Patrick Bade
Virtuosi of the Concert Platform
Patrick Bade - Virtuosi of the Concert Platform
- Well, this is Carnegie Hall in New York, which opened in 1891. It’s huge, it seats 2,800 people. And it quickly established itself as a serious rival to the Musikverein in Vienna and the Philharmoniker in Berlin as one of the world’s greatest concert venues. And New York established itself also as a major centre for the performance of classical music, not just opera at the Met. And there were various reasons for this. You had this very cosmopolitan, highly sophisticated musical audience in New York, excellent newspapers and critics. And of course, the fact that the fees were very high was also an attraction for European pianists, violinists, and concert virtuosi. So the fees already in New York were high, but actually the really big money was in touring across the states. But in order to kind of get that kind of gig, either as a singer where you had to have made your reputation at Metropolitan. And as an instrumentalist, you had to make your reputation in New York at Carnegie Hall. Then here is the interior. You can see how vast it is. And this is the Aeolian Hall which opened in 1912, somewhat smaller, more suitable for chamber music. This seated 1100 people.
Images are displayed throughout the lecture.
It was on the third floor of this building, on the 43rd Street. I’m beginning with the prince of pianists. This is Jan Paderewski, with the possible exception of Liszt, I suppose. He was the most celebrated, the most adored pianist in history. And he was born in Poland in 1860 into a slightly impoverished aristocratic family. He’s an exception amongst the musicians. I’m talking about today for two reasons. Firstly, he’s not Jewish. Of the dozen or so musicians I’m talking about today, only three are not Jewish. And this was not by my design at all. There was no conscious choice here. These were all musicians in a way who chose themselves. And it was only after I compiled the list, I realised how strongly Jewish it was. And I’m not going to really go into that tonight, what the reasons for that are, but you probably have your own theories about why it should be. But the other way in which he is exceptional is that he wasn’t a child prodigy. If you are going to achieve the highest level of virtuosity, really you have to start at a very early age. So he only really began his serious pianistic studies when he was 20 years old. He went to the most famous piano teacher in Europe, Leszetycki in Vienna, and who said to him, “Oh, you are too old, you’re already 20.”
But he was so determined, there was something about him that convinced Leszetycki. I mean, he always had this quite extraordinary aura about him, a kind of charisma, what can I say? And he made his major breakthrough to stardom in Paris in 1889. That was the year of the great exhibition of the Eiffel Tower. And he really took Paris by storm. And he followed that up by taking London by storm in 1890 and then onto New York in 1891. People went absolutely crazy about him. It was, you know, something like, you know, well, it was like Lisztomania earlier, a term coined by Heiner or Beatlemania in the 1960s. And this had to do not just with his pianism, had to do with his looks. Of course, he was a very beautiful man according to the taste of the period. And as I said, he had this extraordinary charisma. When he appeared in London, all the artists wanted to depict him. This is a portrait of him by Burne Jones. There’s a letter by Jones, absolutely ecstatic. Now, as far as I know, Burne Jones was completely heterosexual, but he talks about the beauty of Paderewski in the most sort of gushing terms, almost as if he was in love with him. This is a drawing, actually, I have a version of this on the wall right ahead of me in this room. The original drawing of this is Burne Jones.
This is a very high quality contemporary reproduction. I remember in the days when I was a student and I used to visit the Maas Gallery, Jeremy Maas, he was the great expert on Victorian art. And he always had one of these framed on the wall in his gallery as a warning, because the quality of these late 19th century productions is so high that under glass, you really can’t tell whether they’re the original drawing or reproduction. And here he is by Alma-Tadema on the left hand side and by Alfred Gilbert on the right hand side. Now, he made quite a few recordings and this film of him as well, actually towards the end of his life. And by and large, I’ve already talked with the singers how often there is a discrepancy between recordings and what contemporaries said about these people. And on the whole Paderewski’s recordings are mostly rather disappointing. They don’t really convey what all the fuss was about. A few of them do. And I think the one I’m going to play you does. I’m going to play you a Chopin Mazurka A minor Op. 17. This is recorded in 1917.
And it has a wonderful kind of wayward improvisatory quality as it’s got a sort of dreamy quality to it as though he’s sort of making it up as he goes along. And I certainly find it very seductive. Now, moving on to a composer actually of an older generation. This is Vladimir de Pachmann, who’s born in 1848 in Odessa. Now, Odessa is a city that has produced more than its fair share of great piano virtuosi in the 20th century. Sviatoslav Richter, and well, quite a few who you’ll know. In fact, again, Vladimir de Pachmann was from an aristocratic background. He wasn’t Jewish and he was considered the great exponent of Chpoin. And he was another pianist who had a great cult following in America. He first appeared there in 1880. And over the next 40 years, he constantly toured America and he turned up in London and Paris and other centres as well. He was notorious for his platform eccentricities, his rather strange and self-indulgent behaviour while playing. In fact, George Bernard Shaw, who’s one of the leading music critics in London at the period, he described a performance. He said, “Mr. de Pachmann gave his well-known panto mimic performance accompanied by Chopin.”
