ABSTRACT
Studying the aesthetics of virtuosity brings the researcher into direct contact with a host of contradictory meanings and interpretations that not only cut across centuries of music-making and virtually every style type, but also plays out in other disciplines and professions. The nature of virtuosity and the function of the virtuoso became significant aesthetic issues in tandem with the rise of the musical work and of the professional performer in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The anglophone musicological studies, potentially the most fruitful for the aesthetics of virtuosity, fall into a rough chronology of research that builds upon successive publications, albeit generally to the neglect of the French- and German-language secondary literature. In comparison with the American musicological approaches to virtuosity that have been informed by cultural studies and have centred on Franz Liszt, French scholars have further cultivated the socio-aesthetic path of Janklvitch in particular.
