ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE. Along with Russian extroverts and German introverts, there were purveyors of other regional styles who added their own subtle ingredients to the grand musical stew. Among the offerings, gourmands could sample Polish panache, English earthiness, French charm, Italian refinement, and American spontaneity.
In Poland, the deep melancholy of the country’s greatest musical poet, Frédéric Chopin, had a counterpart in a buoyant folk spirit that thrived in towns all along the Baltic Sea. It could also be found in wandering ensembles like the klezmer bands that migrated from Poland through the Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and, ultimately, to America. These groups took Near Eastern and European elements, liturgical and secular materials, old traditions and spontaneous improvisations and blended them all into a joyous celebration. That raw vitality could also infect Polish classical performers.
The country’s pianism, like the Polish language itself (which over time absorbed parts of Czech, Ukrainian, Turkish, Hungarian, German, Italian, and Latin), incorporated many influences. Those who left at an early age to study and perform abroad, like pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky (1870–1938), who began his career at the age of ten, merged their national sensibilities with those found in newer horizons. Godowsky’s approach married Polish sparkle with Germanic precision, all wrapped up in jaw-dropping technical finesse. Heinrich Neuhaus, the legendary teacher of the Moscow Conservatory, was a Godowsky student. He recalled his mentor’s “small hands that seemed chiseled out of marble and were incredibly beautiful (as a good thoroughbred racehorse is beautiful, or the body of a magnificent athlete), and see with what simplicity, lightness, ease, logic and, I would say, wisdom, they performed their super-acrobatic task.”
Godowsky paid homage to Poland’s native heritage by transforming the music of its favorite son into something entirely new, and staggeringly complex. His fifty-three Studies on Chopin’s Etudes raised the difficulty of Chopin’s original versions from the merely treacherous to the nearly impossible. He even combined two wellknown Chopin Etudes so that they could be performed simultaneously, the left hand playing one and the right hand the other. Few players can sail easily over his music’s hurdles. Yet, for Godowsky, who had yearned as a youngster to study with Liszt, the feat was apparently not very difficult. Critic James Huneker aptly called him “an apparition. A Chopin doubled by a contrapuntalist … The spirit of the German cantor and the Polish tone-poet in curious conjunction. He is a miracle worker.”
Polish-American Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982) admitted, “It would take me five hundred years to get a mechanism like Godowsky’s.” And Rubinstein was no slouch. A bon vivant who relished fine wine, good cigars, and beautiful women, he was often regarded as the yin to Vladimir Horowitz’s yang. If the high-strung Russian Horowitz was a lightning storm, Rubinstein, a more Germanic player, was a summer breeze. Fans of each claimed for their favorite the accolade of greatest pianist of the age.
Arthur Rubinstein revisiting his hometown of Lodz, Poland, in 1976 (Illustration credit 14.1)
He showered the music and his audiences with warmth. Indeed, his daughter Alina has suggested that when she wanted to feel her father’s love, the place to find it was in the concert hall. Over the course of a long career, he evolved from a young piano personality with uneven accuracy into a seasoned artist who approached the repertoire with seriousness, dignity, and an uncanny talent for making it all sound natural. He almost single-handedly changed the way we hear Chopin. In a 1960 article for The New York Times Rubinstein wrote of rejecting the common myth of Chopin as “effeminate if appealing, dipping his pen in moonlight to compose nocturnes for sentimental young women.” In Rubinstein’s hands, Chopin’s music became full-bodied and resolute: clearly heartfelt, yet also muscular—in a word, more “masculine.” Rubinstein’s musical qualities seem to shine through various photos taken of him in action at the keyboard, or dancing through the streets of his birthplace; he radiates the pure joy of life, in a constant celebration of the beautiful.
There was no reckless Russian excess here, but rather tender nobility, playing of emotional sweep tinged with German pensiveness. Little wonder that Rubinstein became a model for the modern Romantic player. His sound was tonally inviting, virile, stirring yet unsentimental, his passions an open book on and off the stage. He was also an ideal musical collaborator. Rubinstein’s chamber ensemble with violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky became known as the Million-Dollar Trio. As a result of his travels, several composers from Spain and South America—Manuel de Falla and Heitor Villa-Lobos, among others, from whom he commissioned works—became lifelong friends.
