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Notes from the Editor
Artur Schnabel and the Ideology
of Interpretation
Leon Botstein
In the fall of 2001 the Akademie der Kiinste in Berlin hosted an exhibition
celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the pianist Artur
Schnabel (1882-1951). An excellent catalog of the exhibit was produced,
with multiple essays, documents, photographs, a work list of compositions,
and a bibliography.1 We can expect in the near future the publication of a
catalog of Schnabel's music by Anouk Jeschke and of a volume of symposium papers that includes an inventory of the Schnabel archive. As luck
would have it, when Schnabel was forced to leave Germany, he sent his papers and materials to Italy, where they remained in storage until his death.
Artur Schnabel holds an atypical if not remarkable place in the history of twentieth-century performance practice. He is remembered more
for his influence and approach than for his virtuosity. Both in his lifetime
and posthumously, he played a decisive role in how, in the twentieth century, the performance of historic repertory, pianists, and piano playing
came to be evaluated. Although trained by Theodor Leschetizky and fully
capable of continuing the post-Lisztian tradition of virtuosity, Schnabel's
musical intuitions and tastes led to a revolt against a superficial construct
of technique and virtuosity linked to a nineteenth-century notion of decoration and the theatrical. Although disdain for an aesthetic seemingly dependent on surface virtuosity was a current in music criticism dating from
Robert Schumann, the distinction between virtuosity and musical beauty
lost some of its credibility as the distance between high-minded musical
content and technical complexity narrowed over the course of the century.
What Schumann objected to were works for the piano that were glorified
pyrotechnics, near-circus acts that exploited a reductive musical rhetoric.
Most of the repertory of the mid-nineteenth century that falls into that
category is justly forgotten. But in the compositions of Franz Liszt and the
concerto repertory of the late nineteenth century, virtuosity and compositional ambition intersected. Commanding ideas with gravitas and admirable novelty that demanded evident technical prowess became quite
commonplace. Conversely, as in the example of Paganini, new standards
and expectations of technique opened up compositional possibilities. In
the cases of Chopin and Brahms, their demands on pianists hardly camouflaged a high degree of necessary technical control, finesse, and skill.
The Musical Quarterly 85(4), Winter 2001, pp. 587-594
© 2001 Oxford University Press
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Many of their works demanded a level of dexterity and proficiency well
beyond that of the amateur. Advanced technique derived from seemingly bland exercises leading to impressive skills became integral to the
musical arguments those works contained. A distinction between surface
and structure in terms of technique became as hard to argue as it always
had seemed to be for the piano writing in the concertos of Mozart and
Beethoven. Late romanticism utilized the rapidly expanding technical
capacities of instrumentalists in the service of the articulation of new
directions in musical logic and expression.
Virtuosity in its most reductive definition did indeed have its positive side. As the public grew accustomed to high rates of speed and accuracy and unexpected, novel feats, composers began to utilize and expand
the range of instrumental effects and possibilities. This is particularly audible in the violin repertory. The concertos of Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and
Joseph Joachim and the solo sonatas of Eugene Ysaye all testify to the
seamless integration of new rhythmic and harmonic invention with
sheer difficulty of realization. That the dichotomy between virtuosity
and high-minded musical values was perhaps just part of a successful but
self-serving novel early-romantic rhetoric of self-definition by a cadre of
musicians in Schumann's generation might be gleaned from contemplating the relation between technique and musical thought in the solo
sonatas and partitas of J. S. Bach. Nonetheless, an ongoing tradition persisted of mere showpiece writing for the violin and piano well into the
twentieth century, and the years in which Schnabel came of age as a
prodigy and then as a young adult (from the early 1890s to the outbreak
of World War I) were after all the high point in the popularity of amateur instrumentalism, particularly on the piano. The extent of active
amateurism was staggering and showed no signs of abating. That in turn
created a mass audience of informed observers with a palpable and infectious delight in and wonderment at agility, speed, power, and brilliance.
But the career Schnabel chose to pursue explicitly rejected the familiar and mainstream path of larger-than-life virtuosity, replete as it was
with the affectations of the grand personality, that most of his contemporaries followed. The young Schnabel early on had ambitions to write
serious music, and he is said even to have had lessons of a sort with
Brahms. Insofar as there was an ongoing tension between empty virtuosity and serious composition, Brahms represented the proponent of the
latter, although he was keenly respectful of the need not only for essential technical skills such as velocity and accuracy, but for less evident but
equally difficult aspects of technique required to render dense textures,
close voicing, and elaborate counterpoint effective.
