"Eunice Norton in Conversation" (4/5) An audio interveiw with pianist Eunice Norton by music critic Riccardo ("Richard") Schulz in 1987 on the topic of her early career, originally presented with her four part series of lectures on the teaching of Artur Schnabel. Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Er62hptAik * Fanfare Magazine, March/April 1997 An Interview with Eunice Norton BY BERNARD JACOBSEN (continued from part 3) B.J.: In another interview, Ive heard you express great enthusiasm for Rachmaninovs playing, especially of Chopin. How do reconcile that enthusiasm with the principle of freedom within the law?--because after all, when Rachmaninov played the Chopin Funeral March, he didnt just extend or vary the dynamics, which I would certainly think legitimate: he actually reversed them, exchanging crescendo and decrescendo, and surely thats not legitimate? E.N.: Remember that when I first heard Rachmaninov I was a child. More recently, Ive been shocked by his playing. Rachmaninov was a marvelous person. He radiated warmth and joy and all good things. He was my favorite at fifteen, and I actually claimed to have learned the Chopin waltzes from him. You see, it wasnt until I went to Schnabel that I learned a whole range of other values in music. I heard him play Beethoven and I realized that I had to make a decision. It broke my heart to leave Matthay, but I knew I had to do it if I was going to learn to play Beethoven the way I wanted to hear him. It was Schnabel who started the whole thing about editions. Before that, pianists just played just what they saw in front of them, and they accepted the dynamic and expression marks from whatever edition they merely happened to learn a piece from. Schnabel taught me about the importance of establishing what the composers markings were. And repeats--he was so strict about repeats. B.J.: I think Schoenberg missed the whole point about music as an art that subsists in time when he said, Surely weve reached the point in music history where we no longer need to hear the same thing twice. You cant ever hear the same thing twice--a counterstatement is never the same as the original statement, simply because of their time relationship. I think of it as something like Heraclitus: You cannot step into the same river twice. E.N.: Exactly, and thats also why there has to be a delicate difference of feeling in the repeats. (continued)

• published: 24 Oct 2010
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