Bartók Interpretation and National Music

Zoltán Kocsis Talks to Zoltán Farkas

 

Zoltán Farkas: There is a popular notion that performers have more knowledge of and sympathy with composers who are their fellow nationals. Put simply "Bartók is only truly understood by Hungarian musicians". Péter Eötvös was asked recently whether people abroad think of his music as Hungarian, and what he thought of his native musical idiom. He said that, right to this day, musical style still develops according to nations and languages, and that you can hear very quickly where a contemporary work was written. He also mentioned that Bartók is often conducted strangely abroad because he is not understood nor is his idiom understood. Eötvös also said that the articulation of the Hungarian language, the patterns in Hungarian folk-songs and Bartók's music are resources that create a detectable community among modern Hungarian composers, to which Kurtág, Ligeti and he himself belong.
To perform Bartók authentically do you have to know Hungarian?

Zoltán Kocsis: How a language is spoken is certainly important. Even so, I usually give the counter example of the Juilliard Quartet; this was never a Hungarian ensemble, none of them has any connection with Hungary, and yet they've managed to learn Bartók's musical idiom. They've probably listened to a lot of our peasant music, to Bartók's own piano-playing, as well as to authentic performances of Bartók's music, and probably studied Bartók's writings, etc. We should say that the string quartets least require this kind of knowledge, since they least bear the imprints of national character. Most of the piano works require you to be Hungarian or Eastern European. I wouldn't insist on being Hungarian, since someone Eastern European can get the essence of the music not just of their own country but also that of their neighbouring countries better than someone from another continent or Western Europe. My own experience is that the further away someone comes from, in terms of geography and the spirit of the place, the more difficult it is to teach them Bartók. I don't really understand why this is so, since most of us are universal performers who 'gobble up anything', have an affinity with the music of other peoples, including those that strongly wear their national characteristics. Do you need that much more for Bartók's music? I honestly don't think so. It's simply a matter of being well disposed. Here I should mention the fact that I have heard really bad performances by musicians playing the music of their own nation. For example Russians giving terrible performances of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto. But returning to Bartók, let me say that I feel that - especially recently - the tradition of performing Bartók has taken a turn that clearly guarantees him a place in the European canon, while stripping him of those characteristics without which Bartók's music may no longer be Bartók.

You are thinking of non-Hungarian musicians?

Yes, but also interpretations that don't take into consideration the metronome markings. I've heard people say over and over again that you needn't take them too seriously, since Bartók himself didn't do it either. Similarly, it has been said about the folk element that it is perhaps not the most important aspect of Bartók's music, and if we discard it, then Bartók is as much a classic as other European composers. I don't agree. Folk music is so welded with the other ingredients of his music that it is impossible to strip him of it, like stripping off a coat. Bartók's own playing shows us the path we should follow when playing his music, and I feel many musicians do not keep to that path today. A mish-mash is most evident in the orchestral works, after all it's much more difficult on an instrument that comprises eighty individuals to realize the characteristic things that Bartók so easily brings into relief by himself on the piano. The orchestra in practice is a great cleansing fire which burns up values. Chamber music is the other; the players have to accommodate to each other and this becomes an excuse for everything to be quasi-purified, so that performances have no taste or flavour. The guardian angels come from the ranks of imaginative soloists, among whom can be found those who foster true tradition. Of course there are some bloodsuckers, but I think this is more a question of taste. My own view, and one often criticized, is that you don't have to be born into a nation in order to play its music well. It's simply a matter of talent. For example, someone may have a fantastic feeling for jazz without being black. In Los Angeles there are Afro-Americans who are taught jazz by someone who is completely white - a Hungarian.

Authentic interpretation then doesn't require a mystical, racial or genetic basis. But talent isn't enough, the performer needs a desire to acquire the necessary background for understanding the music. In Bartók's case, an acquaintance with folk music is unavoidable.

