MOZART’S ASSESSMENT of Clementi as a musical robot was at least partly a result of their conflicting agendas. The Italian-by-way-of-England Clementi had fostered an approach designed to dazzle an audience with technical prowess. (He said as much as he reflected on the competition with Mozart during an interview in 1806, adding that later in his life he managed to develop a more “melodic and noble style.”) Some of his keyboard fireworks, like the precarious leaps and difficult double-note passages, were culled from Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord music, a medium little concerned with pianistic nuance (though even Chopin saw the underlying value of Scarlatti’s music, and assigned it to his students). Mozart certainly had technical command, but his art was centered on the ability of the piano’s tones to embody a living narrative, to express the human condition through the language of music, rather than merely to generate momentary excitement.
Pianists today still reflect those opposing sensibilities. Some amaze through athletic prowess, others probe the human heart in its many guises. Both of these traits find vital expression in the tradition of the Combustibles: musicians whose volatile, unpredictable music echoes life’s erratic tides. C. P. E. Bach was the movement’s godfather. Mozart inherited its power. But perhaps no one better exemplified the Combustibles than the piano’s second great superstar, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827).
Romantic-era pianist Hans von Bülow perfectly captured Beethoven’s significance when he described J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier as music’s “Old Testament,” and Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas as its “New Testament.” Less than a century separates these two monumental collections, yet the analogy seems apt. Bach summarized all that had come before; Beethoven pointed toward the future. Bach’s music rings with heavenly certitude; Beethoven’s radiates human struggle.
His life was as complex and outsized as his art—a roller-coaster ride of willful strife, earthy humor, crushing loneliness, explosive rage, and spiritual triumph. Beethoven’s music similarly “takes at times the majestic flight of an eagle, and then creeps in rocky pathways,” as an 1810 review in the Parisian Tablettes de Polymnie reported. “He first fills the soul with sweet melancholy, and then shatters it by a mass of barbarous chords. He seems to harbor together doves and crocodiles.”
This description especially befits Beethoven’s most intimate creations, the string quartets and piano sonatas—vehicles that served as his testing ground for new ideas. Many of his thirty-two piano sonatas, though experimental, are nonetheless beloved—especially the ones that have acquired nicknames: the dreamy “Moonlight” (Beethoven never called it that, and found its overblown eminence annoying); the tragic “Pathétique”; the blustery “Tempest”; the wistful “Les Adieux”; the monumental “Hammerklavier”; the rhythmically driven “Waldstein”; the tempestuous “Appassionata.” None have the soaring melodies of a Chopin or Rachmaninoff. Yet a haunting beauty inhabits them all.
WHAT’S A SONATA? WHAT DOES ITS NUMBER MEAN?
The term “sonata” has been used in a variety of ways. It may simply indicate a piece (often in three or four movements) that is performed on an instrument rather than sung. Some of the first piano sonatas, like those of Scarlatti, are in simple binary form (an “A” section is played and repeated, followed by a “B” section that is played and repeated). But the phrase “sonata form” generally refers to a compositional design that came to prominence in the classical era in which a theme is sent on a metaphorical journey. After its initial statement, the theme moves away from its home key, explores new territory, meets other themes, develops, and finally returns once again to the key in which it began. There was no single way of constructing a sonata, however: in the hands of various composers, the scheme appeared in endless subtle variations. Some composers, like Beethoven, pushed the boundaries of the form until it was barely recognizable.
The numbers attached to the titles of these works are simply methods of cataloging. An opus number usually reflects that chronological place a work has in the career of a composer; but, as in the case of some of Beethoven’s piano sonatas (op. 31, no. 1; op. 31, no. 2; and op. 31, no. 3), several pieces may share the same opus. The works of some composers have been organized by individual catalogers: J. S. Bach’s “BWV” numbers indicate the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (Bach Works Catalog) system, created by German musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder in 1950, which groups the music thematically; Scarlatti’s music (Domenico’s, as opposed to his father, Alessandro’s) has been labeled in three different systems—“K.” numbers (set by Ralph Kirkpatrick), “L.” numbers (by Alessandro Longo), and “P.” numbers (by Giorgio Pestelli); Mozart’s music carries “K.” numbers as well, but these were assigned by Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, a composer, writer, and botanist; Haydn’s “Hob.” numbers refer to Anthony van Hoboken; and Schubert’s “D.” numbers are chronologically ordered according to Otto Erich Deutsch. Many other composers have been cataloged through special classification systems created by their devotees.
They each contain wonderfully memorable moments, like the hilarious opening of op. 31, no. 1, which seems to poke fun at pianists who can’t manage to strike the keys with their left and right hands at precisely the same time; or the poignant juxtaposition of the sacred and the earthy in his penultimate sonata, op. 110, which uses a quote from the lament sung at Christ’s death in J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion, along with two folk songs, “Our Cat Had Kittens” and “I Am Down and Out”—a divine dove cohabiting with a pair of crocodiles. There is the stunning suspension of time in his last sonata, op. 111, where delicate trills grow into a shimmering, pervasive cosmic harmony, like the Big Bang in slow motion.
His was an art of severe contrasts. In his day, the Viennese were noted for the clarity and precision of their playing, the Londoners for their “singing” tone. As a pianist, Beethoven, the pounder, fit neither model. He was even accused of being abusive toward the instrument. Evidence of his piano style can be found in the printed music, where (as in the first movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata) the sustain pedal might be held down for long stretches, creating a pileup of irreconcilable tones. Some critics blamed his diminishing hearing. One essayist in Paris stated flatly that because of this loss, “accumulations of notes of the most monstrous kind sounded in his head as acceptable and well-balanced combinations.” Of course, on Beethoven’s piano the colliding sounds would have faded more rapidly than on a modern instrument, and such effects were not entirely without precedent.
But accounts of his performances bolster the image of a player who simply went to extremes. His pupil Carl Czerny reported that “the weak and imperfect pianofortes of his time could not withstand his gigantic style”; when composer Anton Reicha turned pages for Beethoven during the performance of a Mozart concerto, he found himself “mostly occupied in wrenching the strings of the pianoforte which snapped, while the hammers stuck among the broken strings. Beethoven insisted on finishing the concerto, and so back and forth I leaped, jerking out a string, disentangling a hammer, turning a page, and I worked harder than Beethoven.”
