Ignaz Friedman plays Liszt & Chopin

by David Dubal









Ignaz Friedman (1882-1948) had a profilic career playing close to three thousand concerts. Immensely creative in his interpretations, he constantly experimented with rubato, accents, phrasing, pauses, half- and quarter-pedal effects and the like. His playing could be extremely elastic or at times quite tight. Occasionally the virtuoso would get the better of him, and his playing on disc of Chopin's A flat Polonaise is rather flashy, if not vulgar. The A flat Ballade is far too precious and the Butterfly and Black Key Etudes are disappointing. The less than six hours of his playing captured on electrical recording represent only a fraction of a large performing repertoire.

The Grieg Concerto, recorded in 1928 with Phillipe Gaubert conducting an unidentified orchestra, finds both conductor and pianist thoroughly unhappy with whatever were the conditions under which it was recorded. Friedman is definitely out of sorts. Unfortunately there is no other recording of his hundreds of concerto appearances with such eminent conductors as Walter, Nikisch, van Beinum, Szell, Sargent, Mengelberg, Damrosch and many others. However, there is still enough to realise that Friedman at his best produced recordings that are marvels of the Romantic spirit. The late Danish pianist Gunnar Johansen, who had recorded a great deal of Friedman's piano music, first heard Friedman in Copenhagen during the First World War when Friedman was living, composing and teaching in the Danish capital. Johansen later told this writer that, "It was colossal - now, years later when I hear his recordings, I understand why. He had an individuality like nobody else - nobody plays like Friedman."

One may listen to his Chopin Etude in thirds which makes that of other pianists pale. Josef Lhévinne's equals his technically, but Friedman's is more relaxed, more Romantically autumnal, with a breathing rubato. Or listen to the Revolutionary Etude. Nobody has ever approached it for originality and daring. His left and right hands are in two different spheres. The performance is barless and follows laws that only Friedman could follow. Perhaps Friedman's performance would be frowned upon by teachers as a bad example for modern virtuosi. It is unique playing however, and comparing it to, say, Pollini's 'modern' performance - grim, abstract and literal - is to hear the two extremes of Romantic and modern interpretation.

Another Chopin Etude, Op. 10, No. 7, is a tour-de-force. It is astonishing to think that he simply walked into a recording studio on a winter's day in 1930 and dashed it off in an age before editing. Friedman also recorded one of the miracles of Chopin interpretation in the Nocturne in E flat, Op. 55, No. 2, one of the composer's greatest Nocturnes. Here we have on disc the very acme of Chopinesque lyricism, a lyricism that transcends all fashion. In Friedman's hands, not an inflection is out of place. There is not a nervous motion to mar the complex linear design, not a patch of purple passion to crush the delicate sentiment. It is the quintessential performance of a Chopin Nocturne: Romantic sentiment at its most refined and restrained, with a perpetually singing tone, which alone can ravish the ear and heart.

Today pianists study and treasure Friedman's recorded output and none of it has been more discussed and admired than the thirty-odd minutes of Chopin Mazurkas that he recorded six and a half decades ago. These Mazurka recordings are now legendary in the annals of piano playing. Friedman's conceptions reveal the powerful authenticity of a man imbued with the essence of this dance form. Yet they have nothing even remotely in common with other mazurka playing. The pianist David Bar-Illan said, "The greater the interpretation, the more impossible to figure it out. A good example is Friedman's recording of the Chopin Mazurkas. I don't understand what he is doing. On purpose I try to imitate them - not to play like him, of course, but to understand what he does. And yet what he does with them remains an enigma." They seem to have a rhythmic life of their own. He pronounced the bass notes as never before. They are rude, fragrant, earthy, lusty and filled with coquetry.

Another facet of Friedman's art must be savoured - his recording of a group of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words. In them, the very spirit of Mendelssohn is kindled, warmed in a radiant light. They melt the heart. In his Mendelssohn performances we find the springtime of life; a sense that all will come in its time and its place. The playing enchants us in the sheer confidence of his phrasing, the lack of anxiety, the clarity of his many touches, the living staccato and smoothness of legato, the loveliness of the tone. Although these nine pieces take less than half an hour, this playing alone would rank Friedman as one of the great Romantic pianists.

Friedman was born in Podgorze, a small town near Cracow, where his father taught him. Like many great performers the boy was a prodigy and by the age of eight he had often played in public. In Cracow he had been given a rigorous training with Flora Grzwinska, a well-known piano teacher of the time. When he was eighteen, he left for Leipzig to study with the renowned theorist Hugo Riemann. After a year at Leipzig, Vienna beckoned. He wanted to work with the musicologist Guido Adler and especially with Theodor Leschetizky, the most celebrated piano pedagogue of the era; the teacher of Paderewski, Gabrilowitsch, Schnabel, Moiseiwitsch, Horszowski and many more of the stars of the time. In fact, it appeared necessary to have Leschetizky's stamp of approval and Vienna was overrun by pianists flocking to the Hapsburg capital for Leschetizky's 'method'. Whether or not he had a method was a vital topic among his disciples. Leschetizky himself said, "I merely teach as my teacher, Czerny taught me." Friedman was immediately impressed with Leschetizky who, in the beginning, discouraged the young Pole. However, Friedman was to become one of his favourites during the four years he worked with him. And no wonder as Friedman had all the necessary ingredients that Leschetizky most prized: an all-encompassing technique, beauty of tone, poetic feeling, a sense of solid structure and a big sound capable of great projection in large halls.

