Bach to the future
I have to meet András Schiff outside the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. He is not hard to spot. His hat is the giveaway: a baggy black cap of the type favoured by Dutch painters in the mid-17th century, worn at a jaunty angle, epitomising the odd combination of artistry and playfulness that characterises this most singular of pianists.
It would be easy to read a great deal into that hat, so of course I will. To suggest that it encapsulates a sensitive musician who feels a little uneasy with the modern world, a man for whom the past is as real as the present, a pianist in love with musical continuities, someone who sees Bach as the future.
I have come to Amsterdam to hear him play a Mozart concerto and to talk about Chopin, whose life and music are celebrated on BBC1 next week in an Omnibus programme scripted and presented by Schiff. Mozart, along with his beloved Bach, is the core of Schiff’s musical life, but Chopin is a surprise. Has Schiff, the consummate classicist, become a convert to the joys of wilful romanticism? Not at all, he insists; Chopin has been misunderstood and the point of the programme is to drag him back into the classical mainstream.
As ever, this most outwardly gentle of musicians has a thesis to propound. He speaks slowly and deliberately, calmly and dispassionately, but he takes no hostages. “This is not right” is a phrase that recurs repeatedly during a leisurely lunch at an Indonesian restaurant marred only by the incongruous tinkling of the piped piano music (La Mer… in Holland?). Schiff is a musician in pursuit of truth, irked by those he believes to be wrong or behaving falsely, not frightened to criticise those he thinks have sold out, setting up art as sacred, and willing to make enemies. Chopin is his latest cause, but it is one among many for this cultivated controversialist.
“Some people belittle Chopin,” he explains. “They see him as a flamboyant, romantic figure who led a picturesque life. It is the perfect subject for sentimental novels or soap operas. But behind this, people don’t always see the master composer. He is not a miniaturist writing sentimental piano pieces but one of the greatest composers ever, writing music of the very highest level.
“That he happened to write for the piano is a coincidence, but he made a virtue out of it. He didn’t write symphonies or operas, not because he couldn’t but because he didn’t want to. To me, a mazurka by Chopin which is three minutes long is not less important than a Beethoven symphony. I wanted to rehabilitate Chopin, to show that he is not a romantic in the way that people like to categorise him, but a classical composer with strong ideas on aesthetics, form and beauty following the examples of Bach and Mozart.”
Schiff, who has recorded very little by Chopin but hopes to do so in the future, has little time for most of his contemporary interpreters. “I don’t like the way that most people play Chopin. He has been mostly played by empty-headed romantic pianists, but he is really not like that. Chopin is a highly polyphonic composer. The problem is that his music has been played mostly by pianists who have no understanding of Bach and Mozart.”
Following the example of Bach is, for Schiff, the ultimate compliment: all the music he admires springs from that source. He established himself as an interpreter of Bach, made a highly regarded recording of the Goldberg Variations, and next year will play six recitals in London to mark the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. Bach is at the core not just of his music-making but of his vision of great art.
“Bach stands in the centre and all the music I like is connected to him,” says Schiff. “Bach produced a system where everything – spiritual, emotional and physical – is connected simultaneously. There is a great sense of economy. Every note matters and nothing could be taken away without the whole structure collapsing. I have great trouble with certain works by Liszt where I find a total lack of self-control and economy. There are pianistic flourishes which are merely showing off. I used to play Liszt – being from Hungary, I had to – but I played it very badly because I didn’t like it, I couldn’t identify with it.”
Schiff was born in Hungary to a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust. He left in 1979, when he was in his mid-20s, and initially divided his time between London and New York, though he found the latter uncongenial. “New York was very interesting but very strange,” he says. “I decided I couldn’t live in America but had to live in Europe. I feel very European, though not very Hungarian.”
Now 45, he is married to the violinist Yuuko Shiokawa and has homes in London and Florence. Until recently he and his wife lived in Salzburg, where each year he would organise an intimate music festival hymned annually by Bernard Levin as one of the finest in the world. But a search for the sun has now driven him south and, for the moment, his festival is enjoying a siesta.
He plays a hundred or so concerts a year all over the world, is developing a career as a conductor – he plans a St Matthew Passion with the Philharmonia in London next year, and Cosí Fan Tutte at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001 – and also hopes to publish essays on music and more general cultural subjects. Like Alfred Brendel, being a world-class pianist is not quite enough: he feels the need to express his cultural engagement in other ways.
For Schiff, that engagement is what distinguishes technicians from artists – and why most of the musicians he admires are from a previous age. “If you asked me to name 25 really great musicians from before 1945 it would be absolutely no problem,” he says. “The problem would be who to leave off the list. But I would have a real problem naming 25 great musicians after 1945. The middle level is very strong today – there are very many people in the conservatoires who play an instrument very well. But they are not necessarily very musical or very talented. There should be more vérité: The whole system of the production of musicians is not right.
“There is integrity, musical and personal, in past performers – Schnabel, Edwin Fischer, Cortot, Adolf Busch, Casals. There is an integrity and a huge culture behind their music. It is not just entertainment, it is a crystallisation of European culture. There is a great problem today with taste – what is good taste, what is bad taste? To me the Three Tenors are very bad taste; Nigel Kennedy is very bad taste. Maybe people will say that I’m a snob. It is not the popular factor that bothers me; it is when people sing badly or play badly that bothers me. People say that Nigel Kennedy misbehaves but that he plays like a god; but I think he misbehaves and doesn’t play like a god. I don’t think his violin playing is anything extraordinary; you can find violinists like that in every music school. It is all marketing.
“It seems to me today that we don’t want to accept the fact that classical music will always be for a minority. That minority is not so small – the public for good music today is a hundred times bigger than it was in the time of the composers. It is a very small public compared to the Three Tenors public or the Spice Girls public, but we should not compare it with that and I find it sad that some very good people – Domingo is a good example, a wonderful singer, in a totally different category from the other two – should feel the need to prostitute themselves. I cannot imagine Furtwängler appearing on a talk show; he would just say we do our art, our music, on our own terms and you are welcome to join.”
Schiff puts much of the blame for classical music’s contemporary ills on the record companies and doesn’t shed too many tears over the mess in which they find themselves. “People say classical music is in crisis, but it is not in crisis. The record companies are in a crisis, especially the big record companies, and it is their crisis. The record companies have overproduced, and misused their power and their great opportunities. I don’t think they will survive and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. They have become too powerful, they have overspent on huge offices and overheads, and pandered to the egos of conductors who want to conduct their third or fourth Beethoven symphony cycle despite the fact that nobody wants to hear it because all their versions are basically identical.
“Look who started all this – Karajan. A lot of the diseases in classical music can be crystallised with that name. People talk about him as if he was a divine figure, but his message was very wrong. In the old days people did one recording and that was it. They didn’t think that every year they had to record a piece again to see how it had changed.”
Schiff had a 13-year association with Decca and a shorter stint at Teldec, but is not now under contract. “I don’t any longer see the advantages from the artist’s point of view of being under an exclusive contract,” he says. “It’s better to be free of those restrictions, to be allowed to express one’s many-sidedness. I like to do solo works and recitals, to work with singers, to do some conducting. Record companies sometimes try to put you into a cage.” He says he would like to record the Beethoven sonatas, but not until he is 50, and do another Goldberg – “I play it very differently now and I hope better” – but not for perhaps 20 years. Over-production is unlikely to be a problem with Schiff.
I have to leave him to prepare for his concert in the evening, and we shake hands in the spring sunshine. Preparation for him does not involve another play-through, but an afternoon in the Rijksmuseum, looking at those perfect miniatures that on a tiny canvas express boundless feeling.
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