It’s really tricky doing inserting these music things, and I’m afraid I’ve got a few of them wrong recently. Now, moving on to Leopold Godowsky, and he was born in Lithuania in 1870 from a very poor background. His father died of cholera. He was orphaned at an early age, and he does follow the pattern. He certainly was Jewish and he was a prodigy. He made his debut at the age of nine. But amazingly, he seems to have been almost completely self-taught. And he was very much a pianist, pianist, other pianists hugely admired him. But they all said that wonderful though he was in public performance, he reserved his greatest performances for private occasions in front of friends and fellow musicians. He’s another who’s famous for the virtuosity of his technique. And I’m going to play one of the most famous Chopin virtuoso of pieces. The so-called “Minute Waltz”. I don’t think anybody’s ever actually managed to play in a minute. And he’s is by no means the fastest recording on, fastest performance on record.
He takes actually nearly two minutes to play it. And it’s considerably slower, for instance, than Yuja Wang who plays it very often as an encore piece. But it’s a lovely performance, more relaxed perhaps, than what one would’ve expected. I think that comes in as about one minute, 50 seconds. So Leopold Godowsky, that was. And now we move on to Josef Hofmann and another extraordinary child prodigy, I dunno what it is about Jewish boys. Well, I do sort of know what it actually, I remember once saying that to an audience at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, and I got a chorus from the saying, “Jewish mothers” and I should Jewish grandmothers. So he’s born in Kraków in 1876, and he made his debut at the age of five. He was so tiny that his feet couldn’t reach the pedals. So he played the piano and it’s his father on his knees on the floor, was manipulating the pedals. And then he was swept off to America and he toured America from end to end until they were stopped, in fact, by the Society for Protection of Children who felt that he was being unduly exploited.
And a generous and wealthy donor offered his father $50,000. That’s a really lot of money in the 1880s to stop him paying in public till the age of 18 and to give him a chance for a proper study. And so he went back to Russia and he studied with Anton Rubinstein. He was a man, there are all sorts of extraordinary stories about him. He was a man of incredible musical memory, could, you know, just play anything at a drop of a hat. And a brilliant mind. He was also a very successful inventor with various things to do with pianos and to do with the burgeoning automobile industry. He patented several devices that were used in the manufacturer of cars. There are recordings of him very early in his career by the acoustic process. And then strangely, he completely stopped making commercial recordings. So there are no electric recordings of him made in the studio. But he continued performing in public until the end of his career. And the image you see on the screen is actually of a concert he gave in at the Metropolitan Opera in 1937 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his American debut.
But I’m going to play you a radio transcript of a concert in which he played the “Chopin Concerto” in F Minor. This is an absolute desert island disc for me. I love this performance. It’s absolute magic. He had apparently very small hands, you know, the opposite of Rachmaninoff, who had had absolutely huge hands. Incidentally, Rachmaninoff was one of his greatest admirers and thought that he was a better pianist than Rachmaninoff himself. But with these small hands, there is a story, I dunno whether it’s true that he actually had pianos specially made for him with narrower keys to accommodate his small hands. But the precision of the articulation, you’ll hear it. These wonderful runs that, you know, a pearly precision of articulation as his hands run up and down the piano and an exquisite poetry to his playing.
Audio plays.
Now, of course, a piano is essentially a percussive instrument, but the secret to great pianism is to make it sound as though it isn’t. And to make the piano sing and in my opinion, Hoffman has, he can really do that. So now moving on to a violinist, and this is Fritz Kreisler, and he was born in Vienna in 1875, also into a Jewish family. Although the family converted to Christianity when he was 12 years old. And he seems to have been somebody who was, who didn’t identify as a Jew and wasn’t actually that comfortable with being identified by others as a Jew. It was a kind of shock for him, I think, when he was outed by the Nazis in 1933 and his concerts were dropped in Berlin. Now he, again, a very, very much loved figure around the world, and particularly in New York and famous for the roundness, the warmth, the sweetness of his tone.
