Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  One particular interest we shared at the time was the traditional Latin Mass. In fact, we became close friends as we chatted over brunch after our weekly ‘Tridentine treat’ at St Agnes’ Church in New York. I never saw him more passionate than when he was lambasting the modern liturgical abuses he witnessed. He would often make these views plainly known to cowering priests or trouser-suited nuns, and would sometimes even walk out in protest as guitars were ‘untuned’ before starting their strumming.

  There is an inevitable sense of tragedy when such talent is unused or ignored or cut short, but some lines from the French philosopher Jacques Maritain seem to me to be an appropriate response:

  The philosopher is without consolation at the loss of the tiniest transient reality, a face, a gesture of the hand, an act of freedom or a musical harmony in which there radiates the faintest glimmer of love or beauty. He has his own solution, I must admit. He trusts that not one of these things will pass away because they are all kept safe in the memory of the angels … [who] will never cease speaking of them to one another and so will bring back to life, in a thousand different forms, the story of our poor world.

  RIP Vlado Perlemuter

  One of the highlights of my years studying at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester was the opportunity to play in masterclasses for the great French pianist Vlado Perlemuter. These classes were held in what was known as the ‘organ room’, and so it was appropriate perhaps that the first piece I played for him was the Prélude, Choral et Fugue by the great organist César Franck. It was inspiring to know that the small, quietly elegant man, seated on my left and wearing a woollen scarf, had studied the piece with Alfred Cortot, and had been at the centre of an incomparably rich time in Parisian pianistic life – either in direct contact or only a generation removed from all of the greatest figures in French music of the period. He seemed to like what I was doing with the piece, although he stressed the gravity of its mood, the seriousness at the heart of Franck’s vision. ‘Don’t play this passage like Meyerbeer,’ he commented as I turned the corner of a phrase with too sweet an inflection. ‘Like a procession,’ was his comment in the opening of the Choral, emphasising its liturgical spirit. He wrote some interesting fingerings in my score, including his suggestion to play the opening arpeggios with the right-hand thumb on the thematic first notes. I did this for a while afterwards but then I found that brilliant Steinway pianos were not really suited to it. It was too easy to find notes in the following arpeggios jumping out with a jangle, but I can see that on older, more mellow instruments if would have been an excellent way to shape that particular melody.

  One of his passions was that one should never repeat a note with the same finger when it was part of a melodic line. This idea came into its own when I played the Fourth Ballade of Chopin for him with its tender repetitions in the main theme; this is an understanding of fingering and its role in shaping a phrase that comes to us from Chopin himself. What has to be calculated artificially with one finger becomes an organic phrase when the whole hand is employed, literally moulding the contours of the melody with elasticity and naturalness. The importance of the left hand was often mentioned too in the classes, not so much in the bringing out of voices, but in the shaping of the harmonic base under the melodic line. Thus Chopin études, where the difficulty appears to be in the fast-moving right-hand figuration, become virtuosic in the fullest sense when the left hand is played with total command and with a palette of subtle inflection.

  For a man with such impressive musical connections it was refreshing to observe Perlemuter’s modesty. Names that could have been dropped with regularity were quietly mentioned only to emphasise a point: ‘Ravel told me to do this…’. Hard to argue with that! Indeed, so quiet were his comments at times that only those in the front seats were able to hear them. He was giving a lesson with people present, not entertaining an audience. He taught only repertoire with which he felt completely at home, and on the School of Keyboard Studies notice board was pinned a sheet with the works he was prepared to hear: all of Chopin, all of Ravel, but only specified, if fairly wide-ranging, selections of other composers. The omissions were interesting: no Russians, as I recall, which seems strange perhaps from someone with Polish-Jewish roots; and no contemporary works, less strange from one who had lived a long time and had seen many ‘contemporary eras’. However, on one occasion, when we had some time left over, I did suggest playing Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto for him. He laughed and said that it was not a piece he taught but he was happy to listen to it. He had nothing to say, not because it was particularly well played, but because it appeared to be outside his particular world of refinement and moderation and nonchalance. There was absolutely no sense of undermining the piece or of any condescension; it was simply in another language, which he found difficult or unnecessary to speak. For all of his Slavic and Semitic background, Perlemuter communicated musically with the purest of French accents. In repertoire where that was appropriate, it seemed at the time to be the only way it could be played.

