In 1876, Robert Heller, the magician and virtuoso pianist, opened his latest theatrical residency in New York City. An English émigré, Heller had trained as a pianist at the Royal Academy in London and, in the 1860s, had found a winning formula in the entertainment business, combining his musical expertise with his wit and skill as a conjurer. He garnered fame and accolades across the United States and around the world, embarking on a tour that lasted nearly a decade, performing in Australia, Egypt, Singapore, India, and China.Footnote 1 At his New York show, billed Heller’s Wonder Theatre, he offered a typical mix of conjuring, music, and mentalism. One advertisement promised a series of illusory ‘scientific effects’, several tricks emulating (and parodying) spiritualist seances, and a ‘musical sketch’ titled Storm and Sunshine, ‘in which is shown how a story told in words may be better told in music’.Footnote 2 Here, Heller offered music as an ideal form of expression, a view drawn from aesthetic movements like l’art pour l’art (pioneered in France) and its anglophone cousin, art for art’s sake, popularized in the 1840s and 1850s. A core tenet of both movements can be summarized by Walter Pater’s adage ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.Footnote 3 When Heller sandwiched a descriptive piano fantasia between conjuring tricks, he staked a complementary aesthetic claim: music as a medium for artistic, magical translation.
The piece Heller performed, Storm and Sunshine, was an original composition — and, like his other descriptive fantasias, Muddy Reminiscences of Faust and The Pianoforte Practice of a Boarding School Miss, it remained unpublished, despite the fact that he had marketed several other piano compositions in the 1850s and early 1860s. Before performing the piece at a show in 1877, Heller first explained to the audience ‘his adventures in an English village, and how he came to illustrate in music the storm and the sunshine and the rain, and the pealing of the village church bells, and the singing of the “Old Hundredth” by the drenched and frightened villagers’.Footnote 4 The concluding hymn arrangement in Heller’s Storm and Sunshine probably adhered to a convention typical of descriptive fantasias: an elaborate finale based on a musical quotation.Footnote 5 Programmatically, the piece evoked Daniel Steibelt’s Storm (1798), whose depictive themes — ‘Dance of the Villagers/Distant Thunder — Storm and Dispersion of the Villagers — The Villagers Return and Recommence their Sports’ — were later echoed in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.Footnote 6 Heller, who had premiered Beethoven’s fourth and fifth piano concertos in the United States and possessed an extensive knowledge of classical repertoire, could have been inspired by both pieces.Footnote 7
Storm and Sunshine is but one example of how Heller transformed an otherwise typical piano performance into a conjuring trick. Since the piece belonged to a genre already popular with audiences, he had only to provide an introductory pretext to elevate it from standard virtuoso fare to magical effect. If Storm and Sunshine illuminates how ‘a story told in words may be better told in music’, it is not through highlighting the difference between artistic disciplines — the apples and oranges of music and narrative. Instead, Heller’s performance posits how one type of fruit may be transformed into the other. Precedent for this type of transformation already existed in the musical world courtesy of the conductor and composer Louis Jullien, who had pioneered popular orchestral concerts in France and England before exporting his distinctive entertainments to the United States in the 1850s. For reviewers enraptured with the conductor’s ebullient stage presence, Jullien functioned like a conjurer, his baton routinely described as a magic wand — wielded, in the words of one critic, ‘like the wand of Prospero’.Footnote 8 The enchantments he cast might bypass narrative altogether, transforming musical sound into another sister discipline, the painted image:
A touch of his wand creates the beautiful landscape: the sun light lies brightly upon the scene […] a few dashes of his magical pencil, and with theatrical rapidity the clouds darken, the thunders roll, lightning illumes with its vivid flashes, all the terror and turbulence of the storm presented in a grand and artistic combination.Footnote 9
Given the critical groundwork that had already been laid, US audiences were well prepared to receive Heller’s fantasia as a magical effect.
Much of the music in Heller’s act was surprisingly conventional. In magic shows, musicians typically played interludes between effects; during tricks themselves, music was featured sparingly unless the magician was pantomiming. (During these ‘silent’ effects, music played throughout.) Other magicians, before and during Heller’s time, had already opened more novel pathways for music in the magic show: in the 1840s, for example, Professor Anderson hired an ensemble later known under P. T. Barnum’s management as the Swiss Bell Ringers, and he once advertised a ‘monster band’ intended to outdo Jullien’s ‘monster concerts’. The Bohemian magician Anton Kratky-Baschik designed and performed on a wind instrument that could play both melody and accompaniment, earning him a command performance before Queen Victoria in 1858.Footnote 10 But for Heller, virtuoso pianism within the magic show itself was a novelty that none of his counterparts, musical or magical, could match. He travelled widely and gained a devoted following, performing not only in every major American city, but also in regions overlooked by most piano virtuosos, especially the American West. Touring the United States for seven years, he benefited from, and helped to shape, a type of magical pianism linked to an emergent celebrity culture that treated virtuosos and conjurers as kin.
Spectators already inured to the novelties of travelling pianists would have found Heller’s pianism in the magic show inventive, but not outlandish. Given the antics of some contemporaries, his performances would have seemed conservative by contrast. The pianist James Wehli, a direct contemporary of Heller’s, imitated cannons in a military piece by sitting on the keys in the piano’s lowest register. J. L. Hatton, the English composer and conductor, strapped sleigh bells to his leg during a Christmas concert and shook them at the appropriate moments, while an assistant provided a sound effect that resembled the cracking of a whip.Footnote 11 The Austrian pianist Leopold de Meyer, who toured the United States in the mid-1840s, reportedly ‘played fantasias for the left hand while he ate vanilla ice cream with his right’.Footnote 12 (The cover of the Meyer-Polka Fantasia, Figure 1, depicts a caricature of Meyer in mid-performance, his foot and elbow on the keys and a devilish expression on his face.) But no virtuoso was really immune from musical spectacles that might be deemed tacky or eccentric in the modern era. During a US tour, Henri Herz — a pianist known for his refined touch and elegance of manner — arranged Rossini’s overture to Semiramide for sixteen pianists on eight pianos; Liszt, Thalberg, and even Clara Schumann had played in similar ensembles at some point in their careers. Such displays of ‘musical sensationalism’ were common, fun, and, as R. Allen Lott points out, ‘no one pretended they were art’.Footnote 13
Figure 1. Cover of Leopold de Meyer, Meyer-Polka Fantasia. Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University.