BEETHOVEN CLEANS THE KEYBOARD by Ferdinand Ries
One evening at Count Browne’s I was to play a Beethoven sonata (A minor, op. 23), a work not often heard.… As usual, Beethoven turned pages for me. At a leap in the left hand, where one particular note must be brought out, I missed the note completely, and Beethoven tapped me on the head with one finger. Princess L. who sat leaning against the piano facing me, noticed this with a smile.…
Later that evening Beethoven was also obliged to play and chose the D minor Sonata (op. 31 no. 2), which had just been published. The Princess, who probably expected that Beethoven too would make a mistake somewhere, now stood behind his chair while I turned pages. In bars 53 and 54 Beethoven missed the entry … It sounded as if the piano was being cleaned. The Princess rapped him several times on the head, not at all delicately, saying: “If the pupil receives one tap of the finger for one missed note, then the Master must be punished with a full hand for worse mistakes.” Everyone laughed, Beethoven most of all. He started again and performed marvelously.
Pianos weren’t the only objects endangered in his presence. Ferdinand Ries recalled that Beethoven “rarely picked up anything without dropping or breaking it. Thus he frequently knocked his inkwell into the piano, which stood beside his writing desk. No piece of furniture was safe from him, least of all anything valuable. Everything was knocked over, soiled, or destroyed. How he ever managed to shave himself at all remains difficult to understand, even considering the frequent cuts on his cheeks.” Little wonder his apartment was a calamitous mess.
He had a notoriously short fuse, and could throw a plate of food at the head of his waiter while lunching at the Swan Inn; but his targets ranged all the way up and down the social ladder. Once, as he and literary luminary Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were on a walk and came face to face with members of the nobility, the poet stepped aside, and Beethoven refused to budge. “When two persons like Goethe and I meet these grand folk,” he wrote in August of 1812, “they must be made to see what our sort consider great.”
Beethoven and the Blind Maiden, by Friedrich Bodenmüller (1845–1913). An artist’s rendering of Beethoven conjuring the healing angels (Illustration credit 7.1)
This brute of a man was nevertheless capable of extraordinary tenderness. When Baroness Dorothea Ertmann, a fine pianist to whom Beethoven dedicated his A Major Piano Sonata, op. 101, lost a three-year-old son in 1804, she was inconsolable, yet found it impossible to weep. Beethoven summoned her to his home. Years later she told Felix Mendelssohn that when she arrived, Beethoven sat at the piano and stated, “We will now talk to each other in tones.” He played for more than an hour, until Ertmann began to sob. “I felt as if I were listening to choirs of angels celebrating the entrance of my poor child into the world of light,” she reported to her niece.
Beneath the roiling surface, Beethoven was a fragile poet. He was perpetually falling in love, and nearly always found it unrequited. He suffered from a host of infirmities, not the least of which was the progressive deafness that descended on him like a dark cloud while he was still in his twenties. In 1810, after a decade of suffering from that loss, he wrote, “If I had not read somewhere that man must not voluntarily part with his life as long as he can still perform a good deed, I would long ago have ceased to be—and, indeed, by my own hand.” The affliction, he said, had left his life “poisoned forever.” The “good deed” he pledged to continue was his gifting of great music to the world.
LIKE ALL COMBUSTIBLES, Beethoven’s musical lineage began with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. While still a twelve-year-old living in Bonn, Beethoven studied with Christian Gottlob Neefe, a self-taught composer and organist who had used C. P. E.’s book Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments as a principal guide for his own education. He turned to it again for instructing young Beethoven, and the influence is easy to hear. Carl Philipp Emanuel’s approach to music was often explosive, shifting moods on a moment’s whim, the musical lines scampering and stalling, simmering and exploding like a teapot being moved on and off a burner.
In Bach’s generation, similar tendencies were budding throughout the arts. Late-eighteenth-century garden designs, for example, highlighted nature’s unruly freedom by intentionally pitting the wild against the cultivated—an approach that became known as “picturesque.” “The Father of the Picturesque,” William Gilpin, described it as a kind of artistic vandalism. “A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant in the last degree,” he claimed, but “should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet instead of the chisel; we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps; in short, from a smooth building we must turn it into a rough ruin.”
The Magazin der Musik saw C. P. E. Bach’s music in just that light. “The greatest virtuosos who have been here in Hamburg, and stood beside him when, in just the right mood, he improvised,” wrote editor Carl Friedrich Cramer, “have been astounded at his bold ideas and transitions, his daring,” and his unprecedented shifts from one key to another—the way, that is, that he took a mallet to earlier rules of style. Charles Burney visited C. P. E. and left an account of the experience. “After dinner, which was elegantly served, and cheerfully eaten,” he wrote, “I prevailed upon him to sit down again to a clavichord, and he played, with little intermission, till near eleven o’clock at night. During this time, he grew so animated and possessed, that he not only played, but looked like one inspired. His eyes were fixed, his under lip fell, and drops of effervescence distilled from his countenance. He said, if he were to be set to work frequently in this manner, he should grow young again.”
In literary circles, that same volcanic quality became associated with an artistic movement known as Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) that swept through Europe on a wave of hysteria. Glorifying inner psychological struggle and hopeless love, it left a pile of youthful suicides in its wake following Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (first published in 1774), an epistolary novel in which the heartbroken protagonist ended his own life. Werther sparked imitators everywhere: hordes of young men adopted the character’s style of dress (a blue coat and yellow breeches), and some also copied his actions.
Joseph Haydn (Illustration credit 7.2)
Meanwhile, in the world of painting, artists like Henry Fuseli added to the general atmosphere of melodrama and dread with works like The Nightmare and Horseman Attacked by a Giant Snake. C. P. E. Bach was the composer who brought this disquieting quality to music, suddenly registering emotions in high definition—as something fluid, intense, uncontrollably alive. He even insisted that musicians experience these affects themselves, in order to communicate them fully to listeners.
