Virtuosi

Mark Mitchell

Description

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001

Virtuosi
A Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists
Mark Mitchell

A bravura performance!

"Vigorous, opinionated, and always entertaining, here is a personal essayist of great charm and sincerity. Mitchell's erudition—his collection of odd and illuminating bits of knowledge—is always a delight and adds a sauce piquanteto the whole dish!" —Edmund White

"...a literary work of real élan, vibrancy, and grace—the very qualities that in his view define the virtuoso. [Mr. Mitchell explores] the traditional linking of musical and sexual virtuosity, the ethical implications of the original instruments' movement, the near deification of Mozart in Anglo-Saxon culture, and, in a particularly witty section, the relationship of the virtuoso to his stool. Throughout, Mr. Mitchell's prose is humorous, intimate, and unapologeticaly polemical." —Cynthia Ozick

The artistic merit of performers with superior technique has long been almost ipso facto denied. At last, Mark Mitchell launches a counterattack. In essays crackling with pianistic lore, Mitchell takes on topics such as encores, prodigies, competitions, virtuosi in film and literature, and the erotics of musical performance. Liszt, Horowitz, and Argerich share these pages with the eccentric Pachmann, Ervin Nyiregyh ("the skid-row pianist"), and Liberace. The illustrations include rare portraits of long-forgotten girl prodigies, historic concert programs, and stills from a lost 1927 film on Beethoven. Punctuating this celebration of personal voice are vignettes, running from the beginnings of the author's obsession with the piano to the particularities of concert-going in Italy (where he now lives).

Mark Mitchell's piano studies led to a friendship with Vladimir Horowitz and other pianistic luminaries. With David Leavitt he co-authored Italian Pleasures and co-edited Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. He also edited The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing.

Preliminary Table of Contents:

The Less Fractious World
1. The Triumph of Marsyas
2. "Le concert, c'est moi"
3. The Critic and the Spider

After Two Concerts
4. Notes on Gourmandism
5. The Circus
6. The Nature of the Bis
7. "The Colour of Classics"

Of Paris
8. Some Virtuosi in Literature
9. The Virtuoso at Home
10. Possibilities of a Homosexual Aesthetic of Virtuosity
11. Celluloid
12. "The pianola 'replaces' Sappho's barbitos"
13. Musical Chairs; or, Il virtuoso seduto
14. "Aut Caesar, aut nihil"

Aristocracy
15. Muscles and Soul
16. Mephistopheleses in Soutanes

The Angel of the Mud

Bibliography

Sujets

• Musical Instruments
• Literary Criticism
• MUSIC
• Musical instrument
• Biography
• Multiple signal classification
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Keyboard instrument
• Musicology
• General
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 novembre 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253028549
• Langue: English

Extrait

V irturosi
V irtuosi
A DEFENSE AND A (SOMETIMES EROTIC) CELEBRATION OF GREAT PIANISTS
MARK MITCHELL
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404–3797 USA
http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress
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© 2000 by Mark Mitchell
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mitchell, Mark (Mark Lindsey)
Virtuosi : a defense and a (sometimes erotic) celebration of great pianists / Mark Mitchell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–253–33757–7 (cl : alk. paper)
1. Piano—Performance. 2. Pianists. 3. Virtuosity in music. I. Title.
 
ML700 .M57 2000
786.2’193—dc21
00–038897
1 2 3 4 5       05 04 03 02 01 00
FOR David Leavitt
 
There is no greater consolation for mediocrity than that genius is not immortal.
 
— Goethe , Elective Affinities (1809 )

It raises the spirits somewhat like champagne, but better than champagne, and it has all the arrogance and costly unreason that are so fascinating in fine jewellery, in common with which it seems to convey a kind of magnificent protest against matter-of-fact and gloom.
 
—Arthur Johnstone, from a review of a concert by virtuoso Moritz Moszkowski (Manchester, 18 November 1898 )

Neurotics are the torchbearers of civilization.
— Ernest Jones
Contents
From the Green Room
 
 
The Less Fractioned World
1. The Triumph of Marsyas
2. “Le concert, c’est moi”
3. The Critic and the Spider
After Two Concerts
4. Notes on Gourmandism
5. The Circus
6. The Nature of the Bis
7. “The Colour of Classics”
Of Paris
8. Some Virtuosi in Literature
9. The Virtuoso at Home
10. Possibilities of a Homosexual Aesthetic of Virtuosity
11. Celluloid
12. “The pianola ‘replaces’ Sappho’s barbitos”
13. Musical Chairs; or, Il virtuoso seduto
14. “Aut Caesar, aut nihil”
Aristocracy
15. Muscles and Soul
16. Mephistopheles in Soutanes
The Angel of the Mud
 