Beyond these entertaining and sometimes farcical exhibitions, virtuoso pianism invited comparisons to the fantastic and supernatural. In the critical reception of musical virtuosos, many were lauded for feats that seemed miraculous; they were, in the words of Ivan Raykoff, ‘freakish’.Footnote 14 When Heller took the stage, spectators without a programme in hand wouldn’t have known which type of superhuman effect he intended to perform — play a Thalberg fantasy or awaken a mysterious goblin drum? Part of his performative ambiguity stemmed from his style of dress. His sober black tailcoat, white dress shirt, and dark tie was the preferred uniform of musicians and conjurers alike. And critics, already fluent in the metaphorical language of conjuring, reinforced the sense that every aspect of Heller’s entertainment functioned as a magical effect, as exemplified here:
Such a stillness, such attention pervaded the whole audience from the beginning until the end of his performance as we have never before witnessed; the spell was remarkable. Whether it was that some were wrapped up in contemplation of the brilliancy of his chromatic scales, or others in admiration of the extreme neatness of his octaves and tenths, certain it is all appeared spell-bound; and it was only when the enchantment ended that a delighted audience spontaneously testified their approbation of Mr. Heller’s merits.Footnote 15
Only the references to chromatic scales and musical intervals reveal that this 1855 review describes one of Heller’s piano recitals; everything else in it might refer to a magic show. Similar passages can be found in the critical history of other virtuosos, particularly that of Franz Liszt.Footnote 16 One of the best-known reviews of Liszt’s London recitals in 1840 notes the pianist’s power of ‘dividing himself, as it were, into two, or sometimes, even, three performers’, his dexterous ‘sleight-of-hand’ allowing him to surpass his greatest rival, Sigismond Thalberg.Footnote 17
What follows here is a two-act study of Heller’s musical effects during the 1860s and 1870s — a key period in the history of theatrical and musical spectacle in the United States and abroad. Before mid-century, as Lawrence Levine has claimed, theatrical entertainment was a communal attraction, with spectators from heterogeneous social classes frequenting many of the same venues. Certain forms of entertainment, like opera and Shakespearean theatre, were ‘simultaneously popular and elite’, attracting broad swathes of the public while also appealing to an elect subset that gained from these performances ‘both pleasure and social confirmation’.Footnote 18 By the 1850s, spectatorship in the United States started fracturing along class lines: historians often cite the 1849 riot at the Astor Place Opera House in New York, which left twenty-two people dead, as a signal event that exposed simmering social and cultural tensions, gradually driving cultural elites to create upscale artistic sanctuaries.Footnote 19 But these changes in theatrical spectatorship, as Nancy Newman and R. Allen Lott have pointed out, had not yet reached the musical world by mid-century.Footnote 20 It would be a few more decades before exclusive musical institutions took hold in cities like Boston and Chicago, ‘sacralizing’ repertoire and establishing restrictive behavioural expectations at concerts. Not until the 1870s did freelancing virtuosos shift their programming from operatic paraphrases and their own compositions to the works of ‘serious’ composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann. And spectacles like the magic show retained their mass appeal throughout the nineteenth century, attracting ticket holders from every walk of life to wherever magic might be performed — opera house, pleasure garden, salon, vaudeville theatre, or circus. (Aristocrats received private performances, but that had always been the case.)
The first act of this essay examines the style and function of music in Heller’s shows, focusing on connections with minstrelsy and spiritualist seances — both popular forms of entertainment with established musical conventions for Heller to draw upon (or parody, as the case may be). Heller centred himself as the preeminent musical entertainer in his shows, despite the involvement of many other musicians performing routine tasks, like filling interludes or accompanying a pantomimed effect. The virtuoso repertoire he performed suited the tastes, expectations, and attention spans of mid-century US audiences, who had not yet grown accustomed to the solo piano recital. When Thalberg toured the country from 1856 to 1858, he featured vocalists on his programmes and intermittently shared the stage with the pianists Louis Moreau Gottschalk and William Mason, the violinists Joseph Burke and Theodore Thomas, and the cellist Carl Bergmann. Heller notably appeared solo, the magical counterpart to Liszt’s ‘Le concert, c’est moi’, inspiring one critic to remark, ‘alone he commenced, and alone he succeeded’.Footnote 21 The musicians he employed were scarcely noticed, like part of the stage furnishings.
Typically, Heller’s musical programming was faultless, lasting no more than thirty minutes and featuring operatic paraphrases and his own parodies of well-known works, like The Pianoforte Practice of a Boarding School Miss, a burlesque fantasia in which he embodied a young woman learning the popular salon piece The Maiden’s Prayer. But Heller revealed the limits of his cultural knowledge when he attempted to stage a musically focused illusion called ‘Tartini’s Dream’, adapted from the illusionist Henri Robin’s ‘Paganini’s Dream’, which Robin had presented to great acclaim in Paris. This rare misstep demonstrated the challenges of cross-cultural and transnational marketing for magic shows and musical performances alike. Both were popular entertainments internationally that reflected local tastes and endemic cultural histories.
The second act of this essay examines how Heller competed in the US marketplace of celebrity virtuosos, which included European imports like Thalberg and homegrown talents such as Gottschalk. As Heller’s career unfolded, the conventions of recital programming were shifting under his feet. His virtuoso fare — operatic paraphrases, variations, and the musical parodies he pioneered — typically thrilled US audiences in the 1850s and 1860s. But when he struck out for Australia in 1869, he found that a different landscape awaited him there. During his tour, he sometimes misjudged expectations, programming repertoire that led critics to question whether he was capable of playing ‘serious’ music. His experience in Australia comports with historical accounts of piano recital repertoire, which changed dramatically in the late 1860s and 1870s: broadly popular ‘contemporary’ music — the paraphrases, fantasies, and variations written by composer-pianists — was being replaced with canonized works by dead composers.Footnote 22 To satisfy Australian audiences and critics, Heller programmed music by the requisite dead (Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn), despite having rarely performed this repertoire in previous decades. When he returned to the United States in the late 1870s, he resumed playing operatic fantasies and burlesques, which continued to be well received in the magic show if not the recital. But he also played the piano less than he used to, often paring down his musical selections to just two.
Heller’s magical pianism linked the implicit supernaturalism of musical virtuosity to the explicitly illusory displays of the magic show in unexpected fashion. As a pianist, his style of playing suggested ease and restraint, in contrast with an 1868 image that depicted him leaning dynamically over the keyboard, one arm raised, one leg outstretched, rising from his seat as if magnetically drawn to the instrument. Heller was not moulded in the style of Liszt; most likely, his model was Thalberg, whose music he played frequently and to whom he had dedicated one of his own bravura compositions.Footnote 23 Thalberg had even pioneered an illusory three-handed technique, in which arpeggios swirled around a melody played in the middle of the keyboard, but during his US tour, critics had little to say about it; nor did they mention this technique when recounting Heller playing Thalberg’s fantasias. Nevertheless, many piano virtuosos active from the 1840s to the 1860s, including Heller and Thalberg, were described by critics using other magical terms. Understanding the context of these terms reveals how Heller’s quiet virtuosity managed to function as a type of illusory effect, transforming and multiplying the piano’s sound while masking his physical presence.
Act I: Heller’s Wonders
Heller worked alternately as a stage magician, pianist, teacher, and organist throughout the 1850s. In 1854, he performed with the Germania Musical Society, a regional touring orchestra that elevated performance standards in the United States and introduced more ‘serious’ repertoire, including the Beethoven concertos that Heller premiered. After his marriage, he settled in Washington, DC, where he gave piano lessons and served as organist at the Church of the Epiphany. By 1860, he started touring with a new magic act calculated to appeal to the tastes of North American audiences. Writing to an unknown correspondent, he described the rapid pace and variety of his shows, which ‘go go go for 2 hours — no breaks, no time lost, every minute is occupied. People are astonished that time slips away so quickly.’Footnote 24 Up to half of each two-hour show featured musical performance, not including interludes between effects. The piano recitals only lasted about twenty to thirty minutes, indicating Heller’s awareness that some in the audience wouldn’t savour solo instrumental music. Though Thalberg had helped to popularize the piano recital in the United States, as Lott notes, non-programmatic music still had neither ‘the extramusical associations of a text, the human touch of the voice, nor the color of the orchestra to make it accessible’.Footnote 25 Heller trained a spotlight on virtuoso pianism without taxing spectators’ attention, performing a range of intelligible favourites: Thalberg’s operatic fantasies, his own variations on popular melodies (The Last Rose of Summer or Dixie), and his descriptive fantasias, like Storm and Sunshine, which featured a narrative or dramatic pretext.
