The bicentennial celebrations of two outstanding pianist-composers of the nineteenth century, Fryderyk Chopin and Franz Liszt, have yielded rich studies of the music and careers of both. Colleagues and friends during their lives, they remain tied together in scholarship and pop culture alike, a century and a half after their deaths. In the 2013 collection «Grandeur et Finesse»: Chopin, Liszt and the Parisian Musical Scene, we find them intertwined again, this time in 17 essays, each one informed by a unique perspective with respect to their lives in Paris. The editor of the volume, Luca Sala, proposes in his preface to interrogate the ‘historical, analytical and aesthetical standpoints’ of the life and works of Chopin and Liszt as well as the context of Parisian music-making (p. vii). In particular, he ponders the difficulty of tackling multifaceted conceptions of Romanticism and posits the contrasting cases of Chopin and Liszt as one possible pathway through the complexities of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics.

«Grandeur et Finesse» is the result of the symposium ‘Chopin and Liszt: Two Composers and Their Relation to the Parisian Musical Scene’, directed by Sala and held in Lucca, Italy, in December 2010. The essays in the volume, which represent approximately half of the conference programme, are offered in French, English and Italian. Organized in four sections, «Grandeur et Finesse» provides a wide-ranging look at the context, composition, aesthetics and legacy of Chopin and Liszt.

The opening section of the volume, which features three essays in French, addresses the pianistic and cultural context in which Chopin and Liszt found themselves upon their arrivals in Paris. One of the conference's keynote lectures, Cécile Reynaud's fascinating exposition of these ‘two Parisian careers’, addresses the construction of Chopin and Liszt, both as singular artists and in relation to each other, during their early years of living and performing in Paris. She consults contemporary criticism and biographies as well as Chopin and Liszt's comments on each other to provide a rich background for the essays that follow. Renata Suchowiejko unpacks the historical context of Chopin's famous concert of 1835 through a close study of an unknown body of primary documents from the Bibliothèque Czartoryski de Cravocie. These manuscript documents, many of which are featured in this article in black-and-white photographs or in transcription, bring to life the Polish aristocrats who organized the event as well as the role of charitable concerts during this period. Thirdly, Anne Penesco connects Chopin and Liszt to the context of violin playing of the 1830s and 1840s. Although Liszt's fascination with Paganini is well known, his collaboration with other contemporary French violinists is less familiar; yet both he and Chopin interacted with high-profile members of the French violin school, such as Pierre Baillot and Chrétien Urhan. Penesco's study complicates the standard piano–violin narrative of Liszt and Paganini and provides an interesting model for further study of concert programming and instrumental music in the nineteenth century.

With the stage set to mid-century Paris, we turn to five essays that confront various processes that shaped the composition and reception of Chopin and Liszt's compositions.Footnote ¹ Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald's revised keynote address, entitled ‘Chopin and the Eighteenth Century: Contrapuntal Process and Syntax in the Formation of his Mature Sonata Style’, examines Chopin's engagement with the music and techniques of eighteenth-century composers. To begin, he investigates the contrapuntal context of Chopin's ‘late’ or ‘last’ style through copious examples drawn from works by Chopin and his contemporaries (including Muzio Clementi and Johann Nepomuk Hummel); with these ideas in place, he turns to the first movement of Chopin's Cello Sonata, op. 65, to challenge traditional readings of Chopin's formal and syntactical practices in this work. His conclusion that Chopin's ‘multi-facetted relationship with music of the previous century’ (p. 98) demands further nuance and careful analysis suggests a fruitful path for future study.

In an essay on the intricacies of interpreting piano scores of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, David Rowland explores how the ‘limitations of an inherited notation system’ and an expanding audience for sheet music led piano composers to adopt new notational strategies directed at improving the descriptive nature of their published scores (p. 112). These strategies involved articulation, rhythmic complexity (for example, rubato), and pedal markings. Although, as Rowland points out, these ideas may not have provided long-term solutions for composers or publishers, his analysis illuminates a fascinating component of score interpretation for the twenty-first century performer.

Three studies by Andrew Davis, Michele Calella, and Céline Carenco provide new analyses of a variety of Liszt's works. Davis examines the formal processes of temporality, narrative and fragmentation in the B-minor sonatas of Liszt and Chopin. He aims to reinterpret what is often called ‘disintegration and decay’ in Romantic form as expressive devices essential to the Romantic engagement with sonata form (p. 109). Drawing from a rich body of theoretical scholarship and the input of an experienced pianist, Davis offers a challenging look at two familiar works. Calella's contribution, ‘The “Genius of the Nation” and the Paris Salon: Liszt's Tarantella and Neapolitan Song’, examines Liszt's revisions of the Tarantella from his Venezia e Napoli (1861 supplement to the second volume of the Années de Pélèrinage). Her analysis situates the piece in the cosmopolitan Parisian context in which Liszt first conceived it, revealing deep connections between representations of Neapolitan folk songs and Liszt's approach to source material. Carenco contends that the slow unfolding of Liszt's eighth symphonic poem, Héroïde funèbre, can illuminate how his compositional process changed over time. She identifies the significance of early conceptions of the work and analyses five stages of the work, ranging from its origins in sketches for a Symphonie révolutionnaire in 1830 to the final published version of Héroïde funèbre in 1857.

