A for art and artists

There are those who believe that delving into the biography of artists ensures a deeper perception of their art. I am not one of them. The notion that a work of art has to mirror the person of the artist, that man and work are an equation, that the integrity of the person proves the integrity of his production – such a belief seems to me to belong, particularly in the area of music, to the realm of wishful thinking. Beethoven's frequently chaotic handwriting in his letters and musical autographs reminds us of his domestic disarray as we know it from pictures and descriptions. In complete contrast, there is the enduring order of his compositions. The person of a great composer and his work remain to me incommensurable: a human being with its limitations facing a well-nigh limitless musical universe.

There are exceptional cases where events from the composer's life can be traced in the music. Beethoven, in his Sonata Op 110, composed the experience of returning to life after a severe case of jaundice. Similarly, Schoenberg in his String Trio turned a major health crisis into sound. And Brahms conceived his D minor Piano Concerto under the impact of Schumann's plunge into the Rhine. Generally, however, the desire to link tendencies and incidents in an artist's life to his compositions will lead us astray. The notion that a griever longs to compose his grief, a dying musician the experience of dying or a person overwhelmed with joy his gaiety, belongs in the realm of fairytales. Music is full of counter-examples. Works of happiness, joyfulness, serenity, and even lightness have emerged from periods of great personal distress. Let us rejoice at that.

B for Bach and Beethoven



When Beethoven exclaimed that to do him justice, the master's name should have been not Bach (brook) but Meer (the sea), he spoke not only of the surpassing abundance and diversity of more than a thousand compositions, but also of the creative power embodied in this supreme exponent of the most widely extended family of professional musicians ever.

I see Johann Sebastian Bach as the grand master of music for all keyboard instruments: the initiator of the piano concerto, the creator of the Goldberg Variations, the master of the solo suite and partita, of chorale preludes, fugues, and cantatas. When, in the postwar years, Bach's piano works were assigned exclusively to the harpsichord or clavichord, young pianists were deprived of the main source of polyphonic playing. To most of us, the assumption that Bach doesn't fit with the modern piano is outmoded. On present-day instruments one can individualise each voice and give plasticity to the contrapuntal progress of a fugue. The playing can be orchestral, atmospheric and colourful, and the piano can sing. To restrict a composer who was himself one of the most resolute transcribers of works by himself and others in this way might seem misguided even to practitioners of "historical performance".

Alongside the boundless wealth of Bachian counterpoint, the free-roaming creator of fantasies and toccatas must not be forgotten. In the spectacular A minor Fantasy ("Prelude") BWV922, to give just one example, no bar reveals where the next one will go.

Grand master of chamber music, sonata, variation and symphony – what other composer has covered such vast musical distances as Beethoven? We pianists are fortunate to have the chance to follow the path of his 32 piano sonatas all the way to his late quartets, supplemented by the cosmos of his Diabelli Variations, and the Bagatelles Op 126. A distillation of his development is presented by the five piano–cello sonatas. Who else offers the range from comedy to tragedy, from the lightness of many of his variation works to the forces of nature that he not only unleashed but held in check? And which master managed, as Beethoven did in his late music, to weld together present, past and future, the sublime and the profane? Some prejudices have prevailed: the image of a thoroughly heroic Beethoven, or of a Beethoven who, in his late works, has become downright esoteric. Let's remember that he could be graceful in his own personal way, and that his dolce, his warmth and tenderness are no less a feature of his music than vehemence and high spirits.

C for coughing



In Chicago, I stopped during a very soft piece and told the public: "I can hear you but you can't hear me." For the rest of the recital, nobody stirred. Have you noticed that in a fine hall the perception of music is good almost anywhere – as long as you don't sit right next to the brass? The same applies to coughing, sneezing, clearing one's throat, rustling, clicking the tongue, or babbling. If you really can't help coughing, be sure to do so during soft passages and general pauses: the "Coughing Rhinemaiden", a tag worn dangling around your neck, will be handed to you in due course by one of the ushers. PS – during funny pieces, laughing is permitted.

