Performers have enacted the ‘Beethoven Syndrome’Footnote 1 in ways that disclose overt similarities in the ways through which they conceptualize both the composer’s music and their own ambitions in performing it. This article looks at the pianist Anton Rubinstein dubbed ‘Van II’ by Liszt – not for his compositions but for his performances. The late nineteenth-century demand for autobiographical readings and their blurring of boundaries between fact and fictionFootnote 2 sets the scene for Rubinstein’s role in the creation of a Russian obsession with the performance of Beethoven’s piano works. Rubinstein’s fame for being a ‘son born of Beethoven’Footnote 3 continued well beyond his death, and set a precedent for other pianists to look to his Beethoven legacy to fashion themselves as ‘revelatory interpreters’ of the composer.Footnote 4 The resulting Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis resulted in a counterpart obsession that peaked in the late-Soviet landscape of the mid-twentieth century. The article turns to the case of Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964) to give a sense of how this active myth-making reflected itself in the construction of a performance narrative by a pianist who had never seen or heard Rubinstein but who felt compelled to enact the language, metaphors, and physical tropes of the Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis. It suggests how, in Neuhaus’s case, enacting the Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis perhaps underpinned aspects of his own pianism (such as the concept of intonirovaniye (a way of intoning sound) as a manifestation of revelatory interpretation) in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A-flat major Op. 110.
‘Our dear homeland gives the world a new Beethoven’.Footnote 5 With these words the eminent Russian musician Vasily Safonov (1852–1918) described Anton Rubinstein: a pianist, conductor and composer who in his lifetime proudly answered to the sobriquet, bestowed on him by Liszt, of ‘Van II’.Footnote 6 Indeed it was as ‘Van II’ that Rubinstein had been heralded as a ‘living legend throughout the Old and New World’.Footnote 7 Both within his lifetime and beyond, Rubinstein’s name has been inseparably bound up with the Beethoven myth. Even decades after his death audiences were led to believe that Rubinstein’s immersion into Beethoven’s piano works was no less than the ‘profound origin’ for the unmistakable physical ‘resemblance of [his] features’ to those of the composer.Footnote 8
Rubinstein’s own willingness to be seen as Beethoven’s spiritual and even biological kin (he did nothing to quell society’s rumours of being the latter’s illegitimate son),Footnote 9 and the public’s zeal in sustaining such narratives is a testament to the grip and longstanding presence of the Beethoven myth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Writing in America, in 1929, more than a century after Beethoven’s death, the Russian musicologist and critic Sabaneyev claimed that to become a ‘lion of music’ meant being a ‘son born of Beethoven.Footnote 10 As Mark Evan Bonds has argued, Beethoven had left a ‘shadow [that] was more than just musical’, and became ‘emulated quite readily [as] the new norm soon after his death’.Footnote 11 Sabaneyev’s comment is a typical, if somewhat belated, illustration of how the emulation of Beethoven’s life and ‘very appearance – above all the famous scowl [and] outward signs of an inward struggle’ reached its zenith by the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 12
Even though performers like Rubinstein were famous in the nineteenth century for enacting the Beethoven myth, scholarly engagement with the repercussions this myth had on performers, their narration of their individuality and practices, are catching up with musicology dedicated to composers.Footnote 13 Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works identified some of the long-ongoing ramifications of this ‘Beethoven paradigm’: it gave future composers the prerogative to ‘willingly adopt’ the ‘romantic role’ where they identified ‘themselves and each other as divinely inspired creators.Footnote 14 By thus separating composers from the ‘ordinary, everyday world’, it introduced a notion of authority that had profound social and political implications’.Footnote 15 Taking these ramifications further, Nicholas Mathew demonstrated that Beethoven paved the way for a composer’s works and life-story to ascend to an ‘almost anti-historical’ plane (where their narratives are largely constructed after the fact) to become ‘a history of deeds that defy their own time’.Footnote 16 It is this posthumous construction that allows the forging of the composer’s works and life into hybrid narratives which then become culturally and even politically ingrained and which gives them the identifiable status as ‘classics’.
Yet, in many cases, performers have actively competed with the mythologized composer for the space to be recognized as divinely inspired creators. This article suggests that the phenomenon of performers carving out their own image as a ‘classic’ through their interpretation of Beethoven needs to be attributed equal, if not greater, importance as the same process in composers. It will do so by focusing on the role of Anton Rubinstein in the creation of a Russian obsession with the performance of Beethoven’s piano works; and its resulting counterpart obsession, which peaked in the late-Soviet landscape of the mid-twentieth century, of embodying the Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis in doing so.
Significantly for the purposes of this article, the synthesis of Rubinstein’s and Beethoven’s names in Russia derives from the public’s insatiable demand for autobiographical readings that compelled amateurs and musicians to think about the inner psyche of the creator. The blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction that arose from such endeavours is epitomized in the nineteenth-century Russian biographers of Beethoven, notably pianist Wilhelm von Lenz and historian Alexandre Oulibicheff,Footnote 17 who would have certainly fuelled Anton Rubinstein’s awareness of autobiographical readings. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Rubinstein’s own perpetuation of Beethoven as self-embedded in his music is evident in his concertizing, lecture-recital activities, and own numerous literary undertakings. As will be discussed, Rubinstein’s psychological and physiological embodiment of the composer became a mythical proposition in itself: in Sabaneyev’s words ‘the psychical life of [Beethoven’s] genius’.Footnote 18
The second part of this article presents the impact of the resulting mythical Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis as something to be aspired to and emulated – in other words, a classic – as a model of Beethoven-interpretation defined not by historical or even textual authenticity, but by active myth-making among virtuoso musicians and pedagogues of the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of pianism from fin de siècle Imperial and twentieth-century Soviet Russia. To demonstrate the endurance of this phenomenon, the second part of this article will look at one of the most famous pianist-pedagogues of twentieth-century Russia, Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964), and give a sense of how this active myth-making reflected itself in the sense of a constructed performance narrative by a pianist who had never seen or heard Rubinstein. The case study illuminates how, despite the ‘zenith’ of what Bonds termed the ‘Beethoven syndrome’ taking place at the turn of the twentieth century, Neuhaus was one of numerous mid- to late-twentieth-century pianists who felt compelled to enact the language, metaphors and physical tropes of the Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis as if they were a quasi-divinely received spiritual inheritance.
