by Ansel Adams
The subject of legato is more than just the conventional smooth progression of one note to another. It is agreed that no matter how a single piano key is struck, a closely similar sound will be heard, more loudly as the impact force increases and impossible to control once struck. It is the relationship of volume and the interval of pitch and time between two or more notes that defines “touch,” the sense of relative tonal quality, and suggests the shape of phrases. The retinal-cortex performance in the achievement of vision is not dissimilar to the aural-cortex phenemenon in hearing, in that the mind not only receives values, but creates their enhancement.
Consider a struck note; the first impact sound is followed by a complex series of harmonics. In this chain of harmonics there are links and profiles of completion, suggesting the ideal moment for the impact of the next note. However, the miracle dwells in the anticipation of the correct moment of impact of the following note; if we acted on perception of this moment, we would, because of the brain-nerve-muscle lag, be late in action and the theory of legato blasted.
With Miss Butler I progressed from Bach—all the Inventions, all the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Italian Concerto, etc.—to early Italian composers and Mozart. After several Mozart sonatas, I was allowed to play Beethoven, then the logical step to Chopin, playing most of the preludes and nocturnes and then the Fantasy C-sharp Minor Scherzo and the B-flat Minor Sonata. Then more Bach—the Partitas and the English Suites—and a balanced injection of Schumann and Schubert.
One day, after playing an assignment for her, she said, in a quiet and unemotional voice, “I have done all I can for you. It is time you went on to larger worlds. I think you should study with Frederick Zech for a while, simply to get the feel of the great musicians of the middle and late nineteenth century.”
My fairly placid world was abruptly changed in 1918 by the formidable character of Frederick Zech. He was at least eighty years old and possessed an impressive mustache and a strong German accent. He had been an assistant to Von Bulow in Potsdam. Zech played for me but once. Because I did not do very well with some double sixths, he pushed me aside and proceeded to cover the keyboard with a chromatic double-sixths scale with both hands at a dazzling tempo.
At my first session, Zech simply asked me to play for him. After a short survey of my repertoire, he said, “You have been very well trained. If you work hard you will play good. We shall now give you more heroic position! You will spend one hour on finger work, one hour on Bach, one hour on Beethoven, then two hours on something else that I shall give you. First we will try a little Schubert and a little Liszt and then we shall see.”
Frederick Zech kept me in line with wry comments such as—this in regard to a Schubert Impromptu—“You must play it like making love, but you should not breathe so fast near the end.” Once I was working on Liszt’s Saint Francis of Paulus Walking on the Waves. I thought I had it fairly well in hand, but he was obviously distressed. “Mr. Adams, please—first you must know the notes, then you can bellow like Chaliapin.” I fear that my performance had paraphrased an old homily, “You could not see the rocks for the avalanche.” There was no way to put anything over on Frederick Zech.
By 1923 I was a budding professional pianist without a decent piano. I was still practicing on our old upright that was falling apart. My mother’s family were old friends of Governor Jewett Adams (no relation) and his wife, in Carson City, Nevada. Mrs. Adams was a good pianist and took a friendly interest in my musical progress. When the governor passed on to the Higher Authority, she moved to San Francisco and had a fine, though small, apartment in the Stanford Court. Mrs. Adams had a huge German piano, an Ermler, nine feet long, that had been manufactured in about 1857. She kindly gave me her piano, which I felt to be a godsend. The keyboard was several notes shorter than modern pianos, the action was simple and not too subtle, but the tone was quite fine.
There was a quality about the Ermler that was unforgettable. Its case was of rosewood, with a marvelous, dark luminosity. The music rack was carved in East Indian style. The end was squared off, slightly coffinlike. In fact, with two candles set on either side of the music rack, it had a truly funereal mood and reeked of the qualities quite different from those of fresh air and green hills in sunlight.
