While the pianist Artur Schnabel is also remembered as teacher
and composer, chamber music was the distinguishing work of his
musical life. His wife, the singer Theresa Behr, had a profound
influence on his music-making; in addition to a group of Lieder
with Behr, we can hear Schnabel in recordings of Mozart's Piano
Quartet in G minor, the Dvorak, Schubert and Schumann piano quintets,
and Beethoven's cello sonatas. Schnabel's earliest trio consisted
of violinist Karl Flesch and cellist Jean Gérardy (who
was replaced by Hugo Becker); Flesch and Schnabel collaborated
to edit the Mozart and Brahms violin sonatas. In the decade before
the Second World War, Schnabel and Bronislaw Huberman gave recitals
in America in sonata repertoire that included the Brahms G major;
Beethoven's Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth ("Kreutzer"),
and Tenth; selected sonatas by Schumann and Mozart, and the Schubert
Fantasia.
Schnabel had been chosen to organize a Brahms festival in Berlin
in 1933, to mark the centenary of the composer's birth. He wrote:
"We had agreed that all the chamber music works with piano
which Brahms had written would be performed in the festival by
Huberman, Hindemith, Piatigorsky and me. Now, when Hitler came
to power, we knew, of course, that the Brahms Festival, if held
at all, would certainly not include us as performers. So it was
no surprise when, also on my last morning in Germany [a functionary]
telephoned me and said: 'Mr. Schnabel, I have to tell you that
I am no longer in charge of the Brahms Festival and plans have
been changed. If you want to negotiate with the new man in charge,
it would be __', I interrupted him, saying: 'I expected that.'
And I think these were about the last words I spoke in Germany:
'Though I may not be pure-blooded, I am fortunately cold-blooded.
Good luck to you.'
"In May 1933 I played at the Brahms Festival in Vienna. I
mentioned that my participation in the Brahms Festival in Berlin
had been cancelled. So Vienna, at that time not yet incorporated
into Germany but independent, engaged us for their festival instead.
We played Brahms's trios and quartets - Huberman, Hindemith, Casals,
and I. I also played the B-flat major Concerto, with Furtwängler
conducting. "Performances went very well and we had great
fun and pleasure at our rehearsals, with plenty of time. After
one of our concerts we went to a very popular restaurant in the
basement of a hotel. There were about fifty people there besides
us. Around midnight Furtwängler came, with two friends, and
his behaviour seemed planned and prepared. In the presence of
these fifty or more people, he addressed Huberman and me, asking
us once more whether we would not change our minds and come back
the following winter to play in Berlin with him. We had been asked
before and refused, of course, to do so, for reasons which you
can easily guess. Huberman asked me to answer first. I made it
very simple and said that if all the musicians were called back
and reinstated in their former positions, then I would agree to
come back. But if they were not called back, I would have to stick
to my refusal. To my great amazement Furtwängler replied
- and this was obviously not prepared - that I was mixing art
and politics. And that was that."
With Europe's fall to totalitarianism, musical life became drastically
reduced as many artists sought refuge in America. It was not until
a unique series of events in 1947 that Schnabel was able briefly
to revive the grand European chamber music tradition so characteristic
of the years before fascism. He assembled a group to perform in
England and on the continent: violinist Joseph Szigeti, cellist
Pierre Fournier, violist William Primrose, and the violinist Ernest
Element and bassist James Merrett. The first programs were given
in Edinburgh, followed by a Brahms-Schubert festival in London;
all of these concerts were broadcast throughout Europe by the
major national radio networks. In Fall 1947, the group performed
the following repertoire in London:
September 22: Brahms, Quartet in C minor, Op. 60; Violin Sonata
in G, Op. 78; Schubert, Trio No. 2 in E flat. September 24 : Brahms,
Trio in C minor, Op. 101; Cello Sonata in E minor, Op .99: Quartet
in A, Op. 26. September 26: Brahms, Violin Sonata in A, Op. 100;
Mendelssohn, Trio in D minor, Op. 49; Brahms, Piano Quintet in
F minor, Op .34. September 29: Brahms, Trio in B, Op. 8; Violin
Sonata in D minor, Op. 108; Schubert, Quintet in C ("Trout").
