Pianists: View from the Inside

Lili Kraus, a 58-year-old grandmother, has a crush on Wolfgang and she doesn’t care who knows it. When she jetted to Manhattan from Vienna last month, riding alongside her was the nearly life-size bust of Mozart that accompanies her wherever she goes. She came to do him honor in the best way she knows how: by playing all 25 of his piano concertos in nine consecutive concerts, the first time such a feat has been undertaken in the U.S.

Behind her were two years of preparation—eight hours a day devoted to her maxim that “a work of art must be broken into a thousand pieces if it is to survive in the eternal.” She bought a piano that had been built in Mozart’s time, played it repeatedly to test its limitations, concluded that because of its fragile construction the composer expected his music to be played with a softer touch than is customary among modern pianists. Says she: “I eat, I talk, I clean my teeth, but always in the back of my head I can hear the music going on. This concert series is a life-consuming event, but also a life-crowning one.”

Treasure Fund. Draped regally in a gold brocade gown, her hair piled high in a bun, Lili Kraus last week began the first lap of her Mozart marathon. In the opening Concerto No. 4, composed when Mozart was eleven, she unfolded the beguilingly simple melodies with a rippling grace and ease; in No. 9 she engaged the Mozart Chamber Orchestra in a lighthearted dialogue that rang with all the gusto of a back-porch gossip fest. And her reading of the passionate No. 20, the most popular of Mozart’s piano works, was clean refinement and intense drama. It was impeccable Mozart throughout, original without being eccentric, introspective without being pedantic. At concert’s end, the sellout crowd in Manhattan’s Town Hall applauded like baseball fans who had just shared in winning the first game of the World Series.

Though she has played infrequently in the U.S., Lili Kraus has been a celebrated soloist in Europe for more than 30 years. Daughter of an impoverished scissor sharpener, she was born in Budapest, became a prodigy at six, taught adult students at eight, became a full-fledged soloist at 20. In 1940, while on a concert tour of Java, she was stranded by the war and eventually placed in a Japanese forced-labor camp. Denied access to a piano for most of the three years of her imprisonment, she “continued to play organically,” deciding that “either I go to the dogs or I make the experience the treasure fund of my life by falling back wholly on that which is within myself.”

Yoga & Oatmeal. It was this blossoming of inner faith, she says, that irresistibly drew her to “the divine serenity of Mozart, which is so close to the bosom of God. I discovered the purity and chastity of his way, the seductive grace, the incredible sweetness.” The hardest part, she explains, was taming her “uncivilized Hungarian temperament, cutting back all passion, all effusiveness, all exaggeration, which does not go well with Mozart.” Steeped in religious philosophy, she is a radiant, darkly handsome woman who fortifies her self with yoga exercises learned from Violinist Yehudi Menuhin’s guru in India, and daily rations of a syrupy mixture of ground-up acorns, figs and raw oatmeal. Last year she visited Bach Scholar Albert Schweitzer in Gabon, played Mozart and Bach for him every night for five weeks; he spent his last days listening to her recording of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. In February, she will become an artist in residence at Texas Christian University.

Does she plan a vacation from Mozart after her series is ended? “Never,” insists Lili Kraus. “It is the kind of enchantment that never leaves you.”