Quintet

Richard Goode had been at the piano for most of the day. It was a Tuesday evening in January; he was in the midst of a ten-day-long tour that had brought him to San Francisco, and he was scheduled to give a recital there at the Herbst Theatre on the following day and one in Berkeley on Friday, with the programs built around three of the most musically demanding works in the repertoire—the last piano sonatas of Schubert. As we walked together along San Francisco’s Opera Plaza, enjoying the mild early evening, he wore an overcoat more suitable for January in New York City, where he lives. His shirt collar was open, as usual, and he wore a gray woollen cap from Verona, of the sort worn by Italian fishermen.

Goode suggested that we visit a nearby bookstore. His love of music is nearly matched by his love of books, and when we got to the shop he moved from shelf to shelf for more than an hour, quietly absorbed, a benign expression on his face as he collected an armful of books and literary periodicals. Goode has accumulated more than five thousand books in the three-room East Side apartment he occupies with his wife, Marcia. When the Goodes go on tour, some of the books go with them in a satchel, which increases in weight as they progress from city to city.

We left the bookstore already late for dinner, and picked up Marcia at the Inn at the Opera, where the Goodes were staying. Marcia is a violinist, and two days earlier, while Richard was giving a master class in Houston, she had played in a performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, in Carnegie Hall. Now she was singing the melody of the Benedictus, which kept going through her head. Much of the Goodes’ conversation, I’ve learned, consists of their singing music to each other.

At the Zuni Café—a favorite of theirs, built on peculiar triangular lines and decorated in a Mediterranean style—Goode was relaxed and jovial, feeling a sense of release after his day’s work. We discussed the latest book acquisitions, which included additions to his collection of Irish literature. “Sometimes when Richard’s on tour he’ll feel the need to have a certain book with him even if he already has it at home,” Marcia said. “He has five copies of ‘Moby Dick.’”

“I did have five copies, but I gave most of them away,” Goode protested. “However, I recently got a new edition—one that I’ve always wanted, with beautiful woodcuts. So I think I’ve come to terms with ‘Moby Dick’ for a while. It’s nice to have an extra copy around of a book you really love.” He asked me if I knew Schubert’s last letter, in which the composer asked his friend Schober to send him books by James Fenimore Cooper. “Think of it!” Goode exclaimed. “He hadn’t eaten for eleven days. He had typhoid fever as well as syphilis. Did he know he was going to die? And, if so, why Fenimore Cooper?”

In a radio interview taped the previous evening, Goode had spoken at length about Schubert’s last sonatas. Contact with the media is a rather new phenomenon for him and still makes him uncomfortable. Although he felt the interview had gone well, he expressed the hope that it would be broadcast too early the next morning for anyone to hear it.

“Schubert is the composer I’d most like to have met,” he went on. “I have a feeling of at-homeness with him on a personal level, more so than with Beethoven—I’m still too overwhelmed by Beethoven. I love Schubert’s modesty. But, you know, once when he had been drinking he was approached by two musicians from the Vienna Opera who wanted to commission a composition from him, and he rudely refused them. They protested that they were artists, and he shouted, ‘Artists! Artists? Musical hacks are what you are! Crawling, gnawing worms that ought to be crushed under my foot—the foot of a man who is reaching to the stars!’”

Goode read from the menu, “Wild mushrooms roasted in the brick oven, with garlic, parsley, and hazelnuts.” He growled voraciously. With the mushrooms he ordered a roasted chicken and a bottle of Pilsner Urquell. “Some people feel that there’s a premonition of death in those last sonatas,” he said. “Yes, there’s darkness and fatalism, but you find those qualities in Schubert from way back, not only in his last year. One of the things that move you in Schubert is the coexistence of marvellous beauty, sweetness, and grace with a kind of terror waiting to be disclosed. More than Beethoven, he evokes the uncanny. You feel how vulnerable that beauty is.”

In conversation, Goode often holds his broad hands together, the fingers interlaced. When he wants to make a point, he’ll lean forward and free a hand to gesticulate at keyboard level. His appearance resists precise description. He is stocky, broad-chested, and seems earthbound, almost peasantlike. Yet there is something gentle and unworldly about him. He is foity-nine years old, and over the years his face has become at once craggy and soft, monumental and tender. As if to complete a Rembrandt self-portrait from the sixteen-fifties, the nose is ample and pronounced. The neck is thick, the lips sensuous, the eyebrows bushy, the hair silvery, nearly shoulder-length, and often scraggly. In his eyes, which are greenish-gray, one can see his thoughts evolving. His voice is a sympathetic, light tenor that tends to trail off to pianissimo as he gets toward the end of a thought, at which time he’ll sometimes append, as though musing to himself, some paradoxical comment. These asides reveal unexpected comers of his mind and will often be followed by an outburst of guttural baritone laughter.

Until a very few years ago, Richard Goode was little known as a solo pianist. “A career has a dark and a light side,” he said now. “Take playing with an orchestra. It means that you have to fight for rehearsal time. The concerto is usually shunted aside, as if its orchestral part didn’t need much attention. It also means that you play with a lot of conductors, and until you find those with whom you see eye to eye it’s not much fun.”

“Marcia’s more outspoken than I am,” Richard commented. “She speaks my id for me. I once studied conducting myself, but I was uncomfortable with it. I need the actual contact with the sound at the piano to feel that I’m really participating in the music.”

The conversation turned to the hut in which Grieg composed, at the edge of a fjord; to ghost towns in the American Southwest; to the marvel of a two-thousand-year-old cypress near Oaxaca. Goode takes a lively interest in almost any subject. “Richard can so easily get involved,” Marcia says. “He reflects on virtually everything he observes. If the purpose of life is getting from A to B as fast as possible, he’s failed in that.”

When we returned to the Inn at the Opera, a tape of a Chopin nocturne was being played in the elevator. I suggested to Goode that the Inn should use one of his recordings. “If they did, I wouldn’t stay here,” he said. He quickly became absorbed in the music, and when we arrived at our floor he held the elevator door open, so that he could go on listening. “Just for a second,” he said. “I hope nobody wants to use the elevator.” He listened all the way to the end.

The next morning, I joined the Goodes in the hotel’s dining room. On the wall behind Richard hung a large watercolor depicting members of a nineteenth-century music public lunging dramatically toward a violinist. That morning’s San Francisco Chronicle had a sizable article about Goode. He opened the paper no more than a crack and spied on it.

The two Bay Area concerts were to be given in relatively small halls, each seating fewer than a thousand, which was as Goode liked it; the more intimate the setting, the more at ease he tends to be. We talked about a concert he had recently given at Camphill Village, a home for the mentally handicapped, in Copake, New York. Goode’s connection to Camphill is through a friend, Anne Ratner, who presents an annual concert series in support of Camphill at her apartment in New York and, at eighty-seven, remains unflagging in her devotion and enthusiasm. He had included in his Camphill program the Schubert A-Major Sonata—a forty-minute work, with which he would conclude his San Francisco concert. It is a challenge to any audience, but the Camphill community had no difficulty responding to it. “It was wonderful to see how enormously concentrated they were,” Mrs. Ratner had remarked to me afterward. “Their emotional openness was beautiful.”

Schubert wrote his last three piano sonatas in less than a month, following directly upon the completion of the C-Major Quintet. They weren’t published until a decade after his death, and then they remained largely neglected. As late as 1928, the centenary of Schubert’s death, even so complete a musician as Sergei Rachmaninoff did not know of their existence. Musicologists generally stigmatized them as rambling and overlong, especially compared with Beethoven’s sonatas.

“Analysis is one thing; reality is another—the reality of experience that can’t be entirely explained,” Goode said. “What makes Schubert so compelling? Beethoven is an architect, and Schubert is a weaver. His sonatas are more singerly, more transparent than Beethoven’s, and they include more kinds of fantasy. When you begin one, you feel that you’re setting out on a long journey through Schubert country—a country unlike any other. There are strange happenings—harmonic marvels—everywhere. But there’s always a thread to follow. In his last years, he deepens the content while developing the form. He manages to have his dreams and make the whole thing cohere at the same time.”

Goode generally gives scant attention to external demarcations of time. But this was a concert day. He rose before finishing his coffee, and picked up a canvas sack containing several volumes of sonatas and a book or two. The piano would be available at ten o’clock; we set off for the Herbst Theatre, which was diagonally across the street, at ten minutes to ten. Goode, who is not prone to exercise, sniffed the morning air and exclaimed with the brio of an aerobics instructor, “Taking this walk twice today will do me a world of good!”

At the hall, Goode and the stagehands tried out various placements for the piano, in order to get the best acoustics, and tested the lighting. Lighting is important to Goode; his eyes are weak, and he can’t tolerate bright lights onstage. At home, he often begins practicing toward dusk and continues in complete darkness. When everything was as he wished, he began to play the Schubert. Until that moment, he had been affable and gregarious. Now, in an instant, the world around him dropped away.

Anyone who has seen Goode enter, however informally, into his musical element will have noticed the immediacy of his transformation, and the totality of its effect upon him. He doesn’t practice in the normal sense of the word; he re-creates, striving for continuity of expression just as intensely as he does when he is giving a concert. “Richard’s practicing always comes from how he feels the work as a whole,” Marcia says. “He never attacks it in pieces and then puts it together. When he goes into his music, he shuts the world out completely.” She and I both knew we were in the way; she embraced him, and we left.

