A short detour
As we approached the end of 2020 while looking forward to 2021, I noted an upcoming event that I had known about for years but had forgotten about recently, the ninetieth birthday of Alfred Brendel. I have been a fan of his for a long time, and I am also a fan of birthdays. Brendel’s birthdate is January 5, 1931.
I posted on Facebook that day reminiscences of attending concerts of Brendel’s and thoughts about his playing. It was longer than most of my Facebook writings, but I realized that it left a lot unwritten that I wanted to say about my history of discovering Alfred Brendel and what his recordings and concerts had meant for my own development as a music listener and a performer. I also realized that this story is about a part of the musical development of one person and therefore not irrelevant to the teaching and learning process.
My family spent six months or so in London beginning in the late summer of 1970. I was thirteen and enrolled in Westminster City School, founded in 1590 and still in operation today on Palace Street near Victoria Station. I was by then fervently and passionately interested in music. That interest was rather disorganized and directionless, which is normal for such an age. I had been taking piano lessons for several years, most recently during the 1969–1970 school year with Lois Lounsbery at Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, Connecticut. I liked the piano and felt drawn especially to Beethoven in those days. But I was much more intensely drawn to earlier music and, increasingly, to harpsichord and organ. For various reasons I thought that it was essentially an impossibility to study organ or harpsichord, but I did not seem to be able to summon the resolve to ever actually practice piano. I was a player more in theory than practice. I felt right then and for the next couple of years quite uncertain about what to do as to music lessons and my musical work overall.
Lois Lounsbery is a wonderful piano teacher and was then very early in her career. I later heard that she had once told a colleague that I was the best student she had at playing softly, but that I could not do anything else. That foreshadowed my career as a harpsichordist and organist, since with those instruments one always plays lightly, not necessarily quietly, of course! And when I sit at a piano nowadays I play so lightly by default that the keys do not always really go down.
Concerning the Beethoven piano repertoire, as best I now remember, I knew some of the sonatas and variations to listen to and I had some favorites. I could even envision how I would perform some of them, but I could not really play much at all, yet. And my relationship to learning piano was equivocal at best. As I say, I did not particularly practice. But I clearly remember that I had never been satisfied with any of the recordings of Beethoven piano music that I had heard. My family owned, or I borrowed from the library, LPs by Schnabel, Richter, Rubinstein, Fischer, Horowitz, and others. I had the feeling that I was being told by the culture at large that I should like any or all of these, but I did not get much out of them.
During that fall of 1970 I had a minor episode of back trouble. I threw my back out mowing the lawn at the home of some friends of ours near Manchester. From that point on I missed a lot of school. To be very clear, I was mostly malingering if not just plain faking. I did not like school—at least, I had a very complicated relationship with a school that was very, very different from what I was used to at home, and I stayed home to rest my back as much as I thought I could possibly pretend was justified.
I spent a lot of time over the course of a few months listening to the radio—BBC 3, classical music radio. That meant accepting other people’s choices about what I was going to hear: that is how it was back then. This was, remember, a “Beethoven year,” as was the year just ended. I began to notice that fairly often, in fact, I heard performances of Beethoven piano sonatas that I really liked. They seemed commensurate with the artistic stature of the pieces themselves, in a way that other performances that I had heard did not (to me at that time). They also seemed to be in sync with what I might have done with those pieces if I could possibly have done anything with them. I began to notice that these were all performances by Alfred Brendel.
I had never heard that name before. I looked into him a bit and found out that he had recently moved to London and that he had made a number of recordings. Maybe I found out fairly promptly that he had recorded all of Beethoven. I am not sure, as I can barely reconstruct how we used to find out such things before the internet! I remember that I especially loved his way of playing the last movement of Beethoven’s Sonata 6, op. 10, no. 2. I became a big fan.
Sometime after we got back to the United States that winter I bought Brendel’s Vox recordings of all of the Beethoven sonatas and other piano music, in several three-disc “Vox Boxes.” I listened obsessively and got to know the pieces better than I had up to that point knew any repertoire. Those particular interpretations became “standard” for me. They seemed right and others wrong.
A bit later on I started going to hear Alfred Brendel play recitals at Carnegie Hall. His debut there was on January 21, 1973. I am fairly sure that the first time I heard him was March 17, 1974. For a few years he was in the habit of giving three concerts there on three Sunday afternoons, focusing each year on three composers—not one composer per concert, but all three at each. The programs in 1974 were Beethoven, Haydn, and Schumann, and the program that I heard first included Beethoven’s Opus 101 and the Schumann C-Major Fantasia. I remember vividly discovering that Schumann piece through being at that concert. I had never paid any attention to Schumann before, and as someone with special appreciation for the Baroque, I thought of even Beethoven, whom I loved, as dangerously modern. I was blown away by the Schumann, and this was a major eye-opening moment.
