Brendel and Schubert

This weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” includes my review of Alfred Brendel’s new essay collection, “Music, Sense, and Nonsense,” as follows:

It is axiomatic, to some, that music speaks for itself. But there are musicians who both perform and speak for music. In this country, Leonard Bernstein was surely the most influential exemplar. Bernstein’s landmark campaign for the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, which he greatly helped to canonize beginning in 1959, included popular sermons on television and in print. But Bernstein’s 1960 Young Peoples’ Concert titled “Who Is Gustav Mahler?” and his 1973 Norton Lecture extolling Mahler’s Ninth as an iconic 20th-century masterpiece were ephemeral acts of advocacy: By themselves, they do not endure as important statements.

Across the water, the champion double advocate was Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924). A musician singular in temperament and personality, Busoni was the supreme concert pianist of his generation as well as a composer whose wizardry will always attract a dedicated minority of listeners. His essays and letters, vivid embodiments of a spirit infused with paradox and humanity, will be read as long as there are people who care about musical meaning and aesthetics.

Alfred Brendel, whose collected essays and conversations in “Music, Sense and Nonsense” total more than 400 pages, is a prominent retired pianist (he departed the stage in 2008) who enjoys continued prominence as a writer. He also happens to be notably influenced by Busoni—by the “peculiar serenity” of his music and the ironic acuity of his intellect. But Mr. Brendel the writer does not command Busoni’s fullness of idiosyncrasy and worldliness. Rather, his achievement echoes that of Bernstein, whom he otherwise does not resemble. Like Bernstein, Mr. Brendel, speaking for music, has powerfully espoused a neglected repertoire: the piano sonatas of Franz Schubert.

Schubert, to be sure, has not been neglected at any point in Mr. Brendel’s lifetime. But his piano sonatas, with a few exceptions, were and are. From Mr. Brendel’s 2015 essay “A Lifetime of Recordings,” one learns with incredulity that Otto Erich Deutsch, who cataloged Schubert’s oeuvre, first heard the C minor Sonata—today esteemed as part one of a valedictory 1828 trilogy—when Mr. Brendel himself played it in Vienna in the 1960s. Rachmaninoff, it is said, did not even know that piano sonatas by Schubert existed. Though I was myself once a habitué of piano recitals, I have never heard in concert the Schubert sonata I would most like to command at the keyboard: the 40-minute A minor Sonata, D. 845, of 1825. It simply is not played.

As Mr. Brendel stresses, the late discovery of these works is a function of their perplexing originality: Compared with the Classical sonatas of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, or the Romantic sonatas of Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, they are uncategorizable. Charles Rosen (another noted pianist-author) nails this point in his dazzling “The Classical Style” (1971), whose penultimate paragraph concludes that Schubert “stands as an example of the resistance of the material of history to the most necessary generalizations.”

Mr. Brendel’s indispensable project has been to promote the eight Schubert piano sonatas composed in 1823 and after as a canon worthy to set beside Beethoven’s 32. He has recorded and re-recorded these works. He has tirelessly purveyed them in concert. What is more, what he has had to say about them may prove more memorable than his recordings and performances.

In the Schubert essays here collected, Mr. Brendel hones a metaphor that ceaselessly illuminates this protean composer: the “sleepwalker.” Using Beethoven’s decisiveness of form and sentiment as a foil, he showcases Schubert’s waywardness—a defining feature long misread as weakness. As opposed to Beethoven’s “inexorable forward drive,” Schubert can convey “a passive state, a series of episodes communicating mysteriously with one another.” As opposed to Beethoven the “architect,” Schubert “strides across harmonic abysses as though by compulsion, and we cannot help remembering that sleepwalkers never lose their step.” Next to Beethoven’s “concentration,” Schubert ”lets himself be transported, just a hair’s breadth from the abyss, not so much mastering life as being at its mercy.”

These observations will strike home to anyone who has listened closely to the Schubert sonatas or whose fingers have grappled with them and experienced at close quarters their chronic resistance to definitive formulation. Their ambiguities of sentiment and interpretation excite feelings of vulnerability. The A major Sonata, D. 959—for some, Schubert’s supreme achievement for the keyboard—begins at least three times. Only with the dreamy second subject, a Lied, does the first movement attain a recognizable expressive state. The second movement shatters into atonal chaos. An endless finale gradually establishes the first movement’s song mode as an anchoring poetic ingredient. Translating this music into words, Mr. Brendel finds “desolate grace behind which madness hides.”

One corollary, as with Mahler, is a musical state of existential duress unknown to Beethoven, a condition of unease or terror prescient of world horrors to come. Mr. Brendel: “In such moments the music exposes neither passions nor thunderstorms, neither the heat of combat nor the vehemence of heroic exertion, but assaults of fever and delusion.” Schubert presents “an energy that is nervous and unsettled . . . ; his pathos is steeped in fear.” An “impression of manic energy” points to “the depressive core of [Schubert’s] personality.”