The venues in which Heller performed similarly reflected a desire to avoid elitist associations. In 1861, when the magician Carl Herrmann fled to New York from the warring southern states, he took up residency at the Academy of Music, where the opera orchestra that accompanied his act was led by Theodore Thomas. His younger brother Alexander, eventually the more famous magician of the two, also sought out opera houses and prestigious concert halls for his shows. A number of other magicians advertised operatic music as interludes in their acts, seeking to raise their artistic stature in a profession plagued by charges of charlatanism. When Heller toured, he also performed at local opera houses, probably because they were the best (or in some cases, the only) available theatres for his needs. But for long-term tenancies, he leased a theatre and assigned it an eponymous name — Heller’s Wonder Theatre, Heller’s Saloon of Wonders, Heller’s Salle Diabolique. He arguably had a much stronger claim than Herrmann did to a venue like the Academy of Music; Bernard Ullman, the manager of the Academy, certainly would have endured less criticism if he had booked a magician endorsed by Steinway who could play Thalberg fantasies. For reasons unknown, that collaboration never happened; nor did Heller take up a lengthy residency at any other prestigious musical venue.
A typical Heller programme was organized in three or four parts: first, illusions; second, piano performance; third, minstrelsy; and fourth, mentalism, such as the ‘Second Sight’ effect (Figure 2). Exhibitions of automata were fairly common in magic acts, but Heller spent his youth practising the piano, not tinkering with clocks and machines. His alternative to automata was the Wood Minstrels, a marionette band intended to parody the popular Wood’s Minstrels troupe.Footnote 26 Few of Heller’s advertisements described the technical operation of the band, perhaps to obfuscate their categorical identity for spectators who might have been less impressed with puppets than machines. One advertisement claimed that the ‘magically organized minstrels’ would ‘play the instruments of an entire orchestra, and sing with remarkably natural voices through throats made of the newly discovered metal Aluminium’, implying at least a cousinly relationship with automata.Footnote 27
Figure 2. Broadside for a typical Heller show, c. 1865. Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
The Wood Minstrels combined the appeal of the apparent mechanical wonder with the popular mid-century minstrel show, a blend of comedy, pastiche, dance, and the display of offensively stereotyped Black characters for white audiences.Footnote 28 Heller’s marionettes closely modelled the minstrel show, incorporating humour, a variety of musical numbers, and a burlesque conclusion that parodied the second-act chorus from Gounod’s Faust. One advertisement promised a cornet solo ‘à la Levy’, a reference to the cornettist Jules Levy. Reviews and promotional notices suggest that Heller used the Wood Minstrels primarily for divertissement and comic effect; they were not intended to be lifelike, nor did they resemble the sort of mechanical objects that might be exhibited at world fairs or in competing magic acts. Instead of evoking the ‘technological sublime’, as automata might have done, they functioned as whimsical proxies for live actors.Footnote 29 Between 1864 and 1867, Heller’s minstrels were a hit with audiences in every region in the United States, including western states outside the geographical axis that had birthed Zip Coon and Jim Crow.Footnote 30 When the minstrels accompanied him on his world tour in 1868, Heller arranged an ‘original’ overture and chorus for them to perform.Footnote 31 In England, he billed them the Christy Minstrels, having learned that Christy’s Minstrels, the group that had standardized many practices in blackface minstrelsy, had become shorthand for minstrelsy itself.Footnote 32
The first part of Heller’s shows sometimes featured an effect called the goblin drum, which ‘beat the tattoo of the Spirits’ without human hands. (An advertisement for the effect is reproduced as Figure 3.) According to a book on Heller published in 1868, 120 goblins played Louis Jullien’s Drum Polka on twelve drums, producing ‘as fine a piece as we remember to have listened to. It was deafening.’Footnote 33 By 1871, he had re-branded the piece Battle of the Goblins, performing a descriptive fantasia on the piano with his drumming collaborators.Footnote 34 If the drum effect had less aesthetic appeal than Heller’s piano solos, it conjured a wider range of musical associations than might be apparent from its thunderous din. The effect was Heller’s musical response to the practice of mediums like William and Ira Davenport, who had started giving public exhibitions in 1854. In their seances, the Davenport brothers would sit tied up inside a cabinet full of musical instruments — usually a violin, guitar, tambourine, trumpet, and bell — and act as physical conduits for spirits to manifest their presence through sound. Inside the cabinet, the tambourine rattled, the guitar haphazardly strummed, and other banging and clattering sounds were heard, before the instruments themselves flew out of the cabinet doors or through a small aperture. The spirits thus channelled were not known for playing well: one commentator noted that the sound of the guitar ‘did no credit to the musical education of the spirit who was performing’.Footnote 35
Figure 3. Advertisement for Heller’s Goblin Drum Corps, published in Anon., Robert Heller: His Doings. Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
Given this context, Heller’s goblin drum — a name calculated to impart a sense of mystery while avoiding overt references to spiritualism — need not have met a particularly high performance standard. Heller sought to distinguish the drum effect from the sounds heard at seances by noting that the goblin drum was ‘the most recent of the many magical feats which have been falsely attributed to the agency of Spiritualism’.Footnote 36 For readers of the New York Times, he went further, declaring his intention to ‘besiege the Spiritualists in their own citadel and with their own weapons’ — about as unequivocal a statement as he could make against the movement. But such proclamations were rare. Heller recognized that spectators who weren’t believers in spiritualism might still enjoy the occasional ‘spirit concert’ (as a medium’s musical performance was often described), which typically led him to take more ambivalent positions. For a show in 1853, five years after the Fox sisters ignited the spiritualist movement by reporting rapping sounds in their home, Heller simply advertised ‘mysterious rappings’ without alluding to seances or spirits, knowing that spectators would draw their own conclusions. When performing his version of a Davenport brothers seance — which he described as ‘the Davenport trick fairly out Davenported’ — his advertisements stated, ‘if you have the slightest belief in Spiritualism, see it’.Footnote 37 Sceptical spectators could appreciate Heller exposing the Davenports as savvy performers; believers could watch the magician reproduce the Davenport seances and find their convictions reaffirmed, perhaps by attributing the power of mediumship to Heller himself. (That is precisely what a number of spiritualists did to the magician Harry Kellar in the 1880s, insisting that he was a medium despite his repeated denials.)Footnote 38
Heller’s piano performances included numbers he played with the Germania Musical Society, though not the music of ‘serious’ composers like Beethoven and Mendelssohn. Instead, he offered the ‘simultaneously popular and elite’ repertoire that could be enjoyed by music lovers and musical agnostics alike. His repertoire echoed what might be heard in many piano recitals, but it excluded the waltzes, polkas, and quadrilles that figured in most magic acts — music typically reserved for the interludes. Very few Heller advertisements mention other musicians, but it can be assumed, despite limited evidence, that he employed either a pianist or an orchestra to fill the interludes with marches and popular dance music, which was standard practice.Footnote 39 (Reviewers sometimes described Heller’s miniature recitals as interludes, even though no specific part of the show answered to that description in the programme.)Footnote 40 That these musicians were rarely acknowledged in reviews illustrates their pervasive — and thus unremarkable — presence in conjuring shows, as well as the eclipsing effect of Heller’s own musical virtuosity. It also shows the magician bucking a recent trend: beginning around 1840, advertisements for magic shows had started to include more detailed lists of musical personnel and their accomplishments, whether conservatory degrees, prizes, or prominent appearances. For the musical aspect of the performance, Heller preferred to keep the focus on himself.