In Bartók it's absolutely unavoidable. I would have to look very hard in music to find another composer who is so much intertwined with folk music, and whose music is so much inspired by it. Even Stravinsky, as he often said, owes far less to folk music inspiration. For example Les Noces feels throughout so folk-like that it could be a reconstruction of a peasant wedding, but it contains only one single melody of a genuine folk-song. Similarly only one or two melodies can be found that indicate a possible folk origin for the Sacré du Printemps. Some of the themes in Petrushka are partly children's songs, partly barrel-organ or street-organ music. The folk-style of Janác©ek has real folk-music behind it but no conscious attempt at systematization or any deep knowledge of folk music as a whole, as we find in Bartók and Kodály. Regarding Bartók, we cannot overlook the fact that some (perhaps even most) of his folk-song arrangements, or music of demonstrably folk music inspiration, come from Romanian folk music. While Kodály, it should be noted, only dealt with Hungarian folk music. However, I don't think you need to know the language to understand what's essential in folk music. You needn't know it. We talk airily about music being beyond words, and that music begins where the power of words ends. In which case, let it begin there, and don't let's get involved in verbal explanations about the nature of folk music, and how folk-song or instrumental folk music originates, and how it is absorbed into the music of various composers. For example in Leó Weiner, the presence of folk music is really a collage, though even that's much more than in many other so-called folk-inspired pieces. Brahms, on the other hand, fell so strongly under the influence of Hungarian music, or rather what was then the music of Gypsies that a performer cannot avoid studying folk music if he wants to tackle Brahms. You can't play the second movement of the
C major Piano Trio op. 87 without being quite clear in your head what the essential elements of Hungarian folk music are. This is true of other works by Brahms, too. They are deeply soaked in that musical idiom, and I would hazard that Brahms, from some points of view, is even more of a Hungarian composer than Liszt.

Let's return a moment to the language. Péter Eötvös says that the stress and intonation of Hungarian play a large role in pieces which have nothing to do with folk music, but whose phrasing and articulation are determined by the linguistic environment; for example the length of time a meaningful musical idea lasts.

That's true. It's interesting that in Dohnányi, who was bilingual in Hungarian and German, the Hungarian musical elements appear relatively late, and then deliberately, because he first made use of Hungarian-style motives, thematic material and treatment in Op. 29, Variations on a Hungarian Folk-Song (1917). If a person speaks his own language over a long period, then it's natural that how it is spoken will be the determining factor in his music, or at least the dominating element. This really is independent of style and period, for although languages change, they remain basically the same. I would go further. If I'm abroad for a time, let's say in Italy for two weeks, somehow I can feel when I'm practising that the Italian language is having an effect on how I play the music.

So linguistic environment does have a direct effect on your piano playing.