  RIP Shura Cherkassky

  When most people die we feel as if the lights have been switched off. With Shura Cherkassky it’s more like lights being turned on – for the concert is now over. The final encore has been played, the stage is bare, the flowers already withering, and the seats vacant under the harsh houselights.

  Artur Schnabel once said, explaining why he would never play encores, that applause was a receipt not a bill. For Cherkassky it was more an invitation to open a bottle of champagne. Dinner might be over, but when an audience has changed in the course of an evening from customers to friends, who can be in a hurry to say goodbye? Sadly, that is what we have to do, although no one who heard Shura play or met him will ever forget his unique personality, both on and off the stage. His golden tone, like sunshine melting a bowl of the richest ice-cream (two of his ‘favourite things’); his contrapuntal voicing, like a child wandering into all the rooms he’s been banned from; or, for that matter, his walk to the piano – as if treading on crushed velvet. We shall try to keep our memories fresh with his recordings (particularly the ‘live’ ones), and will treasure among ourselves the many anecdotes that have now become part of musical folklore.

  One such story comes to mind. I knew Shura a little and experienced, along with a number of extremely annoyed travellers one afternoon, a typical slice of Cherkasskiana when we happened to bump into each other at JFK Airport.

  ‘Stephen, hello! How are you? Why don’t we go and have a drink? Do you have time before your flight?’

  I did and we took our places in the queue. I ordered a coffee and he asked for an orange juice. ‘Is it freshly squeezed? Are you sure? Could you check that it’s freshly squeezed?’ The word ‘squeezed’ was almost onomatopoeic as his lips effortfully delayed each consonant. After much consultation, and a lengthening queue behind us, it was determined not to be freshly s.q.u.e.e.z.e.d but he decided to take the glass of Tropicana on offer anyway. Then the fun started. Out of his suit pocket, from under a monster fur coat, came a purse bulging to breaking point with coins. He spilled them all out in a jangle onto the counter – a vast pile from, it seemed, every country in the world. Then, as if practising scales at the slowest tempo, he counted each one out with a fat forefinger: ‘Five cents … ten cents … thirty-five cents … oh no, that’s a Canadian quarter.’ That one was moved to one side. ‘Fifteen cents…’ and so on, to the mounting fury of the ever-lengthening line of people behind us and the girl at the cash register in front of us. To me he was a hero and a great artist, so I enjoyed this equivalent of an outrageous rubato, but I don’t think the forty-eight people at risk of missing their flights were so enchanted.

  Such oblivion to the world around is not something to be imitated, yet when transferred to the concert platform it can awaken in us a freedom from undue regard for what others think, unleashing the ability simply to do what we want to do. Constant self-questioning at home in the practice room, yes; but then comp
lete self-confidence in the wings of the concert hall – if not at the cash register of a busy airport.

  RIP Lou Reed

  In my teenage bedroom – dark-purple ceiling, light-purple walls, joss sticks smouldering – I used to listen to Lou Reed. ‘Take a walk on the wild side,’ he suggested with that ironic, sing-song, cooler-than-cool voice. I didn’t take his advice in the end and went back to Beethoven, despite years of neglecting the piano and neglecting to do my homework. But in those voice-breaking years as I lounged around in my flared jeans covering my (purple) platform shoes, and as the LP, scratched and coarse, spun lazy circles in the smoke, I did feel a certain coming of age. I felt maturity arriving as if a shoot in a plant pot pushing out of the brown soil (no, not that plant). I was wrong; I was still a kid; it was a false spring. But when I heard of his death and realised that such a force of nature as Lou Reed was now a dead leaf, beyond the autumn of life, I felt a strange and poignant sadness.

  Rest in peace? Maybe chill is more like it.

