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O O P S !

Some moments stay with you for ever... Unfortunately!

My father told me he had heard Artur Rubinstein close the final onrush of Schumann’s Études symphoniques, that tidal sweep after the transition to the major, with a flamboyant flourish - but missing the last note of all just a quarter of an inch out. Oops. Rubinstein characteristically followed through the grand gesture of the right hand by looking at the audience out from under his eye-brows, over the top of his wrist, giving a resigned grimace that said with a twinkle, "C’est la vie!"

Just so.

After all, it is a commonplace that the perfection achieved in the recording studio is often somehow moribund. Life on the other hand has foibles and frailties, moments of oops to unlock other feelings and insights that can struggle for light in the dead dark of perfection for perfection’s sake. After a fluffed passage in a recording session it was suggested to Schnabel that they might take that side again - this was in the days of 78s, where a side could be redone but not edited. With delight in paradox, the great musician replied to this effect, "We could do it again, it would be better but it would not be so good." And Schnabel’s recordings must contain the greatest number of sanctioned fluffs and fudges of any artist of such stature. I’m the last to complain.

Yet, less than sanctioned is a live performance that has come down to us, of a Mozart piano concerto with Schnabel and Rodzinski, in which he loses his place altogether in the last movement. Why does it simply not matter? Quite the opposite, we learn something. Is it perverse of me to say I think Music & Arts have done Schnabel a disservice by editing out the lapse, in their disc of the performance? When we hear the memory lapse that signalled the close of Toscanini’s career, midwy in an all-Wagner programme in 1954, we sense sadly that there cracked a noble heart after decades of myopic perfection of concentration and recall. The frailty of age brings vision nonetheless: try the Busch quartet, live but late, 1951, in late Beethoven, for a mesmerising glimpse to the abyss.

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We are reminded of the extreme artificiality of the pressures of concert-giving and of our arrogance too, perhaps. Useful lessons. Though they are not necessarily lessons that need underlining, as did Vladimir de Pachmann, an enigmatic figure in limbo between being a clown and a wizard. He died in 1833, in his mid-80s, but left copious fluid and loving recordings as well as doubly copious anecdotal material. My favourite record is an old 78 (reissued by Arbiter) in which, seemingly at sea at various points of a Chopin study, he starts to comment in a necessarily eager but off-hand manner - an in ‘allo-‘allo Franglais - about the difficulty of the passage and his preference for a Godowski transcription; "eet eez more pohettick, more mayloddick..." he chants as the oopsies rave at his fingertips. He had the endearing habit, whenever in Paris, of visiting Chopin’s grave and asking forgiveness for his wrong notes. We should say thanks for his poetry, however.

Not that pious sentiments about human frailty are all that there is to it, don’t let us forget that at least an element of the thrill in virtuoso music is akin to spectator sport: few will admit to watch motor racing for the crashes but the fact there can be crashes is part of the event. Some of the long wave-like motions of Chopin’s music for instance - more than with manic Liszt surely - seem to acknowledge this by affording pit-stops between headlong demands on the technique. Yet it is in the lulls that the player can be most vulnerable, Richter for example going skew in the single note statement of the theme in Mussorgsky’s Pictures, in a live performance over forty years old yet still rightly cited as one of the benchmarks despite fluffs and an abundance of audience clatter and coughing.

Richter might not have thanked you for saying so but he belongs to a category of performer whose charm very much embraces the possibility of splash. He is in great company, if we include the smudges, scrapes or grunts respectively of Cortot, Menuhin or Casals, for instance, or knotty Brendel as well as podgy Schnabel. I mention Brendel since I treasure a moment of a masterclass in which a pupil played with abundant bravura a passage from an early Beethoven sonata, to be back-handedly congratulated with the remark that he, Brendel, wished he had the technique to play like that... The unspoken but told all. Brendel is clearly unabashed to allow us to see that there are difficulties in what he is playing, being far too honest not to be horrified at the idea of hiding that. It is certainly one of the shrewd richnesses of his late Beethoven, for instance. And it is especially with great Beethovenians like Schnabel and Brendel that we are reminded that Beethoven would never have wanted to glove the fist.