Yes, yes, very much so. And I think if you are a composer, it affects you too.
I mean I can imagine that if you spend a long time in another country, then your musical language changes. Stravinsky underwent so many changes perhaps because he lived in different places. In Switzerland he was still a Russian composer, but in France no longer. In America, on the other hand, he very quickly discovered himself, and in practice became an American composer. He wrote a few Russian works there, but generally he kept to the 'national' idiom. I don't think this was because he had a tendency that Casals and Kodály later accused him of: of being like a tailor and always following the latest fashion. No, these were characteristics deeply rooted in him - quite simply his assimilation of influences.
I'll give you another example from another period. Liszt didn't speak Hungarian - I wanted to use him as the second absolutely relevant example of the fact that you don't have to know Hungarian to write Hungarian music. His native tongue was German, though he preferred to speak and write in French. He also knew some Italian and English. So as a composer, therefore, where shall we put him? He declared himself Hungarian, yet his early works, chiefly influenced by Berlioz, are absolutely French in character: a Les Preludes, a Mazeppa, an E flat Piano Concerto are, how shall I put it, foreign to the Hungarian style. Later he somehow quite naturally strolled onto the Wagner path, which quite simply was not for him. Not in his piano works, but in his orchestral and choral works, he fell well short of Wagner. So in reality he escaped into the Hungarian style, which he could have put to good use if he had started earlier. All things considered, I still think the late period is the most important, through certain works: namely the Valses oubliées, the Fountains at the Villa d'Este, the Mosonyi piece and the Csárdáses. In these pieces he is clearly a Hungarian composer. And this is not due to the language, because he never managed to learn Hungarian.
So much for composition. Performance on the other hand is considerably more straightforward, or complicated, because apart from your native language, you've got the question of musical training. There are different schools for every instrument, because technique varies everywhere. I think musicality may vary from the musical approach or as a result of a deeper involvement in some styles rather than others. More than once Russians have wanted to persuade me that Mozart is boring. He's boring for them because they don't find in him the great big heart, or I don't know what, that they look for in music, and I am supposed to believe that the real thing is Scriabin. To that I can only say that there are two ways of looking at it, one simple, one complex. The simple explanation is that art means something different for Russians. Their taste is different. You can tell immediately from a Russian book cover that it is Russian - it has something Oriental about it. I can imagine that Vienna doesn't mean much to them, hence their French connection - the Moscow-Paris axis, which spans high over Vienna, at least in the history of music. The other explanation, the complex one, I'm not able to fathom. For example, in his own way Tchaikovsky understood Mozart. In his own way... In the Mozartiana suite [Op.61, (1887)] for example we find that awful arrangement of the middle section of the C minor Fantasia, sung by a vocal quartet with piano accompaniment to the words of some horrible poem. I think place and musical education count at least as much as native language in the development of musical attitudes.
Bartók's music therefore is probably a bad example, a tough morsel to chew, because it consists of a huge number of elements. Just looking at it superficially, we can see at least five sources. The national romantic idiom with reminiscences of an Erkel-flavoured 'heel-clicking' verbunkos style, the French influence, folk-song, the tangential effect of the second Viennese School, then Stravinsky's appearance on the scene, and finally the arrival of the period when, having welded all these together, he writes what he wants as he wants it. The last I would date from around the 5th String Quartet, after which Bartók doesn't concern himself much with questions of style. To play Bartók, you must in fact know all five styles at 'native speaker' level. To give an example, a piece like the Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Op.20. It's a bit 'Schoenbergy', as it was written at the time of the Mandarin, and uses harmony which does not appear in any other folk-inspired work, either before or after. In fact even in the motivic development there is a connection with the Second Viennese School, if you look at what he does in the 6th and 7th pieces, and also in the 8th. Then comes the folk music. For me students from the Far East were the most difficult when I was trying to teach, among other things, the Improvisations. I made very slow progress, and let me say that when something worked out it wasn't because I sought assistance from my native language, but purely for musical reasons. I played something on the second piano, and the more talented pupils did it after me. Of course, at first it was simply imitation, but sometimes it worked completely though very rarely.

Pierre Boulez was here in 2001, for me his recording of The Wooden Prince is simply amazing...

He's made two! The New York one, and the DGG...

I'm thinking of the one with the New York Philharmonic, the 1975 recording. For me following the score listening to that CD was the height of pleasure and enjoyment. I went to the concert in 2001 full of expectations - and was very disappointed. He conducted the Orchestre de Paris, and I think the programme included the Two Portraits, the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and the Concerto for Orchestra.

Boulez's star pieces...

Were you there at the concert?

No, but I know his recordings, and when he took over the New York Philharmonic, I began following them closely. I well remember that his first was Stravinsky's Petrushka, and immediately afterwards The Miraculous Mandarin, together with the Dance Suite, which at the time I really didn't like, whereas the Mandarin I really liked. And why did I like it? Because I finally heard things I'd never heard before. But then that is simply the orchestral playing. On the other hand, if today I put on the same Mandarin and Dance Suite recordings, and I - might add the Concerto for Orchestra, which was its first quadraphonic recording of it, and a sensation - then apart from the perfect orchestral playing there's one thing I can't hear behind it, and that's Boulez himself, or some individual who crowns the whole performance, who dots the i. That's missing. There is perfect orchestral playing which, with a good sound card and a MIDI, can be produced even on a computer.

Do you agree with László Dobszay, who is always saying that musical performance is in decline?

Musical performance is certainly in decline, because there are fewer and fewer people with an imagination. Hardly any professional performers are composers, and among composers hardly any are able to perform their own works. In that sense, it is definitely in decline, and there is an even greater danger. Music itself is pretty much in a cul-de-sac, a situation open to manipulation - and many there are who do it. Like, for example, those who say that there is no need to stick to Bartók's metronome markings, that Bartók himself did not take them seriously.
I heard exactly the opposite from Sándor Végh, who told me that Bartók would sit in the corner measuring the beat with his pendulum metronome. Often enough his only comment after a rehearsal was that between rehearsal marks 9 and 16 the music should really be played at MM120, not MM116. I realized the vital importance of this when I was working on Mikrokosmos, because in it you encounter lots of little worlds, all different, and with differing tempi. But there are pieces - not actually for practising tempo changes - where Bartók felt it necessary to change metronome markings five or six times. To learn them or immediately sense them is practically impossible. In my experience they have to be artificially learned, and then made to seem natural, so that changes in tempo are hardly perceptible. Obviously this worked in the opposite direction for Bartók, who composed a piece, then played it, and - as an afterthought - noticed by measuring that he played some phrases slower or faster, but in such a way, that a tempo indication was not enough to convey it, and he was forced to write in a metronome marking. I could give you hundreds of such examples, the famous one being where the performer begins the Chase in The Miraculous Mandarin in a particular tempo, then slows down, because unexpectedly there appears in the score a change of metronome marking. Bartók's reason for adding it was not technical, but to indicate that the real chase begins there, and that up till then they had just been running about. By contrast there now begins the long process which really does attain its goal. Or take for example the first Study for piano, which at first glance, or first attempt, is quite impossible at the metronome marking Bartók has given. You really have to practise it hard, no kidding. And you either get there after a long haul or you never do, and then of course it's easier to say that 'he himself didn't keep to it', or 'his metronome was faulty' - which is the other thing they often say. It's possible
there was something wrong with his Maelzel metronome, but his pendulum one
couldn't have been wrong. He really did take it with him a lot, and used it to measure the beat. The Fifth String Quartet also has apparently quite superfluous metronome markings written at times over a very small space. Then they turn out not to be superfluous, but simply the authentic performance, end of story. You have to keep to them, and if you don't, you're playing it badly. I'm convinced that Boulez - and I've written quite a lot of criticism about him in this respect - didn't check up on these things. Though I think it's probably easier for a conductor to keep a hold on these things than for a pianist: he can set the device while conducting, which is much more difficult for a pianist.
Incidentally, in both Boulez's recordings of The Wooden Prince there is a very bad moment when they play a misprint in the score. This is at the first descent, the one before the leap that precedes the Dance of the Wood, where there is a place in the trombone part where I think they forgot to print a bass clef. It is read in the tenor clef, and the chord is played incomplete! Yet in the piano score - which again Boulez must have overlooked, otherwise he would certainly have heard the difference - it is clear what Bartók was thinking of. Here is a prime example of Boulez not checking up on something. And you then have the suspicion that there are other things too that he didn't check up on. Which is in fact the case, as there are glaring omissions when it comes to the metronome markings. In the Concerto for Orchestra there is basically not one metronome marking that Boulez follows - in terms of proportion. The second movement is extremely slow, but it is quite clear from the orchestral parts that the metronome marking in the score is wrong. In the introduction to the first movement, he takes a tempo at the end that is impossible to increase. There are many such faults.
If I were really critical, I would say that a performance like that does more harm than good to Bartók.

László Somfai laments that Bartók's works have lost popular appeal and are being neglected by performers.

Oh, but his works are played. I often go abroad, and in my experience his music is played, but it's true that they restrict themselves, for example in the orchestral works, to the Concerto for Orchestra, the Dance Suite, and the suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, just as for Debussy they perform La Mer and Iberia, but who plays Jeux, Rondes de Printemps, Gigues, Printemps?

