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Virtuosi
A Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists
By Mark Mitchell Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2000 Mark Mitchell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02854-9
CHAPTER 1
The Triumph of Marsyas
Marsyas, a satyr of Phrygia, who, having found the flute which Athena had thrown away in disgust on account of its distorting her features, discovered that it emitted of its own accord the most beautiful strains. Elated by his success, Marsyas was rash enough to challenge Apollo to a musical contest, the conditions of which were that the victor should do what he pleased with the vanquished. Apollo played upon the cithara, and Marsyas upon the flute. The Muses, who were the umpires, decided in favour of Apollo. As a just punishment for the presumption of Marsyas, Apollo bound him to a tree, and flayed him alive. His blood was the source of the river Marsyas, and Apollo hung up his skin in the cave out of which that river flows.
— E. H. Blakeney and Sir William Smith
Something there is that does not love a virtuoso, and the word itself has often been applied dismissively, as an accusation of superficiality. Although critics have been the most open, if unsystematic, vilifiers of the virtuoso, some musicologists have been no less culpable. Indeed, the growing institutionalization of Western classical music since the Second World War has owed primarily to the influence of musicologists and scholarly performers — "the academy," for want of a more precise or poetic term. Joseph Kerman identifies his archetypal musicologists as coming "from the middle class; they are indeed likely to be moving up within its spectrum. It is middle-class values that they project and seek to protect. ... In such circles, doing a thing competently is generally better than doing it passionately: passion doesn't pay the mortgage. In counterpoint to anti-virtuoso elements in the academy, there exists a pro-virtuoso establishment, for which a primary forum is The International Piano Quarterly (the IPQ), devoted chiefly to the history and comparison of recordings, to biographies of obscure pianists (Robert Lortat, Noel Mewton-Wood, Walter Rummel, Leo Sirota, and Ignace Tiegerman, for example), and to "appreciations" of the unassailable. Bringing to light the stories of virtuosi who have fallen into neglect is ever an estimable pursuit. The decision to focus so relentlessly on their recordings, however, seems to me deeply flawed. Liszt, of course, did not leave us a single recording. Other virtuosi, captured on cylinder or disc when the phonograph was young and they were old, made recordings that do not reflect their glory. Still others have been allergic to the artificial performance conditions of the recording studio. Above all, technically massaged recordings tell us little about actual performances. Radu Lupu, for example, made a magnificent recording of Schubert's A minor sonata, D. 784, yet each of the half dozen times I have heard him in concert he has disappointed and frustrated me. On one program were Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze — a composition about which the composer had written to Clara (this was before they married), "[I]f I was ever happy at the piano, then it was as I was composing these dances." Lupu's interpretation, on the other hand, had none of the ardor, none of the tentativeness and rambunctiousness, of a young man full of wedding thoughts — or eager to dance with comrades determined to overthrow the Philistines. Indeed, the only mood, or personality, Lupu cultivated was stoniness (sans David's sling). Which, then, tells the truth — the recording or the concert?
This parallel, pro-virtuoso establishment often seems more concerned with uncovering rarities per se, or simply being perverse, than with locating recordings that exemplify an important aspect of the virtuoso tradition. For example, in a recent survey of all complete recordings of the Chopin études published in the IPQ, Donald Manildi gave pride of place not to Pollini or even Cortot (whose first recording tied for second with Ashkenazy's first recording) but rather to the Cuban-American pianist Juana Zayas. (A number of audible edits on her recording suggest technical insecurity.) In the same vein, a piano historian friend rebuked me for "showing a lack of historical comprehension" about the English piano tradition because I was not familiar with the playing of Katharine Goodson, in his view the greatest of all English pianists — greater than Curzon (whose teacher she was), greater than Hess, greater than Solomon. He did concede, however, that as Goodson made no recordings, and only a single tape of her playing exists, I would have been hard pressed ever to hear her. In such situations, the quality of the playing seems to matter less than the pride of discovery.
In Exiled in Paradise, Anthony Heilbut argues that
art history and musicology were invaded, if not invented, by émigré scholars. Musicologists joked that Arnold Schoenberg had made their discipline a viable one, the extreme difficulty of his theories having convinced American educators that anything so abstruse must be academically respectable.
In the subsequent half a century the academy has increased its influence, and the abstruse has remained a principle of music writing to the present day. The academy has separated itself from "musical insights and passions" (Kerman). In partial consequence, criticism of the virtuoso has gained a foundation in — indeed, the support of — the academy.