That evening at six-thirty, after a two-hour nap, Goode returned to the theatre. Without hesitation, he chose the most cramped of three dressing rooms, because its lighting was harsher than that of the others and would better prepare him for the light onstage. He was noticeably less talkative than he had been in the morning.

Since childhood, he has suffered from stagefright. “Cold hands, physical stiffness,” he had told me. “But, above all, mental anguish: worry about memory, a refusal to believe that I’ve done this thing successfully before. I’ve often felt like a runner who has devoted his best effort to preparing and then has a hundred-pound load put on his back. I went to some workshops on stagefright, to no avail—and I went to a psychiatrist for a while. That led in interesting directions, but it yielded nothing I could pass on to anyone else. I haven’t yet found the all-purpose pre-concert calming ritual. I’ll sit quietly and try to empty my mind, or even read until the last minute, but no elaborate yoga techniques. A certain amount of obsessive hand washing goes on—that is, when I’m lucky enough to have hot water available backstage.”

The tuner was late finishing his work and was still onstage. Goode hid himself away in a corner of the wings and read his book of the moment, John Millington Synge’s “The Aran Islands.” When the piano was finally ready, he began to play Mozart’s Sonata K. 570 in flowing lyrical lines that spanned long phrases, coaxing the instrument, caressing it. I remembered that he had once told me, “I often imagine the sound of a piano without the hammers.” He went on practicing until it was time to let the audience in to the hall.

When, at a few minutes past eight, Goode came back onstage, his demeanor betrayed nothing of the inner battle he had waged, or of the musical forces now to be unleashed. Quiet and self-contained, he disappeared to the extent that the bulk of his frame would allow, and walked directly and quickly to the piano—more like a librarian going to a shelf for a favorite book than like a celebrated musician about to begin a concert. He bowed simply and rather formally before settling himself at the keyboard and didn’t take much time before beginning to play—no excessive fiddling with the piano bench. His continuity of mental preparation was not to be broken. Everything nonessential had been pared away.

Onstage, Goode is not a “personality” who enthralls by his presence but a medium, insignificant in itself, through which matters of import will pass. He seems to be playing as if in his own living room, yet his communication with audiences is powerful and bonding. The entirety of his being engages itself in his music-making. A pliable weight is transmitted from his shoulders into the instrument. The hands do more than play the music: they mold it. At times, his back curves toward the keyboard like a sea pine in a storm; at other times, he’ll distance himself from the keys, his head swaying in the dream of a lyrical phrase. His lips nibble goldfishlike, silent coworkers in the formation of musical patterns.

What one remembers most from Goode’s playing is not its beauty—exceptional as it is—but his way of coming to grips with the composer’s central thought, so that a work tends to make sense beyond one’s previous perception of it. This concert was no exception. There was a palpable immediacy of experience throughout—in the Italianate lyricism of the Mozart, the dynamic energy of Beethoven’s Opus 10, No. 3, and the evocation of color in four Debussy preludes. Then came Schubert’s A-Major Sonata.

Goode doesn’t adopt a retrospective view of the Schubert journey: he travels along with the composer. Taking hold of the first movement’s diverse strands, he gave life to particularities while retaining the proportions of the whole. There was inevitability in the way heroic passages gathered cumulative energy, in the way the lyric second subject was set forth in quiet repose.

The melody of the slow movement, which Goode describes as “a nocturnal song of intense stillness,” is interrupted by one of the most remarkable passages in all music: harmonically audacious, rhythmically tumultuous—an unbridled expression of despair. The immediacy of experience now became positively dangerous; the torrent of notes seemed improvisatory, cataclysmic. (“There’s nothing more wrenching,” Goode has said. “From a relatively quiet passage, the music suddenly flares up in a terrifying way into near-chaos. I’ve always accepted these outbursts in Schubert as making enormous sense. Irrational things do make sense. We all have them. These passages come out of the substratum of the soul, and people respond to them in a very deep way.”) A lyrical transition leads back to the movement’s opening theme, but this transition is punctuated by fortissimo chords—horrifying aftershocks. Goode snatched these chords from the keys with unmitigated fury, once bringing up his hand with such violence as to shake his fist.

When the first theme returns, it is accompanied by haunting new rhythmic figures: “night sounds—incipient Bartók,” Goode calls them. “In performance, you wonder how you can get out of the darkness,” he has said. “But light dawns with the Scherzo. The theme of the finale is related to the song Tm Frühling.’ It’s the most wonderful thing to give people this melody; it’s totally openhearted and, in a way, a resolution of all the dissonances of the past movements.” As Goode guided us through the finale’s extended rondo form, along byways into distant regions, he captured the implication of mood in each modulation, and we never felt lost. Schumann once spoke of Schubert’s “heavenly lengths,” and we cherished them. Every time the melody returned, it seemed more eloquent than before. And when it appeared for the last time, fragmented by rests and touching on new harmonic spheres, each moment of silence was imbued with a poignant expectancy. The spontaneous formulating process of the creator was tangible in the concert hall.

How Schubert might have reacted to Goode’s playing can only be conjectured, but the distinguished living composer George Perle told me, “I’m privileged to have Richard as an interpreter of my works. I once felt that I had miscalculated the way I had written a certain passage in my ‘Ballade for Piano,’ and told Richard that I wanted to add octaves to the bass. But Richard said, I think I can find a way to realize the effect you want without your making any changes.’ Usually, it’s up to the composer to urge the interpreter to fulfill the musical intention; with Richard, it was the opposite—he was being my conscience. Richard reconnects to where the music came from. He makes a piece his own, yet he’s true to the piece. He’s a revelatory pianist, like Artur Schnabel.’’

Goode himself fights shy of any comparison with the great Austrian pianist who brought home to our century the full spiritual legacy of the keyboard music of Beethoven and Schubert. But, increasingly, others are making the point. Schnabel’s son, Karl Ulrich Schnabel, now eighty-two and a remarkable pianist and teacher in his own right, put it this way to me: “Richard’s playing has many of the qualities of my father’s: his sense of continuity of tempo, so that any flexibility of rhythm never disturbs the whole, and, above all, his deep respect for the text. Fidelity to the text was the crux of my father’s playing. He and Toscanini both fought an uphill battle to establish that the composer is more important than the performer. Richard makes the most of the intention of the composer: he goes to the core.”

When the applause had ended, Marcia and I found Richard alone in his dressing room. He sat in a chair, drained and white, and somewhat dazed, as if felled by a heavy weight. He declined a drink, but suddenly seized a bottle of orange juice and gulped down the contents. Dress shirts and undershirts were strewn about, thoroughly drenched. With a decisive effort, he drew himself up and changed his clothes once again. In his pre-Marcia days, his soggy after-concert embrace was proverbial; she now provides him with three sets of shirts. Donning a blue sports jacket over his black striped trousers, he went out to greet a throng of well-wishers, and was soon immersed in conversation, speaking with each person at length and heedless of the line of people waiting patiently to talk to him. He is always engaged with the other—to the extent that he finds it difficult to say no, even when he risks being taken advantage of. One of his friends told me, “Richard never changes his relationship to people according to who they are. He doesn’t care if you’re the chairman of the board or the janitor. Some people find this disconcerting.”

It was quite late when we left the hall for dinner at Stars, a lively restaurant whose walls are adorned with gaudy Pop art. “A quiet painting, that,” Goode commented, pointing to one of the gaudiest. He ordered a hamburger and three Pilsner Urquells—one for Marcia and two for himself. “Eating after a concert is wonderful—almost makes the playing worthwhile,” he declared. “If a concert has gone poorly, I console myself with a big meal. If it’s gone well, I reward myself with a big meal.”

We began talking about programming. “I’d like to play programs with fewer composers,” he said. “To stay longer in one area, and get deeper into it. Sometimes the changeover can be quite disturbing.” A few minutes later, he said, almost as a matter of course, “I love the idea of putting Debussy in the middle of a program, of doing something completely different—clearing the palate, like having sherbet in the middle of a meal.”

Goode’s thought processes seem naturally to embrace opposites. Discuss with him his decades-long struggle against bourgeois attitudes, and he’ll defend the bourgeoisie as having produced the greatest artists. Mention the dramatic conflicts raging within Beethoven, and he’ll praise Beethoven’s pastoral side, where the battle is stilled. Refer to the manner in which he merges piano technique and musical expression, and he’ll uphold the virtues of scale practice. Goode’s predilection for seeing more than one side of an issue is born less from a spirit of contentiousness than from one of completeness. The paradox scans the fullness of life—though, as Goode has learned in the course of his career, it can sometimes hold back the flow of life.

By the time we started back to the Inn at the Opera, it was one o’clock in the morning. The Schubert journey, one-third undertaken, would be completed Friday evening in Hertz Hall, at the University of California. A brisk wind had come up, and it had turned cold, but Goode’s collar was unbuttoned, as usual. And, as usual, the heavy sack of music and books was slung over his shoulder. I had stopped offering to carry it for him a while ago, when I realized that he feels better having it near him.

