Henri Herz's Bravura Variations (1825):
Variations and the Virtuosities of Postclassical Pianism

This lecture-recital explores pianistic virtuosity during the postclassical era, whose heyday Samson (2000) posits to have been the 1820s and 1830s. Centred on the 1828 Broadwood fortepiano from the University of Southampton’s collection, it investigates virtuosic concert variations: an immensely popular, ubiquitous sub-genre of piano music that flourished across Europe, England, and America in the first half of the nineteenth century.

What drove their popularity, and why did this vast corpus of keyboard repertoire – once indispensable to the concert repertoires of touring virtuosos – fall to obsolescence? Situating concert variations within the wider variation genre, I explore the landscape from which they emerged, contemporary aesthetics, and the ecosystem around which they were built: composition – which went in tandem with publishing – performance culture, piano development and manufacture, and the synergy of pianism with the operatic theatre.

A set of Bravura Variations by Henri Herz – an Austrian-born, naturalised-French composer, virtuoso, and leading piano manufacturer of the nineteenth century – will serve as the main case study (1825). It illuminates the style, structure, and function of concert variations, and the aesthetic ideals of the postclassical milieu. Demonstrations on the 1828 Broadwood grounds these performance and compositional techniques in their historical context, exploring the piano as a crucial agent in advancing the discourse on virtuosity.

In bringing to the fore a rich, diverse repertory and culture that has long been marginalised in both scholarship and performance, this lecture-recital further reflects on the historiographical narratives that have come to shape musical studies in the interceding two centuries.

© Cheryl Tan, 2025