Countdown to Planyavsky at MIT (15 days)

Photo: The 1742 Schmahl organ in Sitzberg, near Zürich.

Peter Planyavsky was one of Heiller's greatest students and closest friends. He later became Heiller's biographer. Who was this Heiller character?

Anton Heiller was the greatest interpreter of Bach's organ works of his time -- maybe of all time. But there are several facts that are very interesting about this.

First: It's hard to think of anyone else of Heiller's generation or the generation before who played Bach anything like him. From whom did he learn how to play Bach like that? Who influenced him? Where did he get it? (I asked that question once to my teacher, the Heiller student Yuko Hayashi. She answered, "From Bach.")

Second: Heiller could as easily have had a career as a conductor. In fact, at age 23 he was offered the job as conductor of the Vienna State Opera! He turned it down. Why? So that he could devote more time to playing Bach on the organ!

There isn't space to speak of Heiller's Bach playing in any detail. But there is an anecdote worth repeating, told to me in 1994 by Yuko Hayashi.

YH: He played the Orgelbüchlein up in the hills near Zürich [Sitzberg]. An organ restored by Metzler [in 1961, built by G. F. Schmahl c. 1742] And I was assisting him, turning pages. Jean-Claude Zehnder was there. By the way, I'm not a good assistant, so I stayed away from doing it. But that one time in Switzerland when I did do it, it was so EASY. He had this rhythm in his body, and he didn't have to do anything like that [nodding]. He didn't have to nod, he BREATHED. And I felt his breathing. It was so easy.
LC: Like a singer, he breathed, and you knew exactly where to turn the page or pull the stop.
YH: And he was so relaxed. Before the concert he was very nervous. But when the music started … CALM.
LC: So he played the concert.
YH: First he had dinner. Then he went up to this mountain, when into the church, and started to try out registrations, one after another, while Jean-Claude Zehnder and a few students from out in the church would say, "That's good." Then it was time for the concert. Double the amount of people that the church could hold showed up! And you know what he did? He announced to the audience, "Half of you go back into town for dinner and come back later." He played the recital, the whole Orgelbüchlein. He smoked for ten minutes -- in those days he smoked. Now the second audience that had had dinner was in place in the church, and he played the recital AGAIN! I got tired just turning the pages. He got better and better. Meanwhile, there were cows around. The cows liked the music. You could see them through the windows and hear their beautiful bells.
LC: And this was all happening during the concert?
YH: Yes.
LC: It must have been idyllic, having this mixture of nature and classical music.
YH: Then I understand, after that, he recorded.
LC: He made his Orgelbüchlein record.
YH: Yes.

Peter Planyavsky plays a free organ recital at Kresge Auditorium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on Friday, January 27 at 8 p.m.

Vous jouerez du Mozart en mémoire de moi

(or, Mozart By Total Immersion)

How is it that Chopin was my favorite composer, yet his final words on his deathbed -- "Play Mozart in my memory" -- never made sense to me?

Mozart? Why Mozart?

I used to think that Mozart was certainly a Wunderkind, and certainly he was on to something with his latest works, but had he only finished his Requiem and lived longer -- I thought -- maybe then would Mozart have written some great stuff. I held it against him that his music didn't seem "crazy" enough.

But my dear teacher, Yuko Hayashi, warned me during my teens, "Don't judge a piece based on how other people play it." This was a genuine fault of mine, and Mozart was the biggest casualty of it. I was poisoned by the profusion of sane Mozart playing.

On June 14th I had the privilege of performing Mozart's Piano Trio (K. 548) with my beloved colleagues, the Lavazza Chamber Ensemble.

I hadn't played any Mozart in years (save an occasional accompanying gig). I had never played a piece of Mozart chamber music. And for various reasons, I didn't begin practicing this piece -- I mean, I didn't even open the book -- until the Monday evening before the concert.

Mozart by total immersion.

No matter what piece I am preparing, I feel the struggle between preparedness and spontaneity. If every note is too secure, the result isn't music-making that lives and breathes. If the notes aren't secure enough, the music sounds spontaneous but reckless. Every composer forces the interpreter to find that balance; but with many composers the balance is quite easy to find. In a 20th-century étude, you'd better be sure and prepare all the notes. In a lyrical, Romantic slow movement, it might be better not to plan the exact rhythm or dynamics of every note.

But what do you do in Mozart? Every note has to be perfect; the tiniest smudge in Mozart is like a coffee stain on a white shirt. Yet if it's too controlled and calculated, it ceases to be Mozart at all.

I suddenly, but begrudingly, started to agree with a former teacher, who a quarter century ago maintained that Mozart was the most difficult composer to play. I would name a composer; she'd answer, "Mozart is still more difficult."

The problem with most Mozart playing in the 20th century: it wasn't just unemotional -- it was antiemotional. This was the greatest defect in "historically informed" musicians. To reason "Romantic = emotional" is in itself not too harmful. But as soon as you reverse it, "Emotional = Romantic," now you have a real problem. All of a sudden, musicians started stripping away the emotions like old paint. Bach became robotic, Mozart became robotic, everything pre-Beethoven became robotic.

I remember Stephen Drury saying in a masterclass, "Never forget that a Mozart concerto is virtuoso music." I would add to that that Mozart is dramatic, operatic music. The Historical types feared that it would be the Mahler type of drama. So they played it safe: throw out all the drama. And the Tchaikovsky type of virtuosity? Better throw out all the virtuosity as well.

To play Mozart without drama is to play Schubert without lyricism. (But then, some people do that, too.)

But how do you make Mozart always elegant and simultaneously always dramatic?