Rubinstein and the Golden Age
Rubinstein’s case presents a significant manifestation of how performers constructed intricate myths around their own creative and personal identities in the post-Beethoven era – an era that also witnessed the rupture of the traditional holistic identity of the composer-performer into two separate entities. Kenneth Hamilton’s impressive survey of Romantic pianism already pointed to the notion that a body of compositional classics, recognized as such not only by performers but also by audiences, altered the enormity of the task of interpretation, changing it from a day-to-day matter to a lifelong commitment.Footnote 19 Interpreting classics, rather than one’s own compositions or recent music, meant that performers began to navigate a paradox. On the one hand, the pianist claimed to be privy to the divine inspiration of the composer, becoming its messenger and fastidious guardian. It was an idea that had already been firmly set out by early nineteenth-century performance discourse, as explored by Mary Hunter, that interpretative performance assumed a dialectic of subject and object through the ‘ethical ideal of spiritual and bodily transformation’ in the performer’s ‘merging of his own soul with that of the composer’.Footnote 20 On the other hand, these pianists either insincerely concealed their free-handed approach to embellishing or adapting composers’ works to suit their own creative individuality, or indeed did not see a contradiction between their free-handed approach and the desire to reveal the composer’s inspiration.Footnote 21
In defining this exclusive company of pianists as a mythologized Golden Age of Romantic pianism, Hamilton emphasized that the phenomenon thrived on magnifying the claim of a privileged understanding of the composer, and positioning that understanding as a notion of something ‘that always is, or is just about to be, extinct’.Footnote 22 Fear of extinction – in particular the extinction of a privileged or exclusive knowledge – magnifies value. The resulting myth-making around the pianist thus ‘positioned the performer, not the composer, as the centre of interest’.Footnote 23 If that interest was strong enough it has the potential to make that performer synonymous with, if not always fully dependent on, a composer. And thus, the performer could be seen as a classic.Footnote 24
Whilst the notion of extinction proposed by Hamilton is indeed an important facet in perpetuating a performer-centred process of myth-making, it is one that relies on a key prerequisite: a canonized tradition. Once mythologized historical events have been established as classics in the wider consciousness, there may be a fear of the loss of the communal cultural identities they represent. Within the context of Russia’s turbulent socio-political history, I identify two distinct trajectories to this perceived danger of loss.
The first is the substantial nineteenth-century conviction that Russians had of their country as being a cultural backwater that, as summarized by the Russian literary critic and philosopher Ivan Kireyevsky (1806–1856), ‘did not shine either in the arts or in scientific invention’.Footnote 25 So deep-rooted was this conviction that, as described by Marina Frolova-Walker, it united the country’s otherwise polarized socio-cultural views: ‘Slavophiles [accepted] that Russia was indeed lagging far behind the West … while Westernizers … came to believe that only some ineffable force, leading Russia to an unknown destiny, could fully explain the failure of enlightened and civilized values in Russia’.Footnote 26 Rubinstein’s contribution to musical institutionalization and excellence was mythologized within the context of a sense of a dysfunctional and backwards Russia, and a central part of that mythologization was the empowerment of marginalized sections of society (including orphans, Jews and female professionals) through his activities.Footnote 27 This article positions the symbolic enactment of Beethoven by Rubinstein not as an act of prolonging or preserving Beethoven per se, but as a creative act through which Rubinstein adds weight to his own persona through its subjective mergence with Beethoven’s. The resulting synthesis gave Russian society steps of recognized cultural progress and, given the country’s socio-political fragility, a fear of losing that progress.Footnote 28
The second trajectory relating to the perceived danger of cultural loss in the decades after Rubinstein’s death, and relevant for understanding Neuhaus, is positioned within a distinct Soviet intelligentsia. Many creative artists in music and the other arts who, like Neuhaus, lived through the hardships of the Revolution and were unable or unwilling to go into exile, felt a certain moral obligation to be Russia’s ‘voice of memory’. For these figures, a sense of duty to be that voice of memory of the pre-Revolutionary world went beyond the national and became tied up with the idea of redemption. If the poetess Anna Akhmatova (a contemporary of Neuhaus) believed it was ‘her calling to atone for Russia’s transgressions through the prayer of poetry’,Footnote 29 then – despite his atheism – Neuhaus’s borrowing of Rubinstein’s language gives him a similar space in which to engage with a pre-Revolutionary world, and with pianism as spiritual quasi-priesthood.
Looking at these two contexts in which neither performer had heard their inspiration (Rubinstein had never heard or seen Beethoven, and neither had Neuhaus heard or seen Rubinstein) the article aims to lay bare the scope of social and political implications resulting from performers constructing their own mythologized framework of subjectively enacted events. It allows us to identify how such myths involve layers of adapted appropriation (whether through misremembering or misinterpretation) of historical events and cultural aspects; and the audiences’ acceptance of it. This is necessary to set performers apart from others as they compete for attention and to create their own subjective connection with the composer as a basis for a legacy. Thus, the performer blurs the emerging composer–performer hierarchy and empowers their interpretation of the composer as the benchmark by which the music becomes a classic. In his landmark study of Clara Schumann, Alexander Stefaniak described this empowerment of the performer’s interpretation as a ‘revelatory interpretation’. Here, Stefaniak identified that the public were so taken by Clara Schumann’s ‘authentic interpretation via memory’ of her husband’s work, that the simple fact of her career beginning in the 1830s was enough to convince that public that her later performances encapsulate an ‘authentic glimpse of canonic figures who had flourished in that time’, such as Chopin, and even those then recently deceased such as Beethoven and Schubert.Footnote 30
Moving the focus away from prolongation or preservation, and onto creation and manipulation also highlights how the performer’s perception of existing in a state of cultural backwardness played a role in spurring on the myth-making process. The unique socio-historical environment around Rubinstein situated him within a widely felt perception of Russia’s cultural backwardness. It facilitated the coexistence of Rubinstein’s bold and unchallenged claim to be Beethoven’s heir, and an apparent disinterest in a sense of ‘authenticity’ related to the music’s sounds, style of function. It became a game with history that sought to transpose a reimagining of Beethoven through words, descriptions and iconography into contemporary life. The intriguing paradigm, whereby the myth of Rubinstein was conceived and nurtured by him through his subjective consideration of Beethoven, was therefore divorced from the threat of extinction inherent to the passing of time. The example illustrates the notion that the performer as a Beethoven-of-today gave a sense of cultural memory to be continued, played with and enacted by others in their own terms.
The mythical fusion of Beethoven and Rubinstein set the foundation for future pianists like Neuhaus, who had never heard a note of Rubinstein’s playing, to push off from as they charted their own commentaries into the Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis. Within a Soviet society where notions of ‘the classics’ and role models was deeply ingrained into public value-judgement making through its political system,Footnote 31 being accepted as a cultural figure went hand-in-hand with a personification of a timeless autobiographical persona, of which Beethoven–Rubinstein was one of immense weight. Coupled with this, as indicated by Neuhaus’s language (drawn here mainly from his diary, and transcripts of masterclasses) and practices, the cross-pollination of elements of the Beethoven–Rubinstein narratives as subjectively affirmed and appropriated by him was part of personal desire to displace himself out of Soviet culture into an imagined pre-Revolutionary one. The resulting friction of the displacement of these times served to fuel aminated (perhaps even entrenched) dialogue about the myth amongst his students, audiences and colleagues.
Myth-Making in a Perceived Cultural Backwardness
Anton Rubinstein’s meteoric rise to fame in nineteenth-century Imperial Russia coincided with the country’s urgent desire to establish the wider myth of being an empire with a long and richly endowed national cultural history. For many commentators of the time there was a painful discourse, taking hold around them, that the canon of home-grown Russian art and thought that might compare with the achievements of Europe was negligible, and that the hope of such a situation being remedied any time soon was futile.Footnote 32 Exacerbating this awareness was the fact that mid- to late-nineteenth-century Russian music-making remained a largely amateur affair, and one that was heavily reliant on the services of émigré and touring musicians.Footnote 33
Continuous debates about the notion of ‘Russianness’ amongst the intelligentsia were rife during the early part of Rubinstein’s life. Staring at the chasm between these amateur activities and Europe’s longstanding contribution to the arts and sciences, Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky lamented Russia’s apparent slumber of ‘indifference’ in his 1844 magnum opus Russian Nights – voicing the concern that this was a land with ‘no past’ and one that was still far from its moment of awakening.Footnote 34 Slavophiles who were looking to praise the superiority of the Fatherland found themselves confounded by the lack of structure and heritage that might underpin a clearly defined concept of their own national identity. In the 1830s the literary critic Pavel Annenkov even went so far as to claim that ‘Russians as such did not exist’. Thus, his compatriots had no choice but to adopt models from abroad that might at least transform them into ‘a faithful, noble German’ (der treue, edle Deutsche).Footnote 35
Positing this compromise was not as defeatist as one might expect. In fact, the adoption of German culture had stretched back at least to the reforms of Peter the Great some hundred and fifty years earlier in the 1700s: since its foundation, the capital St Petersburg had been home to a substantial and influential German community. Its musical scene – like its intellectual ambitions – was shaped predominantly by sought-after German émigré figures.Footnote 36 The first inklings of a national canon therefore can be observed in an environment where an absence of a definable Russian national character was off-set by a history of co-opting Germanic culture. In short, intellectuals like Annenkov thought that the Russian national character could be raised in the foster-home of German culture, until it could find its independence and flourish on its own.