What Schnabel did early in his career at the fin de siecle was to stake
out a position vis-a-vis the repertory that corresponded to a streak not only
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of antiromanticism, but also of revisionist neoclassicism. Among the least
well understood intellectual and aesthetic movements in fin-de-siecle Vienna was the revival of Biedermeier style, particularly in interior design
and architecture. The return to the premodem, pre-1848 Biedermeier era
represented an aesthetic movement that ran parallel to modernism and
helped lay the groundwork for the postwar neoclassicism of the 1920s. The
clean lines and simplicity of Biedermeier decor were historicist analogs to
the rejection of late-romantic gesture. In music the parallel phenomena
were the Mozart revival and the foregrounding by Schoenberg, Schenker,
and Schnabel of Viennese classicism as a model for the modern artist. The
impetus behind this revival, and behind Schnabel's own advocacy of Mozart and Schubert on the concert stage, was a concern for the cultural taste
of the public. With the mass audience came fear of the trivialization of art
and beauty, of the attraction to virtuosity and facile cliches of expression
that seemed to undercut presumably higher musical values. This debate
had prompted Hugo Riemann in the 1890s to polemicize ceaselessly
against the way training took place in music schools and conservatories.
Schnabel made his fame and reputation through the performance
of a repertory that he believed had receded from the concert stage as a
result of debased taste; except for Beethoven, the classical repertory was
considered insufficiently dramatic and spectacular. The Mozart concertos
and sonatas were examples. In truth, however, as the appetite for piano
playing and concert life continued to grow on both sides of the Atlantic
around 1900, an elite substratum of amateurs and professionals developed
whose personal encounter with Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert only
underscored a sense that they were in the presence of music of consummate greatness. It demanded a kind of attention and performance, as well
as dedication, that the great virtuosi trained in the image of Liszt seemed
either unable or unwilling to provide. There is of course an irony in this.
Liszt, Hans von Biilow, and Anton Rubinstein all possessed their own
version of Beethoven worship. Von Biilow and Rubinstein were among
the first to pioneer "historical" concerts in the 1870s centered on the
thirty-two sonatas of Beethoven.
What Schnabel pioneered was a specific approach to the texts of
musical classicism, one bereft of evident improvisation, extroverted subjectivism, or the overlay of romantic interpretation. Schnabel sought to
counter the advice contained in Reinecke's 1894 manual on the performance of the Beethoven sonatas. As Schnabel recognized, the classical
repertory and its performance and interpretation suffered from a gender
prejudice. They were condescendingly considered the province of women,
as the subtitle of Reinecke's book—Briefe an eine Freundin—suggests.
Just as the furniture designs of Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann
stand in stark contrast to late Victorian opulence in their neo-Biedermeier
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simplicity of line and use of material, so too did Schnabel seek to reveal
the elegance and profundity that lay beneath the veneer of merely restrained simplicity or latent emotionalism of the classical canon of musical works. Schnabel's renditions of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert
were therefore revelatory to the public in the years before 1933, as the
essays in the aforementioned catalog make plain. Schnabel's intervention as both solo performer and a participant with his friend and collaborator, the violinist Carl Flesch, and others in chamber music performance,
as well as his appearances with orchestra, had the shock value and influence that can be compared to the postwar period-instrument movement
and, in the case of a single individual, perhaps to Glenn Gould's initial
long-playing record account of Bach's GoldbergVariations in 1956. To read
William dock's account of his chance hearing of Schnabel playing Schubert is instructive for remembering how radical and novel Schnabel's pianism and musicianship was.2 Nonetheless, it can still be said to retain, to
our ears today, residues of its romantic origins.
Indeed, Schnabel's approach to interpretation and to the definition
of what it meant to command an instrument had a decisive influence on
the shape of twentieth-century performance practice. His approach was
only partially paralleled for the violin in the work of Flesch and Joseph
Szigeti. But in the case of Flesch there was something far less doctrinaire
and more eclectic at work. Flesch's pupils included many violinists who
continued in the late-nineteenth-century tradition of flashy virtuosity.
Schnabel was closer to Szigeti in his engagement with contemporary
music and in his fundamental reconsideration of the sound and practice
associated with his instrument. If the contrast in Schnabel's case became
the distance between himself and figures such as Rubinstein, for Szigeti
the contrast was with Jeno Hubay. Yet Szigeti continued to play showpieces of virtuosity, albeit in his own manner. Among the most revolutionary and lasting aspects of Schnabel's legacy is the notion not only of
a close reading and some presumed fidelity to a text and its "true" meaning, but of the perpetual inadequacy of the performer in the effort to
represent the music and reveal its power. In place of the notion that performance is an enterprise not too distant from composition and improvisation, and therefore marked by freedom and inspiration, came the idea
that is recalled in the title of Claude Frank's introduction to the catalog:
"Great Music Is Always Better than It Can Be Played."3
This is, from our point of view, perhaps an absurd idea. Does the
music exist unplayed? And even if it did, how do we know it is great?