Composer Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Mozart’s friend and Beethoven’s teacher, took note, and developed his own version of the picturesque in works filled with quirkiness, novelty, and whim; it was a celebration of the unexpected. Mozart said that Haydn could shock like no one else. That was before Beethoven came along.
DESPITE THEIR DEARTH of hummable tunes, Beethoven’s sonatas grip us and refuse to let go. This is often due to his brilliant treatment of the simplest materials—there is genius hidden in the architectural scaffolding. His use of small musical cells as building blocks that reappear throughout a work in myriad permutations is a prominent feature even in his very first piano sonata, op. 2, no. 1. It opens with a rising figure (known in his day as a “Mannheim Rocket”) that is methodically shortened and fragmented as it is repeated. With every contraction the theme gains in coiled energy, until it is whittled down to a single, explosive chord that triggers a dramatic release, like a sharp quill freeing the air from an inflated balloon.
Opening of Beethoven Sonata op. 2, no. 1. The theme is increasingly shortened until it becomes a single chord.
The idea of manipulating tiny themes in this way is something he picked up from his teacher Haydn. (Beethoven once claimed you couldn’t learn anything from Haydn, but his music says otherwise.) He never lost interest in it, or in the aesthetic principle expressed by the poet Friedrich Schiller—whose “Ode to Joy” Beethoven adapted for the finale of his Ninth Symphony—in which contrary forces clash in mutual destruction, leading to the creation of a new, joyful unity. Beethoven’s musical constructions frequently mirrored this philosophical narrative. (When a biographer of his, Anton Schindler, a man whose personality, remarked one prominent conductor, was “as spare as his figure and as dry as his facial features,” asked Beethoven about two of his piano works, the composer described them as “a contest between two principles, or a dialogue between two persons.”) And so he wrote works of impeccable logic, seeding them, as in his first piano sonata, with a kind of musical DNA. Yet, he also shattered the old forms by setting in motion strange convergences and outlandish collisions, even blurring distinctions between endings and beginnings. In the end, he always managed to arrive at a moment of transcendent beauty.
As a result, Beethoven’s works manage to be both solidly organic and unsettled at the same time: it is music that bristles with violence, but also entrances with tenderness; it is obstinate, and also accepting.
Beethoven’s ability to transform the most ordinary materials into something utterly awe-inspiring was perhaps his greatest gift. Publisher Anton Diabelli famously sent an undistinguished waltz theme in 1819 to every important composer he could think of, including Franz Schubert and a pre-teen Franz Liszt, along with a request to each for a variation on it. He received fifty affirmative replies. Beethoven at first refused to join the pack, but then created his own set of variations on Diabelli’s mundane piece, which he regarded as a mere “cobbler’s patch.” The result was his magnificent group of thirty-three Diabelli Variations. In the words of pianist Alfred Brendel, Beethoven took Diabelli’s rather prosaic theme and left it “improved, parodied, ridiculed, disclaimed, transfigured, mourned, stamped out and finally uplifted.” It is, like much of Beethoven’s art, a bridge from the silly to the sublime.
Aldous Huxley mused in his novel Point Counter Point about how writers could emulate the techniques of this towering figure: “Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions … More interesting still, the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different.” In a novel, the “transitions are easy enough,” Huxley said. “All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes.”
If only it were that simple. Beethoven’s imagination produced works so daunting that scholar and pianist Charles Rosen believes they led to the great shift in music making from the home parlor back to the concert hall. He cited the time that Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny informed him of a lady in Vienna “who has been practicing your B-flat Sonata for a month, and she still can’t play the beginning.” It was no surprise that she couldn’t: even his trendily popular works, like the “Moonlight” Sonata, required tremendous technical skill. His true masterpieces, such as the last piano sonatas (of which that one in B-flat, op. 106, known as the “Hammerklavier,” is a trial by fire even for professionals), brought the art of piano playing to the very pinnacle of difficulty, and splendor.
His works, representing a lifetime of searching, were embraced by the next generations of musicians with a nearly sacred sense of adoration. “Beethoven’s music,” wrote his contemporary the writer, critic, and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann, “sets in motion the lever of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and awakens just that infinite longing which is the essence of romanticism.” On an evening in 1837, a decade after his passing, a small group of musical friends gathered in the salon of writer Ernest Legouvé. Franz Liszt seated himself at the piano when the room, which had been lit by a single candle, was suddenly plunged into darkness. “Whether by chance or by some unconscious influence,” remembered Legouvé, Liszt “began the funereal and heart-rending adagio of [Beethoven’s] Sonata in C-sharp minor [the ‘Moonlight’]. The rest of us remained rooted to the spot where we happened to be, no one attempting to move … I had dropped into an armchair, and above my head heard stifled sobs and moans. It was Berlioz.”
IF THE common image of Beethoven is of a man shaking his fists at the heavens, that of another icon among the Combustibles, Franz Liszt (1811–1886), is of a Greek god descended to earth. He certainly looked the part. Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen called him “the modern Orpheus … When Liszt entered the salon,” he reported, “it was as if an electric shock passed through it. Most of the ladies rose … a ray of sunlight passed over every face.”
All accounts describe him as tall, thin, and pale. One of his loves, Marie d’Agoult, was struck by his “great sea-green eyes in which glistened swift flashes of light like waves catching the sunlight.” He wore his “perfectly lank hair so long that it spreads over his shoulders,” wrote Charles Hallé, which created an odd appearance at times, “for when he gets a bit excited and gesticulates, it falls right over his face and one sees nothing but his nose.” It must have been a common occurrence because, as Hallé noted, “this curious figure is in perpetual motion: now he stamps with his feet, now waves his arms in the air, now he does this, now that.”
Franz Liszt as a young man (Illustration credit 7.3)
Liszt in his later years (Illustration credit 7.4)
His audiences couldn’t get enough of it, or of the music he produced. Caroline Boissier, the mother of Liszt’s young Swiss student Valérie, witnessed her daughter’s lessons. “To tell you that his fingers have the speed of lightning, and sometimes the vehemence and might of thunder, to tell you that he accelerates certain agitati to the point of breathlessness,” she wrote breathlessly, “and that these stormy moments are followed by a soft abandonment, a melancholy full of grace and feeling, and then by magnificent audacity and noble enthusiasm, would be to speak to you in an unknown language, since, not having heard him, you can have no idea of what he is like … One no longer hears the piano—but storms, prayers, songs of triumph, transports of joy, heart-rending despair.” Hyperbolic as that sounds, the best musicians of his time agreed.
