Most of us fall between these two extremes, and our various shades of moral grey can fluctuate daily, depending on all kinds of varying circumstances. Some artists who left Nazi Germany were courageous, some selfish; some who stayed there were courageous, some selfish. Some began well but descended to evil and collaboration; others began badly but later discovered heroism and humanity. I mean to prove nothing by placing these two formidable ladies next to each other in this way, except, perhaps, to pose the uncomfortable question: is there a moral dimension to music? Can a person who does evil things be a great artist?
Josef Hofmann and Steinway: two greats in an era of greats
It is often said that Josef Hofmann was the universally acclaimed ‘greatest pianist’ of his time. I knew about this reputation – Rachmaninov famously put aside performing Chopin’s B minor Sonata after hearing Hofmann in the same piece; Horowitz, when visiting Steinway Hall in the 1920s and having Hofmann’s piano pointed out to him, said, ‘Please … may I just touch it?’ But when we listen to the recordings of Hofmann today, can we see what these two pianists and just about all of their colleagues and contemporary critics were so enthusiastic about? Was he really the greatest during a golden period of so many greats?
He was born in 1876 in Podgórze, a district of Kraków, in the year the first modern Steinway piano was made. Although the Steinway factory opened in New York in 1853 and its first full concert grand (8 feet 5 inches) was produced three years later, it was only with the invention of the Capo d’Astro bar and the full cast-iron plate that a truly modern piano was created – just in time for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. (It’s worth noting here, as an aside, that Hamburg began making its own home-grown Steinways only around 1910. Steinway was an exclusively American company for its first half century.) I think part of Hofmann’s unique success and acclamation was that he was, by the time his career was in full flow, the first pianist to use the modern American piano properly, to learn how to play to and with its strengths.
Many European artists were uncomfortable with the Steinway. They found its action too heavy, its tone too brilliant, its bass too rich, its treble lacking the delicate silver strands of the Erard or the transparent, reedy baritone of the Bechstein. Moritz Rosenthal, during recording sessions in the early 1930s at Abbey Road, complained to producer Fred Gaisburg that he could not get ‘his effects’ on Steinways, and asked for his favoured Bösendorfer instead. Gaisburg protested that the Steinway sounded cleaner, clearer on record and they ended up adjusting the action to suit the pianist’s taste rather than changing the piano.
Chopin would probably not have been able to play more than a few bars on a modern Steinway. Liszt would have been restricted. Debussy and Ravel would have written very different music if they’d had modern Steinways in their studios. But Hofmann not only sat in front of it with the confidence and expertise of an experienced pilot in a cockpit, but he even invented one of its later features: the ‘accelerated action’, patented in 1940.
When Hofmann’s bass chords crashed against the back wall of Carnegie Hall like huge waves, when he spat out repeated notes with the speed of steel pistons, when his melodies hung in the air like wheeling birds, he was directly influenced by the Steinway’s improved dampers, hammers, iron frame, Duplex Scale system and the Capo d’Astro bar. Hofmann’s assertive brilliance was breathtaking – and new. No one had ever played liked this before, and I think that is the main reason he was crowned king at a time of many princes.
Glenn Gould and modern recording
Some have claimed that Glenn Gould, with his notorious disdain for concerts and the public, would have felt vindicated by twenty-first-century attitudes towards electronic media. That someone can now record himself at home, editing the file to perfection and then uploading it to a potential audience of millions, would have been beyond his wildest dreams.
Let me begin by saying that I adore many of Glenn Gould’s recordings, and I’m always happy to give him the benefit of the doubt, even in interpretations I don’t like. To hear him play the Lord of Salisbury Pavan by (his favourite composer) Orlando Gibbons is a wonder, an example of his amazing and unique way of holding or lifting the slowest singing lines on endless horizons of poise. Not to mention his eccentricity, of course. I’m sure Gibbons would have dropped his cup of mead in astonishment at the slow, pecking ornaments in that performance – the original, decorative earrings recast into swinging chandeliers of attention-grabbing prominence. But nevertheless, he is unquestionably one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, and his playing seems as fresh today as ever.
He was a man of many myths. The most telling for me is that he was an invisible recluse, making recordings as a purist musician’s response to the emptiness and futility of modern concert life. In fact he relied on and was addicted to the most visible, publicity-conscious promotion of his times. He recorded with eyes fully open to his audience; it’s just that he didn’t want them to see him. He scrutinised them voraciously, but through the peephole of technology, safely at home north of the border, safely supplied with his pills and scrambled eggs, safely financed by the regular, large cheques arriving in the post from the offices of Columbia Records in New York City.
The days when an artist could record in a studio, under contract, for decades, for a major label, as Gould did, and make a lot of steady money for himself and his record company, are over. The most successful artists’ recordings still sell a good number of copies, but only on the crest of the wave of their concert careers. CDs and downloads are spin-offs, not the central force of a professional musician’s life. Indeed, some of these are taken from ‘live’ concerts. Many major orchestras now release only recordings of concert performances, either on their own labels or through internet-based downloads. Even pop artists (Madonna, for instance) use recordings to sell concert tours, not, as in the 1980s, the other way round; and some artists are even giving away CDs or digital downloads for free – looking to box-office receipts rather than the cash registers of now-defunct record stores to make their fortunes.
