Title: Virtuosity of the nineteenth century
First published: 1998
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.
Subjects: Virtuosity in music, Knowledge, Music and literature, Music, Music and language, History, Virtuosity in musical performance, History and criticism, Heine, heinrich, 1797-1856, Liszt, franz, 1811-1886, Baudelaire, charles, 1821-1867
People: Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Time periods: 19th century
LC classification: ML3849 .B37 1998