Musicologists are as heterodox as any other body of people who have only their trade in common. Pieter C. Van den Toorn's Music, Politics, and the Academy contrasts positivist and formalist methods of study with the interdisciplinary ones of the "New Musicologists" such as Kerman, Leo Treitler, and Susan McClary (whose sexual politics lead to what Van den Toorn diagnoses as a "musicology of resentment — personal resentment"). Despite Van den Toorn's complaint that the New Musicologists are too ideological, he himself argues against them from a highly conservative — and ideological — position: his dogged analysis of Beethoven, for instance, privileges formalism over McClary's feminist interpretation. Van den Toorn argues that this kind of analysis, which Bernard Shaw famously lampooned, permits of the deepest intimacy with the musical text; yet this intimacy, notwithstanding how much it means to its practitioner, is not expressive. Instead, it is description — and turgid description at that.
"Virtuoso" referred to the learnèd in general, and especially in the physical sciences it would seem, for some time before the term settled on musicians. The Dictionnaire de Musique by Sébastien de Brossard (1703) marks a stage in this evolution:
Virtù means, in Italian, not only that propensity of the soul which renders us agreeable to God and makes us act according to the rules of right reason; but also that superiority of talent, skill, or ability which makes us excel, be it in the theory or be it in the practice of the Fine Arts, beyond those who apply themselves as much as we do. It is from this word that the Italians have formed the adjectives virtuoso or virtudioso, to name or praise those to whom Providence has granted this excellence or superiority....
By the early twentieth century, we can find the following:
Virtuoso. One who is remarkably skilled in performing on some special instrument. Virtuosos are constantly tempted to indulge in an undue exhibition of their wonderful technic, and as many have succumbed to the temptation, the term virtuoso has come to be considered by many as slightly depreciatory, and the greatest artists usually object to having it coupled with their names. (W. L. Hubbard et al., 1908)
Today's critical representation of the virtuoso is startlingly narrower than Bossuet's, precisely because it divorces "right reason" from technical excellence. The academy's favored "virtuoso" has the technique to be reliable and "get the job done," but has no need for transcendent technical ability, while it regards the Romantic virtuoso as lacking in right reason.
Marsyas, a satyr, becomes a virtuoso player of the flute that Athena has cast away. Lyre-playing Apollo, jealous of the satyr's virtuosity and public success, challenges him to a musical contest which will be judged by the Muses. In the end, Apollo triumphs — not because he is the better musician, but because he set Marsyas the task of playing and singing at the same time, as he himself has; an impossibility for a flute player. Apollo punishes Marsyas by flaying him alive and nailing his skin to a pine. (As with any bit of gossip, individual accounts vary on the details.)
In the fourth chapter of his Republic, Plato came down on the side of Apollo and his lyre, because Marsyas's aulos made music that was too dangerous and disquieting — too virtuosic — for the state to tolerate. Perhaps we should not be surprised, since Plato was the father of the academy. Adorno knew that great music surpasses in scale of importance the modes and occasions Plato had assigned to it: great music — as from the aulos of Marsyas, who was less than human and more than divine — reminds the dehumanized masses of their humanity.
The musician capable of achieving all that he sets out to do threatens the academy, for true genius defies all attempts to measure, to constrain, to define it. In A Room with a View Forster writes,
The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us....
In the presence of the virtuoso, one either marvels with Forster, or chafes at being left behind. The academy takes the latter tack. For while Oscar Wilde was unafraid to call the critic an artist — Walter Pater on Leonardo da Vinci illustrates the point — the fact remains that few critics have ever produced the sort of criticism that Wilde called "the record of one's own soul." Accordingly, musicians whose interpretations are the record of a fine and unique soul tend not to be embraced as readily as those whose performances are accepted as "straightforward" explications de texte — even though the explication de texte is hopelessly démodée as a method of academic discourse.
When Schlegel asserted that "[excellent works generally criticize themselves," he seemed almost to anticipate Wilde's age of secondary texts. The point is a keen one, yet it is not applicable to music because the ordinary person cannot from looking at a score determine how it will sound: for this ordinary person, Augenmusik does not exist, and the score of Berg's Wozzeck cannot be read the way Nicholas Nickleby can. George Steiner (in Real Presences) extends Wilde's thesis by putting forward the interpreter himself as critic:
Each performance of a dramatic text or a musical score is a critique in the most vital sense of the term: it is an act of penetrative response which makes sense sensible. ... Unlike the reviewer, the literary critic, the academic vivisector and judge, the executant invests his own being in the process of interpretation ... in respect of meaning and of valuation in the arts, our master intelligencers are the performers.