Glenn Gould’s prophecy that carefully controlled studio recordings would snuff out the public concert seems quaint and dated today, and many of our most recently built halls combine architectural splendour with meeting places for fine food and lively conversation. The concert is alive! Gould’s idealism was ultimately all about control – of himself and the medium – and I think he would have been extremely uncomfortable in the modern pick’n’mix supermarket. It was fine for him to take an exposition from here and a coda from there and stitch them together with an expert and patient producer, but I can’t imagine him welcoming ten thousand Joe Goldbergs doing the same on their bedroom computers – free, swapped, downloaded, or deleted as the fancy takes them.
I’m sure Gould would have loved the internet (I can imagine dozens of his alter egos in dozens of forums), and he would have written a fascinating blog, but if he had been starting his career now, rather than in the golden youth of the 1950s LP, it might have to have been on YouTube where he would make his mark – or miss his mark – in the cruel (and free) lottery of cyberspace’s billion dancing bytes.
Happy (un)together
There cannot have been a more dangerous, free-spirited, unpredictable musician in front of the public than Ivry Gitlis. His career (strange word for something so kaleidoscopic), apart from concert-giving, found him studying with Enescu and Thibaud, jamming with John Lennon and Eric Clapton, acting under the direction of Truffaut and dipping his toes in (at the time) Palestine’s Dead Sea with Bronislav Huberman – oh, and taking part in youthful spitting competitions with Josef Hassid.
I had met Ivry a couple of times but then a few years ago Steven Isserlis asked me if I would come along to Wigmore Hall where he would be interviewing the great violinist, and would I play something with him for this event. I was delighted to do this but we all agreed that there was no point in rehearsing. I knew that whatever Ivry did at 10 a.m. would be comple
tely different by 12 noon when we were on stage, so we just decided to wing it. All I was prepared for was the unprepared creativity of his artistry.
We played the Paradis Sicilienne and Kreisler’s Liebesleid. Having heard something about the life of this venerable legend in the interview for the previous hour, I sat at the piano already moved by the idea of playing with someone whose connections to the past were so rich. But then he began to play. The vibrating violin instantly became the passionate if slightly vulnerable voice of a lover, with words and songs and spit. And impossible to follow … if following means that every chord is together, every bar line reached at the same point. But it reminded me that strict ensemble was not so important to musicians of the past. Listen to chamber performances from the 1930s and everyone is following his or her own subtle path of rubato. Indeed, pianists from the same period are not even together with themselves. Their right-hand melodies rarely align exactly with the left-hand accompaniment, and both Mozart and Chopin spoke of this as an ideal to be sought. If rubato is too carefully planned beforehand it is like scripted lovemaking: false, hollow, stiff.
‘Will you play at my funeral?’ he asked me in the Green Room of Wigmore Hall afterwards.
‘But Ivry, how can you be sure you won’t outlive me?’
Die Meistersinger: Terfel is Sachs
Bryn Terfel is the Hans Sachs of his generation. When I heard him in the role for the first time in Cardiff it was stunning and overwhelming. As with his Wotan at the Royal Opera House a year earlier, he rode over the full orchestra with all the power in the world, yet constantly found lieder-like moments of intimacy and subtlety, drawing a character of multicoloured shades. He is one of the greatest actor-singers I’ve seen on stage, and when the Welsh chorus cried out, ‘Hail! Sachs!’, the poignancy was not unnoticed – a moment of national pride as character and (master)singer melded into one.
Although I’d never seen Die Meistersinger on stage, I’d known it since my enthusiastic teens. Wagner was my favourite composer for a while and neighbours at the time might remember it blaring out of open windows from our house on summer afternoons. I was reminded again on that occasion at the Millennium Centre how extraordinary is Wagner’s genius. Through the sheer fecundity of his musical invention he is able to keep an audience riveted for close to six hours, despite an undramatic plot with awkward moments of comedy (some of the puns on birds and singing are claw-curling) and the final embarrassing paean of political hubris.
Beware! Evil tricks threaten us: if the German people and kingdom should one day decay under a false, foreign rule soon no prince would understand his people; and foreign mists with foreign vanities they would plant in our German land; what is German and true none would know.
Some commentators have seen these foreigners planted in German soil as the Jews, and these lines have to be listened to with a pinch of salt worthy of Lot’s wife. But in this production the director Richard Jones had up his sleeve a trump card that changed everything for me. The ‘front drop’ curtain was a collage of photographs of great artists from the Austro-Germanic tradition ranging from Bach to Goethe to Pina Bausch. As Terfel sang the words quoted above, individual photos from this collage were held up by members of the chorus. I think Haydn was the first one and I winced for a moment at the gesture … but only for a moment. Within seconds it all made sense. Wagner’s political hawk was spreading its wings as a dove, and with the image of Simone Weil, the French-Jewish philosopher who died during the war in London on a starvation diet in solidarity with occupied France, my eyes filled with tears.
