Anton Rubinstein (Illustration credit 12.1)
THEIRS BECAME one of the most powerful pianistic “schools” of all time. As conservatories were springing up all over Europe—Paris in 1795, followed by Milan, Naples, Prague, Brussels, Geneva, Florence, Vienna, London, The Hague, Leipzig (established in 1843 by Mendelssohn), Munich, Berlin, and Cologne—the one that made the most profound impact was the St. Petersburg Conservatory, founded in 1862 by Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) and Theodor Leschetizky (1830–1915). It instantly came to symbolize what Leschetizky described as the Russian musical spirit: prodigious technique wedded to passion, dramatic power, and extraordinary vitality. St. Petersburg eventually graduated such remarkable figures as Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, though Rubinstein resigned his conservatory post in 1891 to protest racial quotas instituted by Alexander III (imposed because Jews were winning too high a percentage of the annual prizes).
Anton Rubinstein (Illustration credit 12.1)
The Russian tradition had been forged through two musical luminaries of the Romantic era. Franz Liszt imparted rhapsodic fire and dazzling technique. John Field’s tune-based dreaminess fostered a love for the lyrical. In Anton Rubinstein, the first great Russian pianist to step onto American soil, audiences got both.
The man was so shambling and awkward that some witnesses compared him to an elephant. Others called him a bear. In any case, reported writer Sacheverell Sitwell, “He had something animal about his downcast, shaggy head and the shape of his limbs and back.” But Rubinstein was a pianistic force to be reckoned with. It was said that as a young prodigy, he had been kissed by Liszt and proclaimed his successor. And he was ready to assume the mantle.
When his ship arrived in New York in 1872, more than two thousand people gathered to greet the pianist and escort him to his lodgings with a torch-lit parade. Outside his windows at the Clarendon Hotel, members of the Philharmonic serenaded him with Wagner, Beethoven, and Meyerbeer. (Apparently, no one at the Philharmonic realized just how much Rubinstein despised Wagner. After attending the 1865 premiere of Tristan und Isolde in Munich, he threatened to commit suicide. “If that is music,” he argued, “what object have I in living any longer?” Luckily, in New York he restrained himself.)
Rubinstein became known as the “shaggy maestro.” He had a face like Beethoven’s (Liszt called him “Van II”) with a scowling demeanor and an extravagant accumulation of unkempt hair. When he bowed, his tresses fell in his face, and according to one report, they “constantly rebel[led] at being imprisoned behind the ears” when he played. It sparked comparisons to the biblical Samson.
Rubinstein Plays for the Czar (detail), by F. Luis Mora, was one of the first paintings commissioned for the Steinway art collection. (Illustration credit 12.2)
He was an impetuous performer, bringing even jaded orchestra members to “a certain wild and unaccustomed enthusiasm.” His opening concerts lasted an agonizing two and a half to four hours, yet throughout the evening his magnetism was unfailing. Here was a pianist, wrote musicologist H. E. Krehbiel, who “stirred up emotional cyclones wherever he went and scattered wide the wrecks of discriminating judgment.” That suspension of “discriminating judgment” was a lucky thing for Rubinstein, because his performances were usually so riddled with mistakes that when Liszt protégé Moriz Rosenthal (1862–1946) heard the Russian play an absolutely faultless recital, he feigned concern. “Poor Rubinstein!” he said. “His eyesight is failing.”
In New York, the pianist got lost in his own D minor Piano Concerto. “He shook his locks, wove appropriate harmonies and sequences with his great paws, and until he finally found himself, he kept on improvising,” remembered one witness. Yet, as critic Eduard Hanslick noted, Rubinstein continued to fascinate because his virtues arose from “a source rapidly drying up” in the music world—“robust sensuality and love of life.” Like Proust’s grandmother, who said she loved all that was natural in life—“Rubinstein’s mistakes, for example”—the public remained adoring.
