A term in use since the 16th century to denote a speech or a narrative account. In a musical context, the term denotes the performance or interpretation of a specific work. Since the mid-19th century, it has come to mean a concert given by one performer or a small group. For some early concerts described as recitals, it is not clear which of the two meanings was intended.
The use of ‘recital’ to describe a solo concert marked a major departure from the conventions of concert-giving. Since the early 18th century, most concerts put on by a musician in his or her own name – usually called a ‘benefit concert’, in German-speaking areas Akademie – involved a variety of performers, both vocal and instrumental (see Concert (ii)). The chief aim of such an event was not necessarily for the sponsor to display musical prowess and artistry, which was best done privately, but rather to demonstrate publicly the prominence of one's musical colleagues and patrons, and thereby to gain well-paid teaching engagements. The programme tended to be long and focussed on selections from operas and fantasies on the best-known and newest operatic melodies. Such concerts continued to be common throughout the 19th century.
Liszt can be credited for giving the most important early concerts that can justifiably be termed recitals. In his concerts of 1837–40, chiefly in Milan, Rome, Vienna and London, he reduced the number and significance of other performers in his programme, and sometimes appeared alone. He applied the term ‘recital’ to such an event in London on 9 June 1840 in the Hanover Square Rooms, using the term in the older sense of ‘interpretation’: one announcement stated that ‘M. Liszt will give … Recitals on the pianoforte’ and another that he would ‘give a recital of one of his great fantasies’. Liszt indicated how novel and daring it was to give a concert entirely alone when he wrote to the Countess Belgiojoso during his Italian tour: ‘wearied with warfare [with other musicians], not being able to compose a programme which could have common sense, I have ventured to give a series of concerts all by myself, affecting the Louis XIV style, and saying cavalierly to the public, “The concert is – myself”’.
The recital as it developed from the 1860s on was focussed on a Classical repertory, with new works generally placed towards the end. While Liszt did offer more works by Beethoven than was conventional among virtuosos of his time, the programmes where he performed alone were devoted chiefly to his own music and to contemporary works in related idioms. His programmes resembled those of a few unusually prominent performers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries – most notably Mozart and Hummel – who offered chiefly their own music but also included other soloists and an orchestra.
Other touring virtuosos performed alone from the middle of the century onwards, as the number and the pace of their concerts increased. In 1843 Ole Bull reported from Trondheim that he ‘gave a concert without any assistance, playing nearly two hours without cessation. It was very fatiguing, but, at least, nothing was ruined by bad accompaniment and the audience was pleased’. Charles Hallé defined the recital as a musical institution in England. He reported in his memoirs that ‘from the year 1850 I commenced to give pianoforte recitals, until then unknown in England. In London I gave them for several years at my own house, until I transferred them to St. James's Hall. In other towns I chose the most suitable concert-rooms, and found willing ears nearly everywhere’.
Recitals had become standard by the 1870s, chiefly through their close association with the newly established conservatories. In contrast with benefit concerts, they became the main context within which a performer – a pianist or violinist, with occasional exceptions – would be judged, and as such they served a specialized purpose within musical life. The widespread study of the piano by amateurs, and the proliferation of piano teachers, made the piano recital an important institution in determining the course of a musical career. This period saw the evolution of a specific genre of journalistic criticism for the evaluation of recitals. Amy Fay, an American studying in Europe, reported going to many recital-like programmes with other students at the Leipzig Conservatory in the late 1860s. She articulated the significance of such events when she declared that at two concerts Clara Schumann, her teacher, ‘gave a full exhibition of her powers in every kind of music’.
The term ‘recital’ was subsequently adopted in France and other countries as a standard title for a concert given by a solo performer. In Germany or Austria, however, other terms – Virtuosenconcert, selbständiges Concert, Claviervortragsabend, Matinée, Soirée or simply Concert – were preferred. Both the practice of one musician performing alone and the term ‘recital’ were also adopted in various other contexts. Organists had long given solo concerts, and these were given the name ‘recital’ during the early 20th century in Britain and the USA. As the song became a major genre in its own right, concerts by individual singers emerged as a kind of recital, though they were not always so called; in Germany the Liederabend developed as a particular type of solo concert.
The recital established itself alongside the repertory of ‘classical’ works that was emerging as a standard for judging performers' abilities. The solo piano works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, then Schumann and Brahms, became the core of this repertory, marking a dramatic change in the nature of musical virtuosity. Leading performers such as Joachim, Anton Rubinstein and Vieuxtemps who came to the fore during the 1860s adopted a less flamboyant demeanour and performed classical works much more often than most of their predecessors had normally done. In this regard the recital differed fundamentally from the benefit concert – indeed, it must be regarded as a fresh start in concert forms. The breadth and catholicity of programmes by 1900 was an important feature, establishing the expectation that a performer prove him or herself in negotiating the music of a few central composers. That was unthinkable in the days when pianists were composers and offered chiefly their own music and that of their friends.
Recital
programmes continued to bear a close relationship to those of vocal and chamber
music concerts. A performer might offer a variety of works on the piano or the
violin, along with one or more for a duo, trio or quartet, and a singer might
also appear on the same programme. In 1861 Hallé included songs by Dussek and
Macfarren in the first public ‘Beethoven Recitals’, as he called them. During
the 1850s and 60s Arabella Goddard offered annual series of soirées along these
lines at St James's Hall in London; on one programme she presented Mozart's
String Quartet in E
and performed Mendelssohn's Sonata in E, the Receuil des airs by Dussek,
Beethoven's Sonata in F
and Schubert's B Trio.
