Clara Haskil, In Spite of Herself

However bad your life has been or is, you might be cheered to know that Clara Haskil probably had it worse.

Not that she didn’t have some advantages; she started out life as a musical prodigy, and seemed equally gifted at the piano as at the violin. Here’s one description of her powers:

She was not yet five when a professor at the Bucharest Academy visited her parent’s home and played a Mozart sonata. When he finished she repeated the sonata perfectly, while simultaneously transposing it into another key, all without having had any musical instruction.

Right—not your average five-year old….

Later, she graduated with the Premier Prix from the Paris Conservatory, where she studied with Alfred Cortot (she had earlier stuided with Busoni). She began to tour, but then, at the age of 18, everything grounded to a halt: she spent four years in a plaster cast, trying to correct curvature of the spine.

Her health, it seems, was never great. In 1941, she had a tumor on her optic nerve, and had to have surgery by a doctor smuggled out of Paris. And all through her life, by all accounts, she was frail.

She also had a phenomenal memory, once playing four pages of a composition she had never seen but only heard years before. And also—very nice for a pianist—she had large hands.

Then, in about 1920, she was afflicted with stage fright; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Frequent illnesses, combined with extreme stage fright that appeared in 1920, kept her from critical or financial success. Most of her life was spent in abject poverty. It was only after World War II, during a series of concerts in the Netherlands in 1949, that she began to win acclaim.

Born in 1895, she would have been 54 before “winning acclaim.”

But what acclaim it was—everyone was raving about her: here’s Charlie Chaplin:

"In my lifetime I have met three geniuses; Professor Einstein, Winston Churchill, and Clara Haskil. I am not a trained musician but I can only say that her touch was exquisite, her expression wonderful, and her technique extraordinary." (Swiss Radio interview, 19 April 1961.)

Well, everyone was raving but Clara; here’s  one account:

In years to come I heard her many times, both publicly and privately. For these experiences I remain eternally grateful. As I left the hall, a friend who knew Haskil offered to take me backstage. She seemed inconsolable and unhappy, excusing her poor performance to anyone who congratulated her.

She lived through two world wars, and not without adventure. Here’s a vivid description of her escape from Paris (she was born a Sephardic Jew):

We left Paris at night from the Gare Montparnasse, which was plunged into murky darkness, and before dawn we left the train at Angoulême. Our luggage had gone ahead of us, since, as we expected to have to do a lot of walking, we did not want to be heavily laden. In the sinister railway station, cold and dark, we huddled together, speaking in hushed tones; then we met the guide who was to lead us through fields and woods to the free zone. A taxi drove us to the edge of a forest, where we listened to the scarcely reassuring advice of our guide. He was obviously frightened and told us that the prisons in the neighborhood were full of people like us who had been caught. One road was especially dangerous; we had to crawl across it for, not very far away, as we could see, was a German police station. It was the end of march. The wind was cold but spring had come; there were violets in the woods and birds were singing, but we were not in a mood to enjoy that particular morning walk. On every signpost was a skull and crossbones and a menacing warning to anyone who ventured into this forbidden zone. Our guide wheeled his bicycle ahead of us and we followed in a single file. Le Guillard carried his viola and Clara’s suitcase since she, after a night without sleep, was physically and emotionally exhausted. Each of us wore several overcoats and my wife carried our cat in its basket. Our hearts beat wildly; at last we had crossed that terrible road. I remember that at the exact moment that our cat started miaowing our guide showed us the road we should take to rejoin the railway; he claimed his fee, mounted his bicycle and rode off as fast as he could. Relieved and reassured at having survived this disagreeable experience we soon found a farm whose hospitable owners were used to groups of people in our situation and gave us something to eat.

At last, in 1960, she fell down a staircase in a Brussels rail station, and died in a matter of days.

May her death be happier than her life! 

Missing the Miracle

On the face of it, it looks like the classic “oh, fuck” moment. Or maybe like those dreams I still have, at age 57, of taking an exam for a class that I have somehow completely forgotten that I was taking.

So there the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires is, sitting at the piano expecting one concerto, and guess what? Yup, the conductor starts off on another concerto completely.

