Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  A piano recital is theatre. The lights dim; a nine-foot black box is illuminated; there is a hush; someone expected by an audience of thousands to be a master strides out from the mystery of darkened wings and sits down. There is a moment of silence and then sounds fill the air. I still find this sequence thrilling. The timing of its execution is related to the timing of a dancer’s leap or an actor’s line. It is drama reaching back to human prehistoric storytelling around a fire.

  There is a place for informality in both the concert hall and in ecclesiastical life – I often talk in a fairly intimate way to the audience from the stage; but there’s also a place for formality and distance, and for the dress that underlines such separation. Indeed, sometimes when I’m in the audience myself, an opening night at the ballet perhaps, if I take a little more care than usual with what I’m wearing, my experience of pleasure and of concentration is enhanced.

  We are inescapably creatures of ritual, and it isn’t just common decency that discourages us from capering down the street stark naked. The human being lacks natural ‘feathers’ of attraction, unlike the peacock, and our mating calls have no set melody. In fact, they might well sound something like: ‘Darling, I’ve got two tickets for a piano recital this evening. Keyboard side.’

  Stephen, that was really dreadful!

  When people come backstage after a concert to greet you, they are usually diplomatic and offer words of praise, which are embarrassingly fulsome or politely restrained or mysteriously mendacious. Very occasionally, though, honest criticism is not withheld and flows forth without scruple. Someone once came back after a recital of mine and said, ‘Stephen, it’s amazing how you coped with that piano. It had such a horrible, nasty tone.’ Was it a compliment or an insult? I thought the piano itself was rather lovely.

  I remember a long time ago – I must have been about thirteen – playing Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann for some friends at home. I finished the piece, putting all of my adolescent soul into the performance, and one of the musicians there said, in a quiet voice shaking with emotion, ‘Stephen, that was really dreadful! I’ve never heard such a ugly, banging sound in all my life.’ I can still remember how shocked I was to hear this said in front of a group of people but our guest was probably right. It was a watershed moment for me. I blushed, spent the rest of the evening playing only the quietest music, and began a lifelong search for beauty of tone at the piano.

  Backstage, immediately post-performance, is not the appropriate place for unrequested criticism. On the other hand, there are masterclasses – forums where you expect to be criticised. There’s something intimate about an individual piano lesson but the vibe is completely different when you expose yourself to the stare and scrutiny of a curious, often voyeuristic audience. I’ve given countless public classes over the years and I’m acutely conscious of trying to pitch my comments with maximum awareness of minimising any potential embarrassment for the student. It’s too easy to show off when you are ‘expert’ for the hour and any demonstrations you might choose to give can stop at the first sign of difficulty. I’ve seen famous pianists and teachers mock, deride and destroy a vulnerable young player; it’s a disgusting sight. Only if a student seems completely unwilling even to try one of my suggestions – especially if they play badly – do I up the amount of spice a little in the sauce of my criticism.

  I am reminded of the story of the pianist Sheldon Shkolnik (a great pianist and a dear friend of mine, who died tragically early) playing his own Sonatina for Darius Milhaud at Aspen many summers ago. Judging from Milhaud’s own music one might expect the French composer to have been fun, light-hearted and frothy. In the flesh, however, he was apparently rather dour and humourless, scowling balefully from his wheelchair. He was rolled up to Sheldon as he played. After the first movement came the terse comment: ‘Beautiful.’ After the second movement, again: ‘Beautiful.’ But after the third movement, a change of tune: ‘Cheap.’ Actually Shelley said he was happy to settle for two beautifuls and one cheap from the famous man.

  Stuck in a hole or building a tunnel?

  Between 1813 and 1820 Beethoven went through a fallow period and often found it difficult to compose. He wrote just one string quartet (op. 95), the Hammerklavier and two other piano sonatas, two cello sonatas and a song cycle. Admittedly, most of these are great works and many people would be happy to have composed such a string of masterpieces in a whole lifetime, but his output during those years was sparse compared with what had preceded and what was to follow.

