Virtuosi

A Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists

Mark Mitchell

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780253337573
• eBook ISBN: 9780253028549
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Virtuosi
A Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists
Mark Mitchell

A bravura performance!

"Vigorous, opinionated, and always entertaining, here is a personal essayist of great charm and sincerity. Mitchell's erudition—his collection of odd and illuminating bits of knowledge—is always a delight and adds a sauce piquanteto the whole dish!" —Edmund White

"...a literary work of real élan, vibrancy, and grace—the very qualities that in his view define the virtuoso. [Mr. Mitchell explores] the traditional linking of musical and sexual virtuosity, the ethical implications of the original instruments' movement, the near deification of Mozart in Anglo-Saxon culture, and, in a particularly witty section, the relationship of the virtuoso to his stool. Throughout, Mr. Mitchell's prose is humorous, intimate, and unapologeticaly polemical." —Cynthia Ozick

The artistic merit of performers with superior technique has long been almost ipso facto denied. At last, Mark Mitchell launches a counterattack. In essays crackling with pianistic lore, Mitchell takes on topics such as encores, prodigies, competitions, virtuosi in film and literature, and the erotics of musical performance. Liszt, Horowitz, and Argerich share these pages with the eccentric Pachmann, Ervin Nyiregyh ("the skid-row pianist"), and Liberace. The illustrations include rare portraits of long-forgotten girl prodigies, historic concert programs, and stills from a lost 1927 film on Beethoven. Punctuating this celebration of personal voice are vignettes, running from the beginnings of the author's obsession with the piano to the particularities of concert-going in Italy (where he now lives).

Mark Mitchell's piano studies led to a friendship with Vladimir Horowitz and other pianistic luminaries. With David Leavitt he co-authored Italian Pleasures and co-edited Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. He also edited The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing.

OF PARIS

For a Southerner, Paris is the most magical and haunting of European cities. And once upon a time Paris was at the center of my love for the piano.

I first went to Paris in May 1982, just a few days after I heard Horowitz play in London. Apart from the Louvre and the inevitable Eiffel Tower, I went to Père Lachaise to see the tomb of Chopin, to the Parc Monceau to see the monument to Chopin, and to the houses where Chopin lived and the one where he died. Chopin was not the only composer in my Panthéon at the time, however: I was a frank partisan of Ravel, of Saint-Saëns (his second and fourth concerti), of D’Ind/s Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français, of Franck’s Variations symphoniques (the recording by Casadesus with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra) and Prélude, chorale et fugue (Rubinstein’s recording), and, no less passionately, of Fauré (the thirteenth nocturne).

The Paris of Gertrude Stein and Picasso appealed to me not at all. I wanted the Paris that I had seen in a National Geographic article on the City of Light, the one I had seen in a series of documentaries about Arthur Rubinstein (who lived on Avenue Foch). The Paris that appealed to me was one I extrapolated from the photographs in my college French book: cafés and pastry shops and book stalls along the Seine. It was the Paris of falling in love with a young Frenchman and of making love in a grand old Hausmann apartment. Such a city could not be assembled in a few days, so I set about trying to find a way to live there.

Back in Florida, I conceived the ambition of studying at the Conservatoire; an ambition encouraged by liana Vered, whom I had heard play both of the Ravel concerti in a concert about that time and who had studied at the Conservatoire herself. (Liszt had attempted to gain admission to the Conservatoire as well, but was turned away by Cherubini, the director, on the grounds that he was a foreigner.) Although I wrote away for the application, I put it aside when it arrived and never completed it. I spoke French well at the time, so I next wrote to the Sorbonne. The application arrived, and this too I set aside.

Thereafter I went devotedly to a West Palm Beach theater that showed foreign films, particularly films in French. I saw two that fueled the nostalgia for my abandoned pianistic career in Paris. Practice Makes Perfect concerned the relationship between a middle-aged pianist and a beautiful woman whom he had not married. (This was where I first heard the “Intermezzo” from Schumann’s Faschingsschzvank aus Wien.) Heart to Heart was not actually about music, yet the soundtrack included the second movement of Mozart’s A major concerto (the recording by Pollini with Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic). This was the first piece by Mozart that I truly loved, and it remains one of the few. And now lines begin to form circles: I could not find the recording used in the film, only one by Vered. It was coupled with the C major concerto, K. 467, but it was the A major to which I listened; and always, in truth, disappointedly. Though she encouraged my ambition to study at the Conservatoire, she was no Pollini.

After all this, Paris slowly paled. The next year I fell in love for the first time with a man, an American cellist. I fell into that relationship headlong and disastrously, endowing him with passions and abilities and virtues that he did not possess. My cellist, like Paris, was what I made him, and our months together took me a decade to get over. Through no fault of his, I find that I still hate him for so wedding music with personal failure that for a long time music itself pained me; and not only the music he played (at the time, a Britten suite and the Carter sonata), but the music we had shared on a Walkman (he would listen from the left earphone, and I from the right) and, later, on his stereo. (“Our song” was the Chopin cello sonata, in particular the trio of the scherzo, played by Argerich and Rostropovich.)