  Great Greens I: by way of an introduction

  It struck me that of the few great people I’ve met over the years, three of them were called Green. By ‘great’ I don’t mean famous, or witty, or talented. I’m thinking of something more powerful than those qualities – a sort of ‘holiness’, although not (necessarily) in a religious sense.

  You sometimes meet people who have an aura, a presence that radiates something extraordinary. This quality can be something unpleasant: there are people who drain you of energy, who seem illuminated only by their own brilliance and plunge all others into darkness. But my Greens were men of quiet, inner strength who radiated a nurturing generosity to those who came in contact with them.

  Gordon Green was my main piano teacher from when I was ten to when I was seventeen. He taught at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music.

  Father Maurus Green was a Benedictine monk from Ampleforth Abbey. He received me into the Catholic Church in 1980 when I was eighteen, at St Mary’s Church in Warrington.

  Julien Green was the French novelist to whom I wrote after reading his powerful novels and diaries and who invited me to lunch at his Paris apartment when I was playing there in 1996.

  One thing that united them was a sense that they really listened to you in conversation. A kindly listening, a listening that encouraged confidence (in both senses of the word), a listening that was not a reluctant price paid for their next prepared monologue, a listening that was not poised with easy answers to the difficult questions, but was simply a pair of open ears connected to an open mind and an open heart. It’s a rare quality … and they were rare men.

  Great Greens II: Gordon and the smokescreen

  We cannot choose our parents and, more often than not, we cannot choose our teachers either, at least in the early, formative years. However, if that choice had been available to me I could not have selected a more nurturing, stimulating or inspiring teacher than Gordon Green.

  I rarely saw him clearly in the seven years I was his student as he was usually obscured by clouds of pipe smoke. Just as he was about to make a musical point he would reach for the matchbox, strike a match, then hold its flare against the charred pipe, tamping down the tobacco and drawing in deeply. Not since the Mount of Transfiguration were wisdom and clouds so perfectly united. As the smoke was billowing all around him his mind was weighing the issue at hand – how to pace, how to phrase, how to pedal. In my first six months of lessons (I was ten years old) I think we talked of pedalling more than anything else – feet as important to a serious pianist as fingers.

  It has been said that in music silence is as important as sound, and this was true of Gordon’s teaching too. Before he made any comments he would always think deeply. His suggestions were illuminating but tentative; he was anxious never to pontificate or to narrow horizons. A hand on the arm to guide, not a collar and leash around the neck. After he made a suggestion my hands would leap to the keyboard. ‘Wait! Think what you want to do before playing.’ Like a farmer, calm and heedless of the seemingly barren ground viewed out of season, he had a holistic approach to artistic development. He would never demonstrate because he didn’t want the student to imitate him, but rather to think, to listen, to form a unique personality slowly and surely. Competitions would draw from him gentle contempt. Why face an evil, however necessary, before the appointed time? To jump into that circuit early merely meant that there was less time to develop musical maturity – and a lifetime is too short for that.

  I had my lessons at his house in Hope Street, Liverpool, until he moved to London. I loved to look at his desk where letters of Proust lay alongside Liszt first editions – and tobacco tins. We would listen to some old recordings. ‘Hear how marvellously Cortot shades the pedal at the end of the A flat Étude of Chopin.’ The LP would turn round and round, and then, that moment of magic from fifty years earlier would shine through the speakers – a shimmer of sound that tickled the ear. I looked through the gossamer clouds at Gordon, his white goatee beard divided in two by a smile of total exhilaration, the pipe held in a cumulus cradle. Then his wife, Dorothy, would swing open the thick, heavy door and bring in a tray of coffee and biscuits. My father used to sit in on most of these lessons and I loved to hear them discuss pipes and politics. They both had rather radical, left-leaning views. Often in the afternoons of my morning lessons a guest would be expected: friends such as Sir Charles Groves, students such as John Ogdon or the young Scouser Simon Rattle, or some mysterious person needing a place to practise. On one occasion that person was Sviatoslav Richter, who was playing at the Philharmonic Hall further down the same street that same evening. I wish I’d hung around to bump into him.

