Music Richard Osborne

RICHARD OSBORNE

CHOPIN’S PIANO

The great Neville Cardus, late of the Manchester Guardian, liked to distinguish between ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ performances and that altogether rarer thing, ‘the musical experience’ which lodges in the memory and remains forever fixed.

One such experience was a performance of Chopin’s Préludes by the great Chilean-born pianist Claudio Arrau which he heard at the 1958 Edinburgh Festival. Cardus’s active musical memory went back to the earliest years of the century, so he was well acquainted with the Chopin of popular legend – the frail, sickly, exquisitely gifted creature whose music is judged by the Harvard hostess in T S Eliot’s Portrait of a Lady to be too frail a bloom to be ‘rubbed and questioned in the concert room’.

Eliot’s hostess speaks of ‘the latest Pole’ transmitting the Préludes ‘through his hair and fingertips’, an echo, perhaps, of Vladimir Pachmann – greatest of musical frauds, who spent a lifetime ‘making Chopin his own’ – seen in profile in his dressing-room dotingly kissing his fingers.

Chopin bred attitudinisers. Paderewski, Cardus recalled, played Chopin ‘as though before royalty’. With Alfred Cortot, it was ‘as if all the world’s lovers and their mistresses were in his audience’.

Arrau, happily, was no attitudiniser. A man of rare modesty and grace, richly versed in the arts of civilisations too various to list, he was a lion among pianists, possessed of an awesome technique and a power of engagement that has had few, if any, equals.

Cardus conceded that he might have liked Arrau less had he encountered him at that young age when all we ask is that our senses be wooed. By his 70th year, however, he was firm in the belief that ‘Arrau, alone of pianists, presents to us Chopin the full man, artist and strongfibred musician’.

These thoughts about the Préludes, surely the darkest and most far-seeing of all Chopin’s works, and Arrau’s playing of them, are prompted by the appearance of Paul Kildea’s Chopin’s Piano: A Journey through Romanticism, a thrilling, infuriating, thought-provoking and at times frustratingly elusive gallimaufry of a book.

The eponymous piano is a six-and-ahalf-octave cottage pianino, run up by a Majorcan carpenter and metal-worker, Juan Bauza, in Palma in the 1830s. It was this with which Chopin ‘made do’ during his three-month stay on the island in the winter of 1838-39, after he, George Sand and her two children moved to an abandoned monastery in the inhospitable hill town of Valldemossa. ‘In Majorca,’ reported Chopin, ‘roads are made by torrents and repaired by landslides.’ The pianino was transported up just such a ten-mile track in an open-sided mule cart.

After Sand and her entourage left in February 1839, the piano remained in its monkish cell, from where it was rescued on the eve of the First World War by the musician who is the subject of the book’s second half, the pioneering Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. Her flight from Vichy France in 1941 gifted the Nazis not only one of the world’s great music libraries but a thing they prized even more, ‘Chopin’s piano’. Where it is now no one knows.

It is idle to speculate about the influence of the Valldemossa experience on the nine preludes which it’s thought