Before I went to Germany for good I had composed a few pieces, some of which were performed in Vienna. One day Leschetizky invited his pupils to participate in a composer’s contest for piano pieces. As was usual, every contestant had to post his composition to the jury in an envelope inscribed with a motto and enclose another envelope containing his name and inscribed with the same motto. Only when a composition was admitted to the final test (a performance by the respective authors, at which all Leschetizky’s pupils and several guests of rank would choose the three winners by vote) was the envelope containing the composer’s name opened. One of the judges told me—much later—of the surprise and amusement he and his colleagues felt when, of the small number of accepted pieces, three (all I had sent in) turned out to be mine. They were also startled by the selection of my mottos. For a youth of my age—fourteen—they seemed very unusual. One I remember—it was set to the piece which won the first prize: four lines by Richard Dehmel, a young poet then considered a most promising genius. They said—in verse and rhyme, of course—that only when man has been weaned from all that is purposeful, and does not know anything but his impulses, will the divine essence of enraptured folly and great love be revealed to him. I played my three pieces for the voters’ assembly and won the first prize. Then I was asked by Leschetizky to resign the second and third prizes, which I, of course, did.

One of the judges was a Viennese composer, internationally known for his piquant, unpretentious, and carefully written salon music. He gave me an introduction to Mr. Simrock, his publisher in Berlin. The Simrock publishing firm was established in the eighteenth century and its noble record belongs to the history of music. One of my first acts in Berlin was to see Mr. Simrock, a man with a long white beard. He was fairly courteous, but rather cool and I felt a bit nervous. None of my music had been printed before. He said, “Mr. S. has told me about your work. Now let me see the pieces of which he speaks.” I handed him the music and after a glance at the pieces he asked me to come back in a week. I came back to learn that they had been accepted for publication. But their original title was not acceptable. Instead of “Three piano pieces” as I had (arrogantly) called them, they were named:

Douce Tristesse, Reverie

Diabolique, Scherzo

Valse mignonne.

I did not protest. After all, what’s in a name? If you are interested, perhaps you can find these pieces in some library or the basement of a music store. They would surely be more popular than most of the works I produced later on, for they have a certain similarity to one successful type of contemporary music.

In Berlin, my manager, Hermann Wolff, quickly got engagements for me. One of them was a tour in Norway. I had to play at fifteen concerts there. It was the first time I had either seen or crossed the sea—and it was quite an experience, what with the winter, a small freighter, and high seas. The star on this tour was a then already famous violin virtuoso (I was merely the accompanist). We played sonatas, I also played some solos—Mr. Wolff had insisted on this—and at the end the star performed musical fireworks, with the piano as background. I also had one performance with an orchestra, playing Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. I remember this occasion chiefly because in one paper I was criticized for having reduced a lion to a well-trimmed poodle.

When I first met the great star, I did not believe my eyes. He did not look like an artist: his appearance was indicative rather of a circus director or an animal trainer. He was very fashionably dressed, with the underlined elegance displayed in shop windows.

Norway—to which later I often returned and always with enthusiasm—did not impress me on this first acquaintance. It seemed to me much more provincial even than Austria, let alone compared with Germany, my latest yardstick. One feature of this tour had, however, a lasting effect on me. My violin virtuoso taught me to play poker, two-handed. I learned it quickly—it does not take long. After my short apprenticeship we devoted ourselves to this noble pastime during all the many hours we spent in trains, going from concert to concert. Experts told me later that two-handed poker counts among the surest and meanest sucker catches. No wonder, then, that I lost almost my entire fee. It was undoubtedly not very chivalrous of a man near his forties to teach a seventeen-year-old comrade such a game. Yet I have to be grateful to him: by initiating it, he also ended my connection with poker, which, by the way, even at the outset I thought silly and boring. The star proved a good teacher and was probably very amused. I returned to Berlin, saw Mr. Wolff and reported my mishap and the empty state of my pockets. He got terribly angry with me, a poor sucker. He was perhaps disappointed in my talent for card playing.