Only in the second half of his career did he start featuring the name of a stage assistant, Haidee (also Haydee) Heller, with whom he had perfected his ‘Second Sight’ routine. Though she sang in one effect, advertisements neglected to mention her musicianship.Footnote 41 In ‘Living Pictures’, she enacted a series of characters, like General and Mrs Tom Thumb, while appearing through a picture frame. Heller, in a rare turn, provided the musical accompaniment. An image from a broadside depicts him at the piano with a score open, hands poised over the keys, gaze fixed on the easel, matching his musical selections to Miss Heller’s characters (Figure 4). The effect was an animated form of the popular tableaux vivants, an illusory entertainment in which performers (frequently women) imitated works of art or dramatized historical scenes by adopting static postures. Elaborate costumes, make-up, artfully arranged poses, and theatrical lighting all contributed to the illusion that spectators were witnessing the artwork or the scene itself. In ‘Living Pictures’, only Miss Heller’s animated head appeared through the frame placed on the easel; the rest of her body was invisible. Music provided a type of misdirection, turning the attention of spectators towards the sound and away from any secret actions; it also encouraged social and temporal entrainment by giving spectators a pulse to which they could tap their feet, if they so wished.Footnote 42
Figure 4. Detail of ‘Living Pictures’, from a broadside advertising Heller’s Wonder Theatre in New York City, c. 1878. Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
The Devil’s Violin
One of Heller’s musical contributions to the magic show involved a relatively new genre, the magical sketch, which combined music, pantomime, illusory effects, dialogue, and a dramatic pretext. Heller was not the first magician to simmer these ingredients in a magical cauldron: Professor Anderson had launched his historical pantomime Ye Belle Alliance, or Harlequin Good Humour and ye Fielde of ye Clothe of Golde in 1855, during his disastrous season as lessee of Covent Garden. But Anderson’s entertainment had sought to shoehorn conjuring effects into a pre-existing genre, the Christmas pantomime, while keeping the genre’s structural and stylistic physiognomy intact. Most critics found Anderson’s pantomime dull, excessively long, and overladen with unnecessary diversions — particularly the wizard’s laboratory scene, where he performed his illusions. When Covent Garden burned to the ground several months into the magician’s tenancy, these same critics felt vindicated in the opinion that he should never have been allowed to lease the theatre in the first place.Footnote 43
The English magician David Devant, who helped bring the magical sketch to its apogee in the late nineteenth century, believed that a successful sketch should adapt the conventions of pantomime and spoken drama only insomuch as they showcase the effects, ensuring that illusory and extra-magical elements are thoughtfully integrated. ‘Either the drama kills the illusion or the illusion kills the drama’, he once put it.Footnote 44 One of Devant’s early successes in the genre was ‘The Artist’s Dream’, an inversion of the straightforward ‘vanishing woman’ effect, which he created with his conjuring partner, John Neville Maskelyne. A painter, tired from working on a portrait of his deceased wife, drapes the canvas and naps in an armchair; as he sleeps, the Spirit of Mercy unveils the painting and the artist’s wife materializes, steps from the frame, and speaks words of encouragement before slipping into the painted background. Devant’s sketch featured dialogue in blank verse by Mel B. Spurr, as well as newly composed music (perhaps also by Spurr) that helped transform a stage illusion into a poignant drama suffused with melancholy, which left a powerful impression on spectators. The music apparently played a memorable role. In 1941, the magician Stanley Dickson reported to the Magic Circular, a trade magazine, how he remembered an officer humming the music to ‘The Artist’s Dream’ years earlier, during the Great War. The magazine’s editor responded that Dickson was ‘not the only one to be impressed by this music’, suggested that it had been composed especially for the sketch, and added that ‘it synchronised so exactly with the actors’ every movement that even the unseen stage mechanics took their cues from it’.Footnote 45 Devant’s sketches demonstrated what might be achieved through the purposeful alliance of illusion and music.
In 1865, a few decades before Maskelyne and Devant’s success in the genre, Heller advertised a ‘musico-dramatic sketch’ called ‘Tartini’s Dream’ that he had adapted from a rival magician, Henri Robin, who had thrilled Parisian audiences with ‘Paganini’s Dream’ (also titled ‘The Song of Paganini, or the Devil’s Violin’) in 1863. But the Tartini effect lasted only a few months in Heller’s repertoire, most likely because he lacked Robin’s mechanical expertise or his flair for humorous and dramatic storytelling. Advertisements for Heller’s version of the effect described a manifestly uneventful scenario in which Tartini ‘heard his best composition in a dream, woke up, and wrote it down’.Footnote 46 Heller, playing Tartini, spent his time on stage either writhing in his sleep or scribbling notes on paper, his musical gifts lying dormant as ‘the devil’ provided the music.
Robin had been demonstrating ‘living phantasmagorias’ since the late 1840s, using an apparitional effect that anticipated the first exhibition of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ at London’s Royal Polytechnic in 1862. In the Paganini effect, Robin plays the violinist, his conjurer’s attire — black tailcoat with a white buttoned waistcoat — doubling for the black suit Paganini would have worn. As Robin reclines on a couch, a spectral demon (cauchemar) straddles his chest, inducing a nightmare; the demon then starts to play the violin (Figure 5). Robin-as-Paganini thrashes and flails, trying to grab the instrument and bow, but the demon violinist carries on, unperturbed. The effect used projection technology and an angled plate of glass; a violinist positioned below the stage played the music, the sound emanating through a hole in the glass plate.Footnote 47 A few comic moments delighted the audience, and one critic, who judged the effect a ‘dazzling success’, described how spectators called back the violinist — in reality, his miming, devilish doppelgänger — for another bow.Footnote 48
Figure 5. Woodcut of Robin’s ‘Dream of Paganini’ effect in L’Almanach illustré le Cagliostro. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Paganini, as Mai Kawabata has shown, was not only compared to but sometimes equated with demonic figures — a view aptly summarized by François-Joseph Fétis in 1851, who observed that ‘everyone had noticed and had guessed for a long time that Paganini and Satan were in the most intimate relationship; that is provided they are not one and the same thing’.Footnote 49 In Robin’s oneiric telling, Paganini’s apparent diablerie converges with Tartini’s legendary account of a dream in which he made a pact with the devil. This account had circulated in France since the mid-eighteenth century;Footnote 50 in fact, Robin reproduced ‘Tartini’s Dream’, an engraving first published in 1840, in his own publication, L’Almanach illustré le Cagliostro, shown in Figure 6. (The engraving, as Joël-Marie Fauquet points out, was based on a lithograph published in 1824; in the later version, the figures are reversed, and Tartini appears to be suffering greater demonic torment.) Robin had little need to provide his audience with context for a legend that had been depicted in popular culture for decades. He could therefore conflate the demonic fraternizations of Paganini and Tartini without confusing spectators, while offering a new perspective on the devilish figure — one who functioned less as a source of artistic inspiration than as an oppressive rival who refuses to cede the spotlight.
