(It., from Lat. virtus: ‘excellence’, ‘worth’).
A person of notable accomplishment; a musician of extraordinary technical skill. In its original Italian usage (particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries) ‘virtuoso’ was a term of honour reserved for a person distinguished in any intellectual or artistic field: a poet, architect, scholar etc. A virtuoso in music might be a skilful performer, but more importantly he was a composer, a theorist or at least a famous maestro di cappella. In the late 17th and 18th centuries a great number of Italian musicians carried the term ‘virtuoso’ to the courts and theatres of northern Europe, regularly applying it to themselves whether or not they merited such distinction in the traditional Italian sense. Brossard (Dictionaire, 1703), writing in France at a time when debate raged over Italian music and musicians, approached the word ‘virtuoso’ by way of its Latin root ‘virtu’, emphasizing that the true virtuoso was a musician of exceptional training, especially in theory (the same emphasis is found in Walther’s Musicalisches Lexicon of 1732). Johann Mattheson, however, in his Der brauchbare Virtuoso (1720), while honouring the traditional ‘theoretische Virtuosen’, paid tribute also to the ‘virtuosi prattici’. Others drew the line less respectfully; in his tract Der musikalische Quack-Salber (1700) Johann Kuhnau left no room for confusion between the true virtuoso (‘der wahre Virtuose’) and the highly gifted musicus (‘der glückselige Musicus’) who enjoyed the support of German princes and emperors but had little to commend him apart from practical facility.
With the flourishing of opera and the instrumental concerto in the late 18th century, the term ‘virtuoso’ (or ‘virtuosa’) came to refer to the violinist, pianist, castrato, soprano etc. who pursued a career as a soloist. At the same time it acquired new shades of meaning as attitudes towards the often exhibitionist talents of the performer changed. In the 19th century these attitudes hardened even more. Liszt declared that ‘virtuosity is not an outgrowth, but an indispensable element of music’ (Gesammelte Schriften, iv, 1855–9). Wagner, on the other hand, expressed the kind of reservations often voiced in his time: ‘The real dignity of the virtuoso rests solely on the dignity he is able to preserve for creative art; if he trifles and toys with this, he casts his honour away. He is the intermediary of the artistic idea’ (Gesammelte Schriften; Eng. trans., vii, 1894–9, p.112). Pejorative implications are present in such German expressions as Virtuosenmachwerk (a piece of routine display), Pultvirtuoso (an orchestral player of virtuoso temperament) and Taktstockvirtuoso (a virtuoso of the baton). But though there has been a tendency to regard dazzling feats of technical skill with suspicion (and even, in such cases as Tartini and Paganini, to ascribe them to some supernatural power), the true virtuoso has always been prized not only for his rarity but also for his ability to widen the technical and expressive boundaries of his art.
E. Reimer: ‘Virtuose’, HMT
H.W. Schwab: ‘Vom Auftreten der Virtuosen: Berichte und Bilder aus der Kulturgeschichte des Konzertsaals: III’, Das Orchester, xxxix (1991), 1358–63
R. Stowell: ‘The Nineteenth-Century Bravura Tradition’, The Cambridge Companion to the Violin (Cambridge, 1992), 61–78
S. Milliot: ‘Le virtuose international: une création du 18e siècle’, Dix-huitième siècle, xxv (1993), 55–64
OWEN JANDER