But perhaps the most formidable Polish-American virtuoso was Josef Hofmann (1876–1957). He was born in Podgórze, a fishing village near Kraków, and made his impressive musical debut at the tender age of six; he concertized at New York’s Metropolitan Opera when he was only eleven. Despite his youth, he set the town on its ear. “Pianists of repute were moved almost to tears. Some wiped the moisture from their eyes,” declared The New York Times. As the years went on, his playing grew even more impressive. He performed in Europe, America, and Russia, giving an astounding series of twenty-one concerts in St. Petersburg in 1913, which included 255 compositions.
His style was impulsive—full of subtle and not-so-subtle contrasts—with sonic gradations that ranged from volcanic outbursts to gentle murmurs. Sometimes he exhibited the full scope of these contrasts all at once, effortlessly shaping the individual lines in a busy musical texture as if they were each being rendered by a separate musician. This was pianistic control at its peak. As writer David Dubal pointed out, “His spontaneity was deeply calculated.” Yet, his finely etched passagework, the hues he elicited from his keyboard harmonies, his masterful rhythmic flair and puckish sense of play were all simply breathtaking.
Hofmann was regarded by many of his peers as perhaps the greatest pianist of all. Late in life, Rachmaninoff declared him “still … the greatest pianist alive if he is sober and in form.” Sobriety was actually his greatest challenge.
Like Godowsky’s, his hands were small. In fact, he had a special piano built with narrower keys to accommodate their limited span. His students at the Curtis Institute of Music, not realizing the keyboard was constructed to be narrower than usual, hit wrong notes whenever they tried to play it, and came to believe the instrument was haunted. (The idea of narrower keyboards has been catching on, especially as a boon to students with very small hands, as a way of preventing strain and injury. At Southern Methodist University, Texas Tech University, the University of North Texas, and the University of Nebraska, some students are using 7/8- and 15/16-size keyboards produced by Steinbuhler & Company of Titusville, Pennsylvania.)
Young Josef Hofmann (Illustration credit 14.2)
Unlike his teacher, the wild, longhaired Romantic Anton Rubinstein (who first heard him perform at the age of seven and expressed astonishment), Hofmann eschewed flamboyance. Instead, he took on the demeanor of a business executive, and cultivated skills on the tennis court. Along with stupendous musical gifts, he possessed a mind brimming with ideas—his seventy patents included designs for pneumatic shock absorbers for cars and planes, the automatic windshield wiper (which purportedly had its origins in the metronome), and a house that revolved with the sun. Among his students was the formidable Shura Cherkassky (1909–1995), regarded as perhaps the last great Romantic.
OTHER PARTS OF the globe exhibited their own particular traits. The stalwart English—hardy, forthright, and free of flashiness—played piano like ideal hosts at an afternoon tea: solidly self-assured and models of propriety. Among the best were the elegant Sir Clifford Curzon (1907–1982), who studied with Wanda Landowska and Artur Schnabel; the muscular Dame Myra Hess (1890–1965); and the phenomenal Solomon, born Solomon Cutner (1902–1988).
They were as upright and dependable as the guards at Buckingham Palace. Their Germanic tendencies were reinforced by a piano-technique guru named Tobias Matthay (1858–1945), whose many books—including The Act of Touch in All Its Diversity (1903) and The Visible and Invisible in Pianoforte Technique (1947)—offered a method for ease of movement in performance. The results left some observers cold. Of Dame Myra Hess, a student of Matthay, Virgil Thomson declared, “She is not memorable, like a love affair; she is satisfactory, like a good tailor.”
Sir Clifford Curzon (Illustration credit 14.3)
Nevertheless, Hess had many fans on both sides of the Atlantic, and, despite Thomson’s assessment, Americans were especially enthusiastic about her gifts. “In England, it is as if people hope I will play well,” she explained; “in America they positively expect me to play well.” Thomson’s criticism might have contained a kernel of truth, but she could certainly muster the fire, especially in a big concerto.
Her friend, critic and conductor Arthur Mendel, made an interesting observation about these diverging views of her playing. Lamenting the differences between what he considered to be her less-than-inspiring recordings and his recollections of hearing her live, Mendel concluded that in person Hess emitted a kind of charismatic spark that went beyond the music and reached into the listener. “I think,” he wrote, “[that] performance for her was essentially communication to an audience.” She certainly had a talent for winning over a crowd. According to one charming but probably apocryphal story, someone noticed the pencil marking “L.U.” scattered throughout her printed music, and inquired what it stood for. The initials turned out to represent the words “look up”; they were a reminder for the pianist to gaze heavenward at key moments in order to convey the impression that she was under the spell of divine inspiration.