Clara Schumann gave frequent concerts of that sort, often with three other
musicians but focussed on her own performances. It is therefore difficult to
make a clear distinction between recitals and chamber music concerts in this
period.
The growth of the international music business – piano manufacturers, publishers and most of all concert agents – gave a strong impetus to the recital. Before the middle of the 19th century a touring performer such as Spohr or Hummel went to a city not as a star performer but as a colleague; whatever his reputation, he had to establish good relations with local musicians if he was to put on concerts, and for that reason it was not proper to perform alone. By 1890 leading soloists had put their tours in the hands of powerful, highly professional agents such as Albert Gutmann in Vienna or Hermann Wolff in Berlin, who not only managed the many details of mounting a concert but also promoted musicians' careers on a broad plane. Concert life now had its own impresarios, who gave artists the status that formerly only opera singers had held. By relieving leading performers of the burden of arranging concerts, the agents helped give them far more lofty reputations than their predecessors.
By the early 20th century recitals had become one of the most common and most important concert formats. In Paris, for example, in the 1924–5 season, recitals for piano alone constituted 11% of the 2699 concerts given. In leading musical centres one or two halls have always tended to be the focus of recitals – the Bösendorfersaal in Vienna, the Beethovensaal in Berlin, the Wigmore Hall in London and Carnegie Hall in New York. One can see how rich the world of recitals – along with the teachers, conservatories and agents closely tied to it – had become in a city such as New York by scanning the issues of Musical America for the period. The prominence given to reviews of recitals in daily newspapers during the first half of the 20th century is itself noteworthy: evaluating a pianist's performance became the critic's most basic task. By 1890 a successful recital had become the instrumentalist's key point of entry into the world of solo performance. Recitals were a highly competitive arena from the start and usually cost performers more money than they earned. The unusually rich collection of correspondence between the highly regarded American pianist Richard Buhlig and his agents from 1905 to 1925, shows that a large part of the listeners had free tickets, that he almost never covered his expenses, and that the difference was made up by patrons and piano companies rather than by the agents. By the 1930s performers had become so hostile to agents that in cities such as Berlin they began establishing non-profit management companies.
A great variety of specialities evolved in the recital during this period. Programmes devoted to a single composer became common: Anton Rubinstein was the most important early performer of a Beethoven sonata cycle, as Schnabel was for Schubert and others were for Bach, Mozart, Paganini, Liszt and Brahms. The anniversaries of a composer's birth or death generated a related custom; Schnabel began playing Beethoven cycles in 1927. Other instruments likewise drew new interest: Wanda Landowska introduced the harpsichord as a recital instrument in 1903, and Andrés Segovia did the same for the guitar in 1908. Recitals became increasingly central to concert life by the mid-20th century. Myra Hess directed a series of recitals at the National Gallery of London during World War II that became the focal-point of musical life at that time. As fewer instrumentalists devoted themselves seriously to composition, appearances with orchestras became less important than they had been in the time of Bruch or Paderewski. Vladimir Horowitz, for example, focussed his career much more on recitals than on orchestral concerts.
The number of recitals declined significantly from the 1960s, following the decrease in the number of amateurs and the growth of competing entertainments. The rise in the importance and the fees of star performers may have played a part in this change, making it more difficult for moderately well-known performers to secure many bookings. By the end of the 20th century far fewer performers could mount an international career than had been the case in the time of Paderewski and Bauer. Performers increasingly became specialists in a particular area or period as the worlds of early music and new music developed. The recital became less important for solo performers than for ensembles known for particular kinds of repertory or performance practice.
At the same time, the greater ease of travel during the late 20th century made possible more concerts in smaller cities, especially university centres. The growing number and importance of prize competitions – the Tchaikovsky in Moscow, the Queen Elisabeth in Brussels and the Naumburg in New York, for example – brought a new vigour to the world of the recital. New kinds of celebrity recital developed, held in large outdoor venues accommodating up to 100,000 listeners. The largest of these were the concerts of the ‘Three Tenors’, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and José Carreras, in the cities associated with the football World Cup in 1990, 1994 and 1998; Pavarotti drew a similarly large audience (150,000) with a televised concert in Hyde Park in London in 1992, the first classical music concert to be held in the park, while in June 1993 more than 500,000 people attended his performance on the Great Lawn of Central Park in New York, and millions more around the world watched on television.
A. Fay: Music-Study in Germany (Chicago, 1880, 2/1896/R), 25–7
S.C. Bull: Ole Bull: a Memoir (Boston, 1882)
La Mara [M. Lipsius], ed.: Franz Liszts Briefe (Leipzig, 1893–1905; Eng. trans., 1894/R), 30–31
C.E. and M. Hallé, eds.: The Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé (London, 1896/R), 147
A. Gutmann: Aus dem Wiener Musikleben (Vienna, 1914)
R. Dumesnil: La musique en France entre les deux guerres, 1919–1939 (Paris, 1946), 75
A. Chasins: Speaking of Pianists (New York, 1957, 3/1981)
P.S. Pettler: ‘Clara Schumann's Recitals’, 19CM, iv (1980–81), 70–76
J. Horowitz: Conservations with Arrau (New York, 1982, 2/1992)
A. Walker: Franz Liszt, i: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (New York and London, 1983, 2/1990)
J. Horowitz: The Ivory Trade (New York, 1990)
N. Lebrecht: When the Music Stops: Managers, Maestros and the Corporate Murder of Classical Music (London, 1996)
For further bibliography see Concert (ii).
WILLIAM WEBER