This chapter examines the rise of the guitar hero in the period from the mid 1960s until the early 1990s, with an emphasis on the 1970−1985 period. The “hippie aesthetic” is explored to establish the various aspects of musical ambition among guitarists that helped to make technical virtuosity a key factor in this rise. Readers’ polls primarily from Guitar Player magazine are surveyed to explore how aspiring guitarists in the 1970s and later ranked contemporary (but also historical) guitarists. These polls suggest that aspiring guitarists sometimes preferred different guitarists to those who might be most popular among the general listening public. A brief survey of modern guitar hero polls suggests that the guitar heroes of the 1970s have mostly retained their standing, though some newer ones appear in these polls and some older ones have receded.

In The Segovia Technique (1972), Vladimir Bobri describes what a guitarist’s hand gesture must be to lean toward virtuosity. This search for the perfection of the “classical” gesture was, however, called into question by another virtuosity: that of rock music. The greatest guitarists of this genre never ceased to break the rules of this ideal gesture. In the first part of the chapter, this study briefly covers the electrification of the guitar and its consequences on guitar manufacturing and the development of the effects dedicated to guitar playing. I will then focus on the possible range of crossbreeding the classically inspired instrumental gesture before addressing Eddie Van Halen’s contribution. Finally, I will consider the influence that the rock virtuosos’ legacy, from Jimi Hendrix to Van Halen, brought to the instrumental gesture, and the tones used by composers of contemporary repertoire whose knowing use of technique has furthered the hybridization of genres.

In spring 1838, Franz Liszt made his first appearances before the Viennese public with a selection of his transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieder for pianoforte. The performances unleashed veritable storms of applause from audiences and critics alike; some of the rapturous reviews even claimed that the music of Schubert, who had died ten years earlier, only became intelligible through Liszt’s playing. Liszt’s transcriptions were meant to transfer Schubert’s piano writing effectively to the new generation of concert grands. Their formidable virtuosity, which was frequently criticised in later years, was only superficially an end in itself, however. Instead, Liszt viewed virtuosity as a vehicle for obtaining the maximum expression appropriate to the original and for capturing the emotive quality of Schubert’s music. His precepts as an editor of Schubert’s piano music were of a different nature. Unlike contemporary editions, the Schubert volumes that Liszt prepared for the Stuttgart publishing house Cotta around 1870 are exemplary in quality and indicate every editorial intervention, while also being devoid of the arbitrary additions common to the subjectively tinged performance tradition of his generation. This chapter provides a thorough study of Liszt’s approach to Schubert’s music, while also considering the reception of his adaptations and editions.

Guitar playing styles have gradually, albeit substantially, changed over time. The new millennium in particular brought a fundamental change in playing techniques, primarily due to technological advances such as extended-range guitars. Established techniques were adapted to new instrument designs and their use in progressive musical styles. This chapter introduces novel approaches to melodic playing in three areas of progressive rock subgenres: percussive techniques, tapping, and using the thumb. The analysis of contemporary techniques includes adaptations from the electric bass that inspired thumping, slapping, and popping techniques. Concerning tapping, traditional shred tapping is complemented by forms of pianistic multi-finger and multi-role tapping, as well as percussive glitch and butterfly tapping. Finally, examining thumb use demonstrates that the picking-hand thumb is now involved in techniques such as under-strumming. The chapter shows how these techniques are used in progressive rock and metal, where virtuosity is expected and where guitarists must actively explore unique ways of playing to distinguish themselves from other skilled players.

This chapter examines Messiaen’s pianistic techniques and virtuosity in Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (1944). In particular, it focusses on Yvonne Loriod, who gave the first performance of the work at the Salle Gaveau in March 1945 at the age of only twenty-one, and whose phenomenal virtuosity enabled Messiaen to explore new complexities of musical thought and pianistic expression. It demonstrates how Messiaen’s pianistic style can be understood as part of a tradition reaching back to Chopin, Liszt, and Mussorgsky, while also exploring its parallels in Albéniz and Ravel.

Just before his death, Hamlet bids Horatio “to tell my story.” However, immediately after Fortinbras's arrival, when Horatio wants to perform this task and “speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about”, Fortinbras interrupts him, claiming “some rights of memory in this kingdom” for himself, and commands his men to “Take up the bodies” and “Go bid the soldiers shoot.” These final moments of Shakespeare’s play initiate the dramaturgical process for future generations to recount the events which led to Hamlet’s death, reconsidering, re-enacting as well as resisting his and the play’s legacy in constantly shifting forms and constellations. This chapter reflects on how this dramaturgical process is established in the play itself bringing together theoretical issues of hermeneutics, text analysis and performance theory with practical, creative work in the theatre. Highlighting the performative link between virtue and virtuosity, dramaturgy connects research and practice and is designed to develop and enhance creative work in the theatre. The aim of dramaturgical analysis is to open up new dimensions for productions of classical texts, by illuminating these texts from innovative perspectives and laying the basis for integrative scenic images that can later be developed for stage interpretations of the text.