In fact, I came across this last night as I was lurching out of a sleep to feed a body screaming for carbohydrates—in short, I was half asleep. So I wasn’t entirely sure—had I dreamed this? Was it my own nightmare? Had I somehow switched sexes and instruments?

I can now tell you—yes, it’s real. And this video below, shot in 1998, has now gone as viral as it gets in the classical music world; if not a million hits, it’s got a respectable 724,000. And people are saying, “wow, that’s amazing—she plays a concerto she wasn’t expecting, and she plays it perfectly! That’s incredible!”

Only Stephen Hough gets it right: it is and it isn’t.

Maria João Pires didn’t start playing piano a couple weeks ago—she gave her first recital at age 4 or 5. And she’s been practicing and playing ever since; she’s had half a century of grind at the piano. And she’s played this concerto every season in her life. More to the point, Mozart doesn’t pose the technical challenges that Chopin or—God forbid—Liszt do. So the real deal here is that she remembered a piano concerto, to which I say…

…big deal.

I say this because every musician is walking around with a lot of music stuffed between the ears. I sat down to play Bach suites a few weeks ago after an absence of five years, and did I drag out the music? Confession—I’m not even sure I have the music, since the termites have gotten into a lot of it. I had to throw a lot of music away….

Which meant comparatively little, since most of the repertoire is in my head. And yes, my memory is unusually good, but not that good. And not, of course, as good as it was: I could learn a piece without effort in a day or two. As Hough points out, the real miracle is that Pires is a marvelous pianist, and, as it turns out, an interesting person as well. How interesting? Well, check out this portion of an interview with David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

DPS: But certainly you’ve spent a lot of time alone as a student practicing.

MJP: I never did it because I had no time. I was always very busy with other things…I had children very early and I had to take care of everything. I never had much time for the piano. I was always an amateur somehow. I did the career … it was not on purpose. It was not wanted and it was not very natural.

DPS: But you have such a natural facility for piano.

MJP: I don’t think so. I have small hands. Many technical problems – not many but some. Of course I found my own body language with the piano and my own way of getting out of my problems but they’re still problems. The other thing is I don’t really like to play concerts. I don’t like to be onstage. That’s not a comfortable thing for me.

An amateur? Well, as a Buddhist, Pires is saying it, but the rest of the world is. Here, ripped off from her biography on Deautsche Grammophon is a quote from The Times of London:

“I can’t think of a pianist with a more ideal command of Chopin’s style. Pires trips through the roulades with filigree dexterity, but her tone is so thoughtful, serious and weighty that they arrive with immense emotional profundity.”

OK—so an amateur with “filigree dexterity….”

Also an amateur who won the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in 1970, and who has performed around the world ever since. Although not, incidentally, much in the United States: she was reluctant to play or travel to America during the Bush years.

And an amateur who really prefers to share the stage—her peeve with Chopin is not the pianistic difficulties he presents, but that he started the piano recital; it has bedeviled her all her life.

And in a field dominated by, well, dominating personalities, Maria João Pires is self-effacing. Or rather, her focus is outward—here’s what she says later in her interview with Stearns:

People care about careers and themselves and all the business that is around music. And that is, for me, somehow, nonsense. Art has nothing to do with that. Competitions take the soul out of the musicians. And the first moments you want to make music in your life it’s for reasons other than business. And in competition you feel like you have to kill someone to have his place. This is horrible. This is not art. So I would like to give young people the possibility of taking the mission of the society in the world. Not fighting against that but finding new ways. I’m not saying to change the world. This is very pretentious. What better than to have artists in projects in many places in the world where problems are big. It’s not decent that we’re eating a lot and having a lot of luxury and people are dying because they have no food or no water. Our mission should be to try to change things. And art is something that can give people their dignity back.

She started a school in Belgais, Portugal, and the experience wasn’t…well, wait. She says she learned a lot, and she might be, as a Buddhist, the last person to describe the experience as bad. At any rate, she applied for Brazilian nationality, and her relationship with her native country may be strained.

There are pianists who somehow win your heart, who manage to take on the prodigious technical demands on the piano, and throw them off completely. Martha Argerich is one, Radu Lupu another. They’re people who know: it’s not about them, still less about the piano. It’s all about the music.