The Liszt image in contemporary music publications

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Franz Liszt remains one of the most richly multifaceted artists of the 19th century; even in his lifetime the media provided him an enormous presence in biographies, music encyclopaedias, reference books, and especially periodicals. This project will detail the widespread and heterogeneous images of Liszt provided by contemporary music publications from the 1820s through the 1880s, to explore central aspects of the ambivalence within this heterogeneity. It offers a source-based analysis of the reception and discourse surrounding Liszt, as an alternative to research based only on Liszt’s occasionally overemphasized self-presentation. The project examines two rhetorical strategies to nuance Liszt’s reception: the »images of life« and the »images of artists«. It will be documented and analysed the use of both strategies, and concluded by synthesizing both as a central aspect throughout the discourse on Liszt in music publications. This method offers a new vantage point to reexamine the accepted reception of Liszt, by avoiding biographical modes of examination that depend on ›true or false‹ categories, and allows instead for an appropriate distance from which to expand limiting polarities, such as ›the virtuoso versus the artist‹ or ›new-German versus absolute music aesthetics‹. The inclusion of biographies, music encyclopaedias, reference books, and a broad panorama of music periodicals lends to this project a wide spectrum of sources and rhetorics from which to draw on, through which it will be illustrated the publication network around Liszt in order to provide space for not only known propagandists, but also anonymous or non-professional reviewers and correspondents.