Not everyone went along with the crowd. Even the admiring Hanslick complained that Rubinstein’s programs were often “too much for even the strongest nerves.” Clara Schumann derided his playing in 1857: “The piano often sounded awful,” she claimed, “like glass, namely when he made his frightful tremolandos [stormy “shakes” in which the tones are made to tremble] in the bass—truly ridiculous, but they delighted the public.” Rubinstein reported in his autobiography that even Liszt, the perpetual bearer of goodwill, had received him coldly. (In Liszt’s case, the reason was extramusical: Rubinstein had obtained a letter of introduction from the Russian ambassador and used it without checking the contents. It turned out to be a gripe by the ambassador about having to engage in “the tedious duty of patronizing and recommending our various compatriots in order to satisfy their oftentimes clamorous requests. Therefore we recommend to you the bearer of this letter, one Rubinstein.”)
Rubinstein could be coldly unsympathetic himself. Josef Hofmann (who would eventually be recognized as one of the world’s greatest pianists) played for him. “Did you start?” Rubinstein asked after listening to a few measures. “Yes, Master, I certainly did,” replied Hofmann. “Oh,” replied Rubinstein. “I didn’t notice.”
When Rubinstein started, everyone noticed. Newspaper correspondent George W. Bagby, who witnessed a performance by the pianist (familiarly known as “Ruby”), recounted the experience in a literary piece called “Jud Brownin Hears Ruby Play”: “Well, sir he had the blamedest, biggest catty-corneredest pianner you ever laid eyes on—something like a distracted billiard table on three legs … When he first sit down, he peered to care mighty little about playing, and wished he hadn’t come. He tweedle-eedled a little on the treble, and twoodle-oodled some on the bass—just fooling and boxing the thing’s jaws for being in the way.” But once things got going, Bagby was swooning along with the rest of the crowd:
The house trembled, the lights danced, the walls shuck, the sky split, the ground rocked—heavens and earth, creation, sweet potatoes, Moses, ninepences, glory, tenpenny nails, Samson in a ’simmon tree—Bang!!!
With that bang! He lifted himself bodily into the air, and he came down with his knees, fingers, toes, elbows and his nose, striking every single solitary key on the pianner at the same time. The thing busted and went off into seventeen hundred and fifty-seven thousand five hundred and forty-two hemidemi-semi-quivers, and I knowed no mo’ that evening.
Vladimir de Pachmann (Illustration credit 12.3)
Hyperbole aside, a look at Rubinstein’s programs confirms how much more than tweedle and twoodle was going on. His final recitals in New York (a group of seven) included works by J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Mozart, Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and more. The second concert alone included six difficult Beethoven sonatas. At the end of his last performance, the audience rushed to the stage and tore at his clothes in an effort to gather souvenirs; women wept and tried to embrace him. But when he left, he vowed never to do it again.
With the piano firm Steinway backing the tour, Rubinstein had booked 215 concerts (at the staggering fee of two hundred dollars each) in 239 days! “The receipts and the success were invariably gratifying,” he wrote, “but it was all so tedious that I began to despise myself and my art.” Years later he was asked to repeat the tour, but he refused, saying the conditions were inimical to art—“One grows into an automaton, simply performing mechanical work; no dignity remains to the artist, he is lost.” Still, he admitted, “the proceeds of my tour in America laid the foundation of my prosperity. On my return I hastened to invest in real estate.”
OTHERS WERE EAGER to replace him. One of the wildest, least predictable, and most mesmerizing was Vladimir de Pachmann (1848–1933). Born in Odessa, his looks and the music for which he became best known inspired critic James Huneker to dub him “the Chopinzee.” He not only looked like a chimp, he chattered like one too. He’d talk animatedly and mutter throughout his recitals, commenting on the music as he played and, at times, insulting the audience. According to biographer Mark Lindsey Mitchell, “If it was summer, he would pretend to mop his brow; if it was winter, he would shake his fingers to suggest that they were too cold to allow him to play. ‘Bravo, de Pachmann,’ or ‘C’est joli,’ he would say if his playing pleased him; ‘Cochonnerie, cochonnerie!’ if he felt that he had ‘played like a pig.’ ”
He would gaze into the distance and announce that Chopin was in the room, or lecture his adoring listeners on their lack of expertise. Once, when a woman was fanning herself in the front row, he complained, “Madame, I am playing in 3/4 and you are fanning in 6/8.” He “ordered one latecomer to ‘sit down’ in so peremptory a fashion that the unfortunate woman almost sank through the floor,” reported the April 1912 edition of Musical America.