October 1: Brahms, Trio in C, Op. 87; Schubert, Duo for Violin
and Piano; Trio No.1 in B flat. October 3: Brahms, Cello Sonata
in F, Op. 38; Schubert, Fantasia for Violin and Piano; Brahms,
Quartet in G minor, Op. 25.
In Paris, a single record collector managed to cut acetates of
the first and second Brahms violin sonatas, Schubert's B-flat
Trio, the Brahms B-major and Mendelssohn D-minor Trios. At Swedish
Radio, another recorded the first two movements of the Brahms
Trio (the opening bars missing) on adequate equipment. Other than
these chance efforts no measures were taken to preserve these
collaborations: those discs are the basis of our cd. As one hears
the individuality of each artist emerge, one senses Schnabel's
role as he subtly guides tempo, character and style, inducing
his colleagues to convey the music freely and with passion. Schnabel
no longer publicly performed chamber music after 1948, and he
died unexpectedly in 1951. -Allan Evans ©2000
The following interview was generously granted by Leon Fleisher,
the eminent pianist, conductor and educator, to accompany publication
of these historic documents. Fleisher had studied with Schnabel
for ten years (1938-1948).
Lev Shorr was my first serious teacher. He mostly worked on technique
- it was Russian school, very much curved fingers, picking them
up, using them as hammers. It was a kind of ambivalent relationship.
He was a very classy, sporty-looking gentleman who wore spats
and a monocle, sported a cane, was bald on the top of his head,
spoke with a thick Russian accent and acted as though it was never
a good lesson unless I cried. But he would then make it up by
taking me to lunch afterwards and would get me lamb chops - which
started my predilection for that dish. The technique he offered
was limited and I see, as I note in piano playing today, that
it leads sometimes, if not often, to negative results. I next
had a sweet teacher, a gentleman named Ludwig Altmann, who was
essentially an organist, a young German who had arrived in San
Francisco. He had a wonderful musical training and began emphasizing
the beauties of music and the feelings that lay behind the notes.
Between those two I had lessons with a rather well-known Danish
pianist, Gunnar Johansen, who lived across the bay in Oakland.
He also emphasized the beauties of music. I had been befriended
by conductors in San Francisco: Pierre Monteux (then with the
San Francisco Symphony) and Alfred Hertz, his predecessor, who
had become conductor of the WPA Orchestra. Both of these gentlemen
thought that I should study with Schnabel, that he would be the
ideal teacher for me and they both knew him. In fact when Schnabel
would come out to San Francisco he would have dinner with the
Hertzes and play bridge afterwards. So it was decided, after Schnabel
replied by a letter in which he very politely declined to teach
me, since he said he never taught anyone under sixteen, that on
his next visit to the Coast, during dinner they would sneak me
into the Hertzes' living room via the basement and have me ready
at the piano when dinner was finished, and when the doors from
the dining room to the living room were opened, I would be sitting
at the piano ready to play for him. And being the gentleman that
he was, he did not order me out of the Hertzes' house, but sat
down and listened to me. I played for him the Liszt Sonetto del
Petrarca, No. 123 and the cadenza to Beethoven's B-flat Concerto.
I was nine and he invited me to come to Italy and work with him.
This happened around March-April, and he invited me for that summer,
in 1938.
We had friends who looked for sponsors and found a gentleman who
at the time was not very involved with music but agreed to sponsor
me. His name was James D. Zellerback, head of the Crown-Zellerback
Paper Corporation. After assisting me he became quite interested
in music and later was President of the San Francisco Symphony.
