Listening to music should always be an active process, and those who attend – pregnant verb – concerts, who listen, who respond, who treasure what they hear there, are musicians. They are the ones who do not let music wash over them like a bubble bath but who actively swim in the water. When vibrations in the air create vibrations in your soul, you’re a member of the club.
Hidden musicians, hidden talents
When I was a student at the Royal Northern College in Manchester, I took organ lessons with the wonderful Eric Chadwick – an ebullient man, rather plump, glowingly pink-cheeked, always three-piece-suited, greatly jolly … and vaguely sad. He was one of those people whose enormous talents had been thwarted for various reasons and then buried for various reasons, mainly through circumstance and the lottery of a career in music.
One day, as I was having my lesson on the Hradetzky organ in the Concert Hall, he said to me, ‘Would you like to hear what this organ can do?’
‘Oh yes, Mr Chadwick.’
I slid off the bench and stood as he took his place. He sat still for a deafeningly quiet few seconds, selected the stops he needed, and then launched into the mighty Sonata on the 94th Psalm by Julius Reubke … from memory. It was a little as if my cleaning lady had suddenly removed her overalls to reveal a tutu in which she proceeded to dance the fiendishly difficult thirty-two fouettés from Swan Lake. It was a devastating display of power, an unleashing of frustration, an explosion of temperament that I remember to this day. He finished, a little more pink-cheeked than usual, with his waistcoat ridden up above his ample belly, and smiled with his usual gentle modesty.
‘It’s a good instrument, some wonderful reeds.’
It had been a performance of perfection, ready for prizewinning commercial release … but the overalls were already back in place, the tutu concealed once more.
The world is full of hidden musicians with hidden talents. Composers whose works sit in drawers or even just in their minds, instrumentalists who can play well only when no one else is around. Apparently even the great Polish pianist Leopold Godowsky was a mere shadow of himself in public (and in recordings), revealing his genius only at small parties for a few friends. Not to mention those hundreds throughout the ages who had within them a talent to match Beethoven’s but had no access to the sort of opportunity or education that could make those gifts develop. And what would it have been, toiling in the fields on a farm a thousand years ago, to burn with his inspiration, before music notation was devised?
Don’t listen to recordings
I have often made the point in masterclasses that students should not listen to lots of recordings of a piece they are learning. I’m always a little horrified when I hear a student say, ‘My teacher told me to learn the Chopin G minor Ballade, so I went to the library and took out eight different recordings.’ To me this limits a student’s horizon even before the eye has been raised to it; it closes off paths even before the putting on of shoes. (Eight different editions? Well that’s a different story!)
Of course, it was impossible to do this until recently. A conductor learning a Beethoven symphony in 1902 had to sit down at a desk or piano and … learn the score. The danger now is that we’ve become lazy and can merely absorb other people’s ‘Beethoven Experience’ rather than living through our own. It’s much harder work to draw the map ourselves, but I’m convinced we learn more about the inner topography that way, even if the first draft can send us on a false path or two. And it’s from this study that we can go on to have original ideas that are neither copied nor capricious. I’m sure that the frequently heard claim that many young pianists today sound the same has a lot to do with the fact that they have not been allowed the time to make mistakes, and the leisure to correct them, in their hurry to claim the first prize in this or that competition. The fruit is picked and packaged and sold (and discarded) before the ripening process is complete.
On the other hand, recordings can be an invaluable resource when it comes to hearing and understanding how musicians played in the past. This is using recordings as a substitute for attending a concert, not as a crib sheet for the piece you happen to be studying. I’m aghast when a student playing Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto admits that he has never heard the composer play. I don’t mean students should copy his interpretation of that particular piece but they should know his general style of playing, his habitual choice of swifter tempos, his characteristic inflections and nuances. They can ultimately reject them if they like (musical style and taste is gloriously subjective) but from choice, not ignorance.
It’s important to recognise that there is an apprentice stage to be undergone in study. I don’t want to hear students, who barely play any Chopin at all, emoting their way through the A flat Polonaise in an arrogant, artificial attempt to be different – wobbly eccentrics before the centric has been established. In all the arts, early discipline and rigour create healthy roots that are invaluable for future growth. A firmly dug foundation allows the buttress the liberty to fly more extravagantly later on. Individuality comes only when there is a properly formed ‘individual’ in the first place.
Joyce Hatto and listening blind
‘Hattogate’ was the musical scandal of the season when it surfaced in 2007. Joyce Hatto was a pianist who, when she was old and ill, released a mountain of recordings of everything under the sun – over a hundred discs in a few years. The problem is that they were not by her. They were by lots of other pianists, all repackaged under the name Joyce Hatto. I have no sympathy for those who created the CDs and the falsehood behind them (and I don’t want to recount here the long story that unfolded) but I do have more sympathy than many for the music critics who were deceived.
A few years ago I was at a radio station to give an interview. As I walked into the booth there was piano music playing. I listened for a few seconds and then asked, ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s you, playing Britten’s Sonatina Romantica.’
