Robert Doran 
Liszt and Virtuosity 

CO-WINNER: The Triennial Alan Walker Book Award, sponsored by the American Liszt Society 2023


A new and wide-ranging collection of essays by leading international scholars, exploring the concept and practices of virtuosity in Franz Liszt and his contemporaries.


In the annals of music history, few figures have dominated the discussion of virtuosity as much as Franz Liszt. A flamboyant performer whose hair-raising technical feats at the piano created a sense of awe-inspiring excitement andan icon whose star power radiated far beyond the realm of music, Liszt was, along with his early model, Paganini, among the first major performer-composers to define himself principally by virtuosity.


Featuring new essays by an international group of preeminent scholars,
Liszt and Virtuosity offers a reevaluation of the concept and practices of virtuosity as shaped and defined in Liszt’s multifaceted oeuvre, as well as a reconsiderationof Liszt’s relation to other major and lesser-known musical figures, including Czerny, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, and Marie Jaëll.


Set in the context of larger trends within the fields of music history, musicanalysis, intellectual history, and performance studies, these capacious explorations demonstrate that Liszt’s uniqueness and significance resided in his ability to transform virtuosity into a revolutionary musical force, pushingthe piano aesthetic to the limits of sound and poetic meaning.

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Introduction: Virtuosity and Liszt – Robert Doran

Part One: Liszt, Virtuosity, and Performance

Après une lecture de Czerny?: Liszt’s Creative Virtuosity – Kenneth Hamilton

Transforming Virtuosity: Liszt and Nineteenth-Century Pianos – Olivia Sham

Spirit and Mechanism: Liszt’s Early Piano Technique and Teaching – Nicolas Dufetel

Paths through the Lisztian Ossia – Jonathan Kregor

Brahms ‘versus’ Liszt: The Internalization of Virtuosity – David Keep

Part Two: Lisztian Virtuosity: Theoretical Approaches

The Practice of Pianism: Virtuosity and Oral History – Jim Samson

Liszt’s Symbiosis: The Question of Virtuosity and the Concerto Arrangement of Schubert’s
Wanderer Fantasy – Jonathan Dunsby

From the Brilliant Style to the Bravura Style: Reconceptualizing Lisztian Virtuosity – Robert Doran

Part Three: Virtuosity and Anti-Virtuosity in ‘Late Liszt’

Harmony, Gesture, and Virtuosity in Liszt’s Revisions: Shaping the Affective Journeys of the Cypress Pieces from
Années de pèlerinage III – Dolores Pesce

Anti-Virtuosity and Musical Experimentalism: Liszt, Marie Jaëll, Debussy, and Others – Ralph P. Locke

Virtuosity in Liszt’s Late Piano Works – Shay Loya

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ROBERT DORAN is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester and an Affiliate Faculty member in the Music Theory Departmentat the Eastman School of Music.