Dial "M" for Musicology

All I Want For Chanuka

Ever heard of Geoff Smith and his “fluid piano”? Dig this article and video.  Now, forget all the experimenting-with-eastern-scales-a-genuinely-new-world-awaits claptrap.  That’s as may be; I’ll leave that to the—um—visionaries.  I’ve got my bona fides, after all; I published an article on Raga Rock once, so I’m, y’know, all cross-cultural and about breaking down barriers and like that.

Not!, but never mind.  What this instrument would be for me is the ideal workshop instrument for experimenting with unequal temperaments and the music of Chopin, which has been an ongoing research project of mine.  So forget (until later) the tuning hammer, the SAT III electronic measuring device, forget all of it.  Just me and Chopin and my ears and his music, and tuning slides that would enable me to change things as subtly as I can, almost instantly, to get his music into focus with what I conceive the exact right tuning to be.  My methodology has been, more than anything else, to tune the temperament to the music (if that makes any sense at all), and though I’ve published a short and very obscure piece on the subject I’ve yet to write it up in more readily available form.  Some of the effects are truly astounding, though.

I don’t, frankly, see the fluid piano as a concert instrument, at least as a classical concert instrument; I can’t tell but I don’t think it has 88 (or even 85) keys, and that lets it out for much of the Romantic repertoire, really.  I don’t know what one of these things would cost, but I’d sure love one. 

Let me finish with the incomparable chutzpah of quoting Wagner: “But will such a prince be found?”

Wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

What's Polish for *scandale*?

Krystian Zimerman, Polish superpianist, declared—before his final piece at a recital at Disney hall in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, April 26—that he was never coming back to the U.S.  Our military is trying to take over the world, etc. etc.  Some audience members walked out, tossing obscenities at him (he lobbed an insult or two back), more cheered, there was tumultuous applause for his final piece (Szymanowski variations), no encore, finis.  Exeunt Krystian Zimerman and his Steinway.  News item here, full review of the concert here, post-mortem here.

I am of two minds on this.  I was taught that one never, ever, ever insults an audience or makes them uncomfortable, and making this kind of statement is, in a sense, holding them responsible for the policies of the Bush administration.  To then mock those departing—“Yes, some people, when they hear the word military, start marching” is really provocative as hell.  Zimerman is an artist I admire deeply and I, had I been in the audience might well have fired something nasty back at him at that point, perhaps something to do with murderous Polish behaviors in the 1930s and 40s, or Polish disposition to march when the commands are being offered by Hitler or the Soviets.  I can further imagine being torn limb from limb for having done something like that, so the fact that I would have severed all good relations with Polish friends (who have been generous with their time and help) would have meant little to me… bleeding to death as I would have been.  Probably ’twas a far, far better thing that I wasn’t in the audience, but I know myself well enough (I was short of self-control in class even in graduate school) that I might well have shot off my mouth—and, to be honest, throwing ignoble Polish behaviors in the pianist’s face would not have been an inappropriate response to his decision to rub Bush policies in the faces of a bunch of admiring angeleno concertgoers.

In any case, it was odd that he would choose to enact this bit of theater now that Obama is in office and so many things are changing; indeed, he spoke approvingly of Obama in Berkeley, where he had performed shortly before.  There had been some build-up, over the years, chronicled in the Los Angeles Times pieces linked above.  The only real explanation is one offered in the LA Times, via Zimerman’s manager Mary Pat Buerkle, is that this had been some time in coming, that Zimerman had been increasingly unhappy with the circumstances of touring in the U.S.  Here a particular anecdote comes to mind, one of which I was unaware until now. 

Shortly after 9/11, when Zimerman entered the U.S. on tour with his personal Steinway, U.S. officials (Customs? Homeland Security?) thought the glue smelled funny and, suspicious that he might have been smuggling in explosives (!?), destroyed the instrument.

