If you're really a genius, you should be able to do it in an hour."
I did it in forty-five minutes.
Glazunov naturally knew all his Conservatory students by their last names. That wasn't so surprising, for a memory for faces and names isn't such a rarity. Military men have it. What was more important for us was that Glazunov remembered each of us as a musician. He remembered when and what a student had played, and what the program had been, and how many false notes there had been.
This is not an exaggeration. Glazunov really did remember how many times and exactly where a given student had made mistakes during an examination. And this examination might have taken place three or four years earlier.
And the same applies to composers. Glazunov remembered them all-the talented, the mediocre, the worthless, and the hopeless. And all their compositions-past, present, and future-even if they studied there for twenty years.
Incidentally, some did manage to spend twenty years and more at the Conservatory. Eternal students, we called them. But there weren't many left in my day, they were gradually being smoked out.
But you could apply to the Conservatory as many times as you liked, trying to prove that you weren't retarded. There was one stubborn fell ow champing at the bit to get into the composition department. And Glazunov astounded him. The applicant played a piano sonata, Glazunov. listened to it and said dreamily, "If I'm not mistaken, 69
you applied a few years ago. Then, in another sonata, you had quite a good secondary theme." And with those words, Glazunov sat down and played a large chunk of the old sonata by the hapless composer.
The secondary theme was rubbish, of course, but the effect was enormous.
And Glazunov played the piano well, I must add. In an original manner, but well. He didn't have a real piano technique and he often played without removing his famous cigar from his right hand. Glazunov held the cigar between his third and fourth fingers. I've seen it myself. And yet he managed to play every note, absolutely everything, including the most difficult passages. It looked as though Glazunov's fat fingers were melting in the keys, drowning in them.
Glazunov could also sight-read the most complicated score and make it sound as though an excellent orchestra were playing. In Glazunov's living room there were two good Koch grand pianos, but he didn't use them. Glazunov played on an upright piano that had been pushed into a small, narrow room. Before the Revolution it had been the maid's room, and after the Revolution it turned out to be the only habitable room in the apartment. There was enough wood to heat it, while the rest of his apartment stood cold.
Coming to his house, you could find him dressed in fur coat and boots. The respected Elena Pavlovna, his mother, bustled about, tucking a blanket around the baby. It didn't help, Glazunov shivered piti•, fully.
Elena Pavlovna was about eighty then and sometimes I came across her darning her baby's socks. Of course, the new conditions of life were difficult for Glazunov to bear. He was amazed that singers, despite the cold, had stopped catching colds. That was a miracle, and it gave him comfort.
So Glazunov sat at the piano in his fur coat, in the more or less warm maid's room, and played his works for visiting celebrities. It was an exotic thrill for them and a safety valve for him. Besides, Glazunov apparently thought it wise to maintain friendly relations with major foreign musicians, since, I assume, he had given more than a passing thought-even then-to emigrating to the West. It was there that Glazunov hoped, not without basis, to satisfy his fading needs and desires without risking his life.
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A marvelous picture-Glazunov in his fur coat, playing, and a famous guest, also in fur coat, listening. Then some social chitchat, clouds of steam coming from their mouths. Steam came from the mouth of Felix Weingartner, and Hermann Abendroth, and Artur Schnabel, and Joseph Szigeti. So all these visiting celebrities returned home to the West, enriched by unheard-of impressions of a frozen country-darkness and cold.
The celebrities were amazed by Glazunov, and he by them. For instance, Glazunov was awed and astounded by the physical endurance of Egon Petri, which he talked about for a long time. And why not?
Petri played an all-Liszt program, this is one concert, mind you-Don Juan and two sonatas (the B minor and the Dante) . It was a champion performance, the result of good nutrition and a peaceful life for three generations.
Glazunov was an admirer of Liszt, whom he had met in Weimar, I believe. Liszt played Beethoven for him. Glazunov liked to tell about the interpretation and juxtapose Liszt's playing to Anton Rubinstein's.
Glazunov often ref erred to Rubinstein when he spoke of piano timbres and quoted him as saying, "You think that the piano is one instrument. It's really a hundred." But in general, he didn't like the way Rubinstein played, and preferred Liszt's manner.
In Glazunov's telling, Liszt's manner differed vastly from what we are used to imagining as such. When we hear the name we usually picture banging and ballyhoo, gloves tossed in the air, and so on. But Glazunov said that Liszt played simply and accurately and transparently. Of course, this was the late Liszt, so to speak, and he wasn't performing on stage but playing at home, where he didn't have to impress assorted women and young ladies.
The sonata in question, as I recall, was Beethoven's C-sharp minor and Glazunov said that Liszt played it steadily and with control and that the tempos were extremely moderate. Liszt revealed all the "inner" voices, which Glazunov liked very much. He liked to remind us that the most important element in composition is polyphony. When Glazunov sat down to demonstrate something on the piano, he always stressed the accompanying voice and chromatics, the ascending and descending progressions, which gave his playing fullness and life.
Personally, I feel that this is one of the great secrets of pianism, and 71
the pianist who understands this is on the threshold of great success.
A major concert performer once complained to me that it was so difficult to play the war-horses. "It's so hard to find a fresh approach,"
he confided. I immediately had a contradictory reaction to this announcement. First I thought what an unusual person is sitting next to me, because the great majority of performers don't think at all when they play their Pathetique or Moonlight Sonata or their Hungarian Rhapsodies. (The list of works can be enlarged or shortened, it doesn't change the point.) These performers do not play what the composer intended, nor do they demonstrate their own relationship to the work, since their own relationship to it simply does not exist. Then what do they play? Just notes. Basically, by ear. It's enough for one to start and all the rest pick it up. The list of literature played by ear nowadays has expanded to include Prokofiev's sonatas and works by Hindemith, but the essential approach to the music by these stars has not changed as a result.
So while at first I was simply delighted by the self-critical announcement, my next thought was much calmer. And it went something like this: How can you complain that it's hard to find a "fresh approach"? What is it, a wallet full of money? Can you find a "fresh approach" walking down the street-someone drops it and you pick it up? This pianist must have taken Sholom Aleichem's joke seriously.