Hess became the inspiration for an entire nation during World War II. When London’s National Gallery was emptied of art to protect it from German bombs, Hess organized a series of concerts in the space; one thousand people showed up for the opening concert instead of the expected fifty. Her ongoing presentations there, which continued throughout the fighting, became a symbol of the enduring spirit of Londoners in the face of terrible adversity. In 1941, a grateful King George VI made her Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. At war’s end, when the artworks were returned and the concerts ceased, a great many British citizens expressed a profound sense of loss.
IF ENGLISH PIANISTS subtly reflected their reserved cultural atmosphere, the frothy, rich sauces of Parisian cuisine and the sleek, immaculate fashions of Milan also suggested the pianistic character of those regions. Even before Friedrich Kalkbrenner and Henri Herz introduced to France such techniques as “caressing” the keys (sliding the finger from the middle to the edge of the key with gentle pressure) and producing jeu perlé—successions of notes that sound like beaded pearls—French playing was a highly sensual affair, characteristically light and fleet. One of the country’s greatest pianists, Marguerite Long (1874–1966), described the sound as “lucid, precise, and slender,” one that prized “grace” rather than “force.”
Paradoxically, France’s most famous piano personality, Alfred Cortot (1877–1962), fit no easy category. His highly polished technique, honed at the Paris Conservatory under Émile Descombes, a disciple of Chopin, was typical of the French. But Cortot’s fascination with Wagner’s music led him to Bayreuth, where he became a choral coach and then an assistant conductor. Returning to France in 1902, twenty-three-year-old Cortot conducted the Parisian premiere of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.
The surface beauty of Cortot’s French side took root in that Wagnerian soil, and the result was a pianism that combined Long’s lucid and graceful execution with a palpable sense of mood and drama. According to the distinguished American pianist Murray Perahia (b. 1947), Cortot “followed an inner emotional logic … He would change tempo if he felt the dramatic context required it, getting faster if the mood became more restless, slowing down if he wanted to show the culmination of a thought.” The result was unconventional, yet highly convincing.
Perahia’s own training, cemented at Marlboro Music, was in the German analytic and chamber tradition—his recording career was launched, in fact, as a Mozart pianist and conductor—yet he became a huge fan of Cortot. The Frenchman’s cross-pollination of styles reflected Perahia’s own circuitous journey. In the 1980s Vladimir Horowitz became Perahia’s mentor, and the younger pianist began to inject more risk and drama into his playing, which made him especially sympathetic to Cortot’s force of personality. Indeed, revealed Perahia, Horowitz had actually studied with Cortot. “He told me that when he left Russia his teacher, Felix Blumenthal, told him that the only person in the West that he really must work with was Cortot,” said Horowitz’s last protégé. “He studied all the Beethoven Sonatas with Cortot, though Cortot wasn’t very nice. Of course, there probably was a touch of anti-Semitism in Cortot,” says Perahia. “He had a very dodgy war record.”
ITALIAN PIANISTS were not so enamored of Wagnerian drama nor of shimmering surface color. Italian playing tends to be superbly polished, and as reliable as a Swiss clock, but by historical imperative it is driven by the “singing line.” The best Italian performers are unfailingly lyrical and elegant, with never a note out of place. In some ways they mirror postwar Italian architecture, such as Rome’s Termini Railway Station and Milan’s Torre Velasca skyscraper, models of clarity in design and impeccable attention to detail.
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920–1995), perhaps the greatest Italian pianist of the twentieth century, could “no more hit a wrong note or smudge a passage than a bullet can be veered off course once it has been fired,” wrote Harold Schonberg. Yet he was never lacking in emotion: Cortot labeled Michelangeli “a new Liszt,” and in some repertoire, particularly Beethoven, he could rally all the forces of darkness. Nevertheless, the surgical precision of his performance was striking, a quality that also characterized the playing of one of his students, piano great Maurizio Pollini (b. 1942).
Still, the Italians, particularly those of today’s generation, play even contemporary works with the sweet breadth of an operatic aria, full of phrases that linger.