Many members of the Russian intelligentsia considered that the struggles of forming this cultural synthesis were not a compromise but evidence that the Russian national character had to be even more receptive and sensitive to culture if it was to appreciate its own nobleness.Footnote 37 As Fyodor Dostoevsky succinctly put it, ‘a German is merely a smug philistine drunk or sober, while the Russian, even in the degradation of advanced inebriation, remains humble and weeps over human suffering’.Footnote 38
Following in this trend of emulating Germanic culture, the so-called ‘Mighty Handful’ – an emerging group of nationalist composers – and their direct contemporaries, looked to conveniently appropriate the monumental figure of Beethoven as one of their founders.Footnote 39 The ground had been well prepared for such an appropriation: by the mid-nineteenth century numerous Russian critics observed that Beethoven was amongst the most widely performed and studied composers in Russian professional and amateur circles.Footnote 40
The co-option of Beethoven was nevertheless not entirely successful at first, as it primarily produced a flare of Beethovenian pastiches met with a deep sense of dissatisfaction and frustration.Footnote 41 Sergei Taneyev described this atmosphere in 1879 as: ‘A Russian musician is like an architect who, on seeing a log house, would begin to build something similar out of stone, trying to lay the stones in such a way as to achieve the same curves’.Footnote 42 Furthermore, there was a notable lack of Russians composing piano sonatas and symphonies, surely the most Beethovenian of genres.Footnote 43 Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky were the most prominent exceptions that proved the rule, but they did not stop Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov from lamenting that ‘the main product of the Russian school is not music, but cold and cerebral composition’.Footnote 44 It is only at the turn of the century that composers once again were compelled to revisit Beethoven as the cradle of the Russian soul. Rimsky-Korsakov summarized in 1891 (three years before Rubinstein’s death): ‘Do you know what is lacking in Russian music? It lacks soul. Beethoven has a mighty soul’.Footnote 45
Rubinstein’s Pianism as Beethoven’s ‘Soul’
The notion of soul (dusha) pervades Russian cultural and philosophical discussions of the time. As in the quotation above, it is tied very much to the idea of a distinct Russian character. Depending on its context the notion of soul brings together ideas not only of national identity but also artistic excellence, and it therefore plays an important role in the creation of ‘classics’. The spiritual dimension to the word also allowed thinkers to invoke something of a mysterious receiving of something that never dies, and that was ennobled by its striving to reconnect to a Godly figurehead. In the writings of figures such as Rubinstein this went a long way toward creating an environment that validated for them the ideas of inheritance and re-enactment of phenomena and identities not otherwise directly experienced.
Although Rubinstein’s international reputation as an unmatched virtuoso-pianist hinged on his mammoth repertoire and tireless touring schedules, it was his synonymity with Beethoven in the eyes of Russian audiences that made him one of the most important figures in transforming the cultural position of secular music in Russia from a status of entertainment to one of quasi-religious spiritualized reverence. Testament to the fact that the perceived embodiment of Beethoven in Rubinstein continued to exert an impact well beyond his death was the large demand for his posthumously published autobiographical writings – as evidenced in the multiple reprints of his multiple attempts at memoirs, aphorisms and lectures.Footnote 46
Based on his compositional output alone, Rubinstein’s catalogue of works – six symphonies, several concert overtures, an Eroica Fantasia, and five piano concerti – might tempt one to consider this affinity with Beethoven as fuelled by his homages to a monumentalized Beethoven. Despite Rubinstein’s successes as a composer during his lifetime, the close association with Beethoven hampered rather than helped him carve out a canonically recognized compositional identity.Footnote 47 The modest impact of the Beethoven myth on Rubinstein’s compositional reputation, however, is more than compensated for in his activities as a performer. In Rubinstein’s case, this disparity illuminates how the performer-centred myth-making process is the means by which the notion of soul, and of embodying the soul of a composer, takes hold in a way that side-steps that musician’s identification with a composer as a composer.
So why does performance, rather than composition, allow Rubinstein to enshrine the triptych of Beethoven, soul and Russian pianism into the wider Russian consciousness by the turn of the twentieth century? Perhaps the most evocative answer can be gleaned from one of Rubinstein’s most famous aphorisms, in which he links the performance of Beethoven’s piano sonatas to the spiritual development of the ‘interpreter’: ‘Playing [igra] on the piano is the movement of the fingers; interpretation [ispolneniye] on the piano is the movement of the soul’.Footnote 48 Rubinstein’s implication was that the creatively subjective, rather than technical, act of musical performance was a mysterious process which transformed a historical stimulus or event (composer and score) into a manifestation of ungraspable depth. Rubinstein claimed an aesthetic space for Beethoven in the act of performance whereby he was the ‘first composer to demand the entire soul [from the pianist]’ and in so doing revealed himself as an almost ‘unsurmountable [composer] because he expresses the metaphysical, the mystical’. Footnote 49
In other words, it is as a pianist that Rubinstein himself would lay claim to reaching the elusive depth that Holly Watkins attributes to the rhetoric of Romantic Germanic writers and philosophers, not least Hoffmann who held that ‘plumbing the depths of a musical work becomes equivalent to plumbing those of the self’. Hoffmann had already asserted that, through his suffering, Beethoven was the first composer to open up ‘the realm of the immeasurable’ that resides ‘deep in the soul’ or ‘innermost nature’.Footnote 50 Rubinstein’s idea that ‘depth’ and ‘movement of the soul’ are manifested in performance and its reception, rather than in the composition itself, as more traditionally held, engages in the same kind of shift in emphasis that is reflected in Watkins’s identification of ‘depth’ by German Romantic critics being able to ‘penetrate [a work’s] inner structure’ only if its ‘axis of horizontal and temporal unfolding’ was complemented by the soul being ‘stirred with special force’.Footnote 51 Hence, whether by (sub)conscious assimilation or manipulation, Rubinstein had positioned the task of interpreting Beethoven’s piano sonatas firmly within his contemporary compatriots’ definitions of the Russian ‘soul’: epitomized in Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) with the phrase ‘what the Russian soul cannot grasp will be for ever unknown to men’.Footnote 52
For contemporaries of Anton Rubinstein, including the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and painter Ivan Kramskoy, the expression of the Russian ‘soul’ required searching for a way to remove the veil of restraint that they believed had, until then, smothered the artistic transmission of experience and emotion with a gloss-like lacquer that demonstrated pristine execution over ‘depth’.Footnote 53 Indeed, Rubinstein’s own playing was celebrated for its rawness and volatility, with all the propensity for accidents that come in the heat of the moment.Footnote 54 Central to this aesthetic was the urgency to redefine beauty so that it did not hinge so heavily on form and structure. These, it was feared, might suggest a sense of tutored embodiment. Or, put more bluntly, the practising of a craft that was disengaged from the creative commitment to individual expression.Footnote 55 Instead, those caught up in the wave of so-called psycho-Realism found across the arts in the latter nineteenth century engaged with the concept of autobiographical selfhood.