This chapter explores Britten’s relationship with the critical press and various writers on music. The composer’s antipathy to critics is widely acknowledged, and his relationship with members of that circle could be contentious at times. In his article ‘Variations on a Critical Theme’, published in Opera in 1952, Britten addressed many of the concerns he had about music criticism in Britain and posited some remedies, but he only created further animosity in some quarters. Nevertheless, several music writers gained his confidence and respect, including Henry Boys, Donald Mitchell, and Hans Keller. Mitchell and Keller, in particular, attempted to elevate discourse about music in England and gave special attention to the works of Britten in their periodical Music Survey and in Boosey & Hawkes’s publication, Tempo, among other Britten-centred endeavours. The chapter focuses upon proponents and adversaries alike, including such disparate personalities as Eric Blom, Boys, Norman Demuth, Peter Evans, Frank S. Howes, Keller, Colin Mason, Mitchell, Eric Roseberry, Erwin Stein, Eric Walter White, and Virgil Thomson.

Clara Schumann embarked on her Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7, not only at a pivotal moment in her own musical development, having previously focused on ‘small forms’ (Kallberg, 1992), but also in the history of the genre. To write a piano concerto in the 1830s was to engage with an established tradition that was in a state of change. Significant in this regard were the continued advancements in the modern piano, the expansion of form, evolving relationships between the soloist and the orchestra, and shifting attitudes towards virtuosity, all of which gave rise to new ways of navigating the nineteenth-century piano concerto.

This chapter offers a contextual reading of the expressive worlds of Schumann’s Concerto, with reference to selected passages from all three movements. At its core lies an emphasis on the ways in which the piece blurs the boundaries between the public and the private, the physical and the intimate. In exploring these areas, the chapter demonstrates the ways in which Schumann situates her Concerto in a web of intertextual associations, establishing dialogues with other composers, while simultaneously putting her own stamp on the genre.

Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17, of 1846 holds a contested place in the nineteenth-century repertory. One of her finest compositional achievements, it was performed regularly throughout the nineteenth century. Yet she herself seems to have led the way for a languishing of its reputation when, upon its publication in 1847, she acknowledged that she ‘did not care for it particularly’ and that, by comparison to Robert Schumann’s Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 63, composed a year later, it now ‘sounded effeminate and sentimental’. This may represent nothing more than an internalization of the widespread belief at this time in women’s inferiority as composers, but her self-doubt cast a long shadow. Clara Schumann’s Trio is usually cited in recent scholarship merely to contextualize Robert Schumann’s Trios (Daverio, 1997; Nemko, 1997), or to exemplify the composer’s capacity for withdrawal into the private musical sphere by way of coping with the emotional and psychological distress with which she was dealing when she composed the piece (Reich, 1985, Rev. 2001; Ferris, 2004).

This chapter considers Schumann’s Trio in relation to a range of contemporaneous piano trios, and through the lens of the New Formenlehre, giving particular emphasis to fugal passages in the opening and closing movements. The striking pianistic virtuosity of this Trio is matched by a compositional virtuosity that significantly enhances our understanding of romantic sonata form. Schumann’s innovations are explored in relation to the Schumannian belief that only through interiority might virtuosity be legitimized and elevated. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Schumann’s Trio as a formal model for later Piano Trios by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Bedřich Smetana.

This chapter explores the rise of the twin ideals of authenticity and self-expression in Romantic musical aesthetics. Abandoning earlier aesthetic paradigms of mimesis and rhetoric, Romantic musicians were exhorted to bring forth music from the depths of their inner experience. Authentic expression, in this context, depended on the composer maintaining complete autonomy and renouncing the objective of affecting or pleasing an audience. After examining philosophical, social, and economic developments behind this shift in priorities, the chapter argues that expressive authenticity functioned less as a stable quality than as a regulative concept in nineteenth-century musical life. As such, it was often evoked as a way of conferring aesthetic legitimacy and prestige, but was employed in ways that were inconsistent and complex. As examples from nineteenth-century discourses on orchestral timbre, virtuosity, and identity in music show, the ideal of expressive authenticity could function as an effective tool in the creation and reinforcement of hierarchies of power and authority.

This chapter first outlines the Romantic perspective on performance as it was elaborated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates on key writers who made music central to their philosophical and literary works, most notably E. T. A. Hoffman and Walter Scott. Both writers foregrounded the immediacy and social intimacy of performance as fundamental to musical beauty, even as they simultaneously discussed music in terms of objects (works, songs, poems). The chapter proceeds with case studies of three early-nineteenth-century performers – Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz (as conductor) – who were considered ‘Romantic’ or who inspired writers to use Romantic literary and journalistic tropes. Each case study considers the interrelations between the performer’s look, onstage behaviour, and musical phenomena, as well as the literary elaborations they inspired. The conclusion suggests ways in these three key performers shaped performance ideals well into the twentieth century.

Chapter One examines the representation of both choral and solo dance in Books 6–8 of the Odyssey, arguing that the representation of virtuosic Phaeacian dance in the eighth book of the poem underscores the tense relationship between Odysseus and his Phaeacian hosts and articulates distinctions between choral and solo dance that echo across Greek literature. While the Odyssey itself is much earlier than the late Archaic and Classical texts explored in subsequent chapters, the models of performance set forth in Archaic hexameter poetry retain their currency in Greek culture through the time of Plato and beyond. The chapter thus considers Homeric poetry as paradigmatic for the representation of both choral and solo dance. The chapter also advances a new reading of the role of dance in the Phaeacian books of the Odyssey, arguing that the Homeric poet presents embodied performance and action as a means by which Odysseus and the Phaeacians negotiate their fraught relationship. My analysis highlights the disruptive and competitive elements of dance that simmer beneath the surface of the poem, suggesting that the prevailing scholarly interest in choral dancing has occluded the unique and unusual elements of Phaeacian dance.