The Lady from Arezzo

by Alfred Brendel

  One of my strokes of luck was that the concert agents who took care of me were ones whose patience matched my own. There was, on the whole, enough stability in the organisation of my concert life to suggest that in this profession, more than in many others, it seemed possible to be, and to remain, a relatively free person.

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  I had already heard Julius Patzak, a quite distinctive tenor of around sixty, sing Winterreise in Vienna with a lovely Austrian diction. When I was in my mid-twenties, I got a telephone call asking me to accompany him in a Lieder recital. It was my first collaboration with a singer. The programme included Janáček, Bartók and a song by Richard Strauss with millions of notes in the piano part. Perhaps this was too outlandish for Viennese accompanists. There were two rehearsals. In the first one, Patzak was sight-reading while in the second he mainly smoked. Then came years where I joined the baritone Hermann Prey at music festivals. Once we even did an actual four-week tour in his Citroën. After the first concert in Amsterdam we were invited to the house of a musicologist. We sat down at a table on which a small plate with biscuits was displayed and started to laugh when our host said, ‘I trust you’ve had dinner already.’ On that day, quite a few things had already happened. In our hotel the elevator was under construction, and the page turner had forgotten to turn the pages.

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, my next singer, had acquired the habit of not just appearing with accompanists but if possible with piano soloists. Under his auspices, the accompanist mutated into a partner. It was evident that he valued suggestions and new ideas coming from the pianist. He sang with open ears, and his mastery was so sovereign that he always appeared completely in command. Fischer-Dieskau’s breathing technique was so superior that one hardly ever noticed him breathing in. The clarity of his diction was tailor-made for big halls: he was the only Lieder singer who on an international scale could fill large halls. One of our Winterreise performances, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, remains to me particularly unforgettable. After another one in Lockenhaus he instantly disappeared, and was carried away by a helicopter. The reason? He was being pursued by a woman with a gun.

  The third singer, also a baritone, was Matthias Goerne, once again, a supremely alert artist. The unity and intensity of his music-making was never in question. Meanwhile it has become common practice to open the piano lid completely, something that in chamber music and Lieder has never been to my taste – or to that of other musicians a few decades ago. It is probably due to the request of sound engineers who claim that they can get a better recorded piano sound. Alas, the listener in the concert hall will easily get the impression of the singer being inside the piano, and not in front. I have always used the quarter stick, even in live recordings.

  For me singing, cantabile, is at the heart of music, one of its constitutive secrets. It is joined by telling articulation and, on the operatic stage, by gesture and movement. In Mozart’s piano concertos, the player may, at times, turn into an imaginary operatic figure. Recently, a lot has been written about musical speech. The rhetorical element should, however, not dominate but rather complement the cantabile. Plasticity and clarity of diction will be an asset to pianists as well.

  Apart from the singers I worked with I also drew inspiration from listening to opera, and records. In the 1950s, before the Vienna State Opera house had been restored, a famous Mozart ensemble performed at the Theater an der Wien. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Sena Jurinac and Irmgard Seefried were the leading ladies whose memorable appearances on stage have merged in my memory with the timbre of their voices. Soon, they were joined by Christa Ludwig. The duo of Schwarzkopf and Ludwig remained to me the perfect pairing of Fiordiligi and Dorabella, with Graziella Sciutti as the ideal Despina. Among tenors, Julius Patzak and Anton Dermota regularly appeared, and Erich Kunz was a peerless Papageno. Josef Krips or Karl Böhm conducted. Fritz Busch, whom Vienna finally got round to inviting, died all too soon. It took quite some time before the musicians and the public became used to the proper execution of appoggiaturas. Just in case you’re interested: appoggiaturas are those two-note groups in which the first of two repeated notes has to be sung or played – in the Baroque style – at a different pitch (usually higher). Opera direction at that time did not offer commentaries, paraphrases or parodies of works but stagings that communicated even to the uninitiated what was actually going on.

  During Karajan’s time in Vienna I witnessed memorable performances of Italian Opera. Aida, Otello, Falstaff, but also Carmen, were, as I found, Karajan’s particular domain. Under his baton, Leontyne Price sang Aida and Regina Resnik Carmen – one of the few realisations of this role that I ever found convincing. At the Theater an der Wien Furtwängler had conducted Tristan. How the opening moment of each act immediately conveyed the basic character of the music was unforgettable – one can verify this with the help of his great recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Of inestimable value to me were the recordings of two dramatic sopranos: Lotte Lehmann and Maria Callas. Lotte Lehmann came to Vienna as an old lady to give a singing class to which the Viennese singing teachers did not send a single student. The way she sang, or rather suggested, Frauenliebe und -leben, because there was hardly any voice left, brought all of us to tears.

