21 MICHEL DALBERTO Unlike the Germanic countries, where there was no break between classicism and romanticism, the French Revolution brought a clean break in the aesthetic continuity of national music. The new regime installed in power a bourgeoisie eager to appropriate the pleasures of an aristocracy whose intellectual and aesthetic codes it did not possess. In the space of a few decades, the virtuoso lost his status as a learned person for that of a skillful performer. Throughout the 19th century, critics - Stendhal, Baudelaire, Berlioz, the chronicler and Flaubert, among others - reveled in false values while admiring athletic performances. The ‘athlete’ supplanted the creator. Physical strength, endurance, and agility overshadowed intellectual pursuits. To emphasise the point, the virtuoso, this man of faded virtues, could no longer distinguish between good and evil...
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