While the Ermler was a definite improvement, I longed for a more sympathetic piano and would visit the Wiley B. Allen store in San Francisco. They were agents for the Mason and Hamlin piano and were very kind to me, letting me come in to practice on whatever instruments were on the floor. One day in 1925 I arrived and the salesman said that two beautiful Double-B’s had just come in. I played for a little while on one of them; it was superb. Then I sat down at the other one and within one minute I knew this was the piano for me! Love at first sound! It had an incredible tone and action; it was right, inevitable, and, of course, expensive! I reluctantly departed that afternoon. On the way home in the streetcar I accumulated gloom; here was the most wonderful piano I had ever touched and there could be no way I could afford it. Struggling to become a concert pianist, I now taught piano lessons, bringing home only a small income. I talked with my father and he said, “Maybe we can do something about it. Let me think.”
The next morning my father reminded me that I had been given a lot in Atherton by my Uncle Ansel. We immediately sold it, receiving twenty-two hundred dollars. I used this as the down payment on the sales price of sixty-seven hundred dollars with interest. My father and I paid it off at seventy-five dollars a month for five years.
I will never forget the great anxiety of waiting for the new piano and the terror of seeing it carried up the twisting path to our house, teetering from side to side. The Mason and Hamlin was installed as though a queen in residence in a simple cottage. It gleamed in the morning light coming through the living room window as I cautiously sat before it, struck a few random notes, then tried a simple Chopin nocturne. With those first few notes, a new experience of beauty blossomed: the sound was so lovely, the dynamics so extended. There was a limpid excellence over the entire scale; the notes seemed willing to live as long as I wished them to. Sixty years later it still retains its beautiful tone; a few things of the world are of enduring quality, and this piano is one of them.
With continued hope for a future in music and with Zech’s blessing, I moved on to another teacher, Benjamin Moore, an extraordinary and tranquil personality, who taught by indirection, requesting me to comment on my own playing in the analytical, rather than critical sense.
Benjamin Moore created thought-trains that I have retained over the years. He was a master of the “as if” method of communication. I will never forget how difficult it was to create any impression of legato with widely separated notes or chords without the sustaining pedal. Getting from one to another position as quickly as possible might give a very short time lag, but the note or notes sounded would be heard as a “slap.” Ben Moore would say quietly, “Why not think of the ‘up’ from the first position as part of the ‘down’ of the second position?” Immediately I was able to achieve the elusive legato, even over a space of several octaves. This was another example of anticipation: achieving the unique moment when the input of a new sound into the receding harmonics of the previous sound is at the optimal moment.
Of course, music is not simply putting one note after another; a tremendous variety of physical, aesthetic, and emotional situations are brought under control over the years by arduous practice. All falls together in a grand, yet apparently simple creative pattern that reveals high levels of memory, comprehension, and sensitivity.
Not made for the piano, my hands were rather small, with a span that barely managed a tenth on the keyboard, and fingerpads that would not tolerate much bravura playing; bone-bruise occurred frequently. I was told I had ideal violin hands—probably also good for flute, piccolo, and harmonica! My style and repertoire were therefore constrained by my physical limits. I did develop an unusually beautiful touch and musical quality. I do not think I could have achieved mu
ch notice as a concert pianist, but I could produce effective sounds, phrasing, and a style of unusual quality. I could have become a performer of a limited repertoire, an accompanist, and teacher.
My first meeting with a celebrated musician was when I was fifteen years old. Paula Humphries, a neighbor, was dedicated to the musical life of San Francisco and frequently entertained visiting greats. She kindly asked me to an afternoon tea with Johanna Gadski, the Wagnerian singer. I approached the event with terror. When I rang the doorbell, I was ushered into a large living room and a chattering flood of voices. For a few moments I was dismally alone in a very strange world. Then Paula rushed up to greet me (one would think I was her son, the mayor, or the symphony conductor) and introduced me to the crowd upon a gathering tide of welcome and hospitality. I was led to the Presence: a mountain of a woman, radiant with health, creative aura, and sheer physical power. She gripped my hands, drew me toward her, clasped me to her expansive bosom adorned with a shimmering emerald, and said, “I am so glad to meet you. Any friend of Paula’s is a friend of mine!” I received an additional bear hug, almost swallowing the emerald, and was passed on so that the next guest could receive the appropriate greeting.
