Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  Demand was such that Alice had to play each of her programs anything up to twenty times during the two years she was in the ghetto. Having premiered her fourth program she now began to practice for her fifth, the Chopin Études. She had hesitated for almost a year before playing these pieces to her fellow prisoners, but now that she had practiced them so intensely, she understood why. As she herself has said, she needed several months after her arrival in Theresienstadt before she could build up the necessary inner strength to face the extreme physical and mental challenge imposed by the Études. The challenge was not just technical, it was mental. Alice associated the Études with the despair she had felt at the time of her mother’s deportation in July 1942. In the end, however, the excitement of playing all of the 24 Études conquered her despair. For Alice, every one of them was “a world in itself. There is everything in them, everything: all human life and all sensation.”

  In his Études, Chopin had expressed pretty well all the basic forms of human perception: mourning, complaint and despair, along with sadness and longing, passion and heroism, even gaiety, mischief and humor. There was even mystery and fantasy. The power of musical expression hidden in the Études is astonishingly original. It is music that “belongs to some of the most accomplished music history has ever known.”10

  But what is it that makes the Études such an extraordinary test of even the greatest virtuosi? In the early nineteenth century European composers competed with one another to stretch the pianist’s virtuosity and Chopin took this process as far as it could go. Even though he remained faithful to the practical purpose of an étude—the study of particular hand movements, practicing and perfecting technique—he nonetheless revolutionized the concept. He was not just interested in improving certain hand movements and increasing the speed of fingering. He wanted to unleash new styles of pianistic effects and sounds that had never been heard before. In reality technical mastery is not an aim in itself, but is above all at the service of the music. In the Études, Chopin was influenced by the compositional severity of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier, which he particularly admired. In each of his preludes and fugues, Bach used a standard structural formula which he shaped into splendid musical units. Chopin followed suit, while striving for something entirely new, which he would make completely his own. If his Études are played in a slow tempo, they reveal their perfect construction and infectious logic. The melodies are beautiful and the harmonic twists are bewitching. The complexity of the single figures reveals—especially when played slowly—their extraordinary originality.

  Since the Études were written, few pianists have ever performed all twenty-four in one concert. Some people maintain that the Études should remain just that—studies—practice pieces which should not be considered part of the concert repertoire. Others feel that a few of them can be integrated into a concert. But perhaps most of all it is the sheer physical challenge that deters most pianists from taking on such a daring project.

  When a pianist does decide to perform all the Études, they normally opt to begin with the Opus 10 set of twelve, which Chopin began writing in Warsaw in 1831, continued in Vienna, Munich and Stuttgart and finished in Paris. After the interval, the second cycle—Opus 25—is performed, written almost entirely at the beginning of Chopin’s Paris period between 1834 and 1835. This is precisely what Alice did in Theresienstadt on 29 July 1944. The prisoners experienced what was for many of them the most impressive of all the concerts they heard in Theresienstadt. Despite all the humiliations they had suffered, despite the inhuman conditions in which they toiled, despite the constant threat of deportation and of death, the prisoners, after hearing Alice play, could look to the future with renewed hope.

  A few survivors who witnessed her performances—some still alive today—have given an account of what they heard, such as the pianist Edith Kraus in Jerusalem, the writer Zdenka Fantlová in London, the piano and song teacher Anna Hanusová-Flachová in Bratislava and the writer and violinist Herbert Thomas Mandl in the United States and Germany. There are also a handful of contemporary accounts which have come down to us.

  The Heroic: Op. 10 No. 1 in C major

  Willy Mahler came under the spell of the C major study from the first moment. It begins with a powerful wave of sound which flows over the proud bass. The music was bold and truly heroic, he wrote in his diary, and he felt that the keys came to life in Alice’s hands: “They rant, disturb, narrate, illustrate, calm you down, let you forget, and put you in an almost narcotic mood of goodwill.”11 The solemn, majestic melody played by the left hand in the bass had moved him so much that he compared it to something carved out of stone: mighty and immutable. He was fascinated by how Alice’s right hand went up and down the keyboard in waves; it was enough to make you dizzy.

  Mahler, then aged thirty-seven, could feel the strength he was absorbing from the music. Like the majority of those present, he belonged to an experienced, educated, middle-class musical public who had filled the concert halls of Prague, Vienna and Berlin in the years before the war. Before being deported to Theresienstadt on 13 June 1942 he had worked as a journalist on the Czech paper Lidové noviny and was thoroughly knowledgeable when it came to classical music.12 He did not miss the fact that there was an extraordinary similarity between this study and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, especially with the first prelude of the Well-tempered Clavier, which is also in C major. Chopin had stressed this in his own study, but while Bach’s piece is played in the middle of the keyboard, Chopin extends the chord all the way down, invoking magical effects which would have been impossible on a baroque keyboard. Chopin not only pushes the manual difficulties to heights never achieved before, he also creates a fullness of sound and polyphony that had never been heard before, in which the right hand covers the keyboard with fractured triplets. As an experienced listener Willy Mahler noticed that the pianist was bringing out the effects with the careful use of the pedal, as if the music had eight, ten or even twelve voices. The result was ravishingly beautiful music: varied, rich in ornament and brilliant in tonal color.

