Dowling Music
Whilst growing up it was sometimes uttered that any pianist pursuing a career, or intending to remain in the field of piano music on some level for their livelihood, would be expected, by the age of 18, to have read through the complete Well-tempered Clavier of Bach; the complete Beethoven sonatas; the Schubert Impromptus, Fantasies, and the mature sonatas; virtually all of Chopin’s works save perhaps for the chamber music and the songs; all the concerti of Beethoven; Tchaikowsky’s First Concerto; Rachmaninoff’s Second and Third concerti. I remember one particularly bold assertor who claimed that anyone who has not played the Tchaikowsky First Piano Concerto by the age of 18 never will, nor will they ever find success as a pianist.
Some of these benchmarks and lists are interesting, others are frivolous, but lists are numerous, and I feel no need to recall them from memory at this moment. I only mention them in order to recall my failings, or more diplomatically I should call them my sins of omission. The sonatas of Schumann never even crossed my radar until after college, and many of his other works made little or no impression on me until about that same time. In fact it seems virtually certain that I did play through much of this music at some point, but it simply did not settle in the way other composers’ music has. These three volumes of Schumann’s virtually-complete piano œuvre have opened some undiscovered country for me, with the third sonata in particular providing grosse abenteur.
As I remember it now, Schumann was something of an enigma to me throughout school. Others felt the same way. A friend whose opinion I respected said, flatly, “Schumann’s music fucks me up.” He said he just didn’t get it, and that anything of Schumann’s that he knew sounded confused and incoherent.
He, like I, may have quietly decided that Schumann’s work was synonymous with his insanity, or an outright manifestation thereof. In high school I may have thought that the later works of Schumann, written whilst his mind deteriorated, would impel me to throw myself into the Hillsborough River in sympathetic imitation of Schumann, who attempted suicide at the river Rhine.
Whatever the case, I knew Schumann’s great Fantaisie, op. 17, mostly through the influential performance by Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall. I could not afford Horowitz records in school, though, so I got an Abbey Simon recording of the Fantaisie on what I think was the Vox discount record label. The A Minor Concerto was also frequently heard, but then as now I never regarded that piece very highly. I also knew of Schumann’s Toccata, probably also through a Horowitz recording played repeatedly on the radio.
The most influential Schumann work in my youth was the Kinderszenen. This suite of short pieces was played in relay form by all the students in my piano teacher’s studio. I think there were 6 or 7 of us, and each played 1 or 2 of the pieces. I don’t remember which ones I played, but the standout from our recital performance of this suite was when Dorothy played “Wichtige Begenbenheit” (“An Important Event”), the 6th in the suite of 13 pieces. Dorothy’s performance is the greatest recital disaster I ever saw. It hurt to be there, and yet the callow, youthful, asshole competitiveness in me felt some schadenfreude at seeing an older student fail so spectacularly.
Dorothy played the first full measure perfectly until the last beat, an F#-Minor/6 chord which flummoxed her. I think she tried to play the next 3 chords all at once, making the correct sequence of chords impossible to figure out. She stopped, started, stopped again, started again, the auditorium towering in a silence which I interpreted as unkind and imperious.
Had she been younger then I think a teacher or en elder might have appeared to delicately usher her away. But she was an older student, a high school senior who was supposedly going on to study piano in college, and whose example was meant to impress the younger ones.
She attacked the opening of the piece at least a dozen times but the result was always the same: she could not play it. She sat on the piano bench, pressing her index and middle fingers into her face, her thumbs symmetrically resting on her lower jaw bones, her fourth and fifth fingers standing up. All eyes and ears pressed down on her as she dove in again, each time producing a fresh and unique cacophony. It was the sound of buildings crashing to the ground, of mighty towers falling, of the Merrill Lynch bull gone wild in those halls of delicate glassware.
I don’t know if that performance influenced my relative apathy toward Schumann, but that 3rd Piano Sonata which so enthralls me these days is one which I don’t think I could have appreciated in school. It sounds modern to me, like it could have been written last week, with gravelly dissonances (some of which I think are actually typos) swirling under and around a righteously crazed swarm. Some of the dissonance are cruel. I have read no analysis or contemporary review of that sonata, but I imagine critics of Schumann’s day found the opening statements as dissonant and brutal as do I.
Critics of Chopin’s day found his 2nd Piano Sonata to be painfully dissonant. This surprised me when I first learned of it, but at the time I believed Chopin was unassailable, and that his greatness was not just permanent but immediate. Playing through that thicket of notes right now I hear the dissonance, not just in the chordal masses but in the near-vulgarity of the gestures. That left-hand piano-pumping sequence in the opening theme is almost obscene, and nearly ludicrous, while the broad, fistfuls-of-notes-triplet driving into the end of the first section and on to the development are hurricane insane. The joy is vulgar, and the vulgarity is psychedelic.
My appreciation for dissonance increases with age. I, for one, believe that there is no dissonance, that it simply does not exist. What I think is becoming sharper with age is my appreciation for what others consider or considered dissonant.