Destroyed the instrument.  Let me explain.  To musicians, instruments are living things.  Even those who would not go so far as to say the sort of thing quoted on Zimerman’s wikipedia entry—“My friendship with the Steinway piano is one of the most important and beautiful things in my life”—we have all had the experience of people coming to us after performances, in tears, transformed, etc. etc.  Yes, it was the music that reached them, and if we have any sense we acknowledge that we personally did not have all that much to do with it.  But to the violinist with his Guarneri or Strad, or the guitarist with his classic Martin or Stratocaster, or Zimerman with his Steinway, that is a living thing, an object miraculously fashioned of star-stuff that can be animated to the point where it communicates directly to listeners’ souls.  I don’t think I exaggerate much; it is akin to how Jews traditionally think about books and scrolls: most certainly not just inanimate objects (hence our reactions to book-burning; that means far more to us even than it looks like).  Rock aficionados should consult John Hiatt’s “Perfectly Good Guitar” if they’re skeptical of my point here; that song is a cri de coeur roughly equal to Clapton’s “Layla,” and it addresses just the subject at hand.  So here’s Zimerman with his beloved Steinway, and the U.S. geniuses—taking a break from renaming pommes frites “freedom fries,” perhaps, or putting up “if you ain’t a patriot you’re a SCUD” posters—destroy his piano.

Since then, Zimerman has chosen to return to the U.S., and now he apparently travels with his piano in pieces, which he reassembles (something I find unimaginable).  I can readily see, though, that such a thuggish act of wanton destruction—needless cruelty, in an artist’s view—would burn away at someone like Zimerman.  Finally, I imagine, he had had enough, though probably the pressures were building up more from within than without: all auguries in the good old U. S. of A. are that we’ve turned back from the moral precipice, governmentally speaking, and are hell-bent on reassuming moral leadership, reestablishing the rule of law, reassuming our responsibilities to our citizens and those of the world, and so on.  It makes no sense for Zimerman to flip us what Bruce Springsteen calls “the New Jersey state bird” now, unless this is a long-term buildup of rage and resentment.

I really have no great conclusion.  Krystian Zimerman is entitled to do what he likes; I continue to admire his artistry, which is equaled by very, very few other musicians.  I hope he decides to return here at some point.  (Since he has returned since the post-9/11 debacle I have to conclude that he decided that return trips would be commercially adavantageous to him.)  All that said, I also think that he was very wrong to allow his feelings to boil over at a bunch of people who had come to be mended and improved by his music, who had paid premium for the privilege, and who had little or nothing to do with Cheney/Rove/Bush (in order of importance) policies.  I have never found artists (or humanities scholars, even) to be deep thinkers, politically—Zimerman or the Dixie Chicks or plenty of other historical examples, so their principled stands can sometimes end up looking a bit…well, simpleminded.  So, while acknowledging his heartfelt feelings, I—proudly American, despite whatever criticisms I choose to level at my government and fellow citizens—would probably been among those bellowing insults back at him. Yet he who[se country] is sinless cast the first stone; it is intellectually so lazy so say something like “your military is trying to take over the world,” now, that however heartfelt this seems like a petty, theatrical display.  Whether Mr. Zimerman returns or not, I’m sure there will still be interest in his playing, but given his choice to make that kind of exit—cape billowing, nose in the air—if this was the final chapter there may not be a lot of mourning here, even among pianists.

A Public Letter

Joel Shapiro, my piano teacher at the University of Illinois (where I earned my M.M. in Piano Performance over a quarter-century ago), recently asked me what was special or interesting about my current project, the Fantasie und Variationen über den Zigeunermarsch aus Webers Preziosa, jointly composed by Felix Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles, which has not been performed in its original two-piano-and-orchestra form since 1833.  As I’ve blogged before (here and here), I've been involved in reconstructing the original score, and I'll be playing one of the solo parts for the twenty-first-century premiere, on February 21 in Austin, TX, and on the pre-premiere here in Greeley, CO on February 9.

