were literary buffs and amateur writers. “In such a milieu Schumann’s
early style of criticism would find a friendly reception. ... [He] wrote this way
deliberately because he thought this kind of criticism would be effective.”19
Since their initial publication, many of Schumann’s reviews have become
familiar classics of nineteenth-century music criticism. Plantinga admits that “excerpts
from his criticism are used ... much more commonly on record jackets and in program
notes. As a result, many people have a faint familiarity with Schumann’s writings.”
Plantinga also expresses some surprise that “things he said have become common
knowledge without ever having been specialized knowledge.”20 The particular review
discussed above has achieved a significant popular currency through numerous
English-language translations and re-publications over the decades. Fanny Raymond
13
Ritter’s translation o f Schumann’s writings was first published in the 1870s, with at
least eight subsequent editions through the 1900s (as well as a 1972 reprinting); Paui
Rosenfeld’s translation was published in 1946, with a second edition in 1952; Henry
Pleasant’s version was published in 1965, and again in 1988 in the popular Dover
reprint series.21
Whatever Schumann’s original motivations or intended audience, his evocative
depiction of Chopin now belongs to a persistent legacy of popular representations of
the Romantic pianist. This tradition of representation has produced an endlessly-
reproduced collection o f narratives and images of this figure since the nineteenth
century. In Music and Manners in France and Germany, first published in 1841 (and
reprinted in 1984), Henry F. Chorley echoes Schumann’s dream-memory of Chopin
when he describes “the delicate and plaintive and spiritual seductions of Chopin, who
sweeps the keys with so insinuating and gossamer a touch.”22 The same line is quoted
by Henry C. Lahee in his book Famous Pianists o f To-day and Yesterday, published in
1900 and reprinted through 1920.
Lahee also makes a nod to the story of Chopin’s delicate health—“Frederick
was a frail and delicate child, quiet and thoughtful, with a sweet disposition”—and
adds a reference to Chopin’s aristocratic associations: “At college he made many
friends amongst the nobility, and thus gained the position in society which he ever
14
afterward retained, and for which his gentle nature fitted him. In fact the name of
Chopin is always connected with the idea of refinement.”23 Arthur Loesser includes
his own Schumann-like dream o f the romantic, aristocratic Chopin in his landmark
social history of the piano, Men, Women, and Pianos, first published in 1954 (and
reprinted in 1990): “Chopin was the incomparable poet of the piano, the explorer of its
most secret, delicious places; it is pleasant to think that his fashionable clients kept
him in white gloves, in a manservant and a carriage, in flowers for his apartment, and
in trips for and against his health, for the remainder of his short life.”24
Taken together, Chorley’s, Lahee’s, and Loesser’s fanciful descriptions of
Chopin belong to a larger context of representations which can be considered popular
mythology. Here “mythology” embraces its usual meaning—as a tradition of fictitious
legends or allegorical stories embodying shared cultural beliefs—as well as the
applications theorized by Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957, English trans. 1972).
In Barthes’s terms, myth is a system of communication, a process of signification, and
an understanding of meaning as semiotic discourse: “Myth is not defined by the object
of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message.”25 Literary or visual
representations, photography and cinema, even gesture and ritual in musical
performance can serve as the means, or technologies, of mythic discourse.
Such processes of representation transform “history into nature” by “giving a
15
historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal,”
Barthes writes. “Myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it,
things lose the memory that they once were made.” The elusive primary materials of
history (Chopin’s music, appearance, personality, performance manner, and so forth)
are re-presented second-hand by performers, scholars, writers, biographers, publishers,
artists, and other creative interpreters. These once-removed representations gradually
coalesce into patterns which take on the appearance of “the way things were” through
the naturalizing process of myth in conjunction with a determining ideology of
meaning. Ultimately, Barthes asserts, “all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this
beautiful object without wondering where it comes from. Or even better: it can only
come from eternity.”26 Indeed, the mythology of the Romantic pianist has gained a
timeless, immutable quality through its persistent repetitions as a popular-culture
representation.
BREAKING THE SPELL
One final detail occurs in both Schumann’s and Ophuls’s depictions of the
Romantic pianist: a sudden interruption of that musical dream. In Schumann’s
account, Chopin “tear[s] himself out of his own spell” with a glissando across the
16
keys. In Letter from an Unknown Woman, Stefan stops practicing midway through the
£tude and slams the lid down in frustration. But these interruptions only excite further
desire. When Lisa hears the lid slam, she runs to the front of the building out of
“anxiety and pleasure,” and there she finally wins her first glimpse of the pianist as he
steps outside. Just as Lisa had previously looked up at Stefan’s window from the
courtyard below, her gaze is now mediated and even confined by the glass panes of
the door which she opens for him.
Ophuls’s mise-en-scene provides an evocative metaphor for the dynamics of
desire associated with the Romantic pianist. This figure still remains an unreachable
object— heard from a distance, and now finally also seen, but through an intervening
window that signifies distance and displacement as well as certain predetermined
perspectives of desire.
This dissertation considers some of the “windows” through which we
comprehend the Romantic pianist as a twentieth-century cultural phenomenon, and
questions how and why these rituals and representations perpetuate certain constructs
of desire. Here romantic is intended both as the label for a historical musical era and in
the more colloquial sense referring to love, desire, and sensual feeling. Through this
two-fold interpretive approach, historical context and popular mythology can be read
alongside one another to reveal a powerful and persistent process of music’s cultural
17
mediation. Representations of the pianist and piano music in an interdisciplinary
context (including films, literature, reviews, recordings, popular songs, and
advertisements) can reveal bow these popular Liebestraume have evolved from the
nineteenth century into the twentieth century (fig. 3), and how they still function as a
social pedagogy of desire for performers and audiences today.
The concert pianist does not only perform a musical role in cultural life of the
past two centuries. Over a half-century since Stefan Brand played, and over a century-
and-a-half since Chopin and Liszt played, the Romantic pianist remains a vibrant and
alluring fantasy-figure. The combination of piano music and nostalgic narrative still
accomplishes a “Romantic” seduction in the popular imagination. Most recently, Mark
Mitchell acknowledges these associations in the title of his book Virtuosi: A Defense
and a (Sometime Erotic) Celebration o f Great Pianists (2000). Through his personal
reminiscences on famous pianists’ playing, and through his attachment to another
popular musical technology, recordings of the great pianists, Mitchell belongs to an
enduring tradition that celebrates the seductive “dream” of the Romantic pianist and
“the spirit of virtuosity itself: adrenaline, perversity, nostalgia, the personal and the
expressive, and above all, a pervasive love.”27
Why is the Romantic pianist still a persistent cultural dream, and why is this
dream so often about love?
18
1 My translation of a passage from Schumann’s “Bericht an Jeanquirit in Augsburg iiber den letzten
kunsthistorischen Ball beim Redakteur,” in Gesammelte Schrifien iiber Musik und Musiker, ed. Martin
Kreisig (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1914, reprt. 1969): I: 257-258. The “body-and-soul-inspiring”
waltz to which Schumann refers is Chopin’s “Grande valse brilliante” in E-flat major, op. 18.
Polish academician Henryk Siemiradzki (1843-1902) settled in Rome, where his famed studio was
visited by royalty and leading Polish figures including the pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski.
3 The plot of Letter from an Unknown Woman bears a striking similarity to a case mentioned by
Sigmund Freud in Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality (1908): “thinking quickly
what she had been crying about, she realized the existence of a phantasy in her mind that a pianist well-
known in the town (but not personally acquainted with her) had entered into an intimate relationship
with her, that she had had a child by him (she was childless), and that he had deserted her and her child
and left them in misery. It was at this point of her romance that she burst into tears.” Sigmund Freud,
Collected Papers, vol. 2, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Bantam Books, 1959): 52-53.
4 Ophuls depicts Lisa’s voyeuristic fascination with Stefan Brand in numerous scenes. Early in the film,
Lisa peers with wide-eyed curiosity into the moving van delivering Stefan’s belongings to his new
apartment. She gazes in amazement at his musical instruments and expensive belongings. Later in the
story, Lisa steals a concert program so that she can look at Stefan’s photograph on the cover. She
watches Stefan bring home female admirers from the window of her room. She sneaks into his
apartment one day to look at his possessions, his piano, and his music scores. When her family travels
to Linz, Lisa slips away unnoticed and runs back to the apartment: “All I wanted was to see you once
more!” Years later she meets Stefan again at the Vienna opera (“Somewhere out there were your eyes,
and I knew that I couldn’t escape them. It was like the first time I saw you”), but he fails to recognize
her—the story’s ultimate irony.
5 Edward Branigan and George M. Wilson analyze the cinematography of Letter from an Unknown
Woman in terms of Lisa’s (and the camera’s) fetishization of Stefan’s body at the piano and her
voyeuristic attraction to his playing. Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York:
Routledge, 1992): 182-191. George M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point o f View
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986): 103-125.
6 Ophuls’s film Letter from an Unknown Woman is based on an adaptation of Zweig’s 1922 novella of
the same title, “Brief einer Unbekannten.” The screenplay adaptation by Howard Koch alters a number
of significant details in the story, including Brand’s profession.
7 Jourdan embodied the tall, dark, handsome. Continental lover-type, from his first Hollywood
appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947), in Letter from an Unknown Woman the
following year, and in subsequent films. He played another Romantic virtuoso-pianist role in Julie
(1956).
8 Richard Leppert, “Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt,” Piano Roles:
Three Hundred Years o f Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1999): 254.
9 As Carolyn Abbate notes, “Our sense for performance as mechanism is paradoxically most keen when
something—a memory lapse, perhaps— goes awry in a solo instrumental performance. One might
assume that the failure marks the performer’s liberation from the instructions that control him, yet in
practice it simply reinforces his mechanical status. We all remember concerts in which the pianist stops,
unable to continue. He seems blank, at a loss. He does not improvise. Instead, he retries this or that
19
passage in an attempt to reenter the piece, until he locates some node in his unspooling movements
where the mechanism can be reengaged. We are left with the strong feeling that a machine has given a
few coughs before moving on." Carolyn Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” Journal o f the American
Musicological Society 52/3 (1999): 480.
10 Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was one of the most widely read and translated German-
language authors during the 1920s and 30s. His novella “B rief ciner Unbekannten” became an
international success upon its publication in Amok, Novellum einer Leidenschaft (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag,
1922), with editions o f 150,000 in the first eight years. In 1931 it was translated into English by Eden
and Cedar Paul (New York: Viking), again in numerous subsequent editions.
11Actress Joan Fontaine had won an Academy Award in 1941 for Suspicion. In the successful 1943 film
The Constant Nymph she had played a “romantic ingdnue” role similar to that of Lisa in Letter from an
Unknown Woman. Screenwriter Howard Koch had won an Academy Award in 1943 for his Casablanca
script. Director Max Ophuls had previously established an international reputation with his German
film Liebelei (1932).
12 Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review (April 29, 1948) is typical of the negative reactions to the
film. Crowther called the film “pseudo-Viennese ‘schmaltz,’” and ridiculed it as a typical “old-
fashioned tear-jerker” exhibiting “all the accessories of that brand of moist-handkerchief romance,
including sad music played on violins and the death of an illegitimate child.”
13 Howard Koch, “Script to Screen with Max Ophuls,” Film Comment 6/4 (Winter, 1970-71): 40-43.
14 Letter from an Unknown Woman, ed. Virginia Wright Wexman, in the Rutgers Films in Print series
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986). Includes a selected bibliography of secondary
literature, pp. 269-271.
15 Ronald Taylor, Robert Schumann: His Life and Work (London: Granada, 1982): 101-102.
16 Percy M. Young, Tragic Muse: The Life and Works of Robert Schumann (London: Dennis Dobson,
1957, 1961): 55.
17 The Musical World o f Robert Schumann: A Selection from H is Own Writings, ed. Henry Pleasants
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965): 133, n l. Gesammelte Schriften iiber Musik und Musiker, ed.
Martin Kreisig, II: 406, n274.
18 My translation. Gesammelte Schriften iiber Musik und Musiker, II: 263. John Daverio discusses this
passage (translating Kunstsprachausdrucke as “technical-artistic expression”) in Robert Schumann:
Herald o f a “New Poetic Age, ” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 126-127.
19 Leon B. Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967): 71. G. Noren-
Herzberg, “Robert Schumann als Musikschriftsteller,” Die Musik 5/4 (1906): 104.
20 Plantinga, xi-xii.
21 Music and Musicians, Essays and Criticisms by Robert Schumann, First Series, trans. and ed. Fanny
Raymond Ritter (New York: E. Schuberth; London: William Reeves, 1876-1880; reprt. Freeport, NY:
Books for Libraries Press, 1972): 102-110. Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, trans. Paul
Rosenfeld, ed. Konrad Wolf (New York: Pantheon, 1946): 133-136. The Musical World o f Robert
Schumann: A Selection from His Own Writings, trans. and ed. Henry Pleasants (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1965): 128-133; reprinted as Schumann on Music: A Selection from the Writings (New York:
Dover Publications, 1988).
22 Henry Fothergill Chorley, Music and Manners in France and Germany: A Series o f Travelling
Sketches o f Art and Society (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1841; rpt. New York:
Da Capo Press, 1984).
20
23 Henry C. Lahee, Famous Pianists o f To-day and Yesterday (Boston: L. C. Page, 1900): 80-81.
24 Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954;
rpt. 1990): 381.
25 Roland Barthes. Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972): 109.
26 Barthes, 130, 142,151.
27 Mark Mitchell, Virtuosi: A Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration o f Great Pianists
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000): xi.
n . THE DYNAMICS OF DESIRE
“I don’t like to play the piano. It makes me too attractive.”

—Oscar Levant to Joan Crawford in Humoresque (1946)
The Romantic virtuoso performs a popular attraction, in both senses of the
word. On the one hand, the pianist’s spectacle of music-making is an act perceived
visually as well as aurally by an audience, as with a cinematic or circus attraction.
Claude Debussy captures this meaning in an amusing review from 1901: “The
attraction that binds the virtuoso to his public seems much the same as that which
draws the crowds to the circus: we always hope that something dangerous is going to
happen. M. Ysaye is going to play the violin with M. Colonne on his shoulders. Or M.
Pugno will finish by seizing the piano between his teeth.”1
The other meaning o f the word refers to the excitement of a technically
gripping performance, or the allure of a compelling musical interpretation, as in the
sense of a magnetic or erotic attraction. This spell might be inspired by the
“dangerous” thrill Debussy mentions, or the charismatic appeal of a celebrated
performer. It may be communicated through the ineffable elements of music and
expression, or through what Barthes calls “the grain of the voice.” Lawrence Kramer
notes the convergence of sight, sound, and bodily sensation in the performance o f the
Romantic virtuoso: “What the audience sees is a theatrical icon of the inspired
21
22
musician; what it hears is a highly charged extension of the performer’s touch, breath,
rhythm.”2
This dual dynamic of attraction is not only the domain of the virtuoso pianist;
it also serves charismatic rock stars, Hollywood movie idols, sports heroes, even
certain politicians. Recent scholarship has explored the dynamics of this alluring star
quality in the popular media industry, especially in terms of Hollywood films, and in
popular music studies, especially on rock music.3 But in the realm of “classical music”
and in the field of historical musicology, the phenomenon of performance and its
means of persuasive power are topics which have not yet received due attention.4 For
this reason it is necessary to lay out a theoretical framework which considers the
Romantic pianist’s act of performance in terms of its cultural context, its musical
content, and its technological means. These factors enable the attractivity the pianist
so often inspires both on the concert stage and in the popular imagination (fig. 4).
The focus here is on the twentieth-century solo concert pianist who still
performs in the nineteenth-century tradition, that is, the “classical” concert pianist. To
be sure, many pianists outside the classical realm have also cultivated an attraction
through their performing. Familiar examples of this figure in Hollywood films include
Sam (Dooley Wilson) playing “As Time Goes By” for the Bogart-Bergman romance
in Casablanca (1942),5 or Hoagy Carmichael providing moody songs for the Bogart-
23
Bacall romance in To Have and Have Not (1944). Similarly, Fats W aller playing and
singing “Ain’t Misbehavin”’ to a coterie of attractive young women in a 1940s jazz
short, Oscar Levant playing for Gene Kelly in an almost homoerotic song-and-dance
duet in An American in Paris (1951), and Jeff Bridges accompanying Michele
Pfeiffer’s sultry rendition of “Makin’ Whopee” in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989)
are other well-known representations o f how the “popular” pianist’s performance can
serve as a catalyst for musical and romantic attractions.
These dynamics operate in similar ways in the realm of classical music, though
the recognized intention there is usually on “higher” ideals such as sublime beauty or
transcendent feeling. Lady Blessington’s famous quip about Franz Liszt—“What a
pity to waste such a man on the piano!”6—reveals a typical ambivalence over these
two sides of the classical musician’s attraction. On the one hand, Liszt’s audiences
wanted him to play the piano; on the other hand, they wanted him “playing” in their
intimate extra-musical dreams. A popular series of Liszt caricatures from 1873 notes
this close relationship of musical and sexual performance: “He has played; not only
for us, but with us” (fig. 5).7
The ambivalence continues to the present day. In recent years many critics
have lamented commercial marketing trends which promote classical music and
musicians through the popular “sex sells” approach. Predictably, attractive female
24
performers are objectified most often in album-cover photographs, televised concerts,
and other forms of visual-musical media. New York Times critic Edward Rothstein
complained that “one cellist with a less-than-stunning concert career has been making
a killing on a CD because of her photogenic shoulders and the hazy allure of her
poses.”8 Underlying critics’ laments or cynicism over such marketing strategies is an
assumption that classical music need not be seen: it should be appreciated primarily
for its beautiful musical and sonic dimensions, not for the visual or physical attraction
of its performance or performers.
Whether in its popular or classical manifestations, the pianist’s attraction is
both musical and physical according to the conventions by which we learn to play,
watch, and listen to music. Musical performance involves certain dynamics of desire
between the performer and the viewer-listener—the desire to make and hear music, to
see music being made, to move and “touch” one’s feelings through music, and to feel
and “be touched” by music. Desire here refers to an impulse toward some object,
experience, or ideal that promises pleasure and satisfaction in its attainment. Desire
can take the form of an emotional yearning, a physical inclination, even an erotic
urge— all o f which reach towards the object across an intervening physical or
psychological divide. In Kramer’s terms (p. 22), both the performer and the viewer-
listener participate in an act of musical and physical “extension.”
25
Successful popular performers recognize and often exploit these relationships
with the viewer-listener to cultivate an undercurrent of desire in the shared musical
experience. Liberace, for example, gazes and smiles ingratiatingly at the domestic
viewer-listener from the cover of his record album titled “You Made Me Love You”
(fig. 6). In the Hollywood film Sincerely Yours (1955), the two beautiful women who
fall in love with Liberace’s character enact that attraction as part of the story (fig. 7).
In one scene, the pianist performs for a group of adoring matronly women. “Play
anything,” they beg of him. “Mind if I touch you? Wanna touch me?” Liberace asks
coyly as he chats with them between selections.
In this chapter the basic theoretical aspects presented in the previous
chapter—memory, identity, and technology—are examined more closely in an attempt
to understand how and why the Romantic pianist’s attraction stimulates the music-
lover’s desire. This chapter examines the concept of desire according to three
categories or dynamics of reaching, cultural, musical, and technological. In terms of
cultural context, how does “popular culture” extend the reach of the Romantic pianist
across registers of aesthetic value, across the displacements o f time and era, and across
geographical or cultural contexts? In terms of musical content, how does the
“Romantic” pianist reach his or her viewer-listener through the act of playing music,
and how does the viewer-listener reach towards the figure o f the pianist as an object of
26
desire, or a fetishized personality, through watching that playing and listening to that
act? Finally, how has the concert pianist become a technologically mediated
figure—that is, how do the pianist and the viewer-listener reach one another across the
cultural “stage” o f representation and reproduction as determined by the media
technologies of twentieth-century popular culture?
THE “POPULAR” PIANIST
Stuart Hall writes on the social phenomenon of popular culture: “the meaning
of a cultural symbol is given in part by the social field into which it is incorporated,
the practices with which it articulates and is made to resonate. What matters is not the
intrinsic or historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in cultural
relations.”9 In this perspective, the Romantic pianist is not a fixed entity restricted to a
certain cultural realm, such as the formal concert hall or “high-art” culture, nor a
specific historical personality, such as Frederic Chopin, Liberace, or Vladimir
Horowitz. Instead, through the processes of representation and reproduction, the
pianist has become a more general mythic figure who plays with music and with
desire on the wider “stage” of cultural relations.
In the twentieth century, this type of pianist survives through the reverential
27
tradition and musical memory enacted in the concert hall, but also through the
popular-culture productions of Hollywood, television, and mass-market recordings.
Here “popular culture” does not indicate a mode of aesthetic evaluation according to
the high/low hierarchy, but rather a mode of accessibility and reach through processes
of representation and reproduction operating at all levels of cultural sophistication.
“The iconologist knows that he cannot allow himself the luxury of working with
selected materials of certified artistic worth,” writes Giulio Carlo Argan. “It can of
course happen that an iconological theme is presented in some famous masterpiece
which magnifies it, but more often its presence or its passage is signalled by
artistically impoverished figurations ... The image which is worn out, consumed,
recited for the thousandth time, or deformed by the careless habit by which it has been
adapted to the most varied occasions is often much more eloquent for the historian of
the image than the scholarly, purified, controlled version which is established by the
lucid structure of a formal system.”10
Arguing the obvious aesthetic differences between the serious Vladimir
Horowitz or Glenn Gould versus the popular Liberace or David Helfgott (of Shine
fame) is a well-worn path of music criticism that adheres to the customary high/low
cultural hierarchy. For example, a typical argument holds that Liberace (1919-1987)
represents a “low” and vulgar imitation of the European Romantic virtuoso for
28
middle-brow American audiences, and that his superficial spectacle and crass
commercialism demonstrate a decline o f classical music’s aesthetic values in
contemporary culture." No one who truly appreciates Chopin, the reasoning goes, can
tolerate how Liberace played and played with Chopin’s music and image.
However, such a perspective obscures the fact that the figure of the Romantic
pianist has been a persistent phenomenon at all levels of cultural sophistication since
the early nineteenth century. An alternate perspective considers the common “stage”
all these personalities—whether high or low— share as participants within the same
historical and mythological continuum. Liberace’s musical and performative acts are
meaningless outside of the social context of nineteenth-century pianism, a tradition of
representation and reproduction which he consciously exploited in his performance
acts. Liberace presented himself as a popular reincarnation of the Romantic pianist
through his references to, and identification with, certain nineteenth-century historical
figures, particularly Chopin.12 Liberace’s trademark candelabra was a stage gimmick
inspired by the 1945 film A Song to Remember, a kitschy Hollywood rendition of
Chopin’s life.13 As the self-styled “Chopin of TV,” Liberace adapted his television
theme song from a Chopin waltz (the theme from the trio section of the C-sharp minor
waltz, op. 64 no. 2). In a 1940s recording, Liberace not only plays Chopin’s music, but
also plays at being Chopin on the illustrated album cover (fig. 8).
29
One consequence of the high/low cultural assumption is a frequent lament over
the demise of the Romantic pianist (and of classical music in general) in the twentieth
century. The pianist becomes a nostalgic dream-memory associated with the “Golden
Age of the piano,” a bygone era of mythic personalities, respected traditions, and
idealized cultural values.14 An earnest nostalgia underlies the concluding chapters of
Arthur Loesser’s Men, Women and Pianos, for example. He ends his survey of the
piano’s musical and cultural history with the early 1930s, asserting that by then the
piano had reached the “dusk” or the “low plateau” of its significance; the piano as a
cultural idol “had been tottering for a quarter of a century; now it fell from its little
pedestal, its halo shattered.”15 According to Loesser, twentieth-century technological,
economic, and cultural developments (among them player pianos, the Great
Depression, the declining importance of the domestic parlor and of female artistic
“accomplishments”) spelled the end of the instrument’s heyday. “Modem mythology
could create no new Anton Rubinstein or Paderewski,” Loesser asserts. Technology
has had a significant role in this demise, since the piano “as a source of passive
musical enjoyment... has been all but snuffed out by the phonograph, the radio, and
the television set.” 16
A similar nostalgia echoes on decades later. In a 1987 New York Times article,
Edward Rothstein laments “the fading of the piano as a cultural force,” and his
30
primary concern is that the piano’s relevance as a cultural symbol has declined or even
disappeared in the course of the twentieth century. ‘T he instrument is little more than
a shadow o f its former self, a wraith on display,” he writes. “It has always invoked
sophistication and prestige ... but it was also once concerned with the connection
between spiritual and material aspirations, the home and the community, the earthy
and the ethereal. The instrument was really about a culture’s notion o f
transcendence.”17 Rothstein invests in this bygone ideal a range of extra-musical
representations echoing Rom antic-era values: a class-conscious notion o f
sophistication and prestige, a philosophy of the sublime, and a bourgeois investment in
domestic family life. His description of the piano’s mythic past invokes nostalgic
memory for these nineteenth century Bildungsbiirgertum ideals.
Paradoxically, however, this nostalgia has thrived even while the Romantic
pianist has remained a vital and persistent cultural presence— not only as a “real-life”
performer on the concert stage, but also as a cultural figure continually represented
and reproduced through the images and narratives of twentieth-century popular
culture. The publication of Loesser’s Men, Women and Pianos in 1954 came amid the
circulation of numerous contemporary novels, short stories, and theater plays about the
Romantic pianist, a slew of 1940s Hollywood and European “pianist” films, countless
adaptations of nineteenth-century piano repertoire into popular songs, and a thriving
31
industry producing and distributing recordings of the great virtuosi. It also overlapped
with the careers of phenomenally successful “popular” pianists such as Ignace Jan
Paderewski (1860-1941) and Jose Iturbi (1895-1980).
As one example of this selective approach, Loesser mentions Paderewski’s
popular appeal in America (beginning in 1891 with his Steinway contract and New
York concert debut),18but not his remarkable second career in politics during and after
World W ar I (as president of the Polish government in exile, as prime minister of the
newly-liberated nation in 1919, and as Poland’s representative to the League of
Nations convention), or Paderewski’s starring role (at the age of 78) and lengthy
musical performance scenes in the 1938 British film Moonlight Sonata.19
Another cultural trend percipitating the “fall” of the Romantic pianist was the
rise and predominance of popular musical styles over established art-music traditions
during the first half of the twentieth century. On the one hand were the historically-
and socially-validated musical traditions of European classical music; on the other
hand were new and evolving musical forms within the American cultural context, such
as the blues, jazz, vaudeville, Broadway musicals, Tin Pan Alley popular songs, and
Hollywood film music. This was a struggle not only about aesthetic values, but about
social values and cultural memory as well. Nationality, religion, race, and class were
implicated, whether in the ban on “degenerate” music (such as jazz) in 1940s Nazi
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout permission.
32
Germany, or in the segregation of black music (such as rock ‘n’ roil) in American
culture through the 1950s and 60s. In this context, it could seem as if the nineteenth-
century Romantic pianist was no longer a relevant figure amid the twentieth century’s
popular and technological musical revolutions.
Significantly, however, it was largely within the realm of popular culture that
classical music’s struggles were acknowledged and enacted. In the 1947 film Night
Song, for example, an uptight young socialite (Merle Oberon) visits a crowded jazz
nightclub with her friends after attending a symphony concert. “The symphony’s over,
dear,” a friend tells her. “You can take your hair down and be human again.” She
retorts, “And should I put a ring through my nose?” A number of Hollywood films of
the 1940s deal with the struggles faced by a young pianist or pianist-composer tom
between European/classical and American/popular inspirations. In Rhapsody in Blue
(1945), Hollywood’s film biography of George Gershwin, young George’s music
teacher scolds him, “Don’t try to improve upon the classics, Mr. Gershwin!” Another
bearded professor of music, who resembles the portrait of Johannes Brahms on the
wall o f his studio, forbids Gershwin to mix ragtime licks into his performance of a
Chopin prelude. In It Happened in Brooklyn (1947), an easygoing American with a
talent for singing (Frank Sinatra) befriends a stuffy British pianist-composer who
needs “a little loosening up,” and helps turn the composer’s virtuoso piano piece into a
33
swinging hit tune.
As a cultural icon, the Romantic pianist could serve as an emblem of
nineteenth-century musical tradition set against or in conflict with the popular appeal
and the contemporary relevance of emergent popular styles. In a skit from the 1943
Hollywood musical Thousands Cheer, Judy Garland is bored by Jose Iturbi’s virtuosic
octaves and arpeggios, so she breaks into a song about how
Millions have heard you play Chopin,

The critics applaud and approve.
But millions more would simply adore
To hear you get in the groove!
She finally coaxes Iturbi into a boogie-woogie bass-line, then sings and swings about
how
Tch-Tch-Tchaikovsky would really be hurt

To hear ‘em jivin’ his Piano Conchert!
Beethoven’s lucky—he can’t hear at all,
‘Cuz the joint is really jumpin’ down at Carnegie Hall!
The comic irony of this skit was clear to audiences of the time, as Iturbi was already
known for his stylistic cross-over in mixing classical music with “boogie-woogie” and
other popular styles.20
Related to this crossover phenomenon bridging European high-art music with
contemporary American popular styles was the frequent adaptation of nineteenth-
century piano repertoire by the Tin Pan Alley song industry. Popular songs and
34
instrumental arrangements of the classics were featured in Broadway musicals and
Hollywood films, and reproduced and circulated through recordings, radio broadcasts,
and sheet music sales. Joe Furst’s “Showpan Boogie” (1949), a jazzed-up take-off on
Chopin’s “Minute” waltz, is one such “modem paraphrase” (fig. 9).
The dream-memory of Chopin figured prominently in this process of musical
reproduction. An early popular example is the fox-trot “Castle of Dreams” from the
1919 Broadway musical Irene. The lyrics of this song describe a romantic scenario,
and the tune is the melody from the middle section of Chopin’s popular “Minute”
Waltz:
There’s a castle in our dreams,

Where we place our hopes and all our fancies,
Where the light of romance beams ...
1940s song writers recycled Chopin’s original themes for a plethora o f popular
adaptations such as ‘T ill the End of Time,” “Polonaise for Two,” and “Counting Ev’ry
Moment” (all based on the main theme of the “Heroic” Polonaise), “I’m Always
Chasing Rainbows” and “My Melody o f May Time” (based on the slow middle theme
of the “Fantasie-Impromptu”), as well as “What is Love,” “My Promise to You,” “No
Other Love,” and many others. Publishing firms often made a point of promoting the
connection between Chopin and these new songs, another example of representation
and reproduction of the Romantic pianist-composer and his music (fig. 10).21
35
A record album titled Sixty Years o f “Music America Loves Best” (RCA
Victor, 1959), featuring a number of famous classical performers and well-known
piano music, provides evidence for the popular currency of the Romantic pianist and
piano repertoire in American culture during the first half of the twentieth century.
Iturbi’s recording of Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat Major is a predictable selection,
given the Chopin fad inspired by A Song To Remember and Iturbi’s role in
popularizing Chopin’s music for American audiences.22 The well-known introduction
of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto is represented by Freddy Martin’s best-selling
dance-band version. Sergei Rachmaninoff is represented by his famous Prelude in C-
sharp minor, and Paderewski by his familiar “Minuet in G.” The compilation also
features Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982) playing his signature encore piece, a
paraphrase of the “Ritual Fire Dance” from Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo, and
Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) playing his own famous “Variations on Themes from
Carmen.’,23
Why were these pianists popular, even “best loved”? One consideration is that
most of the performers featured on the Sixty Years album had expanded their popular-
culture circulation through appearances in Hollywood films during the 1930s and
1940s. Josd Iturbi played “him self’ in seven feature films between 1943 and 1949,
typically performing a well-known piano composition (such as a Liszt Hungarian
36
Rhapsody) in interspersed musical scenes.24 Arthur Rubinstein has cameo roles in
Follow the Boys (1944), performing Liszt’s “Liebestraum,” and in Carnegie Hall
(1947), performing de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance,” Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat
major, and other Chopin selections. Behind the scenes, Rubinstein recorded the piano
soundtrack music for I ’ve Always Loved You (1946) and the Schumann film biography
Song o f Love (1947). In Night Song (1947), Rubinstein performs a piano concerto
(composed by Leith Stevens) as part of the plot, and acts as “himself’ alongside Merle
Oberon and conductor Erich Leinsdorf (fig. 11).
Hollywood studios understood the marketing potential of Rubinstein’s
involvement, so his musical contributions are prominently noted in the opening credits
o f each film. Vladimir Horowitz was also courted by Hollywood studios, but he
declined offers to become involved in film productions either as an on-screen actor or
as an off-screen soundtrack recording artist.25 Still, he posed along with Sergei
Rachmaninoff and Walt Disney in a 1940s publicity photo for a screening of Disney’s
1929 animation short “Opry House,” in which Mickey Mouse plays Rachmaninoff’s
famous C-sharp minor Prelude (fig. 12). Such classical artists brought a high-art
panache to popular-culture productions, raising the films above the level of popular
matinee entertainment.
Other pianists who became “best loved” musical stars through popular-culture
37
productions in the 1940s and 1950s include Liberace, Victor Borge, and Oscar
Levant.26 Levant (1906-1972) was already famous from his Broadway and radio
appearances, and could represent himself more or less realistically as George
Gershwin’s best friend in Rhapsody in Blue (1945) eight years after Gershwin’s death.
In An American in Paris (1951), Levant plays a character said to be based on the
American composer David Diamond, who had briefly studied music in Paris. Even
pianist-comedians such as Victor Borge (1909-2000) were able to broaden their
musical reputations through popular-culture productions during this period.27 After
gaining attention on Rudy Vallee’s radio show and Bing Crosby’s “Kraft Music Hall”
during the early 1940s, Borge played the role of an aristocratic piano-playing con-man
(co-starring with Frank Sinatra) in the 1943 film Higher and Higher. Some years later,
Borge’s “Comedy in Music” show on Broadway ran for 849 performances from 1953
to 1956, earning it a place in The Guinness Book o f World Records as the longest-
running one-man show in theater history. In these various popular-culture productions,
star pianists identified with and also parodied the figure of the nineteenth-century
virtuoso for contemporary audiences.
The star-system of American popular culture— in particular, of Hollywood
films and rock music— parallels the idolization of the Romantic virtuoso in nineteenth-
century European musical life.28 Susan McClary compares the unbridled hysteria
38
surrounding Liszt’s performances in 1840s Berlin to Elvis Presley’s appearances on
the 1950s Ed Sullivan Show and to the antics of 1980s rock star David Lee Roth.29
James Deaville compares Liszt to the contemporary pop star Michael Jackson, since
both cultivated a demonstration of overt sexuality in their performances and both
inspired numerous myths in the popular imagination.30 In this light, it seems logical
that the French cabaret star Charles Aznavour would play the title role of the ex-
concert pianist in Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) (1960), that Roger
Daltry of the rock group The Who would play the role of Franz Liszt in Ken Russell’s
Lisztomania (1975), or that German pop singer Herbert Gronemeyer would portray the
young Robert Schumann in a film about the Schumanns’ relationship,
Fruhlingssinfonie (Spring Symphony) (1982).
The Romantic pianist as a popular-culture figure must be considered in a
global, cross-cultural context that reaches across geographical boundaries—through
what Stuart Hall calls “the state of play in cultural relations.” This may seem counter
intuitive, since national identification has long been an important aspect of the
pianist’s reputation. Many nineteenth-century performers and pedagogues cultivated
an identity (or were represented by critics and historians) in terms o f their nationality:
the Polish Chopin, the German Beethoven, the Hungarian Liszt, the Russian Horowitz,
the American Gottschalk, and so forth. Technical and interpretive approaches have
39
also been labeled according to nationality, such as “the Russian school” or “the French
school.” Nineteenth-century Germany in particular provided a defining influence in
the Romantic piano tradition through the contributions of Beethoven, Clara
Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and others, while the virtuoso tradition was continued
there by Liszt and his foremost pupils Carl Tausig, Hans von Biilow, and Eugene
d ’Albert. The values of the bourgeois Bildungsbiirgertum situated the piano at the
center of domestic music-making and musical education. Piano manufacturing in
Germany established names such as Steinweg (and the Americanized Steinway) as
recognized emblems.
In the twentieth century, however, local and national musical communities
have given way to an international professional network of education, technology, and
commerce, including publicity and marketing firms, recording companies, and piano
competitions. Ever since Amy Fay told Americans about her music studies with Franz
Liszt in Germany during the 1870s,31 or since the Texan Van Clibum (b. 1934)
became Russia’s favorite virtuoso in the historic 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition, the
concert pianist has circulated internationally as a popular cultural icon. Aside from his
exceptional playing, one reason for Clibum’s phenomenal popular success at the
Moscow competition may have been the desire of viewer-listeners on both sides of the
Iron Curtain to dismantle the nineteenth-century nationalist sensibilities of pianism
40
through an acknowledgement of popular-culture associations. As quintessential^
American locales of legend, Texas and Hollywood were probably not too far apart in
the minds o f Clibum’s Russian fans, just as Tchaikovsky and Hollywood film scores
would have been very close in the ears of his American fans.
As examples of this cross-cultural exchange in Him productions, the German
melodrama Mazurka (1935)—about an adulterous playboy pianist and the virtuous
woman he ruins—was remade as Confession in Hollywood in 1937. The Swedish film
Intermezzo (1936)—starring Ingrid Bergman as a passionate piano accompanist who
falls in love with a married violinist—was filmed again in Hollywood in 1939, also as
Interm ezzo and also starring Bergman in her first American role. Cinematic
representations of the Romantic pianist have frequently circulated from Hollywood
back to Europe, as well: Urlaub in Hollywood [Vacation in Hollywood] is the
German-language dubbing of the 1945 Hollywood musical Anchors Aweigh, for
example (fig. 13). In this M-G-M production, Spanish-born pianist Jose Iturbi appears
alongside American stars Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Kathryn Grayson, playing
and conducting in a number of scenes.
One influential but long-forgotten theater piece by a tum-of-the-century
Viennese writer offers a prime example of the wide reach of the Romantic pianist as a
popular-culture figure. Hermann Bahr’s 1909 play Das Konzert (The Concert)
41
parodies the Lisztian virtuoso-lover in the role of Gustav Heink, an aging but still
celebrated “romantic” idol who continues bis philandering as well as his
concertizing.32 When an out-of-town “concert” serves as his alibi for another
extramarital dalliance (this time with his attractive piano student Delfine), Delfine’s
free-thinking husband and Gustav’s long-suffering wife plot a retaliation. The two
wronged spouses pretend to have an affair with each other, a ruse which provokes
anxiety, jealousy, and eventual repentance from their errant mates.
An immediate success in Berlin and Vienna during the 1909-1910 season, Das
Konzert was translated into Czech and Hungarian for performances in those countries
the same year. The play was translated into English for a 1910 American production
(The Concert) by the Hungarian-born actor Leo Dietrichstein, who also played the title
role on Broadway for two sold-out seasons. The play continued its run in many
smaller American cities during subsequent tours, also starring Dietrichstein in the
leading role (fig. 14).
A second American translation was published in the C hief Contemporary
Dramatists series in 1921,33 the same year Bahr’s play was made into an American
silent film (The Concert) directed by Victor Schertzinger. This was followed by
another Hollywood filming in 1929 as Fashions in Love, a “talking-picture”
adaptation of the Dietrichstein version also directed by Schertzinger for Paramount
42
studios. Additionally, Paramount produced French- and German-language versions of
this 1929 film at its European branch in Joinville, near Paris. The German-language
version was titled Das Konzert, and the French-language version was titled Delphine;
each had its own director and cast. Fifteen years later, Germany’s national film studio
filmed Bahr’s play again as a wartime entertainment feature (Das Konzert, 1944), and
in 1956 the work finally returned to its Viennese origins as the basis for the Austrian
film Nichts als Arger mit d er Liebe (.Nothing but Trouble With Love). Most recently,
there was also a 1975 German television film version of Das Konzert starring Klaus
Maria Brandauer and Maria Schell.
These numerous reincarnations of Bahr’s play on stage and screen over the
course of seven decades speaks for the persistence of certain popular-culture
associations around the figure of the Romantic virtuoso-lover. In its basic plot about a
celebrated middle-aged pianist who pursues his adulterous impulses as a function of
his piano-playing, Bahr’s comedy solidified a particular image of the virtuoso for both
European and American audiences in the early part of the twentieth century. It also set
the stage for a number of subsequent comic and ironic representations of the same
character-type, both in Hollywood productions and foreign films.34
As a parallel phenomenon to the circulation of European narratives about the
“Romantic” pianist, certain European film stars also became identified with the
43
dashing Continental virtuoso-lover type through their movie roles. British actor Henry
Daniell acts the role o f the piano-playing playboy Baron de Varville in George
Cukor’s filming of Camille (1937), as well as the role of Franz Liszt in Song o f Love
(1947). French actor Pierre Richard-Willm plays Liszt in the French film Reves
d'amour (1946), and a dashing Austrian piano virtuoso in Le beau voyage one year
later (1947). Austrian-born Francis Lederer plays a Central European concert pianist
in two films, the 1944 Hollywood production A Voice in the Wind, and Stolen Identity,
the 1953 American version of the 1952 Austrian film Abenteuer in Wien. Italian actor
Rossano Brazzi stars as an adulterous pianist-conductor in Interlude (1957) and as an
adulterous pianist-composer in The Battle o f the Villa Fiorita (1965).35
The French-born actor Charles Boyer may have accumulated the most screen
roles as a seductive pianist/composer/conductor character in Hollywood productions.
Boyer plays a womanizing maestro in Break o f Hearts (1935), a dashing pianist-lover
in When Tomorrow Comes (1939), a sensitive young composer-pianist in The
Constant Nymph (1943), and the sinister accompanist-husband in Gaslight (1944). In
When Tomorrow Comes, he plays the role of Andre Chagal, a debonair Continental
virtuoso who falls in love with an American woman. “Don’t spoil it by reality,” she
pleads after realizing that Andre is already married. “Let me dream just a little while
longer.”36
44
THE “ROMANTIC’ PIANIST
What is it about piano-playing that leads so many women into sin with the
“Romantic” virtuoso-lover? And what is it about adultery that makes the pianist so
adept at extramarital conquests? The dynamics of desire between performer and
music-lover are not specifically sexual in nature, but popular-culture productions
frequently employ metaphorical or allegorical representations of these dynamics to
depict romantic relationship as a function of music and musical performance (fig. 15).
In colloquial usage, romantic refers to love, desire, and sensual feeling. As a
label for a musical, artistic, or literary period, Romantic indicates a style characterized
by imagination, sentiment, and poetic fancy. These aspects can be recognized in music
of all eras, but the term belongs primarily to music of the nineteenth century, when
such ideals took precedence over the values of moderation and harmonious proportion
associated with eighteenth-century Classicism. The fact that musical Romanticism still
persists in the twentieth century—through most popular songs, film music, and “neo-
Romantic” trends in composition—further complicates the possible applications of
this term. Instead of trying to parse its various meanings in terms of historical era,
musical style, or colloquial usage, consider the productive overlap of both meanings:
“Romantic” as the label for a music-historical period or style (as loosely as it can be
45
defined) and for a state of physical and emotional love, affection, and erotic desire.
Scholarly discussions of Romantic music typically ignore the colloquial
meaning o f the word, but those associations are ubiquitous in popular-culture
productions. There romantic assigns a particular emotional or expressive association
to musical works, often for marketing purposes. This connection is most evident in
popular romantic “love songs,” which constitute the basic repertoire for innumerable
recordings in diverse genres of popular music. The Romantic Piano o f Ted Straeter
(Columbia, 1959), for example, includes piano renditions o f “Stardust,” “Laura,”
“September Song,” and other standards of the era. Romantic Piano fo r Sentimental
Lovers (Harmony, 1973) compiles works by popular/classical “crossover” pianists
such as Andre Previn, Peter Nero, and Michel Legrand. Sounds Like Love: Romantic
Piano Favorites (Rising Star Records, 1997) features arrangements of more recent
popular songs performed by various “mood music” pianists. Even the “New Age”
movement o f the 1990s has borrowed the associations o f the word, as in Derek
Kieran’s Quiet Moments: Romantic Piano Stylings (1990) or the album Nature’s
Romantic Piano (North Word Press, 1995). In all these examples, romantic indicates
the emotional mood the music is supposed to provide, but has little or nothing to do
with historical or stylistic designations.37
The visual iconography used for these record albums and for similar marketing
46
publicity also demonstrates the colloquial sense of the word. The cover illustration to
Romantic Piano at Cocktail Time: After Dark Piano Favorites (Alshire, 1970s)
illustrates the lounge pianist’s “Romantic” setting (fig. 16). A magazine advertisement
for jazz pianist Diana Krall’s album Only Trust Your Heart (199S) pictures the artist in
a suggestive pose at the piano, and invites the viewer-listener to “get lost in the sounds
of love and romance.” This emotional connection is possible because Krall’s
“sensuous” and “smooth” performances come “straight from her heart” (fig. 17).
Even in the realm of classical music both meanings of the term are employed
interchangeably as marketing ploys. While certain album titles seem to adhere to
“Romantic” as a period designation— Leonard Pennario’s album The Romantic
Chopin (Angel, 1975), The Romantic Side o f Chopin (St. Clair Music, 1995), and The
Romantic World o f Chopin's Piano (Excelsior, 1998), for example—many other titles
confuse the sensual with the historical. The Great Romantic Piano Classics (Readers’
Digest, 1992) includes nineteenth-century piano repertoire as well as twentieth-
century works by Debussy, Ravel, and Gershwin alongside “romantic” film music and
popular songs. Classically Romantic Piano (Michele Audio, 1994) plays with the
ambivalent meanings of “Classical” and “Romantic” as terms used to denote eras of
music history. An unabashed “sex sells” approach is evident in compilations such as
Dreams o f Love: The Ultimate Romantic Piano Solo Album (London, 1999), Intimate
47
Piano: Romantic Classics (Vox Cameo Classics, 1993), or First Kiss: Romantic Piano
Musicfo r Love and Passion (Four Winds, 1996).
If classical pianists occasionally use these rhetorical devices to promote their
musical attractions, popular-style pianists tend to exploit their “romantic” associations.
Easy-listening pianist Richard Clayderman (b. 1953), dubbed “The Prince of
Romance,” has released numerous best-selling recordings with titles such as Am our
(1984), Music o f Love (CBS, 1984), Piano Romance (Arcade, 1986), Classical
Passion (Quality, 1994), and Candlelight & Music: The Romantic Piano o f Richard
Clayderman (Sony Music Entertainment, 1992).38 In describing the musical, cultural,
and commercial phenomenon of Yanni, a popular New Age pianist (b. 1954), one
critic describes his performance as consisting of “a good-looking icon at centre stage
who plays keyboards, shares ‘expressive moments' with his predominantly female
fans, and is touted as a genius at expressing universal emotions and uplifting
aspirations through music.”39 Other critics note Yanni’s tendency to assign “mystical
purposes to his florid soundscapes,” to bring “considerable sound and fury to his
pumped-up passionate music,”40 and to perform selections of “ornate but empty
virtuosity” designed to evoke “the power of dreams” or “the bond that exists among
all human beings.”41 Such descriptions recall Romantic-era aesthetics, but they apply
equally well to popular performers such as Yanni over a century later.
48
Before exploring the figure of the “Romantic” pianist, it is useful to consider
popular representations of the “romantic” piano itself. Though the instrument was
invented around 1700, its modem history effectively begins at the close o f the
Classical era, approximately 1800, with the musical, technological, and cultural
developments o f Beethoven’s era. Some treatments of piano history slip easily
between the historical and colloquial connotations of the term. In the preface to his
1928 book The Romance o f the Piano, Eric Blom suggests that the history of the piano
“is charged with romance,... [a] romance that can be none the less exciting because it
is made to tell, as I hope it is here, the truth at every turn.”42 A more recent book about
the instrument is titled Passion fo r the Piano (1983).43 Popular-culture art, design, and
advertising also frequently reference the instrument’s sensual associations. A
“Symphony of Love” piano pin by Arman has a large heart emerging from beneath the
lid of a grand piano (fig. 18). The cover of a 1997 Windham Hill recordings catalog
pictures a piano keyboard with a red rose lying across the black keys and the word
Romance emblazoned across the white keys (fig. 19).
In popular music, too, the piano signifies romantic love, and enacts romantic
desire through its playing. In Irving Berlin’s classic song “I Love a Piano,” from the
1915 Broadway show Stop! Look! Listen!, the narrator describes the piano’s seductive
potential:
49
I love a piano, I love a piano,

I love to hear somebody play
Upon a piano, a grand piano,
It simply carries me away.. .**
Similar sentiments are expressed in the 1940s German popular song “Man miiBte
(Clavier spielen konnen” from the 1941 film musical Immer nur Du! The title
translates, literally, “one should really know how to play the piano.” The song’s
refrain admonishes men to learn to play the instrument for a definite romantic
advantage:
You really should play the piano!

Whoever plays piano has luck with the ladies!
That’s because men who can make music
Quickly gain the ladies’ trust!
The verses o f this song further elaborate on the pianist’s seductive powers:
‘Tis not always easy to be lucky in love,

But there are a few ways to achieve success.
It goes best with music, and so we’ll show you
How to bewitch beautiful women with a pliant piano.
With this example you’ll see what gets the ladies:

Whoever plays is in unheard-of demand with them.
One can only look on enviously at how the pianist
Rules the roost with just a few skillful strokes!
The sound of the playing piano

Excites every girl the way champagne does,
And her most secret feelings
Are awakened not piano, but fortel45
50
As these lyrics suggest, the instrument’s “Romantic” associations can endow its player
with a similar capacity for seductive allure. The viewer-listener participates in these
dynamics of desire through watching the pianist (“one can only look on enviously”)
and listening to his music (which “excites ... her most secret feelings”).
It is not only the male pianist who can tap the instrument’s erotic associations
through “playing.” In Federico Fellini’s film Prova d'orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal)
(1978), Mirella, the orchestra pianist, explains her relationship to the instrument in
metaphorical terms: “I don’t want a piano. I mean, I have one, but it needn’t be mine.
All the pianos o f the world are that piano. To play mine alone would be limiting,
would be restrictive.” In another scene, Mirella makes love to the tuba player
underneath her piano.
The bordello’s parlor upright is a familiar representation of the piano in
connection with a female prostitute or “fallen” woman. In Casablanca Rick grumbles,
“I ’ve heard a lot of stories in my time. They went along with the sound of a tinny
piano, playing in the parlor downstairs. ‘Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid,’
they’d always begin.” Another popular German film song, “Ich bin die fesche Lola”
(“They Call Me Naughty Lola” in its English translation) is featured in the 1930 film
Die blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), and became a signature song for Marlene Dietrich:
51
They call me naughty Lola, the wisest girl on earth.

At home my pianola is worked for all it’s worth.
The boys all love my music, I can’t keep them away,
So my little pianola keeps working night and day!46
Dietrich is another Continental film star associated with the piano in a particular
connotation. In Dishonored (1931) she plays a prostitute-tumed-spy who uses the
piano to encode secret messages in music notation. In Orson Welles’s A Touch o f Evil
(1958), she plays an aging madame with a rackety player-piano in the parlor of her
Tijuana bordello.
It is evident that traditional gender roles and attitudes about sexuality
complicate notions of the “Romantic” pianist’s erotic potential. Representations of the
female pianist, some modeled after the life-story and reputation of Clara Schumann,
negotiate the socially problematic divide between the public role of a female concert
soloist and the domestic role of a wife, mother, or daughter. The latter type is
frequently portrayed as the “piano girl” of the bourgeois family or the “maiden piano
teacher” down the street. Male pianists who do not conform to traditional gender roles
also present problematic figures. Emasculated, homosexual, or otherwise “queer” male
pianists are frequently depicted as comic, impotent, or sadistic lovers, or as
charismatic but doomed villains. A1 Capp’s parody “Loverboynik” in the 1954 Li'I
Abner cartoon series is one satirical treatment of Liberace as a virtuoso-lover (fig. 20).
52
By the same token, Liberace’s guest appearances as a dastardly villain on the Batman
television series in the 1970s demonstrate the criminal implications surrounding the
sexually-ambiguous male in many popular-culture representations.
The “Romantic” pianist’s attraction works not only through playing and
listening, but also through the attentive desires of those who watch that playing. The
visual spectacle of performance involves physical attractions— including playing
gestures, emotive gestures, the actions of concert ritual, even the details of concert
dress—exhibited for the audience’s view. (Piano aficionados prefer to sit on the left
side of the concert hall for this reason.) In the Schumann and Ophuls examples
discussed in the previous chapter, Florestan’s descriptive vision of Chopin, Beda’s
sketch of the pianist she drew from her own imagination, and Lisa’s longing to see
Stefan Brand (as we can see him through Ophuls’s camera) demonstrate how the
music-lover attempts to reach the pianist as an object of the gaze. As Schumann wrote
about Franz Liszt, “he must be heard—and also seen; for if Liszt played behind the
screen, a great deal of the poetry [of his playing] would be lost.”47 Given that music is
a specifically auditory phenomenon, the appeal of watching its performance indicates
a degree o f scopophilic desire in its dynamics of attraction.
The concept of musical performance as visual discourse has not yet received
adequate attention in the field of historical musicology. The “narrative pleasures” of
53
the viewer’s gaze are a familiar notion in Him criticism and feminist film theory
(Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’’ is a famous contribution to
this topic),48 but to date only Richard Leppert’s work addresses the dynamics of the
gaze in representations of musical performance. In The Sight o f Sound: Music,
Representation, and the History o f the Body (1993), Leppert explores the “sight” of
music-making in the visual arts and literature up through the Romantic era.49 In
another article, Leppert situates the origins of the pianist’s musical-visual dynamic in
the Romantic era: ‘T h e nineteenth century ... was the age of the visual,” he writes.
“More than ever before, performers’ bodies, in the act of realizing music, also helped
to transliterate musical sound into music meaning. ... Musicians literally played out,
visually and with sound, the exotic, sensual, and dramatic fantasies” of that era’s
audiences.50
Popular-culture representations of the “Romantic” pianist frequently depict the
visual spectacle of performance as a catalyst for romantic seduction. In Harold
Frederic’s novel The Damnation ofTheron Ware (1896), a female pianist seduces the
male protagonist through the sight and sound her playing. In her room full of artworks
and statues, the beautiful Celia Madden plays Chopin’s music for Theron Ware, a
repressed minister who achieves a sensual epiphany through his sight o f her sound:
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He looked from the Madonna to Celia. Beyond the carelessly drooping

braids and coils of hair which blazed between the candles, he could see
the outline of her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin
and full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate roseleaf is pink,
against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. The sight convicted him in
the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded rustic. In the
presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to be any such
thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than did those slow,
deep, magnificent chords which came now, gravely accumulating their
spell upon him.51
One century after the novel’s publication, pianist Hae-Jung Kim suggests that the
attraction of her 1999 Alice Tully Hall recital will be equally suited to looking (at her
wardrobe and performative gestures) and listening (“you love to listen,” because “it’s
music to your ears”) (fig. 2 1).52
The pianist’s Romantic repertoire, interpreted with personal feeling and
intimate expression, provides another means of attraction between the performer and
the viewer-listener. It is a common assumption that emotional self-expression through
sound and gesture is a primary goal for the Romantic pianist. In Beethoven's Kiss:
Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery o f Desire (1996), Kevin Kopelson reiterates the
familiar notion that “Romantic pianists express themselves.” What they express is
emotion, memory, or desire—in other words, romantic meanings. For latter-day
devotees of Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann, Kopelson writes, pianistic self-expression
offers a window on the performer’s inner soul: “By playing Beethoven, Romantic
55
Beethoven, I sense m yself... my authentic, essential, sexual self, sexual identity being
the touchstone of post-Romantic subjectivity.”53
Many of the great nineteenth-century virtuosi were composers of their own
music as well as expressive interpreters of others’ works, so the “Romantic” pianist-
composer is also a common character-type in popular-culture representations. A
familiar scenario in films and literature involves a male composer at the piano,
struggling to express his creative impulses through music, but ultimately relying on a
female muse for inspiration. In Song o f Norway, a 1944 Broadway musical (and 1970
film) about Edvard Grieg's life, the composer-pianist is infatuated with his childhood
sweetheart Nina, and sings about her necessary role in his creativity:
Strange music in my ears—