YOUNG AMERICAN PIANISTS seized the opportunity to study with masters of each of these styles, clamoring to work with such eminences as Cortot, Rubinstein, Hofmann, Serkin, and a host of Russian pedagogues. They adopted what they liked, rejected what didn’t suit them, and integrated what remained into a brash, sure-footed style that was infused with America’s greatest artistic asset: an inborn improvisatory flair.
Leon Fleisher (b. 1928), a student of Artur Schnabel, was one of the best of that young American school. He made his Carnegie Hall debut at age sixteen with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of conductor Pierre Monteux, who dubbed him “the pianistic find of the century.” Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, he fulfilled every expectation of greatness. Then, at the age of thirty-six, Fleisher developed weakness in two fingers of his right hand; they began to curl involuntarily.
There was no explanation for it, though in time it garnered the official diagnosis of “focal dystonia.” “I went from doctor to doctor,” he recalled. “I tried everything from aroma therapy to Zen Buddhism and no one had any answers … [But] it usually happens to people who use fine muscles under pressure. It hits surgeons in the hands, horn players in the lips, and singers in the vocal cords.” The pianist turned to repertoire for the left hand alone (much of it previously commissioned by pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in World War I), and pursued other artistic avenues, such as conducting and teaching.
The roster of his students included the phenomenally successful André Watts (b. 1946), whose own electrifying teenage debut took place with conductor Leonard Bernstein; the masterful French-Canadian musician Louis Lortie; and Yefim Bronfman (b. 1958), the Russian-Israeli-American pianist described by Philip Roth in his novel The Human Stain as “Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo!”
Though Fleisher’s playing was far less muscular, Roth’s account of Bronfman’s performance suggests the kind of rapturous response that the teacher himself once inspired:
Enter Bronfman to play Prokofiev at such a pace and with such bravado as to knock my morbidity clear out of the ring … When he’s finished, I thought, they’ll have to throw the thing out. He crushes it. He doesn’t let that piano conceal a thing. Whatever’s in there is going to come out, and come out with its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption. With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly gone, and though he takes all his fire off with him like no less a force than Prometheus, our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, nobody—not if Bronfman has anything to say about it!
Fleisher’s flashes of insight, delivered like poetic lightning bolts, are legendary. Writer Anne Midgette, who co-authored Leon Fleisher’s 2010 autobiography, My Nine Lives, recalled the advice he gave Bronfman on the proper approach to Rachmaninoff. When playing Rachmaninoff, said Fleisher, the sound must “stay cool, so cool that it’s hot, like dry ice. That’s the way to generate heat in that music.”
Such visceral images are only the beginning of a larger picture for Fleisher. “Your focus is not exactly on the poetry or tragedy or pathos of the phrase you’re playing,” he says in his book.
You’re thinking about the quality of sound you’re getting. You’re thinking about how to play the rhythms so they come to life. You’re thinking about how to depress the pedal—sometimes only halfway or one-third of the way—so that you support the phrase with the resonance of the strings, and then, when the next thought begins, you release the pedal and stop the haze of sound and start again fresh. What you gradually learn is that focusing on the score and learning to understand it and developing an awareness of the music’s structure actually broaden your expressive possibilities rather than limiting them. It’s only through that process that you start expressing things that are truly worth expressing.
In recent years Fleisher has been able to return to the piano thanks to various medical treatments, including botox injections to keep his hand muscles from spasming.
In a strange twist of fate, Leon Fleisher’s American colleague Gary Graffman (b. 1928) was also struck with a hand ailment in 1977. “We think it happened,” he explained,
when I was playing the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto no. 1 with the Berlin Philharmonic, using a brand new, totally dead piano. New pianos are often brilliant sounding, but this one wasn’t. I had been told (incorrectly) that Richter had just used it, and that he had been happy with the results. In any case, there was no time to make a change.
To get more sound—but also in anger—I hit a key with my fourth finger, and used such force that the knuckle went up and out. When I returned to New York, my doctor said it was a typical “baseball finger”—something that happens to athletes—and that it would hurt for a while and then get better. I was facing lots of concerts, and to get back in the swing, I started re-fingering the music I was playing.
Subconsciously, I was protecting my fourth finger, using my thumb and third fingers to play octaves. And there was secretly another reason: when a friend in the audience told me, “Now, I see how you get such a big sound: using fingers 1 and 3 really makes a difference!” I thought, I guess it’s a good idea. I was playing with more power. Of course, I was also hurting myself.
