Quote of the Day (Alex Ross, on the Piano’s ‘History of Weirdness’)

“It has never been just about the music. The notion that performers should be faceless butlers of genius, impersonally conveying sublime messages in sound, has no basis in tradition. The bonkers antics of virtuoso pianists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prove otherwise. Franz Liszt, whose stage costumes ranged from Magyar military garb to priestly robes, would sometimes stop between pieces to chat with admirers. The infamously acerbic Hans von Bülow, while on an American tour, became so irritated at the promotional efforts of the Chickering piano company that he took out a jackknife and scraped the brand’s name off the instrument. Vladimir de Pachmann once appeared at a recital holding a pair of socks; these, he claimed, had been knitted for Chopin by George Sand. And so on: the history of the piano is a history of weirdness.”—Music critic Alex Ross, “Thoroughly Modern” (a profile of pianist Yuja Wang), The New Yorker, June 3, 2024

The image accompanying this post shows the last of the three “bonkers” piano virtuosi mentioned by Ross, Vladimir de Pachmann (1848-1933). He sure doesn’t look crazy here, does he?

But the adjectives that most commonly pop up in any online description of this magician of the keyboard are “controversial,” “notorious,” “eccentric,” and, most charitably, “florid.”

I imagine that Ross has had quite a chuckle at some of the cinematic representations of this “history of weirdness,” such as Roger Daltrey in Ken Russell’s Lisztomania and John Cleese’s mynah bird-afflicted Beethoven on “Monty Python.”