Pianists From Austria

"To me, this is very boring music—most of it. It has nothing happening. Nothing is sticking. They’re playing music perfectly with wonderful intonation and technique, but it’s dangerous for jazz itself. I do wish these people all the best."

"That was one thing about [Mr. Gone] that I really love us for–that we did not try to jump on the bandwagon of ‘Birdland.’ Because that was suggested to us. ‘Hey man, write another ‘Birdland’ and you’ll sell a million fuckin’ records.’ Fuck you, man–we’re gonna do what we’re gonna do!"

"Jazz music is a lifestyle. It’s not notes, chords and arpeggios. Today’s improvisation is too based on the knowledge of chords and the way they practice the chords. It’s not a melodic thing anymore like the older days. It was much more important to play shorter and to play more variable, valid stuff. Today, a lot of solos are long and uninteresting and the influence usually comes from John Coltrane’s group. He himself was a master musician, but he put so much emphasis on chord knowledge and technique, and now the kids want to show how fast they can play. This is the same with piano players and most instrumentalists—it’s speed. That’s gonna change again and hopefully the kids who are now 16 and 17 years old have a little more sense and maybe some more stories to tell."

"[Weather Report] has never put out a record that we didn’t believe in, and there’s no way in the world that anybody was ever involved in a one star album. This is a heavy thing, man. I mean, even if somebody doesn’t like the record, just for the compositions alone it’s got to be five stars. We played it very well; we worked hard on this record. Anybody who gives this record one star has got to be insane."

"In the beginning let's say Weather Report was a joint thing. Then, after the second album there's no question about it, it became more and more my group. Wayne wanted it like that, but we were always 'partners in crime'. No Wayne, no Weather Report."

"I ain’t scared of Beethoven or nobody when it comes to composing."

"Everything is in decline the moment you stop giving the artist freedom. That goes for everywhere, but it is happening in America right now. I think record companies are at great fault. In general, they don’t want to develop talent, but rather get the most out of them in the short term. They’re steering people to do things they perhaps wouldn’t do but have to do and not everyone has the integrity to say “No way.” People are hungry and they have to make money and take care of their families, so it’s a great pressure. Only when you can afford it from an artistic or financial point of view can you express what you want to express."

"An instrument is not important. It is the way one plays that is important. Instruments don’t play by themselves. A piano is certainly not a better instrument than a synthesizer, but if a synthesizer is played like a piano, it becomes a very bad instrument. It doesn’t work. You can’t play a trumpet like a violin—it doesn’t go. That’s the problem—the players, not the instrument. Any instrument is a wonderful thing."

"Edwin Fischer was, on the concert platform, a short, leonine, resilient figure, whose every fiber seemed to vibrate with elemental musical power. Wildness and gentleness were never far from each other in his piano-playing, and demonic outbursts would magically give way to inner peace. It was as little trouble to him (as Alfred Polgar once said of an actor) to lose himself as to find himself. His playing of slow movements was full of an unselfconsciousness beside which the music-making of others, famous names included, seemed academic or insincere. With Fischer, one was in more immediate contact with the music: there was no curtain before the soul when he communicated with the audience. One other musician, Furtwangler, conveyed to the same degree this sensation of music not being played, but rather happening by itself."

"Why does he think what he's playing is better than other interpretations? He must think it's better and the question is why. It's not because what he plays is more beautiful than what he might otherwise play. Because if he was aiming at beauty, he could depart from what the composer had written. But he is faithful to the composition. And yet, he's not just playing the composer's music, he's interpreting it."

"Alfred Brendel is a line guy trapped in a chord guy’s body."

"Hearing has its own memory. It registers the dog whose sudden barking startled me as a child. The folk songs my nanny used to sing. The dadaism of a cabaret song from Berlin: ‘I tear out one of my eyelashes and stab you dead with it,’ innocently sung by my mother. Hitler conjuring up the Almighty. The crowing voice of little Goebbels. Alarm sirens, the roar of aircraft, the blast of bombs. Ljuba Welitsch being Salome. The sonorities of Edwin Fischer’s piano playing. María Casares as Lady Macbeth in Avignon. Ralph Kirkpatrick’s two Scarlatti recitals. Gré Brouwenstijn as Leonore in Fidelio. The epiphany of Ligeti’s Aventures et Nouvelles Aventures. The magic application of noise in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All sorts of laughter."

"The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent'."

"I am accountable to the composer, but I am also there to communicate something to the listener. I am not delivering a soliloquy, but am somewhere in the middle."