Liszt in concert, from a Hungarian magazine, April 6, 1873. Drawings by János Jánko (Illustration credit 7.5)
Liszt’s exciting style, which masterfully combined the musical and the theatrical, owed much to two important models. The first was his piano teacher Carl Czerny. When this former student of Beethoven’s first allowed Liszt to audition, the prodigy was a mere eight years old: “a pale, delicate-looking child,” remembered Czerny, “and while playing he swayed about on the seat as though drunk, so that I often thought he would fall to the floor … I was amazed at the talent with which Nature had endowed him.” The older pianist took him in hand.
Liszt’s only teacher before Czerny had been his father, who rewarded his precocious son with “a couple of good slaps” for daring to attempt Beethoven’s great “Hammerklavier” Sonata (the one that poor lady in Vienna couldn’t even begin). It “hardly reformed me,” he reported, and the piece remained close to his heart throughout his life. But by the age of twelve, the time for any such restraints was long gone. After Liszt performed in a small Viennese hall, the London journal The Harmonicon announced, “He is already placed by the side of the greatest pianoforte players of the present day.” Thanks to Czerny, Beethoven attended this event; at the end of the concert, he embraced the young pianist and kissed him on the forehead. Some took it as an anointing.
The other great influence on Liszt was violinist Niccolò Paganini, a musician who threw off such sparks when he played that nearly everyone believed there was sorcery at work. In 1831, when he was nineteen, Liszt attended Paganini’s Paris debut and resolved on the spot to do by means of the piano what Paganini had accomplished with his violin.
Composer Hector Berlioz described Paganini as “a man with long hair, piercing eyes and a strange, ravaged countenance.” His personal doctor, Francesco Bennati, supplied more details: Paganini, he reported, was of average height and “his thinness and his lack of teeth, which gives him a sunken mouth and more prominent chin, make his physiognomy appear to be of a more advanced age. His large head, held up by a long, thin neck, appears at first glance to be rather strongly out of proportion to his delicate limbs … The left shoulder is an inch higher than the right …”
The critic of the Leipziger Musikalische Zeitung explained the effect this unattractive man had on his audience: there is “something so demonic in his appearance that at one moment we seek the ‘hidden cloven hoof,’ at the next, the ‘wings of an angel,’ ” he wrote. “He threw me into hysterics,” confessed Mary Shelley. The great Goethe was actually rendered speechless: “I heard something simply meteoric and was unable to understand it.”
The writer Stendhal encouraged the buzz, claiming that Paganini’s abilities were not due to conservatory training, but were “a consequence of an error in love, which, it is said, caused him to be thrown into prison for many years. Alone and abandoned … nothing remained to him but his violin. He learned to translate his soul into sounds.” And the violinist took every advantage of this folk-legend status. Commenting on two pieces he wrote in 1828 that contained an impressive effect known as “double stops” (harmonies played on two strings at a time), he revealed himself as a showman in complete control of his resources—he knew just how his public would respond. “One made listeners cry,” he stated with satisfaction. “The other, entitled ‘Religious,’ made the audience feel contrite.”
ON-STAGE CHARISMA by André Watts
What does it mean to have the kind of stage charisma that Liszt enjoyed? One big aspect is simply the ability to communicate with an audience. Some pianists seem to be playing just for themselves. They like to peer inside the music, but don’t hold the picture up for the public.
Establishing a connection with the audience involves a bit of magic. As Josef Hofmann said, we are all playing a percussion instrument, pretending to make it sing. But the unreasoning interior belief that you have accomplished this can be very powerful. It is the real core of being an exciting performer.
Unfortunately, performers with a lot of charisma are sometimes accused of superficiality. It seems to me that this has less to do with the music than it does with human limitations. There are pianists with absolutely nothing to communicate who are considered profound simply because of the boredom they engender. Curiously, many people are afraid to connect profundity with fun. Herbert von Karajan was considered a more profound conductor than Leonard Bernstein because he kept his eyes closed, while Bernstein liked to dance around on the podium. But that’s nonsense. Does the fact that Beethoven displays a good sense of humor in his music make him less deep?
Similarly, although we applaud an athlete for his or her skillful ease of execution, a pianist who looks like he is struggling to produce what is inside the music is assumed to be a deep thinker when, actually, it just means he is struggling. Frankly, when I pay my money to attend a performance, I don’t want to hear struggle—you were supposed to have struggled last month, in your practice room!
And that brings up another aspect of this dynamic: we often resent a pianist who makes it look effortless. Sometimes this stirs up feelings of envy—it just doesn’t seem fair! And this same way of thinking can extend to an artist who is prolific—imagine the criticism Schubert would receive were he writing today!—or multifaceted.
Chefs often say that people eat with their eyes. But something that looks light might be heavy, and vice versa. The same is true of musicians.
Liszt could be equally calculating. Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father and piano teacher (and Schumann’s teacher as well), witnessed a Liszt performance in 1838. “He played the Fantasy on a C. Graf [a piano made by Conrad Graf], burst two bass strings, personally fetched a second C. Graf in walnut wood from the corner and played his Etude. After breaking yet another two strings he loudly informed the public that since it didn’t satisfy him, he would play it again [on a third piano]. As he began, he vehemently threw his gloves and handkerchief on the floor.”
Those gloves often came in handy. At one concert in 1846, he dropped a pair and started a near riot as a group of women rushed to seize them. They cut the material into fragments and shared the pieces. The gesture was typical of Liszt, though he probably got the idea from Czerny, who expressed definite notions about how to make an entrance. Begin, he said, with bows toward the principal boxes, then toward the sides, and lastly toward the middle. After this, the performer can take his seat—but not without “depositing his dress hat and drawing out his white handkerchief.” Dropping gloves was simply Liszt’s additional flourish. (No teacher could bestow the innate talent it took to pull it off, of course. Liszt had no choice but to tell his American student William Mason: “You lack my personality!”)
