Ignaz Friedman: Romantic Master Pianist

10 Chopin on the Nile

217 10 Chopin on the Nile Friedman’s life tragically ended shortly before his sixty-sixth birthday, yet his recordings defy the limits of time and age. On which artists did Friedman ’s musical energy, teaching, ideas, and personal intervention leave their strongest influence? A teenager living in Sydney was brought to Friedman by his mother: My chief interest was not actually in playing the piano but in orchestral playing and conducting. However, I realized the great privilege that I had been given in having one-to-one interviews with the great man. He in turn, realizing my interest in matters orchestral, constantly spoke in orchestral terms about the piano pieces we were studying, rather as if we were thinking in terms of orchestration while playing some well-known Chopin Waltz or Nocturne, or more especially, Friedman’s beloved 48 Pre­ ludes and Fugues. I do not think he listened very hard to my playing. What he did was to play quite loud himself, with his incomparable rubato in Chopin, and talk constantly about how he thought the music should be interpreted. I look back on my lessons with him with some nostalgia, because, after all, it was the first time in my life that I had ever had personal contact with such a great and famous musician. His experience with one master led him to pursue a deepening interest in Czech music by studying with another—Vaclav Talich, a conductor linked to Dvořák and Janáček. Sir Charles Mackerras thus developed the depth and expanse of his artistry.1 In Dicsöszentmárton, Transylvania, a young boy became fascinated with the gramophone and a recording of two Chopin etudes and a valse played by Friedman. “It impressed me a great deal. I went to practice at 217 218 · Ignaz Friedman my aunt’s, who owned a piano. I sat down and, each time, became a great virtuoso.” He began to compose and later wrote his own etudes, which incorporated the concept of “Extreme Virtuosity,” a compositional technique that owed its inception to the tremendous speed of the performances on Friedman’s recording, which had struck the fifteen-year-old György Ligeti as almost insanely fast.2 These two instances, of a great conductor and a great composer each finding his path through Friedman’s example, give the idea that his recordings contain more than mere piano music. Did Friedman produce a true heir who had absorbed the substance of his teaching, thus building on Leschetizky’s base? Friedman began preparing pupils assigned to him by Leschetizky, and went on to teach at summer master classes in Lemberg (Lviv) before World War I and in Denmark during it. Later he advised those few who trekked to Siusi, and finally Australian talents. Many pianists benefited from his counsel, but only one had the substance and ability to grasp what he offered and then take it further. At our first meeting in 1981, Lydia asked, “Do you know Tiegerman? He was a pupil of Papá’s—a Polish Jew who lived in Cairo. Papá said he was the greatest talent he ever worked with.” Decades of research affirmed that Papá never again accorded such praise. There are no commercial recordings of Ignace Tiegerman, and his name is absent from biographies and reference works. A few concert reviews in German music journals from 1908 until the late 1920s described him as a “young-blooded Pole, a student of Friedman’s” whose technical perfection was coupled with a certain “emotional violence.” Walter Niemann , a noted Leipzig critic who idolized Friedman, cited Tiegerman’s “deep personality, passion and imagination.” Reviewing a 1913 recital, Niemann spoke of the young artist as “the pianistic hope of the recent generation, perhaps the most shining.”3 If Friedman and the critics were correct, an undocumented master musician had vanished. What had happened to him? The first clue appeared in a most unlikely place: a 1987 article in the now defunct magazine House and Garden. Describing his lavish upbringing and youth in Cairo, author Edward Said said that Tiegerman had been his piano teacher. In an interview with me, Said called his later studies—with five eminent pedagogues at the Juilliard School and in Boston—insignificant: “All rolled into one didn’t equal Tiegerman’s pinkie.” Said wrote: Chopin on the Nile · 219 Although [Tiegerman] kept his Polish passport, he was subject to Egyp­ tian residency...