Wagner is a towering representative of a glorious cultural legacy, but we need not let him be a Beckmesser excluding those who don’t keep his own rules of membership. German art has shaped us all and is greater than any one nation, having the potential (unlike that other Reich of recent, bitter memory) to last for a thousand or more peaceful years.
When Ernest twiddled the knobs
Ernest Fleischmann was not universally liked in the music business, but he was a good professional friend to me over the years. He was a man of strong opinions, of vision, of the sort of intense energy that swept all along with him or else pushed it aside. Despite disagreeing with him on a number of things (usually not voiced – he was not an easy man with whom to argue) it was always clear that he was passionate and deeply knowledgeable about music – the notes in the score and their vibrations in the air, not the vapid print or hot air that so often surrounds those notes today.
Ernest first invited me to play at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1985. A pianist had cancelled and they needed a replacement. The conductor was Sir Charles Groves and the piece was Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody which I had half learned a few years before and played once (badly) with a youth orchestra. I had a few days to get the piece back into my fingers and I remember flying out from Manchester to Los Angeles in a state of excitement and fear. I remember too the tremendous size of the Bowl auditorium as viewed from the stage. The heads of the audience in the back rows were as small as the notes on the page of my miniature score. I also remember being told that the old house Steinway I was playing on that occasion had probably been used by the composer of the work I was performing. A thrilling thought!
I returned to the Bowl many times over the years to play for Ernest, but on one occasion he joined in the performance. The amplified sound was fairly primitive before the shell underwent a highly sophisticated acoustic renovation in 2003–4. I was playing Brahms’s First Concerto with Paavo Berglund conducting and at one point, early in the first movement, I struck one of the great, grand chords in the piece and heard something I’ve never heard before or since: the sound of the instrument increasing in volume with a great swell of sonority – impossible for a piano to do naturally, as its vibrations decay the instant they are created. It was a shock and I quickly recognised the hand of Ernest. His seat in the audience had direct control of the amplification system. He’d obviously decided that the balance was off (all the sound in the Bowl has some artificial enhancement) and he’d taken charge of the situation. I smile as I think of this example of the two sides of his personality: his concern for the music and his relish at being in control.
It is not altogether an admirable trait in human beings that they tend to like those who like them. If Ernest had not invited me back to play regularly over the years and spoken well of me to other managers I would probably not be writing these words. If he’d said of me what he apparently said of some others (‘That man will never play again in this town’), my career in the early years might well have taken a different direction. But without him the Bowl itself would probably not have been renovated, Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall might not have been built, the London Symphony would have had a dramatically different history … to name but three of the many pots that Ernest Fleischmann stirred and seasoned with his own unique blend of spices over a long career.
Douglas Steele’s repetition
My first composition teacher, Douglas Steele, was more than a little absent-minded by the time I studied with him. He would sit at a rattly old upright Danemann in a teaching studio at Chetham’s School in Manchester and play Hommage à Rameau from Debussy’s Images I for me every week. About three lines down he would turn to me (every week) and say, ‘Michelangeli holds down the pedal here.’ Actually, as great as the venerable Italian pianist was, Douglas played this piece better. His sound, scooped out of the cantabile depths of the piano, was radiant, and his sense of rhythmic freedom was sublime, as if the bar lines were a row of trees swaying, breathing in the breeze.
It is said that there is a fine line between genius and madness, but as I sat next to Douglas week after week that line was blurred and irrelevant. The genius was in the sound he drew out of that battered old piano, and my lessons with him were a rare hour of sanity and joy in my otherwise stressful early teens.
RIP Joseph Villa
Joseph Villa, a great pianist and a dear friend, died on Thursday 13 Ap
ril 1995, from complications resulting from AIDS. He was forty-six years old and at the height of his pianistic powers, although, through the puzzling lottery of musical careers, he never had the sort of success he deserved. Fortunately he made five commercial CDs (Liszt and Scriabin), and there are a number of live concerts floating about the internet, most remarkably two versions of the Second Sonata of Rachmaninov, which are possibly the greatest performances of this work to have been captured by a microphone.
It is in these that the clearest glimpse can be seen of the almost fearful energy and passion that could burst forth when Joseph played. A friend of his recalled to me an impromptu performance of Scriabin’s Fifth Sonata at a party where the initial, distracted listening was suddenly transmuted into speechless fixation as Joseph conjured up the piece’s wild frenzy. As the last, screaming arpeggios shredded up the keyboard, it was the audience’s nerves that were in tatters.
Due to his almost empty concert schedule during the years we were friends, I was able to hear him live on only one occasion: when we read through the piano-duet version of Liszt’s Via Crucis at his apartment. I remember his hands being incapable of just playing notes; every chord was coloured with the care and expertise of a great painter. He knew just how to handle the vast scope of Liszt’s style – his epic gestures, his soaring vocal lines. What an irony this duet seemed when I visited him in the hospital a year or so later, his phenomenal powers smothered under the sterilised white sheets, and the burden of extreme physical weakness making his final months a personal ‘Via Crucis’.
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