Figure 6. Woodcut of ‘Tartini’s Dream’, by A. Rose (1860) after an engraving by Julien-Léopold Boilly (1840). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Heller’s scenario followed Tartini’s account of his dream, in which he handed his instrument to the devil and then, upon waking, wrote the Violin Sonata in G minor (the ‘Devil’s Trill’), inspired by the diabolical performance. Heller imitated the method behind Robin’s effect, having a demon mime playing the violin while an off-stage violinist supplied the music. Striking technical and thematic similarities between his effect and Robin’s ‘Song of Paganini’ are probably what motivated Heller to feature Tartini in the illusion instead of his more famous Romantic counterpart. These similarities may also explain why Heller altered and re-branded the ghost illusion at the heart of ‘Tartini’s Dream’, which closely resembled the ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ effect created by John Henry Pepper and Henry Dircks. While Robin used a projection technique, producing an onstage image that appeared both dimensional and spectral, Heller either superimposed two figures or rendered both invisible, christening this illusion the ‘Gyges’. The changes introduced an element of novelty to a familiar effect while also protecting Heller against charges of fraud — something that the creators of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ themselves faced when they found that a French patent for a similar illusion had preceded their British patent by ten years.Footnote 51
But these changes also contributed to the lukewarm reception of ‘Tartini’s Dream’. Replacing the character of Paganini with the lesser-known Tartini meant explaining the anecdote about the violinist’s dream in US advertisements, which Robin would not have had to do for Parisian audiences, even if he had made Tartini the central character. Heller further complicated matters by giving top billing to the ‘Gyges’ illusion (Figure 7), which required further explanation: an early advertisement described it as ‘man ceas[ing] to be to actual vision, without change of position or intervening obstruction, thus realizing the fable of the Ring of Gyges’.Footnote 52 Spectators were flummoxed by Heller’s reference to an artifact best known from Plato’s Republic, leading to more explanatory ads: ‘Plato told the tale of Gyges, Cicero retold the tale of Plato; and the fable listened to in the gardens of the Academia is now realized on Broadway, in Mr. Heller’s novelty.’Footnote 53 One of the few reviews of the effect started, inauspiciously, ‘We don’t profess to be able to describe Gyges. The dramatic scene in which it is introduced might be better and might be worse; but certainly it could not have been more artistically acted than by the perennial Heller.’Footnote 54
Figure 7. Advertisement for ‘Tartini’s Dream’, featuring the ‘Gyges’, at Heller’s Salle Diabolique, 27 February 1865. Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
If Heller’s magical sketch was defeated partly by its scenario, it suffered further indignities from the technical requirements for producing the ‘Gyges’. The apparatus proved difficult to set up at first, requiring modifications to the stage and the presence of an apparently unreliable machinist. (His failure to appear at one performance led a reviewer to wax poetic on the oranges discovered at a fruit shop adjacent to the theatre, for ‘unlike the Gyges, there was no disappointment about them, and no postponement’.)Footnote 55 An advertisement four days after the delayed performance claimed ‘Gyges perfect tonight’, but the promise was premature.Footnote 56 Heller had engaged a concertina soloist to entertain the crowd as he wrestled with the apparatus, but delays persisted, as well as some disappointment: ‘There was a buzz of expectation, a little concertina, some impatience, a little more concertina, and finally there was Gyges.’ Had the effect been more successful, spectators might have endured the concertina without complaint, but ‘Tartini’s Dream’ seemed to lack both the dramatic depth and the comic turns of Robin’s ‘Song of Paganini’. Problems plagued the effect even at the end of its run in New York; doggerel in one advertisement concluded with the lines ‘for Heller, ever fresh and gay, improves his Gyges day by day’.Footnote 57
When Heller took the effect to Boston, he struggled with the same sort of challenges that afflicted Robin when he moved his act to the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1866. Robin found that the arrangement of seats at the Châtelet allowed spectators to see both the demon figure and his projected reflection, prompting him to move the actor to a lower level.Footnote 58 Heller started his run of performances at the Boston Melodeon before moving to Buckley’s Hall, with advertisements stating that the environment at the Melodeon was insufficient to produce the ‘Gyges’.Footnote 59 He abandoned the effect later that year but still sought other ways to use the technology behind it. In January 1866 he debuted a sphinx illusion that was no doubt modelled on Thomas Tobin’s ‘Sphinx’, which had been presented by Colonel Stodare at London’s Egyptian Hall in October 1865 — an effect that involved mirrors without projection.Footnote 60 The effect also jettisoned a violinist whose musical virtuosity might upstage Heller’s own.
Act II: Conjuring Virtuosity
Though musical sketches like ‘Tartini’s Dream’ were rare in Heller’s act, spectators were drawn to his shows as much for the music as anything else. A classified advertisement promised, for the price of one dollar, ‘reserved seats — in arm-chairs, commanding a near view of the stage, and keys of the piano’, placing two types of spectacle, illusions and pianistic virtuosity, on equal footing.Footnote 61 Critics often ranked Heller’s pianism against the popular virtuosos of the era, particularly Thalberg and Gottschalk. The comparisons aided him at every turn: in Cincinnati, one critic pronounced that ‘the names of Thalberg and Heller will be identified as the best that has ever been heard’ in that city; another, in Philadelphia, observed that Heller would ‘compare favorably with either Gottschalk or Wehli’.Footnote 62 Even when deemed the lesser pianist, Heller could claim to eschew the sensationalism and humbuggery that clung to Meyer during his American tour.Footnote 63 Critical discourse on Heller’s musicianship drew him into the kaleidoscopic world of pianistic rivalries and musical spectacle, which helped promote tours and sell tickets. Gaining the upper hand in a rivalry was not always about artistic or technical display: sometimes it was simply a matter of showing up. One reviewer in Houston filtered his backhanded compliment of Heller’s playing through an indignant appraisal of Gottschalk’s touring schedule: ‘Quite likely Gottschalk is a better player than Heller, but we never heard Gottschalk, and so we cannot conceive anything so delightful, and wonderful, as Heller’s playing.’Footnote 64
Gottschalk, for his part, was not impressed with attempts to brand Heller a musical peer, describing him in 1862 as a ‘young English juggler, prestidigitator, and professor of piano’ who took up work as a travelling conjurer because of his limited success as a music teacher.Footnote 65 Both Heller’s stage name and his act, Gottschalk added, consisted of ‘sleight-of-hand embellished with pianoforte variations’, which gave him a ‘certain interest, many persons thinking that he is the author of La Chasse [Stephen Heller], while he has only become the rival of Robert Houdin [sic]’.Footnote 66 Without the witness of other piano virtuosos, it is difficult to assess Gottschalk’s testimony, particularly given his tendency towards scornful, even scathing remarks in his journal. His criticism of Heller may reflect his own anxiety about contending with a uniquely marketable rival during the early years of the Civil War, when the incoming tide of European pianists had finally ebbed. After a five-year stay in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean, he had planned to take full advantage of the exodus, expecting that there would be more opportunities for homegrown talents to rise to prominence.Footnote 67
Heller had far more boosters than detractors, but the type of criticism first levied by Dwight’s Journal in 1854 — that he lacked artistry and acquired his technical facility partly through conjuring — dogged him for much of his career. In 1860, when he first embarked on the tours that would make him a conjuring celebrity, an otherwise admiring critic pronounced him ‘eminently superior to [Maurice] Strakosch and Leopold de Meyer, and almost, if not fully, equal to Thalberg’, adding that if Heller ‘would but devote himself to music’, he might ‘entrance the age with his skill’.Footnote 68 Five years later, a reviewer in Washington, DC, heaped hyperbole on every aspect of Heller’s show, claiming that he could surpass a hybrid of Gottschalk, Meyer, and William Vincent Wallace. At the same time, the reviewer seemed mystified by Heller’s commitment to magic:
That a gentleman who is so absolute a master of a great art should make that art subservient and subordinate to what must be considered as an inferior accomplishment is one of those eccentricities which would puzzle the most astute philosopher to account for.Footnote 69
During Heller’s Australian tour in 1869, a critic rather grudgingly justified the link between pianism and conjuring, noting, ‘I suppose the lightness of touch necessary for the one produces the skill requisite for the development of extraordinary digital dexterity in the other’.Footnote 70 This last line of argument had already become a theme among some of Heller’s supporters in the press, though it undermined the conjurer’s attempts to enhance his artistic reputation, linking the physical demands of legerdemain to the purely technical aspects of virtuoso pianism.
