by Alex Ross
The violinist and violist Philipp Naegele came to Marlboro during the first summer and returned some fifty times. “What do I remember about Serkin?” he said. “Oh, the immense vitality. He had a real farm on a dirt road, with a peach orchard, horses, chickens, whatever one has. And he would go back and forth between the mud and the cows and the children and dogs and Beethoven. His vitality was inseparable from his physical groundedness. He was a great hiker, always going up in the mountains. Like Gustav Mahler. He looked a bit like Mahler, too. He had hands twice as wide and twice as heavy as anybody else’s hands, and he could play softer than anybody else, because he didn’t have to push. He ran a house that was absolutely impeccable, in terms of the decor, the art, the books, the food. But he had a sense of humor that was more than down to earth.”
Serkin was born in 1903 in Bohemia, to a family of impoverished Eastern European Jews. As Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber recount, in a biography of the pianist, Serkin first displayed talent when he heard one of his sisters at the piano. “It’s all wrong,” the boy said, bursting into tears. At the age of nine, he went to study in Vienna, where he fell under the influence of Eugenie Schwarzwald, a pedagogue and social activist. Through Schwarzwald, Serkin encountered Adolf Loos, Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Popper, and Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he studied composition. Schwarzwald’s summertime gatherings of luminaries in mountain retreats influenced Marlboro, as did Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, which tried to break free of commercial concert culture.
The dominant force in Serkin’s life was the German violinist Adolf Busch, a brilliant player who detested virtuoso showmanship and devoted himself in almost monkish fashion to the heights of the German chamber and solo repertory. Serkin met Busch in 1920, when he was still in his teens, and adopted the violinist’s belief system. “It’s the philosophy of Werktreue, of being absolutely faithful to the score,” Richard Goode, who came to Marlboro when he was fifteen, says. “People may discuss the limitations of that approach today, but back then their idealism was so important.” (Goode carries on the tradition in sovereign performances of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.) Serkin joined Busch’s household and, in 1935, married the violinist’s daughter, Irene. The two men appeared as a duo across Europe, setting standards for chamber-music performance. Busch also led the Busch Quartet, whose sinewy recordings of Beethoven and Schubert mesmerized the young Mitsuko Uchida.
When Hitler came to power, Serkin’s German career ended swiftly, and Busch, who was not Jewish, responded by canceling all his German engagements. He paid a price for this rare act of solidarity: when he tried to establish himself in the United States, where he moved in 1939, he made little headway, his slightly astringent tone failing to please audiences accustomed to the sweet tones of Heifetz and Kreisler. In 1940, Busch suffered a heart attack, which further limited his public career. He moved to the small Vermont town of Guilford, with his daughter and son-in-law living in the house next door. The surroundings reminded the emigres of Switzerland and the Vienna Woods.
The idea arose that Busch and his brother, the cellist Herman, should join several other refugees—the French flutist Marcel Moyse; Moyse’s son, Louis; and Louis’s wife, the violinist Blanche Honegger Moyse—in running a summer music school at Marlboro College, which had started up in 1946, on the site of a nearby dairy farm. At first, Serkin had no intention of being closely involved. Busch provided Marlboro’s core philosophy: the concept of master musicians guiding neophytes, the emphasis on rehearsal and conversation over performance and publicity. (Busch complained that New York musicians were obsessed with “covering everything and just getting the notes right … A love of music was rarely present.”) After Busch’s death, in 1952, Serkin took over, and remained Marlboro’s director until his death.
In the early years, turmoil reigned on the business end, with Serkin donating much of his concert income to keep the operation afloat. (Anointed by Toscanini, Serkin fared much better in America than Busch did.) Naegele remembered that some prospective students walked into the dining hall—formerly a cow barn—and then walked out, unable to believe that a ragtag group of beer-drinking, pipe-smoking foreigners had anything to offer. But young musicians soon understood what they had to gain by attending, and Marlboro’s renown grew from year to year. The cellist Pablo Casals began visiting in 1960, his fame attracting international press. The Columbia label issued best-selling recordings in the Music from Marlboro series. When Casals turned ninety-one, in 1967, the Bell Telephone Hour devoted a national broadcast to his activities at Marlboro.
