Book: The veil of order
Author: Alfred Brendel in conversation with Martin Meyer
Price: (Faber & Faber, ?25)
Alfred Brendel is one of Britain's central European treasures. He, in turn, likes the British for their imperviousness to fanaticism and sense of the absurd. The first section of this book of conversations with the journalist Martin Meyer is called "Life," and it reveals Brendel's lifelong attachment to absurdity.
He had a peripatetic childhood, moving from one part of central Europe to another, including a spell on the Dalmatian island of Krk, where his father ran a hotel. He remembers two cabaret songs from childhood, one of which had the line, "I'll pull out an eyelash and stab you to death with it." This is just the kind of line that appears in the surreal, deadpan poetry Brendel has taken to writing in recent years. In fact, his poetical enterprise (which gets a section to itself) could be seen as a recuperation of a childhood view of everything as absurd, even music.
Sometime in his teens, however, Brendel began to take music and literature seriously. How he discovered them is a mystery left intact by this book. His parents were not at all musical, and there seem not to have been many books at home. One gets the sense of an aloofly self-possessed boy, of whom his parents were probably in awe. Looking on the world as one vast Dada cabaret can be amusing, but Brendel also applies this gaze to his own parents. He remembers how his father tried to play the piano "in a carefree, bravura way, raising his hands in jerky movements, and twitching with the corner of his mouth almost up to his eye. My mother was quite the opposite. She would sit very tensely at the piano with an anxious expression and stab at the notes like a woodpecker." There's an exaggerated quality about Brendel's anecdotes, which seems part of a strategy for keeping life at arm's length.
This is why the "Life" section is rather unrevealing. We learn that Brendel was not precocious and that his progress was slow. During the 1950s, he lived quite a straitened life in Vienna, learning the repertoire and working on his technique. "I was different from other musicians in that I was not impatient... I was calm, slightly ironic, and thinking gave me pleasure." When his recordings for Philips propelled him into the front rank of pianists in the late 1960s, he says that "this development rather passed me by." You wonder what it would take to gain his attention.
This detachment lends an oracular tone to the book which is a little wearing, a tone encouraged by the interviewer-Martin Meyer literary editor of the Neue Z?rcher Zeitung. When Bren-del loftily declares that, "I'm sceptical about all political categories, since I'm always aware of the limits within which they function," you want Meyer to pursue the topic, and ask whether the aesthetic view of life doesn't also have its limits. Likewise, when he suggests that Debussy can be thought of as a mere tributary of Liszt, Meyer lets his bizarre comments pass.
Sometimes, though, a hollow answer can be as revealing as a full one. When Meyer asks Brendel whether he has ever suffered any spiritual or emotional crises that impeded the smooth upward path of his career, Brendel remarks: "a low pressure or a sudden rise in temperature. That could really disturb my concentration."
But once Brendel steps into that other world, the world of musical values, he is no longer the amused observer of an absurd world. "A performer is a truly split personality," he says. When Brendel walks on stage, the facial tics and furrowed brow take on an anguished air, which, early in his career, spilled over into distracting face-pulling and arm-waving. Brendel tells us how, in the 1960s, his friends told him he had to do something about it, so he bought a large three-way mirror to observe himself as he practised.
Brendel likes to quote Novalis's line: "Chaos, in a work of art, should shimmer through the veil of order," and he goes on to say, "I am very much for chaos, that is to say feeling. But it's only the veil of order that makes the work of art possible." By "order" Brendel means the total conception that a musical work reveals, to which all the parts are subservient. This does not rule out risk-taking-on the contrary Brendel has often insisted that he will go to extremes of intensity. Among his pianist heroes is Alfred Cortot, whom he praises for "boldness, which came from an intimate knowledge of the work, a boldness which was precisely planned and yet sounded spontaneous." Predictably Brendel has little time for that most surprising of pianists, Glenn Gould. "There is nothing wrong in playing pieces in a variety of ways-but please do so within the limits, within the character and structure of the piece itself."
Brendel defines the essence of a piece as two-fold: character and structure. This will come as a surprise to the people who think of him as an intellectual pianist-a faintly pejorative term meaning someone obsessed with formal things at the expense of expression. For Brendel, performance cannot be so circumscribed: "The fact that the Hammerklavier sonata, say, is in so many respects built up on thirds-in its themes, in its harmonic development over extended passages, in all the important keys-tells you virtually nothing about the character of the piece."
About Beethoven's "characters" he says: "there are painterly, declamatory, and dancing sonatas, and those pieces that, above all, sing. The D minor sonata and the Appassionata belong to the painterly works... while the Waldstein sonata for me is the epitome of experiencing nature."
Brendel is not purist in his approach to performance. Anything that helps the performer project this elusive "character" should be made use of. Elemental metaphors he finds useful; there are "earthy" pieces, "fiery" pieces, "watery" pieces. The finale of Beethoven's Op 26 sonata, he says, should sound "like a wind-although in this case a warm breeze-blowing over the graves." You realise what a gulf separates Brendel from many younger players of the classics, with their interest in original sources and period instruments ("a fundamental error," says Brendel-it would have been good to know exactly why). He points out that realising a composer's intentions isn't just a matter of establishing the text, there always has to be interpretation. "Observing a composer's markings is not a simple, automatic matter that a computer could do as well. Rather, they need to be understood-that requires a great deal of imagination."
It is these observations on the practicalities of performing music that make this book illuminating. By the end, we come to realise that amused detachment can be valuable as an aid towards emotional truth. Brendel loves kitsch, but at bottom disapproves of it, quoting Milan Kundera that "the brotherhood of man is only possible on the basis of kitsch."
There are other pleasures too. Brendel is well read in German and other European literature, and peppers his talk with apothegms from Kleist, Musil and Val?ry. My favourite is from a letter of Goethe: "Let us, dear Graf Sternberg, not worship positive things too much, but let us maintain some irony, and in doing so render them problematic." It is a good motto for a pianist.
