Music: Six-Layer Cake

The piano contest between the two great virtuosos at the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso’s, that spring of 1837, had been one of the unmistakable successes of the Paris season. The cream of society had crowded the princess’ salon to hear famed Franz Liszt outthunder another darling of the day, suave Sigismond Thalberg. If she could enlarge the duel to a multiple piano exhibition, the princess thought, perhaps a goodly sum could be raised for the benefit of her needy Italian compatriots in Paris. So six of the most famous pianists of the day were asked to compose variations on a theme from Bellini’s I Puritani.

Chopin was interested. Thalberg agreed. Liszt’s old teacher, onetime Beethoven Pupil Carl Czerny, promised to come from Vienna. The others were Thalberg’s teacher, Johann Peter Pixis, Pianist-Composer Henri Herz and Liszt himself.

On the great night, the glittering audience found six pianos on the stage. First Liszt, nostrils quivering and long locks tossing,* thundered and rippled an introduction and the theme from I Puritani. Then the pianistically mannered Thalberg played his variation; Liszt provided a transition to the offering of Pixis; Herz came next, then Czerny, whose knuckle-cracking exercises have been the nemesis of piano students for the last hundred years. Liszt, from his piano, interjected a Fuocoso molto energico; the slender Chopin added an exquisite largo. At last, in his finale, Liszt wittily and skillfully parodied the styles of the others—except Czerny and Chopin, whom he respected too much. The audience buzzed with excitement. Tickled, Liszt later published the whole thing with the name Hexameron, often played it on his own programs.

This week Hexameron had one of its few hearings since Liszt’s death in 1886. In London’s His Majesty’s Theater, brilliant Pianist Claudio Arrau (a onetime pupil of Liszt’s pupil, Martin Krause) marched alone to the single piano in center stage. Then, playing with mixed high purpose and good humor, heaving and hammering, sighing and scintillating, he re-created for a moment some of the atmosphere of the Princess Belgiojoso’s 1837 soiree.

The consensus: Hexameron was a six-layer cake that would never do for a steady diet, but it was fun to take once in a while.

* Liszt was the father of keyboard theatrics. Before his time, pianists usually played facing the orchestra with their backs to the audience or vice versa. Liszt turned the piano sideways to reveal his profile. One of his acts: in his debut in St. Petersburg, one chronicler reports, Liszt, “covered with clanking orders . . . mounted the platform, and, pulling his dogskin gloves from his shapely white hands, tossed them carelessly on the floor.”