Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance.

Article Excerpt
After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance. By Kenneth Hamilton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. [x, 304 p. ISBN-10: 0195178262; ISBN-13; 9780195178265. $29.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, bibliography, index.

In After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance, Kenneth Hamilton challenges the monopoly of modern performance practice on romantic repertory. Focusing on the so-called "golden age" of pianism, ca.1840-ca. 1940, Hamilton's healthy mixture of common sense, insightful arguments, and considerable experience as both scholar and pianist demonstrate just how far our current notions of performance etiquette, textual fidelity, and audience responsibility can be from those moved. But Hamilton's main goal is not to enable some abstract musicological recovery of a lost nineteenth-century performance practice. Rather, he emphasizes that "rediscovering practices of the past does not just satisfy curiosity, it offers opportunities" to the modern performer (p. 32).

Chapter 1 frames the book by identifying the multivalent vocabulary associated with the period. Whether by his technique, his compositions, or through sheer accumulation of students, Liszt has come to be viewed as the inaugurator of the golden age. Indeed, many pianists even today introduce themselves as "a student of a student of a student of Liszt," the implication being that Liszt--his teaching, his artistry, even perhaps his spirit--remains alive and well. Hamilton questions the validity of such phrases on several grounds: Is it really possible to speak of an uninterrupted and uncorrupted performance aesthetic that can be traced back to Liszt?...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!