Schnabel, Artur

(b Lipnik, 17 April 1882; d Axenstein, Switzerland, 15 Aug 1951). Austrian pianist and composer, later naturalized American. When he was seven his family moved to Vienna, where he studied the piano with Leschetizky and theory with Mandyczewski. Of Leschetizky he once said that his teaching offered no method of any kind, but something infinitely more important: it was 'like a current which sought to release all latent vitality in the student'. Leschetizky in his turn told Schnabel: 'You will never be a pianist; you are a musician'. And in keeping with this judgment, he allowed Schnabel to ignore Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies and encouraged him to work at some of Schubert's sonatas, which at that time were completely neglected. So with his debut in 1890 began a career which became more and more devoted only to music which, as Schnabel used to say, 'was better than it could be performed'. He would not have been attracted to a lifetime of piano playing on any other basis. That was the true meaning of Leschetizky's remark: for Schnabel the instrument itself was a medium, not an accomplice.

In 1900 Schnabel went to Berlin, where he lived until a few months after Hitler came to power in 1933. He married the contralto Therese Behr (1876--1959) in 1905. She was already a renowned interpreter of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, and there can be no doubt that she played an important part in Schnabel's artistic development. Their many concerts together culminated in a historic series of Schubert recitals they gave in Berlin in 1928. By then her career was ending, while he was approaching the height of his powers. At various times he also formed ensembles with Flesch and Becker, with Casals, Feuermann, Fournier, Hindemith, Huberman, Szigeti and Primrose. He said, in My Life and Music, that the years from 1919 to 1924 were musically the most stimulating and perhaps the happiest he knew. It was then that he made friends with many younger men such as Ernst Krenek and Eduard Erdmann, took part in one of the early performances of Pierrot lunaire, and wrote several works, including three string quartets. It was a period when composing, and the search for a new and individual language, filled his thoughts more than ever before. At the same time he 'learned how to play Beethoven' -- in other words, evolved his own entirely original readings which have made him justly famous. He was, in fact, a creative virtuoso of the old school; not a Busoni (and he would have been the first to admit that), but a composer of some consequence whose playing belonged to another category from that of even the greatest instrumentalists who were that and nothing more.

In 1925 he entered another phase, devoted to performing and teaching (Clifford Curzon and later Claude Frank were among his pupils). He was invited to take the piano class at the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin, and for the next five years, until he left, maintained standards that became legendary. In the meantime he had been twice to the USA (the first time in 1921), had returned to England after an absence of 20 years and aroused enthusiasm with his playing of Schubert and Beethoven, which came as a revelation to audiences there; and in 1932, after protracted negotiations with HMV, he began making records of all Beethoven's sonatas (the first such undertaking in the history of the gramophone), as well as of the concertos (with Sargent and the LPO and LSO) and the Diabelli Variations. HMV's electrical recordings capture Schnabel's Bechstein with warmth and richness and can still be held up as models of microphone balance and faithful piano sound. In 1927, for the centenary year, he had played all the 32 sonatas in Berlin; and between 1932 and 1934 he played them again, first in Berlin and then in London, and these concerts marked the climax of his career. After leaving Berlin he gave summer classes at Tremezzo, on Lake Como, and then, from 1940 to 1945, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1939 he had emigrated to the USA, taking American nationality in 1944. His stature was never as widely recognized there as in Europe, and although he made excellent versions of Beethoven's concertos nos.4 and 5 with the Chicago SO, the American record industry took little interest in him. (The agents wanted him to change his programmes and to conform to their convenient patterns of salesmanship; as a result, he dispensed altogether with their services during the last eight years of his life.) There was criticism too that his performances of Beethoven did not admit any difference between the expressive functions of melody and of passage-work; that he made everything equally eloquent. For many musicians, on the other hand, it was precisely his articulation of scale passages, accompaniments, and figurations of every kind, as well as his power of individualizing every strand of the texture, that helped to make his playing unique. It was not the melody that suffered, but the other elements which took on an unheard-of vitality.

It is difficult to define at all briefly the qualities that he brought to his favourite composers. In Schubert he managed to combine lyrical expression with a rhythmic elan and discipline that gave everything a new intensity. In Mozart, to whom he turned increasingly in later life, he tended to idealize the music and sometimes to adopt very slow tempos; but at his best he showed a deeper understanding than his contemporaries -- in many of the concertos, for example (he recorded five piano concertos, plus the Concerto for two pianos with his son Karl Ulrich Schnabel), and in the wonderful recordings of the Rondo in A minor k511 and the A minor Sonata k310. These also show to perfection the beauty of his phrasing, and his power of sustaining a long line without ever letting it become dull or lifeless. But despite his incomparable playing of Schubert, heard above all on his recordings of the late A major and B sonatas, Schnabel will always be associated principally with Beethoven, and especially with the last sonatas. Here he often achieved a visionary quality in which the piano itself was almost forgotten; and although he allowed himself a remarkable rhythmic freedom at times, his readings were still faithful to the composer's intentions: to the spirit rather than to the letter. The truth is that in playing these great works his own imaginative world found its fullest expression. Clifford Curzon said that there were technical things that Schnabel could not do which hundreds of pianists could, and, conversely, things which he could do which no other pianist could. On his recordings the beauty of sound immediately draws the listener in; and yet he so often seems to transcend the instrument. In his lifetime he changed people's perceptions of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and the best of his recordings still have the capacity to do that for each new generation.

Other things were secondary, but still belonged to his character as a 'creative virtuoso'. Of his books, the most important is My Life and Music. His editions of Beethoven's sonatas and of the Diabelli Variations provide an invaluable insight into his modelling of the music and the subtle choice of fingering that went with it. His compositions, few of them published, include three symphonies, five string quartets, a piano concerto written when he was 19, many songs of the same early period, Seven Pieces for piano, a Rhapsody for orchestra, a string trio, and his last work, Duodecimet for strings, wind and percussion, a small masterpiece.

WRITINGS
Reflections on Music (Manchester, 1933)
Music and the Line of Most Resistance (Princeton, NJ, 1942)
My Life and Music (London, 1961/R1970 with Reflections on Music)
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
C. Saerchinger: Artur Schnabel (London, 1957) [with complete list of works]
R. Stone: 'Artur Schnabel', Grand baton, ix/3 (1972), 19 [with discography]
K. Wolff: The Teaching of Artur Schnabel (London, 1972)
 

WILLIAM GLOCK/STEPHEN PLAISTOW