Yefim Bronfman

At the Center of the World

Piano Music by Bartók, Ustvolskaya, Schumann, and Schubert

Wolfgang Stähr

Under an Open Sky: Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók taught his piano students at the Budapest Music Academy to play Bach, but he certainly also taught them fear: with his strictness, his relentless perfectionism, and the rituals of disapproval reserved for the ill-prepared or less talented students (which included offended silence or leaving the classroom without comment or salutation). “So we in the class were assigned to Bartók to our terrible fright, because I cannot explain what it was like to go on the Monday afternoon—and he came in. He had unforgettable big eyes which looked at one in a most piercing way,” the conductor Georg Solti, who experienced Bartók’s piano lessons at the age of 14, remembered. “Of course I worshipped him together with the whole of the younger generation; we knew that one of the living geniuses of the 20th century was in that classroom. We knew that very well; but this was not a well-known fact either in Hungary or the outside world at that point.”

Despite all his academic discipline, Bartók preferred to compose in the summer, in the open air, in the garden, surrounded by fresh air and an open sky: a “plein-air” music with an infinitely sharpened sensorium for the voices, sounds, tones, and noises of nature, of leaves, insects, birds, and frogs. He had an instinctive connection with “peasant music”—which Bartók had heard, recorded, and researched in Hungary, South-Eastern Europe, and North Africa—as well as a love for an elementary musicianship, imbued with the powerful sounds of drums, fifes, hurdy-gurdies, and bagpipes. How raw and wild, barbarian, even shockingly “uncultured” must contemporary listeners have found his piano pieces when they assaulted their cultivated ears! Especially the grotesque Scherzo or the percussively exaggerated Allegro molto from the Piano Suite written in 1916, in the midst of World War I, and later revised several times, must have come as a frontal attack on beloved listening habits. It was a time when many artists turned their backs on urban civilization, fleeing to the seaside, living on islands, traveling to the South Sea, founding colonies in the countryside, seeking the simple, elementary, unadulterated life. Bartók’s piano pieces, how ever, as brutal and unbridled as they may sound, are paradoxically based upon a painstaking, almost scientific order of tones, scales, rows, rhythms— thought through to the most microscopic detail. Their radicalness has nothing to do with raving madness or the poses of an enfant terrible. Bartók’s art takes us out into the open, into fresh air, but it also touches upon music’s innermost: the nature of sounds. Ultimately and above all, it teaches us one thing—wide-eyed wonder.

“I Live My Solitary Life”: Galina Ustvolskaya

Respect demands refraining from discussions of Galina Ustvolskaya’s music. She herself wanted nothing else. “It is better to write nothing about my music,” she noted very clearly. But better than what? “Than [to claim] always the same things”: classifications of her music as chamber music and as religious—this she did not want to hear or read, under any circumstances. Ustvolskaya purposefully included only her “true, spiritual, non-religious work” in the narrow catalogue of her oeuvre, which she concluded in 1990 with her Fifth Symphony, entitled Amen. Like most 20th-century masters, she insisted that her pieces were “new in ideas and content”: “The fact that my music is not chamber music is the new aspect, the fruit of my tortured life in creative work! It is not about the number of performers, but about the core of the music itself.” Musicologists might discuss the academic question of the “genre” to which her compositions belonged—she rebuked all conjecture with the briefest of replies: according to her, her symphonies are not symphonic music, but, irrespective of the spartan ensemble size (the above-mentioned Fifth is scored for violin, oboe, trumpet, tuba, wood blocks, and narrator), not chamber music either: “The inner content of my music prohibits the term ‘chamber music’.” In addition, she considered her works by no means religious in the liturgical sense (“That is a profound mistake.”), but allowed that they were filled with a “religious spirit,” wherefore they were preferably to be performed in church: “In the concert hall, in a secular environment, the music sounds completely different.”

The daughter of a lawyer and a teacher, Galina Ustvolskaya was born in 1919, 100 years ago, in St. Petersburg, then called Petrograd before being renamed Leningrad and then finally rechristened St. Petersburg again. Through all these years, Ustvolskaya lived in this city, unnoticed, almost unknown: “During my childhood, I was absolutely misunderstood—as I am, incidentally, today; I grew up alone. I was all alone. My parents lived their own life. Since then, my nerves have been shattered.” Ustvolskaya dreamed of living in a barrel, like Diogenes; she loved silence, calm, nature: “Anything but people. I would like to sit under a birch tree. I require nothing else. The best thing is loneliness.” When she came to visit the festival Wien modern in 1998, she half-heartedly (or perhaps quarter-heartedly) agreed to an interview. The Swiss music critic Peter Hagmann recalled this attempted encounter: “There she was, sitting in the glittering hotel lobby: a small, almost inconspicuous woman, pale and trembling with agitation. Camera and lights caused her the greatest discomfort; again and again, she asked that they be removed, gesticulating wildly. Then, with the camera running, she haltingly read two sentences that she had noted in large script on a piece of paper. The questions that had to be submitted in writing earlier, and which were said to have caused many nights of arguments, were never answered.”