As it happened, our common life flew to pieces before we could see Paris together; one of the few blessings we had. Although I had to turn away from music, Paris remained a fantastic place in my imagination. It was with David that I finally heard Chopin in Paris, with David that I went to Père Lachaise, to pay homage to Chopin again, and now to Proust and Wilde as well, David with whom I listen to the French composers, who allow me to believe that this implausible world has grace and verve and beauty.

8.

Some Virtuosi in Literature

While no intelligent soul would claim a familiarity with a few paintings by Caravaggio or three novels by Faulkner as a basis for authoritative responses to painting or literature in general, a familiarity with a dozen “serious” pieces of music suffices today as musical literacy—as if music were somehow a less important art. Shaw, however, had no hesitation in writing,

if you do not know Die Zauberflöte, if you have never soared into the heaven where they sing the choral ending of the Ninth Symphony if Der Ring des Nibelungen is nothing to you but a newspaper phrase, then you are an ignoramus, however eagerly you may pore in your darkened library over the mere printed labels of those wonders that can only be communicated by the transubstantiation of pure feeling [into] musical tone.

Forster was another literary man sustained by music. In the essay “Not Listening to Music” (in Two Cheers for Democracy) he wrote that music “seems to be more ‘real’ than anything, and to survive when the rest of civilization decays”—but his is the minority view of the humanist and the musical amateur. He held music above the uses that can be made of it—by academics, as material for papers and conferences; by students, as a humanities credit—and reverenced the private gifts it bestows upon common life.

Literature is often aloof from music in a way that music is rarely aloof from literature. Works with musical titles such as Eliot’s Four Quartets frequently have nothing to do with music proper, while for a number of writers music is only a costume in which to dress extra-musical preoccupations. One need only compare Wendell Kretschmar’s lecture on Beethoven in Mann’s Doctor Faustus with Prousťs ecstatic description of listening to the Vinteuil Septet in In Search of Lost Time to recognize the difference between a static “use” of music and a passionate literary response.

The male virtuoso pianist has been an attractive figure to a handful of novelists,¹ though often these portrayals have availed themselves of clichés. Novels that feature virtuosi include Fred Mustard Stewart’s The Mephisto Waltz, in which the hero makes a pact with the devil for his virtuosity; Frank Conroy’s Body & Soul, a success story worthy of Horatio Alger; and Bernice Rubens’s Madame Sousatzka, a melodrama of student-teacher-mother angst that was improved upon greatly in John Schlesingers film adaptation.

In Andrew Solomon’s A Stone Boat, the pianist protagonist must stand in for the autobiographical writer figure. Although Solomon makes his alter ego a virtuoso, the glimpses that he gives us of his musical life demonstrate an extreme ignorance of piano repertoire and playing. In one instance, the hero practices on a portable electric keyboard: “[T]he keys were too oddly sprung to work out subtle questions of phrasing,” he tells us, “but I could at least drum through scales, negotiate fingering, and memorize new pieces”—one of these a Chopin nocturne. In another, during an all-Mozart recital in London, he programs a “divertimento” regardless of the fact that Mozart wrote no diver-timenti for the instrument. (Likewise, his encore is “a light early Beethoven prelude” regardless of the fact that Beethoven wrote no preludes.) Finally, in Russia, where he plays Rachmaninov’s second concerto, “a stout woman,” moved by the sadness of his playing, comes up to him afterwards and tells him that she worked as a housekeeper to Rachmaninov. This woman would have to be old as well as stout since Rachmaninov left Russia in 1917—he made his last appearance as pianist there on 5 September—and never returned.

Solomon portrays his hero’s life with no greater accuracy. A high degree of glamour attaches itself to the fictional pianist’s career, which is highly artificial. During the course of the novel he plays in no fewer than three festivals. He also has an ideal recording contract, rarely practices, is very rich, remains indifferent to bad reviews (for all of his concerts are reviewed), never gets hemorrhoids (a curse of those in the sitting professions). His recording company has infinite patience for his personal tragedies; even the music itself has infinite patience for—and capacity to embrace—his personal tragedies.

This is, quite simply, a fantasy Most likely it will not be in Paris (or in the recording studio) that you play the Gaspard de la nuit of your career, but in Austin, Texas. Yet this pianist does not play in Austin: each of his concerts seems to happen in an important place—Liszt in Paris, Schubert in Berlin, a “funny recital in Budapest.” Rachmaninov’s last concert, on the contrary, was in Knoxville, Tennessee; Hofmann’s at Camp Wigwam, Harrison, Maine (1947); Lipatti’s in Besançon, France; Backhaus’s in Ossiach, Austria (28 June 1969); Youri Egorov’s in Maastricht, The Netherlands; Richter’s (apparently) in provincial Germany; Liszt’s, excluding those concerts he gave for charitable causes after 1847 (the last of his eight “Years of Transcendental Execution”), in Elizabetgrad, in the Ukraine.