Not only did I not recognise the pianist, but I had no idea what the piece was either. I hope it says more about one of Britten’s less successful pieces than it does about my faulty musical memory, but it illustrated to me, with a blush at the time, that we hear things in different ways when we hear them in different circumstances.
The Joyce Hatto phenomenon, as well as being a perfect ‘blind listening test’, proved that when we listen to music we don’t listen suspended in a scientific abstraction. Yes, there should be objectivity; yes, we can be culpably prejudiced in favour of artists we know and like, and against those we don’t know or don’t like; but the mysterious chemistry of music is immeasurable, and the magic of a great artist is more than mere notes vibrating in the air. We seek enchantment, we crave fantasy in musical performers. They are shamans taking us to another world, into another dimension.
Hatto, for a short while considered by some a pianistic genius, will now be remembered mainly as a fake. It’s a pity because it seems she was unaware of the full extent of the deception and her own fingers had made some lovely records in earlier years.
Meaning what you sing
Does it make a difference to performers if they ‘believe’ the words they are singing? It is an interesting question and the issues are complex. We can start with a love duet. We do not expect ‘Tristan’ and ‘Isolde’ to mean the rapturous words they sing to each other in Act II of Wagner’s opera; nor do we attribute the wickedness of a character on stage to the singer or actor playing the role. Sometimes he can be booed during the curtain calls but it would be manifestly ridiculous to tip a glass of beer over his head in the bar after the greasepaint and costume have been put aside. The artifice of the theatre is something we learn to accept and celebrate.
But there are deeper implications. When Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius was being performed in the years immediately after its premiere, many choir members objected to being made to sing its Popish words, ‘stinking of incense’ as composer Charles Villiers Stanford spluttered. A phrase from
Cardinal Newman’s poem such as ‘Mary, pray for him’ was deeply offensive to many Protestants, much as singing ‘I believe in God’ might be to a present-day atheist. Are such choral works simply pure music with words attached to enable the music to be sung by a human voice? Would the B minor Mass of Bach or the Te Deum of Dvořák (works written with fervent religious faith) be just as effective with words celebrating the glories of nature rather than of its Creator? Can we sing words in a foreign language with fervour but without comprehension? The story goes (I do hope it’s not true!) that John McCormack once cited Hugo Wolf’s ‘Herr, was trägt der Boden hier’ as one of his favourite songs but then was unable to tell the interviewer what the text was about. These are all interesting questions without simple answers, but one example changes the focus.
In 1939, the Austrian composer Franz Schmidt, at the end of his life and during his final illness, wrote a cantata celebrating the glories of Nazism. His ‘German Resurrection’ (Die Deutsche Auferstehung) was left unfinished at his death and, although completed by his pupil Robert Wagner, it is never performed, has never been recorded and it is almost impossible to find any information about it. It is like a member of a family who, in deepest disgrace, has been removed from the collective memory. We do know that it ends with the words ‘Wir danken unsr’em Führer! Sieg Heil’, which is obviously an odious (goose)step too far in a post-Holocaust world, however fine the music might be. Fortunately, I believe, it has been possible to continue to promote performances of Schmidt’s other music, especially his Fourth Symphony, which is a glorious late-Romantic work. But words do make a difference, and singing them makes even more of a difference.
St Augustine is quoted as having said, ‘He who sings prays twice.’ This attribution appears to be apocryphal but there’s no doubt that music adds a dimension to the communicative power of words. And yet, conversely, I do think that someone can sing passionately of belief in the Holy Ghost in a Mass setting while being utterly convinced that all religion is ghosts and nonsense.
Old pianists
The profession of concert pianist is one of the kindest to the elderly of any in human history. At the age of seventy-five, vocation or no vocation, a Roman Catholic bishop has to submit a letter of resignation to the pope; but the seventy-five-year- old pianist can start learning that Schubert sonata he never got around to playing before, and he can make his debut with it in that city he never got around to visiting before. Indeed, many musicians have found their careers have gone roaring into sixth gear in their eighth decade.
Shura Cherkassky, who from childhood played regularly in New York, moved from a nicely full 92nd Street Y to a crammed Carnegie Hall only at the age when most of his non-pianist contemporaries were moving into nursing homes. Although Jorge Bolet had had a long and busy career playing and teaching, it was only in the final decade of his life that he suddenly found himself moving into the fast lane, with a Decca contract and major engagements. By this point, perhaps, he was not always at his best, and he did muse once to one of his friends, ‘I’ve been playing for decades. Why only now do they want to book me?’ In his nineties Mieczysław Horszowski saw his Indian summer burgeoning into blossom, and Vladimir Horowitz had a very special final few years, a late bloom after a period when illness and the medication prescribed to overcome it had blurred his brilliance.
Perhaps only conductors can last as long as pianists. Singers’ voices mature late and deteriorate early; wind players lose puff and firmness of the lips; string players develop wobbly bows and curdling intonation; but pianists, admittedly often with a notch or three less on the metronome, a careful choice of repertoire, and a note left out here and there, can go on forever.
