Virtuosity of the nineteenth century

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)

Times: 19th century