And does the quality of greatness suggest a fixed or idealized account
that can be said to be right? Crucial, of course, is the notion that a set
of works exists that can be placed into a category called "great" by virtue
of their texts alone. Schnabel was in this way crucial in the elevation of
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a particular group of composers, of an attitude to form and meaning, and
the isolation of certain works to the top of a hierarchy of aesthetic worth. A
second premise was the ideal that there was arguably a right way to recreate
these works. Third was the ultimately unattainable correct interpretation
was discernible from the explicit and implicit information printed in the
musical text. Perhaps most disturbing was the belief that the compositional
content and intent of a great piece were permanently out of the reach of any
performer.
At the end of the day, a cultlike ideology concerning performance
was perpetrated on more than one generation of willing pupils. Every performance of a work of Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert was somehow a
failure that fell short of what might have been. A secular religion of interpretation emerged in which guilt and insufficiency were hallmarks alongside the noble struggle. Much like Tolstoy's view of the imperatives of
Christian ethics, Schnabel's legacy can be set alongside other doctrinaire
ideologies of the early twentieth century. The contemporary re-creation of
great works was a constant reminder of moral inadequacy and imperfection
of the individual as well as of a cultural decline from a mythic past. The
performer who ignored the highest ideals demanded by the texts of these
classical works was condemned as a kind of sinner who had succumbed to
the temptations of shortcuts, superficiality, and mere entertainment.
It is not surprising, then, that for many decades after his death,
Schnabel's recordings and the memory of his performances were held up
as the work of a prophet. However, when one considers these recordings
and looks closely at Schnabel's own editions of the Beethoven sonatas,
particularly from the vantage point of half a century, his achievement
and ideology can be viewed with affectionate criticism, if not skepticism.
There is very little that can be deemed authentic and historically justified about Schnabel's interpretive decisions and suggestions. It is a sobering thought that one generation's notion of historical reconstruction
turns out to be, from a subsequent generation's view, yet another artificial
construct, with no more legitimacy than the apparent interpretive abandon Anton Rubinstein applied to his performances of the Beethoven
sonatas. From a distance one sees that Schnabel's approach, particularly
in the hands of his disciples, took on somewhat of the aspect of a rigid
doctrine. A few carefully trained high priests convinced of a strategy to
try to understand sacred texts recruited others to struggle with them to
plumb the ineffable depth of meaning. However, the way the spiritual
truths contained in these classical texts were formulated turns out itself
to be a form of late-romantic imposition. The revolt that Schnabel represented against the interpretive cliches and expectations of the generation
of Teresa Carreno, Eugen d'Albert, and Ernst von Dohnanyi, was more
influenced by that to which it was in direct opposition than Schnabel
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might have liked to think. Listening to Schnabel today is an experience
in hearing something quite old-fashioned and dated if one listens only
from the perspective of the claims that he and his supporters put forward,
namely that they were engaged in a form of truth-telling and in the
restoration of an objective rendition that stood in opposition to illegitimate subjectivity.
Popular accounts of the history of interpretation often credit
Toscanini with an ideology of faithfulness to the text and the composer's
intentions. But in truth, Toscanini never claimed anything more than
his own authority and opinion. He never sought to marshal an elaborate
intellectual apparatus of any kind, philosophical or historical, to buttress
his interpretive style. He was not loath to reorchestrate, reedit, and do
what every major interpreter had done in the nineteenth century. What
was fresh about his view was his rejection of this species of romantic
style. He, like Schnabel, liked to justify his novel approach with the use
of the rhetoric of objectivity. This rhetoric thrived, as the phrase "Neue
Sachlichkeit" suggests, on the notion that the postromantic was somehow more honest and true to the composer and history than the stylized
practices of the late nineteenth century.
The difference between Schnabel and Toscanini, and even Schnabel
and Flesch, is that Schnabel's strategy to the repertory and to performance,
and to music-making as such, blossomed into an influential dynamic attitude toward the training of musicians and the critical vocabulary by
which performance came to be considered. Schnabel and his acolytes,
particularly between the wars and during the immediate postwar years in
America, became the darlings of self-styled connoisseurs and intellectuals. A new generation of pianists who studied with Schnabel or were influenced by him took a distinctly Schnabel-like approach to the repertory.
Schnabel himself may have been an adventuresome modernist as a composer, but he played little if any contemporary music. With the exception
of Rudolf Firkusny, the subsequent generation of pianists who chose the
Schnabellike path neither composed nor played modern music at all. Furthermore, the glorification of the classical repertory and early romanticism,
and with it the music of Brahms, became institutionalized in summer festivals such as the Marlboro Festival. A cult of chamber music as the pinnacle of the pure musical experience flourished within a subset of music
professionals and aficionados. The bombast and Wagnerian scale of latenineteenth-century symphonic music stood in stark contrast. The justification for rejecting an entire range of repertory, particularly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (with notable exceptions such as classics
from the Second Viennese School and Max Reger), was the charge of superficiality and the belief that SchnabePs core repertory—Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert (curiously, not Haydn), along with J. S. Bach—was
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an inexhaustible and superior treasure trove comparable to classicism in
literature, including Homer, Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aeschylus.