D for dolce



A famous visiting conductor once said to the string players of a German orchestra during a rehearsal of Mozart's Piano Concerto K595: "Meine Herren, spielen Sie dolce! Dolce ist süß." (Gentlemen, play dolce! Dolce means sweet!) Forty years ago, orchestras consisted almost exclusively of men. Another well-known musician confessed to me that, when facing Beethoven's dolce, he was all at sea. "What on earth does he mean?" He wasn't the only one to ask. "Sweet", however, doesn't get us very far. "Tender", an Italian meaning of the word, is more helpful. But in Beethoven's dolce, there is also warmth and introspection. While espressivo is directed more to the outside, dolce aims inward. The German innig comes nearest. Warmth, tenderness, introspection are important hallmarks of Beethoven's lyricism. These days they have become a rarity.

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E for endings



The end of a piece reaches the borders of silence. Endings can bring the piece to a close, but also, in some cases, unlock silence. This happens in Beethoven's Opp 109 and 111. The Sonata Op 110 does something different: it liberates itself from musical shackles in a kind of euphoric self-immolation. The end of Liszt's B minor Sonata leads back into the silence of its beginning. There are many kinds of endings – triumphant and tragic, poetic and laconic, funny and melancholic, majestic and expiring. We find endings that present a final conclusion and others that leave things open. Open endings, as in Schumann's "Kind im Einschlummern" or Liszt's "Unstern" (Disaster) point into the unknown and the mysterious, unseal an enigma.

F for form

According to Hugo Riemann, form is unity in diversity. Aestheticians shortly before 1800 had applied the same formula to musical character. To me, form and character (feeling, psychology, atmosphere, "expression", "impulse") are non-identical twins. The form and structure of a piece are visible and verifiable in the composer's text. The other twin has to be experienced. The visibility of form leads some to see the invisible twin as its subordinate. It is relatively simple to analyse a composition with the help of the written text, more difficult to feel the form, and even more demanding to enter into the psychology of a work.

G for gorgeous



In Los Angeles, a lady greeted me after a concert and implored me to arrange Wagner operas for piano and orchestra. In her day, she had been a well-known coloratura soprano. An LP record with a colourful sleeve bore the title Miliza Korjus – Rhymes with Gorgeous.

H for harmony



If we decide to call singing the heart of music – at least of the music of the past – what then is harmony? The third dimension, the body, the space, the mesh of nerves, the tension within the tonal order, but also the tension in the apparent no man's land of the post-tonal. The performer is expected to reveal such tensions right into their tiniest ramifications. Transitions, transformations, changes of musical climate, and surprises all resist calculation. We need to feel them. I prefer playing harmonic events to explaining them.

I for ideal



The perfect blend of control and insight, of pulse and flexibility, of the expected and the unexpected – is it utopian to hope for this? After thorough preparation, the ideal performance may be around the corner, or so it seems. Let's leave open the possibility that there might at least be moments or minutes when the right wind stirs the strings of the Aeolian harp. The performer, as if by chance, arrives at a superior truth. With uncanny immediacy, our heart is touched. Listen to Edwin Fischer's playing of the coda of the Andante of Mozart's Concerto K482.

J for jest



The Austrian Emperor Joseph II did not enjoy Haydn's "jests". Plato wanted to ban laughter. There are people for whom sense, seriousness and accountability are everything: to laugh, they feel, is to make oneself ridiculous. Some of us listen to music as if all of it was written for the church. Test your sense of comedy in the face of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. Recently, an eminent biologist said: "If you cannot laugh at life, then how in hell are you going to laugh at death?" Let us keep a few laughs for the end.

K for Klunz



Jakob Klunz embodies the tragic case of a composer living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Under the relentless regime of Bismarck he was considered out of step when writing 389 waltzes for two to six hands. Imprisoned, he was coerced to compose his Marches to Fail Victory, posthumously published in a version for wind ensemble by Mauricio Kagel. The waltzes were sent anonymously, as a gesture of abasement, to the Austrian emperor. To make things worse, they were subsequently destroyed by the Strauss family.