Isn't this also a symptom of decline? The conductor takes the line of least resistance, the easy path, where there are no risks, no need to learn something new.

That is clearly the case. There are some works which are a problem - I have deliberately not mentioned Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta with its divided orchestra, or the Divertimento, which needs a really professional string orchestra. Or I could mention the First Piano Concerto where the percussion are not placed where they usually are. It's not even considered. When I played it in Vienna, I had to battle with the organisers before they were willing to put the percussion behind the piano. They objected that it's impossible, it would keep the audience waiting... So we don't bother with the First Piano Concerto, and behold, an important work has disappeared from the repertoire. Then the Two Portraits disappear, and the Two Pictures, after all they are not representative, and they're too short.

And the Four Pieces for Orchestra?

The Four Orchestral Pieces, which end with a funeral march, 'oh God, we'd better leave it alone then!' Then there's Bluebeard's Castle 'it's difficult, the orchestra's huge, and it needs an organ'. The Wooden Prince, easy to claim it's not such a good piece, it's difficult to play well, and so it gets truncated.
Yes, the repertoire is dwindling, and for practical reasons, while at the same time, the public don't realize...

...what they're losing?

Yes. I remember well what a revelation it was when after a long pause we did Bartók's Op. 2 Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra. You can't even say it's not real Bartók, because the last third of the piece is absolutely in the style of The Wooden Prince. Its effect on the audience was simply a revelation. We played the op.1 Rhapsody piano and orchestra quite a lot at the time. It didn't produce anything like the sensation caused by the Scherzo. If I were to be malicious, I might say that Dohnányi could have composed it. But Dohnányi couldn't have written the Scherzo.

You have made a complete recording of Bartók's piano works which is a benchmark. Anyone dealing seriously with Bartók must take into consideration your set of CDs. Now that you are the chief conductor of the Hungarian National Philharmonic, have you thought of facing the challenge of doing the same for the orchestral works? Is there any likelihood of this?

We should certainly do it. The trouble is, I don't like complete recorded editions. The simplest explanation is probably that they include the 'residue'. Residue in the bad sense. The common approach to a complete recorded edition is 'the important works come first, and then we'll somehow throw in all the others, the less interesting.' Having said so much to denigrate Boulez, let me say that there is a great deal he does that I like, including when he says: 'I'd rather hear and play the scrips and scraps of the great composers than possibly good works by the lesser composers.' I am the same: a chance idea rejected by Bartók is of more value to me than the best work by a recognized second-rate Western composer. It was in this spirit that I tried to approach the complete recording of the solo piano works. Before we began I told the recording company that it will be a long job. I wanted to study them all properly, and not give any performances that sound as though they are simply fill-ups. A typical example is the second album of the piano works, in which, apart from important works like the two big Rumanian Dances, the Suite op. 14 and the Three Studies, there are also the Colindas...

But they are wonderful pieces...

