THE CURZON COLLECTION

Transcription

1 THE CURZON COLLECTION O. W. NEIGHBOUR THROUGH the generosity of Dr Peter Curzon and Mr Fritz Curzon the British Library has recently acquired an extensive collection of annotated scores, notebooks, and other papers ofthe late Sir Clifford Curzon.^ The working scores amount to some 300 items. Nearly all are printed editions, but there are a few manuscripts as well, including autographs of William Alwyn and Sir Lennox Berkeley. Seventy-eight composers are represented, the standard ones naturally very liberally, many others by only one or two pieces. There are works with orchestra in either full score or two-piano reduction (and sometimes in both), great quantities of solo pieces, and a substantial amount of chamber music. Although this is not Curzon's complete library it includes everything that could be found with his markings and thus nearly everything that he played in public or worked on. Every musician needs working texts, but there can be few who have attached so much importance to them as Curzon. For him they became the record of a lifetime of musical thought and endeavour. The copies of the works he performed most frequently are covered with many layers of markings which in extreme cases can scarcely be disentangled, despite his frequent use of more than one colour. Works with orchestra contain complete lists, numbered and dated, of all performances given, with details ofthe orchestra and conductor; chamber works are similarly documented with the names of tbe other players. The most used copies are extremely fragile, with corners worn right away through rapid turning. Whatever the obscurities of certain heavily marked scores, the collection as a whole sheds a great deal of light on the development of Curzon's ideas and the discipline tbat went into his meticulous but wonderfully poetic playing. He first appears as a rather selfconscious teenager at the Royal Academy of Music, to which he had been admitted at the age of twelve in 'Aged 16, Oct. 8th 1923' he notes on the Op. 2 Piano Sonata of Alan Bush, who had left the Academy the previous year, and again 'aged 16 & 9 months' on some Blumenfeld preludes. In the early days the music is only lightly marked, with fingering and extra dynamics, but a striking feature is his occasional addition of literary quotations to reinforce the mood of the music. Keats and Shelley find their way into Chopin, Goethe (in translation) into Schubert's 'Wanderer' Fantasy, William Morris into Arthur Hinton (the husband of Katharine Goodson, one of Curzon's teachers), unattributed effusions into Bax's first two sonatas, Tagore into Germaine Tailleferre's 60

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3 Ballade for piano and orchestra, which Curzon introduced to London at a Prom in To this period belong a few manuscript songs and piano pieces of his own composition. After a spell as professor at the Academy Curzon went to study with Artur Schnabel in Berlin from 1928 to 1930, and then with Wanda Landowska and Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Special notebooks record his early sessions with Schnabel and Landowska, with both of whom he continued to take occasional lessons until they died. To quote his own words in an interview given over forty years later,^ Schnabel 'revealed musical horizons far beyond what I could possibly have imagined without him', and 'widened and deepened my whole approach to music and to piano playing for the rest of my life'. Schnabel's analytical tum of mind operated at every level, from minute questions of stress, scansion, and the tonal balance within a chord or between parts, to larger questions of structure, though always in the interests of realizing his 'insight into what lies behind and between the written notes'. The extent to which Curzon, by nature a perfectionist, absorbed and built upon this pattern of thought is very fully documented in his working copies. Even the purely technical matter of fingering is supplemented by comments on hand action and arm weight. Innumerable individual notes within the keyboard texture are encircled, some merely to give warning of octave sonorities requiring special care, others to stress their importance for the harmonic or contrapuntal direction of the passage. Indeed, his chief care lies in the structural goals ofthe music, local or more distant. Underlying harmonic progressions and tonal schemes are spelt out and salient rhythmic features emphasized, and he regularly adopts Schnabel's procedure in his edition of Beethoven's sonatas of subdividing the music into short constituent phrases or paragraphs and numbering the bars within them in order to maintain a clear sense of the short-term musical progress. There are constant reminders to 'think' and 'hear' corresponding phrases or passages elsewhere in a movement while playing; this is the main means by which the broader structure is kept in view. Curzon's concern for the music itself rather than his own virtuoso role is well illustrated by warnings in chamber and orchestral works to play down where a risk might arise of covering an important entry in some other instrumental part. In all this listeners familiar with his playing will recognize his hand. As late as 1981, when he learned and gave a single performance of Elgar's Piano Quintet, he prepared the score with the same care and made a list of background reading about the composer, who was new to his repertory. The scores are by definition powerless to document what lies behind the musical notes: that can only emerge in performance. But there are pointers. When Curzon gave the first performance of Ireland's set of piano pieces Sarnia in 1941, the composer sent him an extremely revealing account ofthe ideas and landscapes that he felt he had captured in it. Although he knew that the detail of such concepts could find no place in the music, for him the spirit was something extraordinarily precise that he expected the interpreter to communicate to the listener. In a general sense Curzon's early attempts to find poetry to match the music he was playing reflect a similar attitude. Schnabel, though of Ireland's generation, shows a more modern sensibility: the meaning of music was no less precise for him, but far less close to anything specific. The adult Curzon shared his view. He does not 62