“When Casals came, the balance shifted, and not always for the best,” Goode told me. “The personality cult around him was so immense.” Naegele, too, experienced a degree of alienation. “Casals could do anything he pleased,” Naegele said. “He had the whole place in his hand. And there was something overloaded, driven, almost hysterical, about the playing in that period. The ‘Marlboro bustle,’ the critic Michael Steinberg called it. We were in danger of becoming an orthodoxy. Marlboro almost suffocated on its success.”
After a certain point, Serkin, innately suspicious of publicity, started to shun inquiries from the outside world. When The New Yorker proposed to write at length about him and the festival, he said no. A kind of retrenchment happened—a return to the quiet informality of early years. This wariness persists. Marlboro-ites ruefully recall what happened when Lang Lang, the Chinese superstar, dropped by a few years back. “You know, this place could be really famous!” Lang Lang reportedly said. It would rather not.
Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax are two of the hundreds of musicians who have made the pilgrimage. On August 3, 1973, they played their first concert together, in a Marlboro performance of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C Minor. They recalled their experiences over coffee at Cafe Ronda, near Lincoln Center.
“We had met at the Juilliard cafeteria,” Ax said. “We ended up being roommates at Marlboro, although you were never in the room. You were always with Jill.”
“I met Jill, my wife, at Marlboro,” Ma explained.
“Do you remember the dress rehearsal of the Brahms, when Mr. Serkin came? He had this thing—whatever was printed in the music, that’s how you play. If, say, the upper register has a note that is very difficult, and it would be easier to play that one note with your left hand, you don’t do it.” Ax mentioned Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, which begins with a rapid leap in the left hand. The easy way out is to split the leap between the hands. “Somebody did that in an audition. That was it.”
“Zank you very much!” Ma said, in the Serkin accent. “Zank you very much for findink ze time!”
“That guy could have played like Horowitz, and he would not have gotten in,” Ax went on. “So, in the Brahms, there is a horrible spot in the last movement, where I couldn’t stretch my hand wide enough to play this one chord. So I rolled it. ‘Ach!’ Serkin said. ‘There is no arpeggiando on that chord.’ ‘I know, Mr. Serkin, but my hand isn’t big enough.’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry! In the concert, it will grow a little bit.’”
“He said your hand will grow?” Ma asked.
“A little bit, yes. What happened was, I played the chord, and I also played every note in between. And that was OK. He was happy with that.”
As Ax idolized Serkin—that summer, he spoke only briefly with the great man, unable to find the courage to have an extended conversation—Ma stood in awe of Pablo Casals, who had performed for Queen Victoria in his youth and remained active into his nineties.
“I played for Casals in a class,” Ma said. “He kept saying, ‘I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!’ That was the feedback. But it was great, especially when he conducted the orchestra in—I think it was Beethoven’s Fourth. Because here’s this guy who had to use an oxygen thing backstage, who needed two people to walk him out. You think he is about to see death. And then the music starts.” Ma impersonated an ancient, shrunken man coming to life, growing in stature, raising his arms hig
h in the air and roaring vague commands: “Nooooo! … Beethoven! … M-u-u-usic! … Crescendo!” Ma went on, “I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to have a musical career at that time. I wasn’t sure that music was all it was cracked up to be. But to see a guy like that, way past retirement age, getting it up for Beethoven’s Fourth—where does this energy come from? And I realized there was something very potent at work.”
Each senior figure had a distinctive approach. Moyse, the master of the French school of flute playing, had his students read through opera arias so that they learned to imitate the human voice. The Polish-born pianist Mieczysław Horszowski said little, sometimes merely pointing and smiling at a passage in a score. Felix Galimir, the hyper-cultivated Viennese violinist, coached players in the psychology of chamber music, where, as Ax says, “no one leads and no one follows.” Alexander Schneider, of the Budapest Quartet, was a Russian-accented volcano, exhorting and berating his charges. And Isidore Cohen, the longtime violinist of the Beaux Arts Trio, encouraged independence. Ma said, “He’d look at you, smoking a cigarette, and say, ‘What do you think? Should there be a decrescendo?’ He’d force you to make choices.”