Two things strike one about Richard Goode the pianist: the depth of his achievement as an artist, and the time it has taken for him to receive due recognition. Goode gave his first New York recital in February of 1962, when he was eighteen, in an improvised concert hall in an Armenian restaurant in Greenwich Village. Over the next couple of decades, he became a consummate chamber-music player and a New York cult figure, with a reputation as a musician’s musician. He was forty-seven years old by the time he gave his first concert in Carnegie Hall. Of that evening Donal Henahan wrote in the Times:

It is difficult to understand why it took 29 years for Richard Goode to make his Carnegie Hall debut, but the event was worth waiting for.… In a perfect world all debutants would be so well prepared, musically and technically.… He commands, in fact, a wider spectrum of tone color than any pianist of his generation whose name comes quickly to mind.… Those who remember him as one of the founding members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center two decades ago can be assured that the quicksilver temperament and total immersion in the score that distinguished his playing then continue in force.… His aptly moody and mercurial performance of the Schumann Davidsbündlertánze won this listener’s vote as the high point of a recital that lived throughout on an extremely lofty plateau.

Was the twenty-nine years’ delay a misfortune or a blessing? The answer depends on your point of view. (When it comes to Richard Goode, you feel free to have several points of view running concur rently.) A longtime chamber-music colleague, the clarinettist Richard Stoltzman, says, “Can you imagine Richard if he had become a well-known soloist at twenty-five? He would have missed the depth and breadth of intensive meditation on music which only an enormous amount of time has made possible. His concentration is what separates him from most musicians.” The pianist Denise Kahn, who has known Goode since 1970, says, “Every little bit of progress he made in his career was an incredible struggle, as opposed to those people who just trot out there like racehorses. There was no stopping his talent—it simply had to express itself. But, God knows, he did everything he could to sabotage his career.” In the espousal of these two viewpoints Goode’s friends fall into two roughly equal camps. He once summarized for me his own ambivalence in the matter of his career by reciting the lyrics of an old Jimmy Durante song: “Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go—still have the feeling that you wanted to stay?”

There was no ambivalence in Goode’s primary musical impulse, which, he says, “was always vocal.” His mother, Helen Kaiser Goode, told me that when he was three he began to sing along with Bing Crosby records, and that when he was taken to see the film “The Jolson Story,” starring Larry Parks as Al Jolson, he came home overflowing with song. “The pathos really got to me,” he recalls.

Richard’s father, Samuel, was a piano tuner and had once played the violin, but neither parent had ever been a professional musician. The family lived in a three-bedroom second-floor apartment on Arnow Avenue, in the East Bronx. (The original family name was Guzman; it was Anglicized when Richard’s grandfather, who emigrated from the Ukraine in 1912, became a citizen.) “The avenues had big apartment houses, mainly Jewish,” Richard recalls. “The cross streets had little houses, mainly Italian. The ladies would sit out on their doorsteps; whenever you came home, you had to run this gauntlet of elderly well-wishers. I still think that’s how neighborhoods should be.”

Richard, who was born on June 1,1943, shared a bedroom with his elder brother, Robert, now a professor of biology at City College of New York. The boys’ maternal grandmother, Anna, had a bedroom to herself. Her presence was powerfully felt in the small household. “As much as possible, my grandmother wanted to re-create in the Bronx the conditions of the old country,” Richard told me. “She lived in her private world, as if removed from us in time, and devoted herself to reading—mostly prayer books in Hebrew, but also Tolstoy, whom she venerated. Her religiosity seemed a grim and dour thing to me. There was no joy in it. But I was impressed by her devoutness.”

Samuel Goode hoped that Richard would take up the violin, and, by way of preparation for this, had him begin piano lessons at the age of six. After an unrewarding start with a neighborhood piano teacher, Richard was brought to Elvira Szigeti, whose nephew was the violinist Joseph Szigeti. This was a stroke of fortune: she proved to be the ideal person to nurture his talent. “Mrs. Szigeti’s home had an Old World aura—lots of dark wood and heavy furniture,” Goode recalls. “She was a majestic woman—stern and indulgent in the right mixture. She had arthritis, so she never demonstrated. But this may have liberated me. I was a fairly timid kid, and if I had heard impressive piano playing I might have felt inhibited. Music was an intense, emotional experience for her. She constantly used the word ‘feeling,’ and wouldn’t let me rattle through scales and exercises unmusically. I was rather slow at learning—I’d get my fingers mixed up. But certain music had a magical effect on me, especially Bach.”

In fact, Richard progressed rapidly and soon found himself deeply responsive to the piano. When a neighbor of the Goodes, the beatific Rabbi Ginzburg, asked Richard’s father why it was that the boy played the same thing over and over, Samuel replied, “Rabbi, haven’t you been saying the same prayers over and over since you were a child?” Thereafter, the rabbi could often be seen walking slowly around the block, his hands behind his back, humming Richard’s piano music to himself.

“My brother practiced then as he practices now, singing and swaying, his whole body becoming part of his music-making,” Robert Goode recalls. “The atmosphere of our home was rather confining, and the piano became for him a kind of emotional release.”

Release had also come in the form of the written word, even before Richard’s hands touched the keyboard: when he was only four years old he obtained a library card from the Wakefield Public Library. “My favorite books had animal protagonists,” he recalls. “In fact, I was obsessed with animals throughout my childhood. I fantasized about having an exotic pet, like a marmoset—an adorable Amazon monkey, the smallest known—or a fennec, which is a desert fox with big ears. I did manage to get a cat, but it proved too mischievous for us to keep. I’d spend hours in the zoo, sketching the antelopes. In ‘Song of Myself Walt Whitman wrote, I think I could turn and live with animals.… Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.’”

Something of a Victorian spirit prevailed in the Bronx in those days. Piano playing was thought to be an accomplishment fit for girls, and Richard was the only boy among Mrs. Szigeti’s students when, at the age of eight, he made his first public appearance, playing Mozart’s D-Minor Fantasy. “I was blissfully unaware of the fact that it was to be my last concert without stagefright,” he says. His schoolmates identified him with Liberace, the reigning pianist of the culture; his schoolteachers lionized him, and a great fuss was made over his playing. Richard responded by dutifully fulfilling everyone’s expectations while managing to remain unpretentious—immune then, as now, to self-aggrandizement. But the adulation cast a shadow. As Marcia Goode put it to me, “Richard somehow felt that he was being primarily valued for his musical talent rather than for himself. The focus on his playing was a driving force, yet a damaging force. He didn’t have a chance to sort out what feelings were truly his own.”

When Richard was nine, Mrs. Szigeti retired from teaching, and he was sent to the noted pedagogue Isabelle Vengerova. “Her studio was really dark,” he told me. “But, unlike Mrs. Szigeti, she seemed as remote and austere as possible. She turned me over to her assistant, Olga Stroumillo, a Russian lady with a big, Brillo head of hair, who assigned me just one exercise: I was to raise the wrist at right angles to the keyboard and let it fall suddenly, so that a note would resound with terrific force. Five seconds later, I would attack another note. I had been used to playing wonderful music, and now I was reduced to a starvation diet. Mme. Stroumillo wasn’t sadistic—she was just the concentration-camp guard. Mme. Vengerova apparently had good results with some people, but I never got to see her again, because when I was returning on the subway from one of the lessons I threw a tantrum and told my father that I’d never go back.”

At this critical moment, a friend of Mrs. Szigeti’s brought Richard to the attention of Rosalie Leventritt, the well-known patron of the arts. Mrs. Leventritt is remembered both for the foundation she created to help young musicians and for her personal devotion to their cause. Although not trained as a musician, she had fine musical intuition, and she sensed an unusual potential in the ten-year-old. She asked the advice of Rudolf Serkin, the pianist she most respected. Goode denies having been a child prodigy, but his playing was sufficiently compelling to move Serkin to say, “This boy is so gifted and quick that he’ll be easy to teach. He needs only to be given the right piece at the right time.” Learning of the Goode family’s modest circumstances, Mrs. Leventritt made an extraordinary offer: she would sponsor the whole of Richard’s musical and academic education. “It took me some years to feel completely at ease with this remarkable woman who seemed to have taken charge of my life,” Goode recalls. “Mrs. Leventritt had a Southern graciousness and warmth, an air of distinction, a wonderful bearing, and a strong will.”

On Serkin’s recommendation, Richard began studying with Claude Frank, then twenty-seven and already a leading interpreter of the Central European repertoire. “Richard’s musical intelligence was such that he could easily comprehend a five-voice fugue by Bach,” Frank told me recently. “Whatever musical faults he had were typical of a boy of his years. He liked to make huge ritards and crescendos at the end of every piece. He needed to learn to love the right things. When he wasn’t studying music, he was reading. I asked his father if Richard was getting enough rest, and he replied, ‘Richard doesn’t sleep at all. He thinks it’s a waste of time.’”

“Claude was the first truly outstanding pianist I had heard from close up,” Goode says. “He played in a really grand style and opened a new world of expression for me. It was overwhelming—and hard work. I was a sensitive plant and prone to burst into tears when any criticism became too severe.”

