The cosmopolitanimprovvisatore: Spontaneity and performance in Romantic poetics

Abstract

Studies of spontaneity, inspiration, and natural genius in Romantic literature and culture have only rarely taken account of the phenomenon of the improvvisatore, the on‐stage improviser of poetry, whose popularity was at its height during the period 1750–1850. While poetic improvisation was to be met with mainly in Italy, travelers' accounts as well as fictional and poetic depictions of male improvvisatori and female improvvisatrici made these figures into familiar cultural reference points throughout Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay examines the confluence of an Italian aesthetics of sociable and performed poetry with Northern European images of “genius,” by examining depictions of poetic improvisers by English, German, and Danish writers. These writers demonstrate a fascination with the improviser's body as the site in which the mechanisms of creativity can be observed, and with the way the performer responds to contingent stimuli and changing circumstances. As the improvvisatore becomes a truly cosmopolitan figure in later Romanticism, he or she is seen as an exemplar of Romantic genius, but also as an unstable agent who is potentially disruptive to gender, class, and economic systems. Moreover, the attempt to represent the improvvisatore or the improvvisatrice as natural genius exhibited to the gaze of the viewer has the ironic effect of exposing “natural genius” as a performance; thus, the improviser forms the nexus of a significant tension between sincerity and constructedness.

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