Rudolf Serkin, A Life (review)

The first piano recital that I ever attended was given by Rudolf Serkin at Hunter College in New York City in the 1960s. It was the first time that I heard the Brahms "Handel" Variations and even more impressive, the Beethoven "Appassionata" at the end of which Serkin seemed to emerge victorious from the music's furious struggle. It is the visual aspect of that recital that remains the strongest in my memory—Serkin's hard-won smile, the intelligence and energy of his face and bearing. In the 1970s, I heard him more often than any other pianist at New York's Carnegie Hall. In the audience were serious music lovers, many of them German-speaking refugees with strong ideas about how each piece should be played. For them, Serkin seemed to be invested with authority; he programmed only "important" music, his interpretations (by virtue of his seriousness) warranted their approval. For these audiences —lovers of Beethoven and Schubert, devotees of Arturo Toscanini and the Budapest String Quartet—Serkin was the most important pianist of his time.

Added to the importance of Serkin's long performing career was his significant role as teacher; as director of America's most elite conservatory, the Curtis Institute of Music; as a founder and long-time director of one of the first and most influential chamber music festivals, the Marlboro Music School & Festival; and as father of the pianist Peter Serkin. A chronicle of his life and career would also document significant developments in the history of classical music performance in the United States, and this story needed to be written. In Stephen Lehmann and Marion Faber's thoroughly researched and artfully assembled Rudolf Serkin, A Life,Serkin now joins other important pianists such as Claudio Arrau and Sviatoslav Richter whose lives spanned most of the twentieth century and who are the subjects of commemorative books. The authors, neither of whom knew Serkin, gracefully combine biography with oral history. Much of the book is given over to sections entitled "Voices" that transcribe the words of notable Serkin associates, among them the pianists Richard Goode, Claude Frank, and Eugene Istomin. The result is a satisfyingly full portrait of Serkin and the importance of his influence on American musical life.

The legacy of a performer's art, helped by having students who become teachers and performers, can be kept alive to some extent by books but much more so by recordings. While teaching a course in the early 1990s on "Great Pianists of the 20^th Century," I found that most of Serkin's recordings—unlike those of his contemporaries Artur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, and Richter—failed to capture what I remembered as his greatness as a performer. (His "Diabelli" Variations by Beethoven, with the sound of crickets chirping in some of the last variations, is a glorious exception.) Interviewed in Rudolf Serkin, A Life, the pianist Richard Goode comments that Columbia didn't "seriously work out the problem of recording him: he was a very powerful pianist and from too close a vantage point the percussive aspect becomes too obvious" (p. 158).

Eugene Istomin, noting that Serkin could "never be superficial" (p. 200), speaks eloquently about why his recordings (unlike those of Alfred Cortot, Rubinstein, Arthur Schnabel, or Sergey Rachmaninoff, all great pianists who "exploit the innate qualities of the instrument but do not go beyond them" [p. 200]) do not give a full sense of Serkin's playing:

Mystical would be a word I'd use in the sense of possessed, the quality of possession. This curious quality, a certain peasant quality that he had, a certain purposeful awkwardness that he had adopted, mixed with the total sense of mission. And at moments of his best, most beautiful playing, it was that quality that the saints also had—willingness to "burn at the stake," that quality of complete ecstacy and...