Solomon embroiders an art that he loves but does not understand, and he gets away with it because he is so intelligent about other things. Still, that “light early Beethoven prelude” glares. Not only does he look ridiculous for writing that, so do the many people who read his book in manuscript without noticing the invention; the acknowledgments list twenty-six.

Even as it pays nominal tribute to the figure of the virtuoso, A Stone Boat is ostentatious proof of culturally sanctioned, or at least culturally tolerated, musical illiteracy.

* * *

The Challoners, one of E. F. Benson’s several homosexually encoded novels, is in its essentials the story of a father and his eventual acceptance of the decisions of his children: Helen marries an atheist, while Martin is a virtuoso pianist who converts from Anglicanism (his father is a clergyman in the C of E) to Catholicism. Martin is at the center of this novel, wherein the veneration of woman—in his case, of Stella—and the affirmation of the family are the external forces against which he is compelled to assert his devotion to music: stand-ins for homosexuality. (Though The Challoners cannot be read as autobiography, Benson himself was homosexual—as were his brothers Arthur and Hugh. Like the fictional Martin’s father, moreover, Benson’s father, Edward White Benson, became Archbishop of Canterbury and was, as Penelope Fitzgerald described him, “integrity itself, a mighty force always heading the same way, excluding other opinions with an absolute certainty of their wrongness.”)

Right at the start of the novel, Martin tells Helen, “[Y]ou may look for beauty and find it in almost everything Father finds it in the work of Demosthenes, but I in the works of Schumann.” Benson here invokes Schumann as Forster does in A Room with a View—as an example of a conflicted nature; when, heated with passion, Martin tells his father, “[Y]ou must not interfere with other people’s individualities,” we understand the terms of his conflict (even though the novel fails to articulate them).

The first of Martin’s performances is of Chopin’s first ballade. Upon hearing it, Stella,

who had been accustomed to consider the piano as an instrument for the encouragement of conversation after dinner, or at the most as the introduction to the vocal part of a concert, found herself sitting bolt upright in her chair with a strange tingling excitement spreading through her and a heightened and quickened beating of blood.

For Lady Sunningdale—an Ottoline Morrell type at whose house Martin is playing—Chopin awakens a desire for something vir-tuosic, although the first ballade is certainly that. (Benson does not tell how Martin became so expert a performer, this ballade being beyond the means of any other kind of pianist.²) Obligingly, then, Martin launches into Brahms’s Paganini variations. And just as in A Room with a View Lucy Honeychurch closes the piano when George enters the room at Windy Corner (when the piano is closed, Lucy is too), Martin closes the piano when his father enters the room and remarks, “And Martin wasting his time at the piano as usual.” In the language of Schumann, Martin’s father is a Philistine: his perception of music, to the extent that he may be said to possess one, is as weak as Stella’s.

Later that night, while lying in his bed, Martin allows his mind to wander:

[T]he exquisiteness of the sleeping summer night, peopled with ivory lights and ebony shadows, and the great velvet vault of the sky pricked by the thin remote fires of innumerable stars, and lit by that glorious sexless flame of the moon [casta diva], smote him with a sudden pang of pleasure. Somehow all this must be translatable into music.

In order to enable Martin to learn to “translate,” then, Benson ere long produces a teacher for him in the person of Karl Rusoff. The boy plays Chopin’s “fourth étude” (presumably opus 10, no. 4) and, again, the Paganini variations—performances impressive enough to convince Rusoff to accept Martin as a pupil. The lessons take place in Rusoff’s house, which is described:

The room itself was large, lofty and well-proportioned, and furnished with a certain costly simplicity. A few Persian rugs lay on the parquet floor, a French writing-table stood in the window, a tall bookcase glimmering with the gilt and morocco of fine bindings occupied nearly half of the wall in which the fireplace was set, two or three chairs formed a group with a sofa in the corner, and the Steinway grand occupied more than the area taken up by all the rest of the furniture. There perhaps simplicity gained its highest triumph; the case was of rosewood designed by Morris and the formal perfection of its lines was a thing only to be perceived by an artist. On the walls, finally, hung two or three prints, and on the mantelpiece were a couple of reproductions of Greek bronzes found at Herculaneum.

At the end, in a seeming throw-away line, Italy and what Italy meant to the Victorian homosexual—a Mecca of available and unpunishable sex—rears its glorious head. A few pages later, a conversation between Martin and Rusoff makes fairly explicit what Rusoff’s decor has foretold. “Drink from every spring but one, and drink deep,” the old man tells his pupil, then paraphrases Pater (writing of William Morris): “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• The Less Fractioned World
• After Two Concerts
• Of Paris
• Aristocracy
• Bibliography
• Index