Playing the Notes

Iwas influenced in my youth by Gould’s transcendent 1960 album of Brahms pieces. His tempo was slow and meditative, similar to that of his 1981 Goldberg Variations. You can’t play fast when you have a lot to say about every chord. Henry VIII’s barge processing grandly up the Thames would have looked trivial with an outboard motor on the back. August harbor yachts are not vinyl-lacquered Chris-Crafts. As Gould said of the recording:

I have captured, I think, an atmosphere of improvisation which I don’t believe has ever been represented in Brahms recordings before…total introversion, with brief outbursts of searing pain culminating in long stretches of muted grief….

Harold Schonberg, in his The Lives of the Great Composers (1970) wrote: It is the twilight of Romanticism, and the peculiar glow of this setting sun is hard to describe. It beams a steady, warm light, not flaring up as it does in the music of Mahler, not looming big halfway over the horizon as in the symphonies of Bruckner, not erupting with solar explosions as in the music of Richard Strauss. It is the music of a creative mind completely sure of its materials, and it combines technique with a mellow, golden glow. In a day when the gigantic operas of Wagner dominated the opera house, when the shocking symphonic poems of Richard Strauss were the talk of Europe, the music of Brahms continued to represent in an intensified way what it had always represented—integrity, the spirit of Beethoven and Schumann, the attitude of the pure and serious musician interested only in creating a series of abstract sounds in forms best realized to enhance those sounds.

Radu Lupu’s 1982 Decca recording (some of it available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=m6Fq5GhUwgA) is very similar to Gould’s in its finding in the architecture and in the pauses of the structure the motivation for the notes. Beauty lies in the voicings, the still center of the modulations, rather than in the rhythmic drive which a concert audience requires for its sense of blood drawn, dragons slain.

This temptation towards what Harold Schonberg calls the “solar explosions” is what led Gould to reject the concert hall in favor of the truths that we tell only to ourselves in the quiet of the night, privately at the piano. Gould took over the details of recording himself, and sent Columbia the results, to keep the concept of “performing,” of pleasing “the other,” even the recording engineer, out of his introspection. When you feel you are being watched, or predicted, you act differently. As with fame, you play your fame, you give the public what you think it expects, what it thinks it expects—you imitate yourself, and evening dies under the glare of the stage lights.

Not that there’s only one way to play the intermezzi: faster tempos allow the music to ripple, to flow. But to me there is a stateliness and an intimacy to the pieces which dictates a tempo closer to the human heartbeat. My own heart beats quite slowly. I am reminded of Victor Borge falling asleep while playing the first movement of the “Moonlight” sonata. So the Brahms intermezzi are for me similar to Proust’s metaphor of falling asleep at the beginning of Swann’s Way. As Dylan Thomas put it, “out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep....” This is also the way many people write poetry: in a trance, the last moment before falling asleep, when the ego is removed from the light, and ideas appear without words or shape, as close to the essence of existence as possible.

Grigory Sokolov has the stillness and the majesty which suit the intermezzi, riven with intermittent eccentricities. Maria João Pires is, as always, as perfect as Dinu Lipatti should be, every note where it should be, maybe the crescendos a bit bland. But no false orchestral swells. Self-effacingly quiet.

Lipatti himself plays too fast, as does Jorge Bolet, as does Artur Schnabel, as does Sokolov in Op. 117, No. 3. Restraint only works so long, and before long virtuosos like Sokolov or Volodos are compelled to abandon the pose and go for gold, as if the cheap thrills of playing an easy piece fast is what will convince people that somehow the slick version is better. They have in fact undermined the summer, and introduced modernity, steam engines, airplanes, into the rhythms of a carriage ride.

Gould, the most eccentric pianist on record, has the most perfect, unyielding atomic clock of them all, subject only to ritards, not to sudden sforzandi or disruptions in the snowfall, the sudden accelerandi, stops, or orphaned notes of Sokolov. Gould’s tone is not only part of the piece, filling the entire horizon of the microphone, but his moments of revelation are psychologically deep: not effects, or tricks, but real. To be a Brahms pianist, more than fingers, you need a heart. Not schmaltz or sentimentality, but respect for the beat of the blood. His slow moments are out of Debussy or Stockhausen, the voicings are oboes, and above it all is the lowering sky of Mussorgsky or Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead.

The most virtuosic of all, Valentina Lisitsa, has in fact the greatest empathy with Brahms, his dreamy Prater rainfalls and long mountain walks, without ever being mawkish. She draws the perfect balance between nostalgia and genuine longing, never losing the sadness or the slowness, never lapsing into sudden insecure speed. She, Hélène Grimaud, Pires, and Gould are the great Brahms pianists of our age. Without the adrenalin of tourist buses, their sounds echo the bells of Austrian clocktowers. Grimaud is the most pianistic, building to gorgeous

climaxes without disrupting the curve of the hills, bringing in sudden quiet to her storms. Mikhail Rudy, the least-known pianist here, a brilliantly accomplished polymath, plays the intermezzi beautifully.