The euphoria of this contact with greatness lasted quite a while. When I heard Gadski sing The Valkyrie, I had that smug satisfaction of saying to myself, “I know her. She hugged me. She’s glorious!” In fact, she was.
Mischa Elman, an extraordinary violinist, was just the opposite. I recall a day in the early 1930s when Kathleen Parlow, a fine violinist who lived next door, invited us to lunch with Elman. He talked incessantly about himself and the dastardly character of most musicians and critics. After lunch, Kathleen suggested we all go to our house. She was sure he would like our big, white living room. He entered, took one look about him, and said, “Kathleen, get your fiddle.” She brought it, whereupon he spent almost two hours striding up and down the room, playing Bach for the unaccompanied violin. I shall never forget the enormous tone he evoked from the instrument and the complete absorption of the man in his music. He asked me to play some accompaniment for him; I tried, scared to death. It was a score for violin and piano by Dvořak that I happened to have. He was a completely commanding musician, and all I could do was timorously follow him.
At the close he said, “Thank you. I want your piano, how much?”
I replied that my pride and joy was not for sale, but he simply would not listen.
He said, “I will pay you five thousand dollars.”
“I do not want to sell it.”
“I will pay you seven thousand dollars!”
“I won’t sell it for anything!”
“Ten thousand dollars?”
“NO!”
He then said, “Kathleen, I want to go back to your house,” and departed forthwith.
I saw him again several years later and he asked, “Will you NOW sell your piano?”
I said, with a certain asperity, “NO, I will NOT sell it to you or anyone.”
He turned away, insulted. I have wondered how a great artist could be so opaque: possessing extraordinary musicianship, incredible tone, and authority, but ruthless and self-centered. I have never been able to reconcile all these qualities in one personality.
One of my oldest friends, Ernst Bacon, represents a creative-intellectual balance I have found rare in artists. He is a gifted pianist, a superior composer, and a perceptive commentator on the human-political scene. In his eighties he still exudes a marvelous youthfulness. He does not find all the notes these days, but his piano playing is strong, solid, and compassionate.
It was always an exciting indulgence to attend a symphony rehearsal, and I went to quite a few in the 1920s. The conductor of the San Francisco Symphony was Alfred Hertz, a full-bearded, totally bald man. Though lame from childhood polio, he had vast energy, excellent musicianship, and a wry, Teutonic sense of humor. He was a perfectionist in the very precise German fashion. He loved a lot of brass and maximum decibel climaxes. He built our orchestra from poor to acceptable.
I recall a Danish violist, who, at least, tried hard. While I never heard him slip in concert, he made some extraordinary mistakes in rehearsal. Hertz was quick to isolate and humorize them if possible. At one point in a rehearsal of a Strauss tone poem, the violas were to enter in unison. Our Danish friend produced a slightly wan, but audible, note, one beat ahead of the score. Hertz tapped vigorously on the music desk, bringing the entire orchestra to silence. He looked around the hushed group and said, in measured, sepulchral tones, “There is something rotten in Denmark!” Everyone roared, including the hapless violist. He would tell this story on himself with glee for the rest of his life.
On one occasion I heard a harpist of undoubted ability who could sometimes be vague and forgetful. He arrived at one of those occasional symphonic opportunities where the harp has a glittering and prolonged cadenza. With handsome head thrown back, eyes closed, and hands rotating like spikey cartwheels across the strings, he completely neglected the score and enjoyed repeating this particular virtuosic display. Hertz let him get through two repetitions, but when he began the third, Hertz banged on the desk and yelled, “STOP, mein Gott, you have passed the station!”