In some respects, the debate over Heller’s artistry was all too commonplace, involving customary quibbles over technique, quality of sound, and choice of repertoire. But these stock complaints, which vexed virtuosos of all stripes, had even deeper resonance for one doubling as a conjurer. Critics who appreciated Heller’s pianism drew liberally from the lexicon of enchantment already familiar to music lovers, who tracked the artistic progress of their favourite performers through reviews. Words like ‘spellbinding’ and ‘enchanting’, used to describe not only Paganini and Liszt, but other musicians with demonstrative performance styles, linked Heller to an already existent community of ‘magical’ virtuosos. In the last decade of his career, from the late 1860s to his death in 1878, disputes over his playing also reflected broader changes to the piano recital, which for decades had featured a potent blend of celebrity and supernaturalism.
Le concert, c’est moi
Not long after a brief tour of the American West, Heller departed for Panama. By December 1867, he was performing in his native England with Haidee Heller, who was variously described in newspapers as his sister, half-sister, step-sister, or, as one Australian paper put it, his ‘something else’.Footnote 71 Miss Heller became a key collaborator, performing ‘Second Sight’, mentioned above, an effect which had been popularized by Professor Anderson and Robert-Houdin in the 1840s. Robert and Haidee remained in England for at least two years before returning to the United States, where they offered a brief run of shows in San Francisco prior to another international tour. This time the two embarked for Australia, tracing the southeastern coasts of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, with excursions to Tasmania and New Zealand. Then they left for Bombay in September 1871, touring cities and countries in Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Java, Cairo, Alexandria, Malta, and Gibraltar.
In 1869, during the Australian part of the tour, a critic for a Sydney newspaper expressed the wish that ‘Mr. Heller would give us a little more music and a little less magic; I think it would suit a Sydney public’.Footnote 72 Just under a month later, Heller performed a recital, separate from his conjuring show, with the assistance of a pair of vocalists. It was pronounced a success in the Sydney Morning Herald, with ‘diversified’ selections that included ‘the brilliant and dashing fantasia, the stately classical sonata, the buffo mélange and formal studies’.Footnote 73 This type of programme was unusual for Heller: he rarely performed classical sonatas or concert études in public after the 1850s. But the Sydney recital offered the sort of musical line-up audiences had come to expect in the late 1860s, when conventions governing recital repertoire were starting to fossilize, as Kenneth Hamilton notes. Hamilton describes an 1870 recital by Carl Tausig that featured a ‘chronological, historical framework’ of canonized repertoire from Bach to Liszt — the same sort of programme that might be performed today.Footnote 74 Outside the context of the magic show, Heller felt obliged to demonstrate his technical and stylistic versatility in the realm of ‘serious’ music and adapted accordingly.
About six months after the Sydney recital, a letter to the editor of the Geelong Advertiser (signed ‘A Musician’) effusively praised Heller’s musicianship before closing with a wish: ‘I hope he will favour us with a little Mendelssohn, Chopin, Mozart, or Beethoven, so that we may also judge his understanding of what is commonly called good music.’Footnote 75 The ‘musician’ who felt inspired to air their compliments publicly might well have been Heller himself, or perhaps his theatrical agent, calling attention to a concert they may already have planned — though if that were the case, the letter might have been more advantageously placed in a newspaper with a larger circulation. Whatever the source of the proposal, Heller was performing a recital in Melbourne three weeks later, enlisting a singer and instrumental soloists on clarinet and trombone. He did include Mendelssohn on the programme, as the letter writer had advised, along with a nocturne by Theodor Döhler and a tarantella of his own, though no Mozart, Beethoven, or Chopin. A reviewer for a local newspaper raved, calling the performance ‘brilliant’, ‘masterly’, and ‘remarkable’.Footnote 76
But his next foray into concertizing proved less successful, revealing the challenges Heller faced when responding to the changing expectations of audiences. For a second Sydney recital, more than a year after the first, he broadened his usual repertoire to include pieces by Beethoven, Chopin, Kalkbrenner, Johann Baptist Cramer, and Stephen Heller (though still no Mozart), seeking to prove himself in the crucible of sober concert music. He performed the entire programme by memory, in keeping with the recent view, proffered by Tausig and Rubinstein, that it was ‘a sign of seriousness to have memorized the program; it showed due reverence to the masterworks presumably contained therein’.Footnote 77 Few of his regular favourites appeared, with the exception of Thalberg’s Sonnambula fantasy — executed, according to one critic, as brilliantly as Thalberg himself would have done. By contrast, Heller struggled with the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata, which was reportedly marred by memory lapses and a nervous demeanour, and in a Chopin impromptu, he ‘got completely astray’.Footnote 78
Part of the problem might have been repertoire sporadically performed: seventeen years had lapsed since Heller had played Beethoven’s fourth and fifth piano concertos with the Germania Musical Society, and even then, his playing of the ‘Emperor’ Concerto had been criticized in Dwight’s Journal for lacking ‘sympathetic fire or delicacy, or sense of light and shade’.Footnote 79 (Echoes of this criticism also appeared in a review of the 1870 Melbourne recital, where Heller’s lone shortcoming seemed to be Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, which lacked ‘the filling-in of pathos, and the light and shadow of feeling’.)Footnote 80 The same critic who pointed out Heller’s memory slips in the ‘Pathétique’ suggested that he should ‘reconsider this plan of trusting to memory in works of importance such as a Beethoven sonata’, for the pianist ‘who cannot supply an absolute guarantee against slips imperils more than his own reputation’.Footnote 81
The concern over entrusting Beethoven only to interpreters worthy of the composer’s greatness indicates that Heller’s problems went beyond faulty memory or shoddy execution. In 1871, it was fine for him to perform a familiar potpourri of operatic paraphrases and fantasies in a magic show, where the musical entertainment was but one medium for producing an effect. But in a recital, some portion of the audience viewed bravura display pieces as excess filigree that masked technical or artistic shortcomings. This perspective on Heller’s playing, while by no means new, grew increasingly common. The positive review of his first Sydney recital in 1869 guarded against detractors by paraphrasing and addressing their criticisms, including the view that ‘he can’t play classical music, or he plays from ear, or a thousand equally absurd things that malcontents will always intent’.Footnote 82 By avoiding the music of Beethoven and his ostensibly serious colleagues, Heller had failed to demonstrate his artistic bona fides, and his repertoire, dominated by improvisatory pieces, had rendered his musical literacy suspect. Indeed, the fact that Heller could be broadly chastised for programmes bereft of ‘classical music’ showed just how much the critical landscape was transforming in the 1860s. The stuffy musical elitism that dominated the 1854 reviews of Heller in Dwight’s Journal had developed transcontinental range — not because Australians were reading Dwight’s, but because pianists were touring the world and attitudes about repertoire were changing accordingly.