It is certainly a fair question, so I will answer publicly, borrowing from the centuries-old practice of public correspondence. 

Dear Joel,

Yesterday we had our first rehearsal with the orchestra, so I now have heard the piece all the way through for the first time.  If the piece makes it to the culture-vulture threshold of the popular media, it will doubtless be called a “lost masterpiece,” which it is not.  To me, it is something perhaps more interesting: a work explicitly composed by two accomplished pianist-composers, within the space of a week, to entertain the English concert audience of 1833.  To learn and perform such a work is to see the rivets and seams, of course, since in such a case “composed by” might better be understood as “assembled by.”  The introduction and finale were collaborative efforts; Mendelssohn took variations one and two and Moscheles took three and four.  Naturally, we learn something about what figuration each man liked to play—all part of the standard vocabulary of post-classical Brilliant Style writing—and we see how compatible they were, which is no surprise to anyone knowing their biographies.  Had I not known of their collaboration, I would have accepted this work as an occasional composition of either Mendelssohn or Moscheles.

The theme is a popular one from the time, the Gypsy march from Carl Maria von Weber’s incidental music to the play Preziosa, which was a retelling of one of Cervantes’s Novellas ejemplares.  Although the subject is, of course, Spanish Gypsies (and Weber’s music does have some music of a Spanish flavor), the march (and this piece) mostly reference the style hongrois, a popular Hungarian-Gypsy idiom which as you know has been an interest of mine for decades.  I smile to find Mendelssohn undoing his collar button enough to have a good time in such a style, since he was generally uncomfortable with openly vernacular excursions into local color such as this.  (Obviously, the “Scottish” and “Italian” symphonies take a very different approach.)  There is also, I think, a reference to another style hongrois piece of Weber’s: variation three has a passage strongly reminiscent of the introduction to Ännechen’s comic second-act dream-divination song from Der Freischütz, which opens with a smoky style hongrois viola solo over pseudo-cimbalom tremolos.  As our conductor Russell Guyver has pointed out, the orchestration itself is very much in Weber spirit, which would certainly have had a resonance in London of the early 1830s.

Another thread running through the piece, for whatever reason, is Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto.  The second half of the first theme of the first movement serves as a motto for the Introduction of the Mendelssohn/Moscheles, and the broken octaves from the end of Beethoven’s finale—a fairly common evocation of idiomatic cimbalom playing—and the texture of the octave melody from just before shows up in a couple of places in the Mendelssohn/Moscheles finale also.  Moscheles in particular was a cult-of-Beethoven type, so it is not surprising from him, but it is interesting that Op. 37 should be so present in an openly style hongrois work.  There are some Hungarian elements in Beethoven’s finale, to be sure (and for that matter Peter van der Merwe heard some in the second movement of the Seventh Symphony), so this piece may give some indication of how vernacular elements in the Beethoven were heard and understood in the decades following its composition.

From the perspective of the keyboard, the Fantasy and Variations almost plays itself.  Mendelssohn and Moscheles scored the piece with plenty of pianistic craft, so the soloists are able to hear where they need to be, to contrive effective cues, and to put the thing together with a minimum of rehearsal.  (Our ensembles are being kinder to us, but I still recognize when subtle fail-safes and safety nets are woven into a piece’s concept.)  The piece is ten to fifteen minutes total; beautifully crafted, loads of fun to play, and attractive and entertaining throughout.  Frankly, I like it much more than Mendelssohn’s first piano concerto, which I have never managed to like and which, to my mind, has a more limited vocabulary of keyboard figuration and no themes I would want to remember.  In comparison to the Preziosa Variations, Mendelssohn’s Op. 25 seems to me to aspire to more and achieve less.

