"Everything should be done as simply as possible but not more simply" ~ Einstein
When doing things, do them with relish.
... I tried to give freer rein to my feelings. That is sometimes dangerous for young performers, because when you simply lean back and give vent to your feelings, you don't always achieve the hoped for results; only after many years of practice is it possible to filter one's feelings properly. Which brings me to a phrase of Novalis that I am always quoting
"Chaos, in a work of art, should shimmer through the veil of order."
I am very much for chaos, that is to say feeling. But it's only the veil of order that makes the work of art possible.
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For me personally it was hugely important in teaching me to listen to myself. I can recommend it to everyone, if need be at home with at microphone and tape recorder. To see how the inner vision corresponds with what is played, and to see what doesn't correspond, and whether it corresponds at all. To see whether one can perceive the sound, even in forte, properly; or whether one gets so emotionally excited that it's simply impossible to hear what's going on. And perhaps it will gradually become clear what repays hearing several times over, and which nuances become embarassing and wearisome when heard more than three times. It's a matter of striking the right balance between too much and too little. It was only much later that I learned to record, as if I were playing in the concert hall.
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What fascinates me in singers is the connection between singing and speaking, which also seems to me particularly important in piano playing. And with Mozart it is literally vital. Mozart, after all, was the great opera composer, but there is also a pronounced singing quality in his instrumental works; and not just a singing quality, but a rhetorical and characteristic quality as well. There are characters, they are visible on stage and all differ from each other. Each has his or her own kind of music. And each of these characters goes through a variety of emotions, which are portrayed in connection with the character.
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It became clear to me fairly early on that a performer is a truly split personality.
One must give oneself certain instructions, such as , 'My arms are heavy.' But one must not desire such a thing in a fanatical way and with one's whole consciousness. On the one hand you have the instructions. on the other, a free flow of associations. It is perhaps something similar that makes a good performance possible.
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When I am on stage, I must do several things at once. I must control myself and free myself; I must look ahead to what I am about to play - see the piece, as it were, spread out like a panorama before me - but at the same time take in what I have just played. I have to play for the audience, and must reach the ears as far back as the thirtieth row. I am accountable to the listener. I am not delivering a soliloquy, but am somewhere in the middle. 'The medium is the message' is a quotation that you have used.
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I was never the most immaculate of artists. There were evenings when I was technically flawless, but I am not basically a perfectionist. I played sufficient wrong notes early on in my career not to be shocked by that as I grew older; and I got the impression from pianists I particularly admired that one could make an impact despite some little lapses. Flawlessness is not the first indication of a great performance.
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I have never believed in the myth of the piano as a percussion instrument. Bach's Inventions were created specifically to encourage cantabile playing- Bach wrote a foreword in which he said as much. He therefore reckoned with the possibility that on old instruments one could play cantabile or less cantabile. If the piano were just a percussion instrument, the great composers would not have written so much for it. I have always tried in my playing to draw sound out of the keys and not strike it in. Hammering and stabbing is not my thing. And neither is it true, by the way, that a single note can only be played louder or softer, but not with different expression, different character and different colour. Nor should the role of pedal be forgotten. I could demonstrate to you on the piano how even single notes can have a distinctive character. Then there is of course the connection between notes which can achieve even more, evoking a mixture of singing and speaking. Singing is for me the basis of music - at least music before the modern age. ... In matters of singing and speaking one should learn from singers, and opera. I have noticed that, despite my admiration for certain great pianists, I seem to have learnt more from singers and conductors. And from actors.
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I wrote that Haydn and Mozart represented for me the antithesis between the instrumental and the vocal. (Beethoven too I consider to be instrumental, while Schubert for me is vocal - which does not rule out the fact that the underlying character of all three is a cantabile. There is an instrumental and a vocal cantabile.) Then: motif and melody. Of course we also find wonderful melodies in Haydn, but he is primarily a composer of motifs, similar in this to Beethoven
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Most people believe that Glenn Gould was a strong personality who therefore had his own idea of a piece, and so much imagination that he was able to turn every piece into something new. On the other hand, people believe that someone who tries to understand and follow the text must of necessity lack imagination and be boring. To which I can only reply that to read the text accurately is an extremely difficult business - much more difficult than even most musicians realize. To understand the markings and give them life requires a great deal of imagination. One should not act as a computer, or as the composer's slave; one must, rather, try to assist the composer as a voluntary helper. I once discussed this with Pierre Boulez, who said that he was satisfied if eighty or ninety percent of the markings were followed.
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A pianissimo with Beethoven is almost always a 'pianissimo misterioso', and more rarely a 'pianissimo dolce'. With Schubert the pianissimo has a much wider domain and is, as Rudolf Kolisch said, a 'pianissimo espressivo'. There are composers who use dynamic markings in a very consistent way to render high and low, near and far. With Beethoven one must be able to distinguish with 'geographical' clarity that the fortissimo is outermost and that a single forte is located somwhere further down; one must never confuse the two.
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I like using the 4 elements to describe music. Busoni tells of how his composition teacher in Graz, Mayer-Remy, explained Bach's preludes and fugues to his pupils in this way. He remarked that in the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier the sequence of the first four fugues represented water, fire, air and earth. Such things can, I think, help the student to get a clearer picture of the pieces, and of musical variety.
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On a personal note (PC): In a way I think Alfred Brendel is pretty interesting because (he himself admits this) he's not really a prodigy, he doesn't have photographic memory, not really faster or louder than others, not really a good sight reader and he does things other than music (such as writing)..... so I guess this makes him quite an all-rounded individual not just a "slave" to music.....
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