From the Benefit Concert to the Recital, 1800—1914

Today we take for granted that an accomplished pianist, violinist or singer will periodically put on a recital where he or she will perform alone or with an accompanist. What many people don’t realize is that such a concert did not arise until around 1840, or become at all common until 1870. What a musician did before that time was called a ‘benefit concert’, a very different kind of event. We will here look at examples of the benefit concert and the recital, to see the historical evolution from one to the other.

A musician, sometimes two, would put on a benefit concert for their own profit or loss, probably more often the latter. Such a concert was designed not so much to make money as to remind their patrons of what they had done and to look for new business both teaching and performing. The musician would send an announcement of the concert to patrons, perhaps by a personal visit, and expect that each one would buy a pair of tickets and hopefully attend. The program would involve a variety of performers, the more the merrier in a sense, to show off the sponsor not so much as to performing excellence as high-level connections. A touring pianist would, however, do all possible to showcase his or her performing and composing talent.

The programme would almost always include both instrumental and vocal works, alternating between them and between genres. While such a programme would offer a much greater variety of genres than we are accustomed to hearing, it had a much narrower spread historically. In effect, as certain works began to remain in repertory, becoming called ‘classics’ by around 1830, the range of genres became less wide.

The recital, by contrast, arose as a programme focused upon a series of classical works. The American pianist Amy Fay once said in a letter to her mother in 1869 that she had just heard her teacher, Clara Schumann, give a concert that showed her ability to play effectively works from Bach to Mozart to Mendelssohn and finally to Brahms. Schumann did called that a Virtuosen-Konzert, but it was in effect a recital. What she did was quite different concert from what we will see Johann Nepomuk Hummel or Franz Liszt did in the 1830s or 40s.