STAGE AND SCREEN
LAST week Egon Petri gave a recital at the Wigmore Hall, which was nearly, if not quite, sold out. It seems that the musical public has at last come to recognise in Petri an artist 11.)f exceptional character. The qualities that distinguish his performances are not merely technical, though his technique is even in these days extraordinary. Nor are they objective in the sense that he places his remarkable powers at the service of the composer so as to become his faithful mouthpiece. Least of all is he analytical, like Artur Schnabel or, to take an extreme instance, Sir Donald Tovey, who likes to expose to our view the internal machinery of composition and in the process is apt to forget that a sonata is a work of art with an emotional content and not a geometrical proposition. Petri's approach to music is subjective, and his greatness lies in the creative imagination he brings to his performances and in an enormous gusto which seems to say that playing the pianoforte is the thing he enjoys more than anything else in life.
This creative power over other men's music has, of course, its disadvantages. It is useless to look to Petri for an orthodox interpretation of much of the music he plays. By this I mean that I would not set up his performance of Chopin's Twenty- four_ rreludes as a model and a pattern sub specie aeternitatis of the way they should be played. But a performance of music is precisely not a thing fixed and eternal. Once finished, it is over and done with, and someone else next day may give us an entirely different view of the same work and rouse in us an equal sense of pleasure. The value of a performance resides in its revelation of beauty in the music, in our enlightenment to unsuspected aspects of it as well as in reviving memory of past experience. One danger in this attitude is, of course, the imposition upon the music of an interpretation that goes contrary to its spirit and musical style. But this fortunately need not be considered, since, were Petri liable to it, he would not be the subject of this article.
At this recital he played, besides the Preludes of Chopin, some Brahms, Schumann's Fantasia in C major and Beethoven's Variations in E flat on a theme from Prometheus. Of the Fantasia I will only say that it was a pleasure to hear it played by a pianist who was in complete control of the music and not, as most are, by one giving an imitation of a cockle-shell boat wallowing helpless in a stormy sea.
Beethoven's Variations are at once a meditation upon a theme previously used in the Prometheus music and a study for the finale of the Eroica Symphony. They are improvisatory in character and this character was fully realised by the pianist who seemed to be making them up as he went. And very remarkable they are. In them we come closer to the essential mind of Beethoven than in many of his more finished and formal compositions, including the symphonic finale which was their outcome. These Variations defy classification under a " period " ; they contain every kind of style in which Beethoven wrote, from the earliest to the latest, and stretch at times far into the future of harmonic development. Not all of them are first-rate music. They are sometimes crude, sometimes orchestral rather than pianistic, for instance in the peroration. But, though at first one felt that this was a work for study rather than for the concert-platform, it became in this perform- any wholly absorbing.
To take a detail, in the thirteenth Variation there are dis- sonances, not one or two but a whole series running through the piece, that are an astonishing breach with orthodox harmony. Even now they sound strange and, if I may use the expression, " out of drawing." I happened that afternoon to have been looking at El Greco's " Virgin and Child with St. Anne," in which the left hand of St. Anne is, by all anatomical principles, hopelessly ill-drawn, and yet produces with its curiously twisted wrist and contorted fingers an emotional effect of great and passionate beauty. It is as nearly a parallel as one could find for the sense of beauty created in this Variation by an imagina- tive breach of rules. Well might Beethoven write to his pub- lishers to claim that these Variations " differ at least from others " and include them among his " greater musical works."
PYNELEY HUSSEY.
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