Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  Bechstein’s fall and rise

  Many of us have had the experience, perhaps an early and lasting memory, of seeing in the corner of some old aunt’s living room a tall, heavy, black box adorned with an army of fading photographs and which, when opened up, displayed a line of yellow keys and the mysterious, tarnished letters: C. BECHSTEIN. While the Steinway gleams on the world’s most glamorous concert platforms evoking the image of a new Rolls-Royce, the Bechstein seems rather to suggest that vintage car under blankets in the garage, either sparkling with care or a sad shell of rust and dust.

  From the company’s foundation in 1856 in Berlin until the Second World War, the Bechstein piano played a major role in European musical life, from concert venues to the salons of patrons and socialites, from the studios of famous artists and teachers – Liszt, Debussy and Scriabin used one when composing – to the practice rooms of students. However, decline was swift following the Bechstein family’s association with Hitler, and the firm’s location in the divided city of Berlin during the years following the war. The disintegration of the 1940s (its factory and supplies were destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945) and the uneven workmanship of the 1950s and beyond made the piano’s continuing success an impossibility. In addition, good, cheap pianos from the Far East began to appear in the showrooms of the West, and, as with cars, offered a serious challenge in price and quality to the middle-range European instruments.

  Taste, too, had changed in the post-war years. Audiences and ears were becoming used to the greater brilliance and penetration of the Steinway, especially in concerto repertoire, where it seemed a better match for the string section of the orchestra, now more frequently using steel rather than gut. The Steinway was always at the forefront in the development of the piano. The company was founded in 1853 in New York by Henry Steinway and three of his sons and within two years had developed the iron frame that came to be the standard skeleton for all subsequent pianos. There followed a stream of patents including the introduction of the Capo d’Astro bar in 1875 which enabled the piano to utilise larger, more powerful hammers, resulting in a bigger sound. These developments continued into the twentieth century and gave the Steinway its trailblazing image. The Bechstein’s more delicate nuances and shallower, slower action-response made it less suitable for the new virtuoso techniques that composer–pianists such as Rachmaninov and Prokofiev were developing, and the recording studios had discovered that the clearer tone of the Steinway was more suitable for their ever-improving techniques. Once music colleges and concert halls turned almost exclusively to the Steinway a virtual monopoly came into being, justified only by that piano’s extraordinary quality and beauty.

  Earlier in the century there was a genuine variety of opinions about the relative merits of the great piano firms. A pianist such as Horowitz would reject the Bechstein as being better suited for chamber music, and he became a loyal Steinway artist from the start of his career. He was only once seen in public playing a piano other than a Steinway, when he played Scriabin’s Bechstein in Moscow, the event captured by television cameras. On the other hand, Schnabel referred to the Steinway as being ‘terribly loud’ and insisted on taking two Bechstein concert grands plus a technician to America on a pre-war visit. After the Nazis had come to power and he was compelled to use Steinways in America he asked for their sound and action to be doctored and made closer to the feel of his beloved Bechstein.

  Comparing the playing styles of these two pianists gives an over-generalised but valid indication of the differences between their preferred pianos. Many artists whose techniques had been developed on European pianos found the Steinway a challenge. Their whole approach to tonal control and colouring relied on the horizontal motion of the hand across a feather-light key rather than the greater vertical pressure required by the weightier actions of the American instruments. Moritz Rosenthal, the renowned Liszt pupil, is an interesting case in point. One of his trademarks was fast, fleet figuration exploiting extreme soft dynamics, and he claimed that it was impossible for him to achieve his effects on the Steinway piano.

  Another wider social change is relevant to the collapse of many piano companies. The whole notion of the piano as an instrument for the home, a magnet drawing friends around it for evenings of amateur entertainment, quickly disappeared after the end of the war. The piano seemed like just another relic from the Victorian age; like an old armoire, it took up too much musty space in the suburban houses of the period. Its elephantine size, its jaundiced ivories, simply couldn’t compete with the stampeding arrival of that smaller box, the television, with its bright, passive images. It was so much more appealing than Aunt Maud’s arthritic fingers struggling with Chaminade’s Automne, or Uncle Harry’s repeated attempts to find The Lost Chord. So the pianos went to the antique shops, Maud and Harry went to the nursing home, and, suddenly, a chapter of European life was finished.

  The piano seemed part of the baggage of Imperialism, and the guitar’s six strings and keyboards that could be plugged in (requiring more sensitive ears to be plugged as well) suited the spring-cleaning mood of the age. So unfortunately the baby was thrown out with the Bechstein, and an unswimmable gulf was formed between the professional pianist and the now passive audience member, a gulf that has deeply affected concert life over the last few decades and seriously threatens its future as audience numbers decrease steadily.

  So has the piano that was ‘By appointment to His Majesty, Emperor William I of Prussia’ gone the way of the country he ruled? Has that black box in the corner of the drawing room become its own coffin, awaiting only the death of its owner before it is dragged to the junk shop without even the last anointing of some furniture polish?

  A friend recently played me a recording: some Ravel – gorgeous playing on a gorgeous piano.