Then I had some more concerts in Germany—several with orchestras. The only orchestra I had heard before I went to Germany was the Vienna Opera Orchestra, which was the same as the Vienna Philharmonic. The Vienna Orchestra of the Imperial Opera, as well as all the big royal, ducal, state, or municipal opera houses in Germany, employed a double set of players, up to perhaps two hundred, engaged in operatic and symphonic work. Afternoon performances were unknown. Since orchestras were not overworked, high quality was guaranteed on all occasions. The Metropolitan Orchestra, I hear, has only one set, which only does operas, also in the afternoon, though not daily. This means too much work, I am afraid, to guarantee equal quality at all occasions. In the Vienna Opera the same brass didn’t play, even, the same Wagner opera for the third act. Some new brass came in, which is very humane.

The musicians in Vienna and Germany were, so to say, court-, state-, or city-owned. Their contracts ran for life. Would you say they were slaves? With short contracts, competition, union rules, dependence on private sponsors—in one word, insecurity—orchestral performances become alarmingly expensive. Art must suffer if it is too deeply involved in financial difficulties. One day, I am sure, the states, or cities, will also take charge of the theatrical and musical branches of civilization. It might interest you to know that the Vienna Orchestra in the nineties gave only ten regular subscription concerts and one pension fund concert in a season. The regular concerts were on Sunday mornings.

The clientele for symphonic music was very limited, comprising at the most a few thousand people. As everywhere, this number increased steadily during the following decades. In the 1790s even a few thousand would have seemed utopian. Jean Paul, a German writer, reported on his first visit to Leipzig to attend a concert there, which had attracted an “enormous crowd, perhaps a hundred people.” The Berlin audience, when I arrived there, was probably twice as large as that in Vienna (though in relation to the population practically the same). In New York City, I estimate the potential audience today to be more than one hundred and twenty thousand. A good number of them are, I suppose, prevented from attending concerts because of the rather small supply of cheap seats in the few available concert halls. Radio and gramophone have, in the meantime, helped with an inexpensive substitute.

The New York music fans have apparently no clear notion of how numerous they are, for, amazingly enough, they are always greatly impressed to find a place like Carnegie Hall sold out, though its capacity is only 2,500. 2,500 is a tiny percentage of a city of ten million. True, there are at least three concerts offered every day for six consecutive months, and operas too.

The orchestras in the smaller German cities where I had my first engagements naturally sounded different from the Vienna Philharmonic. Subtlety, inspiration, and brilliance were not the outstanding features of these bodies. The conductors, like their orchestras, served both opera and concert in most cases. They also had, as a rule, a lifetime job, employed by kings, dukes, princes, states, cities (until 1918 Germany continued to have many courts). It was usually an association of music lovers who were in charge of concert work, hiring the orchestras from their respective bosses.

The Berlin Philharmonic did no opera work. It was exclusively a concert-performing body—as American orchestras are. London and Paris each had several concert orchestras. All these organizations were self-contained, operated on a cooperative basis. In Berlin a subsidy was eventually granted by the city, on condition that special concerts were presented to labor and student groups. London and Paris orchestras adhered—Paris still does—to the so-called deputy system. By this system each member is allowed to send a substitute to rehearsals and performances. Whether the chosen substitute also has the right, having attended one rehearsal, to send another substitute to the next—and so on—I don’t know. You can easily imagine the consequences of so much laissez faire. Instead of an ensemble one might get just an assembly. I myself was once involved in troubles caused by these practices. It was in London. The “incident” got publicized and helped to accelerate the elimination of this anomaly. I was sorry to hear that it has been revived recently, economic conditions being responsible as they were before.