It is reassuring that the people who most respect the stillness of the 1890s are women like Pires, who understands the countryside, and contemporary women like Grimaud and Lisitsa, who have the passion and a kind of hidden anger which ironically restrains them.

My first piano was a seven-foot 1928 Steinway. Its action was very tough, and I was convinced that it made my playing vertical, where I focused on voicing each chord, rather than horizontal, where the music pushed past the goalposts of the measure bars without a second thought. I finally sold the piano because I thought it was interfering with my ability to play in a linear fashion. (I later learned that the action could have been “eased,” or made faster, very easily.) And I am still a vertical introvert.

In some ways the sound of the 1928 Steinway made me want to play it slowly, to savor it. I’ve never encountered that specific timbre again, and I regret selling it. The two 1897 Steinways which Tali Mahanor found and restored for us brought back a lot of the sound of that era, and I’ve used one of them, the nine-foot concert grand which Tali has named Seraphina, for this album.

Although every note has three strings which produce its tone, in an older Steinway like Seraphina those strings are of different lengths and produce an average frequency, rather than being completely in unison, allowing for a shimmer to the notes, a broader definition of what we ask of tuning. This produces the flickering harmonies of an old Beaux Arts Trio recording from the early ‘60s, and is closer to what Brahms himself would have expected from a piano in 1892, when he began to write the intermezzi.

My teacher in Boston, Russell Sherman, always said that every note must be played like it’s life or death. I’m reminded of the Polanski film The Pianist, where the pianist Szpilman plays for his life in front of a Nazi captain. Later, when he is free to play the Grande polonaise brillante in public, it becomes a visceral representation of the freedom that music celebrates, and what we play for.

At a time when performance is in quarantine against the dangers of the 2020 coronavirus, it is more evident than ever that music is life in the face of death, that the profound grief of Brahms’s last pieces for piano is a requiem for everything that we lose when music in real time is paused. A few months seems like years, and a year will seem like a lifetime.

I hope the privacy of the recording process at Tippet Rise produces, especially when heard in more detailed resolution, some of the virtual presence which Gould sought in the middle of the night. We summon up cultures long past when we exhume their mists and their losses, and so even a live performance is necromancy: raising the dead. The idea is to eliminate the middleman, to forget the hall, the pianist, the hovering microphones, and to pass directly into the heart of what Brahms was trying to say.

Music is only a translation of the life behind it. I have to hope that a virtual concert might in a way bypass the doors and chairs and hammers which normally distract us from these ancient, resurrected spirits.

If Brahms’s Four Serious Songs of 1896 are spiritually transcendent, the intermezzi of 1892–93, his last pieces for piano, provide the inner sanctuaries where Brahms hides his deepest human emotions, as Walter Benjamin suggested that Chopin hid his soul in the inner sections of his preludes.

Intermezzo, Op. 117, No. 2

Brahms shifts his allegiances every second, as downward ripples in the clouds are answered with upward ripples from below, their reflections in water, often in a related but different key.

What is a relative minor, other than Clara Schumann? If you take the same number of flats as the bucolic key of D-flat major but think of how to make everything heartbreaking and unstable, instead of serene and grounded, you notice that the note you always arrive at is B-flat. It is the evil twin, the mirror opposite of the benign D-flat. But note how B-flat retains the softness and charm of D-flat. Although there is rain, the sun sits happily in the corner, as light and shade flirt with clouds. The splendor of the major is never too far away.

But Brahms never gets his hands on that resplendent major—resolution, happiness, fulfillment always being just out of reach as it was in his life, as logarithmic harmony imitates biological emotions. Brahms is using his sad, slightly-too-high, melody-missing cries to explain his sorrow as clearly as a bell. But note that he always aims too high, not too low: Brahms is clearly aware that aiming high is a preferable error. Sopranos and tenors always think of a point just above a note in order to convince their voices to err on the side of angels. Brahms is aware of the redeeming aspect music lends to his less attractive persona: too much time playing background music in bordellos as a child.

Brahms slips around the sky of the keyboard without committing himself to where he wants to rest for the first minute or so, until he comes to the midsection, which you can recognize by its sudden melody, when the ripples stop and a quiet midsummer stillness takes over. There is a pause, a small cadenza, where the pianist becomes somewhat overexcited. But this is like a

hothouse where themes mature like vines, and what comes out of the loud chords and then the small Lisztian descent from the heavens is the idea that the entire piece perhaps does have a theme, an underpinning, and that perhaps it is a note, and then the note half a note below it. Just these two notes, so when the ripples begin again, you can suddenly grow with the music and realize the sadness that is being celebrated.

Schumann had a descending theme which for him meant Clara, whom he eloped with when she was a child. Clara became Germany’s greatest pianist and Schumann lapsed into madness.

In the middle of this transition Brahms and Clara fell in love.

