Nineteenth-century piano music from Chile: a performance practice perspective

Romantic piano music by Chilean composers is a rare sight in concert halls and academic publications alike, particularly in the anglophone world. Although some South American composers from the last century have partially broken through and found a following of performers and scholars, none of them hail from Chile. Moreover, information about Chilean pianists and musicologist and work centered on the lives and oeuvres of Isidora Zegers, Federico Guzmán, or Delfina Pérez has remained inaccessible to English speakers until quite recently. Scholarship about these nineteenth-century composers has rigorously explored the cultural context of their musical activities, but has not examined how that context informs the performance practice questions that arise regarding these pieces. This monograph presents a historically informed performance practice perspective on nineteenth-century Chilean piano music. This approach utilizes three components: the context, the product, and the instrument. The context is the outermost layer of understanding, locating the composers of the monograph in a sociopolitical nexus point in Chile’s early Republican period. At a time when the country was reinventing itself as culturally post-Spanish, embracing a pan-European musical palette, these composers contributed significantly towards that movement through their public and private lives. I then trace the piano pieces—the product—as a development of the Parisian pianistic influence, passed onto the culture of Chile through treatises, compositional genres, and visiting artists. The full scores discussed in the monograph are included as appendices. Finally, the instruments which these artists had available serve as a jumping off point for a broader conversation about the piano as an expressive vehicle in its many iterations over history, and about whether the “perfect match” between an instrument and its repertoire need be the final goal of performance practice.