When Richard was twelve, Mrs. Leventritt felt that he needed the stimulation of a conservatory atmosphere, and she arranged for him to work with Nadia Reisenberg, at the Mannes College of Music. Reisenberg, who was Russian by birth, had studied with Josef Hof-mann and during the 1939–40 season had given the first complete series of Mozart piano concertos in the United States. She was a player of uncommon facility, and could routinely demonstrate difficult right-hand passages with her left hand. She put Richard through an exacting regimen of “kitchen work” in the form of études, her emphasis being on fluidity of line and beauty of tone. Colleagues of Goode recognize to this day the benefits of her teaching. “Nadia was terribly nice to me,” Goode says. “And, incidentally, she introduced me to Schubert’s sonatas. I recognized her distinction as a pianist—a sort of limpid perfection. Yet I never had a true temperamental compatibility with her playing. At that point in my adolescence, the emphasis on elegance seemed to thwart my feelings—to focus on what wasn’t essential.”

When Rudolf Serkin played Brahms’ First Piano Concerto in Carnegie Hall in March of 1957, the thirteen-year-old Goode heard what he felt was essential. “The playing was titanic,” he recalls. “The performance seemed a matter of life and death. The sweep, the drama, the sense of immediacy astonished me.” Serkin had kept abreast of Goode’s progress, and the following summer he invited him to take part in the Marlboro Music Festival, in Vermont. Along with Serkin’s son, Peter, with whom he formed a lasting friendship, Goode was one of the youngest musicians ever to participate. After an initial period of bewilderment, he settled into Marlboro life, and he returned for the next six summers. Goode refers to his experience at Marlboro—in company with such musicians as Pablo Casals, Marcel Moyse, Felix Galimir, and Serkin himself—as “perhaps the most important part of my musical education.” A film produced there for German television gives glimpses of Goode, at fourteen, playing a Beethoven trio with an organic connection to the keyboard indicative of his present approach, and singing a melody of Mozart to a young colleague with the concern for musical shape that he manifests today.

Goode appears in the Marlboro film as a neatly groomed, well-adjusted youngster; there is no hint of conflict under the surface. But during his early teens he was “profoundly dissatisfied” with life. As a sort of talisman, he kept in his pocket a volume of Flaubert’s letters. “I felt alienated from the world around me,” he says. “This was a secret I kept largely to myself. Flaubert basically asserted that life is raw material for art—that art is the only way to redeem and justify this messy existence of ours. There was something beautiful but grim in his out look. He was enmeshed in his surroundings, and had a great deal of hate and spleen. These letters were a consolation to me—an outlet for my dissatisfaction as well as for the deep feelings I had about art.”

Goode’s relationship to the everyday world was not enhanced by the McBurney School, a private boys’ school in midtown Manhattan that Mrs. Leventritt had selected for his high-school education. “I didn’t let anyone know how deeply unhappy I was at McBurney,” Goode told me. “There was a lot of sham. The emphasis was on athletics. Nude swimming was required once a week—and each week the prospect filled me with trepidation. The classes were mostly without interest, and I sleepwalked through them.”

Around this time, Goode encountered “Moby Dick.” He had already been fascinated by the seventy-six-foot model of a blue whale hanging in the American Museum of Natural History. “The book utterly entranced me,” he recalls. “Not so much because of the Ahab story as because it tied in with my sense of awe at the power of nature. During that period, too, visual art began to mean a great deal to me: the great splashes of the Abstract Expressionists in the Whitney Museum; Paul Klee’s paintings, with their mystery and their vivid sense of presence. I read French poetry, and I was taken with Rimbaud’s wild imagery: he created a world as far away as possible from the world he lived in. A friend who was in college introduced me to ‘Finnegans Wake’—this huge book written in a special language, with the punctuation missing and the end going back to the beginning. These extraordinary man-made things evoked in me something of the sense of wonder I had felt about animals and natural history.”

The impact of Rudolf Serkin’s playing stayed with Goode. After his second summer at Marlboro, he asked Serkin if he might study with him at the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, and he was accepted. “I had assumed that Nadia Reisenberg had somehow read my mind and knew that I wanted to go to Serkin,” Goode said. “However, she was completely unprepared for this idea. I must have presented it rather badly. It was not a happy moment.”

After graduating from McBurney, Goode took a year off and devoted himself to reading and to visiting Serkin’s home in Philadelphia every so often to work with him privately. Lessons would begin in midafternoon and often continue after dinner. On walks, Serkin would reminisce about his studies with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna after the First World War. In the fall of 1961, Goode moved to Philadelphia, rented a tiny studio apartment overlooking a fire escape, and entered Curtis as a full-time student.

None of Rudolf Serkin’s students will ever forget the quality of Serkin’s listening. Huddled in a corner with his eyes closed and his face buried in one hand, he would concentrate intently on whatever piece was being played. His main concern was interpretation; he said little about technique. He was uncompromising in his demand for textual fidelity. He rarely demonstrated, and he discouraged his students from taking notes. “You’ll remember what I say if it’s important to you,” he would tell them. Lesson material had to be prepared to concert level. Any lack of commitment was blasphemy.

“On occasions when I did disappoint Serkin, as when I played Chopin’s Barcarolle too vehemently, a grave and sad look would come over his face, as if to say that I had transgressed—that perhaps something had even been killed but maybe there was a chance of bringing it back to life,” Goode told me. “In Serkin’s teaching, the unspoken was what was most remembered. We learned most from the feeling with which everything was charged—from the totality of his dedication. Serkin never allowed himself the luxury of self-satisfaction—even the nourishing kind, á la Rubinstein. And if he couldn’t be satisfied with himself how could he be satisfied with you? Much of the incredible tension Serkin communicated as an interpreter was related to the anguish—the inner resistance—he experienced in performing. There are, of course, artists who bring different qualities to the concert stage—a greater relaxation, an untroubled ease in communicating. But such musicians may have other shortcomings—perhaps a certain glibness in their facility, or a lack of idealism. It’s difficult to separate the virtues and defects in an artistic personality. Either they come together into a convincing whole or they don’t. In Serkin’s case, they came together in a uniquely expressive way, and the suffering he endured was part of it.”

Goode had to contend with his own sense of dissatisfaction. “Since my first student recital, a drastic change had come over me,” he said. “During my Curtis years, I began to play a lot in public, and I suffered from such extreme stagefright that I didn’t know how I could possibly continue performing. After a concert I gave in Wyoming, I wrote to Serkin about this—partly as a catharsis, partly pleading for his advice. He told me that my letter had touched him but that, regretfully, he didn’t know what advice he could offer. I was disappointed, but I wasn’t terribly surprised. I began to wonder, What’s a lifetime of this going to be like? I definitely wanted to be a musician, but being a musician and being a performer are two different things.”

The dichotomy was not restricted to Goode’s waking hours. He still remembers a nightmare he had at the time: “I was playing the piano in the Allerton Avenue subway station, in the Bronx. Judges, who were seated in the shadows, announced that every time I played a wrong note I’d lose a finger.” But there were other sorts of dreams: “Sometimes, wonderful music that I’d never heard before would come to me. I couldn’t wait to write it down, but when I awoke it would be forgotten.”

One day while Goode was at Curtis, he visited the Philadelphia public library and listened to Arthur Schnabel’s recording of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata. “A light bulb went on in my head,” Goode told me. “I said to myself, ‘He plays the music as if he had written it!’ He had a way of discovering meanings that might have eluded us—a delight in the articulation of the unexpected. It was a new vocabulary—a kind of sculpturing, such as you find in certain great paintings. Mantegna’s Roman soldiers seem to be so real that you could almost grasp them. Schnabel did that when he played Beethoven: he made the contours of the music seem tangible.”

I asked Goode what role his fascination with visual art plays in his approach to music.

“I don’t think of colors—yellow, green, and so on,” he said. “But I do think of spaces, textures, and moods. The more you pour into the hopper of the imagination, the better. Certain works do call up images, although these are, of course, entirely subjective. For example, at the beginning of Schumann’s C-Major Fantasy I hear an enormous bell. The whole opening section seems enveloped in its reverberations. In the middle of the movement, after the trills die away, the spirit of the music seems to recede into the historical past: a shrouded forest image. In much music I feel shifts in time between the present and the past, especially in Schumann and Chopin—the Ballades, for instance. Or shifts in space, the music moving nearer or farther away—as in Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Some painters achieved marvelous effects in their use of space—Piero della Francesca, for instance, in ‘The Flagellation.’ In Rembrandt you have all kinds of effects of depth, darkness, recession, uncertainty, mystery—qualities that exist also in music. And that’s the challenge. The piano is the great instrument of illusion, of transformation. In the recordings of Rachmaninoff or Cortot, the piano becomes a voice, singing and speaking; it becomes an orchestra; it becomes nature. It doesn’t remain itself.”

Seven years after leaving Curtis, Goode returned there to give a recital. The day after the concert, Serkin took him into his office and, announcing solemnly, “Our ways have diverged,” proceeded to chide Goode for the amount of rhythmic freedom in his playing. “Serkin’s rigor sometimes made people react against it,” Goode recalled. “For me, it was a question of working through his profound influence, fighting it at certain points, and later finding my way toward a synthesis. I’ve learned that too much liberty can disturb the unity of the large design. In the performance of any work, there’s a constant dialogue between freedom and regularity. The first thing one thinks about is flow. If the freedom is right, it will help the piece generate itself; if the freedom is excessive, it will detract from the flow. The piece must always seem to unfold naturally.”

