First Crush Critics for The Times Explore Inspiration: It All Started With a Toy Piano
A Critic’s Ode to a Childhood Joy in Classical Music
Before I showed up, no one in my family was musical, played an instrument or even sang in a choir. I found music on my own. In a way, my eureka moment came early, when my parents bought me a little toy piano and, like Schroeder in “Peanuts,” I started picking out tunes on it. I campaigned to get a real piano. It wasn’t until I was 8 that, seeing that I was serious, my parents complied. One day a boxy old upright was hauled into our home on Long Island.
Of course there were formative moments when I started going to live performances, hearing Van Cliburn play the Brahms Second Concerto with the Long Island Philharmonic and Bernstein conduct the “Eroica” Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” with the New York Philharmonic. It was not my parents but my fifth-grade teacher, a classical music devotee and audiophile, who generously took me to some of my first concerts and, of special note, my first opera: “Tosca,” at the Metropolitan Opera, with Dorothy Kirsten in the title role, Richard Tucker as Cavaradossi and George London as Scarpia.
What really pulled me in, though, was listening to certain recordings in the basement den of my home, by myself. Two albums especially may have pointed me to my life’s passion.
The first was an RCA release titled “Rubinstein Plays Grieg.” I already had a recording I loved of Grieg’s Piano Concerto, which my mother had picked up at a supermarket, and I cannot remember the pianist. On the Rubinstein recording of solo works by Grieg, there was just one longer piece: the Ballade in G minor, written in theme and variations form. I was haunted by the achingly sad theme. The subsequent variations were exciting but baffling. This work of nearly 17 minutes was Grieg’s only attempt at writing an extended solo piano piece, and the music becomes confusingly tumultuous.
What really hooked me on this recording, though, were Rubinstein’s accounts of 11 of Grieg’s short “Lyric Pieces.” Like most aspiring Norwegian composers, Grieg felt compelled to go to Germany to complete his training. Still, he remained Norwegian to his core, someone who loved the music of his country and incorporated freely adapted folk songs into his works.
In the “Lyric Pieces,” the combination of the colorful titles and the wistful music filled me with curiosity about Norway. Why was Grieg’s “Shepherd Boy” so sad? In the “Little Bird,” Grieg depicts no chirping feathered friend but a mysterious forest creature. Even “Spring Dance,”
though hardy and rustic, had thick, heavy chords and strangely
impetuous energy. This recording taught me that music could stir deep,
perplexing emotions in a way that made me want to know more.
The other recording was a Columbia LP of Rudolf Serkin playing three titled piano sonatas by Beethoven: the “Pathétique,” the “Moonlight” and the “Appassionata.” All three pieces were thrilling, and Serkin became my pianist hero.
But the “Pathétique” especially hooked me. I loved that in the grave, slow introduction to the first movement, each phrase began with a steely chord that lingered, then trailed off into a sighing harmonized melodic turn.
Hearing this piece made me want to, even need to, play it. It was somehow already clear that I could never be a Rudolf Serkin. He was a titan. But what he did, I just had to do in my own way.
When I finally heard Serkin perform live, my titan looked like a toothy, bespectacled grandfather. Still, he was charismatic to me. I will never forget the Serkin concerts I heard in my youth, including recitals at Carnegie Hall and solo appearances with the New York Philharmonic, especially a sensational Beethoven “Emperor” Concerto with an exuberant Bernstein conducting.
Before then, though, when I first tried to play the “Pathétique” Sonata, I figured out how to navigate those grave opening chords pretty well, putting all my force into making a crashing fortissimo sound. But the restless Allegro main section was beyond me.
It was not until my sophomore year in high school that I performed the first movement as a musical interlude during a school function. Despite some tangled passagework, my playing, if I remember, was full of tragic intensity. I played the whole sonata on a recital program the next year, along with shorter works by MacDowell, Bartok and Schumann, ending with a sloppy but rhapsodic performance of Chopin’s Second Scherzo.
Later, in graduate school, I played the “Appassionata” quite a bit in concerts, but I dropped the “Pathétique” after high school. Perhaps I had become too emotionally entangled with it.
I was reminded of this formative moment when I interviewed the great soprano Leontyne Price, one of my early idols from the opera world, in public for The New York Times in 2004. I was asking her about growing up in Laurel, Miss., and her early musical experiences. She recalled a life-changing trip as a young girl with her mother by bus to Jackson to see the magnificent American contralto Marian Anderson in recital. The hall was segregated, so Ms. Price and her mother sat in the “colored” section.
This had to have been a confusing experience for the young Ms. Price. I asked her how she processed it. She said that she blocked out everything except Anderson’s glorious singing. “I looked at her,” Ms. Price said, “and told myself, ‘I am going to be her.’ ”
What a eureka moment.
One more thing, something wonderful, about my eureka moment with “Rubinstein Plays Grieg.” In a 1996 article about some Grieg recordings, I mentioned how much that album had meant to me. I received a letter from Paul A. Rubinstein, the pianist’s elder son, who wanted to make a present of his father’s personal copy of that 1955 release. I met him at his office to pick it up, something I could never have imagined when I used to sit alone in the den, listening to that recording as a child.
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