He just couldn’t control himself. Once during a Leopold Godowsky recital, he rushed to the stage and began instructing the performer—a man whose technical mastery was so impeccable, he famously rewrote Chopin’s fiendishly difficult Etudes to make them even harder—on how to play the piano. It was outlandish. But audiences ate it up.
In 1899, writer Willa Cather attended one of his concerts with a friend who had become a Pachmann student. The sound was so ravishing, Cather reported, that her companion had “utterly collapsed” by the time the pianist reached Chopin’s Third Prelude. His playing, she wrote in the December 30 issue of the Courier, was “full of tantalizing pauses and willful subordinations and smothered notes cut short so suddenly that he seems to have drawn them back into his fingers again.” Clearly, there was magic at work.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY found many of Russia’s pianists settling into American conservatories, including New York’s Juilliard School and Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, as a ruling elite. (American pianist Lucy Mary Agnes Hickenlooper [1880–1948] realized the value of a Slavic name and successfully transformed herself into Olga Samaroff, becoming perhaps the most powerful musical educator of her time. She married conductor Leopold Stokowski before he had achieved celebrity status and helped push his career to new heights.)
On the concert stage, however, Russian virtuosos began to reveal a diversity of approaches rather than a monolithic school. There had, after all, been other, less volatile musical influences within the Russian musical world. Sigismond Thalberg, for one, also visited St. Petersburg but, according to Friedrich Wieck, he had to leave after becoming embroiled in a quarrel with one of the tsar’s favorite officers, during which he used intemperate language (apparently, a not uncommon occurrence). “I feel sorrier for Henselt,” remarked Wieck, about another European transplanted to Russia; “they say he is not happy with his wife.”
Indeed, German pianist Adolf von Henselt (1814–1889), a student of Hummel, spent forty years instructing students as the official imperial court pianist. His playing, according to his student Bettina Walker,
suggested a shelling—a peeling off of every particle of fibrous or barky rind; the unveiling of a fine, inner, crystalline, and yet most sensitive and most vitally elastic pith. With this, it suggested a dipping deep, deep down into a sea of tone, and bringing up thence a pearl of flawless beauty and purity; something, too, there was of the exhalation of an essence—so concentrated, so intense, that the whole being of the man seemed to have passed for the moment into his finger tips.
He used to tell his students to imagine they were sinking their fingers in dough.
And Theodor Leschetizky, co-founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein, had been a protégé of Beethoven’s student Carl Czerny (with whom Liszt had also studied). Leschetizky was a tough man to please. He was known to walk beneath his students’ windows after dinner to learn if they were following his instructions.
Renowned pianist Ignaz Friedman (1882–1948) arrived for his audition with Leschetizky armed with a letter of recommendation from his teacher, Hugo Riemann. But after playing, he was told, “Don’t bother with the piano, you will most likely play the tuba better.” The experience of another future star, Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890–1963), was no better. “After I had played,” remembered the virtuoso pianist, “he remarked casually, ‘Well, I could play better with my feet than that.’ ” Nevertheless, the teacher took them both on. Leschetizky claimed there were three indispensables to becoming a virtuoso pianist: one had to be Slavic, Jewish, and a child prodigy. (This was very odd, especially since Leschetitzky was a Catholic, but the statement was no stranger than Vladimir Horowitz’s pronouncement that there were only three kinds of pianists: Jewish, gay, or bad. Horowitz himself fit the first two categories, and occasionally also the third.)
Two Russian pianists from early in the twentieth century, and two from the generation following them, reveal the range of styles that evolved from these influences.
