Last Wednesday (blog day) sometime in the afternoon I informed my spouse that I was feeling rather tired and thought I would make an early night of it. It was with some alarm that she had to remind me that, in fact, we were supposed to attend a musical concert that night. And this was not just any concert. Mitsuko Uchida and Jonathan Biss would devote an evening of piano four hands to an all-Schubert program. How I had failed to have this event seared upon my memory I cannot say, but had it been up to me alone I could well have missed this extraordinary performance of a virtuoso composer being interpreted by two virtuoso pianists.
I am by no means an expert in these matters, but Mitsuko Uchida is presumably the best-known interpreter of Schubert’s piano music in the world. Someone with far more musical training and experience than I could dream of has told me that Uchicda is the best pianist in the world! I can only suspect that Jonathan Biss cannot be all that far behind. When after the intermission the two changed their side-by-side places on the long piano bench, one could imagine reliving a famous party stunt of Chopin and Liszt, or at least enjoying a visit to the Musée de la vie romantique in Paris. It is truly amazing that a roomful of elderly folk in Princeton, NJ, could be privileged by such a performance. I believe that the artists were taking the same program to Carnegie Hall within a week or so. That is a not uncommon pattern for the Princeton concert series. And I will risk shocking sensibilities by saying that in my opinion the acoustical arrangements in Richardson Auditorium are if anything superior to those in New York. What an amazing privilege!
This concert series involves a kind of anomaly or sociological paradox, possibly having to do with their cost. The essence of a university is youth. And the student music scene here—individual student performers and the student orchestra—is of a very high quality. But the enormously affirmative audience for the Princeton University Concerts looks at first glance like a meeting of the American Association of Retired People. A significant proportion of it arrives and departs on retirement home shuttles.
What amateur means, in its obvious literal sense, is lover. If you are an amateur of or at something, you participate in it because you like or love it. Amateurism does not imply expertise, though many amateurs achieve it, and at a high level, nor should it be a term of disparagement or even scorn, as it often is in the phrase amateur hour. I am an amateur of humble grade. I play no musical instrument and am incapable of reading with comprehension a serious musical score. I read music at a “Dick and Jane” level if at all. I enjoy many, though not quite all, forms of musical performance but am capable of actual participation in none. Analogies here may be particularly feeble, but I think there is one between athleticism and musical performance. You don’t have to be a football player to make an intelligent assessment of the quality of play in a football match. But it is likewise obvious that an important aspect of the appreciation of an athletic event is the context in which it is viewed. How different it is to watch a game on television and to watch one as part of a stadium crowd.
Musical performance, like all other fields of theatrical performance, has its endearing conventions, one of the most solemn of which in venues featuring classical piano programs, is the page-turner. Simply keeping up with the breakneck pace of moments of Schubert is a full-time, two-handed job for a pianist, I do have to say that in watching this pair of geniuses—and indeed practically all the professionals one enjoys hearing in this venue—I conclude that the availability of sheet music seems merely a convention, one probably demanded by some obscure governmental agency or featherbedding labor union regulations. The musicians themselves appear to have by memory any score shorter than War and Peace. But of course conventions are very important. Civilization would collapse without them. It is also conventional that the page-turner be so discreet a background element as to be essentially invisible to the audience. Richardson Auditorium has a superb class of page-turners. The perfect page-turner, deserving of an honorable mention in the program that she never gets, needs to be a petite undergraduate of Asian ethnic extraction and constant expressionless mien, whose presence is so self-effacing as to seem more rumor than fact. You may have no idea who she is, though you can make a safe guess that she’s a straight-A major in molecular biology or something, and that she herself plays the violin or flute at concert level. She does this while running some ambitious and useful public service project and singing in an a capella group that has just returned from a triumphant tour in central Europe.
There appears to be some controversy, or at least difference of opinion, concerning whether Schubert (1797-1828) should be regarded as a “Classical” or a “Romantic” composer. This question may arise mainly from scholarly predilections for refined but unnecessary distinctions and categories, but I shall opt for the romantic. That is because I have to think of him in connection with the English poet John Keats (1795-1821), an artistic contemporary of similar achievement and talent, and one whose short life included similar adversities and disappointments. Surely Keats was a “Romantic” if there ever was one. What could be more romantic than his self-devised epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”?
The paradox in Shelley’s famous phrase about the unfulfilled poetic aspirants in which he includes Keats—“the inheritors of unfulfilled renown”—is that there is hardly anything that has made certain artists more famous than the tragedy of early death. What was unfulfilled was their longing. Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is in a strange way both the most mannered and the sincerest poem he ever wrote. And I would venture to suggest that you must be missing an important gene or two if your eyes do not tear up when listening to Schubert’s song cycle called “Winter Trip” (Winterreise). And that is whether or not you understand the meaning of the words. Longing unfulfilled, separation, loss irreparable, the erotic near miss, the unattainable beloved: that’s the Romantic plot. My lords, would you hear a noble tale of love and death? In his famous book Love and the Western World Denis de Rougement found in a single line of a medieval romance the introduction to a vast cultural inheritance. You will find it everywhere in Schubert, perhaps because you first find it everywhere in Life.
