Zoltán Kocsis

Dohnányi Plays Dohnányi

Dohnányi plays Dohnányi. The Complete HMV Solo Piano Recordings 1929-1956. Appian Publications & Recordings APR 7038.

The Romantics cannot be condemned "en bloc"
Béla Bartók

If we were to characterise Ernst von Dohnányi's art in a single word, then the first choice would have to be largesse, with all the positive and negative connotations of the word. We cannot assess Dohnányi or value him artistically from any other standpoint. His musicianship sweeps away any approach that is petty, clever-clever, or over-analytical. This is even more true of his playing, which in its preserved form contains original features which we seek in vain in the written scores. While listening many times to the music on these two CDs, multiple questions arise, the great majority of which relate in fact to his whole career-seen by many as lacking direction, incomplete and full of lost opportunities. The most important question will probably remain forever unanswered: why was he incapable of renewal, why did he not let himself be swept along by the fresh breezes blowing at the beginning of the century, when he was only four years older than Bartók? How could such a talented phenomenon, a born citizen of the world, remain in a certain sense so provincial? Laziness? Conformity? A taste for officialdom? Perhaps a bit of each. True, Dohnányi played an active role alongside Bartók and Kodály as a member of the Music Directorate during the 1919 Budapest Soviet Republic, but by 1923 he already counted as a conservative in musical composition. Next to Bartók's Dance Suite and Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus, Dohnányi's Hungarian Festive Overture, a masterly example of its type, made hardly an impression. In spite of his being with the leading European music publishers, it was Dohnányi the performer that attracted Europe's attention, while the composers were primarily Bartók and Kodály-as well as to some extent Lajtha and Weiner. In these circumstances what could a conservative composer do-one who moreover was the first to play Bartók in the United States and who as a performer supported modern music not just out of fashion, but because he felt its significance deeply? At most he could preserve his stylistic integrity. But what if that style was at least as heterogeneous as the course of his life, his fragmented career, when both as man and artist he was being almost constantly harassed by the politics of the day?
But enough of this. The aim of this essay cannot at all be to assess Dohnányi's place in European musical history on the basis of an examination of his career. The contradictions in the life and artistic career of this great musician are only important insofar as they can be related to what we hear on the present recordings. Inevitably the question arises: why is the Dohnányi discography not far more extensive? Why did none of the big recording companies commission a musician of his calibre to record, say, the complete Beethoven sonatas and/or the main pieces in his repertoire? Why are his recordings so ad hoc in character, how is it that we can find no thread running through the path of his recorded output? Considering his significance as a conductor, why are there so few recordings where he conducts? Did perhaps Dohnányi himself not realise the importance of recordings, and at first treated the whole thing as a plaything? Quite impossible. By 1929 gramophones and 78 r.p.m records had in practice become a feature of middle class homes, even in "backwater" Hungary. A natural tendency to shrink from fixing the musical moment can only partly be the explanation, since for a composer the afterlife of his music is a more important consideration. The direction this afterlife will take can be determined for a long time via a good recording-in some cases for ever. Even in those cases where, as with Dohnányi, the improvisatory element so dominates that it almost contradicts what is written in the score. Let us be realistic-we have no other choice, listening to the authorised recordings of performer-composers-the basically Romantic approach did not mean that no models or fixed guidelines were followed. If we scrutinise the two recordings of the Pastorale-separated by a quarter of a century-then basically we hear, even if not completely identical, the same agogics and rubato in both. True, the later recording is less energetic, but such is natural for a musician approaching the end of his seventies. These are stereotypes we find not just in Dohnányi, but in varying measure in practically all romantically orientated pianists (Rosenthal, D'Albert, Pachmann, Friedheim, Sauer, Lhévinne etc.). There are exceptions-not surprisingly precisely those who first recognized the importance of recordings, and who from the outset made them 'for eternity' (Hofmann, Backhaus, Lamond, Rachmaninov). They evolved a puritanical style deriving purely from the written notes, which in the field of performance in fact turned much earlier against the Romantic style than it did among the composers of the time. Furthermore, they did it in the most syrupy Romantic pieces, the encore items of salon music. Dohnányi remains apart from them, just as he did not join any of the trends of the time as a composer: by 1920 his music had become irretrievably anachronistic. If we were to judge his output simply from a progressive standpoint, then he surely would not occupy an important place even in Hungarian musical history. Fortunately, with the passage of time such prejudices generally fade, and we are forced to recognise that lasting quality, conformity and value are not necessarily mutually exclusive. If we compare the compositional invention and skill of Bartók and Dohnányi at the beginning of the century, perhaps it is not too surprising that Bartók is not only the more awkward, but also much the less inventive. We might even hazard that within this style the situation would have remained unchanged. Bartók's career and his struggles are well known: it would be illusory to think that Dohnányi felt for one minute that he might head the Hungarian avant-garde. His early years took shape too easily and smoothly for that. From the start of his career it was clear that he would not change his style by swapping the ingredients that nourished it for others more risky. Not as a performer, either: his basic orientation remained the same to the end of his life. The differences between his earliest and latest recordings are only of a technical nature, the playing of the 83-year-old being understandably more slipshod, less accurate, less energetic, than the 52-year-old.