Firebrand Vladimir Horowitz (1903–1989), fleeing his homeland in the wake of the 1917 Revolution, made his way through Europe with a string of triumphs. Anton Rubinstein would have been proud. In 1925, when he played the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto in Hamburg as a last-minute replacement for an ailing musician, conductor Eugen Pabst was so astonished by the power and speed of his playing that he left the podium mid-performance to watch Horowitz’s hands. Booked for two recitals in small halls in Paris, Horowitz found the response so spectacular that he had to play five concerts, the last one at the Paris Opéra. American manager Arthur Judson heard him in Paris in 1928 and signed him up immediately for a tour of the United States.
While Horowitz’s approach was electrifying, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s (1873–1943) playing was described by observers as having been shaped by more restrained, classical sensibilities—the music projected through the “cold white light of analysis.” Of course, he could also soar musically. Critic Harold Schonberg wrote that “only the very greatest vocal artists—a Lotte Lehmann or an Elisabeth Schumann—could shape a phrase with equal finesse and authority.”
In Rachmaninoff’s hands, said composer Nikolai Medtner, “the simplest scale, the simplest cadence” acquired “its primary meaning.” What made his performances especially beautiful was the sense of inevitability he brought to an interpretation. Horowitz, on the other hand, was an emissary of the unexpected, often accused of distorting the music—of ignoring the composer’s intentions in pursuit of added excitement; he was no mere interpreter, but a musical hurricane that held the audience spellbound by the force of his personality.
Vladimir Horowitz (Illustration credit 12.4)
Horowitz’s American debut at Carnegie Hall featured the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto again, this time with Thomas Beecham conducting. “I chose the Tchaikovsky because I knew that I could make such a wild sound,” Horowitz told author David Dubal, “and I could play it with such speed and noise. I very much wanted to have a big success in the United States.” But Beecham, who was also making his debut that night, had a different conception, one that was, in Horowitz’s view, too self-absorbed and too slow. At the event, feeling that time was running out and anxious to make an impression, Horowitz made his move in the last movement, like a thoroughbred in the final stretch of a race. “I wanted to eat the public alive,” said Horowitz, “to drive them completely crazy. Subconsciously, it was in order not to go back to Europe … So in my mind I said, ‘Well, my Englishman, my Lord, I am from Kiev, and I’ll give you something.’ And so I started to make the octaves faster and very wild.” According to The New York Times, “The piano smoked at the keys.”
Sergei Rachmaninoff (Illustration credit 12.5)
The conductor fought to keep up, but he had been taken by surprise, and the situation quickly became hopeless. Horowitz later said, without a hint of remorse, “We ended almost together.” His American career was assured.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was in the audience that night, and he wasn’t pleased. Horowitz reported that Rachmaninoff told him, “Your octaves are the fastest and loudest, but I must tell you, it was not musical. It was not necessary.” So Horowitz recounted the story of how the performance had unfolded, and Rachmaninoff’s perpetually dour expression lightened. “But Rachmaninoff could always find something to complain about in any performance,” said Horowitz. Except for the stunning individuality and spectacular technique both possessed, the two pianists had little in common. Yet they would become lifelong friends.
Rachmaninoff had set out to be a composer, scoring an early success with his most famous piece, the Prelude in C-sharp minor. It became an albatross around his neck. When England beckoned in 1898—where the prelude was published under various titles, including The Burning of Moscow, The Day of Judgment, and The Moscow Waltz [sic]—it was chiefly on the strength of that one hit. Everywhere he went people demanded to hear it. James Huneker reported that it was still an audience favorite in 1918. “The Rachmaninoff ‘fans,’ ” he wrote, “and there were thousands of them in the audience, clamored for the favorite piece … But the chief thing is the fact that Rachmaninoff did not play it. All Flapperdom sorrowed last night, for there are amiable fanatics who follow this pianist from place to place hoping to hear him in this particular Prelude, like an Englishman who attends every performance of the lady lion tamer hoping to see her swallowed by one of her pets.”
