08/02/06

Music (1931-Present)

Music has given me more joy in life than any other single thing, including even flying.

Chamber music was a weekly event at our house. Mother was an accomplished pianist and an excellent sight-reader, and father less so, but he did play. Uncle Guido Goldschmidt would stroll into the hall, toss his hat and coat at the coat rack, light up a cigar, and say "Geh hol die Mutti",(go fetch Mother); then he sat down at the Bösendorfer concert grand and started playing the bass part of a four-hand piece of music. He loved Brahms and Schubert. Mother would put an ash tray on the candle shelf in front of him and play the treble part. I would listen, often from under the piano. Later I turned pages. The same thing happened in Brüsau. Uncle Bubi played the violin, Aunt Gitta sang, and most of the local friends played one instrument or another.

As I mentioned earlier, there were many other musicians in the family, some of them famous professionals listed in the Grove concise Encyclopedia of Music Cellist David Popper, Bruno and Paul Nettl, for example. There were frequent string and piano quartets, quintets, and larger ensembles. The usual agenda was music, then dinner, then bridge. They all seemed to have so much fun, that I was very eager to join, and I was very happy to start piano lessons before my seventh birthday. To be sure, there were days when I would rather have played outdoors or biked with Walter, but practicing seemed well worth the effort.

Margarete Alt of the Vienna Conservatory, my first teacher, was famous as a pedagogue and an interpreter of Mozart. She only accepted students from ground zero. I remember that she often surprised us at Conservatory recitals by playing some of the easy sonatas and even etudes by Cerni and Hertz and Behrens, with such perfection and charm that we were inspired to do as well. But I was always driven to tackle harder things. I loved the more heroic Beethoven sonatas, and often I came to a lesson not having worked on some easy Mozart or Schuman, having instead worked on the Pathetique, or the Moonlight and later even the Appassionata, which I had heard some of her advanced students work on or perform. At first she fought this insubordination, but soon she harnessed my ambition by making a deal: if I spent half my practice time on etudes, she would help me work on Beethoven the other half. She even re-wrote to simplify some passages that were beyond my reach.

She lived with her aged mother in her studio which was half-way into downtown Vienna, and twice a week I walked home from high school stopping there for a lesson. On one occasion I arrived with my right arm in a huge cast. I had broken it falling down a flight of stairs while fighting a bully. I was looking forward to no piano lessons for a while, but Miss Alt said " How opportune! I was thinking of having you work on Behrens School for the Left Hand". (Etudes written for a pianist who lost his right arm during WW-1) And so it came to pass that I developed a very strong and agile left hand.

For one brief period I felt I was too busy to walk to piano lessons, and so Miss Alt found a Hungarian conservatory student of hers who was willing to come to our house. Miss Wastl was a hyper-intense person who broke colored pencils writing numerous reminders on my music. She wasn’t much fun, and I soon decided the long walk to Miss Alt’s house was a better deal.

When our house was sold and we moved to an apartment, father bought me a piano accordion and I worked on Strauss waltzes and the accompaniments to Schubert songs. The accordion stayed behind when we escaped to Belgium in March 38, and I didn’t have a instrument until we moved to the Eisler home in December 1939. I worked furiously on my piano repertoire to the point of being a nuisance. Then our Vienna piano came to Elmhurst and Philadelphia, and I practiced on it until I joined the army in 1943. I had developed a love for Bach, and worked on the two and three part inventions. .

There was a brief musical interlude in the Army. While at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, awaiting re-assignment to a language training program, I befriended the organist who appreciated my genuine interest. He taught me evenings and let me play the pipe organ in their chapel. It was a truly grand experience and started working on Bach fugues, thoroughly enjoying the rank of sixteen foot bourdons (open tibias).

In 1946 I entered MIT, where there wasn’t a single useable piano. At the end of my freshman year I made a deal with Phil Bagley, a classmate who also played.. He bought a Steinway grand and I paid for monthly tuning, We kept it in the basement studio of the MIT radio station , in exchange for letting the station use it for performances. I don’t know how I found time to practice, because I was also earning my living by running the MIT translation service. but I did. By this time my repertoire included three of the great Beethoven sonatas (Pathetique, Moonlight and Appassionata) All of the 19 Mozart sonatas, all the Bach inventions, all the Bach preludes and fugues, two of the six partitas, a couple of Chopin etudes, several waltzes and polonaises and mazurkas.

A high point in my music career came in 1947, when I was a sophomore. MIT had just hired Klaus Liepmann, a German musicologist and conductor who organized the student symphony orchestra, designed the new music library, and generally introduced musical culture to what had been a trade school. He decided to do Mozart’s piano concerto number 24, and called for pianists to audition. I worked furiously on the concerto and auditioned in our basement studio. There was one competitor, Michael Koerner. He was young enough to have missed the service, so he had kept up his piano while I was in the army. It is therefore not surprising that he was technically better. But he was too heavy-handed to interpret Mozart, more of a Brahms style German, and I felt very badly, not at having lost to a better pianist, but at having lost to a poorer musician.

The new music library had six sound-proof practice rooms, each with a Steinway baby grand, and we sold Phil’s piano. Then an MIT alumnus donated a Baldwin electric organ. It was installed on the balcony of the Memorial Hall auditorium, and I got a key and permission to practice evenings. Unfortunately I ran out of free time to practice, and my music career went on hold until we bought Weir Meadow and our first piano from Professor Jerrold Zacharias, in 1955. When mother died and moved to Boston, we sold the Philadelphia house and I inherited the Schweighofer baby grand.

We spent every evening digging out a basement, and before going to bed we played one Mozart violin-piano sonata. Elizabeth had started violin lessons in 1953, and I started folk dancing. One of our mutual interest mergers. Once a week we spent an evening with John and Betty King in Dover, where we took showers (no water yet at Weir Meadow), had dinner (we brought the desert) , and played Mozart’s clarinet trio with Betty doing the clarinet part on her viola. We also played the Brahms horn trio. Children put an end to Elizabeth;s violin lessons, and later she took up recorders. I continued working at my piano, at a much reduced pace. My room-mate Vic Mayper gave us the Paul Badura-Skoda recordings of Bach’s six partitas as a wedding present. For the first time I learned all of the voices and how to interpret them on the piano, as distinct from the harpsichord. I added all of the partitas to my repertoire, and started working on the Goldberg variations from Ralph Kirkpatrick’s annotated edition, after I heard him perform them at Memorial Hall at Harvard.

In 1996 I bought an electric organ with two manuals and a two-octave pedal, but in 1997 I had a stroke which pretty much arrested my music career at a clumsy beginner’s level. I am relearning at a frustratingly slow pace. My peripheral vision is blurred, and I have trouble scanning, a very important part of reading music, particularly multi-part music. My left hand has lost much of its small-muscle control.

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