Divergence notwithstanding, Goode’s relationship with Serkin continued until Serkin’s death, in 1991. A letter Serkin wrote to Goode in 1979 evidences the bond that existed between them on more than one level: “I wish we could see each other more often and talk about the really important things in life.… With fear and horror I am becoming aware that in two weeks I shall be playing in Lisbon.” And he noted in conclusion, “Be happy, reasonably happy.”

Goode graduated from Curtis in 1964, when he was twenty-one. It was at that point in his life—a crossroads for a young musician—that his inner dualism met conventional expectations head on. It was taken for granted that he would actively pursue a major solo career and begin to enter competitions—the traditional and most effective ladder toward success. As the pressure to succeed increased, so did his resistance. “I had a revulsion against the idea of ambition,” Goode told me. “Sometimes I’ve felt that I was carrying out somebody else’s wish. This, combined with my doubts about myself, resulted in a lack of confidence as a player. Serkin tried to get me to do more solo playing, but I needed other processes to take place before I was able to make that step. I’ve often felt that simply being on the stage is so difficult for me that my natural love of music forsakes me when I’m there. I always fantasized that I would quit one day. At the same time, I didn’t want to give it up. The fact that I was involved in a career was something I almost kept secret from myself. My way of ignoring it—until quite recently—was just to let it happen, and not admit consciously that it was shaping my life in any significant way.”

A young musician in America today is confronted by a society that feeds on success—particularly, rapid success. But Richard Goode, by his very nature, was a misfit in the world of high-pressure competitions and managerial promotion. “I was anything but a salesman’s dream,” Goode says. “I wasn’t a great virtuoso; I was a rather serious, intense, sweaty young musician. I played repertoire that many concert sponsors didn’t love. And I was at odds with myself.” In 1970, when he had been with a New York concert management for four years, the sales representatives called him in to a meeting. Their chairman said, “Richard, your image is still unclear to us. It’s hard for us to market you. Are you a scholar with a touch of the poet? Are you a classical pianist with a romantic side? Who are you?”

Goode would have had few performing opportunities when he left Curtis had it not been for Charles and Susan Wadsworth. In 1961, Susan had founded Young Concert Artists, a non-profit organization designed to promote the careers of gifted but little-known musicians. Her criterion was artistic merit rather than salability, and she took no commission on her artists’ performance fees. While Goode was still at Curtis, she presented him in her first New York series, and continued to find concert engagements for him until he was taken on by commercial management. In 1964, Charles invited him to play at the Spoleto Festival, and five years later he engaged Goode as a founding member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

By this time, Goode had made a decisive turn toward chamber music. “It’s a shared experience—a friendly thing to do, because of the company onstage,” he says. “I still did occasional solo playing, but I was acutely uncomfortable with it.” In 1967, with Serkin’s encouragement, Goode had made his London début in Wigmore Hall, with a Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann program. The London Times headed its review “UNUSUALLY SUCCESSFUL RECITAL BY YOUNG PIANIST,” and commented, “One predicts for Mr. Richard Goode an exceptional career.” Goode was furious. He was deeply disturbed that anyone should have words of praise for the travesty he thought he had committed.

“It was helpful to learn the chamber-music and vocal repertoire so early,” Goode told me. “I wasn’t boxed in, in a pianistic sense. Thinking in terms of other instruments can immeasureably change the way you play. Take the beginning of Mozart’s D-Major Sonata K. 576—a dialogue between horns and flutes. Or the last song of Schumann’s ‘Frauenliebe und Leben,’ a blow of fate—three trombones.”

In the Wadsworths’ New York apartment, Charles played me a tape, from the 1966 Spoleto Festival, of Schumann’s Fantasy Pieces for cello and piano, in which Goode was joined by Jacqueline du Pré. The two had met in Spoleto and formed a close friendship. Their music-making there generated a white heat of excitement. Du Pré afterward called Goode “a life force.”

Charles, for his part, was impressed with Goode’s way of incessantly exploring the possibilities of interpretation. “A page of music is a living thing to Richard,” he told me. “It was typical of him, just before going onstage, to turn to page fourteen and whisper to his colleagues, ‘You know, we really make too much crescendo here. We should save it for the next bar—and why don’t we take a little more time at the top of the phrase?’”

When I mentioned this to Goode, he said, “I know I can be annoying—very annoying. I once pestered a member of the Boston Symphony Chamber Players about so many details that he told me, ‘Richie, this is chamber music. You play your way, I’ll play my way.”

A year or so after graduating from Curtis, Goode returned to Mannes, in order to continue to deepen his understanding of music. He studied conducting with Carl Bamberger and theory with Carl Schachter, with whom he had also worked during the Reisenberg years. “Schachter showed me how each piece is permeated by certain characteristic musical ideas and generated by its own specific kinds of laws,” Goode recalled. “For instance, in the ‘Pastoral Symphony’ there are places when the harmony doesn’t change for many bars at a time—Beethoven’s intimation of the long, slow cycle of nature. When you view a work from a variety of perspectives and ask ‘What is it that makes this piece unique?’ you begin to see connections that you wouldn’t have thought of before. I had often felt awash in a sea of feelings that music aroused in me. This fuller realization of music as an intellectual object freed me, in a way. It didn’t dissolve the mystery of the beauty—it intensified it.”

At Mannes, Goode came into contact with Karl Ulrich Schnabel, and, in master classes and private lessons with him, he was drawn into a historical continuum: Mr. Schnabel has preserved the heritage of his father’s musicianship without sacrificing his own musical individuality. “He combines an Old World geniality with a scholar’s passion for detail,” Goode told me. “Like a good Talmudist, he showed me how to understand the text, and how to communicate it. His attitude was that, despite his greater experience, we were both students. One felt that the music had limitless possibilities.” Schnabel, too, recalls those lessons. “All great music contains two ingredients—expression and form,” he said. “Richard and I worked on combining the two. It’s not that he destroyed form—he was just not yet building it. Over the years, his playing has become more substantial and authoritative. Form has become one of his greatest strengths.”

In a historic BBC interview in 1935, the composer Ethel Smyth, then in her late seventies, gave this firsthand account of Brahms’ piano playing: “Overwhelming in power, it was never noisy, nor what today is called percussive. And when presently, with what he called his tenor thumb, he lifted some warm, tender passage out of the tangle of sound, the look on his face was a thing one never forgot. Best of all, I like to think of his playing Bach’s mighty organ fugues, sometimes accompanying himself with a sort of muffled roar, as of Titans moved to sympathy in the bowels of the earth.” Goode’s playing shares much with this description, and sometimes the roar has gone unmuffled. “Had I not been a pianist, I’d have liked to be a singer,” he told me. Anyone who takes Goode’s statement as merely figurative should hear him practice. The singing in question would do no credit to Pavarotti; it is an ecstatic humming, a moaning, a keening, a crooning. Little wonder that while Goode was practicing backstage shortly before he was to perform a Beethoven concerto in Naples in 1984, he remained unaware of an earthquake that caused near-panic among the public and the orchestra.

“Singing along was always something of a problem for my father, and it has been for me as well,” Mr. Schnabel told me. “One sings along for two possible reasons. First, you still imagine something that is better than you can realize at the keyboard. Second, you don’t like what you hear from the orchestra. In Richard’s early days, if anything was wrong it was the appearance, not the substance.”

The primal freedom of Goode’s approach to practicing was carried over in large measure to the more formal precincts of the concert stage. “He is…in constant motion, rolling, pouncing, shaking his head, rocking,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in the Times in February of 1966; and the London Times commented in September of 1973, “A pianist more agreeably heard than seen, so ardently does he exteriorize his feelings—but audibly too.”

“Richard’s gestures and vocalism were a huge problem,” a friend says. “They were distracting to many members of the public and injurious to his career. He was very annoyed when people mentioned this to him. It almost drove him further into it. He felt that people were focussing on the wrong thing.”

Other friends take the point of view articulated by the pianist-composer Franklin Latner: “Creativity sometimes demands a rough edge. If Richard had suppressed that jaggedness, his playing might not be what it is today. I’d be respectful of this part of his personality. There’s a truthfulness behind it that’s frequently lacking in a world that rewards uninhibited music-making.”

Bruno Walter tells of the gradual evolution of Mahler’s gestures as a conductor from the “astounding mobility” of his early years in Vienna to the “almost uncanny calm” of his late years “with no loss in intensity of effect.” Today, Goode’s approach to the keyboard has become simpler. The roar, though manifestly yet within him, is generally muted. The change can be credited in part to the demands of recording—which have forced him to control his singing and the piano bench’s squeaking—and in part to an economy, a fullness in concision, that, comes with maturity.

“I agree that my manner at the piano may have held back my career,” Goode said when I raised the point with him. “I think the supreme accomplishment is stillness—not frozen stillness but quiet stillness that’s supple and can move in any direction—although I doubt if I could achieve that ideal in this life. And it’s more gratifying to see somebody doing something with ease than with effort. Stage-fright may have played a role: with those gestures, I’ve tried to throw off a sense of oppression. Sometimes I’ve felt that it’s difficult enough to perform at all—to do it in the approved manner is intolerable.”