...and the Bartók-Reschovsky 18 short pieces, a Piano School entitled The First Term at the Piano. I approached those in the same way as the great works, in that I didn't record them until I felt I had thoroughly absorbed them. I'd like to do the same with the orchestral works, too. I must admit that after recording the Concerto, there was a lot of enthusiasm at Hungaroton, and the idea was mooted. I told them, though, that I'm not keen on doing complete recorded editions, and said what I'd said about the piano music, that it would take a long time, and there was no sense in trumpeting a complete edition, as it may never come to that. If we are going to talk about Bartók's orchestral works, then there are some less successful ones we will have to come to terms with, for example the First and Second Suites. Then there are the overlaps, for example we have to straightaway decide whether the Scherzo op. 2 is an orchestral work or a concerto. The Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Divertimento are also borderline cases. The Divertimento can be considered as one of the chamber orchestra works, while the orchestrated Three Village Scenes cannot be definitely said to be an orchestral work. At the same time all the short arrangements for chamber orchestra can be included among the orchestral works. Bartók obviously composed them to popularise his music: I'm thinking of the orchestral versions of the Transylvanian Dances and Rumanian Dances, or the Seven Pieces of the 27 Choruses which were later provided with school orchestra accompaniment. It is a fairly broad palette, and if we want to include everything, then much detailed work is required, and I'm not sure it can all be done in the foreseeable future. Of course, at the beginning of our conversation, I referred to the fact that from my point of view there is the question of whether Bartók's system of agogics so characteristic of his playing (I would venture to say it was what taught me the most) can be realised with an orchestra. My answer is definitely that it can. But you have to want to do it. For example take the eight syllable line melody in the middle of the 3rd movement of the Concerto for Orchestra which can be sung to lots of different words, like 'Fehér László lovat lopott' (László Fehér Stole a Horse), 'Kalapom a Tiszán úszkál' (My Hat's Floating on the Tisza) etc. You have to learn some of the words, and play the whole viola part as though it was singing them. Then it will be as it should be. Of course, you can teach foreign orchestras to do it, perhaps in translation. When I conducted the Concerto in Ljubljana with the local orchestra, and I told them 'look, lads, this is a folk-song melody, with eight-
syllable lines' - I sang them some of them - and said 'surely you have the same!' 'Of course we have.' 'In that case make up something in Slovenian.' They did, and it was great. I think this is how music exceeds language. Yet at the same time language remains important. It's not so important, as it happens, in The Miraculous Mandarin, but I can't imagine the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta or the Divertimento without some connection with language being present in the performance. I consider one of the best recordings so far of the Divertimento to be the one with the Camerata conducted by Sándor Végh. I can feel that as regards the string playing, the idiom and the Eastern European character, this performance is so far the best. I don't know if we can manage, but I hope we can produce something of the same kind. To perform the early period compositions is the one thingthat does not worry me.

Is that example where the viola part suddenly fell into place unique? Or have you tried to put a spell on the orchestra, to articulate the music with words?

I have indeed.

I'm amazed, because Péter Eötvös uses the same method. During the Balatonföldvár Days workshop he told us that he tries to teach his conducting students to practise saying the music to nonsense words which fit the articulation. In other words, the first thing he teaches is the articulation, and the rest follows ...

I maintain that, if Beethoven had continued studying with Salieri, then he might have become an Italian opera composer. The other day we performed his trio 'Tremate, empi, tremate' [Op. 116, 1801-2] which was a student piece: Salieri tried to get him to set Italian words to music. The whole thing consists of only three or four sentences, but they produced a cantata. In my opinion words are very important. I can't understand music-lovers who don't like opera. I am a believer in the importance of words, and I practice them with the orchestra.
I'll give you another example! There's a ritornello section in the Dance Suite which appears many times, and many conductors, starting with Boulez, make the mistake of interpreting it as a kind of slow item. In the fourth movement of the Dance Suite they make the same mistake. (This is another example of ignoring Bartók's markings, even though a metronome marking is there in black and white, together with a conducting instruction, and the piano score Bartók made later gives absolutely clearly the same metronome marking. Even so it is ignored, and what's more they conduct it 'in nine' right at the beginning.) So we have two things in the Dance Suite which - to put mildly - make the performance boring, bluntly: that's sloppiness, superficilality, and a complete neglect of the composer's intentions. A clearly perceptible and easily understood counter-argument is that it is a dance suite, hence the Ritornello is also dance-like, and what is apparently a slow fourth movement is also some form of dance. Just as the Suite Bergamasque of Debussy's is a set of dances, even if one of its movements is called Moonlight. A sarabande is very slow, but it's still a dance. I think there are a lot of misunderstandings here, and if it were simply a matter of teaching non-Hungarians and non-Eastern Europeans Eastern European speech patterns, or its musical offsets, then there would be no problem. But the problem runs much deeper, at least in Bartók's case. The Dance Suite is one of Bartók's hardest works, because you have to absorb many idioms and moods, since the piece is very heterogeneous. We've recorded it, and perhaps the way we did it is not too bad. Not that it couldn't all be better...