At that point Brendel was an established pianist though nowhere near the level of renown that he later reached. Being in the audience at those Carnegie Hall events had a feeling of coziness and of being at the right place at the right time. They were pretty lightly attended. I always sat in the balcony, and the attendance up there was neither full nor sparse, but we looked down on mostly empty up-market seats below. It was, in those days, extremely easy to go backstage. I did so after most concerts, and I usually had an LP jacket or two with me, looking for an autograph. That scene also had a cozy, relaxed feeling. I remember hearing Brendel give someone the news of the recent birth of his son. That person asked Brendel what the baby’s name was, and he replied “Adrian.” Years later Alfred Brendel and cellist Adrian Brendel recorded and performed together, especially Mozart and Beethoven, and Adrian has for quite a while now been an established presence on the UK music scene.
I have never had anything remotely like a conversation with Brendel. Back in those old days I was just barely not shy enough that I could stand in line at the green room and go in and push an LP jacket up to a performer. I was much too shy to try for conversation or indeed to say anything at all. In spite of that, I believe that those recurring moments backstage at Carnegie Hall, where everything seemed relaxed and normal, helped give me the faint beginnings of a feeling that maybe I could “belong” in the world of classical music.
At the time of those early Carnegie concerts, Brendel was also in the process of making his second recording of the Beethoven piano sonatas. Those were probably some of the LPs that I brought with me. I remember not liking them as much as I did the earlier recordings. The recordings that I had discovered in London were somewhat notorious for having a “classic” quality: very lucid, logically shaped, intense and fervent, yes, but also clear, as non-chaotic as could be imagined. That, I assume, has to be part of what reached me at the time. That is what I wanted or needed then. Most of the recordings from the seventies, even after they had acquired the coveted autographed covers, I listened to once or twice and then put aside. They were, at least to me, disturbingly chaotic, free, and improvisatory compared to Brendel’s earlier Vox recordings.
However, while my reaction to those Beethoven recordings was one of closed-mindedness, I was also using Brendel’s discography to widen my horizons. I discovered some of his Liszt recordings at a time when I was still generally suspicious of anything post-Schubert that was not either Saint-Saëns or Schumann. I loved all of the Liszt, initially the concerti most of all. I encountered both the Fantasia and Fugue on the name B-A-C-H
and the Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen first through Brendel’s recordings made in 1976. This was before I had any awareness of Liszt as a composer for organ. I listened to some of Brendel’s very few Chopin recordings. As best I remember I liked them. But more importantly I remember that they got me interested enough in Chopin that I went looking more widely and discovered recordings by Cortot, Rubinstein, and Horszowski among others that I liked a lot.
In fact at a certain point I began to revisit some of the Beethoven recordings by earlier venerable pianists that I had known as a youngster but had not liked. And I began to get a lot out of many of them. I was more open to some of them than I was to the later Brendel recordings. I think that I wanted to fit the latter into a sort of “Brendel slot” where they did not belong—according to what I had become accustomed to. Meanwhile, all of my piano listening, mainly to Brendel, made me a more open-minded listener in general.
Recently I decided to re-listen to all of those 1970s Brendel Beethoven recordings, the ones that I had not liked when they were new. I had a certain sneaking suspicion about them—really a set of suspicions. And, just as I expected, I loved them. The freedom, liveliness, spontaneity are just what I now want to hear in these pieces. Also, as I imagined I would discover, they are not all that different from the old Vox recordings. It is all about perspective. Coming off my intense discovery of those early recordings, difference was all that I could hear. Now I hear fidelity to everything that I initially loved about his approach coupled with an enviable and delectable ability to make it all sound like it is being improvised on the spot. Over all these years, the latter has become one of my own ideals for performance.
In spring 1983 I was lucky to be able to attend all of the concerts in Alfred Brendel’s complete Beethoven sonata series at Carnegie Hall. It was, of course, considered a major cultural event and was, I imagine, sold out. This was very different from those mid-seventies events. I was even more extraordinarily lucky to be able to attend his final concert at that venue in 2008, as he decided to retire from concert playing after sixty years. That was beyond a major cultural event and packed to the rafters. It was also wonderful—perhaps the best playing of his that I could recall. It seemed odd that he thought that he should retire. It may well not be that he thought he should, just that he felt that he wanted to.
Encountering the early Beethoven recordings of Alfred Brendel probably shaped what I ended up doing or trying to do as a musician as much as anything else ever has. My discovery of the playing of Helmut Walcha in about 1972 or my first hearing the sound of an antique harpsichord around 1973 were more immediately tied to the specifics of the work that I wanted to try to do, but not more consequential to my life or work. And the latter were sought out by me on purpose. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is fascinating to me when something utterly random is important and feels right in a way that makes it seem inevitable. As a “classical music person” in the latter third of the twentieth century and thereafter, I would certainly have been familiar with Alfred Brendel. But it was just my random good luck that his playing came along at exactly the right time, aided by my malingering and slacking off in school. What is the lesson of that?!
Next month, among other things, I will write about some interesting feedback that I received from my recent column about my pedal method.
