Harold Bauer
plays Chopin & Schumann









Harold Bauer (1873-1951) was a rare human being: warm, philosophical, iconoclastic, witty, and for his whole long life very productive. His autobiography, Harold Bauer, His Book, paints a portrait of a gentleman. Not an unpleasant moment is recorded, not an ill word said, it is all discreet and refreshing. The decade of his birth produced some of the greatest talents in pianistic history. To merely name them tells us much of the extent and quality of musical life of that period: Leopold Godowsky, 1870, Ernest Hutcheson, 1871, Katherine Goodson, 1872, Joaquin Malats, 1872, Adelina de Lara, 1872, Carl Friedberg, 1872, Alexander Scriabin, 1872, Edouard Risler,1873, Sergei Rakhmaninov, 1873, Konstantin Igumnov, 1873, Josef Lhévinne, 1874, Marguerite Long, 1874, Ricardo Viñes, 1875, Alexander Goldenweiser, 1875, Ernest Schelling, 1876, Josef Hofmann, 1876, Rudolf Ganz, 1876, Wanda Landowska, 1877, Isabella Vengerova, 1877, Ernö von Dohnányi, 1877, Alfred Cortot 1877, Emile Blanchet, 1877, Sergei Bortkiewicz, 1877, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, 1878, Mark Hambourg, 1879, Harold Samuel, 1879. These were truly a galaxy of stars and their influence continues.

Harold Bauer, born in London, was one of the most beloved pianists of this hallowed group. His activities were immense. Throughout his career he dabbled in composition and wrote some marvellous transcriptions; the finest are his sensitive adaptations of Bach and Franck.

Much preferring to share the stage, Bauer was an incomparable chamber player, often collaborating with Casals, Fritz Kreisler and many others.
One of his most enjoyable activities was his two-piano recitals with Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Together they recorded the Arensky Waltz which has become a 'classic' recording. 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.

Gabrilowitsch began giving two-piano recitals together in 1915, and continued through the years. Clara Clemens, a fine pianist, the daughter of Mark Twain, and the wife of Gabrilowitsch, wrote a biography entitled My Husband, Gabrilowitsch. She quotes a reporter in a St. Louis newspaper who had interviewed them separately during their first tour: "Today Gabrilowitsch expressed his real opinion of Harold Bauer, as he sat under a waving palm in the lobby of the hotel. 'Bauer is a remarkable man,' he said. 'I have never enjoyed a tour so much with anyone before. We not only agree personally, but musically, which is distinctly unusual. He is a wonderful artist.'"

That same day, Bauer told the reporter that "Had anyone ever told me I could make a tour with another pianist and profit by an intellectual as well as musicianly companionship, I would not have believed it. Gabrilowitsch is one of the greatest men in the world, I sincerely believe. His interests extend far beyond the scope of music, and he has in all things a most wonderful mind. As an artist, of course, he is beyond compare."

An exchange of letters between the two pianists from 1927 provides an insight into the light-hearted nature of their friendship.
Ossip wrote:

"Harold,
I am afraid you got Arensky confused with Rodin. The name of the piece is not 'Le Penseur'; it is 'Le Rêveur'. Please bear that in mind in making up the Chicago program."

Bauer replied:

"Dear Ossip,
I do hate a methodical mind! You remind me of Kunwald, who was very much upset with me when I told him that the first horn came in wrong in the Brahms' Concerto. 'Not at all' he said indignantly, 'It was the third horn.' I apologized, of course. And I apologize to you, but I am not going to change the title on the program. So there! If Arensky called the piece 'Rêveur' instead of 'Penseur', he is to blame, not I. And the mistake you make in imagining that I was thinking of Rodin instead of, naturally, Michaelangelo, is your look-out not mine."

Clara Clemens wrote: "The kind of sympathy existing between Bauer and Gabrilowitsch produced intellectual polemics without quarrels. My husband remarked once laughingly, 'Bauer and I have had something like two thousand conversations without agreeing on a single point.' This was what he enjoyed; ingenuity, originality, fresh thought filled Bauer's affirmations,"

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. He now faced the laborious task 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 at the piano was amazing, and he made a Paris début 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 l 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 had made his American début 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 an interview, Bauer told Harriett Brower, "There are a great many methods of teaching the piano, but to my mind they are apt to be long, laborious, and do not reach the vital points... much time will be wasted in useless labour. I came to Paris years ago as a violinist, but there seemed no opportunity for me then in that direction. There was opportunity, however, for ensemble work with a good violinist and cellist. So I set to work to acquire facility on the piano as quickly as possible. I consulted all the pianists I knew - and I knew quite a number - as to what to do. They told me I must spend many months on technique alone before I could hope to play respectably, but I told them I had no time for that. So I went to work to study out the effects I needed. It didn't matter to me how my hand looked upon the keyboard, whether my fingers were curved, flat or stood on end. I was soon able to get the effects I wanted.

I study a work in the first place from the musical side. I see what may be the meaning of the music what ideas it seeks to convey, what was in the composer's mind when he wrote it. I get a good general idea of the composition as a whole; when I have this, I can begin to work out the details.

I do not believe, for instance, in the struggle to play a perfectly even scale. A scale should never be 'even', for it must be full of variety and life. A perfectly even scale is on a dead level; it has no life, it is machine-made. The only sense in which the word 'even' may be applied to a scale is for its rhythmic quality; but, even in this sense, a beautiful scale has slight variations, so that it is never absolutely regular, either in tone or rhythm... We do not need to say: 'Now I have thought out the conception of this composition to my present satisfaction; I shall always play it he same way!' How can we feel thus? It binds us at once with iron shackles. How can I play the piece twice exactly alike? I am a different man today. Each day is a new world, a new life. Don't you see how impossible it is to give two performances of the piece which shall be identical in every particular?"