In addition to that Prelude, Rachmaninoff created some of the most memorable tunes of our time. Several were turned into pop hits, including “Full Moon and Empty Arms” and “All by Myself,” both taken from themes from his Second Piano Concerto. His wordless song “Vocalise” is simply breathtaking. And the sweeping eighteenth variation from his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra—in which the composer held a mirror to Paganini’s Twenty-fourth Caprice, rising upward wherever Paganini descended and vice versa, yielding a gorgeous, soaring melody—became a favorite of Hollywood filmmakers.
The road had not been easy. His First Symphony was an utter failure (composer César Cui said it “would have delighted the inhabitants of hell”), and soon after its disastrous premiere, Leo Tolstoy reacted to his work by asking, “Is such music needed by anybody?” Rachmaninoff was plunged into a deep depression, relieved only by treatments from hypnotist Nikolai Dahl. As those psychic clouds dispersed, he created his incredibly successful Second Piano Concerto, and dedicated it to Dahl. His subsequent triumphs in America and his growing popularity led some musicians and critics to regard his work as superficial—merely pretty.
Horowitz had been attracted to a very different sort of Rachmaninoff piece: the formidable, intense, and technically daunting Third Piano Concerto. It was just the kind of showpiece that allowed him to shine. Before they ever met, the composer heard from virtuoso violinist Fritz Kreisler that “some young Russian plays [your] Third Concerto and the Tchaikovsky Concerto like nothing I ever heard, and you have to meet him.” So the day after arriving in New York, Horowitz received an invitation from Rachmaninoff to visit.
THE SPIRIT OF RUSSIAN MUSIC by Ilya Itin
It’s difficult to describe the spirit of Russian music, because within the tradition there are so many different personalities. But the general perception of the Russian soul as something dark, heavy, tragic, sometimes explosive but also lyrical, has some merit. Russians tend to go to extremes of ecstatic joy or deep depression.
I think this is all connected to the country’s history. There have been horrors over the centuries, and there is much to cry about. At the same time, Russian art, literature, music, and theater have always been extremely important to the people, more than in a free society, probably because there was no other outlet for public thinking and sharing. That’s why there is a saying that in Russia, a poet is more than a poet.
We think of Russian composers like Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin as embracing their national character. But even Stravinsky, who eventually adopted an international language, was in the Russian tradition of figures like Pushkin who wanted to be a part of the greater European civilization.
There is, of course, more than just one Russian piano tradition. Even to this day, Moscow and St. Petersburg have an uneasy relationship. Speaking simplistically, Moscow pianists are said to play with lots of pedal and lots of gestures. St. Petersburg pianists are described as playing with no pedal, and always looking at the keyboard. This is an exaggeration, of course, but there is a grain of truth in it. Properly speaking, despite various exceptions, the Moscow school seems to develop playing that is free, and very concerned with color and virtuosity. It is extremely outgoing. The St. Petersburg school is seen as more introspective: detail oriented, focused on structure and other intellectual aspects of the art of the piano.
Of course, this was truer in the past. Today, all those stereotypes are less accurate.
They wasted no time. Rachmaninoff began by playing Medtner for Horowitz; then, off they went to the basement of Steinway Hall, where they had their choice of pianos for a run-through of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto. The composer played the orchestra part on one, while Horowitz played the solo part on another. “He swallowed it whole,” said Rachmaninoff. “He had the courage, the intensity, and daring that make for greatness.” Those qualities remained Horowitz trademarks his entire life, despite some long absences from the stage. Other pianists held him in awe, baffled by his peculiar flat-finger technique, the way the little finger of his right hand seemed held in a perpetual curl, the speed and accuracy of his performances, the immensity of his sound, and the painterly way he had of shading and blending the harmonies he played. Eventually, he had his Steinway rigged so that the action had a hair-trigger response. But that couldn’t account for the speed of his playing: his student Gary Graffman (b. 1928) reported that this made the instrument even more difficult to handle for ordinary musicians. He was simply a talent for the ages.
