Rudolf Serkin: A Life Review

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Rudolf Serkin: A Life ReviewHe is my favourite piano player of all. To mark the centenary of his birth here is what I would call a brilliant illuminating and very readable account of his life, character and service to music. As well as the book we get a CD of previously unreleased live performances of Bach's 4th French suite, six Mendelssohn numbers and Chopin's op25 etudes.
What a pleasure it is to read an account of a major executant musician, in this age of groupies and supporters' associations, that is actually intelligent. You will not find here any attempts to rank Serkin, nor any talk of expressiveness or inevitable organic unity in his or anyone else's playing. What the authors have done is to provide first a brief sketch of his life. He was born in the Sudetenland to an ethnically Jewish but atheistical father and a mother whom he overheard telling a neighbour that he was an unwanted pregnancy. His talent was recognised early as being not just outstanding but as of an unusual type. He was particularly lucky in attracting the notice of Adolf Busch, reform-minded as a musician and vehemently anti-nazi, and also, in a very different way, in being taught by Schoenberg. Throughout his life Serkin remembered Schoenberg with affection as well as reverence, but he disliked his music and said so once he had safely got Schoenberg's commendation. Schoenberg never forgave this apostasy, but the bellicose and revolutionary imagery that Schoenberg used ('you must decide which side of the barricades you are on' and so forth) clearly displeased Serkin and helped cool any early revolutionary ideas he might have acquired from his father, Karl Popper and others. It looks as if he was always on the liberal side of the political argument, e.g. he fund-raised for Stevenson against Eisenhower, but he knew he was a textbook example of the American self-view as a land of opportunity. Oddly, the puritanical exclusiveness that he objected to in Schoenberg was a striking characteristic of his own. On the one hand he was indifferent to the sexual peccadilloes of his friends: on the other he could break friends completely with someone who gave an unworthy performance of Mozart, Beethoven etc, and he reacted with spinsterish horror when someone told him (rightly I would say) that the end of Beethoven's 5th symphony is naff.
The rest of the book is reflexions on him by associates, and most illuminating they are. Behind all his interpersonal skills, astuteness, genuine humility and not infrequent deviousness, Serkin was a man possessed. If anyone ever embodied Stapledon's grim maxim 'find your calling...or be damned' it was Serkin. As a teacher he instilled a fierce work ethic but never taught by demonstration. As a performer he was wayward and vulnerable to nerves, a bit like Richter. I remember him starting Beethoven's op31/1 in a flurry of wrong notes. Technically the passage is dead easy, but to allow any music to be easy was anathema to him. His great sausages of fingers were odd in a man of medium height and slight build, but they can't have been more of an impediment than to big men like Rachmaninov and Richter, on whom huge hands were in proportion. He could turn out virtuosity equal to any, as some of the Mendelssohn and Chopin pieces on the disc attest. His tone gets some comment, as he is often said to be indifferent to tone-colour, at least in his prime, which is interesting as Serkin's tone-production is near-impossible to mistake, like Michelangeli's or Gould's in that respect if in no other. One contributor puts his finger on the point by saying that Serkin was not 'a smoothie'. He is not alone in that -- Horowitz and Cziffra were not smoothies either. The trouble set in with Michelangeli and Gould. They spawned, unintentionally, a whole generation of players for whom absolute evenness was a basic requirement like perfectly straightened teeth, and Michelangeli himself expressed disgust at this result. There is nobody quite like Serkin when his demon is in the right mood. His command of rhythm and timing surpasses anyone else's. His discography is far more varied than I had realised, and I have to get hold of his Liszt and Debussy performances. On the disc with this book is a complete set of the Chopin op25 etudes, and despite the recorded sound this is terrific Chopin-playing. It is not like Pollini (an admirer of his) nor Ashkenazy but very like Cziffra. Of his other Chopin readings the A flat polonaise does not seem to be on record (I bet he was memorable in that), but the Barcarolle is and I shall find it or die in the attempt.
'Serkin says "You do it like THIS"' was how he was described to me by a friend whom I introduced to his playing. Serkin's mighty Waldstein, the greatest I have ever heard, is not his studio recording but a live performance owned by the BBC. His Appassionata is in the same bracket -- but where do we go from there? Players can't go on doing it 'like this' forever, but attempts at novelty, however distinguished their perpetrators, strike me as travesties of Beethoven. It's a real problem. I can't solve it, but at least there are a lot of his recordings I hadn't known of, and the photo on p145 of the figure I came to know so well and who taught me so much about music is one I would have bought this book for by itself.Rudolf Serkin: A Life Overview

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