Only now, as you spoke, did it start.
Strange music of the spheres—
Could its lovely hum be coming from my heart?
You appear, and I hear song sublime—
Song that I’m incapable o f ...
The muse’s voice engenders a “strange music” in the composer’s heart, and her
physical presence makes the song “sublime.” The Silent Touch (1992) presents another
equally cliched trope about musical composition: the notion that creativity and
procreativity are two manifestations of the same urge of physical desire. In this film, a
young woman’s romance with an elderly married composer revives his amorous
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feelings as well as his musical creativity, and she eventually bears his child. “If I'm
not a man,” the pianist-composer rationalizes, “how can I be an artist?”
The meanings of “romance” both as a musical work (a short piece with a
tender or sentimental quality) and as an erotic attraction work together in the 1943
German melodrama Romanze in Moll {Romance in a Minor Key). This story about a
faithful wife’s descent into adultery with a seductive pianist-composer engages the
typical dynamic between the male composer and his inspiring muse: Michael suddenly
finds his melody through his love for Madeleine. Here the seduction occurs visually as
well as musically, when Madeleine’s smile inspires his melodic “romance” of the
film’s title, and their site/sight of seduction occurs at the piano as well (fig. 22).
THE MEDIATED PIANIST
In a musical performance, the dynamics of desire operate in both directions
across the cultural apparatus or “stage” of the performance. In the traditional concert
hall, an elevated stage establishes a physical and psychological distance between the
musician and the music-lover. It separates the pianist on stage from the viewer-listener
in the audience, but it also draws the audience’s attention towards the performer by
making the pianist seem “larger than life” in the spotlight. In performance, the pianist
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strives to reach the audience across this stage through masterful technique and
expressive musicality. At the same time, the viewer-listener hopes to reach the
performer through watching that technique and spectacle of playing, and listening
attentively to that musical interpretation.
In Musicking: The Meanings o f Performing and Listening, Christopher Small
considers the traditional organization of the concert hall space and its implications in
terms of musical and social relationships.54 The concert hall is “strictly a space for
looking, listening and paying attention,” Small writes, noting the visual-musical
dynamic underlying live musical performance. Moreover, the architecture of the hall
“isolates those within it from the world o f their everyday lives, it brings some
[participants] together and keeps others apart, it places some in a dominant position
and others in a subordinate position, and it facilitates communication in one direction
but not in the other.”55 (Actually, communication operates in both directions, as when
audiences and critics respond favorably to a performance with applause and accolades.
These acts reward the pianist for enacting a successful musical attraction for the
“passive” viewer-listener.) The social dynamics Small mentions make the concert
spectacle analogous to other visual-musical performance acts such as opera, cinema,
cabaret—even, perhaps, the erotic striptease set to a musical beat.
In an essay exploring possible links between the notions of musical and sexual
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performance, Suzanne Cusick ponders, “What on earth is going on in a concert hall
during, say, a piano recital? When the pianist is on a raised stage, in a spotlight while
we are in the dark ... are we observers of a sexual act? Are we its object? Why,
exactly, are we in the dark?”56 Small suggests that the concert hall provides an
environment for “those who wish perfect communion with the composer [or the
pianist] through the performance.”57 The dimmed lighting of the concert hall facilitates
the viewer-listener’s sensory immersion in the spectacle enacted on-stage. It also
provides an intimate cover for a personal dream-like state of fantasy and emotional
openness in which the performer and viewer-listener can reach each other through the
musical experience.
In the course of the twentieth century, new media technologies such as cinema,
television, radio, and recordings have become another kind of intimate stage for die
pianist’s performance. One could even claim that these technologies have gradually
replaced the concert stage itself as the site/sight of the pianist’s performance. When
we hear “the dark flood of Chopin’s waltz” today, it is more likely to emanate from a
recording or a film soundtrack than from any live performance (as Glenn Gould
demonstrated in 1964, when he abandoned the concert stage for the recording studio).
These technologies extend the pianist’s and the viewer-listener’s reach far beyond the
concert hall stage and beyond live performance. They also cultivate desire by
59
establishing and then bridging similar physical and psychological divides/8
Recording technologies, like photography and cinema, seem to capture the
fleeting musical moment intact, “authentic,” and “live” for posterity/9 In the course of
the twentieth century, audiophiles have appreciated the stereo effect, the “high
fidelity” record, and most recently the sonic clarity of digital recordings for enabling a
sense of immersion in the sound of the musical performance itself. Like perfected
piano technique, technology aspires to eliminate the medium (whether the intervening
distractions of surface noise in recordings, or human fallibility in live performance) in
order to satisfy our desire for an apparently direct— and paradoxically
unmediated—encounter with the performer’s attraction.
The role of technological mediation in twentieth-century popular culture is a
topic which has been theorized extensively in media and communication studies, and
also in popular music studies,® but much less so in historical musicology—despite,
oddly enough, the pervasive presence of contemporary media in classical music
performing and listening practices. In his chapter on “Listening Pleasure and the
Popular Music Object,” John Corbett argues that the role of technology, specifically
what he calls “the materiality of the apparatus,” has been overlooked in musicology
first because of its popular-culture implications. “The technology of recording has
made it possible to consider any mediated music as popular,” Corbett asserts. ‘There
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is no music extant that has not been electronically colonized.”61
Technology enables popular accessibility; even some of the most esoteric
classical or “world” music is accessible today through some form of reproduction,
whether recording or publication. However, this notion of a popular, mass-
commodified work contradicts the persistent Romantic ideal of musical performing
and listening as a sublime communion with the unique musical (art)work. Walter
Benjamin voices this perspective most famously in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” According to Benjamin, technological
reproduction causes the “aura”—the authentic, essential, unique identity, the “most
sensitive nucleus”—of the artwork to depreciate, or “wither,” because it replaces the
original work’s context of ritual and tradition with the contingencies of mass culture.
Reproduction “enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a
photograph or a phonograph record,” but this common accessibility “pr[ies] an object
from its shell” of authenticity, and “brush[es] aside a number of outmoded concepts,
such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery.”62
A second factor in technology’s omission, Corbett argues, is that sound
recording divorces the auditory experience of music from the visual aspect of music-
making, disrupting the aural-visual synthesis which had characterized performance in
the pre-recording era. Nineteenth-century audiences both heard and saw the body of
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the pianist in concert; twentieth-century listeners could substitute sound recordings for
live performance, and quickly learned to disregard the “visual lack” and the withered
“aura” o f music’s technological reproduction. Corbett considers sound film, Music
Television (MTV) videos, and album cover art as twentieth-century attempts “to
disavow the cleavage of image/sound and to restore the visual to the disembodied
voice.” In this sense, each of the album cover illustrations included in this chapter
serve as visual representations of, and compensations for, the pianist’s body in the act
of performance.
Roland Barthes describes a similar twentieth-century disembodiment in music
as a consequence o f recording technology. In his 1972 essay “The Grain o f the
Voice,” Barthes asserts there is a tangible difference between the voice of Panzera (a
cabaret singer of the pre-recording era) and the widely-recorded voice of singer
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. According to Barthes, who heard Panzera sing live, Fischer-
Dieskau’s recordings demonstrate a withering of the vocal “grain,” that is, “the body
in the voice as it sings” or “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue.”
This withering seems to be a consequence of the missing visual connection to
the spectacle o f musical performance— that is, the disappearance of the live
performer. Recording preserves the music through a form of mechanical memory, but
diminishes or eliminates the physical presence of the performer’s body. As a result, it
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hinders the viewer-listener’s act of reaching for “something which is directly the
cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement.” In other words,
technology both stimulates and frustrates desire. Like Beda in Schumann’s scenario,
Barthes longs for a direct encounter with the performer: “I am determined to listen to
my relation with the body of the man or woman singing or playing, and that relation is
erotic.... I can hear with certainty— the certainty of the body, of thrill.”63
Like Benjamin, Barthes blames popular-culture media technologies for this
disembodiment (or “withering”) o f the musical (art)work. Barthes notes that “under
the pressure of the mass long-playing record, there seems to be a flattening out of
technique ... into perfection.” Such perfection eliminates the music’s “grain,” the
physical presence of the unique and unpredictable human voice/body. Moreover, mass
reproduction reflects popular appeal, and thus determines the viewer-listener’s access
to any musical source: “If you like Schubert but not [Fischer-Dieskau], then Schubert
is today forbidden you—an example of that positive censorship (censorship by
repletion) which characterizes mass culture though it is never criticized. His a r t ... fits
well with the demands of an average culture [une culture moyenne].”64 Barthes’s
nostalgic lament for the pre-reproduced musical object places him within a Romantic
aesthetics invested in the sublime encounter with individual genius and original
creative expression. Invoking another version of the high/low cultural hierarchy,
63
Barthes implies these are impossible ideals in the context of twentieth-century
“average culture.”
Once again, however, “average culture” acknowledges and quite literally plays
out these issues in many representations of musical performance. The act of listening
to a record, for example, is a signifying event in many depictions of the pianist in
Hollywood films. In The Other Love (1947), Barbara Stanwyck’s character is a pianist
suffering from a debilitating disease, and her doctor forbids her to practice or perform
for many weeks. One day she listens nostalgically to her own recording of
Schumann’s “Aufschwung,” and then suddenly tries to play along with it. When she
can’t keep up with the recorded version of herself, she smashes the record in anger and
frustration. In The Possessed (1947), Joan Crawford’s character plays a record of
Chopin’s “Fantasie-Impromptu,” and this recorded performance triggers a flashback to
a long-ago piano recital and a frustrated love affair of her past (fig. 23).
Even a mechanical player piano can stimulate a powerful attraction. In the
1977 Soviet film Neokonchennaya Pyesa dlya Mekhanicheskovo Pianino (An
Unfinished Piece fo r Player Piano), a young woman faints upon hearing a player-
piano perform Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. In “A Piano in the House,” a 1962
episode of the television series The Twilight Zone, the playing of an antique pianola
causes its listeners to speak truthfully, and so it becomes a tool of manipulation and
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revenge for a sadistic party host whose wife is having an affair with his best friend.
Through the technological mediation of this piano, the husband discovers the secrets
of the people around him, but ultimately “went searching for concealed persons and
found himself.”
A different sort o f technological mediation of the Romantic pianist occurs in
Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fraulein Else (1924), which includes excerpts from
Schumann’s Camaval as musical notation directly in the text of the story (fig. 24).
Like a recording or film soundtrack, these fragments add “real” music to Schnitzler’s
tale of sexual desire and psychosis. Else, a young Viennese woman of good society, is
blackmailed into exposing herself for the voyeuristic pleasure of an older man, a
wealthy family friend who can save her father from bankruptcy. Suffering under an
increasingly desperate sense of guilt and moral ambivalence, Else gradually becomes
hysterical. She hears piano playing emanating from the music-room downstairs.
“Who’s playing the piano down there? Chopin?” she wonders as she leaves her room
dressed only in a fur coat. “Schumann? Yes, Camaval. ... She plays well. But why
she? Perhaps it’s a he. Perhaps it’s a virtuoso. I’ll just look into the music-room.”65
When Else reaches the music-room, she sees both the wealthy older man as well as a
younger man she finds sexually arousing. As the pianist continues to play, Else
disrobes and faints in front of the two men and the other startled guests.
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The convergence of the idolized Romantic pianist, the desiring viewer-listener,
and some form of technological mediation is not limited to the fictional realm of
popular culture, but also characterizes the “real-life” world of concert music and
performance. A famous example of this convergence is the record album Horowitz on
Television (Columbia, 1968). In the mid-1960s popular demand for Horowitz was at a
peak level, partly because of the pianist’s dramatic return to concertizing after a
twelve-year hiatus. In the liner notes to this recording, Horowitz explains, “I have
received innumerable requests from all over the land in the last few years for personal
appearances. Even if I traveled continuously, I doubt that I could fill a minimum of
them. But I no longer enjoy such long tours. I am convinced that television has
reached a state of technical and artistic maturity that can sustain the highest standards.
... I am grateful for this opportunity to reach, through my music, so many of my old
friends and perhaps to make some new ones.”66 The album is a compilation of works
by Chopin, Schumann, Scarlatti, and Scriabin which Horowitz recorded in Carnegie
Hall on February 1, 1968 before an invited audience; the same recital was televised
coast-to-coast on the CBS network on September 22, 1968.
In the Horowitz on Television production, technology mediates the Romantic
pianist’s performance in three distinct ways. First, as one of the great “Last Romantic”
pianists of the twentieth century, Horowitz represented a surviving link to the
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nostalgic memory-object of nineteenth-century musical tradition.67 Horowitz himself
performs a technological role in mediating the Romantic past through his concert
ritual, concert repertoire, and his astounding technical facility at the instrument.68
Second, the illustration on the cover of the record album mediates the pianist
and the technical production for the desiring viewer-listener who purchases the record
(fig. 25). On the left, Horowitz at the grand piano on stage is a “sight o f sound,” while
the television cameraman on the right records and transmits this performance to
millions of viewer-listeners beyond the concert hall. Like the television broadcast, the
recording technology and visual illustration of the album itself presents the individual
fan a chance to see and hear Horowitz’s performance at home, but seemingly as if
from the front row in front of the Carnegie Hall stage.
Finally, the recording faithfully commits the sounds o f Horowitz’s
performance for posterity, but it reorders the desire and release the original audience
experienced through that performance. As the liner notes explain, “Audience applause
has been retained at the beginning and end of the program, but it was decided that
applause between selections be omitted in order not to disturb the musical content in
this special recording.” Here technology displaces the body and the “grain” of the
Carnegie Hall audience for the sake of the viewer-listener at home, who, like Beda in
Schumann’s review, must be content with this simulacrum of the pianist’s historic
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attraction.
The 1996 hit film Shine and subsequent high-publicity conceit tours o f David
Helfgott (b. 1947), the pianist whose story of mental illness is the subject of the film,
provide a comprehensive case study on the dynamics of technology, desire, and
popular attraction surrounding the figure of the “Romantic” pianist in contemporary
culture. Many critics disparaged both the film and the concert tours for exploiting
H elfgott’s handicaps. In Time magazine, Jesse Birnbaum called Helfgott’s
performance at Boston’s Symphony Hall “scarcely more than a pathetic sideshow
attraction.” Birnbaum notes Helfgott’s shortcomings as a performer and as a
mediating agent for the music: “His technical performance was wildly erratic, the
phrasing disjointed, the rhythms unreliable. Most disconcerting was the absence of any
notion of what the pieces were designed to convey; Helfgott played a lot of notes but
not much music.” Nevertheless, audiences responded with overwhelming expressions
of satisfied desire: “Each piece was greeted with a roaring standing ovation, the kind
once accorded to a Rubinstein or a Horowitz.”69
Despite his failures to negotiate the music’s expressive and technical demands,
Helfgott seemed to reach his audiences through other modes of mediation. Director
Scott Hicks acknowledges that “David’s music is one thing. David’s story is another.
... It’s about being able to survive experiences that none of us would want and to
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come out on the other side—in love, loved, and playing music to audiences.”70 Hicks’s
film provides an excellent example o f how mythology as well as technology
supplement the pianist’s performance to create a popular attraction for the music-
lover. Shine engages the three modes of mediation discussed in this and the preceding
chapter: the dieam-memory of the pianist (like Letter from an Unknown Woman, much
o f Shine's story is told via a flashback narrative), the “real-life” dreamer’s desire-
driven identification with that fantasy (whether this dreamer is David’s estranged
father listening to his son’s performance from the past, or the viewer-listener who
feels an emotional response to this film in the present), and the role of a mediating,
reproducing technology in conveying both this memory and this object of desire.
Midway through the film, the teenage David plays a grueling performance of
Rachm aninoffs Third Piano Concerto with his school orchestra in London, a
climactic moment in the plot because this performance triggers his mental and
physical breakdown. In a cleverly-filmed scene, the “grain” of both the music and the
pianist’s body intersect with striking effect through forms of technological mediation
which convey the performer to the viewer-listener. David appears like another
“dreaming visionary” as he performs the concerto with his eyes closed. David’s
teacher, sitting in the audience, also participates in this dream as he listens with closed
eyes. An intercut shot reveals that David’s father is also listening to this performance,
69
but through a displacement of time and space: he stands alone in his own room, and
listens to the performance on a reel-to-reel tape recording.
Back in the performance scene, the camera provides impossible perspectives
on David’s body in the act of playing— impossible, that is, for the audience in the
concert hall, but not for the film viewer-listener. For example, David’s fingers are
reflected in the keyboard lid, a sight of music-making which connotes the tension of
his mind-body conflict (not unlike Chopin’s state of “delicate health”). Vertiginous
camera movements make the piano keyboard sway unsteadily, and also communicate
a sense of David’s unbalanced psychological condition. At certain moments, David’s
piano technique itself becomes a fetish object through slow-motion filming and
extreme close-ups of his fingers on the keys. Twice in this scene the soundtrack music
suddenly falls silent, leaving only the dull thuds of the piano keys hitting the keybed.
The mechanism of the instrument itself suddenly emerges as another mediating
technology, stripped bare of its music, so that the viewer-listener can hear its physical
grain. One can also hear the grain of David’s body, his heartbeat, in these intervals.
This pianist and this performance stimulate an attraction on many levels. The
viewer-listener can feel for David, identify with his struggle, and wonder whether he
will be able to make it to the end of the concerto. David does survive the performance,
and the rousing ovation which follows signifies that desire has been consummated for
70
the viewer-listeners in the concert hall. A final view of David’s solitary father is
intercut with the scenes of the cheering audience. As he holds the tape-recording box
and his son’s gold medal in his hand, David’s father sheds a tear. The viewer-listener’s
desire, that he feel for his son, has also been fulfilled.
1 Claude Debussy, “Good Friday” (La Revue blanche. May 1, 1901), in Debussy on Music, trans. and
ed. Richard Langham Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977): 26.
2 Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990): 90.
3 Robert Walser considers the performance dynamics of heavy metal music, particularly in the overlap
of virtuosity and masculinity. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in
Heavy Metal Music (Hanover Wesleyan University Press, 1993). Steve Waksman examines the role
and significance of the electric guitar in twentieth-century popular music, especially in terms of its
social dynamics of racial and sexual desire. Steve Waksman, Instruments o f Desire: The Electric Guitar
and the Shaping o f Musical Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
4 In addition to Kramer's work cited above on the topic of virtuosity in Romantic musical performance,
Christopher Small examines the phenomenon o f performance as a participatory social phenomenon
involving both musicians and audiences. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings o f Performing
and Listening (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Jose Bowen notes the quite recent
development of interest in “music as performance” within the field of historical musicology, an area of
scholarship “where analysis, cultural studies, hermeneutics, and performance practice meet.” Jose
Bowen, “Finding the Music in Musicology,” Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 451. Jonathan Dunsby recalls the “dangerous” aspect of
live musical performance mentioned by Debussy above: “You go to perform as best you can, but you
don’t know what you are supposed to be dealing with. Or you are a receiver—listener, consumer,
audience—but you cannot know what you will get. In other words, music is always a risk, for everyone,
all the time.” Jonathan Dunsby, Performing Music: Shared Concerns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995):
14.
5 The Hollywood Song encyclopedia notes that Dooley Wilson’s playing was dubbed by Elliot J.
Carpenter, but the image on screen is indelibly associated with the music on the soundtrack. Ken
Bloom, Hollywood Song: The Complete Film & Musical Companion (New York: Facts on File, 1995),
1:935.
5 Franz Liszt, Briefe an Marie Grafin d ’Agoult (Berlin, 1933): 387.
7 JSnos Jank6, “Franz Liszt at the Piano,” in Borsszem Janko (April 6, 1873). Richard Leppert notes
how the text of these caricatures “implies that Liszt is well aware of how he is manipulating his
audience,” and considers these representations an indication of how the Romantic pianist’s attraction
invites “sensual chaos: the reverie, the decentered dream." Richard Leppert, “Cultural Contradiction,
71
Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt,” Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years o f Life with the
Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 268-270.
8 Edward Rothstein, “In Classical Music, Selling Hard and Selling Out,” The New York Times
(September 21, 1997): H3. Two further examples of many such articles: Jamie James, “Sex and the
‘Singles’ Symphony: Marketing Classical Music as Sexy Music,” New York Times (May 2, 1993): HI.
Robert Jobson, “Sex and Drugs and Rachmaninov,” Daily Express (November 12, 2000). Classical
violin prodigy Vanessa-Mae has been criticized for her seductive album-cover photographs and music
videos, but she dismisses her physical appearance and invokes this hierarchy of sound over spectacle
when she asserts, “If the music is good and well played, then it will touch anybody, anywhere.” Michael
Walsh, “Seductive Strings: Concerto for Cello and Cleavage,” Time 146/24 (December 11, 1995).
9 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular,’” People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed.
Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981): 235.
10 Giulio Carlo Argan, “Ideology and Iconology," trans. Rebecca West, Critical Inquiry (Winter 1975):
297.
11 “Liberace looked back to Liszt’s ‘glitter,’” Mark Mitchell writes, referring to Liszt’s Glanzzeit. “For
him, though, there was only the glitter.... there was no musical and moral iron beneath it, which did not
stop him from becoming for millions of people ... the embodiment of the (lowest) popular idea of the
virtuoso.” Mark Mitchell, Virtuosi: A Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration o f Great Pianists
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000): 120.
12 Louis Crowder considers Liberace a latter-day manifestation of the “bad taste” Parisian-style virtuoso
tradition of pianists such as Henri Herz (1803-1888) or Franz Hilnten (1793-1878). Liberace shares with
these historical predecessors flamboyant performing mannerisms, accessible repertoire, and an intimate
appeal to the middle-class public.“Hunten and Herz—names remembered only for their sins! ... have
attained a curious immortality based only on their superlative musical mediocrity. ... [Liberace] is the
closest thing to Hiinten that we have. ... Everything about him—his fluent, rather unmasculine style of
playing, his exploitation of all the irrelevancies, his ingratiating manner, recall the age of Hiinten.
Perhaps we should look on him as a survival of great historical interest.” Louis Crowder, “Battle against
the Philistines,” Clavier (February 1970): 10-14.
13 For a genealogy of the candelabra from Chopin to Liberace in films, see Ivan Raykoff, “Hollywood’s
Embattled Icon,” in Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years o f Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilas
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 340-341.
14 This phrase is often used to describe the era of the nineteenth-century Romantic pianist. The Golden
Age o f the Piano is a documentary film about nineteenth-century pianists, written by David Dubai and
produced by Peter Rosen (Philips Classics/PoIyGram Video, 1992). The Golden Age o f Piano Virtuosi
(Argo, 1966) is a three-volume set of recordings of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century repertoire
performed by Josef Lhevinne, Moritz Rosenthal, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and others on piano rolls from
the Ampico reproducing piano. The Golden Age o f Polish Pianists (Z wielkich tradycji pianistyki
polskiej) (Polskie Nagrania, 1995) features recordings of Chopin’s music by Polish pianists such as
Paderewski, Rosenthal, Friedman, Rubinstein, and others.
15 Loesser, 608. Chapter 7.4 is “The Dusk of the Idol,” 599-608; chapter 7.5 is “The Low Plateau,” 608-
613.
16Loesser, 609,613.
72
17 Edward Rothstein, “For the Piano, Chords of Change,” New York Times 137 (September 27, 1987):
El.
18 “No pianist has ever captured the American imagination as he did, keeping his hold over it for thirty
years. He became a legend: his mispronounced name drew fanners from their bams, schoolboys from
their baseball, real estate speculators from their offices—all manner o f unlikely persons from their
dens—into a concert hall to have a look and a listen at him.” Loesser, S3S.
19 Loesser directly criticizes popular culture’s processes o f reproduction: “The piano’s decline was the
twentieth-century fate of any object—or any publication, or performance, or idea—that cannot be sold
quickly to scores of millions of people. ... At the height of the reign o f technology, only those things
that machines can make the fastest and in the greatest quantities can command the fullest respect.... At
the climax of the worship of technology, its priests say ‘mass’—using a word that pretends we are not
men, but crumbs in a pile of the inanimate stuff that machines live on.” Loesser, 611.
20 “Iturbi knows that some fellow musicians and a good many critics deplore his Hollywood
monkeyshines, and the flashiness that has come into his playing. Says he: ‘To some musicians the only
great thing in the world is a Beethoven symphony. With me life is like a meal, and music is the roast
beef. But what good is roast beef by itself? I must have my coffee and dessert and cigar.’” “Piano
Playboy,” Time (June 17, 1946): 57. Iturbi used the food metaphor to describe his attitude on mixing
musical styles: “Is like a menu—for picnic, you serve hamburger. For stiff-shirt dinner, you serve
caviar. Is the same in music. Boogie-woogie for picnics. Beethoven for white tie.” Arthur Bronson,
“Pianist in Hot Water,” Pageant (February, 1945): 90.
* For composition and publication information on these and other popular songs mentioned, see
Appendix: Popular Song List. In a further parallel, the song ‘T o Love Again” was featured in The Eddy
Duchin Story (1956), a biographical film about the life of the classical-popular crossover pianist who
died of leukemia at the age of 41. A comparison to Chopin himself, who died at 39 of tuberculosis,
seems implicit in this characterization. “To Love Again” was Duchin’s theme song, and he also
arranged a popular-song version of a Chopin Polonaise theme as “My Twilight Dream.” This crossover
phenomenon is not limited to the 1940s or 1950s: a more recent example of adaptations of Chopin’s
piano works is Barry Manilow’s 1972 hit song "Could It Be Magic,” featured in the 1977 film Looking
fo r Mr. Goodbar.
22 Iturbi recorded numerous Chopin piano compositions for the soundtrack of A Song to Remember. In
an article about “Chopin’s New Audience,” Lawrence Morton notes that this film stimulated
“phenomenal, tremendous, unprecedented” interest in the composer’s life and music, prompting a high
demands for scores, recordings, and books on the subject. Gaining public exposure far greater than a
normal concert career could afford, Iturbi performed via this cinematic production “for an audience
probably as numerous as the combined audiences of such famous Chopin interpreters as Liszt, de
Pachmann, and Paderewski.” Lawrence Morton, “Chopin’s New Audience,” Hollywood Quarterly
[Film Quarterly] 1/1 (October 1945): 31-33.
23 In addition to the pianists mentioned, a number of popular singers, violinists, conductors, and band
leaders are represented on Sixty Years o f “Music American Loves B est”-, singers Enrico Caruso, Marian
Anderson, Mario Lanza, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Harry
Belafonte; violinists Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler; conductors Arturo Toscanini and the NBC
Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler and the
73
Boston Pops Orchestra; band leaders Paul Whiteman, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman; and jazz artist
Duke Ellington.
24 Iturbi appears in Thousands Cheer (1943), Two Girls and a Sailor (1944), Music fo r Millions (1944),
Anchors Aweigh (1945), Holiday in Mexico (1946), Three Daring Daughters (1948), and That Midnight
Kiss (1949).
23 According to Leonard Bernstein biographer Humphrey Burton, one proposed project would have had
Horowitz record “the famous Tchaikovsky sonata" for a Paramount production on the life of
Tchaikovsky. Bernstein was to play the role of Tchaikovsky, with Greta Garbo as Madame von Meek.
Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (New York: Doubleday, 1994): 142.
26
Liberace’s television series. The Liberace Show (1951-1956), became so popular it enjoyed a greater
total viewership than the widely-syndicated / Love Lucy show, commanding an audience of 35 million
viewers and carried by 219 television stations across the United States at its peak. However, his popular
television appeal did not translate into a successful Hollywood career, as the flop of his star vehicle
Sincerely Yours (1955) demonstrated. Other minor film roles include “The Maestro” in South Sea
Sinner 11950). Liberace was also a guest popular television series such as The Jack Benny Show (1954),
You Bet Your Life (1955), Batman (1966), Here’s Lucy (1970), Kojak (1978), and The Muppets (1978).
27 Borge was one of the most popular and highest-paid entertainers during the early 1940s, enjoyed a
seven-decade-long international career as a witty pianist-raconteur and popular radio, film, and
television personality. Borge’s ability to make light-hearted fun out of music endeared him to audiences
who may have felt intimidated or bored by the traditional decorum of “classical” music repertoire and
performance.
28 For example, Stephen Davis notes the comparison between violin virtuoso Paganini’s demonic
reputation and that of the rock group Led Zeppelin: “There has always been something about music and
the lives of virtuoso musicians that carries with it the whiff of brimstone.” Stephen Davis, Hammer o f
the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985): 8-9.
39 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991): 151.
30 James Deaville, “The Making of a Myth: Liszt, the Press, and Virtuosity,” New Light on Liszt and his
Music: Essays in Honor o f Alan Walker’s 65th Birthday, ed. Michael Saffle and James Deaville
(Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997): 184.
31 Amy Fay’s extremely popular Music-Study in Germany was hailed as “the book of the age” by one
prominent critic when it was first published in 1880 (Chicago: A. C. McClurg), and it has been
reprinted numerous times since then. Margaret McCarthy, Amy Fay: America "s Notable Woman o f
Music (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1995).
32 Hermann Bahr, Das Konzert: Lustspiel in drei Akten (Berlin: E. Reiss, 1909). Hermann Bahr (1863-
1934) was an influential Austrian writer, critic, and journalist His only work to remain in print to the
present day is the Das Konzert, as a reprint in the popular German Reclam series (Stuttgart: P. Reclam,
c l9 6 l, 1994).
33 Hermann Bahr. The Concert: A Comedy in Three Acts, trans. Bayard Quincy Morgan, in C hief
Contemporary Dramatists, 2nd series, ed. Thomas H. Dickinson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1921):
505-567. Also published as a “college edition for American students of German,” ed. Josef Wiehr (New
York: Prentice-Hall, 1931).
74
34 Ivan Raykoff, “Bahr’s Konzert: Towards an Iconography o f the ‘Romantic’ Pianist in Hollywood
Films,” paper presented at the American Music Research Center conference “Hollywood Musicals and
Music in Hollywood” (Univeristy of Colorado-Boulder, August 2001).
35 Based on Rumer Godden’s 1963 novel of the same title, though the screenwriters changed Godden’s
protagonist Robert Quillet, a film director, into Lorenzo Tassara, an Italian composer-pianist who falls
in love with a married woman. Rumer Godden, The Battle o f the Villa Fiorita (New York: Viking,
1963).
36 The script for this film is based on James M. Cain’s story “A Modem Cinderella” (published in 1951
as “The Root of His Evil”), a story about a lowly waitress who falls in love with a Harvard-educated
businessman. As with Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, however, the screenwriters decided to
turn the male lead character into a European concert pianist.
37 It could be argued that such popular twentieth-century stylings make use of the musical vocabulary
and formal conventions established by composers in the era of nineteenth-century Romanticism: regular
melodic phrasing, common practice harmonic syntax, simple song forms, and musical textures based on
the instrumental and orchestral innovations of Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and other
nineteenth-century composers. Even so, titles which label such stylings as “romantic” will in most cases
engage the common meaning of the word, not its music-historical definition.
38 Clayderman also publishes his arrangements for amateur pianists: Music o f Love: The Piano Solos o f
Richard Clayderman (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 1984, 2000), Coeur Fragile: Richard Clayderman
(Paris: Editions Delphine; Chappell, 1984), Amour [as performed by Richard Clayderman] (Hialeah,
FL: Columbia Pictures Publications, 1985), From Paris With Love [as performed by Richard
Clayderman] (Miami FL: Columbia Pictures, 1986), Richard Clayderman Plays Love Songs o f the
World (Winona, MN: Hal Leonard, 1984-1988), etc.
39 Karl Neuenfeldt. “The Yanni Phenomenon: Musical Exotica, Memories and Multi-Media
Marketing,” in Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music, ed. Philip Hayward
(London: John Libbey, 1999): 187.
40 Sutherland. “Soothing, Melodious, Rick-Free Sounds from Yanni” (1997), cited in Neuenfeldt: 185.
41 Neil Strauss. “Music Contrived to Ease the Angst,” Hew York Times (July 8, 1995).
42 Eric Blom, The Romance o f the Piano (London: Foulis, 1928; reprt. New York: Da Capo Press,
1969): xii. Not only the piano has been historicized in this context, but the violin also. In The Romance
o f the Fiddle: The Origin o f the Modem Virtuoso and the Adventures o f his Ancestors (London, 1911;
reprt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), E. van der Straeten writes, “so many more touches of
romance from real life are running through the history o f the development o f violin technic that I
confidently hope the reader will find the title of this little book fully justified ...” (vi).
43 Judith Oringer, Passion fo r the Piano, foreword by Andrd Watts (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1983).
44
In his analysis of Berlin's song lyrics, James Parakilas suggests that the narrator's "love affair with
the piano” began “only when he reached sexual maturity.” James Parakilas, “Introduction,” Piano
Roles: Three Hundred Years o f Life with the Piano (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 2.
45
My translation of the lyrics.
46
Paradoxically, in the original German lyrics, the singer explains that she doesn 't let her lovers play
her piano. Those who try to “accompany” her she throws into the strings and treads on them with her
75
pedals: “mich liebt ein jeder Mann, doch an mein Pianola, da laB ich keinen ra n !... Und will mich wer
begleiten da unten aus dem Saal, dem hau’ ich in die Seiten und tret’ ihm aufs Pedal!”
47 Robert Schumann on Music and Musicians, ed. Konrad Wolff, trans. Paul Rosenfeld (New York,
1946): 156.
48 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989): 14-26. Also “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’
inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” 29-38.
49 Leppert investigates “the function o f musical practices as representations through which the history of
the body is produced” (xix). He pursues iconic analyses of the visual-performative aspects of music-
making and listening, tying these to social attitudes toward the body and gender. Richard Leppert, The
Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History o f the Body (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993).
50 Richard Leppert, ‘Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt,” in Piano
Roles: Three Hundred Years o f Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1999): 258.
51 Harold Frederic, The Damnation o f Theron Ware, or Illumination (New York: Penguin Books,
1986): 195-96.
52 The pianist’s site/sight of seduction is usually located in the concert hall or the domestic parlor, but
this romantic musical encounter can occur just about anywhere: on top of the piano, as in the British
film comedy The Tall Guy (1989), under the piano, as in Fellini’s Prova d'orchestra (Orchestra
Rehearsal) (1978), in the piano itself, as in the Italian animation feature Allegro non troppo
(1976)—even in a tiny propeller airplane stranded on a desolate Caribbean island, as in the Hollywood
musical Flying Down to Rio (1933)!
53 Kevin Kopelson, Beethoven’s Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery o f Desire (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996): 10-11.
54
Small examines the phenomenon of the symphony orchestra concert as one model of how musical
performing and listening function as a social activity. Chapter 1, “A Place for Hearing,” and chapter 3,
“Sharing with Strangers,” concern the organization of the musical and social space. Small writes, “a
concert hall is a social construction, designed and built by social beings in accordance with certain
assumptions about desirable human behavior and relationships.” Christopher Small, Musicking: The
Meanings o f Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998): 29.
55 Small, 26-27.
36 Suzanne G. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship With Music: A Serious Effort Not To Think
Straight,” in Queering the Pitch, eds. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York:
Routledge, 1994): 79.
57 Small, 44. Like Cusick, Small acknowledges that a musical spectacle can hold seductive or erotic
potential, but notes the strict regulation of this performance dynamic: “some popular artists go to the
point of behavior onstage that under other circumstances could be interpreted as an invitation to sex.
But woe betide any deluded member of the audience who takes the invitation seriously and tries to join
the performer onstage. ... Performers, however glamorous, do not issue sexual invitations, not onstage
at any rate.” Small, 48.
58 Early sound films from the 1930s offered higher quality music-recording capabilities than the audio
recording technologies of the era, and thus provide valuable visual as well as acoustic documentation of
76
historical pianists. In 1998 the Louvre Museum in Paris presented a festival of film and television
documentation of performances by a number of famous pianists of the twentieth century. Catalog:
Classique en images 1998: Les grands pianistes du XXeme siecle, ed. Christian Labrande and Pierre'
Martin Juban (Paris: Musle du Louvre, 1998). Reviews: Ivan Raylcoff, “Great Pianists on Film," Piano
& Keyboard (May-June, 1998): 21-23; “Seeing is Hearing,” American Record Guide (May-June,
1998): 11-13.
59
This role of technology in representing and reproducing the legacy o f the Romantic pianist is
emphasized, for example, by Thomas Dunhill, who urged in the 1950s that recordings be made of the
playing of Clara Schumann’s last surviving pupil: “Unfortunately Clara Schumann is no longer with us,
but we have got Adelina de Lara, and I would strongly advise those who make records to invite her
speedily to make as many Schumann records as possible, before it is too late, so that the tradition can
remain with us.” Adelina de Lara, in collaboration with Clare H-Abrahall, Finale (London: Burke,
1955): 201.
60
For example, Paul Th£berge discusses the impact o f new digital technologies on the tradition of
popular-music production and distribution in the twentieth century. Paul Thdberge, Any Sound You Can
Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hannover Wesleyan University Press, 1997).
61 John Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding O ff from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1994): 35.
62
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969): 218-224. The socialist Benjamin
might be expected to celebrate the artwork’s “proletarianization,” but at the same time seems nostalgic
for the “authentic” memory-object of the past—an ambivalence over technological reproduction which
persists to this day.
63 Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London:
Flamingo, 1977): 181-82, 188. On the other hand, Corbett suggests that recordings, despite their visual
lack, can provide a “fetishistic audiophilia” for listeners. “Recorded music, at once the site of intense
pleasure and the producer of a similar threat of lack [or disembodiment], is therefore constituted in its
object-form as erotic-fetishistic, and the aural is mystified as ‘something satisfying in itself.’ Threat of
absence, of loss, creates a nostalgia for the fullness o f a mythical past; pleasure is inscribed in its
memory—the gap.” Corbett, 37.
44 Roland Barthes, “Le grain de la voix,” Roland Barthes: Oeuvres completes, ed. f-ric Marty (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1994): n, 1439.
45 Arthur Schnitzler, Frdulein Else, trans. F. H. Lyon (London: Pushkin Press, 1998): 85,92,94.
66 Emphasis (italics) added.
67 Among numerous articles to use this term for Horowitz: Kingsley Day, “Vladimir Horowitz, 1903-
1989: The Last Romantic,” Clavier (January, 1990). Horowitz: The Last Romantic is also the title of a
1985 documentary film about the pianist, directed by Peter Gelb.
68 The selections on the record album are Chopin’s Ballade in G minor, op. 23; Nocturne in F minor, op.
55, no. 1; Polonaise in F-sharp minor, op. 44; Schumann’s Arabesque, op. 18 and “Traumerei” from
Kinderszenen; two sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti; Alexander Scriabin's Etude in D-sharp minor, op. 8,
no. 12; and Horowitz’s famous encore “Variations on a Theme from Bizet's Carmen.”
49 Jess Birnbaum, “A Lamentable Debut,” Time 149/11 (March 17, 1997).
70 Production notes to Shine from Fine Line Features (1997).
m . PIANISTIC PROGENITORS
“You have a certain reputation, Franz Liszt, and I am not speaking of your
virtuosity at the piano!” —Martita Hunt (Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna)
to Dirk Bogarde in Song without End
Chopin is not the only nineteenth-century pianist to inspire dreams of love in
the popular imagination. The music and life-story of Franz Liszt (1811-1886) have
contributed even further to the mythology of the “Romantic” pianist in the twentieth
century. Liszt’s Liebestraum e, a set of three piano nocturnes, demonstrate this
evocative convergence of music, nostalgic dream, and romantic desire in their
programmatic title. Significantly, the famous A-flat major Liebestraum is a
transcription of Liszt’s own song “O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst!” (“Oh love as long
as you can love”) (fig. 26). The text’s exhortation to achieve enduring romance seems
an apt description of the pianist’s enduring powers of attraction for audiences,
performers, and music-Iovers well into the twentieth century.
Song without End, the title of a I960 Hollywood feature film about Liszt’s
musical and amorous exploits, provides another metaphor for how his music and
reputations have been perpetuated through popular-culture productions (fig. 27). The
movie depicts Liszt as a profligate virtuoso-lover and focuses on his adulterous affair
with the Russian princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein (from 1847 until the end of his
77
78
as a musician and as a man. The plot involves Liszt callously neglecting his previous
lover, the countess Marie d’Agoult, and their three children in favor of Carolyn and
the musical inspiration she promises to deliver. In this version of the typical
“Romantic” pianist-composer myth, Liszt exchanges one female muse for another.
The first has provided his physical heirs; the second inspires his musical legacy.
Through these two forms of progeniture, Liszt lives on “without end.”
Liszt’s music also lives on thanks to the soundtrack recordings and other
publicity materials marketed with the movie. Song without End won an Academy
Award for Best Score in 1961, and numerous recordings of Liszt’s piano music were
released to capitalize on the film’s success.1Through such technological mediations
the film contributes to the endless reproduction of Liszt’s most familiar piano works,
including the popular “Liebestraum.” Morris Stoloff and George Duning, studio
composers at Columbia Pictures, also adapted other themes by Liszt heard in the film
into songs with romantic lyrics. The melody of “Un sospiro,” for example, was set
with lyrics by Ned Washington, and this adaptation, also titled “Song without End,”
was published as a merchandising tie-in to the film’s release (fig. 28).
These lyrics describe the metaphoric “song” as a sign for lasting romance:
“Our love is like a lovely Song without End, a haunting tune that lingers on.” As the
second verse puts it,
79
There’s something strange about a Song Without End,

That only those in love can comprehend.
Don’t take away your music,
Stay my whole life through!
My song without an end is you.
Indeed, “Un sospiro” is one of a number of Romantic piano “songs” which have
served as evocative love-music on film soundtracks and in popular music throughout
the twentieth century. The same piece echoes on in this 1960 film from an earlier
depiction of another Hollywood virtuoso-lover who plays it, Stefan Brand in Letter
from an Unknown Woman (1948). As discussed in the previous chapter, “Un sospiro”
is the musical catalyst for Lisa’s initial infatuation with her idolized virtuoso.2
In a broader sense, though, “Song without End” (whether the music or the
movie title) also describes the legacy of the Romantic pianist as a figurative song
which has persisted since the mid-nineteenth century. Liszt’s etude endures through its
adaptation 112 years later as the basis for a Hollywood film-song. The mythology of
Liszt’s life-story also demonstrates an underlying genealogy from the nineteenth
century into the twentieth. Liszt and few other renowned nineteenth-century pianists
serve as the role-models or “progenitors” for a wide range of subsequent “real-life”
pianists as well as numerous fictional representations of the pianist in films, novels,
stories, plays, and musical adaptations. Biographical and autobiographical accounts as
80
well as anecdotal legends have transformed these historical figures into self-
perpetuating archetypes still comprehensible to successive generations.
Franz Liszt provides not one but a number of different role-models for
subsequent representations of the “Romantic” pianist. An acquaintance once told
Liszt, “You have in reality three personalities to deal with in yourself: the socialite, the
virtuoso, and the thoughtful and creative composer.”3 For the purposes of this study,
Liszt’s “personalities” can be summarized with another set of three categories:
Musician (as boy-prodigy, virtuoso star, respected teacher, and celebrated composer),
Lover (akin to “socialite”), and Saint-or-Sinner. Each of these roles or reputations has
contributed to Liszt’s reproducibility—his metaphorical “song without end”—through
numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular-culture productions.
Liszt’s reputation as Musician includes his career as a renowned piano virtuoso
(from his early fame as a child prodigy until 1847, when he retired from concertizing),
as a teacher and musical mentor (particularly after he settled in Weimar and instituted
his famous piano master-classes in 1869), and as a prolific composer and a leading
figure of the “New German School” of late nineteenth-century music.
Liszt’s reputation as Lover derives from his scandalous liaisons with the
Countess d’Agoult, the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, and a host of other women. This
aspect of Liszt’s attraction is also a function of his charismatic performing persona
81
(resulting in the phenomenon of “Lisztomania”4) and the programmatic associations of
specific musical works, such as the Liebestraume. In numerous popular-culture
representations, the virtuoso pianist and the seductive womanizer combine in the role
of the Lisztian virtuoso-lover.
Liszt’s reputation as Saint-or-Sinner invokes his complicated psychology,
which is usually represented in terms of a conflict between good (spiritual) and bad
(worldly, erotic, or demonic) tendencies. Liszt’s life-long religious inclinations
motivated him to take minor orders in the Catholic church in 1865, whereupon he
became recognized as the Abbe Liszt. But Liszt’s adulterous affairs demonstrated his
earthly impulses in contradiction to standards of social convention and religious
morality. Liszt’s wnsaintly tendencies also relate to his performing career (his
emulation of the “demonic” virtuosity of violinist Nicolo Paganini, for example) and
specific musical works (such as the Paganini-inspired ‘Transcendental” piano etudes,
the diabolical M ephisto waltzes, or the Totentanz concerto). According to this
reputation, the virtuoso-lover often exhibits a dark side in his musical and romantic
attractions. Liszt’s famous comment about being “half Franciscan and half Gypsy”
sums up his split reputation.5
Admittedly, these three categories are simplified and reductive means to
understand a complex and by now quite distant historical individual. However, the
82
focus here is on processes of representation which perpetuate recognizable images and
familiar characterizations of a historical figure. If these representations lean towards
cliche rather than historical fact, it is less a case for ignoring or dismissing them than it
is for considering the forces which account for their remarkable endurance and popular
appeal.
What makes Liszt one of the most significant progenitors of the “Romantic” *
pianist is the way he has been represented and continually re-presented in popular
culture productions (fig. 29). These same processes can inform serious historiography
and scholarship as well. Legend-making reveals a process of history becoming myth,
as Barthes has noted—an evolution by which “real” history or experience becomes
descriptive anecdote and fanciful representation in the service of larger cultural
ideologies.
LISZT AS LEGEND
Franz Liszt has been immortalized “without end” by historians and critics as a
representative figure of the nineteenth-century Romantic musician. In the 1980 edition
of The New Grove Dictionary o f Music and Musicians, Humphrey Searle notes Liszt’s
disparate reptuations: “Personally tom between a longing for spiritual security, a love
83
of worldly sensation and an idealistic belief in the future of music, he contained in his
character more of the ambitions—and contradictions—of the nineteenth century than
any other major musician.”6 In liner notes to the record album Song without End: The
Story o f Franz Liszt (Colpix, 1960), Abram Chasins asserts that Liszt “typified the
ideals of the entire Romantic period.” Chasins refers to Liszt’s three reputations as
musician, lover, and saint-sinner when he writes that “almost every artistic and human
virtue and weakness was to be found within Liszt as composer, performer, conductor,
teacher, writer, perpetual Don Juan and roving son of the Church.”
Chasins also acknowledges the formation of popular myths around this
historical figure. For an era which prized the workings of fantasy and imagination,
“the fantastic adventures of Liszt provided many fantastic legends of a fantastic era.” 7
Even as early as 1886, a critic describing Liszt’s final visit to London noted that “the
enthusiasm for Liszt is all personal, and not for his [musical] productions. He, as the
central figure of certain representative ideas, attracts attention for himself. His
picturesque and vague history surrounds him with a halo of glorification all aglow
with iridescent colors.”8
This “halo of glorification” has been a major obstacle in fashioning a reliable
historiography of Liszt’s life and music.9 In a 1936 article on the “problem” of Liszt
scholarship, Emile Haraszti calls the pianist a “man of a thousand faces” and an
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“impenetrable romantic soul.” The “enigma” of Liszt’s musical and personal
reputations raises numerous questions for the historian about the role or influence of
Liszt’s lovers, other critics and biographers, and the pianist himself in constructing
and disseminating his legends.10 In “Liszt Studies Past and Present,” an introductory
chapter to an annotated bibliography of Liszt scholarship, Michael Saffle notes that
“by 1847, when he left the concert stage, Liszt had already become a legend.”
Apparently Liszt’s early biographers Lina Ramann, Marie Lipsius (writing under the
pseudonym La Mara), and Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein even invented certain legends
about Liszt as a person and musician. “La Mara and Ramann may have been well-
intentioned,” Saffle argues, “but their versions of Liszt’s affairs required suppression,
rearrangement, and even falsification of the facts at hand.” Contemporary scholarship
attempts to salvage historical fact from the broad wash of myth surrounding this
figure, but popular misrepresentations prove persistent. “Old ideas die hard,” Saffle
admits. “The legends fostered by late nineteenth-century biographers and scholars
were followed by the debunking exaggerations and distortions of Haraszti, [Ernest]
Newman, and their ilk. ... Newman’s claims have been attacked time and again, but
they continue to surface in popular biographies as well as scholarly debates.”"
A typical argument holds that this popular “halo of glorification” around
historical musicians promotes cliched notions about composition and performance.
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Hollywood accounts o f the rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri (in the 1984
film Amadeus, for example) or about Beethoven’s struggle with deafness (in the 1994
film Immortal Beloved) attract popular audiences through their evocative music and
mythic narratives while scholars and serious musicians decry their melodramatic
distortions.12 At least the 1947 Hollywood film Song o f Love is careful to announce, in
its opening credits, that “in this story of Clara and Robert Schumann, of Johannes
Brahms and Franz Liszt, certain necessary liberties have been taken with incident and
chronology. The basic story of their lives remains a true and shining chapter in the
history of music.” 13
Mythologized and melodramatized accounts of musicians’ lives persist because
they exploit levels of representation other than historical accuracy and factual detail.
Instead, they can convey a sense of the emotional impulses (Mozart’s irreverent
eccentricities in Amadeus, Liszt’s religious guilt in Song without End) which may have
motivated these historical figures to compose and perform their music, the mental and
physical “grain” of their bodies (Beethoven’s deafness, Robert Schumann’s insanity,
Liszt’s technical dexterity) in the act of composing and performing, and the
complicated dynamics of desire at work in their professional and private lives. In this
way, popular representations serve as functional allegories about artistic creativity,
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social relationships, professional rivalry, physical handicap, and other universal
aspects of the human condition.
Christopher Small argues that “myths are stories based on exemplary acts [and]
exemplary individuals ... [that] provide us with models and paradigms for behavior
and relationship.” In musical performance and listening, as in other cultural realms,
mythic narratives “place the past, whether real or imagined, at the service of the
present. Their actual historical accuracy is irrelevant to their value” as indicators or
guides to contemporary social relationships and cultural values.14As an example of the
social and cultural signification which can be assigned to a historical musical figure,
Small notes the shifting reputations assigned to Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893),
from “semibarbarous Cossack” during his own lifetime to “sugary, sentimental sissy”
and “agonized, hysterical homosexual” in the twentieth century. In the case of Liszt,
too, critical and scholarly treatments of his life and music have often reflected the
cultural ideologies of a given era.
Music scholarship is not exempt from myth-making under the influence of
ideology. The Oxford Dictionary o f Music (second edition, 1994) declares that “the
Victorian conception of Chopin as a consumptive drawing-room balladeer of the
keyboard, a conception connived at by lesser pianists, has long been exposed as a false
trail leading hearers away from the true, poetic, heroic Chopin.”15 Here one mythic
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depiction—Chopin as frail artiste of “delicate health,” as in Schumann’s fanciful
scenario discussed in the opening chapter— is substituted for another “true”
representation of the pianist-composer as “heroic,” with the gender and even political
associations o f that metaphorical attribute.16In the popular realm, Chopin’s “heroism”
is the basis for A Song to Remember (1945) and other films from the World War II era
that depict the patriotic Polish pianist-hero in conjunction with war-time political
ideologies.17Even representations of recent “real-life” performers can demonstrate the
influence of ideology. In Shine (1996), a factually inaccurate subplot about the
Holocaust trauma o f David Helfgott’s overbearing father incorporates a hackneyed
political mythology into the reportedly “true” story about the struggles of the sensitive
pianist-prodigy.18
As noted above, many popular-culture representations of the male “Romantic”
pianist draw upon Liszt’s three main reputations to fashion characterizations which
blend the musical with the romantic (as in the virtuoso-lover stereotype), the
pedagogical with the spiritual (as in the master-mentor role), and the diabolical with
the desirable (as in the demonic-virtuoso type). As “paradigms for behavior and social
relationship based upon an exemplary individual” (to paraphrase Small), they also
reveal an overarching meta-narrative about the virile, potent masculinity o f the
“Romantic” pianist. In this way, Liszt’s reputations inform subsequent representations
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of the pianist’s potential for physical and musical progeniture— for an enduring
“dream of love without end.”
The rem ainder o f this chapter will consider each of Liszt’s three
reputations—as prodigy and patriarch Musician, romantic and scandalous Lover, and
tormented Saint-or-Sinner—as they contribute to his enduring mythology. In each
case, historical background on Liszt’s life and music complements specific popular-
culture representations o f Liszt’s personality. The underlying thread in this analysis is
the rhetoric o f progeniture and patriarchal succession around the figure of the
“Romantic” virtuoso.
LISZT AS PRODIGY
Though his life-span lies completely within the nineteenth century, Liszt is
often described as a musician whose “lineage” spans the entire period from Beethoven,
a founding father of musical Romanticism, to Arnold Schoenberg, a founding father of
twentieth-century Modernism. As a young prodigy, Liszt studied with Carl Czerny and
Antonio Salieri, both pupils of Beethoven. Alan Walker suggests an Old Testament
patriarchal relationship when he states that “Beethoven was Liszt’s god; Liszt was
Beethoven’s prophet.” 19 Later, as an aged master himself, Liszt influenced subsequent
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generations o f pianists and composers. Saffle notes that “Liszt took much from the
musical world around him, and he gave much back. His ‘original’ works (as well as
his paraphrases and arrangements) were influenced by the works o f Beethoven,
Schubert, Rossini, and other figures, and he in turn influenced the likes of Grieg,
Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Debussy, Bartok, and even Schoenberg.”20
Liszt’s early career demonstrates this patriarchal progression from the master
Beethoven to the young prodigy. Liszt’s earliest published composition (at age eleven)
was a set of variations on a theme by the music publisher Antonio Diabelli, the same
theme upon which Beethoven had composed his famous set of thirty-two variations in
1823. Liszt’s debut concerts in Vienna in December 1822 and April 1823 established
the young pianist as a musical attraction in the European cultural capital.21 The second
of these concerts was the site of the mythic Weihekuss, or ceremonial consecration
kiss, which Liszt received from Beethoven. As legend has it, Beethoven went up to the
pianist on stage after the final selection and kissed him on the forehead in front of the
applauding audience. In this act, some claim, the mantle of musical genius and
tradition was passed from the patriarchal master to the young prodigy.22
Actually, the consecration did not occur in public at all, as Walker explains.
Liszt and his teacher Czerny had visited Beethoven’s home a few days before the
concert, which Beethoven did not attend.23 Nevertheless, the story (as reported by
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Liszt himself, and repeated in numerous biographical accounts) has an enduring
popular appeal. In 1873, a commemorative lithograph celebrated the 50th anniversary
of Liszt’s Vienna debut and the imaginary encounter, an image “reproduced countless
times as ‘proof of Beethoven’s public benediction.”24
There are also numerous literary representations of this event. Raphael Ledos
de Beaufort, in his popular 1880s biography of Liszt, depicts the scenario with
rhetorical flair: “Beethoven himself could not restrain his admiration, and ascending
the platform, he repeatedly kissed the glorious boy, amid the frantic cheers of the
assembled multitude!”25 Thomas Mann adapts the famous encounter to a fictional
setting in his 1903 story “Das Wunderkind” (“The Prodigy”), when the eight-year-old
prodigy Bibi is kissed by his manager in front of an enthusiastically cheering audience:
Then the prodigy stopped playing and a perfect storm arose in the hall.
He had to come out again and again from behind his screen. The man
with the shiny buttons carried up more wreaths: four laurel wreaths, a
lyre made of violets, a bouquet of roses. He had not arms enough to
convey all these tributes, the impresario himself mounted the stage to
help him. He hung a laurel wreath round Bibi’s neck, he tenderly
stroked the black hair—and suddenly as though overcome he bent
down and gave the prodigy a kiss, a resounding kiss, square on the
mouth. And then the storm became a hurricane. That kiss ran through
the room like an electric shock, it went direct to peoples’ marrow and
made them shiver down their backs.26
In Mann’s scenario, the master-prodigy relationship is played out in a shocking
spectacle that titillates the audience and excites their desire.
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The Beethoven legacy continued throughout Liszt’s later career, as well. Liszt
was a strong advocate for Beethoven’s music, performing the solo piano sonatas
before they were considered standard repertoire and fashioning extraordinary
transcriptions of the symphonies. Liszt also acquired Beethoven’s death mask and the
composer’s Broadwood piano, regarding both as “treasured relics,” according to
Walker.27 Popular-culture productions have capitalized on these historical details for
their symbolic connotations. In one scene in Ungarische Rhapsodie {Hungarian
Rhapsody) (1953), a German film version of Liszt’s life, Beethoven’s death mask
hangs on the wall as a reminder of musical tradition and a sign of Liszt’s responsibility
to his musical forebear. The plot, however, makes Liszt’s female muse the catalyst for
this ancestral connection: Carolyne gives Liszt Beethoven’s Broadwood piano as an
inspirational present.
The influential role of a beneficent yet demanding male teacher-mentor is
another aspect of this patriarchal mythology; Walker describes Liszt’s teacher Czerny
as “a hard taskmaster,” for example.28 The teacher-mentor figure appears in numerous
fictional representations of the young male piano prodigy, often in the role of a
surrogate father-figure. In M aestro (1989), a novel by Australian author Peter
Goldsworthy, Herr Eduard Keller is a demanding Viennese piano teacher living in
Darwin. Paul, his fifteen-year-old protege, endures Keller’s strict discipline and
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unbending musical values until he leaves to study at the conservatory in Adelaide.
“You are my teacher,” Paul tells him in parting. “You’ve been like a father to me.
Taught me everything I know.”29 In Shine (1996), Professor Cecil Parkes is young
David’s teacher at the Royal College of Music in London. He firmly believes in
David’s musical potential, and his positive influence “replaces [David’s father’s]
unyielding demands with support and encouragement.”30
In contrast to the usually positive representations of the prodigy’s master-
mentor, the pianist’s actual father, step-father, or older male relative is often depicted
as a negative influence. This figure might be a demanding, domineering, and
ambitious stage-father or “evil uncle,” a dramatic exaggeration of the reputations of
Adam Liszt (the father of Franz Liszt) and perhaps also of Leopold Mozart (the father
of another celebrated piano prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart).31 During Liszt’s
prodigy years, Adam Liszt was the subject of some criticism for exploiting his son’s
talents. In 1822, for example, he decided to arrange an ambitious European concert
tour, cutting short his son’s studies with Czerny and Salieri after only about a year.32 In
many popular-culture representations, the overbearing father-figure forces the young
prodigy to endure hard work and deprivations in order to achieve his virtuoso potential
and popular acclaim.33 At the 1997 Academy Awards ceremony which honored Shine,
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one announcer explained that the film told the story of “a mean father who made his
son practice at the piano until his fingers bled.”34
A psychological element of vicarious aspiration might also motivate the
prodigy’s demanding father-figure. According to Walker, Adam Liszt, an amateur
musician himself, “began to see his own frustrated ambitions realized through the
wonderful career of his child.”35 In the novel Maestro, Paul must endure piano lessons
with Herr Keller because, as his mother explains, “your father never had your
opportunities ... He always regretted it. You must understand: we lost so much time in
the War. And after the War there was no time for music. If he seems hard on you, it’s
because of that.”36 In Shine, David’s father is a frustrated amateur musician who lives
vicariously through his talented son. Thwarted in his own musical dreams as a child,
he relentlessly pushes David to compete and succeed as a pianist, and abuses David
physically and psychologically over the slightest disappointments.37
These patriarchal influences— a strict mentor-master or domineering
father-figure, and the patriarchal succession represented by Beethoven’s legendary
Weihekuss—come together in a 1954 German film, Frtihlingslied (Spring Song),
also released under the title Heidi und ihre Freunde (Heidi and her Friends). In
this story, Wolfgang Fabricius (his first name an obvious reference to the prodigy
Mozart) is an orphaned Wunderkind pianist from the Bavarian Alps who suffers
under the strict tutelage o f Eduard Fabricius, his uncle, adoptive guardian, and
piano teacher (fig. 30). The enthusiastic public acclaim over Wolfgang encourages
Eduard to push for even greater recognition and rewards through strenuous concert
tours in Europe and America. He forces lonely Wolfgang, who has no other
friends, pets, hobbies, to practice incessantly in hotel rooms instead of playing
outdoors with children his own age. When a concerned doctor challenges Eduard
about his unhealthy demands on the young boy, the strict guardian proudly
explains that Wolfgang’s artistic talent is an ancestral calling. ‘T he name Fabricius
is listed three times in the Conservatory Music Lexicon in the space of two
hundred fifty years! Wolfgang’s father was a great conductor who started his
career as music director of the Nuremburg Symphony when he was only twenty-
eight years old. Wolfgang is endowed with genius!” The pianist’s patriarchal
lineage is a matter of pride and duty.
LISZT AS LOVER
In his book Grand Piano (1976), Sidney Harrison asserts that “the story of the
piano cannot be told without touching on the Great Pianist as Great Lover.”38 Liszt’s
reputation as Lover has received the most emphasis in music historiography and
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popular-culture productions. L ’homme d'amour (Franz Liszt: The Man o f Love)
(1925),39 Franz Liszt: himmlische und irdische Liebe (Franz Liszt: Heavenly and
Earthly Love) (1929),40 Galley Slaves o f Love: The Story o f Marie d'Agoult and Franz
Liszt (1957),41 La vie passionnee de Franz Liszt (The Passionate Life o f Franz Liszt)
(1958),42 and Rhapsodie der Liebe: ein Liszt-Roman (Rhapsody o f Love: A Novel
about Liszt) (1986)43 are only five of the many book-length biographies and semi-
fictional novels about Liszt which have circulated widely during the twentieth century.
Through such publications and through numerous films about Liszt’s life-story, the
pianist’s “Romantic” reputation has enjoyed a remarkable persistence.
Each of Liszt’s two major love affairs makes for a melodramatic story in its
own right. Adolphe Pictet’s conte fantastique, Une course a Chamounix (1838), is the
earliest literary account of the affair between Liszt and Marie d’Agoult, detailing their
visit to Switzerland in 1835.44 The same romance is the subject of the 1946 French
film Reves d ’amour (Dreams o f Love). The relationship between Liszt and Carolyne
Sayn-Wittgenstein is the theme of Ungarische Rhapsodie (Hungarian Rhapsody)
(1953), the first German-French feature film collaboration after World War II. Here
Carolyne is assigned the role o f “Franz Liszt’s Great Love” (fig. 31). Hollywood’s
Song without End (1960) tackles both affairs for dramatic effect, and even places
Marie and Carolyne in a fictional face-to-face confrontation over Liszt’s affections.
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Song without End was also intended to commemorate the 150th anniversary o f the
pianist’s birth, Hollywood’s acknowledgement of Liszt’s longevity as a popular-
culture attraction.
Reves d ’amour, Ungarische Rhapsodie, and Song Without End each dramatize
the mythology of Liszt’s romantic life through their plots as well as through their
handling of specific musical works, particularly the famous “Liebestraum.” The films
also expand upon the notion of Liszt’s historical legacy by presenting performance and
composition as two conflicting forms of progeniture. They complicate the pianist’s
dual role as both performer and composer by incorporating a popular Freudian notion
about sexual impulse as the source of creativity and the motivation for artistic
reproduction. In this light, Liszt’s public performances enact a display of virtuosic
virility which incites sexual hysteria in his female audience but does not lead to the
creation o f anything permanent or lasting—it remains superficial spectacle.
Composition, on the other hand, involves a struggle for creative expression from the
male artist as inspired by a female muse, and the fruits of this creative union live on as
a musical legacy for posterity. When popular representations of Liszt employ this
manner of signification around creating/composing versus performing/playing, the
pianist must choose between his two impulses and his two modes of reproduction.
In each of these films, Liszt’s “Liebestraum” represents the musical product of
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a romantic consummation with the female muse. At one point in Reves d'amour, Liszt
plays his “Liebestraum” for Marie— “for you alone, my dream of love”— and
apparently seduces her with this work, for the very next scene shows an infant in a
cradle. There is no historical correspondence between the birth of Liszt’s first child
Cosima (in 1837) and this musical work (composed around 1850), but the film
exploits the symbolism of this “Romantic” piece as a metaphor for Liszt’s physical
union with Marie.
The couple’s domestic idyll at Bellagio is short-lived, however, for Liszt soon
departs on long concert tours as a virtuoso pianist. When he finally returns, he informs
Marie that he is leaving her and their three children to become court composer at
Weimar. At this critical moment in the story, “Liebestraum” plays again on the
soundtrack—but now in an orchestral arrangement, a disembodied and nostalgic
refrain which replaces Liszt’s earlier performance on the piano. What Liszt had
created with Marie (his music, their mutual desire, and their own children) he rejects
in favor of another round of empty virtuosity. In this melodramatic telling of the story,
Marie must renounce their “dream of love” and surrender Liszt to his new life at
Weimar, where he may find another inspiration for his musical legacy.
Ungarische Rhapsodie picks up the story at Weimar, with Liszt as a productive
and creative Kapellmeister. Now his muse is Princess Carolyne, a fiery, independent
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woman who rides horses and smokes strong cigars (perhaps an allusion to another
famously unconventional muse, Chopin’s George Sand), and now Liszt plays his
“Liebestraum” on the piano for her. “Before I met you,” he tells Carolyne, “I had to
fight for everything in my life, especially my music. And now you make everything so
easy for me.” (Like Marie d’Agoult before her, Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein left her
husband and sacrificed her social standing to live out of wedlock with Liszt.) But
Ungarische Rhapsodie, like Reves d'amour, also ends with the woman’s ultimate
admission that she cannot possess the creative artist for herself. After the Catholic
Church denies the petition for an annulment of Carolyne’s marriage, Liszt leaves her
to seek further inspiration in his service to God.
Song Without End integrates both of these romantic plots with Liszt’s Saint-or-
Sinner reputation to tell the story of his struggle to achieve a lasting musical legacy.
The film continues the opposition between Liszt’s public performing/playing and his
domestic creating/composing. Liszt’s enthusiasm for a pianistic showdown with the
virtuoso Sigismond Thalberg in Paris represents the former urge; Liszt’s half-hearted
commitment to Marie, their children, and his own composing represents the latter
responsibility. But irresponsible virtuosity wins out, and at the Paris concert Liszt
meets his new lover, Princess Carolyne. Liszt’s performing provides only a superficial
and temporary substitute for lasting fulfillment, but it is also the means for him to
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seduce his next lady. (This story is also historically inaccurate, as Liszt first met
Carolyne after a performance he gave in Kiev. In the film the location is changed to
Paris, the city o f famous piano virtuosi and the legendary “city of love,” in order to
heighten the romantic significance of their initial attraction.)
In Song without End, Marie is depicted as an unsympathetic and demanding
muse who forces the reluctant Liszt to compose instead o f perform. His single
achievement under Marie’s inspiration is the brief “Consolation” in D-flat major. (This
detail is also historically inaccurate, since the Consolations were composed in 1849-
50, when Liszt was already involved with Princess Carolyne.45) A popular-song
adaptation of this piece, titled “My Consolation,” was also published in conjunction
with the movie’s release in I960 (fig. 32). The lyrics describe the “consolation” a
female muse brings to the struggling pianist-composer:
When life strikes a minor key

You’re always there to comfort m e ....
So, speaking of love, who am I to love, but you?
You’re my Consolation, You’re the one,
the one I will adore forevermore.
But Liszt’s love for Marie does fade, and Carolyne becomes the more
sympathetic muse for his musical legacy. As publicity materials for Song Without End
explain, “Liszt knows that in Carolyne he was at last found a woman who can inspire
him to realize himself.” Under her influence, Liszt finally quits his public performing
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career, then composes his “Liebestraum" (a more likely historical correspondence.)
Now this piece represents a commitment to his new muse: “My wedding present will
be a conceit of my work.” Carolyne also expresses a commitment to Liszt’s musical
legacy: “I not only want to go forward with you, into the future, I want to go
backwards, into the past. All you’ve been, all you shall be, I want it to be mine
forever!” But renunciation is also Carolyne’s ultimate fate, as it had been for Marie.
“Forever doesn’t exist for us,” Carolyne admits when their hopes for a wedding
collapse. Also at the conclusion o f this film, Liszt leaves to seek his further inspiration
in the Church, his ultimate inspiration.46
Such popular narratives about Liszt as a virtuoso performer and composer have
certainly influenced the connotations of his music. Like “Un sospiro,” the famous
“Liebestraum” and “Consolation” have circulated widely as “Romantic” background
piano music on film soundtracks. In the I960 version of the Madame X story, a
generous and caring pianist falls in love with a married woman who has been unjustly
accused of adultery. After her nervous breakdown and collapse, the pianist nurses her
back to health in his home, playing Liszt’s soothing “Consolation” for her. In All
About Eve (1950), the “Liebestraum” is a recurring theme for Margo Channing’s
romantic distress; in one scene, a pianist plays the piece over and over again for her as
she suffers through her own party. In Rhapsody (1954), a young woman plays
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“Liebestraum” at a conservatory audition, then admits she only wants to attend the
school because she is in love with a violin student there. In the eponymous
Liebestraum (1991), a 1920s swing version o f the piece plays on a record while a
couple passionately make love. Later, a prostitute in a brothel plays the piece on the
piano while another woman seduces a customer. Liszt’s musical “dream of love” has
become a remarkably persistent narrative and soundtrack device in films.47
While these and other films about Liszt’s affairs have some basis in historical
events, many popular-culture representations o f the “Romantic” virtuoso-lover are
completely fictional—yet even those frequently evidence specific references to the
Lisztian model as well. One of the most influential fictional works is Hermann Bahr’s
1909 play Das Konzert (The Concert). As discussed in the previous chapter, Bahr’s
play has been produced as a theater piece and filmed numerous times both in Europe
and the United States. Whether Bahr had Liszt or another “Romantic” pianist in mind
as the model for his play’s protagonist, the virtuoso-lover characterization has
influenced many subsequent adaptations of the play. For the 1910 Broadway
adaptation, Leo Ditrichstein changed the name of the pianist from the original German
“Gustav Heink” to the Hungarian “Gabor Arany,” and even describes Arany as “Franz
Liszt’s greatest pupil.” A publicity poster for the 1944 German filming of Das Konzert
(fig. 33) bears comparison to the famous caricature of “Lisztomania” in 1840s Berlin
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(fig. 34): the virtuoso’s female devotees are still cheering and offering bouquets a
century later.
As in the films discussed, Dietrichstein’s play also incorporates specific piano
works by Liszt into the production. The Concert opens with a scene of Arany
practicing the Hungarian Rhapsody no. 10 while his female students await their
morning lesson with the Master. Later, when Arany prepares for his extramarital
“concert,” he tells his wife, “I am going up to the bungalow for a few days to do some
work. Some melodies have been haunting me— some melodies of my Hungarian
plains. I think I may get the inspiration.” Up at the bungalow, Arany’s inspiration
derives from the presence of Delphine, his female muse of the moment, and he plays
Liszt’s “Rackoczy” March for her. In the 1929 film version of Bahr’s play, Fashions
in Love, director Victor Schertzinger composed the theme song which the pianist sings
to his mistress at the bungalow. This song, “Delphine,” makes a reference to Liszt’s
music when it briefly quotes a passage from the popular Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2
just before the refrain (fig. 35). In a similar gesture, the 1944 German filming of Das
Konzert opens with a recital scene in which the pianist plays an all-Liszt program.
Partly through the popularity of Bahr’s original play and its numerous
cinematic retellings, the philandering virtuoso-lover has become a frequent comic
character in Hollywood and foreign films. In Ernest Lubitsch’s 1941 comedy That
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Uncertain Feeling, Mrs. Baker is tom between her duty to a neglectful businessman-
husband and her passion for Alexander Sebastian, an eccentric “Romantic” virtuoso.48
As one publicity item for the film puts it,
Alex, the virtuoso,