Fundamentally, as investigated by Hellbeck in relation to the literary arts, all art which set about narrating the self – whether directly or through the lens of another subject – contributed to autobiography, which was emerging as the leading genre in nineteenth-century Russia.Footnote 56 Art’s value was measured by the perceived purity of the transmission of autobiographical experience. The primary focus of the creative act was not on the pre-determined oratorial artistic intent, but on the volatile individual experience. A convenient shorthand for that raw and unpolished domain became the ‘soul’.Footnote 57 Since the soul represented unfettered individual experience,Footnote 58 it had both an historical awareness of itself and an inherent need to ennoble itself to rise above the injustices and frustrations of that historical moment.Footnote 59 Through this process the soul raised itself beyond the significance of its time into the eternally significant paradigm to be re-enacted and reborn by future generations.
The question of how pianism should embrace and indeed live up to that role, reflected one of the ultimate questions of Rubinstein’s age: the Romantic search and sublimation of the self, and the belief that art’s moral mission would have a healing influence on wider society.Footnote 60 As Russian artists looked increasingly to the West for answers to address their crisis of identity, Beethoven brought into this equation the established European myth of representing the distilled ‘modern Western concept of the self [as] a spiritual or moral entity, the constitutive autonomy of the self, the possibility of self-transcendence, and the fundamental condition of struggle’ so necessary for that quest.Footnote 61
Heirs of Beethoven
Rubinstein’s ethnic identity and cosmopolitanism primed his reception within a cultural environment to widely discussed the need to nurture a cultural identity in the chrysalis of a foreign, and ideally Germanic-centred, culture. This was despite the anti-Semitic hostility that Rubinstein experienced from figures around the 1860s such as Serov who declared war against the former as a ‘feeble imitator of Mendelssohn’,Footnote 62 and Stasov’s xenophobic attacks on Rubinstein as a ‘foreigner with nothing in common with our national roots and our art’.Footnote 63
Born to Jewish parents in Vikhvatinets in the Podolian Governorate of the Russian Empire, Rubinstein remained acutely sensitive to his outsider status, and he complained that ‘Russians call me German, Germans call me a Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew’.Footnote 64 Nonetheless, his career unfolded within a ‘the cosmopolitan circles of aristocratic melomanes and German musicians’ who extolled Rubinstein to the point where he became ‘the Saint Petersburg’s public’s favourite, the “second Beethoven”, as his zealous devotees called him’.Footnote 65
Earlier, his success as a child prodigy and fledgling virtuoso had pushed him into a life of international concert touring which had the effect of putting him in contact with the major European musicians of the day: Chopin, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Moscheles and Clara Schumann. Amongst these the one major encounter that he desperately sought was with Franz Liszt, the only pianist who might have been considered a credible rival.
Following the 1848 revolutions in Europe Rubinstein returned to Russia. After Liszt’s whirlwind concert tours of the 1840s, Rubinstein’s recitals were initially met with resistance from musical circles. Liszt’s recitals had been a shock, but were after all by a foreigner, and difference was expected. Rubinstein on the other hand was presenting himself as a Russian musician, and despite his monumental success in Europe, it took a surprising amount of time for the reserved reactions from Russian audiences to give way: ‘Whilst paying their due to the worth of the young pianist, [reviewers in St Petersburg] reproached him for playing “without niceties” … Neither the gigantic stature, nor the mighty Rubinsteinian impact [could] satisfy the music-lovers of the time [who were] accustomed to the refined grace of jeu perlé’.Footnote 66
Whilst the unaccustomed performance style that Rubinstein adopted offended the audiences’ sensibilities, musical salons were predictably partial to rumour. Given the striking resemblance of Rubinstein to portraits of Beethoven,Footnote 67 his scruffy appearance, and fiery temperament, gossip that Rubinstein was the composer’s illegitimate son quickly became ‘flavour of the month’, and those spreading the gossip were undeterred even by the fact that the pianist’s date of birth superseded Beethoven’s death over two years.Footnote 68
Rubinstein obviously saw the merits of this kinship and never spoke out to resolve this mistake. Perhaps it reminded him of Liszt’s own self-constructed lineage to Beethoven which the former had encoded through the highly mythical story of the Weihekuss – the ‘kiss of consecration’ – which Beethoven supposedly bestowed upon Liszt in Vienna in 1823, symbolically designating him as his heir.Footnote 69 It is imperative to note that much doubt has been cast over this symbolic supposed act, not least because Liszt only started narrating this story after Czerny’s death (the witness who was supposed to have been present). However, what is significant is how deep-rooted a physical sense of enactment is in the myth-creation and subjective persuasion of an identifiable Beethoven–(Liszt)–Rubinstein inheritance, and by extension authority (if not outright performer right and ownership) and ‘authenticity’ as evidenced by the posthumous writings of figures such as Sabaneyev and Safonov.Footnote 70
The synthesis of Liszt’s and Beethoven’s personas became an exceptionally powerful one amongst late-nineteenth-century Russian musicians – far more so than, for instance, the ‘usual’ candidates of Brahms and Beethoven. A part of this may well be explained, at least in part, by the significant presence and influence of Liszt’s students within Russian musical circles and conservatoires.Footnote 71 However, even more unusual is how far into the twentieth-century that synthesis would last. As evident in the writing of the Soviet pianist and musicologist Yakov Milstein, this synthesis implicated the formation of a national performance tradition as late as 1956.Footnote 72 It was not only for himself, however, that Liszt procured a self-constructed and quasi-familial, if mythical, connection to Beethoven. Liszt played a significant role in securing Anton Rubinstein’s status as a fellow missionary of Beethoven. Liszt famous nickname for Rubinstein –‘Van II’– certainly captured the audience’s imagination, and it became widespread in Russia.Footnote 73
Even decades later, when Rubinstein was at the height of his powers, and perhaps the most authoritative musician in Russia, the keenness to combine the two personas into one was staggering, with the following review being highly typical in language:
A small man with a large head shuffled awkwardly and tentatively towards the piano, and placing one hand on the piano bowed to the audience. That was Rubinstein. Immediately one recognizes the face of Beethoven: ugly in its profile, but very attractive en face, familiar from the portraits.Footnote 74
Such observations were evidently strengthened by Rubinstein’s championing of Beethoven’s oeuvre in a manner that had hitherto only been rivalled by the all-Beethoven recitals given by Liszt and then his pupil, Hans von Bülow.Footnote 75
Rubinstein’s ‘Historical Lectures of the Piano Literature’, presented at the conservatories in Moscow and St Petersburg in 1885/6 and 1888/9, undertook the mammoth feat of looking at all 32 sonatas with opus numbers and some of the sets of variations. The endeavour must have come with some degree of rivalry, for in public he was deeply critical of Liszt’s vanity for performing all 32 sonatas in one sitting – even going as far as declaring: ‘To play one Beethoven Sonata after another is a kind of barbarism. Each contains within itself an entire world of thoughts and feelings, and could take up the entire evening’.Footnote 76 Going against his own advice, however, Rubinstein complemented these lecture-recitals with what was arguably his most significant Beethoven programme: Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor Quasi una fantasia Opus 27 no. 2 (‘Moonlight’); Sonata No. 17 in D minor Opus 31 no. 2; Sonata No. 21 in C major Opus 53 (‘Waldstein’ or ‘Aurora’); Sonata No. 23 in F minor Opus 57 (‘Appassionata’); Sonata No. 27 in E minor Opus 90; Sonata No. 28 in A major Opus 101; Sonata No. 30 in E flat major Opus 109; Sonata No. 32 in C minor Opus 111.Footnote 77
This overlap in programme practices coupled with the persuasive signals from Liszt meant that not only did he find his name mentioned in the same breath as Beethoven, but he was also widely referred to as Liszt’s heir.Footnote 78 The resulting associations ingrained into Rubinstein’s persona were enduring: when Liszt’s son-in-law and closest ‘disciple’, Hans von Bülow, undertook his own successful concert activities in Russia in 1886, he too observed that in Russia ‘[Anton Rubinstein] is considered to be the one and same person as Beethoven and Liszt’.Footnote 79
Despite an encyclopaedic repertoire that ranged from Couperin, Lully and Rameau to the works of his day, it was Beethoven whom Rubinstein claimed to be the first composer who unveiled the poetic. To be poetic for Rubinstein meant to express the soul: It is in Beethoven that Rubinstein found that first musical transcendence beyond the merely emotional (heart), and therefore the utterance of the soul. In his Historical Lectures on the piano repertoire, given in 1889, Rubinstein proclaimed: ‘There was expression from the heart, but there was no expression from the soul. The person who put soul and drama into music was Beethoven.’Footnote 80 Such impassioned convictions gave a messianic status to Beethoven and therefore it comes as no surprise that the most lasting impression of Rubinstein’s pianism was with his Beethoven interpretations.