The two-note theme of descent in this Intermezzo is perhaps a nostalgic echo of Schumann’s more robust four-note Clara theme. In fact, Brahms links his two-note descent with a second two-note descent to form the entire Clara theme, but in a minor key. The effect is ineffably, indescribably sad. It mixes love with loss, and at the very end Schumann’s four-note theme of love for Clara is finally, shamelessly reached by his replacement, Brahms.

Why the minor mode? Much blood had passed under the bridge since Clara’s youth, and Brahms’s involvement had become less naive, enervated with Schumann’s death, his betrayal of Clara, his ascension.

Musicians think in keys, which are like colors that shape their contents. Notes are not tones (although tone is an anagram of note), but like chess moves, moves of a body, an arm stretching, a hand held out. A game of Twister. Notes come in phrases, in bundles, and they clash and agree, like a sword fight. Let me try to illustrate how these phrases take on lives of their own.

D-flat major, blasé but happy, mingles with its darker mirror image (that is, B-flat minor) two notes down the keyboard: its relative minor. So D-flat’s darker underbelly (B-flat minor) is exposed. There are only two notes, D-flat and B-flat, but who are they? Johannes and Clara, Robert and Johannes, Robert and Clara? A three-way love triangle is being fought out by two of the players, possibly by all three of them, with their emotions swapping notes, flowing and fluctuating like a note in a bottle across history to our Instagram ears.

The four-note descent of the Clara theme has many manifestations, growing in power. The tranquil major-key D-flat midsection starts soothingly with the Clara theme. Then it is turned upside down, and then the inversion is inverted, until it progresses upwards, joyously. In a diminished mode it marches threateningly around in a dark pinwheel of apprehension.

This entire saga then repeats. Silences appear between the first two and the last two notes. The right hand angrily descends, but a split second later, a little late, the left hand ascends. This is some kind of war. Is it between Brahms and Schumann, Clara and Robert, or Brahms and his own guilt? It is certainly between the positive and the negative versions of the Clara theme. The battle lasts only about 10 seconds.

Then each side gets its say. First, the upwards theme, then the downwards, then the upwards. These arpeggios, or broken chords played note by note, then turn into an angry chord where the top notes ring out the two-note descent. Then a second chord intrudes, where the bottom notes respond with a two-note ascent.

This repeats lower down on the piano, and then a final quiet poignant chord almost wins the day with the descent theme, until the deep bass responds with two growling, quiet ascent notes, modulating into an ascending arpeggio which is rapidly contradicted by a small descending Lisztian cadenza.

A few silences, and the first theme reappears, only this time more insistent, more sure of itself. Now you can hear easily the four Clara notes descending. Instead of small half-tone intervals, the melody breaks out into tones farther apart, which fly higher upwards and deeper downwards. The stakes have gotten higher, more insistent. The original personalities which caused the inner, philosophic theme have been lost, subsumed into the glory of the idea itself, as the music takes over, genius replacing rote, collaboration replacing jealousy, joy leaping beyond mere structure.

Instead of single notes descending, now the descents are five notes apart. This is where the piece modulates into eternity, but it may initially sound like it has overstepped the narrow confines of its theme and become obscurantist. How did a walk turn into a jog? Where was the transition? Even though the plan is gradual and well thought out, suddenly you are running, trying to remember when the trot turned into a race.

Now the episode peters out, winding down to four last chords which are the final conclusion of this Clara debate, depressing and minor. But at the last second the final note produces a flight up to heaven, world-weary and heavy with experience, but sublime.

This is the kind of storytelling we find in Mahler and Richard Strauss—debates over the fate of the universe, laden with casualties of war, transfixed by music, shot through with pollen in the Viennese twilight. The generation that was to follow (Berg, Webern, Schoenberg) would dispense with such genius and such impure mixtures of thought and music, depleting structure of its emotional baggage, risking tone for its own sake. Removing the adjectives, like Goethe’s Elective Affinities. Eliminating the sentimentality of description for the sheer action of verbs, for the heroes of nouns.

But it little profits a man to gain the whole world and lose his immortal soul. The Germans had gained music at the expense of the self. They had won the admiration of their own backyard, but lost the world. They kept the nouns, but lost the soul of the adjectives.

But in the round world of the outmoded long-playing disc, old carriage wheels still clack noisily and painfully over uneven ground, the thump of the vinyl, bringing back the ambiance of imperfection. Brahms is not a composer for perfection, like the scintillations of Liszt or Ligeti. He is a compiler of flaws, of the hiss of the steam heat, the slip of the finger, the pause of the little finger a little too long before it merges with the note it intended, just below it. The pain of love lost, thrown away, demeaned.

In the clarity of DXD, we can hear the imperfections of the piano, the conflicting tunings of the strings, the world of Brahms’s time, with its stenches and flowers, and the weakest link of all, the pianist, torn between notes, like a diplomat trying to serve three countries at once, and pleasing no one.