<<  -- 5 --  Alistair Hinton    TRANSCENDING VIRTUOSITY

Gordon's countering of Busoni's observation on Chopin's music as 'waltzes, all waltzes' is entirely appropriate, for here even Busoni's greatness of mind is arguably revealed as misguided. He would have done well to expand his point by placing it in the specific context in which it occurred, namely a conversation of uncertain date between Busoni and his friend the composer and violinist Bernard van Dieren, reproduced from memory on page 77 of the latter's book Down Among the Dead Men; it is the younger composer who instigates this notion and the elder one who agrees with it. Later in the same conversation, Busoni is reported as exclaiming 'Don't speak to me of Skryabin! Poème de l'Extase! If the man is so obsessed with his neurasthenia, or whatever other obscure troubles, the least he can do is spare us the picture. If instead he colours it with theosophy, as in that other ludicrous symphonic concoction of his [Prometheus], and we get tinted lights added, and the pretence that his melting harmony has some profound ethical and mystical meaning, he simply becomes nauseating. It is an impudent imposition on a presumed public of half-wits, a mystico-erotic appeal to softening brains'. Harsh and abrasive sentiments indeed. Yet, in one of Busoni's letters to his wife, we find the Italian Master expressing shock at the news of Skryabin's premature death and declaring that he placed a high value on Skryabin's 9th Sonata -- a work roughly contemporary with those very two symphonic ones upon which he had poured such venom and scorn. This substantial change of heart, if it is to be believed, must have occurred over quite a short space of time; mindful of it, who would dare venture to account with any certainty the possible vicissitudes of Busoni's approaches to Chopin's Études through the various stages in his life? Just as all great minds constantly develop and change, so do interpretations and interpretative traditions; when challenged about his substantial voltes-face about Fauré and the late music of Richard Strauss, for example, Sorabji retorted that 'one of the most important aspects of changing one's mind is having a mind to change in the first place!'.

In noting pertinently that 'Chopin's rhythmic flexibility was so great that his music never degenerated into mere mechanical dance rhythms', Gordon reminds me simultaneously of Chopin's occasionally acerbic sense of humour and Constant Lambert's like penchant for Dorothy Parker-like barbs, the latter illustrated in the remark about a French composer (whose devotion to Chopin was another 'constant'!) in his book Music Ho! that 'there is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm: this limit is obviously reached by Ravel toward the end of La Valse and toward the beginning of Bolero'.

Gordon's claim that 'there remain vast areas of research into Chopin interpretation' is irrefutable; whilst the conduct of such ongoing research is naturally to be welcomed, some of these areas may remain fraught with difficulty and perhaps even intractability for the very reason that Gordon himself gives when bemoaning the lack of actual recordings of Chopin Études played by Chopin himself at various stages in his life.