As I listen to others play the piano, as I eat, or walk down the sidewalk — all I think of is the passage of music I struggled with yesterday, a passage I have been playing at least for 25 years.
I consider it from many angles, rolling it over in my mind. To be completely cognizant and conscious of every detail in a complicated scripted piece that’s played by memory is to be safe.
Is it after all a misguided act? To reprise these publications, these products crafted for the middle-class home-user? That we should toil to replay them for large audiences in large rooms? Again and again? What kind of flattery?
From Des Moines in 1910, Ferruccio Busoni wrote these lines:
“Considered from the viewpoint of a traveling virtuoso, the concert yesterday was very satisfying. — The heat had reached the highest point of the year. I was dead tired. But, a beautiful piano, good acoustics, and the great expectations of the audience hypnotized me for the two hours I spent on the platform…
“At last, I have learned how to engage with the first movement of the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata that never quite blossomed before. And I have played it almost thirty years!!
“…From the viewpoint of a thinking artist, no longer young, it was an unpardonable and unrecoverable waste of energy, of time, and thought, to make an impression of no importance for a brief moment on an insignificant glob of people.”
Busoni in Denver, 1910
In “My Life and Music,” Artur Schnabel wrote that he that wanted to play only “music which is better than it could be performed.”
I’m not Busoni or Schnabel, but when I play Beethoven or Schubert, even after 50 years of knowing a piece, I occasionally have that flash of insight — obvious only in retropsect — that transforms the way I play a passage.
Yes, Ferruccio, but would the Waldstein have “blossomed” without the presence of the good burghers of Des Moines?