  Both Gordon and my father died when I was in my late teens – too early for me to appreciate fully their wisdom or to ask all the questions that have surfaced since. But, as well as being increasingly conscious of the sap of my father’s artistic genes as the years pass, the roots of Gordon’s early inspiration guide so many of my musical ideas to this day.

  Great Greens III: Maurus and the smile

  When I was in my late teens I decided to become a Catholic. Many friends and acquaintances since have found it puzzling why I would embrace something they have spent their lives trying to cast away. Suffice it to say that without Father Maurus Green O.S.B. (1919–2001) I’m not sure I would have taken the final plunge, however much I had dangled my legs in the water. I’m not talking about finding a latter-day Newman or Knox who could draw with brilliant clarity the clean, clear lines of Catholic doctrine; I already knew that I wanted to swim the Tiber, but I just didn’t have the courage to face either the cold water or the possibility of drowning … and Father Maurus’s warmth and gentleness made it possible.

  I began attending St Mary’s Church in Warrington, which had been staffed by Benedictine monks from Ampleforth Abbey since the late nineteenth century. It has always had a fine musical tradition. One of the early monks, the Reverend J. E. Turner, was a published composer whose fine, sturdy music was still being performed by the choir eight decades later. I ended up attending the 6.30 p.m. Mass to help out by playing the organ, and Father Maurus was nearly always the celebrant. St Mary’s was cold and dark on those Sunday evenings, but when I arrived early to practise the organ I would see Maurus huddled in his habit, praying his breviary near the front. As I approached him he would look up from the book, his face lit up with a big smile, and suddenly there was no need for the electric heaters to be switched on.

  I would also go along to the presbytery on a weekday evening for instruction. I was a fierce traditionalist in those days and was slightly frustrated by Maurus’s unwillingness to snap closed the doctrinal pigeonholes. I wanted ultramontane assurances but he, reaching for another cigarette (he must have smoked hundreds during these sessions), wanted rather to talk about virtue, and the practical application of charity, and the Gospels, and Christ. He was no liberal (he would have taken issue with many of the things I’ve
written about in this book) but I think he saw that I had already read enough Tanquerey or Frank Sheed and that I needed to learn something about why theology was written in the first place.

  He was an excellent preacher, although not a brilliant one. I think a witty turn of phrase would have been seen as either immodest or unkind and so was left unuttered. In fact what I remember most about his sermons were their silent beginnings. He would simply stand in the pulpit and look around the congregation with a gentle smile. It might seem calculated or precious when described in words, but at the time it appeared as if he were praying for all of us, enveloping every one of us in a kind embrace. He was no plaster saint and was not without his faults (although I see him liking this part of his story much more than my earlier words of praise). He could be annoyingly vague at times, and his idealism and support for various causes could seem almost more a provocation than a conviction … and very occasionally I saw a priggishness surface. But it would have been unthinkable for him to be unavailable to anyone who needed to talk, or to cling petulantly to a fault after it was pointed out to him. (Someone should have stopped him driving though. He had a green Citroën 2CV which was held together with only rust and a prayer and he drove it, foot to the floor, with great lurches of the steering wheel.)

  If much of his spiritual character could be traced to its Benedictine roots the rest can be traced to his involvement in the Focolare movement, one of several post-war organisations that arose in the Catholic Church as an expression of a new lay spirituality. This is not the place to discuss its history or teachings; these can easily be found on the internet, including accounts of those who have left the movement with negative experiences. I just know that it had a pivotal place in Maurus’s life. He was the first priest member in the UK in the early 1960s. Its spirit can be clearly seen in the two books he wrote, She Died, She Lives and The Vanishing Root, both biographies of young members of the Focolare. I have to confess (sorry, Maurus!) that I don’t like either of these books very much. Certain movements develop their own ‘members-only’ terminology, which can be perplexing or annoying to outsiders, and although the Focolare’s spirituality of the unity of all people (Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, other faiths or no faith) means that such particularity is not intended to exclude, it does make it seem like a closed door to some. Nevertheless, in the former book there is a prayer quoted by Maurus which I think sums up all that he stood and struggled for in his life: