Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Notes from the Editor. Artur Schnabel and the ideology of interpretation

2001; Oxford University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/mq/85.4.587

1741-8399

Leon Botstein,

Music History and Culture

In the fall of 2001 the Akademie der Kiinste in Berlin hosted an exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the pianist Artur Schnabel (1882-1951). An excellent catalog of the exhibit was produced, with multiple essays, documents, photographs, a work list of compositions, and a bibliography.1 We can expect in the near future the publication of a catalog of Schnabel's music by Anouk Jeschke and of a volume of symposium papers that includes an inventory of the Schnabel archive. As luck would have it, when Schnabel was forced to leave Germany, he sent his papers and materials to Italy, where they remained in storage until his death. Artur Schnabel holds an atypical if not remarkable place in the history of twentieth-century performance practice. He is remembered more for his influence and approach than for his virtuosity. Both in his lifetime and posthumously, he played a decisive role in how, in the twentieth century, the performance of historic repertory, pianists, and piano playing came to be evaluated. Although trained by Theodor Leschetizky and fully capable of continuing the post-Lisztian tradition of virtuosity, Schnabel's musical intuitions and tastes led to a revolt against a superficial construct of technique and virtuosity linked to a nineteenth-century notion of decoration and the theatrical. Although disdain for an aesthetic seemingly dependent on surface virtuosity was a current in music criticism dating from Robert Schumann, the distinction between virtuosity and musical beauty lost some of its credibility as the distance between high-minded musical content and technical complexity narrowed over the course of the century. What Schumann objected to were works for the piano that were glorified pyrotechnics, near-circus acts that exploited a reductive musical rhetoric. Most of the repertory of the mid-nineteenth century that falls into that category is justly forgotten. But in the compositions of Franz Liszt and the concerto repertory of the late nineteenth century, virtuosity and compositional ambition intersected. Commanding ideas with gravitas and admirable novelty that demanded evident technical prowess became quite commonplace. Conversely, as in the example of Paganini, new standards and expectations of technique opened up compositional possibilities. In the cases of Chopin and Brahms, their demands on pianists hardly camouflaged a high degree of necessary technical control, finesse, and skill.