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This dissertation asks how classical rhetoric, as understood during the age of sensibility and early Romanticism (c. 1740–1830), can provide a practical, historically informed framework for interpreting and performing keyboard music. This framework serves both as a model for understanding the historical musician’s conception of performance, and as a methodology for present-day practitioners. Challenging accounts that treat musical rhetoric chiefly as a compositional taxonomy that declined around 1800, this dissertation foregrounds actio: embodied delivery, audience response, and the communication of feeling in performance. Drawing on musical treatises, aesthetic philosophy, acting and elocution manuals, and practice-led research, the study reconstructs period concepts of sensibility, sympathy, genius, imagination, judgement, taste, and the Sublime. It proposes the figures of the “feeling musician” and “rhetorical performer,” for whom historically informed performance entails coupling inner sentiment with outward signs through timing, articulation, tone, gesture, and physicality. Rhetorical principles of invention, disposition, figures, telos, and kairos are then applied to musical structure and interpretation.
The dissertation also contains an artistic research component in which the author trained extensively in historical acting practices of the period in order to apply rhetorical principles analogously to musical performance at the keyboard. Four artistic case studies document this process and further demonstrate the proposed framework in practice. The first two case studies deal with historical declamation and gesture using period methods by John Walker and Gilbert Austin. This included the performance of texts by Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, and Edward Young. The other two case studies turn to music, presenting Forkel’s analysis of C. P. E. Bach’s Sonata in f minor, Wq. 76, and the author’s performance of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata on fortepiano.
The dissertation presents a new vision for historically informed performance. It is reframed as sympathetic interpretation: a historically grounded yet personally creative act that treats the score as a prompt rather than as a fixed text, enabling persuasive, emotionally immediate communication with present-day audiences. |
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