In the twentieth century, jazz celebrity Jelly Roll Morton would carry on this stylish tradition, making it a point, after a dramatic arrival, to remove his overcoat, fold it, and place it in plain view of his audience so that its fancy silk lining would be clearly visible, before carefully wiping off the piano bench or stool with a large silk handkerchief.
Liszt’s recitals—he called them monologues pianistiques—were unusual in featuring a lone performer instead of a variety show. Thus he announced, with self-described impudence, “Le concert, c’est moi” (I am the concert) in imitation of Louis XIV, who famously declared that he was the state. (Another pianist, Ignaz Moscheles [1794–1870], had actually established the solo recital a few years earlier with a series he called Classical Piano Soirées.) Despite the absence of collaborators at a Liszt event, there was no lack of entertainment. He used every trick in the book. At a concert in 1835, he actually fainted in the arms of the page turner. “We bore him out in a strong fit of hysterics,” reported Henry Reeve, who later became editor of the Edinburgh Review. “As I handed Mme de Circourt to her carriage, we both trembled like poplar leaves, and I tremble scarcely less as I write.”
CREATIVE FAINTING by Wanda Landowska
A certain pianist … hired women for twenty francs a concert to simulate fainting in the midst of his playing of a fantasia [that he] attacked so fast that it would have been humanly impossible to carry on at that speed to the end. Once, in Paris, the hired woman, having fallen soundly asleep, missed her cue; the pianist was playing Weber’s Concerto. Counting on the fainting of this woman to interrupt the finale, he had started it at an impossible tempo. What to do? Flounder like a vulgar pianist or simulate a lapse of memory? No, he simply played the role of the hired woman and fainted himself. The audience rushed to the help of the pianist, who was all the more phenomenal, since he added to his lightning performance a fragile and sensitive nature. He was carried backstage; men applauded frantically, women waved their handkerchiefs, and the fainting woman, waking up, really fainted, perhaps in despair at having missed her cue.
FROM Landowska on Music
Liszt’s improvisational skill was also a big draw. In Milan, a silver chalice was placed at the entrance of the hall, into which people slipped little pieces of paper on which they had written themes for him to use as a springboard. Liszt was taken aback by some of the notes. One said, “Milan Cathedral.” Another, written by a man “struck by the advantage there would be in having oneself transported from Milan to Venice in six hours, gave me for a theme: the railway,” the pianist wrote to violinist Lambert Massart. “I hastened to open the final note. What do you think I found this time? One of the most important questions of human life to be decided by arpeggios … Is it better to marry or remain a bachelor?” Liszt’s wise reply: “Whatever the decision that you reach, whether to marry or remain single, it is certain that you will always regret it.”
But the main attraction was his spellbinding artistry. Liszt’s playing was often bombastic, searing, and jaw-dropping—qualities that can be found in his Piano Concertos and in many solo piano works, like his demonic set of Mephisto Waltzes. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to Liszt that in his search to find someone who grasped the true essence of what he called the “Dionysian”—reflecting the character of Dionysus, god of ecstasy and intoxication—“it is to you above all that my eyes turn again and again.”
The pianist’s technical wizardry was helped along by new developments in the instrument that allowed for greater speed across the keyboard. He also had a secret weapon: a practice piano with keys that only moved when tremendous exertion was applied. “I had it made specially, so that when I have played one scale on it I have played ten; it is a thoroughly impossible piano,” he explained to Wilhelm von Lenz, after mischievously allowing the amateur pianist to struggle with it during an audition.
PLAYING LISZT IS NOT EASY by Alfred Brendel
Often, it is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
The [Liszt] pianist should be careful not to take that step. It is up to him whether pathos turns into bathos, whether Liszt’s heroic fire freezes into a heroic pose, whether his rapt lyricism is smothered under perfumed affectation. He should give the passages of religious meditation simplicity, bring out the devilry behind the capriciousness, and convey the profound resignation behind the strangely bleak experience of his late works.
—EXCERPTED FROM “LISZT MISUNDERSTOOD,” IN Brendel on Music
Liszt’s style was in complete contrast to that of his biggest competitor, Sigismond Thalberg, with whom he “dueled” at a concert in 1837. According to one witness, Liszt was “constantly tossing back his long hair, his lips quivering, his nostrils palpitating,” while Thalberg “entered noiselessly” almost “without displacing the air. After a dignified greeting that seemed a trifle cold in manner, he seated himself at the piano as though upon an ordinary chair.” Liszt, the man Heine called “the Attila, the scourge of God,” was anything but cold, on stage or off.
His numerous affairs included several with notorious women like Marie d’Agoult, who described herself as “six inches of snow covering twenty feet of lava”; Countess Marie von Mouchanoff, a powerful socialite, described by Heine as “a Pantheon in which so many great men lie buried”; Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, the cigar-smoking princess; and Countess Olga Janina, who, in a jealous rage, threatened Liszt’s life with a poisoned dagger and a revolver, and ultimately sent scandalous articles about him to his most powerful acquaintances, including the Grand Duke of Weimar and the Pope. There were consequences to his reckless behavior: he managed to alienate his good friend Frédéric Chopin—who once announced, “I wish I could steal his manner of rendering my own Etudes”—by having a tryst with Marie Pleyel, wife of the piano manufacturer, in Chopin’s apartment.
But Liszt was also an intellectual explorer and a spiritual seeker. His musical experiments influenced nearly every important composer who followed. Liszt’s ambiguous, radical harmonies in his late piano piece Nuages Gris (Grey Clouds), for example, anticipated the impressionists, as did the watery cascades in works like his Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este (The Fountains of the Villa d’Este). Meanwhile, his ferocity captivated other Romantic pianist-composers, like Charles-Valentin Alkan and Anton Rubinstein. And his melodic reveries wound their way into the music of countless leading composers, including Richard Wagner (his son-in-law).
