So I guess it would be interesting to talk about Richter's Appassionata. Captured on radio in whatever city, it is just about the least underrated performance in history, and yet it's still underrated. It is one of the key recorded documents of the 20th century, history bottled into a single performance.
A lot of people in our time say that the point of art is to resist oppression. The idea that artists particularly have any power to resist the forces of history is absurd, and the grandiosity inherent in that sentiment can get a lot of people killed. Nevertheless, one of the key points of art is at least related to it: a key use of art is not to resist oppression, but to document it, to express it. The artist doesn't just speak for themself, the artist speaks for the silenced.
The systemic shock to classical music listeners hearing Richter for the first time cannot be overestimated. When Richter came to Carnegie Hall, the idea that 'romantic piano' was anything more than a diversionary entertainment was practically gone. Around 1960, if people wanted to hear 'serious musicmaking' there was the austerity of Serkin and profundity of Arrau, but people listened to Rubinstein to be delighted, and listened to Horowitz to break the strings. Rubinstein could be serious, but he leavened his seriousness with huge helpings of diversionary entertainment that was, admittedly, delightful. Horowitz was an entertainer who, like a lot of entertainment, could express very serious hurts and sentiments beneath the surface, but deliberately couched his substance behind so many effects that his pain was almost impossible to hear behind the Ford Thunderbird roars and whirs.
There were serious musicians regularly operating on the North American concert circuit - Firkusny, Casadesus, Cherkassky, Bachauer, Anda... But behind them was a battery of what we now call 'finger jocks', Perfumed Chopinists, Liszt-bros, and Rach-divers who, by and large, were not filling their calendars with particularly serious music (and I'm sorry, but with exceptions, not even Chopin is particularly serious... You can file complaints with HR...). As estimable as were the techniques and sophistication of Bolet and Cziffra and Weissenberg etc., they were not doing particularly serious work. Then there's the issue of Michelangeli, a Mussolini collaborator whose aesthetic I just find repugnantly cold... maybe the problem is me, but maybe the problem is his repulsive aesthetic...
Around the world, there were more exceptions than ever to that rule, plenty of serious artists operating everywhere but America, all the time. But most of them seemed not to be on the regular American circuit. And behind them was a younger generation of 'great white hopes of the piano.' Immaculately coiffed American virtuosos who seemed impeccably trained, but did not live up to their potential because perfection is too high a standard - just about all of them ended in injury or burnout, or much worse.... The biggest fault in them was their teachers - precisely that training which demanded too much of them - music is about truth, not perfection. What was demanded of Fleisher and Cliburn etc. was like asking Icarus to fly too close to the sun.
And then came Gilels, and then came Richter, and from 1960, music in America was never the same. It was a systemic shock, because classical music in America depends on a culture of affluence and bourgeois complacency. Yet here was musicmaking that was anything but complacent. Everything about it was disturbing. It was a reminder that in many parts of the world, classical music was not a signifier of class and striving, but a basic necessity to express pain that could never be risked in words.
I don't know if Beethoven's Appassionata is his greatest sonata, I don't even know if it's in the top 5... But certain minor-key works of Beethoven are 150 years ahead of their time. Late Beethoven, which to me is the entire world, is about 100 years ahead - they're Mahler with 1/100th the instruments, they embrace the entire gamut of what it means to live in the world and the universe. But the three big name sonatas, slightly overvalued and deeply misunderstood though they may be, are really works of the 20th century in full cry - which refuse the consolative affirmation of the symphonies. All three are works of the deepest suffering and blood from a composer who knew what that meant as well as anyone on earth, meant to reach the hearts of people who knew what suffering meant equally well. They are not works of comfort, not even the Moonlight. They are howls of pain, meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It's exploitatively irresponsible to hear them as often as we do. They should be heard only in those moments when we really need them.
And there was Richter, with all his tectonic explosions that sound like everything from earthquakes to advancing armies - a veritable reincarnation of Beethoven or Anton Rubinstein who enlisted art into its most valuable service; to document all those ways humans desperately need to be heard and understood. No matter how much Richter esteemed Van Cliburn, he expressed something so much deeper than the way a guy like Cliburn played. This is music about suffering, desperation, death, poverty, isolation and humiliation and terror. You have to be willfully deaf not to hear it. It's musicmaking with moral purpose.
America reacted as you'd expect Americans to react in those years. With anticommunist protests and the potential at every performance for the performances to end with a near-riot. There was something in those Western performances that Americans found deeply provocative. Not just because communism was evil (and it was), but because the Soviet Union showed how trivial were the concerns of American lives in those years, and Americans simply didn't want to hear that message or know the truth, which is that American prosperity is a provocative dance upon an explosive volcano of chaos that's engulfed most every other country on earth.
We were overdue for that chaos in 1960. How much more overdue are we for it now?
...play it loud....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPSnMrN8ft0
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