His wife, Naomi, had her own take on the matter: pianos, she said, were not designed for humans but for gorillas. Nevertheless, the lessons learned from these cases have spawned educational programs and medical research to prevent future injuries.
PIANO TECHNIQUE
Proper piano technique has always been a contentious subject, and it remains so. Mechanical devices to improve finger dexterity (the kind that ruined Robert Schumann’s hand) had a history as far back as John Bernard Logier’s early-nineteenth-century Position Frame, a contraption into which students inserted their hands as far as the wrists. It allowed only horizontal motion, keeping unnecessary movement to a minimum and forcing the wrists to maintain a “correct” level of rotation. (Clara Schumann’s father, Friedrich Wieck, endorsed the Logier method.) Somehow, the idea that practicing should feel bad became a popular notion in the nineteenth century. In Germany, there was the vise, built to stretch the fourth finger into obedient submission. In America, the Atkins Finger-Supporting Device used springs attached to overhanging rings for each finger, adding extra resistance to build the strength of each digit.
The Atkins Finger-Supporting Device (Illustration credit 14.4)
The vise (Illustration credit 14.5)
The pursuit of superhuman technical abilities encouraged the editor of The Etude magazine to endorse surgically cutting the connective tissue that binds the fingers to each other. More natural methods, like those advocated by Tobias Matthay, stressed the importance of proper touch and arm movement. However, as Juilliard teacher Martin Canin explained, “There are all kinds of approaches, and they each have their cult following. If you believe in something, it works.” Canin studied with a disciple of technique guru Demetrius Constantine Dounis (1886–1954). “He had me play exercises while sitting on the floor,” Canin reported. It’s not a practice routine he recommends.
Two modern-day proponents of natural coordination in piano playing are Dorothy Taubman and her former protégée Edna Golandsky, for whom acolytes claim miraculous results. Taubman even asserted that she could cure Fleisher and Graffman if only they would place themselves in her hands. However, they were informed that it would require abandoning forever their entire learned repertoire and starting afresh. Since for these two pianists that trove of studied music amounted to nearly all the piano masterpieces of the Western canon, neither pursued the matter.
Some inventors have tinkered with the piano keyboard in an effort to reduce the physical stress on players. The Jankó Keyboard, for example, designed in 1882 by Hungarian engineer Paul von Jankó, offered players a complex, symmetrical array of keys (264 in place of the usual eighty-eight), arranged so that all chords and scales follow the same shape, and wide stretches are virtually eliminated. Franz Liszt predicted that it “will have replaced the present piano keyboard in fifty years.” He was wrong.
The psychological pressures that musicians face have also come under scrutiny in recent times. Studies show that great numbers of musicians have intense performance anxiety, and a shorter life expectancy than the general population. The plight of child prodigies in particular was revealed in a provocative autobiographical memoir called Forbidden Childhood by pianist Ruth Slenczynska (b. 1925). Slenczynska’s account stands as a warning against “stage mothers and fathers” in the music world. It’s worth noting, for those addicted to the spectacle of young, emotionally undeveloped virtuosos tackling the deepest works of the piano literature, that in its archaic meaning, “prodigy” derives from prodigium, the Latin word for “omen” and “monster” (rather than “artist”).
Fleisher and Graffman came to represent a generation of American pianists who experienced setbacks at the peak of their careers—the list included William Kapell (1922–1953), Eugene Istomin (1925–2003), and William Masselos (1920–1992)—through injury, physical or psychological fragility, or early death.
YET THE BEAT GOES ON. In the 1950s, the next American generation emerged, spearheaded by an East Texas naïf who unexpectedly changed the course of history. Small-town piano teacher Rildia Bee Cliburn had wanted her son, Harvey Lavan (“Van”) Cliburn Jr. (b. 1934), to study with the legendary Olga Samaroff (née Lucy Hickenlooper). But Samaroff had passed away before he arrived at the Juilliard School, and he began studies instead with Rosina Lhevinne. As it turned out, the match between student and teacher couldn’t have been better. “His playing touched a deep Russian chord in her,” remembered former Juilliard classmate Jeaneane Dowis. “For Rosina, Van was first. Maybe we were all close seconds, but he was always first.”
What made Cliburn’s playing so singular? There was, in the words of one Texas patron, his “magnolia blossom sound”—warm and full-hearted, a valentine to his audience. And then there was his phrasing.
