So we all trooped off to hear this prodigious youth when he came to a concert hall near us. He did indeed play all the sonatas, including the well-nigh impossible ‘Hammerklavier’ – very well. Not with any finesse, but solidly and dependably. This was Beethoven in the tradition of Schnabel – another ‘complete’ Beethoven pianist, and similarly a pianist who made up for what he lacked in pianistic skill with an apparently quasi-religious dedication to the complete works of the master.

Also part of the package was a blanket shunning of all the colourful Romantics like Chopin, Liszt and the rest in favour of this serious corner of the repertoire (which also included Brahms, Mozart and Schubert – i.e. the German classical repertoire). Chopin and Liszt had even had Hollywood movies made about them – how low class and populist could you get! This was not serious repertoire for ‘musician’ pianists, who shunned ‘technique’ and Chopin and Liszt the way theatre actors – real actors – once shunned television and movies.

The lad recorded all the 32 sonatas, as well as the five concertos – more than once. After a while he had performed them so many times it was no longer unusual. So in order to keep the public intrigued he moved on to something else – Beethoven’s chamber music. He even married his chamber music partner, which made headlines in the general press.

But chamber music wasn’t going to hold the paying public’s attention for very long, so the young man took up a baton and started in on the Germanic symphonic repertoire, especially the Bruckner symphonies – lots of mileage there – and made some notable recordings with his famous wife and some famous orchestras.

After a few years of both conducting and playing solo performances of the Germanic repertoire, conducting became the main focus. Conducting may not necessarily have reached a wider audience than playing the piano, but it carried with it much greater power – especially earning power – in the form of music directorships.

As chief conductor of a major orchestra (or two or three concurrently) not only did one receive a seven-figure salary for each (pianists can not even dream about any such thing as a salary, let alone a seven-figure one) but one could control programming and thus the careers of many other musicians and soloists. No matter that one or two orchestras dispense with one’s services amid much furore with government officials; with two or three concurrent directorships one can fill the gap soon enough.

Onward and upward. What better than controlling the programming of major symphony orchestras than controlling major opera companies? Several concurrently, of course. One could even use symphony programmes to rehearse opera house programmes – with “concert performances” of individual acts from long operas.

L’appetit vient en mangeant. Next step, accompanying famous opera singers in recital. The public will actually come, occasionally, to a vocal recital in such circumstances – everyone loves seeing a celebrity. One couldn’t do many such vocal recitals, mind you, just enough to keep the public’s attention.

Nationality becomes an unexpected issue. The bushy-haired pianist’s previously popular nationality is out of the loop of the major opera houses, as well as out of favour socially, due to incessant press attention – some of which is good, some of which is bad, but in general not especially advantageous, so that has to be played down. After a while, it even looks more helpful to go in the other direction and support the opponents of one’s formerly loved nationality.

Best to get right away from this particular mess. New idea: why not make a feature of one’s country of birth – formerly unremarked and unnoticed – which is currently acceptable to everyone. There is even an unknown composer, recently deceased, from that country, whose works can be recorded and sold. Just one record, though – not much there. Nevertheless, must tell the press that this semi-popular composer has always exercised a very great fascination for one.

Operas are starting to become awfully expensive to produce – even with minimalist productions. (This happened once before in history when governments were looked to for this kind of support, instead of the ticket-buying public: look what they did to Ludwig of Bavaria when he persisted in draining the Bavarian government’s coffers to produce Wagner’s operas – they drowned him in a lake).

Symphony orchestras are going out of business all the time in America – even the hallowed Philadelphia Orchestra declares bankruptcy.

What to do next?

No longer bushy-haired (in fact there is now a shiny dome on top, acerbated by the fact that the technique was never good enough to allow playing without sweating), the first move is towards Liszt – the poetic Liszt, to be sure: Sonnets of Petrarca, etc, not anything requiring too much technique, always  tricky issue. But there aren’t too many of those: most of what Liszt composed for the piano is hard, and just as the ‘musician pianists’ once claimed with such contempt – requires complete technique.

What’s left?

An interesting article appeared in the Melbourne Age recently – a review of ‘Civilization – The West and the Rest (Now a major TV series)’, by Niall Ferguson (Best selling author of The Ascent of Money). The review was by John Keane, director of the Sydney Democracy Initiative and professor of politics at the University of Sydney  (http://johnkeane.net/blog/?p=19#more-19).

The Ascent of Money was excellent and informative. It didn’t teach you how to make money, but it explained how many ways there are to cheat with it once you have it, or are able to pretend to have it, and how history repeats itself constantly. So one looks forward to The West and the Rest.

Although feeling a bit sheepish about it, one identifies emotionally with the reviewer’s opening paragraph: “Civilisation, a big and pompous word, always reminds me of the band of zealous women combing the English countryside recruiting soldiers after the outbreak of World War 1. Bearing down on Oxford, brandishing the Union Jack, they encounter a don dressed in his Oxonian master’s gown, reading Thucydides in the original Greek. “And what are you doing to save Western civilisation, young man?” demanded one of the women. Gathering himself to his full height, the sage looked down his long nose, and replied, ‘Madam, I am Western civilisation!”

