Music: Reincarnation

During the 1930s, most of the long-eared musical world was playing a waiting game. Famed Austrian Pianist Artur Schnabel was slowly recording his way through the Beethoven sonatas—Schnabel would no more hurry a recording session than he would a Beethoven tempo—and each new disk was an event. The whole series ranked as a masterpiece. Schnabel died in 1951, and his old 78 r.p.m. records soon became obsolete in the LP age. Last week Victor brought him back in his finest reincarnation, a package containing all 32 sonatas on 13 LPs, plus Schnabel’s own meticulous edition of the piano scores. It is an extraordinary fusion of free-swinging artistry and absolute faithfulness to Beethoven’s intentions, written or implied.

Beethoven was the first composer to make use of ugly sounds in abstract music, the first to make notes speak in everyday prose, to stamp and rave, and stand still to make philosophical statements, and Pianist Schnabel was temperamentally capable of bringing all of these qualities into line with Beethoven’s more appealing side. Beethoven was also the first composer to become a bourgeois hero and one of the first upon whom the stupefying epithet “great” was popularly bestowed, an event that forecast the beginning of the present sorry condition of concert music—during the last hundred years, no concert has been really classy unless it had some Beethoven or another “great” on the program. Toward the end of his career, Schnabel himself rarely played anything but Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Brahms, but instead of calling them “great,” he called them “still problematic,” and treated them as fresh challenges.

Schnabel’s playing was never note-perfect, but his performances on these disks have something so compelling that mere perfection would seem paltry by comparison. The recorded sound transferred from the old disks varies from good to barely acceptable by modern standards, despite the labors of Victor engineers. The package sells for a luxurious $80, a price that does not preclude some annoying corner-cutting: the sonatas are crammed together, one starting wherever the previous one leaves off, as if the listener were going to stack the entire 32 sonatas on his changer and run them through chronologically.

But the music is all there, and what really matters is Schnabel’s playing. To hear him is suddenly to see light across the generations that separate the composer from today; to be delighted at Schnabel’s surprising methods of treating Beethoven’s surprising turns of phrase; to laugh or sigh, sometimes almost to cower in fright. This playing has the kind of sanity that is expressed in one of Schnabel’s provocative remarks. “Back around the turn of the century,” he once said, “it became the idea that Beethoven’s opening theme in the Fifth Symphony was fate knocking at the door; after that, conductors played it more slowly. Why, tell me, should fate knock slowly?”