4 try to set down what only music can say, let alone anything extraneous to it, but confines himself to modest, though often remarkably suggestive jottings against particular passages: 'important answer', 'stealthily', 'menacing', 'conversational' (all in Mozart); 'hysterical modulations' (in the first movement development of Schubert's D major sonata); 'gradually calling up the orchestra' (in the approach to the first movement coda in Brahms's D minor concerto). The collection contains one or two programme notes in draft, and various unsigned ones extracted from Curzon's concert programmes which are probably also by him. These are often hard to date, but they seem to show the same movement away from the over-explicit. Though a turning-point in his career, Curzon's encounter with Schnabel in no way alienated him from his artistic roots, as his papers demonstrate in a number of ways. Some ofthe editions ofthe standard repertory which he acquired as a student give very poor texts, yet once he had begun using a particular copy he preferred to keep to it as a complete record of the evolution of his view of the music. In later years he would sometimes annotate it with readings from the kind of critical edition he was by then using when learning a new piece, but would rarely replace it. From the time of his lessons with Schnabel he never ceased to invite comments about his playing from other musicians, including various friends of much longer standing. For the most part he simply noted such comments down with page or bar references on odd sheets or scraps of paper. Good intentions to transcribe them into notebooks devoted to individual composers soon flagged (other notebooks, containing aphorisms about life and music, Hsts of books, and comparisons of recordings tended to suffer a similar fate). Each sheet of notes is carefully headed with an indication of their originator, usually in the form of initials, and the date. Naturally Schnabel bulks large; sometimes his comments also contribute a layer of markings in the scores themselves; those about a number of works were obtained from another Schnabel pupil, William Glock. Norman Franklin, a nearcontemporary of Curzon's at the Academy, appears up to the fifties, as does Katharine Goodson, whose judgement he always particularly valued (there are notes of hers on individual pieces dating from his first lessons with her). Nadia Boulanger is present during the 1930s; on one occasion in 1934 he played to Alfred Cortot. In the post-war period Nina Milkina and Hans Gal appear frequently, and there is correspondence with Paul Badura- Skoda. Among many who crop up only once or twice, Myra Hess and Edward Sackville- West may be mentioned. Further notes derive from rehearsals with conductors: Barbirolh, Walter, Krips, Knappertsbusch, Menges, Szell, Barenboim. Most important of all is Curzon's wife, the harpsichordist Lucille Wallace, who almost invariably appears in her professional guise as 'L.W.' (fig. 2). She studied with Landowska and Boulanger in the twenties, and also had lessons with Schnabel, so that by the time of their marriage in 1931 their natural musical affinity was reinforced by their shared experience of formative tuition. She clearly had very deep understanding of his artistic ideals, which she may indeed have helped to shape. Whereas other musicians were naturally called on only as occasion offered and usually heard him play large scale works, she kept him company in his study not only of these, but of everything he played, down to the smallest pieces. 63

5 Fig. 2. Clifford Curzon with Lucille Wallace Curzon, Photograph by John Vickers. Reproduced by courtesy of Mr Fritz Curzon