To one preoccupied with later counterparts of Thucydides in the form of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, this anecdote strikes a chord. One has often wondered about the place in civilization, on a scale from one to ten – of these gentlemen. Like the Oxford professor, the natural inclination is to give then an 11 – to believe that they are not ‘a part’ of civilization, but that they ARE civilization. How can you have civilization without them?

This point of view is tricky to justify in view of the fact that less than 1% of the population has any interest in these gentlemen or their works, while a far larger percentage takes an interest in American Idol or Oprah Winfrey. Yet we do live in a civilized society, a fact which is made clear every night when we turn on the television and see the Rest of the World.

Kenneth Clarke inevitably comes up. Kenneth Clark did a Niall Ferguson in 1969. His TV series Civilisation (plus accompanying book) was a huge hit throughout the 1970s. As both Clarke and Ferguson were and are primarily aiming at a mass TV audience, their approach was and is necessarily populist, and both are very attractive and entertaining.

Nevertheless, Sir Kenneth’s perspective was that Western civilization WAS its art. Sir Kenneth was a great art historian, so it was implicit in his undertaking that this would be a survey of the art works of Western civilization. But to the average viewer or reader the implication was – as with Thucydides and Beethoven – that this was the essence of civilization. According to the title, these products of civilization were the definition of it.

Sir Kenneth’s view was not very surprising, in view of the fact that the English upper classes have traditionally valued the visual arts highly but displayed little interest in music – unlike their counterparts in central Europe, where the situation was reversed.

For a musician, on the other hand, the visual arts may seem a pleasant accompaniment to civilized life, but they are clearly not in the same league as music – which provides a window on the universe and is by its nature semi-divine. And despite their wonderful architecture and sculptures, the Greeks agreed with this view, believing music to be divine, supernatural – of ‘the spheres’ – and the first musician, the mythical Orpheus, the son of Apollo, having the power to journey to the underworld and back.

But apart from Sir Kenneth’s insult to Mozart and Beethoven, there was nonetheless a niggling feeing that there had to be more to it than art, literature or music – which, as is clear from the above, carry a large element of taste alongside their intrinsic value.

Mr. Ferguson’s book takes a political view – that Western Civilization is superior to the Rest because it has handled its politics better. He apparently boils this view down to five main features: political competition (but did this not also exist in the ancient world, as well as everywhere else?); scientific progress (the Arab world came up with lots of that in their early centuries, and the Chinese were no slouches); private property rights guaranteed by law (now that’s getting closer to something different from the Rest); progress in medicine (again, the Arabs had some very good physicians); ‘Protestant work ethic’ (new immigrants in most Western countries today often work harder than the Protestants), and consumer culture (that’s going global these days, as Mr. Keane points out).

So we’ve had the Literary view, the Art view, the Musical view, and now we have the Consumerist view. This is somewhat reminiscent of the two blind Indians who came across an elephant: one felt a leg and surmised that this must surely be a tree, while the other felt the trunk, and came to a completely different conclusion, that it must be some sort of big hose.

No, something is missing – something vital, something at the centre of the whole question, a philosopher’s stone.

Mr. Keane observes that Mr. Ferguson says virtually nothing about the actual term ‘civilization’, which he defines as including such concepts as ‘civility’ – ‘the non-violent respect for others that children are taught from an early age’, and ‘civil society’ – which he describes as ‘the peculiarly modern antidote to violent state power’.

The term civilization is of course derived, together with civil and civility, from the Greek ‘civitas’, meaning city – hence people living together in a city. And if people are going to live together in city-size numbers, they have to be able to listen to each other and give others the opportunity to voice their opinions, hence that other Greek invention: democracy. (Plato was in favour of big cities, but not bigger than where everyone could know each other personally – somewhere in the region of a couple of thousand).

Civilizations are like people: they are born, grow, develop, have ideas, energy and vitality when young, they work hard, acquire responsibilities, then get older, grow fat, middle aged, complacent, flabby and eventually die, or fade away. It is impossible not to find a civilization that has not followed this trajectory. Like people, civilisations are full of vitality when young. However, when they are young, just like young people (for civilizations, read ‘tribal’) they are selfish and only see themselves and their own wants and needs. When they get a little older they notice things around them and try to convert others to their way of doing things – benevolently, but also with an eye to swelling their own ranks.

Like Rome before us, we are now in fat complacent middle age, having gone through a very turbulent mid-life crisis in the twentieth century in the course of which we almost destroyed ourselves completely, but somehow – to our own amazement – have thus far managed to survive. However dotage is ahead of us. Its signs are everywhere – in the fascination with gossip, trivia and dumbing-down of values into sound-bite sized lozenges that can be digested in mass-marketed doses (i.e. little doses) – not to mention the elephant-in-the-room fact that we produce very little and rely on the kindness of strange countries to produce everything for us.

The books with the evidence of our youthful vitality are still on our shelves, however, and we kind of know what’s in them. We are hoping that the rest of the world – the ones who are trying so hard to catch up with our consumerism, for which privilege they are having to make concessions they don’t really care about (such as democracy, which is all about a healthy exchange of ideas and opinions) in order to get at it – will carry the ball for us, as we are now too fat to get up off the couch with any ease.