“Maybe there were some at Marlboro who used the idea of chamber music like a club—a club to beat people with,” Ax added. He assumed the tone of an unctuously disapproving elder: “‘I know he plays the instrument well, but he doesn’t know about cha-a-a-a-mber music.’ But in the end there was no orthodoxy.”
“There couldn’t be,” Ma said. “Because you were seeing all these different characters with their different approaches being passionate in different ways.”
Uchida and Goode admire what Busch and Serkin created and have no wish to alter the formula. But they have put their imprint on the institution. “When I first came back, in ‘92, every second word was ‘Rudi never did that,’ ‘Mr. Serkin never did that,’” Uchida told me. “Nobody says things like that anymore. Richard and I really work very hard on that. The place is more open—yeah, sure. I always keep my antennae going. I watch out for the ones who need more care. The ones who are very gifted but not, you know, whiz kids. That’s why I go to the coffee shop all the time. I sniff around. I always know who is going out with whom—Richard has no idea! And, look, Richard and I, we are both oddballs. But we have careers. And that is what I say to the kids—if I can have a career, anyone can have a career.”
In the old days, with various male egos competing for the upper hand, there was something almost macho about Marlboro. Uchida, both as a personality and as a performer, projects authority without demanding it. The mezzo-soprano Rebecca Ringle recalled what Uchida said after rehearsing the Mozart A-Major Concerto: “She said of one passage, ‘It’s happy but it’s powerful. It’s the way women can be now—happy, good, beautiful, powerful.’ And I almost cried when I heard that, because that’s what she is. She’s so elfin but really powerful and definitely feminine and totally intelligent.”
The Uchida summers and the Goode summers are said to have discrete identities. Goode tends to bring about a looser, more libertine atmosphere. “He’s such an incredibly sweet man, off in his own world,” one musician said to me. “He thinks of music instead of himself. He’s so funny in rehearsal. Sometimes he’ll say, ‘Let’s do that again,’ not because the passage needs work but simply because he loves it and wants to hear it one more time. Mitsuko is more intense. She is always watching, always listening. When she says, ‘Ben Beilman is quite good,’ everyone notices.” (Beilman, a spookily mature nineteen-year-old violinist, was studying at the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia.) “Together, the two of them are the perfect substitute parents.”
Most young musicians who are accepted at Marlboro spend two or three consecutive summers there. Over the winter, hundreds audition for the small number of spots that open up annually. When I asked Goode to define what qualities he and Uchida were looking for, he said, “A certain technical excellence is a prerequisite. But you also listen for urgency, emotional reality. Maybe that is the primary thing in the end. I guess you could call it ‘musicality.’ You can often hear it right away. There’s a story that when Murray Perahia auditioned for Marlboro he played the C-Minor Impromptu of Schubert, which begins with fortissimo Gs.” Goode imitated the sound. “And right after that Horszowski supposedly turned to Serkin and said, ‘Let’s take him.’” Uchida puts it in her pithy way: “As a rule, the imaginative ones are lacking the technique and the ones that have good technique haven’t got a clue. But there are exceptions to the rule, and we try to snap them up.”
Marlboro is designed so that the youth contingent receives guidance from several generations of older musicians: “seniors,” veterans who have been coming to Marlboro for years, and “junior seniors,” established younger players who serve as intermediaries between the generations. Anthony Checchia, Frank Salomon, and Philip Maneval serve as Marlboro’s administrators, binding the group together. They are keepers of Marlboro’s traditions—for example, the rule that all members of the community should take turns waiting on tables in the dining hall. Salomon says, “One of the great things is to see somebody who’s here for the first time, a nineteen- or twenty-one-year-old kid, looking up to see Mitsuko Uchida or Arnold Steinhardt, or someone else they’ve idolized for ten or fifteen years, asking, ‘What would you like to drink?’”
