Concert oddities

[sawyl]

Something from the reliably wonderful James Fenton on the history of the concert and how performance styles have changed over the years. In the 19th century, the approach taken to the performance program was somewhat elastic:

The audience was not shy to make requests. Thalberg went to hear a concert by a Theodor Döhler (a child prodigy who in due course was ennobled, married a Russian princess and gave up playing in public). The audience wanted to hear Thalberg's greatest hit, his fantasy on Rossini's Moses in Egypt. So Thalberg got up on stage and obliged, even though it was not his concert.

Liszt was about to accompany a celebrated violinist called Lambert Massart on the Kreutzer Sonata. But before Massart could play his first note, the crowd began to call for Liszt's Robert le Diable fantasy. Liszt told the audience that he was always their humble servant, but did they want the fantasy before or after the sonata? Again they called for Robert le Diable. So Liszt "dismissed Massart with the wave of a hand" and played his piece first. By the time it came to the sonata, Massart was utterly humiliated.

And even when the scheduled works were actually played, there was often only a passing resemblance between the notes played and the notes on the page because the public loved wrong notes — it made them feel they were getting a true performance and it allowed the performer to indicate just how difficult the work really was:

Wrong notes, we are told, were considered a sign of genius. Eugen d'Albert was celebrated for the wild inaccuracy of his playing. Busoni told one player who had ventured to demur: "If you put as much conviction into your right notes as d'Albert does into his wrong ones, then you'd have cause to criticise."

Best of all, though, was Theodor Leschetizky's suggestion that, should a pianist's memory fail part way through a performance, the best course of action was to complain about the tuning of a particular note, storm off stage, go to a dressing room and there consult a concealed copy of the score whilst the piano is being retuned...