Mahler himself wrote of Schubert’s “freedom below the surface of convention.” Mr. Brendel: “The music of these two composers does not set self-sufficient order against chaos. Events do not unfold with graceful or grim logic; they could have taken another turn at many points. We feel not masters but victims of the situation.”

The antithesis of Schubert’s delirium is the dream-finale, a child’s paradise with which the Sonatas in D major, D. 850, and G major, D. 894, conclude. The dream finale of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is explicitly Schubertian: It quotes the D. 850 finale. The American composer-critic Arthur Farwell, documenting the intense Mahlerian vagaries of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony as conducted by Mahler in New York in 1910, proposed a mutuality of identity binding these twin Austrian pariah personalities nearly a century apart.

A surprise disclosure of “Music, Sense and Nonsense” is that Mr. Brendel’s collected Beethoven writings (110 pages) substantially exceed in length his Schubert writings (77 pages). But Beethoven requires no special advocacy. Busoni does—and I would have happily discovered more than the 17 pages here collected in appreciation of one of music’s most elusive geniuses: “There was the Faustian side of his intellect, which made him familiar with the melancholy of loneliness. As its counterbalance we find serene confidence, rarefied irony and ready surrender to grace.”

Finally, Mr. Brendel has long made a cause of Franz Liszt—after Schubert, his most productive topic, challenging incomprehension and neglect. If Liszt today is not really in need of a champion[ok? (“less needy” didn’t quite track w/the rest of the sentence)], that was not the case in 1961, when Mr. Brendel wrote the essay “Liszt Misunderstood”: “I know I am compromising myself by speaking up for Liszt. Audiences in Central Europe, Holland and Scandinavia tend to be irritated by the sight of Liszt’s name on a concert bill. . . . [They] project onto that performance all the prejudices they have against Liszt: his alleged bombast, superficiality, cheap sentimentality, formlessness, his striving after effect for effect’s sake.”

Understanding Liszt, for Mr. Brendel, is understanding the probity and nobility of the B minor Piano Sonata, not the inspired showmanship and ingenious panache of the “Don Juan” Fantasy. For him, Liszt’s is “the most satisfying sonata written after Beethoven and Schubert.” He takes issue with Charles Rosen, for whom the “Don Juan” Fantasy testifies to Liszt’s “profound originality,” including “almost every facet of his invention as a composer for the piano.” Busoni, in the preface to his edition of this demonic paraphrase of themes from “Don Giovanni,” accorded it “an almost symbolic significance as the highest point of pianism.”

“It is a peculiarity of Liszt’s music,” Mr. Brendel writes, “that it faithfully and fatally mirrors the character of its interpreter.” Applying this shrewd aphorism to Mr. Brendel himself: Performing Liszt, he was no swashbuckling Don Juan; nor did he seek to become one. Applying it to Mr. Brendel performing Schubert: He was the demented Wanderer of “Winterreise,” never the sweetly hapless lad of “Die schöne Müllerin.”

Mr. Brendel’s essays on the art of piano performance – that is, on his own art – prickle with assertions inviting prickly response. Many pianists will vehemently disagree with his vehement objection to the explosive first ending of the first-movement exposition of Schubert’s B-flat major piano sonata. Is this “jerky outburst” really “unconnected to the entire movement’s logic and atmosphere?” Well, that depends on how one reads the movement’s simmering left-hand trills. Given today’s free fall in musical literacy, this advisory component of “Music, Sense and Nonsense” will in any case speak to a small minority of music lovers.

Mr. Brendel himself is a man of wide-ranging interests. He is a published poet. As a young man he composed and painted. His personal history, growing up in Nazi Austria (he was born in Wiesenberg, now part of the Czech Republic, in 1931), shadows his distaste for musical dogma and also, one supposes, his susceptibility to Schubertian terror. Fantasizing another life story in a 2015 interview, he wished for “no wars, no memories of Nazis and fascists, no Hitler or Goebbels on the wireless, no soldiers, party members and bombs.”

The collected essays and lectures of Alfred Brendel occupy a classical-music bubble—and register no awareness that the bubble is shrinking fast. If this failure to deal with the fate of Schubert, Beethoven, and Liszt in the twenty-first century is a disappointment, it equally reassures us that an audience endures for musical ruminations that are learned but not esoteric, studious but not academic. Will Schubert’s sonatas be justly appreciated while a wide appetite for Schubert still exists? How long will it take for the D. 845 Sonata to take its rightful place in the piano pantheon—or will it remain forever off-stage?