 
Bibliography
Index
From the Green Room
This book was born, quite frankly, from a frustration with traditional writing about music. Virtuosity and the virtuoso have been discounted too routinely—largely due to the conservatism of music critics and musicologists. I offer this testament as un amateur who has long wanted a direct and informed consideration of expressive material without, as one scholar puts it, “having to go through all the nonsensical private language and dangerous anti-creative agendas that have bedeviled so much contemporary scholarship.”
It is, of course, impossible to be comprehensive, and a number of superb artists are not represented in these pages. If I do not sing of Guiomar Novaës (whom many in her audiences regarded as the greatest of pianists), it is because I never had the opportunity to hear her—and not because I fail to admire some of her recordings. (I admire particularly her recordings of Mozart’s “Jeune-homme” and D minor concertos with Hans Swarowsky) If I speak more about concerts I have attended than about great recordings, it is because my experiences of the former have made me distrustful of the latter.
I have felt torn between underplaying and emphasizing the subjective nature of my endeavor. In the end, I must revel in it— this is a personal celebration of the virtuoso, with some fisticuffs (on the virtuoso’s behalf) along the way. Here I hope one will hear the spirit of virtuosity itself: adrenaline, perversity, nostalgia, the personal and the expressive, and above all, a pervasive love.
V irturosi
THE LESS FRACTIONED WORLD
My dad’s parents had lived in that house since they married, and at first they shared it with his parents. My grandfather’s grandfather built the house no later than the 1880s (no one knows the exact date): wood, with high ceilings, four fireplaces, and porch all along the front. In those days it was fairly primitive: the only modern features were electricity, gas heat, and indoor plumbing. Still, there was a well behind the house, under the pecan trees, and in the summer I would take my bath outside in a galvanized steel tub filled with water drawn from this well; water sweet, yet tasting also of iron. Those nights were deeply fragrant, but two smells of the house emerge into memory as well: one of towels dried on the clothesline, the other of witch hazel. Considering that my grandmother was, finally, constrained by shame of the body, I wonder that I experienced such an almost pagan rite as these baths at her house, in her back yard. They were a sublimity of twilight and water and nakedness and heat and fireflies and the distant sound of the television.
The house itself was gloomy and haunted. The century was present in it, in great ways and small ones: the downward motion of the glass in the six-over-six windows; a bit of the wood ceiling in the hall that was charred from where there was a fire in the attic in the twenties; the white-on-white fern-patterned wallpaper in the living room that was evidence of the vogue for monochrome decor after the Second World War; a National Geographic map from the fifties representing a world less fractioned than ours. There were two iron-framed beds in the guest bedroom, and one of these, the one my brother and I slept in when we visited, was pushed against the front of the piano: an Adam Stoddard rectangular grand, the case rosewood and ante-bellum (ca. 1850s), the ivory keys yellowed and fewer than eighty-eight in number, the ebony ones faded to the color of old widow’s weeds. My grandmother had long before taken the claw-foot piano stool into her sewing room, since its height could be adjusted for comfort. I had to sit on the bed when I tried the instrument, but this was the smallest of challenges. The piano, like purgatory, had worlds above and beneath it: a first-generation vacuum cleaner, a battered Hartmann leather trunk full of a great aunt’s formal clothes, and a paper grocery bag of spent spools reposed around the lyre of the pedals; a broken lamp, issues and issues of Modern Maturity magazine and some plastic- and flocking-poinsettias my mother had given my grandmother one Christmas were ranged across the lid.
The day I first tried the piano was cold—outdoor baths were a memory—and therefore the bedroom was closed off: only a run of rooms could be kept warm by the gas heaters, the asbestos panels of which glowed blue and vermilion and gold like the stained-glass windows of a cathedral—or so I thought as a boy disposed to poetry. I could see my breath, and half-imagined, half-hoped, that each key, depending upon how I struck it, might issue up a puff of the visible. This did not happen, alas, but because the room was cold the notes really rang out.
The day I first tried the piano was cold—outdoor baths were a memory—and therefore the bedroom was closed off: only a run of rooms could be kept warm by the gas heaters, the asbestos panels of which glowed blue and vermilion and gold like the stained-glass windows of a cathedral—or so I thought as a boy disposed to poetry. I could see my breath, and half-imagined, half-hoped, that each key, depending upon how I struck it, might issue up a puff of the visible. This did not happen, alas, but because the room was cold the notes really rang out.
There were few classical records around our house during my boyhood: Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet , Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring , a Beethoven fifth symphony pressed on red vinyl, Mozart’s piano quartets, Rubinstein playing Chopin, a three-disc Beethoven set that included Serkin playing the “Moonlight,” Pathétique and “Appassionata” sonatas and the fifth concerto. My parents came of age in the sixties, and though they liked classical music well enough, they preferred Joan Baez and Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan, The Incredible String Band, Joni Mitchell and Jesse Colin Young.
As it happened, my own interest in classical music was kindled by a Band-Aid commercial in which a boy played the opening of Grieg’s A minor piano concerto. Through it all, the Band-Aid stayed on. (The first classical record I bought was a 1959 Lisztian performance of this concerto by Kjell Bäkkelund with Odd Günther-Hegge and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. 1 ) My interest was fanned into flame, however, a few days after Christmas of 1977. On I-75, near Gainesville, Florida, I heard on the car radio the “Moonlight” sonata and realized that this was what I had been waiti