In contrast to the modest quality of the German provincial orchestras and their conductors, of whom many, especially the older ones, were either routiniers or pathetic—or even routiniers and pathetic—the audiences were of the highest quality, better than in Vienna, with her talented Philistines—an unhealthy amalgam—and their preconceived, pretentious value judgments, their worship of traditions simply because they were traditions, their enthusiasm for fashions simply because they were fashions—in one phrase, their lazy superiority complex. (This, of course, is a somewhat crude summary—referring to a collective, in a late stage of a declining society.)

The German audiences in the medium-sized towns were composed of people who loved music unselfishly. They knew most of the music they went to hear at concerts. They knew it very well. There was probably not one in these audiences who was not involved, actively or passively, in homemade music—and without any fuss made about it. It was part of family life, old and young cooperating. The children were present and listened. Public concerts especially for children did not yet exist: youngsters deeply attracted to music simply attended some concerts. Last winter, when I was playing at one of the largest American colleges, a girl student asked me how the young people’s attitude to art music in her country compared with that of a corresponding group in pre-Hitler Germany. I said that it did not compare at all. Schools, colleges, and universities in Germany did not present “star courses” to their students. Musical performances at public elementary schools had just been initiated and the children’s reactions, written down or expressed in drawings, were put on file. I saw some very interesting examples of these, gathered chiefly from proletarian districts, where, naturally, home music was not practiced. The relation to music by children of the middle and upper classes was established by home culture and traditions. And, as I said before, those to whom music meant most became the future audience. They were then already familiar with much of the concert repertoire, or even with operas, and particularly interested in all that was new to them. They were not disappointed by mediocre performances, for, after all, mass production of the supreme achievements is still denied by Providence, the so far only known supplier of genius, and mechanical reproduction had not yet reached all corners of the globe.

Germany had an astonishing number of theaters, many of them offering plays and operas. The orchestras employed there, as I have already told you, also played at concerts. Each of the towns thus equipped had an amateur mixed chorus. And, I have to bore you with repeating this all-important fact, home music had not yet completely surrendered to modern times. The theaters, with a season lasting nine or ten months, were, because of the small number of their potential patrons, compelled to have a very comprehensive repertoire. Seventy different works each season were, I estimate, not unusual. (Here we may see a parallel to the present-day cinemas.) And it was still a time when the “what” came before the “how” and “who” and “how much.” I, by the way, cannot subscribe to the conception of the “better” being the enemy of the “good.” The imagined “best” is, I think, the greatest incentive of any effort toward it. Humility is more productive than conceit, be it in the giver or the taker.

My short description of the normal musical situation in Germany in the first decades of our century is intended to point to the important fact that when audiences are superior to performers it is by no means harmful to art. On the other hand, the cry for “first-class” services might contain some dangers for it.

At my debut recitals in Munich and Leipzig I played the same program, including works by Brahms and Schubert. The morning after, I was naturally impatient to learn from the papers whether I was good, mediocre, bad, or all three by turns. By the way, it was not until the second half of my career that my interest in the printed reaction subsided. It was then clear to me that reviews are addressed to the customer, not the salesman, that I have only occasionally learned anything by reading them, and that their stock exchange quotation function did not affect me any longer, for I had, in the meantime, made a name, been accepted as a trademark. Some technical, concrete criticism has, I repeat, helped me occasionally. If, for instance, I was told of my inclination to hesitate before first beats, to rush and blur figurations, to pound the bass, etc., I knew what to try to avoid. If, however, I was blamed for not having grasped the spirit of a work or a period, for having sinned against this or that style, for having failed to create the atmosphere of a moonlit night, or a lover’s despair, of innocence and drama, for being hot, cold, or tepid, I was always at a loss what to do.

