Look at the way the piano is positioned on the stage: side-on to the audience. Liszt was the first famous recitalist to give his concerts like this, rather than playing with his back to the audience. A number of suggestive conclusions can be drawn – the least charitable is that Liszt liked the audience to appreciate his handsome profile.
Ferdinand Hiller recalled some years later Liszt’s first Leipzig recitals: ‘...as he glided along the platform of the orchestra to the piano, dressed in the most elegant style, and as lithe and slender as a tiger-cat, Mendelssohn said to me, “There’s a novel apparition, the virtuoso of the nineteenth century”.’
But there is more to it: Liszt’s Leipzig recitals were given, not in a salon, but in the Gewandhaus Concert Hall. Venues were changing, so that the audience sat in rows, facing a platform, rather than surrounding the performer as in domestic music-making. Audiences were coming to hear (and see) a virtuoso, who had the whole program to him or herself, and who led them through an experience in music. At the same time, the carrying power and sustaining ability of the piano had taken a quantum leap forward, so that the playing could be projected to the back rows of a larger auditorium.
You assume – there’s no music on the piano – that tonight’s performer will play the entire recital from memory. Obvious? It was not always so, and Clara Schumann, while still virtually a girl prodigy, astonished her audiences in Vienna and other places by playing her whole recital program from memory. This is not the place to debate whether playing from memory is necessary. What is not debatable is that it increased the sensational aspects of the recital as a musical fixture. Yet nowadays playing from memory is so usual that it is virtually taken for granted.
Perhaps we have also forgotten why we call a concert like this a ‘recital’? The word has come to mean a musical or other entertainment given by a single performer, but its derivation is clearly from the idea of recitation, delivering text before an audience. It is not an accident that the idea of a piano recital developed, historically speaking, in the heyday of Romantic literature. But the act of reciting has here been transferred from a speaker to a musical performer – in a real sense, a recital, the musical kind, should speak for itself.
Consider the conception of such a concert from a programming point of view. The more the performers, the more the constraints. If you have, say, a string quartet and some wind instruments, let alone a full orchestra, you will want to choose music that makes the most use of the available performers, and that limits the choice – not fatally, if the programming is ingenious.
However, a piano recitalist is able to choose and make combinations from the whole literature of the instrument. The choice of program then makes a statement in itself. Of course, at the most basic level it will be a set of pieces of the right total length, all of which the performer enjoys playing, and which make a satisfying sequence and whole. But it can be even more than that: a thoughtfully-chosen program for a piano recital can make an important and illuminating statement about the history of piano music.
Liszt’s recitals, as well as being superb virtuoso entertainment, contained lessons in music. It was for his recitals that Liszt made the transcriptions of orchestral music which was too avant-garde, and too demanding, to be heard in orchestral concerts – Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique, for example, which Liszt played in his own piano transcription. (Berlioz himself provided a key to this music in the form of a literary program.)
Schumann was one of the first great creative musicians to provide, in his newspaper articles, program notes about other people’s music. These included one about Liszt’s playing of his transcription of the Symphonie fantastique, and a famous one greeting music by a newcomer, Chopin, with the famous phrase, ‘Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!’ Very soon, it became compulsory for recitals like this to be accompanied with intelligent program notes, for the educated audience.
Like many of you today, the audiences of the mid-19th century, even if they were pianists, could never aspire to the technique necessary to play most of this music – it is for virtuosos, whether Liszt, or Clara Schumann, or their successors. But most audiences were musical enough, with guidance, to be prepared to sit through a whole evening devoted entirely to piano music; to appreciate, with the help of thoughtful program notes, what the composers had achieved, and perhaps also why the performer had selected a particular group of works.
You are the inheritors of the recital tradition. You will sit here in rapt silence, perhaps studying your program notes from time to time. You will applaud in all the right places, because your printed program, like an order of service in church, tells you when you’re allowed to applaud. But this was not what audiences of the 1830s expected. They talked, they wandered in and out, they liked short pieces and variety – gimmicks even, party tricks.
Well, are their 21st century successors really all that different? Will the virtuoso aspect of the recital bring back the audiences for this kind of music-making? Or is it the blend of pleasure and instruction to be had from a thoughtfully constructed recital? Perhaps a bit of both: often the encores arouse the audience’s greatest curiosity and enthusiasm, and not only because they’re the only thing that isn’t listed in the program!
First published