And how do you play Mozart virtuosically? Better play him very fast! The second biggest problem with today's Mozart playing -- and not a problem that with which we Lavazza folk did not wrestle.

So how did I overcome these obstacles and learn K. 548 in mere days? I tried out a new idea. I set a timer, and I practiced for 25-minute sessions. My breaks between sessions varied, but they were never less than 10 minutes and never more than an hour. And I did not listen to any recordings. (To this day, I still have not heard a recording of this work.)

To think that I had held it against Mozart that his music wasn't "crazy" enough. Despite its tonality of C major, K. 548 certainly gets crazy. Mozart tosses you sudden harmonic and melodic shifts all over the place. And yet the music always flows like oil. How Mozart achieved this dichotomy perhaps will never be known.

There's something interesting about C major. Several passages occur twice, first in the exposition and again, in a different key, in the recapitulation. When one of these occurrences was in C major, that was always the more difficult one to play. I have decided that C major is by far the most difficult key to play in on a keyboard instrument. Students learn C major first because it's musically the easiest. But note that Chopin started his students not with C major but with B major. There's no question that the more accidentals a key has, the easier its scale is to play. (Or like my father once said: "If you find the right key, you can play in any flat.")

A very interesting Indian woman came up to me at the post-concert reception. She herself was a pianist. She asked, "Are you a Mozart specialist?" I was floored by the question, but I couldn't help but feel that, at the very least, I must have achieved the musical effects that I was trying to achieve, for her to ask such a question. Then she floored me again by declaring, "Mozart is the most difficult composer, and C major is the most difficult key to play in!" Clearly this woman got it.

In Search of Sound

From the Mailbag

Well-meaning readers continue to try to explain to me the concept of felix culpa. I was being facetious; I understood it all along. It may be summarized by the following, unofficial English translation: "Forbidden fruit produces a terrible jam."

In my last post I lamented some of the differences between adolescence and adulthood. The 16-year-old will go to war for his principles, even when bombs fall on bridges. The 38-year-old works harder to protect the bridges but is more reluctant to defend his principles. But as one reader brilliantly and unforgettably commented: "The trick is to give up the foolishness but not the courage."

***

One of the greatest privileges I have experienced as a musician is the search for sound. It is one of the noblest searches we can carry out. We can search for the correct notes, or for the "inner meaning" of the music (assuming music always has an inner meaning, which I doubt. As a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, maybe an Allegro in A major and 4/4 time is just an Allegro in A major and 4/4 time).

But even when I was teenager (when I knew everything), I used to say, "What good is food that doesn't taste good?" By the same token, how can a musician claim to have been "faithful to the composer's intentions" and simultaneously make a bad sound? Doesn't the composer intend for his or her music to "sound good" on some level?

In my teens I always defended Eugene Ormandy, and I was right. They said his interpretations weren't "profound" enough. But what is more profound than making a Romantic masterwork explode with beautiful sonic colors? Isn't that what the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony or Also Sprach Zarathustra are supposed to do?

There are good experiences , great experiences, and life-changing experiences. Working with Dr. Jon Gillock and Yuko Hayashi at the Boston Organ Academy last January fell into the third category.

Yuko had been my organ teacher from 1986 to 1989, when I was 15 to 18 years old. With Jon I had never worked until last January. Had I known either one of them in my lifetime, I would consider myself blest. To have worked with them both -- and during the same week, no less! -- was a miracle.

Everyone has their baggage. My suitcases are filled with agonies about practicing that stem from my piano teacher, with whom I studied between the ages of 11.5 and 15. She spoke much about suffering for music but never once spoke about the love of music. The world knows of her competition-winning students. The world may never know of the students who crumbled. And one day the world will marvel at how few of said competition winners were still playing beyond age 30.

Along came Jon, who reported that when he practices, when he comes to something beautiful, he stops. And he plays the beautiful passage again.

Do you realize that my life changed at that moment?

Stunned, I asked, "But I thought you weren't SUPPOSED to stop when there was a passage you could play. I thought you were supposed to budget your practice time and only practice the parts you didn't know."

As soon as those words came from my mouth, I already knew the answer. What am I practicing if 95% of my playing is music that I cannot play? In effect I'm practicing to NOT be able to play. And even more pertinently: what is the point of wasting time out of my life practicing if I'm not enjoying what I'm doing?

And so it's all about practicing the notes of a piece. It's about what music you want to make in the piece. "Otherwise," asked Jon, "how do you know what to practice for?"

Another sentence at which my life changed.

Jon is quite possibly the most musical keyboardist I have ever encountered in my life. Even if someone put a gun to his head, and someone else put another gun to the other side of his head, I don't think he would be capable of playing even one note unmusically. But I think he trained himself to be that way. He didn't fabricate the God-given, innate musicality, but he trained himself to bring it out -- or to allow it to come out.

As for Yuko, the years have not diluted her zeal for seeking after musical expression. No matter what we're talking about, be it Bach or Brahms, be it clavichords or modern pianos, the conversation seems always to be pulled, as if by a magnet, to the issue of musical expression. For her that is not the bigger picture -- it is the only picture. All other details are merely aspects of that picture.

I remember, as a teenager, asking Yuko how she felt about a certain instrument. She said, "You mean in terms of sound?" But in the end, that is what mattered to Yuko about an organ. It was never, "I like this organ, it's a tracker. I dislike that organ, it's an electropneumatic." Our conversations never went that way. They always went the way of sound and of music.

I'm told that much of Jon's practicing is spent on registration. How blissful it must be if in practicing, instead of thinking what notes you want to hit, you think of what sound you want to create. Jon has been known to sit down at not-quite-world-class organs and make music on them on a level that leaves both the audience and his colleagues dumbfounded.