Shows that he’s more than so-so
At grabbing lovely spouses
Right from their husband’s houses.
In George Cukor’s classic 1949 comedy Adam's Rib, the pianist-composer has a
simple practical reason for his interest in the married woman next door: “You are
mighty attractive in every single way, Mrs. Bonner, but I would probably love
anybody just so long as they lived across the hall. It’s so convenient!”
The virtuoso-lover’s reputation becomes an amusing handicap in the 1978
French comedy Le cavaleur (Practice Makes Perfect), which relates Edouard
Choiseul’s impossible attempts to manage six adoring women: his wife, his ex-wife,
his manager, his attractive piano student, a former lover from the war years, and her
charming granddaughter. Edouard remains frustrated in his efforts to escape with his
student Muriel to a romantic ski resort at Chamonix (where Liszt and Marie d’Agoult
enjoyed their romantic retreat from Paris). He is also tired by his duty to musical
reproduction: “I’m just an old piano player grinding out scores, repeating myself
endlessly.” The resolution of his complicated affairs finally comes at the end of the
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film through an affirmation of his patriarchal legacy. Edouard’s newborn grandson is
named after him, and all the women of his past are happily reunited by his side for his
daughter’s wedding.
In contrast to the usual comic representations o f the charming or amusing
pianist-philanderer, Liszt’s virtuoso-lover reputation also has a dark side. Opposite in
mood and “moral” to Bahr’s Konzert, is another play from 1909 by another tum-of-
the-century Viennese writer, Arthur Schnitzler’s Das weite Land.*9 Its plot revolves
around the suicide of a Russian pianist who had attempted an adulterous affair with his
best friend’s wife. A host of films depict the virtuoso-lover as confused, crazed, or
criminal, from Detour (1945) and Julie (1956) to Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano
Player) (1960), Five Easy Pieces (1970), and The Mephisto Waltz (1971).50 In such
representations, the pianist’s troubled, violent, or self-destructive personality relates to
the Saint-or-Sinner reputation associated with Liszt.
LISZT AS SINNER
The historical connection between Liszt and Niccolo Paganini is a familiar
chapter of Romantic music history. Paganini (1782-1840) was the celebrated violin
virtuoso whose phenomenal technique was an object of popular attraction as well as
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suspicion and scandal during the early I800s.si Walker notes that “demonic,
mephistophelian, satanic” associations are a central aspect of Liszt’s popular
reputation: “such words have often been used to describe Liszt’s new style of
keyboard diablerie.”52 A number of subsequent pianists have exploited these
connotations: consider Earl Wild’s album The Demonic Liszt (Vanguard Classics,
1968) or John Ogdon’s The Mephisto Waltz and Other “Satanic” Piano Music o f Liszt
(Seraphim, 1971).53 The neo-Lisztian virtuoso Erwin Nyiregyhazi, who recorded for
Hollywood film studios in the 1940s, even performs Liszt’s “Mephisto” Waltz in the
1944 B-grade horror film Soul o f a Monster.
Liszt’s “sinner” reputation has inspired numerous representations of the
deceitful or even diabolical virtuoso-lover in popular-culture productions. Seductive,
brooding Stephan Brand in Letter from an Unknown Woman is one example of the
immoral virtuoso-lover who exercises a deceptive allure. Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes
Wide Shut (1999)—adapted from another story by Arthur Schnitzler54—also casts the
pianist as a seductive figure of temptation. In the film version, nightclub pianist Nick
Nightingale draws the naive male protagonist into a realm of decadent and dangerous
sexual excesses. In Solo, a 1980 novel by Jack Higgins, protagonist John Mikali is a
world-renowned concert pianist, but also a political terrorist and dangerous romancer
known as “the Cretan Lover.” Under cover of his respected virtuoso career, Mikali
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insures an alibi for himself by committing his attacks during the hour just before a
concert. Mikali feels “a strange, cold excitement” at the prospect of murderous
revenge, and compares the thrill of an assassination to the excitement of a musical
performance: “It was like that last final moment in the wings before walking out into
the light toward the piano, and then the applause rising, lifting in great waves.””
In many representation of the sinister virtuoso-lover, the target of his anger and
even violence is the female muse herself. In Gaslight (1944), the Hollywood remake
of a 1940 British film,56 the pianist has a secret, murderous past. As “Gregory Anton”
he had been the accompanist to a great diva, and murdered her for her hidden jewels.
Now, as “Sergius Bauer,” he marries the diva’s heiress and terrorizes her as he keeps
searching for the elusive gems. In Stolen Identity (1953), the American version of the
1952 Austrian film Abenteuer in Wien (Adventure in Vienna), an insanely jealous
pianist murders his wife’s lover. Austrian actor Franz (or Francis) Lederer, who plays
the role o f the pianist in both the European and American versions, has a name notably
similar to “Franz Liszt.” Newspaper reviews of the film mention “the demonic pianist
Franz Lederer,” and that “attractive Franz Lederer plays the Pianist-Demon with
reserve.”57
In some of these stories, the diabolical pianist meets his match in an equally
strong and determined female muse. In Julie (1956), Louis Jourdan reprises his
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virtuoso-lover role o f Stephan Brand in Letter from an Unknown Woman, but now
plays a psychotic pianist who murders to steal another man’s wife for himself. “Maybe
my love for you is just as violent as yours for me,” Julie tells her psychotic tormenter.
In other instances, a female muse provides a healing force to redeem the “evil” pianist
and restore him to creative health. In the mystery-thriller The Night Has Eyes (1942), a
malevolent pianist-composer terrorizes a young woman stranded at his estate on the
moors. She falls in love with the pianist despite his sadistic personality and despite her
suspicion that he is a serial killer, and she eventually “cures” him o f his psychosis
through her unconditional love.
As “Liebestraum” is the musical product of the “good” virtuoso-lover and his
muse, the sinful pianist’s musical legacy is typically linked to diabolical inspiration. In
Ken Russell’s Lisztomania (1975), Liszt quips, “I’d sell my soul for the chance to
write a good tune.” In Mephisto Waltz (1971), based on the 1969 novel of the same
title,58 demonic inspiration leads directly to musical progeniture. In this story, aging
Duncan Ely is “the greatest pianist” of all time, particularly famous for his
interpretation of Liszt’s “Mephisto” Waltz. Through Satanic rituals, Duncan possesses
the body and mind of Myles Clarkson, a young amateur pianist, in order for the older
virtuoso’s technical and musical powers to live on after his own death. Myles’s
initiation requires him to abandon his own wife and daughter (his “good” muse and
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true progeny) and become romantically involved with the pianist’s evil daughter
instead. “I’m the son he never had,” Myles explains to his neglected wife. She
counters, “Is he the father you never had?”
An important part of Liszt’s “sinner” mythology involves some form of
punishment for these moral transgressions. One of the most popular stories associated
with Franz Liszt’s romantic reputation is the case of Olga Janina, a mentally unstable
student of Liszt’s who fashioned herself “the Cossack countess.” In November 1871
Janina attempted to shoot Liszt with a revolver and poison herself. In the aftermath of
this confrontation she described her passionate affair with the “Abbe X” in four
autobiographical novels. In 1874, Janina published Souvenirs d'une cosaque
(Reminiscences o f a Cossack) under the pseudonym Robert Franz; it was followed by
an anonymous sequel purporting to be Liszt’s own response, Souvenirs d ’un pianiste:
Reponse aux Souvenirs d ’une cosaque. Still later she published Les Amours d ’une
cosaque par un ami de I’Abbe “X ” and Le Roman du pianiste et de la cosaque, both
under the pseudonym Sylvia Zorelli.59
Janina’s scandal-provoking novels contributed greatly to the popular image of
the errant “Romantic” virtuoso-lover who must be punished out of revenge. For
example, the German courtroom melodrama Mazurka (1935)—remade in Hollywood
two years later as Confession—depicts a scorned woman’s revenge against the corrupt
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virtuoso-lover. In this story, pianist Grigori Michailov callously seduces a happily
married opera singer into divorce, scandal, and ruin. Years later, when he unwittingly
seduces her young daughter, the protective mother (now a lowly nightclub singer)
shoots him dead. Reviews of Mazurka describe the role o f Michailov as a “demonic
man” and an “elegant womanizer” possessing “a cultivated demonic quality.”60 In
Possessed (1947), a vengeful woman murders her former pianist-lover when he falls in
love with her step-daughter. Nocturne (1946) begins with the womanizing pianist-
composer shot dead as he plays the piano. In this noir mystery, a detective investigates
the motivations of a number of women who both loved and hated the pianist. The
philandering virtuoso has already been killed before the opening of the French thriller
On ne meurt que deuxfois (He Died with His Eyes Open) (1985), so the detective has
only the late pianist’s alluring femme fatale lover to help him solve the mystery.
LISZT AS PATRIARCH
The notion of Liszt as a patriarchal father-figure links his three popular
reputations in interesting ways. Liszt was literally a father in terms o f his three
children with Marie d’Agoult: Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel. Cosima went on to gain
a place in history through her own musical influence and her romantic affairs. She
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married Liszt’s pupil Hans von Bulow in 1857, then married Richard Wagner in 1870
after having three illegitimate children by him. The lineage of Liszt’s eldest daughter
Blandine survives into recent times in the person of his great-granddaughter, Blandine
Ollivier de Prevaux. Mme. de Prevaux— granddaughter of Blandine and Emile
Ollivier, prime minister of France under Napoleon m —recalls that she studied piano
with Alfred Cortot in Paris, “but my father discouraged me from pursuing a concert
career since he said I would have too much of a legend to live up to.”61
Daniel, the only son of Liszt and Marie d’Agoult, died at the early age of
twenty, more than twenty-five years before Liszt’s own death. Perhaps in an effort to
compensate for this perceived break in Liszt’s patriarchal lineage, numerous claims of
his illegitimate progeny surfaced in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Dona Hohnel (1882-1963) of Weimar claimed she was “the last daughter of Liszt,”
Carlos Davila (1840s?-1884) of Romania was promoted as an illegitimate fils de Liszt,
and the composer Fran?ois Mathieu Servais (1847-1901) was memorialized in the fifth
and sixth editions of the New Grove Dictionary o f Music and Musicians as a rumored
offspring of the great pianist. Walker considers these numerous claims of illegitimate
progeny a “psychological phenomenon without parallel in the annals of musical
history.”62
Ill
The same fascination with Liszt’s possible progeny has colored numerous
fictional representations o f the errant virtuoso-lover. In Der Kraft-Mayr, Ernst von
Wolzogen’s 1897 roman a c le f about Liszt and piano students in 1880s Berlin and
Weimar,63 the young pianist Florian Mayr “certainly looked like a Lisztite” (146),
which causes his landlady to wonder about “the resemblance between her tenant and
this music Titan.”
There was the same narrow bony face, the same all-dominating nose,
the same long straight hair. As to mouth and eyes, to be sure, they
differed and instead of the five warts of the Master Herr Florian had but
one. Could it be that he was the son of Franz Liszt by some Russian
princess or other? (13)
In “A Son of Liszt,” a short story by James Huneker published in 1902, Piloti is a
moody, vain bachelor who believes himself to be an illegitimate son of the great
pianist, at least in physical terms:
His thick, brown hair was thrown off his forehead in a most exuberantly
artistic fashion. His nose jutted well into the outer world, and I had to
confess that his profile was of a certainty striking.... I noticed a picture
of the Abbe Liszt over the grand piano, and as Piloti took a seat he
threw back his head; and my eyes which had rested a moment on the
portrait involuntarily returned to it, so before I was aware of it I cried
out, “I say, Piloti, do you know that you look like Liszt?”
But Piloti himself is a frustrated and mediocre pianist; the expectation to live up to his
famous ancestor drives him to despair. When his mother informs him that he is
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actually the illegitimate son of Liszt’s piano-tuner, the story ends with Piloti’s
apparent suicide.64
Perhaps the most unusual depiction of Liszt’s genealogical “offspring” is in the
form of a mysterious music-loving stray cat. In Roald Dahl’s short story “Edward the
Conqueror,”66 Louisa, a housewife and amateur pianist, notices a stray cat’s unusual
reactions to piano music by Liszt.66 Later, when she strokes the animal’s head, she
notices bumps over its eyes, nose, and chin that correspond exactly to the warts on
Liszt’s face in a famous portrait of the pianist. Louisa experiences an almost hysterical
delight at the idea of discovering this “reincarnation” of Liszt. “My heavens,” she
exclaims, “he was Wagner’s father-in-law! I’m holding Wagner’s father-in-law in my
arms!” Dahl’s story, first published in 1953, has been reprinted numerous times, and
was filmed in 1979 as part of the television series Tales o f the Unexpected,67
While Liszt’s literal family tree has provided inspiration for the popular
imagination, his “extended family” of piano students, composer friends, and musical
disciples has prompted even further associations. Historians notes that Liszt’s musical
lineage reaches back to Beethoven in the early nineteenth century, but that it also
continues on into the twentieth century through his influence on music composition.
For some, Liszt’s dissonant “Nuages gris” (1881) and the “Bagatelle sans tonalite”
(1885) are evidence that he anticipated musical innovations of the twentieth century.
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In Franz Liszt: The Man and His Music, Alan Walker devotes an entire chapter to
“Liszt and the Twentieth Century,” arguing that Liszt’s late works foreshadow
developments such as impressionism, atonality, and even serialism. Walker quotes
Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein’s assertion (with its phallic imagery o f thrust and power)
that “[Liszt] has hurled his lance much further into the future than Wagner.”68 As
evidence for this “genealogical” influence, Walker also mentions that the 22-year-old
Claude Debussy heard the septuagenarian Liszt perform Les je u x d ’eaux a la Villa
d ’Este in 1884, which inspired the composition of Debussy’s own L'isle joyeuse
(1904) as it had also inspired Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d ’eau (1901). Walker suggests that
it is Liszt, not “the young rebel” Debussy, who should be considered “the father of
modem music.”69
A further aspect of Liszt’s musical legacy concerns his support for composers
of his own era, among them Chopin, Schumann, Hector Berlioz, and Richard Wagner.
By contributing his financial and professional encouragement to their careers, Liszt
furthered their music and their subsequent reputations. This notion of Liszt as a
fraternal or fatherly mentor has been highlighted in many popular representations. In
the 1945 film A Song to Remember, Liszt devises a clever ruse to get his friend Chopin
back into the good graces of elite Parisian society after a disastrous debut recital. In
the 1947 film Song o f Love, Liszt speaks highly of his friend Robert Schumann’s
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talents and musical promise in a dramatic courtroom scene, as a judge decides whether
Clara Wieck can marry the young composer against her father’s wishes. In Ungarische
Rhapsodie, Liszt helps the rebellious Wagner escape the police and flee to
Switzerland, and later premieres the composer’s new opera Lohengrin. The story of
Liszt’s assistance in Wagner’s flight from the law is interestingly reversed for a
completely fictional plot device in Hollywood’s 1943 version of The Phantom o f the
Opera. Here “Franz Liszt” premieres a new piano concerto in order to help the
authorities lure the Phantom, the composer of the concerto, out of his subterranean
hiding place.
Liszt’s pedagogical legacy is another aspect of his figurative progeniture as
evidenced by his extended “family” of students and disciples (fig. 36). Liszt’s
masterclasses at Weimar coached an entire generation of great pianists, including Karl
Tausig, Hans von Biilow, Eugen d’Albert, Frederic Lamond, Sophie Menter, Moriz
Rosenthal, Emil von Sauer, Jose Vianna da Motta, and many others. Wolzogen’s Der
Kraft-Mayr provides a Actional representation of the Schwarmerei around Liszt, which
included “artists of both sexes, aristocratic amateurs, and everybody else who on any
pretext whatsoever had procured the honor.” They gather every afternoon in the
famous Hofgartnerei to hear and see the Master (174-75). These “Lisztites” emulate
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their teacher in their playing and even more devotedly in their appearance and
demeanor:
Pale youths, nearly all of them beardless, with uncannily long bony
fingers, and filled with the desire to look as much like the Master as
possible, gave slovenly escort to the ladies and excited the wonder of
the Philistines by their numerous little eccentricities of dress, and
especially their ostentatious behavior. Nearly all wore gold bosom-pins
in the form of medallions bearing the bust of Liszt. (144-45)
Even well into the twentieth century, noted performers referred to their
pianistic genealogies originating with Liszt: Claudio Arrau studied with Martin
Krause, a pupil of Liszt from 1883 to 1886; Van Clibum’s mother and first teacher,
Rildia Bee, was a student of Arthur Friedheim, Liszt’s close pupil and personal
secretary for eight years. As Henry Charles Lahee notes in Famous Pianists o f To-day
and Yesterday, published in 1900,
There can be no greater proof of the power wielded by Liszt that is

shown by a perusal of the list of celebrated pianists who flourished
during the latter half of the nineteenth century. From the time of Von
Biilow until the advent of Paderewski, it seems that almost every
pianist of note was a pupil of Liszt. Indeed, such was the magic of his
name that it was used by many who were not entitled to it, and both
critics and public became suspicious of the “pupils of Liszt.70
This genealogy also continues through Liszt’s students who became influential
pedagogues in music schools around the world.71
The notion of a patriarchal continuity from master teacher to novice student
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has inspired numerous popular representations. In a recent poem by Kurt Leland, an
elderly Hungarian piano teacher explains how she made her students recite the
“begats”—not the Biblical ones, but the genealogy of their own teacher: “Beethoven
begat Czemy, begat Liszt, who begat Thoman. And Thoman begat Bart6k, begat
me.”72 In Peter Goldsworthy’s novel Maestro, the elderly pianist Eduard Keller makes
his young student recite his own musical ancestry: “Beethoven begat Czemy, ...
Czemy begat Liszt. Liszt begat Lecherovsky—or someone. And Lecherovsky begat...
Keller.” This genealogical progression lends authority to his offspring, as the narrator
explains:
The gospel of Czemy and Liszt had been handed on to me personally; I

hectored my fellow students and teachers with its texts cruelly.
“How do you know Liszt meant the piece to be played like that?”
“Liszt told Leschetizky. Who told Keller. Who told me.”73
In The Competition (1980), a Hollywood romance set in the world of piano
competitions, a female piano teacher explains the source of her pedagogical authority
to her student: “Ludwig van Beethoven taught Carl Czemy, who taught Leschetitzky,
who taught Schnabel, who taught Renaldi, who taught me.”
As a patriarch, Liszt not only perpetuates musical legacies, he also fashions
new romantic ones. In many popular representations, the pianist plays the role of a
romantic match-maker for his students, musical disciples, and friends. In this way the
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famous virtuoso-lover continues his “Romantic” influence even after he has grown too
old to carry on his own affairs— instead he vicariously promotes the destinies of other
lovers. There may be some historical basis for such representations. Liszt introduced
his friend Chopin to the controversial novelist Aurore Dudevant (George Sand) in
1836, and their resulting affair is a famous chapter of “Romantic” musical history.
Wolzogen presents Liszt’s mentoring match-maker role as the main plot of his
novel Der Kraft-Mayr. Florian Mayr teaches piano to the attractive young Thekla
Burmester, but her family soon replaces him with a rival Polish piano teacher who has
selfish designs on the family’s wealth. Disappointed by losing Thekla’s love and her
parents’ approval, Mayr quits Berlin for Weimar, where he becomes a student of the
great Franz Liszt. By the end of the tale, Mayr wins a prominent teaching position at
the Munich conservatory, and he is finally able to gain Thekla’s hand in marriage—all
on account of Liszt’s interventions.
Wolzogen’s novel inspired a film adaptation in 1935, a German production
titled Das Lied der Liebe, or Der Kraft-Mayr (fig. 37). A review of this film in the
Monthly Film Bulletin summarizes the mentoring role of Liszt’s character as “a sort of
deus ex machina, who preoccupies himself in a grandfatherly way with his disciple’s
love-affairs, sees through the crafty foreigner, and who finally establishes the
deserving native musician in an important post, so that he is able to marry the girl, to
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everybody’s satisfaction.”74 Though Der Kraft-Mayr was not a commercial success, a
second German film with a nearly identical plot was also released in 1935, and it did
achieve greater recognition. Liebestrdume: Ein Spiel um Franz Liszt—also known as
Die Pusztakomtesse, and also filmed in a Hungarian-language version titled Szerelmi
Almok (Dreams o f Love)— won the award for “best story based on the life of a national
figure” at the Third International Film-Art Exhibition held in Venice in 1935.
Here, too, the romantic plot hangs upon the efforts of the elderly Liszt, “a
shining model and selfless patron to the young generation of artists,”75 and his match
making talents. Maria Duday, a beautiful Hungarian countess, dreams of becoming an
accomplished pianist, but her parents expect her to marry an army lieutenant who has
little interest in music. After hearing Liszt play a recital in Budapest, she decides to
run away to Weimar to become his pupil. There she befriends Hans Wendland, Liszt’s
favorite student and musical assistant. When Maria’s family forces her to return home,
Liszt arranges a jubilee concert in Budapest and invites Maria to perform a concerto
under the baton of Wendland. As Maria performs joyously under the direction of her
true love, her jealous fiancee realizes that she belongs with a musical genius, not with
a soldier. In the end, Maria’s “dream of love” triumphs when she plays “Liebestraum”
as her encore. As press materials for the film announced, “Franz Liszt’s immortal
compositions frame this tender, heartfelt love story” (fig. 38).76
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LATTER-DAY LISZTS
Originating in some combination of historical fact and fanciful legend, the
many popular reputations associated with Franz Liszt have evolved into enduring
mythologies about the virtuoso-lover, the diabolical maestro, the kindly master-
mentor, and any number of other stereotypes of the male pianist. Such associations are
by now an integral part of the pianist’s “Romantic” attraction.
Because o f their familiarity and popular appeal, these mythologies derived
from nineteenth-century concert life, criticism, and music historiography have also
exercised a powerful influence on “real-life” performers and audiences o f the
twentieth century. Not surprisingly, many contemporary performers have consciously
and deliberately perpetuated these associations in their own professional careers and
public reputations. Leo Ditrichstein revised the dialogue of Hermann Bahr’s Das
Konzert to make this insightful point:
Flora: You flirt with every one of them.

Arany: Nonsense.
Flora: And there isn’t one who doesn’t think you have a terrible crush
on her.
Arany: Well, of course—that is part of the business.77
The popularity of Bahr’s Konzert and Ditrichstein’s Broadway adaptation
prompted speculations over the possible “real-life” role model(s) for the character of
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Gustav Heink/Gabor Arany. According to one publicity release, violinist Jan Kubelik
was asked if such female adoration was enjoyed by all male musicians, or if the play’s
protagonist was inspired by the popular reputation of any specific virtuoso:
“I have known many musicians with just such mannerisms as this stage
musical genius possesses,” Kubelik replied. “The role is drawn true to
life and would fit more than one well known artist of the concert stage.”
“Yourself,” was suggested.
“No, no, no,” said Kubelik. “I am a violinist. I mean great artists at the
piano.”78
Another article noted that distinguished pianists from Russia, Germany, and Austria
had attended the premiere of Bahr’s play in Vienna to determine who among them
might be its “real-life” inspiration. “Even the piano virtuosi themselves were darkly
suspicious of one another. There was also good grounds for the report that d’Albert
fancied Hermann Bahr had had him in mind in the writing of his play, and that de
Pachman, Rosenthal, and Paderewski entertained the same belief regarding
themselves.”79 Josef Hoffman or Ossip Gabrilowitsch were possible contenders as
well, though the popular choice was usually Ignace Jan Paderewski. ‘“ See how Arany
bows before his adoring admirers and continually runs his fingers through his long
hair. Why, it’s Paderewski to life,’ said a Paderewski enthusiast.”80
Of the many twentieth-century star pianists who have cultivated the virtuoso-
lover reputation, Artur Rubinstein (1887-1982) stands out for his very public
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identification with this role. “It is said of me that when I was young I divided my time
impartially among wine, women, and song,” Rubinstein quips in a 1978 television
interview. “I deny this categorically. Ninety percent of my interests were women.”81
Rubinstein’s two autobiographies, My Young Years (recounting the first thirty years of
his career) and the sequel My Many Years detail numerous romantic affairs and
escapades before he married his wife, Aniela, in 1932.82 Even at age 90, Rubinstein
still wanted to “chase after pretty girls,” according to a 1978 People magazine
article.83 One of Rubinstein’s anecdotes is reminiscent of the plot of Letter from an
Unknown Woman: an affair with a married woman which almost ended in a pistol duel
with her insulted husband.84 Another Rubinstein anecdote recalls the story of the boy-
prodigy Liszt’s Weihekuss from the master Beethoven, but changes the gender of its
bestower: “When I reached the coda [of the Chopin nocturne] with its pianissimo
descending sighs, the Countess, suddenly, leaned forward close to me and ... kissed
my mouth with a wild passion.” For Rubinstein, this incident “transported me into the
romantic days of Chopin and Liszt.”85
Eugene d’Albert (1864-1932), one of Liszt’s most famous disciples, was
famous for marrying six times during his life—perhaps a precedent for the twentieth-
century Hungarian pianist Erwin Nyiregyhazi (1903-1987) to boast of his ten wives.
As a child prodigy, Nyiregyhazi was a student of Frederic Lamond (1868-1948),
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another of Liszt’s proteges, and also of Emo Dohndnyi (1877-1960), a student of
Eugen d’Albert. Arnold Schoenberg once described Nyiregyhazi as a latter-day
version of Liszt,86 and even the pianist claimed that “when I play, it’s as though I am
Franz Liszt himself.” A 1976 People magazine article about Nyiregyhazi makes this
hereditary connection explicit by juxtaposing a picture of the young long-haired Liszt
alongside a photograph of the 17-year-old long-haired Nyiregyhazi (fig. 39).
Referencing the virtuoso-lover mythology, the article boasts that Nyiregyhazi’s desire
for women “exceeds even the philandering Liszt’s.”87
Even Hollywood piano-stars such as Jose Iturbi and Oscar Levant could
cultivate the virtuoso-lover role and thus join the ranks of latter-day Lisztian progeny
carrying on the master’s “Romantic” legacy. Publicity articles from the 1940s describe
Iturbi as the “Dashing Don” and the “Sizzling Senor” of the piano, and praise the
“virile bravado” of his Liszt interpretations.88Though Iturbi appears as himself in most
of his films, some of these roles can be regarded more as Iturbi playing and acting the
Lisztian persona.89 In Three Daring Daughters (1948), a beautiful divorcee falls in
love with the virtuoso pianist on an ocean cruise when he performs Liszt’s
“Liebestraum” for her. In Holiday in Mexico (1946), Iturbi plays an unintentional
virtuoso-lover when a fifteen-year-old girl develops a crush on the middle-aged
pianist. The subsequent misunderstandings are resolved when the girl finally realizes
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just how old Iturbi actually is—he is a grandfather, in fact.90 In Anchors Aweigh (1945)
Iturbi plays a match-maker role when two servicemen fall in love with the same girl
during their shore-leave. He resolves the situation to everyone’s satisfaction, and also
helps a young starlet establish her singing career (fig. 40).
In contrast to Iturbi’s “Romantic” persona, Oscar Levant’s roles were always a
parody of the Lisztian lover. Levant’s haggard features and caustic wit did not fit the
image of an attractive virtuoso-lover (though gossip columnist Earl Wilson once
noted, “I’ve seen girls in their late teens get giddy when they heard Levant, who’s
forty and far from good looking, was in the joint.”91) Instead, Levant enacted romantic
frustration for comic effect. In Romance on the High Seas (1948) he plays the
accompanist and persistent but unsuccessful suitor to a nightclub singer (Doris Day).
After admitting that he can never win her love, Levant eventually helps her solve the
romantic complications involving the man she really does love. This film spoofs the
virtuoso-lover’s masculinity and his ability to “get the girl,” as in the scene of Levant
hiding under the covers in a woman’s bedroom and pretending shock when he’s
discovered there by another man.
The cynical but good-hearted Levant was more suited to the match-maker role.
In Rhythm on the River (1940) he helps two songwriters patch up their quarrels and
rekindle their romance. In The Barkleys o f Broadway (1949) he resolves a marital
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quarrel between two Broadway stars. In The Band Wagon (1953) he sympathizes with
another love-sick friend, but with characteristic sarcasm (“What you can see in a
beautiful, young, and talented girl is beyond me!”). In An American in Paris (1951)
Levant helps his best friend Jerry (Gene Kelly) catch the attentions of a beautiful
French woman, and serves as a witty intercessor in the romantic complications which
follow. In Humoresque (1946) he introduces his best friend Paul, a struggling violinist,
to a wealthy patroness of the arts known for her extramarital love affairs (fig. 41). She
soon falls in love with Paul, a situation which invites some of Levant’s famously
cutting quips (“Tell me, Mrs. Wright, does your husband interfere with your
marriage?”).92 About his partly ad-libbed lines in Humoresque Levant recalled, “I was
let loose on this picture as though I were Franz Liszt giving a recital.”93
Continuing Liszt’s patriarchal influence on nineteenth-century pianists, Oscar
Levant also inspired his own figurative progeny in the twentieth century. As a kind of
popular-culture homage, pianist characters in two different Hollywood films are
fashioned around the model of Levant’s personality. In Four Daughters (1938) John
Garfield plays the role of a cynical pianist-composer deliberately modeled after the
image of Levant: disheveled, arrogant, fatalistic, and delinquent. “When I read the
script,” Garfield explained, “that mad, sardonic genius of music flashed through my
mind. And I based my character on him. Tried to figure out how he’d behave under
125
like circumstances. Always keeping uppermost the frustration, and knowledge, that I
myself was a failure.”94 This film is itself an example of the endless reproducibility of
popular-culture productions. The plot of Four Daughters originates from Fannie
Hurst’s 1937 Cosmopolitan magazine story “Sister Act,”95 and Four Daughters
inspired two further sequels, Four Wives (1939) and Four Mothers (1941). It was
remade again in 1955 as Young at Heart, with Frank Sinatra in the cynical “Levant”
role.
The Lisztian Levant is also the inspiration for the title character of Nora
Johnson’s novel The World o f Henry Orient, filmed in 1965 with Peter Sellars in the
title role. Henry Orient is a “has-been” virtuoso who continues to pursue his “playing”
both on stage and in the bedroom with humorous results. Two teenage girls become
infatuated with the pianist, collecting his concert programs, recordings, even cigarette
stubs. Echoing the “song without end” metaphor, Val exclaims, “I love and adore the
great and beautiful and wonderful Henry Orient, world without end!” Echoing the
message of Liszt’s “Liebestraum” and the devotion of a female muse, she adds, “Oh,
my dreamy dream of dreams, my beautiful, adorable, Oriental Henry. How can I prove
to you that I am yours?” The gap between Val’s idealized virtuoso and the real and
rather shoddy Henry Orient is the type of comic irony Levant himself had mastered.
From Franz Liszt to Oscar Levant, the most remarkable aspect of the pianist’s
126
“song without end” is its enduring reproducibility. The phenomenon of the virtuoso-
lover in twentieth-century popular culture represents a continuation of a nineteenth-
century attraction based on the real or imagined, historical or fictional reputations
associated with Franz Liszt. Whether this figure is reincarnated in the likeness of Liszt
(as Nyireghazi’s publicity would suggest) or through derivative variations on aspects
of the Lisztian personalities (as with the virtuoso-lover Stefan Brand, the match
making Jose Iturbi, or the comically impotent Gustav Heink and Henry Orient), his
legacy endures even more than a century after his death.
Popular culture has recognized and cultivated what academic scholarship has
tried to ignore or dismiss: that Liszt does live on through legends and myths, and that
the persistent circulation o f these myths carries significant cultural impact. In the
classic animation short Rhapsody Rabbit (1946), Bugs Bunny’s final comment after
playing Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody—“Franz who? Never heard of him!”— is
certainly meant ironically. We have heard that “song” many times before.
1 Jorge Bolet’s recordings of the “Liebestraum,” “Un sospiro,” “La campanella," the Verdi-Liszt
Rigoletto Fantasy, the Hungarian Fantasy, the Piano Concerto no. 1 in E-flat Major (with the Los
Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Morris Stoloff), plus other works by Chopin, Mendelssohn.
Berlioz, and Wagner, were released as an “original soundtrack recording” album titled Song without
End: The Story o f Franz Liszt (Colpix, 1960). Bolet’s performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in E-
flat Major, the Hungarian Fantasy, and the “Mephisto" waltz (with The Symphony of the Air,
conducted by Robert Irving) was released as an album titled Song without End: The Franz Liszt Story
(Everest, 1960). The Franz Liszt Story (Liberty, 1960) is an album of Liszt piano works arranged for
127
piano and orchestra by Harry Sukman, with descriptive “popular” titles such as “Un sospiro” (as “Song
without End”), a “Mephisto” waltz (as “Devil Dance”), an excerpt from the Sonata in B minor (as “A
Lost Love”), etc. The Franz Liszt Story (Decca, 1960) is another record “inspired by the motion picture
Song without End." This album includes abridged arrangements of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies nos.
1, 2, 6, 12, and 13„ “Liebestraum,” “La campanella,” and other selections performed by Carmen
Cavallaro, piano, with an orchestra directed by Jack Pleis.
2 A portion of Un sospiro is also heard in Shine (1996), as David Helfgott performs at Moby’s wine bar
in Perth. In that scene, the restaurant guests listen transfixed under the spell of the music as they watch
David play the piano. Gillian, his wife-to-be, also listens and looks on, and this scene marks the
beginning of her romantic interest in him.
3 Franz Liszt’s Briefe, ed. “La Mara” [pseud. Marie Lipsius], vol. 2: Von Rom bis an's Ende (Leipzig:
Breitkopf & Hiirtel, 1893-1905): 50-51.
4 “Lisztomania” is a term coined by Heinrich Heine to describe the enthusiastic audience reactions to
Liszt’s performances in Berlin in 1841. In his article “The Making of a Myth: Liszt, the Press, and
Virtuosity,” James Deaville examines how the popular rhetoric of “Lisztomania” originated primarily
from newspaper reviews of Liszt’s performances in Germany between 1840 and 1843. He notes that the
“persistent desire to focus on Liszt's transcendental virtuosity” remains a force in Liszt historiography
even to the present day, with recent scholarly works such as David Allsobrook’s Liszt: My Travelling
Circus Life (1991) and popular-culture productions such as Ken Russell’s outlandish Lisztomania
(1975). This “imbalanced” emphasis, Deaville argues, represents “a distortion of Liszt’s contribution to
music” at the expense of recognition of his “higher” works, such as “the many non-virtuosic keyboard
works and all of his compositions in other media” (185). James Deaville, “The Making o f a Myth:
Liszt, the Press, and Virtuosity,” New Light on Liszt and his Music: Essays in Honor o f Alan Walker's
65th Birthday, ed. Michael Saffle and James Deaville (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997): 185,
195.
Franz Liszt’s Briefe, vol. IV: An Fiirstin Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, p. 316. Liszt biographer Alan
Walker takes issue with the usual interpretation of this phrase as an indication of Liszt's psychological
dilemma. He claims it is better understood as an expression of Liszt’s itinerary in Budapest in 1856.
The composer was rehearsing his mass in the Esztergom cathedral by day, and partaking o f the music of
the local gypsy culture in the evenings. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, vol. I: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988): 64.
6 Humphrey Searle, “Liszt, Franz,” in The New Grove Dictionary o f Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley
Sadie (1980): XI, 29.
Chasins acknowledges the “saint or sinner” reputation when he notes how Liszt provides a symbolic
figure for an era of political and social instability: “[his] equally intense attraction for music, women,
and religion divided his tortured soul tragically against itself.” Chasins’s turn of phrase echoes the title
of Ernest Newman’s popular but discredited biography. The Man Liszt: A Study o f the Tragi-Comedy o f
a Soul Divided Against Itself (London: Cassell, 1934).
8 Monthly Musical Record (London) XVI/185 (May 1, 1886): 114.
Alan Walker writes, “Everywhere he went Liszt lived out his life in a blaze of publicity. People
clamored for literature about him. And so the biographies came first; the hard evidence turned up later.
Most of the energy expended by the modem Liszt researcher has to do with correcting the former in
light of the latter.” Walker, I: 3.
128
10 Emile Haraszti, “Le probl&me Liszt,” Acta musicologica 9 (1937): 123-136, and 10 (1938): 32-46.
11 See nlO above. Michael Saffle, “Liszt Studies Past and Present,” in Franz Liszt: A Guide to Research
(New York: Garland, 1991): 11-19. Unfortunately, Saffle invokes the high/low cultural dichotomy
typical of “serious” scholarship in compiling this bibliography. Publications about Liszt “from a
popular perspective” have been excluded, and “dozens of superficial Liszt ‘lives’" are omitted from the
annotated list of biographical and character studies (xv). These “inferior” studies, however, can provide
clues to how and why spurious claims and legends maintain a persistent presence in scholarly as well as
popular-culture productions.
12 In an article about the representation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the film Amadeus, Robert L.
Marshall considers the plot essentially mythic, “a fable about God’s capricious appointment of talent
among his creatures: specifically, his incomprehensible favoring of the most decidedly undeserving.”
He dismisses the usual distinction between popular and high-art culture when he asserts that “the
Mozart of romantic myth lives on nonetheless, not only in Amadeus but in our most sophisticated
biographical studies. We still prefer to cast Mozart in the story of his life as a largely innocent victim,
be it of the Archbishop of Salzburg, of his rival Salieri, or of his father Leopold” (176). Robert L.
Marshall, “Film as Musicology: Amadeus,” The Musical Quarterly 81/2 (Summer 1997), 173-179. In an
article about the representation of Beethoven in Immortal Beloved, Lewis Lockwood also detects an
underlying mythic narrative, “another instance of the Romantic epic in which the life of a male creative
artist is essentially portrayed as the direct result of a hopeless love for a distant beloved, thus showing
that through suffering, and only through suffering, the right kind of inspiration could emerge, the kind
that is the only imaginable basis for creative work” (196). Lewis Lockwood, “Film Biography as
Travesty: Immortal Beloved and Beethoven,” The Musical Quarterly 81/2 (Summer 1997), 190-198.
13 Displeasure over such story-telling has not only been scholarly. In I9S4, four of Robert Schumann’s
great-grand-children filed a $9 million libel suit against the film’s distributors, arguing that the Song o f
Love story implied a hereditary strain of insanity in Schumann’s descendents. “Schumann Kin Lose
Film Suit for $9,000,000,” Los Angeles Times (October 22, 1954). “Schumann’s Heirs Lose Loew’s
Suit,” Hollywood Reporter (October 25, 1954). The same film was considered “educational” by the
censor board of Chile, and thus exempt from theater admission tax in that country. “MGM Song o f Love
Tax Free in Chile” (c.1947), clipping in AMPAS file on Song o f Love.
14 Small, 99, 91-92. For an overview of the issues at stake in historical and recent scholarship on
Tchaikovsky, see Richard Taruskin, "Pathetic Symphonist,” The New Republic 4/177 [February 6,
1995]: 26-40.
15 “Chopin, Fryderyk,” The Oxford Dictionary o f Music, second edition, ed. Michael Kennedy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994): 170.
16 Michael Saffle notes the political rhetoric evident in certain mid-century scholarship on Franz Liszt,
particularly East European publications which tend towards “Stalinist bombast” and “Marxist-Leninist
dogma,” or nationalistic depictions of a Germanic Liszt from certain scholars during the 1940s. Saffle,
14.
17 I have argued elsewhere that even though such Films may be “historical travesties that perpetuate
misconceptions about these artist’s lives and creativity,” more significantly they represent
contemporary forms of “political propaganda,” and deserve close critical examination as representations
of a particular historical moment and its social or political priorities. Ivan Raykoff, “Hollywood’s
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Embattled Icon,” in Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years o f Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilas
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999): 338.
18
Margaret Helfgott, David’s older sister, published an account of her brother’s life that addresses the
“myth of Shine" and overturns many of the dramatic characterizations which the film presents as
factual. For example, Peter Helfgott became an Australian citizen in 1933, before the Holocaust
occurred. A scar on his hand was the result of a circus accident, but the film depiction moves the scar to
his forearm and implies it was a concentration camp tattoo. Margaret Helftgott, with Tom Gross, Out o f
Tune: David Helfgott and the Myth o f Shine (New York: Warner Books, 1998), particularly chapter 16,
“Dramatic Distortions in S h in e" and chapter 17, “Cheapening the Holocaust” For scholarly analysis of
the SAine-Helfgott phenomenon, see the “Symposium” in Philosophy and Literature 21/2 (October.
1997): 332-391.
19 Walker, I: 85, n35. Ferruccio Busoni famously stated that “Bach is the foundation of piano playing,
Liszt is the sum m it The two make Beethoven possible.”
20 Michael Saffle, “Liszt’s Life, Personality, and Works,” in Franz Liszt: A Guide to Research (New
York: Garland, 1991): 9.
21 Already in this early period of Liszt’s life, the notion of “virile” virtuosity is evident in some of the
reviews of his first performances. Alan Walker cites one review of the December concert, which calls
the eleven-year-old a “little Hercules” whose technique “borders on the incredible.” It adds that “one is
tempted to doubt any physical impossibility when one hears the young giant, with unabated force,
thunder out Hummel’s composition, so difficult and fatiguing, especially in the last movement.” A
review of a concert in Hungary in 1823 mentions that “the handsome blond youth” performed with
“pleasant strength, and masterful grip,” among other appealing qualities. Actually, Walker notes, Liszt
was a child of delicate health who suffered throughout his life from “feverish attacks and fainting
spells" in connection to the stresses of performing. Carl Czerny, the young Liszt’s teacher in Vienna,
describes his first sight of the eight-year-old boy as “a pale, sickly-looking child." Walker, I: 78, 87, 59,
56,67.
T>
Kevin Kopelson discusses the implications o f this famous Weihekuss for Liszt biographers in
Beethoven's Kiss, pp. 67-77.
23 Walker, I: 81-85.
Walker, I: 81. See Kopelson for the illustration.
J Raphael Ledos de Beaufort, The Abbe Liszt: The Story o f His Life (London: Ward and Downey,
1886), 53. This biography has been reprinted in several editions and under different titles, including
Franz Liszt: The Story o f His Life (Boston: O. Ditson, 1887).
26 Thomas Mann, “The Infant Prodigy,” in Stories o f Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936): 178.
27 Walker, I: 85.
28 Walker, 1:72,67.
29 Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro (New York: HarperCoIlins, 1989, rept. 1998): 115.
30 Publicity materials from Fine Line Features (1996).
31 This mythology of the demanding father-figure also applies to certain female prodigies, as in the case
of Clara Wieck in the nineteenth century, or Ruth Slenczynska in the twentieth century. See Ruth
130
Slenczynska and Louis Biancolli, Forbidden Childhood (New York: Doubieday, 19S7). The Seventh
Veil (1945) is a British melodrama about a young girl who is sent to live with her misogynistic “unde”
Nicholas after her parents’ death. Nicholas, a failed amateur pianist, encourages Francesca’s budding
musical talents, but proves to be a domineering and sadistic mentor. “He was a slave driver,” Francesca
recounts after “seven years of Nicholas planning my life, turning me into his dream o f a concert
pianist.” When budding romance distracts Francesca from her dedication to the piano and to her master-
mentor, Nicholas controls her even more brutally, reminding her, “I’ve devoted years to converting a
very ordinary girl in pig-tails into a first-class artist I've given up everything to be with you, to help
your career!”
32 Walker, however, considers Adam Liszt in a positive light, as “a father prepared to sacrifice
everything for the sake of his talented son,” and refutes the claim that he was a “harsh disciplinarian,” as
other accounts have depicted. Adam Liszt taught “Franzi” his first piano lessons and supported his
further development with the financial resources and musical opportunities he could arrange. Walker, I:
66, 60, 86, 109-111. Walker also credits Adam Liszt with a determining influence even past his lifetime:
“[he] was by far the most powerful influence on Liszt during his formative years. Many times in the
course of his long life, Liszt was to recall the sombre and mystical personality of his dead father, which
would reach out even beyond the tomb and determine much of his future conduct.” Walker, I: 128.
33 According to Walker, “it is evident that Liszt’s adolescence was lonely. We do not possess a single
piece of evidence to suggest that the fifteen-year-old youth had any real friends of his own age. ... His
sole companion was his father. The relationship was close, but there were many times when it was
claustrophobic.... Small wonder that this brilliant boy became withdrawn and introspective.” Walker, I:
116.
34 Quoted in Daniel Mark Epstein, “What Hollywood Did to the Truth,” The Wall Street Journal (July
27, 1998): A12. Another typical statement: “Peter ruled the family with an iron will, driving David’s
music education far beyond the emotional and psychological levels a child of his age could withstand.”
‘Transcending” [review of S/tine], Cinema Papers [Victoria, Australia] 111 (August 1, 1996): 8.
35 Walker, 1:42.
36 Goldsworthy, 14.
37 Margaret Helfgott confirms that her father was a frustrated musician (“he would love to have become
a musician but ... the nature of his family in Poland had prevented him from fulfilling his dream”),
however she rebuts the claim about his detrimental influence on his prodigy son. “Far from ruining
David’s career, my father deserves credit for nurturing his talent and paving the way for his success.”
Out o f Tune, 42,4.
38 Sidney Harrison, Grand Piano (London: Faber and Faber, 1976): 148.
39
Guy de Pourtales, L ’homme d ’amour (1925). Translated into English as Franz Liszt: The Man o f
Love, by Eleanor Stimson Brooks (New York: H. Holt, 1926; London: Butterworth, 1927).
40 Joseph August Lux, Franz Liszt: himmlische und irdische Hebe: Roman (Berlin: R. Bong, 1929).
41 Charlotte Franken Haldane, Galley Slaves o f Love: The Story o f Marie d ’Agoult and Franz Liszt
(London: Harvill Press, 1957).
42
Jean Rousselot, La vie passionnee de Franz Liszt (Paris: Editions Seghers-L’inter, 1958). Translated
into English as Hungarian Rhapsody: The Life o f Franz Liszt, by Moura Budbcrg (London: J. Cape,
I960; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961).
131
43 Charlotte Hocker Rhapsodie der Liebe: ein Liszt-Roman (Hamburg: Deutscher Literatur-Verlag Otto
Melchert, 1986).
Adolphe Pictet, line course a Chamounix (Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1838; reprt. Geneva: Journal de
Genfcve, 1930).
45
As Walker writes about “the aptly named Consolations,” “their reflective, self-communing character
reveals a new and much more thoughtful Liszt: this is music tinged with a secret sorrow ... when the
tragedy of his liaison with Carolyne had begun to penetrate his soul.” Walker, II: 145.
46 Other women in Liszt’s life have also been cast in the role of a female muse. In Max Ophuls’s Lola
Montes (1955), the title character is the infamous “Spanish dancer” who pursued Liszt. (In reality, Lola
Montez was Mrs. Eliza Gilbert, bom in Limerick, Ireland. Her legendary love-affair with the pianist
may be merely a popular fabrication. According to Walker, “we do not have a single piece of
documentary evidence to suggest that she became Liszt’s mistress—not one letter, not one diary entry,
not one confession from either side. Strangely enough, Lola, who was never reluctant to name her other
lovers, was silent on the subject of Liszt.” Walker, I: 393.) This film also depicts the metaphorical
correlation of performance, composition, and progeniture. Liszt asks Lola Montes, “Do you never
dream of an affair without end?” But their romance has ended, and Liszt composes his Valse d ’adieu
for her as a good-bye memento. As in other films, the soundtrack reproduces Liszt’s composition from
its solo piano version into an elaborate orchestral arrangement which continues on through the scene.
But Liszt's “dream of love’s farewell” is deliberately interrupted—the soundtrack suddenly goes silent
when he impetuously rips up the manuscript he has just composed for Lola Montez. She reassembles
the shredded music score the next morning, after their final night together. As she gathers together the
pieces of the manuscript, the soundtrack music also gradually reassembles the motives of the waltz
theme back to its previous orchestral arrangement.
47 There are many further examples of the use of this piece as cinematic love-music. In Istvan Szabo’s
Oberst Redl (Colonel Redt) (1984), and in the Russian film Utomlionie solnstem (Burnt by the Sun)
(1994), Liebestraum is played in sexually-charged scenarios. Ken Russell’s Lisztomania (1975)
irreverently spoofs the accumulated associations around the piece in a fanciful dream-sequence set to
the music adapted as “Love's Dream.” The “Romantic” associations around Liszt’s piano works are
further evident in mass-market recordings such as Liszt fo r Lovers: Piano Dreams o f Love and Passion
(Philips, 1997), which includes Liebestraum and Un sospiro among its selections.
48 In a playful Lubitsch touch, the camera mediates the dynamics of desire between the pianist and the
music-Iover. Alex plays the Wagner-Liszt “Liebestod” transcription for Mrs. Baker as she leans on the
piano, transfixed by the sight of his playing and the sound of the swelling music. Suddenly, Alex stops
playing and chases her off-screen for what seems to be a passionate kiss—but the camera remains
focused on the vacant piano.
49 An English adaptation by Tom Stoppard is titled Undiscovered Country (1986).
50 Sarah Cahill discusses the depiction of pianists as killers in Hollywood films in her article “88 Keys
to Terror,” Piano & Keyboard (May/June 1994): 42-47.
51 Liszt’s dedication to virtuosity as a pianist and composer was largely inspired by Paganini’s
phenomenal technique and the attraction of his playing. Liszt endeavored to transfer these into his own
piano technique and composition; his piano transcriptions of six solo violin Etudes by Paganini are a
famous result. Partly on the basis of his gaunt and spectral appearance, Paganini was rumored to have
132
gained his abilities through demonic, even Faustian, means. As Walker notes, “his very name ( ‘little
pagan’) symbolized the satanic aura which surrounded his personality.” Walker, I: 170.
52 Walker, I: 176.
33 Compositions on these albums includes Liszt’s “Mephisto” waltzes for piano, “Fundrailles” from
Harmonies poetiques et religieuses, “Czdrd&s macabre,” “Trauer-Vorspiel und Trauer-Marsch,” the
"Reminiscences de Robert le diable: Valse infemale,” and waltzes from Gounod’s Faust.
54 Arthur Schniztler, Traumnovelle (Berlin: Fischer, 1926), translated as Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, by
Otto P. Schinnerer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1927).
55 Jack Higgins, Solo (Stein & Day, 1980): 23, 48, 133. The novel has also be adapted for a film: Solo
(1999), dir. Harold Becker.
36 Titled Gaslight, or Angel Street. Based on the play of the same title by Patrick Hamilton, which
enjoyed a successful run in London, then to Broadway in 1941 as Angel Street, starring Judith Evelyn,
Vincent Price, Leo G. Carroll; ran for nearly 1300 performances.
37 Review in Der Tag [Berlin] (October 7, 1952). Review in Telegrafam Sonntag [Berlin] (October 5,
1952). Press clippings in file on Gefdhrliches Abenteuer at the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchive, Berlin.
58 Fred Mustard Stewart, The Mephisto Waltz: A Novel (New York: Coward-McCann, 1969).
39 Walker reconsiders historical accounts of Olga Janina (actually Olga Zielinska-Piasecka) in his
chapter “Of Cossacks and Countesses,” noting that there is no evidence that Liszt was ever romantically
involved with her. Ill: 171-190. Janina’s scandal-provoking novels proved extremely popular (the first
went through thirteen editions). See also Les amours de Liszt et de la cosaque, a previously unpublished
manuscript edited by Anton Knepp and Pierre-Antoine Hure (Paris: Parution, 1987). Janina’s novels
follow in the tradition established by another spumed lover of Liszt’s who turned to revenge through
literary fiction—Marie d'Agoult and her best-selling novel Nelida, published in 1846 and again in 1866
under the pseudonym “Daniel Stem.” Walker discusses d'Agoult’s autobiographical novel in I: 382-
401.
60
Press clippings from the Berliner Morgenpost, Berliner lllustrierte Nachtausgabe, and Berliner
Volks-Zeitung in file on Mazurka at the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchive, Berlin.
61 Elyse Mach. “Did the Piano Kill Liszt? An Interview with Liszt’s Great-Granddaughter Blandine
Ollivier de Prdvaux,” Clavier (September, 1971): 23.
“ Walker, I: 23-27.
Ernst von Wolzogen (1855-1934). Der Kraft-Mayr: ein humoristischer Musikanten-Roman (Berlin:
Josef Singer, ?I897, 71932). Translated into English as Florian Mayr: A Humorous Tale o f Musical
Life, trans. Edward Breck and Charles Harvey Genung (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1914).
64 James Huneker, “A Son of Liszt,” in Melomaniacs (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902): 11-
18. Huneker’s story is modeled on a reference to Sir William Davenant, who claimed to be an
illegitimate son of William Shakespeare.
65 Roald Dahl (1916-1990). “Edward the Conqueror,” in Kiss Kiss (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1960),
also in Roald Dahl's Tales o f the Unexpected (London: Michael Joseph, 1948-1979): 115-132.
66 Dahl’s story may have been inspired by a description of Liszt in Amy Fay’s popular [item 236, pp.
259]: “[Liszt’s expression on one occasion] reminded me of the expression of a big tabby-cat as it sits
133
and purrs away, blinking its eyes and seemingly half-asleep, when suddenly— !— ! out it strikes with
both its claws [sic], and woe be to whatever is within it its reach!"
67 “Edward the Conqueror,” starring Joseph Cotton and Wendy Hiller, episode 1.7 o f Tales o f the
Unexpected, aired on May 5, 1979.
68 Alan Walker, “Liszt and the Twentieth Century,” in Franz UszJ: The Man and His Music, ed. Alan
Walker (New York: Taplinger, 1970): 350.
69 Ibid: 351,364.
70 Henry Charles Lahee, Famous Pianists o f To-day and Yesterday (Boston: L. C. Page, 1900): 176.
71 Eugen d'Albert was head of the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin; Alexander Siloti taught at the
Juilliard School in New York from 1925 to 1942; Frederic Lamond taught at the Eastman School of
Music; Edward MacDowell taught at Columbia University; Moriz Rosenthal taught at the Curtis
Institute of Music; Istvdn Thdman in Budapest. For a listing o f Liszt’s pupils and disciples by
nationality, see Appendix Three of Living with Liszt: From the Diary o f Carl Lachmund, an American
Pupil o f Liszt, 1882-1884, ed. Alan Walker (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1995): 393-399. As
Walker notes, this long roster indicates the extent to which “[Liszt’s] influence was carried into the first
half of the twentieth century” (393). Liszt's pedagogical legacy is also memorialized in the name of the
Hungarian national music conservatory he helped found in 1840—Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy of
Music—and in Weimar’s Hochschule fur Musik “Franz Liszt.” John and Virginia Strauss, “Continuing
the Legacy of Franz Liszt,” Clavier (July/August 1994): 26.
72 Kurt Leland, “At the Home for Retired Piano Teachers,” The Beloit Poetry Journal 44/4 (Summer
1994): 30.
73 Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro (New York: HarperCollins, 1998): 19-20, 123.
74 Monthly Film Bulletin 5/56 (August 1938): 207.
75 “Filmspiel um Franz Liszt: Liebestraume," Filmwelt: Das Film-und Foto-Magazin 25 (June 23,
1935).
76 Pressbook file, Bunderarchiv/Filmarchiv, Berlin.
77 Typescript o f Ditrichstein’s The Concert, New York Public Library theater collection.
78 “Why Women Admire Great Musicians,” Pittsburgh Leader (March 24, 1912).
79 “The Concert Arouses Interest of Pianists.” New York Telegraph (Oct. 3, 1910).
DA
“Gabor Arany in ‘Concert Copied After No Individual,” Chicago Tribune [?] (Nov. 29, 1911).
Dietrichstein himself added to the speculation by stating, “to depict the eccentric musician well one
must have been in some way acquainted with the eccentricities of musicians. For some time I had a
room next to de Pachmann. I would hear him when he practiced.” Mae Tinee, “Ditrichstein ‘Star’
Husband as well as Theatrical Light,” Chicago Tribune (Oct. 22, 1911).
81 Harold C. Schonberg, “Arthur Rubinstein at 90,” TV Guide (January 22, 1977): 32.
82 Artur Rubinstein, My Young Years (New York: Knopf, 1973), My Many Years (New York: Knopf,
1983).
83 People magazine (November 20, 1978).
84 Rubinstein, My Young Years, 244-248.
134
85
Ibid, 198. This anecdote is also mentioned in an article about Rubinstein from Time magazine
(February 10, 1975).
86
Letter from Schoenberg to conductor Otto Klemperer. Burt A. Folkart, “Nyiregyhdzi is Dead at 84,”
Los Angeles Times (April 17, 1987): 3.
87 “For Pianist Nyiregyhazi, Fame, Unjustly, is Nine Wives and Ten Photographed Fingers,” People
magazine (March 13,1978).
88 Arthur Bronson, “Pianist in Hot Water,” Pageant (February 1945): 89-91.
89
Virginia MacPherson, “Jose Iturbi Screen’s Newest ‘Great Lover,’” Hollywood Citizen-News
(September 13,1946).
90
In Holiday in Mexico, as in Three Daring Daughters, Itubri’s own extended family also makes an
appearance: his own two grand-daughters appear in cameo roles, and his sister, pianist Amparo Iturbi,
joins him for two-piano performances. Iturbi and his sister also perform Manuel de Falla’s “Ritual Fire
Dance” in an eleborately staged scene in Two Girls and a Sailor (1944). Together they made
numberous recordings of duo-piano repertoire, including the Mozart Concerto in E flat major for two
pianos and orchestra, K. 365, with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra (Victor, 1940s), Mozart’s
Concerto in D minor, K. 466, with the RCA Victor Orchestra (RCA Victor, 1950s), as well as the
album Amparo and Jose Iturbi Play Milhaud, Nepomuceno, Infante (RCA Victor, 1954).
91
Sam Kushner, A Talent fo r Genius: The Life and Times o f Oscar Levant (New York: Villard Books,
1994): 311.
ip
' Levant also played the match-maker role in real life. In 1927, he introduced Irish comedian Frank
Fay to Barbara Stanwyck, his co-star in the Broadway play Burlesque. As Stanwyck’s career flourished.
Fay’s declined, and a bitter divorce followed in 1935. Levant later admitted, “I always felt guilty about
serving as the catalyst in this romance.” Kushner, 65.
93 Kushner, 292.
94 Kushner, 206.
95 Fannie Hurst, “Sister Act,” Cosmopolitan (March, 1937).
IV. PIANO WOMEN, FORTE WOMEN
“I have always held that, if a piano possessed a gender, it would be

