A Pianist's A-Z by Alfred Brendel

Author:Alfred Brendel [Alfred Brendel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571301850
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

LOVE Are there musicians who do not love music? I am afraid so. Are there performers who do not love the composer? You bet. The composer is our father. A performer who doesn’t love his father, and obstructs his intentions and wishes on principle, should become a composer himself.

Are there pianists who do not love the piano? Does a lion-tamer love his lions? Or the trainer of a flea-circus his fleas? I love the piano as a Platonic idea, and those pianos that get close to it.

At the end of a recital in Ballarat, one of the chilliest places in Australia, I told the public that I’d like to have an axe to destroy their concert grand. Ballarat, by the way, is worth the trip. It offers an impressive showpiece of naive architecture, a cottage whose facade, garden and fence are decorated with fragments of teapots.

Our love of pieces that we play may, and should, exceed the frame of the purely structural. Colour, warmth, ardour and sensuous beauty will turn the musical love-object into a living being, as long as its tangibility doesn’t motivate the executant to provide it with bruises and haemorrhages.

Of the seventeen kinds of love, number sixteen is the rarest. It hides, like the Australian lyre-bird, in the thicket of forests. But it exists.

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