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The Early Romantic Solo Concerto

17-19 October 2025, Lovere
Lovere (BG), Biblioteca del Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini
Deadline: Sunday 23 March 2025
All proposals should be submitted by email
Website
organized by Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Palazzetto Bru-Zane – Centre de musique romantique française

Keynote Speakers: • Simon P. Keefe (University of Sheffield), • John D. Wilson (Universität Wien)

The period from the mid-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century was full of fundamental changes in European life. The composer, no longer bound to the service of a court or a patron, sought to be fully integrated into the music market. The market for printed music and the evolution of musical instruments transformed both the role of the composer and the image of the performing musician to a considerable extent. Music went from being an amusement for the upper class to becoming an entertainment of the middle class, who advocated music that favoured participatory experience and thus created a social role for music that was different from that employed by the aristocracy. Composers responded to the needs of the middle class by creating a musical style that better suited the musical ideals of the bourgeoisie itself (see Sumner Lott 2010). In this regard, the phenomenon of virtuosity that developed in this period (not only in music but also in other spheres of work such as chess, gastronomy, criminology or the growing automation industry, just to name a few) perfectly met the needs of a bourgeoisie that believed that life could be manageable and modifiable and that this was not already predetermined and decided. In this sense, the virtuoso — who exhibits his or her talent in front of an audience, who possesses as his or her main endowment a high degree of technical skill and who grows in reputation and fortune, primarily through the exhibition of his or her skill (Metzner 1998) — became a projection, a means used to reclaim a kind of Kleinian position in the wider world, to analyse and, if necessary, to amend one’s own image: the artist became a means to organise a rite, to identify with a mythical hero and so to achieve a social status. In the midst of this industrial and social transformation, the virtuoso, and consequently the solo concerto, became a pivotal and decisive feature of musical culture of the first half of the nineteenth century, being an ideal genre for expressing the ambitions of early Romanticism by exploiting the possibilities inherent in the juxtaposition of solo and orchestral forces. The concerto as a genre became the centrepiece of public concerts more than ever before: it created profit for the composer, gave fame to the performer, and appealed to the listener’s taste. In this context, the production of solo concertos between the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first thirty years of then nineteenth century was substantial both in number and in the instruments for which they were composed; is it possible, therefore, to identify a common aesthetic and stylistic path in that production that could be counted under the umbrella of ‘early romantic’?

The official languages of the conference are English, French, Italian. Papers selected at the conference will be published in a miscellaneous volume.

For any additional information, please contact Dr. Massimiliano Sala


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Lundi 13 Janvier, 2025