1946 recording.
~~~
Artur Schnabel (
1882 - 1951),
was born in
Lipnik,
Austria. Schnabel's piano career began at age six, when his sister's piano teacher noticed that he instantly mastered, without teaching, the lessons his sister had to practice.
Schnabel made his public debut at age 11. By 1898 he was still studying piano in
Vienna but was good enough to take on piano students himself; financially independent, if barely so, he headed for
Berlin, Germany.
Schnabel's career was slow to build, but after he gave a
Berlin debut concert featuring the music of
Franz Schubert, he acquired an agent and began to find intermittent concert engagements. After a series of performances as soloist with the renowned
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Schnabel became a recognized name in
German musical life
. In the years prior to
World War I he toured most of the major
European countries, including
Russia.
Schnabel's repertoire ran straight up the middle of the intellectual
Germanic tradition, seldom straying from that path. He favored music that seemed to hold profundities that would forever be just beyond his grasp, once saying, according to Saerchinger, "Now
I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed."
He loved the comparatively simple sonatas of
Mozart, pointing out that "
Children are given Mozart because of the small quantity of the notes; grown-ups avoid Mozart because of the great quality of the notes."
The most important of composers for Schnabel was
Beethoven, especially the piano sonatas that spanned most of his career; although he had far refused to make any recordings at all, he recorded all 32 sonatas between 1931 and 1935. Many other pianists in the future would record the complete cycle, but Schnabel's was the first.
Schnabel's recordings were prized by collectors in spite of the fact that in
Beethoven's more difficult pieces, his technique was clearly not up to the job. Schnabel considered errors incidental flaws in a performance, rather than major difficulties to be agonized over.
Schonberg related a famous Schnabel story wherein the pianist suffered a memory lapse in the middle of a performance with the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra—severe enough to cause the music to grind to a halt. Any other pianist would have been mortified, but Schnabel, Schonberg wrote, "merely grinned, shrugged his shoulders, got up from the piano, and walked over to the podium" to confer with the conductor, after which he began the music again. For Schnabel, what mattered was the communication of the meaning of the music to the audience, not a display of technical perfection.
For several years he avoided performing in the
United States, but returned in
1930 as a soloist with the
Boston Symphony. In 1936, performing his live cycle of the
Beethoven sonatas at
Carnegie Hall, he drew a crowd of 18,
000 total listeners, and this softened his attitude toward what would become his adopted country. He left
Germany in 1933; after the
Nazi takeover of the country, his concerts had been abruptly canceled, and he had quit his teaching job at the
State Academy of Music as he noticed a hardening in the attitudes of his non-Jewish colleagues. For several years he and his family lived mostly at their villa in
Switzerland. Schnabel visited his mother in Vienna in
1937 and never saw her again; she was arrested after
Germany's annexation of Austria in
1938 and disappeared.
In
1939, Schnabel decided that the United States was the best place for himself and his family. He took up residence in a
New York City apartment hotel and became a citizen during
World War II.
During his own lifetime, Schnabel's own music remained much less well known than his piano performances. In contrast to the conservative nature of his piano repertoire, which rarely, if ever, encompassed contemporary music, Schnabel as a composer was something of a radical, writing three massive symphonies that employed dissonant modern harmonies and, wrote
Mark L. Lehman in the
American Record Guide , "make grueling demands on performers and audiences."
Schnabel also wrote chamber music (music for small ensembles) and a sonata for solo violin that lasted for nearly an hour. "
Chances are that Schnabel's music has disappeared for good," Schonberg told in the
1960s, but a series of new recordings of Schnabel's compositions beginning in the late
1990s cast doubt on that assessment.
Schnabel continued to live in the United States after World War II ended, but he often made return trips to
Europe to perform and to spend time at his
Swiss second home. His last concert was given in
New York in January of 1951 and by then he was already suffering from heart problems.
Schnabel died in Axelstein, Switzerland, on
August 15, 1951.
~
- published: 08 Dec 2009
- views: 42715