A few years before his Australian tour, Heller had managed to anticipate one important shift in recital conventions. An 1865 handbill for a magic show performed in the United States included an admonition:
During the Musical Performance, the unmusical portion of the audience are respectfully requested by the management to abstain from any demonstration of impatience, inasmuch as whispering, talking or moving from place to place, is sufficient annoyance to mar the entire effect of the performance.Footnote 83
Whispering or moving about would not have been unusual behaviour during a recital in the 1860s. An atmosphere of ‘hushed silence’ would descend only later in the century, when the recital was treated with the reverence of a religious rite.Footnote 84 Heller had tried to extract what he considered a more respectful demeanour from audiences years before pianists like Anton Rubinstein started to make it a condition of recital attendance. But these behavioural admonitions were short-lived, and Heller continued playing the sort of music typically experienced in more permissive concert environments, where audiences expressed their interest (or lack thereof) through a wide variety of conduct. By the 1870s, the Australian critics who lavished praise on Heller’s execution of splashy virtuoso repertoire were also careful to assert that he was ‘equally competent to interpret correctly the works of the great masters of the musical world’.Footnote 85 Thalberg fantasies, once a staple of the piano recital, were increasingly better suited to the world of magic.
Back in the United States in 1877, Heller continued to feature repertoire familiar to his audiences — not Chopin, Mendelssohn, or Beethoven, but Thalberg, along with his own musical burlesques. Critics tended to offer the usual plaudits. Yet Heller often performed just two piano pieces in these shows, perhaps because audiences had grown to expect a more fulsome representation of historical and pianistic styles in a longer programme. When Rubinstein toured the United States from 1872 to 1873, his programmes offered a range of ‘serious’ repertoire by dead, mostly German composers, along with a number of his own compositions and a few of Liszt’s. Hans von Bülow’s repertoire during his US tour, from 1875 to 1876, was similar.Footnote 86 (For both pianists, Chopin functioned as an honorary German.) Their performances helped acclimatise audiences to solo piano recitals with less focus on bravura display — a change that should have been to Heller’s benefit, given his restrained playing style and his longstanding practice of performing much of his shows alone. Instead, it seems that Heller needed to reduce the footprint of the piano recital in his magic act, keeping the focus on showy, popular pieces without playing too many of them. His coupling of virtuoso pianism and conjuring had always exasperated a handful of critics, but now it had also become a liability for audiences seeking musical communion with long-dead masters. He could conjure 120 drumming goblins, but not the venerated spirit of Beethoven.
Conclusion: Illusory Pianism
During Heller’s Australian tour, one critic observed the incongruity of blending magic with musical virtuosity, for ‘our idea of a conjurer is so utterly antagonistic, so completely at variance with all the prescribed notions of a pianist’.Footnote 87 It was a decidedly minority opinion, in Australia and around the world. Heller’s defenders parried these charges by claiming that he was ‘not merely a conjurer, or magician, or wizard, but an artist of the highest class’.Footnote 88 Yet he rarely needed these rhetorical shields: for much of the public, he simultaneously filled the roles of virtuoso and conjurer with ease. His demeanour and dress helped to conflate them, in a manner similar to stage magicians obscuring categorical distinctions between different types of conjuring effects. Take the magician Robert-Houdin’s mechanical orange tree, which bore real flowers and fruit, or his Pastry Chef, exhibited as a machine but concealing the illusionist’s young son inside it. Both effects were presented to spectators in disguise: the orange tree, apparently an illusion, was a machine; the mechanical Pastry Chef was a fake automaton.
Indeed, Robert-Houdin, a key prototype for modern magicians in style and comportment, offered a blueprint for how to liken conjuring to the other arts, and specifically to piano practice. In his memoirs, he claimed to have developed an approach to physical dexterity by observing pianists, who were capable of executing several simultaneous tasks. Wanting to outdo them, he practised juggling four balls while reading a book at the same time.Footnote 89 (He must not have considered a pianist reading a score to be an equivalent activity.) Even his choice of uniform — gentleman’s evening attire in place of the wizard’s robes and pointed hats worn by some contemporaries — visually evoked the piano virtuoso. A lithograph from around 1850 shows Robert-Houdin wearing the fashions typical of his time: an unbuttoned dress coat with long lapels, nipped in at the waist and sharply cut away; a single-breasted white waistcoat, angled at the bottom to form a notch; and fairly close-fitting grey trousers (Figure 8). Franz Liszt’s carte de visite, produced in 1858, portrays the pianist-composer in like manner, with slight differences in the styles of the tailcoat, waistcoat, and trousers, all consistent with evolving fashion trends (Figure 9).Footnote 90
Figure 8. Lithograph of Robert-Houdin, c. 1850. From The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, by Harry Houdini.
Figure 9. Reproduction of a photograph of Franz Liszt, c. 1858. Courtesy of Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images.
The tailcoats alone would have sufficed to communicate their social and professional distinction, as case studies by the nineteenth-century French sociologist Frédéric le Play demonstrate. Of thirty-eight working-class families examined between 1850 and 1874 — including farmers, skilled workers, and unskilled labourers in Paris and the provinces — none owned a tailcoat.Footnote 91 (A small percentage of them had other items associated with formal dress: twenty-seven per cent possessed a dress jacket and seventeen per cent a silk waistcoat.) In France, and perhaps through much of Europe, the tailcoat was one of the era’s clearest visual signifiers of privilege and social prestige; the fact that many pianists adopted it as part of their uniform gave Robert-Houdin ample incentive to do the same. When Heller, by extension, donned evening wear appropriate for a gentleman of his era, he evoked the sartorial conventions of both conjurers and pianists, allowing him to move fluidly between roles without a change of costume. An illustration of Heller shows the moustachioed conjurer leaning towards the piano with one leg outstretched, tails of his coat flying, blending the quasi-demonic qualities found in magic advertisements and early Liszt portraiture with the caricatures of Liszt (and later Paderewski) that fancifully depict virtuoso pianism as a superhuman endeavour (Figure 10).Footnote 92 The text on the illustration alters the title Robert-Houdin used for his magic shows, from ‘Soirées fantastiques’ to ‘Solos fantastiques’, completing the fusion of conjuring and pianistic virtuosity.