It is striking that even pianists who had built reputations for seemingly diametrically opposed interpretational styles, such as the eminent pianist-pedagogue Alexander Goldenweiser remembered for his stern personality and disciplined playing,Footnote 81 made a point of stressing the importance that Rubinstein’s Beethoven held for his own artistic values. In his memoirs Goldenweiser makes a point of recalling his adolescent impression of Rubinstein thus:
Out of Rubinstein’s interpretations of the Beethoven sonatas, I vividly remember the first part of the C-sharp minor Sonata (Quasi una fantasia): the bare, nearly unpedalled sound of the triplet background that gave a ‘matt’ colouration; and at the same time the bright, rich sound of the singing top voice. I remember also the unstoppable, passionate flow of the finale with the sforzando chords onto which Rubinstein pounced. I also remember the incomparable interpretation of the D minor Sonata Opus 31 – the caressing charisma of the sound in the finale which I recall so vividly and try so hard to recreate in my own interpretation.Footnote 82
Likewise, the young Sergei Rachmaninov, another ‘Puritan’ pianist,Footnote 83 linked some of his most defining experiences of musical life in Moscow to Rubinstein’s interpretations of Beethoven. He credited Rubinstein for revealing to him what it meant to ‘engage’ the ‘soul’:
It was not so much his amazing technique that astounded, but rather the deep, inspired, sensitive musicality that filled every note, every bar … and made him the most unique and original pianist in the world. Of course, I did not miss a note of his recitals and remember how shaken I was by his interpretation of the Appassionata’.Footnote 84
What these two anecdotes reveal is how much responsibility, or perhaps reverence, these two pianists felt they owed to cherishing and passing on the memory of Rubinstein’s Beethoven interpretations as a symbol of what it meant to play ‘from the soul’. Furthermore, a glance through Russian anthologies of pianism,Footnote 85 confirms countless instances of other greats recounting the same sentiment. And yet, even taking Goldenweiser’s and Rachmaninov’s claims of being witnesses to and enacting a performance tradition directly passed down from Rubinstein, both of their highly eclectic performance styles makes it unlikely that they were genuinely driven to attempt to actually recapture his practices and techniques rather the subjective expression and metaphorical notions behind the interpretational agenda.Footnote 86 It is evident that Rubinstein’s mythical persona became a symbol for being the first to successfully define the ‘soul’ in music and thus it became the basis for the development of performance traditions and practices in Russia.
Rubinstein’s definition of the soul came at a time when writers and thinkers made sustained attempts at claiming an independent cultural identity beyond the artificial European mask of refinement that had largely been adopted by the gentry since Peter the Great. The idea arose that there was a ‘fiery life’, a ‘volatility’, ‘sparks’ and something of the ‘irrational’ (i.e. the uninhibited) that differentiated the metaphorically and physically burning Russian hearth encased by the refined but sterile European marble palatial façades of the aristocracy.Footnote 87 Given how far-reaching such agendas infiltrated the cultural and historical landscape of Rubinstein’s time it is unlikely he could have completely escaped its influence. By dedicating his energies to embodying this differentiation between heart and soul in his definition of autobiographic expression, Rubinstein seems to have carved out a hallmark to his pianism that also differentiated him from Liszt.
Whether stemming from a natural tendency, which happened to resonate with the aesthetic environment he found himself in, or whether it was a deliberate and calculated strategy, Rubinstein became known for the ‘burning heat’ (relentlessness) and rawness of his playing.Footnote 88 The resulting directness challenged both the Russian tradition and European audiences, to engage with something that even a wild virtuoso like Liszt had apparently (in contrast to Rubinstein) clothed in a more refined manner.Footnote 89 As remarked by Hanslick, ‘the bewitching beauty of [Rubinstein’s] tones, the power and delicacy of his touch’ reputedly rivalled Liszt’s, but it seems to have been his ‘inward fervour which in the heat of passion dares all things, even to indiscretion, rather than pause to reason and reflect’ and ‘temperament … of such compelling force that [an] exhausted Europe yields submissive to his will’ that caused the greatest stir. Footnote 90 A generation later, Josef Hofmann, Anton Rubinstein’s celebrated pupil, perpetuated the same metaphoric contrast of Rubinstein’s unbridled tempestuous qualities against Liszt’s ‘gentlemanly elegance’ in his own descriptions.Footnote 91
The volatile changes from blistering intensity to the scarcely audible that permeated Rubinstein’s pianistic attitude to sound seem to have found a perfect outlet in Beethoven’s piano works. As attested by the above critiques, it appears that it was the cultivation of control over a titanic range of touch, and therefore dynamic, which Rubinstein was unafraid to juxtapose at the extremes of the spectrum; it became the main tool that gave the impression of outright emotional integrity that took precedence over technique or form.Footnote 92 Yet, the balancing of technical control of sound and the deliberate chain of interpretative decision-making that would need to support the physical manifestation of the profoundly self-searching questions related to the aestheticity of autobiographic subjectivity could hardly be tackled in an institutional framework, or detailed in a treatise. Sound – and how it appears to be so personal to each truly great artist – has always been one of the most elusive facets of pianism. As Goldenweiser reported, the power of Rubinstein’s delivery was so intense that he often had cause to laugh at amateur musicians who left his recitals shrugging their shoulders saying that they would have played it in ‘exactly the same way too’:
From the very first note, Rubinstein completely captivated his listeners as if infecting them with the hypnosis of his vibrant artistic personality. The listener would lose the ability to reason and analyse: he would be fully vanquished by the tempest of his inspiring art – for a time forgetting himself and his own relationship to the work being interpreted.Footnote 93
A holy grail for those at the echelons of their art, the ability to consciously manipulate the nuances of sound defines all that defies notation and eschews direct pedagogical instruction. It falls into that territory of art that is at once universal, but for most unreachable, and so becomes myth.