He had expressed interest in religious matters from an early age, even attending meetings of the Saint-Simonians, a sect deeply concerned with social equality, the emancipation of women, and the fair distribution of wealth. He took minor Holy Orders in 1865, and though the historian Ferdinand Gregorovius, who saw him in Rome, suggested he was “Mephistopheles disguised as an Abbé,” Liszt was well known for his many kindnesses. (Chief among these was his impressive ability to forgive wrongdoing. Typical was his instruction to Princess Carolyne on how to treat the irascible and erratic Richard Wagner. “He is sick and incurable,” wrote the pianist. “That is why we must simply love him and try to serve him as best we can.”) He created piano arrangements of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Schubert songs, and music by Saint-Saëns, Berlioz, Chopin, and others, specifically to speed the dissemination of works by those composers he admired. His tender side was expressed musically as well. It can be heard in many of his lyrical piano pieces, like the Liebesträume, and the Six Consolations, where sumptuous phrases glisten like pearls against a plush background of undulating harmonies. When he wasn’t setting a hall ablaze, this was the quality he brought to his piano playing. It could break your heart.
The combustibles tradition lived on after Liszt in the works of musicians like the Eastern Europeans Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967). Both men were attracted to vital folk traditions that grew in the wild, far from civilization’s meddling ways. Collecting Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Slovak peasant tunes and dances, they used them as models, and created music filled with pounding, irregular rhythms and prickly harmonies. More than one observer found the results hard to take. Frederick Corder, in the Musical Quarterly of July 1915, decided Bartók’s pieces represented “the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots.” The eminent Percy A. Scholes, writing in London’s The Observer in May of 1923, announced that in the presence of Bartók’s music he “suffered more than upon any occasion … apart from an incident or two connected with ‘painless dentistry.’ ” Yet, by mid-century (especially after Bartók’s death), this music was widely accepted and even celebrated as essential to the Western canon.
Béla Bartók with pianist György Sandor (Illustration credit 7.6)
In Russia, Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), the grand master of twentieth-century music, also turned to irregular accents and provocative, explosive sounds to rouse his listeners. Stravinsky underwent stylistic changes throughout his life, crafting tone paintings of Russian peasant culture (in ballets like The Firebird and The Rite of Spring), mischievous caricatures of popular styles (such as his Ragtime of 1918, an odd, cubist version of early jazz), and even uncompromising abstract works. But rhythmic drive and an anarchist’s sensibility were always at its core.
Conductor Pierre Monteux responded with shock as Stravinsky played a piano reduction of his revolutionary Rite of Spring in 1912: “Before he got very far I was convinced he was raving mad … The very walls resounded as Stravinsky pounded away, occasionally stamping his feet and jumping up and down.” (Stravinsky’s foot stamping was apparently a regular practice. At a rehearsal of the ballet before its premiere, remembered dancer Marie Rambert, Stravinsky “pushed aside the fat German pianist, nicknamed Kolossal by Diaghilev, and proceeded to play twice as fast as we had been doing and twice as fast as we could possibly dance. He stamped his feet on the floor and banged his fist on the piano and sang and shouted.”)
Stravinsky playing The Rite of Spring by Jean Cocteau (Illustration credit 7.7)
Stravinsky aimed in The Rite of Spring to grab the listener by the collar rather than the heartstrings. He conveyed the primeval essence of the ballet’s story, the ritualistic sacrifice of a young virgin, by sabotaging the notion of normality at every moment. (In one famous passage, the changes in groups of accented pulses—from 9 to 2 to 6 to 3 to 4 to 5 to 3—come so swiftly, and with so much force, that they seem like an artillery barrage.)
His unruly rhythms could be unnerving, even to professional musicians. Stravinsky wrote his Piano Rag Music for Arthur Rubinstein, but the pianist declined to play it. “I’m more than proud to own your manuscript,” he explained, “but I’m still the pianist of the old era. Your piece is written for percussion rather than for my kind of piano.”
“He did not like my answer,” reported Rubinstein. “ ‘I see that you don’t understand this music,’ he said a little impatiently. ‘I shall play it and make it clear to you.’ He then banged it out about ten times, making me more and more antagonistic to the piece. Now he became angry. A disagreeable quarrelsome exchange followed. ‘You still think you can sing on the piano, but that is an illusion. The piano is nothing but a utility instrument and it sounds right only as percussion.’ ”
Ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned The Rite of Spring, and Igor Stravinsky (Illustration credit 7.8)
Arthur Rubinstein (Illustration credit 7.9)
The two were operating in different worlds. “You pianists become millionaires by playing the music left to you by the starving Mozart and Schubert and the poor mad Schumann, the tubercular Chopin, and the sick Beethoven,” Stravinsky told Rubinstein, resentfully. “He was right,” wrote Rubinstein in his autobiography My Many Years. “I always felt that we were vampires living off the blood of these great geniuses.”
Stravinsky’s own piano playing, reported American composer Elliott Carter, was “remarkable … filled with electricity … incisive but not brutal, rhythmically highly controlled yet filled with intensity so that each note was made to seem weighty and important.”
His conducting had the same quality: at rehearsals in the 1920s and ’30s, a typical eyewitness report pictured “a little man who bends his legs like a fencer taking guard, who splays his thighs like a horseman, who snaps his elbows back like a boxer on the attack, who looks alternately, or all at once, like a bird, an engineer, a Kobold [spirit in human form], and a surgeon.”
Stravinsky’s music, driven by a powerful rhythmic engine—no matter how disruptive its incessant gear shifts—was often laced with caustic collisions and biting wit. For a time, it also embodied conservative, “neoclassical” principles (as, for example, in his elegant, tightly constructed Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, one of the most beautiful duo-piano pieces ever written). At the end of his life, it lurched headlong into atonality, the musical language that rejects the very idea of a traditionally ordered musical universe with a tonal center. It wasn’t for everyone. Yet, like the works of all of the Combustibles, it was never less than exhilarating.