It must be said that there is a stark contrast between the comments of Dohnányi's contemporaries about his playing-full as they are of admiration and often glorifying the artist-and today's "objective" opinions of those who have heard the surviving recorded material. We must be honest and say that not a few of those who up till now had only heard legends about the phenomenal performer, when confronted with the reality experience disappointment. There is no reason to suppose that Dohnányi played very much differently, or was somewhat more motivated, in concert conditions-especially in his own music. He certainly was not the type of pianist who covered technical or other shortcomings with florid showmanship. Quite the opposite. On the evidence of his contemporaries-and not least of photographs taken in his concerts-he dispensed even with gestures. None of this should surprise us in one who was so "made of music"-he had no need of extra-musical devices, to employ them would have embarrassed him. Yet even the greatest performers over the years develop mannerisms which are not so much the fruit of refinement, but crutches, bad habits, things to hang onto during work done in haste. If we add to this the fact that nothing stood further from Dohnányi's playing than an analytical spirit-indeed, what was there to analyse for him in his own music?-then we move further to the source of his mannerisms and understand more easily the perhaps excessive rubato, the hurried cadences, the snatched strettos-we could say 'too strettoed'. It is not at all surprising that such excesses grew stronger with routine, best heard perhaps in the two recordings of his Op. 41. In the first, made less than a year after the work was finished, we hear a completely fresh, bold performance, full of motivation. We can sense clearly that it was carefully prepared, even that the pianist had been eagerly anticipating the moment. Hardly a decade later the second recording, though better in sound quality, is more muted, less energetic, with many more mistakes as though Dohnányi had lost interest in the work. On top of which the first excellent recording, for technical reasons, was never published. Such is typical of Dohnányi's whole career, or perhaps of all those who squander their talents. Nonetheless, those who criticise the pianist's recordings should realise how lucky we are that even crumbs from his art survive on record.4 The suspicion arises that the managers of recording companies -in whose interests it lay to search out pianists whose technical perfection was not in doubt, who had stamina and were sellable-were as reluctant to display serious and sustained interest in Dohnányi's playing as he was to make any attempt to "become a specialist" in canned music.
Of this, we might say, there is no real need anyway, since the primary purpose of a recording is to preserve everything, down to the last vibration. Hence in practice it does not matter whether the recording is initiated by the inspiration of the moment or the thought of eternity. Whether it can be listened to repeatedly or not is a different consideration, but here time is needed for what is really good to emerge. We can suspect that none of this has to do with the sales figures of His Master's Voice LPs, which-according to the firm's representatives-were the main reason for withdrawing plans to issue the recordings in the States. Nothing could be more natural than that someone whose name was only met with once in a while by the wider public should not continue to work for long with a fundamentally profit-oriented firm whose desire was to cream off the immediate rewards. Even had he not been declared a war criminal, the Dohnányi who was seen as representing the past and as having lived beyond the life of his own music would not have played an important role in the mainstream of European and American musical life. Thus for the public the legend remains, while for the musician there was that hard reality for which without doubt not just external circumstances, but Dohnányi himself was to blame. His tragedy of being in a cul de sac of conformity at the human, political and musical levels could not have been a happy experience-and neither could the fact that the forties and fifies no longer spoke the words of Dohnányi's aesthetic creed. If we add to this that those other musicians who left a diminished, humiliated Hungary had also been through the same hell, then we can only marvel that those recordings where we can hear Dohnányi were made at all-and that we feel no sense of pity when we judge them.