The mythical properties of Rubinstein’s touch reached cult-like proportions, and he readily took on Liszt’s mantle of what he defined as a ‘a musician-enlightener’:Footnote 94 ‘He who performs Beethoven’s sonatas must feel himself a missionary that turns the heathen towards the path of truth: he should feel in himself a priest who proclaims the holy word. It is a high challenge, and not an easy one!’Footnote 95 The responsibilities and voice of an interpreter, which as understood by Rubinstein essentially rose from Beethoven’s ashes, were the same self-reflective utterances that befell a messiah or prophet.
The Myth Takes Hold
By creating a narrative around his persona that not only refused to dispel the erroneous rumour of him being the illegitimate son of Beethoven, but indeed claimed himself as Beethoven incarnate, Rubinstein had demonstrated that the power of myth could escape scrutiny of the facts. The myth of a Beethoven–Rubinstein synthesis could, and would, nurture itself through the imagination. As the amateur music-making scene in Russia was replaced with one where the status of the performer was elevated to that of a statesman or priest, becoming a direct part of this legacy was an immensely appealing prospect to the next generation of pianists, who started appropriating similar language towards Beethoven despite never having studied with him. Thus, it created the myth in which a classical composer is placed at the root of discursive tropes in which each connection is fictionalized.
The following discussion turns to the impact of this myth on Heinrich Neuhaus, perhaps the single most influential pianist-pedagogue at the helm of what is widely designated as the Russian piano tradition. Notwithstanding the fact that Neuhaus (unlike his conservatoire colleague, Goldenweiser) had no experiences of hearing Rubinstein’s playing or teaching, nevertheless he clearly aspired to emulate Rubinstein. His wish for an authentic connection drew him to consider that the amount of time his uncle, Felix Blumenfeld (1863–1931) had spent with Rubinstein and listened to his playing made Blumenfeld a ‘spiritual’ kin and inheritor of Rubinstein’s pianism. Yet Blumenfeld – one of the most influential figures of Russian music of his time – had never been a student of Rubinstein in any official or traditional sense. Besides, Neuhaus believed that his uncle’s pedagogy successfully transmitted ‘the commandments of that great teacher’ and so, as a close relative, admitted him to that same circle of disciples.Footnote 96
As will be discussed below, Neuhaus’s interaction with the Rubinstein myth drew from the latter’s commentaries on Beethoven’s Sonatas. Those verbal narratives shaped Neuhaus’s rendition of particular works, and his own teaching of them. However, Neuhaus’s interaction with Rubinstein’s artistry was uninterested in an historically grounded consideration of sound or style: so, those looking to Neuhaus’s allusions to Rubinstein to find descriptions of tempo, articulation, adaptation, dynamics or technique will be disappointed. Yet, consciously or not, Neuhaus borrowed substantially and recognizably from Rubinstein’s language to discuss specific aspects of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in conjunction with documenting a reflection of his own personal creative response.
Consequently, as I will now discuss, Neuhaus offers a glimpse of the mechanisms through which the performer-centred myth can live on, and an insight into some of the stimuli that it selects in order to do so. Whilst personal agenda and subjectivity undoubtedly make the notion of inheritance or legacy through constructed lineages deeply problematic, their semi-fictitious blend allows us to rethink the significance of Rubinstein’s work and legacy. Indeed, such blends of selective appropriation and re-telling inevitably magnify those facets of Rubinstein’s pianism that had the most far-reaching impact.
What Neuhaus’s writings about his uncle demonstrate is how much symbolic significance Rubinstein’s persona had as a metaphor for the gift of being able to unveil the soul: the soul of the piano, in the sense of its sound; and the soul of the pianist, in the act of performance. Neuhaus claimed that it was Blumenfeld who had directly passed onto him Rubinstein’s ‘unheard of mastery of the secrets of the piano’s sound’.Footnote 97 There is scope to consider Rubinstein’s ‘soulful’ sound as resonating with the cultural agenda of unveiling the Russian soul hitherto suppressed by a dishonest gloss of European refinement. For Neuhaus, however, it is not about ‘Russianness’ but perhaps – given his inherent cosmopolitan outlooks, émigré background, and concern at the socio-political crudeness of Soviet identity formation – the need to see the transnational nature of a noble soul. The piano’s sound, for him, was a means with which to bypass the self-fashioning and socio-political agendas which impede that sense of transnationality.Footnote 98
Neuhaus adopted Rubinstein’s understanding of sound as the literal life-giving force of the piano, and the purest transmission of the interpreter’s soul uncorrupted by translation. Sound and soul were synonyms for him: a barren soul was exposed by an insipid sound, and only one who possessed a soul capable of empathy with all people could evoke a complex, beautiful sound from the piano. Neuhaus identified his uncle’s performances of Beethoven as direct embodiments of that legacy.Footnote 99
Believing to be appropriating a crucial part of Rubinstein’s legacy, Neuhaus took up his uncle’s distinct rubato practices that arose specifically from an interaction with the sound through a practice of ‘intonirovaniye’. This is related to the rise and fall (the inflection) rather than the accuracy of pitch implied by intonation thereby rendering some overlap with the turn-of-the-century practice of portamento (such as understood for instance by violinist Joseph Joachim).Footnote 100 This is related to the rise and fall (the inflection) rather than the accuracy of pitch. On the piano, of course, these inflections are an imaginary phenomenon since no note can actually ‘grow’ after being struck. Intoning sounds (intonirovaniye) on the piano became a descriptor, attributed in loosely (rather than strict fact) to Rubinstein, for the time required to inflect the unfolding sonority of the music to mimic the imagined expressive inflections of speech.Footnote 101 These inflections were described by Neuhaus as what ‘humanize(s)’ the piano, makes the ‘mechanical box … live and breathe’.Footnote 102
So, if intonirovaniye is a note-to-note phenomenon, by contrast the idea of tempo rubato, in this understanding is architectural, rather than expressive, affecting a significantly broader part of a phrase. Therefore, playing with intonirovaniye shifts the emphasis from the rhythm controlling musical ‘time’, to the sound controlling time. In Neuhaus’s famous treatise, On the Art of Piano Playing, which achieved instant international attention, he clarified this stance. Neuhaus explained that that although ‘rhythm and sound are inseparable’, he nevertheless identified an additional concept of ‘sound in time’ (zvuk vo vremeni). This ‘sound in time’ required the interpreter to work on ‘sound-time’ (vremenem-zvukom) as opposed to rhythmic time.Footnote 103 In other words, the mimicking of expressive inflections of speech based on their tonal colour added an additional gradient to the hearing of metric rhythm.
