The Century of the Pianist Creative Authority, Bourgeois Culture, and Its Closure

This paper argues that the twentieth century constituted a distinct historical epoch inwhich the performing musician — above all the concert pianist — established anindependent creative authority that had not previously existed. Drawing on thephilosophical history of the musical work-concept (Goehr), the social history ofbourgeois concert culture (Weber, DiMaggio, Levine), and the cultural history ofrecorded music, it traces the structural conditions that made the pianist a figure of publicsignificance: the paradox built into the Werktreue ideal, the emergence of interpretationas competitive criterion, the European–American divergence in concert culture, and thethree-phase role of recording as a music-dedicated medium. The argument culminates ina revised reading of the Philips Great Pianists of the 20th Century box set (200 CDs,1999) as the crystallisation of a simultaneously contracting and intensifying specialistculture — the last flowering of the civilisation of interpretation rather than its mereepitaph. This paper is the first of a two-part study; the companion paper traces thestructural logic of performer independence into jazz and Vocaloid culture.