It’s a very, very distinctive tandra, as distinctive as that of a human voice. And the recording I’m going to, there are many, many, many recordings of Kreisler and lots of recordings in quite good sound in the 1930s by the electric process. But I’ve chosen a recording, one of the first recordings he made in 1903. It’s a very primitive recording, but even in this recording, I think the qualities I’ve described will come through very strongly, this very distinctive tandra of great warmth and charm.
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Was absolutely gorgeous use of portamento, more than you get, I think from most modern violinists. Portamento is when you slide from one note to another. and we move on to another very great violinist and a heroic figure. This is Bronisław Huberman, who was Polish. Another of course amazing child virtuoso. He was a pupil of Joachim, great Joachim, Brawn’s friend when he was 10 years old. And when he was 12, he accompanied Adelina Patti, she went on a world farewell tour, one of many, she was making farewells over a period of about 20 years. And of course he actually garnered quite a lot of the attention at these concerts beside the great diva. Now, as I said, he’s a heroic figure, rather like Toscanini. He’s perhaps more remembered today as a political activist than as a pianist. There aren’t that many recordings by him.
I love them. I think they’re very exciting, but they’re very much of their time. It’s a style playing that differs enormously from anybody today. He was one of the first people to really understand the dangers of the Nazi regime, right from the start. And as I mentioned, many of the Jewish soloists were forcibly dropped from Berlin concerts in 1933, almost immediately. And Furtwängler in his naivety, he thought, “Oh, well this is just a blip. I’m just going to invite them all back again.” And they’ll all come back in 1934 and that will be that and that will be over and done with. And so he invited Kreisler, he invited Yehudi Menuhin and Huberman. But Huberman wasn’t having it.
And he wrote a public letter to Furtwängler saying that, “No, you could not possibly compromise with this terrible regime.” And also because he understood the danger so quickly, he set about creating an orchestra of exiles in Palestine. He was the driving force behind… And there were so many obstacles to be overcome, from the British authorities, from the local Jewish authorities, from the Zionists. Zionists didn’t want musicians, they didn’t want an orchestra. They wanted soldiers and farmers and so on. So he had to deal with an enormous amount of prejudice and opposition. But he created his orchestra, which made its debut in 1936. And through doing this, he saved the lives of well over a thousand musicians and their families. So I’m going to play you the cadenza from the first movement of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. And there are two recordings actually of him playing. This is a commercial recording and then there’s a live performance. I’m going to play you from the commercial recording. And this was in the news, it must have been about 10 years ago. Somebody claimed to have discovered Hitler’s personal record collection. And in that collection was, rather strangely, the Tchaikovsky violin concerto in this version with Huberman playing.
Maybe Hitler didn’t pay too much attention to what was on the labels of the records. But it’s a very exciting performance and it combines a kind of wonderful virtuosic recklessness with great finesse and delicacy. I think I’m going to have to move on, sorry. But you can find that on YouTube. This is Rachmaninoff Sergei Rachmaninoff, born in 1873. So it’s of course a commemorative Rachmaninoff. And he died in 1943. There’s a lot of Rachmaninoff on the radio this year. And again, he is an exception as he didn’t come from a Jewish background, came from an aristocratic Russian background. Early in his career, he wrote an opera, “The Miserly Knight” based on Pushkin, which has an absolutely horribly antisemitic character in it, depiction of a Jewish character in it. But it’s interesting, I don’t think Rachmaninoff himself clearly, despite setting that text, was clearly philo-Semitic. I mean, especially later in his career after his Russian exile, virtually all his friends were of Russian Jewish origin, you know, Horowitz and many others. So he was a very tall man. He had these absolutely enormous hands. And so when he was forced to leave Russia at the time of the revolution in 1917, he escaped via Finland and Scandinavia, arrived in America.
And then really he needed to earn his living and support his family. The composition wasn’t going to do it even though his compositions were so popular. So he really developed his career as a virtuoso pianist. In fact, he’d already appeared in America in 1909 touring with his third piano concerto, which was especially written to be premiered in America for American audiences. Now I do hope it’s going to turn out right and I’ve got the right soundbite for you. This is a very fascinating recording of the Mendelssohn “Spinning Song” that was recorded on a piano roll. These were machines where the recording is made mechanically rather than acoustically. And so the actual recording I’m playing, of course is a modern one made just a few years ago. So it’s modern quality of sound. There are piano rolls of Gustav Mahler. There are piano rolls of Ravel and many others. And often I’m not totally convinced by them ‘cause especially in legato passages, it seems to me that the piano rolls, the mechanical device doesn’t quite capture the touch of the original performance. It’s much better at capturing rapid, brilliant music. And this is I think, very convincing.