And a personal note: I have always been grateful to you for, among many other things, the fingering principles you passed on to me in the early 1980s—thumbs-together, mirror-groupings, liberation from the standard scale fingerings and so on that both are optimally dependable and facilitate quicker learning and more effective memorization.  Such approaches to fingering have proven invaluable here, and some of the slightly quirky passagework (altered scales patterns, etc.) suggest to me that Mendelssohn and Moscheles understood such principles well, particularly when putting together a piece like this on a we’ve-only-got-five-days-and-this-needs-to-work basis.  Learning the piece with these fingering practices in mind has made me smile many times, as yet another passage falls neatly under the hand.

Thus my take on the Preziosa Fantasy and Variations for two pianos and orchestra by Mendelssohn and Moscheles.  It is a piece for the audience and for the players, well crafted with plenty of bravura and clever contemporary musical references—Freischütz here, a touch of the Spanish Fandango-like two-chord oscillation there, a playful fugato in another place—to please both Kenner und Liebhaber. I am less inclined to think of it as a Work in the sacralized sense, but we’re probably better off freeing ourselves from such needlessly delimiting concepts anyway.  It is a real joy to learn a historical piece with no received performance tradition such as this, because I can bring the entirety of my study of the contemporary musical language to it without having to get into arguments with this or that Influential Figure, Famous Interpreter, etc.  It is like when Jeffrey Kallberg sent me his reconstruction of an early Chopin Prelude in E-Flat Minor (which can be read about here and heard in my unfortunately incoherent performance here), which he reconstructed from a scrap of Chopin’s score-paper on which it was notated in a kind of shorthand; one doesn’t have to waste time disagreeing.

Back to practicing and grading now.  Hoping all’s well with you and yours,

Jon

A Fallacy Needing A Name

Surely there must be a name for the logical fallacy of extrapolating a universal principle from one’s own personal experience.  I look in vain for one in David Hacket Fischer’s classic Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970).  (This was a book of such a reputation that Richard Taruskin once referred to it as “a scurrilous tract”—if I remember correctly—but I was of the impression that he meant it affectionately.)  Perhaps the reason Fischer didn’t deal with it is that historians would not generalize from anything so unitary.  Still, it deserves a name, because at least in music it is all too common.

Here is an illustration. “Look, when I compose a symphony, I [do X]; when Beethoven composed a symphony, he [did X].”  I swear, that’s an exact quote of something I once heard.  One doesn’t know whether to laugh or weep.  It is as if the person is daring you to call him out.  “Are you kidding?  What are you thinking?  Beethoven, and…you?”  It does not matter that he may have accidentally been right.  A trivial example would be that, yes, you both put notes on paper.  That you write symphonies, however, does not privilege your experience in doing so to the point that you can explain others’ with any assurance. 

It gets dicier, of course, when the matter under discussion is a skill I think I have. “Look, when I improvise, I [do X, or think Y]; so I know that when Chopin improvised, he…”  Don’t I know about improvising, having supported myself in dance studios for four years doing that?  So Chopin and I, we…wait a minute.  Did he think harmonically, or melodically?  Did he just play familiar figurations and travel well-trod paths?  Were some of his improvisations better than others, as with all of us, or was he just stratospherically beyond other musicians?  What about Liszt?  Anton Rubinstein?  Can I talk about them?  Because I hacked through ballet exercises, varying them in certain utterly predictable (to me, at least) ways, does that mean I can speak for the improvisation experience of all pianists, living and dead?

[Cue: Sound of a mousetrap being sprung.]  How can any of us be sure how people's minds worked?  Particularly people whose minds are better than ours, by many parsecs?

At the moment, I’m writing (desperately, against the clock) a paper dealing with improvised ornamentation in certain historical styles, how important it is in certain repertories, etc., so these matters are much on my mind.  An improvisation event (not involving me, thankfully) is planned at the symposium I’ll be attending this coming week, so I’m hoping my doors will be blown off.  What if one actually had time to spend at the piano?!

I intend to report back.  Watch This Space.