Schnabel's teaching was done in what is called the master class
format. All his other students were invited to listen to everybody
else's lesson, which was an enormously helpful format. There was
a terrific array of repertoire and you began to see so many of
what may be called the laws of music, how they pertained and were
applied to different music and, as with all laws, they are respected
only to the extent to which they are broken. But you can't break
a law unless you first know what it is. So it was an enormously
productive and informative experience and it's a format I've used
most of my life. In the beginning, the first piece I brought him
was Schubert's little A-major Sonata [Op. 120]. Since he did a
considerable amount of traveling in those days, he arranged that
I work with his son Karl Ulrich when he wasn't around and I did
a great deal of work with him; he was also most inspiring and
illuminating. The pieces I learned in those days were Liszt's
A-major Concerto, Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms. Of the latter, I
studied with them the Handel Variations, the Waltzes, endless
small pieces - Opp. 116, 117, 118 - and both concertos.
Schnabel would gently mock the "hands apart" style:
He felt one could be equally expressive playing hands together,
and would say so with a twinkle in his eye. By this time, I had
spent that one summer in Lake Como with him. The following year
he had emigrated to New York and lived in the Peter Stuyvesant
Hotel, on 86th Street and Central Park West (if I remember correctly,
in apartment 9C). He had two pianos there: one a nine-foot Steinway
on which the students played, and an upright piano, at right angles,
at which he sat, and what was so extraordinary was that the sounds
he drew out of this little upright piano were so infinitely more
beautiful than what we students could produce on the nine-foot
Steinway. I remember Claude Frank and Hilda Banks among the group;
Clifford Curzon would visit on occasion, as well as Firkusny,
and Victor Babin in a handsome U.S. Army captain's uniform. He
demonstrated all the time and that was magic for us. He spoke
very little about technique as such so that when he demonstrated
we sat with eyes glued on his hands at the keyboard. My own hand
position became more reposed, more relaxed, and at the same time
at the ready and yet without tension and fingers more extended.
Rhythm was something that came out as a result of his playing,
of his demonstrating. There would be this schwung, an irresistible
swing to what he did, as though he were twirling you around in
a dance. It was so extraordinary to learn that in the same tempo
one could play slow or fast: in a sense, the rhythm depended on
whether you played with a close-up lens, emphasizing the rhythmic
subtext, the underlying pulsation, or whether you used a telephoto
lens and just looked at half-bar points or bar points and dealt
differently with what lay between.
His method of teaching, if you could call it such, was that in
each lesson he would impart to the student everything he had learned
about that piece of music in his lifetime. Then he expected you
to absorb, to utilize what convinced you, which was why he rarely
wanted to hear the same piece in two successive lessons, because,
in effect, he would just be repeating himself. And it was interesting
when we brought back a piece, say, one year later, he would have
quite different things to say about it. He would accept other
approaches as long as what was being communicated was faithful
to the text and had conviction and beauty behind it.
I think it amused him to somehow inundate the students, because
after two and a half or three hours, I would stagger out of that
apartment like a drunk, I was just absolutely inebriated. We didn't
have tape recorders in those days, so we all sat with our copies
and pencils, scribbling down every word that he uttered, which
he found amusing because he said, "I say one thing to so-and-so
in reaction to his performance, and if you were to play that piece
for me I might say something different. So why do you write?"
His command of the language was so extraordinary for someone to
whom English was not a mother tongue, his command was poetic and
beautiful. I heard a tape on which Schnabel spoke for the US Information
Agency during the War on the importance of liberty and freedom,
against totalitarianism - to hear his voice again was a chilling
thrill. The best way to describe it is that he sounded like Richard
Burton with a German accent because he spoke slowly, relishing
each syllable. The speaking alone was such a thing of beauty to
hear.