And I think one can say definitely because there is actually a recording by Rachmaninoff the same piece, a more conventional recording made by the electric recording process in a studio. If you compare the two, there are almost identical, except of course the sound quality of the recording I hope to play you is much better. This is Ossip Gabrilowitsch and he was born in 1878 in St. Petersburg. And he was educated there initially by Anton Rubinstein and then moved on to Vienna for two year study with Leschetizky. So those were the two greatest piano pedagogues in the world in the late 19th century. And between them, they created the techniques of pretty well all the great pianists of the period. As you can see, he was a very handsome man and he briefly fell into the clutches of Alma Mahler. In her diary, she gives a very lurid description of really seducing him and kissing him in the moonlight. But at the time she was still married to Gustav Mahler and he was a great friend and admirer of Mahler. So he really pulled back at the last minute.
And as my granny would say, “They did not go all the way.” So he then moved on to America where he met and fell in love with the daughter of Mark Twain, Clara Twain. And you can see the two of them there. He was also one of those musicians who was politically aware in the 1930s. And like Huberman, he realised it was very important to take a stand against the Nazis. And in 1933 when it looked like Toscanini was going to go to Nazi Germany to conduct the Festival that year, and initially he said he would, despite the Nazi takeover, and he really tried to move heaven and earth to persuade Toscanini directly, to persuade other people, to persuade him not to go to Nazi Germany. And in the event, of course, Toscanini didn’t, and Toscanini too became one of the important voices against the rise of fascism and Nazism. So here we’re going to hear Ossip Gabrilowitsch actually playing a piece of, I was going to say English music 'cause it sounds so English to me, but really it’s not, it’s Australian. This is Percy Grainger “Shepherd’s Hay”. This is Vladimir Horowitz. Most people would regard him as actually perhaps the greatest piano virtuoso of the 20th century.
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Certainly the middle part of the century. And he arrived in America in 1928. He made his debut at Carnegie Hall. Must have been a nightmare experience for the young man because he was playing the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto and the conductor was Thomas Beecham. Typical Beecham didn’t actually know the score very well, but nevertheless thought he could try and conduct it from memory. And he had obviously had memory lapses or points where the orchestra and the pianist diverged. And that must have been a really terrifying experience for him in his New York debut. Nevertheless, the critics immediately recognised his extraordinary quality and he established himself very quickly. Now I’m going to hope I’ve got this right this time, I’m going to play you something really absolutely amazing. So hold onto your seats for this. This is the climax of the Liszt sonata in B minor. This is recorded in 1932. And it starts off in a rather sort of insouciant way, but rapidly builds up to the most incredible climax. I mean, you just think, how can any human being possibly actually play all the notes that Liszt is demanding? And it builds up into a storm, a storm of notes, and then just sort of breaks off and returns to a sort of very, as though nothing had happened insouciant, little piece of melody.
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I am going to move on there. In music of course, of absolutely insane virtuosity or almost impossible play. Now my last great virtuso that I’m going to talk about is Jascha Heifetz, who was born in Vilnius in 1899. It’s the usual pattern of, well you can look at it two ways, can’t you? See of either nurturing or exploiting these children that he made his concert debut at the age of eight, playing the Mendelssohn violin concerto. And the story of his American debut is a very famous one. He’d had a period of great hardship and after the revolution in Russia, travelling around Russia with his friend Nathan Milstein. And they managed to escape eventually and in a very adventurous way. And he arrived in New York towards the end of the first World War. And on the 9th of October, 1917, I think it is already, he made his Carnegie Hall debut and it was, audiences were absolutely blown away by his virtuosity. They’d never heard anything quite like it before. The incredible technical ease of his playing. And everybody was there. Everybody who was anybody was in New York. I mean, the word had gone around that there was this phenomenal new violinist. Kreisler was there.
And Kreisler was quoted as saying, “Well, we can all break our bows because none of us can possibly compete with that.” And the other very famous story about this occasion was that Mischa Elman, a wonderful violist, rather like Kreisler, known for the sweetness of his turn. He was there in the company of the pianist Leopold Godowsky. And at the end of the concert he turned to Godowsky and he said, “Let’s get out of here, it’s hot in here.” And Godowsky said to him, “Hmm, not for pianists.” So I thought, actually I’d give you a break from virtuosity and I could have played you one of Heifetz’s more showy performances. But he was of course a great musician and he loved playing chamber music in the company of other great musicians. And I thought, by playing you a movement from a Mendelssohn trio, I can also get in two other very great instrumentalists who went to America, Arthur Rubinstein at the piano, Piatigorsky on the cello. A wonderful feather light playing from all three of them.
Audio plays.
So what have you got to say?