Mr. Keane refers to the popular contemporary conversation about a ‘clash of civilisations – East and West’, which implies a fair contest between the two (when, that is, according to Mr. Ferguson, the East ‘suitably adapts Western features such as cricket and secularism’). He rightly refers to the current ‘global civilization’ (more accurately, Western civilization transported everywhere else), which links peoples and eco-systems and ‘renders redundant the whole idea of civilization’, and concludes by saying that ‘the call to defend Western civilization, in the planetary age of Fukushima, cross-border bailouts and uncivil wars, no longer makes sense, and is immaterial.’

Nowhere however, is the C word mentioned. In a post-Christian world it may indeed seem quaint to bring it up, but there is nothing ‘religious’ about Jesus’ tenet that if you don’t do anything else at all, just remember one thing and you can’t go wrong: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”: if you get that right, you get everything right.

It seems that is the one thing that distinguishes Western civilization from all others. There’s beautiful art in the East – the Moslem temples of Samarkand, Persia and Spain make the gothic cathedrals of Europe look drab by comparison. It is hard to see an equivalent to Shakespeare or Beethoven anywhere outside Europe, but literature and music have been practised with sophistication and refinement in many cultures besides the West. Politics are the same everywhere, in all eras and across all cultures – whoever has the ability to do so seizes power and does his damndest to keep it.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you seems to be the one and only principle that underpins all the diverse criteria of Western civilization (even though plenty of examples can be found of transgressions of it: we’re all human, after all). It underpins everything from Magna Carta to the American Declaration of Independence to the modern parliamentary system (parle = talk to each other). It is the one thing that makes ‘Western civilization’ distinct from all other civilizations, and it’s something worth standing up for – that is, if we can get up off the couch.

The other was of Umi Garrett, an eight-year-old going about the business of playing seriously difficult virtuoso piano pieces by Liszt and Chopin in the same way a builder goes about constructing a piece of furniture or a house – objectively, unaffectedly and unselfconsciously; simply doing the job at hand with as little self-concern as possible.
Let me say first that I have never seen a child like Umi, and I think a lot of it probably has to do with her extraordinary hybrid vigor (Japanese/Irish/German and Polish). But a lot of is just Umi – she is obviously a very understanding and caring little person as well as extremely intelligent, and she has a genuine and infectious sense of humor – a sure sign of intelligence.

One of the many friends and relatives to whom I sent the link said: “Wow! She is absolutely amazing. She makes it look fun and the music just flows beautifully, as though it is effortless.”
And another of my friends offered this truism: “Humour is the ability to see two things at once – i.e. the expected and the actual. Or the assumed and the true. Or the generally accepted and the real. It is a factor of intelligence. The most advanced humor is to see one’s own self image vs. the worst truth. Perhaps it’s just her brain, but there is a sense of fun in there too. Slightly wacky. It must be the Irish in her.”

A few years ago another young lady – also eight years old – made her debut with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Centre. On the menu was Paganini’s Violin Concerto No.1, a staple of the virtuoso violinists’ repertoire.

What could this exciting piece be? I didn’t have to wait very long, as it was only five minutes long - nothing could have maintained that level of passion and excitement any longer. It was a piece by Liszt, one of his Transcendental Etudes, entitled ‘Wilde Jagd’ . No wonder it wasn’t better known – who could be expected to get their tongue around that heavy Middle-Ages sounding Germanic moniker (much later I discovered that Wilde Jagd, which means wild hunt, or chase, was indeed a Middle Ages tale, and had a much more svelte-sounding title in French - le Chasseur Maudit (‘The Accursed Hunter’), used, among other incarnations, as the subject of a symphonic poem by Cesar Franck.

Franck’s symphonic poem is OK, but nobody does wild excitement like Liszt. The funny thing is the pianist on that radio broadcast I first heard was a very dour, correct and virtuous, but profoundly unexciting player, Jorge Bolet. Cuban, very good, a big reputation for Liszt – but not because he was a Lisztian pianist: you need electricity, a wild streak, and a little dash of craziness helps too, so Horowitz was an ideal Liszt pianist, also Zoltan Kocsis, Marta Argerich. I’m not crazy enough – Chopin sits much more comfortably with me – but I give it a good stab. The reason Jorge Bolet was famous was a) he was a very solid pianist who played much of the standard repertoire of Liszt, and b) he recorded the sound-track of the film Song Without End (the story of Liszt) in 1960, as a last-minute replacement to the disgruntled Jose Iturbi, who had been engaged to do it after the huge success of the sound-track of A Song to Remember (the story of Chopin) in 1945, which Iturbi’s playing had done so much to make such an overwhelming success.

There are two massively contrasting ideas in Wilde Jagd. The opening subject is indeed a furious chase, and it can’t be furious enough. But it’s a chase, on horseback – so it has a definite and very strongly marked rhythm. If you miss this rhythm no-one will know it’s a chase; it’ll just sound like a lot of noise, and not only that, but a struggle for the pianist (you never want that!).

How do you bring out rhythm clearly? Answer: you accent the main beats. That doesn’t mean you play the main beats louder; you have to play all the things around them softer. Horowitz always did this – he had the most electric rhythm, and he created it by playing everything except for the accentuated beats much quieter than you would imagine, and much quieter than anyone else. The accented notes give you an electric jolt every time, and all the other notes are hardly there. Pianissimo. Think of the octaves build-up at the end of the Rachmaninoff Third. Or the Liszt Sonata. Here’s a case where you really have to bring out the accents. Especially on the repeated chords. Full chords can easily become turgid, so keep it light – just bring out the accents. And by accents, I don’t mean accenting the full chord; just accent the top note of the chord in question – the little finger jabbing at the note like a stiletto. Stab that note in the heart with your fifth finger plunging into it as hard as a dagger.

