On Music

...Leschetizky was a grand seigneur of music, the very embodiment of the virtuoso tradition...

...Schnabel himself was aware of this tendency, and in his talks at the University of Chicago he repeatedly warned that its consequence was likely to be the impoverishment of musical art...

...At age seven, the child prodigy announces himself by taking a piano apart...

...He was more concerned with saying things in his own way than he was with the vainglory of all-too-common literary accomplishments...

...Anonymous Viennese patrons subscribed the money for his living expenses, and he was received in many elegant homes on musical evenings...

...Unlike today's young artists, who often record music they have never performed in public, Schnabel would not even program a piece until he was confident he had mastered all its nuances of meaning and expression...

...His career, with its relentless emphasis on musicianship rather than performance, is analogous to that of a great creative mind...

...The decision simply to stand up and talk was quite characteristic of Schnabel...

...Schnabel was an unflinching individualist who got off the musical career train at the earliest possible opportunity and made his way, slowly and on foot, to the summit of musical art...

...After 50 or 60 years of transcontinental triumphs, the great man comes gently to rest in Southern California...

...His life was a cumulative growth, showing significant shifts of values and ideas—the steady, progressive deepening of a creative personality...

...One wishes they would leam another kind of lesson from the masters...

...One of the few exceptions to this long tradition of self-caricature is Artur Schnabel's My Life and Music, which appeared in Britain in 1961 and has just been published here this month (edited and with an introduction by Edward Crankshaw, St Martin's, 223 pp., $4.50...

...Eventually, his ideal led him to edit the piano sonatas of Beethoven from manuscripts and from the early editions...

...His influence and authority were immense...

...Sometimes, communicating desolation, they darkened and the whole body, quite motionless, seemed nevertheless to shrink into numbness...

...Or when all was well and whoever it was, Mozart or Schubert, was happily chattering away, the grey head would be very slightly cocked, as though listening for the distant sounds of which the performance was the echo...

...And so at the age of 18, Artur Schnabel left Vienna, the city of Mahler, Brahms and Richard Strauss, for Berlin, the city of Captain from Köpenick...

...Taking issue with those people who complained that Schnabel was too cerebral and impersonal, Crankshaw writes: "Nobody watching him from close by could for one moment have doubted that they were watching a man who was totally wrapt away from all the world, oblivious to the world, engaged in the most intimate of dialogues with the dead man whose poetry it was his calling to express...

...at age nine, the prodigy is put into the hands of a James Mason-like pedagogue who begins to enact with him scenes from The Seventh Veil...

...His reverence for the classics was too intense to allow any scope for self-aggrandizement...

...But for Schnabel all this culture and generosity was vitiated by the fact that the Viennese were a decadent lot, more intent on appearances than on realities...

...when it was all tenderness the eyes and the mouth would smile, and the head would be shaken very slightly, as a man smiles and shakes his head at the innocence of children or first love...

...The difference between what Schnabel appeared to be and what he really was is very well conveyed in Edward Crankshaw's description of the pianist's manner at the keyboard...

...He brought to his superb interpretations of Beethoven keen critical and scholarly understanding, and he was at least equally interested in developing his own conception of the music as in playing it...

...He insisted that the whole development of music since the 18th century was based upon the capacity for selftrancendence or the sublimation of personality...

...BY the mid-'30s, Artur Schnabel was a commanding figure in the world of music...

...The eyes, looking straight ahead, reflected almost unbearably every changing mood...

...in fact, it is not written at all: It is a stenographic transcription of 12 informal talks delivered at the University of Chicago in 1945...

...He was a born talker and he felt no foolish qualms about his frequent lapses in English grammar and pronunciation (needlessly corrected in the book...

...Unfortunately, the pianists of the present day are in contact with only one aspect of the Schnabel tradition: its emphasis on purely musical values...

...He had no illusions about the musical culture of the Prussian capital...

...Once the story gets beyond puberty, the timetable effect is complete...

...Unlike the majority of musicians, he preferred study to performance...

...The extreme self-effacement of the modern musician has removed something vital and human from his performance...

...at age 13, there is a combination Bar Mitzvah and Carnegie Hall debut that rocks the public and awakens the critics from their sophisticated slumbers...

...When he was a boy, for example, he enjoyed the many cultural advantages afforded by Vienna...

...He never "practiced" and he scorned mere technique, but he did work hours every day playing over passages which he felt he did not fully understand...

...he simply wanted to live at the "front," where there was vitality and the opportunity for fresh achievement...

...Even as a boy Schnabel had no sympathy for this approach...

...He was the pupil of Theodor Leschetizky and Eusebius Mandyczewski (neither ever took a penny from him), the companion of Brahms, the friend of Schönberg...

...His strongest tie to the city was his famous teacher, Leschetizky...

...The reason for this inadequate response to what is universally regarded as the highest achievement of the art of musical interpretation is not hard to discover: Where for Schnabel, the child of the 19th century, personality was something one assumed and then transcended, for the modem musician, reared in an age of collectivism and the depersonalization of life, the fundamental ground of personality is wanting—or it is simply rejected as likely to impair the purity of music...

...His autobiography is neither colorless nor ghost-written...

...It was Schnabel's idealism which prompted Leschetizky's famous remark to the boy: "You will never be a pianist—you are a musician...

...To the future interpreter of the Mozart concertos, the late Beethoven sonatas and the piano music of Schubert, there was something fundamentally wrong with a culture that had forgotten these mighty works even existed...

...Schnabel also introduced music into the concert hall which had previously been neglected, like the sonatas of Schubert and the concertos of Mozart, and presented such familiar but misunderstood music as the concertos of Brahms and the late Beethoven sonatas in a truer light...

...The heirs of Schnabel and Toscanini have by now pretty well exhausted the creative potential in their inheritance...

...And although he was grateful for the patronage of the Viennese aristocracy, he could not help but notice that the people who put up the money took absolutely no interest in what they were supporting...

...his basic attitude toward a piece was that of an expert rider toward his horse: Music existed so that the virtuoso might mount upon it and amaze the multitude...

...Ironically, though, he failed to see that the example he had himself provided of a kind of musical performance completely free of personal mannerisms would in time become the rationalization for that very different phenomenon— the completely impersonal performance...

...Schnabel literally devoted years to perfecting his interpretations of the finest works of the past, steadfastly refusing to perform anything but the music of the very greatest composers...

...From the windows of railroad trains and hotel suites, we catch fleeting glimpses of old Vienna, gay Paris, foggy London, jazzy New York and benighted Pittsburgh...

...There, attired in a black alpaca jacket of old-world design, he unloads the wisdom of the concert platform into the ears of a well-paid ghost...

...Schnabel's career after his departure from Vienna was only modestly "successful...

...yet even here there was no real affinity...

...By reducing the piano repertoire to five composers—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms—and by rejecting the century-old tradition of the piano virtuoso, Schnabel became the founder and leading exponent of an entirely new tradition, which is today the dominant one...

...at age seven plus five minutes, his ambitious Jewish mother instinctively divines the boy's genius...

...The other side of the tradition, the ideal of poetic evocation, has largely been lost...

...He shared with Arturo Toscanini and the members of the Budapest String Quartet the honor of being the greatest interpretive musicians of the 20th century...

...Independence of spirit characterized all of Schnabel's actions and opinions...