The art of the recitalist
April 2012
Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert would have been puzzled by the practice. Chopin did it only reluctantly. It was the virtuoso pianist-composer Franz Liszt who started it in the late-1830s by giving a peculiar new kind of concert.
What was odd was that Liszt would appear alone on stage to perform the piano for an entire concert, completely unaccompanied by an orchestra or the other diverse entertainments that nineteenth century audiences usually enjoyed in the course of an evening. Vladimir Statsov went to Liszt’s St. Petersburg debut in 1842 and wrote: “This was something unheard of, utterly novel, even somewhat brazen. What conceit! What vanity! As if to say, ‘All you need is me. Listen only to me – you don’t need anyone else.’”
Liszt’s programs on these occasions were eclectic – arrangements of popular arias, his own compositions, excerpts from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – a kind of replica of a typical orchestral concert of the time, with him as the only star.
This led to the innovation of arranging the piano so that the pianist’s profile could be admired (in fact, Liszt would have two pianos on stage facing in opposite directions, alternating between them so that both sides of the auditorium got their money’s worth). The word ‘recital’ was first applied to this kind of concert by one of Liszt’s promoters in London in 1840 and it quickly caught on. The margins for performer and impresario are obviously rather favourable once you dispense with the inconvenience and expense of an orchestra. It spawned the cottage industry of managers and musicians crisscrossing the globe that still exists.
One of the most relentless recitalists of the nineteenth century was Louis Moreau Gottschalk, an exotic ‘creole’ pianist from Louisiana. He toured North and South America, as well as the usual European destinations, at the height of the American Civil War, traveling tens of thousands of miles by rail. His memoirs are testament to the pleasures, but, mostly, the privations of the touring artist, and implicit in them is a story about the growing appetite for culture across all classes in the United States, where concert halls were springing up like a crop of mushrooms, demanding a new kind of performer to fill them.
This was also part of a larger trend of outsourcing musical recreation to professionals. Much of the chamber music composed prior to the rise of the recital was for home or ‘salon’ consumption, within the technical capabilities of a competent amateur and generally not too ‘way out’ (Beethoven’s mystical late sonatas are a conspicuous exception). Liszt and his colleagues changed all that, composing fiendishly difficult works, full of outré harmonies and the latest musical fashions. These would have been out of the reach of all but the most accomplished musical weekend warriors. Some, like the violinist Nicolai Paganini, maintained a cloak of pseudo-diabolical secrecy around their tricks – the exact fingerings and methods for some of his special effects only emerged after his death.
Of course, the aural and visual spectacle of a virtuoso like the handsome Liszt or the strikingly ugly Paganini in full flight had considerable box office appeal and still does. Despite the show-biz antics, Liszt was a composer of real integrity and daring, proposing not just amazing new things to do with a piano, but also advancing a whole musical philosophy. The Lisztian recital even influenced technology: the now-familiar concert grand was developed to be heard in large halls and compete against orchestras, especially in barnstorming late-Romantic repertoire.
A recital affords the most intimate and personal communion with a musical personality and with a certain kind of music that you don’t hear otherwise – a canon of ‘standard recital fare’ has been established, pieces which best establish a performer’s interpretative and technical credentials. There’s the shock and awe approach, where each dazzling showpiece demonstrates the musician’s chops. Some recitalists offer up encyclopaedic concerts of Claude Debussy Préludes or Bach’s Goldberg Variations allowing us to enjoy the subtlety of a beautifully voiced chord or the intertwining of delicate strands of sound. British pianist Paul Lewis has been playing Schubert’s piano music in recital exclusively for the last few years (before that he played only Beethoven).
Singers generally offer the most free-ranging programs as they’re apparently at liberty to choose from early music to opera to show-tunes, in a way that instrumentalists are not. A song recital is perhaps the most authentic evocation of the original spirit of the format: eclectic, surprising, crowd-pleasing and moving by turns.
Even the ready availability of recordings hasn’t diminished the appeal of seeing favourite musicians live, in majestic profile. After all, there’s no risk in a recording where you can lay down another more perfect take. The public performance of a really difficult piece is something of a high-wire act. We know that our trapeze artist won’t fall, even as we gasp at their daring. That’s all part of the recitalist’s art.
Robert Murray is Director of Marketing and Customer Relations at Melbourne Recital Centre.
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