L for Liszt



Romantic sovereign of the piano. Creator of the religious piano piece. Chronicler of musical pilgrimages. Ceaseless practitioner of transcriptions and paraphrases. Radical precursor of modernity. Musical source of César Franck and Scriabin, Debussy and Ravel, Messiaen and Ligeti.

Familiarity with Liszt's piano works will make it evident that he was the piano's supreme artist. What I have in mind is not his transcendental pianistic skill but the reach of his expressive power. He, and only he, as a "genius of expression" (Schumann), revealed the full horizon of what the piano was able to offer. Within this context, the pedal became a tool of paramount importance.

Liszt's outstanding piano works – among which I would like to mention only the B minor Sonata, Années de Pélérinage, the Variations on "Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen", La Lugubre Gondola and the finest of the etudes – are for me on a par with those of Chopin and Schumann. His B minor Sonata surpasses, in originality, boldness and expressive range, anything written in this genre since Beethoven and Schubert.

Much of Liszt's music is nowadays played at overheated speeds. The last thing Liszt deserves is bravura for its own sake. Likewise, he should be shielded from anything that sounds perfumed, or what used to be called effeminate. Wilhelm Kempff's 1950 recording of the First Legend ("St Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds") presents us with poetic Liszt playing of unsurpassed quality.

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M for Mozart



Grand master of opera, the piano concerto, the concert aria and the string quintet. His piano sonatas seem to me, with few exceptions, underrated. Artur Schnabel has splendidly summed up why: they were too easy for children and too difficult for artists. For the most part, the sounds they suggest are those of a wind divertimento; others, like the famous A major Sonata K331 and the C minor Sonata K457, are distinctly orchestral. So, too, is the C minor Fantasy K475. Orchestral versions of the two latter works emerged soon after Mozart's death. Mozart's relatively rare works in minor keys are particularly precious: the A minor Rondo K511 and the B minor Adagio K540 are soliloquies of the most personal kind. Stupendous in their chromatic boldness are the Minuet K355/576b and the Gigue K574. Wagner admired Mozart as a great chromaticist. Mozart – to quote myself – is made neither of porcelain, nor of marble, nor of sugar. The cute Mozart, the perfumed Mozart, the permanently ecstatic Mozart, the "touch-me-not" Mozart, the sentimentally bloated Mozart must all be avoided. An important key to Mozart playing is operatic singing. The grown-up Mozart said what he intended to say with a perfection rarely encountered in compositions of the highest order. More commonly, the minor masters smooth out what may sound rugged, bold or odd in the music of their great precursors. In Busoni's beautiful "Mozart Aphorisms" we find the sentence: "Along with the riddle, he presents us with its solution."

N for notation



Being able properly to read, and grasp, the written text of a composition ranks among the performer's supreme skills. The difficulty of the task should not be underestimated. Besides taking in the written letter the performer needs to put it into practice.

For any pianist, the use of the best urtext editions ought to be mandatory. Wherever possible we should, in addition, consult the original sources. Where the text is incomplete, as sometimes in Mozart, we are entitled to complement and ornament – in proper style.

O for orchestra



Nothing could be more gratifying for a pianist than to feel a high-class orchestra on his or her side, an orchestra that listens with open ears, breathes the same breath, and joins the music in sympathy. The sound of the orchestra, the multitude of its timbres, the scope of its dynamics, but also its rhythmic discipline are, for our playing, the required reference point. The other supreme model is singing, the human voice, the connection between singing and speaking.

Great conductors can demonstrate to us what an orchestra is capable of, how one deals with it, which nuances of tempo may be suggested and demanded. Piano music of an orchestral character was not an invention of Romanticism. As early as Bach and Mozart, orchestrally inspired movements can be found, while Haydn in his late E flat Sonata suddenly turns towards an orchestral style. Among Mozart's piano sonatas, there are also some that clearly indicate an orchestral imagination. In his A minor Sonata K310, the first movement is symphonic, the second a soprano aria with a dramatic middle section, while the third can be easily identified as wind writing. A majority of Mozart's sonatas share this predisposition for the sound of wind instruments. Schubert, not only in his Wanderer Fantasy but also in most of his sonatas, was firmly on the side of the orchestra. And in Schumann's Symphonic Etudes, the frustrated piano virtuoso conjured up an orchestra in his own personal manner, unleashing all of the instrument's orchestral glories.