Whatever lapses they may have, their art is sure enough in technique not to place them in the company of those who have had recourse to fudge in order to save them from fluff. The most obvious example is the pianist’s use of the sustaining pedal to let gist make do for accuracy in an impossible passage. Caught live in a famous recital, Josef Hoffman, of what we may call the old school of piano virtuoso, delivers a variety of passages in Chopin and the Beethoven Waldstein sonata in, shall we say, an optimistic manner? But the recital is awash with his endearing character and fathomless love of music. Related to technical fudge is improvisational fudge, my most lovingly remembered example being a performance of Kreisleriana by Perlemuter in which his drifting memory washed us through all sorts of passages of Schumann from other, though neighbouring, opus numbers. It reminded me of a Poppy Lawson that my father would also tell about from the 1930s; she had the habit of playing the 78s of a Schubert trio for instance in any order that came to hand, stacking 78s not numbered to be stacked, and on being corrected would retort, "Oh, but it’s all such lovely music, isn’t it, dear?" Oops.

String players have special dispensation as members of the oops club, having to form each note each time. Sandor Végh famously asked about Casals, "Tell me, does Pablo play in tune this season?" Or did Casals ask about Végh? For myself the moment that set the seal on why Menuhin’s art was so deeply valuable amidst all the violinists usually but crassly called rivals, was vouchsafed when, at a concert to mark the 50th anniversary of his first London appearance, the opening declamation of the Kreutzer sonata went adrift like a paddle that loses your grip in a current. The meaning of the occasion spoke. Gleaming perfection would have dehumanised the gratitude and warmth of it all.

As it did when in 1958 Jon Vickers, making his Bayreuth début and over-beefing his zest as Siegmund in Die Walküre, allowed his thrilled exhaustion give way close to the end of the first act, the final top note crooned across to us in a way all the more touching for its saggingly false intonation. I’d swap almost no other singer’s accuracy for that moment - that tells you something about what matters in this ravishing interpretation?

Instances of studio oops are usually silently repaired; almost. Lotte Lehmann not having turned up yet for one of the sessions of the gleaming, early truncated version of Der Rosenkavalier, it was up to Elizabeth Schumann to impersonate her for a tiny phrase the shedule had overlooked. Equally there is always the malicious glee with which some hands report that Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, called in to sing a top note for Flagstad in her 1952 studio recording of Tristan und Isolde, came in early, necessitating a lengthy re-take... Oops, m’dear. I was taught that Flagstad had a superstition as to the number of top c’s allowed to her in her life and after the last - immortalised in the Ring cycle from La Scala - she never sang one again; and I’m too sentimental ever to have checked the story! The Liebestod of that Tristan also includes the clunk of something like a metal object hitting the floor, by the way; oops.

Some studio oops were never repaired, a legendary example being a horn passage in Barbirolli’s fine Mahler fifth symphony, possibly an accident-prone work which, when I first heard it in concert, opened not with the trumpet triplet dadada-dah, but with merely a duplet dada-dah. Oops. Poor chap. With presence of mind he kept to the fluff throughout his exposed passage until drowned by the tripletting orchestra and embarrassment.

Opera, where pride is supposedly more puffed and thus more prickworthy than elsewhere in the musical world, offers the pantheon of oops, with disasters legion and legendary. Comedian Victor Borge mimics this in his Mozart opera sketch, in which the tenor arrives and sings a snatch of La donn’é mobile before he realises he’s in the wrong opera so he goes off and goes home. You may think of him when you hear in the many live performances for instance with Callas where the prompter is as audible as the singer, with hilarious results when the line begins with Ah or Oh, let alone Casta: the gruff and gutteral Italian man lurking hidden in the hooded trap makes sure that La Divina is constantly aware of the opera she’s in, with pre-echo grunts of Haah or Ohh. Oops.

None of this should be taken as gloating. It’s just that I noted that when an elderly friend said recently that she had heard Heifetz many times, I was envious, of course, but I threw my hat in the air to the subsequent remark that she had heard him play a wolf-note. How many can say that? Now, that was history in the making! Whoops.

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