Lost Genius

Some time ago, Phil blogged here in expectation of my friend Kevin Bazzana’s book Lost Genius about Ervin Nyiregyházi, a bona fide child prodigy who never quite figured out how to live on planet earth, even though he lived to 84.  I finally got my hands on the book, and to my weird sensibility it’s a page-turner.  It is true that there is much of a too-much-information nature (Nyiregyházi’s failings, sexual proclivities, etc.) but to those of us who know his recordings it is a fascinating story.  He has been called “Liszt incarnate” (Harold Schonberg) but the picture is more complex than that: he really could produce volcanic effects that no one else could, he really did take tempi that ranged from personal to incoherent, he really did take liberties that ranged from daring to insane, and he really did think in music, as one might expect of a bone fide prodigy.  Some of his writing (in English, I mean) seems like overheated raving, but it makes sense if conceived as a musical passage—repeated sounds driving to a climax, etc.  (To a former lover:  “The elements!  Elements!  Elements!  Fate!  Fate!  Fate!”)  He wrote compositions on many aspects of real life, such as “Bernard Goetz vs. the Punks”  or “The Failure of the Dutch Consulate to Grant Me a Visa” (Kevin told me about that one).  His compositions—which were legion—seem to be almost involuntary in some ways: obsessive, reliant on low registers and late-Lisztian chromatics, but seeming weirdly non-progressive or -developmental.  It is as if he composed as other people take notes: rendering his experiences and emotional states in tones, as if that was a necessary mental process.

 

Some regarded him as a pianist of colossal importance, and some thought him a self-centered crank or even incompetent.  We talk about the demise of “personal” styles, but for the most part we can’t really abide them; we complain about note-perfect playing but in reality we demand it.  Let’s try again:

 

To listen to a Nyiregyházi performance is to hear a not only inaccuracy (he didn’t practice regularly, and by the time he resurfaced in the 1970s his technique was basically a ruin) and tempi that might be considered capricious, or even incoherent.  This recording offers several apt examples.  So: a joke, a lunatic?  Rather, a real window into nineteenth-century pianistic style: only What They Did to a certain extent, but more important is the because-I-want-it-this-way stance.  There is an individual personality of titanic power in his performances, however bizarre his personality may have been, his playing had the Ring of Truth, the sense of sheer conviction and individuality for which the best nineteenth-century pianists were celebrated.   We find idiomatic Hungarian-Gypsy playing, dark Hungarian grandeur and brooding, and a full orchestral palette of dynamics and timbres.

 

Worth studying for a wide variety of reasons, his playing commands full attention, a rare, rare reaction today.

Mendelssohn and Moscheles

Almost twenty months ago I wrote the blog Reconstructive Surgery, but did not divulge the piece to which I referred and on which I was working. The secret is now out, by way of the orchestra website, so you can see what I was referring to here. It is a concerted work: a prelude, theme, and variations on a popular Gypsy-style march of Carl Maria von Weber, jointly composed (on a very tight schedule), for a particular concert in 1833, by Felix Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles. The re-premiere gig is 21 February 2009. Everyone is invited to Austin.

It’s interesting to read what I wrote earlier, because my understanding of the piece has changed. So it’s not, say, the Bach Chaconne or Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. It is expert as hell, though, and what’s more—more apparent as I practice it than when I was pushing notes around on paper—it is so grateful to play. Mendelssohn was 24, and Moscheles almost 40, and the piece feels gloriously exuberant. To practice it is to remember the pure joy of playing, of tearing off one’s childhood repertoire WAY too fast. It’s brilliant (stylistically it is the post-classical brilliant style, with fairly heavy doses of style hongrois), and while display-oriented it is eminently playable. So I think I’ve gained a greater appreciation of the piece; imagine two top players of the time (close pals; Moscheles’s son would be named Felix) writing, for themselves, music they would have a good time playing. To be honest, I like it better than I like Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto, which one hears fairly regularly, and this one deserves publication and a firm place in the repertoire (though the joint authorship is an interesting wrinkle). Art is all very well, but now let’s have a knees-up!