The second subject, in the central episode, is so beautiful and passionate. But don’t lose the momentum. It’s quiet, ‘inward’, as Schumann liked to say, but the music can’t come to a standstill – keep the rhythm going. Liszt gives us a little help in keeping up the momentum – at the same time a nice symphonic-poem touch of orchestration – with a distant rumble in the bass, keeping the syncopated repeated-chord motif from the opening. (Busoni said “Wilde Jagd is a piece of the strongest orchestral colouring”). He also gives us the cross-rhythm of two-against-three between the melody and the rippling accompaniment. Keep the momentum! The music becomes more and more passionate, but the underpinning rhythm must drive the melody. Melody in the top notes (with the stiletto pinky), all else pianissimo, building to mezzo piano, and finally mezzo forte, while the melody in the top is singing its heart out fortissimo.

Recapitulation. The chase is back on, faster and more furious than ever. But it starts pianissimo. That means accented notes pianissimo, everything else hardly there at all. Syncopated repeated chords pianissimo. There’s so much speed at this point that it won’t sound pianissimo whatever you do. If you were playing it even only mezzo-forte it would sound heavy and turgid. There are so many notes crowding on each other at this speed, and you simply must reduce the volume to allow them to be heard. LESS is MORE.

Full blast recapitulation of syncopated chords in C major. Full chords. OK, you can’t reduce the volume here, but do everything you can to keep it rhythmic, and that means stiletto pinky as much as possible, and the accented beats standing out from the rest as much as possible.

Return of the second subject. Orgasmic. As fast as you can. ‘Faster’, as Schumann said. Everything apart from the melody in the top notes piano. At such a speed, you really have to concentrate hard to keep it down to piano, but you must! Bring in the Kocsis wild streak here if you have it. But remember, the quieter you start from, the wilder and more over-the-top you can get.

Last page. Same deal. So many notes, so fast, so loud. But you’ve simply got to keep the rhythm clear and electric. Only way – reduce the volume of all but accented beats.

God I love this piece. I can hear it in my mind as clearly as the day I heard it with Jorge. I think he played it very well: it was a live broadcast - he was on tour in Australia at the time – so it didn’t have that careful quality of his studio recordings. Wild and passionate. But to quote Richard Strauss (in his conducting role): “The hotter the music gets, the cooler your head must be.”

First of all, let me advise Alex and everyone else fortunate enough to be 15 or 16, that whatever they are able to get “in their fingers” now will stay with them for life. There will be plenty of refinements and modifications, but there’ll be plenty of time for it. Whatever one tries to learn later is not learnt in the same kinesthetic way. It has becoming increasingly sad for me that I realize everything I can actually perform was learnt before the age of 20. I have learnt other things since, but they all disappear from my mind and fingers no sooner than I perform them once. Everything learnt in my teens is with me in my blood; I wouldn’t bother consulting a score for any of the works I learnt then in order to perform it now, even if I haven’t played that particular piece in a number of years – Chopin G minor Ballade, F minor Ballade, B flat minor Scherzo, assorted Etudes, Nocturnes, Polonaises, etc., Beethoven Appassionata, Moonlight, Waldstein, etc, a handful of Liszt pieces (oh, how I wish I had learnt more!), and alas only two or three pieces by Rachmaninoff – now there I really feel sorry for myself; but there are just too many notes in Rachmaninoff – even a small Prelude or Etude-Tableau - to assimilate once one is out of their teens.

Partly it’s because there are too many distractions as one gets older – did I really sit at the piano ten hours a day throughout my teens and into my twenties??? - these days I get up after five minutes, to write down something I just thought of that I have to do tomorrow, nothing to do with music. But I had a very full schedule when I was young too – I had eight hours of school every day, for God’s sake, and school was a seven-mile trip away. There are many more distractions now, more concerns, but that’s not the real reason.

Music is just like a language – it is a language. We can learn a foreign language without even thinking about it when we are five; we have to think about it, but we can still learn it fluently if we really want to when we are 15; but 25 – faahget it. No point in even trying, as every German, Dutchman or Chinese will speak English much better than we will ever be able to master a few phrases in German, Dutch or Chinese. And we can’t do it anyway. Something has definitely altered in the way we learn between age 5 and age 25. As a five year-old we learnt much more by observation (almost entirely), as an adult by analysis (almost entirely). Maybe analysis has its virtues, but for learning a language - a means of communication (and that includes music) – it doesn’t hold a candle to observation and imitation. I was trying to imitate Horowitz when I was 15. I can now analyze everything about his playing (and there’s plenty to criticize as well as admire) but my current method of learning would not have enabled me to play like him, whereas my former method gave me some ability in that direction.

What’s the answer? Be like a child all your life? Not possible to do. The brain just has its own way of developing.

So learn as much as you can by the first method while you can still do it – get it ‘in the fingers’, or the language ‘on your tongue’. There’ll be plenty of time to correct the grammar and spelling later on. Seventy or eighty years. And you’ll never be able to learn new repertoire so that it sticks, or a new language so that you can really speak it, in all that time.