P for piano



A glance at the scope and wealth of piano literature makes us realise: this instrument works wonders. But the piano must be an instrument, not a fetish. It serves a purpose. Without the music, it's a piece of furniture with black and white teeth. A violin is, and stays, a violin. The piano is an object of transformation. It permits, if the pianist so desires, the suggestion of the singing voice, the timbres of other instruments, of the orchestra. It might even conjure up the rainbow or the spheres. This propensity for metamorphosis, this alchemy, is our supreme privilege.

To accomplish it we need an instrument of superior quality. What may the discerning pianist expect? The piano should have an even sound from treble to bass, and be even in timbre and dynamic volume. It should be brilliant enough without sounding short and clanky in the upper register, or drowning out the singing upper half with its lower one. The soft-pedal sound shouldn't be thin and "grotesque" but round and lyrical, its dynamics reaching up to mezzoforte. Its action should be well measured in key depth and key resistance. And it should, ideally, be suited for a concerto no less than for a Lieder recital. For the noisiest piano concertos, however, a particularly powerful concert grand may be the only answer.

There are pianists who are content just to play the piano. Their ambition stops at what the instrument has to offer if it is only played in "the beautiful and right way". In contrast, the most important piano composers – apart from Chopin – have not been piano specialists; they enriched music in its entirety. The piano is the vessel to which a multitude of sounds are entrusted, the more so since one single player is authorised to control the whole piece. In his solo playing, the pianist is independent of other players. But he bears sole responsibility as his own conductor and singer.

For these reasons, it is not my most pressing concern to take, for authenticity's sake, a certain harpsichord, hammerklavier or Pleyel piano of 1840 as a yardstick, simply because the composer may have favoured such an instrument. What matters more to me is to make manifest the sounds that a piano piece latently contains. The modern piano with its extensive dynamic and colouristic possibilities is well equipped to do this. The pianist should make himself acquainted with the orchestral, vocal and chamber works of the masters. A well-known musician has advised young pianists to spend two years browsing through the entire piano literature. I'd rather spend the time dealing with the other music the composer wrote. Such an extension of one's horizon might enable the player to differentiate the first movement of Bach's Italian Concerto as an orchestral piece that alternates tuttis with solos, the second as an aria for oboe and continuo, and the third, for once, as a harpsichord piece.

Concert grands of recent decades have progressively tended towards the harsh and percussive – or so it seems to me while writing this today. (The great old pianists would have turned away in despair.) Pianos of the past displayed an inner resonance that gave the sound length and warmth. Yet even now it is possible to find, once in a while, a wonderful, magnificent instrument. Frequently, it has been monitored by one of the leading concert technicians. My collaborations with the finest exponents of this trade count among the happiest experiences of my musical life.

Q for querflügel



A rare keyboard instrument, to be played diagonally, built in 1824 by Broadwood ("Traverse Piano") for the exclusive use of Prince Karl von Lobkowitz, who sported one longer and one shorter arm. The only surviving specimen, kept in the basement of Vienna's Palais Lobkowitz, bears an indecipherable dedication by Beethoven.

R for repertoire



It is no accident that piano music boasts the biggest solo repertoire. On the piano, one single player can "master" the complete work with all its parts without the interference of partners. This is a bonus as well as a danger. Thanks to the complexity of the task, the development of a pianist is slower than that of violinists, who play a single voice or doublestops. While violinists can already achieve excellence in their early years, pianists will more likely reach their peak between 40 and 60. The danger consists in a high-handedness that does not do justice to musical responsibility. To be sure, piano literature will, in its more fantastic, improvisatory or recitative-like passages, present the player with the opportunity to live out his spontaneity to the full. In such situations, the inner baton comes to rest. Generally, however, our interior conductor will be the bearer of our standard. Even in comparatively unbuttoned performances, the listener should be able to write down the printed rhythm.