The Chinese have an expression for movement that is delicately balanced and extremely graceful; they describe it as “like pulling silk from a cocoon.” Cliburn’s musical lines had an exquisite elasticity that gently tugged in one direction or another without ever breaking the thread. His way with a phrase was like pulling silken melodies from an endless cocoon. “He had a physical genius,” explained Dowis. “It was so natural—he didn’t have to think about what he was doing. He was unafraid to pick up his hands and drop them from two feet in the air. [Fellow classmate] John Browning was jealous of that. John had a good technique, but he had to work for it. Van did not; for him it came from the birds and the bees and the trees and the air.”
In 1958, at a time when America was in the throes of a panic engendered by the launch of the Soviet’s Sputnik space satellite, Cliburn entered the very first Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. His career at home, despite some awards and small-scale management, had not been going well. But when he arrived on the Moscow stage and began to play, the Tchaikovsky jury was completely overwhelmed. Sviatoslav Richter, who was told to rate pianists on a scale of one to twenty-five, gave Cliburn one hundred, and all the other contestants zero throughout the proceedings. He proclaimed the American “a genius.” Emil Gilels rushed forward in tears and kissed him. Composer Aram Khachaturian said he was “better than Rachmaninoff.” Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had to be consulted before the first prize was awarded to this foreigner, but it was nearly impossible for him to refuse.
Van Cliburn at the Moscow competition (Illustration credit 14.6)
Cliburn returned home to cheering crowds and a ticker-tape parade. Time magazine commented, “He may be Horowitz, Liberace and Presley rolled into one.” The West saw it as a political as well as a musical victory, and he sold out sports stadiums playing his signature piece, the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. Yet, before long, critics began to complain about the sameness of his repertoire, and eventually, the seeming depletion of his early “fire.” Just one year after his phenomenal win, critic Paul Henry Lang wrote of Cliburn’s failings, noting that he was being “hounded and clobbered by the public and the entrepreneurs.”
Cliburn’s ticker-tape parade in New York (Illustration credit 14.7)
The pianist, like Augie March’s grandma, a character created by the novelist Saul Bellow, had always been “as thin and full of play as fiddle wire.” Now he was losing weight and becoming increasingly exhausted, plagued by personal demons as well as public pressures. After Moscow, he had wisely described his own celebrity as not really “a success” but just “a sensation.” Now the sensation was fading.
Nevertheless, for a while, his star power continued to attract fans. In 1962, when Cliburn and Igor Stravinsky both performed at the New York World’s Fair, the pianist played to a packed, enthusiastic house while the composer conducted his ballet score The Firebird to a half-empty hall. Still, his career trajectory followed a long downward slope. Finally, he took an eleven-year “intermission,” returning to play only sporadically. Meanwhile, in Fort Worth, Texas, a group of piano teachers created a piano competition in his honor, beginning in 1962. Scheduled to take place every four years, it continues to this day.
THE TCHAIKOVSKY AND CLIBURN competitions weren’t the first of their kind, but they arose long before the field became cluttered. Over the decades, such contests have proliferated faster than Fibonacci’s rabbits. In 1945, there were only five international piano competitions. By 1990, the number had risen to 114. Today there are at least 750.
Many great artists—Vladimir Horowitz, Rudolf Serkin, Glenn Gould, and Byron Janis among them—never entered one. And early competitions, like the discontinued Leventritt, established in 1939 in memory of lawyer Edgar M. Leventritt, fostered an intimate atmosphere that has by now been lost. “[The Leventritt] was held when Rudolf Serkin and [conductor] George Szell were available,” remembered Gary Graffman.
After their availability was settled, other conductors were invited, along with several pianists, and the powerful manager Arthur Judson. Only performers who might actually win were allowed into the finals. And the jurors could talk openly with each other about their reactions, which is forbidden in most of today’s contests.
This was a good thing. I remember getting a phone call from Rudolf Serkin about Van Cliburn; he thought Van’s Beethoven was terrible, but he loved the beauty of his playing, and he encouraged me to hear him. Today, Van would get deductions from judges who disliked the way he played a particular composer. And, of course, the Leventritt winners had instant concert bookings through the jury members, which was an immediate career boost.
