Schumann

Harold Bauer, Percy Grainger

by David Dubal









This disc of Schumann piano music is performed by two of the finest pianists of a great era in piano playing. Harold Bauer (1873-1951) and Percy Grainger (1882-1961) were both original thinkers in many areas and musicians of vision. During their lives they knew each other quite well. Grainger regarded Bauer highly as a Schumann player and it is touching that they are linked together through the genius of Robert Schumann.

Bauer and Grainger were radically different personalities. Bauer, nine years older than Grainger, was a gentleman who masked his many iconoclastic ideas on life and music in a veneer of discretion and sweet reasonableness, as his writings and memoirs show. Although a star performer, his was a reticent public persona. A man of gentle warmth in his memoirs, he discusses nothing personal, nothing vindictive. Like his aristocratic art, his life seemed smooth and introspective. What a contrast with Grainger, who would have baffled a team of Freuds, Jungs and Adlers. Grainger was a seething cauldron of conflicts, hates, mad passions and contradictions on a grand scale. Indeed the complexity of his life and the range of his mind is startling. He was one minute blindingly lucid, the next bordering on or actually insane. His letters are a testimony to a far-reaching intelligence and a totally honest recognition and cognisance of his sexual perversities. In the admirable biography by John Bird and published by Faber & Faber, one reads with awe about Grainger as a son, lover, composer, pianist and musical polemicist. Indeed it seems everything he thought and felt was different from other people.

Harold Bauer first came to Grainger's notice some time in 1902 when Bauer performed in Franck's Piano Quintet, when Franck and Bauer both impressed Grainger. The two pianists met and retained a friendship throughout the years. Grainger himself seldom attended piano recitals: he was extremely insecure as a pianist and was overtly frightened if he found out a good pianist was in the audience. After a recital in Miami in 1945 he declared the "Real piano-players are egged-on to do their best when their fellow-craftsmen go to hear them, so we are told. But I (knowing myself to be a sham as a tone-show-player) always play my worst, if a piano player is in the hall. My heart sinks into my boots..."

Harold Bauer attended that concert and wrote to Grainger, "Of course you know and you will never forget Delius' admiration for you. He revealed it to me one day in one of his characteristically explosive moments. We were talking about a number of contemporary composers whose work was then attracting considerable attention - 'What is lacking in every one of them,' burst out Fritz, 'is the one indispensable quality: originality... There are just a few who have this quality and one of them is Percy Grainger. I consider him a genius and one of the greatest composers.' Frankly I thought he was exaggerating, but later on I realised that he had said no more than the truth. Don't imagine, because all this went through my mind during your concert yesterday, that I was not listening - everything you did was coloured with that one indispensable quality and I enjoyed it all immensely. I never heard the Bach Toccata played so magnificently."

Grainger's playing was decidedly unique. Even as an old man it possessed a well-spring of youth and animal vitality. Although a proponent of many composers and a champion of the Delius Piano Concerto, Cyril Scott's Piano Sonata and Debussy, Albeniz, Ravel, Carpenter, Sowerby, Dett and Gershwin, Grainger was often associated with his bracing interpretations of Grieg, especially the Piano Concerto, which he was to have performed on tour with Grieg. The death of the Norwegian master in 1907 prevented the collaboration. Grainger's ingenious edition of the Concerto should be consulted by all those studying the score. Grainger played this work with an unforgettable pungency and brio, and the composer was enthralled with Grainger, saying his playing was "like the sun breaking through the clouds... as a pianist I do not know to which of the very greatest I should liken him. But all comparison is futile when greatness is the question. He is himself. Possibly I am partial to him because he has actually realised my ideals of piano playing. If I had his technique, my conception of the nature of piano playing would have been exactly the same. Like a god his playing lifts us high above suffering and struggles. I had to reach the age of sixty-four to hear Norwegian piano music interpreted with so much understanding and genius. His playing of Norwegian folk dances breaks new ground for me and Norway."