What he communicated very soon became quite indistinguishable
from Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert, from whatever we were playing,
because what he did and how he played the examples with such spontaneity,
inspiration, and beauty made it seem that it was the only way
to do it. I remember that for about two years after I left him
I felt at sea, quite lost, convinced that I couldn't remember
all he had said over ten years. It took nearly two years. I remember
quite clearly taking out Schubert's Sonata in B flat (Op. posth.),
and being confronted with a dilemma; and in thinking back over
those years with Schnabel it was like a bubble rising to the surface
of my brain, popping, and I remembered, "Oh yes, this is
the kind of thing Schnabel would have said that about. Let me
try it." And, lo and behold, it worked. I began remembering
things in that manner until I realized that I had not forgotten
anything but it was just kind of hidden away and I had to uncover
it. But then the next step was even more extraordinary. I was
in Paris around the end of 1950, early 1951 (I had left him in
1949), and was listening with a friend to his recordings of the
Beethoven sonatas, I think the Op. 22, and found myself saying
"God, that's wonderful, that's beautiful but I'm not sure
I'd do it that way, but this way." When I sat back and reflected
on what I'd told myself, I think I had by then somehow achieved
a kind of independence.
I attended as many concerts of Schnabel's as I could: I heard
him play Mozart's Piano Concertos K. 503 with Szell, K. 488 with
Rodzinski, and a wonderful concert at the Frick Collection with
Joseph Szigeti - the Schubert Fantasia, that was unbelievable-
the opening was like a shimmering seascape.
In all music he would give advice in a specific place and one
would extrapolate from that. He would demonstrate and one would
hear how it was done. I worked on Chopin with him, the Polonaise
Fantasy and other Polonaises, but he didn't enjoy Debussy. I really
assaulted him and he was not really happy, by playing the Rachmaninoff
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and then when I had the effrontery
to bring it back a year later because I had learned nothing new
in between, he really was unhappy. I also played the Franck Symphonic
Variations for him. He enjoyed Bartók: Hilda Banks brought
it to the lessons.
In his way of dealing with time, since time is such a unique dimension,
he would in effect distort time to further characterize or underline
the character that he was trying to bring out. And to do it in
a way in which, when it was perceptible, it became kind of irresistible
in the swing that carried it. His dealing with beats: Beats are
the subdivision of time. The emphasis was that beats were never
downward events, they were not like fence posts or the hammering
of coffin nails - beats were upward springs that would spring
you on to the next beat. I often use with my students the image
of a ballet dancer who walks on the ball of the foot and springs
on to the next. Therefore his beat always had life to it and led
on and on. If it was a vertical experience it was always upward.
He went into analysis of structure. That was one of the great
things, so that one got a sense of shape of the forms across the
whole piece. Then it was filled with these incredible details
but the large shape was always first. And that's one of the difficult
things for performers and instrumentalists, because they are responsible
to produce every note and sometimes it gets a little tricky for
the emphasis. Very often it turns to the minutiae, to each note.
It's difficult to do that and retain the overall sense of shape.
On pedaling he had enormous flexibility and variety and believed
very much in fractional pedaling. The varieties of sound he achieved
were the result of how he played, how he depressed the key and
there was much variety.
He spoke occasionally of Busoni with much admiration, and of other
people who were highly popular at the time with a certain rueful
disparagement, with a voice of disappointment, more a tone of
embarrassment or regret than any gleeful jealousy.
The only thing he let drop one day was that he had known Brahms,
and all our ears pricked up. We wanted to know what great metaphysical
questions they had discussed. He admitted that he was quite young
at the time. At our urging, he said that Brahms had the habit
of taking a picnic basket on Sunday afternoons into the Vienna
woods, and once he asked the young Schnabel to go along. And we
waited with bated breath to know what they had discussed and he
said, "Brahms just said two things to me. Before the picnic,
'Are you hungry?' and after the picnic, 'Have you had enough?'."
-Leon Fleisher, Baltimore, December 26, 1999.
[In 1945, Schnabel recalled:"I heard Brahms play the piano
part of his G-minor Quartet. This impressed me immensely and is
still in my memory. It was, naturally, the great music which held
and shook me, but also the creative vitality and wondeful carefreeness
with which he played. This to me was the real grand style."]