Music Sounded Out/Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts
Brendel, Alfred
During one fortnight in 1831, Liszt crammed between his four-to-fivehour keyboard practice sessions a deep study of Homer, Plato, Locke, Byron, Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, I amartine, and the Bible....
...that this leads to a helluva lot of boring recordings (granted...
...25.00 MUSICAL THOUGHTS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS Alfred Brendel/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/171 pp...
...Unless those Busoni pieces widely available on disc misrepresent their composer, Busoni's problem lies above all in the vast disparity between his formidable book-learning and his stunted creative power...
...owners of electronic watches thatbeep every hour on the hour, naturellement...
...Noting that "period orchestras" have lately improved to the extent that "they can even play in tune," Brendel also delivers himself in an interview of the following heterodoxies: I do not hesitate to underline dynamic contrast with octave doublings where it seems musically necessary...
...As Dorothy Parker almost put it, "his brains went to his head...
...And for every questionable utterance there are ten insights that are as sound as the proverbial bell: the whole of this month's American Spectator would not be room enough to include them...
...and that the solution is to start recording as many live concerts as possible...
...And there is a special group of pieces of a prophetic kind, such as the remarkable [Bach] A minor `Fantasy' . . . which seems to have been written for an instrument of the future in any case...
...chronic coughers, unwrappers of cellophane, and rustlers of programs, sure...
...O ne sometimes has to take Brendel not simply with a grain of salt but with enough of the stuff to fill a second Dead Sea...
...There is no one who cannot benefit from studying what Brendel says about the noble Bach transcriptions by Liszt and Busoni, who are for Brendel nothing less than musical gods...
...But it would be wishful thinking to claim that a Viennese Schubert tradition ever existed...
...We now have, to our great profit, two reasonably priced and handsomely presented collections of Brendel's essays, some originally written in English, the rest excellently translated from the German...
...Liszt's late piano works—gnomic, chilling, sometimes as close to total wackiness as Beethoven's final string quartets, and as hypnotic—owe their recent revivals to Brendel more than to anyone else...
...as a piano piece it turns out to be quite marvelous...
...Do adults still play blind-man's-bluff...
...12.95 paper R. J. Stove 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991...
...Claudio Arrau was, until his death in June, another (it was said that you could always tell when Arrau had visited a city, because all the second-hand bookshops would be practically empty...
...and Alfred Brendel makes three...
...Or has it been bettered to 13...
...Even the Viennese assertion that "Vienna remains Vienna" is no more than a Viennese delusion...
...Meanwhile, Brendel himself unwittingly provides the plainest illustration of how his much-vaunted live-recording philosophy penalizes talented artists: Over the years I can remember concerts with screaming babies (Japan), a barking dog (New York), a mewing cat (Istanbul), somebody falling down in a faint, a maniac clapping in the most impossible places, and a power cut plunging us all into darkness...
...Tbday, Vienna offers no more clues about Schubert than any other city...
...This is a pianist who can end a fascinating analysis of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations—which he has thrice recorded—with a haunting, wholly germane aphorism by Heinrich von Kleist: "When perception has passed through something infinite, gracefulness appears...
...flash-cameras at mid-concert, by all means...
...Concerts I have recently attended in Sydney confirm that, whatever audience factors impair live music today, ODs on reverence are not among them...
...When his works give the impression of being hollow, superficial and pretentious, the fault lies usually with the performer, occasionally with the (prejudiced) listener, and only very rarely with Liszt himself...
...Is the country governed by the secret police...
...Richard Tauber not only sang other peoples operettas but also wrote his own...
...Even in our own time, a few musicians have bucked the commandment Thou Shalt Not Crack Open Any Non-Musical Publications...
...Do manuscripts have to be submitted to the censor...
...This boredom is best alleviated not by substituting one recording procedure for another, but by persuading boring musicians to take up ditch-digging or some such useful career...
...The Austrian Tourist Bureau will not thank Brendel for so decisively pulling the plug, but even if he has overstated his case—there must, after all, have been something that ionized the city's musical atmosphere for a century and a half—he has in the process furnished an overdue corrective to complacency and muddled thought...
...Brendel's line here is that mere avoidance of wrong notes now plays far too big a role in studio recordings (fair enough...
