An Empty Field, Littered with Cracked Ivory

I stopped identifying as a pianist years ago. I play only the occasional recital, and with ever-increasing reluctance. It's been a quarter century since I willingly attended a piano recital. Solo piano ranks lower than even opera on my list of sought-after musical genres, and heaven knows I'm no opera fan. However, I'm often quite happy listening to opera, at least in small doses. But I can't say the same for piano music. I listen to a solo-piano recording only if I must, as part of preparation for a lecture or a class. I just don't like the piano all that much.

As I have been casting a few random thoughts futurewards in regards to programming a yet-distant but firmly scheduled faculty recital, one source of my pianistic ennui has become clear. The literature of the piano has gone moribund. Almost nothing written since the 1930s has entered the general repertory. A few sonatas—Samuel Barber and Serge Prokofiev—and that's about it. Those Barber and Prokofiev sonatas have won attention primarily due to their lack of initiative; all are thoroughly tradition-bound affairs, clothing 18th-century forms in 19th-century pianistic figurations. They succeed because they are old, not because they are new.

The piano was a child of the 19th century, nurtured to maturity by the Industrial Revolution. The instrument evolved along with the popularity of touring virtuosos, those Romantic-era barnstormers who pocketed lavish receipts as they wowed royalty and rube alike. At first most of them were composers as well—Hummel and Liszt at the top ranks, Herz and Kalkbrenner a few links down on the food chain. Sergei Rachmaninoff brought the species to an appropriately glorious close. Even in Rachmaninoff's day the field belonged to those who made their boodles by playing somebody else's music. Up in the stratosphere, Alfred Cortot, Josef Hofmann, Artur Schnabel, and Leopold Godowsky were followed by Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein, crowded closely by worthy contenders such as Clifford Curzon and, closer to the present, Van Cliburn, Alfred Brendel, and Glenn Gould. Van Cliburn was the last of the old-time superstars, but the species was by then already well into senesence; his career was short, his repertory small, and his musicianship limited.

Nineteenth century composers used the piano as a springboard for their most advanced ideas. Beethoven's sonatas are amongst his finest and most intimate achievements. Frederic Chopin re-thought the instrument in the light of its spectacular recent advances and established a polyphonically sophisticated yet overall homophonic approach that remains the gold standard for piano writing. Chopinesque pianism underlies vast swathes of subsequent piano literature, from Fauré to Debussy to Barber. Liszt, on the other hand, supercharged the late-classical styles of virtuosi such as Clementi and Hummel. Lisztian pianism powers the rest of the piano literature—it lies behind Tchaikovsky and Ravel and Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. But that's really about it: effective piano writing is either Lisztian or Chopinesque. Nothing much new has been brought to the table, although Debussy refined and elevated all things Chopinesque, while Bartók and his ilk took a sledgehammer to the Liszt style and reduced it to dusty rubble.

As it became clear that career-seeking pianists preferred the originals to latter-day knockoffs, composers had little if any impetus to write piano music for anything other than purely functional purposes. The piano ceased to be a vehicle for a composer's artistic growth. Composers ceased playing the piano in any meaningful way. Those few who were accomplished pianists—Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein—wrote within established idioms and made no original contributions to the instrument's technique. Perhaps no further growth was possible; the physical development of the piano had peaked by the 1890s and there was nowhere else to go. There's still nowhere to go. The piano's evolution is long over. Digital keyboards are convenient and inexpensive, but they are only wan copies of the original.

The piano's growth having flatlined well over a century ago, it's hardly surprising that the literature went moribund as well. None of the freakshow stuff—John Cage's prepared pianos or George Crumb's cheesy sound effects—has caught on with performers or audiences, a good thing since such shenanigans are often physically harmful to the instrument. A pianist determined to make a career as a performer will steer resolutely clear of most 20th century piano literature, recognizing it as a career-stopping sinkhole, a parched field littered with justly neglected repertory that is not only ineffective but frequently imposes appalling and unreasonable technical demands. There's just no point in bothering with it.

As a result, the piano world has lost all sense of music-making at anything but the most superficial level. The recent influx of piano hopefuls from Asia bears witness to a cultural phenomenon in which pianists are treated almost like rock stars—but only for playing safely established literature in safely established ways. Your basic media-star young pianist of today strays only about as far as the occasional Prokofiev concerto and the usual batch of faux-Liszt Ravel showpieces. The core repertory remains the same for them as it was for Hans von Bülow and Anton Rubinstein and Moritz Rosenthal and Leopold Godowsky and Josef Hofmann and Vladimir Horowitz: Chopin by the mile, plenty of Liszt, concertos by Beethoven and Liszt and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Basic technical competence is high. Pianists are getting better and better at playing less and less.

That moribund stasis is felt in the conservatories as well. Pianists are the least inquisitive, the least adventuresome, and the least musically broad-minded of the instrumentalists. Their musical horizons are restricted, their musical culture rudimentary, their curiosity stunted. Often straight-A students who perform admirably well in solfège and book theory, they cause no trouble and leave few traces as they pass gracefully through the program. But that's about it. The heady exuberance one finds amongst the classical guitarists, with their manifold passions for new music, Baroque music, composition, and popular music of all stripes, is altogether absent amongst pianists. Pianists are all about playing those basic concertos, those basic showpieces, those basic Chopin nocturnes, those basic Beethoven sonatas, all in the same basic way. To hear so much as a single nuanced phrase from them is becoming an occasion for remark; mostly, it's just hard-driving fingers, appalling levels of bodily tension, and a rigid adherence to every directive spoonfed into them by their teachers. Those few blessed with musical imagination soon drift away and focus instead on chamber music and accompanying, rightfully seeking association with like-minded artists rather than suffocating in the airlessness that is modern-day piano.

I suppose every dog has its day. The piano's day has long passed. It is no longer a vital player in the great scheme of things musical. The action lies elsewhere—in the orchestra, in the theater, in the small ensemble, perhaps in those loose and experimental collaborations that blossom and fade everywhere. The piano's era was only about sixty years—from Chopin and Liszt through Debussy. As of the early 21st century, nothing of remark has emerged in piano literature for at least that long, if not longer. Piano literature has been a one-act play with only a few speaking parts. Nor is there likely to be a second act. Pianos aren't de rigueur home furnishings nowadays; piano lessons are no longer considered indispensable accoutrements to upward mobility; composers aren't writing effective music for legions of enthusiastic amateurs.

Many of today's pianists probably think that everything is just hunky-dory, A-OK, and copacetic. DGG continues to sign photogenic young artists to contracts, the concert halls fill for the superstar names, the New York Times remains good as always for a fawning feature story or two. But it isn't okay. Pianists may march along proudly, heads held high as they bear what they think is a grand and noble tradition. But actually they're pallbearers, and what they bear isn't majestic royalty. It's a corpse.

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