Conference Agenda

Ever since Eduard Hanslick laid down a hermeneutic framework of the European virtuoso in the 1870s, critics have repeatedly characterized the performance culture of the 1830s and 1840s as shallow, self-serving, and historically naive. In light of the historicist direction that many composers, performers, and critics adopted in the second half of the century, the presentist mindset of the virtuoso age seemed especially disengaged from the music and musicians that preceded Haydn and W.A. Mozart. To be sure, virtuosos like Franz Liszt, Ignaz Moscheles, and Clara Schumann included pre-classical repertoire in their programs; but their tendency to privilege J.S. Bach's keyboard music only reified, rather than challenged, established compositional hierarchies and stylistic biases. On occasion, however, a work would appear on stage or in print that fell outside of these narrow stylistic or historical confines. Ironically, the rarity of such “curiosities,” as critics often called them, meant that they had the power to exert an outsized influence on the shape of contemporary aesthetic debates.

Such was the case with Henri-Louis-Stanislas Mortier de Fontaine's piano arrangement of G.F. Handel's Organ Concerto in F major, HWV 292. Mortier de Fontaine performed the piece in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and other major European cities in 1844, the same year he published it through Schlesinger of Berlin. Rather than dismissing the arrangement as a vapid virtuoso showpiece or distasteful historical appropriation, critics bought into Mortier de Fontaine's assertion that he had, as he wrote in the edition's preface, rendered "a genuine service to art by rescuing this concerto from oblivion." Even more important were the discussions inspired by his archaeological find. Journalists like Oswald Lorenz, Ferdinand Laurencin, and Ludwig Rellstab drew heavily on Mortier de Fontaine's performances and edition to work through a number of issues typically associated with later generations, including period-appropriate performance practice, generic hierarchies and interdependencies, schools of composition, and the politics of prestige. Indeed, their criticism reveals how Mortier de Fontaine and his Handel arrangement—two long-forgotten curiosities of the virtuoso age—challenge the persistent notion that the two halves of the nineteenth century practiced opposing modes of performative historicism.

Early proponents of musical Romanticism considered Romantic musical works as forever in process (im Werden). Peter Szendy (2000) observes that this processual character is even clearer in arrangements, potentially leaving performers and listeners much room for imaginative completions. So arrangements, on par with original versions of Romantic works, might gesture towards the unattainable work. In Szendy’s view, arrangers like Schumann and Liszt take us close to how they want to hear the original works in question: they are ‘remarkable listeners who sign and write down their listenings’ (39). Thus, if we listen to Liszt’s Fantasie über Themen aus Mozarts Figaro und Don Giovanni (Fantasy on Themes from Mozart’s Figaro and Don Giovanni, 1842), we learn how Liszt heard those works.

However, Szendy’s argument runs the risk of the intentional fallacy, and raises the problem of treating listening as historically invariant. His theory of the ‘Romantic arrangement’ is useful regarding Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz, and certain of their contemporaries’ ideals. But lesser-known arrangers and anonymous arrangements arguably tell us more about performance and listening practices. Scholars typically have little time for these supposedly more ‘trivial’ categories of arrangement—notably those based on opera—which receive attention in this paper. Thomas Christensen tends to dismiss them in favour of ‘more sober concert repertory’, apparently of greater value (1999). The bulk of this repertoire seems to be easy works for a mass market, as Robert Waissenberger (1986, 257) would have it.

Countering these views, the highly popular and varied arrangements of late Mozart opera in early nineteenth-century Vienna make a useful case study. These arrangements provide insights into how domestic music-making contributed to sociability, education and canon formation. Moreover, the Mozart opera arrangements, in particular, indicate a still prevalent ‘open’ musical work concept at this time, in which amateur performers could complete works in various ways, indicated by publications and manuscript copies, becoming creative artists.

Among the kaleidoscopic trajectories taken by the arrangement of music for instrumental ensemble in the long nineteenth century, the questions of where the adaptations were made, what traditions they adopted and what view they took of their original subjects are paramount. The three issues entwine themselves in complex ways. Three groups of examples – London in the 1820s, Paris in the 1860s and Vienna in the 1910s – allow the beginnings of a systematic theorization of the process of keeping the music of the past before the ears of the present.

Place and tradition determine the sonic nature of the adaptation. Although there were pan-European traditions – the piano-vocal score of a lyric stage work for example, or the reduction of larger concerted works for piano trio – some local traditions are already apparent from case studies already conducted. At the beginning of the century, Viennese traditions entertained the most diverse range of adaptation with reworkings for string ensemble (Thormählen 2010; November 2023) while London exploited perhaps the narrowest range with a predilection for the JUPITER ensemble (fortepiano, flute, violin, cello) (Everist 2023). By the mid century in Paris, the music of previous generations collided with the development of the orgue expressif, which in combination with the fortepiano and at the hands of the virtuoso pianist Amédée Méreaux and others formed the core of domestic adaptations (Everist 2024).

Questions of time and place underpin the authority of musical adaptation: when Johann-Nepomuk Hummel arranged Mozart in the 1820s or Edouard Steuermann arranged Arnold Schönberg’s works from before 1910 they could point to apprentice status regarding their sources. For those who claimed similar authority, but who lacked such direct contact, their introductory paratexts attempted to authorize their adaptations by appeals to tradition and fidelity to the original texts.