Alfred Cortot plays Chopin, Liszt, Beethoven, Skriabin Saint-Saëns & Chabrier







Alfred Cortot was born in Nyon, Switzerland, on 26 September, 1877. The family moved to Paris when Alfred was a child. His first piano lessons were with his sisters, and later he was accepted at the Paris Conservatoire where he studied with Émile Descombes, a pupil of Chopin, and later with the illustrious Louis Diémer, one of the important French pianists of the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1896 at the age of nineteen, Cortot, took the Premier Prix in piano at the Conservatoire and his career was launched as soloist with the famed Colonne and Lamoureux orchestras. Soon after, he was touring Europe performing concertos and solo recitals.

An indefatigable worker, he built up a staggering repertoire and began conducting, as well as becoming a passionate Wagnerian and visiting the Bayreuth Festival as an assistant conductor, soaking up Wagnerian tradition by working with the conductors Felix Mottl and Hans Richter. During these formative years his knowledge of Beethoven deepened through the important pianist Édouard Risler who helped him veer away from the drier style of current French piano playing.

In Paris in 1902, the twenty-five-year-old conductor gave the first performance of Wagner's Götterdämmerung and later Parsifal. He also performed the Paris premières of Brahms' German Requiem, Liszt's Saint Elizabeth Oratorio, and even Beethoven's Missa Solemnis which, amazing as it sounds, took eighty-five years to reach Paris from Vienna. Besides this, he championed many contemporary French works both as a conductor and pianist.

Ever restless and musically hungry, he formed a piano trio with Pablo Casals and Jacques Thibaud in 1905, which must rank as one of the finest chamber ensembles in history. Fortunately, their art is captured in several priceless recordings including Beethoven's Archduke Trio, Schubert's B-flat Trio, and the Mendelssohn and Schumann D minor Trios, while Cortot's conducting may be heard in the Brahms Double Concerto with Casals and Thibaud as soloists.

In spite of these various activities, it was the piano that most attracted his musical spirit. In 1907, Faur&eacure; appointed him professor of the pianoforte at the Paris Conservatoire, where he attracted the best students. He remained at the Conservatoire until 1919, when he founded the École Normale de Musique. Over the years, literally thousands of aspiring pianists came seeking his knowledge at his celebrated master classes. Some had the privilege of studying with him privately, including Gina Bachauer, Dino Ciani, Samson François, Clara Haskil, Magda Tagliaferro, Ruth Slenczynska, Yvonne Léfebure, Vlado Perlemuter and Dinu Lipatti. He implored his pupils to intimately study the lives of the composers, their letters, and everything possible regarding their music. To Cortot this was a solemn duty. At lessons, he required a written analysis of the music to be played - "a geographical map", as he called it.

Cortot's dedication to his art was tireless. He once warned Lipatti, "If you decide to dedicate your life to this art you must be armed with patience, and be ready for many sacrifices". Cortot's musical advice was often highly detailed. After a public performance by Lipatti of the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1, Lipatti wrote home: "At the end of the concert Cortot opened the score and made some interesting remarks. He would have liked bars 22-23, in the third section (Scherzo), played a little more freely, more capriciously. Also in the Scherzo, bars 141-161, he suggested I play a tremolo (similar to the one which precedes the last scale-passage in the Coda) instead of a trill, as only in this way will it sound clearly and powerfully. The same applies to bars 70-72 in the Finale. As to bars 80-85, he suggests I play them in the version given as 'ossia', not in original form. He also showed me several changes in the score added later by Liszt himself..."

Cortot often promoted his favourite pupils, opening many doors for them. Writing to an impressario about Lipatti he says "It is my duty to bring to your notice a great pianist of the future, and to assure you that this will be to your advantage because I am writing about a real revelation on the horizon of pianists."

Cortot's involvement with the piano led him to prepare some eighty editions of the music of Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Weber and others. These are among the most intriguing editions ever made, providing a fund of splendid annotations and ingenious exercises for overcoming technical problems. Cortot was one of the great piano minds, and his writings are sprinkled with his own constant wonder at the masterpieces he played. He also left a treatise on interpretations, as well as two books, the invaluable La Musique Française de Piano (1930) and Aspects de Chopin (1949).

Cortot made his first American tour in 1918 and during the 1919-20 season in the United States he played forty-nine recitals in less than ninety days, with four separate recital programmes. At Carnegie Hall he performed the five Beethoven Concertos, the Schumann Concerto, the Third Rakhmaninov and the Saint-Saëns Fourth Concerto. During the 1920s and 1930s he made more than 150 recordings, becoming one of the best-selling recording artists of the era. During those busy years, Cortot gave nearly 1,500 recitals in Europe, Russia and South America, 282 concerts in the United States and 292 in England, all in addition to his editing, conducting, chamber performances and teaching.