Just saw http://www.wimp.com/bigmind/ Truly weird video. I don’t think you can expect this to happen in more than one in 100 million cases. But it does bring out several relevant points: this guy memorizes and calculates the same way we memorize and make calculations about a piece of music: via signposts – tangible, kinesthetic signposts. I’m not comparing myself to this guy in any way (what he does is totally miraculous), but I can say that my brain works the same way when dealing with music. Keys have definite colours for me. Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto is deepest darkest emerald green, as is almost everything in D minor; A minor is well-nigh black; E flat (the Emperor concerto) is definitely bright golden; whereas the fourth concerto has always been a little spoiled for me by the fact that its colour is a rather bland brown. I will never touch the second concerto, as that is in B flat, a really sickly yellow key (though that makes Brahms’ B flat concerto a problem for me, as the music is so fabulous – nevertheless I hesitate to open the book and start learning it. The Brahms first, on the other hand, is in the very comfortable zone of D minor – emerald green – so I learnt that when I was 15 (and thus, as you know from yesterday’s comments, could perform it tomorrow without even looking at the score after thirty years).

What you say at the end of yoiur second main paragraph is key: it’s not that you learn things best when your brain is developing and growing, but that when you are young, before the analytical way of thinking takes over completely, we have all kinds of signposts – physical, emotional, curious, observational, above all physical (which I call ‘kinesthetic’ – i.e. brain-to-hand co-ordination) which aid the brain in the learning process of anything. These tend to drop away as we age, and we become more and more dependent on pure analysis, and that can be misleading, or at the very least, less effective than analysis combined with physical associations. As someone once said, “I wouldn’t trust my subconscious around the corner on its own.”

The fact that Rachmaninoff’s D minor concerto is always in emerald green to me ensures that it always has the right feeling. Without that physical association, I couldn’t trust that it would always be right. The physical association is much more reliable than the intellectual one. If a child burns his hand touching the stove, that physical association (hand-to-brain association and memory) is much more reliable than a theoretical injunction not to touch the stove, don’t you think?

There is a current vogue for presenting plays and operas in modern dress. While on the surface this sounds like a clever idea, and is often intriguing, it is a purely intellectual, theoretical, one. The divorcing of the ideas and music of a play or opera from the physical setting of their original conception – be it Elizabethan England for Shakespeare, or 16th century Spain or Italy for Verdi, or mid-19th century for Traviata or Boheme, in fact pulls the rug right out from under these works. The removal of the kinesthetic, physical association of the costumes and settings virtually destroys the foundations of these great works, even though if one closes ones eyes one can still respond to the sounds or the words.

Irving Berlin wrote 3,000 songs during his career, hundreds of which are all-time classics. Richard Rodgers – first with Lorenz Hart, then with Oscar Hammerstein – did similarly. These came out between the 1920s and 1950s. Both these composers lived thirty years beyond their last successful number, yet, despite various attempts, were unable to ever come up with even one more song. How is this to be explained? The only possible explanation is that the physical associations of the time in which their work was able to come forth – the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, stopped cold around 1960. Those physical associations included the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the 2nd World War, and the rebirth of the 1950s, and incorporated such items as Fred Astaire’s tails, Ginger Rogers’ swishing dresses, tales of the South Pacific, Julie Andrews’ homespunness, etc. etc. Without these anchors it was not possible for these geniuses to produce even one song!

So I definitely believe it’s the physical associations and signposts which set the brain off and which mark its trajectory on any subject. Still don’t know how that guy can calculate 39 X 39 X 39 X 39 in his head in five seconds. The number thirty-nine isn’t that sexy. Mind you, I don’t like even numbers – much prefer odd ones. 357 is a beautiful number. 246 very mundane and heavy.

But Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto is definitely in emerald green (very sexy key), every bit as much as Gershwin’s Rhapsody is in blue (not very blue), and Beethoven’s Emperor is in gold (very gold).

Apparently I am not alone. Others see colours where you would not normally expect to. They even have a name for it now: ‘synesthesia’.

But that’s not the point Im trying to make. The point is that the brain is a physical organ and it works properly only in conjunction with physical activity. Playing the piano is a clear case in point: the action of gripping the keys - kneading them, poking them, holding them, stroking them, coaxing them, sometimes whacking them (but always telling them you love them) is not only pleasurable, it actually stimulates the musical side of the brain and enables it to make all the necessary (and correct) calculations in order to produce a piece of music in actual sound. Those calculations include our memory, emotions, histrionic abilities, projection talents, as well as making the right notes go down when and how they should.

The same can be said of a carpenter, or builder, or anyone else working with their hands and bodies. The brain works in direct proportion to the physical activity of the hands and arms. The builder may not be thinking about the quantum theory, moving on from where Einstein left off, but what he is using his brain for is spot-on, true and indisputably demonstrable, whereas without any physical involvement our minds can play tricks on us, and not be entirely reliable. For example, if one works late at night, alone, in a darkened house, one can start to hallucinate, or at the very least imagine problems to be greater or lesser than they may in fact be. In the light of day, outside, with the stimulus of physical activity or movement, our perspective is much more reliable. Even just taking a walk will get the brain working better.