The virtuoso, in short, is not a re-creator but a collaborator with the composer: the performer and the music dwell in symbiosis. No theoretical analysis or musicological investigation can critique Beethoven's C minor piano sonata, opus 111 more eloquently and comprehensively than a magnificent performance of it, which, as Peter Kivy argues, is the "ultimate nonverbal description of the work." (He could easily have omitted "nonverbal.") No study of the clavecinistes is more acute than Debussy's piano music; no study of the slow movement of Mozart's clarinet quintet will prove more penetrating than the adagio of Ravel's G major piano concerto. (Few who see music "as their own most private concern" — as did Furtwängler, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1922 to 1954 — would agree with Edward W. Said, who adjudged that the critical essay and the musical performance are interpretive presentations "almost of coeval interest and worth.") While the reading of a paper at a scholarly conference may be followed by polite and even heartfelt applause, I have heard thousands of people become hysterical after Krystian Zimerman played Chopin's B-flat minor sonata and Kissin played Liszt's "La Campanella." The superiority of Kissin and Zimerman to Said rests in the fact that they are not only players, but virtuosi. This is not a response based on a susceptibility to glamour at the expense of allegedly more profound interpretive gifts. Still, when Wilde proposed that only superficial people do not judge by appearances, he touched on a truth: the authentic virtuoso's performance transforms our feelings, the life of our senses, into knowledge.
Italian novelist, critic and film director Mario Soldati, in an essay titled "La sorpresa di un verde-chartreuse," wrote that ours is a sad age because it has no great living musician: the last, he believed, was Stravinsky (who died in 1971). Pianistically, our age is not so sad, though it is at best a bronze age. Indeed, one may argue that three of the most highly regarded pianists of the present moment — Brendel, Lupu, and Perahia — are not virtuosi in the golden Romantic sense; moreover, with (in my concert-going experience) the one-time exception of the second of them and the occasional exception of the third, they do not play the most "pianistic" of piano music (that of Alkan, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Medtner, Ravel, Rachmaninov, Schumann, and Scriabin). To be praised for playing the piano with intelligence, lyricism, and warmth — as these pianists commonly are — is an achievement, yet these qualities may be regarded as shortcomings as well, taking the place of the virtuoso's instinct and intuition, of his heat (and, sometimes equally, his froideur). "Brains and brimstone" (the phrase is Shaw's) are not mutually exclusive. Brendel, Lupu, and Perahia keep within middle-class bounds (whether by design or default is arguable), and thus they are the Apollo, not the Marsyas, of the piano world.
No virtuoso pianist of this century has been regarded by most as the Beethoven pianist, though Liszt, the nineteenth-century's virtuoso assoluto, was regarded also as its supreme interpreter of Beethoven. (Beethoven was the ideal of a musician in the Romantic era; the very embodiment of Hegel's passionate man of genius.) Like Schnabel before him, and Liszt's Scottish pupil Frederic Lamond before him, Brendel — notwithstanding an ample harvest of blunt, dull, and pedantic Beethoven concert performances and recordings — is held to be the finest Beethoven interpreter of our day. Yet Joachim Kaiser, writing in the 1960s, held that "No supposed 'Beethoven specialist' is [Rubinstein's] superior." Though Brendel has developed as a Beethoven player in the last three decades and is, by any standard, a fine pianist, in my view (but not mine alone) his Beethoven playing has not surpassed Arthur Rubinstein's — or, for that matter, Arrau's, Gilels's (which I seem to be just about alone in admiring), Kempff's, Kovacevich's, Pollini's, Rudolf Serkin's (his performance of the opus 110 sonata was one of the most transformative experiences of my life), or Sofronitsky's (he was the supreme interpreter of the Pastorale sonata). One of the desert-island discs chosen by the late Isaiah Berlin was a recording of a late Beethoven string quartet played by the Busch Quartet — a performance he loved because it was not virtuosic (a term, for him, of real disapproval). Perhaps, for the same reason, Brendel was the contemporary pianist most admired by Berlin — the same Berlin who in 1965 gave a series of lectures celebrating the movement that signaled the end of the sovereignty of the Rationalist tradition: Romanticism.
As unfashionable as it may be, I regard Brendel as English composer and critic Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji regarded Schnabel:
Each fresh hearing of this pianist leaves me more and more astonished at his almost legendary reputation with the wiseacres, the art-snobs, the fashionable sedulous apes who monkey the latest cackle, and with certain otherwise intelligent music-lovers. ... The wiseacres naturally admire a dull and dreary imagination — and, soulless pedant, he is a mirror wherein themselves are reflected, a man of the commentator tribe ... the intelligent music-lovers surprise one more than all the rest by their inability to see through all this pretentious mock profundity, this Day-of-Judgment tone of voice when saying 'It's a nice day.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Virtuosi by Mark Mitchell. Copyright © 2000 Mark Mitchell. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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