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The Virtuoso Liszt.

Article Excerpt
The Virtuoso Liszt. By Dana Gooley. (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [xv, 280 p. ISBN 0-521-83443-0. $75.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

In the afterword to his study of Franz Liszt's virtuoso piano career, Dana Gooley describes the process by which he came to write this book: "I began by pursuing the question of how he historically anticipated the modern popular star, only to find that his popularity rested on unfamiliar premises quite specific to the 1830s and 1840s" (p. 266). This confession highlights two of the strengths of the work--first, the study draws on a remarkable array of sources to shed light on the cultural climate unique to the time, and second, Gooley demonstrates a flexible intellect that allows him to look at old questions in new ways, challenging his own preconceptions and those of his readers in the process.

Liszt's virtuosity has been the subject of countless popular and scholarly studies starting in his own lifetime and continuing to the present. Considering the amount of attention that has been devoted...

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