SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD  LECTURE / RECITAL REVIEW
 

Festival Pontino (I) Charles Rosen lecture-recital -  the last years of Beethoven and Chopin: Caetani Castle, Sermoneta, Festival Pontino. 6.7. 2010 (JB)


Charles Rosen is widely held to be the world’s leading professor of pianism –all those aspects of composition and performance which make up the world relating to the piano. As a boy, he studied with Moriz Rosenthal, who provided Rosen with a pianistic facility, which when coupled with the Rosen prodigious memory, equipped him for his distinguished career. His skills with the English language equal those of his piano technique. The entire pianistic repertory seems to be firmly in his mind and fingers, only waiting to be called out. That brings to mind Liszt, with whom Rosenthal had indeed studied. But Rosen is more than a torchbearer of a great tradition: he is forever looking forward, refusing to be entangled in the shadows of the past, however fascinatingly mysterious some of these shadows may be. And anyway, when Rosen enters the scene, they don’t remain mysterious for very long.

Now in his eighties, Charles Rosen showed not the slightest sign of diminishing his familiar intellectual vigour in his lecture-recital on the last years of Beethoven and Chopin at the Festival Pontino in the Caetani castle at Sermoneta, last Tuesday. He insisted that this should be a seminar, rather than a lecture. He invited the audience to interrupt him whenever they had a question or if they thought he was staying too long with any one subject. Those present were eight young pianists and me. Another twenty five young pianists were assisting Elissò Virsaladze’s piano lessons in another room. This was unimaginative timetabling on the part of the organizers; the Rosen seminar ought to have been scheduled at a time when the Virsaladze pupils were free. All the same, those present asked some stimulating questions.

Rosen began with some basics which every student of Beethoven knows: only six of the thirty-two piano sonatas were written between 1812 and 1827. Beethoven was struggling with his deafness in this period (it was total by Opus 111); Broadwood had built an extra loud piano for him, but eventually that would prove useless too. In the end, the composer would declare that the piano was unable to contain his musical ideas.

What is interesting is that all these often-named factors are audible in the music of the final years. (I would make an exception for the Mass, but as this was a seminar for young pianists, I did not want to distract attention from the main material.) So here is a composer striving to get music out of an instrument which he is eventually forced to abandon. And posterity judges him a success largely because he was (by his own criteria) a failure.

The struggle is the key to understanding this. Where there are metronome markings, USE THEM ! declares Rosen. Beethoven debated endlessly with himself, making alterations and adjustments, before he committed these speeds to writing. A slightest variant of speed will give you another piece of music. It might be an interesting piece of music but it will certainly not be what Beethoven wanted. So every pianist who approaches these late works should strive for the same precision of speed as the composer did in writing.

But this is only the beginning. Within the metronome markings there are also such indications as espressivo. –and in late Beethoven, that always means a relaxing of the tempo, adds Rosen.

He then agreed with me that Italians are advantaged by instinctively knowing the difference between such terms as rallentando and allargando since both are used in everyday Italian: the first indicates a slowing down and is the word painted on the middle of the road as you approach a halt-sign at a dangerous crossroad; the second calls for a kind of rubato –a broadening of tempo, of rob a bit to give back a bit –a feeling of the flexibility of the boundaries of the tempo. The music will only come alive when the pianist has incorporated these senses into the music. Beethoven here, by necessity, hands over his struggle to the performer.

Charles Rosen played some interesting uses of sequences in Opus 106, where the sequences sound as though they are bursting at the seams, as though Beethoven wants to tear them up. But what a creative tearing-up!

Then there are the trills which don’t end in the concertos, but especially in Opus 111. Here, the trill doesn’t end a phrase, the music continues throughout the trill which leads onward to somewhere else. In the same way, Beethoven discovered that the smallest elaboration can become a fugue subject.

Chopin’s major influences says Rosen, were Bach and the bel canto opera. The second is at its clearest in the cello melody in Bellini’s Norma which becomes the Opus 25 no 7 Study. Or take the slow movement of the B flat minor sonata which sounds like pure Bellini.

Very useful to these young pianists was Rosen’s illustrations of the right use of the pedal in Chopin. Keep in mind, he said, that there are two proper uses for the pedal in Chopin: the first is to sustain the bass and the second to bring out the interior voices when Chopin becomes (Bach) contrapuntal. Over-use of the pedal can blur and obscure these internal voices, so very rapid movements of the pedal are called for. Rosenthal used to insist that his pupils played some of these passages with no pedal at all.

Charles Rosen was expressing a majority opinion when he declared the Mazurkas to be Chopin’s finest achievement: to take that simple dance form and make great music out of it is enough to include him the world’s leading composers. Rosen insists that the edition of Brahms of Chopin’s music (the sonatas, ballades and mazurkas) remains the best available, though pressed by a student, he agreed that the recent Polish edition is pretty good too.

A postscript conversation with Charles Rosen is worth reporting. He told me he had never charged for a piano lesson as he felt he owed this work gratis to future pianists in return for what had been given to him. He was studying at Julliard when he successfully auditioned at the age of eleven to have lessons with Moriz Rosenthal. No money was charged for these lessons, which were also with Hedwig Kanner, Rosenthal’s wife, but at the time, unknown to Rosen, his parents had made a contract with the Rosenthals that fifteen percent of Charles’s earnings would go to them when he began to play. But Rosenthal died when Charles was seventeen and the maestro had still not allowed his pupil to play in public. However, when Rosen made his debut at the age of twenty one, Hedwig Kanner-Rosenthal was surprised to receive money she had not known about. Rosen was still studying with her. It is worth adding that she was a pupil of Leschetitzky who is on record saying that he never taught the same piece in the same way: every pupil had a different kind of lesson depending on that pupil’s innate abilities. Many Leschetitzky pupils carried on the tradition.

Jack Buckley

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