For there is no need. With all its occasional lack of polish, its haphazardness, and mistakes, we have here the great school of piano playing. In the first bars it becomes clear that a universal musician is playing. In the most complicated passages we hear the composer, in the most pianistic passages the orchestrator, in the apparently most trivial phrases-without exaggeration-the poet. All of us can see that his al fresco approach covers up inaccuracies only to highlight the quintessence of the music. Even where the performance has shortcomings technically, we can sense his original pianism, which nearly all the time uses the ten fingers and radiates the inventiveness of a composer. It is beyond doubt that his composing itself stemmed from the piano and its capabilities, there is no trace of any kind of paper music, or the writing desk. Creativity and performance are so linked together that somehow even the mistakes seem authentic-of course not always. Lack of regular practising is evident here and there, chiefly in richly polyphonic passages. And there are plenty of mannerisms: assessed strictly from the point of view of texture, the playing is far from immaculate. Yet even so we would rather hear Dohnányi's playing with its slips than the perfect playing of others "faithful to the score". Some of the recordings give the feeling at the beginning that he is approaching the instrument under the influence of a 'final intention'-these are the weakest moments of the set. When the inhibition produced by such discipline is broken through, then the spirit of the nineteenth century is conjured up for us-more precisely the Lisztian tradition of piano playing. Then we realise what artistic freedom really means, what the word inspiration refers to, how handicapped, to use Bartók's words, is our musical notation. We can observe accurately that in this piano playing being careful, as such, does not exist, with a corresponding increase in the risk factor. Not one phrase ending is crystal clear on the Tolle Gesellschaft recording in Winterreigen (10 Bagatelles) Op. 13, even so the accelerated gesture reveals more of the composer's intention than a performance metrically more secure. For Dohnányi is proved to be right, even if the result is not one hundred per cent perfect.
But is there a performance possible that makes every succeeding attempt superfluous? Surely not. Bartók's thoughts on the subject of mechanical music also suggest that inferior performances and recordings also contribute to the afterlife of music-to the growth of tradition (just as, in fact, do rehearsals and indeed practising, never mind the approach from the musicological side). Composers' recordings, even where they are inferior, give us indispensable information concerning the essential nature of a composition. A typical example is Dohnányi's recording of his Variations on a Hungarian Folksong, Op.29. Even the theme itself is somewhat awkwardly played, as if the composer were reluctant to present himself to us with a musical form in which so many masterpieces had been composed before him. If we are really strict, we find here numerous faults unworthy of one of the greatest performers of the 20th century, lapses of pedalling, imperfect voice-leading, a lack of proportion, which when heard make us wonder why he left them uncorrected. But if we are not, if we can listen to the recording without expectations and prejudices, if we ignore the unsatisfactory aspects of the playing-if in a word we remember that physical dexterity can only decline with age-even then we are are given real aesthetic pleasure. The way Dohnányi, for the sake of unity, gives less importance to sections of the form which any other pianist would give thought to and "elaborate" more, the way he subordinates the likelihood of achieving a crystal clear style for the sake of giving emphasis to a climax, the way he often plays chords, passagework and arpeggios in a haphazard 'casual' way to bring out the beauties of the harmony, the unceasing use of the pedal: indeed, these are all the heritage of the 19th century and the Lisztian piano style. And this heritage is so enormous, that it is perfectly suited to conveying adequately the cumbersome aspects of Brahms, with his puritan and dense pianistic style12. It would be a little extreme to apostrophise Dohnányi's music as a synthesis of the two styles that defined the turn of the century, but one thing is certain: in his playing his attachment to these musical idioms is continually present. Of course there is much more: his playing manages to be accentuated without ever losing for a moment its liquidity, the air of authority with which Dohnányi always approaches the piano and at the same time covers the whole rich range of its possibilities, and his phrasing never presents just a single perspective on the music13. These are not the signs of conformity, they are, in the Lisztian sense, an attitude that aims at devouring impressions and reworking them. Surely no other performer had command of so many styles as if they were his inborn musical idiom, while remaining so very recognizable through his own individual and unmistakable playing. It is all the more natural that a musician on this scale could not avoid certain failures, falling into traps of his own making (often, to be honest, with evident pleasure), though never overshooting the mark. The elegance that characterises this incredibly impulsive playing may be occasionally at the expense of control, but ipso facto it eliminates all superflous ceremony. "This is easy for me, I'm sorry I'm so much quicker at it than most others are"-is the message we receive on the surface. Fortunately, this is not the only layer it has and those who are willing to dig deeper, to make greater efforts to understand what is coming from deeper and deeper down, sooner or later come to see that Dohnányi does not want to move mountains, change worlds, invade souls, or even disturb them. He simply wants to make music, and it is just by this means that we are given an experience which is increasingly rare, which fewer and fewer people can perceive, and to miss which-whether because of preconceptions about 'progress above all' or other reasons-is quite simply a sorry state to be in.

 

Zoltán Kocsis
a pianist, conductor and composer, has been Musical Director of the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra since 1997. He co-founded the Budapest Festival Orchestra with Iván Fischer in 1983, with whom he won the Edison Prize for their 1987 recording of Bartók's piano concertos. A 1990 selection of Debussy's piano pieces won the Gramophone prize as well as the Instrumental Recording of the Year award.