Violin Improvisation in the Early Nineteenth Century: Between Practice and Illusion Dana Gooley Improvisation is an exceptionally elusive topic for historical investigation, perhaps especially in the context of the early nineteenth century, when incentives to impro- vise and the types of training that supported it were dwindling. Apart from Pierre Baillot’s treatise, which gives detailed guidelines for preluding, none of the violin methods of the period say much about improvisation. It is thus not surprising that Christine Hoppe, in her exhaustive study of Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s compositional oeuvre, decides to ‘bracket the question of the improvisatory, an undoubtedly central component of virtuosity considered at the performative level.’ 1 he diiculties are compounded by uncertainties surrounding the word ‘improvisation’ and its seman- tic relatives (fantasieren, präludieren, extemporieren, aus dem Stegreif spielen). In the 1830s and 1840s there emerged a way of thinking and writing about improvisation that was to an extent disjunct from what musicians were actually doing. his dis- course of improvisation emerged in journalism, biographical pamphlets, and other forms of print culture that shaped audience beliefs and perceptions. Because listeners could not know with certainty whether a performer was actually improvising or not, readers were perhaps especially susceptible to believing exactly what journalists said. For this reason historians of music need to be skeptical in interpreting claims by nineteenth-century writers that a musician was ‘improvising’. he term itself was not even used oten in relation to music around 1800. It only became more common in musical parlance a few decades later, and it was borrowed from European romantic writers who invested with values of spontaneity, immediacy, and divine investiture. he gap between the discourse and the practice of improvisation can be illus- trated with an example from a period somewhat later than that of Ernst. German violinist Goby Eberhardt, in his memoir covering the later nineteenth century, fondly remembered the playing of his teacher August Wilhelmj in these words: ‘His playing 1 Hoppe, Der Schatten Paganinis, p. 143 (all translations by the author).