Memory games
Why do professional classical musicians do it? Why do they memorise entire pieces, from violin partitas to piano concertos, from sonatas to symphonies? All those thousands of notes, every single one of them going into the brains and bodies of soloists, singers, orchestral players and conductors, so that, at will, they can play any bar of a fugue by Bach or a concerto by Tchaikovsky, without hesitation, deviation or repetition.
One of the reasons is that we in the audience love the frisson that these feats of memory give us. Think of any concerto performance you might have seen: with no sheet music in front of the soloist, it’s as if the music is emerging unmediated from their subconsciousness. The music is a spell that’s enchanted in front of our eyes and ears; it no longer belongs to Beethoven or Rachmaninov – it’s Anne-sophie Mutter’s, it’s Martha Argerich’s.
Yet this memory fetish wasn’t always part of musical culture. It began in earnest with Franz Liszt, in his solo concerts in the early decades of the
19th century. Liszt’s piano recitals were sensual rituals of super-virtuosity, in which his audiences were transfixed by his ability to produce whole repertoires of music on the spot.
The pianist Stephen Hough has written about this turn to memory, great for Liszt but anathema to others: ‘Chopin would not have approved.’ In fact, Chopin ‘chastised a pupil once for playing a piece from memory, accusing him of arrogance’. And why? Because
‘To play without a score in Chopin’s time would have meant you were improvising’
‘in the days when every pianist was also a composer, to play without a score would usually have meant that you were improvising. To play a Chopin ballade from memory might have seemed as if you were trying to pass off that masterpiece as your own.’
That’s the hubris of playing from memory: pretending as a performer that you’re making it up on the spur of the moment is an affront to the composers who toiled over their pieces.
And there’s another problem with memory. The condition for a culture that demands that soloists learn their parts off by heart is that there must be a fixed historical repertoire written by other people for them to learn. And since the majority of them are now dead, there’s no real danger of anyone mistaking the performer for the composer. Our insistence on memory comes at the cost of new pieces becoming part of the repertoire, composed so quickly there’s no time to memorise them.
So next time you see a soloist playing with the sheet music, it’s not that they haven’t learnt the piece: they’re restoring musical culture to a state of potential creation, not a mausoleum of memory in which every note is fixed in advance. While memory can be freeing for some musicians, we as an audience shouldn’t demand it of all of performers. When memory becomes an ideology, we might be losing more than we’re gaining.
Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm
Harrison Birtwistle
Born 1934 Composer
Often brash and uncompromising, Harrison Birtwistle’s music could infuriate many – not least when his Panic for saxophone and orchestra caused uproar at the 1995 Last Night of the Proms – but also won him a wealth of admiring listeners, inspired countless performers and influenced other composers. Immaculately crafted, it also had its own distinctive – if admittedly hard-won – beauty.
Born in Accrington, Lancashire, Birtwistle took up the clarinet as a child and went on to play in the town’s military band. It was the clarinet that won him a scholarship to the Royal Manchester College of Music where he rubbed shoulders with composers Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, Elgar Howarth and pianist John Ogdon and, with them, founded the New Music Manchester group. He wrote some of the most influential works of the late-20th and early-21st centuries, from vocal and chamber pieces such as Songs by Myself (1984) and Orpheus Elegies for oboe, harp and countertenor (2004) to large-scale orchestral works including The Triumph of Time (1972) and Earth Dances (1986) and operas ranging from 1967’s Punch and Judy to 2008’s The Minotaur, and won more British Composer Awards and Royal Philharmonic Society Awards than any other musician.
Ironically, given that he dutifully attended so many award ceremonies, such occasions did not seem a natural stamping ground for the quietly spoken, undemonstrative Birtwistle. And though he did give interviews, this was a composer whose most powerful utterances lay in his music itself. We will be paying tribute at greater length in a future issue.
Radu Lupu Born 1945 Pianist
An audience with Radu Lupu was not easily forgotten. Rather more unbuttoned than your typical concert pianist, Lupu’s somewhat ruffled demeanour belied the control and finesse of his music-making. It could almost be a religious experience to witness the Romanian-born virtuoso at the keyboard, as he seemingly channelled some higher power. The music of Mozart, Brahms, Schumann and Schubert occupied the majority of his focus during his long career.
He started young, giving a first recital at the age of 12 – he’d started learning piano at six in his hometown of Galati. Well into his teens he made his way to Moscow, where he studied thanks to a conservatory scholarship, and by his early twenties he had won a clutch of high-profile prizes – including the Leeds and Van Cliburn competitions. While he was never exactly forthcoming as a public figure, something which only added to his mystique as an artist, his music took him to stages the world over. His recorded legacy is certainly rich, but it was in concert where the real magic of this unique player was truly witnessed.
Nicholas Angelich Born 1970 Pianist Nineteenth-century German repertoire was also at the heart of Nicholas Angelich’s music-making, though the Us-born pianist had a sense of adventure and was just as comfortable championing new works. While undoubtedly virtuosic at the keyboard, he will be remembered for the expressiveness and sensitivity of his playing. Born in Cincinnati to musical parents – his father played violin in the city’s Symphony Orchestra for decades – Angelich was taught by his mother from a young age and showcased his talent publically for the first time at the age of seven. Wanting the best for her son, she moved with him to Paris when he was just 13 so that he could study there. Though he would go on to perform in concert halls and at festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, both with orchestras and in chamber recitals, Europe would become his home, and it is there that Angelich did most of his work on stage and in the studio. In recent years, he took on the role of soloist-in-residence with Montreal’s Metropolitan Orchestra.
Also remembered…
The Belgian Philippe Boesmans (born 1936) started his musical life as a pianist but – self taught – went on to become an acclaimed and prize-winning composer of opera, among other works.
Stewart Brown (born 1952) was the founder of Testament Records, and a passionate music lover and producer who brought historic recordings back to modern audiences in a number of acclaimed releases.