Serkin, Rudolf

(b Eger, 28 March 1903; d Guilford, VT, 8 May 1991). American pianist of Austrian birth. His father, a Russian Jew, had eight children and moved his family from Bohemia to Vienna in order that his gifted son could receive from the pedagogue Richard Robert 'a very strict and limited upbringing as far as the piano is concerned' (Serkin's own words). In 1920, at the age of 17, he was considered too old to take further lessons by Busoni, who advised him to follow his own path. In his teens he also made the acquaintance of Schoenberg and his circle, whose ideas were 'like a kind of leprosy to the Viennese establishment'. Serkin thought Schoenberg the greatest musical mind he ever encountered, and for a while he was an enthusiastic performer of his music. The influence of the violinist Adolf Busch (his future father-in-law), whom he met in 1920, was deeper still. Having accepted Busch's invitation to move to Berlin, he lived with Busch's family as a pupil might live with his guru; and it was to Busch that he owed the commitment to chamber music which was to shape his career and development from then onwards. From 1921 they had a duo which lasted until Busch's death, and their magnificent HMV recordings in the 1930s of the Schubert Fantasie in C (d934) and some of the Beethoven and Brahms sonatas were groundbreaking at a time when international violinists were not accustomed to treating their pianists as equal musical partners in this repertory. Their trio recordings have proved similarly durable, notably those of Schubert's E Piano Trio, with Busch's cellist brother Hermann, and of Brahms's Horn Trio, with Aubrey Brain. As a soloist, Serkin made a pioneering recording with the Busch Chamber Players in 1938 of Mozart's Piano Concerto in Ek449; it remains among the finest recorded examples of his art. He was also particularly admired in these years for his Bach, and with Busch's orchestra took part in their recording of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto.

In 1934 the Nazis tried to prevent Busch from performing with Serkin; Busch's response was to give no more concerts in Germany and to move with Serkin to Basle. Having made his American debut in 1936 with the New York PO and Toscanini, Serkin began to spend more time in the USA, and in 1939, when he started to teach at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, he settled there permanently. Busch also emigrated. The establishing of the Marlboro Festival in Vermont in 1950 is attributed to Busch, but Serkin (among others) was there from the beginning, and on Busch's death in 1952 it was natural for him to assume its leadership. In the spirit of its founder, it became an environment for the study of chamber music, free from the pressures and restrictions of conventional concert life, with an emphasis on rehearsal rather than the performance of pre-determined programmes -- a meeting-place too for professional musicians of all ages, backgrounds and nationalities. For 40 years Marlboro complemented Serkin's teaching, and through his direction of it and example as a performer it had (and continues to have) a profound influence on generations of musicians.
 

At the same time Serkin became one of the most celebrated soloists in the USA. He was a virtuoso who worked ceaselessly at his technique: impeccable transparency, clean attack and consummate control, together with an anti-sentimental sonority, had been there from the beginning and they were characteristics of his playing all his life. The latter could sometimes seem like hardness, or severity; it came from a stance that was rigorous in maintaining the importance of realizing everything that could possibly be realized about a work. Nothing less was good enough. The responsibility for what was at stake in his endeavours could inhibit his achievement like a weight, and colleagues and students have said how complicated he was as an artist; yet it was perhaps the conflicts in his make-up that gave his playing such power. His selflessness and devotion to the text could put him in shackles; but when his temperament as a virtuoso (which was the equal of Horowitz's) broke through, in works such as the Brahms concertos, and the Diabelli Variations, the Hammerklavier Sonata, the Fifth Concerto and the Choral Fantasy of Beethoven, the experience was unforgettable. His sensitivity was acute and he was capable of great delicacy; some of his finest achievements were in Mozart, whom he never underplayed.

At the core of his repertory were the Austro-German classics from Bach to Brahms. There were extensions to Reger and Strauss's Burleske and to Bartok's First Concerto and Prokofiev's Fourth (for the left hand). After his earlier enthusiasm, Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School fell away; it is intriguing to speculate how the reception of some of their music might have been different had he continued to champion it to a wide public. The microphone was not his friend and his solo recordings are on the whole unrepresentative. With orchestras, or colleagues in chamber music, it was another matter. His American recordings from the 1950s onwards (later remastered for CD by Sony Classical) include magisterial accounts of the Brahms and Beethoven concertos with such conductors as Szell, Ormandy and Bernstein and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra and New York PO; there are distinguished accounts of Mozart concertos, too, with Szell and Alexander Schneider. The 40th anniversary of the Marlboro Festival was marked by issues of chamber music recordings, among which Serkin frequently appears. When he was at his best and the explosive tension behind his playing was in harmony with his pianism, he was indeed a 'fiery angel' and without doubt one of the great classical pianists of the 20th century. For all that, he was a man for whom music was always more interesting than the piano.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
D. Elder: Pianists at Play: Interviews, Master Lessons, and Technical Regimes (Evanston, IL,1982)
W. Svoboda: 'Rudolf Serkin: eine biographische Skizze', Zwischen Aufklarung & Kulturindustrie: Festschrift fur Georg Knepler zum 85. Geburtstag, ed. H.-W. Heister, K. Heister-Grech and G. Scheit, iii (Hamburg, 1993), 191--7
K. Schumann: 'Rudolf Serkin (1978)', Die Musik und ihr Preis: die internationale Ernst von Siemens Stiftung, ed. R. von Canal (Regensburg, 1994)
 

STEPHEN PLAISTOW