Galina Ustvolskaya had studied with Shostakovich, who spoke of her with admiration (“It is not you who is under my influence, it is me who is under yours.”), whereas she only thought of him with rancor and resentment (“The personality of Dmitri Dmitriyevich strained and killed my best feelings.”). Ustvolskaya made a living teaching at a music school in Leningrad, while her works were hardly performed and printed only many decades later. At the same time, she herself prized the rarity of her music, even after the waning of the patronizing and anti-cultural Socialist attitudes. In 1990 she answered a request from a publisher to write a work with a rejection and a confession: “I would gladly write this work for your publishing firm but it depends on God not on me. If God gives me the opportunity to write something, I’ll do it immediately. I only write when I am in a state of grace.”

Ustvolskaya wrote her music for instruments, but with-

out them—she did not even use a piano, merely sitting at her desk. “Everything is thought out so carefully that it only has to be written down. I am always lost in my thoughts. I also spend the nights in intense thought, and that is why I never manage to rest. My thoughts gnaw at me.” Was it a state of grace in which she composed her Fourth Piano Sonata in 1957? The music itself is certainly distressingly merciless, with its “gnawing thoughts,” its bare tonal sequences, harsh counterpoint, gaping registers, compulsive repetitions, and its clattering, crashing clusters. If the term “chamber music” were to be defined according to traditional notions of dialogue or conversation, this blunt sonata certainly has nothing “chamber music–like” about it—it pursues its own hermetic laws, to the point of a refusal to communicate. In a “secular environment” it sounds different, one can hardly argue with that: strange, abrasive, without any concession to harmony or community. Even within the protective space of a church, however, the four short, untitled, harshly contrasting movements would bring out a “religious spirit” that would seem strict, unapproachable, evoking accusation and the abyss. Or it might ignore us completely. “I have a world that is entirely my own, and I comprehend everything from my own perspective,” Ustvolskaya explained. “I listen, see, and act differently from all other people. I live my solitary life.” The Fourth Piano Sonata was first performed in Leningrad in 1973, but that was beside the point. Galina Ustvolskaya stated that she never discovered anything new in her works from an interpretation: “Such a thing is impossible in my case.”

The Heart of the Poet: Robert Schumann

Faschingsschwank aus Wien, a “Carnival Jest from Vienna”—this is the title Robert Schumann chose for a work in five movements that he originally conceived as a “great romantic sonata” and later characterized as a “romantic showpiece,” eventually publishing it under the abovementioned title as a sequence of “Fantasy Images for the Pianoforte,” according to its subtitle. He had begun writing the score in Vienna, in March of 1839, but only finished it in January 1840, back home in Leipzig. The principle of carnival, invoking a topsy-turvy world of humor and folly, also governs this music: Schumann simply turned the sonata on its head, placing the “main movement” at the end and the final rondo at the beginning (and unmistakably sounding the Marseillaise in it, which was strictly banned in Vienna). The centerpiece of these “fantasy images” is a Scherzino. Dancing, hopping, and jumping about like an unruly sprite, it toys with the listeners, flitting about grinning at them from all directions. The day-dreaming Romance, on the other hand, dripping and drooping with ritardandi, and the lyrical Intermezzo in E-flat minor (which the composer intermittently intended to add to his Nachtstücke Op. 23) do not fit in with familiar notions of carnival and jests. But Schumann was writing his Humoreske for piano at the same time, and, paradoxically, he described this as his most melancholy work, confessing that he had continuously veered between laughing and crying while composing it. “As the heart of the poet is the central point of the world,” Heinrich Heine had written a few years earlier, “so it must well in the present time be wretchedly torn. He who boasts that his heart has remained whole, only admits that his heart is prosaic, far secluded in a remote corner.” How should one know whether to laugh or to cry if the world appears as one big farce? That is the question in Schumann’s romantic, heartfelt showpiece as well.

In Another Language: Franz Schubert

The enormous productivity Franz Schubert displayed in 1828 during the final months of his life, when he also composed his last piano sonatas, has given rise to both serious and wildly extravagant speculation. Was it the final race with the deadly illness, the physical threat of which Schubert had been aware for years? Did he sense that the death of Beethoven, that giant towering over him, had lifted a tortuous pressure to perform from his shoulders? Did he feel his artistic self-confidence strengthened after having mastered the ambitious project of the “Great Symphony” and completed his Winterreise, a cycle whose songs pleased him “more than all others”? From the memoir of his friend Josef von Spaun, we learn that Schubert had entered into a trance-like creative state after composing Winterreise: “Anyone who saw him even once, busily composing of a morning, glowing and bright-eyed, even his very language altered, like a somnambulist, will never forget the impression.” Spaun’s description leaves no doubt that Schubert was in an exceptional state of creativity, and the excesses of work he demanded of himself were fatally likely to ruin his health, which had already been ravaged.

Nor would Beethoven loosen his grip on him. As if setting out to compose the older man’s C-minor Variations WoO 80 all over again, Schubert begins the first of his final three piano sonatas, D 958, in the symbolically fraught, “fateful” key of C minor. The striking resemblance of the sonata’s beginning with the theme of Beethoven’s set of variations is certainly no coincidence, but after a few measures, the illusion of the heroic style breaks down, leaving no remnant of Beethoven’s forcefulness, determination, and purposefulness—on the contrary, there is a predominant sense of desperation, an impulse to flee, fear, and the tortured confusion of a nightmare. Who would speak of victories here?