In planning their future, young pianists would be well advised to consider whether they want to build a comprehensive repertoire or seek specialisation. Which works are, thanks to their quality, worth spending a lifetime with? Which should we dare to take on? And which somewhat minor ones can we afford to include as a luxury? The question of musical quality will start to present itself early on. Even if we cannot assess things properly right away, we ought to attempt to divide the wheat from the chaff to the best of our abilities. Studying composition, and becoming familiar with a wide range of music, will both contribute to recognising a work's originality, its novelty within an era. During some decades the repertoire will expand, in later years it may need to be reduced. The pianist who presents important new music in an accomplished way and spreads its gospel is worthy of the highest praise.

S for silence



Silence is the basis of music. We find it before, after, in, underneath and behind the sound. Some pieces emerge out of silence or lead back into it. But silence ought also to be the core of each concert. Remember the anagram: listen = silent.

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T for tempo



I distinguish between metronomic, psychological and improvisatory time. The metronomic one applies to certain dances and other pieces of a strict character. In the psychological one, tempo modifications appear to be so natural that we get the impression of a piece "remaining in time", while improvisatory tempo should be deployed in passages resembling fantasy, recitative or cadenza. The music of Chopin, and sometimes that of Schumann or Liszt, calls for greater freedom. With few exceptions, Chopin's works are written for the piano alone. We shouldn't forget that his rhythmic gamut reaches from the strictest (C minor Prelude) to the freest. The basic tempo of a piece can only be determined once the performer has taken into account all its components: tempo indications, characters, dynamics, articulation, rhythmic subdivisions and pianistic feasibility. Only then can metronome markings, if there are any, be considered and, when necessary, modified.

U for unity



In music, the call for "unity in diversity" has been applied to both form and character. Unity without diversity tends, in most cases, to become tiresome. Diversity without unity is lively but aimless; or at least it used to be until, in the 20th century, so many aesthetic rules started to shift, and accidental music became one of the options. It would, however, be quite misleading to treat older music in such a random fashion. Even where the appearance of spontaneity is conveyed by the performance, we should have the impression of coherence, and completeness.

V for variation



Works in variation form are the performer's supreme school of characterisation. Admittedly, there are also works where the variations maintain the character of their theme. In general, however, the composer will aim for variety. The player is expected to command a veritable theatre filled with characteristic types, and to control it with assurance. But he should never lose the overview. A neatly separated, side-by-side coexistence of the variations will not be an adequate solution unless we are dealing with Bach's Goldberg Variations. Variations are dependent on the structure of their theme. In his Diabelli Variations, Beethoven has loosened this dependence in an astonishing way. Variations may now comment on the theme, mock it, put it into question and even lead it ad absurdum.

Within piano music variations are of special importance. They extend from Bach's Goldberg Variations via Haydn's lovely double variations in F minor to the second peak, the Diabelli Variations. Sublime sister works that we hold in awe are the final movements of Beethoven's Sonatas Opp 109 and 111. Franz Liszt renewed the form chromatically and psychologically: his Bach Variations entitle the player to "weep, lament, worry and despair" until the concluding chorale redeems the listener, and himself.

W for wail



"Prolonged plaintive inarticulate loud highpitched cry" (Concise Oxford Dictionary), known to be uttered by Johannes Brahms after playing the piano at his ghostly nocturnal appearances.

X for x



Conlon Nancarrow's astonishing music for player piano offers performance without interpretation. As the results are fixed, the pianist can lean back and say: "What bliss! I don't have to break a finger." Canon X is one of his finest pieces.

Y for yuck!



Exclamation of displeasure. A natural reaction to memory lapses, blurred notes and fainting fits.

Z for Zvonimir



Legendary medieval king of the Croats. His connection to music, and to this alphabet, is, at best, peripheral.