IF HOROWITZ AND RACHMANINOFF represented fire and ice, Sviatoslav Richter (1915–1997) and Vladimir Ashkenazy (b. 1937), leaders in the next generations, offered a more complex and very modern face to this country’s musical heritage. Both were philosophically opposed to the excesses of Romantic piano style. What marked them most as quintessentially Russian was a stubborn streak of independence—cultivated in a totalitarian climate that made every thinking person an “outsider”—along with phenomenal technical command and an unyielding intensity.
Richter, unlike Henri Herz entertaining at the gold mines, or Anton Rubinstein rousing the crowds in New York, found the commercial trappings of his profession repulsive. When he visited America in 1960 at the behest of the Soviet government, he hated the “noise, the cheap culture, the advertising,” and thought about “how happy I’d have been if only I’d missed the train.”
A reclusive, weighty figure with a doleful temperament and steel-like will, he despaired of music’s loss of innocence from the corrupting force of the concert world. Richter’s concept of a perfect recital was to play spur-of-the-moment, without fanfare, in a small, unlit room for a handful of listeners. Little wonder his ideal tour turned out to be of Siberia, that cold stretch of geography—its name means “the sleeping land” in Turkic—whose bleak isolation became an endless horror for men and women sentenced to live there. Between 1929 and 1953, the Soviet authorities shipped more than eighteen million political outsiders to Siberia to endure the deprivations of the Gulag. Ironically, Richter’s six-month sojourn across the Urals and Siberia in 1986, when he was well over seventy, driving to small villages and performing for an audience with no classical experience, was a fantasy come true.
Sviatoslav Richter (Illustration credit 12.6)
“Did you ever see him perform Schubert’s B-flat Sonata?” pianist Charles Rosen once asked. “He closed the piano and lowered the lights, and you got the impression you were one of five people in a small room listening to him. And he played it so slowly, which gave it a feeling of even greater intimacy. Richter was the most intelligent pianist I knew.”
“A concert should be a surprise,” Richter told producer Bruno Monsaingeon. “It loses all its freshness if you tell the audience in advance that they should expect something special: It prevents them from listening. That’s why I now play in the dark, to empty my head of all non-essential thoughts and allow the listener to concentrate on the music rather than on the performer. What’s the point of watching a pianist’s hands or face, when they really only express the effort being expended on the piece?”
Emil Gilels (Illustration credit 12.7)
In his desire to distill the concert experience down to an ideal essence, he even gave up the process of selecting his instrument. “[One] reason why I played badly in America,” he claimed, “was because I was allowed to choose my own piano. I was presented with dozens and I spent all the time thinking that I’d chosen the wrong one. Nothing is worse for a pianist than to choose the instrument on which he’s going to have to perform. You should play on whichever piano happens to be in the hall, as though fate intended it so. Everything then becomes much easier from a psychological point of view.” And what if the instrument turns out to be disastrous? “You have to believe, more than St. Peter, that you’ll walk on water,” he said.
Largely self-taught, Richter performed in clubs as a teenager, accompanying singers, violinists, circus acts, and amateur stagings of operatic scenes. Then, at twenty-two, he played for legendary teacher Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory. Neuhaus’s students included such world-class artists as Emil Gilels (1916–1985)—who told admirers during a concert tour of the United States, “Wait until you hear Richter”—and Romanian pianist Radu Lupu (b. 1945), who won such major competitions as Leeds and the Cliburn. But the teacher reportedly confessed that in Richter he had found the pianist he had been waiting for all of his life.
Richter once described Neuhaus as the man who taught him “how to make silences sound,” a skill he put to expert use. “I devised a little trick” when playing the Liszt Sonata, he reported. “You come on to the stage and sit down. Without a motion, and in silence, you count up to thirty. And then there’s a kind of panic in the audience. What’s going on? And only after that long silence, [you play] that first G. Of course it’s theatrical, but in music, an element of surprise is essential. Many pianists serve you a menu of dishes you know in advance. But the unexpected is what makes an impression.”