Meno Mosso

Phil’s meditation on tempo here has much to chew over. To the discussion of “I Kissed A Girl” (a song I find creepy but, then again, I’m old) I would add another example. I don’t know how many of us remember “Jennifer Eccles,” a chirpy pop song (1968) by the English band the Hollies. Schoolyard crush, except they’re clearly of different classes:

I used to carry her satchels
She used to walk by my side
But when we got to her doorstep
Her dad wouldn't let me inside

So: childhood thing about the cute rich girl—fairly close to a universal, I suppose. Never a big hit in the U.S., I think; class issues simply don’t have the cultural resonance here that they do there in the Land of Hope and Glory, with the divide between the vocational schools and the elite public schools, the European heritage of caste and birth and all that. (Yes, I know “Society’s Child” by Janice Ian, but that’s about race, not just class). The 1995 cover of “Jennifer Eccles” by the Eels, however, is at about 1/3 tempo, and its agonizingly off-center, I’m-not-a-singer vocals make it (to me, at least) heartbreaking. The class divide is now high tragedy, because the singer does not sound like a kid, he sounds like an adult shattered by a childhood experience. This is the dead opposite of chirpy, and it gives the song something the Hollies’ version denies it—real pathos. I wish I could attach both versions here; it makes for a striking comparison, and the difference in tempo is the key element.

The question of what exactly constitutes slow practice, as raised by Phil in the same blog, is a complicated one. Certainly, the usual mechanical and unthinking drudgery of getting the fingers in the right places and nothing else—time after time after time—is not real practice at all, because the mind is soon so deadened that the benefit is down to about 5% of what practicing ought to be. I would suggest, though, that finding the way for the slower tempo to be expressive is only part of the task: the pianist should experiment with a wide variety of such, and should make sure to intersperse enough quicker “checks” on the passages to make sure that the fingerings etc. will work at faster tempi. Practicing become a much more multifaceted discipline this way, and especially for people like me much more about the journey than the arrival. In the odd moments I have been snatching to wrap my fingers around Brahms Two I find myself thinking this again and again. Different tempi produce different reactions, understandings, thoughts, whether one is practicing or hearing a familiar pop song done in a very unfamiliar way.

A Little Symphony

I have had a fixation about Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto since I was a child; my parents bought me an LP of composer biographies (two per side), and one was Brahms. His Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-Flat Major, Op. 83 was one of the featured works, and something about that solo horn solo and the later full-orchestra realization of it—that elaboration being the salient point made by the narrator, in a wondering tone guaranteed to hook a child for life—got into my brain tissue. Becoming familiar with the whole massive work later on only deepened my obsession with it. Brahms himself called it “a little symphony with piano obbligato,” and it’s hard to know whether he (somehow) was referring to the way he conceived the work or simply being ironic: the piece is unquestionably symphonic in scope, and is one of the most challenging concertos in the repertoire. There is plenty of a soloistic nature in the piece, but somehow Brahms avoids the piano-for-piano’s-sake feeling found in so many other concertos. The piano and orchestra are interdependent in a way that brings Mozart and Beethoven to mind: concertare, working together, rather than concitare, working against each other. Cadenza passages that have the most gloriously extended harmonic pedals always return to earth in orchestral arms, sharing the joint venture rather than the piano making the orchestra wait, so to speak. This concerto is on my “ultimates” list, certainly, with the likes of the Bach Chaconne for Violin, the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, Chopin’s Ballades (except maybe the Third), the motet Ave Regina Caelorum (III) by Guillaume Du Fay, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, etc.

