Rudolf Serkin: A Life [Hardcover]

What a pleasure it is to read an account of a major executant musician, in an 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 an outline 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 had been 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 attention 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 secured 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' etc) clearly put Serkin off and helped cool any early revolutionary ideas he might have acquired from his father and others such as Karl Popper. It seems he was always on the liberal side of the political argument, e.g. he gave fund-raising concerts for Stevenson against Eisenhower, but as a naturalised American he was very aware of being a textbook case of the American self-image as a land of opportunity. As sometimes happens, the puritanical exclusiveness that he objected to in Schoenberg was also a striking trait 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 or whoever, and he reacted with spinsterish horror when someone once told him (rightly in my opinion) that the end of Beethoven's 5th symphony is naff.

The rest of the book is reflections on him by associates, and most illuminating they are. Behind 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 daunting work ethic but never, very notably, taught by demonstration. As a performer he was wayward and vulnerable to nerves, a bit like Richter. I remember him once in the Festival Hall starting Beethoven's op31/1 in a flurry of wrong notes. The passage is dead easy technically, but to let any music be easy was anathema to him. His great sausages of fingers were odd for a man of medium height and slight build, but they can't really have been more of an impediment to him than to big men like Rachmaninov or 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, 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 identifies the issue 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 who spawned, doubtless unintentionally, a whole generation and more of players for whom absolute evenness was a basic requirement like perfectly straightened teeth, and Michelangeli himself was manifestly not impressed by this outcome. There is nobody quite like Serkin when his demon is in the right mood. His command of rhythm and timing surpasses, to my ears, absolutely 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 that comes with the book there is a complete set of Chopin's op25 etudes, and despite the recorded sound this is terrific Chopin-playing, not like Pollini (an admirer of his) nor Ashkenazy but strangely 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 had 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 and I have no solution to it. Hopefully less intractable will be the problem of finding the numerous recordings he made whose existence I had never suspected, 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.

The book is a lively combination of narrative and interview. The first half of the book tells the story of Serkin's life (his time in Europe and his move to America), and the second half, based on interviews, examines Serkin's career as a pianist.

What most impressed me was the authors' deep understanding of Serkin, his place in the world of music and the world in which he lived. The authors share with the reader their rich knowledge of piano repertoire and 20th Century performance, but without resorting to the sort of technical language that can exclude all but the professionally trained musician. Crucially, Lehmann and Faber help the reader to understand what was at stake for Serkin. Through a thorough examination of Serkin's life and choices, this biography, like all great biographies, ends up being about the big issues. Ultimately, this is a book that invites you to examine your own life.

Intelligently designed (for example, photographs are next to the relevant passages) and beautifully produced (the CD of previously unreleased performances is exquisite).

In short: a great book.