On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, John Halle wrote:
> Not to quibble, but one frequently hear of literary, mathematical,
> scientific or other conceptual/cognitive/artistic achievements described
> as virtuousic, no? It seems unreasonable not to allow for composers being
> described as virtuousi along the same lines.
Yeah, you could. But people generally don't. Your original question was why Justin was referring to Stravinsky as great but not a virtuoso. I was explaining what he meant. If you think people should use words differently than they do, take it up with Webster, not with us.
Interestingly, part of why people make the distinction in classical music is precisely because they look down on instrumental skills as second class. Look at any classical music program -- the composer's name will be in caps under the piece title, and the performers will be in lower case. (In jazz, things are pretty much the opposite, although different graphic devices are involved.) It wasn't always thus. Levine claims to find one of the first times that a producer in America tried to elevate the status of the composers above the performers. In the early 1850s, the impressario, Max Maretzek, sent a pianist and a bass on a concert tour. Discovering that, while famous in New York and Boston and Philadelphia, they were relatively unknown in the New England town where they were to perform, he decided to make the names of the composers a larger feature of the programs. The trick succeeded, he reported; they got a decent sized audience. But it was also evidently so novel that the hotel propietors, confused, billed not the performing artists but Mozart, Handel, Bellini and Beethoven.
In short, in the snotty world of classical music, where they celebrate "fidelity to the score," calling a composer a virtuoso (like Lizst) -- or even calling a performer a virtuoso (like Paganini) -- can be a kind of back handed insult, implying that they are mainly show and froth (in the case of composers) or -- horrors -- embellishing on the composer's holy intentions with their own ideas (in the case of performers). The current usage, where it is restricted to instrumental ability, is the result of a whole series of historical struggles (e.g., over the legitimacy of improvisation, and over the relative status of performers, composers and conductors), and it has its meaning defined (i.e., limited) by the resultant semantic field. But once you leave that field, you can make the word mean anything you want.
BTW, people do sometimes use it for conductors, who are definately worshipped like virtuosi. But for the reasons given above, it's never used for compositional excellence, even for a guy like Mozart. Prodigy, yes, genius, yes. But not virtuoso. Unless you are specifically talking about the way he played the harpsichord. Where, of course, he improvised.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com