Josef Danhauser, Liszt at the Piano, 1840. Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Tuesday 9 June 1840, London, the Hanover Square Rooms. The hall where sixty-five years earlier Johann Christian Bach had begun giving his concerts is full of people who have read an unusual announcement: Liszt’s Pianoforte Recitals. No one, until then, had used that word for music. One recited verses, orations, parts in the theatre. On stage stand a piano and a single man, and for the whole evening no one else will join him.
The man had been born on 22 October 1811 in Doborján, a village in Sopron County in the Kingdom of Hungary that today is called Raiding and lies in Austria. At twenty-eight he was already the most famous pianist in Europe, and he had decided to change the very form of the concert. Until then a musical evening was a mixed programme: an overture, an opera aria, a concerto for soloist and orchestra, a chamber piece, a singer again. The virtuoso was one number among numbers. Liszt removed everything else. In that same 1840 Josef Danhauser painted him at the piano in a drawing room, with the bust of Beethoven on the instrument and around him a small crowd of illustrious friends: it is still music as private conversation. The recital would be the opposite: a public hall, a paid ticket and no one beside him.
The experiment had begun the year before, in Rome, in 1839. There Liszt had played entire evenings alone, and called them, ironically, musical soliloquies. To Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, who in Paris had hosted him in her salon, he wrote the formula that has stuck: Le concert, c’est moi. It was a parody of Louis XIV, and at the same time the exact description of what he was doing. But in London, the following summer, the invention found its name: the posters announced recitals, in the plural, and Alfred Brendel has observed that the word suggested precisely this, a recitation of musical pieces, the testimony of a way of playing that declaimed.
With the name came the rules we still use. Liszt played whole programmes without a score on the stand, which the public was not used to seeing: the caricatures of the time insist on exactly this. He set the piano crosswise, perpendicular to the audience, so the hall could see his profile and the open lid would project the sound towards the rows. He crossed the repertoire from Bach to Chopin, alongside his own transcriptions and paraphrases. Before him the public went to hear an evening; after him it went to hear a person. Heinrich Heine, who in 1844 coined the word Lisztomania for the phenomenon, described the effect that the pianist’s mere appearance had on the hall.
It is said that Liszt invented the solo recital, and the phrase should be taken literally in two stages: in Rome he invented the thing, in London the word. Together they make the recital as a form, that is, as a promise written on the poster: one performer, one instrument, the whole evening, and the idea that this was enough. The risk was enormous, because it took away from the audience the variety it paid for and offered a personality in exchange. It worked so well that today the recital seems to us the natural condition of the piano, and the mixed programmes of the nineteenth century an antiquarian’s oddity.
The period of the great tours lasted eight years. Liszt gave his last paid concert in September 1847, in Elisavetgrad, today’s Kropyvnytskyi in Ukraine, and then stopped playing for money. He was thirty-five, with almost four more decades of life ahead of him as composer, conductor and teacher. The word that Londoners had read on the poster of the Hanover Square Rooms is still the one printed on concert programmes, almost two centuries later.