The irrepressible energy of the Combustibles also erupts in more recent works by contemporary classical composers like the aforementioned Elliott Carter (1908–2012), whose 1961 Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras—declared by Igor Stravinsky the first true American masterpiece—produces a swirl of sounds so dense and furious that the music might be likened to an orchestral traffic jam. Like C. P. E. Bach, Carter creates music populated by human characters. Indeed, much of his chamber music, like the 1997 Quintet for Piano and String Quartet, is like a raucous family gathering. The music unfolds like a scene at a holiday table: the father carves the turkey while an annoying uncle, slightly tipsy and out of tune, demands attention; at the same time, conspiratorial kids unleash some practical jokes, just as a neighbor barges in with breathless news.
Carter’s restless and ever-changing musical textures arise through that sort of emotional counterpoint, with each instrument (or, in a solo work, each theme) representing a particular psychological state. As his personalities move through a range of rhythms and sonorities—sometimes at different speeds and at cross purposes—the result is explosive and unpredictable. He is considered by many to be the greatest composer of his era. Well past the age of one hundred he continues to produce music prolifically, with increasing attention to the piano.
THE CLASSICAL WORLD was not alone in pursuing these tumultuous qualities. In the mid-twentieth century a new audience ripe for “storm and stress” emerged: modern American teenagers, who found in the brash, unruly world of rock ‘n’ roll a perfect outlet for their sense of alienation (and hormonal frenzy). Like the social fabric of C. P. E. Bach’s Germany, America in the 1950s offered a facade of cheerful orderliness beneath which simmered a current of pent-up, wayward emotions. Eventually, a firestorm was inevitable. And renegade pianist Jerry Lee Lewis (b. 1935) happily applied the accelerant.
One of his biographers, Nick Tosches, described a television appearance by the rocker hosted by Steve Allen. “He sat at the big piano and he looked sideways at the camera, eyeballed it the way he had looked at those girls in the Arkansas beer joint, and then he began to play the piano and howl about the shaking that was going on. He rose, still pounding, and he kicked the piano stool back. It shot across the stage, tumbling, skidding … Steve Allen laughed and threw the stool back, then threw other furniture, and Jerry Lee played some high notes with the heel of his shoe. Then he stopped and looked at the camera sideways again. Neither he nor Steve Allen had ever heard louder applause.”
Lewis had migrated from Ferriday, Louisiana, to Memphis, Tennessee, to join Sam Phillips and his Sun Records label where rhythm-and-blues stars Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, and Ike Turner got their start. His uninhibited style borrowed elements from each of them, including western swing, boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues, and country, a mix to which he added the feral impulses of a Louisiana puma. Many of the sounds he used were already on record: Ike Turner, playing piano for Jackie Brenston on Phillips’s first produced hit, “Rocket 88” (which was released by Chess Records), employed the techniques that characterized Jerry Lee’s approach, including his pounding rhythms and wild glissandos—fast, continuous streams of notes performed by sliding one’s fingers or fists across the keys. But in his adoption of these standard piano “tricks,” Lewis reached new levels of volatility.
Jerry Lee Lewis (Illustration credit 7.10)
On Dick Clark’s television show American Bandstand, in 1957, reported critic Richard Corliss, “he tore through the number and, toward the end, shook his long, slicked-back blond hair until it fell forward, like a toupee attached at the brow line, virtually covering his face.” It was the same effect that Liszt had achieved with his long, flowing locks and wild gyrations. “Hair wasn’t supposed to do that, not in the ’50s,” claimed Corliss. “Jerry Lee’s hair was a creature from a horror film, a redneck monster that arose, erupted and smothered its host.” Other singer-pianists were sharing the spotlight at the time—Little Richard, Ray Charles, and Jerry Lee’s fellow Louisianans Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, and Huey “Piano” Smith—but none conveyed quite that level of danger and unpredictability. The public responded by buying millions of copies of his records.
Lewis managed to match Liszt as a destroyer of pianos, too. In 1958, at a live rock extravaganza in Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater, he argued forcefully with guitarist Chuck Berry over who would close the show. Berry had the final say; his contract guaranteed him the honor. So, according to Nick Tosches,
Jerry Lee did as he was bid that night; he went on before Chuck Berry. He had the crowd screaming and rushing the stage, and when it seemed that the screams had grown loudest and the rushing most chaotic, he stood, kicked the piano stool away with violence, and broke into “Great Balls of Fire.” As the screaming chaos grew suddenly and sublimely greater, he drew from his jacket a Coke bottle full of gasoline, and he doused the piano with one hand as the other hand banged out the song; and he struck a wooden match and he set the piano aflame, and his hands, like the hands of a madman, did not quit the blazing keys, but kept pounding, until all became unknown tongues and holiness and fire, and the kids went utterly, magically berserk with the frenzy of it all; and Jerry Lee stalked backstage, stinking of gasoline and wrath.
He dared Berry to follow that.
Some pianists are still trying. They include conceptual artist and “environmental music” composer Annea Lockwood, who created a work entitled Piano Burning. Debuted in London in 1968, it requires the performer to select an upright piano in disrepair, put it in an open space with the lid closed, and set it on fire with a twist of paper doused in lighter fluid. (Optional balloons may be stapled to the piano.) “Play whatever pleases you for as long as you can,” she suggests. To which any responsible writer would add, please do not try this at home.
THE JAZZ WORLD embraced the Combustible spirit too, through ferocious improvisations by pianists such as Earl “Fatha” Hines (1903–1983)—“one of those jazz artists,” said composer Gunther Schuller, “for whom slowing down [was] next to impossible”—as well as perhaps the wildest pianist of all, Cecil Taylor.
Born in a small Pennsylvania town, Hines studied first with a German teacher named Von Holz, who took him through “Czerny and big books of composers like Chopin.” But it wasn’t long before he came into contact with a different kind of sound, and it changed his life. One day it floated down from a club above a restaurant in Pittsburgh—where he was enjoying a meal with some companions—and just grabbed him. “It had a beat and a rhythm to it that I’d never heard before,” he remembered. An older cousin helped him to slip into the club unnoticed, and there at the piano was Toodle-oo Johnson, playing “Squeeze Me.” Hines never looked back.
He found several pianistic models. First came pianist Jim Fellman, who “had a wonderful left hand. He didn’t use his fifth finger, but stretched his fourth finger to [make harmonies] … When he showed me this,” remembered Hines, “my hands were too small and I couldn’t do it … but he showed me how to stretch my fingers so that in time I could.” In payment for the lessons, Fellman asked for “some Mail Pouch chewing tobacco and a few bottles of beer, and some afternoon we’ll go up and sit down and I’ll show you a few things.” It was a deal Hines could afford.