  But what did the Theresienstadt audience hear in this first Étude? Willy Mahler’s diary says it all:

  I gave myself utterly to the effect of the music … I totally forgot where I was. Afterward it was only with difficulty that I became conscious again that I was in a modern, twentieth-century ghetto, sitting next to my then girl, among a lot of people designated by six-pointed stars inscribed with the word “Jew.” Opposite us there was an old couple. He had to be about sixty, she perhaps seven years younger. She clutched his hand and pressed her tear-stained face into it. It was moving, but it was also an expression of weakness, obviously brought on by some lovely memories.

  Artists like Alice Herz-Sommer and music like the C major Étude gave the prisoners the strength to cling to their belief in the ultimate goodness of mankind and the consciousness of their own worth.

  The Puzzle: Op. 10 No. 2 in A minor

  The prisoners were still reveling in the might and magic of the first study when after a momentary pause the second began like a gentle breeze. In the traditional sense this A minor Étude is lacking a melody. Instead you hear a serpentine series of chromatic notes, which become ever more disturbing and more unravelled, making the listener almost dizzy. The music critic Joachim Kaiser said once that this study was not only the most complicated chromatic ballad ever written, but that it also stood at the limits of playability.13

  As Alice was bowing before the audience at the beginning of the concert, her friend Edith Kraus recollected their first meeting in 1937, when she had gone to see Alice to ask her about her interpretation of the Martinů dances. Alice had been heavily pregnant. Her son was born just two months later. Now he was a child prisoner, sitting a few places away from her and listening intently to his mother’s music.

  Edith had one of the Études in her own repertoire. When she heard the staccato-like chords accompanying semiquaver figurations she remembered that she had been saved
from being deported to the east by the music of Bach, Mozart and Chopin. Edith had arrived in Theresienstadt much earlier than Alice and her name had been on the transport list as early as 1942. Someone advised her that she should suggest putting on an evening concert for the prisoners.14 At this time there was no officially sanctioned cultural life in the camp. Performers had to make do with an old, clapped out, and even legless piano, which the physician and music-lover Rudolf Pick had painstakingly put together with Gideon Klein. Edith’s suggestion of putting on a concert was taken up. The legless piano was carried round to the Magdeburg Barracks and put on some boxes, and the pianist gave her first concert in Theresienstadt, a program of works by Bach, Chopin and Mozart which she played by heart. Her name was struck off the transport list and in the months that followed she gave many more solo concerts.

  The Ineffably Beautiful: Op. 10 No. 3 in E major

  With the third study in E major the audience heard a tender, dreamy melody full of melancholy. Once, when Adolf Gutmann, Chopin’s pupil, played it to the composer one day, the latter raised his hands in prayer and cried “Oh my country!”15

  The melody begins in a peaceful and comforting way. Only in the virtuosic middle section does it explode with unbounded passion. Alice was a gifted raconteuse. In her interpretation of the shocking drama, she allowed the tension to grow note by note through a cascade of chromatic sixths, playing with both hands spread out in both directions as she reached the dramatic high point. All at once the storm broke, the tension abated and softly and tenderly the opening theme was heard once more, the contrast making the melody even more intense and melancholic.

  When Zdenka Fantlová, then eighteen, listened to the music she had already suffered a particularly bitter experience. In 1940, she had met the love of her life. Arno was good-looking, sporty, had soft dark hair and brown eyes:

  We looked at one another and it was like lightning: love at first sight … When he came to fetch me he would whistle up to my window a few notes from Dvořák’s symphony “From the New World.” When I heard our signature tune I dropped everything and ran to Arno’s arms. The world seemed like paradise to us. The German occupation disappeared from view. We were alone in our world and perceived no dangers. And even if—we had no fear that love’s light wings would surmount all difficulties.16

  Their good fortune did not last long. Two years later the lovers were taken to Theresienstadt on different transports.

  Zdenka arrived at the camp on 20 January 1942 together with her mother and brother. At that time romantic meetings between prisoners were still strictly forbidden. Zdenka knew, however, that Arno had to be somewhere in the ghetto. The thought that her lover was nearby, that he lived and breathed and thought of her as much as she did of him gave her courage. One day she heard their tune loud and clear. As if struck by lightning she rushed to a second floor window and very nearly fell out when she saw Arno in a group of six men sharing out potatoes. Like a madwoman she ran down the stairs and queued up behind the other women reporting for potato-peeling. “We were only a few paces away from one another. In despair we sought to get close, but how and where?”17

  At great risk to their lives, they met in an empty cellar that was accidentally left open: “Right behind the door and in pitch darkness we began to kiss and cuddle one another passionately. Everything else disappeared: not just the barracks but also the Germans, time itself and Theresienstadt. Only we were there; now together; one mind, one body; alone in the world.”18

  Suddenly they heard footsteps.