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  As a twenty-year-old I hoped to achieve something by the time I reached fifty. When I turned fifty I noticed that there were still a few things to do. In my sixties, there was a minor interruption. While performing both Brahms concertos on a concert tour I overstrained my left arm. A reassessment of my repertoire that had so far contained a remarkable number of highly athletic pieces had become necessary. It remained to be seen how the public would react. But they were gracious about it and seemed to go along with my opinion that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert had contributed a reasonable number of substantial piano works anyway.

  In addition, my repertoire had included a fair selection of works by Liszt and Schumann while Bach, Russian and French music were mostly excluded. A Bach recording for Philips was an exception. During 1976 I had played a programme that at first glance might seem all too daring: it combined works by Bach and Liszt (Hungarian rhapsodies) with Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. While recording a few Liszt pieces, I finished one day early and took advantage of the spare time by recording, among other works, Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue and his unpredictable A minor Fantasia as well as the Italian Concerto. I’m glad that this Bach recording came about, if only by accident.

  Why then didn’t I play Bach both more often and more regularly? There had been an upsurge of period performances that had rejected modern instruments. Another, quite different reason was the impact of Edwin Fischer’s Bach playing, for which finding an equivalent seemed to me a very tall order. Fortunately for us pianists the rights of the modern grand have meanwhile been re-established.

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  Concert tours took me repeatedly to Latin America, Australia, Israel and Japan. I had stopped going to Latin America by 1961. The organisation of these trips was to a scarcely imaginable extent left to chance, and pianos were bad. Besides, I was busy enough elsewhere. I particularly remember a recital in San Salvador where a rat appeared on stage, and the conclusion of my final tour. Before my departure from this continent I was supposed to play three concerts in Buenos Aires: Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto at the Teatro Colón, a benefit recital for the Austrian Embassy, and two Mozart concertos at the Mozarteo. We rehearsed Schoenberg and the notes were gradually becoming recognisable when Pope John XXIII died and all ‘entertainment’ was cancelled. First, there came a telephone call from the Austrian Ambassador, who told me that the recital should nevertheless go ahead – this would definitely have met with the approval of the deceased. But he urged me to modify the programme and eliminate the Schubert sonata in order to avoid frivolous associations with Lilac Time. I assured him that the big A minor Sonata was a tragic work and played it, of course. The next call came from my Argentinian agent telling me that he knew that I was una
ble to prolong my stay and therefore had the following proposal. After the end of the period of mourning I should first get the Mozart concertos out of the way and then be driven over to the Teatro Colón for the Schoenberg. Thus it happened that I appeared on the same evening in two different houses with two different orchestras and conductors.

  The tour of Australia that followed was splendidly organised. The man in charge was a certain Mr Moses whose hobby was chopping wood. In his office, there was a cupboard full of axes. In order to demonstrate how sharp-edged they were, he selected one of them, rolled up his shirt-sleeve and shaved off a few hairs from his arm. In Ballarat, a particularly chilly Australian place, I told the freezing public that I just wished I had an axe on hand to demolish their concert grand.

  In Israel I had to do what I never did anywhere else – to play six days a week. Fortunately, there was the Sabbath, which provided me and the orchestra with a free day. I was deeply touched that at the hundredth anniversary celebrations for Arthur Rubinstein I was invited to participate as the only non-Jewish pianist.

  When playing in Japan I never failed to visit Kyoto to discover some new temples, and to go to Nara, the wonderful old capital, where many deer roam the streets trying to steal chocolate from ladies’ handbags while stags rummage in the dustbins.

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  Next to a great many appearances with orchestras and at least as many in recitals there were the recordings, the number of which, in hindsight, has surprised me. It is a strange feeling looking back at so many records: offspring, some of which never really grow up. My studio recordings for Philips were more and more supplemented by live recordings without me having a marked preference for either. I became accustomed to playing in the studio with an intensity similar to that in a concert hall while live recordings turned out to be mostly happy finds among the radio recordings of my concerts. In the studio one is able to listen to playback, react critically, repeat and edit, while what counts in a live performance is the risk involved of getting through it all in one go. Both have their advantages. No one, I think, would be able to spot the edits in my studio recordings, if any. The precondition is that the performance needs to have a concept. My warmest thanks go to my producers for their committed assistance.

  Alongside my musical responsibilities my other career, that of a writer, gradually developed to become a second creative life. I wrote about music and matters connected to my piano playing until my poems surprised me. Obviously, they were part of my personality. But they showed an alter ego. I would like to claim that there are a number of dimensions in myself that supplement each other – serious and non-serious, sense and nonsense, doubt and conviction. Only in contradiction does the world seem to become a little less absurd. There are, in me, a number of houses and doors. Whoever looks for the Dadaist in my piano playing has tried the wrong door.

  As a writing pianist I was called a ‘savage philosopher at the piano’ or even, in America, branded as an intellectual. That’s what happens if you publish books, wear spectacles, and don’t play Rachmaninov. But in all this, the feeling for and seeking out of musical elements have always been more important to me. Anyone who has watched me teaching knows that I do not waste too much time on dogma or analytical explanation but work precisely on the notes, on their value, colour and nuance, on balance and cohesion. Over many years I particularly enjoyed it when string quartets sought my advice. The fact that I’m not a string player myself didn’t seem an obstacle but even an advantage. My awareness of what string players can do has developed from my own piano playing.