“Break with the outside world, live like a bear,” Flaubert wrote. During the sixties and seventies, Goode appeared to have something of the sort in mind. His friends still speak with incredulity of the state of the small West Side apartment he was living in then: the bed in swirls; clothing, music, records, and magazines on art, theatre, and poetry strewn everywhere; and, of course, books, a number of them years overdue at the library. “A tempest of life,” says Harry Jensen, who studied with Goode for fifteen years. “The order in Richard is in the intensity of his experience. When he was involved in music, I didn’t exist, he didn’t exist, time didn’t exist. Once, when we had been working on a few measures of Bach for over two hours, we heard a loud crash. A cabinet had fallen off the kitchen wall, and all the crockery lay broken on the floor. Richard continued teaching as if nothing had happened. When I went for my next lesson, two weeks later, the mess was still there, untouched.”

“I was intransigent by neglect rather than by design,” Goode says. “People looking at me might have thought I was engaged in a certain form of revolt, but I didn’t think of myself that way. It’s just that I’m horribly disorderly. A lot of what I do is surrounded by chaos.”

One casualty—or, depending on one’s point of view, distinction—of Goode’s bohemianism was the state of his dress. He is remembered from his bachelor days as “an inspired tatterdemalion” and as being “in the great tradition of clothes crumplers.” Appearances on the concert stage with shirttails hanging below his evening jacket or with a safety pin affixed to his music-reading glasses did nothing to dispel such impressions. On one occasion, he had to be sewn into his trousers, which, just before a concert, had split open at the fly. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center received letters from subscribers wondering why Goode had to sit on the Manhattan telephone directory while he was playing, or wear anklets with his dress suit. “As a performer, one has to appear in reasonably decent attire on certain evenings,” Goode says. “That was not impossible for me, but it was a bit of a burden.” Some of Goode’s efforts to achieve sartorial splendor have passed into legend, such as the time he ran the bath (without pulling the plug) to steam the wrinkles out of his tailcoat and was notified an hour later that the ceiling of the apartment below had collapsed. Or the time he washed his white bow tie, put it in the toaster oven to dry, and then covered the singed places with talcum powder.

Goode’s attitude toward money has also been a cause of concern to his friends. Harry Jensen recalls, “I’d pay for my lessons with a check, and he’d ask me to put it in a drawer. The drawer was filled with checks that had never been cashed, some from years back. I tried to pay him with groceries, but he never ate what I left.” Children visiting the apartment found money lying about on the floor, and decided that Goode must surely be a very rich man.

Goode’s career as a pianist almost came to an end in 1970, when he and a girlfriend were in an automobile accident in Mexico. The car they were in turned over twice and landed upside down in a riverbed. Miraculously, both escaped serious permanent injury. Goode’s injuries included two fractured vertebrae, which required him to wear a back brace for several months, and a severed extensor tendon in his left hand; the glass had just missed cutting two other tendons. “My fourth finger is still a bit of a bother to me,” Goode says. “It doesn’t always clear the keys in a satisfactory way. With the combination of the hand and the back injuries, I had to train myself to become more economical in my movements when I was playing. Imagine what I was like before 1970!”

A few years earlier—telling almost no one—he had entered his first international competition: the Busoni, in Bolzano, Italy. “I played with cold hands,” he told me. “I felt miserable—always the same story, ever since I was ten. But being in the competition was not as painful as I’d expected, because every concert I’d given had required so much psychic energy as to seem virtually like a competition. In the end, I was awarded the second prize. Garrick Ohlsson won the first prize. Having got that far, I was deeply disappointed not to win, but I didn’t admit that to myself for several months.”

In 1973, at the urging of the eminent pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Goode relented one more time, and entered the Clara Haskil Competition, in Vevey, Switzerland. At thirty, he had almost reached the competition’s age limit. (“He had to be dragged there in chains,” a friend says.) He played the Mozart D-Minor Concerto in the finals, and this time he won the first prize; Mitsuko Uchida was the runner-up. Thereafter Goode was awarded a number of European engagements, but by that time the odds were against his achieving a major career: he had been before the public for over a decade and was no longer a bright new face. Relatively few knew of the soloist living within the chamber-music player—a situation that his friends tried to remedy.

In 1977, the pianist Shirley Rhoads asked Leonard Bernstein to hear Goode. She told me of the meeting: “After Richard performed Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 110 and Brahms’ Fantasies Opus 116, Lenny said that Richard’s playing was the ‘classiest’ he had heard in years, and asked him why he wasn’t performing Brahms concertos all over the world. Richard was nonplussed. Lenny undoubtedly sensed that Richard himself hadn’t yet decided that he wanted a solo career.”

“It was a curious interview,” Goode told me, even now somewhat abashed at the recollection. “Bernstein’s reaction to my playing was encouraging, but I was taken by surprise when he seemed to throw the responsibility back to me. I was very shy about getting into a discussion of psychological problems, which I felt were probably at the root of the whole thing. So we didn’t have much of a conversation.”

The previous summer, Goode had spent ten days at the Grand Teton Music Festival, in Wyoming. “I felt a sense of freedom, being up in the mountains,” he recalls. “I realized that life, hemmed in by the next concert, had become too narrow. I couldn’t face it anymore—I had to get off the treadmill.” Now he acted on this awareness, and for ten months in 1978 he played no concerts at all. “For much of the time, I was lying fallow,” he told me. “I read a lot, went to auctions and art exhibitions, found a new apartment, and practiced without being under constant pressure.” While lying fallow, Goode made what was for him a painful decision. He withdrew from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, despite the intense loyalty he felt toward the colleagues with whom he had worked for a decade. “I realized that chamber music had become a refuge from pursuing something that would be more difficult for me,” he said. “It had been the path of least resistance.” Bernstein’s challenge was beginning to strike home.

In fact, Goode’s withdrawal from the Society was only partial—his participation continued, with a reduced commitment, for another decade—but he now began to direct time and energy toward a new goal. Significantly, in 1980 he was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize, which carried with it a solo appearance with the New York Philharmonic. “The prize is given in the nicest possible way,” Goode told me. “You don’t have to do anything to get it—you’re just nominated.”

Early in 1983, Goode and Jay K. Hoffman, who had recently become his personal representative, were returning from Westchester County after looking at a concert hall that Goode had been asked to inaugurate. As they drove along the Saw Mill River Parkway, Hoffman asked Goode which works he would choose if he were given the opportunity to record absolutely anything he wanted. Goode laughed, and said, “Oh, all the Beethoven sonatas.” Hoffman said, “Why don’t I give it a try?” He approached Book-of-the-Month Records with the proposal, and, to Goode’s astonishment, it was accepted.

Goode made the first of the Beethoven recordings in the fall of 1983. Because of his critical standards and his unwillingness to regard any performance as definitive, the project wasn’t completed until this year, by which time it had been taken over by Elektra Nonesuch Records. “I stretched everyone’s endurance to the limit, including my own,” Goode says.

During the early stages of the recordings, Goode made a decision that was to have a vital effect on his career: he committed himself to playing all thirty-two Beethoven sonatas in public in a single season. He postponed the project once, but achieved his goal during the 1987–88 season, in a series of seven concerts, which he gave both in Kansas City and at New York’s 92nd Street Y.

Learning and performing all the Beethoven sonatas was a watershed in Goode’s development. From the first concert, there was a sense among his dedicated New York public that something momentous was taking place. The Times described the series as “among the season’s most important and memorable events.” Hoffman, who had followed Goode’s career for many years before they formed their professional relationship, told me, “The fact that Richard had to learn and play all the Beethoven sonatas in a time frame—to make the necessary psychic decision to compress time—forced out certain extraneous things, and gave him, if you will, more power. I contend that with this power came a moment that transformed his career, and that moment was the Sunday afternoon of his first Beethoven recital in New York. The review came out, and suddenly, as if people understood that something important had happened, his management started to get calls from all over the country.”

“When you’re immersed in Beethoven, you feel that he’s right in the center, and everything else is radiating out from him,” he said. “There’s an enormous sense of room in him. He gives strength to people, because of the hugeness of his heart and his will, his refusal to give way. There’s a redemptive force in his music. Its strong shaping power focussed my energies in a way that I hadn’t known before. If a composer is great enough, he forces the interpreter in a certain direction. Beethoven forces you in a direction where the parts can’t take over the whole. He was fanatically occupied with coherence of design. Like a Roman architect, he made the structures profoundly right; his works are less destructible than those of other composers. If you build a Roman wall, the individual bricks, strong as they are, might not be so important in themselves. Beethoven avoids details that can be diverting—the kind of fantastic, purple detail that one finds so often in Schubert. The spirit is so monumental, the structures are so austere, that I sometimes felt a bit of a sensuous deprivation, and wished there were a little flower growing nearby.”

During the series, Goode performed many of the sonatas for the first time, including the “Waldstein” and the “Appassionata.” “A benefit of playing so much chamber music was that certain staples of the solo repertoire remained fresh to me,” he said. “I had to learn many of the early sonatas. In each of them, Beethoven explored new territory. There’s a daring unpredictability in the inspiration. Beethoven’s dynamics are often confrontational. He rarely allows his lyric quality, compelling as it is, to go unchallenged for long. He’ll often interrupt with a brusque statement, as if to place the surrounding serenity in greater relief. One shouldn’t soften those corners. The boldness of these works is most apparent in halls small enough for the powerful passages to sound loud, and not recede into a framework. The essence of this music is the bursting out of a framework.”

