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Published: Tuesday, 28 January 2025 at 10:56 AM
‘But what shall I play?’: the rise and fall of the encore
Sometimes an encore outshines the concert preceding it. Such was the case at a recital in October 2021 in Parma, Italy, when the soprano Lisette Oropesa decided to add a fourth, unrehearsed encore to her programme. A problem loomed: the selection, ‘Sempre Libera’ from Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata, requires a tenor, which had not been arranged.
Sensing the impending void, Liu Jianwei, a music student from a nearby conservatory, rose from his seat in the auditorium and belted out the offstage tenor part, to the apparent delight of Oropesa and the audience. Audience video captured the moment and clips soon ricocheted across social media, YouTube and TikTok. Liu later met Oropesa backstage and offered what turned out to be an unnecessary apology.
The French word ‘encore’ (literally, ‘again’) first appeared in English in the early 18th century, used by audiences of Italian opera in London. It was simply the repetition of a selection (an aria, perhaps, or an overture) that had garnered enough applause to be performed again. But over time, some encores have risen to sensational status on their own.
Consider one that pianist Rudolf Serkin gave in Berlin in 1921. The formal programme had ended with a crowd-pleasing rendition of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, complete with a blazing cadenza. Backstage, violinist Adolf Busch urged Serkin to perform an encore.
‘What shall I play?’ the 18-year-old Serkin asked. ‘The Goldberg Variations,’ Busch replied, jokingly. The pianist took him at his word and delivered Bach’s entire work. Serkin later recalled that the only remaining audience members were Busch and his wife, the pianist Artur Schnabel and the musicologist Alfred Einstein.
When two great sopranos fought over an encore
A very different element of surprise coloured the encores given in 1951 by Renata Tebaldi during a joint recital with Maria Callas in Rio de Janeiro. The sopranos had agreed that neither would upstage the other by performing encores, but Tebaldi gave not one but two. As the story goes, Callas later berated Tebaldi publicly at a dinner party, referencing a recent flop in Italy and setting off a longstanding rivalry.
Eighteenth- and early-19th-century encores grew out of a more freewheeling era for concert etiquette. When audiences called for one at the premiere of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the Allegretto alone received a second hearing.
But mid-show encores posed a larger test for opera houses. As Theodore Fenner details in Opera in London, impresarios and critics found them vulgar and intrusive but also a statistical gauge of public taste. As a Times reviewer noted in 1791, ‘John Bull will perhaps think it extraordinary that during the evening there did not occur one encore’.
One memorable encore: a three-hour opera
Encore practice was more tightly controlled in royal theatres, where only a monarch or his deputy could demand one. When Cimarosa’s comedy Il matrimonio segreto was staged in Vienna before the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, the monarch was so pleased that he ordered dinner for the cast and then called for a repeat of the nearly three-hour opera – possibly the longest encore in history.
In early-19th-century Paris, professional claques known as ‘bisseurs’ were hired to hype singers by calling out for encores. Almost everyone understood their role, and prima donnas who denied audiences encores did so at their peril.
When German soprano Gertrud Elisabeth Mara refused to sing one in a 1785 performance at King’s Theatre, the audience angrily hissed. A Times reviewer took her side, arguing that ‘the airs … should not be bravo’d till the symphony be closed’. But when Mara refused again in 1793, The Times this time decided ‘she was very properly hissed for refusing’.
When conductors put their foot down
More often, divas embraced show-stopping moments. During a Metropolitan Opera touring production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette in Boston in 1895, an upright piano was wheeled onto the stage so that soprano Nellie Melba could sing her encore.
When soprano Marcella Sembrich was called back for multiple encores during Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in Washington, DC, ‘even the musicians dropped their instruments, stood up in their seats, and cried “Bravo!”’ reported The Washington Evening Star. By the 1910s, conductors including Arturo Toscanini had seen enough, and refused to grant singers their starry moment, thus marking a decline in the practice.
