'Fashionable Ornaments': The Reception of Virtuosity in Eighteenth-Century Anglophone Culture

This dissertation is an examination of changing attitudes towards musical virtuosity in eighteenth-century Britain and British colonies. I attempt to trace the emergence of virtuosity as a concept in the long eighteenth-century, while remaining aware of the practices to which thinkers were responding. My contention is nineteenth-century ideas about virtuosity developed over the long eighteenth century, in tandem with the development of emerging virtuosic practices. Although I focus primarily on the 1700s, I begin with the start of public concerts in London in the 1670s and end with Liszt’s second British tour in 1840. The first chapter, offers a lexicological survey of dictionaries and reference materials published from 1598 through 1800. This quantitative study provides a corpus of contextual information on the understanding of the term ‘virtuoso.’ Chapter two, is the first of four qualitative studies of anglophone music criticism. This chapter focuses on the writing of professional critics and their distaste of virtuosic practices. The third chapter, uses the writing of Roger North as a case study for a unique angle of criticism. Chapter four, explores the writing of professional musicians. All three chapters use music criticism to explore the shifting standards of public opinion and detail how virtuosity was denounced in print even while adored by audiences. The final chapter, extends my examination of music criticism to look at the aesthetic ideal that became virtuosity’s foil: the sublime. Over the course of the long eighteenth-century, sublimity became a prime exemplar of artistic supremacy, or even of genius, and virtuosity was frequently held up as the antithesis of such greatness. I demonstrate throughout that musical virtuosity was denigrated in anglophone culture of the long eighteenth century, even while the term ‘virtuoso’ had redeeming qualities related to scholarship and other less practical skills.