Alfred Cortot
If you have truely attained wholeness, everything will flock to you.
~ Lao Tzu
Alfred Cortot’s greatness reveals itself most in his Chamber playing; his Trio with Casals and Thibaut is the stuff of legend. But he’s more renowned as a soloist. Many nominate him as the greatest pianist of the 20th century, and that’s unmerited, but a greater poet of the piano there never was. He exudes warmth in prose.
There are two Cortots: pre-Wagner and post-Wagner. Until the age of about twenty, he was a mere pianist – a fantastic, dry, elegant French pianist – but he lacked depth and sincerity. I imagine, listening to his earliest recordings of works such as Saint-Saens’ Etude in the Form of a Valse, for example, that he must have played much of his repertoire in a similar vein. The technique is staggering and the style full of élan. But it’s a bit insincere and lacks color.
Then he became a Wagner convert, began learning to conduct, and spent his early twenties in Germany working as a Choral Coach and then Assistant Conductor at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. In 1902, at the age of 25, he conducted the Paris Premiere of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. During these years, he reinvented his pianistic language and persona, returning to the stage as a transformed pianist, hardly recognizable. He had reached greatness.
Although a conductor at heart, you don’t hear the baton in his interpretations as you do with many conductor/pianists { Leonard Bernstein or James Levine, for example }; his interpretations are never orchestral transcriptions. Rather, he plays with the vision of a conductor and the colors of an orchestra in the language of a pianist.
The piano is in countless respects inferior to the orchestra but in just as many superior. The pianist has absolute freedom to manipulate time on every level. Every nuance is his own. A conductor would need limitless rehearsals to achieve the same effect. Granted, it’s possible, but in the modern world it’s simply cost-prohibitive. Gone are the days of 30 or 60 rehearsals for a new Opera, the underpaid orchestra subject to the whim of a sometimes great but merciless conductor.
The pianist needn’t depend on mercy – his orchestra is ever willing to oblige, and free of charge.
Cortot is the Piano’s Great Orator. He didn’t separate words and vision from musical expression. There’s a wonderful clip of Cortot teaching a Masterclass, playing Schumann’s Der Dichter Spricht { The Poet Speaks } while narrating the music’s poetic intentions. A must-see! The playing is stunning alone, but accompanied with his words and generous spirit, reveals a light into his soul and thought-processes.
He wrote down his poetic visions about a great deal of repertoire in various Editions, of Chopin and Schumann in particular, and although his writing style is out-dated, over-the-top, and second-rate as Prose, as a guide to understanding the repertoire, it’s often spot-on and visionary.
Many pianists talk about speaking and singing with their fingers – Cortot talks and writes, but also shows.
What turns off many to Cortot is the way he carelessly throws away countless notes in his recordings. He belonged to another era and didn’t quite understand the immortality of recordings. He was thrown into recording from early on, but I doubt he truly believed in the medium. He was a live artist of the Old School. But don’t be deceived – if he needed to rerecord and play a note-perfect performance, it would have given him little trouble. It’s not as if he didn’t possess a colossal technique! He simply had his priorities elsewhere, on the poetry and the pure expression of his artistic vision. Hard to fault the man for the noblest of intentions.
Besides, after his early recordings set new standards for virtuosity, recorded or otherwise, perhaps he no longer felt the need to prove himself on a technical plain. The first time I heard Cortot’s early recordings, I locked myself in a practice room in the heat of summer for two full weeks, castigating my fingers for their sloth and laziness. Such was I humbled by Cortot’s elegant mastery.
There’s a revealing story about a change of the guard. Cortot was to conduct Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto in Paris. The soloist, the young Horowitz, 26 years his junior, was already making waves across the Continent. I had heard that Horowitz was an albatross, but upon hearing him in person I failed to see his wings.
Did Horowitz have an off night?
The following story illustrates the similarity and difference between Cortot and Horowitz. Each of them enjoys catching you off-guard at the peak of a large crescendo. They save a little something extra. Cortot recommended to students to put down the Soft Pedal and make as much crescendo as possible. At the very peak, release the Soft Pedal to reveal a sudden reserve of extra sound and brilliance. It produces quite a special effect – try it!
Horowitz doesn’t often use the Soft Pedal above piano. If he needs to crescendo to ff and then release a mighty sforzando at the peak, he plays a natural crescendo to ff, making you believe he’s maxed out. Then he hits you with a dynamic level that only Horowitz and a small number of pianists possess – ffff! It’s only partly illusion. Most pianists possess a usable dynamic range from pp to ff. Some possess a range from ppp to ff and others from ppp to fff. Horowitz’ range is easily from pppp to ffff. I imagine that only Anton Rubinstein and Franz Liszt possessed such a massive dynamic range with minute control over its entire scope.
The difference between Cortot’s Orchestra and Horowitz’ is that Cortot’s includes Strings, Winds, Horns, a solo Trombone and a solo Trumpet, whereas Horowitz’ includes all of the above plus an entire Brass and Percussion session – a full Mahlerian Orchestra, in effect.
Cortot couldn’t have helped but feel a little threatened by this.
Although perhaps not the greatest pianist of the 20th Century, Cortot certainly ranks among the top dozen. Ranking, however, is an often juvenile pastime; esteeming, dissecting and possessing is the purpose of these pages. Cortot still has much to teach me.