  I don’t think Beethoven was blocked in the sense of lacking inspiration, but rather that he had reached a certain classical threshold. He was up against a wall through which he was compelled to battle with enormous artistic and spiritual effort.

  One of the reasons composers such as Haydn and Mozart were able to be so astonishingly prolific was that they worked in fixed forms. When Haydn sat down to write a symphony or Mozart a piano concerto the templates were already laid out on their desks. Their genius was displayed as they worked against as well as within these forms, but it was an adjustment of the pocket or lapels, not a total redesign of the suit. Beethoven was always an eccentric tailor, but by the time of the works mentioned above he was standing outside, not just thinking outside the box. You don’t finish writing a sonata such as the Hammerklavier on Tuesday and just begin another one on Wednesday. That monumental work was the mapping-out of a new continent, not the building of a new house.

  The fecund templates of the Classical era are now in museums. The works they helped produce are, thank goodness, alive and well, but simply to use their patterns today, unadapted, would be to produce mere replicas. Beethoven already realised as much during those ‘fallow’ periods.

  Caruso’s garlic breath

  Perhaps it’s eccentric, but I can say categorically that the recorded performances that have inspired, delighted and influenced me the most in my life have been from 78 recordings – or at least ones I have heard in LP and CD transfers. I’m often asked which pianists I like most: no hesitation in the roll call of Alfred Cortot, Ignaz Friedman, Sergei Rachmaninov, Artur Schnabel and others from this period.

  I had casually heard 78s played on original machines over the years, but one magical evening in Chicago I actually operated one for the first time, spinning some of my favourite recordings on a Victor Victrola. It was a deeply moving and revelatory experience. First of all, there’s no electricity involved; the machine works entirely with a wind-up mechanism and acoustic vibrations. So used are we now to everything from heating to lighting to flushing toilets being controlled with an electronic button or sensor that to have a wooden box producing (literally) vibrant music seems, ironically, as astonishing as the latest technological advance.

  Not only is it non-electrical; it requires ‘playing’ in a way that a forefinger’s stab at a CD player or slither on a smartphone’s screen doesn’t. I was taken through the process: first you unscrew the old needle (they last for only one or two plays – that’s less than ten minutes); then you insert a new one – soft, medium or loud depending on the thickness of the metal. After that you crank the wrench about twelve times, feeling the tension mount as it tightens. Then you flick the lever that allows the turntable to begin its 78 revolutions a minute. Now you are ready to swing the heavy apparatus housing the needle over to the disc and lower it into the hissing, scratching grooves … and out pour the most amazing, rich, immediate sounds.

  On this occasion, Caruso was simply too loud to listen to standing directly in front of the machine. It was as if his own garlic-breathed vibrato was hitting you full in the face. But beyond the clarity and volume was the realisation that the vibrations Kreisler’s violin made through the horn onto the wax grooves a hundred years ago were the very same vibrations resonating in the air of Chicago in the twenty-first century. In a strange way it was a more accurate, tangible representation of that particular violinist on that particular day than anything a digital format could produce. You could almost
see the strings shiver, smell the rosin clouding from the bow, feel in your gut the quivering sounds. To hear performers on these living, breathing machines is to imagine they are in the same room – the scratches on the shellac only wrinkles in a mirror of preserved music and memory.

  Punctured rolls

  I want to believe in piano rolls. The idea that we can insert an object into a present-day piano and hear long-dead pianists and composers perform again as if they were in the same room is a tantalisingly attractive prospect. It has a magical aura about it. But, I’m afraid, it’s a conjuring trick, or – forgive me – a confidence trick.

  There’s a lovely anecdote of Schnabel being approached by one of the major roll-making executives.

  ‘This new model is state of the art! We have developed a system that allows you to capture fully sixteen different types of nuances and shadings!’