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The Met drew a line with a chaotic 1924 production of Flotow’s Martha. As the audience called on tenor Beniamino Gigli to repeat the aria ‘M’appari’, conductor Gennaro Papi pressed ahead with the next scene even as Gigli was still returning for more bows. The words ‘positively no encores allowed’ began appearing in capital letters in programmes.
‘Has the Met let a monster out of the bottle?’
Both Milan’s La Scala and the Met finally relaxed their encore policies in 2007 and ’08, respectively, when tenor Juan-Diego Flórez was invited to repeat the high C-laden tenor aria from Donizetti’s La fille du régiment (an earlier thaw at the Met came in 1994, when Luciano Pavarotti repeated an aria in Tosca). These moments drew both excitement and some renewed tutting.
‘In lifting official prohibitions and traditional restraints, hasn’t the Met let a monster out of the bottle?’ asked Newsday theatre critic Linda Winer. ‘If tonight’s audience gets an encore, won’t tomorrow’s feel cheated if they just get a fine performance? Without the encores does it mean that the other guy saw a better show?’
Encores are usually plotted carefully and repeated over the course of a performance run or tour. In an era of strict contracts, union rules and licensing restrictions, venues are actively involved in encore preparation to ensure a smooth and timely finish.
Yet among pianists, encore policies vary. Artur Schnabel detested them, while Evgeny Kissin dispensed 12 encores at a 2007 Carnegie Hall recital. Sergei Rachmaninov would always signal that he was done for the night by playing his Prelude in C sharp minor. ‘A new composition by myself,’ he said in a sarcastically theatrical voice before one Philadelphia performance, suggesting that had grown weary of the ritual.
Fanatics followed him from place to place
At Carnegie Hall in 1918, Rachmaninov disappointed the ‘flappers’ in the balconies by denying them the Prelude. ‘All of flapperdom sorrowed last night,’ snorted The New York Times’s James Gibbons Huneker, ‘for there are amiable fanatics who follow this pianist from place to place hoping to hear him in this particular prelude; like the Englishman who attended every performance of the lady lion tamer hoping to see her swallowed by one of her pets.’
Some of history’s most attention-getting encores have doubled as social or political statements. Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Staatskapelle used the humble encore in 2001 as a way to introduce the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde to Israel, breaking with the country’s unofficial Wagner ban and setting off a tempest, with some audience members shouting epithets and walking out.
Other performers have displayed a more relaxed side through their encores. Pianist Gabriela Montero, known for her improvisation skills, has improvised encores based on themes requested (or sung) by audience members. Violinist Pekka Kuusisto has played and sang jaunty Finnish folk songs, even leading an audience sing-along at the BBC Proms in 2016. And fellow fiddler Hilary Hahn, tired of trotting out familiar pieces, commissioned short encores for violin and piano from 26 composers, then held an online competition to choose a 27th.
Perhaps as more artists rethink performance conventions in this unsettled era, the spontaneity of a well executed encore can make its way into the formal part of programmes. Then again, there’s the old show business maxim: always leave audiences wanting more.
Encores: a musician’s view
Violinist Henning Kraggerud: Once during a tour I realised that I had forgotten to prepare an encore, so I decided instead to trust in my ability to improvise straight from the heart. It worked out so well that I often now improvise as an introduction to the main pieces in my concert programmes. I take the harmonic progression from the central work, or any other appropriate elements, and improvise over them. In this way I’m not just performing the work of the composer – I’m a co-creator.
Our reverence for classical repertoire can sometimes feel a bit like a religion. Because encores form a less regulated part of the concert, they present the opportunity for greater creativity.
Cellist Johannes Moser: These days I tend to play an encore with the whole cello section after a concerto, such as Pablo Casals’s Song of the Birds or the second movement of Grieg’s Holberg Suite arranged for six cellos. Often a concerto is more like a symphony with a solo part, so rather than pushing the rest of the orchestra aside in the encore, it’s nice to be more inclusive.
Encore choices may have changed in recent years as the role of the soloist is changing. There’s no longer that singular, star cult. Instead, the soloist is a kind of ambassador between the orchestra and the public. The encore becomes an opportunity to make a statement about how you view your role in that context.