Unfortunately, during World War II he became the High Commissioner of the Fine Arts in the Vichy Government and played concerts in Germany. Following the war, Cortot was found guilty of collaboration with the enemy by a French governmental panel, and was suspended from all public musical activity for a period of a year. But as soon as the year was completed, he was once again performing more than one hundred concerts a season. Cortot's health badly declined, becoming ravaged by pain and Parkinson's disease. His farewell performance took place on 10 July, 1958, with Casals, but he continued teaching, giving his final master class late in 1961. He died on 15 June, 1962. A comprehensive biography of Cortot's personality and deeds still remains to be written.

There is no division regarding Cortot as one of the 'originals' in the history of interpretation. He was highly unpredictable and relied heavily on inspiration. Much too busy to sit for endless hours practising, Cortot's memory-lapses were terrifying and his wrong notes could splatter a keyboard. Artur Rubinstein wrote, "At a concert of Alfred Cortot they would wait with impatience for the moment when his memory would fail." And he was certainly, when out of shape, one of the sloppiest of the great pianists. But Cortot was a genius. There has never been anything like him. His phrasing could curl the toes, bring goose bumps to the flesh, send chill down the spine - and, when he was "in practice", he was a brilliant technician, with an astonishing left hand. The pianist Charles Timbrell interviewed Vlado Perlemuter, a pupil of Cortot's, who said, "He didn't just have one kind of technique. He constantly adapted his technical approach to the music." His pedalling was miraculous. Perlemuter explained, "It's a simple fact that the modern piano is often too harsh without the una corda (left) pedal, but too timid with it. So Cortot would often prefer the sound one gets by playing strongly with the una corda, if he wanted a sonorous soft sound. It's a sophisticated concept that is not well understood even today." "At my lessons," relates another pupil, Guthrie Luke, "Cortot would often pedal for me, using quarter, half and flutter pedalling."

Once one had heard Cortot's tone, it could never be forgotten. Magda Tagliaferro thought, "his sound was pure enchantment, whether the music was soft or loud." Yvonne Léfebure, who for years was Cortot's chief assistant, wrote, "when you listened to Cortot play, you realised that what he was doing at the piano was not like what other people were doing." In a Cortot performance there could be a new flash of insight, and the audience felt included in a special moment. Through his long career he marvelled at the beauty and plasticity of the masterpieces of the piano literature, and, from many accounts, even in old age he transcended a broken body in playing with an often heart-breaking intimacy and poignancy. At his best, everything he touched was heightened with an uncanny elegance. He was so romantic, truly the most youthfully romantic of the great pianists. He had an inspired sense of rubato, and one inflection within a phrase can haunt the listener for days. For Cortot, music was aspiration, a reaching for the unknown. He searched for elusive lights and shadows. His playing was the difference between poetry and prose. Magda Tagliaferro declared, 'the images that he conjured up were absolutely visionary."

Although musical ideas tumbled from his brain, he was so immersed in the composers he performed that he always communicated the composer's meaning without it ever becoming merely Cortot. He detested distorting the composer's idiom and his student, Thomas Manshardt, in his book Aspects of Cortot, related that after playing Franck's Prélude, Chorale et Fugue for Cortot, "there was no rage, no outburst; merely a gentle hand on my arm saying very softly, 'you have made one long magnificent error'." Manshardt says Cortot had a horror of anonymous playing, but hated even more playing with the wrong feeling. In Mademoiselle, Conversations with Nadia Boulanger, by Bruno Monsaigeon, the great composition teacher remembers a Cortot performance of the Chopin Préludes. "I went to see him in his dressing-room and declared, 'a lot of people are asking me for my opinion, to describe how you played. I have no idea. All I know is that I've never found the Préludes so beautiful.' He had focused all his light on the Préludes, not the other way around. I had heard the work in all its splendour. My forgetting the interpreter wasn't neglect, on the contrary. It put him very high, because the light of someone who is nothing illuminates nothing."

Cortot's greatest celebrity rests on his Chopin performances. Perhaps Chopin gripped his heart and mind more than any other composer, and his contribution to the worldwide dissemination of the Polish master's works is significant. James Methuen-Campbell wrote that Cortot was an artist who "possessed extreme virtuosity and one of the greatest musical intellects of all time, who managed to combine the two into a perfect blend, and who had a greater affinity with Chopin's music than any other pianist of our age. His discs are for me, and many others, the foundation of Chopin-playing: subtle, melancholic, heroic, deeply communicative and 'full'... This playing has a quality that transcends normal music-making - it is as if Cortot is revealing Chopin's soul."