I recalled his May, 1989, Beethoven recital in London’s Wigmore Hall, which seats only five hundred and forty. The hall had rocked with the energy of the music, and the response of the audience was a roar, an explosion. “I gather that it was pretty powerful for Wigmore Hall,” Goode said, smiling sheepishly. “It may not altogether have been to the English taste.”

Sibelius once said that “every note must be experienced.” The words are simple; the application—whether by composer or performer—is difficult. In master classes that Goode gave at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in January of 1991, he was constantly asking questions: “Why do you think Beethoven has marked a sforzando here?” “Where is this chord going to lead?” “What sort of mood do these notes imply?” A student began Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 22 with physical bravura, but the music itself lacked character. Goode said, “You have energy in your playing, but not enough comic spirit. It’s a question of rhythm—the sort of thing that can’t be written down.” He then played the passage himself, gathering together the six notes of the opening motif into a more concise group and creating a sense of expectancy during the short rest that precedes the next group. The change was almost imperceptible, but a new rhythmic poise was present. One suddenly understood the idea behind the notes and, hence, behind the movement. Mantegna’s Roman soldiers came into focus: they were standing by their wall and were in high spirits.

Goode’s way of evoking the mood of each piece, of speaking softly—almost hypnotically, and often forgetful of his auditors—and of finding simple, creative analogies helped free the musculature and the imagination of the young players, even during the short period of time available for the lessons. “Don’t think of the fingers at all, but of the movement of the hand and forearm as they take you over two measures,” he suggested while teaching one of Schumann’s Davids-bündler Dances. “It’s a spring song—something gossamer, softly textured, not precisely focussed. Feel the sound as relaxed and serene from within. Imagine the legato line as if it’s on a long violin bow, and translate that into whatever gesture will make for the greatest smoothness of flow. The piano will dictate to you unless you tame it. In other words, you create the motion first—a motion that mirrors the musical idea. Then the notes follow.”

“Finger playing per se is anathema to me,” Goode explained to me later, as we trudged through the snow blanketing the campus. “Some pianists’ fingers seem almost to be separated from their bodies. The gestural quality gives me the sense of proportion in shaping a phrase, and provides an expressive basis for the whole technique. For me, the actual playing has to come from a somewhat larger gesture than is strictly necessary, because when you aim precisely at the mark you get something smaller and more inflexible than you want.”

“He possesses all different touches imaginable,” Mme. Auguste Boissier wrote of Liszt, in 1832. “His hands are so limber and pliable that they maintain no definite fixed position. They contact the keys in all manners and forms.” Goode follows in a worthy tradition. In the Allegro finale of Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 26, his hands will glide almost weightlessly over the keys; in the D-minor Largo of Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 10, No. 3, they will seem weighted down, as if, he says, “subject to the gravity of Jupiter.” In the fugue of the “Hammerklavier,” they stab the keys, dragger-like, from above. As Goode explores the immense range of Beethoven’s creativity, no two walls are similar, no brick remains unexperienced.

After a concert in Houston in 1987, a member of the audience came up to him and exclaimed, “Mr. Goode, you are Beethoven!”

Goode leaned forward, cupped his hand to his ear, and asked, “What did you say?”

San Francisco was hazy in the winter sunlight as the Goodes and I were driven across the Bay Bridge by the conductor Robert Cole, who is the director of Berkeley’s Cal Performances series. It was 11 A.M. on Thursday. Schubert’s heavenly lengths had extended beyond the A-Major Sonata’s conclusion the previous night: Cole was talking about the melody of the finale, and for Marcia it had replaced the Benedictus from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. Richard, however, said that he was already thinking in C minor and B-flat major, the keys of the Schubert sonatas for his Berkeley concert.

We arrived at the campus at eleven-thirty and went directly to Hertz Hall, because it would be free that day only until noon, and Goode wanted to choose between two pianos that were available for the concert. One was distinctly brighter in tone; he chose the other, which he called “warmer and gentler.” Cole took us on to Zellerbach Hall, where, two flights down, in a storage room at the farthest extremity of the basement, in which many pianos were crammed together, Goode could practice in peace for the next five or six hours. He appeared content to be so safely sequestered.

“When I met Richard, I didn’t know much about careers,” Marcia told me later, over lunch. “I assumed he was doing just what he wanted to do. It was only gradually that I became aware of his desire to do more and yet his fear of it. His ambivalence was like a seesaw. I jumped on one end of the seesaw, and became an advocate for the part of his personality that wanted him to express himself fully. I thought, He can always reject a solo career if he wants to, but why not see what it’s like to have the opportunity?”

Marcia’s appearance is striking. She is slender and somewhat shorter than Richard, with long, straight dark-brown hair, an almond-shaped face, and a classical Roman nose. If Goode is something of a Rembrandt self-portrait, she is a Duccio Madonna—but a Madonna with a sense of humor. Born Marcia Weinfeld, she was raised in Buffalo, went to Smith College, and, in 1973, took a master’s degree at Yale in music performance. She and Richard became acquainted in February of 1983, in Ottawa, when, as a violinist in the National Arts Centre Orchestra, she participated in a chamber-music concert in which he also performed. “At the first rehearsal, Richard came into the hall and greeted us,” she told me. “There was something about his voice and his presence—this sounds corny, but I just fell in love with him, even before he began to play. I didn’t know how to flirt with him. I saw that he had come with a plastic bag full of books, so the next day I brought with me something I’d been reading by Elias Canetti. After the rehearsals, we would go with the other musicians for a bite to eat. As the week went on, the number of people going out together dwindled, until Richard and I found ourselves alone. He flew up to visit me several times during the next few months. In August, I sold everything and put myself on a plane for New York. I had never met anybody connected with Richard, nor had I ever seen where he lived. I loved him—what more did I need to know? He tells me that he made a huge effort to clean up his apartment for me but that my face fell when I saw the kitchen. That was immaterial. Richard was there, and all this richness surrounding him. I still haven’t explored all the books and records. I still don’t know quite what’s going on there.”

The consensus among Goode’s friends had been that he would probably never get married. His relationships with women usually ran in seven-year cycles. (No matter how dishevelled Goode became, he was always successful in attracting women.) And Goode—who was not known for being decisive, or for allowing himself to be imprisoned by the traditional forms of things—remained irresolute. One of his previous girlfriends had given him an ultimatum, with the result that he backed out of the relationship. “I found that instructive,” Marcia said. “I wasn’t going to make the same mistake. It was already a huge commitment for him when we decided to live together. He had never before invited anyone to share his apartment. I wasn’t worried about marriage; I was sure that things would work out.” (Later, when I raised the subject with Goode, he said, “Even though I knew I had met the right person in Marcia, marriage was very hard for me to accept. But resistance has its own law: you can hold on just so long. Among other things, marriage was a great relief to me—the relief of throwing off the burden of resisting it.”) “Richard didn’t want a big wedding,” Marcia said. “The production aspect of it would have been almost as frightening as the marriage itself.” On April 10, 1987, they embarked on two adventures: a first-time ferry ride to Staten Island, and marriage in its pleasant borough hall.

After lunch, I took a stroll and happened to look into the University Press bookstore. There was Goode, in his overcoat and woollen cap, quietly absorbed, as he always is while he scans bookshelves. I was surprised to see him, yet his presence seemed inevitable. He looked at me rather guiltily and said that he had only come out for a cup of coffee but hadn’t been able to resist the bookstore when he passed it on his way. Armed with The Yale Review, a book for Marcia about the Missa Solemnis, and a double espresso, he returned to his practicing.

That evening, a friend of the Goodes joined us for dinner at the Chez Panisse Café. Richard ordered a bottle of Lamborn Zinfandel, and sampled something from each of our plates. Presently, he began talking about one of the more arcane of his wide-ranging interests. “Swamps fascinate me,” he said, and a glint came into his eyes. “I guess the personal parallel isn’t hard to find. For some reason, whenever I propose a tour of the swamps of New Jersey, Marcia always has something else to do. But don’t laugh. Swamps happen to have the highest concentration of life—plant, animal, amphibian—of any environment on the planet.”

“No—actually, I haven’t,” Goode said. “I just think about them. After all, I married a woman named Marcia. There must be something in that.”

He changed the subject to Schubert and the voice: “If we come down to it, people love to play Schubert because they love to sing. One associates Schubert with the lied, and Chopin with Italian bel canto. It’s terribly important to imagine ideal vocal shape, and not to fall into the habit of equalizing things that aren’t meant to be equal. When I was ten, I was tremendously taken with recordings of Cantor Rosenblatt. In fact, at Curtis they said that when I sang solfège exercises I sounded like a cantor.”

“At least you play when you sing,” I ventured, and he exploded with laughter.

On Friday morning, during breakfast, Goode received a call from his agent in London, who was pressing him to agree to perform all the Beethoven sonatas there and in several other European cities. Goode would not commit himself. “A legacy of my chamber-music career is that I haven’t yet caught up with the solo repertoire,” he told me. “There are still so many works I’d like to play; I need time to learn them.”

At the hall, later that morning, Goode checked the lighting and the positioning of the piano. The concert was sold out, and stage seats were being set up. Marcia asked that they be arranged so that nobody would be in Richard’s line of vision. The day would be consecrated to Schubert: the Sonata in C Minor, which Goode had characterized as “intensely dramatic,” and the one in B-flat, “a lyrical transformation.”