I use colours just as an example: colours are a tangible, physical thing (though of course colours are to an extent dependent on light). The colours of musical keys may be a little fanciful (but then, why does the number 39 make that guy on the video feel all warm and fuzzy, and he’ll do anything easily and happily for the numbers he likes – it’s obviously a personal thing). However with stage productions it’s no longer just fanciful. Traviata has to be basically in midnight blue or it’s way off base, Tristan and Isolde misty blue, Aida golden, likewise Meistersinger, Tosca black and scarlet, Butterfly pastel cherry blossom, the Ring murky dark green. There’s no question at all about any of that. Traviata is mostly set in the night, in candlelit rooms, in Paris.  Tristan is mostly on the sea, in Irish mists. Tosca in dark rooms with blood and satin. Aida with trumpets and processions. The Ring all forest-bound.

But as I say, colour is merely an example. The brain (I’m speaking from personal empirical observation as a pianist) really only functions properly in tandem with physical activity and stimuli. It’s no more a purely theoretical or intellectual organ than the heart or lungs. Give it the right oxygen and it can do anything. Give it the right emotional associations and it can make calculations that no computer in the world can match. That guy’s brain likes the feel and touch of certain numbers, so it’s off and running. I like the feel and touch of Chopin, so there’s nothing I can’t or won’t do to play that music. The feel of Bach fugues does not turn me on, thus, while I can learn and play them, my brain pushes them away, and it’s a huge effort to get the recalcitrant organ to co-operate.

This is NOT a question of keeping awake, or about getting blood flow to the brain. This is about the ‘kinesthetic’ operation of the brain, i.e. that it doesn’t function correctly unless the thinking is tied to real, physical, 3-D anchors – be they colours, physical associations of all kinds, including ones which have been transformed into memories, sets and costumes in a play, keyboard for a pianist, hammer for a builder, moulding things with your hands, holding the organ in your hands if you’re an anatomist, etc, etc, etc. I don’t think the brain can function properly by itself on a purely theoretical level. If divorced from 3-D reality it just starts to fantasize.

Which is OK too, but it’s a different proposition from a well-oiled, thinking brain dealing with issues and questions with a view to finding rational and workable solutions and perspectives.

One such was the following: a parliamentary candidate came to her family’s town and made a speech in the local hall. When asked a curly question, he responded : “We have a booklet.” ‘We have a booklet’ became the oft-repeated response to difficult questions evermore.

I am reminded of this by a question from my dear friend Zuhair who writes that he wishes to learn ‘Au lac de Wallenstadt‘ from Annees de Pelerinage by Liszt, and is wondering how to approach the first bar. The whole piece is very simple, hauntingly beautiful as Zuhair says, but the first bar does pose a technical question – one in Zuhair’s mind of ‘stretch’ – “my hands are relatively small (maximum stretch = one ninth), making it awkward for me to play the VERY first, arpeggiated, chord (A flat – E flat – C). So I thought it may not be too much of a crime if I omitted the A flat and E flat of this first chord and played only the C of that triplet?”

This is a good question, and one on which I would like to expostulate, as it lies at the heart of all piano technique. It is at the heart of my book on piano technique (‘We have a book’), entitled ‘Mastering the Chopin Etudes‘. Zuhair read this book avidly some time ago, and his response indicated that he had understood its main thesis so well that I placed a couple of his comments on my website (under E-books – ‘Chopin Etudes’), but I can understand the difficulty involved.

I took the Etudes of Chopin as the framework for an examination of piano technique, but I could just as well have used the Etudes of Liszt, Sonatas of Beethoven, Preludes of Rachmaninoff – anything at all (even Bach, though there is little there in the way of chords, and certainly not octave passages).

The reason I could have used anything is that it all boils down to a handful of basic principles - only one handful. And that handful in turn boils down to just one principle – The Philosopher’s Stone of piano technique, you might call it. It’s like Abraham’s revelation in reverse: in order to make it clearer (i.e. that the Universe is bigger than us and our personal desires), Moses separated it into 10 clear rules, but they all really boil down to the same thing, which Abraham came up with in the first place. In turn, Jesus took the ten rules – and those 10 were subdivided into 613 smaller ones (‘we have a book’) – and went back to one basic priniciple: Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself. Get that right and you’ve got everything right.

The basic principle of piano technique (and all physical activity) is: Keep the natural position of the body at all times. The ‘natural position’ means: that in which it finds itself when completely at rest. If we bend over in a way that strains the back, we are putting it in an ‘unnatural’ position. And if we do it repeatedly, we will soon injure ourselves. You get the idea.

The natural position of the hand – that in which it falls when dropped like a dead thing, the way the paw of a cat or dog  falls limply when you lift it then take the support away – is the distance of between a 5th or a 6th (a 6th for very large hands), i.e. no more than five or six adjacent notes. Anything more than this span and you have to STRETCH the hand. Stretching the hand repeatedly is like bending the back painfully repeatedly.

This principle is so hard to understand and assimilate because we do seemingly have to stretch ourselves in the course of most, if not all, physical activity: walking or running, bending over to tie our shoe-laces, reaching over to the glove-box from the driver’s seat. And playing a keyboard, which is five feet in width, with an at-rest arm-span no wider than the width of our bodies, and chords and arpeggios of an octave or more with a hand-span no greater than 5-6 notes.