My Leipzig debut brought me press approval of my Brahms and disapproval of my Schubert interpretation. For the “austere, Nordic bleakness and heavy seriousness” of Brahms’s music (this was the official stigma fixed on his work) I was said to be naturally equipped, chiefly by my firm and rigid rhythm. To Schubert’s colorful, lilting, charming, sweet, and open music I was said to have no access. Three days later in Munich I read the exact opposite of the Leipzig verdict. There I was entirely the Viennese, southern type, gaily or sentimentally wandering in the woods, along brooks, with the birds singing. In both cities I retained these initial labels—cerebral for Leipzig, sensuous for Munich—until Hitler’s advent in 1933. I wonder whether they would still react the same way if I were to go there now.

Shortly after I arrived in Berlin, one of the leading critics there invited me to see him. He was, by the way, a brother-in-law of Gerhart Hauptmann, then the most celebrated young playwright in Germany. At our first meeting I learned that this critic had two other activities in addition to his journalism: vocal teaching the one, advising a music publisher the other. He told me all this very modestly, almost shyly. The publishing firm he worked for had just been established, under the name of The Three Lilies. He knew, probably through the three piano pieces published by Simrock, of my attempts in composition and offered me a contract. His firm printed a score of songs of mine and another set of three piano pieces. The title pages were, on his suggestion, designed by a young and very successful Hungarian architect. I was happy and grateful. The Three Lilies was not, however, fitted for commercial competition and died, after a few years of tender life, in their sleep. I have no idea, for I never investigated, where the “stock” of this delicate enterprise was buried. There must have been a good number of unsold copies of my opuses, hidden somewhere. By now they are presumably ashes.

Only two or three years after I took up residence in Berlin I started a chamber music ensemble—a trio. The violinist was at that time Joachim’s best pupil; the cellist, a Dutchman, concertmaster with Nikisch’s Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, was considerably older than we two.

The Berlin Philharmonie, an adapted roller-skating rink, comprised at that time three halls. Our chamber music concerts were given in the so-called Oberlicht Hall—originally meant to be just a foyer. The prices of admission were low—what one internationally terms “popular prices”—yet the audiences were composed of music lovers able and used to also paying “unpopular” ones. They sat at tables and were allowed to order beer or mineral water, but not food. There was, nevertheless, no disturbance or noise, but always perfect silence and attentiveness during the performances. Actually, only very few of our listeners took the opportunity to satisfy physical and spiritual thirst simultaneously. This fact soon led to the abandonment of the pessimistic belief that beer might enhance the attractiveness of music. The tables were removed, the seats multiplied, the takings improved. Manager and music lover were equally benefited by separating beer from art.

Our concerts, given on subscription under the auspices, naturally, of Hermann Wolff, were from the outset a genuine success. We presented a wide repertoire of chamber music works with piano, in all combinations of instruments; we had singers as guest performers; we very often played contemporary works. With my career as a “roving mount-a-platform” developing rapidly, I had to give up this dear enterprise after, I think, three seasons. Yet my apparently innate attachment to ensemble playing made me soon return to it. Carl Flesch became and remained my partner for two decades. Shortly after we started playing sonatas together, the young Belgian cellist, Jean Gérardy, joined us. We became a trio—traveled together and had a good time. The outbreak of the First World War stopped our happy cooperation. Gérardy, the Belgian, of course did not stay in Germany. He stayed on Belgian soil, died there much too early, still a very young man. Flesch and I asked Hugo Becker, a famous German cellist, to take Gérardy’s place in our trio. He accepted, and our collaboration lasted for many years.

I also toured as a soloist. One of my first tours took me to East Prussia. There I played perhaps eleven or twelve concerts. These concerts were all in the smaller places and were given under the auspices of the provincial administration. Of this I shall tell you tomorrow. Now, let us shift to the discussion part, our ensemble playing.

Discussion

— I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing your pupil, the young Leon Fleisher, this summer, and I would like to have your opinion of his work?

A.S.: He is a highly gifted boy. He plays, for his age, amazingly well. The real difficulties for him lie in his future, for it is more difficult to retain fame than to gain it. I feel certain of his capacity to meet them.

— He seems very much more mature than his seventeen years warrant, though.

