Virtuosity of the nineteenth century
Subtitle: performing music and language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire
By: Susan Bernstein.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
Subjects: Heine, Heinrich, 1797-1856; Liszt, Franz, 1811-1886; Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867 -- Knowledge -- Music; Music and language; Music and literature -- History -- 19th century; Music -- 19th century; Virtuosity in music
Description: Franz Liszt is the organizing figure in this detailed study of music in Heine and Baudelaire. The acclaimed virtuoso functions both as a metaphor for a musical mode of enunciation and as a historical referent. This dual status dramatizes the struggle at the heart of nineteenth-century aesthetics between poetic self-reference and realism's efforts to report the world accurately.

The book's analyses of nineteenth-century theories of correspondence, along with the thematization of the "other arts," point to the limitations of analogy, the impossibility of a general theory of art, and a crisis of identity - that is, a shared non-identity - that can be the only common property among different discourses, genres, and media.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.