One notes that in 1926 Cortot made history's first complete version of the Preludes, and his Chopin recordings include various versions of the four Ballades, four Impromptus, the fourteen Valses, two Scherzos, six Nocturnes, two Sonatas, the Barcarolle, the Berceuse, Fantasy and others. There are four versions of the Preludes. Of the 1926 recording André Gide complains in his diary that he felt Cortot had an "absence of sensuality; in its place, grace and sentimentality." This is true of the 1926 Preludes, but his recording from 1933 displays a deep, almost guttural, sensuality. In Chopin's slower works his glorious sound is heard at its best. A French horn here, a violin there, a momentary harp, cello or bassoon. As Eric Heidsieck said, "Cortot taught us to be in the habit of thinking of the piano as a "little orchestra or, at times, maybe a big one."

Naturally, Cortot put his hand to Chopin's twenty-seven Études, although, when Rakhmaninov was asked his opinion of Cortot's recorded Études, the titanic virtuoso made the devastating comment, "too musical". Nevertheless, few pianists are not deeply affected by Cortot's Études. I once did a series of radio broadcasts in which I played dozens of performances of Chopin's Études to a panel of connoisseurs. In almost every Étude, even with a smudge or technical blur, Cortot's readings were favoured. As Philippe Entremont put it, "Even his mistakes were fabulous! Nobody has ever played the Chopin Études the way Cortot played them. They are so immense, so gigantic; the nonconformity, the fabulous drive - the poetry of the music was airborne. I am absolutely spellbound by the courage of his playing." In an interview Alfred Brendel said of Cortot, "He is the one pianist who equally satisfies my mind, my senses and my emotions... three-dimensional playing..."

Cortot's recordings are never less than fascinating. His discography includes a magnificent reading of Weber's A-flat Sonata, a majestic Ravel Left-Hand Concerto with Munch. His Ravel Jeux d'eau is luscious, and his disc of the Sonatine glows. Cortot deeply admired Franck, and Cortot's teacher Diémer is the dedicatee and first performer of the Symphonic Variations. Cortot's own recording radiates, and his recording of the Prélude, Chorale and Fugue as well as the neglected Prélude, Aria and Finale have never been equalled.

His disc of Mendelssohn's Variations Sérieuses is a classic, as is the Saint-Saëns Fourth Concerto, which was one of his specialities. He was said to dislike Chopin's E minor Concerto, but played a ravishing Chopin F minor Concerto. His Debussy Préludes are delicately wrought and sensuous. His recording of smaller works of Liszt are more successful than his seemingly flippant performance of the Liszt Sonata. Of the classic masters there is very little, and although he recorded twice the Beethoven Sonatas, they have not been issued.

Next to Chopin he most recorded Schumann, indeed there are four versions of the Schumann Concerto, three recordings of Carnaval, the finest from 1928, as well as Papillons, the Symphonic Études, Davidsbündlertänze, and a Kreisleriana of startling poetry and visionary beauty. Cortot's Schumann is chivalric, atmospheric, indeed almost impressionistic at moments with an ineffable sadness of heart.

Since around 1975, music lovers, tired of the perfection and sameness of countless recorded performances, have been responding ever more to the charm, the soaring imagination, the luminous sound, the bold chance-taking and daring of Cortot's recording. Each year in my courses at The Julliard School I take a poll as to the recording most favoured by my pupils in our studies of great pianists. Invariably the choices are Hofmann, Schnabel, Hess, Horowitz, Lipatti, Kapell, Barere, Friedman, Rakhmaninov and, always at or near the top, is Alfred Cortot whose inspiration to young pianists has a thrilling effect. Recently I played Cortot's recording of Chopin's A flat Impromptu for a rather bored pianist who had told me he would soon leave the art of music for studies in something more 'practical'. By the end of the performance the sensitive young pianist was transformed. In a flash his life had changed, and music again lived within him. From that moment, he studied everything that he could hear by Cortot. Indeed, Cortot was an inspired artist, and his recordings remain a testament to a romantic nature, intoxicated on his own delirious temperament.

This Nimbus Release in their important Grand Piano Series gives us fine examples of Cortot's virtually unknown Duo-Art piano rolls released from April 1919 to May 1930.

Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C sharp minor remains one of the world's best loved compositions. The score magnificently exhibits Liszt's histrionic, virtuoso nature in delightful pianistic machinations. No audience can resist its magnetic sway. Cortot adds his own cadenza. Of this specific piano roll, Gerald Stonehill tells us that it was assigned a special Aeolian catalogue number (3099) because of its circumstance. In the ninth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music it is documented "of a London performance of a Liszt Rhapsody, in which passages were performed alternately by Cortot himself and by a 'Duo-Art' roll as recorded by Cortot (the whole being so dovetailed that the effect was continuous) the English critic, Ernest Newman, said, "With one's eyes closed it was impossible to say which was which".

Chopin - Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise in E flat major, Op. 22. This work was on Cortot's début recital in New York at Aeolian Hall in 1918. Written in Chopin's twentieth year, this is a marvellous display piece. The sumptuous Polonaise is ceremonial, the Andante Spianato (ie, with smoothness) is a liquid-toned gem demanding a poet's reading.

Chopin - Impromptu in G flat major, Op. 51, the third of Chopin's four Impromptus, is actually the last of the four; the Fantaisie-impromptu, No. 4, predates the others. The G flat Impromptu remains little known but completely characteristic of Chopin's genius. The double notes of the main theme are rather difficult technically in their serpentine movement. Huneker declares that "The Impromptu flavour is not missing, and there is allied to delicacy of design a strangeness of sentiment..." This strangeness is best attained by Chopin in the extraordinary Trio in E flat minor which morbidly meanders in a long-breathed melody played in the left hand.

Chopin - Nocturne in E flat major, Op. 55, No. 2. In polyphonic richness, lushness of texture and pianistic layout, the Op. 55, No. 2 is a work of striking beauty and exquisite intricacy. One has only to compare the celebrated John-Field-like Nocturne in E flat, Op. 9, No. 2, to realise how far Chopin had travelled during this short creative lifetime.

Chopin - Étude D flat major, Op. 25, No. 8. Von Bülow thought it "the most useful exercise in the whole range of the étude literature..." With poetic potency Chopin writes a dazzling étude in sixths.

Chopin - Étude in G flat major, Op. 25, No. 9. Rather aptly called the 'Butterfly' Étude. Good wrist octaves and endurance are necessary for the projection of this puckish creation.

Chopin - Étude in G flat major, Op. 10, No. 5, is often called the 'Black Key' étude. It is a tour de force, and perfect accuracy of chords in the left hand, with ingenious figuration on the black keys, calls for a combination of fleet finger technique with rotary action and supple wrists.

Chopin - Étude in A minor, Op. 25, No. 11, is often called the Winter Wind. The left hand proclaims a stately marchlike theme; the right hand covers an immense range of territory in chromatic figuration, asking for wintry turbulence and hand malleability.

Chopin, Étude in C minor, Op. 25, No. 12, an étude of oceanic intensity, great majesty and starkness, it requires powerful weight control and balance for arpeggios covering the keyboard in both hands.

Liszt - Au bord d'une source, No. 4, from Années de Pèlerinage, Première Année, Suisse. Here is Liszt the tone painter already dealing with impressionism as early as 1836. This piece is technically treacherous.

Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 11 in A minor is one of the shorter Rhapsodies, ignited with the aura of the czardas, lassu and friska.

Beethoven - Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109. The first movement is a concentrated sonata form of incomparable subtlety in its structure and lyricism, followed by a prestissimo movement also in sonata form. The finale is an elaborate theme and variations, in which the theme returns to close the sonata on an ethereally serene note. Suffice it to say the Op. 109 is a supreme masterpiece.

Saint-Saëns - Étude en forme de valse, Op. 52, No. 6, is from an admirable set of six concert études. Cortot loved this piece, playing it with stylish flair. Saint-Saëns at his best wrote tunes that are memorable, enmeshed in infectious rhythms. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and his wit, sophistication and charm are abundant in this very difficult Étude.

Chabrier - Idylle No. 6, from Dix pièces pittoresques. Completed in 1880, these works show Chabrier to be one of the chief creators of the modern French school and as such Cortot admired him. Only Chabrier could have written Idylle with its tender undercurrent.

Skriabin - Étude in D sharp minor, Op. 8, No. 12, is marked patetico, and is the most famous piece Skriabin wrote. Its rhapsodic declamation seldom fails to thrill in a good performance. The critic Louis Brancolli wrote, "Whoever plays it feels momentarily like a god. To have composed that étude is to have married the piano."

© 1998 David Dubal
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