Reckoning with the Past: Strategies of Musical Authorship in Liszt's Thematic Catalogue (1855/1877).

The thematic catalogue of Franz Liszt's works, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1855 (and in a revised and enlarged edition in 1877), sheds light on Liszt's artistic development after 1848, when he gave up his career as a virtuoso and settled in Weimar. Drawing on a number of previously unpublished or unexamined letters and documents, the article illustrates how this project—probably started on Liszt's own initiative—offered the composer a means to select, order, and authorize the corpus of his works in print. At the same time it provided him with the opportunity to modify his authorial image and strengthen his profile as a 'serious' composer. The correspondence between Liszt and the publisher as well as other manuscript sources reveal the different strategies which allowed him to reposition himself in the music world and—as best illustrated by the later edition—to expand his profile as a composer even further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]