In speaking of velocity in piano playing, Bauer said, "I believe the quality of velocity is inherent - an integral part of one's thought. Even a child, if he has this inherent quality, can play a simple figure of five notes as fast as they need to be played. People of the south, Spain and Italy, are accustomed to move quickly; they gesticulate with their hands and are full of life and energy. It is no trouble for them to think with velocity. Two people will set out to walk to a given point; they may both walk fast, according to their idea of that word, but one will cover the ground much more quickly than the other. I think this idea of a time unit is again a limiting idea. There can be no fixed and fast rule as to the tempo of a composition; we cannot be bound by such rules."

In a 1916 article for Étude 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 subconsciously 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 début, 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 Albéniz, Granados and Ravel. In 1908, he premièred 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 the 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 he 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."

The Music

Chopin

Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, Op. 66 (Posth.)
The most popular of the four impromptus. Countless pianists of all persuasions have attempted this piece composed in 1834. The opening material with its four notes against three, in its Bellinian coloratura, is alluring. The trio is perhaps a bit long and in the wrong hands is mawkish. The coda uses the trio tune in an ingenious manner.

Fantaisie in F minor, Op. 49
This large-scaled composition is one of Chopin's supreme masterpieces, an intense lyric-drama, solemn, mysterious and passionate. Niecks felt that 'Chopin's genius had now reached the most perfect stage of its development...'

Nocturne in F sharp major, Op. 15, No. 2
One of the most popular nocturnes, this is a piece of ravishing beauty, exhibiting a heavenly melody. Niecks, Chopin's late nineteenth century biographer says, 'The fioritura flit about as lightly as gossamer threads.' The middle section, Doppio Movimento, shows Chopin's command of pianistic notation. No composer had thus far been so explicit and original in showing to the pianist, on the page, what was needed. The increased motion of the middle section, with its novel figuration in quintuplets, possesses a burning passion.

Waltz in D flat major, Op. 64, No. 1 ('Minute' Waltz)
This all-time favorite of Chopin's Waltzes is called the Minute Waltz because of its perpetual-motion attitude. However, to play it in a minute would be absurd. When Chopin was in London in 1848, the recently-published Valse was all the rage, and the composer was often compelled to play it. The London society ladies repeatedly exclaimed that it sounded "like water" - a phrase that annoyed Chopin.

Mazurka in D major, Op. 33, No. 2
A delightful specimen, bright, cheerful and popular. A very earthy Mazurka.

Scherzo No. 3 in C sharp minor, Op. 39
The most nervous, tense, ironic and tightly constructed of the four Scherzos, with, at times, an almost Beethovenian grandeur. The chorale-like second subject in D flat, is interspersed with radiant, falling arpeggios. The coda reaches emotional heights with its rhetorical closing.

Étude in F minor, No. 1 from Trois Nouvelles Études (without opus number)
A long melody of restrained passion, its technical use being three notes in the right hand to be played against four in the left.

Étude in D flat major, No. 3 from Trois Nouvelles Études (without opus number)
A wickedly-difficult Étude which demands both legato and staccato in the same hand.

Valse Brillante in F major, Op. 34, No. 3
This witty waltz is little-known. Its third subject with its bracing appoggiaturas casts a special spell.

Polonaise in C sharp minor, Op. 26, No. 1
It opens with an arrestingly-grand statement but the main character of the work is lyric. Once played frequently, the C sharp minor Polonaise ought to be revived. The Meno Mosso section is exquisite, and in Huneker's words "tender enough to woo a princess".

Schumann

Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), Op. 15
Harold Bauer plays eleven of the thirteen pieces of Schumann's Kinderszenen. Nos. 10 and 11 are not included. Since their creation in 1838, these gems have been played around the world, by virtuosi and amateurs alike. No. 7 Träumerei (Dreaming) is one of the world's favorite melodies. Alban Berg once analyzed the piece, showing how complex it actually is.

I quote from Harold Bauer's preface to his edition of the Scenes from Childhood:

"The origin of 'Kinderszenen' lies apparently in a chance remark of Clara's that Robert sometimes seemed to her like a child. He was willing to accept this appraisal of his personality and wrote her shortly afterwards that he had composed about thirty little pieces from which thirteen were to be selected and called 'Kinderszenen'.

'You will like them', he added, 'but you must forget that you are a virtuoso. They make a great impression - especially on myself! - when I play them.' He was indignant when the composition, on its publication, was belittled by the well-known Berlin music critic Heinrich Rellstab, who suggested that a musical imitation of the actions of a child could hardly be taken seriously. 'I have never heard of anything so stupid', wrote Robert. 'It is precisely the other way round. I do not deny, of course, that I was thinking of children when I composed the pieces - Ottilie Voigt's big blue eyes go so well with them, for instance - but the titles were given afterwards and these titles are, in fact, nothing but directions for the performance of the music.'"

As indicated in the editor's preface to 'Album for the Young', Op. 68, the 'Scenes from Childhood' were to be considered 'Reminiscences' whereas the pieces in the 'Album' should be regarded as 'Anticipations'.

What became of the rest of the group of pieces referred to in Robert's letter to Clara? They were laid aside, in the present writer's opinion, to be published many years later in the two collections entitled respectively 'Bunte Blätter', Op. 99, and 'Albumblätter', Op. 124. The Kinderszenen bear no dedication.

Novelette in F major, Op. 21, No. 1 & Novelette in D major, Op. 21, No. 2
Schumann wrote the eight Noveletten, Op. 21 in 1838. He said, "They are intimately interrelated, were written with enormous zest, and are, by and large, gay and superficial, with the exception of places where I got right down to fundamentals." Both works have Schumann's delightful discursiveness, and unique melodic appeal.

© 1998 David Dubal
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