But perhaps when one looks back on Schnabel's achievement and
his approach to teaching, one is struck by an indirect and disturbing result of his legacy. Piano teachers who sought to continue in his traditions, like many epigones, managed to carry forward form and procedure
without necessarily doing justice to the substance. Sociologists call this
process "routinization." The charismatic or spiritual becomes mechanical
through codification. There is little doubt that Schnabel's performances
and strategies were inspired precisely because they were brilliant and
emotionally charged contemporary aesthetic revisions that struck his
audiences as wholly new. He communicated to his listeners an interior
to musical texts and levels of meaning that seemed to have been glossed
over by his predecessors.
In the hands of his imitators, however, rigidity and even a level of
self-loathing became institutionalized. Ironically, the status of performance
itself became degraded. Nothing could be more paralyzing than the notion
that no matter how gifted a young pianist was, he or she would never get it
right, no matter how great the effort. Furthermore, to perform Beethoven's
op. 110 freely without sufficient deep study could be a form of sacrilege.
Spending countless hours on every bar, every phrase, perhaps every note,
made one's command of repertory limited. It easily engendered high
anxiety, and more stage fright than usual. The emotional reward of performance was not a sense of satisfaction but a sense of falling short, of not
having been adequate to a sacred task. Public performance was interpreted
as a species of religious combat, perhaps a form of trial and interrogation
against a noble, superhuman ideal. An obsession with detail and in inflexibility about the possibility of different readings replaced the romantic
ideal of spontaneity, joy, and invention with fear and misplaced reverence.
Intellectual snobbery was easily nurtured, as was disdain for the enterprise
that Schnabel himself was committed to—the writing of new music. All
this was quite foreign to Schnabel's own career, which was based on his
crucial and radical departure from existing conventions and practices.
For all his admirable antifascist politics, in the end Schnabel, like
many of his contemporaries, absorbed more of a Germanic authoritarianism than we might wish to remember. His greatness and originality are
not in dispute. But looking back at his achievement and career reminds
one of how easy it is to invent orthodoxies in music, and how readily
disciples can be misled. We can see the way gifted young people attach
themselves to charismatic individuals who seem to have a formula or a
key to solving a dauntingly complex puzzle by delineating one true path.
It is well known that Brahms was suspicious of cults of personality. His
objection was less to Wagner as a composer and more to Wagner as
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self-styled prophet and therefore to Wagnerians. Schnabel encouraged
intense loyalty and following. In the end he is not responsible for the
cultlike admiration that followed his death.
It seems perfectly obvious that there is no music that can properly
be said to be greater than any performance. The notion of a textual reality that implies a perfect ideal is perhaps odd, if not nonsensical. Equally
disturbing is the notion that there is a right performance or a best performance of anything. Equally spurious is the notion that a text holds a
complete set of truths. Each performance is a reading, and the criteria for
judgment of a performance are obviously always subjective and contingent. Any given text contains legitimate standards of minimum accuracy.
These are commonsense standards of adequacy and necessary but insufficient approximations of the musical logic and structure. But beyond
this basic albeit daunting standard of professionalism, all aesthetic criteria of judgment, even when they are cloaked in the language of historical
appropriateness and scholarly standards of textual and stylistic legitimacy, are in the end evaluated by listeners and performers in a specific
context and circumstance. The range of choice reflects a multiplicity
of variables and instabilities. Music, in the final analysis, exists only in
temporal space and performance. The inexhaustibility of performance,
interpretation, and circumstances of communication through music is
what privileges the performer. Novelty, invention, and the courage to
improvise and interpret give the performer and performance significance.
In remembering and honoring Artur Schnabel, we would do well to jettison the implied contempt of performance that his generation, including
Schoenberg and Stravinsky, celebrated. We need to put to rest the search
for definitive readings and the sense of guilt that there is music so great
that we can never do it justice. What makes Schnabel's core repertory so
powerful is its inexhaustibility, its resistance to repetition, and its unique
capacity to be reinvented by new generations of performers, just as
Schnabel did in his own time. It is the example of Schnabel as pianist,
composer, and inventor if not improvisor of interpretation, and not the
ideologies his followers and devotees cultivated, that merits imitation,
examination, and remembrance. This may be obvious, but it merits repeating, if only to do justice to Schnabel's greatness and originality.
Notes
1. Heribert Henrich and Daniela Reinhold, eds., Artur Schnabel: Musiker—Musician,
J882-195J (Hofheim: Wolke, 2001).
2.
"Schnabel und Berlin," in Henrich and Reinhold, 23-32.
3.
In Henrich and Reinhold, 7-8.