6 special interest attaches to Curzon's association with Britten, which was particularly close in the years following Britten's return from the United States in 1942, and continued through performances at successive Aldeburgh festivals. Britten commented on his performances both as listener and conductor, and they collaborated in Mozart's concerto and sonata for two pianos and Britten's own two-piano works. Curzon played nearly all Britten's piano music, and among the notes about it are some for the Holiday Diary by the composer himself. The title-page of the Introduction and Rondo alia burlesca bears a grateful inscription from the composer, who also brought him from Paris in March 1945 some Faure pieces which had been unobtainable in England during the war. The two of them played two Debussy works for piano duet at Aldeburgh in June 1946, and the copies contain Britten's markings in the bass parts; Curzon gave a repeat performance at Fontainebleau in July with Boulanger. The National Sound Archive has, among a number of non-commercial Curzon recordings, two of works that he never recorded commercially: Mozart's two-piano sonata, in which he is partnered by Britten, and Haydn's F minor variations. In the latter part of his career Curzon restricted his performances very largely to the Viennese classics. This may seem to emphasize his connection with Schnabel, but in fact his repertory differed considerably from his master's. He found the preparation of a new work a slow and painstaking process and played only a limited number of works even among those most sympathetic to him, so that he never undertook, for instance, a complete cycle of Beethoven sonatas as Schnabel did. Through his middle years he maintained the more catholic tastes that he had developed at the Academy, playing popular late romantic works and contemporary music, mostly by English composers. Since he does not usually list performances of solo music, and there is little chamber music later than Brahms and the piano quintets of Schumann, Franck, and Dvorak, the pattern emerges most clearly in the works with orchestra. His interest in English music belongs largely to the thirties and forties. He played the Delius concerto (19 performances in all) only once later, and the Ireland concerto (22 performances) not at all. Rawsthorne's Second Concerto (19) is an exception, since it was specially written for him in 1951 and he played it till Solo music, which included Berkeley's sonata, composed for him in 1945, seems to have taken a similar course. Ofthe romantic repertory Rakhmaninov's Second Concerto (23) got left behind at much the same time, together with Liszt's arrangement of Schubert's 'Wanderer' Fantasy (27) and Franck's Symphonic Variations (19 Boulanger wrote a charming letter about his recording of this work). Chaikovsky's First Concerto (85), the Grieg concerto (50), and Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain (27) survived for another decade to about i960. Against this general trend Curzon rather surprisingly took up Liszt's Second Concerto in 1963, perhaps in response to the post-war cultivation of the composer, and played it twenty-five times before dropping it again about ten years later. Thereafter, apart from the occasional revival, he concentrated on long-standing favourites which reached correspondingly high scores: Mozart's concertos K 488 in A (143 performances), K 491 in C minor (129) and K 595 in B flat (174); Beethoven's No. 4 (169) and 5 (203); Brahms's 65

7 No. I (103) and 2 (124). Two other Mozart concertos accompanied him into his last decade, K 466 in D minor (19) and K 537 in D (44), whilst K 467 in C, which he embarked on as late as 1974, nevertheless reached twenty-nine performances. Curzon's increasing preference for music ofthe classical period or at least of a classical persuasion was very much in tune with an important strand in the thought and sensibility of the time. During the thirty years or so following the First World War, leading continental composers turned away from anything that seemed to them too broad or imprecise in favour of greater concentration, exactitude, and intellectual control. Curzon seldom played their music and may not have felt much drawn to it, but the qualities that informed his playing and gradually winnowed out his later repertory were the very ones that they most valued in their own sphere. As with most artists of real stature there was a representative aspect to his individuality. Thus the extraordinary interest of his written legacy lies not only in the insight it gives into his ideals and the working methods by which he realized them, but in the responses to his playing from the wide range of musicians with whom in one respect or another he felt some affinity. Evidence of this kind about an interpretative artist is highly unusual; it clearly demands the same caution from its own interpreter as a composer's sketches, but offers returns of a comparable nature. The British Library is fortunate to have acquired such a remarkable archive. I The collection, at present in course of arrange- 2 'Artur Schnabel, Pianist and Teacher. Clifford ment in the Department of Manuscripts, will Curzon talks to Alan Blyth', The Listener, xci become available after necessary conservation (25 Apr, 1974), pp work. 66

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