Richter with Neuhaus (Illustration credit 12.8)
There was, of course, one inescapable constant in Richter’s life: the totalitarian state. And, like most Soviet artists, he rode a pendulum between obedience and rebellion. He remembered playing at Stalin’s funeral—a long fugue by Bach, at which the audience hissed. He was playing on an upright piano, he recalled, and the pedals weren’t working. “I couldn’t play under such conditions,” he said. “I stuffed a score under the pedal to make it work. Meanwhile I saw people running all around. They thought I was planting a bomb. The whole thing was repulsive.” The police escorted him away.
Pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy won prizes in the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw and the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels before sharing first place in the 1962 Tchaikovsky Competition with British pianist John Ogdon (1937–1989). But the indignities and constraints of the Soviet regime became unbearable for him and he escaped with his Icelandic wife to the West, where his piano and conducting careers still flourish.
He has reported that Richter “magnetized” him—“He created his own inner world. There is a feeling of spontaneity, of creating in the moment.” At the same time Ashkenazy demonstrated an independent streak from the start by determinately avoiding Neuhaus as a teacher.
THE PIANO AND POLITICS
The piano was used as a political tool well before Richter performed at Stalin’s funeral (at the behest of the authorities), or (as a protest) at the burial of author Boris Pasternak in 1960. Another Iron Curtain artist, the virtuosic pianist György Cziffra (1921–1994), was arrested in the early 1950s and sent into forced labor for attempting to escape Soviet-dominated Hungary, as a result of which he took to wearing a large black wristband while performing.
Pianist Ignacy Paderewski used his stature as a pianist during World War I to bolster the prestige of the Polish National Committee, before becoming his country’s prime minister in 1919. Later, as the Second World War plunged his country into grief once again, he raised money for Poland’s relief efforts through concerts.
The instrument has most often been used as a political tool by bringing to an event a special sense of occasion. When a peace treaty was being negotiated in Potsdam on July 19, 1945, to end the war, President Truman asked American pianist Eugene List to perform for the gathered world leaders. The president turned pages for him. “If you can imagine,” said List, “here was Stalin puffing on his pipe and Churchill with his cigar sort of leaning on the piano. And then I played. I tried to play some Russian music and some American and British, as well as some Chopin for President Truman. Churchill was not a music lover, which surprised me because he was a great writer, and orator, and liked to paint.
“I played the theme of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto,” List remembered, “and Stalin sprang to his feet and said, ‘I want to propose a toast to the sergeant.’ I couldn’t believe it! I was about twenty-two years old. I didn’t know what to do. I was rooted to the spot. The President beckoned to me to come forward to the center of the floor and somebody stuck a glass of vodka in my hand—it was so unbelievable!” The next day, Stalin sent to Moscow for Soviet musicians, to even the score.
The Steinway “GI” piano in the field, 1943 (Illustration credit 12.9)
Unbeknownst to these heads of state, their fierce enemy Adolf Hitler also had a pianist. Ernst Hanfstaengl (nicknamed “Putzi”) had been a student at Harvard University, where he was remembered as a cheerleader as well as “for his thundering renditions of Wagnerian music and the apprehension felt by his hearers for any piano which he attacked.” Hanfstaengl joined the Nazis—he claimed that the chant of “Sieg Heil” and its accompanying arm movement was a technique that had been used by American football cheerleaders, and that the Führer had learned it from him. He was playing for Hitler on a regular basis (mostly Wagner) soon after, and published a Hitler Song Book in 1924.
“Putzi was to Hitler what harp-playing David was to Saul,” reported Louis P. Lochner of the Associated Press. “He eased der Führer out of his frequent fits of depression with his piano playing.” Indeed, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, remembering Putzi from his days at Harvard, sent suggestions for keeping Hitler under control: “Try and use the soft pedal if things get too loud.”
(Hanfstaengl reported that besides Wagner, Hitler liked Verdi, Chopin, Richard Strauss, Liszt, Grieg, and Gypsy music, though he disliked Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.)