You've now conducted Bartók's Second Piano Concerto several times with somebody else as the soloist. On such occasions a little devil inside us says: Look, here's someone who could play it better, and yet he chooses to conduct. What have you experience on such occasions?

The Second Piano Concerto is a wonderful thing in that if it's played properly, it works. Of course, I have to say that many pianists attempt at it without playing all the notes properly - and its catastrophic if not all the notes can be heard. Unfortunately I've had soloists in the Second Piano Concerto who were not up to it, they failed to enter at the right time, we had to skip passages. But for the Second Piano Concerto that's what learning the work hangs on. Richter wasn't Hungarian, but he still managed to learn it. Though it's true that he spent a year on it.

He only played the Second didn't he?

Yes. As far as I know he wanted to learn the Third, but in the end he didn't. Annie Fischer only played the Third. Generally pianists play either the Second and the Third, or the Second and the First. The number of pianists who play all three piano concertos, the mature concertos of Bartók, is negligible, and even more negligible the number who add to them op. 1 and op. 2.

As far as you know, apart from yourself, are there any pianists who include all five in their repertoire?

I don't know of any, but I'm not trying to avoid answering your original question. I act on the principle that if I'm the conductor, in other words the accompanist, in a concerto, then I accompany. If on the other hand I am the soloist, then I expect the conductor to accompany. There's a typical example precisely in Bartók's Second Piano Concerto: there's a place in the 3rd movement where Bartók wrote a comma. You can interpret the comma as meaning that something breaks off, but carries on in the metre or tempo. That's not how I interpret it, instead I take a little breath there, and then continue. This can produce unbelievable confusion in those conductors who can't accommodate themselves to taking a breath there. If I'm the soloist, then I usually request that it be played like that. If it is absolutely impossible to do it, as for example once with an orchestra in Sicily, then it's impossible, and what do I do? Well, in that case it is better if the piece hangs together, and we get to the end. But if I'm the conductor, and the soloist doesn't ask for it, or expressly desires it not to be there, then in such cases I fight to the teeth to have it there. Don't think that the soloist is in a much easier position. Indeed, in this case it's harder for the pianist, because as a conductor it's perhaps easier to hold things together. It's much easier for the soloist to follow the orchestra than for the orchestra to follow the soloist. Stravinsky describes this very well in his book My Life when he talks about how difficult it was for him when practising - and of course before then he hadn't been a performing concert pianist - to keep the orchestral part in his ears. It's obvious of course that an ensemble can't stop playing, whereas a soloist can adapt much more easily...
(I myself have had to conform to world famous conductors - precisely in the Stravinsky Piano Concerto - who couldn't conduct the end of the first movement, because there are very many time changes, and at the end of this complicated section one of the horns has to catch an A minor chord. It invariably went wrong because before it are 3/16, 7/16, 5/8 time signatures etc. etc. These ought to have been conducted, but it went wrong... Thus a conductor can much more easily hold together the musicians using an iron hand.
The First Piano Concerto, fortunately, I've only peformed with Dezső Ránki, or rather I conducted. He's one of the few pianists who play it from memory. The Second and Third I've often conducted with different soloists. But there's hardly one of them I retain a really good memory of, and that's exactly because of the things we talked about at the beginning. It's terrible that people approach Bartók without proper preparation. It's equally terrible if they do the same with Beethoven, or Debussy, or anybody, though I guess that the further back you go in time there is more of a universal style from which composers more or less deviate to the extent that their individualities are different. For instance when somebody has played a great deal of Bach it's hard to imagine that a composition by Telemann would raise problems that he'd have to search through five hundred Telemann works to solve them. But there are huge differences between Debussy and Ravel. Huge differences of style.

Isn't that because we are much closer to them in time and see them differently?

