The complete idiot's guide to classical music (22 page)

In 1831, though, the 19-year-old Liszt heard Paganini give one of his stupendously exciting recitals (and saw women throwing themselves at the violinist’s feet thereafter). Suddenly, his whole world changed. Liszt went into seclusion with his piano, determined to emerge as the greatest piano virtuoso known to humankind and the greatest lover known to womankind. He succeeded handsomely in both quests. His deep-set eyes and confident manner set women ablaze, while his playing induced them to shrieks of ecstasy and occasional swooning. His fans would rush madly to the stage after a performance, desperate to collect his broken piano strings as prized mementos.

Liszt, ever the consummate showman, reveled in all the attention, and did what he could to contribute to it. He would sometimes appear wearing elegant doeskin gloves, which he would remove with sensual grace and casually toss to the floor; other times, he would have wreaths and garlands strewn around the piano, or else he’d walk out on stage with various medals and decorations dangling from his lapel. When he returned in triumph to his native Hungary, he appeared in full Hungarian Magyar costume, complete with a jewel-studded sword. Take that, Liberace!

 
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Sometimes Liszt got so excited that he would swoon himself, right in the middle of a performance. According to one eyewitness, “he fainted in the arms of a friend who was turning pages for him, and we bore him out in a strong fit of hysterics.”

Liszt was not without his rivals, chief among them Sigismond Thalberg (1812–1871), who had developed a method of outlining a melody with both thumbs, while his fingers traced all sorts of gymnastic figurations on either side. Contemporary reports indicate that his playing sounded as if three hands were traversing the keyboard, and during his concerts, otherwise refined ladies and gentlemen would stand on their velvet chairs to see how he did it. Like Liszt, Thalberg made a specialty of opera fantasies, taking one or more themes from popular stage works and swirling them through a whole series of virtuosic variations, usually including a quiet, melancholy episode for a soulful change of pace, but then bringing out the big virtuoso guns for a socko finish.

 
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An elegant Parisian apartment belonging to Princess Cristina Belgiojoso-Trivulzio was jammed to the rafters in 1837, when the entrepreneurial lady charged a hefty admission fee for a piano duel she had arranged between Liszt and Thalberg. (This was before the Princess was arrested for hiding the embalmed body of her ex-lover in her closet.) Thalberg played his splashy fantasy on themes from Rossini’s
Moses
; Liszt followed with his own Grand Fantasy on Pacini’s
La Niobe
. “At the close of the duel,” reported the critic Jules Janin, “a profound silence fell over the noble arena. The two men were adjudged equals, thus two victors, and none vanquished.”

Alkan (1813–1888)—the stage name of Charles Henri Valentin Morhange—was another amazing pianist who might have become a much greater threat to Liszt’s keyboard supremacy had he not become more and more eccentric as he went along. He had a morbid fear of the outdoors, often refusing to leave his apartment for months at a time; he would perform for a few years, then pull back and refuse to appear in public. (During one such lull, he didn’t perform on stage for 28 years.) Eventually, Alkan retreated into a kind of monastic existence, leaving his mark on the world only through a series of incredibly difficult pieces, among them “Chemin de Fer” (1844), which seems to be the first ever description of a railroad train, and a set of 24 etudes in all the major and minor keys.

 
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Alkan’s death was as odd as his life. Apparently, he was reaching for a religious volume on the top shelf when a bookcase toppled over and crushed him.

Europe was the center of the classical music universe in the 19th century, but Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869), born into a Creole family, staked out his keyboard claim in New Orleans, where he began to play the piano at the age of three. By the time he was seven, Louis had advanced sufficiently to replace his indisposed teacher at the organ of the St. Louis Cathedral, and at 12, his talents had become so prodigious that he was sent to study in Paris. (Seven-year-old Camille Saint-Saens was one of his classmates.) Chopin predicted that Gottschalk would become “the king of pianists,” and Berlioz said that he was “one of the very small number who possess all the different elements of a consummate pianist.”

All the while composing delightful little piano pieces based on Creole rhythms and folk tunes, Gottschalk went on concert tours in France, Switzerland, and Spain (where the Queen awarded him the Order of Isabella Cross), and he returned to America as a celebrity. Like Liszt, Gottschalk’s good looks and dramatic stage manner (according to one report, “his large and dark eyes had peculiarly drooping lids, which always appeared half-closed when he played”) made him a favorite among the ladies, whose favors he gratefully accepted at any opportunity. There was a downside however; Gottschalk used to grumble that he kept hitting wrong notes because he was distracted by the pretty young girls who flocked to his concerts.

Gottschalk spent about five years in Central and South America, but returned to North America in 1862 to begin a three-year tour that took him from New York to California, where a newspaper figured out that in the process, he had travelled 15,000 miles by rail to give more than 1,100 concerts. He probably would have racked up even more mileage, except that one of his romantic exploits involved a young lady from a seminary in San Francisco, and the bad press—“Vagabond Musician Should Suffer Death” was one of the more complimentary headlines—made it seem wise to head back to South America. This he did, sneaking out of town in the dead of the night only a few steps ahead of a posse. He continued to compose, and to perform in many South American cities until he was felled by a mysterious disease, variously described as yellow fever, cholera, and peritonitis, collapsing on stage in Rio de Janeiro (as the probably apocryphal story goes, during a performance of his own piece
Morte—A Lamentation
). He died a month later, age 40, and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

 
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Even though Gottschalk was a born and bred Southerner, his sympathies lay with the North in the Civil War. In 1862 he wrote a rabble-rousing piano piece called
The Union,
its massive chords suggesting the sounds of war, while quotations from such patriotic tunes as “Yankee Doodle,” “Hail Columbia,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” made it clear which side was going to win.

Not too many people alive today were lucky enough to hear the great turn-of-the-century pianists in person. If they did, they heard them at the end of their careers when their talents had started to erode.

There was Vladimir de Pachmann, a Chopin specialist whose grimaces, audience chats, and other stage antics were so outrageous that critic James Huneker dubbed him the “Chopinzee” (George Bernard Shaw once wrote that de Pachmann “gave his well-known pantomimic performance, with accompaniments by Chopin); and Leopold Godowsky, who decided that the Chopin etudes weren’t difficult enough, so he devised a way of playing two of them at the same time (in an incredibly difficult piece called “Badinage”). There was Moriz Rosenthal, whose diminutive stature and great keyboard power earned him the nickname “The Little Giant of the Piano;” and Josef Hofmann, who made his American debut playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 1 at the Metropolitan Opera House at age 11 to such wild acclaim that he was immediately booked on a 52-concert tour. He actually gave more than 40 recitals before the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children stepped in to stop others from exploiting him. Godowsky and de Pachmann lived into the 1930s; Rosenthal and Hofmann into the 1940s, as did the two even more legendary pianists we’ll discuss next in somewhat greater detail.

Presidents Truman and Nixon played the piano a bit, and Bill Clinton has been known to trot out his saxophone, but none of those eminent gentlemen could lay claim to being a highly skilled musician. Not so with Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), the fabled pianist who served in Washington as the first representative of the new Polish republic after World War I. In 1919, he became the Premier of Poland, and later that country’s delegate to the League of Nations.

 
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In his official post as Premier, Paderewski attended the Versailles Treaty Conference, where he was introduced to Prime Minister Clemenceau of France. “You are M. Paderewski, the famous pianist?” the Frenchman asked. “And now the Premier of Poland?” Receiving a bowed assent from the pianist-politician, Clemenceau is supposed to have heaved a great sigh, adding sadly, “What a comedown.”