Q&A and Comments:
Q: “Was it not Godowsky who famously…”
A: Oh yes, yes, you’ve got the same story that I just told you indeed.
Q: “One of Josef Hofmann’s inventions for cars is the windscreen wiper.”
A: Yes. Isn’t that amazing? His idea was based on the oscillating arm of the musical metronome. So that’s such an unexpected connection there, isn’t it?
Oh, I’m so glad you’ve seen the “Orchestra of Exiles” documentary from… Yes it’s a great film, but there’s an even better film that was made at the same time by Oh my goodness.
Dorit is the daughter of the first violinist of the orchestra, made a little documentary with interviews with her father. And if you can get hold of that and see that too, Dorit Straus.
Lauren Fenuse, I dunno how to pronounce Hungarian. Remember the Orchestra Palestine, he later came to teach at the conservatory in Toronto, was involved with the youth orchestra, a lovely gentleman and you had the privilege of meeting the family because at the time of his arrival, I was his daughter, Talia’s teacher.
“The street in Tel Aviv, on which Israel Philharmonics Orchestra concert hall is situated, is named after Huberman.” quite rightly so. You are talking about Rachmaninoff, because after the disaster of his first symphony was very badly conducted by Glazunov who was apparently drunk and the critics in St. Petersburg ripped it to pieces and that gave Rachmaninoff a nervous breakdown. It’s true and he had block, and it was through hypnosis that he was to returned to composition and wrote his most famous piece, perhaps the the second piano concert. But he had a second period of more or less block after he arrived in America. There’s a period of 10 years between 1917 and 1927. I think the shock of leaving his native country. And he wrote almost nothing in that 10 years. And then of course a string of late masterpieces in the 1930s and up his death in 1943.
Yes, Gabrilowitsch of course was the conductor, wasn’t he? He was important in Detroit more as a conductor than as a pianist.
This is Dennis again, “A few years ago, "BBC Music Magazine” invited 100 professional pianists to rate their top three pianists of all time. Clear winner was Rachmaninoff, ahead of Horowitz and Rubinstein.“ But it’s funny, I’ve heard that in many of course there’ve been quite a few surveys like that. And another pianist who often comes out top, a pianist, pianist is Alfred Cortot.
And this is Avril who had the honour and pleasure of attending Horowitz’s concert in around 1975.
Thank you, Madeline. I’m sorry, again, it must be my age, I think but also my incompetence with computers. There were a few blips. and I’m afraid the first thing I played you I realised afterwards was not Paderewski, it was actually Vladimir de Pachmann, the first Chopin excerpt that I played you.
Thank you, Madeline. And, "Was there rivalry or support among…” Actually on the whole, not like singers because they’re dreadful rivalries between singers. But no, I think there was huge amount of support. I mean Rachmaninoff got an enormous amount of support from fellow pianists when he arrived in America. I think on the whole there was really more support than there was rivalry between these great artists.
Q: “No women.” Where there any women virtuoso?
A: There were great women pianists of course. I think Myra Hess of course, but nobody would ever call Myra Hess, you wouldn’t say virtuosity. Is it a male thing? This is quite an interesting question really. It’s probably something to do with testosterone and showing off. Although that of course doesn’t apply to singers 'cause there are great virtuoso sopranos. But it’s true, there have been great woman musicians I suppose you’d certainly call her a great virtuoso. But certainly in the period I’m talking about I don’t think there were. There were great woman pianists and some very good woman violinists. But not ones that one would describe as virtuosi.
Thank you, Hannah, very much. And I heard Rubinstein just once actually. And of course I treasure that memory. Because he did go on for a very very long time.
Thank you, Launa, very much. And Milstein I could of included of course. Another very great. You have to make choices I’m afraid when you do these lectures.
Thank you, Diane.
And this is Ellen, who heard Mischa. I was very sorry to leave him out of this lecture as well 'cause I think he’s a… Again I am not quite sure if virtuoso is the right word for him, but a very lovely pianist all the same. One shilling in the front row, how wonderful. And there’s a book Ruth says of “Orchestra of Exiles”. So it’s a very extraordinary story.
Detroit’s concert hall built especially for Gabrilowitsch 'cause he died very young so I suppose he didn’t enjoy it for very long. “Term legato describes smooth moving between notes without pausing.” No, I did use the term legato. I only used it once. I used it to say that the piano roll recording is not good at accurate recording of legato. But portamento is the term which is related to legato. I did use that term. Portamento is when you slide from one note to the next, rather than going cleanly from one note to the next.
Thank you very much, Annette. Thank you, everybody, and thank you for being patient with my blips and my technical problems. And see you again on Sunday.