female. Perhaps this is because I recognize, in the hundreds of
instruments with which I deal, those fickle, mercurial, and sometimes
downright subversive qualities so peculiar to the nature of my own
sex.”—Robin McCabe in Piano Quarterly (1981)
The historical and metaphorical links associating women with the piano are
familiar tropes in literature, films, artworks, and other popular-culture productions.
Since the early nineteenth century the instrument has connoted salon culture, feminine
“accomplishment,” piano lessons, and the domestic sphere of mothers and daughters.1
In many respects, “the history of the pianoforte and the history of the social status of
women can be interpreted in terms of one another,” as Arthur Loesser demonstrates in
Men, Women and Pianos (1954).2
These common associations have led to particular stereotypes o f the female
pianist according to her age, her talent and technical ability, and whether she plays for
the sake of private expression or public attraction. Many generations of amateur
“piano girls” have dutifully practiced at home and played in student recitals as an
educational and social ritual. A traditional image of the piano teacher is a woman
(often a “maiden lady down the street”) who guides the novice through the
complexities of a scale or sonata. A number of female pianists have the talent,
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136
opportunity, and stamina to maintain careers as concert artists despite professional
obstacles and ingrained prejudices in the field.3
Whatever the contexts and motivations for a female pianist’s playing—whether
as a domestic amateur or dynamic virtuoso—these long-established associations invite
an exploration o f how mythologies of the “Romantic” pianist have influenced
representations o f the female pianist. These dynamics are complicated by the
hierarchies of our patriarchal social order, which regulates the internal and external
relationships she establishes through musical expression and the attraction of
performance. At stake is the relationship of the female pianist to her musical
instrument, to her viewer-listener, and to her own mind and physical body. It is one
thing for the male virtuoso of the Lisztian tradition to display temperament and
stimulate desire through his repertoire and performance; it is quite another thing for a
woman to do the same (fig. 42).
To paraphrase Loesser, this chapter considers “the history of the psychological
status o f women” in relation to the piano—that is, with regard to why, how, where,
and for whom women play, and the social and historical factors which determine the
significance of their playing in terms of an overarching social order. Popular-culture
representations of female pianists drawn from literature, films, and artworks reveal
two primary stereotypes based on the piano/forte dynamic range of the instrument
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itself. They also reveal how women have cultivated and also subverted these
psychological dynamics for their own expressive purposes.
PLAYING OUT OF TUNE
In Henry James’s novel The Portrait o f a Lady, first published in 1880, elegant
and dignified Madame Merle plays the piano as one o f her many social
accomplishments.4 Isabel Archer is a young American woman who admires her
musical abilities as well as her worldly manner. In one o f their discussions, Madame
Merle explains to Isabel that the projection of identity is often a function of
“appurtenances,” tangible objects which represent the inner self or personality to the
outside observer:
What shall we call our “self’? Where does it begin? Where does it end?
It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back
again ... One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s
self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one
reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive (253).5
The pianos in James’s novel— like the houses, doors, windows, gardens, artworks, and
other objects he employs as symbolic imagery— resonate as iconic “appurtenances” or
signifiers that contribute specific patterns of meaning around female characters in the
story.6 The act of piano-playing mediates these women’s outward expression and
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attraction as well as their inner thoughts and emotions as a kind o f musical mirror of
the soul.
On one occasion, Ralph tells Isabel, who is pondering her reaction to a
complicated social situation, “Don’t question your conscience so much, it will get out
of tune like a strummed piano” (273). Here the author’s evocative simile invokes a
wide range o f associations, musical and otherwise. An out-of-tune piano signifies a
less-than-desirable object or condition, a mechanism or state of being which was once
tuned (ordered, controlled, appropriate, pleasing) but has become distorted and
corrupt, capable of producing only unpleasant discords. This instrument contradicts
certain standards of regulation by which the piano can and ought to be kept tuned and
well-tempered. This piano is untuned because it has been played too much, or in the
wrong way, or even merely “strummed” or touched at all. It stands as a warning
against proscribed actions which have degraded a previously ideal unstrum m ed
instrument.
This simile also makes a specific connection between an (un)tuned piano and a
woman’s “conscience” or self-consciousness. As Ralph’s comment implies,
representations of the female pianist typically fall into two categories. One type is the
woman of “unquestioned” conscience who plays correctly and remains appropriately
“tuned,” whose values and ideals resonate according to the modes of proper social
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organization, including marriage, motherhood, and settled domesticity. Another type is
the women whose conscience is questioned (or questioning, or questionable), who
plays and gets played in a manner which contradicts established patriarchal standards
of how a female ought to express herself physically and psychologically. In linking a
woman’s moral sense to an (in)appropriately regulated piano, Henry James invokes
further connotations about gender roles in society and about the patriarchal regulation
of a woman’s expression and attraction in the signifying act of piano-playing.
These two contrasting archetypes of the questioned and unquestioned
conscience inform many if not most popular-culture representations of the “Romantic”
female pianist since the early nineteenth century. These roles parallel the more general
Western stereotypes of the female as either a virtuous or fallen woman—the familiar
Madonna/whore dichotomy underlying representations of the female since Antiquity.
The “Madonna” is typically an asexual female who conforms to the regulation of an
overarching patriarchal order. She is a virginal bride, a good mother to her children,
and a faithful wife to her husband; she does not aggressively question the power
structures which determine her identity and expression. The “whore” is a woman who
assumes a sexual potential under her own will and control, and exercises this power in
contradiction to established moral standards if necessary. As a result, she typically
suffers the consequences of what is regarded as arrogance and insubordination. In
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many popular-culture representations, this woman’s punishment may be literal or
figurative, physical or psychological; it may be represented as emotional misery or
distress, bodily illness or infirmity, or even the tragic turn of accident, suicide, or
murder.7
The notion of the (un)tuned piano can represent a woman’s negotiation of such
precarious social and psychological distinctions. In the Hollywood film The Naked
Jungle (1953), a chauvinistic coffee plantation owner in the remote Amazon jungle
sends for a beautiful mail-order bride from New Orleans. At the same time, he also
purchases a brand new piano for her to play. Both the woman and the instrument
arrive, but he soon learns that his new wife has actually been married once before; she
is not the new, perfect, and pliable instrument he had expected her to be. “The only
condition that I ever made about anything I brought up the river was that it be new,
worth the effort!” he rails at her. “Madame, this piano you’re sitting at was never
played by anyone before it came here.” But her strumming has already revealed a few
out-of-tune keys on his “perfect” new instrument. Her reply is sufficiently pointed in
its implications: “If you knew more about music, you’d realize that a good piano is
better when it’s played. This is not a very good piano!”
Similarly in Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano, the (un)tuned instrument is
a central appurtenance intricately associated with the female protagonist. An heirloom
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piano accompanies Ada McGrath and her illegitimate daughter as they emigrate from
the repressive society of Victorian Scotland to the untamed jungle of colonial New
Zealand, where Ada has been sent in an arranged marriage. Abandoned on the beach
when Ada’s more portable possessions are carried through the jungle to her new
home, the piano suffers from exposure to the weather and water (fig. 43). Later in the
story when the piano is finally retrieved, its out-of-tune discords echo the
psychological tensions of Ada’s tempestuous nature. Even after a tuner regulates its
pitch, Ada’s unrestrained playing on the instrument provokes further domestic
disturbances, romantic complications, and ultimately violence.
In terms of popular-culture mythology, Campion’s story taps into accumulated
meanings around the woman/piano connection to convey a story imbued with aspects
of feminist ideology. Here the piano serves as a sign which is deployed or “played”
according to the dynamics of gender and female sexuality, and which implicates the
social institutions of matrimony and motherhood in the process. The instrument
provides an expressive “voice” and “touch” which compensates for Ada’s strange
muteness and for her repressed sexuality. It represents a token of barter and exchange
in Ada’s marriage and in her adulterous affair, and it serves as a catalyst for seduction
in her male neighbor’s piano lessons. The instrument even becomes a symbolic
extension of Ada’s physical body when her removal of a piano key is paralleled by the
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violent dismemberment of her finger.
In a broader context, Campion’s story also functions as a parable about the
perils of the “Romantic” nature for the independent, self-willed, and expressive
woman. Campion writes in an epigraph to the novel version of the film, “I think that
the romantic impulse is in all o f us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but
it’s not part of a sensible way of living. It’s a heroic part and it generally ends
dangerously. ... I believe it’s a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the
foolhardy and the compulsive.”8 In this moral of the story, Campion assigns
psychological and even pathological conditions to the “Romantic” nature even as she
admires the potential daring of its dynamic power. The implication is that Ada would
not have caused these problems had she only just played piano.
PLAYING PIANO
Popular-culture representations of the female pianist constitute a special
category distinct from those of the male virtuoso of the Lisztian tradition. While the
female pianist might also play the role of a “Romantic” virtuoso-lover, or engage a
seductive or sinister musical attraction, such acts challenge traditional constructs of
gender and social organization. Virtue, not virtuosity, is the ideal of femininity in a
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patriarchal culture. For this reason, the dynamics of desire between performer and
viewer-listener play out differently according to the performer’s gender.
The piano’s dynamic range provides a useful analogy for the variety of
performance roles, manners, and moods the pianist can elicit from the instrument.
Dynamics here refers to the literal sense of how loudly, forcefully, and energetically a
pianist plays, but also to the figurative sense of how openly, confidently, and
aggressively a performer will take on the challenge of expressive communication in
her desire to reach the viewer-listener through music, touch, and feeling. In this
figurative or metaphorical sense, piano (soft) implies polite refinement, gentle finesse,
and graceful beauty, attributes typically linked to traditional notions of femininity and
bourgeois domesticity; forte (loud) suggests masculine vigor, confident delivery, and
dramatic spectacle, aspects deemed distinctly M/ifeminine when women assume the
male virtuoso’s dynamics of attraction.
How do these figurative dynamics relate to “real-life” female pianists in a
historical context? In terms of setting, the female pianist has traditionally been
assigned to the domestic parlor or semi-private salon, the male pianist to the stage of
the public concert hall. During the eighteenth century, keyboard instruments such as
the virginal and clavichord were associated with female players partly because of their
domestic use and quiet sound. In the nineteenth century, the evolving grand piano
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(perhaps an anachronistic name for an instrument more forte, much larger, and far
heavier than its eighteenth-century prototypes) allowed the pianist to fill larger spaces
(such as public concert halls) with greater volumes of sound. In terms of repertoire,
the female amateur has traditionally been associated with simple and graceful salon
music to soothe and entertain her family and private guests (though she might also
play raucous “battle pieces”), the male virtuoso with demanding concert works to
inspire and astonish his public audiences. While the nineteenth century was the age of
celebrated male virtuosi such as Chopin and Liszt, the emergence of a number of
highly accomplished female pianists into professional concert life challenged such
assumptions about the role and place of female performers in relation to the
public/private divide.9
The piano/forte dichotomy can serve as a useful means to categorize the roles,
repertoire, and reputations female pianists were assigned as private or public
musicians. It can also serve as a metaphor for the psychological implications
(weak/strong, passive/aggressive) of these musical and social standards. It is important
to emphasize that the binary piano/forte distinction applies best to popular-culture
representations of the female pianist, not to the more complex and varied
circumstances of specific historical pianists or specific musical repertoire, topics
already explored in depth by a number of scholars to date.10
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As an exam ple o f this piano/forte distinction in popular-culture
representations, a Saturday Evening Post article from 1900 provides a humorous
sketch of the domestic female pianist’s music and manners. The author depicts two
piano-playing girls—one meek and quiet who plays the usual salon repertoire, the
other the perpetrator of a frightful musical violence:
When the day’s work is over, and before the lamps are brought in,
while one lounges in slippers and house-jacket in the easy-chair
watching the fall of night through the windows, then blessing on the
daughter of the house who goes quietly to the piano, puts her foot on
the soft pedal and turns the hour to poetry by playing a Chopin
nocturne, a pensive bit of Schumann, or a “Nuit Blanche” of Heller.
Sweet, with a touch of sadness, such music composes the mind while it
stimulates imagination, the home grows cozier and dearer, and the night
comes more soothingly. But woe to that house ... where the confident
one with the hard brain, a thick ear, and a strong arm slams open the
piano cover, glares, squares off, and falls to beating the keys, filling the
unhappy instrument with shrieks and the place with trouble."
Clearly, the dynamics of the gentle “piano girl” are valued more highly than those of
the rough “forte woman” in the patriarchal economy of pleasure.
The Piano Girl
The “piano girl” or “piano woman” is one o f the most familiar stereotypes of
the female pianist whose playing does not transgress the bounds of idealized
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femininity and appropriate desire. This figure reflects long-established cultural
assumptions about music, gender, and performance. The piano-girl is typically an
amateur pianist in the private domain, a young daughter or sister who practices
diligently and plays quietly as a form of genteel social accomplishment. Carl Czerny’s
Letters to a Young Lady on the Art o f Playing the Pianoforte, first published in 1840,
are addressed to one such piano-girl, the fictional Cecilia, “a talented and well-
educated girl of about twelve years old” who plays with proper grace and poise for her
family’s pleasure.12
In an article on gender and the domestic piano, Ruth Solie describes the piano-
girl as an idealized young female “participating in a system of family discipline” while
also “imbibing the essence of the whole artistic and emotional realm that made her
femininity convincing.”13 As a function of her feminine charm, the piano-girl might
also display her good breeding and artistic abilities to secure a favorable marriage, but
this would seem like a more mercenary form of musical attraction. “Undoubtedly,”
remarks Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813), “there is
meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation.
Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable.”14
Underlying representations of the piano-girl and piano-woman is the complex
public/private dichotomy which women have historically faced in their domestic lives
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and professional careers. In the case of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847), it has
been argued that her father and her younger brother Felix Mendelssohn discouraged
her from pursuing a professional career as a performer or published composer because
her social status demanded a properly domesticated role. Instead, Mendelssohn
married and channeled her artistic energies into the vibrant musical culture of her
private salon in Berlin.15Ilona Eibenschiitz (1873-1967) played duets with Franz Liszt
at the age of six, made her debut with the Vienna Philharmonic at the age of nine, and
later studied with Clara Schumann; Anton Rubinstein is said to have praised her as
“the greatest of us all.” She retired from concertizing, however, when she married a
wealthy financier in 1902, and she then limited her playing to private gatherings.
When her husband died in 1927, Mrs. Derenburg declined to resume her public career
because she had become “a grand lady, who didn’t do such things.”16
The conflict between the two incommensurate realms of public and domestic
activity is also evident in the career (and even the names) of the “passionate
Victorian” Amy Marcy Beach, nee Cheney (1867-1944). After a successful debut at
age sixteen, she ended her concert career when she married a prominent physician and
turned to musical composition instead. After his death in 1910, she resumed
concertizing in Europe (as Amy Beach) and the United States (as Mrs. H. H. A.
Beach). The disparity between her public virtuoso persona and her genteel domestic
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persona has also been noted in her music, where “restless modulations” and an
“overuse of chromaticism” contrast with “the kind of perfumed, polite parlor music
women were ‘supposed’ to write.”17 Perhaps the platonic marriage o f Cecile
Chaminade (1857-1944) to a much older man allowed her to maintain a professional
career as both a celebrated composer of salon music and an acclaimed touring concert
artist. As Chaminade admitted in a 1908 interview, “it is difficult to reconcile the
domestic life with the artistic.” 18
The dichotomy of private/public or domestic/virtuosic has been an issue for
twentieth-century female artists to negotiate, as well. According to one critic, Mitsuko
Uchida (b. 1948) became frustrated with her childhood lessons in Japan, “where piano
was taught more to build social savoir-faire than to foster musicality.”19 Instead of
being “the attractive ambassador’s daughter who plays the piano terribly well,”
Uchida made a conscious decision to pursue her musical training and professional
aspirations apart from her family.20 But the demands and responsibilities of domestic
life can still intrude on a woman’s professional career. Pianist Janina Fialkowska (b.
1951) admits, “When I look at my sister-in-law rearing her family, and I ask myself
whether or not I could do it, I think maybe I could, but it also could be totally unfair to
any children I might have. ... Alicia de Larrocha had children, and I remember her
saying that she was a terrible mother. She seems to have that on her conscience.”21
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The exemplary piano-girl is a familiar character-type in many works of
nineteenth-century fiction. “Such a countenance, such manners! and so extremely
accomplished for her age!” exclaims Miss Bingley about Miss Darcy in Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice. “Her performance on the pianoforte is exquisite.”22 In
Thackeray’s Vanity F air (1847), Amelia Sedley is “the sweetest, the purest, ... the
most angelical of young women ... so charmingly simple, and artlessly fond and
tender.” She plays the piano William Dobbin has sent her while she is “broken hearted
and lonely.”23 In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1871), Beth is a typical Victorian
piano-girl, a youngest daughter devoted to her parents and home life. Beth
occasionally reproaches herself for her “self indulgence” in playing the piano, and for
“envying girls with nice pianos,” but she keeps her expressive desires mostly to
herself: “Nobody saw Beth wipe the tears off the yellow keys, that wouldn’t keep in
tune, when she was alone.”24
In The Portrait o f a Lady, young Pansy Osmond embodies the virginal
innocence and dutiful obedience of the domestic piano-girl. James depicts Pansy’s
unstrummed nature through literary imagery, beginning with the obvious connotations
of her name: “Pansy’s a little convent-flower,” (307), she is “so innocent and infantine
... like a sheet of blank paper” (328), “really a blank page, a pure white surface,
successfully kept so” (366). In one scene, “Pansy had on a scant white dress, and her
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fair hair was neatly arranged in a net” (365). Observing the young girl, Isabel “had
never had so directly presented to her nose the white flower of cultivated sweetness”
(366).
As an obedient daughter, Pansy is subject to patriarchal authority. As her father
remarks, “one’s daughter should be fresh and fair; she should be innocent and gentle”
(577). When Isabel advises Pansy to “give pleasure to your father,” she replies, “I
think that’s what I live for” (368). Pansy’s meek and subservient nature is
metaphorically a function of her piano-playing:
“I’m glad they’ve taught you to obey,” said Madame Merle. “That’s
what good little girls should do.”
“Oh yes, I obey very well,” cried Pansy with soft eagerness, almost
with boastfulness, as if she had been speaking of her piano-playing.
(286)
Later, Isabel overhears Pansy “strumming at the piano ... the little girl was
‘practicing,’ and Isabel was pleased to think she performed this duty with rigor” (365).
A primary intention of the piano-girl’s musical accomplishment is to secure a
fortuitous marriage, but when Pansy demonstrates d/ôbediance by expressing
romantic interest in Rosier, an unacceptable young man, piano-playing becomes a
form of punishment. Pansy’s father banishes her to a convent school where she is to
“think things over” and where “she will have her books and her drawing, she will
have her piano” (577). For Isabel, the convent reminds her of “the great penal
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establishments,” but Madame Merle reports that the young girl “has a charming little
room, not in the least conventual, with a piano and flowers” (597). Whether she plays
as accomplishment or punishment, the piano-girl’s talent and technical skill remain
circumscribed. Pansy “had neither art, nor guile, nor temper, nor talent,” (366). She
admits, “I don’t think I’m worth it. I don’t learn quickly enough, and I have no
memory. ... I don’t play very well” (367-68).
Judith Tick adapts James Huneker’s term “piano girl” for her own historical
analysis, examining how this “archsymbol of the dilettante” seemed to have “passed
away” because o f social and economic changes in the late-nineteenth century,
particularly changing demographics of music education, composition, and professional
career opportunities.25 But the piano-girl lives on with a remarkable persistence in
popular-culture productions even to the present day. A mid-nineteenth century
postcard depicts an idealized piano-girl playing Mendelssohn’s “Songs without
Words” (fig. 44), and over a century later, a rock group’s album-cover illustration
depicts another cute piano-girl in another stylized representation (fig. 45). The notion
that the amateur piano-woman could play the instrument adequately (but not too well)
even resurfaces in a recent political campaign. In her 1996 Congressional bid, Chicago
lawyer Nancy Kaszak advertised herself as a devoted wife and mother, a dedicated
community leader, and “a terrible piano player.”26
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Hollywood, too, has also represented the virtuous piano-girl in numerous
films. In Leave Her to Heaven (1946), the good sister plays Chopin in the parlor as
evening falls (fig. 46). In the 1949 film adaptation o f Flaubert’s Madame Bovary,
Emma as a young girl practices the piano at her convent boarding school. Fragile Beth
appears in two silent film adaptations of Alcott’s Little Women (1917 and 1919), in the
classic 1933 and 1948 versions, and most recently in the 1994 adaptation. In the 1993
adaptation of Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club (1993), June recalls her first (and
last) piano recital at the age of nine, when her mother hoped she’d be “the best piano
prodigy this side of China.”27
The female prodigy is a special category in this broader stereotype. The
persistent fascination with child prodigies in Western musical culture means that the
exceptionally talented piano-girl commands an attraction far in excess of her usual
domestic approbation. Prodigious as an adjective indicates either an astonishing
quality or ability which provokes wonder (as with a musical prodigy’s awe-inspiring
technique), or a sense of something unnatural, abnormal, even monstrous, as in a too-
quickly developed infant or a stunted, pre-formed woman.28 Because of this excess and
abnormality, the exceptional piano-girl is often represented as something too good to
be “good,” or as an example of the virtues of domestic music-making “gone bad.” In
The Bad Seed, the 1956 filming of Maxwell Anderson’s play and William March’s
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novel, eight-year-old Rhoda seems to be the model of sweetness, politeness, and
innocence. She dutifully practices “Au clair de la lune” on her piano at home (in the
1985 television adaptation, she plays “Fur Elise”). Other characters comment that
Rhoda is “the perfect little old-fashioned girl.” As the story progresses, however,
Rhoda turns out to be a manipulative liar and a precocious serial killer. An older male
character explains to Rhoda’s distraught mother the connection between musical
genius and the criminal impulse:
Some murderers, particularly the distinguished ones who are going to

make great names for themselves, start amazingly early ... like
mathematicians and musicians. Pascal was a master mathematician at
twelve, Mozart showed his melodic genius at six, and some of our great
criminals were top-flight operators before they got out of short pants
and pinafores!29
Ultimately, the prodigious piano-girl must be punished for her transgressions. Rhoda’s
mother tries to kill her with an overdose of sleeping pills. When that plan fails, the plot
turns to a ridiculous deus ex machina as Rhoda is struck and killed by lightning.
The Maiden Piano Teacher
Another familiar stereotype of the piano-woman is the maiden piano teacher,
an older and typically unmarried woman who instructs young pianists and nurtures
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their budding talents. In positive representations, this figure might serve as a surrogate
mother-figure, a maternal type who is gentle, compassionate, and loving. Kevin
Kopelson considers this maiden piano teacher “a virgin mother.”30 In less flattering
representations, she might be a severe spinster who imposes strict discipline and
demands complete devotion to herself and to the piano. In nearly all cases, the
common denominator is that she be single and celibate. The dynamics of her piano
playing should not excite desire or attraction, either musical or physical.
Marian Paroo in the 1957 Broadway musical (and 1962 Hollywood film) The
Music Man is a quintessential maiden piano teacher. As “Marian the Librarian”
(another familiar stereotype of the celibate single woman) she is prim and uptight; as
the dutiful teacher of the young piano-girl Amaryllis, she is strict and determined. In
the course of the story, however, Marian gradually sheds her inhibitions as she falls in
love with a traveling salesman.
The title character of Bernice Rubens’s 1962 novel (and 1988 film) Madame
Sousatzka is a less flattering representation of the maiden piano teacher.31 Ibrina
Sousatzka is an eccentric older woman “in the heroic mode” who suffers at the same
time from a pitiable sense of personal failure. On the one hand she is demanding and
authoritarian, (s)mothering her students with devotion and demands: “I teach not only
how to play the piano, but how to live!” One character comments, “she has a very
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excessive nature.” On the other hand, as a piano-woman she is frustrated in her
professional hopes because of stage fright and insecurity. Instead she transfers her
musical ambitions onto her impressionable young students, and lives vicariously
through their accomplishments.
Among possible “real-life” role models for the Madame Sousatzka character is
Mathilde Veme (1865-1936), teacher of the famous prodigy Solomon Cutner (1902-
1988). Veme writes about her cultivation of Solomon’s talents: “His success was
instantaneous, and from that time to this he has never looked back. I have never
regretted for one single moment all I have done for him and all the sacrifices I have
made in order to develop so obvious a talent, and that the small boy whom I took into
my house to educate should be able to make a fine career for himself.”32 Madame
Sousatzka also bears some resemblance to Isabelle Vengerova (1877-1956), the
famous Curtis Institute pedagogue who was famed and feared for her tyrannical
personality. Kopelson offers a “psychoanalytic” account of the Vengerova-Sousatzka
comparison.33
When the spinster-teacher is a piano-woman constrained in the dynamics of
her musical and emotional expression, a typical plot line involves her romantic
attraction to a male budding-virtuoso student. Madame Sousatzka obsesses over her
fifteen-year-old student Manek Sen: “All I’m thinking of is what’s right for you,” she
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explains as she tries to control his personal and professional life. She becomes a
masochistic jilted lover when another former student, Edward, returns to visit after
leaving her for a different teacher. “I went mad like a jealous mistress!” she cries. “Of
course I was in love with you. Isn’t every mother in love with the son she creates?”34
Though Kopelson describes Sousatzka as “batty ... uncanny, eccentric,”35 this
description best fits Erika Kohut, the protagonist of Elfiede Jelinek’s 1986 novel (and
2001 film) Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher)?6 At the psychological extreme
of the spinster-teacher characterization, 36-year-old Erika Kohut is still a piano-girl in
terms of her suffocating and infantile relationship with her insane mother. At the same
time, Erika demonstrates a great deal of self-determination in her sexual desires. The
female pianist’s piano/forte dichotomy becomes full-fledged schizophrenia for Erika
as she struggles to maintain her “good” public image as a teacher and performer at the
Vienna Conservatory while indulging in her “bad” private life of secret depravity in
the dark alleys and parks of Vienna. Her fetishes include voyeurism and self-
degradation, and she cultivates a perverse and ultimately violent sadomasochistic
relationship with her much younger male piano student, Walter Klemmer.
Erika represents a corruption of both the piano-girl’s and the maiden piano
teacher’s domestic utility. Maria-Regina Kecht considers Jelinek’s novel “a post
festum account of what has gone terribly wrong in the raising of a daughter ... [and]
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the shocking results o f maternal over-protectiveness and domination.” Kecht seems to
invoke the entire structure of the female pianist’s social and psychological struggles
when she sees “sadism and masochism convert the family nest into a prison full of
mirrors without any exit. The dual role of victim and oppressor is psychologically
conditioned and socially motivated. One cannot survive without the other; a sense of
identity is established only in the conflict-laden dynamics of blind exertion of power
and total subordination.”37 These dynamics of desire and psychological complexity,
and a corresponding patriarchal regulation, characterize a contrasting stereotype, the
forte-woman.
PLAYING FORTE
In Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), Jane, a governess, restricts her
musical efforts to the private domain of children’s education and domestic order.
Blanche Ingram, on the other hand, assumes the vain pretensions of a virtuoso:
Miss Ingram, who had seated herself with proud grace at the piano,
spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude, commenced a
brilliant prelude; talking meantime. She appeared to be on her high
horse tonight; both her words and her air seemed intended to excite not
only the admiration, but the amazement of her auditors: she was
evidently bent on striking them as something very dashing and daring
indeed.38
In Harold Frederic’s novel The Damnation ofTheron Ware (1896), Celia Madden
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grows up from “a red-beaded, sulky, mutinous slip of a [piano-] girl” into a “radiant
and wise and marvelously talented womanhood,” becoming “a tall, handsome,
confident woman” who plays “music for the gods ... a very proud lady, one might say
a queen.” Celia’s nocturnal rhapsodizing on the piano is one manifestation of her
unruly inner impulses and desires:
The bedroom window upstairs was open, and upon the fresh night air
was borne in the shrill, jangling sound of a piano, being played off
somewhere in the distance, but so vehemently that the noise imposed
itself upon the silence far and wide. ... he knew, as by instinct, that it
was the Madden girl who was playing. The incongruity of the hour
escaped his notice. He mused instead upon the wild and tropical tangle
of moods, emotions, passions, which had grown up in that strange
temperament. He found something very pathetic in that picture she had
drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate through her rooms
the livelong night, unable to sleep. The woeful moan of insomnia
seemed to make itself heard in every strain from her piano.39
In contrast to the domestic piano-girl, the accomplished female performer is often
characterized, whether seriously or sarcastically, as a forte-woman who plays with
confident mastery, aggressive vigor, and passionate feeling. According to this
stereotype, the female pianist is deliberate and extroverted in the dynamics of her
expression and attraction. At the same time she is a transgressive figure because she
“strums” too loudly and too forcefully for the regulating constraints of the patriarchal
order.
In many popular-culture representations, the forte-woman plays out her
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passionate emotions and desires without hesitation or apology. In the Hollywood
melodrama I ’ve Always Loved You (1946), a female pianist announces at her audition,
“I’ll play the Appassionato by Beethoven”—to which an intimidating maestro retorts,
“I dare you!” In E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View (filmed in 1986),
Lucy Honeychurch plays a Beethoven sonata with barely-suppressed feeling. “If Miss
Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays,” Mr. Beebe remarks, “it will be very
exciting— both for us and for her.”40 In The Piano, Ada strums her own improvised
tunes with passionate abandon, prompting bewilderment and frustration in her
listeners who are used to more polite musical manners.
The forte-woman also transgresses patriarchal authority in her attraction and
her figurative mastery of both the instrument and the viewer-listener. In The Paradine
Case (1947), a beautiful widow plays her own “Appassionata” in her parlor until the
police arrive to arrest her for murder. In Deception (1947), Christine Radcliffe plays
Beethoven’s “Appassionata” sonata, not Chopin nocturnes, for her guests:
Christine [announcing to her guests]: “I’ve been asked to play.”

Hollenius [muttering]: “Something tender—and pathetic—Chopin,
perhaps.”
Christine: “Karel has asked me to play [she looks at Hollenius
significantly] the Appassionatal” [guests “oh” and “ah,” and applaud
her decision]
[Christine begins to play. A moody atmosphere. Panning camera
emphasizes the wide space she commands. Karel looks down
uncomfortably. Hollenius looks grim, smoking his cigar and scowling
at her. She tears into the piece, and the guests are transfixed. A man
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leans forward with interest to watch how she manages a technical feat.
Hollenius takes his champagne glass in his hand; tense, he inadvertently
crushes it! Christine stops playing, shocked.]
One publicity slogan for Deception was “A Woman So Assured— A Woman So
Ashamed!”41 In “Etude in Black,” a 1972 episode of the television detective series
Columbo, a conductor has an adulterous affair with a young female pianist. “I don’t
like being a secret mistress,” she tells him. “It’s not my style. I have to be open and
free!” Her ultimatum—divorce, or a public scandal— provokes him to murder her out
of anger and anxiety.
As in the case o f the Lisztian virtuoso-lover, many characterizations of the
female pianist are based on real historical figures or historical circumstances modified
to suit the needs of dramatic expression and popular mythology. Certain female
conceit pianists of the nineteenth century set the stage for the forte-woman stereotype
because they bridged public and private realms through their performing and teaching
careers, and contradicted gender assumptions and social regulations in their own
private lives.
Clara Wieck Schumann (1819-1896) remains the leading historical model for
mythologies of the female pianist because of her 63-year-long concert career, her
influence as a renowned pedagogue, and her domestic responsibilities in caring for
eight children as well as her composer husband Robert Schumann when he became ill.
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Even at the age of twelve, Wieck was celebrated for her remarkable “masculine”
abilities and stamina: after her concert of virtuoso piano works by Heinrich Herz,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe remarked that the young prodigy had “more strength
than six boys put together!”42 Fruhlingssinfonie (Spring Symphony) (1982), a German
film about the Schumanns’ relationship, depicts Clara Schumann as both a proper
piano-girl and an unregulated forte-woman (fig. 47).
Other nineteenth-century grande dames of the piano include Teresa Carreno
(1853-1917), who was known for her passionate virtuosity and tempestuous
personality. Carreno’s 55-year-long career began with a Berlin debut that earned her
the title “Valkyrie of the Keyboard.” A female acquaintance noted that Carreno was
“bold, enterprising, energetic, a fiery, unbridled nature ... a beauty well known to
generations, highly talented, but somewhat wild.”43 A review o f one of Carreno’s New
York recitals praised the “power, majesty of conception, sonority of tone, and all the
splendors of passion [that] flamed through the performance of this gorgeous
woman.”44 Contradicting moral conventions of the era, Carreno was also famous for
her four marriages. When she premiered a piano concerto Eugene d’Albert had
dedicated to her, a Berlin reviewer noted that “Frau Carreno played for the first time
the second concerto of her third husband in the fourth Philharmonic concert.”45
The historiography of Carreno’s career reveals an ideological aspect when
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scholars seek to represent her personality and talents in terms o f a regulating
patriarchal order. In his social history of the piano, Dieter Hildebrandt asserts that
Carreno, “disappointed in love” through the failure o f her first two marriages,
“devoted all her passion to the piano.”46 Maurice Hinson suggests that d’Albert
exerted a taming influence on her wild temperamental nature: “her style changed,
gradually losing much of its flashiness, which was replaced by greater control and
subtlety of interpretation.”47 In Hildebrandt’s interpretation, the absence o f a husband
prompted Carreno’s musical passion; in Hinson’s analysis, a husband succeeds in
controlling that unregulated power.
Attitudes towards the female piano virtuoso in the late-nineteenth century
reflect broader concerns over the evolving social, political, and sexual emancipation of
women. As Mary Burgan notes in an article about female pianist characters in
nineteenth-century novels, increased public and professional opportunities for women
in education, employment, and cultural life also inspired representations o f the female
artist as a “heroine” who could assert her personality through an extroverted dynamic
of creative expression.48
The sexual potential of this “new woman” was perhaps the most controversial
aspect of this social trend. A cartoon illustration from the German Jugend magazine of
1898 pictures a woman at the piano casually lighting her cigarette from the flames of a
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young m an’s burning heart, which he holds in his hands as if it were a lighter (fig. 48).
Cigarette smoking would have been a transgressive act for a proper lady of that era;
this woman apparently belongs to the group of progressive women then making an
impact in tum-of-the-century European society and politics. Her nonchalant seduction
of the young man would also indicate a liberated approach to sexual expression and
social relationships.
It is this transgressive “Romantic” potential that most strongly characterizes
the literal and figurative playing of the forte-woman. She may play as powerfully and
persuasively as the male virtuoso-lover in the Lisztian tradition, and her music may be
as seductively appealing, but the consequences of her attraction are much more severe.
The Seductive Siren
In The Portrait o f a Lady, Serena Merle seems at first like one such “heroine,”
a woman who expertly commands her social position and also plays the piano very
well. Through her social savoir-faire and her musical talents, Madame Merle can
exercise a seductive attraction over other characters as an amateur “Romantic” pianist.
She possesses a mesmerizing “charm”: she is “forty years old and not pretty, though
her expression charmed” (226). Isabel feels that she “had as charming a manner as any
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she had ever encountered” (227), and also describes her as “charming, sympathetic,
intelligent, cultivated ... rare, superior and preeminent” (240). Madame Merle’s
attraction is a function o f her playing, as Isabel notes: “Well, she’s very charming, and
she plays beautifully” (229). When Isabel listens to her playing Schubert, “It took no
great time indeed for her to feel herself, as the phrase is, under an influence” (242).
Madame Merle’s playing attracts through its suggestion of high artistic values,
which Isabel naively assumes indicate an equally noble personality: “To be so
cultivated and civilized, so wise and so easy, and still make so light of it—that was
really to be a great lady, especially when one so carried and presented one’s self. It
was as if somehow she had all society under contribution, and all the arts and graces it
practiced” (243). Later in the story, however, the disillusioned Isabel considers
Madame Merle’s great-lady role “as professional, as slightly mechanical, carried about
in its case like the fiddle o f the virtuoso” (375).
Madame Merle’s apparent ease and perfection compares to the virtuoso’s slick
presentation of musical and technical challenges. As with the virtuoso, however, the
distinction between artistry and artifice can be somewhat unclear. Madame Merle’s
practiced charm is only superficial and insincere technique masquerading as true
feeling. Her playing is expressive through calculated design, an attribute usually
reserved for cunning male character-types: “She knew how to think—an
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accomplishment rare in women; and she had thought to very good purpose. O f course,
too, she knew how to fe e l... This was indeed Madame Merle’s great talent, her most
perfect gift” (240).
When the forte-woman adopts the male virtuoso’s means of “Romantic”
attraction, she typically pays a price for the unregulated desires she enacts. One form
of punishment is exclusion from respectable marriage and domestic family life. As the
reader learns later in the novel, Pansy is Madame Merle’s illegitimate daughter
through an adulterous affair with Gilbert Osmond. Madame Merle is not a prototypical
“good mother” who plays the piano for her daughter’s edification and inspiration.
Instead she is a fallen woman who plays too well, too deliberately, and too
ambitiously as a means to compensate for her secret social stigma:
Madame Merle took a sheet of music—she was seated at the piano and
had abruptly wheeled about on the stool when she first spoke—and
mechanically turned the leaves. “I’m very ambitious!” she at last
replied. (251)
The main plot of the novel, in fact, concerns Madame Merle’s ambitions concerning
Isabel Archer, the story’s tragic heroine.49 In the course of the novel, Isabel progresses
from naivete to disillusionment through Madame Merle’s manipulative “playing.”
In this sense, Isabel’s relationship to Madame Merle provides a further
perspective on the image of the forte-woman as a seductive siren. As James writes in
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the preface to his novel, the first meeting between Isabel and Madame Merle is a case
of “rare chemistry,” as Isabel finds her “all absorbed but all serene, at the piano ...
among the gathering shades” (54). Madame Merle plays on the dark side of Isabel’s
unquestioned conscience: “The lady played in the same manner as before, softly and
solemnly, and while she played the shadows deepened in the room” (226). The sinister
implications of James’s shadow imagery suggest the demonic influence the older
forte-woman exerts over the impressionable younger woman.® Another tum-of-the-
century caricature from Jugend magazine suggests that the female pianist’s
Seelenvolle Harmortieen (soulful harmonies) and neugebome Seraphim (newly-born
musical seraphims) may have a darker inspiration than Friedrich Schiller’s famous
poem “Laura am Klavier” assumes (fig. 49).S1
Serena Merle plays the role o f an alluring siren to Isabel’s idealism.52 When
Isabel witnesses her commanding abilities at the piano, “she found herself desiring to
emulate them, and in twenty such ways this lady presented herself as a model. ‘I
should like awfully to be so!' Isabel secretly exclaimed, more than once” (242). The
Siren, however, destroys her victim through the allure of her beautiful music.
Jane Campion’s 1996 film adaptation of The Portrait o f a Lady mediates this
relationship between the two female characters through soundtrack music, with
Madame Merle’s musical attraction as the catalyst for Isabel’s ultimate tragedy. Isabel
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first bears Madame Merle playing Schubert’s A-flat major Impromptu in the drawing
room at Gardencourt. As Isabel turns the knob, slowly opens the door, and enters the
room, the music crosses a threshold of its own: the contrasting minor section of the
piece begins, contributing a sense of darker desire and agitation. Isabel, lured by the
music and the sight of Madame Merle playing, moves slowly towards the piano and
the pianist across the room. After they exchange a few words, Madame Merle begins
another Schubert Impromptu, in G-flat major. Its more subdued melody and rippling
major-key accompaniment lull Isabel into a state of quiet fascination as she watches
and listens to Madame Merle playing. Much later in the film, however, echoes of this
initial encounter return as Isabel reflects bitterly on her youthful naivete.53
In the course of the story, Madame Merle’s manipulations bring Isabel to a
state o f masochistic submission. After turning down a number of worthy suitors,
Isabel enters into a suffocating marriage to Gilbert Osmond through Madame Merle’s
designs. She also loses control of her sizable inheritance by trusting Madame Merle’s
intentions. In a “psychoanalytic portrait” of Isabel Archer, Beth Sharon Ash asserts
that Madame Merle represents “an ensnaring malignity: vicious in her desire to have,
to be what she cannot, she manipulates Isabel without love, and becomes an empty
functionary in service to the dominant code.”54
Many commentators emphasize the sadomasochistic relationship between
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Isabel and her domineering husband Gilbert Osmond,ss but a much more transgressive
dynamic of desire occurs between the two female characters, the forte-woman and her
eager viewer-listener. In James’s description, Madame Merle’s piano-playing acts like
a sensual touch upon a lover’s body. As Madame Merle plays Schubert for Isabel,
“she touched the piano with a discretion of her own ... just du bout des doigts” (225),
or very lightly with the fingertips. Isabel’s reaction to this sensation borders on the
ecstatic: ‘“ That’s very beautiful, and your playing makes it more beautiful still,’ said
Isabel with all the young radiance with which she usually uttered a truthful rapture”
(151).
The friendship between the two women inspires an unprecedented level of
intimacy for Isabel, a communion which James depicts with clearly sexual imagery:
“The gates of the girl’s confidence were opened wider than they had ever been ... It
was as if she had given to a comparative stranger the key to her cabinet of jewels”
(239). Later in the novel, when Isabel confronts Madame Merle about her
manipulative nature, an element of erotic tension is also present: ‘“ What have you to
do with me?’ Isabel went on. Madame Merle slowly got up, stroidng her muff, but not
removing her eyes from Isabel’s face. ‘Everything!’ she answered” (430). Offering a
queer reading of this exercise of “Romantic” attraction, Melissa Solomon examines
“governing but displaced lesbian interests” in the power relationship between Madame
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Merle and Isabel, and the dynamic of “erotic displacement” in the older woman’s
maneuvers to marry Isabel to Gilbert Osmond. Solomon asserts that “Madame Merle
has ‘used’ Isabel, [and] the meaning of her ‘use’ bears the intensity of a sexual
command and Isabel’s utility a sexual utility.”56
James’s characterization o f Madame Merle as a seductive siren to an
impressionable female viewer-Iistener bears a striking resemblance to the seductive
playing of Mademoiselle Reisz in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novella The Awakening:
The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano
sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier’s spinal column.... She saw no
pictures of solitude, or hope, of longing, or of despair. But the very
passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing
it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she
was choking, and tears blinded her.57
Mademoiselle Reisz’s name is similar in sound and spelling to Reiz, the German word
for “charm.” The German idiom sie lafit ihre Reize spielen translates “she turns on the
charm”—but the literal meaning is “she lets her charms play,” almost as if they were a
musical instrument.
In The Portrait o f a Lady, Isabel is “a woman who has been made use o f ’
(455), played with in a manner similar to how Madame Merle plays the piano itself.
Virtuosic Madame Merle represents a corruption of the ideal of the domestic,
bourgeois piano-woman. Her expansive and uninhibited playing becomes a metaphor
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for her unregulated desires, whether musical or social: ‘“ But my dreams were so
great—so preposterous. Heaven forgive me. I’m dreaming now!’ And she turned back
to the piano and began grandly to play” (254). In this sense her character fits into the
broader historical phenomenon of the “new woman”—the sexually liberated and
politically motivated female of the late-nineteenth century.
James’s characterization is by no means a positive one. Madame Merle
exercises “a different morality,” and there is “a sense in her of values gone wrong, or
as they say at the shops, marked down” (375). The forte-woman herself admits in a
moment of honest self-reflection, “But when I’ve to come out and into a strong
light—then, my dear, I’m a horror!” (245).
The Adulterous Accompanist
A second type of forte-woman is the piano accompanist who does not know
her rightful place in the musical or domestic order. According to the patriarchal ideal,
a piano-girl grows up to marry a good man, and becomes his partner and helpmate. In
the domestic economy she remains supportive of, and subordinate to, her husband’s
authority. By analogy, the role of an ideal accompanist is not so different from this
“real-life” relationship. Am I Too Loud?, the title of noted accompanist Gerald
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Moore’s memoirs, is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the proper dynamics of the
chamber-music partnership o f a featured virtuoso and a collaborative pianist.58 When
the accompanist is a female pianist playing “under” a male soloist, the relationship
parallels the broader social organization of patriarchal hierarchy. Her role is to support
and follow the man who leads, and conflicts arise when she becomes “too loud.”
These dynamics o f musical relationship have become a metaphor for
“Romantic” relationship in popular-culture representations of the female piano
accompanist. A 1970s advertisement for Tabu perfume, for example, depicts a dashing
violin virtuoso suddenly interrupting his performance to sweep his accompanist off her
piano stool and into a passionate embrace (fig. SO). The extra-musical connotations of
such duets often inspire stories of illicit romance and adultery. Since a piano
accompanist is not usually the soloist’s own wife, their act of “playing” together can
take on extra-marital implications. In these cases, too, if the playing of the forte-
woman disrupts the patriarchal and matrimonial order, she must suffer the
consequences of her conceit.
Pozdnysheva’s wife in Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata (1888) is
the most famous example o f the female accompanist accused of adultery. This forte-
woman plays Beethoven’s passionate and demanding “Kreutzer” sonata (op. 47) with
a famous violinist while her husband looks on.S9 Richard Leppert interprets this female
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pianist’s duet-playing as “a metaphoric stand-in for sexual intercourse” carrying
implications o f prostitution and adultery. According to Leppert, “she is the agent to
her own needs; she takes the initiative in response to her desires.”60 In other words, she
is a forte-woman who plays according to her own dynamic desires. The fatal
consequence of her musical and erotic collaboration is that her husband murders her
out of irrational jealousy.
Tolstoy’s story has entered the canon of twentieth-century popular culture
through its numerous film adaptations.61 The 1937 German version, D ie
Kreutzersonate (fig. 51), first presents Jelaina Pozdnysheva as a domestic piano-
woman who plays Chopin for her young son. She had given up a promising concert
career when she married her husband, and so her passionate artistic nature is
temporarily subdued. However, an encounter with the dashing violinist Gregor
provokes a transformation in Jelaina. She recognizes her sexual awakening, but takes
measures to control it: she closes the piano, the catalyst for her temptation, and tells
her son “it will remain locked from now on.” In the end, however, Jelaina’s enraged
husband finds her together with Gregor near the piano, and shoots her dead.
In Henry Bernstein’s play Melo (1929) the female pianist is another adulterous
accompanist tom between her “Romantic” musical impulses and her married life as a
piano-woman.62 Under the pretence of “playing together” she begins an illicit affair
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with her husband’s friend, a virtuoso violinist famous for his womanizing. As their
romance turns serious, Romaine suffers from intense guilt over her deception. At the
end of the story, she commits suicide, and her unsuspecting husband is left to wonder
what drove her to that tragic end.
Melo (short for “melodrama”) premiered in Paris in 1929, with Charles Boyer
in the role of the rakish virtuoso. It had a brief unsuccessful run on Broadway in 1931,
but Bernstein’s play has entered the canon of European popular culture through four
film productions. Der traumende Mund (The Dreaming Mouth) and Dreaming Lips
are the two earliest film adaptations of the play, a 1932 German production and a 1937
British production respectively. Both star Elisabeth Bergner in the role of the female
pianist tom between duty to her husband and desire for the virtuoso (fig. 52).63 In
Alain Resnais’s 1986 version, also titled Melo, the pianist and her violinist lover play
the intensely “Romantic” G major sonata (op. 78) by Johannes Brahms. Significantly,
the 1952 German film adaptation, also titled Der traumende Mund, changes the
“Victorian” ending so that the unfaithful piano-woman does not commit suicide, but
redeems herself by returning to care for her ailing husband.
The most familiar Hollywood treatment of the adulterous accompanist role is
Intermezzo (1939, a remake of a 1936 Swedish film), starring Ingrid Bergman as Anita
Hoffman, an unmarried pianist in love with a married violinist. Anita represents an
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ambivalent figure between the forte and piano personae. One character comments that
she has “a great talent. She has power and passion.” Anita plays a passage from the
Grieg Piano Concerto with intense feeling, but when she realizes that the violinist is
watching and listening, she suddenly becomes timid and unsure. “Play on, play on!
More intensity, Miss!” he encourages. “Play as you just did. You can play!” The
violinist joins her in a duet which becomes a visual and musical metaphor of their
mutual attraction (fig. 53).
But Anita is also a piano-woman, “sensitive, well-disposed, positive, kindly
and withdrawn— all consonant with the character of an idealistic young pianist in the
throes of first love.”64 Her subservient role as an accompanist extends to her own
identity, as she considers herself the violinist’s “shadow.” “I sacrificed myself to go
with you. ... As your accompanist, I will always be just an accompanist. Alone, I
might have been an artist in my own right.” Soon her repressed artistic ambitions lead
to emotional conflicts with the violinist. In the end, the he returns to his family and
Anita goes off to study in Paris. There is no place in the patriarchal order for an
accompanist who does not know her place.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DYNAMICS
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Hollywood films provide such a rich trove of narratives about the unregulated
piano/forte-woman as a result of the popular appeal of Freudian psychoanalysis in
American culture during the 1930s and 40s. This trend was partly influenced by the
many German-Jewish emigres who fled Nazi persecution in Europe and contributed
significantly to American cultural life, especially to the Hollywood “dream factory” as
writers, composers, and directors. Psychoanalysis and analysts became almost stock
plotlines and stock characters in numerous Elms of the period.
In The Secret Heart (1939), for example, a talented young female pianist is
traumatized by the idealized memory of her dead father. Her “secret heart” is not only
a vague heart ailment, but also her obsession with the avuncular older man who was
her father’s best friend and who is now her own stepmother’s romantic suitor. In The
Seventh Veil (1945), another young female pianist suffers in a love/hate relationship
with her Uncle Nicholas, an overbearing “stage father” who ruthlessly pushes her
musical career. In both these films, analysts help the unstable piano-girl cross the
treacherous divide from private to public expressions of identity and desire.
One of the fundamental dichotomies of Romantic-era subjectivity is the split
between the public (external, conscious) persona or “social mask” and the private
(internal, unconscious) nature or “true essence.” In this Romantic conception, personal
expression is the desire to reach across the divide between inner self and outer world.
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This perspective was formulated primarily by nineteenth-century German Romantic
poets, philosophers, and natural scientists, but even more famously and influentially
by Sigmund Freud in Vienna around 1900. The piano/forte dynamics in music and the
private/public dichotomy in musical culture provide two useful analogies for these
parallel modes of human experience.
For many nineteenth-century women, piano-playing was not only a private
musical pastime and domestic entertainment but also “a combination spiritual therapy
and mental hygiene,” Ruth Solie asserts in her article on gender and the domestic
piano.65 Solie cites Hugh Reginald Haweis’ M usic and Morals (first published in
1872) on the psychological conditions at play for the piano-woman in the Victorian
era: “As a woman’s life is often a life of feeling rather than of action, and if society,
while it limits her sphere of action, frequently calls upon her to repress her feelings,
we should not deny her the high, the recreative, the healthy outlet for emotion which
music supplies.... A good play on the piano has not unfrequently taken the place of a
good cry up stairs.”66 Music could provide a means for immersion in the self as well as
an escape from the self. It could link the interiority of the self to the domestic realm,
and from that physical interiority to the larger world “out there.”
In her autobiography, nineteenth-century amateur pianist Bettina Walker (d.
1893) recalls her own aspirations to become a professional concert artist, though her
177
mother had insisted a public career was out of the question. As a comparison to her
own frustrated desires, Walker remembers a housekeeper she knew who kept a
Steinway concert grand piano in her drawing-room. “Like many [women] whom I
have met from time to time, she had aspired towards art in her youth, and had been
checked in these aspirations by the most natural circumstance in the world—marriage,
and the care for and devotion to her husband and children—and yet, like all art-
natures, that something in her being that was repressed and had not found an outlet,
stirred and throbbed at times, and though it did not actually make her unhappy, yet it
sometimes filled her with unrest.”67
In such accounts of the female pianist’s struggle to achieve creative
expression, an invisible barrier hinders her reach from private playing towards public
attraction. This limitation provokes psychological crises, frequently represented as
frustration, neurosis, and even mental instability. In The Portrait o f a Lady, for
example, the duplicity of Madame Merle’s public manners (providing the appearance
of social virtues) and the virtuosity of her private intrigues (in “playing” with Isabel’s
feelings and fate) reveals a fundamentally untuned conscience: “she freely admitted
that of old she had been a little mad, and now she pretended to be perfectly sane”
(240). Madame Merle’s double life has damaged her on a psychological and
metaphorically physical level, and extends even to her piano-playing: “I would give
178
my right hand to be able to weep, and that I can’t!” (568).
Twentieth-century popular-culture representations of the female pianist
continue to reflect the psychological piano/forte dichotomy in how they depict a
creative woman struggling to realize her expressive desires. In most cases, patriarchal
order writes the prescription for her mental and musical condition. In the classic
British melodrama Brief Encounter (1945), Alex asks Laura if she plays a musical
instrument. When he isn’t surprised that she stopped playing the piano years ago,
Laura counters,
“After all you know, I may have a burning professional talent.”

“Oh no.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“You’re too sane and uncomplicated.”
In the Hollywood melodrama The Secret Fury (1950), concert pianist Ellen Ewing is
confined to an insane asylum following a nervous collapse. An older female relative
blames Ellen’s fate on her professional concert career and her “obsession with herself
and her plans. ... She was always impulsive and high-strung. But after she went on
that first concert tour, she had what amounted to a nervous breakdown!” Even Ellen
begins to question her own sanity:
“Sometimes at a concert when I’m playing well, I forget it’s a concert. I

forget there’s an audience ... What happens to people in cases of
amnesia, when they go blank? Do they do things that they never do as
their normal selves? Something awful? David, perhaps you shouldn’t
179
marry me! Perhaps I’m ill!”
One advertising campaign for this film trumpeted “the story of a mind maddened by a
secret fury—and a woman’s frantic struggle to save her sanity—and her love!”68
Among the numerous films and novels about “crazy” female pianists, Jane
Campion’s The Piano (1993) stands out for its comprehensive treatment of the
piano/forte struggles of its female pianist-protagonist. On the one hand, Ada is a
piano-girl in her literal and figurative muteness—her identity is a true pianissimo.
Ada’s voice had been stifled by the patriarchal order when her father shamed her into
silence as a little girl.69 Campion represents Ada’s muteness as a psychological
condition. “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice,” Ada
narrates as the film begins. “The strange thing is I don’t think myself silent, that is,
because of my piano.” The instrument itself becomes Ada’s figurative voice, though it
too is repeatedly silenced by the men in her life as it is abandoned on the ocean beach,
sold to her neighbor, and finally thrown overboard into the sea.70
But Ada is also a forte-woman whose passionate musical improvisations move
through her body without compunction or restraint. She challenges social manners and
musical conventions through the unregulated dynamics of her playing:
She played rapid arpeggios and airy speeding trills, possessed of an

unnameable undercurrent that tugged and stirred like the pull of the
tide. ... He had never heard music like this before, so filled with
180
longing; be had never seen anyone play an instrument with such

