Autograph Note giving tickets to the FIRST EVER PIANO RECITAL IN MUSICAL HISTORY

Autograph note signed from the legendary pianist,"avec mille affectuex compliments de la part de Liszt" which once accompanied a pair of tickets (no longer present) to the first piano recital in music history, performed at the Hanover Square Room in London on June 9, 1840.  Details about the item have been written in English in an unidentified contemporary hand "London. 4 June, 1840 - with Two tickets for his 'Recital on Pianoforte,' at the Hanover Square Rooms on 9 June." Mounted to paper, moderate spotting and toning, overall in fine condition.  4.75 x 2.6 inches (12 x 6.6 cm.). Together with a photograph of the musician by Mulnier of Paris, dated 1863 on the verso, likely printed ca. 1900. 4.25 x 6.6 inches (10.7 x 16.2 cm.)

"It was Liszt who first decided to have the whole stage to himself, and set the fashion for dispensing with the mixture of celebrities and supporting acts that had prevailed up to that time.  As he wrote about his audacity to a friend: “Le concert, c’est moi!”  And he called his appearance at the Hanover Square Rooms in London in June 1840 not a concert but a recital." ("Liszt is dead, long live the piano recital," Michael Derban, The Irish Times.)

"This was the first time the word recital had been used in terms of music.  Until then, the word ‘recital’ had only been used to describe dramatic readings, which is perhaps why Liszt was drawn to the word: in the past, his solo concerts bore the curious name ‘musical soliloquies’.  On 9 June 1840, a year or so into his European tour, Liszt hosted the first of two London concerts – advertised as 'Liszt's Pianoforte Recitals' – at the Hanover Square Rooms in Mayfair.  Liszt was back on the touring circuit as a pianist in 1839 to help fundraise for a statue of Beethoven in Bonn.  He had just emerged from an intense period of composition and was alarmed to hear that plans for the statue were under threat through lack of financial support.  For his London appearance, he put together a programme that combined his own works with transcriptions of well-known masterpieces, including his own arrangements of Beethoven symphonies and Schubert songs.  He also included Hexameron, a collaborative work pieced together from music by Chopin, Czerny, Thalberg, Pixis, Herz and Liszt himself.  Following his time in London, Liszt took a short break before returning to England in August to start a nationwide tour.  The schedule was punishing: 50 concerts in six weeks.  ‘My travelling circus begins today’, he wrote to his lover Marie d’Agoult from the first stop on the tour, Chichester.  The ‘circus’ continued for about eight years – by the time he’d finished, Liszt had given 1,000 concerts right across Europe."  ("Who invented the piano recital?", Classical Music) (20979)

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Autograph Letter

Classical Music

Signature

Autograph Document

• Sold