"If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed."

"You need three or five hands to play Ligeti."

"Unlike Beethoven’s sonatas, but like his own song cycles, Schubert’s piano sonatas were not of a nature to inspire the need for public performance for a long time. Sviatoslav Richter’s comprehension of this special intimate nature can explain his interpretation of some of the late sonatas. his very slow tempo in the first movement of the last sonata in B-flat Major (marked only Molto moderato) excited the derision of Alfred Brendel. As I remember, Richter takes almost half an hour for this movement alone, with three more still to go. Brendel was right in thinking the tempo incorrect or inauthentic, but he also appeared not to feel that the intimacy of the work was also essential to its authenticity, and contented himself with a large- scale rendition. The movement is indeed of grand dimensions, but the paradox of schubert’s style here is the astonishing quantity of dynamic indications of pianissimo and even ppp, broken most memorably just before the repeat of the exposition by a single fierce and unexpectedly brutal playing as loudly as possible of the trill of the principal motif, heard so far only very softly (a repeat that Brendel refused to perform, perhaps because the unprepared violence is awkward in a large hall, although paradoxically more convincing in an intimate setting). Richter was an extraordinarily intelligent musician: whenever there was a significant detail in the score, it was always signaled by a reaction in his interpretation, not always, perhaps, the reaction that one would have liked, but no matter."

"Those who look for contradictions will be amply satisfied. The profession of a performer is full of paradoxes, and he has to learn to live with them. He has to forget himself and control himself; he has to observe the composer's wishes to the letter and create the music on the spot; he has to be part of the music market and yet retain his integrity."

"Carl Czerny, “the dry and methodical genius” who has tortured generations of pianists with an inexhaustible stream of studies and exercises, established that it is possible to render on the piano one hundred dynamic gradations encompassed between limits which I shall term “not yet tone” and “no longer tone”."

"I certainly think Czerny’s large pianoforte [Op. 500] is worthy of study, particularly in regard to what he says aboutBeethoven and the performance of his works, for he was a diligent and attentive pupil…Czerny’s fingering is particularly worthy of attention. In fact I think that people today ought to have more respect for this excellent man."

"Czerny believed that finger development must be built solely on mechanical gymnastics. His method was one of endless repetition, of constant pecking at one spot…Czerny believed in first developing technique independently from music, then making this technique eventually serve the realisation of artistic aims. For the first time the full separation of mechanics and music was pronounced clearly and frankly."

"At the age of eleven, I had conceived an ardent desire to meet the great pedagogue Karl Czerny… My father had had lessons from the renowned teacher, so that I was well prepared to derive immediate benefit from his valuable instruction… It has been somewhat the fashion to underrate the services this really great man rendered to pianism; but we have only to point to the list of distinguished virtuosi who have come to him as to a fountain-head – Liszt, Thalberg, Döhler, Kullak … His studies are very valuable. He may well be called the Father of Virtuosi… His manner of teaching was somewhat that of an orchestral director. He gave his lessons standing, indicating the different shades of tempo and colouring by gestures. Czerny insisted principally on accuracy, brilliancy, and pianistic effects."

"No on understands better than he [Czerny] the way to strengthen the weakest fingers or by beneficial musical exercises to make study less burdensome without sacrifice of taste."

"Carl Czerny, the nephew’s teacher, was much less devoted to these [Clementi’s] sonatas, and for this and other pedagogical reasons a disagreement arose between him and Beethoven, as a result of which lessons with him were discontinued. He was replaced by Joseph Czerny, a much better teacher than Carl… Under the new teacher’s guidance the nephew advanced along the road prescribed by his uncle."

"Czerny very frequently uses the words ‘humor, humorous, fantastic’ to describe the character of certain movements without even so much as hinting how such a character is to be presented. In one place he does say, “By the successful mastery of all mechanical difficulties.” But if that were all that was required, we would nowadays have hundreds of outstanding Beethoven pianists."

"It is, however, part of the unfortunate nature of the virtuoso [Czerny] that he demeans all these hard-won accomplishments and wishes to substitute technique for spirit."

"Not even with all one’s critical speed is it possible to catch up with Herr Czerny. Had I enemies, I would, in order to destroy them, force them to listen to nothing but music such as this. The insipidity of these variations is really phenomenal."