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  Strenuous as the life of a travelling pianist can be, there is no shortage of surprises. During my orchestral debut in North America the middle D kept sticking in Brahms’s D minor Concerto – I had to constantly lift up the key during my playing. But that was not all. In the course of two further trips to Montreal, there was a similar mechanical jinx at work. While practising at Meadowbrook, the summer pavilion of the Detroit Orchestra, a bird flew into the pavilion’s roof and thudded down onto the floor, dead, right next to me. During a Beethoven recital at Carnegie Hall I heard a strange noise between two movements. It originated from a dog that was being ushered out with its escort, who apparently kept protesting, ‘This is Mr Brendel’s dog!’ In Cali, a Colombian city of ill repute, the entire pedal came down at the final chord of Schumann’s Symphonic Études. And in Algiers, where French soldiers with machine-guns patrolled the street corners and the musicians of the orchestra were searched for weapons, I was asked to play Liszt’s Totentanz, followed by Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia that had been provided with a French text in which the word ‘Patrie’ appeared as often as possible.

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  After my final concert with the Vienna Philharmonic in December 2008, lectures on music and performance have taken up some of my time. I have given talks on Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and the sometimes misunderstood and misrepresented Liszt. Other subjects that have been of interest to me for many years were character and humour in music as well as certain habits and dogmas of present-day performance practice. When, in Stuttgart, I described Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations as a compendium of musical humour, I was fiercely attacked by a newspaper. It seems that the idea of a Beethoven who in his late works had left behind all that is worldly and is floating transfigured somewhere above the clouds has remained precious to some minds along with the conviction that the comical is something inferior and ill suited to those of a serious cast of mind. Of course, there are also overreactions on the other side. Young musicians who try to express musical humour easily exaggerate.

  I concluded my pianistic career without tears. This should not be interpreted as a lack of musical commitment. I loved to play but I was ready for the farewell. Sixty years of this activity seemed sufficient, and it was to me of paramount importance to stop as long as I was still capable of monitoring my sense of rhythm and nuance.

  In some respect these last years have been more demanding than the concert years before. Whereas then I was able to focus on a limited amount of works per season, now nearly each appearance brings new challenges. Lectures, conversations, readings of my poetry, where I vary the selection and sequence, the writing of new essays, the coaching of chamber music or the preparations for an undertaking such as the Berlin Homage have kept me up to the mark. To which I should add the reading of books, magazines such as the New York Review, and newspapers with their sinister reports on the global situation. But I still manage to laugh – not as much as before but enough to survive. As long as you can find things funny, not everything is lost. I feel awe and enormous gratitude when I recall how Beethoven and Schubert, Haydn and Mozart, Bach and Handel have imbued me with energy and rapture, how all that is new in music has nourished my curiosity, and how the arts, literature, theatre and film brought about epiphanies but also critical discrimination. There would be some good reason to talk about love. But I promised not to become too personal. Listen to Schubert’s Impromptu in G flat.

  Brief Nonsense Bibliography

  Among the publications on nonsense and the grotesque, I particularly took note of Winfried Menninghaus, Lob des Unsinns (Suhrkamp); Susan Stuart, Nonsense (The Johns Hopkins University Press); Noel Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense (Harper Collins); Alfred Liede, Dichtung als Spiel, 2 vols (de Gruyter); Karl Friedrich Flögel, Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen (Die Bibliophilen Taschenbücher), and Philip Thompson’s splendid investigation The Grotesque (Methuen), not to forget the special issue of Merkur: Lachen. Über westliche Zivilisation (Klett Cotta).

  The Authors of Nonsense Texts

  Charles (Karl) Amberg (1894–1964) wrote texts for cabaret songs and operettas in the Berlin of the 1920s in conjunction with the composer Fred Raymond.

  Hans (Jean) Arp (1886–1966), Alsatian–French–German poet, painter, graphic artist and influential sculptor, cofounder of Zurich’s Dadaism, later member of the group Abstraction-Creation, and Surrealist. Dada poetry is, in Arp’s words, ‘a text world
that has nothing to do with our world’. The poems of Wolkenpumpe he called collages. Their main purpose was to be accidental.

  Ernst Jandl (1925–2000), Austrian poet and dramatist who acquired late fame with writings that include realism and experiment, concrete poetry and texts in an idiom resembling the use of language by foreign workers. In his ‘spoken opera’ Aus der Fremde (From Abroad) all the characters speak exclusively in the subjunctive. ‘Nonsense, as a conscious deviation from the logic of everyday language and purposeful thinking, represents a rejuvenating force that delays decay even if it doesn’t prevent it’ (Anmerkungen zur Dichtkunst, Gesammelte Werke, vol. iii, p. 620).