A.S.: Oh, I wouldn’t use that term, “mature.” It would in his case sound like an objection, almost a condemnation. He plays well, convincingly, with an already manifest personality of his own. His type of talent is not too common. He has imagination and courage. He will try things and face the risk of failure. That is nowadays a rather rare quality. Courage is suppressed by the pursuit of safety.

— Did you say it is easier to gain fame than to retain it?

A.S.: Well, I thought so.

— Why is it?

A.S.: Perhaps I was referring to the days before paid publicity made fame. Well, you have to live up to your prestige once you have gained it. Making your debut, in your young years, you are not expected to impress profoundly, to arouse passionate reaction. If you do, unexpectedly, the first time, you will be expected to repeat at least the effect of the first attempt on all following occasions.

The lazy tendency to tie artists down to pigeonholes is getting ever stronger. This was, however, not what I meant by my previous sentence. There I referred to a once-communicated level, to a whole, not to single characteristics, mannerisms, nuances. Every artist ought to be expected to develop as long as he functions, and every listener too. Development means change, progress. But it does not mean change of level.

Bernard Shaw, Richard Strauss, Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, and others of great gifts were not blessed to continue on the level on which they began. Their fame dates from their initial triumphs. Early recognition has perhaps its dangers.

Fame can also, to a degree, be artificially created. Some talent will even then be required. It is certainly more difficult to retain such fame.

— Do you think the modern American type of management is partly responsible for such conditions?

A.S.: I do. It favors patterns, clichés, fashions, and standards. It makes the greatest efforts to direct the market, to dictate what ought to be liked best. I do not think that the musical situation in the U.S.A. corresponds to the wishes of the people attracted to music. The managerial force is undoubtedly responsible for some of the less appetizing supplies, though of course they always pass the buck to the “people’s taste, which they have to satisfy whether they approve or not.” The line of least resistance, the waves of competition, the magnetism of monopolies are the roots. In all my life I have never met a single person who could, or would, precisely tell me what he wanted; I am, however, constantly meeting people who tell me what other people want.

All this seems just not productive for art. Art is the realm of cooperation, of spontaneity, directness, multiformity. The mechanical is its opposite. Quality in it cannot be proved by mechanisms or statistics. And I feel sure we all agree that not all values are suited for mass circulation. Yet eventually it is the artist who is accountable for the state of art.

— Speaking of quality, I remember an article in Time Magazine about Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony. It said that the composer was afraid of comparisons with Beethoven’s Ninth. He was afraid his work would not be approached for its own merits or weaknesses. Why should people be afraid of being measured with the past?

A.S.: Whether Shostakovich is equal to Beethoven is a question to be answered in a hundred years. You can’t now say that Shostakovich is as great as Beethoven.

— Why should one refer to the number of a symphony?

A.S.: We live in an age occupied, preoccupied, I would say, with quantities. But who coupled the two Ninths together? The magazine or, as they claimed, Shostakovich himself?

— He himself.

A.S.: I don’t believe that. Shostakovich is doing his best and would undoubtedly be quite content to pass to posterity as only second to Beethoven. By the way, do you believe everything you see printed?

— No.

A.S.: Good for you. A reporter mentioning artists or other “stars” in public life must—that is the newest routine—put a so-called human touch to his story. Music as such is, of course, never listed among the human touches. Now, making Shostakovich tremble for fear of being subordinated to Beethoven was fairly clever. Still cleverer, he could have pictured the young composer in tantrums, caused by the superstition that as a rule one dies after the creation of nine symphonies. Though Beethoven did not. He lived many years and wrote numerous works after the Ninth, but no other symphony, at least none which is undoubtedly his creation. From time to time compositions of the past are detected or exhumed, and some of them announced as unknown or forgotten creations of the few great ones whose products survive the ages.

Do you know when the Ninth Symphony was written?

— From 1810 to 1820.