"Schnabel himself was an extraordinary composer, and actually thought of himself more as a composer than as a pianist. He wrote absolutely rhapsodic music, and endless pieces. All of his pieces, I think, are 45 minutes long! (laughs) Nothing of the little tidbit variety for him…"

"There are two things about Schnabel. I think he was certainly one of the most important influences of the twentieth century, pretty much on all music. But what was most striking was the level of inspiration every time his fingers touched the keyboard. It was a highly moving, almost kind of life-transformative experience. And one of the reasons was there was little caprice in his approach to music. ‘Because I feel it that way’ was never a sufficient reason to do something; that is arbitrary and it had no place in his lessons either. Everything that he did, he could point to the text, and the text - an urtext, an original text - was terribly important to him. His edition of the Beethoven sonatas is so instructive because his ideas and suggestions are in a different print than what Beethoven wrote; you can always distinguish between Beethoven and Schnabel. But that kind of dedication, that kind of musical integrity to the desires and instructions from the composer, gave it an authenticity that was irresistible, and that was combined with his level of inspiration. Very quickly, it became impossible to distinguish between Mozart and Schnabel, Beethoven and Schnabel, or Schubert and Schnabel; he became the musical personification of the composer, which is why it was so irresistible what he did."

"I know two kinds of audience only – one coughing, and one not coughing."

"Children are given Mozart because of the small quantity of the notes; grown-ups avoid Mozart because of the great quality of the notes."

"I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a never-ending problem, it doesn't interest me too much."

"The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides."

"Applause is a receipt, not a note of demand."

"Haydn is, together with Schumann, probably the most neglected and misunderstood of the greatest composers. Some might argue with this statement by saying that Haydn's works are frequently performed and that he has long been recognised as the father figure of Viennese Classicism. Papa Haydn has become one of the worst clichés in classical music. It degrades one of history's most innovative composers into a lovable but minor figure."

"Dear Haydn, how I love you! But other pianists? They're rather lukewarm towards you. Which is a great shame."

"If I could only impress on the soul of every friend of music, and on high personages in particular, how inimitable are Mozart's works, how profound, how musically intelligent, how extraordinarily sensitive! (for this is how I understand them, how I feel them) — why then the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel within their frontiers. Prague should hold him fast — but should reward him, too: for without this, the history of great geniuses is sad indeed, and gives but little encouragement to posterity to further exertions; and unfortunately this is why so many promising intellects fall by the wayside."

"Ich sage ihnen vor Gott, als ein ehrlicher Mann, ihr Sohn ist der größte Componist, den ich von Person und den Nahmen nach kenne: er hat geschmack, und über das die größte Compositionswissenschaft."

"Give Him thanks, all ye His works so wondrous! Sing His honor, sing His glory, bless and magnify His Name! Jehovah’s praise endures forevermore, Amen, Amen!."

"Music was destined to reach its culmination in the likeness of itself."

"It is improper, to expressly pursue the Urlinie in performance and to single out its tones...for the purpose of communicating the Urlinie to the listener." Rather, "for the performer, the Urlinie provides, first of all, a sense of direction. It serves a somewhat equivalent function to that which a road map serves for a mountain climber."

"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

"openmozart.net: Friedrich Rochlitz forgery"

"Livepictures from Mozart Birthhous in Salzburg"

"Excluding and banning the sublime work of Mozart in the Temple for his masonry militancy seems ridiculous and even offensive to all "men of good will" who love only and above all great classical music, which they do not look with any prejudice at the choices made in life by any genius, and they do not think at all that his celestial notes could harm the soul of anyone or even disturb that of the Franciscan fathers."

"I write as a sow pisses."

"Sie wird das nothwendigste und härteste und die hauptsache in der Musique niemahlen bekommen, nämlich das tempo, weil sie sich vom jugend auf völlig befliessen hat, nicht auf den tact zu spiellen."

"I know myself, and I have such a sense of religion that I shall never do anything which I would not do before the whole world; but I am alarmed at the very thoughts of being in the society of people, during my journey, whose mode of thinking is so entirely different from mine (and from that of all good people). But of course they must do as they please. I have no heart to travel with them, nor could I enjoy one pleasant hour, nor know what to talk about; for, in short, I have no great confidence in them. Friends who have no religion cannot be long our friends."

"The most stimulating and encouraging thought is that you, dearest father, and my dear sister, are well, that I am an honest German, and that if I am not always permitted to talk I can think what I please; but that is all."

"I must give you a piece of intelligence that you perhaps already know — namely, that the ungodly arch-villain Voltaire has died miserably like a dog — just like a brute. That is his reward!"