“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.”
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