On July 3, 1822, the twenty-five-year-old Schubert had a dream so impressive that he took the unusual step of writing down his recollection of it. It is a unique document:

I was deeply and lovingly devoted to [my family]. Once my father took us to a feast…and bade me enjoy the delicious dishes. But I could not, whereupon he became angry, and banished me from his sight.… I wandered into far-off regions, my heart filled with infinite love.… The news of my mother’s death reached me.… We followed her body in sorrow.… Then my father once more took me to his favorite garden.… Did the garden please me? I denied it, trembling. At that, my father struck me, and I fled.… I again wandered far away. For many years I sang songs. Whenever I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.

Thus were love and pain divided in me.

And one day I had news of a gentle maiden who had just died. And a circle formed around her grave in which many youths and old men moved as though in everlasting bliss.… Heavenly thoughts seemed forever to be showered on the youths from the maiden’s gravestone, like fine sparks, producing a gentle rustling.… I went to the gravestone with slow steps and lowered gaze, filled with devotion and firm belief, and before I was aware of it, I found myself in the circle, which uttered a wondrously lovely sound; and I felt as though eternal bliss were gathered together into a single moment. My father too I saw, reconciled and loving.

I have quoted the essential narrative of the dream not to suggest that any Schubert composition adheres to it programmatically, or to set forth any psychological hypothesis, but because, more than any source I know, it expresses in words the kind of journey on which Schubert takes us in his last sonatas.

That evening, as I walked in the darkness with Goode across the university campus toward Hertz Hall, he stumbled and almost fell. Obviously disconcerted, a moment later he dropped his bag of music and books on the ground. “When I’m on tour, I’m forced to hold myself together in a certain delicate equilibrium,” he had said to me that morning. “It’s when the tour ends and I return to normal life that I realize how enormous the tension has been.” We arrived at the hall without further incident, and I left him to carry out his pre-concert rituals.

The C-Minor Sonata begins with a forceful, Beethoven-like gesture—Goode seized on it impetuously—but then the music sets out in directions quite unlike Beethoven: slithery pianissimo chromatic scales, which Goode has likened to “a fast ride in a sled on a chilly wintry night, with some sort of fearful pursuit”; an agitated, unsettlingly fragmented Menuetto; a finale in the relentless rhythm of the tarantella, sister movement to the finale of the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. Sinister forces invade even the requiem-like slow movement. Goode’s performance plumbed a dark disquietude that often rose to a pitch of harrowing confrontation.

After the intermission and Debussy’s preludes came Schubert’s last sonata, the one in B-flat major. Goode had told me of Karl Ulrich Schnabel’s description of its opening theme: “There are some melodies that float, and some that are on the earth. This one is perfectly poised between the two.” The liedlike melody, which Goode set forth as though it had no bar lines, is interrupted by long pianissimo trills deep in the bass, which are followed by enigmatic rests. These trills are not mere ornaments; they are more like the murmurs of lurking furies. Goode led us unerringly through this strange dialogue of light, shadow, and silence. Because the movement is unusually long, pianists rarely make the optional repeat of its opening section. But Goode did, and it was a choice determined less by musicology than by high drama. There is an extraordinary transition passage—it remains unplayed if the repeat is not observed—in which, for the only time in the movement, the trill is declaimed fortissimo. Goode brought this transition to an abrupt, alarming climax and then let loose the furies in all their terrible grandeur. The silence that followed seemed a colossus astride an infinity. When the lied melody returned, it seemed even more consoling than before, and the whispered trills more ominous. With the repeat, the spatial dimensions became almost those of a Bruckner symphony, but we had become wanderers with Schubert and gladly travelled the terrain again. Goode held the architecture together by means of a subtle rhythmic flexibility that flowed with the dramatic gradients. The sense of organic growth reminded me not so much of any other pianist as of the conductor Wil-helm Furtwängler.

The slow movement was a rite of passage, sublime and mysterious. The Scherzo was angelic and childlike; the finale, hovering between minor and major, juxtaposed menace and radiant song. When the journey had come to an end, Goode received a standing ovation. But, more than ever, he was not there. The audience, knowingly or not, was applauding not the unassuming, bearlike pianist but the bespectacled man of five feet two inches who on November 19, 1828, in his thirty-second year, seven weeks after completing this last instrumental essay on the division of love and pain, turned to the wall and said, “Here, here is my end.”

In its days of grandeur, the building in which the Goodes live was the home of Mary Pickford. Much of the ornate molding from 1910 still exists, but the floors have long since been divided into apartments; the Goodes live in two rooms and an eat-in kitchen. It takes a certain determination for two musicians to function successfully in such a relatively small space. “I practice in the bedroom, and often we practice simultaneously,” Marcia told me recently, when I visited them there.

“This took some getting used to,” Goode said, and he added, “What we really need is a two-bedroom apartment over a fantastic restaurant where the owner knows us, loves us, and feeds us for the price of a recital or two a year.”

Goode gave me a tour of his books. Most (aside from seven trunkloads in the building’s basement) are not only shelved but categorized. “Since my marriage, the book collecting has become both more virulent and more ordered,” he said. An L-shaped entrance hallway is lined with bookcases devoted to fiction (double shelved), essays, biography, theatre, cinema, travel, science, and history. Moving into the living room—or what could more aptly be called the piano room—one finds poetry, music, and art. In the bedroom there’s a shelf for literary criticism, and most of the kitchen cabinets are filled with musical scores. Every horizontal surface, including the piano, is covered with a miscellany of music, books, and art works. “Richard is often attracted to some object but doesn’t bother to think about where it might go,” Marcia said. “He has wonderful taste in individual things but no concept of the total.” Goode’s favorite among his eclectic art collection is a nineteenth-century Japanese ceramic piece, which he bought twelve years ago. It’s a brooding monk about seven inches high, cradling one knee, with a somewhat simian aspect and fashioned with precision and delicacy. “Nobody else seems to like him,” Goode said. “He’s half human, half animal. Perhaps he’s a mythological figure. He’s eloquent, in a way; he has a look of remorse—of sorrow for what might have been.”

These days, Goode plays recitals in the major halls of the world, but he still prefers a church in Litchfield, Connecticut, to Carnegie Hall any time. In reference to his forthcoming tours, his first thought is not of concert halls but of bookstores: Powell’s, in Portland; the Tattered Cover, in Denver; Blackwell’s, in Oxford. “Do you want to know what the high point of my career was?” he asked, the glint appearing. “It was in 1981, when I went to Rio de Janeiro for the first time. I was soloist with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. As soon as we got there, I came down with a fever and had to go to bed. When I awoke, it was evening. I felt groggy, but I thought I’d go out for a walk. I went through a dark alleyway and suddenly came upon a large, illuminated square. Magical lights were twinkling everywhere. It was a book fair. I thought I had died and gone to Heaven.”

Although Goode seldom finds time for chamber music now, he takes special pleasure in giving recitals with the soprano Dawn Up-shaw when their schedules permit. “The song texts—for instance, in Schubert and Wolf—give a whole world of imagery that’s reflected in the piano parts,” he told me. “The challenge is to create the largest range of feelings in three or four minutes. I’ve always been attracted to concision, to density, to having every note charged with feeling. That’s also the way I read lyric poetry. The most fulfilling thing you can do is to create these different worlds of expression. After all, we pianists need all the help we can get, the piano being a miraculously limited instrument—limited in such fundamental ways that it stimulates the imagination no end.”

I asked Goode what advice he would give a young musician. He thought for a moment or two, and replied, “I don’t know how helpful it may be, but I’ll give the only answer I can: Pay attention to your deepest response to music, get as close to it as possible. I don’t think there is an external path to something like that. Your strength as a performer comes from where your need is—from saying the things in music you really have to say. Audiences will respond to that—they hear the accent of honest feeling.”

Goode is an aficionado of old recordings, and they are amassed in his piano room. If he still venerates the masters of the past, he has come to realize over the years that he has something to say in his own right.

“I’ve felt it best to get back to my basic instincts about music-making, about how to get the piano to sing like a human voice,” he told me. “This really started happening about ten years ago. I’ve found that I can go out onstage and speak through the instrument in a very direct and simple way. When that happens, giving concerts is wonderful, and I feel that this is really what I should be doing. But at other times—even now, when, as they say, my career has been taking off—the stagefright comes to me as strongly as ever. Often, it’s a horizon of darkness, tension, and anxiety. But you have to try to let the music express itself even when you don’t feel up to it. As Serkin said, ‘It’s no trick to play well when you’re not nervous.’

“A few years ago, I dreamed that I was standing before a large bookcase. From a vast collection of books on music, I chose biographies of three composers—Berlioz, Mahler, and Sibelius. Actually, I love Sibelius, but I have very mixed feelings about Berlioz and Mahler. However, it’s striking that all three of these composers have one thing in common: they never wrote anything significant for the piano. I’ve always fantasized that one day I’d quit playing in public. Every three weeks or so, I tell Marcia that there must be a better way to live. After all, why should we always be under the shadow of this experience? We could go to a small town and open a bookstore. But then I’d have to part with the books. I don’t know if I could do that.”

This interview, conducted in San Francisco, California, first appeared in The New Yorker, 29 June 1992.

CHAPTER FOUR

Going to the Core