The principle is: Don’t Stretch, but instead move the whole hand, or arm, or body, as gently and smoothly as possible from one position to the next.

Case in point: the first bar of Au lac de Wallenstadt. The first chord, which consists of three notes spread over a tenth (i.e. ten notes) should not be ‘stretched’ in any way – either in whole or in part. As it happens, Liszt indicates that this chord should be arpeggiated, but even if he didn’t, we should still approach this as a chord which has to be played in two go’s, with the hand moving from the first bit to the next, easily, gently, and without stretching. You leave the first bit behind, and don’t worry about tying it to the next bit, physically or acoustically. It will be more or less non-legato, but that’s fine, even preferable, because the amount of reverberation going on (there’s always reverberation) will cover the gap.

Next point (much more serious than Zuhair’s concern about the first chord):

At the end of this first bar, and in every bar henceforth – as this figure repeats constantly as an ostinato accompaniment – the last note asks to be played by the second finger, as that finger lies in-between the third finger, which played the preceding note, and the thumb, which plays the following note – the first note of the next bar. Wrong! By playing the last note of each bar with the index finger we unavoidably stretch the hand at the junction of the third finger and the index finger - very strainingly on this ligament. The interval of a fourth simply cannot be handled by 3-2 without stretching this ligament to an nearly injurious level. And this motif is repeated in every bar of this piece! Just imagine what’s going to happen.

Although it seems as if you are ‘cheating’ the legato demand of this accompaniment, you must play this last note in each bar with the thumb. 3 – 1 on an interval of a fourth is not a stetch or a strain at all. It is in fact it is the most natural distance for the third finger and the thumb - which, if allowed to fall with no pressure or effort whatsoever, will fall exactly on an interval of a fourth.

The ‘cheating’ that may seem worrisome would, of course, be at the next juncture – from the last note in each bar to the first note of the next bar – which also has to be played by the thumb. The thumb has to hop over in each case – in every single bar - from one note to the next. If you don’t hop nervously or jarringly, and just move the hand gently and easily from each thumb-played last note to the next, thumb-played, first note, the elision will be smooth. Smoother than smooth. Acoustically as well as physically it will be ideal because the hand will remain at the same angle in the course of this join; with the stretched 3 – 2 version, the hand would twist around in order to accomplish the stretched and strained passage, and this twisting would interfere with the sound, causing a ‘gulp’ every time.

Smoothness is of the essence in this accompaniment, which creates a backdrop of the gentle murmur of lapping water (smoothness is always of the essence):

Au lac de Wallenstadt (At Lake Wallenstadt) – Liszt’s caption is from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto 3 LXVIII – CV):

“Thy contrasted lake

With the wild world I dwell in is a thing

Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake

Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring.”

P.S. The lady I spoke of at the beginning has been immortalized in ‘Rose and Henri‘, available from jdutdem@aol.com

I am reminded of this very familiar syndrome by seeing a clip of Richter on the website www.pianistsfromtheinside.com – a splendid website for piano enthusiasts (splendid not just because it is running a blog post of my own at the moment, but because it is beautifully presented, varied and full of interest to people who love the piano.

When I was twelve or thirteen I asked my dad if I could have a recording of Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, which I didn’t yet know. I was starting to acquire recordings – beautiful, treasurable LPs in those days – and already had the usual suspects: Tchaikovsky No.1, Grieg, Emperor. My dad would buy me one every other week if I was a good boy – even if I wasn’t; but apart from having too much energy and impatience (an early form of ADD I suppose) I was, I believe, reasonable good: there simply wasn’t enough time to get into too much trouble, with eight hours of piano practice as well as school every day. So off we went to the Continental Record Shop in Acland St., St. Kilda, with great excitement and anticipation, and asked for the new addition to my small and very precious collection.

“Here,” the lady said, handing us a purple-cover LP with a photo of a sullen-looking balding middle-aged man – not at all what you would except a great pianist to look like: everyone knew they looked ambassadorial, like Horowitz or Rubinstein, always in regal tail-coat, with some mysterious little decoration pinned to their lapel (Legion d’honneur, I later learnt). “This is the top new pianist”. Richter. Never heard of him. Sounded German, but he was actually Russian. Can’t go wrong with a Russian, I knew already, even at that age. So we bought it.

It was startlingly good, too (I still have it, in mint condition, as I do everything else I bought in the ensuing years). Here was infallibly accurate and unusually strong playing, but there was something else too. There was a raw quality which brought an eerie feeling of suspension of time. I soon acquired Richter’s then celebrated recordings of the Wanderer Fantasy, Tempest Sonata, Appassionata, Schumann recordings from a concert tour of Italy, and others. It seemed that he had only recently become known internationally, in his late forties, having been what was termed a ‘dark horse’ among the well-known Russian artists then celebrated all over the world – Gilels, Oistrakh, a young Rostropovich, the Bolshoi Ballet. ‘Dark horse’, I eventually found out, meant Richter was his own man, and couldn’t be induced to do anything he didn’t want to do; the Soviet authorities liked to keep a tight rein on all the artists they allowed out to the West, and did so through constant intimidating surveillance by their consular officials. Richter would wander off by himself, and seemed to be unintimidatable, so they simply didn’t let him out of Russia till he was middle aged. However, there was so much prestige to be gained for the Soviet Union, they finally decided that he was just a loner and wasn’t going to do them any real harm.

