Discussion

—?You told me to remind you that yesterday I wanted to know at what age a performer is allowed to give his first public concert.

A.S.: At the age at which he or she has the money to pay the rent for a concert hall. Is that satisfactory?

—?Do you think having perfect pitch is an advantage or a disadvantage?

A.S.: It is an advantage, but not indispensable. I suppose you refer to absolute pitch. Relative pitch is, however, sufficient and even more important. If you know with what tones a piece of music starts, you ought to also know all relations and modulations which follow. This does not fully apply to what is—wrongly—called “atonal” music. I had absolute pitch as a child. Ever since, my childhood pitch has been permanently raised in favor of string instruments which thus gain in brilliancy, to the disadvantage of human voices which become strained to a dangerous point. I still have in my ears the standard “A” of my boyhood, and accordingly I hear things played nowadays tones higher than their notation would present them to my mental ear. For instance, if I did not know that the Prelude to the Meistersinger was written in C major, I might in a performance today easily hear it as D-flat major, or even higher. To have absolute pitch is, I repeat, a musical asset, but by no means the sign of a good musician.

—?Yesterday you mentioned Chopin’s studies. You thought they were perfect pieces, yet they didn’t offer you problems any longer, whereas the Mozart sonatas do. You said that some colleagues of yours think just the opposite. How do you account for differences like that among musicians?

A.S.: I believe the content of profundity in a piece of music remains there, whoever looks at it. It is communicated to him who is equipped with the adequate receiver. He knows it is there. There is, however, no device by which to prove that it is there to those who deny that it is. A simile occurs to me: when two wanderers come to a crossroads, and they have a choice of going to the left or to the right, something makes them decide on the left. They call it their own willpower, but I am not so sure of it. One of them is finding flowers, and the other is finding nothing. Is there any guarantee that two wanderers walking along the same path will both see everything that grows there? Do you think that, where there are flowers, everybody must see them?

—?Yes, if you are speaking in a pragmatic way.

A.S.: Not even in a pragmatic way is that the case. I, myself, am an example of the truism that not everything which is attractive must be attractive for everybody. Attraction is a mystery, so is repulsion, even indifference. There are hundreds of things I don’t see which other people see, in the physical as well as in the mental region; details, or the whole. Chopin’s lovely studies are fascinating for some performers because of the opportunities they give for showing how they master the keyboard. Another type of performer is less interested in the keyboard as such. His desire is to project music purely—to let the mediator disappear. To succeed he must, needless to say, have full command of his instrument. There are performers who are almost equally gifted in both directions, and attracted to both. If it comes to the one-sided ones, it should not be a problem to decide who has got the better part. I have always objected to the use of the term “artist” as indicating excellence of performance, irrelevant of the field of activity. An artist is one who devotes his life to occupation with art. Naturally not all art can be supreme. Relatively inferior or mediocre art is still art. In usage these notions became badly confused. If I spend the same amount of time with a Chopin study or with some Beethoven bagatelle, I get tired of the Chopin piece sooner; its demands on me become, after a while, merely external. And I, slave to my disposition, can simply see no reason why I should produce sounds without inner participation in them. Due to the astonishing variety in musicians’ dispositions, unity of judgment can never be expected. Some piano teachers recommend to their pupils reading books, or newspapers, while playing. This seems to me absolutely futile, but it has been and is often done even today.

—?What makes them say that?

A.S.: A misconception. It is hardly ever said to beginners, rarely to amateurs, mostly to advanced students (professionals). To them it is recommended as a prescription for a lifetime. It is based on the conviction that so-called exercises, daily finger-hand-arm training for hours—undisturbed by the interference of musical intentions—are indispensable for the acquisition and preservation of technique. The first teacher who ever thought of reading during these music-less motions has apparently himself experienced how deadly boring they are, even after a short time spent on them. Yet they are not meant to be music. The counsel holds, unfortunately, also for practicing the fast parts of what is meant to be music. These fast parts, isolated and endlessly repeated, become degraded to exercises again. The whole procedure, as I said before, is useless. To project music, the technique employed has to be a technique which from the outset is used exclusively in the service of this projection.