passionate absorption.... The music made it hard for him to move, for
he didn’t so much listen to it with his ears, but with his whole body so
that it ran through him and he was stilled into hearing and stilled into
silence.71
The power of Ada’s “Romantic” playing seriously challenges patriarchal authority and
control when it places the male viewer-listener into a passive condition of silence.72
The late Victorian-era setting of Campion’s fictional story is significant in
terms of the history of mental health as a scientific profession. The practice of
Freudian psychoanalysis itself begins around 1900 with the story of a woman very
much like Campion’s Ada McGrath. Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) was a creative
woman whose psychological condition inspired Freud’s early theories on hysteria,
repressed memory, and the talking cure. Anna, like Ada, felt trapped within the
monotony of Victorian social and domestic life. She found refuge and self-expression
through her own “private theater” of imaginary fantasies and play-acting. When she
developed hysterical symptoms, Freud’s mentor Dr. Josef Breuer tapped Anna’s
unconscious mind through her willingness to verbally describe her interior reality.73
Campion’s story situates the untuned female pianist-protagonist precisely
within the historical and cultural context which inspired Freud’s work on the
unconscious mind, sexual repression, and female hysteria. Like Anna O., Ada also
occupies her own mute, introverted and imaginary world, with piano-playing as her
181
only outlet for creative self-expression. Later, after she experiences a sexual-
psychological awakening through her male lover, Ada is “cured,” and she eventually
returns to the bourgeois social order as a local piano teacher (!).74 It is noteworthy that
Campion’s next film, in 1996, was an adaptation of James’s The Portrait o f a Lady as
a Victorian period-piece. Taken together, the two films offer parallel texts on the
psychological dilemmas of the female pianist.
In both Portrait and Piano, Campion employs specific cinematic imagery to
mediate the internal dynamics of her piano/forte-woman characters. In Portrait,
reflections in mirrors convey the sense of Isabel’s subjectivity as she struggles with
her own conscience and inner emotions, hearing and “seeing” herself in response to
Madame Merle’s music. When Isabel first hears Madame Merle playing Schubert, she
waits a long moment before entering the drawing-room and her face is reflected in a
mirror near the doorframe. Later, after returning to Gardencourt, Isabel faces herself in
another mirror as she “questions her conscience” in the drawing-room once again. In
this scene the piano is now closed and silent, but Madame Merle’s playing still echoes
on the soundtrack and in her mind.75
Like Isabel in Campion’s Portrait, Ada in The Piano also recognizes and
sounds out her private desires through the music of the “reflective” piano. In
Campion’s symbolic imagery, the instrument serves as a psychological appurtenance
182
for the literally and figuratively confined woman.76 Suzy Gordon notes how a mirror
becomes an auto-erotic implement when Ada is imprisoned in the house by her jealous
husband. Ada’s sensual nature has been awakened by her encounters with George
Baines, and she gazes narcissistically into a small mirror, kissing her own reflection.77
As Sue Gillett writes in another article, “[Ada] subverts this attempted reduction of her
being by amplifying her longing.”78 Ada not only extends her sense of self through this
mirror, but also (like Celia Madden in The Damnation o f Theron Ware) through her
loud rhapsodic piano playing in the middle of the night. Immediately following this
scene, forte-woman Ada strokes her husband’s body as an instrument of her own,
much to his confusion and consternation.
Campion’s treatment of the piano as a musical mirror of the soul recalls Kaja
Silverman’s theory on the “acoustic mirror” of the female voice in cinema. Following
Lacanian psychoanalysis, Silverman argues that gender determines soundtrack
function in the classical Hollywood film. The female voice is typically aligned with
interiority, confinement, and self-consciousness (as a private realm), while the male
voice is privileged as direct, authoritative speech (in the public realm). Male voice
overs are typically synchronized with the visual image and the external framing of the
diegesis, while female voice-overs are temporally and spatially dislocated from the
image track, and typically remain confined within the diegesis.79
183
In Campion’s films, both the visual and sonic presence of the piano emphasize
the private psychological realms of the female characters who play the instrument and
hear its music. In Portrait, Isabel remains silent and passive, while forte-woman
Madame Merle plays once and then echoes on as a disembodied presence in Isabel’s
imagination throughout the rest of the film. Maternal Madame Merle also structures
Isabel’s “sonorous envelope” of subjective experience and emotional reflection
through her passionate playing. In Piano, the instrument gives Ada a voice that is both
too private to be understood by others, and too public to be ignored. Like the echo of
Narcissus, Campion’s pianos and their “Romantic” music inspire attractions both
beautiful and dangerous.
Ada’s, Isabel’s, and Madame Merle’s struggles in negotiating the piano/forte
dichotomy are not merely fictional accounts of an imaginary challenge; they compare
to the struggles still faced by “real-life” female pianists who must negotiate the
private/public divide in their own careers. Critical reception of the highly-acclaimed
pianist Martha Argerich (b. 1941) provides a case in point. A review by Ates Orga in
the 1979 International Music Guide describes Argerich as “one of the coolest, most
confident, self-possessed people around,... an Ice Queen whose romantically intense
pianism sears through one’s consciousness with all the brilliance and dazzle of fresh
polar snow. She seems unruffled by anything. The harder the challenge (the Prokofiev
184
Third springs to mind), the more she will equal it.” Orga qualifies his admiration for
her forte public persona, however, with a pseudo-psychoanalytical assessment of
Argerich’s private nature. “The more one probes this image, however, the more it
seems to be an illusion. Alternately moody and flamboyant, with a wild, impassioned
gypsy streak compensating for an underlying element of insecurity, vulnerability and
loneliness.” As evidence of the pianist’s “inner emotional dichotomy,” Orga mentions
details of Argerich’s private life such as her marriage, her romantic affairs, and her
children.
The assessment of a piano/forte psychological dichotomy even extends to
Argerich’s choice of concert repertoire, as Orga describes:
From the abrasive cleanness and attack of the Ravel G major Concerto,
or Gaspard de la nuit, to the grand bravura of the Tchaikovsky B flat
minor Concerto and the Liszt E flat, she on the one hand projects an
image of pianistic brilliance and extreme virtuosity addressed to the
world at large. Behind it, on the other, a more yielding, poetic soul
survives: the Chopin concerti, the slow movement of the Prokofiev
Third, the Chopin Andante spianato—all show great spiritual depth and
an intense emotionalism that is wistful, passionate, dramatic.80
Argerich, it would seem, manifests two distinct and irreconcilable personalities, not
unlike “the music she lives”—on the one hand a pubiic virtuoso image, on the other
hand a private and expressive interiority.
Popular-culture stereotypes of the female pianist such as the piano-girl and the
185
forte-woman demonstrate the complexities o f interior (private, psychological)
motivation and exterior (public, musical) restriction which the female pianist must
negotiate to maintain her social and psychological equilibrium. Difficult transitions,
complex combinations, and disturbing contradictions occur as this figure crosses
thresholds between piano and forte dynamics, public and private attraction, inner
feeling and outer expression, and the patriarchal regulation of her figurative
(un)tuning.
1 This topic has been addressed extensively in scholarship on female pianists and the cultural history of
the piano. Arthur Loesser discusses female amateur and professional pianists since the eighteenth
century in Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954, rprt
1990). The collection Piano Roles includes essays on female pianists in Jane Austen’s novels and in
nineteenth-century French artworks and visual culture, on gender roles in traditional piano pedagogy,
on the female piano teacher in antebellum America, and other topics. Piano Roles: Three Hundred
Years o f Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Joan
Berman Mizrahi analyzes representations of female pianists in iate-ninetcenth century popular fiction in
The American Image o f Women as Musicians and Pianists, 1850-1900 (DMA dissertation. University
of Maryland-College Park, 1989). Richard Leppert discusses nineteenth-century artworks and literature
to consider the domestic piano as a “visual-sonoric simulacrum of family, wife, and mother.” Richard
Leppert, “Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano in the Nineteenth Century," The Sight o f Sound:
Music, Representation, and the History o f the Body (1993): 119-151.
2Loesser, 267.
3 In a 1995 conference presentation, I presented remarks from interviews with fourteen professional
female pianists regarding the personal and career challenges they have experienced as performers and
teachers. Ivan Raykoff, “Piano Women, Forte Women,” paper delivered at the Feminist Theory and
Music III conference. University of Califomia-Riverside (June, 1995). See also Ruth Laredo, “Sex and
the Single Pianist,” Keyboard Classics 11/5 (1991): 6-7.
4 James’s novel was first serialized in Macmillan's Magazine (October 1880 to October 1881) and in
The Atlantic Monthly (November 1880 to December 1881), then published in book form (London and
Boston: Macmillan, 1881). James revised the novel for re-publication in 1908 (New York: Scribner’s
Sons). Mizrahi discusses the image of female pianists in James’s novel, 176-183.
5Citations are from Henry James, The Portrait o f a Lady (Penguin Books, 1984).
186
6 David Galloway discusses a wide range symbolism in the novel, particularly water and light imagery,
noting that James “admired Haw throne’s search for 'images which shall place themselves in
picturesque correspondence with the spiritual facts.'" David Galloway, “Fine Pictorial Tricks,” Henry
James: The Portrait o f a Lady (London: Edward Arnold, 1967): 30-37. R. W. Stallman asserts that “by
such minute particulars James renders symbolically the nature and plight of his fictional characters.”
Bolted doors, for example, signify “the proprieties of protective conventions,” including sexual
frigidity. R. W. Stallman, “Some Rooms from ‘The Houses that James Built,’” Twentieth Century
Interpretations o f The Portrait o f a Lady, ed. Peter Buitenhuis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hail,
1968): 38.
7 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York:
Vintage Books, 1991). Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
(New York: Routledge, 1992). Catherine Clement, Opera: or, the Undoing o f Women, trans. Betsy
Wing (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
8 Jane Campion and Jan Chapman, The Piano screenplay (New York: Miramax Books/Hyperion, 1993).
9 Katharine Ellis examines the critical reception of several professional female concert pianists active in
Paris during the mid- 1840s, noting that “they played out their careers in a professional space which lay
between that o f the salon musician and the touring virtuoso.” Katharine Ellis, “Female Pianists and
Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Journal o f the American Musicological Society 50/2-3
(1997): 353-385. Nancy B. Reich writes about the career of Clara Schumann, “When Clara Wieck
began her performing career, she was compared to other young women pianists— Marie Blahetka, Anna
de Belleville, Marie Pleyel. Many of her widely acclaimed female contemporaries made splashy debuts
and brilliant appearances but one after the other gave up careers when they married or found they could
not keep up with the stresses of combining family and profession. They eventually disappeared from
view.” Clara Schumann, however, remains the primary exception to this trend. Considering her public
career lasting over six decades, “no other pianist of her century, male or female, maintained a position
as a performing artist over such a span of time.” Nancy B. Reich, “Clara Schumann,” Women Making
Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1985): 250-251.
10 Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Freia Hoffman, Instrument und Korper: die musizierende Frau in der biirgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt:
Insel, 1991). Andreas Ballstaedt and Tobias Widmaier, Salonmusik: zur Geschichte und Funktion einer
Biirgerlichen Musikpraxis (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1989).
11 Charles M. Skinner, “The Home Piano,” Saturday Evening Post 172/29 (January 13, 1900): 613.
Cited in Mizrahi, 3 1.
12 Carl Czerny, Letters to a Young Lady, on the Art o f Playing the Pianoforte, from the Earliest
Rudiments to the Highest State o f Cultivation, trans. J. A. Hamilton (New York: Firth, Pond & Co.,
1856; reprt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1982).
13 Ruth Solie, “Gender, Genre, and the Parlor Piano,” Wordsworth Circle 25/1 (1994): 55.
14 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Random House, 1967): 36.
15 Nancy B. Reich, “The Power of Class: Fanny Hensel,” in Mendelssohn and His World, ed. Larry
Todd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Meg Freeman Whalen, “Fanny Mendelssohn
Hensel's Sunday Musicales,” Women o f Note Quarterly 2/1 (February, 1994): 9-20.
16 H. Raynor, “She Played Duets with Liszt,” The Times (May 6, 1967).
187
17 Cori Ellison. “A Woman’s Work Well Done,” New York Times (May 7, 1995): 29H. Adrienne Fried
Block, Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: An American Composer’s Life and Work (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998).
18 Chaminade interview in The Washington Post Magazine section (November 1, 1908): 4. Marcia J. Citron,
Cecile Chaminade: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1988).
19 Kyle Kevorkian, “Mitsuko Uchida,” Keyboard 15/4 (April 1989): 32.
20 Dean Elder, “Mitsuko Uchida: One of a Kind," Clavier (October 1990): 11.
21 Elyse Mach, Great Pianists Speak fo r Themselves, vol. 2 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1988): 68.
22 Austen, 35.
23 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (New York: Random House, 1958): 130-133.
24 Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (New York: S. French, 1921): 111,11, 38.
25 Judith Tick, “Passed Away is the Piano Girl: Changes in American Musical Life, 1870-1900,” in
Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition 1150-1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick
(London: Macmillan, 1986; rpnt. Urbana: University o f Illinois Press): 325. James Huneker, Overtones
(New York, 1904): 286.
26 Adam Clymer, “Democrats Hone Swords in Chicago Election,” New York Times (March 15,
1996).
27 Even in a film plot that has nothing to do with musicians, piano-playing can represent a stage in a
young girl’s life. In The Old Maid (1939), a montage sequence depicts a young girl growing up through
the years. The camera follows her feet as she skips along a sidewalk swinging a doll; then walking
along to school with a bundle of books; then practicing the piano, her right foot on the pedal and a
metronome ticking nearby; then waltzing at an elegant ball in heeled shoes; and finally adjusting her
shoes beneath the hem of a bridal gown. Dolls give way to piano lessons, the cultured pastimes such as
dances, and eventually to the ultimate goal, matrimony.
28 Freia Hoffmann, “Miniatur-Virtuosinnen, Amoretten, und Engel: Weibliche Wunderkinder im fruhen
Burgertum,” Neue Zeitschrift fu r Musik 145/3(1984): 11-15.
29
In the 1956 Hollywood film version, soundtrack music mediates the viewer-listener’s awareness of
Rhoda’s duplicitous nature. The innocent “piano” strains of “Au clair de la lune” begin to take on an
ominous quality when the school principal comes to talk to Rhoda about the “accidental” drowning of a
young classmate. In the climactic scene, when Rhoda's horrified mother realizes that her daughter has
committed another gruesome murder, the “piano girl” is pounding out fortissimo the same tune at the
piano. “Make her stop that music!” her mother screams hysterically.
30
Kevin Kopelson, Beethoven's Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery o f Desire (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996): 126.
31 Bernice Rubens, Madame Sousatzka (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962; Sphere Books, 1982).
32 Mathilde Verne. Chords o f Remembrance (London: Hutchinson, 1936): 103-104.
33 Kopelson, 128-129.
34
In a review of the film, Carol Montparker psychoanalyzes the dynamic of this teacher-student
relationship: “There is the tension created when one master teacher woos gifted students from the studio
of another master teacher, there is the seductive lure o f the predatory manager knocking at the door
prematurely to exploit the young talent, and the tenacious and jealous hold of the student by the teacher
until ‘he is ready.’” Carol Montparker, “Madame Sousatzka et al,” Clavier (February, 1989): 11.
188
35 Kopelson, 127.
36 Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1989).
37 Maria-Regina Kecht, ‘“ In the Name of Obedience, Reason, and Fear’: Mother-Daughter Relations in
W. A. Mitgutsch and E. Jelinek,” German Quarterly 62/3 (Summer 1989): 361,360.
34 Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (New York: Heritage Press, 1942): 166-167.
39 Harold Frederic, The Damnation ofTheron Ware (New York: Penguin, 1986): 88-89, 103-104.
40 E. M. Forster, A Room with a View (New York: Knopf, 1953): 55.
41 Murray Smith notes that the original literary source for this film, Louis Vemeuil’s 1927 play “M.
Lamberthier,” is a love triangle involving a milliner woman, her artist fiancee, and her former lover
who is a wealthy banker. The jealous artist murders the banker. After numerous script revisions,
Hollywood screenwriters had relocated the plot and characters to the world of classical music, turning
the female protagonist into a concert pianist, her fiancde Karel into an accomplished cellist, and her
older lover Hollenius into a domineering conductor. In the final version, it is the “forte woman” who
deceives her fiancee and murders her ex-lover. Murray Smith, “Film noir, the Female Gothic, and
Deception," Wide Angle 10/1 (1988): 62-75.
42 Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: An Artist's Life, trans. Grace E. Hadow (London: Macmillan,
1913): I: 29. Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985, rev. 2000).
43 Louise Stargardt-Wolff, Wegbereiter grosser M usiker... 1880-1935 (Berlin: E. Bote & G. Bock, [1954]): 78.
Marta Milinowski, Teresa Carreho: “By the Grace o f God,” (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1940;
reprt. Da Capo Press, 1977).
44 Amy Fay, “Music in New York,” Music 19 (December, 1900): 179-82.
45 Milinowski, 228.
46
Dieter Hildebrandt, Pianoforte: A Social History o f the Piano, trans. Harriet Goodman (New York: George
Braziller, 1988): 169.
Maurice Hinson, “Teresa Carreno,” Clavier (April 1988): 16. In the entry on Carreno in the New
Grove Dictionary o f Music and Musicians, Norman Fraser asserts, “from having been an impetuous,
almost tempestuous player, she became a thoughtful and profound interpreter.”
48
Burgan writes, “As the issue of women’s independence from the conventional round of family life
became a feature of the ‘woman question’ towards the end of the [nineteenth] century, the possibility
that woman’s music could be a disruptive rather than a harmonizing force in the home became more
insistent. In some novels—especially in the latter half of the century—[female] musicians were likely to
exhibit gifts that were self-proclaiming and unsettling in their aggressive display of energy.” Mary
Burgan, “Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” Victorian Studies
30/1 (Autumn 1986): 52.
49 Isabel is another “piano girl” herself. She may have been considered “rather a prodigy at home,” but
her musical talents remain proscribed: after hearing Madame Merle play Schubert so beautifully, she
“felt ashamed of her own facility, which she now looked upon as basely inferior” (243). Instead of
providing an intimate means of emotional expression, piano-playing for Isabel is more a frustrating
burden “imposed upon me by society” (253). “I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself,”
she admits to Madame Merle, “but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is
any measure of me; everything’s on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one” (253).
189
30 David Galloway suggests that this imagery o f shadows “becomes increasingly symbolic o f the
cultural ambiguities and moral obscurity into which Isabel is moving.” Galloway, 31. In the novel
James represents Isabel’s psychological transformations in part by her movement across particular
distances and divides, such as her travel from America to Europe. In her first appearance in the story,
Isabel walks from the house into an enclosed garden, an open space where apparent freedom proves to
be confinement. Donatella Izzo, "The Portrait o f a Lady and Modem Narrative,” in New Essays on The
Portrait o f a Lady, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 44. As James
describes another of Isabel’s figurative threshold-crossing, “Her imagination, as I say, now hung back:
there was a last vague space it couldn’t cross— a dusky, uncertain tract which looked ambiguous and
even slightly treacherous, like a moorland seen in the winter twilight. But she was to cross it yet” (363).
51 Friedrich Schiller, “Laura am Klavier,” Werke National-Ausgabe, vol. I: Gedichte (Weimar Bohlaus,
1942): 53.
33 The character of Madame Merle bears comparison in name as well as in nature to the scheming
Marquise de Merteuil in Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses (1782). As Ralph tells Isabel in The Portrait
o f a Lady, “On the character of everyone else you may find some little black speck ... But on Madame
Merle’s nothing, nothing, nothing!” (302, 3:362). Joseph McCullough suggests that this line makes
reference to Alfred de Musset’s 1842 short story “L ’histoire d’un merle blanc,” a tale of deceptive love
involving a white female blackbird (merle in French) with a growing black spot which soon makes her
as dark as any common blackbird. Joseph B. McCullough, “Madame Merle: Henry James’s ‘White
Blackbird,”' Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal fo r Scholars and Critics 11 (1975): 312-
lb.
53 Echoes of this initial encounter return to accompany other decisive moments in Isabel’s
psychological transformation. The minor section of the first Impromptu returns again when the
Countess Gemini enlightens Isabel about the relationship of Osmond, Merle, and Pansy—a revelation
which provokes another o f Isabel’s symbolic crossings from naivete to disillusionment, as she must
finally face the truth about Madame Merle’s powerful influence over her life. Later, Madame Merle and
Isabel unexpectedly meet at the convent where Pansy lives, and in this scene the same music
accompanies the revelation that Isabel’s inheritance was made possible by her cousin Ralph. Finally,
near the end of the film, the G-flat major Impromptu returns as Isabel takes the train back to England
and stares out of the window in a despondent reverie.
54 Beth Sharon Ash, “Frail Vessels and Vast Designs: A Psychoanalytic Portrait of Isabel Archer,” in
New Essays on The Portrait o f a Lady, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990):
130.
33 Discussing Jane Campion’s film version of The Portrait o f a Lady, Lizzie Francke considers Isabel as
“both a willing and wilful victim” who “allows herself to be ensnared by Osmond into the most
emotionally sadomasochistic of relationships.” The captions for the article’s photographs describe “the
troubling seduction of Isabel by Osmond” and “Isabel trapped within Osmond’s lair.” Lizzie Francke,
“On the Brink,” Sight and Sound 6/11 (November, 1996): 6-9.
36 Reading the relationship between Isabel and Madame Merle as a same-sex attraction, Kurt
Hochenauer asserts that Isabel is “an ambiguous, subtle character with an apparent but unresolved
sexuality.” Kurt Hochenauer, “Sexual Realism in The Portrait o f a Lady: The Divided Sexuality of
Isabel Archer,” Studies in the Novel 22/1 (Spring 1990): 19. Melissa Solomon suggests that “Isabel’s
marriage to Osmond is Madame Merle's vehicle for displacing her own lesbian attachment to Isabel.”
Melissa Solomon. “The Female World of Exorcism and Displacement (or. Relations between Women
190
in Henry James’s Nineteenth-Century The Portrait o f a Lady," in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in
Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997): 444,460,458.
17 Kate Chopin, The Awakening, and Other Stories, ed. Lewis Leary (New York: Holt, Rinehard and
Winston, 1970): 230.
58 Gerald Moore, Am I Too Loud?: Memoirs o f an Accompanist (London: H. Hamilton, 1948).
59 Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, trans. David McDuff (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1985).
60 Richard Leppert, The Sight o f Sound: Music, Representation, and the History o f the Body
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993): 170.
61 Silent-film versions were produced in Russia (1911 and 1914), in the United States (1915), in
Czechoslovakia (1926), and twice more in Germany (1921 and 1922). Further filmings of Tolstoy’s
story include a 1956 French adaptation titled Serenade, an Italian filming (1985), and another in the
Soviet Union (1987).
62 Henry Bernstein, Melo: piece en trois actes et douze tableaux (Paris: Artheme Fayard & Cie, 1933).
63 Der trdumende Mund was simultaneously filmed in a French-language version titled Melo, and
an Italian version titled Melodramma.
64 Lawrence J. Quirk, The Films o f Ingrid Bergman (New York: Citadel Press, 1970): 13.
65 Solie, 55.
66 H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals (New York: Longmans, Green, 1904): 437.
67 Bettina Walker, My Musical Experiences (London: R. Bentley, 1890): 218.
68 The Daily News (June 1, 1950). AMPAS file on The Secret Fury.
69 Campion relates the story o f how Ada became mute in the novel version of the filmscript. Jane
Campion and Kate Pullinger, The Piano (New York: Hyperion, 1994): 17-20.
70 Mary Burgan writes, “The sacrifice of her piano is one of the harshest elements of the woman’s share
in the economic disasters portrayed in nineteenth-century fiction. Without a piano, women with
pretensions to gentility are deprived of the exercise o f their special training, of any leading role in
family education, and of one of their few legitimate channels of self-expression.” Burgan, 51.
71 Campion and Pullinger, 55-56.
72 Michael Nyman’s soundtrack score for The Piano has been criticized for its minimalist and “New
Age" mannerisms. The music can be considered along the psychoanalytical lines set forth by David
Schwarz, who asserts that “new minimal music in particular represents the sonorous envelope both as
fantasy thing and as fantasy space.” Its simple, cyclical rhythmic patterns and its familiar nineteenth-
century harmonic language lend it a “familiar but archaic quality”—suitable for music set in the 1850s
but evocative to contemporary listeners. Nyman borrowed from Scottish folk music and the piano music
of Frederic Chopin in composing the soundtrack music. David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music,
Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
73 Lucy Freeman, The Story o f Anna O. (New York: Paragon House, 1990). Anna O.: Fourteen
Contemporary Reinterpretations, ed. Max Rosenbaum and Melvin Muroff, Melvin (New York: The
Free Press, 1984). Among extensive scholarly work on the history of psychoanalysis in feminist studies,
Elaine Showalter discusses women’s erotic fantasies in relation to clinical nymphomania in the
Victorian era in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985). Also Showalter, “Victorian Women and Insanity,” Victorian Studies 23 (1980):
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157-181. The Making o f the Modem Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, eds.
Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueuer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
74 Donald Williams, “The Piano: The Isolated, Constricted Self,” in Rim Commentaries, C. G. Jung
Page. Internet address <http://www.cgjungpage.org/films/pianox.html>
75 Campion also incorporates the piano-and-mirror symbolism when Isabel declines the persistent
marriage proposals of Caspar Goodwood, a visual arrangement not mentioned in the novel. Receiving
Mr. Goodwood in the music room, Isabel remains resolutely positioned in front o f the piano, blocking
his (and the film viewer’s) view of that site of female expression and seductive playing. As Goodwood
leaves, Isabel asks, “Do you mean you came simply to look at me?” Disappointed in his unrequited
love, Mr. Goodwood leaves without answering. Isabel then turns to a mirror over the mantlepiece to
look at herself and to look for her complex and private motivations in another moment of inner
reflection. Though the piano is blocked and silent in Isabel’s reluctance to accept the worthy
Goodwood, but this visual mirror continues to “sound out” the depths of her conflicted conscience.
76 Analyzing cinematic objects as symbolic cues in Campion’s film, Carol Jacobs discusses Ada’s skirt
as a “filmic figure of shelter, of cold distance, of utter intimacy,” and as shroud. Carol Jacobs, “Playing
Jane Campion’s Piano: Politically,” MLN 109/5 (December 1994): 765. Lynda Dyson considers female
hairstyle as a signifier of the nature/culture opposition. Lynda Dyson, “The Return of the Repressed?
Whiteness, Femininity and Colonialism in The Piano,” Screen 36/3 (Autumn 1995): 271. Sue Gillett
discusses “Lips and Fingers” in actions of kissing, touching, signing, playing, etc. Screen 36/3 (Autumn
1995): 278-79.
77 Suzy Gordon, “T Clipped Your Wing, That’s All’: Auto-Erotism and the Female Spectator in The
Piano Debate,” Screen 37/2 (Summer 1996): 198.
78 Sue Gillett, “Lips and Fingers: Jane Campion’s The Piano,” Screen 36/3 (Autumn 1995): 278.
79 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices
in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
80 ^
Ates Orga, “Musicians of the Year: Martha Argerich,” International Music Guide 1979, ed. Derek
Elley (London: Tantivy Press, 1979): 9-10.
V. TRANSCRIPTION AS TRANSGRESSION
To consider replication degrading is, literally, homophobic: afraid o f

the same. —Wayne Koestenbaum, “Wilde’s Hard Labor and the Birth
of Gay Reading” (1990)
Popular representations of the “Romantic” pianist may influence our
understanding of that figure’s attraction as a cultural phenomenon and as a
performance ritual, but what about the actual music the pianist plays? Meanings also
exist in and through the notes themselves. In the case of the Lisztian virtuoso-lover,
his “mythic” reproducibility has a parallel in his musical (re)productions, but here the
nagging questions of originality and morality arise. Liszt’s legendary exploits as an
adulterer provide an unacknowledged corollary to his reputation as a composer and to
the reception o f his most controversially “promiscuous” repertoire, the arrangements,
transcriptions, and paraphrases.
“I’d like to play something never before heard in public,” Liszt announces in
the 1947 Hollywood biographical film about Robert and Clara Schumann, Song o f
Love: “A paraphrase, arranged by myself, on a superb melody, ‘Dedication,’ by my
esteemed colleague, Professor Schumann.”' The film thematizes Schumann’s
“Widmung” (fig. 54) as Robert’s musical gift to Clara on the occasion o f their
engagement, and throughout the film this “song of love” signifies the couple’s
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romance. Although Liszt delivers a dazzling virtuoso arrangement of the tune to the
marveling guests at his recital (fig. 55), Clara remains unimpressed and whispers
cattily (in Katharine Hepburn’s classic style of haughty dismissal), “Dedication to
love? Dedication to pyrotechnics!”
“You’re a brilliant artist, Franz. I envy you,” Frau Schumann confides to Liszt
after the ovation, as she sits down at the piano herself. “I wish I had the power to
translate the commonplace into such stupendous experience.” She plays her own
simpler transcription of the same song for Liszt to consider (fig. 56). “Once in a while,
though, a little moment comes along, which seems to defy such translation. Do you
know what I mean, Franz? ... Love, Franz, as it is. No illusions, no storms at sea. No
gilt, no glitter. Not the rustle of silk, and the diamond garter, Franz. Just love,
unadorned.” Finishing her musical parable, she asks, with arch significance, “Or do
you know what I mean?” When Princess Hohenfels intercedes to support Liszt against
her innuendo, he murmurs, chastened, “She did much worse than insult me, my dear.
She described me!”
This scenario, Hollywood invention though it is, enacts a few quasi-
musicological attitudes for its matinee audience. Even musically untrained viewers,
coached by the accompanying dialogue, can hear the oppositional significance of the
two arrangements performed. Clara’s “unadorned” transcription—essentially the
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original song without additional embellishment— is clearly valued over the
“stupendous” paraphrase. Her seemingly more authentic arrangement assumes the
ability to represent love “as it is,” in contrast to the implied superficiality and illusion
of Liszt’s virtuosic version.
The scene also taps into certain recurrent notions of musicality and morality. It
plays up the perceived excesses of the Romantic virtuoso style (flashy and popular
with audiences, yet deemed shallow by more “serious” musicians) as well as Liszt’s
reputation for sexual promiscuity, an image contrasted here with the respectable
virtues of bourgeois married life represented by Clara, Robert, and their “song of
love.”
David Wilde has asserted that “in his arrangements, Liszt often failed to
capture the intimacy that lies at the heart o f German song.”2 In both Hollywood
portrayal and scholarly pronouncement, Liszt is an apparent outsider to true love— he
misses the simple heart and soul of the matter. Liszt, it seems, needs to borrow another
couple’s dedication, either because he cannot create his own or because his own loves
are not to be sung about in public. But when he usurps the matrimonial melody, he is
rebuked for his transgressive appropriation. This playboy virtuoso is unworthy of the
musical/matrimonial ideal, and his performative self-indulgence taints its purity. Liszt
is compelled to exaggerate sincere feeling into dramatic spectacle, because he cannot
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limit himself to a normal—“commonplace”—love(song).3
Movie musicology notwithstanding, the scene demonstrates certain real-life
attitudes concerning musical appropriation as involved in transcription and paraphrase.
By 1947, when Song o f Love premiered, the critical estimation of arrangements had
completed a nearly absolute about-face from the earlier nineteenth-century tolerance
(if not acceptance) of this repertoire and the wide circulation (if not ubiquity) of such
music on recital programs. Authenticity was coming into fashion, and compositional
or interpretive meddling of the Lisztian sort was regarded as a misled indulgence of
the bygone Romantic era. In 1928 the pianist Artur Schnabel censured Liszt’s
arrangements of Schubert Lieder: “To play these transcriptions nowadays is an offense
against Schubert and a detriment to the taste of our time.”4Arthur Loesser, discussing
the declining reputation of piano arrangements during the early part of the century,
asserts that “a greater purity of taste—one might almost call it prudishness—began to
be evident” around this time.5
Even in the early 1980s Alan Walker could still lament the long “conspiracy of
silence” surrounding the Schubert-Liszt transcriptions. He pondered their omission
from the 1936 Breitkopf und Hartel collected edition of Liszt’s music (“a curious
editorial decision ... for which no satisfactory explanation was ever given”) and the
dearth of commercial recordings of these works.6Piano arrangements, transcriptions,
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and paraphrases had become a stealth repertoire, savored privately by a few
aficionados while disappearing from public circulation in recitals, printed scores, and
recordings.
Why this fall from grace? Why the apparent allergy to an important component
of the Romantic piano repertoire after its vogue of popularity through the nineteenth
and early twentieth century? Attitudes toward the compositional identity o f the
original musical work underlie the decades-long neglect, even suppression—as well as
the recent renaissance—of this controversial repertoire. The continuing critical debate
over piano transcriptions reveals a larger struggle over the “identity politics” of the
compositional “body” and its reproduction, as well as the “moral” connotations
inherent in this musical-physical analogy. Transcription is transgressive because of its
potential not only to reconfigure an original musical text but also to rearrange the
socially constructed ideals of originating (pro)creativity.
REARRANGING TASTES
Few areas of musical activity involve the aesthetic (and even the moral)
judgment of the musician as much as does the practice of arrangement.
—Malcolm Boyd, “Arrangement,” The New Grove Dictionary o f Music
and Musicians (1980)
Solo piano arrangements of instrumental and vocal material constitute a
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significant portion of the instrument’s repertoire, both in quantitative and historical
terms.7Piano transcriptions and paraphrases enjoyed their heyday from the 1830s (the
era of celebrated virtuosi such as Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg) into the early
twentieth century, when works such as the Verdi-Liszt Rigoletto paraphrase, the Bach-
Busoni Chaconne, or Adolf Schulz-Evler’s “Arabesques” on the “Blue Danube” waltz
by Johann Strauss, Jr., were still an integral part of the typical recital program. Even in
the 1920s newly composed piano arrangements such as Igor Stravinsky’s transcription
of his own Petroushka (a showpiece for pianist Artur Rubinstein) or Manuel de Falla’s
“Ritual Fire Dance” (arranged by Rubinstein himself) found a sanctioned place in the
concert repertoire.8 Performed by latter-day virtuosi, such works continued the earlier
Romantic-era piano tradition then still in vogue.
There were both practical and performative motivations for composing and
playing piano arrangements in the nineteenth century. Simplified piano solos and
duets provided the fodder for domestic entertainment and amateur music-making.
Since mechanical means of sound reproduction were as yet undeveloped, and
accessibility to large-scale orchestral and operatic performances remained limited, the
piano reduction or transcription served as a primary tool for musical study and
dissemination.9 Arrangements also provided a means to promote new works and
composers and to honor past masters. For virtuoso performers, highly elaborate and
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challenging paraphrases provided vehicles for concert entertainment and technical
display.
The nineteenth century was “the age of the piano,” and transcribers explored
the technical and sonic potential of the newly evolved instrument, striving to match
pianistically the coloristic range of the orchestra or the dramatic glory of the opera
singer. It was also the era of the pianist-composer, and this dual capacity as both
musical creator and recreator enabled the virtuoso to fashion a substantial
“homemade” repertoire, including embellishments and improvisations on material
borrowed from other composers’ works. Of Franz Liszt’s entire compositional output
of approximately 200 solo piano works, only about half (or less, depending on how
one catalogs it) consists of completely original compositions. Comments Philip
Friedheim, “this rather embarrassingly leaves a large collection of arrangements,
which even Liszt enthusiasts approach with some hesitation.”10
Even those composers and performers deemed more “serious” engaged in a
certain degree of musical borrowing and arranging for their performing or pedagogical
needs. Robert Schumann turned a dozen Paganini caprices into piano etudes, and
Johannes Brahms did likewise with compositions by Bach and Chopin. An 1842
review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung asserts the value of arrangements (in
this case, Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s transcriptions of twelve Mozart concertos) for
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the dissemination of musical works but acknowledges the controversy they provoke:
“If some voices are raised against these and similar transcriptions, if some
declare—with more or less justification—that one should not profane holy works with
strange and transparent guises, and so forth, it is still honorable and meritorious that
such works have reached the greater public’s awareness through sensible
arrangements.”"
But “superficial” virtuosity was increasingly devalued, and along with it a
concomitant portion of the arrangement repertoire.12 Early in her career Clara
Schumann performed a repertoire of virtuoso paraphrases and composed a set of
flashy concert variations on a Bellini theme, but she later turned away from
showpieces (“concert pieces like ... Thalberg’s Fantasies, Liszt, etc. have become
quite repugnant to me” 13) and programmed more substantial works by Beethoven and
the German Romantics. Partly as a result of her crusading efforts with this then less-
popular repertoire, Schumann acquired something of a reputation as a musical
priestess. “The reigning saint of music,” the Song o f Love script calls her, or “that dear
old prig in petticoats,” as Ernest Newman misogynistically puts it: “she and her
associates honestly thought that they were the last bulwarks of the virtuous in art
against the inroads of the immoral virtuosi.”14
In the early twentieth century, significant critical opinion was already set
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against the piano-arrangement repertoire. Frederick Niecks, in a 1905 article on Liszt’s
piano works, notes that operatic arrangements “do not now enjoy the popularity they
once enjoyed; the present age has lost some of its love for musical fireworks and the
tricking-out and transmogrification by an artist of other artists’ ideas.”15 In 1911, when
Ferruccio Busoni performed his legendary series of Berlin recitals devoted to the
music of Liszt (including numerous paraphrases, song transcriptions, and even
Busoni’s own versions of works by Liszt),16 Edward J. Dent reported, “It can well be
imagined how horrified the Berlin critics were at programs of this type; but they seem
to have enjoyed them against their will.”17
Arrangements were also becoming less “necessary” as the phonograph
provided new means for musical reproduction—and less “permissible” as international
copyright agreements set in place legal restrictions on the adaptation or arrangement
of musical compositions. Pianist-composers such as Busoni,18 Leopold Godowsky,
and Sergei Rachmaninoff continued the practice of transcription and paraphrase, but
the rise of the modernist aesthetic and the consequent trend toward “authenticity”
prompted a shift in the relationship between composer and performer and in attitudes
about the creation and dissemination of musical works.19 A division of labor between
composer and performer became standard and expected, with the former regarded as
musical creator and the latter as executant serving the composer’s conception.
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Interpretation, previously a valued quality of individual Romantic expressivity, was
deemed self-indulgent excess, indulging the ego of the performer over the original
intentions o f the musical work.
Thus the appropriateness of musical appropriation became an issue sparking a
certain degree o f heated opinion among composers, performers, and critics. Paul
Hindemith, in his 1949 Norton lectures, sarcastically belittles the concert performer’s
urge to transcribe another composer’s work: “The time comes in every serious
performer’s life, when he feels that it cannot be the final purpose of his existence to be
some elevated form of public jester, that there must be some higher aim than a lifelong
concentration on the question how to hit the right tone at the right time with the proper
strength. ... A very popular activity that satisfies such longings is producing
arrangements of other people’s creations.”20
Although Hindemith acknowledges the limited appeal of strict execution, he
nevertheless mocks the creative performer’s attempts to fashion an individualized
(re)creative response to the musical work. On the other side of the debate, Kaikhosru
Shaputji Sorabji, himself a deviser of eccentric pastiches on Chopin’s “Minute Waltz”
and Bizet’s Carmen, ridicules the prevailing critical attitude regarding paraphrases in a
1932 essay: “Among the many works of Liszt misunderstood, malappreciated and
derided by the average musician, whose mentality is invariably of the herd-type,
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slavishly following the lead of some pompous imbecile ... and by the spurious-
superior folk, whose temerity and impertinence in passing judgment upon matters of
which they are utterly ignorant are only equalled by their ignorance of these same
matters, the operatic fantasies come in for a very large share of abuse. They are
virtuoso-music, display pieces of the worst type—vulgar, empty, tawdry, and so on.”21
Not only vulgar, some would say, but sacrilegious. Early in her career Wanda
Landowska weighed in with a condemnation of transcriptions as profane creations:
‘“ The harpsichord works o f Bach,’ said [Hans von] Biilow, ‘are the Old Testament;
Beethoven’s Sonatas the New. We must believe in both.’ And while saying that, he
added several bars to the Chromatic Fantasy, changed the answer of the Fugue, and
doubled the basses; thus he impregnated this work with an emphatic and theatrical
character.”22
Perhaps the shifting attitudes toward this repertoire are best illustrated by Hans
Keller, who compares two dictionary entries on the term arrangement separated by a
span of six decades; the definition in Hugo Riemann’s 1882 Musik-Lexicon and
another in Willi Apel’s 1944 Harvard Dictionary o f Music. Both begin identically
(“the adaptation of a composition for instruments other than those for which it was
originally written”), but whereas Riemann offers a case-in-point example (piano
reduction vs. original composition), Apel feels compelled to remove the arrangement
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to neutral, nonmusical territory: “thus, in a way, the musical counterpart of a literary
translation.”23 As Keller interprets this amendment, a twentieth-century anxiety
motivates Apel, “no longer struck by any natural examples,” to offer an extramusical
rationale for the matter. What would constitute a natural example and why nature
should be a factor in this discussion are issues not pursued by Keller. The repertoire
itself holds clues to this anxiety over (un)natural forms of arrangement and to the
larger moral issues surrounding the creative “urges” that motivate such musical
reproductions.
THE WORK AS BODY
‘T ook liberties with!” ... The implication of it is that music is a sort of

unprotected female who is never safe when a “fast” man is about.
—Ernest Newman, ‘The Virtuous and the Virtuoso”
The debate over reproductive rights is a battleground of beliefs and values in
our society, influencing political elections, motivating religious pronouncements,
inciting anti-abortion violence, and inspiring various national programs to encourage
or limit population growth. The overarching questions in this cultural controversy
concern the status and use of the body vis-a-vis personal desire and social convention:
Is the body (particularly the female body) socially accountable or privately personal?
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What is the body’s appropriate use or role in acts of pleasure or procreation? Closely
related to these questions are issues concerning the control of reproduction (as with
contraception or abortion) and the arrangements o f sexual relation outside of legally
approved practices (sodomy or polygamy, for example). Tradition is set in opposition
to transgression, and the body becomes a contested site of personal identity, political
power, and cultural struggle.
The reproductive-rights debate and the politics o f the body can apply
analogously to music and the other arts. The artistic work, like the human body, is an
entity subject to a variety of manipulations— formal or substantive doctorings, social
regulations, or intellectual deconstructions—from forces acting on it. Certain schools
of literary criticism regard the written text as a conceptual body contingent on or
influenced by the author or reader; a musical composition is likewise shaped through
the composer’s mind and in the performer’s physical body. But there are also
regulations controlling actions on the musical body. Like the physical body, a
composition is often regarded as a sanctified creative entity, and the bowdlerization o f
a masterwork, as tantamount to mutilation.
Landowska employs this analogy between the physical body and the musical
work in the opening of her essay on transcriptions. She relates an anecdote about her
visit in 1908 to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whom she describes as “a great lover o f
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the music of the past.” Together they tour his collection of antique sculpture; at one
point
he became ecstatic before a woman’s torso mutilated by the centuries,

“See, madame, the refinement, the suppleness of these lines! Ah! what
a pity that parts are missing!” Out of curiosity I ventured to ask, “Cher
Maitre, why don’t you try to reconstruct them?” He looked at me,
amazed. It was obvious that this idea had never entered his mind; one
had to be a musician to have such a thought. “But, madame, I do not
feel able to do it; and even if I were, I should never dare.” And I
thought of all these small virtuosos and schoolmaster-composers who
go tooth and nail at tampering, mutilating, and disfiguring our sublime
works. . . . They put Bach, Mozart, and Handel back on the drawing
board; and after slandering the most beautiful masterpieces, they dare to
juxtapose their obscure names with those of our greatest m asters.. . .
What would sculptors say if some plasterer took it upon himself to
shave off some marble from the Venus de Milo to give her a wasp waist
or if somebody twisted Apollo’s nose to give him more character?24
Landowska’s characterization of the artwork as a vulnerable body informs her
criticism of “the parasitic melodic line of the ‘Ave Maria’” which Charles Gounod
"grafted” onto Bach’s famous Prelude in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier.25
Other examples of “unnatural,” even incestuous, musical matings are rife in the
transcription repertoire: consider Busoni’s combination of a Bach Prelude and Fugue
into a single “Perpetuum mobile et infinitum” in his K lavieriibung (1925), or
Godowsky’s quodlibets joining two Chopin etudes into one (fig. 57).
Because the term transcription is used broadly and inconsistently as a label for
different kinds of pianistic adaptations, it will be useful to clarify definitional
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categories. Leonard B. Meyer distinguishes between two types of adaptation: the
literal transcription, in which “means different from those of the original work are
used to re-present it as accurately as possible,” and what he calls the arrangement, or
paraphrase, which “generally involves significant additions to, deletions from, or
changes o f order in the original” and demonstrates more idiosyncratic or
improvisatory revisions with less adherence to the original work.
According to Meyer, the primary difference between the two categories is the
degree to which the work’s original identity is maintained or modified: “the merit of a
transcription . . . is measured by its ability to reproduce the character and ‘tone’ of the
original; the merit of a paraphrase, on the other hand, depends not upon its faithfulness
to a model but upon its inherent interest as a work in its own right.” In short, the
transcription “differs from its model in means and medium,” while the paraphrase
“differs from its model in significance as well.”26
A key attribute in Meyer’s definition invites closer consideration: the notion of
faithfulness. Fidelity to the original work distinguishes the literal transcription from
the more liberal paraphrase; it preserves the identity of the original, and enables the
transcription’s “ability to reproduce” the original work. As Stephen Davies explains in
his article on transcriptions and authenticity, a transcription’s musical content must
“adequately resemble and preserve” that of the original work. Although aspects of the
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original will necessarily be altered in the transfer, a transcription that revises too
extensively “fails through its lack of faithfulness to the musical contents o f the
original.”27
Franz Liszt’s transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies are oft-cited
examples of this ideal of faithful reproduction. According to the biographer Frederick
Corder, “Beethoven was the one composer towards whom any irreverent alterations
was to [Liszt] unthinkable It is open to all to observe the scrupulous fidelity of his
published Beethoven transcriptions, in marked contrast to the freedom of all his other
ones.”28 Alan Walker praises these adaptations for “the challenge these symphonies
presented in defying ten fingers to reproduce them without harming Beethoven’s
thought” and cites “the loving care, the meticulous attention to details, which shines
out of every page of [Liszt’s] Beethoven transcriptions” as evidence of his “single-
minded devotion to the memory of Beethoven.”29 Regarding the Schubert-Liszt
transcriptions, Derek Watson asserts that “critics of these song arrangements object to
the innocent charm and simple sensitivity of Schubert’s Lieder being wedded to the
dazzling plethora of Lisztian effects. Yet he always remains faithful to the spirit of the
originals.”30
Whereas transcription strives for faithful reproduction of the original work, the
paraphrase reconceives musical material through elaborative pianistic textures, new
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counterpoint and harmonies, improvisatory diversions (such “dished-up” revisions
might include free-form “rambles,” to borrow Percy Grainger’s terms), or other
compositional modifications. Walker defines the paraphrase as “a free variation on the
original” that strives for “metamorphosis” rather than careful reproduction: “In a
paraphrase, the arranger is free to vary the original, to weave his own fantasies around
it, to go where he wills.”31
Unconstrained by expectations of fidelity, the paraphrase invites a degree of
compositional liberty, performative spectacle, and the expression of idiosyncratic
identity, including even humor, irony, and parody. Discussing the Strauss-Godowsky
Die Fledermaus paraphrase, Michel Kozlovsky notes that “every motive, harmony or
contrapuntal line in this work is expressive of Godowsky’s humor.” He adds, “the
place of this transcription in the piano repertoire is comparable to that of the clown
among acrobats,” an evaluation that recalls Hindemith’s negative depiction of some
performers as “public jesters.” The work’s ability to convey a high degree of
personality is a function of its being a paraphrase: “Such jocular spirit could not have
been produced in an original work; it is the distortion of a well-known piece of music
which yields this result.”32
Critics often describe a paraphrase as a “distorted” or “perverse” musical
arrangement, although ambivalent attitudes arise regarding the value or significance of
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such alterations. Kozlovsky notes that “this deliciously decadent ‘perversion’ of a
simple harmonic idea is what makes Godowsky’s [Fledermaus] paraphrase so
charming.” Discussing the Strauss-Godowsky “Symphonic Metamorphosis on ‘Das
Kunstlerleben,”’ Maurice Hinson writes that “the simple Strauss waltz is completely
transformed, imprisoned in a labyrinth o f horrendous complexities. Every aspect of
piano playing is utilized with exquisite decadence.”33
Given the metaphorical correlations between musical work and creativity, on
the one hand, and physical body and procreativity, on the other, critical attitudes
toward “true” transcription and “perverse” paraphrase invite certain parallels to the
arrangement o f interpersonal and intimate relationships in society, particularly
marriage and human procreation. If the creative relationship between composer and
performer bears some analogy to the heterosexual procreative relationship (the male
impregnates, and the female gives birth), then the virtue of “true” transcription mirrors
the traditional social expectation of fidelity within marriage and the family. The
transcription’s fidelity is seen to preserve the hierarchy and sanctity of the creative
musical union o f composer and arranger-performer, unlike the compositional
philandering associated with the paraphrase. The paraphrase writer is often accused of
“taking liberties” with the composer’s original creation, of “having his way with” the
music. As a result, the paraphrase is often considered a bastardized version of the
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original that sacrifices fidelity to the composer for the sake of the adapter or
performer’s own gratification.
Identity and authority are the strategic concerns underlying the transcription
versus paraphrase controversy, as they are in cultural debates over reproductive rights
and the regulation of the body. This analogy between physical body and musical work
can be carried further: new creation (of proud biological parents or inspired original
composer) is often valued more highly than mere adoption or adaptation of another’s
(re)productivity. Furthermore, the original progenitor retains “rights” over the new
body or work— at least until the child comes of age or the composition enters the
public domain. The transcriber or paraphraser, however, is seen as a surrogate musical
parent usurping the composer’s distinct creative identity and his or her authority of
authorship. The forced musical “marriage” between original composer and arranger
makes for complicated legal designations in the naming of the parentage: consider the
Schumann-Liszt and Chopin-Godowsky offspring (and the hyphenating complications
of Saint-Saens-Horowitz) or the other interlopers who, as Landowska puts it, “dare to
juxtapose their obscure names with those of our greatest masters.”
Anxieties over the appropriate regulation of (pro)creative “urges” affecting the
work or the body also underlie both the cultural and the musical controversies.
Hindemith, for example, rails against the metaphorical digestive urge o f the
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“paracreative” arranger: “The irrepressible desire to arrange, to participate in the
creative process, at least by nibbling, seems to belong in the same class—although on
a higher level—with the cannibal’s eating of his captured enemy in order to add the
enemy’s strength to his own.”34 Some critics claim that the composer’s creation has
been abused, resulting in a psychological disruption of the work’s original identity.
Paul Henry Lang detects “a weighty psychological problem” inherent in arrangements,
which he regards as motivated by the narcissistic urge to perform: “the desire for
improvisation and virtuosity arising from the identity o f the composer and
performer.”35 Sorabji credits a parapsychological urge when he notes Liszt’s “power of
seizing upon extraneous themes and so charging them with his own peculiar quality
that, without actual alteration, they lose all semblance of their original physiognomy,
and become ‘controlled,’ to use an expression borrowed from the spiritists, or
‘possessed.’”36 At stake is how the work or body may be handled in the course of its
enjoyment and its perpetuation or reproduction.
(PROCREATING QUEERLY
Things are being recycled so promiscuously these day s.. . . Recycling

requires no commitment, no point of view, for it’s predicated on the
emotions of mockery, knowingness and wit, not on those o f earnestness
or passion. — Michiko Kakutani, “Art is Easier the 2d Time Around,”
New York Times (October 30, 1994).
Like a gay/lesbian perspective on social and sexual matters, a “queer”
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perspective on the musical work/body can provide further insights into the politics
surrounding the urges o f musical (pro)creativity and the processes of musical
reproduction. The concept queer signals (in Moe Meyer’s definition) “an ontological
challenge that displaces bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and
continuous while substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative,
improvisational, discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized
acts.”37
What better precis for the distinction between true transcription and perverse
paraphrase? The transcription, charged with fidelity to the patrilinear composer-
progenitor’s text/work/body, maintains the “unique, abiding, and continuous” identity
of a musical work despite surface alterations of color and medium. The paraphrase, on
the other hand, is idiosyncratic and unpredictable: it is performative in that it enacts a
self-conscious display of technique, style, and personality; improvisational in that it
veers off unexpectedly from the original score with flights of fantasy; and
discontinuous because the arranger steps into the accepted reproductive progression,
displacing to a significant extent the original ancestral forebear. In short, the
paraphrase is queerly and transgressively reproductive.
One particular reproductive transgression of the paraphrase is that it oversteps
the boundary of a work’s unique and original content in pursuit of a newly configured
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outward expression. It disregards primary essence in favor of secondary
appearance—a radical reevaluation of musical identity that privileges flexible (and
possibly deceptive) outer style over apparently stable inner content. The paraphrase,
Alan Walker writes, “is not interested in ‘original thought,’ it changes notation with
impunity, and it does not reverence the sonic surface; indeed it often flits about,
chameleon-like, donning the most outrageous acoustical disguises, defying us to say
where the music’s true identity is to be found.”38 Admittedly, it is sometimes difficult
to locate the original musical self underneath its intricate contrapuntal disguises, as in
the Schubert-Godowsky “Wohin?” paraphrase published in a Russian edition (fig. 58).
The paraphrase could even be considered a form of musical drag,
impersonating the original work while at the same time camouflaging that identity
beneath a distracting array of surface appearances and surfeit personalities. Critics
have not looked favorably on this tendency to disguise the identity of the original.
Writes Arthur Briskier in his monograph on Bach transcriptions, “Adaptations with
modifications are but vain accessories, which dress up this music and lessen its
greatness”39 (recall Liszt’s “gilt” and “glitter”). Hindemith engages the trope of cross-
dressed music in his caricature of the arranger: “You take some older music written
for harpsichord, organ, or any other relatively unattractive instrument or group of
instruments, and dress it up with all sorts of more fashionable trimmings. For the
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connoisseur this is an artistic procedure of about the same value as providing a nice
painted skirt and jacket for the Venus of Milo, or dolling up the saints of Reims and
Chartres with tuxedos, mustaches, and horn-rimmed spectacles.”40 Hindemith’s
sartorial disapproval recalls Landowska’s distress over Venus’s “disfiguring” cosmetic
surgery. He criticizes the paraphraser for doing precisely what the drag queen
accomplishes: calling into question markers of identity by “dressing up” the true
body/artwork with seemingly inauthentic gender signifiers.
Authenticity’s esteem for the original text (hence, original musical Self) also
has a political aspect in terms of queer identity. Modem scholarship insists on the
stable, fixed musical work as an object for historical interpretation, theoretical
analysis, and faithful performance. The Urtext score, a carefully edited reproduction of
manuscript sources, seems to best reflect the identity of the work and the original
composer’s musical conception.
In discussing the transgressive potential of queer parody, however, Moe Meyer
points out how “the relationship between texts becomes simply an indicator of the
power relationships between social agents who wield those texts, one who possesses
the ‘original,’ the other who possesses the parodic alternative.” The queer—in his
discussion, camp—copy becomes a transgressive vehicle when “the marginalized and
disenfranchised advance their own interests by entering alternative signifying codes
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into discourse by attaching them to existing structures of signification.”41 Having
appropriated and revised the Schumanns’ “song of love,” Liszt is accused o f
transgressively rewriting the “musical text” of traditional matrimony in just this way.
The power play over original text and its appropriate (re)crcation is particularly
evident when paraphrase is contrasted to another form of musical replication, the
theme-and-variations form. The typical variations form exhibits a reproductive
mechanism that develops (or “paraphrases”) the original material numerous times.
Busoni, however, has noted the general acceptance of a composer’s decision to write
variations on another composer’s theme or musical model, unlike the stalwart
resistance to writing free-standing paraphrases: “For some curious reason variation
form is held in great esteem by serious musicians. This is odd, because if the variation
form is built up on a borrowed theme, it produces a whole series of transcriptions, and
the more regardless of the theme they are, the more ingenious is the type of variation.
Thus, arrangements are not permitted because they change the original, whereas the
variation is permitted although it does change the original.”42 The distinction might be
explained by the fact that the variations’ theme is stated at the outset as the origin(al);
one rarely finds examples of a theme-and-variations form in which the original
musical theme is given only at the close of a series of elaborations. This opening Ur-
theme becomes the metaphoric father-progenitor of a series of musical offspring,
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mirroring the patrilinear model of procreation.
Just as queer political movements at the close of the twentieth century have
fostered alternative structures of procreation and relationship (including adoption,
artificial insemination, and broadened categories of the family), “queer” forms of
cultural production similarly champion alternative forms of relationship between
creator, re-creator, and audience. For example, the camp aesthetic—regarded as a
hallmark of gay cultural expression in the twentieth century, at least in the tradition
that venerates Oscar Wilde as inspirational forebear—readily employs copy, imitation,
and parody for expressive effect. The paraphrase can provide a musical model of this
aesthetic sensibility and this manner of creative (re)production. The “camp”
paraphrase celebrates the primacy of an elaborately theatrical style, the exterior
masquerade that enables interior expression, the indulgence in hidden “second”
meanings (“the lie that tells the truth,” to borrow Philip Core’s title43), and the
incongruous applause for a disfranchised object of devotion (the last element
particularly applicable during the era of the paraphrase’s critical denigration). In this
sense, Liszt’s voluptuous “Widmung” performance in Song o f Love qualifies as a
moment of camp expression.
Modernist criticism has typically regarded the imitative copy as an inferior
simulacrum of the true original object. Walter Benjamin famously claims that the
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“aura” of the artwork “withers” through its mechanical reproduction and that “the
technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of
tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a
unique experience.” But this process of replication also “reactivates the object
reproduced” for newly configured meanings.** Here “queer” (re)production begins its
work. In a discussion o f Oscar Wilde’s post-trial prison writings, Wayne Koestenbaum
considers Wilde’s “fetishistic attention” to his own literary productions as an attempt
to perpetuate gay identity via the reproductive mechanisms of modem publicity and
publication. Koestenbaum asserts that Wilde “reclaimed aura for gay purposes by
redefining mechanical production as aura and insisting that the copy bears the
original’s transcendence.” The description of Wilde’s philosophy on imitative copy
can apply to the pianistic paraphraser’s art as well: “Obsessed with copying, cannily
undermining essences, Wilde entertained the glittering, seductive, and centerless play
of surfaces, and refused to take essences earnestly.”45
Other theorists present the concept of queer replication using different
terminology. Jonathan Dollimore defines “transgressive reinscription” as “a turning
back upon something and a perverting of it, typically if not exclusively through
inversion and displacement.”46 Judith Butler considers “subversive repetition” a
function of normative heterosexuality’s assumption of original, true, and authentic
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identity in opposition to the stereotypical and homophobic understanding o f
homosexuality as a failed and perverse copy of that ideal.47
Hans Keller’s previously cited observation on the lack of “natural” examples
of arrangement can be revealingly paired with Koestenbaum’s consideration of the
politics of cloning, typically considered an inherently unnatural reproductive
mechanism, in relation to post-Stonewall gay culture. As a slang term, “clone” is a
mildly derogatory label for gay men who dress and groom themselves according to
stereotypical images o f masculinity. Since the more common meaning of the word
carries associations of laboratories and scientific engineering, “it also subtly derides a
gay male’s non-procreative sexuality; it defines homosexuality as replication of the
same.”48
What sort of musical body does the queerly reproduced paraphrase represent?
Consider again the subtly homophobic assessments of Liszt’s bachelor-virtuoso
character in Song o f Love. Liszt’s manner of musical (pro)creativity signifies sexual
promiscuity. He is unable to experience intimacy, an apparent outsider to true love, a
purveyor of tasteless insincerity and performative self-indulgence. Liszt’s life
contrasts with the Schumanns’ model of (pro)creative order (composer Robert
conceives what wife Clara brings forth to the world) and “correct” musical
(re)production (exemplified by Clara’s sincere and faithful transcription of her
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husband's original work). Liszt engenders his music differently (via unsolicited
compositional appropriation and inauthentic replication) and enacts his music
differently (via virtuoso performative gestures and seemingly spontaneous fantasy).
Clara’s pointed barb— “Or do you know what I mean?”—carries a world o f meaning.
In numerous critical treatments, too, Liszt presents a problematic figure as a
composer who creates in an unorthodox manner. Indeed, his predilection for
arrangements calls into question his ability to (pro)create at all. A review of Liszt’s
1886 London performances in the Monthly Musical Record declares, “There can be no
question that the genius of Liszt is reproductive (i.e., imitative] rather than creative.”49
Edward Baxter Perry, discussing Liszt’s transcriptions in 1902, asserts that they
demonstrate creative powers of a secondary rank, claiming that the “peculiar aptitude”
required for transcription or paraphrase “may be a lower order of genius than the
originally creative faculty.”50 In a 1905 article on Liszt as a composer, Frederick
Niecks echoes Perry but brings out a fine distinction in this debate over Liszt’s
com positional capacities: yes, Liszt was “a creative genius,” b ut a genius
“qualitatively unlike” the great masters Mozart, Beethoven, or Schumann, for he was
“inventive” (a cloner) rather than “creative.”51 Even some who concede that Liszt’s
compositional output is remarkable regard this as a sign of creative promiscuity: “For
many historians and critics,” writes Arnold Whittall in 1987, “L iszt’s sheer
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productivity as a composer, coupled with the prominence of transcriptions and
paraphrases of other men’s music, has served to reinforce suspicions that he could not
possibly have been either very serious or very discriminating in his creative work.”52
At the same time, Liszt’s fecund (recreative urges (via the art of arrangement)
and his unorthodox manner of handling a musical body (via paraphrase) elicit
admiration from other commentators. Camille Saint-Saens appreciates “how Liszt can
take any bone and extract the marrow out of it, how his penetrating mind has cut
through trivialities and platitudes and got to the hidden artistic germ, which he
proceeds to fertilise.”53 Paul Henry Lang waxes poetic on the subject of Liszt’s
generative powers: “in Liszt’s garden we see many noble plants which inclement
circumstances prevented from bursting into bloom, but while many of them bear no
flowers, not one of them is without deep roots.”54 Watson echoes the horticultural
motif with curiously homoerotic imagery: “As a dramatist and a performer Liszt re
created a number of works distilled from the essence of other men’s flowers.”55
In this more positive light, the queerly reproduced paraphrase holds potential
for a broadened understanding of the work or the body and its social and cultural
relationships. Writing on the subject of queer cultural identity in 1994, Frank
Browning asserts, “some feel that being gay intimates not so much an aesthetic or a
culture of identities as an entree into a world o f forbidden, transgressive desire, a
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manner o f living that challenges overtly the heterosexual conventions of marriage and
procreation in favor o f a radical, collaborative exploration of pleasure and
spirituality.”56 The paraphrase elicits pleasure in its humor, irony, and camp potential;
it exercises spirituality in its transcendence over mundane literalness and its
affirmation of metamorphosis over stasis. It celebrates the mutual collaborative
relationship of the (re)creative process between composer and arranger-performer.
And its transgressive treatment of the original text reminds one that the composer’s
authenticity may be as much an illusion as the virtuoso’s spectacle.
OUT OF THE CLOSET
I have the most hair-raising piano transcriptions of Strauss tone poems