Ridiculous moments, such as these, endure, while many of the fine performances I heard were forgotten. Perhaps if it were not for the persistent underlying humor of musicians, the rigors of the profession would unbalance them. My own highest inane musical achievement was at a VERY liquid party where people were doing extraordinary things. They begged me to play. I felt capable and proved it in a unique and unrepeatable way. I chose the Chopin F Major Nocturne with confidence. In some strange way my right hand started off in F-sharp major while my left hand behaved well in F major. I could not bring them together. I went through the entire nocturne with the hands separated by half a step. No one said anything; the cacophony must have been horrendous. A musician I had just met looked at me with bleary eyes and slowly shook his head. The party moved on to fresh excitements. For me, and I think for most nonvaudevillian pianists, this performance would have been an impossible feat had I not been under the influence of Demon Bourbon. I still cannot figure out what strange perversion of the imagination induced such a schizoid performance. I was told the next day that I was surprisingly accurate throughout, with both hands behaving well in their chosen keys: “You never missed a wrong note!”
During my youth, most of my friendships came from musical associations, including my best friend for many years, Cedric Wright. When I was about eight years old, my father, mother, and I spent a few weeks with Cedric’s family, the George Wrights, at their country home in the Santa Cruz Mountains. George Wright was my father’s attorney, and he and his wife were also part of my parents’ social life in San Francisco.
The Wrights’ country house was built on a steep, forested bank at least fifty feet above the San Lorenzo River. From the main porch the view was directly into the high branches of the trees and down to the pure and rippling stream. It was all very idyllic and clean: bird chirps, river sounds, and the fresh forest fragrance of the air.
Dinner, which I dreaded, was conducted under very proper conditions of stuffy furniture and stuffier food with table talk either above or below me but certainly inconsequential. One afternoon I was swinging rather violently in the porch hammock, expending all the energy I could before my enforced dinner with the adults. I overdid it and fell backwards, hitting my head on the very hard floor. I was out for an hour or so and awoke in bed with a concerned doctor, worried hosts, and frantic parents hovering above me. Any damage, for good or bad, remains undetermined.
That country near Santa Cruz was a strange complex of lush river-banks, canyon forests, and high, brushy, arid areas. It was always hot in summer—too far inland for the cool benediction of the sea fog. When the wind was right, fragrant smoke from the sawdust burners drifted down the canyon. Seventy years ago the forests seemed inexhaustible and few were concerned over their depletion.
Cedric Wright was a bit of a rebel; the very conventional Wright home in Alameda would have been a difficult environment for any free spirit in which to flower. I will never forget Cedric’s debut violin recital in San Francisco that I attended when I was about twelve and he was about twenty-five. Cedric appeared in knickers, an affectation that persisted throughout his life. He started with the Bach Chaconne for Unaccompanied Violin in D Minor, playing it forthrightly, though with a nervous intonation. When he reached the first repeat, he returned to the beginning and played an interesting and properly enhanced variation. When he came to the repeat again, he forgot the second ending and had to start over. He played courageously, only to forget the second ending once more. He then flourished the violin from under his chin and said to the audience, “Well, I guess you have had enough of that,” and walked off the stage. He returned unperturbed for the rest of the program, which he performed very well indeed, and received a hearty round of applause. For many musicians, especially at their debut, such a lapse of memory would have been catastrophic, but not for Cedric. He was able to put his rather extraordinary personality above such minor disasters; in fact, he would extract all possible humor from them.
I did not see Cedric again until the summer of 1923 in Yosemite. The Sierra Club enjoyed an annual outing, during which many members would camp and climb together. In 1923 the outing group, including Cedric, came to Yosemite and started their trek to the northern areas of the park. I was invited to join them for the first few days. On this short excursion Cedric and I became warm friends. We found we had many mutual interests, especially music (we both preferred Bach and Beethoven), the mountains, and our budding awareness of photography.