  Schnabel, with his famously dry wit, replied, ‘My dear boy, I’m afraid that will be a problem. You see, my playing has seventeen.’

  Before I assume the role of the heartless uncle who is about to remove the whiskers and red cloak from Father Christmas to the tearful dismay of a gullible child, let me begin by admitting that piano rolls can be a lot of fun. Their enthusiasts are often great company, with a keen sense of history and a devoted appreciation for piano music and the legends who have played it. I had a most memorable afternoon in Sydney once at the house of Denis Condon, who probably had the largest private collection of piano rolls in the world. We took out one after another, squinting at the fading labels and threading them into his old pianolas. You could feel the floorboards shudder as their ivory keys gnashed up and down at great speed, like so many teeth. The fact that some major figures – Mahler comes to mind – made rolls but not recordings does tug with some thread of fascination. But if someone tells me they’ve heard Paderewski play, on a piano roll … well, quite simply, they haven’t.

  Piano rolls are about as accurate in reproducing a pianist from the past as telling the time from shadows in the park. In the simplest terms, playing the piano involves pressing down keys that activate hammers that strike strings. Dampers lift to allow the strings to vibrate – automatically as every key is struck, or deliberately if the right pedal is depressed. All of this involves countless thousands of different physical movements: the pressure from lightest to heaviest, the touch from long to short, the weight and flexibility of finger, wrist, forearm, elbow, upper arm, shoulders, upper back – in every possible combination, and with constant adjustment of inflection … not to mention the eight different levels at which both right and left pedals can be engaged.

  Every single one of these physical actions by different parts of the body will be affected by the particular piano in front of which one sits on that particular day. Moreover, every individual piano will sound different from month to month (even sometimes from day to day) depending on the humidity, the tuning, the voicing, the regulation, the pedal adjustments and so on. When I returned to Dallas after a six-month gap to continue recording my set of Rachmaninov concertos, the piano I had used earlier was unrecognisable. I would say that virtually every movement my fingers, wrists, arms or shoulders made on every note had to be different from six months earlier in order to produce the same sounds.

  The fiction of the piano roll is to believe that if Paderewski made these (hundreds of thousands of) movements on this piano on 6 July 1923, we can simply take the data and feed it into a totally different instrument and, lo and behold! Paderewski plays again. It is simply not the case.

  Even if we could use the very same instrument on which he had made the original roll it would actually be a different instrument, with new strings and hammers. These deteriorate with time, and to leave them on the piano unaltered would make the instrument sound even more different due to the inevitable ravages of rust and mildew. Even on a new instrument, routine voicing, in which the hammers are needled and shaped to achieve tonal evenness, will change the sound of a note completely. It is not that the piano sounds different, but that the physical actions made by a pianist on every piano are different.

  The nuances a piano roll recorded were for one piano on one day, and cannot simply be transferred to another instrument on another day and be anything but an approximation. You couldn’t even take a living pianist, get him or her to play the same piece on two different pianos, and get the same performance. The fingers, feet, elbows, wrists, arms, back and shoulders will all move in a different way in a constant adjustment of reflex on every instrument in every single bar.

  Imagine a robot – under supervision, of course – driving from Manchester to Liverpool. You record exactly its feet, hand and eye movements for the whole journey. You then take that robot, with the carefully recorded data, and place it into another driving seat in another car on another day. It would certainly be a journey to talk about … if the passenger survived.

  It’s interesting that pianists whose playing had less rubato – Rachmaninov and Josef Lhévinne, for example – tend to fare better on rolls than those who played with more rhythmic freedom – for instance, Paderewski and Friedman, whose piano rolls are ghastly. This has to do with the fact that rubato and sound are inextricably linked. You can’t take the timing of a rubato and separate it from the nuance of a rubato and have anything other than a mess. When working at the turn of a phrase in, say, a Chopin mazurka, we are splitting hairs of inflection and colour. If that F sharp is played a millisecond later it will need a slightly different weight of sound. To hear it inadequately on a 78 recording is frustrating, but true; to hear it approximated on a piano roll (on a different piano, different hammers, different strings, different dampers, different soundboard, different rim, different keybed, different action) is a travesty based on a total fiction.

