ISBN : 9780190633585
The first history of keyboard improvisation in European music from the time of Beethoven through the later nineteenth century, Dana Gooley's Free Play: Fantasies of Improvisation in Nineteenth-Century Music describes the motives, intentions, and musical styles of the nineteenth century's leading improvisers, and traces the evolution of the performance practice into a glorified ideal.
Prelude: The Virtue of Improvisation
Chapter 1: The School of Abbe Vogler: Weber and Meyerbeer
Chapter 2: The Kapellmeister Network and the Performance of Community:
Hummel, Moscheles, and Mendelssohn
Chapter 3: Carl Loewe's Performative Romanticism
Chapter 4: Schumann and the Economization of Musical Labor
Chapter 5: Liszt and the Romantic Rhetoric of Improvisation
Chapter 6: Improvisatoriness: The Regime of the Improvisation
Imaginary
Postlude: Improvisation and Utopia