How did Paganini and Liszt turn playing into a spectacle?

Paganini made his own dazzling technique the attraction, and Liszt, inspired by him, made the soloist the whole show: before 1840 a solo pianist was usually one act on a mixed bill.

Niccolò Paganini, a violinist born in Genoa, toured the continent from 1809 and became famous for technical brilliance and showmanship, as well as an extravagant, philandering lifestyle. He had exceptionally long fingers and could play three octaves across four strings in one hand span. He composed his own pieces to play in his own concerts, and they profoundly influenced violin technique. When he died in 1840 before a priest could be summoned, and given widely rumoured ties to the devil, the Church denied his body a Catholic burial in Genoa, and it was finally buried in Parma in 1876.

Franz Liszt, a Hungarian pianist, heard Paganini in April 1832 and resolved to become as great a virtuoso on the piano as Paganini was on the violin. By the 1840s, in what Heinrich Heine named "Lisztomania", he had a stardom not experienced by earlier virtuosos. Fans sought locks of his hair and broken piano strings to make bracelets. Until 1840 most concerts with a solo pianist also included an orchestra, singers and ballet; Liszt is credited as the first to give solo recitals in the modern sense, and the word itself was first applied to his London concert of 9 June 1840.

The showmanship had a cost that Liszt himself admitted: in a regretful 1837 letter he wrote that, to wring bravos from the public, he had changed tempos and the composers' intentions, a direction he said he soon abandoned.