In the third section, another group of five essays focus on the broadly defined idea of ‘Text and Musical Thought: A la recherche d'une estétique à narrer’.Footnote ² Two scholars, Andrew Harringer and James Garratt, propose deep readings of Liszt's own writings on music and aesthetics. Haringer contributes a new interpretation of Liszt's first essay ‘De la situation des artistes’ of 1835 by naming Abbé Félicité de Lamennais as a more fundamental influence than has previously been demonstrated. More importantly, he unpicks the philosophical strands that together constituted Liszt's worldview to show how Lamennais shaped Liszt's ideas about music and art, not only in the 1830s but also throughout the composer's life. Garratt then traces how these ideas conflict with new aesthetic influences encountered during Liszt's move from Paris to Weimar in 1848. In order to clarify Liszt's tangled approaches to the socio-political function of art and to programme music, he examines Liszt's writings and compositions from the years just following the composer's interest in the aesthetic principles of Goethe and Schiller. Garratt's analysis of Liszt's symphonic poems Héroïde funèbre and Mazeppa as pre-existing works that Liszt intended to bring ‘into line with his new standpoints’ is particularly thought-provoking (p. 190). Michael Saffle's study of Liszt's symphonic poem Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne also interrogates this shift in Liszt's compositional aesthetics in the 1850s. He begins by looking at the pastoral trope in Liszt's compositions and its association with the sacred before turning to Liszt's conception of French Romanticism and his idea of the sublime as it is expressed in his symphonic companion to Victor Hugo's poetry.

Another pair of essays by Christoph Flamm and Andrzej Tuchowski delve into the complex relationships that exist between composers. In Flamm's essay, the professional relationship between Liszt and his French contemporary Charles-Valentin Alkan is outlined, including their in-person meetings and Liszt's reviews of Alkan's compositions. The latter feed into a discussion of the piano étude, particularly how Alkan's work in this genre may have influenced Liszt's revisions of his Études d'exécution transcendante in 1851. Tuchowski's essay, ‘From Lyricism to Ecstasy: Chopin's “Apotheoses”, Recapitulations, Their Impact on Liszt and on Other Composers of European Neo-Romanticism’, traces the concept of ‘musical apotheosis’ from its earliest forms in Mozart and Beethoven to its culmination in music by neo-Romantic composers such as Rachmaninov and Debussy. In particular, he focuses on a detailed examination of Chopin's ‘thematic metamorphosis technique’ as it can be seen in five large-scale works and in Chopin's aesthetic context before turning briefly to Liszt's use of the technique in his own music (p. 223).Footnote ³

A final group of four essays concludes this volume with a section entitled ‘Legacy and Musical Inheritance’.Footnote ⁴ In this section, the long-ranging effects of Chopin and Liszt are illuminated by investigations of the musical, spiritual, and cultural connections between Chopin, Liszt and other figures. In the first two articles of this set, we see Chopin's life and music as they were interpreted by other musicians. First, Mariacarla De Giorgi investigates Pauline Viardot Garcia's vocal transcriptions of 12 of Chopin's mazurkas. Under De Giorgi's gaze, Viardot's process of transcription, particularly with regard to the poetic text and the inherent vocality of Chopin's mazurkas, come to light. In her study of Alfred Cortot's famous biography Aspects de Chopin (1949), Inès Taillandier-Guittard probes Cortot's oft-cited subjectivity. She reveals how Cortot engaged with nineteenth-century constructions of Chopin, using music and a literary approach to form his own construction of Chopin for the twentieth century.

A pair of essays, which may be the last in the volume but are hardly the least, provide a glimpse of Chopin and Liszt in two specific locations. In her study, ‘Chopin and Liszt in Fontanas Cuban Episode’, Magdalena Oliferko tracks Chopin's friend and editor Jules Fontana to Havana, Cuba. Here, Fontana presented the music of both composers to Cuban audiences for the first time. Through his performances and his own compositions, argues Oliferko, Fontana directly influenced the reception of their repertoire and piano aesthetics in Central America. Finally, Laure Schnapper completes the volume by returning to Paris and the early moments of Chopin and Liszt's engagement with the city whose environment played such a significant role in their careers. In particular, she zeroes in on the powerful presence of Henri Herz, whose playing provided a foil against which Parisian audiences understood the performances and compositions of Liszt and Chopin.

As a collection, «Grandeur et Finesse» shines a bright light on the complex and complicated relationship between Chopin and Liszt; the tangled strands of composition, aesthetics, reception, biography and performance receive thoughtful treatment, and, cumulatively, the analysis presented here reveals new and fruitful paths of inquiry. Paris, the geographical and/or cultural home of these case studies, emerges in some ways very clearly, especially in the contributions from Penesco, Reynaud, Schnapper and others. In other ways, however, such an intense focus on two beloved pianist-composers and the connections between them heightens the contrast between these outstanding figures and the lesser-known yet vibrant Parisian context in which they operated. This volume rightly highlights their significance over the last two hundred years, but it also cements their centrality at the expense of a musical world that yielded many other composers and that bears further study in its own right. Liszt and Chopin are firmly ensconced in the canons of scholarly inquiry and concert performance; as scholars continue to examine their lives and legacies, I hope we will also address those figures who, in spite of their integral presence in Paris, have been overshadowed by their celebrated contemporaries in the prevailing historical narrative.