  * * *

  JACKBOOTS: THERE was no doubt about it—it was a German patrol. Judging by the sound there were three of them. Then we heard their commanding voices. It was clear that we were standing before an abyss. If they found us here we would be punished by death … They opened the first door and peered into the room, then the second. Still in one another’s arms we pressed ourselves against the wall. It was our turn now. They were surprised that the door was not locked. “What is going on here?” one shouted, tearing open the door. The edge of the door banged against the wall in the narrow room, but there was a triangle of darkness into which they could not see, and that was where we were, still in one another’s arms. We stopped breathing. The SS man stepped into the room. We could see his shoes. Only the door stood between us and death. “Bring some light here,” came the order. Our hearts stopped beating. The light of a torch circled round the room. It seemed to go on forever. The dust they had aroused went up my nose and I wanted to sneeze. With the greatest effort I stopped myself and thereby prevented the greater catastrophe. “Let’s go on,” came the order.19

  * * *

  BUT DISASTER was not to be averted. Arno was one of the 2,000 condemned to death in revenge for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and was despatched to Auschwitz on 13 June 1942. At about four in the morning, shortly before the transport left, he came to Zdenka one last time to give her a small tin ring he had made himself and on which he had inscribed “Arno 13 6 1942”: “This is our engagement ring. It will protect you. If we survive I will find you somewhere after the war.”20

  Zdenka never saw Arno again. None of the 2,000 deportees survived.

  Elemental Force: Op. 10 No. 4 in C sharp minor

  * * *

  AFTER THE dreamy sense of longing of the Third Étude, it is hard to imagine a starker contrast with the fourth. The C sharp minor Étude is full of energy and vitality. It is insanely quick, but with an implacable clockwork-like rhythm. Right from the beginning it has a monstrous power, lending the music a wild, demonic character and all the tension of a brewing storm, which never breaks but becomes more and more menacing. The music seems to give off sparks; despite its dark colors it is filled with elemental force, power and confidence.

  The Czech bass Karel Berman carried his unstinting power through Theresienstadt and on to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. Berman was transported to Theresienstadt just a few weeks before Alice on 5 March 1943.21 There he had to work in the rubbish dump. His fellow prisoner, the conductor Rafael Schächter, chose him for his opera group and a deep friendship evolved between the two of them. They studied Mozart’s Zauberflöte together, prepared numerous concerts and forged plans for what they would do when they were freed from the concentration camp and when the war was over.

  Alice knew Berman from Prague. It is almost certain that he attended Alice’s performance of the Études together with his friend and highly respected colleague Franta Weissenstein. Both singers appeared in the Theresienstadt performance of Smetana’s Kiss. Weissenstein sang Lukasch and Karel Berman sang Paloucky and both were sent to Auschwitz on 28 September 1944 together with 2,497 prisoners. “On the ramp at Auschwitz [Weissenstein] was just in front of me. With his thumb, the SS doctor Mengele pointed him to the right, me to the left,” Berman, who survived Auschwitz, later wrote, “We took leave from one another in silence, staring for a long time into one another’s eyes. Then he got onto a lorry. The death machine was already working overtime.”22

  The Humoresque: Op. 10 No. 5 in G flat major

  The Fifth Étude has gone down in musical history as the “black key study.” It is a veritable firework display of brilliant piano music. As in a humoresque, there are several abrupt changes between forte and piano from one bar to the next, which lends the Étude a somewhat boisterous and carefree character, while retaining its distinguished and elegant style. “It is gracious, has a refined wit, is a little malicious, sly and mischievous and has an excellent power of invention.”23

  Thanks to its insinuating melody, infectious rhythm and dazzling playfulness, it is one of Chopin’s most frequently performed works and one which breaks with convention. While most piano works use all eight notes in a scale, Chopin limits himself to the five black notes, a pentatonic scale. Moreover, the joyful character of the piece suggests that Chopin himself was happy and relaxed when he composed it, and playing it made Alice happy, too. The sadness in so much of his music affected her profoundly, but the
Fifth Étude is wholly optimistic.

  The “Racked by Pain”: Op. 10 No. 6 in E flat minor

  The sixth study in E flat minor is steeped in melancholy, pain and deepest mourning, ringing out like a piece played slowly by night, or a “dark, accusatory nocturne.”24 The melody is almost a lament. With increasing dissonance and chromatic sequences of notes the music builds to a climax, until “all that remains is the impression of an aimless wandering in despair.”25 Even when the piece finishes with a reconciliatory major chord the impression of utter hopelessness lingers.

  Otto Sattler had arrived in Theresienstadt in September 1942.26 In the 1930s Sattler was one of the best-known and best-loved violinists in Prague and by November 1939 was still playing at the Elyse, a luxurious bar which, after the occupation, was popular not only with Prague’s wealthy citizens, but also with high-ranking German officers.

  Sattler’s faithful companion was the pianist and harmonica player Kurt Meyer. Their ability was legendary and their virtuosity reminded people of Hungarian gypsy musicians. Perhaps because of this they were able to play in the plush surrounding of the Elyse long after Jews had been banned from going there. When their position there became untenable, they then moved on to the Litze coffee house, the only restaurant in Prague still open to Jews, and performed there until it was finally shut down in autumn 1942.