Harold Bauer’s Music

Margaret C. Anderson

The most interesting art in the modern world, to me, is Harold Bauer’s playing of the piano. And one of the strangest phenomenon in the modern world is the fact that people go to hear him and talk about what he does in terms of what other pianists do.

Now there is no connection between Bauer’s playing and that of any other pianist who has so far come to light. The whole root and fibre of it is different. As I have tried to say before, he has more concern with sound than any other pianist. He loves the piano more. He believes quite different things about its potentialities. But you needn’t know what he believes to know that he is doing something different. You can hear that, surely.

But still they babble: he does this as well as Hofmann, and this less well than Paderewski, and this better than so-and-so. Why do they keep on talking of what he does or doesn’t do?—as though it were a matter of technique, this colossal art of conception? How I love to think of all the famous pianists who have gone to the piano to reveal themselves, and then of Harold Bauer who has brought the piano to himself, to reveal it. It’s something like the difference between the artist and the average man: when any one talks to you of how the struggles and agonies of the artist mould his art you can show him that it’s just the other way around: the artist in him is what moulds his struggles and his agonies. And it’s something of this kind that must be said about Bauer’s difference of approach.

As for the things he does, most of them are the things that any good musician does: he makes his conception run just ahead of his execution, like a switchman who regulates trains from a high tower; he makes tone contrasts that—what do the critics usually say? Of course he does many things better than most good musicians: he throws out handsful of color that most of them would give their souls to achieve; he makes the piano sing more deeply than any one else has done; he strikes chords that no piano except his Mason and Hamlin has ever given forth; he never hurts the sounds, and he never applies music to the instrument instead of drawing music out of it, as even the best pianists have a way of doing. There is less diffusion of sound in his performances; you have a feeling that it is the most closely-thought music you have ever heard. He edits the composition until it is flawlessly adjusted to the piano’s best values. All these are essentials of his playing; but they are not the “difference” of which I wish to write.

Harold Bauer uses the piano as if it were an instrument endowed with an intrinsic “significant form.” I once heard Fritz Kreisler play some accompaniments, and I shall never forget how he showed his feeling that the piano has a mysterious life of its own with which he did not mean to interfere. It was as though he simply touched the springs which set that life in motion. Not being a creator on the piano he did not try to do more than that. Bauer believes the same thing; but on top of that theory he builds up the edifice of his own “significant form.” With most pianists you have a feeling that what they want to say is interspersed with what the piano is saying on its own account, and the result is a muddle. What Bauer has to say is placed carefully on top of that life growing just beneath, and the result is the most consciously-intelligent art I have ever come in contact with.

This is making the piano not what paint is to the painter, but what color is to him. There’s a great difference. Even Hofmann can use the keys as if they were paint—colors to be mixed into color; but to touch them as if they were color—something already complete and living—is to do a significant thing.

And so in the case of Bauer you are made to realize that the piano is the thing, even more than the music that is to be played on it—far more than the stunts that can be done with it. I believe he says something to this effect: that the piano is the only instrument for which no technique is demanded; and “How, if I were to practice all day, could I possibly play at night?” I know that he has no use for the agonizing drill of even the greatest teachers of the piano. You can imagine him asking “Is there any longer any meaning in that? Does the sound of it interest you?” You can get any effect you want, on the piano, if you can think clearly what effect you want. You needn’t practise six months to achieve a chord in which the middle note sings louder than the other two: strike it the fraction of a second before the other two and the sound will be what you are listening for.

In January I heard his Modern Program in Chicago, and it was the most beautiful performance on the piano I ever dreamed of hearing. The other day in Aeolian Hall he and Casals gave a joint recital, in which Bauer played the Schumann Papillons as his solo. In almost every measure of it you could hear effects attained by the kind of thinking I have described—marvelous values that can be offered only by one who can conceive greatly. But I heard musicians in the audience saying that they couldn’t discover any new thing in this music. Casals is very close to the soul of music, of course; but sometimes his mastery of the instrument is unrelated to its best beauty. His playing seems not to be built solidly on the beauty of sound; while with Bauer the emphasis is always on sound—which means merely this: that an interesting and compact phrasing made out of thin or harsh sound is as worthless as beautiful tunes played on a worn-out piano.

How I love these concerts of his in which you need never think of the magic of finger-tips—“the hand the perfect instrument”, etc., etc., because of long patient years of diabolical muscular exercise. Once I believe I said that Harold Bauer was not a genius. It must have been in that period when I thought that the genius carries around with him always the look of being submerged in great emotions. I know now that he is probably the genius of our world—the man who has made something entirely of his own, and something that will live not only as a tradition of great piano-playing but as a great invention of new sound.