| This dissertation takes up the nineteenth-century violin concerto as a genre that straddles two worlds at odds with one another in critical discourses---the world of virtuosity and its delight in performativity, and that of the "musical work" with its weighty ideals. The "concertos without virtuosity" in question are those commonly thought to have negotiated this divide in favor of more substantive ideals, including those by Beethoven (1806), Mendelssohn (1844) and Brahms (1878). As the negative image of the "virtuoso concerto," the term reflects a critical trope in which the musically valuable concerto "avoids," "contains," "subsumes," or otherwise distances itself from the virtuosity that, according to critics, mars the others.;These chapters proceed from the proposition that the "concerto without virtuosity" is more of a distortion that reflects anxieties about musical value and respectability than it is a fitting description of the concertos' relationship to a culture of performativity. Chapter One looks at how and why the distortion emerged in the eighteenth century and became routinized and encouraged in music criticism and history in the nineteenth century. Chapter Two considers the changes Beethoven made to the genre and the effects these changes have had on the reception of op. 61 as a concerto and, in turn, as a "musical work." And Chapter Three hears Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto as an expression of the composer's own rejection of the negative valuation of virtuosity in light of the idealization of the "symphonic."... |