A.S.: If you date it back to the first sketches. When he scribbled them first and came back again and again to the material used in these first sketches, Beethoven did perhaps, or most likely did not yet know that they would later develop into a part of that edifice which is his Ninth. He might have used this material, just as well, in another frame. This, I believe, is a very important fact, illuminating the variable usability of material, be it in music, or in other fields.

— You used here, or somewhere else, the term “extra-musical.” To what extent is the fact that Beethoven completed his Ninth Symphony in 1820 of any value? To what extent is that a musical and not an extra-musical fact? I am not trying to be sarcastic or critical but I just wonder how important it is to the musicians, or music lovers, or in general, to know that?

A.S.: The date, you mean?

— Yes.

A.S.: It is not important. It is a tribute to great men to know the dates of their careers. To know the day or hour when one of their creations was completed is entirely irrelevant. It doesn’t add to musical knowledge. The response to the Ninth Symphony would always be the same, absolutely independent of the day it was ready for communication.

— You have spoken several times about competition. I would like to know whether you consider a public competition in which young musicians vie with one another for some sort of award to be helpful or worthless.

A.S.: Contests?

— Yes.

A.S.: I am not too sure of their utility. By the way, do you mean contests for amateurs, for children, or for professionals?

— Professionals.

A.S.: For years I was a member of the jury in such contests. It was one of my duties at the State Academy in Berlin, and I disliked no job more than that. At most of these races the contestants are treated with an automatic callousness bordering on brutality. Conditions are rather discouraging, the milieu so businesslike, that the sensitive among the competitors—and which young artist is not sensitive?—simply could not give their best. I am, moreover, afraid that more often than not these matches, now swollen to alarming numbers, are not quite honest either. I wish to emphasize that what I have just confessed to you is the point of view of one who has been exposed to the office of judge against his heart. Maybe I was thus able to help the contestants to a hardening of their hearts, a kind of immunity against adverse circumstances.

Statistics on the results of contests, in musical and other arts, would be a great surprise. Rarely have the winners reached heights, rarely have the best in a generation been among the contestants.

Hans von Bülow, famous nineteenth-century German musician, famous also for his biting wit, once made a joke—unfortunately untranslatable—about contests. In German: Je preiser-gekr?nt ein Werk, desto durcher f?llt es. It means: the more prizes and praises are heaped on a work (in one or several contests) the surer will it turn out to be a flop. I think this is much too severe, yet not quite wrong. Or do you think it is entirely wrong?

— The contest I had an opportunity to attend had very little first-grade talent participating and none of the first-grade talent has ever been able to win it. Those who were mechanically reliable made it, not those with personality and imagination.

A.S.: They were, I guess, too irritated by the loveless atmosphere, typical for examinations.

— The judges were also soon annoyed and bored by hearing the test pieces again and again.

A.S.: Have the candidates never the choice of repertoire?

— Not as far as my experience goes.

A.S.: That seems to me one more handicap. Nevertheless, it is apparently the prevailing practice. One of my pupils who, less with the ambition of becoming the chosen one than from a desire to get acquainted with the procedure, joined the aspirants at one of the most renowned contests, told me that Schumann’s fragment “Paganini,” a few measures in his Carnaval, was one of the items ordered as evidence. I was duly astonished, for this fragment is not even a piece but just the short interruption of a waltz; the dancers are stopped for an instant by an apparition made up as Paganini. Performed without the waltz framing it, the chance of demonstrating genius is almost nil. The chance of missing keys is better. My pupil also informed me that she was granted seven minutes for her presentation. She said that no one got more. She also received the judges’ reports, in this as well as in the case of a literary contest, which, by the way, she won. I never knew that reports are handed to contestants. The musical reports were funny. One was: “She has good hands. She should give a recital in New York.” The second judge said, “She is quite gifted and we can expect her to become a good pianist.” Very nice. Another one was two pages long; the same two pages were also received by a friend of hers who participated in the same contest. This report said, on two pages: “She is no good at all. She is clumsy, heavy, of the German school.” Of the German school! Now we shall say for Schumann, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to play by the German school. I don’t know why this objection was not quite logical if there is any German school. Then he recommended that these two girls go to a certain school and study with Madame So-and-so. I have no reason to consider this story to be a chimera.