Grainger's earthly virility often overwhelmed audiences, even being accused of having an ugly sound. Certainly his ruggedness surprised many on first hearing, but he usually won over his audiences with an astonishing verve and sweep. Perhaps his playing could be described as "of the great outdoors", of which the pianist was so fond. His discography well shows the spontaneity of his art, and he was the first pianist to record electrically Chopin's Sonata No. 3 in B minor in the the earliest days of the process. It is a magnificent performance. Bird writes, "This performance has stood the test of time and is the recording to which connoisseurs always turn when Grainger's greatness as a pianist is being discussed. It is played with a ferocity and wild abandon that is at times frightening."

Of course in his own music, Grainger shines. Nobody else has played his Mock Morris, Molly on the Shore, Spoon River, Handel in the Strand and Maguire's Kick with anything like his sheer sparkle and rollicking good will. Grainger's greatest pianistic gift was his rhythmic dynamism. "Pianists," he once wrote, "with their alarming lack of rhythmic neatness, their inability to follow a conductor's beat, their inability to listen while they play - are more in need of some kind of musical team work (to offset their all too soloistic study activities) than almost any other class of musicians." During Grainger's heyday, musical leeway was the rule, and he was a fierce exponent of metronome practice, which he imposed on his students.

Percy Grainger was born in Melbourne on 8 July 1882. His father John's drinking led to violent scenes with his mother Rose, who from the first completely dominated Percy's life. At five his mother gave him piano lessons, keeping him at the keyboard with her for a minimum of two hours a day. She was the centre of his life and took all pains to educate him. The boy in turn worshipped his mother. By 1890 John and Rose separated, leaving Rose in complete control of her son. At the age of ten his piano playing progressed rapidly and he was brought to study with Melbourne's Louis Pabst, a German-born pianist and teacher who had himself studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein.

On 9 July 1894 the youngster made his official debut at the Masonic auditorium. A reviewer wrote, "...Australians may watch his future career with mingled pride and confidence." In May 1895, with very little money, mother and son left Australia, their destination being Frankfurt, Germany. At the famed Hoch Conservatory his piano teacher was the Dutch-born James Kwast and in composition he worked under Karl Klimsch. It was in Frankfurt that Grainger developed life-long friendships with the talented composition students from England, Roger Quilter, Cyril Scott and Balfour Gardiner.

By now Percy had acquired a fair repertoire and was earning a small livelihood teaching and accompanying. Rose, who had syphilis, was constantly ill and they decided to improve their fortunes in the lively musical world of London where they arrived in 1901, after Percy's nineteenth birthday. For the next thirteen years London was their home. These years saw his immense growth as a composer, folk song collector and pianist. He was lionised in fashionable society where his golden handsomeness had made a sensation. He made affectionate friendships with Grieg and Delius, concertised extensively, and developed and refined his fanatical sexual deviation of flagellation and sado-masochistic love-making with a Danish lover, Karen Holten.

Grainger had been aware that "by sixteen I was already sex-crazy," and sexuality would become a life-long obsession. He wrote, "If only one could get the whole world to unite in making the earth a temple of sexual intensity." He admitted that whipping and being whipped were equally as important to him as piano-playing and composing. Grainger was a man of almost frightening energy, who loved running, jumping, swimming, rowing and other sports. He dreaded out-of-shape bodies. He wrote to Karen Holten, "one must work... to make [the body] fitter, firmer, fresher, harder, nicer than it is. You know what slack fingers are in piano-playing. Most people's bodies are similar after a certain (and that a very early) age. And there is not the least excuse for it." Although Grainger fortunately never had children he once wrote, "I long to flog children. It must be wonderful to hurt this soft unspoiled skin... and when my girls begin to awaken sexually I would gradually like to have carnal knowledge of them... I would love to explain things to them and open to their eyes in this area the whole way of the world without shame or shyness or cowardice..."

Grainger was in no way ashamed of his sexual abnormalities and wrote, "If I knew of a country where I could publish an unabridged account of my sex-life and sex-feelings I would be a happy man indeed."

It was also during these years that he began developing his many racial theories. A believer in the purity of races, he was an obsessive believer in the superiority of the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon races, and over the years began relieving English of any of its Latin and other derivatives into what he called 'Blue-eyed English'. It was one of his many far-fetched ideas, but one which he kept evolving until he actually expressed himself in words. I give an example from a letter to the composer Cyril Scott:

"I would have joy-quabbed [enjoyed] the tonery [music] at the monk-pack-house [monastery] had the tone-tools [instruments] been more in tune with the singer-host [chorus] and the tone-smacks [accents] been in the right place. Besides, I pain-tholed [was jarred] because the middle-fiddle [viola] seemed all the time to be any othery [different] note from the wind-pipe-tone-box [organ]. Nor was the tone-bill-of-fare [programme] kind, as one might fore-know [expect] when tonery is alter-slain [sacrificed] to Christ-belief [Christianity]."