The piano had actually been a presence all through the war, with American troops receiving Steinway “GI” pianos in the field, airdropped from planes. Steinway created these models for their ability to function in rugged terrain, and soldiers sometimes congregated around them even in battle-ready settings.
A profound political moment for the piano in America was Van Cliburn’s surprising win, in 1958, of the first Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. At the height of the cold war, a victorious Cliburn returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York and cover placement on Time magazine.
But perhaps the most remarkable political turnaround in modern piano history occurred in China. The instrument was banned during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Today, that country is actually at the forefront of producing the next great wave of pianists, and pianos as well.
Vladimir Ashkenazy (Illustration credit 12.10)
As a young pianist, he gripped listeners with a combination of Romantic fire and masterful control. As he matured, Ashkenazy came to view the classic Russian approach as too extreme. “There is still a fascination with Russian playing in the West,” he declared.
That is, playing with a lot of freedom. But it goes against the grain in certain types of music. What I like about Russian ballet is that the dancers don’t necessarily take their steps from the rhythm of the music. It’s like a rubato [gently holding back or rushing forward] in movement. On the stage it’s fine, and it doesn’t upset the pattern or basic expression of the dance. But in the Russian way of understanding music, this can be bad … You don’t need to take big liberties in Mozart or Beethoven or Bach. I think there should be an interpretation that arises from within the music, not so much from a concern with being “free.”
He points admiringly to Rachmaninoff, “a composer who knew how to get from point A to point B: He understood that the music had to move in a certain way.” Indeed, one of the attributes of Ashkenazy’s impeccable playing is its remarkable clarity and freedom from mannerisms. He remains one of the world’s great players.
THE ANTI-ROMANTIC STREAM in Russian pianism was most forcefully represented by another important talent to emerge from the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Even as a student, Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) exploited the percussive side of the piano. His teacher, the formidable Annette Essipov (one of Leschetizky’s four wives) reported in the spring of 1910 that Prokofiev “has assimilated little of my method.” But the steel-like touch and technical freedom for which he became known were hallmarks of the Essipov-Leschetizky school.
Sergei Prokofiev (Illustration credit 12.11)
Neuhaus described Prokofiev’s piano style: “Energy, confidence, indomitable will, steel rhythm, powerful tone (sometimes even hard to bear in a small room), a peculiar ‘epic quality’ that scrupulously avoided any suggestion of over-refinement or intimacy (there is none in his music either), yet withal a remarkable ability to convey true lyricism, poetry, sadness … His technique was truly phenomenal, impeccable.” As a composer, Prokofiev displayed a brilliant flair for combining percussive and lyrical qualities, and, like many Soviet musicians, he often imbued his music with a biting sense of irony (even calling one set of piano pieces Sarcasms). The composer’s spine-tingling Piano Concerto no. 3, with perpetual-motion piano lines—grinding away like the ceaseless gears of an industrial mill—remains an audience favorite. His strange and haunting Piano Concerto no. 2 is unique in the literature.
Prokofiev’s colleague Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975), who shared a similar sensibility, suffered the worst that Stalin’s government could dish out to artists who failed to toe the party line. His work was panned in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, with this assessment: “Snatches of melody, the beginnings of a musical phrase, are drowned, emerge again, and disappear in a grinding and squealing roar. To follow this ‘music’ is most difficult, to remember it, impossible.” The composer was so fearful of the authorities that he slept in the hallway outside his apartment so that his family would be untouched should the police come to take him away.
Tatiana Nikolayeva (Illustration credit 12.12)
Among his most evocative piano works is a celebrated set of twenty-four preludes and fugues, written after he had served as a judge at a piano competition at which a young contestant, Tatiana Nikolayeva, offered to play from memory any of the forty-eight preludes and fugues of Bach’s Well- Tempered Clavier. She won the gold medal, and subsequently played the premiere of Shostakovich’s work when it was completed in 1951. Despite political obstacles, the power of his music proved intractable.