— You said last week that you never teach pupils a piece twice. What stage of preparation must they have reached when bringing it to a lesson?

A.S.: They come with it when it has already undergone a process of clarification in their minds and is absolutely familiar to their fingers. They don’t come to be taught how to do it. They want to hear my objections and counsel, and justification for both. They take the responsibility for their performances. You should ask a few pupils of mine who are here how this works. They will tell you.

— It is just as you said; we try to prepare them the best we can.

A.S.: You take the responsibility?

— Yes.

— Some musicians become very arrogant, very conceited, very aloof, after they have gone through a certain amount of musical training. Other musicians, on the other hand, try to answer the simplest questions that anyone can ask and help to understand the most elementary things about music. This also holds true for painters, philosophers, and every other art there is.

A.S.: And also for human beings, I submit.

— Yes.

A.S.: Arrogance is not created through musical training. Neither is modesty. Both originate in a disposition, and I think that in any field arrogant persons are arrogant because they are born that way.

How do human beings react, let me ask, to success, or what we call success? That is a tough question because there are not only the endlessly nuanced differences between them, but there are also two kinds of success. Success may be the success of approximately accomplishing what was intended. That is the success that one has with oneself, by judging the degree of fulfillment measured against one’s ambition or expectation. The other type of success comes from without and shows what other people think of us. I am never quite sure which is meant when I am asked about success.

Success with oneself is not necessarily success with someone else or with everyone. There are those who are easily satisfied with themselves and rush to the next task. Others are hyper-critical and procrastinating. But success in the shape of popularity hardly affects the person at all. It is now too common and often obviously manufactured.

— You have been asked before about the German school and the Russian school of piano playing and musical interpretation and about differences between them.

A.S.: The question about the Russian school must have somehow escaped me. The phrase “German school” was supplied by me, in a quotation. You know my aversion to pigeonholing and my conviction that there is only one school, namely musical music. Its variety seems inexhaustible. It corresponds to the innumerable differences in combinations of qualities among men. Yet what men have in common is much more than what separates them.

Music has only one language. It cannot be translated into another one. If in word language you say “I am hungry,” it means the same in Norwegian and Polynesian. But it sounds different. Obviously a human being cannot be capable of understanding all existing word languages. It is technically impossible for it to be otherwise. If, however, after listening to a piece of music, someone complains that he does not understand that language, he surely has a wrong idea and he is also using the wrong term. He should have said he felt excluded from it. Surely many people are excluded from books in their mother tongue, in spite of the fact that they know what the words used in them indicate. If I hear that Johann Sebastian Bach’s, Richard Wagner’s, and Robert Schumann’s works ought to be identical because all three were Saxons, I keep silent, naturally.

Recently I read a review of a work of a contemporary American composer. It was praised for being not only genuine American music, but Appalachian music. Well, I think we could go much further in our refinement of distinctions. We should find out in what street, on which floor, something has been composed. Why not? Certainly there must be a loftier, more elevated inspiration on the twentieth floor of a building than on the second. Noisy or quiet neighborhoods would also count. Only imagination does not. And such “refinement” of distinctions will more and more narrow the universe’s role in creation.

— Do you think the virtuoso of Leschetizky’s time, the virtuoso pianist you talked about the other day—the one who was not a musician—would be just as successful today?

A.S.: I never said that he was not a musician.

— No? Well, would he be just as successful today as he was then, or do you think that today we expect a pianist to be a great musician as well as a great pianist?

A.S.: I like your “today.” Franz Liszt, Rubinstein, and many others before yesterday were very great musicians.

— Why?

