Franz Schubert's Power

Franz Schubert 

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”?  

 

Interior of Richardson Auditorium

 

            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.

Mozart, Among Others

 The venue for the Princeton University Concerts is the Richardson Auditorium of Alexander Hall.  This delightful building, a roofed arena of Byzanto-Romanesque mien, dates from 1894.  The great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, here to give a memorable lecture made more memorable by the fact that he delivered it brilliantly despite having had his large box of slides stolen from the Faculty Club while he was having lunch, declared it the most interesting building in Princeton. For decades when the institution was much smaller, it was used for all sorts of solemn ceremonies.  Later, with the large expansion of the university it could no longer serve those purposes.  So the interior underwent a magnificent acoustical upgrading, becoming a superb musical venue: Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall.  You may have noted that university buildings aspire to as many names as possible.  Plural appellation maximizes the confusion of campus visitors, and helps create one of the absolutely indispensable conditions of academic traditionalism and elitism—the dichotomy between an in-group in the know and an out-group anxiously clutching little indecipherable campus maps.  Furthermore the institution can honor the generosity of two major donors at a single blow.  More bucks for their bang, so to speak.  Be that as it may, we were delighted that relaxing Covid conditions made our trip out to a Sunday afternoon concert seem nearly as unexceptional as in the good old days.

 

Alexander Hall 

 

Though I am now long retired and increasingly removed from campus affairs, having some residual friends in high places continues to prove advantageous to me.  For many years our concert seats were in the upper tier of the elegant semicircle that is the interior of Richardson Auditorium.  These were lofty, nearly avian perches allowing a comprehensive and superior view of the whole of the stage and most of the rest of the audience.  But reaching them involved climbing a spiral staircase that leaves even some student athletes in training breathing hard.  One day a couple of years ago we found that our seats had been silently but impressively switched to the very front row of the ground floor (orchestra).  This unsolicited promotion, a response to visibly advancing age and creakiness, puts us about five feet from the stage and seldom more than twelve feet from the soloists, looking up at them at an angle of about fifteen degrees.  Fantastic acoustics and leg-room.  It’s a little ostentatious, but somebody’s got to sit there.

 

Richardson Auditorium

 

Sunday’s performance was a long and uninterrupted recital (about ninety minutes) by the brilliant Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Olaffson.  Mr. Olafsson is a tall, well-built, handsome fellow with a youthful but commanding stage presence.  He is not yet forty but looks as though he were not yet thirty.  He was wearing a quite blue blue suit, tieless, but with a white dress shirt fully buttoned up to the chin, black patent leather shoes, emphatic thick- rimmed glasses, and a wedding ring.  It all added up to what you might call serious, contemporary, minimalist, functional elegance.  Mr. Olafsson was in town because the genius who runs the concert series, Marna Seltzer, is imaginative, well-connected, and entrepreneurial and can sometimes  persuade artists to add a brief trip to Princeton on one side or the other of a scheduled appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York.  The reputation of the programs she has created, working with the law of the conservation of musical energy, has several times paid off for our Princeton audience in this regard.  Carnegie Hall and Richardson Auditorium are now peers.  

 

 

The superb program, which was called “Mozart and Contemporaries,” appears to be similar if not identical to that featured under the same name on one of his hotter Deutsche Grammophon disks.  There were fifteen works—nine by Mozart, two by Baldassare Galuppi, two by Domenico Cimarosa, and one each by Haydn and C.P.E. Bach.  If the performance had been nothing more than an exhibition of the man’s powers of memory, it would have been astonishing.  The very list of names—from the possibly most famous in eighteenth-century Europe to a couple that might send you in the direction of Groves’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians-- highlights the intellectual concept behind Olafsson’s performance.  That is the concept of context.  Artists often preface or supplement the music they perform with a few interesting, illuminating, or annoying remarks.  Olafsson began with what I thought was a brilliant micro-lecture of perhaps seven or eight minutes.  All Scandinavians seem to speak English, just to shame us.  Olafsson, who studied at the Julliard, speaks a virtually unaccented, elegant, educated American English unapproachable by any of the American politicians who have been endlessly talking through the interminable period of our mid-term elections.  “Mixing the celebrated and the obscure, I hope to slightly alter our psychological attunement, removing some of the baggage we all bring with us to Mozart’s music…to approach even the best-known works of Mozart with the same freedom and childlike enthusiasm I felt upon discovering the rare and staggeringly lyrical works from the likes of Galuppi and Cimarosa.”

 

He explained that the overwhelming genius of Mozart flowered in the context of a larger musical efflorescence, some understanding of which actually enriches one’s appreciation of that genius.  If the only thought you have ever given to this—and I fear I here indict myself—is in the cartoonish way that the film Amadeus presents the competition with Salieri, you are likely to have a pretty superficial view of a rather deep subject.  There was something wonderfully generous and expansive behind the pianist’s little talk, a generosity that found its parallel in the scrupulosity with which he addressed the keyboard of the huge Steinway rising from the stage before me, practically within my own reach as it seemed.  One passing remark sticks with me.  It was about Haydn, one of whose sonatas featured in the program.  According to Olaffson, Haydn was one of few of Mozart’s contemporary composers with the breadth of skill and energy of application actually to understand in its fulness the younger man’s achievement.  Haydn applauded that achievement with an open enthusiasm in which there was room only for admiration and thoughtful praise.  “Of course he was himself a very great musician,” said Olaffson.  But he didn’t stop there.  He added: “he was a great human being.”  I do not recall ever before hearing a great artist in any field praised by an expert critic as a great human being.