After his Vienna debut in 1904 playing the Liszt E flat, Tchaikovsky B flat minor and the (then seldom-heard) Brahms D minor Concertos he was launched on a career of chamber, solo and concerto playing that would take him to the four corners of the world, from Egypt to Iceland, from South and Central America and Mexico to Asia.

He was friends with people in many fields and it is unfortunate that he never wrote his memoirs. Arthur Rubinstein - who did write his and who was often rather caddy about some of his colleagues - wrote in his book My Young Years, "Ignaz Friedman was by ten years my senior [recte: five years]. He belonged to the famous Leschetizky school of brilliant and elegant virtuosi who were much in vogue in those days. A gay, witty, convivial companion, a good colleague, he was also a formidable hand at poker..."

The two pianists had shared a programme together in 1910 and collaborated in Chopin's Rondo for Two Pianos. Rubinstein characteristically speaks more of Friedman's talent for poker than for piano playing. In his later memoir My Many Years he tells of an Atlantic crossing when Friedman relieved him of his concert earnings but "generously lent me some money for tips on board." "Friedman," wrote Rubinstein, "was an unbeatable champion at poker, not so much from having good hands as for his genius for guessing the hands of the others. We would bet and raise our bets, holding apparently high cards. If I raised again he would make a strange proposition: 'What about exchanging our hands?' A terrible decision to take. One thing was certain. If I accepted, I became the owner of two sevens, but if I didn't he showed four aces."

Of a New York recital the famed critic Deems Taylor wrote, "This stubby, grey man has a piano technique so utterly complete that his piano playing does not even seem effortless. He sits at the piano, exerting himself just about as much as would appear seemly in a good average player, and out of the instrument come sounds as it seems impossible for any pair of human hands to evoke - glittering scales that approach, flash by and disappear with the speed of lightning and yet are so cleanly fingered that every note is clear and round; runs in sixths, trills in thirds, chords that flare like trumpets, arpeggios that are like a caress, and never for a moment technique for its own sake."

Like so many pianists of the so-called 'Golden Age of the Piano', Friedman was busy as a composer and editor of music. His one hundred and more piano pieces are polished in craft and detail and offer the enterprising pianist vignettes such as the GÀrtner-Friedman Waltzes, masterful and nostalgic waltzes which appear on Nimbus' Grand Piano Series: The Polish Virtuoso (NI 8802). Included also are Friedman's Estampes and the charming Elle Danse, dedicated to and danced by Pavlova.

For ambitious pianists looking for virtuoso works, his paraphrases of Strauss Waltzes are not only formidable but are among the finest such pieces. Friedman's Paganini Variations based on the Twenty-Fourth Caprice may not rank with those of Brahms, but the score is imaginative and full of pianistic surprises.

Friedman's editions of Chopin and Liszt are invaluable, although the Russian pianist-teacher Heinrich Neuhaus hated some of the fingerings in his Chopin editions. He wrote in his The Art of Piano Playing, "I cannot understand how such a gifted and forceful pianist as Friedman with his tremendous experience both as a performer and as a teacher could perpetrate such nonsense. But as a matter of fact in his edition of Chopin such nonsense abounds!" If indeed there are some strange fingerings in Friedman's editions they also contain many subtleties of phrasing, pedalling and other details. In fact, when Debussy was preparing his 'complete' Chopin edition, Friedman's editions were assiduously studied by the French master.

In 1940 he was invited to tour Australia and left France just before the Germans entered. At a concert in the summer of 1943 he felt a cramping of his left hand during a gruelling all-Chopin recital which included the B flat minor Sonata, the B minor Sonata, the twenty-four Preludes as well as a bouquet of Mazurkas, Polonaises and Etudes. The following day his hand was numb, and Friedman, an inveterate concertiser, was never to perform in public again, dying in Sydney on 26 January 1948.

After Friedman's 1920 American tour he began recording a considerable repertoire for the Duo-Art Piano, of which Nimbus presents an all Chopin and Liszt disc. These piano rolls show another, and until now, forgotten aspect of Friedman's art. This disc contains three large Liszt works and La Campanella as well as two Chopin Nocturnes, the posthumous Polonaise, Op. 71, No. 2, the inevitable 'Minute' Waltz and the Fourth Ballade.

In Liszt's Don Juan Fantasy, based on Mozart's opera, Friedman's version is cut, since the composition was too long to be contained on one roll and could not conveniently be divided into parts. The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 14 was made into the Hungarian Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra by Liszt, and on this roll Friedman took liberties with the score, which are extremely effective. Such 'tamperings' with Liszt's music were often done by Romantic pianists as Liszt had once told Siloti that he never minded emendations in his Rhapsodies, the latest in this tradition being the renderings of Horowitz in the second, fifteenth and nineteenth Rhapsodies. Although there is no performance recorded of Friedman's Liszt Sonata, one of his specialities he did record on Duo-Art is his own version of the Wagner-Liszt TannhÀuser Overture which was frequently on Friedman's recital programmes. In the famous La Campanella of Paganini-Liszt, Friedman uses the arrangement by Busoni with his own touches added here and there. Throughout Friedman exhibits one of history's mightiest piano techniques. The Leschetizky school was famous for its technical accomplishments, but no-one surpassed Friedman in the depth and refinement of his technique.


© 1996 David Dubal

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