Next, “a fellow came to town from Detroit, named Johnny Watters.” He was the mirror image of Fellman—he kept stretching his right hand. “His hand was so large he was applying the melody with his middle fingers and using his thumb and last finger for [harmonies] … Johnny was a guy who loved Camel cigarettes, and his beverage was gin. Between the two of them [Fellman and Watters] on different afternoons, I spent what little money I had; but by putting their two styles together I think I came up with a style of my own.”
Once his eyes and ears had been opened, he learned from everyone he could. “We had met [Charles Luckeyeth] Luckey Roberts at my auntie’s place … He had three rooms in his apartment with nothing but pianos sitting in them. One reason for this was that he had very strong hands and could break anybody’s piano down. He had fingers as big as my thumbs, and I remember him playing for us on a torn-out piano, and the keys were flying out as he played!”
Then ragtime star Eubie Blake and his songwriting partner Noble Sissle came through Pittsburgh, recognized Hines’s talent, and encouraged him to branch out: “If I catch you here again I’m going to take this cane and wrap it around your head,” warned Blake. “You’ve got to get away from here.” He took the advice, landing in Chicago in 1925; the town was then home to Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong.
“There was an awful lot of racketeering in Chicago,” recalled Hines, “and as they went on the gangsters got into bigger clubs and theatres like the Grand Theatre … Erskine Tate was across the street at the Vendome Theatre, where they showed movies—no sound—and had live musicians.” Hines eventually played with Tate. “Louis Armstrong and I were there together, and from the Vendome we went to our regular work.” The two stuck together, performing at clubs like the Sunset, where Hines met premier dancers including Buck and Bubbles and Sammy Vanderhurst. In some ways, dancers played as large a role in the development of jazz as the instrumentalists. “They did things with their feet that looked impossible,” he said.
Eubie Blake (Illustration credit 7.11)
One of those dance acts was Brown and McGraw. “She was very cute and he was a handsome little fellow, and later on they got married. They were both short, but he had sharp uniforms and she was well developed and always wore a pretty dress. They had a riff they used that later became very popular with big bands. It used to go bomp-bomp-bomp-bu-bomp, bomp-bomp-bomp-bu-bomp, and Louis used to take his trumpet and do it right with them.”
Hines performed at bigger and better venues, like the Grand Terrace, owned by Al Capone, who began to think of the pianist as his personal property and sent along bodyguards to protect him when he was on the road. Over the course of a long career, he toured the world (on a U.S. State Department–sponsored tour of the Soviet Union, he sold out the ten-thousand-seat Kiev Sports Palace, after which the Kremlin cancelled concerts in Moscow and Leningrad as being too dangerous); performed for the Pope and at the White House; and influenced countless pianists through his recordings. He almost gave up the piano in the early 1960s, ready to retire to his tobacconist’s shop, anxious, he claimed, to take up bowling. But critic Stanley Dance talked him into re-emerging in 1964, at which point the pianist garnered a host of awards and captured an entirely new generation of fans.
Earl Hines (Illustration credit 7.12)
His playing was Lisztian in its showmanship and fire. “It unfolds,” wrote critic Whitney Balliett,
in orchestral layers … He will play the first two choruses softly and out of tempo, unreeling placid chords that safely hold the kernel of the melody. By the third chorus, he will have slid into a steady but implied beat and raised his volume. Then, using steady tenths [harmonies he learned from Jim Fellman] in his left hand, he will stamp out a whole chorus of right-hand chords in between beats. He will vault into the upper register in the next chorus and wind through irregularly placed notes, while his left hand plays descending, on-the-beat chords that pass through a forest of harmonic changes. (There are so many push-me, pull-you contrasts going on in such a chorus that it is impossible to grasp it one time through.) In the next chorus—bang!—up goes the volume again and Hines breaks into a crazy-legged double-time-and-a-half run that may make several sweeps up and down the keyboard and that are punctuated by offbeat single notes in the left hand. Then he will throw in several fast descending two-fingered glissandos, go abruptly into an arrhythmic swirl of chords and short, broken runs and, as abruptly as he began it all, ease into an interlude of relaxed chords and poling single notes.
Cecil Taylor (Illustration credit 7.13)
That maze of turbulence in a Hines solo suggests the essence of unconventional pianist Cecil Taylor (b. 1929), whose performances typically unleash an unrelenting blizzard of notes fueled by a ferocious spirit. At New York’s Kool Jazz Festival in Carnegie Hall in 1984, Taylor began backstage, with wails that resonated throughout the bowels of the hall, before suddenly springing into view, dressed in white and sporting his usual array of wiry dreadlocks. Everything about the pianist, including those aggressive strands of hair that point in all directions like accusatory fingers, seems designed to project an aura of calibrated mayhem.
Once he was situated on the piano bench, Taylor swiftly struck the keyboard with his entire forearm. Within seconds, an explosion of sounds lurched and skittered from one end of the instrument to the other—gathering into prickly clumps or darting off into beads of melody. The tones swirled and crunched and thumped, pausing intermittently for just the length of a breath before rippling along again in another torrent of energy. The music began to resemble an unstable weather system. The piano rocked and shivered and moaned. And many members of the audience began pouring out through the exit doors.
Recognized for his individuality with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur “genius” grant, the pianist nevertheless views himself as part of something larger. He has compared his improvisations to the startling, lifelike constructions of Spanish architect and sculptor Santiago Calatrava. Calatrava’s curvaceous bridges and buildings—like the fifty-four-story twisting tower in Malmö, Sweden, named “Turning Torso,” and Chicago’s winding Spire (known by locals as “the Twizzler”)—seem like forces of nature. Yet Taylor’s natural world is filled, not with gentle spirals, but with randomness and fury.
He is, in fact, simply a recent link in that tradition that began with C. P. E. Bach’s blazing fantasies, a celebration of the unpredictable, the impetuous, and the human spirit unbounded.