Grainger also used only English words in his music: for instance, for crescendo, he wrote louden lots and for diminuendo, soften bit by bit. Indeed, his eccentricities on almost every level of life were incredible and complicated And yet Grainger was, in a sense, very pure. Nothing in his make-up was ever motivated by hatred. When a critic said that his Gum-Suckers March was somewhat vulgar, his mother replied, "But there is always something vulgar about Percy." Throughout his life his habits caused comment and often commotion.

In the early years of the century, merely not wearing a hat was strange, and twice he was arrested for this 'aberration'. Even in frozen weather he went about without an overcoat.

Early in 1915 Grainger made his New York debut performing to a capacity house at Aeolian Hall with Caruso and other luminaries attending. He was a smash hit, with James Huneker calling him "the Siegfried of the piano" and Henry T. Fink telling his readers that "he belongs in the same rank as Paderewski and Kreisler... the audience was stunned, bewildered, delighted."

Later that year he began making a large series of piano rolls for Duo-Art, becoming one of the best-sellers in the Aeolian Company's large roster of pianists. The following year (1916) he played at the White House for President Wilson, and soon after enlisted in the United States Army where he played saxophone in the marching band.

In 1918 he wrote a piano setting of Country Gardens, a traditional English tune which became one of the all-time favourite pieces of the amateur pianist for a quarter of a century. Although it brought Grainger more celebrity and money, he was unhappy that it had eclipsed his entire output. He sarcastically wrote, "The typical English country garden is not often used to grow flowers in; it is more likely to be a vegetable plot. So you can think of turnips as I play it."

Grainger and Rose had decided to stay in the United States and moved to White Plains, New York. Rose's health steadily declined and her behaviour was unstable. She had continued to be the main woman in his life and she demanded constant attention from him. She frequently terrified him by telling him that if he did not love her enough she would kill herself. There had been much gossip and rumour started by a few of Grainger's woman students that mother and son practiced incest. The gossip totally unhinged her, and she flung herself from a building at 27 West 42nd Street in New York. Grainger was on tour. He never fully recovered from the shock. In 1928 he married Ella Viola Ström at the Hollywood Bowl before nearly 20,000 people. For the rest of his life he continued to perform and compose. His final appearance as a concert pianist took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire on 29 April 1960. His last years were wracked by poor health and cancer. On 20 February 1961 he died at his home in White Plains and was buried in Adelaide, Australia's West Terrace Cemetery.

In recent years, his music has become admired as never before. His output ranges from folk song settings to many cryptic works, making him a difficult composer to categorise. He wrote more than four-hundred compositions in various media. Grainger was always the avant-gardist. He spent his final years developing an instrument that would help create a 'free music'. This was a pre-electronic machine of his own invention called a Kangaroo-Pouch Free Music Machine which was intended to liberate him from the tyranny of the division of whole- and half-tones that make up Western scales, enabling him to compose works using 'gliding intervals', unusual rhythms and a freer use of dissonance.

Harold Bauer, born in London, was one of the most beloved musicians of his time. Musically he dabbled with composition and wrote some marvellous transcriptions; the finest are his sensitive adaptations of Bach and Franck. Much preferring to share the stage, he was an incomparable chamber player, often collaborating with Casals, Fritz Kreisler and many others.

One of his most enjoyable activities was his famed two-piano recitals with Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Together they recorded the Arensky Waltz which has become a 'classic' disc. A performance of exquisite elegance, it is the playing of two artists literally breathing together. For its lilt and perfect movement it has no equal. Bauer was also a headliner as a soloist in concertos and in recitals. However, until the age of twenty he had been a violinist: indeed, from childhood he had been a prodigy, publicly performing a wide repertoire. But to his regret he loved the piano more, and with absolutely no formal training he changed instruments.