  ‘Who is that? It’s beautiful!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘It’s Andrew Tyson.’

  ‘Ah, yes. He’s wonderful.’

  I went over to the computer to look at the details of the recording and saw that this young American pianist had recorded it on a … Bechstein. The venerable piano maker is obviously up and running again and making instruments that sound better than ever.

  What kind of piano do you have at home?

  This is one of those questions I get asked regularly. The assumption is that we pianists will own the piano of our dreams, that we will have searched out the equivalent of a Stradivarius, found a generous sponsor or saved up to buy it, and then will spend happy hours playing rippling arpeggios up and down its pearl-white keys.

  The truth is that most musicians I know have pretty rough pianos at home, not to mention the sound systems on which they listen to music (and balance their coffee cups). It’s not so much a question of the cost of a great concert grand, although I found it hard to discover the current price of a nine-foot grand Steinway on the internet: ‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford’, perhaps? It’s more that I find it hard to work well on a gleaming young beast and I prefer to be hidden away in a back room somewhere with a gnarled, weather-beaten old joanna. A concert grand is … a concert piano; for me it feels too much as if I’m on stage performing. Practising is the workshop, not the showroom. Also, I don’t want to own an instrument that makes every concert-hall experience a disappointment … unless, of course, I can take it with me on the plane.

  However, it is important to spend time on a fine, responsive instrument. Much of our practising will focus on colour, nuance, voicing and pedalling, and a worm-infested upright will be limiting, frustrating and damaging. In fact, for practice, better a bad grand than a good upright as the actions of the two are completely different. For my New York apartment I confess I chose floorspace over a Steinway and have a small digital Yamaha to keep fingers limber and notes memorised. It’s surprisingly good, and with the volume turned low I can work all night in the city that never sleeps.

  Lonely on the road

  The nomadic aspect of constantly being on the road – hotel to hotel, airpor
t to airport, dressing room to dressing room – is no great revelation, although its lack of glamour sometimes comes as a surprise to those who imagine the carpet always red, the car windows always darkened, and the hotel room always large enough to open a battered suitcase. But one aspect of the artist’s homelessness is perhaps not fully understood. Concert life brings us many friends in many places … until we leave for the next city. It can be bittersweet indeed, as a week spent with people you love finishes abruptly, not to be experienced again for perhaps two years or more, except by email and phone. But then you de-plane in another city, collect your baggage once more, and throw your arms around another dear friend in another familiar place. Coping with this seesawing of emotional attachment and detachment (hugs of greeting, hugs of farewell) almost requires a ‘technique’, a tool for maintaining mental health on tour, a holding of friends in your heart while letting go of them with your hands. It forces on us an almost monastic discipline of indifference: married to none so that we can be intimate with all.

  The pianist Gina Bachauer spoke once of a train journey she made one Christmas from one concert engagement to another, along a track of endless houses, all of them aglow with lights, families, fires and festivities. She said that she felt terribly lonely as she hurtled past these fleeting glimpses of idyllic hearthside scenes, but then she found comfort in the thought of a bigger family – the audience waiting to greet her at the next town.

  When I don’t play the piano

  A concert pianist is someone who plays the piano in concerts. So far so good, although it might be worth adding the adverb ‘regularly’ to that description. Someone did once tell me that his Aunt Ada was a concert pianist. ‘She had a lovely touch and played to great acclaim in a concert in our church hall – Rustles of Spring, I think.’

  Much more time is spent playing the piano hidden away at home or backstage than in front of an audience. It’s the training leading up to the Wimbledon Final, the solitary punchbag months before the blood flies into the roaring crowds at the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship. But between home and the stage there are many hours when I want to work and I can’t. It’s one of the greatest frustrations of my touring life that, unlike other instrumentalists, I arrive at a hotel without my instrument. There’s that hour before dinner or the time spent twiddling thumbs before doing an interview when I would love to twiddle all ten fingers and check through a passage in my concerto or just get loosened up after a long flight … and I can’t.

  Or the effort involved in doing so can be enormous. A piano in the hotel is the best solution, as long as it’s far away from prying ears – in an abandoned ballroom for instance. If the hotel is a quick walk from the hall then that’s the next best scenario although, later in the evening, there’s unlikely to be someone waiting just for me at the stage door. It has to be planned in advance and it’s often hard to know my plans in advance.

  Then the options start to get worse, a taxi ride to a distant hall in heavy traffic, for instance. Finding the venue itself is the first hurdle, but then, how to find the stage door? I’ve spent many occasions circling the building, rattling rusty handles, banging my fists against flaking doors, pressing antique buzzers, shouting through glass walls, leaving messages on voicemail … to no avail.

  Sometimes a generous patron will invite me to use his or her piano. Now I don’t want to sound unappreciative of such kind offers (and sometimes it’s been the beginning of a wonderful friendship) but in my experience pianos in strange homes often come with cats and their dander, or rattling photo frames or vases of trembling flowers perilously balanced on piano lids, or an impossibly high bench, or a squeaky pedal. And worst of all is the person who, leaving the door ajar, says to me, ‘Oh, I love the piano. Don’t mind me. I’ll just be in the next room if you need anything. What are you going to practise?’ Then I freeze. I simply can’t work if I know someone is listening to me. It’s a bit like writing when someone is looking over your shoulder. Self-consciousness makes self-expression (and self-criticism) impossible.

