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.”

This Day in Classical Music History (Beethoven Makes Public Debut)

March 29, 1795—In Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, 24-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven served notice of a new era in music with a debut in which he played one of his own compositions, leaving listeners running out of superlatives for a new, young force daring to break convention.

I see all kinds of quiz results taken by friends on Facebook. I’ve always avoided these until last week, when, on a classical music history site, I took one that matched my psychological profile to the closest composer. I was expecting—all right, hoping—that the response that would come up would be George Gershwin, a figure of real accomplishment who also happened to be a pretty convivial guy.

Instead, I learned, I matched up most closely with Beethoven.

If you want to know the truth, I read the assessment with some ambivalence. Being compared with a genius is flattering, if transparently ludicrous. But being compared with one whose tempestuous nature led contemporaries (and even a few biographers) to question his sanity—well, that was a different story.

Then I read the summary of why we matched. It seems that we both were enormously, even obsessively, driven in our creative pursuits, sometimes to the point where we worked in solitude for maximum concentration. Neither of us could be said to have many friends, but those friends we did have, we felt intense loyalty to.

Phrased that way, I suppose, we did have something in common. (And so now, Faithful Reader, you have two profiles: not just one of the composer, but also one far more elusive in this blog: of myself.)

Historical eras are notoriously arbitrary conventions, and perhaps none more than musical ones. For instance, what distinguishes the Classical from the Romantic composers? Beethoven, for instance, is generally lumped in with Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a Classical composer, but that seems, as much as anything else, a convenient way of classifying him with them according to a preset timeline and a personal association of the three.

In other important respects, though, Beethoven can be seen as a harbinger of the Romantic Era. His music, like others of the latter era, dealt with nature (e.g., the “Pastoral” Symphony); found many of its deepest wellsprings in literature (Plutarch provided spiritual consolation as his hearing deteriorated); dealt with the tumultuous power of love (the Moonlight Sonata); and embodied his advocacy of greater artistic and political freedom (he stripped his dedication of the Eroica Symphony to Napoleon after the latter had himself crowned emperor of France).

Learning at the hands of Haydn would have been an opportunity that almost anyone else would have dreamed of, but Beethoven was soon intent on cutting loose on his own. Before long, he received his chance at a series of charity concerts, benefiting widows and orphans of the Society of Musicians, at the Burgtheater, the national theater of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

He may have been outspoken in his republican sympathies, but an artist—even one, like Beethoven, intent on creating a commercial market for his work that would liberate him from patrons—has to start somewhere. For Beethoven, it was this national court of the empire in which he lived. The first benefactor of the theater, Emperor Josef II, had boosted attendance simply by showing up, providing a venue where those who hoped to influence imperial policy.

The stakes for Beethoven’s first public performance were enormous, demonstrated by the stress-induced abdominal power that had not bothered him in his native Bonn but that had bedeviled him since arriving in Vienna. Now, “severe colic” plagued him at the most inopportune moment: just as he was striving to complete his composition in time for his show. In the end, he was only able to get it done with two days to spare, as copyists sat in an anteroom, receiving one page at a time of the finale.

It is difficult, given the place that Beethoven occupies in the now-starchy classical music universe, to get a sense of the seismic impact of his performance. “Apart from the beauty and originality of his ideas, and his ingenious manner of expressing them, there was something magical about his playing,” observed fellow pianist-composer Carl Czerny. Late last year, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, in listing Beethoven’s unique contribution to classical music instrumentation, pointed out that “The modern piano bears the imprint of his demand for a more resonant and flexible instrument.”

Contemporary listeners knew they were in the presence of something overwhelming, but none of the acclaim translated into the groupies who would throw themselves at a later piano life force, Franz Liszt. Beethoven courted a number of women in his lifetime, but as soon as they got a load of his temperamental outbursts and often slovenly, smelly apparel, they’d had enough.

The composition that Beethoven tried out that magical night in 1795, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B Flat Major, was one he had been working on ever before arriving in Vienna several years before. He was not terribly impressed with it, perhaps feeling it a bit derivative of Mozart, and so he would revise it a fair amount before he would allow it to be printed several years later. That only demonstrated his perfectionist streak all the more.

(To see—and hear—what the effect was about with this work, please see this YouTube clip of this composition, featuring the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andris Nelson, with Paul Lewis on the piano.)

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther King Jr., on Marian Anderson)

“She [Marian Anderson] sang as never before, with tears in her eyes. When the words of ‘America’ and ‘Nobody Knows de Trouble I Seen’ rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality, and fraternity. That was a touching tribute, but Miss Anderson may not as yet spend the night in any good hotel in America.”-- Martin Luther King Jr., “The Negro and the Constitution,” quoted in Alex Ross, “A Critic at Large: Voice of the Century—Celebrating Marian Anderson,” The New Yorker, April 13, 2009

Ross, of The Rest Is Noise blog, might be the most consistently excellent New Yorker contributor, now that John Updike has passed on. Seventy years to the day that Marian Anderson gave her spellbinding Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial after being rejected by the Daughters of the American Revolution, his article on the pathbreaking soprano makes for must reading.

The quote from Dr. King comes from an oration that the 15-year-old gave five years after the concert. You can’t read it, of course, without thinking of how, 25 years after the event, he would perform his own “baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity” in the “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on the same spot.

Ross reminds us of the racial divide that still exists not just in America at large but even in the classical music world (only two percent of orchestra players are black), but also of the calm self-possession that led Anderson to make one precedent after another, even when she felt the instinct not to make a scene. (In WWII Birmingham, Ala., she had to wait outside a segregated train station while her accompanist went to get her a sandwich—all the while as a group of German POWs sat in comfort inside.)

Above all, Ross explains the nature of her immense gift, the voice that led Arturo Toscanini to praise her as the type of singer who comes along once every hundred years. Here’s how Ross analyzes her performance of Schubert’s “Erlkonig”:

“You seem to be hearing three singers, yet there are no obvious vocal breaks between them. She is fastidious but seldom stiff; caressing little slides from note to note and a delicately trembling tone warm up what might have been an excessively studious approach. The incalculable element is the air of spiritual elevation that dwells behind the technique.”