One day early in 1893 a benefactor gave Bauer fifty pounds for travel purposes. Paris was his destination. He loved the city and stayed there for twenty years. Meeting Paderewski was a turning point for him. After playing to the Polish pianist on his violin, Bauer decided to try out a piano piece. He wrote, "Paderewski pulled me by the hair, saying, you must become a pianist. You have such beautiful hair." Bauer, however, swore that Paderewski's remark had nothing to do with his change of instrument. However, Bauer now began the laborious work of acquiring a professional piano technique as well as a repertoire. In Paris Bauer had been struck by the exceptional violinists being produced at the Paris Conservatoire at the time such as Enescu, Thibaud, Kreisler and Henri Marteau. Bauer wrote, "I could not hold a candle to any of these violinists. I was not good enough, and I knew it."

His progress was amazing, and he made a Paris debut with such works as Beethoven's A major Sonata, Op. 101, Liszt's Feux Follets and Chopin's Allegro de Concert. Years later he would say, "I look back with real amazement, for I cannot imagine how I was able to play such difficult pieces." In a short time Bauer had engagements as an accompanist as well as a recitalist. By 1900 the twenty-seven-year-old pianist made his American debut with the Boston Symphony in the Brahms D minor Concerto.

Obviously Bauer did things his way and was always an iconoclast. He was often asked how he had accomplished his conquest of the piano. "Because our ancestors," he wrote, "were brought up to study the piano a certain way, along rigid lines does not mean that there are no better, broader, less limited ways of reaching the goals we seek. The only technical study of any kind I have ever done has been that technique which has had an immediate relation to the musical message of the piece I have been studying."

In a 1916 article for Etude Magazine he wrote, "According to the old pedagogical formulae one could sit solemnly down and make a deliberate study of the principles of beauty and accomplish everything by rule. How utterly absurd. The sense of beauty belongs to intuition and does not correspond to anything in reason at all... Accordingly the pupil whose ear drums are continually assailed with nothing but the din of the ordinary technical exercises, who has had no opportunity to absorb consciously or sub-consciously the real beauty of music, is not being educated to produce beautiful results in his art... Freedom in piano-playing will never be attained by following stilted pedagogical rules."

After his Boston debut, America in particular took to Bauer, and his career in the United States soared. He seemed to know everybody, and introduced a number of modern works by Albeniz, Granados and Ravel. In 1908 he premiered Debussy's Children's Corner Suite. In his autobiography Bauer writes of playing it for Debussy. "Contrary to my hope and expectation, our meeting was quite formal. I played the pieces, and he expressed himself satisfied. One little thing alone broke the stiffness of the occasion. After I played the last piece, Golliwog's Cake-Walk, he remarked, 'You don't seem to object to the manner in which I treat Wagner.' I had not the slightest idea what he meant and asked him to explain. He then pointed out the pitiless caricature of the first measures of Tristan and Isolde that he had introduced in the middle of the Cake-Walk. It had completely escaped me. I laughed heartily and congratulated him on his wit."

Bauer loved Schumann, and was disappointed that Ravel, who dedicated Ondine to him, disliked Schumann, admitting that he was a genius, but feeling that Schumann had poisoned musical taste with his 'sickening sentimentality'. In the 1930s Bauer began working on his once-popular editions of Schumann for the publisher G. Schirmer. Today they are seldom used because of his arbitrary 'Romantic' editing. Bauer would decide many notational improvements for Schumann, often not telling the student what the original intention was. However, in conjunction with other editions, a pianist may find an altogether original, highly interesting mind at work. Bauer was a Romantic pianist, but with few of the more blatant mannerisms of his era. He was always dignified and mellow; grand surges and cavernous sounds were not his style. But he still had the Romantic's notion that the text is not sacred. After a performance of Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, a listener showed up backstage to tell the pianist, "I am glad to see that you play all the notes in that passage in the bass. So many pianists blur them." Bauer replied, "My dear sir, I didn't play them at all. I purposely leave them out. The passage sounds better that way."

Bauer was pleased with Laurence Gilman's assessment of his art, written in The New York Herald-Tribune, "Bauer is one of those rare professionals whose point of view toward their art is that of the accomplished craftsman who combines with the equipment of the expert the disinterested person of the amateur." Bauer wrote, "Nothing that was ever written about me... has given me so much satisfaction."


© 1996 David Dubal

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