Tonal colour thus became a rhetorical tool that could ultimately lengthen or shorten metric durations in favour of subjectively defined duration. Through intonirovaniye an inflected note could take longer to decay than its physical properties might suggest, and would most likely need a moment of stasis following it: so, without changing overall tempo in a structural sense, the action takes place with a lag (i.e. on the main tempo’s back edge); or the imagined inflection could push forwards at a rate that is impatient to the natural rate of the sound’s decay. The latter would create a collective encroachment that gives the illusion of the tempo speeding up without it actually changing (i.e. moving on the front edge).Footnote 104 Neuhaus, whose own pianism was famous for its striking manipulation of tonal colour through intonirovaniye, advised: ‘Since music is sound, then the main concern, the first and most important obligation of any interpreter, is to work on sound’.Footnote 105
Completing this association of Beethoven, soul and sound (as intonirovaniye) reveals a mirroring of Rubinstein’s language almost to the letter in Neuhaus’s writings. The question is always open as to how much this appropriation of language was crafted for himself and his audience to evoke a sense of kinship, and how much a manifestation of an absorbed legacy. In many such examples Rubinstein is not mentioned by Neuhaus as the source. Neuhaus’s descriptions were delivered to a Soviet society with keen ongoing engagement with Rubinstein’s autobiographic writings.Footnote 106 Whilst for some this may have added to the aura of Neuhaus’s authority as a leading Beethoven interpreter, for others such encroaching proved irritating and misappropriated.Footnote 107
However intentional the mirroring was, it was indeed deeply embedded into Neuhaus’s own lectures on Beethoven. For instance, speaking of Beethoven’s last sonata (Opus 111), Neuhaus had spoken of the human spirit ‘soaring’ into the stratosphere.Footnote 108 The similarity is striking when compared to the image used by Rubinstein himself: ‘The Thirty Second Sonata, C minor Opus 111: The last. Exceptionally soulful, without “academicisms”. The Arietta – a flight into the clouds, the soul soars into the highest spheres’.Footnote 109 Neuhaus was convinced that the interpreter should be able to find a naturalness in the movement from one ‘state’ of the soul to the next, even if it entailed the most extreme opposition of ‘states’. It was an attitude that explicitly echoed, or even mimicked, Rubinstein’s references to ‘capturing the truth’ of the ‘moods of the soul’ that were encoded by the composer through the score in ‘hieroglyphs’.Footnote 110 With this in mind, he wrote of the Piano Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major op. 110: ‘What can be more truthful than that change of the soul’s states, the psychological cryptogram, of which this sonata tells?’Footnote 111
Opus 110 was deeply significant to Neuhaus for the same reason as it was to Rubinstein. To his mind it contained the ultimate psychological test for the interpreter: a fugue as a movement within the sonata. The task of psychologically justifying a fugue (‘an abyss of sorrow’ in the Arioso dolente in Opus 110 led Neuhaus to consider it ‘ein Prüfstein für Pianisten’ (a touchstone for pianists).Footnote 112 The crucial task that fell upon the interpreter in the eyes of both pianists, was in the convincing delivery of the Arioso dolente as an increasingly sorrowful expression of one isolated from the world.
Alluding to Rubinstein’s Historical Lectures,Footnote 113 Neuhaus held that the Arioso dolente was a moment where the soul looked into itself, and by silencing the outer world attained a state of ‘superconsciousness’.Footnote 114 This philosophical statement can be seen to have a bearing on Neuhaus’s performance practice: if we were to entertain Neuhaus’s claim that Beethoven’s music is the ‘purest manifestation of philosophy’,Footnote 115 then Neuhaus’s interpretation (as evidenced in his only recording of the work, from the 1950s) could be taken to deliver the impression of the soul’s introspection literally through his manipulation of the interpreted tempo away from the overall metric tempo by the expressive application of intonation.
In other words, Neuhaus subtlety pulls at the sound to intone it in a way that its decay creates the impression of the tempo being inflected away from the underlying core pulse. By playing the first seven bars of the third movement on the fast edge of his core Adagio tempo, Neuhaus gives the impression of needing to narrate, of a need to live on. By contrast, he takes the Arioso dolente on the back edge of the tempo. It only moves forward to the front edge once in bars 13–14 with the rising melody in crescendo as if implying perhaps one last reaching out before resigning back into its solitude through the return to a more restrained motion (see Figure 1).
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 31, op. 110, iii, bars 7–16. Arrows to the right represent movement on the fast edge, to the left that on the back edge; boxes show the deliberate separation of the hands that also contributes to a sense of intonirovaniye.
The soul singing in the Arioso dolente was therefore, for both pianists, the musical portrayal of a soul on the edge of its existence. Neuhaus deemed that at this point the desolation is unbearable:
How [is it possible for Beethoven] to continue his narrative? How to finish it after the music had reached such an abyss of sorrow that it seems that not only the music, but also all life should cease [?]Footnote 116
By way of an answer to this rhetorical question he offered the fugue as the only meaningful form that could follow such a state: ‘The soul now does not feel anything, emotions are frozen – they have been bound by an icy cold. What is left of life? Nothing except the cold mind, the ability to think’.Footnote 117 In similar terms, Rubinstein had proposed: ‘we are overcome by a strange bitterness as the only thing left is the human mind’.Footnote 118 The power and strength of the mind, symbolized by the fugue, is thus the only force that can will the soul back into existence. In the aftermath of the Arioso dolente, Neuhaus’s interpretation of the fugue could likewise be seen to rely on the use of intonation to shape the micro changes in tempo to reflect the soul’s regaining of life, ‘the finding of the way out into life, the return [to life] after the last glimmer of hope has all but died’.Footnote 119
Neuhaus begins the theme of the fugue tentatively, very much on the back-edge of the tempo. The first sounding of the fugal subject itself moves slightly towards the front-edge as it approaches bar 282 and 291 (see Figure 2 and recording from 2.46 min to 2.53 min).Footnote 120 This ‘micro’ tempo-inclination foreshadows the larger movement of tempo from a cautious back-edge to a gradual shift forwards by the trill and subsequent forte in bar 45 (digital file at 3.17 min). He builds the assuredness and triumph of the fugue to its climax in the fortissimo in bar 110 (see Figure 3 and recording at 4.50 min) by maintaining an overall dynamic increase and an increase in the ‘depth’ of sound. In addition, Neuhaus judges his tempo so that he strives to drive forward from the front-edge of the underlying pulse, which it finally reaches in bar 1012 (recording at 4.37 min). Neuhaus uses the piano and diminuendo markings however, as a reminder of the fragility from which the fugue was born by returning the tempo-inclination once again, this time less obviously, towards the back-edge.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 31, op. 110, iii, bars 262–53.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 31, op. 110, iii, bars 98–115.
The return to the Arioso theme in bar 116 is preceded by Neuhaus taking the tempo back already from bar 1102. The triumphant climax at bar 110 looks ahead to the relapse into sorrow. Neuhaus said:
It is hard to imagine anything more expressive that grips the soul! This time the complaining song is not only complaining, but it is ill: its melody, unlike its first narration, in G minor is fragmented, and the pauses prevent its flow so that one hears the suffering breathing … until we hear the pulse, nine times. It is a pulse that is unwell in itself, [it is the pulse] of one whose heart is about to fail [‘refuses to serve’].Footnote 121
Here, despite the heavy significance and tragedy of the spirit seemingly being unable to revive the soul, Neuhaus keeps the tempo of the second Arioso much more tightly bound to the absolute. There is a feeling that the music’s movement is kept within tight bounds, almost without rubato. In this way he creates contrast with the fluctuation of the reviving fugue just heard, but also, through the strictness of the time, is able to heighten the impact of the syncopations and interruptions.
