FEATS OF MEMORY

Evening Star, Issue 21315, 20 January 1933, Page 12

FEATS OF MEMORY

REMARKABLE MUSICIANS Everyone, says; la Rochefoucauld, cohiplains of his memory. No one complains of his judgment. But the Frenchman was writing before the advent of the virtuoso or the piano. He is not as others are. His memory may give him ground, for ■ genial self-depre-ciation in other things. But—and it is a very large but—once he becomes a pianist he ceases to belong to all the world of humanity included in Rochefoucauld’s observation. His memory then is no longer a lever which by depression may exalt that nobler quality of the mind—judgment (writes H. E. Wortham, in the London ‘ Daily Telegraph ). . When Liszt copied the example of his native Tziganes, and started to play from memory at his recitals, he set a fashion which has now come to be a matter of course. To play the iano now is to play it from memory. Ido not for a moment suppose that Herr Schnabel, if you asked him, would admit to . there being anything the least remarkable in his thus playing the whole of the -Beethoven sonatas. So far, indeed, from his thinking it so, he told me the other day bow once, when he was in Hanover, he happened to see a poster advertising just such .a series of piano recitals. The pianist was Gieseking—then still a student—fledging his wings with this eagle flight in his native town. Were Herr Schnabel to make an inventory of the . whole wealth of piano music stored in that accurate mind, Beethoven’s sonatas would probably form only a modest fraction. I have hoard it claimed for Professor Tovey (who knows his Beethoven as well. as any other living musician) that he .carries the whole of Bach’s clavier music in his head—suites, partitas, the ‘ Fortyeight,’ and all. Mr Harold Samuel also must be pretty well up in his Bach, who teases the memory as Beethoven never does. Herr Horiz-Rosenthal has the whole of Chopin By heart. He will give you the context* of any two bars, though when M. Cortot jestingly tried him wuh a couple consisting only of a rest he had to be given the tonality as well before he could identify the particular bars in the B flat minor scherzo. Mr Herbert Fryer is another master pianist who could probably write out the whole of Chopin’s works if every existing copy and plate of his music were destroyed. I need say nothing about the seamy side of pianists’ memories. They fail much more often than the public think —and if pianists could afford to be candid we might hear them, too, justifying la Rochefoucauld’s epigram.