Conference Agenda

In 1838, Franz Liszt and Henri-Louis-Stanislas Mortier de Fontaine performed Johann Peter Pixis’s Variations brillants sur un théme original, Op. 112, in Milan. The success of the concert led Simon Richault to republish the work that same year, "augmented with a cadenza by Liszt” (“augmentés du Point d’Orgue par Liszt”). By connecting concert repertoire to his musical catalogue, Richault deliberately foregrounded the performer in a way that would prove prescient of the celebrity culture that would dominate European musical arenas in the coming decade. Yet while Liszt’s fame may have helped popularize this practice, other musicians, such as Wilhelm Ernst and Hans von Bülow, also benefited from similar editorial privilege during the nineteenth century.

These performer-centric editions increasingly stood apart from the two dominant editorial practices that characterized the second half of the century. Source-critical editions sought to present music “as intended by” its composer—often dead for decades, if not centuries—thus simultaneously revealing and fixing an authoritative reading that performers were expected to follow reverentially. By contrast, instructive editions of these same works often followed an “as prescribed by” approach, in which contemporary teachers established precepts for how a work should sound, thereby shaping performance norms for the future. Performer-centric editions, however, offered a third approach: the “as played by” model. Rather than aspiring to historical authenticity or pedagogical instruction, these editions sought to capture the ephemeral artistry of a specific performer’s unique interpretation.

By employing musical notation instead of textual commentary, performer-centric editions allowed audiences to recreate—in extraordinary detail—musical events that they might never have witnessed, thereby bridging previously intractable gaps between the ephemeral performance, its physical preservation, and unreliable, prejudiced, or ambiguous recollections. For players of “as played by” editions, the payoff could be even more personal, since such editions offered the potential to become the virtuoso, to fully embody the very celebrity that nineteenth-century material culture had made as ubiquitous as it was inaccessible. These ephemeral inscriptions solved such a paradox, bringing together performer and composer in ways unmatched by any other contemporary communicative medium or discourse network.