Figure 10. Illustration of Heller as a conjuring pianist, c. 1868. Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
Heller’s performative ambiguity was not due to his clothing alone. Reviewers aided the impression, observing how, when he played, he seemed to produce a wellspring of magical effects, as if dozens of colourful scarves were emerging from a piano instead of a top hat. Heller’s pianism combined the somatic qualities of musical virtuosity with a theatrical environment wreathed in mystery and wonder. ‘Everything he touches, from the smallest article in the performing of a trick to the pianoforte,’ noted one critic, ‘speaks as if by the test of the magician’s wand.’Footnote 93 Many others testified of music and magic’s physical and artistic equivalencies: Heller ‘performs his magic as gracefully and humorously as he touches the piano, and he handles the keys of the piano as deftly and happily as he executes his magical feats’.Footnote 94 The instrument itself seemed to transform under Heller’s hands (‘it was anything but a piano’), the sound magnified beyond its natural capabilities: ‘Anyone listening to Mr. Heller’s music, without looking at the performance, might very easily imagine that he was listening to the music of a small band, and not of a single instrument played by one individual.’Footnote 95 Heller’s musical virtuosity functioned like a kind of enchantment, inviting the claim that ‘the rapidity and the extraordinary musical effects which he produces are more magical than the best trick in his wizard’s repertory’.Footnote 96
But this type of praise need not have been reserved for that rarest of breeds, the conjuring pianist; indeed, it could just as readily have characterized a performance by one of Heller’s virtuoso rivals. The notion that Heller’s performances might themselves operate as illusions has crucial precedents in the world of instrumental virtuosity. Chief among them was Paganini, the Romantic prototype for musical supernaturalism.Footnote 97 Critics gushed over his distinctive sound, which resembled ‘anything but a violin’, and the physical agility that made technical challenges disappear.Footnote 98 Perhaps more than any other musician of his time, Paganini was routinely described as a magician, a wizard, or one of many satanic derivatives.Footnote 99 Many pianists who toured the United States just before or during Heller’s tenure were also described in magical terms, yet in most cases, ‘magic’ was a superlative, not a reference to supernaturalism. Strakosch, Herz, Gottschalk, and Thalberg all possessed magic fingers, a magic touch, and alongside reviews of their performances were classified advertisements for a variety of products and remedies peddled as ‘magical’ to hopeful consumers. There were magic pills, magic powders, magic hair dyes, a magic freezer, a magic parlour stove, teething syrups and ‘Constitution Water’ that work ‘like magic’, and an ointment described as a ‘magical pain extractor’. Anything that eased or pleased, and did so painlessly, might be described as magic, whether parlour stove or pianist.
Notwithstanding the ubiquity of this magical descriptor, a smaller subset of performers was portrayed in rapturous terms, evoking the supernaturalism commonly associated with figures like Paganini and Liszt. One such performer was Jullien, the conductor. His baton was an easy metaphorical target, given its similarity to a magic wand, but reviews in the United States expanded beyond this image, casting him as a creative wizard who animated a world of sound ex nihilo. Exercising an ‘immense amount of muscular and facial contortions, he wielded his wand […] with almost magical power’, claimed one critic.Footnote 100 Another noted how ‘the eye is fully occupied in watching the movements of the master director, while the ear is enraptured with the strains conjured forth by his magic wand’, a view that implicitly acknowledges how illusionists divide the sensory attention of spectators.Footnote 101 To better illustrate Jullien’s melange of effects, a reviewer for the Washington Sentinel proposed a scenario whereby the orchestra would be hidden behind a curtain; Jullien, standing at the podium, would touch his ‘magic wand’ to the score, making the orchestra’s sound ‘seem to proceed from the volition of one man, and the powers of one instrument’. Illusion, for this critic, was not the product of spectacle but its opposite; he asserted in proto-Wagnerian fashion how ‘the confusion of many fiddlers, the inflation of cheeks, and the protrusion of trombones, now divides the attention, destroys the illusion’.Footnote 102
Given this critical context, blending conjuring with pianistic virtuosity merely heightened a relationship that already existed in the minds of nineteenth-century listeners — but one bound up by paradoxical filaments. Despite the piano’s strong materialist associations and the pianist’s evident physical labour, its transportive effects seemed to transcend the bodies of performer and listener alike. When critics in the United States described Thalberg’s playing as magical, they weren’t typically referring to a virtuoso’s sleight of hand. He was said to play with ‘the purest taste, without charlatanry or trickery’, attempting ‘no startling effects’.Footnote 103 In other words, he produced remarkable sounds without prestidigitating theatrics.
For these reviewers, the primary illusion in Thalberg’s playing stemmed from his ability to transcend the limitations of the instrument — in essence, to turn the piano into an orchestra. His ‘magic fingers’ produced a ‘prolonged articulation which he alone perhaps can draw from this usually ungrateful, unresponsive instrument’.Footnote 104 One reviewer described in colourful terms how, before Thalberg, ‘no one thought or cared to find out that the piano, the grandchild of the clavicord [sic], had a soul or a voice that could interpret emotions, sentiments or passions’. Thalberg’s ‘magic touch woke the slumbering soul of the instrument […] until the world marveled as though the breath of life had been breathed into lifeless clay’.Footnote 105 Creatio ex piano indeed! The same instrument derided for producing legions of tin-eared, blunt-fingered amateurs was finally acclaimed for its expressive capacities, thanks to Thalberg’s primary feat of magical pianism: transcending the piano itself. Early in the pianist’s US tour, a critic remarked on the swirling, expansive arpeggiations that were his musical calling card, not to point out an illusory third hand in his technique but to admire the felicitous blend of melody and filigree in the composition itself. The theme is always ‘distinctly audible amid the musical tumult of arpeggios, scale passages, octaves, and fanciful outbursts […] of sound, which his magic raises around it’.Footnote 106 Thalberg’s ‘magic and facile touch’, another noted, drew from the instrument its ‘extensive range, the depth of bass combined with the height of treble […] enabling it to embody so effectually the extremes of an orchestra’. This view corresponded with the European perceptions of Thalberg summed up by Fétis, who recounted how the pianist’s sound is ‘capable of producing the illusion of a full orchestra’.Footnote 107 At its best, Thalberg’s piano sounded like anything but itself: it sang, thundered like timpani, trilled with avian delight, rang in orchestral majesty.
For Heller, who regularly performed Thalberg’s music, magical pianism likewise had little to do with demonstrative displays at the instrument. Critics who chronicled his shows rarely commented on specific aspects of his technique. Those favourably disposed to his playing rhapsodized about his sound, but scarcely any of them described how it was made. His digital dexterity was likened and attributed to his conjuring practice, and vice versa, yet his physical disposition at the keyboard went largely unnoticed. Reviewers compared him to contemporary pianists to give a measure of his facility and artistry: he was as good as one, better than another, not quite but nearly as gifted as a third. Bromides about Heller’s taste and style implied that he sought (but did not always achieve) Thalberg’s singing tone and quiet, easy manner at the keyboard, avoiding movements that might be interpreted as overtly theatrical. And yet despite his stylistic reserve, Heller inspired the descriptively elaborate magical critiques more typical of flamboyant performers like Liszt, Paganini, and Jullien; he not only had a ‘magic touch’ (as most pianists did), but was enchanting, spellbinding, producing musical effects as if with a magician’s wand, making the piano sound like anything but itself. Critics in the United States rarely broached the limits of their magical lexicon when trying to portray Gottschalk, Herz, Meyer, or even Thalberg. For Heller, they wore out their metaphorical vocabularies.
Given the attention customarily paid to the virtuoso body — the hair, facial expression, arch of the back, placement of the arms and hands, pitch of the torso in relation to the keyboard —Heller’s physicality was markedly inconspicuous. Critics who paid attention to Meyer’s stagey deportment also noticed Thalberg’s machine-like precision and restraint. For Heller, it was as if the mysteries of the magic show had enveloped the piano performances, too, rendering imperceptible the physical mechanisms of his music-making. The spectacle of piano-playing became its own illusion; the music emanating from the instrument was like a misdirectional cue, splitting the focus between sight and sound. Heller was in a sense the perfect embodiment of the nineteenth-century piano and its paradoxes, the hyperactivity of his magician’s fingers absorbing the spectator’s attention, creating transcendent effects that mask the body and its labours. It is easy to forget in such a setting how the sound is made, and to remember only that it seemed magical.
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