Quote-Unquote: Leon Fleisher

By CONRAD S. SUSA

“Growing as a pianist gets more difficult every day,” confided Leon Fleisher. “I am working harder than ever, but I can feel that it takes more and more work.” Considering that Mr. Fleisher is one of the top pianists of his generation, or as someone phrased it, “the elder statesman of the younger generation,” I was intrigued by this idea and asked him to continue.

“It all started with Artur Schnabel. I had good teachers in San Francisco, but my family felt I should study with a real master. The chance came when a friend of the family pushed me to a piano while Schnabel was dining at her home and I started to play before he could escape. He was impressed with me (I was only 10 at the time) and surprised us all by asking me if I would work with him. In 1938 I went to his summer home at Lake Como for intensive study. Several of us were studying with him and we often attended each other’s lessons. Schnabel had a different approach—he taught the music, not the pupil. We would play for him on a magnificent Steinway and then he would demonstrate improvements from a little upright. The difference in sound was astonishing: his piano sounded better than ours. He had so much to say about each piece that I soon covered my scores with notations as, ‘like liquid gold,’ or ‘a string of pearls.’ Often I left the lessons reeling from the amount of information he had poured out.

“We played all kinds of music, Chopin as well as Beethoven and Schubert. Schnabel was not widely known for his Chopin playing, but it was beautiful. He was more interested in music that was better than it could be played; that is why he concentrated on a few late Beethoven works in his later years.

“While I was studying with Schnabel I was also concertizing and learning there, too. I found out how audiences spend the first few minutes looking you over instead of listening to the music. I can control that now by sheer concentration. Isn’t communication only a matter of concentration?

“After nearly 10 years of study, I developed a passive attitude, and Schnabel knew it. He sensed that I was waiting for his pronouncements, and stunned me by suggesting that I discontinue study with him. This, plus the usual teenage problems, threw me into a slump and I found myself unable to practice for about four years. My concerts began dropping off, understandably—I was playing badly.

“William Kapell and Eugene Istomin were largely responsible for getting me working again. Kapell talked me into entering the Queen of Belgium competition in Brussels. And for six months I practiced as never before. I didn’t know what hard work was until after I won the competition in 1952, because I had to acquire the background to sustain the career that such an important award imposed. During this time I began to remember many of the things Schnabel had said about various pieces. It seems that, quite unknown to myself, I had suppressed much of the information or it had gotten buried during my period of personal troubles in Paris. Now these hints were coming back to me with new meaning.

“But things took an unexpected turn. One day, as I was listening to a recording of his and thinking ‘isn’t that beautiful,’ I felt the blood drain from my face, for suddenly I realized that that wasn’t how I would play it. For one so slavishly attached to Schnabel’s every word, this was quite a jolt. For the first time I could find good in the playing of other pianists, such as Rachmaninoff and Horowitz. During the Schnabel days, I had considered them misguided. It seems as if everything happened at once; I found new energy and motive. Naturally, I like to think my playing improved.