  Is there too much music?

  Is there too much music surrounding us? As a musician I’m supposed to love music, aren’t I? Can there really be too much of such a good thing? Well, leaving aside the ubiquity of recordings and their sheer accessibility on the phones in our pockets (another fascinating topic), what about music as background, passive, decorative, filling a gap?

  Vibrations have been hitting the air since that first mighty chord, the Big Bang, but ‘music’ suggests an ordering of those vibrations, a choosing and cherishing. The first sound of human music would have been random, then later seized on for its utility – a war cry perhaps. But gradually the rhythm and melody carrying the message would have lingered separate from the words until the gradual discovery of music’s allure independent of function: the war cry becomes a war song; and, closer to home, the whisper of music’s lullabies, its lilt of affection, its tug of sadness.

  The problem with present-day canned music is that it returns us to music as function. Instead of the specificity of a painting it becomes mere wallpaper, subject to a decorator’s whim rather than a curator’s choice – music as disposable noise to cover the embarrassment of silence, like some vibrating figleaf. As a constant nibbling from dishes of sweetmeats spoils the appetite for the main feast, so the ceaseless ring of synthetic music dulls the hearing for the real thing.

  Music can entertain as well as elevate, but it shouldn’t anaesthetise. Schubert’s greatest love song was not one of many addressed to another human but ‘An die Musik’, a love song for songs themselves. Music should always be special, always chosen, always an elevation of the spirit.

  Relics

  Pianists use new tools. The sleek, standardised pianos on most major concert stages tend to be younger than a decade – but not always.

  In the middle of Montana Peter and Cathy Halstead own a vast property. Tippet Rise Art Center is a sculpture park where the creations of man and nature intermingle in breathtaking harmony. But then, in the middle of it all, a small concert hall has been constructed, inside which a mere 150 music lovers can squeeze to witness its superb acoustics and cast their eyes beyond the stage through large windows to a view of paradise.

  But for the pianist
there is a further delight: a storage room like some rare wine cellar. Behind its doors are four superb nine-foot Steinways, three of which were expertly, lovingly sourced or restored by the great piano tuner Tali Mahanor. There is an ornate beauty from 1897 and two exceptional present-day examples, one built in New York and one built in Hamburg. But the special treat for me is the fourth.

  Vladimir Horowitz was probably the most visible and powerful pianistic symbol of the second half of the twentieth century, at least in the West. Due to bouts of nervous illness he appeared and disappeared through a long career, his highly strung neurosis both feast and famine of his creativity. In the early 1940s he was a busy performer, and when he played and recorded with orchestra in those mid-century years he used CD-18, the piano now living in Fishtail, Montana. However, this instrument is not just special as the relic of a hero; its soul sings and soars today with a penetration of tone and deftness of inflection rare in the modern piano.

  In the century before the war during which CD-18 was made, there were hundreds of piano manufacturers across Europe and America. Pianos were part of every home that could afford furniture, as ubiquitous as a sofa or a sideboard. Many companies were obscure then and have disappeared since, but some rode high in the Victorian era, not least the French firm Erard who gave one of its most extravagantly decorated instruments to Queen Victoria herself. Built in 1856, it was delivered to Buckingham Palace on 30 April that year. Monkeys and cherubs caper all over its gilded, mahogany case and, unlike the Horowitz piano, it really does feel like something from another era with its shallow action and reedy timbre. On one occasion at the Palace, when I started to play a Mendelssohn ‘Song without Words’ on its yellowing ivory keys, it was as if a magical aura was surrounding me. It wasn’t hard to imagine the queen and her consort, Prince Albert, seated at the same bench, playing a duet by candlelight or accompanying each other in song in that velvet-curtained room.