Graham Johnson, the brilliant accompanist and scholar, once quipped, ‘Old accompanists do not die, they just fake away.’ Many solo pianists do better than that: they remain unfaded and unfazed to the end.
Gay pianists: can you tell?
Someone (a psychologist) wrote to me once saying that he’d heard a recording of my two Valses Enigmatiques and ‘homosexuality came to mind’. He then went to my website, looked around a bit and … bingo! He said that he hoped I was not offended but he was intrigued that his ‘way-out hypothesis was confirmed’.
Vladimir Horowitz once said that there were three types of pianist: Jewish, gay and bad. Actually I’ve known some that were all three, and instantly a plethora of those who fulfil none of these categories springs to mind, but is there something that makes Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter and Cherkassky (to choose three completely contrasting artists) different from, say, Artur Rubinstein, Emil Gilels and Rudolf Serkin? Can you tell the first three were gay? It’s certainly not the old stereotype of effeminacy – Richter is one of the most physically powerful and ‘unglamorous’ pianists of all time. But perhaps there is an intensity, a verging towards the edge, a barely checked hysteria (Horowitz’s on his sleeve, Richter’s under ironclad armour) that can sometimes be a clue.
Was the earlier period of repression and illegality – the fear of policemen waiting at the dressing-room door – a reason for the loneliness you can sometimes discern in this aching turn of phrase, or that camp corner of puckishness? Is our present age’s increasing acceptance of gay people going to make such discussions irrelevant in thirty years’ time? The fact that each of the three pianists I’ve mentioned was married to a woman is significant and marks them as being from a different era.
Shura Cherkassky, the only unequivocally ‘out’ pianist of the three, could play with both intense sadness and riotous campness in dizzying succession in his recitals, and it’s hard to imagine him being the same artist if he had been heterosexual. His marriage lasted only a couple of years and, not long after his divorce, a woman came backstage to see him after one of his concerts. He greeted her warmly: ‘Very pleased to meet you, madam. Have we met before?’
‘Yes, Shura. We were married.’
Leaving politics out of concerts
I’m allergic to telling anyone what to do. I respect totally those who disagree with me but I don’t think a concert is the place to make a political point.
To win souls rather than arguments is an idea that appealed to me in the years when I was considering entering the priesthood. Indeed, to lose an argument in humility, in patience, through kind hesitation, might well be the way to ‘listen through’ to a person’s soul. I feel this religious point strongly in the context of a concert. When I walk onto a stage I face and then sit in profile to a group of people the vast majority of whom are complete strangers to me – with opinions as numerous as bums on seats. I want to be friends with my audience. I don’t want to preach to them or to judge them. I want us all to rise above controversy and conflict through the transcendent voice of the composers whose music is being performed. If I speak to them – and to address a captive audience about politics or religion is always in the end to preach – I will be affirmed by some and rejected by others and a wedge that cannot be removed will have been created.
To win souls rather than arguments. To make friends out of strangers with sounds. When I have done that then maybe we can speak. And maybe I shall change my mind.
Telling tails: do special clothes make a difference?
Does the wearing of special clothes change what our bodies are able to do in them? Are our professional abilities affected by how we dress? It is a vast topic, which touches on almost every area of the psychology of our incarnate lives. Clothing is part of the way we make judgements about others and thus about ourselves. From the first makeshift crown placed on one of our ancestors’ heads to the peaked hat and epaulettes of the pilot who flies us from city to city, clothes symbolise expertise and authority.
It is interesting that two groups, musicians and the clergy, have been re-examining the implications of their traditional costumes in recent decades. Since the Second Vatican Council, priests and members of religious orders have changed the way they dress. Almost no nuns today still wear traditional habits, and many musicia
ns, particularly soloists, have stopped wearing the white tie and tails that were de rigueur for so many years. Both groups now desire a greater informality and have expressed this through dress reform. But are we better musicians or priests if we wear a particular costume?
I really think I play better when I change into something special – when I drape my jeans on the back of a chair in the dressing room rather than around my hips on the piano bench. And if torn jeans were to be my choice of stage apparel then I would pull on a different pair from the ones I rolled out of bed into twelve hours earlier. Wearing something special is not an empty formality. It is a tacit acknowledgement that something special is planned. It is our wedding attire for the composer.
But it doesn’t have to be traditional, black, evening clothes. When tails were first worn on stage everyone in the hall was dressed the same. To be at a concert in 1909, whether as a performer or as a member of the audience, was to attend a formal event requiring a traditional costume. It’s a curiosity that after the First World War audiences began to dress more informally but the musicians on stage continued to be clothed like Edwardian gentlemen – minus the ticklish whiskers. Over a longer time span something similar was happening with religious orders. Widows, nurses and nuns in many parts of the world dressed similarly until the mid-twentieth century, and St Francis did not wear a ‘habit’ but simply gathered some beggar’s rags around him held in place by a piece of dirty rope. Stylisation came later.
Rough Ideas Page 3
