ABSTRACT

Musical performance was born in Vienna in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. More exactly, like Dionysus, it was born twice: once in Vienna in the piano scores of Beethoven and Schubert, and once in the cult of the piano virtuoso that traversed all of Europe in the two decades the deaths of those already iconic figures. Musical performance predates musical composition, predates the score; as a cultural institution, is a historical precipitate of performance. The musical and cultural consequences are too numerous to canvass briefly. The demand that the performer's body audibly translate its corporeality into expressivity is one factor in the rise of solo performance as a pre-eminent mode, not only on the piano but also on the voice and the violin, which has its own trajectory. The public performance of solo works for piano was a relative rarity before the 1830s, although piano concertos had been popular since shortly after the instrument's invention.