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.”

Quote of the Day (E.T.A. Hoffmann, on Music, ‘The Most Romantic of All the Arts’)

“Music… is the most romantic of all the arts—one might almost say, the only genuinely romantic one—for its sole subject is the infinite. The lyre of Orpheus opened the portals of Orcus—music discloses to man an unknown realm, a world that has nothing in common with the external sensual world that surrounds him, a world in which he leaves behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing.”—Composer-music critic E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” (1813)

Quote of the Day (Virgil Thomson, on What Makes a Good Reviewer)

“Any reviewer who finds quickly the compact phrase…has clearly a talent for letters. If he has also a talent for judgment and no fear of using it, …then he is a good reviewer. A good reviewer does not have to be right; he has only to have a good mind and to speak it.”—Composer-critic Virgil Thomson (1896-1989), “A Free Critical Spirit,” New York Herald Tribune Books, Jan. 27, 1957, in Virgil Thomson: The State of Music and Other Writings, edited by Tim Page (2016)

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on Opera Acting)

“Operatic actors, so far from being free from mannerisms, wholly substitute mannerisms of the feeblest sort for acting; and as for variety of resource, there is not a penny to choose between the average prima donna’s treatment of any two of her parts, however dissimilar in conception. Her Lady Henrietta is exactly the same as her Marguerite; her Marguerite is not distinguishable by a deaf man from her Juliet, except by her dress and wig; and her Semiramis is only a swaggering Juliet. Even the few singers, male or female, who are specially celebrated for their acting, would be celebrated for their deficiency if they were placed in an equally prominent position in drama, and judged by the standard set by Ristori and Salvini.”—George Bernard Shaw, How to Become a Musical Critic, edited and with an introduction by Dan H. Laurence (1960)