For a long time, my favorite recording of Brahms #2 was Emil Gilels with Eugen Jochum and the Vienna Philharmonic. Then, perhaps six or seven years ago, I was in the car with my young (8 or 9?) son and heard a recording that was unfamiliar to me. The second movement—my favorite movement, if I had to choose—was so painfully beautiful, so to-the-heart expressive of what the piece always seemed to me to be saying…well, I had to pull over. I wasn’t safe to drive. After I pulled myself together (Ben, thankfully, didn’t really notice that anything was amiss), I listened for the identities of the musicians. Krystian Zimerman, glory be upon his name, was the pianist, and Leonard Bernstein was conducting the VPO.

Things got busy. I never got around to picking it up, and thought about other things. This past week, though, I encountered it again, since our library has the Sony/DG Great Pianists of the Twentieth Century CD series and this recording is on the Zimerman issue. So, I brought it home. And it’s still my favorite; Zimerman sounds as if he isn’t breaking a sweat, and is so superbly in control—without the slightest hint of rushing or dragging—of the myriad tensions and releases of Brahms’s harmonic palette that it makes my soul ache to listen to it. Again and again and again.

I do own the score to this thing, as it happens. I’ve never learned it; a gazillion incredibly difficult notes. I’ve played the Beethoven “Emperor” before (and will again, as I mentioned before) among other things, but I’ve never played a concerto like Brahms #2, or Rachmaninov #3, or one of those. Never got around to it. And yet, my score sits and looks at me. Not reproachfully, exactly, but at the very least penetratingly. When I open the score up, there it is. There’s Brahms. THE piece.

Yeah, I know. Rabbi Hillel, in the Talmud: “If not now, when?” Sometime I wish the Hillel in my head would have the decorum to bide silent. I just turned 51, for heaven’s sake; it’s unreasonable to start such a piece at my advanced age. Isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Walter Schenkman

Walter Schenkman is not a name, probably, that you will know. For a long time, Walter was the Chair of the piano department here at the University of Northern Colorado, and an indefatigable pianist, writer of musical articles, and researcher. He nurtured a lifelong love affair with the Goldberg Variations, which he played for more than fifty years and recorded at least twice, and he recently published articles about it in BACH: The Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute and in Ad Parnassum.

Walter had long since retired when I came here in 1993. In recent years, we met irregularly for lunch and lively musical discussion—the next time was scheduled to be May 1 (this week is Passover, which is not much fun for eating out), when we were planning to wrangle over the end of the finale of Beethoven’s Op. 53…doppio movimento or not? He’d already told me he didn’t buy my bizarre take on Chopin’s Second Ballade, then laughed aloud when I responded “Oh, well, maybe you will when it’s published.” He recorded CDs constantly—Bach, Beethoven, Clementi, Chopin, anyone you can name—edited them, distributed them to friends etc., despite being in his early 80s. Last time I saw him, he said that he had considered giving it all up, but then he discovered that the French pianist Francis Planté began his recording career at age 89, in the dawn of the recording era. “I guess I’m ahead of schedule,” he laughed. “I’ll keep going.”

This morning I received an E-Mail from Walter’s E-Mail address:

“Jonathan, This is from Anne Schenkman. I am deeply sorry to tell you that Walter died last night quite suddenly -- at his piano.”

Of course, that’s the way to go: quickly, doing what you love, and especially playing the piano. And those left behind—like me and his other friends—feel sad and poignant. The fact remains, though, that Walter served the Muses as with as deep a commitment as the biggest-name classical artists: his was a life spent at the piano, in the teaching studio, in the recording studio, and writing about music. Generations of piano students here at not-Juilliard, readers, listeners. This is not New York or Boston…WAY not New York or Boston. And so here Walter lived, peacefully serving the Piano Muse, studying, playing, and talking to his friends.

That is a noble, noble life. I like to imagine Walter as now knowing, once and for all, the answers to all the musical mysteries we used to discuss. (He also knows I was right about the Ballade…!) If music is what mediates between the worlds, as virtually all the world’s traditional cultures seem to agree it does, then Walter still has much to study, and learn. Think of all the lost pieces! (Traditional Judaism—with which Walter maintained virtually no connection whatever—holds that even the Almighty studies for three hours a day, because what greater pleasure could possibly be imagined?)