In the past almost every musician was composer, teacher, and performer. Then the enormous expansion of musical activities led to an unfortunate separation of these functions. Teaching, with multitudes of students not very gifted and only moderately ambitious, was gradually simplified. I think this is an inescapable consequence of collectivism. The teachers, who naturally were not all on the same level, had to face new tasks. Rules, conventions, and standards intelligible for persons without a helpful background had to be established. The growing emphasis on the mechanical, on methods, formulas, and standardization, is symptomatic of this development. It is, for instance, characteristic that the traditional fingering of the C major scale (on the piano), which is still adhered to with the greatest reverence, uses the thumb, the strongest finger, on the subdominant in the right hand and on the dominant in the left hand. The right-hand movement, in the range of one octave upwards, is 3 plus 5, left hand 5 plus 3; back 5 plus 3, 3 plus 5. This is certainly ingenious. But musical only for the left hand; musical by accident. As it is built, the left hand starts with the fifth finger, which in the case of the C major scale is a “priority.” The right hand should compensate its disadvantage by the heroic sacrifice of its fifth finger and execute the scale with only four fingers, thumb on “G.” If played as ordered, right hand alone—or, worse, in unison with the left—the subdominant, touched with the strongest finger, might easily get a musically unintended accent on it, and thus lead to a crime against the harmonic system of centuries and make music the victim of standardization. Not ingenious, but just silly, is the order never to use your thumb on a black key. Why not, if the position of the hand makes it by far the best fingering? All such pedantries also exist, of course, in general education. Notions, ideas, knowledge, have to be simplified, reduced to formulas, further and further removed from the goal. Truth is lost, or forgotten. The individual will find it again—if he has the light. I shall not be disappointed if our talks here inject a little skepticism in those of you who have none. I am sure most of you, already now, don’t take everything which is printed as sacred, just because it is printed. It is better to be very suspicious. To be confident makes one rich; to be gullible, poor.

—?Did you ever hear Clara Schumann play? She was a great friend of Brahms.

A.S.: No.

—?Did you ever hear Brahms play?

A.S.: Only once; chamber music, as I told you.

—?What do you consider the best way of preparing for a concert career? Attaching yourself to a well-known teacher or school, or what?

A.S.: Talent is the premise. It may be released, but cannot be supplied by a teacher. Neither can he guarantee world fame to his students. He is no magician; the student is more important than he. What can a teacher do? At the best open a door, but the student has to pass through it.

In a recent broadcast the idea was sold to uncounted listeners that a great artist can never be a good teacher. Did any of you hear that program? What did you think of it?

—?There are exceptions.

A.S.: I see, you are inclined to believe it, though with some reserve. It was said on the radio by someone who, according to his position, should know. You do not like to think that such a person might be far off the truth? I think it is sheer nonsense. That could easily be proved. It would be better to assume that even “stars” might be wrong, occasionally.

—?Is not teaching entirely different than playing? Someone might try and excel at both, but the functions would still be separate.

A.S.: True, not every great performing artist is attracted to teaching. You apparently think only of performers when you say artists. To be a good teacher he has to love his work. Yet to say that a great artist can never be a good teacher is obviously thoughtless.

—?In another broadcast, the same person made a statement that seemed rather strange to me. He said that good music is the music you love. He apparently was trying to make everyone feel good.

A.S.: This is a dangerous, nihilistic line. It says: value depends on your own reaction. Everything you like is good food. Both meat and poison.

—?You have edited many of the compositions of Beethoven. How do you go about editing the music of a man who is dead?

A.S.: The ?uvre of a man who is still alive is rarely edited. I edited Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas in the twenties. Maybe I would proceed differently now. When I first tried my hands at editing in 1912 (the Mozart Sonatas for Violin and Piano, together with Carl Flesch), I was not yet as conscientious, and much less experienced than in the twenties. For the Beethoven edition which, as a whole, I think to be still usable, I tried to get hold of as much original material as possible—manuscripts, copies corrected or seen by Beethoven, first and second editions of which Beethoven had seen the proofs. Usually I succeeded. I also consulted many other editions. In the case of different versions in the manuscripts and in the printed editions which Beethoven had seen in proofs, I decided on the printed version, because Beethoven was not always too careful in his manuscripts, knowing that he would see the proofs. All my markings are distinguishable from Beethoven’s own by smaller print. All references to problematic points are given in footnotes. The metronome markings—with the one exception of opus 106 where Beethoven has provided them—are my choice and responsibility, but never intended to be more than suggestions. Fingerings, in my edition, have been chosen very often with the idea of forcing the student to stop and think a while. They are occasionally meant to be very difficult, in order to indicate that, where they are, special attention is advised. With an easier fingering the meaning of some important but hidden element might have escaped the student.

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