that you’ll ever hear. I play them privately. —Glenn Gould, quoted in
Payzant, Glenn Gould (1992).
If Liszt is a controversial, compositionally “queer” figure, what about his
figurative pianistic progeny, the Romantic-style virtuosi of our own era? Twentieth-
century pianists known for their repertoire of arrangements—the list includes Vladimir
Horowitz, Jorge Bolet, Earl Wild, and Glenn Gould (and yes, Wladziu Valentino
Liberace must be counted among them)—continued to perform transcriptions and
“perverse” paraphrases during a time when prevailing attitudes looked down on such
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musical reproductions. Their repertoire of arrangements can be seen as a throwback to
the Romantic era, compositional artifacts evoking musical tastes and values of the old-
fashioned past. Even the titles of these works (“Fantasies,” “Reminiscences,”
Souvenirs,” etc.) convey an aspect of nostalgic memory as performed—or in some
cases camped— by these latter-day paraphrasers of the nineteenth-century virtuoso
image.
More to the point, however, this repertoire could also serve a contemporary
political purpose in signifying the rearrangement of social and personal texts through
queer (re)production. The transcription and especially the paraphrase represent an
apparent liberation from the established, apparently authentic texts of normative
(pro)creativity. The paraphrase-playing pianist delights in this textual reconfiguration
and can borrow its temporary disguise—the drag of a new-fashioned musical
body—to enact his own personal rewriting of “moral” texts for public reception. The
paraphrase can offer an expressive cover for presenting concealed (extra)musical
meanings, as if in code, to an unsuspecting audience. Discussing Godowsky’s free
paraphrase o f Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, Abram Chasins suggests that
Godowsky intended “to probe inner meanings and hidden beauties; to give utterance
to vaguely suggested thoughts and to project undivulged ideas.”57
As Godowsky’s case demonstrates, one needn’t be queer to indulge in the urge
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either to revise or to display and enact such subversive reproductions. But this
communicative potential has been exploited and championed by numerous relatively
queer pianists during the twentieth century. While Vladimir Horowitz publicly denied
his homosexual tendencies,58 his playing revealed the camp conflict between outer
style and inner content. Harvey Sachs writes, “Vladimir Horowitz’s phenomenal
technique [read: phenomenal style, phenomenal spectacle] and questionable
musicianship [questionable content, questionable sexuality] have made him the most
controversial pianist o f our time.”59 Glenn Plaskin asserts that Vladimir Horowitz
conveyed “a flamboyant personal impression” via his arrangements. Horowitz himself
admitted this repertoire influenced his own identity: through composing and
performing paraphrases, he said, “my pianism started to change— it became more
shrill, more brutal, so brilliant that I couldn’t play certain kinds of music.”60 Indeed,
one reviewer noted that in his concert paraphrases “the characteristic sound and fury
would be turned loose [and] Horowitz would stop being respectful of the classics and
start being his unafraid self.”61
The paraphrase might also communicate certain disguised meanings. In
Horowitz’s seemingly patriotic paraphrase of John Phillip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes
Forever” march, Detlef Gojowy hears both “a declaration of love for America, and at
the same time a catastrophic caricature. ... Horowitz, who had discovered America in
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the figure o f Scott Joplin, made a grandiose, virtuosic, scurrilous ragtime out of
Sousa s march—a music of the bordello, as Joplin’s was. ... The camouflage is as
perfect as Horowitz’s interpretation of it, at once ridiculous and monumental.”62 Was
Horowitz merely being entertaining in his flamboyant paraphrase of themes from
Bizet’s Carmen, or might there have been a campy delight in the heroine’s brash
sexual promiscuity translated into his own act of musical (pro)creativity?
Glenn Gould also remained enigmatic on the subject of his sexuality, but his
interest in transcriptions and paraphrases indicates some degree of a queer sensibility.
Edward R othstein —wondering “what, exactly, was the nature of Gould’s
sexuality?”— refers to one of his arrangements as an indication of Gould’s inner urges:
“Gould loved the spun-out desires of Tristan: once he began playing that work in his
own piano transcription, we are told, there was no stopping him.”63 Kevin Bazzana
asserts that G ould’s arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse” provides a parodic
commentary on the original work, but that his performance of it also indicates a
delight in ironic double meanings beneath the surface:64 “it is difficult not to hear this
sort of virtuosity— at once punishing and playful—as Gould’s send-up of his own
musical tastes and priorities. To make sly in-jokes (even album-length in-jokes) for
listeners aware of his musical proclivities, to use a virtuoso’s technique to poke fun at
overt virtuosity—these are motivations highly unusual in a ‘serious’ classical
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performer, to say the least.”65 Friedrich Otto detects a queer (i.e., perverse, odd)
sensibility in Gould’s 1967 recording of a Beethoven-Liszt symphony: “Gould
perversely brought forth from relative obscurity one of his oddest triumphs, the Liszt
transcription o f the Fifth Symphony. ... Because he played this almost-laughable
combination with the utmost seriousness, he brought it off with complete success. ...
This is Gouldian wit of a kind that only Gould could love.... The celebrated classicist
was presenting, completely deadpan, a brilliant performance of Liszt’s transcription of
that most venerable of romantic cliches, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”66 The
juxtapositions Otto notes between comic and serious, or ironic and authentic, also
indicate a camp sensibility enacted through the act of paraphrase.
In his own liner notes to the Beethoven-Liszt recording, Gould calls himself
“extravagantly eccentric,” and indulges in a form of scholarly drag by inventing four
fictional authorities to comment on the project. The imaginary German musicologist
Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Heinkel, for example, announces that “the transcription is from
Liszt and we can leave the decision as to whether it fulfills the moral obligations
pertaining to a transcription of German music to our colleagues in anthropological
musikology [.sic].”67 In his “psychobiography” which explores the pianist’s
“suppressed” sexuality, Peter Ostwald notes that such role-playing impersonations
were characteristic of Gould during a certain period of his life, and they provided an
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expressive outlet for inner states of being: “Glenn’s make-believe characters allowed
him to step outside o f himself and give voice to inner doubts and conflicts. They
provided a harmless, even ludicrous vehicle for bringing internal preoccupations out
into the open.”68 In an analogous sense, Gould’s transcriptions and paraphrases could
also express these hidden secondary identities through musical means. Here, too, the
body (or mind) could find its embodiment or expression through the creation and
performance of musical (re)productions.
Niecks sees Liszt’s manner of composition as “a defiance of conventional
respectability, or a device for the dumbfounding and electrification of the gaping
multitude.”69 The same could be said about Liberace, the popular twentieth-century
pianist who fashioned his own extensive repertoire of pianistic paraphrases. Liner
notes to Liberace’s album Candlelight Classics (AVI Records, 1970s) mention the
entertainer’s “spectacular showmanship” and “his exceptional gift of totally
captivating his audience through his multi-faceted musical talent.” Liberace is also “a
successful composer and arranger of music” with “many original compositions to his
credit.” Defying conventional standards of musical (re)production, however, all the
compositions on this album are adaptions of “classical” works “totally reconstructed
by Liberace.” The first selection, for example, conflates Rachmaninoffs popular
Prelude in C-sharp Minor with the ‘Theme from The Godfather." On his album The
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Sound o f Love (Dot, 1968), Liberace fits the melody of “Bye Bye Blackbird” to the
arpeggiated figurations of Chopin’s “Aeolian Harp” etude.
Liberace exemplifies queer camp and Dollimore’s transgressive reinscription
through his stylistic and performative border crossings. Marjorie Garber, for one,
explores “category crisis” in relation to Liberace’s onstage cross-dressing.70 But just as
the spectacle of Liberace’s dazzling costumes was part of the open secret of his
sexuality (he considered his outrageous outfits “just one tuck short of drag”), his
repertoire of musical (re)creations constituted another mode of queer signification.
Margaret Drewal, discussing Liberace’s Radio City Music Hall concerts, describes
how he dressed “Mack the Knife” in classical garb: “First, he played it ‘straight.’ Then
he played ‘Mack the Knife Sonata in C Major’ by Mozart, ‘Claire de Lune de Mack
the Knife’ by Debussy, and finally ‘Blue Mack the Knife Danube’ by Strauss. ...
‘Mack the Knife’ is gendered male—definitely phallic.... A stylistic cross-dresser so
to speak, ‘Mack the Knife’ [became] a transvestite tune.”71 Such “unnatural” musical
matings prompted one critic to complain that “Liberace creates— if that is the
word—each composition in his own image.”72 To hesitate granting Liberace creative
ability (in this biblical turn of phrase, even a godly ability) bespeaks a larger
uncertainty over his (pro)creative abilities, both musical and physical.
Times have changed since 1911, when James Huneker wrote regarding Liszt
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transcriptions and Thalberg paraphrases, “Bold is the man today who plays either in
public.”73 Listeners and performers enjoying such works might feel compelled to
apologize for their reprobate tastes and pleasures. “I must confess a weakness for
some of the transcriptions of the romantic period,” admitted Musical America’s Robert
Sabin in 1959. “I sometimes enjoy a shamelessly pianistic and stylistically inexcusable
elaboration. Morally, this is wrong, but pianistically it is great sport.”74 In a 1966
article on opera paraphrases, however, Raymond Lewenthal discusses the recently
revived interest in bel canto opera and the plentiful piano arrangements it has inspired,
innocently suggesting that “anything that has been kept in the closet long enough can
eventually be brought out again as the height of fashion.”75
A dmittedly, the piano-arrangement repertoire has never completely
disappeared from recital programs, even during the modernist and authenticist mid
century. But piano transcriptions and paraphrases have enjoyed a vigorous renaissance
in recent decades, as witnessed by the increasing numbers of recordings and concert
programs that feature these works. Evgeny Kissin included the Schumann-Liszt
“Widmung” in his 1990 Carnegie Hall debut recital. Stephen Hough’s Piano Albums
of 1988, 1993, and 1999 feature numerous transcriptions, including some of Hough’s
own.76 Arcadi Volodos’s 1997 debut album is composed entirely of arrangements,
including a faithful copy of the Bizet-Horowitz Carmen71Among the very few openly
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gay concert pianists, Jean-Yves Thibaudet recorded a 1985 Liszt album including the
Gounod-Liszt Faust and the Verdi-Liszt Rigoletto paraphrases and a 1993 album
devoted to Liszt’s opera transcriptions.78
The market appeal of this audience-pleasing repertoire, the recent upsurge of
interest in more obscure piano repertoire beyond the established canonical
masterworks, and the continuing crossover trend breaking down distinctions between
art music and popular music have all contributed to this recent revival. Perhaps this
reparation can also be seen as the musical correlate of the incipient but increasingly
powerful identity politics that has developed in American culture since the late 1960s
and 70s. Personality is back in style; drag and camp are trendy politicized expressions
of identity.
And yet this repertoire still elicits a certain degree of anxious justification.
Accompanying the Volodos recording are liner notes by Harris Goldsmith that seem to
anticipate some critical protest: “A recital of transcriptions such as the gifted young
Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos offers here is guaranteed to raise the hackles of self-
styled purists who regard a composer’s printed text as sacrosanct. Such keepers-of-
the-flame will almost certainly take umbrage at this sort of ‘Technique-in-excelsis,’
with its extraordinary rhythmic vitality, its tactile approximation of orchestral
sonority, and its glamorous bursts of color and excitement, finding it all impossibly
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inauthentic, and even hedonistic.” Does one detect in the attributes extraordinary,
glamorous, inauthentic, and hedonistic a recognition of the campiness of it all?
Goldsmith goes on to admit the destabilization of identity in such paraphrases,
which “tend to reflect the stylistic fingerprints of the musicians who devised them,”
citing Volodos’s “unlikely (and let us admit it, sinfully enjoyable) paraphrase” of
Mozart’s famous “Rondo alia turca.” Admitting the (queer) instability of such
identities, Goldsmith acknowledges that these paraphrases are “often chameleon-like
in their ability to change color, and they sound disconcertingly different when filtered
through other fingers and sensibilities.”
Since the era of Liszt, the perverse paraphrase has opened a compositional and
performative space for queer musical liberation. The paraphrase carries political
potential as a transgressive, counterhegemonic device offering a subversive treatment
of a musical text and its performance; it disregards certain approved principles of
(pro)creativity in favor of a more liberal and flexible attitude towards musical,
compositional, and performative identity. Earl Wild comments about his 1981
Carnegie Hall recital series, The Art o f the Transcription, by saying, “I admit that it is
really an indulgence.”79 He adds: “I love to play transcriptions because they give the
pianist so much more freedom. I can make my own interpretations.” Liberation is
achieved not only via musical reproduction, but through the assertion of identity as
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well. “The pleasure in playing transcriptions comes from the projection of what they
are,” Wild admits.80 He might also say that the pleasure comes from a projection of
what the camp pianist himself represents: the queering of the original work/body and
the transgressive potential for reordering the socially constructed “morality” of
musical (pro)creativity.
The transformative urge inherent in the art of pianistic paraphrase has
ramifications for all manner of musical creativity, even for interpersonal and social
relationships. Encouraging and forward-looking words come from Percy Grainger, one
of this century’s most prolific transcribers for piano—“probably Liszt’s only rival as a
transcriber”81—and also a composer whose practices o f bodily pleasure were
somewhat “perverse” as well.82Grainger writes, “Later on I hope to publish my sketch
books with free permission for anyone to use my themes, chords, ideas, etc. I should
like to see every man tinkering with every other man’s art; what kaleidoscopic,
multitudinous results we should see.”83
1Pianist Arthur Rubinstein recorded the solo piano works on the film’s soundtrack.
2 David Wilde, “Transcriptions for Piano,” in Franz Liszt: The Man and His MusicAed. Alan Walker
(New York: Taplinger, 1970): 201.
232
3Certainly, Liszt did “compose” love both in its unadorned virginal beauty and its low-cut evening
wear: his famous Liebestraum (no. 3, in A-flat major) is a solo piano transcription of his own song “O
lieb, so lang du lieben kannst.”
4 Artur Schnabel, “The Piano Sonatas of Franz Schubert,” Musical Courier 97 (19 April 1928): 9.
5 Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954):
609.
6 Alan Walker, “Liszt and the Schubert Song Transcriptions,” Musical Quarterly 67/1 (January 1981):
51.
7 For a comprehensive catalog of this repertoire, see Maurice Hinson, The Pianist's Guide to
Transcriptions, Arrangements, and Paraphrases (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
8 Arrangements in the other direction—from solo piano to symphony orchestra, for example— were also
popular. Maurice Ravel’s 1922 orchestral transcription of Modest Musorgsky’s Pictures at an
Exhibition is now more familiar than the original solo piano version.
9 For a discussion of four-hand piano transcriptions as a medium of musical reproduction bringing
“public” symphonic and chamber works into the domestic/amateur realm, see Thomas Christensen,
“Four-Hand Piano Transcription and Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Musical Reception,” Journal
o f the American Musicological Society 52/2 (Summer 1999): 255-298. In an article on the homoerotics
of four-hand piano duet playing, Philip Brett notes that “the piano duet also bears heavily the mark of
the inauthentic because . . . it is the chief repository o f the literature o f transcription” Philip Brett,
“Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance o f Gay Male Desire,” 19th-Century Music 21
(1997): 153.
10Philip Friedheim, “The Piano Transcriptions of Franz Liszt,” Studies in Romanticism 1 (1962): 83.
11Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12(23 March 1842): 251-252.
12 For a discussion of Robert Schumann’s attitudes toward the variations, fantasias, and arrangements of
Liszt, Thalberg, and other Parisian virtuosi, see the chapter on virtuosi in Leon Plantinga, Schumann as
Critic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967): 196-218.
13 Cited in Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985): 264.
14 Ernest Newman, “The Virtuous and the Virtuoso,” in More Essays from the World o f Music (New
York: Coward-McCann, 1958): 161.
15Frederick Niecks, “Liszt as a Pianoforte Writer,” The Etude 23/10 (October 1905): 400.
16 Programs listed in Maurice Hinson, Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994): 840-841.
17Cited in James F. Penrose, “The Piano Transcriptions of Franz Liszt,” American Scholar 64/2 (Winter
1995): 272.
18For an in-depth study of the group of composers, performers, transcribers centered on Ferruccio
Busoni and Kaikhosru Shapuiji Sorabji, see Marc-Andrd Roberge, “The Busoni Network and the Art of
Creative Transcription," Canadian University Music Review 11/1 (1991): 68-88.
19On the correlations between modernism and the authenticity movement, see Richard Taruskin, Text
and Act: Essays and Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
20 Paul Hindemith, A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1952):
162.
21 Kaikhosru Sorabji, “The Opera Fantasies of Liszt,” in Around Music (London: Unicom Press, 1932):
194.
233
22 Wanda Landowska. ‘Transcriptions,” in Landowska on Music, ed. Denise Restout (New York: Stein
and Day, 1964): 101.
23 In Hans Keller, “Arrangement For or Against?” Musical Times 110 (January 1969): 22.
24 Landowska, ‘Transcriptions,” 98-99.
25 Ibid., 103.
26 Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967): 197-98.
27 Stephen Davies, ‘Transcription, Authenticity and Performance,” The British Journal o f Aesthetics
28/3 (Summer 1988): 216, 218.
28 Frederick Corder, Ferencz Liszt (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1925): 41.
29Alan Walker, “Liszt and the Beethoven Symphonies,” The Music Review 31/4 (1970): 302-303, 305.
In other instances, Liszt seemed to be aware of the infidelities he may have been committing.
Discussing his transcription of Beethoven’s “Adelaida,” Liszt wrote to his publishers Breitkopf &
Hartel in 1840 about a “tremendous” cadenza and an additional coda he had inserted into the original
work: “I will beg you to have the last Coda printed in small notes . . . so that purists may play the actual
text only, if the commentary displeases them. It was certainly a very delicate matter to touch ‘Adelaide.’
. . . Have I done it with propriety and taste?” In Corder, Liszt, 41-42.
30 Derek Watson, Liszt (London: Dent, 1988): 214.
31 Walker, “Liszt and Schubert,” 52,59.
32 Michel Kozlovsky, The Piano Solo Transcription in the Romantic Period: Three Examples from
Liszt, Godowskyand Busoni (DMA dissertation, Indiana University, 1983): 74, 86-87.
33 Hinson, Pianist’s Guide, 136.
34 Hindemith, Composer’s World, 162, 164.
35 Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1941): 866.
36 Sorabji, “Opera Fantasies,” 195.
37 Moe Meyer, “Introduction: Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp,” in The Politics and Poetics o f Camp,
ed. Meyer (New York: Routledge, 1994): 2-3.
38 Alan Walker, “In Defense of Arrangements,” Piano Quarterly 143 (Fall 1988): 26.
39Arthur Briskier, “Piano Transcriptions of J. S. Bach,” Music Review 15/3 (August 1954): 191-202.
40 Hindemith, Composer’s World, 162.
41 Meyer, Politics and Poetics, 10-11.
42 Ferruccio Busoni, The Essence o f Music, and Other Papers, trans. Rosamond Ley (London: Salisbury
Square, 1957): 88.
13Philip Core, Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth (New York: Delilah Books, 1984).
44 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New
York: Schocken, 1969): 221.
45 Wayne Koestenbaum, “Wilde’s Hard Labor and the Birth of Gay Reading,” in Engendering Men: The
Question o f Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge,
1990): 177.
46 “In the process of being made to discohere, meanings are returned to circulation, thereby becoming
the more vulnerable to appropriation, transformation, and reincorporation in new configurations. Such
in part are the processes whereby the social is unmade and remade, disarticulated and rearticulated.”
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991): 323, 87.
234
47 Butler argues that “the parodic or imitative effect of gay identities works neither to copy nor to
emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of
its own naturalized idealization.” Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991): 20-25.
48 Koestenbaum, “Wilde’s Hard Labor,” 182. Koestenbaum further asserts that whereas the scientific
clone is a “faithful” reproduction o f an organism, the gay clone is a “perverse” copy of
hypermasculinity.
49Monthly Music Record 16/184 (1 April 1886): 75.
50 Edward Baxter Perry, ’Transcriptions for the Piano by Franz Liszt,” Etude 20/5 (May 1902): 172.
51 Niecks, “Liszt,” 400.
52 Arnold Whittall, Romantic Music: A Concise History from Schubert to Sibelius (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1987): 86.
53 Camille Saint-Saens, Portraits et Souvenirs (Paris: n.d.), 20, in Ernest Newman, The Man Liszt
(London: Cassell, 1934): 213.
51 Lang, Music, 873.
55Watson, Liszt, 195.
“ Frank Browning, The Culture o f Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today (New York:
Vintage, 1994): 9.
57 Abram Chasins, analysis of Godowsky’s “Suite in C” (performed at Chasin’s Carnegie Hall recital).
New York Times, February 1935, in Rafael Kammerer, “Transcriptions,” Musical Am erica 79
(February, 1959): 138.
58 “I am not homosexual, you know, but I have too many women around me every day. I need male
company.” Quoted in David Dubai, Evenings with Horowitz (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1991), 251.
See also Glenn Plaskin, Horowitz: A Biography o f Vladimir Horowitz (New York: William Morrow,
1983).
59 Harvey Sachs, Virtuoso: The Life and Art ofNiccolo Paganini, Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Ignace
Jan Paderewski, Fritz Kreisler, Pablo Casals, Wanda Landowska, Vladimir Horowitz Glenn Gould
(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 13. Horowitz also did “true” transcription for musical and
pianistic, rather than virtuosic, aims (e.g., his version of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition). See
Plaskin, Horowitz 251.
60 In Plaskin, Horowitz 249, 247.
61 New York Herald Tribune (April 9, 1946), in Plaskin, Horowitz 248.
62 Detlef Gojowy, “Stars and Stripes Forever Zur Transkription des Marschs von John Philip Sousa
dutch Vladimir Horowitz,” Neue Zeitschriftfur Musik 147/10 (October 1986): 32-34.
63 Edward Rothstein, “Heart of Gould,” The New Republic (June 26,1989): 28.
64 According to Geoffrey Payzant, Ravel’s composition “is already a giddy parody of the sentimental
Viennese waltz. Gould’s transcription is a parody of those nineteenth-century piano transcriptions of
orchestral and operatic masterpieces, and works by Bach for organ, to which he objected in his youth.”
Geoffrey Payzant, Glenn Gould: Music & Mind, rev. ed. (Toronto: Key Porter, 1992): 62.
65 Kevin Bazzana, Glenn Gould—The Performer in the Work: A Study in Performance Practice (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997): 114.
66 Friedrich Otto, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (New York: Random House): 140-41.
67 Gould’s liner notes to Glenn Gould Plays Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in C Minor, Op. 67,
Transcribed fo r Piano by Franz Liszt (Columbia Masterworks, 1968).
235
68 Peter Ostwald, Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy o f Genius (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996):
262.
69 Niecks, “Liszt,” 400.
70 Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge,
1992): 10-17.
71 Margaret Drewal, “Camp Traces in Corporate America,” in Meyer, Politics and Poetics, 155, 175.
72 In Bob Thomas, Liberace: The True Story (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987): 81 (emphasis
added).
73 James Huneker, Franz Liszt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911): 63.
74Robert Sabin in Musical America 79 (February 1959): 228.
75 Raymond Lcwenthal, “Who’s Afraid of Lucrezia Borgia?” Opera News 31/10 (31 December 1966):
8- 12.
76 Hough has also published a set of his Song Transcriptions (London: Josef Weinberger, 1999).
77 Arcadi Volodos, Arcadi Volodos: Piano Transcriptions (Sony Classical SK-62691, 1997). See
Thomas Frost, “Trial by Horowitz,” International Piano Quarterly (Autumn 1997): 40-44. Other recent
recordings devoted solely to piano transcriptions and paraphrases include Kevin Oldham, The Art o f the
Piano Transcription (VAI, 1984, 1995), with works by Schubert-Liszt and Johann Strauss—Schulz-
Evler, as well as Oldham’s own transcriptions of Bach works; Eric Himy, The Art o f the Transcription
fo r Piano (recorded 1992), with works by Mozart-Liszt, Saint-Saens-Horowitz, Chopin-Michalowski-
Rosenthal, Delibes-Himy, and others; Thomas Labd, The Virtuoso Johann Strauss: Paraphrases and
Arrangements o f Favorite Strauss Melodies by Rosenthal, Tausig, Godowsky and Schulz-Evler (1992);
and John Bayless, Bayless Meets Bernstein: West Side Story Variations (1992).
78 Thibaudet was interviewed by a national gay and lesbian news magazine in 1994. Charles Isherwood,
“Toujours Gai,” Advocate (May 17, 1994): 53-54.
79 In Harold C. Schonberg, “Earl Wild Harvests a Cornucopia of Liszt,” New York Times (April 10,
1988): 37.
80 In Raymond Ericson, “Piano Virtuosos Display Varied Art on New Releases,” New York Times
(January 23, 1983): 21.
81 Kammerer, ‘Transcriptions,” 7, 190.
82 See the discussion of Grainger’s sadomasochistic tendencies in John Bird, Percy Grainger (London:
Paul Elek, 1976): 42-51.
83 Letter to Scottish music critic D. C. Parker, The Grainger Journal 4/1 (October 1981), in Ronald
Stevenson, “Grainger’s Transcriptions,” Studies in Music 16 (1982): 88.
VI. CONCERTO CON AMO RE
“Rachhh-maninoff!”
‘The Second Piano Concetto.”
“It isn’t fair!”
“Not fair? Why?”
“Every time I hear it I go to pieces!”
—Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch
In the typical Romantic piano concerto, the soloist and orchestra don’t reach
their ultimate fortissimo major-chord consummation until the final pages of the score.
In the typical Hollywood romance-melodrama, the lovers don’t get to live happily ever
after until the end o f the final reel. In both the concerto and the film melodrama, an
underlying progression from conflict to resolution stimulates the viewer-listener’s
desire for closure and provokes the cathartic ovation or tears at the conclusion. Both
genres enact a tale of struggle followed by reconciliation, and both have maintained
their popular appeal thanks to the perpetual attraction of this basic mythic narrative.
Music-lovers and melodrama-lovers are doubly served when Hollywood films
incorporate a favorite Romantic piano concerto into their representations of romantic
struggle, as they frequently did in the 1940s and continue to do to the present day.
Piano concertos have been heard in innumerable Hollywood and foreign
productions since musical soundtracks were added to motion pictures.1 Popular
Romantic warhorses such as the Chaikovsky First (op. 23) or the Rachmaninoff
236
237
Second (op. 18) received frequent cinematic treatments during Hollywood’s “Golden
Age” of the 1940s, and film-specific compositions in the style of a late-Romantic
piano concerto—Richard Addinsell’s “Warsaw Concerto” from Dangerous Moonlight
(1941),2 for example, or the “Spellbound Concerto” derived from Miklds Rdzsa’s
Academy Award-winning score to the 1945 Hitchcock film—have enjoyed
widespread popularity as quintessential movie music. The perennial circulation of
these classical and popular works via films and film-music recordings, together with
the many arrangements and popular song derivations of their well-known melodies,
have insured the piano concerto’s place in the canon of twentieth-century popular
culture.
Despite its presence in many diverse films, however, the Romantic piano
concerto as a cinematic soundtrack device actually demonstrates a rather limited range
of musical applications and narrative associations. In the vast majority of films it
functions as a musical signifier accompanying—and in some cases also enacting,
through its “performance”—scenes and stories of emotional and perhaps also physical
struggle culminating in romantic conquest (or defeat) for the pianist-protagonist.
In some cases this concerto struggle is “performed” by a pianist character, thus
the composition functions as diegetic or source music in the film. In Shine (1995), a
disturbed young man’s struggle to overcome his domineering father and find his own
238
identity centers on his conquest of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto no. 3 (op. 39).3
After a strenuous performance of the concerto triggers his nervous breakdown, he
finds healing and redemption through a woman’s love. In the climactic confrontation
scene in Adrian Lyne’s filming of Lolita (1997), a lascivious child molester is shot
dead as he pounds out the opening of the Grieg Piano Concerto. In Dead Again
(1991), soloist Margaret Strauss is in love with a dashing conductor, and winks at him
while performing Rachmaninoffs “Paganini Variations,” but her performance is soon
followed by her murder.
In other films, the concerto is utilized only as non-diegetic or background
music on the soundtrack, but still parallels representations of desire and emotional
confrontation. Among the darkly ironic musical cues in Happiness (1998), a passage
from Samuel Barber’s neo-Romantic piano concerto (op. 38) underscores a scene in
which a lonely woman finally has a chance to demonstrate her tender affection for her
indifferent neighbor—after he passes out from a drinking binge. In Peter Weir’s Dead
Poets Society (1989), the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto (op.
73) accompanies a scene in which an inspirational teacher writes a letter to his wife far
away in London (“romance”), then counsels a troubled student who is tom between a
passion for acting and duty to his father’s expectations (“struggle”). In The Truman
Show (1998), also directed by Weir, the slow movement of Chopin’s E minor concerto
239
(op. 11) accompanies the star’s romantic encounter with a beautiful but mysterious
woman. Two lengthy excerpts from the concerto set the mood for their initial meeting
in the library, their romantic moment on a deserted beach at night, and his nostalgic
longing for her after she is forcibly taken away from him.
What is it about the nineteenth-century piano concerto that suits it to so many
melodramatic scenes of “Romantic” desire and struggle?4 Two factors have
contributed to its ubiquity and efficacy as a soundtrack device accompanying and
enacting such representations: the basic model of the concerto as a compositional form
juxtaposing soloist and orchestra in relationships of co-operation and confrontation,
and the accumulated mythology surrounding the enactment of these relationships
through performance.
At times, a concerto’s moments of sympathetic collaboration between soloist
and orchestra (particularly in slow movements) can provide a musical correlate to
scenes of cooperative union or tender communion between two characters in a film. At
other times, the apparent contest between virtuoso soloist and orchestra can be mapped
onto an analogous struggle against obstacles endured by a single character, or a
struggle for domination between two characters. Particularly in films that depict a
major character performing a concerto, this element of contest can be personified
through the struggling pianist-protagonist and visualized as an act of “live”
240
performance, becoming part of the characterization, setting, and plot itself. But even
when the concerto is utilized as a non-diegetic background element on the film’s
soundtrack, these connotations can be applied to some character who plays the role of
a metaphoric soloist confronting greater forces.
In numerous film melodramas, this notion of “Romantic” struggle is the
primary meaning assigned to the nineteenth-century piano concerto and to the act of
its performance. Both the story and the soundtrack rely on the concerto’s signification
as a model o f relationship and a form of musical ritual.
RELATIONSHIP AND RITUAL
While musicologists still debate the etymology of “concerto,” the term is
generally thought to derive from the Latin concertare, meaning “to contend, dispute,
debate.” The same word in Italian translates “to arrange, agree, get together,”5 but
these seemingly contradictory definitions actually point to the heterogeneous nature
commonly attributed to the concerto: at times a co-operative union between soloist
and ensemble, at times a competitive confrontation between the two forces.
This dichotomy o f agreement or contention is often traced back to the concerto
grosso of the late Baroque period, in which a group of solo instruments interacts
241
contrapuntally with the tutti (larger string ensemble), but the bipolar relationship
becomes most pronounced in solo concertos of the Romantic era and the early
twentieth century. Here the concerto provides a performative arena for the metaphoric
“battle” pitting individual soloist against full orchestra, or the “bonding” enacted by
their mutually supportive ensemble. Overall, it enacts a spectacle of inner emotional
struggle made both visible and audible by the soloist’s virtuosic exertions against the
orchestra. For many viewer-listeners, the “drama” of a concerto’s performance still
provides a high degree of vicarious pleasure. It was during the nineteenth century that
the piano emerged as the favored concerto instrument (over the violin), largely due to
technological developments enabling the soloist to produce a volume and variety of
sounds that could both complement and compete with the massed orchestra.
In his book Concerto Conversations (1999) and an earlier article on the
subject, “Representing a Relationship” (1992), Joseph Kerman explores how the
concerto as a musical form establishes “a duality of concerto agents”— soloist and
orchestra—and sets them into interaction with each other.6 Through the course of a
concerto, their dialogue or “conversation” with each other traces “the course of a
relationship” that develops as the work unfolds (CC1, RR98). “At issue is the
relationship between the solo and orchestra,” Kerman argues, as evidenced through
“musical syntax,... the way notes and groups of notes, harmonies, and rhythms follow
242
one another and ‘make sense’” (RR82). In Classical-era concerto form, an opening
orchestral ritomello typically establishes tonality and themes according to the first
movement concerto-allegro form; the subsequent solo entrance then responds in some
manner to what has come before. “The second element somehow refers to the first,”
Kerman notes. “The second may act as a varied repetition of the first, a sort of echo, a
response, a rebuttal, a correction, a completion, or some combination o f these things”
(RR83). Thus begins the particular concerto’s “relationship story,” that is, “a musical
process that can be read as narrative,” plotted by its composer and enacted by its
performers (CC52).
Such musical dialogues between solo and orchestra are commonly labeled
statement-and-response or question-and-answer, but Kerman seeks “fresher tropes” to
describe the musical relationships between concerto agents. He proposes descriptive
associations “derived by analogy from human relationships” to personify concerto
agents (CC50). The musical relationships inherent in the concerto’s compositional
structure thus invite analogies to the human relationships effected through the
performance of the work. Kerman writes,
Concertos not only bring dissimilar musical forces into play, they also
enact scenes of human activity. Men and women and groups are
brought into conjunction, cooperation, confrontation. Hence the
common tendency to personify the solo and the orchestra in
concertos— as conversationalists, as debaters, as antagonists, as
Orpheus and the Furies. (CC3)
243
In such anthropomorphizing analyses, the concerto becomes a drama that plays out
lived relationships. The soloist and orchestra become “agents who attempt, guide,
accept, succeed, and enjoy or suffer a relationship” (RR82). Their interactions may be
“playful, antagonistic, supportive, exploitative, and so on”— any variety of “human
action-qualities” (CC50).
Kerman enagages these interpretive strategies in his analysis of the
Chaikovsky Violin Concerto (op. 35). In the first movement he hears the orchestra
performing the role of “servant” and “slave” to the virtuoso solo’s “mistress,” “diva,”
“prima donna,” and “minx”—and not to limit the gender specifications, also “cad”
(CC52-58). Discussing the slow movement o f the Schumann Piano Concerto (op. 54),
he hears a relationship of “conjugal love” as “the piano and the orchestra clearly
assume the role o f ‘lovers,’” further evidence for the genre’s connotations of
“romance.” The mention of Orpheus alludes to Owen Jander’s theories regarding a
dramatic programme for the slow movement of Beethoven’s G major Concerto (op.
58): the solo pianist (as Orpheus) entreats with increasing ardor the initially reluctant
orchestra (as the Furies) to release Eurydice.7
The analogy of concerto soloist and orchestra to the mythological hero and
chorus of Greek drama already has a long history, but it does invite consideration of a
further aspect o f the concerto’s dramatization which is rarely discussed: the mythic
244
significance o f the relationships enacted between concerto agents in performance.
Cultural myths about the relationship of humans to the Divine, to Nature, and
to each other are enacted through rituals, be they religious or political,
commemorative or celebratory. Christopher Small argues that the performance of
classical music works such as the concerto has become a type of social ritual in which
acts of music-making and listening provide us with models of interpersonal
relationship and perpetuate these ideals through tradition. He regards any musical
performance as “an encounter between human beings that takes place through the
medium of sounds organized in specific ways”—not a far leap from Kerman’s notion
of the concerto relationship as an encounter between “concerto agents” through the
medium of musical syntax.8
Though Kerman only briefly touches on the concerto’s significance as a
performative act, Small elaborates further on this point:
The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set

of relationships... . They are to be found not only between those
organized sounds which are conventionally thought o f as being the stuff
of musical meaning, but also between the people who are taking part, in
whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as
metaphor for ideal relationships as the participants in the performance
imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between
individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and
even perhaps the supernatural world. (13)
The relationship Small sees enacted by “the people who are taking part” in the ritual of
245
a concerto is one o f struggle between soloist and orchestra—or, in the broader
perspective of myth, the struggle of the heroic individual against the greater collective
or a higher power:
The struggle that is represented by every piece that goes by the name of
concerto is that which in Western society is assumed to take place
between the individual, with his or her need for freedom and mobility,
and the need to preserve the integrity of the social fabric. There is a
paradoxical relationship between soloist and orchestra, for the soloist,
who represents freedom and mobility, appears to be set in opposition to
the orchestra, representing the social order. The sharply defined
individual is set against the large and anonymous group, and his [or
her] energy and powerful transgressive individuality threatens to tear
apart the social fabric. (181)
Invoking a specific mythologized figure, Small compares the soloist in “the classical
concerto-drama” to Hamlet, “another disturber of the social order, who is finally
destroyed by it” (181). As a musical analogy to dramatic narrative, the concerto can be
seen as one of numerous representations of this mythologized struggle found
throughout literature and the arts.9
Other commentators have also considered the concerto a musical enactment of
the struggle between “the powerful and multicolored orchestra and its weak but high-
spirited adversary,” as Chaikovsky once described it (RR97). David Owen Norris
recognizes “the complex ritual” of the concerto’s performance, and he considers the
“gladiatorial” model o f many Romantic piano concertos as a product o f the hero
246
mythology surrounding the virtuoso soloist. The nineteenth-century pianist, as
“Lonely Genius,” became “the picture of rational humanity, [and] stood alone against
the blind forces of Nature, represented (aptly enough on occasions) by the orchestra.
He struggled, they struggled back. The soloist’s science and skill led to his inevitable
triumph.”10 Bernard Holland considers the piano concerto in a political context with
regard to certain works by twentieth-century Soviet composers. “Struggle is native to
the concerto format, so why not political struggle—where the individual tames the
inchoate mob and leads it to crashing major-triad victory.”"
But in the mythic ritual of the Romantic concerto, the heroic solo is not
appropriate for just any pianist. The role of “gladiator” demands a culturally
sanctioned type to affirm the lesson of the ritual, or suffer the consequences o f a
hubristic resistance.12 Norris’s specifically masculine “Lonely Genius” can bring the
concerto to Holland’s “crashing major-triad victory,” but in popular-culture
representations such an attempt at performative battle is problematic for the concerto
heroine.
As Small asserts, the ritualized conflict enacted by the concerto is predicated
on “the need to preserve the integrity of the social fabric” (181), and gender hierarchy
is certainly one of the foundations of patriarchal social order. In his essay on the 1945
British classic Brief Encounter, Richard Dyer notes the extensive use o f
247
Rachmaninoffs Second Piano Concerto on the film’s soundtrack, and considers the
piano concerto in general as a cinematic device conveying “the idea of the individual
(the soloist) seized by overwhelming emotions.’’13 He notes the significance of such
concertos in “women’s films” of the 1940s, where the music’s evocation of struggle is
paralleled to a narrative about romantic strife endured by the female protagonist. In
this sense, melodramas such as Brief Encounter and a host of 1940s “concerto films”
such as The Great Lie and Dangerous Moonlight establish the Romantic piano
concerto as a soundtrack signifier for romantic struggles resolved according to gender
hierarchy.14
Small cites the “live” concerto performance ritual as one example of
musicking, but what about representations of concerto performance in a film scene or
as a soundtrack device? To take Small’s theory one step further: cinema is also a site
of musicking, for it combines musical signification with the visual and dramatic
aspects apprehended by a film audience. The site of a concerto performance, “the
place where it is happening” (13), is not only Small’s concert hall but the cinematic
scene as well, where sight and sound (including both dialogue and music) serve as
representational devices to establish setting, character, action, and narrative. Kerman
notes that “concertos are viewed, witnessed as well as heard” in their performance
(CC3). Motion pictures can utilize the concerto both musically and visually to tap into
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the mythic associations of its performance-ritual and the drama of its relationship
story.
CHAIKOVSKY’S FIRST
If concertos are “witnessed as well as heard,” what does the beginning of
Chaikovsky’s famous First look like in performance? This work, described by its
composer as “a duel rather than a duet,” is probably the most popular piano concerto
of the nineteenth century in the entire classical repertoire today. In the Allegro non
troppo e molto maestoso which opens the first movement of the concerto, sight and
sound combine to tell a “relationship story” of musical confrontation.
A massed orchestra occupies the stage, an impersonal phalanx of
instrumentalists focused on its dominating leader, the conductor on his podium. In
front of them all is the soloist, commandeering an impressive grand piano. After a
subtle nod between soloist and conductor, indicating that both are prepared for the
ritual ahead, the conductor’s upbeat triggers the orchestra’s opening fanfare, a
descending four-note motive in the French homs, followed by the tutti chords that
punctuate the statement like affirming shouts. Meanwhile, the pianist waits. Small
credits the soloist with “subversive energies” during a concerto’s orchestral
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exposition: “In the concert hall, the sight of the soloist, still and silent, sitting at the
piano ..., waiting for the moment of entry, warns the audience of the potential for
disturbance that exists behind the bland surface of the opening tutti. His or her absence
of movement bring a rare visual element to the symphonic drama” (181). (But this
concerto’s short introduction is hardly bland!)
Suddenly, then, the pianist launches into sonorous D-flat major chords
bounding majestically across the keyboard, a soloistic opening salvo equally as
famous as the orchestra’s melodic theme. This entrance provides an excellent example
of what Kerman calls “the physicality of the concerto” (CC21), for it enacts bodily,
through pianistic gestures, a visual as well as acoustic confrontation between the
“concerto sound-bodies” o f the soloist and the orchestra. Delivered by the pianist’s
powerful arm motions, these chords convey a sense of strength and assertion on the
part of the soloist. Within a single measure of playing, the persona of the soloist as a
concerto agent has been established: strong, determined, dignified. Though the two
concerto agents seem to be at odds here—the piano hammers out strict “vertical”
chords while the orchestra plays a sweeping “horizontal” tune—these chords actually
buttress the orchestral melody rhythmically and harmonically (fig. 59).15
But in the course o f this opening section, the initial relationship of concerto
agents is immediately called into question. What had been an aggressive initiative on
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the part of the soloist becomes a less impressive thematic reiteration when the piano
attempts to take the tune itself. Kerman considers the piano replay o f the melody an
“anticlimax” because a solo piano, despite its melodic embellishments and “twitchy
acciaccatura rhythms,” cannot produce “effusive melody” as richly as orchestral
strings can: “The piano cuts its losses, fails to finish the tune, and drifts into a rather
petulant cadenza instead” (CC7). Though Kerman does not continue further with his
descriptive analysis, the subsequent orchestral resumption of the theme indicates that
the concerto’s opening musical contest has ultimately been decided. After back-and-
forth bantering with the piano over the four-note fanfare motive, the orchestra
triumphantly regains the melody, and the original hierarchy of concerto agents is
restored. The aggressive challenge of the soloist’s opening volley has been contained
by the greater ensemble, and the short first round is over. “After the opening tune is
heard two and a half times it disappears, notoriously, forever” (CC9).
The dramatic potential of this relationship story enacted by the opening of the
Chaikovsky First Concerto has not been lost on Hollywood. The Great Lie (1941)
showcases the concerto both in its plot and on its soundtrack to signify a similar
“duel” between the female soloist-protagonist and the social and romantic hierarchies
she must battle. The opening credits, for example, bring in the concerto directly with
the Warner Brothers logo, and the music continues along with a visual backdrop of a
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pianist’s hands performing the part with vigor. During this credits sequence, nine
different shots of the hands and the keyboard are spliced together, each with dramatic
over- and under-lighting to enhance the black-and-white contrast of the grand piano,
the keyboard, and the motion of the hands. This will clearly be a story about a pianist,
and the confrontational musical relationship enacted by the concerto’s introduction
seems to forecast a similarly melodramatic narrative.
The Great Lie is a story about the fierce rivalry between concert pianist Sandra
Kovak and Southern belle Maggie Patterson over the affections of two-timing playboy
boyfriend, Pete van Allen (fig. 60). Sandra—not only a “great pianist,” but also a
“great beauty”—is characterized as an impulsive and “extravagant” woman who flouts
conventions of appropriate feminine behavior. She indulges in drunken bacchanals,
and she proclaims lines like “Oh, I s h o u ld n ’t, but how I love to do things I
shouldn’t!”16 Director Edmund Goulding outlined her character with three attributes:
“A piano, brandy, and men. In that order!”17 Her forte-woman character represents the
transgressive liberated woman who is nevertheless a sympathetic figure at heart.
Sandra’s admirable talent and self-sufficiency balance her temperamental, irrational
nature.
As the story opens, Sandra’s just-consummated marriage to Pete turns out to be
invalid, as her divorce from her previous husband had not yet been finalized. She
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makes no claim to be an ideal wife, anyway (“You’ve got to be patient with me, Pete.
I’ve been a bachelor so long—so have you, for that matter. I should really have been a
dutiful wife and whipped up a little home dinner for you today”). Pete wants to
remarry the day Sandra’s divorce becomes finalized, but this happens to be the same
day she is scheduled to play the Chaikovsky concerto in Philadelphia. He declares his
proposal an ultimatum, she refuses to cancel her performance, he leaves her. In a scene
enacting the concerto’s dramatically “visual” introduction, Sandra retreats to the piano
and angrily pounds out the opening solo chords. The orchestral melody then joins in as
the scene shifts to the Philadelphia performance. In this short (1-1/2 minute)
encapsulation of the concerto, the music cuts from the opening theme directly to the
closing cadenza in the last movement, the final theme played in unison by both piano
and orchestra, and the brilliant virtuosic passages o f the coda. Sandra, an undaunted
and heroic soloist, receives a rousing ovation for her determined performance.
After several turns of the melodramatic plot,18 Sandra attempts to reclaim
Pete’s love through her child, but she is finally thwarted when he learns the truth of
the deception and chooses to stay with Maggie, his long-suffering and devoted wife. In
the closing scene, the concerto’s visual drama is presented again, but with a deciding
“moral.” Sandra retreats to the piano, and again pounds out the concerto’s defiant
introductory chords, but this time her gestures signal her resigned acquiescence and
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defeat in the battle over Pete and the baby. The orchestra enters with the opening
theme as the camera falls back on Maggie and Pete, the married couple now restored
to domestic bliss. This triumphant opening melody underscoring the closing credits
provides a musical signification of their victory (as “orchestra”) over the no-longer
heroic pianist. Both the story and the soundtrack of the film confirm the lesson of the
concerto-ritual— romantic reconciliation within the confines of the patriarchal social
order.
The Great Lie enjoyed a successful run in theaters and further popularized the
Chaikovsky First Concerto through its romantic story and star actors. Mary Astor won
an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for her role as Sandra Kovak, and at
the awards ceremony she thanked two people: her co-star Bette Davis and Chaikovsky
himself.19 Within a year, at least two arrangements o f the concerto’s opening melody
“as featured in The Great Lie” were published for amateur pianists, and an
unprecedented number of popular song adaptations o f this theme appeared. In 1941
and 1942 alone, at least ten different popular songs based on the Chaikovsky concerto
were published.20 The most popular of these, “Tonight We Love,” became a best
selling instrumental hit for dance bandleader Freddy Martin (featuring pianist Jack
Fina), and a “top ten” success in its vocal version featuring Clyde Rogers.21
While these Tin Pan Alley song adaptations feature the usual trite sentiments,
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in each case they assign a quality of romantic desire to the opening tune, as in “No
Greater Love”:
No greater love can I feel, Than I am feeling for you,

All other loves are unreal. Your love alone is always true....
Certain songs acknowledge the compositional origins— or even the non-diegetic
soundtrack applications—of the borrowed tune, as in “Concerto for Two” (fig. 61):
And when we kiss there’s a sound, Like violins all around,

And then the moment when we kiss again,
Our song becomes a thrilling concerto for two, for me and you.
Whether or not this flood of popular, romanticized song settings of the Chaikovsky
concerto can be credited to the box-office success of The Great Lie, still they
demonstrate the role of popular culture in establishing and perpetuating the
associations of “Romantic” desire surrounding the nineteenth-century piano concerto.
Aside from the famous introduction, another moment of dramatic relationship
between concerto agents in the Chaikovsky concerto has been appropriated for a
melodramatic film story. In the development section of the first movement, the soloist
takes over a repetitive four-note scalar pattern from the orchestra, and plays it in rapid
octaves which then lead into a cadenza. In Kerman’s analysis, this passage is another
example of “replay” (like the piano’s assumption of the first theme in the concerto’s
opening), specifically here an instance of “aggressive” replay. At this moment of
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“great confrontation” between the concerto agents, “[the piano] finally breaks
in—crashes in—with double-octave scale passages replaying material from the
orchestral climax. ... The increasingly heavy-handed orchestral development is cut
off, rejected violently (but so idiomatically) by solo replay” (CC43). It is this musical
“confrontation” that serves as the climactic moment of relationship in another
dramatization of the Chaikovsky concerto in the 1951 French film Ombre et lumiere
(Shadow and Light).
Like The Great Lie, Ombre et lumiere is a love-triangle story that pits a female
pianist against her rival (this time, the pianist's mentally disturbed half-sister) over the
love o f one man, but here— in a reversal of Sandra Kovak’s fate— the pianist-
protagonist does win and marry him, and may thus succeed in her musical/romantic
struggle. As the story begins, Isabelle Leritz performs the Chaikovsky concerto
repeatedly on a concert tour, until one evening her left hand cramps up from tension
just before the treacherous octaves. Frightened by dizzying hallucinations during the
orchestral tutti, and physically unable to play the demanding passage at the appropriate
moment (even after the conductor repeats the section), she suffers a nervous
breakdown and collapses onstage. Isabelle cannot counter the challenge presented by
the orchestra in this moment of “aggressive replay,” and this precipitates her initial
defeat.
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Later, after further plot machinations involving mental illness and her
vindictive half-sister Caroline,22 Isabelle determines to face her psychological demons
in public by performing the dreaded concerto once again (fig. 62). In the climactic
concert scene, Caroline looks on smugly, expecting Isabelle to fail once again in the
“aggressive replay” passage, but Isabelle now has the reassurance of her new
husband’s love and support. When the decisive moment arrives, she begins the octaves
too slowly, but quickly picks up tempo and conquers the passage. After the successful
performance, the happy couple celebrates Isabelle’s achievement, while Caroline sulks
out of the hall, defeated in her own way by this melodramatic concerto-struggle.
One of the advertising slogans for Ombre et lumiere described Isabelle as “a
famous female pianist who must choose between fame or love.” The identical catch-
phrase could apply equally well to “Concerto,” a short story by Borden Chase
published in 1939 in American Magazine (fig. 63).a “Concerto” relates the romantic
struggles endured by young pianist Myra Hassman as she studies under—and falls
desperately in love with—a temperamental Russian virtuoso named Goronoff. In the
course o f her concerto-struggle, Myra must ultimately decide between an impossible
reconciliation with her master, or renunciation of her career for true love.
In the story, Myra’s climactic concert debut is a performance o f the
Chaikovsky concerto in Carnegie Hall, with Goronoff himself conducting. Chase
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depicts the confrontational interaction of concerto agents enacted in the opening of the
work,24 and parallels the progression of Myra’s and Goronoff s relationship story to
the structure of the Chaikovsky concerto itself, wherein a “masculine” theme—the
opening melody— competes for domination over the concerto’s “feminine” themes.
“In every concerto one theme must predominate,” Myra learns, “and that is the
heroic—the male theme” (58). “A concerto is like that, Myra. There is a beginning,
then a blossoming out ... what you call the exposition. Then, in the end, like a man
who has lived, you see the result of his life” (128). This gendered contest of thematic
material hardly works as a formal analysis of the composition (the opening
“masculine” theme is missing from the rest of the work!), but it is one example of how
musical passages can be personified, and how a relationship between performing
human agents can be represented through the interaction of concerto agents.
While the relationship between Myra and Goronoff is hierarchical, it is initially
sympathetic in their performance. When the orchestra threatens to overwhelm Myra in
its speed and volume, the conductor is there to empower her.25But Myra’s “master”
begins to imagine a personal affront in her surpassing musical and technical mastery
of these themes. Suddenly their collaboration becomes a confrontation between soloist
and orchestra. Myra, sensing Goronoff s anger and insecurity, realizes that to gain the
performance would be to lose his love, and she attempts to convey her devotion
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through the second movement’s “feminine” theme.26 In the story, this melody is
represented as “her” theme, “the one she loved.”27 Myra’s melody con amore bears
some comparison to yet another popular song (published in 1942) based on the same
theme from the concerto, “Darling I Love You” (fig. 64):
Darling, I love you! What more, dear, can I say?

Except you’re lovely, You’re more than lovely, You are my inspiration.
This performance proves to be a decisive turning point in Myra’s life, for she
unintentionally alienates the jealous Goronoff, and then, out of grief and dismay,
decides to abandon her concert career altogether. She marries George, a childhood
friend who has always loved her, and together they raise a daughter, a pianist who
makes her own Carnegie Hall debut with the same concerto years later. Chase’s story
would be filmed seven years after its publication as I've Always Loved You, but
featuring the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto instead of the Chaikovsky as the music
of Myra’s romantic struggle.
RACHMANINOFF’S SECOND
When the piano concerto functions as non-diegetic music on the soundtrack,
the relationships that concerto agents enact within the musical composition can
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parallel the dramatic relationships that unfold within a particular story. B r ie f
E ncounter (1945) provides an exceptional document for the analysis o f such
musical/narrative correspondences because its soundtrack consists almost entirely of
excerpts from one particular work, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in C minor.28
Specific themes and passages from the concerto are mapped onto the female
protagonist’s emotional struggles with nostalgia, alienation, and loss, while other
concerto excerpts are assigned to the romantic relationship between the film’s two
main characters.
Adapted from a Noel Coward play,29 Brief Encounter relates the passionate but
frustrated love affair between Laura Jesson, a devoted housewife and mother, and
Alec Harvey, a married doctor. On one of Laura’s weekly shopping outings to a
nearby town, she meets Alec at the railway station, and over the next six weeks their
chance acquaintanceship grows into an intense attraction. For her part, Laura is tom
between the awakening of true romantic feelings and extreme guilt over her adulterous
situation. Recognizing the impossibility of their love for each other, Alec decides to
move abroad with his family; Laura nearly commits suicide, but ultimately returns to
her husband and home.
As with the Chaikovsky concerto incipit opening The Great Lie, the beginning
of Brief Encounter brings in the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto immediately with the
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main title and credits. Here, too, the correlation of film-beginning and concerto-
beginning establishes a parallel narrative progression between the two relationship
stories, the dramatic narrative enacted in the film and the musical one unfolding
through the concerto.30 As an express train rushes through the dark railway station, the
eight-measure piano solo introduction emerges from the roar, followed by the opening
C minor theme in the orchestra (mm. 1-42).
This theme can be considered the film’s “train station” motif; it is heard twice
more in connection with that locale. The low melody in the strings is accompanied by
the piano’s rising and falling arpeggios, which lend a turbulent and unsettled
“locomotion” churning away below. This opening concerto excerpt ceases just at the
highpoint of the second half of the first theme (as the next express train rushes by in
opposite direction), and the unresolved dominant seventh chord (m. 42) creates
anticipation for its harmonic resolution at some point later on the soundtrack.
Brief Encounter's story unfolds almost entirely through a flashback narrative
related by Laura’s interior monologue as she sits in her living room on the evening of
the final day of the affair, reminiscing about Alec and their weekly trysts. During the
first thirteen minutes of the film, the concerto excerpts on the soundtrack seems to
function non-diegetically, but it then becomes clear that the music’s source is located
within the narrative frame of the story. While her husband is engrossed in a crossword
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puzzle, Laura tunes the radio to a broadcast of the Rachmaninoff concerto; at this
point her reminiscences begin, triggered by the swelling music.3'
The concerto excerpt heard here is from the first movement’s recapitulation,
the return of the opening C minor “train station” theme which now continues past the
corresponding dominant seventh climax (m. 276) into the second theme in A-flat
major (beginning at m. 297). The soundtrack thus establishes a relationship between
the two locales of Laura’s story (railway station and living room) and “resolves” the
incomplete statement heard in the opening of the film. Later this same theme returns
again when Laura’s husband interrupts her reverie, begging her to turn down the radio
at the “deafening” fortissimo recapitulation (mm. 245-260).
Here, too, the music serves as a link to the dramatic events at the railway
station (Alec and Laura have just shared their first kiss as an express train roars past).
In this excerpt, however, the formerly supportive ensemble between the orchestral
melody and accompanying piano figurations has given way to a tense opposition
between soloist and orchestra. The long melodic phrases in the orchestra are set in
contrast to a completely different theme in choppy eighth-note octave chords, alia
marcia, in the piano part. This is a quintessential moment of conflict between the two
concerto agents, paralleling Laura’s own struggle to reconcile what happened at the
station with what her marriage and home life demand of her—but it is an impossible
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reconciliation, as mirrored in the polarity (to borrow Kerman’s terminology) between
piano and orchestra.
Aside from her husband, who also hears the concerto broadcast in the frame of
the story, Laura alone mediates the music that accompanies her flashback narrative.
All the music heard during Laura’s reminiscences is filtered through her own
subjectivity, thus the viewer comes to identify the concerto with her own
psychological perspective.32 Throughout Brief Encounter, excerpts from the first
movement of the Rachmaninoff concerto are used exclusively for moments of Laura’s
interior monologue without the inteijection of other characters’ voices; the first
movement is solely “her” private music.
The motif most frequently employed in this capacity is the second theme from
the recapitulation, played by the solo horn over quiet string chords (mm. 297-305).
This phrase is heard four times in the film, each time accompanying Laura’s private
thoughts about her alienation from those around her and her inability to communicate
her true feelings.33 As a referential soundtrack cue, the wistful solitude o f the solo
French hom phrase parallels the aloneness of Laura’s interior life. The same melody
was adapted for the popular song “I Think of You”34 in 1941, just a few years before
Brief Encounter was released. The song’s lyrics provide a remarkable intertext with
the way this particular theme is employed in the film to accompany Laura’s nostalgic
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reminiscences as she sits at home in her living room:
In the hush of the evening, as shadows steal across my lonely room,

I think o f you ...
From afar the music of violins comes softly through the gloom ...
So when dusk is falling, I live again the loveliness we knew,
I think of yo u ...
The other concerto excerpt in Brief Encounter that is strictly Laura’s own is,
appropriately enough, the solo cadenza passage from the second movement (mm. 479-
502). Laura deliberately misses her train and follows Alec back to his friend’s
apartment, but the two awkward lovers are interrupted by the friend’s unexpected
return. Guilt-stricken by the appearance of her situation, Laura runs away in the
pouring rain: “I know it was stupid to run, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt so utterly
humiliated and defeated and so dreadfully, dreadfully ashamed” (the excerpt heard
here is the “running” piano passages that lead up to the second movement’s cadenza).
Soon Laura stops running, leans on a lamppost to catch her breath, and comes
to terms with her predicament—at this moment the cadenza begins: “After a moment
or two I pulled myself together, and walked on in the direction of the station. ... I
suddenly realized that I couldn’t go home, not until I had got myself under more
control, and had a little time to think.” This cadenza moment brings “defeated” Laura
a temporary respite from her struggle with the surrounding ensemble of emotional
stimuli, marital and familial obligations, and social conventions. It also provides the
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audience a momentarily more intimate and perhaps sympathetic relationship to Laura
herself. Here, as in a concerto performance, attention is suddenly focused fully on the
soloist in his/her moment of improvisation.35
Aside from the musical cues which underscore Laura’s private reminiscences
and moments of introspection, other excerpts from the second and third movements of
the Rachmaninoff concerto are shared by Laura and Alec. These passages accompany
moments of dialogue (Kerman’s “concerto conversations”) between the two lovers,
and they reveal through the musical relationships of their concerto agents information
about the relationships between the characters they accompany.
For example, the main theme of the second movement, with its juxtaposition of
two seemingly “irreconcilable” rhythms (duples and triplets) between orchestra and
piano, accompanies scenes in which Laura and Alec discuss the impossibility of their
being together any longer. During one of the lengthiest concerto excerpts on the
soundtrack, the two lovers promise to meet each other again the following Thursday,
but also recognize that their ultimate farewell is foreseeable and unavoidable.
(Alec tells Laura) “I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving you, but now I
see it’s got to happen soon anyway. It’s almost happening already.”
(Laura tells herself) ‘Today was our last day together—our very last
together in all our lives.”
Underscoring such dialogue is the 2-against-3 duet between melody and
accompaniment (m. 389-442) as the rhythmic disjunction between soloist and
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ensemble parallels the incongruous relationship between the two lovers. The coda of
the second movement presents the climactic statement of this musical disunion, in
which the theme is heard in a slow, drawn-out melody in the strings while the winds
(in triplets) and piano counterpoint this with rising and falling chords (mm. 522-532).
“I want to die. If only I could die,” sighs Laura with resignation during this final
musical representation o f their impossible relationship.
The other concerto excerpt shared by Alec and Laura is more optimistic: the
famous “love theme” o f the concerto’s third movement which is heard three times in
the film (mm. 642-685 and 845-903). (This melody too was appropriated for a popular
song, “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” published in 1946 and recorded by numerous
artists through the 1950s and 1960s.36) Its first occurrence on the soundtrack
accompanies their chat in the railway station cafe as the two begin to fall in love.
Entranced by Alec’s quiet enthusiasm as he describes his medical work and
professional ideals, Laura comments, “You suddenly look much younger, almost like
a little boy”—whereupon this theme begins quietly on the soundtrack (with the piano
solo phrase, beginning at m. 658). Soon it crescendos to full volume when Laura
agrees to another rendezvous the following week (the next piano solo statement of that
theme, beginning at m. 862, increasing in volume when the accompanying orchestral
chords enter). The second occurrence of the “love theme” is heard when Laura and
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Alec drive out to the countryside and share a romantic moment on a stone bridge over
a small stream. Here the concerto excerpt begins with the chordal piano solo “lead in”
(m. 634-641), and continues through the orchestral statement of the melody and the
subsequent piano entry. Their dialogue, set against the “love theme” in the piano,
culminates in a kiss just at the climax of the phrase (m. 680) (fig. 65).
The third and final statement of the “love theme” on the soundtrack is a
significant moment both structurally in the concerto and narratively in the film. It is
heard immediately after Laura’s aborted suicide attempt at the railway station, as the
scene shifts back to her living room. At this point, however, Alec is no longer in the
story; rather it is Laura’s husband who rouses her from her reverie and comforts her,
suggesting that “it wasn’t a very happy dream” his wife had been having. The
soundtrack cuts to the grandiose final statement of the “love theme” at the Maestoso
(mm. 967-973, though this cue lasts only seven measures, up to the C major chord at
m. 973, which serves as the final cadence). In this culminating Maestoso, soloist and
ensemble are finally united and reconciled in a shared statement of the theme: the
soaring melody is in the orchestra, while the piano complements it harmonically with
blocked chords, resonating with the basses in low octaves and with the violins in
eighth-note articulations of the line in the upper treble.37
Kerman describes such a triumphant moment of musical reconciliation—a
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typical ending for the late-Romantic piano concerto— as the climax of a “mutual
rondo” movement. “An expansive tune that has been played by the orchestra and then
replayed by the piano comes back in the coda, sounded forth by both agents
simultaneously, in ecstatic unisons and octaves,” Kerman writes, characterizing this
final statement of the theme “as upbeat a consummation as anyone could wish”
(CC114). At the melodramatic conclusion of Brief Encounter, the Rachmaninoff “love
theme,” previously the musical cue for Laura’s and Alec’s (unconsummated)
relationship, is here assigned to Laura’s husband, who rescues his wife from her
strangely depressive reverie and redeems her adulterous experience through his
unconditional love. The soundtrack music appoints Laura’s husband, not Alec, as the
ultimate hero of her romantic struggle by assigning him final control of the Maestoso's
“mutual rondo.” “You’ve been a long ways away,” he tells his wife at the conclusion
of the film. “Thank you for coming back to me.” The marital relationship and ordered
domesticity have triumphed over Laura’s short-lived romantic affair.
The same moment of “mutual rondo” from the Rachmaninoff concerto—and a
similar affirmation of the patriarchal social order—figures prominently in the film
version of Borden Chase’s story “Concerto,” I've Always Loved You (1946). The film
follows the original story’s plot closely, maintaining Myra Hassman’s love triangle
dilemma, her musical/romantic struggle against the domineering conductor and
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“master” Goronoff, and the gendered associations of the concerto’s thematic structure.
On the soundtrack, however, the concerto chosen to enact Myra’s romantic struggle is
not the Chaikovsky First, as in the original story, but rather the Rachmaninoff Second.
This switch invites a comparison with Brief Encounter, which premiered just a year
before I ’ve Always Loved You. Like Laura in Brief Encounter, Myra must choose
between her duty to a dedicated husband and her uncontrollable romantic passion for
another man.
The Rachmaninoff concerto is heard in two lengthy performance sequences in
I've Always Loved You. The first of these is Myra’s Carnegie Hall debut, which
features a 12-minute abridgment of the concerto (a remarkably long segment of
continuous musical performance for a Hollywood feature film). While playing the
Andante sostenuto solo passage from the second movement (m. 503 onward), Myra
gazes lovingly at Goronoff, who has paused in his conducting to watch her. But when
the orchestra enters, the melody in the strings is heard more softly on the soundtrack
than the accompanying piano figurations. To the viewer-listener it might seem as if the
orchestra and its conductor have been rendered secondary as the piano soloist has
taken the musical spotlight; indeed, the script explicitly highlights this dynamic, as a
man in audience remarks excitedly, “She’s taking over! Stealing the show from
Goronoff!” Gradually, however, the orchestral melody—identified earlier in the film
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as the concetto’s “heroic” and “masculine” theme, thus “Goronoff s theme”—begins
to overpower the piano figurations as Goronoff conducts with increasing vigor over
Myra’s accompaniment (from m. 517 onward). “We know that the soloist’s energy
and individuality will always be contained by the orchestral texture,” Small writes,
“and that it will not be overwhelmed by the orchestra” (CC181). Here, however, the
orchestra deliberately overpowers the soloist in volume and tempo as an acoustic
demonstration of G oronoff s power and displeasure over Myra’s abilities. This
musical disunion enacts the breakdown of their relationship, just as the same theme
marks Laura’s and Alec’s impending separation in Brief Encounter.
The intentional asynchronization of concerto agents is further exaggerated in
the closing section of the movement, as Myra struggles to stay together with the
orchestra. As the movement ends, she pleads in a voiceover, “What is it, Maestro?
Why are you angry? Don’t be angry with me, don’t fight against me, please!” It seems
that Myra has been musically defeated by Goronoff, who has “taught her who was the
master.” Then in the concluding Maestoso, supposedly the unifying and affirming
mutual rondo o f the concerto’s love theme, Goronoff and the orchestra speed up in
tempo, rushing ahead of the struggling soloist, who cannot keep up in tempo or
volume. At the end of the performance, Myra, in tears, runs offstage humiliated. As a
result of her crushing defeat in the concerto-struggle, she forsakes her professional
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concert career, marries her childhood friend George, and settles down to a quiet
domestic life on the farm.
The second concerto scene in I ’ve Always Loved You comes at the
melodramatic conclusion of the Him, when Myra and Goronoff confront each other
again in the same concerto and the same hall many years later. Myra agrees to this
second performative confrontation to set the record straight. When Goronoff reminds
her “I am your master!” she stands up to him: “You’re wrong, very wrong!” Her
master is now her good husband George, even if Myra might not love him with the
same passionate intensity she had once felt for Goronoff. From the podium Goronoff
taunts her, “You say I am not your master! Then play!” In this scene, which devotes
over eight minutes to the concerto performance, Myra performs with greater assurance
and determination than before. Now “the shoe is on the other foot,” as a stagehand
remarks, and Goronoff has to admit, “I was wrong, Myra. There is a woman in
music.”
But this mutual rondo does not affirm the relationship between Myra and
Goronoff, as it does not affirm Laura and Alec’s romance in B rief Encounter, instead,
it is once again the music of the established matrimonial order. In the middle of the
Maestoso conclusion, when Myra sees her beaming husband waiting backstage, she
gets up from piano and walks across the stage to him (!). “I love you, George! I’ve
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always loved you!” she exclaims as the orchestra continues on without her part. Here,
too, the female protagonist is reunited with her long-suffering loving husband, the real
hero of the concerto-struggle.
In two additional films from the period, the same mutual rondo from the
Rachmaninoff concerto enacts a pianist-protagonist’s romantic conflict resolved
through recourse to the matrimonial order. In each case, the film ’s concerto
performance scene follows a particular model of soundtrack editing: the opening or
exposition of the first movement cuts directly to the third movement’s final cadenza
leading into the triumphant concluding “mutual rondo.” In Rhapsody (1953), a
climactic performance o f the Rachmaninoff concerto (another eight-minute
arrangement) reconciles the troubled relationship between pianist James Guest and his
wife, Louise (fig. 66).38 In September Affair (1950), pianist Manina Stuart and a
married engineer carry on a secret adulterous affair in Italy, accompanied on the
soundtrack (as in Brief Encounter) by the concerto’s love theme at certain dramatic
moments: a passionate kiss, a farewell departure, a final moment of nostalgia during
the plane trip home. One evening when she is alone, Manina plays an arrangement
(composed by Leonard Pennario) of the love theme interpolated with phrases from
Kurt W eill’s “September Song,” a popular song about a May-to-December
relationship, a juxtaposition which brings associations of longing sadness and
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nostalgia to the concerto melody.
As with Myra in I ’ve Always Loved You, Manina’s climactic performance of
the Rachmaninoff concerto in Carnegie Hall provides a decisive moment of
renunciation in her relationship to David: realizing that his rightful place is with his
own wife and son, she decides to leave for South America immediately after the
conceit to put the affair behind her. “Our love was built on deception,” she tells him
with finality. “It had to end.” In the film’s closing credits, the love theme is again
interpolated with the melody of “September Song,” signifying a bittersweet victory of
duty over love.
EXCESS AND ILLNESS
The 1940s “concerto film” is typically classified as melodrama, a genre of
dramatic narrative emphasizing emotional and psychological aspects of plot and
character and incorporating musical elements for expressive effect. It is also
frequently a “woman’s film,” a category of film story produced primarily for female
audiences, about a female protagonist, and centered on aspects of domestic life (home
and family) and romantic relationship (marriage, affairs, adultery, the “fallen” woman,
love triangles, and so forth). The film melodrama provides a further context for the
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enactment of concerto relationships according to the formal, social, and psychological
determinants that shape its narrative and cinematic style.39 On the formal level,
concerto excerpts provide musical “punctuation” to emotional situations or settings, as
well as “structural significance”40 in conjunction with particular narrative events or
characterizations, as in the case of Brief Encounter's separation theme, or the mutual
rondo scenes closing many concerto films.
Melodrama’s social significance involves its representation of power relations,
particularly (in the woman’s film) the relationship of a female protagonist to some
manifestation of the patriarchal social order: a husband/father figure, the bourgeois
family/home ideal, or the range of social conventions which shape and control a
woman’s identity and agency. The story of her struggle within or against the social
order can be paralleled to the metaphoric struggle enacted musically through the
concerto, particularly when this character is a pianist who performs the confrontation
publicly. But her act of desire and defiance entails a certain degree of suffering, the
emotional impact of which is heightened when the narrative and/or musical
perspective of the film belongs to the story’s suffering victim, as in Brief Encounter.*1
The resolution of this valiant but doomed endeavor comes about through her ultimate
capitulation in the face of those greater forces. This capitulation might entail
renouncing the object of desire (her child in The Great Lie, her lover in Brief
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Encounter, her career in I ’ve Always Loved You) and reconciling herself to the
patriarchal social order.42
Constraining the protagonist’s agency and desire—and pre-ordaining the
impossibility of her struggle—generates a high degree of emphatic, overwrought
(“melodramatic”) emotional tension within the story.43 This is the psychological
significance of the melodramatic narrative. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith explains, the
impossibility of a “happy ending” which resolves all the accumulated desires and
conflicts generates a melodramatic excess, and “the more the plots press towards a
resolution the harder it is to accommodate the excess” (73). This over-the-top pressure
does have a cinematic outlet, however:
The undischarged emotion which cannot be accommodated within the

action, subordinated as it is to the demands of family/lineage/
inheritance [the patriarchal social order], is traditionally expressed in
the music and ... in certain elements of the mise en scene. That is to
say, music and mise en scene do not just heighten the emotionality of
an element of the action: to some extent they substitute for it. (73)
In musicals, Nowell-Smith asserts, music and dancing are the means for “the
siphoning o f the excess” (74) generated by the plot’s push for resolution. In the
concerto film, by extension, the soundtrack music or “performance” itself can convey
this emotional release, often in the story’s climactic concluding scene.
Nowell-Smith further theorizes this mechanism of the film melodrama in
Freudian terms, linking it to the psychopathology of hysteria. Just as psychic trauma is
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somatized into physical symptom according to psychoanalytic theory, the
melodrama’s “unaccomodated excess” repressed at the narrative level is transferred
onto or into “the body of the text” itself, including the musical soundtrack.44 As a
“hysterical” soundtrack device, then, the concerto can embody or enact a character’s
psychological interiority and represent relationships within that character’s body, or
between “sides” o f the body or mind—another “personification” of dialogue or
conflict between concerto agents.
In many films, psychosomatic illness is the metaphorical representation o f such
conflict. In Ombre et lumiere, for example, Isabelle’s Chaikovsky performance
induces her physical paralysis and mental hallucinations. In B rief Encounter, Laura
considers herself a “neurotic creature”—she breaks into unpredictable, unexplainable
fits of laughter or tears, and suffers from debilitating faints that she cannot explain.
Her lovesickness is equated with hysteria by her husband’s question regarding the
crossword puzzle (in which “romance” fits in with “delirium”), and as an explanation
for her fainting spells she suggests with resignation, “I suppose I must be that type of
woman.” The Rachmaninoff concerto, as soundtrack music tied directly to her
interiority, carries the melodramatic excess of her psychosomatic affliction.
Six film melodramas from the 1940s demonstrate this basic narrative o f the
concerto film. A female pianist-protagonist struggles to assert individual agency and
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desire against the confines of the surrounding patriarchal social order (represented by
her husband, doctor, mentor, manager, teacher, or conductor). A psychosomatic
condition afflicts the protagonist, its effects coming to the fore in a climactic moment
of confrontation, the concerto performance itself. This performance culminates in her
physical and/or emotional collapse. As resolution to this defeat (if there is a happy
ending), an appropriate romantic relationship alleviates the distress and restores her
proper place within the social order.
• Stress and strain: In Gefahrtin meiner Sommers (Companion o f my