In 2008, the repertory at Marlboro included 221 works by 70 composers. In a given week, there may be more than two hundred rehearsals, in studios, classrooms, and common spaces around the campus, all activity coordinated on a color-coded schedule board. The Central European golden age predominates—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Dvorak, Brahms—although a fair amount of contemporary music and offbeat fare figures in the mix. One or two composers are usually in residence; the summer I was there, the German composer Jörg Widmann coached his Hunt Quartet, in which players are asked to swish the air with their bows. For the first three weeks, Marlboro participants do nothing but rehearse; in July, they begin putting on weekend concerts for a paying public, in a 630-seat hall. As rehearsals progress, senior members meet on Thursday evenings to devise a schedule for those groups that feel ready to perform. Although everyone insists that the rehearsals matter more than the performances, a competitive edge seeps in.
One muggy Saturday, I spent a day watching one rehearsal after another. The common room of the Happy Valley dormitory, a drab space with triangular eaves and a carpet purplish gray in color, was a hub of activity. In the morning, three musicians in their late twenties and early thirties-the violinist Viviane Hagner, the cellist Priscilla Lee, and the pianist Jonathan Biss, whom I knew from Community MusicWorks, in Providence-were preparing Beethoven’s Piano Trio Opus 1 No. 2. Biss, who first came to Marlboro when he was sixteen, talked more than the others, although he couched his ideas in politely tentative fashion. “I was thinking of playing a slightly faster grace note. You hate it? Any feeling?”; “You can make a crescendo and I will blithely ignore you and go on my merry way” They worked on a repeating phrase, so that it initially had a sunny sound and later darkened. Lee drew a smiley face over the first instance. This led to a digression on the topic of messages that musicians write on their parts to remind themselves when they need to give a cue to other players (“ME!” or “Q”) or when they need to fold out a hidden extra page (”Open the stupid page, motherfucker!” is an extreme example).
In the New Presser building, four wind players—the flutist Joshua Smith, the oboist Jaren Philleo, the clarinettist Romie de Guise-Langlois, and the bassoonist William Winstead—were wrestling with Elliott Carter’s Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, a taxing 1950 work in a more or less atonal idiom. Winstead and Smith hold lead positions with the Cincinnati and Cleveland Orchestras, while Guise-Langlois has been a member of Juilliard and Carnegie Hall’s elite Academy program and Philleo plays in the Louisiana Philharmonic. The mood in the room was tense; the musicians felt frustrated by the score, which, they thought, wasn’t giving them quite enough information. Wins
tead puzzled over a stream of eighth notes that were divided into groups of five and seven. Inevitably, such phrases break down into subsidiary units of two and three, but the bassoonist couldn’t decide where those breaks should fall.
“How about in the last half of seventy-eight I play three plus two plus two,” Winstead said. “No, wait—what if it were two plus two plus three?”
The players tried again but weren’t convinced. They passed around a miniature score so they could see how the parts intermeshed. They started in once more, then broke down, amid exclamations of “Argh!” and “Shit!”
Winstead reflected on how the slow pace at Marlboro had made him look afresh at music that he thought he knew well. He spoke about playing the Carter on the concert circuit: “You’re not asking, ‘What’s it all about?’ You’re just trying to stay together and get through it. I’ve never delved into these kinds of details before.”
Smith attempted to rally the others. “When in doubt, the theme is in the flute,” he said.
Back at Happy Valley, Uchida had arrived for a pair of rehearsals, and was fussing with a recalcitrant dehumidifier. “You jiggle and whack and kick, and it works,” she said. She is particular about the health of her instruments and has had a dehumidifier installed in every room with a piano. Her first rehearsal was of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat. Joining her were Soovin Kim, a thirty-three-year-old violinist whose subtle expressivity suits Uchida’s style, and David Soyer, an eighty-six-year-old chamber-music legend, who played cello in the Guarneri Quartet for most of its existence. Soyer, a bearish man who enjoyed playing the role of the village curmudgeon, was famous for claiming insistently that pianists always play too loudly when they join chamber groups. He was also possessive of his music stand, which carried the notice “David Soyer’s PERSONAL stand. HANDS OFF!”
