The art of Schumann
As his scintillating 2001 performance in Vienna is released for the first time on disc, Alfred Brendel reflects on 60 years of coming to terms with the perils and pleasures of Schumann’s Piano Concerto
Alfred Brendel explores the many pleasures and pitfalls of playing Schumann’s Piano Concerto
When I first played Schumann’s Piano Concerto I did not have the faintest inkling that I was embarking on a precarious task. I had only just started appearing with orchestras, had not encountered stage fright and was far from considering the how and why of performing. I had studied the work on my own – my teacher had told me years before that she was confident I could get on without her further tuition. At the time, around 1950, there was hardly a good edition available. The result was a performance that was far from memorable. Over the next 50 years I had ample opportunity to try my luck again. Finally, the live performances with Sir Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 2001 came close to what, by then, I had hoped I would achieve.
How does a player start to get acquainted with a piece? There is, above all, the composer’s text, more or less corrupted by editors. And there are, in most cases, the performances one has heard, performances of varying quality and competence that may leave, in a young player, an indelible impression. Dealing with a work of new music, on the other hand, usually means that one has to come in from the cold. When I learned Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto in the late 1950s, it had barely been tackled before.
There are musicians who avoid listening to the performances of others in order to receive the spirit of the work as uncontaminated as possible. I wouldn’t go that far. After all, one can listen critically and learn from performances how not to do it. But it would also be misguided to consequently avoid what other people have done just in order to be different. The personal touch of a performance should be the outcome of familiarity with the piece, and not the input.
When had I heard Schumann’s Piano
Concerto performed? My first piano teacher in Zagreb had played it and got into some trouble in the finale. Then there was Alfred Cortot’s wellknown recording from the 1930s, and a more recent one played by Dinu Lipatti with Herbert von Karajan conducting. Although Lipatti had studied with Cortot, these recordings are polar opposites. Much as I admire Cortot’s superb 1933 recording of Chopin’s preludes, I cannot count his realisation of the Schumann Concerto among
‘‘Dinu Lipatti handles the Schumann Piano Concerto with impeccable poise’’
his peaks: though far from boring, it seems to me overblown, turning the work into a rather bombastic showpiece with added doublings, echo dynamics, transpositions and several gratuitous changes of tempo, and all of this while ignoring many of the composer’s markings. Lipatti on the other hand handles it with impeccable poise in the neoclassicist manner of his composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, who was also his occasional duet partner.
Few piano concertos, if any, have generated such a wide margin of performances from hysterical waywardness to dullness. There should be, so I felt, a possibility to present a performance of the work avoiding both the late Romantic hubris and a streamlined fluency that makes the music resemble Hummel or Mendelssohn; a performance combining respect for Schumann’s letter with an emotional warmth that does not misread the tempo indication Allegro affetuoso as appassionato. (‘Affetuoso’ means neither passionate nor affected but affectionate. Only once, during the first movement’s development section, is ‘passionato’ called for, linked to an increase in tempo.) I do not always adhere to metronomic markings but I think that the speeds Schumann indicates in this work give a fair idea of the movement’s characters. The fluency of the middle movement’s Andantino grazioso reminds us that we should not mistake it for a slow movement in the traditional sense, and that the espressivo cantilena of the cellos can be conveyed with discreet rapture. The finale, on the other hand, is not a dashing virtuoso piece – the effort that goes into practising it tends to result in excessive speed – but a dancing vivace that should remain under control. In Wilhelm Kempff’s recording with Rafael Kubelík, this is beautifully realised.
Piano and orchestra, piano versus orchestra, piano as orchestra – the connections are manifold. JS Bach, the first of the great piano composers, was the first master of the piano concerto for one, two, three and four pianos. At the same time in solo works like the Italian Concerto the piano writing itself shows orchestral features, the first movement alternating between stretches of tutti and solo. Among Mozart’s piano sonatas there are pieces like the famous one in A major, K331, that turn the piano outright into an orchestra, whereas his marvellous piano concertos clearly distinguish between the timbre of the soloist and the impact of the ensemble. In Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, an orchestra is evoked with unprecedented power, opening the road to Liszt. Chopin, in contrast, stayed within his exquisite pianistic confines. While Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes had presented an essay in piano orchestration, the solo instrument in his Concerto remains distinctly itself, assisted rather than assaulted or contradicted by the orchestra. The work was, of course, written for Schumann’s wife Clara, who was one of the leading pianists of the day.
How does a soloist who sits right next to the orchestra relate to it? Among pianists there are a few who avoid playing with orchestra altogether. They would rather steer clear from the constraints of ensemble playing and develop their own unfettered notion of rhythm and tempo, disregarding the fact that nearly all great piano composers have been ensemble composers as well – if not in the first place – and that ensemble rhythm is the basis of music making. As for myself, it was one of the supreme pleasures of my musical life to appear as primus inter pares with a great orchestra and conductor. In my Schumann performance with the Vienna Philharmonic and Simon Rattle (see left), I had the privilege of playing with close friends. Some performances simply strike a lucky moment.