...Glenn Gould, spectacularly, was one...
...Since complacency and muddled thought are the foes et origo of the "authentic instruments" movement, and since Brendel clearly acknowledges the impossibility of twentieth-century minds thinking themselves into even as recent a culture as Schubert's, it is scarcely astonishing that Brendel blows several raspberries in the direction of the authentic-instruments ideology...
...Wanda Landowska once stayed—and held her own in conversation—with Tolstoy...
...Yet how many other performers of his eminence are even worth arguing with...
...His essay "Must Classical Music Be Entirely Serious...
...The poor E flat major Concerto in particular has become the target of sporting ambitions...
...iven the gruesome extent to which kJ- music appreciation this century has consisted of simply swooning over Vienna—and never more blatantly, need one observe, than in this year's bicentennial of Mozart's death—one fears for the prospects of anybody who can write what Brendel writes about Vienna's unimportance as an aid to serious musical understanding: R Stove writes for the Weekend Australian, Quadrant, and other publications down under Vienna may be the right place for musicians to learn what a Strauss waltz is about...
...When Brendel talks folly it is at all times his own folly, not folly acquired off the rack from some Marxist professor or pseudo-theologian...
...takes immense pleasure in knocking down a straw man: the idea that present-day musical life has to be dominated by reverential solemnity...
...One cannot emphasize enough Brendel's greatest single virtue: after four decades on the concert circuit, he remains an indefatigable en-foyer of music...
...But undue seriousness...
...Nothing in Brendel's analysis of Busoni is as tough and dramatic as this, possibly because Brendel himself realizes that in Busoni he has a far dicier customer, one whom it is harder to credit with greatness than with permanent interestingness (even if Brendel's colleague Wilhelm Kempff optimistically called Busoni "a kind of musical Leonardo...
...It has become virtually obligatory to play Liszt as if he knew only one tempo indication: pestissimo possibile...
...But he is erudite in a sickeningly large number of languages and literatures...
...0 MUSIC SOUNDED OUT Alfred Brendel/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/258 pp...
...again, it disperses much conceptual fog...
...But Liszt's flashiest and (in bad performances) tawdriest early works, some of them titled "studies in transcendental execution," spur Brendel to an equally fierce verbal defense: It is a peculiarity of Liszt's music that it faithfully and fatally reflects the character of its interpreter...
...The panorama from the Belvedere may have remained unchanged since Schubert's time, but do people still live in one-room apartments—as Schubert's family did—and give birth to their children in an alcove which also serves as the kitchen...
...Pushing and shoving latecomers, yes...
...Paderewski's mind, famously, was broad-gauged enough to make its owner eventually Poland's prime minister...
...Brendel's own 1983 live recording of the Beethoven concertos, markedly inferior to his earlier versions, is apparently vindicated in his own eyes because "none of these things occurred...
...Occasionally, then, even Brendel nods...
...On nearly every page Brendel comes up with at least one remark that makes you want to scurry to your nearest record store, newly inflamed by love for whatever masterpiece he is describing...
...Brendel is not a writer of coruscating genius, as Gould in his dotty way often was...
...And give us another break from "A Case for Live Recordings," which notion is, in the plausibility stakes, right up there with "A Case for Racial Quotas," or "A Case for the Warsaw Pact...
...He will no more grow tired of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven than Madonna will grow tired of Madonna...
...What is the present record-14 minutes' playing time...
...From anyone less gifted than Brendel, that would be an instance of the bad workman blaming his tools...
...Give us a break...
...Again, this runs so counter to prevailing notions of musical acceptability that, if reputations were measured actuarially, Brendel would be considered a hopeless risk...
...Although Brendel once wrote off Rachmaninoff as one of nature's Hollywood hacks, there is no shirking the conclusion that Rachmaninoff surpassed Busoni, through having cultivated a compositional voice unmistakably his own: Busoni's lifelong adoption of earlier composers' personae might well help him notch up points on postmodernism's scoreboard, but artistic splendor it ain't...
...As a harpsichord piece this Fantasy seems to me unsuccessful...
...The reason we have a helluva lot of boring recordings is, pace Brendel, that we have a helluva lot of boring musicians...
Vol. 24 • August 1991 • No. 8