Summer) (Germany, 1943), a pianist suffers a mental and physical
breakdown after her concerto performance. Press materials for the film
describe how “Nature Decides: At the high point of her career pianist
Angelika Rink suffers a collapse and decides to return to her home in
the countryside” (fig. 67). She marries her doctor and settles down to a
quiet life.45
• An affair of the heart: In Love Story, also known as A Lady

Surrenders (UK, 1944), a pianist keeps secret from her boyfriend the
fact that she has a life-threatening heart disease (fig. 68). To help him
cure his impending blindness, she performs her newly-composed
concerto (Hubert Bath’s Cornish Rhapsody) despite her physical
weakness, collapsing into his arms at the end.
• A broken heart: In Solistin Anna Alt (Soloist Anna Alt) (Germany,

1944), a self-sacrificing pianist performs her husband’s newly-
composed piano concerto despite warnings from her doctor about her
“weak heart.” After her near-fatal collapse during the performance,
Anna gains new strength to live through her husband’s devotion.
• Neurosis: In The Seventh Veil (UK, 1945), a pianist is plagued with a

phobia of injuring her hands. When the memory of a childhood caning
on her hands resurfaces just before her performance of the Grieg
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Concerto, she struggles valiantly through the piece, then collapses

onstage as the ovation begins.
• Tuberculosis: In The Other Love (1947), Anton Rubinstein’s Concerto

in D minor (op. 70) provides the melodramatic background music. In
this story, a pianist learns she has tuberculosis after collapsing during a
performance. At a Swiss sanatorium she falls in love with her doctor,
but then runs off with a dashing playboy. A fter near-tragic
consequences, she returns to marry her forgiving doctor.46
• Amnesia: In While I Live (UK, 1947), the accidental death of Olwen

Trevelyan leaves her new piano concerto (Charles Williams’s Dream o f
Olwen) unfinished. Twenty-five years later, a mysterious young woman
suffering from amnesia seems to be a reincarnation of the dead pianist.
She plays Olwen’s concerto note-perfectly, but collapses at the point
where the piece was left unfinished47
A female character might also perform (to) the “excessive” concerto even if
she is not a pianist. In The Story o f Three Loves (1952), Rachmaninoffs “Rhapsody
on a Theme o f Paganini” is the music for an acclaimed choreographer’s new ballet.
Paula Woodward is a talented ballerina who yearns for the leading role, but she
collapses unexpectedly in the middle of the audition because she suffers from a serious
heart condition. After attending the ballet’s premiere, Paula stays behind and dances
alone on the deserted stage as the music echoes in her mind. Here, as in B rief
Encounter, the concerto discloses the female protagonist’s psychological interiority
and conveys the narrative excess of her emotion. Paula embodies the concerto struggle
and its melodramatic excess through her own mortally ill body. “You’re music itself!”
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exclaims the choreographer, who had watched her solo from the wings. Later, the two
proclaim their love for each other to the mutual rondo of the Rhapsody’s famous
Eighteenth Variation.48
Even without a concerto “performer,” the melodrama can enact the mythology
of struggle through a piano concerto-style soundtrack. This is evident in the following
four films about “fallen” women, a female character-type who has challenged the
patriarchal social order and must suffer the consequences:
• In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947), Franz Waxman’s

“Appassionata”49 is the soundtrack leitmotif for Maddelena Paradine, “a
woman who has seen a great deal of life.” She is accused of arranging
the murder of her wealthy blind husband. In the opening scene, Mrs.
Paradine plays a piano solo version of the “Appassionata” just before
her arrest. Later, when her lawyer searches her home, a piano concerto-
style arrangement of the theme signifies the seductive allure of her
private world and the struggle he faces in controlling his romantic
feelings for her.
• In The L-Shaped Room (UK, 1962), an excerpt of Johannes Brahms’s

Piano Concerto in D minor (op. 15) accompanies the story about a
young woman expecting an illegitimate child. This music plays during
the opening credits, as Jane walks through the gritty neighborhood of
Notting Hill Gate searching for a room to rent. Other excerpts
underscore her nascent love affair with a handsome writer (romance),
as well as her emotional and physical anguish as she recovers from an
overdose of abortion pills (struggle).
• In Ross Hunter’s production of Madame X (1965), the frequently-

remade story about a woman unjustly accused of adultery and murder,
Charles W illiam s’s “Swedish Rhapsody”50 accom panies the
protagonist’s nostalgic reminiscences and her struggles against
depression. Her crisis comes to a climactic “performance” when her
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own son is her defense lawyer in the concluding trial scene. The
concerto sounds again as she dies soon afterwards in the courtroom jail
cell.
• In Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (I960), when a young woman arrives

at a restaurant to rendezvous with her married boss, the pianist breaks
into “her” song on the piano (Adolf Deutsch’s “Hong Kong Blues,”
subsequently known as the ‘Theme from The Apartment'). She wryly
comments, “They got it on a long-playing record now: Music to String
Her Along By." Later in the film, a piano concerto-style arrangement of
the theme accompanies her emotional heartbreak over the affair and her
near-fatal suicide attempt.
Not only female characters struggle through a piano concerto in the film
melodrama. Nowell-Smith notes that the melodrama “often features women as
protagonists, and where the central figure is a man there is regularly an impairment of
his ‘masculinity.’”51 In the following four films, an unfinished piano concerto
represents the identity crisis of a male pianist-protagonist whose masculinity is called
into question by some form of mental or physical impairment.52 As a result, the would-
be composer is unable to complete or perform his own concerto, just as he is unable to
consummate his relationship with a female character. This plot line may owe some of
its inspiration to the well-known story of Sergei Rachmaninoffs psychological
breakdown in connection with the composition of his Second Piano Concerto.53
• Shell-shocked stupor: In Dangerous Moonlight (UK, 1941), a Polish

pianist composes a concerto (Richard Addinsell’s “Warsaw Concerto”)
inspired by his fiancee. The concerto serves as a representation of their
relationship: “This music is you and me. It’s the story of the two of us
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in Warsaw, of us in America, of us in—where else I don’t know. That’s

why I can’t finish it.” Stefan is drafted to fight for his country, and his
plane is shot down. He survives in a uncomprehending stupor,
pounding out dissonant clusters on the piano, until his wife rouses him
by softly humming “their” theme. The concerto’s mutual rondo sounds
as Stefan suddenly recognizes her again.
• Disfigured desire: In the 1943 filming of Phantom o f the Opera, a

disfigured violinist-composer writes a concerto (by Edward Ward)
based on a melody sung by his beloved opera singer. He kidnaps her
and forces her to sing along to his composition, an act of involuntary
musical consummation. When she tears away his mask, revealing the
horrible disfigurement, the soundtrack concerto suddenly disintegrates
into a series of dissonant chords— their mutual rondo is destroyed. In
the end, the phantom is also destroyed—“his suffering and madness
will be forgotten, but his music, his concerto, will remain.”
• Psychosis and pyromania: In Hangover Square (1945), a composer

suffers from a Jekyll/Hyde-type schizophrenia which provokes him to
murder whenever he hears a discordant noise. The police catch up with
him as he premieres his new piano concerto (Bernard Herrmann’s
“Concerto Macabre”), but he sets the house on fire and plays on alone
till the end, consumed by the flames.54
• Blindness and bitterness: In Night Song (1947), a blind pianist

struggles to complete his half-written concerto (by Leith Stevens). A
beautiful young socialite falls in love with him, and helps overcome his
bitterness through her love and generosity. Dan undergoes a successful
operation to regain his sight, and eventually wins it all: his concerto, his
sight, and a devoted muse whom he marries.
Though films such as Dangerous Moonlight and Night Song feature male
pianist-protagonists struggling against physical or mental handicaps to achieve
musical and romantic conquest, these two melodramas can still be considered
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examples of the woman’s film for the starring roles played by Sally Gray or Merle
Oberon, respectively, as the afflicted male’s benefactor, muse, and love interest.
Publicity for Night Song demonstrates that this is also a story of a woman’s struggle to
achieve idealized romantic relationship. In a direct appeal to female viewers, a poster
proclaims that “only another woman’s heart would understand why she dared this
strange deception to win his love” (fig. 69). One newspaper review of Night Song
considered the film “A Concerto for Miss Oberon,” assigning the concerto struggle to
the female protagonist herself.55
Even the recent hit film S h i n e (1995) fits the category of the
melodrama/women’s film. Nowell-Smith asserts that “the Hollywood melodrama is
also fundamentally concerned with the child’s problems of growing into a sexual
identity within the family, under the aegis of a symbolic law which the Father
incarnates” (73). In Shine, David struggles against the social order represented by his
excessively overbearing father and the “battleground” environment of his childhood
home. In contrast to the castrating paterfamilias,56 several sympathetic females
(replacing his own weak and ineffectual mother) nurture David’s agency and desire:
the waitress Sylvia (who takes him in from the rain and gets him a job), the maternal
Katharine (who supports his plans to study abroad), the volunteer social worker Beryl
(who takes him out of the sanatorium), and finally Gillian, who becomes his wife. She
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can be regarded as the ultimate heroine of David’s concerto-struggle.57
CONCERTO AS CATHARSIS
Film historians have discussed the abundance of melodramas and women’s
films during the 1940s in light of that decade’s social, economic, and ideological
changes affecting women’s place in the patriarchal social order. Elsaesser, for one,
notes melodrama’s “interiorization and personalization of what are primarily
ideological conflicts.”58 Many aspects of public and private relationship were evolving
during this period, from career opportunities and professional relations to domestic
ideals and sexual mores. The soundtrack concerto, representing the concept of
relationship in musical and performative terms, could provide a powerfully evocative
metaphor for such conflicts and their resolution.
In addition to heightening the degree of emotional “excess” in these film
melodramas, the high-art associations of the piano concerto could also vouchsafe the
“acceptability” of stories about adulterous love and subversive desire, and justify the
vicarious identification female audiences may have felt for the “forte women” who
fought their way through piano concertos.59 A 1950s survey of British cinema
audiences measured the emotional impact of particular films in terms of whether they
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caused viewers to cry. Not surprisingly, Brief Encounter's subject matter prompted an
emotional reaction, but respondents also mentioned the power of the film’s soundtrack
music to bring forth tears.60 Similarly, Stewart Granger (who plays the male lead role
in Love Story opposite the dying female pianist) notes the emotional impact o f the
melodramatic music in his film: “Margaret Lockwood is dying of some unnamed
disease. We meet. I don’t tell her I’m going blind. She doesn’t tell me she’s dying.
The audience knows all this but we don’t. ... She is a pianist/composer and writes the
‘Cornish Rhapsody’ ... It was a smash hit and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”61
The trope o f romantic struggle associated with the soundtrack piano
concerto— confrontation resolved through reconciliation or renunciation, affliction
overcome through loving relationship— has attained a level of mythic familiarity
through its retellings in numerous films over the past seven decades. The emotional
appeal of this convention is clear from the continuing popularity of cinematic
concerto-struggles (witness Shine, Hilary & Jackie, and other films). The “Romantic”
appeal of this convention is clear from the kinds of stories that get told about and
around the pianists who play these works. Gillian Helfgott puts her finger on the crux
of the matter when she writes that the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto “seemed to pour
out from [David’s] soul. He was surrendering to the music. The keys appeared to be an
extension of his self, as the man, the music, and the piano became one.”62 “Becoming
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one”—technically and musically with the concerto, or physically, psychologically, and
romantically through the concerto— is the real story of the concerto film.
1 It seems likely that excerpts from popular nineteenth-century piano concertos were also used to
accompany silent film screenings in the period before sound Films. Lawsuits in the 1920s prevented the
reproduction of current popular song tunes in published collections of music for silent-film pianists; to
avoid copyright infringement publishers reprinted music already in the public domain, particularly
works by “classical” nineteenth-century composers. However, the most famous of these collections,
Emo Rapee’s Motion Picture Moods fo r Pianists and Organists (1924), contains no specific concerto
excerpts.
2 “Warsaw Concerto” became the first best-selling recording o f music from a Film soundtrack, and a
favorite sheet-music selection for amateur pianists. Its main theme became a standard for dance bands
and ballroom orchestras, and in the late 1950s it was also adapted into a song titled “The World
Outside.” See Appendix: List of Popular Songs and Arrangements.
3 Publicity for the Film emphasized the technical difficulty and musical challenges of this piece in order
for its practice and performance scenes to carry dramatic impact. For example; “Between the Rach III
and a Hard Place: A Notoriously Brutal Concerto Stars in a New Film,” U.S. News and World Report
121/22 (December 2, 1996): 78. See also the “Symposium” on David Helfgott and Shine in Philosophy
and Literature 21/2 (October 1997): 332-391. Kevin Bazzana, in his essay “Hot with Chutzpah” in that
collection, asserts that “the best that can be said of Helfgott’s Rach 3 is the best that can be said of most
of his performances: he gets by, he gets through to the end without total collapse. But he never
commands the music.” Kevin Bazzana, “Hot with Chutzpah, ”Philosophy and Literature 21/2 (October
1997): 384-85.
The concerto's utility as a cinematic soundtrack device applies not only for pianists, as there are
numerous depictions of other instrumentalists enduring melodramatic tribulations in relation to a
concerto. In Humoresque (1946), a virtuoso violinist seduces a wealthy married woman through his
performance of Lalo’s Symphonic Espagnole, but she later drowns herself in romantic desperation to
the strains of his Liebestod transcription. Erich Wolfgang Komgold’s cello concerto lends an anxious
edge to Deception (1947), the story of a cellist tormented by his own performance anxieties and caught
in a romantic triangle involving his blackmailed wife and a vindictive composer. Edward Elgar’s cello
concerto provides a musical climax in the recent Film Hilary & Jackie (1998), the story of cellist
Jacqueline DuPrd’s tragic struggle with multiple sclerosis dramatically embellished with a subplot
involving another love triangle.
5 Arthur Hutchings, Thomas Walkers, et al., “Concerto,” The New Grove Dictionary o f Music and
Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (1981), IV: 627.
6 Joseph Kerman, Concerto Conversations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999): 83. Hereafter
CC. Joseph Kerman, “Representing a Relationship: Notes on a Beethoven Concerto,” Representations
39 (Summer 1992): 80-101. Hereafter RR.
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7 Owen Jander, “Beethoven’s ‘Orpheus in Hades’: The Andante con moto of the Fourth Piano
Concerto,” 19th-Century Music 8/3 (Spring 1985): 195-212. Also “Orpheus Revisited: A Ten-Year
Retrospect on the Andate con moto of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto,” 19th-Century Music 19/1
(Summer 1995): 31-49.
8
Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings o f Performing and Listening (Hannover: Wesleyan
University Press, 1998): 10.
9 In her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), Ayn Rand presents her hero-protagonist John Galt as a composer
writing a great piano concerto, “the Concerto of Deliverance" (685). This work represents the intense
struggle of the select “prime movers” against the greed and indifference o f the debased masses. Rand
describes the music as a triumphant force overcoming apathetic inertia: “The notes flowed up, they
spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion,
they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of
sound, breaking out o f hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom o f release and the tension of
purpose. ... It was the song of an immense deliverance.” Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York:
Random House, 1957): 20, 1083.
10 David Owen Norris, “The Long March o f the G ladiators,” Piano <fc Keyboard 182
(September/October 1996): 31.
11 Bernard Holland, “The Solo Concerto As a Paradigm of Social Struggle,” The New York Times
(December 21, 1986): H23.
~ Not surprisingly, popular cliches about this “heroic” struggle have prompted numerous parodies.
Victor Borge spoofs the opening of the Chaikovsky concerto in one o f his famous skits: he nearly falls
off the bench playing the wide-reaching chords, and promptly dismisses the piece as “a little too
dangerous.” Sid Ceasar presented a pantomime spoof of the Grieg Piano Concerto on his 1950s
television comedy series. Miming the piano as he faces the audience, he “plays” the opening flourishes
but painfully stubs his little finger on a dramatic low note. In Monty Python’s “Farming Club/Life of
Tchaikovsky,” a skit from their 1970s television comedy series, “world-famous soloist Sviatoslav
Richter” performs a Houdini-esque feat as he escapes from a sack, three padlocks, and a pair of
handcuffs while playing the opening chords. In An American in Paris12 (1951), Oscar Levant daydreams
about performing Gershwin’s Concerto in F, but in his scenario he takes on the roles o f all concerto
agents involved: not only the virtuoso soloist but also the conductor, the string section, percussion
section, and even audience members shouting “Bravo!”
13 Richard Dyer, Brief Encounter, BFI Film Classics (London: British Film Institute, 1993): 17.
14 ....
The applications of Baroque and Classical-era concertos on film soundtracks is a topic beyond the
scope of this chapter, but in many cases the music generates similar associations. A famous example is
the “Elvira Madigan” piano concerto by Mozart (no. 21 in C major, K. 467) made famous by the 1967
Swedish film of that title. Here the music accompanies a story of romantic struggle between two lovers
as well.
15 This “confrontational” relationship between the two concerto agents was not Tchaikovsky’s original
conception for the work. As Norris describes it, “The opening was originally accompanied by gentle
harped chords on the piano, which matched the string pizzicato and balanced the lightly-scored melody.
... [Chaikovsky] was persuaded to replace his delicate beginning with the bombastic fortissimo chords
that now form so important a part of his concerto's public image.” Norris, 32.
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16 The portrayal of Sandra Kovak as a pianist is pure Hollywood invention. In the original 1936 novel
by Polan Banks, The Far Horizon, the corresponding character is an actress.
17 In The Motion Picture Guide, ed. Jay Robert Nash (Chicago: Cinebooks, 1985): 1098.
18
Disillusioned Pete takes the opportunity of Sandra’s professional dedication to run off and marry
Maggie, his erstwhile fiancee, instead. Some days later he is off on a government expedition to South
America, during which his plane crashes and he is assumed dead. When Sandra finds herself pregnant
with his child, Maggie, his legal widow, strikes a strategic bargain with her rival: Pete’s child in
exchange for lifelong financial security. The deal between the two women becomes their “great lie”
when the missing father does return, alive, to find Maggie caring for the baby as her own.
19 Whitney Stine, Mother Goddam: The Story o f the Career o f Bette Davis (New York: Hawthorn
Books, 1974).
20 Additional published song adaptations of themes from the Chaikovsky concerto: “Dream Melody,”
“The Song Tschaikowsky Wrote,” “The Stars Look Down,” “Lilacs and Love,” “Silent Love,” “Down
Thru the Years,” “A Million Years,” and “My Heart Is Yours.” See Appendix: List o f Popular Songs
and Arrangements.
21 Frank Sinatra also sings a portion of the song in Anchors Aweigh (1945), with Jose Iturbi playing the
piano. When Iturbi tells him the tune is by Chaikovsky, Sinatra’s character replies: “You must be
mistaken, buddy. Freddy Martin wrote that. I heard it on the radio at least a thousand times!” Iturbi
blithely retorts, “Well, you know, those fellas, they steal from each other!”
22 After recuperating in a sanatorium, Isabelle learns that she is prone to a relapse of hereditary insanity.
She falls in love with a handsome young man, unaware that he has recently jilted her half-sister
Caroline. Tortured by Caroline’s resentful bitterness over their affair and by the stigma of her own
professional failure, Isabelle elopes with her new lover and renounces her career.
J Borden Chase, “Concerto,” American Magazine 128 (December 1939): 53-148.
24
“’Da, ta, ta, ta-a-a—da, ta, ta, ta-a-a—da, ta, ta, ta-a-a!' Myra was singing the orchestral opening!
Then, one, two, three—and one, two— her hands caught the keys and the first crashing octave chords
came from the piano. One, two, three—and the orchestra was following, following, playing the theme.
... The heroic theme—the male theme. And Myra was beating the chords back at them. Hard and cold
and very exact—just as Goronoff had taught" (129).
“Soon she had caught them. Caught the orchestra. They were both racing along in a mad and wild
chase. Hand in hand, each straining to lead. But Myra forged ahead. It was her night. She was queen.
She was the soloist And as the movement drew toward its end, a slow, swelling sense of power crept
into her body” (130).
26 “And, as the movement swept on to the cadenza that would herald the return of the first theme, Myra
answered. With the skill of a thousand nights of practice she rounded the theme and tried to tell
Goronoff he was her love” (130).
27 “First, a few plucked notes from the strings, delicate, hesitant, and filled with promise. Then, like a
woman coming over a far green hill, the theme moved into being. And with its coming Myra came of
age” (130). “And she played it as a mother might to her child. Played it through to the change of rhythm
and the change o f emotion that divided the second movement. This was faster, laughing and light.
Myra’s hands quickened their pace. They raced along and romped with the notes. Faster and faster and
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ever so lightly. Playing for Goronoff. Playing for the master. Making him proud, and prouder than
proud” (148).
28
There is additional music heard occasionally throughout the film, but this non-concerto material has a
specific function as “public” music—music of a public space encountered by Laura and her
lover—accompanying moments of optimism or innocent happiness: a barrel organ on a street comer
plays “Let the Great Big W orld Keep Turning,” an amateurish restaurant trio performs light classical
music, and music at the cinem a includes the soundtracks to a Donald Duck cartoon and Flames o f
Passion.
29 “Still Life,” from Tonight a t 8:30 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1936).
30 The concerto itself is prominently announced as an integral component o f Brief Encounter, the
credits name Sergei Rachmaninoff, his Second Concerto, and the soundtrack performers (pianist Eileen
Joyce, conductor Muir Mathieson, and the National Symphony Orchestra) preceding the credits for
director David Lean and producer Noel Coward.
31 Flashbacks initiated by music are a common device in the film melodrama. As Caryl Flinn writes,
music invites a return to the idealized past, providing “gates of refuge from the diegetic present ... the
music establishes the means through which that nostalgic desire is activated in the first place; it appears
its very conduit.” Caryl Flinn, Strains o f Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 109.
32 This auditory perspective is explicitly confirmed twice through soundtrack editing. Laura makes one
telephone call to her friend Mary, to set up an alibi to cover her tryst with Alec, and another, later, to
her husband, to explain why she missed the train home; in both instances the soundtrack music ceases
(in Laura’s “mind”) as soon as the other party picks up the telephone receiver.
33 (Laura thinking about Dolly during their train ride home) “I wish I could trust you. I wish you were a
wise, kind friend instead o f a gossiping acquaintance I’ve known casually for years and never
particularly cared for. I w ish ...”—(Laura thinking about her somewhat inattentive but well-meaning
husband) “Fred, dear Fred. There’s so much that I want to say to you. You are the only one in the world
with enough wisdom and gentleness to understand. ... As it is, you’re the only one in the world that I
can never tell.”
34 The song was recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1941 (The Song is You, RCA Victor) and again in 1957
(Where are You?, Capitol). Jane Powell sings it in the 1946 film Holiday in Mexico, accompanied by
Jose Iturbi, who also performs the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto in the film.
35 As Kerman writes, the concerto cadenza involves “a disruption” in the normal relationship of
concerto agents (CC72), for it provides a moment of soloistic assertion “set apart from the rest of the
discourse by affording the solo a private place, as it were, from which he or she can address the
audience more directly, perhaps more intimately, rather than working with and through the orchestra”
(CC76).
36 Among the vocalists to record this song are Eddie Fisher (I'm in the Mood fo r Love, RCA Victor,
1955), Frank Sinatra (That O ld Feeling, Columbia, 1956), and Jerry Vale (Till the End o f Time: Jerry
Vale Sings the Great Love Themes, Columbia, 1963). Pop and jazz pianists to record their own versions
include Carmen Cavallaro (The Lamp is Low, Decca, 1953) and Johnny Guamieri (The Jazz Giants, vol.
II: The Piano Players, EmArcy, 1955). The song was also a staple for the easy-listening market: Paul
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Weston’s Music fo r Easy Listening (Capitol, 1950) and Music fo r Dreaming (Capitol, 1950), Billy
Vaughn Plays the Million Sellers (Dot, 1958), etc.
37 Brief Encounter may have inspired Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment (about a man who loans his
flat out to amorous couples in need of a discreet rendezvous), but it definitely inspired Wilder’s spoof
of the soundtrack concerto in The Seven Year Itch (1955). When Richard Sherman’s wife and young
son go out of town for a few weeks in the summer, temptation arises in the form of a charming and
voluptuous upstairs neighbor (Marilyn Monroe). Richard struggles with his immoral fantasies, and
holds imaginary discussions with his wife over the appropriateness of these affairs: “This is not a thing
that one likes to discuss with one’s wife, but you might as well know that women have been throwing
themselves at me for years” (an echo of Laura’s hesitance to confess everything to her husband in Brief
Encounter). Francois Truffaut notes that The Seven Year Itch is full of irreverent homages to classic
films by other directors, “but the film Wilder constantly refers to, so that each scene becomes a
vengeful slap, is David Lean’s Brief Encounter, with its streams of tears and its amorously awkward
couple—the least sensual and most sentimental film ever wept over. Some people even weep thinking
about it—inexhaustible tears from English crocodiles. ’Rachmaninoff! His second concerto for piano
and orchestra never loses its effect,’ Tom Ewell declares, just because he’s seen Brief Encounter and he
has figured out that Rachmaninoff is infallible in affairs of the heart and body.” F rancis Truffaut, The
Films o f My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978): 160.
38
Louise has long suffered from a romantic infatuation over Paul, a caddish and selfish violinist, but
after he jilts her she marries James on the rebound, though she does not love him. Her indifference
towards her husband drives him to depression and alcoholism, but she determines to help him re
establish his musical career. Just before an important performance of the Rachmaninoff concerto,
Louise informs James she's going back to Paul as soon as the concert is over. “You don’t need a crutch
to lean on,” she explains, “You’re a whole human being again!” James plays the concerto with
increasing determination; his passionate performance overwhelms Louise emotionally, and she finally
realizes that she belongs with him, not Paul. As the reconciled couple embrace on the empty stage
afterwards, the closing credits are accompanied by the concerto’s “love theme.”
39
These theoretical categories arc discussed in three important essays on the Hollywood melodrama:
Thomas Elsaesser’s “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," Goeffrey
Nowell-Smith’s “Minnelli and Melodrama,” and David N. Rodowick’s “Madness, Authority and
Ideology: The Domestic Melodrama of the 1950s,” all reprinted in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies
in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987).
Page numbers refer to this volume.
40
Elsaesser’s terms (50). Scholars of film melodrama have tended to focus on elements of mise en
seine (composition of frame, lighting, ddcor, color, gesture, and “the symbolization of objects”) which
represent or complement the story’s emotional and psychological aspects. Rodowick, for example,
asserts that “the highly expressive mise en scene of the domestic melodrama did not so much reproduce
as produce the inner turmoil of the characters; or in other words, the dynamic relations of the mise en
scene took over the objective signification of the social network which entrapped the characters and
strictly determined their range of physical and emotional mobility” (274). But the soundtrack of the film
melodrama frequently contributes an analogous manner of representation. Rodowick’s definition of the
formal aspect of melodrama can apply equally to the soundtrack concerto: “a system of conflict
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determined by the figuration of patriarchal authority which in turn mediate[s] the relationship between
the social and psychic determinations in the text” (279).
41
Elsaesser writes, “Melodrama confers on [the characters] a negative identity through suffering, and
the progressive self-immolation and disillusionment generally ends in resignation: they emerge as lesser
human beings for having become wise and acquiescent to the ways of the world [i.e., the social order]"
(55).
42
Nowell-Smith writes, “What is at stake (also for social-ideological reasons) is the survival o f the
family unit and the possibility for individuals of acquiring an identity which is also a place within the
system, a place in which they can both be ‘themselves’ and ‘at home,’ in which they can simultaneously
enter, without contradiction, the symbolic order and bourgeois society” (73).
43
Elsaesser writes, “A typical situation in American melodramas has the plot build up to an evidently
catastrophic collision of counter-running sentiments, but a string of delays gets the greatest possible
effect from the clash when it does come. ... [T]he visual orchestration [again, a reference to mise-en-
scene, but in the metaphor an acknowledgment of music’s role] of such a scene can produce some
rather strong emotional effects..." Elsaesser goes on to note the “pressure” generated by the
accumulating “obstacles and objects [including the concerto itself] that invade [the characters’]
personalities, take them over, stand for them, become more real than the human relations or emotions
they were intended to symbolize” (60-62).
44
Nowell-Smith writes, “In hysteria (and specifically in what Freud has designated as ‘conversion
hysteria’) the energy attached to an idea that has been repressed returns converted into a bodily
symptom. The ‘return of the repressed’ takes place, not in conscious discourse, but displaced onto the
body of the patient. In the melodrama, where there is always material which cannot be expressed in
discourse or in the actions o f the characters furthering the designs of the plot, a conversion can take
place into the body of the text” (73-74).
45 “What didn't it cost Angelika Rink to reach the point where the audiences of her concerts were filled
with inspiration and her managers were scrambling around her! The career of a pianist requires untiring
work—an indefatigable, physically demanding, exasperating struggle to achieve technical mastery of
the keyboard, to turn technique into playing, until the obedience of the fingers can be assumed and
artistry serves the spirit alone. Tireless energy for spreading one’s name and gaining recognition among
music lovers, tireless effort too in the draining hither-and-yon of concert touring. Indeed, Angelika’s
health suffers from this continual rush and pursuit, so that one day her nerves give out, and she must
take refuge in the quiet countryside village of her youth." Geno Ohlischlaeger, “A Woman’s Heart
Caught Between Career and Love,” in clippings file for Gefdhrtin meines Sommers,
Bundesarchiv/Filmarchiv, Berlin.
46
The filmscript credits an unpublished short story by Erich Maria Remarque as its source, but the plot
seems like a retelling of Camille with borrowings from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
47
The soundtrack concerto functions notably here as a carrier o f the narrative’s melodramatic excess. It
“verifies” that the unknown woman is Olwen by having her perform synchronously and note-for-note
along with a radio broadcast of the piece. The concerto also sustains the simplistic happy ending that
reunites the cured amnesiac with her worried husband—a reconciliation which ends everyone’s “dream
of Olwen” and reestablishes the bourgeois domestic order.
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48
The same music accompanies a similar tale of romantic union beyond death in Somewhere in Time
(1980). Here the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody functions both as source music and as a soundtrack cue
linking the past and present for the protagonist moved by nostalgia and loss—a young man pining for a
long-deceased actress he has only seen in a photograph. Through an experience of time travel he is
“reunited” with his beloved for a brief period, they pledge their eternal love for each other, and she
“lives on” in his memory afterwards.
49
Like Miklos Rozsa’s Spellbound Concerto two years before (from another Hitchcock-Selznick
production), Waxman’s piano concerto-style “Appassionata” is a concert work derived from his own
film score. The “Paradine Case Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra” was recorded by pianist Edward
Rebner (with Franz Waxman conducting) in the late 1940s, and re-released in 1979 (Entr’acte).
50 Originally composed as background music for the 1949 Swedish/French film Singoalla/Gypsy Fury,
a love story set in medieval times.
51 Nowell-Smith, 72.
52 Elsewhere I discuss these representations o f the pianist as a factor of World W ar II ideologies. Ivan
Raykoff, “Hollywood’s Embattled Icon,” Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years o f Life with the Piano, ed.
James Parakilas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 328-357.
53 In 1898, Rachmaninoff suffered a nervous breakdown generally attributed to the critical rejection of
his First Symphony. Plagued by doubt and insecurity, he gave up composing until Dr. Nicolai Dahl, a
neurologist specializing in hypnotherapy, successfully treated his depression. Restored to confidence,
Rachmaninoff was able to complete his Second Concerto, which received critical acclaim upon its
premiere, and he dedicated the work to Dahl.
54
About the final concert scene Claudia Gorbman writes that “George runs amok, his two ‘selves’
having joined in an impossible union,” a solipsistic and ultimately self-defeating form of
consummation. Gorbman, 155.
55 A. E. Wilson, “A Concerto for Miss Oberon,” The Star [Los Angeles] (August 6, 1948): 6.
56 Other male leadership figures in the story— Ben Rosen, David’s gay piano teacher in Australia, and
Cecil Parkes, his one-armed professor of piano in London—are presented as similarly supportive, but
emasculated, figures.
57Shine's success prompted a book of memoirs from his wife, Gillian Helfgott, Love You to Bits and
Pieces. “When David achieves his dream of once again performing Rakhmaninov’s Third Concerto in
1995, it is a moment of overwhelming personal affirmation, and the culmination o f Gillian’s
unswerving belief in his brilliance” (from the cover). Gillian Helfgott, with Alissa Tanskaya, Love You
to Bits and Pieces: Life with David Helfgott (New York: Penguin Books, 1996). See also “He’s Playing
Our Song,” Ladies’ Home Journal 114/5 (May 1, 1997): 24-27.
58 Elsaesser, 46.
59
These “concerto films” provided a fantasy or escapist entertainment for female viewer-listeners
identifying with the female protagonists (Sandra Kovak in The Great Lie, or Laura Jesson in B rie f
Encounter) who perform independently, assertively, and expressively within the patriarchal social
order. The popularity o f the actual pianists who recorded these soundtracks could also influence the
reception of such films for the female audience. Richard Dyer asserts that the announcement of British
pianist Eileen Joyce as the performer of the Rachmaninoff concerto in B rief Encounter lends “a
particular female inflection to the music” for the film’s audience (Dyer, 17). Joyce also recorded the
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soundtrack for The Seventh Veil the same year, while British pianists Harriet Cohen and Betty Humby-
Beecham played for Love Story and While I Live, respectively.
60 Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, “Moved to Tears: Weeping in the Cinema in Postwar Britain,” Screen
37/2 (Summer 1996): 152-173.
61 Granger, Stewart. Sparks Fly Upwards (New York: Putnam, 1981): 75-76.
62 Gillian Helfgott, Love You To Bits, 8.
VII. AFTERGLOW
“I’m wrecked—I’ll never play the piano again!”
In Annie Hall (1975), Woody Allen mutters this regret after exhaustingly
passionate intercourse. The joke, of course, is that he’s not a pianist at all. The off
hand quip demonstrates how thoroughly the mythology of the “Romantic” pianist has
become a familiar fixture in the popular imagination. With that line Allen taps into a
wide range of associations around the pianist’s attraction: the relationship between
performer and instrument, the literal and figurative meanings of the word “playing,”
the notion that instrumental virtuosity is linked to sexual prowess, the metaphorical
connection between musical composition and (pro)creativity, and the historical and
mythological reputations surrounding nineteen-century pianist-personalities such as
Liszt or Chopin.
Allen may be exhausted, but the allure of the pianist’s “dream of love” is not.
In fact, Allen does play it again in the Casablanca spoof Play It Again, Sam (1972),
during a passionate kiss with his best friend’s wife. Here the familiar melody of “As
Time Goes By” bursts forth in an elaborately arpeggiated piano solo on the
soundtrack, dying down only after the subsequent consummation of their adulterous
affair. Barbara Streisand also enacts the same romantic desire around the song in
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293
What’s Up, Doc? (1972), as she seduces an uptight musicologist. When they meet at
the piano, Streisand camps the famous Bogart line: “O f all the gin joints in all the
towns in all the world, he walks into mine. Play it, Sam.” Sliding seductively next to
her object of desire on the piano bench, she prompts him along with the chords and the
verses (“And when two lovers woo, they still say ‘I—love— you’”). Suddenly, though,
like the interruption of Chopin’s glissando across the keys or Stefan Brand slamming
down the lid, their ensuing kiss unexpectedly ends when the piano bench collapses
beneath them.
Each of these Hollywood homages points back to what is undoubtedly the
most famous image of piano seduction in twentieth-century popular culture, Sam
playing “As Time Goes By” for Rick and Ilse in Casablanca (1942). Significantly,
however, none of the characters in the original film says “Play it again, Sam,” as the
expression has come to be commonly known. Dse does say, dreamily, “Play it once,
Sam, for old time’s sake,” and then, more insistently, “Play it, Sam, play ‘As Time
Goes By.’” Cyncial Rick later grumbles, “If she can stand it, I can. Play it!” The
entrenched and accepted misquotation of the phrase suggests a common desire to
experience reiteration of that act, to hear “it” played again and again. In a larger
perspective, “it” is not only that particular song, but the cultural significance of its
symbolic performance; “again” indicates our craving for another reenactment of that
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attraction.
In a similar way, the music and mythologies of nineteenth-century “Romantic”
pianists such as Chopin and Liszt, and traditional stereotypes such as the piano-girl
and forte-woman, persist throughout the twentieth century via the mechanisms of
popular-culture representation and reproduction. Certain personalities, music, rituals,
and ideals have proven stimulating enough to sustain a continued attraction for
audiences to the present day. The 1932 Broadway operetta Chonita, A Gypsy Princess
offers a case in point. When Chonita tells the young musician Stefan, “I want you to
sing for me ... and it must be a new song that you have never sung before,” Stefan
sings “Star of Love”— a “new” song set to the melody of Liszt’s famous
“Liebestraum” (fig. 70).' The pianist’s and music-lover’s “dream of love” begins to
seem interminable.
ROMANTIC PIANOS
Persistence is the key word here, since there is little that is particularly new or
original about the piano, the concert pianist, or classical piano repertoire in terms of
twentieth-century popular culture. The piano itself as a musical instrument remains the
most stable and fixed element of this persistent attraction. Despite changes in materials
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or design (the art-case piano phenomenon ended with the Great Depression, though
interest in it has recently revived),2and despite the innovations of the “prepared” piano
or extended techniques (as developed most famously by Henry Cowell in the 1920s
and John Cage in the 1940s), the typical concert pianist today still plays a nineteenth-
century instrument. The piano’s design and its placement on the concert hall stage
perpetuate nineteenth-century models and performance rituals.3 The piano is still
constructed for a certain technique of playing and certain ideals of tone production
historically based in the Romantic era.
Not surprisingly, this piano has already moved from the concert hall to the
museum of cultural history. In 2000-2001, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C. presented Piano 300, an exhibit on the three-hundred-year history of the piano,
dating the instrument's existence back to the invention of the first arpicembalo col
piano e forte by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700.4 The exhibit acknowledged that a
significant portion of cultural and historical memory derives from the piano itself as a
mediating musical technology. On display were representative examples of the
instrument’s technological varieties throughout history, from the age of aristocracy
(harpsichords and clavichords) and the Victorian period (square pianos, grand pianos,
portable travel-pianos) to more recent eras (player pianos, even Liberace’s rhinestone-
studded Baldwin grand). Press materials for Piano 300 note that the piano “has
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evolved into a complex machine ... and an immensely versatile means of human
expression.” According to Spencer Crew, director of the National Museum of
American History, the piano is “America’s favorite music machine.” The exhibit also
pointed out the cross-cultural dynamics of the instrument’s technological
development: “During the mid-nineteenth-century, this European invention achieved
its modem form in the United States with American invention and production setting
international standards. Today, most pianos are manufactured in Asian countries.”
Aside from its focus on actual instruments, Piano 300 was also a celebration of
“people and pianos,” exploring the social meanings of the instrument and its players as
participants in cultural life. The exhibit acknowledged the power of cultural memory
in sustaining the dream o f the “Romantic” pianist. As one of the opening captions
stated, “Since its invention in 1700, the piano has played its way into the hearts and
homes of music lovers around the world. ... In the 300 years of its existence, people
all over the world have responded to the piano, recognizing something of themselves
in the sound.” This statement acknowledges the dynamics of memory and identity in
fashioning the dream-image of the “Romantic” pianist—the same dynamics noted in
the opening chapter as Florestan, Beda, and Lisa remember the distant idolized pianist
and recognize in him and in his music their own desires.
One item that was not in the Smithsonian exhibit but sums up the issues
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associated with the piano as a memory-object and a musical technology is a jewelry
box featured in The Music Stand, a mail-order gift catalog from 1995 (fig. 71). The
box is shaped like a miniature grand piano, and the lid is “romantically adorned” with
an image of “Victorian ladies.” This jewelry box also serves as a music box playing
“Memory,” from the Broadway musical Cats. One’s own initials (“C K S”) can be
emblazoned onto the piano in place of the firm’s name (“Steinway”) to provide a
sense of personal identification with this instrument, its valued contents, and its music.
As a vanity item for a woman’s dressing table, this jewelry/music box can be
read for its markers of femininity within the bourgeois domestic economy, as Richard
Leppert has done with art-case designs of historic keyboard instruments.5 The
reproduced painting on the lid indicates the gender and class connotations of the box
and its contents. It is a repository of “Victorian” high-art ideals of beauty, femininity,
elegance, intimacy, privacy, wealth, and ownership. Like the parlor piano, the music
box is also a receptacle for a woman’s or a culture’s treasured memory-objects. Rings
and necklaces, or even popular love songs such as “Memory,” can be kept safe and
secure here (as the letters of transit are safe in Sam’s upright piano in Casablanca),
but they can be retrieved again (and “again”) when one wants to admire their lasting
beauty and value.
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ROMANTIC PIANO MUSIC
If the jewelry box keeps playing “Memory,” and if Stefan’s new song for the
gypsy princess Chonita is actually another reworking of Liszt’s “Liebestraum,” it
would seem that twentieth-century popular culture has not inspired many truly original
musical materials for the piano and its performers. Music historians and avant-garde
music enthusiasts will counter that the twentieth century did witness significant
musical innovations on the part o f modernist and experimental composers, from
serialism and indeterminacy to improvisation, extended techniques, and the
implementation of music technologies including recording, electronics, and
computers.
Techniques of music composition may have evolved in the concert hall as they
have evolved in popular music, but many fundamental ideals of Romantic pianism
(such as virtuosity) have remained constant since the nineteenth century. Virtuosity
characterizes a significant portion of nineteenth-century piano repertoire, but it also
maintains its attraction for twentieth-century composers and performers. From
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (Opus clavicembalisticum, 1930) and jazz artist Art Tatum
(1930s and 40s) to Frederic Rzewski (The People United Will Never Be Defeated,
1982) and Brian Femeyhough (Lemma-Icon-Epigram, 1982), twentieth-century
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composers and performers demonstrate in diverse ways a consistent interest in the
phenomenon of virtuosic playing.6 The rationale for this attraction to virtuosity may
be, as Susan Bernstein describes, “that its technical mastery transcends the limitations
of the technical, that its prestige consists in this ability to allow music to rise above its
material instruments and merge with poetic reality. This projection of poetic ideals
onto music continues even through twentieth-century semiotics and theories of
representation.”7
The notion of a warm, sensual, and beautiful piano tone is another persistent
Romantic ideal. Alexander Scriabin’s short piano pieces “Desir” and “Caresse dansee”
(op. 57, nos. 1 and 2, composed in 1907) provide an excellent example of this
“Romantic” sound-ideal from the beginning of the twentieth century (fig. 72).
Scriabin, “the Russian Chopin,” exploits the piano’s capacity for sonic stimulation in
these mildly dissonant, highly impressionistic miniatures. Faubion Bowers considers
this music evidence of Scriabin’s “eroticism,” adding that “Caresse dansee” sounds
“as if he had taken a kiss out of the air and photographed it with tones and sounds,
sonorities and resonances.”8
A genealogy of the sensual “Romantic” sound ideal is evident in the
connection between Scriabin and Morton Feldman, the twentieth-century American
composer also famous for exploiting instrumental sounds and textures. Feldman’s
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Madame Press Died Last Week at 90 (1970) is a composition for twelve instruments
that features quiet instrumental timbres and sound textures. According to one account,
Feldman’s boyhood piano teacher was a Russian pianist, Madame Maurina Press, who
had known Scriabin personally. She imparted to the young Feldman “a vibrant
musicality” and a sensitivity to musical pitch, timbre, and registration. “The way she
would put her finger down, in a Russian way of just the finger. The liveliness of just
the finger. And produce a ‘B-flat,’ and you wanted to faint.”9 Continuing the lineage
of sensual Romantic sound, composer John Adams notes that his own piano concerto
Eros Piano (1987) began as an elegy for Feldman. “John Cage had first described
Feldman’s music as ‘erotic,’” Adams writes. “On the microscopic level, his music was
always sensuous, erotic, obsessed with gradations of touch and the subtlest shifts of
color.”10
Even in contemporary popular music the sound ideal of the Romantic piano
has a specific connotation: emotional sensitivity or sincerity. Pianist-singer-
songwriters such as Elton John and Billy Joel have capitalized on the acoustic piano
sound in their many songs about love, longing, loneliness, and other earnest emotions.
Tori Amos, on her third album, Boys fo r Pele (1996), sings about her romantic
traumas and the emotional fallout causes by the end of a relationship. For songs about
melancholy and tender feelings, she accompanies herself on a Bosendorfer upright
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piano. For other, angrier, songs, Amos turns to another keyboard sound: “When she
wants to ‘thrash,’ as she said, she brings in a harpsichord. ... The songs are a spiral
staircase down into Amos’ pain, rage, and grief. ‘Blood Roses,’ rooted in a
harpsichord riff, is wrought with anger.”"
ROMANTIC PIANISTS
“A piano by itself is just furniture,” explained another caption in the
Smithsonian’s Piano 300 exhibit. “It needs a human being at the keyboard to give it
life, song, and soul.” Is there anything new about the figure of the pianist in terms of
twentieth-century popular-culture representations? Roland Barthes writes, “The man
who furnishes himself or is furnished with an adjective is sometimes wounded,
sometimes pleased, but always constituted."'2 How many twentieth-century concert
pianists have experimented with newly-constituted identities as performers? Are new
modes of attraction still possible to cultivate in this performance tradition, or is the
notion o f “attraction” itself already too weighted by historical and ideological
associations?
Earlier chapters have argued that the concert pianist today perpetuates a
musical tradition, performance ritual, and social signification established during the
302
nineteenth century. The format of the solo piano recital, established by Franz Liszt in
1839, is a primary example of this consistent and largely unquestioned tradition.
Glenn Gould’s decision in 1964 to quit the ritual of live concert performance for the
control of a recording studio was a famous milestone in performance history because it
significantly challenged assumptions about how, where, and why the concert pianist
performs his or her attraction. The notion of a star-pianist rejecting the dynamics of
“Romantic” desire inherent in live performance was reason in itself to label Gould an
eccentric.
Some performers, on the other hand, exploit the connotations o f the
“Romantic” pianist’s performance to the point of exaggeration. The Spanish pianist
Carlos Santos has been called “a pornographic Victor Borge” for his outrageous
performance antics. Guy Livingston’s review of a 1994 Santos performance describes
such a scenario in detail:
Attired in red from head to toe, Santos performed on a stripped-down

Steinway with several women who had also been stripped down, mostly
to latex, chains and leather. Inspired scenes included arm-wrestling
piano duets, an orgasmic soprano, Santos performing with two benches
balanced on his head, amplified dildos, and a climactic (yes...) operetta
for pianist, soprano, and naked female buttocks. ... The marvelous, if
raunchy, performance took place in a vivid red set with a gaudy plastic
chandelier and eight swinging doors through which the performers
constantly slammed on and off stage. Santos’s main fault is probably
his overwhelming energy and lack of musical imagination. The other
performers were mostly restricted to supporting roles as sado
masochistic sex goddesses or divas gone astray. This lack of variety
303
lent a certain frenetic monochromaticism to the spectacle, detracting

considerably from its impact. But with the sado-masochistic flair of
flamenco— red and black colors and hard sexual edge—Santos gives us
everything that’s missing from contemporary music.13
In popular music, too, such roles have been exploited for their potential attraction.
Again, Tori Amos provides a familiar example. Amos’s San Francisco concert of
March 1994 was called “the most erotic piano recital ever to grace Herbst Theater” by
one reviewer. ‘Throughout the nearly two-hour show, she performed with great fire
and sensuality, rocking and undulating on her bench as she caressed the piano. When
she tickled the keys, she really tickled the keys.”14
The Piano 300 exhibit also touched upon representations of the “Romantic”
pianist as an iconic figure in twentieth-century American popular culture. One of the
first images the visitor encountered upon entering the exhibit hall was Schroeder
playing for Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip series. “Do you know the tortures of the
memory of a lost love?” Lucy asks him in a Peanuts strip from 1974 (fig. 73). At the
end o f the exhibit, a short documentary film presented this story of the “Romantic”
piano through historical images and Hollywood film clips. The documentary began
with the scene of Judy Garland singing Irving Berlin’s “I Love a Piano” in Easter
Parade (1948), and also included scenes from Casablanca, Letter from an Unknown
Woman, and many other classic films. The closing line of narration in the Piano 300
304
documentary summed up the pianist’s attraction by noting that “after three hundred
years, one thing is clear—we love pianos and the people who play them, and probably
will continue to do so for a long time to come.”
Are these familiar representations of music, performing, and listening merely
cultural ephemera with no bearing on the “real-life” concert pianist of yesterday or
today? Or do they serve as icons and ideals in a larger and more subtle pedagogy of
desire that implicates performers and composers as much as it does music-lovers and
society at large? When our modes of interaction with the historical pianist or the “real-
life” pianist occur through mediating traditions and technologies, as they still do in the
concert hall and the cineplex, the distinction between reality and representation
becomes less certain and our interpretations of the iconic figure have a much wider
significance. As George Lipsitz notes about Hollywood’s ability to influence
collective cultural memory, “[films] are historical in the sense of being cultural
artifacts and social-history evidence about the times in which they were made. But
films are historical in another way as well: they reposition us for the future by
reshaping our memories of the past.”15
In other words, popular mythologies works forwards as well as backwards in
time. Perhaps pianophilia and the nostalgic desire for Chopin’s playing or Liszt’s
“Liebestraum” are alive and well for at least another generation of music-lovers.
305
1 Chonita, A Gypsy Romance: An Operetta Based on Themes o f Franz Liszt, music composed and
arranged by Ira B. Wilson, book and lyrics by Marion Wakeman (Dayton, OH: Lorenz, 1932).
2 An art-case piano features a unique artwork design in its decoration or construction, such as elaborate
carved legs, expensive wood inlays or veneers, gilding, marquetry, or other artistic trappings. The
highpoint of interest in these limited or specially-commissioned instruments coincided with the piano’s
domestic popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century and into the first few decades of
the twentieth century. Terry Trucco, “Keyboard Virtuoso,” New York Times (October 5,1997).
3 This issue became topical with the recent Carnegie Hall controversy over grand pianos with added
lower lids for sound projection. “The image of a gleaming ebony grand piano on a concert hall stage, its
lid propped open by a thin black stick, is fixed in the mind of every classical music lover. But for the
first time in a century and a half, the basic design of the piano is being challenged by a curious-looking,
controversial and potentially transforming invention: the lower lid. ... If it catches on, the lower lid
would be the first significant adaptation of the grand piano since the introduction of the cast-iron frame
in 1825.” Anthony Tommasini, “Not Even Practice Gets a 2-Lid Piano into Carnegie,” New York Times
(December 8, 1997).
4 Piano 300 exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (March 2000 to
June 2001), curated by Cynthia Hoover, Patrick Rucker, and Edwin M. Good.
5 Leppert argues that “domestic keyboard instruments generally— the virginals, harpsichords, and
fortepianos that precede the Victorian piano—were, from their earliest histories, subject to the gaze,
richly discursive ‘texts’ to be read." Leppert traces how the gender discourses these instruments
embodied changed with the rise of a bourgeois domestic order during the nineteenth century. Richard
Leppert, “Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano in the Nineteenth Century,” The Sight o f Sound:
Music, Representation, and the History o f the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993):
119-151.
6 Mark Tucker writes, “Art Tatum demonstrated a degree of virtuosity previously unknown in jazz,
nearly beyond belief. Combining the rhythmic drive and textural clarity of Fats Waller with the rococo
imagination of Earl Hines, and incorporating technical devices associated with the nineteenth-century
school of virtuosity— rapid scales in single notes and thirds, sweeping arpeggiated flourishes,
hammering octaves—Tatum invented a new musical persona for the jazz pianist. He was a force of
liberation proving that anything and everything was possible on the instrument.” Mark Tucker, “The
Piano in Jazz,” Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years o f Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 379.
7 Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity o f the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine,
Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998): 11.
* Faubion Bowers, liner notes to Ruth Laredo’s recording of piano works by Scriabin (Connoissuer
Society, 1971).
Morton Feldman, Essays, cited in liner notes to John Adams Conducts American Elegies (Elektra
Nonesuch, 1991).
10 Liner notes to Eros Piano by John Adams. Paul Crossley, piano.
11 Walla Walla Union Bulletin (January 12, 1996).
12 Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” The Responsibility o f Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1985): 268.
306
13 Carlos Santos, “La Grenya de Pasqual Picanya,” at The American Center, Paris (October 22, 1994).
Review by Guy Livingston, Paris New Music Review V9 (December, 1994): 5.
14 Michael Snyder, “T ori Amos is Smart and Sexy at Herbst,” San Francisco Chronicle (March 23,
1994): El.
15 George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990): 164.
307
Fig. 1. Chopin Plays in the Salon o f Prince Anton Radziwill, by Henryk Siemiradzki
( 1880 ).
306
PIANIST MEDIATOR DREAMER

(the musical object (via “technology”) (the desiring
of desire) subject)
SCHUMANN Frederic Chopin Schumann’s Florestan,

writing in the Neue narrator (Florestan), Beda,
Zeitsckrift Jur Musik and literary and the reader
description
OPHULS Stefan Brand Ophuls’s narrator Lisa (as the subject

filming in the script (Lisa), of the film)
Letter from an camera, and and
Unknown Woman soundtrack music the viewer-listener
Fig. 2. Displacement, mediation, and desire in the Schumann and Ophuls examples.
309
Transcription Ay P.Saline
L ie b e str a a m
English Lyrics by (Dream of Love) Music by
Howard Johnson Franz L iszt
crese.
*/
My dream iove____ will lin - ger on for ev
f f f m
- I l - ' l
1J.
I
W
I
f mm
l ot
ItJ. IJ : l|j:
I *? I
- tho’ we «ie far pan My Dream Of will
Copyright 1931 hy Robhioo Ifoaic Corporalioo, J»* S ortolh A r t . Now York, N.Y.
U t t r n t t i m l CortrtgU S t t m d AU M ifklt H ttrrxtd
Fig. 3. “Liebestraum (Dream of Love)” sheet music (1932).
310
P O L IC E P R O T E C T IO N FOR P IA N IS T S !!
MAOE NECESSARY SY THE ANTICS OR TH E PAOOEO-ROOMSK1 DEVOTEES AT ST. JAMES’S H A IL . WHO RUSH AT.
TRY TO EMBRACE. AND DECK WITH ROSES. A CERTAIN MASTER WHENEVER HE A PPEARS.
Fig. 4. Caricature of Ignace Jan Paderewski (1890s).
H e has played; not only f o r us but
w ith us. Retiring, he bows with lofty
humility. Deafening applause. E viva !
Fig. 5. Caricature from series “Franz Liszt at the Piano” (1873).
Fig. 6. Album cover, Liberace’s You Made Me Love You (1960s).
313
Fig. 7. Publicity photo: Joanne Dru, Liberace, and Dorothy Malone in Sincerely Yours
(1955).
Fig. 8. Album cover, Liberace Plays Chopin vol. 2 (1940s).
315
sh o w p an B o o q ie
P ia n o Solo
Arranged ty Modern P ara p h ra se
JO S F C R S T Chopins Minute W altz
Opus 64, No. 1
Vivace (Lightly)
2nd tim e 8 V kig ke r

to Coda
A iM.ttliJL'l » 2t«-l*l
1*1 * * fid M i i i f i f ffp 11 11a-.
m ■rru
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g--<L
m
/A •
«r T p- t =
‘J l l l i l i ■ •' « - g. *. *. *, a 1 ’M ‘ ‘ 1.3 -
fig. 9. “Showpan Boogie” sheet music (1949).
316
Now!YOU CAN PLAY CHOPIN

C H D P I.x 's M O S T B E A U T IF U L T H E M E S H A V E B E E N
ADAPTED AND ARRANGED IN SIMPLIFIED FORM WITH
W O RD S IN OUR NEW SEN SATIO N AL FOLIO ENTITLED
SONG GEMS fromCHOPIN

I,—s P O L O N A ISE FOR TWO
J qhk Klennek. c h o r Cs
i t > >
Lucy-Anh Bryant m ** 1- uj ijJ »* ^ ^^

Pel - « a - n i * _ L P t iJ a POL-OXvUSE FOR T W O j
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_ OiOPIPfcTHEMESU ^ MY M ELODY OF MAYTIME

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M £ e e £ & r S H A P I R O . B E R N S T E I N G C O -.n c . Music Publishers

H tE €B £'efS £arw e& iftt& sicH oll) B U IL D IN C .
. 1 2 7 0 S x th . A v e n u e . NEW Y C I R K .2 a .» .v
7- - v^^ t
Fig. 10. Sheet music publicity, Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. (1940s).
Fig. 11. Publicity photo: Artur Rubinstein, Merle Oberon, and Erich Leinsdorf
Night Song (1947).
318
Fig. 12. Publicity photo: Sergei Rachmaninoff, Walt Disney, and Vladimir Horowitz
(1940s).
319
m m r n
Fig. 13. Publicity brochure for Urlaub in Hollywood (German dubbing of Anchors
Aweigh).
320
JA N E T
L eo 3)irn R icH s,r r iN ♦ ♦

Z.J2 er7 7 £ £ C O J V 'C J S IZ .r* '
9 PERA H O U 6 E
Fig. 14. Caricature of Leo Ditrichstein in The Concert (1912).
321
PEANUTS
r'a- AND : eC T .MASSlrD W O uSKAT if US TSAVclED A i i CVS? THE AND Il*HAT ir Hi£ri t Ai T rc Hfc:©n. CA -Ct'i<
rCHRCEDES AND lOU 3& U !: u<KAD U M ti H'CU FESFJSMEP U3TH ©SEAT CA>££.< -Cl: 3 C * = *JTH CF -'ClU AiWe cHilE
r CCHCERT PIANIST * OiCKESTaAE IN FCRB6N LAn D * ? «1IN 6 AxP CXl OnF .K A.AVThe AAHC AcAiN
WO I HAD T s O T iCSVN A LAlWRV250PWTt5?
"CUj Jn t th a t s s ( ^ man TIc .VUWOANE PlAtf A .C 7C F tivE SCNSS ST

TNfif iffiAay' a s e h t v e sv s g m a n t c :
Fig. 15. Schroeder and Lucy in Peanuts cartoon strip (1965).
322
Favorites
Fig. 16. Album cover, Romantic Piano and Cocktail Time: After Dark Piano
Favorites (1970s).
Stmtfht fn'tn X*rr h*m! Hi \' \ Kr.sM ... t*n
• 4 tn 2 )U w t£> j t f i i n o . - t \ j L r ? .;•• £,•• p u : :> rr •*> -i •* •
r.r/na^r*26*r«/n/ ifr/vti that l.>.‘ur, /«?fivl.- 'ttrm.>r:, ■.■• i 'A A'... ••• ' /• , !
I n u t c r t « 0 r 2 M g - p r r i h n - t - t l !»\f T m . m . v » > I j \ •.\, Si K .. H ■<
am>CirktSn wMflisil >f «’/,/,a.*.-. .//I.M . • \x.|, .•
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... ■* '
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f ’ .WwCîiV *.»i <
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Rg. 17. Advertisement for Diana Krall’s album Only Trust Your Heart (1995).
'Symphony of Love'
Piano Pin. 18 karat gold:
small (11/2'). $750;
large (21/2"). S2.900.
Sterling silver: $2S0, 5450.
18 karat gold/sterling silver:
$450,51.300.
THE ARMAN
SYMPHONY O F LOVE
PIANO PIN
MOVADO
l ,11I <11CI11KN( Ml | ;,I
Rg. 18. Advertisement for Arman’s “Symphony of Love” piano pin (1995).
325
Rg. 19. Catalog cover, Windham Hill Occasional (1997).
326
MAMMY
r-p?-
L O V E R B O Y M K ?’
- /N A L .L W f
G U D R Y .1' ’'- y . . w .
SW EETHEART
i-------
° , ™ 'r r
P I A N O ..
Rg. 20. Frame from “Ketch a Critic by th’ Toe,” Li'I Abner cartoon strip (1956).
327
n ew york recital d eb u t
me: youthful female concert pianist.Joves to wear couture
dresses, perform, graciously bow to rapturous applause.,
and receive rave reviews!
you: age...gender_.race„.all are of no concern: all that
matters is that you love to listen! if this is music to your ears,
meet me a t
alice tully hall , LINCOLN CENTER
hae-jung kim
PIANIST ^
Sunday, june 6 at 7:30 pm
works by: bach, mozart, ginastera and rachmaninoff
tickets: $35, $25 on sale at the box office or call
CenterCharge 212-721-6500.
P R E S E N T E D B Y f / N E A R T S M A M A G f / V7£ N T
R g. 21. Recital announcement for Hae-Jung Kim (1999).
Fig. 22. Publicity poster for Romanze in Moll (1943).
Fig. 23. Van Heflin and Joan Crawford in Possessed (1947).
FRA U LEIN ELSE
Dorsday! Don’t you notice anything? There in the

armchair . . . good God, in the armchair ... why, it’s
the rascal! Heaven be praised! H e’s back, he’s back!
He’d only gone for a trip and he’s here again. The
Roman head is here again. My bridegroom, my
beloved! But he doesn’t see me. And he shan’t see
me. W hat do you want, H err von Dorsday? You
look at me as though I were your slave, fifty thou
sand! Does our agreement still hold good, H err von
Dorsday? I’m ready. Here I am. I’m quite calm. I’m
smiling. Do you understand my look? His eyes say to
me: Come! His eyes say: I want to see you naked.
Well, you swine, I am naked. What more do you
want? Send the telegram ofF... at once. Thrills run
over my skin. The lady goes on playing ...
Delicious thrills run over my skin. How wonderful

it is to be naked. The lady goes on playing, she
doesn’t know what’s happening. Nobody knows.
Nobody sees me yet. Rascal, rascal! Here I stand
naked! Dorsday opens his eyes wide. At last he
believes. The rascal gets up. His eyes are glowing.
You understand me, beautiful youth!
94
Fig. 24. Excerpt from Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fraulein Else (1924).
331
'S tereo '

iw«aw<
u m d )tc m
Chopin: Polonaise In F-Sharp Minor Horowitz: Variations On AThemt
Nocturne In FMinor From Bizet’s “Carmen”
Ballade In G Minor Schumann: Arabesque/Traumer
Scriabin: Etude In D-Sharp Minor Scarlatti:Two Sonatas
Rg. 25. Album cover, Horowitz on Television (1968).
332
O lieb
G ed icb t »oo Ferdinand F feilig ralh .
Franz Liszt.
(Zwetie Fueue<& lertfhadicbt iSfiOj
Animato.
Singstimme.
Soproa oder Tesac
. ben kannst,
4 ----------- [— —— 4^------------F * t "1

long du lie . ben cannot! 0 lieb. o lieb. ao
■ ■ JM , rm .-ffT li > rm j r t TV - - H T L — r f f l — r=fVr.— P ffl-,