  So for a long time I oscillated between these various unsatisfactory formats until in more recent years I just stopped trying to practise on the road at all. But then a few seasons ago I started renting an electric keyboard if I stayed in a city for more than a couple of days. It was wonderful, saving time and making time so much more fruitful. I’d turn the volume down very low and work away at any time of the day or night. In some ways it was even better than a real piano. Like a ballet dancer at the barre, in just thirty minutes I could warm up, stretch the muscles, work at a few problem bars here and there and generally keep in shape without having to leave my room. Now when I don’t play the piano it’s because I don’t want to.

  Never mind the metronome, learn to use an alarm clock

  I still panic when I think of the dress rehearsal I nearly missed with the New York Philharmonic back in 2005. I had set my alarm clock that morning for seven to give myself plenty of time to have breakfast, to be at Avery Fisher Hall by nine, and to be warmed up in time for the public rehearsal at ten. The problem was that I had mistakenly set the alarm for seven p.m. Just before nine I woke from slumber and lazily reached for the clock to check the time. Frozen panic … five seconds of utter disbelief … then the screech of engines kicking in as I leaped out of bed.

  On this occasion, adrenalin had performed the task normally required of caffeine but the haystack that greeted me in the mirror that morning could not have greeted the audience at Lincoln Center. I showered, dressed, ran down the stairs (six flights, faster than waiting for the elevator), grabbed the subway (faster and more reliable than a cab), ascended the stairs from stage door to stage level in four or five lunging leaps. It was now about 9.54 and Mr Maazel was waiting in the wings to run through the overture. The orchestra was tuning; the audience was quieting their whispering (it looked like a full house, which is around three thousand people), and fifteen minutes later I was in front of the keyboard for the flurry of octaves that begins Rachmaninov’s First Concerto. Since then I’ve always used a 24-hour clock.

  Disgrace at a concert

  I was once thrown out of a concert, along with a dozen friends and fellow students, for appalling behaviour. This is what happened.

  It must have been 1981 or ’82 when I was at Juilliard. A group of us, having had a few drinks and being en route to a party where we expected to have a few more, had been given free tickets to see the British pianist Ronald Smith play a recital at Merkin Concert Hall on West 67th Street in New York. Merkin is not a hall where anyone can hide. Sight lines to and from the stage, and all around the 449-seat auditorium, are crystal clear, and its intimacy is part of its charm. It was a huge and difficult programme: Bach–Busoni Chaconne, Chopin Études op. 25, and, in the second half, Alkan’s Concerto for Solo Piano. We all settled down in one row, already a little giggly, and began to read the hastily photocopied programme notes. They were full of amusing misprints – although Chopin’s étude in ‘Eixths’ is the only one that I can still remember today. So before the pianist had even entered from the wings we were already buzzing and chuckling.

  Then out walked Ronald Smith, and so began the evening’s downward spiral of hilarity. He was wearing something along the lines of a blue jacket, red trousers, yellow shirt, and purple tie, and he sauntered towards the piano peering at the audience through spectacle lenses the thickness of glass bricks. A bemused butler’s bow, an itchy shuffle to get comfy on the piano bench, and then he raised his left hand in the air at full arm’s length and simply held it there – for what seemed like about eight seconds – before bringing it crashing down on the wrong chord of the Bach–Busoni. It was hopeless. A snort of laughter burst forth from one of our party and the seats began to vibrate with suppressed giggles. It was not that we were laughing at his playing, which was always interesting and in places wonderful, but just that the whole occasion was infectious with humour.

  Throughout the first Chopin étude he teased out inner voices, man
y fascinating, but others perplexing, like jolts along a bumpy road; he ended the ‘Butterfly’ étude with an off-beat lederhosen slap on his right thigh; he played the opening single notes of the ‘Winter Wind’ étude with only one finger, somehow managing, occasionally, to catch more than one note per digit. But, the final mirth-inducing straw, he built up to the climax of the first half of the ‘Octave’ étude with crimson-inducing effort, the ferocious four chords before the (long) pause like a last paean of exertion: DA DA DA DUM, hands flung up into the air. He had planned a long, dramatic silence in those rests, but we did not allow that to happen. Our entire row burst out into audible hysterics. It was abominable behaviour, but, by that point, it was pretty much out of our control.

  After the pianist had left the stage, and before the audience had left the auditorium for the intermission, a man two rows in front of us stood up. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ – a hush ensued, and he pointed at us with an angry, trembling finger – ‘these students have behaved disgracefully towards this great artist and I am going to ask them to leave the hall right now.’ The whole audience stared at us and started a slow hand-clap of disapproval as we stood up sheepishly, with the utmost embarrassment, and walked out. I admire this man’s courage. We had no excuse. And the irony is that, of the countless concerts I have attended in New York, the chance to hear the man who, with Raymond Lewenthal, reinvented Alkan play Alkan is one I am really sorry to have missed.