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Con Brio: Karl Ulbrich Schnabel, Master Teacher of Piano

by Mary Lou Chayes and Beverly Jones
The Cinema Guild, New York, 2002
VHS, 57 minutes, color
Sales, $295.00
ISBN: 0-7815-1009-0.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Karl Ulrich Schnabel (1909-2001) is the son of the famous piano virtuoso Arthur Schnabel. He began playing at the age of five and made his debut in 1926. In the following decades, he pursued a brilliant solo career as well as reviving the piano duo tradition, first performing with his father, then his wife Helen Fogel and later with Joan Rowland. He was the teacher of Leon Fleisher, Peter Serkin, and Richard Goode, among many others.

This video includes biographical material about the Schnabel family, comments by Schnabel's former students and clips from teaching sessions with as yet unknown pupils. It shows how Schnabel adheres to a late romantic aesthetic and a view of the virtuoso as a spiritual as well as a technical master. In his view, music should carry a message, at least from the heart but possibly also from above. It should inspire, enlighten and transcend. On the other hand, Schnabel was a firm advocate of the use of the original score of a piece, comparing and studying several editions to come as close to the original as possible if the manuscript is no longer available. He also developed new——classical——techniques for using both the keys and the pedal, thereby extending the tone and the timbre of the instrument.

Schnabel was an icon of a tradition that seems a bit outdated in the twenty-first century. He trained his pupils to become the kind of musician who believes an extreme individualism and an astounding technique are the core of their business——performers of the great concertos of Mozart, Beethoven, and Rachmaninov in the piano competition circuses of the Old World. And he certainly was good at it. The video itself is a valuable document, even if it is a bit lengthy, sometimes making your fingers itch for the fast forward button. The tone is definitely uncritical and apologetic. Schnabel's portrait isn't painted against the backdrop of a musicological and historical context, which makes it at times embarrassing to watch. I am quite certain a more nuanced story would have made the master more human and would have done even more credit to the quality of his music and teaching.

 

 




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