I don't think it's that, but rather the appearance in the foreground of individuality. Thus if I'm conducting Ravel's Sheherazade, it's enough if I know Pelléas. But if I'm conducting L'enfant et les sortilčges, then I must know much much more. That is why for some Hungarian musicians those works by Bartók which are based on Romanian folk music, I'm thinking particularly of the two Violin Sonatas, are simply alien. I can imagine there are many who don't like those two sonatas, but just don't say so. If you look at the statistics and the concert programmes the Improvisations are seem to be played less often performed than say the Suite op.14, the Sonata, or Outdoors. Yet the work is in no way any poorer than the others.

Can't something good come, eventually from those occasions when you work with a pianist who is under-prepared? After all, a pianist learns from his failures...

Look, if we're going to talk about the teaching of music, then it's my opinion that so many crimes are committed, that I'm not sure one ought to get involved in that. I thought that when the political changes came and we broke free of the political subjects taught at the Music Academy - political economy, dialectical materialism and goodness knows what - then the teaching time made free would be used to teach compulsory or optional subjects which are directed towards learning music. Instead I see no change, I don't see any courses where you can get submerged in different styles, or a course aimed at getting acquainted with modern music, or thinking about the history of canned music, or heaven knows what. If Dobszay has said that performance is in decline, then we cannot pass over the fact that teaching is also in decline. At primary level music teaching - apart from one or two people - I can't name any really strong personalities. I'm not much informed about the intermediate level - in that level there are still well known people - but in my opinion they won't be there in twenty years' time, and the Music Academy...What sort of an institution is it, given that the nation's best musicians are not there? And why is it being privatised in a way that offers no guarantee that those musicians who teach there will be worth their fee? The fact that a György Kurtág doesn't live in Hungary is itself a comment on Hungarian musical life. It's true that Péter Eötvös is coming back here, but not to take an active part in Hungarian music. In fact, the saddest thing about the situation is that the 'cream' of musical life bury their heads in the sand. We still proudly boast that the Kodály method and Hungarian music teaching are world famous, while in reality there is almost nothing to substantiate that boast. The problem for a long time has been not to rescue and maintain traditions, but simply to continue to exist.

Clearly this upsets you and everyone who confronts the situation.

I've created my own little world, just as everyone else is tending to do. Take my orchestra, the National Philharmonic. In their playing I can hear certain musical things through which I sense bad or neglectful teaching. I can sense the expectations which they present them with at the Music Academy, but which have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with style, with composers, with works, with music, but which are only about each other, i.e. the relationship between the teachers. It's almost like women dressing and dieting to impress one another, not us. Every day I encounter the shortcomings of musical teaching. In practice I have to teach again what the Music Academy has neglected to teach. It's awful.
András Schiff told me that he left the Academy and stopped teaching when one of his pupils declared that the second movement of Mozart's Violin Sonata in A major was boring. He simply picked up his bag, went home, and never again taught in the Academy. So that's what we are looking at. It's possible that the student was born like that, but there were certainly precedents for his behaviour. Why didn't I say such things when I was a student, if I didn't like something? Why did I try to find the fault first in myself, and not in Mozart? That mentality very much stops me from taking part in teaching. Perhaps it's easier to teach adults, because it's enough for them if I just say: 'Look, you are dealing with masterpieces, you are continuously in the presence of the highest criteria, please play as you should.' I would have to dilute this as a teacher if I said it to the students, because, let's say, it would discourage them if I always insisted on the absolute best. To which I reply that's not what matters, as is proved by a long line of pupils. Let me give you an extreme example. Take Ferenc Rados, of whom much has been said both pro and contra. He was a magnificent pianist and a legendary teacher who was heavy-handed with his students, indeed treated then badly, and if the student was sufficiently talented to survive that, then he came away from the confrontation incredibly strengthened. Ferenc Rados wasn't bad for me for one moment, he only did me good. In spite of the fact that I got what I deserved - in sarcasm, taunting, devilish laughter and all sorts of things, but for heaven's sake! This is not a convalescent home.