It was a far simpler time. By now, major competitions—the Cliburn, Leeds, Chopin, Queen Elisabeth, Gina Bachauer, Montreal, Esther Honens, and others—have taken on the attributes of large-scale sports events. Recently, a new trend has emerged: some competition winners—like Alexander Ghindin, who won top prizes in many prestigious competitions, including the Tchaikovsky, Queen Elisabeth, Cleveland International, and, in 2010, the International Piano Competition of Santa Catarina in Brazil—have turned contests into a career, entering new ones as soon as the cash prizes and performing opportunities gained through their last win begin to dwindle.
The Gilmore Prize, established by the Kalamazoo, Michigan, Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, was an attempt to circumvent this trend. Billed as a “noncompetition” competition, a traveling jury selects a winner every four years from a pool of pianists who don’t know they are being judged. The idea, almost universally hailed by critics, proved to have a serious downside. The original intent of the prize was to discover an unknown worthy of a major career. But someone with talent who is still unknown might have good reasons for preferring things that way; the first winners of the prize did not relish the life of a concert artist, as the Gilmore had hoped, and in at least one case the pressures proved hazardous. Subsequently, the organization changed the nature of the award and began selecting pianists who had already established reputations to some degree.
Competitions for outstanding amateurs—adults in other professions who have nevertheless achieved a high level of pianistic accomplishment—first sprang up in Paris in 1989, and then at the Cliburn in Texas, in Boston, Washington, D.C., and in other cities around the world. They quickly became rife with the same problems faced by the larger, professional competitions. A circuit of contestants began to surface over and over again, like an inbred tribe. The levels varied wildly, and the results were often contentious.
Of course, controversy has been a mainstay of piano competitions—without it, very little attention would be paid. When Ivo Pogorelich (b. 1958) was eliminated at the 1980 Chopin Competition in Warsaw, the audience—especially young women who swooned over his tight leather pants—was aghast. Juror Martha Argerich, in a display of Latin temperament, declared him a genius and angrily resigned (she later apologized). It brought the young pianist immediate fame and a recording contract. More recently, the president of the Géza Anda competition in Zurich publicly disavowed her jury’s decisions after the first round, claiming they were enamored of fast and loud players who had little musical depth. And the Tchaikovsky Competition, reeling from accusations of corruption over decades, hired Richard Rodzinski, former president of the Van Cliburn Foundation, in 2010 to help reorganize the procedures and restore its former prestige.
Despite the drawbacks, however, competitions give pianists a chance to be heard, and the alternatives have grown slimmer. There are still musical soldiers fighting the good fight, however, like Giselle Brodsky of the Miami International Piano Festival, who has the uncanny ability to find formidable piano talents before they win awards at the major competitions. Her discoveries have included pianists Piotr Anderszewski (b. 1969) and Ingrid Fliter (b. 1973), who went on to win the Gilmore Award, as well as the remarkable concert pianist and superb improviser Gabriela Montero (b. 1970).
BACK IN 1958, when the idea of an international competition was still fresh, the impact of the Moscow event was dramatic. The artistic détente signaled by Cliburn’s win gave both the American and Soviet governments an opportunity to establish a cultural exchange program. American Daniel Pollack (b. 1935), who won eighth place, returned repeatedly. Then in 1960, the Soviets sent Richter to the United States, while America’s electrifying Byron Janis (b. 1928), a student of Vladimir Horowitz, performed at the Moscow Conservatory—with two strikes against him.
The first was the fact that American pilot Francis Gary Powers had recently been shot down while flying his U-2 spy plane over Russian terrain. The second was the deep affection for Cliburn that remained in the hearts of Muscovites; as far as they were concerned, there was no substitute. When Janis walked out on stage he first heard chanting of “U-2” and then “Kleeburn, Kleeburn.” But “by the intermission you could see that I was winning them over,” he remembered. At the end, the audience was in tears. “I thought to myself, I don’t think these tears are due to the music,” Janis said, “but because of something else: When I first walked on to that stage I was literally the enemy. Now they saw I was just a human being, like them, who could please their deep musical spirit.”
In a way, the triumph of Cliburn marked a high point for the classical virtuoso. The circumstances that brought him to international attention were unique and unlikely to arise again. Meanwhile, just as Cliburn’s career was taking off, a major shift in the piano world was quietly taking place, introduced by an artist whose radical ideas still reverberate. It’s not overstating the case to suggest that Canadian pianist Glenn Gould ushered in an entirely new era.