And so it proved. After a few brief years, during which everyone quickly came to the same opinion as the lady in the Continental Record Shop, Richter disappeared from the standard concert halls, as well as the big cities of the West. Apart from political intimidation, which was like water off a duck’s back to him, he also went his own way in other ways. He disliked being committed to a definite date for a concert, preferring to perform whenever he felt like it; thus it was impossible to book concert halls for him in large cities (this naturally has to be done in advance, and advertising allowed for). He didn’t like flying at all, so after three tours of America, in 1960, 65 and 70, he swore off any inter-continental travel. He preferred small out-of-the-way places in central Europe, towns with a little atmosphere or history. The only venues available in these small places were churches, or, as in the case where he finally settled on his own annual summer festival – a medieval barn in rural France.

But without a regular concert schedule, the performances became strange and rather introverted. There was always tremendous fascination, and often hypnotic performances, escpecially of works where an introverted approach brought a new and mesmerizing dimension, such as Schubert sonatas and the Well-Tempered Clavier (which can take any approach). By the 1980s Richter seemed to have lost his nerve in public, and insisted on using music at all times – having formerly had the most phenomenal repertoire range of any pianist who ever lived. Using music unavoidably slows one down - in a figurative as well as literal sense: if one feels the need for it in front of one then psychologically one feels at a disadvantage with the music and with the performance. And so it proved.

At this stage of his life, Richter determined to perform all the repertoire he had ever engaged with, and have it recorded live, as if he was thinking very seriously about his legacy. The number of CDs to result from this project is breathtaking (I think in the region of 200 or more). But none of these recordings have the finish, the mastery or the excitiement of those studio and live recordings from the 1960s.

I met Richter once, and it was a very memorable event in my life. I was studying in Warsaw at the time, and there was suddenly a rumor that there was to be a recital by Richter the next day in Krakow; it seemed unbelievable, but that’s how it was with Richter – there was suddenly an announcement that he would perform that week, in whichever hall or church was available in some medium-sized city. So with a friend who was also studying piano in Warsaw, I flew down to Krakow and headed straight for the main concert hall. We went up to the third floor, where he was supposedly practising, and there, from a room at the end of a corridor, was indeed the sound of a piano. We seated ourselves on a bench outside and listened eagerly. Soon a janitor with a pail and mop came along, opened the door to the inner sanctum and announced it was closing time. He looked around at us with an annoyed shrug, and said “What can you do, it’s Richter.” A moment later, the man emerged himself clutching his two or three volumes of music to his chest, over his grey overcoat, and walked past us.

We enquired as to the nearest good hotel and went along to settle ourselves before the concert. At dinner time we went down to the restaurant, and were just about to start on our soup, when Richer suddenly appeared at the entrance. My friend impulsively ran over to him and said “Mr. Richter, please sit with us!” (I never could have done that, but I was very glad she did). He looked a little shy and sheepish, and said “But I don’t know you.” “I’m Renata Turrini and my friend is Alan Kogosowski.” “Good, that’s OK then”, and he came with us to our table. For the next hour we spoke of Schubert Sonatas, Saint Saens concertos, Chopin Etudes, the repertoire he was going to play that evening, how he prepared for it – anything and everything – in a mixture of French and German. After the first ten minutes, we had completely forgotten that he was the most famous pianist in the world and was much older than us (he was then in his early 60s). He was without ego, and had the enthusiasm of a 16 year-old.

He had a naughty streak too. He was then learning Schubert’s late G major sonata, and he was planning to perform it the next season (in an out-of-the-way place) at a super-slow tempo (as he did many Schubert ‘heavenly length’ sonatas). He hummed it to us, and it was certainly slower than any other version. He knew that this would cause controversy, and he twinkled at the reaction he could foresee it getting. He liked music that wasn’t so serious and heavy, like Saint-Saens – “one needs dessert as well as main course”. And he gave me what he said was the best advice he could give: “always lay out all yout clothes for the concert before dinner” (I was starting to get nervous for him as the time drew closer for the concert, and he seemed oblivious, talking instead about Schubert and Saint-Saens).

Years later, I saw Bruno Monsaingeon’s excellent film ‘Richter the Enigma’, and immediately recognized the kind of ego-less conversation that pervades this film. It is advertised on the sleeve as ‘Richter’s first-ever interview’, and I realized that the public had indeed never heard him speak, although in fact he was more than happy to speak – wittily and quirkily – on any subject. I was only sad to see him so thin and ill-looking in this long and fascinating interview, for he had always been a powerful and imposing man. At his height, he looked like Schroder from Peanuts sitting at his toy piano – always uncomfortable looking (unlike the ever-poised Horowitz), hunched over the keyboard, too big for the piano. Although most photos of Richter show him unsmiling and uncharming – often even rather angry looking - when I met him, he looked very much like the photo on the attached record cover. Quizzical, gentle, humane.

I will never have another experience like the discovery of Richter, and all the music that came with that discovery, sadly. “He was like the Roman Empire,” the pianist Roger Woodward remarked to me – you couldn’t imagine the world without him.

But the music is still there – Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven and Saint-Saens; I console myself with that.