1 lr > JW
1
Fig. 26. “O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst” by Franz Liszt (1850).
fig. 27. Video box cover, Song without End (1960).
334
C a tu m iia P ic C u rtt f r t i t n i t - A W iU iam <ru«f* P ro duction "SONG W ITHO U T £ /iD u(T kr \lo r y o f F rnnx L U xt)
Song Without End

Based on"Un Sospiro”by Franz Liszt
Lyric by Music by
NED WASHINGTON MORRIS STOLOFF
and GEORGE W. DUNING
Andante Moderato
Chorus
O ur love like love - ly W ith • ou t
C 7 fiu s .4 ) G m (F b ass)
End A haunt - iag tuoe th at lin - g en

= ^= - h
■§— v?------ — M— - i 4 I \p~-----
'--- 1
= i = i =&= J-i i _______ _=-j------------
= T I = u =
* u —■
r- - — f t " ‘ X9 '
A 7* AT
Cepyflfkt © MCMLX by Columbia pictures Music Corporation, New Y srk

Sole Selling A geat-Shapuo.B sm tteia 4 C o .Ia c .M 6 Fifth Avenue,New Y o rb t» , N.Y.
lnUr*mtt»K+t C o p y rig h t S<cmr*d AU Rights Reserved Including Public Performance for Profit
Fig. 28. “Song without End” sheet music (1960).
335
Fig. 29. Publicity photo: Franz Herterich and Franz T£ray, in Liebestrdume and
Hungarian-language version Szerelmi almok—Liszt respectively (1935).
336
ijfee£»i:- W - £?.■}.', iV-y
Rg. 30. Publicity photo: Oliver Grimm and Rene Deltgen in Friihlingslied (1954).
R g. 31. Publicity poster for Ungarische Rhapsodie (1953).
338
C olum bia P ic tu rtt P rtxcntx A W illia m C otta J+odm ction “SONG W ITH O U T HND“ (Tke ttO iy o f T ran* Z ixalJ 0
My Consolation
(Based on Consolation No.3 by Franz Liszt)
Lyric by Music by
NED WASHINGTON MORRIS STOLOFF
and HARRY SUKMAN
■ = , S T .- = L ■ = j . J - = = * = = fi
W hen
■ ■■ t .
■§— 1-------------------------------- ----------------------------------- ------------------------------------
----------- --------- 1
m — ^ r r u i— ■ J.
=j=Kt, lfc.,1 o> " " ■ *- \ \ 4 =" -
Chorus
Ctnft
tear my dreams two
EVadd*
When life strikes key
C o p y n r M © M CK Ut by Columbia Pictures Music Corporation, N«w York

Sol* Selling A gtnt'Shspiro, Bernstein ft Co. Inc. 666 Fifth Av*nuc,N*w York 19, N.Y.
fn U r u o tim m t C opyrtf+ t S tc u r t* All Rights R nerved Including Public Performance for Profit
Rg. 32. “My Consolation” sheet music (1960).
339
UARRY LI EDTKE
KKTHE H A A C K
GUSTAV FROULI CU
INGEBORG v. KUSj EROW
Fig. 33. Publicity poster for Das Konzert (1944).
340
Rg. 34. Caricature “Franz Liszt in Berlin” (1842).
341
Vtiii If K«ti« I f
LKO ROBIN VICTOR SCHSSTZINGCR
Moderate
Pin no
Fig. 35. “Delphine” sheet music (1929).
Rg. 36. Photo of Franz Liszt with his students (1884).
343
Rg. 37. Paul Horbiger, Louis Rainer, and Karin Hardt in Der Kraft-Mayr (1935).
Fig. 38. Publicity brochure: Erika Dannhoff, Franz Herterich, and Hans Sohnker
Liebestraume (1935).
345
rr'- i ‘V . ,'A £ '■i'z \

v>:-V
FOR PIANIST NYIREGYHAZI, FAME,

UNJUSTLY, IS NINE WIVES AND
TEN PHOTOGRAPHED FINGERS
W h e n I play, it's a s though I am Franz

Liszt him self," say s Californian Ervin
Nvirecvhdzi. Even critics a c c e p t t h e "
b rag g ad o cio . A century back, co m p o s
e r Liszt w as himself a child-prodigy
pianist, flam boyant m aestro an d h er
cu lean w om anizer. His reincarnation,
also H ungarian-born, w as a stu d e n t
of two of L iszt's disciples, an ex-prod-
igy who turned prodigal w astrel in the Before he could talk, Ervin Nyfregyhi2i (at
1920s when he m arried the first of keyboard and, above, a s a 17>year-old prodig*
picked out tunes on a toy piano. At 12 he hear
nine wives. While he c a s ts around rogu
th e m usic of Franz U szt (left) an d “becam e
ishly for his 1 0th, the W est C o a st IB- with excitem ent That passion is undiminlsi
reclu se is giving the world o n e m ore a t 75. a s is his desire for w om en, which excee*
c h a n c e , at 75. to h ear his overwhelm ing ev en the philandering Franz's.
CONT1NL
Fig. 39. Article on Erwin Nyiregyhazi in People magazine (1978).
346
Rg. 40. Gene Kelly, Jose Iturbi, Frank Sinatra, and Sharon McManus in Anchors
Aweigh (1945).
347
Rg. 41. John Garfield, Oscar Levant, and Joan Crawford in Humoresque (1946).
348
“Yes, temperament is a beautiful thing—”

“ —but not for a woman! In any case, not at the piano!”
Rg. 42. Cartoon illustration in Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik (1987).
349
Winner o f the Palme d'Or, Cannes 1993
the Piano
NE CAMPION
Rg. 43. Publicity poster for The Piano (1993).
Rg. 44. Nineteenth-century postcard of piano-girl playing “Songs without Words.
351
Fig. 45. CD cover, The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ One Hot Minute (1995).
O 46. Cornel Wilde and Jeanne Crain in Leave Her to Heaven (1946).
Rg.
353
Rg- 47. Composite still photo: Natassja Kinski as Clara Wieck in Friihlingssinfonie
(Spring Symphony) (1982).
Fig. 48. Cartoon illustration in Jugend (1898).
355
trjutm r*tt
Laura am (Clavier
><fclr t w , ip rK II (U frayc. p a « i r Km A :
•3m»u «ti U k m C«M m 0« im
“Young lady, tell me what I wonder Are you In league with higher spirits?”
Fig. 49. Cartoon parody of Schiller’s “Laura am Klavier” in Jugend (1896).
356
Fig. 50. Advertisement for Tabu perfume in Vogue magazine (1971).
Fig. 51. Publicity poster for Die Kreutzersonate (1937).
358
Fig. 52. Raymond Massey, Romney Brent, and Elisabeth Bergner in Dreaming Lips
(1937).
Fig. 53. Ingrid Bergman and Leslie Howard in Intermezzo (1939).
360
Widmung.
X! 1. F .R ie k r r t. C«af«iir< i»«o.
Lung*, I c b h a f t
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Fig. 54. “Widmung” by Robert Schumann, op. 25, no. 1 (1840).
Reproduced with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
361
(i
l! eresc. eeee/erando
(re Corde
Fig. 55. Excerpt from Franz Liszt’s paraphrase of “Widmung.”
Widmnng.
Devotion.
Op. 2 5 . N? I .
Innig, lebhai't.
âan’, o da mein Scbraerz. du meme Writ,
nb Irh e - . . \vig ruei-m»o Kum » - mer gab!

rt/nra.
UmLj
(fy
Fig. 56. Q ara Schumann’s transcription of “Widmung.”
363
Vivnct* 1 .116 Opus 10 Nr. S

tm lla n tr
5.
A llegro aasrn * • its Opus IS Nr. 9
9. Uzziem^ * - w
- t- g
Fr. Chopin
Op. 10 N9 5 * Op. 25 N9 9
Badinage
Vivace gioviale (« ', ec -io -i)
Leopold GodcwsW
♦a« s
> i i, i < I
R g. 57. Above: two Etudes by Frederic Chopin. Below: Leopold Godowsky’s

“badinage.”
364
Wohin? i >1
b i M w r n f IIn h I Whither?
!. KyflA?
CMdoa«j> rpaHtipnaniia .u i
fo fn a n tm J l ruflOBC.KOro <0. (UyEEPT. con. 25
A llegretto monnorando (J < au«t t*j
Ptaao
‘Sh
l. t l
Fig. 58. Above: “Wohin?” by Franz Schubert, op. 25, no. 2. Below: Leopold
Godowsky’s paraphrase on “Wohin?”
fig. 59. Opening of Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B-flat minor, op. 23.
366
Fig. 60. Mary Astor and Bette Davis in The Great Lie (1941).
367
C o n c e rto F or T w o
(A Love Song-)
A dapted a n d a rraa g « d by
By JACK LAWRENCE and
ROBERT C. HARING P I TCHAIKOVSKY
Slowly (n ltk c x p r tttia n )
6-
Srr
Refrain
And when meet sic
XT
r Gm
e
starts on th e strin g s
Copyright MC.MXLI by Shapiro, B e m ste tn S Co. I n r R K O (H ^dioC ityM oaicHall) B uilding, 1270 S ix th Avenue. J*ew York
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED D o r t t k o t B e t t r r t d n £ n M e x ic o .
In te r m itlo m a t C o p yrig h t S ie n r td
Including Public Perform ance for Profit C m ha y J m e r m C m tr j y Sm d
UCH
Fig. 61. “Concerto for Two” sheet music (1941).
Fig. 62. Simone Signoret in Ombre et lumi&re (1951).
369
througH^ u from the key]

W\ a- ■'leariii
••.^4.
Fig. 63. Illustration for “Concerto” by Borden Chase, The American Magazine (1939).
370
L y ric by
Darling I Lcsve You
N07ICC: This in s im d iw jf I* p i n n a * Mu, ic A d ip tc d by
F R ED RAGES by Copynjht Law (Tite 17. U.S. Code) J u s m - E IN C
L IL L IE KEYSES from Tachaikow skyV C o n c e rto
Moderato aostennto S lu w /tt m itk n f FMi N? 1 - P * rt 2
_*T - ~~~
m
r m
Voice
Dar lore you! What more,dear, can
say; Ex-cept,you’re love - ly, You’re more than
t
erea c, e a c c r i.
rtf.
You are mv spi lion. ‘Dar
\ rt f .
TO-
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l n t .-r n a t> .a ..l ( • ;> yri£ht .S«;»*ur.-d A ll N i^ h t* N « -» e rv e d in c lu d in g t h r r i c h ! r»f p u b lic p r r f u r m u M c r f o r p r o f i t
l > . L" ;•>»■! 5 I 'M r t r d m B. S A .
Rg. 64. “Darling I Love You” sheet music (1941).
371
Alec I want to ask you Laura:

something, just to reassure myself. What is it?Alec: It is true for you, isn't it
This overwhelming feeling it's as true for you

we have for each other. as it is for me, isn’t it? Laura: Yes, it's true.
(They kiss passionately)
-dt-
Fig. 65. Dialogue from Brief Encounter (1945) over excerpt from Rachmaninoffs Piano
Concerto no. 2 in C minor, op. 18.
372
Fig. 66. John Ericson and Elizabeth Taylor in Rhapsody (1953).
373
A u ln a h m e :. Berlin-FUra (L itzm ann)
A . V . '9 A u f n a h m e : B erlia»F ilm (LiU m ann)
Die N atur entscheidet

Auf dem H ohepunkt ihres Ruhms bricht die
Pianistia A ngelika Rink zusam m en und entschiieflt
sich, in d ie Heiinat zuruckzukehren. A nna Dam-
mann und O . E. Hasse (als ih r Verlobter) in dem
Beriin-Film ..G efahrtin m eines Sommers'*
Fig. 67. Anna Damann and 0 . E. Hasse in Gefahrtin meines Sommers (1943).
374
/r tf ro 4 tx in g
Fig. 68. Publicity poster for Love Story (A Lady Surrenders) (1944).
375
gS
V DANA ANDREWS MERLE OBQIOIV

ETHEL BARRYMORE
i jut (iiiwu rniinin
/V /ftffT S o n g-
62 caI micbaec
P rille d «I IUII1T PUSH!
Fig. 69. Publicity poster for Night Song (1947).
376
61
• F in a le .
(C h o a ita , S te f a n ,a s d C h o ru s.)
Chonita.
O h, com*.
Stefan.
M oderate.« : tzo.
my love, «o from
dream ia g My reet - le st, yearn - tag heart. To
Copyright, 1932, by Lorenz Publishing Co., »n**Chontta.M International copyright.

C honiU *6l
Fig. 70. “Star of Love,” finale from Chonita: A Gypsy Romance (1932).
377
Plays
'M emory * H. Victorian
Jewelry Box. So
beautifully crafted in a high gloss resin
laminate this miniature piano has tiny
raised keys that look as if you could play
them. Open the lid and store your rings,
necklaces and larger pieces in the
3 inside velvet-lined compartments.
The lid is romantically adorned with a
reproduction of “Victorian Ladies." Plays
“Memory" from the Broadway musical
“Cats." We’ll gladly personalize with
3 initials in the traditional above the
keyboard position—at no extra charge.
9’ x 6 1/2” Gift boxed. Specify initials.
#11392 Victorian Jewelry Box. 39.95
Fig. 71. Advertisement for “Victorian Jewelry Box” in The Music Stand catalog
(1995).
378
2 Morceaux, Op. 57
1. Desir
' ^ T "rrF —
Rg. 72. “Desir” by Aleksander Scriabin, op. 57, no. 1.
00 YOU KNOW THE T O R T U R E S
o f t h e m e m o r y o f a l j f t lo v'
Rg. 73. Frame from Peanuts cartoon strip (1974).
APPENDIX O: POPULAR SONGS
“As Time Goes By,” music and lyrics by Herman Hupfeld. Harms Music.
“Castle of Dreams,” music by Harry Tiemey, lyrics by Joseph McCarthy. New York:
Leo Feist, 1919. Based on middle section of Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz, op. 64 no. 1.
Chonita, A Gypsy Romance: An Operetta Based on Themes o f Franz Liszt, music

composed and arranged by Ira B. Wilson, book and lyrics by Marion Wakeman.
Dayton, OH: Lorenz, 1932.
“Concerto for Two,” arranged by Robert C. Haring, lyrics by Jack Lawrence. New
York: Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., 1941. Based on opening theme of Chaikovsky’s
Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor, op. 23.
“Could It Be Magic,” music and lyrics by Barry Manilow and - Anderson. 1972.
Based on Chopin’s Prelude in C minor, op. 28 no. 20.
“Counting Ev’ry Moment,” music arranged by Elmer Schoebel, lyrics by Olga Paul.
Edward B. Marks, 1945. Based on Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise in A-flat major, op.
53.
“Darling I Love You,” adapted by Justin Ring, lyrics by Fred Hager and Lillie Keyser.
New York: Edward Schuberth, 1942. Based on theme from the second movement of
Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor, op. 23.
“Delphine,” music by Victor Schertzinger, lyrics by Leo Robin. New York: Famous
Music Corp., 1929.
380
381
“Down Thru the Years” (fox trot), lyrics by Bill Livingston. New York: Stasny Music,
1941. Based on theme(s) from Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. I in B-flat minor, op.
23.
“Dream Melody,” lyrics by Claude Lapham. New York: Claude Lapham, 1941. Based
on theme(s) from Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. I in B-flat minor, op. 23.
“Full Moon and Empty Arms,” music by Buddy Kaye, lyrics by Ted Mossman. New
York: Barton Music, 1946. Based on a theme from the third movement of
Rachmaninoffs Piano Concerto no. 2 in C minor, op. 18.
“I Think of You,” music by Jack Elliot, lyrics by Don Marcotte. Embassy Music,
1941. Based on theme from the first movement of Rachmaninoffs Piano Concerto no.
2 in C minor, op. 18.
“I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” music by Harry Carroll, lyrics by Joseph

McCarthy. New York: Robbins, 1918, 1946. Based on the slow middle section of
Chopin’s “Fantasie-Impromptu,” op. 66.
“Liebestraum,” music by Franz Liszt, arranged by Jim Smock, lyrics by Jerry Castillo.
Chicago: Clumet Music, 1935.
“Liebestraum (Dream of Love),” music by Franz Liszt, lyrics by Howard Johnson.

New York: Robbins Music, 1932.
“Lilacs and Love,” by Con Carr and Ted Larrson. San Francisco: Harmony House,
1941. Based on theme(s) from Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor, op.
23.
382
“Melody from Tschaikowsky’s Piano Concerto in B-flat Minor,” arranged by Ernest

Haywood. London: Keith Prowse, 1942.
“A Million Years,” lyrics by David Ormont. New York: Congress Music, 1942. Based
on theme(s) from Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor, op. 23.
“My Heart Is Yours,” arranged by D. Savino, lyrics by Ted Fetter. New York: J. J.
Robbins, 1947. Based on theme(s) from Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat
minor, op. 23.
“My Melody of May Time,” music adapted and arranged by Lucy-Ann Bryant, lyrics
by John Klenner. New York: Shapiro, Bernstein, 1945. Based on the slow theme from
Chopin’s “Fantasie-Impromptu,” op. 66.
“My Promise to You,” music and lyrics by Ervin Drake and Jimmy Shirl. New York:
Broadcast Music, 1947. Based on Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat major, op. 27 no. 2.
“My Twilight Dream,” music adaptation and lyrics by Lew Sherwood and Eddy
Duchin. New York: Robbins Music, 1939.
“Nadia’s Theme: from The Young and the Restless," music by Barry DeVorzon and
Perry Botkin, Jr. Milwaukee: EMI Music, 1971.
“No Greater Love,” lyrics by John Digges. New York: Robbins Music, 1941. Based
on opening theme of Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor, op. 23.
“No Other Love,” music and lyrics by Bob Russell and Paul Weston. New York: Walt
Disney Music, 1950. Based on Chopin’s Etude in E major, op. 10 no. 3.
383
“The Opening of Tschaikovsky’s B-minor [sic] Piano Concerto,” transcribed for piano
solo by Percy Grainger. New York: G. Schirmer, 1943.
“Polonaise for Two,” music adapted and arranged by Lucy-Ann Bryant, lyrics by John
Klenner. New York: Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., 1945. Based on the main theme from
Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise in A-flat major, op. 53.
“Showpan Boogie,” music by Joe Furst. 1949. Based on the “Minute” waltz by
Chopin.
“Silent Love,” arranged by Carl Deis, lyrics by Margaret Bristol. New York: G.
Schirmer, 1941. Based on theme(s) from Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat
minor, op. 23.
“The Song Tschaikowsky Wrote,” lyrics by Artie Jones. New York: Mills Music,
1941. Based on theme(s) from Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor, op.
23.
“Song Without End,” music by Morris Stoloff and George W. Duning, lyrics by Ned
Washington. New York: Columbia Pictures Music Corp., I960.
“The Stars Look Down,” music by Robert Stolz, lyrics by Gladys Shelly and Judith
Byron. New York: Alfred Music, 1941. Based on theme(s) from Chaikovsky’s Piano
Concerto no. I in B-flat minor, op. 23.
“Swedish Rhapsody,” by Charles Williams, for piano and orchestra. New York: Leeds
Music, 1949.
384
“Theme from Tschaikowsky’s Concerto no. 1,” arranged by Hugo Frey. New York:
Robbins Music, 1941.
‘Theme from the Cornish Rhapsody,” by Hubert Bath, for piano solo. New York: Sam
Fox, 1944.
‘T ill the End of Time,” music and lyrics by Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman. New
York: Santly-Joy, 1945. Based on Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise in A-flat major, op.
53.
“To Love Again,” music by Morris Stoloff and George Sidney, lyrics by Ned
Washington. New York: Columbia Pictures Music, 1956. Based on Chopin’s
Nocturne in E-flat major, op. 9 no. 2.
‘Tonight We Love,” arranged by Ray Austin, lyrics by Bobby Worth. Hollywood:

Maestro Music, 1941. Based on opening theme of Chaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1
in B-flat minor, op. 23.
Warsaw Concerto, by Richard Addinsell, arranged for piano solo by Henry Geehl.
New York: Chappell, 1942. Also published in London by Keith Prowse, in Paris by
Publications F. Day, and in Cologne by Bosworth. Arr. Percy Grainger for two pianos,
four hands. London: Keith Prowse, 1946. Arr. Liberace. New York: Chappell, 1955.
= “The World Outside.”
“What is Love,” music and lyrics by Mack Davis, Ray Bloch, and Bernard Maltin.
New York: Santly-Joy, 1945. Based on Chopin’s “Military” Polonaise in A major, op.
40 no. 2.
“The World Outside,” lyrics by Carl Sigman. New York: Chappell, 1958. Based on
the theme from the Warsaw Concerto by Richard Addinsell.
APPENDIX III: FICTIONAL WORKS AND POETRY
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. New York: S. French, 1921.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Random House, 1967.
Bahr, Hermann. The Concert: A Comedy in Three Acts, trans. Bayard Quincy Morgan.
Chief Contemporary Dramatists, 2nd series, ed. Thomas H. Dickinson. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1921, 505-567.
Bahr, Hermann. The Concert: A Comedy in Three Acts, ed. Josef Wiehr. New York:
Prentice-Hall, 1931.
Bahr, Hermann. Das Konzert: Lustspiel in drei Akten. Berlin: E. Reiss, 1909. Rprt.
Stuttgart: Reclam, 1961, reprt. 1994.
Banks, Polan. The Far Horizon, 1936.
Bernstein, Henry. Melo: piece en trois actes et douze tableaux. Paris: Artheme Fayard
& Cie, 1933.
Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: Heritage Press, 1942.
Cain, James M. “A Modem Cinderella.” Published in 1951 as “The Root of His Evil.”
Campion, Jane, and Jan Chapman. The Piano [screenplay]. New York: Miramax
Books/Hyperion, 1993.
385
386
Campion, Jane, and Kate Pullinger, The Piano. New York: Hyperion, 1994.
Chase, Borden. “Concerto.” American Magazine 128 (December 1939), 53-148.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, and Other Stories, ed. Lewis Leary. New York: Holt,
Rinehard and Winston, 1970.
Coward, Noel. “Still Life.” Tonight at 8:30. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran,
1936.
Dahl, Roald. “Edward the Conqueror.” Kiss Kiss. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1960.
Roald Dahl's Tales o f the Unexpected. London: Michael Joseph, 1948-1979, 115-132.
Forster, E. M. A Room with a View. New York: Knopf, 1953.
Frederic, Harold. The Damnation o f Theron Ware, or Illumination. New York:

Penguin Books, 1986.
Godden, Rumer. The Battle o f the Villa Fiorita. New York: Viking, 1963.
Goldsworthy, Peter. Maestro. New York: HarperCollins, 1989, 1998.
Higgins, Jack. Solo. Stein & Day, 1980.
Huneker, James. “A Son of Liszt.” Melomaniacs. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1902,11-18.
387
Hurst, Fannie. “Sister Act.” Cosmopolitan (March, 1937).
James, Henry. The Portrait o f a Lady. Penguin Books, 1984.
Jelinek, Elfriede. The Piano Teacher, trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York:
Serpent’s Tail, 1989.
Leland, Kurt. “At the Home for Retired Piano Teachers.” The Beloit Poetry Journal
44/4 (Summer 1994): 30.
Mann, Thomas. “The Infant Prodigy.” Stories o f Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-
Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.
Rubens, Bemice. Madame Sousatzka. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962; Sphere
Books, 1982.
Schiller, Friedrich. “Laura am Klavier.” Werke National-Ausgabe, vol. I: Gedichte.

Weimar: Bohlaus, 1942.
Schnitzler, Arthur. Fraulein Else, trans. F. H. Lyon. London: Pushkin Press, 1998.
Schniztler, Arthur. Traumnovelle. Berlin: Fischer, 1926. Trans. Otto P. Schinnerer:

Rhapsody: A Dream Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1927.
388
Schnitzler, Arthur. Das weite Land. Berlin: S. Fischer, 1911. Trans. Tom Stoppard:
Undiscovered Country. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1980.
Stewart, Fred Mustard. The Mephisto Waltz: A Novel. New York: Coward-McCann,
1969.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. New York: Random House, 1958.
Tolstoy, Leo. The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, trans. David McDuff.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.
Wolzogen, Ernst von. Der Kraft-Mayr: ein humoristischer Musikanten-Roman. Berlin:

Josef Singer, 1897, 1932. Trans. Edward Breck and Charles Harvey Genung: Florian
Mayr: A Humorous Tale o f Musical Life. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1914.
Zweig, Stefan. “Brief einer Unbekannten.” Amok, Novellum einer Leidenschaft.

Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1922. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul: Letter from an Unknown
Woman. London: Cassell, 1933.
APPENDIX IV: FILMOGRAPHY
This filmography lists Hollywood and foreign films that have at least one character
who is a “classical” concert pianist and/or a character who plays the piano in a
significant scene. Films discussed in the dissertation in relation to their soundtrack
music are also listed.
Filmography format:
American or European title (original foreign title in parentheses)
Country of production if foreign production, year of release, director
Actor who plays pianist character (name of pianist character in parentheses)
Abenteuer in Wien (Gefahrliches Abenteuer)

Austria, 1952, Emil E. Reichert
Francis Lederer (Claude Manilli)
Abschiedswalzer
Germany, 1934, Geza von Bolvary
Wolfgang Liebeneiner (Frederic Chopin)
Hans Schlenk (Franz Liszt)
The Accompanist (L ’Accompagnatrice)

France, 1993, Claude Miller
Romane Bohringer (Sophie Vasseur)
Adam ’s Rib
1949, George Cukor
David Wayne (Kip Lurie)
Affair in Havana
USA/Cuba, 1957, Laslo Benedek
John Cassavetes (Nick)
389
An Affair to Remember
1957, Leo McCarey
Cathleen Nesbit (Grandmother Janou)
Ainsi finit la nuit

France, 1948, Emil E. Reinert
Claude Dauphin (Andre Fuger)
Alex
Australia/New Zealand, 1993, Megan Simpson
Lauren Jackson (Alex Archer)
All About Eve

1950, Joseph L. Makiewicz
(pianist at party)
Allegro non troppo

Italy, 1977, Bruno Bozzetto
Amadeus
1984, Milos Forman
Tom Hulce (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
An American in Paris
1951, Vincente Minnelli
Oscar Levant (Adam Cooke)
American Nightmare
Canada, 1983, Don McBrearty
Lawrence Day (Eric Blake)
391
Anchors Aweigh
1945, George Sidney
Jose Iturbi (as himself)
Animal Crackers
1930, Victor Herman
Chico Marx (Signor Emanuel Ravelli)
Appassionato
Sweden, 1942, Olaf Motander
Georg Rydeberg (Thomas Dahlhoff)
Alf Kjellin [a.k.a. Christopher Kent] (Erik Linden)
L'appel du destin
France, 1953, Georges Lacombe
Jean Marais (Lorenzo Lombardi)
Arthur
1981, Steve Gordon
Dudley Moore (Arthur Bach)
A t the Stroke o f Nine

UK, 1957, Lance Comfort
Stephen Murray (Stephen Garrett)
Autumn Leaves
1956, Robert Aldrich
(pianist in recital)
392
Autumn Sonata (Hostsonaten) (Herbstsonate)

Sweden/W Germany/UK, 1978, Ingmar Bergman
Ingrid Bergman (Charlotte)
Liv Ullmann (Eva)
The Bad Seed

1956, Mervyn LeRoy
Patty McCormack (Rhoda Penmark)
Bahia de Palma
Spain, 1962, Juan Bosch
Arturo Fernandez (Mario)
The Band Wagon

Oscar Levant (Lester Marton)
The Barkleys o f Broadway

1949, Charles Walters
Oscar Levant (Ezra Miller)
The Battle o f the Villa Fiorita (Affair at the Villa Fiorita)

UK/USA, 1965, Delmar Daves
Rossano Brazzi (Lorenzo Tassara)
The Beast with Five Fingers

1946, Robert Florey
Victor Francen (Frances Warren Ingram)
393
Beau-Pere
France, 1981, Bertrand Blier
Patrick Dewaere (Remi)
Le beau voyage
France, 1946, Louis Cuny
Pierre-Richard Willm (Richard Lehmann)
Beethoven's Nephew (Le neveu de Beethoven)

W Germany/France, 1988, Paul Morrissey
Wolfgang Reichmann (Ludwig van Beethoven)
The Big Combo

1955, Joseph H. Lewis
Jakob Gimpel (pianist in recital)
The Birch Wood (Brzezina)

Poland, 1971, Andrzej Wajda
Daniel Olbrychski (Boleslaw)
The Birthday Party

UK, 1968, William Friedkin
Robert Shaw (Stanley Webber)
The Black Cat

1934, Edgar G. Ulmer
Blackmail
UK, 1929, Alfred Hitchcock
Cyril Ritchard (Crewe)
394
Blueberry Hill
1988, Strathford Hamilton
Margaret Avery (Hattie Cole)
Borderline
Austria, 1988, Houchang Allahyari
Michael Lakner (Thomas Linder)
Brief Encounter
UK, 1945, David Lean
The Brute Man

1946, Jean Yarbrough
Tom Neal (Clifford Scott)
Burnt by the Sun (Utomlennye solnstem)

Russia/France, 1994, Nikita Mikhalkov
Oleg Menchikov (Dimitri)
Camille
1936, George Cukor
Henry Daniell (Baron de Varville)
Carnegie Hall
Artur Rubinstein (as himself)
Casablanca
1942, Michael Curtiz
Dooley Wilson (Sam)
395
The Cocoanuts
1929, Joseph Santley, Robert Florey
Chico Marx (Chico)
Colonel Redl (Oberst Redl)

Hungary/W Germany/Austria, 1985, Istvan Szabo
Gdbor Svidrony (Alfred Redl as child)
The Common Touch

UK, 1941, John Baxter
Mark Hambourg (Chopin)
The Competition
1980, Joel Oliansky
Richard Dreyfuss (Paul Dietrich)
Amy Irving (Heidi Joan Schoonover)
Lee Remick (Greta Vandemann)
Con amore
Poland, 1976, Jan Batory
Miroslav Konarovski (Andrei)
Wojciech Wysocki (Grzegorz)
The Concert
1921, Victor Schertzinger
Lewis S. Stone (Augustus Martinot)
Confession
1937, Joe May
Basil Rathbone (Michael Michailow)
396
The Constant Nymph

UK, 1928, Adrian Brunei, Basil Dean
Ivor Novello (Lewis Dodd)
The Constant Nymph

UK, 1933, Basil Dean
Brian Aheme (Lewis Dodd)
The Constant Nymph

1943, Edmund Goulding
Charles Boyer (Lewis Dodd)
The Cranes are Flying (Letyat Zhuravli)

USSR, 1957, Mikhail Kalatozov
Da qualche parte in citta (Somewhere in the City)

Italy, 1994, Michele Sordillo
Carlina Torta (Anna)
The Dance o f Life

1929, John Cromwell
Oscar Levant (Jerry)
Dangerous Fingers (Wanted By Scotland Yard)

UK, 1938, Norman Lee
James Stephenson (Ronnie “Fingers” Elliott)
Dangerous Moonlight (Suicide Squadron)

UK, 1941, Brian Desmond Hurst
Anton Walbrook (Stefan Radetzky)
397
A Day at the Races

1937, Sam Wood
Chico Marx (Tony)
Dead Again
1991, Kenneth Branagh
Emma Thompson (Grace/Margaret Strauss)
Death in Venice
Italy/France, 1971, Luchino Visconti
(Tadzio’s sister)
Deception
1947, Irving Rapper
Bette Davis (Christine Radcliffe)
Dedicato a una Stella (Take All o f Me) (Stella)

Italy, 1976 or 77, Luigi Cozzi
Richard Johnson (Richard)
Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) (The Hatchet Murders)

Italy, 1975, Dario Argento
David Hemmings (Marcus Daly)
Gabrielle Lavia (Carlo)
Detour
Tom Neal (A1 Roberts)
398
Dishonored
1931, Josef von Sternberg
Marlene Dietrich (Marie Kolverer/X27)
Dormire
W Germany, 1984, Niklaus Schilling
Sunnyi Melles (Claudia Danner)
Dreaming Lips
UK, 1937, Lee Garmes
Elisabeth Bergner (Gaby Lawrence)
The Eddy Duchin Story

1955, George Sidney
Tyrone Power (Eddy Duchin)
Edouard et Caroline
France, 1951, Jacques Becker
Daniel Gelin (Edouard)
Elegy fo r a Quarrel (Elegy to Violence) (Kenka Ereji) (Serejii)

Japan, 1966, Seijun Suzuki
Elvira Madigan
Sweden, 1967, Bo Widerberg
Embrasse moi (Kiss Me)

France, 1988, Michele Rosier
Dominique Valadie (mother)
399
The Enchanted Cottage

1945, John Cromwell
Dorothy McGuire (Laura)
Herbert Marshall (Hillgrove)
The End o f August

1982, Bob Graham
Lilia Skala (Mile. Reisz)
Eroica
Austria, 1949, Walter Kolm-Veltee
Ewald Balser (Ludwig van Beethoven)
Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht

Germany, 1939, Carl Froelich
Hans Stttwe (Peter Tchaikovsky)
The Fabulous Baker Boys

1989, Steve Kloves
Jeff Bridges (Jack Baker)
Fashions in Love
Adolphe Menjou (Paul de Remy)
The Favor, the Watch, and the Very Big Fish (Rue Saint-Sulpice)
France/UK, 1991, Ben Lewin
Jeff Goldblum (the pianist)
400
Finale
Germany, 1948, Ulrich Erfurth
Peter Schiitte (Michael Reimers)
Fingers
1977, James Toback
Harvey Keitel (Jimmy “Fingers” Angelelli)
Five Easy Pieces

1970, Bob Rafelson
Jack Nicholson (Robert Eroica Dupea)
Lois Smith (Partita Dupea)
Five Finger Exercise

1962, Daniel Mann
Maximilian Schell (Walter Langer)
The 5,000 Fingers o f Dr. T

1953, Roy Rowland
Tommy Rettig (Bart)
Hans Conried (Dr. Terwilliker)
Follow the Boys

1944, A. Edward Sutherland
Four Daughters
John Garfield (Mickey Borden)
401
Fraulein Else
Germany, 1929, Paul Czinner
The French Lieutenant’s Woman

UK, 1981, Karel Reisz
Friedemann Bach
Germany, 1941, Traugott Muller
Gustaf Grundgens (Friedemann Bach)
Gaslight (Angel Street)

UK, 1940, Thorold Dickinson
Anton Walbrook (Paul Mallen)
Gaslight
1944, George Cukor
Charles Boyer (Gregory Anton)
Jacob Gimpel (pianist)
Gefdhrtin meines Sommers

Germany, 1943, Fritz Peter Buch
Anna Dammann (Angelika Rink)
The Getting o f Wisdom

Australia, 1980, Bruce Beresford
Susannah Fowle (Laura Tweedle Rambotham)
Un grand amour de Beethoven

France, 1936, Abel Gance
Harry Baur (Ludwig van Beethoven)
402
Grand Hotel
Grand Isle
1991, Mary Lambert
Ellen Burstyn (Mile. Reisz)
Great Balls o f Fire!

1989, Jim McBride
Dennis Quaid (Jerry Lee Lewis)
The Great Lie

Mary Astor (Sandra Kovak)
Green Card
Australia/France, 1990, Peter Weir
Gerard Depardieu (George Faure)
Gretta [Night Train to Terror]

1982, John Carr
Meredith Haze (Gretta Connors)
Groundhog Day
1993, Harold Ramis
Bill Murray (Phil Connors)
Peggy Roeder (piano teacher)
403
Hands o f a Stranger
1962, Newton Arnold
James Stapleton (Vernon Paris)
The Hands o f Orlac (Les mains d ’Orlac)

UK/France, I960, Edmond T. Greville
Mel Ferrer (Steven Orlac)
Hangover Square
1945, John Brahm
Laird Cregar (George Harvey Bone)
Heidi und Ihre Freunde (Friihlingslied)

W Germany, 1954, Hans Albin
Oliver Grimm (Wolfgang Fabricius)
Higher and Higher

1943-, Tim Whelan
Victor Borge (Sir Victor Fitzroy Victor)
Dooley Wilson (Oscar)
Holiday in Mexico
1946, George Sidney
Housle a Sen (Bohemian Rapture) (The Violin and the Dream)

Czechoslovakia, 1946, Vaclav Krska
Vaclav Voska (Frederic Chopin)
404
Husbands and Lovers (La Villa del Venerdi)

Italy, 1991, Mauro Bolognini
Tcheky Karyo (Paolo)
Hry pro mime pokrocile (Games fo r the Moderately Advanced)

Czechoslovakia, 1986, Ota Koval
Lucie Domkova (Klara)
Humoresque
1946, Jean Negulesco
Oscar Levant (Sidney Jeffers)
The Hunger
1983, Tony Scott
Catherine Deneuve (Miriam Blaylock)
The "I Don’t Care" Girl

1952, Lloyd Bacon
Oscar Levant (Charles Bennett)
Ich werde Dich auf Handen tragen

W Germany, 1958, Veit Harlan
Kristina Soderbaum (Ines Thormalen)
Immer nur Du!

Germany, 1941, Karl Anton
Immortal Beloved
UK/USA, 1994, Bernard Rose
Gary Oldman (Ludwig van Beethoven)
405
Impromptu
UK, 1991, James Lapine
Hugh Grant (Frederic Chopin)
Julian Sands (Franz Liszt)
Interlude
1957, Douglas Sirk
Rossano Brazzi (Tonio Fischer)
Intermezzo
Sweden, 1936, Gustaf Molander
Ingrid Bergman (Anita Hoffman)
Intermezzo
1939, Gregory Ratoff
Ingrid Bergman (Anita Hoffman)
It Happened in Brooklyn
1947, Richard Whorf
Peter Lawford (Jamie Shellgrove)
Billy Roy (Leo Kardos)
I've Always Loved You (Concerto)

Republic, 1946 Frank Borzage
Philip Dorn (Leopold Goronoff)
Catherine McLeod (Myra Hassman)
Vanessa Brown (Porky at 17)
Jenny
France, 1936, Marcel Came
Lisette Lanvin (Danielle Bricard)
406
Johnny Guitar
Republic, 1953 Nicholas Ray
Joan Crawford (Vienna)
The Joy Luck Club

1993, Wayne Wang
Ming-Na Wen (June)
Julie
1956, Andrew L. Stone
Louis Jourdan (Lyle Benton)
Kanal
Poland, 1956, Andrzej Wajda
Vladek Sheybal (The Composer)
Kansas City Kitty

1944, Del Lord
Joan Davis (Polly Jaspers)
A Kiss in the Dark

1949, Delmar Daves
David Niven (Eric Phillips)
Maria Ouspenskaya (Madame Karina)
Kiss Me, Stupid (It Happened in Climax, Nevada)

1964, Billy Wilder
Ray Walston (Orville J. Spooner)
407
Kiss the Boys Goodbye

Oscar Levant (Dick Rayburn)
Das Konzert
Germany, 1944, Paul Verhoeven
Harry Liedtke (Heink)
Kreitzerova Sonata
USSR/W Germany, 1987, Mika Schweitzer, Sofia Milkina
Irinia Seleznyova (Lisa Pozdnyshev)
Die Kreutzersonate (The Kreutzer Sonata)

Germany, 1937, Veit Harlan
Lil Dagover (Yelaina Pozdnysheva)
The L-Shaped Room

UK, 1962, Bryan Forbes
Laughter
1930, Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast
Frederic March (Paul Lockridge)
Leave Her to Heaven

1945, John M. Stahl
Jeanne Crain (Ruth Berent)
Let No Man Write My Epitaph

1960, Philip Leacock
James Darren (Nick Romano)
408
Letter from an Unknown Woman

1948, Max Ophuls
Louis Jourdan (Stefan Brand)
Liebestraume
Germany, 1935, Heinz Hille
Franz Herterich (Franz Liszt)
Das Lied der Liebe (Wenn die Musik nicht war’) (Der Kraft-Mayr) (Liszt Rhapsody)
Germany, 1935, Carmine Gallone
Paul Horbiger (Florian Mayr)
Sybille Schmitz (Ilonka Badacz)
Karin Hardt (Thekla)
Louis Rainer (Franz Liszt)
Lisztomania
UK, 1975, Ken Russell
Roger Daltry (Franz Liszt)
Ken Colley (Frederic Chopin)
Liszt’s Rhapsody
1996, David Devine
Geordie Johnson (Franz Liszt)
Little Women
1933, George Cukor
Little Women
1949, Mervyn LeRoy
409
Little Women
1994, Gillian Armstrong
Lola Montes (The Fall o f Lola Montes)

W Germany/France, 1955, Max Ophuls
Will Quadflieg (Franz Liszt)
The Lonely Passion o f Judith Heame

UK, 1987, Jack Clayton
Maggie Smith (Judith Heame)
Love Affair
1939, Leo McCarey
Maria Ouspenskaya (Grandmother Janou)
Love Affair
1994, Glenn Gordon Caron
Katherine Hepburn (Ginny)
Love Happy
1950, David Miller
Chico Marx (Faustino the Great)
Love Story (A Lady Surrenders)

UK, 1944, Leslie Arliss
Margaret Lockwood (Lissa Campbell/Felicity Crighton)
The Loved One

1965, Tony Richardson
Liberace (Mr. Starker)
The Loves o f a Blonde (Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky)
Czechoslovakia, 1965, Milos Forman
The Loves o f Liszt (Szerelmi Almok - Liszt) (Liebestraum)

Hungary/USSR, 1970, Mirton Keleti
Imre Sinkovics (Franz Liszt)
Mad Love (The Hands ofOrlac)

1935, Karl Freund
Colin Clive (Stephen Orlac)
Madame Bovary
Jennifer Jones (Emma Bovary)
Madame Bovary
France, 1991, Claude Chabrol
Isabelle Huppert (Emma Bovary)
Madame Sousatzka
UK, 1988, John Schlesinger
Shirley MacLaine (Madame Sousatzka)
Shabana Azmi (Manek)
Madame X
1965, David Lowell Rich
Ricardo Montalban (Phil Benton)
John van Dreelen (Christian Torben)
411
Magic Fire
1954, William Dieterle
Erik Schumann (Hans von Bulow)
Carlos Thompson (Franz Liszt)
The Magnificent Rebel

1960, Georg Tressler
Karlheinz Bohm (Ludwig van Beethoven)
Mazurka
Germany, 1935, Willi Forst
Albrecht Schoenhals (Grigori Michailov)
Melo
France, 1986, Alain Resnais
Sabine Azema (Romaine Belcroix)
Melodie des Schicksals

West Germany, 1950, Hans Schweikart
Brigitte Homey (Carola Ahrens)
Melodie etem e
Italy, 1940 or 48, Carmine Gallone
Gino Cervi (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
Men o f Two Worlds (Kisenga, Man o f Africa) (Witch Doctor)

UK, 1946, Thorold Dickinson
Robert Adams (Kisenga)
412
The Mephisto Waltz

1971, Paul Wendkos
Alan Alda (Myles Clarkson)
Curt Jurgens (Duncan Ely)
Mildred Pierce
Eve Arden (Veda)
Mlodosc Chopina (Young Chopin)

Poland, 1952, Aleksander Ford
Czeslaw Wollejko (Fryderyk Chopin)
Monkey Business
1931, Norman Z. McLeod
Chico Marx (Chico)
Moonlight Sonata (The Charmer)

UK, 1938, Lothar Mendes
Ignace Jan Paderewski (as himself)
The Mozart Story

Austria/US, 1948, Karl Hartl, Frank Wisbar
Hans Holt (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
Music fo r Millions
1944, Henry Koster
413
The Music Lovers

UK, 1971, Ken Russell
Richard Chamberlain (Peter Tchaikovsky)
The Music Man

1962, Morton da Costa
Shirley Jones (Marion Paroo)
Monique Vermont (Amaryllis)
My Brilliant Career
Australia, 1979, Gillian Armstrong
Judy Davis (Sybylla Melvyn)
My Dream is Yours
The Naked Jungle

1954, Byron Haskin
Eleanor Parker (Joanna Leiningen)
The Net
1995, Irwin Winkler
Never Say Goodbye

1956, Jerry Hopper
Cornell Borchers (Lisa Gosting)
Nichts als Arger mit der Liebe

Austria, 1956, Thomas Engel
Viktor de Kowa (Prof. Heink)
414
Night and Day

Cary Grant (Cole Porter)
A Night at the Opera

1935, Sam Wood
Chico Marx (Fiorello)
The Night Has Eyes (Terror House)

UK, 1942, Leslie Arliss
James Mason (Stephen Deremid)
Night Is My Future (Music In Darkness) (Musik i Morker)

Sweden, 1948, Ingmar Bergman
Mai Zetterling (Ingrid)
Birger Malmsten (Bengt Vyldeke)
Night Song
1947, John Cromwell
Dana Andrews (Dan Evans)
Nocturne
1946, Edwin L. Marin
La Note Bleue (Blue Note)

France/Poland/W Germany, 1991, Andrzej Zulawski
Janusz Olejniczak (Frederic Chopin)
415
Nuit de Decembre (Heure exquise)

France, 1939, Kurt Bernhardt
Pierre Blanchar (Pierre Damond)
The Old Maid

Ombre et lumiere (Shadow and Light)

France, 1950, Henri Calef
Simone Signoret (Isabelle)
On ne meurt que deuxfois (He Died With His Eyes Open)

France, 1985, Jacques Deray
One Hundred Men and a Girl

1937, Henry Koster
Leonid Kinskey (pianist)
Orchestra Rehearsal (Prova d ’orchestra)

Italy/W Germany/France, 1978, Federico Fellini
Elisabeth Labi (The Pianist)
Orlacs Hdnde
Austria/Germany, 1925, Robert Wiene
Conrad Veidt (Paul Orlac)
The Other Love

1947, Andre de Toth
Barbara Stanwyck (Karen Duncan)
416
The Paradine Case

1947, Alfred Hitchcock
Alida Valli (Maddelena Paradine)
Phantom o f Death (Off Balance) (Un delitto poco commune)

Italy, 1988, Ruggero Deodato
Michael York (Robert Dominici)
The Phantom o f the Opera

1943, Arthur Lubin
Fritz Leiber (Franz Liszt)
The Piano
Australia/France, 1993, Jane Campion
Holly Hunter (Ada McGrath)
The Piano Lesson

1995, Lloyd Richards
Picnic at Hanging Rock

Australia, 1975, Peter Weir
The Picture o f Dorian Gray

1945, Albert Lewin
Hurd Hatfield (Dorian Gray)
Pillow Talk
1959, Michael Gordon
Rock Hudson (Brad Allen)
417
Pirosbetiis Hetkdznapok (Nedele ve vsedni den)

(Everyday - Sunday) (Everyday Life)
Hungary/CSSR, 1963, Felix Mdriassy
Jana Brejchovd (Jana Landovd)
Play It Again, Sam

1972, Herbert Ross
Polonia Restituta
Poland, 1981, Bohdan Poreba
Krzysztof Chamiec (Paderewski)
The Portrait o f a Lady

UK/USA, 1996, Jane Campion
Barbara Hershey (Madame Serena Merle)
Possessed
1947, Curtis Bernhardt
Jakob Gimpel (Walter Sveldon)
The Power o f One

1992, John G. Avildsen
Arinin Mueller-Stahl (Prof. “Doc” von Wollensteen)
Stephen Dorff (P. K.)
Practice Makes Perfect (Le cavaleur)

France, 1978 Philippe de Broca
Jean Rochefort (Edouard Choiseul)
418
Pretty Woman
1990, Garry Marshall
Richard Gere (Edward Lewin)
Prisoners in Petticoats
1950, Philip Ford
Valentine Perkins (Joan Grey)
A Private Function
UK, 1984, Malcolm Mowbray
Maggie Smith (Joyce Chilvers)
Psycho 3
1986, Anthony Perkins
Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates)
Quartet: The Alien Com

UK, 1948, Harold French
Dirk Bogarde (George Bland)
Franôise Rosay (Lea Makart)
Redwood Curtain
1995, John Korty
Lea Salonga (Geri Riordan)
Reefer Madness
1936, Louis Gasnier
Warren McCullom (Jimmy)
419
Rendez-vous a Bray (Meeting in Bray)

Belgium/France/W Germany, 1971, Andre Delvaux
Mathieu Carriere (Julien Eschenbach)
Le Retour a la Bien-Aimee (Return to the Beloved)

France, 1979, Jean-Fran?ois Adam
Jacques Dutronc (Julien)
Reves d'amour (Dreams o f Love)

France, 1947, Christian Stengel
Pierre-Richard Willm (Franz Liszt)
Rhapsody
1954, Charles Vidor
Elizabeth Taylor (Louise Durant)
John Ericson (James Guest)
Rhapsody in Blue
1945, Irving Rapper
Robert Alda (George Gershwin)
Oscar Levant (as himself)
Will Wright (Sergei Rachmaninoff)
Rhythm on the River

Oscar Levant (Billy Starbuck)
Ringside
1949, Frank McDonald
Don Barry (Mike O'Hara)
420
Romance on the High Seas

Oscar Levant (Oscar Ferrar)
Romanze in Moll (Romance in a Minor Key)

Germany, 1943, Helmut Kautner
Marianne Hoppe (Madeleine)
Ferdinand Marian (Michael)
Romanze in Venedig (Romance in Venice)

Austria, 1962, Eduard von Borsody
Walter Reyer (Stefan Schroder)
A Room With a View

UK, 1985, James Ivory
Helena Bonham Carter (Lucy Honeychurch)
Rope
Farley Granger (Philip Morgan)
Rose o f Washington Square

Tyrone Power (Bart Clinton)
Route sans issue (La passion d ’Evelyne Clery)

France, 1947, Jean Stelli
Helene Perdriere (Evelyne Clery)
421
Running on Empty
1988, Sidney Lumet
River Phoenix (Danny Pope/Michael Manfield)
Salo, or The 120 Days o f Sodom (Salo, o Le 120 giomate di Sodoma)

Italy/France, 1975 Pier Paolo Passolini
Sonia Saviange (the Pianist)
Santa Sangre
Italy, 1989, Alejandro Jodorowsky
Axel Jodorowsky (Fenix)
Blanca Guerra (Concha)
The Scent o f Green Papaya (Mui Du Du Xanh)

France, 1993, Tran Anh Hung
Vuong Hoa Hoi (the pianist)
The Secret Fury

1950, Mel Ferrer
Claudette Colbert (Ellen Ewing)
The Secret Heart

1946, Robert Z. Leonard
June Allyson (Penny Addams)
Richard Derr (Larry Addams)
September Affair
Joan Fontaine (Manina Stuart)
Frangoise Rosay (Maria Salvatini)
422
Serenade (La sonata a Kreuzer) (The Kreutzer Sonata)

France, 1956, Eric Rohmer
The Seven Year Itch

1955, Billy Wilder
Tom Ewell (Richard Sherman)
The Seventh Veil

1945, Compton Bennett
Ann Todd (Francesca Cunningham)
Shine
1996, Scott Hicks
Geoffrey Rush (David Helfgott)
Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste)

France, 1960, Frangois Truffaut
Charles Aznavour (Charlie Kohler/Edouard Saroyan)
The Silent Touch

UK/Poland/Denmark, 1990 or 92, Krzysztof Zanussi
Max von Sydow (Henry Kesdi)
Sincerely Yours
1955, Gordon Douglas
Liberace (Anthony Warren)
Singoalla (The Mask and the Sword) (Gypsy Fury) (The Wind Is My Lover)
France/Sweden, 1950, Christian-Jaque
423
Skazanyie o zemle Sibirskoi (Tale o f Siberia)

USSR, 1947, Ivan Pyriev
Vladimir Drushnikov (Andrei Balaschov)
Solistin Anna Alt (Symphonie dreier Herzen)(Wenn die Musik nicht war...)
Germany, 1944, Werner Klingler
Anneliese Uhlig (Anna Alt)
Somewhere in Time
1980, Jeannot Szwarc
La sonata a Kreutzer (The Kreutzer Sonata)

Italy, 1985, Gabriella Rosaleva
Daniela Morelli
Sonata pro zrzku (Koncert pro zrzavou holku) (Concerto fo r a Redhead)

Czechoslovakia, 1980, Vit Olmer
Stanislava Coufalova (Petra)
Song o f Love
1947, Clarence Brown
Katherine Hepbum (Clara Schumann)
Paul Henried (Robert Schumann)
Henry Daniell (Franz Liszt)
Song o f My Heart (Tragic Symphony)

1947, Benjamin F. Glazer
Frank Sundstrom (Tchaikovsky)
424
Song o f Norway
1970, Andrew L. Stone
Toralv Maurstad (Edvard Grieg)
Henry Gilbert (Franz Liszt)
Song o f Russia
Susan Peters (Nadejda Ivanovna Stepanova)
A Song to Remember
1944, Charles Vidor
Paul Muni (Joseph Eisner)
Cornel Wilde (Frederic Chopin)
Stephen Bekassy (Franz Liszt)
Song Without End

1960, Charles Vidor, George Cukor
Dirk Bogarde (Franz Liszt)
Alex Davion (Frederic Chopin)
The Soul o f a Monster

1944, Will Jason
Erwin Nyiregyhaza (the pianist)
South Sea Sinner

1949, Bruce Humberstone
Liberace (The Maestro)
Spellbound
425
Spotkania w mroku (Encounters in the Shadows/Dark) (Begegnung im Zwielicht)

E Germany/Poland, 1960, Wanda Jakubowska, Ralf Kirsten
Zofia Slaboszowska (Magdalena Novak)
Spring Symphony (Fruhlingssinfonie)

W Germany/E Germany, 1982, Peter Schamoni
Nastassja Kinski (Clara Wieck)
Herbert Gronemeyer (Robert Schumann).
Stage Fright
UK, 1950, Alfred Hitchcock
Michael Wilding (Wilfred O. Smith)
Stolen Face
UK, 1952, Terence Fisher
Lizabeth Scott (Alice Brent/Lily)
Stolen Identity
Austria/USA, 1953, Gunter von Fritsch
Francis Lederer (Claude Manelli)
Story o f a Woman (Storia di ana donna)

Italy/USA, 1970, Leonardo Bercovic
Bibi Andersson (Karin Ullman)
The Story o f Three Loves

1952, Gottfried Reinhardt, Vincente Minelli
Jacob Gimpel (the pianist)
426
Strange Fascination
1952, Hugo Haas
Hugo Haas (Paul Marvan)
The Tall Guy

UK, 1989, Mel Smith
Der Tangospieler
E Germany/Switz, 1990, Roland Graf
Michael Gwisdek (Hans-Peter Dallow)
Tchaikovsky
USSR, 1970, Igor Talankin
Innokenti Smoktunowski (Tchaikovsky)
Tea fo r Two
1950, David Butler
Doris Day (Nanette Carter)
Ten
1979, Blake Edwards
Dudley Moore (George Webber)
That Day at the Beach (Haitan Te Yitien) (At the Beach)

Taiwan, 1983, Yang Teh-Chang
That Forsyte Woman

1949, Compton Bennett
Greer Garson (Irene Forsyte)
427
That Midnight Kiss

1949, Norman Taurog
Amparo Iturbi (as herself)
That Uncertain Feeling

1941, Ernst Lubitsch
Burgess Meredith (Alexander Sebastian)
Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould

Canada, 1993, Francois Girard
Colin Feore (Glenn Gould)
Thirty Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia

UK, 1967, Joe McGrath
Dudley Moore (Rupert Street)
This Love o f Ours

Merle Oberon (Karin Touzac)
Thousands Cheer
1943, George Sidney
Three Daring Daughters (The Birds and the Bees)

1948, Fred M. Wilcox
428
Too Young to Kiss

1951, Robert Z. Leonard
June Allyson (Cynthia Potter)
Torch Song
1953, Charles Walters
Michael Wilding (Tye Graham)
Der trdumende Mund (Dreaming Lips)

Germany/France, 1932, Paul Czinner
Elisabeth Bergner (Gaby)
Der trdumende Mund (Dreaming Lips)

W Germany, 1952, Josef von Baky
Maria Schell (Elisabeth Merk)
Traumerei (Dreaming)
Germany, 1944, Harald Braun
Hilde Krahl (Clara Schumann)
Mathias Wieman (Robert Schumann)
Friedrich KayBler (Friedrich Wieck)
Emil Lohkamp (Franz Liszt)
Twin Dragons (Shuang long hai)

Japan, 1992, Ringo Lam, Hark Tsui
Jackie Chan (John Ma/Boomer)
Two Girls and a Sailor

1944, Richard Thorpe
Gracie Allen (as herself)
An Unfinished Piece fo r Player Piano
(Neokonchennaya pyesa dlya mekhanicheskovo pianino)
USSR, 1976, Nikita Mikhalkov
The Unforgiven
1959, John Huston
Lillian Gish (Mathilda Zachary)
Ungarische Rhapsodie (Rhapsodie) (Franz Liszts grofie Liebe)

W Germany/France, 1953, Peter Bemeis
Paul Hubschmid (Franz Liszt)
Unknown Country (La terre etrengere) (Das Weite Land)

W Germany/Austria/France/Italy, 1986, Luc Bondy
Paulus Manker (Alexei Korsakov)
Vergifi die Liebe Nicht (Don't Forget Love)

W Germany, 1953, Paul Verhoeven
Luise Ullrich (Anna Kienzel)
Dse Bally (Jeanne Lohr)
Voice in the Wind

1944, Arthur Ripley
Francis Lederer (Jan Volny/“El hombre”)
Wagner
UK/Hungary/Austria, 1983, Tony Palmer
Ekkehard Schall (Franz Liszt)
Miguel Herz-Kestranes (Hans von Bulow)
430
Welcome to the Dollhouse

1996, Todd Solondz
Heather Matarazzo (Dawn Weiner)
The West Side Waltz

1995, Ernest Thompson
Shirley MacLaine (Margaret Mary Elderdice)
What's Up, Doc?

1972, Peter Bogdanovich
Ryan O'Neal (Howard Bannister)
When Tomorrow Comes (The Modem Cinderella)

1939, John M. Stahl
Charles Boyer (Philippe Andre Pierre Chagal)
While I Live (The Dream ofOlwen)

UK, 1947, John Harlow
Audrey Fildes (Olwen Trevelyan)
Carol Raye (Sally Grant)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

1988, Robert Zemeckis
Donald Duck, Daffy Duck
Wien, du Stadt meiner Traume (Vienna, City o f My Dreams)

Austria, 1957, Willi Forst
Adrian Hoven (Peter Lehnert)
431
A Woman’s Face (En kvinnas ansikte)

Sweden, 1938, Gustaf Molander
Ingrid Bergman (Anna Holm/Miss Paulsson)
Tore Svennberg (Magnus Barring)
A Woman's Face
1941, George Cukor
Joan Crawford (Anna Holm/Ingrid Paulson)
Conrad Veidt (Torsten Barring)
The World o f Henry Orient

1964, George Roy Hill
Peter Sellers (Henry Orient)
Tippy Walker (Valerie Boyd)
You Were Meant fo r Me

1947, Lloyd Bacon
Oscar Levant (Oscar)
The Young Girls o f Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort)

1967, Jacques Demy
Catherine Deneuve (Delphine Gamier)
Gene Kelly (Andy)
Young Man with a Horn

1950, Micahel Curtiz
Lauren Bacall (Amy North)
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

Mythologies of the “Romantic” Pianist in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

Professor Jann Pasler, Co-Chair

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ProQuest Information and Learning Company

Ivan Raykoff, 2002

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University of California, San Diego

II. The Dynamics of D esire............................................................................................ 21

HI. Pianistic Progenitors................................................................................................ 77

IV. Piano Women, Forte W om en............................................................................... 135

V. Transcription as Transgression............................................................................... 192

VI. Concerto con am ore................................................................................................236

Appendix II: Popular Songs......................................................................................... 380

Appendix IE: Fictional Works and Poetry...................................................................385

Appendix IV: Filmography.......................................................................................... 389

Fig. I. Chopin Plays in the Salon o f Prince Anton Radziwill.....................................307

Fig. 2. Schumann / Ophuls comparison...................................................................... 308

Fig. 3. “Liebestraum (Dream o f Love)”.......................................................................309

Fig. 4. Caricature of Ignace Jan Paderewski............................................................... 310

Fig. 5. Caricature of Franz L iszt.................................................................................. 311

Fig. 6. Liberace’s You Made Me Love You.................................................................. 312

Fig. 7. Publicity photo: Sincerely Yours......................................................................313

Fig. 8. Liberace Plays Chopin..................................................................................... 314

Fig. 9. “Showpan Boogie” ........................................................................................... 315

Fig. 10. Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. publicity................................................................316

Fig. 11. Publicity photo: Night Song............................................................................ 317

Fig. 12. Rachmaninoff, Disney, Horowitz............................................................... 318

Fig. 14. Caricature of Leo Ditrichstein........................................................................ 320

Fig. 15. Peanuts cartoon strip....................................................................................... 321

Fig. 17. Only Trust Your Heart advertisement............................................................. 323

Fig. 18. Annan’s “Symphony of Love” piano p in .......................................................324

Fig. 19. Windham Hill catalog...................................................................................... 325

Fig. 20. Li 'I Abner cartoon strip fram e........................................................................ 326

Fig. 21. Hae-Jung Kim recital advertisement.............................................................. 327

Fig. 22. Publicity poster: Romanze in M oll.................................................................. 328

Fig. 23. Van Heflin and Joan Crawford in Possessed................................................. 329

Fig. 24. Arthur Schnitzler’s Fraulein E lse................................................................... 330

Fig. 25. Horowitz on Television.................................................................................... 331

Fig. 27. Song without E n d ......................................................................................... 333

Fig. 28. “Song without End” sheet m usic.................................................................334

Fig. 29. Double Franz Liszts..................................................................................... 335

Fig. 30. Publicity photo: Fruhlingslied......................................................................336

Fig. 31. Publicity poster: Ungarische Rhapsodie...................................................... 337

Fig. 32. “My Consolation” sheet m usic......................................................................338

Fig. 33. Publicity poster: Das Konzert........................................................................339

Fig. 34. Caricature of Franz L iszt............................................................................... 340

Fig. 35. “Delphine” sheet m usic................................................................................. 341

Fig. 36. Photo of Franz Liszt with his students..........................................................342

Fig. 39. Article on Erwin Nyiregyhazi..................................................................... 345

Fig. 40. Jose Iturbi in Anchors Aweigh.....................................................................346

Fig. 42. Cartoon illustration in Neue Zeitschrift fiir M usik..................................... 348

Fig. 43. Publicity poster: The Piano......................................................................... 349

Fig. 45. One Hot M inute.............................................................................................. 351

Fig. 47. Natassja Kinski in Friihlingssinfonie (Spring Symphony).........................353

Fig. 48. Cartoon illustration in Jugend...................................................................... 354