Another glance into the infinite: I probably mentioned this already, but at a colloquium in honor of a revered professor (in 2002), a Du Fay scholar, the guest of honor looked around, spied me, and—remembering that I have badgered him for decades to find the lost Du Fay Requiem Mass (under his tutelage, I had fallen in love with Guillaume Du Fay, a master of early Renaissance church music), said something like the following to those assembled: “Jon, I know you sing bassus, and I sing treble. I think I know enough about Du Fay to know that he sang tenor. I promise you, before the century is out, you and I and the Old Man will sing through his Requiem.”

Now, that’s heaven.

Forn gezunt, Walter. I don’t think I’ll ever play Bach again without thinking of you.

Rosy Past, Rosy Future

Last week in the grocery store I was stopped by a friend, the conductor of our local community orchestra (as opposed to our local professional orchestra). He is a stalwart of our community, someone who is constitutionally incapable of doing anything other than giving a great deal of himself, and a gentle, sunny personality to boot—a sort of walking Balm of Gilead. It is always a pleasure to see him and talk music.

A few years ago, he had invited me to do a concerto with his orchestra, and in April 2006 I did the Beethoven Third, even writing my own cadenza. (I mean, why not? Why wouldn’t you, if you have no realistic expectations of doing the piece again?) He apparently enjoyed the experience as much as I did; we met, talked about the pieces, enjoyed the rehearsals, and—for all the nerve-wracking insanity for me (limited practice time, memory, etc. etc.), it remains a warm glow for both of us. I had played the piece before in competitions, years ago, though never with orchestra, so I knew it pretty well. Such a pleasure! As I’m no longer a pianist in Real Life, I always imagine that I will never again get the opportunity to play with a real, live, jan-yew-wine orchestra, so there was this King-for-a-Day cast to the whole experience.

For whatever reason, the Beethoven concertos are the pieces I’d most rather to be playing—with me, they rate up there with my favorite Chopin. Piano concertos per se are particularly close to my heart—you’re not alone up there, and most composers seem to have loved and understood the medium as players as well as composers. I still have the box set of Ashkenazy/Solti-and-Chicago Beethovens that I wore absolutely flat as an undergrad…I don’t think Four or Five will even play straight through any more. (It takes more than one turntable to have that kind of loving effect on a record.) Those recordings have the sound, to me, of My Youth—I love the Levin/Eliot Gardiner ones but there’s something about that old set that was so formative for me; they sound like the Platonic Forms of those concertos. Other interpretions sound plausible, wonderful, questionable, passable, whatever—but those old Ashkenazy/Solti still sound, in my mind like The Way Those Pieces Go.

Anyway—so, back to the checkout line. Dan says, “I owe you a phone call.” “Oh?” “Yes. I have just one question.” “What’s that?” “…Four, or Five?”

I confess my throat caught a little. Not for this coming year, maybe the year after; it’ll take some timetabling. I performed Five (“Emperor”) years ago, again with a second piano rather than orchestra, and would give almost anything for the opportunity to get an orchestra around me for that one. Four, as it happened, I’ve never learned, but it is as close to truly sacred music as it is possible to get—every bit as close as the Bach Chaconne for violin. So, I told him Five, but I’m carrying Four around and playing with it anyway. With that much time, maybe I will actually be able to cobble together the time to learn it. What other opportunity will I have on this earth? When such opportunities are presented, is it not a sacreligious kind of ingratitude to say, “Y’know, yeah, sure, I once howled at the moon to play this piece, but I dunno, maybe another time…” As Rabbi Hillel asked (and I saw this on an Obama poster as well): “If not now, when?”

I must remember to think about this a lot, particularly when I am doing committee work and other necessary drudgery, because it makes me smile serenely both outside and in. Particularly the soft parts.