A.S.: They were creators of music. Franz Liszt was a creative virtuoso; he composed, he conducted, he taught, he wrote, and he kept in contact with some of the best brains of his generation. They were his intimates and their permanent exchange of ideas was evidence and promotion of culture. The virtuoso of today does not correspond to the Franz Liszt type. Our keyboard and string virtuosos do not, as a rule, either compose, or teach, or conduct, or write, or meet each other or equals in other fields. With air transport it is now technically possible to appear in public every day of the year in a different place—with the same program. The development from local to global service of art is an event worth serious reflection. Itinerant virtuosos have, of course, existed before—and among them certainly some who had no other musical activity. Yet they were not the highest reputed ones who addressed their work to a rather limited patronage. Twentieth-century society is not like nineteenth-century society. There are a few among us who may be considered the last radiations, faint memories of the grand old school. The majority, however, are more like the lesser ranks of the nineteenth century. A fresh sprout of the former many-sidedness is quite conceivable. At the moment we have representatives of a new, versatile type: the smart salesmen of any kind of tone assortments.

Do they follow a demand or a created demand? Or does their admirable adaptability come from within? Is it the expression of our generation’s spirit? I am very skeptical in regard to the effect social conditions can exert on music. Speed and noise, for instance, are characteristics of the machine age and of savages. If, as it seems, we have not kept up with the creative level of preceding stages, may it not be due to elemental forces sterilizing certain fields, condemning our years to be lean?

— Mr. Schnabel, when you talk about lean years, do you think the world runs in cycles, that we ever get back to the former stage?

A.S.: The same level of artistic creation has never been seen in continuity in one and the same place. After a few hundred years it seems to wander somewhere else, or to be lowered, dried out altogether. It is in any case rather idle to speculate on what level we are. I continue composing, lean years or not!

Art music, after a very short phase of satisfying private, intimate requirements, now takes a turn toward playing a public role. Whether all or some of the finest and most delicate creations of the comparatively exclusive period can remain a treasure and feel at home in the rougher climate of inclusiveness is a vexing problem.

Orchestral music is now the most popular. It lends itself better to fulfilling a public function than Lieder singing or chamber music. Home music is practically extinct as it belongs to the sphere of personal experience.

— I know that pianists used to cart around their own pianos, their own stools, and a whole trainload of their special little things. Do they still do that?

A.S.: It doesn’t have as much publicity value as it used to have. However, the distrust or fear of not finding good pianos in certain places is quite justified.

— Isn’t it rather hard on a piano to be moved around all the time?

A.S.: No, there are ways to transport pianos safely. Pianos are being transported all the time anyhow and, it is true, they are often handled in an incredibly careless way. We lack, to my regret, a society for the protection of objects from cruelty. A variety of stools and chairs should not be so difficult to find in any inhabited settlement. Yet I have had strange experiences in this respect, in spite of the attention I give to such matters. Performers are generally considered steely people who, if they only have a full house, are quite insensitive to the score of disturbances threatening them. It is my habit to inspect the hall, piano, chair, lighting, etc., the morning before a concert. On one occasion, when I was not sufficiently careful, I had a chair for my performance from which the metal gliders had not been removed. The floor was polished and I in a desperate situation. While I played the chair kept changing its distance from the piano, sliding forwards, backwards as well as to the right and left. It was thus a sport and not interpretation I was engaged in. During the intermission the gliders were taken off. At this memorable concert I gave, which I otherwise never do, an encore, a whole short Beethoven sonata. When applauded back to the stage after the last item on the printed program, I felt magically drawn to the piano and, whispering to myself that I owed an apology to Beethoven, whose music had been frustrated in the first half, I sat down and tried to atone for it. Another time I was going to play in a theater. It had a glass roof, and that morning it was pouring rain—the rain on that roof made a bigger noise than my music could ever hope to make! I said casually to the janitor how unpleasant it would be if by the evening the rain had not stopped. He clapped me on the shoulder: “Don’t worry, the audience won’t hear it!”