The inversion of the fugue, from bar 1362 (see Figure 4) is, for Neuhaus, the soul’s ultimate attempt to return to life:
Thought strengthens, and the [theme] becomes more complex finally achieving its fastest possible statement (diminution). It seems that the blood begins to flow through the capillaries: the theme starts to lose its ‘thematic’ character–and truly it becomes merely an accompaniment to the triumph and victory … rising upwards! To give in a few pages such an ‘emotional trajectory’: from the abyss of sorrow, illness to ecstatic joy, [and] triumphant affirmation of life – one needs to be Beethoven!Footnote 122
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 31, op. 110, iii, bars 131–143.
Neuhaus’s interpretation of the inverted fugal subject is determined, with the tempo reflecting this. He had already used the ‘heartbeats’ in bars 133–134 (see Figure 4 and recording from 6.40 min) to move the overall tempo forward from the Arioso, giving an illusion of the tempo pushing forwards off the front-edge and gaining momentum. Unlike the previous treatment of the fugal material, he is much less inclined to allow the tempo to sit on the back-edge as he aims to take the remaining part of the movement, the restoration to health and life, in one affirming sweep.
It is tantalizing to think of what Rubinstein and Neuhaus would have thought of each other’s realization of intonirovaniye in practice. Such overt similarities unite Rubinstein’s and Neuhaus’s performance narratives and conceptualization of Beethoven’s piano sonatas; their reverent attitude to them for being the first, and perhaps ultimate, works that brought about the individuation and freedom of the soul; and the status with which they both exalted the control, manipulation and cultivation of sound within the expressive context of intonirovaniye as the marker of the pianist’s spiritual worth. The fact that Neuhaus’s direct colleagues working alongside him, who had heard Rubinstein and also laid claim to being part of his legacy, never documented what they thought on the matter adds further intrigue. With no recordings of Rubinstein’s playing, and only a scant number of reliable ones made by Neuhaus and his colleagues, it is only possible to speculate how deep the physical manifestations of the aesthetic offshoots of the Beethoven–Rubinstein myth had embedded themselves into the practices of the following generation. What is certain, however, is that with the onset of the Soviet era and its changing aesthetic values the desire to contextualize Beethoven in this manner of autobiographic art began to lose its hold.
The change in priorities that stimulated a desire to evaluate substance and objectivity that became characteristic of the Soviet era are beyond the scope of this article. Yet, despite clear changes in performance practice and aesthetic outlook Soviet-era pianists continued to use the language that implied they too were embodying a reincarnated Beethoven. Neuhaus’s student, Emil Gilels, who was himself famous for his burnished sound and one of the very few pianists whom Neuhaus singled out for his unsurpassable mastery of sound, was critical of his professor’s practices: ‘he saw stylistic truth through the lens of Romantic spectacles. … Neuhaus was a product of the traditions of the last [i.e. nineteenth] century.’Footnote 123 Yet Gilels identified himself – and indeed was identified by critics – as an heir of RubinsteinFootnote 124 saying he felt Rubinstein’s performance would have been ‘incredibly close and dear’ to his had he heard it, and he singled him out as the one pianist from the past whom he would have liked to have heard.Footnote 125 Furthermore, just as Rubinstein’s physical persona was merged with that of Liszt and Beethoven in his own time (an image perpetuated well into the mid-twentieth century), the imagination of Soviet critics compared Gilels’s own stocky stature, auburn hair, serious countenance, velvet chords and power with Rubinstein’s.Footnote 126
In each of the above cases, despite being generations apart, the illusive nature of sound crystallized in the principle of intonation was moulded into a way of encapsulating a philosophical and aesthetic concept through the interpretation of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. The sublimation of the expressive voice of the free ‘soul’ as opposed to the refined or constrained expression from the ‘heart’ had derived from Rubinstein’s provocative assertion that Beethoven was the first composer to define the ‘soul’. As Rubinstein became the mythical Beethoven incarnate, that notion of soul merged inseparably with tales of his incomparable sound. The insistence on sound and soul ensured that competing future reincarnations of Beethoven fuelled the formation of performer-centred myth that capriciously steers clear of engaging objectively with historical facts, or a composer’s performance indications in a score.
In actively working their way into an imaginary notion of a direct but mythical line that would define them as heirs of Beethoven, pianists followed Anton Rubinstein’s momentum to become standard-bearers of a perceived Russian piano tradition that positioned the communication of outright emotional integrity as its supreme aim. Yet, despite yearning the recognition of authority or pedigree that this quasi-familial attachment afforded, ultimately what the nature of myth magnifies is that it is not the protection of a performance practice that concerns each pianist. Instead, it highlights that the myth is driven by their urgent desire to individuate themselves – to free their ‘soul’ – through the symbolism, rather than substance, of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. And, ironically, that very emphasis on the soul that individuates being timeless (i.e., as receivable and reenactable many generations later) is perhaps the element that situates these pianists in their own historical time.Footnote 127
Exploring the processes in the creation of the mythical paradigm around a performer, and the instigated response to it, can offer a fascinating insight into the ways in which performers have at the same time consciously adopted and undermined the status of the mythologized composer. In essence it is a challenge to Werktreue, but not through improvisation that stakes claim to a distinction of composer and interpreter, as proposed by Goehr, but through a process through which the performer claims a direct kinship to the composer. The composer is replaced by the interpreter’s claim they are the reincarnated composer, and so the only applicable notion of Werktreue is now to the interpreter’s own interpretation. It reveals a symbiotic relationship whereby the wider recognition of the composer as a classic is a vital prerequisite without which the performer cannot stake his claim of being enlightened to the level that he can fully understand the creations of that composer. The resulting interpretations themselves acquire the status of a classic for that performer, but not without first eroding the integrity of the composer. While the performer boldly stakes a claim to be merely an embodiment of the composer, it is naïve to ignore the ultimate aim of the performer: self-individuation. A performance tradition or school that is spurred on by the desire to become a performer-as-a-classic can therefore be perceived as a reaction not to the mythical composer, but the mythical composer as manipulated by the mythical performer.
The mainstream routes of classical training for performers post-Liszt and post-Rubinstein, and their institutionalisation through conservatoires (including those they set up in their own names) and masterclasses, have thrived on fostering the rhetorics of such lineages. Yet, whilst such activities continue to be fundamental to the dynamic ecosystem of classical performance today, they have only been marginally explored in the musicological domain. Their exploration, however, encourages us to look beyond the well-established and tired prototypes of national identity, for example, as defining narratives of cultural identity in the long nineteenth-century. Instead, it allows these to be repositioned as sub-issues that come into a much more cosmopolitan and global view of cultural and historical evolution through the act of performance. Myth-creation as a mechanism for self-individuation in performance therefore can be a viable path to use the notion of classics not as a way to chart museum artefacts and out-dated thought, but as the inspiration towards reinvention and the energies directed towards cultural renewal.
Dr Maria Razumovskaya has an active profile as a pianist and researcher. She is professor of academic studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and previously also held the position of Director of Performance & Performance Studies at the University of Oxford where she is currently an Associate Professor. Her monograph Heinrich Neuhaus: A Life Beyond Music (New York: Boydell & Brewer, 2018) was awarded CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. She has also written book chapters for Indiana University Press, and Palgrave MacMillan. Her recorded performances have been critically praised for their ‘extraordinary mastery’ (American Record Guide), and ‘staggering passion and lyricism’ (Gramophone).
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